Act’s Populist Soufflé Unlikely To Rise Twice.

On Message: Close study of American politics had convinced Richard Prebble (above) that if Act's classical liberal policies were to be given a third crack in the New Zealand legislature (after the successes of Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson) then they would only get there on the coat-tails of right-wing populism.

DAVID SEYMOUR is attempting to replicate Act’s political success under the leadership of Richard Prebble. Unfortunately for Act, David ain’t no Richard. He lacks Prebble’s political instincts: those fearsome talents honed to a savage cutting-edge by years of hand-to-hand conflict in the Labour Party trenches. David is a theorist – not a pugilist – and, therefore, quite unsuited to the raw exigencies of populist politics.

The confident statements of young political reporters notwithstanding, however, it was not Richard Prebble who launched the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers (Act) in 1994, but Roger Douglas and Derek Quigley. What’s more, nothing could have been further from their minds, vis-a-vis their new-born political infant’s political identity, than populism.

With massive financial backing from one of New Zealand’s most enterprising business leaders, Craig Heatley, Act’s founders embarked on a nationwide tour to sell the classical liberal ideology of their new party. The man who gave New Zealand “Rogernomics” asked his many enthusiastic backers in commerce and industry for access to their workforces. Douglas was firmly convinced that once ordinary working-class voters “got” his message of freedom and enterprise, Act could look forward to receiving mass popular support.

It didn’t work. The New Zealand working-class remained stubbornly loyal to the Labour Party. A reputed $1.5 million and months of hard yakka by Douglas and Quigley netted Act a return of just 1.5 percent in the opinion polls. Pure and unadulterated classical liberalism did have an audience in New Zealand. Unfortunately, that audience was vanishingly small.

Enter Richard Prebble.

Close study of American politics had convinced Prebble that if classical liberal policies were to be given a third crack at the New Zealand legislature (after the successes of Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson) then they would only get there on the coat-tails of right-wing populism.

Years in the Labour Party had taught Prebble that if you want to bag political troglodytes, then the place to go hunting for them is in the countryside. He also knew that although the working-class supported Labour it did not do so unanimously. Working-class tories, “Waitakere Men” – call them what you will – constituted a substantial and readily recruitable political force. Of course, you had to be prepared to get your hands a little dirty – quite a lot dirty, actually – but a little grime under his fingernails had never bothered Prebble unduly. Not if it helped him to win.

Hard right-wingers from rural and provincial New Zealand; social conservatives and ambitious battlers from the working-class suburbs of the big cities; these thoroughly un-Act-like demographics were peremptorily bolted-on to the refined upper-class ideologues from the leafy electorates and the eager young libertarian idealists from the universities to power the party over the all-important 5 percent MMP threshold.

It was a butt-ugly way to make it into Parliament, but it worked. In the first MMP election, held in October 1996, Act secured 6.1 percent of the Party Vote and (with a nod and a wink from National’s Jim Bolger) Richard Prebble won the seat of Wellington Central.

Over the next three years, Act’s manifesto took on a decidedly Reaganesque flavour. Prebble’s dog-whistling over issues ranging from the Treaty of Waitangi to welfare cheats and law and order consolidated his grip on the unlikely coalition of conservatives and liberals with which he had secured the party’s parliamentary beach-head. Act’s 1999 Party Vote was 7.04 percent rising to 7.14 percent in 2002. The former Labour Party political brawler had proved it could be done.

Unfortunately for David Seymour, however, making Act electable (without National Party assistance) requires the services of a Darth Vader – not a C3PO. Prebble’s sudden departure from parliamentary politics in 2004 left Act floundering. It’s Party Vote in 2005 fell to 5.3 percent. Crucially, Rodney Hide’s heroic campaigning in Epsom secured Act the electorate life-saver it needed in the House of Representatives.

Seymour’s attempt to resurrect Act as a populist party is almost certain to fail. That he is even trying strobes abject political desperation. It also signals a curious insensitivity to the zeitgeist – the “spirit of the times”. If ever there was a moment for someone to lift up the banner of freedom – it is now. Combine the defence of free markets with the defence of free speech and Act – proudly rebranded as “The Freedom League” – might once again aspire to Prebble’s electoral success.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 17 August 2018.

Laughing-Stock City?

Testing Times: Auckland's Mayor, Len Brown, not only faces the certainty of being formally censured by his Council, but will also have to contend with a concerted effort by councillors to pare down the considerable executive powers granted to the "super-city's" leader by its principal political architect, the then Local Government Minister, Rodney Hide.

 

IS AUCKLAND about to join Toronto? A city with a mayor some would dearly like to be rid of but cannot sack?

 

Auckland’s Len Brown may not have smoked crack cocaine or clean-bowled an elderly councillor in the council chamber, like the rampaging Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, but he is fast engendering a very similar sort of cringe factor.

 

Like Toronto, Auckland is its country’s commercial heart. Politically, it plays a similarly pivotal role. Who leads a city like Toronto or Auckland matters. Getting stuck with a laughing-stock mayor would be but a short step away from becoming a laughing-stock city.

 

That Auckland could finds itself contemplating that possibility is due to a peculiar constitutional anomaly.

 

At the national and regional levels of government in New Zealand our leaders are chosen from representatives elected by the people. The prime minister serves at the pleasure of a parliamentary majority. Regional chairs are similarly answerable to a majority of their fellow councillors.

 

 At the level of our districts, towns and cities, however, the position of mayor is filled by direct election. It is a very curious constitutional arrangement, because, with the exception of Auckland City, the people elected to lead our local bodies are vested with no special executive powers, do not control their council’s budget and may not even enjoy the support of a majority of their fellow councillors.

 

Quite how New Zealand ended up with these popularly elected but essentially powerless mayors is a bit of a mystery. We certainly didn’t inherit the practice from our colonial forebears. In the United Kingdom – and Australia – the mayoral chain goes around the neck of the council’s majority leader (or his or her nominee).

 

Certainly, the British and Australian practice makes for a much more powerful and coherent style of local government. Mayors chosen in this fashion know, from the very beginning of their terms, that the numbers are there around the council table to carry forward the plans they announced during their election campaigns. Majority support also protects them from having the council’s budget wrested from their control.

 

Most importantly, if they suddenly start behaving bizarrely – like smoking crack cocaine – or embark on an orgy of unauthorised spending, then their fellow councillors can simply bust them back to the ranks and elect a new mayor.

 

The new Auckland “super city” was intended to be something else entirely. Its principal political architect, former local government minister Rodney Hide, wanted a city that could get things done swiftly and efficiently. That ruled out the parliamentary model of the UK and Australia which, being dominated by local political parties, was prone to pork-barrelling and horse-trading. Not being a conspicuous fan of either pork-barrelling or horse-trading, Hide opted instead for a lean, mean governance machine presided over by a mayor equipped with unprecedented executive powers.

 

No doubt the sort of figure Hide had in mind as the first mayor of his new super-city was a charismatic business tycoon; someone who could transform the Office of the Mayor into the workplace of a tough-minded, no-nonsense political CEO.

 

But that was not what he got.

 

Auckland’s first “super mayor” turned out to be a rather daffy family lawyer from South Auckland. A great emoter and prone to random outbursts of song, Mayor Len Brown did not, in my view, appear to be either tough-minded or no-nonsense. He was, however, possessed of a keen legal mind and very quickly appreciated the possibilities inherent in the “executive mayoralty” Hide had bequeathed him.

 

Using the super mayor’s budgetary independence and patronage powers, Brown very rapidly constructed what I believe was a well-nigh impregnable political position within the governance structures of Auckland City. So much so that he could, without the slightest trace of irony, instruct his councillors to “leave their politics at the [council chamber] door”.

 

One of the greatest dangers confronting politicians who, like Brown, have been successful in protecting themselves from just about every kind of political attack, is to mistake impregnability for invulnerability. Those who believe themselves safe from their enemies’ attacks are all-too-often un-done by their own personal weaknesses.

 

So it proved with Toronto’s Rob Ford, and, in a very different way, I believe Auckland’s Len Brown has suffered the same fate.

 

In both cases, it is their council and their city that is being forced to pay the price.

 

So eager was Hide to set up his new and streamlined governance structure for the super-sized Auckland City that he neglected to include in its constitutional design any mechanisms for bringing a wayward super mayor to heel.

 

Even the president of the United States is subject to impeachment. But, short of being convicted of a serious crime, adjudged a bankrupt or declared insane, the mayors of Toronto and Auckland are effectively unsackable.

 

A bad mayor could, potentially, do a lot of damage in three years. The people of Toronto and Auckland deserve better mechanisms for keeping their elected Mayors on the straight and narrow.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 17 December 2013.

Standing On Shaky Ground

Self-Destruct Mode? The moment he accepted the candidacy of David Garrett, a man who'd admitted to stealing the identity of a dead child to secure a false passport, Act leader Rodney Hide placed the entire edifice of the New Zealand Right at risk. The seismic pulse from the Garrett scandal threatens to destroy not only Act but also John Key's hopes for a second term.

IT NEVER RAINS but it pours. As if a real earthquake in Canterbury wasn’t enough, John Key now faces an earthquake in Epsom.

And it’s a big one. The extraordinary revelations concerning Act MP, David Garrett, have not only put paid to his political career, but the aftershocks seem certain to destabilise – and ultimately destroy – the whole Act Party.

John Key cannot stand aloof from these developments. Act has always been a critical factor in the electoral calculations of the Centre Right. Bluntly speaking: National’s ability to form a stable government depends upon Act’s unequivocal support. Remove Act from the political equation and the Centre Right’s electoral problems no longer have a solution.

TV3’s political editor, Duncan Garner, disagrees. He insists that Act and the Maori Party are interchangeable factors in this equation: that Mr Key’s shrewd decision to lure the Maori Party into the Centre-Right tent in 2008 has given National all the insurance cover it needs to rebuild an effective administration if Act falls over.

I’m not so sure. By 2011 conservative New Zealand voters may have had about as much of the Maori Party as they’re prepared to swallow. A year from now the unease surrounding the repeal of the Foreshore & Seabed Act will undoubtedly have been heightened by the ramifications of a "Constitutional Review" – the last (and potentially the most divisive) item of unfinished business in the Maori Party’s confidence and supply agreement with National.

It’s equally possible, of course, that by 2011 Maori voters may have had enough of "their" party’s association with National. There are strong indications that a second term National Government will intensify its public-spending cuts; throw open the gates to foreign investment, increase immigration and sell-off what remain of New Zealand’s public assets. Such a hard-right programme is unlikely to enthuse the Maori Party’s base.

Not that the Maori Party needs to worry. It’s political location in the Maori – as opposed to the General – electorate shields it from any sort of Pakeha backlash. This gives the Maori Party the extraordinary advantage of being able to switch allegiances with impunity. If the party’s leaders are of the view that they (and the Maori people in general) have got about as much as they can get from National, there is nothing to prevent them signalling their willingness to negotiate a new deal with Labour.

No, I wouldn’t be relying upon the Maori Party if I were Mr Key.

Which takes us back to Epsom. Can Mr Key rely upon the good burghers of Mt Eden, Epsom, Parnell and Remuera to be guided by the winks and nods of their National Party friends forever? Is it reasonable to expect Epsom’s voters (among the most sophisticated in the country) to make themselves permanent accessories to this blatant "gaming" of the MMP electoral system?

Let’s not forget, Mr Hide’s seat – like every other electorate seat – is won or lost according to the rules of First-Past-the Post. So, let’s assume (on the basis of the 2008 results) that there are roughly 38,500 votes up for grabs in Epsom, and that about 8,000 of these are rock-solid National voters who simply refuse to vote strategically. Let’s further assume that there are another 8,000 "Left’ (Labour, Green) voters, and about 2,500 hard-core Act voters. That leaves a "Strategic Vote" of around 20,000 electors.

What would happen to Mr Hide if a person with impeccable conservative credentials emerged from the leafy streets of Epsom declaring that: "Enough is enough! If National isn’t prepared to choose a decent candidate – someone who still adheres to its traditional values and is capable of articulating its ‘compassionate conservative’ philosophy – then someone else will have to do the job."?

An accomplished and successful woman, subscribing to the new "Big Society" ideas of David Cameron’s British Tories, could quite conceivably split Epsom’s Strategic Vote in half – gathering up most of the Left Vote as she swept past (especially if Labour and the Greens declined to stand a candidate). That would leave Mr Hide about 5,000 votes short of the total needed to keep Act in Parliament.

If Mr Key persists in relying upon Act’s gaming of the MMP system to secure the numbers he needs to govern, then something resembling this scenario will almost certainly unfold.

The problem, of course, is that if Mr Key does do the decent thing, and severs all ties between National and the discredited Act Party, he will be left several seats short of the total National needs to remain in office.

He could, of course, appeal directly to the New Zealand electorate for an unequivocal and unencumbered mandate. Unfortunately, no single party (even under FPP) has won more than 50 percent of the popular vote since 1951.

Mr Garrett’s earthquake threatens to reduce much more than Act to rubble.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 21 September 2010.

"Act Two"

Location, location, location: If Act could reposition itself in a spot more congenial to the New Zealand voter, it might just have a chance of surviving its present identity crisis.

HAS ACT lost its soul – as political scientist Bryce Edwards suggests? Or can its present troubles be traced to a series of major strategic blunders dating all the way back to the formation of the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers in the early 1990s?

If it’s the former, then there’s no hope of recovery, and Act will soon be joining what’s left of the Alliance in Oblivion’s waiting-room.

But, if it’s the latter, then there is still a chance (a very small one, admittedly) that the Act Party can recover.

Strategic errors tend to be cumulative, with every mistake driving you closer to the brink of disaster. But, so long as there is a way of escaping the worst effects of your errors, and the possibility of rebuilding your strength, catastrophe can be avoided.

Just think of Mao Zedong and his Communist comrades in the grim autumn of 1934. A lengthy series of disastrous political decisions and military blunders had left them confronting what appeared to be certain disaster. The Nationalist armies of Chiang Kai-shek were closing in on their positions and the general consensus among foreign observers (even the Russians) was that the Reds were finished in China.

But then Mao set out on his famous "Long March" – leading his troops out of the trap the Nationalists’ had set and embarking on an epic trek of many thousands of miles to a new base in the north-west of the country. It was here, in the city of Yan'an, in Shaanxi Province, that the Communist Party reconstituted itself as a new, peasant-based movement, and Mao's exhausted troops became the core of a new People’s Liberation Army – the unstoppable peasant force which finally defeated Chiang’s Nationalists in 1949.

Act’s original strategic error, the one from which it has never truly recovered, and which led inexorably to all the other errors, was allowing its political enemies to cast it as an ideological party of the far-right. The moment that identity was pinned on its back it was doomed to remain on the fringe of New Zealand politics.

Most New Zealanders simply will not vote for parties they perceive as being either far-left or far-right.

Sir Roger Douglas, as a former Labour Party minister, understood this. It’s why he spent so much time in the early days of Act visiting factories and talking to workers. He was desperate to convince them that his economic ideas were actually far more emancipatory than those of the Left. Unfortunately, his own political persona was already inextricably bound up with the pain and privation of the "reforms" which bore his name. The workers were having none of it.

Richard Prebble, a less ideologically driven (and much more Machiavellian) politician than Douglas, took his cue from the American Right, which was then engaged in fighting the bitter "Culture Wars" of the Clinton Era. He targeted the angry and alienated denizens of rural, provincial and suburban New Zealand, using the classic wedge issues of race and crime to break-up traditional political allegiances.

Prebble’s strategy was successful to the extent that it secured Act just enough of the Party Vote to become (and remain) a parliamentary player. But, in terms of opening the way to an expanded share of the Party Vote it was a failure. The issues Prebble campaigned on were far-right issues, and that doomed Act to playing politics in the shadow of the National Party, its much larger and more moderate right-wing competitor. Denied access to the centre-ground of politics, it was (like the Alliance) confined to its own rather narrow and politically eccentric demographic.

Sir Roger Douglas’s faction of the party understood this and was forever trying to break Act out of the cul-de-sac into which Prebble’s strategy had steered it. With the election of Rodney Hide as the party’s new leader in 2004 they finally got the chance.

In his heart-of-hearts Hide is a libertarian, and if he'd been able to prevail upon his colleagues to recalibrate Act’s political pitch to that part of the population receptive to libertarian ideals, then the party’s future might have been very different.

The model Hide should have followed is Sir Robert Jones’ New Zealand Party. On economic issues, Sir Robert was very much a part of what was then called "The New Right". But – and it is a vitally important "but" – on other issues he was well to the left of the Labour Party.

To the consternation of his business colleagues, Jones not only declared himself a supporter of a Nuclear-Free New Zealand, but he also called for an end to the ANZUS Treaty and the abolition of the armed forces.

This radical pacifist stance seriously messed with the voters’ heads. It was very hard to pin a "far-right" label on a man whose defence policies stood to the left of the Values Party! The 12 percent of the popular vote which Jones’ NZ Party attracted in the snap-election of 1984 included a much broader cross-section of the electorate than Act has ever been able to attract. Jones’ political iconoclasm was pure electoral gold.

So, if Act really wants to break out of the authoritarian cul-de-sac in which it finds itself, it needs to come up with some radical and head-messing policies. An across-the-board decriminalisation of all drugs would be a good start – supported by a comprehensive drug-education programme in schools and generous drug-treatment and rehabilitation schemes for addicts.

And that would only be the beginning.

What's to stop Act from going on to announce a campaign to restore all the traditional rights and freedoms of free-born citizens by rolling back all those so-called "reforms" of the legal and penal systems which have empowered the State at the expense of the "sovereign individual"? Or, coming out in support of a woman's right to choose and gay marriage?

Overnight, Act would lose its creepy followers from the Sensible Sentencing Trust and Family First. In their place it would attract a much larger – and younger – slice of the electorate: a slice that is socially-liberal, economically "dry" and temperamentally hostile to the claims of large and authoritarian institutions – especially the State.

The party would still be a bastion of neoliberal thought, but by taking such a radical libertarian stand on issues like drugs, law and order and the power of the State, Act would finally be able to detach the "far-right" label from its back.

Is it too late for Hide to rediscover his "Inner Libertarian" and jettison Act's far-right authoritarian baggage?

Probably.

But it’s just possible that Sir Roger Douglas and Heather Roy, having suffered so cruelly at the hands of the creepies in "Act One", could redeem both themselves and their battered party by striking-out on a long march of their own towards "Act Two".　

National's Altered Course

Heading for disaster? Key's decision to abandon National's neoliberal moderation and embrace Act's hard-line neoconservatism over the question of Maori representation on the Auckland "supercity" council
signals a major - and quite possibly disastrous - change of course by his government.

JOHN KEY’S decision to appease both ACT and the far-right of his own party by refusing to make provision for Maori representation on the new Auckland "supercity" council will be remembered as the moment his government turned away from neoliberalism and embraced neoconservatism.

It’s an embrace the Prime Minister will live to regret, because in surrendering to the most conservative political elements of his party’s vastly expanded constituency, he has set in motion the processes of electoral decay which National and its leader, until this week, had so spectacularly defied.

Elderly New Zealanders, and those living on farms and in provincial cities and towns have been prioritised over younger voters, and those living in the major metropolitan centres. The values and, more importantly, the anxieties which shaped our past have been accorded greater political weight than the beliefs and aspirations of those who will build New Zealand’s future.

Most importantly, a government which, up until now, had been guided by a coherent set of political principles – the principles of neoliberalism – and which had held steady to that course, has been wracked by sharp divisions over the administration’s proper course. The lessons of the past, which National’s new captain appeared to have learned, are now in the process of being unlearned. That being the case, the political mistakes made by Jenny Shipley, Bill English and Don Brash will, almost certainly, be repeated.

The historical reality Mr Key is most at risk of unlearning is that the great shifts in political sentiment and expectation which convulsed New Zealand in the 1980s and 90s were driven by two very powerful forces. One was the society-wide move away from collectivism and towards individualism. And the other was the rise of broadly-based citizens’ movements against ethnic-, gender-, and sexuality-based discrimination.

In responding to these two powerful trends, Labour discovered it was relatively easy to adapt its pitch to accommodate the demands of the new social movements. Satisfying the expectations of the anti-collectivist "free-marketeers", however, could be achieved only at the cost of splitting the party.

National’s conservative members faced precisely the opposite problem. They found the policies of economic liberalism broadly acceptable (at least in the short term) but rejected utterly the powerfully disintegrative influence social liberalism exerted on traditional moral values.

What made Neoliberalism, as an ideology, so peculiarly suited to the temper of the times: it’s "point of difference" if-you-will; was that it could quite happily, and without serious philosophical contradiction, accommodate the expectations of both economic and social liberalism. The electoral landscape was thus transformed.

On the face of it, therefore, the support agreements which Mr Key forged with Act and the Maori Party following the 2008 election looked set to deliver a super-charged neoliberal government. The Act leader, Rodney Hide, enjoyed the reputation of being not merely a staunch economic liberal, but also a libertarian – someone for whom racial, gender and sexual discrimination was totally unacceptable. What’s more, the Maori Party leadership, for whom ending anti-Maori discrimination was non-negotiable, also showed encouraging signs of embracing the "aspirational" values of the National Party’s individualist philosophy.

What neither Key, nor the electorate, grasped, however, was that in spite of its radical neoliberal rhetoric on matters economic, Act is very far from being a neoliberal party. In spite of the best efforts of its founder Sir Roger Douglas, Act remains what its first leader, Richard Prebble, made of it – a neoconservative party.

Act attracts votes not on the basis of its neoliberal economic dogma, but on the strength of its deeply conservative social policies. It is, in fact, profoundly illiberal on such issues as crime and punishment, war and peace, indigenous rights, and more latterly, the right to inflict "good" parental correction. Rodney Hide, in spite of his personal preferences, must embody these policies or forfeit the leadership of his party.

A positive libertarian (one who construes liberty as empowering the individual, rather than disempowering the state, and who, in constitutional terms, preserves the rights of the minority against the tyranny of the majority) would’ve had no difficulty accepting the Royal Commission’s recommendations regarding Maori representation.

Had Mr Key required Act to live up to its boast of being "the liberal party" on 3 June, Mr Hide’s bluff would’ve been called. Instead, by giving-in to neoconservative pressure, he’s diverted National from its winning course.

This essay was originally published in The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 28 August 2009.

Size Matters!

Christchurch's futuristic Art Gallery: In 1993 Christchurch won the Carl Bertelsmann Prize, and was declared "The Best Run City in the World". That was when it had a ratio of 1 city councillor to every 13,000 citizens. In 2004 the Local Government Commission decided to increase that ratio to 1 councillor per 20,000 citizens. Five years on, and the "People's Republic of Christchurch" has degenerated into "Sideshow Bob" Parker's Tory Circus. Look upon Christchurch, Aucklanders - and despair!

THE rest of New Zealand’s mirth at the Auckland’s mayors’ bitchy reaction to the National-Act-Maori Party Government’s plans for an Auckland "super-city" is easily imagined. To non-Auckland eyes the region’s civic leaders must come across like six little boys in a sandpit arguing over who gets to play with the digger.

As a shrewd Cantabrian, the Local Government Minister, Rodney Hide, knows how impatient the rest of New Zealand gets with this sort of bickering. Residing in much smaller local authorities, most Kiwis simply don’t understand how different North Shore City is from Manukau, or grasp the sheer size of the cultural gulf separating John Bank’s Remuera from Bob Harvey’s Henderson. By casting himself as the sensible adult: someone willing to confiscate the digger and frog-march the squabbling mayoral urchins out of the Auckland sandpit; Mr Hide knows he can only go up in the rest of the country’s political estimation.

But, I suspect the rest of the country would think much less kindly of the Local Government Minister if he announced his decision to merge Invercargill with Dunedin; Oamaru with Timaru; Ashburton with Christchurch; or New Plymouth with Wellington. And, I don’t think their citizens would find anything funny in a plan to reduce the number of councillors elected to represent them by more than two-thirds. They might laugh at the idea of their towns and cities being broken up into dozens of neighbourhood "boards", responsible for bottle-stores, brothels, graffiti and dog-catching, but it would be the sort of laugh people give when their car breaks down miles from nowhere – and it starts to rain.

Southerners should be very thankful that the brute facts of geography militate against their suffering Auckland’s fate. The 200-plus kilometres separating Dunedin’s and Invercargill’s citizens will always be their best guarantee of political independence. Auckland’s curse is that communities which were once a day’s ride from one another are now (on a good day) less than an hour’s drive away. Auckland – in a conceptual sense – is an accident of technology. Trains, trams, busses and cars have encouraged civic amnesia, and the unique histories of Auckland’s villages, towns and cities are largely forgotten.

"Well, that’s progress", I hear all you southerners say – and maybe you’re right. But if we must all be bound to the wheel that draw us together, then let us at least ensure that it is supported by many spokes.

The designers of the Auckland super-city placed good governance ahead of good government: the power to make decisions affecting people’s lives, before a lively people’s decision-making power.

Members of the American school of local government architecture, they have worked from the elitist principle of "fewer but better" elected representatives. By "better", incidentally, they generally mean businessmen.

Like Tucson, Arizona, USA, whose 525,529 citizens are represented by just six city councillors – a ratio of 1:87,588. I suppose we should be thankful Mr Hide settled on a ratio of 1:65,000.

Comparison with European local government is instructive. Not-surprisingly, nations with a recent history of tyranny tend to place a much higher value on representative institutions. The Berlin City Council, for example, has 149 members – a ratio of 1:23,000. While the City Council of Paris – as befits the cradle of revolutionary democracy – boasts 163 councillors: a ratio of 1:13,300 – lower than Waitakere’s!

The Royal Commission on Auckland Governance, or Mr Hide, could have given Auckland an equally generous example of democratic architecture. Simply by deciding to preserve the current ratio of councillors to citizens, they would have created a Greater Auckland Assembly of 70 members. Sheffield – half Greater Auckland’s size – has 84. Glasgow, a city of 580,690 has 79 councillors (1:7,350)

Berlin, Paris, Sheffield, Glasgow: these are among of the most progressive and best governed cities in the world. Yes, their councils are large, but it's their size that gives them the edge over cities organised on the American model of "fewer but better".

And, if you’re riposte to these figures is: "Ah, but those are all overseas examples. This is New Zealand." Think about this.

Christchurch, a city of 316,221 used to have a city council of 24 (A councillor to citizen ratio of 1:13,175 – about the same as Paris.) In 1993, that high level of democratic representation, and the progressive policies which flowed from it – especially the increased efficiency of communal services in competition with private enterprise – had earned Christchurch the coveted Carl Bertelsmann Prize, and the title of "Best Run City in the World. Tragically, in 2004, the Local Government Commission, egged on by Canterbury businessmen, and, once again following the American model of local government, slashed the number of Christchurch City Councillors to just 16 (1:20,000).

Since then, the city has lost its democratic edge. The Council is now thoroughly dominated by its pro-privatisation bureaucracy, and ruled by a right-wing populist celebrity mayor. The "People’s Republic of Christchurch" has degenerated into "Sideshow Bob" Parker’s Tory Circus.

Look upon Christchurch, Aucklanders – and despair.

The above is a slightly modified version of the essay which appeared in The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times, and The Greymouth Evening Star on Friday, 17 April 2009.

Where have all the grown-ups gone?

ARE there no grown-ups left in this country? No one capable of grasping the full significance of the multiple crises through which New Zealand is passing? Not one person with the authority to ‘round up all the spoilt and noisy children currently playing at being responsible adults – and send them to their rooms?

Rodney Hide, for example, is in dire need of some "time out". Confronted with expert advice from the Ministry of Health that up to 20 percent of New Zealanders are at risk of catching something nasty from their drinking water, what does our Minister for Local Government do?

Does he pound the Finance Minister’s, Bill English’s, desk – demanding a budget allocation sufficient to secure for the entire population that most fundamental of civic amenities: a secure supply of potable water?

No, he doesn’t. He demands that the Ministry of Health’s findings be "urgently reviewed".

Now every civil servant knows exactly what "urgently reviewed" means: it’s politician-speak for "take this report away and come back with a set of policy recommendations more in line with the Minister’s views".

Whether or not the Ministry of Health bows to Mr Hide’s astonishing temper tantrum over water quality standards will be a measure of just how grown-up a nation we truly are.

Either the water supplied to citizens by New Zealand’s local authorities is safe, or it is not. If it is unsafe, then a grown-up government initiates the processes required to make it safe. Only a child attempts to wish away the obstacles reality places in his path, and adult behaviour enabling such "magic thinking" is not only very wrong, it is also extremely dangerous.

Mr Hide is, of course, an enthusiastic convert to the ideology of neo-liberalism – an infantile conceptual system especially prone to magic thinking. At it’s core lies a childlike faith in the omniscience and omnipotence of "free markets". Central to this faith is the naïve conviction that, left to its own devices, the market is capable of fulfilling all of humanity’s needs.

Not surprisingly, nothing enrages the neo-liberal child more than being presented with evidence of market failure.

Anyone who identifies circumstances in which the disciplines of the marketplace simply don’t apply (as in the provision of such basic civic amenities as clean water, hygienic sewerage disposal and street-lighting) should expect a very short shrift.

It is no accident that Mr Hide holds the portfolio of Local Government. Because at no other point in the complex edifice of the State is neo-liberalism’s capacity for magical cogitation and wishful thinking more urgently required than at this crucial intersection of theory and reality.

The economists may refer to the destructive and unaccounted-for effects of market interactions as "externalities", but you and I experience them as pollution.

Allow the market for dairy products to operate freely, without effective regulation, and what do you get? Filthy streams, rivers, lakes and estuaries; exhausted acquifers; and constantly rising levels of expenditure for keeping New Zealand’s water supplies – especially those in rural areas – uncontaminated by harmful bacteria.

It simple enough. You’d think even a child could grasp it.

Not that infantile behaviour is restricted to the politicians.

Only last week I was reading about the judge who put away a gang of Chinese "P" (pure methamphetamine) dealers. They’d been running a sophisticated importation and distribution business out of the VIP Room at the Sky City Casino. So alarmed had the judge become at the scale of the operation (millions of dollars-worth of "P" had been traded) that he insisted on sending his sentencing notes to the Sky City Casino’s CEO.

So far, so grown-up.

Then I read about a group of media and sporting celebrities who’ve banded together to combat the use of "P" in the New Zealand community – reportedly the highest per capita in the world.
Rather appropriately, this star-studded bunch have come together under the auspices of the Stellar Trust.

To get the fund-raising ball rolling, the group has decided to "celebrity roast" the veteran broadcaster, Paul Holmes. At just over $3,000 for a table of ten, it promises to be a real red-carpet event.

Then I discover where the fundraiser is being held.

Yep, you guessed it: at the Sky City Casino.

Would the last grown-up leaving New Zealand please remember to switch off the lights in the VIP Room.

This essay was originally published in The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star on Friday 27 March 2009.

POST-SCRIPT: Right on cue, the day this column appeared, the host of TVNZ’s Breakfast show, Paul Henry, provoked consternation and outrage by reading out an e-mail commenting unfavourably on one of his female guest’s facial hair.

The saddest aspect of Henry’s gratuitous discourtesy is not so much that the host of a supposedly serious news and current affairs programme sees nothing wrong in insulting his guests on air, but the deafening silence from TVNZ management.

Many (perhaps most) television "personalities" suffer from a grossly inflated opinion of their own significance – it sort of goes with the territory. And that’s why shows like Breakfast have producers – to keep the egos of their "talent" in check.

The lack of grown-up behaviour on the set of Breakfast is unfortunate – if unsurprising. But its absence in the control-room, and, it would seem, the ranks of TVNZ management, is unforgivable.