No Time To Think: Ageing Boomers, Laurie & Les, Talk Politics.

“Members of Parliament don’t work for us, they represent us, an entirely different thing. As with so much that has turned out badly, the re-organising of MPs’ responsibilities began with the Fourth Labour Government. That’s when they began to be treated like employees – public servants – whose diaries had to be kept full-to-bursting, in case they found themselves with enough time on their hands to talk to their constituents and start thinking for themselves.”

“WHAT THIS PLACE NEEDS”, declared Les, depositing two brimming glasses of ale on the table, “is a fire”.

“Do pubs even have fires anymore?” Les’s friend Laurie replied, having carefully tested the quality of the beverage placed before him. “Haven’t open fires been banned?”

“Not all of them”, Les insisted, “a friend of mine was telling me only the other day about this pub with a brewery attached – or was it the other way round? – anyway, he swears there was a roaring open fire in the bar, and another one outside for the smokers.”

“However did they get that past the Fun Police? For God’s sake, don’t tell your Green Party mates, or they’ll be in there with buckets of water before you can say ‘Consent Variation’!”

“Truth to tell, Laurie, I don’t really have any friends in the Green Party, not anymore.”

“But you used to have heaps of Green Party ‘comrades’. I had to listen to you singing their praises for years. Hell, you even voted for them, if I recall correctly.”

“You do, Laurie, and I did – many times.”

“So, what went wrong?”

They did, mate. They did. When I had friends in the Greens, the party was led by Jeanette Fitzsimons and Rod Donald, and it boasted old lefties like Sue Bradford and Keith Locke in its ranks. Back then the Greens were eco-socialists – an ideology I was happy to vote for.”

“They’re still bloody eco-socialists as far as I can see.”

“Yeah, but when it comes to the Left you’ve never been able to see very clearly – have you Laurie?”

“So, what are they, if they’re not eco-socialists?”

“That’s a bloody good question! As far as I can make out, they’re an unholy mixture of Treaty-freaks, trans-gender defenders, and homespun, patchouli-scented, simple-lifers, deeply suspicious of anything ‘more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom’.”

“What’s that? Tolkien?”

“It is indeed, Laurie, straight out of the prologue to The Lord of the Rings – ‘Concerning Hobbits’.”

“Hmmm”, Laurie mused, setting down his glass. “Nothing very Hobbitish about Julie Anne Genter’s performance in the House last week. Poor old Matt Doocey looked like he’d just been admonished by the Witch Queen of Angmar.”

“Well, it’s all in the hands of the Privileges Committee now. But, you know what? I actually feel sorry for JAG. She’s an enormously talented politician with a huge amount to offer.”

“Whether people want it or not.”

“Yes, yes, I know, she is prone to letting her political passions carry her away. But that’s a side-effect of the parliamentary life itself. Nobody should be expected to live that way – in that dreadful, hot-house, environment.”

“They’re paid well enough for putting up with it.”

“True. But it wasn’t always such a crazy pressure-cooker. I remember listening to Phil Amos – Minister of Education in the Kirk Labour Government – recalling the advice given to him when he was a brand new backbencher, way back in the early 1960s. He’d just been elected as the Member for Manurewa and had no idea what he was supposed to do. So, he called his boss, Arnold Nordmeyer, Leader of the Opposition. ‘Well,’ says Nordy, ‘we’ll have a caucus meeting sometime in February, and the Nats won’t call Parliament together until about June.’ (This is the beginning of December ’63, don’t forget.) ‘So, you just use the time to get to know your electorate.’”

“And we paid him for that?”

“Yes, we bloody did, Laurie, but not because he was our employee. Members of Parliament don’t work for us, they represent us, an  entirely different thing . As with so much that has turned out badly, the re-organising of MPs’ responsibilities began with the Fourth Labour Government. That’s when they began to be treated like employees – public servants – whose diaries had to be kept full-to-bursting, in case they found themselves with enough time on their hands to talk to their constituents and start thinking for themselves.”

“Yeah, well, as I said, they get paid more than most employees.”

“But don’t you get it? That’s the whole point! Phil Amos was a secondary-school teacher. His parliamentary stipend wasn’t a whole lot more than his old salary. That, and having time to talk and think, kept him grounded. Prevented him from melting-down like JAG.”

“By keeping him a safe distance from the fire.”

This short story was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 10 May 2024.

Global Protests Rage On: But Slogans Are Not Plans.

Feeding The Flames: It is simply not enough to demand an end to “corruption”, or “inequality”, or the overbearing influence of the authorities in Beijing. These are just “lowest common denominator” demands: the sort of slogans that pull people onto the streets. They are not a plan.

WHERE’S THE PLAN? Across the planet massive protests, like Californian forest fires, rage out of control. In Santiago, Chile, hundreds-of-thousands march and are met by tear gas and water cannons. In Hong Kong, the confrontations between protesters and police have become almost routine. In Beirut, the crowds, having already brought down Lebanon's Prime Minister, are now going after its President. But what do they want? Where’s the plan?

It is simply not enough to demand an end to “corruption”, or “inequality”, or the overbearing influence of the authorities in Beijing. These are just “lowest common denominator” demands: the sort of slogans that pull people onto the streets. They are not a plan.

There’s reason for this lack of specificity. The moment a protest movement begins to consider specific reforms it opens itself up to debate and division. Unity, difficult to maintain at the best of times, seldom survives the democratic consideration of political alternatives. The moment competing reform programmes are presented, and the mass protest movement begins sorting itself into supporters and opponents of the specific measures being proposed, politics rears its ugly head. The intoxicating unanimity of chanting slogans in the street gives way to the peevish horse-trading of constructing a viable political alternative.

In the end, you can’t keep politics out of politics. A crowd is not a deliberative instrument – no matter how earnestly the Beirut masses insist that it is. Faced with the protesters’ fantasy, the exasperation of Lebanese parliamentarians is entirely understandable. In spite of their guarantees that the grievances of the people have been heard, and will be answered, the crowd stubbornly refuses to disperse. Their massive presence is all they bring to the table. It is not enough. Short of embracing the direct democracy of Ancient Athens, the crowd must, at some point, allow their elected representatives to do what they do.

The unreality in Hong Kong is even more pronounced. What do the protesters expect the Territory’s administrators to do? Set up an independent city state on the model of Singapore? Except, of course, their city state – unlike Singapore – will be defiantly democratic. But, no one seems to have a believable answer when sceptics demand to know under whose protection this independent democracy will be established?

Are the young people in the streets proposing to throw themselves back into the arms of the United Kingdom? Or do they want Trump’s United States to be their new sugar-daddy? And China? What do they suppose the People’s Republic will be doing as the Hong Kong population lines up for a second helping of imperialism? Do they really suppose that Beijing will cheerily wave good-bye as its most important financial hub simply walks away?

It is precisely to keep Hong Kong within its grasp that Beijing has ordered the Territory’s police to avoid the use of deadly force. Clearly, it is the Chinese Government’s intention to wait the protesters out. At some point, Beijing knows, these youngsters will begin to ask themselves how long they’re prepared to postpone completing their university studies. They will also begin to wonder whether the Territory’s extensive surveillance capabilities have placed their personal details on file. And, if they have, how might that affect their future careers?

If, however, the protesters are able, somehow, to convince the rest of Hong Kong’s population to follow them into the arms of the imperialists, then Beijing would no longer have any reason to exercise restraint. The People’s Liberation Army would be unleashed upon the youth of Hong Kong with exactly the same orders it carried into Tiananmen Square in 1989. The resulting bloodbath would be carefully scaled to put an end to any thoughts mainland Chinese youth might have of emulating Hong Kong’s example.

The poor and the marginalised throughout Chile should also give thought to the intentions of their country’s armed forces. It took the democratic elements of Chilean society 17 years to persuade the generals to return to barracks. How likely is it that they will stay there if buildings continue to be torched and shops continue to be looted? How long will the Chilean middle-class remain committed to democracy in the face of the poor’s open contempt for the rights of private property-owners?

Over recent days, the language used by Chile’s right-wing President, Sebastian Pinera, has carried frightening echoes of the language used by Augusto Pinochet – the general who overthrew Salvador Allende, Chile’s democratically elected socialist president, in 1973. Rioting and looting, while undoubtedly cathartic, is not a plan.

Popular rage can frighten politicians: sensibly directed it can even chasten them. What rage cannot do, however, is serve as a substitute for reason. The young, well-educated Lebanese who are tired of economic mismanagement and corruption, and who long for the day when secular politics is able to replace the careful balancing-act that keeps the country’s Christian, Sunni and Shia citizens from engaging in communal slaughter, would be most unwise to confuse themselves for the Lebanese “people”. They may represent the best and the brightest which Lebanon has to offer, but they do not represent all of it. Has Hezbollah joined the protests in the streets? And what will happen if/when it does?

When the world witnessed the “Arab Spring” it waited in fervent hope for an Arab Summer that never came. The young, middle-class Egyptians who crowded into Cairo’s Tahrir Square demanded democracy. But, when they got it, the answer it provided to the question: “Who are the people, and what do they want?” was not at all to their liking. Within months, the soldiers were back in charge, and the people’s choice, the Muslim Brotherhood, were back in jail – or dead. In politics, as in no other human activity, people should be very careful what they wish for.

Planning for the future will always produce a richer harvest than merely wishing away the present. Protest, if it is to be effective, has to make more than noise – it has to make sense.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 4 November 2019.

“Keep Cutting, Jacinda!”

You Gotta Serve Somebody: Is it more accurate to describe MPs as employees of their party? Certainly, the master-servant characterisation works much better in this context than in any other. Without a party, becoming an MP is virtually impossible. Moreover, to become a parliamentary candidate, individuals are not only expected to sacrifice their judgement to the opinion of their party – they are required to.

JACINDA JUST FROZE her colleagues’ income for at least a year. Politicians, she reckons, don’t need any more money. With the average backbench MP’s salary topping $160,000 per annum, most of us would agree. Vehemently.

I say salary, but that’s just for convenience. The truth is, I don’t know what to call the income we taxpayers settle on our political representatives. The word “salary” implies some sort of master-servant relationship. That is certainly the talkback hosts’ assumption when they refer to the members of the House of Representatives as: “our employees in Wellington”.

Except they’re not our employees, they’re our representatives – and being an elected representative of the people is very far from being an employee of the people, let alone their servant!

The English philosopher and statesman, Edmund Burke (1729-1797) is often quoted on what the voters might reasonably expect from their Member of Parliament. In his famous “Speech to the Electors of Bristol” (1780) he wrote: “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

Less frequently quoted, but even more apposite, is Burkes’ contention that: “Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests; which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole; where, not local purposes, not local prejudices, ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole.”

If only! In the 238 years since Burke delivered his famous speech, the British parliament (and our own) has ceased to be a collection of individual representatives dedicated to the “general good” (if such a disinterested body of politicians ever actually existed!) and has indeed become a “congress”. Not of ambassadors, to be sure, but of political parties. These institutions are, indeed, representatives of “different and hostile interests”; “agents and advocates” for every kind of purpose and prejudice; and for all manner of causes.

Is it more accurate, then, to describe your MP as an employee of his or her party? Certainly, the master-servant characterisation works much better in this context than in any other. Without a party, becoming an MP is virtually impossible. Moreover, to become a parliamentary candidate, individuals are not only expected to sacrifice their judgement to the opinion of their party – they are required to.

This raises all manner of problems, however, because, as the American novelist, Upton Sinclair (1878-1968) shrewdly observed: “It is difficult to make a man understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding it.”

If the only way to become – and remain – a parliamentarian is by the grace and favour of one’s political party; and if the financial reward for being an MP is in excess of $160,000; then our political parties are particularly well set up to make “their” MPs understand only what the party leaders want them to understand – on pain of becoming instantly, and in most cases, considerably, poorer.

It is probably pertinent to observe at this point that an income of $160,000 per annum places its recipient in the top 5 percent of New Zealand’s income earners. At more than three times the medium income, it is difficult to see how any person in receipt of such a handsome living could long retain any sort of fellow-feeling with those required to live in more straightened financial circumstances. When one is earning such a large sum of money it is difficult to resist the whispered conclusion of one’s fattened ego that it is entirely proper and well-deserved. It is then but a small step to the conviction that the misery of others is similarly appropriate and well-deserved.

The legends live on in the Labour Party of its founding fathers living no better than their working-class supporters, and how prone they were to share with the most destitute of their constituents what little remained of their meagre parliamentary stipends. Such tales would certainly explain why socialism remained for the First Labour Government something much more than a mere rhetorical flourish; and why their ability to understand things was so refreshingly unimpaired.

So, keep cutting Jacinda! The less our MPs take, then, assuredly, the more likely they are to give.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 24 August 2018.

No Matter Whether You’re Red Or Blue – You Must Keep Paddling In Your Own Canoe.

Each To Their Own: More than any other party, NZ First has good reason for seeking legislative protection against “waka jumping”. It was, after all, NZ First that, in August 1998, was forced to watch eight members of its caucus jump out of their own party’s waka to become either solo kayakers or de facto paddlers in National’s.

SHOULD MEMBERS OF PARLIAMENT be permitted to jump from their own party’s waka into the waka of another political party? The question is more than rhetorical because under the provisions of the Election (Integrity) Amendment Bill, currently before Parliament’s Justice Select Committee, political defection by parliamentarians will render them liable to expulsion from the House of Representatives.

Introduced last December by Justice Minister, Andrew Little, in fulfilment of the coalition agreement between Labour and NZ First, the Bill is being strenuously opposed by the National Party and Act. The Greens, having supported the legislation’s introduction, are now entertaining some pretty outspoken second thoughts.

Why the fuss? Who could seriously oppose the idea of penalising politicians who head off to war in the coat of one army only to turn it when the heat of battle grows too hot?

Many New Zealanders would endorse the argument of the bill’s NZ First promoters: If you don’t like what your party is doing, then quit. It is, quite simply, unethical to upset the balance of the House of Representatives by giving another political party, or parties, votes that they did not win.

More than any other party, NZ First has good reason for seeking legislative protection against “waka jumping”. It was, after all, NZ First that, in August 1998, was forced to watch eight members of its caucus jump out of their own party’s waka to become either solo kayakers or de facto paddlers in National’s.

That spectacular act of political mendacity was glossed-over at the time and has remained largely unexamined ever since. National’s supporters were too busy celebrating their escape from the clutches of their erstwhile colleague, Winston Peters. While Labour voters were prepared to write-off the whole episode as but the first instalment in the political retribution NZ First had well-and-truly merited by leaving Helen Clark standing at the altar.

The unacknowledged truth of the matter, however, was that the nature and general policy direction of a New Zealand government had been fundamentally changed without the fuss-and-bother of a general election. The last occasion upon which such a change-of-government-by-political-defection had been accomplished was the destruction of Thomas Mackenzie’s Liberal Government by the Reform Party leader, William Massey, in 1912.

But, if it suited both National and Labour to turn a blind eye to this blatant assault upon New Zealand’s constitutional norms, it was never forgotten by Winston Peters and NZ First. Nor, indeed, by the late Jim Anderton, who had, similarly, been required to sit back and watch as the renegade Alliance MP, Alamein Kopu, took tea with Jenny Shipley and cast her vote with the National Party.

National and Act’s “principled” opposition to the Election (Integrity) Amendment Bill should, therefore, be taken with a grain of salt.

The Opposition’s objection to the legislation, if the speeches of its MPs can be taken seriously, is because Members of the House of Representatives are there to carry out the wishes of their constituents – not the orders of backroom party chieftains.

If that was ever true, then it was only in the era before the establishment of coherent and tightly disciplined political parties. Since the advent of party politics (which in New Zealand dates from around 1890) candidates have taken their parliamentary seats not on the strength of their character and ability, but courtesy of the political colours they stand under, and the support those colours attract.

This crucial role played by political parties has been further entrenched and strengthened by the introduction of Mixed Member Proportional Representation.

That being the case, becoming a political turncoat is not simply an act of personal moral inadequacy, but of constitutional vandalism. New Zealanders elect parties to govern them – not individuals. Members of Parliament who repudiate their party spit in the face of the whole ethos of representative government.

“Oh, but what about the individual member’s conscience!”, cry the waka-jumping legislation’s opponents. “Is that to be sacrificed to faceless party bureaucrats?”

The only answer to that is: “Of course not!” But, that does not mean that members of parliament are free to do as they please. If an MP no longer finds it possible, in good conscience, to support his or her party, then the only ethical course of action is to resign.

That is precisely what Winston Peters did in 1993 (and what Jim Anderton should have done in 1989). By resigning, Peters gave the electors of Tauranga the opportunity to reject or endorse his refusal to toe National’s party line. Would that his colleagues, four years later, had demonstrated a similar respect for the basic tenets of representative democracy.

There really is no need for the Greens to further equivocate on this matter. The only politicians opposing the Election (Integrity) Amendment Bill are those who have no qualms about rorting our representative democracy.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 13 February 2018.