Making A Difference.

The Jacinda and Ashley Show: Before the neoliberals could come up with a plausible reason for letting thousands of their fellow citizens perish, the Ardern-led government, backed by the almost forgotten power of an unapologetically interventionist state, was producing changes in the real world – changes that were, very obviously, saving the lives of real New Zealanders.

“ROGERNOMICS” didn’t just transform New Zealand’s economy and society, it profoundly changed its politicians. Members of the “political class” of 2024 display radically different beliefs from the individuals who governed New Zealand prior to 1984. The most alarming of these post-1984 beliefs dismisses Members of Parliament and local government politicians as singularly ill-qualified to determine the fate of the nations they have been elected to lead.

This paradox is readily explained when the core convictions driving the political class are exposed. The most important of these is that ordinary voters have absolutely no idea how, or by whom, their country is governed. The ordinary voter’s conviction that “the people” rule – as opposed to the “loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires” whose worldwide corporate interests are protected by globally organised media and public relations companies – is offered as proof of their all-round imbecility. Politicians might just as well be guided by baboons as by the ordinary voter!

This contemptuous view of the people who elect politicians to public office is, naturally, kept well-hidden from the electorate. Indeed, these disdainful “representatives” are forever celebrating in public what they denounce privately as dangerous, “the principles of democratic government”. Why? Because the alternative to perpetuating the myth that the people (demos) rule (kratos) – i.e. by making it clear to them that they don’t – is much, much worse.

Ruling a country by force, rather than by consent, not only turns most of the population into the rulers’ enemies, but also leaves the political class acutely vulnerable to the institutions responsible for perpetrating the violence that keeps it in power. All too often these “men with guns” decide to cut out the political middlemen and rule directly. Historically-speaking, this is the royal-road to graft, corruption, extortion, and, ultimately, to the formation of a brutal kleptocracy. NOT a situation conducive to either making, or keeping, one’s profits!

That feudalism, and the absolute monarchies that grew out of it, were, in essence, arrangements predicated on the maintenance of well-organised bodies of armed and violent men might, given contemporary capitalism’s distaste for such regimes, be considered ironic. Living under the sway of these “gentlemen”, and being required to pay their protection money the swingeing taxes they imposed, did not make for a happy life – or, at least, not for the 95 percent of the population – including the merchant class – forbidden from owning swords!

The popularity of democracy, as a system designed to reduce sharply the power of bullies and extortionists, tends to be greater the nearer in time its beneficiaries are to the oppressive political regimes from which “people-power” liberated them. Even as capitalism began to hit its stride in the nineteenth century, such democratic (or quasi-democratic) legislatures as existed (and there weren’t many) proved remarkably reluctant to bow before the doctrine of laissez-faire. (French for “let the capitalists do what they like’.) The Victorians who founded New Zealand, and wrote its Constitution Act, were impressively unconvinced that a man with a plan (women were yet to be included in their discussions) could not improve the lives of his fellow citizens by persuading them to elect him to Parliament.

This conviction that politicians could make a positive difference to the lives of ordinary people took root more tenaciously in New Zealand than just about any other country on the face of the earth. The radical reforms of the Liberal government (1890-1912) and the first Labour government (1935-1949) earned New Zealand the title “social laboratory of the world”. Politicians who were similarly determined to make a difference came from Europe and America to observe first-hand New Zealand’s own special brand of “socialism without doctrines”.

The people who rendered making a difference unsafe were, of course, the socialists with doctrines. The unfortunate Russians and Chinese would pass from feudalism to communism without any extended period of democratic government in between. From noblemen with swords, they passed into the hands of commissars with pistols. The taxes were just as swingeing, but at least Communism’s bullies and extortionists contrived to paint Paradise in colours more exciting than white.

Lest their workers decide to paint their own countries red, Western capitalists were persuaded, very reluctantly, to let them be painted pink. The problem with social-democracy, however, was that if you conceded it an inch, it would, albeit incrementally, take you many miles down “the road to serfdom”. Such was the grim thesis of the Austrian, arch-capitalist economist, Friedrich von Hayek, founder of the Switzerland-based free-market think tank, the Mont Pelerin Society, and spiritual father of neoliberal political economy.

Labour’s Roger Douglas was a member of the aforesaid Mont Pelerin Society, as was National’s Ruth Richardson, along with quite a number of the bureaucrats and businessmen who first set New Zealand on the road to neoliberalism. At the heart of their project was a very simple imperative: Don’t let politicians near anything even remotely important. Leave all the important decisions to the market, or, at least, to those who own and control the market.

Those who struggle to understand why neoliberals are constantly presenting mild-mannered social-democrats as fire-breathing communists should view their behaviour as pre-emptive ideological law enforcement – pre-crime-fighting. Politicians determined to “make a positive difference” may begin by building state-houses, the neoliberals argue, but they always end up creating gulags. Better by far to create a society in which “making a positive difference” is restricted to capitalist entrepreneurs. Don’t let the political do-gooders get started.

Clearly, no one sent the memo to Jacinda Ardern. Or, if they did, she profoundly misunderstood it. Making a positive difference was what New Zealand’s young prime minister all-too-evidently believed the Labour Party had been established to enable. But, when she said “Let’s do this!”, all those around her, either gently, or not-so-gently, said “You can’t do that!”

It may have looked as though there were levers to pull to set up a light-rail network, build 100,000 affordable houses, end child poverty, and combat global warming, but they weren’t attached to anything. “Jacinda” could pull on them all she wanted, put on a good show, but the cables linking politicians’ promises to real-world outcomes had all been cut decades earlier. She didn’t appear to understand that disempowering politicians was what Rogernomics had been all about.

But, as is so often the case in history, the story was changed by something its author’s had failed to imagine, or anticipate. The onset of a global pandemic made it absolutely necessary that the lever labelled “Keeping New Zealanders Safe” was at the end of a cable that was very firmly attached to the real world, and that the person pulling the lever was empathically qualified to make a real and positive difference.

Before the neoliberals could come up with a plausible reason for letting thousands of their fellow citizens perish, the Ardern-led government, backed by the almost forgotten power of an unapologetically interventionist state, was producing changes in the real world – changes that were, very obviously, saving the lives of real New Zealanders.

It couldn’t last. Neoliberalism, like rust, never sleeps, and in less than a year the lever Ardern and her colleagues had pulled on with such energy had been quietly reconnected to less effective – but more divisive – parts of the state machine. But, not before “Jacinda” and her party had done the impossible. Not before Labour had won 50.01 percent of the Party Vote in the 2020 General Election.

There’s a lesson in there somewhere. Maybe, just maybe, politicians, acting in the interests of the people who elected them, aren’t always ill-qualified to lead? Maybe, just maybe, it is still possible for men and women of good will to make a positive difference?

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack on Tuesday, 20 August 2024.

Unsubscribing From Freedom.

Conscience And Critic Be Damned! It has become increasingly clear to the Free Speech Union, along with many other advocates of freedom of expression, that the place where academic freedom is most at risk is, paradoxically, academia itself.

ACADEMIC FREEDOM is one of those “public goods” that most people seldom question. Even in New Zealand, a country not especially hospitable to intellectuals of any sort, academics are seldom identified as persons in need of official restraint. New Zealanders prefer to joke about the otherworldliness and impracticality of academic research – especially in the social sciences and liberal arts. That is to say, they used to joke about it. Over the last few years academics have given ordinary New Zealanders small cause for laughter.

Indeed, it has become increasingly clear to the Free Speech Union, along with many other advocates of freedom of expression, that the place where academic freedom is most at risk is, paradoxically, academia itself.

The banning of Don Brash from the Palmerston North campus of Massey University – by no lesser person than the Vice-Chancellor herself – was one of the most dramatic early examples. There have been many others. Not the least of these was the initial failure of the University of Auckland to defend the seven members of its own academic staff who dared to declare, on the pages of The NZ Listener, that Mātaurānga Māori was not Science.

While paying lip-service to the principle of academic freedom, New Zealand’s university authorities have begun to hedge it around with all manner of restrictions. The pursuit of research subjects and/or the articulation of ideas capable of inflicting “harm” on other staff and students has become decidedly “career-limiting”.

To discover exactly how pervasive this revisionist approach to academic freedom has become, and to identify how many academics still uphold freedom of expression, the Free Speech Union commissioned Curia Research to survey a representative cross section of the New Zealand academic community. That survey is ongoing, but one of the responses received was so startling that the FSU posted it on its website.

This is what it said:

Tēnā koe,

Please remove me from your e-mail list.

Freedom is an archaic feudal principal (sic) employed by colonial capitalism to advance the upward mobility of the few and maintain the status quo, and I do not subscribe to it.

It is important to bear in mind that the person who wrote this is a member of the academic staff of a New Zealand university. Someone bound by the terms of their employment to uphold the highest standards of scholarship. Someone who is almost certainly lecturing to and/or tutoring young New Zealanders. Someone who, by their own admission, does not subscribe to the principle of freedom.

Disturbing.

Let us begin by unpacking the anonymous respondent’s declaration.

The first observation to make is that the his/her understanding of both European and New Zealand history is entirely untethered from reality. To begin with, feudalism was not based upon the idea of freedom, but of reciprocity.

In the fiercely hierarchical societies of the medieval period even those at the summit of the social pyramid owed a duty of care and protection to those whose status was inferior to their own. Those at the bottom, far from being free, were legally tied to their lord’s land. Male dependents of the lord were also expected to fight for him when required to do so.

What the serfs (as these dependents were called) received in return was access to the sustenance that the lord’s land provided, as well as military and legal protection against those seeking to harm them. In certain rare circumstances a serf might be released from his obligations, thereby becoming a “freed” man. With nobody now obligated to care for him, however, such a person faced a difficult future. Unless he was especially gifted, a freed man would hasten to “bind” himself to another lord or master.

Clearly, feudalism and freedom are not concepts one usually finds grouped together – quite the reverse in fact. What about “colonial capitalism”? Is it legitimate to associate the capitalist economic system with feudalism and freedom?

Not really.

Historically speaking, capitalism is the economic system that dissolved feudalism, along with the aristocratic political system it sustained. Rather than a society founded upon hierarchy and mutual obligation, capitalism gave rise to a society based upon the freedom of the individual to enter into contracts with other individuals – for money. If you were inventive, clever, or just plain lucky, these contracts could make you rich. If you had nothing to offer but your unskilled labour, then the contracts entered into generally offered little more than the barest subsistence.

In the context of New Zealand’s colonisation, however, a persistent shortage of skilled – and unskilled – labour offered working-class colonists a considerably better existence than the one they were escaping on the immigrant ships. At least initially, it wasn’t freedom that underpinned the growth of the colony, but the prospect of a more prosperous and open-ended life – which emigration to New Zealand promised.

New Zealanders’ interest in political freedom grew out of the failure of the colony’s rulers to ensure that opportunity and prosperity remained a realistic prospect for the ordinary colonist. A large part of that failure was attributable to the difficulty encountered by the colonial authorities in acquiring sufficient land from the Māori to keep the New Zealand enterprise going.

It was precisely the freedom to contract, or not to contract, with the Crown in respect to the sale of land – a freedom guaranteed by the Treaty of Waitangi – and exercised vigorously (to the consternation and rising fury of the settler government) by the Kingitanga and its allies, that caused the British Crown to make war upon the Māori.

If anyone was defending freedom in 1860s New Zealand it was the tangata whenua.

In making war upon the Māori, the colonial capitalists and their servants in the colonial legislature were not defending the status quo, they were tearing it – and the Treaty of Waitangi – to pieces. Their legal justification for seizing Māori land had nothing to do with the laws of capitalist enterprise, but to archaic English laws pertaining to rebellion against the Crown. Feudal laws.

What’s more, the seizure of Māori land did not advance the upward mobility of wealthy capitalists alone. Thousands of Pakeha colonists benefitted from the parcelling-out of the territories seized, mostly in the form of leased small-holdings – later translated into freehold farms. It was the Pakeha many who prospered, and the Māori few who were dispossessed.

It is hard to see how this great wrong can ever be righted in an Aotearoa-New Zealand where freedom has no subscribers among the tangata whenua. Harder still to see such a rectification being accomplished where the research and intellectual labour needed to convince a majority of New Zealanders that change is necessary is not rigorously monitored, or the fierce debates it sparks given the freest rein. Academic freedom must amount to more than protecting ignorance and sanctioning disinformation.

The simple truth of the matter is that freedom is always and everywhere indivisible. Suppress it in our universities and its suppression elsewhere will soon follow. Those who do not subscribe to freedom have no place in our halls of learning – or anywhere else enlightened human values are cherished.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 25 March 2022.

What Game Of Thrones Can Teach Us About Magna Carta

Under Duress: In the end, John Plantagenet had nothing but bad options to choose from. Cornered by his barons at Runnymede, about 20 miles west of London, and chivvied by Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury, King John affixed his seal to the charter which, its high-flown promises about freedom, justice and the rule of law notwithstanding, was drawn up to ensure that government of the barons, by the barons, for the barons, would endure.

 

“FOR THE WATCH!” With that grim cry, the conspirators of Castle Black struck down their Lord Commander. How fitting that the assassination of the fictional Jon Snow should coincide with the 800th anniversary of a legal document sealed at Runnymede on 15 June 1215. Why fitting? Because the breath-taking brutality and treachery of Game of Thrones offers us a much truer guide to the political realities underpinning Magna Carta (as that legal document is now known) than the pious platitudes offered up by its latter-day celebrants.

 

The power of Game of Thrones, and the likely explanation for its worldwide popularity, is its clear-eyed refusal to pretend that good character and effective policy are somehow inextricable. The very real John Plantagenet, like the fictional Jon Snow, was a man confronted with a multitude of poor options – none of which were likely to significantly improve his position.

 

George R.R. Martin, the author of Game of Thrones, presents Jon Snow to his readers as a man of honour and courage who, in spite (or is it because) of these qualities, is required to make his choices from a set of dwindling military and political options – each one carrying a higher risk of death, either in battle or by assassination. With every decision Jon Snow makes, his personal circumstances grow more perilous, until, eventually, nothing remains to him but fatal choices.

 

Very few historians (if any) would attempt to present John Plantagenet as an honourable man. The historical cliché of “Bad King John” (so unlike his “good” brother, the chivalrous King Richard the Lionheart) does possess a reasonably solid foundation in historical fact. With brutality to match the very worst scenes in Game of Thrones, John ordered the deaths of the young Welsh noblemen sent to his court as hostages to their fathers’ good behaviour. And, to prevent her spreading rumours (which were, almost certainly, true) that he had personally murdered his own nephew, Arthur, John ordered Maud de Braose, along with her eldest son, to be shut up in the dungeon of Corfe Castle and starved to death.

 

John Plantagenet was, clearly, no Jon Snow when it came to matters of good character. He did, however, have much in common with the fictional hero when it came to poor political options. The vast Angevin Empire, which John inherited from his father, King Henry II, and his formidable mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine (Cersei eat your heart out!) was under constant pressure from barons loyal to the French king. To hold onto his family’s territories across the English Channel, men and money were urgently required – and they did not come cheap.

 

If John had refused to defend his inheritance, he would have been in all kinds of trouble. (His enemies already called him John “Lackland”, or, even worse, “Softsword”!) But, in raising the resources required to defend the empire, he was bound to displease his feudal support-base, the barons. Indeed, it was John’s success as an administrator – and tax collector – that incited his barons (especially those who owed him lots of money) to rebel.

 

And these barons were very far from being the lordly defenders of the rights of freeborn Englishmen that the celebrants of Magna Carta like to paint them. On their own lands they wielded the same sort of brutal authority as the murderous Bolton family displays in Game of Thrones. One could even argue that it was the royal encroachments on baronial power represented by John’s administrative innovations (he invented to post of Coroner, the “Crown’s Man”) that made his rebellious barons so determined to roll back their King’s expanding authority.

 

Good man or bad man, John Plantagenet, like Jon Snow, was ultimately left with nothing but bad options to choose from. Cornered by his barons and their “bannermen” at Runnymede, about 20 miles west of London, and chivvied by Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury, King John affixed his seal to the charter which, its high-flown promises about freedom, justice and the rule of law notwithstanding, was drawn up to ensure that government of the barons, by the barons, for the barons, would endure.

 

Jon Snow over-ruled his enemies in the Night’s Watch – and paid the price. John Plantagenet bowed to his barons’ assembled swords – and survived. Three months later, at John’s insistence, their long-winded charter was annulled by the Pope.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 19 Junes 2015.

Executive Obligations

The service of their swords: For your average medieval knight the essence of the feudal deal was pretty simple: the land was yours, but only for as long as you were willing and able to protect it - along with all those who lived on it and off it. It's taken far too long, but finally our National Party lordlings have realised that if they cannot defend New Zealand's farmland their political tenure will soon be forfeit.

THERE WAS A TIME when the ruling elites had to put their money where their mouths were. More to the point, if they wanted to go on ruling (let alone remain one of the elite) they had to put their lives where their money was.

Back in the Middle Ages, if you weren’t willing to defend your own and your dependents’ lands, then in the eyes of your fellow aristocrats, your men-at-arms, your tenants and most especially your serfs, you weren’t fit to hold them.

That’s because the protection of land – the resource upon which everyone ultimately depends for survival – was the very essence of the feudal system. The serfs, who made up most of the population and supplied all the food, owed many kinds of services to their lord. But their lord, by the same feudal token, also owed services to them.

This reciprocity had a name: noblesse oblige. The obligations of nobility.

And the most important of these was the obligation to defend the demesne: the lands apportioned to lords by their master – the King. Above and beyond all other services, a feudal aristocrat owed his liege-lord (from whom he received the property and people entrusted to his care) the service of his sword.

Even today, defending the source of the people’s wealth and welfare is the sine qua non of executive responsibility. A lord who refuses to defend his demesne is traitor to both his King and his people.

How pleasing, then, that our own "feudal lords" – John Key and Bill English – have finally rendered us the service of their regulatory swords. What remains of this country’s productive farmland: the demesne apportioned to them by their liege-lord and sovereign – the New Zealand people – will not, now, be permitted to fall into foreign hands.

Not that we serfs should forget how much urging it took to recall these lordlings to the obligations of their democratic ennoblement. Nor should we overlook the startling fact that under the stewardship of those wearing Labour’s livery the Overseas Investment Office permitted foreigners to purchase an astonishing 650,000 hectares of the people’s demesne.

The Wearers of Red, who today criticise the Wearers of Blue for their tardiness in addressing the problem of strategic resource alienation, had nine years to redraft the legislation governing the scale and scope of foreign investment in New Zealand – and did little more than tinker around the edges.

But perhaps we shouldn’t be too hasty in condemning our political masters. Considering the multitude of evil counsellors whispering in their ears, it’s surprising we have any land left at all.

What advice do you suppose the foreign moneylenders are offering them? What demands are being made by our desperately indebted farmers? How many of them can afford to refuse the foreigners’ proffered gold?

And what about the mad monks of Treasury – and their even more ascetic brothers in the Business Roundtable? Having compelled us all to wear the hair-shirt of deregulation and the flesh-biting cilice of free trade, they are still urging our leaders to surrender what’s left of New Zealand’s patrimony to the Holy Church of Globalisation.

That the Prime Minister and his Minister of Finance refused to be swayed by such evil counsels is cause for celebration. But, while we are praising our lords for the service of their democratic swords, let us also offer up a word or two of thanks to the Crafar family.

Had their debt-laden farms not come so close to passing forever into foreign hands, it is very doubtful whether we inattentive serfs or our indifferent lords would ever have become sufficiently roused to rise in defence of our beleaguered demesne.

Having lifted not one finger to save the 650,000 hectares that disappeared into foreign ownership over the past decade, the pledge of every citizen, and every political party must now be: New Zealand for New Zealanders!

Whoever seeks to purchase New Zealand farmland must agree to live on it – or look elsewhere.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 1 October 2010.