Islands In The Mainstream

Keeping The Story Straight: But if a conflict arose between the mainstream media's version of events and the version presented by the citizen journalists of the blogosphere - what then? Even more alarming - what if the bloggers' version proved to be the more believable?

SOMEWHERE THERE’S GOT TO BE a focus-group report. Nothing else adequately explains the current behaviour of the “mainstream media” (MSM). Somewhere, somehow, someone has been incautious enough to ask a representative sample of MSM readers, listeners and viewers how often they visit, and what sort of credence they give to, the blogs. Their answers appear to have shocked some journalists into full-scale retaliation.

 

My guess is that the consumers of news and opinion are not abandoning the MSM altogether – not yet. Most probably it’s still just a case of people turning to the blogosphere for a second opinion. The big problems will only arise when the stories people read on the blogs begin to sharply contradict stories being printed in the newspapers and broadcast over radio and television. That’s when the MSM should really begin to worry.

 

But if the note of alarm that has crept into the MSM’s coverage of blogs – especially political blogs – over the past few weeks is anything to go by, some of that worrying has already begun. The final edition of The Nation, broadcast on TV3 last weekend, warned ominously of the potentially destabilising political influence of the left-leaning blog The Standard. Senior Parliamentary Press Gallery journalists have launched repeated attacks against “anonymous bloggers” with many eagerly accusing their blogs of playing a sinister role in David Cunliffe’s alleged “attempted leadership coup” at the Labour Party’s Annual Conference.

 

The tone of these attacks leaves little doubt that not only do these political journalists consider bloggers to be unwelcome and illegitimate contributors to the nation’s political discourse, but that nothing would make them happier than to see them tightly regulated and controlled. It’s an attitude that should send a shiver down every New Zealander’s spine. A genuine “Fourth Estate” would welcome the democratisation of the gathering and distribution of news which the Internet has made possible. That so many MSM journalists have greeted the competitive spur of the blogosphere with a mixture of self-serving patch-protection and outright authoritarianism is cause for considerable concern.

 

It also casts much of their recent reporting of political news in a new and worrying light. If the truth is indeed out there, then presumably it’s as readily accessible to bloggers as it is to members of the Parliamentary Press Gallery? If both are present at the same event, then their reports should be (making obvious allowance for nuance and emphasis) at least broadly similar? But what if they are not similar? What if the MSM’s coverage of Event X is radically at odds with both the experience of participants and the reportage of bloggers? Wouldn’t that raise some extremely disturbing questions about the credibility and trustworthiness of MSM journalism?

 

The recent Labour Party conference demonstrated in the most dramatic fashion the MSM’s capacity to misrepresent and mislead the NZ public. The political journalists covering the conference were either collaborators with, or the dupes of, a faction of the Labour Party Caucus which, fearing the consequences of radical changes to the party’s constitution, manufactured a leadership challenge to Opposition Leader, David Shearer, by his front-bench colleague, David Cunliffe.

 

That the rule changes endorsed by the rank-and-file offered Mr Cunliffe a route to the leadership of the party which allowed him to by-pass his Caucus enemies was obvious to anyone familiar with the agreed reforms. Quite legitimately (if somewhat maladroitly) the MP for New Lynn declined to rule-out taking advantage of these new constitutional opportunities at some point in the future. To translate this sequence of events into a full-scale leadership challenge, as TV3’s Patrick Gower did, lacked even the slightest evidential foundation. It did not prevent him, however, from telling Mr Shearer that Mr Cunliffe was “coming for you” and demanding to know what he was going to do about it.

 

The peculiar political-economy of news reporting from the Parliamentary Press Gallery ensured that Mr Gower’s conspiracy theory became the core of the MSM’s reporting. Effective Gallery reporting is based on easy access to the principal political newsmakers of both the Government and the Opposition. Once it becomes clear that those principals have agreed upon an interpretation of events it is extremely hazardous for any political journalist to offer an alternative view. It would risk not only an immediate denial of access to the principal players, but also the wrath of one’s editor. Any narrative at odds with the main media outlets’ agreed version of events has the potential to make the perpetrator appear both eccentric and/or ill-informed. These are not epithets with which most MSM editors feel comfortable. Multiple interpretations of the same event might also encourage the public to question the competence of the MSM’s journalistic staff. Much safer all round if the coverage remains consistent across all media.

 

But consistent is not the same as accurate. What happened at the Labour Party Conference, far from being an attempted leadership coup, bore all the signs of a pre-emptive strike against the man most likely to front a successful leadership challenge under the new rules. Political journalists who rejected the principal players version of events, could have spoken to conference delegates who witnessed incidents strongly suggestive of the attacks on Mr Cunliffe being carefully orchestrated well in advance of the actions which ostensibly provoked them. Persistent questioning would also have uncovered evidence that it was supporters of Grant Robertson, not Mr Cunliffe, who had been gauging the level of support for a leadership spill in the weeks leading up to the Conference. No hint of these alternative narratives appeared anywhere in the MSM.

 

They have, however, been appearing in both the postings and commentary threads of the political blogs. Is this the real explanation for the sudden spate of attacks on the anonymity of these citizen-journalists? Has a focus group warned the MSM that the stories it declines to tell – and which are now turning up in blogs – are being believed? Are more and more of the MSM’s readers, listeners and viewers coming to the conclusion that the Fourth Estate, far from speaking truth to power, has become its willing stenographer?

 

If this is true, then the decision by so many active participants in the blogosphere to remain anonymous or write under a pseudonym becomes entirely reasonable. Any system powerful and mendacious enough to suborn the one institution specifically charged with exposing its malfeasance is probably not the sort of system to be openly challenged or taunted by vulnerable individuals using their real names.

 

The day focus groups and their deliberations cease to be confidential is the day bloggers will gladly abandon their pseudonyms and the current “pandemic of anonymity” will be ended.

 

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

Welcome To Middle Earth

Re-imagining New Zealand: Forty years of official biculturalism and assertive indigeneity have failed to suppress the colonisers' desire to refashion their new world in the image of the old. In this regard, "Middle Earth" has proved to be a much more comfortable cultural fit than "Aotearoa".

 

ONE HUNDRED PERCENT Middle Earth. That’s how the tourism industry has decided to promote New Zealand. Our national airline has even contributed one of its airliners, emblazoned nose to tail with images from The Hobbit movie, to elevate the promotional cause. This flying billboard will wow those attending the film’s “red carpet” premiere with a low-level fly-past.

 

Asked by a local journalist for his response to Air New Zealand’s generosity, an executive from the movie’s maker, Warner Bros, didn’t know whether to laugh out loud or titter. His consternation is understandable. Very few countries have been as willing to abase themselves quite so completely to the “soft-power” of Hollywood as we poor deluded Kiwis.

 

Having successfully persuaded New Zealand’s government to re-word its labour and immigration laws to industry specifications, increase its financial incentives and provide Warner Bros with millions of dollars’ worth of free publicity, the Hollywood moguls should be blushing with shame. More likely they’re kicking themselves for not demanding more.

 

And considering what we’ve been willing to do unasked – who could blame them! A friend of mine, returning from a trip to the United States, told me of his cringing embarrassment upon discovering that Air New Zealand’s passenger safety instructional video now doubles as a trailer for The Hobbit (complete with the Gollum character crawling up the aisle in search of  his “Prescioussss” – presumably the nearest exit!)

 

Why are we doing this to ourselves? Why are we so quick to dismiss even the slightest criticism of the Middle Earth franchise? How has The Hobbit’s director, Sir Peter Jackson, acquired such a powerful grip upon the public’s imagination and affection, and thus upon the direction of Government policy? What has caused a little nation located in the South Pacific to expend so much time, energy and money transforming itself into a bucolic version of medieval England?

 

Perhaps, after nearly forty years of official decolonisation, Sir Peter’s masterful adaptation of Tolkien’s masterpieces has opened a long-locked door to the colonisers’ cultural storehouse. Most New Zealanders are, when all is said and done, English speakers and (as Maori have been telling us for nearly forty years) culture and language are inextricably linked.

 

Transported half way across the planet our ancestors lost little time in reshaping Aotearoa’s natural landscape with flora and fauna appropriate to their vocabulary. And alongside the oaks and elms, sheep and cattle they’d introduced, they also constructed churches, schools, town halls and railway stations designed to “age” their young colony. It’s why the centre of Christchurch used to, and the heart of Dunedin still does, look like it’s stood there for centuries.

 

Ageing The Colony: St Andrew's Presbyterian Church, Auckland: "A baroque tower in Symonds Street that appears to have stood there since 1730." (Photo by Chris Harris)

 

Two great waves of cultural change have laid much of this “Better Britain” flat. The first was the wave of brutal modernist architecture which reduced the neo-classical and Gothic buildings of our Victorian forebears to rubble. And as modernism flattened New Zealand’s constructed landscape, so the second great wave: officially sanctioned bi-culturalism and assertive indigeneity; deconstructed its fondest cultural assumptions and undermined its intellectual confidence.

 

This great laying to waste of the West’s best stories, which goes by the name of Post-Modernism, is described by the social theorist, Frederic Jameson, as “the cultural logic of late-capitalism”. It’s most devastating characteristic is its power to dissolve boundaries. High and popular culture mingle promiscuously in the post-modern societies of the 21^st Century; as do past and present, fact and fiction, science and religion.

 

Sir Peter Jackson floats freely in this post-modern world – as his mischievous 1995 faux documentary, Forgotten Silver, made very clear. Who better, then, to overlay Tolkien’s Middle Earth upon a New Zealand landscape already transformed by the ecological imperialism of its Victorian colonisers? The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and now The Hobbit, may “only” be movies, but that has not prevented them from turning Mt Ngaurahoe into “Mt Doom” and Matamata into “Hobbiton”.

 

Tolkein’s writings may be fictional but they possess a cultural power that is very real. And thanks to the cinematographic skills of Sir Peter Jackson and the digital magic of Weta Workshops, Pakeha New Zealanders have been given reference points that owe nothing to their country’s indigenous culture. In our post-modern world, where reality has taken on an alarmingly subjective quality, “Middle Earth” is a much more comfortable fit than “Aotearoa”.

 

More comfortable, too, for dwellers in a “West” beset with economic, political, environmental and cultural challenges. A West in whose eyes New Zealand stands as a refuge every bit as wholesome and protected as “The Shire”. New Zealanders’ desire for cultural reassurance and comfort is thus reinforced by an international audience desperate to escape the daunting challenges of multiculturalism and austerity.

 

No, the tourism industry and Air New Zealand should have little difficulty in filling those airliners. Not while Middle Earth is so much more enjoyable than the real one.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 27^th November 2012.

David Cunliffe's Pride

Momentary Triumph: David Cunliffe beams as the Labour Party democratises itself over the concerted resistance of his parliamentary colleagues. Within hours he was being set up as the scapegoat for the Conference delegates' insubordination. (Photo by John Chapman)

 

“OUR PROBLEMS aren’t external – they’re internal.” Chris Hipkins has one of those eternally youthful countenances which argue strongly against such ominous utterances. It’s as if such old words couldn’t possibly slither between such young teeth. And yet there he was before me, speaking darkly about the enemy within.

 

Hardly surprising, perhaps, given the fall-out from Labour’s tumultuous annual conference?

 

Except that Mr Hipkins’ political paranoia was being carried into the hall well before the acrimonious constitutional debate which caught so many Labour MPs and political journalists by surprise last Saturday morning. Because it was Friday afternoon, not Saturday morning, that the Chief Opposition Whip vouchsafed to me his grim opinion on the inherent character of Labour’s “problems”.

 

No matter. From the moment the failure of David Shearer’s followers’ all-out effort to defeat a proposal requiring Labour’s leader, in the February following a general election, to secure the backing of more than 60 percent of his caucus, or face an election involving Labour MPs, party members and affiliated trade unions, became clear, Mr Hipkins and the rest of Mr Shearer’s faction worked tirelessly to paste David Cunliffe’s face all over Labour’s “internal” difficulties.

 

The narrow victory (264/237) of the new party rule was presented as proof that not only were “dark forces” (as one journalist colourfully described them) conspiring behind the scenes, but that a Cunliffe-inspired leadership coup was imminent.

 

The eagerness with which journalists accepted this version of events is, from a week’s perspective, rather puzzling. Had a leadership coup truly been unfolding, how likely is it that its purported leader, well short of the numbers, would kick it off by publicly over-exciting TV3’s irrepressible Patrick Gower with repeated and repeated and repeated refusals to declare his support for Mr Shearer’s leadership?

 

Ambition, as Mark Antony said of Julius Caesar, should be made of sterner (or at least more tactically adroit) stuff. A genuine plotter would have grinned broadly, and with a twinkle in his eye, pledged undying loyalty to his leader. Continuing the Shakespearian theme: he would have “smiled and smiled, yet been a villain”.

 

The one really intriguing question still awaiting a satisfactory answer is, therefore: “Why did he do it?” Why did Mr Cunliffe not tell Mr Gower that a leadership challenge was out of the question? He must have known that his refusal to do so would dominate the news media’s coverage of the conference; overshadow the Labour Party’s radical democratisation process; and draw public attention away from both his leader’s keynote address and the party’s new housing policy.

 

What was he thinking?

 

I can, of course, only speculate. But my best guess is that Mr Cunliffe’s behaviour was driven by a combination of high political excitement; a powerful sense of vindication; and simple, old-fashioned, personal pride.

 

In part, the constitutional victories achieved at last weekend’s conference were the product of the rank-and-file’s indignation at seeing Caucus over-ride their clear leadership preference last December. One could say, therefore, that the votes against Mr Shearer’s allies on the conference floor were votes for Mr Cunliffe. Bathed in the golden light of victory; savouring the sweet taste of vindication after nearly twelve months of unceasing vilification at the hands of Mr Hipkins and his ilk, Mr Cunliffe simply wasn’t prepared to even ritually tug his forelock in the direction of Mr Shearer. (And certainly not via the leering medium of Paddy Gower!)

 

It was pride, and a surfeit of amour propre, that led Mr Cunliffe to turn a considerable political triumph into what has turned out to be a colossal personal defeat.

 

And that, surely, is the point. No man possessed of a serious intention to unseat his leader could possibly have made such a huge and career-damaging blunder.

 

Because, in politics, blunders are almost never forgiven.

 

From his now much-reduced position in Labour’s hierarchy, Mr Cunliffe can, however, comfort himself with the thought that although he has not conquered – neither has he stooped.

 

And there’s always February.

 

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 23 November 2012.

Revolution On The Conference Floor

Reclaiming The Party: "Today's the day we take our party back!" Len Richards challenges the Caucus's attempt to blunt the rank-and-file's campaign for democratisation at the 2012 Annual Conference of the Labour Party. (Photo by John Chapman)

HOW DO REVOLUTIONS BEGIN? With ordinary people discovering their power. When someone or something previously regarded as all-powerful is suddenly seen to falter and fall.

 

Is it over-the-top to call what happened last weekend at the Labour Party’s annual conference in Auckland a revolution? Do twenty-first century political parties even wield that sort of power anymore? Hasn’t “revolutionary party” become an oxymoron?

 

Maybe. But something is changing in the world of progressive politics and the radical changes ratified by the 622 delegates to last weekend’s Labour Party Conference have put New Zealand squarely into the vanguard of that change.

 

And that’s not just because Labour’s membership voted themselves a decisive role in choosing their party leader. After all, the British Labour Party did something very similar thirty years ago. Nor is it a matter of members having left their parliamentary wing very little in the way of wiggle room when it comes to implementing party policy. All of these changes were important, but a long way short of revolutionary.

 

No, the revolution really began when a number of senior members of Labour’s Parliamentary Caucus attempted to water-down the rank-and-file’s radical changes to the Party’s constitution.

 

Suddenly all the pent up frustrations of a membership long accustomed to being treated as little more than an enthusiastic applause-machine boiled-over into a bitter but utterly gripping floor-fight for the heart and soul of the Labour Party.

 

Those who had not made the minutiae of Labour Party politics their special study (which these days includes most of the Parliamentary Press Gallery) may not immediately have grasped the import of what was unfolding before their eyes last Saturday.

 

Historically-speaking, Labour’s traditionally restive rank-and-file have been ruthlessly whipped into line by a combination of Members of Parliament, Labour Electorate Committee (LEC) Chairs and/or trade union bosses. At the close of conference business, seated comfortably in the nearest pub, they may have groused to one another about remits they were “forced” to support or reject, but only very rarely did the membership make a fight of it. Victories for the rank-and-file were rarer still.

 

On Saturday, however, events unfolded very differently. At issue was the number of Labour MPs needed to “trigger” a leadership vote in which the whole party could participate. The percentage of the parliamentary caucus required to activate the party’s new Electoral College (comprising 40 percent MPs, 40 percent ordinary members, and 20 percent trade union affiliates) had originally been set at 66 percent. After loud protests this was amended to 55 percent and then reduced again by the conference delegates to 50 percent + one.

 

So far, so good.

 

The debate then shifted to the number required to precipitate a membership-wide vote after each general election. It was proposed that any party leader failing to secure the support of 60 percent of his or her caucus colleagues would have to fight it out in the Electoral College. In other words, the post-election trigger for a party-wide vote would be set at just 40 percent.

 

Many Labour MPs construed this as an attack directed at Labour leader, David Shearer, by his erstwhile rival, David Cunliffe. Not since the dark days of the 1980s and Rogernomics had an annual conference of the Labour Party echoed to such bitter thrusts and counter-thrusts.

 

But while the intense personal rivalries currently besetting Labour’s Caucus undoubtedly accounted for much of the vitriol flying back and forth last Saturday, rank-and-file resentment at being ignored and over-ruled by their parliamentary representatives was an even more important driver of dissent.

 

Ordinary members of the Labour Party knew their preferred candidate for party leader, David Cunliffe, had been passed over by the Caucus in favour of David Shearer. It was this decision, following years of being dictated to by the parliamentary leadership, that generated the great wave of constitutional reform which broke over last weekend’s conference.

 

But another factor was at work on the conference floor last weekend. In the minds of many delegates were the bitter memories of a Caucus which had not only over-ruled but betrayed the party membership: the caucus that unleashed Rogernomics.

 

When delegate Len Richards declared “Today’s the day we take our party back!” He was alluding to much more than last December’s leadership vote.

 

In the end, and despite all the arm-twisting and brow-beating by Mr Shearer’s surrogates, the 40 percent trigger – symbol of the rank-and-file’s newly-minted authority – was approved: 264 votes in favour, 237 against.

 

Pebbles rolling down a hillside, you may think. But landslides – and revolutions – have to begin somewhere.

David Shearer’s Sunday speech – full of bold, radical and unmistakably Labour rhetoric and policy – was his direct response to the party membership’s noisy determination to reclaim their party.

 

They received Mr Shearer’s speech with whoops and cheers because, in truth, they had written it themselves.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 20 November 2012.

Reclaiming Labour

Perfect Harmony: How many Labour Party MPs (especially those in David Shearer's camp) look wistfully at the Chinese Communist Party's five-yearly congress, where all the delegates are hand-picked and the results of every ballot pre-determined?

 

AND STILL WE WAIT. The Eighteenth Congress of the Communist Party of China has been and gone and yet, at the time of writing, the world still doesn’t know the identities of the dozen or so men and women who will govern China for the next five years.
 

The manner of choosing the ruling “Standing Committee” of the CPC’s “Political Bureau” is nothing if not carefully managed. The Congress’s roughly two thousand delegates are more-or-less hand-picked by a special party commission. Its task made easier by the fact that these potentially unruly comrades are only summoned once every five years. That’s a long time between drinks to the Party’s unconquerable unity, but it does ensure that the outcome of just about every vote is known long before it is taken.
 

How many, I wonder, in Labour’s lacklustre caucus have gazed wistfully at the CPC’s meticulously stage-managed “democracy” and wondered how it might be imposed on their own increasingly restless rank-and-file?
 

Especially this weekend, when said rank-and-file show every sign of reclaiming their party from a caucus whose use-by date – collectively-speaking – expired a couple of elections ago.
 

Most New Zealanders will not be much bothered. Such media coverage as the event attracts will focus almost exclusively on the real or imagined threats to David Shearer’s leadership. If we are lucky it may also feature a few excerpts from the “make or break” speech he is scheduled to deliver on Sunday afternoon. The likely consensus of the assembled scribes? That “Shearer is safe” – at least until February 2013.
 

It was not always so. Forty years ago our single public broadcaster would park an outside broadcast van outside the Wellington Town Hall and deliver roughly twenty minutes of live interviews, commentaries, and recorded highlights of proceedings, each day the conference was in session. The usually three-day conferences of Labour and National would, therefore, receive an hour of television coverage.
 

That’s because, forty years ago, party conferences mattered. New Zealand boasted the highest level of political participation in the Western World. One in four of the population was enrolled in one of three major parties: Labour, National and Social Credit. National, under Rob Muldoon boasted a membership of close to a quarter-of-a-million. Labour in 1984 had a branch membership of 85,000.
 

Party conferences were, therefore, events of genuine democratic significance. The policy remits of rank-and-file members alerted the electorate to how a very large number of their friends and neighbours were thinking – and were seriously debated. Mass party memberships also made it extremely difficult for National and Labour MPs to stray very far from their party’s principles.
 

That is why the successful implementation of “Rogernomics” ultimately required Labour’s destruction as a mass political organisation. Had upwards of 60,000 members not voted with their feet between 1985 and 1990; and had the remaining dissidents not decamped with Jim Anderton to form the NewLabour Party; such a treacherous mix of economic and social policies could never have endured.
 

And it is here that we come to the nub of Labour’s present difficulties. If it expands and democratises itself, the party’s incomplete (and, therefore, insincere) repudiation of neoliberalism will not be permitted to stand.
 

Helen Clark understood this very well, which is why she imposed a level of discipline on Labour that would have made the CPC blanche. Ms Clark’s caucus removed the formation of policy from party hands. For the fifteen long years of her domination, most of the senior positions in the party were filled by “elections” that were effectively uncontested. In 2008, her reign over, she was permitted, in classic CPC style, to nominate and install her own successor.

Apres Moi, Le Deluge: Helen Clark preserved Labour as a political force, but only by imposing an iron discipline upon its members and eliminating as many opportunities for dissent as possible. 

 

This is the legacy that Labour’s rank-and-file members are gathering at Auckland’s Ellerslie Convention Centre this weekend to either decisively repudiate or, fatally, extend. If they seize the right to choose (and dismiss) their own party leader; to determine and enforce their own policy platform; and, by reaching out to their fellow citizens with genuine people-first-money-second policies, to rebuild a mass political organisation; then Labour will survive and prosper.
 

If they bow to the demands (no matter how silkily presented) of Labour’s parliamentary caucus, then the party’s long and increasingly dysfunctional descent into electoral disconnection and political irrelevance will continue.
 

The world has to wait for the CPC. New Zealand will not wait for Labour.
 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 16 November 2012.

Ms O'Sullivan's Curious Commentary

Not Stupid: Fran O'Sullivan is one of New Zealand's most experienced journalists. What, then, lies behind her rather odd analysis of David Shearer's political options at this weekend's Labour Party Conference?

 

LET’S BEGIN with the headline: “Shearer’s vision can unite Labour”. That’s what the Herald’s subs called this morning’s opinion piece by Fran O’Sullivan. It sounded hopeful, but it didn’t take me very long to realise that Ms O’Sullivan was actually urging Mr Shearer to do exactly the opposite:

 

“He should not be afraid to upset grassroot Labour Party members this weekend – particularly the anonymous bloggers who get far too much attention.

 

“Shearer should make it clear he has not resiled from the vision he put forward in Parliament soon after his colleagues voted him leader. That vision is more likely to capture middle-class votes than simply playing to ‘our people’.”

 

Now, I’ve known Ms O’Sullivan for many years, and one thing she isn’t is stupid. On the face of it, however, her column in this morning’s Herald was just that: stupid.

 

Why would any credible political commentator advise a party leader installed over the objections of his own rank-and-file to roll up to his first party conference and piss them off all over again? Why would she suggest that his policy announcements be directed not at “our people” (i.e. the party’s electoral base) but at middle-class voters whose most distinguishing political characteristic over the past four years has been their open contempt and hostility towards the poor and the marginalised?

 

What does Ms O’Sullivan know that we “anonymous bloggers” don’t? (And let me note here how surprised I was to learn that Duncan Garner, Gordon Campbell, Martyn Bradbury, Danyl McLachlan, Brian Edwards and Scott Yorke weren’t those bloggers’ real names!)

 

Does this veteran business journalist have some special insight into this country’s political machinations which allows her to confidently brush aside the rank-and-file of the Labour Party as irrelevant to the outcome of the next general election? In spite of the recent US presidential election demonstrating just how important an effective “ground game” has become to securing victory, Ms O’Sullivan feels able to reassure Mr Shearer that he can safely ignore the very people who make an effective “ground game” possible. Why is that?

 

Perhaps the answer lies in her prediction that playing to the prejudices of the middle-class rather than “our people” would “also yield good results for New Zealand’s economy and business”. Perhaps she envisages the business audiences (to which Mr Shearer – a “fiscal conservative” – is said to have so much appeal) digging deep into their pockets to finance a campaign that would allow the Leader of the Opposition to make an end-run around his own membership?

 

That would certainly seem to be the strategic thinking behind both Ms O’Sullivan’s and Mr Shearer’s references to the former Finnish prime minister, Esko Aho.

 

“[H]e thought it was more important to make a difference than to get re-elected”, Mr Shearer is quoted as saying. “I can tell you I have no interest in being a prime minister who just cautiously tinkers.”

 

And it is here, I believe, that we come to the heart of Ms O’Sullivan’s thinking about Mr Shearer and the sort of Labour Government he might lead. The template in use is, of course, the one bequeathed to us by the Fourth Labour Government.

The Labour Party that gave us “Rogernomics” will always enjoy the special affection of neoliberals like Ms O’Sullivan. Not only for implementing policies that a conservative government would have had to introduce at the point of a gun, but for destroying both the Labour Party and the labour movement in the process.

 

The Lange-Douglas government corrupted everything it touched – including the MPs and party officials who opted to remain inside the empty shell Labour had become after three-fourths of its members – including the best and brightest of its left-wing heart – had departed in disgust. Helen Clark and her enablers may not have been neoliberals, but nor were they prepared to confront or repudiate the neoliberalism which the Lange-Douglas partnership had made the default setting of “New Zealand’s economy and business”.

 

In the nine long years it took Labour (with Jim Anderton’s Alliance in support) to claw its way back to the treasury benches, the trade union movement, as an effective counterweight to corporate power, had been destroyed and the state bureaucracy purged of its civil service ethic. And yet, after nine long years of Labour rule, the countervailing democratic powers of these crucial institutions remained unrestored.

 

It is this seeming inability (or is it unwillingness?) to challenge the neoliberal establishment with something more robust and modern (Josie Pagani take note) than a reheated Blairism which lies at the root of the Labour Party’s (as opposed to the Labour Caucus’s) restiveness. It explains the party membership's endorsement, by a margin of two-to-one, of David Cunliffe's candidacy last December.

Alone among his caucus colleagues Mr Cunliffe grasps how profoundly the global financial crisis is changing the nature of the political-economic game. In response (and in marked contrast to his boss) he's increasingly willing to publicly challenge the dominant neoliberal paradigm. Mr Cunliffe’s popularity among rank-and-file Labour members reflects the wider societal hunger for a genuine alternative to what is clearly a failing system.

 

It is also, I suspect, why even Ms O’Sullivan (who, as I said, is not stupid) writes: “[I]t is abundantly clear that Cunliffe would make a much more compelling Opposition leader than Shearer. He is hard-headed. He has been politically blooded. He has Cabinet experience. He is in tune with Labour’s base.”

 

So it is Mr Cunliffe’s – not Mr Shearer’s – vision that can unite Labour. Isn’t that what Ms O’Sullivan’s column is really saying? And isn’t that why she and all her right-wing colleagues in the mainstream news media are so determined that he NOT replace the incumbent? Isn’t that why they are talking-up Ms Pagani? Isn’t that why they’re begging Labour’s members to give Mr Shearer “more time”?

 

A Labour-led Government headed by the man who takes inspiration from the right-wing Esko Aho; the man who has no interest in being a leader who “cautiously tinkers”; the man who thinks it’s “more important to make a difference than get re-elected”; would be a government hell-bent on repeating the devastating mistakes of the 1980s.

 

Not only that, it would be a government which left what’s left of the Left as demoralised and divided as the government which, in the six bitter years between 1984 and 1990, tore New Zealand’s social-democratic society to pieces.

 

A consummation devoutly to be wished – at least by Ms O’Sullivan.

 

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

Expendable: Unemployment - Past & Present



Fearful Memories: Recaptured here, for the New Zealand television drama, Life's a Riot, is one of the many anti-eviction protests that wracked Auckland during the 1930s. The Welfare State had been built to ensure such scenes were never repeated. Full employment, everyone knew, was the key to working-class security and dignity.

THE FIGURE STRUCK New Zealand like a bombshell. It had been thirty years since numbers like these had been published. Memories were stirred. Fearful memories of one’s own or one’s parents’ abject surrender to the pitiless forces of an economic system in extremis. It was October 1967 and the number of New Zealanders registered as unemployed had risen to 5,458. Worse was to come, by June the following year the number stood at 8,665.

 

New Zealanders’ horrified reaction to the economic recession of 1967-68 and the rapid rise in unemployment which accompanied it was entirely reasonable. Forty-five years ago people possessed a much clearer understanding of the essential elements underpinning the Welfare State. They knew that it could only be paid for by a workforce that was fully employed and in receipt of incomes sufficiently large to maintain a healthy demand for goods and services. Everyone accepted that any return to mass unemployment would first weaken and then destroy the foundations of the Welfare State.

 

Throughout the 1950s and well into the 1960s the number of New Zealanders registered as unemployed seldom rose above three figures. People used to joke that the Prime Minister knew each unemployed citizen by name. Some economists even advanced the theory that New Zealand suffered from “over-full employment”; that skilled-labour shortages were hampering the country’s economic advancement.

 

Going Up? New Zealand economist Keith Rankin has produced this graph indicating the real levels of unemployment in New Zealand 1950-2000. His calculations factor-in the number of women who could not find a place in the workforce. Even with this important modification, New Zealand's success in keeping its people employed throughout the 1950s, 60s and 70s is remarkable.

 

For ordinary wage and salary-earners, however, full employment stood for personal, family and social security. It also guaranteed a measure of working-class dignity. If an employer treated workers unfairly, or paid them too little, there were always plenty of other employers looking for staff. Bad bosses could be told to stick their jobs where the sun don’t shine, and with more than half of the workforce enrolled in trade unions there wasn’t a helluva lot he could do about it.

 

In rehearsing these facts we are also measuring how very far New Zealand has travelled since the 1960s and 70s. The history of the last thirty years is, in many respects, the history of the slow and deliberate dismantling of the economic and social settlement negotiated by the Labour Party in the 1930s and 40s, and preserved (at least in its essentials) by the National Party right up until the critical year, 1984.

 

In a week which saw the number of unemployed New Zealanders swell to more than 175,000, or 7.3 percent of the workforce, the moral gulf separating 1967 from 2012 appears vast. And yet, had the Government been able to announce that the number of unemployed had fallen to 125,000 it would have been loudly congratulated. To keep the all-important inflation rate within the desired range of 1-3 percent per anum, the unemployment rate needs to be pegged at around 6 percent. That’s how successive New Zealand governments have preferred to manage the economy since the late-1980s – and there’s precious little evidence of a change of heart.

 

Keeping more than 100,000 New Zealanders enlisted in this “Reserve Army of Labour” does, however, require a very considerable hardening of the heart. A political class which can watch with impassive detachment while individuals, families and whole communities are stretched and broken on the rack of enforced idleness is not one that answers to anything but the crudest utilitarianism.

 

The biggest problem these comptrollers of human suffering face are the altruistic impulses of the unemployed’s fellow citizens. The natural human urge to extend a helping hand to those in need (an urge once institutionally embodied in the Labour Party) must be constrained. With the cynicism only the truly emotionally dead are able to wield, the victims of neoliberal economics are transformed into vicious parasites and anti-social monsters: “baby-breeders” and “child abusers” – depraved criminals as unworthy of our pity as they are of our taxes.

 

Having recast these largely innocent victims of capitalist dysfunction as members of the feckless and undeserving poor, it requires cruelty of particular refinement to then order them, on pain of being deprived of life’s necessities, to enrol in a labour market already over-subscribed to the tune of 175,000 souls.

 

It was long ago (1972) and far away (Scotland) that the radical trade unionist, Jimmy Reid, addressed the students of Glasgow University – who had just elected him Rector:

 

“To appreciate fully the inhumanity of [unemployment] you have to see the hurt and despair in the eyes of a man suddenly told he is redundant without provision made for suitable alternative employment … Someone, somewhere has decided he is unwanted, unneeded, and is to be thrown on the industrial scrap heap. From the very depth of my being, I challenge the right of any man or any group of men, in business or in government, to tell a fellow human being that he or she is expendable.”

 

How very, very much we have forgotten in forty years.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 13 November 2012.