By Any Other Name.

The Natural Choice: As a starter for ten percent of the Party Vote, “saving the planet” is a very respectable objective. Young voters, in particular, raised on the dire (if unheeded) warnings of climate scientists, and the irrefutable evidence of devastating weather events linked to global warming, vote Green. After all, what sort of person votes against a liveable future?

THE GREENS remain a persistent political puzzle. In spite of espousing ideas and promoting policies that would keep any other party well below the five percent MMP threshold, recent polling places the party between 12 and 14 percent. If replicated in a real election, that level of support would earn the Greens 16-18 seats, making them an indispensable player in any putative government of the Left.

Clearly, the Green brand is doing almost all of the party’s heavy political lifting. What New Zealand’s own Green Party is actually committed to achieving matters much less than what Green parties, as generally understood by the world’s voters, are assumed to be committed to achieving – the salvation of the planet.

As a starter for ten percent of the Party Vote, “saving the planet” is a very respectable objective. Young voters, in particular, raised on the dire (if unheeded) warnings of climate scientists, and the irrefutable evidence of devastating weather events linked to global warming, vote Green. After all, what sort of person votes against a liveable future?

Young voters are not, however, the Greens only source of electoral support. They can also rely upon a substantial number of older voters to tick the Greens’ box on the ballot paper. Some of these will be unreconstructed hippies, the New Zealanders who cut their political teeth on the Values Party back in the early-1970s, and who then fell into the Greens’ welcoming arms with huge relief in 1990, following six years of the apostate Labour Party’s “Rogernomics”.

No one grasped the power of the Green brand more firmly than Jim Anderton, whose uneasy coalition of free-market-unfriendly parties, the Alliance, would not have been electorally viable without the Greens’ participation, and did not long survive their departure. As a centre-left politician determined to bring Labour back to its social-democratic senses, Anderton was determined to provide the many thousands of disillusioned former-Labour-voters with a progressive alternative that was guaranteed to win seats and, thereby, to wield at least some measure of determinative power over policy.

The Alliance’s demise, in 2002, left only the Greens to supply this critical support to the Labour Party. Precisely how many Green voters were voting for the global Green movement’s core principles: Ecological Wisdom, Social Justice, Grassroots Democracy and Nonviolence; and how many were voting for the Greens to keep Labour honest; is difficult to calculate. Suffice to say, when Labour does well the Green vote tends to fall, only recovering when voter support for its progressive competitor declines.

Since breaking free of the Alliance in 1999 the Greens have never failed to crest the 5 percent MMP threshold. (Although, they have come perilously close to falling below it on a number of occasions.) A reasonable working assumption would be that; in a good election for the Greens the ratio of strategic left-wing voters to ideologically-committed Greens will be roughly 50/50; and, in a bad election, that ratio will skew sharply in favour of the true-believers.

What the Greens’ true-believers believe, however, has changed.

Like the Values Party which preceded it, the Green Party that entered Parliament in 1999, under the co-leadership of Jeanette Fitzsimons and Rod Donald, took pride in affirming its allegiance to empirical science. In conformity with the political practice of Green parties around the world, the New Zealand party drew a sharp distinction between the bought-and-paid-for “science” of the big corporations, and the findings of hero scientists who presented their findings to the world fearlessly and without regard to how many corporate toes were trampled on in the process.

This science-driven Green Party reached its apogee under Rod Donald’s successor, Russel Norman – now the Executive-Director of Greenpeace Aotearoa. Working alongside freshwater ecologist Dr Mike Joy – the very epitome of a fearless hero-scientist – Norman and the Greens waged an unrelenting war against “dirty dairying” and the pollution of New Zealand’s waterways.

The success of this environmentally-focused Green Party was reflected in the 11.06 percent share of the Party Vote it received, along with 14 parliamentary seats, in the 2011 General Election. (In the 2023 General Election the Greens received 11.60 percent of the Party Vote and 15 seats.)

More than a decade has passed since the Greens campaigned as an unequivocally environmentalist party. Along with virtually every other element of the New Zealand Left, the Greens have embraced what their conservative opponents delight in castigating as the politics of “wokeness”.

In less pejorative terms, the Greens’ re-orientation involves the forefronting of issues that, while always present in the party’s policy mix, were hitherto given less emphasis. The Greens’ straightforward recognition and celebration of te Tiriti o Waitangi, for example, is now couched in the uncompromising vocabulary of decolonisation and indigenisation. Simple support for trans-gender New Zealanders has morphed into the aggressive assertion and enforcement of radical trans-gender ideology. Any external and/or internal criticism of these developments is condemned by the party as “hate speech”. Freedom of expression is no longer an unchallengeable aspect of “grassroots democracy”, or, as the New Zealand Greens have re-named it, “appropriate decision-making”.

A sense of this change of tone in the Greens is readily apparent in the most recent Green Party policy document. Ostensibly a presentation of the party’s latest thinking on how best to reduce greenhouse emissions, He Ara Anamata, contains a great deal more than the promptings of environmental science.

“For generations,” writes Green Co-leader Chloe Swarbrick in her introduction, “extractive systems have treated the natural world as a resource to exploit, without regard for its limits or the intricate relationships that sustain life.”

Similar sentiments were expressed 25 years ago. It is, however, doubtful whether Swarbrick’s subsidiary claims would have been advanced so forcefully:

“Colonisation has done the same to people and cultures. It has severed connections between tangata whenua and their whenua, prioritising profit over protection, and imposing systems that strip away self-determination and reciprocity. The impacts of this legacy persist, deepening inequalities and undermining resilience.”

Certainly, the expression of unabashed hostility towards capitalism is a more recent rhetorical trend:

“These inequalities have their deep roots in violent land and resource theft of iwi Māori. Capitalism – this current insatiable, unsustainable economic system – requires colonisation and the constant assimilation of new frontiers to exploit and extract from.”

That the above is not simply the ideology of the Greens’ firebrand leader is made clear in the body of the policy document. Te Tiriti’s role in reducing greenhouse emissions will, if the Greens have their way, involve: “An equitable transition, developed by Māori and the Crown [which] will actively prioritise te iwi Māori and the Māori economy.”

Would any other political party (apart from Te Pāti Māori) that so openly attacked capitalism, promised to advance the interests of indigenous citizens ahead of later arrivals, and announced its intention to advance the entire population, whether it likes it or not, towards “[a]n economy based on climate justice [with] policies that are underpinned by Te Tiriti, [and supported by] circular systems, renewable energies, and just transitions for workers” be given such a free pass?

Another expression which encompasses the notion of “circular systems” is “autarky”. That history records a strong association between authoritarian regimes and autarky is probably worth remembering. So, too, the enormous difference between “just transitions” arranged for workers, and the securing of economic and social justice by workers.

But that’s the great advantage of having a brand as immune to critical examination as that of the Greens. Try calling anti-capitalism, ethno-nationalism, statist imposition of societal priorities, and a barely disguised disdain for the principles of democracy, by any other name – and see if it smells as sweet.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 9 December 2024.

Christmas Gifts: Ageing Boomers, Laurie & Les, Talk Politics.

“Like you said, I’m an unreconstructed socialist. Everybody deserves to get something for Christmas.”

“ONE OF THOSE had better be for me!” Hannah grinned, fascinated, as Laurie made his way, gingerly, to the bar, his arms full of gift-wrapped packages.

“Of course!”, beamed Laurie. Depositing his armful on the bar-top and selecting with a flourish the smallest of the packages. “Just a little token of my appreciation for your patience and tolerance over the past twelve months. I know Les and I aren’t the easiest of your customers.”

Hannah blushed in spite of herself, unwrapping Laurie’s gift with exaggerated care.

“I’ve spent the better part of 40 years living with Chanel No. 5, Hannah, so please tell me I’ve chosen correctly.”

“Oh, Laurie, of course you have! I don’t know what to say except, thank you. This is just so sweet.”

“Merry Christmas, Hannah.” Now it was Laurie’s turn to blush. “I’ll join that old reprobate over in the corner now, if you would be so kind as to pour us each pint of your best ale.”

“Of course. On the House. Go on – I’ll bring them over.”

Les frowned ferociously as his friend laid his Christmas pile before him.

“Bloody-hell, Laurie, why did you have to do that? Now I’ll have to get her something. Seriously, man, you’ve got more money than sense!”

“She’s a very good bar manager, Les. Don’t be such a tight-fisted old Scrooge.”

“Bah! Humbug! I can’t help it, Laurie. I hate Christmas.”

“A socialist like you? I thought you believed in handing out goodies to all and sundry, regardless of whether they deserved them or not.”

“Shush!”, hissed Les. “Here’s Hannah with our ale.”

“Here we are, gentlemen. Not a gift to match those of my two favourite Boomers. But it’ll have to do for now.”

“You old fraud!”, whispered Laurie, as Hannah returned to the bar. “Cracking on you hadn’t bought her a gift. I wonder about you sometimes, I really do!”

“No need. Like you said, I’m an unreconstructed socialist. Everybody deserves to get something for Christmas.”

“Even politicians?”

“Especially politicians!”

“So, what would you give the Prime Minister for Christmas?”

“Christopher Luxon? If I could, I’d give him what the German’s call fingerspitzengefühl.”

“Finger-what?”

“Fingerspitzengefühl. The literal translation is ‘fingertips feeling’. By which the Germans mean a politician with an instinctive ability to respond to any given situation appropriately, tactfully, and, hopefully, with lashings of style and flair.”

“Not qualities we generally associate with Christopher Luxon.”

“No.”

“And Chris Hipkins? What would you give him for Christmas?”

“A working memory might be a useful gift. In his speech to Labour’s annual conference on Sunday he paid the usual homage to the great Labour prime ministers of the past. He began with Mickey Savage, moved on to Peter Fraser, then to Norman Kirk. So far so good, you might say, even if he’d missed out poor old Walter Nash. His next pick, however, was Helen Clark. Come on, Laurie, what’s wrong with Chippie’s portrait gallery?”

“Ummm. What happened to David Lange?”

“Damn good question, Laurie! It would appear that the entire Fourth Labour Government has disappeared down the Memory Hole. And why not? Accepting that Lange changed New Zealand every bit as much as Savage, Fraser, and Kirk – and a great deal more than Clark – would mean that Chippie might have to come to terms with the fact that while he and his mates are happy to celebrate their democratic socialist predecessors, they’re completely unwilling to embrace their policies.”

“Like Basil Fawlty not mentioning the war?”

“Exactly! Neoliberalism has become the ideology that dare not speak its name.”

“Unlike ‘Decolonisation’.

“Indeed. But you know why that is, don’t you?”

“Wokeness on steroids?”

“No, no, no, Laurie! It’s because Chippie owes Willie Jackson and his Māori Caucus big time – and vice versa. Willie’s got Chippie’s back – ably assisted, it must be said, by Labour’s Pasifika MPs. Without the support of the Māori and Pasifika caucuses, Chippie would be dog-tucker. It’s quid pro quo, Laurie. Quid pro quo. Chippie stands four-square behind te Tiriti o Waitangi, decolonisation and indigenisation, and the Māori Caucus stands four-square behind Chippie. Throw in his deputy, Carmel Sepuloni, and his Finance Spokesperson, Barbara Edmond, and Chippie can appoint Keiran McAnulty Campaign Chairman in perfect safety.”

“Heh! Because when Labour loses in ’26, he’ll be blamed!”

Exactly! Kieran’s the gift that keeps on giving!”

This short story was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 5 December 2024.

Handling Democracy.

String-Pulling in the Dark: For the democratic process to be meaningful it must also be public. 

WITH TRUST AND CONFIDENCE in New Zealand’s politicians and journalists steadily declining, restoring those virtues poses a daunting challenge. Just how daunting is made clear by comparing the way politicians and journalists treated New Zealanders fifty years ago with the way they handle them today.

The use of the word “handle” is deliberate. The way people are treated cannot be separated, conceptually, from the idea of accountability. Treat people well, and approbation generally follows; treat them badly, and condemnation is to be expected. Likewise, the idea of “handling” people cannot escape its negative associations with manipulation and cynicism. Nobody likes being “handled”.

How, then, were New Zealanders treated by their politicians and journalists in 1974? Given that the weekend just passed featured the Annual Conference of the New Zealand Labour Party (what? really? you didn’t notice?) perhaps the best place to start is with the way these events were covered fifty years ago.

Though younger New Zealanders will struggle to credit this, the annual conferences of the major parties were deemed sufficiently important for the state-owned television network to not only make them lead item on the nightly news bulletins, but also to produce special conference programmes for broadcast later in the evening. Over three consecutive nights, interested citizens could watch between 15-20 minutes of conference coverage – roughly an hour in total – from which to gauge the temper and condition of the political parties aspiring to govern them.

The nation’s newspapers were no less seized of the importance of reporting the major parties’ annual conferences thoroughly. Detailed coverage of major policy debates, including lengthy quotes from MPs’ and conference delegates’ speeches, was expected. And, since the job of covering politics fell to a small clutch of senior, highly-experienced journalists, their analysis of events, on and off the conference floor, was eagerly anticipated and consumed by interested readers.

Even 40 years ago, it still made sense for Labour Leader David Lange to quip that as PM he was required to satisfy the “Three Dicks” – The Dominion’s Richard Long, TVNZ’s Richard Harman, and Radio New Zealand’s Richard Griffin.

It is sobering to recall the respect accorded to the democratic ideal by the politicians and journalists of that now distant era. The idea of keeping the news media away from all but the most carefully stage-managed, set-piece, events – like the Leader’s speech – would have struck the politicians of that era as outrageous.

It was a simple matter of quid-pro-quo. If political parties expected to govern the country, then they were morally obliged to invite the country to observe and judge their deliberations. If that entailed party conference delegates revealing sharp divisions over the wisdom of a particular policy, then, so-be-it. That’s what politics is about.

Such close coverage had another side-effect. It allowed the public to catch its first glimpse of up-and-coming political talent. A delegate capable of delivering a memorable line, or telling a genuinely funny political joke, was someone who would be talked about the next day by thousands of his or her fellow Kiwis. They instantly became somebody party bosses and journalists, alike, needed to keep an eye on.

On all sides, fifty years ago, there was respect. Respect for the people who cared enough to participate in mass political organisations. Respect for the journalists who bore witness to the cut-and-thrust of real political debates. Respect for the entire democratic process which, to be meaningful also has to be public.

The contrast with the coverage of Labour’s 2024 annual conference could hardly be more stark. A minute or two of coverage on the six o’clock news bulletin was all the citizens of New Zealand were deemed fit to bear. Inevitably, everything was about the party leader, Chris Hipkins. How could it not be? The media were not encouraged to cover anybody other than “Chippie” and his allies.

Predictably, the key debate of the Conference, over tax policy, was held behind closed doors. No chance, then, for the public to gain some understanding of the mood of the party’s rank-and-file members. No chance of hearing an arresting flourish of rhetoric, or the sort of wit that bears repeating to friends and colleagues the following day. No chance, indeed, of encountering anything that hasn’t been pre-approved by the comms team well ahead of time.

Not that the comms team got everything right. Chippie’s Friday-night welcome to delegates included the line: “[I]n the true tradition of the Labour movement, we come together one year on not to mourn, but to organise.”

Now, any student of labour history will recognise that reference. The last words of the militant American trade union organiser and balladeer, Joe Hill, convicted on a trumped-up murder charge and executed in 1915 by a Utah firing squad, were: “Don’t mourn – organise!”

The risk, of course, was that anybody who recognised Joe Hill’s last words might take strong exception to Chris Hipkins comparing Labour’s well-deserved thrashing in the 2023 General Election, with the US copper bosses’ judicial murder of the Industrial Workers of the World’s (also known as the “Wobblies”) most beloved activist. Not that the risk was very high. Say “Wobbly” to the average Labour staffer of 2024 and they’ll assume you’re referring to jelly – or the Labour caucus.

Oh, for the days when there were political editors who understood what they were hearing, and recognised what they were looking at.

Willie Jackson’s co-starring role at this year’s Labour conference, for example, was decidedly odd. With a third of Labour’s voters supporting David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill, bringing out the legislation’s most truculent opponent should probably have struck at least some in the Press Gallery as an uncharacteristically bold move on the part of Labour’s apparatchiks.

Then again, Hipkins’ political survival resting squarely on the shoulders of Jackson and his Māori Caucus may be old news to the Press Gallery. Such a shame they have yet to share this crucial piece of political intelligence with the rest of us. It does, however, explain why Labour’s leadership has chosen te Tiriti as the hill upon which the party is ready to die – a second time.

Never mind, the comms team had carefully pre-tested a handful of bright shiny promises to distract the punters: Dunedin Hospital Rebuild Reaffirmed. Inter-Island Ferries Replaced as Planned. Labour will say ‘No’ to AUKUS. Got to make this “Coalition of Chaos” a one-term government!

It is here that the most important difference between 2024 and 1974 becomes clear. Fifty years ago, keeping democracy healthy was the No. 1 priority of politicians and journalists. Both knew the importance of allowing the public to observe what was happening in the nation’s most important political parties. How could voters deliver a credible electoral judgement if the doors were shut in the faces of their proxies – and the news media accepted such exclusion as fair and reasonable?

It is only when the democratic process is perceived by both politicians and journalists as a “deplorable” obstacle to the safe delivery of the political, social, economic and cultural outcomes they jointly favour, that treating their fellow citizens like mushrooms is considered acceptable. Only then does the need to “handle” New Zealanders become obvious.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 2 December 2024.

Sabre-Rattling.

Putin’s Thunderbolts: What message was the devastating arrival of the Russian Federation’s nuclear-defanged MIRVs supposed to send? And how should the government of far-away New Zealand respond?

THE IMAGES BROADCAST ON CNN were terrifying. Out of a glowing circle of dim light, multiple bolts of fire, moving at astonishing speed, burst from the lowering clouds and, in a thundering series of shattering explosions, struck the Ukrainian city of Dnipro.

It was a sight very few people, other than the weapons-scientists of the Cold War superpowers, had ever witnessed. Simply put, the arrival of MIRVs – Multiple Independently-targeted Re-entry Vehicles – was never intended to leave any witnesses.

How so? Because, at the tip of each independently-targeted re-entry vehicle was a nuclear warhead. Wherever they landed, destruction would be absolute.

Delivered by an ICBM – Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile – MIRVs were the ultimate doomsday device. Travelling at hypersonic speed, impossible to interdict (notwithstanding the claims of President Ronald Reagan’s notorious “Star Wars” programme) the MIRV innovation represented the apotheosis of the MAD – Mutual and Assured Destruction – doctrine. ICBM-delivered MIRVs were never supposed to be deployed, because their deployment signalled the imminent demise of human civilisation.

The man who ordered the strike on Dnipro, President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin, has told the world that what it witnessed was a new weapon: hypersonic, deadly-accurate, and devastating.

He should not be believed.

Russia has been firing its “new” hypersonic ballistic missiles at Ukraine for more than two years. Never before, however, has the launch of such missiles been preceded by a “heads-up” call to NORAD – the North American Aerospace Defence Command. Russia’s notification was necessary because NORAD’s satellite surveillance system is well aware of the difference between the “signature” of a hypersonic missile-launch, and that of an ICBM. Without the heads-up, NORAD would have had to treat the ICBM launch as the commencement of a nuclear attack.

Putin and his military commanders are not yet ready to initiate a countdown to Armageddon. So, what were they doing? What message was the devastating arrival of all those nuclear-defanged MIRVs supposed to send? And how should the government of far-away New Zealand respond?

Part of the answer to that question was supplied in the simultaneous confirmation of the Russian Federation’s latest protocols relating to the use of nuclear weapons. Whereas, in the past, the Federation declared its willingness to use nuclear weapons only in response to an attack using nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction “when the very existence of the state is put under threat.”

The Federation’s new nuclear war-fighting doctrine represents a significant lowering of that threshold. The deployment of nuclear weapons may now be contemplated in circumstances where military aggression by a non-nuclear state, acting “with the participation or support of a nuclear state” (a clear reference to Ukraine) threatens to inflict an unacceptable degree of devastation upon the people and infrastructure of the Russian Federation, and/or that of its close ally, Belarus.

Unsurprisingly, the Prime Minister of Poland, Donald Tusk, has expressed his alarm at this latest Russian attempt to pressure the USA and its Nato allies into forcing the Ukrainian government to suspend its recently-sanctioned deployment and use of American and British long-range ballistic missiles against targets hundreds of kilometres inside the Russian Federation’s borders.

On Friday, 22 November 2024, Tusk warned that: “The last few dozen hours have shown that the threat is serious and real when it comes to global conflict.” New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, and its Foreign Minister, Winston Peters, have yet to offer a substantive response to Russia’s terrifying demonstration of the MIRVs’ destructive potential.

New Zealand investors, by contrast, appear to be in exuberant spirits. While bourses across the European Union wobbled uneasily, the NZX50 closed out the trading week with a 2 percent surge to 13,017. Either the prospect of global conflict does not bother Kiwi investors, or they have already filed Russia’s threats under “sabre-rattling”.

Russia’s use of an ICBM equipped with MIRVs is not, however, an excuse for either indifference or exuberance. Taken together, the Dnipro attack and the changes to Russia’s nuclear doctrine are nothing more nor less than a direct threat to Ukraine, the USA, Nato, and the rest of the world’s free peoples – including our own.

Narrowly justifiable when issued in retaliation for an unprovoked nuclear attack, the threatened use of nuclear weapons is completely indefensible in the context of Ukraine’s conventional defensive response to the Russian Federation’s illegal invasion of its sovereign territory in February 2022. That Nato declined to offer a more robust response to Putin’s nuclear sabre-rattling of more than 1,000 days ago can only, with the benefit of hindsight, be viewed as a dangerous dereliction of its duty to protect Europe and the wider world.

That New Zealand has been content, ever since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, to take cover behind the broad shoulders of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia, is also a kind of dereliction.

Since 1985, New Zealand has proudly declared itself nuclear-free, incurring thereby the profound disapproval – bordering on the wrath – of our traditional Anglophone allies. Internationally, successive New Zealand governments have advocated strongly for both nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear disarmament. In doing so, we have acted in accordance with the argument advanced by David Lange during the famous Oxford Union debate of 1 March 1985:

The fact is that Europe and the United States are ringed about with nuclear weapons, and your people have never been more at risk. There is simply only one thing more terrifying than nuclear weapons pointed in your direction and that is nuclear weapons pointed in your enemy’s direction: the outcome of their use would be the same in either case, and that is the annihilation of you and all of us. That is a defence which is no defence; it is a defence which disturbs far more than it reassures. The intention of those who for honourable motives use nuclear weapons to deter is to enhance security. Notwithstanding that intention, they succeed only in enhancing insecurity. Because the machine has perverted the motive.

This country’s obligation to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Ukraine is all the greater because the Ukrainians belong to that tragically small number of peoples who possessed nuclear weapons and gave them up.

In the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, the newly independent state of Ukraine was prevailed upon by the US and its allies to surrender its nuclear arsenal. In return, the United States, alongside the newly-minted Russian Federation, undertook to preserve and defend Ukraine’s territorial integrity – by force if necessary.

New Zealand has singularly failed to draw the correct lesson from Ukraine’s fate. We have cosied-up to our Five Eyes partners in the belief that, as a tiny country, we stand in need of large and powerful friends. But where were Ukraine’s large and powerful friends when she needed them? Tragically, they were in the same place they were in when the men and women (especially the women) of Afghanistan needed them.

If the invasion of a strategically-located European nation, a nation the United States had solemnly promised to defend, was not enough to persuade Uncle Sam to lock-and-load, then what possible reason could New Zealand possess for expecting him to lock-and-load on its behalf?

At the very most we might anticipate Uncle Sam being willing to arm us, and then watch us fight to the last New Zealander. Just as he was willing to (under)arm Ukraine and watch it fight to the last Ukrainian.

Putin is rattling his nuclear sabre in its scabbard for the very simple reason that, to date, it has worked.

Having staged aggressive manoeuvres on Ukraine’s borders for weeks prior to the February 2022 invasion, the Russian President had observed no instantaneous and unreserved mobilisation of Nato armies to the borders of Russia and Belarus; heard no announcement from the White House that America intended to honour its guarantee to defend Ukraine’s territorial integrity, and expected the Russian Federation to do the same; and observed no commitment on the part of the smaller members of the United Nations (which New Zealand could have led) to augment, as far as they were able, Ukraine’s right to self-defence.

All those measures, all those declarations, may not have been as terrifying as Putin’s demonstration of what a nuclear attack looks like; but every lesson to be drawn from the Russian bully’s career points to them being terrifying enough.

We can only hope that Donald Trump, soon to inherit America’s sabre – and its scabbard – is learning how to rattle it like mad.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 25 November 2024.

No Cheers For Democracy.

Sic’em! The silver-tongued demagogue whips up the impoverished masses against those deemed responsible for both the nation’s decline and their own immiseration. He then proceeds to direct his mesmerised followers against a succession of terrified scapegoats, with results that are neither just nor pretty. Out of the ensuing chaos, demagoguery gives way to tyranny, and democracy is finally extinguished.

HOW WILL YOUNG AMERICAN PROGRESSIVES, after registering painfully the second coming of Donald Trump, assess the value of democracy? The political choices of more than half their fellow citizens have dashed their hopes in ways that a great many of them will find it impossible to forget – or forgive. They will ask themselves: “Can progressive ideas and policies ever endure under this system?” Many will be sorely tempted to answer: “No.” Some will give up on politics and progressivism altogether. Others, taking in the new political order through narrowed eyes, will give up on democracy itself.

For most of the post-war period, in the United States and across the Western World, democracy has been celebrated as an unequivocally good thing. This is hardly surprising, given the ghastly nature of the political ideology that the democratic nations of the West were required to defeat in the Second World War.

And not just the West. Even the totalitarian communist regime of Joseph Stalin felt obliged to at least pretend to be fighting for the American President, Franklin Roosevelt’s, “Four Freedoms”.

The “United Nations” (as Adolf Hitler’s enemies described themselves) promised an exhausted and traumatised humanity that the post-fascist world would be one in which there was Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear. As depicted by the American artist, Norman Rockwell, this new world of freedom promised to make all the wartime sacrifices worthwhile.

In 1940, Britain’s darkest hour, Winston Churchill prophesied that the ultimate defeat of Nazi tyranny would allow the life of the world to move out of peril and into “broad sunlit uplands”. Even if the British Empire, which Churchill loved so dearly, and defended so doggedly, would not long survive its epic victory over the Third Reich, this last grand gesture of democratic defiance was, indeed, its “finest hour”. In the words of former Oxford Professor Nigel Biggar: “There are worse epitaphs than: ‘Died fighting fascism’.”

All of which explains why democracy, and the freedoms it enshrined, had, by 1945, become the desideratum of every existing and aspiring nation-state. Everyone valued it. Everyone wanted it. Everyone defended it – at least in public. For those experienced in the ways of power, however, democracy has always been regarded as an inherently volatile, and potentially highly dangerous, political system.

To remain safe and stable, democracy has to be accompanied by a substantial degree of social and economic equality, backed by a solid political consensus in favour of preserving and, where possible, increasing that equality.

For those generations unlucky enough to have been born too late to enjoy their benefits, the institutions and policies of these post-war “social-democratic” societies must seem quite fantastical. What must be understood, however, is that they were constructed to reward and absorb the millions of young men returning from the War with expectations of the peace that could not safely be denied. Highly trained and experienced in the use of weapons, and imbued with the combat virtues of solidarity and comradeship, these were not the sort of citizens to be disappointed – and they weren’t.

Nor were their children. The great “boom” in babies that followed the return of the men in 1945 both prolonged and intensified the social-democratic policies of successive post-war governments. With little to choose between the policies offered by the parties of the Left and the Right, elections soon became low-stakes affairs for everybody but the candidates.

By the 1970s, democracy and prosperity had become fused in the minds of most Westerners. Certainly, the capitalist democracies outperformed the “peoples democracies” and “democratic republics” of “actually-existing socialism”. Up against the Four Freedoms, the precepts of Marxism-Leninism turned out to be anything but competitive. The outcome of the Cold War was always a foregone conclusion. To emerge victorious, all the capitalists had to do was wait patiently – and carry a big ICBM.

The serpent in this social-democratic Garden of Eden turned out to be the debilitating impact of egalitarianism on the wealth and power of capitalism’s ruling-classes. Since the War’s end, the relative strength of the upper-classes of the western democracies, vis-à-vis their middle- and lower-classes, had been steadily declining. If democracy and equality continued marching in lock-step, then the very survival of capitalism, along with the skewed distribution of economic wealth and social influence that kept it functioning, could no longer be assured.

Accordingly, and for the next fifty years, the economic, social, cultural and intellectual resources of the Western ruling-classes were poured into one, all-encompassing political project: to break-up the partnership between democracy and equality. In accomplishing this system-busting objective nothing was ruled out-of-bounds.

The new social movements born out of the steady expansion of equality in the 1960s and 70s: the civil rights movement; feminism, the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights; environmentalism; all were transformed into cultural battlegrounds upon which the forces of tradition clashed with the rag-tag armies of social progress.

Both sides quickly discovered the efficacy of mobilising citizens on the basis of racial, sexual, and religious antagonisms. The Four Freedoms ceased to act as unifiers, becoming instead the bitter pretext for zero-sum arguments over whose speech, whose God, whose resources, and whose security ought to be accorded priority.

The Ancient Romans dubbed this strategy divide et impera – divide and conquer – and it proved no less effective in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries than it had in the First and Second.

With society divided, and the forward march of universal – as opposed to sectional – equality halted, the capitalists’ next project was to persuade people that they had more to gain by identifying themselves as producers and consumers than they did as citizens. It was, they argued, through the relentless balancing of supply and demand, and the unerring democracy of the marketplace, that life was made better or worse. Dollars equalled votes in this never-ending global election. Except, in this contest, no one cared how many you cast.

It was no accident that with every significant advance in the acceptance of this new doctrine – neoliberalism – the redistribution of wealth and power from the bottom of society to the top gathered pace. The state was transformed into a mechanism for ensuring that as little as possible was done to impede the upward flow of money and influence to those least in need of either.

The societies fashioned for the men and women who had defeated fascism in the 1940s, and their children, were fast becoming unrecognisable. Nothing worked, nothing was repaired, and no one paid the slightest attention to the victims of the system’s spectacular dysfunction.

The same parties that had once competed to develop and deliver the most effective social-democratic policies, now find it more expedient to compete for the praise and patronage of the reinvigorated ruling-class. Such promises as the centre-left and the centre-right see fit to make to western electorates are seldom kept, and even more infrequently delivered on time or to budget. The forms of democracy remain, but the substance is fast disappearing.

Precisely the moment of maximum peril, argued the first political philosophers more than 25 centuries ago. With democracy and equality diminished, and opportunistic oligarchs redirecting society’s wealth into their own treasure-chests, a disoriented and increasingly distraught citizenry stands ready to succumb to that classical harbinger of doom – the demagogue.

Recalling the golden age that was, but which is now no more than a bitter memory, this silver-tongued devil will whip up the impoverished masses against those deemed responsible for both the state’s decline and their own immiseration. The demagogue will then proceed to direct this mesmerised mob against a succession of terrified scapegoats, with results that are neither just nor pretty. Out of the ensuing chaos, demagoguery gives way to tyranny, and democracy is finally extinguished.

There are many progressive young Americans who see their country poised at exactly this point – between demagoguery and tyranny. Tragically, at this moment of maximum danger for the American republic, the only ideology capable of rescuing it, egalitarian democracy, is being rejected as the racist, sexist, trans-phobic, and generally deplorable author of all its woes. Confronted with the genuine tyrannical potential of Donald Trump and his populist Republicans, the Democratic Party shows every sign of wishing to install, by whatever means its billionaire donors care to make available, its own, unassailable, tyranny of the pure.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack page on Tuesday, 12 November 2024.

Hearing Ourselves Think.

No Longer Silent: The one sound loud enough to be heard above the efforts of even the most determined makers of political noise, is the sound of the long-suffering majority making up its mind. Emeritus Professor Nigel Biggar addresses the Free Speech Union AGM held at Auckland’s Viaduct Events Centre on Saturday, 9 November 2024.

ARE WE LIVING in a world where, increasingly, “noise” is drowning out “sound”? A world in which it is getting harder and harder to distinguish the discrete voices of reason from the angry roar of the crowd. Where we are assailed by the deafening racket of bad political actors determined to drown out any and all opinions but their own.

Political “noise”, and its impact on society’s ability to “hear” itself, was brought to life vividly by Emeritus Professor Nigel Biggar from Oxford University in his keynote address to the AGM of the Free Speech Union, held at the Viaduct Events Centre on Saturday, 9 November 2024.

Pilloried by the Woke Left for daring to express the heretical view that colonialism wasn’t an unalloyed evil, and that the British Empire, in particular, wasn’t all bad, Biggar recalled the 2016 Oxford Union debate concerning the fate of Oriel College’s statue of Cecil Rhodes. The enemies of colonisation were determined to remove this memorial to one of Nineteenth Century Britain’s greatest imperial swashbucklers (think Elon Musk with a Maxim gun) and Biggar was on hand to argue that it makes more sense to understand your country’s history than to cancel it.

Every time an anti-Rhodes speaker sat down, Biggar told the surprisingly large audience of between 200-300 AGM attendees, the venerable debating chamber would erupt into wild and sustained applause. To the casual observer, support for the removal of Rhodes’ statute would have seemed overwhelming. Looking around the Chamber, however, Biggar noticed that the number not cheering and clapping was almost as large as the number who were. The “anti-colonialists” simply made a lot more noise. (The “Rhodes Must Fall!” motion was eventually carried 245/212.)

This is what political noise does. It renders nuance and subtlety impossible. It makes the voices of dissenters appear weak. Most importantly, deliberately amplified political noise causes those holding dissenting views to doubt the efficacy of their own judgement, intimidating them into inaction and silence. Political noise thus achieves the same result as switching-off an opponent’s microphone. The sounds made by individual contributors are lost in the deafening noise of the mob.

That Prof. Biggar’s speech to the FSU’s AGM, and the introduction of David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill to Parliament, occurred in the same week could be seen as a happy coincidence. In the week ahead, a Hīkoi mō te Tiriti will set off from the Far North for Wellington. As it wends its way south, the ratio of noise to sound promises to be politically instructive.

According to the latest poll, conducted by Curia Research between 3-7 October 2024, 46 percent of those surveyed support the Treaty Principles Bill, 25 percent oppose it, and 29 percent are “unsure”. When compared to Curia’s first poll on the Bill, published on 14 March 2024, these latest results indicate a substantial drop in the number of respondents indicating assent. Back in March, the supporters of Seymour’s legislation outnumbered its opponents 3:1.

What caused this drop, from 3:1 to 2:1, has become a matter for debate. When Curia’s first poll was taken, Seymour’s principles possessed an admirable clarity. By October, however, the second of the three fundamental principles had been complicated considerably by the Bill’s drafters – to the point where its meaning was no longer readily intelligible to the ordinary voter. This would certainly explain the 7-point rise in the number of respondents indicating uncertainty.

The 7 percentage point rise in those indicating opposition to the Bill may also reflect the confusion created by the revised version of its second principle. There is certainly quite a difference between March’s Version 1:

The New Zealand Government will protect all New Zealanders’ authority over their land and other property.

And October’s Version 2:

The Crown recognises the rights that hapū and iwi had when they signed the Treaty. The Crown will respect and protect those rights. Those rights differ from the rights everyone has a reasonable expectation to enjoy only when they are specified in legislation, Treaty settlements, or other agreement with the Crown.

The hitherto staunchest supporters of Seymour’s legislative initiative may well consider the revised version of the Second Principle to be altogether too “Treaty-ish” in its wording and intent to be worthy of their continuing support.

Alternatively, the relentless demonisation of Seymour’s bill by all major media organisations, the overwhelming majority of political journalists and columnists, and – most effectively – by the nation’s leading political cartoonists, may be convincing an increasing number of the Bill’s supporters that they are indeed guilty, as charged, of being on “the wrong side of history”.

By preventing its supporters from hearing either themselves, or the clear plurality of other New Zealanders who share their views, think, the deafening political noise generated by the Bill’s institutional opponents, particularly the universities and the Waitangi Tribunal, may simply, through grinding emotional attrition, be turning the numbers around.

This is the bet that National and NZ First have taken. That, by the time the six months of select committee hearings have concluded, conservative New Zealanders will have grown heartily sick of the whole business.

It could be a shrewd bet, because the select committee hearings will doubtless be drowned out by the relentless cacophony of the Bill’s opponents. What’s more, the constant and public vilification of the Bill’s supporters will not only encourage their shell-shocked withdrawal from the debate, but also convince an ever-increasing number of New Zealanders that the political game is no longer worth the candle.

Alternatively, the actions of the Treaty Principles Bill’s opponents may provoke the same sort of angry public backlash that followed the violent end of the anti-vaccination mandate movement’s occupation of Parliament Grounds.

The Police are expecting upwards of 25,000 Māori protesters and their allies to descend upon the Parliamentary Precinct on Tuesday, 19 November. Among those allies, Police anticipate having to deal with a large number of gang members intending to defy the legal ban on public displays of gang insignia. It is also thought that a contingent of activists determined to link the “anti-colonial struggles” of Māori and Palestinians will be part of the Hikoi.

The Hikoi leaders have assured the Police that its demonstration of opposition to the Treaty Principles Bill will be peaceful. But the level of political noise, and the passions it can hardly avoid arousing, may outstrip the ability of the leaders to keep their followers under control. If the whole thing turns pear-shaped, then National and NZ First will lose their bet.

In the aftermath of the American elections, the Coalition Government would be unwise to position themselves too closely alongside a noisy – let alone a violent – minority. The one sound loud enough to be heard above the efforts of even the most determined makers of political noise, is the sound of the long-suffering majority making up its mind.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 11 November 2024.

Beyond Question?

Record Numbers: The Hīkoi mō te Tiriti, which began at the tip of the North, and the tail of the South, on 11 November, culminated outside Parliament on Tuesday, 19 November 2024, in one of the largest demonstrations in New Zealand’s political history.

ACCORDING TO TE ARA, the Ministry of Culture and Heritage’s Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, there were 15,000 in 2004. Protesters, that is. Gathered in front of Parliament to demonstrate their opposition to the then Labour Government’s foreshore and seabed legislation.

Twenty years later, on Tuesday, 19 November 2024, the number was 42,000 – a truly vast crowd spilling out of Parliament Grounds and into the surrounding streets. This makes the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti, which began at the tip of the North, and the tail of the South, nine days earlier, on 11 November, one of the largest demonstrations in New Zealand’s political history.

On the surface, David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill, seems too puny a thing to have provoked such an extraordinary outpouring of opposition. After all, no party represented in the House of Representatives – apart from Act – is committed to supporting the Bill beyond its Second Reading debate.

Seymour’s proposed legislation is a dead man walking. It will not be enacted during the current parliamentary term. Those determined to prevent the Treaty Principles Bill from becoming law – thereby precipitating a binding referendum on its content – have already won.

How, then, is it possible that a Bill with just six months left to live, has inspired 42,000 mostly Māori New Zealanders to gather outside the parliamentary complex to demand its instant demise? If they’ve already won – why are they still fighting?

They are still fighting because they know that David Seymour is right. His bill might be killed at its Second Reading, but the issues he has raised will not die. He has placed a question on the parliamentary table. A question which a great many more than 35,000 New Zealanders would like to hear answered:

Is this country to be forever constrained by the content of an agreement entered into 184 years ago, by individuals long since deceased, binding entities that have long since disappeared, in order to resolve issues that have long since been decided?

Another way of framing that question is to ask:

Should the New Zealand that was built after the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, and very largely in spite of it – i.e. the New Zealand of today – be radically refashioned, constitutionally, administratively, politically, economically, and culturally, in accordance with the alleged understandings and intentions of te Tiriti’s Nineteenth Century Māori signatories?

But that question immediately raises another – and this one is much more dangerous.

With the benefit of hindsight, do the Māori of today regret the decision of their ancestors to sign the Treaty, or, at least, do they lament that their tīpuna did not make clearer what they expected to get by entering into a formal relationship with one of the Nineteenth Century’s most powerful states?

Which, in turn, raises another.

Is that what has really been going on these past 50 years: have Māori, alongside their Pakeha allies in the judiciary, the universities, and the public service, been quietly revising the Treaty’s meaning so that it better reflects, and serves, the needs of Māori living in the Twenty-First Century?

It is precisely to prevent these sorts of questions being asked – let alone answered – that Māori are so determined to “Kill the Bill”. It also explains why sending Seymour’s Bill to the Justice Select Committee has been so energetically resisted by so many Treaty “defenders”: everyone from a curious clutch of Christian clergy, to a concerned collection of King’s Counsel. The very last thing they, and the organisers of Tuesday’s extremely impressive hikoi, want, is for the meaning and purpose of the Treaty of Waitangi to be openly debated for months at a time.

David Seymour’s great sin has been to offer an alternative to this covert effort to change the constitution of New Zealand by changing the Treaty’s historical meaning. Those who argue that the Treaty Principles Bill is a blatant attempt to re-write the Treaty are quite right. What they omit to say, however, is that Seymour is only doing openly what Māori nationalists and their Pakeha allies have been doing, quietly, in legal chambers, common-rooms, and public service offices for the past 50 years.

The critical difference, of course, is that Seymour was proposing to give the rest of us a vote on his version.

Leaving us with one, final, question:

Is 42,000 enough to stop him?

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 22 November 2024.

Unstoppable.

Too Big To Fail: Forty-three years after the 1981 Springbok Tour protests, Maori defenders of te Tiriti, by their own efforts, and using their own resources, are poised to descend on the capital with upwards of 100,000 followers at their back, and no force in front of them even remotely capable of turning them around.

THE ORGANISERS OF THE Hīkoi mō te Tiriti are predicting record-breaking numbers. As the advancing column of runners, marchers, and cars approaches the capital, its numbers are expected to swell into the hundreds-of-thousands. If these predictions are borne out by events, then the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti will, indeed, be the largest protest demonstration in New Zealand’s political history.

Although no single demonstration associated with the 1981 Springbok Tour came anywhere near 100,000 participants, the 56 days of the Tour, and the months leading up to it, indisputably witnessed in excess of 100,000 protesters on New Zealand’s streets.

Significantly, the convulsions of 1981 and the record numbers participating in the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti are not unrelated historically. The lessons drawn from 1981 by an entire generation of progressive activists have, in the intervening 43 years, resolved themselves into a seemingly unstoppable ideological narrative. That narrative now constitutes the driving-force behind the movement toward decolonisation and indigenisation.

The nationwide campaign to end sporting contacts with Apartheid South Africa began as a fight to see the guarantee of human equality embodied in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights upheld by the New Zealand Government. The Republic of South Africa had been suspended from the UN in 1974 for its refusal to observe the principles enshrined in the Declaration. Playing Rugby with a side purporting to “represent” South Africa was, accordingly, condemned by many New Zealanders as morally indefensible.

In New Zealand’s churches, universities, professional associations and trade unions, this opposition to the 1981 Springbok Tour was deeply entrenched. In the New Zealand of the early-1980s, however, the nation’s demographic structure more-or-less guaranteed that a very large percentage of the population would remain unmoved by the arguments of the Tour’s opponents. Rugby was hugely important to New Zealanders, more than half of whom, according to the opinion polls of the day, were anxious to “keep politics out of sport”.

These New Zealanders had a powerful champion in their country’s National Party prime minister, Rob Muldoon. Presenting himself as the defender of the “ordinary bloke”, he cast the Tour’s opponents as, at best, snobbish intellectuals, and, at worst, subversive communists. In this he could rely upon the nation’s news media, both private and public, to take such accusations seriously. The instincts of most publishers, broadcasters and editors in 1981 were deeply conservative. Many of them regarded protest demonstrations as potentially dangerous attempts to apply extra-parliamentary pressure upon the nation’s democratically elected representatives.

Contrast Muldoon’s strong opposition from the top in 1981 with the way in which the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti has been treated by Prime Minister Christopher Luxon in 2024. National’s leader has been careful not to openly criticise or condemn the Hikoi – with whose bitter criticisms of the Act Party leader’s Treaty Principles Bill he claims to be in at least partial agreement. Luxon and his government have also been careful to affirm publicly the right of New Zealanders to engage in peaceful protest. No thought in 2024 of portraying the Hikoi participants as enemies of anything so retrograde as the “ordinary bloke”.

The behaviour of the mainstream news media in 2024 offers an even stronger contrast with the way events were covered in 1981. From the moment the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti began its long journey to Wellington, the nation’s largest media operations have presented it as something akin to the living embodiment of the nation’s best and truest instincts.

At least one editorial leader-writer has depicted the Hikoi as a powerful and much needed corrective to the “colonial” attitudes embodied in Seymour’s bill. The possibility that 100,000 angry citizens massed outside the New Zealand Parliament might constitute a serious threat to the safety and security of the country’s democratic institutions does not appear to have given the nation’s journalists pause. Or, if it has, then the prospect of Members of Parliament – especially ACT MPs – being sorted-out and set-straight by the people is not one that bothers them unduly.

Clearly, much has changed since 1981. Certainly, the three Treaty principles set forth in Seymour’s bill (the language of which carries strong echoes of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) would have been warmly endorsed by the overwhelming majority of New Zealanders 43 years ago. How, then, has this extraordinary transformation: from multiple demonstrations against the denial of human equality, to a nation-spanning hikoi denouncing its legislative affirmation; been accomplished?

The big idea driving the shift, both here and overseas, in the 1970s and 80s was that white people are blind to their own racism. In biblical terms, Europeans are very good at drawing attention to the mote in other peoples’ eyes, all the while ignoring the whopping great beam that is in their own.

How is it, demanded the Māori who’d marched alongside Pakeha anti-tour protesters, that you could become so incensed by the racism of white South Africa’s apartheid system, but had so little to say about the racist foundations of your own nation?

You took our land, built a happy little colonial state on top of it, and left us to contemplate your generous legacy of ruin and loss. The strategies we adopted for our own survival, most of which reflected our need to avoid te Riri Pakeha – the anger of the white man – you interpreted as evidence of our easy-going good-nature, and patted yourselves on the back for presiding over the “best race-relations in the world” The treaty our ancestors signed in 1840, in which the British Crown promised to protect the autonomy and resources of our tribes, your Chief Justice casually dismissed, just 37 years later, as “a simple nullity”. You’ll understand, then, if we look at you Pakeha and see nothing but a bunch of bloody hypocrites!

It was a list of charges to which the progressive Pakeha Left had no convincing answers, other than to hang their heads in guilt and shame, and promise to do all within their power to right the wrongs of colonisation, and restore to the maximum extent possible the rights of Aotearoa’s indigenous people.

That they chose to do this through the courts, rather than through Parliament, is a reflection of the fear and loathing many anti-tour protesters, university students in particular, took away from their encounters with supporters of the Springbok Tour. That these people were racists went without saying, but the vicious sexism experienced by female protesters came as a nasty shock. Male protesters were equally stunned by the homophobic slurs hurled at them by rugby supporters.

Obviously, from the progressive perspective, National Party voters could not to be trusted to do the right thing. But, sadly, neither could the party of the working class. Far too many Labour voters had been willing to abandon their democratic-socialist ideals for a game of footy. Long before Hilary Clinton came up with the description, New Zealand’s progressives made it their business to ensure that the important business of decolonising and indigenising Aotearoa was kept as far away as possible from such deplorable citizens.

A lot can happen in 43 years. New Zealand jurisprudence can be radically reoriented. The National Party can atone for the sins of Rob Muldoon by initiating the Treaty Settlement Process. Apart from its votes, Labour can give up expecting anything from, or doing very much for, the New Zealand working-class. Te Tiriti, itself, can cease to be regarded as a simple nullity and become New Zealand’s foundational constitutional document. From around 10 percent, Māori can grow to 20 percent of the population.

Most importantly, from being a noisy and morally aggravating adjunct to the anti-apartheid movement in 1981, Māori defenders of te Tiriti, in 2024, by their own efforts, and using their own resources, can descend upon New Zealand’s capital city with upwards of 100,000 followers at their back, and no force in front of them even remotely capable of turning them around.

This essay was posted exclusively on the Bowalley Road blog of Monday, 18 November 2024.

This One's Just For You, Martyn.

 

Hard Hat & A Hammer

Alan Jackson

Video courtesy of YouTube

Posted on Bowalley Road on Thursday, 7 November 2024.

Are We The Baddies?

Difficult Questions: Does denying human equality and rejecting the principles of colour-blind citizenship place you among the baddies? Yes, I’m afraid it does.

THE DEMON OF UNREST documents the descent of the United States into civil war. The primary focus of its author, Erik Larson, is the period of roughly five months between the election of Abraham Lincoln as President in November 1860, and his inauguration in March 1861. These were the months in which, one after the other, the slaveholding states of the South voted to secede from the Union.

Seldom has the evolution of an implacable political logic proceeded in circumstances where so few effective means of altering its direction lay to hand. Americans had become the prisoners of convictions that could not be set aside without incurring, to employ a key concept of the era, an irreparable loss of honour.

Only a president of Lincoln’s strength and steadfastness could have won the American Civil War, but not even a president of Lincoln’s strength and steadfastness could have prevented it.

The most disconcerting feature of Larson’s historical narrative are the many parallels between the America of then, and the New Zealand of now. There are Kiwis, today, as committed to the decolonisation and indigenisation of their country as Yankees once were to the abolition of slavery. Likewise, there is an answering fraction of the New Zealand population every bit as determined to preserve the colour-blind conception of what it means to be a New Zealander as the slaveholders of the American South were determined to preserve their own “peculiar institution”.

The key historical question arising from this comparison is: which of the opposing sides in the present conflict between “New Zealand” and “Aotearoa” represents the North, and which the South? The answer is far from straightforward.

Superficially, it is the promoters of decolonisation and indigenisation who most resemble the Northern abolitionists. Certainly, in their moral certainty, dogmatism, and unwillingness to compromise, the Decolonisers and the Abolitionists would appear to be cut from identical cloth. Brought together by a time machine, one can easily imagine their respective leaders, so alike in their political style, getting along famously.

By the same token, the defenders of Colour-Blind New Zealand, in their reverence for tradition and their deep nostalgia for the political certainties of the past, would appear to be a more than passable match for the political forces that gave birth to the Confederate States of America in 1861.

These correspondences are, however, more apparent than real. From a strictly ideological standpoint, it is the Decolonisers who match most closely the racially-obsessed identarian radicals who rampaged through the streets of the South in 1860-61, demanding secession and violently admonishing all those suspected of harbouring Northern sympathies. Likewise, it is the Indigenisers who preach a racially-bifurcated state in which the ethnic origin of the citizen is the most crucial determinant of his or her political rights and duties.

Certainly, in this country, the loudest clamour and the direst threats are directed at those who argue that New Zealand must remain a democratic state in which all citizens enjoy equal rights, irrespective of wealth, gender, or ethnic origin, and in which the property rights of all citizens are safeguarded by the Rule of Law.

These threats escalated alarmingly following the election of what soon became the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government. Like the election of Lincoln in 1860, the success of New Zealand’s conservative parties in the 2023 general election was construed by the Decolonisers and Indigenisers as a potentially fatal blow to any hope of sustaining and extending the gains made under the sympathetic, radical, and identity-driven Labour Government of 2020-23.

Just as occurred throughout the South in November and December of 1860, the fire-eating partisans of “Aotearoa” lost little time in coming together to warn the incoming government that its political programme was unreasonable, unacceptable, and “racist”; and that any attempt to realise it in legislation would be met with massive resistance – up to and including civil war.

The profoundly undemocratic nature of the fire-eaters’ opposition was illustrated by their vehement objections to the Act Party’s policy of holding a binding referendum to entrench, or not, the “principles” of the Treaty of Waitangi. Like the citizens of South Carolina, the first state to secede, the only votes they are willing to recognise are their own.

Another historical parallel is discernible in the degree to which the judicial arm of the New Zealand state, like its American counterpart in the 1850s, has actively supported the cause of ethnic difference in the 2020s.

In 1857, the infamous Dred-Scott decision of the US Supreme Court advanced the cause of slavery throughout the United States. Written by Chief Justice Roger Taney, the judgement found that persons of African descent: “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States”. The Taney Court’s decision made civil war inevitable.

In 2022, the New Zealand Supreme Court’s adjudication of the Peter Ellis Case would add a novel legal consideration – tikanga Māori – to the application of New Zealand Law. The Court’s constitutionally dubious decision was intended to, and did, materially advance the establishment of a bi-cultural legal system in Aotearoa. It represented an historic victory for the Decolonisers.

It may occur to some readers, that the argument put forward here resembles the celebrated Mitchell & Webb television sketch in which a worried SS officer asks his Nazi comrade-in-arms, Hans: “Are we the baddies?” It’s a great line. But, over and above the humour, the writers are making an important point. Those who devote themselves entirely to a cause are generally incapable of questioning its moral status – even when its uniforms are adorned with skulls.

Those New Zealanders who believe unquestioningly in the desirability of decolonisation and indigenisation argue passionately that they are part of the same great progressive tradition that inspired the American Abolitionists of 160 years ago. But are they?

Did the Black Abolitionist, and former slave, Frederick Douglass, embrace the racial essentialism of Moana Jackson? Or did he, rather, wage an unceasing struggle against those who insisted, to the point of unleashing a devastating civil war, that all human-beings are not created equal?

What is there that in any way advances the progressive cause about the casual repudiation of Dr Martin Luther King Jnr’s dream that: “one day my four little children will be judged not by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character”?

When will the partisans of decolonisation and indigenisation finally notice the death’s head on their caps? That, driven by their political passion to atone for the sins of the colonial fathers, they are willing to subvert the Rule of Law, deny human equality, misrepresent their country’s history, and abandon its democratic system of government. Can they not see that the people they castigate as the direct ideological descendants of the slaveholding white supremacists of the antebellum South, are actually fighting for the same principles that animated and inspired the Northern Abolitionists?

Does denying human equality and rejecting the principles of colour-blind citizenship place you among the baddies? Yes, I’m afraid it does. The demon of unrest has claimed you for his own.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack page on Thursday. 17 October 2024.

Out Of Sympathy.

Unsympathetic Characters: Christopher Luxon should be grateful that his principal opponent, Chris Hipkins, is as out of sympathy with the temper of the times as he is.

CHRIS HIPKINS had both a good week and a bad week. He and his team were able to press home Labour’s attack on the self-destructive behaviour of the Minister for Small Business and Manufacturing, Andrew Bayly. Winston Peters’ mid-week counterattack, however, immediately placed Labour on the defensive.

Hipkins was forced to endure the embarrassment of having to walk-back his description of the public servant at the heart of Peters’ conflict-of-interest claims as a “distant relative” of Ayesha Verrall, Labour’s health spokesperson. As Peters gleefully pointed out, the individual in question was, in fact, Verrall’s sister-in-law.

So, not that distant.

The attack on Bayly, while successful, risked the accusation that Labour was shooting an already wounded fish in a barrel. The walk-back forced upon Hipkins by Peters, by contrast, made the Leader of the Opposition look just a little bit shifty, and a lot foolish.

Even worse, Peters had floated a story calculated to shift the public’s attention away from the controversial actions of NZ First’s Associate Health Minister, Casey Costello, towards the equally controversial possibility that ideologically-driven public servants might be deliberately sabotaging the ministers they are employed to serve.

Peters is entirely justified in querying the failure of the Ministry of Health to alert Costello to the potential conflict-of-interest which Verrall’s sister-in-law had promptly, properly and professionally identified to her employer prior to working alongside the Associate Health Minister.

The Ministry’s failure to adequately brief Costello has placed their employee in an extremely uncomfortable position. Verrall has led the charge in Parliament against Costello’s actions in relation to New Zealand’s long-standing, and hitherto bi-partisan, effort to reduce the population’s consumption of tobacco products. Verrall’s attacks were amplified by the impact of a number of dramatic information leaks. The potential, now, for members of the public, alarmed by Peters’ revelations, to put two and two together, and make five, is considerable.

Peters’ intuitive feel for the sort of story most likely to gel with the mindset of the Coalition’s conservative supporters can only be admired. Justified, or not, there is a widespread conviction on the Right that the Coalition Government’s electoral mandate is not respected by institutions whose acceptance of the majority’s right to govern is essential to the proper functioning of a representative democracy.

The impression left with right-wing New Zealanders, from the way these institutions have conducted themselves since October 2023, is that the victory of the three parties making up the Coalition Government represents a deeply problematic triumph of ideas, attitudes, and policies inimical to the optimal development of Aotearoa-New Zealand.

Public servants, judges, academics, journalists and the liberal clergy are all, rightly or wrongly, perceived to be working against the Government, and doing everything within their power to impede the roll-out of policies deemed morally unjustifiable and evidentially unsustainable. The degree to which conservative voters are invested in these policies is a pretty reliable indicator of the animosity directed at those believed responsible for delaying – or even halting – their implementation.

Such political frustration is far from novel. What is new, however, is the general apprehension of those who identify as right-wing, that “the system” is ideologically rigged against them. Those subscribing to this notion are convinced that across-the-board resistance to conservative policies is not only prevalent in the upper echelons of New Zealand society, but that it also enjoys the unofficial blessing of an unhealthily large number of the nation’s unelected leaders.

As evidence of this phenomenon many of them would point to the Waitangi Tribunal’s apparent refusal to accept that the Coalition Government has a clear electoral mandate to implement policies which, in the Tribunal’s view, run counter to its understanding of te Tiriti and its constitutional significance. That the Tribunal’s judgements are typically met with the enthusiastic support of academia and the news media only confirms the Right’s belief that New Zealand’s state and social infrastructure has been tilted decisively to the left.

The surprising appointment of Richard Prebble to the Tribunal will serve as an important test as to whether that quasi-judicial body is open to being tilted to the right.

Prebble’s comeback notwithstanding, conservative New Zealand’s confusion is entirely understandable. The left-wing biases they detect in today’s institutions are the exact opposite of the biases evident across the same institutions in times past.

Historically, it was the Left who looked with dark suspicion on all the key institutions of capitalist society. Citing The Communist Manifesto, Marxists reminded their comrades that: “The executive of the modern state is nothing but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” No genuine left-wing government, they averred, would ever be permitted to implement an authentic socialist programme.

“Don’t believe us? Just look at what happened to Salvador Allende, Harold Wilson, Norman Kirk, and Gough Whitlam in the 1970s.”

Deep down, one suspects, conservative New Zealanders are struggling to resist the terrifying conclusion that, somehow, Capitalists have convinced themselves that, far from sending their system broke, going woke is actually more likely to strengthen its hegemonic grip on the sensibilities of the post-modern West.

Perhaps it is this deep fear that explains Andrew Bayly’s self-destructive behaviour. There was a time when the servants of power found it advantageous to advertise the superior status of their masters by demonstrating the inferior status of their servants – commonly referred to “sucking up by kicking down”. Bayly’s background as an army officer, and as the paid protector of other people’s capital, would certainly have exposed him to this sort of behaviour. Unfortunately for him, however, the social strategies of the past are no longer the social strategies of the present. Drawing attention to the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy is no longer appreciated by today’s businesspeople – small or large.

Which is why Chris Hipkins’ decision to highlight Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s unwillingness to remove Bayly’s ministerial warrant was such a shrewd one. It provided the voters and, more importantly, the business community, with a vivid illustration of just how all-over-the-place Luxon’s understanding of twenty-first century politics truly is.

Andrew Bayly isn’t a bad man, but he shows every sign of being an outdated one. No politician wishing to succeed in 2024 would contemplate interacting with a fellow citizen so crassly, or so cruelly – not even in jest.

Were Luxon committed to reaffirming and reinstating all the old conservative values – i.e. a right-wing populist – then his handling of Bayly would make perfect sense. There is nothing, however, that suggests Luxon has any sympathy with the populist impulses of NZ First – or Act. On the contrary, he tries to present himself as the quintessential twenty-first century businessperson – an ambition radically at odds with the anti-woke expectations of a significant percentage of the Coalition Government’s electoral base.

Luxon should be grateful, then, that when it comes to not “getting” the frustration and resentment of conservative New Zealand – a designation which includes a large number of former Labour, as well as National, voters – his principal opponent, Chris Hipkins, is as out of sympathy with the temper of the times as he is.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 28 October 2024.

Two States - But No Solutions.

My Enemy’s Enemy Is My Friend: Mohammad Amin al-Husseini, the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, at the opening of the Islamic Central Institute in Berlin, December 19, 1942. The elimination of the Jewish state has been the unwavering ambition of successive generations of Palestinian leaders.

AMIDST ALL THE HORROR of the Israel-Hamas War, the world’s hopes for peace remain pinned on the so-called “Two-State Solution”. Born of the 1993 Oslo Accords, where Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) jointly agreed to establish the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) the Two State Solution looked forward to the creation of an independent Palestinian state adjoining the State of Israel.

Naturally, there were sceptics.

Historians quite rightly pointed out that the option of two states, Israel and Palestine, both of them carved out of the League of Nation’s “Mandate” which the British had just relinquished, had been on the table as long ago as 1947.

It had been laid there by the newly-created United Nations, whose commissioners had drawn the borders of the proposed states as closely as possible around majority Arab and Jewish communities. The result, as with similar exercises undertaken in Ireland and India, left both sides angry and frustrated. After much soul-searching, however, the Jews of Palestine accepted the proposed partition. The Palestinian Arabs, determined to inherit an undivided Palestinian state, refused.

How different the world might have been had the Palestinian leaders followed the example of their Jewish counterparts. Gaza, today, might have been a sparkling Mediterranean city, as buzzing with entrepreneurship and innovation as Tel Aviv, just a few miles up the coast. In a single generation, the West Bank of the Jordan, bankrolled by the Arab oil states, would surely have been replicating Israel’s own economic miracle.

Palestine’s leaders, however, have always presented a problem.

In 1947, the most prominent Palestinian statesman was Mohammad Amin al-Husseini, the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Scion of an aristocratic Arab family which traced its lineage all the way back to the Prophet, al-Husseini was implacably opposed to the Zionist project of recreating a Jewish homeland in what had been the Ottoman province of Palestine. So adamant was he in his opposition that, when the Second World War broke out, he’d allied himself with Adolf Hitler and his Nazis.

Al-Husseini presided over the Egyptian protectorate called the All Palestine Government, based in Gaza, from 1948 until 1953. While he and all those who shared his hatred of the Israeli state (recognised by the UN in 1948) remained in charge, there was no possibility of the original Two State Solution being revived.

It was only the extraordinary efforts of Norway’s peace negotiators outside Oslo that put the Two State Solution back on the table, and President Bill Clinton who “persuaded” al-Husseini’s distant cousin, Yasser Arafat, Chairman of the PLO, to sign the accords. But, not even that silver-tongued son of Hope, Arkansas, could seduce Arafat into making the Two State Solution a reality.

It has come no nearer under Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat’s successor at the PNA. Even if he were willing, however, it is doubtful whether the Israelis would be all that keen on placing their nation’s hopes for peace in the hands of a man who, in 1984, published a book entitled “The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism”, in which Abbas accuses the Zionist movement and its leaders of being “fundamental partners” in the genocide of European Jewry alongside, and sharing equal responsibility with, the Nazis.

They came close, though. With the establishment of the PNA, the Israeli Government quietly removed its public objections to Abbas’s utterly false and outrageous lies. In pursuit of a Two State Solution, Abbas’s accusation that “every racist in the world was given the green light, and first and foremost Hitler and the Nazis, to do with the Jews as they wish, as long as it ensures Jewish immigration to Palestine”, along with many others, were quietly retired.

Which is more than can be said for Abbas. Eighty-eight years old and infamously corrupt, Abbas refuses to retire. Now President of the “State of Palestine”, he continues to survey the pitiful wreckage of his people’s homes and hopes.

While the Americans persist in claiming that two states are the only solution to the bitter and intractable problems that have plagued the region since 1948, at least some of Israel’s diplomats must smile encouragingly whenever the idea is mentioned. That said, very few ordinary Israelis still believe in it.

Entirely understandable, because, honestly, after the horror of 7 October 2023, what sane Israeli would risk one state for two?


This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 25 October 2024.

The Odd Couple.

Strange Political Bedfellows: Matthew Hooton’s support for Winston Peters’ New Zealand Futures Fund reflects the Radical Right’s newfound reluctance to bet everything on the efficacy of market forces.

AS IF HE WASN’T IN ENOUGH TROUBLE, Matthew Hooton has now come out for Winston Peters’ New Zealand Futures Fund (NZFF). Not only that, but he is also calling upon Peters to lower the company tax rate:

“A 12.5% company tax rate, not the current 28%, would be a much better bet [when it comes to attracting foreign investors] than relying on his or any other Prime Minister’s sales skills, along with limos or helicopters from the airport and PowerPoint presentations for visiting funds managers.”

Hooton has been calling for a radical re-design of the New Zealand economy for some time now. But, as the above quotation makes clear, he holds out very little hope that the National Party – let alone its present leader – is either ready, willing, or able to accomplish anything resembling substantive economic change.

Hooton’s support for Peters’ NZFF not only reflects his own personal disillusionment with National, but the Radical Right’s newfound reluctance to bet everything on the efficacy of laissez-faire. Hooton is doubtful, now, that even an economy geared rigorously to the preferences of the market will automatically allocate resources in the most effective and efficient fashion. Judging from his latest NZ Herald column, this gadfly of the Right has grown sceptical even of Act.

It is, however, difficult to tell whether Hooton’s scepticism of Act is fuelled by his perception that the party is too radical, or not radical enough. After all, by roughly halving the company tax rate, the New Zealand state would be denying itself close to nine billion dollars of revenue. The size of expenditure cuts required to fill a fiscal hole that big would likely render the country ungovernable. It is important, always, to bear in mind the extremity of Hooton’s economic and political radicalism.

That political commentators of Hooton’s ilk are losing confidence in both the virtues of right-wing centrism, and strict free-market orthodoxy, indicates an ideological shift of some significance. Just how significant will be indicated by whether or not the USA once again embraces, or rejects, the leadership of Donald Trump.

A victory for Trump would represent not just a repudiation of Kamala Harris’s half-hearted social-democracy, but a rejection of the whole concept of self-regulating markets. It would signal that the intense personalisation of leadership, long a feature of the political sphere, has migrated to the economic sphere. Right-wing voters have long sought a leader willing to bang politicians heads together. Now, it would seem, those same voters are wanting, and expecting, a leader who will bang corporations’ heads together.

The loss of confidence in Christopher Luxon’s leadership, registered in the polls, and unmistakeable in Hooton’s column, may be a reflection of the Prime Minister’s failure to manifest the head-banging qualities so many right-leaning voters were anticipating. Luxon may believe himself to be the sort of guy who can bounce India into a free trade agreement because he “gushes at them or squeezes their shoulder” – to deploy Hooton’s withering phrase – but a surprisingly large chunk of the Right’s electoral base simply aren’t buying it.

Another indicator of this economic personalisation was the readiness of Chris Bishop, Shane Jones and Simeon Brown to assume personal responsibility for setting New Zealand on a “fast track” to economic growth and prosperity. Were they, like Hooton, registering the rising impatience of at least a sizeable fraction of the electorate with conventional decision-making processes? “Just get the bloody job done!” Was that the message being sent to the Government in National’s focus-groups? And, if so, why did the Coalition refuse to heed it?

The answer to that question was on display in RNZ’s “30 With Guyon Espiner” interview with Labour’s finance spokesperson, Barbara Edmonds. In the course of that unedited half-hour, Edmonds exposed the acute tension that now exists between the intelligent politician’s understanding of just how critical the economic situation confronting New Zealand has become; the radical measures required to address it; and the dispiriting combination of intellectual lassitude and political cowardice that more-or-less guarantees that nothing will happen.

Bishop’s, Jones’ and Brown’s enforced backdown on the Fast Track legislation simply confirms that, in National’s ranks, as well as in Labour’s, doing nothing will always find more takers than doing something.

Could this be why Hooton opted to sing Peters’ praises on the pages of the Herald? Whatever else he may represent, “Winston” has always stood for the idea that “the man in the arena” has more to offer the world than those content to be guided by process and convention.

Following the rules of the game was a sound strategy when the game produced a society in which those who worked hard and kept their noses clean could anticipate a comfortable life for themselves and (more importantly) for their children. But, as the imminent prospect of a Trump victory makes clear, that anticipation lost what little purchase it had on realism long, long ago. At a time when so many of the promises of the powerful are best read as threats, more and more people are abandoning the whole democratic idea in favour of putting a strong leader in command, and giving him the freedom to get on with it.

National’s problem is that Christopher Luxon is a successful, private-sector bureaucrat. He has little time for the man in the arena, seeming more at home with the persons in the boardroom. Fond as he is of invoking the waning “mojo” of New Zealanders, Luxon displays an equal deficiency of that quality in his performance as prime minister. For all we know, of course, Luxon may possess all the qualities needed to haul New Zealand out of the Big Muddy. It’s just that, to date, he has declined to manifest them.

There was time when, presented with a faltering capitalism, the electorate could turn leftwards towards the bright (if untried) promises of socialism. No more. Half-a-century has passed since a Labour Government even vaguely reflecting socialist principles held office in New Zealand. That said, if Edmonds’ responses to Espiner offer any guide, the Labour Party of 2024 is miles away from unleashing Rogernomics 2.0, but no nearer to raising the revenue needed to keep what remains of New Zealand’s welfare state on life-support.

And, right there, the grim reality of New Zealand politics reveals itself. Labour has nothing to offer but process and convention, a failure of imagination and courage that it shares with the National Party. Act can only suggest that neoliberalism’s so-far-unavailing remedies be applied with increased rigor. The Greens and Te Pati Māori display nothing but messy ideological incontinence.

NZ First may not, in the end, have what’s needed to lead New Zealand into the “broad sunlit uplands” that Winston’s namesake promised, but, as Hooton’s column suggests, it still has “a man in the arena” shrewd enough to point the way.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 21 October 2024.