Tracy Watkins is Sunday Star-Times editor.
OPINION: Personal, nasty, grubby – Labour’s attack on National leader Christopher Luxon over women’s access to contraception tells you everything you need to know about the ground on which the election campaign will be fought.
Stupidly, I was hoping that with so many big issues for us to grapple with this election the campaign would be a fair fight on real issues – the economy, immigration policy (suddenly at never-before-seen record levels), infrastructure, education, hospital and cancer waiting lists to name a few.
But in just two social media posts, Labour blew me out of the water.
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The first was by Labour’s campaign chair Megan Woods – so a pretty clear steer on the type of campaign she intends running – likening National’s stance on prescription charges to the dystopian Margaret Atwood novel The Handmaid’s Tale, in which women are forced to bear children for the nation of Gilead.
Woods was called out for dirty politics. But that didn’t deter Andrew Little, who took it to even more ridiculous heights, claming in an Instagram post: “Labour decriminalised abortion; National want to stop women’s access to contraception. Disgusting.”
In those two sentences, Little sought to plumb the depths of the culture wars consuming the US and elsewhere, and drag New Zealand politics down to its basest level.
It’s not even true.
Hulu/AP
A scene from the TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, which Labour has used to attack National leader Christopher Luxon.
Let’s take the abortion claim first. Labour did not decriminalise abortion – Parliament did, by a conscience vote. Thirty-seven Labour MPs voted in favour, so nothing like the majority needed to pass a bill. The measure only passed with support from MPs across the rest of the House, including a number of National MPs. Both parties also had MPs exercise their conscience and vote against the legislation.
The contraception claim is even more misleading.
Little and Woods are referring to National’s opposition to scrapping the $5 co-payment for prescriptions, announced in the May Budget. Zeroing in on contraception to claim an agenda by National is about as absurd as claiming they are anti people with high blood pressure, for also wanting to reinstate the charge for blood pressure drugs.
Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images
Finance Minister Grant Robertson’s sixth budget scrapped prescription charges, setting the stage for an unlikely stoush over women’s contraceptive rights.
National opposes the policy because it is untargeted and expensive, with a $618 million price tag. In contrast, the Budget only assigned $118 million to reducing hospital waiting lists. And while there is evidence to show that the $5 co-payment was deterring some people from collecting their prescriptions, there are others for which the $5 cost – capped at a maximum $100 a year, or 20 prescriptions for an entire household – was barely an imposition. For children under 13, prescriptions were already free.
To claim that reinstating the $5 co-payment is tantamount to restricting women’s access to contraception is drawing a very long bow.
Some types of contraception are already fully subsidised, for instance.
But let’s turn the tables on Labour’s absurd claim for a minute; in the main, women need a prescription for the pill. They have to see their GP or a clinic on a regular basis to get the prescription renewed and that can cost $40 at Family Planning, or as much as $67 a pop, depending on what your GP charges.
Instead of spending $600 million on scrapping prescription charges, Labour could have directed the funding to GP capitation payments instead, as ACT has suggested, currently estimated as being $137 million short of what GPs need.
What’s a bigger deterrence to health care – the cost of seeing a GP, or a $5 prescription charge?
The cost of seeing a doctor is a far greater deterrence to accessing primary health care than a $5 prescription charge.
But the last Budget – and Andrew Little as a former health minister – made no effort to address that cost, so by Little’s own logic, both he and his own government are denying women access to contraception.
That’s clearly a nonsense, as are the claims about Luxon, but Labour’s attacks are as much about playing on Luxon’s conservative Christian beliefs as they are about its claimed concern for women accessing contraception.
Labour’s tactics weren’t developed in a vacuum of course; the attacks on former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern by some of her opponents were even grubbier, nastier and deeply personal. They set the stage for an ugly campaign. We get that.
But there’s still time for everyone to pull back and deliver us the campaign voters need.
