A Fast-Track Backwards.

Dubious Destination: What New Zealanders face in the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government is an attempt to return the country to the policy settings of half-a-century ago. What Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop’s fast-track legislation is designed to rehabilitate and revivify is the “national development” mindset of the 1970s and 80s.

IT IS RARE INDEED to encounter a measure as ripe for political exploitation as the Coalition Government’s “fast-track” legislation. Simultaneously, the measure assaults the natural environment, the democratic process, and the rights of te iwi Māori. Serendipitously, on the left of New Zealand politics there are three parties perfectly positioned, at least theoretically, to champion each one of these embattled realms. The damage they could inflict, collectively, upon the Reactionary Right over the course of the next two years is, at least potentially, enormous. In short, if Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori were battle-ready, then they could be governing New Zealand by the end of 2026.

But, how many voters would take that bet?

What New Zealanders face in the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government is an attempt to return the country to the policy settings of half-a-century ago. What Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop’s fast-track legislation is designed to rehabilitate and revivify is the “national development” mindset of the 1970s and 80s.

Driving this reanimation project forward are business-people, investors, and politicians who have convinced themselves that the social and cultural forces ranged against them are nothing like as powerful, electorally-speaking, as they believe themselves to be. If the question is put to voters: “Jobs or Frogs?”, then the Coalition’s and its backers’ money is all on “Jobs”. As far as Bishop and his NZ First attack-dog, Shane Jones, are concerned, Forest & Bird, Greenpeace, and all those other “environmental terrorists” are nothing more than re-cycled paper tigers.

What this old-fashioned “workerist” line of argument ignores is the brute demographic fact that the number of people interested in working down a mine, digging in a quarry, picking fruit, or doing all the other hard, dirty, and dangerous jobs associated with the primary sector is a great deal smaller than it was half-a-century ago. The massive importation of migrant labour is a direct response to the pronounced reluctance of Kiwis – especially young Kiwis – to work in high-risk and uncomfortable industries for lousy pay.

These labour market changes notwithstanding, a large number of New Zealanders still hark back nostalgically to the romance of yesteryear’s heroic toilers. They admire the grainy photographs of long-dead coal-miners, their coal-dust-smeared faces wearing the same expressions as soldiers returning from the front. The problem for Jones and his ilk is that these photographs are most likely to be encountered on the white walls of a Remuera lawyer’s residence.

Heroic toilers, or workers without choices?

There’s a very good reason why a lawyer’s grandfather was a coal miner and she is not. Nobody in their right mind spends their life underground filling their lungs with coal-dust for a wage just big enough to pay the bills. Well-paid professionals may celebrate their forebears as working-class heroes, but the heroes themselves wanted something better for their offspring. Something vaguely resembling a choice.

The Coalition Government is, almost certainly, unaware of the sheer magnitude of the political project they have set in motion. It is nothing less than an attempt to rehabilitate the joys of blood, tears, toil, and sweat. An anachronistic effort to drive men back into the raw exploitative enterprises that gave rise to the hard-working, hard-drinking, emotionally unavailable “jokers” of New Zealand’s past.

It’s a forlorn hope. Weather-worn West Coast baby-boomers may applaud Shane Jones’ “Good-bye Freddy!”, screw-the-environment, hommage to the “rip-in, rip-out, rip-off” model of economic development, but not their long-since-moved-away offspring. These young New Zealanders, and their children, are more likely to be found marching up the main streets of the major cities in protest.

Then again, all this masculinist domination-of-nature rhetoric may be nothing more than political distraction. “Matua Shane” is forever ordering the “nephs” to get “off the couch” and find themselves a job. It’s a trope that plays well among NZ First voters.

But, there’s another way of telling this story. One could construct a narrative in which the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government encourages foreign investors to take advantage of an under-utilised workforce. Of young, unskilled Māori, trapped in New Zealand’s poorest communities, harried by MSD, just waiting to be driven, as their grandfathers were driven in the 1950s and 60s, to fill the jobs vacated by upwardly-mobile Pakeha. Could this be the dirty little racist secret at the heart of the Coalition’s fast-tracked projects?

All of which poses a host of vexing questions concerning the Opposition parties’ response to the Coalition Government’s first year in office. Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori could hardly have asked for a larger, or more indefensible, target than the one their opponents have so generously provided.

The Opposition’s counter-narrative to the Coalition Government is obvious. New Zealanders are being invited to return to the historical era that preceded the full flowering of environmental consciousness. Back to the period of what might be called “heroic” national development, when rivers were damned, native forests felled, neighbourhoods levelled to make way for motorways, and everyone cheered on the “unstoppable” March of Progress.

This is a story that Labour, the Greens, and Te Pāti Māori are perfectly placed to tell together. Taking turns to expose the sheer madness of pretending that fifty years of history can be cast aside. Highlighting the sheer folly of proceeding as if the insights and advances of ecological science can, somehow, be ignored. Warning the Government that the legislative edifice constructed out of New Zealander’s growing environmental awareness cannot be dismantled without incurring significant political cost. And, finally, if it becomes clear that the Coalition Government isn’t listening, warning the voters that its reactionary programme can only be progressed by riding roughshod over the entire democratic process.

How else should the Fast-Track Approvals Bill be described?

The Treaty, too, cannot avoid being over-ridden. Because the Coalition’s great leap backwards cannot avoid returning New Zealand to the era in which te Tiriti o Waitangi was dismissed as “a simple nullity”. New Zealanders growing understanding of Te Ao Māori, and the critical role it is already playing in shaping the nation’s future, simply will not survive the reimposition of a nineteenth century capitalist narrative in which the ruthless destruction and exploitation of the natural world (along with the indigenous people who lived in harmony with it) is presented as both beneficial and cost-free.

Finally, the Opposition’s critique of the Coalition’s reactionary programme should clearly identify the two, closely-related, elements at its heart. The first is the Reactionary Right’s fear of, and resentment towards, the new social movements that have, over the course of the last 50 years, come to dominate the politics of Western nations. These new forces for social change include the civil rights movement and its demand for full racial equality; feminism; the movement for LGBTQI+ rights; and the worldwide effort to protect the biosphere. The Reactionary Right’s second great fear, itself a manifestation of humankind’s growing ecological awareness, is the scientific confirmation of anthropogenic global warming. Full acceptance of climate change is inimical to the Reactionary Right’s promotion of endless economic growth. Which is why, its ministers’ lip-service notwithstanding, the Coalition’s policies confirm its three constituent parties as radical climate change deniers.

If the three Opposition parties cannot organise an effective sharing of their urgent collective responsibility to expose both the madness and the menace embodied in this Coalition Government; if, together, they are unable to present themselves as the nation’s best defence against the dangerous policies of the Reactionary Right; and if they fail to demonstrate a capacity to work together effectively, in anticipation of forming an enlightened and democratic coalition government; then New Zealanders will not, and should not, vote for them.

In those circumstances, that part of the nation which still believes in rational and compassionate government will have to hope that, by the time the 2029 election rolls around, there is still enough left of Aotearoa-New Zealand to make it worth saving, and sufficient progressive Kiwis to effect the rescue.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack page on Wednesday, 9 October 2024.