Is Simon’s Smile Sustainable?

A Sustainable Proposition: With as much as 18 percent of the electorate declaring itself “undecided” about who to vote for, there is obviously plenty of space for a party like former Green Party member, Vernon Tava's, about-to-be-launched "Sustainable NZ Party" to move into. The most hospitable political territory for such a party to settle in would appear to be that occupied by voters who yearn for environmental policy to once again become the preserve of “serious” and “grown up” politicians.

SIMON BRIDGES is feeling pretty chipper this week – with good reason. Pollsters Reid Research and Colmar Brunton have not only re-confirmed the solidity of National’s support, but also tracked a decline in Labour’s numbers. Not a big enough decline, it must be acknowledged, to give the National Party more than the narrowest of victories in one poll and a narrow defeat in the other. Even so, Mr Bridges is beaming. Why?

If his own cryptic encouragement to “watch this space” is any guide, the Leader of the Opposition is anticipating the imminent emergence of what is, potentially, a new coalition partner for National in the 2020 General Election. The most likely candidate for this role is Vernon Tava’s “Sustainable New Zealand Party” The requisite 500 members have, apparently, been signed up and the party’s name approved. All that remains is for Mr Tava’s new political vehicle to be rolled-out with maximum fanfare.

That should not be difficult to secure. Mr Tava is an articulate, energetically moderate and very personable individual who, it must be assumed, has spent the last few months gathering the resources necessary to set his new vehicle in motion. If Sustainable NZ’s website is any guide, Mr Tava’s behind-the-scenes efforts have not been wasted. It is professional in appearance, easily navigable and suffused throughout with ideologically appropriate blues and greens.

If Mr Bridges’ smiles are any indication, however, Mr Tava has done a lot more than produce a website. The National Party leader’s cat-who-got-the-cream expression suggests that the new party will come with a newsworthy collection of founding parents: people for whom liberal National Party supporters would be pleased to vote. Exactly who these people might be remains a closely guarded secret, but a small exercise in imaginative speculation should be enough to indicate how impactful a collection of the right people could be.

Let us imagine, then, that someone with the public profile and indisputable credibility of a Sir Peter Gluckman were to step forward into the glare of the television lights. Instantly, Sustainable NZ would become a serious proposition. The news media would respond enthusiastically, amplifying the party’s messages and giving the existing political landscape a rattling seismic shake.

With as much as 18 percent of the electorate declaring itself “undecided” about who to vote for, there is obviously plenty of space for Sustainable NZ to move into. The most hospitable political territory for the party to settle in would be that occupied by voters who yearn for environmental policy to become the preserve of “serious” and “grown up” politicians. Voters who, while conceding the reality of Climate Change, are not at all impressed by the emotional appeals of Greta Thunberg and her children’s crusade. Voters who refuse to accept the dire predictions of a climate catastrophe: who still have faith in the unbounded ingenuity of the human species to come up with what the doom-sayers scornfully dismiss as “the scientific fix”.

In other words, a party quite unlike the Greens. A party unburdened by the ideological detritus of the 1960s and 70s which the original green parties, formed in the 1980s, felt obliged to haul into the public square. A party that wouldn’t dream of Morris Dancing, or expect its conference delegates to subsist on mung beans, herbal tea and tofu. A party that would be soberly and sensibly liberal on social issues without getting side-tracked into branding its core supporters “white supremacists” or descending into TERF wars. A party which, if presented with a genetically-engineered solution to New Zealand livestock’s methane emissions, rather than cry “Heresy!”, would grab it with both hands.

Most of all, of course, Sustainable NZ would be a party of swingers. For all their origins in the swinging 60s and 70s, the Greens have been the most monogamous of political parties. Since being elected in their own right to Parliament in 1999 they have had only one political partner – Labour. Even when Labour scorned the Greens’ unconditional love; even when it dallied outrageously with Peter Dunne and Winston Peters; even when it left them bruised and battered; they never faltered – never strayed.

Sustainable NZ – if it is the reason for Mr Bridges’ knowing smile – has no intention of becoming the Right’s battered spouse. It will offer itself to National unconditionally only once – but for Simon that will be enough.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 18 October 2019.

Racism And Colonisation: The Inseparable Twins.

Sometimes A Tweet Can Convey As Much Information As a PhD Thesis: Garth McVicar's tweet offers a perfect illustration of the ideological obstacles blocking the path to the rational public conversation Sir Peter Gluckman is hoping to initiate on crime and punishment and the disproportionate incarceration of young Maori men.

SIR PETER GLUCKMAN has pleaded with his fellow New Zealanders for a more rational conversation about crime and punishment. Good luck with that Sir Peter.

New Zealand came into being at the behest of the New Zealand Company’s titled investors and the Foreign and Colonial Office’s high-minded bureaucrats. It was paid for out of the lands and resources expropriated from the indigenous population. Or, to put it even more bluntly: New Zealand was built on the ruins of tribal economies and at the expense of Maori culture generally.

That this country’s prisons are full of young Maori males is, therefore, an entirely predictable consequence of colonisation. What’s more: from the point of view of the Pakeha legatees of all that nineteenth and twentieth century expropriation; it is an entirely necessary one.

Colonisation is about much more than simply transplanting the culture of the metropolitan power geographically. Long before the first wave of settlers sets sail, the colonising power is required to furnish them with an unassailable justification for doing so.

Ordinary, decent people are reluctant to steal the property of other ordinary, decent people. But only convince your settlers that the indigenous inhabitants of their new home are heathen cannibals: primitive savages in desperate need of the blessings of civilisation; and all the subsequent thievery required of a successful colonisation effort can be presented to posterity as evidence of settler beneficence.

Racism is not the unfortunate by-product of the colonisation process: just one of those things that happen when two very different cultures come into contact with one another. No, racism is absolutely integral to the colonial project: its usefulness extending far beyond the initial phases of conquest and pacification.

The legitimacy of the New Zealand colonial state rests upon its foundation myth. The uplifting story of how of the Treaty of Waitangi drew the indigenous tribes of New Zealand peacefully within the compass of Great Britain’s beneficent civilisation.

Implicit in that myth, however, is the unspoken contention that the Maori needed Britain’s civilising influence. Without the efforts of the missionaries; without the spread of literacy and all the useful knowledge that accompanied it; Maori existence would have remained, to use Thomas Hobbes’ pithy definition of the State of Nature: “nasty, brutish and short”. That, in brief, is what Pakeha New Zealand has been encouraged to believe for nearly 200 years.

Within this overtly racist construction of the Maori-Pakeha relationship, the justification for the Land Wars takes on a profoundly defamatory aspect. In essence, the argument advanced in defence of these military campaigns is that they were forced upon the colonial government by the wilful reversion, by a number of “rebel” tribes, to the primitive superstitions and unspeakable savageries of the Maori past.

Without the help of “friendly Maoris” (not to mention the intervention of 12,000 imperial British troops) the infant New Zealand nation would have perished. But, by overcoming this last, desperate gasp of Maori barbarism, the colony was able to move forward and embrace its destiny as the “social laboratory of the world”.

Here, then, is the deeply embedded racist explanation for the gross over-representation of Maori in New Zealand prisons. Consciously, or unconsciously, when the eyes of Pakeha authority-figures fall upon young Maori men they see people who are dangerous; potential rebels; ready to “revert”. And, when young Maori men see this version of themselves reflected in the eyes of teachers, social workers, police officers, prosecutors, judges and corrections staff, that is precisely what far too many of them become.

That more than half of the 9,000 prisoners incarcerated in New Zealand prisons are Maori tells us all we need to know about what Pakeha New Zealand needs from its indigenous population.

Many Pakeha see Maori culture crowding-in on them like the primeval bush that once crowded-in around their settler ancestors’ farmsteads. An alarming number of them would be hugely relieved to see it cut down, broken up and ploughed under. How else to explain the huge majorities racked up in local government referenda against the prospect of including even one dedicated Maori seat at the council table?

Since the 1970s, the New Zealand state has steadily distanced itself from the entrenched anti-Maori prejudices of its Pakeha citizens. Clearly in evidence across this country’s political class is an ongoing effort to move beyond the racist rationalisations of its colonial predecessors. Sir Peter Gluckman’s attempt to wrench the crime and punishment debate out of the clutches of the Pakeha Right is another push in the same direction.

It remains to be seen whether the effects of colonisation – so evident in the behaviour of both Maori and Pakeha – are responsive to the well-meaning ministrations of social scientists. If New Zealand’s story is not about British civilisation triumphant and Maori barbarism overcome, then what story should we be telling ourselves?

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 3 April 2018.

The Gluckman Report: Acknowledging The Symptoms, Ignoring The Causes

The Morbid Relationship of Politics and Science: Professor Sir Peter Gluckman's report to the Prime Minister addresses the biological and psychological aspects of human maturation but fails to locate these in their socio-economic and political contexts. Twenty-percent of Kiwi adolescents aren't making the transition to adulthood easily, says the Professor. Did anyone ask if they were raised in the 15-20 percent of families whose incomes fall below the poverty line?

WHAT A SHAME. To hear the news media tell it, the story of Professor Sir Peter Gluckman’s report to the Prime Minister was one of disinterested science versus ill-informed populism. 

In a world dominated by sound-bites and focus-groups, John Key’s hand-picked scientific adviser was heroically making the case for evidence-based policies. 

“Social investment in New Zealand should take more account of the growing evidence that prevention and intervention strategies applied early in life are more effective in altering outcomes and reap more economic returns over the life course than do strategies applied later.” 

So says Professor Gluckman and his team – adding for good measure that: “This will require long-term commitment to appropriate policies and programmes.” 

For those in the policy-making community this must have been an “Alleluia Moment”. Could it be, that after years of denigration and marginalisation at the hands of the political class, experts and expertise were about to make a come-back? 

Well, I for one hope not. At least not these “experts” or this “expertise”. 

Because, reading through Improving the Transition: Reducing Social and Psychological Morbidly During Adolescence, it quickly becomes clear that this “science” is very “interested” indeed – and not in a good way.

THE HISTORY of scientific involvement in the formation of social policy is not a happy one. From the pernicious social theories of the 19^th Century eugenicist Sir Francis Galton, to the authoritarian social-engineering offered up in the Trilateral Commission’s 1976 report Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of Democracies, the interventions of “disinterested science” have almost always ended up arguing for an intensification of social controls and the consequent curtailment of individual liberty. 

The essence of Professor Gluckman’s argument is that, over the course of the last half-century, the human developmental phase known as “adolescence” has grown longer, and that the discoveries of biological science should be applied to the task of reducing the social and psychological “morbidity” of the “at least 20 % of young New Zealanders” who are failing to navigate this extended period of sub-adulthood successfully.

OH DEAR, oh dear, oh dear: there is just so much wrong with Professor Gluckman’s approach – it’s hard to know where to begin. 

For a start, his thesis is utterly ahistorical – a deficiency which renders most of the report redundant. It neglects to acknowledge that “adolescence” itself is much more of a social than a scientific construct. An ex post facto justification for the very political decision to keep children out of the industrial labour force. 

Prior to the rise of industrial capitalism, women and children had participated fully in the processes of production, and the family formation process was usually underway by the late teens. 

And even after the social reformers of the 19^th Century had put an end to child labour, no legal impediment was raised to employing 12 to 15-year-olds on farms and in factories. 

Those of us over 50 will have little difficulty in remembering people who left high-school at 15, married at 19 or 20 and were parents long before they were 25. No one back then questioned their “social and psychological” fitness for these roles; they were adult citizens in good-standing; holding down jobs, paying off homes and raising families. 

It’s this historical data that Professor Gluckman and his team quite simply refused to confront. 

If there is social and psychological morbidly in New Zealand society, the explanation is not to be found in our genes, or the development of our brains, but in the political and economic decisions that have made the unnatural extension of “adolescence” inevitable. 

Reintroduce full employment and free tertiary education, Professor Gluckman, and watch the morbidity of “at least 20% of young New Zealanders” plummet. Restore State Advances housing loans and the universal Family Benefit, and be astounded at how much earlier those young New Zealanders take on the responsibilities of adulthood. 

To paraphrase Marx: The Scientists have only investigated the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it. 

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 10 June 2011.