Luxon Rejects The “Rejection Election” At His Peril.

Fitting Right In: National retailed a reactionary manifesto of right-wing, racially-charged policies to the electorate throughout 2023. No talk back then of ignoring the overwhelming political preferences of the voting public and making a strong stand on principle. If Luxon’s pollsters and focus-groups were telling him that the public was in a mood to discipline and punish – then discipline and punish it would be.

MUCH HAS BEEN MADE of Prime Minister Chris Luxon’s definitive rejection of Act’s Treaty Principles Bill. Why? Because Luxon not only confirmed that National will vote against giving David Seymour’s bill a second reading, but at the same time acknowledged that the only reason he agreed to support it to the select committee stage was because he did not want to precipitate an unscheduled general election so soon after 14 October. In addition to providing us with a useful gauge of Luxon’s prime ministerial fortitude, Luxon’s “slap-down” of Seymour’s bottom-line policy also betrays his fundamental misreading of the election result’s meaning.

The General Election of 2023 was a rejection election, and rejection elections are powered, overwhelmingly, by popular anger. Not only was there a broad-based and vociferous element within the electorate determined to punish the incumbent Labour Government, but also a coterminous movement to roll back what was perceived to be Labour’s extreme, ideologically-driven, cultural agenda.

At no time during the election campaign did either Christopher Luxon or the National Party attempt to draw a clear distinction between themselves and the other right-wing parties – Act and NZ First – on matters relating to Māori sovereignty.

When Winston Peters announced his party’s policies in relation to removing Treaty principles from legislation, and reframing the mission of the Waitangi Tribunal, Luxon did not recoil in horror. Nor did he remind New Zealanders that it was National, under Jim Bolger and Doug Graham, that kicked-off the Treaty Settlement process back in the early-1990s. Or recall with pride that it was John Key who sent Pita Sharples to New York to sign the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

To be sure, when questioned directly about Act’s desire to clarify the principles of the Treaty by way of a binding referendum, Luxon described his most obvious coalition partner’s policy as “unhelpful and divisive”. That this response was a sop to the liberal wing of Luxon’s party, and to its more “moderate” voters, was made clear by his promotion of policies that unequivocally aligned the National Party with the right-wing populist mood of the nation. Most notably, National’s policy of curbing co-governance by abolishing Three Waters and the Māori Health Authority.

A National Party willing to send that sort of reactionary message to the electorate was not in the least bit concerned about being seen as “unhelpful” or “divisive”. And neither was the National Party committed to reinstating English at the top of official government stationery.

But those were only the most openly acknowledged efforts to align National with the majority’s determination to reject, repeal, rip-up and remove the ideological advances of Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori. Voters who understood the secret language of New Zealand conservatism were in little doubt that National had plenty more punishment in store for Māori New Zealanders.

Conservatives have long exploited the tendency of the racist Right to associate the social pathologies of drug use, domestic abuse, gun violence, aggravated robbery, juvenile delinquency, and truancy with Māori New Zealanders. That these are the pathologies of poverty, afflicting the lives of Pakeha as well as Māori, cuts little ice with right-wingers, who reject structural explanations for anti-social behaviour in favour of those highlighting personal and/or racial deficiencies.

Nor does the Right care overmuch that “cracking down hard” on crime will send Māori New Zealanders to prison in disproportionate numbers, leaving behind broken families and ruined lives. Even though, historically, “tough on crime” policies merely ensure that the cycle of crime and incarceration continues, most National Party voters regard the policy not as “a fiscal and moral failure” (as Bill English described it) but as a necessary evil.

National retailed a reactionary manifesto of right-wing, racially-charged policies to the electorate throughout 2023. Spooked by Act’s record poll numbers, and watching NZ First’s steady rise with alarm, Luxon and his team were in no mood to front-foot National’s liberal traditions. No talk back then of ignoring the overwhelming political preferences of the voting public and making a strong stand on principle. If Luxon’s pollsters and focus-groups were telling him that the public was in a mood to discipline and punish – then discipline and punish it would be.

Not that Luxon, himself, was personally suited to playing the Hard Man. Robotically positive, with his happy-chappy platitudes playing on continuous loop, Luxon left the dog-whistling to his lieutenants. The nearest he came to playing rough was when he dressed up as a pirate – and even then he had to be instructed on how to wield his sword. Even so, when all the votes had been counted and there was a three-way coalition to negotiate, Luxon struggled to locate his inner-thug. The National Party leader’s priority (in almost every setting) is to get whatever he is doing, done – whatever it takes.

And what it took was Luxon’s commitment to Seymour that his Treaty Principles Bill would be backed by National and NZ First to the select committee stage. What that meant was that Act’s coalition partners were supportive of the broad, open-ended debate that sending this particularly controversial bill to a select committee was certain to set in motion. It defies all logic to sanction this course of action if, in utter contempt for the consultation process, and regardless of what the debate reveals about the wishes of the New Zealand people vis-à-vis Te Tiriti o Waitangi, your Party’s next move is to vote it down.

Such a profoundly cynical political strategy would be dangerous at the best of times – and these are not the best of times. New Zealand is in the early stages of the same populist distemper that has polarised and paralysed the United States. Luxon and his party opted to climb on the back of this populist tiger, getting off it will be no simple matter.

To the hundreds-of-thousands of right-wing voters who backed National, Act and NZ First to bring together a government committed to disciplining and punishing Labour and its allies, it looks like Luxon’s National pony has refused its very first fence. Spooked by hui, hikoi and haka at Turangawaewae, Ratana and Waitangi, and bowing to the relentless bullying of the “legacy media”, Luxon has publicly slapped-down the Right’s young champion which, as far as they’re concerned, is the same as slapping them down – the people whose votes put National in power.

But that is not how populism works. You can’t just switch it on and off like a lightbulb. Nor can you boast about ignoring the wishes of the “overwhelming majority” of the New Zealand people. Not if you want to remain the dominant right-wing party.

The sharp up-tick in Act’s support in the latest Curia poll should be taken as a warning. So, too, should the findings of the latest Research New Zealand survey. Against all the confident prognostications of the punditocracy, a solid plurality of Men, New Zealanders aged 18-34, Kiwis living north of Taupo, and (astonishingly) Māori, are in favour of confirming the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi by referendum.

Small wonder then, that in spite of Luxon’s very public slap-down, David Seymour is not at all disposed to giving-up the fight.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 12 February 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.

David Seymour Enlists History In Act’s Struggle For Power.

History Man: Does David Seymour have a case? Does history confirm that National campaigns from the right when it’s in opposition, only to govern from the left when it’s in government? The answer to this question is ….. complicated.

DAVID SEYMOUR is on to something with History. Shrewd use of the past can enhance the political campaigns of politicians battling in the here and now. Knowing this, the Leader of the Act Party is seeding the idea that the National Party has a history of “campaigning from the right, and then governing from the left”. On the five occasions the National Party has defeated and replaced a Labour Government, Seymour alleges, it has failed to scrap its predecessor’s socialist reforms.

It isn’t difficult to discern why Seymour is advancing this line of argument. One of the abiding features of New Zealand’s MMP electoral system is its propensity to pile up seats for the parties of the centre, National and Labour, while denying the more overtly ideological (that is to say, policy-driven) parties the parliamentary seats required for anything more than a supporting role. The long-term effect of MMP has been to condition the voting public into looking upon the smaller parties as “also rans”. Useful for applying pressure on the major parties when they are failing to perform in opposition, but best left to the tender mercies of the ideologically-driven at election time.

From an historical perspective, the voting public can hardly be blamed for declining to reward the also-ran parties with too many seats. The first MMP election (1996) allocated 44 seats to the National Party and 17 seats to NZ First. In other words, nearly a third of the resulting coalition government was made up of NZ First MPs. This made for a particularly fractious partnership, the longevity of which was, from the get-go, extremely doubtful. As the Lakota Native Americans used to say: “Too few to win, too many to die.” No one was surprised when the coalition broke apart well short of the 1999 election.

And yet, a replication of those 1996 coalition percentages would appear to be exactly what Seymour and his team are seeking in 2023. He is asking conservative New Zealanders to vote sufficient Act members into Parliament to ensure that National cannot simply brush aside their policy priorities. To convince them of the need to do this, he is reaching back into New Zealand’s political history.

But, does he have a case? Does history confirm that National campaigns from the right when it’s in opposition, only to govern from the left when its in government? The answer to this question is ….. complicated.

Certainly, one could make the case that the National Party leader, Sid Holland, was only able to defeat the First Labour Government, in 1949, by first promising to leave the essentials of Labour’s welfare state in place. In saying that, however, it is important to note that National’s pledge to undo Labour’s reforms, which had formed a crucial part of its appeal to the electorate in 1938, 1943 and 1946, had also been a crucial factor in its succession of electoral defeats.

Seymour needs to accept that if National had continued to refuse to accept that New Zealanders had no intention of losing their welfare state, then his party would likely have ended up in the same position as the conservative parties of Sweden: political losers for decade after decade.

What National did with the power in won in 1949, by accepting the welfare state, was to make damn sure it was not further extended. The fight Holland picked with the Watersiders Union, and the successful struggle he waged against the most militant elements of the trade union movement, shoved “Overton’s Window” sharply to the right. Holland’s and National’s vindication in the snap election of 1951, in which National won 54 percent of the popular vote, intimidated the Labour Party to such an extent that it would not be in a position to hold power for more than three years until the general election of 1984.

The other thing National did between 1949 and 1957 was make damn sure that Auckland became a city of cars, motorways and dormitory suburbs on the American model. The plans presented to Labour by the radical planners of the Ministry of Works in 1946 would have transformed Auckland into a city on the Scandinavian model: a state-designed and constructed network of public apartment complexes, connected by a comprehensive public transport system featuring light-rail and cycleways. If capitalists drive cars, and socialists ride trains, then National’s 1949 win proved to be an unequivocal capitalist victory!

Seymour is on firmer ground when he castigates National for perpetuating Labour policies following the defeat of the 1957-1960 government of Walter Nash. Between them, Labour’s Finance Minister, Arnold Nordmeyer, and its Trade & Industry Minister, Phil Holloway, set forth an ambitious plan to diversify and modernise the New Zealand economy. National’s Prime Minister, Keith Holyoake, saw no good reason to abandon Labour’s plan. Although the machinations of a young back-bencher, Robert Muldoon, did force him to tear up the already-signed contract for a massive cotton-mill in Nelson.

That same Robert Muldoon also gives the lie to Seymour’s claims about National governing from the left in the aftermath of its stunning landslide victory over Labour in 1975. It was, after all, Muldoon who scrapped the scheme that was set to become one of the greatest socialist achievements in this country’s history – the Third Labour Government’s New Zealand Superannuation Scheme. Had the scheme proceeded as planned, New Zealand’s current appalling infrastructure deficit would not exist. Nearly 50 years after he killed the scheme, Muldoon’s ruinously expensive pay-as-you-go replacement scheme still hangs like an albatross around the necks of young New Zealanders.

No doubt Seymour would counter that Muldoon ended up running New Zealand “like a Polish shipyard”, making him “the best leader Labour never had”. But Muldoon was never a socialist, he was only ever an idiosyncratic Keynesian who had somehow failed to receive the memo explaining the international conservative movement’s decisive break with the Keynesian post-war consensus. (Maybe that’s because the memo somehow fell into Labour’s hands!)

Labour’s adoption of neoliberalism via “Rogernomics” renders what remains of Seymour’s historical schema nonsensical. Since 1990, New Zealand’s economic, social and political settings have been robustly bi-partisan. Such reforms as have been passed never posed the slightest threat to the neoliberal status-quo. Paid Parental Leave, Working For Families, the re-creation of a state-owned bank, and minor tinkerings in the workplace-relations space, were measures that could just as easily have emerged from a shrewdly-led liberal/conservative government. That’s because they tend to make capitalism work more, not less, efficiently. They’re good for business.

Sadly for Seymour, History is not on his, or Act’s, side. National has dominated post-war New Zealand politics not by governing from the left, but by positioning itself in such a way as to render any argument for a radical left alternative to the status-quo vaguely ridiculous. National’s second victory, like Labour’s, was its defining moment. 1951, and all that, destroyed Labour as a driving and decisive working-class-based force in New Zealand society. And, National’s car-centric Auckland was just the oily icing on New Zealand capitalism’s cake.

Paradoxically, about the only eventuality that could reconstitute a genuine left-wing movement in New Zealand would be the election of a National-Act government pledged to implement David Seymour’s reactionary agenda of gutting the welfare state, further engorging the rich, upping the exploitation of the wage-earning workforce and igniting a race-war.

What History really tells us about New Zealand politics is that Kiwis will only vote for radical change in the direst of circumstances. And that the politicians who most often win our elections, are the ones who promise voters to keep as much as possible about their country exactly the same.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 11 July 2022.