To Remain The Same, New Zealand Must Change.

It's Time! The cumulative effect of New Zealand politicians' twenty-year failure to keep strong a generalised faith in the possibility of a better future, has been to set up an election – this election – in which victory will be claimed by the political leader who convinces a majority of New Zealanders that if they want their country to remain the same, then everything will have to change.

NEW ZEALANDERS REQUIRE a lot of persuading to embrace change. It’s a bitter truth for radicals of every stripe to swallow, but New Zealand is an inherently conservative country. Understanding the reasons why Kiwis are so anxious for things to stay the same is, therefore, the essential first lesson for those seeking to change them.

The most important driver of conservative attitudes is having something to lose. That’s why the cliché, “there’s nothing more dangerous than a person with nothing left to lose”, is wrong. The most dangerous people in the world are not the dispossessed, but those who believe their possessions are about to be taken from them. The defining emotion of human-beings who have lost everything is despair. The emotions that define those who believe they are about to be dispossessed are fear and rage – very often murderous rage. It’s the reason why revolutions almost always descend into civil wars.

Herein lies the paradox for the change-makers. Their best chance of radically reforming society comes when those teetering on the edge of poverty – or even of becoming appreciably less affluent – convince themselves that they’re on the point of falling. It is among those most anxious about slipping down the social hierarchy that the promise of a particular kind of change resonates most strongly. The political movement and/or party that comes up with a programme of change which reassures the economically and socially vulnerable that their lives will stay the same is onto a winner.

One of the quirky aspects of New Zealand’s political culture is the degree to which its citizens factor-in the contribution their country’s eighty-year-old welfare state to the personal calculation of their overall well-being. Most Kiwis understand that without state-provided and (mostly) state-funded health care and education, their standard of living would plummet. The quantum of income required to fund a child’s private education, and pay the insurance premiums required to guarantee comprehensive private health coverage, is only available to a very fortunate minority of New Zealand households – and the rest of the country knows it.

It is this reliance on the welfare state that explains why New Zealand’s conservative party – National – always does best when it guarantees to look after the core components of the welfare state. Health, Education, and, more recently, Working for Families, constitute the foundations upon which the moderately affluent have constructed both a comfortable lifestyle and (which is probably more important politically-speaking) a comforting metric of their social status.

Also expected of National, as the designated driver of New Zealand’s economy, is a housing market capable of satisfying every New Zealander with a proven track record of hard work and thrift (both of which presuppose a buoyant labour market). Indeed, the National Party once fetishized home ownership as the key constituent of what it described, proudly, as New Zealand’s “property-owning democracy”. Nothing demonstrated more conclusively National’s understanding that the more people had to lose, the more likely they were to vote conservatively.

If proof is needed, it is there in the electoral record. Between 1950 and 1990, National was in office for 28 years: their Labour rivals, for twelve.

Notwithstanding its failure to occupy the Treasury Benches for even half of the 40 years between 1950 and 1990, Labour had every reason to feel proud of its achievements. The status quo that National felt bound to defend, on pain of losing office, was the work of its socialist opponents – not itself.

Electorally, the meaning of this arrangement was clear. If National, the conservative guarantor, failed to defend the economic and social institutions brought into being between 1935 and 1949, then their principal architect, the Labour Party, would act with radical dispatch to keep them functioning. Or, to put it more bluntly: only uncompromising reform has preserved the status quo.

The drama and confusion which has characterised the past 30 years of New Zealand’s political history are the product of the failure of both National and Labour to adequately defend the core generators of the New Zealand electorate’s economic, social and political security.

The neoliberal project, introduced by Labour’s Roger Douglas, ostensibly as a means of reconstituting the economic foundations of ordinary New Zealanders’ security, has, since 1984, only succeeded in producing a state of affairs very closely approximating the opposite. Neither Helen Clark’s Labour-led Government, nor the National-led Government of John Key and Bill English, have proved equal to the task of rebuilding a properly functioning welfare state.

The cumulative effect of this twenty-year failure to keep strong a generalised faith in the possibility of a better future, has been to set up an election – this election – in which victory will be claimed by the political leader who convinces a majority of New Zealanders that if they want their country to remain the same, then everything will have to change.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 12 September 2017.

John Key's Legacy - A Protected Status Quo.

Shhhh! Don't Frighten The Horses! And that, in essence, is the story of John Key’s prime-ministership. For National Party voters the status quo of 2008 has been protected and extended. The lives of most New Zealanders have not been subjected to sudden and dramatic changes.

 

INCREMENTAL CHANGE is, generally-speaking, the most effective expression of democratic government. Most human-beings are uncomfortable with sudden and dramatic change. They can live with it, and through it, if they have to. (Just ask the citizens of Christchurch and Kaikoura!)  But most people, given a choice between the status quo and massive upheaval, will opt for the status quo.

 

Understanding the New Zealand electorate’s sensitivity to change is what made John Key such a successful prime minister. Like all clever politicians, he approached the whole fraught business of change with the wary circumspection of someone handling nitro-glycerine.

 

There are, of course, exceptions to this general rule about change. If, for example, the status quo has become unbearable, then the prospect of dramatic change acquires a much less frightening aspect. In these circumstances, the smart politician not only embraces the necessity for “Big Change”, but he also does everything he can to cast the dog-in-the-manger defenders of the status quo as “enemies of the people”.

 

On 4 March 1933, the day Franklin Delano Roosevelt was sworn-in as the thirty-second President of the United States, nearly one in every three adult American males was out of work and most of America’s banks had closed their doors. For many millions of Americans the status quo had, indisputably, become unbearable, and they were hungry for change.

 

Nevertheless, Roosevelt was mindful of the need to reassure his fellow citizens that he understood their anxieties concerning both the magnitude of the economic crisis gripping their country and the radical scope of the measures required to fix it. “So, first of all,” he told the American people, “let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”.

 

By the time John Key became prime minister on 19 November 2008 there were many who believed that Big Change would be the defining characteristic of his ministry. His election victory had coincided with the full onset of the Global Financial Crisis and the world was teetering on the brink of an economic calamity every bit as transformative as the Great Depression.

 

New Zealand’s free-market enthusiasts were as eager for Key to take advantage of this real crisis as they had been for David Lange to take advantage of the 1984 speculator-driven financial crisis triggered by Labour finance spokesperson, Roger Douglas’s, leaked promise to devalue the New Zealand dollar by 20 percent. Their hope was that the incoming Key government would seize the opportunity provided by the Global Financial Crisis to announce a raft of savage spending cuts and launch yet another round of radical deregulation.

 

But John Key was made of considerably sterner stuff than the politically inexperienced and economically illiterate David Lange. The new National Party prime minister understood that for most New Zealanders – especially those who had been kind enough to vote for him – the status quo was a very long way from becoming unbearable. Quite the reverse, in fact. A lengthy period of economic buoyancy had turned the status quo into something to be protected and, if possible, extended for as long as possible.

 

And that, in essence, is the story of John Key’s prime-ministership. For National Party voters the status quo of 2008 has been protected and extended. The lives of most New Zealanders have not been subjected to sudden and dramatic changes.

 

For those Kiwis living on the margins, however: the unemployed, solo mums, unskilled workers, homeless people; the changes have been wrenching and unceasing. Unfortunately, a majority of New Zealand’s more secure and contented citizens have been willing to accept the suffering of this marginalised underclass as the price to be paid for maintaining their own, very comfortable (and increasingly valuable) status quo. Had the poor mobilised politically against the unbearable conditions of their daily lives, the status quo might have changed. But they didn’t – and it hasn’t.

 

All the evidence points to Andrew Little and (most) of the Labour Party having, finally, absorbed the key political lesson of the past nine years. That a clear majority of voting New Zealanders remain unconvinced that New Zealand faces anything remotely resembling the conditions that confronted Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, or Michael Joseph Savage in 1935. The status quo, for most Kiwis, remains far from unbearable. Big Change is not required.

 

Certainly, the multiplying number of government failures: the lack of affordable housing; declining water quality; land sales to foreigners; overcrowding in primary school classrooms; the sorry state of New Zealand’s mental health services; is fast reaching the point where, after nine years, the voters are ready for “an orderly rotation of political elites”. What the electorate (as presently configured) is not ready for, however, is revolution.

 

The contemplation of six impossibly big changes before breakfast can safely be left to the TOP of Gareth Morgan’s head.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 21 March 2017.