Rate-Capping Confirms National’s Impoverished Imagination.

Nice To Have Been Given: Dunedin wasn’t built out of rates; it was built out of investors’ confidence in its future. The city’s magnificent botanic gardens and the majestic trees scattered through them were not planted by people afraid of spending money on “nice to haves”.

RATE-CAPPING is one of those right-wing policies that sound common-sensical at first but then turn out very badly indeed. It’s right up there with the done-to-death metaphor representing the economy as being no different from an ordinary household. Predictably, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon made repeated use of the household metaphor when announcing his government’s latest assault on local government, comparing city councillors’ financial management unfavourably with the frugal householder’s budgeting skills.

In reality, rate-capping is a rather tawdry mechanism for shifting the blame for rising local taxation away from where it rightly belongs – with central government. Having set up local councils as patsies, Wellington politicians are free to pull the trigger on their citizens’ hopes with impunity, knowing that the blame will fall on the local power structures which they have, for decades, loaded up with expensive responsibilities, even as they simultaneously starved them of funds.

Ask yourself this question: Could the city of Dunedin have been constructed exclusively from the rating base of its original settlers? Obviously, the city that was for a brief historical moment New Zealand’s most prosperous metropolis needed a great deal more capital than could be extracted from a few thousand dour Presbyterians. Dunedin was built on loans secured by a colonial government flush with gold, and a rapidly growing nation that was clearly destined for great things.

With the confidence of British investors thus established, Dunedin was able to attract the entrepreneurial talent needed to make it grow even bigger, setting in motion a virtuous upward spiral that continued well into the twentieth century.

Dunedin wasn’t built out of rates; it was built out of investors’ confidence in its future. The city’s magnificent botanic gardens and the majestic trees scattered through them were not planted by people afraid of spending money on “nice to haves”. Had New Zealand been governed by politicians whose imaginations were that impoverished, the world would never have acknowledged it as “God’s own country”.

New Zealand’s curse in the twenty-first century is a ruling-class for whom confidence and imagination are dirty words. Inevitably, this lack of confidence and imagination has fostered a political class whose all-purpose pessimism about New Zealand’s future is matched only by its general horror of creative risk-taking.

This present government is a veritable paragon of pessimism: a risk averse, strictly cash-up-front, operation that regards politics as first, last, and always a transaction. Donors give; donors get. The rest of us must shift for ourselves.

Rather than setting up central government as a sort of invigilator; constantly poised to mark local government’s examination papers; the Prime Minister and his colleagues could have accepted that in a nation of just five million citizens the continuous development of New Zealand’s natural and human resources can only ever be successfully accomplished by uniting the efforts of both national and local politicians.

For years now the obvious solution to future-proofing the nation has been to increase the rate of GST and divert the additional revenue to a fund from which local councils can finance the maintenance and improvement of their infrastructure and amenities.

Equally obvious is the ability of central government to borrow capital more cheaply than local government. Major infrastructural development, such as upgrading New Zealand’s water supply and treatment systems, should have been made the responsibility of a publicly owned corporation – albeit one guided by local stakeholders.

Unfortunately, fixing local government isn’t rocket science. If it was, then the work of assembling the needed talent and overcoming the many and varied obstacles to solving the problems of the present while moving confidently into the future would be the responsibility of designers and engineers whose perennial questions are “What?” and “How?”; rather than unimaginative and risk-averse politicians whose reflexive responses are “No”, and “Can’t be done”.

Christopher Luxon’s and Simon Watts’ rate-capping legislation places the poverty of the National Party’s imagination, along with its crippling lack of confidence in the creativity and courage of New Zealanders, beyond question. The Coalition Government’s ideological hostility to any suggestion that the nation’s problems can and should be overcome collectively cannot help but impose a swingeing cost-recovery model on local government.

Our rates won’t disappear, indeed they’ll rise every year by 2-4 percent. But, for the “nice-to-haves”, all those amenities that make a city liveable, and give it soul, we’ll pay through the nose.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star on Friday, 5 December 2025.

Luxon’s Guests.

Speilmeister: Christopher Luxon’s prime-ministerial pitches notwithstanding, are institutions with billions of dollars at their disposal really going to invest them in a country so obviously in a deep funk?

HAVING WOOED THE WORLD’s investors, what, if anything, has New Zealand won? Did Christopher Luxon’s guests board their private jets fizzing with enthusiasm for a little country palpably eager to embark on a new national adventure? Or, did they depart in a more sombre mood, disappointed by New Zealanders’ lack of spirit? Will institutions with billions of dollars at their disposal invest them in a country so obviously in a deep funk?

Or will they, like Michael Corleone in Godfather Part II, take note of more than the sales pitch of the gangster asking him to invest in the Mob’s Cuban casinos in 1959?

MICHAEL CORLEONE: I saw a strange thing today. Some rebels were being arrested. One of them pulled the pin on a grenade. He took himself and the captain of the command with him. Now, soldiers are paid to fight; the rebels aren’t.

HYMAN ROTH: What does that tell you?

MICHAEL CORLEONE: They could win.

It’s a safe bet that the real global investment community pays at least as much attention to what’s happening inside the countries asking for their money as the fictional Michael Corleone. After all, they pay a great deal of money to secure the most accurate and up-to-date information about their hosts. Not just the raw economic data, but information concerning the general disposition of the nation. Not only about the mood of the men and women seated around the boardroom table, but also about the mood of the men and women thronging the streets below.

Interviewed on Radio New Zealand, Tainui strongman, Tukoroirangi Morgan, boasted that he had told the global investors not to waste their time talking to the Crown, but to approach directly the iwi engaged in growing the Māori economy.

Though he gave it his best shot, Christopher Luxon’s pitch to the assembled global investors is unlikely to have resonated as loudly as Morgan’s. New Zealand’s prime minister, as they would have been well aware, leads a state whose outgoings far exceed its incomings, and a beleaguered government desperate for economic growth. All the corporate jargon in the world cannot disguise the brute fact of Luxon’s political need.

By contrast, Morgan and the many other iwi leaders presiding over the burgeoning Māori economy, would likely have struck Luxon’s guests as loud, proud, and hungry for the capital needed to keep their tribal enterprises growing. Māori businesspeople are not begging to be bailed out, they are asking to be built up. Because, as they were no doubt quick to remind these trillion-dollar tauiwi, the only place tangata whenua can succeed is right here. They have to win.

Were Luxon’s guests able to travel back in time 150 years they would have encountered Pakeha with almost as much skin in the burgeoning enterprise of “New Zealand” as the Māori of today.

These were immigrants who had travelled 16,000 miles, leaving behind everyone and everything they had known, and betting all they had on their ability to wrest a future from these distant islands. And what would have impressed today’s big investors – just as it did the big, mostly British, investors of the Nineteenth century – was how much these settlers were willing to wager on the proposition that New Zealand had a future, and how confident they were of winning the bet.

That confidence was crucial to securing the capital investment necessary to make a nation. Fortunately for the colonisers of New Zealand, the Nineteenth Century was awash with confidence.

In his book “Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783-1939” (Oxford, 2009) the New Zealand historian James Belich examines the extraordinary racial confidence that fuelled and underpinned the breakneck economic development, demographic conquest, and cultural domination of North America and Australasia:

“Though somewhat unmilitary, they were dangerous people, especially when in full-frothing boom frenzy. When they had the help of their trusty oldlands, as well as massive boom time numbers and the fanatical ideology of the colonising crusade, hardly anything could stop them. They destroyed, crippled, swamped, or marginalised most of the numerous societies they encountered. They also built new societies faster than anyone had ever done before.”

Certainly, it is hard to argue with that final sentence. In the century that followed the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, the Pakeha population of New Zealand exploded from around 2,000 to nearly 2,000,000. The four main centres grew from a few hastily erected wooden structures to substantial cities of stone and brick. Railways and roads linked rural villages and provincial towns to the major ports. Industries grew and flourished.

The cultures and politics of Belich’s “Anglo-World” were shaped by what he identifies as the boom-bust-recolonisation phases that first created and then consolidated it.

In this regard, the history of New Zealand conforms very neatly to Belich’s template. First came the great investor-fuelled rush for land and resources; drawing in tens-of-thousands of immigrants and driving off the Māori tribes. This initial speculative and extractive economic boom was succeeded by a period of contraction and retrenchment – the “bust” – which was followed by a second, much less anarchic, surge of immigration and investment – both prompted by the nation-defining technological innovation of refrigeration.

The question to be decided by Luxon’s guests is whether or not Belich’s three phases are still driving the economic and social history of New Zealand, and, if they are, which phase is the country going through in 2025 – boom, bust, or recolonisation?

It is difficult to sustain the argument that New Zealand is in the middle of a boom. In terms of metrics and mood the nation would appear to be situated squarely in the middle of a bust. Equally difficult to sustain is the argument that New Zealand is now, or ever likely to be again, driven by the “fanatical ideology of the colonising crusade” which underpinned its first 100 years. Booms seldom follow the mass emigration of the dominant culture’s best and brightest. Nor are the chances high that Mother England, or even Uncle Sam, will come to the rescue of the Anglo-World’s most remote outpost. Only in te Ao Māori is the cultural confidence of which booms are made on display.

What does that tell us? What should it tell the world’s big investors? Possibly, that the best returns are likely to come from backing the most daring and innovative sectors of the fast-growing Māori economy.

They could win.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 17 March 2025.

Whistling Past The Graveyard.

“Bugger the pollsters!”

WHEN EVERYBODY LIVED in villages, and every village had a graveyard, the expression “whistling past the graveyard” made more sense. Even so, it’s hard to describe the Coalition Government’s response to the latest Taxpayers’ Union/Curia Research poll any better. Regardless of whether they wanted to go there, or not, the polling data is leading the Coalition partners’ thoughts inexorably towards the dreary burial-ground of electoral hopes.

As they draw nearer to that dismal place, the tune they have elected to whistle to keep up the courage of their jittery supporters is that old political favourite: “Don’t Worry, We’ve Been Here Before.”

Conservative voters are invited to cast their minds back to 1990-1993, the first term of the Jim Bolger-led National Government. (That rules out every voter under the age of 40, but, never mind, they can always Google it!)

In the years preceding the 1993 General Election, we are told by National’s whistlers, the opinion polls also showed National lagging behind its opponents. (One survey put them at just 21 percent!) When all the votes had been counted, however, National found itself with just enough seats to govern.

On the night, and facing the prospect of a hung parliament, Bolger was not moved to breathe a huge sigh of relief. In the run-up to election day, he had been persuaded that National was on track for a comfortable win. Denied his easy victory, a clearly frustrated Bolger was moved to deliver the most memorable quote of the entire campaign:

“Bugger the pollsters!”

But, National’s whistlers are forgetting something. The General Election of 1993 was the last conducted under the First-Past-the-Post (FPP) electoral system. Indeed, it was also the year in which New Zealanders voted decisively to replace FPP with Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) representation. Looking for solace in Bolger’s narrow 1993 victory is, therefore, a lot like looking for cheese in a chalk factory.

Not a good analogy, then? But wait, it gets weirder.

The Jim Bolger-led National Party had been swept to victory in 1990 on a wave of revulsion at the damage inflicted upon New Zealand society by Labour’s “Rogernomics” – the top-down free-market revolution for which it had never asked, or received, an unequivocal mandate. Promising a return to the “Decent Society” of happy memory, Bolger’s party romped home with just shy of 48 percent of the popular vote.

Three years later, after discovering that the Decent Society entailed the Employment Contracts Act, the Mother of All Budgets, and user-pays health care, National emerged from the last FPP election with just 35 percent of the popular vote. The anti-government parties, Labour, the Alliance and NZ First, between them accounted for 61 percent of the popular vote.

It is practically inconceivable that the 1993 election result, replicated under New Zealand’s current electoral system, would see the incumbent government returned to office. What happened in 1993, largely on account of the anti-government vote being split three ways, would not happen today, because under MMP the parties opposing the government would be allocated parliamentary seats in proportion to the number of Party Votes they received.

Barring something unprecedented occurring (like Labour entering into a “grand coalition” with National) if the 2026 General Election leaves the anti-government parties sharing 61 percent of the popular vote – as they did in 1993 – then they will have more than enough seats to form a government.

After all, the 50.6 percent claimed by Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori in the Taxpayers Union/Curia Research Poll would still give them enough seats to govern.

National hung on in 1993 because, under FPP, 35 percent of the vote was enough to secure them just enough seats to govern. But National, Act, and NZ First, if they continue, as Bolger’s government continued between 1990 and 1993, to implement policies opposed by a significant majority of the New Zealand electorate, should not anticipate a similar, by-the-skin-of-their-teeth, happy ending.

And yet, this is precisely the advice being tendered to the Coalition Government by the Taxpayers’ Union and other assorted ideological cheerleaders. The very policies that are driving the Government’s numbers down, it is suggested, must not be discarded as electoral liabilities, but instead, “all options should be on the table”.

Rather than whistling past the graveyard, any government disposed to heed such advice should probably be praying in the church.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 14 March 2025.

Leadership Problems.

Contenders: The next question after “Will Luxon really go?” is, of course, “Will that work?” The answer to that question lies not so much in the efficacy of Luxon’s successor as it does in the perceived strength of the Centre-Left alternative.

AT LEAST TWO prominent political commentators are alluding publicly to the imminence of a leadership spill in the National Party. Matthew Hooton and Duncan Garner have both written recently about the National Party’s growing dissatisfaction with Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s performance. This sort of commentary would be much easier for conservatives to dismiss were it coming from the usual left-wing suspects, but neither Hooton nor Garner fall into that category. If the Centre (let alone the Right) cannot hold, then things are most certainly falling apart.

The next question after “Will Luxon really go?” is, of course, “Will that work?” The answer to that question lies not so much in the efficacy of Luxon’s successor as it does in the perceived strength of the Centre-Left alternative.

Chris Hipkins is pulling out all the stops to convince New Zealanders that Labour can indeed assemble a more effective and efficient coalition government than the fractious assemblage currently running the country. He used the occasion of his (rather belated) State of the Nation address to the Auckland Chamber of Commerce on Friday (7/3/25) to reassure the business community that his party is committed to comporting itself in a thoroughly non-threatening fashion.

As proof of these moderate intentions, Hipkins later announced a reshuffled, ‘all the talents’, shadow-cabinet – presumably committed to rolling out equally non-threatening policies. It is many years since horses crowded the nation’s streets, but even if they were still there, we may be certain that Labour has nothing planned that would frighten them even a little.

Does that mean that Labour has abandoned all thought of raising taxes, or, even worse, imposing that perennial horse-frightener – a Capital Gains Tax (CGT)? Not at all. It simply means that, in marked contrast to earlier Labour leaders, Hipkins intends to make the case for Labour’s revenue-enhancing policies well before the formal campaign launches in September/October 2026.

In this regard, Labour will be able to draw on the widespread global support for CGTs. New Zealand remains an outlier among the members of the OECD for the disinclination of its political leadership – Left as well as Right – to introduce a comprehensive tax on capital gains. Beset by the same demographic pressures as the rest of the developed world, the New Zealand state remains unusually reliant on income and sales taxes to pay for its core services. As the cost of these services, health in particular, continues to grow, the ability of the state to pay for them, without increasing its revenue, must be called into question.

Finance Minister Nicola Willis’s willingness to meet her government’s core obligations by incurring more and more debt will, as her Treasury advisers were quick to point out, very rapidly become economically unsustainable. But diluting those obligations, by reducing or privatising core public services will, even more rapidly, become politically unsustainable.

The present government’s economic and political difficulties are attributable almost entirely to its unfathomable decision to slash billions off the state’s income by cutting taxes when virtually every part of the state apparatus was crying out for more, and just about every responsible economist was arguing against it. Attempting to resolve the inevitable (and self-imposed) fiscal crisis by cutting state expenditure, has only compounded the Coalition’s difficulties.

On its face the Coalition’s behaviour seems self-defeating, which is why left-leaning commentator Rob Campbell’s latest contribution to The Post is so intriguing. In brief, Campbell sees a great deal more method than madness in the Coalition’s behaviour.

Stripping away its pious posturings and well-worn excuses, the former trade union leader reveals what he considers to be five key shifts at the heart of the Coalition’s policies:

• From public to private investment and delivery.
• From an emergent bi-cultural, back to a colonial nation.
• From universal to user charges.
• From regulated to market-use of resources.
• From limits on, to incentives for, private investment returns.

The temptation for Hipkins and his colleagues to pledge themselves to rolling-back the Coalition’s right-wing policy transitions will be strong. If they succumb, it would require an incoming centre-left government to reprioritise:

• Public provision over private enterprise.
• Tino rangatiratanga over colonial institutions.
• Universal provision over user pays.
• Rational regulation over laissez-faire.
• The public good over private interest.

This isn’t quite the pitch Hipkins made to the Auckland Chamber of Commerce. His purpose there was to play up the continuities embedded in National and Labour policy – especially with regard to the restoration of New Zealand’s decrepit infrastructure. Picking up on the growing disquiet at the Coalition’s apparent obsession with tearing down everything Labour had built, Hipkins was also careful to reassure his audience that while Labour might amend the policies of its predecessor, it does not share its affinity for the wrecking-ball.

The name for this approach is the “small-target strategy”. The idea being that the less one’s opponents have to aim at, the less they can hit. Sir Keir Starmer’s emphatic 2024 victory over the British Conservatives represented a huge vindication of the strategy, which might also be described as relying upon your opponent’s failures, rather than your own party’s policies, to carry you into office. Or, as Napoleon expressed the same idea: “Never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.” Bold and detailed policies are a dangerous distraction.

In the context of MMP, however, one’s own party’s commendable policy discipline can easily be compromised by the wild policy incontinence of one’s putative coalition partners. A strong and measured argument in favour of introducing a CGT on the part of Labour could all-too-easily be undermined by the Greens trumpeting a swingeing Wealth Tax on the non-tax-paying rich. And even that degree of fiscal radicalism might be overwhelmed by Te Pāti Māori demanding that full compensation for the crimes of colonisation be paid to tangata whenua.

Small wonder, then, that Hipkins is asking all those New Zealanders anxious to be rid of the National-Act-NZ First Coalition to play it safe by making sure that Labour receives by far the largest share of the anti-government Party Vote. Keeping the parliamentary representation of Labour’s potential coalition partners as small as possible will also limit dramatically their ability to demand excessive and/or outlandish policy concessions.

A Green Party heading into the election with 15 percent of the vote is much more likely to make trouble for Labour than a Green Party hovering just above the 5 percent threshold. A Te Pāti Māori facing stiff competition from Labour in all the Māori seats, and registering insufficient voter support to crest the MMP threshold, will find it harder to justify the angry performative politics at which it excels.

The chances of Labour winning back all those voters who deserted it for the Right in 2023 would, of course, be seriously enhanced if Hipkins felt confident enough in his position to execute what might be called a “Newsom Turn”.

Gavin Newsom, the Democratic Governor of California, last week turned his face against his party’s uncompromising support for transgenderism. By coming out against biological males participating in sports formerly restricted to biological females, Newsom signalled that he would run for President in 2028 on a “non-woke” policy platform. His decision is the strongest signal yet that the Democratic National Committee’s hold on the party’s ideological direction is faltering.

A similar signal from Hipkins, indicating that Labour’s infatuation with Identity Politics was also waning, would hasten the return of the tens-of-thousands of supporters alienated by Labour’s 2020-23 policies. The true test of Hipkins’ leadership, however, would be whether or not he could prevent tens-of-thousands of outraged “progressives” responding to his “Newsom Turn” by deserting Labour for the Greens and Te Pāti Māori.

Clearly, Christopher Luxon is not the only politician with leadership problems.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 10 March 2025.

Going For Growth?

Mr Mojo Rising: Economic growth is possible, Christopher Luxon reassures us, but only under a government that is willing to get out of the way and let those with drive and ambition get on with it.

ABOUT TWELVE KILOMETRES from the farm on the North Otago coast where I grew up stands the Brydone Monument. Constructed atop Sebastopol Hill, the Oamaru stone monument memorialises Thomas Brydone’s pioneering role in exploiting one of the great industrial innovations of the Nineteenth Century – refrigeration.

It was the consignment of sheep and lamb carcasses from the Totara Estate’s slaughterhouse, and loaded into the SS Dunedin’s refrigerated hold at Port Chalmers, that departed Otago Harbour on 15 February 1882. Ninety-eight days later, those same, frozen carcasses were unloaded in England. In today’s money, that single Totara consignment returned Brydone’s employer, the Australian and New Zealand Land Company, a profit of $200,000.

In the absence of an innovative breakthrough as transformative as refrigeration, Christopher Luxon’s energetic promotion of economic growth rings a little hollow.

In the century that followed Brydone’s original 1882 shipment, this country’s economy expanded enormously. Refrigeration not only rendered the raising of sheep and cattle for slaughter profitable, it more-or-less created New Zealand’s dairy industry. In historian James Belich’s memorable metaphor, it created a 16,000 kilometre-long protein conveyor-belt from the farm gates of New Zealand to the ports – and, ultimately, the tables – of Great Britain.

Refrigeration not only made billions for the largely British concerns that oversaw New Zealand’s economic evolution in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (fair enough, it was their capital that made it possible) but also formed the material foundation upon which New Zealand’s colonial society and culture was built. Our national character, forged on the owner-operated family farms that refrigeration made economically viable, would have been very different without it.

Is there an equivalent industrial innovation which today presents itself to those with capital to invest as ideally suited to New Zealand?

The disruptive innovation that immediately springs to mind is Artificial Intelligence. In New Zealand, however, the potential of AI would appear to lie in the human labour it replaces. In sharp contrast to refrigeration, AI looks set to get rid of jobs – not create them. Compared to New Zealand’s flesh and blood economy, an economy evolving out of AI would be a much more ethereal affair. Certainly, it is difficult to envisage the AI equivalent of a freezing-works.

Still, the world in which AI promises to play an increasingly vital part may see in New Zealand a secure, faraway location, plentifully supplied with the cheap, climate-friendly, and renewable energy supply needed to power the colossal computing resources AI demands. From farming sheep and cattle, could New Zealand become an energy farm for the tech lords of the Northern Hemisphere?

Luxon’s forward vision fell short of confronting that possibility. Instead, the Prime Minister homed-in on two economic sectors: tourism and education. Sadly, his goals for both would appear to embrace nothing more than the restoration of the economic status quo ante.

His ambition for the tourism sector is “more”. More bums on the seats of tour busses; more budget accommodation; more huge crowds at New Zealand’s premiere attractions; more pressure on an already inadequate infrastructure. His Labour predecessors wanted fewer, but richer, tourists. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Luxon, the former CEO of Air NZ, is looking for an increase in tourist numbers.

“Mexicans with cell-phones” was how American producers described the Kiwis who staffed New Zealand’s film industry in the 1990s. How will investors describe the workers in Luxon’s low-wage, low-skill, tourism sector of the 2020s? “Filipinos with cash-registers.”

More bums on the seats of the nation’s lecture theatres is also what Luxon is looking for in the education sector. Full-fee-paying overseas students, the golden geese of the pre-Covid era, returning to these shores in ever-increasing numbers: that is what former health minister, now universities minister, Dr Shane Reti, is being asked to deliver. Such is the fate of this unusually intelligent and thoughtful politician: to be asked to do things that are not only impossible, but stupid.

Insufficient funding, compensated for by the financial contributions of overseas students, is steadily wrecking New Zealand’s universities.

Charging students for their tertiary education may have been justifiable when universities were basically finishing-schools for the ruling classes. In modern, highly-complex, societies and economies, however, user-pays is deeply subversive of the crucial role higher education is expected to play in refreshing and reinvigorating the nation.

Supplying credentials in return for a hefty sum of money transforms students into customers. Unfortunately, when it comes to the arts and sciences, the customers are not always right. Pretending they are undermines the entire meaning and purpose of a university.

As is the case with tourism, the tertiary education sector would benefit from fewer but better students. When tertiary education is state-funded the whole of society becomes the universities’ customer, and the quality of the knowledge and skills imparted, rather than the quantity of degrees awarded, becomes the sector’s primary goal. Graduates are thus reassured that not only do their qualifications possess genuine academic value, but so, too, do they. Indeed, “the best and the brightest” will be viewed by their fellow citizens as crucial to the social and economic development of their country.

But, this is not the state of mind in which the nation finds itself. New Zealand has spent the last 40 years telling its citizens that, barring the handful of social services its political class has – so far – been unwilling to dismantle (although David Seymour and Act are up for it) they are on their own.

If you purchased your tertiary education, and are still paying off the necessary loans, then the resulting qualification is yours, and yours alone. If somebody overseas is willing to pay you more for it than a New Zealand employer, then you are perfectly entitled to take up their offer. What is New Zealand, after all, but a name on the cover of a passport?

There is nothing in Luxon’s 2025 State of the Nation address suggesting than he regards this rugged and morally unimpeded individualism as a cause for government concern. On the contrary, it is precisely the “mojo” made manifest in such clear-eyed selfishness that he is so eager for New Zealanders to recover and display. Economic growth is possible, he reassures us, but only under a government that is willing to get out of the way and let those with the drive and ambition needed to succeed get on with it.

Luxon would have loved Thomas Brydone’s mojo. By all accounts he was a burly, bruising, bully of a man who got things done and wasn’t too particular about how. The men who worked in the Totara slaughterhouse fought heat, filth, stench, flies, and exhaustion to get those carcasses to Port Chalmers on time. Their efforts may not have been deemed worthy of a monument, and the quantum of their “profit” went unrecorded, but they, too, had mojo. Except the mojo of Nineteenth Century New Zealanders was very different from the Twenty-First Century mojo that Luxon prizes.

The extraordinary expansion of Europeans across the globe in the Nineteenth Century reflected something much more profound than mere demographic pressure. It was driven by a desire to create a new home for themselves and their descendants. A home very like the home they had left, but stripped of the evils that were driving them from it. These new homes – in Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand – may have been built with the capital of the elites they were fleeing (and upon the bones of indigenous peoples) but they were constructed differently, and in the name of objectives that were not exclusively commercial.

To have mojo in 1882 a New Zealander had to be a strong individual, but not an individualist. The great attraction of refrigeration wasn’t just its immediate profitability, but the vista it opened up of a national home that was prosperous, and growing constantly in confidence and ambition. A nation that would be better tomorrow than it was today. To have mojo in 1882 you had to be driven by dreams a lot bigger than yourself.

When I was a boy, a stand of tall trees surrounded the elegant homestead of the Totara Estate. John Macpherson, who acquired the property in 1906, and farmed it until his retirement in 1920, would never have seen them attain their full height and splendour. He planted them anyway.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 27 January 2025.

2024: A Year of Dishonouring the Past and Ignoring the Future.

Three Wise Men? Successful political leadership embodies a keen awareness of past, present, and future, along with the wisdom to adjudicate what is owed, and should be paid, to each. Sadly, such leadership has not been much in evidence during 2024. Indeed, New Zealanders have seen just how badly things can go wrong when both respect for the past, and wise adjudication in the present, are lacking. It does not make for a safe future.

KIA WHAKATŌMURI TE HAERE WHAKAMUA: “I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on my past”. To anyone with a love of history, that whakataukī really hits the spot. It is both dangerous (as well as practically impossible) to go forward without consideration for what we leave behind. Which is not to say that watching where you’re going is a bad idea. Clearly, observation and anticipation are vital, not only when it comes to navigating the present safely, but also to keeping the future safe.

Successful political leadership embodies a keen awareness of past, present, and future, along with the wisdom to adjudicate what is owed, and should be paid, to each. Sadly, such leadership has not been much in evidence during 2024. Indeed, New Zealanders have seen just how badly things can go wrong when both respect for the past, and wise adjudication in the present, are lacking. It does not make for a safe future.

Had the National-Act-NZ First coalition government had more respect for the past, it would not now have to contend with so many besetting difficulties.

Certainly, it is difficult to comprehend how any group of politicians who hadn’t spent the 36 months between January 2020 and December 2022 living under a rock could have been so unaware of the grim fiscal legacy bequeathed to all New Zealanders by the overwhelming historical experiences of those three years – the worst years of the Covid-19 global pandemic. But, astonishingly, Christopher Luxon, Nicola Willis, and their colleagues have managed it.

Unmoved, seemingly, by the disastrous fiscal consequences of doing so when the monetary consequences of addressing the urgent needs of the pandemic were everywhere apparent, the National Party promised, and delivered, tax cuts. At the very moment when responsible economic management demanded measures to increase state revenues; measures that would not only have eased the nation’s debt burden, but also dampened demand in an economy afflicted with historically high inflation; National opted to strip the state of billions of tax dollars that might otherwise have been used to address critical social needs.

Reducing the fiscal responsibilities of the National Party’s friends and allies brought many other malign consequences. Not the least of which was the need to impose harsh, across-the-board cuts in public spending. The impact of these cuts would not be felt, or, at least, not as acutely, by National’s friends and allies, but by the friends and allies of National’s electoral opponents. That these included the poorest and most vulnerable New Zealanders did not appear to give Christopher Luxon and his colleagues pause.

A political party which respected, and allowed itself to be guided by, the past would have recalled the impact of previous rounds of drastic cost-cutting by conservative governments. It would also have been aware of the store of trouble that such historical austerity programmes had built up for future generations of political leaders.

But Christopher Luxon’s and Nicola Willis’s National Party appears not think in such terms. It seems not to recognise the overwhelming infrastructure challenges now facing New Zealand as the direct consequence of political leaders who were too afraid to impose the taxes necessary to keep a humane society functioning, and too fixated on the political needs of the present to anticipate the future disasters that such cowardice, if left unaddressed, was bound to produce.

How else to explain the Coalition Government’s fast-track legislation as anything other than the “Oh f**k!” response of Chris Bishop and Simeon Brown, the Ministers, respectively, of Infrastructure and Transport, to the discovery that their country is falling apart? (A condition, incidentally, about which ordinary Kiwis, after four decades of political indifference and neglect, were fully aware!)

Once again, National’s indefatigable “presentism” blinded it to the historical precedents for this sort of “Get-out-of-the-way!” solution to the public resistance engendered by governments attempting to do everything, everywhere, all-at-once. Is there no one left in the National Party who remembers Rob Muldoon?

Not that National stands alone in this regard. Act leader David Seymour is not the least bit afraid of austerity, indeed, he welcomes it. Slashing spending is, for Act, much more than a temporary economic necessity, it’s an ideological mission. How else is the state to be got down to the size where, in the vicious phrase of the American free-market enthusiast Grover Norquist: “we can drown it in the bathtub”?

Drowning the state is not, however, the goal of NZ First. A disciple of the nineteenth century German nationalist economist Friedrich List, the NZ First leader, Winston Peters, looks upon New Zealand’s great nation-builders, Sir Julius Vogel and, yes, Sir Robert Muldoon, as politicians to be celebrated, not shuddered-at. Peters’ deputy, Shane Jones, gleefully piles pounds of rhetorical fat on his leader’s bare theoretical bones, being only too pleased to tell Greens, environmentalists, and every other unmanly defender of Freddy the Frog to “Get out of the way!” – albeit in te reo.

That Peters has just had himself appointed Minister of Railways is no accident. It is difficult to imagine a more disreputable example of National’s reckless presentism, nor of its sublime indifference to the nation’s future, than the cancellation of the iRex Project.

That Peters and his party, in a last-ditch effort to protect New Zealand’s state-owned rail network from the truckers who would happily wave it good-bye, were willing to interpose themselves between the privatisers of National and Act is vintage NZ First. It reflects Peters’ small-c conservative conviction that those who inhabit the present are not only morally obligated to meet the needs of those who are, but also to protect the achievements of those who were. How else to deliver a world worth living in to those who will be?

But, if NZ First retains a firm grasp of the past’s importance, it is every bit as guilty as its coalition partners of failing to appreciate the scale and urgency of Climate Change. Likewise, the radical transformation of public policy that is needed to address the crisis effectively. Not to deal seriously with the ever-more-apparent consequences of global warming requires a political mindset unwaveringly resistant to looking either forward or back. A mindset which, at least historically, has been associated with political parties in thrall to ideologies, private interests, or both.

The Coalition’s failure to respond adequately to the Climate Crisis pales, however, when set alongside its treatment of tangata whenua. In no other aspect of government policy has its resistance to understanding the power and importance of the past been more evident.

As a radical, right-wing libertarian, David Seymour’s impatience with the restraints placed upon the sovereign individual by considerations of lineage and tradition is understandable – if not forgivable. But, what is NZ First’s excuse? Both Peters and Jones need no lessons in the central role of te Tiriti in shaping post-European contact New Zealand. Certainly, they would have been in no doubt as to the hurt and fury that would be sparked, not only by Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill, but also by their own equally aggressive policy of removing all references to the principles of the Treaty from New Zealand legislation. The commitments insisted upon by the leaders of Act and NZ First, post-election, amounted to playing with fire – and they knew it.

And National? The party of Rob Muldoon, Jim Bolger, Dough Graham, John Key and Chris Finlayson. Why didn’t it just say “No.”? Was there really no one in its ranks capable of appealing over the heads of the Act and NZ First negotiators to that huge part of the New Zealand electorate that is proud of its relationship with Māori. The part that believes in the Treaty – or, at least, in the Treaty they learned about in school.

Was there truly no one with the courage and understanding to call Seymour’s and Peters’ bluff? To dare them to force the country to a new election on this issue, and this issue alone? Someone who understood what the American novelist, William Faulkner, meant when he said: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past”. Someone prepared to turn his back on the nay-sayers and march towards the future facing, and drawing strength from, all those who had gone before him.

Someone resembling a prime minister.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website of Monday 16 December 2024.

Running Us Off The Rails.

Crossing Cancelled: The decision to pull the plug on the IRex project was one of the earliest – and stupidest – decisions New Zealand’s new conservative coalition government would make in the first year of its parliamentary term. And that stupidity was only compounded as the year wore on.

LET’S BEGIN WITH THE FERRIES. The decision to pull the plug on the IRex project was one of the earliest – and stupidest – decisions New Zealand’s new conservative coalition government would make in the first year of its parliamentary term. And that stupidity was only compounded as the year wore on.

What began as a pour encourager les autres moment – driven by National’s determination to show the country it was serious about cutting public spending – has turned into an administrative and fiscal calamity. The Finance Minister has exposed herself as an economic cretin. The Coalition partners have proved themselves incapable of agreeing on anything even vaguely resembling a coherent response to the consequences of their own folly. While the long-suffering taxpayer, whose relief from a succession of infrastructure budget blow-outs served as the pretext for Willis’s ill-fated intervention, is beginning to understand that the ultimate cost of canning the iRex Project is likely to exceed, by some margin, the cost of allowing it to proceed.

Largely unexplored (or should that be downplayed?) by those covering the ferries debacle is the not inconsiderable problem of New Zealand’s commercial reputation. This country signed a half-billion-dollar contract with Hyundai Mipo Dockyard (HMD) the South Korean shipbuilders, for two state-of-the-art rail-enabled ferries. This was a bargain-basement price, for which KiwiRail’s negotiators should have been congratulated, not condemned.

In her fatuous accusation that KiwiRail had irresponsibly opted for a Ferrari instead of a Toyota, Willis got it precisely back-to-front. What New Zealand had actually secured were a couple of Ferrari-standard ferries – at a Toyota price.

In unilaterally tearing-up KiwiRail’s money-saving contract, Finance Minister Willis has signalled to the world that New Zealand’s signature on an agreement means nothing. No one living in the world’s grown-up countries will accept the excuse that this was not a government deal. KiwiRail is a state-owned enterprise: the clue to who stands behind it is in the name. That the government of this country can no longer be trusted to keep its word should be a cause for much greater public concern than has been demonstrated to date.

New Zealand will pay a high price for pulling out of this deal – just as it did 64 years ago when the Second National Government tore up the contract its Labour predecessor had signed with British and American interests to establish a large cotton mill outside Nelson. The current estimate for HMD’s break-fee is around half-a-billion dollars, meaning that, by the time this sorry saga ends, New Zealand will likely be left dangling on the hook for something close to a billion dollars – with nothing whatsoever to show for it. And it still has to replace KiwiRail’s aging fleet of ferries and upgrade the portside infrastructure required to support their replacements.

It is worth pausing here to contemplate the fact that pollsters repeatedly report New Zealanders reposing much more faith in National’s ability to manage the economy than they do in Labour’s. But when was the last time Labour tore up a commercial contract with New Zealand’s name on it? When was the last time Labour arrogated to itself the extraordinary powers of the Coalition Government’s “fast-track” legislation?

These are not the actions of serious people. Indeed, the last time economic decisions were fast-tracked in the manner favoured by Associate Minister of Finance Chris Bishop, was back in 1982, and the fast-tracker involved was Robert Muldoon.

This was the very same Robert Muldoon who, as one of a group of freshmen back-benchers calling themselves the “Young Turks”, was principally responsible for inducing Keith Holyoake’s government to tear-up the contract for the aforementioned Nelson cotton mill back in 1961. Though it’s hard to believe, Muldoon’s need for fast-track legislation in 1982 was born out of the exigencies of his government’s “Think Big” projects – an industrial development strategy stolen directly from the second Labour Government’s import substitution programme of 1957-60. A programme which had included – you guessed it! – a cotton mill situated outside Nelson.

When it comes to economic management, National should not be taken seriously.

Serious economic managers do not expose themselves to the accusation that in making critical economic decisions – like safeguarding and future-proofing New Zealand’s inter-island maritime transport services – they allowed themselves to be swayed by the arguments of the road transport lobby.

The trucking companies are in direct competition with KiwiRail and will welcome the demise of a rail-enabled inter-island ferry service. For the road transport lobby, the canning of the iRex Project thus represents a significant commercial and political victory. Unfortunately, it comes with potentially devastating consequences for New Zealand’s rail transportation system in general, and KiwiRail in particular.

Not that the National Party needs very much persuading to place the interests of road users above rail users. Arising out of an unedifying blend of ideological and psychological impulses, National’s hatred of rail has driven its transport policies for the best part of a century.

By its very nature, rail transport confers benefits that are primarily public, rather than private. Trains are vastly more efficient at moving large quantities of goods than trucks. That this fact is so often obscured by the road transport lobby is because the latter are so very good at hiding what economists call “externalities”.

To be even remotely as efficient as trains, trucks need to be huge. This forces them to use vast quantities of fossil fuel and causes them to chew up the nation’s road surfaces. Their size and weight also makes them extremely challenging for other road users. The trucking companies argue that the cost of these adverse externalities are met by road user charges. While partly accurate, the larger truth remains that road user charges would not be necessary if the nation’s principal freight burden was carried by its much cheaper, safer, and more climate-friendly rail network.

To offer themselves as the more efficient freight option, road transport operators need the rail network to present a public face that is anything but. From the moment the road transport industry began to be deregulated in the 1970s, its promoters have made it their business to persuade the National Party to starve the railway network of investment, and connive in its decay to the point where people dismiss it as a “nineteenth century technology” – irrelevant to the twenty-first.

They were pushing on an open door. From an ideological perspective, the automobile is the quintessential capitalist artifact. It further freed the individual from the limitations of the horse, and continues to liberate him from the enforced collectivism of public transportation. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine capitalism developing in the way it has without the automobile. As the world attempts to mitigate and adapt to global warming, the central role played by the industries that keep our cars on the roads acquires an ever-sharper focus. Curbing the automobile means curbing capitalism.

Cue New Zealand’s Transport Minister, Simeon Brown. His love affair with cars, cars, cars, and the roads, roads, roads they run on, borders on the monomaniacal. Like a little boy varoom, varoom, varooming on the carpet with his toy cars and trucks, Brown demonstrates with particular force the automobile’s symbiotic relationship with the human male’s hunger for power and control.

No real man lets another human-being drive him anywhere, or allows himself to be restrained by petty rules and ridiculous speed-limits. That socialists and their Green doppelgangers prefer trains, trams, busses, ferries and, God help us, bicycles, comes as no surprise to Simeon. Defending capitalism, and allowing citizens to drive really-really-fast, are pretty much the same thing to him.

The ferries debacle, like so many others, arises out of the forty-year worldwide failure of governments to spend the large sums of money needed to keep the capitalist economy they prize so highly functioning smoothly. This failure is driven by the sheer cost of modern infrastructure and the all-too-evident inability of private companies to make the supply of collective goods return a reliable profit. This is a particularly irksome failing, not least because it turns infrastructure maintenance and supply into a core public responsibility, to be paid for out of the public purse and, given the cost of modern infrastructure, higher taxes.

Which brings us back to where this discussion began. A year ago, Nicola Willis, fresh from the hustings, was determined to deliver her party’s promised tax cuts. But, the cost of the infrastructure needed to ensure an effective and efficient inter-island passenger and freight service for the next 50 years made those tax-cuts an economic and fiscal non-starter. Unlike her conservative predecessors, however, Willis refused to acknowledge the reality that not only is taxation the price that we pay for civilisation, but also for an economy that works.

What did Willis do? Unwilling to abandon her fiscally reckless promises, Nicola chose instead to do what the Nats have always done – run the country off the rails

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project/From The Left of Friday, 13 December 2024.

A Fast-Track Backwards.

Dubious Destination: What New Zealanders face in the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government is an attempt to return the country to the policy settings of half-a-century ago. What Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop’s fast-track legislation is designed to rehabilitate and revivify is the “national development” mindset of the 1970s and 80s.

IT IS RARE INDEED to encounter a measure as ripe for political exploitation as the Coalition Government’s “fast-track” legislation. Simultaneously, the measure assaults the natural environment, the democratic process, and the rights of te iwi Māori. Serendipitously, on the left of New Zealand politics there are three parties perfectly positioned, at least theoretically, to champion each one of these embattled realms. The damage they could inflict, collectively, upon the Reactionary Right over the course of the next two years is, at least potentially, enormous. In short, if Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori were battle-ready, then they could be governing New Zealand by the end of 2026.

But, how many voters would take that bet?

What New Zealanders face in the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government is an attempt to return the country to the policy settings of half-a-century ago. What Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop’s fast-track legislation is designed to rehabilitate and revivify is the “national development” mindset of the 1970s and 80s.

Driving this reanimation project forward are business-people, investors, and politicians who have convinced themselves that the social and cultural forces ranged against them are nothing like as powerful, electorally-speaking, as they believe themselves to be. If the question is put to voters: “Jobs or Frogs?”, then the Coalition’s and its backers’ money is all on “Jobs”. As far as Bishop and his NZ First attack-dog, Shane Jones, are concerned, Forest & Bird, Greenpeace, and all those other “environmental terrorists” are nothing more than re-cycled paper tigers.

What this old-fashioned “workerist” line of argument ignores is the brute demographic fact that the number of people interested in working down a mine, digging in a quarry, picking fruit, or doing all the other hard, dirty, and dangerous jobs associated with the primary sector is a great deal smaller than it was half-a-century ago. The massive importation of migrant labour is a direct response to the pronounced reluctance of Kiwis – especially young Kiwis – to work in high-risk and uncomfortable industries for lousy pay.

These labour market changes notwithstanding, a large number of New Zealanders still hark back nostalgically to the romance of yesteryear’s heroic toilers. They admire the grainy photographs of long-dead coal-miners, their coal-dust-smeared faces wearing the same expressions as soldiers returning from the front. The problem for Jones and his ilk is that these photographs are most likely to be encountered on the white walls of a Remuera lawyer’s residence.

Heroic toilers, or workers without choices?

There’s a very good reason why a lawyer’s grandfather was a coal miner and she is not. Nobody in their right mind spends their life underground filling their lungs with coal-dust for a wage just big enough to pay the bills. Well-paid professionals may celebrate their forebears as working-class heroes, but the heroes themselves wanted something better for their offspring. Something vaguely resembling a choice.

The Coalition Government is, almost certainly, unaware of the sheer magnitude of the political project they have set in motion. It is nothing less than an attempt to rehabilitate the joys of blood, tears, toil, and sweat. An anachronistic effort to drive men back into the raw exploitative enterprises that gave rise to the hard-working, hard-drinking, emotionally unavailable “jokers” of New Zealand’s past.

It’s a forlorn hope. Weather-worn West Coast baby-boomers may applaud Shane Jones’ “Good-bye Freddy!”, screw-the-environment, hommage to the “rip-in, rip-out, rip-off” model of economic development, but not their long-since-moved-away offspring. These young New Zealanders, and their children, are more likely to be found marching up the main streets of the major cities in protest.

Then again, all this masculinist domination-of-nature rhetoric may be nothing more than political distraction. “Matua Shane” is forever ordering the “nephs” to get “off the couch” and find themselves a job. It’s a trope that plays well among NZ First voters.

But, there’s another way of telling this story. One could construct a narrative in which the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government encourages foreign investors to take advantage of an under-utilised workforce. Of young, unskilled Māori, trapped in New Zealand’s poorest communities, harried by MSD, just waiting to be driven, as their grandfathers were driven in the 1950s and 60s, to fill the jobs vacated by upwardly-mobile Pakeha. Could this be the dirty little racist secret at the heart of the Coalition’s fast-tracked projects?

All of which poses a host of vexing questions concerning the Opposition parties’ response to the Coalition Government’s first year in office. Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori could hardly have asked for a larger, or more indefensible, target than the one their opponents have so generously provided.

The Opposition’s counter-narrative to the Coalition Government is obvious. New Zealanders are being invited to return to the historical era that preceded the full flowering of environmental consciousness. Back to the period of what might be called “heroic” national development, when rivers were damned, native forests felled, neighbourhoods levelled to make way for motorways, and everyone cheered on the “unstoppable” March of Progress.

This is a story that Labour, the Greens, and Te Pāti Māori are perfectly placed to tell together. Taking turns to expose the sheer madness of pretending that fifty years of history can be cast aside. Highlighting the sheer folly of proceeding as if the insights and advances of ecological science can, somehow, be ignored. Warning the Government that the legislative edifice constructed out of New Zealander’s growing environmental awareness cannot be dismantled without incurring significant political cost. And, finally, if it becomes clear that the Coalition Government isn’t listening, warning the voters that its reactionary programme can only be progressed by riding roughshod over the entire democratic process.

How else should the Fast-Track Approvals Bill be described?

The Treaty, too, cannot avoid being over-ridden. Because the Coalition’s great leap backwards cannot avoid returning New Zealand to the era in which te Tiriti o Waitangi was dismissed as “a simple nullity”. New Zealanders growing understanding of Te Ao Māori, and the critical role it is already playing in shaping the nation’s future, simply will not survive the reimposition of a nineteenth century capitalist narrative in which the ruthless destruction and exploitation of the natural world (along with the indigenous people who lived in harmony with it) is presented as both beneficial and cost-free.

Finally, the Opposition’s critique of the Coalition’s reactionary programme should clearly identify the two, closely-related, elements at its heart. The first is the Reactionary Right’s fear of, and resentment towards, the new social movements that have, over the course of the last 50 years, come to dominate the politics of Western nations. These new forces for social change include the civil rights movement and its demand for full racial equality; feminism; the movement for LGBTQI+ rights; and the worldwide effort to protect the biosphere. The Reactionary Right’s second great fear, itself a manifestation of humankind’s growing ecological awareness, is the scientific confirmation of anthropogenic global warming. Full acceptance of climate change is inimical to the Reactionary Right’s promotion of endless economic growth. Which is why, its ministers’ lip-service notwithstanding, the Coalition’s policies confirm its three constituent parties as radical climate change deniers.

If the three Opposition parties cannot organise an effective sharing of their urgent collective responsibility to expose both the madness and the menace embodied in this Coalition Government; if, together, they are unable to present themselves as the nation’s best defence against the dangerous policies of the Reactionary Right; and if they fail to demonstrate a capacity to work together effectively, in anticipation of forming an enlightened and democratic coalition government; then New Zealanders will not, and should not, vote for them.

In those circumstances, that part of the nation which still believes in rational and compassionate government will have to hope that, by the time the 2029 election rolls around, there is still enough left of Aotearoa-New Zealand to make it worth saving, and sufficient progressive Kiwis to effect the rescue.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack page on Wednesday, 9 October 2024.

Gut Feelings.

Vox Populi: It is worth noting that if Auckland’s public health services were forced to undergo cutbacks of the same severity as Dunedin’s, and if the city’s Mayor and its daily newspaper were able to call the same percentage of its citizens onto the streets, then the ensuing demonstrations would number in excess of 400,000 protesters. No New Zealand government has ever survived such levels of public distress and anger.

IF YOU BELIEVE Talbot Mills “internal polling” for the Labour Party, the probability of a one-term National Government is rising. Made available to Sunday Star-Times journalist Henry Cooke, the Talbot Mills data reportedly shows the “Left Bloc” positioned just two percentage points behind the “Right Bloc”.

To which supporters of the National-Act-NZ First coalition government will doubtless (and quite justifiably) respond with a curt “Yeah, right.” Poll data should not be taken seriously before all of it is released – not just the numbers guaranteed to grab a headline.

Even so, it is telling that this carefully staged release of information was permitted to form the basis of a news story. When it comes to assessing the mood of the electorate, most political journalists place considerable store upon what their “gut” is telling them. That a seasoned journalist was prepared to run with Labour’s self-serving, but strictly limited, release of confidential polling-data suggests strongly there’s a “feeling” that the coalition is in trouble, and it’s spreading. Now would not be a good time to dismiss the whispers of journalistic intuition out-of-hand.

The outpouring of anger in Dunedin, where 35,000 citizens, a number approximating a quarter of the city’s entire population, marched down George Street on Saturday afternoon (28/9/24) will do nothing to still this journalistic apprehension of impending electoral doom.

It is doubtful that Dunedin has ever witnessed a protest march so large. In the absence of a government reversal, such public fury must surely portend a serious drop in National’s Party Vote. Not just in Dunedin (which has always been a staunchly Labour city) but in electorates all the way from Waitaki to Invercargill. Two whole provinces rely upon the services of Dunedin Hospital. If National refuses to bend on this issue, then Otago and Southland voters may feel compelled to break it.

Even more sobering, is the news that the Coalition’s retrenchment in Dunedin may only be the beginning of a savage government cost-cutting programme. According to the Deputy-Secretary of the Treasury, Dominick Stephens, reining-in the Government’s projected deficit is likely to require cuts on a scale “unprecedented in recent history”. In response to Stephen’s comments, Richard Harman, the editor of the Politik website, is predicting that Finance Minister Nicola Willis will soon be tasked with pulling together a second “Mother of All Budgets”.

Harman’s reference to the then National Party finance minister, Ruth Richardson’s, devastating first budget, delivered on 30 July 1991, is telling. Because, the electoral consequences of the Jim Bolger-led National Government’s austerity measures were dire.

The year before the Mother of All Budgets, National had crushed its incumbent Labour rival by a popular vote margin of 13 percentage points. Two years later, in 1993, National’s vote would crash from 48.7 percent to just 35.05 percent.

Between them, the parties openly opposing National in 1993: Labour, the Alliance, NZ First; secured 61.28 percent of the popular vote. Only because the opposition vote was split three ways was National able to secure a second term. Bolger, himself, avoided going down in history as the leader of National’s first one-term government largely on account of the distortions of New Zealand’s First-Past-the-Post electoral system. Interestingly, 1993 was also the year that FPP fell to MMP. The new, proportional, system of representation emerged triumphant from the referendum held concurrently with the General Election.

If the Treasury’s Deputy-Secretary is right, and the ever-widening government deficit inspires two years of agonising cost-cutting, then the present recession-like conditions can only worsen. More businesses will shut their doors, unemployment will rise, consumer-spending will shrink, and the tax-take will fall – necessitating even harsher cuts in government spending. By that point, the fate of Dunedin Hospital will have been repeated many times over.

It is worth noting that if Auckland’s public health services were forced to undergo cutbacks of the same severity as Dunedin’s, and if the city’s Mayor and its daily newspaper were able to call the same percentage of its citizens onto the streets, then the ensuing demonstrations would number in excess of 400,000 protesters. No New Zealand government has ever survived such levels of public distress and anger.

In such circumstances it would be most unwise to present the voters of 2026 with a referendum offering them the option of extending the term of a New Zealand Parliament from three years to four. The great Kiwi maxim regarding the parliamentary term – already confirmed emphatically in two previous referenda, one in 1967, the other in 1990 – states that “Three years is too short for a good government, but too long for a bad one.” And a National-led government seen to be imposing measures more extreme that Ruth Richardson’s Mother of All Budgets would likely be branded a very bad government indeed.

New Zealand history buffs might even be called upon to remind their fellow citizens of the infamous “stolen year”. Had New Zealand’s usual three-year election cycle been in operation in 1934, then November of that year would have featured a general election. That it did not was on account of the conservative coalition government of the day being unwilling to put its handling of the Great Depression to the electoral test. Indeed, after the nationwide riots that convulsed New Zealand’s major cities in 1932, the country’s farmers’-and-businessmen’s government was in mortal fear of what the scheduled election might produce.

Accordingly, the Government first equipped itself with the Public Safety Conservation Act, which empowered the Governor-General, upon the advice of the Cabinet, to declare a State of Emergency under which the government might be given extraordinary powers to keep the populace under control. Just how extensive those powers could be was revealed in 1951, when the National Party’s first Prime Minister, Sid Holland, made use of the Act to crush the Watersiders’ Union. The conservative Coalition Government’s second step was to use its parliamentary majority to extend its own life by a year.

It was not a popular decision. As New Zealand historian, Tony Simpson, notes in his book The Sugarbag Years:

When the election loomed up in 1934, the government postponed it for a year, hoping that things would be better by 1935. If anything, the ‘stolen year’, as it was called, made matters worse for them. People resented it, and the Labour promises of widespread social change made an irresistible appeal to the electorate. The stage was set, the fuse was lit, and on that fateful night in 1935, it all went off with a bang that was heard around the world.

Economic recession, made more intense and socially destructive by a cost-cutting government, cannot help giving rise to the notion that the government in question’s lease on life may not be a long one. When the burden of that cost-cutting is widely perceived to be unfair, and public anger intensifies, it is hardly surprising that political journalists begin feeling in their gut all those familiar twinges that presage the defeat of the cost-cutters and the victory of the street-marchers.

Perhaps Christopher Luxon should put aside his biographies of businessmen, and pick up Tony Simpson’s The Sugarbag Years. Who knows, he just might experience a few intuitions of his own?

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 30 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.

Communication Breakdown.

Inadequately Equipped: Forget the loud-hailers Minister, what you need is TikTok. Shane Jones marches into Blackball preaching the gospel of “Mine, Baby, Mine!” the old-fashioned way.

IT ALMOST WORKED. “Matua Shane”, local supporters in tow, advanced down the main street of Blackball. Had the Minister for Resources, Shane Jones, been supplied with a full-sized loud-hailer to amplify his pro-mining slogans, then the photo-op would have been an unqualified success. Unfortunately, the Minister’s loud-hailer was not full-sized, truth-to-tell it was comically under-sized, and the “optics” of that were not great – not great at all.

What that tiny loud-hailer, that mini-megaphone, signalled to the world was that the Minister’s message was similarly under-sized. Worse, in a world grown accustomed to the demonisation of fossil-fuels, where young people, in particular, are encouraged to respond to “climate-change deniers” with undisguised contempt, Jones’s inadequate amplification equipment completed the picture of a politician deliberately placing himself in that most dangerous of places – the wrong side of history.

Worse still, the unintended symbolism of the mini-megaphone, had alerted viewers of the One News item to other tell-tale signs and omens. The greatest of these was the age-gap between Jones’s “Mine, Baby, Mine!” enthusiasts, and the Forest & Bird-led environmentalists lined-up behind their banner.

“How many of you are even from the West Coast?” A rheumy-eyed old-timer who appeared to have seen too many West Coast winters, demanded of the protesters.

It was an old trick, which worked well thirty years ago when those who came to “save” the West Coast’s rain forests were, indeed, the sort of people acutely vulnerable to the accusation of being “outside agitators”. In 2024, however, about half the crowd of young-to-middle-aged protesters raised their hands. The old-timer was momentarily non-plussed.

“Bugger all.”, he eventually muttered, inaccurately, before making his way into the community hall where upwards of two hundred miners, granted a day-off by their employers, were helping to swell the Resource Minister’s audience.

That so many of the protesters were residents of the West Coast indicated how dramatically attitudes have changed in 30 years. Back in the 1990s, angry – event violent – clashes between “Locals” and “Greenies” were not uncommon. Those were the bad old days when, in many parts of New Zealand (usually a long way from the cities) environmentalism was still, very much, a minority sport.

Certainly, some of the tales told of those times carried with them more than a hint of the American Deep South in the 60s. When, in the event of “trouble” with the locals, it could take more than an hour for the Police to arrive, it was very easy to feel paranoid. Not least because, if you were a long-haired Greenie from Christchurch or, even worse, the Coromandel, many of the locals really were out to get you – including the local cop!

Those “Easy Rider” vibes were recalled on Saturday (25/5/24) when, with the Minister safely installed in the hall, a Police officer barred Suzanne Hill, the West Coast convenor of Forest & Bird, from joining her fellow locals in the audience. Not even her official ticket to the Minister’s announcement of the Coalition Government’s Draft Minerals Strategy could get her past the constable. By the time the matter was sorted out, Newsroom’s Lois Williams later reported, “they’d locked the door from the inside”.

The symbolism, seemingly, was in no hurry to call it a day.

So, is Jones being Quixotic, or shrewd? Is the “Mine, Baby, Mine!” faction actually a great deal bigger than the environmentalists have led themselves to believe?

Part of the answer to that question will be provided on Saturday, 8 June, when Forest & Bird, Greenpeace, Communities Against Fast Track (CAFT), Coromandel Watchdog, WWF-New Zealand, and Kiwis Against Seabed Mining will lead a protest “March For Nature” down Auckland’s Queen Street. It may be confidently predicted that the Resources Minister, and a great many other people, will be watching extremely closely to see how many people follow them.

If similar environmental protests (against genetic engineering, against West Coast coal-mining) offer any guide, then well in excess of 30,000 marchers may be expected. By the time the large number of communities and interest-groups aggrieved by the Coalition Government’s policies are factored into the turn-out calculation, the number of demonstrators could quite easily rise to in excess of 50,000.

In addition to the banners and placards of the environmental groups, a forest of Tino Rangatiratanga and Palestinian flags are certain to be in evidence, along with trade union banners and the colours of the left-wing political parties. As the first potentially huge political protest to be organised since the Coalition Government took office, the “March For Nature” offers National’s, Act’s, and NZ First’s growing list of opponents a welcome opportunity to make themselves heard. What must not be forgotten, however, should the numbers turning-out to be truly spectacular, is that it is the environmental cause that provides these occasions with the critical mass of bodies on the street.

Which is not to say that the Minister of Resources does not have an argument when it comes to the mining of gold, coal, and rare earths on the Conservation Estate. What cash-strapped government in its right mind is going to refuse the royalties accruing from a precious metal that sells for in excess of $2,000 per ounce? Nor should it be forgotten that the coking-coal from New Zealand’s West Coast is highly prized by steel-makers around the world. Why? Because high-quality steel, like oil, is critical to the survival of industrial civilisation. Similarly, with the so-called “rare earths”. They are vital to humanity’s ‘green energy’ future – not to mention the world’s billions of smart-phones.

But, these arguments cannot be successfully sold to younger generations except as part of a future in which mineral resources are regarded as necessary evils, tolerable only for as long as they remain critical to humanity’s transition from a civilisation powered by fossil fuels to one powered by the sun, the wind and the rain, augmented by safe nuclear power-plants and, eventually, the clean and limitless power of cold fusion.

This is the story that “Matua Shane” must learn to tell to young New Zealanders. That any future predicated on a great leap backward into a technological context indistinguishable from the Middle Ages will only provide for an existence that is, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, “nasty, brutish and short”. Humanity’s modern rights and freedoms simply will not survive transplantation into a pre-modern setting.

New Zealand may offer superb locations for making movies based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantastic tales, but any plans to transform the country into a Middle Earth of hand-looms and water-mills should be stoutly resisted. It is the technological magic of the Twenty-First Century science that offers the best hope of human survival.

Forget the loud-hailers Minister, what you need is TikTok.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 27 May 2024.