“A Giant Beast Called The Government”

Leviathan: “The Labour Party is not the government. The government is the government. I don’t go and try to lobby the Labour Party. The party does have its democratic structures and its policy platforms and manifesto and that is something that the government — the Labour government, the Labour Party-in-government — the government tries to advance. But ultimately there is a giant beast called the government and it’s the public service, it’s MPs, ministers, ministers from various parties.” - Neale Jones, Lobbyist.

SOMETIMES the mask of politics-as-it-is-officially-presented slips and the true face of the political class is revealed. A particularly serious slippage occurred quite recently in a Spinoff feature about “partisan lobbyists”. Neale Jones, a senior backroom operative in the dreary days of Andrew Little’s leadership of the Labour Party, but now the go-to lobbyist for people and businesses in need of some face-time with Labour cabinet ministers (or the public servants advising them) did something no member of the political class should ever do – he told us exactly what it thinks of our democracy.

It is a fundamental mistake, he told the feature’s author, Asher Emanuel, to assume that the Labour Party has anything to do with the day-to-day decision-making of cabinet ministers and public servants. Never mind that Labour spin-doctors rattle-on about New Zealand having a “Labour-led Government”, the actual, this-is-really-going-to-affect-you, business of government takes place in an almost entirely non-partisan environment.

“The Labour Party is not the government” says Jones. “The government is the government. I don’t go and try to lobby the Labour Party. The party does have its democratic structures and its policy platforms and manifesto and that is something that the government — the Labour government, the Labour Party-in-government — the government tries to advance. But ultimately there is a giant beast called the government and it’s the public service, it’s MPs, ministers, ministers from various parties.”

It’s the same with policy. Jones is scornful of the whole notion of public policy being, at its core, a democratic process.

“A Labour Party member sitting in a dusty hall in Temuka is not writing the government’s policy”, Jones says. “Eventually there’s an impact. But you’re not dealing with that person in the democratic process. You’re dealing with the government.”

At least Jones was decent enough to throw that “eventually there’s an impact” life-line to all those benighted souls raised on the notion that ordinary citizens, sitting in dusty halls, might be able to change the way their society is run. Although, he makes it pretty darn clear that those party members will find it very hard to recognise their ideas in what finally emerges from the “giant beast called the government”.

As Emanuel observes, there is no way of escaping the need for expertise when it comes to influencing the formation of public policy. An organisation wanting to change things, says Jones, is unlikely to succeed without “a decent communications and government relations capacity.”

And, as Emanuel quips: “it helps to be of the political world.”

“If you’re not in that world,” says Jones, “you don’t know, necessarily, how to engage with legislation and regulation. You don’t know who the people are, you don’t know them personally. You don’t know what makes them tick.”

In other words: “Ordinary citizens wishing to change the world should not attempt to do so without a $200-per-hour guide. Citizens requiring guides should proceed to the nearest lobby.”

Emanuel is gloomily philosophical about the world Jones inhabits.

“A certain kind of realism insists that this is simply the shape modern democracy must take. From this vantage, these trends are an inevitability, principle must yield to practicability, and moral conviction is mere aesthetics.”

Jones, of course, agrees: “I got into politics for economic justice issues and I believe in social justice. But also, I’m a pragmatist and a realist and I focus on how to get things done. The measure of what we do is what we get done, or what we achieve.”

These, then, are the opinions of what passes for a “progressive” member of the political class.

But is Jones right? Do pragmatism and realism require the quest for economic and social justice to remain seated in the waiting-room of history until the political class – those professional servants of the “great beast called government” – are ready to receive them?

The history of social and economic change in New Zealand strongly suggests that Jones is very far from being right.

New Zealand’s social welfare system which, in its essentials, came into existence on 1 April 1939, wasn’t written in a dusty hall in Temuka. It was, however, written 80 miles down the road, in the tiny rural settlement of Kurow.

Its authors were Gervan Macmillan, the local GP; Arnold Nordmeyer, the local Presbyterian minister; and Andrew Davidson, the local schoolteacher. On the doctor’s dining-room table, these three – whose jobs had brought them face-to-face with the worst privations of the Great Depression – mapped out the contours of a system which would, eventually, take care of their fellow citizens “from the cradle to the grave”.

Nordmeyer and Macmillan took the plan to the 1934 Labour Party Conference, where it was enthusiastically endorsed and included in the party’s 1935 manifesto. By 1938 it was the law of the land.

Not bad for three ordinary citizens, gathered around a dining-room table in Kurow, North Otago.

And not a lobbyist in sight.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 2 March 2018.

Sour Fruit: Why I’m Not Pinning My Hopes On ESRA.

What Sort Of Tree Are They Planting? The genetic make-up of ESRA reflects the personal histories of its creators. Its core inheritance comes from the Maoist Left of the 1970s. There are also genes from the unemployed workers and Maori nationalist movements of the 1980s. Still more hail from the pacifist, radical feminist and Green philosophies. Finally, there is a generous contribution from the academic Marxist gene-banks located in the political science and sociology departments of the nation’s universities.

 

IS IT TOO SOON to pronounce judgement upon ESRA? Economic & Social Research Aotearoa has only just been launched. So, surely, we should give it a little time to show us what it can do? Except that we already know what ESRA will do, because we already know what ESRA is. ESRA is a Far-Left “think tank” whose contribution to the formulation and implementation of broadly acceptable progressive policies will range from negligible to nil.

 

Unfair? I don’t think so.

 

If I were to show you the first fragile leaves of a lemon sapling, and ask whether or not you wanted a lemon tree in your garden, I very much doubt that you would say: “Oh, let’s not be hasty. That might not be a lemon tree after all. Or, if it is a lemon tree, it might prove to be one of a very special kind – one that does not bear sour fruit.” More likely your answer would depend on how you feel about lemons.

 

If you like lemon trees, and lemons, you’d say: “Oh, by all means, let it grow.” If you don’t like lemons, you’d tell me to pull it out.

 

Well I don’t like lemons. At least, I don’t like lemon trees that take up space and consume resources I would much rather allocate to other plants.

 

The genetic make-up of ESRA reflects the personal histories of its creators. Its core inheritance comes from the Maoist Left of the 1970s. There are also genes from the unemployed workers and Maori nationalist movements of the 1980s. Still more hail from the pacifist, radical feminist and Green philosophies. Finally, there is a generous contribution from the academic Marxist gene-banks located in the political science and sociology departments of the nation’s universities.

 

Perhaps the founders of ESRA are hoping to harvest some hybrid vigour from these waning ideological strains. Certainly their individual evolutions offer scant cause for optimism. The latest historical research paints Mao Zedong as a monstrous figure whose “Great Leap Forward” and “Cultural Revolution” cost the lives of millions of Chinese workers and peasants. The unemployed workers’ movement collapsed in ideological and personal rancour even as Rogernomics and Ruthanasia were tearing the New Zealand working-class to pieces. The so-called “new social movements” (pacifism, anti-racism, feminism, environmentalism) proved easy meat for the assimilative/transformative powers of neoliberalism. Second Wave feminism was reduced to tallying-up the number of female company directors. Maori Nationalism turned into the Iwi Leaders Group. Green became the new Pink. And academic Marxism remained practically impenetrable to anyone not writing a doctoral thesis.

 

It’s not a whakapapa that inspires much confidence. Simply keeping so many unruly horses pulling in the same direction will require the wisdom of a sage and the patience of a saint. There are many on the Left, however, who’ll happily attest to ESRA’s founding mother, Sue Bradford, being over-endowed with both those qualities. All I’m prepared to say is: she’ll need them!

 

Sue has called ESRA a “left-wing think-tank”. Indeed, she wrote her doctoral thesis on the desirability and practicality of establishing just such a beast. Unfortunately for the NZ Left, (which desperately needs a think-tank of its own to match the Right’s Maxim Institute and NZ Initiative) ESRA is nothing of the sort.

 

What stands out the most about the historical phenomenon of the think-tank is its unswervingly practical focus. At the end of World War II the Right stood discredited: its political leadership by their affinities with the defeated fascists and Nazis; its economic theories by the multiple lessons and legacies of the Great Depression. Social-democracy, on the other hand, armed with the economic and social insights of Keynesianism, was in the ideological ascendant. By the early-1970s, it was poised to put an end to capitalism as generally understood. Something had to be done.

 

The principal weapon of the Right’s ideological fightback was the think-tank. Not only did it relentlessly critique the social-democratic assumptions of the era, but it produced a never-ending stream of practical suggestions for action. The process was as simple as it was effective: commission a report on an institution, or a practice, you wish to change. Release the report to the media and make its author available for interviews and public meetings. Arrange private meetings with sympathetic politicians and/or journalists where practical advice can be given and received. Repeat as required until a parliamentary majority is assembled in favour of your “reform”.

 

After more than 40 years, the Right’s refinement of the think-tank “weapon” has developed to the point where a body called the American Legislative Exchange Council is able to supply right-wing state legislators with pre-drafted “model” legislation. Committed to advancing the “fundamental principles of free-market enterprise, limited government, and federalism at the state level through a nonpartisan public-private partnership of America's state legislators, members of the private sector and the general public” ALEC makes the work of the Right’s parliamentary foot-soldiers almost too easy.

 

If this was the sort of tree Sue and her comrades were planting this weekend, I’d be cheering them on. Sadly, they are committed to an organisational model that seeks to bring about radical economic and social change without enlisting ESRA as a skilled participant in the day-to-day, down-and-dirty, cut-and-thrust business of political influence-peddling. But that is what a think-tank is. It’s what it does. Aspiring to be a think-tank that doesn’t get its hands dirty, is like aspiring to be a prostitute who doesn’t sell sex.

 

It’s a tremendous pity, but ESRA is a lemon.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Saturday, 3 September 2016.