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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s he done now?”

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

“Like?”

“Like the use of referenda.”

“The Treaty Principles Bill?”

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

“Which Luxon will not allow.”

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

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

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

“On a four-year term!”

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

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

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

“And Luxon doesn’t see the hypocrisy?”

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

“Bloody-hell, Laurie. Now I’m mad!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Otherwise known as the will of the people.

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

Has Government Become A Public-Private Partnership?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is National A White Supremacist Party?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This time, minus the mask.

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