The Deposition Of "Mad King Donald"?

Heading For A Fall? Will the reign of “Mad King Donald”, the 45th American President, end as tragically as that of Ludwig II, the "Mad King of Bavaria"? Over the Christmas period, newspaper articles and blog postings have appeared in the US media alleging that President Trump’s increasingly erratic behaviour and his refusal to accept professional guidance is placing the Republic in danger.

IT RISES like a piece of romantic confectionary from the fir trees that crowd around its base. The conical rooftops and soaring white-stone towers epitomising the fairy-tale castle. So much so that a scaled-down version became the centrepiece of Walt Disney’s “Fantasyland”. It is called “Neuschwanstein” – the new swanstone castle – and it is the most enduring legacy of Ludwig II: the “Mad King of Bavaria”.

So erratic, so spendthrift, so megalomaniacal, had Ludwig II become that in the early hours of 10 June 1886 a Bavarian Government Commission arrived at the gates of Neuschwanstein bearing a document officially deposing the King, and under orders to take the allegedly “insane” Ludwig into custody.

At first, the King resisted. Police officers loyal to Ludwig drove the Commissioners from the castle gates at gunpoint. For a few hours, the opportunity existed for the King to rouse the Bavarian people against his enemies. But, Ludwig hesitated and the moment was lost. A new detachment of Bavarian police soon relieved the King’s defenders and Neuschwanstein was sealed off. By 12 June a second Commission had taken the King into custody and Ludwig’s uncle, Luitpold, was proclaimed Regent. A day later, Ludwig’s body (and that of his psychiatrist, Dr Bernhard von Gudden) was found in Lake Starnberg, 11kms south of the Bavarian capital. Officially, Ludwig had committed suicide. Unofficially …. ?

Ludwig II's spectacular legacy - Neuschwanstein Castle, Bavaria.

Will the reign of “Mad King Donald”, the 45th American President, end in such tragic circumstances? Over the Christmas period, newspaper articles and blog postings have appeared in the US media alleging that President Trump’s increasingly erratic behaviour and his refusal to accept professional guidance is placing the Republic in danger.

It was Trump’s decision to withdraw US troops from Syria against the advice of his Secretary of Defence, General James Mattis, that constituted the final straw for Pulitzer-Prize winning NY Times columnist, Thomas Friedman:

“It was the moment when you had to ask whether we really can survive two more years of Trump as president, whether this man and his demented behaviour — which will get only worse as the Mueller investigation concludes — are going to destabilize our country, our markets, our key institutions and, by extension, the world. And therefore his removal from office now has to be on the table.”

Accordingly, Friedman is calling upon the Republican Party to stage an “intervention”. Essentially, what he and a growing number of like-minded American opinion formers are demanding is that, for the remaining two years of his presidency, Trump becomes a mere figurehead – guided by a responsible Cabinet of the Republican Party’s own choosing. If Trump refuses, then Republicans and Democrats must join forces and impeach him.

All of which raises the question: Can Mad King Donald be removed from office (and this world) as expeditiously and bloodlessly as Mad King Ludwig?

Twitter was not available in 1886, which meant that the Bavarian Government could control the flow of information concerning Ludwig’s deposition. Such scattered resistance as did occur when rumours of the King’s predicament eventually filtered out to his faithful peasant subjects was easily dispersed. In 2019, by contrast, any attempted Republican Party “intervention” would be revealed instantly in a Presidential “tweet” – thereby mobilising tens-of-millions of Trump’s loyal followers. How easily these “peasants” could be dispersed is an interesting question. They would not be carrying pitchforks.

Much now hinges on how determined the American ruling-class is to “fire” its rogue CEO. Trump has initiated a trade war with the Chinese that is unnerving the world’s free-traders. He has openly attacked the US Federal Reserve – prime defender of the global neoliberal order. Wall Street is not impressed. Not since 1931 has the stockmarket fallen so precipitously in a single week. Bad enough, one would think, but include the strategic signal contained in the Syrian withdrawal and everything gets much worse. American markets are secured by American arms: weaken one and you weaken the other. Weaken both, and you become a “clear and present danger” to the national security of the United States.

And all those Trump loyalists bearing arms? One suspects the American military is just itching to give them a Napoleonic “whiff of grapeshot”. The Second Amendment notwithstanding, there is room for only one army in the USA.

And Mad King Donald’s legacy? Not a Neuschwanstein, certainly. Just possibly, a half-constructed Mexican border wall.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 28 December 2018.

The Shimmer: A Christmas Short Story.

“Flee, Joseph, flee! Turn west and travel south to Egypt. Keep the sea at your right hand. Do not wait for the sun to rise. Flee to the land from which Moses fled. Word will be sent to you when it is safe to return. You must not tarry – not for a moment. Herod’s men are searching everywhere. Go now! Save yourself! Save Mary! Save the boy!” - Painting: The Flight Into Egypt by Luc-Olivier Merson 1879

IT WAS GOOD to sit and share the flat brown loaf. Father and son, tearing off the warm chunks of bread. Passing the wineskin from hand to hand. Washing down the food with mouthfuls of rough Galilean wine. They had been working all morning on a yoke: carved from a single block of cedar; the little workshop’s specialty.

“You have a rare gift with wood, my son. It’s as if you can see already the piece that lies within; as if you’re calling it into being. And your yokes are easy – everybody says so.”

The son, smiled.

“Did I see you talking to Esau’s youngest daughter earlier today? How is she bearing her trouble?”

“All the better for the words you exchanged with her father. She told me how you sat with him the night before last. How changed he was afterwards.”

“Villages can be cruel places, son. A young woman with child and not yet wed – it brings out the worst in people. All I told Esau was that every child is a gift from God. And that it is not given to us to judge the purposes for which He brings life into the world.”

“Wise words, father.”

“Not mine, alas, my son. They were spoken to me a full score of winters ago. As now, this village was rife with rumour and spite. People looked sideways at me. Laughed in their sleeves. Hissed evil words to my back.”

“Concerning my mother?”

“Concerning your mother.”

“Who was it, then, supplied the wise counsel you shared with Esau?”

“To tell you the truth, son, I do not know. I was wrestling with the choices before me in the upper olive grove. It was dark, a new moon hovered above the trees, and he was suddenly there beside me. His tunic was of white wool and I swear it seemed to shimmer – as if masking a light of unbearable brightness.”

“And what did he say, father?”

“That I, and your mother, and you, son, were part of a story that had been written long, long ago. That you were precious beyond the measure of mortal longing. That the world would be changed, changed utterly, by your presence in it. That your mother was the vessel of humanity’s salvation. And that I must keep her safe.”

“Did you ever see him again, father?”

“Just once. It was during those dreadful days following your birth, when the King sent his soldiers to kill all the new-born male children. Those three Parthian wizards, the ones who found us in that Bethlehem stable, they’d told Herod how far they had come, from the eastern lands beyond Rome’s reach, to witness the birth of a king. Not a clever story to tell in a murderous tyrant’s court.

“Neither your mother nor I were aware of the danger. In fact, we were on our way home. I had gone into the trees to gather wood for the fire – and there he was. The same white wool, the same unearthly shimmer.”

“And what were his words this time?”

“Flee, Joseph, flee! Turn west and travel south to Egypt. Keep the sea at your right hand. Do not wait for the sun to rise. Flee to the land from which Moses fled. Word will be sent to you when it is safe to return. You must not tarry – not for a moment. Herod’s men are searching everywhere. Go now! Save yourself! Save Mary! Save the boy!”

“And, you did, father, you did – for here I stand. Safe and sound. For no grander purpose, seemingly, than to whittle yokes for the necks of our neighbour’s cattle.”

“Do you mean to test me, son? By making light of the wondrous circumstances of your birth? Or, do you mean to test the patience of that providence which delivered you? Think you that I have forgotten that your mother came to our marriage bed a maid? That all your life I have called you son and loved you as my own – though mine you are not, and never will be?

“Forgive me, father.”

No need, my boy. You are what you are. Though what that might be remains to be seen. Suffice to say that when you pray, under the stars in the upper olive grove, I cannot help noticing the shimmer.

This short story was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 21 December 2018.

Working Towards The Führer.

All Together Now! In terms of the inviolability of the new neoliberal establishment, it mattered very little whether Labour or National was in power. And, since cabinet ministers from both sides of the aisle clearly regarded ideological boat-rocking as being every bit as career-terminating as state sector CEOs, there was scant incentive to entertain any alternative definitions to what constituted “good governance”. In the years since 1984, therefore, it has made much more sense, personally and politically, to “work towards the [neoliberal] führer”.

AN “AFFRONT TO DEMOCRACY”, was the State Services Commissioner’s characterisation of the state bureaucracy’s decision to spy on political activists. Few would disagree. That multiple state agencies felt entitled to contract-out the gathering of political intelligence to the privately owned and operated Thompson & Clark Investigations Ltd reveals a widespread antidemocratic disdain for citizens’ rights within the New Zealand public service. The alarming revelations of the State Services’ inquiry raise two very important questions: How did this disdain for democratic norms become so entrenched? And what, if anything, can Jacinda Ardern’s government do to eradicate it?

The dangerous truth, in relation to the first question, is also painfully relevant to the second. The effective abrogation of democratic norms in New Zealand dates back to 1984 and the events which the former CTU economist and ministerial adviser, Peter Harris, characterised as a “bureaucratic coup d’état”. In was in July 1984 that elements within the NZ Treasury and the Reserve Bank, taking full advantage of the relationships they had been cultivating for at least a year with the parliamentary leadership of the NZ Labour Party, initiated the detailed and extremely radical economic policy programme which came to be known as “Rogernomics”.

This programme, set forth in “Economic Management” – the book-length briefing paper for the incoming Minister of Finance, Roger Douglas – had received no mandate from the electorate. Indeed, the ordinary voter had no inkling whatsoever that the Labour Party of Mickey Savage and Norman Kirk was about to unleash a programme considerably to the right of Margaret Thatcher’s and Ronald Reagan’s. The authors of “Economic Management” were not, however, interested in obtaining a democratic mandate for their proposed reforms. In fact, they strongly suspected that submitting their ideas to the voters was just about the surest way of securing their emphatic rejection.

Since the mid-1970s the conviction had been growing among big-business leaders and high-ranking civil servants living in the wealthiest capitalist nations, that democracy had gotten out of hand; and that unless the scope for democratic intervention in the economy was radically reduced, then the future of capitalism could not be guaranteed. Free Market Economics, as it was called then, or Neoliberalism, as we know it today, was, from the outset, incompatible with the social-democratic principles that had underpinned western policy-making in the post-war world. It could only be imposed, and kept in place, by a political class sealed-off from all manner of pressures from below. If that meant gutting the major parties of the centre-left and right; purging the civil service, academia and the news media of dissenters; and crushing the trade unions – then so be it.

Once it became clear that the free-market “revolution” was not about to be halted in its tracks, all those with an ambition to rise within the new order made haste to learn its rules and spared no effort in enforcing them. This phenomenon: of absorbing and implementing an antidemocratic regime’s imperatives was described by British historian of the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw, as “Working Towards The Fuhrer”. Kershaw lifted the phrase from a speech delivered in 1934 by the Prussian civil servant, Werner Willikens:

“Everyone who has the opportunity to observe it knows that the Fuhrer can hardly dictate from above everything which he intends to realize sooner or later. On the contrary, up till now, everyone with a post in the new Germany has worked best when he has, so to speak, worked towards the Fuhrer. Very often and in many spheres, it has been the case—in previous years as well—that individuals have simply waited for orders and instructions. Unfortunately, the same will be true in the future; but in fact, it is the duty of everybody to try to work towards the Fuhrer along the lines he would wish. Anyone who makes mistakes will notice it soon enough. But anyone who really works towards the Fuhrer along his lines and towards his goal will certainly both now and in the future, one day have the finest reward in the form of the sudden legal confirmation of his work.”

The behaviour of New Zealand civil servants and their private sector contractors conforms very neatly to Kershaw’s thesis. In terms of the inviolability of the new neoliberal establishment, it mattered very little whether Labour or National was in power. And, since cabinet ministers from both sides of the aisle clearly regarded ideological boat-rocking as being every bit as career-terminating as state sector CEOs, there was scant incentive to entertain any alternative definitions to what constituted “good governance”. In the years since 1984, therefore, it has made much more sense, personally and politically, to “work towards the [neoliberal] führer”.

Certainly, Kershaw’s “Working Towards the Führer” thesis would explain the behaviour that has so disturbed readers of the State Services Commission’s report like Victoria University’s School of Government academic, Chris Eichbaum. Namely, why so few of the people involved in this “affront to democracy” displayed any awareness that they were behaving unethically. If Neoliberalism, like the Third Reich, is not a force which can be legitimately contradicted or criticised, then obviously any person or group engaging in activities inimical to the implementation of state policy is bound to be considered an enemy of the system.

Not that the neoliberal order will ever acknowledge its political imperatives so honestly. A large measure of bad faith continues to operate within the system. It has to – otherwise the still useful façade of human rights and democratic consent will rapidly fall apart.

Ministries and other state entities reach for the private investigator rather than the police officer because the latter is still (at least in theory) accountable. By contrast, the paper and/or electronic trails left by the likes of Thompson & Clark are considerably more difficult to track than those carefully logged in an official Police investigation. What’s more, the unofficial and private aggregation of “evidence” against the State’s “enemies” opens up the possibility of their unofficial and private punishment.

That job the activist lost, or failed to get. The bank loan that was refused. Simple bad luck? Or something else?

The most sinister aspect of the “Working Towards The Fuhrer” phenomenon is that any obstacles or objections encountered along the way will be taken as evidence of forces working against the führer. Popular resistance to neoliberal objectives is never taken as a sign that those objectives might be ill-advised, counterproductive, or just plain wrong. Rather, it is taken as proof that those responsible for organising such resistance are dangerous and irrational opponents of beneficent policies to which there are no viable alternatives.

It appears never to have occurred to Gerry Brownlee, for example, that the rising levels of desperation and anger among the Christchurch clients of the state-owned Southern Response insurance company – feelings that were manifesting themselves in threats to life and property – might be evidence of massive failures on the company’s part. John Key, similarly, refused to accept that oil and gas exploration might constitute a genuine threat to New Zealand’s (and, ultimately, the entire planet’s) natural environment.

Was Simon Bridges, when he introduced legislation outlawing waterborne protests within 2 kilometres of the oil and gas industry’s drilling platforms, doing no more than working along the lines and towards the goals of his leader?

As above, so below: the law of hierarchy is immutable. Thomson & Clark may have been the tool in the hands of ruthless public servants “working towards the führer”, but the masters of those servants were the neoliberal politicians from both major parties who, ever since 1984, have been tireless in their defence of the neoliberal order against its most fearsome foe – the New Zealand people.

The question, therefore, arises: If the Coalition Government demonstrates the slightest willingness to move against the servants of that neoliberal order (as Greater Christchurch Regeneration Minister, Megan Woods, by forcing the resignation of the Chair of Southern Response, has arguably done already) will the same forces that subverted Labour in 1984 set in motion the measures necessary to bring down Jacinda Ardern’s “issue motivated group” in 2020?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 21 December 2018.

An Absent Mirror: Why Can’t This Country Produce Its Own Political Television Series?

Artistic Intelligence: New Zealand’s film and television industry has produced nothing remotely like the Australians’ highly political series Secret City and Pine Gap. Under examination in both of these series is the vexing problem of how Australia should manage its relationship with the United States of America, on the one hand, and the Peoples Republic of China, on the other.

THE BEST MEASURE of a nation’s maturity is its willingness to submit its biggest challenges to the audit of art. For all their political boorishness, the Aussies can boast a much more favourable auditor’s report than we can. I can’t remember the last time this country committed significant resources to a dramatic examination of its domestic and international political relationships. Certainly, New Zealand’s film and television industry has produced nothing remotely like the Australians’ highly political series Secret City and Pine Gap.

Under examination in both of these series is the vexing problem of how Australia should manage its relationship with the United States of America, on the one hand, and the Peoples Republic of China, on the other. How deeply have the Chinese penetrated Australia’s governing institutions? Is honouring Australia’s security relationship with the USA worth the fundamental destabilisation of the Australian economy which an acrimonious break with China would entail? The first question inspires the plotlines of Secret City; the second, of Pine Gap.

Now, if these questions sound at all familiar, then well done You for keeping abreast of current events! New Zealand’s relationships with China and the United States are similarly fraught with ambiguity and risk. All the more so today, following the emphatically pro-American speech delivered yesterday (16/12/18) by Foreign Minister, Winston Peters, to a high-powered American audience assembled at Georgetown University’s Centre of Australian–New Zealand studies in Washington.

Except we Kiwis have one more player to consider than our Aussie cousins: which is Australia itself. Our countries have been so close, historically, that it is very difficult for ordinary New Zealanders to conceptualise a situation where the Australians might look upon us as something less than a mate. Sure, we spar with one another on the sports field and tell obscene jokes at one another’s expense, but the idea that the Australian political class might already have fallen out of love with their irritating Kiwi cousins would strike most New Zealanders as ridiculous.

But what if the Australian “Deep State” already regards New Zealand as an enemy? It’s a thought more likely to seize the imagination of a novelist, playwright or screen-writer than the average Kiwi citizen. Which is why a mature NZ-on-Air would be badgering this country’s writers for scripts dealing with New Zealand’s growing economic and diplomatic vulnerability in the face of the US-Australia vs China stand-off. Anywhere else but here, Professor Anne-Marie Brady’s run-ins with the Chinese would have commissioning editors salivating. The screen-play is practically writing itself in real time!

But, no, NZ-on-Air doesn’t do political thrillers dealing with the moral duty of the news media to expose the dark deeds of the state security apparatus. Nor will it commission a TV series exploring the consequences of discovering Chinese and/or American “assets” embedded at the heart of our major political parties. As for a series examining the contradictions inherent in having our indispensable security partner asking us to spy on our indispensable economic partner: Good God! What would MFAT say?

The Australians are more fortunate, because the challenges outlined above are precisely the challenges confronted and explored in Secret City and Pine Gap. (Both currently available on Netflix.) Aussie viewers can watch these dramas and argue with friends and family about the issues driving their plots and characters forward. How much room for manoeuvre do our political leaders have between China and America? How far should Australia go in honouring One Hundred Years Of Mateship? If the US fires shots in anger at the Chinese, should Australia do the same? Are we really willing to have the Chinese crash our economy in retaliation?

It’s what grown-up countries do. Think not only of the American and British film and television industries, but of the Danes, the Swedes, the Norwegians and the Irish. Think of Borgen and its international success. Think of Scandi-Noir. These are countries not much bigger than ourselves, but unlike us they have the wit to resource their film and television industries to a level where making series like Borgen becomes something more than the wistful pipe-dream of writers condemned to turning out endless variations of Outrageous Fortune.

Thirty-five years ago the Aussies commissioned a series dealing with one of the most traumatic events in their country’s history – the dismissal of Gough Whitlam’s Labor Government by the then Governor General, Sir John Kerr. The screening of the six hour-long episodes of The Dismissal began on 6 March 1983, the day after Bob Hawke’s Government was elected – the first Labor Government to take office since the bloodless coup d’état that toppled Whitlam’s eight years earlier.

New Zealand television was given the opportunity to perform a similar artistic service in relation to the national trauma of Rogernomics. The renowned novelist and playwright, Dean Parker, pitched a series to the networks exploring the reactions of a typical group of Labour Party members to the devastating “reforms” of the Lange-led Government. Parker’s working title was “The Branch”. The chance was there for a New Zealand audience to confront in Art’s mirror not only the moral and political choices forced upon Labour Party members, but the whole nation.

The networks weren’t interested.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 18 December 2018.

Lashing Back.

Right Back At You: There is a fond assumption among a great many progressive activists that, having seen their cherished social reforms enacted, they can relax – confident that they will remain in place indefinitely. History’s clock moves only forwards, they reassure themselves, never backwards. Unfortunately, that isn’t true.

SEPTEMBER-ELEVEN was a day of disaster long before 2001. Twenty-eight years earlier, another day, 11 September 1973, was seared into the memory of every Chilean as indelibly and irrevocably as 11 September 2001 burned itself into the retinas of every American.

Skyhawk jets streaked over the Presidential Palace in Santiago and battle tanks rumbled through the capital’s streets. Salvador Allende, Chile’s democratically elected socialist leader, died in his palace. The Chilean people would have to wait seventeen years for the opportunity to choose another.

There were countless tales of violence and oppression on 11 September 1973, but the report which stuck in my memory involved a young woman stopped on the street by a squad of young, keyed-up, soldiers.

“What do you think you’re wearing?” One of the soldiers demanded.

The young woman was at a loss. It was 1973 and she was dressed fashionably in a T-shirt and flared trousers.

“Go home and change into something more befitting a decent young woman.” The oldest of the soldiers gestured with his rifle at the young woman’s trousers. “The days of women dressing like communist whores are over.”

The overthrow of Allende was about a great deal more than his Popular Unity government nationalising Chile’s American-owned copper mines. His democratic socialist policies had generated social changes every bit as radical as the changes unleashed upon the country’s capitalist economy. Women swapping their skirts for trousers was but one of the many challenges to the cultural hegemony of Chile’s profoundly conservative social and religious institutions.

Allende’s government had fatally underestimated the political impact of its cultural challenges. He and his followers had no idea how lightly their changes rested on the popular masses they fondly believed to have been convinced and converted by their policies.

They would find out soon enough. What happened in Chile in the months and years that followed General Augusto Pinochet’s military coup of 11 September 1973 wasn’t quite on the scale of The Handmaid’s Tale, but the conservative cultural backlash it unleashed left the Popular Unity government’s emancipatory social programmes in ruins.

There is a fond assumption among a great many progressive activists that, having seen their cherished social reforms enacted, they can relax – confident that they will remain in place indefinitely. History’s clock moves only forwards, they reassure themselves, never backwards.

Unfortunately, that isn’t true.

The economic hierarchies of capitalist society are the least of progressivism’s worries. Older, and much more difficult to eradicate, are the hierarchies of race and gender. Not all Whites can be rich, but on the ladder of racial privilege they have long celebrated their “superiority” to people of colour. A black man’s path to equality may be blocked by the racial prejudices of his white brothers, but that in no way guarantees he will acknowledge the rights of his sisters.

At a post-SNCC Conference party in 1964, the black activist leader, Stokely Carmichael, infamously described the position of black women in the American civil rights movement as “prone.”

Many progressives do not appreciate how deeply these racial and gender prejudices are embedded in the minds of their fellow citizens. With the power to legislate in their hands, and a like-minded news media happy to promote their causes, progressive political parties are often tempted to overestimate the transformational power of their reforms. The embittered silence of those who feel that their most cherished beliefs have been overridden and ignored is all-too-easily mistaken for consent and approbation by progressive campaigners. It is neither.

To date, New Zealanders have been extremely fortunate in the generally benign character of their country’s dominant populist party – NZ First. Winston Peters is no Viktor Orban; no Rodrigo Duterte; no Jair Bolsonaro. And for that we should all be extremely thankful.

It is by no means certain, however, that this country will be spared the malign effects of vicious right-wing populism forever. A significant downturn in the New Zealand economy; one jarring social reform too many; and, who knows, a frightened, angry and culturally displaced mass of New Zealanders may find their “drummer”.

Nowhere is it written that such politicians are bound to observe the democratic niceties. Indeed, in circumstances where large numbers of New Zealanders believe themselves to be the victims of an arrogant and uncaring “political class”, democracy may be perceived as the problem.

Yellow Vests anyone?

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 14 December 2018.

The Salvation Army’s Latest Report: Identifying the Sins – but not the Solutions.

Onward Christian Soldier: The Salvation Army’s Ronji Tanielu talks to The AM Show’s Duncan Garner about “The State of Our Communities” 2018 report.

THE LATEST “State of Our Communities” report from the Salvation Army exposes a worrying fragility in New Zealand’s social relationships. Behind the happy multicultural façade so beloved of politicians and bureaucrats, racial animosities fester and tensions between competing ethnic communities multiply.

The report (based on hundreds of face-to-face interviews in Kaitaia, Whangarei, Manurewa in Auckland, New Plymouth, Hornby in Christchurch and Timaru) describes rising resentment at the manifest economic inequalities afflicting the Maori population of Northland; tensions between old and new immigrant communities in Auckland; and a South Island Pakeha monoculture struggling to comprehend the meaning and purpose of diversity.

That this racial dimension to the state of our communities has been explicitly recognised in the Army’s report is itself exceptional. The preferred response of New Zealand’s core institutions is to insist that, thankfully, inter-ethnic conflict is a phenomenon alien to our society.

The wonder is, however, that an explosion of racial violence has not already torn Northland apart. Immigrants from South Africa marvel at the province’s apparently effortless separation of the races. What the apartheid system struggled to effect in their homeland, Pakeha Northlanders have achieved without recourse to anything so crude as Pass Laws. Kaikohe is poor and brown. Kerikeri is rich and white. And never the twain shall meet.

What the Army’s interviews reveal, however, is an unwillingness on the part of younger Maori to accept this state of voluntary apartheid. After all, the nation’s official ideology attributes huge value to New Zealand’s indigenous heritage. Unsurprising, then, that the impoverished Maori communities of the North are requiring these Wellington-based bi-culturalists to back their positive rhetoric with tangible resources. Upon the speed and fulsomeness of their response, the maintenance of racial harmony in Northland largely depends.

The arrival of new immigrants from East and South Asia in Auckland suburbs hitherto the preserve of immigrants from the Pacific Islands is similarly testing New Zealand’s multicultural assumptions. Cook Islanders, Niueans, Samoans and Tongans were brought to New Zealand as factory workers and labourers. The entrepreneurial traditions of immigrants arriving from India and China have not always fitted easily into communities hitherto dominated by wage workers.

Compounding these economic divergences are the sharp religious differences between the devoutly Christian Pasifika and the followers of the Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim religious traditions. The rigorous secularism of official New Zealand is singularly ill-equipped to deal with the strong feelings that arise when different religious communities are required to practice their faiths in close proximity.

Pakeha living in the South Island are often bemused at North Islanders’ preoccupation with bi- and multiculturalism. In communities of overwhelmingly pale complexion, which most South Island towns and cities tend to be, it all comes across as vaguely obsessional. The racial homogeneity of provincial centres like Timaru encourages all manner of easy assumptions about what constitutes a “real” New Zealander – along with some potentially dangerous misapprehensions about how easy it is (or should be) for outsiders to “fit in”.

Southern Man’s obtuseness on matters cultural largely explains his preoccupation with the malign effects of inadequate and/or unaffordable housing in his community. There is no clearer manifestation of poverty than homelessness, and nothing breeds fear, anger and resentment faster than the obvious sufferings of the poor.

Overlay that economic distress with the even more terrifying effects of drug-dealing, and the addictions upon which the drug suppliers’ business model depends, and you have a sure-fire recipe for continuously escalating social anxieties revealing themselves in periodic outbreaks of moral panic.

The severity of these panics is accentuated by the tendency of racially and/or economically homogenous middle-class communities (in both islands) to give the manufacture, distribution and sale of illegal drugs a luridly racial cast. If it’s not the shadowy members of Chinese triads and Mexican drug cartels, it’s the scary bros from Black Power and the Mongrel Mob doing the business. That the organised criminals controlling the New Zealand drug trade – especially the scourge of methamphetamine – are, overwhelmingly, wealthy Pakeha, is a fact too frightening for their middle-class neighbours to acknowledge.

In its essence, the Salvation Army’s report contributes yet another collection of personal testimonies to the multitude already enumerating the unrelenting social cruelties of capitalism. Not that the Army couches its analysis in such godlessly Marxist terms. This is, after all, a Christian denomination determined to demonstrate the redemptive power of faith in action. “Thy Kingdom come”, enjoins the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy will be done on Earth, as it is in Heaven.” The Sallies try to do good one family, one person, one soul, at a time.

Yet even these Good Samaritans in uniform cannot ignore entirely the systemic character of the sins they are pledged to wage war against. The correlation of high numbers of Maori with high levels of poverty; of high levels of poverty with high levels of homelessness and drug abuse; is difficult to miss.

The hardest test for any Christian is to locate the source of human wickedness. Attributing the ills of society to the moral weakness of their victims is always easier than fighting those who made the wrong too strong to resist. Though they call themselves an army, the Sallies have, historically, tended to go to war against the symptoms of sin. Vanquishing the causes of human distress: imperialism, racism, economic exploitation; poverty and social despair; they prefer to leave to God.

To date, not a conspicuously successful strategy for replicating Heaven on Earth.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 14 December 2018.

Normalising The Unthinkable.

Dark Imaginings: That more and more novelists and screen-writers are reaching for the deadly virus plot-line reveals an alarming shift in the zeitgeist. Slowly but unmistakably, the mood of the world’s artists is darkening. Few now are willing to embrace the heroic hopefulness of a Tolkien. Indeed, the twenty-first century fixation with extinction-level pandemics points to an artistic community tormented by murderous despair.

NEW TO SOHO on Sky Television is the latest “Deep State” thriller, Condor. In brief, the plot revolves around a genocidal conspiracy involving a rapacious firm of military contractors* and rogue elements within the CIA. Their goal? To release a deadly virus with which they hope to wipe out vast swathes of the population of the Middle East. The second episode opens with the infamous quotation attributed to Joseph Stalin:

Death solves all problems: no man, no problem.

That more and more novelists and screen-writers are reaching for the deadly virus plot-line reveals an alarming shift in the zeitgeist. Slowly but unmistakably, the mood of the world’s artists is darkening. Few now are willing to embrace the heroic hopefulness of a Tolkien. Indeed, the twenty-first century fixation with extinction-level pandemics points to an artistic community tormented by murderous despair.

It is the privilege of artists to think the unthinkable and imagine the unimaginable. Which is exactly what so many of them are doing in response to the deepening crisis of anthropogenic global warming. Human nature being the raw material out of which they fashion their artworks, it is not difficult to understand their growing pessimism. With every passing year, and every disregarded warning from climate science experts, it becomes clearer and clearer to them that the human species is not going to make it. Unsurprisingly, their imaginative powers are being turned to the subject of how best to rescue the planet’s other life forms.

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche long ago recognised the dangers of turning the human imagination towards extreme solutions. His forebodings are best expressed in two, oft-quoted aphorisms: “Have a care when fighting dragons, lest ye become a dragon yourself.” And: “Stare not too long into the abyss, lest the abyss stare back into you.”

The risk of so many artists concluding that the only solution to Climate Change is to rid the planet of its most dangerous species, is that the most talented among them possess the creative power to make it sound like a good idea. Life has a terrible habit of imitating art.

The other great hazard associated with releasing the terrifying idea of eliminationism into the intellectual bloodstream of the non-artistic community is that the idea of deliberately destroying billions of innocent human-beings will become normalised. In no time at all, the unthinkable will become thinkable. People in a position to make awful things happen will begin to ask themselves: “Why not?”

The writers behind Condor have yet to move beyond the genocidal notion of drying up the sea of the Middle-Eastern peoples in which the Jihadist fishes swim. A reprehensible enough idea in itself but falling well short of the historically unprecedented crime of eliminating 95 percent of the human species. Even so, the Condor series points to the awful probability of eliminationist thinking taking hold in the minds of Deep State actors already quite capable of ordering drone strikes on wedding feasts; deploying chemical weapons against designated enemies of the state; and hacking up the sovereign’s critics with a bone saw.

Would that the world’s artists were willing to latch on to the much more optimistic Fixing-Climate-Change scenario elaborated by Counterpunch contributor, Steve Hendricks. https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/12/07/what-if-we-just-buy-off-big-fossil-fuel-a-novel-plan-to-mitigate-the-climate-calamity/ His eminently practical plan of simply paying the fossil fuel industry to keep their product safely in the ground; and then giving them the job of transitioning humankind to a sustainable green future; is proof of what we human-beings are capable of conceptualising when we shun the darkness and choose instead to keep our eyes firmly fixed upon the light.

*These private sector bad guys all work for “White Sands” – an insider joke aimed at those already familiar with the notorious exploits of the all-too-real military contractor, Blackwater, during the Iraq War. Black Water – White Sands. Geddit?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of 11 December 2018.

A Polish Joke - At The Planet's Expense.

Polish Humour: To stage a critical conference on Climate Change in the heart of Poland’s coalfields just has to be a joke. Right?

KATOWICE, SILESIA. Polish humour, no? To stage a critical conference on Climate Change in the heart of Poland’s coalfields just has to be a joke. Right?

Wrong. Not when the Polish Government is seriously advancing the idea of a “just transition” from coal. Just transition? That’s code for: “Nothing will be done which threatens the job security of the thousands of Polish miners who constitute the electoral heart of the ruling Law & Justice Party.” No one in Polish politics has forgotten that it was the shipyard workers and the coal miners who gave the anti-communist Solidarity movement its economic and political heft back in the early 1980s. If the Commies could crack these guys, what chance do the Greenies have?

The bad news isn’t confined to the coalfields of Eastern Europe. In France an embattled Emmanuel Macron has been forced to back away from his Climate Change-inspired fuel price hikes.

With the furious “Yellow Vests” threatening to launch another nationwide assault on the institutions and symbols of French state authority; and with his Police chiefs warning him that their men, close to exhaustion, may not be equal to the task of preserving law and order; what choice did the French President have? It was either concede the Yellow Vests’ key demand, or, bring in the armed forces to quell their nationwide insurrection against oppressive taxes and “Parisian arrogance”. But, setting the French army against the French people has only ever ended in tyranny, revolution, or both.

This is the world we live in now. A world where the desperate pleading of Sir David Attenborough and the UN Secretary General fails. Their words falling not so much on deaf ears as ears filled with the subtle whispers of fossil fuel lobbyists or the angry protests of workers and consumers. Vice-President Richard Cheney knew exactly what he was talking about when he warned the American political class that: “The American way of life is not negotiable.” Nope, and not the French or Polish ways of life, either.

It really is the perfect political storm. At precisely the time when trust and confidence in the world’s decision-makers is most needed, it is plummeting. Those whom Sir David enjoined, on behalf the world’s peoples, to “lead” the planet to safety simply cannot count on more than a tiny fraction of the global population accepting the massive and radical changes that would require.

Perhaps, if people could be persuaded that the costs of transitioning away from our fossil fuel-based civilisation would be equally shared, then there might be some hope. But who believes that is even remotely likely? Who can see the “loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires” (thank you Paul Simon) who rule this world voluntarily relinquishing their wealth and privilege? Who would put their faith in the political classes that service those millionaires and billionaires ever deciding to treat Climate Change as the moral equivalent of war?

The disconnect between the rulers and the ruled is just too profound. In the current political environment it is much more likely that any Climate Change measures inflicting genuine hardship on the mass of the population would be met not with stoical acceptance but, as we have seen in France, with rage and denial. One has only to listen to the bitterness and contempt in the voices of the Polish miners interviewed by the press corps at Katowice. Rather than accept that the coal they dig out of the ground is warming the planet catastrophically, they preferred to pour scorn upon the scientists’ and economists’ warnings. “Who knows more about coal,” they scoff, “them or us?”

And that marvel of the last quarter-century – the Internet – rather than acting as the perfect instrument for informing the whole world about the dangers that lie ahead has, instead, facilitated the world’s division into a multitude of mutually hostile cultural and political enclaves. There are as many truths today as there are audiences. People are willing to believe only what they have already been convinced of. Like addresses like exclusively – and everyone else can go to hell.

New Zealanders are no different in this respect from the rest of humanity. We should be thankful that the price of oil has fallen precipitately over the past few weeks because, had it not, rising petrol prices combined with increased fuel taxes would almost certainly have sparked a full-scale truckers’ revolt. Considerably less than one hundred large trucks, strategically stalled, could reduce Auckland to angry chaos in less than half-an-hour.

Now imagine those truckers joining forces with thousands of angry farmers protesting against the imposition of Climate Change-driven reforms on the agricultural sector. The French are not the only people who know how to cause trouble!

Sir David Attenborough has spent his entire adult life bringing the wonders of the natural world to appreciative global audiences. Few people on Earth have a more profound understanding of the immense damage being inflicted on the planet’s fragile biosphere by our fossil-fuel based civilisation. One can only imagine his distress at the near certainty of so much wonder and beauty being driven to extinction by anthropogenic global warming.

In the dark watches of the night, I wonder, does even as big-hearted a man as Sir David Attenborough not comfort himself with the thought that the authors of this global tragedy will, in the not too distant future, and along with all other living things, be forced to pay the price. The people of the world may not be interested in responding to Climate Change, but Climate Change is, most certainly, responding to them.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 6 December 2018.

Dances With Elephants.

When elephants dance, the wise mice stick to the wall.  - Swahili Proverb.

IT BEGAN so positively: wreathed in smiles and full of promise; a government of kindness and transformation. It hasn’t lasted. In a depressingly short period of time, the poetry of campaigning was replaced by the harsh prose of governing.

It was clear, from the moment David Parker told us that the Labour-NZF-Green Government would be signing the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, that beneath all the glitter and shine lay the dull gleam of administrative brass. Smiles and Stardust are Jacinda’s brand. Reality is much scarier.

Over the past fortnight New Zealand has played host to gatherings of spies. The first batch arrived from the United Kingdom and the second from the United States. In the midst of these secretive arrivals and departures the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) issued its finding that the Chinese IT giant, Huawei, had failed to pass the “national security” test, and that, as a consequence, its involvement in the roll-out of Spark’s 5G communications network must cease.

Interestingly, the presence of so many foreign spooks was matched by the absence of a select band of journalists. Whisked away to Hawaii by the Orwellian-sounding “Indopacom” (the United States Indo-Pacific Command) they were brought up to speed on what one of the participants described as China’s “expansionist military strategy in the Pacific”.

One of the more accurate and justifiable criticisms of the current Chinese Government is its treatment of its Uighur population. President Xi and his administration have gone to extraordinary lengths to prevent the Muslim Uighurs from embracing the radical Islamicist doctrines so familiar to us now in the West. Human rights groups report that as many as a million Uighurs may have passed through the regime’s “re-education camps”. These are not happy places.

It would seem, however, that the Uighurs are not the only population for whom “re-education” has been deemed necessary. New Zealanders, too, have been singled out for ideological rectification. Seemingly, this country has grown too fond of the Chinese regime and is in urgent need of being re-oriented towards a more reliable combination of “friendly” powers. No less a think tank than the “moderately conservative” Hoover Institution has opined that New Zealand is “particularly vulnerable” to Chinese influence.

Served up as a “test case” in a report bearing the interesting title “Chinese Influence & American Interest”, New Zealand is described as “a small state of 4.5 million people with strong trade ties to China.” These have, according to the report, led us to pursue “closer ties with China than many other nations.”

Too close, apparently, for our largest trading partner, Australia, which has, we were informed by an investment specialist interviewed for TVNZ’s “Q+A” programme, come to the view that New Zealand has allowed itself to stray too far from the accepted anti-Chinese/pro-American path laid down by Canberra.

Jacinda Ardern and her Foreign Minister, Winston Peters, have become something of a problem for the Australians. There is a slippery quality to both of them that irritates New Zealand’s oldest friend and ally. Just when they’re convinced that the Kiwis have stepped over the line – by refusing to condemn the Russians fast enough over the Salisbury chemical attack, for example – they somehow manage to skip back over it with dutiful promises of a “Pacific Re-Set”. Time for Wellington to stop playing silly buggers, says Canberra, and not in a nice way.

Hence the influx of hard men from the UK and America. Hence the sudden rise to prominence of Professor Anne-Marie Brady – New Zealand’s very own “international expert” on the diabolical cleverness of Beijing and its “magic weapons”. No coincidence, surely, that the Hoover Institution’s fortuitously timed warning about Chinese influence draws heavily on Professor Brady’s alarming academic research. Her even more alarming personal experiences, involving burglars and deflated car tyres, lends cinematic emphasis to their concern.

Our re-education, from a nation with delusions of independence, to one which knows its place in the geopolitical scheme of things, will proceed apace, although not as rapidly as with our leaders. The Huawei decision signalled to our Five Eyes partners that from now on it is their preferences, not China’s, which will dictate the shape of New Zealand foreign policy.

The Swahili have a proverb: “When elephants dance, the wise mice stick to the wall.” Or, in our case, scamper back onto the American elephant’s back.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 7 December 2018.

Raining On The White Tribe’s Parade

Santa Who? What sort of woke, politically-correct bubble would you have to be living in to think this was a good idea? Certainly, it is hard to imagine someone with little brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces; someone who remembers mum or dad reading them The Night Before Christmas, or watching The Miracle On 34th Street – or even Bad Santa – being so insensitive, so utterly unaware of the trouble they were about to cause.

WHAT WERE THEY THINKING? The people who decided it would be a good idea to take Santa out of the Nelson Santa Parade?

A South Island city (and a Wakefield settlement to boot!) filled with Pakeha New Zealanders. Who was it who decided that the Thomas Nast/Coca-Cola Santa-Claus, the one which the English-speaking world has taken to its heart for more than a century, could be replaced by a Maori chieftain in a crimson korowai, without pissing a huge number of people off?

The poor old Nelson City Council, which poured $16,000 of its rate-payers’ money into the parade, had no idea that Santa was about to be indigenised. Neither, if the outrage being expressed on talkback radio and across social media is any guide, were the thousands of Pakeha parents and grandparents whose diminutive charges wandered home with them disconsolately – having been denied their chance to cheer-on jolly old St Nick.

What sort of woke, politically-correct bubble would you have to be living in to think this was a good idea? Certainly, it is hard to imagine someone with little brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces; someone who remembers mum or dad reading them The Night Before Christmas, or watching The Miracle On 34^th Street – or even Bad Santa – being so insensitive, so utterly unaware of the trouble they were about to cause.

No, it would have to be someone for whom the Christmas Season holds no precious memories of wonder and joy. Someone who had never read A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens – let alone the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John!

Such people are becoming more and more common in New Zealand as, with every passing census, the number of New Zealanders subscribing to Christianity – or even the Deity, himself – dwindles. Atheism is close to achieving majority status in this country and along with it the justification for purging New Zealand society of every officially recognised Pakeha religious and/or folk festival.

Not (God forbid!) the religious or folk festivals celebrated by New Zealand’s indigenous and immigrant communities. No woke atheist would dream of insulting the members of these communities by interpolating a figure from a completely different cultural milieu into their celebrations. No, it is only those unlucky enough to be born into the culture they (supposedly) share with these arrogant traducers of tradition who will find their special day out with the kids and grandkids ruined.

Perhaps the decision to introduce (unannounced and unauthorised) a Maori Santa Claus was conceived as some sort of payback for the A&P Show float featuring men and women in blackface which so outraged progressive metropolitan New Zealanders a fortnight or so ago?

“Let’s give these provincial deplorables a taste of their own medicine. See how they like it!” Was that the spirit in which the decision to disappoint thousands of eager children was taken? I hope not.

But, even if the decision to dispense with the traditional Santa Claus was taken with the most noble of progressive intentions. Even if it was undertaken as a means of giving the celebration of Christmas a uniquely New Zealand flavour, it nevertheless remains an act of the most aggressive racism.

Why? Because those who made it are guilty of either consciously or unconsciously rejecting the whole notion that the cherished traditions of a specific ethnic community should be considered sacrosanct and worthy of respect. Because the person, or persons, responsible for the decision arrogated to themselves the right to set aside the key cultural element by which a “Santa Parade” is defined: the beaming, white-haired and white-bearded old gentlemen clad in a red suit, edged with white fur, seated in a sleigh piled high with gifts and pulled through the air by flying reindeer. Absurd? Of course it’s absurd! But no more absurd than the Prophet Mohammed being carried to paradise on a flying horse. Or a god with the body of a human-being and the head of an elephant. Racism is no less racism because the contempt on display is being directed at members of one’s own tribe.

There will be consequences, of course. There always are when cultural traditions are traduced. How many little pairs of ears absorbed the angry, racially-charged comments that undoubtedly followed this indigenous interpolation of Santa Claus? How much of the good-will between Maori and Pakeha New Zealand was squandered? The metropolitan elites, who refuse to take what happened in Nelson seriously, are no doubt comforting themselves with the thought that the umbrage taken is a peculiarly “provincial” phenomenon. It is not. Pakeha racism is everywhere and those responsible for so arrogantly raining on Nelson’s Santa Parade have only made it worse.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 4 December 2018.

The Politics Of Transformation - Warning: TERF Triggering.

The Excluder Excluded: What does it say about the state of identity politics in New Zealand and around the world that if Germaine Greer, the Matriarch of Second Wave Feminism, announced she was intending to participate in the Auckland Pride Parade, then Labour's Manurewa MP, Louisa Wall, would do everything in her power to exclude her?

WHAT DOES IT MEAN that Labour’s Louisa Wall would ban Germaine Greer from the Auckland Pride Parade? What offence could the Matriarch of Second Wave Feminism possibly have committed to merit Wall’s exclusion?

Greer’s “crime” is deceptively innocuous. She refuses to abandon her opinion that human-beings come into this world as either women or men, and that simply declaring oneself to be a man or a woman is insufficient from an evidentiary perspective. Greer believes that gender is a matter of straightforward human biology. That it cannot be an act of will – or surgery.

When BBC Newsnight’s Kirsty Walk challenged her with the question: “If a man has his gender reassigned and outwardly – and he feels, inwardly – he is a woman. In your view can he be a woman or not?” Greer responded, with typical Australian bluntness: “No.” And when Walk observed that, to some people, her reaction might be considered insulting, the 76-year-old scholar replied: “I don’t care. People get insulted all the time. Australians get insulted every day of the week!”

That October 2015 interview contributed hugely to the steadily worsening ideological stand-off responsible for introducing the abbreviation “TERF” – Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist – to the vocabulary of progressives around the world. Including, we now know, Louisa Wall, who was secretly recorded telling participants at a recent Pride Parade hui: “My whole thing is that I don’t want any f...ing TERFs at the Pride Parade!”

Wall’s position would appear to be that in the name of inclusion it is necessary to exclude the excluders. The Pride Parade, she says, must never be anything less than a celebration of the whole Rainbow Community. To challenge the right of trans individuals to define their own gender identity constitutes a hateful denial of their human rights. In Wall’s opinion it is vital that TERFs be prevented from disputing those rights.

Greer’s objection to the celebration of Male-to-Female transformers is classic Second Wave Feminist. When BBC Newsnight’s Walk confronted Greer with the example of Caitlyn Jenner, the former football hero and medal-winning Olympic decathlete who later became a glamorous participant in Keeping Up With The Kardashians, she replied: “I think it’s misogynist. I think misogyny plays a really big part in all of this. That a man who goes to these lengths will be a better woman than someone who was just born a woman.”

Greer’s charge of misogyny goes to the heart of the conflict. Here is the author of The Female Eunuch, whose determination that women should embrace their femaleness fully and fearlessly made her a feminist icon for the whole Baby Boom Generation, rebelling angrily against the notion that gender is a fickle, fluid concept. Greer simply will not accept that womanhood is no less a cultural creation than a Versace gown – and just as easily knocked-off.

But, if gender is, indeed, a cultural artefact, then maleness is every bit as artificial as femaleness. What’s more, in a world dominated by aggressive and intolerant upholders of patriarchal values, the covering which males are expected to fasten over and around their bodies resembles much more a suit of medieval armour than it does a Versace gown.

What, therefore, could be more radical – more liberating – than the idea that all those human-beings who feel uncomfortable, confined, oppressed in their suit of armour can simply strip it off and throw it away? Or, conversely, that all those human-beings who long for the reassurance of iron and steel have every right to seek redemption in the armourer’s forge?

“Reject all binary choices!”, declare the singers of this new freedom song. “We can become the people our hearts have always told us we were.”

The Marxists would wearily interject that they have been here before. That human-beings become what the exigencies of existence require them to be. Hunters/gatherers, warriors/wives, workers/homemakers. The computers that define post-industrial societies may follow the logic of zeroes and ones, but the civilisation they are rapidly bringing into existence will have less to do with either/or dichotomies than any of the civilisations which preceded it. Hitherto, the chief preoccupation of human communities has been with survival. The new age which beckons to us from beyond the great test of climate change may be preoccupied with becoming.

The conservative clings to what was and what works. The radical reaches for what s/he yet may be.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 30 November 2018.

From A Table By The Window - A Short Story About The Huawei Decision.

“Ever the idealist, dear boy. You surely didn’t expect this government to tell all those lovely people from British Intelligence and the FBI, who just happened to be in town this week, that, in spite of their oh-so-discretely conveyed objections, Spark’s deal with Huawei would be going ahead.”

HOW MANY YEARS has it been, I asked myself, since I climbed these stairs? That the little Wellington café was still in business after more than 40 years struck me as a miracle. And where better to meet the man who could still remember the events of 40 years ago – not least because he was there, in the thick of them?

He was waiting for me at the table window, his fingers moving slowly over the smooth face of his device. Two full glasses of red wine glowed dully in the wet afternoon light. The muted transactions of Willis Street provided a sibilant soundtrack.

“There you are”, he said, sweeping the information from his screen and placing the device carefully on the table. “Sit down, dear boy, sit down. I took the liberty of ordering a very nice Pinot Noir.”

“Perfect,” I replied, draping my damp jacket over the back of my chair. “I suppose that phone of yours hasn’t stopped ringing since the announcement?”

He smiled wanly. “Ringing, dear boy, ringing? Nothing rings anymore. Our devices beep, or chirrup, or play a bar or two of something, but they do not ring – much too indiscrete.”

“Discretion being the word-of-the-day”, I replied. “As in ‘discretion’ being the better part of valour – a quality of which this government appears to be in short supply.”

“Ever the idealist, dear boy. You surely didn’t expect this government to tell all those lovely people from British Intelligence and the FBI, who just happened to be in town this week, that, in spite of their oh-so-discretely conveyed objections, Spark’s deal with Huawei would be going ahead.”

“Forgive me, but I was under the impression that it was the Government of New Zealand’s job to define the parameters of its ‘national security’ – not the FBI’s. Does the continuing economic strength and welfare of the country not fall under the heading of ‘national security’? Or, making sure that the goodwill of the country’s largest trading partner is retained, and maybe even enhanced? I thought that might also be a matter of ‘national security’? Clearly, I was wrong.”

“If that was what you thought, dear boy, then, yes, you were wrong. Very wrong. The idea that one of the Five Eyes might sign up to a deal that could put all the other eyes at risk has absolutely no feathers, dear boy, none at all. It is never going to fly.”

“Ah, yes, the Five Eyes. A vast electronic eavesdropping network dedicated to plucking all manner of classified information out of the air and sending it on, sight unseen, to the United States of America. The Five Eyes. An operation whose sole purpose is to steal other people’s secrets. This is the outfit that’s demanding we jeopardise our economic and diplomatic relationship with the Chinese because the Chinese might use their state-of-the-art 5G technology to do what? Oh, yes, that’s right – to steal other people’s secrets!”

“The most important noun in those impassioned sentences, dear boy, was United States of America. You named the most powerful nation on the planet. Knowing when you did so that what the most powerful nation on the planet wants, the most powerful nation on the planet gets. And, right now, what it wants is to make sure the nation aiming to take its place is not in a position to weaponise ‘The Internet of Things’ against it.”

“You’ve been reading to many thrillers.”

“Actually, dear boy, it’s you who hasn’t been reading enough. Cyber-warfare is the greatest threat we face. Why? Because, in just a few years, the interconnectedness of the world and the breath-taking speed at which information travels will confer upon the technology organising its distribution the power to simply shut down the economic, social and political systems of its owner’s rivals. What would you do if you went to the nearest ATM and discovered that every one of your bank accounts had been deleted? That all your money had gone? Poof! Just disappeared? What if the same thing had happened to everybody else’s bank accounts? How does a government ‘fix’ a problem like that?”

“Okay – suppose I buy into this sci-fi scenario. It still boils down to Lenin’s fundamental question: ‘Who? Whom?’ Someone’s got to be in the omnipotent position you describe. So, what you’re actually telling me is that the omnipotent one cannot under any circumstances be China. Which is just another way of saying that it has to be the United States.”

“It’s not what I’m saying, dear boy, it’s what the United States is saying.”

“Regardless of the consequences for the economic and social welfare of New Zealanders? Do the Americans and their lickspittles in London and Canberra not understand that Beijing will exact a price for being treated so shabbily by Wellington?”

“Of course they do. They just don’t care. Why don’t they care? Because they know that anything Beijing decides to do will take time to manifest itself in a way that impacts upon the ordinary person in the street. Anything they decide to do to punish a maverick New Zealand government, by way of contrast, will take effect almost immediately. With the Australians acting as their proxies, the Americans can make our economy scream a lot faster than the Chinese. What’s more, in its upper echelons, New Zealand society is so stuffed with US “assets” that the political destabilisation of a recalcitrant government would be over in a matter of weeks, not months.”

“So we just have to sit back and take it – or the Yanks will rip our guts out?”

My companion looked out the window for a moment, taking in the hurrying Willis Street crowds, umbrellas raised against the wind-driven rain, and sipped his wine.

“Do you know, dear boy, that it wasn’t so very far from here that Bill Sutch was apprehended. All his life he had struggled to find a way for New Zealand to strike out on its own: to cut herself free from the apron strings of Mother England; to step out from Uncle Sam’s shadow. The problem he was never able to solve was, how? How does a tiny country escape the clutches of an imperial superpower? In the end, the best answer he could come up with was: by enlisting the help of another superpower. Do you remember, dear boy, how that story ended? The same delightful outfit that has been entertaining the boys and girls from MI6, and the FBI were on to poor old Bill in a flash. They put him on trial. Crushed his spirit. Within twelve months he was dead – and so was the government he had tried to help. Not a happy ending, dear boy. And not a course of action I’d recommend – especially not to a government as callow and inexperienced as this one.

Now it was my turn to stare out into the rain. To take in the purposeful haste of the capital city’s busy ants.

“More wine, dear boy, and a plate of the chef’s truly outstanding club sandwiches. In forty years they, at least, haven’t changed.

This short story was posted simultaneously on The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road of Friday, 30 November 2018.

Winston Keeps His Pledge To The Small Businesses Of Small-Town New Zealand.

Class Warrior: Like his predecessors in the Social Credit Political League, the NZ First leader is acutely aware that the small rural towns and provincial cities of New Zealand are hotbeds of class conflict. Not simply the classic Marxist conflict of capitalist versus proletarian, but also the no less bitter conflict between large and small businesses. Indeed, it is possible to characterise life in provincial New Zealand as a constant struggle of the particular against the general: of individual agency against institutional power.

WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT that the most accomplished class warrior to emerge from the struggle to improve New Zealand’s labour laws would be Winston Peters? No one else with a dog in this fight saw the class issues at stake as clearly as Winston Peters and NZ First. Not the employers; not the unions; and certainly not the Labour, National or Green parties. Peters and his colleagues can walk away from this debate as the undisputed champions of small provincial business. The electoral consequences of NZ First’s decisive intervention should not be underestimated.

There is a strong temptation on the part of left-wing activists in the major metropolitan centres to write off the people of the provinces as a bunch of undifferentiated reactionaries. To your average Labour or Green activist, provincials are racist, sexist and homophobic “rednecks”. The sort of people who still see nothing wrong with sending a float filled with people in blackface down the main street of their little town. Hopeless and irredeemable, these voters are not worth wooing – unless you’re Stuart Nash. (And the less said about Stuart Nash the better!)

Winston Peters knows better. Like his predecessors in the Social Credit Political League, the NZ First leader is acutely aware that the small rural towns and provincial cities of New Zealand are hotbeds of class conflict. Not simply the classic Marxist conflict of capitalist versus proletarian, but also the no less bitter conflict between large and small businesses. Indeed, it is possible to characterise life in provincial New Zealand as a constant struggle of the particular against the general: of individual agency against institutional power.

People living in large cities have a bad habit of romanticising small towns. They like to think that in a place where everybody knows their neighbours life must be wonderful. The reality is almost the exact opposite. In a small community the social hierarchy is much more sharply exposed. Yes, everybody knows their neighbours – but they also know exactly where they sit in the social pecking-order. Fun, one imagines, if you are positioned at or near the top. Wretched, if you are located near the bottom.

The local lawyers and accountants, for example, are perfectly placed to know exactly how well, or how badly, their neighbour’s are doing. The town’s doctors and teachers are similarly well-positioned. If knowledge is power, then these provincial professionals have a lot to play with.

The senior managers of nationwide chains, salarymen who will not lose their houses if their executive decisions turn out badly, may look down their noses at the senior bureaucrats employed by local and central government but, in truth, their day-to-day jobs are distinguished by the same petty protocols; the same demands from above. Well remunerated, but subjected to unceasing “performance reviews”, many opt to take out their frustrations on those further down the totem pole.

Not that the owners of the town’s small businesses would include themselves among the pen-pushers’ inferiors. In their own eyes – and often in the eyes of their employees – they are town’s true heroes.

Independent of spirit, willing to have a crack, contemptuous of those whose only purpose in this world appears to be making the lives of people like themselves as difficult as possible, it is difficult not to admire these small businesspeople.

It is no mean feat to keep a business afloat in the provinces. Notoriously under-capitalised, they all-too-often keep their operations afloat by paying themselves less than their workers. They are no friend of the trade unions with their one-rule-fits-all approach, but neither are they friends of the banks who bleed them dry or the big firms who expect them to submit ridiculously low bids for the jobs they then take their own sweet time paying for.

But without these small business people the towns and cities of provincial New Zealand would die. Their absence is frighteningly easy to spot. Main streets are dead: their shopfronts boarded-up and the real estate agent’s “To Let” signs fading in the sun. The young people those shuttered businesses might have employed have either fled or broken bad. The only signs of life are around the local office of the MSD.

These are the towns NZ First is pledged to restore to economic health. Winston Peters and Shane Jones want those kids in jobs, earning money, dreaming of one day becoming their own boss – just like the man or the woman who took them on under the 90-day rule, to see whether they had what it took, and then employed them permanently when they proved themselves hard-working and trustworthy. The unions can knock on the boss’s door as often as they like – they will find few, if any, takers here.

Of course there are exceptions – but in small-town New Zealand it is more common to find the small employers and their workers united in solidarity against the people who live on the hill. It’s one thing to be paid by the taxpayers; to grow fat on the fees you charge; or draw the salary only a big corporation can afford to pay. It’s quite another to keep the town’s cars and trucks filled up and roadworthy; or to fill the bellies of its inhabitants with decent tucker. All those engaged in small businesses: both their owners and the people who work for them; have taken a bet on themselves. Very often that bet is lost. Fair enough. Making a small business pay has never been easy. All the players ask is that the game stays honest: that the deck isn’t stacked against them.

That is the pledge NZ First made to them – and that is the pledge it has kept. Wages are not always paid in cash. Sometimes they are paid in dreams. By honouring that currency, Winston Peters and NZ First have made the heroes of small-town New Zealand their own.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 29 November 2018.