A lot of LEDs (or digital ink, if you will) has been spent over the last week discussing the whole “Labour carpet blames the Chinese for the housing crisis”. Now, it’s quite obvious what I think of Labour from that previous sentence; at best Phil Twyford and Andrew Little did not think through how their message would come across (which makes them the kind of people who are unsuited to represent us in Parliament) and, at worse, they knew exactly how the message would come across but decided it was okay to sacrifice Chinese New Zealanders as long as it got the dog-whistle vote. I do not know which end of the spectrum of hypotheses is the most likely, although I do think Twyford and Little’s doubling-down on the “People are just being overly sensitive about this; what we really meant was…” vaguely supports the worse case scenario.
So, what do I have to add to the debate (aside from an awful lot of tweets last week poking fun at Labour Party sympathisers)? Very little. However, obviously some people think I should be writing on this, given emails, DMs and tweets all to that extent. And, I can see why; if you think Labour knew what it was they were doing, then it does seem like they have conspired to keep their intentions secret. Then there is the ongoing question of where they got their data from, and the secrecy which still remains about how they moved from a Bayesian analysis of who was buying what to the claim about the non-residential nature of the buyers. Potent questions/issues to be sure, but I really don’t know that I have much to say about.
Compare this case to the Rachinger allegations (the story of which seems to have gone quite quiet, and I am sure certain parties are blaming me and my cronies for that; we were, after all, meant to focus on our common enemy Cam Slater and not question the many interesting details of the story). In the Rachinger case there was an awful lot of publicly available evidence. In the Twyford case (or maybe I should, for consistency, refer to this as the “Twyford Allegations”) there is much speculation but little actual data. Indeed, this was a frequent criticism of the allegations, as shown by Keith Ng, Chuan-Zheng Lee, and Thomas Lumley to count a few. Labour’s response to these criticisms has been disingenuous, and I hate to say it, but none have been more disingenuous than the person who ran the statistical analysis, Rob Salmond. His Sunday Star-Times piece (which can also be read here either deliberately reinterprets the criticisms, or shows that he wasn’t so interested in debating the issue as he was in defending his methodology. Indeed, a more paranoid mind than my own would think, based upon the actions of the Leader, the MP and the Statistician ((A great film title if ever I heard one.)) indicate a concerted effort to wallpaper over the dog-whistling because they know it is doing them harm but they can’t be seen to be in error.
Now, it’s a little known fact but I know quite a bit about Bayesian analysis, since the last two chapters of my book uses such an analysis to argue that in a range of cases conspiracy theories can be inferences to the best explanation. ((There’s no math involved; my talk is entirely in talk of probabilities without the need to delve into fancy equations.)) As such, I read through Salmond’s description of his method with interest. I was struck by this claim:
To estimate ethnicity, we used public NZ census data on the ethnic distribution of neighbourhoods, and also used data we developed privately about the ethnic distribution of last, middle, and first names in New Zealand. We followed some advice – especially about estimating Asian ethnicities – from prominent US academic studies. I won’t be describing that process further, as that is sensitive IP for Labour.
Now, I can understand that, in some cases, claiming “This is sensitive intellectual property!” is a fine thing to say. However, in the case of a Party trying to make hay from an issue, that really is not good enough. If a Party wants to make a claim like “Foreign, non-resident Chinese are buying up all our houses!” and part of the analysis which supports that claim is secret, why should the Public trust the Party particularly when people have already pointed out methodological problems in the data analysis anyway? Hiding behind IP might be a sound business decision, but it should not be an action undertaken by a Party that a) wants to make it into Government and b) would appear to be engaging in racist dog-whistling to do it.
Maybe I’m overly sensitive about this, having written a book chapter on why we should never trust explanations which cite secret evidence. However, the sheer amount of flippancy about the framing of the claims and then a certain amount of secrecy over the alleged evidence which supports them is, if not outright conspiratorial, reason enough to make people sympathetic to a conspiracy theory that says Labour is doing this for reasons other than the ones the Party is willing to admit to.
Another reason to be concerned is Phil Twyford’s claim that the person who leaked the property data from Barfoot and Thompson is a “whistleblower.” Twyford has said:
A whistleblower is someone who reveals illicit or illegal activities. Whoever the leaker was, they were not a whistleblower. Nothing about the leak suggests Barfoot and Thompson did anything illegal. Not only that, but it seems the leaker was not aware the data they were passing on was making it to the Labour Party (and, it seems, other Parties). That raises some interesting questions about how the leaked data was obtained, which really does not reflect well on anyone.
Side issue: I frequently find myself reading the comments section over at Public Address (but rarely commenting these days), and what I found truly fascinating was not just the claim that anyone who disagreed with how the Labour Party framed the data “doesn’t care about the housing crisis” but also as “globalists”. I first saw this in a PA comment, and I was struck, going “Huh?” Then Bryce Edward’s started to characterise the difference in views in such terms:
"Economic nationalists Vs Global cosmopolitans" – that's my best stab at explaining the heated leftwing divide over the Twyford campaign
— Bryce Edwards (@bryce_edwards) July 16, 2015
What is going on here? Answers on a postcard, please.
In the end, I think the problem with the analysis of the housing crisis rides on two issues, the denial of the seriousness of which leads to people thinking there is some duplicity or conspiracy on the part of senior members of the Labour Party. The first is the data, which has been put forward as fact when it is nothing of the sort. Rob Salmond’s analysis is a piece of evidence, and it is highly contested evidence at that. A fact is something which is provably true, and Salmond’s analysis has not produced any factual claims (something he admits to, but others seem to mistakenly believe is true of his analysis). Rather, it is evidence of something, where that something is up to interpretation.
The second issue is our old friend institutional racism. It is true that a lot of people became experts in racism last week, but it’s also true a lot of people only became experts in racism because they reached for a dictionary. The standard dictionary definition of racism goes something like:
The belief that members of a race possess characteristics, abilities, et cetera specific to that race which distinguish it as inferior or superior to some other race or races.
The standard dictionary definition doesn’t capture the notion of institutional racism, however, and I’m sure none of us are simple enough to think that you can win a debate on dictionary definitions alone. ((Especially since there is a lag between dictionaries capturing common use and languages evolving.)) Yet many people went “But the framing of the debate doesn’t make out the Chinese are in anyway inferior, so it can’t be racist, you liberal bigots!” That ignores the structural or institutional form of racism, however, and just how easily Labour’s framing of their story (and it’s foolish indeed to claim it’s entirely the fault of the reporting newspaper in this case, given the defence of the story by Messrs. Little, Twyford and Salmond) plays into the systemic othering and denigration of people who aren’t “real Aucklanders”.
In short (since I realise I said I had little to say on this but have written one and an half thousand words since then), whatever we think of the problem the Twyford Allegations are pointing to, the actual substance of those allegations is nowhere near as strong as senior members of the Labour Party would have us believe, and the defence of those allegations looks at the best, fishy and, at worse, like someone thought it might be good for business to alienate people who easily pass as not looking like really they belong here…