The Independent: 1992 - 2010

Goodbye to all that: Jenni McManus (above) co-founder of The Independent with Warren Berryman and Tony Timpson in 1992, remains a firm believer in Berryman's vision of a publication dedicated to "the free marketplace of ideas". But, in a world where shareholders value regular dividends over critical journalism, Berryman's and McManus's dream could not be sustained.

I WAS THIRTY-SIX when the first issue of The Independent hit the news-stands, and fifty-four when the last paper rolled off the presses. A child born in the same year as the feisty business weekly launched by Warren Berryman, Jenni McManus and Tony Timpson will be eligible to vote in the next general election. What expectations will that eighteen year-old citizen carry with her as she enters the polling booth for the first time?

As a young New Zealand woman, born in 1992, she will expect to be treated as the equal of the young man entering the polling booth alongside her.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of this expectation. In only a handful of countries are such hopes even remotely realistic. Most of the world’s women remain serially subservient to their fathers, brothers, husbands and bosses.

In Guatemala or Somalia the quasi-official Kiwi feminist slogan: "Girls can do anything!" would ring decidedly hollow in young women’s ears. But that is not the case here. New Zealand’s women and girls may have a long way to travel before achieving perfect equality, but already our eighteen year-old voter has come a lot further than her sisters overseas – and she expects to go farther still.

The young man casting his first vote in the adjoining booth is likely to be much less confident of his place in 21st Century New Zealand society.

The jobs that once defined the classic Kiwi male: farmer, shearer, fisherman, soldier, miner, labourer, freezing-worker, tradesman; are nowhere near as numerous as they were in the first 150 years of New Zealand’s history. The occupations that await today’s young school-leavers are not the sort that work up a sweat. Nor are they likely to inculcate the values of rugged independence, mateship and solidarity that once epitomised the "ordinary Kiwi joker".

Eighteen year-old Kiwi males have spent their entire lives under the neoliberal order of Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson. Competing with every other participant in the labour market for the good things in life is what they expect. And everywhere they look – in textbooks, computer games, movies and reality TV shows – the message is the same: "winning" is both its own reward and its own justification. No one wants to be a "loser".

The individual which emerges from this dog-eat-dog environment is a very different beast from the "good Kiwi bloke" of yesteryear. In place of rugged individualism we find a virulent strain of adolescent narcissism. "Mates" have been replaced by carefully assembled audiences of "friends" – some real, some in cyberspace. Solidarity, when it manifests itself at all, is the solidarity of winners against losers: the solidarity of America’s Top Model and Survivor.

Combine the expectations of eighteen year-old Kiwi males and females and the result is unlikely to fill most fifty-four year-old New Zealanders’ hearts with confidence. Self-obsessed, overconfident, ruthless and hungry for all the material trappings of success, these first-time voters are perhaps the least reliable custodians of the traditional New Zealand values of egalitarianism and fair-play that their elders could imagine.

For someone like myself, a left-wing Baby-Boomer who has spent the past eighteen years writing columns dedicated to preserving those old-fashioned values, the kids who have grown up alongside The Independent are the living proof of my utter failure. The market for the social-democratic ideals and institutions that made my own generation the most fortunate in human history has steadily shrunk.

When The Independent first saw the light of day New Zealand politics was being driven by two newly-formed insurgent parties – the Alliance, led by Jim Anderton, and NZ First, led by Winston Peters. Between them, these two attracted more than a quarter of all the votes cast in the 1993 General Election. Looking back, however, it is clear that their electoral success represented the final cri de coeur from an "Old New Zealand" that was, quite literally, passing away.

The leaders of the insurgency, Peters and Anderton, both got their chance to radically alter the nation’s course and return to the status quo ante. Both failed.

Neither politician was able to match the sheer brute strength of the status quo; and in a surprisingly short space of time the two major parties, National and Labour, had reclaimed – if not in body, then most certainly in spirit – their prodigal sons.

Not that the major parties had any more luck than the Alliance or NZ First in gaining control of the nation’s steering mechanisms. New Zealand continued to follow the neoliberal course set by Douglas and Richardson and no party or politician seemed to possess either the strength, or the will, to change it.

Half of The Independent’s life was spent under a Labour Government led by Helen Clark and Michael Cullen – both of whom in their youth boasted radical political leanings. Once in power, however, Clark and Cullen were able to make only the most marginal of social and economic changes.

The tiller was not for turning.

But if people could not, or would not, change the policies of the neoliberal state then, in a grotesque vindication of Newton’s third law of motion, the neoliberal state’s policies would start changing the people.

If history was indeed over, as Francis Fukuyama’s best-selling book (published in the same year as The Independent’s launch) insisted, then what was the point of attempting to master – either conceptually or politically – the swirling clouds of instant information blowing out of that other great artefact of the early-90s – the Internet.

The free and open marketplace of ideas that Warren Berryman had dreamed of – and which The Independent at its best came so close to creating – was attracting fewer and fewer browsers. The new consumers, in the new century, were increasingly drawn to outlets stocked with products – ideological as well as material – they already knew they wanted. The world-wide-web made it easy.

Neoliberalism and its technological homologues, the PC, the cellphone, the Internet, have radically changed what it means to be a citizen – and what’s required of a newspaper.

Democracy was once a game that all the people played, and it was newspapers that taught them the rules. Today, "politics" has become a spectator sport, which the media allows them to watch.

The Independent is closing its doors because, after eighteen years, it has simply run out of people to teach.

This essay was originally published in the final issue of The Independent on Thursday, 1 July 2010.