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.

A Time For Unity.

Emotional Response: Prime Minister Christopher Luxon addresses mourners at the tangi of King Tuheitia on Turangawaewae Marae on Saturday, 31 August 2024.

THE DEATH OF KING TUHEITIA could hardly have come at a worse time for Maoridom. The power of the Kingitanga to unify te iwi Māori was demonstrated powerfully at January’s national hui, where upwards of 10,000 people answered King Tuheitia’s summons to the Turangawaewae marae. But now, at this fractious historical hour, the power of the Kingitanga is passing into untested hands.

If the traditional “kingmakers” of the royalist iwi choose unwisely, then the divisions and tensions between Tangata Whenua and Tangata Tiriti may widen further. In the weeks and months that lie ahead, rash and angry words from King Tuheitia’s successor have the potential to ignite a political conflagration. In these circumstances, Māori and Pakeha have an equally pressing need for the Kotahitanga [Unity] that was the late King’s guiding star.

This need for unity was expressed with affecting sincerity at the King’s tangi by someone many New Zealanders would regard as its most unlikely champion. As the leader of the conservative coalition government responsible for sharpening the points of Māori-Pakeha difference, Christopher Luxon’s participation in the King’s funeral ceremonies could easily have been construed as perfunctory, or, even worse, provocative. That he spoke of his relationship with the King with such obvious emotion, his voice close to breaking, unquestionably impressed his Tainui hosts. That said, the thought surely crossed their minds: “What is it with this Pakeha, who weeps with us, even as his ministers assault us?”

What indeed? The most obvious answer is that Luxon, like all politicians, is a complex mixture of emotion and calculation; sincerity and subterfuge. What’s more, though reason reels from the thought, Luxon, like many politicians, can be both at the same time. Very few Pakeha New Zealanders are immune to the extraordinary, almost magical, power which Maoridom is able to summon at moments of great historical significance. It brings our emotions suddenly, and often unexpectedly, to the surface, catching us off-guard.

This blending of the spiritual with the material was a skill which, until relatively recently, was manifest in all cultures. Those over the age of 70 will recall the state funeral of the slain President, John F. Kennedy: the soldiers slow-marching with arms reversed; the riderless horse, its master’s boots facing backwards; and that unforgettable image, almost unbearably poignant, of Kennedy’s young son innocently snapping his father a filial salute as the funeral cortege passed by.

Symbols, and the powerful feelings they evoke, were much more available to Westerners sixty years ago. New Zealand, now one of the world’s most secular societies, was then an emphatically Christian nation. Pakeha religiosity was strong in the 1950s and 60s, and, come Sunday morning, most of the nation’s churches were full. Back then, the spiritual world and the material world overlaid each other and intermingled in ways that today’s secular Pakeha would struggle to accept.

But not today’s Māori. In te Ao Māori the spiritual infuses the material in ways that at once entrance and confuse Pakeha. A cynic might say that this spirituality, this affinity for the metaphysical, is Maoridom’s secret weapon, and that Christopher Luxon is as susceptible to its magic as any number of his equally entranced compatriots.

Why, then, does he not take advantage of it? Why impress Tainui and the Kingitanga with your tears, and then return to a Parliament where Act and NZ First continue to drag the National Party down the path of “pernicious polarisation?

Typically, “pernicious polarisation” is initiated by political elites that have been electorally sidelined and are willing to do almost anything to get back in the game. They deliberately stoke class, racial and/or religious divisions – often in cahoots with more extreme groups. Their hope is to extend their electoral reach by advancing under the cover of their new allies’ more inflammatory political rhetoric, and by quietly promising to introduce at least some of the extremists’ most radical policies as soon as power has been reclaimed.

Clearly, the National Party, alongside Act and NZ First, has been drawing heavily from the pernicious polarisers’ playbook. Equally clearly, it has worked: National has reclaimed the Treasury Benches and is sitting pretty as the dominant party within a conservative coalition government.

National’s problem, now, is that, having been assisted into office by its more extreme coalition partners, it is required to deliver on the promises made to get them (and keep them) onside. Since these commitments are mostly bound up with Act’s and NZ First’s determination to rein-in what both parties believe to be an over-mighty Maoridom, New Zealand’s politics risk becoming convulsed to a degree not seen since the 1981 Springbok Tour.

Such convulsions are most unlikely to spare the National Party. Its record on race-relations is a proud one, and trashing it to keep David Seymour and Winston Peters happy is not a course of action a significant number of National Party MPs and members are likely to accept with equanimity. Indeed, the louder the chorus of protest from Māori and progressive Pakeha New Zealanders grows, the more misgivings National is likely to experience.

There will be some in the party who look to National’s past and argue that civil unrest has always been the Right’s friend. Certainly, National romped back into office after the 1951 Waterfront Dispute, and Rob Muldoon’s facilitation of the 1981 Springbok Tour saw National returned (narrowly) to power. But, the past is not always prelude, sometimes it represents an end, not a beginning.

With the King’s tangi as a backdrop, Christopher Luxon could earn considerable praise from across the country if he was to announce that, as a coronation gift, he was giving the new Māori monarch his solemn promise that the National Party would not allow Act’s Treaty Principles Bill to reach the floor of Parliament.

Would David Seymour respond by breaking up the Coalition? Quite possibly. Luxon should let him. National still has plenty of money. Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Maori are in no position to mount a credible threat to National’s re-election chances. Indeed, the parties of the Left would be hard-pressed not to cheer Luxon on!

Moreover, if National categorically ruled out entering into another coalition with Act and NZ First, and Luxon, taking inspiration from Kamala Harris’ playbook, declared it time to “turn the page” on the politics of racial division, then he and his party would likely be rewarded with a runaway electoral victory. Kiwis don’t like political confrontation at the best of times – especially not with their own friends and whanau.

Kotahitanga, in addition to being King Tuheitia’s guiding star, could very successfully double as National’s campaign slogan.

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