Strong interest from women to stand in Cook Islands election Posted by: Zabeena in Pacific News1 day agoComments Off 22 Views By: Richard Ewart With just one week to go for to register for Cook Islands elections, candidates are running out of time. Cook Islanders will go to the polls on July 9. Audio: Strong interest from women to stand in Cook Islands election Especially female candidates, who were to be supported by a Pan Pacific South East Asian Women’s Association program. It was designed to run over the months leading up to the election, educating women about what standing for parliament means and how to go about doing it. But the tight registration deadline has left the program in limbo. WOLFGRAMM: Rather than waiting for the electoral handbook that we’d created to be published, we were fortunate to be able to put it into the Cook Islands News in sections. Now I’ve been talking to women in the last 24 hours to see what results have happened, and we’ve found that for both parties there are more women actually putting their hands up for nomination as candidates, which is a really good sign. And so the feedback from having the handbook published as a series of articles has also been very good from the public, because they’ve become more aware of the process, the fact that it’s translated into Maori language as well has been extremely helpful, people like that as well. There are very few articles published in Maori, so they’re very happy to get their information in English and Maori. But the main thing is that more women are coming forward and expressing their interest, there are conversations happening all over the islands between women and their supporters, and so rather than having the negative impacts that we were quite distressed about a week or so ago, it’s had the reverse effect. It’s accelerated everything. EWART: That obviously from your organisation’s point of view is extremely encouraging, but isn’t there still a problem that whilst putting your hand up as it were and saying yes I’m prepared to stand is one thing, are many of these women in a state of readiness as it were, because they’d have to sort things out in literally four or five days? WOLFRAMM: Well that’s right, I guess they’re going to have to make a decision by the 5th of May whether they actually are going to stand either as an independent. But at the moment decisions are being made in the constituency committee level all over the country, and women are making decisions now to put their hands up at that level. So it’s interesting that they’ve decided that they’ll do it, and there is only ten weeks till the election, they’ve going to have to hit the ground running. I think a lot of people have been thinking about it previously, and wondering and this might have been the thing that just made them decide that they would actually go ahead and do it. It’s very encouraging for women to at least have a try, at least it shows your constituency and shows the current government and the people that women are interested and women are willing to step up. We certainly need them in our parliament, we have such a low representation, but we’re hoping to now get behind all of the women candidates that are selected and the independent candidates, and start to help them prepare for their campaign. EWART: I was going to ask you about that particular point, so we do have some women who would if they stand be standing as independents, but others that are aligned with the main parties? WOLFGRAMM: Yes, yes, well currently in Rarotonga we have one woman who has already mounted a campaign as an independent. Mainly they stay with the parties and rely on the party support. The problem of course is always getting selected for the party, and in some constituencies there is quite a number of candidates. So I know of one where there were 11 who had decided that they would step up for one constituency, and so they have to do a run-off. And in that I think there are two women in that constituency. So the idea though of creating a handbook and making people aware was also to make people aware that there are women who will support those other women. We’ve had this difficult problem over here of overcoming a hurdle where people think that women don’t support other women, and we’re trying to explode that myth and to say yes, we do, absolutely entirely, and we will get behind those women. EWART: To what degree do you think that the women who are potentially going to run as candidates in the election, to what degree do you think they’ve been fired up by the incumbent Prime Minister Henry Puna, who’s on record as suggesting that maybe the Cook Islands parliament doesn’t need more women? WOLFGRAMM: Well I guess there’s two schools of thought. This is a small island community and we are also very traditional and culturally oriented, so that still means that a number of people or one school of thought will believe that the parliament is a place for men, and that women should support the men. I don’t know where our Prime Minister got his information from when he decided that women in the Cook Islands didn’t need temporary special measures or quotas to increase our representation. I suppose he asked his wife, he certainly didn’t ask the rest of the population. But I still don’t think that that’s the thing that fired most of the women here. I think that it would have affected some portion of the population who would have been indignant and annoyed about it. But for the most part I think that messages like this through the publication of that handbook are more encouraging, they come at a different level from the grassroots up, and I think that our people respond better to those than they do to top down sort of statements with no evidence or backing. Source:Radio Australia fijione.tv/strong-interest-from-women-to-stand-in-cook-islands-election/
Posted on: Wed, 30 Apr 2014 09:53:22 +0000
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