What’s on the Label -vs- What’s in the Tin.

Would our political parties pass muster under the Fair Trading Act?

WHAT IF OUR POLITICAL PARTIES were subject to the Fair Trading Act? What if they, like the nation’s businesses, were prohibited from misleading their consumers – i.e. the voters – about the nature, characteristics, suitability, or quantity of the products – i.e. the policies – on offer? Would they pass muster? Or would MBIE be sending them a letter?

Let’s begin with the smaller parties.

The unlikelihood of ever finding themselves in a position to implement their entire policy agenda significantly reduces the political incentives for small parties to obfuscate and mislead the voters.

Such honesty is both refreshing and alarming. Small parties like Te Pāti Māori, NZ First, Act, and the Greens are not, as a rule, reticent about their plans for the country. They rightly intuit that ideological candour attracts more serious interest than political evasiveness. Their preference is for the narrow temple over the broad church.

So, Te Pāti Māori is openly demanding tino rangatiratanga – Māori sovereignty – and to hell with all the cavilling colonialists who complain. The party’s openly stated mission is to win all seven of the Māori seats, and to eliminate Labour’s decisive advantage, vis-à-vis Te Pāti Māori, in the Party Vote. Its leaders neither expect, nor are they seeking, a majority of all the votes cast. Their plan is to win enough parliamentary seats to make the support of Te Pāti Māori indispensable to the formation of any future New Zealand government.

That this makes the party hell-scary to a very large number of Non-Māori voters doesn’t bother Te Pāti Māori. It is well aware that skewering the Pakeha is a winning feature, not a fatal bug, of the party’s pitch. To succeed electorally it needs the enthusiastic support of rangatahi – and half-measures are repugnant to the young. Inspired by the uncompromising militancy of Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke, they want it all, and they want it now.

In other words, Te Pāti Māori is offering exactly what it says on the tin.

NZ First and its leader, Winston Peters, are considerably more opaque.

Schooled by Rob Muldoon – New Zealand’s second-most-successful populist politician after Richard Seddon – Peters’ consistent electoral objective has been to reconstitute the angry coalition of farmers, small-business owners, and culturally-alienated working-class voters, that swept Muldoon to victory in 1975.

Like Muldoon, Peters expects his angry coalition to shoulder the task of restoring the social, economic and cultural equilibrium which he charges the Left with disrupting. Unlike Muldoon, however, Peters had to launch his populist crusades in a multi-party environment. The binary choice between himself and Bill Rowling, which Muldoon set before voters in 1975, has never been available to Peters and NZ First. In the post-MMP political marketplace, NZ First has always faced too many competitors.

In attempting to match the offers of its competitors, NZ First has tended to promise more on the tin than its serially monogamous attachments to one or other of the two main parties could possibly secure by way of coalition agreements. It’s the party’s fatal marketing flaw: promising more, delivering less.

Act has never been overly concerned about what gets printed on the party’s tin, or whether it matches its contents. Hardly surprising, given that Act’s key objective has always been to preserve and, if possible, extend, the top-down free-market revolution.

Act’s most successful leaders, Richard Prebble and David Seymour, have always understood that the best way to achieve the party’s objectives is to persuade National voters that the dominant party of the Right has gone soft on social and cultural issues (free speech, the Treaty of Waitangi, law and order) or, even worse, that it is losing focus on the key objectives of neoliberal economics.

‘Give us the votes, and we will keep National honest’, has always been Act’s best pitch. And, if right-wing voters read no further than that on the tin, then satisfaction with the product is likely to be high. To paraphrase the Rolling Stones: Act doesn’t always get what disgruntled right-wing voters want (Treaty Principles Bill) but it’s highly effective at getting what the Neoliberal Revolution needs (workplace reform).

And then there’s the Greens.

For post-scarcity parties like the Values Party (1972-89) and the Greens, it really isn’t stretching things too far to suggest that what’s written on the tin matters a whole lot more than what’s inside it. The purpose of such parties (or should that be “movements”) is to educate and inspire the electorate. Meaning that it’s not so much a matter of telling people what’s actually in your tin, as it is of stipulating what should be in everybody else’s.

To a large extent this explains why Green Party co-leader James Shaw became something of an embarrassment to his colleagues. He’d committed the unforgivable sin of actually achieving something by persuading the National Party to lend its support to his Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Bill. Shaw’s wheeling and dealing, his willingness to compromise, smacked uncomfortably of actually existing politics – as opposed to the “perfect world” politics favoured by the true believers.

The Greens’ unbridled idealism explains in large measure why the challenge of matching what’s written on the party’s tin with its actual contents, has become so daunting. Promising the voters diversity, equity and inclusion on the label is one thing; opening the can to reveal Bible Belt Bussy; is something else entirely!

And Labour? Does it comport with the expectations of the Fair Trading Act?

It’s tempting to say that it does. (Not least on account of the fact that the author once sat as the party’s industrial representative on Labour’s New Zealand Council.) Certainly, anyone turning up to a Labour Party conference will still encounter trade union affiliates, feminists, LGBTQI activists, Māori reps, and ambitious youth delegates. Policy remits will be debated. Elections held. The trappings of a progressive party dedicated to furthering the interests of the New Zealand working-class are all still in place.

Upon closer inspection, however, the label on Labour’s tin has the look of something carefully designed by an advertising agency to evoke a powerful nostalgic reaction. There’s a lovely photo of Mickey Savage, the typeface chosen has a staunch 1930s feel to it, and there are numerous references to Labour’s proud history of delivering “social justice” to “working people”.

But the compulsory list of ingredients, set in 8 point at the bottom of the label, reveals something a little different: Democratic Socialism: 1 percent; Social Justice: 10 percent; Decolonisation and Indigenisation: 15 percent; Gender Equity: 19 percent; Neoliberalism: 55 percent.

Don’t say you weren’t warned.

And National – New Zealand’s most successful political party? How closely does National’s content match its branding?

Let’s start with the party’s name, “National”. It was deliberately chosen by the party’s founders to indicate that, unlike Labour’s openly sectional commitment to working-class New Zealanders and their trade unions, the new party (born in 1936 out of the United and Reform parties) was committed to serving the whole nation – irrespective of its citizens’ class origins. That was a big, and an almost impossible, ask.

If they’d been serious: if the party had indeed been dedicated to the welfare and advancement of all New Zealanders; i.e. to the “national” interest; then its policies would have built upon and extended Labour’s reforms. Not to put too fine a point upon it, a genuinely “national” party would have been as much “left” as it was “right”.

There will be many who, reading the above sentences, will cry: “Aha! That’s exactly what National is – ‘Labour Lite’!”

But, that would be an ideological, not an historical, response. Between 1936 and 1946 National was pledged to sweep away all of the social and industrial reforms of the First Labour Government. And even the party’s reluctant (albeit election-winning) acceptance of the welfare state in 1949 was tactical, rather than sincere. Forty-two years later, in 1991, National atoned for its earlier historical sins by laying waste to both the unions and the welfare state. What little of them remained standing, the party has been systematically dismantling ever since.

So, National isn’t a national party. Still less is it a nationalist party. A party infused with nationalist pride would be voluble in upholding the achievements of the New Zealand nation. It would sing the praises of its settlers, its city-builders, its progressive legislators, its engineers and scientists, its writers, poets, painters, and architects. A nationalist party would not sit mute as the New Zealand people’s achievements were disparaged as work of colonialist white supremacists.

No, National isn’t a nationalist party either.

If the policies promoted by the dominant party of the present coalition government came in a tin, and that tin was labelled “National”, then the only defence against a charge brought under the Fair Trading Act would be that after nearly 90 years of “representing everyone, farmers and businessmen alike” (thanks Gary McCormick) New Zealanders have come to accept that, in their country, the Right’s leading political party has only ever been notionally “national”.

We all know exactly what’s inside.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 21 April 2025.

No Enemies To The Left – Or The Right.

Wrong Turn: Labour and National can only reduce the toxic influence of their electoral competitors by rejecting their extremism.

“NO ENEMIES TO THE LEFT” has always been Labour’s rule-of-thumb. What, after all, does a moderate, left-of-centre party gain by allowing its electoral rivals to become repositories for every radical (i.e. congenitally dissatisfied) left-winger’s protest vote? To deliver effective government, a major party needs coalition partners that are weak and electorally vulnerable. Strong and electorally-secure coalition partners, as Christopher Luxon is discovering, tend to make effective government … problematic.

The classical solution to this problem requires the major parties of the Left and the Right to construct their policy platforms in such a way that only the most unrelenting ideologues would feel impelled to vote for their electoral confreres. By offering enough of what are generally perceived to be “sensible” right-wing/left-wing policies, they make it unnecessary for all but a handful of voters to venture any further along the political spectrum.

When the major parties adopt policies which a large number of their traditional supporters regard as uncharacteristic or extreme, an opportunity is created – especially under proportional representation – for those who feel deserted and/or betrayed by such behaviour to be offered a new electoral home. Labour’s embrace of “Rogernomics” forced it to entertain the Alliance and the Greens; National’s surrender to Ruth Richardson and Jenny Shipley created the opening for Winston Peters and NZ First.

The great risk for the major parties, should these “off-shoots” acquire a solid electoral foothold, is that major party strategists come to regard them as more-or-less reliable allies, rather than what they truly are – dangerous competitors. This could not be said of either Labour’s Helen Clark, or National’s John Key. When Clark was presented with the opportunity to kill the Alliance, she did not hesitate. When Peters and NZ First made themselves equally vulnerable to electoral destruction, Key dispatched them to the outer electoral darkness.

Labour either would not, or could not, replicate Key’s ruthlessness with the Greens. To date, the Green “brand” has proved sufficiently robust to withstand Labour’s “friendly fire”. Indeed, there seems to be a general reluctance on Labour’s part to treat the Greens as a serious rival. At the electorate level one occasionally hears angry accusations that the Greens are “stealing Labour’s vote” (which in Auckland Central, Wellington Central and Rongotai turned out to be no more than the truth!) but the idea of an all-out assault on the Greens has so far been dismissed by Labour’s leadership as electorally counter-productive.

From a more distant perspective, however, Labour’s tolerance of the Greens appears particularly foolish. The cultural radicalism that has largely superimposed itself over the Greens’ hitherto electorally unassailable “environmental-saviour” profile has been bleeding into Labour’s ranks for several years.

Nowhere was this more dramatically on display than in Nanaia Mahuta’s behind-the-scenes collaboration with the Greens during the “Three Waters” parliamentary debate. With Labour’s Māori Caucus acting as the surgeon, the Greens and Labour have been joined at the hip on virtually all matters relating to te Tiriti.

A similar convergence long ago became evident on transgender issues. For the best part of a week in March 2023, Labour and the Greens outbid each other in their condemnation of gender-critical provocateur, Posie Parker. As a consequence, both parties were strongly criticised for jointly contributing to the violence that accompanied Parker’s visit.

That Chris Hipkins’, upon becoming prime-minister in January 2023, either would not, or could not, add his party’s “woke” positions to Labour’s “policy bonfire” did not go unnoticed by the electorate.

Similarly, National’s low-key response to the Free Speech issue, coupled with its refusal to speak out more forcefully against “decolonisation” and “indigenisation” – policies being pursued, with Green support, by what struck many as an unheeding and ideologically-driven Labour Government – both rebounded strongly to the advantage of Act and NZ First. For a party seeking to make itself, once again, the big tent under which the overwhelming majority of right-of-centre voters could congregate, National’s weak responses were politically perplexing and electorally damaging.

Certainly, had Luxon’s 2023 share of the Party Vote (38 percent) equalled Bill English’s in 2017(44 percent) then his Coalition Agreement with Act and NZ First would have been a very different document.

It is the Labour Party, however, that has most need of an unwavering “no enemies to the left” strategy going into the 2026 general election. To understand the dangers it will face if it does not do everything it can to drive down the Greens’ support, Hipkins, or whoever replaces him, has only to consider the left-wing political debacle that is Wellington.

By 2023, Labour’s relationship with the Greens in Wellington had reached the point where voters no longer considered which of the two “left-wing” parties they supported to be all that important. As natural coalition partners, with broadly similar policies, a vote for Labour or the Greens could be presented, simply, as a vote “for the Left”. Coke, or Pepsi? It was purely a matter of taste.

Some indication of just how seriously this approach can go astray has been on more-or-less constant display since Tory Whanau was elected Mayor of Wellington, alongside a council dominated by “the Left”. The result has been a hot mess, as unedifying as it has been ineffectually extravagant.

If left-wing politicians believe that on the big issues they are as one, then they will start sweating the small issues. Inevitably, these small issues reveal themselves to be the big issues, helpfully reduced by unelected bureaucrats to bite-sized chunks. The resulting division, bitterness, and recrimination benefits nobody but the Right.

In what may yet turn out to be the decisive battle, Labour finally did the right thing. It stood by its policy of opposing asset sales. In doing so, however, its representatives incurred the wrath of their ultra-left “comrades”. These latter construed the vote to retain the Council’s airport shares as a repudiation of the Treaty rights of Wellington’s mana whenua, or, at least, of their unelected representatives.

The American political philosopher, Susan Neiman, wrote a book called “Left Is Not Woke”. The recent behaviour of Wellington City Council offers a vivid illustration of her thesis.

If Labour refuses to re-make itself as a moderate left-leaning party, with policies corresponding to the wishes of the overwhelming majority of New Zealanders keen to see the back of the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government, then it will remain in Opposition. While the voters are encouraged to see the Greens – and Te Pāti Māori – as Labour’s “natural” partners, espousing policies largely indistinguishable from its own, they will continue to hold their noses and vote for whichever right-wing party they consider the least objectionable.

Labour needs to reduce the toxic influence of the parties to its left by making it clear that it has put its own woke inclinations behind it. This will be a twofer for whoever has the guts to make it happen. Not only will it reduce (or even eliminate) the electoral irritants to the party’s left, but it will also, as an added bonus, neutralise the equally irritating woke faction cluttering-up its own ranks. Indeed, achieving the first objective is absolutely contingent upon achieving the second. 

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 14 October 2024.

Men, the Left, and the “Women’s Vote”.

On Calvary Street are trellises

Where bright as blood the roses bloom,
And gnomes like pagan fetishes
Hang their hats on an empty tomb
Where two old souls go slowly mad,
National Mum and Labour Dad.

James K. Baxter
Ballad of Calvary Street
1969

JAMES K. BAXTER’S stereotypes, “National Mum” and “Labour Dad”, strike a discordant note in the Twenty-First Century New Zealander’s ear. Most obviously because the political loyalties of men and women have, in the 55 years since Baxter wrote his poem, undergone a dramatic reversal. Labour supporters, today, are much more likely to be women, while National’s support-base has become disproportionately male. How is this dramatic shift in the political allegiances of the sexes to be explained?

The most important driver of the so-called “gender gap” has been the steady erosion of working-class power. Many factors have been at work in this process, but the most important is the slow demise of what was formerly the Left’s most important constitutive myth.

The move to drive women and children out of the paid workforce (which, in the early days of industrial capitalism, they had dominated) was seen (at least by men) as a moral and economic triumph. Not only were society’s most vulnerable members rescued from the ruthless exploitation of capitalist employers, but their return to the “safety” of the domestic sphere, by shrinking the pool of available industrial workers, allowed husbands, fathers and sons to drive-up wage-rates and reclaim the “breadwinner” role so central to the sustainability of patriarchy. Accordingly, setting the price of labour, and growing the political strength that flowed from working-class organisation, was seen as the work of men, by men, for men.

As anyone who has ever heard Judy Collins’ inspiring rendition of the song “Bread and Roses” will attest, the idea that the advance of the working-class was the work of men, alone, is nonsensical. In the clothing and textile industries especially women workers vastly outnumbered men, and their struggles for economic justice were waged no less fiercely than those of their “brothers”.

It nevertheless remains an historical fact that in the vast majority of factories, in the coal mines and the steel mills, in transportation and on the docks, it was overwhelmingly a man’s world. The left-wing project, although conceptually inseparable from the steady advance of working-class power under capitalism, was also presented as a cause in which the qualities and responsibilities of masculinity were constantly made manifest.

Culturally, project and cause came together in the artistic and literary figure of the working-class hero. With every economic and social advance, the pride of “working-men” grew. Their unions and their parties were hailed as the engines of the future, generating a muscular progressivism in which males placed themselves unfailingly at the heart of political action.

So much for “Labour Dad’s back-story. How was “National Mum” created?

Fundamentally, the National Party’s assiduous courting of the female voter is a reflection of the New Zealand Right’s desperation to break the Left’s easy domination of the electorate in the late-1930s and throughout the 1940s.

That the “women’s vote” might deviate significantly from that of the men’s was demonstrated with startling force in the British general election of 1931. At the behest of King George V, the British Labour leader, Ramsay Macdonald, joined forces with the Conservatives and the Liberal Party to form the “National Government” – a grand coalition to address the devastating impact of the Great Depression. Predictably, Macdonald’s “treachery” split the Labour Party and divided the working-class.

Appealing to the British people for what he called a “doctor’s mandate” to heal the country’s economic afflictions, Macdonald’s National Government secured the support of an astonishing 67 percent of the voting public. A huge number of these voters were young working-class women, participating electorally for only the second time since the franchise was finally given to all British women over the age of twenty-one in 1928.

That the offer of national unity, over class division, had proved irresistible to so large a chunk of the female electorate was enough to make even dyed-in-the-wool conservative politicians sit up and take notice. In 1931, to the utter consternation of their menfolk, women voters had proved to have minds of their own.

It was a lesson that the New Zealand National Party, formed in the year following Labour’s electoral triumph of 1935, could hardly fail to keep at the front of its mind. After all, it was women voters who had kept National out of power until it undertook to leave Labour’s welfare state intact, and who, weary of post-war controls and shortages, had seated National on the Treasury Benches for the first time in 1949.

Most of all, however, it was women voters who, like their British sisters twenty years earlier, had voted for national unity, over trade union militancy and class war, in the snap-election called by National to validate its handling of the bitter 1951 Waterfront Lockout. National’s share of the popular vote, at 54 percent, secured its most emphatic victory, ever.

Not all women were prepared to break ranks from their families’ deeply ingrained electoral preferences. Indeed, most women, like most men, voted the same way as their fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives. But, enough of them voted against the familial and marital grain to give National the electoral edge it had been seeking since Labour, with 55 percent of the popular vote, had so decisively shifted the political dial in 1938. Between 1949 and 1984, a period of 35 years, Labour would spend just six years in office.

That long period of National Party electoral dominance was aided by the slow decay and demoralisation of both the New Zealand trade union movement and the Labour Party. The heroic component of the movement, the cream of the nation’s working-class, had been comprehensively defeated and dispersed by the National Government in 1951.

Their defeat could not have been secured without the complicity of the Federation of Labour, whose leaders were happy to see the most radical (and democratic) unions, thorns in their sides for many years, humbled. Not that the “moderate unionists” – as National called them – were unaware of just how comprehensively they had been co-opted by the Right. Twenty years hence, John Lennon would argue that “a working-class hero is something to be”. These guys knew that they weren’t.

What’s more, the impression grew in the minds of at least some working-class men that at least some of the working-class women they rubbed shoulders with also knew that there wasn’t much of the hero left in them.

Increasingly, a crass economism, “bread and butter issues”, came to define the mission of both the trade unions and the Labour Party. Throughout the golden economic weather of the long post-war boom it was enough to keep the wolves of doubt from the door – even if the post-war prosperity, upon which the whole, delicate, socio-political compromise rested, was claimed – and acknowledged – as the National Party’s achievement. Upward social mobility, every aspiring working-class mum’s secret hope for her kids, had become the Right’s most potent promise. They were the heroes now.

Sullen, unadventurous, politically-conventional, and materialistic – that is what so many of New Zealand’s working-class men had become. Kiwis may have joked about being a nation devoted to “Rugby, Racing, and Beer”, but the view from where working-class women were now positioned offered little to laugh at. They chafed for change, for something better. If not for themselves, then for their sons and – why not? – their daughters, too.

In the 1970s and 80s those sons and daughters – especially the daughters – would re-energise and redefine the New Zealand Left. But, across the comfortable, but decidedly unheroic, 1950s and 60s, “National Mum” and “Labour Dad” would continue to cancel each other out … almost.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack on Friday, 4 October 2024.

Is National A White Supremacist Party?

By Their Deeds Shall Ye Know Them: When the defeated Reform and United parties were persuaded to unite under the rubric of “National” in 1936, the values advanced were unashamedly imperialist and white supremacist. Eighty-eight years later, National is at pains to distance itself (coalition agreements permitting) from the most obvious forms of racism. Even so, its attachment to the substance of racial oppression remains disturbingly strong.

THE NATIONAL PARTY has, with an unmistakeable measure of pride, distanced itself from David Seymour’s “Treaty Principles Bill”. The narrative presented by the Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, is of a party acting under the duress of MMP.

According to Luxon, his first responsibility, as the leader of the largest party represented in the House of Representatives, was to give New Zealand a stable government. To achieve that objective, he and his party had no choice but to negotiate with Act and NZ First. The resulting coalition agreements were, inevitably, a collection of compromises.

Had National won an absolute majority, Luxon argues, the Treaty Principles Bill could only ever have made it to the floor of the House as a Private Members Bill. As such, it would not have been given a First Reading, and New Zealand would have been spared months of divisive debate.

But, National did not win an absolute majority, and so Seymour got his debate. Short of calling a second election, Luxon insists, compromising with Act was his only other choice. New Zealand may rest assured, however, that the Treaty Principles Bill will not be read a second time.

It’s a good story, made all the better for being true. In possession of an absolute parliamentary majority, National, the party of Jim Bolger and Doug Graham, John Key and Chris Finlayson, wouldn’t have dreamed of assaulting te iwi Māori with a weapon as crude and obvious as Seymour’s proposed legislation.

That does not mean, however, that te iwi Māori are not being attacked by National ministers wielding weapons every bit as inimical to the interests of tangata whenua as Seymour’s bill. As a political party, National has always worked for a society based on the rigid hierarchies of class, race, and gender. Its purpose continues to be the promotion and protection of private property and private advantage. Such relationships as National has been compelled to form with Māori have invariably reflected the party’s conservative political values.

When a cabal of former army officers and erstwhile members of the quasi-fascist New Zealand Legion persuaded the defeated Reform and United parties to unite under the rubric of “National” in 1936, the values advanced were unashamedly imperialist and white supremacist. Eighty-eight years later, National is at pains to distance itself (coalition agreements permitting) from the most obvious forms of racism. Even so, its attachment to the substance of racial oppression remains disturbingly strong.

Understandably, given the white supremacist assumptions built into the conservative political movements of the British dominions (Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand) National only interacted seriously with Māori when it became politically inescapable.

Labour’s close association with the morehu (remnants of the tribes, survivors) drawn to Ratana, prompted National to cultivate equally close relationships with the chiefly elements of Maoridom. Like National, these rangatira were strong believers in the principles of hierarchy and lineage. They also tended to be the richest and most powerful personalities in their communities. Patriarchal beliefs were similarly shared. For conservative Māori and Pakeha, alike, it was a man’s world.

The post-war mass migration of Māori from the rural periphery of New Zealand to its largest towns and cities presented multiple affronts to conservative Pakeha sensibilities. The sheer proximity of so many brown faces triggered deep-seated fears and prejudices – many of them traceable to the colonial violence and corrupt land acquisitions of the Nineteenth Century. These were in no way relieved by the new arrivals’ easy assimilation into the workforces, unions, and sports clubs of the Pakeha working-class. The political threat represented by this potential Māori augmentation of Labour’s urban electoral base was considerable.

Small wonder, then, that National Governments, from the 1950s to the 1970s, used their command of state-housing policy to concentrate as many Māori (and, later, Pasifika migrants) in as few electorates as possible. Under the First-Past-the-Post system it didn’t matter that Labour racked up huge majorities in a few seats. Much more dangerous was the possibility that Māori and Pasifika voters, unconcentrated, but registered on the General Roll, might tip the balance of votes in the so-called “marginal” seats where New Zealand elections, prior to MMP, were lost and won.

By the 1980s it had become a race between the socio-economic pressures bearing down on an increasingly brown – and bolshie – working-class, and the cultural/political aspirations of the small, but fast growing number of Māori middle-class professionals. These latter had as little to gain from an assertive brown working-class, inspired by the ideals of New Zealand’s idiosyncratic brand of socialism, as the economic interests represented by National. That the neoliberal policies imposed by the Fourth Labour Government were exacting an appalling toll on Māori families up and down the country, immiserating thousands, only made the choice facing Māori leaders more urgent. The political stakes had been raised to dangerous levels.

When Labour finally fell in 1990, National faced two daunting challenges. Meeting and defeating the threat of an angry brown proletariat, while diverting the energies of the burgeoning Māori middle-class into cultural politics. Disconnected from the urban Māori poor, these new leaders’ capabilities could be redirected towards resurrecting the claims of traditional iwi and hapu, and transforming them into vehicles for what the Auckland academic, Dr Elizabeth Rata, calls “neo-tribal capitalism”.

The Employment Contracts Act took care of the first challenge, while the Treaty Settlement Process more than met the second. Not only was the old Māori aristocracy given a new lease on life, but the new, settlement-funded, Māori corporations were fast creating a new one.

This elevation of Māori interests and issues was received uneasily by National’s electoral base. Where would it end? Leading Māori intellectuals spoke openly of reclaiming all the lands lost to the Pakeha. Bolger and Graham described a “fiscal envelope” containing one billion dollars! Where was National taking New Zealand? Were the conquests of the 1860s and 70s secure? Farmers and businesspeople needed to know.

It is doubtful whether the Māori cultural renaissance, or the economic compensation awarded to iwi by the Treaty Settlement Process, would have happened had the grim process of pressing down upon the Māori and Pasifika poor not unfolded alongside it. The National Government’s Finance Minister, Ruth Richardson’s 1991 “Mother of All Budgets” may have been billed as the long overdue curtailment of a welfare-state grown large enough to defeat its own purposes, but, looked at another way, it was also a brutal reimposition of economic, racial and gender hierarchies.

Just as the Victorian division of the lower orders into the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor enjoyed a state-assisted come-back in 1990s New Zealand, so, too, did the Nineteenth Century division of tangata whenua into “friendly Maoris” and “rebels”. Not that they were identified as such by late-Twentieth Century National Party politicians. In the 1990s, troublesome Māori were identified as: “gangs”, “welfare fraudsters”, “solo mothers”, and, even less subtly, the incorrigible perpetrators of domestic violence, child abuse, and illegal drug consumption. A dysfunctional collectivity referred to as the “Māori Underclass”.

As “progressive” Pakeha oohed and aahed over the Te Māori exhibition, life in New Zealand’s Māori and Pasifika communities endured all the cruelties and indignities of which a systemically racist state apparatus is capable.

White South Africans fleeing the final demise of Apartheid in the early-1990s were astounded at the ease with which Pakeha had established something very similar in New Zealand – and all without resorting to pass-laws, tear-gas, water-cannon, or live-rounds. They found “brown towns” and “white towns”, “brown schools” and “white schools”, and nobody not raised amid signs saying “Blankes” and “Nie-Blankes”, or reminded daily of the dishonoured promises of the Treaty of Waitangi, seemed capable of seeing, let alone acknowledging, New Zealand’s racially bifurcated system.

Only under the leadership of Don Brash did the National Party adopt a policy programme that attempted to meld the racially-charged socio-economic divisions with which it placated its atavistic base, with a disarmingly honest attempt to roll back the divide-and-conquer policies embodied in the Treaty Settlement Process. The neo-tribal capitalism of the Māori corporations; the positive discrimination measures that had fed the steady growth of the Māori middle-class; all of it was to go. That Brash’s “Iwi/Kiwi” campaign lifted National’s Party Vote from 20.9 percent in 2002 to 39.1 percent in 2005 indicates just how deeply embedded the question of race has always been in National’s political philosophy.

John Key’s reversion to the Bolger/Graham strategy was as swift as it was successful. His coalition government even included the Maori Party, an inspired MMP manoeuvre which provided him the political cover he needed as the immiseration of Māori and Pasifika proceeded without significant government remediation. The state houses National had built in the 1950s and 60s were either sold-off or allowed to decay. Raw sewerage ran down the walls of “brown” hospitals. Crime and drug addiction in the “brown” towns and suburbs grew steadily worse. National was, however, willing to sanction New Zealand’s adherence to the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

That Luxon would have attempted to steer a similar course to Key’s is certain. Unfortunately, the “decolonisation” and “indigenisation” policies of the Sixth Labour Government were sufficiently radical to re-animate the electoral coalition that had so nearly won power in 2005 – only this time in numbers sufficient to place the racially-agitated right on the Treasury Benches.

National’s – and Pakeha New Zealand’s – problem, in 2024, is that the Māori of the urban slums, the Māori of the iwi corporations, and the Māori of the public sector commissariat, are fast approaching the critical political mass, the kotahitanga, that will make them one, unstoppable, force for change.

The Treaty Principles Bill may not be read a second time, but in the battle between Iwi and Kiwi that now seems inevitable, there is absolutely no doubt that National will be found fighting alongside the white supremacist forces it has always led.

This time, minus the mask.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack page on Thursday, 19 September 2024.

The Dead-End Options Of Political Decay.

Dark Times: Denied the state’s leadership and resources, New Zealand’s economy has been hollowed out and taken over. More importantly, so has its democracy.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH NATIONAL? New Zealand’s “natural party of government” (since its formation in 1936 the National Party has won 17 out of 28 general elections) has long been recognised as a moderate and pragmatic political force. Not only that, but when hardline individuals and factions have taken control of the party, it has demonstrated an admirable willingness to step away from its extremists and re-engage with the political mainstream. From Sid Holland to Keith Holyoake, Ruth Richardson to Bill English, Don Brash to John Key, National has never been slow to recognise an ideological losing streak – and do something about it.

What happened?

Given the party’s mainstream status, it should come as no surprise that what happened to National bears close comparison to what happened to Labour. By embracing the essentially anti-political objectives of the “more market” reforms of the late-1980s and early-1990s, both major parties gave away most of the New Zealand state’s hitherto extensive powers of economic intervention. In doing so they reduced significantly the role and purpose of New Zealand’s elected leadership. National and Labour politicians are still working out what that means, not only for themselves, but also for the parties they represent. 

New Zealand has always suffered from the disadvantages associated with a small population and the large distances separating the country from its principal markets. To offset these disadvantages, the New Zealand state was forced to play a central role in funding the sort of infrastructure which, in other countries, was paid for by the private sector. It’s not that New Zealand lacked capitalists, it’s just that the repeated failure of their undercapitalised private enterprises very swiftly reconciled them to the inescapable fact of their economic lives. That, when it came to laying down the building blocks of a working national economy: banks, insurance companies, railways, roads and bridges, schools and hospitals; the state was the only player with anything like deep enough pockets.

The economic necessity of state intervention catapulted New Zealand’s politicians into what can only be described as an heroic role. Where Great Britain had its Isambard Kingdom Brunel, New Zealand had Julius Vogel. Against the Empire’s Cecil Rhodes, New Zealand set its own Richard ‘King Dick’ Seddon.

The burgeoning wealth of the United States may have been created by its capitalist ‘bobber barons’, but the generally comfortable condition of most New Zealanders at the turn of the Nineteenth Century was the legacy of their hero politicians and their activist state. Not for nothing was this tiny country hailed as “the social laboratory of the world”.

As the Great Depression of the 1930s sent New Zealanders reeling economically, their political response was entirely consistent with the history of “God’s own country”. Almost instinctively, the victims of the worldwide economic catastrophe turned to the state – not only for short-term relief, but also for reassurance that, in the long term, they and their children would have a future worth living in. The First Labour Government’s success in meeting both of these expectations transformed its leader, Michael Joseph Savage, into something considerably more than a hero. It made him a saint.

A tough act to follow. Forced to watch the Left’s steady expansion of state power, and alarmed by the growing power of the compulsorily unionised working-class which, for 13 long years, had kept Labour in government and National cooling its heels on the Opposition Benches, Sid Holland became National’s first prime minister with one over-riding purpose: to make New Zealand safe for farmers and businessmen, and their wives, by turfing out the trade unionists and public servants who had somehow contrived to park their impertinent posteriors in the big leather chairs. Smashing the bolshie wharfies’ union and its allies certainly hastened this restoration of the ‘right people’, and their interests. National would never lose its aura as the country’s prime defender of law and order.

The 1951 Waterfront Dispute was not, however, the first step towards breaking the New Zealand state’s grip on the New Zealand economy. Subsidies and import licences survived the angry eight year reign of Sid Holland and his cronies. His successor, Keith Holyoake, tended the “stabilised”, state-guided, New Zealand economy with the same care that he tended his beloved roses. Unconvinced of the need for major change, “Kiwi Keith” stretched National’s political dominance over the entire 1960s with all the smug propriety of a pampered family cat.

This was the achievement that Rob Muldoon spent the whole nine years of his prime ministership attempting to replicate. Though presented to young New Zealanders as a cross between Darth Vader and Voldemort, National’s fourth prime minister’s boast that he was the last finance minister to truly understand the New Zealand economy was by no means a vain one.

One has only to survey his “Think Big” programme of state-sponsored growth, to see how thoroughly he had absorbed the central truth of New Zealand’s economic history. That, stripped of the state’s resources, the nation’s economy would, in short order, be hollowed out and taken over. More importantly, so would its democracy. New Zealand’s politicians would cease to be heroes, and become villains.

Mastering the complicated alchemy of turning villains into heroes pretty much describes the politics of the last 40 years. After burning down Labour’s inclusive economy with the ‘Rogernomics’ flame-thrower; after promising voters the ‘Decent Society’, and delivering the ‘Mother of All Budgets’; where were the politicians charged with protecting Neoliberalism’s low-tax, deregulated and privatised economy supposed to go? How can a party convince voters that it will do something, when it knows full well that, since 1984, New Zealand governments aren’t allowed to do anything?

The answer devised by Labour’s Helen Clark and Michael Cullen, and perfected by National’s John Key and Bill English, was to smile and wave and hope that their political careers came to an end before the nation’s infrastructure collapsed. Between them, National and Labour kept up this charade for 18 years. The obvious weakness of the strategy, that it would only work for as long as the infrastructure remained upright, left the next generation of Labour and National leaders facing something bearing a frightening resemblance to the Gotterdammerung.

Small wonder, then, that having been returned to the Opposition benches, first Labour’s and then National’s caucuses, went bonkers. Electing and/or ejecting a leader every other year becomes inevitable when the people are crying out for effective policy, and all the major political parties are able to offer them are ineffective personalities.

Jacinda Ardern’s and Grant Robertson’s accidental 2017 victory, plagued by indecision and ineptitude, received, unaccountably, the dubious benediction of the Covid Pandemic which, at least temporarily, allowed the state to resume its old role of New Zealand’s prime defender. How devastating it must have been for Labour to once again be required to surrender the state’s interventionist powers to their Treasury and the Reserve Bank jailers.

With nothing useful left to offer New Zealand economically, Labour’s lurch towards cultural revolution was entirely predictable. Where else do left-wing middle-class Gen-Xers go when all other roads are blocked – except to the road leading them back to the student union?

By the same token, where does the National Party go when the nation’s infrastructure is visibly crumbling, and the cost of fixing it cannot be met (without incurring the wrath of the neoliberal priesthood) by raising taxes, or taking advantage of the state’s ability to borrow capital more cheaply than the private sector? The answer would appear to be that it either starts venturing down the dark alleys of crony capitalism, or hanging-out with the counter-revolutionary culture-warriors of the Weirdo Right. Or both.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 16 September 2024.

A Time For Unity.

Emotional Response: Prime Minister Christopher Luxon addresses mourners at the tangi of King Tuheitia on Turangawaewae Marae on Saturday, 31 August 2024.

THE DEATH OF KING TUHEITIA could hardly have come at a worse time for Maoridom. The power of the Kingitanga to unify te iwi Māori was demonstrated powerfully at January’s national hui, where upwards of 10,000 people answered King Tuheitia’s summons to the Turangawaewae marae. But now, at this fractious historical hour, the power of the Kingitanga is passing into untested hands.

If the traditional “kingmakers” of the royalist iwi choose unwisely, then the divisions and tensions between Tangata Whenua and Tangata Tiriti may widen further. In the weeks and months that lie ahead, rash and angry words from King Tuheitia’s successor have the potential to ignite a political conflagration. In these circumstances, Māori and Pakeha have an equally pressing need for the Kotahitanga [Unity] that was the late King’s guiding star.

This need for unity was expressed with affecting sincerity at the King’s tangi by someone many New Zealanders would regard as its most unlikely champion. As the leader of the conservative coalition government responsible for sharpening the points of Māori-Pakeha difference, Christopher Luxon’s participation in the King’s funeral ceremonies could easily have been construed as perfunctory, or, even worse, provocative. That he spoke of his relationship with the King with such obvious emotion, his voice close to breaking, unquestionably impressed his Tainui hosts. That said, the thought surely crossed their minds: “What is it with this Pakeha, who weeps with us, even as his ministers assault us?”

What indeed? The most obvious answer is that Luxon, like all politicians, is a complex mixture of emotion and calculation; sincerity and subterfuge. What’s more, though reason reels from the thought, Luxon, like many politicians, can be both at the same time. Very few Pakeha New Zealanders are immune to the extraordinary, almost magical, power which Maoridom is able to summon at moments of great historical significance. It brings our emotions suddenly, and often unexpectedly, to the surface, catching us off-guard.

This blending of the spiritual with the material was a skill which, until relatively recently, was manifest in all cultures. Those over the age of 70 will recall the state funeral of the slain President, John F. Kennedy: the soldiers slow-marching with arms reversed; the riderless horse, its master’s boots facing backwards; and that unforgettable image, almost unbearably poignant, of Kennedy’s young son innocently snapping his father a filial salute as the funeral cortege passed by.

Symbols, and the powerful feelings they evoke, were much more available to Westerners sixty years ago. New Zealand, now one of the world’s most secular societies, was then an emphatically Christian nation. Pakeha religiosity was strong in the 1950s and 60s, and, come Sunday morning, most of the nation’s churches were full. Back then, the spiritual world and the material world overlaid each other and intermingled in ways that today’s secular Pakeha would struggle to accept.

But not today’s Māori. In te Ao Māori the spiritual infuses the material in ways that at once entrance and confuse Pakeha. A cynic might say that this spirituality, this affinity for the metaphysical, is Maoridom’s secret weapon, and that Christopher Luxon is as susceptible to its magic as any number of his equally entranced compatriots.

Why, then, does he not take advantage of it? Why impress Tainui and the Kingitanga with your tears, and then return to a Parliament where Act and NZ First continue to drag the National Party down the path of “pernicious polarisation?

Typically, “pernicious polarisation” is initiated by political elites that have been electorally sidelined and are willing to do almost anything to get back in the game. They deliberately stoke class, racial and/or religious divisions – often in cahoots with more extreme groups. Their hope is to extend their electoral reach by advancing under the cover of their new allies’ more inflammatory political rhetoric, and by quietly promising to introduce at least some of the extremists’ most radical policies as soon as power has been reclaimed.

Clearly, the National Party, alongside Act and NZ First, has been drawing heavily from the pernicious polarisers’ playbook. Equally clearly, it has worked: National has reclaimed the Treasury Benches and is sitting pretty as the dominant party within a conservative coalition government.

National’s problem, now, is that, having been assisted into office by its more extreme coalition partners, it is required to deliver on the promises made to get them (and keep them) onside. Since these commitments are mostly bound up with Act’s and NZ First’s determination to rein-in what both parties believe to be an over-mighty Maoridom, New Zealand’s politics risk becoming convulsed to a degree not seen since the 1981 Springbok Tour.

Such convulsions are most unlikely to spare the National Party. Its record on race-relations is a proud one, and trashing it to keep David Seymour and Winston Peters happy is not a course of action a significant number of National Party MPs and members are likely to accept with equanimity. Indeed, the louder the chorus of protest from Māori and progressive Pakeha New Zealanders grows, the more misgivings National is likely to experience.

There will be some in the party who look to National’s past and argue that civil unrest has always been the Right’s friend. Certainly, National romped back into office after the 1951 Waterfront Dispute, and Rob Muldoon’s facilitation of the 1981 Springbok Tour saw National returned (narrowly) to power. But, the past is not always prelude, sometimes it represents an end, not a beginning.

With the King’s tangi as a backdrop, Christopher Luxon could earn considerable praise from across the country if he was to announce that, as a coronation gift, he was giving the new Māori monarch his solemn promise that the National Party would not allow Act’s Treaty Principles Bill to reach the floor of Parliament.

Would David Seymour respond by breaking up the Coalition? Quite possibly. Luxon should let him. National still has plenty of money. Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Maori are in no position to mount a credible threat to National’s re-election chances. Indeed, the parties of the Left would be hard-pressed not to cheer Luxon on!

Moreover, if National categorically ruled out entering into another coalition with Act and NZ First, and Luxon, taking inspiration from Kamala Harris’ playbook, declared it time to “turn the page” on the politics of racial division, then he and his party would likely be rewarded with a runaway electoral victory. Kiwis don’t like political confrontation at the best of times – especially not with their own friends and whanau.

Kotahitanga, in addition to being King Tuheitia’s guiding star, could very successfully double as National’s campaign slogan.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 2 September 2024.

The Only Other Reliable Vehicle.

An Elite Leader Awaiting Rotation? Hipkins’ give-National-nothing-to-aim-at strategy will only succeed if the Coalition becomes as unpopular in three years as the British Tories became in fourteen.

THE SHAPE OF CHRIS HIPKINS’ THINKING on Labour’s optimum pathway to re-election is emerging steadily. At the core of his strategy is Hipkins’ view of the Labour Party as the only other reliable vehicle for achieving an “orderly rotation of elites” – a position which defines the lowest respectable expectation of the democratic process.

Hipkins seems content to shadow the existing government’s policy options – with the single obvious exception of Crown-Māori relations. Were this not the case, the outcry of the Labour Opposition in regard to social-welfare policy, health policy, and even education policy would be much louder than has been the case to date.

A party representing “the preferential option for the poor”, which, as a political movement strongly influenced by the social teachings of both the Catholic and Methodist churches Labour most certainly was, right up until the late-1970s, would have a great deal more to say about the Coalition’s pestilential preference for sanctions over succour. That Labour’s statements on social policy and the poor have about them a decidedly pro-forma quality is, however, of a piece with the party’s real-world conduct when in power.

That Labour’s tax policy would have to be refashioned radically in anticipation of any genuine assault on poverty in New Zealand explains why it is currently the flashpoint of the party’s internal policy debates. Who holds the upper-hand in these debates is best registered by David Parker’s current caucus ranking. At No. 17 he is currently 13 places below Labour’s present Finance spokesperson, Barbara Edmond.

A Labour leader still firmly attached to his party’s founding principles would not have hesitated to allocate the finance portfolio to Parker. He was, after all, the person who, as Revenue Minister, presented his party with a tax package foreshadowing both a Wealth Tax and a progressive, tax-exempt, income threshold of $10,000. A package which also, significantly, enjoyed the support of the then Labour Finance Minister, Grant Robertson.

That the person who issued a “captain’s call” scotching the Parker/Robertson initiative is the same person who elevated Edmonds over Parker, is hardly to be wondered at. Chris Hipkins has little patience for such blatant social-democratic offerings. That a majority of Labour Party members are enthusiastic supporters of Parker’s progressive and redistributive tax suggestions, while very likely true, is also irrelevant. Rank-and-file preferences will not be enough to prevent “Captain” Hipkins from side-tracking his party away from tax reform in 2026.

Why would he not, when so many of the nation’s political journalists respond with Pavlovian reflexes whenever the word “tax” is mentioned? Hipkins is well aware of the damage done to Labour’s chances in election after election by the self-imposed necessity of having to stand in front of the cameras and explain to “hard-working New Zealanders” why the government should take more of their “hard-earned” income by increasing, and/or imposing new, taxes.

No, by far the best course of action, at least from Hipkins’ vantage-point, is the “small-target” strategy adopted by Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party in the run-up to the 4 July 2024 General Election. Napoleon Bonaparte is said to have advised his generals never to interrupt the enemy when he’s making a mistake. Starmer, in the same vein, determined to forbid his party from promising anything likely to distract the British voters from their all-consuming hate-affair with the Conservative Party. Did he care that this would deliver Labour only a default victory? Not a bit. With a 174-seat majority, he didn’t give a hoot.

But, Hipkins’ give-National-nothing-to-aim-at strategy will only succeed if the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government becomes as unpopular in just three years as the Tories became in fourteen.

This is not the long-shot expectation which, at first sight, it might appear to be. Electorally, things only really turned sour for the Conservatives after Boris Johnson’s balls-ups. Prior to the tousle-haired one’s spectacular self-immolation, the Tory party seemed set for another ten years in office. It was only in the five years between their landslide win of December 2019 and the July 2024 election – a period that included the rigors of the Covid Pandemic – that the Tories’ hopes turned to ashes. Hipkins’ wager is that the Coalition’s fall from grace will be even faster.

And, in this, he may well be right. Driven by its smaller coalition partners, National finds itself in a place it has studiously (and very successfully) steered clear of since the social impact of the 1981 Springbok Tour solidified into the New Zealand electorate’s long-term and strong aversion to overtly racist political parties. Building on the impressive legacy of Jim Bolger and Doug Graham, National has taken care to paint itself as, if not the bosom buddy of Māori, then not their sworn enemy, either. That enviable achievement has been put at serious risk by National’s coalition agreement with Act and NZ First. If National is unable to shift Māori perceptions – and soon – then Hipkins is betting that, come 2026, the government will crash and burn.

Making free with the matches and gasoline will be, variously, the judiciary, academia, the public service, and the mainstream news media. Hipkins and his potential coalition allies in the Greens and Te Pāti Māori know that the impression left upon Māori and their Pakeha allies by the Coalition’s “anti-Māori” policies is already so deep and so negative as to render its wholesale elimination impossible. Any further refusals to apply the policy brakes risk up-ending the whole ethnically-charged mess into the nation’s streets.

That will not be pretty.

Some idea of what the country might expect is conveyed in blogger and podcaster, Martyn Bradbury’s review of “Autaia – Haka Theatre” staged in the Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre of Auckland’s Aotea Centre last Wednesday. This is how he describes the behaviour of the mostly young, mostly Māori, capacity audience’s reaction to projected images of the Coalition’s leaders:

During one of the performances, Seymour, Winston and Luxon come up in the background and when they did, all hell broke loose. The gasp of shock from the combined audience that these hated figures would suddenly appear in huge form in front of them was startling, and then that gasp of oxygen ignited with a fury and outrage that exploded from the lungs of over 2000 as they roared in naked rage at the three of them. It was like that moment in 1984 when they all start yelling at Goldstein. It was glorious.

This is the anger that Hipkins and his Praetorian Guard – Carmel Sepuloni, Megan Woods, Barbara Edmonds – are counting on. This is why they are surreptitiously shadowing National in respect of most of its policies unrelated to Māori and te Tiriti.

It is the Labour leadership’s calculation that if a major outburst of Māori rage occurs, and the state’s difficulty in bringing the situation under control is painfully exposed, then all that will be required is for Labour and its allies (by now both suitably house-trained) to step forward with the clear message that, as custodians of the “public welfare, peace and tranquility” of Aotearoa-New Zealand, National and its coalition partners have failed. To secure an orderly rotation of political elites, and put an end to the dangerous racial tension, New Zealanders must fulfil the most basic of their democratic duties – electing a government equal to the task of keeping its citizens from each other’s throats.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 26 August 2024.

National’s Governing For (Crony) Capitalists – Not Capitalism.

Gimme, Gimme, Gimme! The late Bruce Jesson used to say that while National governed for capitalists, Labour governed for Capitalism. Jesson’s suggestion: that National was so firmly locked inside the individualist logic of the private sector that it struggled to see the broader capitalist picture; was a shrewd one.

WHY IS THE NATIONAL PARTY doing so much for landlords, property developers, trucking, and construction companies, and so little for everybody who isn’t already pretty well-off? It’s as if protecting landlords’ investments and building apartments and roads now constitute the whole of National’s policy objectives. Even their most faithful supporters in the farming community are being neglected by National’s present crop of leaders. What has happened to the National Party?

The late Bruce Jesson used to say that while National governed for capitalists, Labour governed for Capitalism. Jesson’s suggestion: that National was so firmly locked inside the individualist logic of the private sector that it struggled to see the broader capitalist picture; was a shrewd one. Certainly, no politician with even the most rudimentary grasp of the public interest would consider doing today what made National Cabinet Ministers of the past so notorious: ensuring that the gravel roads leading to their farms (so many of them in those far-off days were farmers) received a generous topping of bitumen.

But, how different, really, is seeing nothing wrong with sealing a seemingly random collection of rural roads at the public’s expense, from accepting a $1,000 per week government allowance for inhabiting a property one already owns, mortgage-free? The first example might have fallen under the heading of ministerial discretion, the second remains a perfectly legal ministerial entitlement. Real effort was – and is – required to bring these “entitled” National Party grandees to a more realistic understanding of their responsibilities.

Christopher Luxon’s problem with his Wellington accommodation allowance reflects his background as a corporate leader and property investor. Such perquisites are taken for granted at the CEO level, and very few, if any, eyebrows arch upwards when they are accepted. Luxon and his ilk float freely in the gravity-free milieu of the privileged. For these types, getting reacquainted with solid ground can be a fraught process.

At least when National was the party of the farmers its leaders’ feet remained firmly rooted in the soil. Drawing one’s wealth from lamb-sales, wool-clips, and cow’s milk is very different from watching property and share prices surge. Farmers are intimately connected to the real world. The best one can say about money is that it is a representation of the real world. Which isn’t the same thing – not at all.

So who are these capitalists on whose behalf National is governing the country? Predominantly, they are the capitalists involved in building houses, apartment buildings, and all the ancillary infrastructure that goes with property development. Not far behind them are the capitalists who use and build New Zealand’s roads – the trucking companies and the big civil-engineering firms.

What little understanding of Capitalism’s priorities National does possess is reflected in its support for the extractive industries of mining, oil and gas, forestry, and fishing. The party’s perception of these industries’ importance is sharpened by the quantum of their donations to its campaign funds.

That said, the number of these “crony” capitalists is insufficient to sustain an electoral party. National needs a Party Vote approaching 40 percent to have any hope of governing the country in coalition with the other parties of the Right. (Forty-eight percent if it seeks to govern alone.) But, to achieve these sorts of numbers, National needs to make a plausible pitch for the support of close to half the population.

To forge the necessary synergy between National’s capitalist cronies and its electoral base, its strategists have targeted those older New Zealanders in possession of their own, mortgage-free, homes – along with one or more rental properties. These voters may continue to make their homes in the leafier suburbs of New Zealand (electorally-speaking, National has long been the party of the better-off suburbs) or, they may have joined the burgeoning number of ageing Kiwis living in retirement homes and villages.

A great many of the people living in retirement communities will be cashed-up beneficiaries of the housing boom. As such, they have no interest whatsoever in Adrian Orr lowering the official cash rate. The higher the interest rates, the greater the return on their savings. They have no interest, either, in Wealth or Capital Gains taxes. When the time comes to sell the family business, they have no inclination to cut the Tax Man in on the deal. Certainly, National did not lose any votes by relieving these older landlords of Labour’s pesky tax deductions.

That these older-voters-with-money have children and grandchildren also works to National’s advantage. With more and more young people relying upon the Bank of Mum & Dad for the deposit on their first house, any measure depleting the Bank’s deposits is unlikely to be welcomed. Then there’s the touchy subject of their inheritance. Mum & Dad don’t live forever. These voters-waiting-for-a-legacy are not likely to support any party promising to impose an Inheritance Tax.

Which just leaves those Kiwis who want nothing more than to become the owners of the big mansions that feature on the front pages of the real-estate supplements. The sort of people without whom Lotto would go broke. “Aspirational Voters”, that’s what the political scientists (and the election campaign specialists) call them. The people who are never tempted to swap their avarice for a commitment to social justice – or even for a capitalist system that works! In their eyes, equality makes losers of us all. They may not be winners – yet – but by voting for National they at least get to feel like winners.

It’s just possible that National’s Simeon Brown has cottoned-on to the fact that these aspirational voters – especially the blokes – also feel like winners when they’re tearing down the highway in a gas-guzzling SUV. Nothing shouts “Freedom!” like a fast car. Not something that’s generally observed of busses and trains!

So, that’s National: the party that governs for capitalists – large, small, and aspiring. As proof of their commitment to the avaricious, they have promised, and are absolutely determined to deliver, tax-cuts. To pay for these National is perfectly willing to: defund the Police; keep the NZDF on its knees; run the risk that Foot & Mouth Disease will get past overworked border security staff; downgrade KiwiRail and the inter-island ferry service; pare-back public transport; see another generation of Māori and Pasifika children grow up poor, malnourished and angry, while they stand back and watch the public health and education services – those time-tested ladders out of poverty – fall apart.

It’s not the pathway to a thriving and profitable capitalist society. Capitalism works best when the state encourages it to lift the whole population to a level of comfort and security that makes increased productivity more than a pipedream. Historically-speaking, that’s been Labour’s goal – and achievement. More to the point, when National’s been intelligent enough to follow Labour’s lead, that’s been its achievement, too.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project Substack on Monday, 25 March 2024.

The Clue Is In The Name.

Truth In Advertising? The Nats do best when they take the “National” part of their name seriously,

WHEN ITS FOUNDERS christened New Zealand’s newest anti-socialist party “National”, they had two objectives. The first was largely cosmetic. The second, and much more important objective, was ideological.

In 1936, the year in which the New Zealand National Party was formed, the “Mother Country” – as a great many New Zealanders still referred to Great Britain – was under its third “National Government”. Although dominated by his own Conservative Party, the new Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, saw no reason to dispense with the fiction that he was leading something very similar to the government of national unity that had been formed to fight the Great Depression in 1931.

Essentially a “grand coalition”, the first British National Government had contained a substantial chunk of the British Parliamentary Labour Party. Indeed, the first leader of Britain’s first National Government was the Labour leader, Ramsay MacDonald.

It isn’t difficult to understand why the men who drew together the defeated Reform and United Parties into a new and permanent coalition decided to call their creation “National”. By consciously referencing its British namesake, and the example it set of bringing together all “responsible” political actors for the sake of the nation; New Zealand’s conservatives hoped to borrow a little of its lustre.

But, more important by far than referencing the Mother Country was the deeper, ideological objective behind the “New Zealand National Party” name. Its founders were determined to differentiate the new party’s purpose and principles from the class-driven imperatives of the Labour Party.

Except for the most socialist of its followers, Labour’s name has always been a problem. It speaks unashamedly of the class conflict lying at the heart of New Zealand’s capitalist society, and of its founders’ avowed determination to put the interests of the working-class – Labour – ahead of those of the employing-class – Capital. Unsurprisingly, Labour’s enemies never tired of accusing Labour of sowing conflict and division. Years after the Great Depression, Labour leader Norman Kirk still fretted about the party’s name, confiding to his private secretary, Margaret Hayward, his wish to drop the word “labour” altogether, in favour, simply, of the “New Zealand Party”.

Had National’s founders been as recklessly honest about their political goals as Labour’s socialists, they would have called their new party “Capital”. Given the numerical paucity of the country’s capitalist elites, however, such forthrightness would have been ill-advised. In New Zealand’s parliamentary democracy, such ideological candour would have condemned the new party to permanent opposition.

Hence the bid to equate the interests of all those who belonged to, and/or voted for, the National Party with the national interest per se. In sharp contrast to the Labour Party, which it portrayed as sectarian, divisive, and disloyal, National presented itself as the great unifier, open to all New Zealanders, and dedicated to the nation’s continuing progress and prosperity.

In a strictly practical sense, the new party was correct – it did represent the preponderant interests of New Zealand. United under its moniker were the rural-based interests of the country’s principal income earners, the farmers; along with the principal generators of New Zealand’s economic activity, the owners of private enterprises large and small. The poet and broadcaster Gary McCormick spoke more truly than he knew when, many years ago, he quipped: “The National Party stands for all New Zealanders – farmers and businessmen alike!”

It is this curious, almost contradictory, combination of political motives: seeking to advance and unite the whole nation, while simultaneously protecting the private and special interests of its farmers and businesspeople; that has dogged National ever since its formation.

In times of prosperity, when farmers and businesspeople, along with the rest of the nation, are doing well, the National Party’s expansive and inclusive political rhetoric finds a ready audience. When times are hard, however, and a choice must be made between looking after everyone, and making the welfare of farmers and businesspeople the National Party’s No. 1 priority, then New Zealand politics can turn decidedly nasty.

Christopher Luxon, National’s ninth prime-minister, has assumed office in times that look set to grow increasingly hard. True to National Party form, he and his colleagues, egged on by their party’s coalition partners, Act and NZ First, are aggressively prioritising the claims of the farming and business communities over those of the rest of the New Zealand population – most particularly social-welfare beneficiaries. Under the rubric of “Tough Love”, Luxon is brazenly playing social and economic favourites.

Historically, this class oriented strategy has not turned out well for the National Party. The last time it turned nasty, during the first and third terms of the Fourth National Government (1990-1999) it set the scene for nine years of Labour-led governments. National only recovered power on the strength of John Key’s wink-wink, nudge-nudge, commitment to pick up where Helen Clark left off.

Luxon could do himself and his party a power of good by studying closely the strategy of National’s fourth prime minister, Rob Muldoon, who, in spite of holding the prime-ministership through some of New Zealand’s most challenging and tumultuous years, won three general elections on the trot. The secret to Muldoon’s electoral success lay in his decision to take the “national” part of National’s name seriously.

His 1975 slogan, “New Zealand the way YOU want it” indicated clearly the populist path Muldoon was determined to follow. Three years later he insisted that his government had pulled off an “economic miracle” and counselled against doing anything rash (like voting for Labour or, yikes, Social Credit!) that might undermine it.

In 1980 Muldoon refashioned the economic-nationalist policies formulated by the 1957-60 Labour Government – policies he had won his political spurs opposing back in 1960-61 – and presented them to the country as his own “Think Big” national development strategy. With these, and having demonstrated, with “batons and barbed wire”, his party’s unflinching commitment to New Zealand’s national game, Muldoon eked out a third consecutive electoral victory in 1981.

Critical to Muldoon’s destruction of Labour’s 23-seat majority in 1975 was his populist promise to outdo Labour’s contributory New Zealand Superannuation scheme. Seldom has so much been offered to so pivotal a voting bloc! Muldoon’s “National Superannuation” promised what amounted to a universal basic income, equivalent to 70 percent of the average wage, to every New Zealand citizen over the age of 60 years. The elderly would remain National Party loyalists – “Rob’s Mob” – for the best part of the next decade.

According to University of Auckland economics professor, Tim Hazledine, a similar opportunity exists today for a politician with imagination and daring to dramatically reconfigure the delivery of state support. Excluding the over-65s, there are more than 600,000 New Zealanders in receipt of transfer payments from the New Zealand state. Noting that many of the recipients of these benefits will remain dependent of the state’s charity for more than 10 years, Hazledine correctly observes that our social welfare system has morphed into something its creator, Labour’s Michael Joseph Savage, would struggle to recognise.

The Professor’s solution? Redirect the $10 billion currently being spent on state transfer payments into a non-means-tested Universal Basic Income of $300 per week for all citizens currently receiving state support.

“Yes, that is somewhat less than what beneficiaries get now,” writes Hazledine in his NZ Herald op-ed piece, “but not a lot less, and it would liberate the productive energies of several hundred thousand able-bodied citizens.”

It might also do for Christopher Luxon what New Zealand’s original UBI did for Rob Muldoon: demonstrate that National is, as it says on the tin, a party committed to the welfare of the whole nation; and, as an added bonus, cement-in the support of a hitherto unresponsive voting-bloc for the best part of the next decade.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 26 February 2024.

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.

Bunching Up.

Shoulder To Shoulder: With Labour only 8 percentage points away from descending into what most political scientists encouragingly call the “death zone” – i.e. a poll result under 20 percent – the instinct, like raw recruits under fire, is to bunch-up alongside the other parties of the Left.

STRATEGICALLY-SPEAKING, the Labour Party has positioned itself in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong leader.

The Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, uncomfortably sandwiched between the Treaty revisionists of Act and NZ First, has precious little room in which to manoeuvre. Labour should, therefore, be taking full advantage of Luxon’s discomfort by presenting itself as the only party capable of leading New Zealand out of the Badlands of racial disharmony and conflict. This it cannot do, however, because it has positioned itself alongside the Greens and Te Pāti Māori at the uncompromisingly radical end of the political spectrum.

The reasoning behind Labour’s eagerness to present itself as every bit as radical as the Greens and Te Pāti Māori isn’t difficult to grasp. Having secured just 26.91 percent of the Party Vote in the General Election, seen six of the seven Māori seats fall to Te Pāti Māori, and watched the Greens rack up their largest share of the Party Vote ever, while holding Auckland Central and picking up the former Labour strongholds of Wellington Central and Rongotai, Labour’s strategists are keen to keep as little daylight as possible between themselves and their left-wing competition.

They are terrified that any attempt to distance Labour from the positions carved out by the Greens and Te Pāti Māori will only encourage more desertions. When your (supposedly major) party is only 8 percentage points away from descending into what most political scientists encouragingly call the “death zone” – i.e. a poll result under 20 percent – the instinct, like raw recruits under fire, is to bunch-up.

Which only makes it easier for your enemies to shoot you down.

Labour needs to put as much daylight as possible between itself and their radical comrades as possible. Especially when it was the electorate’s negative reaction to what seemed to be Labour’s wholehearted embrace of the same ideological positions that have, for years, kept Te Pāti Māori and the Greens trapped in the Death Zone, that drove thousands of former Labour voters into the arms of National, Act and NZ First.

This is not only necessary for Labour to have any chance of recovery, but also for the Greens and Te Pāti Māori to have the slightest hope of ever being in a position to pull the big levers of government. Holding six of the seven Māori seats is all very well, but what can Te Pāti Māori’s MPs do with them except engage in performative Pakeha-baiting on the floor of the House of Representatives? Pumping-up the Green vote to 11.6 percent is similarly unavailing if its only effect is to increase your party’s presence on the Opposition benches. For the minor parties to be effective, they must attach themselves to a major party.

But, that’s the question – isn’t it? Are New Zealand voters convinced that Labour will ever again be regarded as a “major” party? Or, do they see Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori joining together in some sort of ideologically polyamorous commune at the “left-wing nutters” end of the political spectrum?

Any half-way decent political leader of a centre-left party would by now have recognised the intensifying debate over te Tiriti o Waitangi as a golden opportunity to stake out a position close enough to the concerns of Non-Māori voters to make them very glad that Labour is, at long bloody last, talking sense; while remaining close enough to Māori voters for them to feel reassured that Labour is not preparing to consign Te Tiriti to the dustbin of history. Something along the lines of: “If Te Tiriti is to remain a living document, then all New Zealanders – not just Māori, judges, and academics – need to feel confident about what the document actually meant in 1840, and what it should mean in 2024.”

Sadly, Chris Hipkins and his Labour caucus are unwilling to risk the wrath of Te Pāti Māori and the Greens by shifting their party out of its woke comfort zone. Instead they are still hurling accusations of racism and white supremacy at the political parties which attracted a majority of the votes cast in the 2023 general election.

Oblivious, apparently, to the inherent unwisdom of branding the citizens whose votes you so desperately need if you are to have any chance of ever again forming a government – racists and white supremacists.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 2 February 2024.