The Death Of "Big Norm" - Exactly 50 Years Ago Today.

Norman Kirk
Prime Minister of New Zealand 1972-1974

Born: 6 January 1923 - Died: 31 August 1974

Of the working-class, by the working-class, for the working-class.

Video courtesy of YouTube

These elements were posted on Bowalley Road on Saturday, 31 August 2024.

Claims and Counter-Claims.

Whose Foreshore? Whose Seabed? When the Marine and Coastal Area Act was originally passed back in 2011, fears about the coastline becoming off-limits to Pakeha were routinely allayed by National Party politicians pointing out that the tests imposed were so stringent  that only a modest percentage of claims (the then treaty negotiations minister, Chris Finlayson, predicted 10 percent) would end up being granted.

A PRIVATE MEETING involving two Cabinet Ministers, sundry departmental officials and representatives of the seafood industry has achieved headline status. According to the 1News Māori Affairs Correspondent, Te Aniwa Hurihanganui, evidence exists of Minister for Treaty Settlements, Paul Goldsmith, and the Minister for Oceans & Fisheries, Shane Jones, offering industry representatives reassurance that proposed Government changes to the Marine & Coastal Areas Act would likely see the percentage of New Zealand’s coastline subject to customary marine title claims plummet from 100 to just 5 percent.

The 1News report has the ministers’ meeting occurring on 21 May 2024 – two months before the July announcement of the Coalition Government’s proposals regarding the Act. The inference being that favoured elements within the New Zealand fishing industry have been promised ongoing access to marine resources at the expense of mana whenua.

But is this inference justified? Is this really a case of “crony capitalism”, or, even worse, “racist crony capitalism”? The answer, thankfully, is: “No.”

For a start, the meeting between Goldsmith, Jones and seafood industry representatives took place in the context of a Coalition Agreement undertaking to roll back the highly controversial 2023 Court of Appeal decision which upheld customary ownership claims from Māori iwi and hapu, claims now affecting, collectively, 100 percent of the New Zealand coast.

The Court of Appeal’s judgement construed the Marine & Coastal Area Act in such a way that it effectively negated the onerous proofs of customary title demanded by Parliament. The justices argued that in an Act which also entrenched the undertakings of the Treaty of Waitangi, such proofs of ownership could not be taken literally.

The surge of claims to customary marine title which followed the passage of the 2011 Act was driven by the requirement that no further claims would be considered after 2017. The Court of Appeal’s 2023 decision greatly enhanced these pending claims’ chances of success. This, in turn, generated sufficient political pushback to secure the NZ First Party’s support for legislative rectification. Parliament would nullify the Court of Appeal’s interpretation of the Marine & Coastal Areas Act and secure the restoration of the status quo ante. In the post-election negotiations between National and NZ First, this rectification was agreed and included in the two parties’ Coalition Agreement.

It is not, therefore, a case of the seafood industry prevailing upon the Coalition Government to grant it special favours at the expense of Māori, but of the two government ministers most closely involved in the issue seeking industry input regarding the most likely consequences of the Coalition Government’s pledge to roll-back the Court of Appeal’s decision.

Consultations of this nature are not uncommon when a government is contemplating legislative measures likely to affect a major industry. In this respect, the meeting between Goldsmith, Jones, relevant officials and industry leaders is hardly newsworthy.

More interesting, from a journalistic perspective, is how the notes of a private ministerial meeting, held under the auspices of Te Arawhiti – The Office for Crown-Māori Relations – ended up in the hands of 1News’s Māori Affairs correspondent. Was it simply part of a “catch” netted by 1News’ own OIA “fishing expeditions”? Or, were these notes passed on to Hurihanganui as part of a concerted effort to embarrass the Government and impede its fulfilment of the Coalition Agreement pledge?

Certainly, some of the ministerial comments minuted during the meeting were highly embarrassing – most notably the comment relating to the percentage of the coastline likely to be affected by customary marine titles once the Coalition’s restorative legislation is passed. That said, the minister’s comment is only embarrassing because the public’s political memory is so short.

When the Marine and Coastal Area Act was originally passed back in 2011, fears about the coastline becoming off-limits to Pakeha were routinely allayed by National Party politicians pointing out that the tests imposed were so stringent – the coastal area under claim had to have been exclusively used by the claimants since 1840 without “substantial interruption” – that only a modest percentage of claims (the then treaty negotiations minister, Chris Finlayson, predicted 10 percent) would end up being granted.

The shock-value of Hurihanganui’s story lies in the misapprehension that established claims to customary marine title are to be pared back from 100 percent to just 5 percent of the coastal area, which, if true, would be a very grave injustice indeed. The reality is somewhat different.

The Court of Appeal’s 2023 decision to effectively reverse the legislative intent of Parliament made it much more likely that the plethora of claims lodged between 2011 and 2017 would be upheld in the High Court. The triggering figure of 100 percent thus refers only to the extent of the coastline currently affected by pending claims – not to the percentage actually awarded customary marine title by the High Court. Goldsmith’s figure of 5 percent represents his best guess at the coastal area likely to be impacted when the original tests have been reconfirmed and the undecided claims nullified. Proving exclusive use, without substantial interruption, for 184 years, is a daunting challenge for any New Zealander!

A journalist with a slightly broader brief than Ms Hurihanganui’s might have been moved to enquire as to why the Court of Appeal thought it appropriate to reverse the clear intent of New Zealand’s democratically-elected legislature. The constitutional convention of “comity” enjoins each of the three branches of government, the executive, the legislature and the judiciary, from encroaching upon the powers of the others. Why, then, did the judiciary (in the form of the Court of Appeal) whose role it is to interpret and apply the law, not re-write it, presume to correct the nation’s legislators in relation to the Marine & Coastal Areas Act?

It stretches credulity to suppose that the Court could have been entirely unaware of the impact its controversial decision would have upon the outcome of claims as yet unresolved by the High Court. Nor is it credible to suggest that the Court of Appeal is entirely innocent of courting precisely the political backlash that led to representatives of the seafood industry meeting with Ministers Goldsmith and Jones in May of 2024.

The responsibility for making the laws of New Zealand lies with the men and women elected to the House of Representatives, not with the men and women appointed to the Court of Appeal. The latter’s dramatic negation of the legislature’s intentions vis-à-vis the Marine & Coastal Areas Act 2011 left the Coalition Government with no honourable option but to reassert in the plainest language the original evidential requirements needing to be fulfilled before customary marine title can be granted.

To suggest otherwise is to posit a revolutionary constitutional revision which places unelected judges at the summit of the state. Judges with the power to not only interpret and apply the laws, but to re/write them. And if that is what lies at the heart of this controversy, then it is passing strange that such a naked bid for unaccountable power has yet to headline the 1News bulletins at Six O’clock.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack page on Wednesday, 28 August 2024.

The Only Other Reliable Vehicle.

An Elite Leader Awaiting Rotation? Hipkins’ give-National-nothing-to-aim-at strategy will only succeed if the Coalition becomes as unpopular in three years as the British Tories became in fourteen.

THE SHAPE OF CHRIS HIPKINS’ THINKING on Labour’s optimum pathway to re-election is emerging steadily. At the core of his strategy is Hipkins’ view of the Labour Party as the only other reliable vehicle for achieving an “orderly rotation of elites” – a position which defines the lowest respectable expectation of the democratic process.

Hipkins seems content to shadow the existing government’s policy options – with the single obvious exception of Crown-Māori relations. Were this not the case, the outcry of the Labour Opposition in regard to social-welfare policy, health policy, and even education policy would be much louder than has been the case to date.

A party representing “the preferential option for the poor”, which, as a political movement strongly influenced by the social teachings of both the Catholic and Methodist churches Labour most certainly was, right up until the late-1970s, would have a great deal more to say about the Coalition’s pestilential preference for sanctions over succour. That Labour’s statements on social policy and the poor have about them a decidedly pro-forma quality is, however, of a piece with the party’s real-world conduct when in power.

That Labour’s tax policy would have to be refashioned radically in anticipation of any genuine assault on poverty in New Zealand explains why it is currently the flashpoint of the party’s internal policy debates. Who holds the upper-hand in these debates is best registered by David Parker’s current caucus ranking. At No. 17 he is currently 13 places below Labour’s present Finance spokesperson, Barbara Edmond.

A Labour leader still firmly attached to his party’s founding principles would not have hesitated to allocate the finance portfolio to Parker. He was, after all, the person who, as Revenue Minister, presented his party with a tax package foreshadowing both a Wealth Tax and a progressive, tax-exempt, income threshold of $10,000. A package which also, significantly, enjoyed the support of the then Labour Finance Minister, Grant Robertson.

That the person who issued a “captain’s call” scotching the Parker/Robertson initiative is the same person who elevated Edmonds over Parker, is hardly to be wondered at. Chris Hipkins has little patience for such blatant social-democratic offerings. That a majority of Labour Party members are enthusiastic supporters of Parker’s progressive and redistributive tax suggestions, while very likely true, is also irrelevant. Rank-and-file preferences will not be enough to prevent “Captain” Hipkins from side-tracking his party away from tax reform in 2026.

Why would he not, when so many of the nation’s political journalists respond with Pavlovian reflexes whenever the word “tax” is mentioned? Hipkins is well aware of the damage done to Labour’s chances in election after election by the self-imposed necessity of having to stand in front of the cameras and explain to “hard-working New Zealanders” why the government should take more of their “hard-earned” income by increasing, and/or imposing new, taxes.

No, by far the best course of action, at least from Hipkins’ vantage-point, is the “small-target” strategy adopted by Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party in the run-up to the 4 July 2024 General Election. Napoleon Bonaparte is said to have advised his generals never to interrupt the enemy when he’s making a mistake. Starmer, in the same vein, determined to forbid his party from promising anything likely to distract the British voters from their all-consuming hate-affair with the Conservative Party. Did he care that this would deliver Labour only a default victory? Not a bit. With a 174-seat majority, he didn’t give a hoot.

But, Hipkins’ give-National-nothing-to-aim-at strategy will only succeed if the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government becomes as unpopular in just three years as the Tories became in fourteen.

This is not the long-shot expectation which, at first sight, it might appear to be. Electorally, things only really turned sour for the Conservatives after Boris Johnson’s balls-ups. Prior to the tousle-haired one’s spectacular self-immolation, the Tory party seemed set for another ten years in office. It was only in the five years between their landslide win of December 2019 and the July 2024 election – a period that included the rigors of the Covid Pandemic – that the Tories’ hopes turned to ashes. Hipkins’ wager is that the Coalition’s fall from grace will be even faster.

And, in this, he may well be right. Driven by its smaller coalition partners, National finds itself in a place it has studiously (and very successfully) steered clear of since the social impact of the 1981 Springbok Tour solidified into the New Zealand electorate’s long-term and strong aversion to overtly racist political parties. Building on the impressive legacy of Jim Bolger and Doug Graham, National has taken care to paint itself as, if not the bosom buddy of Māori, then not their sworn enemy, either. That enviable achievement has been put at serious risk by National’s coalition agreement with Act and NZ First. If National is unable to shift Māori perceptions – and soon – then Hipkins is betting that, come 2026, the government will crash and burn.

Making free with the matches and gasoline will be, variously, the judiciary, academia, the public service, and the mainstream news media. Hipkins and his potential coalition allies in the Greens and Te Pāti Māori know that the impression left upon Māori and their Pakeha allies by the Coalition’s “anti-Māori” policies is already so deep and so negative as to render its wholesale elimination impossible. Any further refusals to apply the policy brakes risk up-ending the whole ethnically-charged mess into the nation’s streets.

That will not be pretty.

Some idea of what the country might expect is conveyed in blogger and podcaster, Martyn Bradbury’s review of “Autaia – Haka Theatre” staged in the Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre of Auckland’s Aotea Centre last Wednesday. This is how he describes the behaviour of the mostly young, mostly Māori, capacity audience’s reaction to projected images of the Coalition’s leaders:

During one of the performances, Seymour, Winston and Luxon come up in the background and when they did, all hell broke loose. The gasp of shock from the combined audience that these hated figures would suddenly appear in huge form in front of them was startling, and then that gasp of oxygen ignited with a fury and outrage that exploded from the lungs of over 2000 as they roared in naked rage at the three of them. It was like that moment in 1984 when they all start yelling at Goldstein. It was glorious.

This is the anger that Hipkins and his Praetorian Guard – Carmel Sepuloni, Megan Woods, Barbara Edmonds – are counting on. This is why they are surreptitiously shadowing National in respect of most of its policies unrelated to Māori and te Tiriti.

It is the Labour leadership’s calculation that if a major outburst of Māori rage occurs, and the state’s difficulty in bringing the situation under control is painfully exposed, then all that will be required is for Labour and its allies (by now both suitably house-trained) to step forward with the clear message that, as custodians of the “public welfare, peace and tranquility” of Aotearoa-New Zealand, National and its coalition partners have failed. To secure an orderly rotation of political elites, and put an end to the dangerous racial tension, New Zealanders must fulfil the most basic of their democratic duties – electing a government equal to the task of keeping its citizens from each other’s throats.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 26 August 2024.

Table Talk: Ageing Boomers, Laurie & Les, Talk Politics.

“That’s the sort of constitutional reform he favours: conceived in secret; revolutionary in intent; implemented incrementally without fanfare; and under no circumstances to be placed before the electorate for democratic ratification.”

TO SAY IT WAS RAINING would have understated seriously the meteorological conditions. Simply put, it was pissing down. One of those cloudbursts that causes people, having reached shelter, to slam the door behind them as if they’d just run the full length of no man’s land without being hit.

That, at least, was the look on Les’s face as, trailing rainwater behind him, he made his way to the bar.

“Laurie’s already got them in, Les”, said Hannah, staring despairingly at the growing pool Les’s greatcoat was dripping onto the pub’s just mopped floor, “He’s waiting for you in the corner.”

From their usual table, Laurie nodded in recognition and gestured grandly at the two glasses of ale standing before him.

“It’s not fit for man or beast out there!” Les exclaimed, hanging his sodden greatcoat over the back of the nearest empty chair. “Honestly, when the weather’s like this, I really miss the days when everyone drove to the pub.”

“Long gone, mate. And a good thing, too.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, I know. Even so.”

“Otherwise alright?”

“Fantastic!” Les’s glum expression belied his affirmation. “At least it would be if we didn’t have my bloody son-in-law staying with us.”

“Oh Lord! What’s brought David to town?”

“The usual. Some sort of workshop, seminar, hui – I’m not exactly sure which. Quite possibly all three at once. Of one thing I am sure, however. You and I, the long-suffering taxpayer, are footing the bill!”

“Is Allison with him?”

“Oh, yes, she likes to catch up with her Mum and Dad whenever she can. We look forward to it.”

“But not to Mr Political Correctness?”

“It’s just such hard work, Laurie. I’ve got to be so careful what I say. Sitting at the dinner-table last night I let slip something vaguely pro-Israeli, and for the next half hour we all had to endure David’s take on the United Nations’ definition of genocide. I was about to offer him the much simpler definition of ‘Southern Israel, 7 October 2023’, but Rosemary shot me one of those ‘Don’t you dare!’ looks, so I bit my tongue and tried to look neutral.”

“Half-an-hour? Sounds to me as if you got off lightly. Didn’t you once say that David could give Fidel Castro a run for his money in the long speeches stakes?”

“Oh, don’t worry, he still can! You should have heard him waxing eloquent over the appointment of Steven Rainbow as Chief Human Rights Commissioner. To hear him tell it Rainbow’s the ideological love-child of Joseph Goebbels and Lavrentiy Beria! Had Rosemary’s watchful eyes not been on me I would have asked him how believing in Free Speech makes Rainbow a fascist. So, I contented myself with asking him whether his job at the Ministry was safe.”

“Oh boy!”

“You can say that again! I got a painful kick in the left ankle from Allison, and an even more painful one in the right from Rosemary. It was worth it though, just to see the look of displeasure on his face.”

“And is it safe? His job?”

“As houses, Laurie! People like David are never made redundant – for the very simple reason that it’s people like David who get to decide who stays and who goes. My question did, however, elicit a rather dark remark about this government not being allowed to serve more than a single term.”

“I rather thought that was our decision to make”, muttered Laurie. “As, you know, the voters.”

“Hah! David has a very low opinion of voters. Regards the overwhelming majority of them as an unsavoury collection of ignorant, sexist, transphobic white-supremacists and Zionists. If he could get away with it, I’m convinced he’d only allow those who demonstrated an ‘acceptable psychographic profile’ into the polling-booths.”

“Not a big fan of David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill, then?”

“No. But he knew a couple of the people who helped write the He Puapua Report. Went to varsity with them. That’s the sort of constitutional reform he favours: conceived in secret; revolutionary in intent; implemented incrementally without fanfare; and under no circumstances to be placed before the electorate for democratic ratification. David does not believe ‘decolonisation’ and ‘indigenisation’ are compatible with ‘majoritarian democracy’.”

“Jeez!” Laurie sighed. “When’s he flying back to Wellington?”

“Not soon enough, mate. Not soon enough!”

This short story was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 30 August 2024.

Making A Difference.

The Jacinda and Ashley Show: Before the neoliberals could come up with a plausible reason for letting thousands of their fellow citizens perish, the Ardern-led government, backed by the almost forgotten power of an unapologetically interventionist state, was producing changes in the real world – changes that were, very obviously, saving the lives of real New Zealanders.

“ROGERNOMICS” didn’t just transform New Zealand’s economy and society, it profoundly changed its politicians. Members of the “political class” of 2024 display radically different beliefs from the individuals who governed New Zealand prior to 1984. The most alarming of these post-1984 beliefs dismisses Members of Parliament and local government politicians as singularly ill-qualified to determine the fate of the nations they have been elected to lead.

This paradox is readily explained when the core convictions driving the political class are exposed. The most important of these is that ordinary voters have absolutely no idea how, or by whom, their country is governed. The ordinary voter’s conviction that “the people” rule – as opposed to the “loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires” whose worldwide corporate interests are protected by globally organised media and public relations companies – is offered as proof of their all-round imbecility. Politicians might just as well be guided by baboons as by the ordinary voter!

This contemptuous view of the people who elect politicians to public office is, naturally, kept well-hidden from the electorate. Indeed, these disdainful “representatives” are forever celebrating in public what they denounce privately as dangerous, “the principles of democratic government”. Why? Because the alternative to perpetuating the myth that the people (demos) rule (kratos) – i.e. by making it clear to them that they don’t – is much, much worse.

Ruling a country by force, rather than by consent, not only turns most of the population into the rulers’ enemies, but also leaves the political class acutely vulnerable to the institutions responsible for perpetrating the violence that keeps it in power. All too often these “men with guns” decide to cut out the political middlemen and rule directly. Historically-speaking, this is the royal-road to graft, corruption, extortion, and, ultimately, to the formation of a brutal kleptocracy. NOT a situation conducive to either making, or keeping, one’s profits!

That feudalism, and the absolute monarchies that grew out of it, were, in essence, arrangements predicated on the maintenance of well-organised bodies of armed and violent men might, given contemporary capitalism’s distaste for such regimes, be considered ironic. Living under the sway of these “gentlemen”, and being required to pay their protection money the swingeing taxes they imposed, did not make for a happy life – or, at least, not for the 95 percent of the population – including the merchant class – forbidden from owning swords!

The popularity of democracy, as a system designed to reduce sharply the power of bullies and extortionists, tends to be greater the nearer in time its beneficiaries are to the oppressive political regimes from which “people-power” liberated them. Even as capitalism began to hit its stride in the nineteenth century, such democratic (or quasi-democratic) legislatures as existed (and there weren’t many) proved remarkably reluctant to bow before the doctrine of laissez-faire. (French for “let the capitalists do what they like’.) The Victorians who founded New Zealand, and wrote its Constitution Act, were impressively unconvinced that a man with a plan (women were yet to be included in their discussions) could not improve the lives of his fellow citizens by persuading them to elect him to Parliament.

This conviction that politicians could make a positive difference to the lives of ordinary people took root more tenaciously in New Zealand than just about any other country on the face of the earth. The radical reforms of the Liberal government (1890-1912) and the first Labour government (1935-1949) earned New Zealand the title “social laboratory of the world”. Politicians who were similarly determined to make a difference came from Europe and America to observe first-hand New Zealand’s own special brand of “socialism without doctrines”.

The people who rendered making a difference unsafe were, of course, the socialists with doctrines. The unfortunate Russians and Chinese would pass from feudalism to communism without any extended period of democratic government in between. From noblemen with swords, they passed into the hands of commissars with pistols. The taxes were just as swingeing, but at least Communism’s bullies and extortionists contrived to paint Paradise in colours more exciting than white.

Lest their workers decide to paint their own countries red, Western capitalists were persuaded, very reluctantly, to let them be painted pink. The problem with social-democracy, however, was that if you conceded it an inch, it would, albeit incrementally, take you many miles down “the road to serfdom”. Such was the grim thesis of the Austrian, arch-capitalist economist, Friedrich von Hayek, founder of the Switzerland-based free-market think tank, the Mont Pelerin Society, and spiritual father of neoliberal political economy.

Labour’s Roger Douglas was a member of the aforesaid Mont Pelerin Society, as was National’s Ruth Richardson, along with quite a number of the bureaucrats and businessmen who first set New Zealand on the road to neoliberalism. At the heart of their project was a very simple imperative: Don’t let politicians near anything even remotely important. Leave all the important decisions to the market, or, at least, to those who own and control the market.

Those who struggle to understand why neoliberals are constantly presenting mild-mannered social-democrats as fire-breathing communists should view their behaviour as pre-emptive ideological law enforcement – pre-crime-fighting. Politicians determined to “make a positive difference” may begin by building state-houses, the neoliberals argue, but they always end up creating gulags. Better by far to create a society in which “making a positive difference” is restricted to capitalist entrepreneurs. Don’t let the political do-gooders get started.

Clearly, no one sent the memo to Jacinda Ardern. Or, if they did, she profoundly misunderstood it. Making a positive difference was what New Zealand’s young prime minister all-too-evidently believed the Labour Party had been established to enable. But, when she said “Let’s do this!”, all those around her, either gently, or not-so-gently, said “You can’t do that!”

It may have looked as though there were levers to pull to set up a light-rail network, build 100,000 affordable houses, end child poverty, and combat global warming, but they weren’t attached to anything. “Jacinda” could pull on them all she wanted, put on a good show, but the cables linking politicians’ promises to real-world outcomes had all been cut decades earlier. She didn’t appear to understand that disempowering politicians was what Rogernomics had been all about.

But, as is so often the case in history, the story was changed by something its author’s had failed to imagine, or anticipate. The onset of a global pandemic made it absolutely necessary that the lever labelled “Keeping New Zealanders Safe” was at the end of a cable that was very firmly attached to the real world, and that the person pulling the lever was empathically qualified to make a real and positive difference.

Before the neoliberals could come up with a plausible reason for letting thousands of their fellow citizens perish, the Ardern-led government, backed by the almost forgotten power of an unapologetically interventionist state, was producing changes in the real world – changes that were, very obviously, saving the lives of real New Zealanders.

It couldn’t last. Neoliberalism, like rust, never sleeps, and in less than a year the lever Ardern and her colleagues had pulled on with such energy had been quietly reconnected to less effective – but more divisive – parts of the state machine. But, not before “Jacinda” and her party had done the impossible. Not before Labour had won 50.01 percent of the Party Vote in the 2020 General Election.

There’s a lesson in there somewhere. Maybe, just maybe, politicians, acting in the interests of the people who elected them, aren’t always ill-qualified to lead? Maybe, just maybe, it is still possible for men and women of good will to make a positive difference?

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack on Tuesday, 20 August 2024.

Can The Left Assemble A Winning Coalition?

Voting Together? Collectively, Māori and Pasifika workers, professionals and managers employed by the state, and “progressive” Baby-Boomer superannuitants, possess the electoral clout to defeat the Coalition Government. But will they?

TO WIN THE NEXT ELECTION, “The Left”, as we still rather hopefully refer to it, needs three key demographics. Voting together, the Māori and Pasifika working class, professional-managerial staff employed by the state, and “progressive” Baby Boomer superannuitants, cannot fail to return a combination of Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori to the Treasury Benches. The Left’s great challenge, as it approaches 2026, is developing an electoral pitch capable of mustering all three – and keeping them mustered – until the people’s votes have been cast and counted.

Voting together, Māori and Pasifika workers, professionals and managers employed by the state, and “progressive” Baby-Boomer superannuitants, can defeat the Coalition Government. But will they?

It’s a tall order. None of these groups present a homogeneous mass guaranteed to respond with Pavlovian reliability to the Left’s electoral stimuli.

Although in excess of three-quarters of Māori live in towns and cities, and are employed in occupations traditionally designated as working-class, the appeals of the left-wing parties are seldom presented in ways that prioritise the challenges of urban, working-class, Māori life. Indeed, they are much more likely to be presented with by policies reflecting the priorities of the iwi-based capitalists dominating the Iwi Leaders’ Forum.

The powerfully nationalist flavour of the Forum’s determination to “build the Māori Economy” obscures the socio-economic deprivation of its urbanised working class. The latter’s decline is reflected in the alarming statistic that, fifty years ago, more than half of urban Māori owned their own home, while, today, that figure has fallen to less than one-fifth. Even so, the social costs of liberalising the New Zealand economy, borne so disproportionately by Māori workers (especially those in the freezing and forestry industries) are only rarely presented unequivocally in class terms by the parliamentary Left. Certainly, in this century, Māori deprivation is much more commonly attributed to the ongoing impact of white supremacist “colonisation”.

Of the three left-wing parliamentary parties, Labour has by far the best chance of garnering the votes of Māori workers. To remind itself how this might be done, it has only to watch the television and social-media advertising Labour broadcast to voters in the Māori seats back in 2017. Whether by accident or design these ads proved to be little masterpieces of class-based communication. They portrayed the life-world of urban Māori in a way that conveyed both understanding and admiration. Unsurprisingly, Labour won all seven Māori Seats.

Pasifika workers’ loyalty to the Labour Party, and the impact of their votes, is legendary. The power of the “South Auckland booths” to save the day for Labour was never demonstrated to greater effect than in 2005 when, late in the evening, the votes cast by the Pasifika community tipped the scales in Labour’s favour, denying Don Brash’s National Party the victory which, just 72 hours earlier, had seem a dead cert.

That the surge in Pasifika voting had been achieved by Labour’s eccentric reading of the National Party’s housing policy is less enthusiastically recalled. Certainly, since 2005, there is evidence of the old adage “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me” gradually but unmistakably diminishing Pasifika voter participation. In 2008 Labour supporters waited in vain for the South Auckland booths to “come in”. They are still waiting.

Could it be that the failure of Labour’s Pasifika Social Development minister to implement welfare policies that would have benefitted Pasifika working-class families hugely has convinced them that it is wiser to be guided by Labour’s deeds than its words. Delivering their vital support not in recognition of promises made, but in gratitude for promises delivered.

But, if the votes of Māori and Pasifika workers must be earned, then the votes of the state-employed members of the professional-managerial class are pretty much a given. It is, after all, the class responsible for supplanting the Pakeha working-class that had ruled Labour from the party’s foundation in 1916 to the “Rogernomics” reforms of the 1980s. Young, university-educated, and openly disdainful of the conservative social mores of most of New Zealand’s working-class families, these were the ones who deliberately transformed Labour from a mass party to a cadre party – them being the cadres – in the decade spanning 1990 and 2000.

And there was no coming back for the workers – not when their unions had also been taken over by the meritocratic beneficiaries of Labour’s welfare state. No, the state-employed professionals and managers will vote Labour, overwhelmingly, because Labour has made itself the party of state-employed professionals and managers.

Any credible indication that Labour is returning to its working-class roots: prioritising what Chris Hipkins dubbed, euphemistically, “bread and butter issues”; is likely to be answered by a wholesale shift of state-sector employee support to the Greens in protest. This largely confirms the Green Party’s’ status as a handy escape-pod from Labour’s mother-ship.

Regardless of their faux-Marxist rhetoric, the Greens have always been, and show every sign of continuing to be, a party of middle-class utopians, stubbornly unreconcilable with a world that consistently fails to follow their excellent advice. That they have turned into something more substantial will be made evident only when the bulk of their electoral support ceases to be concentrated in the university suburbs of Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin.

For the “progressive” Baby-Boomer superannuitants observing these peregrinations of the Left from the safety and security of their mortgage-free villas and/or swanky retirement villages, the once straight-forward business of casting a vote is growing increasingly fraught. Their great advantage (or disadvantage – it rather depends on one’s point of view) is that their memories of the “old”, twentieth century, New Zealand are every bit as vivid as their encounters with the twenty-first’s “Aotearoa”.

Sadly, this ability to compare and contrast is of little use. Like every younger generation in the long history of humankind, their own children and grandchildren have little time, and even less patience, for the ideological antiques so prized by their parents and grandparents.

Gen-X and the rest of the generational alphabet show every sign of being completely relaxed about pronouns; will “chest-feed” their own offspring without ontological misgivings; and enthusiastically celebrate their shape-shifting Treaty as a very good thing indeed. They simply cannot understand their elders’ reluctance to meet the requirements of diversity, equity and inclusion.

What’s worse, the “progressive” Baby Boomers do not seem to be sufficiently seized by the awfulness of the National-Act-NZ First Coalition. As beneficiaries are bashed and te Tiriti is trashed, the “democratic-socialists” of yesteryear witter on interminably about free speech, feminism, and the colour-blind content of a person’s character. Whatever happened to taking one for the left-wing team?

It probably ceased when the left-wing team started playing a different game.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 19 August 2024.

In Whose Footsteps?

Who To Follow? Helen Clark is one of the prime movers of Labour’s anti-nuclear policy, and principal author of New Zealand’s independent foreign policy. Andrew Little has come out swinging in favour of AUKUS Pillar 2. Helen Clark negotiated the Free Trade Agreement with China that has kept the New Zealand economy afloat through a global financial crisis and Covid-19. Andrew Little has cast our largest trading partner as a dangerous geopolitical disruptor in urgent need of Anglophone “containment”.

MAYBE IT’S A GENERATIONAL THING? Andrew Little, born in 1965, qualifies (narrowly) as Generation X, while Helen Clark, born in 1950, is, indisputably, a Baby Boomer. Gen-Xers have a “thing” about Boomers, a strange mixture of envy and resentment, that manifests itself in their determination not to be seen following in their predecessors’ footsteps.

If Helen Clark was one of the prime movers of Labour’s anti-nuclear policy, and principal author of New Zealand’s independent foreign policy, then Andrew Little has come out swinging in favour of AUKUS Pillar 2. If Helen Clark negotiated the Free Trade Agreement with China that has kept the New Zealand economy afloat through a global financial crisis and Covid-19, then Andrew Little has cast our largest trading partner as a dangerous geopolitical disruptor in urgent need of Anglophone “containment”.

It is, if I may borrow a term made popular by Kamala Harris’ vice-presidential pick, Tim Walz, “weird”.

More problematic, however, is Andrew Little’s support for the ideas of Professor Anne-Marie Brady, the Christchurch-based academic who has done so much to “recalibrate” this country’s relationship with China.

Just four years ago, Professor Brady and her colleagues from the “Small States and the New Security Environment” research team had this to say about what they saw as New Zealand’s geopolitical vulnerability:

“The global environment has not been so challenging for New Zealand since 1942 when British forces in Singapore, who were New Zealand’s shield, fell to the advance of the Japanese. New Zealand must now face up to the national security risk of the Covid-19 outbreak. The current situation poses a risk not only to New Zealand, but collectively, for our Pacific, Five Eyes and NATO partners, as well as like-minded states who uphold the international rules-based order.”

Scary stuff! Clearly, the Chinese have taken the place of the Japanese in this grim geostrategic scenario. And, one must presume that Beijing’s “One Belt, One Road” project is the reincarnation of Imperial Japan’s “Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”.

If New Zealand’s economic survival wasn’t at stake, this sort of re-heated Cold War rhetoric would be laughable.

But wait, there’s more. Six years ago, in 2018, New Zealand’s Foreign Minister, one Winston Peters, addressed a high-powered Washington audience, before whom he announced New Zealand’s “Pacific Reset”. This, in part, is what Mr Peters (who just happens to be, once again, New Zealand’s Foreign Minister) had to say:

“The Pacific Reset […] reflects New Zealand’s response to the increasingly contested strategic environment in the Pacific in which more external actors are competing for influence. This calls for close cooperation with Pacific Island countries, Australia, the United States, and other partners with historic links in the region –countries such as Japan, the EU, UK and France – to uphold values that we share and want to promote in the region; values like democracy, good governance, greater women’s participation, and above all the rules based systems on which the region relies.”

It is surely no more than coincidence that the person who invited Mr Peters to address the Centre for Australian, New Zealand & Pacific Studies at Washington’s Georgetown University, was a fellow member of the same NATO-supported research team dedicated to assisting “small states” (like ours) navigate the “new security environment”, as Professor Brady.

Small states in a small world!

And guess who was the minister responsible for New Zealand’s national security (SIS & GCSB) when Winston was re-setting the Pacific at Georgetown in 2018, and Professor Brady was reminding us of the perils of being unprotected in that wide, wide sea, as Covid raged? That’s right, it was Andrew Little. The same bloke who, less than a year ago, became (briefly) New Zealand’s Minister of Defence.

All of which strongly suggests that the journey towards AUKUS, the weapons purchase agreement announced in September 2021, got underway at least three years before Messrs Biden, Sunak and Albanese started talking about equipping Australia with nuclear-powered submarines. Around the time that New Zealand prime-ministers started turning up as loyal friends of the West at NATO gatherings.

If all these moves and counter-moves make you feel that New Zealand is being pushed about like a pawn on somebody else’s chessboard, then “Congratulations!” – you have been paying attention.

And, whoever’s footsteps this younger generation of politicians are now following, they sure as hell ain’t Helen Clark’s.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 16 August 2024.

This One's Just For You, Chippie!

 

"It's Alright To Be A Redneck"

by Alan Jackson

Video courtesy of YouTube

This video was posted on the Bowalley Road blogsite on Tuesday, 20 August 2024.

What The State Keeps Hidden.

You Don’t Want To Know: In the end, our collective aversion to disreputable realities is what all states rely upon. Loyalty and obedience are guaranteed not by what the state reveals to us, but by what its servants keep hidden.

AMONG THE MANY QUESTIONS raised by the Abuse in Care inquiry is the cruel nature of the state’s responses. Among the worst examples of this official cruelty is the way in which, over many years, Crown Law impeded the timely compensation of victims. There is something deeply troubling about the state’s legal division, with its effectively inexhaustible resources (at least when compared to those available to the victims of abuse and their legal representatives) waging a war of financial attrition against these extraordinarily vulnerable citizens. What is it that makes public servants so determined to prevent the state from acknowledging liability for even its most egregious sins? Why is the state so vicious in its own defence?

The best place to start looking for answers is in the psychological realm of human solidarity and institutional pride. One has only to think of military units and the esprit de corps so crucial to their effectiveness. In a social environment where loyalty is identified as the supreme virtue, anything threatening that loyalty must be confronted and destroyed. All other virtues, such as justice, accountability and truth-telling, are deemed to be of secondary importance. Indeed, if the choice is between defending the unit and responding to one or more of these secondary considerations, then loyalty to the unit will always win.

Since almost every state traces its origins to bodies of armed men, it is hardly to be wondered at that state institutions place a similar premium on institutional loyalty. No less than an effective military unit, or army, the state is acutely vulnerable to anything likely to undermine its servants’ morale. Admitting to error, or, worse still, to criminal behaviour, raises fears that the loyalty of the state’s subjects/citizens will be undermined.

A state that admits to making one mistake raises instantly the possibility that it has made others. Its decisions, formerly absolute and unchallengeable, come to be seen as tentative, subject to revision, or even reversal. Such a state will find it increasingly difficult to impose its will. Certainly, it will lose the ability to inspire fear. And a state that is not feared runs a palpable risk of not being obeyed.

Paradoxically, it is the state’s power to enforce decisions that are in clear violation of both reason and morality that inspires the most fear in the minds of its subjects/citizens. The message conveyed is one of savagery and unresponsiveness. Like James Cameron’s Terminator: “It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop” – until it has utterly crushed its challenger/s.

That this is how the New Zealand state sees itself, or, at least, used to see itself, is revealed with particular clarity in the Arthur Allan Thomas case. No matter how much new evidence was presented; no matter how compelling the arguments in favour of Thomas’s acquittal, the Court of Appeal repeatedly upheld his convictions. Undaunted by the public’s outrage at the Court’s apparent willingness to uphold an obvious injustice, the Judiciary’s most senior representatives made it clear that they would not be persuaded to set Thomas free. The Court of Appeal simply could not be seen to have got it wrong.

To free Thomas, one part of the state was ultimately required to wage war upon another. The Executive, in the form of New Zealand’s pugnacious Prime Minister, Rob Muldoon, simply outmanoeuvred the Judiciary by convening a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Thomas conviction. Significantly, this was not headed by a member of the New Zealand Judiciary, but by an Australian judge known for his independence of mind.

No longer protected by the courts, furious members of the New Zealand Police (which did not emerge well from the Inquiry) would regularly turn up to the Royal Commission’s hearings and hurl abuse at the Aussie interloper. The cops never did accept their culpability in the false conviction and imprisonment of Thomas, and the Court of Appeal never forgave Muldoon for effectively over-ruling its judgements. Second-guessing the New Zealand state is not a game for the faint-hearted!

But, if the injustices meted out to Arthur Allan Thomas (as well as, twenty years later, Peter Ellis) left an abiding unease in the public’s mind about the trustworthiness of its justice system, then its response to any confirmation that thousands of young New Zealanders had been terribly abused whilst in the custody and under the supervision of the New Zealand state would presumably be several orders of magnitude greater than simple “unease”. No rational citizen could ever again repose the slightest trust in the wisdom and benevolence of state institutions.

Small wonder then that so much was done for so long to prevent the awful truth about abuse in care from penetrating the public’s consciousness. The resistance of Crown Law, no matter how outrageous, was, in purely legal terms, entirely understandable. To acknowledge the state’s responsibility for decades of abusive behaviour would carry the not insignificant risk of leaving taxpayers liable for compensation amounting to billions of dollars. Drawing out the process to the maximum extent possible may not have been in the least bit compassionate – or just – but it did present itself as the most effective way of reducing the state’s liability. While the victims of its failings are all-too-mortal, the state is not. Barring bloody revolution and/or defeat in war, the state is immortal.

The other factor which the state can count on in matters such as the Abuse in Care inquiry is the degree to which so many of its citizens identify themselves with its interests. Imperfect though it may be, New Zealand’s democratic system of government makes it relatively easy for the state to present itself as the servant of the people it purportedly serves.

Like the soldiers of a regiment, many New Zealand citizens offer their country an inexhaustible quantum of loyalty. Like the regimental colours, New Zealand’s flag is seen by patriots as quasi-sacred. Whistle-blowers seeking to besmirch the honour of the nation for which it stands should expect no mercy.

Those dumfounded by the quietude of the New Zealand public’s response to the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care shouldn’t be. Quite apart from the fact that the Inquiry’s most disturbing evidence is buried away in the millions of words printed in the Report’s sixteen volumes, the half-century inquired into (1950-1999) is now at least a quarter-of-a-century removed from the New Zealand of today. That said, at some place, buried deep in the Kiwi Collective Conscience, lies the realisation that abuse on such a scale couldn’t have happened had generations of New Zealanders not quietly decided to look the other way.

In the end, this collective aversion to disreputable realities is what all states rely upon. It is not what the state reveals to us that guarantees our loyalty and obedience, it is what its servants keep hidden.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack on Thursday, 8 August 2024.

Keir Starmer's "Standing Army".

Defending England From Itself: Those dismissed as “far right thugs” don’t hate the refugees holed-up in hotels because they’re Muslims, or because their skins are a different colour, they hate them because they are changing a lifeworld Englishmen like themselves no longer feel able to defend, and which no one – least of all their iron-fisted “Labour” government – is prepared to defend for them.

KEIR STARMER’S promise to create a “standing army” of specialist riot police undoubtedly evoked a number of disturbing historical associations. Not the least of these would have been the Cromwellian Commonwealth of the 1640s and 50s. The one and only time the British Isles have lived under a republican form of government was made possible by the existence of a large standing army. Indeed, without Oliver Cromwell’s “New Model Army” it is doubtful King Charles I would have lost the English Civil War – let alone his head! Inspired by the ideals of radical puritanism, it was Cromwell’s “plain, russet-coated troopers” who ensured the victory of Parliament over the Crown.

That said, the New Model Army would likely strike contemporary Englishmen and women as something akin to the Taliban in breastplates. Even in the Seventeenth Century, the heavy-handed imposition of the puritans’ abstemious and censorious version of Christianity provoked alarm and despondency.

While Cromwell and his standing army ruled, Bibles in one hand, swords in the other, “Merry England” fell silent. The Puritan-dominated Commonwealth Parliament closed all the theatres and ruthlessly enforced their no-frills observance of the Sabbath. Determined to root out “paganism” in all its forms, the Puritans cut down village maypoles and outlawed the celebration of Christmas!

With Cromwell’s death, England fell under the sway of the New Model Army’s Major-Generals. For a brief period the country was forced to endure a military dictatorship.

The British people’s longstanding hostility towards the maintenance of large standing armies was born out of these bitter experiences. Radical ideology, backed by armed men, has been seen as profoundly un-English ever since.

All the more reason, then, to wonder at Starmer’s use of the term in relation to the violent civil disturbances which have shaken the British people over the past fortnight. It is possible that the United Kingdom’s new prime minister promised to create a standing army of special police in complete ignorance of the term’s historical resonances. But, even if he did, the promise is fraught with danger.

Sir Robert Peel, the British prime minister responsible for the creation of the British police force was careful to reject the idea of modelling his new law enforcement body on the armed French gendarmerie. Aware of the British people’s deep aversion to being ordered about by men with guns, Peel was the original promoter of “policing by consent”. Prior to Peel’s force, the quelling of public disorder had largely been left to the “Redcoats” – soldiers who tended to shoot first and not ask questions later.

Outside of Northern Ireland, it is many years since the British Army has been called to the aid of the Civil Power. This is hardly surprising, since the issuance of such an appeal is the last resort of a state under immense internal pressure. After calling out the armed forces, there is no one left to summon. If soldiers cannot restore order, then the next step is full-scale revolution.

What does it mean, then, that as anti-immigrant rioting peaked across north-west England some Members of Parliament were openly calling for the UK Defence Force to be unleashed upon its own people?

Sadly, it means that the UK political class, like Cromwell’s radical puritans, no longer sees itself as an integral part of the body politic, but as something extrinsic to it. The puritans believed themselves to be the elect of God, a holy minority of true Christians whom the Almighty had already predestined for paradise. The contrast between themselves and the sinful majority, all headed for the endless chastisement of hellfire, could hardly have been sharper.

The contrast between today’s puritans (often labelled “woke”, a term they heartily despise) and the rioting crowds of rock-throwers and arsonists who do not share their betters’ love for refugees and migrants, is every bit as pointed. What’s more, in their hearts, Starmer and his Labour colleagues know that for every angry protester on the street waving the Union Flag and England’s red cross of Saint George, there are hundreds more watching the action unfold on their screens – and urging them on.

The irony of all these riots breaking out along Labour’s “Red Wall” can hardly be lost on its newly-elected MPs. Nor the fact that in so many of the seats Labour reclaimed from the Tories, Nigel Farage’s anti-immigrant Reform Party came second. While Starmer and his Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, promise the perpetrators of “far-right thuggery” a lengthy holiday at His Majesty’s expense, and the UK’s terrifying Director of Public Prosecutions, Stephen Parkinson, threatens to incarcerate Freedom of Expression along with them, the yawning gulf between rulers and ruled grows ever greater.

It is tragic that no one entrusted with the running of the UK has thought to wonder publicly what could possibly inspire sufficient rage to render otherwise ordinary people capable of attempting to set fire to a hotel containing scores of terrified refugees.

The go-to explanation for the Prime Minister, and for the UK’s mainstream news media, is that the riots are the work of “far right thugs”. This is, in part, a plausible charge, inasmuch as a great deal of the disinformation carried by social-media has, indeed, been the work of white supremacists and outright fascists.

It is wide of the mark, however, at the level of the working-class lad marching alongside his mates in the name of the community they all grew up in, but which is now fast dissolving before their eyes. These youths do not come from Far Right families. There was a time when all of them voted, with an almost religious fervour, “not for the iron fist, but for the helping-hand”. For Labour.

These guys don’t hate the refugees holed-up in the hotels because they’re Muslims, or because their skins are a different colour, they hate them because they are changing a lifeworld Englishmen like themselves no longer feel able to defend, and which no one – least of all their iron-fisted “Labour” government – is prepared to defend for them.

What do they want from Keir Starmer? They want a “standing army” to protect their communities from being overwhelmed by a flood of refugees and immigrants (more than two million in the last two years) that they did not ask for and cannot absorb.

What are they being offered by Keir Starmer? A standing army of special coppers bearing a frightening resemblance to the ones who cracked their father’s heads during the Miners’ Strike of the 1980s. Or, for those among them who know even more of their nation’s history, to Cromwell’s standing army of radical puritans who silenced Merry England in the 1650s.

This essay was posted on the Bowalley Road blogsite on Monday, 12 August 2024.

Default Settings.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind: The institutionalised had few friends and no respite from the abuse that persisted, unreported and unpunished. Behind the barbed wire and inside the locked wards, the hunger of those who feed on pain and violence continued to be sated.

LET IT BE KNOWN that appalling behaviour will not be prevented, or punished, by the authorities, and watch it flourish.

To confirm this grim assertion, one has only to consider the example of the former Yugoslavia. Families who had lived next to one another for decades, whose children had played together, grown together, married one another, suddenly found themselves sucked into a maelstrom of horrific communal violence. Overnight, a murderous, state-sanctioned nationalism began portraying one’s neighbours as deadly enemies, whose destruction, far from being punished, would be rewarded. How quickly former friends became rapists, torturers and murderers was chilling.

The same terrifying spectacle unfolded in Rwanda.

That these examples point to a terrible hunger for pain and violence lodged deep in the human psyche is profoundly confronting.

That these destructive urges do not tear our society to pieces cannot be wholly explained by the ordinary citizen’s fear of retribution. From an early age we are schooled in the virtues of kindness and consideration. These, we are assured, are the default-settings of humankind, and those who behave otherwise are portrayed as dangerous deviations from the norm.

That unkind, often brutal, treatment is meted out to our fellow citizens by persons we regard as perfectly normal, is explained by the recipients’ actual or alleged propensity to harm the communities in which they live. Convince people that any given individual, or group, constitutes an existential threat to their wellbeing, and you can do pretty-much anything you want to them – and not be punished for it.

The multiple reports of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care reveal in excruciating detail how this stigmatising of individuals and groups played out in New Zealand between 1950 and 1999. Our empathy for the victims of the policies and practices of that half-century is so strong that it has left us curiously uninterested in identifying what it was that permitted so much pain and violence to be inflicted on so many mostly young New Zealanders for so long.

The brutally straightforward explanation for those 50 years of abuse is that, for at least the 50 years that preceded 1950, persons categorised as: “alcoholics, imbeciles, illegitimate children (and their mothers), prostitutes, criminals, the feeble-minded, lunatics, epileptics, deaf-mutes, the unemployable, the tubercular, the immoral (e.g. homosexuals), anyone from another race” were branded by credible authority figures – senior public servants, academic experts, medical professionals, political leaders – as threats to the moral, social and racial “hygiene” of the nation.

To safeguard the nation’s genetic health, argued the promoters of the new “science” of Eugenics, “unfit” and/or “defective” individuals must be isolated from the rest of the population in closed institutions. The most extreme eugenicists went further. Those declared “unfit” in the United States and Sweden were subjected to forced sterilisation. In 1928, New Zealand eugenicists were poised to do the same, but, to their eternal credit, the parliamentarians of the time refused to oblige them.

Nowhere did the eugenic ideology take firmer hold than in Nazi Germany, where tens-of-thousands of “useless mouths” were murdered with the blessing of the state and its professional servants.

The horrors perpetrated in the name of social and racial “hygiene” by the Nazis turned Eugenics into a dirty word, but the ideas at its core – that the different were dangerous – lingered on in the state institutions erected in its name.

And it wasn’t just the medical superintendents and senior bureaucrats who continued to treat the different as dangerous, the overwhelming majority of “normal” New Zealanders concurred. Out of sight and out of mind, the institutionalised had few friends and no respite from the abuse that persisted, unreported and unpunished. Behind the barbed wire and inside the locked wards, the hunger of those who feed on pain and violence continued to be sated.

It is estimated that upwards of 200,000 young New Zealanders were abused in institutional settings during the second half of the twentieth century. Such massive and prolonged mistreatment cannot be perpetrated, or successfully hidden, unless its victims are first reduced to something less-than-human.

In Yugoslavia and Rwanda that dehumanisation was achieved by making them enemies of the nation, of the tribe. In New Zealand, by presenting them as a challenge to our tragically narrow definition of “normality”.

Leaving us with just two questions: What appalling behaviour goes unpunished today? And against whom?

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 2 August 2024.

Friends Or Enemies At The Gates?

Crushing The Hegemon: What will/can the USA do to avoid becoming the sick, old man of the Indo-Pacific?

THEY WERE CALLED THE “WINGED HUSSARS”. In 1683, at the gates of Vienna, these elite Polish cavalrymen, sporting feathered “wings” designed to give them the appearance of avenging angels, provided the vanguard of the largest cavalry charge in history. Emerging unexpectedly from the forested heights above the capital city of the Hapsburg Empire, they swept down upon the besieging Ottoman army of Sultan Mehmed IV and swept it from the field.

Never again would the Ottoman Empire threaten the security of Christian Europe. Over the next two centuries, what had been the dominant power of the Mediterranean world would decline to the point where it could be described, by Tsar Nicholas I, as “the sick old man of Europe”. And, as it declined, the hungry powers of the West extended their sway to encompass the entire planet.

There will be those in Beijing who look at the United States of America and see the Ottoman Empire. Not the Ottoman Empire that existed after the Siege of Vienna, but the Ottoman Empire that might, with a bit more luck, and better military leadership, have taken the city and put the whole of Europe in play.

But, those same Chinese geopolitical strategists will also see in the USA of 2024 what was doubtless equally clear to Western European leaders in the 1600s. That, for all its strategic reach, the hegemonic power of their age was over-extended militarily and fatally wounded economically.

The maritime triumphs of Portugal and Spain had opened alternative routes to resources which had previously flowed from East to West through Constantinople. Paradoxically, winning control of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles would end-up proving disastrous for the Ottomans’ long-term prospects.

Similarly, the Americans’ dominant global position has been undermined by the dramatic resurrection of China, and looks set to be further weakened by the rapid growth of India. Perceiving this, the geo-strategic thinkers of both nations are perfectly aware that their leaders need only watch and wait.

Looking to their defence (so that the US cannot do in the Twenty-First Century what the British did to India and China in the Nineteenth) and continuing to broaden and deepen their economies, these rising powers have no sound geopolitical reasons for attacking the USA. Global power has always been zero-sum. The bigger and stronger the Asian tigers grow, the weaker the American Eagle becomes.

The most important question, therefore, is what will/can the USA do to avoid becoming the sick, old man of the Indo-Pacific?

For the moment, at least, the answer would appear to be AUKUS. Two increasingly decrepit former global hegemons have succeeded in ensnaring a much younger and more vigorous regional power in a confused and, almost certainly, fruitless attempt to reassure themselves that their imperial writ still runs in the Indo-Pacific theatre.

Not that Australia has ever played hard-to-get in these increasingly forlorn adventures. It gaily traduced the UN Charter in 2003 alongside its American and British confederates, committing Australian forces to the same “forever wars” that did so much to weaken the military capacity of all three nations. Undeterred, Australia has now cheerfully agreed to put the “A” into AUKUS. Mostly, this entails spending impossible sums of money on a force of Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines, vessels which the Australian geostrategist, Hugh White, is quietly convinced will never be delivered.

Hitherto declared “off-limits” to every other nation on earth, this formidable weapons-system is now being made available for sale – if not to the highest bidder, then certainly to Uncle Sam’s self-proclaimed “Deputy-Sheriff”. The deal may be seen as proof of the USA’s and the UK’s increasingly evident willingness to let others do the fighting – and dying – for them. What’s been good for the Ukrainians is now, apparently, doubleplusgood for the Aussies. In the unlikely event that China does decide to force the issue over Taiwan and/or the South China Sea, however, Uncle Sam will, as White argues persuasively, move swiftly to bring all his nuclear subs under strict American control.

So, why have the USA, the UK and Australia embarked on this AUKUS course? And why are Canada and New Zealand giving serious consideration to joining them?

Much of the explanation undoubtedly boils down to a failure of geostrategic imagination, made worse by the UK’s former colonies’ more-or-less instinctive Anglocentrism. (The less forgiving observer might attribute the five nation’s behaviour to the pernicious legacy of old-fashioned, white supremacist, imperialism.) Bluntly, none of the present AUKUS partners, nor those thinking about signing up for “Pillar 2” of this glorified arms purchase, can envisage a world in which English-speaking white people are not setting the pace, and calling the shots.

In the case of Australia and New Zealand this failure of imagination is especially egregious. Both nations are, to slip into antipodean, “a bloody long way from anywhere”. Except, of course, from Asia. Both countries have always known this, but resisted strongly the obvious conclusions to be drawn from their extreme geographical isolation from the metropolitan power that created them.

For a few terrifying months in 1942 that isolation from the “Mother Country” was brought home to Australians and New Zealanders in ways impossible to ignore. But then the deus ex machina of the American Pacific Fleet at Midway restored Anglophone supremacy – albeit with an American accent. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sealed the deal. In a matter of milliseconds, Asia had, once again, ceased to be a problem.

Except, as the Ottomans discovered, nothing stands still. Even successful attempts to enlarge their power only end up lumbering expanding empires with more peoples, more territories, to defend. And all that effort, as the UK learned in the Boer War, and as the USA discovered in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, is not only economically draining, but it also saps the citizenry’s willingness to go on footing the bill – in blood and treasure – of imperial greatness. That’s when making your country great again means telling the rest of the world to go to hell.

Which way New Zealand elects to jump in this geopolitical game will not trouble China greatly. Its diplomats and spies have doubtless already explained to their bosses in Beijing the present New Zealand Government’s curious conviction that the certainties of the past are recoverable and durable. That Australia’s Labour Government is as convinced of this as its National Party-led trans-Tasman ally merely confirms the unwillingness of both nations to see clearly the nature of the global reality that is fast emerging.

Hugh White has noted how easily Aussies and Kiwis slipped into the comforting assumption that “America would keep us safe, and China would make us rich.” For a while, it even appeared to be true. Now, however, the Americans are at our gates, determined that their hegemony in the Indo-Pacific region remains unchallenged. Exactly what shape the Winged Hussars of the Twenty-First Century will take is yet to be seen. But that they will come should not be doubted.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 5 August 2024.