Balancing Act.

Even Stevens: Over the 33 years between 1990 and 2023 (and allowing for the aberrant 2020 result) the average level of support enjoyed by the Left and Right blocs, at roughly 44.5 percent each, turns out to be, as near as dammit, identical.

WORLDWIDE, THE PARTIES of the Left are presented as experiencing significant electoral decline. Certainly, in the 70 elections that took place across the planet in 2024 there wasn’t all that much for left-wingers to celebrate. But, does a review of New Zealand’s recent political history reveal a similarly receding electoral tide? How much evidence is there that, over the past 30 years, this country has become a part of what some commentators are calling “The Global Drift to the Right”?

The latest analysis detailing a worldwide decline in voter support for the Left was published in the right-wing British newspaper The Telegraph on 16 January 2025. Looking back over the past 30 years, journalists Meike Eijsberg and James Crisp felt confident enough to proclaim that “The Left is more unpopular than any time since the Cold War”.

Even so, the Left’s global average, based on the results of the most recent electoral contests in 73 countries, isn’t exactly dire. Indeed, at 45.4 percent, the level of public support would strike most leftists as comfortable. Sure, the Right, especially in North America and Europe, is currently riding high, but at 51 percent globally, the forces of conservatism are only a few percentage points away from defeat.

What’s more, in Africa and Latin America the forces of the Left remain in the ascendancy. Not to the same extent as a decade, or two, ago, but still – the success of Argentina’s Javier Milei notwithstanding – well ahead of the Right.

The Telegraph being The Telegraph, New Zealand’s ideological divisions have, for the most part been lumped-in with those of our Australian neighbours. The downfall of Jacinda Ardern is, however, noted with, one assumes, a fair measure of schadenfreude. Ardern was not liked by The Telegraph, which never passed-up an opportunity to devalue and downplay the extraordinary achievements of New Zealand’s young prime minister during the Covid-19 global pandemic’s first, terrifying, months.

Eijsberg’s and Crisp’s anticipation of a conservative victory in Australia similarly betrays their newspaper’s unabashed partisanship. Anthony Albanese may be no one’s idea of a charismatic political leader, but, to a great many Australians the alternative, Liberal Party Leader Peter Dutton, comes across as a hard-core – bordering on fanatical – right-winger. As things now stand across the Tasman, the safest bet would appear to be on a 2025 election that produces no clear winner – and lots of losers.

What, then, does the electoral record tell us about the fortunes of the New Zealand Right and Left over the past thirty years? Does the Left register a steadily descending trend-line? Are the parties of the Right entrenching themselves ever-more-firmly in the role of New Zealand’s “natural” leaders? Or are we presented with an altogether more nuanced history?

Between the election of 1990 and that of 1999, the most arresting feature of the Left-Right divide is the acute vulnerability of the Right’s overall position. National’s success in both 1990 and 1993 was entirely attributable to the unfairness of the First-Past-the-Post (FPP) electoral system.

Jim Bolger’s defeat of the Fourth Labour Government was presented – at the time, and still is today – as a landslide win. In terms of the popular vote, however, it was an extraordinarily close contest. Yes, National received 47.82 percent of the votes cast, but, between them, Labour, the Greens and Jim Anderton’s NewLabour Party attracted the support of 47.15 percent of the voting public.

The narrowness of National’s win never seemed to be fully appreciated by Bolger and his hardline Cabinet. The electorate’s embittered judgement on Bill Birch’s Employment Contracts Act, Ruth Richardson’s “Mother of All Budgets” and Jenny Shipley’s harsh “welfare” policies, was, however, rendered three years later, when National’s share of the popular vote plummeted from 47.82 percent to 35.05 percent. The Left’s share of the vote (Labour + Alliance) was 52.89 percent. That figure rises even higher, to 61.29 percent, when NZ First’s 8.40 percent is tacked on!

That National, with barely a third of the votes cast, was, nevertheless, able to form a government, vindicated in dramatic fashion the arguments of those who had promoted, successfully, a change to a proportional electoral system.

The power conferred upon Winston Peters and his moderate populists in NZ First, and, to a lesser degree, upon Peter Dunne’s succession of shape-shifting electoral vehicles, renders an accurate assessment of the Left-Right balance problematic.

In the 1996 election, the first held under the rules of Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) representation, for example, the anti-government parties collectively accounted for 51.64 percent of the Party Vote. The mutual mistrust of Peters and Anderton, however, resulted in a National-NZ First coalition government. The messy dissolution of the coalition, just 18 months later, made clear the unwisdom of “protest” parties pledged to unseating the government perversely restoring its leading players to power.

Over the course of the 18 years separating the general elections of 1999 and 2017, electoral success and ideological dominance (albeit in a muted sense) was shared evenly between the parties of the Left and the Right.

In the nine years that the Left Bloc was dominated by Helen Clark’s Labour Party, supported by Jim Anderton’s Alliance (later the Progressive Party) and The Greens, its collective share of the Party Vote averaged almost exactly 50 percent. The Right Bloc, by contrast, averaged just 39 percent between 1999 and 2005.

The Right Bloc’s nine years of dominance – from 2008 until 2017 – were the mirror-image of the Left’s. Its component parties – National, Act and the Māori Party – also racked-up an average of 50 percent of the Party Vote – while the Left Bloc’s average election tally similarly dropped to 39 percent.

With the benefit of hindsight, it seems altogether more appropriate to attribute this mirror-imaging to the quality of the contending block’s respective leaderships, than to grand ideological lurches. In Helen Clark and John Key, Labour and National were blessed with strong leaders who attuned themselves with remarkable accuracy to the mood of the electorate.

Throughout these 18 years, voter feeling was driven much more by exogenous events than ideological allegiances. The impact of 9/11 and the War on Terror; the Global Financial Crisis; the Christchurch Earthquake; these, and the way the government of the day responded to them, were what moved the electoral dial.

If 2024 feels more fraught and ideologically polarised than usual, that is, almost certainly, on account of the disruptive boost the Internet and social media have given to the generation and articulation of popular grievances; the impact of globalisation on core economic and social institutions, and the enormous global disjuncture occasioned by Covid and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Overlay all that with the continuing slow burn of global warming, and is it really any wonder that everybody is looking to blame “the other lot”?

And yet, allowing for the obvious exception of the 2020 “Covid” election, which saw the Left Bloc’s share of the Party Vote soar to an unprecedented 57.87 percent, with Labour winning 50.01 percent of that on its own, the ideological balance of the last 30 years presents us with a curiously reassuring picture.

Over the 33 years between 1990 and 2023 (and allowing for the aberrant 2020 result) the average level of support enjoyed by the Left and Right blocs, at roughly 44.5 percent each, turns out to be, as near as dammit, identical.

Some might interpret this “tie” as evidence of a society split right down the middle and at daggers drawn. But, for most New Zealanders, it doesn’t feel that way at all. For most of us, it simply suggests that, although we may have to wait a little while for democracy to deliver the right (or left!) result, our side’s turn will come.

DeepSeek, And Ye Shall Find.

 The East Is Red: Journalists and commentators are referring to the sudden and disruptive arrival of DeepSeek as a second “Sputnik moment”. (Sputnik being the name given by the godless communists of the Soviet Union to the world’s first artificial satellite which, to the consternation and dismay of the Americans, they successfully launched into space in October 1957.)

“DEEPSEEK” is a pretty good name for an artificially intelligent Chinese chatbot. Not as good as Douglas Adams’ “Deep Thought”, which, as all readers of A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy know, was the name of the super-computer tasked with answering the Ultimate Question – i.e. the meaning of “Life, the Universe, and Everything” – and which came back, 7.5 million years later, with the less-than-helpful, “42”.

That said, the numbers associated with the arrival of DeepSeek are nothing if not compelling. One trillion, for example, is the number of US dollars knocked-off the collective value of the companies listed on the “tech-heavy” Nasdaq index. $US600 billion of that trillion is attributable to the plummeting value of America’s leading AI chip manufacturer, Nvidia – the greatest single one-day loss ever recorded by a US listed company.

To rub salt in the American tech-lords’ financial wounds, the Chinese creators of DeepSeek claim to have spent just $US6 million on perfecting their chatbot, which they are generously offering to the world free, gratis, and for nothing.

No wonder journalists and commentators are referring to all this as a second “Sputnik moment”. (Sputnik being the name given by the godless communists of the Soviet Union to the world’s first artificial satellite which, to the consternation and dismay of the Americans, they successfully launched into space in October 1957.)

The success of DeepSeek, like the success of Sputnik, throws into serious doubt a whole host of American assumptions. Not the least of these being the typically brash and overconfident American assumption that the United States enjoys an unassailable lead in AI and is, therefore, destined to be the prime beneficiary of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” this crucial innovation will, inevitably, usher-in.

The future is, thus, an American “lock”. Too far ahead of its rivals to be overtaken technologically, the economic and military hegemony of the USA will remain incontestable – a “golden future” indeed!

“Meh!”, says China, “We shall see.”

Viewed from the other side of the Pacific Ocean, the future of the USA does not seem so golden. Yes, America’s big, powerful, and well-protected – but so was Goliath.

Beijing observes a blustering bully in the White House, throwing his weight around, and expecting the rest of the world to be intimidated. But the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, is not afraid of Donald Trump’s tariffs, seeing them as proof, not of America’s economic strength, but of its weakness.

Beggar-thy-neighbour economics will not keep America at the top of the global heap. A superpower that raises its drawbridge and hides behind its walls is no longer a superpower.

It is now more than two decades since the USA, in full control of the UN Security Council, thanks to the support of both the Russian Federation and the Peoples Republic of China, was able to unleash shock and awe upon any nation that dared to challenge, or simply got in the way of the “New World Order” Washington was fashioning out of its total Cold War victory.

But, the hyper-globalised world that American neoliberalism produced succeeded only in enriching China and hollowing-out the United States as a coherent social and political entity. Trump, far from being the apotheosis of American success is the tawdry emblem of American failure.

The only redeeming feature of the 47th president’s wrecking-ball administration is its determination to implement Trump’s populist agenda. In doing so, however, it will not make America great: “Promises made, promises kept” will only make America bankrupt.

Trump’s long and lurid career has left him supremely indifferent to the perils of debt. But, there is a big difference between a media-savvy paper billionaire shrugging off his financial failures and striking out in a new direction; and the world’s largest economy, fast approaching the limits of its ability to print its way out of irredeemable insolvency.

The timing of DeepSeek, like most Chinese moves, shows every sign of being carefully thought through. It speaks of a regime that is happy to demonstrate, rather than brag about, its technological prowess. Such seemingly effortless (and cost-effective!) competence is likely to play better than America’s punitive tariffs and sanctions, especially on those continents where Chinese capital and expertise are, increasingly, on display.

Perhaps the Americans should ask DeepSeek to predict the future of their once “indispensable” nation. The answer is, almost certainly, not 42 – or 47!

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 31 January 2025.

Which Sort of People? Liberal versus Populist Democracy.

With The Stroke Of A Pen: Populism, especially right-wing populism, invests all the power of an electoral/parliamentary majority in a single political leader because it no longer trusts the bona fides of the sprawling political class among whom power is traditionally dispersed. Populism eschews traditional politics, because, among populists, traditional politics is perceived as the problem – not the solution.

SIR GEOFFREY PALMER is worried about democracy. In his Newsroom website post of 27 January 2025 he asserts that “the future of democracy across the world now seems to be in question.” Following a year of important electoral contests across the world, culminating in Donald Trump’s emphatic recapture of the United States presidency on 5 November 2024, Palmer’s assertion is, on its face, a curious one.

Ordinary citizens around the world celebrated – and continue to celebrate – Trump’s victory, interpreting it as a political, economic, and cultural triumph for men and women like themselves: the poorly housed, poorly paid, poorly educated, and poorly treated people of the planet. In their eyes, at least, 2024 ended on a high democratic note, and 2025 has begun with their billionaire champion making it plain, through scores of Executive Orders, that his “promises made, promises kept” commitment was more than Election Night rhetoric.

Palmer’s personal and political distaste for Trump emerges unmistakably in his post. Certainly, the list of the 47th US President’s faults and flaws is a long one. It is, however, difficult to see how Trump could have succeeded without them. A candidate who conformed to the accepted rules of the political game, and comported himself as a reasonable and responsible member of the political class, would never have placed himself at the head of an angry populist revolt.

Trump’s faults and flaws, his dishonesty and bombast, signalled to those whose votes he was soliciting that although he was richer than they were, he wasn’t better than they were. For Palmer, such ethical insouciance is an affront to what the former prime minister and law professor is pleased to call “liberal democracy”.

Liberal democrats (not to be confused with liberal Democrats!) do not expect those elected to represent the people, to be representative of the people. If that was the case, then elections would not be needed to fill the legislature. One-hundred-and-twenty citizens could simply be chosen at random – like jurors – to make the nation’s laws. Except, without the guidance and discipline imposed by political parties, such a random collection of citizens – most of them strangers to higher education – would, according to liberal democrats, be wholly unequal to the challenges of governing a modern state.

To fill the House of Representatives with MPs capable of dealing with the complexities of contemporary government a properly functioning party system is deemed to be essential. Without one, the task of identifying those with the qualifications and temperament necessary to keep the economic and social system functioning smoothly would be much more difficult. By acculturating their members to the generally agreed principles and processes of good governance[1], liberal-democratic political parties are able to reduce dramatically the chances of the ‘wrong sort of people’ finding themselves in a position to write the nation’s laws.

Unsurprisingly, liberal democracy produces Members of Parliament who are, in large measure, temperamentally and ideologically interchangeable. The overwhelming majority of MPs adhere to the conventional economic wisdom, limiting policy differences between the dominant political parties to matters of emphasis and degree – mostly by avoiding any policy requiring fundamental changes to the status quo.

There are political moments, however, when, as Palmer knows well, conventional economic wisdom is stood on its head and fundamental changes are deemed unavoidable. In 1984, as Prime Minister David Lange’s deputy, Palmer played a crucial role in ensuring that the Labour Party’s sudden abandonment of the Keynesian economic policies that had guided its own, and the National Party’s, management of New Zealand’s economy since the end of the Second World War, was accepted and endorsed by Labour’s parliamentary caucus.

That the impetus for the policy revolution known as “Rogernomics” came from the Reserve Bank and Treasury, and had been stoutly resisted for many years by the National Party Prime Minister, Rob Muldoon, who had just been voted out of office, undoubtedly made Palmer’s job easier. This is simply the way the world is going, he reassured his colleagues, and there is no viable alternative. National’s conversion to the new economic wisdom took a little longer, but by 1990 all but a handful of members of the House of Representatives were singing obediently from the same neoliberal song-sheet.

Liberal democracy, while hostile to popular political pressures bubbling-up from below, will countenance all kinds of fundamental changes without demur – providing they are initiated from above, and can count on the active support of the business community and the mainstream news media. Palmer’s hostility towards Trump, and his obvious fear of Trumpism, stems from his conviction that the fundamental changes Trump is promoting are the wrong sort of changes, and that they are being pursued on behalf of the wrong sort of people.

This is the crux of the matter: that liberal democracy, far from enacting the will of the people, is dedicated instead to enacting the will of the right sort of people. The populist impulse, which Trump embodies, arises when the wrong sort of people are finally convinced that their urgent concerns and fundamental interests form no part of the liberal-democratic agenda – and never will.

This is why successful populist politicians, like Trump, care so little about the rules of the political game. It is why they are so willing to break them. With every lie, with every affront to the ‘proper’ way of conducting politics, the populist leader proves to his supporters that he is one of them, not one of “them” – the despised “elites”.

Populism, especially right-wing populism, invests all the power of an electoral/parliamentary majority in a single political leader because it no longer trusts the bona fides of the sprawling political class among whom power is traditionally dispersed. Populism eschews traditional politics, because, among populists, traditional politics is perceived as the problem – not the solution.

A populist political party does not exist to facilitate the smooth functioning of the system, or to manage carefully the inevitable debates concerning the system’s character and purpose, it exists solely to execute the will of its leader. Only the leader has divined and won the people’s will and confidence. Only the leader can be trusted to give them what they want – which is, usually, to blow the system up. Accordingly, in a populist party, the supreme virtue is loyalty. Without loyalty, unity is unachievable. Without unity, the leader lacks the strength to blow anything up, and traditional politics reasserts itself.

Liberal democrats hostility towards the populist form of democracy arises from their visceral fear of any determined majority that has achieved even a small measure of self-awareness. They are terrified that, like the cyborg in The Terminator, a politically mobilised majority can’t be bargained with, or reasoned with; that it doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear; and that it absolutely will not stop – until the system has been purged of its poisons and, to borrow the Trumpists’ favourite tagline, made great again.

Such a majority will, indeed, act tyrannically. If it behaves in any other way, its goals are unlikely to be achieved. In fine Hobbesian style, the successful populist movement seeks to infuse its collective strength into the sinews of an irresistible political Leviathan, point him in the direction of its foes – and let him go to work.

Obviously, it’s a great deal safer to be behind him than in front of him.


[1] The use of the word governance – as opposed to “government” – by liberal democrats is deliberate. It denotes not decisive power, but rational administrative process. Governance is what happens when the possibility of radical – i.e. system-threatening – change has been taken off the table.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project website on Thursday, 30 January 2025.

Going For Growth?

Mr Mojo Rising: Economic growth is possible, Christopher Luxon reassures us, but only under a government that is willing to get out of the way and let those with drive and ambition get on with it.

ABOUT TWELVE KILOMETRES from the farm on the North Otago coast where I grew up stands the Brydone Monument. Constructed atop Sebastopol Hill, the Oamaru stone monument memorialises Thomas Brydone’s pioneering role in exploiting one of the great industrial innovations of the Nineteenth Century – refrigeration.

It was the consignment of sheep and lamb carcasses from the Totara Estate’s slaughterhouse, and loaded into the SS Dunedin’s refrigerated hold at Port Chalmers, that departed Otago Harbour on 15 February 1882. Ninety-eight days later, those same, frozen carcasses were unloaded in England. In today’s money, that single Totara consignment returned Brydone’s employer, the Australian and New Zealand Land Company, a profit of $200,000.

In the absence of an innovative breakthrough as transformative as refrigeration, Christopher Luxon’s energetic promotion of economic growth rings a little hollow.

In the century that followed Brydone’s original 1882 shipment, this country’s economy expanded enormously. Refrigeration not only rendered the raising of sheep and cattle for slaughter profitable, it more-or-less created New Zealand’s dairy industry. In historian James Belich’s memorable metaphor, it created a 16,000 kilometre-long protein conveyor-belt from the farm gates of New Zealand to the ports – and, ultimately, the tables – of Great Britain.

Refrigeration not only made billions for the largely British concerns that oversaw New Zealand’s economic evolution in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (fair enough, it was their capital that made it possible) but also formed the material foundation upon which New Zealand’s colonial society and culture was built. Our national character, forged on the owner-operated family farms that refrigeration made economically viable, would have been very different without it.

Is there an equivalent industrial innovation which today presents itself to those with capital to invest as ideally suited to New Zealand?

The disruptive innovation that immediately springs to mind is Artificial Intelligence. In New Zealand, however, the potential of AI would appear to lie in the human labour it replaces. In sharp contrast to refrigeration, AI looks set to get rid of jobs – not create them. Compared to New Zealand’s flesh and blood economy, an economy evolving out of AI would be a much more ethereal affair. Certainly, it is difficult to envisage the AI equivalent of a freezing-works.

Still, the world in which AI promises to play an increasingly vital part may see in New Zealand a secure, faraway location, plentifully supplied with the cheap, climate-friendly, and renewable energy supply needed to power the colossal computing resources AI demands. From farming sheep and cattle, could New Zealand become an energy farm for the tech lords of the Northern Hemisphere?

Luxon’s forward vision fell short of confronting that possibility. Instead, the Prime Minister homed-in on two economic sectors: tourism and education. Sadly, his goals for both would appear to embrace nothing more than the restoration of the economic status quo ante.

His ambition for the tourism sector is “more”. More bums on the seats of tour busses; more budget accommodation; more huge crowds at New Zealand’s premiere attractions; more pressure on an already inadequate infrastructure. His Labour predecessors wanted fewer, but richer, tourists. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Luxon, the former CEO of Air NZ, is looking for an increase in tourist numbers.

“Mexicans with cell-phones” was how American producers described the Kiwis who staffed New Zealand’s film industry in the 1990s. How will investors describe the workers in Luxon’s low-wage, low-skill, tourism sector of the 2020s? “Filipinos with cash-registers.”

More bums on the seats of the nation’s lecture theatres is also what Luxon is looking for in the education sector. Full-fee-paying overseas students, the golden geese of the pre-Covid era, returning to these shores in ever-increasing numbers: that is what former health minister, now universities minister, Dr Shane Reti, is being asked to deliver. Such is the fate of this unusually intelligent and thoughtful politician: to be asked to do things that are not only impossible, but stupid.

Insufficient funding, compensated for by the financial contributions of overseas students, is steadily wrecking New Zealand’s universities.

Charging students for their tertiary education may have been justifiable when universities were basically finishing-schools for the ruling classes. In modern, highly-complex, societies and economies, however, user-pays is deeply subversive of the crucial role higher education is expected to play in refreshing and reinvigorating the nation.

Supplying credentials in return for a hefty sum of money transforms students into customers. Unfortunately, when it comes to the arts and sciences, the customers are not always right. Pretending they are undermines the entire meaning and purpose of a university.

As is the case with tourism, the tertiary education sector would benefit from fewer but better students. When tertiary education is state-funded the whole of society becomes the universities’ customer, and the quality of the knowledge and skills imparted, rather than the quantity of degrees awarded, becomes the sector’s primary goal. Graduates are thus reassured that not only do their qualifications possess genuine academic value, but so, too, do they. Indeed, “the best and the brightest” will be viewed by their fellow citizens as crucial to the social and economic development of their country.

But, this is not the state of mind in which the nation finds itself. New Zealand has spent the last 40 years telling its citizens that, barring the handful of social services its political class has – so far – been unwilling to dismantle (although David Seymour and Act are up for it) they are on their own.

If you purchased your tertiary education, and are still paying off the necessary loans, then the resulting qualification is yours, and yours alone. If somebody overseas is willing to pay you more for it than a New Zealand employer, then you are perfectly entitled to take up their offer. What is New Zealand, after all, but a name on the cover of a passport?

There is nothing in Luxon’s 2025 State of the Nation address suggesting than he regards this rugged and morally unimpeded individualism as a cause for government concern. On the contrary, it is precisely the “mojo” made manifest in such clear-eyed selfishness that he is so eager for New Zealanders to recover and display. Economic growth is possible, he reassures us, but only under a government that is willing to get out of the way and let those with the drive and ambition needed to succeed get on with it.

Luxon would have loved Thomas Brydone’s mojo. By all accounts he was a burly, bruising, bully of a man who got things done and wasn’t too particular about how. The men who worked in the Totara slaughterhouse fought heat, filth, stench, flies, and exhaustion to get those carcasses to Port Chalmers on time. Their efforts may not have been deemed worthy of a monument, and the quantum of their “profit” went unrecorded, but they, too, had mojo. Except the mojo of Nineteenth Century New Zealanders was very different from the Twenty-First Century mojo that Luxon prizes.

The extraordinary expansion of Europeans across the globe in the Nineteenth Century reflected something much more profound than mere demographic pressure. It was driven by a desire to create a new home for themselves and their descendants. A home very like the home they had left, but stripped of the evils that were driving them from it. These new homes – in Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand – may have been built with the capital of the elites they were fleeing (and upon the bones of indigenous peoples) but they were constructed differently, and in the name of objectives that were not exclusively commercial.

To have mojo in 1882 a New Zealander had to be a strong individual, but not an individualist. The great attraction of refrigeration wasn’t just its immediate profitability, but the vista it opened up of a national home that was prosperous, and growing constantly in confidence and ambition. A nation that would be better tomorrow than it was today. To have mojo in 1882 you had to be driven by dreams a lot bigger than yourself.

When I was a boy, a stand of tall trees surrounded the elegant homestead of the Totara Estate. John Macpherson, who acquired the property in 1906, and farmed it until his retirement in 1920, would never have seen them attain their full height and splendour. He planted them anyway.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 27 January 2025.

Close To The Edge.

California Burning: The veteran firefighters of California and Los Angeles called it “a perfect storm”. The hillsides and canyons were full of “fuel”. The LA Fire Department was underfunded, below-strength, and inadequately-equipped. A key reservoir was empty, leaving fire-hydrants without the water pressure needed for fire hoses. The power companies had successfully delayed mitigating the risk posed by their powerlines.

IT IS NEARLY 60 years since the American author Joan Didion wrote about Los Angeles’ “weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse”. The hot, dry Santa Ana wind, trailing wildfires in its wake, affected “the entire quality of life in Los Angeles”, accentuating “its impermanence, its unreliability”. According to Didion, Santa Ana showed Angelenos “how close to the edge we were.”

Los Angeles’ wildfires are making it clear to the whole world how close to the edge it now stands. In 2024, an increase of 1.5°C above the pre-industrial era’s average temperature was confirmed by climate scientists. That figure represents a catastrophic, an apocalyptic, failure of global political will. How so? Because keeping the impact of global warming below 1.5°C was the critical objective of the COP21 agreement signed in Paris by humanity’s leaders in December 2015. It has taken them just ten years to fail.

Warmer air holds more moisture, so, when it rains, it rains harder and for longer. Californians experienced this directly when for two years in a row the state’s rain gauges registered an appreciable increase in precipitation. What that produced was a sudden spurt in plant growth on the state’s mountainsides and hillsides, and in its canyons. This was especially true of the mountains, hills and canyons to the east of Los Angeles.

After two wet years, however, California went dry. All that vigorous vegetative growth became tinder, just waiting for a spark.

Did the leaders of California realise the danger? Did the city and county governments of Los Angeles comprehend the risk? Of course they did! It’s not as if wildfires are unknown in the Hollywood Hills. It’s just that the people in charge were convinced that ‘CalFire’ and its fire-fighters could handle anything Santa Ana sent them.

CalFire’s veterans weren’t so sure. Over their long careers they had been able to count on nightfall bringing a slackening in wildfire ferocity. A respite that allowed them to rest and regroup their forces. But, in recent years they had detected an ominous change. Sunset now brought no respite. Wildfires burned as fiercely in darkness as in daylight, making them much harder to contain. If Santa Ana blew long and strong, then Los Angeles would be in peril.

The defining characteristic of modern politicians is that they invariably plan on events unfolding as expected. Until they occur, deviations from the norm are routinely dismissed as unlikely. Politicians reflexively hope for the best until the worst happens – by which time, of course, it is much too late.

California and Los Angeles should have been prepared. They should have taken precautions: kept the reservoirs topped-up for the helicopters’ monsoon backets; made sure there was full pressure in the suburban fire hydrants; provided the firefighters with new recruits and state-of-the-art equipment; compelled the power companies to mitigate the risk of their powerlines arcing in the middle of tinder-dry forest and brushland.

But in California, and everywhere else on Planet Earth, preparation, precaution, and mitigation cost money – lots of money. They require higher taxes, stricter regulations, long-term planning: all those measures that politicians, along with the people who elect them, prefer to minimise, delay, or avoid altogether. We trust to luck there will be no day of reckoning, until the day arrives in a torrent of fire and smoke.

The veteran firefighters of California and Los Angeles called it “a perfect storm”. The hillsides and canyons were full of “fuel”. The LA Fire Department was underfunded, below-strength, and inadequately-equipped. A key reservoir was empty, leaving fire-hydrants without the water pressure needed for fire hoses. The power companies had successfully delayed mitigating the risk posed by their powerlines.

And Santa Ana was not herself. This year she blew longer and stronger than anyone could remember. With hurricane force, as if the gates of Hell itself had been thrown open. Embers raced ahead of the fire-front by up to two miles, igniting rooftops and turning trees into flaming torches. CalFire’s helicopters could not be sent aloft. Fire hydrants proved useless. The highways were choked with the cars of fleeing residents. Whole blocks were reduced to ash.

Didion’s “weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse” had descended, and Los Angeles was burning.

Hoping for the best is not a strategy. Not for our political leaders, not for us. We are all standing perilously close to the edge.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star on Friday, 17 January 2025.