Labour’s Interfaith policy
Labour’s interfaith policy is mainly harmless platitudes such as:
Labour will commit to building harmonious relationships between communities of different faiths as intrinsic to ensuring strong, healthy and safe communities of understanding and tolerance in Aotearoa, New Zealand.
Hard to disagree with that!
I did appreciate the irony that the policy sites approvingly the ratification of the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, considering Labour in Government refused to ratify it!
But one section grates with me:
Labour will work collaboratively across all government sectors to ensure that New Zealand’s diverse cultures and communities of faiths will be protected from racism, discrimination, prejudice and injustices.
First of all Labour conflates race with religion. You can not be racist against a religion. You do not choose your race but you do choose your religion. One can have a negative view of a particular religion, and this does not make you racist. Labour’s policy suggests that people who do not like certain religions are racists.
And by the same measure, it is totally valid to have negative views on a religion. I am allowed to mock Scientologists, and think anyone who is a Scientologist is either a gullible fool or a con-artist. There is a push at the UN for it to be an offence to mock or denigrate a religion. We should resist such moves strongly.
Talking of racism though, maybe Labour can do something about it a bit closer to home. The Maritime Union is an affiliate member of the Labour Party, pays members subs to Labour, and gets votes on policy and selections. With that in mind this Stuff article reveals:
Mr McKean was an executive member of the Auckland branch of the Maritime Union of New Zealand at the time of the incident.
In a column submitted to the September 2011 edition of the union magazine Mr McKean talked about recent sackings and redundancies, and concerns about previous managers as well as the employment of workers from ”one of the island nations”, by which he meant Tuvalu, the court said.
Mr McKean also wrote about a ”quieter more subservient workforce” which would not question the ”ruling class”, which the court said appeared to be aimed squarely at his workmates from Tuvalu.
The column was the subject of 11 complaints from other staff members and was variously called offensive, disgusting, racially divisive and insulting. The court found there was a likely negative effect on other members of the port workforce if Mr McKean was reinstated.
The full court report on McKean is interesting. This is more of what he wrote:
They’ve packed up their Nazi uniforms and Darth Vader outfits with the bumhole bits cut out of them, their cat of nine tails and their other toys for self flagellation and trundled off to their rubber walled dens where the mistresses know how to despoil, correct and require the naughtiness out of them for the time being.
That was him referring to his former managers.
He doesn’t just not want Pacific Islanders, but also no blondes. He said:
present a prime opportunity to seed in a quieter more subservient workforce. No complaints, no questioning of the ruling class, just job done, rail [sic] hail or sunshine and then the ability to insidiously wind down the work practices, dismantle the costs of doing business, push the health and safety envelope and give no thought to their work life balances. If at all possible one of the island nations would serve admirably. A steady selection process until we’d hit critical mass and then the assimilation. It would be important to have a Pacifica manager in a position of influence for harmonisation and the ability to collect where necessary affidavits to collar the odd malcontent. Introduce company sports teams that pitch to the interest of the worker demographic and have an attractive and intelligent female organiser and preferably make her a blonde. We would the [sic] need an insider who had a close working relationship with the fellows and who wouldn’t mind stealing collective agreement benefits. Allow him to slither amongst the flock and sow seeds of dissent and promise him all the earthly riches for himself and his family for his unbridled treason. Remind me again – how did old Judas Iscariot end up?
He has all the makings of a future Labour MP I’d say!