While Ireland's President Michael D Higgins calls for Israel’s expulsion from the United Nations for what he describes as its "lies" over its treatment of Palestinians in Gaza, New Zealand continues to dither over joining the 157 (out of 193) United Nations members that have already given diplomatic recognition to a Palestinian state.

Foreign Minister Winston Peters will announce New Zealand's decision in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly at the end of the week. According to him, this will allow New Zealand as much time as possible to gather and assess the latest information on the issue before reaching a definite conclusion.

Frankly, this claim is poppycock. A decision as momentous as giving diplomatic recognition to another state, especially one as contentious as the Palestinian state, would never be left to the Foreign Minister alone to make after a few conversations at the United Nations. Rather, the New Zealand government’s position would have been determined by the Cabinet some time ago. In that sense, he will be but the message boy in New York.

Winston Peters’ statement that the Palestine issue has been around for at least eighty years, so waiting a few more days to announce New Zealand’s decision is hardly a problem, further obfuscates the issue. He is hardly likely to have travelled all the way to New York to tell New Zealanders and the rest of the world, that New Zealand is not going to do as Commonwealth partners Australia, Canada and Britain, among so many other countries, have already done this week. Therefore, the question becomes why the delay?

The most obvious and easily dismissible argument is that New Zealand’s speaking slot at the United Nations does not occur until the end of the week, so it would have been churlish to announce New Zealand’s decision before then. That is true up to a point but has not applied in the case of other countries. Australia, Canada, Britain and France all felt able to indicate in advance of their General Assembly speeches that they would be announcing Palestinian recognition, leaving no credible reason why New Zealand could not have done likewise.

A second possible argument is that there was division within the Cabinet on recognition which has only been overcome in recent days. It is well known that ACT has not been comfortable with recognising a Palestinian state if Hamas is involved, so may have delayed until the last moment a Cabinet decision being reached. However, given both the Prime Minister’s and the Foreign Minister’s “when not if” support for recognising Palestine, it is most unlikely that Peters would have departed for New York without a firm government commitment to recognition in his back pocket.

Then there is the outside chance that the Cabinet’s decision was conditional, leaving open the possibility of last-minute information exchanged in the corridors at the United Nations influencing New Zealand’s final decision. Again, that seems unlikely given that the overwhelming majority of United Nations’ member states have already recognised Palestine or are about to do so.

That leaves only one credible explanation for New Zealand’s tardy response. It has nothing to do with weighing up the merits of last-minute information or respecting diplomatic niceties and not disclosing one’s position ahead of the country’s formal speaking slot. Nor has it anything to do with not wanting to offend Israel or the United States. Israel has already been critical of New Zealand’s comments about the situation in Gaza, and the United States’ position is discredited by most countries.

Rather, New Zealand’s approach to this issue has been all about bolstering the mana and ego of the Foreign Minister on the world stage and ensuring all New Zealand eyes are on him when he addresses the General Assembly. Sadly, the government appears to have decided that pandering to this is more important than letting New Zealanders, many of whom have marched in the streets in support of Palestine, in on its eventual decision.

However, given that no formal Palestinian state currently exists, recognition now is at best an in-principle decision. The real and far more difficult decision relates to the shape and form of an eventual Palestinian state, given Israel’s defiant, intransigent opposition, repeated this week by Israel’s Prime Minister, to any form of Palestinian state ever. In this regard, it was notable that Peters attended the two-state side meeting at the United Nations, a further indication of New Zealand’s likely upcoming announcement.

Given New Zealand’s support for a two-state solution since the 1990s, the tardiness of the government’s response to calls for recognition of Palestine has been appalling. The fact that it has descended from the noble aspiration of supporting the right of people to self-determination, to pandering to a Foreign Minister’s ego to look good on a world stage is unconscionable    

Meanwhile, while it plays these games, innocent people in Gaza continue to be slaughtered.

Governments rarely lose office because their policies are unpopular or not working. Far more often they are defeated because they have become arrogant and contemptuously dismissive of those promoting different views to theirs. 

Usually, this trend becomes pronounced during a government's second or third term, but there are already emerging signs of increasing arrogance and intolerance from the current government, barely two-thirds into its first term. This week alone there have been three such displays of the government's mounting arrogance and disregard for contrary views.

First was the Prime Minister’s refusal to discuss the government's decision regarding recognition of a Palestinian state, saying that all would be revealed when the Foreign Minister addressed the United Nations General Assembly next week. The New Zealand public will learn the government's decision on what is arguably one of the most sensitive foreign policy issues the country has faced in recent years at the same time as the rest of the world. The government seems more interested in pandering to the Foreign Minister’s vanity of wanting to be on the world stage than keeping New Zealanders in the loop. And the Prime Minister seems unbothered by that.

Then there was the Finance Minister's response to a group of Wellington clergy who sought a meeting with her over the government's approach to the genocide in Gaza. When they chained themselves together outside her electorate office in protest, she crudely dismissed them saying that the way to get a meeting with her was, not to "don an adult nappy and chain yourself to a door".

While she was fully within her rights to refuse their request for a meeting, it was nonetheless unbecoming of a senior Minister to deride them the way she did. It smacked of extraordinary arrogance and a dismissive contempt for which she should apologise.

But the government's arrogance is not just limited to National Ministers. ACT's David Seymour, the Deputy Prime Minister, rejected a call from actress Keisha Castle-Hughes for Māori to be automatically entitled to New Zealand citizenship, regardless of whether they were born here. Seymour correctly pointed out that such a move would be contrary to the rules currently applying to every other New Zealander. But then he added the gratuitous and unnecessary rejoinder that Castle-Hughes “frankly should stick to whale riding.”

In politics, tone is critical. Both Willis’s and Seymour’s remarks failed the tone test, coming across as cheap, nasty and smart aleck. Each could have made their points in a far more considered and reasonable, but no less effective, way. What Willis and Seymour may have considered to be mildly humorous responses looked instead to be sneering superiority.

Their comments, and the Prime Minister’s equally tone-deaf deference to his Foreign Minister’s ego on the Palestine announcement at the expense of the rest of New Zealand reflect the type of response more typical of governments becoming world-weary after a couple of terms in office. But this government is displaying the same symptoms, not even two years into its first term.

Voters turn off governments when they feel they have stopped listening and instead give off the air that they know best.  With the ongoing cost-of-living crisis still hitting many New Zealand households hard, and the economy teetering on the brink of returning to recession, the last thing the government can afford in the lead-up to the election is for voters to conclude that it no longer cares what they think. Yet that is precisely the response the above examples engender.

Times are undoubtedly unchallenging for the government at present, with significant reform programmes underway in health, education and the economy. The pressure is intensifying to produce some positive results before the election. This is even more reason for it to be showing more humility and understanding than this week’s incidents indicate.

People abandoned the last Labour-led government when its unctuous be-nice-to-everyone approach in the absence of policy achievement became overbearing. That should have been the signal to this government to go about its business with quiet determination to make a difference, rather than the strutting swagger it has developed.

The Prime Minister, who presented himself before the election as the solid, determined leader the country required, now needs to live up to that. He needs to re-focus his government, “laser like”, as he used to say, on addressing the things that matter. Otherwise, his government will be defined by side-shows like the continuous pandering to individual Ministerial egos and smart remarks that we are now seeing.

And if that feeling becomes entrenched, the government’s days may well be numbered.

When relationships break up, it is frequently any children involved who suffer most. They often become pawns in a wider game – the struggle between parents over custody and access rights, or questions of responsibility for their financial upkeep, for example. Sometimes, the struggle goes beyond the parents, and involves the wider family, or even the community in which they live. But whatever the circumstances, the innocent children at the centre of the dispute generally have the least say in its resolution.

The recent tragic case involving Tom Phillips and his children portrays all these elements. Even now, with Phillips dead and the children remaining in the care of the state while Police investigations are carried out, their mother, who remains their legal guardian, says she does not know when they will be returned to her. The children, meanwhile, have no option but to go along with what is happening and being decided around them.

Sadly, parents too often use their children as a means of getting back at the partner from whom they have separated. In many cases, an unseemly tug-of-war develops between the custodial parent (often but not always the mother) and the non-custodial parent (frequently the father) over access to the children. Where informal custody arrangements exist, these are often breached when one parent or other decides it does not suit them to have the children at the previously agreed time. Family Court mandated custody arrangements are more reliable but are also often breached. But whatever the custody arrangement, the children’s interests and preferences invariably run secondary to the tussle of wills between the estranged parents.

The same applies with regard to financial support for the children. When I was Minister of Revenue responsible for the Child Support scheme it was always my view that every child had the right to the love, attention and support of both their parents, whatever the circumstances, and that, equally, every parent had the responsibility to support their children, also whatever their circumstances. My strong preference was that parents should be encouraged to jointly reach their own voluntary agreements about the upkeep of their children, and that the state’s Child Support scheme should be a back-stop, to be applied only when parents could not or would not reach agreement.

Unfortunately, for too many parents Child Support became an easy default position, which just happened to conveniently relieve them of any obligation to reach satisfactory arrangements for the upkeep of their children. But this often created an intolerable situation where one parent was set against the other, probably exacerbating much of the bitterness present in already fraught situations. Frequently, custodial parents felt they were receiving insufficient support from their former partners, and non-custodial parents argued they were getting insufficient access to their children for the Child Support they paid.

This clash between access and financial support was as visceral, as it was misplaced. Parents are responsible for supporting their children regardless of the level of access they receive and there can be no compromise or trade-off on that. Access and support are separate issues and should not be linked to each other, and cannot be traded the way some parents think.

That they can be is a consequence of an essentially confrontational approach both at the Family Court and in the Child Support system. For the administrative ease of both, there has to be a custodial parent and a non-custodial parent, a winner and a loser if you like. The system struggles to cope with the concept of shared custody or shared financial support arrangements. And in this environment, it is not surprising that the children have so little say.

In 2012, I amended the Child Support Act to give greater encouragement and recognition of shared parenting arrangements, which better reflected the financial circumstances of both parents, not just the non-custodial (paying) parent. However, I am not sure that this has worked out as intended, for a number of reasons.

At the time, officials, brought up on the Child Support Act and the more draconian liable parent scheme which preceded it, were sceptical that shared parenting arrangements would work or could be enforced, so I suspect did little to encourage their utilisation. Moreover, shared parenting arrangements called for a greater level of commitment to the wellbeing of their children than recently separated and still angry parents were willing to make. So, once again the inherently inflexible Child Support scheme became their easy way out.

This situation will not improve until the confrontational winner/loser approach both the Family Court with regard to custody and access cases, and the Child Support scheme with regard to financial support, changes. The focus of both needs to shift towards an emphasis on seeking collaborative solutions involving both parents equally (or at least to the extent they want to be) as the preferred outcome in the future of their children.

While Tom Phillips’ actions, whatever their motive, cannot be condoned and will have scarred his children, emotionally and psychologically, for the rest of their lives, they are an awful extreme reminder of what may happen when the system breaks down.

For every parent, properly looking after their children must be paramount – ranking well ahead of seeking to satisfy residual bitterness towards a former partner, or taking out frustration against state agencies for perceived inflexible and unreasonable actions.

There is no acceptable alternative to putting children first.

 

 

 

 

The government has just announced plans to strengthen New Zealand’s immigration laws to make it easier to deport residents convicted of serious criminal offences. Under current law, permanent residents of up to ten years standing who have been convicted of criminal offences can be deported after release from prison. However, the term of their deportation depends on the nature and seriousness of their offending. The government’s new plans significantly broaden the scope of the existing policy. It is planning to increase the time frame to residents of twenty years standing and also includes historic crimes, committed before the person came to New Zealand,

These announcements will likely be welcomed, especially by those concerned about community safety and the risk they consider released offenders pose to the community. As such, the announcements – reported in the media as making it easier for the government to deport non-New Zealand criminals – will play well as part of the government’s tough law and order agenda.

And it will be easy for the government to portray parties opposing the moves as “soft on crime and criminals”. With an election looming next year, and law and order always being an important issue, that will be no bad thing as far as the government is concerned. 

However, there is a certain irony in these announcements. For years, successive National-led and Labour-led governments have railed against Liberal/National coalition and now Labor Australian governments for their notorious s.501 policy. Under this policy many Australian criminals, born in New Zealand and often with the most tenuous remaining links to this country have been deported here once released from prison in Australia.

So, as it now moves to strengthen New Zealand’s deportation rules, our government will need to be very mindful of the consistent and outspoken approaches various Prime Ministers have made over the years to their Australian counterparts about the s.501 policy and potential risk of claims of hypocrisy it now raises.

Indeed, on the same day the Immigration Minister was announcing New Zealand’s proposed changes, the Prime Minister was attacking calls from Australia for the deportation to New Zealand of neo-Nazi Thomas Sewell because he was born here and holds dual Australian and New Zealand citizenship. While he is undoubtedly “a pretty awful human being” as the Prime Minister described him, Sewell has so far not been convicted of any crimes that would lead to his deportation from Australia, so he is unlikely to become a victim of the s.501 policy, and thereby New Zealand’s problem, despite more than 88,000 Australians having signed a petition calling for his deportation.

In the circumstances, the Prime Minister’s comments that Sewell is Australia’s problem were ill-timed, given his own government’s deportation announcements the same day. The risk is they will further embolden hard-line politicians on both sides of Australian politics to dig-in further against any softening of the s.501policy insofar as New Zealand is concerned. They know that, as in New Zealand, cracking down on migrants who break the law is good domestic politics.

However, it must be acknowledged that all sovereign nations – New Zealand and Australia included – have a right to protect their citizens against the risk imposed by foreign criminals and to deport those non-citizens who seriously offend to their countries of origin. The right to citizenship and residence in any country must always be conditional on acceptance and compliance with the laws of that country. The issue around deportation is therefore less about the right of countries to deport those who are not citizens who have criminally offended, than it is about the reasonableness of such actions.

In that context, there is a legitimate argument about the reasonableness of Australia deporting to New Zealand people who have not lived here since childhood and who no longer have any substantial family links here. However, in the same vein, it was only a few weeks ago that Immigration New Zealand was threatening to deport a teenage boy to India for being an overstayer, despite the fact his family was legally resident in New Zealand and he would have no means of familial or other support in India. Government officials contemplating this move and Ministers who initially supported it failed to see the hypocritical parallel until the last minute.

For this reason, many will argue that as it moves to strengthen its deportation laws New Zealand should be mindful of the reasonableness test, and not get itself into the type of s.501 mess Australia has. But there will also be more cynical voices – inside and outside government – arguing precisely the opposite, that, for domestic political reasons, having a deportation policy that is criticised externally as unreasonable and excessively xenophobic will play well for the government in election year.

With ACT and New Zealand First being the glue holding the Luxon-led coalition together, it is hard to escape the conclusion the latter view is the more likely driver of the new policy direction.