Big Screen Excitement: If New Zealand’s experience of Covid-19 was a movie we’d only have been watching for about 20 minutes. The main characters of “Pandemic – The Movie” have been introduced and have risen splendidly to meet the script’s first big challenges. We’re all rooting for Jacinda and Ashley – willing them to succeed. But, even as our identification with the heroes grows stronger, a little voice is reminding us that “Pandemic” still has 100 minutes left to run.
SO FAR, SO BLOODY FANTASTIC! All around the world people are
watching the press conferences of New Zealand’s prime minister and comparing
them to whatever you call those performances featuring the President of the
United States. Imagine how decent, intelligent Americans must feel as they
compare and contrast the style and the substance of these two very different
political leaders. The experience must surely be as harrowing for them as it is
affirming for us.
The cynics will object, of course, that it’s easy to be
“nice” when everything is going well. Which is true. But, here’s the thing: New
Zealanders’ experience of the Covid-19 Pandemic has been so much less fraught
than the Americans’ because our system and our leadership rose to meet this
extraordinary challenge and theirs did not. Our politicians and civil servants,
acting together, and supported by the overwhelming majority of the people, made
the right choices at the right time and for the right reasons – which is why
everything is going so well. Better than many of us dared to hope.
If this was a movie, however, we’d only have been watching
for about 20 minutes. The main characters of “Pandemic – The Movie” have been
introduced and the best of them have risen splendidly to meet the script’s
first big challenges. We’re all rooting for them – willing them to succeed.
But, even as our identification with the heroes grows stronger, a little voice
is reminding us that “Pandemic” still has 100 minutes left to run.
Because even if New Zealand succeeds in eliminating the
Covid-19 virus – and that is still a long way off – our Prime Minister and her
colleagues must meet the much larger and more daunting challenge of the virus’s
economic consequences. The Treasury’s most optimistic scenario predicts an
unemployment rate of around 10 percent as the New Zealand economy struggles to
lift itself off its knees. Some economists are expecting as many as a third of
this country’s business enterprises to fail. It is difficult to fully
appreciate what this means in simple human terms: the collapse of so many hopes
and dreams; the rising level of anxiety and despair; the dangerous casting
about for someone or something to blame.
If the first 20 minutes of “Pandemic” have been inspiring,
the next 60 are likely to be bloody terrifying.
How so? Because wrestling with an economic crisis is a very
different proposition from managing a public health crisis. When it comes to
the economy there is (as yet) no equivalent character to the steadfast and
reassuring Director-General of Health, Dr Ashley Bloomfield. Economists like to
think of their profession as a science, but it isn’t. “Political-Economy”, as
people used to call economics, is a much more honest descriptor. It captures
the central role which politics plays in how a society organises the means of
production, distribution and exchange.
As Lenin rightly recognised, the whole complex business of
how any particular society functions is reducible to just two one-word
questions: Who? Whom? Or, as Leonard Cohen, rather less tersely, puts it in his
song “Democracy”, economics is all about “the homicidal bitchin’ that goes down
in every kitchen to determine who will serve and who will eat.”
People may be willing to let the scientific experts like
Ashley Bloomfield, Michael Baker, Siouxsie Wiles, and Shaun Hendy guide them
through a medical emergency, but a willingness to be guided by the often
conflicting advice of bankers, industrialists, trade unionists and academics,
is much less likely. Convincing New Zealanders to “unite against the economic
depression” will be several orders of magnitude more difficult that convincing
them to unite against Covid-19. Unity against a potentially deadly coronavirus
is much more easily achieved than uniting the rich and the poor in a common
struggle to rebuild a collapsing economy. That will be a much more daunting
task.
Daunting – but not impossible. Already emerging from the
present crisis is a broad intellectual consensus that the answers to the
questions Who? Whom? which the Powers-That-Be have for the past 35 years deemed
acceptable will no longer suffice. The Covid-19 Pandemic has brought home to
all people of good will the indispensable nature of the state. Not even the
Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09 was sufficient to topple the ideological
hegemony of neoliberal economics, but this latest global catastrophe has
brought it crashing down.
And this time, the neoliberal economists and financiers know
it. Their efforts at self-defence have, however, been spectacularly self-defeating.
The reason for this lack of success is simple. At its core, neoliberalism is a
sociopathic ideology, and sociopathology is, by definition, incapable of
recognising its own core deficiencies: grandiosity, narcissism, amorality and a
complete lack of empathy.
The neoliberal “solutions” to the present crisis reflect
these deficiencies. Their protagonists simply cannot comprehend why ordinary
decent people recoil in horror from their campaign to “save the economy” by
allowing the old, the sick and the weak to die in their tens-of-thousands.
People may not know much about economics, but they are still perfectly capable
of distinguishing right from wrong. The howling moral vacuum at the heart of
Neoliberalism has finally been exposed by – of all people – the neoliberals
themselves.
Though finished strategically, the tactical response of
Neoliberalism in extremis is certain to enliven the middle section of “Pandemic”.
But, if Jacinda Ardern, Grant Robertson, and whoever emerges as the humane
economist equivalent of Dr Ashely Bloomfield, can maintain the tone and poise
displayed in the battle against the virus, then the battle against the economic
crisis may unfold in an equally satisfactory fashion.
Then again, the Government may not need an economic expert character.
In his address to business leaders of 15 April, the Finance Minister, Grant
Robertson, may have taken the burden of leading and explaining New Zealand’s
economic recovery on to his own shoulders. These words in particular suggest
that, in Robertson, the hour has met the man:
“The importance of the role of the state has been
underlined by this crisis. I hold a strong personal belief in the power of the
state to do good. It is through a well-funded, highly functional public
service, that we have had the ability to coordinate and provide leadership for
New Zealanders, guiding both the public health response and the economic
response to this crisis.
“I believe it is of the utmost importance that the state
continues to play an active part in the economic recovery, providing leadership
and direction as we move forward through the challenging times ahead.
“Finally, I know that what we have asked New Zealanders
to do in this crisis is huge. As we have all had to make sacrifices in doing
our bit to stop the spread of the virus, so too will we all have a part to play
in our economic recovery.”
It’s hard to imagine a better answer to the questions: Who?
Whom? Especially since Robertson’s answer to both questions is the same:
Us.
It would certainly guarantee “Pandemic” a happy
ending.
This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Friday, 17 April 2020.
