The Power of One

Power to the People: There will always be situations in which the collective needs of society must over-rule the personal preferences of the individual.

SO, IT HAS come to this? Seventy thousand people can be seriously inconvenienced because one individual is determined to assert his "rights".

The National Grid Emergency which Transpower was forced to declare on Tuesday evening would never have happened had Mr Steve Meier behaved like any other reasonable citizen over whose property power-cables carrying vital electrical energy to New Zealand’s largest city are strung.

For months now, Transpower has been attempting to gain access to Mr Meier’s land. According to Chief Executive, Patrick Strange, numerous letters seeking his co-operation in keeping the crucial power-cables clear of foliage have been sent to his Waikato address – without success.

And even when Transpower’s worst fears were realised – an electrical arc igniting a stand of trees located directly beneath the cables – it required the intervention of armed police to get Transpower’s linesmen up to the site.

Thirty years ago, the behaviour of Mr Meier would have been universally condemned. In 1980 New Zealanders understood that citizenship confers not only rights, but also responsibilities, and that there will always be situations in which the collective needs of society must over-rule the personal preferences of the individual.

Thirty years ago, anyone who deliberately obstructed the necessary maintenance of the country’s National Grid would have attracted a mixture of anger and derision. And someone who’d refused to help the authorities put an end to a National Grid Emergency? Well, they’d have been dismissed as either very bad, very mad, or both.

How things have changed. On Wednesday morning I awoke to hear Radio New Zealand – National’s Sean Plunket repeating Mr Meier’s angry denunciation of Transpower as though it was – to quote the Minister of Energy, Gerry Brownlee – "the Gospel truth". To my utter astonishment, Mr Plunket was framing the story as a David and Goliath struggle between a bullying, state-owned behemoth (Transpower) and a plucky – if somewhat "grumpy" – Waikato cockey (Mr Meier).

The use of the word "grumpy" I found particularly galling. In using it do describe the behaviour of a man against whom Transpower’s linesmen were unwilling to proceed without armed Police protection, Mr Plunket must have known he was affording Mr Meier priceless rhetorical protection. The word "grumpy", unlike its synonyms – sullen, testy, irritable – has an almost affectionate quality to it. Just think of the "Grumpy" character in Walt Disney’s Snow White: sure, he’s acerbic and irascible, but underneath that bluff exterior beats a heart of pure gold.

But, experienced linesmen: workers who dangle tens-of-metres above the ground; men who regularly repair machinery capable of reducing them to a blackened corpse in a split-second; are not afraid of "grumpy" farmers.

In using the word "grumpy" Mr Plunket was deliberately minimising the threat – real or imagined – which Mr Meier clearly represented to those who were required to deal with him face-to-face.

But Mr Plunket wasn’t the only public figure taking Mr Meier’s side against Transpower and its CEO. The Mayor of Auckland, John Banks, unleashed a long (and mostly erroneous) catalogue of accusations against Mr Strange and the SOE.

One can only suppose that, with the Auckland "super-city" elections looming, Mr Banks saw considerable political capital to be made by charging-off down the populist road.

As one of his potential electors, however, I have to say that I was unconvinced – especially when he appeared to suggest that Transpower was at fault for not using its vast wealth and top-flight lawyers to simply make Mr Meier and his legal claims "go away".

Are we to take from this remark that an Auckland led by Mr Bank’s will willingly pay-off anyone lucky enough to have his city over a strategic barrel – and ruthless enough to demand a ransom for allowing it to go about its lawful business? I hope not.

That such a question can even be posed, however, shows how very far we have sunk as a society. Where the whole concept of the Common Good can be heedlessly cast as some sort of overbearing ogre; and where the individual – regardless of his or her behaviour – is always the hero; we are perilously close to passing the point-of-no-return.

Beyond that point lies Margaret Thatcher’s world. The world to which our neoliberal political class has been driving us for the past thirty years. A world, where "there’s no such thing as society – only individuals and families".

And darkness.

This essay was originally published in The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 29 January 2010.