Shrugging-Off The Atlas Network.

Upholding The Status-Quo: The Left’s election defeat is not the work of the Atlas Network. It is not even the work of David Seymour and Act. It is the work of ordinary citizens who liked the Right’s stories better than they liked the Left’s. If the Right’s stories were made more convincing by a sympathetic think tank, then the Left should not be getting mad at their opponent’s effective apparatus, it should be getting mad at itself for not having one of its own.

THE ATLAS NETWORK has been trending lately – in the minds of the New Zealand Left. Devastated by the election result, and further demoralised by recent polling showing the Right increasing its grip on New Zealanders’ political imagination, the Atlas Network has provided the Left with what it most needs – an explanation for its failure.

It is important to state at the very start that the Atlas Network is not the Left equivalent of Q-Anon. It is a real organisation, founded in 1981, by Antony Fisher (1915-1988) devotee of the fanatical anti-collectivist, F.A. Hayek (1899-1992) and a tireless proponent of the monetarist and free-market ideas that ultimately found practical political expression in the government of Margaret Thatcher and the administration of Ronald Reagan.

Fisher’s objective in forming the Atlas Network was to encourage like-minded individuals and groups to do as he had done nearly thirty years earlier: set up “think tanks” dedicated to advancing free-market ideology. His own creation, the Institute of Economic Affairs, was founded in 1955 and played an important role in formulating what would become Thatcher’s economic programme. But, just as Che Guevara wanted “one, two, many Vietnams”, Fisher wanted one, two, many right-wing think tanks. He had witnessed at first-hand what could be achieved by a handful of people “thinking the unthinkable”. The more there were of these ideological handfuls, the faster the “New Right’s” ideas would spread.

None of this information is new, Fisher’s exploits are documented comprehensively in Richard Cockett’s book, “Thinking The Unthinkable: Think-tanks and the Economic Counter-revolution, 1931-83”, published in 1995.

Paying close attention to who is influencing whom behind the scenes is, however, something activists on the New Zealand Left engage in only intermittently. There was a brief flurry of left-wing journalists twitching back the curtains in the late-1980s. They were motivated, mainly, by the dramatic emergence of the Business Roundtable as the New Zealand free marketeers’ ideological powerhouse.

The fact that Roger Douglas, father of New Zealand’s neoliberal revolution, was a member of Hayek’s high altitude think tank, the “Mont Pelerin Society”, prompted even more left-wing interest in the influence of think tanks on New Zealand’s political life.

With the election of the Labour-Alliance coalition government in 1999, however, the power of the Business Roundtable began to wane, leading to a corresponding falling-off of interest in venturing behind-the-scenes by left-wing journalists. This decline was compounded by the death of the Left’s principal keeper-of-tabs on the machinations of the business-backed Right, the editor, author and journalist, Bruce Jesson (1944-1999).

The death of the Business Roundtable’s indefatigable Executive Director, Roger Kerr (1945-2011) was similarly demoralising for the Right. In 2012, having already merged with the New Zealand Institute, the Business Roundtable became a new, much sunnier, think tank, the New Zealand Initiative. Led by the ebullient Oliver Hartwich, the New Zealand Initiative has carefully avoided acquiring the sinister reputation of its big-business-backed predecessor.

Growing alongside the Business Roundtable for most of the 1990s was what began as the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers (ACT). Founded in 1993 by Roger Douglas, the former National cabinet minister, Derek Quigley, and multi-millionaire, Craig Heatly, ACT was to serve as a vehicle for those classical liberal ideas no longer deemed acceptable by either Labour or National. In 1994, a year after New Zealand’s adoption of the Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) electoral system, ACT became the Act Party. In the first MMP general election (1996) Act (now led by Douglas’s former henchman, Richard Prebble) secured 6.1 percent of the Party Vote.

The question being asked by left-wing journalists in 2024 is whether or not the Act Party has always been associated with right-wing organisations like the Atlas Network. Or, is the Network’s sole link with Act its present leader, David Seymour, who, prior to entering Parliament, was employed by two conservative Canadian think tanks, the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and the Manning Foundation, both of which were, at one time or another, members of the Atlas Network.

Neither of these questions make much sense.

To begin with, the Atlas Network has never made any secret of its existence (even if, after years of left-wing attention, it now keeps its membership list secret. It was not illegal to set up such an organisation in 1981, and it is not illegal now. Think tanks, and organisations dedicated to facilitating the establishment of think tanks, have been a feature of the global political landscape for decades – and that is as true of the Left as it is of the Right.

Indeed, the rise of right-wing think tanks in the 1970s and 80s was a direct response to what their big-business backers (including, entirely unsurprisingly, big oil and big tobacco) saw as the near conquest of their capitalist societies by left-wing ideas and left-leaning institutions.

The free-market fightback, pioneered by think tanks like Fisher’s Institute of Economic Affairs, represented UK and US capitalists’ last-ditch defence of their profits and power. They had witnessed the trade unions bring down a British government in 1973, and the liberal press force the resignation of an American president in 1974. These unprecedented defeats had struck them as harbingers of doom – their doom.

That the Right was smart enough to realise that the battle for the hearts and minds of voters living in democratic states would be a battle of ideas – ideas that those same voters could believe in and be inspired by – and against which the Left, still mired in the demonstrably inadequate economic doctrines of the past, could offer nothing remotely competitive, was hardly the Right’s fault.

Nor is it fair to blame a young man, inspired by the libertarian and free-market doctrines of the right-wing counter-revolution of the 1980s and 90s, for accepting offers of employment from conservative Canadian think tanks. Where else was he supposed to go looking for a “political” job – the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions? Greenpeace?

It is highly instructive that left-wing politicians with CVs that show them working for “progressive” organisations, NGOs, and yes, even left-wing think tanks with links to billionaire donors, are not portrayed as evil-doers by the mainstream media. Having a background in the trade unions, student organisations, environmental groups, etc, is seen as perfectly natural. Where else are left-wingers going to learn their trade? Exxon? British & American Tobacco? Pfizer?

David Seymour’s links to the Atlas Network do not make him a villain. Working for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy is not the same as working for Hamas. Morally-speaking, is taking money from oil companies really all that distinguishable from giving money to oil companies every time we fill up our petrol tank? Getting from A to B; winning the battle of ideas; the Devil clips our tickets either way.

The Left’s election defeat is not the work of the Atlas Network. It is not even the work of David Seymour and Act. It is the work of ordinary citizens who liked the Right’s stories better than they liked the Left’s. If the Right’s stories were made more convincing by a sympathetic think tank, or two, then the Left should not be getting mad at their opponent’s effective apparatus, it should be getting mad at itself for not having one of its own.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project of Monday, 12 February 2024.

Luxon Rejects The “Rejection Election” At His Peril.

Fitting Right In: National retailed a reactionary manifesto of right-wing, racially-charged policies to the electorate throughout 2023. No talk back then of ignoring the overwhelming political preferences of the voting public and making a strong stand on principle. If Luxon’s pollsters and focus-groups were telling him that the public was in a mood to discipline and punish – then discipline and punish it would be.

MUCH HAS BEEN MADE of Prime Minister Chris Luxon’s definitive rejection of Act’s Treaty Principles Bill. Why? Because Luxon not only confirmed that National will vote against giving David Seymour’s bill a second reading, but at the same time acknowledged that the only reason he agreed to support it to the select committee stage was because he did not want to precipitate an unscheduled general election so soon after 14 October. In addition to providing us with a useful gauge of Luxon’s prime ministerial fortitude, Luxon’s “slap-down” of Seymour’s bottom-line policy also betrays his fundamental misreading of the election result’s meaning.

The General Election of 2023 was a rejection election, and rejection elections are powered, overwhelmingly, by popular anger. Not only was there a broad-based and vociferous element within the electorate determined to punish the incumbent Labour Government, but also a coterminous movement to roll back what was perceived to be Labour’s extreme, ideologically-driven, cultural agenda.

At no time during the election campaign did either Christopher Luxon or the National Party attempt to draw a clear distinction between themselves and the other right-wing parties – Act and NZ First – on matters relating to Māori sovereignty.

When Winston Peters announced his party’s policies in relation to removing Treaty principles from legislation, and reframing the mission of the Waitangi Tribunal, Luxon did not recoil in horror. Nor did he remind New Zealanders that it was National, under Jim Bolger and Doug Graham, that kicked-off the Treaty Settlement process back in the early-1990s. Or recall with pride that it was John Key who sent Pita Sharples to New York to sign the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

To be sure, when questioned directly about Act’s desire to clarify the principles of the Treaty by way of a binding referendum, Luxon described his most obvious coalition partner’s policy as “unhelpful and divisive”. That this response was a sop to the liberal wing of Luxon’s party, and to its more “moderate” voters, was made clear by his promotion of policies that unequivocally aligned the National Party with the right-wing populist mood of the nation. Most notably, National’s policy of curbing co-governance by abolishing Three Waters and the Māori Health Authority.

A National Party willing to send that sort of reactionary message to the electorate was not in the least bit concerned about being seen as “unhelpful” or “divisive”. And neither was the National Party committed to reinstating English at the top of official government stationery.

But those were only the most openly acknowledged efforts to align National with the majority’s determination to reject, repeal, rip-up and remove the ideological advances of Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori. Voters who understood the secret language of New Zealand conservatism were in little doubt that National had plenty more punishment in store for Māori New Zealanders.

Conservatives have long exploited the tendency of the racist Right to associate the social pathologies of drug use, domestic abuse, gun violence, aggravated robbery, juvenile delinquency, and truancy with Māori New Zealanders. That these are the pathologies of poverty, afflicting the lives of Pakeha as well as Māori, cuts little ice with right-wingers, who reject structural explanations for anti-social behaviour in favour of those highlighting personal and/or racial deficiencies.

Nor does the Right care overmuch that “cracking down hard” on crime will send Māori New Zealanders to prison in disproportionate numbers, leaving behind broken families and ruined lives. Even though, historically, “tough on crime” policies merely ensure that the cycle of crime and incarceration continues, most National Party voters regard the policy not as “a fiscal and moral failure” (as Bill English described it) but as a necessary evil.

National retailed a reactionary manifesto of right-wing, racially-charged policies to the electorate throughout 2023. Spooked by Act’s record poll numbers, and watching NZ First’s steady rise with alarm, Luxon and his team were in no mood to front-foot National’s liberal traditions. No talk back then of ignoring the overwhelming political preferences of the voting public and making a strong stand on principle. If Luxon’s pollsters and focus-groups were telling him that the public was in a mood to discipline and punish – then discipline and punish it would be.

Not that Luxon, himself, was personally suited to playing the Hard Man. Robotically positive, with his happy-chappy platitudes playing on continuous loop, Luxon left the dog-whistling to his lieutenants. The nearest he came to playing rough was when he dressed up as a pirate – and even then he had to be instructed on how to wield his sword. Even so, when all the votes had been counted and there was a three-way coalition to negotiate, Luxon struggled to locate his inner-thug. The National Party leader’s priority (in almost every setting) is to get whatever he is doing, done – whatever it takes.

And what it took was Luxon’s commitment to Seymour that his Treaty Principles Bill would be backed by National and NZ First to the select committee stage. What that meant was that Act’s coalition partners were supportive of the broad, open-ended debate that sending this particularly controversial bill to a select committee was certain to set in motion. It defies all logic to sanction this course of action if, in utter contempt for the consultation process, and regardless of what the debate reveals about the wishes of the New Zealand people vis-à-vis Te Tiriti o Waitangi, your Party’s next move is to vote it down.

Such a profoundly cynical political strategy would be dangerous at the best of times – and these are not the best of times. New Zealand is in the early stages of the same populist distemper that has polarised and paralysed the United States. Luxon and his party opted to climb on the back of this populist tiger, getting off it will be no simple matter.

To the hundreds-of-thousands of right-wing voters who backed National, Act and NZ First to bring together a government committed to disciplining and punishing Labour and its allies, it looks like Luxon’s National pony has refused its very first fence. Spooked by hui, hikoi and haka at Turangawaewae, Ratana and Waitangi, and bowing to the relentless bullying of the “legacy media”, Luxon has publicly slapped-down the Right’s young champion which, as far as they’re concerned, is the same as slapping them down – the people whose votes put National in power.

But that is not how populism works. You can’t just switch it on and off like a lightbulb. Nor can you boast about ignoring the wishes of the “overwhelming majority” of the New Zealand people. Not if you want to remain the dominant right-wing party.

The sharp up-tick in Act’s support in the latest Curia poll should be taken as a warning. So, too, should the findings of the latest Research New Zealand survey. Against all the confident prognostications of the punditocracy, a solid plurality of Men, New Zealanders aged 18-34, Kiwis living north of Taupo, and (astonishingly) Māori, are in favour of confirming the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi by referendum.

Small wonder then, that in spite of Luxon’s very public slap-down, David Seymour is not at all disposed to giving-up the fight.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 12 February 2024.

Threatening “Consequences”.

Warning Shot: The former Māori Development Minister, Willie Jackson, predicted civil unrest on a scale “five times, ten times” worse than the 1981 Springbok Tour protests if the Act Party’s referendum on Te Tiriti O Waitangi goes ahead.

“CONSEQUENCES” – it’s a word that acquires an ominous quality in the mouths of political radicals. As in: “Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from its consequences. Or, as Te Pāti Māori’s Debbie Ngarewa Packer expressed it, when asked what would happen if the Act Party secured its referendum on Te Tiriti from its new coalition partners: “We have always said there will be consequences.”

In both contexts the word is freighted with menace. It is impossible to miss the threat which the word is now required to bear. What the political radical is saying to the person about to avail herself of what is perhaps the most fundamental of all human rights is chilling.

“Of course you can speak out on this issue, but you are surely not so naïve as to believe that your little speech will be the end of it. Giving voice to such opinions cannot help but leave a very black mark on your record. It’s the sort of thing that goes down in an employee’s personal file. Your chances of promotion may be limited very seriously by giving voice to such views. Still, it’s entirely up to you. Just remember, though, freedom of speech does not mean freedom from its consequences.”

If you were a public servant harbouring serious doubts about the wisdom of enshrining “decolonisation” and “indigenisation” at the top of your ministry’s priorities, and you had let it be known that it was your intention to speak out against the idea at the next staff training day, and your supervisor delivered that not-so-subtle warning to you the night before, would you go ahead with your plan? Or would the consequences of going ahead with your “little speech” cause you to scrap the whole idea?

Are we really free to express ourselves if, by doing so, we place our livelihood, our entire future career, at risk? If that’s what’s at stake, then doesn’t the exercise of our freedom of expression take on a fraught, almost existential, character? Like the German citizen of the Third Reich who, in obedience to his Christian faith, conceals a Jewish family in his attic. Simply by showing compassion for his fellow human-beings, that man is risking arrest, imprisonment and death. When those are the outcomes of displaying human compassion; of obeying the Christian injunction to “love thy neighbour”; is it not reasonable to suppose that the exercise of love and compassion will diminish?

Attaching dire consequences to any aspect of human behaviour must be seen as a means of reducing or eliminating that behaviour. If speaking out against “decolonisation” and “indigenisation” in a government ministry could cost the speaker their career, then the chances of it happening will be reduced dramatically. A climate of fear and compliance will be created in which the only safe speech is that which conforms to the policies and plans of the people in charge. The language of consequences all-too-easily shades into the language of totalitarianism.

It is difficult to attribute anything other than an intention to intimidate the incoming government to Debbie Ngarewa Packer’s statement to RNZ. Or to Willie Jackson’s comments to Jack Tame on TVNZ’s Q+A current affairs programme. The former Māori Development Minister predicted civil unrest on a scale “five times, ten times” worse than the 1981 Springbok Tour protests if the Act Party’s referendum goes ahead. Both politicians are laying out the consequences of a coalition partner making it possible for citizens to cast a vote on the role and scope of Te Tiriti o Waitangi in New Zealand’s constitutional arrangements. It is suggested that massive civil disturbances – quite possibly violent in nature – will be the result if this classically democratic mechanism is employed to resolve significant differences in the interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi.

Compare the response of these two Māori nationalists with those of the people who opposed the introduction of proportional representation, assisted dying, and decriminalisation of cannabis. Did the “anti” side of these debates, or the “pro” side for that matter, threaten massive civil disturbances if their will was thwarted by the democratic process? No, they did not, because the referendum is generally acknowledged by all those who adhere to the democratic values of New Zealand society to be the best method of resolving controversial issues rationally and peacefully.

What other conclusion can be drawn from the statements of Debbie Ngarewa Packer and Willie Jackson, except that they reject the principle of majority rule that underpins the entire democratic system of government. And, if that is true, then New Zealanders will find it difficult to resist the conclusion that these two politicians’ preference, and the preference of the Māori nationalist movement generally, is for a system of government that accords the right of veto to a minority of the population.

Because, what else is being demanded here but the right to prevent certain political policies from being implemented? Not by virtue of winning an election fought, at least in part, on the political policies in dispute, Not by winning a referendum called to determine, finally, which course of action should be followed. But by warning of the consequences of allowing the offending policy to be implemented over the minority’s objections. Or, in the language of the mafioso enforcer: “Nice little country you’ve got here, it would be a real shame if something happened to turn it into a hell-hole of civil strife.”

How, then, should the incoming government respond to this threat of consequences? The largest party of the coalition currently in formation, National, has rejected Act’s policy of a Treaty referendum as “divisive and unhelpful”. But this is nonsense. A great many of the policies espoused by National, Act and NZ First are “divisive and unhelpful” – not least their pledge to abolish Fair Pay Agreements. But, the fact that a great many people are opposed to National-Act-NZ First policies will not prevent them from being implemented. It’s one of the principal reasons for holding democratic elections, to provide governments with the mandate needed to proceed with their policies over the objections of the opposition. The question, therefore, is not whether Act’s policy is “divisive and unhelpful”, but whether it is justified.

And, if it is justified, then the incoming government must decide how to respond to the threatened consequences of allowing Act’s referendum to be put before the people. The answer to this question is as clear as it is daunting: no government can allow its conduct of national affairs to be determined by threats of massive civil disturbance and/or political violence.

Successfully applied once, the minority’s consequences – its veto – will be applied again, and again, and again, until the political will of the majority has been set at nought. Either that, or, unwilling to be ruled by the minority, the majority will develop a sequence of consequences intended to secure results considerably more to their liking.

This essay was originally posted on the Democracy Project website on Monday, 6 November 2023.

Labour In 2023: No Place Left To Grow.

Missing The Point: It’s the element of punishment – the mood of ‘anyone but Labour’ – that Labour stubbornly refuses to accept. It certainly wasn’t evident in Chris Hipkins concession speech on the night his government was so resoundingly voted out of office. 

“I HAD BEEN HOPING that this election would resemble 2005 more than 2014. Clearly this was not the case.” So said the pseudonymous “Mickey Savage” on the Labour-leaning website, The Standard, the morning after. A spectacular understatement, obviously, but the observation also confirmed just how out of touch Labour’s membership has become.

The election-night which Saturday evening (14/10/23) most resembled wasn’t the election night of 2014, with its calamitous Party Vote of 25.13 percent, but the election night of 1990 when, after six tumultuous years in office, Labour was punished with exemplary viciousness by an electorate which had, very clearly, had enough. 1990 was also the other occasion when the voters of the “safe” Labour seat of Mt Roskill ejected their local MP (one Phil Goff) in favour the National candidate.

It’s that element of punishment – that mood of ‘anyone but Labour’ – that Labour stubbornly refuses to accept. Certainly, it wasn’t evident in Chris Hipkins concession speech. Although politicians invariably reach for tidal metaphors when confronted with significant defeats, the identification is far from apt. Politics is not a matter of gravitational attraction, it is constructed out of the hopes and fears – and rage – of human-beings. When parties lose, it’s not on account of the position of the moon, it’s because they have done things that cause even their supporters to vote for someone else – or stay at home.

The things that Labour did between 1984 and 1990 – “Rogernomics” and all that – turned New Zealand upside-down. Concepts and theories which had guided the politicians of both parties for decades were jettisoned with a speed and a ruthlessness that made effective opposition extremely difficult. Difficult, but not impossible. The New Zealand in the 1980s was still the sort of society in which dissent and debate, even in regard to what was fast becoming the state’s official ideology, was still permitted. The mainstream news media still saw the virtue of offering citizens both sides of the story.

Herein lies the difference between that earlier wholesale clean-out of Labour, and the 2023 General Election. Between 2017 and 2023, the Sixth Labour Government also turned New Zealand upside-down – but not in the same way as Roger Douglas and Richard Prebble.

When the Fourth Labour Government closed down freezing-works and sold state-owned enterprises, it was front page news. Protests were staged and documentaries were made. The responsible Cabinet Ministers were forced to explain and justify their actions publicly which, to a creditable degree, they did. The introduction of neoliberalism in New Zealand did not end up requiring (as one trade union leader had predicted) tanks in the streets.

That’s not how its been for the past six years. Massive changes in education and health policy were introduced without adequate explanation or justification. Jarring changes in the linguistic structure of official communications were implemented without consultation, leaving many New Zealanders feeling culturally disoriented and politically ignored. Distracted by the Christchurch terrorist attack and the sudden onrush of the Covid-19 Pandemic most of these developments went unnoticed until Labour, freed from NZ First’s moderating influence by the “Thankyou Jacinda!” election of 2020, began stepping up the pace of change.

Missing from this “revolution” (as Dame Claudia Orange described it) was anything approaching the coherent explanatory framework provided by Roger Douglas and his colleagues courtesy of the neoliberal intellectuals in Treasury, the Reserve Bank and the Business Roundtable.

The highly controversial report, He Puapua, for example, proposed wholesale constitutional reform – to a degree which would have left New Zealand politically unrecognisable. Far from being conceived as the starting point for a wide-ranging public debate, the report was prepared in secret and only released by the Sixth Labour Government after it was leaked to the Act Party.

Although disavowed by Jacinda Ardern, sharp-eyed members of the public recognised a remarkable degree of congruence between He Puapua’s recommendations and government policy. They were told, none too politely, that they were seeing things.

Undeterred, those taking a close interest in public policy noticed something else: the deep reluctance of Labour ministers to engage in the sort of head-to-head ideological confrontations that were common during the unrolling of Rogernomics. After 2020, all attempts to debate the future of Te Tiriti o Waitangi and Māori-Pakeha relations tended to be framed as manifestations of racist, white supremacist, prejudice. Tellingly, a long-delayed discussion document on Treaty-based constitutional reform was deemed too inflammatory for public release by Māori Development Minister Willie Jackson. It still hasn’t seen the light of day.

Even more concerning was the mainstream news media’s extreme reluctance to entertain any debate over the many contentious issues – “co-governance” in particular – that were growing out of the Crown’s newfound commitment to “indigenisation” and “decolonisation”. Increasingly, voters came to understand that there were topics which could not be questioned or debated without “consequences”. Around this new ideology they further observed the erection of a complex array of protective barriers. Those who attempted to breach these barriers were accused of spreading “misinformation, disinformation and malinformation” or, even worse, of deploying “hate speech”.

Inflation, the cost-of-living, rising mortgage interests rates: if the pollsters’ efforts were to be believed, then these were the issues driving the voters towards National, Act, and a change of government. Concerns about co-governance did not feature in these lists of voter concerns. Nonetheless, they persisted. In places where no one was likely to cluck their tongues in disapproval, or send an anonymous complaint to the HR department, the state of ethnic relations in New Zealand was the subject of intense unease. It kept Act’s numbers at record levels and fuelled the re-emergence of NZ First. It was the political dissidence that dared not speak its name, but it existed – and it would prove extraordinarily motivational.

When the defectors from Labour punished their old party in 1990, it was an act of bitter revenge. David Lange and Roger Douglas had promised “transformation” and they had delivered it. New Zealand the way Muldoon’s followers had wanted it, no longer existed. The votes of those who lamented its passing were cast against Labour in anger and despair. A final “Take that!” gesture of defiance before the new order became irretrievably bedded-in.

Thirty-three years later, voters threw their support behind National, Act and NZ First with much higher hopes of achieving something positive. While freezing works could not be re-opened or privatised state enterprises repurchased, the indigenisation and de-colonisation of New Zealand society can still be halted at the stroke of a ministerial pen.

It is to be hoped that New Zealand’s new Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, understands this. That among all the other things he has to do, he must not fail to honour the expectation of his conservative voters to defend democratic “New Zealand” from Te Tiriti-Centric “Aotearoa”.

The 2023 election result signals a decisive shift of the non-Māori, non-Pasefika, and non-Woke elements of the electorate to the right. Labour’s massive losses in Auckland put it at serious risk of being reduced to a South Auckland-based Pasefika party. In forthcoming elections, what National, Act and NZ First haven’t already taken is in grave danger of being stripped off Labour’s electoral carcass by the Greens and Te Pāti Māori.

For as long as its manifesto fails to overtly distance itself from the authoritarian radicalism of today’s “progressives”, the party of Mickey Savage, and “Mickey Savage”, seems destined to fade into historical irrelevance.

From where it stands now, Labour has run out of places to grow.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 16 October 2023.

Reckless Speculation.

Don't Panic! Chris Bishop’s scaremongering may elicit nothing but voter scorn, being seen as evidence of a party in full panic-mode. Presumably, National’s loss of confidence in its capacity to shape events has been brought on by its pollsters’ detection of a steady, and so far irreversible, slide in their level of electoral support.

WHAT HAS CHRIS BISHOP SEEN that has so unhinged him? Why would National’s Campaign Manager, whose party is currently attracting by far the largest share of voter support, suddenly start babbling about a second election?

In all its long history of responsible government: from the 1850s to the present day; New Zealand has never been forced into a second election. It’s just not something New Zealanders anticipate. Having cast our votes, most of us expect a functioning government to be fashioned without delay. What we do not expect is for the party with the largest number of votes to say: “No, we don’t like the hand you’ve dealt us – deal us another one.”

The sort of politicians who do that sort of thing are mostly to be found in the member states of the European Union. When the citizens of an EU member state get it into their heads that they don’t particularly like the latest treaty their political class had signed, successfully petition for a ratification referendum, and win it, they’re surprised to learn that voting a proposition down is nothing like enough to persuade their political class to accept defeat and enforce the will of the people.

Dear me, no – that’s not how things work at all. With the honourable exception of the United Kingdom, the only thing winning a referendum entitles the poor old EU serfs to is … another referendum. Just ask the Danes, who voted “No” to the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, only to discover that “No” was the wrong answer. In 1993, presented with another referendum, the Danes reluctantly voted “Yes”. The lesson was not lost on the Irish, who faced a similar ‘second go’ if they voted down the austerity measures contained in the EU’s fiscal treaty of 2012.

Nothing signals the political class’s contempt for the will of the people as strongly as its refusal to accept the will of the people. The message being sent is unmistakable: We – not you – know what’s best for the nation. So, don’t go getting ideas above your station. Which was the pretty much the gist of Chris Bishop’s reckless speculation. Get it right – or we’ll make you do it again!

The question now, in the backwash of Bishop’s intervention, is how will the voters – especially those currently intending to vote for Winston Peters – respond to National’s threat? Is the prospect of enduring something unprecedented in New Zealand’s political history – a second election – likely to prove too unsettling for the average punter? Will it be enough to extinguish the fluttering flame of rebellion that led them to contemplate a vote for NZ First? Will “instability” simply be coded as “personal insecurity” in conservative voters’ brains, causing them to tug their forelocks and, suitably chastened, step back into National’s ranks?

If that’s what happens (and very clearly that is what National’s strategists are hoping will happen) then the NZ First Party Vote may drop below the 5 percent MMP threshold. National’s Party Vote, and quite possibly Act’s too, may then inflate sufficiently to allow them to come together in the “clean” two-party coalition government Christopher Luxon is begging voters to give him.

To discover that New Zealanders could so easily be cowed into submission would be rather disconcerting. It would signal an almost masochistic desire to be punished for allowing themselves to be seduced by Jacinda Ardern’s “kindness” back in 2020. Lacking Peters’ restraining influence, the resulting National-Act government would have free-rein to impose the swingeing austerity programme required to pay for Luxon’s inflationary tax-cuts. That so many of us are willing to see so much pain inflicted upon our fellow citizens, strongly suggests that there is a fair amount of sadism mixed in with all that masochism. Hardly a pretty picture of our national character, and even less so of those NZ First voters so easily bounced into abandoning their nobler impulses by the prospect of a second election.

Contrariwise, Bishop’s scaremongering may elicit nothing but voter scorn, being seen as evidence of a party in full panic-mode. Presumably, National’s loss of confidence in its capacity to shape events has been brought on by its pollsters’ detection of a steady, and so far irreversible, slide in their level of electoral support. Bishop’s talk of a “hung parliament” may even suggest that notwithstanding NZ First’s support, National-Act may soon be struggling to command the 61 seats needed to govern.

Those same pollsters may also be predicting that if Act’s support continues to decline, and NZ First’s to climb, then, by the evening of Saturday, 14 October, the two parties may be level-pegging. Certainly, such a prospect would induce palpitations in all but the most hardened political campaigners. Not only would it void the best argument for Luxon making Act his first choice, but it would also throw into sharp focus the National Party leader’s singular lack of experience in forging coalitions. Voters would be entitled to query whether Luxon has the political skills needed to manage coalition partners displaying such obvious mutual loathing as NZ First and Act.

Where the polls land in this, the last week of the election campaign, may produce a truly spectacular result. Providing Peters’ support remains solidly above 6 percent, and Act’s determination to hold a referendum on the meaning of Te Tiriti remains firm, something disastrous may happen to National’s support. Seeing only the chaos and instability that Bishop’s reckless speculation has primed them to see, a crucial number of the voters who deserted National for Labour in 2020 – and were then persuaded to return by Luxon’s elevation to the leadership in December 2021 – may opt to return to the devils they know.

After all, a political combination that has already demonstrated its incapacity to deliver very much of anything, may begin to look a lot more desirable than a coalition of parties committed to making the economy scream, and splitting their society into two, mutually hostile, racial camps, with frightening efficiency. The venerable Aesop’s fable about the frogs who grew tired of their do-nothing monarch, Old King Log, only to find his deadly replacement, the altogether too active King Stork, much less to their liking, seems increasingly apposite to the 2023 election campaign’s final days.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project of Monday, 9 October 2023.

National Starts To Panic.

Running Scared? That’s the voters’ choice, if you listen to National’ s panicky Chris Bishop: a clean two-party coalition, or a dirty three-way.

GUYON ESPINER AND ANDREA VANCE kept casting glances towards Ruth Richardson, much as they would towards a batty old aunt. Indisputably, there was something deeply eccentric about Richardson’s performance on Saturday’s Newshub Nation. But, there was also something scary.

Like the Bourbons (the French royal family restored to power following the defeat of Napoleonic France) Richardson appears to have “learned nothing, and forgotten nothing”. Hearing her speak about the New Zealand economy, and what is needed to restore it to health, it was as though the three decades that have slipped by since her brief tenure as Finance Minister were empty of incident. As if all the deterioration in the quality of New Zealanders’ lives and the slow decay of their nation’s institutions – much of it attributable to Richardson’s policies – could be made to disappear by a furious waving of hands.

Richardson is exactly the same person, ideologically, that she was in 1991, when her vicious “Mother of all Budgets” left beneficiary families in tears, and the charities dedicated to their support starved of resources. The same, pint-sized true believer: fizzing with ideological certainty; ready to inflict pain and hardship upon half a nation for its own good – and for the even better of the other half.

That the passage of so many years has not dimmed the fanatical brightness in Richardson’s eyes is only marginally less frightening than the fact that she sits on the Act Party’s Board-of-Directors.

That Ruth Richardson just might have the ear of Act Party Leader, David Seymour, was reportedly enough for a number of the National Party’s biggest friends and donors to take a deep breath and pour hundreds-of-thousands of dollars into the coffers of NZ First. Their argument was straightforward. National could not afford to be driven into the same dangerous territory as Jim Bolger. Winston Peters had applied the handbrake whenever Jacinda Ardern’s government threatened to leave the road – best to have him there if Christopher Luxon’s looked like doing the same.

After all, the only thing that had saved Jim Bolger’s government, following three years of “Ruthanasia”, was the First-Past-The-Post electoral system. The disastrous electoral impact of Richardson’s policies may be measured in the precipitate fall in the National Party’s share of the popular vote. From 48 percent in 1990 to just 35 percent in 1993. Had MMP been in place for the 1993 general election, Labour and the Alliance, with a combined Party Vote of 52 percent could easily have taken power. Bolger would have presided over National’s first one-term government.

If Seymour is permitted to exert the same economic and social policy influence over Luxon’s government as Richardson exerted over Bolger’s, then a Labour-Green government in 2026 will be odds-on favourite. And it won’t be anything like the Labour-Green-NZ First Government of 2017-2020. Assuming the pollsters are correct, and that Chris Hipkins’ government is soundly defeated on Saturday, then a pretty ruthless scouring of the Labour Party is unavoidable. What a National-Act government (unrestrained by Peters’ handbrake) is likely to face in 2026 will be as close to a “coalition of communists” as New Zealand has ever seen.

For a few days, over the course of the past fortnight, it appeared that the moderate faction of the National Party had prevailed over its hard-liners. Luxon made it clear to the voting public that while his preference was for a “clean” two-party coalition with the Act Party, if its preference was otherwise, then he would pick up the phone and call Winston. Almost overnight, NZ First’s numbers improved by a whole percentage point – lifting it to a projected 6 percent of the Party Vote. With NZ First securing that level of support, a National-Act-NZ First government became a dead certainty. The Right was poised to re-take the Treasury Benches.

Or … not. Between Luxon’s confirmation of a week ago that, if required, a three-party coalition, including NZ First, was possible; and National Campaign Manager Chris Bishop’s panicky Sunday predictions of deadlocked negotiations, hung parliaments, and the possibility (probability?) of a second election; something very serious had gone very wrong. Somewhere in National’s caucus, party, or party-donors’ ranks (and, quite possibly, in all three simultaneously) a split has opened up between those who favour simply a change of government, and those who, echoing Act’s election slogan, favour “real change” – Richardsonian change.

Having witnessed the NZ First “surge”, from 5 to 6 percent, these “Real-Changers” were clearly terrified that Act’s recent slump in support, from 15 percent to 10 percent, was not going to stop, and that Luxon might well emerge from Saturday night’s count with a Party Vote between 34-36 percent, followed by Act and NZ First with 8 percent apiece. For the Real-Changers, an Act Party with no more support than NZ First could produce only a lazy, do-nothing, National Government – something on the model of John Key’s. Unacceptable, was their judgement. Act won’t wear it. Seymour would rather face a new election than spend the next three years as National’s and NZ First’s geeky younger sibling. If Chris Bishop wasn’t prepared to tell the public, then Act and the Real-Changers would.

Hence Bishop’s panicky statement regarding fruitless negotiations, hung parliaments and a second election. Clearly, he and his fellow strategists are attempting to spook Peters’ more recent converts into returning to National and Act. Their argument is brutally simple: back a National-Act government – without Peters – or face months of crippling political and economic instability by keeping him in the mix. That’s the voters’ choice: a clean two-party coalition, or a dirty three-way.

Will it work? Is Peters’ recent support susceptible to such threats? Are they Real-Changers, too, or are they after a different sort of change? Not Richardson’s economic rationalism, but Peters’ economic nationalism? And if it’s the latter, then asking them to embrace Ruth and kiss Winston good-bye, may not work. It just seems logical that if a right-wing voter was looking for the real change that Seymour is offering, then he or she would already be safely tucked-up with Act.

Then there’s the Left’s lost and lonely. Driven away from both Labour and the Greens by the latter’s’ support for restricting freedom of expression, re-writing the Treaty, and encouraging transgenderism. These unreconstructed lefties are looking to NZ First for shelter from the wokesters’ storm. Ex-Labour-Alliance-Green voters are not going to oblige Bishop by backing a National-Act government – no way.

Peters, Himself, has described Bishops’ statement as “scaremongering”:

These very concerning comments must be an unfortunate misunderstanding because suggesting the National Party would start scaremongering and threatening to ignore the will of the people on Election Day and ignore the need of our country to form a stable government would be highly troubling to voters. It is telling voters National would instead enforce another costly election on the nation purely because of their own political expediency.

Which is a classically orotund Winstonian way of saying that such behaviour, far from persuading opponents of Labour and the Greens to run towards the National and Act parties, is much more likely to drive them into the arms of NZ First.

Very good news indeed for sly Uncle Winston, but not at all what eccentric Aunt Ruth was hoping to hear.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website of Monday, 9 October 2023.

Calling The Big Dog’s Bluff.

Can This Be Possible? For nearly thirty years the pundits have been telling the minor parties that they must be good little puppies and let the big dogs decide. The parties with a plurality of the votes cast must be allowed to govern – even if that means ignoring the priorities of hundreds-of-thousands of voters.

IT IS THE CONSIDERED VIEW of the political punditocracy that the Act leader, David Seymour, is bluffing. The conventional wisdom of the so-called “experts” has not changed since New Zealand adopted MMP – any small party responsible for forcing an early election will be wiped out. The voters will not be trifled with – not by small parties demanding more than their share of the Party Vote entitles them. That being the case, Seymour must be bluffing. End. Of. Story.

But is it? It was inevitable that at some point, some minor party leader was going to call bullshit on the conventional wisdom. The only real surprise is that it has taken nearly 30 years of MMP coalition governments to produce someone willing to think the unthinkable. Fitting that it should be the leader of Act, because thinking the unthinkable has long been touted as Act’s stock-in-trade.

And, is it really that unthinkable for parties capable of securing hundreds-of-thousands of votes to decide, finally, to make those votes count? What we should all find unthinkable is the bizarre notion that a minor party is morally obliged to shelve 90 percent of its policies, smile sweetly for the cameras, and vote alongside its coalition partner like a robot for the next three years. Especially when most of the senior coalition partners’ members and supporters cordially despise everything the junior partner stands for.

Eventually, any party with even a modicum of self-respect is going to rebel against such unreasonable expectations. Possessing a great deal more than a modicum of self-respect, Act has, over recent weeks, been alarmed by a disrespectful degree of shrinking voter support. Finally, Christopher Luxon’s National Party has the acquired the momentum that makes electoral victory look almost certain. Those voters who had turned to Act, almost in despair, are, in ever-increasing numbers, hauling themselves aboard National’s band-wagon. Somehow, Act has to prevent more defections.

There is only one effective way to do this. Act must play on the widespread fear among right-wing voters that Luxon isn’t much more than a political Ken Doll. Good for joshing and jiving with the punters, but not much more than a handy accessory to a Labour-lite Action Barbie named Nicola. Given the alarming falling away of Act support, isn’t Seymour’s optimum strategy to urge the Right to give the wide-awake David Doll all the muscle he needs to break National out of its plastic fantastic play-world and force it to confront political reality?

It’s why Seymour is telling National that if a detailed coalition agreement, promising to enact the most important of Act’s promises, cannot be negotiated, then it will only be able to rely on Act’s votes in support of parliamentary confidence motions. Act will not pledge to support National on motions of supply (i.e. money bills). It’s support for National’s 2024 Budget would be determined transactionally – it would not be automatic. Seymour’s strategy should be to convince at least one-in-three right-wing voters that they must vote Act – or face a National government even squishier than John Key’s.

Seymour also needs to convince his colleagues that such a hardline approach will not result in what all the pundits regard as inevitable – a new election leading to Act’s destruction. Rather, he must challenge them with these questions:

“Why would the voters punish a party for insisting that politics is not a game? Why would they wipe out a party that is prepared to stake everything on its determination to bring real change? After 15 years of neither-fish-nor-fowl governments, isn’t there a better-than-even chance that at least 5 percent – and possibly much more – of the electorate is in the mood for some honest-to-goodness red meat?”

For nearly thirty years the pundits have been telling the minor parties that they must be good little puppies and let the big dogs decide. The parties with a plurality of the votes cast must be allowed to govern – even if that means ignoring the priorities of hundreds-of-thousands of voters.

But, what if an early election is forced by Act and the party is not wiped out? What if it actually picks up seats? Surely, in those circumstances, the senior coalition partner would be obliged to revise its negotiating strategy?

Not so much a case of the tail wagging the dog, as the tail successfully calling the dog’s bluff.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 15 September 2023.

Act’s Message: Cheerfully Libertarian? Or, Radically Right-Wing?

Mr Pushmepullyou: Pushed by the need for votes, Act's leader, David Seymour, like Richard Prebble before him, has reached out to the dark side of the New Zealand electorate. Much as he would prefer to pull in support on the strength of Act's sunny libertarianism, there just ain't enough Eighteenth Century liberals living in New Zealand to make such a party a viable electoral proposition. Although, God knows, Act has tried!

DAVID SEYMOUR IS DISCOVERING what Roger Douglas and Derek Quigley learned in 1994 – the first year of Acts’s existence. That the sort of supporters the party wants are pathetically few in number – far fewer than the sort of supporters it doesn’t want.

From the moment it was formed, the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers had everything a political movement needs to succeed: leaders and spokespeople who were well known; a coherent political ideology; a detailed economic programme; access to large audiences of potential supporters; and money – lots and lots of money. In Act’s first year, it has been estimated that the millionaire entrepreneur, Craig Heatley, spent one million dollars introducing the new political party to the New Zealand electorate.

On paper, Act should have succeeded, but it did not. After a year of touring the country. After a year of free media, and a million dollars’ worth of ads and pamphlets, the opinion polls showed Act hovering just below, or just over, 1 percent. Not enough. No matter how many factory owners obligingly “invited” their employees to hear Douglas’s pitch; no matter how many university campuses Quigley visited; the result was the same. At the point-of-sale, Act lacked the one thing a political movement must have to succeed: a message people want to hear.

Act’s message was liberal in the classical, eighteenth century, sense. Douglas and Quigley preached the gospel of the sovereign, self-actualising, utility-maximising individual, and located him in an economic and cultural environment where state interference is reduced to the absolute minimum. The principle Act subscribed to most enthusiastically was laissez-faire. The doctrine of laissez-faire – “allow to do” – embraced more than free markets, it looked forward to a world without bullies and/or busy-bodies. A permissive world based on the “freedom to” become the best person you can be. A libertarian world.

Or not. New Zealand’s leading Libertarian, Lindsay Perigo, walked out of the founding Act conference, denouncing its refusal to declare total war on the state, and insisting that what Douglas and Quigley were proposing was anything but libertarian. Perigo was free to split ideological hairs because he, unlike Douglas and Quigley, had no real experience of down-and-dirty retail politics. Purity and practical politics don’t mix.

Also present at Act’s founding conference, even if she had no intention of taking part, was the redoubtable left-wing activist, Sue Bradford. With considerably more political savvy than Perigo, Bradford denounced Act as an extreme right-wing party dedicated to finishing the job which Douglas had started. This description of Act was picked up by the news media and repeated ad nauseum. No matter how hard it tried, the Act Party was never able to convince the nation that Bradford’s definition was mistaken. She had branded Act for life.

Not that the “extreme right-wing” brand bothered Richard Prebble all that much. Watching from the sidelines, he was content to let Douglas discover the hard way how very few votes there were in the philosophical doctrines of the Eighteenth Century, or, for that matter, in Ayn Rand’s Objectivist fantasies of the 1940s and 50s. Prebble knew where to go looking for the votes Act needed: exactly which stones, in which dark places, it would be necessary to lift up.

Prebble understood better than just about anybody what MMP was making possible. Parties of the far-Left and the far-Right had never prospered in New Zealand for the very simple reason that the First-Past-the-Post electoral system (which the country had just discarded) made it virtually impossible for such parties to win seats. The one party which had succeeded in doing so was the Social Credit Political League, but only when popular hostility to both National and Labour was strong enough to transform Social Credit into a repository for “protest votes”. Even then, Social Credit was never able to win more than 2 seats.

Prebble was well aware that in the most propitious of political circumstances upwards of 20 percent of the electorate could be susceptible to the blandishments of a third party. Since Act could not expect many votes from the Left (not with Jim Anderton’s Alliance competing so successfully against Labour) the votes he needed belonged to those right-wing New Zealanders who believed that on matters relating to Māori, law-and-order, public morality, women, gays, unions and the environment, the National Party had aligned itself far too closely with Labour. Where is the advantage, Prebble asked his Act colleagues, in allowing Winston Peters to go on sweeping up all these votes?

Taking his inspiration from the right-wing of the US Republican Party, Prebble set about transforming Act into a far-right populist party – albeit one represented by carefully chosen neoliberal/libertarian candidates whose personal beliefs were often at odds with the prejudices of the ideological troglodytes who voted for them. Perhaps the best historical analogy is with the “Dixiecrats” of the southern US states. From the 1940s to the 1970s, outstanding political leaders – like Senator William Fullbright – owed their seats to the votes of unapologetic white supremacists.

While Prebble led Act (1996-2004) the party polled between 6-7 percent of the Party Vote. With his departure in 2004, however, the party’s fortunes plummeted. To 1.5 percent in 2005, recovering slightly to 3.5 percent in 2008, back to 1 percent in 2011, and then to 0.7 percent under the cheerfully libertarian Jamie Whyte in 2014. In 2017, under the stewardship of Act’s incumbent leader, David Seymour, the party won just 0.5 percent of the Party Vote.

Kept in Parliament by its “Epsom Deal” with the National Party, Act seemed likely to fade into obscurity as a one-MP “appendage party”. Then, like so many aspects of New Zealand society, it was transformed by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. With National a fractious political hulk lying low in the water, many right-wing voters cast an angry protest vote for Act. From a risible 13,000 party votes in 2017, David Seymour’s party garnered a remarkable 219,000 votes in 2020 – beating Prebble’s best result (7 percent) by half a percentage point.

Seymour’s stewardship of the Act Party since 2020 has for the most part been exemplary. The party’s 9 additional MPs have presented themselves as a disciplined and competent team – offering voters a stark contrast to the bad behaviour afflicting all the other parliamentary parties. Act’s staunch defence of Free Speech, and its resolute opposition to much of the so-called “woke agenda” – especially co-governance – has pushed its numbers up and over 10 percent in the opinion polls. Not even National’s recovery under Christopher Luxon has been sufficient to seriously undermine Act’s support.

What does pose a threat to Act’s projected success on 14 October, is Seymour’s failure to be guided by Prebble’s thinking on candidate selection. Given the deeply conservative character of  Act’s newfound support – much of it subscribing to the dangerous conspiracy theories growing out of the Covid-19 crisis – the need to scrutinize the party’s prospective candidates within an inch of their lives was urgent. It was absolutely vital that Act’s next ten MPs were (to continue the American analogy) William Fullbrights – not Marjorie Taylor Greenes.

The withdrawal and/or resignation of five Act candidates over recent weeks – a number of them for making claims alarmingly similar to Marjorie Taylor Greene’s – has the potential to give voters pause. Some, perhaps many, will ask themselves just how much they really know about Act and what it stands for.

Here’s a clue: it ain’t libertarianism.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 11 September 2023.

Forward To A New Day, Or Taking The Country Backwards?

Beginning Again: Te Pāti Māori is unequivocal, the system under which 2.1 million New Zealanders earn less than $30,000 per year, must be brought down. Their slogan draws on a metaphor as old as politics itself. Out of darkness a new day must dawn. The nation must be re-made. “Aotearoa Hou.”

TE PATI MĀORI’S ELECTION SLOGAN is “Aotearoa Hou”, which, roughly translated, means “A New Day”. NZ First’s slogan is “Let’s take back our country”. This, in essence, is what the 2023 General Election will be about.

Are New Zealanders still capable of imagining a brighter future, or are they, indeed, desperate for a return to the better country they remember. Most of the other party slogans are variations on these themes. National wants to get New Zealand “back on track”, for the Greens “the time is now”, while Act is promising “real change”.

Labour’s slogan, “In it for YOU”, stands out by being determinedly agnostic about New Zealand’s future direction of travel. All the voters are being asked to do is place their trust in a clutch of politicians who are in the game solely for their benefit. (By which, presumably, they mean the voters’ benefit, not their own!)

A number of political scientists have pointed out the lack of ambition in Labour’s slogan. Traditionally, the Party has focused voters’ attention on the need for change. It has also favoured collective over personal pronouns – as it the upbeat slogan of 2017, “Let’s do this!”

Rather than linking Labour and the people in a combined effort for national improvement, the “In it for YOU” slogan conjures-up the image of a gaggle of well-meaning do-gooders (many on salaries of nearly a quarter-of-a-million dollars) desperately anxious for YOU to believe THEY are without sinister, ulterior or selfish motivation. Labour: A party of altruists, pure as the driven snow, and they’re doing it all for YOU, baby!

It’s a dismal admission of failure, but one which has been implicit in the Labour Party that emerged from the splits and divisions of the Rogernomics era. When Labour was a party of 100,000 paid-up members and financial supporters, “we” had real political heft. To be a member of the Labour Party was to be a member of an organisation that that had transformed New Zealand’s economy, society and culture.

By 1990, however, Labour had been reduced to an organisation of fewer than 10,000 members. Most of these looked upon the party as a sort of social club in which, if they were lucky, they might have their photo taken with the prime minister. These folk actually hated political debate – it only led to unpleasantness. When the minority of political careerists who actually ran the party called upon these stalwarts to guard Labour from dissidents and traitors they were only too happy to oblige.

The present Labour Government constitutes a grim demonstration of what happens to a political party that no longer possesses the transformational impulse that animated its predecessors. (Even the Fourth Labour Government, albeit from the wrong end of the telescope!)

Having been handed the reins of government by Winston Peters in 2017, the party that Helen Clark and Michael Cullen had carried for nine years, almost entirely on the strength of their own prodigious political competence, took less than five years to demonstrate a heartbreaking degree of political ineptitude. Not even an unprecedented (under MMP) parliamentary majority, delivered in recognition of Labour’s initial success in handling the Covid-19 crisis, could help it get whatever “this” was, done.

If this Labour Government really is in the business of government for us, then we can be forgiven for wondering just how much worse-off we might be if they were actually in it for somebody else!

That the National Party can think of no more inspiring slogan than to get the country “back on track”, is evidence of how far it, too, has fallen since the days when John Key (state house boy made good) promised New Zealanders a “brighter future”. National’s current metaphor portrays New Zealand as a train derailed, and itself as the maintenance gang with both the engineering expertise and the heavy-lifting machinery needed to get things moving again.

All of which would make perfect sense if New Zealanders were confronting a more conventional economic and social crisis – one screaming out for remedial action. But, is that the mood? Or is it, rather, that instead of a derailment, New Zealanders are gripped by the conviction that the train they are on has been surreptitiously re-directed towards a destination they were not told about, and would not have chosen if they had been.

The problem with National’s slogan is that it offers the voters no possibility of travelling in a new or different direction. The best they can hope for is that National will convey them in the same direction as Labour, only with a little more attention to their health and safety. The party might just as well have inscribed “National – we’ll get you there in one piece” on their billboards.

Act’s invocation of “real change” – especially in the context of presenting itself as National’s hard line/hard core coalition partner – merely confirms to voters that David Seymour intends to get them to the Right’s neoliberal destination at top speed, ignoring the safety regulations, and without making any further stops.

Having arrived at the terminus, however, it will soon become clear to the travelling public that National and Act have not taken them anywhere they haven’t been before. That Act’s “real change” is really just (big) business as usual – and, maybe, something even worse.

Deconstructing NZ First’s slogan presents a much more intriguing proposition. “Let’s take back our country” invites the voters to participate in a daring act of political intervention. Rather than sit back passively as the ship-of-state sails on into a worsening storm, Winston Peters is inviting the voters to turn him into their Fletcher Christian. With them at his back, he will storm the bridge and take back control from the neoliberal Captain Blighs who stole the good ship “New Zealand” from them forty years ago, and under whose command it has become less-and-less seaworthy. “Let’s take back our country” is nothing less than an invitation to electoral mutiny.

It is only Te Pāti Māori, however, which is offering the electorate the prospect of something entirely new. Only the Māori Party which is willing to take the necessary next steps beyond the Greens’ plaintive warning that “the time is now”.

As Te Pāti Māori has demonstrated with its radical tax policies, the intention is to strike at the very heart of the neoliberal status quo. Tinkering, argues Deborah Ngarewa Packer and Rawiri Waititi, is no longer enough, the system under which 2.1 million New Zealanders earn less than $30,000 per year, must be brought down. It’s a metaphor as old as politics itself. Out of darkness a new day must dawn. New Zealand must be re-made. “Aotearoa Hou.”

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 31 July 2023.

Sweet Moderation.

Balancing Act: Looming behind the comparatively modest voting tallies of the minor parties, is the clear preponderance of the votes cast in favour of the major parties. Should push come to shove, with the minor parties refusing to play ball unless their key policies are accepted, the prospect of a Grand Coalition of National and Labour will swiftly emerge as the crucial disciplinary threat.

THE PROBLEM FACING EVERY LEFTIST on 14 October is whether any vote they cast will bring anything resembling progressive change. Gaming it out, the radical voter always loses. There is no combination, short of an absolute majority for either the Greens or Te Pāti Māori (TPM) that holds out the slightest hope of delivering genuine transformational change. And, let’s be honest, the chances of either the Greens or TPM claiming an absolute majority of the Party Vote are as close to zero as makes no difference.

But, for the sake of argument, let’s embrace the most wildly optimistic scenario. Labour, after a surprisingly effective campaign, takes 35 percent of the Party Vote. Somehow, the Greens do enough to hold on to their 2020 Party Vote of around 8 percent. TPM, to the shock and surprise of the pundits, proves the Roy Morgan pollsters right by winning 7 percent of the Party Vote.

On paper, that’s a pretty creditable victory for the Left. Labour with 45 seats, the Greens with 10 seats, TPM with 9 seats: together they command 64 seats – more than enough for an effective coalition to govern. But, honestly, what are the chances of cobbling together a radical programme out of the policies of these three very different political parties? The truthful answer is: Not Good.

With more than twice the number of seats than the Greens and TPM combined, Labour will see no reason why it should not call the shots on all serious policy issues. Having ruled out a whole swag of radical Green and TPM policies in the run-up to the election, Labour’s negotiators would present their plurality of the Party Vote as a clear endorsement of the Government’s moderation. Wealth and windfall taxes would be off the table. GST would remain on food. There would be no state-owned supermarket chain supplied by iwi growers.

In staking out this ground, Labour would receive the near unanimous backing of the business community, the mainstream news media, and (from behind the scenes) the public service. After all, the defenders of the status quo would argue, the combined Party Votes for Labour and National account for more than two-thirds of the electorate. Moderation, they would say, won the election – not radicalism. The radical parties of the Left must, therefore, accept that on all important matters the will of the Labour Party must prevail. Had National and Act secured the majority, Act’s radicalism would have had to be similarly curtailed.

Okay, okay, we know: there is no way the Greens and TPM are about to let themselves be thrust back in their boxes – not this time. This time they’re going to play hard ball: no substantive concessions – no votes. This time, from the cross-benches, the Greens and TPM fully intend to control the flow of events. After all, Labour cannot govern without them. So, this time, it’s Labour that will have to bend.

But taihoa, comrades, you’re not thinking this through! There are no cross-benches for you to sit on – not yet. The summoning of Parliament is one of the very few powers reserved to King Charles III, or his representative (in this case the Governor-General Dame Cindy Kiro) and constitutional convention requires that the Crown be satisfied that one or more of the parties elected is in a position to govern the Realm. And, when the Crown says “govern” it means run the country effectively, efficiently, and reliably for three years. Not precariously, from vote to vote, at the whim of one or more of the minor parties.

And, don’t forget, the person advising the Governor-General through this fraught process will be Chris Hipkins. Sure, he will only be a “caretaker” prime minister, but constitutionally he remains the politician Dame Cindy must turn to first. It will be Chippy who keeps her up-to-speed, vis-à-vis the Greens and TPM, right up to the moment he and his colleagues decide it is time to inform the Governor-General that Labour’s negotiations with the Greens and TPM have reached an impasse.

At that point, Dame Cindy will pick up the phone and direct a few well-chosen questions to James Shaw and Marama Davidson. Will their party allow Chris Hipkins to form a strong and stable administration? Will he be able to rely upon the Greens to refrain from turning every important policy decision into a battle of political wills?

What are the chances, really, of James and Marama saying anything other than “Yes”? And then, what are the chances of the designated representatives of the Green membership tipping New Zealand into a constitutional crisis by refusing to back their leaders?

Not that such a refusal would stop the step-by-step Vice-Regal advance towards a resolution of the developing crisis. Dame Cindy’s next move would be to pick up the phone and direct the same questions to Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa Packer. And their response, almost certainly, would be to put off answering Dame Cindy until the TPM President, John Tamihere, had had a brass-knuckle discussion with Chris Hipkins and Willie Jackson about what Labour needed to do to secure TPM’s unswerving backing.

Were Chippy and Willie to promise moving the constitutional/Te Tiriti debate to the next level, while pouring a truly outrageous amount of money into Whanau Ora, would John, Rawiri and Debbie say “Yes”? Almost certainly, they would. The TPM call to Government House would be made.

All eyes would now be on the Greens – assuming they hadn’t already caved. Once again the phone would ring. This time Dame Cindy would let them know that if they continued to withhold the votes Mr Hipkins needs, then her next call will be to Mr Luxon.

And if that call was made, to whom would Christopher Luxon speak next? Chris Hipkins? Definitely. John Tamihere? Possibly. David Seymour? Not if he’s got any sense. You see where this is going, don’t you?

Certainly, both James Shaw and Marama Davidson are quite intelligent enough to know who will end up getting blamed if New Zealand, driven by their intransigence, moves inexorably towards a Grand Coalition. That’s why, after securing Chippy’s promise of four Green seats at the Cabinet Table, the reply to the Governor-General will be “Yes.”

Because, it is utterly unrealistic to believe that the National Party will keep baling a left-wing government out of its multiplying parliamentary difficulties by ponying-up with the needed votes whenever the PM calls. If that’s the way of things, then why not demand the Deputy-Prime Ministership for Luxon? Why not secure multiple National Party seats at the Cabinet Table? In other words: why not go all-in for a Grand Coalition? Either that, or force a new election.

It just isn’t that easy to hold a whole country to ransom – especially when your party, or parties, emerged from the election with 15 percent of the Party Vote. In the end, a democratically-governed state simply will not attempt to rule in defiance of public opinion. If a clear majority of the electorate declines to vote for the revolutionary option, then – one way or the other – the policies of sweet moderation will prevail.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 21 July 2023.

Unstoppable And Explosive.

An Awesome Power: The metaphor of the erupting volcano is often pressed into service by journalists and historians. Understandably, since political upheavals, like volcanic eruptions, tend to take all but the most attentive observers by surprise. The existing political order, like a dormant volcano, seems stable right up until the moment it blows apart. 

IT’S VOLCANOLOGISTS who detect the first signs of the pending eruption. Barely discernible tremors, swarms of them, imperceptible to those not equipped with a seismograph, but indicative of something stirring beneath the seemingly solid earth. Magma, rising from the depths, disturbs an equilibrium that may have endured for centuries, causing the ground to shake. Inside the volcano things are heating up. Expanding gases create fissures in the volcano’s flanks, asphyxiating birds and other creatures caught in their invisible plumes. The quakes grow more violent. The air reverberates eerily – as if the mountain itself is groaning. In the final few hours before eruption, the volcano begins to deform, swelling ominously as the magma and the superheated gases expanding ahead of it approach the surface. Finally, with a roar like that of a stricken god, the volcano belches millions of tons of molten rock and ash into the upper atmosphere. For miles, across the landscape, Hell rises and walks around.

The metaphor of the erupting volcano is often pressed into service by journalists and historians. Understandably, since political upheavals, like volcanic eruptions, tend to take all but the most attentive observers by surprise. The existing political order, like a dormant volcano, seems stable right up until the moment it blows apart. Destroyed by forces which have been gathering strength for weeks and months right under the authorities’ noses – not so much unnoticed – as disregarded.

In this volcanic metaphor, the role of the seismograph is played by the polling agencies. It is the pollster who picks up the first tremors of political mobilisation. Barely noticed at first, generating results well inside the margin-of-error, but real nonetheless. Unmistakable evidence that beneath the familiar political topology magma is rising, gases are heating, hitherto solid rock is melting.

It was Act which provided the first indication that the fragile equilibrium established in the aftermath of the Covid Earthquake was coming apart.

As National began its belated rise towards electoral respectability (i.e. a Party Vote in the low-to-mid 40s) it soon became clear that getting there, and staying there, was more than it could accomplish. Meanwhile, the angry Right was refusing to cool down. New Zealand society was being changed radically, and without the permission of those who saw changing things as their prerogative. Moreover, National didn’t seem to be that bothered – as if they regarded the changes as tolerable.

Act’s take-off in the polls was the first sign of the roiling masses of magma churning away deep below the surface. More than willing to take the hard lines that National was eschewing, Act gave voice to the fears of those whose long-established privileges were being challenged by proudly insubordinate social movements pushing transformational ideas about ethnicity and gender.

Below the Me Too and Black Lives Matter agitation, however, and below the bewildering claims of the transgender activists, there was an upward thrusting force that at once empowered and overwhelmed the causes which Act and its fellow travellers dismissed as “Woke”. This was the magma of Māori nationalism, the expanding force of a people whose numbers and aspirations simply refused to stop growing.

The Māori Question was being put to Pakeha New Zealanders with an urgency born of too many wrong and/or misleading historical answers. It was heating the rhetorical gases of the Left, but it was not the Left. To the defenders of Pakeha privilege, however, the denizens of old New Zealand, two things were terrifyingly clear. That all this “Māori stuff” was huge – and that it was rising inexorably towards the surface of New Zealand politics.

Act placed itself athwart the Māori nationalists’ path. It promised to turn back the relentless advance of “Aotearoa” against “New Zealand”. The Treaty of Waitangi would be re-written, all traces of co-governance, would be swept away. A new, written constitution would entrench Pakeha privilege forever. But, these were horizontal solutions: as if the Māori cause was an army advancing towards a defensible border; a force that could be stopped and turned around.

Wrong metaphor.

The upward thrust of the Māori cause is magma – unstoppable and potentially explosive. It may flow down the slopes of New Zealand as lava, reshaping the state in dramatic and irreversible fashion. Or, blocked by the congealed rock of racist resistance in its throat, its pressure will grow and grow until New Zealand disappears in an explosion of fire and ash, leaving behind only Aotearoa.

Therefore, take note of the latest Roy Morgan poll. In that dramatic upward tick of Te Pāti Māori – to a system-busting 7 percent – perceive the first, tell-tale tremors of a political eruption in the making. It is the young people, the rangatahi, who are rising. Not simply in response to Act’s futile policies of obstruction and suppression, but because there is in them a passion for growth and expansion that must, by whatever means necessary, find its way to the sky.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 7 July 2023.

An Electoral Taniwha Is Rising.

Unexpected Participants: Labour’s own pollsters, Talbot-Mills, are reported to have detected a pronounced up-tick in the number of Māori aged between 18 and 35 who are indicating their intention to vote in this year’s election. This is not a demographic in which New Zealand psephologists (people who study elections) generally place much stock. Historically-speaking, roughly two-thirds of 18-35-year-old Māori have declined to participate in the electoral process.

THE FINDINGS of the latest Roy Morgan Poll are nothing less than a political bombshell. It is not only that the poll shows both National and Labour falling to roughly 30 percent of the declared respondents’ Party Vote. It’s not even that Act is now boasting 15 percent of the Party Vote – a share that would entitle them to 6 or 7 seats at the Cabinet Table. No, the explosive nature of these results lies in the fact that Te Pāti Māori (TPM) stands at 7 percent of the declared Party Vote. If that is the result on Election Day, then TPM could be looking at nine MPs. Moreover, Labour and the Greens would need the support of those nine MPs to form a government.

It may be objected that for several months now a plethora of polls have confirmed TPM’s status as “kingmaker” in the 2023 General Election. And, since the National Party has ruled out any kind of deal with TPM, the only King it will be able to crown is Labour. While correct, what this “So what else is new?” response fails to adequately register is TPM’s significant rise in the declared Party Vote. Add TPM’s 7 percent to the Greens’ 9.5 percent and between them the parties of the Far Left are currently representing one out of every six voters.

Boom!

What’s even more significant, is where TPM’s 7 percent of the Party Vote is coming from. Labour’s own pollsters, Talbot-Mills, are reported to have detected a pronounced up-tick in the number of Māori aged between 18 and 35 who are indicating their intention to vote in this year’s election. This is not a demographic in which New Zealand psephologists (people who study elections) generally place much stock. Historically-speaking, roughly two-thirds of 18-35-year-old Māori have declined to participate in the electoral process.

That amounts to tens-of-thousands of uncast votes – tens-of-thousands of votes which, if consolidated into a bloc, could reconfigure the electoral landscape dramatically. It is precisely this sort of reconfiguration which the Roy Morgan Poll has now made visible to the public. Young Māori are waking up politically and they are telling the pollsters that the overwhelming majority of the votes they intend to cast will go to Te Pāti Māori.

Why? What is it that has, to employ Shane Jones’ rather condescending phraseology, got the nephews off the couch? To those who understand that for every extreme political action there is an equal and opposite extreme political reaction, the answer is plain. It is the Act Party’s policies in relation to te Tiriti o Waitangi, co-governance and affirmative action.

Act’s leader, David Seymour has amassed an impressive number of former National Party voters by refusing to equivocate on the politics of race. Where National has been mealy-mouthed on race – frightened, no doubt, that too much frankness will drive away urban liberals – Act has been all-too-clear. Given sufficient parliamentary clout, it will first re-define, and then re-write, the Treaty of Waitangi. Act will then confirm the revised text by majority vote in a binding referendum.

This raw political meat has proved particularly appetising to those right-wing voters who are strongly of the view that all this “Māori stuff” has gone too far, and that National is doing far too little to roll it back.

That there are votes – lots of votes – in the politics of race has been clear ever since 2005, when Don Brash’s in/famous “Orewa Speech” saw National’s poll numbers go up by a whopping 17 percentage points. Seymour’s attitude in 2023 appears to be: “If you don’t want these voters Mr Luxon, then we’ll gladly take them off your hands!”

Did Seymour think at all about how Māori would react to what would amount to a unilateral Pakeha re-writing of te Tiriti, followed by a tyrannical Pakeha majority’s gratuitous ratification of Act’s new and improved version of New Zealand’s founding document? Does he, even now, have any idea of the fury such a course of action would unleash? Is he really so sure that young Māori New Zealanders, whose expectations of a decolonised and indigenised Aotearoa have never been higher, will just sit on the couch and watch him set their treaty – and their hopes – on fire?

Roy Morgan’s pollsters suggest otherwise. They’re telling us that an electoral taniwha is rising.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 7 July 2023.