Nobody Move: Ageing Boomers, Laurie & Les, Talk Politics.

“So long as we live in a democracy, economic policy can never be anything other than social-democratic.”

“HEH!”, snorted Laurie, as he waved his debit card over the EFTPOS machine. “Same price as last week. I guess budgets aren’t what they used to be.”

“I wouldn’t know,” replied the young barman, wearily, “my memories don’t go back that far.”

“Heh!”, Laurie snorted again. “I keep forgetting that half the world’s younger than I am.”

Depositing the two brimming glasses of ale on the table in the corner, Laurie seats himself, smiles wanly at his drinking companion, Les, and sighs.

“Remember when Budgets were announced at 7:30 at night, after all the shops had shut, so that people couldn’t rush out as stock up on booze and cigarettes before Parliament raised the excise taxes?”

“I certainly do,” Les replied, “and in those days nobody pretended to be doing it for the nation’s health. The nation’s soul, perhaps, since drinking and smoking were still regarded as sinful by a goodly chunk of the population. But the nation’s health? Nah! Finance ministers just needed the revenue.”

“Anyway, the price of this ale hasn’t changed since last week. So Nicola Willis’s budget can’t be all bad.”

“Even if the excise tax has gone up, Laurie, I doubt if this place can afford to pass it on to its customers. You must have noticed that this old pub ain’t exactly bursting at the seams anymore, not the way it was before Covid. Time was, patrons were three deep at the bar. Now the bar staff are all standing idle, face down, fiddling with their phones.”

“So, what did you make of Nicola’s budget? What would you give it out of ten?”

“I’d give it a flat five, Laurie. Not because it was mediocre, but because, when push comes to shove, finance ministers don’t have a lot of choices about what they include in a budget. Truth is, mate, I’d give the same mark out of ten to every budget since Ruth Richardson’s “Mother of All Budgets” in 1991.”

“Crikey! That’s not the answer I was expecting – not at all. What would you have given Richardson’s effort, then?”

“Ten out of ten.”

“Aww, come on, Les, an old socialist like you? You’re pulling my leg.”

“Not at all. I’ve given that mark to Richardson because at least she tried to break the mould. She made a genuine attempt to reset the New Zealand government’s spending priorities. Was it a harsh budget? Yes, it was. Was it a cruel budget? Indisputably – to a degree not seen since the 1930s. But, she was determined to change the game, and, for a little while, she did.”

“As I recall, Les, all hell broke loose after the Mother of All Budgets. Voter trust in the two main parties plummeted. Jim Anderton and Winston Peters powered ahead in the polls.”

“That wasn’t the half of it, Laurie. National won the 1993 election by the skin of its teeth with just 35 percent of the vote. Jim Bolger’s government clung-on thanks to the vagaries of first-past-the-post – which was, of course, voted out of existence in favour of MMP. Bolger had no choice except to sack Richardson – a blood sacrifice to appease an incandescent electorate. Not surprisingly, no finance minister since has dared to reprioritise the state’s obligations.”

“So it would seem. Nicola’s spending and borrowing more than Grant Robertson – hardly the best of starts for a right-wing coalition government.”

“And that’s the whole story in a nutshell, Laurie. So long as we live in a democracy, economic policy can never be anything other than social-democratic. Oh, sure, it may be a penny-pinching social democracy when the Right is in power, and a free-spending social-democracy when the Left’s seated on the Treasury Benches. But, the party, or coalition of parties, that attempts to starve the poor, or make us pay for health care, or our kid’s education, will be voted out of office before you can chant “What’s the story filthy Tory? – Out! Out! Out!”

“And the really big problems? Like New Zealand’s lousy productivity, its huge infrastructure deficit, its economy that’s far too dependent on what comes out of cows’ udders? Are they untouchable, too?”

“Did you ever see that old ‘Counting Crows’ video? The one with the woman carrying the sign that read: ‘Nobody move and nobody gets hurt.’? That’s us, Laurie. Nobody’s moving.”

“And everybody’s getting hurt.”

This short story was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 7 June 2024.

In Search Of Unity.

Kotahitanga: New Zealand’s future belongs to those who do not fear a nation carved out of unity and solidarity, and are willing to trust the carvers. Some New Zealanders will be required to step up, and others, perhaps for the first time in their lives, will be expected to step back.

BUDGET WEEK has thrown up two very different examples of political representation. In the House of Representatives what we have witnessed is the intentionally divisive squaring-off of Government and Opposition. Unity is not a realistic possibility under our system of representative democracy.

On the streets, however, New Zealanders have witnessed something very different. On the streets, the call from one of the largest indigenous minorities on earth (approximately 20 percent of the population) has been for “Kotahitanga” – unity. What’s more, among those for whom indigeneity constitutes the core of their identity, that unity is not only possible – it is likely.

What is it that causes peoples raised in the traditions of representative democracy to accept disunity? The most optimistic answer is that what many critics condemn as disunity isn’t disunity at all. The debates in Parliament, according to the optimists, are intended to improve the legislative process by requiring the governing majority to test its policies against the objections and/or proposed alternatives of the minority. What some perceive as petty squabbles are, by this reckoning, vital contributors to a much broader and more important unity – that of the citizenry’s faith and trust in the democratic system.

That’s the theory, anyway. But it is by no means certain that a majority of citizens are disposed to accept it. Many people find representative democracy’s angry parliamentary exchanges unedifying – to the point of being disgraceful. Many blame the party system for fostering and perpetuating socio-political divisions. They find it difficult to believe that ordinary, decent, citizens would not, given half-a-chance, coalesce naturally around a programme dedicated to the public good. Their instincts tell them that a political system which deliberately divides the nation is a liability, not an asset.

In the context of New Zealand’s democratic traditions, a cynic might point to the fact that between the mid-1850s and the mid-1870s – the period when the spirit of party and faction was suppressed by a franchise limited to Pakeha male property-owners (joined, after 1867, by four Māori Members of Parliament) – the spirit of unity was much more in evidence. Property-owners do, after all, share a unifying inclination to protect what they own from any political movement disposed to redistribute it among those who own next-to-nothing.

By the 1870s, the gravest threat posed to the “private” property of Pakeha New Zealanders was from dispossessed hapu and iwi. Indeed, nothing is more likely to create unity among Pakeha than the prospect of Māori coming together, under the aegis of the Treaty of Waitangi, to reclaim the collective property which the Pakeha, largely by virtue of controlling the Legislature, had empowered themselves to seize. It is no accident that the class antagonisms that would shape New Zealand for the next 100 years did not emerge as a significant historical driver until the Māori had been stripped of the power to defend their resources.

So, if our political system is, fundamentally, a process driven by the see-sawing struggle between those who own a disproportionate amount of property, and those who seek an equitable portion of the life-chances such ownership confers, then is the realisation of social and political unity a goal restricted to soft-headed idealists and hard-hearted revolutionaries?

As is her wont, the Goddess of History offers no easy or comforting answers. She will tell you that social and political unity is possible, but only when a nation is threatened with subjugation and/or annihilation. When an enemy threatens to destroy all that a people holds dear, then all other quarrels are momentarily, at least, set aside.

To the crowd assembled outside his royal palace on 1 August 1914, as war loomed over Europe, the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, declared:

“I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the expression of your loyalty and your esteem. When it comes to war, all parties cease and we are all brothers.”

In New Zealand, too, the unity generated by the outbreak of the First World War brought Government and Opposition together in a coalition that would last until 1919. Something very similar happened at the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. And, although the global Covid-19 Pandemic did not inspire a coalition government, it certainly produced a high level of political co-operation between all the political parties. Economic measures that would normally have engendered bitter opposition were introduced quickly, and largely without rancour.

How far away that crisis-induced unity seemed on Thursday, 30 May 2024 when Nicola Willis delivered her first budget to the House of Representatives. Those controlling a disproportionate amount of the nation’s wealth would have been well-satisfied with the economic and social policies of the conservative coalition government. Those whose life-chances were being limited by those same policies looked to the opposition parties for succour. Very soon, all the ideological binaries were on display.

When it came to solving New Zealand’s problems, division and rancour were more in evidence on the floor of the House than unity and solidarity.

Not so on the streets, or in Parliament Grounds. There it was all unity and solidarity. Under the aegis of Te Tiriti, Māori from all over Aotearoa had gathered in defence of everything they hold dear: their language, their mana, and the rights guaranteed to them 184 years ago at Waitangi. In the eyes of those thousands of marchers, the Pakeha colonisers are, once again, making war on their people, and, once again, the spirit of Kotahitanga is breathing upon the flames in the flax-roots.

On display across New Zealand on Thursday, 30 May 2024 was an indigenous people that still has faith in itself, and continues to believe that its hopes are not vain.

How different is the picture inside the Pakeha nation. There, the National Party, Act, and NZ First have thrown up a defensive palisade around the interests that elected them. Labour, the Greens and Te Pati Māori, far from walking forth gladly to find, in the words of James K. Baxter, “the angry poor who are my nation”, keep faith only with the thin social strata that long ago reconciled itself to the administration of a system it does not control, and will never own.

New Zealand’s future belongs to those who do not fear a nation carved out of unity and solidarity, and are willing to trust the carvers. Some New Zealanders will be required to step up, and others, perhaps for the first time in their lives, will be expected to step back.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 3 June 2024.

This Unreasonable Government.

Losing The Room: One can only speculate about what has persuaded the Coalition Government that it will pay no electoral price for unreasonably pushing ahead with policies that are so clearly against the national interest. They seem quite oblivious to the risk that by doing so they will convince an increasing number of voters that they are extremists.

ONE OF THE MOST PERPLEXING ASPECTS of the National-Act-NZ First coalition government is its perverse unreasonableness. Perverse, because in almost every instance the unreasonable nature of the Coalition’s policies generate reactions that can only be politically counterproductive to its chances of re-election.

Politicians can be radical, or reactionary, it matters little, just so long as they can a make a reasonable case for their intended course of action. A reasonable policy not only stands a good chance of being implemented, it is also likely to be well received by the electorate. If, over the course of its three year term, a government’s actions strike most voters as consistently unreasonable, then its chances of being re-elected will lessen considerably.

What makes a policy reasonable in the eyes of the ordinary voter? Principally, it is the quality of the evidence presented in its favour. If a policy is endorsed by persons with a reasonable claim to being experts, or, at the very least, by people with a long history of being right about the subject under discussion, then its chances of being accepted are high. The more questionable the credentials of those making the government’s case, however, the less faith the public is likely to place in its policies.

Public faith in government policy will dissipate even more rapidly if the only people or organisations to speak up in its favour are those with a clear vested interest in seeing it implemented. The moment the “evidence” of any given policy’s supporters provokes the ordinary voter to respond “Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?”, then the policy is in serious trouble.

But being in trouble is not the same as being rejected. A government absolutely determined to forge ahead has the power to implement policies that are unsupported by scientific evidence, expert opinion, common sense, or even a majority of the electorate. By doing so, however, the parties responsible not only expose themselves as being unreasonable, but they may also come across as potentially dangerous.

They remind voters of the intoxicated individual who, in the face of abundant evidence to the contrary, insists that s/he is sober enough to drive home. It’s not just the drunk people worry about, but the possibility that, if s/he gets behind the wheel, then a perfectly innocent person, or persons, may be seriously injured or killed. Unfortunately it’s not as easy to take the keys away from a government as it is to take the keys away from a drunk. Voters may be forced to wait three years, or more, before they can get a government intoxicated by its own unchallengeable authority off the road.

On the subject of roads: car-lovers and the Coalition would appear to be locked in what more and more New Zealanders perceive to be a particularly worrying example of political folie à deux. The Transport Minister, Simeon Brown, unmoved by scientific evidence, expert opinion, common sense, and what is fast approaching a majority of the electorate, is prioritising the construction of more and more “highways of national significance”. His decisions, by favouring road users (and the road haulage lobby) at the expense of New Zealand’s rail network, can only further impede New Zealand’s efforts to meet its Climate Change commitments.

One can only speculate about what it is that persuades the three coalition parties that they will pay no electoral price for unreasonably pushing ahead with policies that are so clearly against the national interest. They seem quite oblivious to the risk that by doing so they will convince an increasing number of voters that they are extremists.

Only extremists are so convinced of the rightness of their cause that no argument, no matter how rational and well-supported by evidence, is permitted to prevail against it.

Only extremists would consider passing a law that allows one of three Ministers of the Crown to over-rule the previous judgements of the courts, the recommendations of expert witnesses, the advice of his/her own carefully chosen advisory panel, and the clearly expressed wishes of affected locals, if they run counter to the Ministers’ preferred solutions.

The last time a right-wing government passed such a law, the author and some comrades, under cover of darkness, chained together and padlocked the doors of the Dunedin Law Courts, on the grounds that Rob Muldoon’s “Clutha Development (Clyde Dam) Empowerment Act” (1982) had just made them irrelevant to the conduct of public affairs.

That same Rob Muldoon would spend the next two years over-ruling virtually every institution dedicated to advising the government of the day on the state of the New Zealand economy, and how best it might be served by the decisions of its ministers. By mid-1984, unable to bring together a budget that added-up, Muldoon called a snap-election. New Zealand would never be the same.

Forty years later, another Finance Minister, against the advice of just about every reputable economist and responsible interest-group in the country, is proceeding with the Coalition’s promise to cut personal income tax. The consequences of this Muldoonesque intransigence are already apparent in public sector lay-offs, health sector cut-backs, and social-welfare sanctions. Not even the latest report from the OECD, which not only recommends against tax-cuts, but actually advocates for a Capital Gains Tax, carries sufficient weight to persuade Finance Minister Nicola Willis to see sense and act reasonably.

An unwillingness to be advised. Turning a deaf ear to ideas that challenge one’s prejudices. Insisting upon following a course of action that is more likely than not to result in unnecessary and avoidable harm to people, animals, and/or the natural environment. Starting down a road that seems to be leading to disaster, but refusing to turn back. These are not the actions of reasonable human-beings. On the contrary, they are the actions of the individuals, parties, and even the nation states, that have dragged humanity into it worst catastrophes.

Barely six months into its three-year term, the Coalition Government of Christopher Luxon cannot avoid the charge that it is manifesting all the self-destructive behaviour listed above. In circumstances where good ideas, no matter their provenance, should be given a fair hearing. Where concessions and compromises aimed at achieving consensus are more than ever necessary to steer the New Zealand ship-of-state through what Leonard Cohen called “the reefs of greed”, and “the squalls of hate”, we are given only the jutting chins of men and women who will not be told.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project Substack site on Monday, 13 May 2024.