Forgotten Lessons: Has Labour Just Chosen To Lose Hutt South?

Best Man Or Mandatory Woman? Are Labour’s compulsory gender quotas dictating the party’s candidate selection processes?

 

SOMETIMES IT FEELS LIKE THE LEFT is incapable of learning anything. Why leftists forget every lesson History teaches them – even those of the recent past – I simply do not know. Mistakes, it seems, are for repeating – endlessly.

 

Twenty-seven years ago the NewLabour Party, full of energy and idealism, decided to institute a gender quota. Half of its candidates had to be women. Had to be, you’ll note. None of this “strive to ensure an equal number of women candidates” malarkey. Fifty percent meant fifty percent. Sorry fellas.

 

The NLP women grinned and the NLP guys puffed out their chests. Theirs was a party of real democratic-socialists – completely unlike those devious traitors in the Old Labour Party. If the NLP leader, Jim Anderton, had reservations, then he kept them to himself. Or, maybe, he knew enough about working-class voters to let them do the talking for him.

 

And talk they did. Canvassing Dunedin’s working-class streets I was taken to task on doorstep-after-doorstep by a succession of narrow-eyed matrons as suspicious of my rounded middle-class vowels as they were contemptuous of the NLPs affirmative action policy.

 

“I don’t agree with quotas”, I was told over and over again. “You should pick the best person for the job.” With impressive prescience, these hard-bitten mothers and grandmothers demanded to know what the NLP would do “if your quota isn’t filled and you’ve got to choose between a really good man and an unsuitable woman? Are you really going to tell the best man to bugger off? Because if you are – then you needn’t bother coming around here asking for my vote.”

 

Not that anyone paid much attention. Even in the democratic-socialist NLP, the idea that the political leadership should be guided by the views of those whose votes they were seeking got precious little traction. If working-class women were sceptical (if not downright hostile) to the gender quota, then it was only because they had yet to throw off the dead weight of patriarchal thinking. Nothing that a little feminist consciousness-raising couldn’t fix.

 

Always assuming that those working-class women wanted their consciousness raised, which, by-and-large they didn’t. Or, at least, not by democratic-socialists so utterly unaware of how patronising they sounded. If the choice was between being talked down to by a middle-class feminist, or represented by a working-class bloke who’d grown up in the same neighbourhood as themselves, then the best man was always going to win.

 

With the NLP long since deposited on the ash-heap of history, you might assume that the Labour Party would be wary of repeating its mistakes. But, you’d be wrong. Feminism is one of the progressive traditions which Labour has never turned its back on. The support of the Women’s Council of the party thus remains indispensable to any attempt to re-write Labour’s rules. Or un-write them. As David “Man Ban” Shearer discovered when he attempted to attenuate the Women’s Council’s constitutional efforts to ensure gender balance.

 

Over the past three years, those efforts have been crowned with success. And now Labour’s mandatory gender quotas are dictating the party’s candidate selection processes in precisely the way those shrewd Dunedin working-class women foresaw nearly thirty years ago.

 

Last weekend, Labour members in the Hutt South electorate gathered to choose a successor to their long-serving MP, Trevor Mallard. The choice they faced was between a popular local lawyer and city councillor, Campbell Barry, and a well-connected party insider, Virginia (Ginny) Andersen. Barry, who attended Wainuiomata High School, easily won the support of the Hutt South members present at the meeting, but he failed to convince the selectors representing the party’s New Zealand Council. By a narrow majority (4-3) the selection panel voted to install Ginny Andersen.

 

Bear in mind that Mallard holds Hutt South by just 709 votes, and that in 2014 National won the Party Vote by a margin of 6,745 votes. National’s candidate, Chris Bishop, is a strong campaigner and will only be prevented from lifting the seat in 2017 by a Labour candidate capable of putting a large and enthusiastic team of volunteers in the field. That is very hard to do when the local membership believes “Head Office” has ignored their preferences and imposed an unwanted “outsider” on the electorate.

 

Once again, I’m recalling that doorstep dialogue of thirty years ago: “I don’t agree with quotas. You should pick the best person for the job. What do you do if your quota isn’t filled and you’ve got to choose between a really good man and an unsuitable woman? Are you really going to tell the best man to bugger off? Because if you are – then you needn’t bother coming around here asking for my vote.”

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 31 October 2016.

The Better Angel: Why Birgitte Nyborg Beats Donald Trump.

American Cynicism vs Danish Idealism: That the ruthless and corrupt hero of House of Cards, Francis Underwood, so completely captivated American television viewers should, perhaps, have alerted us to the possibility of Donald Trump in the White House. The tremendous popularity of the Danish TV series Borgen and its heroine, Birgitte Nyborg, testifies to the worldwide hunger for a more principled kind of politics.

 

ALONG WITH LEGO, and those foiled-wrapped segments of creamily delicious cheese, Borgen, is one of Denmark’s most successful exports. When the idea of a series about the intricacies of Danish politics was pitched to the bosses at the publicly owned Danish Broadcasting Corporation more than a few eyebrows must have shot up. But, somehow, the show’s creator, Adam Price (one of Denmark’s leading television chefs!) convinced them to back the project – and Borgen went on to wow the world.

 

What made the series so compelling (apart from Price’s intelligent script and Sidse Babett Knudsen’s insightful rendering of Birgitte Nyborg, the drama’s central character ) was the way party politics was presented to the show’s well-off and well-educated audiences.

 

Unlike the blackly comical British series, The Thick Of It, which delighted in portraying the political process and its practitioners as irredeemably corrupt and ineffective, Borgen took as its starting point the historically undeniable ability of the democratic process to improve the lives of ordinary human-beings.

 

It’s an important difference. The Thick of It may be funny, but it is also profoundly disempowering. Nothing good can come from the politics represented in TTOI because none of its characters are in the least bit inspiring. The viewers may laugh at the hugely inventive invective which pours out of the mouth of its anti-hero, Malcolm Tucker, but very few of them would want to inhabit his world.

 

Borgen does not pretend that the political world is without self-aggrandisement and venality. Or that deception, compromise and betrayal are not inescapable aspects of the exercise of political power. But the series refuses to make these the be-all and end-all of the process. In the character of Birgitte Nyborg, Price offers his audience a politician who, through all the vicissitudes of high public office, remains unswervingly committed to the bright bundle of ideals that impelled her into politics.

 

Borgen is empowering precisely because it refuses to validate the cynicism and disillusionment which pervades so many ordinary citizens’ perception of contemporary politics. What makes the series work dramatically, however, is the way Price plays to his audiences’ deep-seated yearning for a politician who refuses to play it safe. A person with enough faith in the intelligence of the voting public to tell them the truth, and enough trust in the essential goodness of human-beings to address her policies to what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature”.

 

This is the style of politics that Birgitte Nyborg practices – and Borgen’s audiences love it.

 

Danish Broadcasting is to be commended for Borgen. Not only because it reveals Denmark, a country about the same size as New Zealand, to be deeply committed to the idea that its public broadcaster has a vital role in both explaining and upholding its democratic institutions, but also because it is willing to invest in the creative capacities of its own citizens – to the point of funding a project of Borgen’s scope and scale. Would that New Zealanders were as committed to preserving the public service aspects of their broadcasting system!

 

Because there is a price to be paid for dwelling only on the negative aspects of politics. If voters are encouraged to believe that their political system is “rigged”, and that their political leaders are “crooked”, then they will cease to have faith in the intricate networks of alliances; the complex arrangements of compromises; and the step-by-step fulfilment of promises that is the daily grind of democratic politics.

 

And when that happens: when the voters dismiss the give-and-take of parliamentary politics; the sort of politics that President Lyndon Johnson personified, and which produced the transformational Voting Rights Act of 1965; then they begin to long for a leader strong enough to dispense with the formalities of politics and cut to the chase.

 

Except that a leader who’s contemptuous of complexity and compromise must also be contemptuous of the voters themselves. Because the inescapable fact of human existence is that it is not simple, and that the competing needs of human society are only resolvable by people who are willing to compromise.

 

Compromising does not mean capitulating. This is Borgen’s core message. That compromising is about keeping your own ideals alive by recognising the ideals of others: the rights of others.

 

Rejecting the politics of Birgitte Nyborg, leaves only the anti-politics of Donald Trump.

 

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 October 2016.

Board Games: Can Phil Goff Really Make Auckland Transport More “Accountable”?

Not Auckland's Emperor - Just Its Mayor: Phil Goff as Auckland’s emperor, before whom the CCOs haughty CEOs must bend their knees and render full account, is an arresting image. Unfortunately, although the Mayor can ask for full accountability from the CCOs, he cannot compel it. Auckland Transport, like the Ports of Auckland, exists at arm’s length from the Governing Body of the Auckland Council. The city may own it, but it does not run it.

 

PHIL GOFF has declined to reappoint Councillors Mike Lee and Christine Fletcher to Auckland Transport’s (AT) Board of Directors. Auckland’s new mayor is unconvinced that councillor directors are the solution to the city’s Council Controlled Organisations’ (CCOs) alleged unaccountability. Rather than maintain the current arrangement linking the citizens of Auckland and their elected representatives with the opaque entity responsible for the city’s public transportation services, Goff intends to make AT and all the other CCOs directly answerable to himself.

 

If only Auckland’s Mayor possessed the legal authority to do such a thing. Goff as Auckland’s emperor, before whom the CCOs haughty CEOs must bend their knees and render full account, is an arresting image. Unfortunately, although the Mayor can ask for full accountability from the CCOs, he cannot compel it. AT, like the Ports of Auckland, exists at arm’s length from the Governing Body of the Auckland Council. The city may own it, but it does not run it.

 

What the Mayor does possess the power to do is nominate two directors to sit on the AT board. Could he nominate himself? The presence of the Mayor would certainly make AT’s other directors sit up and take notice. It would not, however, deliver as much accountability as one might think. Directors are legally responsible to the company that appoints them – and to no one else. They are also legally bound to accept the decisions of their fellow directors. The confidentiality of the deliberations out of which board decisions arise is also legally enforceable.

 

In extremis, the Mayor and the Governing Body of Auckland Council could pass a resolution sacking the board of directors of the legal entity responsible for appointing the boards of directors of the CCOs. The replacement board could then, theoretically, purge the CCO boards of any director insufficiently committed to the radical idea that council controlled organisations should be – in fact as well as in name – controlled by the Council.

 

But even this is doubtful. Faced with a Governing Body of such uncompromising radicalism, it is highly likely that the entity constitutionally located between the Council and the CCOs would send for its lawyers and the whole matter would be taken out of the political arena and placed before the courts. A speedy resolution of the issues in dispute would be … unlikely.

 

And even if the Mayor and the Governing Body won the right to demand accountability from the CCOs, their problems would not be over. Persons with the legal, commercial and administrative expertise required to oversee an organisation as large and complex as Auckland Transport are few and far between. Persons in possession of the requisite qualifications and who are also willing to offer their services to a council whose “commercially irresponsible” actions have been condemned by practically all of their colleagues would be even harder to find.

 

The word would go out to every company director in the city that taking the place of any CCO board member sacked by the Council would be a seriously career-limiting move. Solidarity is not a quality reserved exclusively for the working-class. The bourgeoisie has every bit as much reason to stick together as the proletariat – and they’re surprisingly good at it.

 

They are also surprisingly good at letting politicians know how disappointed they could be should certain individuals be reappointed to certain boards of directors. Someone with Phil Goff’s experience doesn’t need too much in the way of hints to appreciate the political difficulties that could suddenly arise if Mike Lee and Christine Fletcher were to resume their seats at AT’s boardroom table.

 

But those fine young people from Generation Zero; those indefatigable supporters of the Unitary Plan; just think of the impression appointing people like that would make. A new Mayor clearing the way for new blood. Why, the polls would go through the roof!

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday 26 October 2016.

“Old Lefties” – WTF! Simon Wilson hosts “Table Talk” at the Ika Seafood Bar and Grill.

Takes One To Know One, Simon: Simon Wilson's denigration of "old lefties" struck some as odd - coming as it did from a former member of the Workers Communist League! His present political orientation, however, is relatively clear. As he wrote for The Spinoff: “[O]ne way or another, everything benefits the agents of capitalism. If you’re a progressive, or a social democrat, or a socialist, you have to suck that up.”

 

“LABOUR – WTF?” The question said it all. And the packed-out restaurant confirmed its aptness. Laila Harré has good instincts for the mood of the Auckland Left, and “WTF?” sums up its assessment of the current state of the Labour Party with earthy directness.

 

Less adroit, perhaps, was her decision to allow The Spinoff to co-sponsor the event. It’s hard to reconcile the Ika Seafood Bar and Grill’s skilful courting of Auckland’s progressives with The Spinoff’s vicious attack on one of the Left’s most respected representatives – Mike Lee. That the attack on Lee could so easily have resulted in (and was quite probably intended to secure) Bill Ralston’s election to the Auckland Council merely confirmed The Spinoff’s political incorrectness.

 

That the choice of Simon Wilson as host of the evening’s panel discussion’s proved equally unsuitable was not something for which the Ika team could be blamed. Wilson made himself so by persuading The Spinoff to post his “Look, there goes the Labour Party – sliding towards oblivion” on the same day as the Table-Talk event.

 

It is a very curious piece of writing. Provocative title aside, Wilson’s posting is mostly an attempt to isolate and ridicule left-wing critics of his beloved Unitary Plan. Though no names are mentioned, it is clear that the sort of people Wilson has in mind when he castigates these “old lefties”, are people like Mike Lee.

 

“Their dispute wasn’t really defined by age,” writes Wilson, “but it was about modernising the progressive cause. The old argument is that when you relax the rules around building and allow more density, you create conditions for ugly apartment blocks and slums that ruin the quality of life for everyone who has to live in or near them. There might be more homes but the big winners are the developers who make a killing.

 

“That sounds grand, principled, insightful and historically sound. It’s been true in the past, even the quite recent past. In fact, in relation to the UP, it’s sentimental nonsense.”

 

But is it? Auckland’s history offers very little justification for believing that market-led intensification will produce anything other than “ugly apartment blocks” and “developers who make a killing.” More importantly, Wilson offers nothing in the way of evidence that the Unitary Plan, as approved, will ensure that Auckland’s future does not resemble its past.

 

What he does do, however, is set up a straw man. He implies that Mike Lee and his allies do not understand that “a compact city, with good quality affordable homes clustered densely around a comprehensive and efficient public transport system, is essential for any fast-growing city that wants to offer a decent quality of life to all its citizens.”

 

This is laughable. One of the reasons the tight little clique of lawyers, land-bankers, property developers, and roading contractors that has run Auckland for the past 150 years was so keen to get rid of Mike Lee was because, as Chairman of the Auckland Regional Council, he refused to extend Greater Auckland’s boundaries. Lee was arguing for a more compact city when Wilson was still collecting recipes for Cuisine magazine. His constant and highly successful advocacy for “a comprehensive and efficient public transportation system” – especially rail – also put Lee offside with Auckland’s powerful roading lobby.

 

Not so laughable is the fact that Wilson knows full well that Lee is but the latest in a long-line of left-wing politicians and planners who have fought for an Auckland capable of offering “a decent quality of life to all its citizens”.

 

In between his stints at Cuisine and Metro, Wilson was a jobbing editor for the Random House publishing group. One of the books he edited was my own No Left Turn, which included a chapter entitled “The Auckland That Never Was”. All of the elements making up what Wilson rather grandly calls “New Urbanism” feature in the plans for Auckland’s future development that were prepared for the First Labour Government by the Housing Division of the Ministry of Works back in the 1940s! That those extraordinarily progressive plans remained unfulfilled may be sheeted home to the same private sector interests who made their fortunes by turning Auckland into a cheap copy of Los Angeles, and who now propose to make themselves even richer by turning Auckland into a cheap copy of Singapore.

 

How someone in possession of this knowledge could, nevertheless, attempt to paint Mike Lee as someone guilty of failing “a bedrock test” for progressive urban planning, is utterly beyond me. But, then, I found it no less puzzling that the same man who could write: “one way or another, everything benefits the agents of capitalism. If you’re a progressive, or a social democrat, or a socialist, you have to suck that up”, was, somehow, able to begin last Wednesday’s (19/10/16) Table Talk discussion by quoting the late Helen Kelly’s emphatically anti-capitalist vision of the Labour Party.

 

Obviously, Wilson’s definition of “progressive”, “social democrat” and “socialist” is somewhat different from my own.

 

The rest of the evening was full of depressingly similar contradictions.

 

Only a very few minutes had expired before the Labour Party President, Nigel Haworth, took on the expression of a man who wished he'd stayed at home. Keeping out of the public eye has been something of a fetish for Haworth, whose principal motivation in taking on Labour’s presidency appears to have been quieting down the party’s frequently  restive rank-and-file. Having to admit that, had he been in Britain, he would not have voted for Jeremy Corbyn, was almost certainly something he would have preferred to keep under his hat.

 

Deborah Russell, Labour’s candidate for the Rangitikei electorate in 2014, told us she would have voted for Corbyn. That becoming a Corbynista would have put her offside with a fair swag of her putative caucus colleagues did not appear to have occurred to her. Which says a lot about her understanding of the party she defended with such enthusiasm throughout the night.

 

Chloe Swarbrick’s reputation for straight-talking was in no way diminished by her participation in the Table Talk panel. When asked what it would take to make her join the Labour Party, her quick-fire response, “an invitation”, raised eyebrows and hopes in almost equal measure.

 

Head-and-shoulders the most acute political thinker on the stage last Wednesday night was, however, Andrew Campbell. Formerly the Green Party leaders’ chief-of-staff, and now – impressively – communications director for the NZ Rugby Union, Campbell’s insights into the workings of contemporary New Zealand politics were refreshingly candid. That, in his estimation, “politics is a PR game” might be a bit depressing for “old lefties” like me, but only a fool would argue that, in New Zealand, in 2016, our politics is very much of anything else.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 25 October 2016.

A Stranger In The Mirror.

An Indistinct Reflection: New Zealanders have been slow to turn against their country’s economic, social and cultural transformation. Most accepted the changes of the Lange government and its successors, at least initially, as necessary and positive. Thirty years on, however, the consequences of those changes are all around them. The global economy, with its free movement of goods and people, lacks the reassuring consanguinity of the homogeneous nation state. When a people looks in the mirror, it expects to recognise its reflection.

 

THIS IS THE STORY of a small nation which tried to move beyond its history as a British colony to become a more open and diverse society. It is also the story of how that country’s national identity was fundamentally altered in the process. To the point where many of its citizens are no longer sure who they are, or where their society is headed.

 

The story begins in 1986 when the new Labour Government of David Lange and Roger Douglas steered New Zealand in a radically new economic and cultural direction. It was widely believed that Lange’s predecessor, Sir Robert Muldoon, had allowed the country to become fixed in a view of itself that owed much more to the past than the present. Lange’s government was determined to modernise and open-up New Zealand to a new way of organising its “Polish shipyard” economy.

 

This determination went well beyond opening up the economy. An important part of New Zealand’s insularity, it was argued, stemmed from the narrowness of its immigration policies.

 

Prior to 1986, New Zealand’s immigration policies were driven by one, over-riding consideration: too preserve the country’s essential “Britishness”. For most of New Zealand’s history this objective had been interpreted quite literally. New Zealanders were proud to call themselves “Better Britons” and looked upon the United Kingdom as “home”.

 

From the 1930s onwards, however, this attitude underwent an important change. More and more New Zealanders, while acknowledging their British heritage, were determined to transcend it by constructing a nation that was more progressive, less hidebound and much more independent than the colony it had started out as. This view of New Zealand was given a huge boost by the reforms of the First Labour Government (1935-1949) and contrasted sharply with the more traditional view of New Zealand’s national identity espoused by the National Party.

 

By the 1980s, however, this Kiwi nationalist position was being widely dismissed as an unhelpful barrier to moving New Zealand into the new “global” economy. The survival of the sort of society favoured by New Zealand’s left-wing nationalists depended on the continuation of economic and cultural protectionism. But, with the tides of history running strongly against them, the Left’s preferences were fast becoming untenable.

 

The country’s almost entirely mono-cultural institutions added another complication. Since the land wars of the nineteenth century, New Zealand’s indigenous Maori people had been largely shut out of national life. Progressive New Zealanders demanded a new, bi-cultural, definition of nationhood. They also wanted New Zealand’s foreign affairs, defence and trade policies to reflect its geographical location in the Asia-Pacific region.

 

The inquiry launched by Lange’s Immigration Minister, Kerry Burke, in 1986 touched upon all of these considerations. It’s findings represented a decisive shift away from the de-facto “White New Zealand” policy that had, hitherto, preserved the country’s narrow ethnic profile.

 

Labour’s new immigration policy, like the free-market policy it was intended to complement, would take as its starting point the economic needs of New Zealand. Immigrants would be admitted on the basis of a culturally-neutral “points” system. Social cohesion, formerly achieved by its cultural homogeneity, would now be secured through strong economic growth. New Zealand was to become an increasingly diverse and multicultural nation.

 

Very little of this new population policy was known to New Zealanders. And the politicians of both major parties were in no hurry to inform them. There were clues, however, such as National Prime Minister Jim Bolger’s peculiar claim that New Zealand was an Asian nation.

 

By the time the rapid influx of non-European immigrants became impossible to hide, National and Labour could rely on most political journalists and a growing number of academic and business leaders to reassure the public that the new multicultural New Zealand was an entirely positive development. Those who objected, most notably the leader of the anti-immigration NZ First Party, Winston Peters, were condemned as racists and xenophobes. In the city where most new immigrants settled, Auckland, rapidly rising property values reconciled native-born citizens to its changing ethnic balance.

 

What the authors of New Zealand’s current immigration policy failed to account for, however, was the social inequality which free-market economics almost always generates. Where economic growth is based on large migrant inflows – as it is in New Zealand currently – and wealth is distributed unequally across the population, social cohesion begins to break down.

 

New Zealanders have been slow to turn against their country’s economic, social and cultural transformation. Most accepted the changes of the Lange government and its successors, at least initially, as necessary and positive. Thirty years on, however, the consequences of those changes are all around them. The global economy, with its free movement of goods and people, lacks the reassuring consanguinity of the homogeneous nation state. When a people looks in the mirror, it expects to recognise its reflection.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 25 October 2016.

Why Does Labour Keep Going Round And Round In Circles?

Stuck In A Rut? Historically-speaking, this is where Labour is supposed to step in. With National mired in an all-too-predictable circularity, Labour's role is to excite voters with the promise of a straight line to the future. Moving us forward; taking us somewhere new; somewhere better: that’s always been the Labour Party’s most effective sales pitch.

 

WHY DOES LABOUR do it? Why is it forever tying itself up in ethical knots and programmatic contradictions? Its policy-making does not seem to proceed from any discernible core of political principle. On the contrary, it comes across as the sort of haphazard collection of fleeting public obsessions a party guided exclusively by opinion polls and focus groups might present to the electorate.

 

Voters are prepared to forgive National for this sort “suck it and see” approach to policy-making. Most of us understand that the only principle that National will never abandon is the one commanding it to remain in office for as long as possible. Everything else is negotiable – as the Government’s recent swag of policy tweaks and re-adjustments makes abundantly clear.

 

Nor can the voters object too strenuously to National’s governing style. After all, it is their own likes and dislikes that are being so assiduously fed back to them by the party’s pollsters and marketing specialists.

 

If democracy is about giving the people what they want, then John Key’s preternatural sensitivity to the slightest change of pitch in the vox populi makes him a democratic leader of no mean ability.

 

The problem, of course, is that, at some point, the people grow weary of hearing their own preferences and prejudices tripping-off the tongues of their political leaders. Eventually, people start wondering what it would be like to inhabit a political environment enlivened by something more inspirational than The Electorate’s Greatest Hits on continuous loop.

 

Historically-speaking, this is where Labour is supposed to step in. With National mired in an all-too-predictable circularity, Labour should be exciting voters with the promise of a straight line to the future. Moving us forward; taking us somewhere new; somewhere better: that’s always been the Labour Party’s most effective sales pitch.

 

So what in the name of radical linearity is Labour doing promising us 1,000 extra policemen? As if New Zealanders haven’t heard The Kneejerks’ hit single, “Law & Order”, at least a million times before. Yes, but this time there’s a twist. This time, all the extra bobbies bopping on the beat will have a special mission: rescuing New Zealand from the scourge of P-for-pure methamphetamine. The “thin blue line” may still be fighting the “War on Drugs”, says Andrew Little, but it is losing. Labour’s going to send reinforcements.

 

But prohibition and beefed-up law enforcement was already an old and discredited policy when President Ronald Reagan first declared war on drugs back in the 1980s. And New Zealand’s policemen and politicians made a huge mistake in allowing the Americans to convince them that such a war could be won, and that its principal casualties would be somebody other than our own children.

 

Drugs, in and of themselves, have never been the problem. The problem has always been the demand for substances that render the fraught business of making a living on this unforgiving planet just that little bit easier.

 

Our own culture’s drug-of-choice is alcohol – but it could just as easily be hashish, or opium, or peyote. And isn’t it significant that we treat the addiction to our own drug-of-choice, alcoholism, as a health problem – not a crime problem? Can we really have forgotten that the only people who benefited from America’s “noble experiment” in alcohol prohibition were the Mafia?

 

If Labour truly wants to win the war on drugs, then its first priority should be to make life easier for as many New Zealanders as possible. Filling our prisons with the young, brown perpetrators of what are, essentially, victimless crimes does not constitute making life easier.

 

But this is not Labour’s position. Andrew Little persists in advancing the utterly discredited argument that if the supply of drugs is reduced, then the demand for those same drugs will be diminished. He really ought to let the people who hand out the Nobel Prize for Economics know that he’s somehow managed to repeal the law of supply and demand. He’d be a dead cert to win in 2017!

 

A Labour leader determined to break this country out of National’s ever-decreasing circles would strike a blow against the gangs, violent crime, and our rapidly rising prison muster by decriminalising the use of all drugs. It would move New Zealand forward to a better place. And focus groups would soon be applauding Labour’s courage.

 

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 October 2016.

Why the Greater Good requires Americans to vote for the Lesser Evil – Hillary Clinton.

The Lesser Evil: Yes, Hillary Clinton is more Hawk than Dove when it comes to US foreign and defence policy. And, yes, like so many “mainstream” Democrats, she is not above taking donations from her friends in Wall Street, Hollywood and Silicon Valley. But what she is not, is a bloated, foul-mouthed racist and misogynist, who, facing imminent defeat, is preparing, like some narcissistic parody of Samson, to pull down the temple of American democracy upon the heads of its fractious citizens.

 

THE CLAIM that “voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for evil” raises as many difficulties as it resolves. If we accept that society’s most intractable problems are a reflection of its most serious imperfections, then, surely, we must also accept that imperfect solutions are the best we can hope for? If the only choice presented to us is between inflicting less – or more – harm upon the world, then, surely, the only way for us to do any good is by deciding to do the least evil?

 

Simply refusing to choose between the greater and the lesser evil does not get us off the hook – not if our desire is to do the most good we can, whenever we can. If that is not our desire, then fine – we can just shrug our shoulders and walk away.

 

But, presumably, the very fact that we find choosing between (in this case) Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton so frustrating is because we have a vision of the United States that neither candidate is willing to fulfil completely. Like progressive activists all around the world, we want a socially-just, ecologically-sustainable and peace-making America. How likely are we to see that America, however, if the best advice we can offer our American comrades is to simply throw up their hands in exasperation and cry “A plague on both your houses!”?

 

Yes, you could argue that given the evident corruption of the Republican and Democratic parties, the best way to do good is to encourage American progressives to build a new political party. And you might be right – but it doesn’t solve the problem of what to do now. A genuinely progressive and thoroughly organised third party is not going to be on the ballot-paper on 8 November!

 

Then, again, you might say that voting for one of the minor party candidates is the best way of doing good. Except that, as John Oliver’s latest Last Week Tonight show so brilliantly demonstrates, the Libertarian’s Gary Johnson and the Green Party’s Jill Stein are complete flakes, whose grasp of what the US President can and cannot do is as woefully inadequate as Trump’s.

 

Nor will it do to simply declare that since New Zealanders don’t get to vote in the 2016 US Presidential Election, the choice between Trump and Clinton is one we can, mercifully, avoid. But, if we take it upon ourselves to judge and condemn these candidates (and boy do left-wing Kiwis love to judge and condemn these candidates!) then it seems entirely gutless to refuse to make the imaginative leap into an American polling-booth and choose.

 

Not that the choice is all that difficult – not really.

 

Yes, Hillary Clinton is more Hawk than Dove when it comes to US foreign and defence policy. And, yes, like so many “mainstream” Democrats, she is not above taking donations from her friends in Wall Street, Hollywood and Silicon Valley. But what she is not, is a bloated, foul-mouthed racist and misogynist, who, thwarted in his grandiose ambitions (quite possibly for the first time in his entire life) and facing imminent defeat, is preparing, like some narcissistic parody of Samson, to pull down the temple of American democracy upon the heads of its fractious citizens.

 

The socially-just, ecologically-sustainable and peace-making America we are all hoping for is unlikely to be fully realised under President Hillary Clinton, but a great deal more of it will be brought into existence under her leadership than under Donald Trump’s.

 

In an imperfect world, the imperfect solution is to vote for the least-worst presidential candidate. For the greater good, American progressives are morally obliged to choose the lesser evil – Hillary Clinton.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 19 October 2016.

Buying Civilisation – With Higher Taxes

Jam Tomorrow - Maybe: Last Thursday morning (13/10/16) Finance Minister, Bill English told reporters that the unexpectedly large projected government surplus of $1.8 billion “means we have a few choices we didn’t have in the past”. He did not rule out tax cuts.

 

“THERE’S NEVER A BAD TIME FOR TAX CUTS”, was Rodney Hide’s message to Radio Live’s listeners last Thursday afternoon. The Finance Minister, Bill English, appeared to agree. At least, he didn’t rule them out.

 

On Thursday morning, English told reporters that the unexpectedly large projected government surplus of $1.8 billion “means we have a few choices we didn’t have in the past”.

 

Not that the National Party-led government’s fiscal goals: “reduced debt, infrastructure investment, reduced taxes for lower and middle income families”, were about to change. On the contrary, the Finance Minister remained firmly wedded to the view that the best means of achieving his government’s fiscal objectives were “expenditure control and a growing economy.”

 

Civil society’s reaction was swift and unequivocal. The very idea of deliberately reducing state revenue, when additional government spending on crucial social services is needed so urgently, was greeted with dismay.

 

“The government has left, over the last eight years or so, a social deficit, which we are now seeing literally on the streets of Auckland and elsewhere”, was how the Salvation Army’s policy analyst, Alan Johnson, responded to English’s announcement. Adding bitterly that “it doesn't appear to be interested in bridging that deficit.”

 

The NZ Council of Trade Unions’ economist, Bill Rosenberg, was equally aghast at what he identified as the National Government’s strategy of deliberate procrastination and deferral: “You can’t put off dealing with child poverty indefinitely. You can’t put off dealing with a struggling health system indefinitely.”

 

Compelling evidence that the Government’s fiscal stinginess is generating a measurable electoral backlash would lend a deadly cutting edge to Johnson’s and Rosenberg’s criticisms. Unfortunately for the institutions they represent, no such evidence exists.

 

David Farrar, the owner of the National Party’s indefatigable polling agency, Curia Research, averages-out the major polls for his Kiwiblog blogsite. His latest calculations give National 44.3 percent of the Party Vote, to the Labour-Greens’ 42.7 percent. Widespread public revulsion at National’s fiscal strategies would see a Labour-Green government-in-waiting positioned well ahead of its centre-right opponents. It isn’t.

 

If an angry electorate is out there, then the best that can be said is that it’s very well hidden.

 

Clearly, there is a very large constituency for the views on poverty expressed recently by the Police Minister, Judith Collins.

 

Asked how her government proposed to address the link between gangs and childhood poverty, Collins asserted that there was always sufficient money available for New Zealanders in need. What she saw in poor households, she said, was something quite different from material deprivation: “I see a poverty of ideas, a poverty of parental responsibility, a poverty of love, a poverty of caring.”

 

Collins’ remarks were roundly criticised by experts on social deprivation, who dismissed them waspishly as a “middle-class New Zealand myth”.

 

“Forty per cent of children in poverty are in households in paid work”, observed Associate-Professor Mike O’Brien on behalf of the Child Poverty Action Group. “Are we saying there’s a large chunk of parents who are working who are inadequate? That’s hard to sustain. This is not about behaviour. It’s about access to resources, the way we distribute opportunity.”

 

“In some ways [and] at the risk of being simplistic”, said O’Brien, “it’s easier to blame parents rather than doing something about the social and economic setting.”

 

The Associate-Professor is right: it is easier. Which is, presumably, why the National Government goes on doing it.

 

Bill English could inform the country that his surplus is unavailable for tax cuts. That, instead, the extra revenue will be spent on raising benefits, housing the homeless, and refilling the coffers of New Zealand’s cash-strapped health and education services. He could commend to voters the words of the celebrated American jurist, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jnr, who said: “I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization”. But, if he did, how would “middle-class New Zealand” react?

 

Political parties tailor their policies to meet the interests and prejudices of the people who vote for them. As an explanation for poverty, “poor parenting” may infuriate the experts as a “middle-class New Zealand myth”. But, since it is overwhelmingly the New Zealand middle-class that turns out to vote in local and national elections – it’s a myth that counts.

 

On the subject of voting, it is very tempting to paraphrase Judith Collins:

 

“Poverty’s not the problem, it’s people who don’t understand the role of voting in ending poverty, that’s the problem. Poverty persists because these people no longer vote in elections, or even think they should vote in elections.”

 

Poverty plummeted in New Zealand when the working-class poor organised themselves  industrially and politically to end exploitation on the job and deprivation in the home. For their own shot at civilisation, they happily voted for higher taxes. It’s an historical lesson today’s working poor could help themselves enormously by re-learning.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 18 October 2016.

A Howling Moral Vacuum: America’s Syrian Policy.

The Other Side Of The Story: A rebel fighter from the Jaish al-Fatah (or Army of Conquest) prepares to fire artillery during clashes with Syrian pro-government forces earlier this year. Why is it that the Western news media provides so little coverage of the Jihadists' artillery bombardment of West Aleppo? Perhaps it's because we might  start asking embarrassing questions about where these big guns come from.

 

AVID FANS of the US television series Homeland are already familiar with the drill. People in the White House, people in the Pentagon, people in the State Department let it be known to people working in the Central Intelligence Agency that certain things must be made to happen. None of these people will ever tell (or admit to) the world what it is that they want to make happen. That’s because what the US actually wants to happen is very often the opposite of what the US says it wants to happen. And that, of course, is the whole point of an outfit like the CIA. It allows the American Government to enjoy its diplomatic cake while blowing everybody else’s cake to Kingdom Come.

 

Take Syria, for example. In the earliest days of the uprising that became the Syrian Civil War the CIA was hard at work on the ground. It’s job was to build up the armed resistance to the regime of Bashar al-Assad as quickly as possible. Money and weapons flowed freely – even though the CIA’s knowledge of exactly who it was funding and equipping was, at best, sketchy. At worst, the CIA helped to funnel American aid to individuals and groups who had a much greater interest in Salafist Islam than they did in liberal secular democracy.

 

Of course the creation of a liberal secular democracy was not the real reason the CIA was in Syria. The real reason they were working so hard to make civil war inevitable was because they wanted to prevent Syria and its neighbours, Lebanon and Iraq, from getting any closer to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

 

In pursuing this objective the United States wasn’t only acting in its own interests, but also in the interests of the governments of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel.

 

Turkey was paranoid that the quasi-autonomous Kurdish enclave in Northern Iraq might one day morph into an independent Kurdistan. Such a development would make the task of repressing its own Kurdish minority ten times harder.

 

Saudi Arabia was determined to free the Sunni Syrian majority from the tutelage of Assad’s Shi’a allies - thereby preventing the creation of a powerful and antagonistic crescent of Shi’a-dominated states stretching from the Pakistani border to the Mediterranean Sea.

 

Israel’s motives for fomenting an intractable civil war may have been no more reputable than preferring a Syria racked by the agonies of civil and religious strife, to a Syria peaceful and prosperous enough to once again attempt to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Once again? Oh yes, in the early 2000s the Assad regime, with help from the North Koreans, undertook the construction of its own nuclear reactor. In 2007, Israeli jets blew the reactor to smithereens before it could come on line.

 

The motives of the people in the White House, Pentagon and State Department were much the same as the Israelis. US strategic objectives in the Middle-East have remained remarkably consistent since the end of World War II. First and foremost there’s the region’s oil reserves. These must, at all costs, remain under the control of regimes friendly to the United States. Even the remotest possibility that the emergence of a dominant regional power, or combination of regional powers, might threaten US access to Middle eastern oil will cause the potential threat to be “terminated with extreme prejudice” (as they say in the CIA).

 

Whether the potential leader of such an emergent entity be a Persian (as in the case of the Iranian Prime Minister, Mossadegh) or Arab (as in the case of the Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein) the United States has demonstrated that it will stop at nothing to preserve its hegemony in the Middle East.

 

So, the next time you’re wincing at horrific images broadcast out of East Aleppo, ask yourself why the civilian population hasn’t left the war zone for somewhere safer. While you’re at it, you might also ask yourself how it is that the Jihadis dug into the rubble never seem to run out of arms and ammunition. And, why it is that only the Assad Government and its Russian allies are being ordered to stop the shelling and the bombing of civilian targets?

 

Could it be that the men, women and children under fire in East Aleppo are much too valuable to the Jihadis as human shields to be allowed to leave their shattered homes? Or is it simply their immense value as propaganda weapons? Especially East Aleppo’s children, whose tiny broken bodies are beamed into the living-rooms of Western households practically every night of the week. Absent from our news bulletins, however, are the images of the men, women and children being killed by the Jihadi artillery shells exploding every day in the streets of West Aleppo. Funny that.

 

The US Secretary of State, John Kerry, just like his predecessor, Hillary Clinton, may say America wants peace in Syria. But if that was really the case, then the US Government would have ordered the CIA out of Syria, and stopped shipping arms to the rebel units dug into the rubble of East Aleppo. If ending the Syrian civil war was America’s true objective in the Middle East, then it would be making peace at the side of the Russian Federation – not casting it as the principal obstacle to a successful resolution of the conflict.

 

What makes the Homeland series so compelling is the howling moral vacuum at the heart of American foreign and defence policy. It sucks the characters into its emptiness and leaves them breathing dirt in the dark. They are expendable instruments who would like to do good, but can’t. Because doing good is not what serving a superpower is all about.

 

President Ronald Reagan may have presented America as “a shining city on a hill”, but it was Richard Nixon’s Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, who came closest to describing her true character. “America”, he said, “has no friends – only interests.”

 

Remember that next time you watch the news.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 17 October 2016.

Giving Workers What They Want: Honouring The Legacy Of Helen Kelly.

Helen Kelly - A Twenty-First Century Union Leader: The truth of the matter is that restoring equality in the workplace will not be accomplished by top-down, bureaucratic, institutional solutions. To enjoy the confidence and active support of ordinary working people, a fit-for-purpose, twenty-first century system of employment relations would need to have emerged from a consultative exercise of unprecedented size and thoroughness. In the simplest terms: it would need to be the product of the workers themselves.

 

WHAT BETTER TIME could there be to talk about Kiwi workers’ rights than in the days following Helen Kelly’s death? Who has contributed more to this discussion than the NZ Council of Trade Unions’ (CTU) first female President? And what other contemporary New Zealand trade unionist’s passing could have left such large and stylish shoes to fill?

 

Few would dispute that Kelly was by far the best leader that the CTU has so far produced. The way she was able to combine rock-solid principle with PR smarts made her the labour movement’s most effective twenty-first century union boss. Though she couldn’t quite match the Unite union’s Matt McCarten at street-level campaigning, Kelly’s keen intellect and her winning ways with the news media allowed her to keep the ideals of trade unionism alive in an era notoriously hostile to the claims of collectivism.

Had she not succumbed to lung cancer, it is likely that well before the end of this decade she would have made the transition from the trade union movement to the Parliamentary Labour Party. Once in Parliament, her rise to the top would have been inexorable. In relatively short order New Zealand would have had its second Labour Prime Minister called Helen.

 

All of which makes it one the great counterfactual questions of our history: “How different would New Zealand have been if Helen Kelly had not died of cancer at the tragically young age of fifty-two?” It is only when we attempt to answer that question that the true magnitude of the nation’s loss is brought home to us.

 

Labour has made great play of its current Future of Work exercise, but it has been much less enthusiastic about discussing the future of workplace relations. Indeed, Grant Robertson seems much more comfortable discussing how vital it is that workers are made ready for the challenges of the so-called “Fourth Industrial Revolution”. We hear a great deal about the importance of continuous upskilling and labour flexibility, but nothing like as much about ensuring employees have a genuine say in how much they are paid and under what conditions they work.

 

For a party calling itself “Labour”, this is a critical deficiency. The power relationships of the workplace have a huge impact on people’s well-being. How much we earn and how we work continue to dominate our existence in much the same way that they have done since the first industrial revolution. More so in the first quarter of the twenty-first century than in the second half of the twentieth, because the effective destruction of mass trade union membership in the 1980s and 90s swung the balance-of-power decisively in the employers’ favour.

 

Anyone raising these issues, however, will be told that they are living in the past, and that the world has changed too much for any social-democratic party to contemplate a return to the industrial relations regime of the 1970s. And it’s true, times have changed: although not enough, apparently, to destroy the master/servant relationship, or eliminate the commercial necessity of legally limited liability; but certainly enough to make joining a union a career-threatening move for 90 percent of private sector employees.

 

The most important challenge facing today’s Labour Party is how to render workplace power relationships more equal without mobilising the entire neoliberal establishment against it. Simply legislating for the restoration of compulsory unionism and industry-wide contracts is not the answer, because a change of government would instantly bring about their legal demise.

 

The truth of the matter is that restoring equality in the workplace will not be accomplished by top-down, bureaucratic, institutional solutions. To enjoy the confidence and active support of ordinary working people, a fit-for-purpose, twenty-first century system of employment relations would need to have emerged from a consultative exercise of unprecedented size and thoroughness. In the simplest terms: it would need to be the product of the workers themselves.

 

Such an exercise would need to be established and protected by legislation. The body responsible – let’s call it WorkRight NZ – would aim to, and be empowered to, approach as many working people as possible in their workplaces and have them fill in a comprehensive questionnaire intended to identify both the good and bad aspects of working life in twenty-first century New Zealand. The survey would also ask workers how their rights, as citizens and employees, might best be protected and exercised within the workplace.

 

The WorkRight NZ legislation would also establish a second investigative unit, dedicated to drawing upon the knowledge and experience of existing trade union and employer organisations; the experiences of employers, unions and working people in other countries; and the research and insights of New Zealand and overseas academic employment relations specialists. The goal of this investigative unit would be to establish local and international best practice in relation to collective bargaining.

 

The results of the consultative exercise would then be collated, analysed and written up in the form of a comprehensive report by WorkRight NZ. Contained within the report would be a draft bill, incorporating the participants principal recommendations, for presentation to Parliament.

 

Interestingly, a similar exercise in mass inquiry was undertaken by the First Labour Government. The Social Survey Bureau was set up in 1937 to discover the actual conditions prevailing in New Zealand’s farms, factories, shops, offices and homes. Its first major inquiry – into the living conditions of dairy farmers – produced such shocking findings, however, that the responsible cabinet minister, Peter Fraser, tried to suppress the research report and, when that failed, shut the Bureau down.

 

Asking the right questions has always been the essence of political radicalism. It’s what made Helen Kelly such an effective trade union leader. If the CTU and the Labour Party are looking for a way to honour her legacy, then finding out what workers want from their employers and their workplaces – and giving it to them – would be a great place to start.

 

This essay was jointly posted by The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road on Sunday, 16 October 2016.

Raising Nixon's Ghost.

Political Pathology: Once again, the United States risks falling under the spell of a man pathologically incapable of quarantining his own disreputable impulses from the immense powers of the supreme political office he is seeking.

 

IN THE FINAL, desperate days of the Nixon Administration, a crucial instruction was communicated to the commanders of military bases in or near the American capital. Any  presidential order pertaining to the disposition of units under their command should be obeyed only if it was countersigned by James Schlesinger, the Secretary of Defence.

 

That was how seriously the situation had deteriorated in the early months of 1974. Senior figures in the government of the United States were taking grim precautions against the possibility that Richard Nixon, acting in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, might attempt to forestall his imminent impeachment by ordering tanks onto the streets of Washington DC.

 

Why was the prospect of such an unprecedented abuse of presidential power considered plausible? The answer lies in what came to be known as the “Saturday Night Massacre”.

 

On Saturday, 20 October 1973, President Nixon ordered his Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, to sack Archibald Cox, the Independent Special Prosecutor appointed by the Justice Department to investigate the Watergate scandal. Cox’s investigation had advanced perilously close to the Oval Office and Nixon wanted him gone.

 

Richardson refused to obey the President’s order and immediately tended his resignation. Upon being given the same instruction, the Deputy Attorney General of the United States, William Ruckelhaus, also refused and resigned. Undaunted, Nixon ordered the Solicitor General of the United States, Robert Bork, brought to the White House. After swearing-in Bork as his new Attorney General, Nixon immediately ordered him to sack Cox. With considerable reluctance, Bork complied.

 

It was the Saturday Night Massacre that finally drove American public opinion towards impeachment. The President’s evident contempt for the US Constitution and the Rule of Law made the Watergate accusations all-too-believable. The events of 20 October also caused a number of senior White House officials and Cabinet members to wonder just how far Nixon would be prepared to go to avoid impeachment, arraignment, almost certain conviction, and, quite possibly, incarceration.

 

For students of American history these forty-year-old events have been pulled into sharp focus by Donald Trump’s threat to put Hillary Clinton in jail. Routinely castigating his opponent as “Crooked Hillary”, Trump used the occasion of last Sunday’s Second Presidential Debate to inform his opponent that: “If I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation.” When Clinton responded: “It’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country.” Trump shot back: “Because you’d be in jail.”

 

This is a chillingly Nixonian exchange. Once again, the United States risks falling under the spell of a man pathologically incapable of quarantining his own disreputable impulses from the immense powers of the supreme political office he is seeking.

 

The attempt to establish an “imperial presidency”, began in 1937 with Franklin Roosevelt’s unsuccessful bid to pack the Supreme Court. By the end of the 1960s, it was threatening to turn the American Constitution into a museum piece.

 

The Watergate scandal and Nixon’s downfall had vindicated the Founding Fathers’ commitment to the doctrine of the  “separation of powers”. Under the US Constitution, a President Trump has no more right to hire a special prosecutor than President Nixon had to fire one. In a democracy, presidents don’t put people in jail, courts do – and only after the accused has been found guilty, at a fair trial, according to law.

 

Unfortunately, two generations of Americans have grown to maturity since the Saturday Night Massacre, and the lessons of Watergate are only now recalled by ageing Baby Boomers.

 

But if the “great silent majority” that re-elected Nixon in 1972 were voting for a strong leader to quell the waning “youth revolt” and restore “law and order” (i.e. repress African-Americans) the ambitions of the marginalised white males currently cheering-on Donald Trump are much more perilous.

 

What Trump’s supporters want is an America purged of all the social gains achieved by blacks, women and gays since the 1960s. An America ready to wall-up Latino immigrants below the Rio Grande. An America in which Muslims are neither seen nor heard.

 

This is the America they bellow for so raucously whenever their putative Emperor/President promises to “Make America Great Again”.

 

And because Hillary Clinton is standing in his way: “Lock her up!”

 

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 October 2016.

Helen Kelly 1964 - 2016

Helen Kelly - Trade unionist. Who reminded us how good the best can be.

The Truly Great

By STEPHEN SPENDER
          

I think continually of those who were truly great.

Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history

Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns,

Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition

Was that their lips, still touched with fire,

Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song.

And who hoarded from the Spring branches

The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

 

What is precious, is never to forget

The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs

Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.

Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light

Nor its grave evening demand for love.

Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother

With noise and fog, the flowering of the spirit.

 

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,

See how these names are fêted by the waving grass

And by the streamers of white cloud

And whispers of wind in the listening sky.

The names of those who in their lives fought for life,

Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.

Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun

And left the vivid air signed with their honour.

This posting is exclusive to Bowalley Road.

Idiot Windbag: Mike Hosking On Democracy.

Democracy Not His Cup of Tea: "It is time to change the system. It is time to get rid of voting for health boards. It is time to vastly reduce council sizes. It’s time for more appointments, less democracy, given that we’ve rejected democracy as a mechanism." - Mike Hosking.

 

SOMETIMES, even the most staunch defenders of the system slip up. It doesn’t happen all that often, but, very occasionally, they say things that they shouldn’t. Take Mike Hosking’s recent rant about the failings of democracy. He really, really, shouldn’t have said what he said. It’s just not smart to let ordinary people hear what those at the top of the social pyramid think about the way society should be run.

 

What did Hosking say? Well, he was giving us the benefit of his deep insight and wisdom concerning the recent local government elections. This is what he said:

 

“No one cares. Turnout yet again was down. The vast majority of us couldn’t be bothered voting. Not interested this time, not interested last time; haven’t been interested for decades. The elected representatives concerned have failed for a generation to engage us. They’ve failed to convince us that what they do is relevant. It is time to change the system. It is time to get rid of voting for health boards. It is time to vastly reduce council sizes. It’s time for more appointments, less democracy, given that we’ve rejected democracy as a mechanism. We need to stop the moaning about the fact it doesn’t work, and actually start changing it”

 

Obviously, Mike has never heard the old saying about “the only cure for poor democracy is more democracy”. Indeed, his cure for our poorly performing democracy is to give us less of it. Never mind that the ratio of Auckland city councillors to electors is already 1:70,000! The solution, obviously, is to “vastly reduce council sizes”.

 

We can only speculate about what Mike would consider an appropriate ratio. One councillor for every 150,000 residents perhaps? That would halve the size of the Auckland Council from 20 to 10. Never mind that this ratio would allocate cities the size of Dunedin, Hamilton and Tauranga just one councillor apiece. After all, as Mike says: “We need to stop the moaning about the fact it doesn’t work, and actually start changing it.”

 

And when Mike talks about change, he’s not kidding. What’s needed, he says, are “more appointments” and “less democracy”.

 

Just who will make these appointments, and on whose authority, Mike doesn’t say. Clearly, Thomas Jefferson’s argument that governments derive their “just powers” from the “consent of the governed” forms no part of Mike’s new constitution. But, that’s okay, because according to Mike “we” have “rejected democracy as a mechanism”.

 

Now, given how closely I pay attention to politics, I’m simply stunned that I missed the nationwide referendum on the future of “democracy as a mechanism”. But “stunned” isn’t a strong enough word to describe my reaction to what I can only assume is the fact (Mike Hosking is, after all, one of this country’s most trusted broadcasters) that a majority of New Zealanders voted to put an end to their democracy.

 

It truly is astonishing, because, to the best of my knowledge, no people on earth has ever done such a thing before. Plenty of peoples – the Greeks, the French, the Americans, the South Africans – have fought and died for a system of government based upon the freely given consent of the governed. But a people voting to reject democracy as a mechanism? Wow! – That’s new!

 

Speaking of the Greeks, it is interesting to note that in Ancient Athens – the birthplace of democracy – it was considered the height of irresponsibility not to “care” about the processes of self-government. In fact, the Athenians had a word for the sort of citizen who wasn’t interested in the affairs of the “polis” (the Greek word for the body of the citizens making up a city-state – from which we get the word “politics”). The people who declared “not interested this time, not interested last time; haven’t been interested for decades”; the ones who simply “couldn’t be bothered”; they went by the name of “idiotes”.

 

The word still survives. We use it every time we watch, listen to, or read the words of – an idiot.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 12 October 2016.