Can Judith Collins Make Don Brash’s ‘Nationhood Soufflé’ Rise Twice?

Can She Raise It A Second Time? The question is: Can National’s current leader, Judith Collins, rely upon Don Brash’s Nationhood Soufflé recipe to produce an equally dramatic rise in her party’s fortunes? Or, in the intervening years, has the ideology of “Treatyism” persuaded enough New Zealanders to renounce the ideas which, in 2004, transformed National overnight from a party of the walking wounded into a serious electoral contender?

SEVENTEEN YEARS HAVE PASSED since Don Brash gave his in/famous “Nationhood” speech to the Orewa Rotary Club. On the strength of the sentiments communicated in that address, the Brash-led National Party leapt from a risible 28 percent in the polls to 45 percent. In a single 17-point bound, National was free of the clutches of its crushing 2002 election defeat. Had National’s chief strategist, Steven Joyce, not played silly-buggers with the Exclusive Brethren Church, there was every chance that 18 months later Brash would have become prime minister.

The question is: Can National’s current leader, Judith Collins, rely upon Brash’s Nationhood Soufflé recipe to produce an equally dramatic rise in her party’s fortunes? Or, in the intervening years, has the ideology of “Treatyism” persuaded enough New Zealanders to renounce the ideas which, in 2004, transformed National overnight from a party of the walking wounded into a serious electoral contender? More to the point, does Collins share Brash’s unwavering moral commitment to the ”single standard of citizenship” principle at the heart of his “Nationhood” address.

This is not an idle question. If Collins is unable to convince those voters who are either doubtful of, or openly hostile to, the Labour Government’s radical Treatyist agenda, that her opposition is authentic, then she is most unlikely to emulate Brash’s success. Love him or hate him, only the most rabid of his opponents doubted Brash’s sincerity on the “race issue”. Those who voted for him were absolutely certain that, if elected, he would fulfil his promise to remove all references to the Treaty of Waitangi and its ex post facto “principles” from the statute books; and that the Maori seats would, indeed, be abolished. Collins, if she is to capture the support National so desperately needs, must convince both her party, and the public, that the “separatism” she decries must – and will – be stopped in its tracks.

The slightest equivocation on this matter will convince even those who agree with Collins’ basic proposition that she cannot be trusted to see it through. Anything other than a rock-solid guarantee to uphold the core principles of liberal, colour-blind, democracy will only convince her potential supporters that her brave words are hollow: that, when push comes to shove, she, like all the others, will retreat before the relentless criticism of practically the entire political class. Does Collins have what it takes to hold her ground on the “race issue”? Does her caucus? We shall see.

The feeling that National needs to exploit, if it is to return to office in 2023, is the feeling shared by a great many voters that, no matter which party they vote for, the core settings of New Zealand society will not be changed. That the people “in charge” have absolutely no regard for, or interest in, the opinions of what Richard Nixon called “the great silent majority”. Indeed, many Kiwis are now uncertain whether or not their opinions are any longer shared by a majority of their fellow citizens, or whether they – and people who think like them – now constitute a minority of the New Zealand population.

On the “race issue” and “Treatyism”, this sense of being shut out of the debate is very far from being a figment of their imaginations. The politician most responsible for inserting “the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi” into legislation is the former constitutional law professor-turned-Labour-politician, Sir Geoffrey Palmer. In a paper entitled “Māori, the Treaty and the Constitution” delivered to a Maori Law Review symposium on 12 June 2013, he observed:

“These [legal] developments, and indeed later developments, have meant that substantial grievances of the Māori minority have a good chance of being handled in a principled fashion. Insulation from the ravages of extreme opinion has been achieved. The settlements have become mainstream.”

“The ravages of extreme opinion”. It is difficult to conceive of a phrase that more vividly sums up the way the New Zealand elites view the thoughts and feelings of their less elevated citizens. It would be equally difficult to locate a clearer confirmation of the widely held conviction that nothing ordinary Pakeha New Zealanders might say in relation to the “race issue”, or the Treaty’s place (if any) in this country’s constitutional arrangements, is likely to have the slightest effect upon the conduct of the powers-that-be.

Palmer, himself, confirmed as much in the same address when he stated: “My mail about the Treaty was always adverse and voluminous, but I was not deterred by it.”

What produced that extraordinary 17-point jump in National’s poll-ratings following Brash’s “Nationhood” speech was the electrifying collective conviction that Brash had listened to the opponents of Treatyism, heard their grievances, and was determined to give effect to their wishes.

Nothing mobilises voters faster or more effectively than the belief that, for once, their vote might actually count. Whether it be Dominic Cumming’s invitation to “Take Back Control”, or Donald Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again”, the idea that a visit to the ballot-box just might make a difference, almost always makes one helluva difference.

Collins’ predicament would be made a great deal easier if she and her team could avail themselves of solid data on New Zealanders’ views about the Treaty of Waitangi and the “race issue” generally. Twenty years ago this was a relatively straightforward process. In the 1990s, for example, one could turn to the reports of the New Zealand Study of Values (NZSV) for a very precise take on the public’s attitude to a whole host of economic, social and political issues.

In a little book entitled New Zealand Politics At The Turn Of The Millennium by Paul Perry and Alan Webster, which was based on these reports, New Zealanders attitudes towards the Treaty of Waitangi were set out very clearly.

In 1998 only 5.4 percent of those questioned believed that the Treaty should be strengthened and given the force of law. A quarter believed that Treaty claims should be dealt with through the Waitangi Tribunal “as it is at present”. Nearly 30 percent believed there needed to be greater limits on Maori claims under the Treaty. And 33.8 percent believed the Treaty should be abolished. Only 16.3 percent of those questioned responded positively to the idea of giving Maori special land and fishing rights to make up for past injustices.

When Don Brash delivered his “Nationhood” speech to those Orewa Rotarians in January 2004, his ideas fell upon fertile ground. We cannot be so sure that Collins’ views on separatism will be equally well-received. The NZSV ceased in 1998. For reasons one can only speculate about, academic interest in acquiring and publishing data on inconvenient public attitudes appears to have declined in the new millennium.

A great many of the New Zealanders who participated in those NZSV surveys more than two decades ago are no longer alive. Judith Collins must, therefore, make a big political bet. Have the numbers relating to the status of the Treaty of Waitangi, and to the “race issue” generally, become more favourable to the Treatyists – or more unfavourable? How many New Zealanders have changed their minds? More importantly, how many of them are willing to bet that National’s leader won’t change hers?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 30 April 2021.

After Four Years In Office …

They Did This: On March 27th 1939, Michael Joseph Savage opened the new Social Security building. Built in just 7 weeks, the new structure replaced the half-completed Social Security headquarters destroyed in an arson attack on 2 February 1939. In his book The Quest For Security, W. B. Sutch recalled the ceremony taking place “in the presence of thousands of people, in time to mark, five days later, the end of poverty.”

IT’S 30 APRIL 1939, and the New Zealand Labour Party has been in office for nearly four years. On the 15 October 1938, the government of Michael Joseph Savage had been re-elected with 55 percent of the popular vote – a still unsurpassed level of support.

April 1939 began with the coming into force of the Social Security Act. Described by the National Party as “applied lunacy”, and by the Labour leader as “applied Christianity”, the Act represented one of the most far-reaching social reforms ever undertaken by a New Zealand government.

Just how popular Labour’s social reforms were among the overwhelming majority of New Zealanders was revealed when, on the morning of 2 February 1939, the half-completed Social Welfare departmental headquarters situated in Aitken Street, not far from Parliament Buildings, was burned to the ground in a deliberate arson attack. Savage refused to be daunted by this overt act of far-right defiance. “We have got to get the Social Security Act working on April 1st and it’s going to work”, Savage told the country.

The Labour prime minister was as good as his word. “We are not going to weep,” Savage’s irrepressible Minister of Public Works, Bob Semple, bellowed. “It is a question of getting our backs into it, and getting the job done.”

While firefighters were still dampening down the smoking ruins on Aitken Street, Semple promised the construction of a replacement building within six weeks. The Public Works Department, Fletcher Construction, and the building firm of R.C. Love began work immediately on a site in Aotea Quay.

This breakneck schedule would “necessitate the working of two 10-hour shifts”, James Fletcher admitted, “and it is anticipated that approximately 150 men will be required for each shift”. The normally obstreperous building trades unions agreed to work the site around the clock. Fletcher and Love agreed to take no profit.

Thirty years later, the eminent public servant and historian W. B. Sutch, recalled the almost festive atmosphere that permeated the construction site: “Wellington citizens daily visited the job to share, to encourage, and to offer, at breaks, refreshment for weary workers.” Astonishingly, the construction was completed in seven weeks – just 7 days shy of Semple’s wildly optimistic target. Even the normally hostile journalists of the daily press were forced to acknowledge “an achievement never approached in New Zealand before.” On March 27th 1939, Savage opened the new building. In his book The Quest For Security, Sutch recalled the ceremony taking place “in the presence of thousands of people, in time to mark, five days later, the end of poverty.”

When the First Labour Government said “Let’s do this!” – it meant it.

Because, of course, the Social Security Act (1939) and the herculean rebuilding of the new department’s headquarters, were not the only things Labour was able to show after nearly four years in power. Between 1935 and 1939 Savage’s housing czar, the charismatic John A. Lee, had overseen the construction of thousands of so-called “state houses”. According to Sutch: “[D]uring 1937 there were three times the number of houses built compared with 1932 or 1933; by 1938 this had risen to five times”. By 1940-41 fully 40 percent of all houses built in New Zealand were state houses.

It is important to remember that the Members of Parliament who served in the First Labour Government were overwhelmingly drawn from the same working-class that made up the solid core of the Labour Party’s electoral base. Hardly any of them had much in the way of formal education. University graduates were few and far between. Trade unionists, on the other hand, were sufficiently plentiful to secure the passage of a bill making union membership universal across most of the New Zealand workforce. For good measure, they also reduced the working-week to 40 hours.

Like the Sixth Labour Government of Jacinda Ardern, Mickey Savage’s ministry was fond of harking back to the darkest days of the Great Depression, when New Zealanders were subject to the tender mercies of the right-wing coalition of George Forbes and Gordon Coates. Unlike Jacinda’s government, however, Savage’s never resorted to highlighting the Tories’ failures as a way of justifying its own.

Michael Joseph Savage made a promise to transform New Zealand, and nothing – not even a right-wing arsonist in Aitken Street – was going to prevent him from keeping it.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 30 April 2021.

Winston's Comeback: A Strategy.

On The Comeback Trail? Having followed it all the way to the Deputy Prime Ministership and a coalition with National in 1996, Winston Peters is well aware of right-wing populism’s advantages and disadvantages. Few New Zealand politicians possess a better appreciation of how well anti-Maori and anti-Asian messages are received by large sections of the electorate. He is also aware of how much more effectively these familiar right-wing themes might be “sold” to conservative voters if they were associated with the “evils” of “liberal wokedom”.

IS WINSTON PETERS on the comeback trail? At 76 years of age, there are many who say that Winston is too old to contemplate a return to Parliament. Then again, the President of the United States, Joe Biden, was 78 years old when he took the Oath of Office on 20 January 2021. So … maybe not. But, if he is serious about taking the comeback trail (and there are many well-placed to know who insist that he is) then from what quarter of the political compass should Winston set out? And, who will provide him with the wherewithal for what is always a very costly journey?

Winston’s knows well the path he and NZ First would be best advised to follow. It is a path with which the NZ First leader is already thoroughly familiar. Having followed it all the way to the Deputy Prime Ministership and a coalition with National in 1996, he is well aware of right-wing populism’s advantages and disadvantages. Few New Zealand politicians possess a better appreciation of how well anti-Maori and anti-Asian messages are received by large sections of the electorate. He is also aware of how much more effectively these familiar right-wing themes might be “sold” to conservative voters if they were associated with the “evils” of “liberal wokedom”.

It is often forgotten by those on the Left who range themselves alongside tangata whenua struggling for tino rangatiratanga and a te Tiriti-based constitution, that by no means all Maori subscribe to their cause. As was the case in the 1850s and 60s, there is a substantial number of Maori who are much more concerned to get their share of the good things made possible by the Settler State than they are with restoring the cultural status-quo ante. Winston is the perfect representative of these Maori, and in that role is able to attack “separatists” and their “sickly white liberal” allies with, if not impunity, then a great deal more success than any right-wing Pakeha politician attempting to do the same.

As the bi-cultural agenda set forth in the controversial He Puapua report becomes more widely known, and uneasiness among Pakeha voters grows, the National Party, Act and NZ First will vie with one another for the “honour” of leading the fightback against separatism and wokeness.

For the moment, the advantage lies with Act, whose leader, David Seymour, is currently fronting a nationwide campaign against the proposed criminalisation of “hate speech”. He is also deploying to good effect the divisive content of He Puapua on the floor of the House.

National, by contrast, has so far failed to distinguish itself in any of these battles. Inwardly focused, and bereft of serious political talent, the largest party of the Right, to the dismay of its followers, drifts aimlessly: a ship becalmed by its captain’s inability to catch any breeze strong enough to carry it out of the doldrums of electoral defeat.

National’s inaction leaves plenty of space for a reinvigorated NZ First to fill – if only Winston can find the money required to fund a credible comeback. Money (or the lack of it) has always been Winston’s and NZ First’s Achilles Heel. Time and again funding issues and problematic political donations have figured in the events that resulted in NZ First (and its leader) being voted out of Parliament. These misfortunes have made the raising of party funds an increasingly fraught undertaking. Potential donors could be forgiven for looking upon Winston in the same way aristocratic English ladies once looked upon Lord Byron: as someone “mad, bad and dangerous to know”. What NZ First needs is an injection of cash from donors with deep pockets and the skills to deploy it without precipitating another funding scandal.

Over recent years the place to go looking for this sort of assistance has been at discreet gatherings of Chinese business investors and their consular guides. Certainly, both National and Labour have benefitted from accepting such invitations. There’s no point in Winston attending these gatherings, however. Not when, as New Zealand’s foreign minister, he made it so very clear where his allegiances lay. Winston Peters, like his namesake, Winston Churchill, believes in the historical mission of “the English-speaking peoples”. Washington long ago marked him down as an “asset”. Beijing sees him as an adversary. From a Chinese perspective, keeping Winston out of Parliament serves their country’s interests much better than financing his triumphant return.

The Americans, on the other hand, have everything to gain by assisting Winston back into the role of king/queen-maker. With the “balance of responsibility” (as he likes to call the balance of power) Winston could furnish both National and Labour with a plausible excuse for distancing themselves from Beijing. The major parties’ leaders would be able to reassure the Chinese: “You know how we feel, but, what can we do? Without Winston, we cannot form a government. For the time being, we’re going to have to make nice with Washington. Please try to understand.”

To avoid the damaging charge of being Washington’s poodle, Winston and his party could play the Five Eyes card. If anyone can sell the argument that New Zealand’s fundamental interests lie in reaffirming its identity as a loyal member of the family of democratic, English-speaking nations, it’s Winston Peters. Certainly, the enunciation of such a position would be music to the ears of not only the Americans, but also the Australians, British and Canadians. The sort of music that could very easily persuade those nations to toss a goodly sum of money (via appropriate surrogates) into NZ First’s hat.

Nothing would be gained by Winston and his party following their usual practice of attempting to keep the sources of their financial support secret. Indeed, with a bit of luck he could turn the enthusiastic support of New Zealand’s traditional allies into an invaluable political asset. Anti-Chinese sentiment is growing in New Zealand at about the same rate as the electorate’s unease with the Ardern Government’s support for the liberal woke agenda. By casting himself as the defender of New Zealand’s classical liberal-democratic values, and his opponents as the enemies of those values, the moral and financial support of traditional allies might be transmuted into electoral gold.

Such is the nature of political competition that NZ First making itself the champion of a return to the English-speaking fold would trigger a powerful “patriotic” response from the National Party. As the principal representative of the Right, National simply could not afford to cede so much of its ideological territory to Act and NZ First. In short order, all three right-wing parties would take on the appearance of a solid electoral bloc committed to severing the ties binding Wellington to Beijing. Labour would be most unlikely to allow itself to be electorally positioned as the unpatriotic stooge of the Chinese Communist Party. It’s best bet would be to repudiate Nanaia Mahuta’s independent foreign policy and try to pass itself off as the leader of the new Anglophone realignment.

As a way of capping-off the NZ First leader’s career, this returning-New Zealand-to-the-English-speaking-fold strategy is hard to beat. In all the capitals that matter to him, Winston would be fêted as the statesman who brought New Zealand to its senses. For the many honours that would be showered upon him by a grateful Right – both at home and abroad – New Zealand’s loss of the Chinese market would not be counted too high a price.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 29 April 2021.

Anzac Day 2021: Myths Under Pressure.

Imperial Mission: All nations need myths: common narratives – usually heroic, or tragic, or both – with which to bind their citizens to the state with just the right mixture of awe, pity, gratitude and pride. New Zealand’s historical myths were initially crafted to instil loyalty to the imperial British mission, and have maintained a remarkably tenacious grip on the public imagination.

NICHOLAS BOYACK’S controversial commentary piece for Stuff is a harbinger of historical controversies to come. Published just 48 hours before Anzac Day’s dawn parades, Boyack’s “We need an honest debate on Gallipoli and a fresh approach to history”, offers an unashamedly revisionist take on the Gallipoli landings. Not surprisingly, it aroused powerful emotions in Stuff’s readers.

Predictably, many of these emotions reflected the affronted nationalism of adherents to the official version of the Anzac story. More interesting, however, were the responses signalling sympathy with Boyack’s anti-imperialistic views.

With the current government strongly committed to overseeing a revolution in the teaching of New Zealand history, Boyack’s Anzac bombshell looks set to be just the first of many such attacks on our national myths. There are few individuals more subversive of the status quo than historians on a mission.

All nations need myths: common narratives – usually heroic, or tragic, or both – with which to bind their citizens to the state with just the right mixture of awe, pity, gratitude and pride. New Zealand’s historical myths were initially crafted to instil loyalty to the imperial British mission, and have maintained a remarkably tenacious grip on the public imagination. The second great wave of national mythmaking gathered strength in the 1950s and 60s and was aimed at inculcating a robust faith in New Zealand’s “progressive” impulses – the reforms that made “little New Zealand” the “social laboratory of the world”. The grip of this second iteration of “New Zealand-ness” turned out to be considerably weaker than the first.

The proof of the imperial mythology’s enduring strength has just been presented to us in the impressive numbers once-again turning out for the traditional Anzac dawn parades. The devotion of the young to the Anzac Myth has perplexed and delighted not only traditional historians, but the entire New Zealand political class.

It was, after all, the young New Zealanders of the 1970s and 80s who had offered up the first serious challenges to the monolithic imperial mythology of the “RSA Generation”. Provoked, at least initially, by New Zealand’s involvement in the Vietnam War, Anzac revisionism soon expanded into a critique of the deeply-ingrained conservative values, and limited political vision, of the taciturn Kiwi blokes who returned from World War II. The fear was that as those with personal memories of the First and Second World Wars became fewer and fewer the Anzac spirit would also march away, shoulder-to-shoulder, with their ghosts.

The Scotsman-turned-Aussie songwriter, Eric Bogle, summed-up this anxiety in his famous song about Gallipoli “The Band Played Waltzing Matilda”: 

And so now every April, I sit on me porch
And I watch the parades pass before me
And I see my old comrades, how proudly they march
Reviving old dreams of past glories
And the old men march slowly, old bones stiff and sore
They’re tired old heroes from a forgotten war
And the young people ask, “what are they marching for?”
And I ask myself the same question

But the band plays Waltzing Matilda
And the old men still answer the call
But as year follows year, more old men disappear
Someday no one will march there at all

Except, astonishingly, the thinning ranks of the world war veterans were filled by their children, grandchildren and, by 2021, their great-grandchildren. The Baby Boom generation may have been sceptical of Anzac Day and what it stood for, but Generation X et seq embraced the Gallipoli myth with a passion that was little short of embarrassing. The question is: Why?

Much of the answer is doubtless bound up with the dramatic social and economic transformations of the 1980s and 90s. The free-market reforms that characterised the political histories of both Australia and New Zealand during that critical period effectively put paid to the “progressive” mythologies of the Anzac “brothers” – represented most forcefully by the Labour governments of Gough Whitlam and Norman Kirk.

Globalisation was an important part of the sales pitch of their successors, Bob Hawke and David Lange, and their respective finance ministers, Paul Keating and Roger Douglas. The only problem being that a political project based on giving de-regulated capitalism its head is extremely difficult to reconcile with the tightly regulated capitalism of the social-democratic Australia and New Zealand which Hawke and Lange were in the process of sweeping away. With the costumes of “progressive nationalism” now passé, the Anzac brothers had little other recourse but to reach into the depths of their national memory chests for the imperial paraphernalia of an even older era.

That the Anzac nations did not emerge from this re-invention exercise wearing pretty much the same clobber is due to New Zealand’s nuclear-free policy. Cold-shouldered by Canberra and Washington, and scolded by the British, New Zealand’s embrace of the old imperial myths was tempered by its new status as the scourge of the English-speaking nuclear powers. For a while, at least, this gave to New Zealand’s Anzac Day commemorations a decidedly Blackadder Goes Forth flavour. While the Aussies become increasingly jingoistic (to the point of almost forgetting what the “nz” in Anzac stands for) the Kiwis played up the horror and tragedy of war.

Unfortunately for the New Zealand political class, that doesn’t really work. Play up the horror and tragedy of war too poignantly and people cannot avoid questioning the point of going to war at all. Moreover, it’s only a short step from recognising the futility of war to grasping, as Nicholas Boyack does so persuasively in his commentary, the less-than-honourable motivations of the imperial politicians who refused to stop the war; and the willingness of New Zealand’s politicians to trade so much blood for butter.

And so it is that the rattle of imperial harness has become more and more a feature of Anzac Day commemorations. Youngsters, in particular, will declaim proudly on how the Anzacs went to war for “freedom” and “democracy”, rather than to strengthen the Mother Country’s grip on the oil reserves of the Middle East. One is moved to wonder if the new and compulsory New Zealand history curriculum will appraise these young New Zealanders of the fact that the wartime government of William Massey considered it advisable to lock up freedom and democracy for the duration: conscripting socialist MPs and subjecting the Christian pacifist, Archibald Baxter, to the torture of “Field Punishment No.1”

“It is time for a national debate on our history, focusing on what we can do to lift the standard in schools and universities” says Nicholas Boyack. “We also need to stop peddling myths about Gallipoli and New Zealand nationalism, and take a more honest approach to our history.”

Ah, yes, but that will entail emulating the sorcerer in Aladdin who offered new lamps for old. And when our historians set about exchanging old national myths for brand new ones, who knows what sort of genies will be summoned forth – or what they will be asked to do?

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 26 April 2021.

Labour’s Health Reforms: Boldly Going Where It Might Not Be Wise To Venture.

Breaking Bold: Andrew Little's reform of the health sector smacks of the sort of desperation that seizes politicians who know very well what the solution to the problem facing them is, but, having been told they cannot choose that solution, have opted to distract us with something so huge that our first instinct is to say: “Crikey! They’d hardly choose to do something this big if the odds of it succeeding weren’t exceptionally high.” But, are they?

THERE IS NOTHING WRONG with being bold, the real trick is to be bold about the right things. Is “Health New Zealand” (HNZ) the right thing? Labour supporters are saying it is with a suspicious degree of vehemence. (The sort of vehemence usually reserved for the defence of a dear friend who has done something that we all know, deep down, is really, really stupid.)

Meanwhile, the National Party has promised to repeal the legislation setting up HNZ the moment it’s re-elected. For good measure, they’re labelling the proposed Maori Health Authority (MHA) “separatist”.

So, there you have it. This “bold” reformation of New Zealand’s health system will proceed without the slightest hint of bi-partisan consensus. Excellent.

What do I think of Labour’s proposed reform? From what I’ve been able to glean over the course of the past few hours, the whole exercise smacks of the sort of desperation that seizes politicians who know very well what the solution to the problem facing them is, but, having been told they cannot choose that solution, have opted to distract us with something so huge that our first instinct is to say: “Crikey! They’d hardly choose to do something this big if the odds of it succeeding weren’t exceptionally high.”

It’s a good trick – but is it the right trick?

Regretfully, I’m forced to say “No.”

What has been at the root of our health system’s problems for the past 30 years? Inadequate funding and a management regime intended to replicate the incentives and disciplines of the free market. As New Zealand’s population has aged, the demands upon its public health system have steadily increased. Unfortunately, this rising level of demand has coincided with the imposition of neoliberal economics. Accordingly, from the mid-1980s onwards, the necessary fiscal adjustments have been deemed impermissible by politicians and bureaucrats alike. Rather than raising taxes to fund New Zealand’s hard-pressed health system, successive governments have commanded those charged with running it do more and more with (in real terms) less and less.

Had Andrew Little and his colleagues announced this morning that, thanks to a major fiscal re-jig (to be announced later in the day by Finance Minister, Grant Robertson) there was to be a significant and permanent increase in Vote Health, then we would have been able to say that this government had indeed grasped the nettle of reform. If they’d also announced a return to the ratio of administrators to health professionals that prevailed in the early 1980s, then we could be certain that what we were witnessing was a wholesale repudiation of the neoliberal model in health delivery. That would have been “transformational” – with bells on.

Sadly, that is not what Little and his colleagues announced. Rather than more money, more professionals and fewer administrative overseers, this government has opted to construct a massive single bureaucracy out of its current collection of 20 smaller bureaucracies. There is no hint that this new HNZ bureaucracy will be run on anything other than neoliberal lines. The same determination to prevent “professional capture” of the health service will lead to exactly the same sort of bureaucratic interference that eliminated the outstanding professional leadership of the Canterbury District Health Board only a few months ago.

For good measure, the new health system has been shorn of all the pitiful vestiges of democratic accountability still clinging to the DHB model. How the new, improved, neoliberal bureaucrats of HNZ will be held to account is anybody’s guess.

“But what about the new Maori Health Authority?”, I hear you ask. “Surely this innovation is an unequivocally progressive advance?” We must certainly hope so, but even here the Labour Government’s proposals fill me with nagging doubts.

In this morning’s media release, the Minister announced that: “A new Māori Health Authority will have the power to commission health services, monitor the state of Māori health and develop policy.”

On its face, this sounds excellent. Indisputably, Maori and Pacifica New Zealanders fare much worse at the hands of their health system than Pakeha New Zealanders. A MHA run by Maori, for Maori, is surely more likely to produce better results than the present system, which insists on treating all patients “the same” – regardless of the very different (i.e. inferior) health outcomes its one-size-fits-all approach produces.

If, however, we unpick the Minister’s statement, it becomes apparent immediately that the MHA will not, itself, be the provider of Maori health services. These will be “commissioned” by the Authority: presumably from private Maori contractors. Exactly who these contractors will be is not spelled out. Urban Maori Authorities will almost certainly be involved, as will health providers established by Iwi. We may even see the rise of Maori health entrepreneurs: individuals keen to profit from the needs identified by the MHA’s “monitors”.

If Little had announced that HNZ would be commissioning private sector providers to supply the health needs of New Zealanders, then the Left would have condemned him roundly. Labour would stand accused of privatising the public health system. People would demand to know how the citizen’s right to publicly provided health care can possibly be reconciled with the pursuit of private profit. That no such outcry has greeted the Government’s decision to hand over the health care of New Zealand’s poorest and most vulnerable citizens to private entities – some of them quite likely profit-seeking businesses – is telling.

Is Labour of the view that Maori are incapable of exploiting Maori? Is it saying that the operating principles of capitalism cease to function when the capitalists’ skins are brown? That indigenous people, simply by virtue of being indigenous, possess moral qualities that render them incapable of wrongdoing and that, as a consequence, they must be permitted to operate freely, without the strict bureaucratic oversight deemed essential for businesses conducted by the descendants of settlers and immigrants? Surely not.

Labour might also like to answer how it could possibly be in the MHA’s interest to report anything other than a strong improvement in Maori health outcomes. Were it ever to report that in spite of its best efforts the general health of Maori New Zealanders, as compared to Pakeha, continues to decline, then one of the key rationales for its establishment would be seriously compromised. Is it reasonable to ask the MHA to be a judge in its own cause?

Readers may find these propositions jarring, but that will not stop them being advanced by Labour’s political opponents. Indeed, it is happening already. What’s more, if any of them turn out to be true, then Labour’s health reforms will stand revealed as the wrong sort of boldness. Jacinda’s government will have tricked itself.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 22 April 2021.

The Kangaroo Encounters The Taniwha.

Uncomfortable: Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne, along with the rest of the Five Eyes Partners, were shocked to hear New Zealand's Foreign Minister, Nanaia Mahuta, tell the New Zealand-China Council: “It’s a matter that we have raised with Five Eyes partners; that we are uncomfortable with expanding the remit of the Five Eyes relationship; that we would much rather prefer looking for multilateral opportunities to express our interests on a number of issues.”

ON WEDNESDAY, when the Australian Foreign Minister, Marise Payne, met with our own, Nanaia Mahuta, diplomatic sparks undoubtedly flew. By then, Payne would have had plenty of time to analyse the content of Mahuta’s ground-shifting speech to the New Zealand-China Council on Monday. If that wasn’t enough to turn her face to flint, then it’s hard to know what could. Australia has made no secret of its desire to see the Kiwis straighten up and fly right for their Five Eyes partners. That Mahuta announced New Zealand’s intention of doing no such thing would certainly have sent sparks flying all over Canberra.

The Australians would’ve been no more interested than the Chinese in all the usual diplomatic ruffage in Mahuta’s speech. The only line that would have made them sit up and take notice was this one:

“It’s a matter that we have raised with Five Eyes partners; that we are uncomfortable with expanding the remit of the Five Eyes relationship; that we would much rather prefer looking for multilateral opportunities to express our interests on a number of issues.”

In plain English:

New Zealand is unwilling to go along with the Five Eyes intelligence gathering operation being expanded into a full-scale diplomatic and military alliance.

That is NOT what the Aussies were expecting, or wanting, to hear. Up until Mahuta’s appointment as foreign minister, New Zealand’s diplomatic (and military) direction of travel had been set by the Five-Eyes-friendly Winston Peters and his Defence Minister sidekick Ron Mark. The idea of New Zealand being welcomed back into the bosom of what Peters’ namesake, Winston Churchill, called “The English-Speaking Peoples” was one that warmed the cockles of the NZ First Leader’s heart.

Reading Peters speeches, it is clear that Canberra (and Washington, London and Ottawa) had allowed itself to hope that not only was Wellington finally prepared to set aside all that 1980s “nuclear-free” nonsense, but that it was also ready to make the key conceptual leap from the old “Asia-Pacific” to the new “Indo-Pacific” diplomatic paradigm.

Aimed directly at the Peoples Republic of China, the Indo-Pacific strategy of containment pits the combined military might of the United States, Japan, India and Australia against the burgeoning capability of the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army. Encouraged by Peters anti-Chinese rhetoric, did New Zealand’s Five Eyes partners indulge the wild surmise that New Zealand was preparing to resume its strategic role as the guardian of Australia’s eastern flank? If so, then Mahuta has dashed their hopes most cruelly.

Contained in her address to the New Zealand-China Council (the venue, alone, should have put the other four “Eyes” on alert) is the outline of a wholly new set of foreign policy objectives. At the heart of Mahuta’s plan is the Pacific nation “Aotearoa”. As the largest of the South Pacific island nations, “Aotearoa” intends to articulate and defend the interests of the region in a proudly indigenous fashion.

“I believe our foreign policy settings can be enhanced by te Tiriti,” said Mahuta. “The principles of partnership, active participation and protection can be called upon to enable equity and tino rangatiratanga (self-determination).”

Mahuta’s title for her address, “The Dragon and the Taniwha”, must have sent the diplomatic corps scurrying for a dictionary of Maori myths and legends. What did she mean?

Given her comments about the predicament of small South Pacific nations currently overburdened by Chinese debt, Beijing might consider mollifying the Taniwha by writing-off these onerous “development” loans. How better to reward Wellington for stepping away from the rapidly solidifying anti-Chinese alliance? How better to signal to the nations of the South Pacific that Aotearoa-New Zealand’s new regional diplomacy deserves their enthusiastic support?

The veteran political journalist, Richard Harman, describes Mahuta’s diplomatic gambit as “arguably one of the most important made by a foreign minister in recent years”. Describing the speech as “subtly and carefully worded”, Harman argues that “with its declaration that we would no longer participate in the Five Eyes alliance’s broader political and security campaigns, it may prove to be as important as the 1984–87 Labour Government’s anti-nuclear speeches which led to New Zealand being expelled from ANZUS.”

Certainly, Bob Hawke resented David Lange’s do-it-yourself diplomacy. At the very least, Marise Payne, will be telling Nanaia to tell her mate, Jacinda, that “Australia’s not happy about this – not happy at all.”

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 23 April 2021.

A Fast Train To A Sustainable Future.

Future Proofed: KiwiRail needs to become an all-electrically-powered, broad-gauged, and comprehensively re-equipped state-owned enterprise with state-of-the-art locomotives and rolling-stock. An infrastructure project of massive proportions and prodigious expense is required. But, when it is completed, New Zealand will have a sustainable, twenty-first century transportation network, capable of carrying both passengers and freight at high speed from Cape Reinga to Bluff – and all important points in between.

TE HUIA, the “fast train” to “Auckland” has been a subject of some contention in my family. My brother-in-law thinks it’s a great thing. His sister (my wife) thinks it’s the worst sort of white elephant – the eye-wateringly expensive kind. I agree. Te Huia represents the very worst kind of compromise: the sort that saps the strength of the original proposition by confirming the strongest arguments of its detractors. This train isn’t fast and it doesn’t take you to Auckland. The best that can be said for Te Huia is that it reminds us of what we should have – but don’t.

In a sensible country – a grown-up country – Hamilton would be linked to Auckland by the sort of rail services New Zealanders encounter (and travel on) overseas. Trains like Trenitalia’s alta velocita (high speed) service that took my family from Venice to Florence – a journey of 260 kilometres – in just 2 hours. Hamilton is 93 kilometres from Te Huia’s destination, Papakura. The journey takes 1.5 hours! Hamilton to Papakura by car is a journey of barely an hour. To put it bluntly: Te Huia is not a serious rail service. A serious rail service would take passengers from downtown Hamilton to downtown Auckland in half-an-hour.

A serious rail service cannot be delivered to New Zealanders, however, unless and until our narrow gauge railway tracks are replaced by the much broader gauge required for high-speed trains. That New Zealand engineers weren’t permitted to opt for a broader gauge at the time the tracks were laid is just another example of those idiotic penny-pinching decisions that have plagued this country’s development for more than 150 years. The narrow-gauge “solution” was cheaper and allowed more track to be laid, but the long-term consequences were dire. New Zealand’s railway tunnels are as narrow as its railway tracks. Opting for a broader gauge would necessarily entail widening those tunnels – an eye-wateringly expensive proposition.

Too expensive. For New Zealand governments of all complexions it was easier to just go along with the conventional wisdom that dismissed railway transportation as yesterday’s technology. The private motor vehicle and the heavy lorry were deemed to have done away with the whole economic rationale for a comprehensive rail network. Investment faltered, efficiency declined, and the public lost faith in the state-owned New Zealand Railways.

This suited some people just fine. For the Right, railways had always smacked of socialism. Capitalism may have made billions out of railways in the nineteenth century, but in the twentieth all the smart money was on cars, trucks and aeroplanes. Even on the Left, arguments in favour of rail transport tended to be dismissed as the grunting of technological dinosaurs. Rail’s glory days, it was confidently assumed, had come and gone.

In New Zealand, this dismissive attitude was further entrenched by the gauge problem. The arrival of high-speed trains in the 1960s and 70s may have altered the financial calculations in places like Japan and France, but not here. New Zealand’s narrow gauge could not accommodate the new “bullet trains”, and no one was prepared to invest the sort of money that would allow the country to begin again with the new and improved rail technology.

Matters were not improved by the decision of the neoliberal Fourth Labour Government to turn NZ Railways into the poster-child of inefficient public ownership. Story after story was fed to the news media about the rail network’s extraordinary stuff-ups. Heavy machinery was said to have simply disappeared – only to turn up months later on some forgotten railway siding. Even worse, the whole organisation was described as over-manned. State ownership permitted workers who would otherwise be unemployed to have a job – or, as Richard Prebble might have said: "If sitting around brewing tea and smoking cigarettes can be called a job!"

The 1993 fire-sale of the once proud NZ Railways to private American interests was thus presented as a sort of mercy killing. At least the New Zealand taxpayer was no longer on the hook for its costly inefficiencies. A decade later, however, it was clear that New Zealand simply couldn’t do without a functioning railway network – not if Kiwis wanted highways they could drive on safely. What had been TranzRail became KiwiRail, as, once again, the network was brought under state control.

Just as well. The looming threat of Climate Change meant that the fossil-fuel powered transportation systems of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries could no longer be permitted to carry the lion’s share of passengers and freight. Though no one was brave enough to come right out and say so, New Zealand (along with many other countries) was objectively required to completely reconfigure and upgrade its rail network.

KiwiRail needs to become an all-electrically-powered, broad-gauged, and comprehensively re-equipped state-owned enterprise with state-of-the-art locomotives and rolling-stock. An infrastructure project of massive proportions and prodigious expense is required. But, when it is completed, New Zealand will have a sustainable, twenty-first century transportation network, capable of carrying both passengers and freight at high speed from Cape Reinga to Bluff – and all important points in between.

This new KiwiRail would make it possible for a commuter bound for downtown Auckland to board the high-speed Te Huia service in the heart of Hamilton at 7:45am and meet his business contact in Aotea Square at 8:20am for breakfast.

My brother-in-law should not settle for the present service’s very, very poor second-best – and neither should the rest of us.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 20 April 2021.

Is The Government’s Proposed “Cure” For Hate Speech Worse Than The Complaint?

For Our Own Good? Police officers knocking on New Zealanders’ doors on account of what they might think, or what they have said, is more likely to make the rest of us think we are living in Nazi Germany – not drawing lessons from it. The disharmony such heavy-handed state intrusion is bound to create will exceed by a wide margin the disharmony it is attempting to prevent.

IF ANY NATION UNDERSTANDS the relationship between “Hate Speech” and “Hate Crime” it is the German nation. Not only is Germany the nation which gave birth to Nazism, but it is also the nation which gave birth to the constitutional protections which allowed Nazism to destroy Germany’s fledgling democracy.

The constitution of the Weimar Republic – fragile successor to the defeated German Empire of Kaiser Wilhelm II – was the most progressive of its time. It conferred upon the German people civil and political rights as new as they were exhilarating. Foremost among these was that capstone of democracy, Freedom of Expression. Without this crucial freedom, all of Democracy’s other rights and freedoms are swiftly rendered illusory.

But, as the excellent German documentary series The Abyss: Rise and Fall of the Nazis, makes clear, the Weimar constitution’s unconditional guarantee of Freedom of Expression allowed the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper, Der Stürmer, to go on pumping its poison into the German body-politic. Tellingly, at the post-war Nuremberg Trials the editor of Der Stürmer, Julius Streicher, was charged with being an accessory to the mass murder of European Jewry. For his relentless incitement of hatred against the Jews, Streicher was found guilty of aiding and abetting the Holocaust and condemned to death. He was hanged on 16 October 1946.

The judgement of the international jurists at Nuremberg was clear: hate speech leads to hate crimes. To incite hatred is to invite violence – and worse. The constitution of the German Federal Republic (modern-day Germany) reflects the lessons learned from the tragic fate of Weimar. Germany’s “basic law” makes it clear that democratic rights and freedoms do not include the right to turn democracy against itself.

The question which New Zealanders must now answer is whether or not they confront a situation which in any serious respect resembles that of the doomed Weimar Republic? Is there a political force at work in New Zealand society remotely similar to Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party? And, if such a force does exist, is it reasonable to characterise its protagonists as an existential threat to this country’s democratic institutions?

The answer to all of those questions is an unequivocal “No.” Nevertheless, the Labour Government is getting ready to pass legislation which will more define more clearly – and punish more harshly – “hate speech”. It is doing so at the behest of the Royal Commission of Inquiry in to the Christchurch Attacks of 15 March 2019. In the name of strengthening “social cohesion” – and thereby lessening the likelihood of future attacks – the Commissioners concluded that some revision of our current legal protections against hate speech was in order.

Before examining the Government’s proposed changes, it is important to determine whether the “Lone Wolf” Australian-born terrorist who carried out the Christchurch attacks did so as a consequence of absorbing hate speech uttered and/or published by New Zealanders on New Zealand soil. Or, more bluntly, was Brenton Tarrant incited to murder 51 people by a New Zealand variant of Der Stürmer? Once again, the answer is unequivocal: “No, he was not.”

Tarrant’s inspiration came from much further afield. He was a disciple of the Norwegian Lone Wolf terrorist Anders Breivik. He spent years visiting battlefields in southern and central Europe where Christian and Ottoman armies clashed more than 500 years ago. He participated in chat-rooms on the notorious US-based “4-Chan” social media platform. His political focus was upon events unfolding in the Northern – not the Southern Hemisphere.

Indeed, Tarrant chose New Zealand as the location for his attack on Islam precisely because it was so blessedly free of the unbridled hate speech that so inflamed the political discourse in other jurisdictions – along with the protections erected to preserve their citizens from its consequences. Prior to Tarrant’s deadly attack, New Zealand had not experienced a fatal terrorist incident since the death of Ernie Abbott in the Wellington Trades Hall bombing of 1984, and the loss of Fernando Pereira a year later in the state terrorist bombing of the Rainbow Warrior by the French government. Tarrant felt able to hide in plain sight in this country, confident that until he acted, he would not be detected. He wasn’t wrong.

All of which is not to suggest that New Zealand is entirely free of racial and religious prejudice and hatred. Verbal and physical assaults on people of colour and adherents of non-Christian religions are, sadly, all-too-common here. The point remains, however, that the level of this verbal and physical harassment was low enough for Tarrant’s attack to fall upon New Zealand like a bolt from the blue. No one anticipated anything like the horror and mayhem of the 15 March 2019 mosque shootings.

Why, then, did the Royal Commission feel moved to recommend a strengthening of our hate speech legislation? Did they not consider our democratic institutions robust enough to meet the outpouring of hatemongers head-on? Did they not regard the power of our news media to name and shame extremists of all kinds as a sufficient bulwark against the rise of a New Zealand Nazi Party and/or the publication of a down-under Der Stürmer? After all, when Far-Right and White Supremacist groups have shown themselves on the streets, the only impression they have left is one of profound weakness.

Although not yet “official”, the following wording would appear to be the Government’s preferred alternative to the existing legal prohibition against inciting racial hatred, it reads:

the incitement of disharmony, based on an intent to stir up, maintain or normalise hatred, through threatening, abusive or insulting communications.

It is further reported that legislative protection will be extended to target hate speech directed at religious belief and gender identification. Those found guilty of hate speech will be liable for a prison sentence not exceeding three years.

What sort of speech will it take to convince a jury of ordinary New Zealanders to send a fellow citizen to jail? One suspects that hatred of the sort perfected by Julius Streicher in Der Sturmer will be required to secure a conviction. Speech falling short of that measure will almost certainly result in acquittal. In the process of sorting out where the cut-off point lies (which is unlikely to be very far from where it is currently) real damage could end up being done to New Zealand democracy.

The framers of the Weimar constitution weren’t wrong to hold up Freedom of Expression as the capstone of democracy. They could not have foreseen the intensity of the hatred that fuelled the rise of the Nazis – hatred which the victors of World War I did so much to feed. Nor should we condemn the framers of Germany’s present constitution for attempting to learn the lessons of their country’s awful history. The problem our government faces, however, is that New Zealand is not Germany. Our political history contains nothing even remotely resembling the Nazi Party – or Der Stürmer.

And that’s the rub – isn’t it? Police officers knocking on New Zealanders’ doors on account of what they might think, or what they have said, is more likely to make the rest of us think we are living in Nazi Germany – not drawing lessons from it. The disharmony such heavy-handed state intrusion is bound to create will exceed by a wide margin the disharmony it is attempting to prevent.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 19 April 2021.

Why Haven’t They … ? How to Explain this Government’s Baffling Refusal to Solve New Zealand’s Problems.

Yes They Can - So Why Don't They? In matters relating to child poverty, homelessness, mental health, climate change and, of course, Covid-19, the answers are right in front of the Government's collective nose - often in the form of reports it has specifically commissioned. Why can’t Jacinda and her ministers see them? How are we to explain this government’s baffling refusal to solve New Zealand’s problems?

THE LONGER this government lasts, the more its supporters ask: “Why haven’t they … ?” On just about every front, Labour and Green voters, see solutions just begging to be adopted by their government of “kindness”. In matters relating to child poverty, homelessness, mental health, climate change and, of course, Covid-19, the answers are right in front of their noses. Why can’t Jacinda and her ministers see them? How are we to explain this government’s baffling refusal to solve New Zealand’s problems?

For example: Why haven’t they used the twelve months since the outbreak of the global pandemic to …

Recruit a nationwide “Covid Army”?

It was obvious very soon after the Pandemic was declared that the country was going to need a massive and highly co-ordinated response to keep Covid-19 at bay, and that the Ministry of Health (which was never intended to take on an operational role of this size and complexity) was probably not the best institution to provide it.

From the very start, the whole effort should have been presented as the moral equivalent of war. Calling for volunteers to serve on the “front lines” of the “fight against Covid-19” would have attracted hundreds, if not thousands, of New Zealanders. Just as happened in the days of Compulsory Military Training, the jobs of all those who stepped forward to serve “for the duration” of the crisis could have been preserved by law. Just as happened in World War II, volunteers would be feted as heroes.

The whole quasi-military organisation could have gradually taken over the handling of the pandemic response from the Ministry of Health. Its leadership co-opted from DHBs, Medical Schools, the Armed Forces, the Business Community, Universities and Trade Unions, the “Covid Army” would have featured an “MIQ Division”, a “Track-n-Trace Division”, a “Testing Division”, a “Communications Division” and, ultimately, a “Vaccination Division”. It would have operated as a single, national, publicly-owned and operated entity, with a unified chain-of-command answering directly to the responsible minister.

Had such an entity been created, it is most unlikely that the second and third lockdowns would have been necessary. More importantly, were such a Covid Army in existence right now we would be in the midst of one of the biggest public education campaigns ever mounted in New Zealand.

With the largest vaccination exercise ever attempted in this country looming, radio and television, the newspapers and social media should be driving home the need for all citizens to be inoculated. Co-opting the most creative “creatives” our advertising industry has to offer, this public education exercise should be as relentless as it is imaginative; as hard-hitting as it is surgically targeted. That no such campaign is yet in evidence, with the major roll-out of the vaccine just over three months away, speaks volumes.

Why is it proving so difficult to get any of these things done? Why are private security guards not being tested every fortnight as required? Why has MBIE failed to get the state-owned security firm, promised months ago, up and running? Everywhere we look we find potentially disastrous failures. Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, New Zealand has benefited hugely from a large measure of plain, old-fashioned good luck. It would, however, be the height of folly to base our continuing Covid response on the assumption that our luck will hold.

A politically paranoid person would long ago have concluded that the failure of the government to establish an altogether more coherent and streamlined approach to fighting the Coronavirus is deliberate. Such a person would point to the deeply ingrained resistance throughout both the public and private sectors towards anything smacking of “heavy-handed regulation” – let alone “compulsion”. They would argue that the advice so far tended to the government has almost certainly eschewed anything remotely resembling establishing publicly owned and managed organisations fully equipped with the legal and moral authority to get things done. After three decades of neoliberal indoctrination, most of the government’s advisers would likely consider such a Covid “cure” considerably worse than the complaint.

Perhaps the best piece of luck we have had in the whole Covid crisis, is the speed with which Jacinda, her Cabinet, and the legally designated bureaucrat responsible for combatting epidemics, the Director General of Health, were forced to act. There simply wasn’t time for ideologues to throw their spanners in the government’s works. Almost instinctively, New Zealanders like Siouxsie Wiles and Michael Baker grabbed whatever weapons were at hand and began returning fire against the virus. Jacinda Ardern, in particular, proved to have superb instincts. Her communication skills, combined with those of her accidental hero, Ashley Bloomfield, somehow tricked a bureaucracy framed to resist collectivism into acting decisively in defence of “the team of five million”.

Looking back at our extraordinary delivery from the horrors that still plague Italy, the USA, England, Brazil and India, it is easy to adopt a smug and self-congratulatory attitude towards the stunning success of New Zealand’s elimination strategy. But, it could all have ended so differently – and it still could.

Because people aren’t dying, it is tempting to confer retrospective competence upon a bureaucracy which, in the months since the decisive battle against Covid in March and April of 2020, has demonstrated almost unbelievable ineptitude. The government’s response to these repeated failures has been insufficiently forceful to prevent their recurrence. What’s more, in the absence of bold measures to reconfigure and reinvigorate them, our public institutions’ disturbing propensity to fuck things up may finally overwhelm Godzone’s good luck.

Why haven’t they solved this (and so many other) problems? Because Jacinda and her colleagues have yet to fully appreciate that they can.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 16 April 2021.

Can The State Pull The Lone Wolf Terrorist’s Teeth?

Punished, But Not Prevented: Though bitterly contested by those firmly convinced that the Christchurch Mosque Shootings represent something more than the crime of a Lone Wolf terrorist, the Royal Commission’s finding that no state agency could have prevented Brenton Tarrant from carrying out his deadly intent – except by chance – is correct. He understood that, for his “mission” to succeed, he must do nothing to draw the attention of the authorities – and, God help us all, he didn’t.

WHEN GOVERNMENTS EXTEND the state’s power to monitor their citizens’ ideas and activities, we should all be on our guard. Even when such extensions are introduced in response to a terrorist atrocity, we need to ask ourselves: would these new powers have prevented it?

For better, or for worse, this is no longer a moot point. Earlier this week the Justice Minister, Kris Faafoi, announced a raft of changes to our counter-terrorism laws.

Responding to the recommendations of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Christchurch mosque shootings, the Minister gave notice of the Government’s intention to: alter the definition of a terrorist act; criminalise planning and/or preparing for a terrorist attack; further criminalise terrorist weapons and combat training; criminalise international travel for the purpose of carrying out a terrorist attack; further criminalise the financing of terrorism to include broader forms of material support; and broaden the scope of ‘Control Orders’ to include convicted terrorists who may have served their prison sentences yet remain, in the judgement of the state, an ongoing terrorist threat.

The Minister further justified his strengthening of New Zealand’s anti-terrorism legislation by drawing attention to the way the Christchurch attacks “mirrored how the nature of terrorism has been changing internationally, involving lone actors rather than organised terrorist groups. We need to ensure our laws can respond to that.”

But will these changes produce the intended effect? More pertinently, had they been in place in the year immediately preceding the mosque attacks, would they have led to the early apprehension of the Christchurch shooter?

The answer to that question, sadly, is: almost certainly not.

Brenton Tarrant inhabited a Manichean moral universe in which the forces of Good were engaged in a never-ending struggle with the forces of Evil. Geopolitical events led him to the conviction that, as in the Middle Ages, this struggle was manifested principally in the conflict between Christendom and Islam. Following the death of his father, Tarrant inherited a sum sufficient to fund overseas trips to battlefields where holy armies of crusading Christian knights had thrown back the Ottoman invaders of Eastern Europe. Fortified by his ever deeper immersion in anti-Muslim propaganda, Tarrant’s fanaticism gradually morphed into the cold-blooded mindset of the “Lone Wolf” terrorist. With great care he set about planning an “inspirational” massacre worthy of his hero, the Norwegian terrorist, Anders Breivik.

It is extremely difficult to see how any of the legislative changes proposed by Minister Faafoi could possibly have deflected Tarrant from his murderous mission.

The state can hardly prevent citizens (or Australian visitors) from watching the news, surfing the Internet, or taking books on Medieval History out of the local library. Nor can it criminalise the intellectual tradition bound up with what writers and political activists have, for more than century, characterised as the “Decline of the West”.

The idea of Western civilisation under pressure is related to, but not quite the same as, the “white supremacist” beliefs attributed to Tarrant. This twisted individual was radicalised by, of all things, his tragically “wrong” reading of Europe’s past. Is Minister Faafoi proposing to criminalise history?

It would also be interesting to know how the Minister plans to prevent people from spending their inheritance. Does he propose to confiscate all legacies lest they be put to terroristic purposes?

Nor would the criminalising of terrorist weapons and combat training have stopped Tarrant. He purchased his weapons lawfully, on the basis of a firearms licence issued to him by the Police. His “combat training” involved attending – alongside many other firearms enthusiasts – a rifle-range about twenty kilometres from his Dunedin residence. Does the Minister propose to shut down all gun-clubs and rifle-ranges?

Though bitterly contested by those firmly convinced that the Christchurch Mosque Shootings represent something more than the crime of a Lone Wolf terrorist, the Royal Commission’s finding that no state agency could have prevented Tarrant from carrying out his deadly intent – except by chance – is correct. He understood that, for his “mission” to succeed, he must do nothing to draw the attention of the authorities – and, God help us all, he didn’t.

Against such careful and pitiless premeditation, all the laws on our statute books are powerless. The state can punish Lone Wolves, but it cannot stop them. In attempting to minimise the terrorist threat, however, the state can eliminate our freedoms.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and Greymouth Star of Friday, 16 April 2021.

No Place for Democratic-Socialists in the Undemocratic Neoliberal Government of the Auckland Supercity.

A Thorn In Their Side: As Chair of the Auckland Regional Council, Mike Lee made sure Auckland’s municipal resources remained in Aucklanders’ hands. Not surprisingly the neoliberal powers-that-be (in both their centre-left and centre-right incarnations) hated this last truly effective standard-bearer for democratic-socialist values and policies.

MIKE LEE is the closest Auckland has come to a socialist leader since Mayor “Robbie” (Sir Dove Meyer Robinson) back in the 1970s. As Chair of the Auckland Regional Council Mike made sure Auckland’s municipal resources remained in Aucklanders’ hands. Not surprisingly the neoliberal powers-that-be (in both their centre-left and centre-right incarnations) hated him.

It is most unlikely that their opinion of Mike has changed – not since his recent revelation that, since its formation in 2010, the Auckland “Supercity” has transferred roughly $10 billion from the pockets of residents and ratepayers into the bank accounts of mostly foreign-owned corporations.

As Mike rightly points out, it was to facilitate just such a colossal transfer of wealth that the Supercity was created. Its whole structure was carefully designed to disconnect as far as possible the Council’s democratic components from its day-to-day decision-making machinery – the stuff that really matters. In particular, the pivotal “Council Controlled organisations” (CCO’s) were deliberately and elaborately insulated from “interference” by Auckland’s elected representatives.

This left the City’s twenty councillors with nothing much too do except read policy papers penned by city bureaucrats, attend interminable committee meetings, and bank the $100,000+ per annum they “earn” for representing their fellow citizens. No, that’s not a mistake. Winning a seat on Auckland’s “Governing Body” immediately puts you in the top 5-8 percent of income earners.

Is it any wonder – given the financial reward – that it is not really in the interests of Auckland city councillors to be seen to do either too much, or too little. Indeed, it could be argued that councillors’ re-election chances are enhanced if the voters struggle to recall them doing anything at all. Certainly, a propensity to do nothing is what the Supercity prizes most highly in its political leadership. Councillors are not supposed to do anything. Councillors are there to disguise that fact that the people who do everything haven’t been elected by anybody.

That the Supercity would effectively neuter local democracy was pointed out to Aucklanders at the time of its creation. It was calculated that people living in the Greater Auckland area would go from having roughly one councillor for every 15,000 residents to having one member of the “Governing Body” for every 70,000 residents! This did not, however, appear to bother Auckland voters unduly. Local government just wasn’t sexy. In fact, it was so unsexy that only around half of those eligible to vote in Supercity elections bothered to return their postal ballots. That their indifference might be facilitating a colossal transfer of public wealth into private hands gave them not the slightest pause. So long as their rates didn’t rise too sharply, they simply didn’t care.

Suggestions that the maintenance of infrastructure and the provision of services and amenities (water, waste disposal, public transport, libraries, art galleries and other cultural experiences) would all be improved by a radical democratisation of the Supercity were met with a near universal “meh”. So deeply ingrained is the idea that public ownership is always less effective and efficient than private provision, calls for more politicians, taking much more responsibility for the delivery of Supercity services, were dismissed as batty. When it comes to politicians, the broad public consensus is – the fewer the better.

Very few New Zealanders are aware that large cities overseas are governed by councils made up of 50, 60, sometimes as many as 100 councillors. Bodies of this size allow the people’s representatives to accept responsibilities that, in New Zealand, have long since been farmed out to local government bureaucracies. Overseas, powerful council committees are able to hold bureaucrats accountable for their failures. In cities like Paris and Berlin, complaining to your local councillor actually works. Try complaining to a member of the Governing Body of the Supercity and all you can be assured of is mounting frustration.

Unless, of course, you were lucky enough to know Mike Lee. Some years ago, my daughter had a problem with Auckland Transport. I immediately got in touch with Mike, at that time one of the two Councillor-Directors seated on the CCO’s Board. Within hours I had action – from the CEO, no less. When it came to effective and efficient, Mike was the man. I was bitterly disappointed, but not a bit surprised, that when Phil Goff was elected Mayor of the Supercity, one of his first acts was to remove Mike from the Auckland Transport Board of Directors.

Nor was I surprised when the supposedly “centre-left” City Vision fielded a candidate against Mike in the 2019 Supercity elections. The Labour/Green apparatchiks behind City Vision had grown tired of being shown what a real democratic-socialist looks like. He was defeated.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 15 April 2021.

Principled, Pragmatic AND Expedient? You Betcha! Replying To Paul Buchanan.

Predatory Morality: Is geopolitical consultant, Paul Buchanan, right? Does the rest of the world truly monitor New Zealand’s miniscule contribution to the international arms trade so closely? Are foreign chancelleries truly so insensitive to their own governments’ complicity in the world’s horrors that they expect all other sovereign states to be unblemished moral exemplars – especially New Zealand?

MUCH IS BEING MADE of the fact that New Zealand firms are exporting military equipment to unsavoury regimes. Geopolitical consultant, Paul Buchanan, reflected the views of many critical of New Zealand’s involvement in the international arms trade when he declared on his Kiwipolitico blog: “If NZ is to regain a semblance of integrity in diplomatic circles, its foreign policy decision-making matrix must change away from trade obsessed expediency and towards the principled but pragmatic orientation that grants it the independence that it claims to have.”

“Regain a semblance of integrity”? Seriously? Does the rest of the world truly monitor New Zealand’s miniscule contribution to the international arms trade so closely? Are foreign chancelleries truly so insensitive to their own governments’ complicity in the world’s horrors that they expect all other sovereign states to be unblemished moral exemplars?

Certainly, New Zealand’s arms exports are not going to be condemned by their principal recipients (which, if Buchanan is to be believed, includes the NATO countries and many of our most important regional allies). Nor should we tolerate the slightest reproof from the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (USA, China, Russia, United Kingdom, France) who also just happen to be the world’s five largest arms exporters. Unlikely, too, that this country will suffer criticism from the really “bad buggers” on our list of arms importers, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. They, at least, have no expectations of ever being regarded as unblemished moral exemplars. Murderous autocracy is its own reward.

So, if the foreign offices and state departments of the world are not going to waste a moment tut-tutting little New Zealand for daring to export military equipment to their friends, allies and leading petrochemical suppliers, then who is?

A couple of idealistic RNZ journalists, seemingly. Tipped-off, perhaps, by that outspoken anti-imperialist Valerie Morse, who has never seen a gun she didn’t abhor – unless it was in the hands of her wannabe freedom-fighter friends “exercising” in the Urewera bush.

Then there’s the Greens’ Golriz Ghahraman, who has been tut-tutting fit to beat the band. But, then, Ghahraman, if properly cross-examined, would probably admit to not wanting New Zealand to have an arms industry at all – or, for that matter, an army. In the eyes of the Greens, guns (and mortar sights) are inextricably bound up with imperialism, colonialism, white supremacy and all those other things deemed injurious to children, animals and other living things. Away with them!

One can only feel a pang of sympathy for the boffins in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT). On the receiving-end of a flurry of Official Information Act requests, they had little option but to reveal the extent to which New Zealand’s high-tech industries have been making the most of the world’s insatiable appetite for the weapons of war.

Promoting trade is, after all, MFAT’s job, and, to give them their due, they’re bloody good at it. Like the rest of the world’s diplomats and bureaucrats, ours tend to work on the principle that what is not expressly prohibited is tacitly permitted. Should someone have been looking over someone’s shoulder when the application for a permit to export military equipment to Saudi Arabia and the UAE came across their desk. Probably. Politicians hate surprises, so a good public servant anticipates trouble before it becomes a headline. Even so, no laws were broken.

Buchanan has posed the question: “Principled, pragmatic or expedient”. Once again, the proposition is a curious one. Is he arguing that it is possible to be both principled and pragmatic but not expedient? His positioning of the word “or” would suggest so. But to treat all expedient decisions as in some way morally objectionable is to render practical diplomacy impossible.

The conduct of sovereign states is almost always dictated by what their rulers deem expedient. Indeed, it is easier to mount a moral case for the most principled diplomacy being that which delivers the most expedient outcomes for all the states involved in an international dispute. Pragmatism, in this context, may be seen as the ability to obtain the maximum of one’s country’s objectives with the minimum of moral and material compromises.

Buchanan would also have New Zealand draw a clear distinction between the moral status of its Five Eyes partners – most especially his homeland, the United States – and other international actors. Included on his list of countries with whom it is unacceptable to seek expedient outcomes one finds not only Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Indonesia, but also the People’s Republic of China. The latter is castigated by Buchanan for systemically abusing human rights at home, denying individual and collective rights as a matter of course and treating minorities as if they were foreign enemies.

As someone who has worked closely with not only America’s soldiers, but also America’s diplomats, Buchanan must be aware of the speciousness of this line of argument. The great distinction between Chinese and American imperialism is that China, for its whole history, has been a contiguous land empire. Unlike the United States, which, upon subduing (and in many cases exterminating) all those who hindered its expansion across the North American continent, proceeded to extend its imperial reach across the entire planet, China has been content to remain within its historical borders. Ethnic and religious threats to China’s rulers have always been dealt with internally. Threats to America’s global hegemony, by contrast, almost always originate offshore. From Korea to Vietnam, Afghanistan to Iraq, the USA – no less than China – has abused human rights with wanton and murderous abandon.

Buchanan’s laborious description of the United States process of determining whether or not arms should be supplied to a particular regime would be funny if it was not for the sobering fact that this former participant in “the decision-making chain” for “US military sales and training, etc. to Latin American countries” clearly believes every word he is writing. As if the sickening history of Uncle Sam’s murder and mayhem in Latin America was perpetrated by some other power. “The process was slow and circuitous but in the end it was comprehensive and transparent.” Tell that to the victims of the Contras, Paul! Tell it to the Mayans!

Perhaps it is Buchanan’s own experiences in Latin America that cause him to treat expediency as a dirty word. Certainly, what New Zealand finds it expedient to do differs greatly from what the United States considers expedient. Buchanan knows full well that New Zealand’s size and relative powerlessness severely restricts the harm it can do. Ultimately, the well-being of New Zealanders depends upon their country’s trading relationships with the rest of the world. Maximising that trade is, accordingly, the principled, the pragmatic and the expedient thing to do.

Buchanan is the son of a brutal imperial power. New Zealand used to be the colony of one and must now do all within its power to avoid becoming the colony of another. It ill-behoves a former citizen of the United States (and a newly-minted citizen of New Zealand) to lecture his adopted country on the morality, or otherwise, of its foreign policy. The Kiwi, unlike the Bald Eagle, is not a bird of prey.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 13 April 2021.

A Break In The Wave: Giving Effect To The UN Declaration On The Rights Of Indigenous Peoples In Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Stormy Seas: Will Jacinda Ardern's Labour Government stand behind the revolutionary proposals contained in He Puapua – the 20-year plan devised by a government appointed working group to realise the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Aotearoa/New Zealand?

“GETTING AHEAD of the story” is one of the most important aspects of crisis management. As the PR mavens are fond of reminding their clients: “Explaining is losing.” If Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Government is not very careful, however, it will soon find itself having to explain why it has failed to reject out-of-hand an official document which calmly anticipates the end of democracy as most New Zealanders understand it.

The Report of the Working Group on a Plan to Realise the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Aotearoa/New Zealand is one of the most remarkable documents ever submitted to a Minister of the Crown. Set forth on its pages is a twenty-year plan to transform New Zealand from one of the world’s oldest and most respected continuous democracies into what would effectively be a political condominium, presided over by co-equal Maori and Non-Maori rulers. A state in which the economic and cultural power of non-indigenous New Zealanders would be much diminished, and the authority, wealth and influence of its indigenous people greatly expanded.

Entitled He Puapua, the report’s authors: Claire Charters, Kayla Kingdon-Bebb, Tamati Olsen, Waimirirangi Ormsby, Emily Owen, Judith Pryor, Jacinta Ruru, Naomi Solomon and Gary Williams; are refreshingly upfront about the scope of their endeavours. In an explanatory note on the report’s title they sate:

‘He puapua’ means ‘a break’, which usually refers to a break in the waves. Here, it refers to the breaking of the usual political and societal norms and approaches. We hope that the breaking of a wave will represent a breakthrough where Aotearoa’s constitution is rooted in te Tiriti o Waitangi and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.”

For most people “the breaking of the usual political and societal norms and approaches” is another way of describing revolutionary change. Certainly, it is difficult to interpret the Declaration Working Group’s (DWG) blueprint for change as anything less. It is highly unlikely, however, that when the Prime Minister spoke of “transformation”, she was referring to He Puapua’s proposed revolutionary reconstruction of the New Zealand state.

Even so, when the Minister of Maori Development, Nanaia Mahuta, presented her paper entitled DEVELOPING A PLAN ON NEW ZEALAND’s PROGRESS ON THE UNITED NATIONS DECLARATION ON THE RIGHTS OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES to the 18 March 2019 meeting of the Cabinet Māori Crown Relations: Te Arawhiti Committee, it is rather surprising that her colleagues were not temporarily deafened by political alarm bells going off in their heads.

Did none of those present think to parse out the potentially disastrous political consequences of commissioning a “Declaration plan” which, according to Mahuta, “could be a national plan of action, a strategy, or some other tool that provides a map that demonstrates and guides progress across government. I expect the Declaration plan to include time-bound, measurable actions that show how we are making a concerted effort towards achieving the objectives of the Declaration.”

Clearly not, because that is precisely what the DWG presented to the Minister seven months later. Te Puni Kokiri’s response to the document was certainly not discouraging: “The DWG provided the Minister with their final report, He Puapua, on 1 November 2019. The DWG’s report was highly insightful and provided a positive starting point to guide our thinking and will be used as part of the work programme to develop a Declaration plan.”

Somewhere, however, someone decided that, on reflection, it might be better to keep the content of He Puapua under wraps. It was not until October of 2020 that Mahuta consented to the release of a highly truncated version of the report.

Unsurprisingly, given the content of He Puapua, opponents of the now decades old “Maori Separatist” agenda were not slow to recognise its radical implications for the future of New Zealand’s constitutional arrangements. Former Act MP, and founder/director of the New Zealand Centre for Political Research, Muriel Newman, even managed to secure of copy of the whole 123-page document. 

Newman’s judgement of the report’s contents was savage:

In essence, once a Treaty-based constitution is in place and tikanga is embedded in the common law, under Vision 2040 Maori separatists will control the country.

This is not pie in the sky. It is already underway.

There has been no public debate about the Declaration, nor was it mentioned in the Labour Party’s election manifesto.

The only information freely available about this UN plan to replace New Zealand democracy with tribal rule – and enact the biggest overhaul of public affairs this country has ever seen – was a general announcement by Minister Mahuta in 2019, and now, a year and a half later, the partial publication of a document revealing Jacinda Ardern’s dangerous intentions.

Are the National Party and Act aware of the existence of He Puapua, its contents and recommendations? Maybe not. In October of 2020 both of the right-wing parties were in the midst of an election campaign and its aftermath. It is just possible that they missed the importance – and even the fact – of its release altogether.

Besides, as Newman points out, it was under the Prime Ministership of National’s John Key that New Zealand signed-on to the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Or, more precisely, it was Key who authorised the Maori Party co-leader, Pita Sharples to fly off secretly to New York in April 2010 to surprise the world with his country’s acceptance at the United Nations.

At the time this was considered something of a coup for both Sharples and Key. After all, the Labour leader, Helen Clark, had consistently refused to support the Declaration while she was prime minister. Clark, like Winston Peters, was convinced that its provisions would have dire consequences for the country’s democratic institutions. Peters’ summation was typically trenchant: “The United Nations Indigenous Peoples Declaration… is the final step on the road to separatism. This is the road to Zimbabwe.”

But if Newman is right, and National is steering clear of the whole issue out of embarrassment, that still leaves unexplained Act’s failure to respond to what can only be considered the most extraordinary political gift.

For a classical liberal party like Act, the idea that a fundamental transformation in the nation’s constitutional, legal, political, economic and cultural arrangements could be contemplated in secret, and enacted piecemeal, without the prior passage of an authorising referendum, piles anathema upon abomination.

Act’s leader, David Seymour, should be demanding from the present Minister of Maori Development a categorical rejection of He Puapua’s “roadmap”. At the very least he should be seeking a rock-solid commitment from Willie Jackson – and the Prime Minister – that the creation of a bi-cultural state, founded squarely upon the prevailing reading of te Tiriti o Waitangi and the provisions of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, will only proceed on the basis of a two-thirds referendum majority.

Will he, though? The possibility has to be conceded that Act – along with National – will dismiss He Puapua as just one more example of Te Puni Kokiri’s magical thinking. If this is, indeed, their response, then they will be vindicating the prediction made nearly 40 years ago by Donna Awarere, author of the ground-breaking series of articles published in Broadsheet under the title “Maori Sovereignty”:

The strength of white opposition will be allayed by the fact that Maori sovereignty will not be taken seriously. Absolute conviction in the superiority of white culture will not allow most white people to even consider the possibility.

The likely consequences for Labour, however, if “white people” are persuaded to take the ideas and plans contained in the DWG’s report seriously, are potentially so dire that the only realistic way to get ahead of this story is to kill it – and He Puapua – stone dead.


This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 12 April 2021.