Chris Trotter has spent most of his adult life either engaging in or writing about politics. He was the founding editor of The New Zealand Political Review (1992-2005) and in 2007 authored No Left Turn, a political history of New Zealand. Living in Auckland with his wife and daughter, Chris describes himself as an “Old New Zealander” – i.e. someone who remembers what the country was like before Rogernomics. He has created this blog as an archive for his published work and an outlet for his more elegiac musings. It takes its name from Bowalley Road, which runs past the North Otago farm where he spent the first nine years of his life. Enjoy.
The blogosphere tends to be a very noisy, and all-too-often a very abusive, place. I intend Bowalley Road to be a much quieter, and certainly a more respectful, place. So, if you wish your comments to survive the moderation process, you will have to follow the Bowalley Road Rules. These are based on two very simple principles: Courtesy and Respect. Comments which are defamatory, vituperative, snide or hurtful will be removed, and the commentators responsible permanently banned. Anonymous comments will not be published. Real names are preferred. If this is not possible, however, commentators are asked to use a consistent pseudonym. Comments which are thoughtful, witty, creative and stimulating will be most welcome, becoming a permanent part of the Bowalley Road discourse. However, I do add this warning. If the blog seems in danger of being over-run by the usual far-Right suspects, I reserve the right to simply disable the Comments function, and will keep it that way until the perpetrators find somewhere more appropriate to vent their collective spleen.
PENDANT PUBLISHING in the UK has published a
free e-book of 19 poems, edited by Russell Bennetts, entitled Poets
For Corbyn which celebrates the political phenomenon of Jeremy Corbyn and all the hopes he carries for
the birth – or rebirth – of an authentic British Labour Party. I have
reproduced here the contribution of Michael Rosen, a fellow historian, because
it so succinctly captures the vacuity of Corbyn’s opponent’s arguments. The
rest of the poems are available at http://www.berfrois.com/poets-for-corbyn/Enjoy.
Say What? How ironic it would be if, just as Jeremy Corbyn is showing us how Labour politics can be made to work, Andrew Little threw in his lot with those who have, to date, only shown us how to make them fail.
WHO politicians turn to for advice tells the world a great
deal about what sort of people they are. Do they go straight for the
professionals? Or, do they rely on friends and family? Most importantly, do
they seek guidance from people who simply reinforce their prejudices, or are
they guided by those who are willing to openly challenge their deepest
assumptions?
The Labour Party leader, Andrew Little, is a cautious man,
and, by and large, he has opted to surround himself with cautious people.
Professionally trained, himself, he expects a high degree of professionalism
from his staff. As a lawyer, he has a natural inclination towards
following the rules of whatever game he is playing.
Persuading Little to take a risk is hard work – but not
impossible. His decision to keep on David Cunliffe’s Chief-of-Staff, Matt
McCarten, is a case in point. McCarten’s radical reputation would likely have
proven too much for Little’s rivals, but his own background in the trade union
movement made Little much less prone to an attack of the vapours. McCarten may
talk like a revolutionary, but, as the leader of the Unite Union, he always
knew when it was time to tie up the attack dogs and seal the deal.
Little was also aware of just how much he owed McCarten for
his wafer-thin victory over Grant Robertson. It was, after all, McCarten who,
like the Praetorian Guards of Imperial Rome, understood the supreme importance
of timing in the “transition” from one Caesar to the next. It’s never enough,
simply to know when the moment has come to strike down the Emperor who has
failed, one must also know around whose shoulders to drape the blood-stained
purple toga, and upon whose head to place the golden diadem. McCarten chose
Little’s head – and Little knows it.
Little also knows that the best service McCarten can offer
his leadership is to embrace fully his role as the Emperor’s Praetorian
enforcer. This was, after all, the role at which he excelled when he was with
the Alliance. In Jim Anderton’s fractious coalition, McCarten was the man who
kept the noisy ones quiet, and the quiet ones under surveillance. Little has
put McCarten’s head-kicking skills to work in the Labour Party where, by all
accounts, he has picked up from where Helen Clark’s fearsome enforcer, Heather
Simpson, left off seven years ago. Given the extraordinary lack of discipline
in Labour’s ranks since 2008, one is tempted to observe: and not a moment too
soon!
McCarten, however, will always be an ally of Little’s – not
a mate. That title belongs to the man he has appointed his Political Director,
Neale Jones. The two men both hail from the Engineering, Printing and
Manufacturing Union (EPMU) where Jones served alongside Little, before haring
off to the UK and contracting himself to a number of progressive and campaigning
NGOs. If London can be said to have a “beltway”, Jones clearly knew his way
around it.
And therein lies a potentially very large problem. Unlike
McCarten, who brings with him the whiff of cordite and a kit-bag full of
class-war stories, Jones is very much the political technocrat. In this
respect, he is very like his boss: dogged, well-briefed, sensitive to the rules
of the game, and thoroughly unimpressed by political passion. Hence Jones’
aversion to rushing Labour into anything. After the disasters of Goff, Shearer
and Cunliffe, he believes Labour priorities should, for the moment, be strictly
remedial. Not until the public’s lost love for Labour has been restored will
Jones be happy to let the party, its leader, and its long-suffering
rank-and-file, let fly with a little live ammunition.
How, then, to explain Labour’s curious foray into the
treacherous territory of ethnicity and foreign investment? Who was it who
thought singling-out Chinese investors in a city where Chinese residents make
up nearly 10 percent of the population was a good idea?
The man responsible for manipulating the leaked Auckland
housing statistics into something Labour’s housing spokesperson, Phil Twyford,
could use was Rob Salmond. Anyone looking for proof of what can happen to a
political party when it allows itself to be persuaded that politics is not an
art – but a science – need look no further than the relationship between Labour
and Salmond.
After a few years teaching at an American university,
Salmond returned to New Zealand certain he could adapt the techniques he saw
employed by the Obama Campaign to New Zealand conditions. This is the “science”
of politics that sends out postcards detailing the voting habits of
people’s neighbours, in an attempt to psychologically dispose them towards
doing the same. Somehow, Salmond persuaded the Labour Party to unleash these
sorts of highly manipulative tactics on the long-suffering New Zealand voter.
Sadly, as we all know, his political “science” failed to fire, and Labour’s
share of the popular vote declined to its lowest point since 1922.
Salmond has recently posted a couple of articles on the Public
Address Blog in which he wields his ideological agnosticism like a club
against anyone who dares to argue that political parties should “stand for
something”. All that matters, according to Salmond, is winning over “the
middle” – a political designation, apparently, determined not by geometry, but
by opinion polling! How one accomplishes this feat, without sacrificing a
political party’s ideological (and hence electoral) coherence, he does not
elucidate.
Salmond’s overall influence within the Leader of the Opposition’s
Office is difficult to judge, but Little should think hard before again taking
him into Labour’s confidence. His insistence that there is a road to electoral
victory that allows a political party to bypass the ideological commitments
inseparable from political conviction; that elections can be won by some sort
of tricky “scientific” fix; if accepted by Little and his team, can only place
New Zealand Labour in the same sorry position as the British Labour Party under
Ed Miliband.
How ironic it would be if, just as Jeremy Corbyn is showing
us how Labour politics can be made to work, Little threw in his lot with those
who have, to date, only shown us how to make them fail.
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Saturday, 29 August 2015.
Greed Meets Fear: A New York stockbroker attempts to keep pace with the vertiginous slide in the Dow Jones Index following China's "Black Monday" (24/8/15). Capitalism likes to paint itself as a force of nature, before which human-beings are individually and collectively powerless. Only when this economic fatalism is challenged by people's renewed confidence in the efficacy of collective action can capitalism's catastrophes be overcome.
ROUND AND ROUND AND ROUND it goes, and where it stops nobody
knows! You might think that ordinary human-beings would have tired of
Capitalism’s cyclical catastrophes by now. But our capacity to absorb these
entirely man-made calamities appears to be no less impressive than our ability
to cope with the genuine disasters nature sends our way. Indeed, Capitalism’s
longevity is, almost certainly, attributable to its success in convincing us
that it, too, is a force of Nature – something far beyond our feeble strength
to influence for good or ill.
It was not always so. Eighty years ago, with the world in
the clutches of another capitalist catastrophe, human-beings somewhere found
the collective strength to denounce this “force of nature” falsehood. They
decided that what humankind could ruin just by “letting things go” (laissez-faire) it could rebuild by
replacing the “invisible hand” of the all-powerful capitalist market with their
own.
The American President, Franklin Roosevelt, demonstrated the
power of those all-too-visible hands in the massive public works of his “New
Deal”. And the British Prime Minister, Clement Atlee, likewise demonstrated
what focused political will could achieve when, in the midst of post-war
austerity, the British people created their National Health Service.
Nor was New Zealand lacking in these triumphs of the
people’s will. The First Labour Government’s Social Security Act of 1938 was
New Zealand’s answer to the poverty and desperation of the Great Depression.
Likewise its state housing programme: a massive construction effort funded by
“Reserve Bank Credit”. (A capital source unrecognised by contemporary
capitalist economists!)
So spectacular were the achievements of collective endeavour
in the years before, during and after the Second World War, that capitalists
everywhere felt obliged to pay them a grudging lip-service. This apparent
conversion was, however, illusory. Whenever the parties of “private enterprise”
managed to supplant the parties of collectivism, the latter’s policies were
either subtly, or not so subtly, perverted. Projects designed to serve the
interests of the many, always seemed to end up by disproportionately
benefitting the few.
Visionary Blueprints: Ministry of Works plans for "The Auckland That Never Was".
The visionary blueprints for the development of post-war
Auckland, drawn up in the mid-1940s by Ministry of Works planners, anticipated
the goals of Auckland’s contemporary urban planners by 70 years. Tragically,
the election of the First National Government, in 1949, put paid to this
“Auckland that never was”, leaving Aucklanders with the sprawling,
automobile-dependent conurbations that, today, they cannot afford to fix.
An even more comprehensive development plan, this time
embracing the whole country, was brought together by William B. Sutch in the
1950s. One of New Zealand’s most creative (and controversial) public servants,
Sutch recognised, very early, the urgent need for New Zealand to diversify its
agricultural commodity-based economy. He argued for the sort of value-added
products that distinguished the export-base of small economies like Switzerland
and Denmark. This would require a much stronger national emphasis on skills
acquisition and tertiary education. Only with a highly educated workforce could
New Zealand produce the innovation necessary to broaden its economy. Sutch also
argued for an economy that was much less import dependent. New Zealand, he
said, must develop a much stronger industrial base.
In the Second Labour Government (1957-1960) led by Walter
Nash, Sutch found a pair of eager listeners. The Finance Minister, Arnold
Nordmeyer, and the Industry and Commerce Minister, Philip Holloway, were both
convinced that Sutch’s ideas offered the only coherent path to a more
prosperous, and less vulnerable, economic future for New Zealand. It is one of
the great tragedies of this country’s history that the Second Labour Government
did not last long enough for the change it contemplated to be undertaken and
become entrenched.
As Sutch would later write: “The National Party could not
have made this change because of their dependence for financial and political
support on the farmers, importers, merchants and finance houses.” Plus ça change!
It’s been seven years since the Global Financial Crisis of
2008 provided yet another warning of New Zealand’s economic vulnerability. Was
it heeded? There’s scant evidence of it. What cannot be missed, however, is
seven years of enormous investment in dairying. The export of raw commodities
remains this country’s stock-in-trade.
Today, as another capitalist catastrophe looms, is it not
time to heed the collective spirit of ‘38 and ‘45 and ’57? Those years when
“Yes we can!” was more than a presidential slogan.
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, 28 August 2015.
Whaddarya? David Slack epitomises the thinking, egalitarian, inclusive and creative half of New Zealand society that has always been so feared and despised by the hyper-masculine, woman-hating, anti-intellectual, Rugby-worshipping half. How we Kiwis have made one nation out of two such mutually hostile traditions was the subject of David's "Salon" spot at Ika Seafood Bar & Grill on Tuesday night.
ALL NEW ZEALANDERS must live with Rugby. There is no
possibility of escaping, and absolutely no chance of ignoring it. Rugby, love
it or hate it, has exerted, and continues to exert, a tremendous influence on
the way New Zealand presents itself to the world. It has certainly left its
mark on David Slack. In the “Salon” spotlight at the Ika Seafood Bar &
Grill on Tuesday night (25/8/15) the professional speech-writer, author and
broadcaster proved how impossible it is to discuss New Zealand’s brutal national
game without, at the same time, discussing the nature of the society which
supports it – and oneself.
Slack was born in Feilding, a small town in the Manawatu,
that could easily have been the setting for Greg McGee’s extraordinary play
about Rugby, Foreskin’s Lament. The sort of town about which these lines
from the play could have been written:
“This is a team game, son, and the town is the team. It’s
the town’s honour at stake when the team plays, god knows there’s not much else
around here.”
The frankly fascist implications of the statement “the town
is the team” need little elucidation. It was Mussolini, after all, who came up
with the slogan: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing
against the state.”
Slack’s description of his Fielding contemporaries as
“knuckle-dragging sons of the soil” speaks eloquently of a young boy made to
feel like an “exile” from his own country. Growing up in Fielding, Slack’s
subversively divergent personal priorities (he read books!) would elicit from
his peers, over and over again, the single, brute interrogatory: “Whaddarya!”
“Whaddarya!” is, literally, the last word of Foreskin’s
Lament. Its electrifying effect produced by McGee’s inspired inversion of
the word’s usual purpose. Instead of drawing attention to the “other’s”
difference – and so confirming his or her exclusion from the team/town/nation –
the word was hurled back in the audience’s face. “Whaddarya!” was McGee’s
defiant challenge to a country that was already, in 1980, gearing up to welcome
the Springbok ambassadors of apartheid.
1981 – and all that. The Springbok Tour cannot be avoided in
any honest discussion of New Zealand Rugby (unless, of course, you are the
Prime Minister). It was as if both sides, Pro- and Anti-Tour, had contrived to
line up and scream “Whaddarya!” at each other for 56 days of utterly
uncharacteristic political passion. For Slack, and the tens-of-thousands of
others who opposed the Tour, the issue was whether or not the more open and
diverse country that New Zealand was becoming would prevail, or, be smothered
to death in the fascistic headlock of all those “knuckle-dragging sons of the
soil” who wouldn’t have hesitated to affirm the slogan: “All within Rugby,
nothing outside Rugby, nothing against Rugby.”
After 1981, it seemed that the two halves of New Zealand
could never be brought back together. Rugby became a litmus test. If you were a
fan, then you were morally reprehensible: a “Rugby thug” who was also, no
doubt, a racist, sexist, homophobe. In the new New Zealand that was rapidly
taking shape there could be no place for such people.
But, of course, there was a place for them. As the hero of Foreskin’s
Lament reproves the liberal feminist character, Moira, following one of her
diatribes against the piggishness of New Zealand’s Rugby culture:
“This is the heart and bowels of this country, too strong
and foul and vital for reduction to bouquets, or oils, or words. If you think
they’re pigs, then you’d better look closer, and get used to the smell, because
their smell is your smell.”
Remove Rugby from the New Zealand equation and we no longer
add up.
Slack has written a delightful history of the childhood game
of “Bullrush”. In it he celebrates the “teamlessness” of the game, and the way
people remember it with smiles and laughter. This, he seems to be saying, is
the true essence of the Kiwi character; the way we really are before the “town”
turns us into emotionally-stunted sacrifices to the mud-splattered god, whose
only gospel is “kick the shit out of everything that gets in the way of winning
the game”.
But that just won’t do. And, in his gloriously meandering
address, Slack more-or-less conceded as much. Yes, New Zealand is about the
anarchic individualism of Bullrush, but it also about the fascism of the First
Fifteen. We are, if I may borrow that most overused of Rugby phrases, a game of
two halves. And at some point over the past 34 years, almost unnoticed, those
two halves have become one again – at least when the All Blacks are playing.
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Wednesday, 26 August 2015.
Hard Going: All attempts to intrude regulations pertinent to the general welfare of all New Zealanders beyond the farm gate has invariably been met with ferocious political opposition. Whether it be the public’s “right to roam”, the doomed “Fart Tax”, the Emissions Trading Scheme, or, in just the last few weeks, the Health and Safety Reform Bill, the cry of New Zealand’s cockies has been – "They shall not pass!"
IT WAS GENOCIDE of a special kind. Relentless mass killing
inspired not by ethnicity, or religion, but by the victims’ social and economic
position. “The liquidation of the Kulaks as a class” was one of Joseph Stalin’s
greatest crimes. Farmers around the world looked on in horror, and their
instinctive hostility towards the collectivising tendencies of city-based
socialists congealed into an implacable hatred.
As a political designation, “Kulak” is derived from the Polish
word for “fist” – as in “tight fisted” – making it, from the very beginning, a
term of abuse for those farmers who had worked harder and smarter than their
neighbours, produced a surplus, sold it on the open market, purchased some
basic agricultural machinery with the proceeds, hired a little help – and made
a profit.
Even in Tsarist times (when Poland was a part of the Russian
Empire) the Kulaks were objects of envy and suspicion. After the Bolshevik Revolution,
however, to be classed (and the word is used here advisedly) as a Kulak all-too-often
meant persecution, confiscation, and, with the advent of “the collectivisation
of agriculture” in late 1920s and early 30s, arrest, deportation, enslavement in
the gulags [Soviet forced labour camps] and death.
With the Revolution’s ruthless elimination of the old
Russian aristocracy, the Kulaks – though only marginally better off than their
neighbours – had found themselves elevated to the status of the new capitalist
class in the countryside. The smarter Bolsheviks had wanted to harness the
drive and entrepreneurial flair of the Kulaks to secure the volume of exportable
agricultural surpluses required to make socialism affordable for the rest of
the USSR’s population.
Stalin was having none of it. The great Soviet experiment
could not be held hostage to the capitalistic proclivities of its peasant farmers
– no matter how economically productive. Agriculture must be collectivised and
industrialised. Peasants must become workers. “Now”, Stalin boasted in 1929,
“we have the opportunity to carry out a resolute offensive against the kulaks,
break their resistance, eliminate them as a class and replace their production
with the production of kolkhozes [collective farms] and sovkhozes [state-owned
farms].”
"Do Not Trust Him! This Czech poster, from the 1940s, depicts the Kulak as the most hardened enemy of Socialism.
Ancient history? Not a bit of it! The fate of farmers under
conditions of “actually existing socialism” has stood as a cautionary tale to
generation after generation of Kiwi cockies. The very idea of the state and its
minions attempting to impose their will beyond the farm gate fills New Zealand
farmers with a combination of fury and dread. Resistance, loud and implacable,
has always been their first response.
Except, of course, when collective solutions were manifestly
in the farmers’ interest – as was the case with the guaranteed prices and
massive state subsidies that underpinned New Zealand agriculture from the 1930s
to the 1980s. Like so many other Kiwi capitalists, farmers have never had a
problem with socialising the costs and privatising the profits of their endeavours.
Well, hardly ever. When, in 1972, the National Government
suggested the compulsory acquisition of the entire New Zealand wool clip, the
parliamentary candidate for the Southland seat of Awarua, a farmer named Aubrey
Begg, thundered that: “If this measure is allowed to proceed, we might as well
paint a hammer and sickle on every barn door in New Zealand!” (And he was the Labour candidate!)
The farmers’ great fear of socialism is nowhere better
displayed than in their unwavering refusal to recognise workers’ rights. Such
recognition would only open the door to the trade unions – long resisted (think
"Massey’s Cossacks") as both the harbingers and hand-maidens of every socialist burden
ever imposed upon the long-suffering cockie.
One imagines the fate of the doomed kulaks looming large in
the farmers’ fevered imaginations when, in 1936, the First Labour Government
passed the Agricultural Workers Act. No doubt its provision of a minimum wage,
four weeks paid holiday, and radically improved housing, for all farm workers,
was regarded as proof positive that the Kiwi Kulaks’ one-way trip to the gulags
was imminent!
Though the word “Kulak” may have faded from twenty-first
century cockies’ vocabulary, their visceral fear of trade unionists and the
socialist aspirations they embody, has not. Which is why any and every attempt
to intrude regulations pertinent to the general welfare of all New Zealanders
beyond the farm gate is invariably met with ferocious political opposition.
Whether it be the public’s “right to roam”, the doomed “Fart Tax”, the
Emissions Trading Scheme, or, in just the last few weeks, the Health and Safety
Reform Bill, the cry of New Zealand’s cockies has been the same as the cry of
the communist defenders of the Spanish Republic: ¡No pasarán! – They Shall Not Pass!
The rest of New Zealand must understand that allowing farm
workers to manage their own health and safety would open the door for trade
unionism – and socialism!
And what could possibly be more dangerous than that?!
This essay was
originally published in The Press of Tuesday,
25 August 2015.
George Orwell Had Their Measure: In his dystopian masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, he presented characters who are actually very thankful for the ability to behave as though the lies their political leaders tell them are true. After all, people convinced they’re being lied to might start demanding the truth – and that could lead to all kinds of trouble.
HOW ANGRY “CENTRISTS” GET when they’re referred to in anything
less than the most congratulatory terms. As if their appalling ignorance of,
and disdain for, politics is something to be proud of. And yet, proud they are –
very proud – of their refusal to shoulder even the most basic responsibilities
of citizenship. Day after day, these people are fed statements by their
political leaders which cannot, in any way, be reconciled with the facts – but which,
their obvious falsity notwithstanding, they accept as true.
George Orwell had their measure. In his dystopian
masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, he
presented characters who are actually very thankful for the ability to behave
as though the lies their political leaders tell them are true. After all,
people convinced they’re being lied to might start demanding the truth – and
that could lead to all kinds of trouble. Orwell even invented a name for this
condition: doublethink.
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete
truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously
two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and
believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality
while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the
Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to
forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed,
and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process
to the process itself – that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce
unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of
hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’
involved the use of doublethink.
In short: “Doublethink means the power of holding two
contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of
them.”
The all-pervasive ideological system which required the
citizens of “Airstrip One” [Great Britain] to practice doublethink was “Ingsoc”
[English Socialism]. Though no centrist would accept for a moment that New
Zealand society is in any way comparable to Orwell’s dystopia, it is not at all
difficult to see in the all-pervasive influence of neoliberalism a polity more
than a little analogous to Big Brother’s totalitarian regime.
It is one of the most frightening features of totalitarian
systems that their effectiveness relies less upon naked force than it does upon
the ordinary person’s realisation that, in practical terms, going with the flow
of the new system makes much more sense than attempting to stand against it. In
Nazi Germany, this was called “moving in the direction of the Fuhrer”. Adolf
Hitler’s beliefs being well known and understood, it was unnecessary for his
ministers to issue precise instructions concerning the implementation of his
new government’s policies. Bureaucrats and other authority figures simply acted
as they believed the Fuhrer would wish them to act.
Is it not possible to see in the appalling treatment meted
out to beneficiaries of all kinds by MSD and WINZ bureaucrats more than a
little of this “moving in the direction of the Fuhrer” phenomenon? No detailed
memos will have been sent out to MSD employees – indeed, it would’ve been most
unwise to put such sentiments down in writing – but everyone in that
bureaucracy knows exactly what is expected of them. Government ministers,
editorial writers and talkback hosts have made it very clear what the
appropriate demeanour towards their beneficiary “clients” should be. They all
know how their bosses would wish them to act.
If any centrists are still reading this, their blood
pressure will no doubt be rising rapidly. “I’m not like that! This isn’t Nazi
Germany! You’re out of you mind!” The great problem, of course, for these
outraged folk, is that between 1933 and 1938 Nazi Germany wasn’t like Nazi
Germany. For most German citizens, and in the eyes of the rest of the world,
Hitler was a hero, and his regime’s achievements – full-employment especially –
the envy of all those nations still mired in economic depression.
No, we don’t have concentration camps filled with John Key’s
opponents. But that is not, of itself, proof that our democracy survives
unscathed. It might just as easily point to the extraordinary success of what
is, indisputably, the most successful totalitarian ideology in human history.
Neoliberalism is a brilliantly conceived edifice of lies which, in order to
have a successful career, it is in the intelligent citizen’s interest to affirm
as an unanswerable collection of self-evident truths.
If you can do this without demonstrating the slightest
traces of amusement, stress or guilt, then there’s a better than even chance that you call
yourself a centrist.
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Monday, 24 August 2015.
The Machinery For Change: Startlingly captured in this image are the many components of political consciousness formation in the Twenty-First Century. The sensibilities of so-called "Centrist" voters are constructed out of a multitude of similarly mediated experiences. What should never be forgotten, however, are the very real events out of which popular perceptions are fashioned.
YOU KNOW THE LEFT’s on a roll, when Labour’s number-cruncher, Rob Salmond, comes out “In Defence of the Centre”. It’s all Jeremy Corbyn’s fault, of course. Even here, in the far antipodes, the excitement generated by his campaign for the leadership of the British Labour Party is palpable. It leaps out at us from the videos of packed halls and chanting crowds. And we know it’s real because, from his enemies, we get only scorn and hatred – and the unmistakeable stench of fear.
Along with all the same old arguments about elections being won in the centre. Which is, of course, true – but trivial. In a society where enthusiasms of any kind are regarded with deep suspicion, it is hardly surprising that people overwhelmingly characterise themselves as inhabitants of the centre ground – “Middle New Zealanders”.
That most self-identified “centrists” are no such thing never appears to bother the political scientists of this world. To the number-crunchers of electoral politics the only thing that matters is that there are a lot of them. So many, in fact, that it is more-or-less impossible to win elections without them. But let us be very clear about the priorities and preoccupations of this group. It is “centrist” only insofar as it occupies the swampland between the shores of rock-solid belief that loom to left and right.
Centrists’ “ideas” are a weird amalgam of television images, talkback arguments and newspaper headlines. Their morals are drawn from half-remembered parental reproofs; lines from songs, movies, TV dramas, novels and magazines – not forgetting pub-talk and the angry abuse of social media. Centrists communicate in the common parlance of popular culture: the inconsistent, self-contradictory and ever-changing patois of office, street, tavern and suburban lounge. Politically-speaking, the Centre is a rubbish skip: if there’s a message in there, then, for the most part, it’s a very confused one.
And if that sounds like the manifesto of your average political party, then you’re right on the money. The endless pursuit of the Centrist voter has reduced our politicians to the equivalent of those journalistic low-lifes who go scavenging through the garbage of the rich and famous. In much the same way, the carelessly discarded detritus of the men and women “in the middle” gets picked over by political rubbish men, cleaned up, and re-cycled into party policy.
The enormous appeal of men like Jeremy Corbyn is that their messages do not carry the oily patina of the centrist swamp. People respond to the message’s clarity, its simplicity, and the way each piece of its fits together to form a coherent picture of an alternative future. At first, not everybody sees the picture, but before too long word of its power and beauty spreads. There are images of it on television; arguments in its favour are heard on talkback; and it gets condensed into newspaper headlines. Parents recall catching a glimpse of the picture when they were young. There are songs about it – movies and TV dramas follow. It’s talked about in offices, streets, pubs and suburban lounges.
And the political rubbish men who go poking about in the skips of the Centre are suddenly confronted with evidence of some very different patterns of consumption. And the message it conveys is very clear.
The Centre has changed.
This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Saturday, 22 August 2015.
Pushback: Rob Muldoon's NZSIS Amendment Bill 1977 inspired huge protest demonstrations up and down the country. The Bill passed, but only at the price of massive and enduring public mistrust of the SIS itself. Were a left-wing government ever to give legislative expression to that mistrust, however, the true purposes of our national security apparatus would very quickly be revealed.
SUBMISSIONS TO the Independent Review of Intelligence and
Security closed last Friday. No doubt the “Independent Reviewers”, Sir Michael
Cullen and Dame Patsy Reddy, are already up to their elbows in the earnest
recommendations of their fellow citizens. By March of next year we will learn
what they have made of them.
In all probability, neither Sir Michael, nor Dame Patsy,
will end up recommending much more than a little tweaking here and there to New
Zealand’s national security apparatus. The terms of reference of their inquiry
were extremely narrowly set – always an indication that nothing too dramatic is
expected by the politicians who set the process in motion.
A few judicious redefinitions of the scope and powers of the
Security Intelligence Service (SIS) and the Government Communications Security
Bureau (GCSB) is the most we should anticipate. (Especially after the Prime
Minister has strongly and publicly hinted that this is what his government is
expecting!)
Indeed, any government attempting to make more than minor
changes to either institution is asking for trouble. In 1977, the National
Prime Minister, Robert Muldoon, ignited a firestorm of nationwide protests when
he announced his intention to legislate a substantial increase in the powers of
the SIS. The New Zealand Security Intelligence Service Amendment Bill, which
dramatically expanded the Service’s capacity to intercept private
communications, and forbade the public identification of its agents, was passed
by Parliament, but only at the cost of a significant portion of the citizenry’s
trust and goodwill.
That New Zealand’s so-called “intelligence community” is
anxious to retain and build public trust and goodwill has been evident over the
past fortnight in the substantive public relations campaign it has waged in
advance of the Independent Review. SIS Director, Rebecca Kitteridge, knows how
difficult her job will become if her fellow citizens are unwilling to concede
the legitimacy of the SIS’s role.
But, if losing the trust and goodwill of New Zealand’s
citizens is a bad thing, losing the trust and confidence of New Zealand’s
allies would be much, much worse. This would, however, be the most likely
outcome if the recommendations of those who made submissions to the Independent
Review from the left were ever to be taken up and implemented by a future
left-leaning government.
The submission from the Anti-Bases Campaign, for example
(whose spokesperson is the redoubtable left-wing activist, Murray Horton) has
recommended to Sir Michael and Dame Patsy that: “New Zealand immediately exits
the Five Eyes regime.”
The reviewers will, of course, ignore this demand – if only
because it falls outside the scope of their inquiry. But, what if a future
Labour-Green Government was persuaded to withdraw from the UK-USA Agreement, to
which New Zealand has been party for more than 60 years?
It is precisely in circumstances such as these that the true
function of our national security apparatus would be demonstrated.
It was the United States Secretary of State, Henry
Kissinger, who infamously remarked of the democratically elected socialist
government of Chile: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country
go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people. The issues are much
too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.” On
11 September 1973, that government was overthrown by the Chilean armed forces.
"The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves." - US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, justifies the overthrow of Chile's socialist government.
On 10 November 1975, outraged that his government was under
CIA surveillance, the Australian Labour Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, let it
be known that he would be closing down the joint CIA/National Security Agency’s
satellite tracking station at Pine Gap near Alice Springs in the Northern
Territory. The following day, Whitlam’s government was dismissed by Sir John
Kerr, the Australian Governor-General. (The Pine Gap station was critical to
the effectiveness of the “Five Eyes regime”.)
In the eyes of both the Chilean armed forces, and
Australia’s national security apparatus, the permanent national interests of
their respective states had been placed at serious risk by political figures
who either did not understand, or were hostile to, those interests. In arriving
at these conclusions, both institutions relied upon the intelligence and advice
of their nation’s principal military and economic ally, the United States.
Although neither Sir Michael, nor Dame Patsy, will admit it,
“national security” is all about identifying which permanent national interests
are best kept beyond the reach of Democracy’s impermanent practitioners.
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, 21 August 2015.
All That Glitters: Hosking is not a megaphone for neoliberalism, he is its bright and shining mirror.
WHEN IT COMES TO RATINGS, Mike Hosking is a winner. He knows
it, his employers know it, and, if they’re honest with themselves, the Daily
Blog’s firebrands know it too. What he says to Newstalk-ZB’s listeners is,
for the most part, well received. Which is why Newstalk-ZB’s breakfast show is
the most popular product on commercial radio. Seven Sharp’s viewers,
likewise, are insufficiently offended by Hosking’s opinions to change channels.
And that’s all anyone has to do, FFS – if they don’t like or approve of
Hosking’s shtick – change the bloody station or switch channels. Their
forbearance, in the case of Seven Sharp, is what made the programme roughly
twice as popular as Campbell Live.
Though it pains the Left to admit it, Campbell Live
was a vehicle for values shared by fewer and fewer New Zealanders. Thirty years
of neoliberal hegemony will do that to a country. The social-democratic culture
in which Kiwis over 50 were raised, while very far from being dead, can be
accessed now only through the indistinct portals of nostalgia. By contrast, the
culture which succeeded it, whatever people choose to call it, is everywhere
you look. Love it or hate it, this is the culture we are all required to move
and function in: the culture that counts.
Mike Hosking is a perfect fit for this new, market-driven,
culture. The social-democratic culture that permeated the old state broadcasting
system was never one in which he felt comfortable. It was too sedate, too
elevated, too wedded to the Reithian ethic, for a broadcaster of his voluble and
quicksilver temperament. [Reithian: Named for John Reith, the first
Director-General of the BBC, who held that the role of a public broadcaster was
to “inform, educate and entertain” its listeners and viewers – C.T.]
The Hosking personality: self-confident, thrusting and
ambitious; scornful of those who cannot reach conclusions quickly and
definitively; and unshakeably wedded to the idea that if success is not
recognised by, and reflected in, increased material wealth and higher social
status, then it isn’t really success; was, however, supremely well-adapted to
the new world ushered in by the changes of the fourth Labour Government.
Who could forget the Hosking interview with a Labour Cabinet
Minister during which the hapless politician was incautious enough to ask the,
by now extremely well-paid, broadcaster how much he earned. “More than you
do!”, Hosking snapped back without missing a beat. Seldom has a Cabinet
Minister looked so crestfallen. It was vintage Hosking. In the new era, ushered
in by Rogernomics, human worth was measured by the quantum of an individual’s
income. If he earned more than a Cabinet Minister, that could only mean that he
was better than a Cabinet Minister – and Hosking wasn’t the least bit
afraid of letting Cabinet Ministers know it.
The Left, of course, rejects Hosking’s world view as utterly
repellent, and condemns it as antithetical to everything they believe in and
want for the world. From their perspective, it is morally indefensible that
such a person should be accorded the privilege of daily addressing
hundreds-of-thousands of their fellow citizens. But the corruption they believe
his unabashed worship of wealth and status is bound to work in the body politic
was already dissolving “Old” New Zealand long before Hosking took possession of
Sir Paul Holmes’s prime-time batons.
The sad fact is that Hosking is not the problem, merely its
artfully tousled personification. His high ratings among 18-35 year-olds is
explicable only if we accept that, in the eyes of those who have grown up under
neoliberalism, being rich and famous is the indisputable desideratum of
twenty-first century life. These youngsters have no wish to tear Hosking down,
on the contrary, they want to be just like him. Wealth and fame have become the
markers of a life well lived. By this reckoning, reiterated over and over again
in Hosking’s speeches and columns: success is well-earned, by definition; and
failure is merely Nature’s way of delivering her pink slip to those
unfortunates on the wrong side of the Bell Curve.
If this is “right-wing bias”, then the whole era through
which we are living must be adjudged in precisely the same terms. Hosking is
not a megaphone for neoliberalism, he is its bright and shining mirror. And
those who accuse him of being John Key’s “stooge” simply do not appreciate the
chemistry at work between them. Mike Hosking might earn more than the average Cabinet
Minister, but all his thrusting ambition has not come close to earning him a
fortune of $55 million. To the Hoskings of this world (and there are many more
of them than the Left would like to think) Key’s fortune is proof positive that
the Prime Minister is a superior human-being.
Mike Hosking’s heart of gold: cold and glittering as any
precious metal; goes out to the ubermensch born in a state house. When
God and Mammon have become one and the same – where else would it go?
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Wednesday, 19 August 2015.
Bryce Who? Small and unprepossessing, smiling his grandfatherly smile, Dr Bryce Wilkinson would be passed, unrecognised, in the street by 999 out of 1,000 New Zealanders. And yet, unelected, and largely unknown outside the neoliberal elite, this little man has left a very big impression on our country.
DR BRYCE WILKINSON can make a reasonable claim to have
written the book that launched neoliberalism in New Zealand. The name of that
book was Economic Management, and
although its official author was the New Zealand Treasury, most historians
agree that the book’s guiding intellect was Dr Wilkinson’s.
Economic Management
knitted together, into what amounted to a detailed manifesto, a raft of radical
economic measures that had been worked out in “Economics II” – described by Te Ara, The Encyclopaedia of New Zealand,
as: “a think tank in the Treasury in the late 1970s and early 1980s.”
Economics II was staffed by young economists who had studied
at universities in the United States where the monetarist theories of Milton
Friedman, and the ideas of neo-classical economics generally, were already
well-entrenched. Along with Dr Wilkinson, Treasury’s “think tank” included
Graeme Scott, Rod Deane and Roger Kerr – individuals who would go on to play
pivotal roles in the execution and consolidation of the neoliberal order in New
Zealand.
When the Labour Party was swept into office at the snap
election of 1984, Economic Management
was waiting for them.
“But, wait a minute!”, I hear you object, “Since when does
Treasury supply New Zealand’s political parties with ready-made manifestoes?
Didn’t Labour have a manifesto of its own in 1984?” Indeed it did – but not the
sort of manifesto in which anyone could place much confidence.
Though the public were not told, Labour’s manifesto was a
hastily-cobbled-together mish-mash of the policies advocated by Labour’s left-wing
dominated Policy Council, and the ideas emanating from the faction in Labour’s
caucus led by Roger Douglas and his fellow “reformers” Michael Bassett, Richard
Prebble, Mike Moore and David Caygill.
So extreme were the ideas of Douglas’s faction, and so
hostile to Labour’s traditions, that a new faction was summoned into existence
to fight them. By May of 1984, this latter group was circulating a document
posing a radical left-wing alternative to the right-wing measures being fed
directly to Douglas and his followers by their special Treasury adviser, Doug
Anthony.
Had the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Muldoon, fearing a loss
of his parliamentary majority, not called an early election on the night of 14
June 1984, it is fascinating to speculate as to which of these two,
diametrically opposed, factions would have triumphed. An election held at the
usual time, in November 1984, would have given Labour four more months (and an
annual conference) to decide its future direction. Denied that time, the
contending factions were persuaded to let David Lange’s deputy, the former Law
Professor, Geoffrey Palmer, compose a manifesto both sides could live with, but
which, as a reliable guide to the party’s future conduct in government, was
next to useless.
Labour’s Bastille Day victory ceded the political initiative
to Douglas’s faction. That the country was said by the Reserve Bank and
Treasury to be in the grip of a “financial crisis” contributed hugely to the
Right’s ability to control the course of events. Precipitated by a policy paper
outlining Douglas’s determination to devalue the NZ dollar by 20 percent (which
somehow ended up in the hands of the news media), the “financial crisis”, and
the new government’s decisive handling of it, brought the Left/Right policy
debate to an abrupt (if only temporary) end. It would be Dr Wilkinson’s Economic Management which set the course
for what would later be called “Rogernomics”.
Readers of Bowalley Road born after those heady days in 1984, and thus played no part in the
great struggle for Labour’s heart and soul that raged from July 1984 until the
ejection of Mike Moore from – and the elevation of Helen Clark to – the leadership
of the Labour Party in 1993, have been supplied with this brief sketch of the
role Dr Wilkinson has played in New Zealand’s recent history, so that they can
put his statement on foreign investment and racism, released earlier today
(17/8/15) into some kind of context.
Commenting on the KPMG report showing China to be only the
second-largest foreign investor (after Canada) in New Zealand (excluding
residential property) Dr Wilkinson is reported as saying that “the report
tackled many New Zealanders’ fears that China was buying up land, farms and
businesses.” Anxiety about China was producing a “silly defensiveness” he said,
adding that “racist attitudes and red tape were making New Zealand one of the
most restrictive regimes in the world”. According to Dr Wilkinson: “We should
be much freer and more open to the rest of the world and that helps New
Zealanders get a better price for their assets which means they can invest more
in the rest of the world themselves.”
More free and open! Such is the prescription of the man who,
along with his colleagues from Economics II, persuaded the fourth Labour
government to transform New Zealand into the most “free” and “open” economy on
Earth. The man who urged on the sale of public assets to “foreign investors”,
who were then free to repatriate the billions of dollars of profits extracted
from them to their new owners offshore. The man who now calls those attempting
to keep what remains of New Zealand’s assets out of foreign hands “racist”, but
whose policy of preparing state-owned entities for privatisation saw
tens-of-thousands of Maori forestry workers, railway workers and construction
workers thrown out of their state jobs – leading to the disintegration of whole
communities and the fracturing of whanau.
Small and unprepossessing, smiling his grandfatherly smile
in the group photos of the New Zealand Initiative (successor to the now defunct
Business Roundtable, which for many years was run by another alumnus from
Economics II, Roger Kerr) Dr Wilkinson would be passed, unrecognised, in the
street by 999 out of 1,000 New Zealanders. And yet, unelected, and largely
unknown outside the neoliberal elite, this little man has left a very big
impression on our country.
I’ll leave it for you, the reader, to decide whether it has
been for good or ill.
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Monday, 17 August 2015.
More Than "The Usual Suspects", Mr Groser: Once a demonstration swells beyond “the usual left-wing suspects” to include the sort of ordinary Kiwis who turned out in their thousands on Saturday, 15 August 2015, a wise government will begin to ask itself some very serious questions about the wisdom of proceeding with the policy under attack. John Key's best political option, now, is to walk away from the TPPA.
ON SATURDAY, upwards of 30,000 New Zealanders protested
against the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA). From the tiny village
of Kohukohu in the Hokianga, where 50 people marched, to Auckland, where Queen
Street was filled from top to bottom with, at the very least 15,000 protesters,
New Zealanders from all walks of life expressed their opposition to the
proposed agreement.
When confronted with the protest numbers, Trade Minister, Tim
Groser, who, only a fortnight ago, branded his opponents “breathless children”,
was quick to reach for more insults. Many of those marching, he claimed, had
been “misled” by the TPPA’s opponents: people he’d earlier dismissed as
“politically irrelevant”.
Well, in the light of Saturday’s turnout around the country,
that’s a judgement he may wish to reconsider.
Sustained protest activity in New Zealand, after peaking
during the Springbok Tour demonstrations of 1981, has fallen away steadily over
subsequent decades. Occasional spikes, such as the massive protests mounted
against the Employment Contracts Bill in April 1991, or the 50,000-strong
Auckland march against mining in New Zealand’s national parks on 1 May 2010,
have not been able to disguise the seemingly inexorable demise of public
protest as an effective political tactic.
One of the obvious reasons for abandoning the street as a
venue for effective politics is that, over the course of the past 30 years,
increasingly derisory turnouts have only tended to alert politicians to the
weakness of the organisers’ causes. A memorable article (later turned into a
poster) from the anti-Vietnam War era posed the question: “Suppose they gave a
war – and nobody came?” The temptation for government politicians to paraphrase
that question in relation to protest demonstrations must have been very great!
Not that many of the governments of the past 30 years have
been at all responsive to political pressures from below. Indeed, making a
virtue out of refusing to be swayed by public opinion is a distinguishing
characteristic of neoliberal governments the world over. As the newly-elected,
left-leaning Greek government was curtly informed by the technocratic masters
of the Eurozone earlier this year: “Elections change nothing.” That the 99
Percent must be prevented from voting themselves a better life at the expense
of the 1 Percent, is a neoliberal article of faith. Keeping ignorant
electorates well away from complex, technical exercises – like the negotiation
of free trade agreements – is, similarly, regarded as axiomatic.
Dismissing the anti-TPPA protests as “politically
irrelevant” is, therefore, the most natural top-of-the-head reaction for a
confirmed neoliberal politician like Mr Groser. Unfortunately, for him and his
government, however, the anti-TPPA movement is growing, not dwindling. Moreover, thanks to the extraordinary
communicative power of the Internet, generally, and of social media, in particular,
protesters are not only extremely well-informed, but also supremely
well-equipped to increase the circulation of anti-TPPA propaganda
exponentially.
On 7 March, this year, The
Press estimated 1,000 Christchurch protesters had turned out for the “It’s
Our Future” coalition’s nationwide, anti-TPPA, day of action. Five months on,
and the numbers have increased four-fold, with the Stuff website estimating Saturday’s turnout at 4,000 demonstrators.
Since the first of the “It’s Our Future” days of action, held in November 2014,
the overall number of people participating has surged from 10,000 to 30,000. Mr
Groser and his colleagues need to understand that, for the first time in a long
time, they are confronted with a street-based, nationwide, protest movement
that is growing larger – not smaller. When 50 people turn out in Kohukohu
(Population: 150) “politically irrelevant” is not the right call.
Once a demonstration swells beyond “the usual left-wing
suspects” to include the sort of ordinary Kiwis who turned out in their
thousands on Saturday, a wise government will begin to ask itself some very
serious questions about the wisdom of proceeding with the policy under attack.
That is exactly what the Prime Minister, John Key, and his Cabinet did following
the huge anti-mining demonstration of May-day 2010. On that occasion, and to
their credit, Mr Key and his government walked away from what was, clearly, an
unacceptable policy. They would be very wise to do the same in relation to the
Trans-Pacific Partnership.
If they refuse to be advised by the electorate on this
issue: if, like good neoliberals, they reject the very idea of the people
having a say on matters fundamental to their economic well-being; and, without
letting New Zealanders to know what is in it, sign the TPPA – thenthings will change.
Sign the TPPA, and the mood of rising frustration with the
National-led Government – so evident on the streets over the weekend – will
become one of outright fury. This will only intensify once the content of the
TPPA becomes known, and people discover what sort of agreement their leaders
have signed.
Not just a bad deal, Mr Groser, but your government’s death
warrant.
This essay was
originally published in The Press of Tuesday,
18 August 2015.
"The Gasping Pits And Poisonous Mounds Grew Hideously Clear." Toxic waste from the processing of rare earths pours into Lake Baotou in China's Inner Mongolia province. This is where 97 percent of the world's rare earths come from. Without them neither our smart phones nor our much vaunted "green technology" would work.
IT IS ONE of the most graphic passages in the whole of
J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings
trilogy. The description of the toxic desert on the outskirts of Mordor.
Inspired by the polluted landscapes surrounding Britain’s great industrial
cities in his youth, Tolkien employs the waste-dumps of Mordor as a metaphor
for the diseased and poisoned nature of the Dark Lord’s character. Just as the
ruined land is beyond all rehabilitation, so, too, is Sauron.
Here is Tolkien’s description of that terrible place:
“They had come to the desolation that lay before Mordor: the
lasting monument to the dark labour of its slaves that should endure when all
their purposes were made void; a land defiled, diseased beyond all healing –
unless the Great Sea should enter it and wash it with oblivion. ‘I feel sick,’
said Sam. Frodo did not speak.
For a while they stood there, like men on the edge of a
sleep where nightmare lurks, holding it off, though they know they can only
come to morning through shadows. The light broadened and hardened. The gasping
pits and poisonous mounds grew hideously clear. The sun was up, walking among
clouds and long flags of smoke, but even the sunlight was defiled. The hobbits
had no welcome for that light; unfriendly it seemed, revealing them in their
helplessness – little squeaking ghosts that wandered among the ash-heaps of the
Dark Lord.”
Throughout the fantasy, Tolkien takes great care to reassure
his readers that the “free peoples” of Middle Earth are at great pains to stand
aloof from Mordor and all its works. If, however, someone were to attempt to
describe the political economy of Middle Earth (at the end of the Third Age) it
would have to begin with the declining empire of Gondor and its vassal states,
Rohan and The Shire. A largely self-sufficient economic entity, such trade as
Gondor still engaged in was principally with the Dwarf kingdom located in the
Iron Hills, many hundreds of miles to the north. Tolkien hints that Gondor
might also have engaged in limited commerce with the kingdoms of the
“swertings” – the black-skinned peoples of the south – but only during the
period when the Dark Lord was believed to be dead.
There can be no doubt, however, that Mordor constituted the
economic powerhouse of Middle Earth. Like the ante-bellum South, Mordor boasted
vast plantations in which thousands of slaves produced the food and other
materials required for its sustenance. Any surplus was traded with the southern
kingdoms which had, since Sauron’s return, fallen steadily under Mordor’s sway.
Moreover, the Dark Lord’s military build-up, in preparation for his attack upon
Gondor, would have required the production of weapons on an industrial scale.
Mordor’s hunger for iron and other minerals must have been insatiable.
Deconstructing Tolkien’s great tale in this cold-eyed
economic fashion is, of course, anathema to LOTR
aficionados. The War of the Ring is supposed to be a battle between good and
evil, not an economic struggle between a rapidly industrialising, slave-owning
tyranny on the one hand, and an economically weak, largely agricultural,
kingdom without a king, on the other. Looked at in this fashion, it becomes
very clear, very quickly, that without the magical assistance rendered by
Gandalf and the Elves, Gondor would have been a gonner.
Cold-eyed and economically determined is, however, very
definitely the nature of the world in which we are required to live. A world
sadly lacking in magical beings dedicated to the protection of fading empires
and bucolic farming communities like the Shire. On Planet Earth, the rising
power of a tyrannical industrial powerhouse is unlikely to be checked by
anything remotely resembling wizards, elves or hobbits.
Where Tolkien’s fantasy and twenty-first century reality do
intersect, however, is in the environmental degradation attendant upon our
high-tech civilisation. The hideous pollution which Tolkien encountered in his
youth has, like the factories and mines that created it, largely disappeared
from England’s green and pleasant land. But this does not mean that Mordor-like
desolation is also a thing of the past. Mordor has merely shifted its location:
from the north of England and the midlands, to the seemingly limitless horizons
of Inner Mongolia and the horrors of Baotou.
Baotou is the global centre of rare earth production: the
place from which the minerals that make our post-modern, digitally-driven world
possible. Only in China is such an industrial complex possible, because the
inescapable environmental degradation attendant upon the extraction of Rare
Earths would never be tolerated in the democratic nations of the West.
Read how a team of BBC journalists and photographers
described their arrival at the man-made “lake” on the outskirts of Baotou. If
Mordor is anywhere in this world, then surely, it is here:
“We reached the shore, and looked across the lake. I’d seen
some photos before I left for Inner Mongolia, but nothing prepared me for the
sight. It’s a truly alien environment, dystopian and horrifying. The thought
that it is man-made depressed and terrified me, as did the realisation that
this was the by-product not just of the consumer electronics in my pocket, but
also green technologies like wind turbines and electric cars that we get so
smugly excited about in the West. Unsure of quite how to react, I take photos
and shoot video on my cerium polished iPhone.”
Baotou's Toxic Lake: "Nothing prepared me for the sight."
Tolkien’s great fantasy both reveals and conceals the true
nature of the world human-beings inhabit. The Ring of Power – symbol of the
ruthless instrumentalism through which humankind has subdued the planet – is
wonderfully conceived, but its ability to instruct the reader is fatally
weakened by Tolkien’s determination to make Good triumph over Evil.
The bitter truth, of course, is that all of us wear the Ring
of Power, all the time. And all of us are irredeemably engaged in the moral
self-destruction that use of the Ring inevitably entails. We New Zealanders may
be “sleepy hobbits”, dozing blissfully in our beautiful little Shire at the
world’s end, but that doesn’t stop us, when we’re awake, from using the
wondrous consumer goods Baotou’s rare earths make possible. Our ease, and the
bounteous lifestyle of which we are so proud (and of which the rest of the
world is so envious) only exists because somewhere, far, far away, in the
barren wilds of Inner Mongolia, giant pipes are continuously spewing their poisonous
brew into a lake so ruined, hideous and deadly, that Sauron, himself, would
blanche in horror.
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Saturday, 16 August 2015.
SOMETIMES the names of American towns are just too perfect
to be true. I mean “Magnolia, Texas”? Wouldn’t you just love to be able to tell
people you were born in a town called “Magnolia”? Well the two founding members
of Jamestown Revival (think,
Jamestown, early North American settlement, and then think, Credence Clearwater
…) both had the good fortune to be born in the very real Magnolia, Texas. (Population:
1,393)
Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance started writing and singing
songs together at the age of 15. The harmonies they happened on in the course
of their on-stage collaboration proved to be more rewarding than anything they’d
dug out of solo performances – and so Jamestown
Revival was born.
The duo’s songs are crafted out of the raw experiences of being
young and Texan. Their musical ear has always been more attuned to what sounds
right to them, rather than anything that might sell. Even so, it’s clear
that their music fits pretty comfortably under the heading of Americana.
Listening to these guys brings back memories of youth
hostels and folk clubs: places where young American tourists would lift a
Gibson out of its case and just blow everyone away with their astounding musicianship
and vocal power. They all seemed to come from places with names like “Magnolia,
Texas” too!
Jonathan and Zach, self-released their highly acclaimed first album, Utah, in 2014, after which they were
picked up by Republic Records. The duo are now based in California – hence the featured track “California (Cast Iron Soul)” - full of bitter-sweet nostalgia for their old home town. The act's been expanded recently by the addition of Ed Benrock on drums and Nick
Bearden on bass.
If you like the sound of Magnolia, Texas (by way of
California) Jamestown Revival will be
performing in Auckland in October as part of the Tuning Fork venue’s “Americana”
festival.
Ukraine Doesn't Even Come Close: Soviet troops roll over the Afghan border in late-December 1979. The presence of T-54 tanks on the streets of Kabul was not enough, however, to halt New Zealand's burgeoning trade relationship with the Soviet Union. So keen was the Muldoon Government to keep selling butter to the Reds that the relationship even survived the SIS catching the Soviet Ambassador passing $10,000 to the Socialist Unity Party!
NEW ZEALANDERS like to make fun of their Security
Intelligence Service. That an SIS agent’s abandoned briefcase was found to
contain a cold meat pie and a hot copy of Penthouse
magazine has provided endless fodder for the nation’s satirists. The service’s
critics also like to reiterate its agents’ failure to secure a conviction for
espionage against William B. Sutch – one of New Zealand’s most distinguished
public servants. More latterly, we’ve been encouraged to shake our heads in
wonderment at the sort of Cold War madness that could persuade the SIS to keep
a file on the mild-mannered Keith Locke – from the age of ten!
The so-called “Sofinsky Affair” took place just before
Christmas in 1979 and featured the Soviet Ambassador, Vesevelod Sofinksy,
caught in the act of handing over $10,000 of “Moscow Gold” to a representative
of the Socialist Unity Party. The latter, a Soviet-aligned communist
organisation, though small in numbers, wielded considerable influence in the
then powerful trade union movement. Sofinsky was the SIS’s biggest “gotcha” by
far – a Christmas present wrapped up in the reddest of red ribbons.
And yet, the Prime Minister of the day, Rob Muldoon, was
troubled. His most obvious course of action was to expel the ambassador for
what everybody agreed was an egregious breach of diplomatic protocol. The
problem was that, on Christmas Eve 1979, just days after the wildly successful
Sofinsky “sting”, Soviet armoured divisions began rolling across the Afghan
border.
Amidst the outraged protests of the Muslim states, and the
teeth-grinding rage of the “Free World”, Prime Minister Muldoon was desperately
worried that New Zealand’s expulsion of its Ambassador would be construed by
the Soviet Government as an act of exaggerated Cold War fealty. How would the
Soviets respond? What would happen to the burgeoning trade relationship between
the two countries? What was a delinquent ambassador worth? Hopefully not that
much!
Muldoon dispatched one of his most trusted advisers, Gerald
Hensely, to consult New Zealand’s principal allies on the likely consequences.
The [Jimmy] Carter Administration in Washington urged caution, but the British
were confident that the most New Zealand had to fear by withdrawing Sofinsky’s
diplomatic credentials was that the Soviets would do the same to New Zealand’s
ambassador in Moscow.
And so it proved. The two states expelled each other’s
ambassadors, but took no further action. The shipments of butter and mutton to
Russian ports continued uninterrupted – as did the unloading of Russian-made
Lada cars at the Auckland docks. Not even the Soviets’ reckless intervention in
the internal politics of New Zealand, or the presence of T-54 Russian tanks on
the streets of Kabul, was enough to keep the Dairy and Meat Boards’ exports out
of the Russian market. Back in 1980, foreign trade was important to New
Zealand’s prime minister.
Customer? Cartoonist, Malcolm Evans, exposes the hypocrisy of the Muldoon Government's anti-Soviet rhetoric.
Is it still? As dairy prices tumble, and the Aussie banks
start sharpening their pencils, you might think that New Zealand’s current
prime minister, John Key, would be doing everything within his power to move
this country’s major exports over the border of any country willing to let them
through. Russia is one such country. Her people are hungry for butter, cheese
and milk powder, and their government is anxious to supply them. Who, or what,
could possibly prevent New Zealand and Russia from taking advantage of this
mutually beneficial situation?
The answer, apparently, is exactly the same combination of
“allies” who, back in 1980, had no problems at all with New Zealand trading
with the Soviet Union. Today, however, the Russian Federation is a “no-go area”
for New Zealand exports. Russia could invade Afghanistan in 1979, and not be
subjected to trade sanctions. But, in 2014, her defensive annexation of Crimea
(which had, up until the mid-1950s, been an integral part of the Russian state)
has prompted her Nato enemies to declare Russia’s markets off-limits.
Why isn’t our government challenging the EU’s/Nato’s/USA’s
right to impose such trade barriers? Time, perhaps, for the SIS to place the
American ambassador and the National Party under surveillance?
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, 14 August 2015.
