All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
-
William Butler Yeats, “Easter 1916”
MIKE WILLIAMS, searching for a political
precedent, reached all the way back to the Snap Election of 1984. His fellow
panellists on TVNZ’s Q+A couldn’t
help but agree. Certainly, I remember the electrifying effect of Rob Muldoon’s
surprise announcement. On the evening of the day after the night before, dozens
of people turned up to the emergency campaign committee meeting called by Stan
Roger, Labour’s candidate for Dunedin North. The meeting room was far too small
to accommodate all of them comfortably. It was standing room only – with the
doors flung wide.
I recall looking at the faces of the people
present. Some were familiar, party stalwarts of forty years standing, but many
were new. Looking at the younger, middle-class professionals lining up along
the walls, the nascent political analyst in me could hardly miss the blindingly
obvious conclusion: Labour was going to win.
Even in the 1980s, Labour needed more than
the unionised working-class to seize the Treasury Benches. Thirty years ago – just
like today – electoral victory could be secured only by drawing into Labour’s
ranks a critical mass of young, well-educated, urban professionals: the
confident offspring of Mickey Savage’s welfare state. (The very same demographic,
it should be noted, who rescued Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party from oblivion back
in June.)
It’s a notoriously difficult group to
engage politically. If they cannot be convinced that something new and positive
will be achieved by casting a vote, then they have no qualms at all about sitting
an election out. In 1984 the opportunity to usher in something new and positive
was unmistakeable and the yuppies seized it with both hands. Nine years of Rob
Muldoon had been more than enough!
Jacinda Ardern’s dramatic ascension to the
Labour leadership has captured the attention of Savage’s children and
grandchildren alike. Her arrival has generated an overwhelming surge of money
and people into Labour’s camp. More than that, however, her “unrelentingly
positivie” and “sunny ways” are rapidly persuading tens-of-thousands of young
New Zealanders that – this time – casting a vote just might make a difference.
If that process of persuasion and
mobilisation is to continue, however, Ms Ardern must make very clear what she
is running against. In 1984, David Lange was challenging Muldoon’s last-ditch
defence of Keynesian economics. New Zealanders had had enough of wage and price
freezes, massive agricultural subsidies and patently absurd bureaucratic
regulations. “You can’t run a country like a Polish shipyard!”, Lange
thundered, and the New Zealand electorate cheered him to the echo.
In 2017, Ms Ardern is running against a
very different set of economic and social phenomena. Her targets are not
massive and poorly directed state interventions, or heavy-handed government
controls. On the contrary, her targets are the consequences of Keynesian
economics wholesale rejection. When she says “Let’s do this!”, the “this” that
her supporters anticipate is an unequivocal repudiation of the squalor and
misery that Roger Douglas unleashed, Ruth Richardson intensified, and which
even Helen Clark’s and Michael Cullen’s best efforts failed to eliminate. Jacinda’s
“Muldoon” is Neoliberalism: the relentless extension of competitive markets
into every corner of New Zealand society and into every facet of New Zealanders’
lives.
Nowhere are the consequences of this
country’s thirty-year neoliberal experiment more obvious than in housing,
health, education and the environment. The squalid spectacle of poverty amidst
plenty. The entrenched inter-generational unfairness of the housing market. The
deep cultural affront of undrinkable water and unswimmable rivers. The virtual
debt peonage into which so many young New Zealanders seeking higher education have
fallen. The appalling state of New Zealand’s mental health services. These are
the targets upon which Ms Ardern must train her rhetorical guns. To prove that “New
Zealand can be better than this” – they are the giants she must slay.
“All changed, changed utterly” was how the
Irish poet William Butler Yeats described the Ireland that emerged from the
tragedy of the 1916 Easter Rebellion. Before the rising, he had despaired of
his society as a place where only fools prospered; a place of “polite
meaningless words” and pointless pub conversations. And then, suddenly, it
wasn’t. Where once there had been the despondent resignation that nothing could
ever change, the uprising’s tragic heroism was transforming everything.
Suddenly, a “terrible beauty” was born.
Yeats is right. The Goddess of History is a
terrible deity to behold. Ruthless and utterly uncompromising in her
expectations of those she thrusts forward onto the stage of human affairs. Yes,
it is a good thing to be “unrelentingly positive”. And, yes, “sunny ways” are
by far the best means of securing the electorate’s co-operation. But, if Ms
Ardern intends to offer them as alternatives to a 1984-style electoral
uprising, then she will fail.
“Sunny ways” are not enough.
This
essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 8 August 2017.
