Bowalley Road

Christchurch City Council Needs Choristers - Not Soloists

2012-01-31T10:23:00.003+13:00

A Dangerous Duet: The failure of leadership on the part of the Christchurch City Council's CEO, Tony Marryatt (Left) and its Mayor, Bob Parker (Right) has plunged the city's sole remaining local democratic institution into crisis. The appointment of a Government "Observer" to "advise" Cantabrians' democratically elected representatives has only added to their humiliation.

CANTABRIANS DESERVED BETTER from the Christchurch City Council. Thanks to the inability of their elected representatives to fulfil their civic responsibilities, the citizens of Christchurch may lose their right to local democratic representation.

The humiliation of a government-appointed “observer” has already been visited upon the Council, and the threat of outright dissolution, though unspoken, is very real. Political gridlock in the face of critical decisions that cannot wait was the excuse for shutting down the Canterbury Regional Council. It’s a daunting precedent.

The tragic aspect of Christchurch’s local government crisis is that it comes at a time when the need for effective democratic representation has never been greater. The huge destruction wrought by a succession of earthquakes has spawned an equally huge array of public and private remedial bureaucracies. Equipped with formidable powers, these bureaucracies march to the mechanical drum-beat of hierarchy and administrative fiat – not democratic accountability. The men and women elected to the Christchurch City Council constitute the only effective local check upon the power of these institutions. To be the voice of the quake-stricken people of Christchurch, they must cease acting as soloists and become choristers.

But to meld a council of strong-willed and opinionated individuals into a united team of citizens’ advocates requires leadership of the highest order. Unfortunately, this has not been forthcoming. Neither the Mayor, Bob Parker, nor the Council CEO, Tony Marryatt, appear to have grasped the urgency of transforming the Council into the principal advocate of – and for – Christchurch’s battered citizens. On the contrary, both men seem to have scant regard for the three principles indispensable to the construction of unity: transparency; consultation; and accountability.

Local democracy is not about gathering together a bare majority of compliant cronies whose sole contribution to local government is to rubber-stamp the joint recommendations of the Mayor and his CEO. And it is certainly not about the Mayor’s cronies, puffed-up with pride at their insider status, heaping scorn upon those councillors denied admission to the magic circle of power. Indeed, nothing is more calculated to breed disunity, disaffection and defensiveness: the very feelings that cause politicians to resort to that time-honoured response to secrecy and exclusion – the leak.

Of all the many sins capable of arousing the fury of administrative authoritarians the leaking of privileged information is the most egregious. Their invariable response is to double-down on the secrecy while setting in motion a witch-hunt for the person or persons responsible. The “Us versus Them” mentality is thus transferred from the council table to the council bureaucracy. In consequence, the political and administrative dysfunction, far from being reduced, intensifies.

Administrative Authoritarianism thus lies at the heart of Christchurch’s local government crisis. In a nutshell, the administrative authoritarian regards the elected representative as an ill-informed, unprofessional irritant to the “effective and efficient” operation of whatever institution they have been hired (usually on an exorbitant salary) to administer.

A CEO in the grip of administrative authoritarianism has a vested interest in surrounding himself with vainglorious but intellectually vacuous politicians; persons easily persuaded to stand in the glare of the media’s spotlights and “sell” policies they had no hand in fashioning, and about which they have little to contribute beyond the talking-points handed to them by the CEO’s public relations “experts”.

Two manifestations of administrative authoritarianism deserve special attention. The so far unsuccessful attempts by local government officials to impose legal restraints on the degree to which elected representatives can participate in contentious debates. And, the Local Government Commission’s on-going campaign to reduce the number of elected representatives on city councils and with them the ratio of councillors to citizens.

In 1993, Christchurch – which then boasted a council of twenty-four elected representatives – won the coveted Carl Bertelsmann Prize for “Best Governed City in the World”. A decade later the Local Government Commission reduced the number of Christchurch City Councillors to twelve. Where once the Mayor and CEO of Christchurch City had to round-up twelve to thirteen compliant councillors, they now needed to corral only six or seven.

The subordination of active democratic participation to “effective and efficient” management is a dangerous development at the best of times, but in the face of natural disasters on the scale of the Christchurch earthquakes it is nothing less than catastrophic.

Citizens desperate to “get things done” all-too-easily fall prey to the hard-edged promptings of administrative authoritarians – handing over powers that should never be surrendered to those who dismiss democracy as an unwelcome hindrance to “good governance”.

Disasters bring with them remedial institutions guided by – at best – a ruthless utilitarianism. Which is why, amidst impassive bureaucracies dedicated to “the greatest good for the greatest number” there must remain a united and democratic Christchurch City Council, jealously guarding its power to protect and serve that most vulnerable, but important, of persons: the individual citizen.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 31^st January 2012.

To: Occupy Auckland. From: A Vacillating Leftist.

2012-01-27T17:07:00.001+13:00

Who Should I Fight? The Police clear Auckland's Aotea Square, inciting anger and frustration. In the end, however, revolutions are not made out of testosterone or adrenalin, but from ideas people are ready to follow. Occupy Auckland identified the problem, but was less than successful in identifying solutions.

I’VE BEEN THERE you know. In that place where you are now. The place where frustration and anger overwhelm reason and the only questions are “How did it happen?” and “Why did it happen?” and “Who should I fight?”

The thing is, you can’t stay there. Frustration and anger are the flames of a mental fire that will consume you – if you let it. And when there’s nothing left to burn: when, politically speaking, you’ve been reduced to embers and ash; what good are you then? To the movement? To your comrades? To yourself?

Where do you think the expression “burned out” comes from?

It’s time to stop now. Time to take stock. Time to think about those questions.

How did it happen? That’s easy. You didn’t have a plan. Occupying Aotea Square wasn’t a plan, it was a beginning: a means to an end; a way of starting a conversation with the people of Auckland. But to have a conversation you’ve got to be ready to do two things: talk, and listen.

You had to be prepared to talk to everyone. Not just to the people who joined you in the Square, but to those who never came anywhere near the Square. And you needed to listen to everyone – including your opponents. How many of you tuned-in to the talkback shows? How many of you rang in? How many wrote letters to the Editor of the Herald? Or contacted Close Up and Campbell Live? How many got on blogs like this one to argue Occupy Auckland’s case?

And what, come to think of it, was Occupy Auckland’s case? That Capitalism is harmful to small furry animals, children, and other living things? That inequality sucks?

Gee! Who knew?

You must have known that simply naming your enemy is never enough. At some point you’ve got to decide how to fight him. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only person in Auckland who struggled to understand how erecting a dozen-or-so tents could ever achieve anything more than drawing people’s attention to the issues of poverty and inequality.

Did you ever think about inviting the Mayor to address one of your General Assembly meetings? Or the Prime Minister? Or the Leader of the Opposition? Did you ever consider asking CTU President, Helen Kelly, what her solutions to poverty or inequality might be? Or the Child Poverty Action Group’s? Or the Maori Women’s Welfare League’s? Or Plunket’s?

Did anyone ever consider asking the Mayor if he and his staff could identify any wasteland in the city that could serve as a camp ground? Or if there were areas that could be turned into community gardens? Did anyone ever think of asking Aucklanders to help Occupy Auckland grow food for families who were struggling to feed their kids? There are lots of good conversations to be had while making a garden.

How did Occupy Auckland end so badly? Easy. Not enough talking, and nowhere near enough listening.

The answer to “Why did it happen?” is even more straight forward.

Public bodies cannot tolerate a permanent challenge to their authority. Eventually they will take measures to demonstrate that they still have the power. You all knew that. I suspect there were some of you who were even looking forward to the City Council proving that it – and not you – had the power. Why? Because then you would have an answer to the third question: “Who should I fight?”

But revolutions are not made with testosterone or adrenalin. They are made by people with an idea so attractive, so compelling, so all-embracing that other people – thousands of other people – will pour into the streets to affirm it. Like they did in Tahrir Square – for Liberty. Like they did in Wall Street – for Equality. As they might have done in Aotea Square – for Fraternity.

If there had been anyone there who understood what it meant – or how to make it.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

Labour's Kodachrome Moment

2012-01-27T10:22:00.001+13:00

The Nice Bright Colours: Eastman-Kodak has been forced to close its doors because it failed to grasp that the business it was in was the business of preserving people's memories - not making colour film. The Labour Party makes a similar mistake. It thinks it's in the vote-gathering business when, in reality, it's in the business of selling a more secure today and a more exciting tomorrow.

KODACHROME’s gifts, according to Paul Simon’s 1973 hit single, were the “nice bright colours”, the “greens of summer” and a magical ability to make all the world “a sunny day”. The Eastman-Kodak corporation’s eponymous product, for which Simon’s snappy little ditty acted as a world-wide advertisement, was indisputably one of the hottest technological properties of its day.

Sad to learn, then, that in January 2012, America’s colour-film colossus is finally closing its doors. The nice bright colours and the greens of summer no longer require a Nikon camera loaded with 36 of Eastman-Kodak’s exposures. Unlike the songwriter, the world’s great pioneer of popular photography failed to read “the writing on the wall”. It wasn’t Mamma, but the instant images of the new digital technology that took Rhymin’ Simon’s Kodachrome away.

My friend, the photographer and artist, Barry Thomas, reckons the manufacturers of Kodachrome and the New Zealand Labour Party have a lot in common. Both were once at the cutting edge. Both had something to sell which masses of people were happy to buy. And both, by failing to keep pace with a rapidly changing world, have seen the power of their “brand” dwindle and fade.

Eastman-Kodak believed it was in the business of manufacturing photographic film, when it was actually in the business of preserving ordinary people’s memories. When film was no longer required to capture those special moments, the makers of Kodachrome should have been there with the digital technology that was fast replacing the photographic process. Nikon, Nokia, Samsung and Apple made the transition. Eastman-Kodak didn’t.

The Labour Party believes that it’s in the business of attracting electoral support. But the vote a person casts for a political party is only the last in a long series of decisions and commitments he or she has already made to its “brand”.

When Paul Simon considered Kodachrome what was in his mind? A tube of tightly-rolled, unexposed film in a chrome yellow box? No. What he saw were the “nice bright colours” and the “greens of summer”. When a voter thinks about Labour his or her mind should be flooded with similar positive images.

It was once. Mention Labour to the voters of the 1930s and 40s and the image of Bob Semple driving a bulldozer over the picks and shovels of the hated work schemes would spring to mind. Or a row of brand new state houses gleaming in the summer sun. Or smiling children clutching their bottles of state-provided milk. They’d recall pictures of hydro-electric dams, and the friendly faces of Labour’s leaders opening yet another school, hospital or factory.

Reassurance, Security, Optimism: When people thought of Labour in the 1930s and 40s it was an image like this, of Mickey Savage carrying furniture into the first State House, which sprang to mind. What is the image of Labour in 2012?

Back then Labour understood that its core business was offering New Zealanders reassurance, security and an optimistic vision of the future. Once people were persuaded that these were the things Labour stood for, collecting their votes became a mere formality.

But speak the word Labour to a voter in 2012 and what – if any – images spring to mind? Architectural drawings of the new housing estates Labour is committed to building? No. The Labour leader arguing about how best to put an end to inequality with Occupy protesters? Hardly. Standing in solidarity with the Maritime Unions? Perish the thought! Unveiling a graph indicating how quickly Labour’s new tax policy will reduce the share of New Zealand’s income currently claimed by its wealthiest one percent. Never. Announcing Labour’s “Grow New Zealand” scheme for putting unemployed Kiwis to work. Nope.

Mention Labour in 2012 and most New Zealanders will struggle to conjure-up any images at all, apart from a succession of vaguely recognisable faces and a sorry string of embarrassing headlines.

The Labour Party Opposition should be in the business of displaying courage, thinking the unthinkable, searching for the root causes of the nation’s problems and coming up with solutions that require the voters to discard their prejudices, step away from past failures, and take the risk of committing themselves to something new.

A successful Opposition doesn’t waste time attacking the Government, it devotes itself to enlisting the electorate in a great adventure.

If a vote for Labour is anything less than a decision to join that great adventure then the party will share the fate of Eastman-Kodak. It neglected its core business: preserving people’s memories. Labour’s core business, in 2012, must be stimulating New Zealanders’ imagination.

Using digital, colour, and, if necessary, black-and-white.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 27 January 2012.

The 2012 US Presidential Election: One Nation Under God.

2012-01-24T10:28:00.001+13:00

Instrument Of Redemption? Newt Gingrich's victory in South Carolina was constructed out of the still raw historical memories of the American Civil War and the uncompromising political evangelism which continues to divide the US population into saints and sinners.

ONE HUNDRED and seventy-eight years ago, in the little Massachusetts town of Charlestown, a mob of Protestant evangelicals attacked and burned to the ground a Roman Catholic convent and school. In spite of incontrovertible evidence of their guilt, twelve of the thirteen men charged with instigating and participating in the riot were acquitted. Recommendations that the state recompense the Archdiocese of Boston for its loss were repeatedly voted down in the Massachusetts legislature.

I re-tell this long-forgotten tale of religious bigotry and violence for two reasons. First, it is a useful corrective to the very common belief that this sort of behaviour is confined, historically, to the states of the American South – the so-called “Bible Belt”. Second, it reveals the crucial role evangelical Protestantism has played, and continues to play, in the history of the United States.

As the 1834 Convent Riot shows, the volatile mixture of politics and religion that so baffles foreign observers of the United States is nothing new; indeed, in the opinion of at least one American historian, David Goldfield, it has been one of its principal drivers. As he writes of the United States in the middle of the Nineteenth Century:

“[E]vangelical Christianity’s influence was everywhere in the political arena, in discussions about the West, about Roman Catholics, and especially about slavery. What was troubling about this religious immersion was the blindness of its self-righteousness, its certitude, and its lack of humility to understand that those who disagree are not mortal sinners and those who subscribe to your views are not saints.”

Goldfield’s observations resonate powerfully with the present condition of American political life. And if the most virulent expressions of religious intolerance have their present geographical location in the states of the old Confederacy, that is only because the creation of the Confederacy, and its ultimate defeat by Abraham Lincoln and the Union armies, was a product of the Northern evangelicals’ holy crusade against the “sin of slavery”.

One has only to read the words of Julia Ward Howe’s The Battle Hymn of the Republic to gain some understanding of the extraordinary moral fervour pervading the Union armies – especially following Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863:

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,

With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:

As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,

While God is marching on!

Religious fervour of this intensity inevitably incited an equal and opposite fervour among its intended victims. Messianic Methodists from the North were met by belligerent Baptists from the South, and their watchword was “redemption”. As Goldfield notes:

“Confederates talked of ‘redeeming’ their states from Union control during the Civil War. After the wall, the term usually implied a two-step process. Redemption would cleanse southern sins and therefore restore the Lord’s blessing on the South … it would also remove ‘the yoke of Yankee and negro rule’. Redemption, therefore, would secure for white southerners the victory denied to them in the Civil War.”

The clash of these historical convictions, in the shape of the civil rights movement, is still within the living memory of many New Zealanders. That struggle to make good Lincoln’s pledge was initiated and sustained within the context of Dr Martin Luther King’s evangelical Christian pacifism. It’s street-based expression stirred the conscience of the Yankee North, whose liberal protestant creed had been both tempered and extended through its association with progressive Judaism, the social gospel of Vatican II, and the secular humanism of “official” America’s science-based modernity.

It is by no means clear that the legislative victories of the civil rights movement betokened a genuine change of heart among Southern evangelicals. Certainly, the still-glowing embers of Southern Baptist redemptionism were stirred to life by the election of an African-American as President of the United States. Once again the racial, religious and cultural demarcations of American society are traced in lines of fire across the republic’s face.

Newt Gingrich’s victory in South Carolina (the first state to secede from the Union in 1861) offers proof of how brightly these fires can burn. His sudden surge in popularity in the run-up to last Sunday’s primary was almost entirely due to his thinly disguised attack on African-Americans. His depiction of Barack Obama as “the food-stamps President” harked back to the South’s rejection of “Yankee and negro rule”. He didn’t quite brandish the Confederate flag – but he came dangerously close.

It is a sobering experience to witness how readily the United States falls victim to its past. Sobering, yet strangely inspiring, that the political mandate of the Almighty continues to be so highly prized, and so bitterly contested.

For Americans, “one nation, under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all” will always be much more than a slogan.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 24 January 2012.

Whatever It Takes

2012-01-20T10:29:00.002+13:00

Don't Do It, Josie! Frustrated at Labour's failure to connect with the electors in 2011, Labour's highly talented candidate, Josie Pagani, penned an article for the NZ Herald in which she hints that if abandoning New Zealand's poorest families will help Labour regain the Treasury benches, then that is what it should do. But if electoral victory means embracing the prejudices of your political enemies, then what, exactly, have you won?

“ALL POWER CORRUPTS”, wrote Lord Acton, “and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” But the risk of political degeneracy exists not only in the proximity of power, but is also present in its absence. If winning is the politician’s sole objective, then seeing victory slip through her fingers over and over again surely renders her equally vulnerable to corrupt counsels?

The most persuasive of these siren songs is the one that begins: “One day in Government is worth a thousand years in Opposition.” Meaning: genuine political achievement is available only to those with access to the levers of power. Once this precept is accepted, the idea that serious politicians must be willing to do “whatever it takes” to win office becomes dangerously easy to sell.

And the moment it is purchased, the politician is lost. The means we adopt inevitably shape and determine the ends we arrive at. Being prepared to do “whatever it takes” means being willing to enlist evil in the cause of right; and in that encounter it is not evil which is changed.

Like all stories peddled by the corrupt, the notion that political achievement is restricted to those with access to the levers of power is a lie. The greatest movers of human events are ideas and the moral force they generate. And a person does not need to be in government – or even in Parliament – to advance an idea or exert moral force.

It would be most unfortunate, therefore, if Josie Pagani, the young, compassionate and very talented Labour Party candidate for the blue-ribbon seat of Rangitikei in last year’s election, and all the other progressive candidates who failed to enter Parliament, succumbed to the twin fallacies that only those who sit on the Treasury Benches wield genuine political power; and that parties should, therefore, do “whatever it takes” to get there. Unfortunately, a close reading of her recently published assessment of Labour’s unsuccessful 2011 campaign indicates that she’s at risk of doing just that.

“We lost because [we] were seen as looking backwards, not forwards” says Ms Pagani. “We didn’t sound aspirational, we sounded miserable. We were turning up on people’s doorsteps telling them their lives were gloomy. And anyone who has ever been poor knows the last thing you want is someone telling you your life is crap.”

Well, if Ms Pagani was standing on people’s doorsteps telling them their lives were crap it’s hardly surprising that she lost! And if the perceptions she describes were as widespread in the electorate as she claims, I’m not entirely sure it’s fair to lay the blame exclusively at Labour’s door. Isn’t it more likely that the voters’ negative perceptions of Labour are simply evidence of the superiority of National’s propaganda? Labour had a story to tell in 2011: it lost because it didn’t tell it well enough.

Much more disquieting, however, is Ms Pagani’s statement that: “The hardest week to door-knock was when we were telling people - who had just come home from a day’s work earning the minimum wage - that it was a great idea to extend their Working for Families tax credit to beneficiaries.”

This comment represents a calculated slap in the face to the many Labour members who have struggled ceaselessly for nearly a decade to force the Labour caucus to acknowledge the enormous social damage their policy of denying beneficiaries the economic relief of Working for Families was inflicting on the children of the poor. That Annette King and Phil Goff finally allowed themselves to be persuaded by the irrefutable evidence of the harm this policy was causing represented a genuine moral triumph for them and their party.

To abandon Labour’s new position, as a gesture of appeasement to the ill-informed prejudices of working-class National voters – because that is what it takes – would signal a willingness to march into office over the backs of impoverished families.

It’s hard to conceive of a Labour victory more corrupting – or less worth winning.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 20 January 2012.

The Auckland Ports Dispute: An Open Letter To David Shearer

2012-01-17T10:34:00.002+13:00

A Spurious and Culpable Neutrality? To stand to one side and do nothing while injustice is taking place before your eyes is to participate in that injustice. David Shearer and Labour must speak out against the Port sof Auckland management's plan to sack its entire workforce - or share their guilt.

WHY SO SILENT, Mr Shearer? Why has the Labour Party not voiced its solidarity with the Maritime Unions of New Zealand? Why have you not spoken out against the Ports of Auckland CEO’s outrageous threat to sack his entire workforce? What’s the matter with you, man?

The white sands and Pohutukawa blooms of Northland are beautiful at this time of year, and God knows you’ve earned a break, but you must know a politician is never truly on holiday. Time and the twenty-four-hour news cycle wait for no man.

The story unfolding on the Auckland waterfront has political implications far beyond the winning and losing of a single industrial dispute. Ultimately, it’s about whether or not the Labour Party stands for something more than an alternative set of political managers. And, if it does, then what, in the Twenty-First Century, is that “something more” about?

You are fond of telling us, Mr Shearer, about that transformative moment in the Sudan when you looked over the side of the truck you were travelling in and witnessed half-starved children scrabbling in the dust for the scraps of food you had casually tossed away. It’s an arresting image: redolent with all the sub-texts of injustice, wealth and poverty, and the inevitable conflicts to which scarcity gives rise. And the clear implication of your story is that not only did you perceive the intrinsic moral squalor of the scene being enacted in the fly-blown Sudan dust, but that you decided then and there to do something about it.

It’s why you’re the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Shearer. Your United Nations “back-story” of “doing something” about poverty, war and injustice is what inspired your colleagues to make you, rather than David Cunliffe, leader of the Labour Party. An essential element of that back-story, in case you need reminding, was your celebrated Kiwi approach; your ability to get alongside all the parties involved in a conflict and help them identify the common-ground. It’s what you’re supposed to be good at.

So, I ask again: Why so silent on the Ports of Auckland dispute?

Is it because you’ve been listening to Trevor Mallard, Mr Shearer? I sincerely hope not. Because Mr Mallard and his ilk are the very last people you should be listening to at the moment. They are, when all is said and done, the people who devised the campaign strategy which culminated in Labour’s worst election result in more than 80 years. The people whose political counsel is dictated by opinion polls and focus-groups. The sort of people who purport to lead by following. The people who would have asked those Sudanese children scrabbling in the dust which variety of scraps were their favourite.

Or, perhaps you’re recalling the example of “Side-line Stan” Rodger – Minister of Labour during the darkest days of Rogernomics. Mr Rodger made a virtue out of staying on the side-lines of industrial relations and refusing to involve the Government in settling strikes and lockouts.

St Paul would have recognised the tactic. He recalled the time, before his encounter on the Road to Damascus, when he had held the cloaks of those involved in the hot work of stoning a Christian martyr. But, after Damascus (and the Sudan?) St Paul and you both understood that to stand on the side-lines while injustice is taking place is to participate in that injustice. If you opt to “hold the cloaks” of the Ports of Auckland management while they stone their own employees – then, damn you Mr Shearer, you’re as guilty as they are.

Which brings us back to the central question: Is Labour something more than an alternative set of political managers? And, if it is, what is that something more about?

Ultimately, isn’t it about answering the question: “Who is strong enough to stop the stone-throwers?” The men and women who formed the Labour Party in 1916 decided that the answer to that question was the State. If the State could be made to stop working for those who already exercised power, and began instead to work for those who were powerless, then a political party seeking to put an end to poverty, war and injustice would have a fighting chance.

Labour was formed to create a State that wasn’t neutral; a state that never stood on the side-lines when working people were being threatened and abused. Labour was about intervention: constant, massive, intelligent and creative intervention on behalf of the weak and against the strong.

It’s time to bid farewell to the white sands and the Pohutukawa blossoms, Mr Shearer, and come on down to the Auckland wharves. It’s time to cast aside the gathered cloaks of a spurious and culpable “neutrality” and place yourself and your party between the stone-throwers and their victims. It’s time to end the silence.

This letter was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 17 January 2012.

The Auckland Ports Dispute: An Injury To All

2012-01-13T08:47:00.000+13:00

Together We Stand: If the New Zealand Left fails to launch a counter-offensive against the, to date, highly successful campaign by the Right to break the Maritime Union and set the scene for the privatisation of the Ports of Auckland, then it will sustain a significant, perhaps historic, strategic defeat. There is much more at stake on the Auckland wharves than the wages and conditions of 300 waterside workers.

THE LOOMING CONFRONTATION on Auckland’s wharves will be a test for the whole of the New Zealand Left. If the clear pattern of escalation by the Ports of Auckland Ltd’s (POAL) Board of Directors is not answered by a broad counter-mobilisation from the Left, then not only POAL, but the entire New Zealand Right, will score a significant – perhaps historic – victory. As they were in 1913 and 1951, Auckland’s wharves have once again become the crucible of class conflict in New Zealand.

It is hardly a coincidence that this dispute flared within days of National’s election victory. Hard-liners in the Auckland business community know that if POAL can take down the Maritime Union of New Zealand (MUNZ), one of the very few New Zealand trade unions with sufficient strength to protect the living standards and working conditions of its members, then Prime Minister Key and his Labour Minister, Kate Wilkinson, will feel free to introduce a further round of swingeing workplace “reforms”.

And it is not simply at the level of central government that a management victory on the Auckland wharves would free the hands of the Right. If the highly popular, left-leaning Mayor of Auckland, Len Brown, can be manoeuvred into a position where he is seen to be acting against the interests of working people, then there is every possibility that his electoral base in the south of the city will desert him in next year’s local government elections. This would open the way for a right-wing council and mayor to take power on a programme of privatising the city’s assets – including POAL.

Clearly, there is a lot more at stake on the Auckland wharves than the wages and conditions of MUNZ’s members. The defeat of MUNZ in Auckland will open the way for a further and rapid erosion of trade union rights across the rest of New Zealand, as well as providing additional fuel for the Right’s campaign to privatise what remains of New Zealand’s public estate.

What, then, should the Left be doing?

There is already a measure of co-operation between MUNZ and the NZ Council of Trade Unions (CTU). Together these bodies have released a fact-sheet on the dispute which puts paid to most of POAL’s half-truths and misrepresentations of the union’s position. But much more than this needs to done. MUNZ should consider seriously “handing over” the dispute to the CTU in the way unions enmeshed in serious disputes in the 1960s and 70s “handed them over” to the National Executive of the old Federation of Labour.

By involving all of New Zealand’s trade unions in the dispute’s resolution, MUNZ would be saying to the POAL management: “This fight is now a national issue.” It would empower the CTU President, Helen Kelly, to speak out nationally on the issues at stake and, as workers’ awareness grew, the CTU’s affiliates could be advised to prepare for large-scale solidarity actions in support of MUNZ’s members.

Because New Zealand’s draconian employment laws outlaw sympathy and protest strikes the CTU’s response (at least initially) would have to be confined to organising demonstrations and raising funds to support striking workers’ families. What the CTU could also do, however, if POAL refuses to negotiate with MUNZ in good faith, is call upon young unemployed workers and students to take a leaf out of California’s “Occupy Oakland” play-book and prepare to occupy the wharves.

Makes more sense than sitting in a pup-tent in Auckland’s Aotea Square.

The CTU and the Occupy Movement should not, however, be expected to fight POAL alone. Mayor Brown, rather than allow himself to be alienated from his South Auckland base, should announce immediately his intention of organising a series of rallies throughout Auckland’s working-class suburbs where he will declare his support for trade union rights, pledge to keep the Ports of Auckland in public hands and ask for Aucklanders’ support in dismissing the POAL Board of Directors should a settlement of the dispute not be effected quickly.

Nor should the Leader of the Opposition, David Shearer, be allowed to repeat the error of his predecessor, Walter Nash, by attempting to keep the Labour Party neutral in this dispute. Here, before him, lies his “Orewa moment”: a chance to demonstrate to Labour’s electoral base that the Left is far from vanquished.

That “an injury to one” remains “an injury to all”.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 13 December 2012.

Facing Fearful Odds: A Reply To John Pagani

2012-01-12T14:19:00.006+13:00

"You Turn If You Want To": But Margaret Thatcher, Britain's "Iron Lady", was not for turning. And that is the lesson John Pagani has failed to draw from her career. Powerful ideas, coherently organised and ruthlessly implemented, are extraordinarily difficult to resist. Only when the Left evinces the confidence in its principles that Mrs Thatcher had in hers, will the Right be decisively defeated.

JOHN PAGANI’s intriguing riff on Thatcherism and the importance of being on the right side of history has got me worried. It’s not that I think he’s wrong – there is much to be learned from Margaret Thatcher’s career. What worries me is that he’s learned the wrong lessons.

Mr Pagani characterises Thatcher as a politician of principle who was able to achieve great things for her country because, having set her course, she could rely upon the surge of History’s tide to carry her forward. Of course he’s only able to say such things because he knows how the story ends, which, from an historian’s point of view, is cheating. In 1979, when Mrs Thatcher became Prime Minister, the ‘surge of History’s tide’, far from favouring the Right, was assumed to flowing, with ever-growing force, to the Left.

For many Conservatives the image which best summed up the mission Margaret Thatcher had assigned herself was that of Horatius on the bridge. She was willing to be the “Last Tory”, just as Horatius was willing to be the “Last Roman”, denying passage to the implacable enemies of a great, if faltering, empire and averring, by her readiness to stand and fight, the power of Lord Macaulay’s oft-quoted lines:

And how can man die better

Than facing fearful odds

For the ashes of his fathers

And the temples of his gods

When Mrs Thatcher became Leader of the Opposition in 1975 the British nation was in crisis. It’s working-class was pushing hard against the crumbling structures of tradition and privilege in hopes of building a more rational and humane society. Twelve million strong, the trade unions had already seen off the Conservative Government of Edward Heath and had imposed upon a startled Labour Party a manifesto openly calling for the nationalisation of the “commanding heights” of the British economy and the introduction of “industrial democracy”. More than a few on the right of British politics feared that just one more king hit from the Left would see British Capitalism go down for the count.

But if Britain’s manufacturers were resigned to the state relieving them of their responsibilities, and her middle-classes already half-way convinced that the manifold absurdities of their existence (so brilliantly satirised in the BBC’s 1976-79 series The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin) had rendered them unfit to rule, there was still one, rock-solid bastion of British capitalism that was not willing to go gentle into that good night of socialism – the City of London.

The financiers of the City of London constituted the Imperial Guard of British Capitalism. It was extractive and parasitic, and cared not one whit for the vast workforces employed in Britain’s industrial heartlands. The City of London had not just grown alongside the British Empire, it had, in a very real sense created it. And the tribute of that empire, in the form of dividends and interest, continued to pile up in its vaults.

And the men of the City did not lack for resources. Above all else, the City was a vast and complex network – and its reach was long. It extended into Fleet Street and Oxbridge and the Civil Service. The younger brothers of City men could be found in the upper echelons of the armed forces, and, more disturbingly, in the ranks of MI5 and MI6. Descendants of Duke William’s knights, and of Henry VIII’s “new men”, the ones who ended up with Catholicism’s English acres; the families who ran the City of London had always known what to take – and how to keep it.

As Richard Crockett shows in his book Thinking The Unthinkable: Think-Tanks and the Economic Counter-Revolution, 1931-1983, it was men of the City who bank-rolled the so-called “New Right” and underwrote its ideological factories. And it was from these that the “new” ideas flowed: to the news media; to the universities; and to the Conservative Party faction, led by the cadaverous Sir Keith Joseph and his ambitious young protégée, Margaret Thatcher, which was determined to prevent the Left from delivering British Capitalism's coup de grace.

But, of course, they were not new ideas at all. Mr Pagani, having pumped himself full of Thatcherism's anabolic steroids, waxes eloquent about the “paleolithic”political tactics advocated by “left reactionaries” – all the time forgetting that the ideas Mrs Thatcher championed and the social order she constructed had already been tested to destruction in the hundred years between 1830 and 1930. Like the US officer in Vietnam,who was willing to “destroy the village in order to save it”, Mrs Thatcher was prepared to let Britain’s productive industrial base go under rather than see the City of London subjected to effective regulation.

And that refusal continues to exact its toll on British society. The consequences of the City’s unregulated greed are today as clear to Britons as Wall Street’s recklessness is to Americans. Mrs Thatcher’s historic achievement was not to show how far one can travel when History is pushing you forward, but how long History’s progress can be impeded by someone relentlessly pushing back. In the 33 years since Mrs Thatcher was elected, British society has not become more rational or more humane – quite the reverse. The breakthrough that so nearly occurred in the 1970s remains to be made, and only the Left can make it.

And that’s the lesson Mr Pagani failed to draw from his cinematic sojourn with Meryl-as-Maggie. The extraordinary power of ideas, and how far a politician and her party can go when those ideas are marshalled into a coherent set of economic, social and political objectives.

Far from advising New Zealand's Labour leader, David Shearer, to shun the looming battle on the Auckland Waterfront, Mr Pagani should be urging him to strap on his armour and unsheath his sword. Mrs Thatcher never ran away from a fight, which is why she was able to win over and over and over again. Nor did she have the slightest patience for those who advocated poll-driven ideological U-turns.

“You turn if you want to,” she famously told the Conservative Party’s doubters and worriers, “the Lady’s not for turning.”

Oh that David Shearer should prove as willing to go into battle for the long-delayed advance of socialism, as Britain’s “Iron Lady” did for the sterile ashes of her capitalist fathers and the high-rise temples of their greedy London gods.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

The Auckland Ports Dispute: Pace Setters

2012-01-10T15:11:00.000+13:00

Overcapitalised: In the anarchic context of free market capitalism, businesses like the Ports of Auckland Ltd attempt to steal a march on their competitors by investing in plant and machienery they can, ultimately, only afford by downgrading the pay and conditions of their workforce. A real union will prevent them - but only at the cost of sparking a major confrontation.

THE MACHINERY of a modern port dwarfs the men who work it. Vast sums of capital are bound up in each gantry crane and reach stacker, requiring their human operators to move the waiting cargo with speed and efficiency. These are solid, reliable men: worth every cent of their generous wage package.

The 300 waterside workers employed by the Ports of Auckland Ltd (POAL) know exactly what they are worth, and with a tradition of unionisation extending back well over a century they know how to defend the wages and conditions the Maritime Union of New Zealand (MUNZ) and its predecessors have won. They also know the dangers inherent in deunionisation; the risk that is posed to every worker when the work rhythms and safety measures enforced by the union’s collective contract are undermined by “self-employed” contractors.

It is in defence of their self-determined pace and rhythm of work and its critical importance to the health and safety of workers on and off the job that the members of MUNZ employed by POAL have struck. The bitter experience of other workers across New Zealand has taught them that the moment the union’s central role in determining the working conditions of its members is surrendered, then it ceases to be a union. It may still collect dues and celebrate May Day, but by facilitating the full restoration of managerial prerogatives on the “shop floor” it has become the employer’s creature – not the workers’.

The unimpeded exercise of managerial prerogative is what lies at the heart of all great industrial disputes. “Flexibility” is the watchword – meaning the ability of the employer to call workers in and send them home, as required, without incurring penalty rates of pay. “Flexibility” empowers the employer to hire and fire at will; to raise or lower employees’ wages according to the dictates of the market and without reference to the actual living expenses of individual workers and their families. “Flexibility” imposes on every worker an inescapable obligation to “give”, while conferring upon every employer an unchallengeable right to “take”.

That’s why every union that takes root in a business enterprise and wins the recognition of its owners is, in its own small way, a revolution. At stake is the fate of that business’s profits: the proportion allotted to the shareholders, and the proportion returned to the workforce in the form of higher wages and/or improved conditions. It’s class war at its most basic, its most dynamic, level. The unavoidable by-product of, to quote Leonard Cohen’s magnificent song Democracy: “the homicidal bitchin’/ that goes down in every kitchen/ to determine who will serve and who will eat.”

And when all of those tiny revolutions are joined together the result can very easily add up to a big revolution. Data gathered by the UK’s Office of National Statistics reveals in the starkest terms how Britain’s Top 1 Percent’s share of total income declined as trade union membership rose. When expressed graphically, one almost becomes the mirror-image of the other. In 1978, when the wealthiest Britons’ share of total income reached its nadir, the number of Britons belonging to a trade union attained its peak. Significantly, Mrs Thatcher’s neo-liberal counter-revolution set about reversing the process less than a year later. Five years on, New Zealand’s data undoubtedly reveals a very similar story.

The whirlwind of abuse unleashed against MUNZ’s Port of Auckland members reveals how acutely sensitive the employing class still is to even the slightest stirrings of union power. The employers understand perfectly what is at stake and are furious at MUNZ for flexing its muscles so publicly.

Winning concessions in private is one thing, but by making the benefits of solidarity so obvious, and demonstrating the limits of managerial prerogative – at least on Auckland’s publicly-owned waterfront – MUNZ has crossed a line. A victory for the union at this point in the dispute could only be interpreted as a victory for all unionised workers.

And that’s how revolutions begin.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 6 January 2012.

Occupy New Zealand: Less Than Beloved

2012-01-03T16:22:00.000+13:00

The Casual Brutality Of The State: This astounding image of a Californian campus policeman casually pepper-spraying passive student occupiers quickly became a symbol of the US authorities' fear-driven hostility towards the ideas of the Occupy Movement. Old-timers recalled earlier struggles for human rights, and the solidarity of the protesters grew. The New Zealand Occupy Movement seemed tame and non-threatening by comparison. By the end of 2011 it had all but fizzled out.

“THE BELOVED COMMUNITY” was how Dr Martin Luther King described the civil rights movement of the early 1960s. The relationships forged between participants in that brutal, often deadly, struggle were intense and enduring. Like war buddies, the lunch-counter desegregators, protest marchers and freedom riders look back on their experiences as both the worst and the best moments of their lives.

It is significant, therefore, to hear participants in the American Occupy Movement describe themselves as something akin to Dr King’s “beloved community”. Clearly, they see the occupations playing a role analogous to those first, defiant acts of passive resistance against the “separate but equal”, “Jim Crow” regimes of the Old South. Equally clearly, the Occupy Movement seeks to align itself with progressive America’s proud tradition of moral and physical resistance to injustice and oppression.

Can New Zealand’s Occupy Movement lay claim to such lofty credentials? Have our occupiers even come close to forming themselves into a “beloved community”?

Sadly, the answer must be: “No.”

There are many reasons for this, but the most obvious is the vast experiential gulf between those at the sharp end of inequality in the United States, and the New Zealand poor. Even in the 1950s and 60s, at the height of the post-war boom, the living standards and quality of life of the average American were much more precarious than those of the average Kiwi. The USA was able to construct only the rudiments of a functioning welfare state. New Zealand’s welfare provision, by contrast, was second only to the Scandinavians’. When the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) struck the USA in 2008, such safety nets as still remained beneath the ordinary American family were threadbare and full of holes. When put to the same test, our own proved to be in a much better state of repair.

It is also true that New Zealand’s “one-percenters” have a lot less to answer for than the one percent of Americans who control more than 20 percent of that country’s wealth. In particular, our (Australian controlled) financial system – most crucially its banks – weathered the GFC without the need for colossal bail-outs from the public purse. The spectacle most responsible for sharpening the social divisions of the USA was that of a reckless and bloated Wall Street being rescued from its own greed and folly, while an innocent and suffering Main Street was left to go to the Devil.

The contrast, captured for posterity by (of all networks) Russian Television, of New York City’s financial elite, on a balcony high above Wall Street, sipping Champagne from crystal flutes and peering down with amused condescension at the ragged “occupiers” waving their hand-lettered cardboard signs on the pavement, many floors below, could hardly have been more incendiary.

Rather than this gilded social contempt, New Zealand’s experience in 2011 was one of social solidarity and collective exhilaration. The devastating Christchurch earthquake which killed 181 people on 22 February 2011 drew New Zealanders much closer together and mobilised the very best qualities of the Kiwi character. While the sheer joy than enveloped the country when the All Blacks won the Rugby World Cup made it especially hard for those hoping to expose the nation’s shortcomings to win a hearing.

In this context, the Occupy Movement’s New Zealand off-shoots never really managed to rise above their one-off novelty value, nor to overcome the unflattering comparisons between their own tatterdemalion derivativeness and the heroism of the American original. While the Kiwi occupiers did battle in provincial courtrooms with bemused and increasingly frustrated mayors, Occupy Oakland was laid waste by multiple police agencies hurling stun grenades and firing tear gas canisters into the terrified protesters tents.

And nowhere, among the Kiwi Occupiers’ interminable “General Assembly” attempts to reach an ontologically impossible “consensus” between anarchism and socialism, was there ever a mobilising image to match that of the burly University of California campus cop nonchalantly pepper-spraying the faces of kneeling, non-violent student occupiers.

New Zealand’s Occupy Movement has fizzled for all of the above reasons, and more, but its single greatest failure has been its refusal to transform its manifestly untrue claim to represent 99 percent of the New Zealand public into anything resembling reality. When even New Zealand’s conservative prime minister confesses that most Kiwis are socialists at heart, an appeal for greater equality should have been the easiest of sells. But aside from the excitement of the initial occupations, and the potent resonances of the borrowed American slogans, this never eventuated. Afraid of soiling their ideological purity through contact with the unenlightened majority, the New Zealand occupiers, like a collection of Antipodean Achilles, refused to come out of their tents.

Beloved communities arise out of the open and collective struggle for a better world, not from muddy encampments, or the ineffectual fluttering of consensual hands.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 3 January 2012.

Anno Domini 2012

2012-01-01T12:00:00.000+13:00

Happy New Year!

A Happy New Year to all Bowalley Road readers!

May the next twelve months be fruitful, prosperous and, above all, happy ones for you, me, and everyone who visits this site.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

Singing Away The War

2011-12-30T09:49:00.001+13:00

From What? Are the Taliban laying siege to Buckingham Palace? Are Predator drones taking out shoppers in Slough? The carefully manufactured song Wherever You Are reaching No. 1 in the British pop charts represents not only a propaganda triumph for the UK's Department of Defence, but is also a sobering commentary on the British people's ability to look through the war crimes committed in their name.

WHEREVER YOU ARE, by Military Wives, is No. 1 on the UK pop-charts. And somewhere in the UK Department of Defence (DOD) the Champagne corks are popping. Why not? The song and its accompanying video, released on 19 December, represent the triumph of a truly masterful PR campaign in support of the United Kingdom’s participation in the Afghan War.

The most effective aspect of the campaign was to have it fronted by the wives of soldiers on active duty in Afghanistan. These women are not only a potent reservoir of patriotic emotion, but they also constitute an unchallengeable rhetorical vector for DOD propaganda. Who’s going to contradict the testimony of 100 military wives?

The story that ended this week with Wherever You Are at No. 1 began several months ago when the DOD convinced BBC-2 to take a hand-picked group of military wives as the raw material for the third season of the public network’s high-rating series Choir – hosted by Britain’s “inspirational” choirmaster, Gareth Malone.

As a propaganda force, this alliance between the DOD and the BBC proved formidable. Through its sponsors The Choir: Military Wives was able to secure the musical talents of celebrated Welsh composer, Paul Mealor, whose Ubi Caritas et Amor formed part of the ceremony at Prince William’s and Kate Middleton’s nuptials.

The lyrics to Mr Mealor’s appealing melody were stitched together out of hundreds of letters sent by the Military Wives’ choir to their husbands in Afghanistan. With such phrases as “my wondrous star” and “my prince of peace” prominently featured in Wherever You Are, it is pretty clear that the quest for the No. 1 Christmas slot was something more than fortuitous.

The finale of The Choir: Military Wives series was recorded at The Royal Albert Hall on 12 November as part of the Royal British Legion’s (the UK’s equivalent of the RSA) Remembrance Parade, with the Queen in Attendance. Wherever You Are was thus able to make its debut before a television audience estimated at 2.6 million viewers.

Like all hit recordings, Wherever You Are comes with its own “official” video. Images of the choir engaged in recording the song are interspersed with footage of the wives and their children preparing “Welcome Home” banners for their returning heroes, along with heart-wrenching scenes of family reunions. Throughout, the women are shown wearing black T-shirts bearing the words “My husband protects Queen and Country.”

From whom? One is moved to enquire. Have Afghan tanks rolled through the streets of London? Have Afghan attack helicopters strafed defenceless villages in the Home Counties? Do Afghan soldiers patrol the strategic passes of the Pennines? Is the Metropolitan Police Force being re-trained by advisors from Pakistan and Egypt?

Were all these things true, and if the Royal Army was engaged in a heroic defence of the United Kingdom against a foreign army of occupation, then those T-shirts might make some sense. But they are not true. The truth is that it is these women’s husbands who are driving the tanks, flying the attack helicopters, patrolling the mountain passes and training a Quisling government’s army and police.

And for every one of the “wondrous stars” and “princes of peace” who fall in battle, we must count ten, twenty, thirty Afghan resistance fighters and civilians. The “official” video does not show us these families. We do not hear the wailing of Afghan women, or the sobs of Afghan children, for Afghan husbands and fathers who never came home.

The brutal reality of the Afghan War is deliberately hidden in Wherever You Are. Indeed, the very name of the song, by denying the combatants’ theatre of action its true name, and its unique location on the globe, is itself an act of sanitation. It allows the “sexy, sexy supermen” of the Royal Army and Marines to “protect Queen and Country” in an anonymous country called “Wherever” without scrutiny or accountability.

Should the military wives be blamed for participating in this superbly executed propaganda exercise? After all, it wasn’t on their orders that their menfolk were unleashed upon the tragedy that is Afghanistan.

No, it wasn’t, and it’s not for that I condemn them.

What I condemn is their lack of empathy and imagination; their utter incapacity to acknowledge the all-too-real victims of their husbands’ “heroism”.

The men, women and children of Afghanistan.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 30 December 2011.

Turning A Page?

2011-12-27T14:29:00.003+13:00

Labour Turns A Page: But which way? A parsing of David Shearer's Address-in-Reply speech suggests that the party is about to revert to the economic and social priorities of the Clark-Cullen Government of 1999-2008.

THE ADDRESS IN REPLY to the Speech from the Throne presents the Leader of the Opposition with a great opportunity. The newly elected government has placed its words in the mouth of the Governor General, and now it’s time for the alternative government to have its say. The Address-in-Reply debate is a time for grand themes and memorable lines; a time for inducing “buyer’s remorse” among the governing party’s supporters; a time – in short – for the man or woman who would be prime minister to really shine.

Did David Shearer shine? In delivering his first Address-in-Reply speech, did he rise to the occasion? And what (if any) grand and memorable lines did he deliver? Let’s find out.

Mr Shearer began with an acknowledgement that, on 26 November, the electorate rejected what Labour had to offer:

Just over three weeks ago the National Government and the Labour Opposition put our ideas in front of the people of New Zealand, and our side didn’t win.

And therefore Labour will be different in these coming three years.

We will turn a page.

To “turn the page”, in common English usage, means “to stop thinking about and dealing with something”. As in: “Your divorce came through over a year ago, it’s time to turn the page”.

So what is Mr Shearer so keen to stop thinking about? What’s he so tired of dealing with? Is it Helen Clark’s Labour Party? The Labour Party that Phil Goff inherited but couldn’t, or wouldn’t, change? Turning a page on that would make a huge difference.

It would also be extremely difficult. Helen Clark dominated Labour for 15 years – longer than any other Labour Leader. There are those in Camp Shearer who insist that, even now, from a distance of 15,000 kilometres, she is still trying to call the shots. That in the just-concluded leadership contest, Ms Clark actively lobbied for Mr Shearer’s opponent, David Cunliffe.

A party leader reveals a great deal about his character and intentions through the people he chooses to sit alongside him, and those he relegates to the back-benches. If Mr Shearer really is determined to stop thinking about and dealing with Helen Clark, his ‘Shadow Cabinet’ ought to show it.

What it actually discloses, however, is that the Shearer-led Labour Party is more about continuity than change. Mr Shearer’s two big winners, Grant Robertson and Jacinda Ardern, though certainly younger than Ms Clark’s generation of politicians, have yet to demonstrate the slightest ideological deviance from her “social-democratic” prescriptions.

Some of Mr Shearer’s other picks: David Parker, Clayton Cosgrove, Shane Jones, Nanaia Mahuta, Su’a William Sio, Trevor Mallard, Phil Goff, Annette King and Damien O’Connor; suggest a greater willingness to acknowledge the ideals and aspirations of his more conservative caucus colleagues. This could presage a turning away from the social-liberalism that cost Labour so dearly in Ms Clark’s final term. But, the inclusion of David Cunliffe, Phil Twyford, Charles Chauvel, Lianne Dalziel, Chris Hipkins, Darien Fenton and Clare Curran in the Shadow Cabinet points to the more mundane conclusion that, rather than any burning desire to turn over a new leaf, Mr Shearer’s choices reflect Labour's need for “rejuvenation” and a balancing of caucus factions.

But Mr Shearer was not about to let his page-turning metaphor go. A little later in his speech he declared:

The Labour Party is turning a page.

This Labour Party will put growing the pie for all New Zealanders at the front of our agenda.

We cannot be content dividing an ever shrinking pie.

But, “growing the pie” is simply a way of expressing the deeply conservative idea that how one’s country’s national income is distributed matters less than its constant expansion. Ms Clark was fond of quoting John F. Kennedy’s observation that: “A rising tide lifts all boats.” But, as JFK undoubtedly knew (because he used to sail them) and Ms Clark surely appreciates, there’s a world of difference between struggling along in a row-boat, and sailing in a luxury yacht.

In pledging to “grow the pie”, Mr Shearer is speaking in code to New Zealand’s wealthiest men and women. He is telling them that they need not fear a future Labour Government. Wages will continue to be subsidized by Working For Families, and the government will pour millions into scientific research and development. Mr Shearer will use the additional revenue flowing into the state’s coffers from innovative new business ventures to boost spending on education and health. The new jobs created by these business will reduce the government’s welfare obligations, allowing it to repay debt and rebuild surpluses.

If you’re asking yourself: “Weren’t these the economic and social policies of Ms Clark and Dr Michael Cullen?” The answer is: “Yes, they were.”

Mr Shearer and the Labour Party aren’t turning the page forward – they’re turning it back.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 27 December 2011.

Gaudete!

2011-12-25T08:05:00.000+13:00

And they came with haste, and found Mary and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger - Luke 2:16

A Merry Christmas to all Bowalley Road Readers.

May the joy of this day be yours through all the year to come.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

Kia Kaha, Christchurch. New Zealand Stands With You.

2011-12-24T09:37:00.000+13:00

Our hearts and hands go out to all the citizens of Christchurch, as once again the shaking earth tests their resilience and steadfastness.

Know that in the days ahead the thoughts and the prayers of your fellow New Zealanders are with you, Cantabrians.

Stay strong.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

The Forty-First Day (A Christmas Story)

2011-12-23T09:51:00.000+13:00

Immanuel - God Is With Us: Tiny, yet huge. Helpless, yet more powerful that all of Caesar’s armies. Simeon and Anna greet the infant Jesus at the Temple in Jerusalem. (Painting by Arent de Gelder)

IT IS FORTY-ONE DAYS since the star cast its light over Bethlehem, and still we wait. Anna and I, in the shade of the cloisters, as the people come and go, and the smoke of the sacrifices rises. As much a part of the temple as the great gilt doors and the smooth marble pillars. Sitting. Waiting.

Anna is old by any man’s reckoning. Fourscore years and four, they say. She remembers the Second Temple before King Herod arrayed it in cold marble and bright gold.

‘The Temple is Israel’s heart’, Anna says, ‘it’s Holy of Holies. But it does not hold its soul.’ Anna never wavers from this. ‘Not even marble and gold’, she says, ‘can house a person’s soul.’

And so we argued, back and forth. Blind Simeon and Ancient Anna. As the world swirled around us and the years piled up like broken sandals. Fixtures of the Temple Court: constant as the money-changers; harmless as the sacrificial doves.

Until the dreams.

A light, growing in the darkness of our slumbers. Every night it shone more brightly – resolving itself, at length, into the image of a great star, drawing ever nearer.

And then we heard the voice. At first, no more than a whisper. Moving through our minds as the wind moves through the Temple Veil, breathing out the sacred consonants. The words were hard to catch – but I recognised them. For had I not made myself blind reading the holy books? Pouring over them by lamplight until the characters swam away into mist and darkness?

“But as for you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, Too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you one will go forth for me to be ruler in Israel. His goings forth are from long ago, from the days of eternity.”

The words of the prophet, Micah. But what could they mean?

Anna dreamt too. In hers a voice spoke clearly from the very heart of the star.

“Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.”

Immanuel. God is with us.

And then the dream came true. Low in the western sky it shone, night after night, just after the going down of the sun. A star where no star had been before. And every evening it grew brighter, until the night – forty-one days ago it was – when it seemed to hover, lower than ever in the night sky, over Bethlehem.

And the next morning the shepherds came. With wide eyes and stammering tongues they told us of what they had seen: the heavenly host; the stable; the woman; the child. One of the shepherds, eyes wider than all the rest, took me by the arm.

“Death draws near, Blind Simeon. But not before your eyes behold the saviour: God’s true son, here, in the Temple, on the forty-first day.”

And so we wait, Anna and I. Here, in the shade of the cloisters. On the forty-first day.

Anna saw them first. The little family. Rustic and awestruck amid Herod’s splendour. She grabbed me by the sleeve and led me to them.

“Here, at last,” she said, “is one fit to hold men’s souls. Good Lady will you let Blind Simeon, the Rabbi, bless your son?”

I took the babe in my arms. And like a curtain drawn aside, light flooded into my waking mind, and I saw him. Tiny, yet huge. Helpless, yet more powerful that all of Caesar’s armies. I lifted him high above my head, so all could see, and cried out in a voice that echoed off the Temple walls:

“Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word: for mine eyes have seen thy salvation, which thou hast prepared before the face of all people; a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.”

Above our heads, a dove flapped wildly, and was gone.

This short story was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 23 December 2011.

Tony Blair No Guide For Shearer's Labour

2011-12-20T14:08:00.000+13:00

First and Second of the Third Way: Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson felt obliged to destroy the British Labour Party in order to save it. This is precisely NOT what David Shearer and his team should do.

TONY BLAIR transformed the British Labour Party by means of root-and-branch reform. His priorities were as clear as they were ruthless. Disable the party. Re-write its rule-book. And, most importantly, make sure Labour’s MPs were accountable to nobody but themselves.

Blair’s reforms were driven by the strategic thinking of his chief henchman, Peter Mandelson. In essence, Mandelson’s strategy boiled down to just three, fundamental, political insights:

One. Since the British working-class has no serious political alternative to Labour, the party can safely ignore its interests.

Two. Since no party can be elected without the support of the British middle-classes, and since these have multiple electoral options, Labour must not, under any circumstances, advance policies that might upset middle-class voters.

Three. To retain the support of middle-class voters, Labour must never allow its political rivals to out-bid it on matters relating to “sound” economic and social policy.

Blair’s and Mandelson’s strategy made a brutal kind of sense in the light of the British Labour Party’s recent history, and within the wider context of British electoral politics.

The party had endured years of bitter factional strife, with those who regarded Labour as the last bastion of working-class resistance to Thatcherism fighting a desperate rear-guard action against the bleak electoral logic of the “modernisers” analysis.

That logic was, of course, underpinned by the First-Past-the-Post electoral system, which allowed the Conservative Party to win large parliamentary majorities in spite of attracting considerably less than half of the popular vote.

Labour’s “modernisers” also had to factor-in the impact of globalisation on the size of Britain’s industrial working-class (the core of both the traditional Labour vote and the more militant trade unions) and the more recent ideological triumph of capitalism over its Soviet rival.

IN 2011, the strategic choices confronting the New Zealand Labour Party’s new leader, David Shearer, are very different to those which taxed Tony Blair in the mid-1990s.

Rather than a fractious, activist and openly antagonistic party organisation, Mr Shearer inherits a party in which rank-and-file members have sunk to the level of what one wit describes as “MP fan clubs”. At its upper levels, the party is caught in the grip of a sclerotic, self-selecting oligarchy based in Labour’s insular and largely unaccountable sector-groups. In effect, Mr Shearer’s Labour Party is rapidly disabling itself. His first and most urgent priority is to kick it back into life.

To do this he must, like Blair, re-write Labour’s rule-book. Not to marginalise the party and insulate the caucus from its influence, but to do exactly the opposite. Mr Shearer needs to grow his party. At 6,000 members, Labour is only slightly bigger than the Greens. If it is to re-claim the Treasury Benches it must once again become a mass party, with a membership measured in the tens-of-thousands. And that cannot happen unless those members are equipped with real powers. These include the power to determine (and not merely “contribute” to the making of) party policy. The power to choose and rank the people on Labour’s Party List – as the Green Party members do. And, lastly, the power to choose their party’s leader. (Either directly, by a postal ballot of the whole membership, or, as the British do, through an electoral college composed of the rank-and-file, affiliated organisations, and the Parliamentary Caucus.)

Unless Mr Shearer moves swiftly to force rule-changes along these lines, all of his rhetoric about wanting to “listen” to New Zealanders will ring hollow. The most effective way to “hear” what ordinary Kiwis have to say about their country’s future, is to encourage them to join your political party by promising to translate their ideas into policy. Mr Shearer needs to convince the tens-of-thousands of Labour members who have walked away from the party that he’s committed to a future in which rank-and-file votes not only shape what Labour stands for, but who stands for Labour.

The fate of Damien O’Connor points the way. Rejecting the influence of Labour’s oligarchs over the content and ranking of the Party List, Mr O’Connor staked his future on an all-or-nothing bid for the West Coast-Tasman seat. The Coasters were only too happy to reward his courage. On 26 November, alone of all Labour’s candidates, it was Mr O’Connor who took a seat off the National Party – and by a handsome majority.

Mr Shearer has another great advantage over Tony Blair. He’s assumed Labour’s leadership in a world embittered and angry at neoliberalism’s botched ideological recipes. In 1998 Peter Mandelson infamously remarked that Labour was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”. In 2011, far too many people are drowning in the rich’s filth for any sensible Labour leader to utter such dangerous apostasy.

To win in 2014, David Shearer need only steer Labour in precisely the opposite direction to that of Tony Blair.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 20 December 2011.

A Fresh Face - For A Fresh Start

2011-12-16T11:13:00.002+13:00

Authenticity: David Shearer feels real. And it's that quality, more than any other, that Labour needs if it is to recover from its worst defeat in 80 years and win the 2014 election.

THE BLUE SEDAN had been following their car for some time. The driver kept glancing in the rear-view mirror, saying nothing, but watching, with growing apprehension, as the distance between the two vehicles narrowed. He was pretty sure he’d seen the occupants’ faces before. They’d been part of the angry crowd of Israeli settlers who’d gathered to hurl stones and abuse at the West-Bank border checkpoint.

The Palestinian villagers who were the focus of the settlers’ rage just shrugged. This was their life now. What could they say? For a couple of hours the little delegation had stayed and listened, and then driven away with the details of yet another incursion; yet another seizure of Arab land. But, as their driver now plainly saw, they had not left alone.

The narrow streets of Old Jerusalem prevented any sort of fast getaway, and corner by corner, intersection by intersection, the blue sedan edged closer. The driver was certain now: these were the men he’d seen at the check-point, the ones who had eye-balled him directly and drawn their fingers across their throats in the universal gesture of murderous intent. Still the driver said nothing to his companions, but around the steering-wheel his knuckles visibly whitened.

And then, thanks-be-to-God, another checkpoint loomed ahead. Israeli soldiers moved towards the two now motionless vehicles seeking identification. The driver presented his United Nations ID and his three Kiwi companions offered up their New Zealand passports. While a weary-looking officer checked them out, the driver clearly overheard one of the occupants of the blue sedan tell the young conscript holding his papers: “Hurry-up and let us through little brother, we’ve come to kill that sonofabitch from the UN!”

As the soldiers patiently instructed the settler assassins to turn their car around, David Shearer and his friends drove on to safety.

"Let us through little brother, we've come to kill that sonofabitch from the UN!"

IT’S STORIES LIKE THAT that made David Shearer Labour’s leader, and may, in three years’ time, make him New Zealand’s next prime minister. Not because he is New Zealand’s most eloquent politician. Not because his grasp of detail is second-to-none. Not because he has a face and a manner perfectly suited to the small screen. If those were the qualities the Labour Caucus had been seeking they would have chosen David Cunliffe – who has them in abundance.

Labour’s Caucus, which the New Zealand electorate, just three weeks ago, saw fit to pare down from forty-three to thirty-four Members of Parliament, knows better than anyone that their party’s been judged and found wanting. Its deficiency was not one of intellect, or feeling, or capability. What Labour was deemed to lack was authenticity. More bluntly: it didn’t seem real. And unless and until it becomes real, Labour will remain in opposition.

And that is David Shearer’s great advantage. In spite of (or is it because of) his “lived-in” face and his hesitant speech Labour’s new leader feels genuine; feels true.

At the media conference that followed his election, David Shearer talked about bringing a “fresh face” to a “fresh start”, and of wanting to build a “clean, green and clever” economy “open to all New Zealanders”. Most importantly, Labour’s new leader wants to “reconnect” his party with the people whose support it has lost.

These are not the factory workers of yesteryear, they’re the independent contractors and self-employed workers of today. Workers who, for better or for worse, have only themselves and their families to rely on. Workers who, though unprotected by unions, and unsupported by the State, are nevertheless proud of what they have made out of the skills they have acquired and the opportunities they have seized.

Like the farmers of Palestine and the herdsmen of Somalia, all these New Zealanders want is a chance to get on with their lives in peace and without undue interference. An olive grove, a herd of cattle, or a little franchise business mowing lawns, altering clothes or splicing cables: the difference in the end is pretty negligible. These are “little guys” in a large and too-often-uncaring world. And all they’re looking for is someone and something to stand in their corner; a person and a party to watch their back.

And that, for his whole adult life, is precisely what David Shearer has been doing.

And the men in the blue sedan haven’t been able to stop him yet.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 16 December 2011.

Looking Back - A Sketch

2011-12-15T13:48:00.005+13:00

"To the Revolution!"

IT’S THE DAY AFTER the 2014 General Election. We’re at Matthew Hooton’s splendid residence in Parnell and the champagne is flowing. Out in the garden Chris Trotter is holding forth to John Pagani and Matt McCarten when Bryce Edwards steps onto the deck clutching a copy of the Herald on Sunday.

CHRIS: Bryce, you Useful Idiot! Get your arse over here and have some Champagne!

BRYCE: (Waving the paper in front of him) Brilliant column Matt. Just the right combination of triumphalism and spite.

MATT: I try to please.

BRYCE: I especially liked the reference to Shearer’s “Un-lefting of the Left”.

CHRIS: Hardly surprising, Bryce – it’s your concept.

BRYCE: (Blushing) Well, that’s true, I suppose.

MATT: No supposing about it! But how far would the idea have got if Trotter and Pagani hadn’t been around to popularise it?

CHRIS: Or if Shearer hadn’t been smart enough to pick it up.

JOHN: (Winking) No fear of that! It’s amazing what a politician will do with a little encouragement from his friends.

MATT: (Raising his glass) To malleable Manchurians!

ALL: (Clinking their glasses) To malleable Manchurians!

Cathy Odgers approaches the group bearing a tray of Russian caviar.

CATHY: I presume the sort of socialist who’s willing to drink Veuve Clicquot won’t turn his nose up at caviar?

CHRIS: Beluga?

CATHY: Of course.

CHRIS: Lovely!

MATT: So how was the Act bash, Cathy? You must have taken some grim satisfaction at seeing Banksie wiped out in Epsom?

CATHY: Yes and no. It was great to see him defeated – but not by Labour!

MATT: Didn’t I tell you that Shearer had cross-over appeal?

MATTHEW: (Depositing a couple of eye-wateringly expensive Pinot Noirs on the table.) Yes, but that’s only because you bastards were so bloody successful at transforming him into a racist, sexist, homophobic, fascist cunt who made Key sound ideological - while he was somehow allowed to present hard-line communism as economic common-sense.

JOHN: (Perusing the wine label, before pouring himself a generous glassful.) Spoken like a true 1-percenter Matthew.

MATTHEW: Hah! But it won't stop you drinking my wine, will it? Still, what the hell is the Right supposed to do when the likes of Time Magazine makes “The Protester” 2011’s Person of the Year? There were just too many people – like those class traitors Gareth Morgan and Bernard Hickey – who were willing to give all that smelly hippie ‘we are the 99-percent’ crap credibility.

CHRIS: That’s no way to talk about our David. Just because he plays the guitar. (Takes another sip of wine.) This is fabulous Pinot, by the way.

BRYCE: (Excitedly) But Matthew’s right! It was the Occupy movement and the collapse of the Eurozone which finally broke the neoliberal spell. That, and the landslide re-election of Obama on a platform of economic populism. It all conspired to open up the path towards a traditionally left-wing Labour programme.

CHRIS: Which opened the doors of the Labour Party to that most extraordinary of creatures – the ordinary New Zealander.

CATHY: Yes, that was the really clever move. Once the party was pumped full of Trotter’s Waitakere Men it was sayonara for the gaggle.

CHRIS: Ah, yes, the “defenestration” conference. How did Shearer put it: “I’ve worked in places where racial, religious and ideological fanaticism have armed themselves with political power, and I can tell you, the results are not pretty – and offer no models for the New Zealand Labour Party.”

JOHN: Definitely one Trotter’s better lines.

CATHY: You think so? I reckon it was Shearer’s “We must move beyond what George Bush called ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations’; it’s time to stop allowing brown skins to excuse black deeds.”

MATTHEW: Bloody disgraceful racist bullshit!

BRYCE: It worked though. The Identity Politicians all marched out in protest.

MATT: With Robertson at their head!

CHRIS: A definite twofer! And not before time. The Clark Years infantilised Labour’s membership. After the upheavals of the 1980s and early 90s they were so terrified of debate and dissent that they forgot how to think for themselves. And when you do that, there are always plenty of people only too willing to do your thinking for you. (Leaning toward the table.) Is there any of that Beluga still going begging?

BRYCE: And after the big walk-out it was pretty much all plain sailing. Because, in most people’s minds, feminism, gay rights, tino rangatiratanga and bossing people around is the Left. When all those people threw themselves out of the window, “Middle New Zealand” breathed a huge sigh of relief. Chris and John hailed Shearer for “de-Lefting the Left”, John Armstrong picked up the quote in The Herald, and ….

MATTHEW: …. I know, I know, iPredict went mad ….

MATT: … and the polls followed suit.

CHRIS: (Spreading caviar on a sliver of rye bread) Eighteen points in a single bound – Don Brash eat your heart out!

MATT: It was amazing really. When Shearer announced he was going to re-nationalise the privatised assets and re-introduce universal union membership, nobody – apart from Business NZ and Federated Farmers – batted an eyelid. Although, I suppose it helped that Obama was doing much the same thing in the States.

CATHY: And that’s it, isn’t it. Parasites in charge from London to Vladivostok. And after the Chinese Communists’ latest anti-capitalist crackdown, I can’t even go back to Hong Kong!

CHRIS: The trick was to make John Key the voice of ideology, and David Shearer the voice of common-sense.

JOHN: Which we did.

MATTHEW: (Rising from the table.) And so bloody well, you Commie bastards! Why do I keep inviting you to these things?

MATT: Because we're good for business?

CATHY: What do you mean?

MATT: Exceltium’s been offered the job of softening up - I mean preparing - the country for the restoration of universal union membership. A big PR contract, with a big price-tag to match.

CATHY: (Rising to follow Matthew) Hmmm? Does he need a lawyer?

CHRIS: What was it Lenin said about capitalists competing to supply the rope that will hang them?

MATT: Comrades. (Rising to his feet and raising his glass.) To the Revolution!

ALL: The Revolution!

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

National's High Tide

2011-12-14T12:11:00.000+13:00

This Far - But No Further: In spite of his best efforts, John Key could not lift National's vote above 48 percent. Like Rob Muldoon and Jim Bolger before him, it was a matter of "close, but no cigar". Clearly, Stephen Joyce's dream of winning more than 50 percent of the Party Vote must remain just that - a dream. National's tide is at the full: it can only recede.

THE RULE BOOK is safe. The experts told us that, under a system of proportional representation, it is next-to-impossible for a single party to win more that 50 percent of the popular vote in a multi-party election. And so it has proved. Indeed, John Key’s election-night boast that National had achieved its best result since 1951 proved to be somewhat premature. In terms of the popular vote, both Rob Muldoon and Jim Bolger did better than Mr Key, taking 47.6 percent And 47.8 percent respectively.

Nevertheless, 47.3 percent of the Party Vote is an impressive feat – and fully two percentage points higher than the MMP record established by Mr Key’s party only three years ago. In failing to breach that historical limit of 48 percent, however, Mr Key has laid to rest the cherished hope of many in the National Party that a genuine majority lies within their grasp. And, with the emphatic victory of MMP in the referendum, it must now be generally accepted that the tide of National support can rise no higher.

This leaves National’s strategists facing a rather large conundrum. Having swallowed-up all of their right-wing electoral rivals – and still fallen short of their 50 percent + 1 target – in which direction should they now turn? Further to the Right? Or double-back and turn towards the Left?

Prior to the election there were many in National’s ranks quietly praying that most of the four percent of the Party Vote claimed by NZ First in 2008 would end up flowing National’s way. Their shock and anger on election-night is easily imagined.

Unlike the Alliance, Winston Peters’ party did not fracture, and then fracture again into electoral irrelevance. Far from it. NZ First not only held, it grew. The notorious “tea-pot tape” observations of Messrs Key and Banks notwithstanding, Mr Peters support extends far beyond the elderly. As anyone who witnessed the launch of his campaign at Alexandra Park will testify, his base now spans the entire New Zealand population – including, perhaps surprisingly, immigrants from East and South Asia.

That just leaves Colin Craig’s Conservative Party. Absorbing the latter’s two percent of the Party Vote would, however, come at a cost. National would have to step back into the fetid ideological swamp of the Religious Right: that place where Don Brash came to such grief in the 2005 General Election; that place from which Mr Key extracted National’s electability by throwing his party’s support behind the anti-smacking bill in 2007.

Any embrace of the Religious Right would provoke a mass exodus of National’s more liberal supporters. The party might inherit the nearly 60,000 electors who voted Conservative, but it would likely lose twice that number to Labour and the Greens.

If moving further to the Right offers National few, if any, advantages; what about a move to the Left? Much of Mr Key’s first term success is attributable to his decision to bring the Maori Party into his government. Like his very public repudiation of the Religious Right, the National Leaders embrace of the Maori Party silenced the howling dogs of Orewa who, like their evangelical brethren, posed a deadly threat to National’s carefully constructed image of moderation.

But while the embrace of the Maori Party has brought only good to National, to the Maori Party itself it has brought only division and decline. Though the loyalty of its three remaining MPs may be shored up with the perquisites of ministerial office, the party will almost certainly expire as a viable electoral force before the 2014 election.

Which leaves only the Greens as a potential National Party running mate in elections to come. But is this, the ultimate fantasy of the Right’s urban liberals, a practical proposition? Or, would it lead to the fracturing of both parties’ electoral bases?

Reaching out to the Greens would induce both rage and panic among National’s rural and provincial supporters. The offer of anything more substantial than an anodyne “Memorandum of Understanding” would immediately set off wild drumming in the heartland for the establishment of a “Country Party”. In the deep blue suburbs of metropolitan New Zealand such an unthinkable misalliance would pump lungfuls of desperately needed oxygen into the barely breathing body of the Act Party. And with Winston Peters hastening to set up refugee camps in NZ First, National would be faced with imminent disintegration.

And always, over National’s shoulder looms the spectre of New Zealand’s second largest party. No, not Labour, but the party of the one million Kiwis who chose not to vote at all in 2011. It is among these voters that the missionaries of the opposition parties will be moving ceaselessly for the next three years: cajoling them; flattering them; and wooing them back to the ballot-box.

How many of them, I wonder, are National voters?

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 13 December 2011.

Sky Is Not The Limit: Restoring Public Media

2011-12-12T16:16:00.000+13:00

Searching For A New Signal: The restoration of genuine public broadcasting - and the reinvigoration of New Zealand democracy - could begin with the nationalisation of the Sky Television Network.

WHILE THE LAW COMMISSION’s latest Issues Paper has raised a number of important questions about how best to regulate the content of the news media, there is much less interest in discussing news media ownership. The political class, in particular, tends to run a mile from such discussions. The extraordinary domination of the New Zealand media market by just a handful of overseas-owned media conglomerates is one of those things that polite politicians simply do not discuss.

The implications of foreign media ownership for the quality of New Zealand democracy are, however, substantial. The maximisation of profit, unconstrained by even a residual sense of national responsibility, can only lead to the relentless downgrading of journalistic standards and the elevation of entertainment over news values. Intellectually taxing and culturally challenging media products are increasingly relegated to niche markets and the steady dumbing-down of the mass media’s bill-of-fare continues apace.

The question which politicians of the Left should be asking themselves is a simple one: ‘Do dumbed-down consumers make better, or worse, democratic decisions than well-informed citizens?’ And if they concede that an ignorant population is incompatible with an effective democracy, then what do they propose to do about foreign control of the New Zealand news media? In particular, what do they propose to do about the growing domination of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sky Television Network?

Shortly before the General Election a senior media entrepreneur told me that within two years Sky would find itself in exactly the same position as the old, state-owned NZBC: exerting something perilously close to monopoly control over New Zealand broadcasting. With a friendly government willing to look the other way, Sky may soon be in a position to either drive out or absorb what remains of its on-screen competition. This country’s extensive cross-media ownership could also see Sky acquiring most of New Zealand’s radio audiences as a sort of broadcasting by-catch. Complaints about anti-competitive behaviour would be answered by pointing to the existence of the isolated, under-staffed and politically beleaguered state-owned broadcasting system.

A foreign-owned, privately controlled broadcasting network occupying a near-monopoly position within the New Zealand media market should be anathema to Labour, Green, NZ First and Mana politicians. Together, these parties of the Centre Left should take serious thought as to how the growing power of the Sky Television Network might be constrained, and public broadcasting restored to its former status as the prime guarantor of a well-informed and actively engaged democratic citizenry.

In my view, the most successful re-nationalisation strategy would involve a two-pronged regulatory thrust at the core of Sky’s profitability. The first thrust would involve passing a law limiting the amount of foreign share-holding in any New Zealand television network to ten percent. This would require a massive sell-off of foreign-owned shares – sharply depressing their value. Television New Zealand and Radio New Zealand could then be furnished with sufficient funds to acquire these shares on the public’s behalf. At the same time legislation would be introduced to Parliament requiring all existing networks to re-apply for a broadcasting licence. These would only be issued if the owners undertook to offer their viewers and listeners a comprehensive news and current-affairs service, and were ready to commission a generous quantity of local drama, documentary, children’s and ethnically-oriented programmes. The high cost of these licencing requirements would further depress the value of Sky’s shares, greatly facilitating their purchase by the state-owned broadcasters.

It would, of course, still be in the interests of the main content providers to sell their product to the new state-owned Pay-TV network. It’s monopsonistic (look it up!) position in the New Zealand market would, however, allow it to purchase that content at a significantly lower price. The subscription-price would be reduced accordingly (but not set so low that the public-service requirements of the State Broadcasters’ free-to-air programming could not be assured of a generous subsidy).

The Right will, naturally, protest loudly at such a policy. Dire warnings will be issued about the “sovietisation” of the New Zealand media, and the grave threats this policy would pose to our democratic way of life. They are, of course, the same people who cheered when the National Government of Jim Bolger legislated away the rights of hundreds of thousands of New Zealand workers with the Employment Contracts Act. And they will no doubt cheer again when, over the objections of nearly three-quarters of the population, our state-owned energy companies are “partially” privatised. They are also the people who have remained suspiciously silent as the democracy they so loudly claim to prize has been consistently undermined and weakened by the dumbed-down programming of the market-driven news media.

In his book The Economics of Feasible Socialism, Alexander Nove wrote of nationalisation:

The original notion was that nationalization would achieve three objectives. One was to dispossess the big capitalists. The second was to divert the profits from private appropriation to the public purse. Thirdly, the nationalized sector would serve the public good rather than try to make private profits ...To these objectives some (but not all) would add some sort of workers’ control, the accountability of management to employees.

Having seen what the “big capitalists” have done, and are continuing to do, to our world, policies directed towards refilling the “public purse”, upholding the “public good”, and increasing the “accountability of management”, recommend themselves as not only well worth a second look – but a second go.

And rest assured, Sky is not the limit.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

Waitakere Woman Beats "Waitakere Man"

2011-12-12T10:24:00.002+13:00

Waitakere's Choice: Congratulations Carmel! You and Labour were right - and I was wrong.

CONGRATULATIONS CARMEL SEPULONI! There can be no greater riposte to the pronouncements of a political commentator than to actually do what he says cannot be done.

In a Bowalley Road posting on 10 March 2010 entitled “Outrageous Choices” I stated that:

The clear goal facing Labour in Waitakere was to choose a candidate who can beat Paula Bennett. That candidate needed to be: female, have a solid working-class background (to which, at some point, she had added a tertiary qualification) be either Pakeha or Maori (or, ideally, a mixture of both) and, most importantly, be capable of “talking shit” with the same cheeky facility as the incumbent. Think Outrageous Fortune meets Erin Brocovitch.

A healthy Labour Party would have women like that lining up for the Waitakere seat. That it has ended up selecting a candidate who would, quite frankly, have been much more usefully matched against National’s Sam Lotu-liga in Maungakiekie (where I also happen to think Labour has made a wrong choice) speaks volumes.

Well, by winning Waitakere (albeit with just 11 votes to spare) Ms Sepuloni has vindicated Labour’s choice and proven that Paula Bennett isn’t the only one with a facility for “talking shit”.

Well done, Carmel. The Crow is in preparation. (Dammit – but I hate those feathers!)

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

Staying Ahead Of The Power Curve

2011-12-09T12:08:00.000+13:00

Joint Take-Off: Only by joining forces can David Shearer and David Cunliffe free themselves from the tutelage of Labour's "Spent Forces". Shearer alone will be beholden to them. And Cunliffe alone will be undermined by them. Only together can Shearer and Cunliffe isolate and disarm Labour's Old Guard. Only by working together can the forces of reform stay ahead of the power curve.

THERE’S A SCENE in the movie Missing where Captain Ray Tower, the US Naval Intelligence officer, gives Beth, the leftist hero’s girlfriend, a piece of advice.

“You gotta learn to stay ahead of the power curve, kid. You know what I mean? It's an old aircraft carrier term. If a pilot gets ahead of the power curve and something happens, then he can pull up and away. But if he falls behind the power curve and something happens, then it's adios. You gotta stay ahead of the power curve, kid.”

By now David Cunliffe will have a pretty good idea of whether he’s ahead of, or behind, the power curve that’s about to determine the Labour leadership. My guess is, he’s behind. My guess is David Shearer will, by the time you read this, have enough support to win the caucus vote on Tuesday.

If Mr Cunliffe remains on his present course, then, in the words of Captain Tower, “it’s adios” to his leadership hopes. He will have fallen behind the power curve.

But, there’s still a way Mr Cunliffe’s fighter plane can clear the aircraft carrier’s deck. Because, from the moment David Parker abandoned the race and released his supporters, Mr Shearer has also been behind the power curve. If Mr Shearer wants to get ahead of the power curve, then he’s going to need Mr Cunliffe.

How can this be? How can Mr Shearer be poised to become Labour’s leader and yet lack the power to get his plane off the flight deck? The answer lies in the composition of Mr Shearer’s support.

When he, almost casually, added his name to the list of leadership candidates on 29 November, I really don’t think Mr Shearer had much of a game plan beyond signalling to his colleagues that, at some point, but probably not this point, he might be considered for the top job. What he failed to grasp was that by adding his own candidacy to the leadership contest he’d unwittingly strengthened the hand of Mr Cunliffe’s enemies.

Prior to Mr Shearer’s announcement, the “Anyone But Cunliffe” (ABC) clique had been forced to place all their hopes in Mr Parker. But, as the three-Davids encounter on TVNZ’s Close-Up cruelly exposed, Mr Parker was never going to beat Mr Cunliffe. Mr Shearer, on the other hand, looked like a winner.

Almost overnight, Mr Parker found himself abandoned by his erstwhile backers. Even Grant Robertson, the man Mr Parker had nominated as his preferred Deputy, snuck off to “Camp Shearer”. Stricken, Mr Parker withdrew from the race and threw his support behind Mr Shearer.

Now Mr Shearer was a serious contender, but his new front-runner status came at a price. Like David Lange before him, he was no longer his own man. Labour’s spent forces, the MPs epitomised by the politically exhausted figure of Trevor Mallard, were now wrapped around Mr Shearer like Supplejack around a Totara. And they were clinging to him for only one reason: survival. Their arch-enemy, Mr Cunliffe, had long ago read their use-by dates. That’s why the ABC’s couldn’t allow him to win.

But, if Mr Cunliffe cannot defeat Mr Shearer, he can, at least, defeat Mr Shearer’s backers. A rejuvenated, restructured, or, to borrow Labour stalwart, Jordan Carter’s, term, “refounded” Labour Party cannot be created by a glove-puppet.

If Mr Cunliffe cannot beat Mr Shearer, then he should, over the next 72 hours, think very seriously about joining him. It’s not too late for the best qualified candidate to contact the most popular candidate; set up a meeting; and make a deal. Mr Key and Mr English did it – why not Mr Shearer and Mr Cunliffe?

Together, they’ve more than enough strength to tear off and make a bonfire of all that parasitic caucus Supplejack. Together, they could bend the arc of history towards a Labour victory. Together, a new power curve could hurl their fighters skyward – heading straight for the National fleet.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 9 December 2011.

Ripping-Up The Consensus

2011-12-08T12:58:00.005+13:00

Re-focusing On The Right: The Confidence and Supply Agreement signed between Act and National signals the Right's intention to rip-up the "Labour-lite" consensus that guaranteed John Key's re-election. Neoliberalism With a Human Face is about to be replaced by Neoliberalism Without a Human Heart. The resulting political crisis could easily become the Left's opportunity.

WELL, NOW WE KNOW. For more than three years political commentators have speculated and quarrelled about National’s identity. Was John Key’s rise evidence of a return to the conservative pragmatism of the 1960s? Or, was this government’s relatively unadventurous first term merely the necessary hiatus between Helen Clark’s and Michael Cullen’s Neoliberalism With a Human Face and the renewed onset of Neoliberalism Without a Human Heart?

The confidence-and-supply agreement negotiated between National and Act provides us with an emphatic answer to that question. Confronted with a “coalition partner” incapable of garnering more than 20,000 votes nationwide, or winning a seat without assistance, Key’s National Party arrived at the negotiating table without obligation. Indeed, it was John Banks who was entirely obligated to John Key – without whose intervention the Act Party would’ve ceased to exist as a parliamentary player. Had they been of a mind to do so, National’s negotiators could have simply shoved a C&S agreement in front of Banks and told him to: “Say ‘Thank-you’ and sign here.”

That National’s negotiators walked out of the room with a C&S agreement mandating a Tax-Payers’ Bill of Rights (TABOR) and the establishment of Charter Schools owed nothing to Banks' skill as a wheeler-dealer, and everything to a sophisticated strategic understanding between Catherine Issacs, John Key and Stephen Joyce. The latter’s pragmatism dictates that Key should hold on to his moderate persona for as long as he can by attempting to blame Act for the National-led Government’s sharp turn to the Right. Issacs, meanwhile, will take advantage of the inevitable disintegration of the “Brash Bloc” to carve out a new niche for the Act Party.

The “Brash Bloc” was Joyce’s shrewd adaptation of Labour’s long-established “No Enemies to the Left” strategy. Between 2002 and 2008 National’s key objective was to re-absorb the voters of the Right into a single, massive bloc of conservative support, eliminating or hopelessly marginalising every other party bidding for right-wing votes. The ultimate goal was a genuine majority of the Party Votes cast and the re-birth of National as “the natural party of government”.

Well, it was a case of “close, but no cigar” – hence the decision to tear up the “Labour-lite” consensus of 2008-2011, break up the Brash Bloc, and allow Act to reconstruct itself as the ideologically-driven, vanguard party it should always have been (and which Catherine Issacs has been trying to build for the past seven years). The Brash Bloc was worth preserving while there was still some hope of expanding it with the remnants of New Zealand First. But Winston Peters' dogged refusal to accept his 2008 defeat, coupled with the remarkable tenacity of the NZ First Party itself, saw National’s high-tide crest where, in the sixty years since 1951, it has always crested – at just under 48 percent.

Some commentators have suggested that, faced with this situation, National should break to the Left and position itself as a potential coalition partner for the Green’s. To follow this strategy, however, National would have to concede a far larger share of the conservative vote to Act and NZ First, leaving it dangerously vulnerable to a strong leftward push from the Green’s. More worryingly, the notion that National was at the mercy of a radical, farmer-unfriendly, social-ecologist party could easily lead to the formation of a “heartland” country party based in rural and provincial New Zealand. The risk, then, would be the coming together of a conservative bloc large enough to contemplate governing without a by-now-limbless National rump.

Strategically-speaking, National has run out of “soft” options. Saddled with the proportional MMP electoral system, and having reached the outer limits of its voter support, it will be obliged to abandon its moderate persona and strike out boldly to the Right. With Act’s capacity to mask this rightward shift extremely limited, the public’s perception of National will likely undergo a sea-change, causing the polls to register a steadily rising level of support for the opposition parties.

The Government’s only real hope of re-election at this point will be to manufacture the sort of crisis that causes people to seek refuge under conservatism's umbrella. Some sort of cultural and/or environmental provocation seems the most likely: something to provoke Maori, the social-liberals and/or the environmentalists to actions which exceed the bounds of “mainstream” tolerance. If they were really clever, the Right’s strategists would be looking for something that could not only incite extra-parliamentary protest, but a sharpening of the ideological tensions within the opposition parties. Chaos on the streets and conflict in the ranks of the Government’s opponents might just be enough to snatch a tactical triumph from the jaws of strategic defeat.

The onus is thus placed upon the parties of the Centre and Left to anticipate National’s tactics and use the next few months to formulate a decisive break with the current economic and political orthodoxy. The emergence of a de facto progressive programme, based on the opposition parties’ firm and final rejection of the neoliberal project and their embrace of emerging policy options like the Universal Basic Income and the Financial Transactions Tax awaits only the political will to write it down. This emerging progressive coalition should also evince a willingness to think the unthinkable by openly discussing such taboo subjects as the restoration of universal union membership and the renationalisation of privatised industries.

If National’s only viable strategic option is the ripping-up of the economic and political consensus that won John Key his second term, then the Left would be foolish indeed not to take full advantage of the ideological space his radical change of direction is bound to open up. In the finest dialectical fashion, the Government’s dwindling strategic and tactical options are multiplying the Opposition’s opportunities for bold and original thinking.

The same circumstances which now constrain the Right can offer hope and freedom to the Left; providing only that it possesses both the wit and the courage to use them.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

Let Shearer Build It - And They will Come

2011-12-06T10:17:00.000+13:00

A Light In The Darkness Of Defeat: The conventionally wise would say that David Cunliffe, as the Labour politician best qualified to guide his party to victory in 2011, should become its leader. Except that it was the very same conventional wisdom that persuaded Helen Clark to annoint Phil Goff in 2008. After its most crushing defeat in more than 80 years, perhaps it's time for Labour to ignore the conventionally wise and take a risk - on David Shearer.

IT HAS TO BE DAVID SHEARER. A week from today, the 34 members of Labour’s caucus must reject the known quantity that is David Cunliffe and take a risk on the new and untested Mr Shearer. Why? Because “known quantities” are not what New Zealand needs.

Labour is a “known quantity”: a known quantity which three out of every four New Zealand voters decisively rejected on 26 November. Choosing the smooth-talking Fulbright scholar over the rough-hewn UN trouble-shooter would be spitting in the face of that electoral judgement. It would be an admission that Labour is only interested in returning, as quickly as possible, to the politics of business-as-usual.

But, business-as-usual is National’s game. Labour cannot beat John Key by playing on his field and according to his rules. The party needs a new set of rules and a new field.

But, before laying-out that field, a great many entrenched interests must be cleared away. In five years’ time, Labour, New Zealand’s oldest political party, will celebrate its centenary. In 95 years, a vessel’s hull acquires many barnacles. It’s long past the time that the good ship Labour was hauled up on to the hard and had its bottom scraped.

“[T]he Labour Party has just become too focused on process”, Mr Shearer told The Nation’s Sean Plunket on 3 December. “We end up going to meetings where we talk about process, and it hasn’t become a contest of ideas, of really open ideas, and therefore it’s become boring, and people join political parties because they want to have this contest, they want to argue stuff together and they want to see good stuff moving forward, and I think we’ve lost that, and I think we’ve lost some of our good thinkers.”

Re-constructing the Labour Party, so that it may once again become a forum in which ideas can be openly argued and contested, would be a genuinely radical political act. It would mean stripping-out the numerous “Sector Groups” from Labour’s Constitution, and moving the central policy debates out of the MP-dominated Policy Committees and returning them to the floor of the party’s annual conference. Allowing the votes of Labour’s rank-and-file delegates to once again set the party’s course.

That would be risky. The speeches of ordinary rank-and-file delegates have the potential to severely embarrass the party hierarchy. “Unenlightened” delegates might advocate policies that offend the socially liberal sensibilities of the infamous “Bowen Triangle”. The news media would undoubtedly zero-in on dissenters and single-issue zealots, and the whole edifice of “professional” media management (or should that be manipulation) might come crashing down. But, at least the policy that emerged from the “really open contest of ideas” that David Shearer is seeking would be recognisably “popular” – in the sense of arising from the people – and would attract many more votes than the endlessly refined products of the policy elites.

Liberating Labour from the tutelage of its interest groups would also mean doing away with the present system of trade union affiliation. A new form of affiliation: providing for like-minded organisations to send observers to party gatherings, and allowing them to contribute to – but not vote – in its debates and elections, should be introduced.

Trade unions wishing to move beyond advocacy to full-scale deliberation should encourage their members to take out ordinary party membership. The image of union affiliation which I still retain from my years in the Labour Party is of a single union secretary collecting all of the ballot papers allocated to his affiliated union, filling them in himself, and stuffing every single one into the ballot-box on behalf of a candidate his members had never been given the opportunity to either endorse or reject.

It’s that sort of behaviour which has persuaded so many rank-and-filers to give up in disgust. And, as ordinary membership of the party has dwindled, the power of the affiliated unions has grown, until the point was reached where the abomination that was the 2011 Labour Party List became inevitable.

If the 2011 election result hasn’t convinced Labour’s caucus that these sort of root-and-branch reforms of the party are urgent and essential, then I strongly suspect David Cunliffe will be the next leader; and that, in eighteen months’ time, we’ll end up going through the same exercise all over again – with a new set of contenders.

“I’ve got a bit of freedom to talk to you frankly,” David Shearer told the Tertiary Education Conference on 28 November, “because [the election result] was a message for me and for my colleagues in Labour that we need to change. We didn’t emerge as the party voicing the dreams and aspirations of New Zealanders.”

In David Shearer Labour has already found its Kevin Costner. If the caucus will only let him build Kiwi voters a new “field of dreams” – they will come.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 6 December 2011.

Renationalisation: It's Easy If You Know How

2011-12-05T17:57:00.002+13:00

Uttering The Deplorable Word: David Cunliffe has outraged the Right and befuddled the Left by speaking openly of renationalising any assets partially privatised by John Key's Government.

DAVID CUNLIFFE has placed the question of renationalisation back on the political agenda. In doing so he’s provoked an extraordinary flurry of indignant condemnation from Newstalk-ZB’s Mike Hosking, who lost little time in raising the dread spectre of Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. The Labour Party itself seemed rather non-plussed by the suggestion (like the husband whose wife's just encouraged him to visit a brothel). Throughout the election campaign didn’t Phil Goff insist that once the assets were gone, they were gone for good? If they’re as easily recoverable as Cunliffe seems to be suggesting, what was all the fuss about?

The cost of re-purchasing privatised state assets is, of course, the biggest “fuss” associated with any policy of renationalisation. It was a problem that occupied some of the sharpest minds in the Alliance back in the early 1990s. “Buying back the farm” may have been party policy, but no one was really sure how to pay for it. I well recall receiving a call from an Alliance member in search of a cheap alternative to forking out the billions required to repurchase Telecom. I promised to do some reading on the subject.

By far the cheapest option turned out to be straightforward expropriation. The government simply passes a law declaring the telecommunications system, the railways, the banks, etc, to be an inalienable part of the national patrimony. Such assets to remain the property of the people and be administered, on their behalf, by the state.

The only problem with expropriation is that any aggrieved foreign owners will almost certainly seek redress under international law. The offending country may find its financial assets frozen in foreign banks, and its national property (like airliners on the ground at foreign airports) seized. If you’re a small and vulnerable trading nation, this is not a good thing.

The other way to re-acquire your country’s assets on the cheap is to argue that their owners have reaped an unwarranted harvest of super-profits from the privatised business, and that in assessing the quantum of compensation to be paid to the “owners”, these super-profits must be deducted from the business’s re-purchase price. This was the formula employed by Salvador Allende when computing the level of compensation payable to the (mostly American) owners of Chile’s copper industry. And I strongly suspect, had New Zealand applied a similar formula to Telecom, it could’ve taken the company back into public ownership without paying a single cent.

The downside of this approach is that, once again, you lay your country open to retaliation. At the urging of the dispossessed Anaconda Copper Company, President Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, undertook to “make the [Chilean] economy scream”. The rest is history.

Probably the most effective (and safest) way to recover one’s country’s privatised assets is to do so one little bite at a time. Citing the “strategic” nature of the asset, and the vital role it plays in preserving the nation’s security and/or well-being, the Government passes a law requiring an initially small, but annually rising, percentage of the private company’s shareholding to be placed in the hands of the State. At the same time, the Government introduces a raft of perfectly justifiable (but regrettably very expensive) regulations which (again, very regrettably) reduce the company’s profitability quite dramatically.

Not surprisingly, the private company’s share price plummets – whereby the State simply steps in and re-purchases its erstwhile assets for the proverbial song.

Although the situation was not produced by such a policy of renationalisation, there was a point, around the middle of the last decade, where New Zealand’s privatised rail network’s value reached such a low point that the Clark-led Labour Government could have picked it up for about a third of the price the State ultimately paid to bring the railways back under public control. Of course, what happens “naturally” under capitalism, a genuinely socialist government can very easily induce.

David Cunliffe has been severely criticised by both the Right (and elements of the Left) for uttering the deplorable word “renationalisation” in polite neoliberal company. For what remains of the campaigning period, those who've attempted to paint him as the candidate of the more conservative elements within Labour’s caucus will win far fewer converts.

Because the brutal fact of the matter is that if Cunliffe is successful in his bid to become Labour’s leader his statement on the possibility of renationalising partially privatised assets will have a pronounced – possibly decisive – dampening effect on the degree of overseas investor interest. Nobody invests billions in an asset that could be renationalised in a year’s time.

That’s why “renationalisation” is such a dangerous, such a deplorable word. Merely to utter it is to stir to life ideas that have not been seriously debated in this country for close to forty years. The ghost of Norman Kirk must be smiling down on the Member for New Lynn. If he had a vote next Tuesday, I’m pretty confident which way he would cast it.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

Rebuilding Labour - Without The Unions

2011-12-02T09:37:00.003+13:00

Growing In The Open Ground: When universal membership made trade unions the most representative institutions in New Zealand society, their affiliation to the Labour Party was an important part of our progressive and democratic political traditions. But the dramatic reduction in union density and the trend towards oligarchical control in union organisations renders their continuing attachment to a similarly reduced Labour Party highly problematic. The rejuvenation of the labour movement requires trade unions without electoral attachments. Affiliation has had its day.

WHAT MUST LABOUR DO to be welcomed back by ordinary Kiwis? What are the things it has to find, and what must it lose?

The first thing it has to lose is trade union affiliation. The big private sector unions still associated with the Labour Party: the Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union (EPMU) and the Service and Food Workers Union; must be cut loose – and soon.

I write those words with a heavy heart, because it was the affiliated union vote that elected me to the New Zealand Council of the Labour Party way back in 1987. In those grim years unionists were the backbone of the opposition to Rogernomics. They kept the flame of the true Labour faith flickering through the party’s darkest days. And it was the block-votes of the trade union affiliates which kept Helen Clark’s political machine ticking over so reliably for the 15 long years it controlled the party.

Even so, it’s time for them to go.

Back in 1987, universal union membership meant that the labour movement was one of the most representative institutions in the country. The Trades Councils in the main centres functioned as embryonic workers’ parliaments where everything from fiscal reform to foreign policy was argued out – often passionately – by delegates representing tens of thousands of working people. The Auckland Trades Council (referred to by some as “The Auckland Soviet”) regularly assembled more than 200 delegates to its sometimes stormy debates.

Direct intervention in the economic life of the country – through widespread strike action – periodically reminded New Zealanders that unions and unionists exercised genuine power. To become a union leader in those days it was necessary to win the support of a majority of the union’s rank-and-file membership. Thousands of postal ballots would be cast and counted to determine the winning candidate. Workers were players in the great game of politics – and so was their political party.

But the days when unions constituted a genuinely representative social, economic and political force are long gone – and with their democratic credentials has gone the rationale for the role they continue to play in the Labour Party. In the private sector workforce barely one worker in ten is unionised. The constitution of the public sector-dominated Council of Trade Unions swept away the democratic traditions which had animated the local trades councils and concentrated all power in the hands of a gaggle of union officials at the very summit of the organisation.

What’s more, the “electorate” responsible for electing these top officials has shrunk alarmingly. In more and more unions leaders are elected not by a postal ballot of the rank-and-file, but by a few score of hand-picked delegates at the union’s annual conference. What were formerly the powerhouses of working-class democracy; and the generators of workers’ power; have become self-selecting oligarchies, against which all dissent crashes and burns.

If Labour wants to do the working-class a big favour it will purge its party of these oligarchs and welcome workers into the party as ordinary rank-and-file members. Who knows, if enough of them join up, they might even be able to persuade Labour’s MPs (including those who owe their positions on the Party List to the machinations of the Affiliates Council’s wise old heads) to rebuild New Zealand’s trade unions to Twenty-First Century specifications – most particularly by requiring them to operate, from bottom to top, as inclusive, transparent and recognisably democratic institutions.

A democratic trade union movement, with members in every workplace and abundant opportunities for them to learn and practice the art of politics, might then be persuaded to re-examine the question of whether or not unions should be affiliated to the Labour Party. But, my suspicion is that a truly democratic trade union movement would run a mile from such a proposition. As the poet, A.R. D. Fairburn, so wisely put it:

The mushroom grows in the open ground,

The toadstool under a tree.

Labour must rebuild itself in plain sight: by reaching outwards, not turning inwards. There are many in the party who cling to the illusion that the affiliates are the guardians of the party’s heart and soul. They are not.

Ordinary Kiwis built the labour movement; and ordinary Kiwis must rebuild it.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 2 December 2011.

Rout & Ruin

2011-11-29T10:18:00.001+13:00

"When the hurlyburly's done,/ When the battle's lost and won.": Having come within a whisker of winning 50 percent of the popular vote, National's position on the Right has grown even more hegemonic. But what of the Left? What can we expect to see emerge from the rout and ruin in 2011?

“ROUT AND RUIN” was my bleak reply to the e-mail from Glasgow. A friend had asked “How bad is it?” What else could I say? Labour’s 2011 Party Vote was an eye-watering 165,000 votes shy of 2008’s. At 27.1 percent, the Party’s share of the popular vote was only marginally greater than the 24.2 percent it attracted in 1919 – the very first general election it contested.

The crucial difference, of course, was that in 1919 Labour was the new kid on the political block. Barely three years old, it was bursting with enthusiasm and eager to replace the ailing Liberal Party as the principal opponent of Bill Massey’s Reform Party government.

Fast-forward 92 years and it is Labour that is ailing. New Zealand’s oldest political party is being challenged on all fronts by younger, more vibrant organisations – most particularly the Greens. With close to 11 percent of the Party Vote, the latter’s level of support is now approaching half that of Labour’s, an ominous statistic for the party which used to be able to count on attracting seven votes for every one that went to the Greens.

Labour’s dramatic debut on the hustings in 1919 ushered in a decade and a half of extraordinary political turbulence that only ended with the Labour Party victory of 1935 and the creation of the National Party the following year. The 2011 general election result suggests that New Zealand may be about to re-enter the sort of agitated political air it last encountered in the 1990s.

The difference, this time, is that the turmoil within the party system is not being driven by the sound of ideologies clashing (or crashing) as they were (and did) in the days of Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson. This time it is the absence of strong ideological themes in our domestic politics that is generating the instability – especially on the centre-left.

What does Labour really stand for in 2011? It most certainly does not stand for the socialist aims and objectives proclaimed by Harry Holland’s Labour Party in 1919. Indeed, two of the most important policies promoted by Phil Goff’s Labour Party in 2011: the introduction of a Capital Gains Tax; and lifting the age of eligibility for superannuation from 65 to 67; could just as easily have emerged from a moderate conservative party.

Moderation has also been the watchword among Green Party strategists in 2011. Gone are the apocalyptic, doom-saying Green Party MPs of yesteryear, and in their place we find the coolly rational Dr Russel Norman, laconically peddling non-threatening economic solutions in a pale green suit. Dr Norman openly proclaims his party’s intention of taking Green politics “mainstream”: moving out beyond the gentrified streets of the inner-cities to the sprawling suburbs of “Middle New Zealand” where modern elections are won and lost.

There was a time when Labour was extremely competitive in these leafy suburbs. But the Greens’ emergence into double figures, Party Vote-wise, suggests that the well-educated, environmentally-conscious, middle-class New Zealander with a social conscience – the demographic that has provided Labour with its winning electoral edge for the best part of three decades – may, finally, have completed its migration from red to green.

But a Labour Party reduced to what are now its core demographics of Pakeha superannuitants, low-paid Pasifika and Maori, and beneficiaries of all colours and creeds, offers a very poor match for the politics and policies of moderation. The diminishing parliamentary assortment of middle-class professionals, civil servants and trade union officials that sits atop Labour’s demographic rump look less-and-less like the people it purports to represent. So much so, now, that the notion of the brown, the poor and the elderly one day deciding to cut out these middle-men and women, and represent themselves, is acquiring an aura of inevitability. Hone Harawira and his Mana Party will be hoping so.

But Mana has a lot of growing to do before it can hope to compete with the party that re-emerged from the electoral shadows with a pundit-smiting 6.8 percent of the Party Vote: NZ First.

Winston Peters’ success hinges upon his instinctive grasp of the issue that will increasingly come to dominate the politics of the next decade: the issue of economic sovereignty. How to foster not only the domestic control and utilisation of the nation’s resources, but also the cultural and political confidence required for their successful defence.

In this respect, as a party identified with economic sovereignty and national identity, NZ First may prove to be the opposition party with the greatest potential for growth. Because the New Zealand electorate has given Winston Peters and his new caucus that rarest and most precious of gifts: the opportunity to learn from past mistakes, and lay claim again to the gratitude of posterity.

Proof, indeed, that “rout and ruin” can be overcome.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 29 November 2011.

Farewell To Old New Zealand?

2011-11-25T17:15:00.002+13:00

Dreams Of Old New Zealand: A glimpse of the curving North Otago shoreline and a swathe of bright blue sky

LAST NIGHT I dreamed of Oamaru. I was born there 55 years ago in the big public hospital which overlooked the little seaside town. In those days, public hospitals were almost always built on hilltops. Set there by the State, they quite literally “watched over” the citizenry they were erected to serve. It was reassuring.

Why was I dreaming of Oamaru? I’d like to think it was because, on the eve of the 2011 General Election, I was reaching back into my past for answers about the present, and the future, of my country. That, at some point in the dream, someone would step forward and answer all the questions my conscious mind has been asking me since the campaign began.

But the unconscious doesn’t work like that, does it?

In my dream the person with the answers was me. A hall-full of people was waiting for Chris Trotter to get up and sing. But he couldn’t sing. His guitar had no strings, and he had forgotten all the words to his songs.

I looked down at the audience from the stage. All the faces were friendly, expectant and curiously familiar. The big doors at the end of the hall stood open, framing a glimpse of the curving North Otago shoreline and a swathe of bright blue sky. Then somebody shut the doors; the audience fell silent; and I woke up.

Except it won’t be a dream from which we wake on Sunday morning; it’ll be a brand new political reality to which we open our eyes. And unless I’m very much mistaken, the most important aspect of this new reality will be how few points of connection it has with our nation’s past. Old New Zealanders, like me, will feel like those people left standing on the quay when a big passenger liner pulls away. One by one the paper streamers connecting us to the departing world will snap. The ship will sail away and we’ll be left behind.

The people on board the ship will breathe a huge sigh of relief. For the past three years they have grown increasingly impatient with Old New Zealand and its passé traditions. They know that the egalitarian values it persists in celebrating have no currency in their brave new world.

A brutal and unreflective fatalism defines these New New Zealanders. For those lucky enough to be born to the right parents, life is good. Is it their fault they’re lucky? Losers’ children (with the right sort of genes) will scrabble and claw their way out of whatever hell-hole they’re born into – and why not? No one’s going to condemn them for the crimes they commit getting out and climbing up. The consideration of others is a choice people make – usually at their own expense. The only real crime is getting caught.

It’s why the Captain of this happy little ship, John Key, is so incredibly popular among passengers and crew alike. He epitomises the strategies for success they long to emulate. Mixing sunny smiles and cheery waves with the most ruthless and unforgiving displays of political management. His enemies called him “the smiling assassin” – never understanding that his friends have come to admire both the killings, and the “aw-shucks” grin that accompanies them, in equal measure.

The most frightening thing about the new ship of state is the number of people who have scrambled aboard for no better reason than the proximity of wealth and power. Even in the bowels of steerage their excitement remains undimmed. They can feel the beat of the band through the ship’s bulkheads, and smell the champagne and caviar wafting through the ventilation shafts. They have no idea that their real purpose is to satisfy the First Class passengers’ pathological appetite for social torture. That, in the neoliberal theatre of pain, the flesh of the poor is the ultimate prop, and their suffering the only acceptable tribute. Not even their children will be spared.

Perhaps that’s why I awoke so suddenly from my dream. Perhaps the closing of the doors was the signal that it was about to descend into nightmare.

And I'm left wondering: is my use of the departing ship metaphor ill-judged? Is it really possible for us Old New Zealanders to avoid embarking alongside the New on Mr Key’s voyage of the damned? Aren’t we all aboard that ship? All inescapably bound to its fate? Aren’t those paper streamers attached to the world we are leaving behind? Isn’t the moment of their breaking also the moment we must bid farewell forever to Old New Zealand?

I don’t believe it is. Neoliberal values are like those plates African tribeswomen insert in their lower-lips. They are alien to the true shape of humanity and are only accommodated by constant application and severe distortion. Once accomplished, however, the effect is much admired by those who have already endured the process. And those who have not are, naturally, despised.

But we plate-less ones at least retain the natural shape of our humanity and inhabit a world in which it is still possible to whistle to, smile at, and kiss one another. In this sense, we Old New Zealanders have indeed been spared the horrors of Captain Key’s voyage.

I dreamed last night of Oamaru and awoke fearing the onset of nightmare. But it need not be so. For hasn’t Oamaru become the capital of that strange art-form known a “steam-punk”? Past and future can be merged to create a potent new hybrid of magic and science. Old songs can find new singers, and old guitars new strings. And, if we all try hard enough to remember, perhaps, in time, the right words will come back to us.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

Coronation or Conundrum?

2011-11-25T10:06:00.001+13:00

Giving Or Taking?: With all the polls showing National on track to win an outright majority of the votes cast, the Prime Minister is heading for an electoral coronation. If NZ First crosses the five percent MMP threshold, however, New Zealand faces a conundrum. Will NZ First, by abstaining on Confidence and Supply motions, allow "King John" to govern, or will that wily old kingmaker, Winston Peters, permit Phil Goff to seize his crown?

TOMORROW’S ELECTION will be either a coronation or a conundrum. The pollsters predict the former: that National will canter home with more than half the votes cast. If the voters confirm these prognostications, then Mr Key will more than merit the monarchical moniker. He and his party will have achieved what no other New Zealand prime minister or German chancellor has ever achieved under the Mixed Member Proportional system: outright victory and the ability to govern without the irksome baggage of coalition. If that is the result, then “King John” it’ll be – and who’s to say him nay?

For the Election to become a conundrum two things have to happen. First, and most crucially, Winston Peters’ NZ First Party must rise above the 5 percent MMP threshold. If it doesn’t, then Mr Key’s Government is almost certainly safe. The second thing (and, naturally, it’s closely related to the first) is that National’s percentage of the Party Vote has to fall to the mid-forties. If Mr Peters gets up, and National drops down below 45.5 percent, then it’ll be fair to announce: “Houston, we have a problem.”

Our problem might best be described as a case of multiple and mutual political allergies. Mr Key is allergic to Mr Peters, and Mr Peters is allergic to Mr Key. Fair enough, you might say, there’s no love lost between those two. If Mr Peters adds his 5 percent (6 seats) to Labour’s 32 percent (39 seats), the Green’s 12 percent (15 seats) and Mana’s 1.5 percent (2 seats), then it’s all over. Phil Goff becomes Prime Minister and Mr Key remains uncrowned. (We’re assuming, of course, that Mr Goff’s allergy to Mr Harawira miraculously vanishes on Saturday evening.)

If only it were that simple.

But, unfortunately, Mr Peters’ allergies extend far beyond Mr Key and the National Party. He also claims to be allergic to Labour’s Mr Goff, the Greens’ Russel Norman and Metiria Turei, and Mana’s Hone Harawira. National’s unforgiveable sin is its plan to sell state assets. Labour’s, the Greens’ and the Mana Party’s unpardonable transgression is their support for what Mr Peters’ calls “Maori separatism”. Accordingly, Mr Peters has declared a plague on all their houses. NZ First, he says, will take itself off to the Opposition Benches and there maintain the strictest political celibacy.

Hmmmm.

That could be good news for Mr Key. Let’s assume his worst nightmare with National sliding down to “just” 45 percent of the Party Vote. That would entitle it to 55 seats. Now let’s assume that “the good voters of Epsom” elect Mr Banks, but Act, itself, receives only 1 percent of the Party Vote. National gets one ally. If Peter Dunne holds Ohariu, National has two allies. If the Maori Party wins three of the Maori seats, National’s allies number five and it is able to form a coalition controlling 60 of the 121 seats. That’s a healthy margin above Mr Goff’s 56 seats.

Not so fast. Before he can form a Government, Mr Key must be able to inform the Governor-General that National commands a majority of the seats in the House of Representatives. Can he do that? Only if Mr Peters gives him a firm undertaking that on matters of Confidence and Supply he and his colleagues will abstain.

But, if NZ First undertakes to abstain on votes of Confidence and Supply that’s tantamount to allowing Mr Key to form a government. Is it possible that Mr Peters, having confounded the critics and led his party back to Parliament, will then repeat his extraordinary decision of 1996 and re-seat his arch-enemies on the Treasury Benches?

No, the only way Mr Peters can “punish” his enemies is to pledge his party’s consistent support on matters of Confidence and Supply to Mr Goff. There’s simply no other means of securing his political legacy.

Were I the Governor-General, I’d be praying that the coronation of “King John” spares me the conundrum of Mr Peters.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion-Post, The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 25 November 2011.

Human, All-Too-Human

2011-11-22T17:27:00.004+13:00

The Eyes Have It: If "Cuppagate" fails to put an end to the people's trust, John Key will have the general reluctance of human-beings to surrender their most cherished illusions to thank for his re-election.

RIGHT NOW there’s nothing more important than Bradley Ambrose’s recording. Those who lament the salience of “Cuppagate” in the current campaign simply don’t understand the nature of electoral politics. General Elections are a bloodless form of warfare, waged with symbolic weapons. Like it or not, the disputed digital recording of the Key-Banks conversation in Café Urban has become the most potent weapon in the struggle between those who want to keep John Key in office and those who want to remove him.

Team Key need their man to be seen as the victim of a media conspiracy. That’s why they have cast him as the public’s champion, barring the way to the slippery slope down which unethical journalists are preparing to toss the whole nation. That is why he’s had to resist every call to authorise release of the recording. Because if he relented then nobody would be safe. Invoking the memory of Milly Dowler, the Prime Minister’s ranged himself alongside Steve Coogan and Hugh Grant. Like them, he’s standing in front of an out-of-control media juggernaut and crying “Halt!”

The news media cannot quite get its head around Mr Key’s tactics. Most of the time politicians are extremely wary of journalists and their vast audiences. Spin doctors take great care to cultivate the most important media players and do everything they can to ensure that their employer’s messages reach the public without too much in the way of unhelpful journalistic interpretation. But, on those rare occasions when the media sets itself against a beloved leader, a helpless individual and/or a trusted institution, none of this applies. When the media allows its own conduct to become the focus of public attention the result is seldom pretty.

The American networks’ coverage of the police riot outside the Democratic Party Convention in 1968 is the most famous illustration of this phenomenon. News reporters and TV anchors were deeply shocked at the violence meted out, not simply to young anti-war protesters, but to many of the Convention delegates themselves. Images of berserk Chicago cops beating defenceless citizens were broadcast to the nation and the authorities condemned for allowing such violence to take place.

For more than a generation, America’s leading journalists had felt supremely confident they were speaking for the vast majority of decent Americans. But they weren’t. Following these historic news broadcasts, tens-of-thousands of phone calls, telegrams and letters flooded the TV networks. And these messages, far from condemning the Police violence, condemned the journalists for defending the protesters and criticising the authorities.

The US news media’s moral confidence never fully recovered from this experience. Deeply disillusioned, journalists were forced to accept that, far from being automatic defenders of media freedom, most citizens were suspicious of social critics, and resented the space and time news organisations made available to them.

People do not like to receive information which contradicts their most cherished assumptions. The 50 percent of New Zealanders who identify with John Key’s aspirational and anti-political persona do not want to be told that it is nothing more than a carefully constructed mask. They don’t want to know that behind the Prime Minister’s genial and easy-going manner lies a ruthless and unforgiving politician.

The harder the news media pushes for the Key-Banks conversation to be released, the more fearful his supporters become that they will be forced to change their favourable opinion of the Prime Minister. And since that’s something they’re desperately unwilling to do, they’re happily telling the pollsters they support his “principled stand”.

Horizon Research puts the Against Release/For Release split at 53 to 46 – and that may well turn out to be the way the votes are finally distributed between the parties of the Centre-Right and the Centre-Left. Only a handful of political junkies and policy wonks genuinely care about the parties’ policies. Elections are not won or lost on policy. (If they were, then National’s policy on asset sales would already have condemned it to defeat.) Elections, for most people ,boil down to only one question: “Who do you trust?”

Who do you trust to keep your job? Who do you trust to keep your house? Who do you trust to keep you safe? Who do you trust to give your kids a rich and fulfilling life?

Overwhelmingly, and for an unprecedented period of time, New Zealanders have answered those questions with the name of the Prime Minister. That’s why the National Party has put all its eggs into the single basket named “John Key”. It also explains why Mr Key and his party are going to such extraordinary lengths to suppress Mr Ambrose’s recording.

Protecting its contents has been transformed into an act of almost religious fidelity. John Key the people’s saviour must remain inviolate, lest John Key the calculating politician be exposed as human, all-too-human.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 22 November 2011.

If We Were A Nation Of Grown-Ups

2011-11-21T12:11:00.001+13:00

Things To Come: A society in its adulthood was the subject of the 1936 film adaptation of H.G. Well's futuristic novel The Shape of Things to Come. Perhaps this Saturday we should all make an effort to put an end to New Zealand's arrested development and vote like a nation of grown-ups.

IF WE WERE a nation of grown-ups, the biggest battle at election time would be the one between Labour and the Greens. They would be arguing about the wisdom of persisting with a system in which the environment is treated as something external to economic transactions, or adopting a new approach in which all human-behaviour is judged according to the severity of its ecological impact. Because, in an age of anthropogenic global warming and peak oil, that is the only argument that matters.

A grown-up nation’s political energies would be devoted to resolving the outstanding ideological objections preventing a productive meshing of the social-democratic and social-ecological programmes. How to keep human welfare at the centre of government action without losing sight of the ecological costs such policies inevitably entail. Not only the Labour and Green parties, but also the news media and the universities would be devoting all their resources to this debate.

A grown-up nation would pause, in the midst of the debate, and give thanks that the parties of the discredited neoliberal past were no longer around to tout the interests of farmers and businessmen. Parties which treated the environment as either a massive sink into which their sponsors were permitted to pour their waste; or, as an inexhaustible quarry from which farmers and businessmen could appropriate the planet’s resources with impunity.

A grown-up nation would shudder at the memory of the politics of distraction in which parties like National and Act engaged. It would recall the way the corporate news media constantly whipped-up fear of crime for commercial gain, and how conservative politicians exploited public fear to justify the incarceration of thousands of citizens in dehumanising penal institutions. It would remember the way criminality and poverty were constantly conflated by the parties of the Right: to the point where whole ethnic and economically deprived communities came to be regarded as either dangerous animals to be controlled, or suitable cases for therapeutic treatment. It would marvel at how effective these tactics were at focusing people’s attention away from the all-too-obvious causes of poverty and crime; economic and social inequality with all their manifold manifestations: unemployment, inadequate and over-crowded housing, domestic violence, family break-up, physical and mental illness and substance abuse.

A grown-up nation would long ago have devoted its energies to eradicating these contributory factors to human misery. It would remember the importunate shrieks and outraged imprecations of the tiny minority of obscenely wealthy individuals (in whose exclusive interests its institutions had been run) as a rigorous and strongly progressive taxation system systematically dismantled the edifices of privilege built up in the old regime’s final phase. It would congratulate itself on the radically democratic structures established in both the workplace and the community, and the speed with which these bodies were able to bring “the wisdom of crowds” to bear on the so-called “problems” of productivity and innovation. It would feel again the sense of wonder at how easily the processes of participatory democracy and consensus-based decision-making were incorporated into the institutions of local and central government.

If we were a nation of grown-ups these are the issues we’d be debating, and these the achievements we’d be gratefully and proudly recalling, five days out from a general election.

But we are not a nation of grown-ups. We are still a nation of moral and political infants reaching out desperately for the hand of a man who would see police constables raid the offices of newspapers and broadcasters rather than share with the voters the contents of a supposedly “bland” political conversation. We are a nation in which so-called “journalists” from major media outlets are perfectly willing to endorse (and even praise!) the state-enforced suppression of political information in the midst of a general election. We are a nation that worships wealth and fame. We are a nation profoundly ignorant of its own past. We are a nation obsessed with limiting government expenditure, but unrelentingly hostile to raising government revenue. We are a nation that still prefers to marginalise, blame and punish the poor rather than lift them out of poverty. We are a nation that is willing to do just about anything except accept what sort of nation we are.

We’re a nation with a lot of growing up to do.

We should all make a start this weekend.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

Two's Company ...

2011-11-18T08:43:00.000+13:00

Crowded Out: Act's leader, Dr Don Brash, who might have been expected to be included in this very public tea party, was actually one of the main topics of John Key's and John Banks' now notorious conversation - and not in a good way.

THE AMERICAN HUMOURIST, Mark Twain, once described a conspiracy as “nothing but a secret agreement of a number of men for the pursuance of policies which they dare not admit in public.” Generally speaking, voters are wary of politicians who agree privately to do things they’re too scared to announce publicly. What am I saying? “Wary” simply doesn’t do the voters’ feelings justice. “Mistrustful” would be a better word; “Suspicious” better still. Which is why, if the Prime Minister, John Key, hasn’t allowed the news media to reveal the contents of the notorious “teapot tape” by the time this column is printed, then he’s a damn fool.

But, even assuming he has relented, and everyone now knows exactly what transpired in Newmarket’s Café Urban between the Prime Minister and Act’s Epsom candidate, John Banks, chances are the true victim of these wily politicians’ tête-à-tête is only slowly grasping his role in the larger conspiracy animating the National-Act tea-party.

Several months ago, at an undisclosed location (but you can be fairly sure it wasn’t Newmarket’s Café Urban ) a number of men and women came together to plot the overthrow of Rodney Hide. At the centre of the plot was the former Reserve Bank Governor and National Party leader, Dr Don Brash, who was convinced that when it came to keeping the National-led Government on the straight-and-narrow neoliberal path he was the only man for the job.

Dr Brash, you’ll recall, had been commissioned by the Prime Minister to lead a taskforce dedicated to closing the wages-gap with Australia. The good doctor’s hard-line neoliberal prescription for lifting New Zealand’s productivity did not, however, impress the Prime Minister, who more-or-less dismissed Dr Brash’s recommendations out-of-hand. Not surprisingly, Dr Brash felt slighted.

His mood was not improved when Rodney Hide’s perk buster reputation was forced to die for love, and David Garrett’s youthful enthusiasm for Frederick-Forsyth-inspired cloak-and-daggering transformed Act from what Dr Brash had fondly hoped would be an invaluable ideological thorn in the Government’s side, to an embarrassing whoopee-cushion under the Neoliberal Establishment’s bottom.

“Hell, I could do better than that!”, mused the Good Doctor, and then proceeded to prove himself wrong.

Dr Brash’s fatal error was to invite Auckland’s former Mayor and National’s former Police Minister, John Banks, to step into the soon-to-be-deposed Rodney Hide’s shoes as Act’s Epsom candidate. Now, the hapless Dr Brash claims to have known Mr Banks for years and years and years, yet in all that time he’s somehow missed the rather important fact that his bosom friend and business partner is an outrageous right-wing populist in the mould of Sir Robert Muldoon. Just how outrageous Dr Brash would soon discover when he mused in public about decriminalising marijuana.

Only then, I suspect, did Dr Brash become vaguely aware of the trap into which his eagerness to rehabilitate Act had led him. Far from becoming a rallying beacon for the neoliberal cognoscenti of the libertarian Right, Act was just an election-day away from reverting to what it had been under the unsentimental leadership of Richard Prebble: a repository for every red-necked, right-wing crackpot who ever ran a small business or operated a dairy farm on what had once been Maori land.

The meeting in the Café Urban: that much bally-hooed “cup of tea” featuring the Prime Minister and John Banks; it would, of course, send a message to “the good people of Epsom” about the desirability of giving “that nice Mr Key’s” government a reliable coalition partner; but that wouldn’t be the only message it sent. To those who knew how to read the tea-leaves in the bottom of the two Johns’ teacups, it also signalled that the electoral alliance being forged was not between conservatives and neoliberals, it was between the centre-right and the far-right. Between the genial and urbane Mr Key and the aggressive and provincial Mr Banks.

Why wasn’t Dr Brash invited to that much-hyped photo-op? Because as soon as the votes of “the good people of Epsom” have been counted, the members of Act’s Board will be holding an election of their own. And when those votes have been counted, Dr Brash will almost certainly find himself joining Mr Hide and Mr Prebble in the Ex-Leaders of Act Club.

Yep, the two Johns have played Dr Brash – and the country – like a guitar.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 18 November 2011.

"The Most" versus "The Majority"

2011-11-15T10:27:00.000+13:00

Out Of Many, One: The key constitutional requirement for the exercise of executive power in New Zealand is the confidence of a working majority of members of the House of Representatives. To suggest that the party which received the most votes cast must be a part of that working majority is both unconstitutional and undemocratic.

THE SEMANTIC DIFFERENCE between “the most votes” and “a majority of the votes” is about to become extremely important. Why? Because, constitutionally-speaking, winning more votes than any other party is nowhere near as important as winning more than half the votes cast and/or controlling more than half of the seats in Parliament.

It is, for example, quite possible for a party to hold the largest number of seats in the House of Representatives and yet find itself relegated to the Opposition benches by a combination of parties commanding a majority of the seats. This is because, under our constitution the Government must retain the confidence of the House to go on governing. The Parliamentary Opposition can test this with a motion of No-Confidence, which, to be carried, must be supported by more than half of the participating Members of Parliament.

That even the slightest confusion over “most” and “majority” continues to exist is one of the most pernicious legacies of the First-Past-the-Post (FPP) electoral system.

In order for FPP to produce a majoritarian outcome the electorate must be restricted to a choice of just two parties. If there are only two candidates contesting each electorate then the winner will attract not only the most votes but also a majority of the votes. FPP election are contested electorate by electorate and the party accumulating more than half of the parliamentary seats is declared the winner and invited to form a government.

In its whole political history, New Zealand fulfilled this requirement for just eighteen years. From 1936 until 1954 our electoral landscape was dominated by two mass parties: Labour and National. No other political organisations came anywhere near them in terms of voter support. As a result, it was not unusual for the winning party to attract more than 50 percent of the popular vote. In the snap-election of 1951, for example, held in the wake of the infamous 1951 Waterfront Dispute, National received 54 percent of the votes cast.

In 1954, however, the Social Credit Political League brought New Zealand’s pure two-party system to an abrupt end. For the first time in our history, the monetary reformers of Douglas Social Credit fielded candidates in a General Election, attracting a very creditable 11.2 percent of the votes cast. Under our current MMP electoral system the Social Creditors would have been entitled to proportional representation, but in 1954 Social Credit failed to win a single seat and it was National, with just 44.3 percent of the popular vote (a whole 0.2 percentage points ahead of Labour) which ended up forming a government.

And so it continued for the next 42 years. Though the Social-Creditors’ support rose as high as 20.6 percent of the popular vote, it never won more than 2 parliamentary seats. More importantly, neither Labour nor National was ever again sufficiently popular to win more than half of the votes cast. In 1978 and 1981, not even winning the most votes was enough to make you the Government. In both of those Elections National secured a parliamentary majority with fewer votes than Labour.

It was in this grossly inequitable FPP context of parties winning less than half of the votes cast but securing well in excess of half the parliamentary seats that the voting public’s propensity to confuse “winning the most votes” with “winning a majority of the votes cast” began to take hold. The semantic confusion was in no way lessened when, in the General Election of 1993, the Alliance Leader, Jim Anderton, pledged his support to the party which won the most votes. Fortunately for Mr Anderton, he was never obliged to keep his promise. But, if he had, it would have seen the left-leaning Alliance backing an incumbent National Government which 62 percent of the electorate (including his own followers) had failed to endorse.

The confusion was exacerbated three years later in the first General Election conducted under the new MMP voting system. In spite of the fact that 66 percent of the electorate (including his own followers) had declined to endorse the incumbent National-led Government, the NZ First Leader, Winston Peters threw his support behind the party with the most (33.8 percent!) votes.

With the 2011 General Election less than a fortnight away, alarm is already being raised at the prospect of any party other than the party winning the most votes being allowed to form a government. Already, any combination of parties commanding a majority of parliamentary seats – but excluding the party with the most seats – is being derided as a “Coalition of Losers”. Already, conservative commentators are issuing thinly-veiled threats that such a government would face mass protest action.

Decent New Zealanders will reject such threats. Those making them are behaving undemocratically and unconstitutionally.

If 51 percent doesn’t beat 49 percent – then what does?

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 15 November 2011.

Something Borrowed, Something Blue

2011-11-11T09:50:00.001+13:00

Like A Lamb To The Slaughter: The Powers-That-Be are not about to let a Labour-Green-NZ First-Mana combination take power - not while National can lay claim to winning more votes than anybody else. That's why the Greens are already being fattened-up for the role of National's "responsible" coalition partner. Would you care for some mint sauce with that cabinet seat, Russel?

CAN’T YOU HEAR THEM? The wheels spinning within wheels? The subtle change in the whine of the engine? The Machine is changing gear. The Powers-That-Be are preparing to offer us something new. A National-Green Government.

Don’t believe me? Just take a look at the way this election is being covered. Whose stocks are being talked up? Whose leaders are being praised for their “realism” and economic “savviness”? Let me give you a hint: It isn’t Labour.

Of course, it’s only an insurance policy at the moment. Something to reach for if everything goes horribly wrong on Election Day. But that’s the thing about insurance – it’s very hard to acquire after the event. You’ve got to be ready.

Ready for what?

Could be a number of things.

Could be the polls wildly overstating National’s support. Could be the voters, not relishing the prospect of Mr Key governing alone, deciding to cast their ballots elsewhere. Could be that instead of receiving 56 percent of the Party Vote, National has to make do with just 46 percent.

Could be that, when told to jump, “the good people of Epsom” refuse the fence. Could be that, faced with two (very) old National faces, the Epsom voters opt for the comparatively youthful features of Mr Paul Goldsmith. That would put Act out of Parliament, and leave the Prime Minister dangerously bereft of trustworthy coalition partners.

Could be a sudden, last-minute surge towards the Left. An unexpected wave of support that pushes the Greens up to 15 percent of the Party Vote and heaves Labour, coughing and spluttering, into the mid-30s. Hone Harawira could stride up the beach with Annette Sykes under one arm and John Minto under the other. That would leave Phil Goff perilously close to being able to cobble together some form of Centre-Left government.

Could be that Old Brown Eyes – Winston Peters – croons his way back into the hearts of the over-60s. Could be that they warm to the idea of NZ First sitting on the cross-benches, wielding one of those “Stop/Go” signs: Asset sales? Stop! School meals for the children of the poor? Go! Could be that, in the pundits’ opinion, Winston’s return presages John Key’s departure.

That’s why the Powers-That-Be have to be ready.

Editorialist and political commentator, John Roughan, pointed the way last weekend:

“National’s winning margin this time could be nearer 10 points than 20, which means it could be displaced by a Labour coalition. What would happen then? I suspect the electorate would feel cheated. The result wouldn’t seem right. The government would be held in general contempt. Nothing it did would command much respect. A small army of MMP’s old advocates would come to its defence, reminding us that it had always been possible under MMP for a winner to be defeated by second and third. That would not help at all. We would resolve to change not just the government at the next opportunity but to elect a party that promised to fix the system.”

You get that? Is that clear enough for you?

Fail to allow the party which wins the most votes to govern and you can kiss MMP good-bye.

Never mind that our constitution guarantees power only to the party, or parties, commanding a majority of the seats in the House of Representatives. And forget completely that in spite of the fact that it won more votes than National in 1978 and 1981, Labour never got to form a government. All you have to remember is that if National wins more votes than any other party on 26 November, it must be allowed to go on governing – or else.

And you know already who the designated fall-guy, the patsies, are going to be.

Yep, poor old Russel Norman and the Greens.

They’re Mr Key’s insurance policy; his Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free Card.

And believe you me, once Russel and the Greens are ushered into the Powers-That-Be’s government-making machinery, saying “No” will not be an option.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 11 November 2011.

Vicious Spiral

2011-11-09T13:07:00.002+13:00

Spiral Of Silence: The ability of opinion polls to materially shape the outcome of elections is strongly indicated in the academic research. If the Election Night result suggests that our major polling agencies somehow got it wrong, a great many New Zealanders will have every right to feel extremely angry.

IT’S GOING TO BE one of the most interesting “results” on Election Night, and quite possibly one of the most devastating. How closely do the “snap-shots” taken by the major opinion polling agencies resemble the actual election outcome?

It will be interesting because for the past three years the conclusions of the major polling agencies (Colmar Brunton, Reid Research, Research International, DigiPol) have sharply contradicted the intuitive assessments of many ordinary voters. To these folk the idea that John Key’s government is supported by more than 50 percent of decided voters is ludicrous. Again and again, you will hear people say: “I simply don’t believe National is that high, or that Labour is that low.”

Not surprisingly, the academic experts in the field of statistical research have reacted rather condescendingly when confronted with this response. Their stock reply has been to invite the doubters to consider the historical evidence. And why not? Averaged out in the so-called poll-of-polls, the agencies’ final “snap-shots” of the electorate have consistently, and accurately, mirrored the actual election outcome.

There are a whole host of personal and ideological reason why people may not want to believe the poll results, say the experts, but that does not mean that they’re wrong.

But what if they are wrong?

Over the past week there have been at least three statistics-based depictions of the electorate’s political preferences.

The latest, from Research International, confirms the findings of the other major polling agencies. National rides high with 52 percent; Labour flounders at 26 percent; and the Greens, on 12 percent, continue their impressive upward climb. No other party comes even close to crossing the 5 percent MMP threshold.

A very different picture emerged from the second survey. Conducted by a trio of Weekend Herald journalists led by Simon Collins, it showed National on 43 percent, Labour on 31 percent, and the Greens on 14 percent. The sample amounted to just over 500 persons, and the interviews were conducted face-to-face on the streets of the nation. Collins and his team readily acknowledged that the sample was skewed in favour of younger voters and that this was likely to advantage Labour and the Greens.

But what about the major polling agencies’ reliance on telephone interviewing over land-lines? Doesn’t this skew their results in favour of mature, middle-class, settled suburban voters willing to talk to pollsters? And doesn’t that person sound a lot like your typical National Party voter?

Isn’t it possible that the methodologies of the major polling agencies are consistently over-stating the level of public support for the right-wing parties? Let us suppose for a moment that they are, or that it is, at the very least, a possibility. Is this possibility of disortion acknowledged by the newspapers and networks who commission these polls? Or does each media outlet report “their” poll’s findings without the slightest reference to potential methodological shortcomings or contradictory data?

Which brings us to the third survey, released on 2 November by Horizon Research Ltd. This poll, conducted within methodological parameters radically different from those employed by the majors, presents a dramatically different picture of the 2011 election campaign. In Horizon’s poll, National stood at 36 percent, Labour at 30 percent, the Greens at 14 percent, NZ First at 6.5 percent, the newly-formed Conservative Party on 4 percent, Act on 3 percent, Mana on 1.8 percent, the Maori Party on 1.2 percent and United Future on 0.8 percent.

If those numbers are accurate, then the NZ First Party and its leader, Winston Peters, will once again play the role of Kingmaker in post-election negotiations.

It’s right about here that things turn ugly.

Using the Colmar Brunton poll as their guide, TVNZ decided to exclude NZ First from the minor party debates. Other media outlets (including Radio New Zealand and Sky Television) have done the same. Indeed, the reporting of the entire election campaign is being shaped, to an unhealthy degree, upon data supplied almost exclusively by land-line telephone interviews. Not surprisingly, a National victory is taken for granted. Labour is painted as a party of losers. The Greens are said to be making impressive gains. And Winston Peters is dismissed as irrelevant.

Overwhelmingly, this is the picture of the campaign being presented to the electorate. It is, therefore, highly likely that a large number of voters have already succumbed to the psephological effect known as “TheSpiral of Silence”.

Now consider this counterfactual.

Imagine that the newspapers and broadcasting networks have based their coverage of the election on the Horizon poll. That all the talk has been about the “knife-edge” election. That Winston Peters has found himself and his party at the centre of media attention. Public engagement in the campaign has been considerably higher – and so has the turn-out on Election Day. In short, the Horizon-based picture of the contest has been dramatically more inclusive than the major agency-based picture.

Which brings us back to Election Night.

How devastated centre-left voters will feel, and how justifiably furious, if the actual voting statistics indicate that National’s support was grossly exaggerated, and that Labour has fared considerably better than all of the major polling agencies were suggesting. Imagine their anguish if NZ First, in spite of being almost entirely shut-out of the mainstream news media, wins 4.9 percent of the Party Vote. And if NZ First’s desperately narrow failure to crest the 5 percent threshold turns out to be the difference between a National-led and a Labour-led government.

If that is the way the numbers fall on Election Night, hundreds-of-thousands of New Zealanders will not only be perfectly entitled to say “bugger the pollsters”, but they will also be entirely justified in asserting that the election has been stolen from them by a news media which placed far too much faith in what has proved to be the major polling agencies flawed methodology.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

No Time For Instant Verdicts

2011-11-08T10:20:00.000+13:00

Guilty As Charged!: The modern news media's seemingly insatiable appetite for instant verdicts - especially on political performance - risks reducing the citizen's serious civic responsibility of rendering democratic judgement to the level of participating in a television game show.

THE RUSH TO JUDGEMENT encouraged by the modern news media serves us very ill.

If you doubt this, try the following thought experiment.

Imagine that there were 24-hour news channels like CNN, Fox News and Al Jazeera covering the Battle of France in 1940. Imagine the breathless reports of Germany’s surprise attack through the Ardennes, and the journalists’ consternation at the speed of the Wehrmacht’s advance. Consider what the endless parade of pundits and military experts would’ve made of the French Government’s chances of survival. Or, how the British electorate would’ve responded when pollsters offered them the choice of pursuing the war under Churchill, or making peace under Sir Samuel Hoare. Who’s to say that a British Government, harried by the 1930s equivalent of the far-right Fox News channel, might not have bowed to the public fear of invasion and signed an armistice with Adolf Hitler?

All very well, you might say, but in wartime the news media would simply not behave so recklessly. And, if it did, the Government would, quite rightly, impose very tight restrictions on what it could and couldn’t say.

When ballots, not bullets, are in play, however, we are unwilling to even contemplate placing restrictions on press freedom. As a result, our politicians, journalists and commentators all fall prey to the news media’s insatiable demand for instant stories and instant judgements.

The Leader of the Opposition stumbles over his party’s fiscal projections in The Press’s “Leaders Debate” and the Prime Minister is more-or-less instantly proclaimed winner: not merely of the debate (which he was) but of the election itself.

Forty-eight hours later, the Labour Party releases its fiscal outlook, making nonsense of the National Party’s claims of a $14-17 billion “hole” in the Opposition’s numbers. What are the journalists supposed to say then? That their earlier call was incorrect? That the election is not, quite, a foregone conclusion? That the Prime Minister has been shown up as economically innumerate?

Hardly. One precipitate judgement is simply built upon another, until the electorate’s head begins to spin and the entire electoral contest becomes a shimmering mirage – as untrustworthy as it is alluring. Parched though the voters may be for clear, cold, facts, these hastily generated illusions will not quench their thirst.

Indeed, one of the results I’m most eagerly looking forward to on Election Night is how closely the public opinion polls’ “snap-shots” of the electorate’s preferences match up with the hard-and-fast electoral judgements finally deposited in the ballot-box. Will the National Party really receive more than 50 percent of the Party Vote? Or, will the Government’s tally much more closely replicate the 45-46 percent of the vote anticipated by the political “share-traders” investing their money on iPredict?

If iPredict’s numbers prove to be closer to the actual result than the result predicted by political journalists and commentators on the basis of the opinion polls, then the electorate is entitled to feel very annoyed.

The electoral effects produced by poll data which consistently reveals a huge gap between the principal contending parties’ levels of popular support are well attested in the academic literature. Voter perception of the political efficacy of their ballot may be influenced to the point where they forego participation in the election altogether. Alternatively, voters of more malleable political allegiances may be persuaded to abandon the “losers” and clamber aboard what has been repeatedly depicted as the “winner’s” bandwagon.

Pondering these issues, the question arises: Is it wise for the news media to devote so much effort to telling the voter who’s “ahead” and who’s “behind” – as if elections were indeed nothing more than horse-races? Surely, the most important democratic function of the media is to subject the various political contenders’ claims to the critical scrutiny of expert witnesses? Publishing dispassionate critiques of contending policy; broadcasting fair and balanced accounts of the candidates behaviour on the hustings; and then allowing the voters to make up their own minds. Isn’t this the media’s most important contribution to the electoral process?

In a country whose largest cities publish only one daily newspaper, political neutrality is even more essential. Commentators from Right and Left can provide readers with an indication of the mood of their respective patrons, but we should never forget the words of Guardian editor, C.P. Scott, who wisely reminded his readers that while “comment is free”, “facts are sacred.”

And is not the existence of Winston Peters and NZ First a fact? Why, then, has he been excluded by so many media outlets from the minor party debates? Yes, he’s contentious, and yes, a maverick. But then, so was his namesake in 1940. The world has reason to be grateful that the media organisations of 1940, fighting for the very life of democracy, knew better than to offer instant verdicts, or demand rushed judgements.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 8 November 2011.

Glad Tidings, Or Cruel Game?

2011-11-04T10:06:00.001+13:00

Un-Persons: National's welfare policies only work politically because there are a huge number of voters who instantly relegate solo mothers and their children to a place outside the circle of respectable citizens. Only when paid employment reclaims them from the ranks of "the undeserving poor" do welfare beneficiaries stand the slightest chance of being accepted as a "decent, hard-working New Zealanders". Such is the cruel reality behind Mr Key's Pollyanna-ish "glad games".

IN ELEANOR PORTER’S classic children’s novel, Pollyanna, the orphaned heroine startles her misanthropic guardians with what she calls “the glad game”. No matter how bleak her prospects, Pollyanna always finds something to be glad about.

Listening to the Prime Minister wax eloquent about his government’s new welfare policy, I couldn’t help thinking of Pollyanna. Forty-six-thousand New Zealanders are to be purged from the welfare rolls over just four years, and Mr Key is glad. Why? Because, according to the Prime Minister, unemployed, sickness, invalid and domestic purposes beneficiaries will have individualised care wrapped around them like a cuddly blanket.

It’s a lovely thought. Thousands of young solo-mums will have their lives sensibly organised by an army of highly-qualified case-workers. Job training will be made available to all, while their kiddies are looked after in top-notch child-care centres. New MSD swipe-cards will keep these eager job-seekers safe from the temptations of booze, tobacco and God knows what else. Their weekly rent will afford them warm and commodious accommodation.

And all of this will be achieved at the very reasonable cost of just 50 million additional dollars, spread over four years. Presumably, this “new money” will be added to the $130 million per annum already spent moving beneficiaries from welfare to work. So, let’s see: $50 million divided by four equals $12.5 million per year to be spent assisting 11,500 beneficiaries (46,000 divided by 4) into the paid workforce. Hmmm? That’s just $1,086.95 per beneficiary.

Can professionally trained case-workers, high-quality child-care, affordable and appropriate housing stock and effective job-training services really be provided for just $1,086.95 of additional resources per person?

And what about the Government’s boast that getting 46,000 beneficiaries back into the workforce over four years will save the taxpayer one billion dollars – that’s $250 million a year. Or is it? Don’t forget, the estimated annual cost of getting 11,500 people off the welfare roll is $130 million + $12.5 million or $142.5 million. Which means that the annual net benefit to the taxpayer isn’t $250 million, but a much more modest $107.5 million. The saving over four years is more likely to be $430 million – not $1 billion.

Not forgetting, of course, that for there to be any net benefit to the taxpayer at all sufficient new jobs will have to be created to: 1) absorb the normal number of school-leavers and graduates entering the workforce; 2) re-employ workers in businesses which have been sold, shut down or failed; and 3) provide jobs for the 11,500 “Jobseekers” the Government intends to purge from its rolls every year for the next four years.

That’s a very big ask – especially for a government recovering from a global economic recession which added 60,000 people to the welfare rolls. The Prime Ministers glad-game notwithstanding, New Zealanders’ employment prospects remain bleak.

Isn’t it more likely that the $1,086.95 per person of “new money” will be expended on the “services” of a vastly expanded army of “assessors”? Medical professionals (many of them, perhaps, retired, or holding overseas qualifications) who will be expected to tell thousands of sick citizens that they have been “re-assessed”, and that, overnight, they have quite miraculously become “job fit” and, therefore, ineligible for Mr Key’s new “Jobseeker Support” payment?

And, isn’t it equally likely that the Ministry of Social Development will hire scores of new, minimally-trained, case-workers to harry and prod, prod and harry solo mums and unemployed workers into taking any kind of work, no matter how intermittent or unsuitable, so that the number of citizens in receipt of state support can be shown to be trending downwards?

Or, perhaps, the MSD won’t hire any new staff at all. Perhaps the responsibility for managing those receiving Jobseeker and Sole Parent Support payments will be contracted out to private enterprise. The more jobseekers and sole parents they purged from the welfare rolls, the higher the profits of these private agencies would climb.

It’s what happens in Australia – and it’s what the Welfare Working Group set up by Mr Key’s government recommended.

Pollyanna transformed a whole town by refusing to be beaten-down by circumstances, and by unlocking in her neighbours an altruism they’d long been encouraged to repress. Is it a similar, altruistic, game Mr Key is playing with New Zealand’s beneficiaries? Or will he just be glad to see them gone?

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star on Friday, 4 November 2011.

Remembering & Forgetting

2011-11-01T09:32:00.000+13:00

Masterful Evocation: Labour's opening television broadcast recalled its electoral base to their party's history and values, firmly locating its contemporary leadership within a strong and compelling narrative. The work of film-maker Dan Salmond, the broadcast ranks alongside the very best examples of New Zealand political propaganda. Following National's deeply flawed effort, Labour's production gave its campaign an impressive kick-off.

IT’S EASY TO FORGET how little people remember. Scholars call it “political amnesia” – the curious inability of modern voters to keep a coherent historical narrative in their heads. When tested, voters’ political recall closely resembles those “flashback” scenes in movies about people who have lost their memories. The images and the words follow one another in a rapid, disjointed, almost random, stream. The hero knows they mean something, and that buried deep within them is the answer to his or her problems. And the movie’s plot is all about putting the garbled elements of the hero’s story back into their proper order.

Watching the opening broadcasts of the major political parties I was forcefully reminded of how disjointed and decontextualized modern political communication has become, and what a powerful effect the recovery of historical memory can have on people’s political perceptions.

Labour’s opening message demonstrated the latter effect with extraordinary panache. Seldom have I seen the historical record used to such telling political effect. The 20-minute broadcast re-told Labour’s story, from its birth in the trade union movement of the early 1900s, to the watershed elections of 1935 and 1938. It used original newsreel footage to chronicle the creation of the welfare state, and we were reintroduced to the Labour pantheon: Mickey Savage, Peter Fraser, Walter Nash, Norman Kirk, David Lange, Helen Clark.

Most significantly, we were reminded of the anger and division which accompanied the implementation of Rogernomics. For the first time, Labour held a mirror up to this, the most shameful moment in all its long history, and did not flinch or turn away.

A lot of the effectiveness of this technique is due to the fact that our own history, and the history of political parties, are inextricably interwoven. Our parents and grandparents were there during the Great Depression; they remember the difference Labour’s policies made to people’s lives. Just as we recall Rob Muldoon’s trashing of Labour’s superannuation scheme in the 1975 General Election. By putting those images up on the screen, Labour’s film-makers stirred the viewers’ own memories. Theirs become ours, and in a potent demonstration of political alchemy, ours become theirs.

Placing Labour’s leader, Phil Goff, and the party’s spokespeople, into this living historical context allowed them to show us how and why they’d entered politics. Suddenly, they ceased to be “politicians” seeking our vote, and became instead people whose own family and personal histories had led them to embrace the values of the Labour movement.

There was Phil, seated alongside his eighty-seven-year-old Dad, recalling the privations of a working-class family in the 1920s and 30s. We met Damien O’Connor, who seemed to have absorbed the West Coast Labour tradition through the pores of his skin. And David Cunliffe, the parson’s son, imbibing the redemptive message of the Carpenter through the busy spiritual commerce of the Manse. And, most tellingly, we encountered Jacinda Ardern, windswept amidst the remains of the once thriving forestry town of Murapara, recalling the waste and ruin of the 1980s.

It was as stark and evocative as the black-and-white film of its historical newsreels. Labour was no longer running from its past, it had turned and, for better or for worse, embraced it with love and with pride. “This is who we are”, said Labour’s opening broadcast. “We’re as ingrained in the history of this country as coal-dust in a miner’s palm. We fought, both metaphorically and physically, to make this a country the world could admire – and we’re ready to do it again.”

The contrast with National’s opening broadcast could hardly have been greater. Where Labour’s message had been about the many, the Government’s story celebrated just one: John Key. The overwhelming impression was of a political figure stripped of everything but the quality of his suit and the glibness of his tongue.

The Prime Minister stood in the dark, his audience barely more than deferential shadows. Clearly, the production was inspired by the “town hall meetings” so beloved by presidential candidates in the United States. It didn’t take the viewer very long, however, to understand that this, unlike those, was a carefully scripted affair; and that every question “from the floor” had been crafted to show the PM off to best advantage.

And he was alone: his caucus colleagues, his Cabinet team, nowhere to be seen. Our future, our “aspirations” (to use a favourite Key-word) were presented as being in the hands of a single individual. This man who knows the answer to every question that is put to him – but only because, one way or another, he wrote them himself.

But history is never the work of just one man. Every person stitches the thread of their life into the tapestry of their times. Labour’s opening was a celebration of that fact; National’s shrouded it in darkness.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 1 November 2011.

Eating Crow

2011-10-28T14:30:00.002+13:00

It's The Feathers That I Hate: Having misjudged the nature of Labour's election strategy, and heaped premature scorn on her strategists, it's only fair that I eat my due portion of that most ill-omened of birds - the Crow.

WELL, I’VE EATEN CROW before and, really, it’s not that bad – tastes like chicken. Even so, I’m pretty sure Labour’s strategists will derive considerably more enjoyment from the experience than I will. They’ve had to endure some pretty harsh criticism from this particular commentator over the past few months, so the sight of Chris Trotter with grease and feathers on his chin is likely to be a very pleasing one.

I can’t deny that it’s been a surprise. The apparent passivity of the Labour Opposition over the past few months had me well and truly fooled. All I could assume was that they’d given away this year’s contest, and that those best-placed to make a difference were more concerned with “succession planning” than winning the election.

Clearly, appearances have been deceptive.

Labour’s strategy recalls Napoleon’s strategy at the Battle of the Pyramids. The French general’s opponents were Egypt’s warrior-rulers, the Marmluks. Mounted on Arab horses, gloriously arrayed, they were supremely confident of victory. And, had Napoleon chosen to meet them on their own terms, he and his army would have been cut to pieces.

But Napoleon was not about to make that mistake. What he saw before him were lightly armed horsemen imbued with an indefatigable belief in their own superiority and a hunger for personal glory. Decimated by thirst and dysentery though they may have been, Napoleon knew that his men still constituted the most formidable fighting force of the Eighteenth Century. They were a highly disciplined army of experienced veterans, fully conversant with the most effective weapons and tactics of their day.

Napoleon configured his army into vast hollow “squares” of infantry, placed his artillery at the corners, and his cavalry in the middle. Then he sat back and waited for the Marmluks to come to him.

Their charge was a sight to behold. In a vast crescent formation they galloped straight for the French lines. Napoleon waited. On came the wave of horsemen. Still the French waited. It was only when the Marmluk warriors were almost upon them that the front ranks of French infantry coolly raised their muskets and fired. The artillery joined them, firing grapeshot and canister rounds into the horsemen at point-blank range. The splendid horses and their even more splendid riders were cut to ribbons. The speed with which the Napoleonic infantryman was able to fire, reload, and fire again was legendary. The Marmluks ornate muskets could be fired once from horseback and were then next to useless. As wave after wave of cavalry hurled themselves against the French formations the slaughter escalated. By the time the smoke cleared, the warrior ruling-class of Egypt was in headlong retreat.

The Battle of the Pyramids, 21 July 1798

Labour’s strategic insight is identical to Napoleon’s. National may look invincible, but, in policy terms, it is only lightly armed. Prime Minister John Key’s popularity and the Government’s soaring poll numbers are the equivalent of the Marmluks’ splendid armour and eager stallions: they look impressive, but in the cut-and-thrust of modern political warfare they are actually rather useless. What counts for much more, once battle is joined, is the quality of the contending parties’ policies; how they are presented; and when they are released.

National’s fatal assumption was that Labour would attempt to fight them on the ground where their man was strongest. That Floundering Phil Goff, wearing nothing but his low preferred prime minister scores, would ride out against John Key, the resplendent Pasha of the Polls, and get slaughtered.

This is where Labour’s experience and discipline have been so effective. They know that big policies, announced during the campaign can produce startling changes in the balance of political forces. (Grant Robertson, in particular, has experience of this; it was his policy of removing the interest from student loans that made such a difference during the 2005 campaign.)

By holding back their announcements on Superannuation and Kiwisaver until the campaign got underway, they have succeeded in inflicting maximum damage on the Government. Key can offer nothing substantial in return. Like a hapless Marmluk warrior he can brandish his rhetorical scimitar and fire-off the occasional (largely ineffectual) round from his ornate musket – and that’s about it.

Key will close with Phil Goff in the Leaders’ Debate on Monday, 31 October. His only hope of evening up the growing imbalance in “serious” policy releases will be to unveil National’s welfare plans to the party faithful at the Government’s official campaign launch on Sunday.

But even this may not be enough. Goff’s and Labour’s achievement has been to re-frame the electoral debate by offering policies which may not be immediately popular but which are unquestionably in the nation’s long-term interest. A punitive, “beneficiary-bashing” welfare policy runs the risk of being dismissed as pandering to the most disreputable elements of the electorate, but contributing nothing useful to the “big issue” discussions which Labour has forced on to the political agenda.

As Labour’s campaign unfolds, we should expect to see more television ads featuring the friendly-but-firm Phil Goff we met in the party’s first sally on asset sales. These will play to Goff’s strengths – his competency, his experience, his safe-pair-of-hands reputation. In all likelihood John Key and his government will barely rate a mention. The focus will be on what has to be done to secure New Zealand’s future, and on Labour’s willingness to take the hard decisions required to make it happen.

Phil Goff and his advisers are betting everything on the voters’ willingness to concede the need to make such difficult choices; and on their readiness to reward the Opposition for its courage in grasping so many stinging policy nettles.

If they’re right, and the voters respond as Labour hopes they will, then National will suffer the same fate as the Marmluks.

“Forward!”, cried Napoleon, as he ordered his troops into position on the melon fields adjoining the distant Pyramids of Giza. “Remember that from those monuments yonder forty centuries look down upon you.”

Phil Goff’s appeal is not to monuments of stone looking down, but to future generations of New Zealanders looking back. The test that lies ahead of us now is no longer just a test of Labour’s leader, it has become a test of ourselves.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

A Landscape Of Flags

2011-10-28T08:00:00.000+13:00

In The Shadow Of The Flag: Mass outpourings of triumphal emotion are all-too-often accompanied by an underlying consciousness of sacrifice and loss. We should never forget that those sacrifices were made so future generations could enjoy moments of joyous inclusiveness - like New Zealand's victory in the Rugby World Cup 2011 - in peace and freedom.

I WENT WALKING with my daughter last Sunday afternoon – RWC-Final Day. Landscape Road is a dead straight kilometre of bitumen and concrete linking Auckland’s much more famous Mt Eden and Dominion Roads.

Socially, the neighbourhood is what you would probably call “mixed”. To the east rise the tall trees and grand houses of Epsom. In Mt Roskill, to the south-west, the ancient lava-flats are traversed by street after street of state houses – among the first to be constructed by the First Labour Government. Along the length of Landscape Road you can see both sorts of dwellings – and a great many more that are neither grand, nor government-built: the modest bungalows of Middle New Zealand.

As we made our way down Landscape Road, the first things we noticed were the flags. They were everywhere: tied to hedges; affixed to windows; nailed to fences; flying from rooftops. I’d never seen so many. And it wasn’t only the New Zealand Ensign that was on display. Outnumbering our national flag by a margin of 2:1 was the silver-fern-on-a-sable-field that is the “All-Blacks” flag. Ranged alongside these quintessentially Kiwi emblems were the flags of the many nations out of which New Zealand itself has been fashioned: England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Tonga, Samoa, South Africa.

I remarked to my daughter how unusual it was for New Zealanders to indulge in this sort of overt display; how we tended to scoff at the ultra-patriotism of the Americans and their habit of flying “Old Glory” over anything and everything: from the overcrowded trailer parks of the poor; to the quiet suburban streets of the middle class; to the luxurious mansions of the obscenely rich. And yet, right there, fluttering before us, was proof that New Zealanders – no less than Americans – are capable of being swept up in the fierce passions of national pride.

“Can you imagine how upset New Zealand will be if the All-Blacks lose tonight?”, I said.

My daughter stood still, looked around at the multitude of fluttering pennants, and slowly shook her head.

But, as all the world now knows, the All-Blacks didn’t lose. And, with their re-claiming of the Webb-Ellis Cup, all that longing, all that confidence, which the flags down Landscape Road represented, has been vindicated.

And how we celebrated. To see literally hundreds-of-thousands of Aucklanders pour into the heart of their city to share in the elation of this long-anticipated sporting victory put me in mind of the vast crowds thronging Tahrir Square in Cairo or Martyrs’ Square in Tripoli. What a fortunate nation, I thought to myself: that its people can turn out in such numbers for something so innocent, so free of death and misery, as a sporting trophy.

How wonderful that our joy in the All-Blacks’ triumph was so emotionally unalloyed. That, beneath the revels, there ran no deeper sadness; no heart-rending knowledge that the price of victory must be counted in the bodies of the fallen.

Historically-speaking, New Zealand is no stranger to those feelings: following two world wars we were forced to undertake our own, grim, calculation of victory’s cost. And let us remember that it was for the possibility of just such moments of happiness, inclusiveness, unity and pride; moments shared by a free people, living in a tried and tested democracy, that New Zealand “laid upon the altar the dearest and the best” she had to offer.

So, as we once again avail ourselves of those democratic instruments, purchased at such expense by our ancestors, let us strive to preserve, in the allocation of our support, that same happiness, inclusiveness, unity and pride that illuminated the nation last Sunday night. Let us give our support only to those who would use our votes as tools for creation – not as weapons to exclude, threaten or destroy.

What made Sunday’s victory so special was that the joy it brought was available to everyone. That, in the shadow of those flags, we were all New Zealanders – all winners.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times, The Greymouth Star and The Waikato Times of Friday, 28 October 2011.

Labour's Leg-Irons Remain Unbroken

2011-10-26T09:58:00.001+13:00

Still In Use: Labour's "Work & Wages" policies represent a very different approach to industrial relations when compared to the National Party's punitive instincts, and yet, even after 20 years of neoliberal restraint, the Labour Party still declines to extend the protection of union membership to all employees, or to repeal any of the oppressive legislative restrictions on the workers' right to strike. One hundred years ago the socialist journalist, Harry Holland, described these legal restraints as "labour's leg-irons". One hundred years later, little has changed.

THE BEST that can be said of Labour’s “Work & Wages” policy is that it has been universally condemned by the nation’s leader-writers. This is an excellent start for any Labour policy – especially those relating to the workplace. Any Labour plan capable of attracting the unstinting praise of “mainstream” political commentators should always be greeted suspiciously by Labour voters.

Those who claim that there is no real difference between the two major parties have clearly never followed the National/Labour debate over wage-bargaining and the role of trade unions. No other issue throws the differences between the Centre-Left and the Centre-Right into such sharp relief. Because every neo-liberal politician and economist knows that laissez-faire capitalism and a strong trade union movement are mutually incompatible. Where one exists, the other falters and dies.

Though Labour oversaw the introduction of “Rogernomics”, it stopped short of abolishing compulsory unionism and New Zealand’s national awards-based system of wage-bargaining. (National awards were industry-wide, occupation-based contracts establishing minimum wages and working conditions).

Labour’s leadership understood that any Labour Party willing to deregulate the labour-market would forever forfeit the right to be called a Labour Party. The likes of Roger Douglas, David Caygill and Richard Prebble may have looked forward to National’s final solution to the union question in New Zealand, but they could not implement it themselves.

Interestingly, the Australian Labor Government of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, whose time in office lasted from 1983 until 1996, provides an interesting control to the New Zealand experience. Where our union movement was ruthlessly disabled, and our national award system totally destroyed by the National Government’s Employment Contracts Act, Australia’s unions, buttressed by compulsory arbitration and national awards, remained major players in the workplace. The wages and working conditions of Kiwi workers have lagged behind those of their Aussie cousins ever since.

In other words, had New Zealand’s nearly century-old tradition of extending the protection of trade union membership and national award coverage to practically every wage worker in the country endured, not only would Kiwi and Aussie wage-rates be much more closely aligned, but New Zealand businesses would also had to have become much more effective and efficient.

Because what the Employment Contracts Act did, over-and-above making the private-sector trade unions significantly less effective defenders of workers’ living standards, is allow New Zealand capitalists to extract their profits directly from the pay-packets of their own workforce – rather than from the fruits of improved productivity and/or innovation. For what remained of the private-sector unions, wage-bargaining became a dispiriting process of determining how large a chunk of their members’ income would be conceded to the employers this year.

Without the goad of a constantly rising wage-bill, the productivity (and, hence, competitiveness) of New Zealand industry declined, businesses closed, and workers were forced to seek employment in this country’s notoriously low-paid service-sector – where the protection of union membership is even harder to access.

So, how does Labour propose to break this cycle of demoralisation and decline, and restore the living-standards of New Zealand workers?

First, by creating a new “Workplace Commission” – which sounds like a somewhat stunted reincarnation of the old Arbitration Court. Second, by introducing Industry Standards Agreements. Bearing a striking resemblance to the former system of national awards, these new workplace agreements will establish a minimum set of wages and conditions across entire industries.

Sadly, Labour’s “Work & Wages” policy stops short of once again extending the protection of union membership to all workers. Clearly, non-union workers are expected to be so impressed by the Industry Standards Agreements that they instantly do the decent thing and join up.

But will they? As it stands, Labour’s “Work & Wages” policy is a free-rider’s charter. While the boss will be forced to adhere to the decisions of the Workplace Commission (which, unlike the old Arbitration Court, offers no guaranteed seat at the table to the employers) non-union workers will get their “Industry Standard” improvements in wages and conditions at no cost to themselves. Far from guaranteeing an expansion of private-sector union coverage, Labour’s reforms seem designed to keep it small.

And, just like the old system of compulsory arbitration, Labour’s proposed new regime will clamp its intended beneficiaries in legal leg-irons. It will be unlawful for workers to strike over the content of an Industry Standards Agreement.

But, if employers are required to participate in Labour’s new regime, why shouldn’t workers be treated the same? If National was willing to use the full force of the law to smash trade unionism, why is Labour being so half-hearted about devising legal mechanisms to restore it?

Perhaps it’s because the re-creation of a large and democratically organised trade union movement would pose an existential threat to New Zealand’s neo-liberal establishment. And for Labour – as for the nation’s leader-writers – that remains a bridge too far.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 25 October 2011.

Encountering Resistance

2011-10-21T11:18:00.001+13:00

Offering Resistance: At the tender age of 26, I learned the hard way that mass support should never be assumed, or demanded. It has to be earned. "Resistance" was modelled on the Polish "Solidarity" (can't ya tell!). In theory a "movement of movements" seemed like a fine idea. Putting it into practice turned out to be a little more difficult.

HAVE YOU EVER HEARD of Resistance? No, not The Resistance, which fought the Germans in occupied France during World War II, but Resistance – as in the single word – like Solidarity? Don’t worry. Unless you lived in Dunedin in 1982, and have a very good memory, there’s no reason why “Resistance” should mean anything to you at all.

The only reason I remember it, is because I set it up.

Radicalised by the Springbok Tour protests of the year before; despairing of formal electoral politics following the narrow return of Rob Muldoon’s National Government; and inspired by the exploits of Poland’s free trade union, Solidarnosc (Solidarity), I was hoping to set up, right here in New Zealand, a similar extra-parliamentary people’s movement, broad enough to encompass all of the big issues of the day.

The movement was to be launched at what I called, with youthful grandiloquence, “The Dunedin People’s Congress”. Invitations went out to interest groups of all kinds: unions, students associations, environmental organisations.

It was a flop. Only a handful of people turned up. And, at the tender age of 26, I learned a bitter – but immensely valuable – lesson about political agitation. Mass support cannot be assumed, or demanded. It must be earned.

The then President of the Labour Party, Jim Anderton, summed it up for me a few months later, when he advised the radical core of Labour Youth’s Dunedin branch to: “Always build your footpaths where the people walk.”

Today, nearly thirty years on, the “Occupy Wall Street” (OWS) movement, and its multitude of emulators in the USA and around the world, are inspiring a new generation of activists – just as Solidarity inspired activists in the early-Eighties. In Auckland and Dunedin, small encampments have been erected in the city-centre by “occupiers” eager to assert the OWS slogan “We are the 99 Percent!” Occupy Auckland has even borrowed OWS’s ultra-democratic, consensus-based, decision-making process: setting up its own “General Assembly” to govern the occupation.

I simply couldn’t avoid a wry grin of recognition when I saw the big “General Assembly” banner unfurled in Aotea Square. “Dunedin People’s Congress” anyone?

The central question that Occupy Auckland and Occupy Dunedin now have to answer, after six days of occupation, is whether or not “the people” are walking on the “footpaths” these groups have, with such enthusiasm (and not a little self-importance) constructed? Or, like the doomed “Dunedin People’s Congress”, is their General Assembly only attracting the most idealistic and/or naïve of the Radical Left?

Earlier this week, a friend of mine e-mailed me the link to a YouTube clip of the 15 October demonstration in Madrid. The Spanish capital’s most central public square – La Puerta del Sol – and the broad avenues leading into it were filled with demonstrators. There must have been at least 100,000 of them; an angry swarm of “indignant” Spanish citizens. The sort of crowd that, here in New Zealand, only great sporting events like the Rugby World Cup can assemble.

When Occupy Auckland and Occupy Dunedin are able gather support on a similar, massive, scale, their claim to speak for “the 99 percent” of the population which cannot boast great wealth, nor wield great power, will acquire a measure of credibility.

But that day is, I fear, far away.

New Zealand is not Spain. We do not face an unemployment rate of 20 percent. Our government has not unleashed the sort of savage austerity measures that have so incensed the Spanish people. At time of writing, Police have yet to pepper-spray, tear-gas or baton-charge any of the non-violent occupiers camped-out in Aotea Square or the Octagon. And, if for some reason (the MV Rena sinks, for example) people do become indignant enough to fill those public spaces, the radical Left will soon discover just how conservative most ordinary people really are. Broad agreement is possible on economic issues – but on precious little else.

I speak from experience. Because, you see, I did end up at a Dunedin “people’s congress” – of sorts. It was called the Otago Trades Council, and its 100-plus delegates represented more than 25,000 unionised workers throughout the province. You dared not take these ordinary New Zealanders for granted. Their trust was a precious commodity – and you had to work hard for it. But when you’d earned it: when it was given; resistance was guaranteed.

This essay was originally published in The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times, The Greymouth Star and The Waikato Times of Friday, 21 October 2011.

Drill, Baby, Drill!

2011-10-19T11:01:00.000+13:00

Foreseeable Crisis: The mile-deep disaster that overtook the Deepwater Horizon oil-rig in the Gulf of Mexico had massive technological assistance within a day's sailing of the catastrophe. Even so, it took BP several months to bring the massive ecological crisis under control. Given the authorities' obvious logistical difficulties in dealing with the comparatively small oil-spill from the Rena, is deep-sea oil exploration really the best answer to New Zealand's energy deficit?

“DRILL, BABY, DRILL!” It’s the battle-cry of the believers in “business as usual”. Sarah Palin’s infamous injunction is also the Populist Right’s translation of former American Vice-President, Dick Cheney’s, much more ominous observation that: “The American way of life is non-negotiable.”

What did the Vice-President mean? In brutally simple terms, Mr Cheney’s words meant that nothing should be allowed to come between Americans and the supply of cheap fossil fuel that underpins the USA’s extraordinary wealth.

“Drill, baby, drill!”, also sums up the National-led Government’s policy on fossil fuels. The Rena may be leaking heavy fuel-oil into the Bay of Plenty, but the Government’s plans for promoting deep-sea oil exploration within New Zealand’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) have yet to be put on hold. Indeed, the Greens and Labour have been chastised for even suggesting such a moratorium, and thereby giving the relevant authorities time to absorb the causes, consequences and lessons of Rena’s grounding.

Why the gung-ho attitude? Why is the Government so determined to proceed in the face of so much evidence suggesting the need for extreme caution? The enormous difficulties already encountered in off-loading just 1,700 tonnes of fuel-oil from a coastal container ship pale into insignificance when compared to the ecological tragedy which unfolded in the Gulf of Mexico between April and July of 2010.

That disaster took place within a day’s sailing of the USA and Mexico, two of the world’s largest energy producers and refiners. So, help was close at hand. A similar deep-sea drilling accident occurring off the coast of New Zealand: a country at the end of the world’s sea-lanes; thousands of miles, and weeks of sailing, away from international assistance; would swiftly dwarf the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe.

Simple common-sense suggests that even the most rudimentary of cost-benefit analyses would flag deep-sea exploration in New Zealand’s EEZ as, at best, marginal, and, at worst, grossly irresponsible.

Of course, the same could’ve been said (and was) about the radical deregulation of our coastal shipping industry. Allowing so-called “flag of convenience” vessels (crewed not by the best, but by the cheapest officers available) to supplant New Zealand flagged and crewed vessels, made a Rena-style accident all-but-inevitable. The Maritime Union of New Zealand warned successive governments over and over again about the risks. Nobody listened.

So, what is it? How is this refusal to recognise simple common sense, and heed the warnings of experts, to be explained?

The answer is frighteningly simple. Politicians like Sarah Palin, Dick Cheney, Gerry Brownlee and Hekia Parata (Mr Brownlee’s stand-in as Energy Minister) are all in a state of denial.

Even though a succession of reputable international agencies (the latest being the IMF) have warned the world’s governments that the moment of peak oil production occurred five years ago, and that the chances of the current and future global demand for oil being met by the discovery and exploitation of new deep-sea fields are extremely low (the world needs to locate the equivalent of four Saudi Arabia’s to meet the looming shortfall of cheap oil supplies) the politicians just go on denying that any of this alarming information is true.

Given New Zealand’s acute vulnerability to price and supply shocks, our political leaders’ refusal to face the facts is, perhaps, understandable. The best evidence available suggests that this country’s domestic fossil fuel reserves will be largely exhausted by 2020. That will leave our automobile-dependent society and economy dangerously exposed to the vagaries of international supply and demand.

Try these numbers for size.

The current price of “Brent Crude” is between $US100-$US120 per barrel. The NZ Treasury forecasts that in 2015 our exchange rate with the US dollar will be 0.60$US/$NZ. Assuming that by 2015 the declining global supply of oil has pushed the price of Brent Crude to $US200 per barrel, means New Zealand would need to find an additional $10.5 billion, annually, to pay its net fuel import bill. (Compare this with the total cost to Government of rebuilding Christchurch, estimated by Treasury to be $8 billion.)

The economic consequences of such a massive increase in the price of oil are easily imagined: falling GDP, rising inflation, declining real income, decreased consumer spending, increased unemployment, recession.

And so the cry of “drill, baby, drill!” goes up. Because it’s easier to imagine some lucky offshore prospector uncovering another North Sea oil and gas field than it is to imagine how any government might even broach, let alone manage, the winding-back of our fossil-fuel-based civilisation.

It’s all too hard. Just as it was too hard to resist the deregulation of our coastal shipping industry – and so keep our beaches and wildlife free from stinking, toxic sludge.

Fifty years from now, when the foreign ships no longer call, may our grand-children laugh where we now weep – and wonder at our folly.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 18 October 2011.

They're Only 0.1 Percent - But It's A Good Start!

2011-10-17T11:27:00.008+13:00

A Good Beginning: One-thousand-plus "Occupy Auckland" protesters gathered in Aotea Square on 15 October and constituted themselves as a "General Assembly" of Aucklanders. But, if it really wishes to speak for 99 percent of its fellow Aucklanders, the General Assembly must turn a good beginning into something much, much bigger.

IT’S NOT OFTEN that old age and treachery are bested by youth and idealism, but it happened on Saturday. The “Occupy Auckland” organisers gave themselves just one week to add New Zealand’s largest city to the growing list of “occupied” cities around the world. Too little time, I said. People aren’t angry enough, I said. Can’t be done, I said.

Well, I was wrong.

I had expected less than 300 people to show up. But it was clear from the moment I arrived at QEII square on Saturday afternoon that there were many more people than that. Between them, Facebook and the wreck of the Rena had assembled a reasonably respectable protest march. As an estimate, two thousand would have been too generous, and one thousand too stingy. But if you’d said around 1,400 protesters set off up Queen Street for Aotea Square, you wouldn’t have been far off the mark.

I like that number because it represents exactly 0.1 percent of Auckland’s 1.4 million citizens. In other words, the “Occupy Auckland” protesters numbered just one tenth of the 1 percent of fat-cat capitalist greedsters they were marching against. I’m not making this point to be snarky, merely offering it as a hopefully useful corrective to some of the over-ambitious claims being made by the protest leaders.

Because the people who have set up camp in Aotea Square are very obviously NOT representative of 99 percent of Aucklanders. They are far too young, far too white, and far too unencumbered by the burdens of job, mortgage and family to be anything like the twenty-thousand-plus ordinary Aucklanders who celebrated the All-Blacks victory over the Wallabies throughout the central city the following night.

But they do represent something. There was a pile of youthful energy and a playful sense of creativity permeating the Aotea Square “campsite” on Saturday afternoon. Even I, a staunch opponent of “consensus-based decision-making” for more than 30 years, felt my frown lines disappearing and a smile slowly spreading across my face as the “facilitators” (don’t, whatever you do, call them “leaders”) explained to the thousand-strong “General Assembly” the four basic hand-signals indicating Agreement, Disagreement, Point of Process and Block.

Here on the green lawns of Aotea Square, under a bright spring sky, I was witnessing something new under the sun – and I hadn’t witnessed anything new in left-wing political practice for a very long time. Suddenly, I was laughing at the speakers’ lame jokes. And, when the various “working-groups” who’d made the day’s events possible were introduced to the General Assembly, I found myself joining-in the crowd's very big round of applause.

I was, however, very glad the plan to literally “Occupy Queen Street” had been abandoned. Worried that there might still be some who refused to accept the decision to shift the focus of the protest to Aotea Square, I moved ahead of the march and took up a position overlooking the big Wellesley Street intersection. If there was going to be a street-based occupation, this is where it would happen.

The Police agreed. From a side street, 24 constables, led by a burly Police Sergeant, formed up into what was clearly a snatch-squad. They were decked out in stab-vests, hand-cuffs and appeared to be carrying batons. Further up Wellesley Street, three large “Paddy Wagons” stood ready to receive the constables’ “catch”.

I watched the protest march approach the intersection, saw it pause, gather mass, pause again, and then move on up Queen Street. The back-end of the march did the same: pause, gather mass, pause. A haka was performed – and then the last of the marchers followed their comrades up Queen Street to the Square. The Police snatch-squad about-turned and marched away.

Aotea Square was always the obvious occupation site. In the popular imagination, if not in strictly legal terms, it is Auckland’s most important public space – a city square – just like the city squares of Cairo and Athens, Barcelona and Madrid. Wall Street is a potent political symbol: Queen Street, for most people, is just a carriageway.

But now the rules of the General Assembly are agreed, and the tents pitched – what happens next? The weather is predicted to turn bad for most of the next week, and heavy rain will quickly turn Aotea Square’s green lawns into muddy wallows. A General Assembly of one thousand merry protesters is an impressive sight. An assembly reduced to 100 bedraggled campers will not look so good.

The question of how to build the protest: of how to reach out to the 99.9 percent of Aucklanders who are yet to involve themselves in this bold political experiment; must be answered. Only when “Occupy Auckland” can gather together in one place as many enthusiastic citizens as the organisers of the Rugby World Cup, will their calls for change acquire genuine political heft. (And when the General Assembly numbers 20,000 - instead of 1,000 - I suspect its calls for change will turn out to be a lot less radical than Saturday's revolutionary speeches.)

The organisers of “Occupy Auckland” have made a good beginning – better than I thought possible. But, in the words of All-Black coach, Graham Henry: “The job hasn't been done yet.”

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

Lies, Damn Lies, and "Inferences"

2011-10-15T12:41:00.000+13:00

"Dunno. Wasn't There.": The Prime Minister's ordeal by press conference over his allegation that Standard & Poors had warned economists that a credit downgrade was more likely under Labour has hopefully cured him of relying too heavily on the "inferences" of businessmen-spies.

THE PRIME MINISTER can count himself very lucky that the House of Representatives stands adjourned and the Speaker is abroad. Were they not, it is difficult to see how John Key could have escaped the scrutiny of the Privileges Committee. Had the timing been just a little different, he could easily have found himself in the same position as Winston Peters in 2008: diverted from the election campaign to answer charges of misleading Parliament.

But, then, Mr Key has always been lucky – as lucky as his principal opponent, Phil Goff, has been unlucky. Even so, the adjournment (and imminent proroguing) of the House, and Dr Lockwood Smith’s absence have not protected him from several days of acute political embarrassment.

His claim to the House that a change of government would increase the likelihood of a credit downgrading by Standard & Poor’s has been exposed as, at best, a false conclusion – drawn from an unjustified inference.

We know this because a spokesperson from Standard & Poor’s has taken the highly unusual step of publicly contradicting a prime-minister.

Melbourne-based Kyran Curry, who was present at the S&P-sponsored meeting of economists where the discussion of New Zealand’s credit-rating took place, stated unequivocally: “I would never have touched on individual parties. It is something we just don’t do. We don’t rate political parties; we rate Governments.”

In the face of such a public slap-down, Mr Key had no choice but to concede that his understanding of Standard & Poor’s position was based entirely on information received from an anonymous source who had been present at the meeting. Fierce questioning from a highly sceptical Press Gallery then forced the Prime Minister to release his “evidence” – an e-mail in which his (still anonymous) informant declared:

“There was a key one-liner that I thought you could well use. S&P said that there was a 1/3 chance that NZ would get downgraded and a 2/3 chance it would not, and the inference was clear that it would be the other way round if Labour were in power.”

That word “inference” should have caused Mr Key’s political radar warning system to light up like a tilted pin-ball machine. Prime Ministers do not rely on inferences – no matter how “clear”. They rely on facts.

Nor should they allow their parliamentary opponents to assume that they were present at a meeting which, in reality, they did not attend. Unless, of course, they enjoy repeating, over and over again, to a roomful of stony-faced journalists: “I wasn’t there.” “I wasn’t at the meeting.”

And, never – under any circumstances – should they twitch back the curtain of Prime Ministerial omniscience to reveal the tacky truth that he or she is the receptacle for an endless stream of petty gossip and partisan innuendo.

How long does Mr Key think it will take a clever journalist to track down the full list of economists present at the Standard & Poor’s meeting? When, by his own admission, one of the names on that list is a prime-ministerial spy, how long does he think it will take before a shrewd process of elimination identifies the guilty party?

The bank economists representing the ANZ and the BNZ have already been forced to deny any part in the leaking of their colleagues’ private deliberations to the Prime Minister. Others are bound to follow. And none of them will be happy.

Contemporary economics reminds me of nothing so much as the huckster’s shill. And, like any confidence trick, it only works while people keep believing what they’re told. Just as in Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz, where the smooth running of the Emerald City depends on no one discovering what lies hidden behind the curtain, faith in the Government’s economic management depends upon people believing their leader is guided by more than anonymous spies peddling “one liners” and “inferences”.

Mr Key’s remarkable luck may have preserved him from the Privileges Committee, but in the Court of Public Opinion he stands convicted.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times, The Greymouth Star and The Waikato Times of Friday, 14 October 2011.

Moving The Frame

2011-10-13T11:46:00.000+13:00

Propaganda Coup: This excellent example of political re-framing should be giving the National Party serious heart palpitations. The Rena Disaster is a classic example of the exogenous political event - the thing no campaign manager can plan for. In 2002 in was "Corngate" - this year it could well be the Rena. Some are already calling New Zealand's worst environmental disaster "Key's Katrina". If the Prime Minister isn't able to escape this frame - and quickly - he could end up drowning in it.

Defusing The Bomber

2011-10-12T13:00:00.004+13:00

Defused: Martyn "Bomber" Bradbury's exclusion from Radio New Zealand's Afternoons with Jim Mora's "The Panel" was unfair to the man and embarrassing for public radio, but it was also, in the intimate little country New Zealand has always been, utterly predictable.

I WAS A LITTLE SURPRISED, and a lot impressed, when the production team behind Radio New Zealand – National’s Afternoons with Jim Mora invited Martyn “Bomber” Bradbury on to “The Panel”. Surprised: because Bomber’s style is about as far away from the decorous National Radio tradition as it’s possible to get. Impressed: because it confirmed Afternoons’ determination to remain at the cutting-edge of public service radio in New Zealand.

Since the demise of Radio New Zealand’s commercial arm in the 1990s, and the Fifth Labour Government’s craven refusal to honour its promise to establish a publicly-owned, commercial-free, nationwide youth network, Radio New Zealand – National has drifted, like a piece of pre-Rogernomics cultural flotsam, in hostile neo-liberal seas.

For nearly two decades the public network has struggled to re-invent itself – with limited success. How could it be otherwise, when the funding increases required for genuine experimentation were consistently withheld by Radio New Zealand’s political masters.

To be utterly dependent on non-hypothecated state funding cannot help but foster an institutional culture of acute self-awareness. Radio New Zealand’s broadcasters have become experts at sensing where the invisible political trip-wires had been laid – and how to avoid them.

“The Panel” – a sort of radio adaptation of TV3’s much-loved The Ralston Group – brought its staff and their guests about as close to those trip-wires as Radio New Zealand’s bosses were prepared to go. And, like The Ralston Group, “The Panel’s” survival depended on its guests fully understanding and respecting the show’s parameters.

I well remember TV3’s Head of News & Current Affairs, Rod Pedersen, telling Ralston’s guests (most of whom were experienced journalists) that he trusted them, as professionals, to know the difference between fair comment and defamation, and thus to keep the network out of the courts. To my knowledge, no one ever let him down.

The producers of Afternoons weren’t as explicit as Rod Pedersen, and yet it was always pretty clear to me that the “culture” of Radio New Zealand was very different indeed from the culture of Newstalk-ZB, Radio Live, and commercial radio in general. Though it ended up as a sort of Ralston-Group-without-pictures, it was originally conceived as a radio version of the BBC’s delightful show Grumpy Old Men – a witty and wistful programme by and for ageing “Baby-Boomers”. You could be many things on Afternoons – but strident wasn’t one of them.

I well remember the day I was ambushed on-air by a bitter and even more than normally vituperative Mike Moore. The former Labour leader really laid into me, landing verbal blow after verbal blow until, becoming very angry, I began to fight back – stridently. Immediately, I felt the vice-like grip of my fellow panellist, Richard Griffin, on my wrist. He shook his head emphatically, as if to say: “don’t go there, stay calm”. Meanwhile, the programme’s amiable host, Jim Mora, very adroitly and professionally, began defusing the confrontation.

This was the institutional culture that Bomber – a natural broadcasting talent honed at stations like BfM and Channel Z – was striding into: pre-written “Soapbox” diatribe gripped tightly in his hand, and that enormous, Gen-X, anti-Baby-Boomer chip he carries around balanced precariously on his shoulder. Talk about inviting Hamas to a bar-mitzvah! This was one gutsy call.

Bomber’s bombastic bloviations swept through Radio New Zealand’s studios – and into the middle-class parlours of the nation – like a noisome radical fart. And, presumably, that was the point. Why else bring Bomber onto “The Panel” unless you genuinely intended to get up the Afternoons audience’s nose? Unless, in the words of Theodore Roszak, you wanted your listeners to experience “an invasion of centaurs”? (Or, in this case, centaur?)

But what about the tripwires? Well, that’s why I was so surprised, impressed, and – yes – even delighted. Because Bomber, host of the high-rating (for Stratos) Citizen A show, and no-holds-barred poster on the Tumeke blog, was gloriously oblivious to any and all of the political tripwires lacing through Radio New Zealand’s corridors. And that could only mean, by inviting him on to Afternoons, one of the network’s highest-rating shows (and one of the highest-rating in the whole country) Radio New Zealand was ready to push out the boundaries of public radio – hard.

Too hard, it would seem.

Perhaps the Radio New Zealand producers were just so used to stepping carefully over all those political tripwires they simply assumed every other broadcaster was too. But there are all kinds of tripwires in broadcasting. In commercial radio they’re laid by the advertisers – via the Sales & Marketing Department – and the shock-jocks ignore them at their peril. In student radio, I imagine the ultimate sin is a terminal lack of “cool”.

As Bomber’s commentaries nudged the stridency levels higher and higher, and Afternoon’s Baby-Boomer audience grew weary of the Bradbury blame-game, the programme was dragged further and further away from its comfort-zone. Sooner or later, Radio New Zealand was bound to say: “Nup. That’s it. We’ve gone too far out on this particular limb.”

The moment came last Thursday afternoon. Bomber took aim at the Prime Minister and squeezed-off a sustained burst of heavy-calibre fire. It was no better or worse than a dozen other well-aimed political fusillades he’d unleashed over the past few months. But, it was one too many.

What happened? I don’t know – and I haven’t been able to find out. Did RNZ Board Chairman, Richard Griffin, put the vice-like metaphorical squeeze on CEO Peter Cavanagh’s wrist? I doubt it. The most likely explanation is that, quite suddenly, and without the clear warning he was entitled to and should have been given, Bomber crossed the invisible line from “gutsy call” to “major liability” – and the Bomber-disposal squad went into action.

Unfair to Bomber? Yes. Bad for the programme? Possibly. Deeply embarrassing for Radio New Zealand? Definitely. But in a society so small; so politically and professionally intimate; and so utterly dependent on invisible lines and unspoken rules as New Zealand, it was also very, very predictable.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.