Visitors With Votes.

The Way We Were - And Hoped To Remain: The iconic photograph of Prime Minister Norman Kirk holding the hand of a little Māori boy at Waitangi on 6 February 1973 held out the promise of a future founded upon the uncomplicated and uncontested acceptance of racial equality.  

WAITANGI DAY commentary see-saws manically between the warmly positive and the coldly negative. Many New Zealanders consider this a good thing. They point to the unexamined patriotism of July Fourth and Bastille Day celebrations, and applaud the fact that the character of Aotearoa-New Zealand, and its future evolution, remain matters for passionate disputation, rather than military chauvinism and outsized flags.

Conservatives of a certain age are less confident of the virtue of this annual debate. They look back wistfully to that period of New Zealand history when the constitutive peoples of New Zealand, Māori and Pakeha, gathered at Waitangi to celebrate the 1840 treaty signing which, according to Queen Victoria’s representative, Captain William Hobson, constituted them as “one people”.

In the memories of these people, no Waitangi Day better illustrated this notion of national unity than 6 February 1973. That was the day when the newly-elected Labour prime minister, Norman Kirk, announced that henceforth Waitangi Day would be known as New Zealand Day.

A powerful visual image of Kirk’s intentions for this new public holiday was provided by the photograph of a big prime minister holding the hand of a little Māori child as the two of them made their way across the Treaty Ground. Symbolically, the image suggested that the rising generation of Māori should expect to live lives of equivalent fullness to those of their Pakeha compatriots. The photograph’s clear assimilationist message was not welcomed by all, but for a large number of New Zealanders it expressed their hope for a future founded upon an uncomplicated and uncontested acceptance of racial equality.

“Why can’t we have Waitangi Days like that anymore?”, these old-timers ask. “Why can’t we celebrate the positive national achievements of New Zealanders, regardless of ethnicity? What is to be gained, in terms of strengthening social cohesion, by foregrounding – and all-too-often fomenting – this country’s ethnic divisions?”

The straightforward reply from the nation’s historians, Pakeha and Māori, is that the legacy of conquest, land seizure, economic marginalisation, and cultural erasure central to the European colonisation of New Zealand is seared into the collective memory of its indigenous people. At some point, the historical injustices that have not been forgotten by the colonised will have to be acknowledged and redressed by the colonisers. To suggest otherwise, they insist, is itself an act of colonialist oppression. Moreover, as the rising generation of Māori nationalists are only too willing to point out, by no means all these injustices are historical. Far too many of them are contemporary.

The articulation of such grievances, long assumed by the victors of the New Zealand Wars to be safely buried in the past, gathered momentum throughout the 1970s and 80s and were characterised by legal challenges and vigorous political protests.

The impressive Māori Land March of 1975 hastened the creation of the Waitangi Tribunal. Equipped with quasi-judicial powers, the Tribunal was instrumental in investigating past wrongs, determining the most appropriate means of their redress, and introducing New Zealanders to a more complete account of their history. Over the course of the next 50 years, its power and influence would undergo significant expansion.

The forcible eviction of the Ngati Whatua occupiers of Bastion Point in 1978 presented New Zealanders with a rare and shocking demonstration of the raw power of the Pakeha state. Hundreds of Police officers were involved, with logistical support provided by the armed forces. The operation provided a jarring reminder to New Zealanders that the alienation of Māori land and resources was predicated on the actual or threatened use of force by political and legal institutions that were overwhelmingly dominated by Pakeha – and remained so.

The watershed event that finally extinguished the sunny optimism of 1973, however, was the 1981 Springbok Tour. The dramatic and at times violent incidents that marked the 56-day tour by Apartheid South Africa’s rugby team brought the idealistic champions of classical racial equality into frequent and often uncomfortable contact with Māori protesters who had experienced first-hand the widespread and deeply ingrained Pakeha racism that, thanks to the Tour, would ensure the re-election of Rob Muldoon’s National Government.

The young, well-educated, middle-class Pakeha who mostly comprised the anti-tour movement found themselves at a moral disadvantage when challenged to account for the fact that they were willing to suffer Police batons for Black South Africans but not for Brown New Zealanders. Why was the racism of the White South Africans capable of inspiring a mass anti-racist movement, but not the equally egregious colonialist excesses of Pakeha regimes past and present?

The only acceptable answer was: “Because we’re as racist as the Rugby thugs.”

“Damn right!” came the Māori nationalists’ retort, “And now is the time for you to do something about it!”

Which they did. For the next forty years the students who had supplied the shock-troops of the anti-tour movement accepted the wero Māori Nationalists had laid before them and slowly but surely integrated it into whatever institutions they found themselves in a position to influence and/or control. Political parties, the courts, universities, schools, hospitals, the public service, law firms, the news media, trade unions, even corporations: all those institutions into which young, idealistic New Zealanders were disgorged annually. Places where, increasingly, the best way to get along was to go along with the ever-expanding ramifications of “the principles of te Tiriti o Waitangi”, and the Crown-Māori “partnership” which the New Zealand judiciary had determined the Treaty to mandate.

By the 2020s this self-replicating social layer of te Tiriti-inspired professionals, administrators and managers numbered in the hundreds-of-thousands and was exerting a decisive influence over the evolution of New Zealand’s political, social and cultural institutions. Binding its members together was a deep mistrust, bordering on active hostility, directed at that part of New Zealand society which evinced little or no understanding of, or enthusiasm for, te Tiriti and the transformational narrative it was driving forward. That this part of New Zealand almost certainly outnumbered te Tiriti’s promoters and protectors gave cause for even greater concern, raising serious doubts about the cultural safety of democratic institutions.

Nevertheless, it was this strategic aggregation of Pakeha allies that facilitated significant cultural, economic, and political indigenous progress – precipitating a veritable “Māori Renaissance”. Mutually reinforcing, the alliance between Pakeha jurists, administrators, and educators, and the rapidly expanding Māori middle-class fostered by te Tiriti’s official rehabilitation and the opportunities flowing from a succession of substantial iwi-based “Treaty settlements”, continued to grow and strengthen. By the second decade of the twenty-first century it had solidified into the permanent and seemingly unchallengeable arbiter of New Zealand’s social, economic, cultural and constitutional development.

Te Tiriti’s victory may have been complete in these institutional islands, but they were surrounded by a vast sea of doubt. A substantial majority of Pakeha, as well as a growing portion of the recent immigrant population, struggled to accept the Waitangi Tribunal’s increasingly radical findings. Before their eyes the power of the Crown seemed to be crumbling away – a shrinkage of sovereignty fuelled by historical revisionists who flatly contradicted the public’s understanding (however flawed) of their nation’s story.

It was only a matter of time before this public doubt crystalised into public anger. Increasingly, the narrative growing out of the Treaty’s judicial and bureaucratic restoration was being presented to Pakeha in ways that not only made clear the “settlers’” general unfitness to shape its evolution, but also rejected, absolutely, their democratic right to do so.

That the 80 percent of New Zealanders who did not identify as Māori were to be given no say in elevating the Treaty’s status to that of supreme and unchallengeable law was finally made clear in the He Puapua Report. This document, penned by Treaty scholars and activists, and presented secretly to the Sixth Labour Government in 2019, detailed the changes required to ensure that New Zealand’s constitutional arrangements conformed with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

The measures required to achieve this goal in time for the bicentennial celebration of the Treaty’s signing in 2040 were deemed to necessitate a full-scale constitutional revolution. This was not to be attempted in one go, however, but piecemeal. Each step along the way was to be accomplished through stand-alone, apparently unconnected, legislative adjustments. Significantly, the plan included no provision for these cumulative, transformational, changes to be presented to the whole citizenry for ratification by referendum. Like the proverbial slow-cooked frog, Pakeha New Zealanders were to be kept in ignorance of their constitutional fate until it was too late to change it.

That such a plan was thought to be implementable in an open democratic society speaks eloquently of elite New Zealanders’ assumptions concerning both the powers they wielded and the extent to which those powers could be challenged by ordinary citizens. As Sir Geoffrey Palmer makes clear in his book The New Zealand Constitution In Crisis, confidence in his own and other elite actors’ ability to sideline the democratic process was considerable:

The logic of the approach was as follows… Some parliamentary action by way of legislation was needed to make a base. But if that legislation itself redressed the grievances it would run into the problem that the majority of the community would oppose it. If, on the other hand, legislation was used to set up processes, and procedures and the principles on which decisions should be based were stated, it may be possible to get even a majoritarian legislature to act. The initial commitment required was to a process. No tangible outcome was provided by the legislation itself. What should be done was to be decided only after judicial or quasi-judicial processes had assessed individual cases. First it was necessary to give the courts something to interpret. Such was the nature of the approach I brought to both statutory incorporation of the Treaty in statutes, and extension of the Waitangi Tribunal to examine grievances back to 1840.

What brought He Puapua and the elite Treaty project generally to grief certainly wasn’t its exposure and condemnation by mainstream journalism. Indeed, the opposite was true: the major media organisations saw themselves as integral to the project’s success. Ultimately, what doomed the elites’ Treaty project to failure was the democratising impact of social media.

Palmer’s “processes” required media gatekeepers committed to keeping “the majority of the community” out of the game. In fact, so reliant upon the exclusionary powers of these gatekeepers were Palmer’s strategies for their ultimate success, that the moment the Internet empowered ordinary citizens to receive and impart information independently of the mainstream media and its guard-dogs, they began instantly to fall apart.

The picture that emerged from the collective exertions of these “citizen journalists” was as clear as it was disturbing. The bureaucratic and administrative elites had, since the early-1980s, come to view themselves as the irreplaceable brain and muscle of what political scientists call the “permanent state”, and constitutional lawyers refer to, simply, as “The Crown”. They had arrived at this conclusion alongside the leadership of the tangata whenua, who saw themselves, and were certainly acknowledged by the leaders of the Permanent State, as the “Permanent People”. The relationship between the two was mutually reinforcing.

The conclusion to be drawn from this reading of New Zealand’s constitutional, political and cultural evolution is daunting.

The status of those who are members of neither the Permanent State nor the Permanent People is problematic – to say the least! That they constitute a majority of the population is openly acknowledged by both the Crown and Māori. But, majorities under pressure from minorities all-too-easily behave tyrannically. Meaning that, while New Zealand remains a representative democracy, the non-Crown, non-Māori majority is likely to be treated as a permanent threat.

Because, what are they really? Victims of history: the flotsam and jetsam of a botched process of colonisation? Communities without roots, lacking permanent interests, bereft of cultural awareness, and off to Australia at the drop of a hat? A people just passing through?

No wonder Māori politicians call these New Zealanders manuhiri – visitors.

But that is not what they call themselves. It would, therefore, be most unwise of both the Permanent State and the Permanent People to forget that these visitors, these citizens, still come armed to the teeth with votes.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project website on Friday, 14 February 2025.

Handling Democracy.

String-Pulling in the Dark: For the democratic process to be meaningful it must also be public. 

WITH TRUST AND CONFIDENCE in New Zealand’s politicians and journalists steadily declining, restoring those virtues poses a daunting challenge. Just how daunting is made clear by comparing the way politicians and journalists treated New Zealanders fifty years ago with the way they handle them today.

The use of the word “handle” is deliberate. The way people are treated cannot be separated, conceptually, from the idea of accountability. Treat people well, and approbation generally follows; treat them badly, and condemnation is to be expected. Likewise, the idea of “handling” people cannot escape its negative associations with manipulation and cynicism. Nobody likes being “handled”.

How, then, were New Zealanders treated by their politicians and journalists in 1974? Given that the weekend just passed featured the Annual Conference of the New Zealand Labour Party (what? really? you didn’t notice?) perhaps the best place to start is with the way these events were covered fifty years ago.

Though younger New Zealanders will struggle to credit this, the annual conferences of the major parties were deemed sufficiently important for the state-owned television network to not only make them lead item on the nightly news bulletins, but also to produce special conference programmes for broadcast later in the evening. Over three consecutive nights, interested citizens could watch between 15-20 minutes of conference coverage – roughly an hour in total – from which to gauge the temper and condition of the political parties aspiring to govern them.

The nation’s newspapers were no less seized of the importance of reporting the major parties’ annual conferences thoroughly. Detailed coverage of major policy debates, including lengthy quotes from MPs’ and conference delegates’ speeches, was expected. And, since the job of covering politics fell to a small clutch of senior, highly-experienced journalists, their analysis of events, on and off the conference floor, was eagerly anticipated and consumed by interested readers.

Even 40 years ago, it still made sense for Labour Leader David Lange to quip that as PM he was required to satisfy the “Three Dicks” – The Dominion’s Richard Long, TVNZ’s Richard Harman, and Radio New Zealand’s Richard Griffin.

It is sobering to recall the respect accorded to the democratic ideal by the politicians and journalists of that now distant era. The idea of keeping the news media away from all but the most carefully stage-managed, set-piece, events – like the Leader’s speech – would have struck the politicians of that era as outrageous.

It was a simple matter of quid-pro-quo. If political parties expected to govern the country, then they were morally obliged to invite the country to observe and judge their deliberations. If that entailed party conference delegates revealing sharp divisions over the wisdom of a particular policy, then, so-be-it. That’s what politics is about.

Such close coverage had another side-effect. It allowed the public to catch its first glimpse of up-and-coming political talent. A delegate capable of delivering a memorable line, or telling a genuinely funny political joke, was someone who would be talked about the next day by thousands of his or her fellow Kiwis. They instantly became somebody party bosses and journalists, alike, needed to keep an eye on.

On all sides, fifty years ago, there was respect. Respect for the people who cared enough to participate in mass political organisations. Respect for the journalists who bore witness to the cut-and-thrust of real political debates. Respect for the entire democratic process which, to be meaningful also has to be public.

The contrast with the coverage of Labour’s 2024 annual conference could hardly be more stark. A minute or two of coverage on the six o’clock news bulletin was all the citizens of New Zealand were deemed fit to bear. Inevitably, everything was about the party leader, Chris Hipkins. How could it not be? The media were not encouraged to cover anybody other than “Chippie” and his allies.

Predictably, the key debate of the Conference, over tax policy, was held behind closed doors. No chance, then, for the public to gain some understanding of the mood of the party’s rank-and-file members. No chance of hearing an arresting flourish of rhetoric, or the sort of wit that bears repeating to friends and colleagues the following day. No chance, indeed, of encountering anything that hasn’t been pre-approved by the comms team well ahead of time.

Not that the comms team got everything right. Chippie’s Friday-night welcome to delegates included the line: “[I]n the true tradition of the Labour movement, we come together one year on not to mourn, but to organise.”

Now, any student of labour history will recognise that reference. The last words of the militant American trade union organiser and balladeer, Joe Hill, convicted on a trumped-up murder charge and executed in 1915 by a Utah firing squad, were: “Don’t mourn – organise!”

The risk, of course, was that anybody who recognised Joe Hill’s last words might take strong exception to Chris Hipkins comparing Labour’s well-deserved thrashing in the 2023 General Election, with the US copper bosses’ judicial murder of the Industrial Workers of the World’s (also known as the “Wobblies”) most beloved activist. Not that the risk was very high. Say “Wobbly” to the average Labour staffer of 2024 and they’ll assume you’re referring to jelly – or the Labour caucus.

Oh, for the days when there were political editors who understood what they were hearing, and recognised what they were looking at.

Willie Jackson’s co-starring role at this year’s Labour conference, for example, was decidedly odd. With a third of Labour’s voters supporting David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill, bringing out the legislation’s most truculent opponent should probably have struck at least some in the Press Gallery as an uncharacteristically bold move on the part of Labour’s apparatchiks.

Then again, Hipkins’ political survival resting squarely on the shoulders of Jackson and his Māori Caucus may be old news to the Press Gallery. Such a shame they have yet to share this crucial piece of political intelligence with the rest of us. It does, however, explain why Labour’s leadership has chosen te Tiriti as the hill upon which the party is ready to die – a second time.

Never mind, the comms team had carefully pre-tested a handful of bright shiny promises to distract the punters: Dunedin Hospital Rebuild Reaffirmed. Inter-Island Ferries Replaced as Planned. Labour will say ‘No’ to AUKUS. Got to make this “Coalition of Chaos” a one-term government!

It is here that the most important difference between 2024 and 1974 becomes clear. Fifty years ago, keeping democracy healthy was the No. 1 priority of politicians and journalists. Both knew the importance of allowing the public to observe what was happening in the nation’s most important political parties. How could voters deliver a credible electoral judgement if the doors were shut in the faces of their proxies – and the news media accepted such exclusion as fair and reasonable?

It is only when the democratic process is perceived by both politicians and journalists as a “deplorable” obstacle to the safe delivery of the political, social, economic and cultural outcomes they jointly favour, that treating their fellow citizens like mushrooms is considered acceptable. Only then does the need to “handle” New Zealanders become obvious.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 2 December 2024.

Procedures, Processes and Principles: Is It Possible To Defend The Treaty Of Waitangi And Democracy?

Out Of The Loop: The great insight of sympathetic Pakeha jurists, like Sir Geoffrey Palmer, was that, suitably empowered, the judiciary and the executive branch of the state could take on the role formerly played by the non-elected governors of mid-nineteenth century New Zealand. Māori resources could be protected, and past injustices redressed, but only if the Pakeha Parliament could somehow be persuaded to take itself out of the loop.

SIR GEOFFREY PALMER has penned a two-part response to Act Leader David Seymour’s “Treaty Principles Bill”. In its essence, Palmer’s contribution reflects the growing unease of the institutions which have hitherto dominated the Waitangi discourse – the legal profession, the courts, and the universities – that they are in real danger of losing control of the narrative.

Between the lines of Palmer’s analysis one detects a profound hostility to the populist impulse, and a palpable impatience with the machinery of representative government that empowers it. The clear intention of Palmer’s intervention is to deflect the popular desire for a democratically defined Treaty away from the decisive instruments of parliamentary democracy, and towards a much more manageable set of “deliberative” options.

In many ways it is surprising that Palmer, and those who share his ideas about the Treaty, did not anticipate the current populist push for a political solution to the doubts and anxieties raised by the document’s startling legal evolution. From the 1980s to the present day, some kind of democratic revision of the Treaty’s status and meaning was always on the cards.

In an address to the Māori Law Review Symposium entitled Māori, the Treaty and the Constitution on 12 June 2013, Palmer offered his audience the following, highly revealing, admission:

“If the remedying of injustice under the Treaty could only be done by Parliament under our existing constitutional structure, then the big obstacle was what John Stuart Mill called majority tyranny. If the legislation addressed the grievances, then majority tyranny would kick in and the likelihood of the issues being addressed in a principled fashion would be reduced. Elected politicians should not be involved in the investigation and formulation of the appropriate remedy. So Parliament had to be persuaded to initiate action, but not determine the nature of the grievance. A set of procedures, processes and principles was likely to work better. Thus, it seemed to me that the aim could be achieved by having Parliament set up a body to investigate and report. That meant extending the jurisdiction of the Waitangi Tribunal back to 1840.”

As a means of drawing the fangs of this supposed tyrannous and unprincipled majority (which is an interesting way of thinking about the nation’s political leaders and the people who elected them) these “procedures, processes and principles” were to prove their worth many times over. So much so, that Palmer felt able to reassure the symposium that:

“Insulation from the ravages of extreme opinion has been achieved. The settlements have become mainstream.”

But if elected politicians were to be excluded from the investigation and formulation of appropriate remedies for the sins of New Zealand’s colonial fathers, then in whose hands should the whole fraught process be placed? What other answer could a former law professor give except – the courts:

“The courts are better protectors of “discrete and insular minorities” than the majoritarian legislature, even under MMP. I remain of the opinion that the Treaty, like the Bill of Rights, should become part of New Zealand’s new superior law Constitution. We now know a great deal about how the courts will go about the task of interpreting the Treaty, just as we know how the courts go about interpreting the Bill of Rights Act. We have had more than twenty years’ experience of both […] We cannot go backward on these issues, but we need to summon up the political courage to go forward.”

The reference to “discrete and insular minorities” comes from a 1937 judgement of the United States Supreme Court. Such minorities, the justices explained, are “saddled with such disabilities, or subjected to such a history of purposeful unequal treatment, or relegated to such a position of political powerlessness as to command extraordinary protection from the majoritarian political process.”

In citing this celebrated case, Palmer was signalling to his 2013 audience that he well understood the historical predicament of the Māori people.

The Treaty of Waitangi was the initiative of a British Government which, in 1840, was impelled by the political principles then guiding its Foreign and Colonial Office to secure control of New Zealand, but only after obtaining the freely given consent of its indigenous inhabitants.

This was duly achieved by recognising the full authority – tino rangatiratanga – of tribal chieftains to determine the disposition of their lands, forests, fisheries, and other valued resources, as they saw fit, and by giving Maori the same rights and privileges as the people of Great Britain.

Crucially, the chiefs’ lands could only be sold to representatives of the British Government. Thus were Māori protected from the contemporaneous depredations of the agents of the rapacious New Zealand Company – and the French.

Overseeing the evolution of this new relationship would be a Governor appointed by the British Government. Not the least of the Governor’s duties was to protect the Māori tribes from the greed and the larceny of the British, European and American settlers determined to make their fortunes in Britain’s new colony.

While the original parties to the 1840 Treaty, the British Government and the tribal chiefs, continued to be the only parties that mattered, the relationship, though often strained, endured. By the early 1850s, however, the fast-growing population of Pakeha settlers was demanding that the powers-that-be in London grant them self-government.

The settlers objective was brutally simple: to avail themselves of Māori land without having to secure the chiefs’ and/or the Governor’s permission. In other words, they wanted to construct a New Zealand state in which the Treaty could be dismissed as a “simple nullity”. Such a state could only be created by the forcible dispossession of Māori hapu and iwi, but that was a price the Pakeha settlers were perfectly willing to pay.

Putting the matter bluntly, the greatest enemy of Māori, since 1853, has been the Pakeha Parliament. While its power to make the law remained untrammelled there was nothing Māori could do to defend their fast-diminishing patrimony.

The great insight of sympathetic Pakeha jurists, like Palmer, was that, suitably empowered, the judiciary and the executive branch of the state could take on the role formerly played by the non-elected governors of mid-nineteenth century New Zealand. Māori resources could be protected, and past injustices redressed, but only if the Pakeha Parliament could somehow be persuaded to take itself out of the loop.

It is, perhaps, the most remarkable aspect of New Zealand history that, for a period of roughly half-a-century, the nation’s elected representatives were willing to do just that. They made way for the courts, the Waitangi Tribunal, and the Office of Treaty Settlements to right as many of the wrongs done to te iwi Māori as they adjudged Pakeha voters to be willing to accept.

That turned out to be an impressively large number. But, by 2023, Pakeha voters’ – or, at least, a majority of Pakeha voters’ – willingness to go on righting the wrongs of the past had reached its limit. In response, the newly elected Pakeha Parliament, to the utter dismay of the courts, the Waitangi Tribunal, and the Office of Māori Crown Relations, determined to suddenly and dramatically re-enter the loop.

Small wonder Palmer is calling for “deliberative” alternatives to parliamentary action, such as randomly selected citizens’ assemblies, to be substituted for the deliberations of the House of Representatives. These latter, which tend to culminate in legislative action, are to be avoided at all costs lest they precipitate a head-on collision between the legislature, the judiciary, and that part of the executive branch represented by the state bureaucracy.

Palmer, and those who share his outlook, must know that in any contest between Parliament and the rest of the State only two outcomes are possible. Either the coercive agencies of the state – the armed forces and the police – put an end to representative democracy on the Executive’s/Judiciary’s behalf. Or, the key institutions of the state, with varying degrees of rage and reluctance, bow to “majority tyranny” and the “ravages of extreme opinion”.

Otherwise known as the will of the people.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack page on Thursday, 26 September 2024.

Has Government Become A Public-Private Partnership?

Dirty Deals Done In The Dark: There will be times when it is to the considerable advantage of both National and Labour to be able to shrug philosophically and pardon themselves for cooperating in the introduction of controversial and divisive policies by explaining to an outraged public that this is simply the way MMP works. Photo by Lynn Grieveson.

“CAMPAIGN IN POETRY, govern in prose.” It is one of the most memorable political maxims to emerge from American politics. A relic, perhaps, of the era in which the policies of the major parties did not diverge substantially from one another. In those circumstances, the winning of elections is largely reduced to questions of style and performance.

The maxim’s most famous proof came in the presidential election of 2008. Millions of American’s were uplifted by Democratic Party candidate Barak Obama’s soaring rhetoric. Pundits and professors compared his speeches to JFK’s, or even to those of Rome’s greatest orator, Cicero. His campaign poster, emblazoned with just one word: “Hope”, and his campaign slogan: “Yes we can!”, all contributed to the “poetry” of his victory over the Republicans’ John McCain. In office, however, Obama turned out to be a very prosaic president indeed. As McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin later quipped: “How’s that hopey, changey thing going for ya?”

A large measure of policy consensus, by refocusing attention upon the personalities of contending party leaders, offers the additional benefit of keeping the political temperature agreeably low. Representative democracy works best when the most heated arguments are restricted to the cover art, rather than the content, of the political books on sale. It is only when the personalities presenting the policies begin to matter less than the policies presented, that the prospects for a peaceful transfer of power start to diminish. When a party’s supporters become convinced that they cannot afford to lose an election, they will stop at nothing to win it.

The greatest virtue of the First-Past-the-Post (FPP) electoral system (and it does not possess that many!) is its propensity to, first, generate a broad measure of political consensus, and, second, to deliver the decisive electoral outcomes required to keep that consensus in place. It is only when the voters begin to sense a widening gap between the rules of the traditional democratic game, and the rules of whatever game its leading politicians have taken to playing, that demands for a new set of rules – or even a whole new game – start attracting significant support.

New Zealand’s adoption of the Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) electoral system was driven by the widely-shared voter perception that Labour, followed by National, had been taken over by ideological zealots who made a fetish out of their refusal to be swayed by the policy preferences of either their own party members, or the voters.

Perhaps the most dramatic demonstration of this indifference to public opinion came from Labour Cabinet Minister Richard Prebble, who, upon learning that close to 90 percent of the population opposed the privatisation of Telecom (then a state-owned telecommunications enterprise) declared that New Zealanders should be proud to have a government willing to defy such a powerful pressure-group!

In large measure, MMP prevailed over FPP in the referendum of 1993 because most voters were convinced that the coalition governments made more-or-less obligatory by proportional representation would prevent the politicians responsible for turning Labour and National into ideologically-reanimated zombie parties from imposing upon New Zealanders even more economic and social “reforms” they hadn’t asked for and didn’t want.

What most New Zealand voters failed to grasp, however, is that for this moderating influence on Labour and National to be effective, the new minor parties made possible by MMP would need to possess extraordinary negotiating skills, and, if these proved inadequate and/or unavailing, the political courage to force a new election. That was a very big ask. To date, no minor party has been willing to court the electorate’s wrath by becoming the tail that wagged the dog. Certainly, the conventionally wise have cautioned against such behaviour. Indeed, the pundits’ predictions have never varied: any minor party deemed responsible for forcing a new election will be “wiped out”.

But, the minor parties were damned if they did, and damned if they didn’t. Voters may well have punished any small party that forced them back to the polls, but that didn’t mean those same voters were ready to reward it for refusing to create political instability. Parties opting to enter coalition arrangements with either Labour or National, and agreeing to swallow all manner of dead rats in the process, frequently found themselves falling below the 5 percent MMP threshold at the next election.

Governing in prose came at considerable cost to the minor parties.

Preserving the policy consensus they were elected to unwind, however, was not a strategy the minor parties could afford to pursue indefinitely. The logic of MMP is implacable. Excessive co-operation with a major party is likely to result in the guilty minor party exiting Parliament – as NZ First, the Alliance, and the Māori Party could all attest, and Act, too, would surely have attested, had it not been for the strategic nous of the Epsom voters. In order to survive, a minor party must present to their preferred coalition partner a short list of “must haves” that cannot, under any circumstances, be traded away.

It must, however, do more than that. To get around the problem of what to do if the major party says “No.”, a minor party needs to persuade those with a powerful commercial and/or political interest in seeing specific policies enacted to clear a path for them in either National or Labour well in advance the next scheduled general election. Intensive lobbying, generous targeted donations, probably both, will be deployed to create what amount to “fifth columns” of policy allies inside the major parties. With these in place, the pressure to give the minor parties their “must haves” will likely prove irresistible.

Such arrangements are unlikely to generate serious objections from within the major parties. There will be times, after all, when it is to the considerable advantage of both National and Labour to be able to shrug philosophically and pardon themselves for cooperating in the introduction of controversial and divisive policies by explaining to an outraged public that this is simply the way MMP works.

Naturally, if it was just up to them, they wouldn’t dream of re-writing the Treaty, introducing hate speech laws, relaxing firearm controls, phasing out the internal combustion engine, introducing a Māori upper house, reducing the taxes on tobacco products, or privatising the Cook Strait ferries, but, sadly, the wishes of one’s coalition partners cannot be ignored.

Given the pernicious evolutionary path MMP now appears to be following, does it still make sense to talk about campaigning in poetry, and governing in prose? Sadly, it does not.

Lobbying and donating large sums of money to carefully cultivated politicians in both the major and the minor parties, for the purposes of securing specific policy objectives, is not the sort of behaviour that lends itself to poetry – unless it’s Bob Dylan’s pithy observation that “money doesn’t talk, it swears”.

Governing, too, is changing. No longer written in the dull but honest prose attendant upon raising the money needed to keep the nation solvent and in good heart, government, today, is all about fulfilling private interests’ pre-paid objectives – while attempting to pass them off as your own.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 23 September 2024.

Managed Democracy: Letting The People Decide, But Only When They Can Be Relied Upon To Give the Right Answer.

Uh-uh! Not So Fast, Citizens! The power to initiate systemic change remains where it has always been in New Zealand’s representative democracy – in Parliament. To order a binding referendum, the House of Representatives must first to be persuaded that, on the question proposed, sharing its decision-making power with the people is a good idea. Not an easy task.

WHEN DID HOLDING REFERENDA become a bad thing? What transformed the option of asking citizens to decide an issue collectively into a sin against democracy on a par with the Reichstag Fire? In attempting to answer that question, it is important to establish that referenda have been a common feature of New Zealand political life for more than a century.

Voters participated in what was called the “National Licencing Poll” – a referendum – at every general election held between 1919 and 1989. The question put to them was whether New Zealand should embrace “Prohibition”, “Continuance”, or the “State Purchase and Control” of alcohol. More than once, astonishingly, “Prohibition” came within a percentage point of winning!

In August 1949, 77 percent of New Zealanders voted in favour of a Labour Government sponsored referendum calling for compulsory military training in peacetime.

Twice since 1967 New Zealanders have been given a choice between a three-year and a four-year parliamentary term. (Spoiler Alert: Both times they opted to stick with a three-year term.)

In 2015 and 2016, New Zealanders voted in two referenda to decide whether or not the nation’s flag should be replaced.

In 2020, Kiwis voted to legalise euthanasia, and reaffirm Cannabis prohibition, in two separate and binding referenda.

Most significantly, however, New Zealand’s electoral system was changed profoundly, and remained so, on the strength of not one, not two, but three referenda.

How, then, has this tried and tested means of testing the general will been transformed into something so dreadful that 440 Christian clerics recently felt compelled to publish an open letter to the nation’s legislators urging them to reject out of hand a bill defining the principles of te Tiriti o Waitangi, and providing for these legislatively (re)defined principles to be accepted or rejected by referendum at the next general election?

The answer to this question may be found in the unfortunate history of Citizens Initiated Referenda (CIR). Much like the popular campaign for a shift towards proportional representation, the demand for citizens initiated referenda grew out of the public’s immense dissatisfaction with a political system that seemed impervious to the popular will.

In spite of all the promises made to voters in the run-up to general elections, the neoliberal economic and social order erected by Labour in the late-1980s, and reinforced by National in the early-1990s, remained unchallengeable.

The First-Past-the-Post electoral system, by delivering an absolute majority of the seats in the House of Representatives to single parties receiving less (and, not infrequently, considerably less) than 51 percent of the popular vote, allowed doctrinaire governments to defy public opinion. Under the prevailing two-party system, and with Labour and National equally committed to preserving the neoliberal order, root-and-branch change remained the preserve of parliamentarians – not citizens.

To the chagrin of those who had successfully campaigned for proportional representation, the new electoral system – “MMP” – hardly improved matters. While the New Zealand Parliament became more representative of New Zealand’s increasingly diverse electorate, the electoral duopoly committed to the survival of neoliberalism remained strong enough to deny smaller parties the critical policy concessions they and their supporters were anticipating under the new MMP system.

The public push for CIRs was intended to supply the “braces” to proportional representation’s “belt”. Any government foolhardy enough to dig in its toes over dismantling neoliberalism could be forced to do so, albeit in piecemeal fashion, by having specific policy changes mandated by referendum.

With the decisive referendum on MMP looming in 1993, the National Government appeased the CIR campaigners by passing legislation allowing for 10 percent of electors to initiate a referendum. There was, however, a catch. Any referendum thus initiated would not be binding.

Huh? Wasn’t that a pretty massive spanner to throw in the works of plebiscitary democracy? With the benefit of hindsight, the answer seems blindingly obvious. At the time, however, people were persuaded that it might be dangerous to bind the hands of government quite so tightly. More importantly, they bought the argument that no government would be foolhardy enough to ignore the moral force of a successful referendum.

Yeah, right.

Without the assurance of the CIR’s result being binding, a worryingly large percentage of New Zealand’s already cynical electorate consistently declined to participate in the process. But, without a convincing turn-out, the politicians argued, no affirmative result could be taken seriously. Even 100 percent support for a proposition loses its lustre when three-quarters of the population cries-off expressing an opinion.

Unsurprisingly, the public’s enthusiasm for CIRs soon waned.

The initiative for change thus remains where it has always been in New Zealand’s representative democracy – with Parliament. To order a binding referendum, the House of Representatives must first to be persuaded that, on the question proposed, sharing its decision-making power with the people is a good idea.

Not an easy task.

Getting Parliament to devolve its power is made even more difficult if the question to be decided runs counter to the accepted wisdom of the ruling elites and their parliamentary proxies. In the case of questions requiring the jettisoning of neoliberal economics, or messing around with the accepted understanding of te Tiriti o Waitangi, those MPs attempting to give the people the final say should expect to be opposed by an overwhelming majority of their colleagues.

Which is precisely what Act’s MPs have discovered in relation to their leader, David Seymour’s, Treaty Principles Bill.

Every other party in Parliament opposes vociferously the very thought of defining the principles of te Tiriti by referendum. The issues, they say, are far too complex to be resolved by such a crude political mechanism. Treaty matters are best left to the sober deliberations of New Zealand’s most senior judges, the Waitangi Tribunal, and experienced public servants. They must not, under any conceivable circumstances, be left to the tender mercies of the ordinary New Zealander in the street.

Were such a thing to happen, the parties argue, New Zealand’s social cohesion would likely be sorely tested. If David Seymour’s definitions of the Treaty’s principles are ratified by referendum, they warn, there could be violence.

Backing these alarming claims is the Ministry of Justice’s Regulatory Impact Statement which further cautions the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government that: “[P]utting decision-making on Treaty matters to the wider public through a referendum brings a significant risk that the will of a non-Māori majority will impose on the minority partners (who are also most likely to be affected by the policy).”

That this is precisely what has been proposed in every binding referendum ever conducted in New Zealand seems to have escaped the Ministry of Justice.

The will of the alcohol consuming majority was triennially imposed upon the teetotalling minority. The will of the communist-fearing majority in 1949 over-ruled those who opposed turning teenagers into cannon-fodder.

It’s the way democracy works: by ensuring that politicians are only able to exercise power legitimately “with the consent of the governed”; because the only state of affairs worse than the tyranny of a ballot-casting majority, is the tyranny of a violence-threatening minority.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack page on Friday, 13 September 2024.

Making A Difference.

The Jacinda and Ashley Show: Before the neoliberals could come up with a plausible reason for letting thousands of their fellow citizens perish, the Ardern-led government, backed by the almost forgotten power of an unapologetically interventionist state, was producing changes in the real world – changes that were, very obviously, saving the lives of real New Zealanders.

“ROGERNOMICS” didn’t just transform New Zealand’s economy and society, it profoundly changed its politicians. Members of the “political class” of 2024 display radically different beliefs from the individuals who governed New Zealand prior to 1984. The most alarming of these post-1984 beliefs dismisses Members of Parliament and local government politicians as singularly ill-qualified to determine the fate of the nations they have been elected to lead.

This paradox is readily explained when the core convictions driving the political class are exposed. The most important of these is that ordinary voters have absolutely no idea how, or by whom, their country is governed. The ordinary voter’s conviction that “the people” rule – as opposed to the “loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires” whose worldwide corporate interests are protected by globally organised media and public relations companies – is offered as proof of their all-round imbecility. Politicians might just as well be guided by baboons as by the ordinary voter!

This contemptuous view of the people who elect politicians to public office is, naturally, kept well-hidden from the electorate. Indeed, these disdainful “representatives” are forever celebrating in public what they denounce privately as dangerous, “the principles of democratic government”. Why? Because the alternative to perpetuating the myth that the people (demos) rule (kratos) – i.e. by making it clear to them that they don’t – is much, much worse.

Ruling a country by force, rather than by consent, not only turns most of the population into the rulers’ enemies, but also leaves the political class acutely vulnerable to the institutions responsible for perpetrating the violence that keeps it in power. All too often these “men with guns” decide to cut out the political middlemen and rule directly. Historically-speaking, this is the royal-road to graft, corruption, extortion, and, ultimately, to the formation of a brutal kleptocracy. NOT a situation conducive to either making, or keeping, one’s profits!

That feudalism, and the absolute monarchies that grew out of it, were, in essence, arrangements predicated on the maintenance of well-organised bodies of armed and violent men might, given contemporary capitalism’s distaste for such regimes, be considered ironic. Living under the sway of these “gentlemen”, and being required to pay their protection money the swingeing taxes they imposed, did not make for a happy life – or, at least, not for the 95 percent of the population – including the merchant class – forbidden from owning swords!

The popularity of democracy, as a system designed to reduce sharply the power of bullies and extortionists, tends to be greater the nearer in time its beneficiaries are to the oppressive political regimes from which “people-power” liberated them. Even as capitalism began to hit its stride in the nineteenth century, such democratic (or quasi-democratic) legislatures as existed (and there weren’t many) proved remarkably reluctant to bow before the doctrine of laissez-faire. (French for “let the capitalists do what they like’.) The Victorians who founded New Zealand, and wrote its Constitution Act, were impressively unconvinced that a man with a plan (women were yet to be included in their discussions) could not improve the lives of his fellow citizens by persuading them to elect him to Parliament.

This conviction that politicians could make a positive difference to the lives of ordinary people took root more tenaciously in New Zealand than just about any other country on the face of the earth. The radical reforms of the Liberal government (1890-1912) and the first Labour government (1935-1949) earned New Zealand the title “social laboratory of the world”. Politicians who were similarly determined to make a difference came from Europe and America to observe first-hand New Zealand’s own special brand of “socialism without doctrines”.

The people who rendered making a difference unsafe were, of course, the socialists with doctrines. The unfortunate Russians and Chinese would pass from feudalism to communism without any extended period of democratic government in between. From noblemen with swords, they passed into the hands of commissars with pistols. The taxes were just as swingeing, but at least Communism’s bullies and extortionists contrived to paint Paradise in colours more exciting than white.

Lest their workers decide to paint their own countries red, Western capitalists were persuaded, very reluctantly, to let them be painted pink. The problem with social-democracy, however, was that if you conceded it an inch, it would, albeit incrementally, take you many miles down “the road to serfdom”. Such was the grim thesis of the Austrian, arch-capitalist economist, Friedrich von Hayek, founder of the Switzerland-based free-market think tank, the Mont Pelerin Society, and spiritual father of neoliberal political economy.

Labour’s Roger Douglas was a member of the aforesaid Mont Pelerin Society, as was National’s Ruth Richardson, along with quite a number of the bureaucrats and businessmen who first set New Zealand on the road to neoliberalism. At the heart of their project was a very simple imperative: Don’t let politicians near anything even remotely important. Leave all the important decisions to the market, or, at least, to those who own and control the market.

Those who struggle to understand why neoliberals are constantly presenting mild-mannered social-democrats as fire-breathing communists should view their behaviour as pre-emptive ideological law enforcement – pre-crime-fighting. Politicians determined to “make a positive difference” may begin by building state-houses, the neoliberals argue, but they always end up creating gulags. Better by far to create a society in which “making a positive difference” is restricted to capitalist entrepreneurs. Don’t let the political do-gooders get started.

Clearly, no one sent the memo to Jacinda Ardern. Or, if they did, she profoundly misunderstood it. Making a positive difference was what New Zealand’s young prime minister all-too-evidently believed the Labour Party had been established to enable. But, when she said “Let’s do this!”, all those around her, either gently, or not-so-gently, said “You can’t do that!”

It may have looked as though there were levers to pull to set up a light-rail network, build 100,000 affordable houses, end child poverty, and combat global warming, but they weren’t attached to anything. “Jacinda” could pull on them all she wanted, put on a good show, but the cables linking politicians’ promises to real-world outcomes had all been cut decades earlier. She didn’t appear to understand that disempowering politicians was what Rogernomics had been all about.

But, as is so often the case in history, the story was changed by something its author’s had failed to imagine, or anticipate. The onset of a global pandemic made it absolutely necessary that the lever labelled “Keeping New Zealanders Safe” was at the end of a cable that was very firmly attached to the real world, and that the person pulling the lever was empathically qualified to make a real and positive difference.

Before the neoliberals could come up with a plausible reason for letting thousands of their fellow citizens perish, the Ardern-led government, backed by the almost forgotten power of an unapologetically interventionist state, was producing changes in the real world – changes that were, very obviously, saving the lives of real New Zealanders.

It couldn’t last. Neoliberalism, like rust, never sleeps, and in less than a year the lever Ardern and her colleagues had pulled on with such energy had been quietly reconnected to less effective – but more divisive – parts of the state machine. But, not before “Jacinda” and her party had done the impossible. Not before Labour had won 50.01 percent of the Party Vote in the 2020 General Election.

There’s a lesson in there somewhere. Maybe, just maybe, politicians, acting in the interests of the people who elected them, aren’t always ill-qualified to lead? Maybe, just maybe, it is still possible for men and women of good will to make a positive difference?

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack on Tuesday, 20 August 2024.

The Illusion of Power: How Local Government Bureaucrats Overawe Democratically-Elected Councillors..

The Democratic Façade Of Local Government: Our district and city councillors are democratically elected to govern their communities on one very strict condition – that they never, ever, under any circumstances, attempt to do so.

A DISINTEGRATION OF LOYALTIES on the Wellington City Council has left Mayor Tory Whanau without a reliable majority. The cause of this disintegration has been identified by those whose loyalty has been tested to destruction as Council Staff. Not only do WCC employees and consultants stand accused of pushing aggressively for the sale of the Council’s shares in Wellington Airport, but also of intimidating and threatening Councillors opposed to the proposed divestment. If these accusations are proved, then serious questions will need to be raised concerning the authenticity of local democracy right across New Zealand.

But what could possibly persuade a councillor that he or she was not free to vote as they pleased? These men and women are the citizens’ elected representatives, so, surely, the opinions of the Council’s employees may be heeded, or rejected, according to the best judgement of the politicians it is their function to serve. Bluntly, Council staff and their expertise should be on tap – not on top!

Certainly, that is the way it used to be – back in the days when the elected councillors were served by a Town Clerk, assisted by a small but highly competent staff. Back then, no Town Clerk worthy of the name would have dreamed of intimidating or threatening the citizens’ representatives. The very idea would have left the Mayor with little choice but to send his Town Clerk packing. Indeed, any failure to punish such an open affront to local democracy would have left the electors with little choice but to send the Mayor packing at the next election.

Today, however, elected councillors are served by a bureaucracy over which, in practical terms, they exercise no effective control. Theoretically, the Chief Executive of the Council is obliged to give effect to the broad policy objectives identified by the citizen’s representatives. In reality, however, councillors are strongly discouraged from interfering directly with the CEO’s interpretation of his or her received policy priorities. “Operational” matters are the CEO’s preserve – and councillors are legally forbidden from adopting a “hands-on” approach to the governance of their city. Indeed, most councils employ a “Democracy Manager” to make damn sure that the councillors keep their hands off!

No longer can an aggrieved citizen pick up the phone to her local councillor and complain long and loud about the dirty great pothole at the entrance to her street. Neither is it possible for the Councillor to pick up the phone to the foreman of the road gang that fills in the potholes on the aggrieved citizen’s side of town. Were he to be so bold, he would receive a decidedly icy call from the Council’s Democracy Manager. In the course of this “discussion” he would be forcefully reminded that he is legally prohibited from involving himself in “operational matters”. And the pothole? Ah, well, its repair would be added to the extremely long list of potholes that a privately-owned company, contracted to the Council, has been tasked with filling. Best guess? Sometime before the century’s end.

So, right from the get-go, elected representatives are encouraged to see themselves as people who not only should, but must, keep themselves well above the fray of day-to-day administration. What’s more, as they are earnestly contemplating staying above the fray, the Democracy Manager will be introducing them to a document called the “Councillors’ Code of Conduct”. At the heart of this code is a strict series of prohibitions against saying anything unpleasant or critical about the Mayor, their fellow councillors, the electors, or – and this is emphasised strongly – the Council Staff.

Less emphasised is the fact that such documents are not legally enforceable, and that it is not compulsory to sign them. What the unwary councillor will likely fall prey to, in such circumstances, is the irresistible moral suasion that inevitably engulfs anyone who is being “asked” to sign a document that everybody else is signing.

After all, what reason would a councillor have for not signing a document intended to ensure that council meetings proceed amicably and without rancour? A refusal to sign the Code of Conduct will be construed as proof of the noncompliant councillor’s intention to cause trouble. And, being branded a troublemaker in the first week of one’s three year term is unlikely to strike most local government politicians as a good start.

To re-cap: the votes have hardly been counted before the elected councillors are being told that while they are perfectly entitled to talk about policy, they must, on no account, attempt to implement it. And, while they’re talking about policy, or receiving the reports of those who are empowered to implement it (which usually detail how little implementation has actually been accomplished) these same councillors are not allowed to get angry, call each other names, compare colleagues unfavourably with lickspittles and cowards, or – and this cannot be emphasised too strongly – in any way criticise or abuse Council Staff.

The message is crystal clear: As a city councillor you have no real power and should not pretend, to anyone, that you do. It’s the Council staff that really run things. They’re the ones who keep things operating smoothly. They know what’s going on and what needs to be done. Some staff members have PhDs, others have worked successfully in the private sector. How many councillors can boast such expertise? Not many – if any. So, what should they do? That’s right, they should keep their ears open and their mouths shut. If you want to get along as a city councillor, then you’ve got to learn to go along.

And, if none of this works? If there are still a handful of councillors who still feel obliged to heed their own best judgement about where the interests of the city’s residents lie, and to follow the dictates of their conscience. What do Council staff do then?

Well, then, the Council’s lawyers corner the unruly councillors and proceed to spell out for them what they insist is their precarious legal position. Declaring one’s opposition to a plan to sell down the Council’s shares in public utilities, for example, and voting accordingly, could easily result in commercial interests suing them for failing to act impartially. Any proposition brought before the Council, these lawyers will insist, must be judged on its objective merits. Those who have declared their position prior to the Council’s official deliberation cannot possibly expect to cast a vote. They must, instead, recuse themselves of any involvement in the decision. In fact, it would be most improper if they were even seated at the Council Table when discussion is taking place – lest they unduly influence the outcome.

In other words, our district and city councillors are democratically elected to govern their communities on one very strict condition – that they never, ever, under any circumstances, attempt to do so.

The three young progressive councillors who have announced their unwillingness to continue getting along by going along with Mayor Whanau should be hailed as heroes. Against all the odds, they have retained sufficient self-respect to say “This far, Tory, but no further!”

What’s more, if their colleagues in Central Government really wanted to help conscientious and courageous councillors across New Zealand, then they would legislate to outlaw any and all attempts by local government bureaucrats and/or contractors to intimidate, threaten, or by any other means overawe, those elected to serve the public interest, and enforce the people’s will.

But, don’t hold your breath.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack page on Thursday, 13 June 2024.

Democracy Denied.

Political Intervention From Above: From the early-1970s on, lobbying firms and think-tanks have grown like Topsy all across the capitalist world. Had the progressive middle-class not drawn its teeth and clipped its claws, an angry working-class might have risen to meet the Robber Baron’s challenge as it did in the 1890s, the 1930s and the 1970s. Without the kratos of the unruly majority of the demos behind them, however, the paternalist strategies of the progressives were easily countered.

DEMOCRACY WILL ALWAYS BE HATED by the rich and powerful. This is a truth that should never be, but all-too-often is, forgotten. If the kratos (power) really does reside in the demos (people) then it cannot reside in the clubs and boardrooms of the corporate elites. The stronger the people become, the more determined the elites will grow to destroy the institutions through which popular power is expressed. Much has been made recently (not least by the Democracy Project) of the political influence of lobbyists and think-tanks, as if this was somehow a new and disturbing development. It is not. All that the growing power and influence of lobbyists and think-tanks reveals is the growing weakness of our democratic institutions.

Rather than devoting their energies to building up the strength of those institutions – by aggressively re-democratising the Labour Party and the trade union movement, both of which have long-since ceased to evince the slightest democratic energy – more and more leftists are avoiding the implications of their crushing political defeat by jumping down the rabbit hole of Mihingarangi Forbes’ Atlas Network conspiracy theory.

According to Forbes’ narrative, New Zealand’s political life is increasingly falling under the influence of unseen bad actors. These dark forces are unfairly resourced with all the talents and resources needed to shape and steer decisions critical to New Zealand’s future without the public’s knowledge.

If this all sounds like the plot of a Dan Brown novel, it’s because both Forbes and the author of The Da Vinci Code both deal in fiction. Forbes’ dark forces are, in fact, openly acknowledged and registered pressure groups, like the Taxpayers’ Union, which operate in the broad light of day and are constantly seeking to engage with the public via electronic newsletters, public meetings, and the media. Real conspirators do not behave like this. Prior to flying hijacked planes into the Twin Towers, Al Qaeda did not issue a press release!

What Forbes is attempting to paint as sinister and illegitimate is actually a very real tribute to the power of grass-roots organising. What makes the Taxpayers’ Union so effective is what made Halt All Racist Tours (HART) so effective: a popular cause; generous donors; dedicated leadership; powerful propaganda; and a bloody huge mailing-list. It is ironic that the organising model which the Left now attempts to pass-off as diabolical, is what made the left-wing pressure groups of the past so politically effective.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of the New Zealand Right borrowing the tactics of the New Zealand Left is the New Zealand National Party. National’s founders were determined that their fledgling organisation should grow into a mass party – as large, if not larger, than the New Zealand Labour Party. How else could they hope to defeat it?

Just like Labour, National gave itself a branch structure which penetrated deeply into ideologically sympathetic communities. Membership fees were kept within the reach of the ordinary voter, and the members themselves were constitutionally empowered to choose parliamentary candidates and participate in the formation of National Party policy. The “divisional” structure of the party guaranteed a large measure of regional autonomy from the party’s central office.

In short, until Stephen Joyce transformed it into a self-perpetuating oligarchy in 2003, National was a thoroughly democratic organisation. Had it not been, the party would not have been able to dominate New Zealand’s post-war politics so emphatically. At its peak in the mid-1970s, National’s membership topped a quarter-of-a-million.

What Forbes and her fellow conspiracy-theorists fail to grasp about democratic success, is that the exercise of real political power by working-class people (as evidenced by Labour’s dramatic economic and social transformations of the 1930s and 40s) does not just alarm the corporate elites.

When confronted by a confident and increasingly insubordinate working-class, broad swathes of the middle-class grow fearful that their superior social status is about to be eroded. To resist the rise of the working-class, two strategic options present themselves. The first is to effect a middle-class alignment with the ruling elites. The second is for the middle-class, using its credentialled expertise, to overwhelm the organisations of the working-class, turning lions into lambs and effectively giving the bosses two parties to play with.

The New Zealand middle-class has chosen both options. It’s commercial and industrial half backs the corporate elites in National, while its professional and managerial half makes sure Labour remains the neoliberal party it helped it to become in the 1980s and 90s. Middle-class idealists may have migrated to the Alliance and the Greens, but their more “progressive” policies have not yet contributed, in any meaningful way, to the re-empowering of the working-class.

Historically, “progressivism” represented the educated American middle-class’s answer to the brutally democratic working-class solutions developed by immigrant communities living in the United States’ largest cities during the Nineteenth Century. Dubbed “machine politics” by middle-class reformers affronted by its ruthless majoritarianism and unabashed clientism (which the reformers called corruption) progressivism successfully tamed the unruly beast that was American democracy, and made sure that working-class Americans kept their red crayoning safely inside the lines.

But, just because the kratos has been relocated in the hands of the more respectable sort of demos doesn’t mean that the corporate elites were willing to leave the political stage to those who clearly saw themselves as stepping nimbly between the Scylla of an angry working-class, and the Charybdis of Robber Baron Capitalism. Progressivism (a.k.a social-democracy) needs working-class votes if it is to wield political power, so, at least some of its measures must be to the obvious advantage of the whole population.

Not acceptable. As the capitalist elites discovered in the 1970s, even the middle-class version of democracy has a nasty habit of eventually encroaching on those parts of the system which capitalism has ruled off-limits. Give people of colour, or women, or the environment, enforceable rights and the next thing you know the cheeky so-and-sos will be wanting to use them.

What to do? Easy. Raise several well-equipped ideological divisions and throw them into the battle of ideas. From the early-1970s on, lobbying firms and think-tanks have grown like Topsy all across the capitalist world. Had the progressive middle-class not drawn its teeth and clipped its claws, an angry working-class might have risen to meet the Robber Baron’s challenge as it did in the 1890s, the 1930s and the 1970s. But, without the kratos of the unruly majority of the demos behind them, the paternalist strategies of the progressives were easily countered.

When the corporate elites discovered how intensely the working-class hated the educated middle-class that had shut them out of power, they must have known they couldn’t lose.

And, that’s the problem with democracy, isn’t it? It’s indivisible. Deny it to some, and you end up allowing its enemies to deny it to all.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project of Monday, 19 February 2024.

Time To Choose.

To Have And To Hold: And now, as if the malevolent spirit of the times has not destabilised our world enough, New Zealanders’ adherence to the values and processes of democracy is being put to the test. Once again, the dividing line is horizontal, not vertical, with the “decolonising” project of Māori nationalism sundering the supporters of democracy from the partisans of ethnic exceptionalism. 

TO BE POLITICAL in the fourth quarter of 2023 is not easy. Yes, New Zealand has just passed through a general election, but the outcome of that contest was signalled well in advance by the polls. That the government lost came as no surprise, even if the vehemence of the electorate’s judgement came as a shock to many of the defeated party’s supporters. But, it wasn’t Labour’s thrashing, and the victory of the Right, that made politics so hard. The explanation for the souring of political discourse here, and around the world, may be traced to Southern Israel, Hamas’s hideous rampage of 7 October, and the furious reaction of the Israeli state.

These events have hacked a bloody line through religious faiths, political movements, parties, families and friendships. Where people stand in relation to that dividing line is determined by many factors. Their understanding of history. Their perception of what politics should, and should not, permit. The reach of their hate. The strength of their love. The persuasiveness of their fear.

Significantly, the line runs horizontally, not vertically. Where one stands on the Israel-Hamas War is not a straightforward matter of Left versus Right. On both sides of the classical divide, friends and comrades draw away from each other: blue and white above the line; red, white, green and black below.

Discussing the times and the morals with an old comrade, just a few days ago, we reflected on the fast decreasing utility of the terms “Right” and “Left”. He recalled the ease with which, as much younger men, we were able to sort the issues of the day into neat ideological piles; separate the protagonists from the antagonists; and know a kind of ontological peace. Now, he told me, the only political idea with which he still identifies unequivocally is Democracy. In the past, he proudly proclaimed himself a socialist. Today, he would own to being a “radical democrat” – nothing more.

And now, as if the malevolent spirit of the times has not destabilised our world enough, New Zealanders’ adherence to the values and processes of democracy is being put to the test. Once again, the dividing line is horizontal, not vertical, with the “decolonising” project of Māori nationalism sundering the supporters of democracy from the partisans of ethnic exceptionalism. Like Palestine, the meaning, purpose, and future of Te Tiriti O Waitangi has become an issue over which an amiable ‘agreement to differ’ is no longer possible.

The day that was always going to dawn has arrived. The day when the unmandated revision of the meaning, purpose and scope of the Treaty of Waitangi runs into the numerical majority of New Zealanders who, according to the pollsters, have run out of patience with the “Treatyists” insistence that ‘Non-Māori’ have an open-ended obligation to acknowledge and fulfil what are now their unabashedly revolutionary constitutional claims. This loss of patience has taken the form of the Act Party’s democratic counter-revision of the Treaty: a political formula it seeks to ratify with a referendum involving – and binding – the whole adult population of New Zealand.

The political leadership of Maoridom, and their Pakeha supporters, have been quick to declare their opposition to any resolution of Treaty differences by way of counting votes. The former Minister of Māori Affairs, Willie Jackson, has warned that elements within the Māori world are willing to “make war” on any attempt to re-write the Treaty’s meaning. (That the Waitangi Tribunal and the Judiciary have been doing exactly that for the best part of 50 years appears to have slipped the former minister’s mind.)

Considerably less ferociously, the distinguished Treaty historian, Dame Anne Salmond, has also taken up an anti-referendum position. Writing for the Newsroom site, she argues that “the idea of putting the ‘principles of the Treaty’ to a popular vote is unjust and unwise, and should not be entertained by any responsible government ….. a referendum on ‘the principles of the Treaty,’ given its populist appeal to the majority and its inflammatory potential, is not the right (tika) way to conduct this kind of discussion. It would be unjust and divisive, inciting extreme views in all directions and fostering misinformation, anger and ill-will.”

The central difficulty with Dame Anne’s position is that it fails to acknowledge that the manner in which the (re)interpretation of the Treaty has been carried out since the passage of the Waitangi Tribunal legislation in 1975 has not been all that “tika” either. The re-conceptualisation of New Zealand’s democratic system of government was undertaken by institutions and individuals not subject to the judgement of the citizenry. Attempting to re-construct the nation’s constitutional edifice without reference to those obliged to live within it was always a very risky venture.

Dame Anne is not alone in her view that holding a referendum on the Treaty would not be wise. Rather than leave the decision to the electors, the former National Party Defence Minister, and present Law Commission member, Dr Wayne Mapp, argues for a Royal Commission of Inquiry “charged with coming up with an acceptable set of ‘Principles of the Treaty’, that could form the basis of legislative definition of the principles. The term itself is a creature of statute but it has never been statutorily defined. So over the last 36 years the Courts have fulfilled that role, supplemented by the bureaucracy.”

Presumably, Dr Mapp is channelling the wisdom of King Solomon, since nothing less would be required to select a panel of Royal Commissioners acceptable to all the parties involved in the Treaty Debate. Any line-up receiving the thumbs-up from Iwi leaders, Te Pāti Māori and Willie Jackson would, almost certainly, get the thumbs-down from David Seymour and Winston Peters. Which is, precisely, why a referendum is necessary.

Dr Mapp is not convinced. “The reason why I oppose a referendum is that it will be an explicit removal of minority rights. Māori are a minority, mostly contained in the 18%. They will not agree to an ACT imposed definition of the principles of the treaty. I am well connected to Māori views on this matter, primarily through my wife [Denese Henare - C.T.]. I know the level of response and division that such a referendum will cause.”

Once again, the apparent absence of concern at what manner of response and division might ensue when those Mapp describes as “conservative senior politicians” are successful in persuading Christopher Luxon to rule out a referendum. Clearly, the levying of war against the Crown is something only Māori have the wit to threaten.

And, therein, lies the conundrum Luxon will have to face. If he bows to Māori threats to “make war” on his coalition government by scotching Act’s referendum proposal, then what’s next? What does he suppose will be the lesson drawn by those Māori determined to persist with co-governance, with Three Waters, with the Māori Health Authority?

“The last thing National needs over the next 3 years is an intemperate ‘debate’ over the principles of the Treaty.” Opines Dr Mapp. “There is a smarter approach to this issue.” So the Crown has insisted, ever since the 1980s, when it became frightened of what Māori might do if it dared to say “No”. But, it was those “smarter” approaches, driven by fear, that prompted the decisions that have led us, concession by concession, one legal judgement inspiring and empowering the next, to this present position. Thus we find ourselves located, dangerously, between a rock and a hard place.

But, being political has never been easy – not even when one takes the easy way out. The moment always arrives when a choice has to be made. Democracy? Or Ethnic Exceptionalism? And what determines the choice? That, too, does not change:

Our understanding of history. Our perception of what politics should, and should not, permit. The reach of our hate. The strength of our love. The persuasiveness of our fear.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 13 November 2023.

Failing To Hold Back The Flood: The Edgy Politics of the Twenty-First Century.

Coming Over The Top: Rory Stewart's memoir, Politics On The Edge, lays bare the dangerous inadequacies of the Western World's current political model.

VERY FEW NEW ZEALANDERS will have heard of Rory Stewart. Those with a keen eye for the absurdities of politics may recognise the name as that of the hapless Tory cabinet minister who fronted for David Cameron’s government during the catastrophic British floods of 2015. It was Stewart who, glumly – and hilariously – informed the news media that: “[T]he flood walls are working well. The only problem is that the water is coming over the top.”

Not the sort of line that is easy for anyone, let alone a politician, to live down. Perhaps surprisingly, Stewart did recover from his prize-winning clanger and went on to hold many more ministerial portfolios under Cameron and Teresa May.

Boris Johnson, however, was a force of nature Stewart couldn’t survive – even if he’d wanted to. When the extreme Brexiters forced May to resign, Stewart offered himself as the sane alternative to Johnson. Roundly rejected by his fellow Tories, Stewart was then cast out of the Conservative Party altogether by the unforgiving Johnson.

Fascinating though Stewart’s career may have been, the only reason he is again being talked about is because he has written an unusually effective memoir entitled “Politics on the Edge”, in which he lays bare the dangerous inadequacies of the working model of politics currently in use across the Western world. In a powerful essay for the Guardian newspaper, published over the weekend, Stewart summarises the working assumptions of that model:

“The polling graphs, which had brought Bill Clinton and Tony Blair to victory, looked like bell jars with the votes heaped in the centre, and few at the extremes. This era had left a whole generation of politicians with three assumptions: that liberal global markets were the answer to prosperity; that prosperity would spread democracy; and that the world would be governed by a liberal global order.”

With our own general election less than a month away, it is alarming how much of New Zealand’s politics is still governed by these three assumptions. Certainly, National and Labour, the two major parties, in whom close to two-thirds of the voters place their trust, have yet to demonstrate, in either their political demeanour, or their policy platforms, any convincing evidence that they concur with Stewart’s assessment that since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09 “all this has changed”.

Equally alarming is how closely Stewart’s experiences as a cabinet minister chime with what so many close observers of New Zealand politics have reported about the behaviour of our own executive branch of government. There is an ominous familiarity about Stewart’s reflections on the way contemporary politics is conducted:

“I had discovered how grotesquely unqualified so many of us, including myself, were for the offices we were given ….. It was a culture that prized campaigning over careful governing, opinion polls over detailed policy debates, announcements over implementation.”

That last sentence, in particular, could serve as the epitaph of the Sixth Labour Government.

Stewart’s most frightening observation, however, concerns the reckless excavation of the once proud mound of centre-ground:

“The old bell jar opinion poll, with the votes in the centre, [has] been replaced by a U-shape with the votes at the extremes.”

While New Zealand has yet to experience the extreme polarisation to which the United States has fallen prey, there exists a level of dissatisfaction with the way politics is being conducted that could easily be exploited by a populist politician less benign than Winston Peters and more effective than Brian Tamaki.

That such a figure has not arisen, either here or in the United Kingdom, bears out Stewart’s observations concerning the general level of knowledge and competence possessed by the political classes of most western democracies.

Certainly, it is hard to argue with his general thesis that because there continues to be broad agreement among the political and financial elites about how a twenty-first century society and economy should be run, our ideologically redundant politicians now vie with one another for the coveted title of “person the ordinary voter would most enjoy having a drink with”. Stewart would be the first to concede that, in the political celebrity stakes, Boris Johnson is without peer. What his Guardian essay (not to mention Johnson’s and our own Jacinda Ardern’s careers) make clear, however, is that celebrity is not enough.

The fascist leader, Benito Mussolini was much admired by middle-class Britons for making the notoriously unreliable Italian trains run on time. What was deemed admirable in the 1920s is making a resurgence in the 2020s. Democracy is entering that extraordinarily dangerous political space where a political ideology becomes inextricably associated with failure.

It is the principal reason for the Russian people’s troubling indifference (some would say contempt) for democratic values. In their minds, the global elites’ promotion of freedom, democracy and neoliberal capitalism coincided with the simultaneous collapse of Russia’s national prestige and their own personal well-being. Vladimir Putin’s popularity is due, in no small measure, to his success in restoring a fair measure of both.

Similarly, Donald Trump’s enduring political clout arises from his ability to make the degraded white American working-class feel proud again. Democracy is for college kids, sneer the Deplorables, apparently unaware that for a frightening proportion of woke college kids, democracy is also an over-rated political system.

Democracy’s steady retreat across the globe has left the moderate Tory, Stewart, reaching for such NGO panaceas as citizens’ assemblies and grass-roots, self-help initiatives. He is plenty smart enough, however, to know that these are nowhere near enough. What he, and a great many moderate politicians like him, are struggling to come up with is a democracy that works.

It’s not easy. This is how he describes the fork in the road at which he, a cabinet minister still in possession of a working brain and conscience, eventually arrived:

“I found myself struggling to produce policies that were other than either a grey compromise between past ideals and the populist present, or policies of the new right, cloaked in the language of the old centre. I acknowledged that the liberal consensus had failed to support manufacturing, adequately regulate the financial industry or invest appropriately in areas such as the north-east. But I struggled to come up with an alternative that did not echo Jeremy Corbyn’s nostalgia for the borrowing, protectionism and subsidies of the 70s.”

Which, depressingly, is where New Zealanders still in possession of a working brain and conscience find themselves struggling, just 26 days out from the General Election of 2023.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 18 September 2023.