Labour vs The People's Party: Mt Roskill Up For Grabs?

The Successor: The man the Labour Party has chosen to replace Goff is young, intelligent, hard-working, and has already proved his ability to attract the votes of his neighbours by being twice elected to his local community board. As Goff’s electorate chair, he worked tirelessly to keep the Mt Roskill seat in his party’s hands. But, this otherwise ideal candidate does have one important factor working against him – his ethnicity. Michael Wood is a Pakeha New Zealander.

 

LESS THAN TWO-MINUTES’ WALK from my front doorstep is a wine shop. On Saturday, 13 August, it was robbed by four masked teenagers wielding clubs. The two retail workers on duty were beaten badly enough to require treatment in hospital. It was not an isolated incident. The same business had been robbed three times in as many weeks. The retailer and his staff are Chinese New Zealanders. The wine shop is located in the Mt Roskill electorate.

 

Barring something politically cataclysmic overwhelming his campaign, the current Member of Parliament for Mt Roskill, Phil Goff, will be Auckland City’s next mayor. A by-election will, therefore, be needed to fill the vacancy created by Goff’s departure for the Town Hall.

 

The man the Labour Party has chosen to replace Goff is young, intelligent, hard-working, and has already proved his ability to attract the votes of his neighbours by being twice elected to his local community board. As Goff’s electorate chair, he worked tirelessly to keep the Mt Roskill seat in his party’s hands. But, this otherwise ideal candidate does have one important factor working against him – his ethnicity. Michael Wood is a Pakeha New Zealander.

 

“So is Phil Goff”, you rightfully object, “but it didn’t prevent him from taking 56 percent of the Electorate Vote in the 2014 General Election.” No, it didn’t, but then Goff has held the seat for all but three of the last 35 years. Incumbency and name recognition confer enormous advantages upon a candidate, and Goff has made the most of them in ten out of the last twelve general elections.

 

Unfortunately for Michael Wood, while Goff has been winning, Mt Roskill has been changing. As the local political fiefdom of the long-time Deputy-Mayor of Auckland, Keith Hay, Mt Roskill was a notorious bastion of evangelical Christian social-conservatism. Some Labour wags even referred to it as the “Bible Belt”.  Not anymore. Today, Mt Roskill’s 25,000 Christians share their electorate with more than 3,000 Muslims and nearly 6,000 Hindus. This religious diversity reflects the fact that “Asians” comprise nearly 40 percent of the electorate. More than 45 percent of today’s Mt Roskillites were born overseas.

 

Michael Wood has always known he would face a tough race to secure this new Mt Roskill for Labour. Boundary changes have shaved an uncomfortably large slice off Goff’s winning margin, and, as if that wasn’t bad enough, in 2014 National’s Party Vote tally exceeded Labour’s by more than 2,000 votes. In other words, Mt Roskill should no longer be classed as a safe Labour seat.

 

Even so, by securing his selection early and setting in motion an impressive canvassing effort, Wood has made himself the one to beat.

 

On Monday night, however, the formation of the New Zealand People’s Party changed everything. Aimed squarely at winning the votes of Mt Roskill’s large immigrant community, the People’s Party has the potential to draw enough votes away from Labour to deny Wood the seat. (By-elections are fought under the rules of First-Past-The-Post.) Indeed, if National decided not to field a candidate, and steered its voters towards the People’s Party, the seat might even change hands.

 

Much will depend on the quantum of money and expertise the people behind the People’s Party are willing to invest in contesting the by-election – and what cause they choose to make their own.

 

Which takes us back neatly to the wine shop and the multiple attacks it has sustained. For far too many immigrant families such victimisation has become almost routine. Their anger at the apparent impotence of the authorities grows daily, even as their patience wears thin. A charismatic candidate, chosen from either the Indian or Chinese communities, running on an uncompromising promise to restore law and order to the Streets of Mt Roskill could easily attract thousands of immigrant votes. Add to them the votes cast strategically by National supporters raring to deny Labour the seat, and the race could get very close indeed.

 

Fortunately, that veteran of closely-fought by-election contests, Matt McCarten, has just announced his imminent return to Auckland. Andrew Little’s erstwhile chief-of-staff knows that if Labour doesn’t win Auckland, then it doesn’t win at all. Mt Roskill looks set to provide McCarten with his first organisational test. One can only assume that, for Michael Wood’s campaign team, the Wellington cavalry cannot arrive too soon.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 2 September 2016.

Of Capitalist Catastrophes And Collectivist Triumphs

Greed Meets Fear: A New York stockbroker attempts to keep pace with the vertiginous slide in the Dow Jones Index following China's "Black Monday" (24/8/15). Capitalism likes to paint itself as a force of nature, before which human-beings are individually and collectively powerless. Only when this economic fatalism is challenged by people's renewed confidence in the efficacy of collective action can capitalism's catastrophes be overcome.

 

ROUND AND ROUND AND ROUND it goes, and where it stops nobody knows! You might think that ordinary human-beings would have tired of Capitalism’s cyclical catastrophes by now. But our capacity to absorb these entirely man-made calamities appears to be no less impressive than our ability to cope with the genuine disasters nature sends our way. Indeed, Capitalism’s longevity is, almost certainly, attributable to its success in convincing us that it, too, is a force of Nature – something far beyond our feeble strength to influence for good or ill.

 

It was not always so. Eighty years ago, with the world in the clutches of another capitalist catastrophe, human-beings somewhere found the collective strength to denounce this “force of nature” falsehood. They decided that what humankind could ruin just by “letting things go” (laissez-faire) it could rebuild by replacing the “invisible hand” of the all-powerful capitalist market with their own.

 

The American President, Franklin Roosevelt, demonstrated the power of those all-too-visible hands in the massive public works of his “New Deal”. And the British Prime Minister, Clement Atlee, likewise demonstrated what focused political will could achieve when, in the midst of post-war austerity, the British people created their National Health Service.

 

Nor was New Zealand lacking in these triumphs of the people’s will. The First Labour Government’s Social Security Act of 1938 was New Zealand’s answer to the poverty and desperation of the Great Depression. Likewise its state housing programme: a massive construction effort funded by “Reserve Bank Credit”. (A capital source unrecognised by contemporary capitalist economists!)

 

So spectacular were the achievements of collective endeavour in the years before, during and after the Second World War, that capitalists everywhere felt obliged to pay them a grudging lip-service. This apparent conversion was, however, illusory. Whenever the parties of “private enterprise” managed to supplant the parties of collectivism, the latter’s policies were either subtly, or not so subtly, perverted. Projects designed to serve the interests of the many, always seemed to end up by disproportionately benefitting the few.

 

Visionary Blueprints: Ministry of Works plans for "The Auckland That Never Was".

 

The visionary blueprints for the development of post-war Auckland, drawn up in the mid-1940s by Ministry of Works planners, anticipated the goals of Auckland’s contemporary urban planners by 70 years. Tragically, the election of the First National Government, in 1949, put paid to this “Auckland that never was”, leaving Aucklanders with the sprawling, automobile-dependent conurbations that, today, they cannot afford to fix.

 

An even more comprehensive development plan, this time embracing the whole country, was brought together by William B. Sutch in the 1950s. One of New Zealand’s most creative (and controversial) public servants, Sutch recognised, very early, the urgent need for New Zealand to diversify its agricultural commodity-based economy. He argued for the sort of value-added products that distinguished the export-base of small economies like Switzerland and Denmark. This would require a much stronger national emphasis on skills acquisition and tertiary education. Only with a highly educated workforce could New Zealand produce the innovation necessary to broaden its economy. Sutch also argued for an economy that was much less import dependent. New Zealand, he said, must develop a much stronger industrial base.

 

In the Second Labour Government (1957-1960) led by Walter Nash, Sutch found a pair of eager listeners. The Finance Minister, Arnold Nordmeyer, and the Industry and Commerce Minister, Philip Holloway, were both convinced that Sutch’s ideas offered the only coherent path to a more prosperous, and less vulnerable, economic future for New Zealand. It is one of the great tragedies of this country’s history that the Second Labour Government did not last long enough for the change it contemplated to be undertaken and become entrenched.

 

As Sutch would later write: “The National Party could not have made this change because of their dependence for financial and political support on the farmers, importers, merchants and finance houses.” Plus ça change!

 

It’s been seven years since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 provided yet another warning of New Zealand’s economic vulnerability. Was it heeded? There’s scant evidence of it. What cannot be missed, however, is seven years of enormous investment in dairying. The export of raw commodities remains this country’s stock-in-trade.

 

Today, as another capitalist catastrophe looms, is it not time to heed the collective spirit of ‘38 and ‘45 and ’57? Those years when “Yes we can!” was more than a presidential slogan.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 28 August 2015.

Party Like It's 1949

The Auckland That Never Was: The visionary 1940s urban design of Ernst Plischke would have given birth to an Auckland with a decidedly European feel. Held together by its ultra-modern light-rail system and high-density state-housing, the city would have become the Stockholm of the South Seas. The defeat of the First Labour Government in 1949 put an end to the Ministry of Work's grand plan, and, under successive National Government's, Auckland was transformed into the car-dependent, South Seas version of  Los Angeles we have today.

THE DEBACLE that was Auckland’s public transport system last Friday night was more than sixty years in the making. That’s how long it’s been since a group of brilliant urban planners, based in the Ministry of Works, sent their blueprint for post-war Auckland to Parliament. Had the Labour Party won just 50,000 more votes in the 1949 general election, that blueprint would have become reality, and Auckland would now be a very different city.

But, Labour lost the ’49 election, and the National Party government which replaced the planning-friendly administration of Peter Fraser was not impressed by the MoW’s version of Auckland’s future.

As far as the National Party was concerned, Auckland’s post-war growth was the business of the private sector – not the state. Housing construction, and the infrastructure required to service the new suburbs of the 1950s, would, as far as possible, be the preserve of commercial builders and contractors.

National’s belief in individualism and self-reliance similarly militated against the MoW’s plans for an Auckland woven together by an extensive network of electric railway units on the Hutt Valley model. The government of Sid Holland was convinced that the future belonged to the private automobile. In the nostrils of the Nats, trains always carried the whiff of socialism.

They still do – as anyone who has listened to Transport Minister Steven Joyce’s paeans of praise to the virtues of the motor car can attest.

To be fair, however, the failure to create a modern public transportation network in Auckland is not the National Party’s alone.

One of the largest and most important elements in the import substitution plans drawn up by the Second Labour Government, were the car assembly plants. Not only were these factories intended to save overseas funds, but they were also excellent devices for manufacturing loyal Labour voters. The MoW’s plans for an Auckland that ran on rails continued to gather dust.

It would be another 12 years before Labour was again in office. By the 1970s, the party needed little convincing of the shortcomings of Auckland’s congested car culture. Finally, Labour was ready to back (but not to fund) the plans for a light-rail network that Auckland’s indomitable Mayor, Sir Dove-Myer Robinson, had been advocating for more than a decade.

They had not reckoned on Sir Robert Muldoon.

The monstrous hydra of motorways continued to grow, along with the number of cars crawling along it’s sinuous necks.

Labour’s neoliberal conversion in the 1980s saw the railways ruthlessly downsized and readied for privatisation. Free marketeers drove cars: public transport (especially trains) were for state-subsidised losers.

Not even the election of a Labour-Alliance government in 1999 was enough to halt the madness. And when Prime Minister Helen Clark backed and won New Zealand’s bid for the Rugby World Cup 2011, there was scant understanding of what that would require of Auckland’s public transportation system, and even less enthusiasm for making it happen.

Labour’s finance minister, Dr Michael Cullen, could have left Auckland with a modern, electrified, light-rail network. Egged on by his Treasury advisers, he chose instead to prevaricate and delay. His successor, Bill English, at least had the excuse of a global financial crisis – not to mention the disadvantage of a Transport Minister who never saw motorway plans he didn’t fall in love with at first sight.

And so, when we most needed it to succeed, Auckland’s rail network simply collapsed under the sort of numbers most modern cities move about every day of the week.

Visitors here for the World Cup from Western Europe and North America must have wondered what they’d struck. Gazing incredulously at last Friday’s hopeless snarl of decades-old, diesel-belching locomotives, and SRO carriages lacking effective air-conditioning, a working PA system, and the professional assistance of trained railway-guards; they must have asked themselves if they really were in a first-world city, in the 21^st Century.

Nope – on both counts. In Auckland, if you’re looking for efficient public transport by rail, it’s always 1949.

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, 16 September 2011.

I #*! Super City: Why Metro has got it wrong. Really

Metro's Simon Wilson: Cheerleading Rodney Hide's Auckland "super city" power grab.

FOR sheer Pollyanna puffery, Simon Wilson’s "Why We Love Super City", in the latest issue of Metro, takes some beating. The image of a perky cheerleader dominates Wilson’s text, and that is wholly appropriate. When your sub-heading is "Why Rodney Hide has got it right. Really." – cheerleading is pretty obviously the name of the game.

It’s a pity really, because Wilson is usually a thoughtful writer, and not given to lending his support to the sort of PR glad-games currently being rolled out to justify one of the most audacious power-grabs in New Zealand’s political history.

The article begins with the picture of a region suffering from "economic underperformance, blighted urban planning and social dysfunction" – all of it, Wilson implies, the dystopic residue of incompetent "local fiefdoms". He has to do this, of course, because if it could be proved that Auckland’s multiple afflictions (if they exist at all) are in no way the fault of its local authorities, then the whole rationale for Hide’s "Super-City" disappears.

But, this is precisely what Auckland’s history does; it completely explodes both Hide’s and the Royal Commission on Auckland Governance’s arguments for collapsing local democracy into regional "governance". The city’s woes, going back to, and beyond, 1865, have almost always arisen out of Auckland businessmen’s determination to turn politics into profit.

Whether it be Thomas Russell, fomenting war with the Maori king to expedite his company’s land-grabbing; or the powerful "development" business nexus, which spawned the sprawling, car-dependent culture of post-war Auckland; or the mirror-glass speculators, who tore down what remained of the city’s graceful Victorian architecture in the deregulated 80s; it has always been that fateful combination of greed and ambition (both local and national) which made Greater Auckland so much less than it could have – should have – been.

Were the cities and boroughs of Auckland responsible for the motorway system which demolished so many thriving communities in the 1950s and 60s – or was that the work a handful of Auckland roading contractors and property developers, operating hand-in-glove with their National Party cronies in the Capital?

Was it Auckland’s local politicians who shut down the great manufacturing plants of south and west Auckland in the 1980s – or was the resulting "economic underperformance" and "social dysfunction" the legacy of the MPs for Mangere, Manurewa, Te Atatu and Auckland Central?

Was it the avarice of mayors and city councillors which saw the wealth of middle-class Aucklanders wiped out in the crash of ’87 – or was it the greed of the wide boys who drank at the Rogues Bar and worked for Equiticorp?

Was it the Auckland Regional Council which stalled the electrification of Auckland’s rail services for the past four years – or was that Michael Cullen and his Treasury advisers?

The key premise behind the Super City proposal is that Auckland’s local problems are the fault of Auckland’s local politicians – and it just ain’t true.

Wilson, as an editor of New Zealand history, and one of Metro’s senior writers, should know all this. So why is his article a history-free zone? Perhaps because it’s so much easier to declare, bluntly, and without the slightest supporting evidence, that: "The status-quo is not an option."

But even if we accept that some sort of change is desirable, the more important question: "Why Rodney Hide’s version of change?", is one that Wilson does not even begin to answer.

It’s all very well to play-up the Royal Commission’s emphasis on social, economic, environmental and cultural "well-being", but the brute fact of the matter is that all of its "namby-pamby, feel-good sloganising" has been rejected by both the National and Act Parties. They have a very different set of priorities.

And before citing Singapore, Seattle, Glasgow and Barcelona as examples of "vibrant" urban economies, why didn’t Wilson do a little research into the nature of their governmental structures.

Rightly celebrated throughout the European Union as one of its most progressively governed cities, Glasgow, with a population of 580,690 citizens, is roughly comparable in size to the present City of Auckland. The similarities end there, however, because instead of Auckland’s 19, Glaswegians get to elect 79 city councillors – one councillor for every 7,350 citizens. Compare that "vibrant" and very democratic ratio with Rodney Hide’s one Super City councillor for every 65,000 citizens. Even Barcelona’s 1.6 million citizens, living under a municipal constitution drafted in 1960 by General Franco’s fascist regime, are entitled to 41 councillors (1:39,000).

What Wilson has either failed to understand, or refuses to acknowledge, is that the Auckland Super City has been designed by neo-liberals, for neo-liberals. From its very beginnings, as the brainchild of senior Auckland business leaders, it’s purpose has never been to generate the "social well-being" which the members of the Royal Commission so naively attempted to interpose in their report, but its opposite. What Rodney Hide and his backers want to see in their shining Super City on a hill, is that universal hallmark of neo-liberal success: growing income inequalities.

That’s why Hide is promoting the democratic obscenity of 20 councillors for 1.3 million citizens. (With eight of the 20 elected "at large", an electoral option rejected by New Zealanders more than 20 years ago.) It’s why he’s promoting 20-30 powerless "community councils", rather than the four, more influential, "city councils" recommended by the Royal Commission. It also explains his vehement opposition to special Maori representation, and why the straightforward, democratic, expedient of taking the 75 councillors currently representing the four major cities of the Auckland region, and putting them under the roof of a single chamber, simply wouldn’t occur to him. Why not? Because, fundamentally, neo-liberalism and democracy are incompatible.

In his final paragraph, Wilson quotes the Royal Commission’s vision statement, noting approvingly its preference for "an integrated sustainable approach" and its wish that the city’s business be "actively and effectively managed … in a responsible way". But this is the bloodless language of corporate bureaucracy – not popular democracy. Nowhere in his article, and in spite of all his condescending concern for the "common folk", does Wilson acknowledge that it is their right to self-government – not good governance – that is at stake for Auckland’s 1.3 million citizens.

A Super City Council of Aucklanders, by Aucklanders, for Aucklanders.

All Aucklanders.

"Who doesn’t want that? Who doesn’t think we need it? And who seriously thinks we’ve got it already?"

This commentary was originally published in The Independent of Thursday, 4 June 2009.

National's Roads to Victory

The post-war multiplication of roads, cars and suburbs secured (and continues to secure) the National Party’s political success.

LABOUR voters from New Zealand’s towns and cities often marveled at the quality of rural roads.

Miles from anywhere, they would suddenly find themselves travelling on a brand-new, tar-sealed carriageway in a better state of repair than the cracked and pot-holed city streets where they lived.

This was, of course, in the 1950s and 60s, when the New Zealand economy was booming, and the politically dominant National Party could afford to indulge in a little harmless pork-barrelling.

It was, after all, along these fine new roads that the sheep and cattle trucks, the lorries piled high with wool bales, and the gleaming, stainless-steel milk-tankers made their way to the freezing-works, wool-stores and dairy factories that processed the nation’s primary exports.

Cockies were the backbone of the country – didn’t they deserve good roads?

The political economy of roading in New Zealand embraces a great deal more, however, than a few examples of old-fashioned pork-barrelling in the back-blocks. Urban voters might not have been able to miss the signs of National’s love affair with roads and trucks in the countryside, but for most of the past 50 years they’ve been blind to its larger and much more expensive manifestations in the metropolitan centres – especially Auckland. The central role which the National Party has played in the politics and economics of transportation has similarly been overlooked (For an excellent article on this subject by Dr Chris Harris try here.)

Primarily a private-sector activity, albeit one financed out of national and/or local taxation, the road-building business is particularly susceptible to political patronage (and, it must be said, corruption). The distinction to be made with railway construction and maintenance – especially in New Zealand – is very important in this respect. For most of its history this country’s railways have been state-owned enterprises, guarded by powerful trade unions, and offering correspondingly fewer opportunities for rewarding one’s private sector mates. Not surprisingly, New Zealand’s right-wing parties have tended to favour road over rail.

Of course there’s no point in building roads if there are no cars, trucks, motorbikes and busses to use them. If you’re the state sponsor of, or a private contractor in, the road-building industry, there’s nothing more expensive, or embarrassing, than an empty highway. So, once again, genuine competition from an inherently cheaper and more efficient rail network has always been a major problem for road builders. If the myriad opportunities for profit opened up by the invention of the internal combustion engine were to be successfully exploited, people had to be persuaded that it made more sense to transport themselves, and their goods, by road, in a motor vehicle, than by rail, on a train.

To activate the political economy of roading, however, one more component was required: an urban geography that made the building of roads and the acquisition of motor vehicles a matter of necessity rather than choice. The post-war suburban sub-division, located on the periphery of New Zealand’s big cities and unconnected (except in the case of Wellington and the Hutt Valley) to their key economic hubs by effective commuter rail services, became the perfect excuse for the National Party to sink millions into the construction of roads and motorways. In Auckland, National’s right-wing allies on the city council made certain of this commitment by canning the First Labour Government’s blueprint for a much more compact city based on an extensive, state-owned commuter rail network, and then tearing up the tracks of the heavily patronised trams.

The political economy of roads, cars and subdivisions inevitably produced a host of societal side effects – many of which proved to be of huge political advantage to the National Party.

The political genius of the post-war "car culture" lay in its ability to draw a critical percentage of the working-class (invariably the white percentage) into the atomised, deeply conformist, consumption-based communities of the post-war era. Once inside the magic circle of home and car ownership, the collectivist spirit of the 1930s and 40s began to fade, and workers’ political priorities changed. Safely ensconced in his new suburban bungalow, surrounded by people just like himself, and driving to work in his prized late-model automobile, the average white wage and salary earner wanted nothing more from "politics" than a rock-solid guarantee that what he had acquired, he would be allowed to keep.

By the turn of the century, those workers (overwhelmingly black) who remained materially dependent of public provision; whether in the form of state housing or public transport; soon realised that entry into "first-class", as opposed to "second-class", citizenship was only granted to those who owned a private car and a suburban home.

Urban liberals in 2009, hearing the comments of National’s candidate for the Mt Albert by-election, Melissa Lee: that the controversial extension of SH20 would "keep South Auckland criminals away from Mt Albert" angrily dismissed them as racist stereotyping. But to the electorate’s status-conscious Pakeha and Asian voters, Lee’s comments carried a very different message.

Both Lee and her aspirational audiences recognise something about Auckland’s motorways that her liberal critics prefer not to acknowledge: that they are both escape-routes and boundary-fences. The Waterview Diversion will carry South Auckland’s dark-skinned underclass safely past Mt Albert in exactly the same way as the Southern Motorway carries the smug burghers of Papakura past the mean streets of Mangere, Otara and Manurewa.

National’s Transport Minister, Stephen Joyce, understands this symbolic language. Perhaps not consciously, but deep in his conservative gut, he knows that a motorway hidden in a tunnel is a motorway stripped of its most important political benefits.

The Auckland that Peter Fraser’s government was planning to build, had it won the 1949 general election, would have housed the city’s residents in state-owned apartment blocks, built next to parks, and connected by cycle-ways. And every working day they would have been carried to and from work in electric railway units. The few motorways that were planned would have gone around Auckland, not through it. And, of course, these publicly housed and transported Aucklanders, just like their comrades in the Hutt Valley, would have voted overwhelmingly for Labour.

If pork-barrel-politics is taken to mean the money which politicians and political parties spend locally in order to secure their re-election, then the massive concrete sinews, which for 50 years have bound Auckland’s voters to the National Party’s dream of a million right-minded commuters, all driving down the motorway in their own cars, towards the hard-won security of their suburban firesides, must surely rank as its most effective application.

This essay was originally published in The Independent of Thursday, 21 May 2009.

Development's Evil Twin

The Suburban Idyll. Dad, Mum, the kids and the dog pose before the key talismans of individual and familial success in the 1950s and 60s: a new home in the suburbs, a new car, and that prized symbol of the homeowner's annual escape from the suburban dream - a boat. But rich as suburbia's citizens believed themselves to be, they were nowhere near as wealthy as the private speculators who'd invented, constructed and profited so hugely from the new suburban "lifestyle".

WHEN I was a lad of nine or ten, my parents shifted the family to Invercargill. From the big ranch-slider doors of our brand new house on the northern fringe of the city, I looked out on to empty sections, and, beyond these ready-made playgrounds of cocksfoot and broom, to the rolling farmland of rural Southland. Rushing around the neighbourhood, I never paused to wonder who owned all these vacant lots, and it certainly never occurred to me that someone, somewhere, was becoming very rich by virtue of the fact that New Zealand was a healthy, prosperous nation in the midst of a baby boom.

Property speculation has always been the evil twin of New Zealand’s growth and development. Wherever people have settled; wherever the bush has been felled and the swamps drained; wherever, with back-breaking labour, fences have been erected, bridges built, and roads and railways laid down; there also, lurking in the shadows, have been the property speculators, ready to pocket the "unearned increment" that naturally accrues from mankind’s "improvement" of the natural environment.

The essential parasitism of the property speculator was much more apparent to the early settlers of New Zealand than it is to us today. The people who built our villages, towns and cities were only too aware of what they had collectively contributed and achieved, and they were loathe to permit anyone who hadn’t borne their fair share of the effort to walk away with the lion’s share of the profits.

It is the reason why, even today, business premises still pay a higher rate than personal dwellings. Without human-beings there can be no market for the goods and services local merchants provide, and without the natural increase in population their enterprises cannot grow. The differential rating system is a form of tax on the commercial benefits which any expanding urban centre naturally confers upon its business sector. When returned to the local inhabitants in the form of improved public amenities, this unearned increment not only enhances the quality of their lives, but also makes their towns and cities more attractive places in which to settle, thereby creating an environment even more conducive to doing business.

All this was plain to our grandparents and great-grandparents, but, tragically, it is much less obvious to us. To the generations born since the great, post-war suburban sprawl, our towns and cities are no longer seen as things human-beings have imposed upon the landscape – they have simply become the landscape.

This indifference to the realities of urban growth and development has allowed the property speculators to make millions of untaxed dollars while imposing higher and higher costs upon the nation’s ratepayers and taxpayers.

Auckland, our largest city, lies at the very heart of this speculative empire. And the fact that some of the most powerful formative elements of the right-wing coalition that eventually became the National Party were concentrated in Auckland, and its encircling rural hinterland, explains a great deal of New Zealand’s post-war history.

The Los Angeles-style sprawl which typified Auckland’s expansion in the 1950s, 60s and 70s not only made a great many of the National Party’s financial backers extremely wealthy men, but it also pioneered the growth of the deeply conservative and materialistic suburban culture which has had such a deleterious effect on our national character.

Had Labour, and not National, entrenched itself as the dominant political force in Auckland, the shape of the city, and of New Zealand politics in general, would have been very different. As Auckland fares – so fares the nation.

It was Auckland, after all, which ignited the housing boom that eventually engulfed the rest of the country. The rapid enrichment of the upper classes which Rogernomics and Ruthanasia made possible, coupled with the vast influx of Asian capital in the 1990s, dramatically extended the purview of property speculation. Almost overnight, the richest five percent of the population has become the landlord of the poorest 20 percent.

National’s housing minister, Phil Heatley, has reassured this privileged twentieth of New Zealanders that their rents are safe. There will be no Capital Gains Tax (to socialise the unearned increment) and, for the really big-time speculators, he and local government minister, Rodney Hide, have promised to lift restrictive zoning regulations and gut the Resource Management Act.

The evil twin has come into his inheritance.

This essay was originally published in The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star on Friday 30 January 2009.