Tuesday, 4 March 2025

The Politics of Ostracism.

Ruled Out: The AfD, (Alternative für Deutschland) branded “Far Right” by Germany’s political mainstream, has been ostracised politically. The Christian Democrats (many of whose voters support the AfD’s tough anti-immigration stance) have ruled out any possibility of entering into a coalition with the radical-nationalist party.

THAT THERE HAS BEEN A SHIFT towards the political right across virtually the entire world is now indisputable. The latest demonstration of right-wing strength came earlier this week (23/2/25) in Germany where the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) alliance and the even more emphatically conservative Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) together accounted for just under half of the popular vote.

The corollary of right-wing strength is, of course, left-wing weakness. In Germany the traditional left-wing standard-bearer, the Social Democratic Party, slumped to its lowest share ever of the post-war popular vote. The Greens also lost ground. Only the relatively minor Left Party registered solid gains.

On its face, the German result would indicate the swift formation of a strong right-wing coalition government. The German electorate has, after all, delivered the right-wing parties a commanding majority in the German parliament. That such a coalition will not, as matters presently stand, eventuate, requires some explanation.

Predictably, that explanation derives from the twelve years that Germany spent under Nazi rule. The crimes committed against the German people and, ultimately, the entire world by Adolf Hitler and his followers presented the victors of the Second World War with a dilemma: How to establish a political system sufficiently robust to allow the Germans to rule themselves without embracing the same radical-nationalist ideas that gave birth to Nazism?

In the Russian Zone of occupied Germany “denazification” was accomplished by constructing another totalitarian state, the German Democratic Republic, in which a single political organisation, the Socialist Unity Party (superintended by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) controlled everything.

The American, British and French occupiers of the defeated Reich, already engaged in bitter ideological competition with the Soviets, could not be seen to embrace the totalitarian solutions of the Communists. Their brand-spanking-new Federal Republic of Germany could only be a democracy – with all the dangerous freedom that entails.

“Dangerous freedom”?

Of course “dangerous freedom”. Because, if freedom is to be anything other than a sham, it must encompass the possibility of its own rejection. People are not genuinely free unless they are also entrusted with the power to surrender their freedom. Liberty cannot be enforced.

The American, British and French occupiers disagreed. The constitution of their new republic was shaped in such a way that any political party unwilling to conform to its unwavering intolerance of anti-democratic ideas would be shunned by all the pro-democratic parties. If this political ostracism failed, and the voters, against all reason, continued to vote for an anti-democratic party in large numbers, then the all-powerful “Office for the Protection of the Constitution” could ban it altogether.

For good measure, all speech supportive of Hitler’s Nazi regime; the public display of Nazi symbols and memorabilia, and the use of Nazi greetings and slogans, was outlawed.

Following the collapse of the German Democratic Republic in 1989, and the re-unification of Germany in 1990, the exclusion of the anti-democratic Right was extended to the anti-democratic Left. On the grounds that a number of its founders had been members of the Socialist Unity Party, the centrist Social Democrats and their Green Party allies point-blank refused to enter into a coalition with the Left Party.

The AfD, branded “Far Right” by Germany’s political mainstream, suffered a similar fate. The CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the CSU (many of whose members support the AfD’s tough anti-immigration stance) have ruled out any possibility of entering into a coalition with the radical-nationalists.

For the long-suffering Germans this means enduring yet another “Grand Coalition” of the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats. (In New Zealand terms, National and Labour.) But these two ideological formations are traceable historically to very different socio-economic classes and cultural/religious divisions in German society. Politically-speaking, it is extremely difficult to effect a durable combination of chalk and cheese.

Nor is it a durable solution to the steady expansion of radical-nationalist populism in Germany, or, for that matter, across the globe. Once a political movement achieves sufficient momentum to double its popular support from 10 to 20 percent of the electorate, excluding it from political office becomes completely counterproductive. What meagre support for democratic principles that still exists within its ranks will disappear altogether.

The treatment of the AfD will thus prove the truth of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous maxim: “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”


This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 28 February 2025.

Monday, 3 March 2025

What Are We Defending?

Following Our Example: Not even the presence of Chinese warships in the Tasman Sea will generate the sort of diplomatic breach the anti-China lobby has been working so assiduously for a decade to provoke. Too many New Zealanders recall the occasions when a New Zealand frigate has tagged along behind the Aussies and Americans in their regular voyages across the South China Sea and through the Taiwan Strait. 

A SMALL FORCE, just three ships, but its impact in a week of geopolitical transformation was devastating. Chinese naval vessels had sailed past Sydney at a distance of just 150 nautical miles. A clearer message to Australia and New Zealand could not have been sent by the Chinese Government: The Pacific is no longer an American lake.

The question to be answered, now, is: How should New Zealand respond? It’s armed forces are in a state of deplorable disrepair. Enlisted men and women are poorly paid and their morale is said to be dangerously low. Recruitment to all three services is bad and getting worse. The Royal New Zealand Navy, the service now in the spotlight, would struggle to show the flag in the Tasman Sea. If it tried, the not unreasonable fear would be that the vessel it sent might not come back. After all, the HMNZS Manawanui didn’t.

Defence Minister Judith Collins acknowledges these difficulties and is pledged to address them. New Zealand’s defence spending, expressed as a percentage of its GDP, is set to double over the next five years.

Unfortunately, that’s not saying much. Currently, New Zealand spends less that 1 percent of GDP on its armed forces. So, even a doubling of that figure would still leave us shy of the 2 percent figure now accepted globally as the minimum spend for any nation wishing to be taken seriously – not only by its enemies, but also by its friends.

According to Stats NZ: “The size of the New Zealand economy was $NZ415 billion for the year ended June 2024.” Working from this figure, if this country’s defence spending was to be brought up to the new minimum of 2 percent, a sum of roughly $8 billion would need to be appropriated by the House of Representatives. That’s an additional $3 billion on top of the 2024-25 appropriation.

That’s a lot of dollars to spend of guns and ships and planes when your country’s public health service is falling to pieces before its citizens’ horrified eyes. To supply the New Zealand Defence Force with an additional $3 billion, Finance Minister Nicola Willis would either have to embark on a blistering austerity programme reminiscent of Ruth Richardson’s 1991 “Mother of All Budgets”; or, the Coalition Government would have to raise taxes steeply. With an election looming in 2026, neither of those options is politically enticing.

Historically, securing general public support for a sharp increase in defence spending is almost impossible in the absence of a palpable – maybe even an existential – threat.

Following the successful conclusion of the Second World War, the administration of US President Harry S. Truman moved swiftly to restore American society to its pre-war settings. When the behaviour of the Soviet Union made it clear that the USA’s general demobilisation had been a tad premature, Truman rapidly concluded that to secure the appropriation of massive sums for the nation’s defence it would be necessary to, in the words of Senator Arthur Vandenberg: “scare the hell out of the American people”.

Fortunately for Truman, that proved to be less of a problem than many anticipated. Then, as now, the Russians made it easy!

Less so the Chinese – especially in New Zealand. The best efforts of Professor Anne-Marie Brady notwithstanding, casting the Peoples Republic in the role of Stalin’s Soviet Union has proved problematic. Most Kiwis are aware of the huge economic value of their country’s agricultural exports to China, and are, accordingly, in general support of the efforts of successive governments to avoid antagonising China to the point where the relationship between the two countries is jeopardised.

That being the case, not even the presence of Chinese warships in the Tasman is guaranteed to generate the sort of diplomatic breach the anti-China lobby has been working so assiduously for a decade to provoke. Too many New Zealanders recall the occasions when a New Zealand frigate has tagged along behind the Aussies and Americans in their regular voyages across the South China Sea and through the Taiwan Strait. If New Zealanders are entitled to sail where they please in international waters, then so too, presumably, are the Chinese.

What’s more, in light of the events of the past week, the Washington faction of MFAT faces a new and major problem. While the contrast between the United States and China remained stark, drawing attention to the totalitarian inclinations of its Communist Party rulers remained a reliable strategy. But, President Donald Trump’s affection for dictatorial regimes; the brutality of his transactional approach to international affairs; and his apparent repudiation of the “rules-based international order” in favour of cold-eyed realpolitik; makes it difficult for America (and its increasingly apprehensive allies) to retain their footing on the moral high-ground.

It is difficult to criticise the transactional elements of the relationships forged between China and the micro-states of the Pacific – the Cook Islands being only the latest in a succession of Chinese-initiated bilateral agreements negotiated in New Zealand’s “back yard” – when the United States is demanding half of Ukraine’s rare earths in part-payment for the American munitions supplied to counter Russian aggression.

What those three Chinese warships have produced, however, is a much more compelling argument for aligning New Zealand’s defensive posture in general and its military procurement in particular with Australia’s. In the much colder and more brutal world that is fast emerging from the collapse of the 80-year-old Pax Americana, only the Australians can be relied upon to protect us – and only then if they are satisfied that the Kiwis are pulling their weight.

What does that mean? It means finding that additional $3 billion and spending it. It means a much bigger and more effective navy. It means paying our soldiers, sailors, and air force personnel the sort of money that makes it easy for the NZDF to recruit and retain the best and the brightest young New Zealanders. It means a strategic military vision that makes sense to the NZDF, the politicians, and the overwhelming majority of New Zealanders. And, yes, it probably also means swallowing hard and signing up to AUKUS Pillar 2.

None of this will be of any use, however, in a nation divided against itself. A population composed of mutually antagonistic cultures and identities; a country racked by ideological differences and beset by conflicts made all the more intractable by the demonisation of every side except one’s own, cannot possibly achieve the consensus needed to construct an effective national defence.

If New Zealand is to defend itself, then the very first thing it needs to agree upon is the nature of the state it is defending. Is it a state committed to refashioning its ideas and institutions in conformity with the cultural imperatives of its indigenous people? Is it a state dedicated to maximising the ability of individuals to act effectively in the marketplaces of goods, services, and ideas? Is it a state dedicated to ensuring that every citizen has the support required to realise their full potential? Is it mixture of all three?

Until we can agree upon the shape and purpose of the state for which we are annually appropriating 2 percent (or more) of the nation’s economic output, then the long-overdue refurbishment and rehabilitation of our armed forces is unlikely to, and probably shouldn’t, happen.

Denied the easy option of marching behind British and American drums, and before they simply fall in step with the Australians, New Zealanders should sort-out why, and for what, they are willing to march at all.


This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 24 February 2025.

Monday, 24 February 2025

Visitors With Votes.

The Way We Were - And Hoped To Remain: The iconic photograph of Prime Minister Norman Kirk holding the hand of a little Māori boy at Waitangi on 6 February 1973 held out the promise of a future founded upon the uncomplicated and uncontested acceptance of racial equality.  

WAITANGI DAY commentary see-saws manically between the warmly positive and the coldly negative. Many New Zealanders consider this a good thing. They point to the unexamined patriotism of July Fourth and Bastille Day celebrations, and applaud the fact that the character of Aotearoa-New Zealand, and its future evolution, remain matters for passionate disputation, rather than military chauvinism and outsized flags.

Conservatives of a certain age are less confident of the virtue of this annual debate. They look back wistfully to that period of New Zealand history when the constitutive peoples of New Zealand, Māori and Pakeha, gathered at Waitangi to celebrate the 1840 treaty signing which, according to Queen Victoria’s representative, Captain William Hobson, constituted them as “one people”.

In the memories of these people, no Waitangi Day better illustrated this notion of national unity than 6 February 1973. That was the day when the newly-elected Labour prime minister, Norman Kirk, announced that henceforth Waitangi Day would be known as New Zealand Day.

A powerful visual image of Kirk’s intentions for this new public holiday was provided by the photograph of a big prime minister holding the hand of a little Māori child as the two of them made their way across the Treaty Ground. Symbolically, the image suggested that the rising generation of Māori should expect to live lives of equivalent fullness to those of their Pakeha compatriots. The photograph’s clear assimilationist message was not welcomed by all, but for a large number of New Zealanders it expressed their hope for a future founded upon an uncomplicated and uncontested acceptance of racial equality.

“Why can’t we have Waitangi Days like that anymore?”, these old-timers ask. “Why can’t we celebrate the positive national achievements of New Zealanders, regardless of ethnicity? What is to be gained, in terms of strengthening social cohesion, by foregrounding – and all-too-often fomenting – this country’s ethnic divisions?”

The straightforward reply from the nation’s historians, Pakeha and Māori, is that the legacy of conquest, land seizure, economic marginalisation, and cultural erasure central to the European colonisation of New Zealand is seared into the collective memory of its indigenous people. At some point, the historical injustices that have not been forgotten by the colonised will have to be acknowledged and redressed by the colonisers. To suggest otherwise, they insist, is itself an act of colonialist oppression. Moreover, as the rising generation of Māori nationalists are only too willing to point out, by no means all these injustices are historical. Far too many of them are contemporary.

The articulation of such grievances, long assumed by the victors of the New Zealand Wars to be safely buried in the past, gathered momentum throughout the 1970s and 80s and were characterised by legal challenges and vigorous political protests.

The impressive Māori Land March of 1975 hastened the creation of the Waitangi Tribunal. Equipped with quasi-judicial powers, the Tribunal was instrumental in investigating past wrongs, determining the most appropriate means of their redress, and introducing New Zealanders to a more complete account of their history. Over the course of the next 50 years, its power and influence would undergo significant expansion.

The forcible eviction of the Ngati Whatua occupiers of Bastion Point in 1978 presented New Zealanders with a rare and shocking demonstration of the raw power of the Pakeha state. Hundreds of Police officers were involved, with logistical support provided by the armed forces. The operation provided a jarring reminder to New Zealanders that the alienation of Māori land and resources was predicated on the actual or threatened use of force by political and legal institutions that were overwhelmingly dominated by Pakeha – and remained so.

The watershed event that finally extinguished the sunny optimism of 1973, however, was the 1981 Springbok Tour. The dramatic and at times violent incidents that marked the 56-day tour by Apartheid South Africa’s rugby team brought the idealistic champions of classical racial equality into frequent and often uncomfortable contact with Māori protesters who had experienced first-hand the widespread and deeply ingrained Pakeha racism that, thanks to the Tour, would ensure the re-election of Rob Muldoon’s National Government.

The young, well-educated, middle-class Pakeha who mostly comprised the anti-tour movement found themselves at a moral disadvantage when challenged to account for the fact that they were willing to suffer Police batons for Black South Africans but not for Brown New Zealanders. Why was the racism of the White South Africans capable of inspiring a mass anti-racist movement, but not the equally egregious colonialist excesses of Pakeha regimes past and present?

The only acceptable answer was: “Because we’re as racist as the Rugby thugs.”

“Damn right!” came the Māori nationalists’ retort, “And now is the time for you to do something about it!”

Which they did. For the next forty years the students who had supplied the shock-troops of the anti-tour movement accepted the wero Māori Nationalists had laid before them and slowly but surely integrated it into whatever institutions they found themselves in a position to influence and/or control. Political parties, the courts, universities, schools, hospitals, the public service, law firms, the news media, trade unions, even corporations: all those institutions into which young, idealistic New Zealanders were disgorged annually. Places where, increasingly, the best way to get along was to go along with the ever-expanding ramifications of “the principles of te Tiriti o Waitangi”, and the Crown-Māori “partnership” which the New Zealand judiciary had determined the Treaty to mandate.

By the 2020s this self-replicating social layer of te Tiriti-inspired professionals, administrators and managers numbered in the hundreds-of-thousands and was exerting a decisive influence over the evolution of New Zealand’s political, social and cultural institutions. Binding its members together was a deep mistrust, bordering on active hostility, directed at that part of New Zealand society which evinced little or no understanding of, or enthusiasm for, te Tiriti and the transformational narrative it was driving forward. That this part of New Zealand almost certainly outnumbered te Tiriti’s promoters and protectors gave cause for even greater concern, raising serious doubts about the cultural safety of democratic institutions.

Nevertheless, it was this strategic aggregation of Pakeha allies that facilitated significant cultural, economic, and political indigenous progress – precipitating a veritable “Māori Renaissance”. Mutually reinforcing, the alliance between Pakeha jurists, administrators, and educators, and the rapidly expanding Māori middle-class fostered by te Tiriti’s official rehabilitation and the opportunities flowing from a succession of substantial iwi-based “Treaty settlements”, continued to grow and strengthen. By the second decade of the twenty-first century it had solidified into the permanent and seemingly unchallengeable arbiter of New Zealand’s social, economic, cultural and constitutional development.

Te Tiriti’s victory may have been complete in these institutional islands, but they were surrounded by a vast sea of doubt. A substantial majority of Pakeha, as well as a growing portion of the recent immigrant population, struggled to accept the Waitangi Tribunal’s increasingly radical findings. Before their eyes the power of the Crown seemed to be crumbling away – a shrinkage of sovereignty fuelled by historical revisionists who flatly contradicted the public’s understanding (however flawed) of their nation’s story.

It was only a matter of time before this public doubt crystalised into public anger. Increasingly, the narrative growing out of the Treaty’s judicial and bureaucratic restoration was being presented to Pakeha in ways that not only made clear the “settlers’” general unfitness to shape its evolution, but also rejected, absolutely, their democratic right to do so.

That the 80 percent of New Zealanders who did not identify as Māori were to be given no say in elevating the Treaty’s status to that of supreme and unchallengeable law was finally made clear in the He Puapua Report. This document, penned by Treaty scholars and activists, and presented secretly to the Sixth Labour Government in 2019, detailed the changes required to ensure that New Zealand’s constitutional arrangements conformed with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

The measures required to achieve this goal in time for the bicentennial celebration of the Treaty’s signing in 2040 were deemed to necessitate a full-scale constitutional revolution. This was not to be attempted in one go, however, but piecemeal. Each step along the way was to be accomplished through stand-alone, apparently unconnected, legislative adjustments. Significantly, the plan included no provision for these cumulative, transformational, changes to be presented to the whole citizenry for ratification by referendum. Like the proverbial slow-cooked frog, Pakeha New Zealanders were to be kept in ignorance of their constitutional fate until it was too late to change it.

That such a plan was thought to be implementable in an open democratic society speaks eloquently of elite New Zealanders’ assumptions concerning both the powers they wielded and the extent to which those powers could be challenged by ordinary citizens. As Sir Geoffrey Palmer makes clear in his book The New Zealand Constitution In Crisis, confidence in his own and other elite actors’ ability to sideline the democratic process was considerable:

The logic of the approach was as follows… Some parliamentary action by way of legislation was needed to make a base. But if that legislation itself redressed the grievances it would run into the problem that the majority of the community would oppose it. If, on the other hand, legislation was used to set up processes, and procedures and the principles on which decisions should be based were stated, it may be possible to get even a majoritarian legislature to act. The initial commitment required was to a process. No tangible outcome was provided by the legislation itself. What should be done was to be decided only after judicial or quasi-judicial processes had assessed individual cases. First it was necessary to give the courts something to interpret. Such was the nature of the approach I brought to both statutory incorporation of the Treaty in statutes, and extension of the Waitangi Tribunal to examine grievances back to 1840.

What brought He Puapua and the elite Treaty project generally to grief certainly wasn’t its exposure and condemnation by mainstream journalism. Indeed, the opposite was true: the major media organisations saw themselves as integral to the project’s success. Ultimately, what doomed the elites’ Treaty project to failure was the democratising impact of social media.

Palmer’s “processes” required media gatekeepers committed to keeping “the majority of the community” out of the game. In fact, so reliant upon the exclusionary powers of these gatekeepers were Palmer’s strategies for their ultimate success, that the moment the Internet empowered ordinary citizens to receive and impart information independently of the mainstream media and its guard-dogs, they began instantly to fall apart.

The picture that emerged from the collective exertions of these “citizen journalists” was as clear as it was disturbing. The bureaucratic and administrative elites had, since the early-1980s, come to view themselves as the irreplaceable brain and muscle of what political scientists call the “permanent state”, and constitutional lawyers refer to, simply, as “The Crown”. They had arrived at this conclusion alongside the leadership of the tangata whenua, who saw themselves, and were certainly acknowledged by the leaders of the Permanent State, as the “Permanent People”. The relationship between the two was mutually reinforcing.

The conclusion to be drawn from this reading of New Zealand’s constitutional, political and cultural evolution is daunting.

The status of those who are members of neither the Permanent State nor the Permanent People is problematic – to say the least! That they constitute a majority of the population is openly acknowledged by both the Crown and Māori. But, majorities under pressure from minorities all-too-easily behave tyrannically. Meaning that, while New Zealand remains a representative democracy, the non-Crown, non-Māori majority is likely to be treated as a permanent threat.

Because, what are they really? Victims of history: the flotsam and jetsam of a botched process of colonisation? Communities without roots, lacking permanent interests, bereft of cultural awareness, and off to Australia at the drop of a hat? A people just passing through?

No wonder Māori politicians call these New Zealanders manuhiri – visitors.

But that is not what they call themselves. It would, therefore, be most unwise of both the Permanent State and the Permanent People to forget that these visitors, these citizens, still come armed to the teeth with votes.


This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project website on Friday, 14 February 2025.

Monday, 17 February 2025

Adapting To Trump’s Changing Climate.

New World Orders: The challenge facing Christopher Luxon and Chris Hipkins is how to keep their small and vulnerable nation safe and stable in a world whose economic and political climate the forty-seventh American president is changing so profoundly.

IT IS, SURELY, the ultimate Millennial revenge fantasy. Calling senior Baby-Boomer and Gen-X bureaucrats and asking them to justify their salaries. “Come on, dude, just tell me what it is that you do!” All the time knowing that the hapless federal employee at the other end of the call is fighting for his job, his status, his self-respect.

Except, this scenario is no fantasy. Such conversations have been going on for days: proof that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is every bit as real and scary as its critics predicted. Musk’s twenty-something “tech geek” hires are cutting a swathe through the federal bureaucracy with the implacable determination of the Grim Reaper.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world struggles to make sense of the Trump Administration. What is its ultimate purpose? What is the nature of the political dynamic driving the raging torrent of Executive Orders pouring out of the Trump White House?

It is a testament to the essential mildness of their country’s politics and politicians that New Zealanders struggle to make any kind of sense of Donald Trump. Can he really be serious? Is there the slightest method to policies that strike so many Kiwis as utter madness?

There is – but it’s in the service of an agenda so completely foreign to the thinking of the vast majority of the world’s politicians, administrators and journalists, that even conceptualising it requires considerable effort.

Consider the following self-characterisation, offered-up to a puzzled world by one of Trump’s most hardcore supporters, Steve Bannon:

“I’m a Leninist. Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too.”

Seriously? How can a MAGA Republican possibly cite the Russian revolutionary, Vladimir Lenin, as his inspiration? Wasn’t Lenin responsible for establishing one of the most ferocious states in all of human history?

He certainly was, but Bannon’s Leninist sympathies amply confirm the old French aphorism: Les extrèmes se touchent. (The extremes find each other.)

Certainly, that is what the world is currently witnessing in the United States. The deliberate destruction of the 80-year-old state machine arising out of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” policies of the 1930s – by right-wing revolutionaries determined to create a new one?

It’s what Bannon attempted to do in 2017, when he was, briefly, Trump’s White House chief-of-staff. But, he failed.

The strength and resilience of the old state machine was simply beyond the First Trump Administration’s powers. The “Country-Club Republicans” had yet to be purged from the Republican Party. The Supreme Court was not yet fully harnessed to the Right’s agenda. Most importantly, Trump and his MAGA court had seriously underestimated the obstructive capabilities of the ancien regime. Transformative regime-change clearly required an “Everything, Everywhere, All at Once” battle-plan – and Trump 45 didn’t have one.

The crucial difference between Trump 45 and Trump 47 is that the forty-seventh president of the United States does have a battle-plan, Project 2025, and one of its principal authors, Russell Vought, has been safely installed as the new Director of the Office of Management and Budget. If the American ship-of-state has a bridge, then the OMB is it.

Trump’s greatest challenge, over the next four years, will be working out how to smash the status quo without, simultaneously, smashing the working-class Americans whose votes carried him to a comprehensive (if narrow) electoral victory. That Trump’s MAGA movement expects him to unleash holy vengeance upon the “Deep State” (aka the old state machinery) is indisputable. Less certain, however, is whether those same working-class voters appreciate how effectively the old state machinery has protected them and their families for the past 80 years.

If Elon Musk is to keep his promise to carve one trillion dollars off the Federal Budget, then the health, education and welfare services currently available to working-class Americans cannot avoid taking a massive hit.

Trump’s Democratic Party opponents simply cannot understand why American workers don’t get this. But, the very fact that the Democrats don’t “get it” is the very reason so many of those workers gave their votes to Trump. The extraordinary cluelessness of Democratic Party politicians when it comes to communicating effectively with ordinary Americans, let alone understanding their grievances, explains entirely the latter’s indifference to the plight of those federal bureaucrats on the receiving end of Musk’s tech geek interrogators.

Revolutions happen when, at roughly the same time, both the elites and the struggling masses arrive at the same conclusion: things cannot go on as they are. That the respective solutions advanced by these two groups are likely to diverge spectacularly only begins to matter after they have, between them, brought the failing system to its knees.

New Zealanders who shake their heads in disbelief at the speed and breadth of the Trump Administration’s changes are either too young to remember “Rogernomics”, or too embarrassed to acknowledge how fulsomely they embraced its breakneck “reforms”. If the machinations of Elon Musk seem sinister today, then so, too, should the machinations of Bob Jones and all the other ideologically-driven members of New Zealand’s elites back in 1984.

Those who argue that the “quiet revolution” of the 1980s simply represented New Zealand’s rather belated recognition that the world had changed, can hardly now object that the USA has collectively made the same determination. The economic and geopolitical doctrines that have dominated the policy-making of the last 40 years have been recognised, by billionaires and “deplorables” alike, as no longer fit for purpose.

Globalisation. Free Trade. The International Rules-Based Order. Donald Trump’s black felt pen has confirmed the death sentences of all three. Likewise the entrenched institutional power of the professional and managerial classes which emerged out of the social and cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 70s.

The challenge facing Christopher Luxon and Chris Hipkins is how to keep their small and vulnerable nation safe and stable in a world whose economic and political climate the forty-seventh American president is changing so profoundly. Faster and better than anybody else, Trump has grasped the possibilities of a world which is more in tune with the nationalist and imperialist marching songs of the Nineteenth Century, than the Kumbaya globalist singalongs of President George H. W. Bush’s and President Bill Clinton’s “New World Order”.

A President who openly canvasses the annexation of Greenland, Canada, Panama and the Gaza Strip, to the applause of an admirer of Lenin who once, rather incautiously, confessed: “Darkness is good. Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power”; should alert us to the fact that, like Dorothy and Toto in The Wizard of Oz, we’re not in Kansas anymore.


This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 10 February 2025.

The First Twenty-Four Days: Ageing Boomers, Laurie & Les, Talk Politics.

“This might surprise you, Laurie, but I reckon Trump’s putting on a bloody impressive performance.”

“GOODNESS ME, HANNAH, just look at all those Valentine’s Day cards!”

“Occupational hazard, Laurie, the more beer I serve, the more my customers declare their undying love!”

“Crikey! I had no idea business was so good.” Laurie squinted theatrically at the line of cards. “Is one of those from Les?”

“No, no. Les is much too sensible.”

“Whew!” Laurie glanced towards the table by the window at the back of the bar. Les raised an empty ale glass by way of welcoming his favourite drinking companion.

“I’ll bring them over”, Hannah smiled.

“Happy New Year!” Les stretched out his hand and Laurie grasped it firmly.

“And what a year it’s turning out to be! Has there ever been a blizzard of Presidential activity like Trump’s?”

“Actually, Laurie, there has, but not for more than ninety years. The first hundred days of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency were even more dramatic than Trump’s. Just as well, really, because the USA was in much worse shape in 1933 than it is now.”

“Presumably, that’s where the idea of ‘the first hundred days’ comes from?”

“That’s right. Roosevelt told Americans that the only thing they had to fear was ‘fear itself’, so he was determined to show them he wasn’t afraid of tackling the economic crisis paralysing the US economy.”

“Well, okay, that was Roosevelt’s first hundred days. What about Trump’s first twenty-four days?”

“This might surprise you, Laurie, but I reckon he’s putting on a bloody impressive performance.”

“Really? I’m gobsmacked. I assumed you’d be breathing fire and brimstone about a Far-Right coup, and branding Trump a tyrant.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, that’s what the so-called ‘Left’ are calling him. But, you won’t hear that from me. Because, in a free and fair election, Trump won fair and square. What’s more, on Election Night, back in November, he pledged to his followers: ‘Promises made. Promises kept.’ – and, so far, he’s keeping his word by turning the USA upside down and pulling it inside out. And, I’ll tell you what, Laurie, it’s not just the scale of Trump’s disruption that’s impressed me; it’s that massive change is happening at all.”

“I know, I know! And when was the last time that happened? – apart from 90 years ago!”

“Exactly! Roosevelt – an American aristocrat – understood that if the American republic was to remain the same, then everything would have to change. Trump’s vision is much more radical. He understands that if the American dream is to be resurrected …”

“If America is to be made great again …”

“That’s it. If America is to be made great again, then everything that is preventing it from being great has to be destroyed. That’s why he’s recruited Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, to ‘move fast and break things’ …”

“That was Mark Zuckerburg …”

“Was it? Sorry. But you get what I mean.”

“I sure do! And so do the elites. They all went to the same Ivy League colleges, subscribe to the same liberal ideas, and, until the Second Coming of Trump, were all supremely indifferent to the political colouration of the individual sitting in the White House. Because while presidents came and went, the permanent state – which they controlled – rolled on forever.”

“But, not anymore, eh Laurie? Not anymore. Just look at the US Agency for International Development, USAID. For decades, we lefties denounced it as the human face of American imperialism – the Kumbaya Division of the National Security State. If the CIA was Uncle Sam’s nasty cop, USAID was its nice one.”

“Like the missionaries softening up the natives before the colonists arrived with their muskets.”

“Hey, that’s pretty good, Laurie. We’ll make a leftie of you yet!”

“That’s the whole point, Les. Trump’s unleashing a revolution, tearing up the rules, repairing what’s been broken. It makes me laugh when I hear people say: ‘He can’t do that, it’s a breach of international law!’ Well, so was the invasion of Iraq – and Ukraine. The only question all the bleating defenders of the ‘rules-based international order’ should be asking themselves is: ‘Who’s going to stop Trump’s America? The Danes? The Canadians? The Panamanians? Hamas?’”

“So, Laurie, is your name down for one of the ‘beautiful’ new seaside apartments that the Trump International Reconstruction Corporation, with massive assistance from the Saudis, will soon be erecting in Gaza?”


This short story was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star on Friday 14 February 2025.

Monday, 3 February 2025

Balancing Act.

Even Stevens: Over the 33 years between 1990 and 2023 (and allowing for the aberrant 2020 result) the average level of support enjoyed by the Left and Right blocs, at roughly 44.5 percent each, turns out to be, as near as dammit, identical.

WORLDWIDE, THE PARTIES of the Left are presented as experiencing significant electoral decline. Certainly, in the 70 elections that took place across the planet in 2024 there wasn’t all that much for left-wingers to celebrate. But, does a review of New Zealand’s recent political history reveal a similarly receding electoral tide? How much evidence is there that, over the past 30 years, this country has become a part of what some commentators are calling “The Global Drift to the Right”?

The latest analysis detailing a worldwide decline in voter support for the Left was published in the right-wing British newspaper The Telegraph on 16 January 2025. Looking back over the past 30 years, journalists Meike Eijsberg and James Crisp felt confident enough to proclaim that “The Left is more unpopular than any time since the Cold War”.

Even so, the Left’s global average, based on the results of the most recent electoral contests in 73 countries, isn’t exactly dire. Indeed, at 45.4 percent, the level of public support would strike most leftists as comfortable. Sure, the Right, especially in North America and Europe, is currently riding high, but at 51 percent globally, the forces of conservatism are only a few percentage points away from defeat.

What’s more, in Africa and Latin America the forces of the Left remain in the ascendancy. Not to the same extent as a decade, or two, ago, but still – the success of Argentina’s Javier Milei notwithstanding – well ahead of the Right.

The Telegraph being The Telegraph, New Zealand’s ideological divisions have, for the most part been lumped-in with those of our Australian neighbours. The downfall of Jacinda Ardern is, however, noted with, one assumes, a fair measure of schadenfreude. Ardern was not liked by The Telegraph, which never passed-up an opportunity to devalue and downplay the extraordinary achievements of New Zealand’s young prime minister during the Covid-19 global pandemic’s first, terrifying, months.

Eijsberg’s and Crisp’s anticipation of a conservative victory in Australia similarly betrays their newspaper’s unabashed partisanship. Anthony Albanese may be no one’s idea of a charismatic political leader, but, to a great many Australians the alternative, Liberal Party Leader Peter Dutton, comes across as a hard-core – bordering on fanatical – right-winger. As things now stand across the Tasman, the safest bet would appear to be on a 2025 election that produces no clear winner – and lots of losers.

What, then, does the electoral record tell us about the fortunes of the New Zealand Right and Left over the past thirty years? Does the Left register a steadily descending trend-line? Are the parties of the Right entrenching themselves ever-more-firmly in the role of New Zealand’s “natural” leaders? Or are we presented with an altogether more nuanced history?

Between the election of 1990 and that of 1999, the most arresting feature of the Left-Right divide is the acute vulnerability of the Right’s overall position. National’s success in both 1990 and 1993 was entirely attributable to the unfairness of the First-Past-the-Post (FPP) electoral system.

Jim Bolger’s defeat of the Fourth Labour Government was presented – at the time, and still is today – as a landslide win. In terms of the popular vote, however, it was an extraordinarily close contest. Yes, National received 47.82 percent of the votes cast, but, between them, Labour, the Greens and Jim Anderton’s NewLabour Party attracted the support of 47.15 percent of the voting public.

The narrowness of National’s win never seemed to be fully appreciated by Bolger and his hardline Cabinet. The electorate’s embittered judgement on Bill Birch’s Employment Contracts Act, Ruth Richardson’s “Mother of All Budgets” and Jenny Shipley’s harsh “welfare” policies, was, however, rendered three years later, when National’s share of the popular vote plummeted from 47.82 percent to 35.05 percent. The Left’s share of the vote (Labour + Alliance) was 52.89 percent. That figure rises even higher, to 61.29 percent, when NZ First’s 8.40 percent is tacked on!

That National, with barely a third of the votes cast, was, nevertheless, able to form a government, vindicated in dramatic fashion the arguments of those who had promoted, successfully, a change to a proportional electoral system.

The power conferred upon Winston Peters and his moderate populists in NZ First, and, to a lesser degree, upon Peter Dunne’s succession of shape-shifting electoral vehicles, renders an accurate assessment of the Left-Right balance problematic.

In the 1996 election, the first held under the rules of Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) representation, for example, the anti-government parties collectively accounted for 51.64 percent of the Party Vote. The mutual mistrust of Peters and Anderton, however, resulted in a National-NZ First coalition government. The messy dissolution of the coalition, just 18 months later, made clear the unwisdom of “protest” parties pledged to unseating the government perversely restoring its leading players to power.

Over the course of the 18 years separating the general elections of 1999 and 2017, electoral success and ideological dominance (albeit in a muted sense) was shared evenly between the parties of the Left and the Right.

In the nine years that the Left Bloc was dominated by Helen Clark’s Labour Party, supported by Jim Anderton’s Alliance (later the Progressive Party) and The Greens, its collective share of the Party Vote averaged almost exactly 50 percent. The Right Bloc, by contrast, averaged just 39 percent between 1999 and 2005.

The Right Bloc’s nine years of dominance – from 2008 until 2017 – were the mirror-image of the Left’s. Its component parties – National, Act and the Māori Party – also racked-up an average of 50 percent of the Party Vote – while the Left Bloc’s average election tally similarly dropped to 39 percent.

With the benefit of hindsight, it seems altogether more appropriate to attribute this mirror-imaging to the quality of the contending block’s respective leaderships, than to grand ideological lurches. In Helen Clark and John Key, Labour and National were blessed with strong leaders who attuned themselves with remarkable accuracy to the mood of the electorate.

Throughout these 18 years, voter feeling was driven much more by exogenous events than ideological allegiances. The impact of 9/11 and the War on Terror; the Global Financial Crisis; the Christchurch Earthquake; these, and the way the government of the day responded to them, were what moved the electoral dial.

If 2024 feels more fraught and ideologically polarised than usual, that is, almost certainly, on account of the disruptive boost the Internet and social media have given to the generation and articulation of popular grievances; the impact of globalisation on core economic and social institutions, and the enormous global disjuncture occasioned by Covid and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Overlay all that with the continuing slow burn of global warming, and is it really any wonder that everybody is looking to blame “the other lot”?

And yet, allowing for the obvious exception of the 2020 “Covid” election, which saw the Left Bloc’s share of the Party Vote soar to an unprecedented 57.87 percent, with Labour winning 50.01 percent of that on its own, the ideological balance of the last 30 years presents us with a curiously reassuring picture.

Over the 33 years between 1990 and 2023 (and allowing for the aberrant 2020 result) the average level of support enjoyed by the Left and Right blocs, at roughly 44.5 percent each, turns out to be, as near as dammit, identical.

Some might interpret this “tie” as evidence of a society split right down the middle and at daggers drawn. But, for most New Zealanders, it doesn’t feel that way at all. For most of us, it simply suggests that, although we may have to wait a little while for democracy to deliver the right (or left!) result, our side’s turn will come.


This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 3 February 2025.

Friday, 31 January 2025

DeepSeek, And Ye Shall Find.

 The East Is Red: Journalists and commentators are referring to the sudden and disruptive arrival of DeepSeek as a second “Sputnik moment”. (Sputnik being the name given by the godless communists of the Soviet Union to the world’s first artificial satellite which, to the consternation and dismay of the Americans, they successfully launched into space in October 1957.)

“DEEPSEEK” is a pretty good name for an artificially intelligent Chinese chatbot. Not as good as Douglas Adams’ “Deep Thought”, which, as all readers of A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy know, was the name of the super-computer tasked with answering the Ultimate Question – i.e. the meaning of “Life, the Universe, and Everything” – and which came back, 7.5 million years later, with the less-than-helpful, “42”.

That said, the numbers associated with the arrival of DeepSeek are nothing if not compelling. One trillion, for example, is the number of US dollars knocked-off the collective value of the companies listed on the “tech-heavy” Nasdaq index. $US600 billion of that trillion is attributable to the plummeting value of America’s leading AI chip manufacturer, Nvidia – the greatest single one-day loss ever recorded by a US listed company.

To rub salt in the American tech-lords’ financial wounds, the Chinese creators of DeepSeek claim to have spent just $US6 million on perfecting their chatbot, which they are generously offering to the world free, gratis, and for nothing.

No wonder journalists and commentators are referring to all this as a second “Sputnik moment”. (Sputnik being the name given by the godless communists of the Soviet Union to the world’s first artificial satellite which, to the consternation and dismay of the Americans, they successfully launched into space in October 1957.)

The success of DeepSeek, like the success of Sputnik, throws into serious doubt a whole host of American assumptions. Not the least of these being the typically brash and overconfident American assumption that the United States enjoys an unassailable lead in AI and is, therefore, destined to be the prime beneficiary of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” this crucial innovation will, inevitably, usher-in.

The future is, thus, an American “lock”. Too far ahead of its rivals to be overtaken technologically, the economic and military hegemony of the USA will remain incontestable – a “golden future” indeed!

“Meh!”, says China, “We shall see.”

Viewed from the other side of the Pacific Ocean, the future of the USA does not seem so golden. Yes, America’s big, powerful, and well-protected – but so was Goliath.

Beijing observes a blustering bully in the White House, throwing his weight around, and expecting the rest of the world to be intimidated. But the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, is not afraid of Donald Trump’s tariffs, seeing them as proof, not of America’s economic strength, but of its weakness.

Beggar-thy-neighbour economics will not keep America at the top of the global heap. A superpower that raises its drawbridge and hides behind its walls is no longer a superpower.

It is now more than two decades since the USA, in full control of the UN Security Council, thanks to the support of both the Russian Federation and the Peoples Republic of China, was able to unleash shock and awe upon any nation that dared to challenge, or simply got in the way of the “New World Order” Washington was fashioning out of its total Cold War victory.

But, the hyper-globalised world that American neoliberalism produced succeeded only in enriching China and hollowing-out the United States as a coherent social and political entity. Trump, far from being the apotheosis of American success is the tawdry emblem of American failure.

The only redeeming feature of the 47th president’s wrecking-ball administration is its determination to implement Trump’s populist agenda. In doing so, however, it will not make America great: “Promises made, promises kept” will only make America bankrupt.

Trump’s long and lurid career has left him supremely indifferent to the perils of debt. But, there is a big difference between a media-savvy paper billionaire shrugging off his financial failures and striking out in a new direction; and the world’s largest economy, fast approaching the limits of its ability to print its way out of irredeemable insolvency.

The timing of DeepSeek, like most Chinese moves, shows every sign of being carefully thought through. It speaks of a regime that is happy to demonstrate, rather than brag about, its technological prowess. Such seemingly effortless (and cost-effective!) competence is likely to play better than America’s punitive tariffs and sanctions, especially on those continents where Chinese capital and expertise are, increasingly, on display.

Perhaps the Americans should ask DeepSeek to predict the future of their once “indispensable” nation. The answer is, almost certainly, not 42 – or 47!


This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 31 January 2025.