On the whole Dr Seuss Thing

So this Tuesday Dr Seuss Enterprises stated that they would no longer be printing six of his books.

And the world seems to have lost its mind.

A tiny part of me gets it.  I grew up with Dr Seuss.  My kids are growing up with Dr Seuss.  I do not think he's a total hero - his books are super gendered and have little female representation.  But his books are good at teaching kids literacy in a fun way.  It is hard to envisage a world without Green Eggs and Ham, The Cat in the Hat or Fox in Socks (my favourite).  And we don't need to.  Because none of these books made the list.  This is the out-of-print list:

And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street (1937)  
McElligot's Pool (1947)
If I Ran The Zoo (1950)
Scrambled Eggs Super (1953)
On Beyond Zebra (1955)
The Cat's Quizzer (1976)

While I've read some of the books on that list, none of them are books I'd consider 'Classic Seuss'.  Seriously, when did you last sit down and think 'Hmmm, I really need to buy McElligot's Pool for my kids.'*  Or 'Man I miss reading On Beyond Zebra, I wonder if it's at Whitcoulls?'  Sure, it's a shame the first kids book he got published no longer will be.  But this is small fish compared to the reasons not to.

The reasons for not continuing to print these books is because they contain racist imagery**.  That's it.  As quoted directly from the statement from Dr Seuss Enterprises:

'These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.
Ceasing sales of these books is only part of our commitment and our broader plan to ensure Dr. Seuss Enterprises’s catalog represents and supports all communities and families.'

Because at it stands, the magic of Seuss is for white kids.

Having a relationship with an author that not only excludes you but actively makes fun of your heritage is complicated.  It's easy to love Seuss if you're white.  Even easier if your male.  It's easy to shrug these few books off as 'whoopsies'.  It's a lot harder if you're not.  If you're not, his is just another racist voice in the crowd.  Even if you love some of his books, how do you feel comfortable reading books by  someone who creates racist imagery?  Especially in a world that already treats you differently.  The discontinuation of publishing these books is an effort to make the rest of Dr Seuss's catalogue more accessible to more people.  And while this cannot rectify the issues caused by them being published in the first place, it is at least an effort to acknowledge this issue.

One of his cartoons depicting Hirohito

And honestly, I think Dr Seuss would have applauded it.

Before he was spitting rhymes in kids books Geisel was a political cartoonist.  He drew over 400 cartoons for the New York Newspaper between 1941 and 1943 .  Many of these had racist content - particularly aimed at the Japanese.  He was a product of his times.  Pearl Harbour was bombed in December 1941.  I am not justifying his actions, but I understand that this was essentially his job.  Much of the US lived in fear of what their future held, and fear is a big driver of prejudice.

 
But at his heart, Theodor Seuss Geisel was a liberal and a moralist.  Many of his books convey liberal messages - The Sneetches is a critique of anti-Semitism.  The Butter Battle Book conveys the dangers (and futility) of the arms race.  And Horton Hears A Who! is about listening, and helping uplift the powerless.  Geisel passed away in 1991.  He never witnessed the LA riots of 1992.  He never saw the rise in Islamophobia following September 11.  And he never heard about the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis Police Officer in 2020.  If he had, I really don't think he would have backed the racist imagery a younger Seuss had drawn.

Because around the same time he was drawing these awful cartoons he was also drawing these:

He understood the dangers of prejudice.  He was concerned about how they were affecting things at home in the US.  And as he got older, his books became more inclusive.  Of the more than 50 books he published from 1954 onward - only one of those books made the list.  Geisel made an effort to change with the times.  His books addressed not just issues from earlier times, but climate change, political freedom, and the importance of creativity in an ordered world.

But I think the reason we value Seuss so highly is because of how successfully he has shared his love of words.  The Cat In The Hat was written as a response to the debate about early literacy in America.  He wrote it in an effort to rid the world of Dick and Jane and the terribly boring world they occupied.  And in doing so he introduced fun and colour and rhyme which helped to engage young readers.

So if you're one of those people who is upset about this I want you to really consider what it is you're upset about.  What have you lost?  Are you really upset that these books are no longer being published - that they will be harder to get?  I honestly think this is about fear.  Fear of a changing world.  Fear of a world that looks different to the world many of us grew up in.  And it's so important to remember that fear is a dangerous thing.   Fear was used by Hitler back in the 1930's to engage the masses.  Fear was used by Donald Trump in recent times to do the same thing.  Fear is the food of racism.  Fear is the starter of wars.  But fear also halts progress, it maintains the current hegemony.

If we want this world to be more accessible, if we want people to have equal opportunities we need to acknowledge the mistakes of our past.  We need to accept that while change is scary, it is necessary for us to move toward a more balanced world.  This is a small change.  Real change requires much more.  And in the famous words of Dr Seuss himself:

* And I seriously wouldn't.  Not just because of the racist imagery, but that book is super creepy.  I think that as a child it was the second most scary Dr Seuss book I ever read (the scariest was definitely What Was I Scared Of.  The third scariest was The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins).

** I do not need to repost those images here.  You can look them up for yourself if you want.

On Voting

 

It's Election Day this Saturday.  Don't forget to VOTE

My big thing about the pending election is that people VOTE.  I don't care who you are, where you live, what you do for a living or who you want to vote for.  I just want you to vote.  Even though I was disappointed with the last election results, I was more disappointed in how many people didn't vote at all.  26.2% of Kiwi's didn't vote.  That's too many.  And I won't be surprised if this election it's even higher.

Because I want everyone to vote, I've started asking customers at work if they are organised to vote.  While most people my age and older, and most women I've spoken to are, I found most of the young men (in their 20's) were not.  Some because they didn't know who to vote for, and some because they just weren't enrolled and weren't interested, and others because they thought it was too late and they didn't know how to vote.

If I had thought about this earlier and had more energy, I would have tried to organise some way of explaining basic things about voting to people.  Because after talking to just a small sample of people I realised that a system I think is quite simple, is actually quite confusing to some Kiwis.  And that's ok.   I think a part of this has come down to the assumption that all Kiwis have access to (and know how to use) the internet.  And have (and watch) Freeview.  And many Kiwis don't. 

On Thursday night I had to reassure someone that they really should open their election mail.  They probably weren't in trouble, it was probably just checking their address, or sending them their Easy Vote pack.  This person also thought he was too late to vote because he'd seen the early voting booths in his local library.  I explained that it wasn't the actual election day until next Saturday, but if he was enrolled and wanted to, he could vote early.

And yes there are those people with stickers and things that gravitate toward malls and try and encourage people to be enrolled, but that's usually during business hours, and it's in a mall.  Working poor people will:

a) be at work and

b) probably not frequent malls that much

as with little disposable income what is the point (unless it's school holiday's and there's free stuff for the kids).  And rich working people will also miss out.  Cos they probably have no time for malls and shop online whilst on the plane to X business meeting.  So those people only interact with a select part of society.  Not everyone.

And those people may not be able to explain all the necessary information required.  While NZ has a 99% literacy rate, 1% of New Zealanders is still a lot of NZers that will struggle to understand mail they receive.  Plus I'm sure plenty of people in that 99% of 'literate' NZers may be literate, but possibly not enough to understand their voting paperwork.  And 'people on the street' in general scare me.  They probably scare other people too.  Especially if they say you can be prosecuted for not enrolling.  That's pretty much police level scary.

I'm not saying Mall Vote shouldn't exist.  I'm just saying we need a broader approach to get people interested in voting.  Simple things like electing people (at community or government level) to sit down with people they know and talk them through the process.  Because this is definitely part of the problem.

The other part is people feeling disengaged - there is no point in voting.

It is difficult for me to fully understand this.  I can understand not wanting to vote because you don't feel anyone is good for this country, but if I were in that position I would do something about it.  Like start my own political party.  Or vote for the 'protest vote' party (The Civilian Party - alpacas and icecream, huzzah!).  But I can completely understand not voting because you don't see the point.

But I feel this is almost an issue of esteem.  Feeling so downhearted you see no point in voting - you don't feel that you can make a difference.  If this is why people don't vote it's sad.  If we lived in a well functioning society people with these issues would be picked up either by friends or whanau or even workmates.  I know I'm probably exaggerating here, but they genuinely cannot see that their view is important, that they can change the world (or their government at least).

What I have said to these people is to just pick one issue that's important to them.  It might be child poverty.  It might be how much tax they pay.  It might be education.  Whatever it is just look at the policy of the major parties (or all if you have time/energy) that relate to this - National, Labour, Greens and NZ First, and vote according to which policy works best with your beliefs.

An even simpler way to decide - if you like how NZ is going now vote National or one of their supporting parties (Act, United Future or probably The Conservatives), if not, vote Labour, Greens or Mana/Internet.  If you want to put the cat amongst the pigeons, vote NZ First.

And if you're stuck on who to vote for for your candidate there are many systems you can pick:
- choose the candidate from the party you like most
- choose the candidate most likely to beat the candidate from the party you like least
- choose the hottest candidate
- choose the candidate with the funniest name.

These are all valid ways of deciding who to vote for and in no way does they way in which you choose who you vote for diminish your vote, or your right to choose it that way.

Why is ensuring more Kiwi's vote important?  Because any government who is in power when almost 1/3 of folks didn't vote is not truly representative of our country.  It means our democracy is failing.  And this government in particular has used winning the election with votes from less people than those who didn't vote as a mandate to do whatever they wanted despite people's wishes.  Although I am not a fan of National and what they have done I am more sad because I feel like so many New Zealanders have given up on their country, and the rest of us are worse off for it*

I want all New Zealanders to feel that they are important, that they can make a difference.  That they can change their lives and their country for the better, and the simplest way of doing that is by voting for what they believe in. 


* Whether we have a change in government or not I believe this to be true.  If we had 90% of us voting and we have the same government I'd respect the situation a lot more as I'd feel it were more representative of us as a nation.

On Politics: Part Two – Economic policy

I’m trying to keep this short and simple, which is very tricky. What seem to me to be the major economic issues for this election are:

- Getting a handle on our debt

- Growing our economy

- Taxation

- Cost of living

- Savings schemes

Here are some graphs to give you an idea of how our debt has been handled over the last ten years. The things we need to take into account when looking at this are the major, unexpected expenses which have come up since the last election – the Christchurch earthquakes and the Rena grounding. This has, understandably, blown out budgets significantly. What is interesting about the graphs is how it shows a serious decline in debt toward the end of Labours last term in government. Despite National constantly touting Labour as the 'spendthrift' party, they managed to keep our debt in check. Both National and Labour have plans to have our debt paid down by 2015, but both have very different plans. In simplified form, National plan to part sell our SOE’s, grow the economy and cut spending. Labour plan to install a CGT, bring emissions taxing for farmers forward to 2013, grow the economy, gradually increase the retirement age to 67, and bring the upper tax bracket back up to where it was before National reduced it.

In order for us to ‘compete’ with other countries in terms of wages and work opportunities, we need to grow our economy. Growing our economy will also help us pay down our debt faster, and add some slack to those tight governmental purse strings. This is valued by all the political parties I looked at, but all have a different view on how to do this. National plans to reduce business costs, work on progressing trade agreements to encourage our export market, use Asset Sale shares as a way to ‘revamp’ investment, alter the beneficiary system significantly and improve infrastructure (internet/roading etc) within NZ. Labour are looking at bringing in an R&D tax credit to encourage research and development, creating more apprenticeship schemes, putting more red tape around the sale of our land to foreigners, keep government contracting to NZ based firms only and introduce a CGT to encourage more diverse investment.

In the minority parties the Greens are interested in more than measuring a country by GDP, and want to focus on creating a new way to measure success. They want to create more sustainable businesses, support local businesses and stop the sale of land to foreigners. Act want to cut spending and red tape, lower taxes, sell SOE’s and allow more mining. NZ First want to buy back land that is in foreign hands and rebuild the NZ export economy without free trade deals with low wage economies. Maori want to encourage business in small rural communities, and create a Maori Economic Strategy.

Tax is an interesting thing. It is essential to the running of our country, but also hits us where it can hurt – in the pocket. Labour’s proposed CGT has got a lot of people running scared, but it isn’t a new concept. It has been one of the Green’s policies for a long time, and currently exists in most OECD countries. National and Act are against it, but it is a tax policy most minority parties agree on. Where Act and NZ First is about lower taxes for all, Labour wants to bring the upper tax rate back up to where it was before National took it down and bring emissions taxation forward. The Greens want to bring in more eco taxes and Mana want to bring in the ‘Hone Heke’ tax (like the British ‘Robin Hood’ tax) and a more progressive tax system.

There are also some ‘tax free’ zones proposed by a number of parties. For every party for it, there is a different amount:

Labour $5,000 Greens $10,000 Maori $25,000 Mana $27,000

Many parties are also all for taking GST off at least something, if not everything. Mana want to abolish GST entirely, Maori want to remove it from food, and Labour want to remove it from fruit and veges.

Cost of living is of large concern to many of us. Inflation has gone up around 9% because of the rise of food, electricity and petrol prices, not to mention the 2.5% hike to GST. Over this time median incomes have dropped around 6%, and the minimum wage has increased just 1.9%. For families working hard for minimum or low wages, it’s tough times. National has few plans to address this – a slight reshuffle of Working for Families giving low income families around $14 extra a week, and changes to healthcare. Labour, NZ First, Greens and Mana want to bring the minimum wage up to $15, with both Greens and Mana wanting to fix minimum wage at two-thirds of the average wage. Changes to GST are also designed to aid in this. Act do not seem to be concerned about cost of living at all, but given their target demographic for votes, this is no surprise.

Savings has become even more of an issue for this election with Standard & Poors saying this was a key reason behind our credit downgrade. To be honest, it’s quite difficult to find what the minority parties plan to do about this through reading policy online. Although the Greens say they ‘support savings schemes’ they do not outline specifically how they support these. National and Labour clearly outline how they plan to address this issue. National plan to increase minimum Kiwisaver payments, establish auto-enrolment to Kiwisaver in 2014 (if in surplus), adding investment opportunity through partial asset sales, and resuming contributions to the NZ Super fund once back in surplus. Labours plans are similar – making Kiwisaver compulsory, restarting contributions to the NZ Super fund and gradually increasing the age of Super entitlement from 65 – 67 over 22 years.

So that’s the basic gist of financial policy. I’m sure you have already made your mind up, or at least thought about what you think makes most sense. I’ll tell you my thoughts pretty shortly, but first, here are a few informative articles about what other people think: This is from business leaders on National's economic plan. This, on National from an MYOB poll. And this is an interesting blog on both parties and their approach to the economy.

Economics is supposed to be National’s strong suit, and as such, I see no point in debating their numbers. Phil Goff has produced the numbers also, and until someone other than John Key and Bill English can pick this apart, I see no reason to believe it will not work. More importantly, National's fiscal policy might be completely sound, but is it really what's good for New Zealand?

National are proposing selling off 49% shares in some of our SOE's. This means that the government will maintain decision making power over these assets, but 49% of the profits from those assets will go to whoever invests in them. National and Act are behind this idea, but everyone else disagrees with this. And although National has said these shares will be sold to 'Kiwi families', the likelihood of 'Kiwi families being able to afford this investment is minimal, and in reality, these investments will go offshore. This will not 'revamp' the NZ investment economy as proposed by National. It will just provide a short-term cash fund for the government. As David Cunliffe from Labour says: ‘Asset sales: a one off, short term fix that ignores the lessons of history.’ Selling off our SOE’s is an extremely short sighted plan with little benefit. My other concern with National’s proposal of this, is the validity of it being necessary to get us into surplus. Initially, asset sales were designed to pay down our debt. Now National are saying that asset sales will fund changes to education, health and provide more funds for Kiwibank, so are asset sales really necessary to get us into surplus?

Labour (and every party besides National and Act) give us the option not to sell our SOE's. This comes at the price of changes to taxation. If the upper tax bracket is brought back up to 39%, it will still be the 7^th lowest top tax bracket in the OECD. Countries with lower top tax brackets tend to have more unequal societies. Given that NZ is currently rated as the 6^th most unequal economic society in the OECD, surely upping tax levels in the top bracket can only mean positives for us as a country? Introducing CGT’s to me is just a common sense way of creating a fairer tax system and a more equal society. Please read Labour’s CGT policy if you don’t really understand it – it’s quite simple, and not really that scary.

For those of you who don't know me, you are probably thinking that I'm just another 'bloody Leftist', that I have everything to gain from Labour and nothing to lose. That I am another poor beneficiary who is moaning about the 'haves and the have nots'. Like many 'Leftists', I am not. My husband and I both work. Financially, I would probably be considered middle class. We eat out at nice restaurants, we're about to buy our first home, we travel overseas, we part-own our family bach. Although (like most Kiwis) we would not be affected 'in the pocket' by changes to the upper tax bracket, we would be financially affected by the introduction of a CGT and changes to the retirement age and my workload would be affected by changes to GST My choice not to support National is not about financial envy, it's about how I truly believe NZ can be a better country to live in.

I do not believe selling our assets is a good long term plan. Neither do most politicians. I do believe in creating a fairer tax system. Given both our current financial position and position on the OECD tables, I think this is necessary for creating an all-round better New Zealand. More equal societies have been proven to have lower rates of crime, unemployment, poverty, teen pregnancy, mental illness and homelessness. That means less spending on health and law enforcement, and an increase in tax revenues. The bottom line is important to me, but, like the Greens, I believe the wealth of a country is determined by more than it's GDP.