Category Archives: Writing

Postcards From The Edge

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Postcards From The Edge: Exploring the confluence of Bollywood, the Indian diaspora in New Zealand and neoliberal multiculturalism

One of the highlights of May was getting mail (remember that? with stamps and everything) from New Zealand containing a fabulous catalogue and postcards created by Bepen Bhana for his solo exhibition. The envelope was beautifully wrapped in cloth and sewn, rather like mail you used to get from India.

The envelope the catalogue came in.

The envelope the catalogue came in.

Bepen, an Auckland-based artist had asked me last year if I would contribute to the catalogue for his solo exhibition. It is the first time I have written something for an artist and I have another in the pipeline. Catalogues usually contain images and descriptions of the pieces being exhibited by an artist or artists with essays written by the exhibition’s curator and other specialists in the topic which provide context and a way for people to understand what they are seeing.

Bepen’s photorealist paintings superimpose Bollywood actors and scenes onto New Zealand composite landscapes. If you haven’t seen the exhibition already, get yourself to Te Tuhi, it’s on from 04 May 2013 – 14 July 2013.

This is the most exquisite artist catalogue I have ever set eyes upon.

This is the most exquisite artist catalogue I have ever set eyes upon.

Bepen has kindly given me permission to reproduce the essay I wrote for him below, but I think it would be even better if you went and checked out the exhibition and the exquisite catalogue. You can also watch this Nightline report about the work by Ali Ikram.

This is the image for my piece.

This is the image for my piece.

First published in May 2013: Postcards from the edge by Bepen Bhana.

Most postcards or promotional brochures of New Zealand foreground the natural beauty of the country, its pure unspoilt assets of snow capped mountains, pristine beautiful lakes, and isolated beaches— there for the enjoyment of tourists. Bepen Bhana’s seven large scale landscape paintings in a simulated Graphicswallah hoarding style are juxtaposed with iconic highly visible Bollywood couples who are lush, colourful, and passionately engaged with each other drawing the eye to themselves and to these hypothetical landscapes. Bepen Bhana’s work has a special resonance for me as a twice migrant (now thrice having moved to Australia in January). These images combine my own nostalgia for the glamorous and beautiful aspects of an imagined Indian culture that I’ve always been displaced from— and been on the periphery of— with the clean, tidy, orderly New Zealand landscape, a place devoid of roaming animals, where everything in its proper place. Bepen’s work also provides a welcome opportunity to begin to explore the confluence of Bollywood (a huge and diverse film industry made up of a range of Indian cinematic traditions), the Indian diaspora in New Zealand and neoliberal multiculturalism. Different members of the Indian diasporas negotiate belonging through Bollywood differently for example Being Goan or Tamil in Kenya, Fiji or New Zealand in the context of diverse viewing practices and diverse mediated identity constructions (Punathambekar, 2005).

Reterritorialization refers to how migrants recreate their cultural identities in new contexts and locales (Punathambekar, 2005). In the Nairobi of the seventies, Indian cuisine, Indian sweet shops and massive Bollywood billboards/hoardings were ubiquitous. Not so much in New Zealand when we arrived, nothing in the mainstream media or landscape reflected my inherited cultural experiences nor the difficulties of migration (Punathambekar, 2005).

The New Zealand Indian experience has been shaped by legislation in response to political and economic factors. Indian people first arrived as deserters from British East India Company ships in the late 1800s (Swarbrick, 2005). Despite being British subjects they were subject to hostility and exclusionary legislation including the 1899 Immigration Restriction Act aimed at restricting Indian and other Asian immigration (Beaglehole, 2002). Indian migrants who were largely men (because of the legislation) were perceived as a threat, both as competitors for jobs and threats to sexuality and morality (Leckie, 1995). Anti-Asian feeling directed at Chinese and Indian communities continued to increase after World War I. Anti-Asian organisations including the White New Zealand League, formed in 1926 on the basis of the apparent threat Chinese and Indian men presented through miscegenation, alien values and lifestyle (Cormack, 2007). The New Zealand Government introduced restrictions under a ‘permit system’ in 1920 (Museum of New Zealand: Te Papa Tongarewa, 2004). However, a review of immigration in 1986 catalysed by neoliberal concerns about the ‘brain drain’ and decreased immigration to New Zealand led to The Immigration Act of 1987. This legislation introduced a points system shifting migrant selection from preferred source countries to skills criteria. Subsequently, Business Immigration Policy and ‘family reunification’ and ‘humanitarian/refugee’ categories were introduced which cumulatively increased migration from Asia. These policy changes and the Fijian coups increased the range and number of Indian migrants beyond the historical kin migration from Gujarat and the Punjab.

The New Zealand of the seventies differs from today. There’s been an indigenous Maori resurgence and the changes that I’ve outlined mean that there is a plethora of pan-Asian spaces, festivals and celebrations. This ‘happy hybridity’ (Lo, 2000) belies the weak link between a politics of multiculturalism and a politics of anti-racism. The former is consumptive and makes few demands and all that’s required to engage is superficial and temporary. The fissure is exposed through incidents like attempts to purchase land by Chinese interests which reveal “it is fine for Asians to own the corner dairy, but not a dairy farm” as Raybon Kan quips referring to the Crafar farms furore. Some things remain the same, the media selectively screens the nation (Fresno-Calleja, 2011), representations of ethnically diverse New Zealanders are scarce and draw on stereotypes, reproducing unequal power relations instead of culturally inclusive narratives (Kothari, Pearson, & Zuberi, 2004). Consequently, the inadequacy of mainstream media has led many diaspora to develop their own media. Another reversal is evident in the switch from the diaspora being a market for Bollywood, to now settings including New Zealand extending the cultural imaginary of Bollywood cinema (Punathambekar, 2005).

Bollywood might represent the export of Indian nationalism or a “feel good” version of Indian culture (Punathambekar, 2005), but I am grateful for this counter discourse. It’s a break from the relentless discourses of people who are backward, deficit laden, poverty-stricken and patriarchally confined that circulate through mainstream media in New Zealand. The stereotype of India as traditional yet modern and prosperous is preferable (Kaur, 2002) but it too needs to be interrogated. It is a double-edged neoliberal sword that Tourism New Zealand wields in its bid to leverage off the powerful marketing influence of Bollywood films. Attempting to increase the 30,000 annual visitor arrivals from India while in the same breath, Indian origin residents have suffered historical discrimination and continue to do so in fields such as employment.

Apart from being beautiful, Bepen Bhana’s postcards from the edge pose crucial questions at a critical juncture in New Zealand’s relationship with India. Who belongs and who is out of place in the New Zealand landscape? Do our exploitative past relationships with India and Indian communities mirror our future neoliberal aspirations for export earnings and tourism trade? Bepen’s work provides a platform for interrogating these and many other social and political questions.

 

Catalogue

Bibliography

Beaglehole, A. (2002). Refugees from Nazism,1936-1946: The experiences of women. In L. Fraser & K. Pickles (Eds.), Shifting centres: Women and migration in New Zealand history (pp. 81-103). Dunedin: University of Otago press.

Cormack, D. (2007). Once an Other, always an Other: Contemporary discursive representations of the Asian Other in Aotearoa/New Zealand. A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in East Asian Studies at The University of Waikato, Hamilton.

Fresno-Calleja, P. (2011). Reel New Zealanders: Contesting tokenism and ethnic stereotyping in Roseanne Liang’s Take 3. Studies in Australasian Cinema, 5(1), 19-29.

Kaur, R. (2002). Viewing the West through Bollywood: a celluloid Occident in the making. Contemporary South Asia, 11(2), 199-209.

Kothari, S., Pearson, S., & Zuberi, N. (2004). Television and multiculturalism in Aotearoa New Zealand. Television in New Zealand: Programming the Nation, 135-151.

Leckie, J. (1995). South Asians: Old and new migrations. In S. W. Greif (Ed.), Immigration and national identity in New Zealand (pp. 133-160). Palmerston North: Dunmore Press.

Lo, J. (2000). Beyond happy hybridity: Performing Asian-Australian identities. In I. Ang, S. Chalmers, L. Law & M. Thomas (Eds.), Alter/Asians: Asian-Australian identities in art, media and popular culture (pp. 152-168). Annandale: Pluto Press Museum of New Zealand.

Te Papa Tongarewa. (2004). Indians in New Zealand. AINAA Reflections through Indian weddings Retrieved 28th November, 2005, from http://www.tepapa.govt.nz/LEARNING/AAINAA/ceremonies/indians_nz.html

Punathambekar, A. (2005). Bollywood in the Indian-American diaspora Mediating a transitive logic of cultural citizenship. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 8(2), 151-173.

Swarbrick, N. (2005, 11 July 2005). Indians. Retrieved 8th October, 2005, from http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/NewZealanders/NewZealandPeoples/Indians/en

Regulating migrant maternity: Nursing and midwifery’s emancipatory aims and assimilatory practices

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I’ve just had the first paper from my PhD published: DeSouza, R. (2013), Regulating migrant maternity: Nursing and midwifery’s emancipatory aims and assimilatory practices. Nursing Inquiry. doi: 10.1111/nin.12020

In contemporary Western societies, birthing is framed as transformative for mothers; however, it is also a site for the regulation of women and the exercise of power relations by health professionals. Nursing scholarship often frames migrant mothers as a problem, yet nurses are imbricated within systems of scrutiny and regulation that are unevenly imposed on ‘other’ mothers. Discourses deployed by New Zealand Plunket nurses (who provide a universal ‘well child’ health service) to frame their understandings of migrant mothers were analysed using discourse analysis and concepts of power drawn from the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault, read through a postcolonial feminist perspective. This research shows how Plunket nurses draw on liberal feminist discourses, which have emancipatory aims but reflect assimilatory practices, paradoxically disempowering women who do not subscribe to ideals of individual autonomy. Consequently, the migrant mother, her family and new baby are brought into a neoliberal project of maternal improvement through surveillance. This project – enacted differentially but consistently among nurses – attempts to alter maternal and familial relationships by ‘improving’ mothering. Feminist critiques of patriarchy in maternity must be supplemented by a critique of the implicitly western subject of maternity to make empowerment a possibility for all mothers.

 

 

Refugee women in New Zealand: Findings and recommendations

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Today on International Women’s Day, it seems apt to share this article that I wrote on behalf of our research team for the Women’s Health Action Update, volume 16, Number 43, December 2012. Women’s Health Action is a charitable trust, that works to “provide women with high quality information and education services to enable them to maintain their health and make informed choices about their health care”. Their focus is on health promotion and disease prevention and they are particularly supportive of breastfeeding and screening. Their vision is ‘Well women empowered in a healthy world’.

More than 80 per cent of the world’s refugees are women and their dependent children. Often women of refugee backgrounds [1]are constructed within deficit frames as having high needs. This representation is problematic as it deflects attention from considering broader historical, social, systemic and political factors and the adequacy of resettlement support.

Little is known about the experiences of women who enter New Zealand through the Women at Risk category identified by The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). This category constitutes up to 75 places (10%) of New Zealand’s annual refugee quota of 750. Refugee Services worked with AUT University and the three Strengthening Refugee Voices Groups in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch to undertake a project to examine the resettlement experiences of women who enter New Zealand through this category or become sole heads of households as a consequence of their resettlement experiences. This project was funded by the Lotteries Community Sector Research Fund.

The project was important not only for its findings but also for the research process, which focused on strengths, social justice, community development and transformative research. This transformative agenda aimed to enhance the wellbeing of refugee background women by focussing on the roots of inequality in the structures and processes of society rather than in personal or community pathology (Ledwith, 2011). Within this frame we were committed to constructing refugee women as an asset rather than deploying a deficit model of refugee women as a burden for the receiving society (Butler, 2005).

Focus groups were held in 2009 and 2010 with women who entered New Zealand as refugees under the formal category ‘Women at Risk’ or became women who were sole heads of households once they arrived in New Zealand. Women that took part had lived in New Zealand from between five months to sixteen years.  Lengthy consultations were held with the three Strengthening Refugee Voices groups in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch prior to undertaking data collection, in order to scope and refine the research focus and process. These groups were subsequently contracted to provide services and support.

Key findings

Although support needs are similar to all refugees arriving in New Zealand, there were unique and exacerbated gender issues. Refugee background women experienced a double burden of stress with half the support, especially as they parented on their own. This is despite the tremendous unpaid and voluntary support provided by faith and ethnic community members. Women frequently postponed their own aspirations in order to assure the future of their children. When they were ready to take up further education (including English language classes) or employment, limited assistance was then available (given the focus on early resettlement) leading to women feel disadvantaged.

We have made several recommendations based around several specific themes. More broadly we recommended that:

  • More intensive and longer term instititutional support be made available from agencies such as Refugee Services.
  • Subsidised practical help be made available.
  • Assistance to broaden sources of support and networks is goven.
  • Subsidised English language lessons and childcare are available.
  • That a one stop shop/holistic support from culturally and linguistically skilled refugee community insiders be provided.

Parenting

Raising children in New Zealand brought new stresses. These included concern about the loss of culture, values and language and losing their children to less palatable values including the consumption of alcohol and drugs, gender mixing and loss of respect for elders. Women addressed these issues in a range of ways that included trying different less hierarchical styles of parenting, attempting to spend more time with their children, engaging them in broader supports eg mosque. However, a few women had the experience of losing their children through the intervention of CYFS and felt disempowered in their interactions with CYFS and with schools.

  • Programme for parenting for Refugee women, particularly around issues such as discipline, inter-generational gender issues
  • Programmes for young people.
  • Cultural competence training for CYFS.

Family reunification

Living in New Zealand is difficult for women who are conscious of their own comfort while other family members struggle. However, the cost of bringing family members over is prohibitive and the costs involved in providing support in the form of phone calls and remittances add a burden to already stretched lives of the women. The importance of extended family is highlighted for women on their own and the kinds of help that could be provided by family members. Additional stresses are the requirement that refugee women are able to support their families once they arrive in New Zealand. The process is also made difficult by the lack of transparency in the immigration process.

Recommendations:

  • Prioritise the reunification with family for women who are here on their own.
  • Provide financial support to women.
  • Increase transparency of the processes and decisions that are made.

Health system

Women encountered a different health system that at times was difficult to navigate. Many women felt that their health concerns were not taken seriously and that the health system created new problems. In terms of some health beliefs and stigma there was value in having more culturally appropriate services available. The surfeit of refugee background health professionals was a potential resource that was not being used.

•            Recommendations:

  • Train and employ a more ethnically, religiously, and linguistically diverse health workforce at all levels
  • Develop culturally responsive services.
  • Examine the affordability of services.
  • Develop cultural competence of staff working in health services.

Education

The cost and availability of day care for Refugee women on their own is prohibitive in some cases consuming the lion’s share of their income/benefit. Taking up loans in order to finance their own educations is also a problem. This prevents women from achieving their own goals such as learning English, driving or further education, which would assist them in the long term with employment and independence. Women generally considered their own advancement as secondary to their children. If women were resourced financially to gain an education this would assist them to also be a resource for their children. Having long-term support to enter the workforce would also be of benefit.

Recommendations:

  • Subsidised day care for women on their own.
  • Mentoring.
  • Scholarships for further education.

Employment

Women were concerned that their children were not getting employed despite tertiary qualifications. Barriers to employment included: ‘lack’ of New Zealand experience, language barriers, their perceived difference (clothing, culture, skin colour) and paucity of appropriate childcare, poor public transport. The impacts of unemployment included losing their dignity, health impacts of taking inappropriate jobs, boredom

Recommendations:

  • Subsidised driving lessons, support with transport
  • More work with employers to destigmatise refugee workers
  • Work mentoring/brokering services
  • Support for family members who come into New Zealand through the reunification category to obtain further education

Racism

Refugee women and their families experienced a range of racism related harms that were instititutional and interpersonal taking physical and verbal forms. Their clothes and accent marked them out, and verbal altercations saw stereotypes being invoked particularly around Islamophobia and discourses of war on terror. Women deployed a range of strategies to cope with racism including minimising the racism and helping their children to cope with it.

Recommendations

  • Social marketing campaigns
  • Community education
  • Addressing structural racism
  • National conversation on racism
  • National campaign against racism

The research team hope that this research provides a snapshot of the role and value of various sectors in enabling or constraining the resettlement of refugee background women. This could contribute to better informing theory, practice and policy in order that the self-determination and resilience of refugee background women and their communities is supported.


[1] Note that terms like ‘refugee background women’ and ‘communities’ refer to highly diverse groups of people (Butler, 2005). In capturing the experiences of refugee women as sole heads of households, we were mindful of the potential that using a category could imply a “single, essential, transhistorical refugee condition” (Malkki, 1995, p.511).

 

How can we better support new mothers to sing?

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I am a member of the Perinatal Mental Health New Zealand Trust (PMHNZ) whose vision is to : “improve outcomes for families and whanau affected by mental illness related to pregnancy, childbirth and early parenthood”. They produce a quarterly newsletter that includes information about research, training, workshops and courses, innovative projects and services, topics for discussion and stories. It was a privilege to share my research with other members in the February newsletter (pdf) and on this Women’s day it seems apt to share it with a broader audience.

One of my favourite stories that I would tell when we ran workshops in the nineties about postnatal depression was by Jack Kornfield. I would share this story and half the room would be in tears.

“There is a tribe in East Africa in which the art of true intimacy is fostered even before birth. In this tribe, the birth date of a child is not counted from the day of its physical birth nor even the day of conception as in other village cultures. For this tribe the birth date comes the first time the child is a thought in its mother’s mind. Aware of her intention to conceive a child with a particular father, the mother then goes off to sit alone under a tree. There she sits and listens until she can hear the song of the child that she hopes to conceive. Once she has heard it, she returns to her village and teaches it to the father so that they can sing it together as they make love, inviting the child to join them. After the child is conceived, she sings it to the baby in her womb. Then she teaches it to the old women and midwives of the village, so that throughout the labor and at the miraculous moment of birth itself, the child is greeted with its song. After the birth all the villagers learn the song of their new member and sing it to the child when it falls or hurts itself. It is sung in times of triumph, or in rituals and initiations. This song becomes a part of the marriage ceremony when the child is grown, and at the end of life, his or her loved ones will gather around the deathbed and sing this song for the last time.” A Path with Heart (1993, p. 334).

For me the message in this story reflects the importance of love, being loved by a community and the importance of acknowledgement. Painfully, however, it highlights the ways in which women’s experiences of maternity can be just the opposite. That is, they can feel isolated, disrespected and invisible. As a clinician, I’ve learned that there are ways in which we, and the system that we work in can make this most magnificent, sacred and profound time in a woman and her family’s life also one that is painful, one that leaves long lasting scars. Health professionals can cause harm even especially when we think we are doing good. As an academic for 13 years prior to which I worked as a clinician for 10 years, I am deeply interested in the issue of power and how professional frameworks of care can undermine women’s personal experiences.

This song has been the background soundtrack to my recently completed PhD. I used data from a study funded by the Families Commission and assisted by Plunket, where I talked to 40 migrant women about their experiences of becoming mothers in New Zealand. I also talked to Plunket nurses about their experiences of caring for women from ethnic migrant backgrounds.

My motivation for doing research was prompted by my clinical experiences. Several years ago I decided to make a move from working in mental health to working in maternity. As someone who had worked as a community mental health nurse I took a lot of concepts about my work in mental health into this new setting, for example, I believed that care should be client centred and driven, that services should fit around consumers of services and that taking time to be with people was important. What I found in the institutionalised setting of hospital maternity care and later community care was that some of the routine procedures that are administered in hospitals and in the community with good intentions had negative impacts and were oppressive especially for women who did not tidily fit into the mould for the factory style model that was in place then. The conveyor belt metaphor is apt given that women who were the wrong fit were viewed as a problem, as only a single way of becoming a mother was acceptable. I saw that staff were frustrated at the extra demands or complexity of working with ‘diverse’ women, they lacked resources like time and knowledge. In turn, I could see that women who valued particular kinds of social support, acknowledgement and rituals were not getting their needs met. It seemed like a situation where no one was a winner.

What I found out in my research was that there was a big gap in satisfaction among women who were familiar with the structure of maternity services in the west and women whose lives had been shaped by growing up in other cultural contexts. Fundamentally there was a schism in the ways in which birth was understood. To be simplistic, western modes of being a mother valued independence, autonomy, taking up expert knowledge and using it and being an active consumer. By that I mean the individualising of responsibility for maternity on the mother, to take up scientific knowledge through reading self help books and for the role of the partner to be a birth coach and the goal of birth to be “natural”.

This dominant Pakeha middle class model of being a mother clashed with other understandings of motherhood, where responsibility was more collectivised, so that embodied knowledge from cultural authority figures (mother and mothers in law) protected mothers and where a range of rituals and supports were available for the mother (including some which were also not necessarily helpful). Women who became mothers in New Zealand had to negotiate these two different models of maternity and come to terms with what they negotiated. However, in the context of an assimilatory maternal health system it was very difficult for women to maintain traditions that were important to them. For example many women were not supported if they wanted to bring in traditional foods with them or have support from grandmothers. Many of these encounters left migrant mothers feeling disempowered. Another important clash was the different philosophies and roles of professionals and mother in the context of midwifery models and medical models. Some women viewed birth as a risky process and wanted the reassurance of visualising technologies. The view of birth as a risky process clashed with midwifery models of birth as a natural process that women are physically prepared for but need encouragement and support with.

Conclusion How can we support all kinds of women with different values, beliefs and rituals around birth, to feel loved, nurtured, safe and supported? How can we give women who might be separated from their loved ones, support to access those values, beliefs and that will allow them to manage the transition into motherhood? Returning to the metaphor of singing, and the power of connection it engenders, how can we connect and support people who are singing different kinds of songs? Can we adjust our tone so that we can harmonise? Can new songs and rhythms infuse the songs we already know with new energy and possibility?

Having a baby in New Zealand without your support base http://www.mentalhealth.org.nz/kaixinxingdong/page/486- resources+dragon-babies+parents-stories 

Finding more humane solutions: New Zealand’s refugee deal with Australia

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Last weekend the New Zealand government made a deal with Australia to take 150 asylum seekers held in Australian detention facilities. New Zealand accepts the fifth highest number (equal with Canada) of refugees per capita, but this move reduces the number of refugees selected through New Zealand’s quota of 750 by 150 (600 refugees a year compared with 50,000 in the United States and 20,000 in Australia). What’s even more alarming as Gordon Campbell notes, is the way in which this new deal conflates two very different mechanisms for refugee arrival.

KeyGillard

There are two ways in which refugees are able to remain in New Zealand. The first is the quota category, which in New Zealand is presently 750 persons per annum. People are recommended by the UNHCR to Immigration New Zealand (INZ) for selection. The refugees who apply for resettlement in New Zealand must meet the definition of a refugee given below. The second resettlement category includes Convention Refugees, or Asylum Seekers. Asylum seekers most often arrive at Auckland International Airport and then need to go through an application process to be granted refugee status and be able to settle in New Zealand. A boat of asylum seekers has never reached New Zealand.

It is a right under the UN Refugee Convention to claim political asylum and there is no queue. A claim for asylum is carefully assessed and if there are grounds for political persecution, asylum has to be granted. It is a completely different procedure from the UN annual refugee quota of 750. The 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees is the key legal document, outlining the rights of refugees and the legal obligations of signatory states. Article 1 (2) of the United Nations’ 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees modifies Article 1 A (2) of the 1951 Convention to define a refugee as a person who:

owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such a fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.

This definition only refers to people who have fled their country of origin and then sought sanctuary in a second country for protection.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is an international agency that provides protection for refugees, Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), asylum seekers, and stateless persons—it attempts to find long-term solutions for a number of the world’s refugees. There are three options: the first is voluntary repatriation; the second is local integration in the country of asylum; and in the third, the UNHCR works with eighteen countries with established or developing resettlement programmes to resettle refugees in a third country, including Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States of America. Countries with emerging programmes are Benin, Brazil, Britain, Burkina Faso, Chile, Iceland, Ireland and Spain.

The earliest refugees to New Zealand arrived between 1870–1890 and included Danes, Russian Jews and French Huguenots. Subsequently, refugees from Nazism (1933–39), Poland (1944), Hungary (1956–58), ‘handicapped’ refugees (1959), Chinese (1962– 71), Russian Christians from China (1965), Asians from Uganda (1972–73), Chileans, Soviet Jews, Eastern Europeans, people from the Middle East, South-East Asia (Indo-Chinese), Somalia, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Iran and the Sudan have resettled in New Zealand—over 40,000 refugees.

New Zealand only developed its quota programme in 1987. The development of a formal annual quota for refugees occurred concurrently with the Immigration Policy Review of 1986 and subsequent Immigration Act 1987. This legislation brought into being more diverse migrants to New Zealand. Whereas previously, migrants had been selected on the basis of country of origin (primarily European), the new legislation liberalised migration so that migrants entered New Zealand by way of a points system on the basis of skills. Other significant changes included the development of four migration categories—occupational, business, family, and humanitarian. The latter category represented refugee policies and saw the introduction of an annual quota for resettling refugees.

The Minister of Immigration and the Minister of Foreign Affairs set the composition of the refugee quota. This process takes into account the UNHCR’s international protection priorities, the needs of refugee communities settled in New Zealand, and the capabilities of New Zealand as a host country. The UNHCR refers refugee cases to Immigration New Zealand for consideration under the refugee quota. The refugees are then assessed by Immigration New Zealand, which makes a final decision on the refugees’ admission to New Zealand. The quota comprises up to six intakes a year of around 125 people each.

One of my concerns is that this move will impact on special categories within our NZ Refugee Quota Programme such as national, ethnic and religious groups, as well as special needs groups such as ‘handicapped’ refugees, long stayers in refugee camps, and refugee “boat people” rescued at sea (Tampa). In particular from these formal categories introduced in 1992:

  • Protection (600 persons)—This category includes up to 300 places for family members, covering hgh-priority refugees needing protection from an emergency situation.
  • Medical and/or disabled cases (75 persons)—Refugees with a medical condition or disability that cannot be treated in the country of asylum but can be treated in New Zealand. This special category “provides for the resettlement of refugees with medical, physical or social disabilities which place them outside the normal criteria for acceptance by resettlement countries” (Parsons, 2005).
  • Women at risk (75 persons)—Women refugees (alone or with dependant children) at risk in a refugee camp, especially from sexual violence (75 persons). New Zealand, like Canada and Australia, has created a special category for resettling women at risk. The UNHCR definition for refugees in this category includes:

Women and girls who have protection problems particular to their gender…including expulsion, refoulement and other security threats, sexual violence, physical abuse, intimidation, torture, particular economic hardship or marginalization, lack of integration prospects, community hostility, and different forms of exploitation. Such problems and threats…may render some refugee women or girls particularly vulnerable. (UNHCR, 2002, p. 22).

In addition to the refugee quota, 300 places are made available per year for family members to be sponsored under the Refugee Family Support category who would otherwise be unable to qualify for residence under any other category of government residence policy. The government has recently made changes to the category, including expanding the definition of family member, to recognise a wider range of family structures. It also introduced a ballot system in 2002.

My other concern is that New Zealand should be doing more not less. For all the criticism of Australian policy, its annual refugee intake as a proportion of its population is still five times ours. Why not either increase our overall refugee quota to 900 so that it includes the number of people from Australia as this Dominion Post editorial suggests:

And this means that 150 other refugees, typically rotting in wretched camps near some of the ghastliest places on earth, will not be able to come to New Zealand.

Their places will be taken by those who were lucky enough to have become the responsibility of Australia. This isn’t really fair. Australia’s rejected refugees are not necessarily more deserving than the 150 who will miss out.A more compassionate approach would have been simply to increase the overall refugee quota by 150, bringing it to 900.

Race Relations Commissioner, Mr Joris de Bres supports this increase and advocates for refugees accepted from Australia to be subject to a bilateral agreement and distinguished from the humanitarian refugee quota:

 The 150 places should be in addition to the annual quota. The quota is a separate arrangement, and the Government’s announcement could constitute an ongoing reduction in New Zealand’s humanitarian commitment to the UNHCR to accept up to 750 refugees in need of resettlement. The present 750 refugee quota includes specific groups including women at risk, disabled people and family linked cases. The announcement may diminish New Zealand humanitarian response to these vulnerable groups of refugees.For transparency, any refugees accepted from Australian detention camps should be subject to a bilateral agreement separate and distinct from the humanitarian refugee quota.

Another concern is whether in tone, language, media and treatment we are emulating a punitive and dehumanising Australian asylum seeker policy. Bryce Edwards in the National Business Review notes that:

we have effectively approved and given international legitimacy to an Australian policy that ‘is the outcome of squalid politics, beginning with John Howard’s demonising of the boat people and exaggerating their threat. The effectiveness of the scare tactics, also employed after Howard left the scene, forced Gillard to reopen the foreign detention centres – centres of human misery.

Photos received by Sarah Hanson-Young of the Manus Island Detention Centre, Nauru. from an article by Bianca Hall

Brian Rudman in the Herald observes that John Key is embracing a particularly hellish vision:

Amnesty International’s refugee expert, Dr Graham Thom, after a visit to the Nauru camp in November, called the conditions “cruel, inhuman and degrading”, with 387 men cramped into five rows of leaking tents “suffering from physical and mental ailments – creating a climate of anguish as the repressively hot monsoon season begins”. Dr Thom said “the news that five years could be the wait time for these men under the Government’s ‘no advantage’ policy added insult to injury”, with one man attempting to take his life while the Amnesty group were visiting.

 

Even former MP’s have jumped in Aussie Malcolm in the Herald:

Australia and Australia alone stands out from the rest of the world with arguments about queue jumpers and all sorts of populist jargon that actually hides racism, and now New Zealand has joined Australia it’s a tragedy,” Mr Malcolm told Radio New Zealand…It couldn’t be a worse outcome.

 

Jan Logie of the Green party asked questions in parliament but interestingly enough there’s been silence from our Labour party as the National Business Review points out:

Yet opposition parties have been noticeably weak in their critiques of the policy, choosing to play it safe. A Labour-led government, David Shearer says, wouldn’t necessarily reverse the policy, and instead ‘Labour would discuss the policy with Australia’

 

I’m with Michael Timmins a New Zealand refugee lawyer when he suggests that New Zealand could play a positive role and improve protection in the region rather than “cosy[ing] up to Australia’s broken asylum system”. In his excellent article, he suggests engaging in regional co-operation and working with South East Asian countries so that they can properly process refugees. New Zealand is at a cross-roads, we can choose to punish groups of people who demonstrate incredible courage to leave horrendous circumstances or we can attempt to find some solutions that uphold people’s human rights and dignity.I know which I would prefer.

courage 2 courage1

Unsettled in Australia: Reflections on my first Australia/Straya/Invasion day

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koala bear

My first stuffed toy as a child in Nairobi was a koala bear and I’ve been besotted with them ever since. So you can imagine that I was captivated by this meme where the koala realises that she’s not a bear but a marsupial. To draw a very long bow, I think her puzzlement captures the experience of so many visibly different migrants in settler societies who believe they are part of a nation and then find that they aren’t, whether it’s because their qualifications aren’t recognised which leads them to be unemployed or under-employed or they begin to realise that their skin colour doesn’t lend them to being neatly absorbed into the imagined community on national days of celebration. So here I am in Australia, not as a nine year old (when my family were looking to migrate from Nairobi) but as an adult in mid-career, here to live and work. Joining a multitude of other New Zealanders (the most common country of birth of Australian residents outside of Australia is the United Kingdom followed by New Zealand, you’ll find other interesting nuggets on cultural diversity on Esther Hougenhout‘s blogpiece) who’ve also crossed the ditch. I’ve visited Australia for conferences and to visit my partner’s family, but it’s been over twenty years since I lived somewhere other than Aotearoa. In my work and community life I’ve carefully considered how migrants engage with settler institutions and their relationships with indigenous communities, but I am having a powerful opportunity to examine my own complicity in forms of oppression (in the context of another settler society) as Harsha Walia so powerfully puts it in a video on anti-oppression, decolonization, and being a responsible ally.

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From news.com.au

australia-map-aboriginal-nations

Courtesy of Brisbane Murri Action Group

We’ve arrived in time for Australia day which commemorates the 225th anniversary of the arrival of the First Fleet in Sydney Cove, New South Wales in 1788, when British sovereignty was also proclaimed over the eastern seaboard of Australia. It’s a day of festivals, concerts, citizenship ceremonies and acknowledgements of the contributions Australians have made with the recipients of honours and Australian of the year announced. Entrepreneur and electrical retailer Dick Smith even got into the jingoistic spirit with his casually racist advertisement for Aussie foodstuffs, beautifully critiqued by Sunili. I’m not sure if the stones that hit both our heads as we were walking along the Nepean highway to look at housing options were an important Australia day cultural tradition for young blokes in fast cars (I’d like to know how their aim was so brilliantly accurate). Nevertheless fervent nationalism is everywhere, cars and houses are adorned with Australian flags and there is an exacerbation in bogan behaviour as comedians Aamer Rahman from Fear of a Brown Planet and Robert Foster/Kenneth Oathcarn observe.

S Peter Davis who made a YouTube video Straya Day, notes that

as January 26 rolls around, you begin to see cars on the road with little Australian flags poking out the windows like a diplomatic cavalcade. In what is usually a pretty tolerant and multicultural nation, this is one day of the year when folks start casting suspicious and slightly disapproving glances toward brown people. Anti-immigrant slogans like “We grew here, you flew here,” and the somewhat more direct “Fuck off we’re full” begin to make the rounds. Understand, it’s the minority of people, and Australia does not hold the patent on racism. But when you combine this with a cocktail of youth, alcohol and barbecue…parts of the country just explode in a shower of beer, singlets and thongs.

Or not as the pictures below reveal.

Beer baby

Via Chalk Hotel’s Facebook page

This day of barbecues and beer is also called Invasion or Survival day. It represents “an undercurrent of division and inequality that belies the happy, egalitarian culture that the day is meant to convey, “a day of mourning for the land that was taken and the ensuing two centuries of social alienation and discrimination” as Robin Tennant-Wood puts it. There are also Survival Day celebrations like the 2013 Share The Spirit Festival featuring Indigenous music, dance and culture. Numerous Invasion day marches have also taken place across Australia.

Grandtheft Australia

Via Idle No More Facebook page

Hip hop artists Reverse Polarities recent release “Invasion Day” acknowledges the historical and continuing injustices faced by Indigenous Australians and pushes for Australians to understand their history rather than being immobilised by guilt (white Australians) or innocence (visibly different new Australians):

Many Australians feel guilt for the actions their white predesessors and claim non- involvement due to being new Australians. We must be active in our understanding of history. The past is not ours to change, but the future can be shaped.

INM Invasion day

Via Idle No More Australia’s Facebook page

Peter Gebhardt a poet, retired County Court judge and former principal asks for accountability and reckoning with the history of genocide “What might an Aboriginal person say of Australia Day? Why should the Aborigines celebrate that day?” He adds:

It was the day that marked the theft of a land (terra nullius), the day that marked the theft and abduction of a people, of a culture, the day that initiated the pathways to the Stolen Children and, to our ultimate shame, the deaths in custody. It is a day that stands as a reminder of massacres. The wind-stench of bodies burned in bonfires hangs heavy upon the nation’s conscience and in the clouds…You can shuttle history, but you cannot shuttle facts. It would be a great Australia Day if it faced honesty, historical facts, abandonment, hypocrisy, shelved superiority and embarked upon an exercise of spiritual empathy rather than religious hubris.

A point supported by Tristan Ewins, who calls for celebration and critique of this national day:

There is a problem, here, in that there is still no formal resolution: comprehensively righting the injustices suffered by indigenous people. Without the closure provided by a just, representative and inclusive Treaty between the modern Australian nation and our indigenous peoples, it is hard to imagine a fully inclusive celebration of the Australian nation. Perhaps in the future – should such a resolution be achieved – then maybe this could become the focus of a new ‘national day’ for all Australians.

The desire for redress and accountability has a long way to go to being realised, but small steps toward reconciliation are evident. This year for the first time both the Aboriginal and Australian flags were simultaneously hoisted on the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Aboriginal flag on bridge

Picture: Sam Ruttyn Source: News Limited via new.com.au

Apparently, more than 17,000 people from 145 countries took the citizenship pledge to become Australians on January 26th. Without any sense of irony whatsoever, Tony Abbott Leader of the Opposition told an Australia Day breakfast and citizenship ceremony in Adelaide that change should be welcomed “when it’s in accordance with the customs and traditions of our people” and he added that new citizens were “changing the country for the better”.

Being a new arrival in Australia myself has been interesting, there are many similarities with New Zealand. The neoliberal multicultural success stories of refugees and migrants loom large both in media and in private conversations. Take Akram Azimi, Young Australian of the Year 2013 who arrived  in Australia 13 years ago from Afghanistan and went from being ‘an ostracised refugee kid with no prospects’ to becoming his school’s head boy. Or diasporic Maori, Frank (name changed) who repeatedly called himself and other Maori “niggers”in front of his car salesman colleagues. He told me that his wife wanted to return home six months into their stint here and he insisted they “tough it out”, he quipped “things are fine if you just work hard”. He’s taught his children important aspects of Te Ao Maori and has disdain for the various groups that have formed stating that “if you want to learn about your culture you should go home to do it”. Rauf Soulio (chair of the Australian Multicultural Council and a judge of the District Court of South Australia) peppers an opinion piece with words and phrases like “enterprise”, “courage and commitment” and talks about people who “strove to build new and prosperous lives”.  Extolling a neoliberal narrative combined with a commitment to reconciliation:

It is one of the hallmarks of our multiculturalism that we work hard to ensure that those who come here have every opportunity to become fully participating members of Australian society, rather than remaining guests or temporary visitors. It doesn’t matter that you don’t have Australian lineage or ancestry when you arrive – as long as you contribute.

Aus-strayer

Illustration: Ben Sanders/The Jacky Winter Group in the Sydney Morning Herald

Yup, I’m here to work and become a “fully participating member” of Australian society, and to that end have also been consuming multiculturalism with relish and delight. I am blissfully happy at being able to access ingredients and cuisines that are difficult to find in Aotearoa. But consumption aside, I do want to find a way to engage ethically with this place. Shakira Hussein‘s incisive critique of Scott Morrison’s speech at the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies in London brilliantly skewers Morrison’s selective consumption of multiculturalism:

Morrison doesn’t spell out which aspects of “diversity” would be considered acceptable under a more balanced post-multicultural regime, but I’m guessing he subscribes to the consensus view that multiculturalism has had a beneficial effect on the Australian diet. (Sharia tribunals? No thanks. Homous and baklava? More, please.) Even those most ardent racists participate in the multiculturalism of consumption. But while enjoying our pizza and laksa, we need to “send a message” that such tolerance “is not a licence for cultural practices that are offensive to the cultural values and laws of Australia and that our respect for diversity does not licence: the primacy of the English language”.

His comments come just in time for Geert Wilder’s visit to Australia next month. See Deborah Kelly’s kit below.

Veiled woman

I was in Sydney almost seven months ago when I caught up with a friend of the family who asked me why I hate white people. I had to explain to him that my work is about critiquing white hegemony and that is a different thing.The danger of critiquing hegemony and racism and advocating for indigenous rights is viewed as decidedly un-Australian according to Don Watson:

We’re pragmatists. It comes with being Australian that we don’t upset ourselves about things of no practical consequence. Of course, for some people the wine’s always corked. You’ll hear them from Ballarat to Bali, running the country down. Fair dinkum, you want to deck the bastards sometimes. But, as I said, we don’t upset ourselves. Poor things, they can’t think of the foundation of the country without thinking of the people it was taken from. They can’t think of dear old decent Arthur Phillip without thinking of the time he sent out men with bags to collect half a dozen Aboriginal heads. Nothing in the manifold benefits of British rule, British institutions, British customs and British capital cheers them up or excites a little gratitude.

Remind them of the nation’s progress, show them how human health and happiness have in general flourished here, and in return you’ll get the vale of tears it has been for the Aborigines, or the grave injustices to women, or the treatment of refugees arriving on boats: as if because some people got the rough end of the pineapple we are all supposed to be abraded by it.

Watson’s callous and dismissive account highlights to me how important it is to learn about ‘our’ history. His riposte (“If you don’t like it, why don’t you go and live somewhere else? Take yourself off to New York if it’s so much better than here. Or Kabul. Good riddance”) represents a stuckness, a lack of willingness to consider other points of view. I know that as an economically and socially resourced newcomer to Australia I am in a privileged position, I can go and live somewhere else. Instead I’d like to access resources that will help me to deepen my understanding of the significance of this holiday, to consider whose interests and aspirations it might support, and to acknowledge for which groups of people such a celebration might further oppress.

Michel Foucault the French philosopher said that the point of “a critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices we accept rest”. For me, as an academic with a commitment to social justice, blindly supporting the status quo is not an option. I know that I have a long journey of learning and unlearning ahead of me, without the reassurance of state sanctioned biculturalism or a biculturalism grounded in treasured processes and relationships in Aotearoa that have inflected my adult life. But this grounding from the place I’ve called home for most of my life will be fundamental to examining my complicity in the maintenance of oppression, my understanding of the multicultural project and to forging my own rather than received understandings of indigineity here in Australia. Luckily there are many who’ve already walked this path. Between their wisdom and those of my global intellectual and political community I think I am koalified to undertake this next adventure.

Via Colourfest film festival

Via Colourfest film festival

 

 

 

Migrant support for Idle No More

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When my parents were considering migrating from East Africa, their focus was on the white settler contexts of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States. For a bunch of reasons I won’t go into here, they settled on Aotearoa New Zealand. A part of me always felt like my life would have been better if we’d moved to Canada or the United States, because there would have been a bigger Goan community and more support for my family. I reasoned I might have felt more culturally confident, more capable at speaking Konkani. My visit to Canada in October helped me accept the gift that my parents had given me in migrating to Aotearoa New Zealand. By not being wrapped in the comforting cocoon of an insular diasporic community, I had to figure out my own relationship with my personal and cultural history but also what Ghassan Hage terms, an ethical relationship with colonisation and living on colonised land. Visiting Canada and meeting terrific indigenous people and migrant scholars allowed me to see the contrast between Canada’s genocidal history and its self-representation as a benign, civilised and benevolent nation. The parallels between Aotearoa and Canada of a colonial history supplemented by exploited migrant labour to meet settler ends mirrored the clearly unfair outcomes in measures of health, well-being and prosperity for indigenous peoples that I see in Aotearoa New Zealand as a health professional. For the first time I began to see how the issues I’d been grappling with as a migrant were replicated across seemingly disparate white settler contexts.

Idle No More. Immigrants support Indigenous rights. Les immigrantes appuient les droits des peuples autochtones. Los inmigrantes apoyan los derechose de los pueblos indigenas. Via Harsha Walia
Image courtesy: Aaron Paquette

The Idle No More movement which began on Great Turtle Island on December 10, 2012 was initiated by four women Nina Wilson, Sylvia McAdam, Jessica Gordon & Sheelah McLean in response to legislation (Bill C-45) affecting First Nations people and gained momentum with the hunger strike by Attawapiskat First Nation Chief Theresa Spence. Impressively the United Church of Canada has acknowledged it’s complicity in colonization, inequality and abuse, through being one of the bodies that ran Indian Residential Schools. In 1986 they apologized to Aboriginal peoples for confusing “Western ways and culture with the depth and breadth and length and height of the gospel of Christ.” Apologizing to former residential schools students in 1998. Their response to the Idle No More movement has been to fully support Chief Spence’s statement that “Canada is violating the right of Aboriginal peoples to be self-determining and continues to ignore (their) constitutionally protected Aboriginal and treaty rights in their lands, waters, and resources.”

Other activists have also taken note of the commonalities of the struggle, noting how how what is particular, has universal relevance. Naomi Klein notes that

During this season of light and magic, something truly magical is spreading. There are round dances by the dollar stores. There are drums drowning out muzak in shopping malls. There are eagle feathers upstaging the fake Santas. The people whose land our founders stole and whose culture they tried to stamp out are rising up, hungry for justice. Canada’s roots are showing. And these roots will make us all stand stronger.

International support has come from the occupied lands of Palestine and indigenous communities around the globe. In Aotearoa New Zealand a Facebook page has been developed called Aotearoa in Support of Idle No More: Maori women’s group Te Wharepora Hou, a collective of wāhine based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland  with a commitment to ensure a stronger voice for wāhine have also pledged support. As a migrant occupying a disquieting position in a country working through issues of biculturalism and mutliculturalism in a monocultural context. Diasporic migrant communities and organisations have also backed the Idle No More movement, with South Asian activists and BAYAN-Canada, an alliance of progressive Filipino organizations noting the similarities between migrant experiences and indigenous struggles.

Immigrants in Support of Indigenous Rights via Harsha WaliaPhoto credit: Cameron Bode

Immigrants in Support of Indigenous Rights via Harsha Walia
Photo credit: Cameron Bode

How do we do engage with an indigenous struggle when we do and don’t belong at the same time? Himani Bannerji notes in a Canadian context (but one that readily resonates through various white settler contexts):

So if we problematize the notion of ‘Canada’ through the introjection of the idea of belonging, we are left with the paradox of belonging and non-belonging simultaneously. As a population, we non-whites and women (in particular, non-white women) are living in a specific territory. We are part of its economy, subject to its laws, and members of its civil society. Yet we are not part of its self-definition as ‘Canada’ because we are not ‘Canadians.’ We are pasted over with labels that give us identities that are extraneous to us. And these labels originate in the ideology of the nation, in the Canadian state apparatus, in the media, in the education system, and in the commonsense world of common parlance. We ourselves use them. They are familiar, naturalized names: minorities, immigrants, newcomers, refugees, aliens, illegals, people of color, multicultural communities, and so on. We are sexed into immigrant women, women of color, visible minority women, black/South Asian/Chinese women, ESL (English as a second language) speakers, and many more. The names keep proliferating, as though there were a seething reality, unmanageable and uncontainable in any one name. Concomitant with this mania for naming of ‘others’ is one for the naming of that which is ‘Canadian.’ This ‘Canadian’ core community is defined through the same process that others us. We, with our named and ascribed otherness, face an undifferentiated notion of the ‘Canadian’ as the unwavering beacon of our assimilation.

The experiences of marginalisation that Bannerji elucidates can guide our responses to the Idle No More movement. Gurpreet Singh from Vancouver, notes that South Asian seniors have always referred to the indigenous peoples as Taae Ke (family of elderly uncle). If we see a familiar connection between what we ourselves experience as migrants and extend that empathy to the struggles of indigenous people who have experienced an inter-generational slow genocide, we might be able to see beyond our own oppression and our view that we are too far outside the structures of power to claim a space. Privileged in some ways, disadvantaged in others, our futures are tightly imbricated in this indigenous struggle. Our presence has sometimes diffused indigenous claims and we must consider our complicity in the continuing colonisation of indigenous people. We must put pressure on governments to recognise the rights of indigenous people and their unique place as guardians of the lands we stand upon, our futures depend on it.

At the asset sales March in Auckland in April 2012. Banner by YAFA-Young Asian Feminists Aotearoa.

At the asset sales March in Auckland in April 2012. Banner by YAFA-Young Asian Feminists Aotearoa. Photo by Sharon Hawke.

 

 

A smile and more: Improving Asian health in Auckland

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Many years ago I remember talking to an older Chinese woman in Wellington about a presentation I was going to give about cultural safety. When I gave her a slightly academic and jargon laden explanation, she said to me: “Ruth, it’s really simple, you just have to smile at people”. I’ve never forgotten her words and I agree with her. A smile communicates several things, it says “I am going to look after you and care for you, you will be safe with me”. I’ve been teaching students to remember to smile ever since. I’ve also been interested in what makes a good experience for patients/service users/tangata whai ora and three words come to mind. These are competence (we need to know that nurses have the skills and resources to provide care), communication (we need to feel informed about what is happening to us, so that we can make informed decisions) and caring (we need to feel cared for and important).

A new discussion paper launched by The Human Rights Commission last month  examines how structural discrimination or institutional racism perpetuates inequalities and outlines government initiatives with potential to achieve systemic change. Four areas receive attention: health, justice, education, the economic system and the public service. In the section on health, the discussion paper cites the 2006/07 New Zealand Health Survey which found that the experience of feeling treated with respect and dignity by their primary health care provider varied by ethnicity, Asian, Pacific and Māori adults:

were significantly less likely than adults in the total population … to report that their health care professional treated them with respect and dignity ‘all of the time’.

Cultural competence has been enshrined in the Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Act (2003), but focuses on the ‘differences’ between the giver and recipient of care rather than broader macro-processes. Māori and Pacific experience the greatest health disparities in New Zealand. Consequently their dissatisfaction with mainstream services that don’t meet their needs has been chanelled into developing innovative, effective and responsive parallel services which have invigorated the health landscape and called mainstream services to account for better outcomes for racialised groups. However, the numbers of Māori and Pacific health workers are small which means that invariably Māori and Pacific people will be nursed by someone from a different ethnic background. Given the globaI recession, it is unlikely that parallel services will become available for Asians and the growing population group of MELAA so it is incumbent for all health professionals to develop skills for working inter-culturally. Hence, I am grateful for the development by nurses in New Zealand of the concept of cultural safety, requiring that nurses pay attention to their own social location and to account for their own role as a culture bearer and having an awareness of the colonising impacts of the culture of health care. Rather than other approaches where learning a laundry list of cultural preferences is the thing.

I’ve been a nurse since 1984 (including being a nursing student, dropping out and coming back). There was a time when I was the ‘go to’ person for anything related to culture and health, thankfully there are now lots of great people around. Our expertise is growing as is our evidence base about the health needs and experiences of Asians and other groups in Aotearoa. Hence my delight at the launch of a new Asian health needs assessment . It comes on the back of several other reports: Health needs assessment of Middle Eastern, Latin American and African (MELAA) people living in the Auckland region (pdf 2.84 MB); A health profile of young Asian New Zealanders who attend secondary school (pdf, 2.71 MB); Asian Public Health Project Report (pdf, 819 KB); Asian Health Chart Book; Health Needs Assessment for Asian People in Counties Manukau (pdf, 2.2 MB); Health Needs Assessment for Asian People in Waitemata (pdf, 1.2 MB); Asian Health in Aotearoa in 2006–2007: trends since 2002–2003 (pdf, 2.23 MB) and Talking Therapies for Asian People, Building Evidence for Better Practice in Support of Asian Mental Wellbeing, Asian Mental Health and Addiction Research Agenda for New Zealand 2008-2012, Service Responsiveness to Asian, Refugee and Migrant Populations: Factsheet series, Spotlight on: Asian, refugee and migrant mental health and addiction support, Te Pou Research Update – May 2011 – Issue 2 – Asian Mental Health Service Responsiveness Mental Health Issues for Asians in New Zealand: A Literature Review.

Health needs assessments (HNA) involve collecting and analysing data about a population’s demand and need for health services (rather than individuals) in order to help prioritise health needs and services and determine strategic priorities for the medium and long term. Collecting information also involves talking to people about their priorities and gaps in services. The New Zealand Public Health and Disability Act 2000 requires that District Health Boards (DHBs) regularly assess the health and disability service needs of local populations.

The health needs assessment is aimed at “identifying the health needs, including inequalities in health status, of the main Asian ethnic groups living in the Auckland region”. Commissioned by the Northern DHB Support Agency on behalf of the Auckland Regional Settlement Strategy Migrant Health Action Plan it’s an acknowledgement of the size of the Auckland Asian population which represents 22% of the total population in the Auckland region: 310,000 Asian people live in the Auckland region, made up of 127,000 Chinese, 100,000 Indians, and 84,000 Other Asian people according to 2010 figures. These numbers are expected to increase, so that Asians make up more 60% of the total population in the Auckland region by 2026. Asian people comprise 9.2% of the total New Zealand population and are seen to have similar or better health than European New Zealanders. Many complain that the term Asian is confusing and problematic homogenising a diverse group of people with a range of migration and social histories whose needs can be disguised and subsumed. This needs assessment addresses concerns about the need to disentangle the category while maintaining the strategic importance of the umbrella term in advocating for health services.

Ahem, we already know from the from the New Zealand Health Survey and Youth ’07 that Chinese, Indian and Other Asian adults and youth eat fewer fruit and vegetables and do less physical activity (we’re studying actually) and we have a higher prevalence of adult obesity compared to other ethnic groups (cough!) This week we found out we had even more problems. I’ve tried to summarise them here, but you should really check out the full report.

Health concerns among Asian populations in Auckland include:

Chinese: diabetes prevalence among older men and middle-aged and older women, diabetes in pregnancy, child oral health, cervical screening coverage, cataract extractions and terminations of pregnancy.

Indians: CVD, diabetes (including during pregnancy), child oral health, child asthma, low birth weight deliveries, terminations of pregnancy, cervical screening coverage, family violence, hysterectomies, cataract extractions and total knee joint replacements.

Other Asian populations: stroke and overall CVD hospitalisations, diabetes (including during pregnancy), child oral health, child asthma, cervical screening coverage, terminations of pregnancy and cataract extractions.

Access issues:

Asians generally do pretty well, except in primary care (Chinese have low rates of PHO enrolment rates among Chinese across Auckland), but Asian women have lower cervical screening coverage across Auckland compared with European/Other rates. Asian people have lower rates of access to mental health services, disability support services and aged residential care compared to other ethnic groups.

Recommendations for the Three Auckland DHB’s to:

There’s no point trying to summarise all the key findings as you can go to the Executive summary for that. But the following recommendations are important and timely:

1) Notice Asians are here:

  • Advocacy for the health needs of Asian people in health-related policy, planning, monitoring and reporting at a regional and national level.
  • There should be better ethnicity data collection for the ‘Asian’ group and for Asian ethnic sub-groups, particularly with regard to CVD and diabetes and consistent use of ethnic coding for Asian ethnic groups at all levels.
  • Review whether the ‘Indian’ ethnic group should be replaced by ‘South Asian’.

2) Get Asians to be more healthy

  • Promoting healthy eating, adequate physical exercise, being smoke-free and cervical screening
  • Targeting CVD, diabetes, oral health (particularly among children), child asthma, family planning and contraception. Especially the ones that carry stigma such as disability, mental illness, and family violence.
  • Enabling health literacy by providing culturally-appropriate written information and providing this through community sessions and utilising local community media.
  • Educating health professionals about the key health needs for Asian communities.

3) Offer targeted health services for Asian people (within mainstream services):

  • Asian-focussed CVD and diabetes nurse practitioners (and how are they going to do this?)
  • Expanding and further developing existing Asian mental health service models .
  • Early intervention for family violence.
  • Family planning and contraception advice, including for Asian international students
  • More culturally-appropriate disability respite services.
  • More culturally-appropriate residential care facilities for older Asian people
  • Culturally-appropriate community oral health services, particularly for Asian children.

4) Improve PHO enrolment data and access to primary care services for Asian people

  • Better coding of ethnicity data
  • Increasing PHO enrolment rates for Chinese people across Auckland, and Indian and Other Asian people in WDHB.

5) Reduce cultural and language barriers to care

  • Training up the health and disability workforce across the Auckland region using culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) cultural competence training and providing freely available resources.
  • Expanding cultural support services for Asian people in the Auckland region.
  • Providing additional resources for development of the Asian health workforce reflecting the ethnic composition of the populations served including: scholarships for further training of Asian health professionals; more bridging courses in nursing and allied health, for overseas-qualified Asian health professionals to register and work. Having language-matched carer-support workers for non-English speaking families in the home-based support sector.
  • Encouraging health service providers, particularly GPs to use qualified interpreters.
  • Additional funding for English as a Second Language (ESOL) courses, to increase the number of Asian people attending these courses.I don’t understand this)

6) More collaboration between health service providers in the Auckland region

  • •Better awareness among health service providers of the Auckland Asian, migrant and refugee services, programmes and initiatives currently available.
  • Sharing service delivery models of evaluation and research for Asian population health outcomes between the three DHBs in order to plan services.

7) Improving social capital among Auckland Asian communities

  • Funding to initiate and maintain community support groups for Asian people affected by disability, mental illness, family violence and other key health issues should be considered by Auckland DHBs.
  • Better awareness of charitable organisations that provide support services to Asian people, including Shanti Niwas (for older Asian people) and Umma Trust (for women and children), is required.
  • Better publicity about the community centres, libraries, public transport and other public facilities available to Asian communities in Auckland to reduce social isolation among migrants.
  • Consultation with Asian community leaders and community groups should be sought when evaluating existing health services or planning additional health services.

8) Future research

Another health needs assessment of Asian people across the Auckland region in 4-5 years; consultation with Auckland Asian communities regarding health needs and barriers to accessing appropriate health care; further examination of the effects of acculturation on the health of Asian migrants and subsequent generations in Auckland; a comparison of the health profiles of Fijian Indians as compared to other ‘Indians’ to determine if there are important differences; further analyses around the health of older Asian people as data for Asian ethnic sub-groups becomes available; the prevalence of disability in Auckland Asian communities; and ethnic-specific analyses of falls and pressure sores occurring in residential care, as well as osteoporosis and sun exposure.

Things I like about the report:
  • It confirms in writing what many of us who are passionate about health already know, it gives legitimacy to this knowledge, provides a benchmark and starting point for action.
  • The needs assessment considers Asian health within the context of broader determinants of health, I like the attention to improving social capital among Asian peoples and health literacy.
  • The report implies that the three Auckland DHB’s need to make a better effort at seamlessness and integration, collaboration and so on which are good things. The report also asks the DHB’s to take more action at Regional and National levels.
  • The recommendation to consult Asian communities when re-evaluating or starting new services.
  • The identification of health priorities eg mental health, reproductive health, services for older people etc.
  • The emphasis on developing a culturally responsive workforce.
  • Ensuring that future health professionals reflect the workforce and supporting the transition of the exisiting workforce who have struggled to get their qualifications recognised.
  • Better ethnicity data collection.
  • The desire to sharpen up terms (eg South Asian versus Indian) and to disentangle and fine tune the analysis of the largest groups of Asians that is Chinese and Indians.
  • The HNA consulted with “insiders” for their perspectives.
I’d be interested in how some of the recommendations are realised given the current financial climate of health service prudence and how pivotal upskilling our workforce is to making services engaging, safe and acceptable for Asian communities. I am not sure how prepared our workforce is for working with the kind of superdiversity we have in New Zealand and for me this is an enormous gap that I’ve worked hard to address in my research, teaching, presentations and publications.
One of my favourite definitions of health is from the Ottawa Charter which defines health as the “full personal development and participation in balanced and independent social, economic and cultural life”. I like the way it allows health to be considered in the context of health structures and systems as well as wider social, cultural, economic and political environments. Considering the social determinants of health, that is the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age, including the health system is important, because these conditions are shaped by the distribution of money, power and resources at global, national and local levels. The social determinants of health are mostly responsible for health inequities – the unfair and avoidable differences in health status seen within and between countries. It is my hope that this needs assessment and the report on structural discrimination contributes to an agenda that allows everyone to flourish and to enjoy “full personal development and participation in balanced and independent social, economic and cultural life” in Aotearoa, New Zealand.
References

Mehta S, Health needs assessment of Asian people living in the Auckland region. Auckland: Northern DHB Support Agency, 2012.

A fair go? Using liberal principles to support Islamophobia and racism.

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I am interested in the issue of fairness. Anyone with siblings might be I would think. Whether it’s about making sure everyone gets an equally sized piece of cake or equal chances to speak, fairness has been a driving force in my life that I might have inherited.  As one of three daughters it was very important to our parents that we were treated fairly. So every birthday and Christmas we got the same kinds of presents, matching housecoats, matching crockery and so on. I kinda like the way I can go to both my sisters’ houses and enjoy drinking from the same cups. But over the years I’ve realised that treating people the same (is universalism) isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be and sometimes we need to treat people differently (particularism) to support them to get their needs met. For example, my parents have a prolific avocado tree and out of all my sisters I like avocados the most (hint hint), therefore is it fair that we all get the same number of them? This issue has resonance in health too, treating everyone the same can result in differential outcomes and sometimes you need to treat people differently to get the same outcome-for example for different population groups to have a long life different strategies might be needed. Which brings me to the issue that’s driving this blog post. How can we ensure that what we do is fair? and how do we define what fairness is? How might discourses invoking equality reinforce inequity and oppression?

The backlash against KONY 2012 did something useful. It made people think twice before re-posting items on their newsfeed and drew attention to the ways in which activism through social media can go horribly wrong. Joshua Foust says KONY 2012 accentuated the challenges “of enthusiastic support for someone who seems to be doing the right thing without really investigating whether their methods are the best, and privileging the easy and fun over the constructive”. In the case of the social media whirl around Russian punk band Pussy Riot, Foust’s criticism is that a serious concern about the erosion of political freedoms and civil liberties has been converted into a celebration of feminist punk music and art, detracting from the brutality and mistreatment being meted by Putin’s government to Russian activists or political prisoners.

It’s been a lousy few weeks for women in the west. The Julian Assange saga, Republican Todd Akin’s stupidity and comments that women can’t get pregnant from rape and more. But even more grump inducing has been the appearance on my Facebook feed of more white saviour complex campaigns, this time run by white feminists. Feminism is supposedly about building a fairer and more just society for women, but these campaigns only reinforce the limitations of western feminisms for engaging with axes of oppression such as ethnicity, racialisation and social class. This isn’t my only beef with western feminisms, the others are that they have a decidedly liberal tone with a focus on individual rights and also the frequency with which feminist discourses are co-opted for neoliberal ends. For example, the way in which western feminisms have legitimated expansionist neoliberalism, think Muslim women needing to be rescued from the Taleban by the Enlightened West in Afghanistan.

This hero/martyr narrative in this annoying image from Feminists United is illustrative of a hierarchy that pits western women against non-Western women.

The advert represents a white woman as a hero, both educated and modern and able to freely exercise choice and control over her own body. In contrast, the ‘non Western woman’ is represented as oppressed by her culture, other women and tradition, all of which impinge on her sexuality. The comments on this image included:”Indeed, a horrific practice that comes from satan’s kingdom of darkness and needs to end; ” and “In Africa 3000 girls every day!!!”. Thankfully commentators also pointed out the racist and imperial assumptions of this advert. The comments recentre Western feminisms rather than expose the limitations of Western epistemological frameworks for making sense of women’s experiences outside the West. Given my own health background, I’m conscious of the ways in which FGM is constructed as a health issue. The image implicitly reifies the superiority of Western medicine for having the values most emblematic of Western civilisation such as enlightenment, benevolence and humanitarianism. We’ll just ignore the collusion of Christian missionary medicine and biomedicine in the advancement of colonialism and imperialism.

One of my intellectual and political concerns is with the ways in which certain practices and subjectivities are privileged through liberal feminist discourses that actually replicate the colonising impacts of heteropatriarchy (even though feminism was developed to critique it). These liberal feminist discourses construct femininity within particular norms such as being liberated that are within normative modes of middle class white behaviour. Racialised “oppressed” women are constituted as a threat to the liberal and neoliberal projects of self regulation and improvement which in turn reinforce the centrality of a white world view

The comments on the second set of images that popped up on my feed were also disturbing, viewing Muslim women as victims of their male partners. The comments framed the woman as unagentic and Muslim males as dominating and unable to control their sexual drives. The inability to recognise sexism and misogyny closer to home in the context of Todd Akin talking about “legitimate rape” were interestingly absent. This ‘fighting sexism with racism’as Sherene Razack (1995) calls it fills me with dismay, especially when differences are framed as a civilisational clash between western liberal values of equality and individualism versus the patriarchal, hierarchical and communal values of the ‘other’.

As Arundhati Roy articulates in a pointed essay:

Western-liberal feminism (by virtue of its being the most funded brand) [has become], the standard-bearer of what constitutes feminism. The battles as usual, have been played out on women’s bodies, extruding Botox at one end and Burkhas at the other. (And then there are those who suffer the double-whammy, Botox and the Burkha.) When, as happened recently in France, an attempt is made to coerce women out of the burkha rather than creating a situation in which a woman can choose what she wishes to do, it’s not about liberating her, but about unclothing her. It becomes an act of humiliation and cultural imperialism. Coercing a woman out of her burkha is as bad as coercing her into one. It’s not about the burkha. It’s about the coercion. Viewing gender in this way, shorn of social, political and economic context, makes it an issue of identity, a battle of props and costumes. It’s what allowed the US Government to use western feminist liberal groups as moral cover when it invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Afghan women were (and are) in terrible trouble under the Taliban. But dropping daisy-cutters on them was not going to solve the problem.

These coercive aspects reeking of cultural imperialism and humiliation have been close to home this week in Aotearoa with the furore over the decision by Lower Hutt’s Dowse Art Museum to ban men from seeing a video work by Qatari-American Sophia Al-Maria. The video Cinderazahd: For your eyes only was filmed in a woman only section of her grandmother’s home in Doha and shows Muslim women preparing for a relative’s wedding without their veils. Al-Maria requested that it only be shown to women and children in keeping with the belief that male strangers should not see their faces. However, this ban on mail viewers has resulted in complaints of gender discrimination to the Human Rights Commission.

The Dominion Post argues:

The real issue is that the Dowse is a ratepayer-funded organisation. As such, it should not be using the public purse to stage exhibits from which some ratepayers are excluded. The sum involved in this case – $6000 for the complete exhibition of 17 artists – is small, but the principle is important.

Clearly, the conflict between Al-Maria offering a work that can be seen only by women and the gallery’s duty to ensure equal access to all those who contribute towards funding it cannot be reconciled. That being the case, the Dowse should withdraw the video from the exhibition and Al-Maria should find a private gallery in which to show it.

Luckily there’s been some great responses from the blogosphere. Especially from QOT who says:

There’s a lot of argument going down around the fact that the Dowse is publicly-funded, is this discrimination, do we owe it to the poor oppressed brown women to tear away their autonomy because they’re too stupid to know they’re oppressed … yeah, guess where I fall on that one.

QOT checks our Human Rights legislation and notes that it is not unlawful to discriminate on the ground of religious belief (within particular circumstances). QOT acidly remarks that this legislation is what enables Catholics to ban women from the priesthood, but who’s complaining? If the primary complainant was a male student taking a third-year compulsory Art History paper where half the final exam marks were based on the film this would then disadvantage the males in the class. But is not being able to see that exhibit going to disadvantage the complainant really? Wise words also from Gaayathri, pointing out how important it is for those who are marginalised to be able to create and have access to safe spaces. Gaayathri cynically notes how the incident smacks of using Islamic women’s rights as a political football and if we indeed gave a damn then listening to their wishes would be a great start, and even better respecting the boundaries that have been set for the viewing of the work.

Contemporary racism is covert and subtle, a response to the social taboo against the open expression of racist sentiments. It is also more likely to be denied by majority group members.What I find most interesting about the Dowse drama is how the parameters of cultural consumption can only be set by the majority culture. Whether it’s invoking the white saviour discourse or railing against so-called Islamic oppression, it’s the majority white settler culture who decides how much culture is palatable and in what form. Setting boundaries results in the range of devastating comments that you can see on the interweb and it shows me that the veneer of civility is wafer thin. Kiwis can indeed hold negative views of particular groups in tandem with liberal principles of equality, tolerance, fairness and justice and just as quickly invoke these liberal values of fairness and equity in the service of  Islamophobia and racism. Our attitudes and beliefs in New Zealand haven’t been tested in the same way Australians have. They are forever in the spotlight about asylum seekers, but what it does make me think is that we should not be too complacent in New Zealand about the moral high ground. In all of this, what I am most grateful for is that like KONY 2012, these frustrating and painful incidents provide an opportunity to consider more deeply questions of freedom and liberation and more importantly to find out who our allies are.

Refugee women on their own in New Zealand: Uncommon courage

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Recently the report  ”Doing it for ourselves and our children: Refugee women on their own in New Zealand” was launched in Auckland, New Zealand. The project was jointly undertaken by AUT University and Refugee Services New Zealand with the support, guidance and practical assistance of the three Strengthening Refugee Voices groups in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. It was an honour for me to write the report.

The purpose of this project was to examine the resettlement experiences of women who entered New Zealand through the category of Women at Risk (identified by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). This category constitutes up to 75 places (10%) of New Zealand’s annual refugee quota of 750 applicants) or who became sole heads of households as a consequence of their resettlement experiences. The terms ‘refugee women’ and ‘communities’ refer to highly diverse groups of people  and in this report we don’t assume a “single, essential, transhistorical refugee condition” (Malkki, 1995, p.511).

A focus on strengths and principles of social justice, community development and capacity building were central to this investigation. Specifically, we had a transformative agenda, which was to enhance the wellbeing of refugee women by focussing on the roots of inequality in the structures and processes of society rather than in personal or community pathology. Within this frame, we were committed to constructing refugee women as assets rather than deploying as replicating deficit models where refugee women are represented as burdens for the receiving society.

You can read the whole report on the Refugee Services website