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10 March 2010

Update: a statement from the Social Justice Commissioner of the Anglican Church will be presented at today’s media conference in Katherine Mansfield Park.

Media conference: Understanding the Waihopai Ploughshares

The Waihopai Ploughshares trial is being held at Wellington District Court this week.

On Wednesday 10th March, at 6pm at the Ploughshares shrine in Katherine Mansfield Park, other members of Ploughshares international network will speak to the New Zealand media for the first time.

Many people will be unaware what the Ploughshares movement is about. Ciaron O’Reilly, Bryan Law and Jim Dowling, members of other Ploughshares actions in the United States, Ireland and Australia will join a panel to answer questions from the media.

“It is a privilege to stand in solidarity with these men who have taken a considered and faithful action to protect the human rights of the poor and oppressed,” said Jim Dowling, who along with Bryan Law, was a member of the Pine Gap Four in Australia who won their case on appeal when the three judges agreed with the defendants submission that there was a miscarriage of justice at the original trial because they were not able to bring evidence before the jury about the function of the Pine Gap facility. “It is particularly appropriate given the Lenten season, a time when people of faith remember Jesus’ own trial before Pilate.”

The Waihopai Ploughshares entered the Waihopai spy base in Blenheim in the early hours of Wednesday 30 April 2008. They entered New Zealand’s most secure facility using only a pair of pliers and gumboots. They then used sickles to disarm one of two domes covering satellite dishes used to gather intelligence at the behest of the United States and United Kingdom. This daring action was to highlight New Zealand’s complicity in gathering intelligence for the so-called ‘War on Terror’, the tens of millions spent by taxpayers each year on a facility that the Prime Minister has little knowledge of or control over.

Ciaron O’Reilly was part of the Pitstop Ploughshares action in Ireland causing over NZ$4m in damage that was successfully defended in the courts. The trial judge agreed with the defence on the applicability of the statutory lawful excuse defence.

These men and others present provide an authoritative insight into the international context of Ploughshares actions and the implications of a successful defence for accountability to and awareness of human rights.

“The actions of the Waihopai Ploughshares need to be understood in relation to an international movement for disarmament and peace,” said Graham Bidois Cameron, spokesperson for the Waihopai Ploughshares. “Adrian, Sam and Father Peter are part of rich history of activism in support of those without a voice.”

Lunchtime picket / vigil details (remainder of this week)

Thursday, 11 March, from 1 to 2pm, at the Australian High Commission, 72 – 76 Hobson Street.

Friday, 12 March, from 1pm to 2pm, at the Canadian High Commission, 125 The Terrace.

And both days outside the District Court from 10am to 5pm. If you are able to come along and help with the vigil outside the court, please note that the vigil is sometimes on the corner of Ballance Street and Lambton Quay – if you cannot see anyone with Ploughshares placards outside or opposite the court, please look for the vigillers on that corner.

Also, the trial may continue over into next week, so anyone able to join in the vigil outside the Wellington District Court (43 – 49 Ballance Street) next Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday (from 10am to 5pm) would be much appreciated.

The Anglican Church has committed itself to pursuing non-violence and building peace at the highest level, and the practice of non-violent direct action and civil disobedience has a strong history in this country and beyond – from protests at Waitangi, resistance of American nuclear submarines entering NZ, opposing the Springbok tour for example. Anglican involvement in these actions has been significant.

I realise that many in the church will feel uncomfortable with the actions of the ploughshares, and those in leadership may believe they cannot take sides. Clearly, we have much work in the church to be done and the witness of the ploughshares to us and the world is an important one, upholding biblical teaching (e.g. Romans 13).

I hope the trial serves to allow the both the reasons behind the actions of Ploughshares and the work of the spy base at Waihopai to be better understood and appreciated by everyone, for to do so would be to the benefit not only of this country, but those whom are persecuted and killed out of our gaze.

“The International Year is about advancing the full and effective participation of youth in all aspects of society. We encourage all sectors of society to work in partnership with youth and youth organizations to better understand their needs and concerns and to recognize the contributions that they can make to society.”

For more information, visit the website for the International Year of Youth at: http://social.un.org/youthyear/

The Campaign for Shared Security works to engage religious leaders and believers around the world to unleash the power of multi-religious cooperation through shared action. It will also reach out to international organizations, governments, national assemblies and parliaments, municipalities, media, and all men and women of good will.

The Peace Foundation (Aotearoa-New Zealand) assisted with the launch of the campaign in Costa Rica in November 2009, when more than 120 young religious leaders of different faiths from forty-nine countries in six regions came together to outline their strategies for meeting the campaign’s three goals: abolishing nuclear weapons, stopping the proliferation and misuse of conventional weapons and redirecting at least 10 percent of military expenditure to achieve the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015. The United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon and Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sánchez offered their support to this historic initiative.

Over the three days of the event, several panel discussions were held that exposed the youth to valuable insights from international experts on each of the campaign goals. At the same time, capacity building workshops equipped the participants with the practical tools to work on lobbying and advocacy, engaging the media, raising public awareness and working with mayors, parliamentarians and policy makers for the purposes of the campaign. Lastly, participants were divided into regional working groups to develop national, regional and global plans of action that would eventually contribute to the success of the campaign.

At the closing ceremony of the event, the International Youth Committee (IYC) of Religions for Peace presented the Statement and Plan of Action of the Global Level to Mr. Hernando París, the Minister of Justice and Peace of Costa Rica. Each region has also committed to collect signatures on the Arms Down! Disarmament petition, and the Global Youth Network has set a goal of 50 million signatures to be delivered to the United National Secretary General, the permanent members of the Security Council, as well as to Members of Parliaments, in one year’s time.

Campaign for Shared Security
Religions for Peace homepage

Join the Save Radio NZ facebook page and keep an eye out for some initiatives aimed at defending our last bastion of public service radio.

He Maori ahau no Aotearoa, I am Maori from this land of unending light. I stand before you as one voice and many faces:

• As bishop of the Anglican Church and Chair of its Social Justice Commission.
• As Maori – part of a people whose connection with the environment is literally our life.
• As sportsman, teacher, artist, anthropologist, and a desire to understand and transform people.
• As husband, father and a grandfather, filled with a passion for my family and their future.
• And so in the face of climate change, I stand before you with tears in my heart and hope in my voice, but I wonder if I am hoping for nothing.

In the Psalms we hear the cry of the Israelites: “by the rivers of Babylon I sat down and wept. How shall I sing the lord’s song in a strange land?”

And today, I weep for similar reasons – it is as though no one understands our cry. What do we really seek to achieve through this action? How can the voice of truth ever be heard, understood, accepted, and precipitate change of the magnitude we need right now?

What can we do in order for us to avoid being perpetrators of the biggest act of genocide and wanton natural destruction in human history? We tend to avoid the word genocide and instead prefer user friendly terms like natural disaster and human tragedy. But these are simply lies, we tell ourselves to let us sleep at night. We are all complicit in the destruction of lives all over the world on a grotesque scale – the lives of people alive now, and the lives of future generations. None of us seem to fully grasp the enormity of our actions and our inaction to change.

I am just a normal person. I don’t know the details of climate science, nor the behind the scenes talks in climate negotiations.

But you know, what I do know is people. It’s part of who I am. And people are formed by habits. In the church we do a great deal to encourage people to adopt habits that are life giving not life taking, but to be really honest with you, even in the church sometimes we find it hard to work out how best to do that these days.

Scientists give us information, but they can’t change what we do. Politicians have the ability to create laws and shape our nation, but all of them seem to lack the political will to act responsibly in the face of the biggest moral issue we have ever faced. And that’s what climate change is all about – it’s primarily a moral issue, not an economic issue, nor even primarily a scientific issue. Economics and science report the state of the world, but morality shapes that world because it informs and guides how we act.

To act in ways that deliberately cause the destruction of people and the planet is immoral. History, even just since the second world war, has shown that ignorance is no excuse. Either we act to stop it or we are complicit in it – I am complicit in it.

We are all very good at words. That’s especially true in the church. We get so used to talking about action that we begin to believe that our talk is in fact action itself. This of course is a nonsense. We have also come to believe that consensus means the lowest common denominator, rather than something more aspirational. That too is a nonsense.

The problem is, climate change isn’t your normal disaster. It doesn’t seem to happen in real time.

We will all remember recently the disasters in the Philippines due to flooding or those in Samoa because of Tsunami and earthquake.

The general response to such disasters is to send in a disaster response team – to rescue the living and wounded, recover the dead where possible, and to try and restore some kind of order in the face of the tragedy which affects us.

Climate change is a disaster that appears to be occurring in slow motion. It seems intangible; ungraspable, unseeable. Climate change is more like a runaway train. It may seem a bit on the slow side now, but once it’s got momentum it’s going to be harder and harder to put the breaks on. Distant deadlines make us feel we have all the time in the world. That’s deadly.

Copenhagen as it stands would mean, that agreement would be something close to a comic tragedy – and I wouldn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The real disaster may not be that we do nothing – the real disaster may be that we do a little and think it’s a lot.

I said at the beginning that while I weep, I have hope.

My hope is that all of us can find the moral courage to act.

We need leadership and engagement that is more intuitive, more imaginative, more willing to take risks.

We need, new personal, national, regional, global habits. And we need mechanisms for forming them. New questions require new answers.

But most of all we need to end the silence. But demonstrations like this are simply not enough.

Climate change requires a quantum shift in how we form societies and act as members of them.

We can raise awareness and ring bells, but it isn’t going to make any real difference. It’s just going to make us feel better. Like the offerings of our politicians it’s too little, too late. We are refusing to face the reality of our situation.

And the reality is, as history shows: what we need is a revolution. Peaceful, if possible, but a revolution nevertheless.

We cannot wait for inaction and indecision to determine our future – we, the people, need to act decisively for the sake of our mokopuna and for the planet.

Haeremai tonu ra te Wairua Tapu runga i te Upoko hau i te po marangai i te puehutanga mai o te aroha. Come Holy Spirit, as the windy cloud, the night storm, to energise us with your compassion. Kia ora tatou katoa.

The Right Reverend Muru Walters

It seems to me that both are required. Big corporations would not do what they do if it were not profitable, and it is profitable because we buy the end product. Individual action may not change a system that creates a situation in which individual action is required. But the people who are concerned enough to act and change their own lives become conscientised and empowered. They are more likely to be those who engage at a political level to change what is unjust. There is also a question of credibility. To cry out for systems to more fair while living in a way that exploits your global neighbour doesn’t have a lot of integrity and is unlikely to attract followers. To try to draw a line between individual action and systemic change is unhelpful.

Perhaps a better way to reflect on what is required is that of community change. We are not called to act individually to make society better; or to individually act for political change. Becoming a christian is about inclusion into a community, about a new way of life. To be in Christ, to be one body, to be in and not of… however you want to word it being a christian isn’t about individually believing a set of statements about God, it is about being caught up into God and becoming a part of a community. It isn’t easy to know how to function and live and decide and act as a called and gathered community in the midst of a fractured and compartmentalised culture. And a lot of the time I’m not even sure I want to. But it seems a more helpful direction to struggle in than trying to decide between individual or political action. To live a different and peculiar life with a community of people is far easier and more sustainable than trying to do it alone, and there is little that is more political than a large community of people that insist on living out a radically different story than the one they are surrounded by.

Read the rest of this timely article from Orion Magazine: http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/4801/

I think this article missed some critical links, but it is well worth thinking about. Do you agree? Anything that needs adding?

Equality isn’t a magic solution

What’s the solution to our societal problems? According to recent social commentators it lies in making sure we all have roughly the same amount of stuff. Tapu Misa, writing in 7 September’s New Zealand Herald, joined the likes of John Minto in suggesting that reducing income inequality is the way to solve New Zealand’s endemic social ills. Minto is perhaps in another league to Misa, in advocating for government to even out income imbalances with a 100 percent income tax on earnings above $250,000. With 24 percent of our highly skilled workforce already ditching the country, surely we don’t want to give them another reason to leave.

Misa and Minto are getting excited by these familiar ideas because of a new book written by two British health researchers, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, called The Spirit Level. Using data for 23 wealthy countries, including New Zealand, they have investigated the statistical relationship between income inequality and a range of social outcomes, like health, educational achievement and mental health.

Contrary to what we might expect, they find that it isn’t necessarily the wealthiest countries that are the happiest or healthiest. In fact, some of the wealthiest countries have the highest levels of social problems, and—as the commentators emphasise—the highest levels of inequality. The authors of The Spirit Level claim this as evidence that higher economic growth has done all that it can for boosting living standards; once countries reach a certain level of prosperity, increasing economic growth does not seem to make their societies healthier or happier. They recommend politicians should instead reduce the “scale of the material differences between people” to improve everyone’s quality of life.

Wilkinson and Pickett’s study is thorough and original. But despite the commentators’ excitement about the apparent relationship between inequality and worsening social outcomes, this correlation is still just a correlation. In other words, seeing a relationship between two things doesn’t prove that one causes the other. We cannot be certain it is inequality that is causing a problem and not the other way around.

We should also be careful about concluding from such evidence that there is a single, neatly packaged solution to social problems. In this case, the research has declared inequality to be a problem, so commentators have decided that all we have to do is fix inequality and the world will be better. Sound familiar? From Communism to New Zealand’s “Think Big,” grand schemes have been tried in the past and they have been found wanting. Minto is misguided to suggest that we can cure social problems through tax-payer financed redistribution. Quite apart from the economic consequences, Wilkinson and Pickett themselves do not see a bigger hand for government as the only solution. They say “the argument for greater equality is not necessarily the same as the argument for big government.”

Like Misa and Minto, we all care about having a fairer society. But by claiming that reducing material inequality is the solution to our problems, Misa and Minto have ironically made the very mistake that Wilkinson and Pickett wrote The Spirit Level to condemn—reducing everything to economics. Just as economic growth won’t guarantee health and happiness, it is fair to say that making everyone’s material wealth roughly the same provides no guarantees. What we truly need is a society where we take responsibility for one another. In the past, New Zealand had a range of thriving friendly societies that dispensed welfare and education to the community. Now the government does it—often badly. If society lacks care and compassion, all the redistribution in the world won’t help.

We need a society that actually encourages people to thrive. That celebrates with the entrepreneur when they bank their first profit and encourages businesses as they create more jobs. We need the kind of society where a young person, unemployed for the third generation in their family, is not condemned to endless queuing for the dole. But this requires ordinary people doing the harder work of sticking with one another; providing people who have been given a rough deal a chance to turn things around, by driving them to work, helping them learn their trade and cheering for them as they stay in a job. Redistribution sounds easy—it lets us transfer money and feel like a good Samaritan—but in reality, a better commitment is needed.

There is no single solution for creating a fairer society. But there are about 4 million individual solutions if all of us decide to do what we can in our communities. You and I are the closest thing there is to a silver bullet.

	Read “It’s just not fair—why equality matters” by Tapu Misa
	Read “Put a cap on eye-popping incomes” by John Minto