Are The Greens Arriving From, Or Departing For, Another Planet?

Little Green Men: Coming Or Going? Green Co-Leader, Metira Turei's State of the Nation speech made it very clear that her party has grown very weary of living on Planet Impotence - and may even be contemplating a departure for Planet Key. Her plans for Treasury to audit political parties' manifestos would certainly make the Greens' stay on Planet Key more comfortable.

 

I’M WORRIED that the oft-repeated claim that the Greens come from another planet, might, in fact, be true. Because only someone recently arrived from an altogether more benign solar system could possibly argue that the NZ Treasury casting its cold forensic eye over left-wing parties’ policies is a good idea. The astonishing naivety of the suggestion confirms every old socialist’s slur that when you’re dealing with the Greens, you’re dealing with the children of a very different tribe. And, honestly, after Metira Turei’s “State of the Nation” speech, I’m minded to amend the end of that sentence to read: “a very different and a very stupid tribe.”

 

According to Ms Turei: “New Zealanders deserve more transparency from their politicians so that they can better engage in the political system. That’s why the Green Party is proposing the establishment of [a Policy Costing Unit] to provide independent costings for the policies proposed by political parties. The PCU would be an independent unit within the Treasury and available to all parliamentary parties. It would help cut through the noise of political party promises and deliver New Zealanders unbiased information.”

 

Unbiased information! Clearly, the inhabitants of the planet Ms Turei has been visiting for the past 32 years are entirely ignorant of the 1984 neoliberal coup-d’état spearheaded by the leaders of the New Zealand Treasury. How else are we to explain her child-like faith in the Treasury’s lack of bias? Any other politically aware individual from this benighted chunk of our planet would have not the slightest difficulty in identifying No. 1 the Terrace, Wellington, as New Zealand’s Barad-dûr – dwelling place of the Dark Lord and source of all the woes of Middle Earth.

 

Can it really be true that Ms Turei has never heard of “Economics II”, the special Treasury division headed by the late Roger Kerr (of Business Roundtable fame) which, working alongside Dr Bryce Wilkinson and Dr Graham Scott of “Economics I”, was responsible for bringing together “Economic Management” – the policy bible for what came to be known as “Rogernomics”? Does she really not know that the current institutional “culture” of Treasury descends directly from these implacable ideologues?

 

Obviously not. Otherwise she wouldn’t dream of advocating that her party entrust its policies to Treasury’s tender mercies. Any more than she’d happily dispatch her youngest child for a sleepover at Michael Jackson’s Neverland!

 

And yet, Ms Turei was here, in New Zealand, for the entire time Treasury’s neoliberal evangelists were transforming the country. She knows full well that before 1984 the number of children living below the poverty line was 15 percent, and that after 20 years of Treasury-guided economic “reforms”, that figure had nearly doubled.

 

So, if eradicating child poverty is one of the Greens’ most important “twenty-first century policies” (as she told us, on the radio, only this week) then how is she going to feel when Treasury solemnly vouchsafes to the electorate that the measures her party proposes are not only unlikely to reduce child poverty but may even make it worse. And if she refuses to believe that Treasury would stoop to such blatantly political tactics, then all I can recommend is that she spend an hour or two with Sir Michael Cullen. As Labour’s finance minister from 1999 until 2008, he became something of an aficionado of Treasury’s “ideological burps”.

 

There is, of course, another explanation for Ms Turei’s extraordinary suggestion. It involves the Greens not arriving from, but departing for, another planet. Planet Key.

 

After all, the planet they’re currently living on – Planet Impotence – is a very dreary place. Nothing ever happens on this dismal chunk of rock, and what makes their lives even more frustrating is that Planet Key looks like a place where the right sort of Green could have such a lot of fun! It’s so bright, so blue, and everyone living there looks so happy. A material girl soon grows tired of hanging out with the poor and needy. Surely, it must be someone else’s turn to nursemaid the Labour Party! Especially when, every time Labour manages to construct a spaceship capable of lifting them off Planet Impotence, they always leave the Greens behind!

 

And that’s the beauty of establishing a PCU! It more-or-less guarantees that the Green Party’s Treasury-vetted policies will be ideologically indistinguishable from those of a National Government.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times, The Greymouth Star of Friday, 29 January 2016.

Mislaid Narratives

Black Riders, Dark Heroes: Roger Kerr, mouthpiece for the Neoliberal Nazgul of the Business Roundtable, deserves our admiration for his unceasing promotion of the capitalist narrative. Oh that the Left had such a fearsome ideological warrior.

WHAT CAN I SAY about Roger Kerr? Advised that the CEO of the Business Roundtable is the subject of The Nation’s investigative endeavours this Saturday (16 April) I’ve been wracking my brains (as one of The Nation’s panellists) for something intelligent to say, about the man.

Most Leftists wouldn’t bother. After Sir Roger Douglas, Roger Kerr is probably the most readily identifiable representative of the entire Rogernomics era. And his Business Roundtable, comprised of the CEOs of New Zealand’s leading businesses, plays the role of Tolkien’s Nazgul in The Lord of the Rings: the most potent instrument of an ancient evil men believed they had overcome but which has risen anew to plague this Middle Earth.

But even if Roger Kerr is regarded as a villain by the Left, he is – like most literary villains – a character who fascinates every bit as much as he repels.

When interviewed on television, and even more so in the flesh, his eyes are alive with what can only be described as merriment. On the occasions I have met him I could not help feeling that he had already anticipated every objection I could possibly muster to his line of argument and was quietly amused at their lack of force. Like a thoroughly prepped witness, he has a cogent and alarmingly persuasive response to any and every question his left-wing prosecutors might throw at him.

And it’s this imperviousness to cross-examination that sums up the real damage Roger Kerr and the Business Roundtable have done to political discourse in New Zealand. By treating the determination of national policy as a zero-sum game: a life-and-death struggle in which any neoliberal objective not won must be considered lost; Kerr and his big business backers have rendered open and intelligent debate impossible. Developing the military metaphor a little further, 21st Century political discourse resembles two armies firing bullets of a different calibre at each other. The enemy’s ammunition cannot be used in your weapons – and your own ammunition cannot be used in theirs.

The contrast between the neoliberal approach to managing the economy and society and the approach that prevailed from the end of World War II until the end of the 1970s could hardly be starker. The so-called “mixed economy” of the post-war era blended a great deal more than simply publicly- and privately-owned enterprises. By recognising that the workers’ and the bosses’ ideological narratives both contributed important insights to the processes of production, Keynesian economics encouraged a pluralism that drew all of the important “players” into the game.

For the thirty years between the end of World War II and the mid-1970s, the primary objective had not been to “win the game”, but to come up with solutions that were acceptable to as many of the players as possible. It was an approach which required a willingness to give as well as to take: which more or less mandated a search for consensus; and which gave great heed to empirical expertise.

The neoliberal paradigm, which Roger Kerr so effectively embodies, rejects the quest for consensus utterly and harnesses empiricism for purely instrumental ends. The utility of an argument lies not in how close it comes to reflecting the truth, but in how effective it is at undermining the arguments of those who threaten neoliberalism's objectives. For neoliberals, facts are like clubs – useful things for beating your opponents to death.

Nowhere is neoliberalism’s essential hostility to empiricism more overtly on display that in the so-called “debate” over climate change. Because accepting the empirical data of anthropogenic global warming would require neoliberalism to surrender a great many of its most cherished ideological assumptions about the ineluctable beneficence of capitalism, it has enlisted scores of compliant scientists to manufacture arguments sufficiently club-like to secure, if not outright victory, then at least a planet-endangering stalemate.

What should I say, then, about Roger Kerr? I guess I’d have to say that I admire him – but only in the way I admire the Wehrmacht or the Waffen-SS. When viewed as a ferociously well-organised, well-equipped and highly-motivated fighting force, Roger Kerr and the Business Roundtable – like the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS – evoke feelings of awe and fear. But asked to judge whether they constitute a contribution to, or a subtraction from, the sum total of human happiness, I'd have to say that the only good thing they have ever done is to expose the howling ideological void where a strong and competitive left-wing opposition should be.

A few days ago, in her magisterial summation of The Hobbit Dispute, Helen Kelly wrote persuasively about the extraordinary success of the neoliberal establishment in implanting a narrative highly beneficial to the interests of the employing class in the minds of the New Zealand population:

“Basically the story runs like this – and I am simplifying it. Work is a benefit, business is the benefactor and workers are merely the beneficiaries. Workers should be grateful for a job; a job is a privilege; employers should be lauded for the contribution they make to growing economic wealth.”

Kelly’s problem, as President of the CTU, and the problem facing the entire Left, is that they have yet to adjust to the fact that the employing class has walked away from the consensus-based politics of the Keynesian Era.

The Left’s current narrative is all about "co-operation" with the employers; bargaining in “good faith”; strengthening “social partnerships” and “building consensus”. What they have forgotten is that the historic compromise thrashed out between Capital and Labour in the aftermath of the Great Depression and the global war against fascism featured not only the old laissez-faire description of the master-servant relationship (which Kelly so accurately summarises above) but the classic Marxist description of the capitalist as the last in a long line of overlords who've unjustly appropriated the ‘surplus value’ created by working people’s labour.

This working-class narrative is summed-up neatly in the 1916 lyrics of Ralph Chaplin’s union anthem Solidarity Forever:

They have hoarded untold millions
That they never toiled to earn
But without our brain and muscle
Not a single wheel can turn

It’s a narrative that seizes the moral high ground for the worker and casts the employer as thief and parasite. The capitalists are a criminal class which is only able to preserve its expropriated wealth because it controls the police, courts, schools, news media, legislature and, when push finally comes to shove, the armed forces.

According to this story, the liberation of the working-class can only be achieved when the contradictory forces shaping and reshaping capitalist society finally resolve into a general, revolutionary crisis: when, in Marx’s ominously clanking sentences:

“Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.”

This is the narrative Helen Kelly and the Left generally have mislaid. The narrative which, right up until the 1980s, continued to haunt the capitalist imagination. The German poet, Heinrich Heine, writing in the 1840s described their nightmare like this:

“Communism is the secret name of the dread antagonist setting proletarian rule with all its consequences against the present bourgeois regime. It will be a frightful duel. How will it end? No one knows but gods and goddesses acquainted with the future. We know only this much: Communism, though little discussed now and loitering in hidden garrets on miserable straw pallets, is the dark hero destined for a great, if temporary, role in the modern tragedy …”

Roger Kerr – and all he represents – have persuaded themselves that the “Dark Hero’s” moment in the "modern tragedy" has come and gone. The task of Helen Kelly – and all who march on the Left – is to convince Roger and his friends that what they have so far witnessed is only the First Act.

This essay is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

Johnny & Billy - Zombie Slayers?

Night of the Living Dead: This 1968 horror classic features creatures that refuse to die. Is the National Government battling a neo-liberal establishment which similarly refuses to accept its own mortality?

IS THIS GOVERNMENT really the free-market horror film its left-wing critics make it out to be? Or, are John Key’s and Bill English’s most daunting political challengers now coming at them from the Right?

Not if you subscribe to the Left’s political narrative.

According to Labour and its left-wing allies, John Key is a hard-line free-marketeer who had to be "sold" to the New Zealand electorate (principally by the Australian political consultancy, Crosby-Textor) as a benign centrist. Had Key not adopted this persona, the Left insists, he would never have been elected. Which means National’s election-winning formula: Labour-lite + tax-cuts; cannot be abandoned before 2011 without putting its re-election at risk. Consequently, Key must wait until he wins a second term before unleashing his "secret" agenda: radical welfare reform + wholesale deregulation and privatisation.

But what if we are actually watching a very different movie? What if, far from being a sort of antipodean werewolf, impatiently waiting for the next electoral full moon so he can tear to shreds what remains of the egalitarian New Zealand dream, Key really is a moderate? What if the horror-movie we’re watching isn’t The Howling, but a political version of Night of the Living Dead, in which Key and his Finance Minister desperately battle the reanimated corpses of economic and social policies everyone believed dead and buried in the 1990s?

Now, that would be a real horror-show.

So, has the Budget really got the zombies pounding on the Beehive door? Well, National’s far-Right allies were certainly vocally unimpressed by Bill English’s "Road to Recovery". Act Leader, Rodney Hide, (as befits his ministerial status) has remained silent, but the keeper of the party’s ideological flame, Sir Roger Douglas, has unleashed volley after volley of verbal scorn upon English’s economic programme.

"This is the budget of deficits", thundered the former Finance Minister on Budget Day. "A deficit of spending, a deficit of the current account, a deficit of courage, but most importantly, a deficit of imagination."

But what would a budget which passed Sir Roger’s imagination test look like? What do the unreconstructed disciples of Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek actually want from John Key and Bill English? And could Key’s government possibly deliver it?

Fortunately, former Act MP, and proprietor of the NZ Centre for Political Research website, Muriel Newman, also wanted answers to these questions, and asked the Executive Director of the NZ Business Roundtable, Roger Kerr, to supply them.

In his guest commentary to the NZCPR Weekly newsletter, Kerr is careful not to be too specific in his recommendations, but the overall direction of his proposed programme of "reform" is reasonably clear.

He applauds what he claims is Bill English’s emphasis on "structural adjustment" – meaning a "shift of resources from the domestic economy to internationally competing industries". This "basic change in economic direction", says Kerr, is one of the (all-too-few?) "positive features" of the Budget.

What that ominous term "structural adjustment" means in plain English, is that Kerr very badly wants this Government to slash public spending on the goods and services New Zealanders consume, and redirect the state’s resources towards private businesses producing goods and services that foreigners consume.

In reality, there’s very little in this Budget that redirects resources in the way Kerr suggests. Indeed, English has been criticised by many commentators for maintaining the level of state spending in health, education and social welfare at the expense of the export sector. He did, after all, cut back on state support for research and development and skills training – both of which are crucial to lifting productivity.

To be blunt, I think Kerr is confusing what English has actually done, with what the Business Roundtable would like him to do. It’s a frequent mistake among left-wing ideologues, especially those dealing with conservative social-democratic governments – so it’s comforting to discover that right-wing ideologues suffer from the same wishful thinking.

The key passage in Kerr’s commentary, however, is this one:

"If we are to [catch up with Australian income levels by 2025] the government (and the community at large) have to recognise the need for policy settings much more like those of more successful countries. We can’t continue avoiding ‘third rail’ issues such as the superannuation eligibility age, privatisation of commercial businesses, a freer labour market and welfare reform."

In unpacking that heavily loaded sentence, we catch a glimpse of the sort of New Zealand the Business Roundtable is hoping to create.

It will be a New Zealand without unions. What else can "freer" mean when, already, barely seven percent of the private sector workforce is unionised? To further "free" the labour market, the public sector unions covering teachers, nurses and civil servants would have to be targeted. But, eliminating these powerful democratic institutions will not be achieved without massive political upheaval.

The same, of course, might be said about imposing "welfare reform" – a code-word for radically restricting citizens’ access to transfer payments, usually by limiting the period of eligibility to 3 months, or less.

Limiting elderly New Zealanders’ access to superannuation, by lifting the age of entitlement to 67, or more, and privatising what remains of the publicly-owned airways, railways and electricity generators rounds out Kerr’s vision of the future. Clearly, the Business Roundtable’s "ideal" New Zealand is going be a much less generous – and a much more politically contentious – country in which to live.

Or will it? Given that Kerr holds up both Hong Kong and Singapore as models of "small, high income countries" (‘with authoritarian governments’, he should have, but unaccountably failed, to add) political dissent may not be all that welcome in the Business Roundtable’s brave new world.

Writing about the current global economic crisis in The London Review of Books, recently, the veteran British labour historian, Ross McKibbin observed:

"The present crisis has established beyond doubt that neoliberalism, even the British form, and democracy are incompatible. To try to make them compatible, governments have adopted ever more risky policies, which brought down the last Conservative government and will probably bring down Brown’s."

"Risky" is a most inadequate word to describe the prescription which Kerr is offering Key and English. Filling it would be political suicide.

Perhaps, the Left should reconsider its rather gruesome characterisation of National’s leaders. Compared to the undead ideological creatures pounding on their door, who do Key and English more resemble: villains – or heroes?

This commentary was originally published in The Independent of Thursday, 11 June 2009.