Centaurs Need Not Apply.

Keeper of the Green Faith: From the moment the Labour/Green “Budget Responsibility Rules” were announced, I knew that a scorching sermon from Sue Bradford was only a matter of time. She did not disappoint. Barely 72 hours after Grant Robertson’s and James Shaw’s blasphemy had sullied the ears of the faithful, Sue was on RNZ’s Morning Report castigating her erstwhile comrades with considerable passion.

 

AS A GUARDIAN of left-wing orthodoxy, Sue Bradford is without peer. At the first hint of heresy she can be relied upon to stride purposefully to the nearest progressive pulpit and start preaching.

 

From the moment the Labour/Green “Budget Responsibility Rules” were announced, I knew that a scorching sermon from Sue was only a matter of time. She did not disappoint. Barely 72 hours after Grant Robertson’s and James Shaw’s blasphemy had sullied the ears of the faithful, Sue was on RNZ’s Morning Report castigating her erstwhile comrades with considerable passion.

 

“The Greens have completely sold out on where they started from in my generation of MPs in 1999”, Sue thundered. “So what you see here is the Green Party deciding to go after votes on the centre and the right of the New Zealand political spectrum. It wants business in its corner. It wants your National blue-green voters in its corner.”

 

What does this mean? Sue is in no doubt. It means “completely abandoning the huge number of people who are in desperate need in the areas of housing, welfare, jobs, and education.”

 

There’s a part of me that inclines towards Sue’s critique. It’s the part that remembers those original Green MPs, the “magnificent seven”, as they galloped up the steps of Parliament and onto the floor of the House of Representatives like “an invasion of centaurs”. (If I may borrow Theodore Roszak’s evocative image.)

 

Which was great to see. (And even greater to be, Sue, I’m sure!) But only if your purpose was (borrowing once again from Roszak’s 1969 best-seller The Making of a Counter-Culture) to embody “the experience of radical critical disjuncture, the clash of irreconcilable conceptions of life”. Or, as an old-time Maoist like Sue might express it: only if the Greens were there to make revolution.

 

An Invasion of Centaurs: "the clash of irreconcilable conceptions of life".

 

But even back then, in 1999, the Greens’ revolutionary faction was in the minority. Alongside Sue, Keith Locke and Nandor Tanczos, sat Rod Donald, Jeanette Fitzsimons, Sue Kedgely and Ian Ewen-Street. Radical and visionary these latter four may have been, but they had come to Parliament to accomplish things, not to turn New Zealand’s capitalist society upside down.

 

Twenty years later and the Greens are still waiting to fulfil even a small fraction of the Magnificent Seven’s agenda. Most members of the Green Party are not interested in being seen as the harbingers of a “radical critical disjuncture” but as members of a political party dedicated to finding practical solutions to global warming; cleaning up New Zealand’s lakes, rivers and streams; housing the homeless and helping to develop a principled and purposeful role for New Zealand on the international stage.

 

For most New Zealand voters, the idea of revolutionary Green Party centaurs rampaging through Parliament is equally politically uninteresting.

 

So perhaps Sue should cast her mind back to the 1999 election and recall just how narrow was the margin that separated the Greens from parliamentary representation and political oblivion. Rod Donald delighted in his white shirt and coloured braces for six years, but by 2005 he was very publicly having himself measured for a stylish Kiwi-made business suit. When the brute arithmetic of political power kept him out of Helen Clark’s Cabinet it, quite literally, broke his heart.

 

“At what price power,” Sue demands “if you sell out everything that your party was originally set out to achieve? I mean, this Green Party here is following the same trail as green parties all over the world – some of who have ended up in coalitions and alliance with really right-wing governments.”

 

But in 2014, with just one image, the National Party destroyed the Green Party’s (and Labour’s) hopes of achieving anything for New Zealand. Their depiction of a Red/Green government as an uncoordinated and unreliable “Ship of Fools” was devastating.

 

That’s the public perception that Andrew Little, Grant Robertson, James Shaw and Metiria Turei are up against. And it is the widespread public misgivings about the Left’s economic realism and reliability that their “Budget Responsibility Rules” are intended to allay.

 

That’s because powerlessness also comes at a price.

 

A real revolutionary would understand the importance of inoculating the two leading parties of the Left against the “Show me the money!” ambushes of elections past.

 

The Greens are not trying to make a counter-culture, Sue – they’re trying to make a government.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 31 March 2017.

Sour Fruit: Why I’m Not Pinning My Hopes On ESRA.

What Sort Of Tree Are They Planting? The genetic make-up of ESRA reflects the personal histories of its creators. Its core inheritance comes from the Maoist Left of the 1970s. There are also genes from the unemployed workers and Maori nationalist movements of the 1980s. Still more hail from the pacifist, radical feminist and Green philosophies. Finally, there is a generous contribution from the academic Marxist gene-banks located in the political science and sociology departments of the nation’s universities.

 

IS IT TOO SOON to pronounce judgement upon ESRA? Economic & Social Research Aotearoa has only just been launched. So, surely, we should give it a little time to show us what it can do? Except that we already know what ESRA will do, because we already know what ESRA is. ESRA is a Far-Left “think tank” whose contribution to the formulation and implementation of broadly acceptable progressive policies will range from negligible to nil.

 

Unfair? I don’t think so.

 

If I were to show you the first fragile leaves of a lemon sapling, and ask whether or not you wanted a lemon tree in your garden, I very much doubt that you would say: “Oh, let’s not be hasty. That might not be a lemon tree after all. Or, if it is a lemon tree, it might prove to be one of a very special kind – one that does not bear sour fruit.” More likely your answer would depend on how you feel about lemons.

 

If you like lemon trees, and lemons, you’d say: “Oh, by all means, let it grow.” If you don’t like lemons, you’d tell me to pull it out.

 

Well I don’t like lemons. At least, I don’t like lemon trees that take up space and consume resources I would much rather allocate to other plants.

 

The genetic make-up of ESRA reflects the personal histories of its creators. Its core inheritance comes from the Maoist Left of the 1970s. There are also genes from the unemployed workers and Maori nationalist movements of the 1980s. Still more hail from the pacifist, radical feminist and Green philosophies. Finally, there is a generous contribution from the academic Marxist gene-banks located in the political science and sociology departments of the nation’s universities.

 

Perhaps the founders of ESRA are hoping to harvest some hybrid vigour from these waning ideological strains. Certainly their individual evolutions offer scant cause for optimism. The latest historical research paints Mao Zedong as a monstrous figure whose “Great Leap Forward” and “Cultural Revolution” cost the lives of millions of Chinese workers and peasants. The unemployed workers’ movement collapsed in ideological and personal rancour even as Rogernomics and Ruthanasia were tearing the New Zealand working-class to pieces. The so-called “new social movements” (pacifism, anti-racism, feminism, environmentalism) proved easy meat for the assimilative/transformative powers of neoliberalism. Second Wave feminism was reduced to tallying-up the number of female company directors. Maori Nationalism turned into the Iwi Leaders Group. Green became the new Pink. And academic Marxism remained practically impenetrable to anyone not writing a doctoral thesis.

 

It’s not a whakapapa that inspires much confidence. Simply keeping so many unruly horses pulling in the same direction will require the wisdom of a sage and the patience of a saint. There are many on the Left, however, who’ll happily attest to ESRA’s founding mother, Sue Bradford, being over-endowed with both those qualities. All I’m prepared to say is: she’ll need them!

 

Sue has called ESRA a “left-wing think-tank”. Indeed, she wrote her doctoral thesis on the desirability and practicality of establishing just such a beast. Unfortunately for the NZ Left, (which desperately needs a think-tank of its own to match the Right’s Maxim Institute and NZ Initiative) ESRA is nothing of the sort.

 

What stands out the most about the historical phenomenon of the think-tank is its unswervingly practical focus. At the end of World War II the Right stood discredited: its political leadership by their affinities with the defeated fascists and Nazis; its economic theories by the multiple lessons and legacies of the Great Depression. Social-democracy, on the other hand, armed with the economic and social insights of Keynesianism, was in the ideological ascendant. By the early-1970s, it was poised to put an end to capitalism as generally understood. Something had to be done.

 

The principal weapon of the Right’s ideological fightback was the think-tank. Not only did it relentlessly critique the social-democratic assumptions of the era, but it produced a never-ending stream of practical suggestions for action. The process was as simple as it was effective: commission a report on an institution, or a practice, you wish to change. Release the report to the media and make its author available for interviews and public meetings. Arrange private meetings with sympathetic politicians and/or journalists where practical advice can be given and received. Repeat as required until a parliamentary majority is assembled in favour of your “reform”.

 

After more than 40 years, the Right’s refinement of the think-tank “weapon” has developed to the point where a body called the American Legislative Exchange Council is able to supply right-wing state legislators with pre-drafted “model” legislation. Committed to advancing the “fundamental principles of free-market enterprise, limited government, and federalism at the state level through a nonpartisan public-private partnership of America's state legislators, members of the private sector and the general public” ALEC makes the work of the Right’s parliamentary foot-soldiers almost too easy.

 

If this was the sort of tree Sue and her comrades were planting this weekend, I’d be cheering them on. Sadly, they are committed to an organisational model that seeks to bring about radical economic and social change without enlisting ESRA as a skilled participant in the day-to-day, down-and-dirty, cut-and-thrust business of political influence-peddling. But that is what a think-tank is. It’s what it does. Aspiring to be a think-tank that doesn’t get its hands dirty, is like aspiring to be a prostitute who doesn’t sell sex.

 

It’s a tremendous pity, but ESRA is a lemon.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Saturday, 3 September 2016.

L’État c’est Sue

You'll Do It My Way: Observers have noted the extraordinary condescension of a middle-aged Pakeha and former Green MP setting forth the correct moral path for a party dominated overwhelmingly by young, marginalised Maori. Her refusal to be bound by their votes, followed by the very public repudiation of both their judgement and their party, has given rise to considerable speculation concerning exactly who Sue Bradford thinks she is – much of it less-than-flattering.

 

THERE’S NO SHOW WITHOUT PUNCH, they say. But on the left of New Zealand politics it’s more a matter of there being no show without Sue Bradford. Hone Harawira and Vikram Kumar may have been the ones up on the platform announcing the formation of the Internet-Mana electoral alliance, but it was Sue who, once again, gate-crashed the party.

 

Since the decision to join forces with the German millionaire, Kim Dotcom, clearly struck at the heart of everything Mana stood for, Sue told the world, she was left with no other choice but to quit the party in protest.

 

No other choice? Well, not exactly, Sue. You could have decided to abide by Mana’s democratic decision-making processes. Having put forward the case against an alliance with the Internet Party to Mana’s membership, you could have left the final determination to them and accepted the outcome with good grace.

 

But, you weren’t willing to do that, were you, Sue? Right from the start, when you very publicly hung the threat of your resignation over Mana’s head, you made it very clear that if the party rejected your advice, made the wrong decision, then you were out of there.

 

Now, an unkind commentator might draw his readers’ attention to the extraordinary condescension involved in a middle-aged Pakeha and former Green MP setting forth the correct moral path for a party dominated overwhelmingly by young, marginalised Maori. He might even observe that her refusal to be bound by their votes, followed by the very public repudiation of both their judgement and their party, might give rise to considerable speculation concerning exactly who Sue Bradford thinks she is – much of it less-than-flattering.

 

And, while he was at it, that commentator might also question why a person steeped in the writings of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong, and possessing an encyclopaedic knowledge of twentieth century revolutionary movements, should be so down on politically motivated millionaires.

 

Was it not the Belarussian millionaire, Alexander Parvus, who bankrolled the Bolsheviks into power? And wasn’t it Parvus’s gold that paid for Lenin and 30 of his comrades to be spirited across Germany in a sealed train to join a Russian revolution that had had the temerity to start without them?

 

JFK’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy once quipped to his son: “A man only needs three things to become President of the United States. The first is Money. The second is Money. And the third is … Money!” The same formula clearly works for revolutionary leaders.

 

And maybe, Sue, that is the real reason behind your rejection of Kim Dotcom’s money. That it might make Mana into something more than a mere pin-prick in the shins of power. That with the funding Mr Dotcom will undoubtedly make available to the alliance, Mana’s Annette Sykes will have a better than even chance of knocking Te Ururoa Flavell – and with him the Maori Party – out of Parliament. That with the Dotcom dollars behind him, Hone Harawira will be able to bring into the House of Representatives your erstwhile comrade, John Minto. (Not since the days of Harry Holland will our Parliament have welcomed a more revolutionary MP!) Isn’t that the unspoken explanation behind all your many party entrances and exits over the years, Sue? That, to remain pure, your parties must relinquish any prospect of political success?

 

If I’m wrong, you have my sincere apologies. It’s just that, sometimes, I think the entire New Zealand Left would rather cling to their principles in a state of weakness than compromise some of them from a position of strength.

 

Revolutionary ambition is made of many things. For Hone Harawira it was the crushing effect of the Pakeha nation’s economic and cultural power upon an indigenous people beaten to their knees by 150 years of settler injustice and racism. For John Minto it was the obscenity of Apartheid South Africa.

 

And for Kim Dotcom? Perhaps it was the experience of having his home invaded and his family terrified by 80 heavily armed police officers acting on information illegally supplied to them by the Government Communications Security Bureau, at the behest of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation, and with the smug approval of the New Zealand Prime Minister.

 

Sometimes, Sue, the story’s about more than your principles.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 30 May 2014.

Taking the Red out of the Green

Sue Bradford: She spoke for those conspicuously absent from most Green gatherings: the poor, the brown and the white working-class.

NO WONDER Sue Bradford quit. If a big chunk of your party declared themselves so allergic to your political beliefs that they’d walk away in protest, or form a new one, if you were elected its co-leader, then Hell - you’d quit too.

The Greens have such a cuddly image, it’s hard to believe things could get so nasty. But, pay a visit to the Green Party’s blogsite, "Frogblog", follow the long thread of commentary attached to the posting on Sue’s resignation, and you’ll see just how un-cuddly some Greens can be.

It all looked so much nicer when Rod Donald was the leader. He had such a warm and bouncy personality that the press gallery christened him "Tigger". And that bouncy, optimistic and relentlessly friendly image soon came to encompass the whole Green Party. (Few people outside the Greens ever got to see Rod’s claws and teeth – but, of course, they were there.)

Rod cultivated the Green’s "peace, love and mung-beans" image assiduously because he knew how politically potent their apparently gentle brand of right-on radicalism was when set against the ruthlessness and cruelty of National, Act, Labour and the Alliance.

Behind the scenes, however, the Greens’ political practice reflected exactly what you’d expect from a movement dominated by self-employed small-business people, middle-class professionals and academics. Genteel it might have been. Gentle it was not.

Sue Bradford understood this social milieu extremely well. She had, after all, been born into a distinguished academic family, and was no mean scholar herself. On the other hand, years spent "proletarianising" herself in the Progressive Youth Movement, the Workers Communist League and the Unemployed Workers Movement, also meant that, when she needed to, Sue could play the struttin’, swearin’, rough-as-guts battler from the streets to a nicety.

It was a skill that left most of her political rivals gasping. Someone with the ability to move effortlessly between two worlds; who looks as formidable leading a demonstration against the Asian Development Bank, as she does explaining the finer points of government (not to mention her own) legislation, will generally unnerve most opponents – be they internal or external.

Being on the receiving-end of state-violence on a semi-regular basis also gives the street-level activist another great political advantage: it develops mental, emotional and physical toughness. In a party where non-confrontational manoeuvring behind-the-scenes ("consensus building") is the preferred political style, Sue’s bluntness could be profoundly unsettling.

This was especially true when her bluntness was deployed in the name of social groups conspicuously absent from the standard Green Party muster: the poor, the brown, and the white working-class. Sue never let the Greens off the hook when it came to honouring their formal commitment to social justice (not even when they started calling it "social responsibility").

She also refused to let them get away with the nonsense of "Mother Coke and Father Pepsi" when it came to choosing between Labour and National. Sue’s ideological DNA carried far too many Marxist genes to swallow the "one’s bad as t’other" arguments of a party membership growing increasingly frustrated with, and embarrassed by, its association with the Left.

It was this refusal to let the Greens decline into a genteel and thoroughly non-threatening environmentalism that brought about Sue’s downfall. As more and more New Zealanders shifted restlessly to the Right (a shift given added impetus by her own anti-smacking legislation) the Green rank-and-file decided it was high-time they shifted with them.

Rod’s instinctive grasp of the electoral centrality of the Green’s radical message (of which Sue had become the political icon) would have allowed him to defuse the looming ideological confrontation. But, tragically, Rod was dead. And his successor, Russel Norman, lacked both the instincts and the skills to save his party from itself.

Sue’s rival for the co-leadership, Metiria Turei, with all the reckless insouciance of the genuine anarchist, traded shamelessly on the Greens’ fundamental ignorance of political power’s true nature. To the party rank-and-file she represented the alluring fiction that the planet could be saved from the top down.

Had Sue, in her determination to abolish s59 of the Crimes Act, not suppressed her understanding that enduring political change always comes from the bottom-up, she’d have seen the rank-and-file rebellion that drove her from the Greens coming.

She probably couldn’t have altered their decision, but it wouldn’t have come as such a painful surprise.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 2 October 2009.

Sue Bradford Resigns

Former (as of 30th October 2009) Green Party MP, Sue Bradford.

THE SHOCK ANNOUNCEMENT of Sue Bradford’s resignation from Parliament raises a number of troubling questions about the political trajectory of the Green Party under its new leadership.

Referring to her failure to defeat Metiria Turei for the Greens’ co-leadership position, Bradford declared: "The Party made a clear and democratic decision, but of course it was personally disappointing and I’m ready for a change."

Clearly, there was a lot more to Bradford’s defeat than the party hierarchy was willing to admit at the time. With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that the struggle for the female co-leadership role was merely a reflection of a much wider internal struggle over the Greens' long-term ideological direction.

During the 2008 election campaign, Bradford had spiked a major push by the then female co-leader, Jeanette Fitzsimons, and male co-leader, Russel Norman, to reposition the Greens as a fundamentally non-ideological political movement, capable of working with either of the major parties.

Bradford’s hard-line stance against entering into any kind of deal with National can now be seen for what it was: the last stand of the Green Left. Turei’s May 2009 victory was the Green Party rank-and-file’s emphatic response. The days of uncompromising eco-socialism are over.

Bradford’s defeat leaves the remaining representatives of the eco-socialist tradition, Keith Locke and Catherine Delahunty, in a dangerously exposed position.

Looking back at the Greens’ 2008 Party List in the light of Bradford's resignation, it is now possible to see how far the rank-and-file have moved away from the heady mixture of peace, pot and planetary justice that the Green Party of Rod Donald, Nandor Tanczos and Sue Bradford so colourfully represented in 1999. Of the Class of 2008, Kennedy Graham and Kevin Hague both have links to the National Party. Only Delahunty bears the slightest resemblance to the MPs of the Greens' glory days.

With the tragic death of Donald in 2006, and the burning-off of Tanczos, and now Bradford, the transformation of the New Zealand Greens (once hailed as the most radical Green Party in the world) into a thoroughly middle-class and politically moderate political movement, will gather speed.

Bradford’s Party List replacement, Dave Clendon, fits the new paradigm perfectly. As "a sustainable business advisor who is of Ngapuhi/Te Roroa and Pakeha heritage", he presents a very different ideological profile to Bradford’s hard-edged, class-based, street-level activism.

According to a Green Party media statement: "Bradford had the unique distinction of seeing three Members’ Bills passed into law in the last Parliament. Respectively, they lifted the youth minimum wage to adult rates, extended the length of time some mothers in prison can keep their babies with them, and amended s59 of the Crimes Act so that children receive the same legal protection from assault as adults".

That the party was willing to lose such an effective legislator, and so accomplished a parliamentarian, speaks volumes about how far the new-look Green Party wants to distance itself from Bradford's radical/revolutionary persona.

It will be very interesting, now, to watch the response of the New Zealand electorate. Will the next round of polls register a rise, or a fall, in the Greens' popularity? Will the departure of the politician who introduced the "anti-smacking bill" make "Middle New Zealand" look more - or less - favourably upon the Green MPs who remain?

If it's more, Locke and Delahunty should watch their backs.