What’s on the Label -vs- What’s in the Tin.

Would our political parties pass muster under the Fair Trading Act?

WHAT IF OUR POLITICAL PARTIES were subject to the Fair Trading Act? What if they, like the nation’s businesses, were prohibited from misleading their consumers – i.e. the voters – about the nature, characteristics, suitability, or quantity of the products – i.e. the policies – on offer? Would they pass muster? Or would MBIE be sending them a letter?

Let’s begin with the smaller parties.

The unlikelihood of ever finding themselves in a position to implement their entire policy agenda significantly reduces the political incentives for small parties to obfuscate and mislead the voters.

Such honesty is both refreshing and alarming. Small parties like Te Pāti Māori, NZ First, Act, and the Greens are not, as a rule, reticent about their plans for the country. They rightly intuit that ideological candour attracts more serious interest than political evasiveness. Their preference is for the narrow temple over the broad church.

So, Te Pāti Māori is openly demanding tino rangatiratanga – Māori sovereignty – and to hell with all the cavilling colonialists who complain. The party’s openly stated mission is to win all seven of the Māori seats, and to eliminate Labour’s decisive advantage, vis-à-vis Te Pāti Māori, in the Party Vote. Its leaders neither expect, nor are they seeking, a majority of all the votes cast. Their plan is to win enough parliamentary seats to make the support of Te Pāti Māori indispensable to the formation of any future New Zealand government.

That this makes the party hell-scary to a very large number of Non-Māori voters doesn’t bother Te Pāti Māori. It is well aware that skewering the Pakeha is a winning feature, not a fatal bug, of the party’s pitch. To succeed electorally it needs the enthusiastic support of rangatahi – and half-measures are repugnant to the young. Inspired by the uncompromising militancy of Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke, they want it all, and they want it now.

In other words, Te Pāti Māori is offering exactly what it says on the tin.

NZ First and its leader, Winston Peters, are considerably more opaque.

Schooled by Rob Muldoon – New Zealand’s second-most-successful populist politician after Richard Seddon – Peters’ consistent electoral objective has been to reconstitute the angry coalition of farmers, small-business owners, and culturally-alienated working-class voters, that swept Muldoon to victory in 1975.

Like Muldoon, Peters expects his angry coalition to shoulder the task of restoring the social, economic and cultural equilibrium which he charges the Left with disrupting. Unlike Muldoon, however, Peters had to launch his populist crusades in a multi-party environment. The binary choice between himself and Bill Rowling, which Muldoon set before voters in 1975, has never been available to Peters and NZ First. In the post-MMP political marketplace, NZ First has always faced too many competitors.

In attempting to match the offers of its competitors, NZ First has tended to promise more on the tin than its serially monogamous attachments to one or other of the two main parties could possibly secure by way of coalition agreements. It’s the party’s fatal marketing flaw: promising more, delivering less.

Act has never been overly concerned about what gets printed on the party’s tin, or whether it matches its contents. Hardly surprising, given that Act’s key objective has always been to preserve and, if possible, extend, the top-down free-market revolution.

Act’s most successful leaders, Richard Prebble and David Seymour, have always understood that the best way to achieve the party’s objectives is to persuade National voters that the dominant party of the Right has gone soft on social and cultural issues (free speech, the Treaty of Waitangi, law and order) or, even worse, that it is losing focus on the key objectives of neoliberal economics.

‘Give us the votes, and we will keep National honest’, has always been Act’s best pitch. And, if right-wing voters read no further than that on the tin, then satisfaction with the product is likely to be high. To paraphrase the Rolling Stones: Act doesn’t always get what disgruntled right-wing voters want (Treaty Principles Bill) but it’s highly effective at getting what the Neoliberal Revolution needs (workplace reform).

And then there’s the Greens.

For post-scarcity parties like the Values Party (1972-89) and the Greens, it really isn’t stretching things too far to suggest that what’s written on the tin matters a whole lot more than what’s inside it. The purpose of such parties (or should that be “movements”) is to educate and inspire the electorate. Meaning that it’s not so much a matter of telling people what’s actually in your tin, as it is of stipulating what should be in everybody else’s.

To a large extent this explains why Green Party co-leader James Shaw became something of an embarrassment to his colleagues. He’d committed the unforgivable sin of actually achieving something by persuading the National Party to lend its support to his Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Bill. Shaw’s wheeling and dealing, his willingness to compromise, smacked uncomfortably of actually existing politics – as opposed to the “perfect world” politics favoured by the true believers.

The Greens’ unbridled idealism explains in large measure why the challenge of matching what’s written on the party’s tin with its actual contents, has become so daunting. Promising the voters diversity, equity and inclusion on the label is one thing; opening the can to reveal Bible Belt Bussy; is something else entirely!

And Labour? Does it comport with the expectations of the Fair Trading Act?

It’s tempting to say that it does. (Not least on account of the fact that the author once sat as the party’s industrial representative on Labour’s New Zealand Council.) Certainly, anyone turning up to a Labour Party conference will still encounter trade union affiliates, feminists, LGBTQI activists, Māori reps, and ambitious youth delegates. Policy remits will be debated. Elections held. The trappings of a progressive party dedicated to furthering the interests of the New Zealand working-class are all still in place.

Upon closer inspection, however, the label on Labour’s tin has the look of something carefully designed by an advertising agency to evoke a powerful nostalgic reaction. There’s a lovely photo of Mickey Savage, the typeface chosen has a staunch 1930s feel to it, and there are numerous references to Labour’s proud history of delivering “social justice” to “working people”.

But the compulsory list of ingredients, set in 8 point at the bottom of the label, reveals something a little different: Democratic Socialism: 1 percent; Social Justice: 10 percent; Decolonisation and Indigenisation: 15 percent; Gender Equity: 19 percent; Neoliberalism: 55 percent.

Don’t say you weren’t warned.

And National – New Zealand’s most successful political party? How closely does National’s content match its branding?

Let’s start with the party’s name, “National”. It was deliberately chosen by the party’s founders to indicate that, unlike Labour’s openly sectional commitment to working-class New Zealanders and their trade unions, the new party (born in 1936 out of the United and Reform parties) was committed to serving the whole nation – irrespective of its citizens’ class origins. That was a big, and an almost impossible, ask.

If they’d been serious: if the party had indeed been dedicated to the welfare and advancement of all New Zealanders; i.e. to the “national” interest; then its policies would have built upon and extended Labour’s reforms. Not to put too fine a point upon it, a genuinely “national” party would have been as much “left” as it was “right”.

There will be many who, reading the above sentences, will cry: “Aha! That’s exactly what National is – ‘Labour Lite’!”

But, that would be an ideological, not an historical, response. Between 1936 and 1946 National was pledged to sweep away all of the social and industrial reforms of the First Labour Government. And even the party’s reluctant (albeit election-winning) acceptance of the welfare state in 1949 was tactical, rather than sincere. Forty-two years later, in 1991, National atoned for its earlier historical sins by laying waste to both the unions and the welfare state. What little of them remained standing, the party has been systematically dismantling ever since.

So, National isn’t a national party. Still less is it a nationalist party. A party infused with nationalist pride would be voluble in upholding the achievements of the New Zealand nation. It would sing the praises of its settlers, its city-builders, its progressive legislators, its engineers and scientists, its writers, poets, painters, and architects. A nationalist party would not sit mute as the New Zealand people’s achievements were disparaged as work of colonialist white supremacists.

No, National isn’t a nationalist party either.

If the policies promoted by the dominant party of the present coalition government came in a tin, and that tin was labelled “National”, then the only defence against a charge brought under the Fair Trading Act would be that after nearly 90 years of “representing everyone, farmers and businessmen alike” (thanks Gary McCormick) New Zealanders have come to accept that, in their country, the Right’s leading political party has only ever been notionally “national”.

We all know exactly what’s inside.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 21 April 2025.

Our Rough Beast.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming, 1921

ALL OVER THE WORLD, devout Christians will be reaching for their bibles, reading and re-reading Revelation 13:16-17. For the benefit of all you non-Christians out there, these are the verses describing the economic power of the beast.

“And he causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, and that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, the name of the beast, or the number of his name.”

Okay, okay, 47 is not 666, and the ergot-induced visions of a First Century hermit, living in a cave on the Greek island of Patmos, are hardly the most reliable guide to what is happening in the Year of Our Lord 2025. But, you have to admit, the spectacle of Donald Trump commanding the whole earth (including the penguins of Australia’s Heard and McDonalds Islands) to bend the knee to his universal tariffs, is pretty evocative of what are beginning to look remarkably like the “end times” – of globalisation.

The question I hear people ask, over and over again, is “How?” How did this happen? How is it that the CEOs of America’s largest corporations have been willing to watch trillions of dollars knocked off the value of their collective stocks – in silence? Why hasn’t Trump been summoned, as Howard Beale, hero of the 1976 movie classic Network, was summoned, to be reminded of the exact nature of the activity in which he is engaged? Why hasn’t Trump been told:

“You have meddled with the primal forces of nature ….. and I won’t have it! Is that clear? You think you’ve merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case! ….. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immense, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars.”

Of course the world was very different in the mid-1970s. For a start, the American constitution had just been stress-tested by Watergate – tip of the criminal iceberg that was the Nixon presidency – and it had come through with flying colours. To be sure, the USA of President Jimmy Carter faced numerous challenges, but the American system still worked, it hadn’t fallen apart.

Trump’s political success was predicated on the contrary proposition being true – America was falling apart. As evidence of its disintegration, the USA’s two-party system no longer seemed capable of choosing presidential candidates who could reach out and connect with the crucial clusters of angry voters, living in swing states, who now decided American elections.

The buy-in simply wasn’t there for the traditional country-club Republicans, or the bureaucratic liberals of a Democratic Party which, rather than representing American workers, condescended to and patronised them.

When push had come to shove in the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09, the “Yes We Can” president, Barack Obama, had saved Wall Street, and allowed Main Street to go to the Devil. As a consequence, the game of politics became increasingly difficult to play.

Highly educated Americans with good jobs couldn’t understand poorly educated Americans with shit jobs. The Republicans drinking at the Country Club had no idea what sort of candidate alienated working-class Democrats getting drunk at their local bar might be willing to vote for.

But Donald Trump did. Like that other great political adventurer, Charles-Louis Napoléon Bonaparte (1808–1873) who made himself President, then Emperor, of France in the 1850s and 60s, Trump forced his way between the wheels and cogs of a political system that had ground to a halt, gave the machinery a hefty whack, and achieved a surprise victory that delighted his friends to roughly the same degree that it confounded his enemies.

By 2025 what used to be true of the USA is fast becoming true of the whole world. Everywhere, the wheels and the cogs are stuck. The global machinery needs a hefty whack. Sadly, the only politicians willing to deliver such blows are openly scornful of democratic pieties.

And so, the hour of Trump, our rough beast, comes round at last.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star on Friday, 11 April 2025.

What does India Want? What is New Zealand willing to give?

Give me what I want, what I really, really want:  And what India really wants from New Zealand isn’t butter or cheese, but a radical relaxation of the rules controlling Indian immigration.

WHAT DOES INDIA WANT from New Zealand? Not our dairy products, that’s for sure, it’s got plenty of those. Indeed 45 percent of the Indian population are small-scale farmers, most of them running a few head of cattle – not to eat, you understand – but to milk. If it once made no sense to send coals to Newcastle, it makes even less sense, in 2025, to send dairy products to India.

So, what does India want?

To answer that question it is important to understand where India currently stands in the process of economic maturation. In the most brutal terms, India stands in roughly the same place as Britain stood when the agricultural and industrial revolutions were generating population pressures that were fast becoming unsustainable. For a while, Britain’s industrial revolution was able to soak up most of the victims of its agricultural revolution. Those who could not, or (understandably) would not, be absorbed into the “dark satanic mills” of industrialisation, took the option of emigration.

The crucial difference between Britain’s options in the Nineteenth century and India’s options in the Twenty-First is that the Earth is carrying roughly eight times as many human-beings as it was in 1825.

Two hundred years ago there were places for Britain’s (and Europe’s) excess population to go. North America and Australasia were blessed with land – vast quantities of land – whose numerically insignificant (thanks to the arrival of European pathogens against which they had no natural immunity) indigenous peoples could not hope to defend, and the colonisers took it. Resource rich, and soon to become people rich, these territories contributed decisively to the global reach and power of the European way of doing business.

Returning to that extraordinary statistic relating to India’s primary production sector – i.e. that 45 percent of its population are small-scale farmers – what must happen if India wishes to conform to the historical rules of economic development? Simply put, those small farmers must be replaced by the sort of large-scale, and vastly more efficient, farming enterprises that characterise North American, European, and Australasian agriculture.

Will the small farmers of India go quietly into the good historical night? Unlikely.

Viewed dispassionately, the political raison d’être of Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has always been to capture India’s small farmers before they were captured irretrievably by ideological forces less malleable to the needs of India’s elites. Modi’s Hindu nationalist populism has proved itself many times over, albeit at the cost of dismantling the Congress Party’s secular dream of a modern, religiously tolerant, and inclusive Indian state.

But, if India’s elites are to be congratulated for saving the world from the emergence of not one nation with a billion-plus citizens under the control of a communist party, but two, then that success has been won at the cost of seriously distorting the evolution of India’s economy.

Fewer than 20 percent of India’s labour force are employed in the nation’s secondary industries, and most of them are construction workers. As things now stand, there is simply no way India’s vast numbers of small-holders and agricultural labourers can be absorbed (as Britain’s were) in its factories. Not to put too fine a point upon it, China has already beaten India in the race to create a second “workshop of the world”.

Barring a geopolitical cataclysm, China’s victory is not about to be reversed anytime soon. [Although Donald Trump is doing his best! - C.T.]

So, where does that leave Christopher Luxon and his ambitious plans to open up India to New Zealand’s exports?

It leaves him facing a nation that must somehow earn enough from its secondary and tertiary sectors to keep its small-holders safe from the ambitions of investors determined to rationalise Indian agriculture.

This raises a number of possibilities for “New Zealand Inc”. Not the least of which is the contribution this country’s agricultural expertise could make to the voluntary consolidation of small-scale Indian farming operations into larger, more efficient, and much more profitable units. This country’s long history of successful farmer co-operatives makes it the ideal partner for a more equitable, owner-driven, transformation of India’s agricultural sector.

New Zealand could also embark on a major upscaling of it educational exports to India. This could be done in two ways: firstly, by providing New Zealand’s tertiary institutions with the resources required to make many more places available to full-fee-paying Indian students; and secondly, by inviting Indian investors to participate alongside New Zealand universities in establishing “franchise” institutions in India itself.

Tuition in English, at New Zealand’s well-established and (generally) well-respected universities, remains a powerful selling-point to middle-class Indian parents anxious to see their offspring well-credentialled in an increasingly competitive society. Most particularly when merit-based access to the upper-ranks of income-earners – via the most prestigious Indian universities – can no longer be guaranteed.

None of these options are a “sure thing”, however, while the offer that would really open doors for New Zealand Inc continues to be ruled out-of-bounds by New Zealand’s negotiators. What India really wants from New Zealand isn’t butter or cheese, but a radical relaxation of the rules controlling Indian immigration.

India isn’t seeking this concession because it is in love with New Zealand’s scenery, or its values. The Indian government is seeking similar changes from the United States, Canada, and Australia – as well as New Zealand. By increasing the Indian diaspora, it is hoped, India will follow in China’s footsteps. Trade may or may not follow a nation’s flag, but it sure as heck follows its people.

It is difficult to see the National Government being willing to court the political backlash that such a dramatic increase in Indian immigration would doubtless engender. Were Luxon to secure his promised New Zealand-India FTA by giving India what it most wants, NZ First would have all it needed to campaign against its former coalition partner with every prospect of increasing its tally of seats. Te Pati Māori would, similarly, be free to its indulge its worst xenophobic impulses without fear of losing votes. One suspects that even Labour would struggle to stay off the anti-immigrant band-wagon. Only the Greens could embrace the new policy without reservation.

That said, facilitating Indian immigration makes solid historical sense. The expectation that New Zealand could remain forever a proud redoubt of British ethnicity and culture at the bottom of the world should never have survived the demise of the British Empire. Indeed, there are those who argue strongly that it didn’t. They point to the 1986 Burke Report that quietly recommended the discarding of the de facto “White New Zealand” policy in favour of an immigration policy geared towards creating a multicultural New Zealand.

Given the fact that, in 2025, upwards of 20 percent of New Zealand residents were born somewhere else, the policy must be accounted a success.

An interesting exercise in counterfactual history is to ask what sort of country New Zealand would have grown into had the Burke Report recommended the continuation and strengthening of the White New Zealand policy. Rather than the generally welcoming and inclusive multicultural society that Aotearoa-New Zealand has grown into over the last 40 years, an alternative vision, of an embittered and isolated nation of increasingly unapologetic white supremacists, is distressingly easy to imagine.

Quite where that would have left Māori is anybody’s guess. Without Te Reo? Without the Waitangi Tribunal? With Te Tiriti once again dismissed as “a simple nullity”. Reduced to an unrelenting diet of white-bread and butter?

Faced with that dismal vision, a bowl of spicy Rogan Josh, with a side-plate of Naan Bread, doesn’t sound so bad!

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