Who’s Driving The Right-Wing Bus?

Who’s At The Wheel? The electorate’s message, as aggregated in the polling booths on 14 October, turned out to be a conservative political agenda stronger than anything New Zealand has seen in five decades. In 1975, Bill Rowling was run over by just one bus, with Rob Muldoon at the wheel. In 2023, Labour was run over by a million busses – driven by ourselves.

BILL ROWLING told New Zealanders that he felt as though he had been run over by a bus. The metaphor was apt. Rob Muldoon’s 1975 electoral victory represented one of the great turnarounds in New Zealand political history. Three years earlier, Labour’s Norman Kirk had sent the National Government of Jack Marshall packing. But, just three years later, Muldoon, Marshall’s populist successor, exactly reversed Kirk’s landslide. National’s majority in the House of Representatives was identical to Labour’s – a whopping 23 seats. New Zealand had voted for the nation they wanted – and Muldoon was determined to give it to them.

It is nearly 50 years since Muldoon’s bus flattened poor Bill Rowling, but, for those with long political memories, the parallels with the election of 2023 are striking. The greatest of these is the profound sense of shock and disorientation among the activist supporters of the Left. Their discomfort is born not only of the brute facts of the election results, but also by the growing realisation that the incoming coalition government is determined to roll back practically all of the Left’s policy advances of the past six years.

Two generations have grown to adulthood since Muldoon’s reactionary political agenda was unleashed upon New Zealand. Young New Zealanders are not accustomed to governments committed to actually dismantling the changes of their predecessors, or, at least, not outside specialist areas such as workplace relations and educational assessment. For citizens under 50, the changes of the last few decades have all been in more-or-less the same direction. Economic policy has been neoliberal. Social policy has been “progressive”. Indigenous policy has been concessionary. Matters may have moved more swiftly under Labour, and slowed down a little under National, but, since 1984, the direction of travel has always been the same – onwards and upwards!

That’s what makes the experience so wrenching for the progressives of 2023. Especially with regard to the one, recurring issue which New Zealanders cannot escape: Race.

It was the National Government led by Jim Bolger that set in motion the Treaty of Waitangi settlement process – ably guided by his Treaty Settlements Minister, Doug Graham – in the early 1990s.

Not to be outdone, Labour, under the leadership of Helen Clark in the early 2000s, launched a policy effort dedicated to “closing the gaps” between Māori and Pakeha. The public backlash created by the policy was hugely strengthened by the Court of Appeal’s surprise affirmation of an enduring Māori proprietary interest in the foreshore and seabed. To keep Labour’s electoral prospects alive, Clark was forced to rein-in Māori expectations dramatically, a move which led to the creation of the Māori Party.

Don Brash, Leader of the Opposition in the run-up to the 2005 General Election, capitalised on the growing public disquiet over ethnic relations by throwing the National Party’s support behind calls for a comprehensive rolling-back of the state’s support for Māori sovereignty.

Brash lost the 2005 election, but only narrowly. “Progressive” New Zealand had been profoundly disturbed by the breadth of support for National’s reactionary policies. Brash, himself, was forced to endure what amounted to excommunication from “polite” political society. His fate was intended to serve as a warning to all serious politicians: mess with Māori (and Te Tiriti) at your peril.

Brash’s successor, National’s John Key, restored his party’s reputation (in the eyes of the political class) by sending the Māori Party’s co-leader, Pita Sharples, to New York to add New Zealand’s signature to the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People.

Labour’s next prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, went one better; commissioning a group of hand-picked “experts” to compile a secret report, He Puapua, setting forth a pathway to the UN Declaration’s full implementation by the 200th anniversary of the Treaty of Waitangi’s signing in 2040. Driven forward by Labour’s radical Māori caucus, Ardern and her Pakeha colleagues felt obligated to support their colleagues’ controversial, Te Tititi-driven constitutional innovation of “co-governance”.

As happened in 2004-05, these bold moves towards Māori sovereignty ignited a Pakeha backlash. In 2023, however, the Left lacked the collective political strength to head-off the forces of reaction.

Across a broad front of social issues, public hostility towards the scope and speed of proposed and/or actual changes neutralised almost entirely the massive support Labour had received in 2020 for its highly successful early handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. Indeed, the psychological and material damage inflicted upon the population by the pandemic, and the measures adopted to contain it, after 2020, contributed significantly to what the Left only belatedly registered as an alarming swing to the Right.

Separated by nearly 50 years from the strikingly similarly political derangement that followed the onset of the global oil crisis in October 1973, the sudden collapse of public trust and confidence in the Labour Government in 2022-23 was experienced by the Left as a Black Swan event of perplexing severity.

Young leftists had read about the swift succession of progressive moves undertaken by Norman Kirk’s Labour Government. The abolition of compulsory military training; the troop withdrawal from Vietnam, the recognition of “Red” China; the sending of a NZ frigate to protest French atmospheric nuclear testing at Mururoa; the cancellation of the 1973 Springbok Tour; the creation of ACC and the NZ Superannuation Fund. This is what Labour was capable of delivering – from the left.

Less well understood were the social dynamics which made it possible for a right-wing politician as shrewd and ruthless as Rob Muldoon to bring about an absolutely catastrophic change in the political climate. In the 15 months following Kirk’s sudden death in August 1974, New Zealanders egalitarian instincts were harnessed to an aggressively populist campaign directed against a Labour Party portrayed as having been taken over by intellectuals and radicals whose values were wildly at odds with those of “the ordinary bloke”. Not only was Muldoon able to present himself as the saviour of the country’s middle-class, but of its working-class as well. National’s slogan: “New Zealand the way YOU want it”, said it all.

Depressing though it is to admit, New Zealanders’ deeply ingrained social conservatism; their fury at any person, or group, who see themselves as being better than everybody else; their unwillingness to tolerate one rule for thee, and another for me; their impatience with intellectuals and artists; their wariness of difference; their hatred of privilege; and their comfort in conformity; remains as powerful today as it was 50 years ago.

Perhaps, not seeing a Muldoon figure looming over the electoral landscape, the Left felt itself to be safe. But, 50 years on from 1974-75, charismatic leadership is no longer strictly necessary. Fifty years on, we have the Internet, social-media, and algorithms. Today, we can manufacture a Muldoon for every taste. A protean Muldoon, who addresses tens-of-thousands of voters every day, with a message cleverly crafted for them alone, and delivered instantaneously through those magic rectangles of glass that never seem to leave the voters’ hands.

The sum total of these messages, as aggregated in the polling booths, is a conservative political agenda stronger than anything New Zealand has seen in five decades. In 1975, Bill Rowling was run over by just one bus, with Rob Muldoon at the wheel. In 2023 Labour was run over by a million busses – driven by ourselves.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 27 November 2023.

Forwards And Backwards.

The Right In Action: Nothing in politics is ever settled. The hands of History’s clock can go backwards, as well as forwards.

IT REALLY WAS THE BEST OF TIMES. The brief recession of the late-1950s was over. The United States was led by a young, Harvard-educated war hero, with the dashing style and good-looks of a Hollywood movie star.

The Kennedy Administration had made idealism sexy, and politics heroic. “Ask not what your country can do for you,” John F. Kennedy had declared in his Inaugural Address of 20 January 1961, “ask what you can do for your country.”

The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, and its peaceful resolution, offered proof positive that “the best and the brightest” of the “Free World” were more than a match for the hard men of Soviet Communism. There was a confidence and purposefulness about the United States that not only lifted the spirits of Americans, but fuelled the hopes of people all over the world.

Even the great American scars of racism and poverty no longer seemed beyond remedy. Dr Martin Luther King’s non-violent civil rights movement was galvanising young Americans of all colours in ways not seen since the Civil War of the 1860s. It recalled the high idealism of the Abolitionists: that extraordinary fervour for racial justice reflected in the words of The Battle Hymn of the Republic: “As [Christ] died to make men holy, let us die to set men free.”

Kennedy had also invited Michael Harrington, democratic socialist and author of the 1962 best-seller, The Other America, to the White House for a briefing on those pockets of poverty Roosevelt’s “New Deal” had left in place, and how, finally, they might be eradicated.

Underlying all this optimism and idealism was a rising tide of Keynesian-inspired economic prosperity that had lifted all boats high enough for the usual hardscrabble, hand-to-mouth priorities of ordinary Americans to be temporarily set aside. If the United States was rich enough to contemplate putting a man on the moon by 1970, then perhaps the elimination of racial inequality and poverty could be overcome.

Paradoxically, Kennedy’s assassination only hardened the resolve of Americans to meet the challenges their fallen leader had set before them.

President Lyndon Baines Johnson pledged unreservedly to make good his predecessor’s promises. In January 1964, just weeks after the tragedy in Dallas, “LBJ” used his first State of the Union Address to declare an unconditional “war on poverty”. In November of that same year, Johnson handed Barry Goldwater, the presidential candidate of a Republican Party hi-jacked by its far-right lunatic fringe, a stunning and humiliating defeat.

In his most effective campaign ad’, Johnson said, simply: “Either we must love each other, or we must die.” Less than sixty years ago, an American President had secured a landslide victory on a platform of delivering racial justice, ending poverty, and keeping America at peace.

In the bitter aftermath of the US Supreme Court’s revocation of Roe v. Wade, the above history lesson should serve as a sharp reminder of just how tenuous, and temporary, political progress can be. In the space of just four tumultuous years, the United States had retreated so far from its progressive high-water mark, that Richard Nixon was able to re-take the White House for the Republican Party. Nothing in politics is ever “settled”. The hands of History’s clock can go backwards, as well as forwards.

Nor are such dramatic political reversals peculiar to the United States. In 1972, the New Zealand electorate swung sharply left, propelling the Labour Party into power with 48.4 percent of the popular vote and a whopping 23-seat majority. The professors and the pundits of the time were unanimous in their opinion that a majority of 23 could not be overturned in the space of a single term. Labour, they insisted, was good for at least six years.

They couldn’t have been more wrong. Between 1972 and 1975, the mood of the New Zealand electorate soured to the point where National’s right-wing populist leader, Rob Muldoon, was able to exactly reverse the 1972 election result. Politically and socially, New Zealand voters had swung as sharply to the right as, only 36 months before, they had swung to the left.

Fear was the key: fear and its associated need for reassurance and protection. Muldoon’s success was built on the sudden failure of the New Zealand economy. Rampant inflation, rocketing petrol prices, and the widespread conviction that something very serious had gone wrong with the stable (some might say smug) New Zealand so gently mocked in Austin Mitchell’s in/famous bestseller The Half-Gallon, Quarter-Acre, Pavlova Paradise.

Which is why, when professors and pundits glibly reassure us that there is no way New Zealanders could turn against a woman’s right to choose an abortion, we are entitled to a small snort of derision.

Four years ago, approximately 65-70 percent of New Zealanders were in favour of legalising cannabis. That’s roughly the same percentage of the population that supports the current abortion law. After 18-months-to-a-year of extremely sophisticated campaigning by the anti-cannabis lobby, however, the percentage of voters supporting marijuana law reform had plummeted to just under 50 percent – a fall sufficient to cost the reformers the 2020 referendum. Public opinion doesn’t just change, it can be made to change.

With most economists predicting an imminent recession, many New Zealanders will enter 2023 in fear of what lies in store for them, and resentful of a Labour Government they believe has let them down. If extra-parliamentary forces like the Family First organisation are able to associate Labour’s political leadership with an ideology that despises and derides the beliefs and values of ordinary people, linking their lack of empathy with New Zealanders’ declining economic fortunes, then the chances of them producing a dramatic shift in the electorate’s thinking are relatively high.

In a commentary-piece written for The Conversation, the Auckland academic Suze Wilson warns New Zealanders against placing too much stock in Opposition Leader, Christopher Luxon’s, reassurances that National would not pursue a change to this country’s abortion laws should it win government.

“Even if Luxon’s current assurance is sincerely intended,” writes Wilson, “it may not sustain should the broader political acceptability of his personal beliefs change. And on that front, there are grounds for concern.”

Wilson draws particular attention to the sharp rightward drift set in motion by the Covid-19 Pandemic and the measures adopted by Jacinda Ardern’s Labour-led Government to protect New Zealanders from its worst effects. The early success of those measures, sufficient to secure Labour’s landslide victory in 2020, has not been maintained. Voters who, just 18 months ago looked upon “Jacinda” as a national hero, are daily falling prey to extreme right-wing conspiracy theories depicting her as a power-crazed tyrant.

“If these kinds of shifts in public opinion continue to gather steam, it may become more politically tenable for Luxon to shift gear regarding New Zealand’s abortion laws”, Wilson warns.

The same America that gave us JFK, also gave us Richard Nixon and Donald Trump. The same New Zealand that gave us Norman Kirk, also gave us Rob Muldoon. Except they weren’t really the same countries, were they? Because, when Prosperity leaves the building, Empathy is seldom very far behind.

Nothing in politics is ever settled.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 4 July 2022.

The Left's Lost Allies.

Rebels In A Wrong Cause: The truly frightening thing about Jami-Lee Ross’s and Billy Te Kahika’s success in persuading thousands of New Zealanders that Covid-19 is just another trick, just another way of stealing away their power, is realising just how many of them once marched at the Left’s side. Before recoiling in horror at where so many of their fellow citizens have ended up, and what they have found there, perhaps “progressive” New Zealanders should ask themselves how, and why, their former allies became so lost.

 

LET’S BE HONEST, last Saturday’s Advance NZ rally in Aotea Square was bloody impressive. If the Left had turned out a crowd that large they would have claimed at least 5,000 participants. Now, the last time I remember seeing that sort of number in the Square was when the CTU summoned its affiliates in support of a concerted national push for higher wages. It was a very well organised affair, with workers bussed-in from all over Auckland. By contrast, Jami-Lee Ross and Billy Te Kahika turned out 5,000+ of their people on the strength of not much more than a summons via Facebook and Instagram. It is now vitally important for the Left to understand what it is looking at: a large and potentially dangerous mass movement of the Right.

Such a thing has not been seen in New Zealand for a very long time. Perhaps the closest historical parallel is “Rob’s Mob”. This, too, was a populist phenomenon, whipped-up on the basis of lies and misinformation by an accomplished political demagogue. The huge difference, of course, is that “Rob’s Mob” was under the firm control and direction of the National Party and its leader, Robert Muldoon. It was a movement created out of whole cloth to challenge the Labour Party’s confident assumption that it remained the party of the people.

With the able assistance of the privately-owned news media – especially the right-wing tabloid “Truth” – conservative working-class voters were encouraged to look upon “Rob” Muldoon as their champion against the pointy-headed intellectuals and communists who were accused of taking-over the Labour Party. The result was a neat anticipation, in reverse, of what has happened with Jacinda. A substantial chunk of working-class voters were drawn across the political divide and into the camp of their traditional enemy. National mustered these defectors with the skill of a heading-dog. The crowds turning-out to Muldoon’s rallies numbered in the thousands. New Zealand had its own Trump when the man himself was still working for his dad!

What we’re looking at in the case of Jami-Lee Ross and Billy Te Kahika, however, is something quite distinct, ideologically and organisationally, from Rob’s Mob. Advance NZ and the Public Party are not under the control of any coherent political group. They are being mobilised by Te Kahika only in the sense that he is drawing together the loose threads of far-Right conspiracism – most them traceable back to Alt-Right social media platforms in the United States – and weaving them into a more-or-less coherent narrative of resistance to Jacinda Ardern’s government.

Once again, the historical parallels are uncanny. In 1974-75, the National Party was offered assistance (at whose instigation remains unclear) from Hanna Barbera – a studio dedicated to producing animated cartoon series for American television. The resulting animated sequences, cleverly embedded in National’s television advertising, burst upon the 1975 election campaign like a thunderclap. Their impact, especially the infamous “Dancing Cossacks” sequence, was devastating. Labour had nothing even remotely comparable with which to answer National’s devastating attack.

Forty-five years later, skilfully constructed media messages are, once again, making a forceful impression on the consciousness of groups who, historically, have identified strongly with the Labour Party. Sourced from the United States, these messages are not, like Hanna Barbera’s cartoons, the product of a shadowy collaboration between the National Party and American “friends” with a mutual interest in ridding New Zealand of a radical social-democratic government. Indeed, it is precisely against such “Deep State” machinations that the political messages of 2020 are directed.

The authors and repeaters of these conspiracy theories have no more interest in restoring the conventional Right to power than keeping the conventional Left in office. Their purpose is to disrupt the status-quo fundamentally: to bring the whole rotten edifice of elite power crashing down upon the heads of its corrupt political mis-leaders. Their loyalty is only to the Disrupter-in-Chief in the White House. But if, by helping Trump, they can also assist his New Zealand imitators and disciples, then where’s the harm?

Overlaying all these hymns of fear and loathing is, of course, the global Covid-19 Pandemic. Without the Pandemic, the febrile environment in which conspiracy theories can take root and thrive would – at least in New Zealand’s case – be lacking.

Interestingly, the formation of “Rob’s Mob”, and the populist campaign (National’s slogan in 1975 was “New Zealand the way YOU want it.”) which they did so much to propel forward, was enormously assisted by the fear and uncertainty created by the 1973 Oil Crisis. Massive increases in the price of crude oil had destabilised the hitherto booming economies of the Western powers. Ordinary people sensed that the whole post-war era of security and prosperity was coming to an end. Muldoon played upon these anxieties “like a piano”.

Now, many on the left will argue that Advance NZ’s 5,000 protesters pale into insignificance when compared to the 30,000 people who turned out against the TPPA, or the 50,000 who protested against the global lack of progress against Climate Change. This is true. Also true, however, is that a large number of the Maori who took part in the TPPA protest, seeing the free-trade agreement as yet another attempt to steal away of their power, were also at Saturday’s protest. Likewise, many of those who joined the climate change protests out of frustration at the lack of action from a prime minister who had promised to make the issue her generation’s “nuclear-free moment”. After so many broken promises – so many betrayals – it takes surprisingly little to convince people that the powers-that-be cannot be trusted. That all politicians lie.

The truly frightening thing about Jami-Lee Ross’s and Billy Te Kahika’s success in persuading thousands of New Zealanders that Covid-19 is just another trick, just another way of stealing away their power, is realising just how many of them once marched at the Left’s side. Before recoiling in horror at where so many of their fellow citizens have ended up, and what they have found there, perhaps “progressive” New Zealanders should ask themselves how, and why, their former allies became so lost.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 15 September 2020.

Democracy "A Bit Bonkers" - Thoughts Inspired By Lizzie Marvelly's Latest Column.

Didn't See It Coming: NZ Herald columnist Lizzie Marvelly's latest column merits serious scrutiny because such a clear example of anti-democratic thinking is encountered only rarely on the pages of the daily press. Which is not to say that the elitism which lies at the heart of such social disparagement goes unnoticed by the people who are its principal targets. Just as Hillary Clinton’s description of Trump’s supporters as “deplorables” only strengthened her opponent’s hand, the “progressives” all-to-obvious disdain for the competence of ordinary people will inevitably rebound to the Right’s electoral advantage.

THE EXPRESSIONS of stunned horror that greeted the news that Donald Trump had won the 2016 Presidential Election spoke volumes. Almost none of the people gathered to celebrate the election of the USA’s first female president believed a Trump victory was even remotely possible. On display that fateful November night was a lethal mixture of social isolation and social ignorance. The shocked and horrified young Democrats who turned their grief-stricken faces from the television screens clearly knew next to nothing about the America that had just dashed their hopes.

In New Zealand, the world’s most “woke” country, the risk of something very similar to Trump’s upset 2016 victory grows stronger by the day. The 2020 General Election may deliver New Zealanders their first one-term government in 45 years. If that is the outcome, then it will likely be produced by exactly the same combination of forces that toppled the Kirk-Rowling Labour Government in 1975. An angry cocktail of resentments and denials; of ordinary people feeling abandoned by the decision-makers; of core values and cherished traditions perceived as being under threat. A dark tsunami of voter anger: barely perceptible in its approach, but rearing-up to terrifying heights as, finally, it comes ashore.

And, of course, like Hillary supporters, the partisans of Labour and Green haven’t a clue. They just don’t see it: the anger and resentment; the alienation and bewilderment. Or, if they do, they simply don’t rate it. In the eyes of the decision-makers and their opinion-former allies, “ordinary people” simply aren’t up to it.

Consider the latest contribution from NZ Herald columnist Lizzie Marvelly. The fact that New Zealand’s District Health Boards contain a majority of elected members strikes her as a serious design fault. “Democratic elections for District Health Boards have always seemed bizarre to me”, she writes. “Though it’s important to listen to the views of the community when designing services to serve them, the idea that anyone, regardless of their experience, qualifications and skill set (or lack thereof) could be elected to a position where they are tasked with effectively running the health system in their region seems a bit bonkers.”

In these two chilling sentences, we can identify all the ingredients of the looming political disaster. Of these, it is Marvelly’s careless disdain for the capabilities of her fellow citizens that is the most telling. That such people might possess insights and understandings of which the “experts” she so clearly prefers are entirely innocent, does not appear to have occurred to her. Neither, apparently, has the thought that democracy itself is predicated on the notion that the views of ordinary people, as expressed through the ballot-box, constitute the beating heart of political sovereignty.

No, “government of the people, by the people, for the people” cuts little ice with Marvelly. The word she offers up in preference to “government” is “governance”: something best left to professionals.

“Making a difference in an organisational setting, providing quality services for clients and ensuring at the very least that the bills are paid and the doors stay open, is a challenge that requires good governance,” opines Marvelly. Such work, she goes on to say, with all the breathless confidence of the recent convert, must be “conducted by directors who have the right mix of skills, experience and foresight to plan for worst and best case scenarios, pivot quickly when things aren’t quite right, and steer an organisation through times of both trouble and success.”

That working-class mums and dads, struggling to make their meagre wages stretch to housing, feeding and clothing their families might also have the skills, experience and foresight to plan for both the best and the worst, pivot quickly when things go wrong, and so steer themselves and their loved ones through good times and bad, is apparently an idea that has never crossed her mind.

Which is why, presumably, she felt compelled to suggest that “at least half of each health board around the country should be appointed experts, or even better, 60 percent.” With astonishing condescension, all the more objectionable for being unconscious, Marvelly concludes: “Retaining a minority of elected board members would allow DHBs to stay connected with their local communities, without giving the balance of power to people who may not have the skills to wield it properly.”

I have quoted Marvelly at some length because such a clear example of anti-democratic thinking is encountered only rarely on the pages of the daily press. Which is not to say that the elitism which lies at the heart of such social disparagement goes unnoticed by the people who are its principal targets. Just as Hillary Clinton’s description of Trump’s supporters as “deplorables” only strengthened her opponent’s hand, the “progressives” all-to-obvious disdain for the competence of ordinary people will inevitably rebound to the Right’s electoral advantage.

The thousands of West Coasters who gathered in Greymouth last weekend to demonstrate their opposition to the Coalition Government’s policies will no doubt be dismissed as feral rednecks. Even worse epithets will be reserved for the 200+ women who attended the Speak Up For Women conference hosted by David Seymour in the Beehive’s banqueting hall.  Sticks and stones. The Act Party leader’s gesture, prompted by the failure of Massey University to defend the free speech rights of radical feminists, has significantly boosted Act’s chances of adding two – maybe three – new members to its parliamentary caucus.

There was a time when progressives and conservatives could both agree that 2+2=4. As next year’s election draws near, however, the confidence that there are still some propositions to which all politicians can sign-up – such as freedom of speech – diminishes. When young newspaper columnists openly disparage the notion that ordinary people can be trusted with the reins of government; when the same “experts” who led the world into its current condition are held up as the only persons capable of leading it out; then those still capable of grasping basic political arithmetic should not expect next year’s election to have a happy ending.

So long as ordinary people retain the right to vote; so long will pissing them off remain the very worst political strategy.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 19 November 2019.

Petrol Pump Politics.

Unaffordable?  Labour supporters should brace themselves for a National Party-driven social media campaign built around the slogan: “At $2.40 a litre, we can’t afford Jacinda.” Re-cycled though this catch-phrase may be, for Kiwis on low incomes paying far too much for gas it’s likely to have a catchy ring to it. (And anyone on the Labour team thinking about telling these folk to “go electric” should, perhaps, recall the effect on the breadless masses of the thoughtless suggestion that they should consider eating cake!)

“AT A DOLLAR a gallon we can’t afford Rowling.” Given his latest media release (8/10/18)  “Government Pricing Kiwis Out Of Their Cars”, someone’s obviously been schooling up young Simon Bridges on the way Rob Muldoon smashed Labour in 1975.

[Bill Rowling, for all you millennials out there, was the Labour Prime Minister of New Zealand from September 1974 until December 1975, and a gallon (4.5 litres) was the unit of measure at the petrol pump. So, yes, you’re right, the motorists of 1975 paid roughly a tenth of what we pay today to fill up our tanks! – C.T.]

But even back when petrol was only a dollar a gallon, Kiwi motorists were hurting. Ever since the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, during which Egypt and Syria came within an ace of destroying the State of Israel, the price of oil had soared. Saudi Arabia and the other Arab oil-exporters had imposed an embargo on the USA and its allies for resupplying the Israelis with arms and ammunition. The resulting price-hikes delivered a stunning blow to the Western economy. The so-called “Oil Shocks” of 1973-79 marked the end of the Great Post-War Boom. Almost overnight, New Zealanders – along with just about everyone else in the Western World – lost confidence in the future. Even worse, they began casting about for someone to blame.

Hence, the National Party’s propaganda blaming soaring oil prices on Bill Rowling. Of course, anybody who had been following current affairs over the previous two years knew perfectly well that National was peddling what today we would call “fake news”. But, those weren’t the people Muldoon was after. The voters he was seeking to enlist alongside National’s habitual supporters were the disoriented, frustrated and just flat-out angry working-class Kiwis who were struggling to work out what had all-of-a-sudden gone wrong with their world.

Like the former Democratic Party supporters backing Trump in 2016, these bewildered Labour voters found it increasingly difficult to identify with “their” party. Labour was supposed to stand for “the working man” and his values, but now, following the tragic death of that quintessential working-class battler, “Big Norm” Kirk in August 1974, the party was led by a training-college lecturer. What’s more, he and his colleagues were advancing policies which seemed to have more in common with the demands of the long-haired hippies and protesters in the streets than they did with the “ordinary Kiwi joker” and his concerns. Not the least of these being the soaring price of petrol.

Muldoon and his campaign advisers were only too aware of the culture war that was brewing in the Labour Party and they couldn’t wait to exploit it.

Over the course of the 1960s and 70s, Labour’s membership had dwindled. The party branches were peopled predominantly by people who may have been young and radical in the 1930s and 40s but who were now very settled in their ways – and views – which tended towards the socially conservative. Many Labour stalwarts were Roman Catholics, Baptists and Salvation Army members. They bitterly resented the small but active groups of liberals and radicals who had begun drifting into Labour from 1969 onwards. They were seen as middle-class carpet-baggers without the slightest idea of what it meant to be a working-class Kiwi.

These were the people for whom National’s election slogan, “New Zealand the way YOU want it”, was created. The people who had begun to feel neglected, misunderstood and even a little bit despised by the people at the top of the Labour Party – and their intellectual friends. Some of the more prominent of these had banded together in the group called “Citizens for Rowling”. In the ears of a great many Kiwis, that sounded a lot more like “Citizens Against Muldoon”.

It was a huge strategic error on the part of Labour’s hifalutin supporters. Instead of turning people against the pugnacious National leader, it drew them towards him. Just as liberal America’s hatred of Trump only served to entrench his support among aggrieved Americans without college degrees or six-figure salaries, Labour’s near-obsession with Rob Muldoon proved to be one of the key factors in the growth of “Rob’s Mob”. This was the peculiar assemblage of “ordinary blokes and blokesses” for whom Muldoon felt more like a Labour leader than the thoroughly decent but doggedly uninspiring Rowling.

Forty years on, Labour supporters should brace themselves for a National Party-driven social media campaign built around the slogan: “At $2.40 a litre, we can’t afford Jacinda.” Second-hand though it may be, it’s bound to acquire some measure of political purchase. How could it not when, for Kiwis on low incomes, $2.40 a litre for gas is just one more burden for them to bear. (And anyone on the Labour team thinking about telling these folk to “go electric” should, perhaps, recall the effect on the breadless masses of the thoughtless suggestion that they should consider eating cake!)

National’s big problem is that Simon Bridges is not Rob Muldoon. Bridges simply does not possess Muldoon’s ability to inspire both confidence and hope, fear and dread. Nor is Jacinda Ardern even remotely like Bill Rowling. The latter always came across as the person for whom the saying “nice guys finish last” was invented. And although stardust was intermittently available to politicians back in 1975, the historical record makes it very clear that nobody ever got so much as a speck of it to Bill.

About the only thing Bridges has got going for him is that, unlike the 1973-79 oil shocks, the steady rise in the price of petrol over the period 2018-2021 cannot be sheeted home to greedy Arab oil magnates. This time, a large measure of it is Labour’s own work.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 9 October 2018.

Political Dementia - Or, Is Labour In Need Of Aged Care?

Political Decline: How sad it will be if New Zealand’s oldest political party is forced to end its days looking out at a world it is no longer able to change; weeping tears of silent rage as younger politicians, with the courage to look beyond tomorrow, get ready to inherit today.

FOR A FEW WEEKS, towards the end of 1973, aged just seventeen, I worked as an orderly at Siverstream Hospital. Speaking frankly, a few weeks was all I could stand. Officially, this public hospital catered for “long-term care” patients. Unofficially, it was an old people’s home.

Many of Silverstream’s residents suffered from dementia. Some were violent, while others drifted in and out of reality in the most disconcerting fashion. The most difficult to deal with, however, were those who remembered enough to know that they didn’t want to be there. Recalling how we would apprehend these brave old souls as they tried to “escape” still gives me pangs of guilt. The bathing, the feeding, the replacing of colostomy bags: it was all hard and emotionally draining work; but the sight of those tears, falling silently from eyes that saw a world their aged owners could never re-join; that was heart-breaking.

There was, however, nothing heart-breaking about the pay. Anyone working through Christmas could earn a week’s wages in less than 72 hours. Overtime, double-time, triple-time: back then the workman and workwoman were worthy of their hire. Mind you, back then union membership was compulsory. Back then we had a Labour Government worthy of the name. Back then, the prediction that my job would one day be described as “modern day slavery” would not have been believed.

Two years later, not so very far from Silverstream Hospital, just a couple of miles up the Hutt Valley at Brentwood School, I cast my first vote. I still remember how my hand hovered above the name of the Values candidate. I had read the party’s splendid manifesto, Beyond Tomorrow, and my head told me that the policies enunciated by Values were the only policies to take the future seriously. My heart, however, recalled “Big Norm”, and I voted Labour.

Taking The Future Seriously: The Values Party's best-selling 1975 election manifesto, Beyond Tomorrow.

Silverstream Hospital, built by the New Zealand government for the repair and recuperation of American sailors during World War II (and visited in 1943 by no less a personage that Eleanor Roosevelt) has long since been decommissioned. In its place stands the very handsome Silverstream Retreat – venue for the 2012 AGM of the Green Party.

The Greens are, of course, the direct political descendants of those prescient men and women who, almost exactly 40 years ago, founded the Values Party. Naturally, there will be celebration – and much reminiscing – over Queen’s Birthday Weekend as Values veterans, like its founder, Tony Brunt, and Jeanette Fitzsimons, the woman who helped birth its political offspring, rub shoulders with the Green Party’s record crop of fourteen MPs. Also present will be Claire Browning, there to launch Beyond Today, her book on the movement Values began.

Writing in Tuesday’s Otago Daily Times, political pundit, Colin James, argued that: “[T]he Greens don't have to win the centre. They can look more oppositionist than Labour because they can occupy (to coin a word) a spot nearer the periphery. This frustrates Labour, which must win votes from National to win the Treasury benches and must sound reasonable while competing with Greens for airspace.”

When Labour’s legacy was still potent enough to win hearts and minds, Mr James’ analysis may have been correct. In 2012, however, I’m not so sure. When the 150,000 mostly female, mostly professional, voters that National wooed away from Labour in 2008 and 2011, and whom they now seem so determined to drive away, decide to go in search of an alternative, are they really going to choose Labour? Does David Shearer really have the emotional heft of a Norman Kirk? I don’t think so.

More and more Labour is beginning to resemble those dementia patients at Silverstream Hospital. Some of Labour’s caucus, like Trevor Mallard, are prone to violent episodes; others, like Shane Jones, test the boundaries of political probity in the most disconcerting fashion. The most pitiful to contemplate, however, are the likes of David Cunliffe and Grant Robertson. They know there are alternatives out there, they can see them, but their colleagues will insist on hauling them back to their beds.

How sad it will be if New Zealand’s oldest political party is forced to end its days looking out at a world it is no longer able to change; weeping tears of silent rage as younger politicians, with the courage to look beyond tomorrow, get ready to inherit today.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 1 June 2012.