The Road To October.

Road Closed: For Chris Hipkins and Labour, the state highway to October has been rendered impassable by inaction and political slash. Christopher Luxon and National, meanwhile, have discovered an unsealed road without slips and fallen trees. It’s not their usual way of reaching the Treasury Benches, but, with a bit of luck, it just might get them where they want to go.

THE NATIONAL PARTY stands at the beginning of an unsealed road which, if followed, might just carry it to victory. The question, now, is whether the party possesses the guts to set off down it. Sometimes politicians hit upon a winning strategy by accident, unaware that they have done so. National’s answer to the Government’s controversial Three Waters project may be a case in point. Wittingly, or unwittingly, National’s policy reflects the principle of subsidiarity – i.e. the idea that the best decisions are those made by the communities required to live most closely with their consequences. Set against Labour’s preference for large, centralised (and almost always unresponsive) bureaucracies, National’s preference for the local and the accountable has much to recommend it.

Labour, meanwhile, may find that its road to October has been closed. Rather than proceed with all speed down the path of repudiation and reprioritisation promised by Chris Hipkins when he became Prime Minister, the exigencies of dealing with the Auckland Anniversary Weekend Floods and Cyclone Gabrielle appear to have provided Hipkins’ caucus opponents with a chance to regroup and push back.

This was especially true of Three Waters. The period within which the unequivocal repudiation of the project remained politically feasible was always dangerously short. Indeed, the slightest delay threatened to make its abandonment impossible. Nor was the threat exclusively internal. The longer Hipkins put off Three Waters’ demise, the greater the risk that National would produce a viable and popular alternative. Which is exactly what it has done.

Announced with uncharacteristic political savvy at the National Party’s “Blue-Greens” conference in Nelson, the Opposition’s alternative closely reflects the ideas and plans formulated by the local government opponents of Three Waters. National is promising to restore the ownership of the nation’s drinking, waste and stormwater infrastructure to its local authority owners – albeit at the cost of the latter submitting to improved and much stronger regulatory oversight.

National’s decision to restore of local authorities’ property could hardly have come at a more opportune moment, given the very recent judicial observation that the asset base of the Three Waters’ “entities” had, indeed, been “expropriated”, from their local authority owners without the payment of fair and adequate compensation. It is a measure of the reckless radicalism of the Three Waters project that a New Zealand court could endorse such a claim. In no other context is it possible to imagine a Labour Cabinet signing-off on expropriation without compensation – a policy worthy of Lenin’s Bolsheviks.

Not that National is averse to a little Bolshevism on its own account. Its “Local Water Done Well” policy paper confirms that local authorities unable to meet the costs of transitioning to the new system without incurring a ruinous level of debt, or striking an impossibly high rate, will be able to turn to the Crown for a “one off” grant. Spurning the short-termism that has plagued infrastructural development for the past four decades, National is also hinting at the availability of long-term (and, presumably, lower-interest) finance for long-term water investments. Such promises point to the strong possibility that, in the expensive upgrading of the nation’s water infrastructure, the New Zealand state will both a borrower and a lender be.

If this is, indeed, what National is planning – and by what other means could citizens escape crippling rate increases and/or water charges? – then it is reasonable to predict a decisive shift in the relationship between New Zealand’s central and local government institutions. If the drift towards ever larger and more remote central bureaucracies is to be halted, then a radically new way of funding local infrastructure and the provision of local services will have to be devised. It is simply untenable for the present practice of central government offloading more and more responsibilities onto local authorities, while simultaneously withholding the funding needed to pay for them, to continue. There is a limit to how much can be borrowed affordably from private lenders, just as there is a democratic limit to the size and frequency of local government rate-hikes.

If National has, at long last, recognised this, then it can present itself as offering something new and progressive to the electorate. Subsidiarity is, after all, entirely congruent with the conservative (but not the neoliberal) view of politics. Conservatives are deeply suspicious of strong, centralised states which have no need to fear the displeasure of their citizens. Democracy, as a means of ensuring political accountability, similarly decreases in efficacy the further away the decisions affecting citizens’ daily lives are made. When the Americans say, “all politics is local”, they’re speaking the truth.

While it is easy to understand Chris Hipkins having other things on his mind these past few weeks, it is not so easy to forgive him for letting Three Waters – and all that it has come to stand for – slip through his fingers. Three Waters was, after all, the big test of whether or not his promises of reprioritisation were genuine, or just more Labour Party spin. He didn’t even have to come up with a detailed alternative, merely a promise to repeal the legislation and begin again. Starting, perhaps, with the proposals put forward by Communities 4 Local Democracy. (Now the basis of National’s plan!) His failure to maintain his momentum on this issue has allowed Christopher Luxon and his National colleagues to steal a march on Labour and, amazingly, outflank them on the left.

Making everything worse, are the public misgivings about the way Labour is handling the aftermath of Cyclone Gabrielle. Intended or not, accurate or not, Hipkins’ downplaying of claims of lawlessness in the stricken communities of Tairawhiti and Hawkes Bay reminded too many people of the Covid emergency’s infallible “Podium of Truth”. Compounding Labour’s difficulties is Forestry Minister Stuart Nash’s inability to fully articulate the locals’ white-hot rage at the forestry companies. The latter’s failure to do anything about the hugely destructive volumes of “slash” that repeated storms have sent crashing into bridges, fences, orchards and people’s homes, has outraged the whole country. If ever there was a moment for righteous ministerial wrath, then, surely, this is it. Action, not yet another expert inquiry, is what the situation demands. Action, and the colourful condemnatory language of a Bob Semple or a Jack Lee. Labour men who really did “move with speed” in a crisis.

For Chris Hipkins and Labour, the state highway to October has been rendered impassable by inaction and political slash. Christopher Luxon and National, meanwhile, have discovered an unsealed road without slips and fallen trees. It’s not their usual way of reaching the Treasury Benches, but, with a bit of luck, it just might get them where they want to go.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website of Monday, 27 February 2023.

The Privatisation Two-Step: Is Three Waters A Masterpiece Of Misdirection?

Profit Uber Alles: The sort of people who see nothing objectionable in taking over another country’s water resources are unlikely to be put off by the objections of its citizens. Where there’s a will, there’s a way – all the investors have to do is find it.

IF CABINET FAILS to scrap Three Waters and start again, New Zealand may very quickly come to resemble Bolivia. Not the Bolivia of today, where a socialist government elected by a huge majority holds sway, but the Bolivia of 1997. That Bolivia had been ordered by the World Bank to privatise its water – on pain of being refused the loans it so desperately needed to keep its economy afloat. Taken over by French and American corporations, Bolivia’s water resources were very quickly priced beyond the reach of its poorest – that is to say, its indigenous – citizens.

Unsurprisingly, the Bolivian Government soon found itself in the grip of a massive popular uprising. In 2005, after five years of unrelenting struggle, the indigenous Bolivians forced their government to terminate the concessions granted to the French and the Americans.

In place of these foreign-owned private corporations, a publicly-owned water utility, the Empresa Pública Social de Agua y Saneamiento (EPSAS) was established. A strong case can be made that the popular struggle to reclaim Bolivia’s privatised water resources laid the groundwork for the nation’s sharp political turn to the Left. Indigenous interests in water, and socialism, it would seem, go hand-in-hand.

That being the case, one can easily imagine that a foreign investor, or group of investors, anxious to get their hands on New Zealand’s abundant water resources, would be particularly sensitive to the likely response of its indigenous citizens. As the sole possessors of Aotearoa for half-a-millennium, the Māori are linked to its lands, forests and fisheries by immensely strong bonds of lineage and tradition. Any attempt to place those resources in the hands of foreigners would provoke resistance every bit as strong as the indigenous Bolivians’.

Nor would the Māori stand alone. New Zealanders’ experience of the neoliberal privatisations of the 1980s and 1990s – and the partial privatisation of energy generators in the 2010s – has left a sizeable portion of the population implacably hostile to the privatisation process. The idea that something as basic to human existence as water might be handed over to private, profit-seeking interests has become a very hard sell.

But, the sort of people who see nothing objectionable in taking over another country’s water resources are unlikely to be put off by the objections of its citizens. Where there’s a will, there’s a way – all the investors have to do is find it.

Investors making a close study of New Zealand will quickly realise that Māori are the key interest group to neutralise. If the privatisation of water could be disguised as the indigenisation of water, then not only would the potentially unrelenting opposition of Māori be finessed away, but also the opposition of those Pakeha concerned to restore self-determination to Māori after nearly two centuries of colonisation. All the foreign investors need to identify is an appropriate vector through which their two-step process – indigenisation to privatisation – can be realised. (Interestingly, exactly the same two-step process was employed by the Fourth Labour Government to finesse the first wave of privatisations back in the 1980s: corporatisation to privatisation.)

The most obvious vectoral candidate is the National Iwi Chairs Forum. This is an outgrowth of the Treaty Settlement Process – the New Zealand state’s inspired mechanism for de-radicalising Māori nationalism by setting-up a series of neo-tribal capitalist buffers between the traditional/professional Māori elites and the urbanised, poorly-educated and culturally unmoored Māori working-class. The leaders of these tribal corporations are already more than half-way into the deracinated world of global capitalism – a fact they keep well-hidden from their own people behind swirling veils of Māori mysticism.

Enlist the support of these commercial rangatira, and the journey towards the privatisation of water will be underway long before the nation realises. And if an iwi already seething with bitter historical resentments steps forward to lead the process of detaching New Zealand’s water resources from the state, then so much the better. What’s more, any politician willing to front this iwi power grab is bound to become a lightning-rod for all manner of racially-charged criticism and abuse. Cui bono from this cynical exercise in political misdirection? Who else but the true instigators of the project: the always silent, always patient, foreign investor/s.

That this exercise might be all-too-real is attested to by the involvement of those front-of-house facilitators of foreign direct investment – the international credit-rating agencies. Advising the Sixth Labour Government (represented primarily by Local Government Minister Nanaia Mahuta) on what was now being called “Three Waters” was Standard & Poor’s (S&P Global Ratings). It’s advice was unequivocal: make sure the entities charged with the management of New Zealand’s drinking, storm and waste water are hermetically-sealed from democratic interference. Above all, keep their books and the State’s books entirely separate.

Had political journalists not been so distracted by the so-called “co-governance” arrangements built into the Three Waters proposal, the credit-rating agency’s stipulations would have pointed clearly to the project’s ultimate goal. What could be easier to privatise than a stand-alone, financially “independent” entity, slowly sinking beneath an insupportable burden of foreign debt?

Before that point could be reached, however, the whole process had to be turned into a hot mess of White Supremacists versus De-Colonisers. In this regard, the Three Waters legislation’s author, Nanaia Mahuta, could hardly have performed more obligingly. The deeper the project’s critics dug into the details of the legislation, the more evidence they found for the argument that Three Waters was all about the indigenisation of Aotearoa-New Zealand’s water. Not the least important feature of the legislation in this regard were the “Te Mana o Te Wai” statements – directives relating to both the public and private use of water that have the force of law, and that only Māori can issue!

Among the most vocal critics of Three Waters has been the radically neoliberal Act Party. Its active participation in the debate raises an intriguing (and potentially worrying) question. Is Act just another dupe of the foreign investors’ bait-and-switch operation, or is it surreptitiously giving them a helping hand? Act has always been a strong advocate of privatisation – an objective that would be made considerably easier by thoroughly discrediting the option of indigenisation and, along with it, the whole idea of public ownership.

In an ironic twist to this story, the first person to realise the long-term privatisation agenda built-in to the Three Waters project may well have been Nanaia Mahuta herself. Certainly, it would explain the Minister’s panic-stricken, last-minute attempts (in collusion with the Greens) to entrench anti-privatisation provisions in her legislation. If this is what happened, then it is difficult to avoid feeling sorry for the Minister. She could not adequately explain why her drastic (and arguably unconstitutional) amendments were necessary, because to have done so would have been to acknowledge her stalking-horse role in a project most New Zealanders would have condemned as unconscionable.

One crucial outcome of the entrenchment debacle, however, is that Mahuta’s fellow ministers were no longer content to rely upon her assurances that Three Waters was a sound and necessary project. Accordingly, they took a much closer look at the legislation. In doing so, they could hardly avoid the alarming question: “Is there anything in this legislation to prevent Iwi corporations from entering into agreements that could ultimately facilitate the privatisation of one or more of the four Three Waters entities?”

The answer to that question will be indicated by just how decisively Prime Minister Hipkins rejects Three Waters. Getting rid of the co-governance provisions will not be enough. If the legislation continues to empower the four entities to take on debt that is ultimately redeemable out of the pockets of New Zealand’s ratepayers, then the momentum towards their ultimate sale to foreign investors will not be slowed. If that is Hipkins’ decision, however, then either he, or his successors, will eventually be confronted with the same sort of popular uprising that convulsed Bolivia.

And in that battle, Māori and Pakeha will be fighting shoulder-to-shoulder. Proof that caring for and managing the waters of Aotearoa-New Zealand is the responsibility of all its peoples – and theirs alone.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 17 February 2023.

A Modest Exercise In Arithmetic.

Buttering Up Labour's Electoral Base: At his post-Cabinet press briefing of Wednesday, 8 February 2023, Chris Hipkins executed a major and politically adroit course alteration which will not only steer Labour away from Treaty revisionism’ s revolutionary rocks, but also deprive National and Act of the angry political breezes that have, of late, been filling their sails.

THE DAILY BLOG’S EDITOR, appears convinced that there exists in New Zealand a great silent majority of Treaty revisionists. He seems to believe that the revolutionary interpretation of Te Tiriti o Waitangi which underpins, ideologically, both the notion of a “Treaty partnership” and “co-governance”, enjoys widespread and enthusiastic support among New Zealand voters – especially those under forty. Interestingly, the numbers presented to us in the latest Roy-Morgan poll point in precisely the opposite direction.

The poll shows National with 32 percent, Act with 13.5 percent, and NZ First with 5 percent support – a total of 50.5 percent. Labour, meanwhile, comes through with 30 percent, the Greens with 12 percent, and Te Pāti Māori with 4.5 percent – a total of 46.5 percent. On the face of it, therefore, the Great Silent Majority lines up with the parties of the Right. If asked whether Māori ceded sovereignty to Queen Victoria on 6 February 1840, these New Zealanders would most likely answer “Yes, they did.” Having said that, their support for the key Treaty revisionist concepts of partnership and co-governance would be … limited.

Well, okay, but the Treaty revisionists could point out, with some justification, that 50.5 percent is hardly a ringing endorsement for the traditional reading of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. With 46.5 percent in support of the Treaty revisionists’ reading, isn’t it more accurate to say that on this matter the electorate is pretty evenly divided?

Not really.

Unlike the Greens, whose membership would, indeed, line up overwhelmingly behind Treaty revisionism, Labour’s electoral base is more likely to share a view of the Treaty’s meaning that is not wildly at odds with National’s and Act’s. Labour’s working-class voters – Māori as well as Pakeha – are considerably more likely to view the Treaty as the document that made one nation out of two peoples, each of them equal in rights and obligations, than as an enforceable contract binding two cultures together in a relationship “akin to a partnership”.

Surely, this is why Chris Hipkins has been so keen to step back from the brink of what one of this country’s foremost Treaty scholars, Dame Claudia Orange, describes as the “revolutionary changes” unleashed by Treaty revisionists like herself? Any further advance down the partnership/co-governance road and Labour risked seeing its working-class Māori and Pakeha voters peeling away from the party and moving (albeit reluctantly) to the Right.

Which is why, in his post-Cabinet press briefing of Wednesday, 8 February 2023, Hipkins executed a major and politically adroit course alteration which will not only steer Labour away from Treaty revisionism’s revolutionary rocks, but also deprive National and Act of the angry political breezes that have, of late, been filling their sails.

And it’s not just in relation to the vexed Three Waters project that Hipkins has signalled a significant course-change, he has also unceremoniously thrown overboard Willie Jackson’s proposed public media merger, Grant Robertson’s social insurance scheme, and Kiri Allan’s hate speech legislation. It’s a veritable Night-of-the-Long Knives for the pet projects of Labour’s wokesters.

Announcing a $1.50 increase in the Minimum Wage to $22.70 per hour was the new Labour Leader’s pièce de résistance. Nothing could better signal Labour’s return to its political roots – a movement dedicated to the welfare and uplift of ordinary working-class New Zealanders. For these voters, Hipkins’ turn away from wokeism will have been the “bread” of this afternoon’s briefing, but his announcement of a new $22.70 per hour Minimum Wage was, unquestionably, the butter.

Nor is it likely, that Hipkins’ turning away from Treaty revisionism will cost him all that many votes among New Zealanders under forty. Those who have given themselves, body and soul, to the revolutionary politics of partnership and co-governance are more likely than not to vote either Green or Te Pāti Māori. Rather than angst about the Treaty, younger voters will now be asking themselves: “If Chippy’s willing to raise the Minimum Wage by $1.50 per hour, might he not also be willing to freeze rents and raise the taxes of the wealthy?”

That’s a good question. Because, in terms of political arithmetic, such “bread and butter” moves, precisely because they are so very far from being woke, are bound to subtract even more votes from National and Act, and add them to Labour’s growing electoral tally.

A sum which, after today, looks set to re-configure the Great Silent Majority of New Zealand voters in the Left’s favour.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 8 February 2023.

Blowing Off The Froth: Why Chris Hipkins Must Ditch Three Waters.

Time To Call A Halt: Chris Hipkins knows that iwi leaders possess the means to make life very difficult for his government. Notwithstanding their objections, however, the Prime Minister’s direction of travel – already clearly signalled by his very public demotion of Nanaia Mahuta – must be confirmed by an emphatic and unequivocal pledge to repeal the Three Waters legislation and start again.

THERE’S FROTH, AND THERE’S BEER. What we see happening on the Waitangi Treaty Grounds every 6 February, not to mention the political performance-art on the lower marae, is froth. The beer of Māori-Pakeha relations is to be found in the private meeting rooms of Waitangi’s Copthorne Hotel & Resort, where the National Iwi Chairs Forum (NICF) deliberates in secret upon Maoridom’s next moves. It is there, in the days leading up to Waitangi Day, that New Zealand’s new Prime Minister, Chris Hipkins, will either face down the men and women driving the stake of co-governance into the heart of the Settler State – or see Labour spiral slowly to defeat.

The designation “Iwi Chairs” seems so innocuous. It conjures up the image of a roomful of corporate bureaucrats working their way through a very boring agenda, and breaking-off every now and then to listen to equally boring presentations from bankers, accountants and the occasional politician. In reality, the NICF represents the High Command of Maoridom: the strategic hub of the campaign to take back control of Aotearoa from its Pakeha conquerors. Those gathering at the Copthorne are not a bit like the rag-tag groups of Māori nationalist activists that came together in the 1970s and 80s. If tino rangatiratanga means “the power of the chiefs”, then these are the chiefs who wield it.

Thanks to thirty years of Treaty Settlements, the NICF is both well-positioned and well-resourced to flex its muscles. Between them, the iwi represented at the Forum command assets valued in the billions. That buys them all the big law firms and all the big lawyers they need. It buys them top-of-the-line lobbyists and public relations experts. It buys them influence in the news media and the universities. It means that, when the NICF whistles, serious politicians from all the major parties tend to come running – up to and including prime ministers.

In short, the NICF is what you get when you don’t want hundreds-of-thousands of working-class Māori demanding their fair share of the national cake. An uprising of marginalised urban Māori (the primary focus of Māori political agitation in the 1980s) could hardly avoid inspiring an even larger number of marginalised Pakeha. Such a potent socio-economic alliance would be extremely harmful to capitalism and other exploitative creatures. Hence the Crown’s inspired prophylactic against the further radicalisation of the Māori working-class – the Treaty Settlement Process. Make a handful of Māori aristocrats and other assorted high-flyers rich and powerful, and not only can they then be relied upon to keep the urban Māori poor quiet, but also to co-opt anyone of a mind to stir them up.

For a while.

The great risk of re-establishing a well-resourced and powerful indigenous elite is that, a generation or two later, those responsible will be faced with confident, highly educated young Māori who can think of no good reason why they – the privileged beneficiaries of the Treaty Settlement Process – should continue to provide a buffer between the heirs of their colonial conquerors and the tens-of-thousands of Māori families made poor, and kept poor, by colonisation.

What’s more, this generation will evince no interest in constructing a Māori-Pakeha working-class alliance against either Pakeha Capitalism or the Neo-Tribal Capitalist sub-system brought into being by the Treaty Settlement Process. The generation raised under this ethnically-charged neoliberal regime will not be socialists, they will be ethno-nationalists. If wealth is to be redistributed, it will not be from the rich to the poor, but from the descendants of the Pakeha colonisers to the descendants of the colonised Māori. It will be a revolution driven by race, not class.

There could be no better example of the policies generated by the iwi elites and their political representatives than the project known as Three Waters. Putting Private Members Bills to one side, it is rare to encounter a piece of legislation so closely associated with and shaped by a single member of Cabinet – in this case, the then Local Government Minister, Nanaia Mahuta. Nor is it common to see a legislative project preceded by an advertising campaign subsequently condemned as both misleading and inaccurate. The Labour Government’s decision to reverse its earlier affirmation that local authorities would be free to opt-out of the scheme only compounded the ethical problems besetting Mahuta’s project.

At the forefront of these was the legislation’s commitment to “co-governance”. In the midst of structures specifically designed to protect the relevant “entities” from all forms of democratic accountability, the legislation located a body split 50/50 between members supposedly chosen to represent the interests of local consumers, and those indisputably chosen to represent the interests of local iwi.

NZ First’s Shane Jones’s description of Mahuta’s Three Waters Project was typically robust:

What was initially an attempt to fix some drinking water has turned into a highly divisive and pulverising social experiment that has got nothing to do with poo pipes and infrastructure. Now it’s got everything to do with whether or not tribes should have a superior right [over water].

Jones also argued that Jacinda Ardern’s government had “lost control” of Mahuta’s project:

She was unable to control Nanaia Mahuta, who has proven to be one of New Zealand’s most divisive politicians that God ever put breath into.

Nowhere was Ardern’s loss of control more evident that in the parliamentary debacle which followed the last-minute, constitutionally-dubious, attempt to entrench “anti-privatisation” clauses in the legislation setting up the Three Waters project as it neared the end of its passage, under urgency, through the House of Representatives.

If ever a project needed to be abandoned completely, and the rebuilding of New Zealand’s drinking, storm and wastewater infrastructure reconceptualised in ways that keep it both affordable and accountable, then that project is Three Waters.

Not that the Iwi Chairs gathered at the Copthorne Hotel are likely to see it that way. Mahuta’s project had brought them closer to Jones’s “superior right” over water than any of her predecessors. Their message to Chris Hipkins is likely to be blunt: repeal Mahuta’s legislation at your peril.

New Zealand’s new Prime Minister knows that the National Iwi Chairs Forum has the means to make life very difficult for his government. Notwithstanding their objections, however, Hipkins direction of travel – already clearly signalled by his very public demotion of Mahuta – must be confirmed by an emphatic and unequivocal pledge to repeal the Three Waters legislation and start again.

If Labour is to secure a third term, then Hipkins must make it clear to all New Zealanders – Māori and Pakeha – that his government is not about fulfilling the agendas of corporate/tribal elites. It is about making sure that every New Zealander in need of a job, a living wage, and a warm, dry house, gets one. That their family’s right to publicly-provided, quality health care and education is not denied. And that the promise of equality, enshrined in Article Three of the Treaty of Waitangi, is kept. Because that’s the only beer that’s electorally fit for Labour to drink: the beer of class – not race.

Everything else is froth.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 2 February 2023.

Three Waters. Three Mayors. Three Cheers!

Three Wise Men: Who should pay for upgrading New Zealand's waste, storm and drinking water services? That is the $64 billion (at the very least!) question. The most obvious answer: and the one Mayor Wayne Brown in Auckland, Mayor Phil Mauger in Christchurch, and the Mayor of the Waimakariri District, Dan Gordon, reached for with plain, old-fashioned, common-sense, was that the state should pay.

THE THREE MAYOR’S proposed revision of Three Waters is timely, sensible, and ought to be accepted by the Labour Government. If Jacinda Ardern and her colleagues press on regardless, then the electorate will know just how little Three Waters has to do with securing an affordable upgrade of New Zealand’s water infrastructure, and how much the controversial scheme is now about mandating the co-governance of water.

Not that the Prime Minister will admit that co-governance is the driver of the proposed reforms. To do so would be to lay upon the table, for free and frank debate, the fraught issues of radical constitutional change, and the future of our democracy. Ms Ardern is, almost certainly, in possession of poll data indicating that any such debate would be lost by her Government – decisively.

No, the Prime Minister’s explanation for why the Three Waters project must proceed is already being aimed, unwaveringly, at the voter’s back-pocket. If Three Waters isn’t implemented, she is warning the electorate, council rates are going to go through the roof.

Caught in the grip of a serious cost-of-living crisis, citizens desperate to get their household budget under control will receive the PM’s message with relief. If Three Waters can prevent the average household’s rates bill from skyrocketing, then the average household will more than likely give “Jacinda” the big thumbs-up.

What the average household almost certainly doesn’t realise is that the Prime Minister is spinning them a yarn. Providing the nation with clean drinking water, dealing with its stormwater, and getting rid of its waste water, is already costly, and cannot help getting costlier. Three Waters, or no Three Waters, there’s a mighty big bill coming New Zealand’s way – and, for better or for worse, New Zealanders will have to pay it.

But, how will they pay it? That is the $64 billion (at the very least!) question. The most obvious answer: and the one Mayor Wayne Brown in Auckland, Mayor Phil Mauger in Christchurch, and the Mayor of the Waimakariri District, Dan Gordon, reached for with plain, old-fashioned, common-sense, was that the state should pay.

Nothing can borrow money more cheaply than a solvent, sovereign state. Why? Because states, unlike people, corporations, and even banks, are immortal. There was a time when investors thought of municipalities in the much the same way. If nation states weren’t going anywhere, then neither were their cities and towns. But then New York City went bust, and international investors had to think again.

States, too, thought it advisable to impose strict limits on their borrowing. That’s why, for the last 40 years, successive Finance Ministers have forced local government to borrow the money it needed on the open market. The problem with this “solution” is that a city’s credit-card is maxed-out a lot faster than a state’s. Ditto, its rate-payers’ willingness to pay more and more and more. The present government has heaped scorn and derision on local authorities for their failure to adequately manage municipal infrastructure. Unfair. Those responsible for starving a person, are not really entitled to then complain about their victim’s weakness!

The Three Waters project, with its four “entities” and their hideously complex financial and governance structures, was the Government’s answer to local government’s maxed-out credit cards. The water entities could borrow the money that New Zealand’s cities, towns and districts could no longer access.

There was, however, a catch. According to the international credit-rating agencies, the four entities had to be protected from politics. International investors do not like politics – it’s messy and destabilising. If the cost of drinking, storm and wastewater management rose sharply, said the credit-raters, then the entities responsible had to be protected from every kind of consumer backlash. Whatever else these big beasts might be – they won’t be in any way democratically accountable.

Small wonder, then, that iwi authorities, and the co-governance faction of the Labour Government, were so keen to hitch a ride on the Three Waters bus!

Labour’s big mistake was letting them climb on board. Because, by doing so, it turned the Three Waters project into the hottest of political hot potatoes. And what don’t international investors like? That’s right: putting their money into political hot potatoes.

If this government has a lick of sense, it will greet the Three Mayor’s solution to Three Waters with three cheers.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 4 November 2022.

Radical Remedies.

Pure Crap: In terms of what they wanted the public to believe, the advertising campaign signed off by the promoters of Three Waters could not have been more transparent. New Zealand’s rivers and streams were awash with poo. Councils had failed their electors. Fixing up the water would be eye-wateringly expensive. Radical remedies were the only answer.

THE ORIGINAL ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN for Nanaia Mahuta’s “Three Waters” project was surprisingly honest. Not in terms of the information it communicated to the public, which was, at best, misleading; and, at worst, shamefully propagandistic. In terms of what they wanted the public to believe, however, the promoters of Three Waters could not have been more transparent. New Zealand’s rivers and streams were awash with poo. Councils had failed their electors. Fixing up the water would be eye-wateringly expensive. Radical remedies were the only answer.

None of these frightening propositions were true.

New Zealand’s rivers and streams had come under increased pressure as the country’s dairy herd expanded rapidly in the first two decades of the Twenty-First Century. The solution to this problem, however, lay not with a radical restructuring of New Zealand’s drinking, waste and stormwater infrastructure, but in improving the livestock management of the nation’s diary-farmers. As is so often the case, New Zealand’s farmers rose to this challenge. Access to waterways was fenced-off and riparian planting helped to filter farm run-off.

Not that this has prevented the Government’s supporters from characterising New Zealand farms as open sewers. Seemingly, ten million cows are only able to relieve themselves in bodies of running water. What actually happens, of course, is that cows, like most mammals, defecate on what lies immediately beneath their rear ends. For the vast majority of this country’s 4.9 million cows (the size of the New Zealand dairy herd has never exceeded 6.5 million and is steadily decreasing) what lies beneath their haunches are good, old-fashioned, New Zealand paddocks, which actually benefit from the breaking down of cow-pats into top-soil. Dangerous nitrate run-off is as much an artificial fertiliser problem as it is a cow-pee problem.

None of these facts mattered. New Zealanders were supposed to believe that every time they quenched their thirst with a glass of water they were swallowing shit. Not only that, but the task of fixing their drinking water was now beyond the financial resources of their local council. Worse still, many local authorities’ century-old-plus sewage and stormwater infrastructure was failing and in urgent need of repairs and/or replacements they could not afford.

This “the country can’t afford it” catch-cry was critical to the shape of the Three Waters project. New Zealand’s neoliberal state ideology is violently allergic to the public-funding and ownership of critical infrastructure. Treasury’s preference is to have local government bear the costs of renewal – either by raising rates, or borrowing. Unfortunately, local government’s credit is fast running out.

Rather than have the New Zealand state stand in the market for the finance required to upgrade New Zealand’s drinking, waste and stormwater systems – which it could borrow at by far the most favourable interest rates – successive governments have been advised to create a new stand-alone entity, or entities, and have it/them borrow the needed money. To reassure the lenders that their returns are secure, those same advisers have made it crystal clear that said entities must be absolutely impervious to all forms of democratic interference. While it might be politically wise to reassure voters that their councils still “owned” their three waters infrastructure, under no circumstances could local authorities be permitted to control it.

It was precisely this separation of ownership from control (control being central to the whole concept of ownership) that caused the Auditor-General to present such a strong critique of the Three Waters project – as currently conceived.

But, ownership and control are not only concepts crucial to the value and utility of tangible assets – private as well as public – they are also crucial to Māori concept of tino rangatiratanga – Māori sovereignty. It is at the intersection of these two key concepts that the deepest and most difficult problems of Three Waters arise.

Iwi authorities have seized upon the credit-rating agencies’ insistence that the proposed Three Waters entities be sealed-off from democratic interference, to fashion a governance structure favourable to themselves, from which the Pakeha majority is excluded, and which enables Iwi to release revenue streams that the (for once powerless) Pakeha state cannot dam. A bold plan, but one which Iwi could not reasonably have expected their Pakeha compatriots to simply wave on through.

Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of any group other than the present collection of political actors who would have taken such risks to see the Three Waters project implemented. Labour has the largest Māori caucus in its history, ably co-led by Nanaia Mahuta and Willie Jackson. Labour itself commands an absolute majority in the House of Representatives and, like their Green ally, its leaders are ideologically committed to the judicially contrived and academically elaborated concepts of “partnership” and “co-governance”. Without the staunchness of the Māori caucus, and the “wokeness” of Labour and Green MPs, Three Waters would never have got off the ground.

There are those on the Left who argue that this fortuitous aggregation of Māori activists and their progressive Labour allies is the direct result of Helen Clark’s legislative rejection of the Court of Appeal’s Foreshore & Seabed judgement back in 2004. The three dominant players in the Sixth Labour Government: Jacinda Ardern, Grant Robertson and Chris Hipkins; are depicted as shocked and unwilling accomplices in the Clark Government’s unconscionable theft of the Foreshore & Seabed. Eighteen years later, at the summit of the Pakeha state, these three are determined to have no repeat of the racist travesty they were forced to live through in 2004. This time, Labour will not let the Māori lose.

Stirring stuff! But if the so-called “Sharma Drama” has taught us anything, it is that the political culture of the post-Rogernomics Labour Party simply does not produce politicians of such mettlesome quality. For those who were following politics closely back in 2004, Tariana Turia’s resignation from the Labour Party appeared to inspire the same cold fury as Gaurav Sharma’s “treachery”. Loyalty trumps all other considerations in Labour: has done since the party split apart with such destructive acrimony in 1989. Had Ardern, Robertson and Hipkins felt the shame of 2004 as keenly as some on the Left suggest, they would have resigned alongside Turia and, like the fast disintegrating Alliance, done all they could to help her get the Māori Party up and running.

Equally untrue is the proposition that Labour’s inadvertent creation of the Māori Party kept it out of office for nine years. At no time did Māori Party MPs constitute the difference between a National and a Labour government. Between 2008 and 2014 Labour’s parliamentary numbers were so low that had all the Māori Party MPs defected to the Opposition, the National Government would have continued to govern with the support of Act.

The durability of the Three Waters Project is not the product of Labour heroism, but of 18 years of Crown-Iwi collaboration and compromise. Eighteen years of hard academic yakka in the fields of law, medicine, sociology, anthropology and history. Eighteen years of positive discrimination in the public service, the news media and the arts.

In sum, Three Waters is the culmination of a grand intellectual pincer movement. On the one hand, an immeasurably stronger alliance of Iwi-controlled institutions; on the other, a state no longer capable of dismissing Māori leaders as “haters and wreckers” – or, apparently, saying “No.” Squeezed between these two, is the Pakeha nation.

That was the core message embedded in the initial Three Waters advertising campaign. Māori New Zealand was telling Pakeha New Zealand:

“You can’t stop this.”

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 25 August 2022.

Proceeding Without The People: Labour’s Gift To The Right.

Colonial Relic: The te Tiriti-driven constitutional transformation proposed by the parties of the Left makes no provision for popular ratification. The radical changes proposed – like Three Waters – will either be imposed by statute, or achieved by judicial fiat. No heed will be given to the venerable notion that it is unacceptable for a government in possession of a temporary parliamentary majority to fundamentally change the rules of the political game. 

BY THE SECOND HALF of 2022 the right-wing assault on the Treaty policies of the Left will be raging.

At the level of local government, candidates known to support the Government’s Three Waters scheme will be targeted for electoral destruction. The local government elections will be repurposed as a national referendum on the Three Waters legislation. If its supporters are voted out, then the Government will face increasingly angry demands for the scheme’s abandonment.

On the broader political front, NZ First, finally free of the Serious Fraud Office’s investigation, will be terrifying rural and provincial audiences with tales of rampant, government-supported Māori separatism hellbent on destroying New Zealand democracy.

With contrapuntal precision, Act’s David Seymour will be reassuring the people Winston Peters has been terrifying that the price of Act’s participation in any coalition government of the Right will be the effective nullification of the Treaty of Waitangi.

National, with less venom and vitriol than its potential allies, will, nevertheless, have re-positioned itself on Treaty issues. Christopher Luxon will argue that what “normal” New Zealanders want more than anything in 2023 is a restoration of “social cohesion”. National’s position will be that social cohesion is impossible while three of New Zealand’s parliamentary parties are promoting racially-charged and undemocratic policies calculated to drive New Zealanders apart.

Labour’s, the Greens’ and the Māori Party’s ability to successfully counter the Right’s attack will be fatally undermined by their deafening silence on the key issue of whether or not they intend to seek formal popular authorisation for their radical (some would say revolutionary) proposals.

To date, however, the te Tiriti-driven policies and plans of all three left-wing parties offer no opportunity for the people of New Zealand to have their say on the profound constitutional changes being promoted.

The Left’s refusal to abide by the long-established conventions for validating and effecting significant constitutional change in New Zealand will leave them wide open to the charge that they are conspiring to brush aside their country’s democratic traditions.

The most damaging aspect of the Right’s charge will be that it is true.

The te Tiriti-driven constitutional transformation proposed by the parties of the Left makes no provision for popular ratification. The radical changes proposed – like Three Waters – will either be imposed by statute, or achieved by judicial fiat. No heed will be given to the venerable notion that it is unacceptable for a government in possession of a temporary parliamentary majority to fundamentally change the rules of the political game. The convention that significant constitutional reform – like altering the way parliamentarians are elected – must be put to a referendum, will be over-ridden.

Labour and the Greens have “form” in this regard.

The Labour-led government of Helen Clark established the New Zealand Supreme Court and abolished the right of New Zealanders to appeal to the Privy Council in London, simply by passing a law to that effect. In spite of the radical reformation of the New Zealand judiciary proposed by the law’s supporters, New Zealanders were given no opportunity to vote the reforms up or down.

Labour’s parliamentary caucus has not grown any more supportive of New Zealand’s democratic political culture in the years since the Supreme Court Bill was passed in 2003. Indeed, the venomous scorn poured upon the defenders of freedom of expression by some Labour and Green MPs strongly suggests that the rights and freedoms granted to all New Zealanders by the Bill of Rights Act (and, for that matter, the Treaty of Waitangi) are regarded as irritating obstacles to the imposition of a new te Tiriti-based political order.

The process adopted by the Clark Government in relation to the Supreme Court Act is, however, instructive.

According to the Department of Courts own historical summary:

The issue re-emerged in early 2000, when the Labour/Alliance Government agreed to review the role of the Privy Council. In December 2000 Cabinet approved the release of a discussion paper entitled Reshaping New Zealand’s Appeal Structure. It invited public comment on three options to replace the Privy Council. Submissions were evenly divided on whether appeals to the Privy Council should be abolished or retained. There was a clear consensus however that if appeals to the Privy Council ended, a replacement stand-alone court sitting above the Court of Appeal should be established.

Further public consultation culminated in the report of a Ministerial Advisory Group. This formed the basis of a Supreme Court Bill. The bill was introduced in 2002, and passed by Parliament on 14 October 2003. The Act came into force on 1 January 2004, officially establishing the Supreme Court, and at the same time ending appeals to the Privy Council in relation to all decisions of New Zealand courts made after 31 December 2003.

Remember that sequence: A “discussion paper” is released. Public “comment” is invited. In spite of expert opinion being “evenly divided”, “further public consultation” takes place. Eventually, a “Ministerial Advisory Group” presents a report. This report becomes a government bill. Public submissions on the bill are invited by a Select Committee of the House. The shape of the bill remains essentially unchanged. Despite strong representations from four of the seven parties represented in Parliament, the call for a referendum is rejected. The bill passes, 63 votes (Labour, Greens, Progressives) in favour, 57 votes (National, NZ First, Act, United Future) against.

That is how easily our constitution can be changed – if a government is sufficiently motivated to do so.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 10 February 2022.

Buying Back The Whenua.

Dangerous Visionaries: Rex Connor wanted to “buy back the farm” (i.e. nationalise Australia’s mineral wealth) and ended up bringing down the government of Gough Whitlam. Nanaia Mahuta’s Three Waters Project is seen by many as a first step to “buying back the whenua” (repatriating Māori lands and waters). A policy which threatens the longevity of Jacinda Ardern’s government.

REX CONNOR is remembered in Australian political history as the Labor Party minister who wanted to “buy back the farm”. In the rough language of Gough Whitlam’s 1970s Labor Party, “buying back the farm” meant bringing Australia’s phenomenal mineral wealth under public control for the benefit of all Australians – rather than a handful of obscenely profitable mining companies. Unlike the Australian Labor Party of today (or the New Zealand Labour Party, for that matter) the party of Rex Connor, MP for Cunningham, New South Wales, still boasted some honest-to-goodness socialists.

Sadly, Rex Connor is remembered for more than wanting to buy back the farm, he’s remembered for actually trying to do it. Bull-headed and scornful of political compromise, Connor stepped beyond the accepted bounds of Cabinet Government and allowed himself to be duped by a charlatan almost certainly in the employ of the Central Intelligence Agency. In doing so, Connor brought down not only himself, but also the charismatic Labor Treasurer, Jim Cairns, and, ultimately, the government of Gough Whitlam itself.

Connor’s economic nationalism was about as strong as it gets. He was fond of quoting the Australian poet, Sam Walter Foss. These lines in particular:

Give me men to match my mountains,
Give me men to match my plains,
Men with freedom in their visions
And creation in their veins.

By and large, politics and the poetic temperament do not mix. Had Whitlam paid more attention to the visionary gleam in Connor’s eye, he might have avoided the “dismissal” that brought his stellar career to a sudden and ignominious end. Creativity can be equally dangerous – especially when it extends to swallowing the too-good-to-be-true promises of shadowy “bankers” like Tirath Khemlani.

Connor’s tale is a cautionary one. So much so, that between 1975 and 1984 the lessons to be drawn from the Lands and Minerals Minister’s pig-headed economic nationalism were dinned into our own Labour MPs. Two lessons in particular were emphasised. One: It is impossible for a Cabinet Minister to operate secretly without the tacit support of his officials. Any attempt can only end in disaster. Two: Threatening the core economic interests of your country’s capitalist class is always a bad idea. They will get you long before you get them.

Connor’s tragic history therefore contributed in no small way to the readiness of both Antipodean labour parties to be convinced that there were no viable political alternatives to the free-market economic policies urged upon them in the mid-1980s. Rex Connor’s failure to buy back the farm, and Roger Douglas’s eagerness to sell it, are not unrelated.

But what have these fifty-year-old experiences got to do with the New Zealand of 2021? Surely our own government contains no one even remotely like the recklessly quixotic Rex Connor?

Actually, it does. Her name is Nanaia Mahuta.

Labour’s Minister of Internal Affairs is not an economic nationalist, but she is a Māori nationalist. Her mission is not to buy back the farm, but to redeem the whenua out of which New Zealand’s farms were fashioned. And not just the whenua. Mahuta’s sights are firmly set upon Aotearoa’s waters as well.

Though she is extremely guarded about the potential of her controversial Three Waters Project to provide an answer to the question: “Who owns the water?”; the Waitangi Tribunal evinces no such reticence. According to the Tribunal, Aotearoa’s waters do not belong to the Crown. Nor do they belong to “no one” – as Prime Minister John Key insisted, when 50 percent of New Zealand’s hydro-electric assets were being floated on the share market. No, Māori and water cannot be justly separated. Hence the “co-governance” provisions embedded in Mahuta’s Three Waters reform package.

Mahuta does, however, possess advantages Rex Connor lacked. In the Aotearoa of 2021 there is no Rupert Murdoch figure ready to publish devastating leaks from senior bureaucrats outraged by their Minister’s secret manoeuvrings. On the contrary, a great many journalists and public servants share the transformative visions contained in the Mahuta-commissioned He Puapua Report. Nor is it the case that Mahuta’s colleagues are being kept in the dark, as Connor’s were, about the implications of the Minister’s radical plans.

On one thing, however, Mahuta’s colleagues need to be very clear. Her version of “buying back the farm” cannot avoid buying a political fight every bit as consequential as Rex Connor’s.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 19 November 2021.

“Yesterday’s Controversy” – Labour Better Hope So!

Murky Waters: Essentially, what the world’s money-lenders are saying is that, when it comes to financing large infrastructure projects, like Nanaia Mahuta’s Three Waters project, democratic accountability is a deal-breaker. The surprise here is not the Standard & Poor’s credit rating agency’s demand, but this government’s uncritical acceptance of it.

ANDREA VANCE’S CLAIM that: “Beyond 2022’s local government elections, Three Waters will be yesterday’s controversy”, is a bold one. Had the Delta Variant of Covid-19 not made it to New Zealand, and if Jacinda Ardern’s government was still basking in the warm glow of public adulation, then it is just possible that the Three Waters project would, indeed, have become “yesterday’s controversy” by 2023. But Delta did arrive, and the Prime Minister has become the lightning-rod for a noisy political movement dedicated to the utter destruction of both herself and her government. Labour’s Three Waters project can only assume an ever-increasing salience as that anti-government movement grows.

What Vance was careful to sidestep in her Polyanna-ish determination to focus our attention on the good intentions of Nanaia Mahuta and her colleagues, was the rock-solid promises of both the National and Act parties to dismantle the entire scheme the moment they reclaim the Treasury Benches. This is hardly surprising, because the Right’s pledge to repeal Three Waters makes a nonsense of the Government’s key explanation for the undemocratic construction of the four “entities” responsible for delivering the Three Water’s objectives.

We are told, by Vance herself, that the governance structure has been designed according to the specifications of the Standard & Poor’s credit rating agency – now known as S&P Global Ratings. Without it, says S&P, the cheap money required to repair New Zealand’s drinking-, storm-, and waste-water infrastructure will not be forthcoming.

It is worth spending a few moments unpicking this extraordinary intervention from the enforcers of international finance. Essentially, what the world’s money-lenders are saying is that, when it comes to financing large infrastructure projects, democratic accountability is a deal-breaker. The surprise here is not S&P’s demand, but this government’s uncritical acceptance of it. Rarely has the naked power-politics of the neoliberal world order been on such unabashed display. That the Labour Cabinet, Labour’s parliamentary caucus, and the Labour Party organisation, itself, have so meekly rolled-over on this issue is astonishing. That they have then concluded that slitting Democracy’s throat is their sad but necessary duty, is more than astonishing – it’s chilling.

Vance simply passes over this brutal abrogation of New Zealand’s sovereignty, and the political facilitation it has elicited, without comment, exposing with unusual clarity the ideological bankruptcy of “woke” journalism. Vance is eloquent in her description of the racism inherent in local government’s treatment of Māori, but she has nothing at all to say about the derangement of this country’s democratic institutions at the behest of neoliberalism’s international enforcers. The wonder of it all is that Vance and her journalistic colleagues still evince surprise and indignation when they find themselves bracketed with the Left’s politicians as “enemies of the people”.

Returning to S&P’s bottom line, the question arises: How will the world’s lenders react to the pledge of New Zealand’s right-wing parties to dismantle the Three Waters project? Asked to invest money in a venture so subject to the whims of the electorate, it beggars belief to suggest that any lender so disposed would not demand a premium rate of interest. Only a fool would throw cheap money into such a risky enterprise, and whatever else international financiers may be – they are not fools.

This creates an insurmountable problem for Mahuta and her colleagues. If the whole justification for the undemocratic structure of the Three Waters project is that nothing else can guarantee access to the cheap money needed to make it happen. And if it then turns out that the political risk involved with the Three Waters project is so great that the possibility of cheap money must be taken off the table. Well, then the justification the Three Waters project – as presently structured – must also be taken off the table.

That this would be the outcome must have been clear to Mahuta’s economic advisers. So, why is she still proceeding? Without the support of the right-wing parties, the Three Waters project simply cannot assume that the necessary cheap money will be forthcoming. Mahuta’s conduct only makes sense if the cheap money argument is nothing more than a smokescreen for another, much more important, if unstated, set of objectives.

Vance, herself, makes reference to this opaque communications environment:

“Where the Government has failed is in its communication of its intentions, and critics have exploited this weakness. Mahuta is not a natural communicator and has done a poor job of explaining how the asset ownership works, fudging direct questions about royalties.”

As well she might, if “royalties” were included among those important and unstated objectives.

Vance will not, however, entertain for one moment the idea that there may be more to Three Waters than cheap money. With unseemly relish she reaches for that trusty journalistic stand-by: the accusation of conspiracy theorising. So handy whenever the paths of inquiry lead into territory neither editors nor publishers are keen to have their journalists traverse:

“Some critics have drawn a very long bow with a conspiracy theory which links the Three Waters proposals to the question of allocation of water rights.”

A long bow? Really? When the Waitangi Tribunal and a growing number of iwi have made it clear that the question of “Who owns the water?” must be answered soon – and that the correct answer is neither “The Crown”, nor “Nobody/Everybody”. A long bow? When the He Puapua Report, commissioned by Mahuta, makes it clear that by 2040 the restoration of Māori water rights should be an acknowledged and accomplished fact.

Mahuta’s strategic reticence on discussing Three Waters freely and fulsomely, along with Vance’s airy dismissal of any significant reasons for her doing so, are all of a piece. At their heart lies a deep (and not unjustified) fear that the truth will outrage sufficient New Zealanders to kill the project stone dead. This government, and its journalistic bodyguard, no longer trust the democratic system to deliver the “right” answers. Their response: to propose, and defend, a massive centralisation of power in bodies sealed-off from democratic accountability.

This would have been a bad idea in the very best of circumstances. Pursued with the sort of ruthlessness we have witnessed in the case of Nanaia Mahuta’s Three Waters, it has turned out to be much more than a bad idea. In the minds of a growing number of frightened and angry New Zealanders Mahuta’s project is further evidence of a political project of unprecedented scale and ambition. Justified, or unjustified, in the fraught conditions imposed upon New Zealand society by the Delta incursion, the belief is growing that Labour is making plans for New Zealand. Plans that its citizens will have no opportunity to either endorse or reject.

Andrea Vance rejects these people’s fears as conspiracy theories. She remains confident that Three Waters and its political siblings will be “yesterday’s controversies” by the time the next General Election rolls around in 2023. If she’s right, then all will be well for the Labour Government and its media apologists.

But, if she’s wrong …..

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 16 November 2021.