Don’t Need A Weatherman: Is New Zealand about to experience storm-force winds from a radicalised Māori electorate?

Coming Home: Very few commentators were willing to call Chris Hipkins’ decisions what any reasonable observer could hardly avoid calling them: the ruthless reassertion of Pakeha power and control. What Meka Whaitiri’s defection to Te Pāti Māori made clear, however, was that Hipkins’ “bread-and-buttering” of Maoridom would not be cost-free.

THE EXTRAORDINARY MUDDLE into which the Labour Government manoeuvred itself over “Three Waters” was entirely avoidable. At its heart lay the all-too-common failing manifested over-and-over again by the senior Pakeha politicians of both major parties. Unconsciously, for the most part, Pakeha political leaders consign “all that Māori stuff” to the agenda space reserved for non-urgent and/or too-difficult-to-explain issues.

This Pakeha failure to treat Māori issues with the same seriousness as those referred to them by Treasury, MFAT, MBIE, Health, Education and Social Development is made a lot easier when Māori colleagues are willing to take responsibility for their own advancement. In the case of Three Waters, Labour’s leadership was quite happy to leave pretty much the whole thing to Nanaia Mahuta. Until it all started turning to custard.

When that happened, the response of Labour’s Pakeha leadership was instructive. First, the person in charge when everything started to go wrong, Jacinda Ardern, decided it was time to go and do something else. Second, Ardern’s successor, Chris Hipkins, took the whole Three Waters project away from Mahuta, demoted her, and then sent her into what looked suspiciously like near-permanent exile. Third, Mahuta’s replacement, at the helm of the now renamed “Affordable Water Reform”, was that emphatically Pakeha Kiwi bloke, Kieran McAnulty.

The political meaning of these decisions was not at all difficult to understand. In the words of Bob Dylan: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

“You” may not, but a surprisingly large fraction of the New Zealand news media found it well-nigh impossible to feel (let alone explain) the wind-shift. Very few commentators were willing to call Hipkins’ decisions what any reasonable observer could hardly avoid calling them: the ruthless reassertion of Pakeha power and control. Nor was there much discernible enthusiasm for reporting on the ramifications of the Labour Māori Caucus’s successful defence of the co-governance elements of Three Waters. A more hands-on style of Pakeha leadership had clearly come at the price of keeping co-governance in play. How else to explain McAnulty becoming a more eloquent defender of tino rangatiratanga than Willie Jackson?

There was a similar failure on the part of many journalists to link the defection of the Labour MP for Ikaroa-Rāwhiti, Meka Whaitiri, with the Government’s arguably racist “bread-and-buttering” of Māori policy. A gleeful John Tamihere might hail Labour’s loss of Whaitiri as Te Pāti Māori’s gain, but he forbore from explaining her departure in terms of the Labour leadership’s unconscious prejudices concerning the responsibility – or otherwise – of their Māori colleagues. Hipkins’ refusal to reinstate Whaitiri as a full member of Cabinet may, or may not, have been justified, but the Māori woman who leap-frogged the Ikaroa-Rawhiti MP into Cabinet, Northland MP Willow-Jean Prime, presents as a very different sort of Māori politician to the woman who preserved the flax-roots nurtured by her kaiako, Parekua Horomia.

The defenestration of Elizabeth Kerekere raises some very similar questions about just how far down the road that leads to “transformation” Pakeha politicians – even Green politicians – are prepared to go with their Māori colleagues. It’s one thing to blithely swear fealty to the “principles” of te Tiriti o Waitangi, quite another to put those principles into practice in ways that ruffle the feathers of the status quo. Blaming the world’s ills on “Cis White Males” has a revolutionary ring to it, but it is not at all the same as promising te iwi Māori control over Aotearoa’s water, or restoring “stolen” Māori land to its rightful custodians.

While the polls continue to identify Te Pāti Māori as the holder of the votes necessary to keep Labour and the Greens on the Treasury benches, however, the contemplation of revolutionary demands is something the centre-left will find extremely difficult to avoid.

Of course, contemplation and implementation are two very different things. Jacinda Ardern contemplated a revolutionary anti-capitalist transformation in the early days of her prime-ministership. More than that, she went to Waitangi and instructed Māori to hold her government accountable for how faithfully it upheld the principles of the Treaty. Ardern soon discovered, however, that implementing Labour’s promises was a lot harder than making them. This was serious, because nothing is more likely to cause a revolution than raising the expectations of the poor and the marginalised – and then failing to meet them.

Ultimately, the management of expectations may turn out to be as big a problem for Te Pāti Māori as it is for Labour and the Greens. If Whaitiri is going to win Ikaroa-Rawhiti for her new party, then she is going to have to paint her former Māori colleagues as politicians who talk big, but, whenever the Pakeha majority shows signs of restiveness, allow their colleagues to slam on the policy brakes and throw Labour’s political vehicle into reverse.

It is vital that Te Pāti Māori does not do the same. Its promises of transformation must be unequivocal and non-negotiable. Either, Labour and the Greens embrace the revolution, or, they shuffle-off to the Opposition benches. Regardless of the centre-left’s choice, Te Pāti Māori must not loosen its grip on the radical bunting.

It is difficult to see the Labour Party that abandoned the transformational policy agenda of its Māori caucus for a “bread-and-butter” manifesto being willing to radicalise itself in sympathy with the Greens and Te Pāti Māori. Frankly, it is easier to see Labour quietly reconciling itself to electoral defeat. Sitting back and watching National and Act attempting to solve New Zealand’s rapidly growing list of intractable problems must, surely, have its attractions?

But, what if the New Zealand electorate refuses to let Labour throw the electoral fight? What if Te Pāti Māori mobilises younger voters in unprecedented numbers? What if the Greens do the same? What if, in spite of Labour’s best efforts, the electorate swings sharply to the left? What if, when all the votes are counted, National and Act simply do not have enough to form a government? What then?

One answer is that Labour and National might suddenly discover that they have more in common with one another than they do with the parties representing the extremes, and agree to form a Grand Coalition. Such a solution would, however, offer only a short-term respite, since the processes of radicalisation on both the right and the left would, almost certainly, intensify.

The choice facing voters in three years’ time might not even include Labour and National. “All that Māori stuff” may no longer permit the reassertion of Pakeha power and control. It is even possible that Pakeha may no longer want it.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 8 May 2023.

After Ratana.

Smiling And Waiving A Golden Opportunity: Chris Hipkins knew that the day at Ratana would be Jacinda’s day – her final opportunity to bask in the unalloyed love and support of her followers. He simply could not afford to be seen to overshadow this last chance for his former boss to shine. National’s Christopher Luxon, however, was under no such obligation.
 

CHRIS HIPKINS found himself in an impossible situation yesterday (24/1/23). He had come to the tiny village of Ratana at the side of his Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern. At what would be her last official public engagement in that role, he could not possibly upstage her. His job was to smile and mouth platitudes. He was there to “introduce” himself to the assembled leaders of Maoridom and convince them that he will be a fitting replacement for the most accommodating prime minister Māori have ever had. He knew that this would be Jacinda’s day – her final opportunity to bask in the unalloyed love and support of her followers. He simply could not afford to be seen to overshadow this last chance for his former boss to shine.

The other Chris, however, National’s Christopher Luxon, was under no such obligation. He came to Ratana with a message to deliver. That message was not for the assembled Māori leaders, or, at least, not primarily for them. Luxon’s message was aimed squarely at all those Pakeha conservatives who have for many months been openly sceptical of National’s willingness to take a strong stand against Co-Governance, He Puapua and Three Waters. Ardern’s resignation and the uncontested election of Chris Hipkins to replace her had made the delivery of an unequivocal repudiation of all three of these racially-charged propositions a matter of urgency. Luxon and his advisers knew that if National didn’t stake out its position immediately, then the Hipkins-led Labour Party would beat them to the punch.

And Luxon did stake out a clear – or should that be clearer – position. His remarks concerning co-governance, recorded by RNZ-National’s reporters, left little room for misunderstanding:

I think it has been quite a divisive and immature conversation over recent years,” Luxon told the Ratana crowd, “and I personally think it’s because the government hasn’t been upfront or transparent with the New Zealand people about where it’s going and what it’s doing […..] We believe in a single coherent system – not one system for Māori and another system for non-Māori – for the delivery of public services. Things like Health, Education, and Justice, and critical infrastructure like Three Waters. It doesn’t mean that we don’t want Māori involved in decision-making and partnering with [non-]Māori, [but] we have a princip[led] objection because New Zealand has one government: it’s elected by all of us, it’s accountable to all of us, and its public services are available to anyone who needs them.

Clear enough for the Pakeha conservatives? Possibly. But, for many on the Right, National remains the party of John Key. The same John Key who secretly dispatched Te Pāti Māori’s Pita Sharples to the United Nations in New York to sign on behalf of all New Zealanders the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). The very same UNDRIP that Labour’s Helen Clark had refused to sign, because, with her much deeper understanding of the indigenous debate, she understood that the Declaration posed a direct threat to the constitutional integrity and sovereignty of the New Zealand state.

Those same conservative Pakeha also know that National is the party of Chris Finlayson who, while New Zealand’s Attorney-General and Treaty Settlements Minister, did more to hasten the fulfilment of the Māori nationalist agenda than any politician not named Mahuta or Jackson. The Right understands that an extremely radical reading of te Tiriti o Waitangi has already been deeply entrenched in the New Zealand Public Service (bolstered by legislatively enforceable Treaty principles) and is steadily transforming the way in which New Zealand is administered, as well as raising serious questions about the long-term future of private property rights.

There is also serious doubt on the right of New Zealand politics that Luxon and his advisers have even read – let alone understood – the He Puapua Report. Their fear is that, as the Māori nationalist, Donna Awatere, observed back in the early-1980s, Pakeha politicians will continue to remain blind to virtually every aspect of the nationalists’ project, and that this, the Pakeha’s racist refusal to take Māori sovereignty seriously, is what offers its promoters their best chance of success. Moreover, when two Labour prime ministers in a row have proved themselves incapable of answering basic questions about the content of te Tiriti o Waitangi, it’s difficult not to concede that Awatere and the conservatives have a point!

While it is certain that Luxon’s statements at Ratana constitute a direct conceptual challenge to the transformative constitutional project posited by the authors of He Puapua, what is much less certain is whether the National leader – unlike the leader of the Act Party, David Seymour – grasps just how much of the basic infrastructure of co-governance has already been constructed. Having drawn his line in the sand at Ratana, Luxon cannot now avoid arriving at the same political destination Seymour reached more than two years ago. The point where he realises that the progress towards a racially bifurcated, co-governed Aotearoa can only be halted by enshrining a conservative reading of te Tiriti in law, and by rooting-out with ruthless thoroughness all of the structures and procedures that have grown out of the radicals’ reading of te Tiriti’s meaning.

The daunting challenge confronting Chris Hipkins is how to regain the initiative from Luxon without locking himself into the same conservative logic currently drawing National and Act inexorably towards a maximalist, Pakeha-driven, revision of the Treaty’s constitutional, political and cultural significance. Between now and the October General Election, Hipkins and his party are going to have to learn to take Māori nationalism seriously. Because Luxon is right, to date Labour’s handling of this issue has been divisive and immature. The new prime minister could, therefore, do a lot worse than to sit down with an old one, Helen Clark, and learn a few home-truths about the deadly seriousness of the indigenous forces seeking to take their country back.

Hipkins’ first and most obvious move is to announce that the Three Waters legislation will be repealed, pending a broad and thorough examination of the project’s all-too-obvious political and economic shortcomings. Pushing the pause button on this extraordinarily unpopular project will be good, practical, “bread-and-butter” politics. Were the new prime minister to follow it up with a promise to initiate an equally broad and thorough democratic debate about the moral and practical status of the Tiriti/Treaty in twenty-first century New Zealand, the public response might be even more positive – especially if the right of all schools of historical and constitutional thought to freely contend with one another was guaranteed by Hipkins’ Government.

Jacinda Ardern’s greatest contribution to her country’s evolution was to reinvigorate the idea that politics should be about more than conventional administration and “responsible” financial management. She made us believe again that a person’s reach should exceed their grasp. “Jacinda” was a ray of sunlight through the drear neoliberal darkness. In that shaft of sunlight she showed us a new and wonderfully different nation. The task she has bequeathed to her successor – and her people – is to create the road that will take them there.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 26 January 2023.

2022: Annus Horribilis.

Trauma: The catastrophic conclusion to the anti-vaccination mandate protest in Parliament Grounds on 2 March 2022 is seared in the minds of New Zealanders. Those dramatic scenes were, however, easily eclipsed by the planetary violence of Climate Change, the biological violence of Covid-19, the political violence of Three Waters, and the deadly military violence of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine.

AS THIS TERRIBLE YEAR, this annus horribilis, draws to a close, we must all hope that 2023 brings us happier days.

As we watch the Chinese Government transition from its old, hardline, Covid-19 elimination strategy, characterised by long and uncompromising lockdowns, to a new, laissez-faire, wide open borders (and bugger the health system) strategy, uncannily like our own, we have confirmation that not even the totalitarian regime of Xi Jinping’s Communist Party can operate indefinitely without a social licence.

Not that our own government is returning the compliment by acknowledging the lack of genuine social licences for its own flagship policies – and changing them. There is more than a whiff of totalitarian indifference to public opinion in the Labour Caucus’s blunt refusal to change course on Nanaia Mahuta’s Three Waters project.

When the results of the local government elections made it painfully clear that whatever limited social licence central government might have claimed for Three Waters had been withdrawn, the Labour Government refused to flinch. The former National Party Cabinet Minister Nick Smith, now Nelson’s Mayor, implored the Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, to back away from the project. Failure to do so, he suggested, would indicate that her government had a “death wish”.

Undeterred, Labour doubled-down. Constitutional conventions became confetti. The co-governance provisions of Three Waters became stronger and their likely impact on Māori-Pakeha relations even more divisive.

And this situation looks set to be made ten-times worse the moment the public cottons-on to the fact that the cost of borrowing the billions required to “fix” their drinking-, storm- and waste-water systems is to be extracted from the pockets of the poor schmucks who “own” – but do not control – the four vast “entities” at the heart of the Three Waters project. A bitter realisation, that will hit home about the time they open their new-fangled water bills.

The Labour Government’s intransigence on Three Waters was not, however, matched by its response to the ever-increasing clamour for decisive state action on global warming. Far from becoming this government of Gen-Xers’ “nuclear-free moment”, the Labour-Green tag-team on Climate Change has impressed New Zealanders only by its prodigious ability to dilly, dally and delay. If the New Zealand football team possessed this government’s talent for kicking the can down the road, they could have won the World Cup!

Maybe, if Labour possessed an environmental faction as strong as its Māori faction more progress might have been made on Climate Change. But, if the Government refuses to be guided by public opinion on the deeply unpopular policy of co-governance, it is acutely sensitive to the social and economic realities that continue to keep SUVs at the top of the list of motor-vehicles purchased in New Zealand. When pushbikes replace four-by-fours in Kiwi affections, it is then – and only then – that our carbon emissions will plummet.

Covid, Co-Governance and Climate-Change may have helped to shape the domestic politics of New Zealand in 2022, but they have done so in the shadow of something much larger and more terrible than anything we Kiwis could conjure-up.

War.

Russia’s bloody invasion of Ukraine has dealt what looks like being the final death-blow to the “international rules-based order” overseen by the United Nations. What we deplored, then ignored, in Syria, has come home to the cursèd bloodlands of Eastern Europe.

The global economic system, already rendered dangerously fragile by the financial measures required to fight the Covid-19 pandemic, has received a vicious kick in the gonads from Russia’s combat boots. Rising inflation has ignited multiple cost-of-living crises – even in the world’s wealthiest countries – precipitating social and political conflicts not seen for nearly half-a-century.

But Vladimir Putin’s aggression has done something else. It has stimulated martial feelings long thought dead and buried in the materially abundant (but spiritually impoverished) societies of the West.

The Russo-Ukraine War has not produced a global peace movement – even under Putin’s constant threats of nuclear escalation. On the contrary, it has generated a “war movement”. Prior to 24 February 2022, Volodymyr Zelensky would not have struck most people as the man to revive the Latin verse: Dulce et decorum est pro Patria mori – Sweet it is and fitting to die for one’s country.

When the heroism and sacrifice of war seem preferable, and more honourable, than an enervated peace, it is, truly, a terrible year.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 30 December 2022.

Parliament’s Collective Failure To Defend The Constitution.

Unbitten: It is one of the oddest and most worrying aspects of the events surrounding Green MP Eugenie Sage’s late-night attempt to re-write the constitutional convention on entrenched legislation while a weary House of Representatives was sitting under Urgency. Sherlock Holmes’ famous observation concerning the dog that did not bark, might be applied with equal justification to the Opposition that did not bite.

WHILE WE MAY be reasonably confident that the attack on New Zealand’s constitution will be repelled, it should never have happened. That it was legal scholars who sounded the alarm over the entrenchment of a section of the Three Waters legislation, should cause all 120 of our parliamentarians to hang their heads in shame. Their collective failure to grasp what Green MP Eugenie Sage was doing points to a woeful lack of political and constitutional awareness among those whose first and most important duty is to protect the integrity of our democratic system.

Had a similar effort to screw the constitutional scrum been attempted even ten years ago, the perpetrator would have been red-carded immediately. Not even Rob Muldoon, who was not above the odd instance of constitutional skulduggery, would ever have contemplated a stunt like Ms Sage’s. He would have known that his National Party colleagues would have intervened decisively to prevent him bringing their party into such disrepute.

It is one of the oddest and most worrying aspects of the events surrounding Ms Sage’s late-night introduction of her controversial SOP (Supplementary Order Paper) while a weary House of Representatives was sitting under Urgency. Sherlock Holmes’ famous observation concerning the dog that did not bark, might be applied with equal justification to the Opposition that did not bite.

Tired though National’s and Act’s MPs may have been, and eager to get home to their beds, Ms Sage’s SOP should have had the same effect upon them as a bucket of cold water. Members of the Opposition parties should have risen instantly to their feet, baying like bloodhounds for the Speaker to rule upon the constitutional propriety of the Green MP’s SOP. Expressions of anger and disgust should have been ringing off the Chamber’s walls like the echoes of heavy artillery.

Those Cabinet Ministers present in the House, and their colleagues listening to the proceedings with one ear back in their offices, would have known immediately that something was wrong. Leader of the House, Chris Hipkins, would have hurried to the side of the Minister in charge of the Three Waters legislation, Nanaia Mahuta, seeking urgent clarification as to what the hell Eugenie Sage was playing at.

A fair question – even at this stage of the proceedings. What was Ms Sage playing at? More to the point, was Ms Mahuta aware of her game? Did the Green MP’s SOP come out of nowhere, or was the entrenchment of the section prohibiting the privatisation of any or all of the four water “entities” part of a long-planned attempt to distract the public from the co-governance provisions of the legislation, by making it practically impossible for the Opposition parties to sell off the people’s water to private interests? (That the Opposition parties had categorically ruled out the privatisation of water was deemed an insufficient barrier to its introduction.)

Journalistic inquiries have established that the entrenchment of prohibitions against privatisation was being recommended by supporters of Three Waters months ago. It has also emerged that the Crown’s legal advisers had warned those responsible for the legislation (Ms Mahuta presumably) that such a course of action would be constitutionally abhorrent. It is further suggested that Cabinet received the same advice.

All to no avail. Neither Crown Law, nor the Attorney-General, were able to dissuade the Prime Minister from writing to the Opposition leaders, seeking their support for adding anti-privatisation to the list of core democratic rights and freedoms entrenched in our electoral legislation.

That privatisation is so very clearly “one of these things [that] is not like the others” in no way dissuaded the three women of Three Waters from undermining the integrity of New Zealand’s sixty-six-year-old, unanimously enacted, entrenchment provisions – along with the parliamentary consensus that had rendered them sacrosanct for so long.

The beauty of this country’s unwritten constitution is its simplicity and flexibility. It is not beholden to unelected judges, and vouchsafes to all citizens the right to overturn with their votes what arrogant politicians have set up with their own. The only right our constitution sets in stone, is the right of citizens to participate in the government of their country. Those who seek to remove the power of the people’s representatives to amend and/or repeal the laws, are not their friends – they are their enemies.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 2 December 2022.