The Greens’ Manifesto Is Called “The Time Is Now” – But Is It?

You Cannot Be Serious! To announce that your party is even “exploring” the idea of bestowing upon Māori the “right of first refusal” to privately-owned land offered for sale will certainly test the relative strengths of collectivism and individualism in New Zealand! Attempting to restore the status-quo-ante that prevailed prior to the enforced alienation of Māori land is an invitation to civil war.

NORMAN KIRK’S COLLEAGUES called it the “bloody red book”, and privately lamented that he referred to it constantly at Cabinet. But Labour’s 1972 Manifesto was taken very seriously by “The Boss”. It contained promises which the voters expected a Labour Government to keep – and Kirk was not about to let them down.

It is a measure of how profoundly the practice of New Zealand politics has changed since the 1970s that, back then, both the public sector chiefs and the news media took party manifestos very seriously. The former detailed talented underlings to tease out the costs and consequences of the parties’ plans. The news media did its best to do acquaint the public with the same information.

Just how far party manifestos had been downgraded was demonstrated vividly by another Labour prime minister, David Lange, who frankly admitted to his party not bothering with a manifesto in 1987 – on the grounds that had his government told the voters what it was planning to do they would have voted it out of office!

What passed for manifestos in the aftermath of the radical economic changes of the 1980s and 90s were glossy documents containing few words and many pictures. Coherent arguments were replaced by bullet-pointed sentences inspired by the reactions of focus-groups. From being statements of party principle and purpose, manifestos simply told voters what they wanted to hear – as interpreted by the polling agencies hired to translate the vox populi.

Even then, there was no guarantee that these pre-tested promises would be kept. The extent to which cynicism had come to guide the behaviour of New Zealand politicians was famously revealed by the Labour Cabinet Minister Steve Maharey, who informed the House of Representatives that an unfulfilled party promise was: “Just one of those things you say when you’re in Opposition, and then forget about when you’re in Government.”

The exception to this downgrading of the election manifesto was the small, ideologically-driven party determined to present its transformational programme to the electorate in considerable detail. Perhaps the most famous of these was the manifesto prepared by the Values Party for the 1975 general election. Across 91 pages, its idealistic authors described the sort of nation the Values Party believed New Zealand could/should become. Retailing for $1.65 (roughly $20.00 in today’s money) Beyond Tomorrow became a best seller.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the impressive precedent set by their Values predecessors served as an inspiration to the Greens who remembered it. So much so that, even today, the Green Party makes an effort to present its ideas in some detail to the public. This year’s effort, The Time Is Now, at 48 A4 pages, may not be as inspiring as Beyond Tomorrow, but the Greens have, at least, made an effort.

No matter how odious comparisons are said to be, it is instructive to compare the opening lines of The Time Is Now with those of Beyond Tomorrow. The latter begins with a quote from Gandhi: “The earth has enough for everyman’s need, but not enough for everyman’s greed.” The opening line of The Time Is Now reads: “Our vision is a climate-friendly Aotearoa that honours Te Tiriti and meets the needs of everyone within the boundaries of the planet, so that we and the rest of nature can thrive.” The remaining 47 pages are intended to translate that “vision” into a consistent policy platform.

Introducing the Greens’ manifesto to the party’s AGM on Sunday (9/7/23) Co-Leader Marama Davidson began by describing what she believes to be the essence of Greenness:

“As Greens we have always found [our] humanity in being part of a collective.”

Not the best start in a nation whose majority culture is firmly founded upon the principle that the human individual is supreme, and whose touchstone novel is entitled Man Alone. Being of Ngāti Porou, Te Rarawa, and Ngāpuhi descent, it is entirely reasonable for Davidson to espouse the values of te Ao Māori, but for a party whose voter base is overwhelmingly well-educated, middle-class and Pakeha, extolling collective values may not be the most effective opening gambit – psycho-socially speaking.

Never mind. Let us proceed on the assumption that the Green Party’s members and voters are all staunch collectivists. Certainly, that would need to be the case if their commitment to an Aotearoa which honours te Tiriti is genuine. Especially when honouring te Tiriti involves facilitating “the return of whenua that was wrongfully alienated from tangata whenua, including through exploring a right of first refusal process that enables the return of private land to iwi, hapū and whānau at point of sale”.

To announce that your party is even “exploring” the idea of bestowing upon Māori the “right of first refusal” to privately-owned land offered for sale will certainly test the relative strengths of collectivism and individualism in New Zealand!

There was a very good reason why the Waitangi Tribunal was forbidden from considering privately-owned land, a reason which is, almost certainly, as valid today as it was forty years ago. Restoring the status-quo-ante that prevailed prior to the enforced alienation of Māori land is an invitation to civil war. One suspects that the Greens’ manifesto promise to “Implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in Aotearoa”, would amount to the same thing.

Not to worry, just a few pages on, under the heading of “Workforce”, the Greens’ manifesto promises to: “Legislate for a right to solidarity strikes and political strikes.”

One of the most effective political strikes on record is the general strike of Protestant workers organised by the Ulster Workers Council, which took place in Northern Ireland between 15-28 May 1974. The strikers successfully destroyed the Sunningdale Agreement establishing a power-sharing arrangement between the (majority) Protestant and (minority) Catholic communities under the auspices of the governments of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. The ruthlessly enforced sectarian strike forced the UK Government to restore direct rule from London.

This sort of political strike is, patently, not the sort of political strike the Greens were thinking of when they confirmed that particular element of their Workforce policy. But they should be under no illusion that it is but one of the many radical responses to which the Pakeha majority would likely have resort if UNDRIP was imposed from above by a Green Government.

Many readers will undoubtedly object that the Greens are fully aware that they will be in no position to enforce the policies contained in their manifesto, and that its content is purely aspirational. But, if that is the case, then they are merely children playing at the game of politics, and should not be treated as serious contenders for office.

A political party offering a manifesto to the public, is expected to have thoroughly debated its contents and satisfied itself that the measures proposed are both desirable and workable. And, further, that its MPs are committed, 100 percent, to implementing its promises. “Given the power, this is what we’ll do.” That is the pledge they are making. If the only purpose of publishing a manifesto is to make themselves feel better, then the Greens should abjure participation in any government.

Norman Kirk was very likely the last New Zealand prime minister to take his party’s manifesto promises seriously. What New Zealanders read in the “bloody red book”, was what New Zealanders got from “Big Norm” – until the pressures of giving it to them killed him.

If the “bloody green book” is not a document to be taken seriously, then neither is the party that wrote it.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website of Monday, 10 July 2023.

Is It “Game Over” For The Greens?

Is History Repeating Itself? From 5 percent of the popular vote in 1975, the Values Party’s share was more than halved to just 2.41 percent in 1978. Within months, middle-class social-liberalism was back in the saddle. Unimpressed, the voters’ judgement was even harsher. In 1981, and again in 1984, Values received barely 0.2 percent percent of the popular vote. The party was over. Are the Greens about to go the same way in 2023?

THERE IS NO POSSIBILITY of a centre-left government being formed if the Greens are no longer in Parliament. That’s a sobering thought, and yet the return of the Greens is taken for granted by most political pundits. A party which could survive the self-immolation of Metiria Turei in the weeks leading up to the 2017 general election, it is widely assumed, can survive anything. But can it? Is the Green brand really bullet-proof? Good for 5 percent of the Party Vote – no matter what?

I don’t think so.

What keeps the Green Party in the electoral game is a widespread misapprehension that, at its heart, the Greens are the same rather quirky but highly principled outfit that impressed itself so deeply on the imagination of New Zealanders in the first five years of the twenty-first century. The most obvious historical comparison is with the pre-Rogernomics Labour Party. So great was the political momentum generated by the First Labour Government under Michael Joseph Savage (1935-1940) that the party was able to win four more elections on the strength of it. But, as Labour demonstrated in 1984, parties can change. And the Greens have changed – a lot.

What the Greens are slowly but surely turning into was always there in the political movement they inherited from the Values Party. When push comes to shove, the Greens, like the majority of the Values Party membership before them, will always break in the direction of the middle-class idealism out of which both parties were born. Logically, Greens should be socialists: if this planet’s a corporation, it’s a corpse. In reality, however, the Greens are social-liberals. How else to explain the fact that the party secures the bulk of its support from the well-heeled professionals inhabiting the nation’s leafier suburbs – and their children?

For those history buffs out there, the other exemplars of the social-liberal dynamic at the heart of middle-class progressive movements are the Suffragettes. Like the Greens, the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) embraced the cause of social-justice (a necessary indulgence if it was to enlist the support of working-class women) but at the outbreak of World War I its leaders were quick to jettison the WSPU’s socialist wing. A deal was struck with Lloyd George, the firebrand politician poised to become the UK’s next prime minister. The WSPU would back the war effort, and in return, at the war’s end, women (or, at least, women of means over 30 years of age) would be enfranchised. As proof of their patriotism, middle-class Suffragettes took to the streets handing out white feathers (tokens of cowardice) to young men not in uniform.

“Deeds Not Words” – the WSPU’s motto – was always open to multiple interpretations!

The Values Party broke apart over the question of whether or not environmentalism was a cause that could be embraced meaningfully by the working-class. Between 1975 and 1978, the socialist faction of the Values Party did its best to supply a positive answer. Values’ 1978 election manifesto was an unabashedly radical socialist document. The electors, however, had other priorities. From 5 percent of the popular vote in 1975, the Values Party’s share was more than halved to just 2.41 percent. Within months, middle-class social-liberalism was back in the saddle. Unimpressed, the voters’ judgement was even harsher. In 1981, and again in 1984, Values received barely 0.2 percent percent of the popular vote. The party was over.

Values rebirth as The Greens in 1989 represented the conscientized middle-class’ deep distress at Neoliberalism’s ruthless dismantling of the New Zealand welfare state, along with its unwavering promotion of the “free” market. Even more than Values, the Greens “got” that capitalism was killing the planet. As an internationally successful political movement, the Greens’ electability was based on the growing public understanding that the “old parties”, spawned by the exploitative industrial societies capitalism had created, no longer possessed the imagination necessary to rescue life on earth. Their message was encapsulated in the slogan: “The Greens are not of the Left, the Greens are not of the Right, the Greens are in front.”

But, in order to remain “in front” the Green brand had to fulfil two absolutely crucial obligations. It had to base its policies on the findings of science, and, it had to repudiate neoliberal capitalism and all its works. So long as Green parties did this, they went from strength to strength. Consistent failure to honour these obligations, however, rendered them acutely vulnerable to electoral annihilation.

It is becoming increasingly clear to green-oriented voters in 2023 that the Green Party is no longer as faithful to science as it was in the early 2000s, and that it is much more willing to compromise with the neoliberal order. Perhaps in an attempt to compensate for these two, critical, failures, the party has embraced a particularly volatile and uncompromising form of social-liberalism. One which a great many green voters find deeply offensive and alienating.

In sharp contrast to the leadership of Jeanette Fitzsimons and Rod Donald, who, respectively, embodied the movement’s fidelity to science and its duty to challenge the economic status quo, the leadership of James Shaw and Marama Davidson seems to embody constant compromise with the Powers That Be, accompanied by a wholesale rejection of rationality itself. As election day approaches, it is becoming increasingly difficult to construct a rationale for remaining loyal to the off-putting political force that the Greens are turning into.

The brute psephological fact, amply demonstrated by the fate of Values, is that no political party has a core vote below which it cannot fall. The moment small-g green voters feel that a vote for the Greens is no longer a meaningful act of faith in the planet’s future, the party will be over. Ultimately, it is not the members who make or break a political party, but the reaction of the voters watching them.

Those engaged in finalising the Greens’ Party List for the 2023 general election would be wise to remember that.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 2 May 2023.

News From Nowhere: If the Greens are to have a future, then they must listen to their past.

Taking Inspiration From The Past: Clio, the Muse of History, is traditionally depicted perusing the book of humanity’s past glories. At need, however, she will put down her book and take up a sword. Never has that need been greater. Only when we remember who we are, where we have come from, and what we have achieved, will we find the strength to drive Clio’s liberating sword through neoliberalism’s black and befouling heart.

THE TRAGEDY OF THE GREENS’ corruption by neoliberalism is that they simply cannot grasp how completely they’ve been seduced. At its heart, the problem is one of generational experience and perspective. The younger generation of Greens, the ones currently in control of the organisation, simply have no experiential connection to the zeitgeist out of which their movement was born. Their entire adult lives have been lived in the shadow of the neoliberal revolutions of the 1980s and 90s. What came before the revolution has been dismissed by its architects and disciples as existing outside the realm of common sense. Those who preach the values and aspirations of those pre-revolutionary times offer news from nowhere – and no one is listening.

They could, of course, learn the origin stories of radical environmentalism by entering imaginatively into the historical circumstances out of which it was born. Historians do this all the time. Watch Mary Beard’s television series on Ancient Rome and it will soon become clear how thoroughly an intelligent and inquisitive human-being is able to not only comprehend, but also inhabit, the past. Beard talks of being captured by the history of the Roman world from the moment she read Tacitus’ chilling judgement of his own people: “They make a desert and they call it peace.”

The problem with the generations that have grown up in the 40 years since Thatcher and Reagan destroyed the post-war social-democratic settlement, is that they have been convinced the past has nothing useful to teach them.

Like the early cartographers who wrote “Here Be Monsters” in the blank spaces of their maps, the neoliberal ideologues tell frightening tales about the times before their “Year Zero”. Anxious to dissuade those contemplating their own voyages of historical discovery, they warn that only bad and mad things lie beyond the well-charted shorelines of the present. Sadly, they have been remarkably successful. The past remains one of the very few foreign countries that millennial “influencers” have no interest in visiting – not least because “they do things differently there”.

One of the principal reasons for the neoliberals’ success is that their own ideologically-inspired break with the post-war world was strengthened immeasurably by the natural inclination of young people to dismiss the world in which their elders were raised as hopelessly passé. Ordinarily, such youthful disdain is reserved for the fashions, art and music of the recent past – so lacking in the manifestly superior tastes of the present. What the Neoliberals merged so successfully was this essentially harmless generational scorn with their own deep ideological hostility towards the ideas and institutions of the entire modern era.

When Baby Boomers like Catherine Delahunty and Sue Bradford condemn the younger generations of Greens for abandoning the foundational beliefs and principles of the Green Movement, all these younger Greens hear is an ideological version of “Taylor Swift can’t hold a candle to Joni Mitchell.” Or, “Where is your generation’s “Godfather”? Where’s your “Catcher in the Rye”? Your “Sergeant Pepper”? Social-democracy, the Club of Rome, Rachel Carson, Earth Day 1971: Catherine and Sue might just as well be touting the virtues of a dusty vinyl version of “Greatest Hits of the 1960s and 70s”. 

Okay Boomer.

Lacking a firm grasp of recent history, the generations at the end of the alphabet do not understand that while their parents and grandparents might have laughed at the “RSA Generation’s” stuffy conformism, and marched against nuclear weapons, the Vietnam War and Apartheid sport, they had nothing but admiration for the extraordinary structures of social care which these earlier generations had built. Moreover, they were full of gratitude for the fact that their own lives would be fuller and more prosperous as a result. The Boomers grew up in the shadow of fascism and genocide. They knew what the generation preceding their own had beaten back – and they loved them for it.

Discouraged from accessing the past, the younger Greens will struggle to understand the extraordinary exhilaration of encountering their own movement for the first time. New Zealand was the first nation to encounter a “green” political party. Inspired by the Club of Rome’s “Limits To Growth”, the Values Party spoke, for the first time, of constructing a future guided by humility and restraint. To hear Tony Brunt and his successors talk about limiting economic growth, and expanding the time in which people could simply be themselves, was to envisage a world “beyond tomorrow”. This was news from a somewhere humankind had yet to reach.

Values Party political broadcast from the 1972 General Election.

The worst crime against History which the Neoliberals have committed, however, is to convince young people that the past was a stinking cesspit of privilege, prejudice and oppression. That their ancestors were monsters – wiping out indigenous peoples even as their axes and machines laid waste to the forests, lakes, rivers and streams which had sustained them for millennia. By painting the past as a hellscape of irredeemable horror, the tiny fraction of one percent who lord it over the rest of humanity, Paul Simon’s “loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires”, are robbing us of the means to rescue the future.

Is there horror in the past? Is it full of murder and rapine? Of course it is – but no more than the horror that daily disfigures the present. Nor are evil deeds all that the past has to show us. Amidst the horror there is heroism. Amidst the murder and rapine there is also empathy and courage, creativity and love.

Human-beings do not suffer injustice meekly, they rise against it again and again and again. Down through the centuries reformers and revolutionaries have dreamed dreams and seen visions. Slavery was abolished. Women were enfranchised. Children were removed from coalmines and cotton mills.

When the armed constabulary invaded Parihaka in 1881, not all Pakeha cheered – nowhere near all. In the end, Apartheid fell. Eventually, gay sex was decriminalised. The past is not simply a catalogue of horrors. It is also an endless source of inspiration and hope.

The Neoliberals would shut the younger generations off from that hope and inspiration. The neoliberals would have us believe that this is as good as it gets. They have – almost – convinced James Shaw and Marama Davidson that the future can only be reached with tiny steps. On a warming planet, rapidly running out of time, that is deadly advice.

Catherine and Sue, and all those who stand with them, are right: this is no time for tiny steps. Humankind has made giant leaps before – all the way to the moon. But the booster rockets that push us towards the future are fuelled by the knowledge of what human-beings have achieved in the past.

Clio, the Muse of History, is traditionally depicted perusing the book of humanity’s past glories. At need, however, she will put down her book and take up a sword.

Never has that need been greater.

Only when we remember who we are, where we have come from, and what we have achieved, will we find the strength to drive Clio’s liberating sword through neoliberalism’s black and befouling heart.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 11 January 2022.

It’s A Question Of Values, My Friends: What The Greens Must Do To Survive.

"People Are More Important Than Progress": The Values Party's 1972 "guerrilla" TV Commercial electrified younger voters. To re-energise their 2017 campaign, the Greens need to dig deep into the bedrock of environmentalist ideology and produce an equally uncompromising political testament for the voters of the twenty-first century.
 

THE COLLAPSE in Green Party support – down to 4.3 percent in the latest Colmar Brunton poll – can be reversed. But, halting the slide, and building the Green Vote back up to its 1999-2014 average of 7.65 percent, will require James Shaw and his campaign team to dig deep into the bedrock of green ideology. They will have to reach back through time to the very first stirrings of the post-industrial political project in the early 1970s and rediscover what it was that so captured the imagination of that young and turbulent generation of voters. Then they will have to distil it into campaign propaganda powerful enough to snatch their party from the jaws of electoral death.
 

They will be sorely tempted to resist this advice. To re-tool their propaganda at this late stage is not only a very big ask, it is also a very expensive one. They have a re-cycled slogan, re-designed signage, and a re-edited TVC (television commercial) in their campaign kit-bag. The urge to just run with what they’ve got will be very strong. It will also see them bundled out of Parliament.
 

What they need to absorb is that the “core vote” of any political party is zero. (The Alliance used to tell people that its core vote was 10 percent – what is it now?) Once the belief takes hold that: ‘A vote for the Greens is a wasted vote’; the party is doomed. With the “Jacinda Affect” at full-throttle, and Labour ruthlessly stripping the Greens’ of their most valuable policy assets, the party’s current pitch to the voters: “Love New Zealand”, and a TVC describing Green New Zealand as “a place where businesses are booming in a thriving green economy”; simply isn’t enough to stop the slide.
 

Right now, what all those deserting voters need is a clear and compelling restatement of what the Green Party stands for and why, now, more than ever before, it needs to be represented in Parliament. The Greens current TVC doesn’t do that. It has the look and flavour of an ice-cream commercial. Oh sure, all the milk is sourced from free-range cows, grazing freely on organic farms, but, when all the selling-points are laid to one side, what we’re looking at is still just another item of confectionary.
 

James Shaw and his campaign team’s No. 1 priority, therefore, should be to settle themselves comfortably in front of the nearest computer screen and watch the Values Party TVC from 1972 – fear not, it’s on YouTube.
 

 

The script is 45 years old, but it still possesses the sort of intellectual toughness that makes you stop, listen, and think:

 

Economic growth equals more productivity, more people, more pollution.
 

It also means more money – so we’re told.
 

IMAGES OF 1970s CONSUMER SOCIETY FLASH ACROSS THE SCREEN IN RAPID SUCCESSION.
 

Can money buy us a new planet?
 

Economic expansion is not the answer. The world’s wealthiest nations can attest to that.
 

IMAGES OF CIVIL STRIFE, POVERTY AND INDUSTRIAL POLLUTION DISSOLVE INTO IMAGES OF CHILDREN’S FACES.
 

New Zealand twice led the world in social reform – it can again.
 

Are we to have a quantity of life – or a quality of life?
 

Let’s preserve the good things we still have.
 

People are more important than progress.
 

CUT TO VALUES PARTY LOGO.
 

“Wow!”, I hear you say, “Which ad agency made that? It’s brilliant!”
 

Yes, it is, but it wasn’t the work of a paid copywriter or an ad agency. The whole thing was thrown together in a few days by Hugh Macdonald and Rob Ritchie, a couple of young cinematographers working at the National Film Unit (a state-owned movie studio based in the Wellington suburb of Miramar). In a strictly undercover and emphatically unofficial effort, these two “guerrilla” filmmakers captured to perfection the core message of the Values Party founder, Tony Brunt. Broadcast on the country’s single television channel at the commencement of the 1972 election campaign, it’s effect on young voters was electrifying.
 

Co-director of the Values Party TVC, Rob Ritchie (centre) with two of his National Film Unit colleagues, circa 1972.

If the Greens are to come back, it is a message of this quality, simplicity and audacity that James Shaw and his colleagues need to craft – and quickly. They must reach out beyond the formulaic offerings of the advertising industry to the vast pool of talented Kiwi film and video makers. They must appeal for the help of people like Darren Watson and Jeremy Jones – the guys who created the extraordinary “Planet Key” music video. Not only do they need to ask for the help of Robyn Malcolm, but of every other progressive artist in the country. Beg them to activate their networks, punch their speed-dials and rustle-up the talent required to create a Greens campaign TVC every bit as good – if not better – than the Values Party TVC of 1972.

The most important lesson to draw from that historic 1972 Values ad’ is how little a message dates when its content is both real and relevant. Forty-five years on, and confronted by the looming catastrophe of global warming, the reality and relevance of the pivotal question located at its heart: “Can money buy us a new planet?” is as undeniable as it is urgent. What’s also clear, is that a world dominated by the philosophy of “More!” is, indeed, a doomed world.

New Zealand needs the Greens in Parliament. Not to turn New Zealand into a “thriving green economy” filled with “booming businesses”, but to remind us, at every possible opportunity, that “people are more important than progress”, and that a better world is possible.
 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Saturday, 19 August 2017.

Green Vote Down! Is History Repeating Itself?

Red Pressure: Is it possible that the same reckoning that caused Values supporters to return to the Labour fold in 1978 is at work again? Even in the era of Mixed Member Proportional Representation, have the supposedly redundant arguments of FPP reasserted themselves? Have centre-left voters come to the realisation that, if they want to get rid of John Key’s National-led Government, then they are going to have to push Andrew Little’s Labour into a credible second place?

 

THE GREENS’ DRAMATIC FALL in the latest Colmar-Brunton should be a matter of considerable concern to the whole party. If it continues, then we may see the Greens fall victim to the same political phenomenon that led to the demise of the Values Party.

 

Voting for Values peaked at the General Election of 1975 when it attracted 5.19 percent support. Not surprisingly, its members were ecstatic. Anticipating an even bigger surge of support in 1978, they began the process of firming-up and paring-down the policies contained in their extremely popular 1975 Manifesto, Beyond Tomorrow.

 

This turned out to be an unexpectedly fraught process. A large and well-organised fraction of the Values Party argued strongly that the system-changing objectives set forth in Beyond Tomorrow would never be acceptable to New Zealand’s ruling-class, whose power would have to be substantially diminished if the party’s core environmental policies were ever to be implemented.

 

This eco-socialist position did not sit altogether comfortably with the party’s pure ecologists, who believed that once people understood the scientific rationale for radically reorienting Western values, then radical change would follow naturally – and without the class conflict predicted by Values’ eco-socialist wing.

 

Better organised and superior in debate, the eco-socialists gained the upper hand, leading Values into the 1978 General Election with one of the most radical manifestos ever presented to the New Zealand electorate. The votes they hoped to plunder with this document were those of Labour’s more left-wing supporters. On paper, it seemed like a winning strategy.

 

What the eco-socialists hadn’t counted on, however, was just how fed-up the non-National-Party-voting half of the New Zealand electorate had become with Prime Minister Rob Muldoon. Under the First-Past-The-Post electoral system, the sort of oppositional vote-splitting which Values was advocating almost always ended up advantaging the incumbent government.

 

Recognising this, the left-wing idealists who had flocked to Values banner in 1975 underwent a decisive change of heart. In the name of getting rid of “Piggy” Muldoon, they were willing to abandon the idealistic dreams of Beyond Tomorrow. Accordingly, in 1978, the Values Vote almost exactly halved: falling from 83,241 to 41,220 – just 2.41 percent of the votes cast.

 

The eco-socialists’ strategy of taking on Labour had failed dismally. The pure ecologists rallied their supporters and drove the eco-socialists out of the party. But, if they were hoping that a Red purge would recover their fortunes, they were wrong. In the General Election of 1981, Values was more-or-less wiped out. From 41,220 their vote fell to a risible 3,460. In 1984, the party attracted just 0.20 percent of the popular vote. Game Over.

 

Values’ rebirth, as the Green Party, in 1990, saw it win an impressive 6.85 percent of the popular vote. The old FPP realities remained, however, and they were forced to join forces with the left-wing NewLabour Party in 1991 under the rubric of Jim Anderton’s “Alliance”. With the introduction of proportional representation in 1996, however, all the old FPP rationales against vote-splitting became redundant. In 1999, the Greens stood under their own banner and received 5.16 percent of the Party Vote – just enough to secure them 7 seats in Parliament.

 

Between 1999 and 2008 the Greens’ Party Vote fluctuated between 5.16 percent and 7.0 percent. With the defeat of Helen Clark’s Labour-led centre-left government, however, and the onset of what would be six years of internal conflict and lacklustre politics from Labour, the Green vote soared: from 157,613 Party Votes (6.72 percent) in 2008 to 257,356 Party Votes (10.70 percent) in 2014. It looked as though the old eco-socialist strategy of luring away Labour’s left-wing voters was on the point of being vindicated.

 

And then, in February 2016, Colmar Brunton’s pollsters registered a drop of 4 percentage points in the Greens’ numbers. The party had shed one third of its support: falling from 12 to 8 percent.

 

Is it possible that the same reckoning that caused Values supporters to return to the Labour fold in 1978 is at work again? Even in the era of Mixed Member Proportional Representation, have the supposedly redundant arguments of FPP reasserted themselves? Have centre-left voters come to the realisation that, if they want to get rid of John Key’s National-led Government, then they are going to have to push Andrew Little’s Labour into a credible second place – i.e. somewhere closer to 40 percent of the Party Vote than 30 percent?

 

If the answer to all these questions is “Yes”, then the Greens had better brace themselves. They have a lot further to fall.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog on Monday, 22 February 2016.

A Green Offer National Couldn't Refuse

"Fredo, You Broke My Heart!" Michael Corleone would not tolerate disloyalty - not even from his own brother. Will Labour forgive the Greens for doing a deal with National's 'Godfather', John Key, over the 'Red Peak' flag? Or will Labour's decades old strategy of "no enemies to the left" set in motion a 'hit' against their supposed Green brothers?

 

THERE ARE PEOPLE in the Labour Party who take an almost forensic interest in the Greens. They can discourse at length on the “fundi/realo split”; “Deep Green” versus “Red Green”; and whether the electorally perilous potential of “Blue Green” will ever be realised.

 

Labour’s ongoing surveillance of the Greens should not, however, be compared to the twitcher’s hobby of watching birds. Labour’s interest in the intricacies of green politics is much more akin to the FBI’s interest in the intricacies of the Mafia. Agents may be able to rattle off the names of the heads of the Five Families; which gangsters are on the way up; and where the gangsters who used to be on the way up are buried; but this does not mean that the FBI loves or admires the Mafia. Far from it! The FBI is interested in the Mafia only because it intends to destroy it.

 

A Labour Party that drew its electoral support, overwhelmingly, from the poorest and most marginalised members of society would have little to fear from green parties of any kind. If they thought about them at all, it would only be as an eccentric off-shoot of middle-class politics, whose electoral participation was as likely to damage the Right as the Left.

 

The fate of the Values Party (arguably the world’s first “green” party) demonstrates the point nicely. Though it made a big splash in the news media, the newly-formed Values Party attracted only 1.9 percent of the popular vote in the General Election of 1972. This was, of course, the election in which the Norman Kirk-led Labour Party romped home with 48.4 percent of the votes cast.

 

Values did better in the next election, but only because Labour’s popularity, over the course of the intervening three years, had plummeted. In 1975, Values’ share of the popular vote swelled to 5.1 percent. Labour’s share, by contrast, fell nearly 10 percentage points, to a dismal 39.5 percent.

 

Between 1975 and 1984, however, Values’ support collapsed. In 1978 it polled 2.4 percent. In 1982, 0.19 percent. And in 1984 0.20 percent.

 

In spite of the fact that New Zealand’s two-party system had largely broken down by 1984, Labour was still able to capture 42.9 percent of the popular vote – on a record turn-out of 93.7 percent of registered voters.

 

The General Election of 1984 would, however, be the last in which Labour entered the race as an unequivocally social-democratic party, and was swept to power with the support of the poorest and most marginalised voters. In future elections an increasing percentage of Labour’s support would come from middle-class electors. This demographic shift in Labour’s electoral base would, increasingly, bring it into head-to-head competition with the Greens.

 

Labour’s electoral base is, however, broader than the Greens’. Though middle-class voters now comprise an important chunk of Labour’s constituency, its residual support among Pakeha, Maori, Pasifica and immigrant industrial and service-sector workers is still high. These traditional loyalties usually ensure that Labour’s vote is two-to-three times that of the Greens – enough support to make it a major party, but not yet enough for it to form a government without first securing a voter-antagonising guarantee of Green Party support.

 

Labour’s problem may be summed up in two words: proportional representation. New Zealand’s MMP electoral system allows minor parties to thrive, thus removing the pressure on opposition supporters to transfer their allegiance to the party best placed to defeat the Government. By denying Labour the 5 to 10 percentage points it needs to become a credible competitor to the National Party, proportional representation and the Greens are encouraging the Right to contemplate permanent political ascendancy.

 

In these circumstances, it is hard to blame the Greens for engaging in a little contemplation of their own. If, by its very existence, and by positioning itself as Labour’s “natural” coalition partner, it is keeping the Left out of power permanently, then wouldn’t the Green Party’s chances of achieving at least some of its critical environmental objectives be improved by repositioning itself as the potential coalition partner of either Labour or National?  Certainly, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this is exactly what the Green Party membership was contemplating when they elected the young, business-friendly, social entrepreneur, James Shaw, as their co-leader on 31 July 2015.

 

The same Mr Shaw’s adroit handling of the Red Peak flag issue in the House last week will not have lessened Labour’s forensic interest in the Greens’ ultimate intentions. His parliamentary “deal” with National, relatively insignificant though it may have been, was seen by Labour as an alarming portent of things to come.

 

If Labour operated like the Mafia it would know exactly what to do. Without seeking permission, Jimmy “The Business” Shaw, and his Green Gang, made approaches to a rival family.

 

Whack ‘em!

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 29 September 2015.

"Damn the Dam" - John Hanlon (1973)

 

 



WHILE WE’RE DEBATING the economic competence, or otherwise, of the four candidates vying to become the male co-leader of the Greens, here’s a blast from the past from John Hanlon.

 

Damn the Dam was released in 1973, and tunefully encapsulates just about all of the sentiments that propelled the Values Party into the forefront of progressive New Zealand’s imagination during the General Election campaign of 1972.

 

The Values Party can lay a pretty solid claim to being the world’s first “green” party. (Which is why I found it so odd that only Gareth Hughes was willing to cite one of its earliest members, Jeanette Fitzsimons, as his personal political hero!) But, as Hanlon’s song clearly illustrates, it carried within it, almost from the moment of its birth, the inherent contradiction between the needs of the natural and the human worlds.

 

As my wife puts it (rather brutally I’m afraid): “I’d rather have cheap power than the bloody fantail!”

 

Even within the ranks of the late (and, by some, lamented) NewLabour Party, the comrades rapidly sorted themselves into the “Red-Green” and “Smokestack” factions.

 

In the end, just about all political struggles boil down to a set of arguments based upon giving “power” – however narrowly or widely defined, to “the people” – however narrowly or widely defined. “Tiny animals, little birds as well” don’t get much of a look-in. Which is why Russel Norman was so emphatic in his insistence that the Greens must learn to speak the language of human priorities, aka “Economics”.

 

Still, it’s a lovely song.

 

 

Video courtesy of YouTube.

 

 

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

Shouting From Beyond The Crossroads

Green Marx: The growing awareness that Capitalism, unchecked, will ultimately consume the life-giving properties of the planet itself is challenging Green parties' reliance on "Green Technology" and the technological fix. Karl Marx saw the overthrow of the capitalist system as a social and ethical necessity, but it is now clear that revolution and human survival are no longer separable.

DO YOU SHOUT at the television? Indulge in lengthy harangues at the radio? I’m afraid I do. Increasingly so, given that it’s an election year and there’s a growing number of things to shout at television about. Time was when I’d have attributed this habit of berating inanimate objects to advancing years. But young people assure me that nowadays they do it too.

 

Last Sunday I gave my lungs a good workout during TVNZ’s current affairs programme Q+A. Bryce Edwards, the University of Otago’s peripatetic commentator on all things political (and compiler of that utterly invaluable compendium of political news and commentary, NZ Politics Daily) was criticising the Greens for attempting to use Green Capitalism to save the planet.

 

“Awh, jeez, Bryce, give us a break!”, I yelled at the offending collection of electronic circuitry, “How many viewers do you suppose are going to hold that against them? And how many extra votes do you reckon they’ll attract by decking out Karl Marx in a green suit?”

 

Later that morning, however, after my blood pressure had returned to normal, I began to think more carefully about Bryce’s criticism. By mid-afternoon I’d already half-convinced myself that the young political studies lecturer was right.

 

If even the Greens aren’t prepared to call things by their true names – who is?

 

Can you really prefix “Green” to the global phenomenon that’s pouring more and more Carbon Dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere? From Brazil to Indonesia: in all the world’s denuded tropical rainforests, what else but Capitalism is powering the chainsaws of the tree-fellers? Could the gaunt and exhausted construction workers recruited from across the Muslim world really distinguish between the Capitalism that vomited up their squalid shanty towns and the Capitalism that’s erecting Dubai’s towering “eco-friendly” architecture? And, much closer to home, can Green Capitalism really displace the Cow-Cockey Capitalism pouring nitrates and phosphates into our waterways? Or the Carbon Capitalism sinking drill-shafts into our deepest seas?

 

Green Capitalism? You might as well speak of Green Cancer. But, if you’re looking for alternatives – why not ‘Man Crusher’? Or, ‘Earth Eater’?

 

I’m old enough to remember when the first whispers began to spread about the limits to capitalist growth. When individuals like Rachel Carson and groups like the Club of Rome first connected the insatiable appetites of industrial capitalism with the gaping rents that were appearing all around the globe in the fragile webs of life we were only just beginning to call ecosystems.

 

It was around the time when, in the manner of a glittering cosmic cue, the Apollo astronauts began sending back to humankind the first images of its tiny blue planet floating – so beautiful, so vulnerable and so alone – in the infinite reaches of space.

 

And it was here, in New Zealand, that those whispers first cohered into an audible political voice. Formed in 1972, the Values Party was the first to openly question the idea that economic growth could be pursued endlessly and without cost.

 

It was heresy, but it stuck. Tens-of-thousands had just signed the ‘Save Manapouri’ petition. The Labour Party’s election ads depicted the environment in an Agee preserving jar! Tantalisingly close to the surface of the voters’ minds, not only in New Zealand but all across the developed world, a realisation of extraordinary power was taking shape. That humanity had reached a cross roads.

 

Down one road lay something new, something transformative. A new, lighter and less destructive way of being human. Charles Reich called it “The Greening of America”. Values promised to take us "Beyond Tomorrow".

 

Down the other road lay more: much more; unbelievably more. Waiting for us was a cornucopia of technological wonders that also offered something new and transformative. A human society increasingly wired to its machines, and those machines becoming more and more human.

 

But such magic technology could only ever be the distillation of processes fatally destructive of the planet’s capacity to maintain ecosystems conducive to human survival.

 

Capitalism’s technological fix, founded upon the shifting sands of cheap energy, finite resources and cheap labour is, ultimately, unsustainable. Its ever-more miraculous industrial alchemy can only be sustained by cannibalising its own children and heating up the planet’s atmosphere.

 

These are unglad tidings for any political party to bear. Values tried to warn New Zealand about the ultimate cost of Capitalism but only succeeded in splitting itself apart. Like the rest of us, Values’ members (and now the Greens’) have found it easier to believe in the power of science to resolve all contradictions.

 

Hence Russel Norman’s promise that Green Capitalism, wielding Green Technology, will rescue us from the twin threats of Global Warming and critical resource depletion. I suspect he knows this is nonsense. The Devil is not defeated by weapons manufactured in Hell.

 

From the road we’ve chosen there is no turning.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 20 May 2014.

Political Dementia - Or, Is Labour In Need Of Aged Care?

Political Decline: How sad it will be if New Zealand’s oldest political party is forced to end its days looking out at a world it is no longer able to change; weeping tears of silent rage as younger politicians, with the courage to look beyond tomorrow, get ready to inherit today.

FOR A FEW WEEKS, towards the end of 1973, aged just seventeen, I worked as an orderly at Siverstream Hospital. Speaking frankly, a few weeks was all I could stand. Officially, this public hospital catered for “long-term care” patients. Unofficially, it was an old people’s home.

Many of Silverstream’s residents suffered from dementia. Some were violent, while others drifted in and out of reality in the most disconcerting fashion. The most difficult to deal with, however, were those who remembered enough to know that they didn’t want to be there. Recalling how we would apprehend these brave old souls as they tried to “escape” still gives me pangs of guilt. The bathing, the feeding, the replacing of colostomy bags: it was all hard and emotionally draining work; but the sight of those tears, falling silently from eyes that saw a world their aged owners could never re-join; that was heart-breaking.

There was, however, nothing heart-breaking about the pay. Anyone working through Christmas could earn a week’s wages in less than 72 hours. Overtime, double-time, triple-time: back then the workman and workwoman were worthy of their hire. Mind you, back then union membership was compulsory. Back then we had a Labour Government worthy of the name. Back then, the prediction that my job would one day be described as “modern day slavery” would not have been believed.

Two years later, not so very far from Silverstream Hospital, just a couple of miles up the Hutt Valley at Brentwood School, I cast my first vote. I still remember how my hand hovered above the name of the Values candidate. I had read the party’s splendid manifesto, Beyond Tomorrow, and my head told me that the policies enunciated by Values were the only policies to take the future seriously. My heart, however, recalled “Big Norm”, and I voted Labour.

Taking The Future Seriously: The Values Party's best-selling 1975 election manifesto, Beyond Tomorrow.

Silverstream Hospital, built by the New Zealand government for the repair and recuperation of American sailors during World War II (and visited in 1943 by no less a personage that Eleanor Roosevelt) has long since been decommissioned. In its place stands the very handsome Silverstream Retreat – venue for the 2012 AGM of the Green Party.

The Greens are, of course, the direct political descendants of those prescient men and women who, almost exactly 40 years ago, founded the Values Party. Naturally, there will be celebration – and much reminiscing – over Queen’s Birthday Weekend as Values veterans, like its founder, Tony Brunt, and Jeanette Fitzsimons, the woman who helped birth its political offspring, rub shoulders with the Green Party’s record crop of fourteen MPs. Also present will be Claire Browning, there to launch Beyond Today, her book on the movement Values began.

Writing in Tuesday’s Otago Daily Times, political pundit, Colin James, argued that: “[T]he Greens don't have to win the centre. They can look more oppositionist than Labour because they can occupy (to coin a word) a spot nearer the periphery. This frustrates Labour, which must win votes from National to win the Treasury benches and must sound reasonable while competing with Greens for airspace.”

When Labour’s legacy was still potent enough to win hearts and minds, Mr James’ analysis may have been correct. In 2012, however, I’m not so sure. When the 150,000 mostly female, mostly professional, voters that National wooed away from Labour in 2008 and 2011, and whom they now seem so determined to drive away, decide to go in search of an alternative, are they really going to choose Labour? Does David Shearer really have the emotional heft of a Norman Kirk? I don’t think so.

More and more Labour is beginning to resemble those dementia patients at Silverstream Hospital. Some of Labour’s caucus, like Trevor Mallard, are prone to violent episodes; others, like Shane Jones, test the boundaries of political probity in the most disconcerting fashion. The most pitiful to contemplate, however, are the likes of David Cunliffe and Grant Robertson. They know there are alternatives out there, they can see them, but their colleagues will insist on hauling them back to their beds.

How sad it will be if New Zealand’s oldest political party is forced to end its days looking out at a world it is no longer able to change; weeping tears of silent rage as younger politicians, with the courage to look beyond tomorrow, get ready to inherit today.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 1 June 2012.

Getting The Message

Loud and Clear: The Mana By-Election result not only shows the importance of getting people to vote, but of giving them something to vote for.

SOMETIMES all it takes to set off a landslide is the sudden dislodgement of a couple of pebbles.

Today, the "green" political brand is so potent that no major party can afford to issue a manifesto without at least paying lip-service to its core principle of "sustainability".

It was not always so. In the early 1970s New Zealand was still the sort of country where drowning lakes and rivers in the name of cheaper power was considered good politics by both the Right and the Left.

That was before the "Save Manapouri Campaign" – a mass political movement which for the first time successfully challenged, on a national scale, the view of "progress" which attributed no intrinsic value to New Zealand’s wild and beautiful places.

That was the first pebble.

The second pebble was the Values Party. Launched just a few months out from the 1972 General Election by a young journalist named Tony Brunt, Values was the world’s first "green" political movement to wage a nationwide electoral campaign.

Though Labour ran away with the 1972 election, the Values Party exerted an extraordinary influence on the campaign. Its superb advertising (produced virtually free-of-charge by a couple of sympathetic cinematographers at the National Film Unit) gave focus to the widespread longing, especially among the young, for a political vision that encompassed something more than the endless accumulation of material wealth. Though it only secured a minuscule 2 percent of the popular vote, the Values Party opened a door for Labour: a door upon which was written: "Another world is possible".

Much of this has been forgotten. The landslide upon which most political historians focus their attention is the landslide that swept Robert Muldoon’s National Party to victory in 1975. Viewed from the perspective of 35 years, however, it is clear that the dramatic shift in people’s perceptions of the environment – the shift represented by Values' best-selling manifesto, Beyond Tomorrow – has proved to be the more enduring.

Analysing last weekend’s Mana by-election results, I’m wondering if we may be witnessing another seminal political moment. Like the 1972 General Election, it’s possible that the closely fought Mana contest holds some crucially important lessons for the major parties.

At the most superficial level, the result was a clear moral triumph for the Government and its very effective candidate, Hekia Parata. In a country only slowly emerging from recession; in an Opposition-held electorate perfectly positioned to send the Government "a message"; it almost beggars belief that the by-election campaign ended with a 14 percent swing towards the governing party.

Indeed, without radical left-wing trade unionist, Matt McCarten’s, last minute entry to the by-election race it's possible Ms Parata could've won the seat.

Mr McCarten saw the Mana by-election as an opportunity to send his own message. Not to the National Government of John Key, but to Phil Goff’s Labour Party.

Like the Values Party in 1972, he was determined to make Labour understand that "another world is possible". A world in which it is possible to campaign (and, ultimately, to govern) "as if you were free".

His challenge to Labour was to give on-the-ground, practical expression to the progressive policy initiatives announced at its Annual Conference by campaigning – as he did – on the issues of low wages, inadequate housing and the urgent need for job creation.

Labour’s candidate, the woefully inexperienced TV journalist, Kris Fa’afoi, wasn’t equal to meeting this last-minute challenge, and Mr McCarten’s dramatic intervention prompted the by now thoroughly alarmed Labour hierarchy into pouring everything it had into the Mana campaign.

It was this massive intervention which ensured Mr Fa’afoi’s victory – albeit with a sharply reduced share of the popular vote.

To the cynical observer, Mr McCarten’s 3.6 percent share of the Mana vote may seem derisory. But then, so did the 2 percent share won by Values in 1972. Besides, there are moments in politics when, as Prime Minister Key told Ms Parata’s jubilant supporters on Saturday night: "losing is winning."

Hopefully Labour’s "got the message" Mr McCarten was sending it throughout the campaign. That, if it is to successfully counter Mr Key’s (obviously still effective) appeal to "aspirational" Kiwis, it has to maintain the sort of "on the street" presence for which Mr McCarten and his radical Unite union are justifiably famous, and which, ultimately, is all that rescued Mr Fa’afoi from catastrophic defeat.

But, even more important than getting Labour out on the street, Mr McCarten’s candidacy – like Values' campaign in 1972 – should remind Labour that getting people to vote is only half the battle: the other half is giving them something to vote for.

In 1972, that was the environment. In 2011 it should be for the two million hard-working New Zealanders whose greatest aspiration is simply to make ends meet.

Get that message, Labour – or lose.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 23 November 2010.