It Was A Fair Cop, Hekia, And Treasury's To Blame

Suck It Up, Minister: Education Minister, Hekia Parata, was forced to reverse her government's own policy on class sizes in the face of massive public opposition. Had she possessed sufficient critical intelligence to challenge the policy's prime promoter, Treasury Secretary, Gabriel Makhlouf, she could have saved herself - and her government - a very large serving of very dead rat.

IN THE END, it all comes back to Treasury. Education Minister, Hekia Parata, like so many politicians before her, has taken the advice of Treasury’s ideologues, and paid the price. This willingness of right- and left-wing politicians to drag their careers over a cliff, by following the lead of an agency which has consistently failed to tender either reliable or useful advice to government, bears testimony to ideology’s uncanny knack for over-riding the urgings of electoral common sense.

The debacle over class sizes may be traced back to Treasury’s advice to the incoming Minister of Education following the 2011 General Election. Faced with an intensifying fiscal crisis, Treasury Secretary, Gabriel Makhlouf, saw an opportunity to attend to Treasury’s unfinished business with this country’s disconcertingly independent educationalists.

The proudly professional culture of New Zealand’s highly regarded education system (we rank sixth out of thirty-four OECD countries) continues to stand athwart Treasury’s relentless ideological advance.

It thus constitutes a standing rebuke to Treasury’s otherwise unassailable neoliberal mandarinate. Its collegial values and altruistic purposes sit most uncomfortably within the neoliberals’ highly individualistic and competitive reading of human nature. While achieving a large measure of success in the universities (attributable mostly to New Zealand academics’ timidity and lack of solidarity) Treasury’s neoliberal policies have been staunchly and successfully resisted in New Zealand’s primary and secondary schools. This is due, almost entirely, to the strength of New Zealand’s two main teacher unions – the NZEI and the PPTA.

Before New Zealand’s teaching profession can finally be “neoliberalised”, it will first be necessary to break these teacher unions. There are two ways of doing this. The first, and most brutal, is to do what Scott Walker, Governor of the US state of Wisconsin, did: pass legislation stripping state employees of their right to collective bargaining. The second, and much more effective, way to break a union is to undermine its members’ solidarity: to divide and conquer.

The classic method of decollectivising a workforce is the introduction of performance pay. Once workers’ remuneration ceases to be reckoned by the job to be done, and is set, instead, by the boss’s perception of how well each individual worker is doing the job, the ability of the workforce to maintain collective cohesion and purpose rapidly falls away.

New Zealand has, of course, already attempted a legislative “final solution” to the union problem. But, although the Employment Contracts Act (1991) proved highly successful at breaking the power of private sector unions; public employees – especially teachers – by sticking together and fighting back, have resisted every attempt to set one colleague against another, undermine the union, and hand the education sector over to Treasury (and its political handmaidens) for neoliberal “re-education”.

It is, therefore, very difficult not to read the Treasury Secretary’s advocacy for trading-off a few extra pupils in every class-room for a lift in the quality of the country’s teachers, as a way of admitting performance pay (and undermining the teacher unions) by the back door.

Prime Mover: The author of the "class-size-increase-for-improved-teacher-quality" trade-off, Treasury Secretary, Gabriel Makhlouf.

Citing the highly contestable figure of “one in three” school-leavers entering the New Zealand workforce as an educational failure, Mr Makhlouf argued strongly, and very publicly, that this scandalous “output” of the system could only be rectified by encouraging better teaching. By this he did not mean that we should embrace the Finnish policy of keeping a very high teacher-student ratio while, at the same time, ensuring that teaching remains one of that country’s best qualified and well-paid professions. No, what Mr Makhlouf wanted was an opportunity to pit teachers against one another in a quest to find “the best” teachers, and then, presumably, offer them individual employment contracts and higher pay. This competitive model would also have identified “the worst” teachers, allowing them to be purged from the system. School staff-rooms would thus become battle-grounds where “winners” prospered and “losers” lost their jobs. Collegial values, ill-adapted to Treasury’s new “survival of the fittest” environment, would be driven to extinction – followed closely by the teacher unions.

The triumph of the competitive market model within the teaching profession would, inevitably, see its operating principles installed in every class-room. The transmission of skills and knowledge, the system’s outputs, would be subjected to detailed empirical measurement. Every pupil would be “tested”, and every school’s resourcing determined by the results of those tests. New Zealand’s internationally admired education system would very quickly join the derelict systems of the United States and the United Kingdom.

Was Ms Parata really seeking this disintegration of New Zealand’s education system? Of course not! Why, then, couldn’t she decode Mr Makhlouf’s policy prescription? The answer is simple: to decipher neoliberal ideology one needs to adopt a critical perspective; and that presupposes ideological agnosticism.

Had Ms Parata felt equal to challenging Treasury’s ideologically-driven recommendations, she’d never have been required to undertake her embarrassing political “reversal”.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 6 June 2012. 

Refugee Status: Or, Why The Polls Aren't Necessarily Good News For Labour.

Safe Haven: David Shearer has a great deal of experience working with refugees. He knows that the last thing people fleeing from war and oppression want to encounter is divisive political ideology. Voters migrating from National to Labour are much the same - and Mr Shearer seems only too happy to oblige them by transformimng Labour into a "politics-free zone".

NATIONAL DROPS four percentage points in the latest 3 News/Reid Research poll and Labour picks up almost exactly the same amount. What’s wrong with this picture?

Too small and too timid to go after the 800,000 New Zealanders who did not bother to vote in the 2011 General Election, Labour’s strategy for 2014 appears to involve transforming itself into a refugee camp for disillusioned, disaffected, or just plain disgusted National Party voters.

David Shearer knows a great deal about refugee camps, he did, after all, spend many years working for the United Nations. He knows, for example, that if they’re to function properly refugee camps must steer well clear of politics. All that people fleeing war zones and/or massive persecution are looking for is a place of safety: somewhere they can find food, shelter and, if they’re lucky, some semblance of human warmth and sympathy.

When former National Party voters abandon John Key’s government for Mr Shearer’s opposition, the last thing they want, upon arrival, is to be bombarded with radical left-wing propaganda. Ideologically-driven policy-making is what they are fleeing. If they discover they’ve only exchanged one bunch of gimlet-eyed apparatchiks for another, they’ll simply keep on moving. Some will push-on to the Greens, some to NZ First, while others may even travel as far as Colin Craig’s Conservative Party.

There is nothing homogeneous about this stream of refugees, it contains many political tribes. Former Labour supporters – the ones who abandoned the party in 2005 and 2008 – will be the easiest to assimilate. All Mr Shearer has to tell them is that the party has rediscovered its respect and admiration for their values - especially their commitment to hard work and personal betterment. It’s an assurance that will serve equally well for the dwindling tribe of National Party moderates. In Labour’s camp, Mr Shearer will tell them, they’re in capable and experienced hands. Here, they’ll encounter no promises to raise taxes or restore trade union rights. Here, their investments in the partially-privatised state assets will remain perfectly secure. Here, they will be safe.

And the Labour tribe itself – the people who stood loyal right through – how will they react to their leader offering such reassuring guarantees to turn-coats and Tories?

Some, as the 3 News/Reid Research poll indicates, will decamp to the Greens in disgust. Others – a smaller but much more dangerous number – will throw their support behind Mr Shearer’s rival, David Cunliffe (now registering for the first time in the preferred prime-minister stakes). But most, delighted by Labour’s steadily expanding claim upon the affections of the electorate, will think only of the prospect of defeating their traditional enemy, the National Party, and of laying low its infernally popular leader.

The option of going after National’s vote will also appeal to Labour’s mostly middle-class membership because it involves so little genuine political effort. No one will expect them to venture into the neighbourhoods of the poor, where vicious dogs wait to leap at their throats and hostile Maori and Pasifika voters ask embarrassing questions about jobs and housing and health care for their kids and how long Labour’s MPs would last on shit wages and inadequate welfare payments?

In their heart-of-hearts they know that to provide adequate answers to such questions Labour would have to develop policies that would instantly drive away all of those refugees from the Centre-Right. They know from bitter historical experience that putting people first and money second only earns Labour the unrelenting hostility of the mainstream media (not to mention putting-off potentially generous business donors). It’s just so much easier and less risky to rely on slick TV ads showing Mr Shearer playing his guitar to delighted classrooms of healthy Pakeha children. So much less hassle to distribute glossy, platitude-packed pamphlets in neighbourhoods where the residents don’t bite. And so much more satisfying erecting billboards featuring the rugged (but reliable) face of their “anti-political” leader, promising New Zealand “A Future That Works”.

Spare some sympathy, then, for the newly-elected Policy Council of the Labour Party: Jordan Carter, David Craig, Nigel Haworth, Leanne Dalziel and Michael Wood. Theirs is the unenviable task of pulling together an election platform that still has some kind of connection with the “democratic socialist” principles to which the Labour Party still officially subscribes, but to which the parliamentary caucus is still prepared to give its support. David Craig, for example, has fought for years to extend the same level of state support to mothers and children on the DPB as that extended to low-paid workers by Working For Families. The same policy that Josie Pagani decried as unhelpful to Labour’s candidates in 2011. Will that policy make it into Labour’s 2014 manifesto? Will any policies likely to upset the party’s new, conservative, supporters?

The radical Marxist scholar, Slavoj Zizek, writing in the London Review of Books about the imminent Greek elections, warns upholders of Europe’s political legacy that:

In his Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, T.S. Eliot remarked that there are moments when the only choice is between heresy and non-belief – i.e., when the only way to keep a religion alive is to perform a sectarian split. This is the position in Europe today. Only a new ‘heresy’ – represented at this moment by Syriza – can save what is worth saving of the European legacy: democracy, trust in people, egalitarian solidarity etc.

The sprawling political refugee camp that Labour is busily turning itself into will find it increasingly difficult to distinguish between the “No Discussion of Beliefs Permitted” rule it is currently enforcing in order not to upset its National refugees, and a position which denies the importance of espousing coherent political beliefs altogether. Such a Labour Party, by extirpating the “heresy” of genuine social-democratic thought and allowing itself to become a safe haven for an ideologically inert and politically demobilised population could, paradoxically, win election after election.

But what would be the point? And who would notice the difference?

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

Be Careful What You Wish For

Only A Superficial Likeness: With the electoral logic of the 2014 General Election driving Labour and the Greens in opposite ideological directions, the prospect of David Shearer and Russel Norman negotiating a viable (let alone a durable) coalition agreement grows steadily more remote.

THE BURDENS OF SUCCESS are often as heavy, or heavier, than the dead weight of failure. Contemplating the latest poll results, the Greens could be forgiven for thinking that their party’s rising level of public support contains as many risks as it does rewards.

As Labour’s more adventurous supporters abandon David Shearer’s sprawling centrist encampment, their places are being taken by refugees from National’s suddenly inhospitable political territory. If this process continues, the ability of both the Greens and Labour to negotiate a workable coalition agreement in 2014 will steadily diminish.

The Greens’ planning up until now has been based on the assumption that Labour will remain a distinct political destination: a party whose foundations are sufficiently solid to carry the weight of a joint, red/green, policy platform. But what will happen to Labour’s foundations if Mr Shearer decides to make his erstwhile National supporters feel more comfortable?

Was the closed strategy session at last weekend’s Green Party AGM called to address the worrying possibility that, by 2014, Labour may have ceased to be a genuine ideological terminus and become, instead, a place where voters pause, temporarily, on their way to somewhere else?

If Labour does indeed become an electoral transit station, then the political calculus of the 2014 election becomes extremely problematic. The Greens intend to grow their support by offering voters a clear and uncompromising alternative to both Labour and National. But Labour can only replace the voters it loses to the Greens by luring supporters across from National’s ranks.

The two parties that, together, constitute the most likely electoral alternative to the incumbent regime, will, thus, end up working at cross-purposes to one another. To enlarge their electoral base the Greens must appeal to Labour’s left-wing supporters. To make itself more acceptable to National moderates, Labour must move to the right. Instead of drawing closer together, ideologically, these two putative coalition partners will end up moving farther apart.

This ideological disjunction will not be improved by the obvious need for Labour and the Greens to share out the twenty-or-so Cabinet seats between them. If, for example, the Greens attract 15 percent of the Party Vote and Labour 35 percent, Russel Norman will have every right to demand 6 or 7 seats at the cabinet table for his party. Who will Mr Shearer sacrifice? Are the disappointed prospective cabinet ministers more likely to come from the left of his caucus, or the right?

Given that Mr Norman’s choices are all likely to be more left-wing than anyone Labour puts forward, Mr Shearer’s most sensible choice – unless he wants a Cabinet top-heavy with leftist ministers – would be to choose his ministers from Labour’s centre and right-wing factions. Where will this leave David Cunliffe, I wonder? Or Phil Twyford?

Long before the first vote of the 2014 general election is cast, a significant number of Labour politicians will be casting a jealous eye in the direction of their caucus colleagues and asking themselves: “How can I make sure that it’s s/he who misses out and not me?” This is not a question calculated to lift a political party’s morale, or help it come together as a match-fit electoral team.

The Greens, too, will be asking themselves some daunting questions. Most obviously: “How can a party committed to clear and uncompromising economic, environmental and social policies possibly cohere with a party whose policies have been carefully fudged so as not to offend the right-wing prejudices of middle-class suburbia?” And, equally importantly: “How can we prevent six ideologically isolated Green Party cabinet ministers from been drawn into the vortex of collective cabinet responsibility, without (quite impractically) dissenting from virtually every decision the right-wing Labour majority makes?”

How long will it be before the Greens’ cabinet ministers start seeing themselves as half-a-dozen virgins in a brothel?

 “Be careful what you wish for – you just might get it.” For the Green Party, that time-worn cliché could hardly be more apposite.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 8 June 2012.

A Monstrous Power

Show Me The Money! Walt Disney's view of MB. Scrooge McDuck swims like a porpoise through the all-too-real cash piled up in his money bin . In reality, of course, the loan the bank gives you to buy a house is nothing more than a book entry. In the final anaysis it is your own hard work that secures the value of your mortgaged property - not to mention the bank's interest-derived profit.

EVER WONDERED where home loans come from? It’s worth a moment’s thought. A bank extends someone a line of credit amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars – but from where? Where does the money come from? Is there a vast vault somewhere, filled with cash, like Scrooge McDuck’s money bin? Does the bank simply lower a big basket into the pile and haul up a home loan?

No. In reality, home loans are book entries – nothing more. The bank assesses its clients’ credit worthiness, fixes a repayments schedule, and, over the next fifteen-to-twenty years, in addition to recovering the loan, charges them an eye-wateringly large sum for the privilege of using its purely nominal capital.

So, in the beginning, there’s a book entry, and, by the end, the bank has taken thousands of dollars of its client’s very real cash, cancelled its book entry, pocketed the interest, and started the process all over again with a new generation of dupes – oops! – I mean clients.

Home loans are, therefore, a kind of wager. The bank bets on the debtor’s ability to repay, with interest, a sum of money which, strictly speaking, it does not possess. Since most human-beings are decent sorts, who almost always keep their word, this is a pretty safe bet on the bank’s part. Indeed, if we’re being truthful, the risk of the bank losing on the deal is negligible. (After all, it holds a mortgage on the house!) In fact, you could even argue that it’s the debtor who, through years of honest toil, creates his or her own home loan – while, simultaneously, paying the bank a small fortune for being generous enough to believe that its client was good for the money.

This is a monstrous sort of power, made even more frightening by being placed in private hands. Surely, the ability to financially enslave a reasonably large chunk of the population (mortgage, literally translated from the Old French, means “a death-dealing pledge”) shouldn’t be entrusted to just anyone. If someone’s going to create money out of thin air, and charge people to participate in the conjuring trick, then, surely, that someone ought to be the state?

That is certainly what a great many New Zealanders used to believe. Which is why, thirty years ago, the state used to own the Bank of New Zealand, the Post Office Savings Bank and the Rural Bank. It also, almost certainly, explains why a state-owned institution called the State Advances Corporation could finance couples into their first home at an interest rate of three percent.

The singular advantage states enjoy over both individuals and private institutions when lending money is immortality. Citizens, real and corporate, come and go but the citizenry lives forever. In practical terms, this means the state can afford to extend credit on vastly longer time horizons than any private financier. It also means it can lend with far greater assurance than the largest private bank. Being the institutional expression of its citizens’ collective needs and interests, the state is really only lending to itself.

In Our Own Interest: The First Labour Government availed itself of Reserve Bank credit to construct thousands of state houses for the nation's homeless citizens, creating thousands of new jobs in the process.

Back in the late 1930s, the first Labour Government used precisely this argument to finance its massive state housing programme. The Reserve Bank of New Zealand lent millions of pounds to the Government at nominal interest rates on the security of the thousands of homes it was about to build, and the rentals those houses would provide to the treasury for decades to come. It also knew that by setting such a construction programme in motion, and by using New Zealand sourced materials wherever possible, thousands of new jobs would be created, and that the men and women who were hired to do those jobs would pay taxes to the state instead of drawing welfare payments from its dwindling coffers.

Was the credit advanced to the Government by the Reserve Bank ever repaid? Nobody’s quite sure. What we do know, because they stand all around us, is that thousands of houses were constructed for New Zealand families to live in, at rents they could afford, and that thousands of New Zealanders found jobs that paid them a living wage and freed them from the dole. Some might say that if these achievements are considered as interest on its loans, then the Reserve Bank, and the nation for whom it acted, got a very good return on its investment.

Surveying the global havoc wreaked by the world’s privately owned financial institutions, I am moved to inquire whether any of them should ever again be permitted to create money out of thin air. And looking at the huge number of homes that need to be built in Christchurch and around New Zealand, perhaps the best place to turn for the financial resources required to build a fair and prosperous future – is to ourselves.

This essay was originally published by The Press on Tuesday, 5 June 2012.

Long Live The Republic!

Sixty Glorious Years: But Elizabeth Windsor was not born to be Queen. Indeed had her wicked uncle, Edward VIII, been just a little cleverer (and a lot wickeder) England may well have been burdened with a royal fascist dictator. Such are the fatal vagaries of the hereditary principle. Heads-of-state should be chosen by more rational - and democratic - means.

A LOATHING OF MONARCHY is one of the many benefits of living with an avid student of Tudor history. You learn about the huge political, economic and social costs of hereditary rule. How utterly dependent society becomes upon the health and fecundity of royal fathers and mothers. Of the dangers posed to political and social order by physically and mentally deficient monarchs. And, most especially, of the horrors and injustices to which royal personages and their families are exposed on account of the constitutional principle of hereditary succession.

To which all you monarchists out there will smugly reply: “Just as well, then, that our Queen is a constitutional monarch.” Well, if you want to comfort yourself with that notion, feel free. But if you believe the “conventions” of constitutional monarchy offer us the slightest political protection, then you are quite mistaken.

Take our present sovereign, Queen Elizabeth II. When she was born very few people believed she would inherit the throne. Her uncle, Edward, Prince of Wales, was heir apparent and was duly proclaimed King-Emperor upon the death of his father, King George V, in 1936. We are all extremely lucky that Edward VIII was nowhere near as clever as he was selfish, vain and irresponsible. Had he been as smart as his youngest brother, George, the Duke of Kent, he could well have turned the constitutional crisis arising out of his determination to marry Mrs Wallis Simpson into an opportunity to establish a fascist monarchical dictatorship. He would certainly have been able to count on a great deal of public support, not to mention the solemn oaths of loyalty sworn to his person by the armed forces and the police.

Democracy’s stocks were not very high in 1936, and the Windsor’s connections with Hitler’s Nazis were much stronger than they now care to admit. The Duke of Kent, in particular, moved freely in the highest Nazi circles. He was convinced that the British Empire could not survive another war with Germany. had he ever been in a position to do so, he would have guarded Germany’s back while she demolished the Soviet Union, and thereafter remained confident of her support against the economic ambitions of the USA. It is not difficult to understand why the German Ambassador to Great Britain, Joachim von Ribbentrop, kept in such close touch with both the Duke of Kent and Mrs Simpson.

Dangerous Liaisons: Wallis Simpson and the former King Edward VIII are welcomed to Germany by Adolf Hitler.

Had King George VI named Lord Halifax, and not Winston Churchill, prime minister in 1940, exactly the same calculations that made life for the surviving members of the Plantagenet dynasty so precarious during the reign of Henry Tudor would have been made about both himself and the little princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret. For there is no disputing the fact that, in the first six months of the war, a substantial “fifth column”, committed to making peace with the Nazis, florished in Britain – especially among the aristocracy. A negotiated peace with Germany could very easily have seen Edward VIII restored to the throne – leaving the erstwhile King George and his family to the tender mercies of a triumphant Adolf Hitler.

So, we are, indeed, extremely fortunate that Edward VIII was not equal to the many political opportunities that came his way. And, by “we” I certainly refer to New Zealand. Because you may be absolutely sure that if Great Britain had signed a peace treaty with Germany in mid-1940, our own government, and the governments of Canada, Australia, and South Africa, would have ceased hostilities immediately. And if, in a fit of madness, Peter Fraser had attempted to carry on the fight (counting, perhaps, on help from the United States) then it is certain that the new King-Emperor’s representative in New Zealand, the Governor-General, Viscount Galway GCMG DSO OBE PC, would have dismissed the Labour Government from office and invited the National Party leader, Adam Hamilton, to form a new ministry.

This is, of course, a very long way from the version of constitutional monarchy peddled by Dr Sean Palmer, Chair of Monarchy New Zealand, who shills for the hereditary principle on the grounds that it offers a much more stable foundation than popular election when determining a nation’s head-of-state.

His argument boils down to a recitation of those mostly European countries whose heads of state are kings and queens. Do you see how stable and non-threatening Norway, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands are? asks Dr Palmer. That has nothing to do with the democratic character of their politics, the homogeneity of their populations, or the pluralistic nature of their societies. No, no, no! It’s because their heads-of-state were raised to that office not by virtue of their talent, their courage, their generosity or their contribution to their fellow human-beings, but because they were clever enough to choose royal parents.

This is the same Dr Palmer who told Radio New Zealand’s Queen’s Birthday host, Richard Langston, that his homeland, Canada, and New Zealand had very similar constitutional arrangements. I suppose you could make out a case for that proposition – providing, of course, you set aside the fact that Canada has a written constitution, a bi-cameral parliament and a federal system of provincial governments. Apart from these small and inconsequential constitutional differences, Canada and New Zealand are practically identical!

We are, however, alike in being ruled over by a Governor-General (when Her Majesty isn’t going walkabout) and so I would have expected a constitutional expert, like Dr Palmer, to have had something intelligent to say about the Canadian Governor-General, Michaelle Jean’s, egregious failure to uphold the principle of parliamentary sovereignty.

Egregious Failure: Canada's unparliamentary sovereign, Governor General, Michaelle Jean.

Her 2009 decision to prorogue the Canadian House of Commons, thereby preventing it from debating a No Confidence motion in the Conservative Government of Stephen Harper, was made in defiance of the near unanimous opinion of Canada’s leading constitutional experts. Like the Australian Governor-General, John Kerr’s, decision to dismiss the Whitlam Labour Government in 1975, Jean’s abrogation of democratic norms lays bare not the stability, but the capriciousness, of “constitutional” monarchies, and demonstrates how extremely vulnerable their “subjects” are to the anti-democratic proclivities of these unelected heads-of-state.

All constitutional questions turn on the direction in which one believes power ought to flow: from the top to the bottom; or from the bottom to the top? It is quite impossible to cast monarchical institutions as anything other than top-down and, hence, profoundly undemocratic.

The “honours” announced to mark the sixtieth anniversary of Elizabeth Windsor’s coronation, provide stark proof of just how corrupting service to such monarchical institutions can be. In addition to a union-buster and a neoliberal hatchet-woman, Prime Minister Key has announced that the Duke of Edinburgh, Phillip Mountbatten, the man the late Chris Hitchens memorably described as “a dingy fascist”, has been made a member of the Order of New Zealand. Worse than this, however, was the news that Dr Michael Cullen, the man who taught me about the Levellers and the Diggers, Oliver Cromwell and the Putney Debates, has accepted a knighthood.

I felt a great wave of shame wash over me on his behalf. Could this be the same man whose university office once boasted a full-size poster depicting humanity’s putative parents above the revolutionary slogan of the English Peasants Revolt of 1381?

 

May my vanity and pride never play me so false, Dr Cullen. Rather, let me invoke on this, Queen's Birthday holiday weekend, the spirit of Oliver Cromwell’s plain, russet-coated troopers; whose contribution to human liberty a younger Michael Cullen once kept fresh; and cry out again, with a great voice:

“Long live the Republic!”

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

The Journey: A Political Memoir - Posting No. 9

Scene Of The Crime: The Labour Party met for its annual conference in the Christchurch Town Hall in August 1985. It was there that the internal party debate over GST would be won or lost. When all the cards and ballot papers had been counted it was clear that while a majority of the party wasn't yet willing to vote with the Left - it was willing to vote for them.

It was supposed to be a book about the birth of the NewLabour Party, but somewhere along the way it became the story of what led me into, and out of, the old Labour Party. In hopes of providing future political studies students with a glimpse of what it was like to be a left-wing Labour activist in the days of David Lange and Roger Douglas, I am publishing The Journey on Bowalley Road as a series of occasional postings. L.P. Hartley wrote: “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.” May these memoirs, written in 1989, serve, however poorly, as my personal passport.

Friday, 30 August 1985

WE HAVE BEEN SUMMONED. Mike Hanifin and I join Rob Campbell, Peter Willis, Jack Cunningham and the other delegates from unions affiliated to the Distribution Workers Federation in a tiny, smoke-filled, chamber deep in the heart of the Christchurch Town Hall. A deal is about to be done.

Campbell and Rex Jones, Secretary of the Engineers Union, have a proposition to put to us concerning Remit 56. It is our own remit, the Sunday Morning Club's. I remember distinctly writing the words that morning back in Adams House:

That this Conference register its strong objections to the present arbitrary nature of economic policy formation and calls for a return to the principle of the widest possible consultation and discussion within the NZLP prior to the formulation and implementation of economic policy.

“We simply don’t have the numbers out there,” Campbell says flatly, “we won’t win.” His argument is brutally simple. If you can’t win a vote, the best you can hope for is not to be seen to lose. “Rex and I will run the arguments on an amended version of Remit 56. Remit 62A will be lost.”

Remit 62A states simply: “That the proposed Goods & Services Tax not be implemented.”

*   *   *   *   *

Mike and I emerge from the close atmosphere of the chamber and into the wide foyer that circles the auditorium. John Stewart, former Values Party worker and now one of the Labour Party Conference organisers, waylays us. Looking us up and down with a shrewd eye, he laughs: “You two look like you could use a drink!” In no time we are seated in a room behind the stage. Faintly, the PA system can be heard relaying the earnest speeches of the delegates.

Life Saver: Former Values Party Organiser, turned Labour Party activist, John Stewart.

“What did you make of Margaret’s speech?” Someone asks. “I wasn’t sure what she meant by all those references to Right Wing Fundamentalists,” says another. “I mean who are they? Where are they?”

“That’s easy,” Stewart begins to laugh in a high-pitched, wheezing sort of way. “They’re all in the Cabinet!”

Saturday, 31 August 1985

I AM FEELING SULLIED. The night before, in the house bar of Lattimer Lodge, I dutifully relayed Campbell’s diagnosis of the conference to the Otago delegation. Our remit, like all remits to Labour Party conferences, could only have raised a brief ripple in the seamless surface of the Government’s complacency. Nevertheless, it was one of those initiatives that Wilson, Douglas and Caygill had been unable to turn back at the regional conference, and we were proud of it. Now I was telling them that the union bosses were planning to amend it. Worse still, I was imparting the bleak news that the affiliates would not be backing Remit 62A. Their eyes spoke of bitterness and disillusionment. Silently, they turned away.

I tried to reassure myself with the thought that Campbell and Jones were experienced politicians, much more accomplished than I was a reading the mood of Labour Party conferences. After all, wasn’t politics the art of the possible? Campbell and Jones were forceful speakers: in moving and seconding the amendment they would put the Government on notice that the trade unions would accept no more deviations like GST.

The Heavy Brigade: Union boss, Rob Campbell, kept the Left's "arses intact".

Campbell moves to the microphone. In stunned disbelief I hear him read out the amendment. Our cry of protest has been smothered in the bland platitudes of the union politician:

That Conference acknowledges the serious economic position facing the country after nine years of mismanagement and the desire in the community for economic reform, but also notes the real financial and other pressures facing many in the community and calls on the Government:   a) to monitor the impact of policy to ensure that living standards suffer no further decline and that improvements, particularly for low income families, occur promptly.  b) that this monitoring by Government take place in close consultation with the party, the unions and other electoral interests.

Campbell’s speech to the amendment is short and perfunctory. Rex Jones is nowhere to be seen. The amendment is carried. Wilson moves on briskly to Remit 57.

Furious, I lurch from my seat, elbowing my way past the delegates in the aisles, I confront Campbell:

“Where was Jones!” I hiss across the heads of the startled people seated at Campbell’s table. Campbell grins broadly, turning his palms and shrugging in a gesture of sublime indifference: “I’ve no idea.” Struggling to find I reply, I stare back at him in impotent rage. No words come. I have been used, and now my usefulness is over. Campbell resumes his conversation with the delegate to his right.

*   *   *   *   *

The opponents of GST are testing the mood of Conference. Remit 57 calls for a “planned, self-sufficient, socialist economy”. The Government’s speakers are having a field day: One by one they line up to lecture the conference on the global economy and the idiocy of “cloth cap socialism”. The question is put to the Conference. The socialists are defeated on a card vote: 323 For: 573 Against.

Remit 62A, opposing GST, is lost on the voices.

Game, Set and Match to Roger Douglas.

*   *   *   *   *

THE LABOUR PARTY is a quirky beast. Having endorsed the Goods & Services Tax, the conference goes on to elect a left-wing Policy Council. Jim Anderton tops the poll with a staggering 611 votes. Time and time again I will see this behaviour repeated by the delegates to party conferences. While unwilling to openly challenge their government by voting down key policy decisions, they will skilfully utilise the party’s electoral process to register their protest at the parliamentary wing’s conduct. The message from the ordinary branch membership is clear: “We won’t vote with the Left, but we will vote for them.”

The Saturday night celebration at Jim Anderton’s place is a crowded and noisy affair. The Left are there in strength; buoyed up by the results of the party elections and trying desperately to put a brave face on the Government’s victory over GST.

“Well, Rob, what happened to the great economic debate?” I was still smarting from the Campbell/Jones finesse of the afternoon.

Campbell pauses in mid-sip from his bottle of Steinlager: “It’s alright, Mate,” he grins, “we got out with our arses intact – that’s the main thing.”

With our arses intact! Soon the whole room is falling about with laughter as the Great One’s words are twisted into ever more obscene combinations. Francesca is acidic: “What was wrong with his arse in the first place!” She hisses, and returns to her argument with Pat Kelly.

The party warms up. Kelly sings When The Red Red Robin Goes Bob, Bob Bobbin’ Along. I follow with a re-worked version of Don Franks’s Hold Down The Wages, and my own We’re All Working For A Labour Victory:

We all used to think that the workers

Would follow our clarion call

But we’ve given up the revolution

To go canvassing door-to-door.

Not to be outdone, Jim Anderton picks up a guitar and, in a surprisingly fine baritone, gives us a West Auckland version of the talking-blues:

Oh if you get to heaven

Before I do,

Just cut a hole

And pull me through.

“If you’re going to pull David through,” Pat Kelly whispers impishly, “it’ll have to be a very big hole!”

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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