“A Giant Beast Called The Government”

Leviathan: “The Labour Party is not the government. The government is the government. I don’t go and try to lobby the Labour Party. The party does have its democratic structures and its policy platforms and manifesto and that is something that the government — the Labour government, the Labour Party-in-government — the government tries to advance. But ultimately there is a giant beast called the government and it’s the public service, it’s MPs, ministers, ministers from various parties.” - Neale Jones, Lobbyist.

SOMETIMES the mask of politics-as-it-is-officially-presented slips and the true face of the political class is revealed. A particularly serious slippage occurred quite recently in a Spinoff feature about “partisan lobbyists”. Neale Jones, a senior backroom operative in the dreary days of Andrew Little’s leadership of the Labour Party, but now the go-to lobbyist for people and businesses in need of some face-time with Labour cabinet ministers (or the public servants advising them) did something no member of the political class should ever do – he told us exactly what it thinks of our democracy.

It is a fundamental mistake, he told the feature’s author, Asher Emanuel, to assume that the Labour Party has anything to do with the day-to-day decision-making of cabinet ministers and public servants. Never mind that Labour spin-doctors rattle-on about New Zealand having a “Labour-led Government”, the actual, this-is-really-going-to-affect-you, business of government takes place in an almost entirely non-partisan environment.

“The Labour Party is not the government” says Jones. “The government is the government. I don’t go and try to lobby the Labour Party. The party does have its democratic structures and its policy platforms and manifesto and that is something that the government — the Labour government, the Labour Party-in-government — the government tries to advance. But ultimately there is a giant beast called the government and it’s the public service, it’s MPs, ministers, ministers from various parties.”

It’s the same with policy. Jones is scornful of the whole notion of public policy being, at its core, a democratic process.

“A Labour Party member sitting in a dusty hall in Temuka is not writing the government’s policy”, Jones says. “Eventually there’s an impact. But you’re not dealing with that person in the democratic process. You’re dealing with the government.”

At least Jones was decent enough to throw that “eventually there’s an impact” life-line to all those benighted souls raised on the notion that ordinary citizens, sitting in dusty halls, might be able to change the way their society is run. Although, he makes it pretty darn clear that those party members will find it very hard to recognise their ideas in what finally emerges from the “giant beast called the government”.

As Emanuel observes, there is no way of escaping the need for expertise when it comes to influencing the formation of public policy. An organisation wanting to change things, says Jones, is unlikely to succeed without “a decent communications and government relations capacity.”

And, as Emanuel quips: “it helps to be of the political world.”

“If you’re not in that world,” says Jones, “you don’t know, necessarily, how to engage with legislation and regulation. You don’t know who the people are, you don’t know them personally. You don’t know what makes them tick.”

In other words: “Ordinary citizens wishing to change the world should not attempt to do so without a $200-per-hour guide. Citizens requiring guides should proceed to the nearest lobby.”

Emanuel is gloomily philosophical about the world Jones inhabits.

“A certain kind of realism insists that this is simply the shape modern democracy must take. From this vantage, these trends are an inevitability, principle must yield to practicability, and moral conviction is mere aesthetics.”

Jones, of course, agrees: “I got into politics for economic justice issues and I believe in social justice. But also, I’m a pragmatist and a realist and I focus on how to get things done. The measure of what we do is what we get done, or what we achieve.”

These, then, are the opinions of what passes for a “progressive” member of the political class.

But is Jones right? Do pragmatism and realism require the quest for economic and social justice to remain seated in the waiting-room of history until the political class – those professional servants of the “great beast called government” – are ready to receive them?

The history of social and economic change in New Zealand strongly suggests that Jones is very far from being right.

New Zealand’s social welfare system which, in its essentials, came into existence on 1 April 1939, wasn’t written in a dusty hall in Temuka. It was, however, written 80 miles down the road, in the tiny rural settlement of Kurow.

Its authors were Gervan Macmillan, the local GP; Arnold Nordmeyer, the local Presbyterian minister; and Andrew Davidson, the local schoolteacher. On the doctor’s dining-room table, these three – whose jobs had brought them face-to-face with the worst privations of the Great Depression – mapped out the contours of a system which would, eventually, take care of their fellow citizens “from the cradle to the grave”.

Nordmeyer and Macmillan took the plan to the 1934 Labour Party Conference, where it was enthusiastically endorsed and included in the party’s 1935 manifesto. By 1938 it was the law of the land.

Not bad for three ordinary citizens, gathered around a dining-room table in Kurow, North Otago.

And not a lobbyist in sight.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 2 March 2018.

Transparently Opaque: What, exactly, is the “this” Jacinda is inviting us to do?

Let's Do What, Jacinda? You are only too aware, Jacinda, of what needs to be done to heal the harms inflicted on New Zealanders these past nine years. You also know they cannot be healed on the cheap. Strict adherence to the Labour/Green “Budget Responsibility Rules” will force your government to break its promises – to break your promises.

 

IT’S NOT TOO LATE, JACINDA. Not yet. But it soon will be. If you keep following the economic and fiscal track you’re on, then the campaign that started with such promise will end in some sort of tawdry compromise with an already discredited status-quo. Or, even worse, in yet another electoral failure. If you begin your career as Labour’s leader by deferring to the Powers That Be, then you will spend the rest of your political life living in fear of them.

 

“Let’s do this”, your own brilliant slogan, works because it communicates fierce personal determination and raw political urgency in equal measure. But, the person who says “let’s do this” doesn’t immediately add “but only if my colleagues concur”, or, “providing the business community doesn’t object”. The power of the slogan lies in the reassurance it offers that Jacinda Ardern knows what needs to be done – and is not about to let anyone stop her from doing it. Labour has already endured four equivocal leaders, it absolutely does not need a fifth.

 

But that is what you have begun to do, Jacinda: equivocate. On the subject of taxation, in particular, there is a growing sense that you’re not being straight with the electorate.

 

You could have looked your fellow New Zealanders squarely in the eye and asked them to tell you, honestly, whether they believe that enough has been spent on housing the homeless, improving mental health care, upgrading our hospitals and schools, expanding public transport and cleaning up the environment. And, when they said “No”, you could have asked them if they were willing to pay just a little bit more in tax to make good New Zealand’s shocking social deficit. And, when they said “Yes”, you could have nodded decisively and said: “Right. Good. Let’s do this!”

 

Instead, you have waffled-on about handing over the re-design of New Zealand’s taxation system to a “working group” of “experts”. Telling your inquisitors at the NZ Herald that you were being forthrightly “transparent” about being frustratingly opaque – as if that was a good thing!

 

One of those inquisitors, the business journalist Fran O’Sullivan, was speaking no more than the truth when she told “Morning Report” listeners that a party which has been in Opposition for nine years has had more than enough time to sort out exactly what they want to do and how they intend to pay for it. Because, if the people we pay $170,000 per annum to sit in the House of Representatives aren’t “experts”, then who the hell are? A bunch of bank economists and corporate tax accountants? Are you seriously going to ask people like this to design your Labour government an equitable system of progressive taxation? Really, Jacinda? Really!

 

A week or so ago I urged you to reach back into Labour’s past for inspiration about how to pay for your promise to build enough houses to accommodate all those New Zealanders in need of a place to call their own. This week I’m recommending you take a look at the “working group” of “experts” who designed Labour’s social welfare reform “package” back in the 1930s. The artist and author, Bob Kerr, called them “The Three Wise Men of Kurow”.

 

Arnold Nordmeyer, Andrew Davidson and Gervan McMillan rough-out New Zealand's future social welfare system around McMillan's dining-room table. Watercolour by Bob Kerr

 

Kurow is a tiny town in North Otago situated above the Waitaki River. In the grim years of the Great Depression it was a place of considerable privation and distress. Determined to relieve that distress were the local doctor, Gervan McMillan; the local Presbyterian minister, Arnold Nordmeyer; and the local schoolmaster, Andrew Davidson. Between them, these men devised a scheme to take care of the workers on the nearby hydro-electric project and their families. Working around McMillan’s dining-room table they went on to rough-out a way of scaling-up their highly successful local effort into a nationwide welfare scheme. McMillan and Nordmeyer, who were Labour members, presented their ideas to the Party’s 1934 Annual Conference – which seized upon their plan with eager hands. Four years later, the First Labour Government passed the Social Security Act.

 

Nobody paid these men for their nights around Gervan McMillan’s dining-room table. No one supplied them with detailed Terms of Reference. No public relations firm was engaged to “sell” their ideas to the voters. “Let’s do this!”, said the three wise men of Kurow, for no better reason than “this” needed to be done – and Labour was willing to do it.

 

You are only too aware, Jacinda, of what needs to be done to heal the harms inflicted on New Zealanders these past nine years. You also know they cannot be healed on the cheap. Strict adherence to the Labour/Green “Budget Responsibility Rules” will force your government to break its promises – to break your promises.

 

The increased public spending New Zealand so urgently needs can only be funded in two ways. Either it is paid for out of an expanded revenue base, or, out of an increased deficit. Unfortunately, Jacinda, you appear to be ruling out the former, and the Budget Responsibility Rules are ruling out the latter.

 

So, Jacinda, when you say “Let’s do this”, what, exactly, do you mean? Don’t you think it’s time for you to be completely transparent about what “this” is – and to whom it is done?

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Saturday, 26 August 2017.