By Any Other Name.

The Natural Choice: As a starter for ten percent of the Party Vote, “saving the planet” is a very respectable objective. Young voters, in particular, raised on the dire (if unheeded) warnings of climate scientists, and the irrefutable evidence of devastating weather events linked to global warming, vote Green. After all, what sort of person votes against a liveable future?

THE GREENS remain a persistent political puzzle. In spite of espousing ideas and promoting policies that would keep any other party well below the five percent MMP threshold, recent polling places the party between 12 and 14 percent. If replicated in a real election, that level of support would earn the Greens 16-18 seats, making them an indispensable player in any putative government of the Left.

Clearly, the Green brand is doing almost all of the party’s heavy political lifting. What New Zealand’s own Green Party is actually committed to achieving matters much less than what Green parties, as generally understood by the world’s voters, are assumed to be committed to achieving – the salvation of the planet.

As a starter for ten percent of the Party Vote, “saving the planet” is a very respectable objective. Young voters, in particular, raised on the dire (if unheeded) warnings of climate scientists, and the irrefutable evidence of devastating weather events linked to global warming, vote Green. After all, what sort of person votes against a liveable future?

Young voters are not, however, the Greens only source of electoral support. They can also rely upon a substantial number of older voters to tick the Greens’ box on the ballot paper. Some of these will be unreconstructed hippies, the New Zealanders who cut their political teeth on the Values Party back in the early-1970s, and who then fell into the Greens’ welcoming arms with huge relief in 1990, following six years of the apostate Labour Party’s “Rogernomics”.

No one grasped the power of the Green brand more firmly than Jim Anderton, whose uneasy coalition of free-market-unfriendly parties, the Alliance, would not have been electorally viable without the Greens’ participation, and did not long survive their departure. As a centre-left politician determined to bring Labour back to its social-democratic senses, Anderton was determined to provide the many thousands of disillusioned former-Labour-voters with a progressive alternative that was guaranteed to win seats and, thereby, to wield at least some measure of determinative power over policy.

The Alliance’s demise, in 2002, left only the Greens to supply this critical support to the Labour Party. Precisely how many Green voters were voting for the global Green movement’s core principles: Ecological Wisdom, Social Justice, Grassroots Democracy and Nonviolence; and how many were voting for the Greens to keep Labour honest; is difficult to calculate. Suffice to say, when Labour does well the Green vote tends to fall, only recovering when voter support for its progressive competitor declines.

Since breaking free of the Alliance in 1999 the Greens have never failed to crest the 5 percent MMP threshold. (Although, they have come perilously close to falling below it on a number of occasions.) A reasonable working assumption would be that; in a good election for the Greens the ratio of strategic left-wing voters to ideologically-committed Greens will be roughly 50/50; and, in a bad election, that ratio will skew sharply in favour of the true-believers.

What the Greens’ true-believers believe, however, has changed.

Like the Values Party which preceded it, the Green Party that entered Parliament in 1999, under the co-leadership of Jeanette Fitzsimons and Rod Donald, took pride in affirming its allegiance to empirical science. In conformity with the political practice of Green parties around the world, the New Zealand party drew a sharp distinction between the bought-and-paid-for “science” of the big corporations, and the findings of hero scientists who presented their findings to the world fearlessly and without regard to how many corporate toes were trampled on in the process.

This science-driven Green Party reached its apogee under Rod Donald’s successor, Russel Norman – now the Executive-Director of Greenpeace Aotearoa. Working alongside freshwater ecologist Dr Mike Joy – the very epitome of a fearless hero-scientist – Norman and the Greens waged an unrelenting war against “dirty dairying” and the pollution of New Zealand’s waterways.

The success of this environmentally-focused Green Party was reflected in the 11.06 percent share of the Party Vote it received, along with 14 parliamentary seats, in the 2011 General Election. (In the 2023 General Election the Greens received 11.60 percent of the Party Vote and 15 seats.)

More than a decade has passed since the Greens campaigned as an unequivocally environmentalist party. Along with virtually every other element of the New Zealand Left, the Greens have embraced what their conservative opponents delight in castigating as the politics of “wokeness”.

In less pejorative terms, the Greens’ re-orientation involves the forefronting of issues that, while always present in the party’s policy mix, were hitherto given less emphasis. The Greens’ straightforward recognition and celebration of te Tiriti o Waitangi, for example, is now couched in the uncompromising vocabulary of decolonisation and indigenisation. Simple support for trans-gender New Zealanders has morphed into the aggressive assertion and enforcement of radical trans-gender ideology. Any external and/or internal criticism of these developments is condemned by the party as “hate speech”. Freedom of expression is no longer an unchallengeable aspect of “grassroots democracy”, or, as the New Zealand Greens have re-named it, “appropriate decision-making”.

A sense of this change of tone in the Greens is readily apparent in the most recent Green Party policy document. Ostensibly a presentation of the party’s latest thinking on how best to reduce greenhouse emissions, He Ara Anamata, contains a great deal more than the promptings of environmental science.

“For generations,” writes Green Co-leader Chloe Swarbrick in her introduction, “extractive systems have treated the natural world as a resource to exploit, without regard for its limits or the intricate relationships that sustain life.”

Similar sentiments were expressed 25 years ago. It is, however, doubtful whether Swarbrick’s subsidiary claims would have been advanced so forcefully:

“Colonisation has done the same to people and cultures. It has severed connections between tangata whenua and their whenua, prioritising profit over protection, and imposing systems that strip away self-determination and reciprocity. The impacts of this legacy persist, deepening inequalities and undermining resilience.”

Certainly, the expression of unabashed hostility towards capitalism is a more recent rhetorical trend:

“These inequalities have their deep roots in violent land and resource theft of iwi Māori. Capitalism – this current insatiable, unsustainable economic system – requires colonisation and the constant assimilation of new frontiers to exploit and extract from.”

That the above is not simply the ideology of the Greens’ firebrand leader is made clear in the body of the policy document. Te Tiriti’s role in reducing greenhouse emissions will, if the Greens have their way, involve: “An equitable transition, developed by Māori and the Crown [which] will actively prioritise te iwi Māori and the Māori economy.”

Would any other political party (apart from Te Pāti Māori) that so openly attacked capitalism, promised to advance the interests of indigenous citizens ahead of later arrivals, and announced its intention to advance the entire population, whether it likes it or not, towards “[a]n economy based on climate justice [with] policies that are underpinned by Te Tiriti, [and supported by] circular systems, renewable energies, and just transitions for workers” be given such a free pass?

Another expression which encompasses the notion of “circular systems” is “autarky”. That history records a strong association between authoritarian regimes and autarky is probably worth remembering. So, too, the enormous difference between “just transitions” arranged for workers, and the securing of economic and social justice by workers.

But that’s the great advantage of having a brand as immune to critical examination as that of the Greens. Try calling anti-capitalism, ethno-nationalism, statist imposition of societal priorities, and a barely disguised disdain for the principles of democracy, by any other name – and see if it smells as sweet.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 9 December 2024.

The Left’s Joyous Cherub: Keith Locke, 1944 - 2024.

The Struggle Continues: Keith Locke belonged to a generation that still believed in a world that could be, through struggle, relieved of its chains. That struggle constituted the core of a life lived with purpose, courage and determination. 

MANY NEW ZEALANDERS would, no doubt, have been surprised to discover that Keith Locke was 80 years old. There was always something of the cherub about the man which generally prompted guesses well south of his actual age. That youthfulness could also be applied to his ideals, which never soured with the passing of the years. Certainly, he reached the age of 80 without losing either his heart or his head. Indeed, there was a joyous naiveté about the man who finally succumbed to the twin ravages of Parkinson’s and Cancer on Friday, 21 June 2024.

Locke was what the Americans, rather unkindly, call a “red diaper baby”. The son of confirmed socialists Jack and Elsie Locke. That being the case, Locke had only two “historical” choices: to follow in his parent’s ideological footsteps, or execute an about-face and become a fierce champion of capitalism. It no doubt came as an immense relief to Jack and Elsie that their son not only kept the left-wing faith, but became (along with his sister Maire Leadbeater) one of its leading New Zealand missionaries.

It is telling, however, that when he returned from tertiary study in Canada to take up a lectureship in sociology at Victoria University in 1970, Locke declined to devote himself to either of the orthodox communist parties then operating in New Zealand.

When Moscow and Beijing parted ideological company in the “Sino-Soviet Split” of 1962, New Zealand and Albania were the only communist parties which sided with Mao Zedong and the Communist Party of China. After much internal wrangling, Moscow’s loyalists finally broke away to form the Socialist Unity Party in 1966.

Given that the SUP had all the flair and pep of a Soviet stamp-collectors congress, and the CPNZ’s ultra-leftism made Mao’s Red Guards look like Labour Youth, Locke’s decision to throw in his lot with the Trotskyites of the Socialist Action League (SAL) is entirely understandable.

Leon Trotsky, alongside Lenin himself, was indisputably the most able of the Bolshevik revolutionaries. His upper-class background, however, proved problematic. In a party increasingly composed of hard-bitten working-class battlers, Trotsky’s ostentatious love of “bourgeois” culture raised more than a few comrades’ hackles. Anyone who read French novels during meetings of the Central Committee was asking for trouble – which duly followed him into exile, and caught up with him in Mexico City where, in 1940, he met his death at the hands of an ice-pick-wielding Soviet assassin.

Was there ever any historical figure better suited to attracting the allegiance of middle-class rebels than this cinematic combination of dazzling intellectual, ruthless revolutionary, and sensitive reader of French literature? As the crimes of Stalinism became increasingly obvious, the global appeal of Trotsky – the man who should have succeeded Lenin – grew and grew. Although most of them will be quite unaware of the fact, whenever any politician consigns their political adversaries to “the dustbin of history” they are quoting Trotsky.

Trotskyism certainly found a loyal follower in Locke who, as editor of its newspaper Socialist Action, soon became one of the SAL’s key figures. It was in this role that Locke was to provide future opponents with statements that were, to say the least, embarrassing.

His too-early celebration of the Khmer Rouge’s takeover of Cambodia was to strike him again and again, like an avenging ideological boomerang, throughout his years as a Green Party Member of Parliament. While it is true that he didn’t know about Pol Pot’s killing fields when he wrote his celebratory articles – he should have guessed.

Locke’s naiveté was again in evidence following the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which Locke hailed as a victory for the Iranian working-class and its communist cadres. History would render a very different judgement – as would the Ayatollah Khomeini and his legions of deeply conservative Shite Muslim “revolutionary guards”, who never saw a crane that could not be improved by hanging an Iranian leftist from its hook.

Locke’s sojourn in the SAL proved personally costly in other ways. Like so many of his comrades, Locke allowed himself to be buried alive in the bowels of industrial capitalism. This “turn” to the New Zealand working-class involved men and women with impressive academic credentials – Locke had an MA from the University of Alberta and and was working toward a PhD in Sociology at Toronto when he returned to become a lecturer at Victoria – taking the jobs of honest workers in the car plants and freezing works of the nation.

Perhaps this “turn” was inspired by the sneering contempt in which the “bourgeois intellectual Trots” were held by their Maoist and Muscovite competitors. Nowhere is this scorn better captured than in “Socialist Action”, an excoriating parody of Peter Cape’s satirical ditty “Taumarunui – On the Main Trunk Line”. The Maoist bard was merciless:

They run the revolution

From the student union hall.

We’re down here on the picket-line

And we don’t see them at all.

They bring around a pamphlet

Maybe once or twice a year,

Saying ‘Forget about your wage demands,

You’re better off being queer.’

What is clear is that Locke, after 15 years in the SAL, many of them devoted to assembling cars and disassembling sheep, was ready for something else. He threw himself into international causes and became the proprietor of One World Books in Auckland’s Karangahape Road. But, if he remained hopeful of revolution breaking out overseas, Locke had finally reconciled himself to the fact that the only leftists who were going anywhere politically in New Zealand were those prepared to follow the “parliamentary road”.

Locke joined Jim Anderton’s NewLabour Party in 1989 and was quickly elected to the roles of foreign affairs and defence spokesperson. He could not, however, overcome Anderton’s ingrained suspicion of any NLP member further to the left than he was. Some up-and-comers Anderton had to endure – like Laila Harre and Locke’s old SAL comrade, Matt Robson – but at Locke, himself, the Alliance leader drew the line. Anderton was not prepared to ease him into Parliament. At Number 24 on the 1996 Alliance Party List there was little chance of that.

Locke’s chance came when the Greens decided to part company with Anderton’s Alliance in 1997. Alongside the former Maoist, Sue Bradford, the former Trot, Locke, secured himself one of the top seven slots on the Green Party List. If the party crossed the magic 5 percent MMP threshold, then this former lecturer, editor, car-assembler, freezing-worker, and bookseller would do what the spooks who had contributed so generously to his bulging SIS file believed to be impossible – enter the New Zealand House of Representatives.

Locke would serve four terms as a Green MP, acquitting himself impressively as the Party’s foreign affairs spokesperson. Few New Zealanders outside the circles of the more-than-rhetorical Left have any real appreciation of how steeped its members are in the great causes of their time. To a degree that would put most Labour, National, Act and NZ First MPs to shame, Locke was able to discourse knowledgably on every one of the many international issues for which he was expected to articulate the Greens’ position.

Locke departed Parliament in 2011, the same year as Phil Goff, whom he’d first encountered as a young left-wing firebrand back in the early 1970s. In sharp contrast to Goff, Locke kept the socialist faith right through, but, that said, both men almost certainly left Parliament at the right time. Because neither of them were truly ready for the changes that were, even in 2011, transforming the New Zealand Left – including Labour and the Greens. Locke was a good communist, and a passable eco-socialist, but he was not “woke”. His retirement was shrewdly calculated.

The contemporary New Zealand Left is many things, but “joyous” isn’t one of them. Locke belonged to a generation that still believed in a world that could be, through struggle, relieved of its chains. That struggle constituted the core of a life lived with purpose, courage and determination. At times, Keith Locke could be naïve, but he was never cruel. Even as the afflictions that claimed him wore down his body, he remained a gentle left-wing cherub. Aware of the darkness in the human soul, but always walking hopefully towards the light.

This essay/obituary was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 24 June 2024.

Forward To A New Day, Or Taking The Country Backwards?

Beginning Again: Te Pāti Māori is unequivocal, the system under which 2.1 million New Zealanders earn less than $30,000 per year, must be brought down. Their slogan draws on a metaphor as old as politics itself. Out of darkness a new day must dawn. The nation must be re-made. “Aotearoa Hou.”

TE PATI MĀORI’S ELECTION SLOGAN is “Aotearoa Hou”, which, roughly translated, means “A New Day”. NZ First’s slogan is “Let’s take back our country”. This, in essence, is what the 2023 General Election will be about.

Are New Zealanders still capable of imagining a brighter future, or are they, indeed, desperate for a return to the better country they remember. Most of the other party slogans are variations on these themes. National wants to get New Zealand “back on track”, for the Greens “the time is now”, while Act is promising “real change”.

Labour’s slogan, “In it for YOU”, stands out by being determinedly agnostic about New Zealand’s future direction of travel. All the voters are being asked to do is place their trust in a clutch of politicians who are in the game solely for their benefit. (By which, presumably, they mean the voters’ benefit, not their own!)

A number of political scientists have pointed out the lack of ambition in Labour’s slogan. Traditionally, the Party has focused voters’ attention on the need for change. It has also favoured collective over personal pronouns – as it the upbeat slogan of 2017, “Let’s do this!”

Rather than linking Labour and the people in a combined effort for national improvement, the “In it for YOU” slogan conjures-up the image of a gaggle of well-meaning do-gooders (many on salaries of nearly a quarter-of-a-million dollars) desperately anxious for YOU to believe THEY are without sinister, ulterior or selfish motivation. Labour: A party of altruists, pure as the driven snow, and they’re doing it all for YOU, baby!

It’s a dismal admission of failure, but one which has been implicit in the Labour Party that emerged from the splits and divisions of the Rogernomics era. When Labour was a party of 100,000 paid-up members and financial supporters, “we” had real political heft. To be a member of the Labour Party was to be a member of an organisation that that had transformed New Zealand’s economy, society and culture.

By 1990, however, Labour had been reduced to an organisation of fewer than 10,000 members. Most of these looked upon the party as a sort of social club in which, if they were lucky, they might have their photo taken with the prime minister. These folk actually hated political debate – it only led to unpleasantness. When the minority of political careerists who actually ran the party called upon these stalwarts to guard Labour from dissidents and traitors they were only too happy to oblige.

The present Labour Government constitutes a grim demonstration of what happens to a political party that no longer possesses the transformational impulse that animated its predecessors. (Even the Fourth Labour Government, albeit from the wrong end of the telescope!)

Having been handed the reins of government by Winston Peters in 2017, the party that Helen Clark and Michael Cullen had carried for nine years, almost entirely on the strength of their own prodigious political competence, took less than five years to demonstrate a heartbreaking degree of political ineptitude. Not even an unprecedented (under MMP) parliamentary majority, delivered in recognition of Labour’s initial success in handling the Covid-19 crisis, could help it get whatever “this” was, done.

If this Labour Government really is in the business of government for us, then we can be forgiven for wondering just how much worse-off we might be if they were actually in it for somebody else!

That the National Party can think of no more inspiring slogan than to get the country “back on track”, is evidence of how far it, too, has fallen since the days when John Key (state house boy made good) promised New Zealanders a “brighter future”. National’s current metaphor portrays New Zealand as a train derailed, and itself as the maintenance gang with both the engineering expertise and the heavy-lifting machinery needed to get things moving again.

All of which would make perfect sense if New Zealanders were confronting a more conventional economic and social crisis – one screaming out for remedial action. But, is that the mood? Or is it, rather, that instead of a derailment, New Zealanders are gripped by the conviction that the train they are on has been surreptitiously re-directed towards a destination they were not told about, and would not have chosen if they had been.

The problem with National’s slogan is that it offers the voters no possibility of travelling in a new or different direction. The best they can hope for is that National will convey them in the same direction as Labour, only with a little more attention to their health and safety. The party might just as well have inscribed “National – we’ll get you there in one piece” on their billboards.

Act’s invocation of “real change” – especially in the context of presenting itself as National’s hard line/hard core coalition partner – merely confirms to voters that David Seymour intends to get them to the Right’s neoliberal destination at top speed, ignoring the safety regulations, and without making any further stops.

Having arrived at the terminus, however, it will soon become clear to the travelling public that National and Act have not taken them anywhere they haven’t been before. That Act’s “real change” is really just (big) business as usual – and, maybe, something even worse.

Deconstructing NZ First’s slogan presents a much more intriguing proposition. “Let’s take back our country” invites the voters to participate in a daring act of political intervention. Rather than sit back passively as the ship-of-state sails on into a worsening storm, Winston Peters is inviting the voters to turn him into their Fletcher Christian. With them at his back, he will storm the bridge and take back control from the neoliberal Captain Blighs who stole the good ship “New Zealand” from them forty years ago, and under whose command it has become less-and-less seaworthy. “Let’s take back our country” is nothing less than an invitation to electoral mutiny.

It is only Te Pāti Māori, however, which is offering the electorate the prospect of something entirely new. Only the Māori Party which is willing to take the necessary next steps beyond the Greens’ plaintive warning that “the time is now”.

As Te Pāti Māori has demonstrated with its radical tax policies, the intention is to strike at the very heart of the neoliberal status quo. Tinkering, argues Deborah Ngarewa Packer and Rawiri Waititi, is no longer enough, the system under which 2.1 million New Zealanders earn less than $30,000 per year, must be brought down. It’s a metaphor as old as politics itself. Out of darkness a new day must dawn. New Zealand must be re-made. “Aotearoa Hou.”

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 31 July 2023.

Is It “Game Over” For The Greens?

Is History Repeating Itself? From 5 percent of the popular vote in 1975, the Values Party’s share was more than halved to just 2.41 percent in 1978. Within months, middle-class social-liberalism was back in the saddle. Unimpressed, the voters’ judgement was even harsher. In 1981, and again in 1984, Values received barely 0.2 percent percent of the popular vote. The party was over. Are the Greens about to go the same way in 2023?

THERE IS NO POSSIBILITY of a centre-left government being formed if the Greens are no longer in Parliament. That’s a sobering thought, and yet the return of the Greens is taken for granted by most political pundits. A party which could survive the self-immolation of Metiria Turei in the weeks leading up to the 2017 general election, it is widely assumed, can survive anything. But can it? Is the Green brand really bullet-proof? Good for 5 percent of the Party Vote – no matter what?

I don’t think so.

What keeps the Green Party in the electoral game is a widespread misapprehension that, at its heart, the Greens are the same rather quirky but highly principled outfit that impressed itself so deeply on the imagination of New Zealanders in the first five years of the twenty-first century. The most obvious historical comparison is with the pre-Rogernomics Labour Party. So great was the political momentum generated by the First Labour Government under Michael Joseph Savage (1935-1940) that the party was able to win four more elections on the strength of it. But, as Labour demonstrated in 1984, parties can change. And the Greens have changed – a lot.

What the Greens are slowly but surely turning into was always there in the political movement they inherited from the Values Party. When push comes to shove, the Greens, like the majority of the Values Party membership before them, will always break in the direction of the middle-class idealism out of which both parties were born. Logically, Greens should be socialists: if this planet’s a corporation, it’s a corpse. In reality, however, the Greens are social-liberals. How else to explain the fact that the party secures the bulk of its support from the well-heeled professionals inhabiting the nation’s leafier suburbs – and their children?

For those history buffs out there, the other exemplars of the social-liberal dynamic at the heart of middle-class progressive movements are the Suffragettes. Like the Greens, the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) embraced the cause of social-justice (a necessary indulgence if it was to enlist the support of working-class women) but at the outbreak of World War I its leaders were quick to jettison the WSPU’s socialist wing. A deal was struck with Lloyd George, the firebrand politician poised to become the UK’s next prime minister. The WSPU would back the war effort, and in return, at the war’s end, women (or, at least, women of means over 30 years of age) would be enfranchised. As proof of their patriotism, middle-class Suffragettes took to the streets handing out white feathers (tokens of cowardice) to young men not in uniform.

“Deeds Not Words” – the WSPU’s motto – was always open to multiple interpretations!

The Values Party broke apart over the question of whether or not environmentalism was a cause that could be embraced meaningfully by the working-class. Between 1975 and 1978, the socialist faction of the Values Party did its best to supply a positive answer. Values’ 1978 election manifesto was an unabashedly radical socialist document. The electors, however, had other priorities. From 5 percent of the popular vote in 1975, the Values Party’s share was more than halved to just 2.41 percent. Within months, middle-class social-liberalism was back in the saddle. Unimpressed, the voters’ judgement was even harsher. In 1981, and again in 1984, Values received barely 0.2 percent percent of the popular vote. The party was over.

Values rebirth as The Greens in 1989 represented the conscientized middle-class’ deep distress at Neoliberalism’s ruthless dismantling of the New Zealand welfare state, along with its unwavering promotion of the “free” market. Even more than Values, the Greens “got” that capitalism was killing the planet. As an internationally successful political movement, the Greens’ electability was based on the growing public understanding that the “old parties”, spawned by the exploitative industrial societies capitalism had created, no longer possessed the imagination necessary to rescue life on earth. Their message was encapsulated in the slogan: “The Greens are not of the Left, the Greens are not of the Right, the Greens are in front.”

But, in order to remain “in front” the Green brand had to fulfil two absolutely crucial obligations. It had to base its policies on the findings of science, and, it had to repudiate neoliberal capitalism and all its works. So long as Green parties did this, they went from strength to strength. Consistent failure to honour these obligations, however, rendered them acutely vulnerable to electoral annihilation.

It is becoming increasingly clear to green-oriented voters in 2023 that the Green Party is no longer as faithful to science as it was in the early 2000s, and that it is much more willing to compromise with the neoliberal order. Perhaps in an attempt to compensate for these two, critical, failures, the party has embraced a particularly volatile and uncompromising form of social-liberalism. One which a great many green voters find deeply offensive and alienating.

In sharp contrast to the leadership of Jeanette Fitzsimons and Rod Donald, who, respectively, embodied the movement’s fidelity to science and its duty to challenge the economic status quo, the leadership of James Shaw and Marama Davidson seems to embody constant compromise with the Powers That Be, accompanied by a wholesale rejection of rationality itself. As election day approaches, it is becoming increasingly difficult to construct a rationale for remaining loyal to the off-putting political force that the Greens are turning into.

The brute psephological fact, amply demonstrated by the fate of Values, is that no political party has a core vote below which it cannot fall. The moment small-g green voters feel that a vote for the Greens is no longer a meaningful act of faith in the planet’s future, the party will be over. Ultimately, it is not the members who make or break a political party, but the reaction of the voters watching them.

Those engaged in finalising the Greens’ Party List for the 2023 general election would be wise to remember that.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 2 May 2023.

An Ugly Demonstration.

Mobbed! As Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull’s (Posie Parker’s) opponents surged forward, her only protecters were a handful of burly security guards who surrounded their client and began forcing a path through what was now a howling mob. At least one video recording shows the diminutive Keen-Minshull, a terrified rag-doll, eyes dulled by the effects of shock, being heaved past individuals with faces contorted by fury and hate.

WHAT SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED on Saturday morning, 25 March 2023, in Auckland’s Albert Park is easily described.

At 11:00am, Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull (a.k.a “Posie Parker”) a small (just 155 centimetres tall) bottle-blond mother of four from the United Kingdom, would have stood behind the microphone set up in the Albert Park band rotunda and delivered a speech.

To a small crowd of about 250 people, she would have detailed her objections to transgender women (i.e. persons born biological males and, in some cases, retaining their male reproductive organs) having the right to enter spaces hitherto reserved for biological women and girls; being incarcerated in biological women’s prisons; and permitted to compete against human females in sporting events intended for biological women only.

Keen-Minshull would have been followed by a line-up of New Zealand speakers (most of them biological women and feminists) concerned about the linguistic erasure of their sex from official discourse (as in the expression “pregnant persons”) and alarmed at the efforts of transgender women and their supporters to silence the public expression of their concerns.

At a distance of about 50 metres, a much larger crowd of transgender persons and their supporters, safely corralled behind sturdy barriers, and a cordon of police officers, would have kept up a noisy barrage of objections to the content of the speakers’ speeches. Above their heads, banners and placards proclaiming their support for the rights of transgender New Zealanders would have been clearly visible to the “Let Women Speak” organisers in the rotunda.

The news media would have been there in force to record the confrontation for posterity. When the meeting came to an end, roughly 90 minutes later, and the crowds began to disperse, journalists would have been seen interviewing participants from both sides of the barriers for their media employers.

Spokespersons for the Transgender community would have set forth their objections to Keen-Minshull’s claims, drawing the journalists’ attention to the lack of evidence for any widespread abuse of women and girls by transgender women in toilets, changing-rooms, women’s refuges or prisons, and pointing out how extremely hurtful such suggestions are to the members of one of society’s most fragile and vulnerable communities. The journalists’ professional commitment to fair and balanced reporting would have ensured that the views of both groups were presented to the public.

By 2:00pm, Albert Park would again have become the preserve of Aucklanders enjoying a sunny autumn afternoon.



WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED on the morning of Saturday, 25 March 2023, bore very little resemblance to the civilised political ideal described above.

As Keen-Minshull stepped forward to speak she was physically assaulted by a person pretending to be a supporter. This attack caused the counter-protesters, estimated at more than 2,000, to surge forward, thrusting aside the flimsy barriers erected to separate them from the much smaller crowd which had gathered to hear the speakers. They were able to do this because there was no police cordon to enforce that separation. Within seconds, the counter-protesters were pressing in on Keen-Minshull’s audience, screaming abuse, hurling projectiles, and lashing out with fists and placards.

Fearing for the safety of Keen-Minshull and her audience, one observer implored a nearby police officer, who was looking on impassively, to intervene. He refused, allegedly declaring that Keen-Minshull: ‘is in a public space. If she feels unsafe she needs to leave’.

At this point, Keen-Minshull’s only protecters were a handful of burly security guards who surrounded their client and began forcing a path through what was now a howling mob. At least one video recording shows the diminutive Keen-Minshull, a terrified rag-doll, eyes dulled by the effects of shock, being heaved past individuals with faces contorted by fury and hate.

Only when the police present realised that if they did not place Keen-Minshull under their protection, then her bodyguards would be forced to exit the melee by driving through it in their own vehicle – with all the attendant risks to the counter-protesters’ health and safety such a manoeuvre would entail. Keen-Minshull was, accordingly, bundled into a police car and driven from the scene.

Not all the scheduled speakers were so lucky. This is how Ani O’Brien, from the group Stand Up For Women, described her experience:

No sooner had Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull arrived at the Rotunda, a protestor (who had managed to get past the barrier) ran at her and threw a red substance all over her and a security guard. As she attempted to clean up, the protestors pushed over, crushed, and dismantled the barriers and swarmed around her.

At this point, I was caught in the angry crowd. I had whistles blown in my face, abuse screamed at me, and I was fearful for my own safety. This was nothing compared to what Kellie-Jay endured. She was trapped and surrounded by a mob screaming abuse and trying to get past her security guards.

Chris, there were no police in sight. Despite widely publicised threats of violence, the police were nowhere near the protest frontlines to prevent the event from devolving into chaos as it did. I had to call the police from the middle of the screaming crowd! And even then they weren’t particularly concerned that a woman was trapped in the midst of a mob determined to get to her.

Keen-Minshull’s rally was over before it had even begun – victim of the Thug’s Veto. Her right to free expression had been illegally and violently curtailed. Left in possession of the park, the elated counter-protesters took to Twitter to celebrate their historic victory over bigotry and hate.



WHAT ARE WE TO MAKE of the events of Saturday, 25 March 2023? The most urgent questions are those that will, over the coming days, be levelled at the Police. Who was in command? What intelligence did they have regarding Keen-Minshull and her increasingly vocal enemies? Why, in the face of credible threats to her person, was police protection denied to Keen-Minshull and her followers? Why, as the situation spiralled out of control, did the police officers present not intervene?

Predictably – and entirely appropriately – the Free Speech Union, has raised these issues in a letter to the new Police Minister, Ginny Andersen:

We call on you, and the Police Commissioner, to acknowledge the lack of action to defend the basic speech rights of those who turned up to the ‘Let Women Speak’ rally, and reassert that those who express unpopular or controversial views in public are entirely in their right, and deserve to be protected from threats, intimidation, and violence.

There will be considerable public scepticism, however, concerning the willingness of the Labour Government, and Party, to defend New Zealanders’ freedom of speech and assembly. There will be scepticism, also, that the Minister and her colleagues are any longer capable of perceiving the ethical issues which Saturday’s ugly demonstration laid bare.

All through the preceding week, Labour Ministers, Members of Parliament, and activist party members were telling those seeking to silence Keen-Minshull that, as far as Labour was concerned, they were doing the Lord’s work. In this they were echoed, even more vehemently, by the Greens. When the governing parties of the day publicly back a political movement, its followers may be forgiven for believing they have been given the green-light for coercion. The parliamentary Left did not balk at describing Keen-Minshull’s views as “abhorrent” and “incorrect”. Not quite in the same league as King Henry II’s “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest!” – but close.

Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of this incident is the crucial role played by the mainstream news media in creating the preconditions for the violent suppression of free speech which ensued. Throughout the preceding week, journalists had denigrated Keen-Minshull – who describes herself as an “advocate for women” – as “an anti-trans activist” – finding her guilty, by association, of endorsing far-right, even Neo-Nazi, groups. That she, and people who shared her concerns, had a case to make was simply not acknowledged journalistically. In a synergy worthy of Putin’s Russia, the views of the Government, and the views of the mainstream media, had become interchangeable.

Certainly, the state media appeared incapable of perceiving the role it had played in the events of Saturday, 25 March. Television New Zealand’s Jack Tame even offered the violence unleashed by Keen-Minshull’s opponents as an ex-post-facto justification for denying her entry to New Zealand. In other words, allowing those threatening to exercise the Thug’s Veto to determine who should be allowed to speak in New Zealand, and who should not. Nothing could better illustrate the yawning generational gulf into which journalistic ethics has disappeared.

Over the next six months, the New Zealand electorate will discover just how effectively the parties of the Right are able to exploit the Labour-Green failure to uphold the Bill of Rights Act and the democratic polity it underpins. Chris Hipkins may soon regret that he did not step in immediately to set the political tone on Keen-Minshull. Because, whatever the reasons that set New Zealanders against one another so aggressively on Saturday, 25 March 2023, they had absolutely nothing to do with bread and butter.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 27 March 2023.

Who Is Pulling Sharma’s Strings?

Plaything Of The Right? Just how decisively the Right is shaping our politics will become clear in the run-up to the Hamilton West by-election. Though National may consider the by-election outcome a foregone conclusion, it is likely to be disabused of any such notion relatively quickly.

GAURAV SHARMA’S DEATH-DIVE into the Labour mothership may strike many traditional leftists as fortuitous. Certainly, his decision to force a by-election in Hamilton West will inflict far more damage on Jacinda Ardern’s radically elitist government than any number of old-school leftists could possibly hope to achieve. This should not be permitted to obscure the fact, however, that, in 2022, it is the Right, not the Left, that is driving New Zealand politics.

Just how decisively the Right is shaping our politics will become clear in the run-up to the Hamilton West by-election. Though National may consider the by-election outcome a foregone conclusion, it is likely to be disabused of any such notion relatively quickly.

Between them, Act, NZ First, and the new parties of the Far-Right have the potential to siphon-off enough votes to place the contest’s outcome in serious doubt. The lazy assumption among political commentators that National’s strategists will be able to browbeat its right-wing rivals into giving it a clear run at Labour smacks more of wishful thinking than sound analysis.

If National wants a clear run, then it will have to give its rivals some pretty unequivocal assurances about what it will – and won’t – do in government. Even then, the arguments for delivering National a sharp lesson in the raw power of ideological conviction may prove hard for its right-wing competitors to resist.

A political novelist would look at this evolving situation and explore the question of exactly who informed Sharma that Ardern was planning to waka-jump him less than six months out from Election Day 2023. Sharma insists that it was a member of Labour’s New Zealand Council, but, honestly, that seems unlikely. The New Zealand Council of the Labour Party has been pretty effectively “scrubbed” ideologically. The notion that there is someone sitting around that table harbouring dark thoughts about Ardern and her colleagues, and spilling the beans to Sharma, is most unlikely. Easier to believe is that someone – a genuine enemy of the Labour Government – is pulling Sharma’s strings.

If such a person exists, then he or she is almost certain to be a right-winger. But, just how far is that person, and those s/he is working with, prepared to go? Is the idea of a Sharma-led “centrist” party his own, or was it planted and watered by his unnamed “friends”?

It’s an important question. A group of seasoned operatives who knew what they were doing might actually pull together something that looked enough like a genuine centrist party to draw-off a useful number of Labour votes. Then again, why would they invest so much energy and cash in a guy who’s never going to be more than a political footnote?

The only plausible explanation is that the political force best placed to draw off Labour votes – the Greens – have been so thoroughly battered and bullied by Labour, that they no longer possess the necessary political courage to demonstrate their indispensability to the “left-wing” cause.

A surging and ideologically rampant Green Party, slashing into Ardern’s record from the left, would make it next-to-impossible for Labour to retain Hamilton West. Not that a genuine Green Party would care. It’s only goal would be to show that if 2023 isn’t a Labour-Green victory, then it won’t be a victory at all.

Sadly, only the most unrealistic of optimists could foresee such a welcome recovery of electoral nerve. Most likely the Greens will meekly agree to sit-out the by-election. Meaning that, if there’s any vote-siphoning to be done, it will have to be done by the Right.

Viewed from the perspective of the non-National Right, the best possible outcome of the Hamilton West by-election would be a narrow (the narrower the better!) win for Luxon’s team.

A romper-stomper victory for the National candidate is the last thing the non-National Right wants. A win like that would reassure National that they have no need to make serious policy concessions to the parties on their right. It will convince Luxon and Willis that they can continue fudging on the Treaty and Three Waters, and double-down on John Key’s successful formula of doing whatever it takes to win and hold the suburbs. Knowing that, if National holds the suburbs, then the rest of the Right has no real option but to make do with half an ideological loaf.

Ensuring that National’s candidate only just makes it would put an end to all the party’s thoughts of an easy campaign in 2023. The idea that it will be enough to just shuffle along a few paces to Labour’s right, and muddle-through as usual, will be scotched. National will have no option but to respond to the gravitational pull of all those political forces unwilling to accept Labour’s radical elitism. The results are unlikely to be pretty.

But that’s what your country gets when it lacks a mass movement, grounded in the working-class, and dedicated to social equality – rather than radical elitism. The penny has yet to drop in Aotearoa-New Zealand that identity politics is not left-wing politics. Labour and the Greens are by far the slowest learners – dangerously slower than the Right.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 20 October 2022.

James Shaw Apologises To Rod Donald And Jeanette Fitzsimons - A Parody.

(To the tune of Paul McCartney’s “Uncle Albert – Admiral Halsey”)

 

I’m so sorry, Rod and Jeanette,

I’m so sorry if I caused you any pain.

I’m so sorry, Rod and Jeanette,

But the party that you left me

Is in trouble once again.

 

I’m so sorry, but we’ve hardly done

A thing all term.

I’m so sorry, Rod and Jeanette.

But, Jacinda’s so unhelpful

And Winston always makes me squirm!

 

Sob, sob.

 

So you’re sorry, James? You wanker!

Cos you haven’t done a bloody thing all term?

So you should be, James. You tosser!

There’s a planet on the boil,

And you’re less green than Ardern!

 

Handouts to the wealthy!  (wealthy?)

Handouts to the rich!

Handouts for the crystals  (crystals?)

Buried in a ditch.

 

Taranaki Green School notified me,

They had to have more cash – cos salvation isn’t free.

So I got a grant from Grant, in spite of Treasury, and Chippie (Chris Hipkins)

Who had the gall to call it a strange priority!

 

Handouts to the wealthy!  (wealthy?)

Handouts to the rich!

Handouts for the crystals  (crystals?)

Buried in a ditch.

 

Bugger-off, you ageing hippies – on yer bike!  (on yer bike)

Being green’s a business now,

So you lefties – take a hike!

Bugger-off, you ageing hippies – on yer bike!  (on yer bike)

Being green’s a business now,

So you lefties – take a hike!

 

Handouts to the wealthy!  (wealthy?)

Handouts to the rich!

Handouts for the crystals  (crystals?)

Buried in a ditch!

This parody was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 4 September 2020.

A Sorry Excuse For A Green Party.

Cuckoo In The Nest? Unlike Rod Donald, Jeanette Fitzsimons, Russel Norman and Metiria Turei, Shaw has never shown any recognisable affinity for the kind of Green Party they represented. Nothing I have ever heard from Shaw has ever reassured me that he subscribes to either the hardcore anti-capitalist critique of the ecological socialists, or the radical anti-materialist ideas of the Greens’ visionary forerunners in the Values Party. On the contrary, Shaw has always struck me as the sort of Green politician you would be sent if you asked a high-powered corporate public-relations agency to supply one.

JAMES SHAW is sorry. Yes he is! Genuinely, abjectly, politically and electorally sorry – as he damn well should be! His decision to grant 12 million public dollars to a privately-owned Taranaki “school” (which appears to specialise in promoting every cliched remnant of the 1970s hippy culture) was way beyond stupid. If the Greens sink below the crucial 5 percent MMP threshold on 17 October, then a fair old chunk of the responsibility will belong to Shaw.

 All over the country, people are asking each other: “How could he have been so dumb?” Leaving aside the school’s promotion of New Age mumbo-jumbo which, of itself, raises serious questions about the adequacy of Ministry of Education oversight, there was the small, but hopefully still important, matter of Green Party policy. How could Shaw not have known that what he was doing contradicted his party’s long-standing opposition to the public funding of private education? Did he really think that Green Party members and supporters wouldn’t notice?

 Maybe he did. Unlike Rod Donald, Jeanette Fitzsimons, Russel Norman and Metiria Turei, Shaw has never shown any recognisable affinity for the kind of Green Party they represented. Nothing I have ever heard from Shaw has ever reassured me that he subscribes to either the hardcore anti-capitalist critique of the ecological socialists, or the radical anti-materialist ideas of the Greens’ visionary forerunners in the Values Party. On the contrary, Shaw has always struck me as the sort of Green politician you would be sent if you asked a high-powered corporate public-relations agency to supply one.

 Unkind? Probably. But the transformation which has led the Greens to this unfortunate fork in the road has been driven by the corporate world’s urgent need to, first, disarm, and then, absorb, its most serious threat. The above reference to public relations is, therefore, not intended as an insult. It speaks directly to the way in which the world’s largest corporations have expended billions on convincing the world’s peoples that, while capitalism may have got the planet into its present predicament, it is also – paradoxically – the only viable means of getting it out.

 Shaw’s career, prior to entering Parliament, was built upon this dubious proposition. He became an indefatigable promoter of “Green Capitalism”: a guide, if you will, leading consumers to the promised land of “sustainable” capitalist production. He offered living proof to the rising generation of ambitious Green Party activists that they could look sharp, rub shoulders with the rich and famous, and still be non-gender-specific siblings in the struggle to save Parent Earth. Just like Bono.

So, why not throw a wad of taxpayer cash at a couple of millionaires committed to training-up an army of green warriors and sending them forth to take their rightful places around the boardroom tables of a climate-change-stricken planet? Fully conversant in the idioms of wokefulness; tested adepts of ceremonial magic; shrewd manipulators of social-media and spreadsheets: what’s not to like?

 How like the masters of capitalism to simply toss all the contradictory elements of the green worldview into their cultural blender and flick the on-switch. Gaia-worship and Marxism; Reason and Unreason; Science and Mysticism; mix ‘em all up. Throw the empirical proof of climate-change and the radical paranoia of the anti-vaxxers into the same swirling potion and invite all the wide-eyed seekers after a better world to drink deep. When your only purpose is to render effective resistance impossible, feeding people contradictions makes perfect sense.

 Just so long as the Greens cease to be the party of well-informed idealists that bought this country 20 years of freedom from genetic engineering. The party that forced all the other parties in Parliament to at least pay lip-service to the reality of climate-change. The party that offered voters the inspiring examples of Rod Donald’s great heart and Jeanette Fitzsimons’ brilliant mind; the principled activism of Sue Bradford; the wisdom and courage of Keith Locke; the resinous mysticism of Nandor Tanczos. The party that, for however brief a moment, vouchsafed their fellow New Zealanders a glimpse of what the world could look like if we loved it and each other with equal fervour.

 The only school fit to teach young New Zealanders the geography of this new heaven, this new earth, is a genuine Green Party. The sort James Shaw wouldn’t want to be found dead in.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 4 September 2020.

The Cost Of Compromise.

Not Brownshirts, Greenshirts: If you believe yourself to be in the midst of an existential struggle; and that every day which fails to bring you closer to absolute victory brings you one day closer to absolute defeat; then compromise isn’t just ill-advised, it’s morally indefensible. The goal must be power. Not power in combination with others, but power alone. Power that can be wielded without reference to anybody else. Absolute victory – the salvation of the biosphere – can only be secured by winning absolute power.

IF THE GREENS are to survive 19 September, they’ll need to draw inspiration from – of all people – the Nazis. Preposterous? Only if you refuse to understand that both the national-socialist and green movements have at their core an unwavering conviction that if they fail, then everything they hold dear will be lost. What separates the Greens from the Nazis is, of course, what they hold dear. Hitler and his followers were fighting for a myth – the German volk. The Greens are fighting for the survival of a very real and very vulnerable biosphere.

But what sort of inspiration could possibly be drawn from the political tactics of the most evil political party in human history?

The answer can be summed-up in a single word: compromise. If you believe yourself to be in the midst of an existential struggle; and that every day which fails to bring you closer to absolute victory brings you one day closer to absolute defeat; then compromise isn’t just ill-advised, it’s morally indefensible. The goal must be power. Not power in combination with others, but power alone. Power that can be wielded without reference to anybody else. Absolute victory – the salvation of the biosphere – can only be secured by winning absolute power.

This was Adolf Hitler’s crucial insight. He looked at the Weimar Republic, with its pure system of proportional representation, its multitude of competing parties, its fragile and ineffectual coalitions, and he bet his entire movement on the German electorate growing increasingly impatient with the political paralysis in Berlin. For a few years, from the mid-1920s until the onset of the Great Depression in late-1929, it looked as though he would lose his bet. But the collapse of the German economy, the descent of millions into poverty and despair, and the complete failure of “democratic” politics to meet the crisis, saw the Nazi’s share of the vote skyrocket.

Hitler’s contemporaries expected him to do what any other party leader would do in the face of such unanticipated electoral success: cut a deal. But the Nazi leader wasn’t interested in deals. Why would he enter into a coalition with the very parties who had proved themselves so incapable of doing anything to alleviate Germany’s suffering? Openly contemptuous of his electoral rivals, he didn’t promise to work with them, he promised to abolish them. Only one party, he said, could rescue Germany: the National Socialist German Workers Party. It would govern alone, or it would not govern at all.

As conditions in Germany grew steadily worse, and as the political centre crumbled and fell apart, it became clearer and clearer to the state bureaucracy, the army and the large capitalists, that if the Nazis were not given what they wanted, then an increasingly desperate German electorate would shift its support to the Communist Party. Rather than make a red revolution inevitable, the powers-that-be made a brown revolution possible. On 30 January 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor. Within six months his National Socialists were wielding absolute power. It was given to them to save Germany, but tragically they came close to destroying it. The human cost of Nazism’s fanatical pursuit of racial purity was colossal and its ultimate failure inevitable. Why? Because the German volk wasn’t real.

But anthropogenic global warming – climate change – is very real. And every day that is lost to compromise and drift does indeed bring global ecological catastrophe closer. Whether they are willing to admit it or not, everything human-beings hold dear is at risk of being overwhelmed by a disaster greater than any which has hitherto confronted human civilisation. To avert this impending global tragedy an international political movement is required. A global movement which absolutely refuses to compromise with the political, bureaucratic and corporate entities whose failure to take decisive action to combat climate change imperils human survival – along with that of just about every other life form on the planet.

The leaders of green parties around the world have largely chosen to turn their faces from this most urgent of political priorities. Rather than take a bet on the peoples of the world growing increasingly willing to throw their support behind an uncompromising international movement dedicated to radically reducing greenhouse emissions and implementing a “Green New Deal” to redirect the world economy away from fossil fuels and exploitative industrial production, these green leaders have opted to “do a deal”. They have joined hands with the very people who created the crisis and who have consistently declined to end it.

New Zealand’s Green Party has proved to be no exception in this respect. Its co-leader, James Shaw, not only refuses to bet on the people coming round to the need for urgent and ruthless change, but he has also fetishized “compromise” to the point where any attempt to draw a line in the sand is met with a rolling of eyes and statements like:

“Finding the path of least resistance. There’s that horrendous phrase about politics being the art of the possible, which can be read two ways.

“You can do things, it’s a really expansive notion. And there are some moments where we have changed things.

“And then there are others where you can only do what is possible. Maybe moving from naivety to experience is being able to live in both those worlds at the same time.”

Unfortunately for Shaw, humanity has only one world to live in, and it is running out of time. As the climate crisis deepens, and the failure of democratic politics to adequately address the need for radical change opens the way for more uncompromising parties, the politicians who continue to throw in their lot with the problem, rather than the solution, will be swept aside. For Shaw and his increasingly irresolute colleagues the electoral broom is approaching with unnerving speed.

Over the past three years, all the voters have received from the New Zealand Greens are pallid non-solutions. These, the fruit of the party’s craven unwillingness to call Labour and NZ First’s bluff, have been justified as the best outcomes available from a dispiriting range of “realistic” options. Together, they have brought the Greens’ nothing but a steadily declining share of the Party Vote. Political “realism” is Labour’s brand. If all they are offered in September is a choice between compromises of ever-decreasing effectiveness, then many Green supporters may elect to make no choice at all.

The only virtue to which the Nazis may lay claim is their willingness to risk everything for the opportunity to put their ideas to the test. Their unwillingness to compromise with reason cost humanity dearly. How supremely tragic (and ironic) it will be if the Greens’ willingness to compromise with greed and selfishness ends up costing humanity everything it’s got.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 9 June 2020.

Is Simon’s Smile Sustainable?

A Sustainable Proposition: With as much as 18 percent of the electorate declaring itself “undecided” about who to vote for, there is obviously plenty of space for a party like former Green Party member, Vernon Tava's, about-to-be-launched "Sustainable NZ Party" to move into. The most hospitable political territory for such a party to settle in would appear to be that occupied by voters who yearn for environmental policy to once again become the preserve of “serious” and “grown up” politicians.

SIMON BRIDGES is feeling pretty chipper this week – with good reason. Pollsters Reid Research and Colmar Brunton have not only re-confirmed the solidity of National’s support, but also tracked a decline in Labour’s numbers. Not a big enough decline, it must be acknowledged, to give the National Party more than the narrowest of victories in one poll and a narrow defeat in the other. Even so, Mr Bridges is beaming. Why?

If his own cryptic encouragement to “watch this space” is any guide, the Leader of the Opposition is anticipating the imminent emergence of what is, potentially, a new coalition partner for National in the 2020 General Election. The most likely candidate for this role is Vernon Tava’s “Sustainable New Zealand Party” The requisite 500 members have, apparently, been signed up and the party’s name approved. All that remains is for Mr Tava’s new political vehicle to be rolled-out with maximum fanfare.

That should not be difficult to secure. Mr Tava is an articulate, energetically moderate and very personable individual who, it must be assumed, has spent the last few months gathering the resources necessary to set his new vehicle in motion. If Sustainable NZ’s website is any guide, Mr Tava’s behind-the-scenes efforts have not been wasted. It is professional in appearance, easily navigable and suffused throughout with ideologically appropriate blues and greens.

If Mr Bridges’ smiles are any indication, however, Mr Tava has done a lot more than produce a website. The National Party leader’s cat-who-got-the-cream expression suggests that the new party will come with a newsworthy collection of founding parents: people for whom liberal National Party supporters would be pleased to vote. Exactly who these people might be remains a closely guarded secret, but a small exercise in imaginative speculation should be enough to indicate how impactful a collection of the right people could be.

Let us imagine, then, that someone with the public profile and indisputable credibility of a Sir Peter Gluckman were to step forward into the glare of the television lights. Instantly, Sustainable NZ would become a serious proposition. The news media would respond enthusiastically, amplifying the party’s messages and giving the existing political landscape a rattling seismic shake.

With as much as 18 percent of the electorate declaring itself “undecided” about who to vote for, there is obviously plenty of space for Sustainable NZ to move into. The most hospitable political territory for the party to settle in would be that occupied by voters who yearn for environmental policy to become the preserve of “serious” and “grown up” politicians. Voters who, while conceding the reality of Climate Change, are not at all impressed by the emotional appeals of Greta Thunberg and her children’s crusade. Voters who refuse to accept the dire predictions of a climate catastrophe: who still have faith in the unbounded ingenuity of the human species to come up with what the doom-sayers scornfully dismiss as “the scientific fix”.

In other words, a party quite unlike the Greens. A party unburdened by the ideological detritus of the 1960s and 70s which the original green parties, formed in the 1980s, felt obliged to haul into the public square. A party that wouldn’t dream of Morris Dancing, or expect its conference delegates to subsist on mung beans, herbal tea and tofu. A party that would be soberly and sensibly liberal on social issues without getting side-tracked into branding its core supporters “white supremacists” or descending into TERF wars. A party which, if presented with a genetically-engineered solution to New Zealand livestock’s methane emissions, rather than cry “Heresy!”, would grab it with both hands.

Most of all, of course, Sustainable NZ would be a party of swingers. For all their origins in the swinging 60s and 70s, the Greens have been the most monogamous of political parties. Since being elected in their own right to Parliament in 1999 they have had only one political partner – Labour. Even when Labour scorned the Greens’ unconditional love; even when it dallied outrageously with Peter Dunne and Winston Peters; even when it left them bruised and battered; they never faltered – never strayed.

Sustainable NZ – if it is the reason for Mr Bridges’ knowing smile – has no intention of becoming the Right’s battered spouse. It will offer itself to National unconditionally only once – but for Simon that will be enough.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 18 October 2019.

Warning! Warning! Danger Jacinda Ardern! Danger Marama Davidson! Warning!

Lost In Political Space: The most important takeaway from this latest Labour sexual assault scandal, which (if I may paraphrase Nixon’s White House counsel’s, John Dean’s, infamous description of Watergate) is “growing like a cancer” on the premiership, is the Labour Party organisation’s extraordinary professional paralysis in the face of an accusation that demanded the most circumspect and judicious handling.

IF THE SEXUAL ASSAULT scandal engulfing the Prime Minister’s office hasn’t been properly dealt with by the time you read this, Labour’s in big trouble. An article in this morning’s (9/9/19) edition of The Spinoff has catapulted this matter squarely into the realm of full-blown political crisis. The detail supplied brings to life the victim’s accusations in a way that cannot help but elicit sympathy. The Labour Party’s response, by contrast, inspires nothing but the most profound contempt.

The question repeated endlessly after the posting of Alex Casey’s article is: “How on earth did it get to this?” The person at the centre of these allegations isn’t just a Labour mover-and-shaker among other Labour movers-and-shakers, he’s a mover-and-shaker who works in Jacinda’s office! This means that, like Caesar’s proverbial wife, he must be “above suspicion”. Why those around the Prime Minister did not see fit to protect her from the fallout of a potentially catastrophic investigation is a deeply problematic mystery.

National’s pollster and Kiwiblogger, David Farrar, has openly stated that: “I’ve heard that [the accused person’s] role makes him invaluable to Labour’s election campaign. Labour have decided he must be protected.” If true, this tells us a great deal about the moral quality of decision-making within Labour’s ranks – none of it good.

It also tells us that everyone within the Wellington “Beltway” knows who this guy is. That includes, of course, the Parliamentary Press Gallery, who will be on nodding terms (at least) with every staff-person in the Prime Minister’s Office. This knowledge, privileged for the moment, can only add a dangerously intimate ingredient to what is already a toxic political mix. How long Wellington’s political journalists and commentators will allow themselves to go on knowing things that their viewers, listeners and readers do not, is anybody’s guess – but it cannot be for very much longer.

Word has it that the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, Paula Bennett, will name the accused staffer under the protection of Parliamentary Privilege as early as Tuesday afternoon (10/9/19). It was to Bennett that a number of aggrieved young women went with their grievances about Labour’s handling of this matter, so the DLO has skin in the game.

The most important takeaway, so far, from this scandal, which (if I may paraphrase Nixon’s White House counsel’s, John Dean’s, infamous description of Watergate) is “growing like a cancer” on the premiership, is the Labour Party organisation’s extraordinary professional paralysis in the face of an accusation that demanded the most circumspect and judicious handling. Senior party officials should have spared no effort to ensure that the process of their investigation was as impartial as it was forensic. “Best Practice” should have been only the starting-point!

That it was so far from anything resembling best practice only reinforces the rapidly congealing public impression that this government can do nothing right – or well. It is becoming harder by the day to avoid the conclusion that the movers-and-shakers in and around this government are incapable of assessing how bad their own behaviour, and the failure that flows from it, looks to those living outside the bubble.

Jacinda has about 24 hours to seize control of this situation – or risk being seriously damaged by it. Everyone in the Prime Minister’s office serves at the Prime Minister’s pleasure – something which every staffer’s contract makes clear. Jacinda needs to make her displeasure known in ways that cannot possibly be misconstrued. She must act – now.

*  *  *  *  *

EQUALLY IN NEED of remedial action is the Green Party. It’s recent decision to take down from its Te Awa website an opinion piece penned by the veteran New Zealand feminist, Jill Abigail, has set in motion what shows every sign of turning into an avalanche of voter disaffection.

Abigail’s entirely reasonable and courteously framed objections to the words and deeds of those she clearly regarded as transgender zealots very soon fell foul of the very zealotry she was complaining about. The justification advanced by the Greens’ co-leader, Marama Davidson, for censoring Abigail was that she had put “trans people’s right to exist” up for debate.

By any reasonable reading of Abigail’s essay, Davidson’s accusation is entirely groundless. And, for that very reason, it has inspired scores of formerly Green Party-voting women and men to put their name to an open letter demanding a full accounting of the party’s apparent unwillingness to defend not only the rights of women, but also the right of citizens to express themselves freely without being subjected to emotional and/or physical violence.

That some of these signatures belong to feminists whose careers span more than 40 years of struggle on behalf of women and girls should give Davidson and her ilk serious pause. Just as positive word-of-mouth communication can be a wonderful form of advertising; a steadily rising chorus of outrage is capable of inflicting extreme damage upon a minor party’s reputation and – hence – its chances of re-election.

What the Green Party needs to decide is whether or not it is willing to bow to the demands of what may – or may not – be a majority of its members, even if, by doing so, it alienates a very substantial number of its voters. Twitter is not New Zealand. Indeed, it is nothing like New Zealand – not even that narrow slice of the country some people still like to call “progressive New Zealand”. Confined within the hothouse precincts of the Parliamentary complex it is all-too-easy to forget that.

Demographics matter. Psychographics matter. That being the case, it makes no sense for the current Green leadership to drive out female voters aged 55+ whose progressive political principles – especially those relating to women’s rights – were forged in the 1970s and 80s. This is especially true of those conscientious voters who look upon the attitudinal and legislative changes secured for women during their lifetimes as some of the most important achievements of their generation.

Nor should the Greens forget that these female voters have partners and brothers, daughters and sons, and grandchildren – all of whom are about to hear, from someone very close them, a vivid description of the intolerable and unforgivable treatment meted out to an 80-year-old feminist veteran, Jill Abigail, by the Greens.

Exactly who does Marama Davidson believe these folk are most likely to side with in the polling-booth? The Green Party Co-Leader – or their mothers and grandmothers?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 9 September 2019.

Those Who Do Not Learn The Lessons Of History …

The Past As Prologue: The 2002 demise of the Alliance is a sad and complicated story. But, at its heart is a single, brutal, truth. Labour has no use for a support partner determined to pursue policy objectives at odds with those of the Government it leads. Rather than endure the consequences of such political insubordination, Labour will do all within its power to break the party responsible.

MARAMA DAVIDSON and Golriz Ghahraman would be well advised to take a break and read a little history. Not the history of colonial New Zealand: they seem very well-acquainted with that dismal narrative. No, the history they should familiarise themselves with, is the history of the Alliance in the weeks and months that followed the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001.

It’s a sad and complicated story. But, at its heart is a single, brutal, truth. Labour has no use for a support partner determined to pursue policy objectives at odds with those of the Government it leads. Rather than endure the consequences of such political insubordination, Labour will do all within its power to break the party responsible.

The issue which broke the Alliance was Afghanistan. Identified as the protectors of Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaida terrorist network, the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan were given an ultimatum by the United States Government to surrender those responsible for the 9/11 attacks or face the full force of the US and its allies. The Labour Prime Minister, Helen Clark, and her deputy, the Alliance Leader, Jim Anderton, raised no serious objections to President George W. Bush’s proposed course of action.

The left-wing of the Alliance was, however, outraged by what they saw as Anderton’s craven capitulation to US imperialism.

With the left of his party in open revolt, the Alliance leader, Jim Anderton, resolved to seize control of the party’s resources and records, and purge its membership of left-wing dissenters. When his attempted coup was thwarted, Anderton moved swiftly to split the Alliance – drawing loyalists away to form a new political entity: Jim Anderton’s Progressive Party.

As the Alliance tore itself apart, Labour sat back and watched. Clark understood that with the Christchurch seat of Wigram firmly in his grasp, Jim Anderton and his new party were absolved from having to secure 5 percent of the Party Vote.

The Alliance enjoyed no such advantage. It waged a brave fight in the 2002 General Election but, deprived of Anderton and scorned by Labour, it attracted just 1.27 percent of the Party Vote and was bundled out of Parliament. Jim Anderton’s Progressive Party, by contrast, although it won only 1.7 percent of the Party Vote, secured two parliamentary seats. Anderton’s vengeance was complete.

Even today, it is hard to believe that what was, at that time, the most successful left-wing party in the Western World, allowed itself to be split and broken over whether or not the Taliban should be overthrown for harbouring an organisation responsible for planning and facilitating the most devastating terrorist attack in modern history.

Why is any of this relevant to the Greens? Because, in the aftermath of another terrorist attack, this time against the Muslim community of Christchurch, New Zealand, another radical faction, in another small but highly successful progressive party, again appears determined to compromise another Labour Prime Minister’s domestic and international responses to an appalling terrorist outrage.

Davidson and Ghahraman need to ask themselves what the reaction of their parliamentary colleagues is likely to be if it becomes clear that their determination to leverage-off the Christchurch Mosque Shootings to unleash an uncompromising anti-racist campaign encompassing the whole of Pakeha New Zealand, is met with a strong enough push-back to jeopardise the Greens chances of remaining in Parliament after 2020? Will the other members of the Green Caucus meekly accept that two of their number must be permitted follow the dictates of the consciences, regardless of the damage they are inflicting on their party? Or, will they attempt to stop them?

Davidson and Ghahraman should also ask themselves what Labour is likely to do.

The Christchurch Mosque Shootings have left NZ First fatally compromised. Denied the option of playing the Anti-Maori, Anti-Muslim, and Anti-Immigration cards, the party’s chances of surging back over the 5 percent MMP threshold in 2020 are slim-to-non-existent. That leaves only the Greens to partner Labour in the next progressive coalition. Davidson and Ghahraman should, therefore, ask themselves what Labour’s reaction will be if its internal polling shows their New-Zealand-Is-A-Profoundly-Racist-Society campaign is causing the Greens to haemorrhage votes in a fatal fashion?

While they’re at it, they should probably also ask themselves what use National and Act are likely to make of their We-Are-All-Guilty campaign. Do they really think the right of New Zealand politics is going to refuse to take advantage of the anger and disgust generated by what many (perhaps most) voters will characterise as a cheap-and-nasty attempt to capitalise politically on a terrible and unprecedented tragedy? Do they not see that what they are doing, and clearly intend to go on doing, is helping the Right to get back in the game? And, do they really think that Jacinda and her “Praetorian Guard” – Andrew Little and Grant Robertson – are going to just sit back and let that happen?

Helen Clark and Jim Anderton weren’t prepared to allow the left-wing of the Alliance to compromise their political mission. Marama Davidson and Golriz Ghahraman should, therefore, ask themselves whether, in their heart-of-hearts, they truly believe Jacinda Ardern and James Shaw are any different?

This essay was posted simultaneously on The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road on Tuesday, 26 March 2019.