"For mercy has a human heart, pity a human face" - William Blake
MOST OF NEW ZEALAND’S social problems are concentrated among
those living at the margins of what is otherwise a relatively wealthy society. Recently
released international data on child poverty has exposed an acutely stressed
social strata encompassing roughly 20 percent of the nation’s population. Most
of these New Zealanders are young, brown, indifferently educated and lacking in
readily marketable skills. A significant number are supported by the State, but
many others support themselves through part-time jobs paying at or below the
minimum-wage. Some will supplement their meagre “official” income through
various kinds of socially stigmatised and/or criminal activity such as prostitution
and drug-dealing. Maintaining traditional family structures under such stress is
further hampered by a critical shortage of affordable housing, inadequate
public transportation and declining levels of unskilled and semi-skilled
employment. The heaviest burden falls upon single mothers. It is estimated that
approximately 250,000 children are being raised in circumstances of serious material,
emotional and cultural deprivation.
Eighty-three years ago an even larger percentage of the New
Zealand population lived in poverty. In 1931 the Great Depression had cast
tens-of-thousands of families into circumstances of acute hardship. Nearly a
quarter of the workforce was unemployed. Everywhere small businesses were
failing. The banks and mortgage companies were throwing farmers off their land.
Even those lucky enough to have a job were subject to frequent and arbitrary
wage reductions. The trade unions were powerless to help. One third of the
country was desperate. One third was under stress. And the remaining third
lived in fear of the rest.
In 1932 rioting broke out in all of New Zealand’s major
cities. In Dunedin a hungry crowd ransacked Wardell’s – a high-end food
emporium. In Auckland Special Constables were sworn in to maintain order after thousands
of enraged unemployed workers smashed the plate-glass shop fronts of Queen
Street and looted all they could carry away. At the Devonport naval base,
ratings armed with 303 rifles and machine-guns waited for the order to suppress
the rioting by deadly force.
The government of the day – a coalition of rural
conservatives and urban liberals – reacted to this unprecedented expression of
social despair by passing the Public Safety Conservation Act (which allowed for
the indefinite suppression of democratic norms) and by deporting as many
able-bodied unemployed male workers as possible to work-for-the-dole labour
camps in the countryside. By 1933, a terrible, sullen, silence had descended upon
New Zealand. But, underneath that silence, there was a grim determination –
extending across all social classes – to bring these hateful conditions to an
end.
These are just some of the vivid tales contributing to the
Great New Zealand Myth. That enduring narrative concerning the collective struggle
for social justice and social progress which culminated in the election and
re-election of the First Labour Government. Like all great myths it is
characterised by expiation, catharsis and the eventual emergence of a new
consensus about what and who we are. A happy ending – of sorts.
Fast-forward 83 years and what has become of the Great New
Zealand Myth? There is much about it that remains unchanged. As a nation we are
still susceptible to appeals for social justice, still ready to make social
progress. But there are differences also. The very success of the Welfare State
that Labour brought into being has given rise to some very different
expectations.
Poverty carries no stigma when everybody is poor. Quite the
reverse. Deprivation visited upon a community through no fault of its own tends
to develop tremendously strong bonds of solidarity and a willingness to share
and co-operate. Indeed, it was precisely these virtues of solidarity and
co-operation that made the changes of the First Labour Government possible and
which allowed them to endure.
But a welfare state – especially one underpinned by a
bi-partisan commitment to full employment – slowly but inexorably changes
people’s perception of poverty. When the state has given everyone access to
health care, affordable housing, and an education to the fullest extent of
their powers, then poverty ceases to be regarded as a collective curse and
becomes, instead, evidence of individual failure.
And if, to this general impatience with “welfare dependency”
one adds the prejudices of a comfortable Pakeha majority all-too-easily
provoked by people of different colours and cultures, then that marginalised 20
percent of New Zealanders still in the grip of poverty ends up being despised
as useless mouths, parasites, persons as underserving of decent citizens’ pity as they
are of the State’s succour and support. It’s why progressives no longer talk
about poverty per se. “Child poverty”
is what you’re forced to talk about when general compassion for the condition
of those children’s parents is all tapped out.
Buried deep in the former white working-class’s antipathy to
“bludgers” and “welfare cheats” is an unspoken but politically crucial
question: ‘Why don’t you people do something about your situation?’ Their class
memory informs them that there was a time when their parents and grandparents
faced exactly the same problems as today’s poor. The big difference, they tell
themselves, is that their forebears did something about it. They joined unions.
They went on strike. They rioted in the streets. They formed their own political
party. They won state power. They changed the rules. They got out. ‘So, what’s
stopping these buggers?’
Nothing. And that’s the point. The First Labour Government
created a society in which anyone in possession of a good enough brain, a
strong enough will and a big enough dream was free to escape from their family’s
cash-strapped condition. In the years prior to 1935, the powers-that-be had built a brick
ceiling over the working-class. Those who were smart and ambitious had to be
smart and ambitious not just for themselves but also for their class.
Eventually, these working-class leaders assembled the necessary tools and
muscle to smash through the bosses’ brick ceiling and erect the ladders up which
their “aspirational” offspring could climb into a new and very different world.
To a considerable extent it is this that explains the bottom
20 percent’s political inertness. In a proportional electoral system there is
little doubt that a roused “underclass” would very quickly force the rest of
society to address its problems. So, where are the Harry Hollands, the Mickey
Savages, the Peter Fraser’s of today? Where is the Maori, the Pacifica, John A
Lee speaking for today's “Children of the Poor”? Well, most of them, being free
and clear of their origins, don’t need to. They did not have to make a
revolution to get their children up and out. That’s why they’re lawyers and
doctors and business-people. For this lucky few, those who would once have served as the yeast in the social bread, the underclass is in the past. It's no longer their
problem.
The stubborn fifth of social dysfunction at the base of New
Zealand society thus imposes a huge responsibility on the lucky four-fifths of
New Zealanders smart and skilled and lucky enough to be at least a few
pay-checks away from the lethargy and despair which so quickly disempowers the victims
of poverty. So, if there is one last,
important political mission for progressive New Zealanders, then it is surely
this: to fulfil the role once played by the best and the brightest of a
working-class offered no means of escape. To read Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals; to assemble a
veritable army of “community workers”; to preach the gospel of getting up-and-in
to all those who are presently down-and-out. To stay among the poor and
marginalised for as long as it takes. Until the wonderful day dawns when the
people they have come to break out of poverty’s prison tell them to: “Fuck off!
We can do this ourselves.”
This essay was posted
simultaneously on The Daily Blog and Bowalley
Road on Saturday, 1 November 2014.
