Is The Prime Minister “Evil”?

She’s Such A Scream! The Prime Minister’s enemies, those who want us to hate her, suffer from the not insubstantial handicap of being more than a little hateful themselves. Rendered nonsensical by their unwavering belief in the most absurd conspiracy theories, and dangerous by their relentless peddling of fake news about the Covid-19 vaccines, they stand exposed to the accusation that they are all exceptionally dark right-wing pots to be calling Labour’s kettle black.

WHAT DOES IT SAY about the state of New Zealand politics that our prime minister is being branded as “evil”? “Nothing good” is the obvious, if insufficient, response. Calling another human-being evil signals that political discussion has veered away from the predictably ideological towards the dangerously metaphysical. Good and Evil are religious – not political – terms.

Escalating the depiction of one’s political opponents from the merely incompetent, simply ignorant and defensively dishonest, to the overtly mendacious, fundamentally corrupt and self-consciously immoral, makes politics, “the art of the possible”, impossible.

After all, competence can be acquired through experience; ignorance can be corrected through education; and the political consequences of dishonesty can be powerfully corrective. But, mendacity, corruption, and the deliberate choice of clearly immoral options, are failings beyond the remedial powers of most ordinary mortals.

I vividly recall watching the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, waxing eloquent on the evil character of his Russian enemy. Zelensky’s depiction of President Vladimir Putin made the Devil himself look like a rank amateur. It was only when the journalist interviewing Zelensky pointed out that if Putin really was as bad as he was saying, then compromise would be impossible. How does one negotiate with pure evil? The question pulled the Ukrainian president up short. If only for a moment, doubt took command of his features. Is it ever possible to make peace with the Devil?

That is the problem with terms like Good and Evil: they tend to shut down the possibility of compromise and negotiation. Indeed, they render compromise and negotiation morally unacceptable. The threat posed by the individuals and/or groups described as evil is transformed into something viscerally existential. If “they” are not overcome, then “we” will be. The only options become: Victory – or Death.

Those who choose to characterise Jacinda Ardern as evil do so with a similarly binary political objective. In the simplest terms, they are hoping to rule out all other political options except the decisive destruction of the Labour Government and its leader.

Certainly, they do not want all those New Zealanders tossing-up whether to cast another vote for Labour to say: “On the one hand, Jacinda and her government have been pretty hopeless at keeping their promises on climate change, child poverty and affordable housing; but, on the other hand, they did a great job keeping the country going under Covid.”

Nor are Jacinda’s foes keen for voters to compare New Zealand’s economic and social performance with those of other nations. Once people grasp the fact that their own country is economically, socially and culturally out-performing a great many of the wealthy nations against which we like to compare ourselves, the idea of returning Labour to power doesn’t seem quite so unthinkable after all.

Transforming Jacinda Ardern into a hateful caricature, and loading her with responsibility for all the nation’s woes, will also serve to distract the electorate from the straightforward and eminently measurable response of her government to the most pressing (and potentially the most politically determinative) “bread and butter” issues bound up with the steadily rising cost-of-living, ballooning mortgage repayments, and the ability of working people to ensure that their wages and salaries at least keep pace with inflation.

If the data emerging from the Treasury and the Reserve Bank over the next 11 months indicates that the Labour Government is making a reasonable fist of managing the economy in unusually trying times, then the Prime Minister will have realistic grounds for electoral optimism. Doubly so, if her Finance Minister, Grant Robertson, is able to announce changes to the tax regime that penalise the rich and reward the poor.

It should also be noted that the Prime Minister’s enemies, those who want us to hate her, suffer from the not insubstantial handicap of being more than a little hateful themselves. Rendered nonsensical by their unwavering belief in the most absurd conspiracy theories; and dangerous by their relentless peddling of fake news about the Covid-19 vaccines; they stand exposed to the accusation that they are all exceptionally dark right-wing pots to be calling Labour’s kettle black.

Should Jacinda Ardern re-fashion herself as a humble witness to her own and her government’s shortcomings, and commit herself to achieving a very small number of extremely useful things, then her enemies’ accusations of evil are most unlikely to stick.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 13 January 2023.

Disenchanted.

Another World: Oamaru’s whitestone Victorian Precinct is an enclave for aging alternative life-stylers. The air is filled with the scent of patchouli and hand-crafted leather. There are troll figurines and fairies for sale, alongside crystals and dream-catchers.

OAMARU likes to think of itself as the “steam-punk” capital of the world. It certainly has plenty of the whitestone Victorian and Edwardian architecture needed for such a project. It has also made room for the requisite collection of amiable eccentrics and creatives required to flesh-out the standard steam-punk narrative. As harmless games of dress-up go, Oamaru’s make-believe world seemed quirkily benign.

But, that was before Covid.

Walking around the North Otago town’s “Victorian Precinct” in early January, the anti-vaxxer vibe was unmistakable. It wasn’t just the signs welcoming “everyone” into the market stalls and boutiques that gave the anti-vax sentiment away, but the defiant stares their owners levelled at the tourists. Some of the retailers almost seemed to be daring the out-of-towners to make an issue of the fact that their QR codes had mysteriously gone missing.

Not that many visitors would have “made an issue” out of it – any more than a Springbok Tour protester would have “made an issue” of apartheid sport in a public bar back in 1981. Wrong sort of place. Wrong sort of people.

Oamaru’s whitestone Precinct is an enclave for aging alternative life-stylers. The air is filled with the scent of patchouli and hand-crafted leather. There are troll figurines and fairies for sale, alongside crystals and dream-catchers.

In the North Otago artist Donna Demente’s “Grainstore Gallery” it is difficult to resist the whiff of magic that permeates not just her paintings and papier mâché sculptures, but all the weird and wonderful nineteenth and twentieth century bric-a-brac among which her artworks nestle. For all its steam-punk machinery, the Precinct smacks more of Pre-Raphaelite sorcery and enchantment than Victorian science.

Donna Demente’s “Grainstore Gallery”, Victorian Precinct, Oamaru.

The intrusion of QR codes and Vaccination Passes into this world was never going to be welcomed with open arms. Even among the vaccinated, one suspects, there would have been a strong sense of disappointment. Like when some kill-joy suddenly turns on the electric lights at an intimate candle-lit party.

Covid-19 must have burst into the Precinct with all the sensitivity of a drugs bust. Rules and regulations, masks and jabs, and precious little tolerance for those whose understanding of health and wellbeing embraces wholesome food, sunlight, and midnight swims with dolphins. The eccentric steam-punk scientists may have accepted the rationality of mass inoculation, but a significant number of the hippies and herbalists clearly remain unconvinced.

Magic only works in circumstances where people are willing to suspend their disbelief and set their imagination free. The possibility of catching a dangerous disease – even among the ornate “Oamaru stone” facades of the Precinct – is simply not conducive to turning-on, tuning-in, and dropping-out of the workaday world.

What Covid meant was that just about everybody suddenly stopped “playing”. The childlike wonder which had been the common currency among those who stepped across the invisible boundary separating twenty-first century Oamaru from its nineteenth century forerunner was replaced with the impatience and intolerance of visitors determined to “stay safe”.

No wonder the aging hippies and herbalists, funky craftspeople, magical artists, and amateur baristas felt affronted and disrespected. No wonder some of them felt compelled to make a stand against the rules and regulations pouring out of Wellington.

And if the cotton-print stall-holders and bearded wood-carvers glared with barely concealed hostility at the loud and decidedly unenchanting Aucklanders – who could really blame them?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 13 January 2022.

Hell To Pay: The alarming similarities between the Anti-Vaccination Movement and the creators of the Jim Crow South.

Never Let Go: If the violent prejudices of the Jim Crow South, echoing through contemporary struggles, teach us anything, it is that the defence of rationality, science and progressivism must never be allowed to falter. Those pre-modern night-riders, filled with unrelenting hate, are still out there. If the troops of Reason and Justice are withdrawn; if Liberty’s bayonets are sheathed; there will be Hell to pay.

FOR WEEKS NOW, I’ve been racking my brains over why the anti-vaccination movement feels so very, very creepy. I’ve sought reassurance in Jess Berentson-Shaw’s gentle enjoinders to engage empathically and constructively with the vaccine resistant, but without success.

Jess reminds me of those naïve souls who argue that non-violent tactics could have brought the Third Reich to its knees. These folk always forget that non-violent tactics only work against a government that is still capable of feeling shame, or, at the very least, fears being despised in the eyes of the world. Regimes fully armoured in self-justifying ideological extremism cannot be successfully challenged by the tactics of Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

Jess’s humanistic faith did, however, set off a train of thought. It caused me to review the history of the Black civil rights movement through the prism of non-violence. Was it the key element in the movement’s success, or was there something else at work that caused the segregationist regimes of the southern states to step back and take stock? While there is no doubt that the imagery of the civil-rights struggle: of fire-hoses and Billy-clubs; savage Alsatian dogs and tear-gas; deployed for the world to see against unresisting, non-violent youngsters; was more than successive US administrations were willing to tolerate; it was not enough, on its own, to bring victory.

What effectively ended the official administration of Jim Crow was the Federal Government’s clear willingness to pick up where it left off in 1877. That was the year in which the last remaining garrisons of Federal troops were withdrawn from the South. The year when Washington effectively told Southern Whites that nothing would be done to prevent them from constructing violently racist regimes throughout the states of the defeated Confederacy. It was the 1957 decision of the Republican President, Dwight Eisenhower, to dispatch paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce the Supreme Court’s desegregation orders, that made it clear that “Reconstruction”, deferred for 80 years, was back.

After 1957, more and more of the heavy-lifting in defence of Jim Crow was taken up by the openly terrorist Ku Klux Klan. But the violence unleashed by the Klan, and the non-violent response of Black and White civil rights activists, only made the Federal authorities’ responsibility to uphold the Constitution more urgent. The FBI’s ruthless counter-intelligence tactics made the Klan’s terrorism increasingly ineffectual. The violence at Selma, the Jim Crow South’s last stand, merely ensured that the crucial 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed – sealing its fate.

Of what relevance is this to the anti-vaccination movement of 2021? Simply, the anti-vaccination movement draws its power from the same mental machinery that constructed the Jim Crow South nearly a century-and-a-half ago.

What enraged Southerners in the aftermath of the American Civil War was not simply that they had been defeated militarily, but that the racist ideological edifice that had sustained slavery was being demolished. The progressive view of humankind espoused by the Abolitionists had prevailed. In contemporary language, the old software no longer worked in USA 2.0.

Something very similar happened in the US, and New Zealand, with the arrival of Covid-19. Dangerous ideas and attitudes, which had been permitted to guide a minority of the population, were suddenly and unequivocally declared erroneous and unsafe by the State. The majority strongly concurred. Anti-scientific twaddle could no longer be ignored. In the context of a deadly viral pandemic, such ideas posed a direct threat to society’s well-being.

For those who saw science, and the progressive political and social ideas it underpinned, as the root of all evil, this was an intolerable situation. With some justification, they saw the war against Covid-19 as a war against their own, essentially pre-modern, world-view. Accordingly, the demands being made of them by the State were received as an existential threat – to be resisted at all costs, by any means necessary.

Exactly the same feelings of desperation and outrage gripped Southern Whites as they saw the triumphant principle of racial equality being given practical application in the 1870s. Under the protection of Federal bayonets, Black Southerners founded schools, established businesses and stood for public office. It was not to be borne.

An utterly uncompromising determination to destroy this new regime, and to obliterate the progressive ideology that inspired it, seized an unrelenting majority of White citizens across the Southern states. They would not rest until their version of reality was reinstated. Those who opposed them were shown no mercy. When the political weariness of the Northern states offered them the opportunity to reclaim political control, they grabbed it with both hands. Racist terror became the means of restoring calm to White Southern souls – for the next 80 years.

Peruse the Southerners’ “Lost Cause” propaganda of the Reconstruction Era (1869-1877) and you will find there the same unhinged extremism that throngs the dark recesses of the anti-vaxxer Internet. The same “Big Lies” are there. The same dumbfounding claims. The same threats of violence.

A vast international crisis, the Covid-19 Pandemic, has exposed the irrational underbelly of twenty-first century society. Neuroses and delusions that the majority had reluctantly tolerated (if only because the harm they caused was almost exclusively restricted to those who suffered from them) now threaten the general welfare.

If the violent prejudices of the Jim Crow South, echoing through contemporary struggles, teach us anything, it is that the defence of rationality, science and progressivism must never be allowed to falter. Those pre-modern night-riders, filled with unrelenting hate, are still out there. If the troops of Reason and Justice are withdrawn; if Liberty’s bayonets are sheathed; there will be Hell to pay.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 18 November 2021.

The Escalation Game That Protesters Cannot Win.

Death And The Marchers: What the so-called “Freedom & Rights Coalition” would be wise to factor into their calculations is how quickly the public’s tolerance will evaporate if its followers move beyond the energetic expression of their grievances towards violence and/or the massive disruption of daily life. At that point the forbearance of the state will cease, and the protection of life and property will begin.

PROTESTERS CALLING for the overthrow of the Government should take a deep breath and consider their strategic situation. According to the Ministry of Health’s own polling, the hardcore anti-vaxxers represent – at best – five percent of the population. Even assuming that that many again are in some degree supportive of the protesters’ aims and objectives, that would still leave them confronting the remaining 90 percent of the population – who are not.

Now, it is very easy to forget this grim arithmetic when you are in the middle of a crowd of 5,000 people, surrounded by flags and placards, and breathing in the exhaust fumes of 100 large motorcycles. In such circumstances, the protester’s mind is filled with intoxicating feelings of invincibility. That any force could successfully turn “We, the People” around seems impossible.

It is, however, an enormous mistake for protesters (let alone insurrectionists) to interpret the fact that nobody has so far attempted to stop them, as proof that they cannot be stopped. What they may see as weakness on the part of a corrupt and cowardly government, will be seen by many more as evidence of a Government doing its utmost to facilitate a tiny fraction of the population’s right to express themselves politically. For most New Zealanders this will be taken as proof of their country’s deep commitment to democratic principles.

What the so-called “Freedom & Rights Coalition” would be wise to factor into their calculations is how quickly the public’s tolerance will evaporate if its followers move beyond the energetic expression of their grievances towards violence and/or the massive disruption of daily life. At that point the forbearance of the state will cease, and the protection of life and property will begin.

The Freedom & Rights Coalition will then find itself caught up in a process of relentless escalation that it cannot win. If its followers use their fists and their boots against their fellow citizens, then the Police will don riot gear and equip themselves with pepper-spray, tasers, tear-gas and rubber bullets. If the insurrectionists then decide it is time to arm themselves with knives and firearms, the Government will call upon the armed forces to “aid the civil power” and the rebels will find themselves confronting highly trained military personnel armed with machine-guns and artillery. Anyone foolish enough to put themselves at the mercy of artillery will not be given a lot of time to regret their mistake.

This process of escalation will not be restricted to the armament deployed. Faced with violence and disruption on such a scale, it is highly likely that the Government will resort to measures not seen in this country for nearly 90 years.

Not the least of these will be the swearing-in of “Special Constables”. The last time this happened was in the immediate aftermath of the 1932 Queen Street Riot. Waikato cockies, many of them on horseback, were enrolled to ensure that the unemployed remained off the streets – by any means deemed appropriate.

Twenty years earlier there had been a similar mobilisation of conservative citizens. In the Great Strike of 1913, the Prime Minister of the day, William Massey, had unleashed hundreds of Special Constables against the militant unionists affiliated to the “Red” Federation of Labour. More than a few of these “Red Feds” were unabashed revolutionaries who, like the Freedom & Rights Coalition, believed in the right of the citizenry to overthrow a tyrannical government. “Massey’s Cossacks” reminded them, none too gently, of the resources available to a state which still commands overwhelming popular support.

Interestingly, during the Waterfront Lockout of 1951 the National Government considered, but then rejected, the use of Special Constables. The trade union militants were vastly outnumbered, not only by “ordinary Kiwis”, but even by the moderate unionists affiliated to the Not-So-Red Federation of Labour. Prime Minister Sid Holland’s notorious “Emergency Regulations” were more than enough to bring the Watersiders to heel.

The contemporary equivalent of those Emergency Regulations would, of course, be a Government decision to order a temporary shutdown of the Internet, giving the Police and the rest of the national security apparatus the opportunity to round-up what was left of the insurrection.

Most New Zealanders would likely consider it entirely fitting: if the shutting-down of social media – the prime generator of anti-vaccination militancy – turned out to be its ultimate cure.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 12 November 2021.

Turning Up Angry.

Goin' Full Cray-Cray: The vandalism of a Panmure Vaccination Centre came just a day after an estimated 5,000 anti-vaxxers staged an impromptu march from the Auckland Domain to Newmarket and back. Clearly, the maintenance of social cohesion in Auckland is fast becoming a critical issue for the authorities as the Covid-19 Delta Outbreak intensifies across New Zealand’s largest city.

AROUND MID-DAY on Sunday (31/10/21) Auckland City Councillor, Josephine Bartley, tweeted. “Anti vax now turning violent smashed shop front of our local pasifika provider here in Panmure after our successful community vax yesterday and the online abuse they been receiving unacceptable.” Half an hour later, the Councillor tweeted again. “Oh boy pacific leaders turning up here angry that’s not helpful. Just waiting on police and have sorted business Association for camera footage. I know we have strong anti vax movement here in my area but what we don’t want is for this to become violent and for retaliation.”

The vandalism in Panmure came just a day after an estimated 5,000 anti-vaxxers staged an impromptu march from the Auckland Domain to Newmarket and back. Clearly, the maintenance of social cohesion in Auckland is fast becoming a critical issue for the authorities as the Covid-19 Delta Outbreak intensifies across New Zealand’s largest city.

The biggest concern for the political and law enforcement agencies should not, however, be the behaviour of the anti-vaxxers – deeply concerning though that may be – but how much anti-vax provocation the vaccinated majority is prepared to tolerate. No matter how ugly the anti-vaxxers get, any kind of co-ordinated backlash from the vaccinated is bound to get uglier.

Seized with all the passion of true believers, the anti-vaxxers have yet to demonstrate any awareness of this acute vulnerability. There are a number of reasons for this. Not the least of which is that the communities from which they draw their energy and (mis)information are virtual – not real.

Without social-media, the anti-vaxxers would be unable to escape the reality of their isolation from the broader society’s shared understanding of the Covid-19 crisis and its remedies. Prior to the arrival of the Internet, it required considerable fortitude for a single citizen, or tiny group of citizens, to challenge the accepted wisdom of the overwhelming majority. Human-beings do not like to live outside the social embrace. Ostracism is a terrible punishment.

With social media, however, it is possible for individuals to join communities in which their dissident views are echoed enthusiastically by every member. The natural safeguards against making oneself a social outlier, with all the risks which, historically, marginalising oneself incurs, are simply over-ridden by the twenty-first century’s astonishing communications technology. When everyone you talk to reads the same thing, and believes the same thing, then your outlier status is concealed and your outré convictions strengthened.

This misapprehension of reality is aggravated by the fact that so much of the anti-vaxxers’ world view is bound up with the notion that those who reject their ideas are not simply mistaken, but malevolent. That so many people share a completely different understanding of what is going on in relation to Covid-19, and what to do about it, is taken as proof of the monstrousness of the global conspiracy, of which the virus is but one part. Far from seeing themselves as the deluded victims of disinformation, the anti-vaxxers regard themselves as an heroic minority of truth-tellers. Some go further, describing themselves as “purebloods”. What does that makes the rest of New Zealand society? Zombies?

The problem this poses for the Police is enormous. Although the percentage of hard-core anti-vaxxers may be very small, when manifested in flesh and blood, on the streets of Auckland, even a small percentage can take on an extremely menacing aspect. Five thousand anti-vaccination protesters, many of them vociferously anti-government, have the potential to do a lot of damage: to private property; to their vaccinated fellow citizens; and – not least – to the Police themselves.

There has been much criticism of Police Commissioner, Andrew Coster, for appearing to “do nothing” about obvious and egregious violations of the Level 3 Covid-19 regulations. In the eyes of those Aucklanders who have done everything they were asked to do: stay at home; social distance; wear masks; get vaccinated; the inaction of the Police in the face of anti-vaxxer defiance is intolerable. Many cannot help feeling that the likes of “Bishop” Brian Tamaki and his Destiny Church are laughing in their faces. Why aren’t the Police getting stuck in?

The surprisingly forthright answer of the Health Minister, Andrew Little, when questioned on this matter by Q+A’s Jack Tame was: “Because you can’t arrest 5,000 people.” The Minister is quite correct, and this is Coster’s dilemma. Taking even 500 protesters into custody would require a Police operation of unprecedented scale. The Police Commissioner simply does not command the human and material resources needed to mount such an operation. And, even if he did, he would be most unwise to do so.

The level of craziness in the anti-vax movement is such that an aggressive Police response would, almost certainly, spark a ferociously violent reaction from the hard core anti-vaxxers. Coster will be very anxious to avoid the sort of running battles between protesters and riot cops that took place on the streets of Melbourne for three straight days.

Not the least of these worries would be straightforwardly tactical. To arrest and detain a fully-grown human-being who is behaving aggressively requires at least two – more likely three or four – police officers. Unwilling to deplete their on-the-ground strength by ordering such mass arrests, Police commanders will resort to tactics designed to immobilise and/or disperse violent protesters. Pepper-spray, tear gas, rubber bullets, truncheons: all of these riot-control weapons were deployed in Melbourne. It ain’t a pretty sight.

What’s more, it doesn’t work. Escalation of force on the part of the Police, simply begets escalation of force on the part of the protesters. Whatever moderation remaining among the leadership of Auckland’s anti-vaxxers would be shunted aside by hard-core extremist elements – many of them Pentecostal Christians convinced they are on the eve of the Battle of Armageddon. Better by far to let 5,000 people let off a bit of steam by marching from the Domain to Newmarket and back again, than to have at least some of them running down Queen Street smashing windows and beating up cops.

All well and good, but for how long are people like Councillor Bartley and her Pasifika constituents supposed to put up with abusive and threatening phone-calls and the vandalising of vaccination clinics? If conscious law-breaking is not met with a decisive Police response, then it will increase. All that is ever required to bring out the absolute worst in human-beings is a rising level of confidence that their actions will not bring consequences.

 If it becomes clear to Police commanders (and one hopes that Police Intelligence is in a position to advise them) that such voices of moderation as could be counted on among the anti-vaxxers are no longer being heeded, and that, even in the absence of heavy-handed policing, extremist violence is about to escalate –– then all bets must be considered off.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 1st November 2021.

Counter-Cultural Counter-Revolutionaries.

The Political Economy Of "Hippyness": Small businesses selling “whole-foods”, pottery, furniture, or (if the small business was bad) a little home-grown weed, swallowed up the hippy “movement”, leaving only a peculiar social sub-set devoted to “doing their own thing”. Refugees from the dominant culture: suspicious of, if not downright hostile to, the demands of “Society” and “The Man”. Easy meat for the Anti-Vaxxers.

“NEVER LET A GOOD CRISIS go to waste” has become something of a cliché in contemporary political writing. The thing about clichés, however, is that they become clichés by describing real situations succinctly and effectively. The current Covid-19 crisis, for example, has aroused the ire of those who reject the idea that enjoying the benefits of human society incurs a reciprocal obligation to preserve its wellbeing. Often associated with the Left, this rights-based, libertarian impulse actually sits more comfortably with the Right. Certainly, the Far Right has shamelessly exploited the Covid-19 crisis to pull a depressingly large number of confused libertarian leftists down goodness knows how many phantasmagorical rabbit-holes.

To clarify this proposition, it helps to recall the curious phenomenon conjured-up by the word “hippy”. Conservatives loathed and detested “hippies” on account of their rejection of the buttoned-down world of the early-1960s. The era which the makers of the television series Mad Men evoked so powerfully. With their long-hair, beads, headbands, free-love, drugs, crash-pads and communes, the radically non-conformist hippies appeared to be rejecting the American Dream in toto. But were they really the counter-cultural revolutionaries the mainstream news media proclaimed?

Consider the classic hippy formula, “Turn on. Tune in. Drop out” – attributed to the guru of LSD, Dr Timothy Leary.

Rejectionist though it most certainly was, Leary’s formula was utterly inadequate to the challenge of building something enduring to replace the “rat-race” that was capitalist America. Like the Romantic Movement of the early nineteenth century, from which the hippies drew so much inspiration, the Counter-Culture of the 1960s and 70s was a reaction to the transformational impact of rapid technological change. Rationalism and science were in the driver’s seat, and there no longer seemed to be any social space for spontaneity, creativity, intuition – or fun.

But fun has its limits, and capitalism doesn’t. Dropping out, when it didn’t end in addiction and criminality (like Charles Manson’s murderous “Family”) almost always saw the hippies take one of two roads: either back into the rat-race, or, off into what Karl Marx would have called the petit-bourgeoisie. Small businesses selling “whole-foods”, pottery, furniture, or (if the small business was bad) a little home-grown weed, swallowed up the hippy “movement”, leaving only a peculiar social sub-set devoted to “doing their own thing”. Refugees from the dominant culture: suspicious of, if not downright hostile to, the demands of “Society” and “The Man”.

Old hippies could be relied upon to react antagonistically to the demands of collectivities of all kinds. Not only to the collectivism represented by the state and its institutions, but also the collectivism of the working-class. These small business people were no friends of the Tax Man, but they also distrusted the trade unions. The communities inhabited by ex-hippies were, first and foremost, collections of individuals. Places where “characters” could enjoy their freedom from the demands of society, living “close to nature” without interference.

Now, if this summary of the ageing hippy’s convictions strikes you as having a lot in common with the young libertarian capitalist in his high-rise apartment, then that may not be entirely accidental. At the root of both ideologies lies the deep-seated fear of being swallowed up by the inescapable expectations and obligations of social existence. That both thought-systems represent an infantile and potentially dangerous refusal to recognise the claims of other human-beings, in no way lessens their appeal. For such individuals, the attraction of negative liberty – the absence of constraint – has always been irresistible.

For the libertarian capitalist, the opportunities for evading social constraints are, understandably, considerable. (What else are lawyers and accountants for?) For the ageing hippy, however, the enjoyment of negative liberty often entails rejecting the claims of reason and science, along with the social and political expectations derived from them. It is but a small step from “leave me alone” to “you can’t tell me what to do”. In normal circumstances, these evasions of responsibility, while corrosive, are not critically so. In times of crisis, however, when both the problem and its solution are rooted in collective activity, any rejection of social obligation is fraught with danger.

The libertarian capitalist, pulling all the levers at his disposal to secure the freeing of the economy from Covid-19 restrictions, will make allies wherever he can. The ageing hippies, with their lifelong hostility towards the horrors of Big Science, and the dangerous concoctions of Big Pharma, fit the bill nicely. With their preference for living “close to nature”, the state’s public health demands for mask-wearing, social-distancing and mass vaccination are all-too-easily construed as evidence of the iron fist of tyrannical government they have spent their entire lives trying to escape.

Snugly ensconced in their on-line communities, where individual obsessions all-too-easily become comforting prejudices, these sad old hippies are easily recruited to the libertarian capitalists’ invaluable fifth column – the Anti-Vaxxers. Negative liberty, thus weaponised, is translated into the language of “rights” and “choice”.

That the true definition of humanity: creatures born with individual rights and social obligations; would be forgotten in this rabbit-warren of selfishness was as inevitable as it is tragic.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 28 October 2021.

Putting On The Armour Of Covid Righteousness.

Moral Authority? To those who complain that the Prime Minister is unnecessarily and unethically stigmatising the vaccine hesitant and resistant, there is only one genuinely ethical retort: They have stigmatised themselves.

ONE OF THE BIGGEST CHALLENGES facing New Zealanders over the next few weeks will be Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy and resistance. Not the least of these will be the challenge of understanding what makes so many people so unwilling to do what the overwhelming majority of their fellow citizens are asking them to do. To reach such an understanding will require an effort of the imagination that a rapidly decreasing number of New Zealanders – especially those living in Auckland – are willing to make. For these Kiwis, the Covid proposition is fast resolving itself into a very simple binary: Get vaccinated for society, or, get excluded from society.

That, essentially, was the Prime Minister’s message from the podium on Friday, 22 October 2021:

Vaccinations are our armour. They help keep us safe.

So my message to the New Zealanders who have not yet had their first dose – if you want summer, if you want to go to bars and restaurants. Get vaccinated. If you want to get a haircut. Get vaccinated. If you want to go to a concert, or a festival – get vaccinated. If you want to go to a gym, or a sports events, get vaccinated. If you are not vaccinated, there will be everyday things you will miss out on.

And if you are vaccinated you can be assured that in the new framework, you will get to enjoy the things you love, secure in the knowledge that the people around you, and the environment you are in, is as safe as possible in a COVID world. If you have done the right thing to keep yourself and others safe, to look after one another, you should feel safe. You should be protected from those who haven’t made that choice.

But, is it fair to declare that the vaccine hesitant have made a genuine “choice”? The answer to that question turns upon the degree to which those falling into this category have heard and understood the messages directed towards them concerning the Pfizer vaccine.

Is it still a tenable proposition to suggest that after so many weeks of unrelenting messaging, from a vast array of sources, delivered from, and to, every conceivable platform, there are still people out there who have not heard that the Pfizer vaccine is tested, efficacious, safe, and absolutely crucial to New Zealand re-emerging into something approximating normality?

It beggars belief to argue that more than a tiny number of such individuals exist.

But, if the message has been received and understood by the yet-to-be-vaccinated, then only one conclusion can reasonably be drawn. The so-called “vaccine hesitant” aren’t really hesitant at all. Though they may lack the courage to come right out and admit to being vaccine resisters, they have, nevertheless, made that choice.

The Labour Government’s professional advisors seem reluctant to accept that this is, indeed, the case. It is possible that their reluctance stems from a deeply ingrained disinclination to hold the ill-treated and excluded members of our society accountable. The proposition that the experience of being ill-treated and excluded makes a human-being more – not less – likely to behave selfishly and, all-too-often, brutally towards others, is quite simply unacceptable. In the eyes of the relevant professionals, such people are victims of circumstances beyond their control. As such, they cannot be held morally accountable. As the French put it: Tout comprendre c’est tout pardoner. To understand all, is to forgive all.

All very well for the sociologists and medical ethicists, but not at all helpful to a Government struggling with the problem of what to do with citizens who refuse to acknowledge either the validity of “The Science”, or their obligations to the collective welfare of the society in which they live.

After all, the proudly vaccine resistant – the so-called “anti-vaxxers” – cannot even point to a brutalised upbringing in poverty as the explanation for their selfishness. In the avowed and proud anti-vaxxer, the state is confronted with the sort of reckless solipsism that it is actually dangerous to ignore. The sort of people who make fake bookings at a vaccination centre in a deliberate attempt to sabotage the system should not be forgiven – they should be punished.

In resolving these dilemmas, the Vaccination Certificate emerges as the only viable vector for the virtues of both the Carrot and the Stick. Without it, the Government’s goal of getting 90 percent of the population double-jabbed simply will not be reached before the patience of the already vaccinated expires. If that is allowed to happen (and in Auckland it is not far away) then the authorities will find themselves confronted with even more pressing challenges to New Zealand’s well-being.

Vaccination Certificates promise to be highly efficacious in hurrying along the huge number of young people who have yet to get around to getting themselves vaccinated. The idea of not being able to go to pubs and clubs without “the passport” should be a powerful incentive for this group. Youth is nothing if not highly social. It is also acutely fearful of missing out on the fun its friends are having. If all it takes is a couple of more-or-less painless shots in the arm to gain admission to the footy and the most fashionable music festivals, then WTFN?

For older New Zealanders the looming possibility of “No Jab. No Job” should also hurry along the stragglers. Though pointedly left out of the Prime Minister’s Friday speech, “No Jab. No Job” is only a fast-tracked parliamentary bill away from further arming the authorities against the uncooperative minority.

To those who object that the state is arming itself with a sledgehammer to crush a handful of nuts, the Prime Minister and her colleagues need only cite their duty, as the people’s representatives, to do the greatest good by the greatest number. They have a whole raft of concerns over and above the paranoid fantasies of anti-vaxxers to consider. There are people whose mental fragility is fast becoming critical. Small business owners, in particular, who cannot be expected to see their life’s work ruined because their government pays more heed to the relentless selfishness of a handful of solipsists and anomic lumpenproletarians than it does to those who have done everything the state has asked of them.

It is not fashionable these days to bracket politicians and morals in the same sentence. Nevertheless, our democratically-elected government has both the right and the duty to protect the New Zealand people from harm. Indeed, the safety of the people is its supreme duty. Those whose conduct threatens the safety of the people cannot be located anywhere else but in the wrong.

No reasonable person can deny that Jacinda Ardern’s Government has deployed a whole fieldful of carrots in an attempt to persuade those who remain unvaccinated to do the right thing by their fellow citizens. That she is now reaching – however tentatively – for “The Stick” is incontrovertibly the correct moral choice.

To those who complain that she is unnecessarily dividing “The Team of Five Million” by unethically stigmatising the vaccine hesitant and resistant, there is only one genuinely ethical retort:

They have stigmatised themselves.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website of Monday, 25 October 2021.

The Power Of "No".

Irrational Resistance: With the Delta variant of Covid-19 raging through their communities and pumping up the number of community cases to new and frightening levels, it’s beginning to dawn on the ill-treated and excluded that, for once in their lives, they have the power. If the System is so desperate for them to get “the jab”; then refusing to get vaccinated constitutes a powerful political statement. How often, in the past, has anybody listened when they said “No.” Well, they’re listening now!

BREXIT STILL PUZZLES many Britons, especially those in possession of a good education and an impressive Curriculum Vitae. The “better sort of persons”, those with a genuine “stake” in the nation, still cannot understand why so many of their fellow citizens voted “against their own interests”. It seemed like utter madness.

Those who supported the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union denounced this “Remain” response for displaying both a lamentable ignorance of the issues involved and a disgraceful measure of condescension towards more than half the British population.

All true, but the Remainers were on to something, nonetheless.

One of the reasons the Remain campaign was so shocked by the result of the Brexit referendum was that their pollster (allegedly the best in the business) was assuring them, right up until the last minute, that the “Leave” campaign would fall short by two or three percentage points. What he and his clients had failed to factor-in to the Brexit equation was just how irrational people can be when they feel ill-treated by and excluded from “mainstream” society.

Those on the left of the political spectrum like to pin the blame for this unlooked-for eruption of political irrationality on Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. But, they didn’t create the ill-treated and the excluded, that was the work of decades – of centuries. All they did was find these people and allow the Leavers to talk to them.

The fatal assumption of the Remainers was that people this alienated from the “System” simply didn’t vote. Their pollster shaped his raw data with the assumption that the Britons who didn’t vote in the General Election of 2015 would also sit out the Referendum in 2016. That’s why his predictions consistently overestimated Remain’s support. He simply had no idea that the Leavers were in contact with three million potential voters that almost no one knew anything about.

And what did the Leave campaign tell these voters? Simple. It told them that, for just this one time, they had the power. All those high-and-mighty people who always ended up winning – regardless of which party was in power. The rich and the powerful with all the good things in life – the things they’d never have. These, the so-called “elites”, wanted to remain – needed to remain – in the EU. Losing the referendum was, quite literally, inconceivable. Impossible.

But, it wasn’t impossible. If, just this one time, they got up off the couch and voted, the Leave campaigners told the ill-treated and the excluded, they could throw a gigantic spanner into the System’s works. “Take Back Control” they whispered across the wilderness of social-media. Just this once – make the bastards weep!

New Zealanders are not Britons. But, like the United Kingdom, this country also has a large – albeit largely invisible – population of the ill-treated and excluded.

Most of the time their ill-treatment and exclusion isn’t that much of a problem. Oh sure, they cost the taxpayer a lot of money in benefits, police officers, courts and prisons – but not as much as it would cost the System to bring them out of the shadow and into the light. Which is why they are left to rot in damp and unhealthy houses, in decaying suburbs without amenities – or hope. Places where a career in crime offers one of the few proven exits from poverty and misery – at least for a while.

The ill-treated and the excluded know very well that they’re being ground-down by the System, they have just despaired of ever making the Powers-That-Be listen to them.

Until now.

With the Delta variant of Covid-19 raging through their communities and pumping up the number of community cases to new and frightening levels, it’s beginning to dawn on the ill-treated and excluded that, for once in their lives, they have the power. If the System is so desperate; dammit, if all those nice, comfortable people, in all those nice leafy suburbs they’ll never visit are so desperate for them to get “the jab”; then refusing to get vaccinated is flat-out certain to drive them nuts. How often, in the past, has anybody listened when they said “No.” Well, they’re listening now!

Irrational? Yes. Immoral? Yes, again. But, if we offer our poorest citizens nothing but physical and spiritual blows, then should we really be surprised when they strike us back?

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 22 October 2021.

Missing From The Anti-Covid Action.

The Invisible Man: Where has the NZ Council of Trade Unions been during the Covid-19 Pandemic? Why hasn’t its current president, Richard Wagstaff (above) become a household name during the pandemic? Up there with Ashley Bloomfield, Michael Baker, Shaun Hendy and Siouxsie Wiles? 

WHERE HAVE THE UNIONS BEEN during the Covid-19 Pandemic? That the question can even be posed suggests that something is very wrong with the New Zealand labour movement. After all, the answer should be all around us.

At its high-point, under the late, and sorely missed, Helen Kelly, the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions (CTU) liked to present itself as the largest democratic organisation in New Zealand. With upwards of 300,000 affiliated members, that claim was no idle boast. As Kelly proved, the CTU has always possessed the potential to do an enormous amount of good.

So, where has it been? Why hasn’t its current president, Richard Wagstaff, become a household name during the pandemic? Up there with Ashley Bloomfield, Michael Baker, Shaun Hendy and Siouxsie Wiles? Where was the tireless advocacy for essential workers: the people who stood at the check-out counters, drove the trucks and operated the warehouses? When supermarket workers came under attack from the stupid and the selfish, why were they defended with more passion by their bosses, than by the CTU?

Which is not to imply that, down at the coalface, union organisers have not been fighting the good fight for their members. The “sergeants” and “corporals” of the movement have, indeed, been working tirelessly. Some of them have even managed to attract the attention of the news media. Unions like FIRST and Unite – affiliates of the CTU – have stood loyal right through this pandemic: speaking-up and fighting-back; making it very clear to anyone with ears to hear, exactly which side they are on.

But these are the “grunts”, the frontline fighters, the ones who, when the question arises: “Who ya gonna call?”, answer: “Us. You call us. You call your union.” There just aren’t enough hours in the day for these battlers to meet even half the need that’s out there. They certainly don’t have the time or the resources to plan and fund nationwide campaigns; issue media releases; and appear on programmes like AM, Breakfast, Newshub Nation and Q+A. That’s why they send money, collected from thousands of ordinary working people, to the CTU in Wellington.

This is where you might expect to find the “generals” and the “colonels” of the labour movement. The men and women who run the unions’ union. This is where you might expect to hear the national voice of organised labour in New Zealand – speaking up loud and proud for this country’s working-class.

So why haven’t we heard anything remotely like this coming from the CTU? All that money: taken from the pockets of ordinary working men and women so their voices can be heard and their interests defended; what has it been spent on?

This country has been subjected to a veritable blizzard of propaganda from those whose profits have been put at risk. The lobbying of the tourism and hospitality industries was so unrelenting they were gifted their precious Trans-Tasman Bubble – and workers ended up with the Delta variant.

Workers might have expected the CTU to lead the charge for “No Jab. No Job”. Because how else can employees be protected from the enormous risk posed by the stupid and the selfish? The great union motto has always been: “An injury to one is an injury to all!” Not, “The injury of all – by one.” What greater priority could the labour movement have than throwing its entire weight behind the drive for universal inoculation against Covid-19?

Well, according to the veteran political journalist, Richard Harman, the priority of the CTU has been ever-so-slightly different:

“Businesses are caught in a legal tangle if they try to enforce ‘no jab no job’ policies. Up until yesterday, business leaders were convinced the Government would not move on “no jab no job”, in part because it is opposed by the Combined Trade Unions.”

Yep, that’s what he said: “because it is opposed” by the CTU. Opposed!

Rather than defend the health of ordinary working people, the CTU has been slowing the vaccination roll-out by defending the “rights” of the stupid and the selfish. Permitting the injury of all – by anti-vaxxers.

How wonderful that, at last, Jacinda Ardern and her Labour colleagues have finally seen sense and set the “No Jab. No Job” ball rolling. But, how ironic, that they had to do it over the objections of the CTU.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 15 October 2021.

Extraordinary Lengths: Social Solidarity versus Death-Cult Capitalism

Taking Care Of Bus-Iness: The success of the Pasifika vaccination effort has no doubt reassured Jacinda and her government that they are on the right track. Clearly, they are doing all they can to replicate their success in Māori communities. There is no reason to suppose that the state’s outreach strategies here will not prove equally successful. When they are, the national vaccination rate will be nudging 85 percent.

JACINDA ARDERN has clearly decided to do all she can to persuade New Zealanders to get vaccinated. Her Government is going to extraordinary lengths to reach out to the “vaccine hesitant”; to engage with them in positive conversations about the benefits of getting the jab.

Celebrities and sports heroes are being asked to provide “social proof” of the vaccine’s efficacy. Trusted figures like church pastors and community organisers are reassuring doubters that vaccination against Covid-19 will not only protect them, but also their friends and whanau. The Prime Minister, herself, is constantly reiterating the message that the fastest route to freedom is through New Zealanders’ upper arms.

No one can accuse the state of not walking its talk. Testers and vaccinators are going door-to-door in some suburbs. Special busses are cruising the streets. Taxi cabs are being paid by the tax-payer to take carless families to the vaccination centres. That the New Zealand state is pulling out all the stops in the persuasion department is incontrovertible.

For the overwhelming majority of Kiwis this massive effort simply isn’t necessary. Most of them trust their government to do everything within its power to keep them safe. That it may not do these things particularly well on occasion is irksome and frustrating, but it is not proof of official mendacity – let alone of a diabolical conspiracy. They are also pre-disposed to accept the advice of scientific experts, and reassured to learn that their political leaders are doing the same. They follow the rules of lockdown and are moved by the feelings of solidarity which their own – and their fellow citizens’ – compliance evokes.

These are the people who have lifted New Zealand’s vaccination rate effortlessly towards the 70 percent mark. Well-educated, well-housed, well-remunerated – they are not the problem. The “problem” – if that is the right word – lies with those who are poorly educated, poorly-housed, and/or just plain poor. The very people for whom all these over-and-above efforts are being made, and among whom they are proving to be highly successful.

Pasifika communities are leading the way in this respect. Vaccine hesitant, and plagued by all kinds of misinformation and conspiracy theories, these Covid-struck communities swiftly mobilised their considerable social and religious resources, driving up the vaccination rates of Pasifika people to the point where, in some parts of the country they are now well ahead of Māori and Pakeha alike.

The Pasifika example has no doubt reassured Jacinda and her government that they are on the right track. Clearly, they are doing all they can to replicate their success in Māori communities. There is no reason to suppose that the state’s outreach strategies here will not prove equally successful. When they are, the national vaccination rate will be nudging 85 percent.

Which leaves only the diehard anti-vaxxers, and those The Daily Blog Editor Martyn Bradbury colourfully calls “Death-Cult Capitalists”.

It is by no means certain that any kind of “outreach” will prove effective against those who, for whatever reason, have convinced themselves that the Covid-19 vaccines are part of a vast global conspiracy to enslave what remains of the world’s free-thinking and freedom-loving people. Against such individuals the techniques of persuasion have proved to be depressingly ineffective. The more sophisticated and evidence-based the arguments in favour of vaccination, the more the anti-vaxxers are convinced that they are dealing with forces of the most diabolical cunning. Attempts to use friends and family members to expose the delusional nature of their thinking have proved equally unsuccessful. Though deeply upset, they are not convinced. Discovering that their loved ones have succumbed to the mind-control of the global puppet-masters, only makes them more determined to hold out and fight on.

Against these folk the only reasonable means of defence is the Vaccination Passport. Denied access to all the usual locations of friendly and productive human interaction may not convince the anti-vaxxers that they are wrong about the vaccine, but, over time, it just might wear them down. There is very little in this world that is harder for human-beings to bear than being shunned by society and excluded from its benefits. What’s more, at no more than 5 percent of the population, their recalcitrance may very soon cease to be a problem. In saving themselves, the “pro-social” may end up saving the “anti-social” as well.

When it comes to the Death-Cult Capitalists, however, New Zealand faces a much more serious threat.

This vicious minority of the population isn’t against vaccination, it’s against the whole idea of society in general, and the state in particular, going to such lengths to protect the weak and the vulnerable. They regard the very idea of locking down a whole country, or even an entire city, as abhorrent.

Imposing costs upon businesses, and constraining free-market forces, is seen as far more damaging in the longer-term than losing a few hundred, or even a few thousand, of society’s weakest links. They chafe at the restrictions imposed upon them – especially those impeding their freedom of movement. That mere politicians are daring to tell them what they can do, and where they can go, is experienced by these people as the worst kind of tyranny – the “North Korean option”.

Rather than celebrate their government, and their fellow citizens, engaging in the practical application of social solidarity, kindness and love; they look at their country and see only a “smug hermit kingdom”.

Such people are a far cry from the hesitant, the misinformed, and the anti-vaxxers. The worst you can say of these folk is that they are either frightened, deluded or wrong – sometimes all three at once. But for those who see human existence as a pitiless struggle to determine the survival of the fittest; for those who see human-beings as means to an end, never as ends in themselves; for those who would let thousands die rather than see the strong restrained in any way; for these people there is only one word: Evil.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 1 October 2021.

“No Jab, No Job!” – Preventing The Injury Of All By One

Intramuscular Solidarity: A trade union movement dominated by the working-class wouldn’t have a bar of all this anti-vax nonsense. The idea that some ignorant believer in conspiracy theories peddled by right-wing nutters on the Internet should be allowed to refuse vaccination – putting countless other Kiwis at risk – would strike them as complete bullshit. A working-class-led trade union movement would have been in the ear of  Workplace Relations and Safety Minister Michael Wood for weeks, urging him to institute a “No Jab, No Job!” policy ASAP.

ALL TRADE UNIONISTS are familiar with the slogan: “An injury to one is an injury to all.” It encapsulates the principle of solidarity and signals the determination of the collective not to be picked-off one-by-one. Employers who are not brought up sharply by their employees’ union for harming one of its members, will very soon feel emboldened to harm them all. Much more challenging, from the union’s point-of-view is how to guard against the behaviour of a single worker imperiling the health and safety of their co-workers. How to prevent the injury of all by one.

It might be expected that, with the Delta Variant of the Covid-19 virus rampaging through Auckland, and mass vaccination being presented as the most important escape-route from the pandemic, the institutions dedicated to the protection of workers’ health and safety would be leading the charge against those who refuse to acknowledge the obligations of social solidarity. Why then, are the trade unions not at the forefront of a “No Jab, No Job!” movement? In the midst of a pandemic, a refusal to be vaccinated (without medical justification) is surely the crowning example of individual indifference to the welfare of the whole. Is it not the duty of the trade unions to take a resolute stand against such anti-social selfishness?

In the context of a Labour Government with an absolute parliamentary majority, is it not, similarly, the duty of the Minister of Workplace Relations and Safety, Michael Wood, to do all within his power to ensure that the obligations of solidarity are backed-up by the full force of the law? If, upon inquiry, that same Minister discovered that employers presenting their employees with the “No Jab, No Job!” alternative would almost certainly be acting unlawfully, then, surely, his next step would be to arrange for the law to be changed? After all, this is exactly what was done to ensure that “border workers” were all fully vaccinated. If “No Jab, No Job!” was good enough for customs officers and stevedores, then why not for every other group of New Zealand workers?

Wood was unable to provide a clear answer to questions such as these when he appeared (by Zoom) before the relevant parliamentary select committee. A superb chance to cast himself in the role of a hard-nosed, no-nonsense, champion of the working-class was squandered. Instead Wood chose to present himself as the inconsistent and mealy-mouthed champion of, well, God knows what.

The employers of workers already on the payroll, he informed the committee, could not say “No Jab, No Job!”, but, it would be perfectly okay for them to demand it of their next job applicant as a condition of employment. What a principled stand! Almost as principled as dodging the questions relating to the employers’ legal obligation to provide a safe and healthy work environment for their employees. Isn’t New Zealand lucky to have a Minister of Workplace Relations and Safety who is willing to place the rights of anti-vaxxers ahead of the rights of everyone else in the workplace – and the country?

Wood’s failure is emblematic of the more general failure of the entire New Zealand Left. To prevent certain classes of citizens from feeling hurt or offended by the free speech of their fellow citizens, leftists are all in favour of breaching the Bill of Rights Act and jailing “hate speakers” for three years. Those same “leftists” would not, however, dream of overruling the Bill of Rights Act’s prohibition against forcing medical procedures upon citizens – even at the cost of undermining the nation’s collective effort to defeat the Covid-19 Pandemic.

A trade union movement dominated by the working-class wouldn’t have a bar of this sort of “leftism”. The idea that some ignorant believer in conspiracy theories peddled by right-wing nutters on the Internet should be allowed to refuse vaccination – putting countless other Kiwis at risk – would strike them as complete bullshit. A working-class-led trade union movement would have been in the ear of Michael Wood for weeks, urging him to institute a “No Jab, No Job!” policy ASAP.

Sadly, however, New Zealand’s trade union movement isn’t led by the working-class (of which fewer than 10 percent now belong to a trade union) but by a council dominated by middle-class public servants of every description. A surprising number of these regard the right to refuse having their bodies polluted by injections of unwanted fluids as sacred, and not to be overruled for any reason – not even to preserve the health, safety, livelihoods, and lives, of their fellow citizens.

The idea that there are circumstances (fortunately rare) in which the safety of all might require the injury (but only to the pocket) of one, would strike them as barbaric. Unless, of course, the “one” was engaging in Hate Speech!

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 27 August 2021.

Happy New Year?

But Will She Keep Smiling? Kindness is as kindness does. And the one thing kindness cannot do is force people to be kind. Understanding that was the single most important factor in the Prime Minister’s success at stamping out the Coronavirus. She took New Zealanders with her; she encouraged them to “Unite Against Covid-19” for their own good. Now, in 2021, she must encourage them to do the same against poverty and homelessness.

WELL, IT’S GONE! The 2,020th year of the Common Era. The year of the global Covid-19 pandemic. The year of bubbles and lockdowns and Zoom. The year Donald Trump lost – badly. The year Jacinda Ardern won – bigly. Gone. But, we’re still here, celebrating the first day of the first month of 2021. A good time, traditionally, to hazard some guesses as to what the next 364 days may bring.

My most confident prediction is that Covid-19 will feature as prominently in the next twelve months as it did in the last.

By the time most New Zealanders begin to see the effects of the mass vaccination campaign against Covid-19 more than half of 2021 will already be behind them. Over the months remaining, those same New Zealanders will become increasingly impatient with the sizeable anti-vaxxer movement and its profoundly anti-social delusions.

Pressure will grow for the Government to make vaccination against Covid-19 mandatory. Should compulsion fail to move the hardliners, then the ugly punitiveness which lies just below the easy-going exterior of the average Kiwi is likely to erupt in spectacular fashion. Refusing to be vaccinated may be classed as a form of criminal assault, and denying the benefits of vaccination to one’s children may see the offending parents prosecuted as abusers.

If we’re very unlucky, the outrage of the anti-vaxxers will merge with the rising stridency of the “Free Speech Union” and the undiminished frustration of the country’s gun-owners, into a single, very angry, “Freedom Coalition”.

Jacinda Ardern’s government will be portrayed by this group as dangerously dictatorial: a collection of woke virtue-signallers prepared to unleash the full powers of the state against any individual citizen who refuses to acknowledge their obligation to serve the greater good.

The strength of the Government’s position on the issues of Covid-19 vaccination, curbing hate speech, and comprehensive gun-control should be sufficient to marginalise these critics. What could weaken its position, however, is the Ardern Administration’s apparent unwillingness to acknowledge its own obligation to serve the greater good.

Sharp rises in the number of families living in poverty, and the intractability of the housing crisis, could well see the Government facing serious charges of hypocrisy. In the name of “kindness” citizens are expected to swallow their objections to enforced inoculation, watch their language, self-censor their opinions, and submit their firearms to state regulation and control. That same state, however, acknowledges no obligation to show kindness to the tens-of-thousands of beneficiary families living in poverty: no duty to advance the collective wellbeing of the nation by redistributing wealth and intervening directly in the “free” market.

Both the Act Party and (if it can summon sufficient intellectual energy) the National Party will seek to exploit the issues arising out of vaccinations against Covid-19, hate speech and gun control. From the other end of the political spectrum, the Greens and the Maori Party will chime in against poverty and homelessness.

A self-confidently “centrist” government, assailed from both the right and the left, has little to fear. With most voters happy to position themselves somewhere in the “middle”, support for the Government is unlikely to be shaken by attacks launched from the political extremes.

Of much more concern to Jacinda Ardern and her colleagues would be the emergence of a political force willing to combine the arguments of both the right and the left into a single devastating critique of the Government’s policies.

For most of the period between 1993-96 this was precisely the strategy adopted by Winston Peters and his NZ First Party. While that particular soufflé may not rise a second (or should that be a third?) time, the option remains open for anyone with sufficient charisma to launch a radical populist party.

A “Freedom Coalition” committed not only to the individual’s “freedom to”, but also to securing people’s “freedom from” poverty, homelessness, discrimination and exploitation, could attract the sort of double-digit support that gives incumbent governments nightmares.

Kindness is as kindness does. And the one thing kindness cannot do is force people to be kind. Understanding that was the single most important factor in the Prime Minister’s success at stamping out the Coronavirus. She took New Zealanders with her; she encouraged them to “Unite Against Covid-19” for their own good.

Now, in 2021, she must encourage them to do the same against poverty and homelessness.

This essay was originally published in the Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 1 January 2021.