The Realm Of The Possible.

The People’s House: What would it be like to live in a country where a single sermon could prick the conscience of the comfortable? Where a journalist could rouse a whole city to action? Where the government could be made to respond to the people’s concerns? Where real change was possible? And we could make it.

IN A YEAR of important elections, some already held, some yet to come, one common factor has become very clear. The ideological shift that rescued mainstream political parties from the seemingly endless crises of the 1970s has, in the intervening decades, become a serious electoral liability.

Neoliberalism may have provided the political mainstream with the circuit-breaker it was looking for in the 1970s and 80s, and its success in burying the social-democratic orthodoxy of the post-war era may have provided mainstream politicians with a field cleared of credible opponents, but the problems its adoption was supposed to solve have not disappeared. Indeed, many have grown.

Certainly, forty years on from the Snap Election of 1984 and the neoliberal revolution it ushered in, New Zealand’s mainstream parties stand in urgent need of a new circuit-breaker. If a tsunami of radical populism is not to roll over the centre ground, then a new set of answers is required to the key questions of democratic politics: “What is possible – and what is not?”

Since the late-1980s, for example, nationalisation, or even significant public ownership of key infrastructure and services, has been rejected outright as politically impossible, or been characterised with some asperity as the least effective alternative to untrammelled private ownership. At virtually every level of government, and regardless of the manifest severity of key infrastructural failures, both legislators and administrators continue to shy away from the most obvious and financially rational solutions.

Since the state is far ahead of all other borrowers in terms of how much it can borrow and at what cost, it makes obvious sense for it to take over New Zealand’s “three waters” and carry out the necessary upgrading and extension projects that long ago exceeded the ability of local authorities to finance. Cost recovery could be negotiated with the local government sector over a period of sufficient length to render it fiscally bearable. Easy-peasy?

Apparently not. That the option of straightforward nationalisation was never considered seriously by either Labour or National bears testimony to the remarkable persistence of the neoliberal vision. Even in the United Kingdom, where the privatisation of water is an accomplished fact, the abject failure of the experiment – as attested to by the open sewers that were England’s rivers and streams – has been insufficient to make nationalisation the preferred option of anybody except the voting public.

Restoring the organised working-class as one of the great “estates” of the realm has similarly been dismissed as impossible by the neoliberal clerisy. Their reticence on this subject is understandable, since it was the growing power of the trade unions in the advanced capitalist states of the 1960s and 70s – especially their real or potential influence over the major parties of the Centre-Left – that made the identification and introduction of an ideological circuit-breaker so urgent.

New Zealand’s destruction of organised labour in the early 1990s was of a thoroughness unequalled in the democratic West. Over a period of 30 years, union density declined from just under half the workforce to less than 10 percent. Take out the unions representing teachers, nurses, salaried medical specialists and public servants, and the percentage of private-sector workers enrolled in trade unions shrinks away to something not much better than nothing.

Except that, as is so often the case with the neoliberal “reforms” of the past 40 years, the cure for the apprehended “socialist” disease has proved to be worse than the complaint. The elimination of union power removed one of the most powerful drivers of productivity. By making it possible for employers to keep wages low, investment in more efficient plant and machinery, and the uplifting of employee skill levels, could be more-or-less permanently deferred.

The consequences of making it possible for businesses to ‘live’ with low productivity are clearly illustrated in the widening gulf between wage levels in New Zealand and Australia. That this differential (upwards of 30 percent) acts as a powerful magnet for what skilled workers New Zealand has left, not only strips the country of the people best placed to lift its productivity, but also entrenches its status as a low-skill, low-wage economy. The downward spiral becomes self-reinforcing.

The stripping-out of New Zealand’s manufacturing base, justified by the neoliberals’ unbreakable attachment to the Eighteenth Century economic doctrine of “comparative advantage”, may have offset the effects of declining real wages by lowering the price of manufactured goods, but it also robbed the New Zealand working-class of the pride and dignity that attaches to those who make real things in the real world. Emptying container-loads of manufactured imports is a poor substitute for the satisfaction derived from participating in their creation.

Allowing your best and brightest workers to seek a better life elsewhere, while allowing the self-esteem and skill levels of those who remain to fall in unison, is a recipe for socio-economic polarisation. It encourages those positioned higher on the socio-economic ladder to look down on those below them – a disdain which is all too easily translated into self-reproach and self-loathing by those so regarded. Just because the comfortably positioned in the social hierarchy do not have to endure the hidden injuries of class does not make them any less real.

New Zealand was once a society in which the exploitation of citizens was deemed unacceptable. The most dramatic illustration of this determination to be a nation in which few were rich and none were poor may be found in the story of Dunedin’s “sweated” tailoresses – women and girls paid starvation wages for sewing garments all day and late into the night.

An 1888 sermon, “The Sin of Cheapness”, penned and delivered by local clergymen, the Rev. Rutherford Waddell, inspired a local journalist to take up the tailoresses’ cause in The Otago Daily Times. At a public meeting the following year middle-class and working-class activists, acting together, decided to form the Tailoresses Union. In 1890, the New Zealand Government felt sufficiently pressured to set up a Royal Commission of Inquiry into “sweated labour”. Legislation followed.

Harriet Morrison of the newly formed Tailoresses Union attacks the monstrous practice of sweated labour in this New Zealand Observer cartoon of 1892.

A Christian preacher, a crusading journalist, a conscience-stricken middle-class, an energised working-class, New Zealand’s first union for women, a Royal Commission, legislative reform, socio-economic change. In 1888, all these factors contributed to defining the realm of the possible in New Zealand.

It was precisely to reduce the constantly expanding scope of what was considered possible, and to address the radical implications of such expansion for the social and economic future of the nation, that persuaded so many powerfully placed New Zealanders to unleash the neoliberal revolution of 1984-1993.

Few would argue that they did not succeed in lowering Kiwis’ expectations of what their society, their government, and they, themselves, were capable of achieving. This shrugging-off of what were depicted as excessively onerous collective responsibilities made it much easier to believe that individual success had been made correspondingly easier, and that individual failure, while regrettable, was no longer society’s business.

But, forty years on, are we really better off for living in a political environment where so little is considered achievable? What would it be like to live in a country where a single sermon could prick the conscience of the comfortable? Where a journalist could rouse a whole city to action? Where the government could be made to respond to the people’s concerns. Where real change was possible?

And we could make it.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 17 June 2024.