Uncomfortable Comparisons: If Labour’s Harking Back To 2017, Then It’s Not Looking For A Win.

2017’s Queenmaker: Five years ago, Winston Peters’ choice ran counter to New Zealand’s informal, No. 8 wire, post-MMP constitution, which, up until 2017, had decreed that the party with the most votes got to supply the next prime minister. Had National not been in power for the previous 9 years, it is very unlikely that Peters would have installed Jacinda. Certainly, a repeat performance (even assuming NZ First surges back into Parliament in 2023) is out of the question.

THERE IS LITTLE to be learned from most of the analyses of the Tauranga By-Election results. Those on the Right continue to present 2020’s general election as a normal contest. It wasn’t. The 2020 General Election was in fact an aberrant political event. Labour’s majority was the product of Jacinda Ardern’s world-beating response to the Covid-19 pandemic: a hearty “Thank you!” from at least half of her “Team of Five Million”. The Tauranga By-Election was always going to register the return of traditional National voters to the conservative fold. The result for Labour did not spell “catastrophe”. Nor did a represent a “failure” on Jacinda’s part. The percentages won by the two principal contenders closely matched the 2017 result – exactly as anticipated.

The return of those traditional National voters, while anticipated, nevertheless poses a series of very difficult questions for Labour’s strategists. While there is comfort to be drawn from the proximity of Saturday’s results to those of 2017, there is absolutely no comfort to be taken from Labour’s overall 2017 result.

Five years ago, Jacinda Ardern did extremely well to lift Labour’s Party Vote from 25 to 37 percent, but she still found herself 7 percentage points shy of National’s extraordinary (after three terms!) Party Vote of 44 percent. Jacinda’s rather flat speech on Election Night 2017 reflected her understanding that, by failing to win a plurality of the votes cast, she could not expect to become New Zealand’s next prime minister.

Winston Peters changed all that, but, as the photographs taken of Jacinda and Grant Robertson listening to Peters’ speech make clear, they really didn’t know if they had successfully persuaded him to put Labour into power – or not. Certainly, Peters’ choice ran counter to New Zealand’s informal, No. 8 wire, post-MMP constitution, which, up until 2017, had decreed that the party with the most votes got to supply the next prime minister.

Had National not been in power for the previous 9 years, it is very unlikely that Peters would have installed Labour in 2017. Certainly, a repeat performance (even assuming NZ First surges back into Parliament in 2023) is out of the question. Peters reprising his kingmaker role only makes sense in the political context of an electorate that has undergone a pronounced shift to the right. An important part of that shift has been the dramatic re-casting of the Prime Minister: from faerie queen and national saviour, to pantomime demon – and worse. A minor party opting to keep Jacinda Ardern on the Ninth Floor of the Beehive would provoke nationwide fury.

Well aware of this possibility, it is also unlikely that the Māori Party would opt to keep Labour in power – even if it could. Between them Rawiri Waititi, Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and John Tamihere have more than enough nouse to discern what would happen if they backed a Labour Party beaten into second place by National. Yes, they might secure another three years in which to implement the He Puapua blueprint, but it would be against a backdrop of racist rage that would not be stilled until te Tiriti and all its works had been cast into the fire.

If the Māori Party’s votes could make it possible for National and Act to rule – moderately – then it would be well advised to let them. The ultimate threat: to pull the pin and bring them down with Labour and Green support; need never be spoken. Christopher Luxon would have the muzzle he needed for Act – without ever having to ask.

There are no friends in politics – only interests to be defended, and opportunities to be seized.

That said, the victory that now looms ahead for National and Act will not be founded upon an enthusiastic right-wing majority within the electorate, but upon the fatal absence of left-wing support. Christopher Luxon is set to become prime minister not on the strength of those who turned out to support him, but on the disillusionment of those who opted to stay at home.

The historical record tells this story in the most unequivocal terms. In 1972, when Norm Kirk romped home to victory, the turn-out was 89.1 percent. Three years later, when Rob Muldoon steamrollered Labour’s hopes for “A New Society” to dust, it was 82.5 percent. In 1984, when Labour again won the Treasury benches, the turnout was a record 93.7 percent. In 1990, when Jim Bolger defeated Mike Moore, it had fallen to 85.2 percent. National Party victories are almost always built on the defeat of Labour voters’ hopes.

Is there anything Jacinda and Labour can do to avert the National-Act triumph that looms ahead? Of course there is! In the simplest terms, they can give their supporters a compelling reason for turning up at the polling-booths. This time, however, it will take more than rhetorical gestures and snappy slogans. This time Labour’s programme will not only need to spell out a clear sequence of reforms, but also the mechanisms required to implement them. And it must be a compelling programme: one that makes losers out of those who have spent the last three decades winning all the prizes; and winners out of those who have spent the same 30 years chewing on their leftovers.

“Bottom rail on top!” That’s how freed African-American slaves described the transformation wrought by General Army Order No. 3, which on 19 June 1865 – “Juneteenth” – gave effect to Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

Māori New Zealanders have never been so close to seeing te Tiriti o Waitangi honoured in practical and enduring ways than they are today. For this country’s bottom rail to make its way to the top, however, this government must frame the next election as a straightforward battle between the entrenched colonial legacy of “old” New Zealand, and the enlarged democracy of a new “Aotearoa”.

The mission of Labour’s Māori caucus is clear: to persuade their Pakeha colleagues that they must give rangatahi – young New Zealanders of all ethnicities – a reason to get out and vote. Not only is this the only way that Labour can win another term, but it is also the only guarantee that it will not fade into historical oblivion.

Jacinda and her caucus need to take a look around the world and note what is happening to those political parties who still cling to the idea that the centre-ground is the safest place to play. Look at what has just happened in the French legislative elections – where the Far-Right and the Far-Left have both made huge gains. Observe the fate of the business-as-usual candidates for the Colombian presidency, and the historic victory of the former revolutionary guerrilla, Gustavo Petro: Colombia’s first left-wing President.

In his victory speech, Petro thanked the party workers who had fanned out across the nation to “seduce” Colombia’s voters. An interesting choice of words, and an accurate one. Victory for the Left has always been a matter of seduction: of making the voters lust for what the Left is offering. And if that is not, as Petro told the thousands gathered before him in Bogota, a government of love and hope, then what good is the Left? What is it for?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 21 June 2022.

Tauranga: A Predictable Result, With A Warning Attached.

Walking On Sunshine: National’s Sam Uffindell cantered home in the Tauranga By-Election, but the Outdoors & Freedom Party’s Sue Grey attracted an ominous level of support.

THE RIGHT’S gadfly commentator, Matthew Hooton, summed up the Tauranga by-election in his usual pithy fashion. “Tonight’s result is poor for the National Party, catastrophic for Labour, very good for the Act Party and brilliant for the far-right nutter fringe. The last bit makes it terrible for New Zealand.” About National and Labour, Hooton is simply being provocative. But his assessment of “the far-right nutter fringe’s” impact on the by-election is spot-on.

The 2020 election result in Tauranga, which saw the gap between National and Labour shrink dramatically, was – as every political commentator should know (but apparently doesn’t) aberrant. Hell, the entire General Election was aberrant – as National’s loss of seats like Rangitata and Ilam made clear. For Jacinda Ardern and her party to have held onto the roughly 400,000 “Thank-you for saving us from Covid-19” votes that pushed Labour up-and-over 50 percent of the Party Vote, would have required her to shift New Zealand into some sort of weird parallel universe, where the absence of success goes unreproved, and political failure is rewarded.

Much as she might like to be living in such a universe, the Prime Minister knows that she is not. Which is why she and her advisers would have been looking at the results of 2017 for guidance – not 2020. On that basis, the Tauranga By-Election was very far from being a catastrophe.

As Greg Presland, lawyer and regular contributor to the Labour-leaning website “The Standard” tweeted shortly after the result was announced: “Election night Tauranga result is Uffindell 56% Tinetti 25%. 2017 election result was Bridges 54% Tinetti 26%. Beware of claim this is a bad result for Labour. Looks like business as usual without the anti-Government bounce that opposition parties hope for in by-elections.”

Equally untrue is the claim that the Tauranga result represents a poor showing for National. To easily restore the status-quo-ante-Covid was all anyone could reasonably have asked of Sam Uffindell. This was especially true of a contest precipitated by an incumbent National MP in circumstances entirely lacking in political drama, whose outcome was never in doubt. Uffindell was always going to win, and win he did in a commendably boring campaign. (Exciting campaigns in safe seats are generally regarded as unhelpful – even dangerous!)

In these circumstances the risible 40 percent turnout was as predictable as the result itself. With the outcome a foregone conclusion and the rain bucketing down, only the most faithful of party stalwarts were ever going to make it to the polling booths. That they did so in almost exactly the same percentages as the 2017 contest should be enough for any sensible commentator to conclude that normal electoral transmission in Tauranga has been resumed.

Although Act’s candidate, Cameron Luxton, should have felt extremely pleased with his 10.26 percent of the votes cast, he could be forgiven for feeling that he had earned a much bigger share. Most observers of the by-election campaign concur that Luxton was by far the most dynamic candidate.

Once again positing a parallel political universe, this one featuring publicly-owned local broadcasters committed to bringing fulsome coverage of electoral contests to their viewers (don’t guffaw, New Zealand once boasted such broadcasters!) Luxton would have ended his campaign with an embarrassingly large number of traditional National voters in his column.

Those Tauranga electors who tuned into the debates on the weekend political shows can hardly have avoided drawing unfavourable comparisons between Luxton and Uffindell. Not that he really needs to, given the result, but if Sam could arrange for a generous injection, or two, of political passion, his value to Team National would undoubtedly be boosted. Languid-and-Aristocratic is not the Kiwi way – not in politics.

But, if the Tauranga candidates with the best chances appeared to lack all conviction, then at least one of those written off as belonging to the worst was definitely not lacking in passionate intensity. Sue Grey, candidate for the New Zealand Outdoors & Freedom Party, managed an impressive 4.72 percent of the votes cast.

Just how impressive is immediately apparent when one considers that the nationwide support for the Outdoors Party in 2020 was a miniscule 0.1 percent. (3,256 Party Votes.) On Saturday, another 53 votes would have put Grey over 5 percent. Replicated across the country in 2023, that would put at least six NZOF MPs in the House of Representatives.

It is important to acknowledge that Grey’s result was achieved in a by-election with a very low turnout (40.6 percent) and in which the Greens, NZ First, and the Māori Party opted not to field candidates. Nevertheless, the 47-fold increase in the NZOF Party’s support is so dramatic that it merits serious political scrutiny.

The Outdoors Party’s beginnings are nothing if not firmly rooted in the “heartland”. It was founded to represent the huntin’, shootin’ fishin’ community: rugged, authority-scorning, Kiwi blokes and sheilas entirely lacking in affinity for the vegan “Greenies” of the big cities, who wouldn’t know one end of a hunting rifle or fishing rod from the other. On the other hand, the sort of hippies who hare off into the bush to live off-the-grid, and who decry the use of 1080 poison by DoC, are a different story. Like them, these outdoorsmen and women also favour the legalisation of cannabis and would like the state to FRO out of their lives.

If that description rings a bell, then it’s because a great many of these characters could be found camping in Parliament Grounds earlier this year. Begin with a general pre-disposition towards believing the absolute worst of the Powers That Be, mix-in the uncompromising government demands of the Covid-19 Emergency, and then allow the resulting anti-vaccination fury to be articulated by a personable online spokeswoman – who just happens to be a lawyer and scientist – and hey-presto! Sue Grey gets 917 votes in Tauranga.

It is also important to note that Grey’s co-leader is fellow lawyer Donna Pokere-Phillips. This bi-cultural aspect of the NZOF Party is important. Though harbouring a strong anti-immigrant element within its ranks, there is very little evidence of the anti-Māori sentiment that disfigures so many far-right groups. If this is fascism, then it is of a quintessentially Kiwi, backwoods libertarian, variety. Not so much brown shirts as black singlets.

Unsurprisingly, the evangelical Christian leader of the Freedoms & Rights Coalition, Brian Tamaki, has been working hard to draw together all the parties of the far-right into a single electoral proposition – an “Alliance”-style coalition of the Dark Side, if you will. So far unsuccessful, Tamaki is likely to remain so. Too much of his message bears a “Made in the USA” stamp. New Zealand, one of the world’s most secular nations, marches to the beat of a very different drummer to Donald Trump and Q-Anon.

The NZ Outdoors and Freedom Party, while far too angry and conspiratorial for most New Zealanders, has, nevertheless, clearly shown itself to have something going for it. Good keen fascism, perhaps? Something that was always there, just below the surface of New Zealand progressivism. The New Zealand poet, James K. Baxter, saw it and wrote about it in his “Pig Island Letters” series.

Lines that could have been written for Sue Grey and her comrades:

Her son is moodier, has seen
An angel with a sword
Standing above the clumps of old man manuka
Just waiting for the word

To overturn the cities and the rivers
And split the house like a rotten totara log.
Quite unconcerned he sets his traps for possums
And whistles to his dog.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 20 June 2022.

A Bloody Hard Act To Follow.

From Here To There: In 2017 the Grey Lynn Ardern declared airily, “Let’s do this!” If, in 2023, the Morrinsville Ardern can snarl, “I’ve bloody done it!”, then she’ll lead her Labour Government to a third term.

POLITICAL PROVACATEUR, Matthew Hooton, predicts that we should expect to see “less Grey Lynn and more Morrinsville” from Jacinda Ardern. He may have been referring to the Prime Minister’s earthy vocabulary, with its “bloody” this and “bloody” that, but his characterisation also offers an apt description of the political territory traversed by Ardern since the heady days of her “Let’s do this!” campaign of 2017.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to recognise the almost reckless quality of Labour’s 2017 election campaign as the product of a party that did not expect to win. The gap to make up after David Cunliffe’s 2014 debacle, when Labour’s Party Vote declined to a woeful 25 percent, was generally assumed to be too wide. With a Party Vote of 37 percent, Labour seemed happy enough to have lifted its vote by 12 percentage points. Ardern had done well, but her demeanour on election night gave no hint that she believed herself to have done any more than avert yet another electoral catastrophe.

Certainly, the pundits’ verdict on the night was that, with 44 percent of the Party Vote, Bill English would remain New Zealand’s prime minister. Much as he might squirm at the prospect, Winston Peters’ final decision as to which of the two main parties NZ First backed would be dictated, as it always had been before, by which of them received the most Party Votes.

But it wasn’t. This time Peters chose to sit down and dine on a dish of cold vengeance, and Ardern found herself, at the age of thirty-seven, the stunned steward of New Zealand’s fortunes. That she was woefully unprepared for that role was hidden from the electorate by the new prime minister’s superb communication skills. Ardern accomplished the transition from the person who could always be relied upon to charm Labour’s rank-and-file, to the prime minister who could charm not only her own people, but the rest of the world to boot, with astonishing aplomb.

That words – no matter how well chosen – were not, in the end, enough to produce concrete policy victories became clear to all in the grotesque failure of KiwiBuild. It would not be the last instance of massive over-promising, followed by equally massive under-delivery. Indeed, all those years working alongside Helen Clark and Heather Simpson had not driven home to Ardern the deep political wisdom of Clark’s “under-promise and over-deliver” formula for electoral success.

The explanation for this failure is almost certainly generational. As a Baby-Boomer, Clark belonged to a generation that not only understood how much a properly equipped state could accomplish, but also knew, as someone who had lived through the angst and anguish of Rogernomics, exactly how much equipment the state had lost. Yes, there were still many levers left to pull, but hardly any of them were attached to anything that actually worked. If it was work you wanted, the place to get it done – after 1984 – was the market.

Ardern’s other generational problem was the extent to which “communication” and “performance” had melded together. Government announcements about government action had become so important that the very fact an announcement was about to be made itself became the excuse for an announcement. It was as though Ardern and her colleagues believed that the announcement of a set of measures, and their accomplishment, were one and the same. To say it was to do it. Which was fine, providing “it” was something the market wanted to “do”.

The ”Grey Lynn” Ardern understood the genuine desire of her generation to do something about climate change, poverty, racism, sexism and cycle-lanes. But, she also understood how good they felt “liking” a Facebook post of “hearting” a tweet, and how effortlessly signing an online petition had come to replace trudging down the main street with a placard. Politics had become performative – a play. It existed to deliver a message – but not much of anything else. Surely, everybody understood that what they were looking at wasn’t real?

When it comes to delivering messages, however, the Grey Lynn Ardern had few equals. Her “They are Us” on the day of the Christchurch Mosque Massacre, followed by her hug in a hijab, brought the whole world to tears – and cheers. Covid-19 provided an opportunity for more of the same. In the face of a global pandemic, the delivery of calm and inspiring leadership proved to be a vaccine every bit as effective as Pfizer’s – maybe more so!

Ardern’s signature message of kindness, and her powerfully solidaristic “Team of Five Million”, combined with her intuitive decision to “go hard, go early” with the “science” (rather than the business community) carried her forward to an historic electoral victory.

But, if 2017-20 was the Lord Mayor’s Coach, then 2020-23 shows every sign of being the shit-cart. In spite of announcements, and announcements about announcements, the relentless machinery of free-market capitalism grinds on. Every crisis has its cost, and the cost of New Zealand’s Covid-19 pandemic has been, and will continue to be, huge. Political dramas cannot go on forever, and all too often the audience steps out of the theatre into driving wind, freezing rain – and Omicron. When you’re wet, cold, ill-housed and infected, and the cost-of-living keeps spiralling upwards out of control, then messages – no matter how inspiring – tend to be forgotten.

The Morrinsville Ardern is emerging because our Prime Minister has realised just how bloody naïve the Grey Lynn Ardern always was. Like Helen Clark, who grew up in the same part of the country, the Morrinsville Ardern has learned the hard way just how little the contemporary New Zealand state is capable of delivering. She knows what it’s like to pull on a lever and feel it rattle loose in her hand. She knows, too, that a Labour prime minister can only say “No” to the business community for so long. She has learned that carrots are all very well, but every now and then it’s necessary to put a bit of stick about. And if the stick’s victims turn up on your front lawn? Well then, you give them a little bit more!

Morrinsville Ardern is what you get when reality drives an iron spike into the gentle soul of Grey Lynn’s “Jacinda”. Will Kiwi voters take to Morrinsville Ardern? Hard to say. As a people we’re notorious for letting ourselves fall in love with performers – generally on the sports field. We are even willing to allow them a few mistakes – providing the culprits demonstrate they’ve got what it takes to pull themselves together and lift their performance. Even the disappearance of the grace and flair that first attracted us to them is forgivable, just so long as the ruthless and ugly efficiency with which they’ve been replaced continues to deliver the wins.

In 2017 the Grey Lynn Ardern declared airily, “Let’s do this!” If, in 2023, Morrinsville Ardern can snarl, “I’ve bloody done it!”, then she’ll lead her Labour Government to a third term.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 28 March 2022.

Reconnecting Jacinda With her Inner Swashbuckler.

Let's Do This - Again? If all Labour has to take to the electorate in September 2020 is an automobile-driven infrastructure programme borrowed wholesale from the last National Government, then Simon Bridges is going to make sure that being the prime minister of a one-term Labour government is the only thing Jacinda will ever have in common with Norman Kirk.

HOW DID 2019 END on such a jarring note of neoliberal bi-partisanship? With the Coalition and the Opposition united in their backing for a lavish spend-up on roads, roads, and more roads? It’s possible the two parliamentary groupings may diverge on the question of how all this bitumen should be paid for: directly by the state, or through Private-Public Partnerships (PPPs); but that’s about it in terms of potential disagreement. The year is ending on an apparently unanimous parliamentary assumption that trucks and cars will continue to provide New Zealanders with their prime means of transportation. With this slavish commitment to the automobile, the country’s political class has demonstrated its near-total moral incapacity. New Zealand’s claim to be taking Climate Change seriously stands exposed as utter bullshit.

Also exposed is Labour’s intellectual exhaustion. By returning to National’s pro-automobile vomit so shamelessly, Jacinda Ardern and her senior colleagues are essentially admitting that they lack the necessary competence to translate their promises of “transformation” into reality. It’s a fatal admission. By acknowledging that the big stuff is simply too much for them they have opened a royal road (if you’ll excuse the expression) along which Simon Bridges and his team can now motor to electoral victory.

Bridges’ script is pathetically easy to write: “National and Labour are in full agreement about what needs to be done in New Zealand. But, let’s be brutally honest, only one party possesses the competency required to do it. From KiwiBuild to the Provincial Growth Fund, the Labour-led Government has proved woefully inept. By the time the election rolls around, New Zealanders will be looking back at three wasted years. About the only things our Prime Minister and her Cabinet are good at is making promises, finding excuses and providing hugs. By contrast, National possesses both the will and the talent to get this country moving again – and that’s exactly what it’s going to do.”

Which is not to suggest that Bridges and his team won’t employ Topham Guerin Ltd to mastermind a complementary social media campaign. If the high road of “competency” fails to inspire, then the low road of crude emotional arousal will be primed and ready for all the traffic it can bear. Indeed, Ben Guerin and Sean Topham may advise Bridges to use both roads – at the same time. They’ve already proved they can do it – just ask Boris!

Labour, the Greens and NZ First could beat this style of campaigning easily – if they only had the will and the talent to get even a little bit creative on the propaganda front. But, that, alas, is where the party falls so woefully short. Unless he or she is being kept extremely well hidden, there just isn’t anyone in Labour’s ranks who even remotely fits the description of “a little bit creative”. How could there be? The culture of the Labour Party in 2020 is hardly what you’d call welcoming to the swashbuckler and the maverick. Its ideologically rigid and puritanical apparatchiks simply wouldn’t know what to do with a political gunslinger like Ben Guerin.

Even if Jacinda intervened on behalf of the 2020 equivalent of Bob Harvey – the young swashbuckler who somehow persuaded Norman Kirk to take a punt on him in 1969 and who then proceeded to transform the public’s perceptions of both Labour and Kirk by deploying state-of-the-art advertising techniques – it’s doubtful he or she would last the distance. Ideological Orthodoxy and Art have never been the best of friends.

Which only leaves Jacinda, herself, to take on the role of the swashbuckler and maverick. Looking back, that’s exactly what she did in 2017. There just wasn’t the time – or the script – for anything other than Jacinda’s inspired, seat-of-the-pants, political acrobatics. The party had to let her carry more-or-less the whole campaign because it had nothing else to offer. When it did step back in – remember the sudden about face on the Capital Gains Tax, and the equally sudden reversal of the about-face? – it succeeded only in slowing Jacinda’s momentum and carving 3-4 percentage points off Labour’s final tally of Party Votes.

The best we can hope for is that Jacinda will be put in touch with someone with the same insouciant brilliance as Ben Guerin. Someone who simply doesn’t care if what he’s pushing out there is politically correct or incorrect – only that it works. Only if it causes the person scrolling-down his or her device to stop and read Labour’s latest post. That means engaging them at the level of the heart – not the head. To win “The Battle of the Thumbs”, as Guerin calls this struggle to hold the modern voter’s attention, you don’t have time to make them think – so you have to make them feel.

In the last, crucial days of the UK general Election, Topham Guerin Ltd’s brilliant parody of “Love Actually” was watched by more than 7 million British voters. It held them spellbound for the few minutes it took the equally brilliant Boris Johnson to give them his simple, but winning, messages. “The other guy could win.”, and “Get Brexit done”. Jacinda has the skills to do something similar – just ask Stephen Colbert! The $64,000 question, however, is: “Does she have anyone smart enough, and creative enough, to come up with an idea that good?”

Because, if all Jacinda has to take to the electorate in September 2020 is an automobile-driven infrastructure programme borrowed wholesale from the last National Government, then Simon Bridges is going to make sure that being the prime minister of a one-term Labour government is the only thing she has in common with Norman Kirk.

When Jacinda stood in the Auckland Town Hall in 2017 and proclaimed Climate Change “the nuclear-free moment of my generation” – how we all cheered.

The thing is, we were expecting her commitment to amount to something more than the well-meaning but toothless Zero Carbon Act. Something like announcing a completely new, wider-gauge, electrified, national rail network. An infrastructure programme that would allow New Zealand to replicate the ultra-fast trains that move people around Europe, China and Japan. Something to put the greenhouse-gas pumping road transport industry out to pasture. Something more than a plan to build roads, roads and more roads.

Something to make young and old alike exclaim, at least one more time: “Let’s do this!”

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 20 December 2019.

Jacinda's Magic Politics.

It's A Kind of Magic: Jacinda Ardern's memorable declaration, made at the launch of the Labour Party’s 2017 election campaign, that climate change would be her generation’s nuclear-free moment, epitomises her political style. So richly evocative of selfless activism and against-all-odds success was her declaration that Ardern’s audience’s critical faculties were suspended. Almost as if the promise and the deed were one and the same. Some people might call what she did “casting a spell”. Others, even more provocatively, might call it “magic”. (Photo by John Miller)

WHAT IS IT? This weird, emotionally energetic style of politics that promises “transformational” change and then, mysteriously, fails to deliver it? What should we call it? Something less than the old-fashioned left-wing populism of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. Much more, however, than the cynical deployment of standard PR techniques. It is a style which has so far defied all attempts to pin a label on it.

Nameless though it may be, few would deny that Jacinda Ardern is its most brilliant local exponent. Her openness: the sheer force of her empathic projection; imbues our Prime Minister’s statements with extraordinary persuasive power. So effective are “Jacinda’s” communication skills, that a great many New Zealanders have taken to confusing her declarations with actual achievements. Those who point out the discrepancy between the Prime Minister’s magnificent words and her government’s less-than-magnificent deeds are not well received. But, that does not mean they are wrong.

Her memorable declaration, made at the launch of the Labour Party’s 2017 election campaign, that climate change would be her generation’s nuclear-free moment, epitomises Ardern’s political style. So richly evocative of selfless activism and against-all-odds success was her declaration that Ardern’s audience’s critical faculties were suspended. Almost as if the promise and the deed were one and the same. Some people might call what she did “casting a spell”. Others, even more provocatively, might call it “magic”.

But, magic of a certain kind. Ardern’s are not the sort of spells that begin with fantasy but end in reality. Jacinda is no Churchill. Rather than a magician, she is a conjurer. What Ardern weaves with her words are not the intentions that lead to actual deeds, but the dangerous illusion that what is being asked of her has already been accomplished – made real by the unmistakable sincerity and the power of her will. Once she has declared her determination to end child poverty, who could be so churlish as to point out that the children of the poor are still with us?

Ardern’s conjuring is perfectly suited to that crucial group of voters who detached themselves from the National Party in response to what they saw as the “awful” problems which John Key and Bill English had failed to address during their nine years in office. Homelessness and unaffordable housing; worsening child poverty; inadequate spending on health and education; filthy rivers and streams; the manifest inadequacies of New Zealand’s mental health services: something had to be done.

Or, at least, something had to be said that made them feel better than the bleak and blameful rhetoric of Paula Bennett and Judith Collins.

Ardern’s game-changing intuition was that all these voters really wanted to hear were different words. Commitments, promises, studies, working-groups, projects: policies filled with good intentions and promoted with powerful displays of empathy. The number of voters eager to focus on the fiscal mechanisms required to pay for Labour’s kinder, gentler New Zealand were considerably fewer.

That had always been the problem with Labour’s dreary procession of earnest middle-aged blokes. They had all been way too keen on the nuts and bolts; far too ready to tell everybody how much fiscal pain they would have to be willing to suffer in order to make all the good things they wanted for New Zealand affordable. Who the hell wanted to hear about that!

That was Jacinda’s gift. A young face. A bright smile. A “Let’s Do This!” willingness to hit the ground running. And, most of all, an extraordinary ability to make her middle-class supporters believe that, as with the relentless rise in the value of their houses, her “politics of kindness” could be brought into being without serious sacrifice or effort.

Every successful conjurer, however, must have their very own Jonathan Creek. Somebody to design and build the equipment that turns the conjurer’s masterful misdirection into a reality that baffles and delights. Ardern’s misfortune is to preside over a coalition government decidedly lacking in Jonathan Creeks. Thanks to Clare Curran, Phil Twyford, Iain Lees-Galloway, Grant Robertson and Shane Jones, too many people in the audience are being distracted from Ardern’s magic spiel. Some are even beginning to work out how the tricks are done.

This is not how the story is supposed to end. Not with people wondering whether the Prime Minister’s promises are ultimately achievable.

It’s not that “Jacinda” has become less likeable. What New Zealander, watching her cut such an impressive figure on the international stage, has not felt a surge of national pride. It’s just that Ardern’s “Magic Politics”, as with all kinds of fiction, is absolutely dependent on the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief.

If (or should that be ‘as’) people discover that fighting climate change and ending child poverty will require the imposition of real and rising taxes, then Ardern’s illusions will begin to fade. The voters will start noticing the strings attached to her magical promises.

And the spell will be broken.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 7 March 2019.

Bonny Prince Billy.

Leader In Waiting? If this government falters, then the Opposition Leader will be perfectly placed to become the nation’s “Jacobite” leader-in-exile: the only legitimate inheritor of the 2017 General Election; the King-Over-The-Water; Bonny Prince Billy.

Will ye no come back again?

Will ye no come back again?

Better lo’ed ye canna be;

Will ye no come back again?

– Jacobite Lament

THAT, FIVE MONTHS AFTER the 2017 election, 44.5 percent of New Zealanders remain loyal to the National Party is astonishing. Political defeat almost always foreshadows political desertion – usually on a large scale. Finding oneself on the losing side of any conflict is never a happy experience. The temptation to treat harshly the people who put you there can be very strong.

And yet National’s support remains precisely where it stood on election night. Conservative New Zealand is yet to be convinced that the government of Jacinda Ardern is worthy of so much as a second glance – let alone a second thought.

The reason for the Right’s steadfast opposition to the new regime is very simple: they do not believe it to be a legitimate government. No matter how many times the constitutional lawyers and political scientists insist that the present arrangement is perfectly legitimate: that a ‘coalition of the losers’ has always been one of the potential outcomes of any MMP election; the Right refuses to accept their arguments.

As adherents to New Zealand’s informal constitution, they cannot reconcile National’s stunning election-night plurality with its subsequent exclusion from government. How is it possible that a political party securing 44.5 percent of the popular vote – 7.6 percentage points ahead of its nearest rival – is denied power? How can it be ethical for a party receiving fewer than 7 percent of the votes cast, to set aside the clear preference of nearly half the electorate?

In the eyes of a worryingly large number of voters, the politicians currently seated on the Treasury Benches cannot be considered a legitimate government; and their leader, Jacinda Ardern, cannot be considered a legitimate prime minister.

The corollary to this denial is equally troubling. If Jacinda Ardern, the leader of the party which won the second-highest tally of votes, is not the legitimate prime minister; then the proper bearer of that title can only be the leader of the party which received the most votes: Bill English.

It is possible that Bill English’s colleagues are unaware of the power of this sentiment. As Members of Parliament, they know that the only votes that count in the formation of a government are the votes cast on the floor of the House of Representatives; and that the brutal truth of the present situation is – National doesn’t have enough.

Unlike so many of those who voted for them, they are moving on. The big question exercising their minds: Who should replace Bill – and when?

In this regard, they are, arguably, a little premature.

Jacinda’s stardust continues to dazzle us – her performance at Waitangi being just the latest demonstration of its brilliance – but, beneath the sparkling surface of this coalition government, powerful contradictions are at work. The Labour-NZF-Green government is determined to lift New Zealanders into paradise, but it lacks the funds required to pay for their new accommodation. Even worse, it is refusing to do what’s necessary to raise them.

By Budget Day – 17 May – it will have become demoralizingly clear to Jacinda’s Cabinet that her Finance Minister, Grant Robertson, is about to make liars of them all. By then, he’ll have made it clear that their generous promises of redress and renewal simply cannot be adequately funded. That’s when the deepening fissures in this ramshackle political construction will suddenly and dramatically widen; and the government’s most loosely-fastened adornments will begin falling-off.

That will be National’s Jacobite Moment.

For those who know their Scottish history, the Jacobites were the followers of the descendants of the deposed Stuart king, James II, whom they hailed as the only legitimate rulers of Great Britain.

If this government falters, then the Opposition Leader will be perfectly placed to become the nation’s “Jacobite” leader-in-exile: the only legitimate inheritor of the 2017 General Election; the King-Over-The-Water; Bonny Prince Billy.

The National Party’s best strategy is, therefore, to make no move against Bill English until it becomes clear whether or not Jacinda Ardern possesses the political skill to both deliver on Labour’s promises and adhere to her Government’s self-imposed “Budget Responsibility Rules”

If she doesn’t, then the 44.5 percent can start serenading their Bonny Prince Billy:

“Will ye no come back again?”

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 9 February 2018.

2017: Metiria’s Speech And Jacinda’s Wild Ride

A Two-Faced Year: The “Jacindamania” phenomenon was a very different proposition from the quasi-revolutionary call-to-arms enunciated by Metiria Turei. At no point during the suddenly enlivened 2017 election campaign did Jacinda Ardern articulate an idea so saturated with both radical conviction and righteous indignation as Turei’s magnificent repudiation of poverty as a political weapon.

IT’S METIRIA’S SPEECH wot done it. Although delivered in mid-July, Metiria Turei’s keynote address to the Green Party’s AGM neatly divides 2017 into its “No Hope” and “New Hope” halves.

This was the speech containing Turei’s dangerous confession that, 26 years earlier, she had knowingly defrauded the social welfare system for the sake of her infant child. That admission, alone, made certain New Zealanders would be listening. It also meant that the most powerful declaration of the entire election campaign: “We will not be a government that uses poverty as a weapon against its own people”, was heard.

It is rare for a single political speech to make such a difference. David Lange’s March 1985 address to the Oxford Union springs to mind – along with Don Brash’s in/famous Orewa Speech of January 2004. In Turei’s case, the speech’s impact can be explained using just one word: defiance.

By defying the rules of political survival, the speech more or less guaranteed Turei wall-to-wall media coverage. By defying the unacknowledged political consensus on welfare policy, it also signalled that the Greens were no longer playing “politics as usual”. What else could Turei’s promise to make a bonfire of the MSD’s hated “sanctions” mean? The woman who’d defied the social-welfare system in 1991, was now asking her party to defy the entire neoliberal establishment in 2017.

That Turei’s speech (and many subsequent interviews) was able to instantly and dramatically divide the country bore eloquent testimony to its potency.

Most New Zealanders were outraged by the Green co-leader’s admission of fraud, declaring her unfit to hold political office. Many called for her to be prosecuted. Overwhelmingly, this was the position adopted by the news media, which began clamouring for her resignation.

For a significant minority, however, Turei’s speech was an inspiration. Up until its delivery, New Zealand’s political system had seemed both deaf and blind to the growing evidence of widespread social distress. Many voters were feeling both estranged and alienated from those institutions tasked with registering and reacting to such manifestations of public unease. Most particularly, the political parties seemed quite unable to translate voter dissatisfaction into policy. Turei’s speech made a huge impression upon these people precisely because, for the first time in a long time, a politician had not only heard their concerns, but had also attempted to address them through bold and uncompromising reforms.

The contrast between Turei’s almost evangelical fervour and the Labour Party’s general state of torpidity could hardly have been stronger. Almost immediately, the nation’s pollsters began registering a powerful double movement in voter intention. The number of people intending to vote for the Greens rose sharply, while the number indicating their intention to vote for Labour declined ominously. Speculation mounted that the Greens were about to achieve “escape velocity”, shrugging-off their larger partner’s gravitational pull altogether. If that happened, the consequences for Labour could prove catastrophic.

Turei’s speech was the single dislodged stone which sets off a landslide. It brought home, as nothing else could have done, to Labour’s Leader, Andrew Little, the true measure of his own political ineffectiveness. Not only that, but it also made clear the likely consequences for the Labour Party should that failure not be addressed.

From that moment, matters unfolded with unprecedented speed and drama. In an act of rare political selflessness and decency, Little stood aside for the politically untested, but, equally, the politically untarnished, Jacinda Ardern. It was a decision which did several important things at once.

First, it permitted Ardern to demonstrate her exceptional political talent. Second, as Turei succumbed (as she surely must have known she would) to the media’s unrelenting inquisition, it made possible a decisive transfer of the affection and, more importantly, the sudden surge of hope, which Turei’s words had inspired, from the Greens to Labour. Third, it broke up the ideological ice-floes in which New Zealand society had been imprisoned for more than 30 years. Politics had started moving again. Overnight, the situation had become excitingly fluid.

Inevitably, the “Jacindamania” phenomenon was a very different proposition from the quasi-revolutionary call-to-arms enunciated by Metiria Turei. At no point during the suddenly enlivened election campaign did Ardern articulate an idea so saturated with both radical conviction and righteous indignation as Turei’s magnificent repudiation of poverty as a political weapon.

The impression, instead, is of Labour’s new leader surfing with extraordinary skill on a political wave she played no part in making. Mesmerised by the performance of their new Prime Minister, the people whose faith in the redemptive and transformative power of politics was rekindled by Turei’s speech, are currently giving little thought to what happens when the wave she is riding finally dissolves in froth and foam.

Politically, 2018 will be about whether “Jacinda” has what it takes to make waves of her own.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 26 December 2017.

Jacinda And The Bard.

Always The Right Words: When words fail you, Shakespeare's are always there to say what you want to say - only more eloquently. Our new Prime Minister possesses qualities the Bard knew well - and well described.

THE THING ABOUT SHAKESPEARE, is that he has already said everything you could possibly want to say – only more eloquently. Never was this more obvious to me than during the thirty-six hours between Andrew Little’s public admission that Labour’s dire polls had made him think about stepping-down; and Jacinda, reluctantly (?) stepping-up.

Before setting out to share my thoughts on the rapidly unfolding political drama with the AM Show’s Duncan Garner that fateful morning, I’d Googled “there is a tide in the affairs of men” and hurriedly printed-off the result. Half-an-hour later, in TV3’s Green Room, I attempted to commit Brutus’s famous lines from Julius Caesar to memory.

“There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.”

For Jacinda Ardern and her fortunes were, indeed, afloat upon a full sea. Never had her party had greater need of a leader of courage and imagination than on that day, Monday, 31 July 2017. That she was the leader Labour needed could not be disputed. The polls confirmed it. Her colleagues knew it. The country wanted it. The question was: Would she do it? Could she, like Hotspur in Henry IV Part One, step forward boldly to declare:

“Out of this nettle – danger – we pluck this flower – safety.”

The country would have its answer within twenty-four hours.

Watching Andrew Little announce his decision to resign the Labour Party leadership and nominate Jacinda Ardern as his successor, I once again found myself indebted to the Bard. This time for his rendering of Malcolm’s report of Cawdor’s death to King Duncan in Macbeth:

“Nothing in his life

Became him like the leaving it. He died

As one that had been studied in his death

To throw away the dearest thing he owed

As ’twere a careless trifle.”

But the country was granted only a few minutes to muse upon the death of Little’s ill-starred leadership. The doors to the Labour Party’s Caucus Room swung open and there she was, striding down the corridor towards the waiting cameras and the microphones of the assembled journalists.

And what a performance she delivered! In 40 years of participating in and writing about politics I have never seen the like of it. Jacinda’s first media conference confirmed the pollsters’ numbers, her colleagues’ hopes, and the public’s intuition – in spades.

So perfectly did she time this astonishing demonstration of her brilliance, that I could only think of Prince Hal’s shrewd, if somewhat calculating, speech in Henry IV Part One:

“I know you all, and will awhile uphold

The unyoked humor of your idleness.

Yet herein will I imitate the sun,

Who doth permit the base contagious clouds

To smother up his beauty from the world,

That, when he please again to be himself,

Being wanted, he may be more wondered at

By breaking through the foul and ugly mist

Of vapors that did seem to strangle him.”

For if Jacinda Ardern had hardly smothered up her beauty from the world, she had, most assuredly, concealed from it the sheer magnitude of her talent and the full scope of her ambition. In this she was aided by the “foul and ugly mist” created by her predecessors. Among the “contagious clouds” of Labour’s repeated failures, it turned out, had been the perfect place to hide!

But now Mt Albert’s princess is New Zealand’s Sun Queen. And, in the grim tradition of all who assume national leadership, Jacinda must undergo the painful alchemy of power. Her base metal days of deejaying the night away among Auckland’s bohemian set are over. Her golden days as New Zealand’s prime minister begin.

In Henry IV Part Two, Shakespeare has Prince Hal – now King Henry – dismiss his former friends with brutal finality:

“Presume not that I am the thing I was,
For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
That I have turn’d away my former self”.

In the Coalition Agreement she signed with Winston Peters, Jacinda promised to lead a “transformational government”. Only slowly, I suspect, is she beginning to understand who is being transformed – and to what degree.

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 22 December 2017.

Long Live The Sun Queen!

Sunny Ways: I have participated in, and written about, politics for close to 40 years, but in all that time I can honestly say I have never witnessed anything like Jacinda Ardern’s first media conference as Labour Leader.

WHEN 2017 BEGAN, I wasn’t feeling all that hopeful about how it would end. Shortly after New Year’s Day, I wrote:

“The political consensus, at the beginning of 2017 – election year – is that the National-led Government will hold on to power. Not in its own right, as might have happened had John Key led them into battle, but with sufficient parliamentary support to govern comfortably. The identity and character of National’s support will likely prove the most intriguing electoral story of the year. The most significant political event of 2017, however, could well be the collapse of the Labour Party and the emergence of the Greens as New Zealand’s leading party of the centre-left.”

And if Andrew Little, alarmed at the sudden surge in support for the Greens, had not stepped aside in favour of Jacinda Ardern, then my gloomy prediction might very well have come true. Because, as we all know, that Green surge had come at Labour’s expense, driving the party’s poll numbers down towards politically unsustainable levels.

It is, therefore, arguable that the Labour-NZF-Green Government presiding over New Zealand as 2017 draws to a close owes its existence to the moral courage and simple decency of Andrew Little. Certainly, the Labour Party owes him a huge debt of gratitude. He was willing to do – unbidden – what, left to their own devices, his indefatigably self-interested caucus colleagues would never have had the gumption to force upon him.

There’s no disguising the fact, however, that Little’s decision to step down in favour of Ardern was a huge gamble. Neither he, nor his colleagues, nor the news media, were at all sure whether the MP for Mt Albert had what it took to reanimate Labour’s 2017 campaign.

Until, that is, she strode out of the Labour Caucus and into her first media conference – and opened her mouth.

I have participated in, and written about, politics for close to 40 years, but in all that time I can honestly say I have never witnessed anything like Jacinda Ardern’s first media conference as Labour Leader.

When words fail you, the best place to look for someone else’s is often in the works of William Shakespeare. Watching Ardern’s extraordinary political talent blaze forth so unexpectedly, I was reminded of the lines spoken by Prince Hal in Henry IV, Part One, where he explains his reasons for keeping his true nature hidden until exactly the right moment:

I know you all, and will awhile uphold

The unyoked humor of your idleness.

Yet herein will I imitate the sun,

Who doth permit the base contagious clouds

To smother up his beauty from the world,

That, when he please again to be himself,

Being wanted, he may be more wondered at

By breaking through the foul and ugly mist

Of vapors that did seem to strangle him.

No one can dispute that Ardern’s sunny ways dispelled the “foul and ugly mist” in which Labour had been slowly expiring. Beneath the television lights, those “base contagious clouds” which, in the persons of Phil Goff, David Shearer, David Cunliffe and Andrew Little had been smothering Labour’s hopes, were dispelled by the glorious summer of this daughter of Morrinsville. “Jacindamania” was upon us.

And yet, for all her “relentless positivity”, Ardern’s dramatic emergence foreshadowed only negative consequences for the Green Co-Leader, Metiria Turei, and her party. While Little’s grey presence cast a pall over Labour’s campaign prospects, Turei’s reckless challenge to the status quo – “I committed welfare fraud to feed my baby!” – had set progressive hearts a-flutter. Before Jacinda’s blazing sunshine overwhelmed it entirely, Turei’s defiant policy candle had sent out rays of hope into the neoliberal gloom. So transfixed were progressives by the bells and whistles of the passing “Jacinda” juggernaut, however, that only a few took note of the number of radical Green policies left crushed and broken beneath its wheels.

And, it wasn’t only the progressive Left that found itself transfixed by the Jacinda spectacle. For most of the year NZ First had been struggling to come up with a plan to moderate the policies of its most likely coalition partner – the National Party. Suddenly, Labour was back in the game. Was it possible that Jacinda also knew “The Hallelujah Song” of political transformation and economic emancipation? Would she be willing to sing it with him? Peters didn’t know, but for the first time in a long time, it made sense to listen.

And the rest, as they say, is history. Thanks to her fairy NZ First godmother, Jacinderella did get to go to the ball. And, much to the fury of the National Party’s ugly sisters, it was onto her foot that Prince Winston slid the glass slipper of power.

So, can we say that, in spite of all those New Year forebodings, 2017 has had a happy ending? New Zealand has a progressive government, of sorts, and its young prime minister has already set about enchanting the world. What’s not to be hopeful about?

Strangely, I keep coming back to that Shakespearian quote: the one about Prince Hal imitating the sun. Because, of course, Prince Hal eventually becomes King Henry V. It is then that, as promised, he emerges from the “base contagious clouds” of his disreputable friends and hangers-on to claim his birthright – the Crown of England.

Aye, and there’s the rub. Power is transformative – it changes all who wield it. Henry V – Prince Hal as was – ruthlessly dismisses his former companions: breaking all former bonds, and forgetting all previous promises. With a kingdom to govern, his need is now for new friends, new advisors, new policies.

What that means, in terms of the true nature of the Labour-NZF-Green Government and its leader is, alas, only now becoming clear. New Zealanders may revel in the warm glow of their Sun Queen, but, having placed her on the throne, they must now content themselves with the role of mere spectators of her royal progress.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 19 December 2017.

Socialism and Populism: The Party is Just Beginning!

Let's Do This! Back here in God’s Own Country, though, I’ll go on looking at the clips of Prime Minister Ardern being welcomed back from Government House by thousands of delighted New Zealanders. I’ll listen again, as she promises to lead “a government of kindness”, and I’ll wish her – and the 72-year-old patriot who gave progressive New Zealand the votes it needed to govern – all the success that “socialism and populism” can bring.

ZACH CASTLES is sitting, gutted, in a café overlooking the Thames. The former “National ministerial adviser”, no longer having any National ministers to advise, has clearly relocated himself to a more promising political marketplace. Even so, our brave young capitalist has taken the time to share his thoughts with The Spinoff. (Who else!) And, oh, comrades, what thoughts they are!

He begins by imploring National to defend capitalism from “the coalition of socialists and populists” who are attempting (apparently Jacinda hasn’t quite got the hang of this yet) to unleash class war across New Zealand’s green and pleasant land. Poor Zach, it’s the sheer ingratitude of the Left that upsets him the most. Don’t these ingrates realise that “nearly one billion people over the last 20 years [have] been lifted out of poverty because of it.”

Really, Zach? The dragooning of millions of subsistence farmers and their children into the factories, warehouses and shops of China, India and Brazil. The super-exploitation perpetrated by the burgeoning bourgeoisie of these countries. The impossible working conditions. The relentless speed-ups. The graft and corruption upon which so much of their “economic growth” depends. The unbelievable environmental despoliation left in its wake. This is what you call being “lifted out of poverty”? This is what you are asking National to defend?

It sure is. In fact, according to Zach: “the very ‘neoliberalism’ the incoming prime minister criticises, and yet refuses to define [Oh, for God’s sake, just look it up on Wikipedia, man!] has helped many Kiwis out of a life of welfare dependence and into the dignity of a job.”

Ah, but there’s a big difference, isn’t there, Zach, between the sort of job you’re heading for in London and the jobs which beneficiaries are forced to accept, or face being sanctioned into abject poverty. Pumping gas for the minimum wage. Or being paid $17.00 an hour to stand all day behind a till while your feet swell and your calves cramp-up. That’s not the sort of job you’re about to take up – is it Zach? And those are most certainly not the sort of wages you’re anticipating from whatever right-wing political party or think-tank you’re about to be snapped-up by. It just wouldn’t be dignified. Not for a man of your talents. Would it Zach?

But, then, Zach isn’t accustomed to thinking about such matters. If he was, then he simply couldn’t write a paragraph like this:

“The return of the left to government now means everything that makes New Zealand such a role model, at a time of supposed global despair, now hangs in the balance. We were meant to be the poster child for globalism, free trade and ambition; now we are being set up as the test flight for a return to the 1970s. A world Jacinda Ardern’s own voters have never actually known.”

“Never actually known”? Really, Zach? I’m well aware that most Kiwis over 55 voted for your lot, but most is not the same thing as all. (Just as receiving most of the votes cast is not the same as receiving a majority of the votes cast!) I was very much alive and kicking in the 1970s, and let me tell you, those were great years to be young.

There were jobs for everyone – at good, union-negotiated, wages. The state loaned young couples money, at 3 percent interest, to buy their own home. All mothers received a generous Family Benefit. Tertiary education was as close to free as makes no difference. Ah, Zach, the manifold evils of socialism and populism!

Zach claims the National Party subscribes to the ideas of Edmund Burke, but this attempt to drape the clothing of a respectable political philosophy over National’s naked worship of power, simply will not wash. Burke understood the critical importance of tradition, and the wisdom it was able to impart to generations raised in its embrace. But National has never been a respecter of tradition – at least not of the core New Zealand traditions of fairness and decency. Indeed, the party was founded with the express purpose of thwarting the organised political expression of fairness and decency.

Presumably, that is why Zach can hail the “radicalism” of Ruth Richardson; and why he speaks glowingly of his party’s role in “leading transformative social and economic change”. Transformative, eh? Well, yes, as someone who remembers a New Zealand in which everyone worked, was comfortably housed, and could look forward with confidence to their children living in a happier more prosperous world than the one in which they’d been raised, I’d have to say that “transformation” is exactly the right word. What I’m much less certain about, however, is whether Kiwis sleeping in cars, while their children go hungry, was the change most New Zealanders were looking for.

So, you go on looking out over the Thames, Zach. And, by all means, urge your National Party comrades to seize this wonderful opportunity to “make capitalism cool again”. Back here in God’s Own Country, though, I’ll go on looking at the clips of Prime Minister Ardern being welcomed back from Government House by thousands of delighted New Zealanders. I’ll listen again, as she promises to lead “a government of kindness”, and I’ll wish her – and the 72-year-old patriot who gave progressive New Zealand the votes it needed to govern – all the success that “socialism and populism” can bring.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Saturday, 28 October 2017.

Can Jacinda Ride “Hirschman’s Cycle” Without Falling Off?

Good Will Receiving: If New Zealanders are in a mood to promote the public good, then there is every chance that the Ardern-led government will succeed. If they are more concerned with promoting their own, private, welfare, then the resistance to the new government’s redistributive ambitions is likely to be very fierce indeed.

WILL THIS NEW GOVERNMENT SUCCEED? Across the political spectrum, that is the question. Will Jacinda Ardern and her NZ First and Green Party allies find their fellow New Zealanders broadly accommodating of, or fiercely resistant to, her government of change?

If New Zealanders are in a mood to promote the public good, then there is every chance that the Ardern-led government will succeed. If they are more concerned with promoting their own, private, welfare, then the resistance to the new government’s redistributive ambitions is likely to be very fierce indeed.

A sociologist might attempt an answer to this question by asking where New Zealand currently stands in the “Hirschman Cycle”.

Named after the much-admired American sociologist, Albert Hirschman, the Cycle describes those recurring historical transitions from periods in which society is predominantly concerned with maximising private consumption and individual well-being; to periods characterised by a general willingness to accommodate public programmes aimed at uplifting those in need and dedicated to reaffirming the nation’s core values and aspirations.

The period of US history most proximate to Hirschman’s research was the period known as “The Great Society”. After nearly two decades of rapidly rising incomes and growing affluence, Americans entered the 1960s more willing to embrace public policies of uplift and altruism than at any time since the “New Deal” of the 1930s.

The architect of The Great Society, President Lyndon Baines Johnson, attempted to sketch out his administration’s response to inequality – especially racial inequality – in his famous “To Fulfil These Rights” speech to Howard University’s commencement class on 4 June 1965:

“There is no single easy answer to all of these problems”, the President told his audience of mostly African-American students. “Jobs are part of the answer. They bring the income which permits a man to provide for his family. Decent homes in decent surroundings and a chance to learn – an equal chance to learn – are part of the answer. Welfare and social programs better designed to hold families together are part of the answer. Care for the sick is part of the answer. An understanding heart by all Americans is another big part of the answer. And to all of these fronts – and a dozen more – I will dedicate the expanding efforts of the Johnson administration.”

This, the high-water mark of social-democratic liberalism in the United States, is made even more luminous by the darkness currently enveloping Trump’s America. Born out of one of V.O. Key’s, “permissive” political consensuses, Johnson’s “Great Society” would not survive the public’s rapidly declining faith in Washington-based solutions. The race-riots of the mid-60s, a steadily escalating war in Vietnam, and the fast-deteriorating US domestic economy soon ushered America into the selfish phase of Hirschman’s Cycle.

The question Jacinda and her colleagues have to ask themselves, therefore, is whether or not such a “permissive” political consensus exists in New Zealand. Is her “administration” entering office at a point in the Hirschman Cycle roughly analogous to where the US was when President Johnson was inaugurated in January 1965?

The answer, sadly, is: “No.” Far from being swept into office on an historic landslide, Jacinda’s victory is both electorally narrow and politically controversial. If a US precedent is being sought, it isn’t to be found in the Johnson Administration, but in the politically and economically fraught administration of President Jimmy Carter.

Massive problems have grown up during the nine-year period of National Party rule. Escalating social inequality has fuelled poverty and homelessness: leading to rising levels of mental illness, suicide, violent crime and a record number of incarcerated citizens. The social and economic climate is, therefore, very different to that which prevailed when Norman Kirk was swept to victory in the golden year of 1972.

Like the Johnson Administration, the Kirk Government inherited a “permissive” political consensus of unprecedented scope. Jacinda’s political environment, by contrast, has all the room for manoeuvre of Jimmy Carter’s and Helen Clark’s. Hirschman’s Cycle-wise, New Zealand remains deeply mired in its individualistic/private consumption phase. Moreover, as Winston Peters soberly observed, there is little prospect of the country enjoying, anytime soon, the expansive economic and social conditions capable of persuading an electorate to embrace a government committed to the public good.

And yet, out-of-phase though New Zealand may be, Hirschman Cycle-wise, Jacinda and the public good have no choice but to deliver each other.

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 27 October 2017.

Strategies Of Right-Wing Resistance: It CAN Happen Here.

Mass Resistance To A Left-Wing Government: Women bang pots and pans in protest at the shortages arising out of the right-wing strategies of resistance directed against the left-wing government of Chilean President Salvador Allende 1970-73.

CAN WE REALLY DO THIS? As the euphoria of victory wears off, and the sheer enormity of the challenge confronting progressive New Zealand reveals itself, it would be foolish not to feel just a little bit daunted. We face an economic system without the slightest idea how to solve the problems created by its discredited policies and practices. Nevertheless, the Neoliberal Establishment remains very strong, and just as soon as it settles upon an effective strategy of resistance, the fightback will begin.

Two principle lines of attack present themselves. The first, sketched out in this morning’s NZ Herald editorial, is to paint the new Labour-led coalition as little more than a pink-tinted continuation of Bill English’s National Government.

The Herald’s leader-writer dismisses any notion that the new regime represents some sort of sharp break with Neoliberalism. He is at pains to point out that all the key elements of the “Open Economy” remain firmly entrenched. All we are hearing from Labour, he says, is the rhetoric of change. But, even the most cursory examination of the Labour-NZ First-Green Government’s priorities, argues the Herald’s leader-writer, reveals them to be little changed from those of the Clark-Cullen years: priorities to which both John Key and Bill English were more than happy to subscribe for 9 years.

This is a subtle strategy, directed principally at the new government’s most ideologically-committed supporters. Its purpose is to demoralise, antagonise, and inflame suspicion. At its heart stands the figure of Grant Robertson: Finance Minister and close friend of Prime Minister Ardern. As the prime-mover of the Labour-Greens’ self-limiting “Budget Responsibility Rules”, Robertson has already positioned himself as New Zealand Capitalism’s first line of defence against left-wing fiscal recklessness. By praising Robertson’s political moderation and economic orthodoxy, the Herald’s mouthpiece intends to divide and conquer the Neoliberal Establishment’s most coherent progressive critics.

The most obvious deficiency with this “demoralisation” strategy is that it leaves the Opposition with very little room in which to manoeuvre politically. If the Labour-NZ First-Green Government is really just a slightly pinker version of its pale-blue predecessor, then how can National attack it with any credibility – or success? To raise a political storm violent enough to reclaim the Treasury Benches requires the red-hot passion of the fanatic – not the lofty sneers of the neoliberal intellectual who recognises kindred economic spirits when he sees them.

That Richard Prebble recognised this in an instant is unsurprising. Few living New Zealand politicians can claim a better rapport with the dark animal spirits needed to rouse this country’s right-wing voters. It was Prebble who recognised the futility of Act attempting to sell pure free-market policies to an electorate that wasn’t buying them. It was only when he identified the party with law and order, crime and punishment, environmental scepticism, and the deep anti-Maori prejudices of rural and provincial New Zealand that Act was able to lift itself up and over the 5 percent MMP threshold. Like Rob Muldoon before him, Prebble understands that to make right-wing Kiwis angry enough to destroy the Left, you first have to frighten them out of their wits.

Hence Prebble’s outrageous claim that Winston Peters is guilty of mounting a coup d’etat against Kiwi democracy. It is not his purpose, and neither, I suspect, does he believe it should be National’s, to convince New Zealanders that they have nothing to fear from what, in all likelihood, will prove to be a pretty mild and responsible Labour-led Government. His aim, and almost certainly the aim of most of the National Party caucus (and their surrogates in the mainstream news media) is to splash as much red paint over Jacinda Ardern, Winston Peters and James Shaw as is humanly possible.

The Labour-NZ First-Green Government will be presented by these hard-line rightists as an illegitimate and dangerously anti-capitalist regime. Its anti-business and anti-farming policies, they will argue, are not only incompatible with genuine Kiwi democracy, but also constitute a direct attack on the sanctity of private property. As such, it will not be enough to merely oppose this far-left government; it will be necessary to fight it head-on.

Interviewed on RNZ’s “morning Report” this morning, Ken Shirley, CEO of the Road Transport Forum (and former right-wing comrade-in-arms with Richard Prebble and Roger Douglas in both the Labour and Act parties) reminded listeners of the massive truck-owners protest in the dying days of Helen Clark’s government. If Jacinda’s government went ahead with its plans to use the Road User Charges collected from the RTF’s members for purposes other than the maintenance and construction of roads, then similar protests could be expected.

Prior to the coup that toppled the left-wing “Popular Unity” government of Salvador Allende in 1973, the country’s economy had been made to “scream” by a nationwide strike organised by the right-wing truckers’ union and supported by the bosses of Chile’s biggest trucking companies. The ensuing shortages brought thousands of angry, middle- and working-class women onto the streets, banging their pots and pans in protest. The right-wing newspapers maintained a relentless barrage of criticism against the “anti-democratic” and “incompetent” government of Chile’s self-proclaimed Marxist president. Calls for Allende’s forcible removal grew louder and more frequent until, on 11 September 1973, General Pinochet was obliged to overthrow the “communist dictator”.

A very similar project of economic destabilisation and political mobilisation was set in train by the right-wing opponents of the left-wing Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez, in 2002.

As a strategy of right-wing resistance, it has proved successful in a distressingly large number of countries. Progressive New Zealanders would be most unwise to believe, even for a moment, that it cannot happen here.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 26 October 2017.