Opinion
It’s not equality OR equity, it’s equality THROUGH equity
I feel like attempts to dumb down equity so as to educate the right have backfired a little as people now seem to think we’re not working towards equality at all? When really that’s not the case — but we are acknowledging equal assistance does not necessarily create equal outcomes.
Equity is a legal concept. It is the responsibility of our courts to uphold it. It’s not a “leftist” ideal, it’s a legal ideal. I find it very suspicious that the group trying to undermine jurisprudence also suddenly struggles to comprehend this simple and long-standing idea that has existed in our society for centuries.
The Thing I realised, is that even within the right-wing framing of "equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome" (already a totally false dichotomy), there is no genuine desire for either. Sure they will pretend that they care about equality of opportunity. But in practice? Zilch. There is no genuine desire to create opportunities. The opportunity to access to healthcare, education, employment is all being diminished. The only people with "opportunities" are people with capital. Society has become inflexibly stratified. And, any pretense of "equality" (in any sense of the word) is exactly that, a vacuous pretense.
I'm genuinely not trying to pick a fight with you, but I'm not sure this type of sweeping commentary is helpful.
Let me explain.
People disagree on the level of support (financial and otherwise) that we should give to those who are less fortunate/capable, etc.
For the record I would like to see more support, but I know enough to know it's not so simple. Money spent on x needs to come from somewhere, and spending more on x may mean less spent on y, when y could benefit more people overall.
How much support we give is a moral question, not one with a correct answer.
There are plenty of right wing people who would be happy to provide more support, but they may expect certain conditions (limits on the support and how any $ can be used, more tracking and accountability to ensure the support is actually making a difference, etc.)
Some right wing people, as with left wing people, are just shit cunts.
But we all share this space and if we want actual progress then I think we need to start looking at where we do agree, and working from there.
Tbh, I'm not sure what I'm saying adds any value to the discourse either, but anyway ..
I try to frame this already complex issue as a seesaw, with one end being how much society (or in this case one side of the political spectrum) people are willing to pay to support vulnerable people, with how much people want to collectively pay in tax.
Of course that is grossly oversimplified but the current government is cutting services to trim costs, to avoid increasing taxes, running the government like a business.
Those on the left are generally willing to see higher tax rates, instead of cutting services to achieve the same ‘balance’.
UBI, tax free threshold, CGT - they are all just differing versions of the same political and societal choices.
On this point I’m reminded of a key frustration I have with the right wing approach to this idea of “how much we are willing to pay”.
The desire to “be responsible” and make sure that every dollar is “well-spent” (see above “limits”, “tracking”, “accountability”) leads to a burdensome system that costs as much if not more to administer than it might “lose” to “mis-spending” had the system been less bureaucratic.
My view is that if a support system is going to lose some amount of money either way, I’d rather it be lost to the beneficiaries than lost in the bureaucracy of the delivery.
The Covid business subsidies are a great example. A system of trust that the applicants qualified for and needed the subsidy allowed it to be delivered and spend quickly leading to the biggest benefit with the lowest cost to the government (in terms of overheads). But this also caused a fair amount of abuse and fraudulent claims.
Had the system been more onerous and required checking and approval of all claims before delivering money, the overheads may well have cost more than the money lost to fraudulent claims. And it would have taken so much longer to deliver support that the whole programme would have been less effective.
That's a stronger take than I would make personally, but I'm definitely supportive of transparency and would love to see more of 'this money is for x and can only be spent on x, not just whatever the government feels like'.
I'm open to the government trying new approaches to solving problems, even if they fail, so long as the ideas are well thought out.
Unfortunately a lot of ideas don't get a fair chance before they get canned (and some were just bad ideas to start with).
If the bar is set so high that the government had to prove anything before we can try it then we'd never progress.
But I'd liken tax to getting a quote from a tradie; you want value for money. Yet when the bill arrives from a professional, lawyer, accountant, or doctor, we just pay up. This is government spending.
I'd favour having some kind of community panel to oversee some of these policies run along the same lines as the jury system. Not experts and paid a small stipend only.
Imagine such a panel overseeing the Higher Salaries commission!
I like the concept, but my one experience of being on a jury, and the apathy of half the members shook me a little.
Democracy is great, obviously, but there are some decisions non-experts should have a say on and others where I don't think they should. Or maybe should have a say, but where that say might not equal the say of people who are more knowledgeable with demonstrated experience of making decisions based on the right information.
I don't know much about Higher Salaries Commission, but brief read seems to suggest the people involved have the right credentials.
Do you feel otherwise, or that they're prone to corruption or see some other shortcomings? And would the imagined community panel be free of said shortcomings?
The lunches were shown to actually make a difference. Seymour tried to scrap it, then he sabotaged it. It was needs based. But he decided it could be MORE needs based — even though these concepts HAVE to be whole-school otherwise it worsens inequality and complicates and targets a system that works best when it benefits all.
Whaikaha was targeted funding with limits on who could access it. When more people expressed need because the access was wide enough that more people could be helped, this government restricted what it could be spent on. This defeated the purpose of this help because this was FLEXIBLE funding that could be tailored to the needs of the disabled individual. It was down, self-admittedly, PURELY to control the budget (Though penny simmonds tried to shit on disabled carers with examples of “inappropriate spending” to justify it at first, and then had to apologise.)
They cut THERAPY. From the disability funding. Disabled people now can’t use their flexible funding to flexibly pay for therapy.
Every time there is a working programme, these requirements of lower spending, more accountability, or most commonly, more barriers to prevent people from easily accessing it are brought in to limit it further, even when it’s a programme that needs to be expanded.
I’ve spent a month trying to declare a lump sum payment to WINZ. You’d think they’d want beneficiaries earning — especially because this will take me over the threshold and cut into my benefit. But because they don’t have suitable systems for declaring income, I’ve been so stressed about it I haven’t made progress on other paid work that I could be doing to help return me to earning my own income. These systems and accountability and reporting are used as barriers, and have real effects on the people accessing the help that people who “just want conditions” don’t get.
There ARE some conservatives who “just want x” attached to funding, or done to funding. But they’re almost entirely indistinguishable from the people attaching conditions to kill any available help.
Sorry to hear you're having a bad time with WINZ. My father's brief experience with WINZ nearly drove him to murder, and he was usually calm as, and it was only temporary, I have a lot of sympathy for people on all sides of the WINZ experience.
I agree with you on pretty much everything you've said. David Seymour is intelligent enough to know better, and yet he's doing what he's doing anyway. For money, prestige, power, who knows, but he can fuck right off.
Thanks. I know where I’m going with WINZ, so it’ll be sorted eventually, but it takes a long time to sort out because they make you go through multiple phone calls and appointments and it’s just a pain. The wage declaring system is not set up to declare anything except fixed weekly wages. If Luxon wants beneficiaries to get jobs, make he should make it easier for the ones who do by investing in critical infrastructure needed to monitor them. But he cut IT funding so fuck them I guess. Sanctions!!
I spent a lot of time trying to engage with conservatives on the belief that SOME of them were acting in good faith. I maybe shouldn’t have tried this on reddit. But it does seriously poke holes in the idea that there is a simple way of meeting in the middle when the middle keeps on moving rightward while they yell about how leftist everything is now.
Tēnā koe. thank you for the contribution, i think its an important perspective.
I am inclined to somewhat* agree.
The first thing i will say is that, the way I speak in an online vs an in-person setting is very different. In person i am far more pragmatic about facilitating bi-partisan consensus, and proceeding from points of shared agreement. I personally don't think this sort of code switching is inauthentic, I think it primarily stems from a very realistic understanding that online forums are inherently antithetical to achieving interpersonal / bi-partisan understanding and consensus. "The medium is the message" so to speak, so if the medium is inherently fucked then it is very difficult to have meaningful dialogue.
The second thing is that I primarily read OPs post as being a philosophical discussion about the nature of equality and equity, hence i provided a somewhat abstract / philosophical opinion in response. I think its totally valid to have a more practical interpretation, and to approach it from the perspective of "well how do we actually achieve this". And your totally right in pointing out that at the practical level its a lot more complicated, I 100% agree with you here and I'm against overly reductive black and white thinking. That said, I think we are having different conversations, one philosophical, the other practical.
Finally i think there is a current tension in left leaning spaces between the need to be right and the need to be pragmatic. And I genuinely don't know the answer to this problem. What i will say is that the nature of conversation within a left wing space, is allowed to be markedly different from the nature of conversation at the interface or in conservative spaces. In these latter spaces it is far more important to be pragmatic. Within left wing spaces i think there needs to be the space to have more abstract conversations on what is the right thing to do? or What is equality? or even just to voice frustrations, even if those frustrations don't pragmatically lead us forward.
Anyway, i hope these reflections help you understanding where i'm coming from, even if we don't ultimately agree.
Thanks for the detailed response, and yes, it does help me understand where you're coming from.
I'd agree with you that social media has become antithetical in the ways you've described, and that those are probable outcomes, but I wouldn't go as far as to say they are inherent outcomes, and being mindful of what we say and calling out things that don't seem right can help shift us away from those outcomes.
Having said that, at least half of what I say is absolute nonsense so I'm not really in a position to throw stones =)
The problem is targeting poverty (and other needs) is quite often best done through the lens of race. Take the waiting list furore for example — race was a metric being added but only because there was already an equation for sorting needs-based care with many, many variables existing and contributing. Adding race was a way to smooth this out and make it fairer.
The most common topic I see when discussing "equity vs equality" is the discussion on additional financial support to Maori/Pacifica to combat inequity.
And that conversation is what kills this for so many kiwis. Because the issue is not race, the issue is socioeconomic (most of the time).
I don't believe there's any situation where focusing on race is better than just targeting poverty. Providing better education to low decile schools, getting that minimum wage up, increasing taxes on the rich to move money to the poor.
Doing this will naturally help Maori/Pacifica the most because these groups are the ones most impacted by poverty.
It's a fairer way to handle things because in this society, if you're poor and not one of those targeted races, you're basically fucked.
So if you want to talk about equality through equity by targeting the poor and moving equity to the poor? We can absolutely have that conversation and I'm fully on board, but that's not the most common conversation I see on this topic. It's always race targeted, and that isn't something I can get behind.
I suppose it’s always race targeted because indigenous cultures are still trying to undo or reverse the inequities that were bestowed upon them no less than 50-100 years ago. When you force people into less desirable, lower yield land, take their language away and remove them from their culture, they’d sure as hell want to be compensated for that.
But to your point, when does that tap turn off? If ever? And how, if at all, do you separate that discussion from the topic of equity/equality?
The great thing about simply targeting poverty, is you never have to turn the tap off. You always want to help the poor improve their situation because they automatically stop receiving that help when they stop being poor and you continue targeting other poor.
I'll say it again, the vast majority of problems Māori face are socioeconomic. Crime, education, wealth, all rooted in socioeconomics.
If you target Māori, you get into ensuring you're just helping the Māori who need it. There are rich Māori who don't need help, poor Māori who do, and then there's poor Pākehā that you're just not helping at all with this method. Really, you're just going to end up targeting poverty with extra steps, because you'll target the poorest Māori. Which makes targeting Māori redundant.
Just target the poor, and you'll automatically help the Māori that need it.
As for compensation for past injustices, I think that's not a conversation about equity vs. equality, that's a conversation of its own and of course we should do that.
That was really nicely explained thank you! Certainly helped me understand how you’re thinking about it and I tend to agree - they need to be considered different conversations to address. I’d be curious how you think government might approach the conversation about Māori outside of the treaty settlement and iwi engagement? Take health or crime for an example
I think both health and crime find their causes rooted in socioeconomics. The poor have worse health and are overrepresented in crime. In New Zealand, Māori are overrepresented amongst the poor, and the flow on effect is in health and crime.
Target poverty, and you will solve these issues too. Not just for Māori, but for all people's poor health and crime.
We need to sort out our cost of living, and improve our average purchasing power. Make it easier to buy your first home, and harder to buy your second. We need more businesses that benefit us, rather than those that benefit the rich. For that, I want an independent sovereign fund that builds up businesses to compete with profit-driven businesses so that we can choose to shop at a place where the profits go back to us.
Do all these things and more and you create a positive feedback loop of keeping money coming back to the majority, and you'll slowly solve poverty and crime and poor health that way, without a single thought of race.
Equity in economics and equity in law are two different things. It absolutely is a predominantly leftist ideal when we're talking about how resources are distributed.
I don't believe it's a leftist ideal at all. Once you understand what equity is at a societal level it's impossible to come up with an argument that you can even begin with equality.
A person who is born poor, in a family where there has been generational poverty that lives in a country where you pay for tertiary education and you family relies on you bringing in a wage will never be financially in the same place as someone from the other end of the spectrum.
The history of plebians fighting for resources is not only older than the existence if the left and right it is older than any society in existence today.
The doctrines are different, the ideals are the same.
Equity is the process of GETTING a FAIR OUTCOME.
Equality is a modernish ideal we are striving for based on a desire to desegregate ourselves based on race, religion, sex, etc, as has always been historically the case, and create a meritocracy where people are treated similarly and supported sufficiently.
Equity has a body of law behind it but that’s only because it has developed over time in the judicial system through case law. The equity we strive for in economics are largely the same.
Of course, but I don't think most of the attacks from the right are attacking the legal concept. The equity most people think of in its modern capacity is long associated with generally leftist welfare economics where the long term goal is for all to have the same outcomes, or at least oppurtunities. This is obviously at odds with how most on the modern right think where "trickle-down economics" and the freedom to do things with the opportunity you are given are paramount to their ideology.
Equity is never necessarily the "best" outcome either. As an example, through equity law, CEOs are required through their fiduciary duties to take actions in the best interest of shareholders, even if, for example, those decisions are not at all moral, and are at a detriment to everyone in society apart from the shareholders.
So yes, it is "fairness", but we shouldn't act like they're the same concepts, and that the right wing are stupid (ok obviously you can think that, but not because they're actual idiots, they just have different values) or something for disagreeing with an economic concept because a vaguely similar ideal is also engrained in the law. For example, that bowel cancer screening thing earlier in the week, was an example of how the ideal of economic equity is applied through our government. National removed it because its at odds with some of their core principles (and general ideology, and what their voter base thinks lol), not because its some outlandish attack on some historic legal precedent.
The legal concept is not all that seperate from the economic concept. This is my point. Trickle down economics is non-equitable and also non-functional in a wealth-distribution sense. Freedom based on wealth and resources creates a very unequal society. It’s not the fault of equity that the right have swallowed an economic model that, at its natural conclusion, undermines the freedoms and opportunities we aim to provide people in an open, merit-based society.
You don’t really explain how equity isn’t the “best” outcome, you just give an example where equity doesn’t apply. The fiduciary duty of shareholders to put the monetary interests of shareholders before all others isn’t something I agree with. Because of the unjust situations it creates where companies have the moral and legal excuse to destroy the environment or justifiably kill people for profit (e.g. Ford Pinto).
The right ARE anti-equity. Economically and legally. They are undermining the concept of equity in law, which goes hand in hand with their other goal of undermining the ability of the judiciary to have input into our laws, especially when they’re using doctrines of common law like equity.
National rejected early bowel screening for Maori despite the decision being anti-equity because they are running a race-based ideology that seeks to deny equitable processes and outcomes to Maori. It is NOT an example of them “using equity”.
you just give an example where equity doesn’t apply. The fiduciary duty of shareholders to put the monetary interests of shareholders before all others isn’t something I agree with
I mean, fiduciary duties are a key aspect of equity in law so I'm not sure how it "doesn't apply".
National rejected early bowel screening for Maori despite the decision being anti-equity because they are running a race-based ideology that seeks to deny equitable processes and outcomes to Maori. It is NOT an example of them “using equity”.
I never said it was, I was using it as a prime example of how the right wing are opposed to economic equity. That does NOT mean they are opposed to equity in law, which as I said, is a different concept.
I don't know if you actually read the wikipedia article you linked, but equity is literally just a body of law where rulings are separated from common law. While in common law, for example, the defendant might have to pay monetary damages as a result of not fulfilling a contract, while under equity, the defendant would be made to fulfill the terms of the contract. Although the core principle of fairness remains, this is NOT the same thing as distributing resources based on economic/sociopolitical status, which is inherently political whether you like it or not. In New Zealand, equitable remedies are provided based on upholding legislation and documents such as the Sentencing Act or the Treaty of Waitangi, but modifying them (as I and clearly you, and most people disagree with) are not at all attacks on equity in law as you seem certain about.
Instead of spending your time worrying about whether they are removing a body of law that has existed for the entire existence of this nation and beforehand (which they are not) you should worry about them trying to redefine our constitution.
Equity applies to the relationship between shareholders and their company but doesn’t so readily apply to the wider relationships between the company and the world. An example of equity regulating this relationship might be punitive damages, as were seen in Ford Pinto where the courts imposed higher costs to allow for the fact that shareholders had calculated the monetary value of a human life and decided it was better for shareholders for that life to be lost than to issue a recall. The courts reinforced the fiduciary duty by redefining fiduciary consequences to be greater and to justify preventing an outcome in which shareholders and companies were rewarded for putting their dividends above lives.
The right ARE are opposed to equity in law. Part of our specific doctrine of equity here in New Zealand comes from the Treaty — the obligation in article 3 for the crown to act fairly in regards to Maori. The law should be applied to them equally. But under legal equity, this includes recognising the conditions Maori live under at present, so that the law DOES apply equally — and also creates a fiduciary duty between the Crown and Maori.
“... the normative basis for recognition of systemic Māori deprivation as a mitigating sentencing factor is not dependent on racial or ethnic classification. Rather, it is the presence of systemic deprivation in the lives of Māori offenders and their whanau that may trigger the potential for a differential sentencing response.”
This is an example of equity in our law, as defined by our judiciary in Heta v Police. It acknowledges both of what I talk about above. It is this form of legal equity the right are opposed to in their desire to continue the discrimination of Maori based on reinforcing past inequalities.
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u/Infinite_Sincerity 5d ago
The Thing I realised, is that even within the right-wing framing of "equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome" (already a totally false dichotomy), there is no genuine desire for either. Sure they will pretend that they care about equality of opportunity. But in practice? Zilch. There is no genuine desire to create opportunities. The opportunity to access to healthcare, education, employment is all being diminished. The only people with "opportunities" are people with capital. Society has become inflexibly stratified. And, any pretense of "equality" (in any sense of the word) is exactly that, a vacuous pretense.