Can The Left Assemble A Winning Coalition?

Voting Together? Collectively, Māori and Pasifika workers, professionals and managers employed by the state, and “progressive” Baby-Boomer superannuitants, possess the electoral clout to defeat the Coalition Government. But will they?

TO WIN THE NEXT ELECTION, “The Left”, as we still rather hopefully refer to it, needs three key demographics. Voting together, the Māori and Pasifika working class, professional-managerial staff employed by the state, and “progressive” Baby Boomer superannuitants, cannot fail to return a combination of Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori to the Treasury Benches. The Left’s great challenge, as it approaches 2026, is developing an electoral pitch capable of mustering all three – and keeping them mustered – until the people’s votes have been cast and counted.

Voting together, Māori and Pasifika workers, professionals and managers employed by the state, and “progressive” Baby-Boomer superannuitants, can defeat the Coalition Government. But will they?

It’s a tall order. None of these groups present a homogeneous mass guaranteed to respond with Pavlovian reliability to the Left’s electoral stimuli.

Although in excess of three-quarters of Māori live in towns and cities, and are employed in occupations traditionally designated as working-class, the appeals of the left-wing parties are seldom presented in ways that prioritise the challenges of urban, working-class, Māori life. Indeed, they are much more likely to be presented with by policies reflecting the priorities of the iwi-based capitalists dominating the Iwi Leaders’ Forum.

The powerfully nationalist flavour of the Forum’s determination to “build the Māori Economy” obscures the socio-economic deprivation of its urbanised working class. The latter’s decline is reflected in the alarming statistic that, fifty years ago, more than half of urban Māori owned their own home, while, today, that figure has fallen to less than one-fifth. Even so, the social costs of liberalising the New Zealand economy, borne so disproportionately by Māori workers (especially those in the freezing and forestry industries) are only rarely presented unequivocally in class terms by the parliamentary Left. Certainly, in this century, Māori deprivation is much more commonly attributed to the ongoing impact of white supremacist “colonisation”.

Of the three left-wing parliamentary parties, Labour has by far the best chance of garnering the votes of Māori workers. To remind itself how this might be done, it has only to watch the television and social-media advertising Labour broadcast to voters in the Māori seats back in 2017. Whether by accident or design these ads proved to be little masterpieces of class-based communication. They portrayed the life-world of urban Māori in a way that conveyed both understanding and admiration. Unsurprisingly, Labour won all seven Māori Seats.

Pasifika workers’ loyalty to the Labour Party, and the impact of their votes, is legendary. The power of the “South Auckland booths” to save the day for Labour was never demonstrated to greater effect than in 2005 when, late in the evening, the votes cast by the Pasifika community tipped the scales in Labour’s favour, denying Don Brash’s National Party the victory which, just 72 hours earlier, had seem a dead cert.

That the surge in Pasifika voting had been achieved by Labour’s eccentric reading of the National Party’s housing policy is less enthusiastically recalled. Certainly, since 2005, there is evidence of the old adage “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me” gradually but unmistakably diminishing Pasifika voter participation. In 2008 Labour supporters waited in vain for the South Auckland booths to “come in”. They are still waiting.

Could it be that the failure of Labour’s Pasifika Social Development minister to implement welfare policies that would have benefitted Pasifika working-class families hugely has convinced them that it is wiser to be guided by Labour’s deeds than its words. Delivering their vital support not in recognition of promises made, but in gratitude for promises delivered.

But, if the votes of Māori and Pasifika workers must be earned, then the votes of the state-employed members of the professional-managerial class are pretty much a given. It is, after all, the class responsible for supplanting the Pakeha working-class that had ruled Labour from the party’s foundation in 1916 to the “Rogernomics” reforms of the 1980s. Young, university-educated, and openly disdainful of the conservative social mores of most of New Zealand’s working-class families, these were the ones who deliberately transformed Labour from a mass party to a cadre party – them being the cadres – in the decade spanning 1990 and 2000.

And there was no coming back for the workers – not when their unions had also been taken over by the meritocratic beneficiaries of Labour’s welfare state. No, the state-employed professionals and managers will vote Labour, overwhelmingly, because Labour has made itself the party of state-employed professionals and managers.

Any credible indication that Labour is returning to its working-class roots: prioritising what Chris Hipkins dubbed, euphemistically, “bread and butter issues”; is likely to be answered by a wholesale shift of state-sector employee support to the Greens in protest. This largely confirms the Green Party’s’ status as a handy escape-pod from Labour’s mother-ship.

Regardless of their faux-Marxist rhetoric, the Greens have always been, and show every sign of continuing to be, a party of middle-class utopians, stubbornly unreconcilable with a world that consistently fails to follow their excellent advice. That they have turned into something more substantial will be made evident only when the bulk of their electoral support ceases to be concentrated in the university suburbs of Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin.

For the “progressive” Baby-Boomer superannuitants observing these peregrinations of the Left from the safety and security of their mortgage-free villas and/or swanky retirement villages, the once straight-forward business of casting a vote is growing increasingly fraught. Their great advantage (or disadvantage – it rather depends on one’s point of view) is that their memories of the “old”, twentieth century, New Zealand are every bit as vivid as their encounters with the twenty-first’s “Aotearoa”.

Sadly, this ability to compare and contrast is of little use. Like every younger generation in the long history of humankind, their own children and grandchildren have little time, and even less patience, for the ideological antiques so prized by their parents and grandparents.

Gen-X and the rest of the generational alphabet show every sign of being completely relaxed about pronouns; will “chest-feed” their own offspring without ontological misgivings; and enthusiastically celebrate their shape-shifting Treaty as a very good thing indeed. They simply cannot understand their elders’ reluctance to meet the requirements of diversity, equity and inclusion.

What’s worse, the “progressive” Baby Boomers do not seem to be sufficiently seized by the awfulness of the National-Act-NZ First Coalition. As beneficiaries are bashed and te Tiriti is trashed, the “democratic-socialists” of yesteryear witter on interminably about free speech, feminism, and the colour-blind content of a person’s character. Whatever happened to taking one for the left-wing team?

It probably ceased when the left-wing team started playing a different game.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 19 August 2024.

Passing Things Down.

Keeping The Past Alive: The durability of Commando comics testifies to the extended nature of the generational passing down of the images, music, and ideology of the Second World War. It has remained fixed in the Baby Boomers’ consciousness as “The Good War”: the conflict in which, to a far greater extent than any other, the stakes were as high as the morality was simple. 

WHEN “COMMANDO’ WAR COMICS first started appearing in the newsagents of New Zealand, the war depicted was just 16 years ago. Think about that for a moment. Cast your mind back to the events of 2007. Helen Clark was Prime Minister. George W. Bush was President. Tony Blair’s “New Labour” government was still ruling the United Kingdom. Our memories of these people (all of them still alive) and their deeds remain vivid.

Memories of “The War” – everybody knew which war you were referring to – remained equally vivid for the men and women who had lived through it. That their experiences would be passed down to their children – the “Baby Boomers” – was inevitable. Commando war comics were an important part of that passing down.

Commando’s impressive stable of graphic artists worked in black and white. This seemed fitting to their young readers, since the images vouchsafed to them of the War were similarly monochromatic. Indeed, as the comic’s readership aged – peaking in number during the 1970s – they found it difficult to conceive of the past as happening in anything other than black and white.

Perhaps that’s why the war films emerging from the studios of the United States and the United Kingdom in the postwar decades never seemed quite real to their Baby Boomer audiences. Too much colour. Many of them felt the same way about the “colourisation” of film footage shot during the First and Second World Wars. It seemed, somehow, a violation.

The founders of Commando were all veterans of the War, a fact which explains their insistence on accuracy, and their eye for anything that contradicted their own recollection. It mattered to them that their boy readers (not many girls read Commando comics!) imbibed as truthful a representation of their fathers’ and mothers’ experiences as was compatible with compassionate discretion and commercial success. By and large they succeeded – although it is most unlikely that the expletive phrases of the average German soldier under fire were limited to “Gott in Himmel!” and “Donner und Blitzen!”

The durability of Commando comics testifies to the extended nature of the generational passing down of the images, music, and ideology of the Second World War. It has remained fixed in the Boomers’ consciousness as “The Good War”: the conflict in which, to a far greater extent than any other, the stakes were as high as the morality was simple. Unlike Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, the war against the Axis Powers is still accepted as a straightforward battle between Good and Evil.

That so much of the History Channel’s schedule is devoted to programmes about World War II is proof that this colossal, world-shattering event’s absence of moral ambiguity is as much appreciated by Boomers in their old age as it was when they were twelve.

But, as the war-fighters’ children entered their late-teens and early-twenties, the black and white certainties upon which they’d been raised, the anti-fascist ideas they’d imbibed with their mother’s milk, appeared to have been rejected by the very same “good guys” who’d won the war.

When the blood, tears, toil and sweat of Vietnam were captured in all their true colours, and broadcast into the living-rooms of World War II veterans and their families, they arrived from a very different historical place. Everybody knew that these dreadful images no longer came from “then”. They depicted the horrifying realities of “now”. And all the Commando comics in the world could not dismantle the wall behind which the so-called “Greatest Generation” – the men and women who had defeated Hitler – had so irretrievably sundered the past from the present.

For better or worse, the Baby Boomers’ “passing down” has been a mighty warning about the ease with which heroic men and women can pass from the side of the “good guys” to side with the “bad guys”. When the Boomers saw what their parent’s generation was doing to the world they had won – and on whose behalf – they did everything within their power to persuade their own children to question the historical and ethical narratives passed down to them from the past – including those of their own parents.

This is why the comics of the post-Boomer generations are all about deception and betrayal. About superheroes who fail, and turn bad. About the world which the dead heroes of Commando comics could not save.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 24 November 2023.

Corrupted Generations.

Socrates Takes The Rap: “Corrupting the youth”, the Athenian philosopher Socrates was convicted and executed for this offence more than 2,400 years ago. It is a sure sign of generational desperation: of the old order’s fear of the values and aspirations of its younger citizens; and of a generation no longer willing to accept the traditions and moral precepts of their parents and grandparents.

CLASHES between Police and supporters of jailed opposition leader, Ousmane Sonko, have brought the Senegalese capital, Dakar, to a standstill. Convicted of “corrupting the youth” of Senegal, Sonko will not now be eligible to stand against authoritarian President Macky Sall in the next presidential election.

“Corrupting the youth”, the Athenian philosopher Socrates was convicted and executed for the same offence more than 2,400 years ago. It is a sure sign of generational desperation: of the old order’s fear of the values and aspirations of its younger citizens; and of a generation no longer willing to accept the traditions and moral precepts of their parents and grandparents.

There are many older New Zealanders who would gladly bring a charge of corrupting the nation’s youth – if only they could decide who to bring it against. This country has, after all, witnessed two transfers of generational power. From what the political journalist Colin James dubbed “The RSA Generation” to the Baby Boom Generation; and from the Baby Boom Generation to Generation X. It is, therefore, rather difficult to determine with any exactitude who has corrupted whom – and when.

Some would argue (but they would be in their eighties and nineties now) that the rot set in when the almost-a-Baby-Boomer (he was born in 1942) David Lange took over the leadership of New Zealand from that unflinching champion of the RSA Generation, Rob Muldoon (1921-1992). Muldoon had led the backlash against the all-too-brief summer of principled statesmanship and reform unleashed by Norman Kirk’s Labour Government between 1972-74.

For the Baby-Boomers who had languished under the deeply conservative social policies of the three-term Muldoon Government, and clashed with his supporters during the 1981 Springbok Tour, the election of the Lange-led Labour government in 1984 was like the coming of spring after a long and bitter winter. In relatively short order, Lange set New Zealand’s face firmly against Apartheid South Africa, established a Ministry of Women’s Affairs, extended the Treaty of Waitangi’s purview all the way back to 1840, declared his country nuclear-free and effectively withdrew New Zealand from the ANZUS Pact. The Parliament of 1984-87 also passed Fran Wilde’s private member’s bill legalising homosexuality – defying the 800,000 signatories to a petition urging it not to.

But, if Lange’s almost-Baby-Boomer government fulfilled the dreams of anti-Apartheid demonstrators, second-wave feminists, gay-rights activists and anti-nuclear campaigners, it also dutifully followed the advice of the free-market ideologues at Treasury and the Reserve Bank. Advice endorsed eagerly by the corporate free-marketeers represented by the Business Roundtable. This peculiar fusion of social and economic liberalism would march on boldly for the next 40 years under the banners of both major parties.

Certainly, the election of New Zealand’s first unequivocally Baby Boomer Prime Minister, Helen Clark (b. 1950) did nothing to fundamentally modify the neoliberal economic regime established between 1984 and 1993. Neither did her successor, John Key. Be it Labour or National, the commitment to neoliberalism did not waver. As the years passed and New Zealand’s infrastructure, starved of the necessary investment, continued to crumble and decay, the Baby Boomers’ children, Generation X, observed the steady diminution of their prospects and arrived at the grim conclusion that theirs would be the first generation to fare worse than its predecessor – their parents’.

The election of New Zealand’s first Gen-X Labour prime minister, Jacinda Ardern (b. 1980) backed by yet another almost-Baby-Boomer, the NZ First Party leader, Winston Peters (b.1945) took office among dark mutterings about the failure of capitalism and the need to establish a “Politics of Kindness”. For a moment, it appeared as though the policies unleashed by Lange in 1984, and held in place ever since by New Zealand’s bi-partisan Boomer commitment to neoliberalism, would not survive this latest generational transition.

Economically-speaking, however, this hope turned out to be forlorn. Had it not been for the Covid-19 Pandemic, the policies of Ardern’s Gen-X finance minister, Grant Robertson (b. 1971) would have been indistinguishable from those of his mentor, Michael Cullen (1945-2021). The massive increase in state spending forced upon Robertson by Covid did not signal anything more than a temporary concession to a transitory crisis. The Finance Minister’s response to the consequential inflationary surge has been straight out of the neoliberal playbook.

On social policy, however, the Gen-X governments of Jacinda Ardern and Chris Hipkins have evinced a willingness to accommodate what a great many older New Zealanders regard as revolutionary concepts – most particularly in relation to te Tiriti o Waitangi, “co-governance”, the provision of education and health services, and trans-genderism. Though their efforts in terms of social legislation actually passed has been well short of revolutionary, the perception of this government as being excessively “woke” in its social policy ambitions is very strong.

This is curious, because the “far-left” character of what appears to be Labour Government social policy is more properly described as a manifestation of the social-radicalism that has grown steadily in the public service, the judiciary, the professions (especially journalism) and academia since the first of the Baby Boom generation’s politically radicalised graduates began emerging from the universities in the late-1960s and early-1970s. In the fields of race and gender relations, their social radicalism has come to guide state policy no less absolutely than the economic radicalism of the government’s neoliberal advisers.

In academia itself, a key fraction of the radicalised students of the 1960s and 70s would become the teachers, lecturers and professors of the 1980s, 90s and beyond. By the third decade of the Twenty-First Century, the students of the students who undertook “the long march through the institutions” have themselves emerged from the universities, as persuaded of the “truth” of radical sociology and anthropology, as their counterparts across campus about the “truth” of neoliberal economics.

It would seem, therefore, that the Jeremiahs and Cassandras of the RSA Generation were spot-on in blaming the Baby Boom Generation for “corrupting the youth” of New Zealand. Unable or unwilling to confront the economic powers-that-be, they expended their revolutionary ardour upon the deconstruction of their parents’ moral certainties. The final irony of this long-running generational saga lies in how completely moral relativism, spawn of the great “Youth Revolt” of the late Twentieth Century, has, in passing through the hands of its institutional legatees, congealed into the moral absolutism of the hapless children of the Twenty-First.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 5 June 2023.

Game-Changer.

It’s Okay Boomers: Either through careful sociological study, or by pure intuition, Kieran McAnulty has grasped that a substantial number – maybe even a majority – of the Baby Boom Generation can be won away from their fear of a devastating racist backlash. Boomers no longer have to worry about what the older generation will say or do – because most of the RSA Generation are dead and buried. It’s their kids and their grandkids that they should be thinking of now.

KIERAN MCANULTY has changed the game in a way only open to authentic political leaders. Instead of shying away from the challenges of co-governance, he has leaned into them. Instead of hiding behind the obfuscating language of official communications, he has demonstrated the extraordinary power of a simple “Yes” or “No”. What’s more, he has done all this in the accents of an ordinary Kiwi bloke. Kieran McAnulty is the person Chris Hipkins is trying to be.

Sticking up for the Treaty of Waitangi was always the winning response for the Sixth Labour Government. Most New Zealanders are justifiably proud of their country’s efforts to offer the indigenous Māori a measure of redress for the injustices heaped upon them during the creation of the settler-state called New Zealand. It is, of course, true that not all New Zealanders feel this way, but those who reject the promises of the Treaty grow fewer in number with every passing year. Young New Zealand, the demographic fast embracing “Aotearoa” as their nation, believe in the Treaty – and will fight for it.

McAnulty gets this because, at just 38 years-of-age, he’s a member of that younger demographic. The Baby Boom generation came of political age under the shadow of a racist majority. The majority Rob Muldoon knew he could count on in 1975 and 1981. The reactionary social formation that was still there in great numbers back in 2004 when Don Brash delivered his in/famous Orewa Speech. The prime motivator of Helen Clark’s ruthless response to the Court of Appeal’s decision on the foreshore and seabed. But McAnulty, alongside many others in Labour’s caucus, is two generations away from the politicians who were young in the 1960s and 70s. That world has gone – just as gaslight and gaiters had departed the world of the post-war generation.

So why didn’t Gen-Xers like Jacinda Ardern, Grant Robertson and Chris Hipkins lean-in to the co-governance debate like McAnulty? One possible explanation is that they were never able to shake-off their fear that the Big Racist Monster was still out there, still capable of upending progressive governments. They had, after all, seen at close hand Clark’s reaction to the post-Orewa polls. They had been witnesses, not only to the Labour leader’s fear of a Pakeha racist backlash, but also to her antipathy towards the “haters and wreckers” of Māori nationalism. Those sort of experiences leave a deep impression.

For McAnulty, however, they are yesterday’s political calculations. Either through careful sociological study, or by pure intuition, he has grasped what so many of his colleagues have not. That a substantial number – maybe even a majority – of the Baby Boomers can be won away from their fear of the Big Racist Monster. That the people who marched against the Vietnam War, protested the Springbok Tour, and organised for a nuclear-free New Zealand no longer have to worry about what the older generation will say or do – because most of the RSA Generation are dead and buried. It’s their kids and their grandkids that the Boomers should be thinking of now.

McAnulty’s other key insight is that when younger New Zealanders hear the word “democracy” their reaction is often quite different from that of their parents and grandparents. Democracy was what the Baby Boomers parents had fought for during the Second World War. It was the precious heirloom of the “Free World” through all the years of the Cold War. For the young New Zealanders who grew up in the shadow of Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson, however, democracy has been subjected to an altogether more robust interrogation.

It was under democracy that the New Zealand trade union movement was gutted, and never allowed to recover. It was under democracy that the welfare state became as cold as charity. It was democracy that looked at global warming – and did nothing. Democracy that denied an entire generation their own affordable home. Democracy that allowed big corporations to wreck the New Zealand environment, and then take their profits offshore. Sure, you could vote, once every three years, but nothing ever seemed to change. Democracy might have done plenty for their grandparents’ and parents’ generations, but it has done bugger-all for theirs.

When older New Zealanders look at co-governance they are prone to see the demise of one-person, one-vote. But young New Zealanders look at the mess local government has made of their cities and towns, rivers and forests; they think about the way farming and business interests always seem to get what they want – often at the expense of everybody and everything else; and they ask themselves: Could the Māori make a worse job of looking after Aotearoa than Pakeha democracy? Could co-governance with mana whenua be any worse than co-governance with capitalists?

McAnulty has, quite rightly, pointed out that New Zealand has developed its own version of democracy. That it is steadily moving towards a way of governing that sees achieving consensus as preferable to, and certainly more sensible than, a 50 percent+1 tyranny of the majority. Both Māori and Pakeha are talking about a constitution based on the Treaty of Waitangi, rather than the Westminster system, might look like. Ways forward that follow the paths already laid down in numerous Treaty settlements. A system of governance based on the peoples we are becoming, rather than the far-from-democratic institutions the British colonisers brought with them.

If McAnulty’s colleagues have the courage to follow his lead, then the looming election may yet become an historical turning-point. With National and Act offering nothing more than more of the same, Labour, the Greens, and Te Pāti Māori have been given the chance to join the most progressive elements of the older generations with the hopes and aspirations of younger New Zealanders, thereby forging an electoral alliance equal to the challenges of an uncertain and demanding future.

More than quarter-of-a-century ago, I concluded a feature article entitled “The Struggle For Sovereignty”, written for New Zealand Political Review, with the following sentences:

New Zealanders are heading into a great storm of change. Much that is precious to us will pass away. As Pakeha we have grown accustomed to being the colonisers rather than the colonised. Loss of power will be a new experience for us. As the second great wave of colonisation washes over us, our best chance of survival will be to reach out for the hands of the tangata whenua – whose feet are sunk deepest in the earth of Aotearoa. In the storm of change that is coming, the strength which that position gives to Māori will make them the only solid point around which everything else twists and turns. If we, as Pakeha, do not reach out and grasp that strength, the fury of the storm will blow us far away.

That storm is now upon us.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 18 April 2023.