Men, the Left, and the “Women’s Vote”.

On Calvary Street are trellises

Where bright as blood the roses bloom,
And gnomes like pagan fetishes
Hang their hats on an empty tomb
Where two old souls go slowly mad,
National Mum and Labour Dad.

James K. Baxter
Ballad of Calvary Street
1969

JAMES K. BAXTER’S stereotypes, “National Mum” and “Labour Dad”, strike a discordant note in the Twenty-First Century New Zealander’s ear. Most obviously because the political loyalties of men and women have, in the 55 years since Baxter wrote his poem, undergone a dramatic reversal. Labour supporters, today, are much more likely to be women, while National’s support-base has become disproportionately male. How is this dramatic shift in the political allegiances of the sexes to be explained?

The most important driver of the so-called “gender gap” has been the steady erosion of working-class power. Many factors have been at work in this process, but the most important is the slow demise of what was formerly the Left’s most important constitutive myth.

The move to drive women and children out of the paid workforce (which, in the early days of industrial capitalism, they had dominated) was seen (at least by men) as a moral and economic triumph. Not only were society’s most vulnerable members rescued from the ruthless exploitation of capitalist employers, but their return to the “safety” of the domestic sphere, by shrinking the pool of available industrial workers, allowed husbands, fathers and sons to drive-up wage-rates and reclaim the “breadwinner” role so central to the sustainability of patriarchy. Accordingly, setting the price of labour, and growing the political strength that flowed from working-class organisation, was seen as the work of men, by men, for men.

As anyone who has ever heard Judy Collins’ inspiring rendition of the song “Bread and Roses” will attest, the idea that the advance of the working-class was the work of men, alone, is nonsensical. In the clothing and textile industries especially women workers vastly outnumbered men, and their struggles for economic justice were waged no less fiercely than those of their “brothers”.

It nevertheless remains an historical fact that in the vast majority of factories, in the coal mines and the steel mills, in transportation and on the docks, it was overwhelmingly a man’s world. The left-wing project, although conceptually inseparable from the steady advance of working-class power under capitalism, was also presented as a cause in which the qualities and responsibilities of masculinity were constantly made manifest.

Culturally, project and cause came together in the artistic and literary figure of the working-class hero. With every economic and social advance, the pride of “working-men” grew. Their unions and their parties were hailed as the engines of the future, generating a muscular progressivism in which males placed themselves unfailingly at the heart of political action.

So much for “Labour Dad’s back-story. How was “National Mum” created?

Fundamentally, the National Party’s assiduous courting of the female voter is a reflection of the New Zealand Right’s desperation to break the Left’s easy domination of the electorate in the late-1930s and throughout the 1940s.

That the “women’s vote” might deviate significantly from that of the men’s was demonstrated with startling force in the British general election of 1931. At the behest of King George V, the British Labour leader, Ramsay Macdonald, joined forces with the Conservatives and the Liberal Party to form the “National Government” – a grand coalition to address the devastating impact of the Great Depression. Predictably, Macdonald’s “treachery” split the Labour Party and divided the working-class.

Appealing to the British people for what he called a “doctor’s mandate” to heal the country’s economic afflictions, Macdonald’s National Government secured the support of an astonishing 67 percent of the voting public. A huge number of these voters were young working-class women, participating electorally for only the second time since the franchise was finally given to all British women over the age of twenty-one in 1928.

That the offer of national unity, over class division, had proved irresistible to so large a chunk of the female electorate was enough to make even dyed-in-the-wool conservative politicians sit up and take notice. In 1931, to the utter consternation of their menfolk, women voters had proved to have minds of their own.

It was a lesson that the New Zealand National Party, formed in the year following Labour’s electoral triumph of 1935, could hardly fail to keep at the front of its mind. After all, it was women voters who had kept National out of power until it undertook to leave Labour’s welfare state intact, and who, weary of post-war controls and shortages, had seated National on the Treasury Benches for the first time in 1949.

Most of all, however, it was women voters who, like their British sisters twenty years earlier, had voted for national unity, over trade union militancy and class war, in the snap-election called by National to validate its handling of the bitter 1951 Waterfront Lockout. National’s share of the popular vote, at 54 percent, secured its most emphatic victory, ever.

Not all women were prepared to break ranks from their families’ deeply ingrained electoral preferences. Indeed, most women, like most men, voted the same way as their fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives. But, enough of them voted against the familial and marital grain to give National the electoral edge it had been seeking since Labour, with 55 percent of the popular vote, had so decisively shifted the political dial in 1938. Between 1949 and 1984, a period of 35 years, Labour would spend just six years in office.

That long period of National Party electoral dominance was aided by the slow decay and demoralisation of both the New Zealand trade union movement and the Labour Party. The heroic component of the movement, the cream of the nation’s working-class, had been comprehensively defeated and dispersed by the National Government in 1951.

Their defeat could not have been secured without the complicity of the Federation of Labour, whose leaders were happy to see the most radical (and democratic) unions, thorns in their sides for many years, humbled. Not that the “moderate unionists” – as National called them – were unaware of just how comprehensively they had been co-opted by the Right. Twenty years hence, John Lennon would argue that “a working-class hero is something to be”. These guys knew that they weren’t.

What’s more, the impression grew in the minds of at least some working-class men that at least some of the working-class women they rubbed shoulders with also knew that there wasn’t much of the hero left in them.

Increasingly, a crass economism, “bread and butter issues”, came to define the mission of both the trade unions and the Labour Party. Throughout the golden economic weather of the long post-war boom it was enough to keep the wolves of doubt from the door – even if the post-war prosperity, upon which the whole, delicate, socio-political compromise rested, was claimed – and acknowledged – as the National Party’s achievement. Upward social mobility, every aspiring working-class mum’s secret hope for her kids, had become the Right’s most potent promise. They were the heroes now.

Sullen, unadventurous, politically-conventional, and materialistic – that is what so many of New Zealand’s working-class men had become. Kiwis may have joked about being a nation devoted to “Rugby, Racing, and Beer”, but the view from where working-class women were now positioned offered little to laugh at. They chafed for change, for something better. If not for themselves, then for their sons and – why not? – their daughters, too.

In the 1970s and 80s those sons and daughters – especially the daughters – would re-energise and redefine the New Zealand Left. But, across the comfortable, but decidedly unheroic, 1950s and 60s, “National Mum” and “Labour Dad” would continue to cancel each other out … almost.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack on Friday, 4 October 2024.

Gut Feelings.

Vox Populi: It is worth noting that if Auckland’s public health services were forced to undergo cutbacks of the same severity as Dunedin’s, and if the city’s Mayor and its daily newspaper were able to call the same percentage of its citizens onto the streets, then the ensuing demonstrations would number in excess of 400,000 protesters. No New Zealand government has ever survived such levels of public distress and anger.

IF YOU BELIEVE Talbot Mills “internal polling” for the Labour Party, the probability of a one-term National Government is rising. Made available to Sunday Star-Times journalist Henry Cooke, the Talbot Mills data reportedly shows the “Left Bloc” positioned just two percentage points behind the “Right Bloc”.

To which supporters of the National-Act-NZ First coalition government will doubtless (and quite justifiably) respond with a curt “Yeah, right.” Poll data should not be taken seriously before all of it is released – not just the numbers guaranteed to grab a headline.

Even so, it is telling that this carefully staged release of information was permitted to form the basis of a news story. When it comes to assessing the mood of the electorate, most political journalists place considerable store upon what their “gut” is telling them. That a seasoned journalist was prepared to run with Labour’s self-serving, but strictly limited, release of confidential polling-data suggests strongly there’s a “feeling” that the coalition is in trouble, and it’s spreading. Now would not be a good time to dismiss the whispers of journalistic intuition out-of-hand.

The outpouring of anger in Dunedin, where 35,000 citizens, a number approximating a quarter of the city’s entire population, marched down George Street on Saturday afternoon (28/9/24) will do nothing to still this journalistic apprehension of impending electoral doom.

It is doubtful that Dunedin has ever witnessed a protest march so large. In the absence of a government reversal, such public fury must surely portend a serious drop in National’s Party Vote. Not just in Dunedin (which has always been a staunchly Labour city) but in electorates all the way from Waitaki to Invercargill. Two whole provinces rely upon the services of Dunedin Hospital. If National refuses to bend on this issue, then Otago and Southland voters may feel compelled to break it.

Even more sobering, is the news that the Coalition’s retrenchment in Dunedin may only be the beginning of a savage government cost-cutting programme. According to the Deputy-Secretary of the Treasury, Dominick Stephens, reining-in the Government’s projected deficit is likely to require cuts on a scale “unprecedented in recent history”. In response to Stephen’s comments, Richard Harman, the editor of the Politik website, is predicting that Finance Minister Nicola Willis will soon be tasked with pulling together a second “Mother of All Budgets”.

Harman’s reference to the then National Party finance minister, Ruth Richardson’s, devastating first budget, delivered on 30 July 1991, is telling. Because, the electoral consequences of the Jim Bolger-led National Government’s austerity measures were dire.

The year before the Mother of All Budgets, National had crushed its incumbent Labour rival by a popular vote margin of 13 percentage points. Two years later, in 1993, National’s vote would crash from 48.7 percent to just 35.05 percent.

Between them, the parties openly opposing National in 1993: Labour, the Alliance, NZ First; secured 61.28 percent of the popular vote. Only because the opposition vote was split three ways was National able to secure a second term. Bolger, himself, avoided going down in history as the leader of National’s first one-term government largely on account of the distortions of New Zealand’s First-Past-the-Post electoral system. Interestingly, 1993 was also the year that FPP fell to MMP. The new, proportional, system of representation emerged triumphant from the referendum held concurrently with the General Election.

If the Treasury’s Deputy-Secretary is right, and the ever-widening government deficit inspires two years of agonising cost-cutting, then the present recession-like conditions can only worsen. More businesses will shut their doors, unemployment will rise, consumer-spending will shrink, and the tax-take will fall – necessitating even harsher cuts in government spending. By that point, the fate of Dunedin Hospital will have been repeated many times over.

It is worth noting that if Auckland’s public health services were forced to undergo cutbacks of the same severity as Dunedin’s, and if the city’s Mayor and its daily newspaper were able to call the same percentage of its citizens onto the streets, then the ensuing demonstrations would number in excess of 400,000 protesters. No New Zealand government has ever survived such levels of public distress and anger.

In such circumstances it would be most unwise to present the voters of 2026 with a referendum offering them the option of extending the term of a New Zealand Parliament from three years to four. The great Kiwi maxim regarding the parliamentary term – already confirmed emphatically in two previous referenda, one in 1967, the other in 1990 – states that “Three years is too short for a good government, but too long for a bad one.” And a National-led government seen to be imposing measures more extreme that Ruth Richardson’s Mother of All Budgets would likely be branded a very bad government indeed.

New Zealand history buffs might even be called upon to remind their fellow citizens of the infamous “stolen year”. Had New Zealand’s usual three-year election cycle been in operation in 1934, then November of that year would have featured a general election. That it did not was on account of the conservative coalition government of the day being unwilling to put its handling of the Great Depression to the electoral test. Indeed, after the nationwide riots that convulsed New Zealand’s major cities in 1932, the country’s farmers’-and-businessmen’s government was in mortal fear of what the scheduled election might produce.

Accordingly, the Government first equipped itself with the Public Safety Conservation Act, which empowered the Governor-General, upon the advice of the Cabinet, to declare a State of Emergency under which the government might be given extraordinary powers to keep the populace under control. Just how extensive those powers could be was revealed in 1951, when the National Party’s first Prime Minister, Sid Holland, made use of the Act to crush the Watersiders’ Union. The conservative Coalition Government’s second step was to use its parliamentary majority to extend its own life by a year.

It was not a popular decision. As New Zealand historian, Tony Simpson, notes in his book The Sugarbag Years:

When the election loomed up in 1934, the government postponed it for a year, hoping that things would be better by 1935. If anything, the ‘stolen year’, as it was called, made matters worse for them. People resented it, and the Labour promises of widespread social change made an irresistible appeal to the electorate. The stage was set, the fuse was lit, and on that fateful night in 1935, it all went off with a bang that was heard around the world.

Economic recession, made more intense and socially destructive by a cost-cutting government, cannot help giving rise to the notion that the government in question’s lease on life may not be a long one. When the burden of that cost-cutting is widely perceived to be unfair, and public anger intensifies, it is hardly surprising that political journalists begin feeling in their gut all those familiar twinges that presage the defeat of the cost-cutters and the victory of the street-marchers.

Perhaps Christopher Luxon should put aside his biographies of businessmen, and pick up Tony Simpson’s The Sugarbag Years. Who knows, he just might experience a few intuitions of his own?

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 30 September 2024.

The Long and the Short: Ageing Boomers, Laurie & Les, Talk Politics.

“While a nationwide vote to confirm, or not, the public’s understanding of our foundational constitutional document would be ‘divisive’, ‘racist’, a ‘blunt instrument’, and therefore completely out of the question, a referendum to extend the life expectancy of elected politicians, which no one not deeply involved with the governing process has actually asked for, or wants, is perfectly okay.”

LAURIE WAS ANGRY. So angry, in fact, that he had assigned a small part of his brain to search back through his more than six decades of experience for a precedent.

Inevitably, he found many. The actions of politicians evoke a special sort of anger, but only rarely do they produce the same anger as a love betrayed; an unfair dismissal; or the unbelievably stupid behaviour of one’s offspring – and the cost of it. Even so, as Laurie made his way to the bar, his anger advanced before him like a sci-fi force-field.

“You look like you could use something stronger than a pale ale, Laurie”, Hannah the bartender, who had been watching his approach with a mixture of apprehension and humour, cast a knowing glance at the top shelf.

“Good idea. Give me a nip of Johnny Walker.” Glancing towards the table in the corner, where his friend, Les, was waving a hand in greeting, Laurie nodded. “And two pale ales.”

Les watched his friend toss back the whiskey. This promised to be interesting.

“What is it, mate? You seldom venture up to the top shelf.”

“Ah, it’s silly really. I shouldn’t let myself get so riled up – least of all by politicians. But, sheesh, Christopher Bloody Luxon really pisses me off.”

“What’s he done now?”

“It’s not so much what he’s done, as what he has proved, over and over again, to be incapable of doing. The man just can’t seem to assemble the pieces of his own government’s jigsaw into a coherent picture. They’re all just bits and pieces to him. A law change here, a policy reversal there. He just doesn’t seem to be able to see what his colleagues and supporters – both in and out of his government – are looking at.”

“Like?”

“Like the use of referenda.”

“The Treaty Principles Bill?”

“Yeah, let’s take a look at that piece of the puzzle. Act is asking Parliament to respond to the widespread public unease about the Treaty and its growing impact on the way New Zealand is governed. David Seymour wants to give the public a real chance to have its say about what the Treaty actually amounts to in 2024, and then to vote the outcome of that discussion either up, or down, in a referendum.”

“Which Luxon will not allow.”

“Correct. Although, he will allow six months of discussion and debate in front of a Select Committee. But, no matter what all that talking finally produces. No matter how impressive the results of the Committee’s deliberations might be. Luxon is pledged to kill the Treaty Principles Bill stone dead by denying it a second reading.”

“Yeah, that’s right. But surely Laurie, we’ve known this for some time?”

“Yes, we have. But what most of us don’t realise is that Luxon has signed National up for another referendum.”

“On a four-year term!”

“Correct. And just think about that for a moment. There’s no evidence of widespread public unease about the current three-year term. It’s an issue beloved by political scientists, policy wonks, and that’s it. As far as the public’s concerned – and this has been confirmed in two referenda already, one in 1967, the other in 1990 – three years is too short for a good government, and too long for a bad one. In other words, the status-quo represents the epitome of good, old-fashioned, Kiwi common-sense.”

“But, in spite of there being no clamour for a change,” Les continued Laurie’s thought, “Luxon and all the other politicians in Parliament will vote to increase the number of years they’re entitled to a minimum salary of $165,000 – plus perks – by one. To be confirmed by referendum.”

“You bet your life, by referendum! Because, while a nationwide vote to confirm, or not, the public’s understanding of our foundational constitutional document would be ‘divisive’, ‘racist’, a ‘blunt instrument’, and therefore completely out of the question, a referendum to extend the life expectancy of elected politicians, which no one not deeply involved with the governing process has actually asked for, or wants, is perfectly okay.”

“And Luxon doesn’t see the hypocrisy?”

“Exactly! He toddles along to some business leaders’ conflab, waxes eloquent about the deficiencies of our three-year term, more-or-less guarantees a referendum, and doesn’t for a single second recognise the double-standard he’s just set.”

“Bloody-hell, Laurie. Now I’m mad!”

This short story was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 27 September 2024.

Procedures, Processes and Principles: Is It Possible To Defend The Treaty Of Waitangi And Democracy?

Out Of The Loop: The great insight of sympathetic Pakeha jurists, like Sir Geoffrey Palmer, was that, suitably empowered, the judiciary and the executive branch of the state could take on the role formerly played by the non-elected governors of mid-nineteenth century New Zealand. Māori resources could be protected, and past injustices redressed, but only if the Pakeha Parliament could somehow be persuaded to take itself out of the loop.

SIR GEOFFREY PALMER has penned a two-part response to Act Leader David Seymour’s “Treaty Principles Bill”. In its essence, Palmer’s contribution reflects the growing unease of the institutions which have hitherto dominated the Waitangi discourse – the legal profession, the courts, and the universities – that they are in real danger of losing control of the narrative.

Between the lines of Palmer’s analysis one detects a profound hostility to the populist impulse, and a palpable impatience with the machinery of representative government that empowers it. The clear intention of Palmer’s intervention is to deflect the popular desire for a democratically defined Treaty away from the decisive instruments of parliamentary democracy, and towards a much more manageable set of “deliberative” options.

In many ways it is surprising that Palmer, and those who share his ideas about the Treaty, did not anticipate the current populist push for a political solution to the doubts and anxieties raised by the document’s startling legal evolution. From the 1980s to the present day, some kind of democratic revision of the Treaty’s status and meaning was always on the cards.

In an address to the Māori Law Review Symposium entitled Māori, the Treaty and the Constitution on 12 June 2013, Palmer offered his audience the following, highly revealing, admission:

“If the remedying of injustice under the Treaty could only be done by Parliament under our existing constitutional structure, then the big obstacle was what John Stuart Mill called majority tyranny. If the legislation addressed the grievances, then majority tyranny would kick in and the likelihood of the issues being addressed in a principled fashion would be reduced. Elected politicians should not be involved in the investigation and formulation of the appropriate remedy. So Parliament had to be persuaded to initiate action, but not determine the nature of the grievance. A set of procedures, processes and principles was likely to work better. Thus, it seemed to me that the aim could be achieved by having Parliament set up a body to investigate and report. That meant extending the jurisdiction of the Waitangi Tribunal back to 1840.”

As a means of drawing the fangs of this supposed tyrannous and unprincipled majority (which is an interesting way of thinking about the nation’s political leaders and the people who elected them) these “procedures, processes and principles” were to prove their worth many times over. So much so, that Palmer felt able to reassure the symposium that:

“Insulation from the ravages of extreme opinion has been achieved. The settlements have become mainstream.”

But if elected politicians were to be excluded from the investigation and formulation of appropriate remedies for the sins of New Zealand’s colonial fathers, then in whose hands should the whole fraught process be placed? What other answer could a former law professor give except – the courts:

“The courts are better protectors of “discrete and insular minorities” than the majoritarian legislature, even under MMP. I remain of the opinion that the Treaty, like the Bill of Rights, should become part of New Zealand’s new superior law Constitution. We now know a great deal about how the courts will go about the task of interpreting the Treaty, just as we know how the courts go about interpreting the Bill of Rights Act. We have had more than twenty years’ experience of both […] We cannot go backward on these issues, but we need to summon up the political courage to go forward.”

The reference to “discrete and insular minorities” comes from a 1937 judgement of the United States Supreme Court. Such minorities, the justices explained, are “saddled with such disabilities, or subjected to such a history of purposeful unequal treatment, or relegated to such a position of political powerlessness as to command extraordinary protection from the majoritarian political process.”

In citing this celebrated case, Palmer was signalling to his 2013 audience that he well understood the historical predicament of the Māori people.

The Treaty of Waitangi was the initiative of a British Government which, in 1840, was impelled by the political principles then guiding its Foreign and Colonial Office to secure control of New Zealand, but only after obtaining the freely given consent of its indigenous inhabitants.

This was duly achieved by recognising the full authority – tino rangatiratanga – of tribal chieftains to determine the disposition of their lands, forests, fisheries, and other valued resources, as they saw fit, and by giving Maori the same rights and privileges as the people of Great Britain.

Crucially, the chiefs’ lands could only be sold to representatives of the British Government. Thus were Māori protected from the contemporaneous depredations of the agents of the rapacious New Zealand Company – and the French.

Overseeing the evolution of this new relationship would be a Governor appointed by the British Government. Not the least of the Governor’s duties was to protect the Māori tribes from the greed and the larceny of the British, European and American settlers determined to make their fortunes in Britain’s new colony.

While the original parties to the 1840 Treaty, the British Government and the tribal chiefs, continued to be the only parties that mattered, the relationship, though often strained, endured. By the early 1850s, however, the fast-growing population of Pakeha settlers was demanding that the powers-that-be in London grant them self-government.

The settlers objective was brutally simple: to avail themselves of Māori land without having to secure the chiefs’ and/or the Governor’s permission. In other words, they wanted to construct a New Zealand state in which the Treaty could be dismissed as a “simple nullity”. Such a state could only be created by the forcible dispossession of Māori hapu and iwi, but that was a price the Pakeha settlers were perfectly willing to pay.

Putting the matter bluntly, the greatest enemy of Māori, since 1853, has been the Pakeha Parliament. While its power to make the law remained untrammelled there was nothing Māori could do to defend their fast-diminishing patrimony.

The great insight of sympathetic Pakeha jurists, like Palmer, was that, suitably empowered, the judiciary and the executive branch of the state could take on the role formerly played by the non-elected governors of mid-nineteenth century New Zealand. Māori resources could be protected, and past injustices redressed, but only if the Pakeha Parliament could somehow be persuaded to take itself out of the loop.

It is, perhaps, the most remarkable aspect of New Zealand history that, for a period of roughly half-a-century, the nation’s elected representatives were willing to do just that. They made way for the courts, the Waitangi Tribunal, and the Office of Treaty Settlements to right as many of the wrongs done to te iwi Māori as they adjudged Pakeha voters to be willing to accept.

That turned out to be an impressively large number. But, by 2023, Pakeha voters’ – or, at least, a majority of Pakeha voters’ – willingness to go on righting the wrongs of the past had reached its limit. In response, the newly elected Pakeha Parliament, to the utter dismay of the courts, the Waitangi Tribunal, and the Office of Māori Crown Relations, determined to suddenly and dramatically re-enter the loop.

Small wonder Palmer is calling for “deliberative” alternatives to parliamentary action, such as randomly selected citizens’ assemblies, to be substituted for the deliberations of the House of Representatives. These latter, which tend to culminate in legislative action, are to be avoided at all costs lest they precipitate a head-on collision between the legislature, the judiciary, and that part of the executive branch represented by the state bureaucracy.

Palmer, and those who share his outlook, must know that in any contest between Parliament and the rest of the State only two outcomes are possible. Either the coercive agencies of the state – the armed forces and the police – put an end to representative democracy on the Executive’s/Judiciary’s behalf. Or, the key institutions of the state, with varying degrees of rage and reluctance, bow to “majority tyranny” and the “ravages of extreme opinion”.

Otherwise known as the will of the people.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack page on Thursday, 26 September 2024.

Has Government Become A Public-Private Partnership?

Dirty Deals Done In The Dark: There will be times when it is to the considerable advantage of both National and Labour to be able to shrug philosophically and pardon themselves for cooperating in the introduction of controversial and divisive policies by explaining to an outraged public that this is simply the way MMP works. Photo by Lynn Grieveson.

“CAMPAIGN IN POETRY, govern in prose.” It is one of the most memorable political maxims to emerge from American politics. A relic, perhaps, of the era in which the policies of the major parties did not diverge substantially from one another. In those circumstances, the winning of elections is largely reduced to questions of style and performance.

The maxim’s most famous proof came in the presidential election of 2008. Millions of American’s were uplifted by Democratic Party candidate Barak Obama’s soaring rhetoric. Pundits and professors compared his speeches to JFK’s, or even to those of Rome’s greatest orator, Cicero. His campaign poster, emblazoned with just one word: “Hope”, and his campaign slogan: “Yes we can!”, all contributed to the “poetry” of his victory over the Republicans’ John McCain. In office, however, Obama turned out to be a very prosaic president indeed. As McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin later quipped: “How’s that hopey, changey thing going for ya?”

A large measure of policy consensus, by refocusing attention upon the personalities of contending party leaders, offers the additional benefit of keeping the political temperature agreeably low. Representative democracy works best when the most heated arguments are restricted to the cover art, rather than the content, of the political books on sale. It is only when the personalities presenting the policies begin to matter less than the policies presented, that the prospects for a peaceful transfer of power start to diminish. When a party’s supporters become convinced that they cannot afford to lose an election, they will stop at nothing to win it.

The greatest virtue of the First-Past-the-Post (FPP) electoral system (and it does not possess that many!) is its propensity to, first, generate a broad measure of political consensus, and, second, to deliver the decisive electoral outcomes required to keep that consensus in place. It is only when the voters begin to sense a widening gap between the rules of the traditional democratic game, and the rules of whatever game its leading politicians have taken to playing, that demands for a new set of rules – or even a whole new game – start attracting significant support.

New Zealand’s adoption of the Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) electoral system was driven by the widely-shared voter perception that Labour, followed by National, had been taken over by ideological zealots who made a fetish out of their refusal to be swayed by the policy preferences of either their own party members, or the voters.

Perhaps the most dramatic demonstration of this indifference to public opinion came from Labour Cabinet Minister Richard Prebble, who, upon learning that close to 90 percent of the population opposed the privatisation of Telecom (then a state-owned telecommunications enterprise) declared that New Zealanders should be proud to have a government willing to defy such a powerful pressure-group!

In large measure, MMP prevailed over FPP in the referendum of 1993 because most voters were convinced that the coalition governments made more-or-less obligatory by proportional representation would prevent the politicians responsible for turning Labour and National into ideologically-reanimated zombie parties from imposing upon New Zealanders even more economic and social “reforms” they hadn’t asked for and didn’t want.

What most New Zealand voters failed to grasp, however, is that for this moderating influence on Labour and National to be effective, the new minor parties made possible by MMP would need to possess extraordinary negotiating skills, and, if these proved inadequate and/or unavailing, the political courage to force a new election. That was a very big ask. To date, no minor party has been willing to court the electorate’s wrath by becoming the tail that wagged the dog. Certainly, the conventionally wise have cautioned against such behaviour. Indeed, the pundits’ predictions have never varied: any minor party deemed responsible for forcing a new election will be “wiped out”.

But, the minor parties were damned if they did, and damned if they didn’t. Voters may well have punished any small party that forced them back to the polls, but that didn’t mean those same voters were ready to reward it for refusing to create political instability. Parties opting to enter coalition arrangements with either Labour or National, and agreeing to swallow all manner of dead rats in the process, frequently found themselves falling below the 5 percent MMP threshold at the next election.

Governing in prose came at considerable cost to the minor parties.

Preserving the policy consensus they were elected to unwind, however, was not a strategy the minor parties could afford to pursue indefinitely. The logic of MMP is implacable. Excessive co-operation with a major party is likely to result in the guilty minor party exiting Parliament – as NZ First, the Alliance, and the Māori Party could all attest, and Act, too, would surely have attested, had it not been for the strategic nous of the Epsom voters. In order to survive, a minor party must present to their preferred coalition partner a short list of “must haves” that cannot, under any circumstances, be traded away.

It must, however, do more than that. To get around the problem of what to do if the major party says “No.”, a minor party needs to persuade those with a powerful commercial and/or political interest in seeing specific policies enacted to clear a path for them in either National or Labour well in advance the next scheduled general election. Intensive lobbying, generous targeted donations, probably both, will be deployed to create what amount to “fifth columns” of policy allies inside the major parties. With these in place, the pressure to give the minor parties their “must haves” will likely prove irresistible.

Such arrangements are unlikely to generate serious objections from within the major parties. There will be times, after all, when it is to the considerable advantage of both National and Labour to be able to shrug philosophically and pardon themselves for cooperating in the introduction of controversial and divisive policies by explaining to an outraged public that this is simply the way MMP works.

Naturally, if it was just up to them, they wouldn’t dream of re-writing the Treaty, introducing hate speech laws, relaxing firearm controls, phasing out the internal combustion engine, introducing a Māori upper house, reducing the taxes on tobacco products, or privatising the Cook Strait ferries, but, sadly, the wishes of one’s coalition partners cannot be ignored.

Given the pernicious evolutionary path MMP now appears to be following, does it still make sense to talk about campaigning in poetry, and governing in prose? Sadly, it does not.

Lobbying and donating large sums of money to carefully cultivated politicians in both the major and the minor parties, for the purposes of securing specific policy objectives, is not the sort of behaviour that lends itself to poetry – unless it’s Bob Dylan’s pithy observation that “money doesn’t talk, it swears”.

Governing, too, is changing. No longer written in the dull but honest prose attendant upon raising the money needed to keep the nation solvent and in good heart, government, today, is all about fulfilling private interests’ pre-paid objectives – while attempting to pass them off as your own.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 23 September 2024.

Is National A White Supremacist Party?

By Their Deeds Shall Ye Know Them: When the defeated Reform and United parties were persuaded to unite under the rubric of “National” in 1936, the values advanced were unashamedly imperialist and white supremacist. Eighty-eight years later, National is at pains to distance itself (coalition agreements permitting) from the most obvious forms of racism. Even so, its attachment to the substance of racial oppression remains disturbingly strong.

THE NATIONAL PARTY has, with an unmistakeable measure of pride, distanced itself from David Seymour’s “Treaty Principles Bill”. The narrative presented by the Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, is of a party acting under the duress of MMP.

According to Luxon, his first responsibility, as the leader of the largest party represented in the House of Representatives, was to give New Zealand a stable government. To achieve that objective, he and his party had no choice but to negotiate with Act and NZ First. The resulting coalition agreements were, inevitably, a collection of compromises.

Had National won an absolute majority, Luxon argues, the Treaty Principles Bill could only ever have made it to the floor of the House as a Private Members Bill. As such, it would not have been given a First Reading, and New Zealand would have been spared months of divisive debate.

But, National did not win an absolute majority, and so Seymour got his debate. Short of calling a second election, Luxon insists, compromising with Act was his only other choice. New Zealand may rest assured, however, that the Treaty Principles Bill will not be read a second time.

It’s a good story, made all the better for being true. In possession of an absolute parliamentary majority, National, the party of Jim Bolger and Doug Graham, John Key and Chris Finlayson, wouldn’t have dreamed of assaulting te iwi Māori with a weapon as crude and obvious as Seymour’s proposed legislation.

That does not mean, however, that te iwi Māori are not being attacked by National ministers wielding weapons every bit as inimical to the interests of tangata whenua as Seymour’s bill. As a political party, National has always worked for a society based on the rigid hierarchies of class, race, and gender. Its purpose continues to be the promotion and protection of private property and private advantage. Such relationships as National has been compelled to form with Māori have invariably reflected the party’s conservative political values.

When a cabal of former army officers and erstwhile members of the quasi-fascist New Zealand Legion persuaded the defeated Reform and United parties to unite under the rubric of “National” in 1936, the values advanced were unashamedly imperialist and white supremacist. Eighty-eight years later, National is at pains to distance itself (coalition agreements permitting) from the most obvious forms of racism. Even so, its attachment to the substance of racial oppression remains disturbingly strong.

Understandably, given the white supremacist assumptions built into the conservative political movements of the British dominions (Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand) National only interacted seriously with Māori when it became politically inescapable.

Labour’s close association with the morehu (remnants of the tribes, survivors) drawn to Ratana, prompted National to cultivate equally close relationships with the chiefly elements of Maoridom. Like National, these rangatira were strong believers in the principles of hierarchy and lineage. They also tended to be the richest and most powerful personalities in their communities. Patriarchal beliefs were similarly shared. For conservative Māori and Pakeha, alike, it was a man’s world.

The post-war mass migration of Māori from the rural periphery of New Zealand to its largest towns and cities presented multiple affronts to conservative Pakeha sensibilities. The sheer proximity of so many brown faces triggered deep-seated fears and prejudices – many of them traceable to the colonial violence and corrupt land acquisitions of the Nineteenth Century. These were in no way relieved by the new arrivals’ easy assimilation into the workforces, unions, and sports clubs of the Pakeha working-class. The political threat represented by this potential Māori augmentation of Labour’s urban electoral base was considerable.

Small wonder, then, that National Governments, from the 1950s to the 1970s, used their command of state-housing policy to concentrate as many Māori (and, later, Pasifika migrants) in as few electorates as possible. Under the First-Past-the-Post system it didn’t matter that Labour racked up huge majorities in a few seats. Much more dangerous was the possibility that Māori and Pasifika voters, unconcentrated, but registered on the General Roll, might tip the balance of votes in the so-called “marginal” seats where New Zealand elections, prior to MMP, were lost and won.

By the 1980s it had become a race between the socio-economic pressures bearing down on an increasingly brown – and bolshie – working-class, and the cultural/political aspirations of the small, but fast growing number of Māori middle-class professionals. These latter had as little to gain from an assertive brown working-class, inspired by the ideals of New Zealand’s idiosyncratic brand of socialism, as the economic interests represented by National. That the neoliberal policies imposed by the Fourth Labour Government were exacting an appalling toll on Māori families up and down the country, immiserating thousands, only made the choice facing Māori leaders more urgent. The political stakes had been raised to dangerous levels.

When Labour finally fell in 1990, National faced two daunting challenges. Meeting and defeating the threat of an angry brown proletariat, while diverting the energies of the burgeoning Māori middle-class into cultural politics. Disconnected from the urban Māori poor, these new leaders’ capabilities could be redirected towards resurrecting the claims of traditional iwi and hapu, and transforming them into vehicles for what the Auckland academic, Dr Elizabeth Rata, calls “neo-tribal capitalism”.

The Employment Contracts Act took care of the first challenge, while the Treaty Settlement Process more than met the second. Not only was the old Māori aristocracy given a new lease on life, but the new, settlement-funded, Māori corporations were fast creating a new one.

This elevation of Māori interests and issues was received uneasily by National’s electoral base. Where would it end? Leading Māori intellectuals spoke openly of reclaiming all the lands lost to the Pakeha. Bolger and Graham described a “fiscal envelope” containing one billion dollars! Where was National taking New Zealand? Were the conquests of the 1860s and 70s secure? Farmers and businesspeople needed to know.

It is doubtful whether the Māori cultural renaissance, or the economic compensation awarded to iwi by the Treaty Settlement Process, would have happened had the grim process of pressing down upon the Māori and Pasifika poor not unfolded alongside it. The National Government’s Finance Minister, Ruth Richardson’s 1991 “Mother of All Budgets” may have been billed as the long overdue curtailment of a welfare-state grown large enough to defeat its own purposes, but, looked at another way, it was also a brutal reimposition of economic, racial and gender hierarchies.

Just as the Victorian division of the lower orders into the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor enjoyed a state-assisted come-back in 1990s New Zealand, so, too, did the Nineteenth Century division of tangata whenua into “friendly Maoris” and “rebels”. Not that they were identified as such by late-Twentieth Century National Party politicians. In the 1990s, troublesome Māori were identified as: “gangs”, “welfare fraudsters”, “solo mothers”, and, even less subtly, the incorrigible perpetrators of domestic violence, child abuse, and illegal drug consumption. A dysfunctional collectivity referred to as the “Māori Underclass”.

As “progressive” Pakeha oohed and aahed over the Te Māori exhibition, life in New Zealand’s Māori and Pasifika communities endured all the cruelties and indignities of which a systemically racist state apparatus is capable.

White South Africans fleeing the final demise of Apartheid in the early-1990s were astounded at the ease with which Pakeha had established something very similar in New Zealand – and all without resorting to pass-laws, tear-gas, water-cannon, or live-rounds. They found “brown towns” and “white towns”, “brown schools” and “white schools”, and nobody not raised amid signs saying “Blankes” and “Nie-Blankes”, or reminded daily of the dishonoured promises of the Treaty of Waitangi, seemed capable of seeing, let alone acknowledging, New Zealand’s racially bifurcated system.

Only under the leadership of Don Brash did the National Party adopt a policy programme that attempted to meld the racially-charged socio-economic divisions with which it placated its atavistic base, with a disarmingly honest attempt to roll back the divide-and-conquer policies embodied in the Treaty Settlement Process. The neo-tribal capitalism of the Māori corporations; the positive discrimination measures that had fed the steady growth of the Māori middle-class; all of it was to go. That Brash’s “Iwi/Kiwi” campaign lifted National’s Party Vote from 20.9 percent in 2002 to 39.1 percent in 2005 indicates just how deeply embedded the question of race has always been in National’s political philosophy.

John Key’s reversion to the Bolger/Graham strategy was as swift as it was successful. His coalition government even included the Maori Party, an inspired MMP manoeuvre which provided him the political cover he needed as the immiseration of Māori and Pasifika proceeded without significant government remediation. The state houses National had built in the 1950s and 60s were either sold-off or allowed to decay. Raw sewerage ran down the walls of “brown” hospitals. Crime and drug addiction in the “brown” towns and suburbs grew steadily worse. National was, however, willing to sanction New Zealand’s adherence to the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

That Luxon would have attempted to steer a similar course to Key’s is certain. Unfortunately, the “decolonisation” and “indigenisation” policies of the Sixth Labour Government were sufficiently radical to re-animate the electoral coalition that had so nearly won power in 2005 – only this time in numbers sufficient to place the racially-agitated right on the Treasury Benches.

National’s – and Pakeha New Zealand’s – problem, in 2024, is that the Māori of the urban slums, the Māori of the iwi corporations, and the Māori of the public sector commissariat, are fast approaching the critical political mass, the kotahitanga, that will make them one, unstoppable, force for change.

The Treaty Principles Bill may not be read a second time, but in the battle between Iwi and Kiwi that now seems inevitable, there is absolutely no doubt that National will be found fighting alongside the white supremacist forces it has always led.

This time, minus the mask.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack page on Thursday, 19 September 2024.

The Dead-End Options Of Political Decay.

Dark Times: Denied the state’s leadership and resources, New Zealand’s economy has been hollowed out and taken over. More importantly, so has its democracy.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH NATIONAL? New Zealand’s “natural party of government” (since its formation in 1936 the National Party has won 17 out of 28 general elections) has long been recognised as a moderate and pragmatic political force. Not only that, but when hardline individuals and factions have taken control of the party, it has demonstrated an admirable willingness to step away from its extremists and re-engage with the political mainstream. From Sid Holland to Keith Holyoake, Ruth Richardson to Bill English, Don Brash to John Key, National has never been slow to recognise an ideological losing streak – and do something about it.

What happened?

Given the party’s mainstream status, it should come as no surprise that what happened to National bears close comparison to what happened to Labour. By embracing the essentially anti-political objectives of the “more market” reforms of the late-1980s and early-1990s, both major parties gave away most of the New Zealand state’s hitherto extensive powers of economic intervention. In doing so they reduced significantly the role and purpose of New Zealand’s elected leadership. National and Labour politicians are still working out what that means, not only for themselves, but also for the parties they represent. 

New Zealand has always suffered from the disadvantages associated with a small population and the large distances separating the country from its principal markets. To offset these disadvantages, the New Zealand state was forced to play a central role in funding the sort of infrastructure which, in other countries, was paid for by the private sector. It’s not that New Zealand lacked capitalists, it’s just that the repeated failure of their undercapitalised private enterprises very swiftly reconciled them to the inescapable fact of their economic lives. That, when it came to laying down the building blocks of a working national economy: banks, insurance companies, railways, roads and bridges, schools and hospitals; the state was the only player with anything like deep enough pockets.

The economic necessity of state intervention catapulted New Zealand’s politicians into what can only be described as an heroic role. Where Great Britain had its Isambard Kingdom Brunel, New Zealand had Julius Vogel. Against the Empire’s Cecil Rhodes, New Zealand set its own Richard ‘King Dick’ Seddon.

The burgeoning wealth of the United States may have been created by its capitalist ‘bobber barons’, but the generally comfortable condition of most New Zealanders at the turn of the Nineteenth Century was the legacy of their hero politicians and their activist state. Not for nothing was this tiny country hailed as “the social laboratory of the world”.

As the Great Depression of the 1930s sent New Zealanders reeling economically, their political response was entirely consistent with the history of “God’s own country”. Almost instinctively, the victims of the worldwide economic catastrophe turned to the state – not only for short-term relief, but also for reassurance that, in the long term, they and their children would have a future worth living in. The First Labour Government’s success in meeting both of these expectations transformed its leader, Michael Joseph Savage, into something considerably more than a hero. It made him a saint.

A tough act to follow. Forced to watch the Left’s steady expansion of state power, and alarmed by the growing power of the compulsorily unionised working-class which, for 13 long years, had kept Labour in government and National cooling its heels on the Opposition Benches, Sid Holland became National’s first prime minister with one over-riding purpose: to make New Zealand safe for farmers and businessmen, and their wives, by turfing out the trade unionists and public servants who had somehow contrived to park their impertinent posteriors in the big leather chairs. Smashing the bolshie wharfies’ union and its allies certainly hastened this restoration of the ‘right people’, and their interests. National would never lose its aura as the country’s prime defender of law and order.

The 1951 Waterfront Dispute was not, however, the first step towards breaking the New Zealand state’s grip on the New Zealand economy. Subsidies and import licences survived the angry eight year reign of Sid Holland and his cronies. His successor, Keith Holyoake, tended the “stabilised”, state-guided, New Zealand economy with the same care that he tended his beloved roses. Unconvinced of the need for major change, “Kiwi Keith” stretched National’s political dominance over the entire 1960s with all the smug propriety of a pampered family cat.

This was the achievement that Rob Muldoon spent the whole nine years of his prime ministership attempting to replicate. Though presented to young New Zealanders as a cross between Darth Vader and Voldemort, National’s fourth prime minister’s boast that he was the last finance minister to truly understand the New Zealand economy was by no means a vain one.

One has only to survey his “Think Big” programme of state-sponsored growth, to see how thoroughly he had absorbed the central truth of New Zealand’s economic history. That, stripped of the state’s resources, the nation’s economy would, in short order, be hollowed out and taken over. More importantly, so would its democracy. New Zealand’s politicians would cease to be heroes, and become villains.

Mastering the complicated alchemy of turning villains into heroes pretty much describes the politics of the last 40 years. After burning down Labour’s inclusive economy with the ‘Rogernomics’ flame-thrower; after promising voters the ‘Decent Society’, and delivering the ‘Mother of All Budgets’; where were the politicians charged with protecting Neoliberalism’s low-tax, deregulated and privatised economy supposed to go? How can a party convince voters that it will do something, when it knows full well that, since 1984, New Zealand governments aren’t allowed to do anything?

The answer devised by Labour’s Helen Clark and Michael Cullen, and perfected by National’s John Key and Bill English, was to smile and wave and hope that their political careers came to an end before the nation’s infrastructure collapsed. Between them, National and Labour kept up this charade for 18 years. The obvious weakness of the strategy, that it would only work for as long as the infrastructure remained upright, left the next generation of Labour and National leaders facing something bearing a frightening resemblance to the Gotterdammerung.

Small wonder, then, that having been returned to the Opposition benches, first Labour’s and then National’s caucuses, went bonkers. Electing and/or ejecting a leader every other year becomes inevitable when the people are crying out for effective policy, and all the major political parties are able to offer them are ineffective personalities.

Jacinda Ardern’s and Grant Robertson’s accidental 2017 victory, plagued by indecision and ineptitude, received, unaccountably, the dubious benediction of the Covid Pandemic which, at least temporarily, allowed the state to resume its old role of New Zealand’s prime defender. How devastating it must have been for Labour to once again be required to surrender the state’s interventionist powers to their Treasury and the Reserve Bank jailers.

With nothing useful left to offer New Zealand economically, Labour’s lurch towards cultural revolution was entirely predictable. Where else do left-wing middle-class Gen-Xers go when all other roads are blocked – except to the road leading them back to the student union?

By the same token, where does the National Party go when the nation’s infrastructure is visibly crumbling, and the cost of fixing it cannot be met (without incurring the wrath of the neoliberal priesthood) by raising taxes, or taking advantage of the state’s ability to borrow capital more cheaply than the private sector? The answer would appear to be that it either starts venturing down the dark alleys of crony capitalism, or hanging-out with the counter-revolutionary culture-warriors of the Weirdo Right. Or both.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 16 September 2024.

Judge Not.

Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. Matthew 7:1-2

FOUR HUNDRED AND FORTY men and women professing the Christian faith would appear to have imperilled their immortal souls. The second of the Ten Commandments could hardly be clearer: Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image. And yet, in their open letter to the nation’s legislators, these 440 clerics have made it equally clear that, by their adoration of te Tiriti o Waitangi, idolatry is precisely what they are guilty of. Worse still, by publicly bowing down before te Tiriti, and serving it so aggressively, they have called down upon their heads the wrath of a self-confessed “Jealous God”, whose punishments extend – even unto the fourth generation.

Then again, citing the Old Testament probably cuts little ice with these Christians. They do, after all, introduce their attack on Act leader David Seymour’s, Treaty Principles Bill with a quote from the Gospel of Matthew:

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.

A fine old Presbyterian once described the Beatitudes (from which the above verse is taken) as “Jesus’s marching orders”. Such a pity, then, that what the clerics put their names to evinces so little in the way of elucidating the paths of peace. Counselling men and women to use their power to silence the voices of others smacks more of violence and repression than peace-making.

Certainly, David Seymour’s epistolary assailants have given him cause to seek solace in the ninth beatitude:

Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.

For Christ’s sake? Who among the 440 clerics would aver that David Seymour’s Bill is infused with Christian purpose? Not many, if any. Which is disappointing, since the Act leader would appear to have a firmer theological grasp of the issues at stake in this matter than the professors of theology who signed on to the open letter.

“I am not a religious person,” David Seymour tweeted. “However, I do have an enormous respect for the core Christian principle of imago dei – we are each made in the image of God. I like it because it automatically means we all have equal dignity. It is one of the foundations of liberal democracy and whether you are Christian or not, you have to be grateful for the freedom and dignity that idea has given us.”

Well, yes, it does, and we should. The idea that each soul approaches the throne of God naked and alone, no longer cloaked in the pretentions of class, or race, or gender, but only in the artistry of the Creator’s hand, is, perhaps, why the carpenter from Nazareth warned us:

Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

A beam in the eye of 440 clerics? Surely not?

But what else are we to call a letter which so clearly divides the people of New Zealand into sheep and goats – an exercise in separation considered by most Christians to be the privilege of Jehovah alone.

The letter’s depiction of te Tiriti as a “sacred covenant” is also troubling. No deities of any kind are invoked, or included, in the Treaty’s text. It was a document made on earth, by men, and in the nature of all man-made things its meaning has proved as difficult to pin down as quicksilver.

Is it really such an awful sin to ask the voters of New Zealand to validate, or repudiate, David Seymour’s attempt to define the essence of te Tiriti o Waitangi? After all, God leads us through history towards the future, not the past. It is surely blasphemy to suggest that he has forever bound New Zealanders’ imaginations to the confused deliberations of 6th February 1840.

Is a referendum really so unthinkable? After all, as another wise cleric (not one of the 440) memorably declared: Vox populi, vox dei. The voice of the people is the voice of God.

This sermon was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 13 September 2024.

Managed Democracy: Letting The People Decide, But Only When They Can Be Relied Upon To Give the Right Answer.

Uh-uh! Not So Fast, Citizens! The power to initiate systemic change remains where it has always been in New Zealand’s representative democracy – in Parliament. To order a binding referendum, the House of Representatives must first to be persuaded that, on the question proposed, sharing its decision-making power with the people is a good idea. Not an easy task.

WHEN DID HOLDING REFERENDA become a bad thing? What transformed the option of asking citizens to decide an issue collectively into a sin against democracy on a par with the Reichstag Fire? In attempting to answer that question, it is important to establish that referenda have been a common feature of New Zealand political life for more than a century.

Voters participated in what was called the “National Licencing Poll” – a referendum – at every general election held between 1919 and 1989. The question put to them was whether New Zealand should embrace “Prohibition”, “Continuance”, or the “State Purchase and Control” of alcohol. More than once, astonishingly, “Prohibition” came within a percentage point of winning!

In August 1949, 77 percent of New Zealanders voted in favour of a Labour Government sponsored referendum calling for compulsory military training in peacetime.

Twice since 1967 New Zealanders have been given a choice between a three-year and a four-year parliamentary term. (Spoiler Alert: Both times they opted to stick with a three-year term.)

In 2015 and 2016, New Zealanders voted in two referenda to decide whether or not the nation’s flag should be replaced.

In 2020, Kiwis voted to legalise euthanasia, and reaffirm Cannabis prohibition, in two separate and binding referenda.

Most significantly, however, New Zealand’s electoral system was changed profoundly, and remained so, on the strength of not one, not two, but three referenda.

How, then, has this tried and tested means of testing the general will been transformed into something so dreadful that 440 Christian clerics recently felt compelled to publish an open letter to the nation’s legislators urging them to reject out of hand a bill defining the principles of te Tiriti o Waitangi, and providing for these legislatively (re)defined principles to be accepted or rejected by referendum at the next general election?

The answer to this question may be found in the unfortunate history of Citizens Initiated Referenda (CIR). Much like the popular campaign for a shift towards proportional representation, the demand for citizens initiated referenda grew out of the public’s immense dissatisfaction with a political system that seemed impervious to the popular will.

In spite of all the promises made to voters in the run-up to general elections, the neoliberal economic and social order erected by Labour in the late-1980s, and reinforced by National in the early-1990s, remained unchallengeable.

The First-Past-the-Post electoral system, by delivering an absolute majority of the seats in the House of Representatives to single parties receiving less (and, not infrequently, considerably less) than 51 percent of the popular vote, allowed doctrinaire governments to defy public opinion. Under the prevailing two-party system, and with Labour and National equally committed to preserving the neoliberal order, root-and-branch change remained the preserve of parliamentarians – not citizens.

To the chagrin of those who had successfully campaigned for proportional representation, the new electoral system – “MMP” – hardly improved matters. While the New Zealand Parliament became more representative of New Zealand’s increasingly diverse electorate, the electoral duopoly committed to the survival of neoliberalism remained strong enough to deny smaller parties the critical policy concessions they and their supporters were anticipating under the new MMP system.

The public push for CIRs was intended to supply the “braces” to proportional representation’s “belt”. Any government foolhardy enough to dig in its toes over dismantling neoliberalism could be forced to do so, albeit in piecemeal fashion, by having specific policy changes mandated by referendum.

With the decisive referendum on MMP looming in 1993, the National Government appeased the CIR campaigners by passing legislation allowing for 10 percent of electors to initiate a referendum. There was, however, a catch. Any referendum thus initiated would not be binding.

Huh? Wasn’t that a pretty massive spanner to throw in the works of plebiscitary democracy? With the benefit of hindsight, the answer seems blindingly obvious. At the time, however, people were persuaded that it might be dangerous to bind the hands of government quite so tightly. More importantly, they bought the argument that no government would be foolhardy enough to ignore the moral force of a successful referendum.

Yeah, right.

Without the assurance of the CIR’s result being binding, a worryingly large percentage of New Zealand’s already cynical electorate consistently declined to participate in the process. But, without a convincing turn-out, the politicians argued, no affirmative result could be taken seriously. Even 100 percent support for a proposition loses its lustre when three-quarters of the population cries-off expressing an opinion.

Unsurprisingly, the public’s enthusiasm for CIRs soon waned.

The initiative for change thus remains where it has always been in New Zealand’s representative democracy – with Parliament. To order a binding referendum, the House of Representatives must first to be persuaded that, on the question proposed, sharing its decision-making power with the people is a good idea.

Not an easy task.

Getting Parliament to devolve its power is made even more difficult if the question to be decided runs counter to the accepted wisdom of the ruling elites and their parliamentary proxies. In the case of questions requiring the jettisoning of neoliberal economics, or messing around with the accepted understanding of te Tiriti o Waitangi, those MPs attempting to give the people the final say should expect to be opposed by an overwhelming majority of their colleagues.

Which is precisely what Act’s MPs have discovered in relation to their leader, David Seymour’s, Treaty Principles Bill.

Every other party in Parliament opposes vociferously the very thought of defining the principles of te Tiriti by referendum. The issues, they say, are far too complex to be resolved by such a crude political mechanism. Treaty matters are best left to the sober deliberations of New Zealand’s most senior judges, the Waitangi Tribunal, and experienced public servants. They must not, under any conceivable circumstances, be left to the tender mercies of the ordinary New Zealander in the street.

Were such a thing to happen, the parties argue, New Zealand’s social cohesion would likely be sorely tested. If David Seymour’s definitions of the Treaty’s principles are ratified by referendum, they warn, there could be violence.

Backing these alarming claims is the Ministry of Justice’s Regulatory Impact Statement which further cautions the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government that: “[P]utting decision-making on Treaty matters to the wider public through a referendum brings a significant risk that the will of a non-Māori majority will impose on the minority partners (who are also most likely to be affected by the policy).”

That this is precisely what has been proposed in every binding referendum ever conducted in New Zealand seems to have escaped the Ministry of Justice.

The will of the alcohol consuming majority was triennially imposed upon the teetotalling minority. The will of the communist-fearing majority in 1949 over-ruled those who opposed turning teenagers into cannon-fodder.

It’s the way democracy works: by ensuring that politicians are only able to exercise power legitimately “with the consent of the governed”; because the only state of affairs worse than the tyranny of a ballot-casting majority, is the tyranny of a violence-threatening minority.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack page on Friday, 13 September 2024.

Looking For Labour’s Vital Signs.

Flatlining: With no evidence of a genuine policy disruptor at work in Labour’s ranks, New Zealand’s wealthiest citizens can sleep easy.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN has walked a picket-line. Presidential candidate Kamala Harris has threatened “price-gauging” grocery retailers with price control. The Democratic Party’s 2024 platform situates it well to the left of Sir Keir Starmer’s British Labour Party, which is still “righting” itself after lurching leftwards under Jeremy Corbyn. Australia’s Anthony Albanese is the first Labor Party leader since Paul Keating to show signs of completing a full three-year parliamentary term without being rolled. New Zealand’s Labour Party, by contrast, shows virtually no signs of internal dissent, excitement, or even life.

And it should be showing all those vital signs. What other centre-left party, in any part of the developed world, would sit idly by after its leader – then the country’s prime minister – decided, without Cabinet sanction, and while he was out of the country, to scupper the tax policies of his Revenue and Finance Ministers, and who then went on to halve his party’s support at the next election? None with a political pulse.

Then again, what sort of leader, having delivered his party’s second-lowest share of the popular vote in 80 years, would think it in any way appropriate to remain in the top job? Sadly, such refusals to take personal responsibility for catastrophic failure are far from uncommon in electoral politics. Much rarer, however, are party caucuses so lacking in spine that they allow such failures to cling on to power.

Certainly, when David Cunliffe led Labour to its worst election result in 80 years: attracting a Party Vote of just 25.13 percent; his caucus was utterly unwilling to countenance him remaining Leader of the Opposition. Interestingly, one of Cunliffe’s most vociferous 2014 critics was Chris Hipkins – the same man who, nine years later, would deliver Labour a Party Vote of 26.91 percent. Clearly, that additional 1.78 percentage points made a huge difference!

Those who have followed Labour’s political evolution post-Rogernomics will no doubt attribute this inconsistency to the debilitating factional in-fighting that nearly consumed the party as it struggled to chart a way forward following Helen Clark’s departure in 2008. It was Cunliffe’s election as Party Leader in 2013, over the strong objections of a majority of his parliamentary colleagues, that brought these faction fights to their final, bitter, denouement in the aftermath of the 2014 debacle.

The faction that should have won, and was widely expected to win, in the aftermath of 2014 was the caucus clique led by Grant Robertson, Chris Hipkins and Jacinda Ardern. These were the “Clarkists”, all of whom had served as ministerial and/or prime-ministerial advisers in Clark’s government. They were determined to keep the party in its place, as Clark had done for 15 unyielding years.

A Labour Party liberated from caucus control could not be trusted to maintain the neoliberal order. On the contrary, it was likely to attack it. But, making an enemy of the neoliberal order, or even appearing to, is not a good idea – as Helen Clark and Michael Cullen, then in coalition with Jim Anderton’s left-wing Alliance, discovered in the “Winter of Discontent” that followed the Left’s 1999 victory.

Robertson came agonisingly close to replacing Cunliffe in 2014, losing to Andrew Little by a fraction of 1 percent. One can only speculate as to how successful, or unsuccessful, a Robertson-led Labour Party might have been in the election of 2017. Or, how any government he went on to lead might have performed when compared to those led by Jacinda Ardern. Would his handling of Covid-19 have been better? Worse? Essentially the same? The random contingencies of History can drive a person mad.

The questions that pose themselves in 2024 are mostly inspired by the political tenacity of the Clarkist faction, or, at least, of Chris “Chippy” Hipkins, its sole remaining representative now that Ardern and Robertson have departed the stage. While there are unmistakable stirrings among Labour’s rank-and-file – as there always are following the party’s loss of the Treasury Benches – there is little sign, as yet, of a Kiwi version of Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, or even of Kamala Harris.

About the only political declarations Hipkins’ caucus colleagues have been prepared to make since the 2023 election, apart from the usual boiler-plate media releases, are those in which they vehemently deny even the slightest interest in replacing him. The nearest New Zealand Labour can boast to a political “disrupter” is the principal victim of Hipkins’ “Captain’s Call” on taxation reform, David Parker.

Parker has been addressing Labour gatherings around the country on the urgent need to re-design New Zealand’s fiscal architecture if Labour is to make any credible promises regarding health, education, superannuation, housing, welfare, and any of the other many calls upon the public purse. There are those in the news media, as there always are, who would happily represent such behaviour to Hipkins as a direct attack upon his leadership. For the moment, however, Hipkins is, quite rightly, affecting an easy indifference to Parker’s efforts. He recognises a Quixotic gesture when he sees one.

For the past seven years the Labour Party apparatus has been making it harder and harder for another Cunliffe to challenge the near-absolute power of the Leader and her/his factotums in the Labour Leader’s Office. Working alongside a party hierarchy carefully stacked with loyal apparatchiks – many of them readying themselves for life as an MP – the Labour leader can threaten any MP who fails to maintain caucus discipline (i.e. who demonstrates insufficient loyalty) with quiet deselection and/or a hopelessly low position on the Party List.

The party’s ability to assert itself, as it did with Cunliffe and Little, is weaker today than it has ever been. The collective grip of the Leader, his closest caucus allies, the people in his office, senior party office-holders, and all those ambitious parliamentary staffers in possession of embarrassing information about their bosses, will likely keep “Chippy” in place until he decides its time to go.

About the only thing that could upset this cosy oligarchic arrangement is a palace coup. And the problem with palace coups is that they are best remembered for changing faces – not policies.

With no realistic prospect of a Kiwi policy disruptor like Corbyn, Sanders, AOC, or even Kamala Harris, taking control of the Labour Party, New Zealand’s wealthiest citizens can continue to sleep easy.

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

Forty Years Of Remembering To Forget.

The Beginning of the End: Rogernomics became the short-hand descriptor for all the radical changes that swept away New Zealand’s social-democratic economy and society between 1984 and 1990. In the bitterest of ironies, those changes were introduced by the very same party which had entrenched New Zealand social-democracy 50 years earlier. Labour has yet to atone adequately for its most grievous historical sin.

EVERYBODY AND THEIR DOG, it seems, is marking the 40th anniversary of “Rogernomics” by writing about its meaning and legacy. The plain fact, of course, is that any journalist with a serious interest in politics and economics should have been writing about little else since 1984. Rogernomics is the driving narrative of our times.

Over the span of those 40 years, the term for the phenomena described by Rogernomics has changed frequently.

In the years preceding the election of the Fourth Labour Government, when New Zealand journalists still had their eyes on the “overseas” depredations of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the analytical catch-all phrase was “The New Right”. When the nostrums of Thatcher and Reagan arrived on these shores they were bundled together under the heading of “Labour’s Free Market Policies”. Then, Rob Campbell (still a prominent trade unionist in the mid-1980s, as well as a popular columnist for the Sunday Star-Times) translated the US catch-all term Reaganomics into Rogernomics.

That one stuck.

Rogernomics became the short-hand descriptor for all the radical changes that swept away New Zealand’s social-democratic economy and society between 1984 and 1990. In the bitterest of ironies, those changes were introduced by the very same party which had entrenched New Zealand social-democracy 50 years earlier. Labour has yet to atone adequately for its most grievous historical sin.

As the years, and then the decades, passed, however, Rogernomics seemed increasingly inadequate to the task of describing the new society that was taking shape – let alone the ideological foundations upon which it was being built. Some writers, well aware of the historical origins of the ideas that were now driving not only New Zealand’s, but the entire world’s, economic thinking tried, unsuccessfully, to attach the “Classical Liberal” label to them.

For journalistic purposes, however, the word “classical” was just too old and too dusty to characterise an ideology that was relentlessly laying waste to old and dusty things. For reporters without the slightest grounding in economic history, the policies being implemented all around them seemed new and dynamic. Twenty-something journalists weren’t to know that similar policies had been tried, and had failed, a century before they were born. They didn’t care – history was so last millennium!

A better word than Rogernomics still had to be found. Something with intellectual heft – and a twenty-first century ring to it. If the soubriquet “Neo” was good enough for the hero of the Matrix, then it was also good enough to update and turbocharge the rather lame legacy of economic and political liberalism. Thus was born “neo-liberalism”. But, since hyphens, too, were old and dusty, the noun was swiftly shortened to, “neoliberalism”.

That one stuck, too.

There was, however, another reason why the shock of the neo was crucial to the changed economic, social and political order. As everybody who’s ever taken a marketing course (and that includes far too many journalists!) will be aware, describing a product as “new” gives it a palpable edge. Because who wants to buy something “old” – right?

Certainly not the neoliberals, and certainly not the Labour politicians and their advisers charged with making as many New Zealanders as possible cringe when they “remembered” what their country was like before Rogernomics picked it up by the scruff of the neck and set it on the right track to a freer and more prosperous future.

And, boy, were they good at it! Even today, 40 years later, journalists who were barely out of nappies in 1984, will roll out the same terrible hardships listed by the Rogernomes as they set about persuading their fellow citizens that the New Zealand of 1935-1984 was a cross between a Soviet supermarket and a Polish shipyard. Whole bulldozers, they said, could be made to disappear completely by New Zealand Railways. If you wanted to subscribe to a foreign magazine, then you had to apply in advance to the Reserve Bank for the necessary ‘overseas funds’. Everything closed for the weekend. There were no decent restaurants. And, you could not get a decent cup of coffee for love or money!

It would be quite wrong to suggest that there was no truth at all to any of these carefully crafted anecdotes. But, truth or falsehood wasn’t really the point. Their real value lay not in what they encouraged people to remember about the years before Rogernomics, but in what they made it so much easier for people to forget.

We Kiwis are an insecure bunch, and nothing encourages our tendency towards cultural cringe more successfully than suggesting the rest of the world sees us as being out-of-touch and behind-the-times. Who hasn’t heard about the story of the American tourist who, having been dropped-off in downtown Auckland, was obliged to set his watch back twenty years?

In the end, the number of Kiwis who wanted their country to be “just like overseas” was more than enough to make it happen. When the Rogernomes set out to eliminate the “dinosaur” institutions of old New Zealand, they were pushing on an open door.

What New Zealanders failed to grasp (or willfully ignored) was that the highly-taxed, highly-regulated economy that the Rogernomes and their neoliberal successors set out to dismantle and destroy, was also the economy that made it possible for the overwhelming majority of Kiwis to have a job, own their own home, save for their retirement, and fund a public health and education system that allowed them to predict with confidence a life for their children that would be better and more fulfilling than their own.

Yes, the “opening up of New Zealand” meant 24/7 shopping, excellent restaurants, and world-beating coffee. But, it also meant that the men and women who had cringed at the thought of living in a country that closed for the weekend would, as the price of their unimpeded retail therapy, be required to watch their children grow up in an nation that made them pay for their tertiary qualifications, spend the first 5-10 years of their working lives paying off their student loans, and watching, helplessly, as house prices climbed beyond their reach.

And that was just the middle-class! What the Rogernomes and neoliberals are determined to make New Zealanders forget is that the shift from a highly-taxed, highly-regulated economy, to one guided by the Nineteenth Century doctrine of laissez-faire, was made possible by the deliberate and brutal impoverishment of working-class Māori and Pasifika. God knows, the old New Zealand could, and should, have treated its non-Pakeha population much better than it did, but at least in the years prior to 1984 the stats were headed in the right direction. By the mid-80s, close to two-thirds of Māori living in Auckland owned their own home. Within 40 years, that number had fallen to 18 percent.

Everything comes at a price – even a decent cup of coffee.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack page on Monday, 2 September 2024.