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Lindsay Mitchell
lindsaymitchell.blogspot.com
Lindsay Mitchell has been researching and commenting on welfare since 2001. Many of her articles have been published in mainstream media and she has appeared on radio,tv and before select committees discussing issues relating to welfare. Lindsay is also an artist who works under commission and exhibits at Wellington, New Zealand, galleries.
I strongly object to writers who refer to groups of people and profess to speak for them. It happens all the time with Maori, and now Paula Bennett presumes on behalf of women.
But once a politician always a politician so it’s hardly surprising.
Political parties run ‘focus groups’ to find out who to woo and what to say. They put their political pinkies in the wind and blow with it. And blow is a good word.
This piece is a lot of ‘blow’.
‘We’ this, ‘we’ that. Heavy on stereotypical female roles. A shout out to the sisterhood? A signal about how to behave if you want to belong?
Identity politics, to be blunt about it.
BUT Bennett knows more about women than I do. She has lost none of her political smarts. Her cloaked advice is for National (not Labour): “You must capture our heads and our hearts.” Currently common corporate parlance.
I must have been mistaken when I thought identity politics was the domain of the left.
It squeezes out the individual who doesn’t identify with any group – who gets a shiver down their spine when told WHAT THEY THINK AND WANT. Exactly what Bennett has done.
This whole device (former minister speaks for her gender to her former party) leaves me cold.
Then again, my cynicism regarding politicians has never been as deep as it is right now.
The manipulative game they play, and which voters willingly participate in, is ruinous.
