Nov.22 | The Prod Comm and the Supreme Court go out on some limbs; soft bigotry; will today's students learn critical thinking?
Solutions to poverty and productivity look at long way off | The Supreme Court on tikanga | Research on student speech | Agnes Loheni on expectations and prejudice
The Productivity Commission’s latest report trips over its own assumptions
It looks like we’ll be waiting a while for solutions to disadvantage, or productivity
There’s a gaping hole in the latest Productivity Commission report. Can you guess what it is? I’ll give you a clue: it begins with “p” and ends in “roductivity”. The report, an interim release from the Fair Chance for All inquiry, opens with a list of “commonly used terms.” It takes the trouble to define the obvious—“assumptions”, we are told earnestly, are “things that are generally accepted to be ‘true’”, while “social norms” are “implicit, unwritten rules, beliefs, attitudes and behaviours that are considered acceptable”. But nowhere in this list will you find “productivity”. Search the report for the term, and all you will find is vague hand-waving in the direction of productivity helping to achieve better life outcomes, the Commission’s own name, and exhortations to pay less attention to productivity. All of which begs the question, if the Productivity Commission doesn’t care about productivity, who does? And, less rhetorically, what’s the point of the Commission? (Click to keep reading)
Is the Supreme Court’s decision on tikanga an outlier or a harbinger?
The majority in the Ellis case asks and answers its own constitution-shaping questions
Courts have an important role in our system of government. They interpret the law, apply it and, sometimes, make new law through a process of incremental adaptation building on previous decisions. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. Sometimes courts depart from the script, taking it on themselves to make a pronouncement that goes further than they’re supposed to. The Supreme Court’s recent decision on tikanga is one of those times. It’s a sensitive and important subject, one that should be handled with care and in a constitutionally appropriate way to reach an enduring position on the relationship between tikanga and law. Even the most charitable reading of the Court’s judgment would struggle to discern anything other than a majority of judges not merely seeing, but creating, an opportunity to reshape the law according to their views. That’s a troubling result not only in this case and for this issue, but because it raises a wider question: is this a harbinger, a sign of things to come? (Click to keep reading)
Will today’s students still have the opportunity to learn critical thinking?
New Zealand research suggests maybe not.
Over the course of six years and three degrees, the most important thing I learned at university was the ability to think critically. Yes, I learned about specific subjects, like biochemistry and administrative law, but the content wasn’t as valuable as gaining the ability to really think—to identify presuppositions, evaluate arguments, and begin to construct my own view of things. Studying law was particularly helpful for this thanks to its emphasis on advocacy, and so was exposure to a wide range of views and the debates about meaning that these fostered. Increasingly it became obvious that what was advanced as received wisdom was concocted out of a mixture of facts, values, and opinions. Some of it I agreed with and some of it I didn’t; engaging with these ideas was key to personal growth. I wonder if this would still be possible now; 20-40 percent of current students are reluctant to say what they think in the lecture theatre on issues of politics, religion, gender, and sexual orientation. (Click to keep reading)
Agnes Loheni on the soft bigotry of low expectation
What do a chemical engineer, a former politician, a mum of five, and a business owner have in common? They’re all one person, Agnes Loheni. But much current thinking would tell you she shouldn’t have achieved all these things given the circumstances she grew up in. She calls this thinking the soft bigotry of low expectation, and in this latest video from The Common Room she tackles that prejudice—hard. She describes it like this:
Growing up, no one told me that the system was against me because I was a Samoan. No one told me I was an impoverished child of migrants living in destitute conditions. No one said I needed to be taught differently from all other children because of my race. …
Contrast today, where many of our children are inundated with messages that they will be preyed upon because of their race or other such perceived disadvantage. That any dreams or aspirations they might have for themselves must be tempered by a system that is rigged against them.
This is a lived example of the problem with the approach exemplified by the Productivity Commission’s Fair Chance enquiry and so many other official reports when they lay the blame for social ills solely on nebulous systemic factors. Loheni says:
Narratives of envy and hopelessness lead to an insidious victim mentality that are perpetuated by those who say they care more and are genuinely concerned for the communities I grew up in … That soft bigotry of low expectation is the real injustice today to our marginalised communities. To take hopes and dreams away from a child through good intentions conflicts with the messages of aspiration, resilience, and compassion that I was exposed to growing up.
The official approach is well-meaning but it is a species of false compassion. It denies agency to the very people it is meant to help and treats them merely as helpless prisoners of circumstances. Yes, the system matters, but so do people. If you want to know why, and if you want to have hope for the future, watch Loheni’s video.