Are We The Baddies?

Difficult Questions: Does denying human equality and rejecting the principles of colour-blind citizenship place you among the baddies? Yes, I’m afraid it does.

THE DEMON OF UNREST documents the descent of the United States into civil war. The primary focus of its author, Erik Larson, is the period of roughly five months between the election of Abraham Lincoln as President in November 1860, and his inauguration in March 1861. These were the months in which, one after the other, the slaveholding states of the South voted to secede from the Union.

Seldom has the evolution of an implacable political logic proceeded in circumstances where so few effective means of altering its direction lay to hand. Americans had become the prisoners of convictions that could not be set aside without incurring, to employ a key concept of the era, an irreparable loss of honour.

Only a president of Lincoln’s strength and steadfastness could have won the American Civil War, but not even a president of Lincoln’s strength and steadfastness could have prevented it.

The most disconcerting feature of Larson’s historical narrative are the many parallels between the America of then, and the New Zealand of now. There are Kiwis, today, as committed to the decolonisation and indigenisation of their country as Yankees once were to the abolition of slavery. Likewise, there is an answering fraction of the New Zealand population every bit as determined to preserve the colour-blind conception of what it means to be a New Zealander as the slaveholders of the American South were determined to preserve their own “peculiar institution”.

The key historical question arising from this comparison is: which of the opposing sides in the present conflict between “New Zealand” and “Aotearoa” represents the North, and which the South? The answer is far from straightforward.

Superficially, it is the promoters of decolonisation and indigenisation who most resemble the Northern abolitionists. Certainly, in their moral certainty, dogmatism, and unwillingness to compromise, the Decolonisers and the Abolitionists would appear to be cut from identical cloth. Brought together by a time machine, one can easily imagine their respective leaders, so alike in their political style, getting along famously.

By the same token, the defenders of Colour-Blind New Zealand, in their reverence for tradition and their deep nostalgia for the political certainties of the past, would appear to be a more than passable match for the political forces that gave birth to the Confederate States of America in 1861.

These correspondences are, however, more apparent than real. From a strictly ideological standpoint, it is the Decolonisers who match most closely the racially-obsessed identarian radicals who rampaged through the streets of the South in 1860-61, demanding secession and violently admonishing all those suspected of harbouring Northern sympathies. Likewise, it is the Indigenisers who preach a racially-bifurcated state in which the ethnic origin of the citizen is the most crucial determinant of his or her political rights and duties.

Certainly, in this country, the loudest clamour and the direst threats are directed at those who argue that New Zealand must remain a democratic state in which all citizens enjoy equal rights, irrespective of wealth, gender, or ethnic origin, and in which the property rights of all citizens are safeguarded by the Rule of Law.

These threats escalated alarmingly following the election of what soon became the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government. Like the election of Lincoln in 1860, the success of New Zealand’s conservative parties in the 2023 general election was construed by the Decolonisers and Indigenisers as a potentially fatal blow to any hope of sustaining and extending the gains made under the sympathetic, radical, and identity-driven Labour Government of 2020-23.

Just as occurred throughout the South in November and December of 1860, the fire-eating partisans of “Aotearoa” lost little time in coming together to warn the incoming government that its political programme was unreasonable, unacceptable, and “racist”; and that any attempt to realise it in legislation would be met with massive resistance – up to and including civil war.

The profoundly undemocratic nature of the fire-eaters’ opposition was illustrated by their vehement objections to the Act Party’s policy of holding a binding referendum to entrench, or not, the “principles” of the Treaty of Waitangi. Like the citizens of South Carolina, the first state to secede, the only votes they are willing to recognise are their own.

Another historical parallel is discernible in the degree to which the judicial arm of the New Zealand state, like its American counterpart in the 1850s, has actively supported the cause of ethnic difference in the 2020s.

In 1857, the infamous Dred-Scott decision of the US Supreme Court advanced the cause of slavery throughout the United States. Written by Chief Justice Roger Taney, the judgement found that persons of African descent: “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States”. The Taney Court’s decision made civil war inevitable.

In 2022, the New Zealand Supreme Court’s adjudication of the Peter Ellis Case would add a novel legal consideration – tikanga Māori – to the application of New Zealand Law. The Court’s constitutionally dubious decision was intended to, and did, materially advance the establishment of a bi-cultural legal system in Aotearoa. It represented an historic victory for the Decolonisers.

It may occur to some readers, that the argument put forward here resembles the celebrated Mitchell & Webb television sketch in which a worried SS officer asks his Nazi comrade-in-arms, Hans: “Are we the baddies?” It’s a great line. But, over and above the humour, the writers are making an important point. Those who devote themselves entirely to a cause are generally incapable of questioning its moral status – even when its uniforms are adorned with skulls.

Those New Zealanders who believe unquestioningly in the desirability of decolonisation and indigenisation argue passionately that they are part of the same great progressive tradition that inspired the American Abolitionists of 160 years ago. But are they?

Did the Black Abolitionist, and former slave, Frederick Douglass, embrace the racial essentialism of Moana Jackson? Or did he, rather, wage an unceasing struggle against those who insisted, to the point of unleashing a devastating civil war, that all human-beings are not created equal?

What is there that in any way advances the progressive cause about the casual repudiation of Dr Martin Luther King Jnr’s dream that: “one day my four little children will be judged not by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character”?

When will the partisans of decolonisation and indigenisation finally notice the death’s head on their caps? That, driven by their political passion to atone for the sins of the colonial fathers, they are willing to subvert the Rule of Law, deny human equality, misrepresent their country’s history, and abandon its democratic system of government. Can they not see that the people they castigate as the direct ideological descendants of the slaveholding white supremacists of the antebellum South, are actually fighting for the same principles that animated and inspired the Northern Abolitionists?

Does denying human equality and rejecting the principles of colour-blind citizenship place you among the baddies? Yes, I’m afraid it does. The demon of unrest has claimed you for his own.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack page on Thursday. 17 October 2024.

Out Of Sympathy.

Unsympathetic Characters: Christopher Luxon should be grateful that his principal opponent, Chris Hipkins, is as out of sympathy with the temper of the times as he is.

CHRIS HIPKINS had both a good week and a bad week. He and his team were able to press home Labour’s attack on the self-destructive behaviour of the Minister for Small Business and Manufacturing, Andrew Bayly. Winston Peters’ mid-week counterattack, however, immediately placed Labour on the defensive.

Hipkins was forced to endure the embarrassment of having to walk-back his description of the public servant at the heart of Peters’ conflict-of-interest claims as a “distant relative” of Ayesha Verrall, Labour’s health spokesperson. As Peters gleefully pointed out, the individual in question was, in fact, Verrall’s sister-in-law.

So, not that distant.

The attack on Bayly, while successful, risked the accusation that Labour was shooting an already wounded fish in a barrel. The walk-back forced upon Hipkins by Peters, by contrast, made the Leader of the Opposition look just a little bit shifty, and a lot foolish.

Even worse, Peters had floated a story calculated to shift the public’s attention away from the controversial actions of NZ First’s Associate Health Minister, Casey Costello, towards the equally controversial possibility that ideologically-driven public servants might be deliberately sabotaging the ministers they are employed to serve.

Peters is entirely justified in querying the failure of the Ministry of Health to alert Costello to the potential conflict-of-interest which Verrall’s sister-in-law had promptly, properly and professionally identified to her employer prior to working alongside the Associate Health Minister.

The Ministry’s failure to adequately brief Costello has placed their employee in an extremely uncomfortable position. Verrall has led the charge in Parliament against Costello’s actions in relation to New Zealand’s long-standing, and hitherto bi-partisan, effort to reduce the population’s consumption of tobacco products. Verrall’s attacks were amplified by the impact of a number of dramatic information leaks. The potential, now, for members of the public, alarmed by Peters’ revelations, to put two and two together, and make five, is considerable.

Peters’ intuitive feel for the sort of story most likely to gel with the mindset of the Coalition’s conservative supporters can only be admired. Justified, or not, there is a widespread conviction on the Right that the Coalition Government’s electoral mandate is not respected by institutions whose acceptance of the majority’s right to govern is essential to the proper functioning of a representative democracy.

The impression left with right-wing New Zealanders, from the way these institutions have conducted themselves since October 2023, is that the victory of the three parties making up the Coalition Government represents a deeply problematic triumph of ideas, attitudes, and policies inimical to the optimal development of Aotearoa-New Zealand.

Public servants, judges, academics, journalists and the liberal clergy are all, rightly or wrongly, perceived to be working against the Government, and doing everything within their power to impede the roll-out of policies deemed morally unjustifiable and evidentially unsustainable. The degree to which conservative voters are invested in these policies is a pretty reliable indicator of the animosity directed at those believed responsible for delaying – or even halting – their implementation.

Such political frustration is far from novel. What is new, however, is the general apprehension of those who identify as right-wing, that “the system” is ideologically rigged against them. Those subscribing to this notion are convinced that across-the-board resistance to conservative policies is not only prevalent in the upper echelons of New Zealand society, but that it also enjoys the unofficial blessing of an unhealthily large number of the nation’s unelected leaders.

As evidence of this phenomenon many of them would point to the Waitangi Tribunal’s apparent refusal to accept that the Coalition Government has a clear electoral mandate to implement policies which, in the Tribunal’s view, run counter to its understanding of te Tiriti and its constitutional significance. That the Tribunal’s judgements are typically met with the enthusiastic support of academia and the news media only confirms the Right’s belief that New Zealand’s state and social infrastructure has been tilted decisively to the left.

The surprising appointment of Richard Prebble to the Tribunal will serve as an important test as to whether that quasi-judicial body is open to being tilted to the right.

Prebble’s comeback notwithstanding, conservative New Zealand’s confusion is entirely understandable. The left-wing biases they detect in today’s institutions are the exact opposite of the biases evident across the same institutions in times past.

Historically, it was the Left who looked with dark suspicion on all the key institutions of capitalist society. Citing The Communist Manifesto, Marxists reminded their comrades that: “The executive of the modern state is nothing but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” No genuine left-wing government, they averred, would ever be permitted to implement an authentic socialist programme.

“Don’t believe us? Just look at what happened to Salvador Allende, Harold Wilson, Norman Kirk, and Gough Whitlam in the 1970s.”

Deep down, one suspects, conservative New Zealanders are struggling to resist the terrifying conclusion that, somehow, Capitalists have convinced themselves that, far from sending their system broke, going woke is actually more likely to strengthen its hegemonic grip on the sensibilities of the post-modern West.

Perhaps it is this deep fear that explains Andrew Bayly’s self-destructive behaviour. There was a time when the servants of power found it advantageous to advertise the superior status of their masters by demonstrating the inferior status of their servants – commonly referred to “sucking up by kicking down”. Bayly’s background as an army officer, and as the paid protector of other people’s capital, would certainly have exposed him to this sort of behaviour. Unfortunately for him, however, the social strategies of the past are no longer the social strategies of the present. Drawing attention to the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy is no longer appreciated by today’s businesspeople – small or large.

Which is why Chris Hipkins’ decision to highlight Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s unwillingness to remove Bayly’s ministerial warrant was such a shrewd one. It provided the voters and, more importantly, the business community, with a vivid illustration of just how all-over-the-place Luxon’s understanding of twenty-first century politics truly is.

Andrew Bayly isn’t a bad man, but he shows every sign of being an outdated one. No politician wishing to succeed in 2024 would contemplate interacting with a fellow citizen so crassly, or so cruelly – not even in jest.

Were Luxon committed to reaffirming and reinstating all the old conservative values – i.e. a right-wing populist – then his handling of Bayly would make perfect sense. There is nothing, however, that suggests Luxon has any sympathy with the populist impulses of NZ First – or Act. On the contrary, he tries to present himself as the quintessential twenty-first century businessperson – an ambition radically at odds with the anti-woke expectations of a significant percentage of the Coalition Government’s electoral base.

Luxon should be grateful, then, that when it comes to not “getting” the frustration and resentment of conservative New Zealand – a designation which includes a large number of former Labour, as well as National, voters – his principal opponent, Chris Hipkins, is as out of sympathy with the temper of the times as he is.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 28 October 2024.

Two States - But No Solutions.

My Enemy’s Enemy Is My Friend: Mohammad Amin al-Husseini, the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, at the opening of the Islamic Central Institute in Berlin, December 19, 1942. The elimination of the Jewish state has been the unwavering ambition of successive generations of Palestinian leaders.

AMIDST ALL THE HORROR of the Israel-Hamas War, the world’s hopes for peace remain pinned on the so-called “Two-State Solution”. Born of the 1993 Oslo Accords, where Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) jointly agreed to establish the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) the Two State Solution looked forward to the creation of an independent Palestinian state adjoining the State of Israel.

Naturally, there were sceptics.

Historians quite rightly pointed out that the option of two states, Israel and Palestine, both of them carved out of the League of Nation’s “Mandate” which the British had just relinquished, had been on the table as long ago as 1947.

It had been laid there by the newly-created United Nations, whose commissioners had drawn the borders of the proposed states as closely as possible around majority Arab and Jewish communities. The result, as with similar exercises undertaken in Ireland and India, left both sides angry and frustrated. After much soul-searching, however, the Jews of Palestine accepted the proposed partition. The Palestinian Arabs, determined to inherit an undivided Palestinian state, refused.

How different the world might have been had the Palestinian leaders followed the example of their Jewish counterparts. Gaza, today, might have been a sparkling Mediterranean city, as buzzing with entrepreneurship and innovation as Tel Aviv, just a few miles up the coast. In a single generation, the West Bank of the Jordan, bankrolled by the Arab oil states, would surely have been replicating Israel’s own economic miracle.

Palestine’s leaders, however, have always presented a problem.

In 1947, the most prominent Palestinian statesman was Mohammad Amin al-Husseini, the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Scion of an aristocratic Arab family which traced its lineage all the way back to the Prophet, al-Husseini was implacably opposed to the Zionist project of recreating a Jewish homeland in what had been the Ottoman province of Palestine. So adamant was he in his opposition that, when the Second World War broke out, he’d allied himself with Adolf Hitler and his Nazis.

Al-Husseini presided over the Egyptian protectorate called the All Palestine Government, based in Gaza, from 1948 until 1953. While he and all those who shared his hatred of the Israeli state (recognised by the UN in 1948) remained in charge, there was no possibility of the original Two State Solution being revived.

It was only the extraordinary efforts of Norway’s peace negotiators outside Oslo that put the Two State Solution back on the table, and President Bill Clinton who “persuaded” al-Husseini’s distant cousin, Yasser Arafat, Chairman of the PLO, to sign the accords. But, not even that silver-tongued son of Hope, Arkansas, could seduce Arafat into making the Two State Solution a reality.

It has come no nearer under Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat’s successor at the PNA. Even if he were willing, however, it is doubtful whether the Israelis would be all that keen on placing their nation’s hopes for peace in the hands of a man who, in 1984, published a book entitled “The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism”, in which Abbas accuses the Zionist movement and its leaders of being “fundamental partners” in the genocide of European Jewry alongside, and sharing equal responsibility with, the Nazis.

They came close, though. With the establishment of the PNA, the Israeli Government quietly removed its public objections to Abbas’s utterly false and outrageous lies. In pursuit of a Two State Solution, Abbas’s accusation that “every racist in the world was given the green light, and first and foremost Hitler and the Nazis, to do with the Jews as they wish, as long as it ensures Jewish immigration to Palestine”, along with many others, were quietly retired.

Which is more than can be said for Abbas. Eighty-eight years old and infamously corrupt, Abbas refuses to retire. Now President of the “State of Palestine”, he continues to survey the pitiful wreckage of his people’s homes and hopes.

While the Americans persist in claiming that two states are the only solution to the bitter and intractable problems that have plagued the region since 1948, at least some of Israel’s diplomats must smile encouragingly whenever the idea is mentioned. That said, very few ordinary Israelis still believe in it.

Entirely understandable, because, honestly, after the horror of 7 October 2023, what sane Israeli would risk one state for two?


This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 25 October 2024.

The Odd Couple.

Strange Political Bedfellows: Matthew Hooton’s support for Winston Peters’ New Zealand Futures Fund reflects the Radical Right’s newfound reluctance to bet everything on the efficacy of market forces.

AS IF HE WASN’T IN ENOUGH TROUBLE, Matthew Hooton has now come out for Winston Peters’ New Zealand Futures Fund (NZFF). Not only that, but he is also calling upon Peters to lower the company tax rate:

“A 12.5% company tax rate, not the current 28%, would be a much better bet [when it comes to attracting foreign investors] than relying on his or any other Prime Minister’s sales skills, along with limos or helicopters from the airport and PowerPoint presentations for visiting funds managers.”

Hooton has been calling for a radical re-design of the New Zealand economy for some time now. But, as the above quotation makes clear, he holds out very little hope that the National Party – let alone its present leader – is either ready, willing, or able to accomplish anything resembling substantive economic change.

Hooton’s support for Peters’ NZFF not only reflects his own personal disillusionment with National, but the Radical Right’s newfound reluctance to bet everything on the efficacy of laissez-faire. Hooton is doubtful, now, that even an economy geared rigorously to the preferences of the market will automatically allocate resources in the most effective and efficient fashion. Judging from his latest NZ Herald column, this gadfly of the Right has grown sceptical even of Act.

It is, however, difficult to tell whether Hooton’s scepticism of Act is fuelled by his perception that the party is too radical, or not radical enough. After all, by roughly halving the company tax rate, the New Zealand state would be denying itself close to nine billion dollars of revenue. The size of expenditure cuts required to fill a fiscal hole that big would likely render the country ungovernable. It is important, always, to bear in mind the extremity of Hooton’s economic and political radicalism.

That political commentators of Hooton’s ilk are losing confidence in both the virtues of right-wing centrism, and strict free-market orthodoxy, indicates an ideological shift of some significance. Just how significant will be indicated by whether or not the USA once again embraces, or rejects, the leadership of Donald Trump.

A victory for Trump would represent not just a repudiation of Kamala Harris’s half-hearted social-democracy, but a rejection of the whole concept of self-regulating markets. It would signal that the intense personalisation of leadership, long a feature of the political sphere, has migrated to the economic sphere. Right-wing voters have long sought a leader willing to bang politicians heads together. Now, it would seem, those same voters are wanting, and expecting, a leader who will bang corporations’ heads together.

The loss of confidence in Christopher Luxon’s leadership, registered in the polls, and unmistakeable in Hooton’s column, may be a reflection of the Prime Minister’s failure to manifest the head-banging qualities so many right-leaning voters were anticipating. Luxon may believe himself to be the sort of guy who can bounce India into a free trade agreement because he “gushes at them or squeezes their shoulder” – to deploy Hooton’s withering phrase – but a surprisingly large chunk of the Right’s electoral base simply aren’t buying it.

Another indicator of this economic personalisation was the readiness of Chris Bishop, Shane Jones and Simeon Brown to assume personal responsibility for setting New Zealand on a “fast track” to economic growth and prosperity. Were they, like Hooton, registering the rising impatience of at least a sizeable fraction of the electorate with conventional decision-making processes? “Just get the bloody job done!” Was that the message being sent to the Government in National’s focus-groups? And, if so, why did the Coalition refuse to heed it?

The answer to that question was on display in RNZ’s “30 With Guyon Espiner” interview with Labour’s finance spokesperson, Barbara Edmonds. In the course of that unedited half-hour, Edmonds exposed the acute tension that now exists between the intelligent politician’s understanding of just how critical the economic situation confronting New Zealand has become; the radical measures required to address it; and the dispiriting combination of intellectual lassitude and political cowardice that more-or-less guarantees that nothing will happen.

Bishop’s, Jones’ and Brown’s enforced backdown on the Fast Track legislation simply confirms that, in National’s ranks, as well as in Labour’s, doing nothing will always find more takers than doing something.

Could this be why Hooton opted to sing Peters’ praises on the pages of the Herald? Whatever else he may represent, “Winston” has always stood for the idea that “the man in the arena” has more to offer the world than those content to be guided by process and convention.

Following the rules of the game was a sound strategy when the game produced a society in which those who worked hard and kept their noses clean could anticipate a comfortable life for themselves and (more importantly) for their children. But, as the imminent prospect of a Trump victory makes clear, that anticipation lost what little purchase it had on realism long, long ago. At a time when so many of the promises of the powerful are best read as threats, more and more people are abandoning the whole democratic idea in favour of putting a strong leader in command, and giving him the freedom to get on with it.

National’s problem is that Christopher Luxon is a successful, private-sector bureaucrat. He has little time for the man in the arena, seeming more at home with the persons in the boardroom. Fond as he is of invoking the waning “mojo” of New Zealanders, Luxon displays an equal deficiency of that quality in his performance as prime minister. For all we know, of course, Luxon may possess all the qualities needed to haul New Zealand out of the Big Muddy. It’s just that, to date, he has declined to manifest them.

There was time when, presented with a faltering capitalism, the electorate could turn leftwards towards the bright (if untried) promises of socialism. No more. Half-a-century has passed since a Labour Government even vaguely reflecting socialist principles held office in New Zealand. That said, if Edmonds’ responses to Espiner offer any guide, the Labour Party of 2024 is miles away from unleashing Rogernomics 2.0, but no nearer to raising the revenue needed to keep what remains of New Zealand’s welfare state on life-support.

And, right there, the grim reality of New Zealand politics reveals itself. Labour has nothing to offer but process and convention, a failure of imagination and courage that it shares with the National Party. Act can only suggest that neoliberalism’s so-far-unavailing remedies be applied with increased rigor. The Greens and Te Pati Māori display nothing but messy ideological incontinence.

NZ First may not, in the end, have what’s needed to lead New Zealand into the “broad sunlit uplands” that Winston’s namesake promised, but, as Hooton’s column suggests, it still has “a man in the arena” shrewd enough to point the way.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 21 October 2024.

No Enemies To The Left – Or The Right.

Wrong Turn: Labour and National can only reduce the toxic influence of their electoral competitors by rejecting their extremism.

“NO ENEMIES TO THE LEFT” has always been Labour’s rule-of-thumb. What, after all, does a moderate, left-of-centre party gain by allowing its electoral rivals to become repositories for every radical (i.e. congenitally dissatisfied) left-winger’s protest vote? To deliver effective government, a major party needs coalition partners that are weak and electorally vulnerable. Strong and electorally-secure coalition partners, as Christopher Luxon is discovering, tend to make effective government … problematic.

The classical solution to this problem requires the major parties of the Left and the Right to construct their policy platforms in such a way that only the most unrelenting ideologues would feel impelled to vote for their electoral confreres. By offering enough of what are generally perceived to be “sensible” right-wing/left-wing policies, they make it unnecessary for all but a handful of voters to venture any further along the political spectrum.

When the major parties adopt policies which a large number of their traditional supporters regard as uncharacteristic or extreme, an opportunity is created – especially under proportional representation – for those who feel deserted and/or betrayed by such behaviour to be offered a new electoral home. Labour’s embrace of “Rogernomics” forced it to entertain the Alliance and the Greens; National’s surrender to Ruth Richardson and Jenny Shipley created the opening for Winston Peters and NZ First.

The great risk for the major parties, should these “off-shoots” acquire a solid electoral foothold, is that major party strategists come to regard them as more-or-less reliable allies, rather than what they truly are – dangerous competitors. This could not be said of either Labour’s Helen Clark, or National’s John Key. When Clark was presented with the opportunity to kill the Alliance, she did not hesitate. When Peters and NZ First made themselves equally vulnerable to electoral destruction, Key dispatched them to the outer electoral darkness.

Labour either would not, or could not, replicate Key’s ruthlessness with the Greens. To date, the Green “brand” has proved sufficiently robust to withstand Labour’s “friendly fire”. Indeed, there seems to be a general reluctance on Labour’s part to treat the Greens as a serious rival. At the electorate level one occasionally hears angry accusations that the Greens are “stealing Labour’s vote” (which in Auckland Central, Wellington Central and Rongotai turned out to be no more than the truth!) but the idea of an all-out assault on the Greens has so far been dismissed by Labour’s leadership as electorally counter-productive.

From a more distant perspective, however, Labour’s tolerance of the Greens appears particularly foolish. The cultural radicalism that has largely superimposed itself over the Greens’ hitherto electorally unassailable “environmental-saviour” profile has been bleeding into Labour’s ranks for several years.

Nowhere was this more dramatically on display than in Nanaia Mahuta’s behind-the-scenes collaboration with the Greens during the “Three Waters” parliamentary debate. With Labour’s Māori Caucus acting as the surgeon, the Greens and Labour have been joined at the hip on virtually all matters relating to te Tiriti.

A similar convergence long ago became evident on transgender issues. For the best part of a week in March 2023, Labour and the Greens outbid each other in their condemnation of gender-critical provocateur, Posie Parker. As a consequence, both parties were strongly criticised for jointly contributing to the violence that accompanied Parker’s visit.

That Chris Hipkins’, upon becoming prime-minister in January 2023, either would not, or could not, add his party’s “woke” positions to Labour’s “policy bonfire” did not go unnoticed by the electorate.

Similarly, National’s low-key response to the Free Speech issue, coupled with its refusal to speak out more forcefully against “decolonisation” and “indigenisation” – policies being pursued, with Green support, by what struck many as an unheeding and ideologically-driven Labour Government – both rebounded strongly to the advantage of Act and NZ First. For a party seeking to make itself, once again, the big tent under which the overwhelming majority of right-of-centre voters could congregate, National’s weak responses were politically perplexing and electorally damaging.

Certainly, had Luxon’s 2023 share of the Party Vote (38 percent) equalled Bill English’s in 2017(44 percent) then his Coalition Agreement with Act and NZ First would have been a very different document.

It is the Labour Party, however, that has most need of an unwavering “no enemies to the left” strategy going into the 2026 general election. To understand the dangers it will face if it does not do everything it can to drive down the Greens’ support, Hipkins, or whoever replaces him, has only to consider the left-wing political debacle that is Wellington.

By 2023, Labour’s relationship with the Greens in Wellington had reached the point where voters no longer considered which of the two “left-wing” parties they supported to be all that important. As natural coalition partners, with broadly similar policies, a vote for Labour or the Greens could be presented, simply, as a vote “for the Left”. Coke, or Pepsi? It was purely a matter of taste.

Some indication of just how seriously this approach can go astray has been on more-or-less constant display since Tory Whanau was elected Mayor of Wellington, alongside a council dominated by “the Left”. The result has been a hot mess, as unedifying as it has been ineffectually extravagant.

If left-wing politicians believe that on the big issues they are as one, then they will start sweating the small issues. Inevitably, these small issues reveal themselves to be the big issues, helpfully reduced by unelected bureaucrats to bite-sized chunks. The resulting division, bitterness, and recrimination benefits nobody but the Right.

In what may yet turn out to be the decisive battle, Labour finally did the right thing. It stood by its policy of opposing asset sales. In doing so, however, its representatives incurred the wrath of their ultra-left “comrades”. These latter construed the vote to retain the Council’s airport shares as a repudiation of the Treaty rights of Wellington’s mana whenua, or, at least, of their unelected representatives.

The American political philosopher, Susan Neiman, wrote a book called “Left Is Not Woke”. The recent behaviour of Wellington City Council offers a vivid illustration of her thesis.

If Labour refuses to re-make itself as a moderate left-leaning party, with policies corresponding to the wishes of the overwhelming majority of New Zealanders keen to see the back of the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government, then it will remain in Opposition. While the voters are encouraged to see the Greens – and Te Pāti Māori – as Labour’s “natural” partners, espousing policies largely indistinguishable from its own, they will continue to hold their noses and vote for whichever right-wing party they consider the least objectionable.

Labour needs to reduce the toxic influence of the parties to its left by making it clear that it has put its own woke inclinations behind it. This will be a twofer for whoever has the guts to make it happen. Not only will it reduce (or even eliminate) the electoral irritants to the party’s left, but it will also, as an added bonus, neutralise the equally irritating woke faction cluttering-up its own ranks. Indeed, achieving the first objective is absolutely contingent upon achieving the second. 

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 14 October 2024.

An Unending Nightmare.

Hate Will Find A Way: Historians divide into those who see Zionism as the only sane answer to the Jews’ historic vulnerability; and those who regard the Zionist “entity” as a purely colonial construct, founded in racism and shrouded in mythology. The moralists of both camps, meanwhile, demonstrate a capacity for joint-cracking contortions calculated to make a circus impresario’s mouth water.

ACROSS THE WORLD, Jews and Palestinians have been remembering the events of 7 October 2023 in very different ways. Israelis, still traumatised by the savagery of Hamas’s pogrom, struggle to visualise a purposeful future unmediated by the contradictory impulses of vengeance and security. The Palestinians of Gaza, shattered and broken by Israel’s relentless bombardment, sustain themselves with a potent mixture of indignation and hate – brewed in the caldron of their unending national nightmare.

The rest of the world has fallen in behind the flags of these bitter antagonists, each side decrying the dangerous “disinformation” of the other. Historians divide into those who see Zionism as the only sane answer to the Jews’ historic vulnerability; and those who regard the Zionist “entity” as a purely colonial construct, founded in racism and shrouded in mythology. The moralists of both camps, meanwhile, demonstrate a capacity for joint-cracking contortions calculated to make a circus impresario’s mouth water.

Perhaps the smallest group, after twelve months of blood, fire, and torment, are the optimists. These brave (or idiotic) souls still insist that a “two-state solution” is the only viable way out of the unceasing tragedy that is Israel/Palestine. As if 7 October 2023, and its aftermath, can somehow be set aside. As if the trauma-stricken judgement of Israelis and Palestinians can somehow be rendered sufficiently calm and dispassionate to envisage something other than the utter annihilation of the national enemy.

What, then, is the solution to this, the Devil’s own most treasured problem? Given its constitutive role in the Israel/Palestine impasse, history may not be the most obvious of guides. But, where else can we turn? There is no war in the present that was not conceived, and brought to term, in the past. What the world has been watching these past twelve months is nothing that the world hasn’t witnessed many, many times before.

In spite of appearances, no conflict is endless. Wars end. Peace is restored. How?

Let’s begin in the aftermath of the First World War. The Ottoman Empire lies in ruins. Far away, in the commune of Sèvres, on the outskirts of Paris, the victors have drawn up a treaty which shares what’s left of the Ottoman possessions (after the territories agreed upon by Monsieur Picot and Mr Sykes have been deducted) between France, Britain, Italy and Greece.

Encouraged by the British prime minister, David Lloyd-George, who dreamed, madly, of resurrecting Byzantium, the Greeks did their best to oblige him.

Mustapha Kemal, whom New Zealanders had learned to fear at Gallipoli, was having none of it. His Turkish troops drove the Greek invaders, quite literally, into the sea. But, not before the contending armies’ Muslim and Christian commanders had distinguished themselves by permitting/encouraging multiple atrocities against the inhabitants of the helpless faith communities their forces over-ran.

A new, and much revised, treaty having been signed and sealed, this time in the Swiss city of Lausanne, Kemal turned to the problem of what to do with all the Greeks who continued to live in his new Republic of Turkey (now Türkiye).

Too much blood had flowed under too many bridges for Turks and Greeks to co-exist peacefully, as they had done for centuries under the Ottomans.

Ever the ruthless problem-solver, Kemal determined to rid his new republic of Greeks – quietly encouraging the defeated Greeks to rid their own kingdom of Turks at the same time. The human-beings caught up in this first example of “ethnic cleansing” got no say in the matter. They were simply ordered to leave. Enterprising tourists can still visit the decaying ruins of settlements from which Christian Greeks and Muslim Turks were summarily uprooted and deported in the 1920s.

So successful was Kemal’s “solution”, that the victorious allies of World War II adopted it as the most efficient means of emptying the states of Eastern Europe of their numerous German-speaking communities. With the example of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland before them, the Allies were in no mood to burden the region’s future with the witches’ brew of ethno-nationalism. The victims of Nazi oppression watched with cold eyes as millions of “displaced” Germans trudged westward. Few tears were shed.

The Palestinians insist that, in 1948, they, too, became the victims of ethnic cleansing. If true, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Israelis made an uncharacteristically poor job of it.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 11 October 2024.

A Fast-Track Backwards.

Dubious Destination: What New Zealanders face in the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government is an attempt to return the country to the policy settings of half-a-century ago. What Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop’s fast-track legislation is designed to rehabilitate and revivify is the “national development” mindset of the 1970s and 80s.

IT IS RARE INDEED to encounter a measure as ripe for political exploitation as the Coalition Government’s “fast-track” legislation. Simultaneously, the measure assaults the natural environment, the democratic process, and the rights of te iwi Māori. Serendipitously, on the left of New Zealand politics there are three parties perfectly positioned, at least theoretically, to champion each one of these embattled realms. The damage they could inflict, collectively, upon the Reactionary Right over the course of the next two years is, at least potentially, enormous. In short, if Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori were battle-ready, then they could be governing New Zealand by the end of 2026.

But, how many voters would take that bet?

What New Zealanders face in the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government is an attempt to return the country to the policy settings of half-a-century ago. What Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop’s fast-track legislation is designed to rehabilitate and revivify is the “national development” mindset of the 1970s and 80s.

Driving this reanimation project forward are business-people, investors, and politicians who have convinced themselves that the social and cultural forces ranged against them are nothing like as powerful, electorally-speaking, as they believe themselves to be. If the question is put to voters: “Jobs or Frogs?”, then the Coalition’s and its backers’ money is all on “Jobs”. As far as Bishop and his NZ First attack-dog, Shane Jones, are concerned, Forest & Bird, Greenpeace, and all those other “environmental terrorists” are nothing more than re-cycled paper tigers.

What this old-fashioned “workerist” line of argument ignores is the brute demographic fact that the number of people interested in working down a mine, digging in a quarry, picking fruit, or doing all the other hard, dirty, and dangerous jobs associated with the primary sector is a great deal smaller than it was half-a-century ago. The massive importation of migrant labour is a direct response to the pronounced reluctance of Kiwis – especially young Kiwis – to work in high-risk and uncomfortable industries for lousy pay.

These labour market changes notwithstanding, a large number of New Zealanders still hark back nostalgically to the romance of yesteryear’s heroic toilers. They admire the grainy photographs of long-dead coal-miners, their coal-dust-smeared faces wearing the same expressions as soldiers returning from the front. The problem for Jones and his ilk is that these photographs are most likely to be encountered on the white walls of a Remuera lawyer’s residence.

Heroic toilers, or workers without choices?

There’s a very good reason why a lawyer’s grandfather was a coal miner and she is not. Nobody in their right mind spends their life underground filling their lungs with coal-dust for a wage just big enough to pay the bills. Well-paid professionals may celebrate their forebears as working-class heroes, but the heroes themselves wanted something better for their offspring. Something vaguely resembling a choice.

The Coalition Government is, almost certainly, unaware of the sheer magnitude of the political project they have set in motion. It is nothing less than an attempt to rehabilitate the joys of blood, tears, toil, and sweat. An anachronistic effort to drive men back into the raw exploitative enterprises that gave rise to the hard-working, hard-drinking, emotionally unavailable “jokers” of New Zealand’s past.

It’s a forlorn hope. Weather-worn West Coast baby-boomers may applaud Shane Jones’ “Good-bye Freddy!”, screw-the-environment, hommage to the “rip-in, rip-out, rip-off” model of economic development, but not their long-since-moved-away offspring. These young New Zealanders, and their children, are more likely to be found marching up the main streets of the major cities in protest.

Then again, all this masculinist domination-of-nature rhetoric may be nothing more than political distraction. “Matua Shane” is forever ordering the “nephs” to get “off the couch” and find themselves a job. It’s a trope that plays well among NZ First voters.

But, there’s another way of telling this story. One could construct a narrative in which the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government encourages foreign investors to take advantage of an under-utilised workforce. Of young, unskilled Māori, trapped in New Zealand’s poorest communities, harried by MSD, just waiting to be driven, as their grandfathers were driven in the 1950s and 60s, to fill the jobs vacated by upwardly-mobile Pakeha. Could this be the dirty little racist secret at the heart of the Coalition’s fast-tracked projects?

All of which poses a host of vexing questions concerning the Opposition parties’ response to the Coalition Government’s first year in office. Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori could hardly have asked for a larger, or more indefensible, target than the one their opponents have so generously provided.

The Opposition’s counter-narrative to the Coalition Government is obvious. New Zealanders are being invited to return to the historical era that preceded the full flowering of environmental consciousness. Back to the period of what might be called “heroic” national development, when rivers were damned, native forests felled, neighbourhoods levelled to make way for motorways, and everyone cheered on the “unstoppable” March of Progress.

This is a story that Labour, the Greens, and Te Pāti Māori are perfectly placed to tell together. Taking turns to expose the sheer madness of pretending that fifty years of history can be cast aside. Highlighting the sheer folly of proceeding as if the insights and advances of ecological science can, somehow, be ignored. Warning the Government that the legislative edifice constructed out of New Zealander’s growing environmental awareness cannot be dismantled without incurring significant political cost. And, finally, if it becomes clear that the Coalition Government isn’t listening, warning the voters that its reactionary programme can only be progressed by riding roughshod over the entire democratic process.

How else should the Fast-Track Approvals Bill be described?

The Treaty, too, cannot avoid being over-ridden. Because the Coalition’s great leap backwards cannot avoid returning New Zealand to the era in which te Tiriti o Waitangi was dismissed as “a simple nullity”. New Zealanders growing understanding of Te Ao Māori, and the critical role it is already playing in shaping the nation’s future, simply will not survive the reimposition of a nineteenth century capitalist narrative in which the ruthless destruction and exploitation of the natural world (along with the indigenous people who lived in harmony with it) is presented as both beneficial and cost-free.

Finally, the Opposition’s critique of the Coalition’s reactionary programme should clearly identify the two, closely-related, elements at its heart. The first is the Reactionary Right’s fear of, and resentment towards, the new social movements that have, over the course of the last 50 years, come to dominate the politics of Western nations. These new forces for social change include the civil rights movement and its demand for full racial equality; feminism; the movement for LGBTQI+ rights; and the worldwide effort to protect the biosphere. The Reactionary Right’s second great fear, itself a manifestation of humankind’s growing ecological awareness, is the scientific confirmation of anthropogenic global warming. Full acceptance of climate change is inimical to the Reactionary Right’s promotion of endless economic growth. Which is why, its ministers’ lip-service notwithstanding, the Coalition’s policies confirm its three constituent parties as radical climate change deniers.

If the three Opposition parties cannot organise an effective sharing of their urgent collective responsibility to expose both the madness and the menace embodied in this Coalition Government; if, together, they are unable to present themselves as the nation’s best defence against the dangerous policies of the Reactionary Right; and if they fail to demonstrate a capacity to work together effectively, in anticipation of forming an enlightened and democratic coalition government; then New Zealanders will not, and should not, vote for them.

In those circumstances, that part of the nation which still believes in rational and compassionate government will have to hope that, by the time the 2029 election rolls around, there is still enough left of Aotearoa-New Zealand to make it worth saving, and sufficient progressive Kiwis to effect the rescue.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack page on Wednesday, 9 October 2024.