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Protesters at Auckland’s Albert Park on Saturday morning. (Photo: Anna Rawhiti-Connell)
Protesters at Auckland’s Albert Park on Saturday morning. (Photo: Anna Rawhiti-Connell)

The BulletinMarch 27, 2023

The anti-trans rally that wasn’t

Protesters at Auckland’s Albert Park on Saturday morning. (Photo: Anna Rawhiti-Connell)
Protesters at Auckland’s Albert Park on Saturday morning. (Photo: Anna Rawhiti-Connell)

Posie Parker said she wanted to ‘speak up for women’. Hundreds of protesters spoke up for trans rights instead, writes Catherine McGregor in this excerpt from The Bulletin, The Spinoff’s morning news round-up. To receive The Bulletin in full each weekday, sign up here.

A day of anger and joy

At 11am on Saturday morning the anti-trans activist Posie Parker (real name Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull) was scheduled to speak at the rotunda in Auckland’s Albert Park. By 11.30am she’d been bundled out, having abandoned her plans in the face of a counter-protest led by the city’s rainbow community. As the NZ Herald reported, a barrier erected to try to keep the two factions apart was pushed down, skirmishes broke out between the counter-protest group and Parker’s smaller entourage, and one counter-protester rushed towards Parker and poured a bottle of tomato juice over her head. The events of Saturday morning were tumultuous – but that’s not all they were, wrote Anna Rawhiti-Connell. “To leave people with the impression that the protest was only ugly, angry and chaotic is to assist Parker in feeding the narrative that trans people are people to be feared.” In fact, she wrote, the protest was a “symphony of fearlessness” and a joyful celebration of equality and aroha.

‘The worst place for women I’ve ever visited’

Parker’s own response was vehement. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” she told Stuff. “What a shameful day for New Zealand.” Later, having abandoned her scheduled Wellington event, she flew out of Auckland and back to the UK. Claiming that police had told her she was lucky to be alive, she tweeted: “I get to leave the worst place for women I’ve ever visited.”

‘I don’t want to give her a platform’

Asked about the weekend’s events on TVNZ’s Q&A, deputy prime minister Carmel Sepuloni said that while she would not have attended the protest, that didn’t mean she wasn’t strongly opposed to Parker and her beliefs. “In my mind, that woman and her views are abhorrent and actually, in some ways, quite ridiculous,” she told host Jack Tame. “I don’t want to give her a platform, because I think we’re much more progressive and we’ve moved beyond those views mostly in this country.” National’s Erica Stanford said the best way to respond to Parker’s presence would have been to ignore her, and blamed the Green Party for publicising her events. “If she’d come in under the radar, a few people would have turned up, nobody would have known she was here, and she would have gone, and we’d have carried on our tolerant normal ways as we do in New Zealand,” she said.

A proud history of protest in Aotearoa 

Saturday morning’s events may have left some people feeling shaken, but it’s worth remembering that’s what an effective protest is designed to do. In a Twitter thread, historian Scott Hamilton drew a direct line between the Springbok tour protests of 1981 and this week’s trans-rights protesters who “felt the morality of their cause” and believed that “the effects of their protest were more important than one person’s freedom to speak in Albert Park. They made the same calculation as the protesters in ’81.” Stuff’s Caroline Williams brought some levity to the matter with her list of the weird things that have been thrown at people during protests in New Zealand, including horse poo (at John Banks), a novelty sex toy (at Steven Joyce) and a wet t-shirt (at the Queen). One outrageous omission: the chocolate and cream lamington thrown at Act’s John Boscawen in 2009, as reported by the NZ Herald with the brilliantly succinct headline ‘Candidate creamed in sponge cake attack’.

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Photo: Getty Images
Photo: Getty Images

The BulletinMarch 24, 2023

National’s ‘back to basics’ plan to address the literacy crisis

Photo: Getty Images
Photo: Getty Images

Christopher Luxon says the policy is what’s needed to address serious issues with reading, writing and maths in primary schools. Others aren’t so sure, writes Catherine McGregor in this excerpt from The Bulletin, The Spinoff’s morning news round-up. To receive The Bulletin in full each weekday, sign up here.

Back to basics – and a lot more tests

In December 2021, two weeks after becoming National Party leader, Christopher Luxon told Businessdesk (paywalled) that New Zealand’s poor educational achievement rate was “without doubt the most startling and worrying” discovery of his political career so far. Yesterday he unveiled his turnaround plan: under a National government all primary and intermediate students will learn reading, writing and maths for at least an hour a day, and will undergo “standardised, robust assessment” in those subjects every six months. In many respects, the Teaching the Basics Brilliantly policy echoes the arguments of education expert Michael Johnston, a senior fellow at the NZ Initiative thinktank. The current curriculum, he argued in the NZ Herald, “offers teachers little guidance on the specific knowledge that they should teach, and almost none on how to sequence learning so that children proceed on firm foundations”. Last Friday the Ministry of Education itself released the first phase of its new common-practice model for maths and English pedagogy, part of a wider refresh of the New Zealand curriculum and how subjects are taught.

Testing times for literacy rates

When it comes to literacy, nearly everyone agrees there’s an urgent need for improvement. A report last year by Dr Nina Hood of Education Hub noted that just 35% of students in year eight are achieving at or above the curriculum level for writing, while reading ability at both primary and secondary school levels is steadily declining. “Only 60% of 15-year-olds in New Zealand are achieving above the most basic level of reading, meaning a staggering 40% are struggling to read and write,” wrote Hood. The decline in writing ability appears to be of particular concern. When the Ministry of Education piloted its new NCEA Level 1 literacy and numeracy standards, only one in three students passed the writing component, while around two-thirds passed reading and numeracy tests, reported the NZ Herald (paywalled). “Even more concerningly, just 2% of students in decile 1 schools passed the writing assessment, compared with 62% in decile 10 schools.”

National Standards by another name?

National’s proposal for two standardised tests a year for all primary and intermediate school children attracted immediate pushback from the NZEI, the union that represents primary school teachers. The policy was the return of National Standards by stealth, said NZEI president Mark Potter who said it promised “an even more intensive form” of the testing system introduced by the National government in 2010 and scrapped by Labour in 2017. “National Standards narrowed the curriculum, put undue pressure on children, increased teacher workload and weren’t even an accurate measure of a child’s progress,” then NZEI president Lynda Stuart said at the time. Defining the curriculum year-by-year was an “old and unsatisfactory” policy that wasn’t suitable for Aotearoa, Potter told TVNZ Breakfast yesterday. “Children don’t come in a lovely production line all operating at the same time, at the same level. What we do know about learning, that’s evidence-based, is that they all learn at different times and different rates,” he said.

An alternative to testing

Not every country believes regular standardised testing is the best way to help children learn. The poster child for the standardised testing-free system is Finland, the country with the world’s best education system according to the World Economic Forum (WEF). In Finland, “all children… are graded on an individualised basis and grading system set by their teacher” says the WEF, while its education system is “grounded on equal opportunities for all, equitable distribution of resources rather than competition, intensive early interventions for prevention, and building gradual trust among education practitioners, especially teachers”, wrote one policy analyst.

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