In The Bonds Of Love We Meet

Ready To Work? The National Government's use of "Social Bonds" to reintegrate the mentally ill into the workforce will test the limits of the private sector's willingness to risk serious cash in attempting to resolve what the State long ago recognised as a knot of extremely complex and often intractable clinical conditions. How many corners will investors feel obliged to cut in order to protect their investment?

 

IMAGINE YOU’RE A SMALL EMPLOYER, and in need of an appropriately qualified and experienced assistant. You place an ad’ on Seek and, to your intense irritation, nothing happens. A not uncommon experience for small employers seeking qualified staff. New Zealand, it seems, has an overabundance of people without marketable skills, and a serious shortage of the sort of people small businesses need to become large ones.

 

Then, a week or so later, an e-mail arrives from an outfit calling itself the Employment Therapy Trust. Funded by the sale of Social Bonds to an impressive array of “good corporate citizens”, the Trust’s mandate is to facilitate the transition of mentally ill persons from state-supported living to productive work.

 

“The Trust is aware that your company is seeking the services of an appropriately qualified and experienced person”, the Trust’s e-mail observes. “We are confident that one of our current clients fulfils all of the requirements specified in your advertisement. Should you wish to discuss this offer further, or arrange an interview with our client, please do not hesitate to get in touch.”

 

What do you do? Your need for a capable assistant grows more urgent with every passing week, but the stigma of mental illness is very strong. How will your other employees react? Not to mention your customers? What if the “therapy” doesn’t work and the person becomes disruptive – dangerous even? There are a lot of factors to consider.

 

You decide to have a chat with someone from The Employment Therapy Trust.

 

What she tells you makes you wonder whether or not you’re in the right business.

 

The Trust is only a few months old, but already it has amassed working capital of around $5 million through the sale of special, government-issued, Social Bonds. Using this money, the Trust is offering Employers a substantial subsidy on the salary of any client hired for a period of not less than 90 days. Clients still in employment at the end of three months, the Trust’s representative informs you, are deemed by the Ministry of Health to have made a successful transition from welfare to work. If the Trust repeats this exercise to the extent specified in its contract with the Ministry, the holders of the Trust’s Social Bonds receive a generous dividend.

 

“Why only three months?” you ask the Trust’s representative. “Why not six months – or a year?”

 

She tells you that a period exceeding the specified three months would not only be too expensive for the Trust to subsidise, but that there was also considerable reluctance on the part of potential bondholders to support a longer transition period. Investors were fearful that the Trust’s clients might not be able to cope with a period of paid employment longer than 90 days.

 

“And the Government is prepared to wear this?” you ask, incredulously.

 

She explains that the Government’s priority is to reduce the cost to the taxpayer of supporting beneficiaries over the course of their whole lifetimes. The best way to do this, she says, is to come up with new ways of getting beneficiaries off the welfare rolls and keeping them off.

 

“That’s much easier to do”, she says, winking wickedly, “if the responsibility for helping beneficiaries transition from welfare to work is taken out of the hands of traditional service providers – public servants – and transferred to purpose-built private-sector providers like the Employment Therapy Trust.”

 

“Because once you’ve signed off a client as having held down a job for three months,” you respond, “that’s it. He’s cured. Off your hands.”

 

“And off the Government’s books!” she replies triumphantly.

 

“And everybody wins! The Government, by reducing the fiscal burden of long-term state dependency. The Trust, by keeping its contract. The Social Bond holders, by receiving a whacking great dollop of interest. The company, by filling its vacancy. And, hopefully, the client, through the multiple therapeutic benefits of re-joining the workforce!”

 

“That’s it exactly”, smiles the Trust’s representative.

 

You peruse, once again, the excellent CV she has handed you.

 

“And what happens if your client’s mental illness reasserts itself four or five months into his time with the company? What if his medication has to be increased and he’s no longer capable of doing the job?”

 

“Well,” she smiles, handing over her card, “you just give me a call. There’s plenty more where he came from!”

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 5 June 2015.

A Gangster's Charter: Bill English's "Social Investment" Budget.

A Gangster's Charter: Just think about everything that lay behind Tony Soprano’s cynical description of himself as a “waste management consultant”, and you’ll have a pretty good grip on what Bill English's 2015 Budget is all about.

 

NEXT THURSDAY, 21 May, is Budget Day. No, don’t yawn, because if the veteran political journalist, Richard Harmon, is right, then “next week will be a defining moment in the third term of this government and a critical point in its campaign to retain power in 2017.”

 

That “defining moment” will mark the commencement of the next great campaign in Neoliberalism’s thirty years war against collectivism and the public sphere.

 

Some will call it privatisation but that’s not really what this next phase is all about. If John Key and Bill English really wanted to privatise the provision of social welfare they would simply shut down the Ministry of Social Development, close all the Work and Income offices, and sell off every one of the country’s 60,000 State Houses to the highest bidder. The public schools and hospitals would suffer a similar fate.

 

No doubt most of the Decile 10 schools would be snapped-up at a good price. The big public hospitals in the main centres would, similarly, attract plenty of interest. But all those Decile 1 schools? Who would want to pour good money into them? And provincial hospitals? Not much scope for profit there.

 

No, what Bill English is planning is something very different from a straightforward reversion to the “night-watchmen state” so beloved by the followers of Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises.

 

In any case, it’s doubtful that such a radical step would save the government all that much in the way of expenditure. Casting adrift the poor on such a massive scale would necessitate huge increases in Vote Defence, Vote Police, Vote Courts and Vote Corrections. Much of the money saved by shutting down the welfare state would end up being spent defending whatever replaced it from the ravages of tens-of-thousands of desperate citizens with nothing left to lose.

 

The “Better Public Services Programme” that Bill English launches on Thursday (almost certainly under a new and catchier name) won’t be about relinquishing all state responsibility for the poor, the sick and the young, it will be about funding private entities to provide the services which, hitherto, have been provided by public servants.

 

In English’s own words to the Institute of Public Administration on 19 February 2015: “Testing for spending effectiveness will be core to this process. If we can’t measure effectiveness, it won’t be funded through social investment. We’ll be systematically reprioritising funding to providers that get results.”

 

To anyone who’s been following the commissioning of the new privately-run prison at Wiri, south of Auckland, all this talk of “social investment” and “providers” will sound very familiar. The taxpayers have spent millions on the construction of the Wiri facility, and the Government has just announced the laying-off of close to 200 prison officers from around the country in order to supply it with a core of highly-trained staff, but the actual running of the prison has been contracted-out to the multinational firm, Serco. For the next quarter-of-a-century a private entity will be permitted to extract a substantial profit for the provision of “services” for which the state has, quite rightly, accepted responsibility (without seeking a profit) for the past 200 years.

 

How has it come to this? Why is the National Government preparing to pay (with our money!) the private sector for taking over the provision of services the public sector is still perfectly capable of providing? In essence, the answer is: because in mature capitalist economies like New Zealand there’s bugger-all new profit-making opportunities available to the private sector. Hence its growing interest in “social investment”, a new kind of venture which promises to pay the private shareholder a handsome dividend without the necessity of massive capital outlays for plant and machinery – all of which is supplied up-front by the generous taxpayer.

 

This isn’t capitalism in any accepted sense of the word. It is, however, instantly recognisable to any enterprising gangster as an officially sanctioned opportunity for skimming-off-the-top.

 

A public body contracts a private institution to supply a much needed social service. The latter offers a price – which includes a hefty chunk of cash for its trouble – and then proceeds to utilise every possible means of cutting corners and short-changing its “customers” so that it can (in the unlikely event of being asked) present the public with a passable facsimile of the service it undertook to provide.

 

Just think about everything that lay behind Tony Soprano’s cynical description of himself as a “waste management consultant”, and you’ll have a pretty good grip on what Bill English and his government’s “defining moment” is all about.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Saturday, 16 May 2015.

Cooking The Medical Books: Citizens suffer in stoical silence so National can keep taxes low.

Suffering In Silence: The Government and its cash-strapped DHBs are relying upon the decency and stoicism of the average citizen to get them off the fiscal hook.

 

FUDGING THE FIGURES is what governments do when effective policy solutions are ruled off the table. According to Radio NZ News: “New research shows nearly 40 percent of patients who need hip and knee operations in at least two district health boards are not getting them because of budget restrictions. The study, published in The New Zealand Medical Journal, which looked at Northland and Hawke's Bay, found the drive to cut wait times has left 36 percent of patients with moderate to severe pain and disability untreated.”

 

Clearly, the now retired National Party Health Minister, Tony Ryall, was unable to persuade his fellow “Brat Packer”, Bill English, to appropriate sufficient funds to keep our public health service up to the job of actually serving the public.

 

One doesn’t imagine that English, an essentially decent politician, was very happy about this. But with his colleagues demanding lower taxes for the wealthiest New Zealanders (and some modest covering reductions for the rest of us) he was left with little choice. It would require a Labour-led government of more than usual fortitude and radicalism to institute the fiscal reforms necessary to ready the New Zealand health system for the influx of ageing Baby Boomers steadily falling prey to all the ills that flesh is heir to.

 

Tony Ryall’s response to his increasingly underfunded health system was, however, ethically extremely radical. According to the study published in The New Zealand Medical Journal, he simply invisiblised upwards of a third of New Zealanders in need of non-urgent surgical interventions.

 

Chairman of the Canterbury Charity Hospital Trust, Christchurch surgeon, Philip Bagshaw, told Radio NZ that focusing on the length of time people were waiting, rather than the length of the waiting lists themselves, was “a great way of hiding the scale of the problem”.

 

“It’s become smoke and mirrors”, said Mr Bagshaw. “They’ve created a self-fulfilling prophecy, so they say the waiting list is only six or four months, but that’s because they only allow that many people onto the waiting list.”

 

Smoke and mirrors it may have been, but the practice permitted Tony Ryall to boast that the time spent waiting for elective surgery was steadily decreasing. According to Mr Bagshaw, haemorrhoids, cataracts, hernias and varicose veins – among a host of other debilitating conditions – are simply not being treated in the public system until such time as serious complications render them acute – and costly.

 

Allowing the condition of sufferers to deteriorate to the point where they are forced to seek emergency admission to public hospitals is, not surprisingly, a considerably more expensive proposition, long term, than providing treatment early. “Investing in health early on is not only humane but also makes good economic sense because to do things in a timely way is the cheapest way,” Mr Bagshaw confirmed. “If you deny people treatment ... they come back later with bigger complications and cost more money.”

 

As scams go, however, this is a particularly clever one, because, obviously, not all of those sufferers rendered invisible will end up undergoing emergency surgery. Most will simply go on suffering, unheard and untreated.

 

In other words, the Government and its cash-strapped DHBs are relying upon the decency and stoicism of the average citizen to get them off the fiscal hook. Their deeply cynical – but apparently accurate – expectation has been that the voters will evince little interest in how Mr Ryall’s miracle is being achieved, just so long as the waiting period for elective surgery keeps decreasing. And so it proved. On Election Day, most people accepted without demur that John Key’s government was managing our public health system with considerable skill.

 

So, it’s ‘all good’ for the Government? Well, not necessarily. As the Baby Boomers find themselves relying more and more on the public health system, they are bound to flex their still massive demographic muscles to ensure that sufficient funding is appropriated to meet their growing needs. With everything to fight for in terms of free medical care, there is nothing to suggest that the ageing Boomers will not emulate the exemplary levels of electoral participation demonstrated by older voters generally. In securing their self-interested health objectives, the Boomers will be aided by the short-sighted failure of so many young voters to participate in the electoral system.

 

The politicians of the future will respond to the medical demands of the Boomers in the way politicians always do when presented with a choice between serving the interests of citizens who vote and the needs of citizens who stay at home. If young New Zealanders want a viable public health system to still be in place when they reach their 60s and 70s, then they’d better start voting in the same proportions as their elders. Otherwise the health statistics being fudged will be their own.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Saturday, 8 November 2014.

Something Fishy About Nick Smith's Game

Intimidator-in-Chief: For eight years Dr Nick Smith has worked hard to convince voters that he is the National Party's chief point of environmental resistance; the one brave voice raised in opposition to the milk-before-water lobbyists of Fonterra and Federated Farmers. Now we know that it isn't true.

DR NICK SMITH’S crude intimidation of the Fish and Game Council points to the bleakest of environmental futures should National be re-elected on 20 September. It is now considerably clearer than 60 percent of New Zealand’s lakes, rivers and streams that there are no serious points of environmental resistance in John Key’s Cabinet. For eight years Smith has worked hard to convince voters that he is, indeed, one such point of resistance, the one brave voice raised in opposition to the milk-before-water lobbyists of Fonterra and Federated Farmers. Now we know that it isn't true.

 

Smith’s threats to “tweak” the legislation establishing the Fish and Game Council is of a piece with this Government’s proven impatience with all forms of institutional dissent. It will not, it seems, be happy until every official check and balance against unbridled executive power has been neutralised.

 

Unless it is absolutely forced to (as in the case of Environment Canterbury) the Government’s strategy is not to make this suppression of dissenting voices explicit. Its preference is rather to intimidate these legislatively mandated watchdogs into silence. This can be effected in two ways. Either by appointing new and more malleable individuals to quasi-governmental boards and councils, or, by stripping those not subject to ministerial manipulation (like Fish and Game) of all their effective regulatory and/or advisory powers.

 

To casual observers it will appear as though nothing has changed because all the institutions created to permit democratic participation in the management of irreplaceable public resources will still be in place. But they will be looking at a regulatory ghost town. Behind the fading signage, nobody will be home.

 

A succession of National Party ministers have perfected this process by using the Department of Conservation as their guinea-pig. Since 2008 John Key’s government has systematically starved the "DoC" of the resources needed to properly manage and protect the vast estate it administers on the public’s behalf. Constant restructuring has allowed the Minister’s hand-picked managers to purge the Department of its experts and visionaries, wipe clean its institutional memory and leave in place only those willing to make the best of a situation which long ago made the transition from bad to worse.

 

Smith calls Key’s administration a “Blue-Green Government”. But the veteran conservationists, Guy Salmon and Gary Taylor, who established the original blue-green political party, the Progressive Greens, would almost certainly disagree. Much has changed since the early 1990s when Nick Smith and his fellow “Brat Packers”, Bill English, Roger Sowry and Tony Ryall, first entered Parliament.

 

Back then it was still possible for a National Party Environment Minister, Simon Upton, to seriously pursue the idea of a Carbon Tax. Over the past twenty years, however, the ideological and political consolidation of Neoliberalism has downgraded the natural environment to the status of a mere sub-set of the economy when, in reality, it is the other way round. 

 

Neoliberals quickly grasped the deadly threat the science of ecology posed to the re-emergence of laissez-faire capitalism. In Marxist terms, the planet’s finite capacity to absorb the deadly externalities of carbon-based industrial civilisation constituted “the final contradiction”. Capitalism must either be tamed or it and the civilisation which created it will perish.

 

Rather than accept this last, irrefutable, existential challenge to Capitalism its defenders have opted instead for the politics of outright denial. But climate change “scepticism” is only the tip of the rapidly melting iceberg when it comes to the political and cultural consequences of Neoliberalism’s refusal to face the facts of anthropogenic global warming.

 

Resisting “the final contradiction” requires neoliberalism to destroy the rationalist and scientific foundations of the industrial civilisation upon which it stands. This can only be accomplished by undermining the public’s faith in the scientific method and investing all opinions – no matter how absurd – with a spurious equivalence. Evidence-based decision-making, which former National politicians like Simon Upton accepted as the sine qua non of competent and rational governance, is being supplanted by ‘evidence’ commissioned and purchased on the open market from ‘experts’ who specialise in telling Capitalism and its political agents exactly what they want to hear. (Alister Barry’s documentary film, Hot Air, shows how the Carbon Lobby and Federated Farmers utilised this technique to delay and/or defeat every attempt by successive New Zealand governments to combat climate change.)

 

The politics of denial also requires the complete hollowing out of those state institutions deliberately constructed to collect evidence from individuals and groups best placed to provide it. Institutions – like Fish and Game – whose democratic composition protects the processes of gathering evidence from those with a vested interest in suppressing information antithetical to their purposes.

 

When it comes to the Department of Conservation, Nick Smith and his colleagues know they have nothing to fear – as the censoring of the evidence DoC's scientists had gathered about the ecological effects of the proposed Ruataniwha Dam made clear. But Fish and Game and uncooperative Regional Councils still have an evidential sword to draw in defence of Mother Nature.

 

Shut them down.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 28 July 2014.

Budget Alternatives And Alternative Budgets

Walking The Talk: The NLP's 1991 Alternative Budget. NewLabour's leader Jim Anderton understood the political and ethical rewards accruing from his party's willingness to show the voters not only what they wanted to do - but how they intended to pay for it. Act's new leader, Jamie Whyte, has just picked up the idea. What's stopping Labour from putting some numbers alongside its promises?

 

IT WAS ONE OF THE THINGS I admired most about the NewLabour Party (and later the Alliance) – it’s Alternative Budget. From its inception, in 1989, until its absorption into the Alliance, the NLP Leader, Jim Anderton, made a point of pre-empting the Government’s official Budget Statement with one of his own.

 

Along with Anderton, himself, the alternative document was put together by the NLP’s economic consultants, John Lepper and Petrus Simons, with invaluable input from the University of Otago’s Professor James R. Flynn. The irrepressible Flynn was the party’s unofficial conscience when it came to fiscal policy, insisting that it was politically unethical and tactically foolish to offer voters all manner of benefits without, at the same time, demonstrating how the party intended to pay for them.

 

It was Flynn’s stated intention to make not only his party comrades, but also the wider electorate, understand that democratic socialist outcomes could not be guaranteed in the absence of democratic socialist taxes. He knew that the fastest and most effective way of turning a party of idealists into a party of realists and pragmatists was by showing them how high income taxes would have to rise in order for them to cover the costs of what Bill English describes sneeringly as “nice to haves”.

 

It was very instructive to observe how the policy maximalists would wince when they saw how high the income taxes of not just the obscenely wealthy but ordinary middle-class professionals and skilled wage workers would have to rise if the Party’s pet projects were to go ahead. The wily old Flynn knew that the prospect of having to levy politically suicidal income tax rates would spur the membership into moderating their demands and searching for alternative methods of revenue-gathering. The result was the NLP/Alliance’s adoption of the Financial Transactions Tax – a measure which, very neatly, solved the problem of how to pay for paradise.

 

The preparation of an alternative budget is a highly educational (not to say therapeutic) exercise for any political party, but it is especially useful for radical parties like the NLP/Alliance and ACT.

 

That the ACT Party’s new leader, Jamie Whyte, not only recognises this but has actually gone ahead and released an alternative budget bodes very well for the party’s electoral future. At the very least it has forced ACT’s members into thinking seriously about where they want the country to go and how they propose to take it there.

 

Getting In On The Act: Jamie Whyte recently released his party's own Alternative Budget.

 

As neoliberals, not democratic socialists, the task confronting ACT’s members would have been pretty much the opposite of the one facing the NLP/Alliance. Rather than starting with all the things they’d like to have and then calculating how much tax would be needed to pay for them, ACT’s members began by asking themselves how far taxes should be lowered and then worked out how many government services and transfer payments would have to be eliminated to make that figure possible.

 

The answer, of course, turned out to be: “A helluva lot!”

 

Whether the scale of expenditure cuts required to produce a top income tax rate of 17 percent made ACT’s members wince I do not know, but, after reading their alternative budget, I’d wager that very few of them were in any doubt about the radicalism of their party.

 

Why 17 percent?

 

Well, I have a theory about this seemingly random number. Originally, I suspect, the desired top tax rate was deemed to be 10 percent. But, when ACT’s economic advisors told them that to bring the top rate down to that level would require them taking a very large and a very blunt axe to health, education and welfare spending, they reluctantly decided that, 10 percent being electorally suicidal, a higher figure was required. Hence 17 percent.

 

Set at this level, Whyte is able to reassure (the Epsom?) voters that taxes can be lowered dramatically without slaughtering the New Zealand electorate’s sacred cows.

 

It is interesting to note that immediately following the release of its alternative budget the value of ACT’s “stocks” on iPredict rose to 3.8 cents. In other words the political speculators now expect ACT to win nearly 4 percent of the Party Vote.

 

Why, then, does Labour not produce an Alternative Budget? Wouldn’t such an exercise be of enormous assistance in putting some credible flesh on the bones of Opposition policy? Would it not ensure that when John Key, channelling Tom Cruise, began shouting: “Show me the money!” the Leader of the Opposition was well equipped to do exactly that?

 

Because, when you think about it, there’s really no excuse for an opposition party not being able to cover its policy bones with detailed flesh of. Opposition politicians would, after all, like us to believe that they have what it takes to form an alternative government. So, surely, within its ranks there ought to be sufficient wit and experience to pull together an alternative budget?

 

Oh yes, I know, the political “strategists” will have none of it. “Why show the Government your hand?” They will ask. “Why risk Treasury ripping all your numbers to shreds? The resources just aren’t there for the Opposition to even contemplate producing a document to challenge the government’s budget statement.”

 

But no one’s asking for that sort of detail. All Labour’s supporters want to hear is the two Davids – Cunliffe and Parker – making confident replies to Government and news media questions about numbers. The policies of the alternative government have got to add up. If working people are going to be better-off – or worse-off – as a result of Labour’s policies, then surely they have a right to know by how much? If Phil Twyford wants to be believed when he says the next Labour Government will build 10,000 affordable homes every year, then he must be able to quantify “affordable” in a way that makes sense to a young couple bringing in $70,000 per year.

 

The so-called “cheese-on-toast” budget that National will deliver on 15 May is unlikely to be spectacular – but it doesn’t have to be. The Government will simply point to their handling of the Global Financial Crisis; to steadily expanding economic activity; to rising business confidence and falling unemployment and say: “See? It’s steady as she goes. The economy’s in safe hands.” The advantages of incumbency are numerous and usually decisive.

 

Unless.

 

Unless they are systematically undermined by an Opposition with a clear and compelling story to tell. Using broad brush strokes to outline their alternative narrative, but also supplying sufficient detail for ordinary people to be able to imagine themselves into the story.

 

If there really is an alternative – for God’s sake, let’s hear it!

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 14 May 2014.

Citizens Left Out Of The Water Equation

Enjoy It While You Can: The Tukituki River sparkles in the Hawkes Bay sun, but if the Ruataniwha Dam is built and intensive dairying is made possible further upstream, this iconic river will swiftly be transformed into what Green Party co-leader, Russel Norman, predicts will be "an industrial drain". Water is fast becoming New Zealand's most valuable natural resource and Federated Farmers - aided and abetted by the National Government - is determined to place that resource in private hands.

THERE’S ALWAYS A MOMENT when we realise that power has shifted. Trusted people and institutions suddenly turn against us. Those whose job it is to assess and avert public risk disappear. We hear rumours about wholesale sackings and forced resignations. Obvious and serious conflicts of interest are studiously ignored. And those in charge, while not guilty of telling outright lies, have unquestionably stopped telling us the whole truth.

 

Such extreme power shifts are generally confined to the corporate sector. And while they are never pleasant, and often very costly in personal terms, most of us nevertheless accept the process. The business world is not a democratic world: its unfairness and rapacity is largely beyond our control. Businesses fail, are sold, merged, asset-stripped, re-branded and downsized – and there’s not a lot any of us can do about it.

 

Beyond the business world, however, we do not expect to be left out of the equation. Employees may be required to subordinate their judgement to the entity paying their wages but, constitutionally-speaking, citizens are sovereign: their democratic judgements not subject to private-sector countermand.

 

Citizens do not take kindly to being treated as if they were employees.

 

But this is precisely what is happening. All over the country: from the Canterbury Plains to the Tukituki River in Hawke’s Bay; private interests are muscling in on public resources; compromising the integrity of public institutions; and trampling with ill-disguised contempt upon the rights of New Zealand citizens.

 

And at the heart of this power grab is – water.

 

 

I SHOULDN’T BE SURPRISED. On 19 November 2008, just eleven days after the election of the current government, myself and the right-wing political commentator, Matthew Hooton, were invited to address the National Executive of Federated Farmers.

 

Coming away from that meeting, I was impressed by three things.

 

The first was how much the Federated Farmers CEO, Conor English, looked and sounded like his brother, Bill, the newly elected government’s Finance Minister.

 

The second was the presence of Dr William Rolleston. Until that moment, I had only known Dr Rolleston in his role as one of New Zealand’s most outspoken advocates of genetically engineered agricultural production. That he was so closely associated with Federated Farmers was something I probably should have known, but was still rather disturbed to find out.

 

The third, and by far the most important, thing I took away from that meeting was Conor English giving me a quiet “heads-up” that the most important issue facing Federated Farmers, and New Zealand, over the next few decades would be the issue of who controlled access to what was fast becoming the nation’s most valuable natural resource – water.

 

 

MOST NEW ZEALANDERS don’t think too much about water. Most of us live in cities and towns which, for the better part of a hundred years, have enjoyed a plentiful, safe and remarkably cheap water supply. In the odd drought year we townies may be asked to refrain from watering our gardens, but most of us, for most of the time, don’t give water a second thought.

 

Matters are very different in the countryside.

 

Over the course of the past twenty years the New Zealand landscape has been transformed by the extraordinary growth of the dairy industry. Where once the cargo vessels leaving our ports were loaded down with carcasses of frozen lamb and bales of wool – as well as butter and cheese – our agricultural exports are today dominated the thousands of tons of top-quality milk powder produced by New Zealand’s world-beating dairy farmers.

 

That milk powder earns this country billions of dollars every year, but dairying’s “white gold” comes at a heavy cost. The successful dairy farm not only requires millions of litres of water by way of an input, but its hundreds of cows also discharge equally vast quantities of effluent by way of an output. That effluent inevitably makes its way into the nation’s waterways – polluting them to the extent that the lower reaches of more than half of New Zealand’s largest and most magnificent rivers are no longer safe to fish or swim in. And neither are their tributaries.

 

 

THE SHUTTING DOWN of democracy in the Canterbury Regional Council, and the more recent suppression of a Department of Conservation draft report on the sustainability of the Ruataniwha Dam, represent the working out in political terms of Conor English’s heads-up warning of five years ago.

 

New Zealand’s dairy farmers, and the enormous economic interests they represent, have decided to privatise the nation’s water resources – and the government is helping them do it.

 

Dr William Rolleston has even enlisted the reality of Global Warming to advance Federated Farmers’ cause: While New Zealand has plenty of water, he says, it's not always in the right place at the right time.

But, presumably, it will soon be in the right hands.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 1 October 2013.

The Paradox Of The Free Market

Non-Market Player: A Greenpeace protester position's himself in the path of the Orient Explorer as part of the ultimately successful campaign to drive deep-sea oil prospector, Petrobras, out of the Raukumara Basin. The National Government now proposes to make such protests illegal. It is the great paradox of "free" markets that they require an ever-stronger state to keep them functioning.

AT THE HEART of the so-called “free market” is a puzzling paradox.

 

Around the world, the justification for implementing free market policies was said to be the damaging effects of state intervention on economic performance. In his inaugural address, that arch free-marketeer, President Ronald Reagan, warned his fellow Americans that “Government isn’t the solution … Government is the problem.”

 

For prosperity to be guaranteed, argued the free marketeers, the power of the state must be curtailed, and its interfering hands forcefully removed from the economic levers.

 

The paradox of the free market lies in the political implications of those two words: “curtailed” and “forcefully”.

 

To prevent non-market players from intervening in the economic life of society and increase the scope and freedom of market forces, the power of the state must not, under any circumstances, be “curtailed”. Quite the opposite, in fact: to protect the operations of the free market, the capacity of the State to act “forcefully” must be increased.

 

The latest proof of the free-market paradox comes in the form of an announcement from Energy and Resources Minister, Simon Bridges.

 

In his media statement of 31 March, Mr Bridges states:

 

“The Government is proposing stronger measures to protect offshore petroleum and minerals activity from unlawful interference”.

 

In a Supplementary Order Paper to the Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill the Cabinet has provided for a firming up of the protection available to “lawful offshore petroleum and minerals activity”. The SOP, to be tabled in Parliament, also gives new enforcement powers to police and defence force personnel.

 

Explaining the Government’s decision, Mr Bridges points to recent attempts to “seriously disrupt lawful mining and related activities”. Such actions, says the Minister, “impose significant costs on companies carrying out legitimate activities under permits, and present very serious health hazards and safety risks”.

 

Those “recent activities” no doubt refer to the successful 2012 campaign by Greenpeace and a local Maori organisation, Te Whanau a Apanui, to disrupt and dissuade the giant, state-owned Brazilian energy company, Petrobras, from continuing its deep-sea oil prospecting in the Raukumara Basin off East Cape.

 

The most effective protest action of the Greenpeace/ Te Whanau a Apanui Campaign involved a small flotilla of seven boats sailing into Petrobras’s prospecting zone and taking up positions around its large survey vessel, the Orient Explorer.

 

When a local Maori fisherman, Elvis Teddy, steered his own vessel, the San Pietro, across the Orient Explorer’s path, dropping buoys and long-lines, the National-led Government authorised the Police and New Zealand Defence Force naval units to move in and arrest him.

 

Powerful Combination: Elvis Teddy's San Pietro sails towards its confrontation with the Orient Explorer. The pairing of Greenpeace and Te Whanau a Apanui proved to be a winning political formula in the campaign against deep-sea oil prospecting off East Cape.

 

To the Government’s dismay, the charges against Mr Teddy were later dropped. The Court declined jurisdiction because the protest action took place outside New Zealand’s twelve nautical miles territorial limit.

 

Earlier this year, on 13 January, Petrobras announced it was pulling out of New Zealand.

 

Minister Bridges “stronger measures” are designed to prevent any further protest interventions along the lines of those developed by Greenpeace/ Te Whanau A Apanui.

 

“The changes address a gap in the current legislation. They provide an effective deterrent, and readily workable operational powers, to act against unlawful interference with legitimate exploration and production activities.” Mr Bridges stated.

 

Future protest groups face jail sentences and massive fines if they violate a “notified minimum non-interference distance” of up to 500 metres.

 

What just happened here?

 

The National-led Government is keen to develop energy potential of the Raukumara Basin. Accordingly, it invites large multinational energy companies to acquire the necessary permits and begin prospecting.

 

Greenpeace, in alliance with Te Whanau a Apanui, oppose deep-sea oil drilling as an unacceptable threat to both the kai moana of local whanau and hapu, and the acutely vulnerable deep sea environment. They point to the devastating Deepwater Horizon disaster which spilled billions of litres of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

 

Now, consider the State’s role in this classic stand-off.

 

From the outset it has given preference to market over non-market interests. In spite of the fact that New Zealand lacks both the technology and the financial resources to adequately respond to a deep-sea drilling malfunction on the scale of the Deepwater Horizon spill, it promotes and facilitates deep-sea prospecting in the Raukumara Basin.

 

Thwarted by the Court’s refusal to punish the behaviour of the protest flotilla, the National-led Government sets about equipping the State with new, quite draconian, powers to protect any future oil-prospecting multinational corporations from the physical obstruction (and attendant publicity) of Greenpeace’s “Stop Deep Sea Oil” protest campaign.

 

It will soon be perfectly lawful to deploy the New Zealand armed forces to protect and defend not the victims of war or natural disaster, but vast, privately-owned corporations whose profit-seeking activities threaten both the New Zealand environment and economy.

 

Whose freedom is the Government protecting here? The market’s, or our own?

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 2 April 2013.

An Accumulation Of Scandals

A Queen's Ransom: Star of The Affair of the Necklace, Hillary Swank, wears a replica of the ruinously expensive necklace which, in 1785, engulfed the French Queen, Marie Antoinette, in scandal. The Affair proved to be the tipping point for the French people's tolerance of monarchy. If the scandal over Solid Energy's ruin isn't enough to tip the New Zealand people into open rebellion against the excesses of its elites - what will?

 

THE AFFAIR of the Necklace was a sensation. Four years before the outbreak of the French Revolution, this extraordinary story of royal profligacy, political intrigue and criminal fraud at first mesmerised, then outraged, the French people.

 

The centuries-old bond between the French Crown and its subjects (already frayed by years of famine and excessive taxation) was broken. Ears that had been closed to the arguments of those advocating radical change were suddenly open. The magic of monarchy had been exposed as a charlatan’s trick – nothing more than political sleight-of-hand.

 

Today, the Affair of the Necklace would probably be described as a “tipping point”: that moment when an accumulation of events, each of themselves too insignificant to call into question the viability of a social or political system, suddenly acquires the necessary weight to bring it crashing down.

 

Last week’s revelations concerning Dr Don Elder, the former boss of Solid Energy, set me to wondering whether New Zealand might be close to experiencing its own Affair of the Necklace – and what such a scandal might mean for John Key’s government.

 

Could the revelations relating to Dr Elder’s sudden departure from Solid Energy be compared to the Affair of the Necklace?  They have certainly provided New Zealanders with a rare glimpse of the world in which New Zealand’s wealthiest and most powerful men and women go about their business.

 

And the parallels with pre-revolutionary France are startling.

 

Solid Energy’s corporate headquarters (dubbed “The Palace” by its detractors) neatly fills the role of Louis XVI’s sprawling Palace of Versailles. Behind its glittering façade, Dr Elder surrounded himself with an astonishing four hundred employee “aristocrats” on salaries in excess of $100,000. Dr Elder himself, over a decade of service to Solid Energy, was paid the kingly sum of $10 million.

 

And yet, in spite of these extraordinary rewards (not to mention the millions paid out as executive bonuses) we are told that Solid Energy, with debts approaching $400 million, is teetering on the brink of insolvency. Unsurprisingly, both Dr Elder’s and the Solid Energy Board of Directors’ stewardship of what was once a highly profitable state-owned enterprise has come in for swingeing criticism.

 

Hence the public’s shocked disbelief at the news that Dr Elder, though no longer in charge of Solid Energy, is still receiving a salary of $27,000 per week. Last Thursday, the company’s interim Chairman, Mark Ford, informed Parliament’s equally disbelieving Commerce Select Committee that the former CEO’s unique knowledge and understanding of Solid Energy, considered vital to the company achieving a smooth leadership transition, required Dr Elder to be kept on the payroll.

 

A Kingly Salary: In spite of the fact that he no longer runs Solid Energy, Don Elder continues to be paid $675.00 per hour, or $27,000 per week.

 

Given the fact that Dr Elder was continuing to be paid $675 per hour by the taxpayer-owned SOE, the Opposition members of the Commerce Select Committee argued they had as much right to hear Dr Elder’s insights into what went wrong at Solid Energy as Mr Ford and his board. With very few opportunities available for the public scrutiny of the SOEs’ performance, the Opposition insisted that their select committee appearances be models of transparency.

 

Alas, Dr Elder – like Miss Otis in the song – could only present his “regrets”. And Mr Ford was not disposed to mandate his employee’s appearance before the Committee. Accordingly, the people’s representatives – in marked contrast to the interim Chairman and his corporate colleagues – were not entrusted with the reasons for Solid Energy’s sudden reversal of fortune.

 

The demise of Solid Energy and Dr Elder’s fall from grace is a salutary tale, but it is not, I would hazard, the tipping point which the Affair of the Necklace became.

 

It was, after all, the innocent (but deeply unpopular) Queen Marie Antoinette who ended up wearing the blame for the loss of her father-in-law’s ruinously expensive piece of bling. That was important, because in Marie Antoinette the scandal acquired a target more-or-less guaranteed to generate the kind of visceral reactions that shift public consciousness.

 

These are the scandals that threaten governments.

 

The Solid Energy debacle remains, however, a significant contribution to the accumulation of scandals already weighing down the National-led Government’s scales.

 

That it has not provoked a response as damaging to our Prime Minister as the Affair of the Necklace proved to King Louis XVI and his queen, is probably because Dr Elder remains a largely abstract symbol of the vast gulf that now yawns between the elites who run New Zealand and mass of the people who must bear the cost of their delinquency.

 

The New Zealand public was alarmed and affronted by the Solid Energy story, but it was not enraged. Mr Key and his government should give thanks for a lucky escape.

 

They should also move quickly to reduce their vulnerability to the depredations of elites who seem to have forgotten how quickly the status quo can become the ancien regime.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 12 March 2013.

Lovers And Haters: Further Thoughts On The Hobbit Dispute

Enforcing Difference: In the American South, during the "Jim Crow" era, it was as vital for whites to engage in discrimination as it was for blacks to suffer it. In New Zealand, during the Hobbit Controversy, it was vital that most Kiwis be seen to be backing Sir Peter Jackson and his anti-union allies. "Hobbit Hater!" - like "Nigger Lover!" - is an insult designed to both discipline and isolate the dissenting minority from the assenting majority.

“NIGGER LOVER!” No accusation was more feared by white citizens of the old American South. Upon its recipients’ shoulders descended – with the sting of an overseer’s stock-whip – the entire, obdurate and unyielding expectations of Dixie’s racially-defined culture.

 

Following the withdrawal of the federal government’s army of occupation in 1877, a “Nigger Lover” was any Southern white who dared to deviate from the brutal racist consensus which,  vote by vote, law by law, lynching by lynching, was rebuilding white supremacy in the states of the shattered Confederacy.

 

It is a fact easily forgotten that the “Jim Crow” segregationist regimes of the South were as dependent on the willingness of whites to enforce their will, as they were on the legally engineered incapacity of blacks to defy them.

 

Securing the full co-operation of Southern whites in the grim business of exploiting Southern blacks, required constant and unrelenting ideological effort. The beneficiaries of segregation had to be reassured that the racist rules of their society represented not simply the most practical answer to the “race question”, but also constituted its best, self-evidently moral, resolution.

 

To ignore or openly defy the Jim Crow Laws of the South, by reaching out to one’s black neighbours, workmates or employees was, in effect, to engage in an act of brazen subversion. To treat African-Americans as equals was to concede their full constitutional status, both as human-beings and citizens, and thus to acknowledge their right to all the opportunities and services denied by segregation.

 

“Nigger Lover!”, therefore, wasn’t merely a declaration of racist scorn, it was a reminder – a very sharp reminder – of the white individual’s obligation to maintain solidarity with every other beneficiary of racist bigotry. The whole socio-economic and political order of the South, and their status within it, required whites (either passively or actively, as the situation dictated) to hate and oppress their black neighbours.

 

THESE MUSINGS on the most devastating disciplinary insult of the Old South were prompted by the past week’s recapitulation of the so-called “Hobbit Crisis” of October 2010.

 

The release by both the National-led Government and the Council of Trade Unions of hitherto withheld documents and e-mails has confirmed the reportage of that very small number of journalists who refused to accept the “official version” of events which so inflamed New Zealanders at the time. (Again, I raise my hat to Radio New Zealand’s Brent Edwards and Scoop’s Gordon Campbell.)

 

We know now that the “official version” of events, the version scripted by Sir Peter Jackson and the National Government, and relayed almost verbatim to the public by a distressingly large section of the news media, bore very little relation to what was actually happening.

 

Being wrong, however, in no way reduced the “official version’s” effectiveness. Sir Peter is a master story-teller and the tale he wove around the hapless Actors Equity Union was one from which it could not escape.

 

Hobbit Lovers: Even children were enrolled in the campaign to prevent the New Zealand film industry from being unionised.

 

Because Actors Equity wasn’t simply the villain of Sir Peter’s particular story. His admirers were encouraged to see it as something more: a generic enemy which threatened not only The Hobbit and the local film industry to which it was so important, but also the whole way of doing business in Twenty-First Century New Zealand.

 

It is important to recall the context in which the Hobbit Crisis took place. The world remained in the grip of the Global Financial Crisis, the Labour Party was moving to the left, and the trade union movement had just held a series of mass rallies around the country. On the right of politics there was a sense of unease – a feeling that, after thirty years of steady advance, its ideology was in retreat.

 

Sir Peter’s genius allowed him to transform the question of whether The Hobbit would be filmed in New Zealand, and under what sort of labour relations regime, into a litmus test of people’s allegiance to the social, economic and political realities of the “new” New Zealand.

 

The actual provenance of the epithet used by those opposing the efforts of Actors Equity and the CTU to unionise the New Zealand film industry is unclear. What cannot be disputed, however, is its impact. “Hobbit Hater” – like “Nigger Lover” – branded the recipient as someone hostile to the objectives of national revitalisation. Someone who still saw ordinary workers – even actors – as people with a legal right to bargain collectively for higher wages and improved conditions.

 

“Hobbit Haters” were the sort of people who wanted to return New Zealand to the bad old days of unbridled union power. “Hobbit Haters” had no respect for Weta Workshop’s Sir Richard Taylor or his army of “independent contractors”. “Hobbit Haters” were people who stood in the way of jobs and prosperity – like Labour and the Greens.

 

“Hobbit Haters”, like “Nigger Lovers”, refused to recognise what was good for them.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 5 March 2013.

Indisputable Mandate

Key Policy: In 2011 Labour made opposition to a partial sale of the state's energy assets the centerpiece of its election campaign. National's long-signalled privatisation plans were thus thrown into sharp electoral focus. Significantly, the final result put Labour 20 percentage points behind National. With nearly 50 percent of the votes cast, Mr Key's Government not surprisingly claimed a strong mandate to proceed with its sales programme.

THE TARGET of 310,000 signatures has been reached – or so we are told. The coalition of interest groups and political parties seeking a Citizens’ Initiated Referendum (CIR) on the National Government’s plans to partially privatise the state-owned energy generators has yet to submit its petition to the Clerk of the House for checking. But even if this final hurdle is cleared, the petitioners will still have to find their way around a much more daunting obstacle: the Government’s mandate.

 

That the Government has a mandate to sell-off 49 percent of Mighty River Power, Genesis, Meridian and Solid Energy is hotly contested by the four organisations petitioning for a CIR. Grey Power, The NZ Council of Trade Unions, The Labour Party and The Greens all deny the legitimacy of the Government claiming a specific electoral mandate for its partial privatisation programme. According to the petitioners’, the voters have (at best) given the National-led Government a general mandate. To claim a specific mandate, they say, it must first ask the electorate a specific question – hence the need for a referendum.

 

This argument would carry more weight if the National Party’s principal challenger in the 2011 General Election – the Labour Party – hadn’t itself specified National’s privatisation plans as the best reason for voting it out of office. “Stop Asset Sales” was the Labour Party’s most coherent slogan in 2011. That only 27.4 percent of the voters were prepared to back its flagship policy with their ballots strongly suggests that privatisation was not the electoral game-changer Labour’s focus-groups had suggested.

 

The Greens’ were much less willing than Labour to give the privatisation issue such critical electoral salience. They promised New Zealanders “a richer future” of which the retention of state assets was certainly an important (but not an essential) feature. How, then, can the Greens argue that National’s claim to a specific electoral mandate is illegitimate when their own policy pitch was so general? If National isn’t entitled to claim a specific mandate for asset sales, then, by the same logic, the Greens cannot claim one against them.

 

The same applies to all the other political parties offering manifestoes in which, inter alia, the Government’s plans to partially privatise the State’s energy companies were opposed. It’s simply not fair to aggregate the Greens 11.6 percent, NZ First’s 6.5 percent, the Maori Party’s 1.4 percent, Mana’s 1.0 and the Conservative Party’s 2.6 percent of the Party Vote with Labour’s 27.4 percent to claim a minimum anti-asset sales bloc of 50.5 percent. Opposition to asset sales was not deemed important enough to preclude a confidence and supply agreement between National and the Maori Party. Nor would it have been had the Conservatives managed to cross the 5 percent threshold.

 

National, of course, has no need to aggregate percentages for its partial privatisation programme as desperately as its opponents. With 47.3 percent of the Party Vote, the governing party came within an ace of securing an absolute majority of the votes cast. It would have been an outstanding tally even under the old First-Past-the-Post electoral system, but coming within 2.8 percent of an outright majority under our Mixed-Member-Proportional system was close to miraculous. Any political party racking up such a total is entitled to claim a very strong electoral mandate for all its policies.

 

National’s claim to a specific mandate for its asset sales programme is, accordingly, very strong. The policy was announced nearly a year prior to the election and was subjected to the intense scrutiny of not only the parliamentary opposition, but also the news media and a broad cross-section of civil society. The 2011 election was no 1980s or 1990s exercise in duplicity and fraud: the public understood that a vote for National was a vote to privatise 49 percent of Solid Energy, Meridian, Genesis and Mighty River Power. Nearly half of them voted for the Government anyway. If Prime Minister John Key’s government doesn’t have a mandate to proceed with its privatisation policy, then the word no longer has any political meaning.

 

New Zealand’s representative system of government entrusts the administration of the nation to the political party, or parties, which alone, or in combination, command a majority in the House of Representatives. National and its allies played by these rules – and won. Their performance referendum is scheduled for 2014 – and it’s binding.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 11 January 2013.

John Key's "New Men" Could Learn A Lot From National's "Wise Heads"

Risen Without Trace: John Key and Steven Joyce are the true heirs of Muldoonism which overturned the "natural" social hierachy of Old Values, Old Families and Old Money. If Jack is as good as his masters, then, eventually, his masters will end up being no worse, and no better, than Jack.

THERE WAS A TIME when even the National Party had some class. It might have given us Sid Holland and Rob Muldoon, but it also gave us Ralph Hanan, Tom Shand, Brian Talboys, Alan Highet, Les Gandar and Simon Power. Following every election, former provincial chairmen of Federated Farmers and sharp-eyed small town accountants would be met at the doors of Parliament by a sleek collection of urbane professionals. These men knew how to smooth the rough edges off their doltish country cousins and how to keep them at a safe distance from all those responsibilities of government requiring just a little more in the way of intellectual refinement than the average backbencher could muster.

It was, of course, an era when most conservatives (and even some on the Left) still respected the “natural social hierarchies”. Old money wisely invested, an excellent education at expensive private schools, a decent law degree leading to a partnership in a well-established practice – these were the things that gave a man the “right to rule”.

Privately, such men would acknowledge that their side had rather seriously “dropped the ball” in the 1920s and 30s. They knew how large a debt they owed to men like Savage, Fraser and Nash who had pulled local capitalism’s irons out of the fire of the Great Depression. The value of Labour’s stabilisation policies – especially in the countryside – were quietly acknowledged and National was in no hurry to get rid of them. The unions needed a firm hand, of course, which is why they elevated a man like Sid Holland every now and again to put a bit of stick about. But, after the thrashing, it was to “Kiwi Keith” Holyoake that the “wise heads” of National turned. Someone who could keep the peace.

Though people were slow to register the fact, it was Rob Muldoon who undermined the “natural hierarchies” of New Zealand politics and opened the gates of New Zealand conservatism to the barbarians.

Some historians have described Muldoon as “the best leader Labour never had” and that, of course, was the explanation for his political success. As Labour, in its own way, began paying homage to the “natural social hierarchies” by selecting young urban professionals like Dr Michael Bassett and Richard Prebble to represent its solid working-class constituencies, Labour’s supporters began edging away. Muldoon’s pugnacious populism gave them somewhere to go.

Political Superstar: Rob Muldoon kept Labour out, and let Neoliberalism in.

“Rob’s Mob”, both within the National Party and the wider electorate, represented the revolt of the “average Kiwi” and the “ordinary bloke” against the “natural social hierarchies” of education, intellectual and cultural accomplishment and inherited wealth. Muldoon’s appointment of Merv Wellington as Minister of Education and Bert Walker as Minister of Social Welfare was all the proof sophisticated New Zealanders required that the Visigoths had entered Rome.

That Muldoon turned out to be the staunchest defender of the “stabilised” New Zealand society which emerged from the Second World War is ironic. Well before most New Zealanders, he understood how deadly a threat the “free market” ideology posed to the unlikely alliance which, since the early 1950s, had united the fortunes of New Zealand’s conservative working-class with its paternalistic, state-subsidised, ruling-class. Neoliberalism was a radical economic and social doctrine destined to sweep away not only the organised labour movement, but also the social power of both intellectual accomplishment and “old money”. Muldoon’s populism undermined the “wise heads” by proclaiming the “Mob” their equals, but in doing so he opened the door to a radical right-wing movement that would undermine the “Mob’s” security forever. Henceforth, the only hierarchy that mattered would be the hierarchy of money.

And so, in 2012, the National Party is led by a man with a personal fortune of $55 million. Not old money, either, but as new as computerised currency trading. His right-hand man, Steven Joyce, is another of these “new” men, these National politicians who’ve “risen without trace”. Entrepreneurial in politics as well as business, their values are those of self-made people everywhere. Only results count. Intelligence must pay its way. The world does not reward you for what you know, only for what you do. The successful man backs his judgement by any and all available means. Truth counts for a great deal less than utility.

Overwhelmingly, they are men and women who dwell in the present. Because nothing is more subversive of their self-perception than the past. History reminds them that, ultimately, more men fail than succeed, and that nothing has more utility than the truth. History reveals that the only deeds which endure are those that enrich the human condition and extend the range and depth of human knowledge: that giving counts for more than taking.

History tells them that the quality which gave the governments of National’s “wise heads” both their class, and their longevity, was humility.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 10 July 2012.

Putting the Public In Their (Private) Place

Puffed-Up Political Popinjay: Associate Minister of Education, Craig Foss. The Member for Tukituki epitomises the National Party's almost reflexive antagonism towards urban culture and the free life of the mind which it promotes. Mr Foss's neoliberal ventriloquists are determined to dismantle the democratic and egalitarian education system set in place by the First Labour Government.

SEVEN YEARS AGO Craig Foss made his living manipulating money for Credit Suisse Financial Products. Before that he had, like his leader, John Key, been a currency trader. In 2005, after heaving Labour’s Rick Barker out of the provincial Hawke’s Bay electorate of Tukituki, he became a National Party MP. National had been odds-on favourite to take the seat, but everyone agrees Mr Foss worked tirelessly to make it a certainty.

He was perfectly cast for the role. The election of 2005 marked the first surge of the king conservative tide which would sweep away practically all Labour’s representation in the provinces and seriously erode much of its urban base. To the conservative voters of Tukituki Mr Foss’s jutting chin, porcine squint, and querulous pout communicated the confidence of the self-made man who understands the value of Pounds, Dollars and Euros – but very little else.

This lack of cultural depth was anything but a handicap in Tukituki, where the Clark Government’s intelligent social liberalism had long since outworn its welcome. Mr Foss may have spent much of his working life in the world's financial hubs, but his values remain firmly rooted in the socially conservative Hutt Valley suburbs of the 1960s and 70s, where he was raised.

BEING A TORY in the Hutt Valley of that era can't have been easy. Surrounded by one of the largest concentrations of industrial workers in New Zealand, the besieged defenders of free enterprise who triennially defied the Labour-voting hordes must have felt like political refugees. Their true home wasn’t the Hutt, seething with socialists, but out there – in the Heartland. In all those decent, hard-working provincial towns. In all those leafy city suburbs. That’s where “real Kiwis” lived, well-fenced against trouble-making trade-unionists, subversive secondary-school teachers and condescending academics.

It’s this almost reflexive antagonism to urban culture that turns most National Governments into dreary re-runs of The Heartland’s Revenge: a dull-witted drama punctuated by repeated acts of petty social vengeance. Think Murray McCully’s dismantling of MFAT; Paula Bennett’s axing of the Tertiary Assistance Grant; Steven Joyce’s sabotage of public transport; and Bill English’s pogrom against public servants. Most of all, think of the entire National Caucus’s hatred of education.

Nothing epitomises the Tory mind-set more completely than its attitude to learning. The essence of conservatism is its love of boundaries. People are supposed to stay where they are put: the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate. Workers, Maori, women, children: each must remain in their allotted social space. The only legitimate vector of social mobility is wealth. Work, by itself, will not set you free: but work attached to bundles of cash just might. Of course, money is not the only source of freedom. The human mind, liberated from ignorance, prejudice and superstition, bestows upon its owner a very different sort of wealth. Education has the power to dissolve boundaries – which is why conservatives hate it with such passion.

Why else would National have withdrawn the funding that allowed schools and polytechnics to offer night classes? Why else would they, against the advice of their own experts, have introduced “National Standards”? Why else are they underfunding our universities and attempting to turn them into purely vocational degree factories? What else could explain their extraordinary contempt for public service broadcasting? Their enthusiasm for dumbed-down, commercially-driven programming? The free life of the mind is anathema to the National Party, and everything which contributes to that freedom must be destroyed.

But, how to end the free dissemination of knowledge without, at the same time, crippling the ability of the rich man in his castle to govern effectively? The answer is simple: ensure that only the wealthy get a good education. This will, of course, entail the destruction of the public education system put in place by the First Labour Government, whose 1939 “mission-statement”, penned by the then Secretary of Education, C.E. Beeby, at the behest of his Minister, Peter Fraser, required:

[T]hat every person, whatever the level of his academic ability, whether he be rich or poor, whether he live in town or country, has a right, as a citizen, to a free education of the kind for which he is best fitted, and to the fullest extent of his powers.

The swiftest and most effective means of destroying such a system is simply to place it in the hands of private, profit-seeking businesses. Identifying the system’s weakest performers by using NCEA pass-rates and National Standards test results will allow private-sector investors to pinpoint the prime locations for National’s new, taxpayer-funded “Charter Schools”. The construction of these new institutions will offer further opportunity for private profit in the form of Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs).

WHICH BRINGS US BACK to Mr Foss. At the end of last year John Key made the Member for Tukituki Minister of Commerce, Minister of Broadcasting, Associate Minister for ACC, and Associate Minister of Education. In was in this latter role that Mr Foss, on Tuesday 10 April, proudly announced the education sector’s first PPP.

Over the next 25 years, a private consortium called Learning Infrastructure Partners will construct, administer and maintain Hobsonville Point Primary School and Hobsonville Point College. At what cost to the taxpayer, and at what rate-of-return to Learning Infrastructure Partners, we are not being told. Such information, according to Mr Foss, is “commercially sensitive”.

Listening to Mr Foss being interviewed by Mary Wilson on Checkpoint and by Simon Mercep on Morning Report, I was moved to wonder by what measure the Associate Minister was deemed worthy of his $257,800 (excluding allowances) salary. So fatuous were his answers; so completely pre-scripted were his lines; that not even he could deliver them without a suppressed giggle. Over and over again, reading from the page of talking-points which no doubt lay on the desk in front of him, Mr Foss told Radio New Zealand’s listeners that this was:

A good deal all ‘round for the taxpayers, for the Government, for teachers, for boards of governors, for the pupils themselves.

Boards of “governors”? Surely that should have been “trustees”. New Zealand schools haven’t had boards of governors for more than a quarter-century. That our new Associate Minister of Education was so ignorant of his portfolio that he failed to correct the error did not surprise me. But who, in the Ministry of Education, could possibly have made such a slip? Could it have been someone who’d only just arrived from a place where schools still have boards of governors? Someone whose last job was managing her country’s education infrastructure and funding? Surely, the Minister’s talking points were drafted by that proud promoter of Charter Schools and PPPs; Sheffield’s own ambitious lass; and New Zealand’s brand new Secretary of Education: Lesley Longstone?

Ms Longstone is what’s known as a “change manager”. Her appointment is all the proof we need to convict this National Government of planning to dismantle New Zealand’s democratic and egalitarian system of public education – a system internationally acclaimed for its outstanding pedagogical successes.

Assisted by Treasury Secretary, Gabriel Makhlouf, Ms Longstone will continue to put the words of the neoliberal ideologues who still run this country into the mouths of puffed-up political popinjays like Mr Foss. Who will, in turn, continue to receive six times the median income for putting young New Zealanders in their place.

The place from which C.E. Beeby and Peter Fraser freed them, more than three-quarters-of-a-century ago.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.