Are We The Baddies?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Out Of Sympathy.

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

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

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

So, not that distant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two States - But No Solutions.

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

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

Naturally, there were sceptics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

The Odd Couple.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No Enemies To The Left – Or The Right.

Wrong Turn: Labour and National can only reduce the toxic influence of their electoral competitors by rejecting their extremism.

“NO ENEMIES TO THE LEFT” has always been Labour’s rule-of-thumb. What, after all, does a moderate, left-of-centre party gain by allowing its electoral rivals to become repositories for every radical (i.e. congenitally dissatisfied) left-winger’s protest vote? To deliver effective government, a major party needs coalition partners that are weak and electorally vulnerable. Strong and electorally-secure coalition partners, as Christopher Luxon is discovering, tend to make effective government … problematic.

The classical solution to this problem requires the major parties of the Left and the Right to construct their policy platforms in such a way that only the most unrelenting ideologues would feel impelled to vote for their electoral confreres. By offering enough of what are generally perceived to be “sensible” right-wing/left-wing policies, they make it unnecessary for all but a handful of voters to venture any further along the political spectrum.

When the major parties adopt policies which a large number of their traditional supporters regard as uncharacteristic or extreme, an opportunity is created – especially under proportional representation – for those who feel deserted and/or betrayed by such behaviour to be offered a new electoral home. Labour’s embrace of “Rogernomics” forced it to entertain the Alliance and the Greens; National’s surrender to Ruth Richardson and Jenny Shipley created the opening for Winston Peters and NZ First.

The great risk for the major parties, should these “off-shoots” acquire a solid electoral foothold, is that major party strategists come to regard them as more-or-less reliable allies, rather than what they truly are – dangerous competitors. This could not be said of either Labour’s Helen Clark, or National’s John Key. When Clark was presented with the opportunity to kill the Alliance, she did not hesitate. When Peters and NZ First made themselves equally vulnerable to electoral destruction, Key dispatched them to the outer electoral darkness.

Labour either would not, or could not, replicate Key’s ruthlessness with the Greens. To date, the Green “brand” has proved sufficiently robust to withstand Labour’s “friendly fire”. Indeed, there seems to be a general reluctance on Labour’s part to treat the Greens as a serious rival. At the electorate level one occasionally hears angry accusations that the Greens are “stealing Labour’s vote” (which in Auckland Central, Wellington Central and Rongotai turned out to be no more than the truth!) but the idea of an all-out assault on the Greens has so far been dismissed by Labour’s leadership as electorally counter-productive.

From a more distant perspective, however, Labour’s tolerance of the Greens appears particularly foolish. The cultural radicalism that has largely superimposed itself over the Greens’ hitherto electorally unassailable “environmental-saviour” profile has been bleeding into Labour’s ranks for several years.

Nowhere was this more dramatically on display than in Nanaia Mahuta’s behind-the-scenes collaboration with the Greens during the “Three Waters” parliamentary debate. With Labour’s Māori Caucus acting as the surgeon, the Greens and Labour have been joined at the hip on virtually all matters relating to te Tiriti.

A similar convergence long ago became evident on transgender issues. For the best part of a week in March 2023, Labour and the Greens outbid each other in their condemnation of gender-critical provocateur, Posie Parker. As a consequence, both parties were strongly criticised for jointly contributing to the violence that accompanied Parker’s visit.

That Chris Hipkins’, upon becoming prime-minister in January 2023, either would not, or could not, add his party’s “woke” positions to Labour’s “policy bonfire” did not go unnoticed by the electorate.

Similarly, National’s low-key response to the Free Speech issue, coupled with its refusal to speak out more forcefully against “decolonisation” and “indigenisation” – policies being pursued, with Green support, by what struck many as an unheeding and ideologically-driven Labour Government – both rebounded strongly to the advantage of Act and NZ First. For a party seeking to make itself, once again, the big tent under which the overwhelming majority of right-of-centre voters could congregate, National’s weak responses were politically perplexing and electorally damaging.

Certainly, had Luxon’s 2023 share of the Party Vote (38 percent) equalled Bill English’s in 2017(44 percent) then his Coalition Agreement with Act and NZ First would have been a very different document.

It is the Labour Party, however, that has most need of an unwavering “no enemies to the left” strategy going into the 2026 general election. To understand the dangers it will face if it does not do everything it can to drive down the Greens’ support, Hipkins, or whoever replaces him, has only to consider the left-wing political debacle that is Wellington.

By 2023, Labour’s relationship with the Greens in Wellington had reached the point where voters no longer considered which of the two “left-wing” parties they supported to be all that important. As natural coalition partners, with broadly similar policies, a vote for Labour or the Greens could be presented, simply, as a vote “for the Left”. Coke, or Pepsi? It was purely a matter of taste.

Some indication of just how seriously this approach can go astray has been on more-or-less constant display since Tory Whanau was elected Mayor of Wellington, alongside a council dominated by “the Left”. The result has been a hot mess, as unedifying as it has been ineffectually extravagant.

If left-wing politicians believe that on the big issues they are as one, then they will start sweating the small issues. Inevitably, these small issues reveal themselves to be the big issues, helpfully reduced by unelected bureaucrats to bite-sized chunks. The resulting division, bitterness, and recrimination benefits nobody but the Right.

In what may yet turn out to be the decisive battle, Labour finally did the right thing. It stood by its policy of opposing asset sales. In doing so, however, its representatives incurred the wrath of their ultra-left “comrades”. These latter construed the vote to retain the Council’s airport shares as a repudiation of the Treaty rights of Wellington’s mana whenua, or, at least, of their unelected representatives.

The American political philosopher, Susan Neiman, wrote a book called “Left Is Not Woke”. The recent behaviour of Wellington City Council offers a vivid illustration of her thesis.

If Labour refuses to re-make itself as a moderate left-leaning party, with policies corresponding to the wishes of the overwhelming majority of New Zealanders keen to see the back of the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government, then it will remain in Opposition. While the voters are encouraged to see the Greens – and Te Pāti Māori – as Labour’s “natural” partners, espousing policies largely indistinguishable from its own, they will continue to hold their noses and vote for whichever right-wing party they consider the least objectionable.

Labour needs to reduce the toxic influence of the parties to its left by making it clear that it has put its own woke inclinations behind it. This will be a twofer for whoever has the guts to make it happen. Not only will it reduce (or even eliminate) the electoral irritants to the party’s left, but it will also, as an added bonus, neutralise the equally irritating woke faction cluttering-up its own ranks. Indeed, achieving the first objective is absolutely contingent upon achieving the second. 

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 14 October 2024.

An Unending Nightmare.

Hate Will Find A Way: Historians divide into those who see Zionism as the only sane answer to the Jews’ historic vulnerability; and those who regard the Zionist “entity” as a purely colonial construct, founded in racism and shrouded in mythology. The moralists of both camps, meanwhile, demonstrate a capacity for joint-cracking contortions calculated to make a circus impresario’s mouth water.

ACROSS THE WORLD, Jews and Palestinians have been remembering the events of 7 October 2023 in very different ways. Israelis, still traumatised by the savagery of Hamas’s pogrom, struggle to visualise a purposeful future unmediated by the contradictory impulses of vengeance and security. The Palestinians of Gaza, shattered and broken by Israel’s relentless bombardment, sustain themselves with a potent mixture of indignation and hate – brewed in the caldron of their unending national nightmare.

The rest of the world has fallen in behind the flags of these bitter antagonists, each side decrying the dangerous “disinformation” of the other. Historians divide into those who see Zionism as the only sane answer to the Jews’ historic vulnerability; and those who regard the Zionist “entity” as a purely colonial construct, founded in racism and shrouded in mythology. The moralists of both camps, meanwhile, demonstrate a capacity for joint-cracking contortions calculated to make a circus impresario’s mouth water.

Perhaps the smallest group, after twelve months of blood, fire, and torment, are the optimists. These brave (or idiotic) souls still insist that a “two-state solution” is the only viable way out of the unceasing tragedy that is Israel/Palestine. As if 7 October 2023, and its aftermath, can somehow be set aside. As if the trauma-stricken judgement of Israelis and Palestinians can somehow be rendered sufficiently calm and dispassionate to envisage something other than the utter annihilation of the national enemy.

What, then, is the solution to this, the Devil’s own most treasured problem? Given its constitutive role in the Israel/Palestine impasse, history may not be the most obvious of guides. But, where else can we turn? There is no war in the present that was not conceived, and brought to term, in the past. What the world has been watching these past twelve months is nothing that the world hasn’t witnessed many, many times before.

In spite of appearances, no conflict is endless. Wars end. Peace is restored. How?

Let’s begin in the aftermath of the First World War. The Ottoman Empire lies in ruins. Far away, in the commune of Sèvres, on the outskirts of Paris, the victors have drawn up a treaty which shares what’s left of the Ottoman possessions (after the territories agreed upon by Monsieur Picot and Mr Sykes have been deducted) between France, Britain, Italy and Greece.

Encouraged by the British prime minister, David Lloyd-George, who dreamed, madly, of resurrecting Byzantium, the Greeks did their best to oblige him.

Mustapha Kemal, whom New Zealanders had learned to fear at Gallipoli, was having none of it. His Turkish troops drove the Greek invaders, quite literally, into the sea. But, not before the contending armies’ Muslim and Christian commanders had distinguished themselves by permitting/encouraging multiple atrocities against the inhabitants of the helpless faith communities their forces over-ran.

A new, and much revised, treaty having been signed and sealed, this time in the Swiss city of Lausanne, Kemal turned to the problem of what to do with all the Greeks who continued to live in his new Republic of Turkey (now Türkiye).

Too much blood had flowed under too many bridges for Turks and Greeks to co-exist peacefully, as they had done for centuries under the Ottomans.

Ever the ruthless problem-solver, Kemal determined to rid his new republic of Greeks – quietly encouraging the defeated Greeks to rid their own kingdom of Turks at the same time. The human-beings caught up in this first example of “ethnic cleansing” got no say in the matter. They were simply ordered to leave. Enterprising tourists can still visit the decaying ruins of settlements from which Christian Greeks and Muslim Turks were summarily uprooted and deported in the 1920s.

So successful was Kemal’s “solution”, that the victorious allies of World War II adopted it as the most efficient means of emptying the states of Eastern Europe of their numerous German-speaking communities. With the example of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland before them, the Allies were in no mood to burden the region’s future with the witches’ brew of ethno-nationalism. The victims of Nazi oppression watched with cold eyes as millions of “displaced” Germans trudged westward. Few tears were shed.

The Palestinians insist that, in 1948, they, too, became the victims of ethnic cleansing. If true, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Israelis made an uncharacteristically poor job of it.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 11 October 2024.

A Fast-Track Backwards.

Dubious Destination: What New Zealanders face in the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government is an attempt to return the country to the policy settings of half-a-century ago. What Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop’s fast-track legislation is designed to rehabilitate and revivify is the “national development” mindset of the 1970s and 80s.

IT IS RARE INDEED to encounter a measure as ripe for political exploitation as the Coalition Government’s “fast-track” legislation. Simultaneously, the measure assaults the natural environment, the democratic process, and the rights of te iwi Māori. Serendipitously, on the left of New Zealand politics there are three parties perfectly positioned, at least theoretically, to champion each one of these embattled realms. The damage they could inflict, collectively, upon the Reactionary Right over the course of the next two years is, at least potentially, enormous. In short, if Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori were battle-ready, then they could be governing New Zealand by the end of 2026.

But, how many voters would take that bet?

What New Zealanders face in the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government is an attempt to return the country to the policy settings of half-a-century ago. What Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop’s fast-track legislation is designed to rehabilitate and revivify is the “national development” mindset of the 1970s and 80s.

Driving this reanimation project forward are business-people, investors, and politicians who have convinced themselves that the social and cultural forces ranged against them are nothing like as powerful, electorally-speaking, as they believe themselves to be. If the question is put to voters: “Jobs or Frogs?”, then the Coalition’s and its backers’ money is all on “Jobs”. As far as Bishop and his NZ First attack-dog, Shane Jones, are concerned, Forest & Bird, Greenpeace, and all those other “environmental terrorists” are nothing more than re-cycled paper tigers.

What this old-fashioned “workerist” line of argument ignores is the brute demographic fact that the number of people interested in working down a mine, digging in a quarry, picking fruit, or doing all the other hard, dirty, and dangerous jobs associated with the primary sector is a great deal smaller than it was half-a-century ago. The massive importation of migrant labour is a direct response to the pronounced reluctance of Kiwis – especially young Kiwis – to work in high-risk and uncomfortable industries for lousy pay.

These labour market changes notwithstanding, a large number of New Zealanders still hark back nostalgically to the romance of yesteryear’s heroic toilers. They admire the grainy photographs of long-dead coal-miners, their coal-dust-smeared faces wearing the same expressions as soldiers returning from the front. The problem for Jones and his ilk is that these photographs are most likely to be encountered on the white walls of a Remuera lawyer’s residence.

Heroic toilers, or workers without choices?

There’s a very good reason why a lawyer’s grandfather was a coal miner and she is not. Nobody in their right mind spends their life underground filling their lungs with coal-dust for a wage just big enough to pay the bills. Well-paid professionals may celebrate their forebears as working-class heroes, but the heroes themselves wanted something better for their offspring. Something vaguely resembling a choice.

The Coalition Government is, almost certainly, unaware of the sheer magnitude of the political project they have set in motion. It is nothing less than an attempt to rehabilitate the joys of blood, tears, toil, and sweat. An anachronistic effort to drive men back into the raw exploitative enterprises that gave rise to the hard-working, hard-drinking, emotionally unavailable “jokers” of New Zealand’s past.

It’s a forlorn hope. Weather-worn West Coast baby-boomers may applaud Shane Jones’ “Good-bye Freddy!”, screw-the-environment, hommage to the “rip-in, rip-out, rip-off” model of economic development, but not their long-since-moved-away offspring. These young New Zealanders, and their children, are more likely to be found marching up the main streets of the major cities in protest.

Then again, all this masculinist domination-of-nature rhetoric may be nothing more than political distraction. “Matua Shane” is forever ordering the “nephs” to get “off the couch” and find themselves a job. It’s a trope that plays well among NZ First voters.

But, there’s another way of telling this story. One could construct a narrative in which the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government encourages foreign investors to take advantage of an under-utilised workforce. Of young, unskilled Māori, trapped in New Zealand’s poorest communities, harried by MSD, just waiting to be driven, as their grandfathers were driven in the 1950s and 60s, to fill the jobs vacated by upwardly-mobile Pakeha. Could this be the dirty little racist secret at the heart of the Coalition’s fast-tracked projects?

All of which poses a host of vexing questions concerning the Opposition parties’ response to the Coalition Government’s first year in office. Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori could hardly have asked for a larger, or more indefensible, target than the one their opponents have so generously provided.

The Opposition’s counter-narrative to the Coalition Government is obvious. New Zealanders are being invited to return to the historical era that preceded the full flowering of environmental consciousness. Back to the period of what might be called “heroic” national development, when rivers were damned, native forests felled, neighbourhoods levelled to make way for motorways, and everyone cheered on the “unstoppable” March of Progress.

This is a story that Labour, the Greens, and Te Pāti Māori are perfectly placed to tell together. Taking turns to expose the sheer madness of pretending that fifty years of history can be cast aside. Highlighting the sheer folly of proceeding as if the insights and advances of ecological science can, somehow, be ignored. Warning the Government that the legislative edifice constructed out of New Zealander’s growing environmental awareness cannot be dismantled without incurring significant political cost. And, finally, if it becomes clear that the Coalition Government isn’t listening, warning the voters that its reactionary programme can only be progressed by riding roughshod over the entire democratic process.

How else should the Fast-Track Approvals Bill be described?

The Treaty, too, cannot avoid being over-ridden. Because the Coalition’s great leap backwards cannot avoid returning New Zealand to the era in which te Tiriti o Waitangi was dismissed as “a simple nullity”. New Zealanders growing understanding of Te Ao Māori, and the critical role it is already playing in shaping the nation’s future, simply will not survive the reimposition of a nineteenth century capitalist narrative in which the ruthless destruction and exploitation of the natural world (along with the indigenous people who lived in harmony with it) is presented as both beneficial and cost-free.

Finally, the Opposition’s critique of the Coalition’s reactionary programme should clearly identify the two, closely-related, elements at its heart. The first is the Reactionary Right’s fear of, and resentment towards, the new social movements that have, over the course of the last 50 years, come to dominate the politics of Western nations. These new forces for social change include the civil rights movement and its demand for full racial equality; feminism; the movement for LGBTQI+ rights; and the worldwide effort to protect the biosphere. The Reactionary Right’s second great fear, itself a manifestation of humankind’s growing ecological awareness, is the scientific confirmation of anthropogenic global warming. Full acceptance of climate change is inimical to the Reactionary Right’s promotion of endless economic growth. Which is why, its ministers’ lip-service notwithstanding, the Coalition’s policies confirm its three constituent parties as radical climate change deniers.

If the three Opposition parties cannot organise an effective sharing of their urgent collective responsibility to expose both the madness and the menace embodied in this Coalition Government; if, together, they are unable to present themselves as the nation’s best defence against the dangerous policies of the Reactionary Right; and if they fail to demonstrate a capacity to work together effectively, in anticipation of forming an enlightened and democratic coalition government; then New Zealanders will not, and should not, vote for them.

In those circumstances, that part of the nation which still believes in rational and compassionate government will have to hope that, by the time the 2029 election rolls around, there is still enough left of Aotearoa-New Zealand to make it worth saving, and sufficient progressive Kiwis to effect the rescue.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack page on Wednesday, 9 October 2024.

Waiting By The River.

Looking Sideways: To the Peoples Republic of China, and its friends around the world, the United States must remind them of the flailing and failing Chinese Empire of 1900.

WATCHING THE SCREEN in Oamaru’s Majestic picture theatre, I struggled to make sense of Fifty-Five Days At Peking. Yes, it was exciting, but it was also, for a seven year-old, extremely confusing. What war was this? Not the First World War, and certainly not the Second. More to the point, why were the nations I had grown up regarding as enemies – the Germans, the Japanese, and the Russians – all counted among the “goodies” in this movie? Turns out that I was not the only person confused by Fifty-Five Days At Peking. In spite of an all-star cast, including Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, and David Niven, it was not a box-office success.

In 1963, a well-informed New Zealander in their seventies would not, however, have had anything like as much trouble understanding the plot. The blood-curdling “Boxer Rebellion” of 1899-1901; the consequent 55-day siege (20 June-14 August 1900) of the foreign legations in the Chinese capital; and the Eight Nation Alliance that lifted the siege and then proceeded to humiliate and punish the Chinese Empire; that was not an historical sequence any youngster following it in the newspapers was likely to forget. Certainly, it has never been forgotten by the Chinese, whose irreplaceable cultural treasures were destroyed by the armies of the “imperialists”.

Hardly surprising, when one considers how loudly those imperialists boasted of their victory. The intervention of Great Britain, Germany, France, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Italy, the United States, and Japan, had demonstrated to the whole world, or at least those few remaining parts of it not under the Eight’s complete control, what lay in store for any people who dared to raise their “harmonious fists” against them. The deliberate destruction of the Chinese emperors’ beautiful Summer Palace constituted a pretty big hint.

As always, the German Emperor, Wilhelm II, offered the most memorable quote:

Just as the Huns under their king Attila created for themselves a thousand years ago a name which men still respect, you should give the name of German such cause to be remembered in China that no Chinaman will dare look a German in the face.

That was the way the world was in 1900. The German Kaiser merely put into words (the “Huns” reference coming back to haunt him in 1914) what all the other leaders of the great imperial powers were thinking. The nations of Europe (and Japan) dominated the globe. Their cultures, and their technologies, were in every way superior.

Lest any reader assume that all such unabashed imperialist notions, following the horrors of World War II, had been set aside by the “international community”, here’s a memory-jogger from 1990-1991 – the Gulf War.

When Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded the oil-rich emirate of Kuwait in 1990, the American President, George H.W. Bush, sternly informed him, and the rest of the world, that “this will not stand”.

He was as good as his word. With China still dealing with the fall-out from Tiananmen Square, and the Soviet Union in the process of disintegration, the United States was able to pull together a “coalition” of 42 nation states to intervene on behalf of the Kuwaiti government and drive the Iraqis back across the border. Dominated, overwhelmingly, by the military resources of the United States, the Coalition made short work of Saddam’s army. It was a stunning demonstration of the USA’s uncontested global hegemony.

Savouring his victory, George H.W. Bush made no reference to the Huns, but he did proclaim the arrival of a “New World Order” – one in which any nation bold and/or foolish enough to flout Washington’s rules of international engagement should expect to pay a very heavy price.

How the events of the last thirty years have changed the world’s geopolitical architecture!

When Bush senior’s “New World Order” still meant something, the idea of a rebel regime in Yemen forcing the world’s shipping companies to abandon the Suez Canal would have been dismissed as absurd.

With the Cold War won, and American hegemony an accomplished fact for most of the 1990s, the idea that the Suez Canal could be closed – as it was for seven years in the wake of the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973 – would not have stood. The impact on global oil prices, and the disruption of the international supply-chains so vital to the world’s increasingly interconnected economy, would have been regarded as unacceptable. The United States, the nations of Western Europe, and many of the Arab oil-states, would have unleashed upon Yemen the same overwhelming force that pummelled Iraq.

After 11 September 2001, however, the global game changed dramatically. Al Qaeda’s attack on the United States (itself an outgrowth of the USA’s co-option of the Saudi Kingdom in 1991) took place in an international setting very different from that which prevailed at the time of the Gulf War.

For a start, Russia and China were back in the game, stronger and more focused than they had been ten years earlier. Much of that strength was born out of both nations’ burgeoning trade with the European Union. Other states, Brazil, India and Iran in particular, were impatient to claim a more equitable share of the global economy. The USA remained strong – but not as strong as it had been at the end of the Cold War. It was an open question, in 2001, as to how many countries would respond to an American summons.

While joining the United States in a Global War on Terror made perfect sense in a world containing terroristic forces on the scale of Al Qaeda, partnering-up with Uncle Sam for what were obviously little more than punitive expeditions intended to slake the American thirst for vengeance after 9/11 was much less appealing. While the American overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan was given a pass (the regime had, after all, provided a base for Al Qaeda) the invasion of Iraq stepped over a line that most of the rest of the world would, ultimately, refuse to cross.

It would take twenty years for the Americans to comprehend, finally, that they were no longer in a position to issue orders to the rest of the world. Nor could they rely on the sort of racial and religious solidarity that prompted the world’s leading imperial powers to join together for yet another demonstration of White Supremacy on Chinese soil.

After the USA’s disastrous retreat from Afghanistan, the Russians and the Chinese must have exchanged knowing glances, and prepared to up-the-ante. The Russian Federation’s invasion of Ukraine, while demonstrating the astonishing courage and resilience of the Ukrainians, also revealed the vacillation and disunity of the Nato states and, in the aftermath (and facing the possible return) of Donald Trump, of the USA itself.

In Fifty-Five Days At Peking the Chinese were the baddies, and the white imperialists (alongside their plucky Japanese ally) represented the clear moral and technological superiority of Western Civilisation. If, in American, Australian and, increasingly, in New Zealand eyes, the Chinese are still the baddies, the perspective from Beijing, and a large part of the rest of the world, is rather different.

To the Peoples Republic of China, and its friends, the United States of 2024 must remind them of the flailing and failing Chinese Empire of 1900. In their own estimation, however, the Chinese people, once on their knees, have stood up.

And all those great empires that ravaged China in 1900, where are they now? Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Austria, Japan: all of them have become second-rate powers – at best. Even the United States, the great hegemon, is no longer equal to the task of preserving freedom of navigation along the Suez Canal.

In the words of China’s greatest sage, Confucius: “If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.”

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 7 October 2024.

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

On Calvary Street are trellises

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

James K. Baxter
Ballad of Calvary Street
1969

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gut Feelings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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