After The Deluge.

On that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. And rain fell on the earth.

Genesis 6:11-12

THE TORRENTIAL DOWNPOURS that dumped a record-breaking amount of rain on Auckland this anniversary weekend will reoccur with ever-increasing frequency. The planet’s atmosphere is warming, and since warm air carries more moisture the likelihood of such extreme weather events is similarly increased. New Zealanders are no longer entitled to write-off the sort of deluge that flooded much of Auckland on 27-28 January 2023 as a one-in-500-year event.

Not that New Zealanders are particularly receptive to the dire warnings of climatologists and meteorologists. With considerable justification, they demand to know what they are supposed to do about it. How, precisely, are the human-beings at the end of “atmospheric rivers” carrying mind-boggling quantities of water supposed to prevent them from dropping it on their heads? The air and ocean currents which determine New Zealand’s climate are not subject to the will of its human population – or their leaders.

Indeed, for those Aucklanders who lived through the events of Friday and Saturday, the power and indifference of the natural world was terrifyingly reiterated. Ours is a proud and headstrong species, but in the face of what one Aucklander described as “apocalyptic” precipitation, our arrogance is swiftly beaten down. The images of men and women wading through floodwaters chest deep, their faces frozen in a rictus of fear and uncertainty were biblical in their eloquence.

On Friday and Saturday the natural world also plunged Auckland into a fast-moving political crisis. In extremis, people turn towards those in authority for guidance and reassurance. Sadly, “Authority’s” response left much to be desired.

Auckland’s Mayor, Wayne Brown, who should have been all over the mainstream and social media, dispensing such information as he possessed, publicly ordering all the relevant Auckland Council bodies into action, and gathering what intelligence he could concerning the intensity and destructiveness of the weather “bomb” that was devastating his city, instead maintained an frustrating radio silence.

Hour after hour of torrential rain went by. Streets became rivers. Homes were flooded. Parks became lakes. Cars were abandoned. People drowned. It was not until 10:17pm, however, that Mayor Brown declared a local state of emergency – thereby allowing the Central Government to swing into action on behalf of Auckland’s citizens.

Those who were following the unfolding tragedy on Twitter were soon made aware of the rising fury of those Auckland City Councillors struggling to assist the flood’s victims. Members of Parliament, too, some of them Ministers of the Crown, were equally aghast. The equivalent of cheers went up on Twitter when the Minister of Transport and MP for Mt Roskill, Michael Wood, peremptorily ordered Waka Kotahi to get its shut-down website up-and-running and to post transport-related up-dates every half-hour.

The Minister’s rage was entirely justified as first the state highways in and out of Auckland, and then the domestic and international terminals of Auckland Airport, succumbed to the floodwaters. The city’s bus fleet struggled to carry its passengers out of the rising waters. In some of them the murky-brown flood-water sloshed back and forth along the access-aisle as alarmed passengers willed the vehicle forward. Private motor cars were quickly overwhelmed and abandoned. Citizen journalists captured eerie images of cars floating: their lights still glowing in the failing light; their windscreen wipers still thrashing ineffectually against the unceasing rain.

Mayor Brown insists that he was guided by the advice of his “professionals”, and that the moment they asked him to declare a state of emergency, a state of emergency was declared. He has further avowed that, as the person responsible for organising the city-wide response to what was fast-becoming a full-scale disaster, he did not have the luxury of delivering hands-on assistance at the ward and community-board level. Someone had to remain at the calm centre of the crisis.

All true, but a leader must also be seen to lead. He must be there – or, at least, his voice and image must be there – consoling, inspiring, thanking and guiding his city’s people. But, on that frightening Friday night, Brown wasn’t there. Very few Aucklanders will be prepared to swear – hand-on-heart – that, in the Great Auckland Flood of 2023, their Mayor did all that was expected of him. The response of Christchurch’s Mayor, Bob Parker, when Mother Nature shook his city to ruins in 2011, offers the people of New Zealand a particularly telling contrast.

Certainly, the country’s new Prime Minister, Chris Hipkins, did not need to be told that his place was in front of the electorally crucial voters of the nation’s largest city. Hitching a ride on an RNZAF Hercules transport, and then on an air-force helicopter, Hipkins was given a birds-eye view of the damage. But, even as he said all the right things and made all the right promises, the Labour Leader must have been asking himself whether the New Zealand state was up to a challenge of this magnitude.

New Zealand’s cities were founded and grew to their present size in the bounteous years before global warming was recognised as a problem. Their waste and stormwater infrastructure simply wasn’t built to cope with the sort of deluge that descended on Auckland.

“Flooding happens when stormwater can’t drain away fast enough”, writes James Fenwick in an opinion piece posted on the Newsroom website. “So what we need are bigger drains, larger stormwater pipes and stormwater systems that can deal with such extremes.” Except, as Fenwick notes: “The country’s stormwater drain system was designed for the climate we used to have – 50 or more years ago. What we need is a stormwater system designed for the climate we have now, and the one we’ll have in 50 years from now.”

Hipkins despair at being forced to confront even bigger challenges in managing New Zealand’s three waters (drinking, waste and storm) than the ones already on his plate is readily imagined. Also gnawing away at his confidence – as well, no doubt, as Christopher Luxon’s – will be the frightening conclusion that the highly-urbanised nation that is New Zealand is going to have to be rebuilt from top to bottom. Or, failing that, left to simply decline and decay for want of the billions-upon-billions of dollars needed to re-fit it.

After the deluge, the questions around climate change become even starker. This country’s contribution to global warming is infinitesimal – barely two-tenths of one percent. We could revert to the Stone Age tomorrow and not only would the rest of the world fail to notice or appreciate New Zealand’s sacrifice, but also – and much more ominously – those devastating atmospheric rivers would not stop turning warm air into disasters.

It would appear that the choice between rolling-back global warming, and seeking to mitigate its worst effects, is being made for us.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 30 January 2023.

Jung At Heart.

The Clinical Magus: Of particular relevance to New Zealanders struggling to come to terms with the sudden departure of their prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, is Jung’s concept of the anima. Much more than what others have called “the feminine principle”, the anima is what the human male has made out of women. All women. From mothers and grandmothers, to sisters and cousins. From female friends and colleagues, to wives and lovers. From Nobel Prize-winners to porn stars. Sirens to soulmates. Jung’s anima is the distillation of every human female in which the human male invests his emotions.

CARL JUNG (1875-1961) was a magician masquerading as a psychoanalyst. His psychological theories were conjured out of myths and symbols, and he transmuted the human individual’s fraught journey from birth to death into the hero’s sacred quest for wholeness.

It’s easy to laugh at this little Swiss doctor now, but he developed his theories in a world that did, indeed, seem to have fallen under an evil spell. In the same Viennese streets where he and Sigmund Freud walked, sharing excitedly their ideas about the unconscious elements of the human personality, there also wandered the young Adolf Hitler.

This terrifying embodiment of Europe’s worst psychoses and obsessions (what Jung would later call “the shadow”) seems, in retrospect, to confirm Jung’s key insight that all of us inhabit curiously familiar stories, peopled by characters we have never met, but whom we recognise instantly. Humanity itself, Jung argued, possesses its own unconscious, within which move the archetypes we have collectively fashioned to confer order upon chaos – the characters we once called gods.

Of particular relevance to New Zealanders struggling to come to terms with the sudden departure of their prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, is Jung’s concept of the anima. Much more than what others have called “the feminine principle”, the anima is what the human male has made out of women. All women. From mothers and grandmothers, to sisters and cousins. From female friends and colleagues, to wives and lovers. From Nobel Prize-winners to porn stars. Sirens to soulmates. Jung’s anima is the distillation of every human female in which the human male invests his emotions.

Think about that for a moment. Scary, isn’t it? Because, obviously, not every female in which a male invests his emotions responds as anticipated or desired. The sum total of all these responses – good and bad – adds up to his anima, his unconscious formulation of what being female means.

What, then, does it say about New Zealand’s men and boys that so many of them were so eager to heap abuse upon New Zealand’s young female prime minister, Jacinda Ardern? Quite obviously, she presented a version of the feminine which in no way comported with the inner sheila of the average Kiwi bloke.

Viewed objectively, Jacinda Ardern was remarkably close to her own self-assessment: Kind, but strong. Empathetic, but decisive. Optimistic, but focused.

Since the archetypal leader is often represented as a kingly figure, Jacinda’s leadership says a great deal about the strength of her own animus – the human female’s unconscious formulation of what it means to be male. Her experience of maleness has clearly been sufficiently positive to produce a harmonious personal blending of both the masculine and the feminine. On the one hand, strong, decisive and focused. On the other, kind, empathetic and optimistic.

Such rare psychological harmony should evoke both confidence and admiration – and among most New Zealanders those were indeed the feelings Jacinda inspired. But, for a minority of New Zealanders the woman they listened to on the radio, watched on television, and read about in newspapers and magazines proved to be seriously psychologically jarring.

Called upon to respond to a woman in the top job, many New Zealand males betrayed a stunted and impoverished anima. Their unconscious formulation of the feminine left them utterly incapable of recognising anything at all positive in their country’s leader.

Jung might have surmised that their anima was the product of acutely damaging experiences of emotional and possibly physical abuse meted out by the females who dominated their early lives. Certainly, the psychological concept of projection would explain why so many New Zealand men were eager to describe their prime minister as something monstrous and evil. As a woman in charge she could not, in their unconscious minds, be anything else. Females with power were terrifying, and what human-beings fear, they hate.

Jacinda Ardern’s critics were not exclusively male, however, many New Zealand women joined in the abuse of the Prime Minister and her family. Observing a woman with power over them and their families, their reactions betrayed the impact of terrible experiences not dissimilar to those of abused males. They, too, projected outward the feelings they were too terrified to acknowledge in themselves.

And so the story ended as all Jung’s stories end, with the hero learning and leaving. We are saddened – but not surprised.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 27 January 2023.

After Ratana.

Smiling And Waiving A Golden Opportunity: Chris Hipkins knew that the day at Ratana would be Jacinda’s day – her final opportunity to bask in the unalloyed love and support of her followers. He simply could not afford to be seen to overshadow this last chance for his former boss to shine. National’s Christopher Luxon, however, was under no such obligation.
 

CHRIS HIPKINS found himself in an impossible situation yesterday (24/1/23). He had come to the tiny village of Ratana at the side of his Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern. At what would be her last official public engagement in that role, he could not possibly upstage her. His job was to smile and mouth platitudes. He was there to “introduce” himself to the assembled leaders of Maoridom and convince them that he will be a fitting replacement for the most accommodating prime minister Māori have ever had. He knew that this would be Jacinda’s day – her final opportunity to bask in the unalloyed love and support of her followers. He simply could not afford to be seen to overshadow this last chance for his former boss to shine.

The other Chris, however, National’s Christopher Luxon, was under no such obligation. He came to Ratana with a message to deliver. That message was not for the assembled Māori leaders, or, at least, not primarily for them. Luxon’s message was aimed squarely at all those Pakeha conservatives who have for many months been openly sceptical of National’s willingness to take a strong stand against Co-Governance, He Puapua and Three Waters. Ardern’s resignation and the uncontested election of Chris Hipkins to replace her had made the delivery of an unequivocal repudiation of all three of these racially-charged propositions a matter of urgency. Luxon and his advisers knew that if National didn’t stake out its position immediately, then the Hipkins-led Labour Party would beat them to the punch.

And Luxon did stake out a clear – or should that be clearer – position. His remarks concerning co-governance, recorded by RNZ-National’s reporters, left little room for misunderstanding:

I think it has been quite a divisive and immature conversation over recent years,” Luxon told the Ratana crowd, “and I personally think it’s because the government hasn’t been upfront or transparent with the New Zealand people about where it’s going and what it’s doing […..] We believe in a single coherent system – not one system for Māori and another system for non-Māori – for the delivery of public services. Things like Health, Education, and Justice, and critical infrastructure like Three Waters. It doesn’t mean that we don’t want Māori involved in decision-making and partnering with [non-]Māori, [but] we have a princip[led] objection because New Zealand has one government: it’s elected by all of us, it’s accountable to all of us, and its public services are available to anyone who needs them.

Clear enough for the Pakeha conservatives? Possibly. But, for many on the Right, National remains the party of John Key. The same John Key who secretly dispatched Te Pāti Māori’s Pita Sharples to the United Nations in New York to sign on behalf of all New Zealanders the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). The very same UNDRIP that Labour’s Helen Clark had refused to sign, because, with her much deeper understanding of the indigenous debate, she understood that the Declaration posed a direct threat to the constitutional integrity and sovereignty of the New Zealand state.

Those same conservative Pakeha also know that National is the party of Chris Finlayson who, while New Zealand’s Attorney-General and Treaty Settlements Minister, did more to hasten the fulfilment of the Māori nationalist agenda than any politician not named Mahuta or Jackson. The Right understands that an extremely radical reading of te Tiriti o Waitangi has already been deeply entrenched in the New Zealand Public Service (bolstered by legislatively enforceable Treaty principles) and is steadily transforming the way in which New Zealand is administered, as well as raising serious questions about the long-term future of private property rights.

There is also serious doubt on the right of New Zealand politics that Luxon and his advisers have even read – let alone understood – the He Puapua Report. Their fear is that, as the Māori nationalist, Donna Awatere, observed back in the early-1980s, Pakeha politicians will continue to remain blind to virtually every aspect of the nationalists’ project, and that this, the Pakeha’s racist refusal to take Māori sovereignty seriously, is what offers its promoters their best chance of success. Moreover, when two Labour prime ministers in a row have proved themselves incapable of answering basic questions about the content of te Tiriti o Waitangi, it’s difficult not to concede that Awatere and the conservatives have a point!

While it is certain that Luxon’s statements at Ratana constitute a direct conceptual challenge to the transformative constitutional project posited by the authors of He Puapua, what is much less certain is whether the National leader – unlike the leader of the Act Party, David Seymour – grasps just how much of the basic infrastructure of co-governance has already been constructed. Having drawn his line in the sand at Ratana, Luxon cannot now avoid arriving at the same political destination Seymour reached more than two years ago. The point where he realises that the progress towards a racially bifurcated, co-governed Aotearoa can only be halted by enshrining a conservative reading of te Tiriti in law, and by rooting-out with ruthless thoroughness all of the structures and procedures that have grown out of the radicals’ reading of te Tiriti’s meaning.

The daunting challenge confronting Chris Hipkins is how to regain the initiative from Luxon without locking himself into the same conservative logic currently drawing National and Act inexorably towards a maximalist, Pakeha-driven, revision of the Treaty’s constitutional, political and cultural significance. Between now and the October General Election, Hipkins and his party are going to have to learn to take Māori nationalism seriously. Because Luxon is right, to date Labour’s handling of this issue has been divisive and immature. The new prime minister could, therefore, do a lot worse than to sit down with an old one, Helen Clark, and learn a few home-truths about the deadly seriousness of the indigenous forces seeking to take their country back.

Hipkins’ first and most obvious move is to announce that the Three Waters legislation will be repealed, pending a broad and thorough examination of the project’s all-too-obvious political and economic shortcomings. Pushing the pause button on this extraordinarily unpopular project will be good, practical, “bread-and-butter” politics. Were the new prime minister to follow it up with a promise to initiate an equally broad and thorough democratic debate about the moral and practical status of the Tiriti/Treaty in twenty-first century New Zealand, the public response might be even more positive – especially if the right of all schools of historical and constitutional thought to freely contend with one another was guaranteed by Hipkins’ Government.

Jacinda Ardern’s greatest contribution to her country’s evolution was to reinvigorate the idea that politics should be about more than conventional administration and “responsible” financial management. She made us believe again that a person’s reach should exceed their grasp. “Jacinda” was a ray of sunlight through the drear neoliberal darkness. In that shaft of sunlight she showed us a new and wonderfully different nation. The task she has bequeathed to her successor – and her people – is to create the road that will take them there.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 26 January 2023.

Ominous Similarities.

Extremism Consumes Itself: The plot of “Act of Oblivion” concerns the relentless pursuit of the “regicides” Edward Whalley and William Goffe – two of the fifty-nine signatories to King Charles I’s death warrant. As with his many other works of historical fiction, Robert Harris’s novel brings to life a period that is at once starkly alien but also curiously familiar to our own.

ROBERT HARRIS’S LATEST NOVEL, “Act of Oblivion” is a welcome reminder of fanaticism’s terrifying aptitude for extinguishing human happiness. By recalling that period in English history when God was taken seriously enough to die and kill for, it also serves as a timely check upon our readiness to condemn the excesses of contemporary religious bigotry.

The plot of “Act of Oblivion” concerns the relentless pursuit of the “regicides” Edward Whalley and William Goffe – two of the fifty-nine signatories to King Charles I’s death warrant. As with his many other works of historical fiction, Harris’s novel brings to life a period that is at once starkly alien but also curiously familiar to our own.

Whalley and Goffe were colonels in Oliver Cromwell’s “New Model Army” – a fearsome body of righteous killers that might best be thought of as the Taliban in breastplates. Both men were what their contemporaries called “Puritans” – standard-bearers for a radical Protestantism that sought to strip away from Christian practice all oppressive hierarchies and unnecessary rituals, until only the purified encounter between God and the sinner remained.

Fanaticism was more-or-less built into Puritanism. So much religious falsity was said to have been interposed between the simple Christian seeker and his Bible, and for such base and nefarious purposes, that clearing the path to glory struck the Puritan-in-arms as an inescapable duty. Not the Church of England, not the Roman Catholic Church (whose doctrines and practices were thought to skulk beneath the Anglican Bishops’ surplices) not even the King of England, after years of civil war, could be permitted to go on corrupting and obstructing the path to salvation. Not if these New Model Puritans had any say in the matter.

And for the eleven years of the English republic – dubbed the “Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland” by Cromwell, its “Lord Protector” – they did have a say. In their zeal, the Puritans shut down the brothels and the theatres, and cut down the “pagan” maypoles standing erect over a multitude of English village greens. Not even Christmas – similarly denounced as an excuse for pagan revelry – escaped the attentions of the Puritan Parliament’s censorious legislators. Under the Commonwealth, celebrating Christmas became a crime.

Today, those evincing such unyielding determination to do good would be described as “Woke”. The comparison is far from original. No less a luminary than the English historian, David Starkey, has noted the rather ominous similarities between the Sixteenth Century’s Protestant Reformation (of which Puritanism was but one radical evolution) and the “Woke Revolution” of the Twenty-First.

Both movements were born out of game-changing technological innovation. The Protestants’ progenitor was the printing-press, the Woke communicate via the Internet. If the Reformation was the inevitable corollary to the emancipatory impulses of the Renaissance, then Wokeism is the heir of the counter-cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 70s.

In both cases, the movements’ intellectual trajectories trace a course from moderation to extremism; liberation to forced conversion. Once accepted as righteous and true by its followers, any system of religious, moral and/or political thought will be refined and intensified to the point where the idea of the rest of humanity continuing to languish in moral and political ignorance becomes intolerable. Those dwelling in darkness must be made to see the light. Those who wilfully reject the enlightenment of the righteous deserve only punishment.

The danger arises when religious and political fanaticism acquires arms. Christianity found the Emperor Constantine and his legions. The Puritans did not so much find as construct their New Model Army. The Bolsheviks enrolled the armed deserters fleeing the Russian Czar’s broken armies.

The Woke have yet to find their army – but they are close.

Like the English Puritans of the 1630s and 40s, the Woke of the 2020s are to be found embedded in the nation’s most powerful political, legal, commercial and intellectual institutions. They are determined and ingenious promoters of their cause, and a significant fraction of the means of communication is under their control. All they need is an antagonist to match the folly of Charles I – someone to deliver them the key to the arsenal.

But, as Robert Harris’s latest novel makes clear, fanaticism burns too brightly to long endure. It also conjures up its own nemesis. For every fanatical action, there is an equal and opposite fanatical reaction.

Extremism consumes itself.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 20 January 2023.

What Is Co-Governance?

Two Flags, Two Masters? Just as it required a full-scale military effort to destroy the first attempt at Māori self-government in the 1850s and 60s (an effort that divided Maoridom itself into supporters and opponents of the Crown) any second attempt to establish tino rangatiratanga, based on the confiscatory policies required to give it cultural and economic substance, could only be achieved militarily. That is to say, by fighting a racially-charged civil war.

CO-GOVERNANCE presents New Zealanders with the most acute constitutional challenge since the Land Wars of the 1860s. Paradoxically, it would be a considerably less vexing problem if our ancestors truly had been the colonialist monsters of contemporary “progressive” folklore. Had the defeated Māori tribes been driven onto and confined within “reservations” – as happened to the Native Americans of Canada and the United States – instituting co-governance in the 2020s would be a breeze. Likewise, if the National Government of 1990-1999 had opted to create the New Zealand equivalent of “Bantustans” (self-governing ethnic enclaves) instead of instituting the internationally celebrated Treaty Settlement Process.

The central difficulty of the Treaty Settlement Process, as so many Māori nationalists have pointed out, is that it cannot offer more than a fraction of a cent on the dollar in terms of the current value of the Māori lands alienated under the laws of successive settler governments. To recover these from their present owners would require the outlay of hundreds-of-billions of dollars, a sum well beyond the means of even the New Zealand State – let alone individual iwi.

And yet, as the Waitangi Tribunal’s recent finding in relation to the Ngapuhi rohe makes clear, the establishment of authentic rangatiratanga is virtually impossible without the land that gives chiefly authority its political heft. With all but a tiny fraction of New Zealand presently under the control of the New Zealand State, its Pakeha citizens, and a not insubstantial number of foreign owners, any discussion of co-governance is inevitably reduced to sterile arguments over Māori representation on city councils and other public bodies.

That’s why the true underlying agenda of those who preach the gospel of co-governance can only be the re-confiscation of the tribal territories lost since the Land Wars. This may sound far-fetched, but it is not impossible. As Māori discovered in the 1860s, and subsequent decades, all that is required to deprive a people of their lands, forests and fisheries is control of the legislative process, and the military force necessary to enforce the legislators’ will.

While Pakeha New Zealanders remained united in their resolve to construct a “Better Britain” on the lands confiscated and/or acquired (all too often by immoral means) from the country’s indigenous people, the notion of re-confiscation could be dismissed as an absurdity. But, if a substantial portion of the Pakeha population, most particularly those occupying the critical nodes of state power: the judiciary, the public service, academia, the state-owned news-media, and at least one of the two major political parties; were to become ideologically disposed to facilitate the compulsory restitution of confiscated Māori resources, then the idea would begin to sound a whole lot less far-fetched.

To see how it might be accomplished one has only to study the manner in which the government of the newly-declared People’s Republic of China secured effective control of the privately-owned elements of the Chinese economy. The Communist Party of China, in sole control of the nation’s legislative machinery, and assured of a compliant judiciary and civil service, simply required private concerns to make over an ever-larger fraction of their shareholding to the Chinese state. With Boards of Directors dominated by government appointees, and no prospect of ever recovering control of their enterprises, the “owners” reluctantly sold their remaining shares to the state (receiving only a risible fraction of their true worth). The smart capitalists, reading the writing on the wall, sold-up early and fled to Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and the United States. The one’s who hoped for the best, generally fared the worst.

With the news-media firmly under the Communist Party’s control, and the legal climate growing increasingly hostile to any citizen courageous enough to challenge the government’s policies, the transfer of private property into state hands was accomplished by the end of the 1950s – in less than a decade. It would have taken considerably longer if the People’s Liberation Army had not been standing behind the Communist Party’s legislators, civil servants and journalists. But, its willingness to apply military force to enforce the party’s will was never in doubt. In the words of the Chinese Communist leader, Mao Zedong: “All political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

How might a New Zealand parliament dominated by political parties favourably disposed towards co-governance set about transferring land held by private Pakeha/foreign interests to iwi authorities? One option might involve imposing all kinds of environmental and cultural obligations on landowners – obligations that could not be fulfilled without rendering the enterprise unprofitable. Crown purchase (at a fraction of the land’s true worth) would follow, allowing the state to amass a vast amount of additional  real-estate. This process would undoubtedly be speeded-up by the consequent catastrophic collapse in agricultural land prices, which only constant and massive Crown purchases could stem.

With most of New Zealand land now in the possession of the Crown, returning it to tangata whenua would be the obvious next step towards meaningful co-governance. The Waitangi Tribunal, or some other, similar, body could be tasked with delimiting Aotearoa’s iwi boundaries as they existed at the time of the Treaty’s signing in February 1840. (Given that many of these boundaries would have been extended, reduced, or eliminated altogether as a consequence of the Musket Wars of the 1820s and 30s, deciding who should get what would likely entail a fair amount of ‘robust’ negotiation!)

The critical question to be settled in order for this process to succeed is whether a pro-co-governance parliament could rely upon the Police and the NZ Defence Force to enforce its legislative will. That there would be considerable resistance to the government’s plans may be taken as given, with such resistance escalating to terrorism and a full-scale armed rebellion more than likely. With the outbreak of deadly race-based violence, the loyalties of the Police and the NZDF would be tested to destruction.

Just as it required a full-scale military effort to destroy the first attempt at Māori self-government in the 1850s and 60s (an effort that divided Maoridom itself into supporters and opponents of the Crown) any second attempt to establish rangatiratanga, based on the confiscatory policies required to give it cultural and economic substance, could only be achieved militarily. That is to say, by fighting a racially-charged civil war.

Some would argue it makes more sense to accept that the historical evolution of the nation of New Zealand has actually allowed Māori to enjoy the best of both worlds. Their language and culture endure alongside their iwi and hapu connections, all very much alive beneath the overlaid institutions of the settler state. 

That they are able to take full advantage of those institutions is due to the historical oddity of the colonists who created New Zealand not following the example of their white settler contemporaries and forcing the remnants of the indigenous tribes onto reservations – entities particularly suited to being “co-governed” in “partnership” with their conquerors. Instead, the Pakeha declared Māori to be full citizens, afforded them parliamentary representation, and laid the foundations of the bi-cultural society fast-emerging in Twenty-First Century Aotearoa-New Zealand.

If co-governance denotes a political system in which an indigenous people and the descendants of the settlers who joined them wrestle together with the legacies of colonisation – as free and equal citizens – then we already have it.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 17 January 2023.

Does Chris Hipkins Have The Spinal Steel To Force A Change In Labour’s Course?

A Different Kind Of Vibe: In the days and weeks ahead, as the Hipkins ministry takes shape, the only question that matters is whether New Zealand’s new prime minister possesses both the wisdom and the courage to correct his party’s currently suicidal political course. If Chris “Chippy” Hipkins is able to steer Labour into less contentious and more bounteous electoral waters, then Jacinda Ardern’s sacrifice will not have been in vain.

IT REMAINS to be seen whether Chris Hipkins can overcome the political contradictions which drove his predecessor from the prime-ministership. Jacinda Ardern resigned her office in recognition of her personal incapacity to confront and overcome the problems that were driving her government inexorably towards defeat. When she told New Zealand that she had “nothing left in the tank”, Ardern was courageously acknowledging that after five-and-a-half years of unrelenting crisis management, she simply could not summon the energy for the political fight required to save her government, her party, and, ultimately, her country.

In many respects Ardern was the author of her own misfortune. In dealing with core challenges confronting the New Zealand state – practically all of which are traceable to the consequences of colonisation – the former prime-minister had demonstrated both excessive cultural generosity and insufficient political realism.

Predictably, the resulting “revolution of rising expectations” so clearly evident among Māori, especially young Māori, has generated an equal and opposite political reaction among the Pakeha population – especially older Pakeha – which is driving the electorate sharply to the right. The prospect of arguing her caucus, her party, and a good chunk of her electoral base into abandoning Labour’s commitment to the radical decolonisation project of its Māori caucus was simply too big an ask for Ardern – so she quit.

A prime minister possessed of less “kindness” and goodwill would have coldly informed Labour’s Māori leadership from the get-go that their programme of constitutional transformation was much too broad and far too radical to impose upon an electorate insufficiently prepared for such a revolutionary “break in the wave” of New Zealand’s political evolution. Ardern should have put it bluntly to Willie Jackson and Nanaia Mahuta, that prior to any enduring legislative changes being attempted by her own, or any, government, the unavoidable philosophical, cultural, and practical political arguments would have to be won – decisively.

All-too-clearly, such an ultimatum was never put to Labour’s Māori caucus. Like so many well-educated and well-meaning Pakeha, Labour’s non-Māori MPs – led by Ardern – were unwilling to challenge the programme being promoted by their Māori colleagues. Fearful of the charge of racism, and mindful of the bitter recriminations that followed Helen Clark’s 2004 Foreshore & Seabed legislation, the Prime Minister and her caucus waved through policies that could only be described as revolutionary.

Except, of course, they were not described – not to the broader electorate. Mahuta commissioned the report that became known as He Puapua in so quiet a fashion that Labour’s NZ First coalition partner was unaware of its existence. The electorate was similarly kept in the dark concerning the document setting 6th February 2040 – the 200th anniversary of the signing of te Tiriti o Waitangi – as the date by which the transformation of New Zealand culturally, politically and economically was to be accomplished.

When, inevitably, the document was leaked, and the public acquired some inkling of what was being considered, Prime Minister Ardern was forced to deny unequivocally that the document in any way represented official government policy. By this stage, however, the electorate was growing sceptical.

That scepticism was not diminished when the full extent of Nanaia Mahuta’s “Three Waters” legislation became known. Putting to one side the bitter controversies arising out of the Labour Government’s handling of the Covid-19 Pandemic, no other government initiative has aroused so much public opposition and suspicion as “Three Waters”. Indeed, it has become a talisman for that part of the electorate which purports to feel the political ground shifting under its feet – even as its government lies, prevaricates, and at times appears to be led by the nose by those with the most to gain from the “Three Waters” legislation’s passage.

And still the case for co-governance, decolonisation and indigenisation is not made. The construction of an argument from first principles may indeed have been accomplished by the project’s Māori initiators, but, if it has, then it has been presented in the absence of Pakeha, a critical news media, and always behind firmly closed doors.

Moreover, it is not a case which the Māori Development Minister, Willie Jackson, is prepared to put in front of his Cabinet colleagues. He knows that, even among Pakeha as sympathetic as Labour’s, the arguments and recommendations contained therein simply would not fly. In recognition of their sheer unacceptability, Jackson has announced his determination to keep the revolutionaries’ interpretation of te Tiriti o Waitangi and its constitutional implications under wraps – at least until the general election is out of the way.

But it is precisely this sort of political cynicism that is fast eroding Labour’s support in the opinion polls. “Three Waters” may be the leading cause of voter disillusion, but it is merely emblematic of the voters’ growing unease that this government is hell-bent on doing things to them, rather than for them.

In considering Labour’s deteriorating electoral position, and its causes, over her summer break, all the while contending with the unrelenting torrents of misogynist and conspiracist hate pouring down upon her head from social media, Ardern correctly concluded that the task of righting Labour’s ship was beyond her powers. Without Winston Peters’ ability to stare down her Māori caucus, Ardern had conceded far too much ground to Jackson and Mahuta, more than she could hope to reclaim personally.

Boxed into a corner ideologically, electorally, and personally, Ardern rightly concluded that her best (and only sensible) move was to exit the game entirely. Only someone coming into the top job fresh, and unburdened by the concessions of five-and-a-half prime-ministerial years, could entertain the slightest hope of prevailing upon his colleagues to change course.

There is little doubt that Ardern’s successor, Chris (“Chippy”) Hipkins, has the necessary spinal steel to demand, and be given, a new set of political co-ordinates. On the vexed questions of co-governance, decolonisation and indigenisation, the new prime minister need not even repudiate the Māori caucus’s revolutionary ambitions, merely state the obvious truth that they have so-far failed to convince their fellow citizens that such radical constitutional changes are either necessary or desirable. In the same breath, he can then reassure the Pakeha electorate that Labour will never connive in the arbitrary imposition of a new, ethnically-bifurcated, constitution from above. To be accepted, constitutional changes must first be ratified, democratically, by all the people.

Were Hipkins to make this position clear to the Māori leaders gathered at Ratana – that they must win the debate for change before attempting to legislate their programme into being – a significant fraction of the Pakeha electorate, quite possibly a winning fraction, would be both relieved and reassured. As a consequence, both the National and Act parties would be forced to discard some pretty important face cards from what had been their very strong electoral hands.

In the days and weeks ahead, as the Hipkins ministry takes shape, the only question that matters is whether New Zealand’s new prime minister possesses both the wisdom and the courage to correct his party’s currently suicidal political course. If “Chippy” is able to steer Labour into less contentious and more bounteous electoral waters, then Jacinda Ardern’s sacrifice will not have been in vain.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 23 January 2023.

Jacinda Resigns.

An Astonishing Rapport: Jacinda Ardern's "Politics of Kindness" raised so many progressive possibilities. Her own tragedy, and New Zealand's, is that so few of them were realised.

MUCH WILL BE WRITTEN in the coming days about "The Ardern Years", some of it sympathetic and insightful, most of it spiteful and wrong.

For the moment, however, I shall limit my own response to these few observations:

No leader since Norman Kirk filled me with such powerful hopes for genuine change. In the first heady weeks of her leadership Jacinda was like the sun breaking through clouds heavy with rain. She exuded an astonishing sense of possibility that fired the imagination of millions of New Zealanders. Her elevation to Prime Minister, courtesy of Winston Peters, appeared to complete a political fairy-tale.

This, she told us, was a time for transformation. A time for the politics of kindness - and for action, too. On climate change, child poverty, homelessness. 

It was the best of times.

And even when the skies darkened, she continued to shine. Her wonderfully empathic "They are Us" on 15 March 2019. The miraculous reality - at least for a while - of her "Team of Five Million" during the initial Covid-19 lockdowns. When Jacinda allowed herself to be guided by her heart her decisions were politically faultless. It was only when she ignored her instincts and followed her head that the poor decisions began to multiply.

She never appeared to grasp that announcing policy is not the same as implementing it. Press releases do not build houses. Speeches do not end poverty. In the end, it was Jacinda's constant failure to deliver that made it impossible for her to go on.

If you say "Let's do this!", then, Dear God, you have to do it!

This response is exclusive to Bowalley Road.

Is The Prime Minister “Evil”?

She’s Such A Scream! The Prime Minister’s enemies, those who want us to hate her, suffer from the not insubstantial handicap of being more than a little hateful themselves. Rendered nonsensical by their unwavering belief in the most absurd conspiracy theories, and dangerous by their relentless peddling of fake news about the Covid-19 vaccines, they stand exposed to the accusation that they are all exceptionally dark right-wing pots to be calling Labour’s kettle black.

WHAT DOES IT SAY about the state of New Zealand politics that our prime minister is being branded as “evil”? “Nothing good” is the obvious, if insufficient, response. Calling another human-being evil signals that political discussion has veered away from the predictably ideological towards the dangerously metaphysical. Good and Evil are religious – not political – terms.

Escalating the depiction of one’s political opponents from the merely incompetent, simply ignorant and defensively dishonest, to the overtly mendacious, fundamentally corrupt and self-consciously immoral, makes politics, “the art of the possible”, impossible.

After all, competence can be acquired through experience; ignorance can be corrected through education; and the political consequences of dishonesty can be powerfully corrective. But, mendacity, corruption, and the deliberate choice of clearly immoral options, are failings beyond the remedial powers of most ordinary mortals.

I vividly recall watching the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, waxing eloquent on the evil character of his Russian enemy. Zelensky’s depiction of President Vladimir Putin made the Devil himself look like a rank amateur. It was only when the journalist interviewing Zelensky pointed out that if Putin really was as bad as he was saying, then compromise would be impossible. How does one negotiate with pure evil? The question pulled the Ukrainian president up short. If only for a moment, doubt took command of his features. Is it ever possible to make peace with the Devil?

That is the problem with terms like Good and Evil: they tend to shut down the possibility of compromise and negotiation. Indeed, they render compromise and negotiation morally unacceptable. The threat posed by the individuals and/or groups described as evil is transformed into something viscerally existential. If “they” are not overcome, then “we” will be. The only options become: Victory – or Death.

Those who choose to characterise Jacinda Ardern as evil do so with a similarly binary political objective. In the simplest terms, they are hoping to rule out all other political options except the decisive destruction of the Labour Government and its leader.

Certainly, they do not want all those New Zealanders tossing-up whether to cast another vote for Labour to say: “On the one hand, Jacinda and her government have been pretty hopeless at keeping their promises on climate change, child poverty and affordable housing; but, on the other hand, they did a great job keeping the country going under Covid.”

Nor are Jacinda’s foes keen for voters to compare New Zealand’s economic and social performance with those of other nations. Once people grasp the fact that their own country is economically, socially and culturally out-performing a great many of the wealthy nations against which we like to compare ourselves, the idea of returning Labour to power doesn’t seem quite so unthinkable after all.

Transforming Jacinda Ardern into a hateful caricature, and loading her with responsibility for all the nation’s woes, will also serve to distract the electorate from the straightforward and eminently measurable response of her government to the most pressing (and potentially the most politically determinative) “bread and butter” issues bound up with the steadily rising cost-of-living, ballooning mortgage repayments, and the ability of working people to ensure that their wages and salaries at least keep pace with inflation.

If the data emerging from the Treasury and the Reserve Bank over the next 11 months indicates that the Labour Government is making a reasonable fist of managing the economy in unusually trying times, then the Prime Minister will have realistic grounds for electoral optimism. Doubly so, if her Finance Minister, Grant Robertson, is able to announce changes to the tax regime that penalise the rich and reward the poor.

It should also be noted that the Prime Minister’s enemies, those who want us to hate her, suffer from the not insubstantial handicap of being more than a little hateful themselves. Rendered nonsensical by their unwavering belief in the most absurd conspiracy theories; and dangerous by their relentless peddling of fake news about the Covid-19 vaccines; they stand exposed to the accusation that they are all exceptionally dark right-wing pots to be calling Labour’s kettle black.

Should Jacinda Ardern re-fashion herself as a humble witness to her own and her government’s shortcomings, and commit herself to achieving a very small number of extremely useful things, then her enemies’ accusations of evil are most unlikely to stick.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 13 January 2023.

In Praise Of Individualism.

Me, Myself, Eye: The great irony of individualism is that the nearer humanity comes to the point where every person can make their own life, the more doubtful many intellectuals become of its merit. But, before embracing the moral oblivion of collective identity; and the strictures of tribal tradition, they should ask themselves this question: How long could I be happy in a house without windows, doors … or mirrors?

SURELY, the greatest creation of human civilisation is the human individual. To own one’s own life, freed from the unyielding obligations of family, tribe and nation, is a relatively new human experience. For most of human history, human experience has been overwhelmingly collective. For millennia, tradition has dictated practically every aspect of our lives. Our ways were expected to be the ways of our ancestors – and, if they weren’t, then the people who mattered would want to know why.

The people who mattered: emperors, kings, warlords, popes; they were the only people who could aspire to the luxury of individualism. Their power and their wealth provided them with the mental and physical space to conceive of themselves as unique beings in time. Beings whose features, words and deeds could live on long after they were dead.

The words of the mythical Irish hero, Cuchulainn, sum up the proposition neatly: “I care not if I live but a night and a day, so long as my deeds live after me.”

What was it, then, that allowed ordinary people to find the space and time to conceive of themselves as something more than someone’s son or daughter, a member of a tribe, the subject of a king? The answer is, of course, the city. From the earliest times, cities have served as the crucibles of individualism. They are also the birthplaces of the essential quality that makes selfhood possible: liberty.

Not by accident did the Middle Ages produce the saying: “City air makes you free.” If a serf was able to evade his obligations to his feudal lord by living within the boundaries of a town or city for a year and a day, then he was declared a free man. That freedom to make of oneself what one pleases is crucial. It is difficult to be an individual in chains.

Cities are also – and not surprisingly – the birthplaces of democracy. The sheer diversity that existed within a city’s walls: the vast number of tradespeople and specialists who lived there; and the markets which these successful individuals created, regulated and supplied; all were allergic to tyranny. It is difficult to make money with someone looking over your shoulder.

Indeed, economic historian, Jeremy Black, pondering why it was Great Britain rather than the larger and more prosperous France that kicked off the Industrial Revolution, contrasts the less centralised and more liberal government of the British Isles with the highly centralised and bureaucratic regime of the absolute Bourbon monarchs. To get a good idea financed and a working prototype designed and built in Great Britain was a matter of months, in France it could take years.

Capitalism, itself, represents the apotheosis of individualism. One has only to contemplate the extraordinarily eloquent photograph of the Victorian engineer, entrepreneur, and all-round industrial titan, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, to grasp the why and how of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerburg.

The individual as world-shaper: Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

But, the freedom to make a good idea pay must be buttressed by a great many other freedoms. The individual must be free to think, to speak, to write, and to publish her thoughts. She must be free to come together with like-minded individuals in pursuit of a common purpose. Most crucially, she must be free to participate in the making of the laws by which her life is both protected and constrained, and be confident that those laws will be applied, and enforced, without fear or favour – to everyone.

Cities, liberty, capitalism, liberal democracy, the Rule of Law: all of these have played a part in the emergence of the individual. Indeed, the history of the last three centuries has been the history of individualism’s relentless demographic expansion: from the rulers’ dreams of immortality; to the craftspeople and merchants who turned muck into brass; to the industrial workers who demanded, with unrelenting energy, a fair share of the wealth their own blood, toil, tears and sweat was creating.

The great irony of individualism is that the nearer humanity comes to the point where every person can make their own life, the more doubtful many intellectuals become of its merit. But, before embracing the moral oblivion of collective identity; and the strictures of tribal tradition, they should ask themselves this question:

How long could I be happy in a house without windows, doors … or mirrors?

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 6 January 2023.