Caught In The Crossfire.

Paradigm Shift: Suddenly, a motley crew of lumpenproletarians were being presented as ordinary, decent working-class battlers. Suddenly, their frothing irrationality and anti-social demands were being presented as reasonable propositions – worthy of serious discussion.

IT WAS ONLY a matter of time before the Let-Covid-Rip lobby cottoned-on to the political usefulness of the Freedom Convoy.

Throughout the two years of the Covid-19 pandemic the Government’s policies have come under fire from two very different positions.

The first to draw a bead on the Government’s efforts to protect New Zealanders from the Coronavirus were the business interests most directly affected by the closure of the border and lockdowns.

The Education Industry began squealing almost immediately. Understandably, I suppose, since its business model was predicated on a constant inward flow of full fee-paying overseas students.

Close behind them, and for very similar reasons, was the Tourism Industry. It had benefited hugely from the “hyper-tourism” of the previous ten years. Fuelled by super-cheap airfares, the ever-increasing inflow of foreign visitors had made tourism one of this country’s biggest earners of overseas funds.

Hot on the heels of education and tourism came the hospitality and retail sectors. Without overseas students and tourists, and with their domestic patrons and customers locked down inside their homes, the ongoing viability of many businesses operating in these sectors looked increasingly doubtful.

Nor should we forget the agricultural sector. Many New Zealanders were surprised by their country’s biggest earner’s hitherto unnoticed dependence on foreign workers to keep its farms, orchards and vineyards operating efficiently.

Put all these sectors together, and what you get is a powerful combination of interests constantly in the Government’s ear to open the borders and lift the lockdowns.

Similar lobbies sprang up more-or-less overnight in the UK, the USA and Europe. Their arguments in favour of letting the virus rip in order to build up “herd immunity”, not to mention their claims that the threat of the Coronavirus was being over-hyped, spread swiftly around the world.

Remember the arguments advanced by the promoters of our own “Plan B”?

The second firing position was set up in response to the development and roll-out of the Covid-19 vaccines. What had been expected to take years, was achieved in just a few months. Inevitably, given the already deeply entrenched communities of anti-vaccination sentiment here and around the world, shrill voices were soon declaring their absolute refusal to be injected with the new vaccines.

What the Let-Covid-Rip lobbyists hadn’t counted on, however, was the extraordinary success of Jacinda Ardern’s efforts to keep New Zealanders safe from Covid-19. With the overwhelming majority of citizens behind her, and results that spoke for themselves, the Prime Minister felt able to over-rule the business interests which, in so many other countries, had successfully bullied their politicians into opening up too early.

Ardern’s spectacular victory at the polls in 2020 offered further incentive for the Covid-impacted sectors to get along by going along.

For the anti-vaxxers, however, going along wasn’t an option. With the new Delta variant of Covid-19 making 90 percent-plus vaccination rates essential, the Government was required to introduce “No Jab, No Job” vaccination mandates and issue vaccination passes.

For the vaccine hesitant these measures were enough. For the hardcore vaccine resisters, however, the same irrationality which had driven them to refuse inoculation in the first instance, now drove them down social media rabbit-holes and into the arms of an irrationality that was much bigger and more malign.

Just how tightly that irrationality now grips them has been on display in Parliament Grounds for more than a week.

Initially, the Let-Covid-Rip apologists saw only what the rest of the country saw in the “Freedom Convoy” and its illegal encampment – nuts. Like most of us, they assumed the Police would move swiftly to reclaim the streets of Wellington from the protesters’ vehicles, and Parliament Grounds from its inchoate community of conspiracy theorists.

When that didn’t happen, and the public condemned the Government’s evident ineffectuality. When the absurdist interventions of Speaker Mallard caused people to wonder whether there were any adults at all left in the Government’s room. That was the moment when it began to dawn on the Let-Covid-Rip lobby that the longer this folly went on, the weaker Ardern’s Government would become.

Suddenly, a motley crew of lumpenproletarians were being presented as ordinary, decent working-class battlers. Suddenly, their frothing irrationality and anti-social demands were being presented as reasonable propositions – worthy of serious discussion.

Caught in their enemies’ deadly crossfire, our embattled Government turns in desperation towards the Police.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 18 February 2022.

Get In The People Who Get Things Done.

Those Who Can Do: Rob Campbell, Chair of Tourism Holdings, the Summerset Group, Sky City Entertainment, Chancellor of Auckland University of Technology - and former trade union leader. Whether it be defeating the fascist disease, or eliminating the Coronavirus; History teaches us that not all capitalists are bad.

IN 1940, the deadly threat confronting Great Britain was not a biological virus, but the deadly political disease of fascism. To defeat this disease, Britain needed aircraft: most particularly the Supermarine Spitfire; arguably the best fighter aircraft then in operation.

Knowing this, the newly appointed prime minister, Winston Churchill, did not turn to the men of Whitehall, whose bureaucratic inertia had already very nearly cost Britain the war, but to business leaders with a proven record of getting the job done.

Accordingly, the newly created position of Minister of Aircraft Production went to Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook. Proprietor of the right-leaning Daily Express, the Canadian-born Beaverbrook had a fearsome reputation as a string-pulling go-getter, par excellence. It was this ability to make things happen that recommended him most strongly to Churchill.

Beaverbrook did not disappoint. During the Battle of Britain, when the fate of the British Empire hung in the balance, Beaverbrook’s success in increasing aircraft production was crucial. Lord Dowding, the leader of Fighter Command during the battle, later wrote:

“We had the organization, we had the men, we had the spirit which could bring us victory in the air but we had not the supply of machines necessary to withstand the drain of continuous battle. Lord Beaverbrook gave us those machines, and I do not believe that I exaggerate when I say that no other man in England could have done so.”

The great virtue of a working historical memory is its capacity to draw out of the past situations and identities capable of inspiring those grappling with the challenges of the present. It certainly explains why, when a group of New Zealand’s leading businesspersons last Tuesday (2/3/21) asked the Government to allow the business community to do more to help it defeat Covid-19, Churchill’s appointment of Beaverbrook instantly sprang to mind.

The historical parallel is very far from being exact. Had Jacinda Ardern been channelling the spirit of Britain’s “finest hour”, then she would, like Churchill, have drawn the New Zealand business community more directly into the fight much sooner. Certainly, Rob Fyfe was invited – and responded instantly – when asked to facilitate the utmost co-operation between government and business during the crisis. From a PR perspective, the “optics” of Fyfe’s appointment were excellent. Unfortunately, the level of co-operation was much less than he and the business community were expecting.

The instinct of the Ministry of Health (as well as the DHBs it relied upon to deliver on the ground) was to hold onto power at all costs. Certainly, it seemed extraordinarily reluctant to allow any outside players into the game.

Nowhere was this dog-in-the-manger attitude more evident than in the Ministry’s refusal to allow the roll-out of the “smart” Covid Card developed by Trade Me founder, Sam Morgan, and the talented team of digital wizards he had assembled. Obstacle after bureaucratic obstacle was placed in front of these experts from the private sector until Morgan, his patience exhausted, simply threw up his hands in frustration and walked away.

One of the reasons for the Ministry’s bureaucratic obstruction was its acute sensitivity to the “privacy issues” raised by the Card’s capacity to track-and-trace the movements of the people carrying it in real time. No need for voluntary QR scanning with the Covid Card. The authorities would be able to track the cardholder’s every move.

The Ministry’s sensitivity wasn’t just a question of whether or not the proposed Covid Card breached the Privacy Act, it was also a vexing political problem. There was a strong feeling among the bureaucrats’ that their political masters would never permit such an invasive piece of technology to be imposed upon the general population.

In this they were, almost certainly, correct. In the early days of Covid, Jacinda Ardern and her colleagues were acutely wary of “losing” the co-operation of the general public. The Prime Minister’s success in, by turns, inspiring, cajoling and convincing the “Team of Five Million” to be “kind” and “Unite Against Covid-19” persuaded her closest colleagues – and the health bureaucrats surrounding them – that Sam Morgan’s Taiwanese-style tracker-card was just too risky a proposition.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is possible to argue that both the Ministry’s and the Government’s fears on this matter were unjustified. If the Year of Covid has taught us anything, it is that New Zealanders are prepared to surrender all manner of “freedoms” to keep themselves and their loved-ones safe. Ever-practical Kiwis would probably have welcomed the convenience of a device that freed them from the irksome responsibility of holding their cellphones up to shop windows and/or signing a register.

The Ministry of Health and the Government had another, even more compelling, reason for declining to involve the business community too closely in the fight against Covid-19. Almost from the very beginning, some business elements took very strong exception to the Labour-led Government’s “Elimination Strategy”.

The notorious “Plan-B” group was widely perceived as a “front” for those industries most likely to be damaged by the Government putting the country into “Lockdown”. The quest for the chimera of “Herd Immunity” – exemplified most powerfully by the Swedish Government’s ultimately calamitous response to the pandemic – was regarded by many as proof of neoliberal capitalism’s callous (not to mention “ageist”) disregard for human life. Trump’s America confirmed these perceptions with decisions as bizarre as they were terrifying.

The problem confronting Rob Campbell, Joan Withers, Patrick Strange, Prue Flacks, Scott St John, and other business leaders, is that the Ministry of Health’s refusal to share power was not validated by its growing operational effectiveness as the nation’s principal defender. Multiple Ministry and DHB failures, from the unavailability of PPE, to failings at the border, and serious deficiencies in communicating clear and accurate information to the public, have all contributed to the feeling that New Zealand’s indisputable success at beating the virus has, all-too-often, been more a matter of good luck than good management.

But, if we have already passed through our equivalent of the Battle of Britain – without the assistance of a Beaverbrook – the war against Covid-19 is very far from being won. The quiet, but forceful, advocacy of Rob Campbell – so impressively on display in his Q+A interview with Jack Tame – makes it clear that there is a very large reservoir of expertise and good-will among the overwhelming majority of business leaders who were never persuaded by the arguments of the Plan-B special-pleaders.

As the big German corporations are already demonstrating, and our own are ready to confirm, the private sector can, at the very least, offer decisive logistical assistance to the huge task of vaccinating the whole population.

The “group of business leaders” argument: that the more experience and expertise which can be gathered around the national decision-making table, the safer and swifter our path out of Covid will be, and the more secure and prosperous New Zealand’s post-Covid future; is very hard to gainsay. New Zealand’s leading businesspersons are not claiming a monopoly on wisdom, merely that getting things done is what they’re good at – and they’re all keen to get started.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website of Monday, 8 March 2021.

Happy New Year?

But Will She Keep Smiling? Kindness is as kindness does. And the one thing kindness cannot do is force people to be kind. Understanding that was the single most important factor in the Prime Minister’s success at stamping out the Coronavirus. She took New Zealanders with her; she encouraged them to “Unite Against Covid-19” for their own good. Now, in 2021, she must encourage them to do the same against poverty and homelessness.

WELL, IT’S GONE! The 2,020th year of the Common Era. The year of the global Covid-19 pandemic. The year of bubbles and lockdowns and Zoom. The year Donald Trump lost – badly. The year Jacinda Ardern won – bigly. Gone. But, we’re still here, celebrating the first day of the first month of 2021. A good time, traditionally, to hazard some guesses as to what the next 364 days may bring.

My most confident prediction is that Covid-19 will feature as prominently in the next twelve months as it did in the last.

By the time most New Zealanders begin to see the effects of the mass vaccination campaign against Covid-19 more than half of 2021 will already be behind them. Over the months remaining, those same New Zealanders will become increasingly impatient with the sizeable anti-vaxxer movement and its profoundly anti-social delusions.

Pressure will grow for the Government to make vaccination against Covid-19 mandatory. Should compulsion fail to move the hardliners, then the ugly punitiveness which lies just below the easy-going exterior of the average Kiwi is likely to erupt in spectacular fashion. Refusing to be vaccinated may be classed as a form of criminal assault, and denying the benefits of vaccination to one’s children may see the offending parents prosecuted as abusers.

If we’re very unlucky, the outrage of the anti-vaxxers will merge with the rising stridency of the “Free Speech Union” and the undiminished frustration of the country’s gun-owners, into a single, very angry, “Freedom Coalition”.

Jacinda Ardern’s government will be portrayed by this group as dangerously dictatorial: a collection of woke virtue-signallers prepared to unleash the full powers of the state against any individual citizen who refuses to acknowledge their obligation to serve the greater good.

The strength of the Government’s position on the issues of Covid-19 vaccination, curbing hate speech, and comprehensive gun-control should be sufficient to marginalise these critics. What could weaken its position, however, is the Ardern Administration’s apparent unwillingness to acknowledge its own obligation to serve the greater good.

Sharp rises in the number of families living in poverty, and the intractability of the housing crisis, could well see the Government facing serious charges of hypocrisy. In the name of “kindness” citizens are expected to swallow their objections to enforced inoculation, watch their language, self-censor their opinions, and submit their firearms to state regulation and control. That same state, however, acknowledges no obligation to show kindness to the tens-of-thousands of beneficiary families living in poverty: no duty to advance the collective wellbeing of the nation by redistributing wealth and intervening directly in the “free” market.

Both the Act Party and (if it can summon sufficient intellectual energy) the National Party will seek to exploit the issues arising out of vaccinations against Covid-19, hate speech and gun control. From the other end of the political spectrum, the Greens and the Maori Party will chime in against poverty and homelessness.

A self-confidently “centrist” government, assailed from both the right and the left, has little to fear. With most voters happy to position themselves somewhere in the “middle”, support for the Government is unlikely to be shaken by attacks launched from the political extremes.

Of much more concern to Jacinda Ardern and her colleagues would be the emergence of a political force willing to combine the arguments of both the right and the left into a single devastating critique of the Government’s policies.

For most of the period between 1993-96 this was precisely the strategy adopted by Winston Peters and his NZ First Party. While that particular soufflé may not rise a second (or should that be a third?) time, the option remains open for anyone with sufficient charisma to launch a radical populist party.

A “Freedom Coalition” committed not only to the individual’s “freedom to”, but also to securing people’s “freedom from” poverty, homelessness, discrimination and exploitation, could attract the sort of double-digit support that gives incumbent governments nightmares.

Kindness is as kindness does. And the one thing kindness cannot do is force people to be kind. Understanding that was the single most important factor in the Prime Minister’s success at stamping out the Coronavirus. She took New Zealanders with her; she encouraged them to “Unite Against Covid-19” for their own good.

Now, in 2021, she must encourage them to do the same against poverty and homelessness.

This essay was originally published in the Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 1 January 2021.

Absent Friends: Labour knows what needs to be done to win – but not how to make it happen.

Give Her The Tools: The challenge confronting the Prime Minister and her colleagues is to somehow muster the intellectual forces needed to move Labour’s admirably simple campaign strategy from the lofty realm of theory into the gritty world of practice.

WINNING IN SEPTEMBER should be a doddle for Labour. The successful campaign strategy virtually writes itself. Draw together a comprehensive plan for economic recovery post-Covid. Indicate the Government’s general direction of travel by announcing creative solutions to the problems which will, inevitably, arise over the next 100 days. Maintain a “relentlessly positive” approach by insisting, in the spirit of 2017, “We can do this!”

Unfortunately, the biggest problem confronting Labour isn’t recognising what needs to be done; it’s working out how to make it happen.

For the best part of 30 years, Labour’s caucus hasn’t needed to draw together a comprehensive economic plan. In 1984, the plan that came to be known as “Rogernomics” was handed to them, ready-made, by Treasury. Labour and National have dutifully followed Treasury’s plan ever since. So rock-solid has the neoliberal consensus become in New Zealand that both of the major political parties have forgotten how to think in any other way. When either one of them wants to know what to think, they simply ask Treasury.

Prior to 1984, in the years when both Labour and National were mass parties boasting hundreds-of-thousands of members, policy advice was largely sourced in-house. What could not be obtained from members tended to be supplied by key interest groups. National could rely on Federated Farmers, the Employers Association and the Chambers of Commerce. Labour had the trade unions, schoolteachers and university staff, liberal churchmen, voluntary-sector workers, and elements of the Manufacturers Association. The secret to successive National Governments’ extraordinary longevity was simply a matter of stealing Labour’s policies, watering them down, and then introducing them as their own.

This complex process of producing economic and social policy even had a name: “Pluralism”. Society was presented as a multitude of competing “power centres” which the pressure of regular electoral contests forced into the self-reinforcing negotiation of political compromises. Viewed historically, pluralism was an indisputably progressive system. It guaranteed that the interests of workers and their families were both protected and advanced, but only at a speed with which capitalist investors and employers could keep pace, and which afforded them the time required to adapt. In this way “evolution” forestalled “revolution”.

Obviously, pluralism represented everything which the followers of what we now call neoliberalism detested. In their estimation, the only “power centres” which merited the state’s protection were those which protected the rights and interests of the market. Rogernomics thus set about the systematic dismantling of just about every competing centre of power in New Zealand society. Its straightforward purpose was to create a system in which the formulation of economic and social policy became the preserve of private think tanks and a state apparatus re-configured to serve the interests of capital exclusively. Their objective, largely achieved, was to leave all those seeking an alternative to neoliberalism with literally no viable means of either thinking it up, or making it happen.

You see the problem here? The Covid-19 Pandemic has exogenously generated (i.e. in the way the asteroid-Earth collision influenced the dinosaurs!) a critical need for new and imaginative economic and social policies. Unfortunately, the only institutions capable of formulating such policies are intellectually incapable of thinking outside the neoliberal box. The ideas of neoliberalism permeate not only the advice flowing into National’s caucus from the “Right”, but also the advice flowing into Labour’s caucus from the “Left”. Neither the trade unions, nor the universities; the churches nor the not-for-profit sector; have anything to offer, policy-wise, that even remotely resembles a detailed and comprehensive alternative to the status-quo.

Just consider the fate of what is probably the most heterodox policy package presented to a New Zealand government in the last 30 years: the report of the Welfare Expert Advisory Group. What happened to this radical, sector-wide suite of reforms? It was almost completely ignored. Carmel Sepuloni, the Social Development Minister, simply couldn’t summon-up the independence of mind required to over-rule her MSD advisers – for which her colleagues were no doubt profoundly grateful. What on earth would they have done if she had!

Because it would be a mistake to think that policy orthodoxy and a general reluctance to challenge official advice is behaviour peculiar to Carmel Sepuloni. The same could be said of just about every minister in Jacinda Ardern’s cabinet – including Jacinda herself.

She and her senior colleagues cut their political teeth in an environment where the neoliberal foundations of social and economic policy were regarded as immovable. Those who suggested otherwise, like Jim Anderton’s Alliance, and the Green Party under Rod Donald and Jeanette Fitzsimons, were treated like embarrassingly eccentric family members: people to be endured – not heeded. Certainly, anyone within Labour’s ranks foolish enough to suggest that neoliberalism might have had its day – like David Cunliffe – inspired only the rolling of eyes and grinding of teeth among their colleagues.

Like that asteroid, however, the Covid-19 crisis has brought on one or two changes. As both the Prime Minister and her Finance Minister have made clear in recent weeks, the need for a comprehensive policy reset is now urgent. Facing unemployment levels not seen since the darkest days of the Great Depression, the Labour component of the Coalition Government is reaching back, through its own history, for the inspiration needed to confront the vast challenges ahead.

What they are discovering, however, is that Rogernomics’ most pernicious legacy – at least in Labour – is the extraordinary damage it inflicted on the party’s intellectual and moral capacities. Never has the left-wing faction of the party which departed with Jim Anderton in 1989 been needed so desperately. Never has the absence of the alternative thinking it would have encouraged been more telling.

Pluralism, you see, is as vital to the health and progress of parties as it is to the general welfare of societies. I have this on the authority of no less an expert than Matt McCarten – who served as chief-of-staff to Jim Anderton, David Cunliffe and Andrew Little. Ruminating recently upon the ideological monoculture Labour has become, he told me sadly: “We should have stayed, Chris. We should have stayed.”

History, however, seldom offers us second chances. Notwithstanding Jacinda’s need for new ideas, she is unlikely to find them within her current ranks. Certainly, she will not discover them in the policy papers passed up by her neoliberal officials. They won’t be found in the glossy submissions of right-wing think tanks and PR firms either.

The challenge confronting the Prime Minister and her colleagues, therefore, is to somehow muster the intellectual forces needed to move Labour’s admirably simple campaign strategy from the lofty realm of theory into the gritty world of practice.

Never was the old saying more true: “Now is the time for every good person to come to the aid of the party.” Especially those with democratic socialist ideas!

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 12 June 2020.

The Limits Of Kindness.

Race-Based Geography: All the old Marxists out there (all seventeen of them!) will object that the bureaucratic discrimination embodied in the new two-tier benefit system is not based on race, but on social class. To say that, though, is to miss the salient fact of the socio-economic changes of the past 35 years. Namely, that the poorest and most marginalised people in our society have become steadily less white.

I’VE OFTEN WONDERED if South African immigrants passing through towns like Kerikeri and Kaikohe ever wonder how we do it. In their homeland, through the bitter years of Apartheid, keeping the races segregated required pass laws, Alsatian dogs, tear gas, rubber bullets and, all-too-often, live rounds. Not here. Not in Godzone. Here, the “brown towns” are readily distinguished by their boarded-up shops, bottle stores and WINZ offices. The “white towns”, by their main streets’ homage to conspicuous consumption: all those funky cafes and swanky boutiques. No Sharpevilles required. No Sowetos. Quite a trick.

They must also scratch their heads at New Zealand’s segregated schools. How were the rolls so effortlessly sorted? In one school (usually in the poorest part of town) the roll will be upwards of 85 percent Maori and Pasifika. In another (ten miles from the first, where the pupils’ warm dry houses are surrounded by mature trees and carefully tended gardens) the roll will be 85 percent Pakeha and Chinese.

In Boston, Massachusetts, it took school-busses and billy-clubs to enforce desegregation. No political party in New Zealand has ever been willing to wear the backlash. And because we lack a supreme court with the power to strike down legislation which violates a written constitution (which we also lack) no one has ever forced them to.

Parliamentary supremacy, coupled with a free-wheeling Executive Branch unburdened by serious judicial restraint, has produced a political system in which racism has not only been institutionalised but also rendered electorally invisible. To argue otherwise is to ignore the evidence of Tuesday’s newspaper headlines – or (at the very least) wilfully misinterpret them.

Monday’s announcement, under the names of Finance Minister, Grant Robertson, and Social Development Minister, Carmel Sepuloni, of what they have dubbed the Covid-19 Income Relief Payment – CIRP (but which would rather more honestly have been called the Middle-Class Pakeha Income Relief Payment) was a shocker. Seldom has a government acknowledged the yawning gulf between the rich and the poor – the white and the brown – with such gobsmacking insouciance. Or, it must be said, with such rock-solid confidence that its blatant policy of racial discrimination will be accepted by the voting public with barely a flicker of concern or guilt.

What is it, after all, that separates a young Maori bartender made redundant on 29 February 2020, from a middle-aged Pakeha marketing manager let go on 25 May? It’s a question with many answers. But after all the superficial demarcators have been acknowledged, the explanation always circles back to one thing: the size of the fuss you can make. The marketing manager from Remuera has the means to make a great deal more fuss than the out-of-work bartender from Mangere. Give a marketing manager a look of withering contempt and he’ll ask to see your supervisor. Give a bartender the same look and he’ll turn away from the counter with a burning knot of rage and shame in his guts.

Oh, and the other thing that separates these two New Zealanders is the fact that the bartender on his Jobseeker Allowance will receive $250 from the taxpayer, while the marketing manager on his CIRP will receive $490.

All the old Marxists out there (all seventeen of them!) will object that this bureaucratic discrimination is not based on race, but on social class. To say that, though, is to miss the salient fact of the socio-economic changes of the past 35 years. Namely, that the poorest and most marginalised people in our society have become steadily less white.

The effectively monocultural social landscape of the 30 years after World War II played a crucial role in preserving the political acceptability of the Welfare State. The more “bi-cultural” and then “multicultural” we became, however, the less redeemable our cradle-to-grave promissory notes became. Social generosity and cultural homogeneity are intimately related. When the majority of blue collars (or should that be Hi-Viz vests?) begin to be worn around brown necks, then the socialist party tends to get cancelled.

This government has decided (very sensibly in a strictly political sense) that it would be electorally counter-productive to have a growing number of middle-class Pakeha New Zealanders discovering exactly how many humiliating hoops working-class Maori, Pasifika and immigrant New Zealanders have to jump through to get their hands on a lousy $250.

Clearly, kindness has its limits.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 29 May 2020.

Does National Still Need A Street-Fighting Man?

Eyes Left! On the face of it, the election of Todd Muller and Nikki Kaye is a no-brainer. New Zealanders are clearly in no mood for a “dirty little street-fighter” and, if the polls are any indication, resent strongly Bridges’ implication that they are. To be at all competitive with Labour, National needs a radical change of faces.

WHO WILL EMERGE from Friday’s emergency meeting of National caucus as the party’s No.1 and No. 2? Will it be the incumbents: Simon Bridges and Paula Bennett? Or will the election of Todd Muller and Nikki Kaye signal National’s return to a kinder, gentler conservatism? Does Judith “Crusher” Collins’ very public renunciation of her leadership ambitions indicate her intention to swing her support behind Bridges and Bennett? Or, is she backing Muller and Kaye in return for the crucial Finance portfolio? Are Collins’ supporters even numerous enough to swing this contest, or will Mark Mitchell’s handful of votes be required to nudge the eventual winners over the line? If so, what will Mitchell’s price be?

On the face of it, the election of Muller and Kaye is a no-brainer. New Zealanders are clearly in no mood for a “dirty little street-fighter” and, if the polls are any indication, resent strongly Bridges’ implication that they are. To be at all competitive with Labour, National needs a radical change of faces. Beating Jacinda’s “Kindness” will require of the Right a credible presentation of “Kindness+”. In the best of all possible contests that “plus” would be “Wisdom”. In its present mood, however, the best “plus” the Right is likely to offer the voters is “Competence”.

Like everything in electoral politics it will all come down to numbers. Who has them and who doesn’t. In the February 2018 caucus contest that gave New Zealand the Bridges/Bennett combination it seemed pretty clear that the liberal wing of the party backing Amy Adams didn’t have the numbers. The question to be answered now is whether or not the 27 months under Bridges/Bennett have convinced enough of National’s hard-liners that dirty street-fighting is not going to win them back the treasury benches. If the polls have sufficiently spooked them, then they may be persuaded to reluctantly shuffle left. Unspooked, they will keep their nerve and wait for Covid-19’s economic shit to hit the fan.

Empirically, the hardliners can point to the impressive solidity of National’s public support across all but a few of those 27 months (the big exception being the period following the Christchurch Mosque Shootings). They might also cite the salutary impact of Bridges’ dirty social media street-fighting on Labour’s popularity. Unbuttressed by crisis and calamity, they can fairly argue, Jacinda Ardern and her colleagues are sitting ducks. Thinking of political feather-brains like Phil Twyford, David Clark and Kelvin Davis it’s hard not to agree!

Those hardline Nats with a bent for military history might compare National’s position with that of the Germans at the Battle of the Somme. The Covid-19 health crisis, like the British artillery’s horrendous opening barrage, has indisputably shaken the defenders’ confidence – but has it been destroyed? When the whistles blew and the poor Tommies rose out of their trenches and began moving steadily across no man’s land towards what they had been assured was a pulverised enemy, the German machine-gunners mowed them down like corn. Substitute utter economic carnage for those German machine-gunners and the analogy becomes strikingly clear.

The problem with political hardliners of every stripe is that they lack the flexibility of mind to put themselves in the position of their opponents. Not being able to imagine – and hence anticipate – what their enemy might do to thwart their plans, they are rendered incapable of adapting fixed strategies and tactics. The National Right has convinced itself that the Coalition Government lacks the experience and talent required to steer New Zealand safely through the Covid-19 induced recession. Confronted with ever-increasing numbers of failed businesses and unemployed workers, they see Jacinda and her colleagues freezing in the headlights of the Right’s oncoming truck. As far as National’s hardliners are concerned, all they have to do to win is make sure those headlights are kept on full-beam.

What they have singularly failed to grasp is that, as Laila Harré observed on Q+A on Monday night, the Covid-19 emergency has elevated Jacinda well above the plane of a mere party leader or prime minister. It has transformed her into New Zealand’s leader: the woman credited with doing the right thing to defend her people by an astonishing 92 percent of Reid Research’s respondents. A political dynamic is operating here that goes way beyond mere partisanship. Jacinda has not only changed the way her people look at her, she has changed the way she looks at herself. You cannot bring down such leaders, you can only wait for them to fall.

Jacinda does not have to do anything more between now and 19 September than urge New Zealanders to endure the pain. Like Winston Churchill in 1940, she need offer them nothing more in the immediate term than “blood, toil, tears and sweat”. But, if they can hold out in these fortunate islands; if they are willing to give her and Labour the votes they need to finish the job of rebuilding and recovery; ah well, then, in Churchill’s wonderfully evocative words: “the life of the world can move forward into broad sunlit uplands”. This is the new reality that the National Opposition has to grasp: that Labour does not need to win the battle of the present, if it has already won the battle of the future.

Which is not to suggest that Jacinda and her government are incapable of slipping and falling. Unanticipated obstacles, new disasters, may yet send dark clouds scudding across those sunlit uplands. If they do, then who is better placed to comfort and inspire their dispirited compatriots: Simon Bridges and Paula Bennet, or Todd Muller and Nikki Kaye?

There have been times in New Zealand’s political history when its more conservative citizens have been in the market for “a dirty little street-fighter”. One thinks of Sid Holland, who tamed the militant unions in 1951. Or Rob Muldoon in 1975, promising conservatives New Zealand the way they (not the Left) wanted it. In 2005, it was Don Brash who asserted the rights of “Kiwi” over “Iwi”. These were the leaders chosen by National for times of “Us” versus “Them”.

These are not such times. The Covid-19 global pandemic of 2020 has brought the New Zealand people closer together. They are not looking for a National Opposition determined to drive them apart.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 21 May 2020.

Conceding Nothing – To The Undemanding Non-Voter.

Missing From The Electoral Action: The radical Left's last forlorn hope, the "Missing Million", is generally despised by mainstream New Zealand and mistrusted by the respectable members of their own communities. They have moved well beyond the reach of conventional electoral politics.

TO SAY the Left’s reaction to Grant Robertson’s “Recovery Budget” has been mixed would be a considerable understatement. Everyone from Mike Treen and John Minto to Susan St John and Gordon Campbell have criticised the Coalition Government for failing to piggy-back a socialist programme on its economic response to the Covid-19 recession. To which I feel obliged to call: Bullshit!

Had Jacinda Ardern and Grant Robertson followed the advice of those who are now so loud in their condemnation of the Budget, their 26 percentage-point poll advantage would have evaporated practically overnight. Why? Because the additional 10-15 percent of popular support Labour appears to have attracted over the past two months can only have come from former National supporters. How long, I wonder, do Labour’s critics on the Left suppose these people would have stuck around had Jacinda decided to go all Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders on them? That is not a trick question. The answer is – not long at all.

The bad news wouldn’t have stopped there, however, it would just be getting started. Can Jacinda’s and Grant’s critics not imagine how right-wing commentators like Mike Hosking and Matthew Hooton would have seized upon the Government’s sudden lurch to the left as proof of its fundamental dishonesty. Oh yes, they may have pretended to be responsible managers of the New Zealand economy, but when the crisis/opportunity came – in the form of a critical public health emergency, for God’s sake! – they fell upon it cynically to implement a radical agenda – the content of which they had concealed from the electorate.

And what about that NZ First, eh? What about Winston Peters! The sly old fox had been a radical socialist all along. Forget about the Manchurian Candidate – this guy was the original Moscow Sleeper! And the rest of his caucus – what consummate actors! Ron Mark a socialist – who knew? I mean, the Greens never made the slightest effort to hide their radical credentials – and didn’t NZ First give them stick for it. That decision, back in 2005, to keep the Greens out of government: what a masterstroke! Put everyone off their guard. Talk about your long-term, far-left agenda.

Yes, I’m being facetious, but only to remind this government’s left-wing critics that it is a coalition; and that one of the constituent parties of that coalition was formed by a former National Party cabinet minister. Which is just another way of saying that even if Jacinda and Grant had been foolish enough to try and drive through the measures demanded by the radical Left, Winston would have vetoed them. Would that have broken up the coalition? Yes. Would Winston and NZ first have suffered for pulling the emergency hand-brake? No. Would Labour and the Greens have been punished electorally? Yes. Would Simon Bridges have become New Zealand’s next prime minister? Of course.

Now, I’ve been around long enough to know exactly how the radical and revolutionary Left would answer these arguments. They would say that driving all those cross-over Nats back into Simon’s waiting arms wouldn’t matter, because the political consequences of a radical left-wing response to the Covid-19 induced recession would, on balance, be favourable to the Government. All those beneficiaries whose lives would have been improved immeasurably by its decision to implement the Welfare Expert Advisory Group’s recommendations, for example, would have turned out in their droves to re-elect Jacinda and her colleagues.

This is yet another iteration of the “Missing Million” argument: a political proposition that the Left has been kicking around for at least the last three general elections. Give the poor and marginalised something to vote for and they will reward their political benefactors at the ballot-box.

Except they won’t.

Increasingly, electoral politics is an activity restricted to those whose lives are still buoyant enough to warrant engagement with “mainstream” New Zealand institutions. Unionised workers; church members in good standing; newly-minted professionals who have scraped and clawed their way out of the immigrant communities into which they were born. By-and-large, these are not people with a revolutionary mindset. On the contrary, many of them have little or no respect for those who, as they see it, have given up the struggle to make a better life for themselves and their children. That’s why the Missing Million is generally despised by mainstream New Zealand and mistrusted by the respectable members of their own communities. They have moved well beyond the reach of conventional electoral politics.

Whenever the Missing Million argument is used by left-wingers seeking to reconcile electoral politics with revolutionary aspirations, I think of Len Richards in Mangere. Len, a staunch and thoroughly engaging socialist, stood for the NewLabour Party against David Lange in 1990. He ran a very good campaign, winning 11.79 percent of the votes cast – more than twice the NLP’s 5.16 percent of the popular vote nationally. And yet, even after everything the Labour Party had done to the working people of the Mangere electorate; even after six years of Rogernomics; even with unemployment skyrocketing; David Lange romped home with 51.1 percent of the votes cast.

The most fundamental problem confronting the radical Left has never really been about the people who don’t vote. It’s always been about the political parties supported by the people who do. New Zealanders will vote for parties positioned to Labour’s left – sometimes in impressive numbers – but only when those parties are offering policies demanded by a significant percentage of the electorate, and which Labour, for reasons best known to itself, refuses to endorse.

Clearly, this is not the situation in 2020. In this year’s election there will be only one viable party to Labour’s left, the Greens, and the policy differences between the two are now marginal – at best. On its current standing in the Newshub-Reid Research poll (56 percent) Labour will be looking to retain office with the support of former right-wing voters – not radical leftists. It’s not a situation which any democratic-socialist activist enjoys, but one that cannot be avoided without giving up the game of electoral politics altogether.

Grant Robertson’s Budget is offering what most New Zealanders are hoping for – economic recovery. More importantly, it’s offering what the New Zealanders who actually vote are demanding. Is that the same as offering what so many poor and marginalised New Zealanders desperately need? No, it’s not. But if people’s economic and social needs are not translated into serious political demands, then they are unlikely to be fulfilled in any serious way. In the immortal words of the Black abolitionist and former slave, Frederick Douglass: “Power concedes nothing without a demand – it never has and it never will.”

When the wretched of the earth – and that includes the people of Mangere and Porirua – organise themselves to the point of convincing mainstream politicians that there is more to be gained by acceding to their demands than ignoring them, then their lives will improve immeasurably. Put enough community organisers in New Zealand’s most deprived suburbs and all the exclusions of the 2020 Budget, which have so upset the radical Left, will very rapidly become inclusions.

Until then, Labour – riding so very high in the polls – will go on listening to and meeting the demands of those who know how to make themselves heard where it counts – in the ballot-box.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 19 May 2020.

Is the New Zealand State Equal To Covid-19’s Economic Challenge?

Sufficient Leverage? Years of underfunding and down-scaling, and countless restructurings, have routinely wiped away decades of institutional memory. Grant Robertson's 2020 Budget has engaged the levers of government action - but do they still work?

THE FINANCE MINISTER would appear to have pulled hard on every economic lever he could find. The 2020 Budget is breath-taking in the sheer scale of its ambition. What we are all about to discover now, however, is how many of those levers are still attached to machinery that works. Can the Government’s orders be carried out, or, like Adolf Hitler in his Berlin bunker in April 1945, is it urging forward armies that no longer exist?

Think about the early stages of the fightback against Covid-19. How long it took for meaningful interventions against the virus to kick in. In the minimum possible time, the Ministry of Health was required to reach maximum effectiveness – and all from a standing start. Years of underfunding and down-scaling; countless restructurings during which decades of institutional memory had been routinely wiped away: all of these ideologically-inspired weaknesses had to be overcome not in months and years – but in days and weeks. They were, but the effort required from Ashley Bloomfield and his team to make sure everything worked was nothing short of heroic.

If the entire population of the tiny Mediterranean island of Malta could be awarded the George Cross for their stoicism and bravery under relentless German bombing in 1942, then I cannot see why our entire health service should not be similarly acknowledged in the next Honours List.

Now we shall see how well the other major ministries of the state meet the economic challenges of Covid-19. Impelled by the same sense of urgency; required to respond across a similar number of critical fronts; how will they perform? Will the massive amounts of financial and practical assistance that our failing businesses and vulnerable employees need arrive in time? Will the strategies required to haul the New Zealand economy out of the deep hole into which it has fallen be forthcoming? More importantly, will they – like the Ministry of Health’s responses – be subjected to the same searching examination and ruthless critique?

Frankly, I am sceptical of the chances of either of these crucial objectives being achieved. In the key state ministries: Treasury, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment; the Ministry of Social Development, the Ministry of Primary Industry and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the record to date has been one of lethargy, procrastination and imaginative failure. Certainly, all of them have been subjected to the same spending cuts as the Ministry of Health (thankfully now remedied by Grant Robertson’s Budget) but the malaise in these ministries goes much deeper than a mere dearth of funds.

Since at least the fundamental reorganisation of the public sector in the late 1980s, the record of every successful state-sector CEO has demonstrated not how much he or she could make their ministry do, but how much he or she could make it do without. Under New Zealand’s all-conquering neoliberal ideology, the state is an institution whose ineffectiveness is accepted a priori: the less there is of it, the more efficiently our economy is predicted to perform. It was the far-right American ideologue, Grover Norquist, who recommended shrinking the state to the point where it could be drowned in a bathtub. For more than 30 years, New Zealand’s state-sector’s CEO’s (and the Ministers they advise) have made it their business to keep it on a crash diet.

The Ministers of the present government have learned to their political cost just how weak the New Zealand state’s starvation diet has left it. The unfortunate Phil Twyford tried pulling levers at Housing only to discover that, methodically, under governments of every hue, the wires connecting the political will to give New Zealanders affordable houses with the bureaucratic machinery needed of get them built had been cut. No matter how hard Twyford pulled Housing’s levers – nothing happened.

Yesterday, the Minister of Finance rolled out his blueprint for Responding, Recovering and Rebuilding New Zealand’s crisis-stricken economy. He is borrowing and spending billions to make it happen. Of necessity, a very large part of the work that lies ahead will be undertaken by the state. It is, however, far from certain that New Zealand’s core economic ministries will rise to the Covid-19 challenge as effectively as its Health Ministry.

There is, you see, a huge difference between the action mandated by science, and the inaction dictated by ideology. 

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 15 May 2020.

Go Hard, Jacinda. More Importantly, Go Early!

Jacinda's "Simple Proposition": No prime minister in the past 65 years has placed such an opportunity before the New Zealand people. We cannot afford to let it slip through our fingers. Jacinda’s offer must be taken up: by every union, every charity, every NGO, every church, and every citizen with a reason to want the New Zealand which emerges from this crisis to be better than the New Zealand that went into it.

JACINDA ARDERN’S Covid-19 formula: “Go hard, go early” has proved a resounding success – at least in public health terms. Success on the economic front will not be so easy. The number of foes arrayed against her is formidable – all of them doing everything they can to erode the admiration she has won both at home and abroad for her handling of the crisis. That being the case, might it not be time for the Prime Minister to consider whether the slogan “Go hard, go early” has more than one application?

Waiting until 19 September to go to the polls, while constitutionally admirable, invites political disaster. Certainly, the National Opposition is convinced that electoral victory has become a simple waiting game. Waiting for the unemployment numbers to swell beyond anything experienced by any New Zealander under the age of 90. Waiting for upwards of a third of New Zealand’s small businesses to fail. Waiting for the levels of fear, anguish, resentment and despair to rise beyond the ability of even the most empathic of prime ministers to assuage.

And, while National is waiting, the mainstream news media will be doing everything it can to magnify the voters’ sorrow and incite their rage. The business community, still eager for every bit of assistance the Ardern-led government can be bullied into offering, will nevertheless damn it with faint praise: strongly suggesting that a considerably more competent alternative government is ready and waiting to put things (or should that be move things) right.

In a powerful pre-Budget speech from the Beehive Theatrette, Jacinda told her compatriots: “New Zealand is about to enter a very tough winter.” The challenge she faces, politically as well as economically, is how to navigate the next four months so that they do not become “the winter of our discontent.”

The Prime Minister’s plan, as set out in her speech, is to pivot from health to economics without losing her “team of 5 million”.

First and foremost her government’s intention is to keep New Zealanders working. That, says Jacinda, cannot and will not mean embracing the grim doctrines of austerity: “[T]he notion that at this time of need we would make cuts to the essential services so many New Zealanders need more than ever is not only immoral, it is economically wrong.” These words offer not only reassurance to New Zealand’s most vulnerable citizens, but they also deliver a stinging slap to the faces of National and Act.

In her own words:

“Now more than ever we need our schools and hospitals, our public houses and roads and railways. We need our police and our nurses, and we need our welfare safety net. We will not let our team of 5 million fall when the times get tough, instead we will strengthen the blanket of support the Government can provide. We are rebuilding together, not apart.”

Stirring sentiments! But, as they say in the Ginsu ads: “Wait, there’s more!” The Prime Minister was not content to leave the electorate with nothing more than the standard government promises to single-handedly rescue the nation from its woes.

“In the coming month the Government will launch a comprehensive engagement programme that will pose a simple proposition – look what our team of 5 million achieved together in beating the virus, now what can we do together to get our economy moving again, to look after our people, and rebuild in a way that make things better than they were before. That will of course include the business community, but it will be broader too.

“If anything,” Jacinda continued, “the last few months have shown that united we are a formidable force. When we channel our energies into a goal collectively we are stronger for it. Prior to the virus we faced serious long term challenges – persistent inequality and poverty, the threat of climate change, the need to diversify the economy, low productivity, limited domestic manufacturing and an abundance of low paid jobs. Do we return to those settings or is now the time to find a better way?”

It is difficult to overstate the radicalism of the Prime Minister’s “simple proposition”. In effect, what she is saying is that the way out of the Covid-19-induced economic crisis must be determined by more that the usual business suspects. She is inviting everyone: from the corporate CEO to the hero on the supermarket check-out; from the bank economist to the welfare beneficiary; to have their say about the shape and purpose of their country’s “new normal”.

No prime minister in my lifetime has ever placed such an opportunity before the New Zealand people. We cannot afford to let it slip through our fingers. Jacinda’s offer must be taken up: by every union, every charity, every NGO, every church, and every citizen with a reason to want the New Zealand which emerges from this crisis to be better than the New Zealand that went into it. The Beehive needs to be bombarded with the submissions of the “democratic public” – that great choir of New Zealand’s better angels to which the nascent Labour Party first appealed for support more than a century ago.

And we need to do it fast – as fast as we possibly can – so that Labour can compile the “people’s manifesto” with maximum speed. We must make sure that Jacinda and her colleagues can not only “go hard” for the progressive electorate’s support, but also, and much more importantly, “go early”.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 14 May 2020.

The Crowd That Booed.

Social Distancing: Student protesters make their way carefully around the working class. Dunedin 1994. Photo Otago Daily Times.

IT WAS THE LARGEST CROWD I had ever addressed – and it booed me. In 1990 the Labour Government of Geoffrey Palmer (look him up!) announced that university tuition fees would rise from $129.00 to $1,250.00 per year – an eye-watering 969% increase! Unsurprisingly, the news was not well-received by New Zealand’s 100,000 university students. When Labour's policy was first floated the year before, the then Education Minister, Phil Goff, was mobbed by hundreds of angry students at Victoria University who followed him all the way down Wellington's Terrace hurling abuse. In Dunedin, students from the University of Otago turned out to protest Labour’s fee increase in unprecedented numbers. I was one of a large number of people invited to address them.

Why? Because only a matter of months before Goff's announcement the Labour Party had split. Jim Anderton, followed by thousands of others, had abandoned the party of Rogernomics to form the NewLabour Party. The students’ association wanted to know NewLabour’s policy on user-pays education – and I – naïve fool that I was – told them.

It started well. There were cheers when I told them that the NewLabour Party was committed to providing a free tertiary education to every young New Zealander who wanted one: that Goff’s hated $1,250.00 fee would be scrapped. A more sensible aspiring politician would have stopped right there. For better or for worse, however, I did not fall into that category. Promising to abolish tuition fees was only part of the story, I told the assembled thousands. In order to fund free tertiary education for all, New Zealand would have to re-introduce the sharply progressive income tax which the Fourth Labour Government had dismantled. To make the first promise without making voters aware of the second would be dishonest. Zero student fees could only be paid for by higher taxes.

That’s when the booing started. I quit while I was behind – a sadder but a wiser man.

I was 34 years-old in 1990 – roughly fifteen years senior to the crowd in front of me. People were just beginning to refer to these youngsters as “Generation X” – Jacinda Ardern’s and Grant Robertson’s generation. Many of these kids would fight the good fight against user-pays education with energy and dedication right through the 1990s. Grant, himself, was elected President of the Otago University Students Association in 1993 and would go on to co-lead the national student organisation three years later. That said, I couldn’t forget those Gen-Xers’ cheers for free education, nor their boos for higher taxes. Neither, it would appear, could Grant.

Few economists and even fewer political journalists are predicting that Thursday’s Budget will feature a sharp rise in taxes. Envisaged instead is a massive increase in Government borrowing. Some younger commentators have worked out that the burden of repaying the enormous foreign debt this government is racking-up will be borne by them and their children – and they’re not happy about it. There is talk about extracting at least some of the repayment from older New Zealanders. After all, they argue, all of this uniting against Covid-19 has been for their benefit. The least they can do is give something up for the generations who will bear the brunt of the economic crisis which combatting the virus has precipitated. One of the Aussie bank economists has even, in the finest Shock Doctrine style, called for drastic action on superannuation, the retirement age, and untaxed capital gains.

Not wanting to provoke the election-compromising boos that such measures would elicit – not least from New Zealand’s most assiduous voters, the Over-60s – Grant is most unlikely to do any of those things. He, at least, is not so naïve as to waste all the election-victory-enhancing cheers which his Thursday promises to spend whatever it takes to get New Zealand out of trouble are certain to produce, by idiotically going on to explain how he intends to pay for them! Instead, he will reassure us of just how much scope for borrowing his prudent fiscal management of the New Zealand economy has provided. And there’s plenty of money on offer! In the immortal words of John Clarke (aka Fred Dagg) “If we stand in the queue with our hats on, we can borrow a few million more.” Verily, we don’t know how lucky we are to have such a government.

Few New Zealanders see as clearly as John Minto what will be sacrificed to pay the vastly expanded mortgage that Grant is negotiating with overseas lenders. All the fine ideas about overcoming child poverty, humanising the welfare system, building state houses, tackling mental illness and doing something real about global warming will, to use Grant’s own words: “be put on ice”. If politics is the language of priorities, then almost without exception it speaks with a middle-class accent.

Because, in the subsequent hours and days – and years – in which I relived the humiliation of that booing crowd, I was finally blessed with the consoling insight that, big as it was, it represented only a very narrow slice of the New Zealand population. Moreover, it was not a slice that was ever going to welcome the news that its parents and, eventually, itself, would be called upon to pay, and pay handsomely, for the maintenance of the sort of society that offered all its young people a free tertiary education. That consolation came when I remembered that I was not the only speaker to be booed that day. The young Maori woman who spoke of the needs of her people, and of their just historical claims upon the resources of the Pakeha nation – they booed her, too.

The bourgeoisie, you see, has always been extremely keen on getting into heaven; but it’s damned if it’s ever been willing to die to get there. Always, that’s been somebody else’s job – somebody poor.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 12 May 2020.

A Creative Solution To Tourism’s Demise.

Paradise Lost: The millions of tourists who collectively constituted New Zealand’s largest single source of overseas funds will not be returning to these shores any time soon. For the foreseeable future, tourism and the multitude of businesses that serviced its voracious appetites, will be – to use a technical term – buggered.

LET’S BE HONEST, most sectors of the New Zealand economy will recover relatively quickly from the Covid-19 Pandemic. Our primary production sector and all the businesses that support it will bounce back. Our secondary industries will, in large measure, do the same. Indeed, pressures are already building for our industrial sector to step up to the challenge of increasing New Zealand’s economic resilience. Winston Peters is far from being the only person who regards the virtual elimination of this country’s import substitution capability in the 1980s and 90s as a singularly unwise policy.

But, the millions of tourists who collectively constituted New Zealand’s largest single source of overseas funds will not be returning to these shores any time soon. For the foreseeable future, tourism and the multitude of businesses that serviced its voracious appetites, will be – to use a technical term – buggered.

There simply aren’t enough New Zealanders with enough time and money to fill the tourist void. For the past twenty years we have struggled to keep pace with the demands of our international visitors. For every hotel we built; every new adventure we devised; every taste-bud-titillating restaurant we opened; there were always more and more customers to satisfy.

They came on vast cruise ships – floating towns that disgorged virtually their entire populations to spend, spend, spend for hours – sometimes days – at a time. All the cruise liners in the world, however, could not compete with the unending stream of airliners touching down at our international airports. Most of them packed full of passengers eager to enjoy their very own New Zealand experience.

Future historians will look back with wonder at the age of hyper-tourism. They will observe how cost-cutting innovations in aviation technology combined with the exploding numbers of newly enriched middle-class citizens from countries hitherto priced out of international travel to produce a surge in tourist numbers so great that the attractions they travelled thousands of miles to enjoy threatened to collapse under the sheer weight to their numbers. In the late twentieth century the New Zealand tourist industry looked forward to welcoming a million visitors a year. By 2020 it was gearing up to entertain five times that number.

But the Covid-19 Pandemic arrived instead and now this country finds itself with more tourist-oriented enterprises than can possibly be sustained by its tiny population.

The first and most obvious victim of the pandemic was the national carrier, Air New Zealand. Practically overnight, the airline lost 80 percent of its business. Of necessity the Government bailed it out. Located as they are at the bottom of the world, New Zealanders simply cannot do without their own airline. What other carrier, in the prolonged absence of the tourist hordes, would come so far, and at such cost, except Air New Zealand?

Sadly, not every carrier has a state to bail it out. From the hundreds of airlines traversing the skies in the age of hyper-tourism, the post-pandemic world will likely be serviced by no more than a few dozen. Fares will sky-rocket and the number of international tourists will plummet. The days of the golden tourist weather will be well and truly gone.

And what of the cruise ships? After the horrors of the Diamond and Ruby Princesses, the world may have to wait many years for the return of those floating towns and their wealthy pensioner passengers. Indeed, History may record the cruise ship craze as the last hurrah of the death-defying Baby Boom Generation. The cost of insuring themselves against involuntary quarantine should, alone, be more than enough to put off their children and grand-children!

The urgent problem remains, however, of how New Zealand fills the tourist void. What can possibly take the place of those millions of international travellers and their oh-so-precious hard currency? An expanded “bubble” encompassing the whole of Australia? It’s a nice thought, but hardly a practical one. Making it work – without reigniting Covid-19 – poses a truly daunting number of questions. What’s needed is a product the world is willing to buy: a product unique to New Zealand.

If the world can no longer come here by ship or plane, then why not invite it to tour the landscape of our imagination? Let’s invest in movies, television series, plays, music, novels, computer games. Encourage the world to partake of New Zealand’s unique creativity.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 8 May 2020.

The List Candidate: Winston Peters and the Looming Covid-19 Depression.

Economic Nationalist: The NZ First leader, Winston Peters, has lived long enough to know that what New Zealanders did once they can do again. That economic change is the product not simply of improved technology but of political will.

WHY IS IT, that of all the party leaders only Winston Peters fully understands the economic ramifications of the Covid-19 Pandemic? Perhaps it’s his age. That might sound snarky, but it isn’t. None of the other party leaders are old enough to possess a solid mental picture of what New Zealand was like before the Neoliberal Revolution of 1984-1993.

Just do the maths. Jacinda was born in 1980 – which makes her 4-years-old in 1984. Simon Bridges, born in 1976, was 8. James Shaw and Marama Davidson, both born in 1973, were 11. The Act leader, David Seymour, born in 1983, was hardly out of nappies!

Now, consider Winston Peters. He was born in 1945, just as the Second World War was drawing to a close. He grew to adulthood in the “golden years” of the post-war boom, nurtured by the political, economic and social infrastructure of Mickey Savage’s cradle-to-grave welfare state. In 1984, as Labour set about dismantling this crowning political achievement of the New Zealand working-class, Peters was already 39-years-old.

The eldest of the other party leaders, Shaw and Davidson, will possess only the haziest memories of pre-Rogernomics New Zealand. What I remember of New Zealand in 1967, when I was 11-years-old, is made up mostly of family events, popular songs, movies and television programmes. As far as political memories go, I struggle to recall any names beyond Keith Holyoake, Harold Wilson and President Johnson. I had only the vaguest notion of what capitalism was, but I was pretty sure that “communism” was a very bad thing. Now, it’s entirely possible that the Green Party co-leaders were much more politically aware than I was at the age of 11, but it’s much more likely that they, like me, were far too busy being children.

Five years on, however, in 1972, my political memories are much more vivid. I shall certainly never forget that Saturday evening in November when for the first time in 12 years there was change of government. There had been a Labour government in my lifetime, but I was no older in 1957 than David Seymour was in 1984. For me, “Big Norm” was a political phenomenon: a breaker of moulds; a man who made it possible to believe in a better world; my hero.

What would Shaw’s and Davidson’s memories of 1989 have been? Of a riven Labour Party tearing itself to pieces over “Rogernomics”? Of a National Party, circling like a flock of vultures over the bloody entrails of a discredited government? Of the unsettling sense of a world they’d never really known being dismantled before their eyes? Of its replacement being full of sharp edges and dangerous spikes: a world that promised winners everything and losers nothing? Did they celebrate their sixteenth birthdays dreaming about building a better world, or wondering how to navigate their way through such a shitty one? A world where walls came down; students were shot down; heroes fell down; and history itself was said to be winding down.

Winston Peters, meanwhile, possessed a very clear picture of what his country looked like before Rogernomics and after “Ruthanasia”. He and the National Party had been elected on a “no ifs, no buts, no maybes” promise to restore “the decent society”. What was that? For Peters it was a society that allowed a dirt-poor cow-cockey’s son from Northland to become a pin-striped lawyer in a double-breasted suit. It was a society that offered work to all who wanted it – and felt only disdain for those who didn’t. It was a society that knew better than to leave the rich in charge of an economy. A society smart enough to know that in such a small country only the state was big enough to guarantee both prosperity and fairness.

Most importantly, Peters had lived long enough to know that what New Zealanders had done once they could do again. That economic change is the product not simply of improved technology but of political will.

A whole generation before Columbus set foot on the islands of the Caribbean, the Chinese were sailing 600-foot ocean-going junks all the way to East Africa. They had the technology to become the masters of the planet, but not the political will. The great sailing junks ended up rotting at their moorings. Voyages beyond the horizon were forbidden. Europeans conquered the world.

Peters loves these historical counterfactuals. He revels in knowing who Friedrich List (1789-1846) was and how his “national system” of economics transformed Germany into an industrial behemoth second only to the United States. He would write articles lamenting the fact that while the university book stores of South Korea were full of List’s economic nationalist ideas, most Kiwi students have never heard of him – let alone been taught about his kind of economics.

Friedrich List (1789-1846) Economic Nationalist.

Certainly, it’s a pretty safe bet that Jacinda, Simon, James, Marama and David could not tell you very much at all about List and the state-led capitalism which he championed and which has, historically, always outperformed the laissez-faire variety so beloved of the English-speaking capitalist countries. Not that their ignorance of economic nationalism worries them unduly. Having no clear memory of the world that existed before the triumph of Neoliberalism, they find it difficult to imagine that countries and economies could possibly be run successfully according to principles not sanctioned by their Treasury advisors.

The other party leaders may snigger at Peters now, but when the unemployment rate is climbing steadily towards 15 percent, and a third of New Zealand’s small businesses have shut down, there will be much less to snigger at. When Neoliberalism’s failure can no longer be hidden – even from those politicians who have grown up knowing nothing else – the man who has lived long enough to know that his alternative economic model works will be the man to know. And, when all the votes have been counted, he will still be the man who decides which of all those young leaders, born in the 1970s and 80s, becomes New Zealand’s next prime minister.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 1 May 2020.

If The Answer Is "Treasury", Then Ask Another Question!

Ground Zero: It was the Treasury which planned, and in large measure led, the neoliberal revolution in New Zealand. In 1984, its official “briefing paper” to the incoming Labour Government – presented in book form and entitled Economic Management – became the Finance Minister’s, Roger Douglas’s, “Little Beige Book”. Step-by-step it led the new government down the most radical path of deregulation, privatisation and marketisation yet attempted in a western democracy. 

JACINDA ARDERN had the Director-General of Health, Dr Ashley Bloomfield, to stand alongside her in the Beehive Theatrette. Who should Grant Robertson stand alongside? The Finance Minister tells us he is talking with Treasury’s top people. Together, he assures us, they are charting a course out of the unfolding Covid-19 Recession. In effect, Robertson is inviting us to trust Treasury. If economics were a real science, like microbiology, then trusting Treasury would be a reasonable option. But economics isn’t a science. In fact, it’s not even close.

Treasury could send out it’s top person, Chief Executive and Secretary Caralee McLiesh, to stand alongside the Finance Minister, but unless she possesses presentation skills so far undisplayed in her short career at the top of New Zealand’s most powerful government department, it just wouldn’t be the same.

That’s because it was the Treasury which planned, and in large measure led, the neoliberal revolution in New Zealand. In 1984, its official “briefing paper” to the incoming Labour Government – presented in book form and entitled “Economic Management” – became the Finance Minister’s, Roger Douglas’s, “Little Beige Book”. Step-by-step it led the new government down the most radical path of deregulation, privatisation and marketisation yet attempted in a western democracy. Three years later, a second volume, ominously entitled “Government Management”, instructed Labour and National in how to finish the job.

Nothing released by the NZ Treasury in the last 36 years has indicated that it has deviated in any significant way from the ideological position it staked-out so boldly in the early 1980s. That no government elected in the last 36 years has felt confident enough to defy Treasury advice (at least, not in any meaningful way) merely confirms how enduring its ideological and organisational victories have been.

If the Finance Minister invites Ms McLiesh to stand at the other podium on the Beehive Theatrette stage it will tell us at least two things: 1) That the co-ordinates to economic recovery have been set using a neoliberal compass. 2) That the Finance Minister is happy to steer by Treasury’s stars.

New Zealanders are confident that the advice of their Director-General of Health, grounded solidly in medical science, is sound. We can trust Ashley. But, unless there’s been another revolution in the upper echelons of Treasury, its advice will continue to be grounded in the demonstrably unsound neoliberal ideology. That being the case, Caralee can be trusted to prescribe exactly the same medicine New Zealanders have been forced to swallow since 1984. Moreover, if Grant is standing there alongside her in the Beehive theatrette, nodding sombrely as she speaks, then he can be trusted absolutely to administer it.

It is only fair to acknowledge at this point that the Finance Minister isn’t exactly spoiled for choice when it comes to alternative ways out of the economic disaster inflicted upon us by the Covid-19 virus. So crushing were Treasury’s victories of the 1980s and 90s that until very recently the opponents of neoliberalism have lacked the intellectual confidence to advance anything approaching a credible alternative to the economic status quo.

Where, we may ask, is the comprehensive recovery plan submitted to the Finance Minister by the Council of Trade Unions? Where is the progressive equivalent of the plethora of books penned by the disciples of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek in the 1970s and 80s? If the French economist/historian Thomas Piketty is supposed to be the twenty-first century’s answer to that great prophet of managed capitalism, John Maynard Keynes, then the Left has been sold a very soggy croissant.

Once again, being fair to Grant Robertson, it was Labour’s “Future of Work” exercise – over which he presided in the run-up to the 2017 General Election – that equipped the Finance Minister with such heterodox ideas as he has been willing to draw on in responding to the Covid-19 Crisis.

Rather than attempt to replicate the Prime-Minister’s highly effective daily briefings with Dr Bloomfield, perhaps it would be wiser for the Finance Minister to draw upon his Future of Work’s consultative precedent. Would it not constitute an “essential service” to New Zealand’s economic wellbeing to convene (with appropriate social-distancing) a conference embracing all the significant sectors of our society: bosses, workers, farmers, bankers, bureaucrats, professors, students, artists, beneficiaries, priests and non-profiteers; to collectively chart an equitable course to national recovery?

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 1 May 2020.