Legislating For Liberty.

Revolutionary Intentions: The Regulatory Standards Bill sounds like one of those pieces of legislation debated on a dreary Thursday afternoon in an almost empty House of Representatives - it is anything but.

FOR A BILL set to transform New Zealand into a libertarian nightmare, it has an extremely boring name. The Regulatory Standards Bill (RSB) sounds like one of those pieces of legislation debated on a dreary Thursday afternoon in an almost empty House of Representatives. Not because anyone in particular wants it, but because those whose job it is to monitor the efficacy or otherwise of government regulations declares it to be necessary.

MPs protesting to their respective Party Whips that they know absolutely nothing about this sort of bill’s content, are told that participation in such debates is good for them. Speaking for ten minutes about something one knows absolutely nothing about is key political skill. Without it, no politician should expect to do more than shepherd boring bills through a nearly empty House for the rest of their (short) political career.

The RSB may sound like one of those bills, it is anything but. According to one critic, the Bill will “neuter the ability of lawmakers to consider anything outside of individual liberty and property rights”.

That this proposed piece of alleged legislative dynamite is the product of the Act Party is entirely unsurprising. David Seymour and his caucus are the most disciplined band of ideologically-driven politicians in our Parliament. Liberty and Property are their twin lodestars, and by them they navigate the choppy seas of New Zealand’s resolutely non-ideological politics.

Knowing exactly where they want to go has made it much easier for Act to determine, often with alarming and near-revolutionary clarity, what they ought to do. Boiled down to its essence, Act’s political mission is captured in the French expression laissez-faire – loosely translated as “let them do it”.

If the actions of individuals cause no harm to others – let them do it.

If those actions involve only their own property – let them do it.

Contrariwise, if some individuals seek to compel other individuals for any reason other than preventing them from causing harm to others, then don’t let them do it. And if that compulsion involves regulating the use of other individuals’ private property, then definitely don’t let them do it!

Understandably, socialists are not (and never have been) great fans of laissez-faire. The collective welfare is (or used to be) their lodestar. Individuals determined to put themselves, and their property, ahead of measures designed to serve the common good should not be allowed to do it.

Obviously, a great deal rests on how “harm” is defined.

If your dairy farm is polluting the streams and rivers that others are accustomed to fishing and swimming in, does that constitute harm? And, if it does, then, surely, the state is entitled to regulate your farming practices? That is to say, restrict the ways in which you can legally use your private property.

Alternatively, if a friend undertakes to sell you a few grams of cannabis, what business is it of the state’s? Why should smoking weed, which most medical scientists have determined to be essentially harmless, be punishable by law? Why shouldn’t individuals, if they’re old enough to assess and accept the consequences of using cannabis, and it causes others no harm, be allowed to do it?

If pressed, Act will always put the liberty of individual New Zealanders and the sanctity of their private property, well ahead of the nation’s collective welfare. With National and NZ First’s backing, Act’s leader hopes to enshrine his party’s guiding principles in the RSB.

If it becomes law, then all regulatory legislation will be weighed carefully by an appointed board against the claims of Liberty and Property. And, if Parliament, in its wisdom, elects to override the Board’s advice, then, as is already the case with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, it will be required to do so in the basilisk glare of public scrutiny.

Naturally, environmental groups, iwi, trade unionists and the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of NGO-land regard the RSB with horror and dismay. They no doubt believed that, having been soundly defeated several times already, such libertarian legislative forays were things of the past.

The Left, generally, is flabbergasted and outraged that the Coalition remains committed to the RSB’s passage. And, boy, are they making a fuss. To hear them talk, the Bill might have been co-sponsored by Sauron and Voldemort.

But, don’t be alarmed. One parliament cannot bind another. If the RSB looks like transforming Aotearoa-New Zealand into Mordor, then the next government can simply repeal it.

A version of this essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 6 June 2025.

What’s on the Label -vs- What’s in the Tin.

Would our political parties pass muster under the Fair Trading Act?

WHAT IF OUR POLITICAL PARTIES were subject to the Fair Trading Act? What if they, like the nation’s businesses, were prohibited from misleading their consumers – i.e. the voters – about the nature, characteristics, suitability, or quantity of the products – i.e. the policies – on offer? Would they pass muster? Or would MBIE be sending them a letter?

Let’s begin with the smaller parties.

The unlikelihood of ever finding themselves in a position to implement their entire policy agenda significantly reduces the political incentives for small parties to obfuscate and mislead the voters.

Such honesty is both refreshing and alarming. Small parties like Te Pāti Māori, NZ First, Act, and the Greens are not, as a rule, reticent about their plans for the country. They rightly intuit that ideological candour attracts more serious interest than political evasiveness. Their preference is for the narrow temple over the broad church.

So, Te Pāti Māori is openly demanding tino rangatiratanga – Māori sovereignty – and to hell with all the cavilling colonialists who complain. The party’s openly stated mission is to win all seven of the Māori seats, and to eliminate Labour’s decisive advantage, vis-à-vis Te Pāti Māori, in the Party Vote. Its leaders neither expect, nor are they seeking, a majority of all the votes cast. Their plan is to win enough parliamentary seats to make the support of Te Pāti Māori indispensable to the formation of any future New Zealand government.

That this makes the party hell-scary to a very large number of Non-Māori voters doesn’t bother Te Pāti Māori. It is well aware that skewering the Pakeha is a winning feature, not a fatal bug, of the party’s pitch. To succeed electorally it needs the enthusiastic support of rangatahi – and half-measures are repugnant to the young. Inspired by the uncompromising militancy of Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke, they want it all, and they want it now.

In other words, Te Pāti Māori is offering exactly what it says on the tin.

NZ First and its leader, Winston Peters, are considerably more opaque.

Schooled by Rob Muldoon – New Zealand’s second-most-successful populist politician after Richard Seddon – Peters’ consistent electoral objective has been to reconstitute the angry coalition of farmers, small-business owners, and culturally-alienated working-class voters, that swept Muldoon to victory in 1975.

Like Muldoon, Peters expects his angry coalition to shoulder the task of restoring the social, economic and cultural equilibrium which he charges the Left with disrupting. Unlike Muldoon, however, Peters had to launch his populist crusades in a multi-party environment. The binary choice between himself and Bill Rowling, which Muldoon set before voters in 1975, has never been available to Peters and NZ First. In the post-MMP political marketplace, NZ First has always faced too many competitors.

In attempting to match the offers of its competitors, NZ First has tended to promise more on the tin than its serially monogamous attachments to one or other of the two main parties could possibly secure by way of coalition agreements. It’s the party’s fatal marketing flaw: promising more, delivering less.

Act has never been overly concerned about what gets printed on the party’s tin, or whether it matches its contents. Hardly surprising, given that Act’s key objective has always been to preserve and, if possible, extend, the top-down free-market revolution.

Act’s most successful leaders, Richard Prebble and David Seymour, have always understood that the best way to achieve the party’s objectives is to persuade National voters that the dominant party of the Right has gone soft on social and cultural issues (free speech, the Treaty of Waitangi, law and order) or, even worse, that it is losing focus on the key objectives of neoliberal economics.

‘Give us the votes, and we will keep National honest’, has always been Act’s best pitch. And, if right-wing voters read no further than that on the tin, then satisfaction with the product is likely to be high. To paraphrase the Rolling Stones: Act doesn’t always get what disgruntled right-wing voters want (Treaty Principles Bill) but it’s highly effective at getting what the Neoliberal Revolution needs (workplace reform).

And then there’s the Greens.

For post-scarcity parties like the Values Party (1972-89) and the Greens, it really isn’t stretching things too far to suggest that what’s written on the tin matters a whole lot more than what’s inside it. The purpose of such parties (or should that be “movements”) is to educate and inspire the electorate. Meaning that it’s not so much a matter of telling people what’s actually in your tin, as it is of stipulating what should be in everybody else’s.

To a large extent this explains why Green Party co-leader James Shaw became something of an embarrassment to his colleagues. He’d committed the unforgivable sin of actually achieving something by persuading the National Party to lend its support to his Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Bill. Shaw’s wheeling and dealing, his willingness to compromise, smacked uncomfortably of actually existing politics – as opposed to the “perfect world” politics favoured by the true believers.

The Greens’ unbridled idealism explains in large measure why the challenge of matching what’s written on the party’s tin with its actual contents, has become so daunting. Promising the voters diversity, equity and inclusion on the label is one thing; opening the can to reveal Bible Belt Bussy; is something else entirely!

And Labour? Does it comport with the expectations of the Fair Trading Act?

It’s tempting to say that it does. (Not least on account of the fact that the author once sat as the party’s industrial representative on Labour’s New Zealand Council.) Certainly, anyone turning up to a Labour Party conference will still encounter trade union affiliates, feminists, LGBTQI activists, Māori reps, and ambitious youth delegates. Policy remits will be debated. Elections held. The trappings of a progressive party dedicated to furthering the interests of the New Zealand working-class are all still in place.

Upon closer inspection, however, the label on Labour’s tin has the look of something carefully designed by an advertising agency to evoke a powerful nostalgic reaction. There’s a lovely photo of Mickey Savage, the typeface chosen has a staunch 1930s feel to it, and there are numerous references to Labour’s proud history of delivering “social justice” to “working people”.

But the compulsory list of ingredients, set in 8 point at the bottom of the label, reveals something a little different: Democratic Socialism: 1 percent; Social Justice: 10 percent; Decolonisation and Indigenisation: 15 percent; Gender Equity: 19 percent; Neoliberalism: 55 percent.

Don’t say you weren’t warned.

And National – New Zealand’s most successful political party? How closely does National’s content match its branding?

Let’s start with the party’s name, “National”. It was deliberately chosen by the party’s founders to indicate that, unlike Labour’s openly sectional commitment to working-class New Zealanders and their trade unions, the new party (born in 1936 out of the United and Reform parties) was committed to serving the whole nation – irrespective of its citizens’ class origins. That was a big, and an almost impossible, ask.

If they’d been serious: if the party had indeed been dedicated to the welfare and advancement of all New Zealanders; i.e. to the “national” interest; then its policies would have built upon and extended Labour’s reforms. Not to put too fine a point upon it, a genuinely “national” party would have been as much “left” as it was “right”.

There will be many who, reading the above sentences, will cry: “Aha! That’s exactly what National is – ‘Labour Lite’!”

But, that would be an ideological, not an historical, response. Between 1936 and 1946 National was pledged to sweep away all of the social and industrial reforms of the First Labour Government. And even the party’s reluctant (albeit election-winning) acceptance of the welfare state in 1949 was tactical, rather than sincere. Forty-two years later, in 1991, National atoned for its earlier historical sins by laying waste to both the unions and the welfare state. What little of them remained standing, the party has been systematically dismantling ever since.

So, National isn’t a national party. Still less is it a nationalist party. A party infused with nationalist pride would be voluble in upholding the achievements of the New Zealand nation. It would sing the praises of its settlers, its city-builders, its progressive legislators, its engineers and scientists, its writers, poets, painters, and architects. A nationalist party would not sit mute as the New Zealand people’s achievements were disparaged as work of colonialist white supremacists.

No, National isn’t a nationalist party either.

If the policies promoted by the dominant party of the present coalition government came in a tin, and that tin was labelled “National”, then the only defence against a charge brought under the Fair Trading Act would be that after nearly 90 years of “representing everyone, farmers and businessmen alike” (thanks Gary McCormick) New Zealanders have come to accept that, in their country, the Right’s leading political party has only ever been notionally “national”.

We all know exactly what’s inside.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 21 April 2025.

No Enemies To The Left – Or The Right.

Wrong Turn: Labour and National can only reduce the toxic influence of their electoral competitors by rejecting their extremism.

“NO ENEMIES TO THE LEFT” has always been Labour’s rule-of-thumb. What, after all, does a moderate, left-of-centre party gain by allowing its electoral rivals to become repositories for every radical (i.e. congenitally dissatisfied) left-winger’s protest vote? To deliver effective government, a major party needs coalition partners that are weak and electorally vulnerable. Strong and electorally-secure coalition partners, as Christopher Luxon is discovering, tend to make effective government … problematic.

The classical solution to this problem requires the major parties of the Left and the Right to construct their policy platforms in such a way that only the most unrelenting ideologues would feel impelled to vote for their electoral confreres. By offering enough of what are generally perceived to be “sensible” right-wing/left-wing policies, they make it unnecessary for all but a handful of voters to venture any further along the political spectrum.

When the major parties adopt policies which a large number of their traditional supporters regard as uncharacteristic or extreme, an opportunity is created – especially under proportional representation – for those who feel deserted and/or betrayed by such behaviour to be offered a new electoral home. Labour’s embrace of “Rogernomics” forced it to entertain the Alliance and the Greens; National’s surrender to Ruth Richardson and Jenny Shipley created the opening for Winston Peters and NZ First.

The great risk for the major parties, should these “off-shoots” acquire a solid electoral foothold, is that major party strategists come to regard them as more-or-less reliable allies, rather than what they truly are – dangerous competitors. This could not be said of either Labour’s Helen Clark, or National’s John Key. When Clark was presented with the opportunity to kill the Alliance, she did not hesitate. When Peters and NZ First made themselves equally vulnerable to electoral destruction, Key dispatched them to the outer electoral darkness.

Labour either would not, or could not, replicate Key’s ruthlessness with the Greens. To date, the Green “brand” has proved sufficiently robust to withstand Labour’s “friendly fire”. Indeed, there seems to be a general reluctance on Labour’s part to treat the Greens as a serious rival. At the electorate level one occasionally hears angry accusations that the Greens are “stealing Labour’s vote” (which in Auckland Central, Wellington Central and Rongotai turned out to be no more than the truth!) but the idea of an all-out assault on the Greens has so far been dismissed by Labour’s leadership as electorally counter-productive.

From a more distant perspective, however, Labour’s tolerance of the Greens appears particularly foolish. The cultural radicalism that has largely superimposed itself over the Greens’ hitherto electorally unassailable “environmental-saviour” profile has been bleeding into Labour’s ranks for several years.

Nowhere was this more dramatically on display than in Nanaia Mahuta’s behind-the-scenes collaboration with the Greens during the “Three Waters” parliamentary debate. With Labour’s Māori Caucus acting as the surgeon, the Greens and Labour have been joined at the hip on virtually all matters relating to te Tiriti.

A similar convergence long ago became evident on transgender issues. For the best part of a week in March 2023, Labour and the Greens outbid each other in their condemnation of gender-critical provocateur, Posie Parker. As a consequence, both parties were strongly criticised for jointly contributing to the violence that accompanied Parker’s visit.

That Chris Hipkins’, upon becoming prime-minister in January 2023, either would not, or could not, add his party’s “woke” positions to Labour’s “policy bonfire” did not go unnoticed by the electorate.

Similarly, National’s low-key response to the Free Speech issue, coupled with its refusal to speak out more forcefully against “decolonisation” and “indigenisation” – policies being pursued, with Green support, by what struck many as an unheeding and ideologically-driven Labour Government – both rebounded strongly to the advantage of Act and NZ First. For a party seeking to make itself, once again, the big tent under which the overwhelming majority of right-of-centre voters could congregate, National’s weak responses were politically perplexing and electorally damaging.

Certainly, had Luxon’s 2023 share of the Party Vote (38 percent) equalled Bill English’s in 2017(44 percent) then his Coalition Agreement with Act and NZ First would have been a very different document.

It is the Labour Party, however, that has most need of an unwavering “no enemies to the left” strategy going into the 2026 general election. To understand the dangers it will face if it does not do everything it can to drive down the Greens’ support, Hipkins, or whoever replaces him, has only to consider the left-wing political debacle that is Wellington.

By 2023, Labour’s relationship with the Greens in Wellington had reached the point where voters no longer considered which of the two “left-wing” parties they supported to be all that important. As natural coalition partners, with broadly similar policies, a vote for Labour or the Greens could be presented, simply, as a vote “for the Left”. Coke, or Pepsi? It was purely a matter of taste.

Some indication of just how seriously this approach can go astray has been on more-or-less constant display since Tory Whanau was elected Mayor of Wellington, alongside a council dominated by “the Left”. The result has been a hot mess, as unedifying as it has been ineffectually extravagant.

If left-wing politicians believe that on the big issues they are as one, then they will start sweating the small issues. Inevitably, these small issues reveal themselves to be the big issues, helpfully reduced by unelected bureaucrats to bite-sized chunks. The resulting division, bitterness, and recrimination benefits nobody but the Right.

In what may yet turn out to be the decisive battle, Labour finally did the right thing. It stood by its policy of opposing asset sales. In doing so, however, its representatives incurred the wrath of their ultra-left “comrades”. These latter construed the vote to retain the Council’s airport shares as a repudiation of the Treaty rights of Wellington’s mana whenua, or, at least, of their unelected representatives.

The American political philosopher, Susan Neiman, wrote a book called “Left Is Not Woke”. The recent behaviour of Wellington City Council offers a vivid illustration of her thesis.

If Labour refuses to re-make itself as a moderate left-leaning party, with policies corresponding to the wishes of the overwhelming majority of New Zealanders keen to see the back of the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government, then it will remain in Opposition. While the voters are encouraged to see the Greens – and Te Pāti Māori – as Labour’s “natural” partners, espousing policies largely indistinguishable from its own, they will continue to hold their noses and vote for whichever right-wing party they consider the least objectionable.

Labour needs to reduce the toxic influence of the parties to its left by making it clear that it has put its own woke inclinations behind it. This will be a twofer for whoever has the guts to make it happen. Not only will it reduce (or even eliminate) the electoral irritants to the party’s left, but it will also, as an added bonus, neutralise the equally irritating woke faction cluttering-up its own ranks. Indeed, achieving the first objective is absolutely contingent upon achieving the second. 

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 14 October 2024.

Bunching Up.

Shoulder To Shoulder: With Labour only 8 percentage points away from descending into what most political scientists encouragingly call the “death zone” – i.e. a poll result under 20 percent – the instinct, like raw recruits under fire, is to bunch-up alongside the other parties of the Left.

STRATEGICALLY-SPEAKING, the Labour Party has positioned itself in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong leader.

The Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, uncomfortably sandwiched between the Treaty revisionists of Act and NZ First, has precious little room in which to manoeuvre. Labour should, therefore, be taking full advantage of Luxon’s discomfort by presenting itself as the only party capable of leading New Zealand out of the Badlands of racial disharmony and conflict. This it cannot do, however, because it has positioned itself alongside the Greens and Te Pāti Māori at the uncompromisingly radical end of the political spectrum.

The reasoning behind Labour’s eagerness to present itself as every bit as radical as the Greens and Te Pāti Māori isn’t difficult to grasp. Having secured just 26.91 percent of the Party Vote in the General Election, seen six of the seven Māori seats fall to Te Pāti Māori, and watched the Greens rack up their largest share of the Party Vote ever, while holding Auckland Central and picking up the former Labour strongholds of Wellington Central and Rongotai, Labour’s strategists are keen to keep as little daylight as possible between themselves and their left-wing competition.

They are terrified that any attempt to distance Labour from the positions carved out by the Greens and Te Pāti Māori will only encourage more desertions. When your (supposedly major) party is only 8 percentage points away from descending into what most political scientists encouragingly call the “death zone” – i.e. a poll result under 20 percent – the instinct, like raw recruits under fire, is to bunch-up.

Which only makes it easier for your enemies to shoot you down.

Labour needs to put as much daylight as possible between itself and their radical comrades as possible. Especially when it was the electorate’s negative reaction to what seemed to be Labour’s wholehearted embrace of the same ideological positions that have, for years, kept Te Pāti Māori and the Greens trapped in the Death Zone, that drove thousands of former Labour voters into the arms of National, Act and NZ First.

This is not only necessary for Labour to have any chance of recovery, but also for the Greens and Te Pāti Māori to have the slightest hope of ever being in a position to pull the big levers of government. Holding six of the seven Māori seats is all very well, but what can Te Pāti Māori’s MPs do with them except engage in performative Pakeha-baiting on the floor of the House of Representatives? Pumping-up the Green vote to 11.6 percent is similarly unavailing if its only effect is to increase your party’s presence on the Opposition benches. For the minor parties to be effective, they must attach themselves to a major party.

But, that’s the question – isn’t it? Are New Zealand voters convinced that Labour will ever again be regarded as a “major” party? Or, do they see Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori joining together in some sort of ideologically polyamorous commune at the “left-wing nutters” end of the political spectrum?

Any half-way decent political leader of a centre-left party would by now have recognised the intensifying debate over te Tiriti o Waitangi as a golden opportunity to stake out a position close enough to the concerns of Non-Māori voters to make them very glad that Labour is, at long bloody last, talking sense; while remaining close enough to Māori voters for them to feel reassured that Labour is not preparing to consign Te Tiriti to the dustbin of history. Something along the lines of: “If Te Tiriti is to remain a living document, then all New Zealanders – not just Māori, judges, and academics – need to feel confident about what the document actually meant in 1840, and what it should mean in 2024.”

Sadly, Chris Hipkins and his Labour caucus are unwilling to risk the wrath of Te Pāti Māori and the Greens by shifting their party out of its woke comfort zone. Instead they are still hurling accusations of racism and white supremacy at the political parties which attracted a majority of the votes cast in the 2023 general election.

Oblivious, apparently, to the inherent unwisdom of branding the citizens whose votes you so desperately need if you are to have any chance of ever again forming a government – racists and white supremacists.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 2 February 2024.

The Radical Consequences Of Doing As Little As Possible.

The Man With His Hand On The Handbrake: NZ First’s participation in government is defined not so much by what it does, but by what it prevents its coalition partners from doing. Photo by Richard Harman.

IN THE NORMAL COURSE OF EVENTS New Zealand general elections are won and lost in the centre-ground. Even under MMP, the multiplicity of parties is more apparent than real. For the most part, the minor parties are ideological outriders, positioned to the left or right of the more moderate political sentiment pursued by the majors. When National showed signs of losing its taste for economic reform, Act stepped forward to keep it honest. When Labour embraced neoliberalism in the 1980s, it spawned a succession of protest parties: NewLabour, the Alliance, the Greens; to keep the progressive flag flying. It is, therefore, a pretty straightforward exercise to work out who will go with whom after the votes have been counted. Everyone knows that the outriders have only one credible choice of coalition partner.

What makes the NZ First Party such a difficult political proposition is that it is the only party which claims the centre – not the centre-right or the centre-left – as its natural home. Since its foundation in July 1993, NZ First’s consistent pitch to voters has been that National and Labour are fraudulent centrists: pretending to moderation while secretly embracing extremism. Coming from the National Party, the founder and leader of NZ First, Winston Peters, has witnessed at close hand the enormous political effort required to prevent New Zealand’s business and farming interests from bending successive governments’ economic and social policies to their will. Peters knows what a radical undertaking the defence of moderation has always been.

Radicalism of any sort is disruptive, and the sort of radical populist interventions required to thwart the predatory intentions of the Australian banks, big business, the agricultural sector, large public sector unions and iwi-based corporates must entail major disruptions. This explains the unabashed hostility towards NZ First which has become the default position of virtually all the other political parties. They know that any coalition relationship with Peters and NZ First is bound to involve the frequent use of the party’s infamous “handbrake”. NZ First’s participation in government is defined not so much by what it does, but by what it prevents its coalition partners from doing.

The first coalition government of which NZ First was a part illustrates the political dilemma created by the mere presence of a genuinely centrist party. The changes demanded by NZ First were small-scale, but very popular: free doctor’s visits for children under six years old; generous concessions for superannuitants. They were bearable. But, NZ First’s refusal to support any further privatisations of municipally- and/or state-owned enterprises most certainly was not. National’s “dries” could not countenance such a direct challenge to the core tenets of neoliberalism. The successful plot, first to oust Jim Bolger (the coalition’s enabler) and then to dismiss Peters and his party, gave the lie to National’s pretentions to moderation. It also illustrated in the most vivid terms the radically disruptive effect of, in effect, doing nothing.

NZ First’s coalition with Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Party also illustrates the disruptive effect of centrist aspirations, this time from the point of view of a populist party which had quickly become profoundly alarmed at both the inexperience of its senior coalition partner’s ministers, and what its leader and his colleagues were persuaded was the extremism of some of those ministers’ ambitions. It was not long before NZ First was reaching for the handbrake – most notably in relation to Labour’s preference for a Capital Gains Tax. Here, again, we see NZ First’s strong reluctance to disturb the status quo. Tax-free capital gain constitutes a vital part of New Zealand’s small enterprises’ business model. Peters was unconvinced that his Labour colleagues fully grasped the likely consequences – economic and cultural – of introducing a CGT.

Peters’ apprehension concerning the extremism permeating Labour’s parliamentary ranks was subsequently borne out by the eventual release of the He Puapua Report. The fact that the far-reaching recommendations of this guide to New Zealand becoming fully compliant, by 2040, with the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples had been kept from them was bitterly resented by NZ First and its leader.

Had it known about He Puapua, it is likely that NZ First, by campaigning strongly against it, would have remained above the 5 percent MMP threshold. While it is probable that the 2020 general election would have freed Labour from the need for NZ First’s support, Peters’ mere presence in the House would have strengthened the opposition to Labour’s decolonisation and indigenisation efforts significantly. In these circumstances, Act’s opinion poll support may not have surged so dramatically, and the 2023 electoral battlefield would look quite different.

Certainly, Act’s implacable opposition to serving alongside Peters and his colleagues in a National-Act-NZ First coalition government lends strength to the argument that political parties determined to keep the actions of a multi-party government within the parameters of public tolerance cannot avoid having a decisive impact on its conduct.

A National-led government committed to a purely ameliorative programme vis-à-vis infrastructure, housing, health and education would, surely, welcome the support of a similarly inclined NZ First? That the National leader, Christopher Luxon, has, to date, had so little to say on whether he would, or would not, welcome Peters’ participation in a coalition government, suggests strongly that his party’s ambitions fall well short of the grandiose. Unfortunately for Luxon, the same cannot be said for the ambitions of David Seymour and Act.

Act’s radicalism may yet prove its undoing. Were Peters and NZ First to retire to the cross-benches, promising their support for any confidence motion in a National-Act minority government (in much the same way as the Greens promised their support for a Labour-Alliance minority government back in 1999) Luxon would become New Zealand’s next prime minister. The downside of this arrangement would be that he and his party would be governing as hostages to Act’s extreme policy agenda.

While NZ First could vote for those items on National-Act’s agenda enjoying majority support, and for which it had also campaigned, this would not be the case when it came to Act’s hardline economic and social policies. As the time for National-Act to present their first Budget drew near, the question of whether Peters’ promise of confidence also included “supply” would become increasingly acute.

Were NZ First to say “This far – but no further!” and join with Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori in voting down a cruel austerity Budget, a new election would have to be called. With Act having demonstrated what it is made of, Peters and NZ First might humbly invite the electorate to provide National with a less extreme coalition partner. One not so determined to force unkind and unwanted policies down the electorate’s throat.

Of course, all the pundits will opine that any party forcing a snap election so soon after a general election will be punished mercilessly by the voters. It is possible, too, that if given the option of a second crack at getting the country back on the right track, the electors might opt for Labour-Green-Te Pāti Māori. Then again, a great many of those same electors, marvelling at the political magic of the Great Centrist Showman, might give him exactly what he asks for – thereby confirming the radical consequences of doing as little as possible and as much as necessary.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website of Monday, 14 August 2023.

After Ratana.

Smiling And Waiving A Golden Opportunity: Chris Hipkins knew that the day at Ratana would be Jacinda’s day – her final opportunity to bask in the unalloyed love and support of her followers. He simply could not afford to be seen to overshadow this last chance for his former boss to shine. National’s Christopher Luxon, however, was under no such obligation.
 

CHRIS HIPKINS found himself in an impossible situation yesterday (24/1/23). He had come to the tiny village of Ratana at the side of his Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern. At what would be her last official public engagement in that role, he could not possibly upstage her. His job was to smile and mouth platitudes. He was there to “introduce” himself to the assembled leaders of Maoridom and convince them that he will be a fitting replacement for the most accommodating prime minister Māori have ever had. He knew that this would be Jacinda’s day – her final opportunity to bask in the unalloyed love and support of her followers. He simply could not afford to be seen to overshadow this last chance for his former boss to shine.

The other Chris, however, National’s Christopher Luxon, was under no such obligation. He came to Ratana with a message to deliver. That message was not for the assembled Māori leaders, or, at least, not primarily for them. Luxon’s message was aimed squarely at all those Pakeha conservatives who have for many months been openly sceptical of National’s willingness to take a strong stand against Co-Governance, He Puapua and Three Waters. Ardern’s resignation and the uncontested election of Chris Hipkins to replace her had made the delivery of an unequivocal repudiation of all three of these racially-charged propositions a matter of urgency. Luxon and his advisers knew that if National didn’t stake out its position immediately, then the Hipkins-led Labour Party would beat them to the punch.

And Luxon did stake out a clear – or should that be clearer – position. His remarks concerning co-governance, recorded by RNZ-National’s reporters, left little room for misunderstanding:

I think it has been quite a divisive and immature conversation over recent years,” Luxon told the Ratana crowd, “and I personally think it’s because the government hasn’t been upfront or transparent with the New Zealand people about where it’s going and what it’s doing […..] We believe in a single coherent system – not one system for Māori and another system for non-Māori – for the delivery of public services. Things like Health, Education, and Justice, and critical infrastructure like Three Waters. It doesn’t mean that we don’t want Māori involved in decision-making and partnering with [non-]Māori, [but] we have a princip[led] objection because New Zealand has one government: it’s elected by all of us, it’s accountable to all of us, and its public services are available to anyone who needs them.

Clear enough for the Pakeha conservatives? Possibly. But, for many on the Right, National remains the party of John Key. The same John Key who secretly dispatched Te Pāti Māori’s Pita Sharples to the United Nations in New York to sign on behalf of all New Zealanders the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). The very same UNDRIP that Labour’s Helen Clark had refused to sign, because, with her much deeper understanding of the indigenous debate, she understood that the Declaration posed a direct threat to the constitutional integrity and sovereignty of the New Zealand state.

Those same conservative Pakeha also know that National is the party of Chris Finlayson who, while New Zealand’s Attorney-General and Treaty Settlements Minister, did more to hasten the fulfilment of the Māori nationalist agenda than any politician not named Mahuta or Jackson. The Right understands that an extremely radical reading of te Tiriti o Waitangi has already been deeply entrenched in the New Zealand Public Service (bolstered by legislatively enforceable Treaty principles) and is steadily transforming the way in which New Zealand is administered, as well as raising serious questions about the long-term future of private property rights.

There is also serious doubt on the right of New Zealand politics that Luxon and his advisers have even read – let alone understood – the He Puapua Report. Their fear is that, as the Māori nationalist, Donna Awatere, observed back in the early-1980s, Pakeha politicians will continue to remain blind to virtually every aspect of the nationalists’ project, and that this, the Pakeha’s racist refusal to take Māori sovereignty seriously, is what offers its promoters their best chance of success. Moreover, when two Labour prime ministers in a row have proved themselves incapable of answering basic questions about the content of te Tiriti o Waitangi, it’s difficult not to concede that Awatere and the conservatives have a point!

While it is certain that Luxon’s statements at Ratana constitute a direct conceptual challenge to the transformative constitutional project posited by the authors of He Puapua, what is much less certain is whether the National leader – unlike the leader of the Act Party, David Seymour – grasps just how much of the basic infrastructure of co-governance has already been constructed. Having drawn his line in the sand at Ratana, Luxon cannot now avoid arriving at the same political destination Seymour reached more than two years ago. The point where he realises that the progress towards a racially bifurcated, co-governed Aotearoa can only be halted by enshrining a conservative reading of te Tiriti in law, and by rooting-out with ruthless thoroughness all of the structures and procedures that have grown out of the radicals’ reading of te Tiriti’s meaning.

The daunting challenge confronting Chris Hipkins is how to regain the initiative from Luxon without locking himself into the same conservative logic currently drawing National and Act inexorably towards a maximalist, Pakeha-driven, revision of the Treaty’s constitutional, political and cultural significance. Between now and the October General Election, Hipkins and his party are going to have to learn to take Māori nationalism seriously. Because Luxon is right, to date Labour’s handling of this issue has been divisive and immature. The new prime minister could, therefore, do a lot worse than to sit down with an old one, Helen Clark, and learn a few home-truths about the deadly seriousness of the indigenous forces seeking to take their country back.

Hipkins’ first and most obvious move is to announce that the Three Waters legislation will be repealed, pending a broad and thorough examination of the project’s all-too-obvious political and economic shortcomings. Pushing the pause button on this extraordinarily unpopular project will be good, practical, “bread-and-butter” politics. Were the new prime minister to follow it up with a promise to initiate an equally broad and thorough democratic debate about the moral and practical status of the Tiriti/Treaty in twenty-first century New Zealand, the public response might be even more positive – especially if the right of all schools of historical and constitutional thought to freely contend with one another was guaranteed by Hipkins’ Government.

Jacinda Ardern’s greatest contribution to her country’s evolution was to reinvigorate the idea that politics should be about more than conventional administration and “responsible” financial management. She made us believe again that a person’s reach should exceed their grasp. “Jacinda” was a ray of sunlight through the drear neoliberal darkness. In that shaft of sunlight she showed us a new and wonderfully different nation. The task she has bequeathed to her successor – and her people – is to create the road that will take them there.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 26 January 2023.

Proceeding Without The People: Labour’s Gift To The Right.

Colonial Relic: The te Tiriti-driven constitutional transformation proposed by the parties of the Left makes no provision for popular ratification. The radical changes proposed – like Three Waters – will either be imposed by statute, or achieved by judicial fiat. No heed will be given to the venerable notion that it is unacceptable for a government in possession of a temporary parliamentary majority to fundamentally change the rules of the political game. 

BY THE SECOND HALF of 2022 the right-wing assault on the Treaty policies of the Left will be raging.

At the level of local government, candidates known to support the Government’s Three Waters scheme will be targeted for electoral destruction. The local government elections will be repurposed as a national referendum on the Three Waters legislation. If its supporters are voted out, then the Government will face increasingly angry demands for the scheme’s abandonment.

On the broader political front, NZ First, finally free of the Serious Fraud Office’s investigation, will be terrifying rural and provincial audiences with tales of rampant, government-supported Māori separatism hellbent on destroying New Zealand democracy.

With contrapuntal precision, Act’s David Seymour will be reassuring the people Winston Peters has been terrifying that the price of Act’s participation in any coalition government of the Right will be the effective nullification of the Treaty of Waitangi.

National, with less venom and vitriol than its potential allies, will, nevertheless, have re-positioned itself on Treaty issues. Christopher Luxon will argue that what “normal” New Zealanders want more than anything in 2023 is a restoration of “social cohesion”. National’s position will be that social cohesion is impossible while three of New Zealand’s parliamentary parties are promoting racially-charged and undemocratic policies calculated to drive New Zealanders apart.

Labour’s, the Greens’ and the Māori Party’s ability to successfully counter the Right’s attack will be fatally undermined by their deafening silence on the key issue of whether or not they intend to seek formal popular authorisation for their radical (some would say revolutionary) proposals.

To date, however, the te Tiriti-driven policies and plans of all three left-wing parties offer no opportunity for the people of New Zealand to have their say on the profound constitutional changes being promoted.

The Left’s refusal to abide by the long-established conventions for validating and effecting significant constitutional change in New Zealand will leave them wide open to the charge that they are conspiring to brush aside their country’s democratic traditions.

The most damaging aspect of the Right’s charge will be that it is true.

The te Tiriti-driven constitutional transformation proposed by the parties of the Left makes no provision for popular ratification. The radical changes proposed – like Three Waters – will either be imposed by statute, or achieved by judicial fiat. No heed will be given to the venerable notion that it is unacceptable for a government in possession of a temporary parliamentary majority to fundamentally change the rules of the political game. The convention that significant constitutional reform – like altering the way parliamentarians are elected – must be put to a referendum, will be over-ridden.

Labour and the Greens have “form” in this regard.

The Labour-led government of Helen Clark established the New Zealand Supreme Court and abolished the right of New Zealanders to appeal to the Privy Council in London, simply by passing a law to that effect. In spite of the radical reformation of the New Zealand judiciary proposed by the law’s supporters, New Zealanders were given no opportunity to vote the reforms up or down.

Labour’s parliamentary caucus has not grown any more supportive of New Zealand’s democratic political culture in the years since the Supreme Court Bill was passed in 2003. Indeed, the venomous scorn poured upon the defenders of freedom of expression by some Labour and Green MPs strongly suggests that the rights and freedoms granted to all New Zealanders by the Bill of Rights Act (and, for that matter, the Treaty of Waitangi) are regarded as irritating obstacles to the imposition of a new te Tiriti-based political order.

The process adopted by the Clark Government in relation to the Supreme Court Act is, however, instructive.

According to the Department of Courts own historical summary:

The issue re-emerged in early 2000, when the Labour/Alliance Government agreed to review the role of the Privy Council. In December 2000 Cabinet approved the release of a discussion paper entitled Reshaping New Zealand’s Appeal Structure. It invited public comment on three options to replace the Privy Council. Submissions were evenly divided on whether appeals to the Privy Council should be abolished or retained. There was a clear consensus however that if appeals to the Privy Council ended, a replacement stand-alone court sitting above the Court of Appeal should be established.

Further public consultation culminated in the report of a Ministerial Advisory Group. This formed the basis of a Supreme Court Bill. The bill was introduced in 2002, and passed by Parliament on 14 October 2003. The Act came into force on 1 January 2004, officially establishing the Supreme Court, and at the same time ending appeals to the Privy Council in relation to all decisions of New Zealand courts made after 31 December 2003.

Remember that sequence: A “discussion paper” is released. Public “comment” is invited. In spite of expert opinion being “evenly divided”, “further public consultation” takes place. Eventually, a “Ministerial Advisory Group” presents a report. This report becomes a government bill. Public submissions on the bill are invited by a Select Committee of the House. The shape of the bill remains essentially unchanged. Despite strong representations from four of the seven parties represented in Parliament, the call for a referendum is rejected. The bill passes, 63 votes (Labour, Greens, Progressives) in favour, 57 votes (National, NZ First, Act, United Future) against.

That is how easily our constitution can be changed – if a government is sufficiently motivated to do so.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 10 February 2022.

The Future Of Act: Climate Change Cannot Be Stopped, But It Can Be Ridden.

Back To The Land: Act understands that rural New Zealanders are feeling put upon and devalued by urban New Zealanders; that they are chafing under an ever-increasing number of government rules and regulations. Keen to draw these voters away from National, David Seymour is not about to tell his audiences that, thanks to Climate Change, life on the land is going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.

ACT HAS A PROBLEM: one which it shares with just about every other Western conservative party; Climate Change. William F. Buckley, who founded, and for many years edited, the thoughtfully right-wing magazine, The National Review, described a conservative as “someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.” All very well when the forces driving history are human; but not helpful at all when inhuman forces are driving events, and yelling “Stop!” will in no way slow them down.

At present, Act isn’t really addressing the Climate Change crisis seriously. Oh sure, it pays lip service to the reality of anthropogenic global warming, but its policies show scant evidence of serious thought about the problem that is going to dominate the economics and politics of the next fifty years.

Out in rural and provincial New Zealand, for example, the Act Leader, David Seymour, and his colleagues are attracting big audiences. Farmers, their families, and voters working in businesses associated with farming, are angry with the Labour Government, and disillusioned with their traditional electoral champions in the National Party.

Act understands that rural New Zealanders are feeling put upon and devalued by urban New Zealanders; that they are chafing under an ever-increasing number of government rules and regulations. Keen to draw these voters away from National, Seymour is not about to tell his audiences that life on the land is going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.

Instead, he promises to abolish the Climate Change Commission and make a bonfire of the Government’s regulations and red-tape. The cockies, of course, applaud, and Act’s poll-numbers rise. For the moment, that’s all Seymour and his party care about. Their mission is to drag National’s numbers down to around 20 percent, and pump their own up into the high teens. At that point (as Labour discovered vis-à-vis the Alliance) the whole equation on the Right could very easily unravel – leaving Act as the runaway favourite of conservative voters.

All very well, but if the ultimate balance of political forces leaves the Right sharing 40-45 percent of the Party Vote, and the Left in firm command with 55-60 percent, then Act will find itself all dressed up, but with nowhere to go.

What’s more, without a coherent and believable policy response to the unrelenting pressures of Climate Change, Act could easy end up becoming the top-dog in a conservative kennel that gets smaller and smaller with every passing year.

In ten years’ time, the big political and economic arguments will have moved well beyond the Neoliberal shibboleths that defined the period between 1979 and 2008. In ten years’ time, Capitalism itself will be struggling to retain the support of a majority of citizens – even in the West.

Parties like National and Act will find themselves in the same unenviable position as the reactionary political movements that advocated for the return of absolute monarchy in the early-to-mid nineteenth century. It won’t be a case of them having no supporters, merely of having too few to count any longer as a serious force. History will have rolled right over them. Their last, unheeded, words will be: “It’s not stopping!”

Regarding the politics of the future, the lines of division are already becoming clear. The battle will no longer be between capitalists and socialists: comprehensive state control of the economy will be taken for granted. How else could humanity have responded with any degree of effectiveness to devastating floods and droughts; heatwaves and cold-snaps; rising seas and advancing deserts? No, the political battles of the future will be between those who still believe that science can and will rescue humanity from the ravages of Climate Change; and those who offer a new “green” paradigm for the way in which human societies interact with the natural world.

In the elections of the future, the followers of Scientism will contend for power with the followers of Ecologism. A meritocratic technocracy will find itself opposed by an anarchistic collectivity of simple-lifers. The technocrats, based overwhelmingly in the cities, will be trapped in a frustratingly symbiotic relationship with the simple-lifers – for the very simple reason that, overwhelmingly, it will be the rural simple-lifers who grow the food. Dependent upon one another, and united in their struggle to survive in an overheated world, the parties of Scientism and Ecologism will be constantly re-defining and re-negotiating the terms of their co-existence, while contending jointly with an increasingly hostile planet. Parties determined to rehearse the arguments for and against capitalism/socialism will have become utterly irrelevant.

Ironically, it was the recent “Groundswell” protests that anticipated the fundamental political proposition of the Climate Change-driven future: those Tractors bearing placards declaring “No Farmers, No Food” spoke more truly than they knew.

For Act, that fundamental division between technocrat and simple-lifer offers a straightforward path to political survival. Ever since the father of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke, wrote Reflections Upon the Revolution in France conservatives have celebrated the slow rhythms of the seasons and the tiny, incremental changes that shape the world beyond the mad rush (and even madder ideas) of the city. A party that celebrated the stoic virtues of rural living and was content to be instructed by Mother Nature, would find many followers. Alternatively, as a party of libertarian individualists, an urban culture – based upon the unsentimental rigors of scientific expertise, might offer Act’s followers a better fit. As they used to say in the Middle Ages: “City air makes you free.”

The world to come: the world shaped by Climate Change; will not be a neoliberal, or even a capitalist, world. The state will offer and organise whatever defence still avails humanity. It will hold the ring while the children of Climate Change weigh the relative merits of the “technological fix” versus the simple life of the ecologically-friendly farmer.

William F Buckley’s peremptory demand that History stop in its tracks was profoundly unrealistic. The key conservative insight has always been that, while History cannot be stopped, it can be ridden.

While National resigns itself to going “gentle into that good night”, Act just needs to learn how to hold on tight.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 13 August 2021.

Winston's Comeback: A Strategy.

On The Comeback Trail? Having followed it all the way to the Deputy Prime Ministership and a coalition with National in 1996, Winston Peters is well aware of right-wing populism’s advantages and disadvantages. Few New Zealand politicians possess a better appreciation of how well anti-Maori and anti-Asian messages are received by large sections of the electorate. He is also aware of how much more effectively these familiar right-wing themes might be “sold” to conservative voters if they were associated with the “evils” of “liberal wokedom”.

IS WINSTON PETERS on the comeback trail? At 76 years of age, there are many who say that Winston is too old to contemplate a return to Parliament. Then again, the President of the United States, Joe Biden, was 78 years old when he took the Oath of Office on 20 January 2021. So … maybe not. But, if he is serious about taking the comeback trail (and there are many well-placed to know who insist that he is) then from what quarter of the political compass should Winston set out? And, who will provide him with the wherewithal for what is always a very costly journey?

Winston’s knows well the path he and NZ First would be best advised to follow. It is a path with which the NZ First leader is already thoroughly familiar. Having followed it all the way to the Deputy Prime Ministership and a coalition with National in 1996, he is well aware of right-wing populism’s advantages and disadvantages. Few New Zealand politicians possess a better appreciation of how well anti-Maori and anti-Asian messages are received by large sections of the electorate. He is also aware of how much more effectively these familiar right-wing themes might be “sold” to conservative voters if they were associated with the “evils” of “liberal wokedom”.

It is often forgotten by those on the Left who range themselves alongside tangata whenua struggling for tino rangatiratanga and a te Tiriti-based constitution, that by no means all Maori subscribe to their cause. As was the case in the 1850s and 60s, there is a substantial number of Maori who are much more concerned to get their share of the good things made possible by the Settler State than they are with restoring the cultural status-quo ante. Winston is the perfect representative of these Maori, and in that role is able to attack “separatists” and their “sickly white liberal” allies with, if not impunity, then a great deal more success than any right-wing Pakeha politician attempting to do the same.

As the bi-cultural agenda set forth in the controversial He Puapua report becomes more widely known, and uneasiness among Pakeha voters grows, the National Party, Act and NZ First will vie with one another for the “honour” of leading the fightback against separatism and wokeness.

For the moment, the advantage lies with Act, whose leader, David Seymour, is currently fronting a nationwide campaign against the proposed criminalisation of “hate speech”. He is also deploying to good effect the divisive content of He Puapua on the floor of the House.

National, by contrast, has so far failed to distinguish itself in any of these battles. Inwardly focused, and bereft of serious political talent, the largest party of the Right, to the dismay of its followers, drifts aimlessly: a ship becalmed by its captain’s inability to catch any breeze strong enough to carry it out of the doldrums of electoral defeat.

National’s inaction leaves plenty of space for a reinvigorated NZ First to fill – if only Winston can find the money required to fund a credible comeback. Money (or the lack of it) has always been Winston’s and NZ First’s Achilles Heel. Time and again funding issues and problematic political donations have figured in the events that resulted in NZ First (and its leader) being voted out of Parliament. These misfortunes have made the raising of party funds an increasingly fraught undertaking. Potential donors could be forgiven for looking upon Winston in the same way aristocratic English ladies once looked upon Lord Byron: as someone “mad, bad and dangerous to know”. What NZ First needs is an injection of cash from donors with deep pockets and the skills to deploy it without precipitating another funding scandal.

Over recent years the place to go looking for this sort of assistance has been at discreet gatherings of Chinese business investors and their consular guides. Certainly, both National and Labour have benefitted from accepting such invitations. There’s no point in Winston attending these gatherings, however. Not when, as New Zealand’s foreign minister, he made it so very clear where his allegiances lay. Winston Peters, like his namesake, Winston Churchill, believes in the historical mission of “the English-speaking peoples”. Washington long ago marked him down as an “asset”. Beijing sees him as an adversary. From a Chinese perspective, keeping Winston out of Parliament serves their country’s interests much better than financing his triumphant return.

The Americans, on the other hand, have everything to gain by assisting Winston back into the role of king/queen-maker. With the “balance of responsibility” (as he likes to call the balance of power) Winston could furnish both National and Labour with a plausible excuse for distancing themselves from Beijing. The major parties’ leaders would be able to reassure the Chinese: “You know how we feel, but, what can we do? Without Winston, we cannot form a government. For the time being, we’re going to have to make nice with Washington. Please try to understand.”

To avoid the damaging charge of being Washington’s poodle, Winston and his party could play the Five Eyes card. If anyone can sell the argument that New Zealand’s fundamental interests lie in reaffirming its identity as a loyal member of the family of democratic, English-speaking nations, it’s Winston Peters. Certainly, the enunciation of such a position would be music to the ears of not only the Americans, but also the Australians, British and Canadians. The sort of music that could very easily persuade those nations to toss a goodly sum of money (via appropriate surrogates) into NZ First’s hat.

Nothing would be gained by Winston and his party following their usual practice of attempting to keep the sources of their financial support secret. Indeed, with a bit of luck he could turn the enthusiastic support of New Zealand’s traditional allies into an invaluable political asset. Anti-Chinese sentiment is growing in New Zealand at about the same rate as the electorate’s unease with the Ardern Government’s support for the liberal woke agenda. By casting himself as the defender of New Zealand’s classical liberal-democratic values, and his opponents as the enemies of those values, the moral and financial support of traditional allies might be transmuted into electoral gold.

Such is the nature of political competition that NZ First making itself the champion of a return to the English-speaking fold would trigger a powerful “patriotic” response from the National Party. As the principal representative of the Right, National simply could not afford to cede so much of its ideological territory to Act and NZ First. In short order, all three right-wing parties would take on the appearance of a solid electoral bloc committed to severing the ties binding Wellington to Beijing. Labour would be most unlikely to allow itself to be electorally positioned as the unpatriotic stooge of the Chinese Communist Party. It’s best bet would be to repudiate Nanaia Mahuta’s independent foreign policy and try to pass itself off as the leader of the new Anglophone realignment.

As a way of capping-off the NZ First leader’s career, this returning-New Zealand-to-the-English-speaking-fold strategy is hard to beat. In all the capitals that matter to him, Winston would be fêted as the statesman who brought New Zealand to its senses. For the many honours that would be showered upon him by a grateful Right – both at home and abroad – New Zealand’s loss of the Chinese market would not be counted too high a price.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 29 April 2021.

Looking For "The Drummer".

Drumming-Up Support For The Nationalist Right: They’ll know “The Drummer” when they see him. He’ll be raffish, but not dishevelled. He’ll be articulate, but not slick. He’ll tell the most outrageous lies, which they will want to believe. But, most important of all, he’ll tell the most outrageous truths, which nobody else has the courage to speak. He’ll say the things that everybody on the Right (and even some disillusioned comrades on the Left) are thinking – and they’ll love him for it.

 

IN THE FIRST, fraught years of the Weimar Republic, its enemies spoke longingly of “The Drummer” who would re-awaken Germany. By the early 1920s, a small group of ultra-nationalists were convinced “The Drummer” had been found – in Munich. The name of this decorated front-line soldier and self-proclaimed artist, with an extraordinary gift for rousing political oratory? Adolf Hitler.

With the demise of Winston Peters and his NZ First Party, the New Zealand Right is in the market for a replacement “Drummer”. To say that the political merchandise currently on offer is shoddy would be an understatement. The manifestoes of the New Conservatives, Advance New Zealand, The Public Party and Heartland New Zealand are too cramped, and their leaders too lacking in talent, to serve as any sort of replacement for Peters and NZ First. For the time being, therefore, right-wing anger and resentment will seek to find expression in the National Party and Act – vessels too old and weak for wine as new and strong as theirs.

That said, it is difficult to see a radical right-wing party built from scratch achieving very much very soon. For a start, who would lead it? It is equally difficult to see the next Winston Peters in the latest intake of MPs. If there is a truly dangerous man or woman among them, then these qualities have been kept exceptionally well hidden.

David Seymour has performed admirably, it is true, but for a good part of the last term he was essentially pushing on an open door. National was too divided, too conflicted, to offer a credible alternative to Jacinda Ardern’s kindly populism. This allowed Seymour to move Act into the unoccupied political space. Holding that space, however, should National ever recover its mojo, will be a much harder task. Historically, Act’s success tends to be inversely proportional to National’s and, hence, a reflection of the Right’s overall weakness.

Could National’s leader, Judith Collins, morph into the long-awaited Drummer in the way her predecessor, Rob Muldoon, did between August 1974 and November 1975? The answer is: No.

There just isn’t enough of Judith Collins: intellectually, culturally or performatively; to become New Zealand’s next Drummer. She possesses neither Muldoon’s ear, nor his stomach. Muldoon “heard” the anxieties and resentments of “ordinary” New Zealanders more clearly than anyone except Norman Kirk – the man who had the good grace to die just weeks after Muldoon became National’s leader. More significantly, “Piggy” Muldoon had ample stomach for the political brutality required to transform the electorate’s anxiety and fear into votes. It helped, of course, that he was an intellectually formidable politician who despised “intellectuals”. That always plays well with “ordinary blokes”.

If the Drummer is not to be found in Act or National, then the Right will have to go looking for him elsewhere. (That the Drummer might be female is, of course, possible, but given the nature of right-wing Kiwi culture, unlikely.)

The monied men of the Right will not find him among the ranks of the ideologically compliant. The Drummer cares nothing for the “rules” of neoliberalism. For him, economics is a means to an end – nothing more. Having carefully studied the fortunes of the populist parties of Hungary and Poland, he’s convinced that nationalism only succeeds electorally when mixed with good sized dollops of socialism. This, he tells his friends, was where Trump got it so wrong. You can’t promise to rescue the working class from the clutches of the liberal elites, and then pump billions of dollars into the already bulging pockets of the One Percent!

So, where should they look for their twenty-first century Drummer? Will he be found, like Hitler, regaling the patrons of a crowded beer-hall with all manner of outlandish conspiracy theories? Unlikely. The place to find New Zealand’s next Drummer, Winston’s replacement, is by frequenting the one place Peters never felt comfortable – Online.

They’ll know him when they see him. He’ll be raffish, but not dishevelled. He’ll be articulate, but not slick. He’ll tell the most outrageous lies, which they will want to believe. But, most important of all, he’ll tell the most outrageous truths, which nobody else has the courage to speak. He’ll say the things that everybody on the Right (and even some disillusioned comrades on the Left) are thinking – and they’ll love him for it.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 4 December 2020.

Banana Split: David Seymour’s Latest Declaration of Intergenerational War.

Millennials Of The World Unite! Act Leader, David Seymour, has issued yet another call for the Millennials to take up arms against the rapacity of the Baby Boomer Generation. As if all the young people of today will not themselves grow old and be succeeded by a new generation of New Zealanders. As if the whole experience of human existence is not a constant process of paying forward and paying back.

 

THAT DAVID SEYMOUR’S latest effusion of political bile is being hosted by The Spinoff is entirely fitting. The ACT leader and his hipster enablers cannot wait to get into the political engine-room, and their chosen path to the centre of power is via fomenting an intergenerational war. The headline attached to Seymour’s piece says it all: “NZ Baby Boomers are Building a Banana Republic, and No One Gives a Shit.”

 

Except that “banana republics” are characterised by obscene extremes of wealth and poverty, authoritarian modes of governance, ruinous levels of corruption, and the irretrievable loss of national sovereignty. In other words, states that have dispensed altogether with democratic politics. That this continues to be Act’s and Seymour’s endgame should surprise no one. But for those who still regard The Spinoff as a platform for serious journalism, its tacit support for Seymour’s plans to incite young citizens to use their votes as weapons against the old may come as a bit of a shock.

 

Seymour’s latest excuse for fanning the flames of Millennial discontent is the Treasury’s most recent Long-Term Fiscal Outlook (LTFO). And, when the Treasury boffins say “long-term” they’re not kidding. Their latest LTFO purports to describe the fiscal position of the New Zealand government in 2056!

 

To put their heroic prognostications into some sort of perspective, ask yourself how much luck someone living in 1916 would have had describing the world of 1956. As Peter Drucker quipped: “Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window.” Which is why the only way to produce a half-way credible LTFO is to proceed on the assumption that current government policy settings remain unchanged for 40 years. If you’re thinking that this reduces the LTFO to a simple exercise in linear extrapolation, then take a bow. That’s pretty much all it is.

 

So, what are the fiscal implications of the current policy settings remaining unchanged for 40 years? Well, not surprisingly, they’re pretty dire. As Seymour, rather breathlessly, puts it:

 

“If no policy changes are made, by 2060, when current students reach retirement age, government debt will be 206 per cent of GDP. In other words national debt will equal two years’ income, worse than the current debt of countries world famous for being fiscally screwed such as Zimbabwe (203 per cent) Greece (179 per cent), Italy (133 per cent) and Portugal (121 per cent). No matter how well you prepare for retirement, you’ll be living in a banana republic.”

 

Unless, of course, we, the voters of New Zealand, taking serious and principled thought for our nation’s future, decide to change the current policy settings.

 

The most obvious way pay for the dramatic increase in human longevity would be to restore a much larger degree of progressivity to New Zealand’s taxation system. Additional measures to improve our future fiscal position might include re-starting government contributions to the Superannuation Fund and making Kiwisaver compulsory. Getting rid of the commercial imperatives currently driving New Zealand’s universities and research institutes into the ground would also help. Neoliberalism is deadening our national imagination.

 

That’s why a thorough-going “deliberalisation” of the whole of New Zealand society would be so helpful. Modelled on the “denazification” of post-war Germany, such an exercise would unleash precisely the sort of pent-up social energy and creativity that the LTFO itself identifies as a the best way of avoiding the long-term fiscal difficulties it is projecting.

 

Not that David Seymour wants a bar of anything even remotely resembling these solutions. He dismisses the option of raising taxes with characteristic venom by presenting it as yet another dastardly imposition by the Baby Boom Generation:

 

“The first way of absorbing [the projected demographic changes] is to raise taxes by about a quarter, so GST becomes nearly 20 per cent and the top tax rate goes over 40 per cent, along with every other rate being increased by the same proportion. People embarking on their careers now would pay a 25 per cent extra “boomer tax” for being born at the wrong time.”

 

As if all the young people of today will not themselves grow old and be succeeded by a new generation of New Zealanders. As if the whole experience of human existence is not a constant process of paying forward and paying back.

 

Utterly dependent when we are born; utterly dependent as we drift inexorably toward death. Isn’t this the universal fate of humanity? As applicable to the richest people in the world as it is to the poorest – and just as inescapable? The true measure of our equality.

 

And isn’t this the dreadful reality that all the pathologically ambitious are running from: that not all the power in the world, nor all the money, can save them from the grave? And isn’t it the true measure of wisdom that, in the end, we come to recognise that we are defined by what makes our fellow human beings’ similar to ourselves – not by what makes them different?

 

As President John F. Kennedy told the students of Washington’s American University in his celebrated commencement address of June 1963 – delivered just six months before his assassination in Dallas:

 

“For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.”

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 29 November 2016.

Privileged Status

The Settling Of Social Scores: The poor of Paris leer at the abused body of the Princesse de Lamballe, friend of Queen Marie-Antoinette and, ironically, a passionate advocate of social reform. Jamie Whyte's comparison of the "privileged" legal status of Maori with the legal privileges of the Aristocracy of pre-revolutionary France inevitably raised the ghosts of the Revolution's aristocratic victims. In the words of the Race Relations Commissioner, Dame Susan Devoy: “Equating Maori New Zealanders to French aristocrats who were murdered because of their privilege is a grotesque and inflammatory statement.”

 

Maori are legally privileged in New Zealand today, just as the Aristocracy were legally privileged in pre-revolutionary France.

 

Jamie Whyte, Act Party Leader, 26 July 2014

 

REPROVED BY DAME SUSAN, condemned by the Maori Party, castigated by most of the news media, it remains to be seen whether Jamie Whyte’s equation of Maori legal “privileges” with the feudal privileges of the French aristocracy was electorally clever or stupid.
 

The example of Don Brash’s Orewa Speech undoubtedly looms very large before any right-wing political leader whose party is languishing in the opinion polls. The National Party leader’s notorious address to the Orewa Rotary Club, in which he promised to nullify nearly all of Maoridom’s political rehabilitation since the 1970s, saw his party’s poll ratings advance by an unprecedented 17 percentage points. It put the National Opposition back in the race – with a vengeance!
 

The New Zealand electorate, it seems, is one vast racist itch just waiting for a scratch. And if it remains as easily satisfied as it was ten years ago, then Whyte’s speech to the Act Party’s Hamilton conference – and all the fallout from it – should produce a statistically significant up-tick in his party’s support.
 

And really, what else could Jamie do? The New Zealand voter is ill-disposed toward philosophical speculation and debate. The finer points of John Locke’s defence of individual liberty and the role played by private property in its preservation, are not the stuff of all that many Pakeha conversations. The merits or otherwise of their Maori neighbours, on the other hand, remains the subject of lively speculation.
 

Richard Prebble understood and accepted this inconvenient truth about the New Zealand voter. He had watched good-naturedly as Roger Douglas and Derek Quigley (Act’s founders) toured the country (on millionaire Craig Heatley’s dime) preaching the pure gospel of neoliberalism to anyone who would listen. Which, as Prebble already knew, would always be far too few to secure a solid footing for Act in the new MMP parliament. He had the data, he knew what it would take to move 5 percent of his fellow Kiwis into Act’s camp – and it wasn’t John Locke.
 

What Jamie Whyte lacks, however, is his predecessor’s wry political cynicism. If he was to raise again the divisive issue of Maori “privilege” (at Act’s campaign manager, Richard Prebble’s insistence?) then he was determined to do so with all the panache of a swashbuckling Cambridge philosopher. Not for him the mean-spirited snarling of the hard-bitten provincial voter that Prebble translated so well. No, he would wage war on the legal privileges of Maoridom in the guise of an antipodean Robespierre.
 

“Maori are legally privileged in New Zealand today,” Whyte told Act’s annual conference in Hamilton, “just as the Aristocracy were legally privileged in pre-revolutionary France.”

Really?
 

Presumably, in making this bold comparison, our Cambridge graduate had some notion of what those aristocratic privileges included, even if many in his audience, subscribing to Henry Ford’s view that “history is bunk”, did not.
 

Let’s list just a few of them:
 

·        The French Aristocracy were exempt from taxation.

·        French aristocrats presided over their own seigneurial courts – i.e. they were able to try their own tenants for any beaches of the law alleged to have taken place on their own estates.

·        Deceased tenant farmers of aristocratic land were prevented, under the law of mainmorte (the “dead hand”) from bequeathing the tenancy rights they enjoyed whilst living to their descendants. Upon their death the right to use the property reverted to its aristocratic owner who was then free to dispose of it as he saw fit – even at the cost of evicting the deceased tenant’s family. The aristocrat could, of course, be “persuaded” against this course of action by the tenant’s descendants paying their lord a “fine” for the right to go on farming the land.

·        Aristocrats also enjoyed a range of monopolies within their domains. For example, requiring tenants to have their grain ground in the aristocrat’s mill.

·        In many parts of France, a tenant wishing to get married had first to acquire his or her lord’s permission.

·        The aristocrat’s prior permission was also required before a tenant farmer could vacate his tenancy – i.e. move away from the lord’s estate.

·        To secure these aristocratic consents it was customary for tenants to pay yet more “fines”.
 

Do any of these legal privileges bear any resemblance to the supposed legal privileges enjoyed by Maori? Are Maori exempt from taxation? Do Maori preside over their own courts? Are Maori able to prevent the alienation of their tribal resources by imposing restrictions on their tenants’ ability to bequeath, sell or otherwise transfer their interest in tribal property? Do Maori enjoy monopolies over specific goods and services? Is prior permission required from Maori before a citizen is able to exercise his or her rights?
 

Perhaps the most questionable aspect of Whyte’s historical comparison was the aspect the Race Relations Commissioner, Dame Susan Devoy, picked up on in her statement of Wednesday, 30 July, in which she stated: “Equating Maori New Zealanders to French aristocrats who were murdered because of their privilege is a grotesque and inflammatory statement.” Quite true, because to link the French Aristocracy and the French Revolution is to conjure up images of angry crowds, clattering tumbrils, rolling drums and the sudden descent of Madame Guillotine’s blade.
 

The historical details surrounding the persecution of the French Aristocracy are, as is so often the case, even worse. The guillotining of condemned aristocrats in the manner so vividly described by Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities certainly did take place, but at least as many more aristocrats met their deaths at the hands of the Parisian Mob. In a grotesque settling of centuries-old social scores, aristocratic families were dragged from the relative safety of the city’s overcrowded prisons and butchered in the streets. Whipped up to a frenzy by such fanatical foes of privilege as Jean-Paul Marat, the poor of Paris fell upon these defenceless men women and children and quite literally tore them to pieces.
 

These are dangerous precedents to play with in a country whose racial and social prejudices lie buried in such shallow graves. Politicians who make persistent, but groundless, claims that a minority of the population is enjoying legal privileges which the majority of ordinary citizens do not possess, can hardly hold themselves blameless when those same ordinary citizens turn against that minority. Or, God forbid, upon them.
 

As the great Russian playwright, Anton Chekov, once remarked: “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.”
 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 4 August 2014.