Wooing The Masses – A Green Fairy Tale?

Downloading The Deplorables: What Chloe Swarbrick is proposing to her Green comrades is a mass movement, but mass movements are driven by the interests of dominant majorities, not elites, and certainly not by the agendas of ethnic and sexual minorities. Working-class people, poorly-educated people, heterosexual people, Pakeha people: these are the New Zealanders the Greens will be required to accept on their own terms – which are most unlikely to line up with their elitist, anti-democratic, identity-driven political ideology.

CHLOE SWARBRICK has embarked on a brave, but almost certainly doomed, political experiment. She has set out to build a mass movement on the foundations of a political party that rejects majoritarian decision-making, and which, by elevating the particular above the universal, makes the social solidarity that fuels mass action impossibly difficult to achieve. If the transformational movement Swarbrick is hoping to build is ever to eventuate, then she will have to fundamentally remake her party.

Perhaps the best way to illustrate the difficulty of the task Swarbrick has set herself is to reverse-engineer the salutary fate of the Auckland chapter of School Strike 4 Climate. This was the organisation, composed mainly of conscientized middle-class secondary-school students, widely credited with mobilising upwards of 50,000 young Aucklanders for the struggle against global warming back in 2019.

Central to the success of School Strike 4 Climate was its correct assumption that mass support for their cause already existed among those aged 15-20 years, and that to mobilise that support all they needed to do was organise a time and place for them to demonstrate it. The leadership of School Strike 4 Climate was largely self-selected, but the organs of organisation they conjured into existence were open to all. The kids who produced one of the largest political demonstrations in Auckland’s history did not ask permission before proceeding. Instead, they took the advice of the Nike Corporation and Greta Thunberg – and just did it.

And what a price they paid for having the temerity to organise a successful political event without first proving themselves fit “allies” for the victims of white supremacy, colonial subordination and heteronormative oppression. In the months and years that followed School Strike 4 Climate’s 2019 success, its organisers and participants were systematically “re-educated” to the point where their casual exercise of white privilege “persuaded” them to disband their organisation and withdraw into silence. In a statement released in June 2021, Auckland School Strike 4 Climate, declared itself to be “a racist organisation”. Henceforth, the fight against global warming would be led by their systemically victimised comrades.

But, if School Strike 4 Climate’s fate was to start huge and be made small, Swarbrick’s problem is how to take an organisation whose political mechanisms are designed to keep it small, and make it huge.

The Greens insistence on consensus-based decision-making, or, failing that, requiring the support of 75 percent of those responsible for making decisions, is driven by a profoundly elitist approach to politics. Those who framed the constitutional arrangements of the Green Party of Aotearoa were mistrustful of majorities and the political behaviour best suited to generating them. They did not want demagogues, they wanted philosopher kings and queens – men and women whose demonstrable wisdom counted for more than their ability to sway a conference of delegates. Investing these wise elders, and their tight circle of supporters, with veto powers was considered preferable to allowing 51 percent of Greens to overrule the preferences of the remaining 49 percent.

The problem with this constitutional structure is that it not only empowers those gathered around the revered philosopher king and/or queen, but also every other minority with the political smarts to throw a spanner in the decision-making works until its own agenda items are ticked-off. Constitutionally and politically, the Greens could hardly be better suited to advancing the cause of “Identity Politics” which, almost by definition, is hostile to the claims of dominant majorities. So much so that any Green politician demonstrating an ability to enthuse, galvanise, and (most alarmingly) mobilise large numbers of people is bound to attract the suspicion, even the outright enmity, of those whose interests would be compromised by an influx of members advancing policies believed to represent the greatest good for the greatest number.

In her speech to the Greens’ AGM in Christchurch (27-28 July 2024) Swarbrick challenged her audience with what, in the context of Green politics, is a deeply subversive question:

“What would it mean to build the biggest Green movement that the world has ever seen? For me, that’s not just about more seats in Parliament. It’s actually not even just about holding the Government benches. It’s about a country of citizens equipped with the understanding and the time and the resources to actively participate in our democracy. To hold those who make decisions on their behalf accountable. Even and especially if that’s us. It’s tens of thousands more Green Party members – people choosing to wear their hearts and values on their sleeves, organising and practising those values to win transformative change. From our neighbourhood corners to the very fabric of our state, in record numbers. Those people can and must come from all kinds of different backgrounds and walks of life.”

What Swarbrick is proposing here is a very big tent indeed – one stretching sufficient canvass to cover the sort of numbers needed to transform societies, and rescue planets. But such a big tent – “the biggest Green movement that the world has ever seen” – could not possibly endure for more than a few months under the present Green constitution.

What Swarbrick is demanding of her Green comrades is a mass movement, and mass movements are driven by the interests of dominant majorities, not elites, and certainly not by the agendas of ethnic and sexual minorities hostile to people who “come from all kinds of different backgrounds and walks of life” – most of them radically at odds with their own. Working-class people, poorly-educated people, heterosexual people, Pakeha people: people the Greens will have to accept on their own terms – and whom they must on no account attempt to convert to their elitist, anti-democratic, identity politics.

It is unclear whether or not even Swarbrick grasps this central reality of mass, or, as most commentators prefer to call it these days, “populist” politics. Buried in her challenge to the Green AGM is a perplexing reference to “a country of citizens equipped with the understanding and the time and the resources to actively participate in our democracy”. Nowhere does Swarbrick explain how such a country could possibly come into being prior to the revolutionary changes she is seeking. Only after the revolution is it possible to envisage citizens with “the understanding and the time” to make eco-socialism work.

Could it be that the only people Swarbrick is capable of envisioning as co-participants in the construction of a better world are people exactly like herself? Does she not understand that those in possession of the resources needed to participate meaningfully in the processes of self-government will always, this side of the revolution, be those with the most to lose by its arrival. Doesn’t she “get” that those with the most to gain from revolutionary change are unlikely to evince the placidity and equanimity of philosopher kings and queens? Their willingness to join the fight for change will be born of anger and despair, and the certainty that they have bugger-all left to lose. You don’t tell these sorts of people what they should be looking for – you give them what they want.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack page on Monday, 29 July 2024.

Numbers Game.

Respect Existence, Or Expect Resistance? There may well have been 50,000 pairs of feet “Marching For Nature” down Auckland’s Queen Street on Saturday afternoon, but the figure that impresses the Coalition Government is the 1,450,000 pairs of Auckland feet that were somewhere else.

IN THE ERA OF DRONES and Artificial Intelligence, how hard can it be to provide an accurate count of protesters? Knowing how many Aucklanders were willing to make the effort and join the Greenpeace-organised “March For Nature” on Saturday afternoon (8/6/24) would make the calculation of its significance so much easier. If the figure of 20,000 offered by some participants is correct, then the turnout was good, but not spectacular. But, if the old rule-of-thumb which reckons that if Queen Street is tightly-packed with protesters, from Aotea Square to Britomart, then you’re looking at turnout well in excess of 30,000 citizens – then that would be an excellent result.

In earlier times, reports of Britomart filling-up as Aotea Square was still emptying-out would have sparked estimates of 50,000 protesters – a monster march. Certainly, some of the photos taken on Saturday have that look about them. Either way, Greenpeace deserves a solid pat on the back for its ability to mobilise its supporters.

But, does any of it matter? Because even a march of 50,000 protesters, out of an Auckland population of 1.5 million, would struggle to satisfy the definition of a “revolutionary crowd”. To get some idea of what that looks like, check out the huge demonstrations overwhelming the Hungarian capital, Budapest, in the run-up to the EU parliamentary elections. (6-9/6/24) It’s been a while since New Zealanders turned out in those sort of numbers for a political cause – although the School Strike 4 Climate demonstrations of 2019 came close.

The answer to the question “Does any of it matter?” delivered by Resources Minister, Shane Jones, less than 24 hours after 20,000-50,000 protesters marched down Queen Street, was brutal: “Government to reverse oil-exploration ban.”

The decision to cease oil and gas prospecting, announced by Jacinda Ardern and Megan Woods in 2018, ranks as one of Greenpeace New Zealand’s proudest achievements. By reversing that decision, almost before the paint on the “March For Nature” placards was dry, Jones and his Coalition colleagues were telling Norman, Greenpeace, the Greens, and all the putative defenders of “Freddie the Frog”, that they could stick their placards where the sun don’t shine. The only slogan registering with “Matua Shane”, for the foreseeable future, will be Sarah Palin’s fossil-fuel classic: “Drill, baby, drill!”

“Natural gas is critical to keeping our lights on and our economy running, especially during peak electricity demand and when generation dips because of more intermittent sources like wind, solar and hydro,” said the Minister. “I want a considered discussion about how we use our natural resources to improve the security and affordability of energy and resources supplies, stimulate regional economic development opportunities, and increase New Zealand’s self-sufficiency to protect against volatile international markets.”

But, “considered discussion” isn’t really on anybody’s agenda at the moment. Jones has a long-standing and deep-seated contempt for the people he dismisses as “greenies”. In 2014 he told the NZ Herald’s Claire Trevett that “he once told Labour’s leadership he would not be a minister if he was ‘second fiddle’ to [then] Green co-leader Russel Norman as deputy prime minister or in a senior economic role.”

That contempt continues to be passionately reciprocated by virtually the entire environmental movement. Unsurprisingly, the response from Greenpeace to Jones’s media release was blunt:

“Shane Jones is dreaming. The oil exploration industry won’t risk coming back to Aotearoa because they know that it’s not worth coming all this way to fail again”, sneered its spokesperson (and seasoned exploration disrupter) Niamh O’Flynn. “For nearly a decade under the Key Government, together with iwi and hapū the length of Aotearoa, we fought tirelessly to push oil company after oil company out of the country and we succeeded. Oil and gas won’t win in Aotearoa.”

The political parties responsible for the original ban, Labour and the Greens were no less direct:

“Minister Jones is hell-bent on ignoring options of energy that are future-proofed and up to global standards,” said the co-imposer of the 2018 ban, Labour’s Megan Woods.

“This is a manufactured crisis. We know there are reliable and cost-effective energy sources available to New Zealand that can be used without destroying the country. New Zealand is being taken backwards. This government is being cruel to future generations, this will take decades to undo – if the damage can be undone at all.”

Green Party co-leader, Chloe Swarbrick, was equally uncompromising:

“The science is clear that fossil fuels must stay in the ground to limit global warming within 1.5 degrees of warming. This Government’s actions are anti-science and show a flagrant disregard for international climate commitments which could lead to huge costs down the line.”

Swarbrick also had words for the Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon:

“The climate crisis is the defining issue of our time. If Christopher Luxon is unwilling to look in the mirror and deal with the gap between his rhetoric and the reality of his government’s actions, the least he could do is face up to the New Zealanders he’s selling down the river.”

What, then, is the explanation for the Coalition Government’s confidence that neither the environmentalists’ political rhetoric, nor their feet on the street, pose a serious threat to the Coalition’s electoral chances? The answer is bound-up with Jones’s conspicuous reference to “keeping the lights on”.

National, Act and NZ First have convinced themselves (or allowed pollsters and focus groups to do the job for them) that a very large number of voters have a great deal in common with those raised-in-the-faith Catholics who genuflect reflexively before the holy imagery of their religion without giving the gesture much, if any, thought. Like conservatives the world over, New Zealand’s Coalition Government is of the view that although, if asked, most ordinary voters will happily mouth environmental slogans, considerably fewer are willing to freeze in the dark for them.

Minister Jones’s wager is that if it’s a choice between watching Netflix, powering-up their cellphones, and snuggling-up in front of the heater, or, keeping the fossil fuels that power our extraordinary civilisation “in the ground”, so that Freddie the Frog’s habitat can remain pristine and unmolested, then their response will be the same as the Minister’s: “Bye, bye Freddie!” No matter what people may say; no matter how superficially sincere their genuflections to the “crisis” of Climate Change; when the lights go out, all they really want is for them to come back on again. Crises far away, and crises in the future, cannot compete with crises at home – right here, right now.

The Transport Minister, Simeon Brown, knows how this works. Everyone supports public transport and cycle-ways, right up until the moment their holiday journey slows to a snail’s pace among endless lines of road cones, or a huge pothole wrecks their new car’s suspension.

Idealism versus realism: that’s the way the parties of the Right frame this issue; and they are betting their electoral future on the assumption that the realists outnumber the idealists. There may well have been 50,000 pairs of feet “Marching For Nature” down Auckland’s Queen Street on Saturday afternoon, but the figure that impresses the Coalition Government is the 1,450,000 pairs of Auckland feet that were somewhere else.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 10 June 2024.

Something Important: The Curious Death of the School Strike 4 Climate Movement.

The Hope That Failed: The Christchurch Mosque Massacres, Covid-19, deep political disillusionment, and the jealous cruelty of the intersectionists: all had a part to play in causing School Strike 4 Climate’s bright bubble of hope and passion to burst. But, while it floated above us, it was something that mattered. Something Important.

THE YOUNG MAN is every centimetre the twenty-first century revolutionary: youthful, indigenous, and draped in the keffiyeh of martyred Palestine. Like so many of his generation, raised with-on-by the smart-phone, he communicates faultlessly with his audience. And what he says is every bit as revolutionary as his looks.

Except … Except his message is aimed at an audience that until this week had not, generally, been associated with the Palestinian, or the Toitū te Tiriti o Waitangi, causes – secondary school students.

Posted on “X”, the young revolutionary’s video-post was intended to mobilise the tens-of-thousands of students who had turned out five years ago to play their part in the global “School Strike 4 Climate” (SS4C) movement. Presumably, he and his comrades had reasoned that their own causes would be immeasurably strengthened through this “intersectional” linking of the Treaty, Palestine and Climate Change.

In his own words:

“The primary tool used against the people is division – divide and conquer. Our response must be to unite. We cannot win with fragmented movements.”

Had the young revolutionary’s expectations been met, it would, indeed, have been a political triumph.

On Friday, March 15 2019, an estimated 170,000 New Zealand secondary school students took to the nation’s streets. RNZ still ranks that turnout as the “second largest” protest in New Zealand history. There is no precedent, however, for 170,000 demonstrators turning out on a single day. Those kids represented an astonishing 3.5 percent of the total population!

On Friday morning (5/4/24) RNZ was carrying the SS4C protest organisers’ predictions of a turnout in excess of 100,000. Protest rallies were scheduled from Whangarei to Invercargill. RNZ was also careful to share with its listeners the six demands of the protesters:

• A ban on oil and gas exploration 
• Halting the Coalition Government’s fast-track approvals bill 
• Honouring Te Tiriti o Waitangi 
• “Climate education” for all 
• Lowering the voting age to 16 
• Free Palestine - Stop the Genocide

By the end of the day, however, it was clear that something very serious had gone wrong with the plan to unite the Left’s fragmented movements by, in effect, piggy-backing on the huge numbers formerly responsive to the SS4C’s summonses. Rather than a turnout in the range of 100,000: across the whole country, and by the most generous estimate, the organisers of the “Strike” turned out a derisory 5,000 people.

By any measure, the “Strike” was a disaster. Indeed, the whole event turned out to be less than the sum of its parts. That is to say, more people turned out to rallies organised in solidarity with the people of Palestine, and/or to protests against the Coalition Government’s Treaty policies, when these were staged as separate events, than turned out for SS4C’s unity demonstrations on Friday afternoon. As for New Zealand’s secondary school students, well, apart from a few hard-core “intersectionists”, they were nowhere to be seen. The largest turnout of 5 April was in Wellington, where a few hundred kids gathered in Parliament Grounds to chant “From the river, to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

What the hell happened?

To answer that question we have to go back to 2021, and the tragic demise of SS4C Auckland at the hands of the very same intersectionist forces responsible for Friday’s debacle.

The young people behind the Auckland chapter of SS4C were responsible for turning out 80,000 protesters in 2019 – beating Labour legend John A Lee’s 1938 record of 70,000. Predictably, such extraordinary support bred deep resentment and hostility among less fulsomely supported activists. Homing in on the whiteness of the SS4C organisers’ and their middle-class origins, the “decolonisers” and “indigenisers” within the Auckland chapter’s ranks “persuaded” the leadership to shut down the most successful protest organisation in the city’s political history.

In their final communique to the people of Auckland, SS4C’s local leadership stated:

“We are disbanding because, since 2019, SS4C AKL (as well as the wider national group, though we can’t speak on their behalf) has been a racist, white-dominated space. SS4C AKL has avoided, ignored, and tokenised BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, People of Colour – C.T.] voices and demands, especially those of Pasifika and Māori individuals in the climate activism space. As well as this, the responsibility and urgent need to decolonise the organisation has been put off for far too long. SS4C also delayed paying financial reparations for the work BIPOC groups/individuals within and alongside the group have done for this organisation in the past.”

There is much, much more, all in the same vein, in this cringing example of polemical self-criticism (which would not have been out of place at a Maoist Red Guard rally circa 1967) admirably concluding with this, its guilt-tripped authors’ parting admonition:

“We fully discourage any future and current Pākehā-led groups from occupying the space we leave behind.”

Strangely enough, neither this incident, nor the subsequent collapse of the fight against global warming in Auckland’s secondary schools, is mentioned on the SS4C website promoting the 5 April “Strike”. Those intending to join the demonstrations are, however, urged to chant: “The people united – Can never be divided!”

Equally strange, but much less excusable, is the almost complete absence of mainstream media analysis of this mass-event-that-wasn’t. How could a movement that had put 3.5 percent of the country’s population on the streets, on a single day, have crumbled to virtually nothing in the space of five years? How could the organisers of Friday’s event have deluded themselves to the point of predicting a turnout of 100,000? And what do those same organisers make of New Zealanders’ apparent indifference (if not downright hostility) to the causes in support of which they had been invited to demonstrate?

These are important political questions.

Certainly, the dismal turnout must have given Green co-leader, Chloe Swarbrick, considerable pause. After all, she has staked a great deal of her political credibility on the proposition that she and her party can mobilise, electorally, the young, the alienated, and the disenfranchised. After Friday, however, transforming the 2026 general election into a people’s crusade would appear to be a much taller order.

Contrariwise, the failure of the “Strike” offers Messers Luxon, Seymour and Peters considerable cause for celebration. Their coalition is described on the SS4CNZ website as: “the most conservative government in our history” – a claim that would doubtless bring a wry smile to the lips of Bill Massey, Sid Holland, and Rob Muldoon. Still, if Friday’s flop is the best the New Zealand Left can set against the Great Strike of 1913, the 1951 Waterfront Lockout, and the 1981 Springbok Tour protests, then our Coalition Government can breathe a huge sigh of relief.

Perhaps the most important lesson of Friday is that political consciousness cannot be assembled like so many Lego blocks. The huge SS4C mobilisations of 2019 were symbolic of a confrontation as old as history. The intergenerational hostility encapsulated in the young Swedish founder of the movement, Greta Thunberg’s, choked challenge: “How dare you!” She spoke for the children and grandchildren of the men and women who run this world. “If you cannot save the planet for yourselves,” she seemed to be saying, “then, in Gaia’s name, save it for us – your own flesh and blood!”

The Future confronted the Present – and demanded action. Its partisans may not have displayed the revolutionary chic of the young man in the video with whom our story began, but they made their parents simultaneously proud and penitent. One-hundred-and-seventy-thousand strong, they convinced the system, if only for a little while, to stop, and listen.

The Christchurch Mosque Massacres, Covid-19, deep political disillusionment, and the jealous cruelty of the intersectionists: all had a part to play in causing the SS4C’s bright bubble of hope and passion to burst. But, while it floated above us, it was something that mattered.

Something important.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 8 April 2024.

Iron In Her Soul.

“Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

TELEVISION NEW ZEALAND is to be congratulated for inviting Chloe Swarbrick onto its Q+A current affairs show. The Green MP for Auckland Central is the odds-on favourite to become the next co-leader of the Green Party, making her a vital player in the trio of left-wing parties (the other two being Labour and Te Pāti Māori) that together constitute our alternative government. Allowing the public to get to know Swarbrick a little better was a sensible editorial decision.

There will be many Green members and supporters, however, who, having watched Q+A’s Jack Tame interrogate Swarbrick, may be wondering whether accepting TVNZ’s invitation to be interviewed was as shrewd as issuing it.

Tame is an exceptionally talented broadcaster whose boyish good-looks mask a daunting interrogative talent. If there are weaknesses in any given political persona, Tame may be relied upon to find them. Last Sunday (11/2/24) he found Swarbrick’s – and goaded her into revealing them, live, on free-to-air public television.

The weakness Tame homed in on was Swarbrick’s political inflexibility – a flaw which has only grown as her time in Parliament has lengthened.

When she first burst upon the political scene, as an independent candidate for the Auckland mayoralty in the 2016 local body elections, the clarity of her thought and expression was Swarbrick’s greatest asset. Here was a young woman who was capable of presenting her ideas forcefully, without prevarication, and then supporting them with a truly intimidating army of facts and figures.

Swarbrick’s campaign may have been run on a shoestring, and mostly on social media, but it made sufficient political impact to leave her the third-highest-polling candidate for Mayor. Clearly, this diminutive, articulate and courageous young woman was destined for great things. That Labour and the Greens set out immediately to recruit her, surprised nobody.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is possible to observe that Swarbrick’s choice of the Greens may not have been the best one. While, on paper, the Greens’ determination to arm their politics with the weaponry of reason and science made it a perfect fit for the serious, almost scholarly, Swarbrick, there were risks. The currents of unreason that were flowing with ever-increasing force beneath the surface of Green Party politics were bound to end up battering her core intellectual and political principles.

Swarbrick’s candidacy for the Greens’ co-leadership was prompted by the departure of James Shaw. In spite of an impressive record of political wins – most obviously the Zero Carbon Act – Shaw has found it increasingly difficult to make his colleagues understand that their electoral success depends on voters seeing them as the only party dedicated to combatting global warming effectively. Shaw’s implied warning: that a Green Party which cares less about climate change than it does about fighting the culture wars will end up bleeding away its support (a proposition confirmed by the latest Curia poll) went unheeded.

The politician who emerged from Tame’s interview with Swarbrick cannot replace the qualities the Greens are losing with Shaw. Her six years in Parliament appear to have diminished her faith in democracy as the most effective political system. Swarbrick has observed politicians of all colours tapping into the raw emotional power of ignorance and prejudice, and it appears to have hardened her and made her brittle. There no longer seems to be as much “give” in the Swarbrick of 2024, as there was in the Swarbrick who entered Parliament in 2017. Iron has entered her soul.

Swarbrick’s declining faith in representative democracy is reflected in her conviction that “the people” possess a power that overmatches the tawdry compromises of professional politicians. In her pitch to Green members Swarbrick hints that this power may be sufficient to bring the whole rotten, planet-destroying system crashing down. That, with the masses at their back, the Greens can build a new and better Aotearoa.

How many times has revolutionary zealotry offered this millenarian mirage to an angry and despairing world? How many times has it all gone horribly wrong? And how sad is it that a politician as talented as Chloe Swarbrick now finds herself wandering this arid trail?

Many have praised/condemned Jack Tame for identifying Swarbrick’s unflinching defence of the Palestinian cause as the most effective means of exposing her zealotry. But, to those who once saluted Swarbrick’s political promise, Tame’s uncompromising interview proved profoundly depressing.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 16 February 2024.

She Says She Wants A Revolution.

Heads Up: Jeremy Corbyn’s greatest mistake was to give the ruling elites and their enablers advance warning that he was coming for their power, their purse, and their privilege. Candidate for the Green Party co-leadership, Chloe Swarbrick, appears to share Corbyn’s naïve assumption that those who own the system will sit idly by while a genuine left-wing leader organises a revolution at the ballot box to take it from them.

CHLOE SWARBRICK WANTS A REVOLUTION. Her “announcement speech” has been hailed as a “once in a generation” oratorical triumph. I wouldn’t go that far, but there’s no disputing that Swarbrick took full advantage of the media’s interest in her candidacy for the Greens’ co-leadership to lay her programmatic cards on the table.

“Conventional, incremental politics has failed to rise to the challenges we face”, Swarbrick declared, “those intertwined climate, inequality, biodiversity and housing crises.”

So far, so good left-wing boilerplate. But, it was in the next few sentences that the young MP’s revolutionary intent was revealed:

“What is possible in politics is only ever defined by the willingness of those in power. As Co-leader, I want to show everyone in this country the power running through their veins to choose our future. We cannot leave politics to the politicians.”

Opined the Green politician.

And it is here that the problems confronted by all revolutionaries begin: with those beguilingly inclusive words; “everyone in this country”.

There was a time and place – late-eighteenth century France, to be precise – when appealing to “everyone in this country” made a certain kind of sense.

When the King, supported by an aristocracy encompassing approximately 1 percent of the population, ruled over everybody else, most notably a rightless and impoverished peasantry comprising 90 percent-plus of the population, “everyone in this country” (who wasn’t a king or an aristocrat) had a strong and direct interest in transforming their society.

But that was more than 200 years ago. The power that runs through the veins of New Zealanders, today, does not, alas, run uniformly. Some Kiwis are better equipped to choose their futures than others. Indeed, there are hundreds-of-thousands of New Zealand citizens so bereft of cultural, social and economic capital that speechifying to them about choosing their futures could be seen as grossly insensitive.

Swarbrick is a highly intelligent person, with an impressive and oft-demonstrated capacity to marshal facts and figures in support of her arguments. It is strange, therefore, that her announcement speech largely fails to address the manifest power differentials in the society she is proposing to transform. Especially when she goes out of her way to preface her call for a grass-roots uprising with the eminently sensible – and accurate – statement:

“What is possible in politics is only ever defined by the willingness of those in power.”

Like the willingness of farmers to shoulder the not inconsiderable cost of cleaning-up their rivers and streams and reducing their greenhouse-gas emissions.

Like the willingness of small business owners to pay a capital gains tax.

Like the willingness of big businesses to redistribute the lion’s share of corporate surpluses from their shareholders to their employees.

Like the willingness of landlords to shoulder the costs of upgrading their properties, and empowering their tenants.

Like the willingness of those whose salaries place them in the top quintile of income-earners to pay higher taxes.

Except, of course, the willingness of all the above groups to redefine politics in ways that not only make them poorer, but also undermine their ability to set the boundaries of acceptable change, is NIL.

These New Zealand socio-economic interests are no more willing to surrender their power and privilege than were their British counterparts when the Labour Party membership elected a leader determined to govern “for the many, not the few”.

That last was a powerful rhetorical flourish – adapted from the final verse of Percy Bysshe Shelly’s incendiary poem “The Masque of Anarchy”.) Too powerful, as it turned out.

Jeremy Corbyn’s greatest mistake (apart from his failure to back Brexit) was to give the ruling elites and their enablers advance warning that he was coming for their power, their purse, and their privilege. Corbyn’s political destruction is thus attributable to his naïve assumption that those who owned the system would sit idly by while he organised a revolution at the ballot box to take it from them.

Clearly, Swarbrick has not learned the lessons embedded in the depressing saga of Corbyn’s rise and fall.

“I will grow the Green movement to achieve tangible, real-world, people-powered change - as I have since I first signed up - but now, at even greater scale.”

That’s telling ‘em, Chloe!

“I will challenge this Government’s cruel agenda and communicate the imagination, potential, and the necessary hope to mobilise for the sustainable, inspiring and inclusive Aotearoa that I see reflected every day in our communities”

And that’s telling them even more!

“They” will not move immediately to remove the potential threat that is Chloe Swarbrick. Like the British ruling-elites, New Zealand’s defenders of the neoliberal status-quo will wait to see if the putative Green co-leader’s revolution at the ballot-box amounts to anything more than yet another middle-class firebrand’s pipe-dream.

There’s no denying that “they” have every reason to be sceptical. After all, Jim Anderton’s Alliance had promised something very similar thirty years ago. It’s unashamedly socialist component, the NewLabour Party, had also set out to make its followers “local body members, councillors and mayors” They, too, promised “more [Alliance] MPs in Parliament and ultimately, our nation’s first [Alliance-led] Government.”

Didn’t happen. With the notable exception of Anderton’s proletarian redoubt of Sydenham, the Alliance did well (even, like Swarbrick, capturing Auckland Central) where, thirty years later, the Greens still do best. Those central-city electorates composed of university students and young professionals. Where it mattered, however, in the electorates of the poor and marginalised, the Alliance failed miserably. Against their most formidable competitors, Labour voters, and those who didn’t vote at all, Alliance candidates struggled to reclaim their deposits.

Just how steep a mountain Swarbrick has set herself to climb is evident in the votes received by Labour and the Greens in the electorates where citizens’ life choices are most seriously constrained. Let’s look at Mangere. Labour: 61.40 percent; Greens: 7.85 percent. Or, Mana. Labour: 62 percent; Greens: 9.8 percent.

It is always possible, of course, that Swarbrick, unlike Anderton, will succeed in heating the blood of enough New Zealanders to turn those stats around. That in 2025 there will be a Green tsunami that lifts unabashed insurgents into council chambers and mayoral offices all across New Zealand. That the polls will register a massive shift from Labour to Green and, month after month, confirm Swarbrick’s preferred prime minister status. It is possible that, against all the odds, her revolution at the ballot-box progresses from pipe-dream to probability.

If that is the case, however, then Swarbrick’s troubles will only just be getting started. Every weapon the Establishment possesses will be pointed in her direction, and every right-wing journalistic scalp-hunter will be powering-up his keyboard.

By the time the Powers That Be were through with Corbyn, working-class Brits were cursing his name. By the time our own elites are through with Chole Swarbrick, she’ll either be a broken political doll – or New Zealand’s first Green prime minister.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 5 February 2024.

The Right Move Against Hamas Was Not To Make One.

“Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.” - Sun Tzu (544 ─ 496BC)

ISRAEL’S LEGAL RIGHT to strike back at Hamas is unchallengeable. No nation, having suffered the sort of horrific attack unleashed upon Israel by Hamas terrorists on 7 October 2023, is ever going to be convicted in an international court of law for defending itself. It is the nature of Israel’s retaliation that is challengeable. In war, doing precisely what your enemy expects you to do is never a good idea. By responding to the 7 October attack in precisely the way Hamas anticipated, Israel has allowed the terrorists’ long-planned (and far more important) propaganda offensive to build and strengthen the pro-Palestinian Cause.

That Benjamin Netanyahu was Israel’s Prime Minister on 7 October was of enormous importance to the success of Hamas’ plans. With the survival of the Likud Party-led Israeli Government in the hands of its much smaller coalition partners – all of them murderously Zionistic – there was no way Netanyahu could have responded to Hamas with anything other than overwhelming military force. The only strategy acceptable to Netanyahu and his allies was the one which called for the utter annihilation of Hamas. If Israel had opted to do something else, then Hamas would have been bitterly disappointed – and thoroughly alarmed.

The massive propaganda effort which sprang into action the moment the Gaza fence came down and Israeli citizens began to die, depended absolutely on the screens of the world fast filling up with gruesome images of Palestinians (their children especially) being killed and maimed by Israeli shells, bombs and missiles. These would be the cue for Palestinian apologists all across the West to start talking about “disproportionate responses”, or, more simply, “genocide”.

Many of these defenders of “Palestine” would be well aware that the charge of disproportionality, when used in such a context, does not mean that one side, having killed roughly as many people as the other, is legally obliged to cease and desist. What must be proportionate, under international law, is the nation state’s response to the initial attack. By this measure, Israel’s response to the horrors of 7 October was unquestionably proportionate.

Those who challenge the assertion, should ask themselves how the United Kingdom, Canada or Australia would respond if thousands of their citizens were raped, tortured, shot, stabbed, and burned alive by enemy forces located within the operational reach of their armed forces. Can there be any doubt that their armies, navies and air forces would have been unleashed upon these enemy forces?

And, if those same enemies attempted to avoid the just retribution that was heading their way by situating their military personnel and resources in or below civilian structures, and by using the bodies of their own citizens as human shields (a war crime, by the way) can there be any doubt that the British, Canadian and Australian forces would not have allowed themselves a moment's hesitation before sending their ordnance to blow every living thing within its range to Kingdom Come?

As it says in the Bible: “He who sows the wind, shall reap the whirlwind.”

But the “useful idiots” who fling a Keffiyeh around their shoulders and recite the annihilationist Palestinian mantra: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”; are not influenced in the slightest by such counterfactuals. They are living proof of the saying that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing; and further, that a little historical knowledge can lead otherwise intelligent and progressive Members of Parliament into some very dark places.

Chloe Swarbrick is a walking testimonial to the extraordinary effectiveness of Palestinian propaganda. On the AM Show of Monday, 20 November 2023, she made reference to the “Nakba” – the catastrophic evacuation of Palestinian cities, towns, villages and farms that accompanied the war between the newborn Israeli state and the armies of the Arab League. (Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, “assisted” by sundry Palestinian militia.) To hear Chloe tell the story, 700,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes by evil Zionists hellbent on seizing their land and property. The Nakba was ethnic cleansing on a massive and brutal scale.

Except, it wasn’t.

What happened in 1948 was the culmination of nearly thirty years of unrelenting Palestinian resistance to Jewish settlement in Mandatory Palestine. Arabs had been bearing arms against the Jews, and the Jews had been defending themselves, since at least the 1920s. In 1947, organisations representative of the Palestinian Arabs had rejected the United Nations partition plan (which the Jews, albeit reluctantly, had accepted). By 1948, the Palestinian leadership were confident that their Arab brothers would rout the Jewish militias, and that “from the river to the sea” Palestine would be what the Nazis called Judenfrei – free of Jews.

A great many of the Palestinians who evacuated their homes and farms in 1948 did so at the urging of the Palestinian Arab leadership. Let the armies of the Arab League do their work, these leaders advised, claiming that their family’s return would only be a matter of days or weeks. Few of those who decamped on the basis of this advice had the slightest concern about the genocidal catastrophe which, for the second time in less than a decade, was about to overtake the Jewish people.

Chloe Swarbrick should know this, but since her knowledge of the Arab-Israeli conflict appears to have been gleaned from the tendentious accounts of Palestinian nationalists, Islamic fanatics and that great throng of usefully idiotic allies who retail “Free Palestine!” propaganda in the West’s universities and news media, the chances are depressingly high that she does not.

And this is the strategic problem confronting Israel. That the effectiveness of the disinformation from which Palestinian nationalism and religious fanaticism continue to draw their strength depends, almost entirely, on Israel’s willingness to confirm its emotional truth by blowing Palestinians and their defenceless communities to Kingdom Come.

The only winning move for Israel, when subjected to the atrocities of 7 October, was, paradoxically, not to make one. To do nothing. This necessitates imagining an Israel led by a Prime Minister of enormous courage and wisdom – enough to face her people with solemn determination and tell them that, this time, unlike all the other times, the Israeli people will not take the bloody bait laid before them by the jackals of Hamas and their Iranian backers. This time, not a single bullet will fly, not a single bomb will drop. This time the Palestinians of Gaza will be left in peace to contemplate the true nature of the organisation that governs their little strip of hell.

One can only imagine the dismay of Hamas, and all the “Hamas adjacent” politicians, journalists and students who have spent the past six weeks waving Palestinian flags, tearing down the posters of Hamas’ hostages, and telling us what a genocidal, colonialist, monstrosity Israel is, and has always been. Why? Because who, and what, would the world be looking at if there were no babies’ bodies to evoke our horror and disgust? Who would be caught in the media spotlight and forced to answer for their atrocities? Their war crimes? Their unrelenting antisemitism?

Let me give you a hint: it wouldn’t be Israel.

This essay is exclusive to Bowalley Road.

A Test For The Greens.

Top Ten? Over the next few weeks the Green Party membership has the opportunity to study the provisional list presented to them by the party’s ruling bodies. If the provisional list seems wildly out-of-sympathy with the membership’s mood, then members have the power to re-organise it from top to bottom. Exactly where Elizabeth Kerekere ends up being ranked will be a test of the Greens’ political credibility and ethical strength.

THE EXPOSURE OF ELIZABETH KEREKERE is at once trivial and important. That members of the same political party can harbour intense dislike for one another should surprise no one. As the Nineteenth Century British statesman, Benjamin Disraeli, famously quipped: “No, Mr Speaker, before me sit my opponents. My enemies are seated behind me.” That the full measure of a member’s dislike may occasionally surface in view of the public is equally unsurprising – no matter how amusing its expression. What is indisputably important, however, is when the inadvertent revelation on internal party animosities reveal ambitions and machinations serious enough to affect the future political course of the entire nation.

Elizabeth Kerekere is not only an ambitious politician, but also, within the confines of the contemporary Green Party (of which more later) an effective one. To rise from an unwinnable nineteenth ranking on the Green Party List in 2017, to ninth position (and a parliamentary seat) in 2020, to a provisional ranking of fourth in 2023, indicates a willingness to exploit the dynamic internal divisions currently racking the Green Party. Kerekere’s leadership role in securing the passage of the legislation outlawing so-called “gay conversion therapy”, coupled with her ground-breaking academic research into takatāpui (a Māori person who is gay, lesbian, bi-sexual or transgender) strongly suggests an ideological orientation towards the Greens’ ultra-radical faction.

Editor of The Daily Blog, Martyn Bradbury, explicitly identifies Kerekere as: “someone who has been rumoured to have been positioning a far more extreme woke clique within the Greens”. The accidental release of Kerekere’s chat-group criticism of fellow Green MP Chloe Swarbrick – “omg what a cry-baby” – is characterised by Bradbury as “messaging co-conspirators who are involved in manoeuvring a new co-leadership team of Kerekere and Ricardo [Menendez-March]”.

Menendez-March was born in Mexico to a Mexican father and a New Zealand mother. Returning to New Zealand with his mother, Menendez-March first entered the political arena as a serious player when he became the convenor of Auckland Action Against Poverty. An articulate and resourceful advocate, he was unsparing in his criticism of Jacinda Ardern’s failure to deliver on her promise to dramatically reduce child poverty and homelessness in New Zealand. Ranked tenth on the Green Party List, Menendez-March entered Parliament one place behind Kerekere in 2020.

With neither Kerekere nor Menendez-March susceptible to the increasingly disqualifying “Cis” prefix (she being lesbian and he gay) and with both MPs being considerably more comfortable espousing radical cultural ideas than most of their Green Party caucus colleagues, it was hardly surprising that they should find themselves cheered-on by the two Green Party “networks” at the core of the ultra-radical faction – the Rainbow Greens and the fervently anti-capitalist, Green Left.

Adding a further wrinkle to this factional manoeuvring on the part of the “ultras” is the overlap between party activists on the one hand and parliamentary staffers on the other. Well-resourced and supremely well-located at the very centre of political power, these staffer-activists appear to have been extraordinarily successful at lifting their preferred parliamentary candidates into winning positions on the Party List. Undoubtedly there are some within the Greens who blame these radical apparatchiks for the fiasco surrounding James Shaw’s re-election as Green Party co-leader in 2022. Inevitably, less radical Greens will also blame them for Kerekere’s dramatic rise from 9 to 4 in the List rankings.

Those familiar with left-wing political history will object that all “big change” parties have their ultra factions. No matter how fierce they might appear, however, the radicals’ numbers are so small that, should they be foolish enough to force key policy issues, a huge moderate majority stands ready to slap them down. The question is: has the Green Party still got a moderate majority? Or, have the Greens – always a very cliquey outfit – undergone the same degree of membership burn-off that has undermined so many “progressive” organisations? There is a degree of emotional violence in highly-motivated radical activists that only the most robust spirits are either willing or able to face down.

The Green Party of Jeanette Fitzsimons and Rod Donald, within which the principal ideological divide fell between the radical environmentalists and the eco-socialists (with some avant-garde “Treatyism” and second-wave feminism off to the side) has long since ceased to exist. The Green Party of 2023 is a volatile mixture of “decolonising” Māori nationalism, revolutionary anti-capitalism, and uncompromising Rainbow zealotry. The idea that these are nothing more than frothing eddies of youthful activism, and that deep down the slower currents of ecological wisdom and political responsibility continue to flow serenely on, may soon be exposed as the purest wishful thinking.

The way to tell will be to examine the final Green Party List. Over the next few weeks the Green Party membership has the opportunity to study the provisional list presented to them by the party’s ruling bodies. If the provisional list seems wildly out-of-sympathy with the membership’s mood, then members have the power to re-organise it from top to bottom.

If those deep currents of ecological wisdom and political responsibility really do exist, and are not merely figments of progressive New Zealand’s imagination, then the all-too-obvious activist-staffer-Green MP shenanigans revealed in the leaked chat-group exchanges will be severely punished. Elizabeth Kerekere will be lucky to find herself left where she is at ninth position on the Party List. A Green Party determined to signal to the electorate that it has no place for such “mean” and all-consuming ambition would slot her in at twenty-ninth!

If, however, Kerekere remains where she is, or even leapfrogs over Chloe Swarbrick into third position, then we will know that there is no steadying majority of moderate Greens to keep the party within the confines of electability. It will be clear that the extraordinary civility and gentle strength that won the admiration of even the Greens’ electoral rivals under Fitzsimons and Donald really has gone. The effect upon the tens-of-thousands of Green Party voters who recoiled in disgust when the chat-group exchanges were leaked will be profound. Their faith in the Green Party as a responsible political organisation run by principled grown-ups (already strained by the nonsense associated with Shaw’s re-election and Marama Davidson’s “It’s Cis, white males” comment) will be shattered – and their votes will be lost.

That will be extremely important. Because it may well see the Greens fall below the crucial 5 percent MMP threshold. On current polling, a Labour Party stripped of its Green allies will have insufficient parliamentary support (even with Te Pāti Māori) to form a government. Electoral victory will be claimed by National and Act.

And that will be no trivial matter.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 10 April 2023.

Poverty Is Indivisible, Ms Swarbrick.

Rights Of Passage: Very few would dispute Chloe Swarbrick’s contention that no citizen should be expected to suffer poverty – not even those who, in five to ten years’ time, will find themselves among the top 5 percent of income earners. Paying an exorbitant sum for the privilege of freezing in a leaky, moldy flat is not a “rite of passage” to be endured. It is exploitation pure and simple, and should not be permitted.

CHLOE SWARBRICK is a mystery. Whip smart and unafraid of courting controversy, she is also frustratingly conventional when it comes to solutions. Her latest cause, battling student poverty, illustrates the problem very neatly.

Very few would dispute Swarbrick’s contention that no citizen should be expected to suffer poverty – not even those who, in five to ten years’ time, will find themselves among the top 5 percent of income earners. Paying an exorbitant sum for the privilege of freezing in a leaky, moldy flat is not a “rite of passage” to be endured. It is exploitation pure and simple, and should not be permitted.

But why ring-fence these instances of exploitation with the term “student poverty”? Like the term “child poverty” it pretends that privation and exploitation can be situated in discrete categories and remediated piecemeal. As a political tactic, it is not only self-defeating, but also morally questionable. (And that is being kind!)

In what ethical universe is it acceptable to pour resources into the amelioration of “student” and “child” poverty, while those who are not students or children are permitted to slowly fade from the big poverty picture?

How could it possibly be okay to support university students with an allowance of $400 per week, while refusing to pay young unemployed individuals more than $200 per week? Why would you advocate for a rent cap on student accommodation, while doing nothing about the rack-renting of low-paid workers and their families?

Advocacy of this sort cannot help but convince those who find themselves outside the ranks of the “deserving poor” that they are socially worthless. Students need support because very soon they’ll be running the country. Today’s law students are tomorrow’s lawyers and judges. Today’s med students are tomorrow’s doctors. Today’s communications studies students are tomorrow’s prime ministers. But today’s functionally illiterate high-school drop-outs are tomorrow’s what? Drug addicts? Prostitutes? Gang members? Convicts? Who needs them?

Intended, or not, there is the unpleasant odour of class politics about Swarbrick’s attack on student poverty. Understandable, I suppose, after 40 years of neoliberalism. These days we look after our own.

Interviewed on RNZ’s “Morning Report”, Swarbrick lamented what she described as 40 years of deliberate disempowerment of university students as a force for political and social change. Although she is far too young to have any personal memories of the days when the nation’s campuses seethed with radical ideas, and student demonstrations against war and racial injustice numbered in the tens-of-thousands, Swarbrick was clearly aware how decidedly the times have changed. Particularly damaging, she suggested, was the abolition of compulsory student union membership. Its demise had fatally weakened the student movement.

“Bullshit!”, I shouted at the radio. Student unions, compulsory or voluntary, had little to do with the explosion of student radicalism in the 1970s and 80s. In fact, these student “associations” were inherently conservative institutions.

No, student radicalism arose from a heady brew of individual self-discovery, fearless teachers, and the challenging headlines of the era. It bubbled-up out of the vigorous, open-handed, social-democratic society post-war New Zealand had become. And, when neoliberalism buried that society in the late-1980s and 90s, student radicalism died with it.

Swarbrick’s demand for a top-down reinvigoration of the student movement is symbolic of a generation that has yet to experience the sheer joy of finding its own power. If she paused to reflect for a moment, Swarbrick would remember top-down is never the answer.

New Zealand’s universities are bursting at the seams with young people: scores-of-thousands of them concentrated in seven campuses – usually not that far from the heart of the cities in which they are located. What could these young people not achieve if they decided to shake off the ideological chains in which they have allowed themselves to become enmeshed? What concessions could they not extract from the Powers That Be when once they learned that what unites human-beings is infinitely more compelling than what divides them?

Perhaps Swarbrick and the Greens could begin by urging tomorrow’s lawyers, doctors and prime ministers to tackle poverty and injustice with the same selfless dedication as Christchurch’s “Student Army” tackled the aftermath of a killer earthquake.

Poverty – not “student poverty” – is the enemy. Fight it in unity. Historically-speaking, students’ power reaches its zenith, morally and politically, when they’re putting the needs of others ahead of their own.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday 22 July 2022.

Build The Surge For Chloe Swarbrick!

The One To Watch: If Chloe Swarbrick, backed by the votes of young Aucklanders, surges into second place in the Auckland mayoral election, outperforming both Victoria Crone and John Palino, she will identify herself as a political phenomenon. She will be feted by the news media as the voice of her generation – proof of the Millennials’ potential to completely upset the calculations of “politics” and “politicians”.

 

THE SO-CALLED “MILLENNIAL” GENERATION has been harshly criticised for its lack of political engagement. Clear away the red mist of Boomer rage, however, and the under-30s disinclination to participate in electoral politics takes on a very different aspect. Be it inspired by sophisticated political science, or simple gut instinct, the Millennials’ refusal to validate the politics of neoliberalism by joining in its electoral rituals is easily defended.

 

Sometimes, however, casting of a ballot can inflict a serious blow to the neoliberal order. The most obvious recent example is the British electorate’s decision to leave the European Union. A great many young Britons who hadn’t yet voted in a general election (because “politics” and “politicians” always win) voted for Brexit because they sensed that, if they did, politics and politicians would, for once, be the losers.

 

Chloe Swarbrick’s decision to run for Mayor of Auckland has given the city’s young voters a similar opportunity to make a real difference. With virtually no money, and in spite of being excluded (until very recently) from the mainstream news media’s coverage of the election, a recent poll showed Swarbrick in fourth place, after Phil Goff, Vic Crone and John Palino.

 

Essentially, only 15 percentage points separate this 23-year-old political prodigy from second place. A concerted effort by voters under 30 could easily see Swarbrick surging towards runner-up status in the 2016 Mayoral contest.

 

What good is coming in second? The answer is simple and important. By outperforming both Crone and Palino, Swarbrick will identify herself as a political phenomenon. She will be feted by the news media as the voice of her generation – proof of the Millennials’ potential to completely upset the calculations of “politics” and “politicians”.

 

More than a few political commentators have observed that the next centre-left prime-minister has yet to be elected to Parliament. If Swarbrick is propelled into second place in the Auckland Mayoral election, then Labour and the Greens will soon be competing fiercely to get her to accept a winnable position on their Party Lists.

 

I remember meeting Helen Clark for the first time when I was an undergraduate student at Otago. She was just six years older than me, but I could tell, even back then, in the early 1980s, that this junior political studies lecturer from Auckland was going to play a major role in New Zealand’s political history. I defy anyone to watch Swarbrick’s performance on last Sunday’s Q+A and not reach exactly the same conclusion.

 

The Millennial Generation’s progressives have their representative – now all they need to do is vote for her!

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 19 September 2016.

Reinvent Auckland, Simon? If Only We Could!

A Safe Pair Of Hands: The whole point of the neoliberal Auckland supercity is to ensure that “big visions” and “bold execution” in the pursuit of anything other than neoliberal objectives is rendered impossible. As a tried and tested neoliberal himself, Phil Goff gets this. Producing “incremental improvements with greater efficiency” constitutes the outer limits of his political imagination. It’s what makes him the perfect candidate.

 

SIMON WILSON is an odd fellow – with some odd opinions. Here, for example, is the Metro Editor-at-Large's opinion on the general public response to the National Government’s forced amalgamation of Auckland, North Shore, Waitakere and Manukau cities. “Aucklanders were cynical about everything before he [Len Brown] and the supercity came along in 2010. But we lost that cynicism and we set about reinventing the city.”

 

I would be most annoyed if I thought Simon was including me in that “we”. Long before the legislation setting up the supercity came into force the level of my cynicism was already off the scale.

 

Everything about the supercity’s establishment: from the man chosen to oversee the process (the Act Party leader, Rodney Hide) to the deliberate exclusion of the people of the Auckland region from any meaningful say in whether or not the merger of their four cities should finally proceed; highlighted the profoundly anti-democratic spirit in which the entire process was conceived.

 

The reason for this hostility to democracy wasn’t difficult to discern. Far from being a bottom-up exercise: driven by angry residents’ from across the Auckland region; the supercity was a top-down exercise: the joint creation of local and national elites. Their common purpose? To create a model for local government in the neoliberal era. And the central feature of that model? The almost total disempowerment of the citizens of Auckland and their elected representatives.

 

The full measure of the supercity’s creators’ contempt for democracy was revealed in the proposed size of the supercity’s “Governing Body”. In the equivalent decision-making structures of Auckland, North Shore, Waitakere and Manukau cities, the ratio of elected representatives to citizens was roughly 1:15,000. In the new supercity it would be 1:70,000! Supercity councillors were being asked to represent more citizens than a directly elected Member of Parliament.

 

My own level of cynicism (and, I suspect, the cynicism of thousands of other Aucklanders) was in no way lessened by the Ports of Auckland dispute. It was during this brutal test of strength between the supposedly municipally-owned Port and its employees that Aucklanders learned just how misnamed their “Council Controlled Organisations” (CCOs) truly were.

 

Aucklanders elected representatives turned out to be equally mischaracterised. Far from being the people’s democratic tribunes, Auckland’s elected councillors proved to be little more than powerless pawns. The real game was controlled by legally cocooned CCO boards of directors – over whom the so-called “Governing Body” (including the Mayor) exercised no effective control whatsoever.

 

Indeed, so politically impotent was the Mayor made to feel in relation to the day-to-day management of National’s neoliberal supercity, that the poor fellow felt obliged to demonstrate his potency “by other means”. A better symbol of Auckland’s vast democratic deficit than Len’s and Bevan’s affair is difficult to imagine. Turned out the Mayor’s Office was good for very little else!

 

Even Brown’s signal achievement: the National Government’s final approval of his beloved City Rail Link; owes as much to the projected massive inflation of property values along its inner-city route, as it does to any rational realignment of Auckland’s public transport system.

 

In his latest Metro article, Simon Wilson opines that the job facing the next Mayor of Auckland is “not simply to produce incremental improvements with greater efficiency and better relations with the government in Wellington. Auckland has fallen into crisis. Growth has far outstripped expectations. Housing policies have had a catastrophic outcome. A big vision is required, all over again, and bold execution has to follow.”

 

Except, of course, the whole point of the neoliberal supercity is to ensure that “big visions” and “bold execution” in the pursuit of anything other than neoliberal objectives is rendered impossible. (That the Unitary Plan was so heavily promoted by the National Government and the Auckland City bureaucracy, both of whom threatened dire consequences should the councillors fail to approve it, tells us all we need to know about the document’s ideological complexion!) As a tried and tested neoliberal himself, Phil Goff gets this. Producing “incremental improvements with greater efficiency” constitutes the outer limits of his political imagination. It’s what makes him the perfect candidate.

 

Poor Simon. He seems to have been both surprised and distressed to learn that in a Citizen Insights Monitor survey released by the Auckland Council in June 2016, “just 15 per cent of us said we were satisfied with the council’s performance. Only 17 per cent of us said we trust it. This is disgraceful.”

 

Really, Simon? Disgraceful? Frankly, I’m astounded as many as 17 percent of Aucklanders place any trust at all in National’s neoliberal supercity. I do, however, understand completely why 83 percent of us find little, if anything, to like about the “governance” of the unresponsive bureaucratic monstrosity into whose tender care we were delivered without so much as a confirming referendum.

 

Nor am I surprised that only 35 percent of eligible voters bothered to return their ballots in 2013. Not when the people elected by those ballots are so bereft of power that – even if they wanted to – it wouldn’t be “within the purview of their lawful governance function” to make the trains run on time.

 

In terms of empowering the people who live within its boundaries, there’s nothing I’d rather do, Simon, than “reinvent” the Auckland supercity. It’s why I’m voting for Chloe Swarbrick. Not because she stands the slightest chance of winning, but because, alone of all the Mayoral candidates, she demonstrates some understanding of just how much we have lost.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 13 September 2016.