This whooping cough story from south Auckland is a good example of the coalition government’s approach to social need - spend money on urging people to get vaccinated but only after you’ve cut the funding to where they could get vaccinated. This has been the case all year with public health services to Māori. The only programmes known to work – health delivery by Māori to Māori – have been demolished in a series of ideological displays of right wing wokeness.

As the year draws to an end, there is less and less connection between political gestures and the actions required to anchor them in reality. For example: greyhound racing is being shut down. It will be officially illegal to euthanise the dogs, but the estimated 3,500 dogs that will have to be rehomed far exceed the people willing (or able) to re-home them. Yet the government has no plan to cope with the consequences.

Similarly, there has been a sharp spike in the numbers of people being denied emergency housing, and their numbers exceed those who can be rehomed with friends or family. As a result, there has been a visible rise in the numbers of people begging on the street. Families with children have been evicted from emergency housing without the government having a clue as to where at least 20% of them have ended up. The government has no plan to cope with the consequences.

Reportedly, some of Auckland’s major food banks may have to close or make significant cuts to the food parcels they provide to working households, beneficiary families and children. A one-off grant from the coalition government to Auckland’s City Mission will run out at year’s end, but pleas for reliable annual government funding have fallen on deaf ears.

This should be a no-brainer. Unemployment is still rising and the economic outlook is getting even worse. Currently, hundreds of thousands of people in Auckland are reliant on the Mission for their access to food. Yet the government is punishing (with benefit sanctions) the victims of its own inability to create jobs and grow the economy, while reducing access to food parcels in the meantime.

As Auckland City Missioner Helene Robinson explained to RNZ, state agencies keep referring people to food banks, but the state is refusing to fund the service on a reliable basis. On the North Shore, Good Works Trust operations manager Sophie Gray also told RNZ that state continuity of funding for food banks is both necessary and justified:

Gray is also calling for the government to provide ongoing funding for foodbanks. "Some funding and some recognition of the fact that our organisation and others like us are actually doing the government's job.”

Thanks to the government’s withdrawal of funding, Robinson has warned, the number of food parcels is set to reduce next year from 50,000 to 20,000. If the government has a plan to deal with this reality, it isn’t sharing it with anyone. You have to wonder: is the coalition intentionally under-mining the experienced and efficient food banks, so that for-profit providers can move into the space?

There are more examples of the same syndrome. As the government looks on from the sidelines, media companies in New Zealand are being left to fall into terminal decline. In stark contrast, Australia has just launched a range of funding support schemes for the media:

Local news and community broadcasting is at the core of a $180 million media funding package. The Albanese government [has] revealed plans of its News Media Assistance Programme, known as News Map, which plots a path for services considered critical to Australian democracy. The four-year programme is designed to support media sustainability in a contracting market, with an expert advisory panel to guide its rollout, Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said.

"Local news and community broadcasting is at the heart of local communities and makes a vital contribution to national identity and media diversity," the minister said in a statement.

Key measures include $116.7 million across four years to help build the sustainability and capacity of news organisations as they deliver public-interest journalism. Another $3.8 million will fund Australia's first National Media Literacy Strategy, co-designed with the education and media literacy sectors.

Ten months have elapsed since the news first broke of Newshub’s imminent demise. Yet there is still nothing on the rails here that’s remotely comparable to what Australia has just announced. Like the destitute people on the pavement outside the supermarket doors, New Zealand media companies are putting out the begging bowl, and asking the public for spare change.

Abortion refusal is the new slavery

In the city of Amarillo, Texas in June, the city council seriously debated whether to enact a model “ abortion trafficking ban” that woud deny citizens the right to traval down local roads and highways if they intend to obtain an abortion in another state that does recognise women’s right to this procedure.

The Amarillo proposal was defeated. But it is a portent of what is to come, now that women’s access to abortion has been handed over to individual states to determine:

It is already foreseeable that there might be interstate legal battles over whether people can be extradited and prosecuted in one state for “aiding and abetting” an abortion, even if the procedure took place in another state where it’s legal. Texas, again, currently has a law on the books that hypothetically allows a Wisconsinite to sue a Californian for abetting a Texan’s abortion...

That prospect is looking less and less hypothetical. A few days ago, Texas announced its intention to sue a New York doctor for mailing abortion pills to a 20 year old woman living at a Texas address. For now, New York has so-called“ shield” laws that protect doctors in just this situation. Yet -unfortunately – the desire of one state to criminalise those “ aiding and abetting” a procedure that’s entirely legal in their home state, is exactly the sort of conflict that’s likely to end up in front of the same Supreme Court that overturned Roe v Wade. Guess the likely outcome.

Weirdly, these legal attempts to (a) limit abortion travel and (b) criminalise those “abetting” abortion look a lot like America’s slave trafficking laws of the 1850s. It is a reminder that activities deemed illegal in one state cannot meaningfully co-exist with states where those actions remain legal. Fugitives will always try to find a path to freedom, while those in power try to shut them down.

Slaves that tried to escape bondage and find freedom in “free” states ended up being pursued via the Fugitive Slave Act. This law made it a crime for escaped slaves to not be slaves anywhere in the United States. The law put the onus on the federal government to find and return to the plantations any runaway slaves that had found refuge elsewhere. The Act also criminalised the actions of those who “aided and abetted” the attempts to flee.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 not only became federal law. It was upheld by the US Supreme Court in the notorious 1857 Dred Scott decision, which ruled that enslaved people were not citizens of the United States. As mere economic chattels, they were held to have no rights as persons, under US law. Dred Scott is now widely recognised to be one of the worst decisions ever handed down by America’s highest court.

You can readily see the parallels with the current crackdown on abortion “trafficking.” Just as slaves were criminalised for trying to exert their rights over the uses of their own labour, American women are at serious risk of being criminalised for trying to exert their rights over the uses of their own bodies.

Footnote: Ken Paxman, the Texas attorney-general who is trying to sue that New York doctor for mailing abortion pills inter-state, is the same fellow who – incredibly – has opened an investigation into the firms that removed their advertising from Musk’s social media website, X. That’s right, if you fail to give money to Elon Musk, you may face a criminal investigation for being part of an alleged conspiracy to place your advertising dollars elsewhere, once Musk had turned X into a cesspit.

You think you can freely choose where and how to promote your business? Think again. Not if the President-elect’s new BFF wants your money, and there are people in positions of power willing to weaponise the law on behalf of Donald Trump and his friends. BTW, these happen to be the same advertisers that Musk told to “go fuck yourself” back when they pulled their ads from X.

Life as a loop

For over 30 years, the Q Lazzarus track “Goodbye Horses” has been remembered – if at all – as the needle drop for a Buffalo Bill serial killer sequence in the 1991 film Silence of the Lambs. Music by this obscure artist (born Diane Luckey in 1960, she died in 2022) was also featured in several other movies directed by Jonathan Demme, such as Something Wild, Married To The Mob and Philadelphia - to which Q Lazzarus contributed her version of the Talking Heads track “Heaven.”

According to legend, Demme had caught a cab in London that Diane Luckey was driving, and after they chatted she played him a cassette of her Q Lazzarus persona and band. Demme is said to have responded “Oh my God, what is this, and who are you?”

This past week, a collection of Q Lazzarus rarities has finally seen daylight, including a remix of “Goodbye Horses.” The original song was written by Luckey’s bandmate William Garvey, who died in 2009. There’s more here about him, and about what he was trying to convey in the lyrics. (Oddly, the rarities tracklist doesn’t include “White Lines” the flipside of the original “Horses” single.) Even now, “Goodbye Horses” is still mesmerising. All things pass into the night, indeed.

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