Clued Up: Ageing Boomers, Laurie & Les, Talk Politics.

“But, that’s the thing, mate, isn’t it? We showed ourselves to be nothing more useful than a bunch of angry old men, shaking our fists at the sky. Were we really that angry at Labour and the Greens? Or was it just the inescapable fact of our own growing irrelevancy to the country’s future that caused us to do it so much harm?”

LAURIE LOOKED UP for the umpteenth time from his newspaper. It was 4:10 in the afternoon and he was wondering where his mate Les had got to. By and large, Les was a very punctual guy. If he told you he’d meet you at 4:00 pm, then that’s when he’d appear. But it was now ten minutes after the hour and Laurie was reduced to doing the crossword puzzle. Four across, seven letters: A remedy for strife.

“Sorry I’m late, mate! Got held up.”

“Not like you, Les. What? Did you get waylaid by one of those Māori Party protests?”

“Heh! I wish! But there are not too many of those this far south. A pity, because we could use some of that Māori Party moxie in these parts. At least they’re fighting back.”

“I thought you were opposed to all that Treaty stuff? Didn’t you used to say that co-governance was undemocratic?”

Les took a long sip from his glass of pale ale, replacing it carefully on the circular coaster provided.

“Yes, I did, didn’t I. But since this new government got cracking, I’ve been having second thoughts. Serious second thoughts.”

“Oh, come on, Les. You knew what you were doing. National, Act and NZ First hardly made a secret of their intentions. You knew what you were voting for.”

“I’ve been thinking about that, too, Laurie. Wondering if all I really wanted was to put the boot into Labour and the Greens for making such a God Almighty mess of governing the country. All that woke nonsense.”

“And it was nonsense, Les! They were holding up four fingers and demanding that we see five!”

“Yeah, I know. And it made me so angry that I used my vote as a weapon, rather than as a shield, or, in the best way, as a tool. I swore to my late father I’d never, ever, do that – cast a vote in anger. But, dammit Laurie, that’s what I did!”

“Well, you can take some comfort from the fact that you weren’t the only one.”

“But, that’s the thing, mate, isn’t it? We showed ourselves to be nothing more useful than a bunch of angry old men, shaking our fists at the sky. Were we really that angry at Labour and the Greens? Or was it just the inescapable fact of our own growing irrelevancy to the country’s future that caused us to do it so much harm?”

“You really think that’s what we did, Les?”

“God forgive us, Laurie, yes, I think that’s exactly what we did. Just look at these Fair Pay Agreements. I mean they were a bloody good idea. They’d have made life easier for a whole lot of ordinary working people. We both knew they’d be gone before Christmas if we voted for the Nats and their mates, a reform you and I have been pushing for these past 40 years, and we helped to get rid of them, God forgive us Laurie, we made it happen!”

Laurie, fiddled with his ballpoint pen.

“Four across. Seven letters. A remedy for strife? Any ideas?

Les ignored the question.

“The Maori Party’s protests got me thinking, Laurie.”

“They were pretty small, mate. Nothing like 1981.”

“True enough, but I looked at the live broadcasts on Tuesday, and you know what I saw? I saw young people, Māori and Pakeha, standing together on that overbridge with their placards and their Tino Rangatiratanga flags, and you know what else I saw?”

“Yourself, 40 years ago?”

“Yeah, I saw that – of course I did. But, I saw something else, too, Laurie. I saw this country’s future, or, at least, a version of its future that offered up something better than greed and prejudice and keeping capitalism’s boot on the necks of the poor. I heard Rawiri Waititi talking about ‘Aotearoa Hou!’ – which sounded to me a whole lot like Mickey Savage’s ‘Applied Christianity’. And, do you know what else I saw? I saw a version of democracy that was alive. A version that offered more that triennial polling-booths and oaths to a distant king.”

“The rough and ready democracy of the picket-line?”

“Exactly! Exactly! Let me get you another ale. Oh, and by the way, the solution to Four Across. Seven letters. A remedy for strife.”

“Yeah? What is it?”

“Justice.”

This short story was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 8 December 2023.

Cans of Worms.

“And there’ll be no shortage of ‘events’ to test Luxon’s political skills. David Seymour wants a referendum on the Treaty. Winston wants a Royal Commission of Inquiry into Labour’s handling of the Covid crisis. Talk about cans of worms!”

LAURIE AND LES were very fond of their local. It was nothing flash. Les liked to describe the decor as “Best Western Modern” – which wasn’t all that far off the mark. Lots of concrete, lots of plastic, carpets that hid the stains, windows that either let in too much light, or too little. Still, there was a corner of the bar, where the window-seat ran into the wall, that was Les’ and Laurie’s own.

On this particular day the sun was shining, doing its best to compete with the cold wind blowing in off the sea. A good day for shooting the breeze.

“I see the Labour caucus has re-elected Chippy as the Party’s leader.”

“Hoo-bloody-ray!” cheered Les, whose contempt for the Labour Party had been taken as read by Laurie since 1984. “You didn’t really expect that bunch of political sycophants to do anything other than reward the man responsible for conducting the worst election campaign since David Cunliffe apologised for being a man.”

“At least Cunliffe knew he wasn’t a woman.” Laurie muttered.

“Exactly. And therein lies the problem. Labour doesn’t know how relate to ordinary people anymore. If you don’t have a degree in the social sciences and work for the government, Labour’s MPs don’t know where to look – or what to say.”

“Hence the sausage rolls.” Laurie volunteered. “They had to stand-in for the ordinary joker that Hipkins so very obviously wasn’t.”

“You’re absolutely right,” Les snickered, “all that ‘boy from the Hutt’ malarkey. As if Chippy had grown up in working-class Naenae with his process-worker Dad and shop-assistant Mum. As if he’d been a union organiser instead of a bloody student politician. Sometimes I wonder if they appreciate how insulting it is to be fed this PR bullshit.”

“Like the West Coast”, Laurie chipped-in. “Have you ever noticed the way Labour is always claiming the Coast as the party’s birthplace? The Miners’ Hall at Blackball and all that? When what the Coast actually gave birth to was the ‘Red’ Federation of Labour – the most militant union outfit this country’s ever known.”

“You so right, mate!” Les agreed. “The Labour Party wasn’t founded in Blackball in 1908, it was founded in Wellington in 1916. A whole host of political groups: parties, unions, anti-conscription organisers got together and Labour was the result. A perfectly honourable origin story, but not one to set the heart racing like the two-gun Aussie agitators that led the Blackball Strike.”

“Story of Labour’s life, really, isn’t it.” Laurie added mournfully. “A moderate working-class party living off the legacy of the working-class militants it had self-consciously supplanted. Morphing, eventually, into a party of snotty-nosed middle-class professionals masquerading as beer-drinkers and sausage-roll aficionados.”

Les snorted derisively. “When everybody knows they prefer smashed avocados and a decent Cab-Sav.”

“Still, that’s who we’re stuck with for the next little while at least – Mr Sausage Roll. How do you think he’ll go against Luxon, Seymour and Peters?”

Les paused to take a deep swallow of his pale ale.

“That’s the worst of it. Luxon, as Prime Minister, could be a complete flop. He’s assuming leadership of the country when his political instincts are only half-formed. The penalty for allowing himself to promoted from rookie back-bencher, to party leader, to prime minister, all in the space of three years. I don’t care how fast a learner he is, that simply isn’t long enough to learn how to respond effectively to ‘events, dear boy, events’ – as Harold Macmillan is said to have remarked when a junior staffer asked what could possibly blow his government off-course. Hipkins could end up running rings around him – making him look completely idiotic.”

Laurie peered morosely into his empty glass. “And there’ll be no shortage of ‘events’ to test Luxon’s political skills. David Seymour wants a referendum on the Treaty. Winston wants a Royal Commission of Inquiry into Labour’s handling of the Covid crisis. Talk about cans of worms!”

“Cans of worms they may be,” Les replied, picking-up Laurie’s empty glass, “but they both need opening. The Covid Crisis has deranged a frighteningly large chunk of the population. A full-scale inquiry could go a long way to debunking desperate myths and conspiratorial fantasies. As for Seymour’s referendum. That will tell us who we really are – something I’m quite keen to find out. Another beer?”

This short story was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 10 November 2023.

Accidentally Pandering To The Rich – On Purpose.

Glad You Liked It! In a nutshell, what Bernard Hickey’s Kaka podcast seems to be saying is that in an unabashedly capitalist nation, a government elected on the strength of middle-class (i.e. homeowners) votes, made sure that the massive transfers of cash required to keep the economy afloat in the midst of a global pandemic went to capitalists, and the people whose votes it really, really, really didn’t want to lose. Well, duh! Who would have thought it?

THERE’S NO DISPUTING the shock-value of the statistics assembled by Bernard Hickey in his latest Kaka podcast. What they show is that, in responding to the Covid-19 pandemic, the New Zealand Government transferred vastly more money to the business sector and homeowners than it did to beneficiaries and the working poor. Or, as he puts it: “The Labour Government, supported by the Greens, presided over policies that accidentally on purpose engineered the biggest transfer of wealth to asset owners from current and future renters in the history of New Zealand.”

Well … maybe. The problem with statistics is that they are generally presented without regard to context. To be honest, that’s probably a good thing. I don’t think it would be all that helpful (or ethical) for the Department of Statistics to encase its data in a carapace of tendentious ideology. In the 1950s American cop show, Dragnet, the hero’s signature line was: “Nothing but the facts.” That sounds about right to me.

So, let’s not argue about the facts. I’m sure a financial journalist of Mr Hickey’s experience has got the numbers right. What I’m much less certain of is whether his interpretation of the facts makes a great deal of sense.

In a nutshell, what Mr Hickey seems to be saying is that in an unabashedly capitalist nation, a government elected on the strength of middle-class (i.e. homeowners) votes, made sure that the massive transfers of cash required to keep the economy afloat in the midst of a global pandemic went to capitalists, and the people whose votes it really, really, really didn’t want to lose.

Well, duh! Who would have thought it?

And, with all due respect to Mr Hickey, it is nothing short of facile to evince horror and outrage that the perpetrators of this exercise in maintaining class (and, let’s be honest, racial) privilege were Labour and Green politicians. Labour gave away its historical role as the workers’ friend in 1984 – nearly 40 years ago. What’s more, since the introduction of “Rogernomics”, the Labour Party has occupied the Treasury Benches for a total of nearly 14 years. In all that time, it has made no serious attempt to dismantle the neoliberal regime it created. Expecting Jacinda Ardern to behave like Mickey Savage is just silly.

Especially when you consider the makeup of New Zealand’s House of Representatives. Labour, an unabashedly capitalist party, holds 65 seats. National, another unabashedly capitalist party, holds 35 seats. Act, a fanatically capitalist party, holds 10 seats. The Greens, supposedly not a capitalist party, but one which has, to date, done nothing to suggest that it is an anti-capitalist party, also holds 10 seats. Which leaves the Māori Party, an ethno-nationalist party which appears to be okay with capitalism – but only if it’s Māori capitalism – with just 2 seats.

The question I would put to Mr Hickey is: How would he have persuaded this House of Representatives, composed more-or-less entirely of MPs committed to the preservation of New Zealand’s capitalist system, to adopt policies which differed in any meaningful way from those actually implemented by the Labour Government of Jacinda Ardern? Not forgetting that for the first few months of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Prime Minister was dependent on the support of NZ First – a party convinced that capitalism could, and should, do better.

Presumably, Mr Hickey believes that New Zealand’s parliamentarians, alerted to the sheer bloody inequity of their Covid response, should have felt obliged to come up with something much kinder and fairer.

But why would they feel obliged to do that? Just recently I learned that in the United States the friends of capitalism (about 90 percent of the country!) not only believe in the doctrine of laissez-faire – French for letting the market rip – but that they also subscribe to what they call “lazy-fair”. Apparently, because so many of the underprivileged are lazy, it’s only fair that they’re poor. I know, I know, it’s an awful thing to say – although I’m sure it raises a good guffaw among the Country Club set. But, you know what? Although they would never repeat such an awful “joke” out loud, there are plenty of Kiwi MPs (some of them in the Labour Party) who subscribe wholeheartedly to the underlying philosophy of the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor.

Even worse, there are hundreds-of-thousands of ordinary Kiwi voters who subscribe to exactly the same philosophy – with bells on. The awful truth about New Zealand politics is that practically all of our political parties are just too scared to suggest anything like the massive transfer of wealth to the “current and future renters” whom Mr Hickey clearly believes the Government’s Covid response should have targeted.

The only way such a transfer could possibly have eventuated is in a political context dominated by the electoral success of a party aggressively representing the interests of the working poor and beneficiaries. Assuming such a party drew the bulk of its support from the 700,000 eligible voters who declined to participate in the last election, its impact on what politicians considered both possible and acceptable would be huge.

The problem, of course, is that every party which has tried to mobilise these voters has failed miserably. The Internet-Mana Party may have had a brilliant manifesto (so brilliant that I voted for it!) but its share of the 2014 Party Vote was a demoralising 1.42 percent.

In other words, if all the “current and future renters” had voted for Internet-Mana in 2014, its ideological and political influence would have made the Covid-19 response delivered by Labour over the past 21 months unthinkable.

And that’s what I mean by statistics shorn of context not amounting to very much. For the only people who counted – the people who voted – Jacinda Ardern’s and Grant Robertson’s Covid response was good enough to see them returned to office with 50 percent of the Party Vote. That Mr Hickey should be surprised that the values of politicians tend to reflect the values of their supporters is, itself, surprising.

If he wants a revolution, Mr Hickey will need to do more than excoriate Labour and the Greens on Substack – he’ll need to organise one.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 27 January 2022.

The Longest Year.

The Anti-Vaxxers’ Barmy Army: The media-generated climate of aggressive scepticism, combined with the anti-vaxxers’ feverish exhibitions of anger and hate, contributed significantly to the febrile atmosphere enveloping New Zealand in 2021. The observation that the nation was fast becoming unrecognisable became a commonplace in conversations across the country. 

TWO-THIRDS of all New Zealanders, and three-quarters of all Aucklanders told pollsters that Covid-19 had influenced their Christmas holiday plans. It is difficult to think of a more moving recognition of New Zealand’s citizens’ love and respect for one another. Unquestionably, the Covid-19 Pandemic has brought out the very best in this country.

The greatest tragedy of 2021 is that this astonishing demonstration of collective empathy and public-spiritedness was often overshadowed by the behaviour of the most ignorant and selfish among us. That the worst in New Zealand was amplified and, to a worrying degree, encouraged by the news media must rank as the second greatest tragedy.

In journalism, context is everything. If the actions of individuals and groups are not set properly in the context that gave rise to them, then they are liable to serious misinterpretation. It says a great deal about the quality and the intentions of New Zealand journalists that context was conspicuous by its absence from so many of 2021’s stories.

To hear senior journalists, day after day, question small business owners in the tourism and hospitality sectors about the impact of the Covid regulations on their hopes, dreams and bank-balances, was worse than infuriating: it generated mistrust and suspicion. No intelligent person was unaware of the impact of the Pandemic on businesses large and small. No compassionate person could fail to feel genuine sympathy for the predicament of their owners. But to hear journalists present these folk’s situation as if it was the result of malign and/or maladroit Government actions, couldn’t help but raise serious questions about the media’s intentions.

Only rarely did journalists balance their reporting by offering their readers, listeners and viewers the more obvious counterfactual arguments. One almost never heard them asking business spokespeople if they were promoting the withdrawal of all anti-Covid protections at the border. In the endless media advocacy for a relaxation of the MIQ regime, it was, similarly, extremely rare to hear a journalist remind those complaining that, very early-on in the Pandemic, the Prime Minister had advised travellers that they ventured overseas at their own risk, and that a timely and trouble-free return to New Zealand could in no way be guaranteed by the Government.

That the lines of questioning followed by many leading journalists so often paralleled closely the attack-lines of the Opposition parties did not go unnoticed by their readers, listeners and viewers. Those same Opposition parties would, of course, be quick to reject such claims – pointing to the extremely supportive reporting of the Governing parties’ actions throughout the first year of the Pandemic. The possibility that such positivity was no more than an accurate reflection of New Zealand’s outstanding performance in combatting the Coronavirus never seemed to occur to them.

Clearly, given its conduct over the last 12 months, that possibility never occurred to the mainstream news media either. It seemed at times that, among the upper echelons of the principal media outlets, a consensus had been reached that journalists had been far too easy on the Government in 2020, and that a much tougher approach was required in 2021. Certainly, the simultaneous release, by major media outlets, of the former Prime Minister’s, John Key’s, “smug hermit kingdom” commentary, did little to allay citizens’ fears that the mainstream media was “out to get” Jacinda Ardern’s government.

As New Zealand underwent the inevitable transition from the strategy of Covid elimination to the strategy of mass vaccination, the news media’s newfound hostility towards the Government couldn’t help but augment and intensify the hostility and suspicion of those New Zealanders who, for a whole host of reasons, did not want to be vaccinated. While it is certainly not the case that journalists were “anti-vax”, the often quite truculent scepticism contained in their reporting reinforced the much deeper hostility and suspicion of the anti-vaxxers.

Not that mainstream journalism’s readiness to criticise the Government’s handling of the Pandemic in any way endeared them to the anti-vaccination movement. It remains an article of faith among anti-vaxxers that the Government and the news media are willing co-conspirators, hellbent on aiding the global assault, masterminded by perverted billionaires, on the rights and freedoms of ordinary people.

What can be said, however, is that the media-generated climate of aggressive scepticism, combined with the anti-vaxxers feverish exhibitions of anger and hate, contributed significantly to the febrile atmosphere enveloping New Zealand in 2021. The observation that the nation was fast becoming unrecognisable became a commonplace in conversations across the country. Those old enough to recall the bitter divisions of the Springbok Tour, declared the country’s mood to be much, much worse.

What made it all so much harder to fathom was that the media outlets they trusted to tell them the truth about the world seemed either unable or unwilling to acknowledge what every intelligent New Zealander knew: that their country was doing incredibly well.

The economy was among the best performing in the OECD. Unemployment was at record lows. The nation’s hospitals continued to function. Most importantly, the number of New Zealanders who had died from Covid-19 remained comfortably below one hundred.

In the Age of the Internet, all these facts were available to Kiwis at the touch of a keyboard. And yet, for Opposition politicians, businesses spokespeople, talkback hosts, newspaper columnists, editors and their teams of reporters, it was as though none of these extraordinary achievements were of any consequence.

Had all the country’s politicians and journalists lost their minds?

Sometimes, it almost seemed as though they had. It was as if a vital memorandum had been circulated, detailing a number of profoundly important changes. Specifically: the name of the country was being changed from ‘New Zealand’ to ‘Aotearoa’, and the country’s major cities were undergoing a similar transformation. In spite of the fact that they had all been built by and for the Pakeha settlers of Aotearoa-New Zealand: and named for their homelands, leaders and heroes; henceforth they would bear Māori names. Much more importantly, the nation’s constitutional arrangements were to be fundamentally revised in order to better reflect a democratically unmandated interpretation of te Tiriti o Waitangi.

When, and on whose authority, this memo and its unsettling contents was released, remains a mystery to the overwhelming majority of New Zealanders. The mystery only deepens when those same Kiwis discover that, in spite of the memo obviously being received by politicians, public servants, journalists and business leaders, the rest of the population were not included on the circulation list.

In spite of this glaring sin of democratic omission; the failings of the mainstream news media; and the increasingly toxic behaviour of the anti-vaxxers; the overwhelming majority of New Zealanders – as evidenced by the 90 percent+ of eligible citizens who ensured that they were double-jabbed – did not falter in their solidarity to one another, nor in their collective determination to defeat the Covid-19 virus and its variants.

These past twelve months have confirmed the fundamental decency, resilience, solidarity and compassion of the ordinary New Zealander. Which is why the 2021 prize for: The Most Significant Participant in National Affairs; belongs, unquestionably, to the sorely-tried, long-suffering, but ultimately unbeaten – and unbeatable – People of New Zealand.

An earlier version of this essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 20 December 2021.

Off-Key.

Not Helpful: It is no small thing when a former leader steps forward to criticise the present leadership’s handling of a national crisis. Far from generating unity, such interventions can only intensify divisions – especially when the former leader concerned hails from the Opposition party. On top of the fears arising directly out of crisis, such interventions heap the bitterness of partisanship and conflict. Only in the face of the most imminent danger; only in response to the most abject failure; could such an intervention be justified.

IT IS NO SMALL THING when a former prime minister speaks publicly during a time of national crisis. At such times, the words of former leaders, spoken in support of present leaders, can have a powerfully unifying effect. Indeed, there are few gestures capable of generating such positive results. When support is received from across the party-political divide, the message is simple. In this time of crisis, what unites us is of vastly greater importance than what divides us.

By the same token, it is no small thing when a former leader steps forward to criticise the present leadership’s handling of a national crisis. Far from generating unity, such interventions can only intensify divisions – especially when the former leader concerned hails from the Opposition party. On top of the fears arising directly out of crisis, such interventions heap the bitterness of partisanship and conflict. Only in the face of the most imminent danger; only in response to the most abject failure; could such an intervention be justified.

That the former National Party prime minister, Sir John Key, makes no attempt to convince his fellow New Zealanders that the policies of their government pose either an imminent threat to public safety, or represent an abject failure of political leadership, casts his very public intervention in the ongoing Covid-19 crisis in a deeply troubling light. To present an alternative strategy to that of the Government: a strategy unsupported by scientific evidence, but laced with highly contentious invective; raises serious questions as to motivation.

Not the least of these questions is why Key chose to make his intervention in splendid isolation from the present leader of the National Party, Judith Collins? The most obvious riposte: to give Collins plausible deniability; simply will not wash. Key’s article, published in competing newspapers, on the same day (26/9/21) comes at a time when Collins’ leadership is under constant fire from forces both inside and outside her party. It would, therefore, be entirely understandable if Key’s opinion-piece was construed by many National Party supporters as a “For God’s sake, woman, stand aside and let me show you how it’s done!” moment.

If Key’s article constituted a magisterial review of Jacinda Ardern’s government’s handling of the Covid-19 Pandemic, such an unflattering construction might have been avoided. Had it been full of carefully marshalled scientific evidence and practical solutions to well-established problems, suspicions of intra-party dog-fighting could have been cast aside. Especially if it had been rounded-out with a measured, above-the-fray call for bi-partisan co-operation in the national interest. Sadly, Key’s article does not fit this description.

Even Key’s choice of metaphor – the ill-fated mission of Apollo 13 – fails to fire. Key presents Apollo 13 as the classic example of imaginative adaptation:

“In a crisis, humans can be creative and inventive. Faced with the growing acceptance that Covid-19 and its variants may be with us indefinitely, the New Zealand Government and public health officials, like Nasa in 1970, rapidly need to change their thinking to adapt to the new challenge.”

Except that Key’s understanding of Apollo 13 is fundamentally flawed. Nasa didn’t change their thinking, they were simply forced to do more of it. Most importantly, they had to think about how to get the astronauts home safely using only what they had on the spacecraft. That was the critical challenge: to accept that no one was going to save Apollo 13 except the men on Apollo 13. All Houston had to offer them was advice. To get home, the Apollo 13 astronauts had to “follow the science”.

It is highly instructive that this interpretation of Apollo 13 never occurred to Key. Hardly surprising, of course, since by this reading, Jacinda Ardern, her Government, and “the team of five million” behaved exactly like the astronauts. They sealed themselves in and sat tight in their tiny, acutely vulnerable country. They consulted their scientists, heeded their advice, and with maximum care, and minimum destruction, brought New Zealand safely home.

It is telling that Key looks upon the this extraordinary success-story and can come up with no better descriptions than “smug hermit kingdom” and “North Korean option”. In the midst of this country’s ongoing, much more desperate, and yet to be won struggle against the Delta variant of the Covid-19 virus, New Zealand’s former prime minister decries what he sees as the Ardern Government’s lack of urgency:

“The only urgency we’ve seen for months is an enthusiasm to lock down our country, lock up our people and lock out our citizens who are overseas.”

This not the sort of language one expects to hear from someone who is trying to help. Frankly, it is more akin to the sort of language one encounters on Facebook. A cartoonist who shared Key’s opinions would undoubtedly depict Jacinda Ardern as a madly cackling queen enthroned atop a pile of prostrate Kiwi prisoners.

Not content with describing his country as a gigantic jailhouse, however, Key goes on to characterise the Government’s expert scientific advisers as fearmongers:

“Public health experts and politicians have done a good job of making the public fearful, and therefore willing to accept multiple restrictions on their civil liberties which are disproportionate to the risk of them contracting Covid.”

Says who? A former prime minister whose professional expertise lies in currency trading – an occupation with no obvious connections to the science of epidemiology. One hesitates to ask which overseas model Key would wish to see promoted by the New Zealand Government: Sweden’s, Ireland’s, Singapore’s, the United Kingdom’s, the United States’?

One wonders, too, how Key must have greeted the news that the latest polling by Research New Zealand shows upwards of 70 percent of New Zealanders wholly or partly supportive of the “multiple restrictions on their civil liberties” that “Lockdown” entails. His dismay at discovering how very few New Zealanders favoured dropping all restrictions – “masks, quarantine and the lot” – just 7 percent, is easily imagined.

Key’s 5-point plan, for what? “Freedom Day”? is a curious mixture of carrot and stick. The more reasonable suggestions are already being investigated by the Government, the Ministry of Health, and the business community. At the core of his appeal, however, is Key’s deep-seated frustration (shared by the not inconsiderable number of powerful individuals and organisations for whom he is speaking) with the Government’s all-too-evident success in persuading a substantial majority of the population that the measures it has adopted to keep New Zealanders safe are both necessary and effective.

How do they explain their own failure to persuade New Zealanders that getting rid of lockdowns and throwing open the borders is the best way forward for the country? The insulting answer, sadly, is because, as far as Key is concerned, they are too scared to think for themselves. In short, they have been frightened into compliance. “Stop ruling by fear.” Key bluntly demands of Ardern’s government.

It is as well Key declined to govern New Zealand with the ham-fistedness on display in this opinion-piece. Had he done so, it is doubtful his time in office would have lasted eight years. With the considerable political finesse he demonstrated as prime minister, Key could have achieved so much more. An essay clearly intended to be constructive, filled with the agreeable optimism that made New Zealanders vote for him again and again, would likely have prompted a grateful phone-call from the Prime Minister – maybe even an invitation to toss some ideas around. The effort carried in yesterday’s newspapers, however, merited no more than it received – a good hard slap from Covid Response Minister, Chris Hipkins.

It turned out to be a small thing after all.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 27 September 2021.

Engineering A Miracle: Can Judith Collins Reprise Rob Muldoon?

Miracle Worker? But Judith Collins and National cannot regain power by simply hoping for the worst. Elections are won by politicians like Rob Muldoon, who persuade the voters that the incumbent government is the worst choice.

WAITING FOR THE MIRACLE, as Leonard Cohen observed, is an agonising test. Especially if its arrival is far from certain. Judith Collins is living through that test right now. Convinced that political disquiet is taking hold of more and more New Zealanders, she waits for evidence of its existence outside National’s rural heartlands. Collins’ “Demand the Debate” campaign has undoubtedly stirred the latter, but is her caucus capable of holding its nerve until those former National supporters who voted Labour in 2020 start showing similar signs of feeling “left out”?

The “Groundswell” protests of 16 July 2021 were generated primarily by the Government’s unrelenting imposition of regulatory responsibilities on an already stressed rural sector. Farmer anger and impatience was readily mobilised because rural dwellers still enjoy a significant degree of effective political representation and are well-used to participating in decision-making forums. Federated Farmers, in particular, reaches into every wool- and milking-shed in the country. The Fonterra co-operative is run by and for its highly engaged farmer members. Farmers are used to having their say – and being heeded.

Collins’ problem is that the rest of New Zealand has become decidedly rusty at defending its interests. Gone are the days when working-class Kiwis could rely upon their peak trade union body, the Federation of Labour, to flex its industrial and political muscle on their behalf. The current peak union body, the NZ Council of Trade Unions, is overwhelmingly a middle-class institution dominated by the Public Service Association, the teacher unions and the Nurses Organisation. Since its formation in 1987, the NZCTU has operated as a “top-down” organisation. Recent historical experience suggests that middle-class unions don’t ask their members – they tell them. (That Labour and Green activists are drawn disproportionately from this social layer and its representative structures is no accident – a point we shall return to presently.)

That the National Party lacks the ability to raise Cain in either the working-class or the professional middle-class with the same swift effectiveness that it rouses the ire of rural New Zealand is a truism of New Zealand politics. Only Rob Muldoon demonstrated any facility for breaching the electoral and cultural defences of the working-class, and even then, his infamous “Rob’s Mob” encompassed only a small fraction of New Zealand workers.

National’s grasp upon the professional middle-class first began to weaken in the 1970s, but it was the Springbok Tour of 1981 that generated the first really significant migration of professional support from National to Labour, where – with a worrying wobble-or-two under John Key – it largely remains. Poor performance by Labour may send some of this social-liberal support leftward to the Greens, but only rarely does it flow rightward to National.

Among the conventionally wise, National’s “Demand the Debate” campaign is dismissed as dangerously mistargeted. By their reckoning, Covid-19 and its economic fallout remains the central issue of New Zealand politics. A serious misstep on the part of Jacinda Ardern’s government in relation to the Coronavirus – most especially an outbreak of its highly infectious Delta variant in the community – is seen as the eventuality most likely to move the needle decisively in National’s direction.

While it is hard to argue that a Delta variant outbreak would not, indeed, rebound to National’s electoral advantage, that does not free the main Opposition party from its obligation to take the political fight to the Government on other issues of public concern. After all, the Delta variant may not break through the border. By the end of the year, most adult New Zealanders may have received both jabs of the Pfizer vaccine. As predicted, inflationary pressures may prove to be temporary. New Zealand’s economic growth may continue to surge ahead of forecasts. National cannot regain power by simply hoping for the worst.

While massive and widespread economic dislocation remains the principal reason for Governments being hustled out of office, the same result may befall political leaders for whom a sudden loss of public faith has been engineered. The fates of Richard Nixon, Gough Whitlam, Bill Rowling and Donald Trump bear testimony to how rapidly political fortunes can change when a decisive majority of the voting public gives up on you in disgust. Engineering such a reversal is never easy, but Collins could learn something by studying Muldoon’s demolition of Labour’s Bill Rowling in 1975.

At the heart of Muldoon’s campaign was fear. The First Oil Crisis of 1973 had raised well-justified fears of impending economic dislocation. Rowling’s decision to borrow his way through the crisis was attacked to great effect by the National Party’s “Economic Wizard”. With his in/famous “Dancing Cossacks” political ad’, which characterised the Labour Government’s newly-established Superannuation Fund as an anti-Capitalist Trojan Horse, Muldoon also exploited New Zealanders’ Cold War-stoked fear of socialism.

It was, however, a much more diffused fear that Muldoon exploited most effectively. The fear that the New Zealand in which most of the voting public had grown up was under insidious attack. The moral and political certainties of the post-war years, he asserted, were being undermined by liberals and radicals who held the “traditional values” of the majority in ill-disguised contempt.

Muldoon’s stroke of political genius was to implant the suspicion that these revolutionary ideas had found a home in the upper echelons of the Labour Party. Ideas which had received short shrift when “Big Norm” Kirk was alive, Muldoon insinuated, were now tolerated – even encouraged. The ill-conceived “Citizens for Rowling” campaign was portrayed by National’s leader as a bunch of academics and liberals pouring scorn on a humble champion of the “Ordinary Bloke”. It was out of this febrile political atmosphere that Muldoon distilled National’s winning election slogan of 1975: “New Zealand the way YOU want it.”

If Collins can pull off a reprise of Muldoon’s political miracle, then she, too, can win. For that to happen, however, the normal electoral order of things must be reversed. In 1975, for example, it was not uncommon to see eager young university students waving placards celebrating Labour’s promise of “A New Society” being shouted down by young working-class adults chanting “We Want Rob!” Those young workers had jobs they feared losing, and mortgages they feared being unable to pay. They interpreted Labour’s new society as a threat – not a promise.

Collins must blend together the twin challenges of responding to Climate Change and fighting racial injustice into a single, frightening, threat to the way of life of New Zealand’s comfortable majority. If she can persuade voters that getting rid of their prized SUV’s, sending people to jail for “Hate Speech”, and setting up a separate Maori justice system for the Mongrel Mob, are all illustrative of Labour’s and the Greens’ determination to change everything – irrespective of the wishes of the majority – then there is every chance the electorate will respond negatively.

Should Collins further lace her political concoction with the idea that the Labour/Green “social revolution” is being driven by a new priesthood of public servants, academics, journalists and “woke” members of the helping professions – all of whom have come to regard their less-enlightened (deplorable?) fellow citizens as “suitable cases for treatment” – then she will lead the National Party to an election result as dramatic as Muldoon’s miraculous reversal of fortune.

The only questions that remain to be answered are whether Collins possesses Muldoon’s ruthless and unwavering political aggression; and whether or not her caucus is as terrified of her as Muldoon’s caucus was of him. If the answer to both questions is ‘No’; and Covid-19 can be kept at bay; then in 2023 Jacinda Ardern and Labour will ensure that National remains left out of the debate. Still waiting for the miracle to come.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website of Monday, 26 July 2021.

Forty Years After.

Angry Encounters: New Zealand was extraordinarily lucky that no one – on either side of the Police barricades – was killed in the 1981 Springbok Tour protests. So high were feelings running that a murderous cycle of retaliation could very easily have been set in motion – with tragic and politically poisonous consequences.

FORTY YEARS AGO, New Zealand was convulsed by mass protests against the touring Springbok Rugby team. For 56 days, in big cities and small provincial towns, tens-of-thousands of New Zealanders risked injury and arrest to obstruct the South African tourists’ progress. Hamilton’s Rugby Park pitch was invaded by several hundred anti-tour protesters who, aided by what today would be described as a ‘credible terrorist threat’, succeeded in having the game called off. (A Waiuku farmer, Pat MacQuarrie, seemed ready to fly a rented Cessna aircraft into the stands, and the Police Commissioner could not be sure he was bluffing.)

New Zealand was extraordinarily lucky that no one – on either side of the Police barricades – was killed in the Springbok Tour protests. So high were feelings running that a murderous cycle of retaliation could very easily have been set in motion – with tragic and politically poisonous consequences.

Throughout the protests, however, one vital piece of information remained uppermost in the anti-tour movement’s strategic deliberations. They were a minority – and a relatively small minority at that. Set against the scores-of-thousands of Rugby fans who packed the stands, the thousands protesting outside Carisbrook, Lancaster, Athletic and Eden Parks must have looked pretty feeble. New Zealanders who believed that politics and sport should be kept separate vastly outnumbered those who argued that, thanks to Apartheid, the two had become inseparable. In 1981, the battle for the hearts and minds of the majority had yet to be won by the opponents of racism.

Being in the minority does, however, allow protesters to bear witness to their beliefs with the moral strength that numerical weakness often, paradoxically, confers upon a cause. Even their opponents can be impressed by the dogged determination and courage displayed by those willing to put their bodies on the line – non-violently – for a principle they hold dear. Think Gandhi. Think Dr Martin Luther King.

Forty years on, however, I can’t help thinking how self-righteous we must have seemed to a great many of our fellow citizens. There is a famous incident described by Geoff Chapple in his book 1981: The Tour:

“‘What is this? A rising of the workers?’ Yelled a passer-by on his way to the [Hamilton] game. ‘You’d better hope not fella,’ [Tim] Shadbolt yelled back. ‘Because most of the workers are down in the park.’”

The protest movement against the Springbok Tour was, overwhelmingly, a movement of the educated middle-class – and their offspring.

A few years later, in the clutches of Rogernomics, I often asked myself whether the indifference of so many tertiary-educated middle-class New Zealanders to the suffering of the working-class victims of the Fourth Labour Government’s brutal reforms was in some strange way an expression of their contempt for (and fear of) the “Rugby Thugs” who backed the Springbok Tour.

That formative historical event certainly widened many of the fissures dividing New Zealand society in the 1970s and 80s. The Tour exposed a lot of ugly truths about the way Kiwi men regarded Kiwi women. It shone a light on the tortured relationship between Maori and Pakeha. Most of all, however, it revealed the vast gulf between the educated middle-class and the people Rob Muldoon, the prime minister who made the Tour possible, liked to call “the ordinary Kiwi bloke”.

At the end of those eight tumultuous weeks the pollsters of the day discovered something quite remarkable. Public opinion had shifted. No longer was the support for sporting contacts with South Africa anything like so one-sided. Whether New Zealanders’ change of mind was due simply to the vituperation and violence unleashed by the tour; or to the penny finally dropping on the true meaning of apartheid; it became clearer and clearer that they didn’t want any more years like 1981.

It was a victory of sorts.

I suspect that we anti-tour protesters would have considered it an even bigger victory if we’d been told that our children, forty years hence, would be engaged in a revolutionary campaign to stamp out all forms of sexism and racism in Aotearoa. That the 2021 equivalents of those Rugby Thugs who, forty years earlier, had attacked their mums and dads, would soon be facing charges of “hate crime” and “hate speech”. And, this time, the Police would be on their side.

Truly is it said: “Be careful what you wish for.”

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and the Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 9 July 2021.

Who Else Is There? Why the Right Needs Winston Peters.

Who Ya Gonna Call? Enlisting the unique skills of Winston Peters is now the Right’s key mission – if it is serious about bringing the drive towards a bi-cultural state to a halt. Conservatives must see that neither Judith Collins nor David Seymour have the chops for this critical historical task. Only with Peters’ help can Labour be defeated. 

IF WINSTON PETERS did not exist, the Right would have to invent him – and it can’t. Peters is a product of the assimilationist era of New Zealand’s social history. That period between the end of World War II and the 1970s when the central objective of race relations policy in New Zealand was to create “Brown Pakeha”. Citizens who were proud of their “Maori heritage”, but otherwise determined to make of themselves and their offspring well-educated and well-adjusted citizens of New Zealand.

A young Maori person emerging from the University of Auckland with a law degree in 2021 would be extremely unlikely to see themselves as a Brown Pakeha. In the nearly fifty years that have elapsed since Peters’ graduation, the assimilationist policies of the 1950s and 60s have become the focus of bitter criticism. It is difficult to see a contemporary Maori law graduate devoting their newly-acquired skills to derailing the bi-cultural project on behalf of the Pakeha Right.

That being the case, the Pakeha Right is stuck with Peters. Who else can be sure that his critique of “Maori separatism” will not be met with angry charges of racism and white supremacy? Peters’ Maori ancestry cloaks him like a political force-field, allowing him to speak out fearlessly where Pakeha right-wingers are tongue-tied by timidity.

In addition to his ancestry, Peters brings the invaluable gift of sincerity. He dubbed his party “NZ First” because he is fiercely and unquestionably loyal to the country that made his rise to power and influence possible. He refers often to his dual inheritance: of being a judicious blend of British and Maori cultural influences. The New Zealand he prioritises is a projection of his own experience – the best of both worlds.

Peters’ other big advantage is his age. Many commentators fail to grasp the importance of the fact that he has been a politician for more than forty years. That he entered Parliament in 1979 means that his career has spanned the whole of New Zealand’s recent political history: from the era of his mentor, Rob Muldoon, to that of his erstwhile protégé, Jacinda Ardern (who was not even born when Peters first became an MP). Along with the Baby Boomers and what remains of the Greatest Generation, Peters remembers the “old” New Zealand, and can justly claim to have resisted most of the worst aspects of the “new” New Zealand. Political longevity and consistency, properly presented, can be an attractive combination – as the career of Bernie Sanders attests.

Such is the scale of the problem facing the Right. The sheer impossibility of finding another politician with Peters’ extraordinary credentials. How can they not ask Peters to front the fightback against bi-culturalism and the forces which, in his speech to NZ First’s AGM on Sunday, 20 June 2021, he dubbed (with his trademark wicked accuracy) “Ngati Woke”? Who else is there who can pull the Right’s irons out of the fire?

But, if they can’t invent him, and they can’t do without him, then those committed to preserving the state bequeathed to New Zealanders by the imperialism and colonialism of the Nineteenth Century, and fine-tuned by the social-democratic nation-builders of the Twentieth, are going to have to protect him from the weaknesses that have plagued him from the very beginnings of his political career.

Peters is prone to the worst kind of cronyism: to building and maintaining tight little cliques of confidants and admirers who learn very quickly how to navigate their boss’s idiosyncrasies or find themselves ejected unceremoniously from his inner circle. The danger here for Peters is sycophancy: the absence of a warning hand upon the shoulder in precarious places.

How much more effective Peters might have been as a political leader if he’d been willing to take advice from someone other than himself? Certainly, he could have avoided the pitfalls (and enormous costs) arising out of his seemingly insatiable appetite for litigation. He might also have avoided the many errors arising from his aversion to individuals as talented and ambitious as himself. Those who are truly great recognise and welcome the greatness they see in others. They do not drive it away. To be the only big bullfrog in a tiny pond is no great achievement.

If the Right is serious about asking Peters to defeat Ngati Woke, then it must also, for once, make sure he has all the financial resources needed to do the job. Too often in the past, Peters has been forced into the orbit of interests in the market for a political fixer. If Peters has not learned by now that any attempt to draw a veil of secrecy across such negotiations is bound to end in disaster, then he never will. Under no circumstances should those keen to harness Peters’ talents leave the management of NZ First’s funds to its leader and/or his friends.

This, then, is the Right’s mission – if it is serious about bringing the drive towards a bi-cultural state to a halt. Conservatives must know by now that neither Judith Collins nor David Seymour have the chops for this critical historical task. Only with Peters’ help can Labour be defeated.

But, if the more conservative elements of the ruling-class are serious about bringing into play Peters’ unique strengths, then they must be equally committed to protecting him from his own worst weaknesses. He needs people around him who are not too proud to admit that there is no one else. Experts who know all the latest campaign tricks. A team willing and able to give this extraordinary performer the opportunity to do what he does best: be the Winston Peters that Winston Peters invented.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 22 June 2021.

Getting Our Politics Sorted.

Sorting Us Out: In many respects political beliefs, and the way we respond to them, play a very similar role to J.K. Rowling’s Sorting Hat. An expectation that people will be treated fairly assigns us to one political “house”, while a belief that people must learn to stand on their own two feet sends us to another. A love of Mother Nature pushes us in one direction; a love of Lady Liberty somewhere else.

THE SORTING HAT is one of J.K. Rowling’s cleverer inventions. In the first of her best-selling series of children’s books, Harry Potter and his fellow First Years are sorted into their appropriate Hogwarts houses – Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw and Slytherin – by the all-knowing Sorting Hat. As the Harry Potter saga unfolds, it resolves into a life and death struggle between the evil denizens of Slytherin, and everybody else.

In many respects political beliefs, and the way we respond to them, play a very similar role to the Sorting Hat. An expectation that people will be treated fairly assigns us to one political “house”, while a belief that people must learn to stand on their own two feet sends us to another. A love of Mother Nature pushes us in one direction; a love of Lady Liberty somewhere else.

Such diversity remains healthy only for as long as there is something greater than houses holding the Sorting Hat’s assignments together. In the Harry Potter novels, that greater thing is Hogwarts itself. In societies like our own, it is the nation state which binds us: an indissoluble collection of political principles to which all citizens subscribe.

Looking around the world, it is becoming increasingly clear that the nation state is struggling to retain the universal allegiance that prevents it from descending into a partisan war of all against all. Whether it be Donald Trump’s Disunited States of America, or Boris Johnson’s Disunited Kingdom, the all-important “whole” shows worrying signs of becoming something less than the sum of its parts. The houses have become more important that the school.

One of the first people to notice this phenomenon was the American writer and journalist, Bill Bishop. His 2008 book, The Big Sort, was subtitled: “why the clustering of like-minded America is tearing us apart”.

The natural tendency of birds of a common ethnic/cultural/political feather to flock together – in discrete neighbourhoods, suburbs, towns and (smaller) cities, where everybody does the same sort of work, has the same sort of educational credentials, earns the same sort of money and, crucially, shares the same sorts of views, is making it harder and harder for them to understand (let alone stand shoulder-to-shoulder with) those who don’t.

John Harris, writing in The Guardian, recently raised the possibility that this propensity to “cluster” might produce an historic reversal of traditional political polarities in the United Kingdom:

“If you want a possible vision of the future, picture a liberal, university-educated middle class concentrated – by choice – in the affluent south, while a reactionary conservatism speaks for more deprived parts of the country, and the tensions that surfaced around Brexit burst forth again and again.”

Could something similar happen here? Is New Zealand society sorting itself into similar clusters? And if it is, how likely is it to effect a reversal of our politics?

If New Zealand’s four “houses” are Taking Care of Business, Taking Care of Others, Working With My Hands, and Working With My Brain, then New Zealand Labour is unlikely to suffer the fate of British Labour. The latter lost its supposedly impregnable “Red Wall” when its liberal, university-educated middle class lost touch with (and all-too-often actively alienated) its working-class base. Here in New Zealand, however, Labour’s strong relationship with Maoridom makes a similar rupture most unlikely. Overwhelmingly, the house members of Working With My Hands are brown.

Far from losing touch with its brown working-class base, New Zealand Labour’s liberal, university-educated middle class: the house members of Working With My Brain and Taking Care of Others; are doing everything they can to empower Maori and Pasefika New Zealanders. They are doing this by strengthening their unions; by increasing their benefits; by more appropriately tailoring health and educational services to their needs; and, most significantly, by reconfiguring New Zealand’s constitutional structures to ensure their voices are heard and their cultural needs recognised.

Ironically, this leaves New Zealand’s National Party where British Labour now appears to be standing: with insufficient allies to win a nationwide election. Of New Zealand’s four houses, only Taking Care of Business (especially rural business) is overwhelmingly loyal to National. Increasingly, the house members of Working With My Brain, once more-or-less evenly split between National and Labour, are clustering around like-minded “progressives”.

The Sorting Hat has distributed Labour across Gryffindor, Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw. National’s stuck in Slytherin.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 21 May 2021.

The French Connection.

Anti-Philosopher President?  Emmanuel Macron and his party’s reaction to the terrorist atrocities committed on French soil targets the very same philosophical movements excited and emboldened by New Zealand’s own terrifying tragedy.

IT IS NOT the sort of thought experiment New Zealanders are encouraged to conduct in these culturally sensitive times. Even so, let’s imagine that the 2019 massacre which seared itself across New Zealand’s collective memory had not been of peaceful Muslim worshippers by a white nationalist extremist. Let’s imagine, rather, that as practically the whole of this country’s national security apparatus was anticipating, the massacre had been of Christian worshippers by an Islamic jihadist extremist.

Overnight, the ideological climate in this country would have become exceedingly hostile to the forces of progressivism. A bitter mood of “we told you so” would have settled over the nation: a mood as far removed from Jacinda Ardern’s inspired “they are us” formulation as it is possible to imagine.

Responding to the angry clamour of public opinion, the security services would have cracked down hard on the Muslim community, activating the multitude of surveillance and control measures already thoroughly tested (and strongly recommended) by their Five Eyes partners. Attacks on Muslims and their places of worship would have skyrocketed. Tragically, most New Zealanders would have struggled to summon-up much in the way of sympathy.

Certainly, the Green Party leadership would have had to think twice about exploiting the emotional turmoil arising from the massacre to launch an all-out assault of white supremacy and colonisation. The actual behaviour of Marama Davidson and Golriz Ghahraman in 2019 did the Greens few enough favours. Had an identical strategy been attempted in the circumstances of a jihadist attack, the consequences would have been politically suicidal.

The personal impact on Jacinda Ardern of a jihadist attack would, similarly, have provided a stark contrast with her actual response to the Christchurch tragedy. Rather than the empathic woman in the hijab, it is likely the Prime Minister would have adopted the persona of the stern shield-maiden of the nation. Unleashing without hesitation the terrible swift sword of national retribution, she would have become New Zealanders’ avenging angel. Not so much “they are us” as “they will pay”.

In this jihadist scenario, the deep and enduring bond between the Prime Minister and New Zealand’s Muslim community following the white nationalist attack could not have been forged. Consequently, her strong personal commitment to restricting Islamophobic “hate speech” would not be there. Equally absent would be the Ardern government’s determination to rid New Zealand of automatic weapons. Indeed, this government’s unusual receptiveness towards ideas and policies aimed at suppressing right-wing extremism and curbing white privilege would not be in evidence anywhere.

Over and above its devastating impact on the faith community directly involved, the Christchurch mosque massacre also acted as the catalyst for a sharp shift towards the ideological left in New Zealand. The very opposite to what is currently unfolding in France.

Since the year 2000, France has lost more than 250 of its citizens to jihadist violence, precipitating a pronounced political repositioning within the French electorate. Repulsed by the actions of Islamic fanatics, French politicians have reasserted their nation’s strong traditions of secularism and egalitarianism. Just last week, the French National Assembly passed a law which, in addition to proscribing “Islamicism”, also requires every citizen to indicate active support for the classic republican virtues of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.

Aware of the opening which this reconstitution of political forces has provided for the Radical Right, ministers in the government of President Emmanuel Macron are indicating a wish to go further. Leading the charge is France’s Minister for Higher Education, Frédérique Vidal. In a recent television interview, she announced an investigation into “the totality of research underway in our country”. Firmly in her sights was what she calls “Islamo-leftism”.

According to Vidal, “Islamo-leftism corrupts all of society and universities are not impervious.” Unsurprisingly, French academics reacted with fury – not least because Vidal went on to accuse those involved in race and gender studies of “always looking at everything through the prism of their will to divide, to fracture, to pinpoint the enemy.” In response to this, the National Centre for Scientific Research, came out swinging, condemning in particular “attempts to delegitimise different fields of research, like post-colonial studies, intersectional studies and research on race.”

In a nation like France, however, with such a long and strong imperial tradition, these fields of study are precisely those from which the political right stands to derive the most electoral advantage. Hence Macron’s haste in heading-off his principal rival in next year’s presidential elections, the far-right nationalist, Marine Le Pen, at the ideological pass. Both candidates are determined to not to be found wanting by those French voters who still take patriotic pride in their nation’s past glories.

Ironically, the same “intersectional” academic disciplines under attack in France are also responsible for inspiring the New Zealand government’s new and compulsory history curriculum designed to rectify New Zealanders’ woeful understanding of their country’s long and (allegedly) ignoble record of conquest and expropriation. That such a radical policy (along with kindred initiatives on Maori wards, hate speech, and limiting the rights of defendants in rape trials) could have advanced so far is inconceivable without the tremendous political impetus provided by the Christchurch mosque massacres. More, and even bolder, advances will be hazarded – most especially in relation to constitutional issues – if Labour’s current initiatives are concluded successfully.

That the success of Labour’s radical programme appears imminent is not only explicable in terms of the Christchurch attack, but also on account of the National Party’s all-too-evident ideological confusion. Some in National seem quite relaxed about intersectionalism and its policy implications, while others seem bitterly opposed. Should the former faction emerge triumphant, their party risks electoral marginalisation. At present there seems barely enough room on the New Zealand electoral stage for two “woke” parties – let alone a third in two minds on the subject! A win for the conservative faction would, therefore, seem the most likely outcome – especially since, thanks to Macron and his ministers, there is now a growing body of coherent ideological opposition to Islamo-leftism and its kindred political faiths for them to call on.

National will have to be quick, though, if Act is not to occupy the ground opened-up by the French Right first. Ideologically-speaking, David Seymour and Emmanuel Macron have much in common. Both are confident technocratic liberals, perfectly at ease in their defence of “Enlightenment values”, even as they unashamedly promote the arguments and interests of free-market capitalism. Both men, and their parties, also possess the philosophical clarity of mind to confront the intersectional and post-colonial theorists head-on. Unless they’re keeping their light especially well-hidden under a bushel, the person in National with that capability has yet to be elected to Parliament.

One final point needs to be made here. Macron and his ministers have been quick to blame the intellectual disorientation of its best and its brightest on what The New York Times describes as “destabilising influences on US campuses”, with Macron himself denouncing “certain social-science theories entirely imported from the United States.” Now, that is a particularly cheeky gallic accusation! Because, when it comes to the destabilising influence of the philosophical movement generally referred to as “Post-Modernism”, just about all of its leading intellectual lights – past and present – declaimed at length upon the death of meaning in strong French accents.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website of Monday, 22 February 2021.

Trump's Surprisingly Large Army Of New Zealand Supporters.

The Sincerest Form Of Flattery: As anybody with the intestinal fortitude to brave the commentary threads of local news-sites, large and small, will attest, the number of Trump-supporting New Zealanders is really quite astounding. 

 
IT’S SO DIFFICULT to resist the temptation to be smug. From the distant perspective of New Zealand, the United States is fast becoming incomprehensible. We greet the information that there are now more US troops in Washington DC than there are in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria combined with a dumfounded shake of the head. As we witness National Guardsmen and women securing the streets of the United States capital city against car bombs and IEDs, we struggle to accept that the terrorists against whom these extraordinary measures are directed are not from foreign parts – they’re home-grown.

“Thank God we live in New Zealand!”, has become a common refrain wherever people gather to discuss the images of insurrection and political violence filling our screens. As if the God of Nations has given us some sort of free-pass through the unending vicissitudes of history.

As if …

Bryan Gould who, had the dice rolled differently, might have ended up leading the British Labour Party, has an interesting tale to tell about the political tensions simmering just beneath the surface of New Zealand. Astonishingly, this Oxford graduate and former Vice-Chancellor of Waikato University had a column submitted to his local newspaper rejected. In Gould’s own words:

“In a recent column I wrote for local newspapers, I ventured to suggest that Donald Trump – in addition to being a liar and a cheat, and sexist and racist – was a fascist in the making and would probably try, if he were to lose the election, to defy the democratic will of the people. The column was deemed to be too extreme by my editor who declined to publish it on the ground that it would offend some of his Trump-supporting readers who might write letters to him to complain. So much for a free and courageous press! Our failure to agree on the issue led to my no longer writing my column for his paper.”

Now Gould is very far from being the first person to have his editor reject a contribution. Editorial discretion and press freedom cannot be separated without abandoning both principles. What is remarkable about Gould’s account, however, is the editor’s reference to his “Trump-supporting readers” and their potential to make sufficient epistolary mischief to give him pause.

Now, granted, all this happened well before what CNN delights in calling “The Trump Insurrection”. This event has, presumably, reduced the number of Gould’s editor’s Trump-supporting readers considerably. Nevertheless, as anybody with the intestinal fortitude to brave the commentary threads of local news-sites, large and small, will attest, the number of Trump-supporting New Zealanders is really quite astounding. There are certainly enough of them to raise the question: If a truly Trumpian figure were to emerge from our own political environment, would he or she attract a level of support comparable to the original?

The question isn’t quite as hypothetical as it might at first appear. In the general election of 2005, the Don Brash-led National Party came within 46,000 votes of winning a plurality of the Party Vote. With the support of Act and NZ First, Brash could very easily have become prime minister. And what a prime minister he would have been! The National leader and his party were committed to returning the Treaty of Waitangi to history’s glass case. The Maori seats were marked down for abolition, and all race-based references were to be expunged from the statute books. In the parlance of present-day “progressives”, Brash’s would have been a “ neo-colonialist”, “white supremacist” government.

Not to put too fine a point upon it, all hell would have broken loose.

It does not require too large a slice of the Devil’s imagination to envisage Brash and his allies being left with little alternative but to mobilise their “silent majority” of supporters against the fury his policies had unleashed in the streets. Protest action that resulted in serious property damage or, even worse, to loss of life, would have left him with even fewer choices. Calling-in the military to support the civil power would likely have become necessary quite quickly – with all-too-predictable results. A snap election, called to provide ex-post-facto validation for the emergency powers taken by the government to quell the unrest (as happened following the 1951 Waterfront Dispute) would, almost certainly, have delivered National a stunning victory. New Zealanders would have struggled to recognise the angry mess their country had become.

It didn’t happen, of course, because, as happened recently in Georgia’s run-off Senate elections, people of colour resident in a handful of crucial suburbs came through at the eleventh hour with enough votes to save the day. South Auckland’s Maori and Pasifika voters give Labour’s Helen Clark the leverage she needed to persuade Winston Peters to keep the National Party off the Treasury Benches. (Even though NZ First had actively campaigned on an anti-Treaty manifesto no less radical than Brash’s.)

The other thing that happened over the course of the three years following the 2005 election was exactly what all moderate Republicans must be praying for in the post-Trump era. A young, charismatic and, most importantly, moderate leader of the dominant centre-right party emerged to challenge the incumbent centre-left government.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of John Key’s decade-long reign of moderate conservatism to the political and cultural evolution of contemporary New Zealand. It protected National from the creeping madness which has slowly but surely overtaken the centre-right parties of the USA, UK and Australia. In the fifteen years that have elapsed since Don Brash set his lance against the elites’ decolonisation project, the implacable grind of human mortality has eliminated a huge chunk of the electoral support for Brash’s “Iwi/Kiwi” dichotomy of 2005.

Racist nostalgia for the carefully camouflaged white supremacist New Zealand that endured from the end of the Land Wars in the mid-1860s until the defeat of Rob Muldoon in the mid-1980s still exists, of course, and four years of Trump’s shameless racism have given his Kiwi admirers’ renewed hopes of a National Party committed to making (white) New Zealand great again.

Their hopes are unlikely to be realised. A frankly white supremacist government in power – even if it had only ruled New Zealand for three or four years – could not have failed to extend its electoral base well into younger demographic cohorts. But Brash’s failure and Key’s success have limited significantly the political space available for Trumpism in New Zealand.

They’re here, of course, but not in the numbers needed to generate a politically decisive right-wing populist pulse. Gould’s editor really had no need to worry. The Baby Boomer voting bloc grew up with Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. Hell! A fair number of them wore HART badges and exchanged blows with “Rob’s Mob” on the streets. When the owners of the Steinlager brand start celebrating anti-nuclear protesters as heroes, then you’d have to say that Trumpism’s chances of doing to New Zealand what it has so tragically done to the United States are pretty slim.

Even so, it never pays to give smugness too much room at the table. While there’s precious little scope for right-wing populism gaining significant political purchase here in Aotearoa-New Zealand, the prospects for left-wing populism are looking surprisingly good. What’s more, if this government doesn’t deign to put in an appearance sometime very soon, then that left-wing pulse is only likely to grow stronger.

It might pay to strengthen Parliament’s front doors – you never know these days who’s going to come a-calling.


This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 18 January 2021.

Holding The Centre.

"You call that a conservative? Nah, this is a conservative!" New Zealanders are in the market for a quiet and reassuring small-c conservative political centrist. The critical question, however, is which politician is currently playing that role? Who has mastered the art of relaxed, informal and intimate political communication? Who will soon announce her intention to mobilise the expertise of New Zealand’s most practical and successful businessmen and women? Who, like so many “ordinary” people has a toddler with a future to protect? Is it Todd Muller - or Jacinda Ardern?

THE PROBLEM WITH CENTRISTS is that, practically by definition, they shy away from extremes. It’s the quality that most encourages voters to trust them. The quality that makes people feel safe. Unfortunately, it is also the quality most likely to bore people rigid. If a politician wishes to promote safe policies, then it is absolutely vital that he does so in an interesting and engaging way. If your brand of politics is boring, then you have to be anything but. So far, Todd Muller has come across as every bit as uninspiring as his politics. Not a good start.

In fact, compared to Jacinda Ardern’s first few days as leader of the Labour Opposition, Muller’s gaffe-prone performances have constituted an excruciating tutorial in how not to play the game of politics.

Who could forget the day Jacinda emerged from the Opposition caucus-room as Labour’s new leader to greet the assembled media. Hers was a performance so faultless, so accomplished, so crackling with energy and sheer, draw-dropping competence that seasoned professionals were reduced to stunned silence. Not, however, before offering brief, two-word responses to her performance like: “holy shit!”, “fucking hell!”, and “bloody unbelievable!” That some political commentators have uttered exactly the same words in response to Muller’s performances should not be considered a good thing. In Jacinda’s case the journalists were responding to how astonishingly good she was; in Todd’s they were registering precisely the opposite!

Muller’s problem is that he lacks Jacinda’s ability to make moderation come alive. Ardern understands that most people are drawn to traditional values and common sense ideas. Far from seeing this as a sign of their intellectual weakness, however, she treats it as proof of their ethical strength. It’s an insight which allows her to infuse the great rounded hump of the bell-curve with heroic purpose. By characterising people’s conventional reactions as the only serious, morally-defensible options available, Jacinda makes the ordinary extraordinary.

Just think of her inspired “They are Us” comment following the dreadful events in Christchurch. It resonated so powerfully because it expressed to perfection the instant identification with the unjustly attacked that is hard-wired into the human animal. Ardern understands the enormous power of common human emotions. Her ability to unleash them; to in effect mobilise the ordinary; is what makes her such a formidable politician. Ardern’s description of herself as a “pragmatic idealist”, and her commitment to being “relentlessly positive”, encapsulate perfectly her determination to not only make Labour’s middle-of-the-road brand of social-democratic politics interesting and exciting, but also to make it honourable.

If Muller is to have the slightest hope of becoming competitive in this election, then he has to get his head around all this – and quickly. Conservatism, in its proper sense of reflecting the organic social bonds linking the past (our parents) the present (ourselves) and the future (our children) will always enjoy a pronounced advantage over those political movements dedicated to altering the status quo. In politics, no less than in physics, inertia is a difficult state to overcome. And when, for whatever reason, it is overcome; when things are changing way faster than most people like; then offering to make them stop will, almost always, be the winning offer.

What does that mean in practical political terms? That Muller doesn’t appear to know should be scaring the bejesus out of his promoters. That he didn’t immediately reassure voters, calmly and with fatherly conviction, that he understood fully the need – without in any way endangering New Zealanders’ extraordinary victory over the Covid-19 virus – to do everything required to bring New Zealand’s perilous economic situation under control, is problematic – to say the least. Above all else, Muller’s approach to the electorate needs to be relaxed and informal – intimate even. As an avid reader of American political history, he should have no difficulty recalling the way Franklin Roosevelt communicated with the American people during the Great Depression. What could be more relaxed, informal and intimate than a “fireside chat”?

Muller doesn’t need to attack Jacinda or her government directly, he merely has to present the electorate with a credible plan for economic recovery. He doesn’t have to point to Phil Twyford’s, David Clark’s and Kelvin Davis’s failures, he simply has to draw people’s attention to how much still remains to be done. And all the time, in the finest small-c conservative tradition, he has to subtly remind voters of how well the country has fared under past National governments; of the expertise he and his colleagues can bring to bear immediately; of the historically reliable instincts of practical and successful businessmen and women and how vital these will be in securing a prosperous future for New Zealand’s children.

None of those objectives will be achieved by standing in an empty Legislative Chamber, booming out trite phrases to Q+A’s Jack Tame, and gesticulating wildly to thousands of startled New Zealanders sipping tea in their living-rooms.

It is debateable whether Muller and his advisers understand the danger they and the National Party are in. Yes, this is a moment for the quiet and reassuring counsel of a small-c conservative political centrist. The critical question, however, is which politician is currently playing that role? Who has mastered the art of relaxed, informal and intimate political communication? Who will soon announce her intention to mobilise the expertise of New Zealand’s most practical and successful businessmen and women? Who, like so many “ordinary” people has a toddler with a future to protect?

Is it Todd Muller – or Jacinda Ardern?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 28 May 2020.

Returning To “Normalcy”.

Resuming Normal Service: The Republican Party's nominee for President in 1920, Warren Harding, promised the American people: “not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration”. If she wishes to remain our prime minister, then Jacinda Ardern will offer New Zealanders the same.

HOW EDUCATED AMERICA snickered when the Republican Party’s nominee for President campaigned for a “return to normalcy”. Clearly, the poor rube was unfamiliar with the correct noun – “normality”. What more could be expected, they sniffed derisively, from this undistinguished Senator from Ohio?

But Warren Gamaliel Harding had got it right. In the aftermath of one of the most tumultuous periods in American history, yesterday’s nouns were no longer fit for linguistic duty. In 1920 “normality” just didn’t cut it. “Normalcy”, however, struck just the right note with an American electorate bone weary of war, influenza, strikes, Justice Department raids, race riots and entangling foreign treaties. Harding became the twenty-ninth President of the United States, with 60 percent of the popular vote.

It was “normalcy” wot won it.

It is ever thus. After an extended period of heightened emotions and devastating experiences, the one overwhelming desire of the overwhelming majority of human-being is for everything to go back to the way it used to be – before everything got upended. Yes, there are lessons to be drawn from these traumatic events. But not now. And, yes, if we are to avoid something similar happening to us in the future, then, of course, things will have to change. But not now. Right now, all we want is some peace and quiet – and for our lives to return to normal.

It a facet of human nature to which all those leftists currently urging Labour, NZ First and the Greens not to “waste” the Covid-19 crisis should pay close attention. New Zealanders old enough to have participated in the massive protests that accompanied the 1981 Springbok Tour might like to cast their minds back to how quickly all that activist fervour and commitment evaporated. It seemed preposterous that after such a pivotal political event the people who’d made it happen could simply pick up from where they’d left off prior to the Springbok’s arrival – but they did.

If the Left does not formulate its strategies with the political potency of the “return to normalcy” slogan uppermost in its mind, then its representatives are certain to pay a very high price. Whenever the next general election is held: 19 September, 28 November, or sometime in 2021; any party not promising the voters a well-earned holiday from fear, sorrow, frustration and anger will crash and burn.

After weeks in lockdown and months of economic anxiety, the voters will be in no mood for grand schemes and novel experiments. They will vote for the parties that ask the least of them. The politicians who make it clear that the New Zealand people, having done all that was asked of them – and more – have every right to expect their Government to say: “We’ve got this.” Essentially, the winning message will be: ‘You’ve done enough. Now, leave it to us.’ Grand schemes and novel experiments will not win votes, but a promise to “return to normalcy” will.

Left-wing radicals will howl with frustration if the Labour-NZ First-Green Government allows itself to be guided by Harding’s example. The Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, is, however, well enough attuned to the needs of New Zealanders to let these grey-muzzled old dogs of the Left go on howling. She, too, must feel the need to call ‘time-out’ on unrelenting crisis management and endless decisions – each one more important than the last. She, too, must long for an evening-in with her baby and her man. More than anyone, she must feel the planetary attraction of “normalcy”

She and her colleagues must also understand that if they don’t offer a “return to normalcy” then Simon Bridges and his National Party most certainly will. They must understand that “normalcy” is the meat and drink of all conservative parties: that what people crave most in life is predictability; a world they can wake up to with confidence and enthusiasm. Nothing frightens people more than a world out of joint: a world that no longer works. Mr Bridges need convince Kiwi voters of only one thing: that he has the ability and the determination to restore predictability to New Zealanders’ lives; to make their world work again.

Warren Harding promised the American people “not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration”. If Jacinda is wise (and she is) she will promise New Zealanders the same.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 3 April 2020.