“Old Lefties” – WTF! Simon Wilson hosts “Table Talk” at the Ika Seafood Bar and Grill.

Takes One To Know One, Simon: Simon Wilson's denigration of "old lefties" struck some as odd - coming as it did from a former member of the Workers Communist League! His present political orientation, however, is relatively clear. As he wrote for The Spinoff: “[O]ne way or another, everything benefits the agents of capitalism. If you’re a progressive, or a social democrat, or a socialist, you have to suck that up.”

 

“LABOUR – WTF?” The question said it all. And the packed-out restaurant confirmed its aptness. Laila Harré has good instincts for the mood of the Auckland Left, and “WTF?” sums up its assessment of the current state of the Labour Party with earthy directness.

 

Less adroit, perhaps, was her decision to allow The Spinoff to co-sponsor the event. It’s hard to reconcile the Ika Seafood Bar and Grill’s skilful courting of Auckland’s progressives with The Spinoff’s vicious attack on one of the Left’s most respected representatives – Mike Lee. That the attack on Lee could so easily have resulted in (and was quite probably intended to secure) Bill Ralston’s election to the Auckland Council merely confirmed The Spinoff’s political incorrectness.

 

That the choice of Simon Wilson as host of the evening’s panel discussion’s proved equally unsuitable was not something for which the Ika team could be blamed. Wilson made himself so by persuading The Spinoff to post his “Look, there goes the Labour Party – sliding towards oblivion” on the same day as the Table-Talk event.

 

It is a very curious piece of writing. Provocative title aside, Wilson’s posting is mostly an attempt to isolate and ridicule left-wing critics of his beloved Unitary Plan. Though no names are mentioned, it is clear that the sort of people Wilson has in mind when he castigates these “old lefties”, are people like Mike Lee.

 

“Their dispute wasn’t really defined by age,” writes Wilson, “but it was about modernising the progressive cause. The old argument is that when you relax the rules around building and allow more density, you create conditions for ugly apartment blocks and slums that ruin the quality of life for everyone who has to live in or near them. There might be more homes but the big winners are the developers who make a killing.

 

“That sounds grand, principled, insightful and historically sound. It’s been true in the past, even the quite recent past. In fact, in relation to the UP, it’s sentimental nonsense.”

 

But is it? Auckland’s history offers very little justification for believing that market-led intensification will produce anything other than “ugly apartment blocks” and “developers who make a killing.” More importantly, Wilson offers nothing in the way of evidence that the Unitary Plan, as approved, will ensure that Auckland’s future does not resemble its past.

 

What he does do, however, is set up a straw man. He implies that Mike Lee and his allies do not understand that “a compact city, with good quality affordable homes clustered densely around a comprehensive and efficient public transport system, is essential for any fast-growing city that wants to offer a decent quality of life to all its citizens.”

 

This is laughable. One of the reasons the tight little clique of lawyers, land-bankers, property developers, and roading contractors that has run Auckland for the past 150 years was so keen to get rid of Mike Lee was because, as Chairman of the Auckland Regional Council, he refused to extend Greater Auckland’s boundaries. Lee was arguing for a more compact city when Wilson was still collecting recipes for Cuisine magazine. His constant and highly successful advocacy for “a comprehensive and efficient public transportation system” – especially rail – also put Lee offside with Auckland’s powerful roading lobby.

 

Not so laughable is the fact that Wilson knows full well that Lee is but the latest in a long-line of left-wing politicians and planners who have fought for an Auckland capable of offering “a decent quality of life to all its citizens”.

 

In between his stints at Cuisine and Metro, Wilson was a jobbing editor for the Random House publishing group. One of the books he edited was my own No Left Turn, which included a chapter entitled “The Auckland That Never Was”. All of the elements making up what Wilson rather grandly calls “New Urbanism” feature in the plans for Auckland’s future development that were prepared for the First Labour Government by the Housing Division of the Ministry of Works back in the 1940s! That those extraordinarily progressive plans remained unfulfilled may be sheeted home to the same private sector interests who made their fortunes by turning Auckland into a cheap copy of Los Angeles, and who now propose to make themselves even richer by turning Auckland into a cheap copy of Singapore.

 

How someone in possession of this knowledge could, nevertheless, attempt to paint Mike Lee as someone guilty of failing “a bedrock test” for progressive urban planning, is utterly beyond me. But, then, I found it no less puzzling that the same man who could write: “one way or another, everything benefits the agents of capitalism. If you’re a progressive, or a social democrat, or a socialist, you have to suck that up”, was, somehow, able to begin last Wednesday’s (19/10/16) Table Talk discussion by quoting the late Helen Kelly’s emphatically anti-capitalist vision of the Labour Party.

 

Obviously, Wilson’s definition of “progressive”, “social democrat” and “socialist” is somewhat different from my own.

 

The rest of the evening was full of depressingly similar contradictions.

 

Only a very few minutes had expired before the Labour Party President, Nigel Haworth, took on the expression of a man who wished he'd stayed at home. Keeping out of the public eye has been something of a fetish for Haworth, whose principal motivation in taking on Labour’s presidency appears to have been quieting down the party’s frequently  restive rank-and-file. Having to admit that, had he been in Britain, he would not have voted for Jeremy Corbyn, was almost certainly something he would have preferred to keep under his hat.

 

Deborah Russell, Labour’s candidate for the Rangitikei electorate in 2014, told us she would have voted for Corbyn. That becoming a Corbynista would have put her offside with a fair swag of her putative caucus colleagues did not appear to have occurred to her. Which says a lot about her understanding of the party she defended with such enthusiasm throughout the night.

 

Chloe Swarbrick’s reputation for straight-talking was in no way diminished by her participation in the Table Talk panel. When asked what it would take to make her join the Labour Party, her quick-fire response, “an invitation”, raised eyebrows and hopes in almost equal measure.

 

Head-and-shoulders the most acute political thinker on the stage last Wednesday night was, however, Andrew Campbell. Formerly the Green Party leaders’ chief-of-staff, and now – impressively – communications director for the NZ Rugby Union, Campbell’s insights into the workings of contemporary New Zealand politics were refreshingly candid. That, in his estimation, “politics is a PR game” might be a bit depressing for “old lefties” like me, but only a fool would argue that, in New Zealand, in 2016, our politics is very much of anything else.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 25 October 2016.

The Space To Make Dreams Come True: Why Labour’s Latest Move On Housing Could Be A Ground-Breaker.

Back To The Future: By sanctioning green-field (as opposed to brown-field) housing development, Phil Twyford and his colleagues are now free to draw forth from Labour’s honourable past the sort of planning ideas which, had they been implemented at the time they were developed (the late-1940s) would have made Auckland a much easier city in which to live and move around.

 

PHIL TWYFORD has urged the National Government to rule Auckland’s contentious Urban Growth Boundary out of the city’s Unitary Plan. This is a major policy announcement from Labour’s housing spokesperson. By embracing the virtues of expansion over intensification, the party has repositioned itself as a defender of Auckland’s characteristic urban sprawl – and everything that goes with it. That Twyford’s announcement prompted congratulatory media releases from the National Party, Business New Zealand and the Taxpayer’s Union is a measure of just how big a concession Labour has made.
 

Labour should not, however, be condemned simply because in some respects (and only in some) its housing policies are similar to the Right’s. Politically-speaking, the policy of urban intensification was as impractical as it was controversial. Homeowners were always going to balk at the prospect of multi-storeyed apartment buildings sprouting up in their leafy streets. Overruling those objections would have required a degree of heavy-handedness quite foreign to the New Zealand scene. Those deemed responsible – be they local or national politicians – would have paid a heavy price.
 

Policy-wise, Labour now has room to breathe. It also, quite literally, has the space to display some progressive creativity. By sanctioning green-field (as opposed to brown-field) housing development, Twyford and his colleagues are now free to draw forth from Labour’s honourable past the sort of planning ideas which, had they been implemented at the time they were developed (the late-1940s) would have made Auckland a much easier city in which to live and move around.
 

Seventy years on, however, with the population of Auckland approaching two million, the size of the planning canvass has expanded considerably. Looking forward, we must now envisage an urban corridor extending all the way from Hamilton to Whangarei.
 

A conurbation of this size cannot be serviced efficiently by the automobile. Crucial to its success would be the creation of a state-of-the-art rapid-rail network capable of whisking commuters from Hamilton to Downtown Auckland in 30 minutes. (If that seems impossible, just have a word with the French and the Chinese!) The huge enabling power of such a network would be more than sufficient to underwrite the many housing developments along its length.
 

Rather than leave the design and construction of these new communities to the private sector, Labour should promote the creation of a public design and construction entity dedicated to building homes, apartments and community facilities equal to anything currently on display in Germany and Scandinavia.
 

This massive public construction programme (which would not only encompass the building of houses and apartment buildings, but also the new rapid-rail network) would need to be accompanied by a radical reform of New Zealand’s tenancy laws. Only by, once again, making the State the nation’s pre-eminent – and most accommodating – landlord will New Zealanders enjoy access to well-designed and healthy homes, with full security of tenure, at an affordable rent.
 

On RNZ’s “Morning Report”, this morning (18/5/16) Max Rashbrooke and James Crow spoke to Guyon Espiner about the urgent need for 20,000 new homes – just to meet the needs of this country’s homeless families. Many of these families reside in Auckland, and neither their needs, nor the needs of the tens-of-thousands of New Zealand and immigrant families who intend to make the Auckland Region their home, will ever be adequately met by the existing, market-driven, system – which daily demonstrates its incapacity.
 

By abandoning the Urban Growth Boundary, Labour has given itself both the physical and intellectual space in which to prove that it still knows how to make New Zealanders dreams come true.
 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of 18 May 2016.

Hey, Bomber! Inter-generational War Is Not the Answer To Auckland’s Problems.

Open Season On Baby Boomers: The highly topical second episode of the multi-media talk-show Waatea Fifth Estate covered the controversy surrounding housing intensification and the Auckland Unitary Plan. The otherwise excellent show was marred only by the casting of the Baby Boom Generation as the guilty party. Ageism can no more supply a progressive answer to Auckland's housing problems than racism or sexism.

 

NO, NO, NO, BOMBER!* This ageism has got to stop – now. You wouldn’t permit anyone writing for The Daily Blog to discriminate against people on the grounds of race, gender or sexuality. So what, in the name of Progressive Politics, are you hoping to achieve by blaming everyone born between 1946 and 1965 for Auckland’s housing crisis?

 

The Baby Boom generation didn’t choose their parents, Comrade! Any more than a black man chooses his ethnicity, or a woman chooses to be born female. Scapegoating people on the basis of their date-of-birth makes no more sense than scapegoating them because of their genetic make-up, or because their sex chromosomes are XX and not XY.

 

I’m genuinely affronted by all this Baby-Boomer-bashing, old friend. And if you want to know why, then I’d invite you to sit down and watch Episode 2 of Waatea Fifth Estate, and every time the word “Baby-Boomer” or “Boomer” is used, to mentally over-dub the word “Jew”.

 

Can you imagine the firestorm of criticism that would erupt if Jews were accused of preventing young Kiwis getting into their first home? Or if Jews were accused of taking all the good things that were on offer in the 1960s and 70s, and then denying them deliberately to succeeding generations?

 

Any broadcaster disseminating such ideas would immediately fall foul of both the Race Relations Act and the Human Rights Act. Because it is a criminal offence to incite racial hatred, and/or, to discriminate against one’s fellow citizens on the basis of their ethnicity or religious belief.

 

And while we’re on the subject of the Human Rights Act (1993) perhaps it would be helpful to point out that Section 21 of the legislation includes, among a long list of “prohibited grounds of discrimination”, the ground of “age”.

 

Also worth considering is the prohibition contained in the Fourth Geneva Convention against the imposition of collective punishment. Article 33 clearly states that: “No persons may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.”

 

Progressive people are rightly outraged when the Israeli authorities inflict massive material and human damage on Palestinian communities in retaliation for the hostile actions of a few Hamas fighters. I would, therefore, like to hear the explanation for why we shouldn’t be just a teeny-wee bit upset when an entire generation of human-beings is blamed for societal ills they did not create and which a great many of them – myself included – wholeheartedly deplore.

 

Because, to be honest, Bomber, your eagerness, in Episode 2 of W5E, to see the planting of Generation X and Y settlements in the Baby Boomer occupied territories of Auckland’s leafy suburbs would have done the average West Bank Israeli settler-developer, and his IDF-protected construction teams, proud.

 

Forgive me, Comrade, but fomenting inter-generational warfare (which, ultimately, entails turning children against their parents or grandparents) is not, and can never be, a progressive cause. Indeed, it strikes at the most primal forms of human solidarity, and at the most essential drivers of human co-operation. Worst of all, Bomber, it misdirects the legitimate rage of those denied the social goods their parents were able to enjoy away from the social class which bears the actual responsibility for their destruction.

 

Just ask yourself, Bomber: Was it the Maori New Zealanders born between 1946 and 1965 who deliberately destroyed their own employment opportunities? Are they the ones responsible for gutting their rural communities? Did they set out to create urban breeding grounds for crime, domestic violence and drug abuse? And was it the Pasifika Baby Boomers who deliberately ran down their local schools and health services? Are they the ones responsible for the decay of social housing in New Zealand? Did Pakeha Boomers demand the destruction of their own unions? Must they be held responsible for the political marginalisation of the entire working class? And did all of these groups really conspire to thwart the aspirations of their own children and grandchildren?

 

Those responsible for the hollowed-out shell that is 21^st Century New Zealand society are Baby Boomers only in the sense that they are also human-beings. They changed this country for the worse, not out of some mysterious generational impulse precipitated by listening to the Beatles or eating Eskimo Pies, but because it was in their interests to destroy the social-democratic beliefs and institutions that had so successfully limited their ability to enrich themselves, and which, if left in place, would have further undermined their political and cultural power.

 

The truly outrageous aspect of Auckland’s housing crisis is how effectively Auckland’s citizens have been excluded from playing any role in fixing it. The Auckland Super City is democratic in name only. It’s true purpose is to create opportunities for property developers (and all of the other businesses their activities sustain) to go on making profits. The power of Auckland’s ruling class will not be broken by setting one short-changed generation against another, but by creating a movement in which old and young join forces to determine what needs to be done, and out of whose pockets the money to pay for it should be taken.

 

* “Bomber” is the nom de guerre of Martyn Bradbury, Editor of The Daily Blog. Martyn and the author, Chris Trotter, have been friends and comrades since the mid-1990s.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Saturday, 27 February 2016.