Up Front by Emma Hart

So Lianne Dalziel has finally declared that yes, she is running for mayor. There'll be plenty of time to talk about the mayoral race later. The other thing this means is that there'll be a by-election in Christchurch East. What I want to do at this point is just have a quiet, general word with the Labour Party about Not Fucking This Up. 

It's been clear for a while that you'll need new candidates in East and also in Christchurch Central. I'm mostly going to pretend that I haven't heard any rumours about who those candidates might be, except for this one, because it was in the paper. Now, it may be that it's about as soundly based as that time The Press suggested that perhaps Bob Parker wasn't going to to run for mayor again, but just in case it's not, what the hell were you guys smoking? You're thinking about standing Clayton Cosgrove in Christchurch East, instead of him fighting to regain Waimakariri? I mean, I guess it would be an efficient way of showing both electorates exactly the same degree of respect, but really? This is Christchurch. Even moving someone in from North Canterbury is considered carpet-bagging here. 

Look, I don't know if you noticed (no, seriously, I don't know if you noticed) but we had an earthquake. Everything changed. That's the only issue there is here. We feel abandoned and betrayed. We feel like we're fighting a war, and Campbell Live are the only people who know it's happening. That might not be a fair appraisal, but it's how we feel. 

This is not the time to be taking us for granted. Yeah, we really hate those other fuckers, and yeah, those are traditionally safe Labour seats, but you know what happens if you don't engage us with your candidates? No, we don't vote National. We just don't vote at all. That's what happened in Christchurch Central. It didn't swing to National. Wagner won the seat with 1079 fewer votes than she got when she lost it the time before. In particular, if you want us to turn out for a by-election? You need us to be actively on your side. Or rather, you need to be actively on our side. 

You need to stand people we feel are down here in the trenches fighting with us. And when I say "us", I particularly mean women. All "shoulds" aside, it's the women in eastern and central Christchurch who are particularly carrying the emotional burdens of what's happened to us. Even if we work, we're more socially expected to look after our families, mentally and physically. We're the ones walking our children through the pissing rain for forty minutes to get to their "new" school, and trying to make them feel okay about it. A quarter of our teenage daughters exhibit symptoms of PTSD, and you know what? We kind of feel like that's our fault. We are tired and angry and sad. 

James Dann is right: this by-election is a chance for our issues to make the news night after night. We need you to stand someone who knows how we feel. Your candidates should be people who marched with us, who fought with us even when nobody else was paying any attention. I would love it if at least one of the candidates you chose, for Central or East, actually was one of us: the exhausted scary fucked-off mothers of Christchurch.

One of the ways I can tell I'm getting old is that sometimes, when my Social Media Posse are raising hell on an issue, I find myself thinking, "Man, it's way more complicated than that." The case of Kaitlyn Hunt is one of those times. 

You might think I'd be utterly unambivalent about this. Here's an eighteen year old girl facing a felony prosecution for 'lewd and lascivious battery' for having sex with her fourteen year old girlfriend. Isn't this clearly homophobia? 

No. Kaitlyn's girlfriend's parents might have pushed the prosecution because they're homophobic, or they might have done exactly the same thing if their kid had been sleeping with an eighteen year old boy. We don't know. The prosecution would still have been taken if the older teenager had been male. We know this, because it happens. There have been many cases in the States of boys facing felony prosecution, and the rest of their lives on Sex Offender Registers, for having consensual sex with their younger girlfriends. Homophobia is probably a factor, but it's way more complicated than that. 

There are also clearly people who find this relationship less problematic because it's not heterosexual, not more. Some people have a much easier time thinking of a theoretical eighteen year old boy as a manipulative abusive predator than they do a girl. That's problematic too, because it's based on a sexist assumption that the male is always the one pushing for sex. 

Here's the question that should be really hard to answer: is it wrong for an eighteen year old to have sex with a fourteen year old? Mulling this question led me to an even curlier one: should there be an age of consent? 

Our age of consent is about right, yeah? Sixteen; seems about right. Not fifteen, that's too young – unless you're Swedish. And fourteen is definitely too young. Germany and Italy have that dead wrong. Thirteen is ridiculous. That's only for creepy third-world countries, like Spain. 

There are countries, and states in the States, where it's only legal to have sex with someone under eighteen if you're married to them. A fifteen or sixteen year old can't possibly consent to something as significant and life-altering as casual sex, but marriage? No problem. In the Cook Islands and Samoa there is no age of consent for boys. In Canada – Canada! – the age of consent is orifice-dependent. 

Any age of consent is deeply problematic. It's a bright line. It says that today someone cannot possibly consent to sex, but tomorrow they can. It creates a situation where two people can have sex they both want, and both be guilty of a crime. 

One of the ways some jurisdictions have tried to deal with the injustice this can cause is the "Romeo and Juliet" exception that might have saved Kaitlyn Hunt had she been a little younger. This offers mitigation, or negates the offence, if the couple are 'close in age'. How close is close enough varies. 

What Romeo and Juliet laws try to convey is that a relationship is okay if the couple are peers. When I was fourteen, my boyfriend was seventeen. Nobody who knew us thought that was a problem. We were clearly peers. Equals. The fact that our age difference crossed the age of consent did not create an unhealthy power dynamic. 

So Romeo and Juliet laws are clearly a good idea, right? I mean, as long as you don't do it like Kansas. There's still a bright line, though. To quote from Connecticut's law: 

A 15-year-old born on 1 January can consent to a 18-year-old born on 1 February. This is just under a 3-year age difference. A 15-year-old born on 1 February cannot consent to an 18-year-old born on 1 January.

Can age of consent law be done well at all, when age is the only signifier of maturity and power dynamic we can use? What's its purpose? A hundred and fifty years ago or so, the age of consent was about three years below the average age of menarche. Now, it's about three years above that. Is it about protecting children from paedophiles, or teenagers from mistakes? Can we have an informed debate about it in a society that's still scared of teenage girls having protected consensual sex in ongoing relationships? 

Kaitlyn Hunt's girlfriend's parents say they had no choice but to involve the police. They'd asked their daughter not to see her. They'd told Kaitlyn to stay away from their daughter. Anyone who's had, met or been a teenager will be gob-smacked to hear that didn't work. They had no choice. What I can't fathom is what they thought they were protecting their daughter from that would be worse than what they're putting her through.

This is a slightly weird day for me. Today, something I've been fighting for for years is going to come to pass. The Marriage Equality bill is going to pass its third reading. What will I do tomorrow? 

Obviously, the answer to that question, for me and hundreds like me, will be  'groan, wince, and think "I really shouldn't have done that".' Tonight is for celebrating, with like-minded individuals. 

It's days like this when I really wish we could all be together. Not that you could fit all the people I'd want to spend this evening with into the same bar, but you understand the sentiment. The closest I will come is Twitter, where I fully expect to see the people I love making sarcastic remarks about ParliamentTV's hold music. 

Out in the meat-space, there are events all over the place. In keeping track of this, I am even more than usually indebted to gaynz for constantly updating this page as things have changed through the week. 

Starting with Christchurch, because that's where I am. There will be a free concert at the Pallet Pavilion from 6pm, featuring Anika Moa. The third reading will be shown. 

I will not be there, and given the forecast and the venue, I won't be the only one. Luckily (and contrary to what was reported in The Press) it's not the only game in town. A bunch of us will be heading along to join Tony Milne and the Christchurch Campaign for Marriage Equality upstairs at the Pegasus Arms from 7pm for viewing and drinking. It's always nice to have company when you're yelling at the television. 

Wellington, where they really know how to celebrate some legislation. Legalise Love has a lunchtime picnic planned on Parliament's lawn from 12-2. Again, the weather is probably going to be a factor there. (EDIT: Picnic has been cancelled due to weather.) For the reading itself, the public gallery is full, but there's now overflow space in the Legislative Council Chamber. On the other hand, Back Benches is also filming that night, right across the road. The official after-party is, of course, at San Francisco Bath-house, and it's free. 

You can also watch the debate and the vote at S&M's and Ivy. 

Auckland. You can watch the debate at Caluzzi, or The Zookeeper's Son. The latter venue would like you to RSVP. [EDIT: Zookeeper's Son viewing party has been cancelled.) I remain convinced there must be more going on in our northern city. Let's not keep it a secret. EDIT: Gaynz have added an event at Family, from 9pm. That's more like it.

The gaynz page also has details of events in Hamilton, Palmerston North, WaihekeIsland and, yes, Blenhiem. Nothing for Dunedin. Yes, it's cold, but I know y'all have bars down there. 

The debate will be on Sky and Freeview, and you can stream it here. 

In the midst of all this celebration, I can't help but spare a thought for the legislation's opponents. They've found themselves a minority in our society that some people feel it's okay to say mean things about. I can't even imagine what that must be like. And imagine the strain of maintaining the cognitive dissonance of continuing to believe they were right when all around them, society fails to fall apart. 

On the other hand, maybe they're right, and I'm wrong. Maybe I really will wake up tomorrow gay-married to my cat while fire and brimstone rains from the sky. All the more reason to party hard tonight.

 

(Always gay-drink gay-responsibly and all that.)

Parents of special-needs children are used to fighting their government to get their kids' needs met. Giovanni's talked about it here, and I touched on it here. By the time our kids get to high school, we can no longer be shocked, right? Introduce Unit Standard 26625 as compulsory, so hearing-impaired teens have to pass "actively participate in spoken interactions" to get NCEA Level 1 Literacy? Of course. Why not? Turn my gifted writer into a failure in her strongest subject because her speech isn't clear.* Why would we expect to be treated any better? Hearings on enrolment applications for special-needs schools are held in February of the year in question, after the school year has started? Of course they are. 

Exams in particular are supposed to be barriers, right? That's their purpose. Thing is, those barriers are bigger for some kids than others. Some special-needs kids have issues that make sitting exams particularly difficult: reading, or writing, or motor control, or sight. It would be (I hope) obviously unfair to make them sit exams under the same conditions as their peers who don't have those issues. 

That's why NZQA has Special Assessment Conditions, or SACs. They're designed to go some way to levelling the playing field. Mostly, they're pretty simple. Things like enlarging an exam paper to A3 for a visually-impaired kid, Braille papers for the blind, or giving a dyslexic kid an extra half-hour on a three-hour exam to compensate for their naturally-slower reading speed. Sometimes SACs are a little more complicated, like providing readers or writers or NZSL signers. 

All in all, though, it really is just common sense. What would possibly be the point in not providing special-needs kids with the assistance they need to gain qualifications? It would be mad to get in their way. You'd end up ensuring they were unemployable and a much greater expense to the state in the long run, so even on an Arsehole Values scale, granting SACs just makes sense. 

Last year, NZQA declined a record number of SAC applications. This year, they've made some of the criteria tougher. Why? I assume for the same reason it got harder and harder to get ORRS funding: the government is facing an epidemic of fraud from disabled children. 

Take the criteria for extra time. Previously, candidates qualified for the extra ten minutes per exam hour if they had slow processing, or slow reading, or slow writing. This year, they need to fulfil two of those criteria. Why? Seriously, they have those meetings in February. I mean, this is a whole extra half hour of a supervisor's time. We can't be giving that away recklessly to kids who just read slowly. That's a lot of money: think how many Wanganui Collegiates you could bail out for that. 

There are increased requirements for schools to provide psychometric and in some cases intelligence testing (yes, really, next it'll be polygraphs) to back applications. Kids who want a writer have to do a typing speed test, even though the vast majority would be hand-writing exams. There is no extra funding for this testing. 

Here's a thing that really bugs me. If your SAC application is refused, only the school can appeal that decision. Parents have lost the ability to do so. Why? Oh, come on.

Last year we moved our daughter from a mainstream school to a special-needs unit in a mainstream high school. The difference in catering for her needs has been overwhelming. It's not just the extra support in her day-to-day schooling. It's the experience the staff have in gaming the system. I know that, should my daughter have issues with MinEdu, her school will pursue the issue and act in her interests. 

Let's be honest. Not all schools will do this. In some, the staff don't have the experience. In others, the school environment is unsupportive** towards special-needs pupils. How much time are they going to take out from trying to get paid or stay open to fight for your kid's half-hour? You'd be prepared to take that time yourself? Can't be having that, now. 

NZQA has advised the Ministry of Education that it will be undertaking a full review of SACs, to be completed by October this year. I'd love to tell you how you could have input into this review. I'd love to give you a cookie if you can find any trace of this review on the net. The information I have has come through the Dyslexia Foundation of New Zealand. To be honest, though, the devil isn't in the detail on this one. The problem is the underlying institutional attitude that this funding must be kept from its intended recipients if this is at all possible. You know what people who benefit from things are? Beneficiaries. 

We've just applied to renew my daughter's Child Disability Allowance. Yes, as it turns out, she's still hearing-impaired. Our GP, who did the paperwork, is not optimistic. There's been no change of criteria, but what she's seeing is that it's becoming a lot harder to get. No doubt people are farming disabled children for the forty bucks a week. 

This is why I can't be glad Thatcher's dead. Zombie Thatcherism is still shambling along just fine.

 

  

* The actual solution was to ram her level one English through a year early, before the change came in. Success!

**by which I mean "actively hostile"

Know what I hate? Yes, you do. Know what else I hate? Those lists of things people should be able to do to be proper... whatever. Men. Women. New Zealanders. Grown-ups. They're normative and stereotype-reinforcing and they're always going to make someone feel excluded and inferior. (The obvious exception is Hyperbole and a Half's "This Is Why I'll Never Be an Adult", being as it's the best thing on the internet.) 

Lately, however, we've had to accept that our "children" are now... offspring, or progeny. Something: but no longer children. (You can't say "our teens"; it sounds like you keep them locked in the basement for nefarious purposes.) Some time in the near future – gods willing - they'll leave home, go out into the world, and have to function on their own, without us. As adults. It's our job as their parents to equip them with the skills they need to do that. So we have to think about what those skills are. And if, like me, you're a compulsive theoriser and you have a slight (or massive) tendency to over-think things, this gets kind of problematic. 

My partner, for instance, is teaching them to drive. All adults should be able to drive, right? Except, y'know, me. Meanwhile, I'm teaching them to cook. A necessary survival skill. Not one, however, that my partner possesses. What we're saying to them is, "You absolutely need to be able to do this thing an adult member of your immediate family can't do." How is that justifiable? 

One might think that what adults need to do is be able to take care of themselves. They need to be able to do all the things their parents did for them as children. Wash, dress, feed, clean, get around, support themselves financially. Bare minimum, right? Sure it is. Unless, you know, you're ill or disabled. When I was spending most of every day in bed because my CFS was utterly crippling, I didn't cease being a grown-up, and nobody thought I had. 

Yet we have children, and we have adults, and we even have an intermediate maturing stage these days called 'teenagers'. How can we have a concept of 'adult' if we can't define it? Is it just a matter of age? People turn eighteen (or twenty-one, or twenty-five if you have a student allowance) and then get their Adult Card? 

My son will turn eighteen this year, and in preparation for this he's been carrying on an involved correspondence with the Electoral Commission. He'll be grown-up enough to be allowed to vote, to have an actual say in the future direction of his country. So... does that mean I think people who don't vote aren't proper adults? 

Man, this weather. And how about those Black Caps? 

Okay, no, of course I don't. And yes, I am way, WAY more excited about his enfranchisement than he is. 

I went and asked Google Auto-complete for advice. It's one window into the zeitgeist. Its suggestion for "adults should be able to" was "carry concealed handguns". Jesus, America. Grow the fuck up. 

And there it is. When we say "Grow up," or "Stop being so childish," we're not talking about skills. We're talking about emotional maturity. And, largely, being dicks about it. But still, there's our cultural expectation of adulthood, in the way we slag people off for behaving like children. When I say, "She acts like she's still in high school," I don't mean she's on her Learner's, sits a lot of exams and can't plan a meal. I mean she plays games with other people's emotions. I mean she lies, and slags her friends off behind their backs. I should also, y'know, stop slagging her off behind her back. 

So let me go out on a limb here, and make a "should" statement about Proper Grown-Ups. An adult should be able to say "Thank you," "I'm sorry, I fucked up," and "I need help." All of those things are hard. We all fall down over them some of the time. But we owe them to other people, and we also owe them to ourselves. I reckon mastering them (and "I love you,") might be the Key to Life. I want my kids to be kind in their dealings with others, but also to be able to stand up for themselves. Maybe I should just make them read all of Captain Awkward. 

To be honest, though, we're not really trying to turn them into adults currently. That's the long, exhausting game. Our actual goal is "people who won't starve to death in a pit of their own filth when we leave them on their own for three weeks." Auto-complete has no suggestions for that.