Merry Christmas To All Bowalley Road Readers.

 

Ríu Ríu Chíu

Ríu Ríu Chíu is a Spanish Christmas song from the 16th Century. The traditional carol would likely have passed unnoticed by the English-speaking world had the made-for-television American band The Monkees not performed the song as part of their special Christmas show back in 1967. The show's producer, Chip Douglas, had been a member of the Modern Folk Quartet, which recorded the song three years earlier for their 1964 Changes album. According to Wikipedia, "ríu ríu chíu" represents the call of a kingfisher, a metaphor for God's protection the Virgin Mary from the devil. Indubitably, the 1967 performance of the pop quartet of Peter Tork, Mike Nesmith, Davy Jones, and Mickey Dolenz is outstanding. Made-for television The Monkees may have been, but, boy, could these guys sing! May it provide Bowalley Road's readers with a moment of magic in what I trust will be a blessed and joyous day for all of us.

Chris Trotter.

(Acknowledging 'The Barron's' inspiration.)

Video courtesy of YouTube.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road. blogsite of Wednesday, 25 December 2024.

Angelic Hosts.

JOSEPH TWISTED THE DISHCLOTH gently in the wine-glass, removed it carefully, and held the glass up to the light. Though the bar was dimly lit, there was illumination enough to set the glass a-sparkle. Satisfied, Joesph replaced it carefully on the shelf.

“Whose that fellow at the end of the bar?”

The question came from the morose customer hunched over the bar-top. He’d been sitting there for at least an hour, steadily working his way through what had been a full bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label. That said, Joseph did not believe the customer was intoxicated. He was in a black mood when he entered, and he was still in a black mood. If asked, however, Joseph could not honestly attribute his depression to the alcohol.

“I’ve heard him referred to as ‘Sonny’,” Joseph replied, “but I don’t think that’s his real name.”

“He would have to be the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen”, the customer responded, pushing his empty glass towards Joseph with a meaningful nod. “And while you’re pouring another shot, why don’t you ask ‘Sonny’ if he’d like a refill?”

Joseph smiled. Only moments before he had been contemplating the extraordinary beauty of the customer in front of him. His swept-back locks shimmered golden, and his sapphire eyes were the eyes of an angel. But, he was right about the character at the end of the bar. Sonny made the customer in front of him seem drab by comparison.

“Thank you, Gabriel.” Sonny settled himself onto the nearest bar-stool, and smiled brilliantly at his benefactor.

“You know my name. Have we met?”

“It was a long time ago, Gabriel. But, if I recall correctly, you were working as the chief communications officer for Sovereign Lord. Tell me, are you still with them?”

“Yep,” Gabriel replied, “I’m still there. Although, sometimes I wonder why.”

“How so?”

“I’ll tell you ‘how so’, Sonny. My career was made by two major exercises in communicating the intentions of Sovereign Lord. It began with two baby boys, both born in unusual circumstances. But, the men they grew into Sonny! You never saw such men. I thought I was pretty good at talking to people – telling stories – but these guys, Sonny, they were phenomenal. The older one was inspirational, but the younger one, well, he could perform miracles.”

“Sovereign Lord must have been well pleased.”

“You would have thought so, wouldn’t you? But, when everything turned sour, Sovereign Lord never lifted a finger to save them. The older one had his head chopped-off. The younger one was tortured to death. To tell you the truth, Sonny, I’ve never got over it. Why bring such men into the world – and Sovereign Lord played a key role in their births – only to see them both executed? I still don’t understand why it was allowed to happen.”

“You should come and work for me, Gabriel. My outfit takes very good care of its own.”

“And your outfit is?”

“It has many names, Gabriel. In some places we’re known as the Illumination Corporation. In others Accusations International. Colloquially, people call us ‘King of the World’ – but we’ve yet to decide whether that’s a compliment or an insult.”

“And what is your name?” Joseph asked quietly. “Because it’s not Sonny, is it?”

“My names are legion, barman, with new ones being invented all the time.”

“True enough”, Joseph chuckled. “But I fancy I know some of the old ones. ‘Son of the Morning’ was one – hence ‘Sonny’, I’m guessing. ‘The Accuser’ was another. ‘Satan’ in Hebrew.”

“I prefer the title ‘Lucifer’ – the light bringer – myself. But, congratulations, young man, there’s not many who can guess my name.”

Not so young, ‘Sonny’. I’m older than Gabriel, here, and though you may not believe it, I’m even older than you. I’m here this evening to keep an eye on Gabriel until his supervisor, Michael, arrives to take him home.”

“To Sovereign Lord. Who takes such good care of his prophets.”

“Indeed.”

“And which of them are you? Elijah? Jeremiah? Isaiah? Which of those pious fools are you? Because I don’t recall any prophets going by the name of Joseph.

“But you know who I am, Sonny. We met nearly 2,000 years ago, in the Galilean hills.”

“I met no Josephs.”

“Oh, Sonny! Joseph was my mother’s husband’s name.”

This short story was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 20 December 2024.

2024: A Year of Dishonouring the Past and Ignoring the Future.

Three Wise Men? Successful political leadership embodies a keen awareness of past, present, and future, along with the wisdom to adjudicate what is owed, and should be paid, to each. Sadly, such leadership has not been much in evidence during 2024. Indeed, New Zealanders have seen just how badly things can go wrong when both respect for the past, and wise adjudication in the present, are lacking. It does not make for a safe future.

KIA WHAKATŌMURI TE HAERE WHAKAMUA: “I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on my past”. To anyone with a love of history, that whakataukī really hits the spot. It is both dangerous (as well as practically impossible) to go forward without consideration for what we leave behind. Which is not to say that watching where you’re going is a bad idea. Clearly, observation and anticipation are vital, not only when it comes to navigating the present safely, but also to keeping the future safe.

Successful political leadership embodies a keen awareness of past, present, and future, along with the wisdom to adjudicate what is owed, and should be paid, to each. Sadly, such leadership has not been much in evidence during 2024. Indeed, New Zealanders have seen just how badly things can go wrong when both respect for the past, and wise adjudication in the present, are lacking. It does not make for a safe future.

Had the National-Act-NZ First coalition government had more respect for the past, it would not now have to contend with so many besetting difficulties.

Certainly, it is difficult to comprehend how any group of politicians who hadn’t spent the 36 months between January 2020 and December 2022 living under a rock could have been so unaware of the grim fiscal legacy bequeathed to all New Zealanders by the overwhelming historical experiences of those three years – the worst years of the Covid-19 global pandemic. But, astonishingly, Christopher Luxon, Nicola Willis, and their colleagues have managed it.

Unmoved, seemingly, by the disastrous fiscal consequences of doing so when the monetary consequences of addressing the urgent needs of the pandemic were everywhere apparent, the National Party promised, and delivered, tax cuts. At the very moment when responsible economic management demanded measures to increase state revenues; measures that would not only have eased the nation’s debt burden, but also dampened demand in an economy afflicted with historically high inflation; National opted to strip the state of billions of tax dollars that might otherwise have been used to address critical social needs.

Reducing the fiscal responsibilities of the National Party’s friends and allies brought many other malign consequences. Not the least of which was the need to impose harsh, across-the-board cuts in public spending. The impact of these cuts would not be felt, or, at least, not as acutely, by National’s friends and allies, but by the friends and allies of National’s electoral opponents. That these included the poorest and most vulnerable New Zealanders did not appear to give Christopher Luxon and his colleagues pause.

A political party which respected, and allowed itself to be guided by, the past would have recalled the impact of previous rounds of drastic cost-cutting by conservative governments. It would also have been aware of the store of trouble that such historical austerity programmes had built up for future generations of political leaders.

But Christopher Luxon’s and Nicola Willis’s National Party appears not think in such terms. It seems not to recognise the overwhelming infrastructure challenges now facing New Zealand as the direct consequence of political leaders who were too afraid to impose the taxes necessary to keep a humane society functioning, and too fixated on the political needs of the present to anticipate the future disasters that such cowardice, if left unaddressed, was bound to produce.

How else to explain the Coalition Government’s fast-track legislation as anything other than the “Oh f**k!” response of Chris Bishop and Simeon Brown, the Ministers, respectively, of Infrastructure and Transport, to the discovery that their country is falling apart? (A condition, incidentally, about which ordinary Kiwis, after four decades of political indifference and neglect, were fully aware!)

Once again, National’s indefatigable “presentism” blinded it to the historical precedents for this sort of “Get-out-of-the-way!” solution to the public resistance engendered by governments attempting to do everything, everywhere, all-at-once. Is there no one left in the National Party who remembers Rob Muldoon?

Not that National stands alone in this regard. Act leader David Seymour is not the least bit afraid of austerity, indeed, he welcomes it. Slashing spending is, for Act, much more than a temporary economic necessity, it’s an ideological mission. How else is the state to be got down to the size where, in the vicious phrase of the American free-market enthusiast Grover Norquist: “we can drown it in the bathtub”?

Drowning the state is not, however, the goal of NZ First. A disciple of the nineteenth century German nationalist economist Friedrich List, the NZ First leader, Winston Peters, looks upon New Zealand’s great nation-builders, Sir Julius Vogel and, yes, Sir Robert Muldoon, as politicians to be celebrated, not shuddered-at. Peters’ deputy, Shane Jones, gleefully piles pounds of rhetorical fat on his leader’s bare theoretical bones, being only too pleased to tell Greens, environmentalists, and every other unmanly defender of Freddy the Frog to “Get out of the way!” – albeit in te reo.

That Peters has just had himself appointed Minister of Railways is no accident. It is difficult to imagine a more disreputable example of National’s reckless presentism, nor of its sublime indifference to the nation’s future, than the cancellation of the iRex Project.

That Peters and his party, in a last-ditch effort to protect New Zealand’s state-owned rail network from the truckers who would happily wave it good-bye, were willing to interpose themselves between the privatisers of National and Act is vintage NZ First. It reflects Peters’ small-c conservative conviction that those who inhabit the present are not only morally obligated to meet the needs of those who are, but also to protect the achievements of those who were. How else to deliver a world worth living in to those who will be?

But, if NZ First retains a firm grasp of the past’s importance, it is every bit as guilty as its coalition partners of failing to appreciate the scale and urgency of Climate Change. Likewise, the radical transformation of public policy that is needed to address the crisis effectively. Not to deal seriously with the ever-more-apparent consequences of global warming requires a political mindset unwaveringly resistant to looking either forward or back. A mindset which, at least historically, has been associated with political parties in thrall to ideologies, private interests, or both.

The Coalition’s failure to respond adequately to the Climate Crisis pales, however, when set alongside its treatment of tangata whenua. In no other aspect of government policy has its resistance to understanding the power and importance of the past been more evident.

As a radical, right-wing libertarian, David Seymour’s impatience with the restraints placed upon the sovereign individual by considerations of lineage and tradition is understandable – if not forgivable. But, what is NZ First’s excuse? Both Peters and Jones need no lessons in the central role of te Tiriti in shaping post-European contact New Zealand. Certainly, they would have been in no doubt as to the hurt and fury that would be sparked, not only by Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill, but also by their own equally aggressive policy of removing all references to the principles of the Treaty from New Zealand legislation. The commitments insisted upon by the leaders of Act and NZ First, post-election, amounted to playing with fire – and they knew it.

And National? The party of Rob Muldoon, Jim Bolger, Dough Graham, John Key and Chris Finlayson. Why didn’t it just say “No.”? Was there really no one in its ranks capable of appealing over the heads of the Act and NZ First negotiators to that huge part of the New Zealand electorate that is proud of its relationship with Māori. The part that believes in the Treaty – or, at least, in the Treaty they learned about in school.

Was there truly no one with the courage and understanding to call Seymour’s and Peters’ bluff? To dare them to force the country to a new election on this issue, and this issue alone? Someone who understood what the American novelist, William Faulkner, meant when he said: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past”. Someone prepared to turn his back on the nay-sayers and march towards the future facing, and drawing strength from, all those who had gone before him.

Someone resembling a prime minister.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website of Monday 16 December 2024.

Running Us Off The Rails.

Crossing Cancelled: The decision to pull the plug on the IRex project was one of the earliest – and stupidest – decisions New Zealand’s new conservative coalition government would make in the first year of its parliamentary term. And that stupidity was only compounded as the year wore on.

LET’S BEGIN WITH THE FERRIES. The decision to pull the plug on the IRex project was one of the earliest – and stupidest – decisions New Zealand’s new conservative coalition government would make in the first year of its parliamentary term. And that stupidity was only compounded as the year wore on.

What began as a pour encourager les autres moment – driven by National’s determination to show the country it was serious about cutting public spending – has turned into an administrative and fiscal calamity. The Finance Minister has exposed herself as an economic cretin. The Coalition partners have proved themselves incapable of agreeing on anything even vaguely resembling a coherent response to the consequences of their own folly. While the long-suffering taxpayer, whose relief from a succession of infrastructure budget blow-outs served as the pretext for Willis’s ill-fated intervention, is beginning to understand that the ultimate cost of canning the iRex Project is likely to exceed, by some margin, the cost of allowing it to proceed.

Largely unexplored (or should that be downplayed?) by those covering the ferries debacle is the not inconsiderable problem of New Zealand’s commercial reputation. This country signed a half-billion-dollar contract with Hyundai Mipo Dockyard (HMD) the South Korean shipbuilders, for two state-of-the-art rail-enabled ferries. This was a bargain-basement price, for which KiwiRail’s negotiators should have been congratulated, not condemned.

In her fatuous accusation that KiwiRail had irresponsibly opted for a Ferrari instead of a Toyota, Willis got it precisely back-to-front. What New Zealand had actually secured were a couple of Ferrari-standard ferries – at a Toyota price.

In unilaterally tearing-up KiwiRail’s money-saving contract, Finance Minister Willis has signalled to the world that New Zealand’s signature on an agreement means nothing. No one living in the world’s grown-up countries will accept the excuse that this was not a government deal. KiwiRail is a state-owned enterprise: the clue to who stands behind it is in the name. That the government of this country can no longer be trusted to keep its word should be a cause for much greater public concern than has been demonstrated to date.

New Zealand will pay a high price for pulling out of this deal – just as it did 64 years ago when the Second National Government tore up the contract its Labour predecessor had signed with British and American interests to establish a large cotton mill outside Nelson. The current estimate for HMD’s break-fee is around half-a-billion dollars, meaning that, by the time this sorry saga ends, New Zealand will likely be left dangling on the hook for something close to a billion dollars – with nothing whatsoever to show for it. And it still has to replace KiwiRail’s aging fleet of ferries and upgrade the portside infrastructure required to support their replacements.

It is worth pausing here to contemplate the fact that pollsters repeatedly report New Zealanders reposing much more faith in National’s ability to manage the economy than they do in Labour’s. But when was the last time Labour tore up a commercial contract with New Zealand’s name on it? When was the last time Labour arrogated to itself the extraordinary powers of the Coalition Government’s “fast-track” legislation?

These are not the actions of serious people. Indeed, the last time economic decisions were fast-tracked in the manner favoured by Associate Minister of Finance Chris Bishop, was back in 1982, and the fast-tracker involved was Robert Muldoon.

This was the very same Robert Muldoon who, as one of a group of freshmen back-benchers calling themselves the “Young Turks”, was principally responsible for inducing Keith Holyoake’s government to tear-up the contract for the aforementioned Nelson cotton mill back in 1961. Though it’s hard to believe, Muldoon’s need for fast-track legislation in 1982 was born out of the exigencies of his government’s “Think Big” projects – an industrial development strategy stolen directly from the second Labour Government’s import substitution programme of 1957-60. A programme which had included – you guessed it! – a cotton mill situated outside Nelson.

When it comes to economic management, National should not be taken seriously.

Serious economic managers do not expose themselves to the accusation that in making critical economic decisions – like safeguarding and future-proofing New Zealand’s inter-island maritime transport services – they allowed themselves to be swayed by the arguments of the road transport lobby.

The trucking companies are in direct competition with KiwiRail and will welcome the demise of a rail-enabled inter-island ferry service. For the road transport lobby, the canning of the iRex Project thus represents a significant commercial and political victory. Unfortunately, it comes with potentially devastating consequences for New Zealand’s rail transportation system in general, and KiwiRail in particular.

Not that the National Party needs very much persuading to place the interests of road users above rail users. Arising out of an unedifying blend of ideological and psychological impulses, National’s hatred of rail has driven its transport policies for the best part of a century.

By its very nature, rail transport confers benefits that are primarily public, rather than private. Trains are vastly more efficient at moving large quantities of goods than trucks. That this fact is so often obscured by the road transport lobby is because the latter are so very good at hiding what economists call “externalities”.

To be even remotely as efficient as trains, trucks need to be huge. This forces them to use vast quantities of fossil fuel and causes them to chew up the nation’s road surfaces. Their size and weight also makes them extremely challenging for other road users. The trucking companies argue that the cost of these adverse externalities are met by road user charges. While partly accurate, the larger truth remains that road user charges would not be necessary if the nation’s principal freight burden was carried by its much cheaper, safer, and more climate-friendly rail network.

To offer themselves as the more efficient freight option, road transport operators need the rail network to present a public face that is anything but. From the moment the road transport industry began to be deregulated in the 1970s, its promoters have made it their business to persuade the National Party to starve the railway network of investment, and connive in its decay to the point where people dismiss it as a “nineteenth century technology” – irrelevant to the twenty-first.

They were pushing on an open door. From an ideological perspective, the automobile is the quintessential capitalist artifact. It further freed the individual from the limitations of the horse, and continues to liberate him from the enforced collectivism of public transportation. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine capitalism developing in the way it has without the automobile. As the world attempts to mitigate and adapt to global warming, the central role played by the industries that keep our cars on the roads acquires an ever-sharper focus. Curbing the automobile means curbing capitalism.

Cue New Zealand’s Transport Minister, Simeon Brown. His love affair with cars, cars, cars, and the roads, roads, roads they run on, borders on the monomaniacal. Like a little boy varoom, varoom, varooming on the carpet with his toy cars and trucks, Brown demonstrates with particular force the automobile’s symbiotic relationship with the human male’s hunger for power and control.

No real man lets another human-being drive him anywhere, or allows himself to be restrained by petty rules and ridiculous speed-limits. That socialists and their Green doppelgangers prefer trains, trams, busses, ferries and, God help us, bicycles, comes as no surprise to Simeon. Defending capitalism, and allowing citizens to drive really-really-fast, are pretty much the same thing to him.

The ferries debacle, like so many others, arises out of the forty-year worldwide failure of governments to spend the large sums of money needed to keep the capitalist economy they prize so highly functioning smoothly. This failure is driven by the sheer cost of modern infrastructure and the all-too-evident inability of private companies to make the supply of collective goods return a reliable profit. This is a particularly irksome failing, not least because it turns infrastructure maintenance and supply into a core public responsibility, to be paid for out of the public purse and, given the cost of modern infrastructure, higher taxes.

Which brings us back to where this discussion began. A year ago, Nicola Willis, fresh from the hustings, was determined to deliver her party’s promised tax cuts. But, the cost of the infrastructure needed to ensure an effective and efficient inter-island passenger and freight service for the next 50 years made those tax-cuts an economic and fiscal non-starter. Unlike her conservative predecessors, however, Willis refused to acknowledge the reality that not only is taxation the price that we pay for civilisation, but also for an economy that works.

What did Willis do? Unwilling to abandon her fiscally reckless promises, Nicola chose instead to do what the Nats have always done – run the country off the rails

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project/From The Left of Friday, 13 December 2024.

By Any Other Name.

The Natural Choice: As a starter for ten percent of the Party Vote, “saving the planet” is a very respectable objective. Young voters, in particular, raised on the dire (if unheeded) warnings of climate scientists, and the irrefutable evidence of devastating weather events linked to global warming, vote Green. After all, what sort of person votes against a liveable future?

THE GREENS remain a persistent political puzzle. In spite of espousing ideas and promoting policies that would keep any other party well below the five percent MMP threshold, recent polling places the party between 12 and 14 percent. If replicated in a real election, that level of support would earn the Greens 16-18 seats, making them an indispensable player in any putative government of the Left.

Clearly, the Green brand is doing almost all of the party’s heavy political lifting. What New Zealand’s own Green Party is actually committed to achieving matters much less than what Green parties, as generally understood by the world’s voters, are assumed to be committed to achieving – the salvation of the planet.

As a starter for ten percent of the Party Vote, “saving the planet” is a very respectable objective. Young voters, in particular, raised on the dire (if unheeded) warnings of climate scientists, and the irrefutable evidence of devastating weather events linked to global warming, vote Green. After all, what sort of person votes against a liveable future?

Young voters are not, however, the Greens only source of electoral support. They can also rely upon a substantial number of older voters to tick the Greens’ box on the ballot paper. Some of these will be unreconstructed hippies, the New Zealanders who cut their political teeth on the Values Party back in the early-1970s, and who then fell into the Greens’ welcoming arms with huge relief in 1990, following six years of the apostate Labour Party’s “Rogernomics”.

No one grasped the power of the Green brand more firmly than Jim Anderton, whose uneasy coalition of free-market-unfriendly parties, the Alliance, would not have been electorally viable without the Greens’ participation, and did not long survive their departure. As a centre-left politician determined to bring Labour back to its social-democratic senses, Anderton was determined to provide the many thousands of disillusioned former-Labour-voters with a progressive alternative that was guaranteed to win seats and, thereby, to wield at least some measure of determinative power over policy.

The Alliance’s demise, in 2002, left only the Greens to supply this critical support to the Labour Party. Precisely how many Green voters were voting for the global Green movement’s core principles: Ecological Wisdom, Social Justice, Grassroots Democracy and Nonviolence; and how many were voting for the Greens to keep Labour honest; is difficult to calculate. Suffice to say, when Labour does well the Green vote tends to fall, only recovering when voter support for its progressive competitor declines.

Since breaking free of the Alliance in 1999 the Greens have never failed to crest the 5 percent MMP threshold. (Although, they have come perilously close to falling below it on a number of occasions.) A reasonable working assumption would be that; in a good election for the Greens the ratio of strategic left-wing voters to ideologically-committed Greens will be roughly 50/50; and, in a bad election, that ratio will skew sharply in favour of the true-believers.

What the Greens’ true-believers believe, however, has changed.

Like the Values Party which preceded it, the Green Party that entered Parliament in 1999, under the co-leadership of Jeanette Fitzsimons and Rod Donald, took pride in affirming its allegiance to empirical science. In conformity with the political practice of Green parties around the world, the New Zealand party drew a sharp distinction between the bought-and-paid-for “science” of the big corporations, and the findings of hero scientists who presented their findings to the world fearlessly and without regard to how many corporate toes were trampled on in the process.

This science-driven Green Party reached its apogee under Rod Donald’s successor, Russel Norman – now the Executive-Director of Greenpeace Aotearoa. Working alongside freshwater ecologist Dr Mike Joy – the very epitome of a fearless hero-scientist – Norman and the Greens waged an unrelenting war against “dirty dairying” and the pollution of New Zealand’s waterways.

The success of this environmentally-focused Green Party was reflected in the 11.06 percent share of the Party Vote it received, along with 14 parliamentary seats, in the 2011 General Election. (In the 2023 General Election the Greens received 11.60 percent of the Party Vote and 15 seats.)

More than a decade has passed since the Greens campaigned as an unequivocally environmentalist party. Along with virtually every other element of the New Zealand Left, the Greens have embraced what their conservative opponents delight in castigating as the politics of “wokeness”.

In less pejorative terms, the Greens’ re-orientation involves the forefronting of issues that, while always present in the party’s policy mix, were hitherto given less emphasis. The Greens’ straightforward recognition and celebration of te Tiriti o Waitangi, for example, is now couched in the uncompromising vocabulary of decolonisation and indigenisation. Simple support for trans-gender New Zealanders has morphed into the aggressive assertion and enforcement of radical trans-gender ideology. Any external and/or internal criticism of these developments is condemned by the party as “hate speech”. Freedom of expression is no longer an unchallengeable aspect of “grassroots democracy”, or, as the New Zealand Greens have re-named it, “appropriate decision-making”.

A sense of this change of tone in the Greens is readily apparent in the most recent Green Party policy document. Ostensibly a presentation of the party’s latest thinking on how best to reduce greenhouse emissions, He Ara Anamata, contains a great deal more than the promptings of environmental science.

“For generations,” writes Green Co-leader Chloe Swarbrick in her introduction, “extractive systems have treated the natural world as a resource to exploit, without regard for its limits or the intricate relationships that sustain life.”

Similar sentiments were expressed 25 years ago. It is, however, doubtful whether Swarbrick’s subsidiary claims would have been advanced so forcefully:

“Colonisation has done the same to people and cultures. It has severed connections between tangata whenua and their whenua, prioritising profit over protection, and imposing systems that strip away self-determination and reciprocity. The impacts of this legacy persist, deepening inequalities and undermining resilience.”

Certainly, the expression of unabashed hostility towards capitalism is a more recent rhetorical trend:

“These inequalities have their deep roots in violent land and resource theft of iwi Māori. Capitalism – this current insatiable, unsustainable economic system – requires colonisation and the constant assimilation of new frontiers to exploit and extract from.”

That the above is not simply the ideology of the Greens’ firebrand leader is made clear in the body of the policy document. Te Tiriti’s role in reducing greenhouse emissions will, if the Greens have their way, involve: “An equitable transition, developed by Māori and the Crown [which] will actively prioritise te iwi Māori and the Māori economy.”

Would any other political party (apart from Te Pāti Māori) that so openly attacked capitalism, promised to advance the interests of indigenous citizens ahead of later arrivals, and announced its intention to advance the entire population, whether it likes it or not, towards “[a]n economy based on climate justice [with] policies that are underpinned by Te Tiriti, [and supported by] circular systems, renewable energies, and just transitions for workers” be given such a free pass?

Another expression which encompasses the notion of “circular systems” is “autarky”. That history records a strong association between authoritarian regimes and autarky is probably worth remembering. So, too, the enormous difference between “just transitions” arranged for workers, and the securing of economic and social justice by workers.

But that’s the great advantage of having a brand as immune to critical examination as that of the Greens. Try calling anti-capitalism, ethno-nationalism, statist imposition of societal priorities, and a barely disguised disdain for the principles of democracy, by any other name – and see if it smells as sweet.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 9 December 2024.

Christmas Gifts: Ageing Boomers, Laurie & Les, Talk Politics.

“Like you said, I’m an unreconstructed socialist. Everybody deserves to get something for Christmas.”

“ONE OF THOSE had better be for me!” Hannah grinned, fascinated, as Laurie made his way, gingerly, to the bar, his arms full of gift-wrapped packages.

“Of course!”, beamed Laurie. Depositing his armful on the bar-top and selecting with a flourish the smallest of the packages. “Just a little token of my appreciation for your patience and tolerance over the past twelve months. I know Les and I aren’t the easiest of your customers.”

Hannah blushed in spite of herself, unwrapping Laurie’s gift with exaggerated care.

“I’ve spent the better part of 40 years living with Chanel No. 5, Hannah, so please tell me I’ve chosen correctly.”

“Oh, Laurie, of course you have! I don’t know what to say except, thank you. This is just so sweet.”

“Merry Christmas, Hannah.” Now it was Laurie’s turn to blush. “I’ll join that old reprobate over in the corner now, if you would be so kind as to pour us each pint of your best ale.”

“Of course. On the House. Go on – I’ll bring them over.”

Les frowned ferociously as his friend laid his Christmas pile before him.

“Bloody-hell, Laurie, why did you have to do that? Now I’ll have to get her something. Seriously, man, you’ve got more money than sense!”

“She’s a very good bar manager, Les. Don’t be such a tight-fisted old Scrooge.”

“Bah! Humbug! I can’t help it, Laurie. I hate Christmas.”

“A socialist like you? I thought you believed in handing out goodies to all and sundry, regardless of whether they deserved them or not.”

“Shush!”, hissed Les. “Here’s Hannah with our ale.”

“Here we are, gentlemen. Not a gift to match those of my two favourite Boomers. But it’ll have to do for now.”

“You old fraud!”, whispered Laurie, as Hannah returned to the bar. “Cracking on you hadn’t bought her a gift. I wonder about you sometimes, I really do!”

“No need. Like you said, I’m an unreconstructed socialist. Everybody deserves to get something for Christmas.”

“Even politicians?”

“Especially politicians!”

“So, what would you give the Prime Minister for Christmas?”

“Christopher Luxon? If I could, I’d give him what the German’s call fingerspitzengefühl.”

“Finger-what?”

“Fingerspitzengefühl. The literal translation is ‘fingertips feeling’. By which the Germans mean a politician with an instinctive ability to respond to any given situation appropriately, tactfully, and, hopefully, with lashings of style and flair.”

“Not qualities we generally associate with Christopher Luxon.”

“No.”

“And Chris Hipkins? What would you give him for Christmas?”

“A working memory might be a useful gift. In his speech to Labour’s annual conference on Sunday he paid the usual homage to the great Labour prime ministers of the past. He began with Mickey Savage, moved on to Peter Fraser, then to Norman Kirk. So far so good, you might say, even if he’d missed out poor old Walter Nash. His next pick, however, was Helen Clark. Come on, Laurie, what’s wrong with Chippie’s portrait gallery?”

“Ummm. What happened to David Lange?”

“Damn good question, Laurie! It would appear that the entire Fourth Labour Government has disappeared down the Memory Hole. And why not? Accepting that Lange changed New Zealand every bit as much as Savage, Fraser, and Kirk – and a great deal more than Clark – would mean that Chippie might have to come to terms with the fact that while he and his mates are happy to celebrate their democratic socialist predecessors, they’re completely unwilling to embrace their policies.”

“Like Basil Fawlty not mentioning the war?”

“Exactly! Neoliberalism has become the ideology that dare not speak its name.”

“Unlike ‘Decolonisation’.

“Indeed. But you know why that is, don’t you?”

“Wokeness on steroids?”

“No, no, no, Laurie! It’s because Chippie owes Willie Jackson and his Māori Caucus big time – and vice versa. Willie’s got Chippie’s back – ably assisted, it must be said, by Labour’s Pasifika MPs. Without the support of the Māori and Pasifika caucuses, Chippie would be dog-tucker. It’s quid pro quo, Laurie. Quid pro quo. Chippie stands four-square behind te Tiriti o Waitangi, decolonisation and indigenisation, and the Māori Caucus stands four-square behind Chippie. Throw in his deputy, Carmel Sepuloni, and his Finance Spokesperson, Barbara Edmond, and Chippie can appoint Keiran McAnulty Campaign Chairman in perfect safety.”

“Heh! Because when Labour loses in ’26, he’ll be blamed!”

Exactly! Kieran’s the gift that keeps on giving!”

This short story was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 5 December 2024.

Handling Democracy.

String-Pulling in the Dark: For the democratic process to be meaningful it must also be public. 

WITH TRUST AND CONFIDENCE in New Zealand’s politicians and journalists steadily declining, restoring those virtues poses a daunting challenge. Just how daunting is made clear by comparing the way politicians and journalists treated New Zealanders fifty years ago with the way they handle them today.

The use of the word “handle” is deliberate. The way people are treated cannot be separated, conceptually, from the idea of accountability. Treat people well, and approbation generally follows; treat them badly, and condemnation is to be expected. Likewise, the idea of “handling” people cannot escape its negative associations with manipulation and cynicism. Nobody likes being “handled”.

How, then, were New Zealanders treated by their politicians and journalists in 1974? Given that the weekend just passed featured the Annual Conference of the New Zealand Labour Party (what? really? you didn’t notice?) perhaps the best place to start is with the way these events were covered fifty years ago.

Though younger New Zealanders will struggle to credit this, the annual conferences of the major parties were deemed sufficiently important for the state-owned television network to not only make them lead item on the nightly news bulletins, but also to produce special conference programmes for broadcast later in the evening. Over three consecutive nights, interested citizens could watch between 15-20 minutes of conference coverage – roughly an hour in total – from which to gauge the temper and condition of the political parties aspiring to govern them.

The nation’s newspapers were no less seized of the importance of reporting the major parties’ annual conferences thoroughly. Detailed coverage of major policy debates, including lengthy quotes from MPs’ and conference delegates’ speeches, was expected. And, since the job of covering politics fell to a small clutch of senior, highly-experienced journalists, their analysis of events, on and off the conference floor, was eagerly anticipated and consumed by interested readers.

Even 40 years ago, it still made sense for Labour Leader David Lange to quip that as PM he was required to satisfy the “Three Dicks” – The Dominion’s Richard Long, TVNZ’s Richard Harman, and Radio New Zealand’s Richard Griffin.

It is sobering to recall the respect accorded to the democratic ideal by the politicians and journalists of that now distant era. The idea of keeping the news media away from all but the most carefully stage-managed, set-piece, events – like the Leader’s speech – would have struck the politicians of that era as outrageous.

It was a simple matter of quid-pro-quo. If political parties expected to govern the country, then they were morally obliged to invite the country to observe and judge their deliberations. If that entailed party conference delegates revealing sharp divisions over the wisdom of a particular policy, then, so-be-it. That’s what politics is about.

Such close coverage had another side-effect. It allowed the public to catch its first glimpse of up-and-coming political talent. A delegate capable of delivering a memorable line, or telling a genuinely funny political joke, was someone who would be talked about the next day by thousands of his or her fellow Kiwis. They instantly became somebody party bosses and journalists, alike, needed to keep an eye on.

On all sides, fifty years ago, there was respect. Respect for the people who cared enough to participate in mass political organisations. Respect for the journalists who bore witness to the cut-and-thrust of real political debates. Respect for the entire democratic process which, to be meaningful also has to be public.

The contrast with the coverage of Labour’s 2024 annual conference could hardly be more stark. A minute or two of coverage on the six o’clock news bulletin was all the citizens of New Zealand were deemed fit to bear. Inevitably, everything was about the party leader, Chris Hipkins. How could it not be? The media were not encouraged to cover anybody other than “Chippie” and his allies.

Predictably, the key debate of the Conference, over tax policy, was held behind closed doors. No chance, then, for the public to gain some understanding of the mood of the party’s rank-and-file members. No chance of hearing an arresting flourish of rhetoric, or the sort of wit that bears repeating to friends and colleagues the following day. No chance, indeed, of encountering anything that hasn’t been pre-approved by the comms team well ahead of time.

Not that the comms team got everything right. Chippie’s Friday-night welcome to delegates included the line: “[I]n the true tradition of the Labour movement, we come together one year on not to mourn, but to organise.”

Now, any student of labour history will recognise that reference. The last words of the militant American trade union organiser and balladeer, Joe Hill, convicted on a trumped-up murder charge and executed in 1915 by a Utah firing squad, were: “Don’t mourn – organise!”

The risk, of course, was that anybody who recognised Joe Hill’s last words might take strong exception to Chris Hipkins comparing Labour’s well-deserved thrashing in the 2023 General Election, with the US copper bosses’ judicial murder of the Industrial Workers of the World’s (also known as the “Wobblies”) most beloved activist. Not that the risk was very high. Say “Wobbly” to the average Labour staffer of 2024 and they’ll assume you’re referring to jelly – or the Labour caucus.

Oh, for the days when there were political editors who understood what they were hearing, and recognised what they were looking at.

Willie Jackson’s co-starring role at this year’s Labour conference, for example, was decidedly odd. With a third of Labour’s voters supporting David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill, bringing out the legislation’s most truculent opponent should probably have struck at least some in the Press Gallery as an uncharacteristically bold move on the part of Labour’s apparatchiks.

Then again, Hipkins’ political survival resting squarely on the shoulders of Jackson and his Māori Caucus may be old news to the Press Gallery. Such a shame they have yet to share this crucial piece of political intelligence with the rest of us. It does, however, explain why Labour’s leadership has chosen te Tiriti as the hill upon which the party is ready to die – a second time.

Never mind, the comms team had carefully pre-tested a handful of bright shiny promises to distract the punters: Dunedin Hospital Rebuild Reaffirmed. Inter-Island Ferries Replaced as Planned. Labour will say ‘No’ to AUKUS. Got to make this “Coalition of Chaos” a one-term government!

It is here that the most important difference between 2024 and 1974 becomes clear. Fifty years ago, keeping democracy healthy was the No. 1 priority of politicians and journalists. Both knew the importance of allowing the public to observe what was happening in the nation’s most important political parties. How could voters deliver a credible electoral judgement if the doors were shut in the faces of their proxies – and the news media accepted such exclusion as fair and reasonable?

It is only when the democratic process is perceived by both politicians and journalists as a “deplorable” obstacle to the safe delivery of the political, social, economic and cultural outcomes they jointly favour, that treating their fellow citizens like mushrooms is considered acceptable. Only then does the need to “handle” New Zealanders become obvious.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 2 December 2024.