The Facts Don’t Always Tell The Truth.

Sins Of Omission: Ardern’s speech to the 2022 Labour Party Conference shows just how much of the truth can be obscured through the presentation of the “facts”. Had she been of a mind to speak honestly to her party, Ardern could have explained to conference delegates that the reason so little has been accomplished on her watch is because the Fourth Labour Government deliberately powered-down the state.

WHAT WOULD YOU THINK of a man who offered himself for high political office with the following credentials? He was raised in humble circumstances, fought his way out of poverty and, at 44, is a twice-decorated war hero. He does not eat meat or drink alcohol, loves animals and has an easy rapport with children.

Worth a go?

Not when you hear his name. Not when you discover that the man seeking your support is Adolf Hitler.

And yet, all the attributes listed above are completely factual. Adolf Hitler was all of those things. But, simply listing facts, especially when they are stripped of context, is not the same as telling the truth. To grasp the truth of Adolf Hitler’s contribution to world history requires more than mere facts, it requires understanding, interpretation and judgement.

When the Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, addressed her party’s annual conference on 6 November 2022, she cloaked herself in the legacy of the Labour leaders who had preceded her. This is what she said:

On the 9th floor of the Beehive building in Wellington, sitting directly behind my desk, is a picture of Michael Joseph Savage. You could say he’s on my shoulder but also ever so slightly in my ear.

“Of course it was Savage and the first Labour Government that lifted New Zealand out of the depths of the Great Depression. Not by cutting taxes and services, but by investing in jobs, and building a social welfare safety net. They built the country’s first state home. And not long after these social reforms - New Zealand’s living standards were among some of the highest in the world. Not for the few, but for the many.

“The Finance Minister who supported Savage, Walter Nash, then led Labour’s second government as it continued to build our nation’s social welfare system, while advocating on the world stage for peace over war after World War 2.

“It was Norman Kirk and a Labour government who tilted the country towards a modern future with reforms of trade, health, the arts, and education. They worked hard to foster a renewed national identity and partnership with Maōri - all the while challenging global evil such as apartheid and nuclear testing.

“It was a fight David Lange continued, making New Zealand nuclear free, while also righting the wrongs of the past by legalising homosexuality, and fully abolishing the death penalty.

There are many facts embedded in the PM’s speech, but precious little truth.

It is certainly a fact that the Second Labour Government was led by Walter Nash, but to suggest that he was some sort of courageous pacifist visionary is very far from the truth.

Nash was 75 years old when he became Prime Minister in 1957 and was a notorious prevaricator and procrastinator. The two Labour Ministers who drove the Second Labour Government were Finance Minister, Arnold Nordmeyer, and the Trade & Industry Minister, Phil Holloway. Inspiring these two men was a third – the senior public servant and left-wing intellectual, Bill Sutch.

Knowing these things about the Second Labour Government, being able to put Nash and his colleagues into their proper historical context, offers the present-day member of the Labour Party a radically different perspective on the possibilities of social-democratic government. Sadly, Ardern did not want to share even a small measure of the truth about those three years. Her only concern was to establish her place in the line of succession.

Poor Norman Kirk fares little better. On the basis of the PM’s summary, the Third Labour Government could easily be presented as laying the groundwork for the Fourth. The truth is, of course, very different. Kirk was a nation-builder who, like his Australian counterpart, Gough Whitlam, was determined to extend and expand the Labour accomplishments of the 1930s and 40s. In other words, Kirk’s government represented the antithesis of Lange’s.

The Fourth Labour Government made New Zealand safe for neoliberalism by dismantling everything that the First, Second and Third Labour Government’s had built. Ardern’s impossibly brief sketch of the Fourth Labour Government, in which Lange champions the anti-nuclear policy, decriminalises homosexuality, and “finally” abolishes the death penalty comes perilously close to lying by omission.

Lange initially attempted to water-down the anti-nuclear policy, and then made sure he was as far from Wellington as possible when the critical decision to either admit or deny entry to a visiting US warship could no longer be put off. The decriminalisation of homosexuality was effected by a private members bill in the name of Fran Wilde on a conscience vote. It was not a government bill, and Lange had nothing to do with it. The big battle over the death penalty for murder had been won twenty-three years before Lange became PM. It was accomplished under a National Party government in 1961. All that the Fourth Labour Government abolished, thanks to Sir Geoffrey Palmer (not Lange) was the death penalty for treason in time of war.

Ardern’s reference to the Fourth Labour Government shows just how much of the truth can be obscured through the presentation of a few highly dubious “facts”. Had she been of a mind to speak honestly to her party, she could have explained to conference delegates that the reason so little has been accomplished on her watch is because the Fourth Labour Government quite consciously decided to disempower the state, and had carefully dismantled all the machinery that made it possible for previous Labour Governments to make New Zealand a better place.

It is entirely possible that Ardern approves of David Lange’s and Roger Douglas’s “reforms”. Certainly, neither she, nor her Finance Minister, Grant Robertson, have seen fit to roll back the neoliberal revolution which the Lange/Douglas partnership began. And that’s fine – just so long as she doesn’t then pretend to be one more gleaming crimson link in the long democratic-socialist chain that begins with Harry Holland in 1919!

The Labour Party does not like to be criticised and is fiercely protective of its leaders. Over the years it has discovered that the best form of defence is to personally attack all those who draw attention to its shortcomings. Crucial to the success of this strategy, however, is the fostering within its ranks of a pervasive political amnesia, and the encouragement a profound level of historical ignorance. The measure of these Labour apparatchiks’ success is that, to date, not one party member has dared to protest the Prime Minister’s grotesque misrepresentation of the Labour governments which preceded her own.

There is so much that the Labour Party could learn from its past. So much courage that could be drawn from the men and women who refused to be told that their plans were beyond the scope of practical politics. People who didn’t have to pretend to be radical reformers. A party that said “Let’s do this!” – and then did it.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 15 November 2022.

The Affable Snake: Tony Simpson Remembers Stan Rodger (1940-2022)

A Man May Smile And Smile: Stan Rodger was an affable almost avuncular figure although it’s important to recall that no-one gets to the top of the then largest union in the country without exercising the skills commonly found in any political snake pit; ostensible bands of brothers and sisters are no exception.

THE DEATH of erstwhile Dunedin Labour politician and Cabinet Minister Stan Rodger on 29 May and the obituary note by Chris Trotter that followed a few days after raised a number of ghosts which I thought I had long buried; but ghosts have a habit of coming back to haunt and Stan’s role in the Lange government of the eighties is no exception. That government may be ancient history to many reading this but it represents a significant phase shift in our political past which needs to be regularly examined and analysed. As someone once said: those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it; someone else added “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” [1]

I knew Stan quite well when I was a senior advocate for the PSA in the early seventies and he was the union president. He was an affable almost avuncular figure although it’s important to recall that no-one gets to the top of the then largest union in the country without exercising the skills commonly found in any political snake pit; ostensible bands of brothers and sisters are no exception. Stan went on to parlay his union background into a safe Labour seat in Parliament. There was nothing exceptional about that. The trade union movement invented the Labour Party in 1916 to unify its parliamentary initiatives on behalf of working people and moving from union office to MP was quite common in past decades. As an experienced worker representative Stan was an obvious candidate for Cabinet when the Lange government came to power in 1984 and he became Minister of Labour and of State Services. And that’s where the fun begins.

It is now commonplace to recognise that that government repudiated the social democratic tradition which was central to its previous philosophies and replaced it with a thoroughgoing economic and social neo-liberalism which included an attack on some of the longstanding rights of workers in their trade unions. There was widespread outrage at this within the union movement; I myself abandoned my role with the PSA, at root because they refused to call out the Lange government for its anti-union policies, but immediately because the debate became so heated that there were fisticuffs in the office and I had to go, although I was subsequently to return as president to try and repair some of the damage.

The angry debates that government occasioned affected its Members of Parliament along with everyone else. Some, such as Jim Anderton walked away and set up an alternative party true to what they perceived to be the previous Labour traditions. Others, along with much of the previous mass party membership, disappointed and disillusioned, turned their backs and slipped away. But some stayed on in Parliament and saw the crashing defeat of Labour at the 1990 election. Stan’s erstwhile membership at the PSA showed their displeasure by revoking his honorary status at a subsequent Conference against the advice of the then platform leadership. It was subsequently restored but it is indicative of the fury among many committed unionists that it happened at all.

All of this created a dilemma for Stan. No-one likes to be labelled a traitor to a cause i.e. in this case the workplace rights of working people, whether such a characterisation is justified or not. Others who were confronted with the same problem took the obvious course and published a memoir in justification. [2] Stan didn’t publish a memoir as far as I am aware. But he did it seems invent a narrative of his motives which he vouchsafed to those around him such as the veteran journalist Richard Harman; it is one that finds its way into Chris Trotter’s obituary notice.

According to this story there was a left wing Marxist conspiracy against the PSA led by another of its erstwhile presidents, Jack Lewin, who by the deployment of a sinister body called The Korero sought to take over the union and turn it by stealth to its own left wing purposes. This group it is alleged, playing some master game of which the puppet master had been Bill Sutch, were trying to use their position within the PSA to turn our polity in an extreme left direction, and had already attracted the attention of not only the scurrilous right wing newspaper Truth but the SIS. Stan, by playing a major instrumental role in getting David Lange into Parliament, his story goes, and then into the leadership of Labour saved the nation from this Marxist conspiracy. His role in the Lange government was an on-going part of that brave enterprise. Its problem as a narrative is that it bears little or no resemblance to the facts of the matter.

That there was a group referred to informally and partly in jest as ‘the korero’ is true, and Jack Lewin who was also well known to me not only existed but was considerably more colourful and larger than life. I also knew personally quite a number of the other activists involved including Jim Turner and Jack Batt, both subsequently union presidents. But to understand what this was all about you must go back to the creation of the PSA in 1913 in the wake of the passage of the first serious attempt to create a professional and non-political civil service in this country, the Public Service Act of 1912. This Act was predicated on the assumption that some organisation would be in place representing the interests of the newly created professional public service workers, and so one was accordingly created – the PSA. But if you called it a union you would probably give its founders a heart attack. Even its name eschewed the word ‘union’; it was an association, and its rules to this day contain a clause forbidding it to affiliate to any political party. It sternly rejected the suggestion that it should register under the then Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act because it had a paranoid fear of anything resembling compulsory membership and was from its inception to this day a wholly voluntary body.

But times change. By the late nineteen fifties New Zealand had gone through a cruel Depression, the first Labour government, and the trauma of the Second World War. This had created a generation of committed unionists to whom the PSA as originally constituted was no longer fit for purpose. But neither were they Marxists or Leninists or any other of the communist sectarians who are always with us but who have also had little or no influence on the direction of the trade union movement in this country, except perhaps in the fevered imaginings of the SIS or populist politicians in search of a bogeyman such as Robert Muldoon, and sometimes only in their own minds.

What Jack Lewin and the so-called ‘korero’ were all about was ending the cosy relationship between the senior public service of the day and the leadership of the PSA and replacing it with a leadership transparent and accountable to its rank and file members. In this they succeeded admirably. I would venture to say, from my own observation, and as someone with a highly sensitive nose for bull shit and subterfuge that during my period working at a senior level for the PSA it was genuinely responsive to the views and requirements of its members and probably more so than any other union in the country. Those were its agendas and nothing else despite efforts from time to time by various groups to take it over or assert influence on it – including at various points a strange right wing philosophical group calling itself Moral Rearmament, the ubiquitous sectarians of the communist left, and some of the more socially conscious groups within the Catholic Church. None of them came within a bull’s roar of gaining their objectives or even enjoying other than minor influence.

Ironically, it was only when the Lange government repealed the State Services Act – not on Stan’s watch but that of Geoffrey Palmer - and replaced it with legislation which effectively shut out the PSA from any influence on the direction of government workplace policy, that there was serious damage done to the professional and politically neutral ethos of our public service. In a very real way we have returned at least partially to the situation which pertained prior to the passing of the 1912 Act when the New Zealand civil service was subject to gross political patronage and inappropriate interference by politicians.

I last saw Stan and chatted briefly to him at the centenary function of the PSA in 2013. He remained at a personal level what I had always known him to be – an affable and avuncular figure who came over as someone who wouldn’t harm a fly. In that regard I would simply remind you reading this that appearances, particularly when power is involved, can be very deceptive, and that Stan survived and flourished in one of the most unforgiving of all social environments - the trade union movement.

Tony Simpson.


[1] There are many claimants to have invented this dictum, including Winston Churchill and a Spanish philosopher George Santayana but the most likely candidate is Edmund Burke (1729-1797) with the coda added by Karl Marx.

[2] The prime instance of this is Reform by Geoffrey Palmer (2013). There were others I will not mention, some so egregious as to beggar belief. In its subsequently published centenary history the Labour Party also glossed over the whole matter.

This essay is exclusive to Bowalley Road.

Following Labour's Lead.

Red And Proud: The only real question, after Thursday’s Budget, is: How long will it take National to realise how profoundly the political game has been – and is being – transformed by Covid and Climate Change? Socialism is no longer a dirty word.

YOU HAVE TO ADMIT, Judith Collins made a reasonable fist of responding to Grant Robertson’s 2021 Budget. It wasn’t enough, of course. It would have required a truly Churchillian performance to dispel the magic of Robertson’s speech. Labour has well-and-truly learned what National appears to have forgotten: that people feel long before they think. And Robertson had just made a goodly portion of the New Zealand electorate feel righteous. As performances go, his was a bloody hard act to follow.

Still, the leader of the Opposition has not forgotten how to use her sword. Her thrust against “Meccano lessons” at the Hillside Workshops was deadly. Unfortunately, she failed to follow it up with an equally devastating assault upon the whole import substitution policy to which Robertson’s proudly proletarian pitch paid homage. There was, after all, a reason why Labour, in the early 1980s, began casting around for something to replace the Sutchism that had dominated Labour’s policy-making since the late-1950s.

It is one of New Zealand political history’s greatest ironies that Rob Muldoon, the “Young Turk” who won his spurs attacking the massive import substitution programme unleashed by the Second Labour Government, should have ended his career amidst the wreckage of “Think Big” – as he called his own updating of the left-leaning economist, civil servant and historian, Bill Sutch’s, radical economic development policies.

Indeed, it is interesting to speculate on what might have happened if Muldoon had remained true to the instincts of his younger, private-enterprise self, by continuing to reject state-directed development in New Zealand. Had Muldoon embraced the same ideas as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the late-1970s and the early-1980s, it could easily have been Labour which ended up betting the farm on one last roll of Sutch’s dice.

As things turned out, it was Labour’s new leader, David Lange, who found himself proclaiming that New Zealand couldn’t go on being run “like a Polish shipyard”. Egged-on by his Treasury advisers, and the smarter elements of the Fourth Estate, he was persuaded to join his backers (Roger Douglas, Michael Basset, Mike Moore and Richard Prebble) in “thinking the unthinkable” about New Zealand’s economic future.

A strong case can be made that Labour’s willingness to “think the unthinkable” made it possible for National to give up thinking altogether. Initially confounded by Labour’s abrupt change of ideological direction – not to mention the near universal praise heaped upon its new “more market” policies by the mainstream news media – National floundered hopelessly. Its win in 1990, which the news media proclaimed a “landslide”, was, by MMP standards, a remarkably close contest. National may have received 47.82 percent of the popular vote, but the combined popular vote for Labour, New Labour and the Greens was 47.15 percent.

Thanks to the First-Past-the-Post electoral system, the new National prime minister, Jim Bolger, was spared the challenge of governing with a one-seat majority. He may have campaigned in the poetry of “The Decent Society”, but the prose he governed in was all written by the same neoliberal scribes who had authored Labour’s policies – albeit with considerably sharper pens. The National Party’s finance minister’s, Ruth Richardson’s, “Mother of All Budgets”, so loudly condemned by Grant Robertson in Thursday’s Budget Speech, was really only Roger Douglas – with bells on.

By the time Labour (with the Alliance in tow) was back in control of the Treasury Benches, its acceptance of the ground rules of Neoliberalism was, if not complete, then sufficiently substantial for the emergence of a style of governance that could be, as John Key went on to prove, as readily adopted by National as Labour. Conservative purists railed against Key’s “Labour-Lite” approach, but it proved more than equal to the challenge of a global financial crisis and a devastating earthquake. It was certainly enough to secure nine years of National Government, which might easily, in the absence of “Jacindamania”, have stretched into twelve.

Historically, this is par for the course with National. From the Opposition Benches, it railed against the Keynesianism of the First Labour Government, only to embrace it as the price of electoral victory.

Muldoon shot down radical Sutchism in 1961, only to see Holyoake and Marshall adopt a watered-down version of the same well into the 1970s. In 1979, beggared for options in the face of seemingly indefatigable “stagflation”, Muldoon became the last, and easily the most radical, of the Sutchists.

Bolger played the same game with Neoliberalism: railing against its brutalities from Opposition; then allowing Bill Birch to crush the trade unions, and Richardson to poleaxe what was left of the welfare state, from the safety of the Government benches.

In 2008, Key accepted a less-sharp-edged version of Neoliberalism from Helen Clark, and cruised effortlessly to three electoral victories in a row.

And now, thanks to Covid-19, Labour finds itself, once again, strategically placed to set a new course for economic and social policy in New Zealand. With the monetarist policies that have, for the past 40 years, constituted the core of Neoliberalism, discredited (by that inveterate foe of all theories – Reality) Prime Minister Ardern and Finance Minister Robertson find themselves at a turning-point very similar to the one their party encountered in the early-1980s.

Confronted with the immediate challenges of a global pandemic, and, behind them, the even more daunting challenges of climate change, governments all over the world are shrugging-off the dogma that there is no problem so great that it cannot be solved by giving the market its head. State action, on a massive scale, is once again being seen, by politicians with an eye to the future, as the indispensable agency of economic and social survival.

Ardern and Robertson have grasped this ideological shift a great deal faster than any of their rivals. Certainly, it has encouraged them to deploy the sort of rhetoric that would have made their predecessors cringe. Targeting Richardson’s Mother of All Budgets and raising benefits in a long-delayed one-fingered salute to this hated left-wing symbol of neoliberal cruelty, was only the beginning. As the Budget Debate wore on, Labour’s backbenchers could not forbear from getting in on the act. The new MP for Wairarapa, Kieran McAnulty, delivered the lines most likely to raise the National Party’s collective blood-pressure:

“Yes, I am a socialist and I’m proud of it. Yeah, there you go. Thank you very much. Bring it on. And I’m very proud to say to the good people of the Wairarapa that they elected a proud socialist as their MP.”

The only real questions, after Thursday’s Budget, is how long will it take National to realise how profoundly the political game has been – and is being – transformed by Covid and Climate Change? Will it be two, three, or four terms? And, how many leaders will the party have to elect, and discard, before it finally masters the new language of electoral victory?

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website of Monday, 24 May 2021.

From A Table By The Window - A Short Story About The Huawei Decision.

“Ever the idealist, dear boy. You surely didn’t expect this government to tell all those lovely people from British Intelligence and the FBI, who just happened to be in town this week, that, in spite of their oh-so-discretely conveyed objections, Spark’s deal with Huawei would be going ahead.”

HOW MANY YEARS has it been, I asked myself, since I climbed these stairs? That the little Wellington café was still in business after more than 40 years struck me as a miracle. And where better to meet the man who could still remember the events of 40 years ago – not least because he was there, in the thick of them?

He was waiting for me at the table window, his fingers moving slowly over the smooth face of his device. Two full glasses of red wine glowed dully in the wet afternoon light. The muted transactions of Willis Street provided a sibilant soundtrack.

“There you are”, he said, sweeping the information from his screen and placing the device carefully on the table. “Sit down, dear boy, sit down. I took the liberty of ordering a very nice Pinot Noir.”

“Perfect,” I replied, draping my damp jacket over the back of my chair. “I suppose that phone of yours hasn’t stopped ringing since the announcement?”

He smiled wanly. “Ringing, dear boy, ringing? Nothing rings anymore. Our devices beep, or chirrup, or play a bar or two of something, but they do not ring – much too indiscrete.”

“Discretion being the word-of-the-day”, I replied. “As in ‘discretion’ being the better part of valour – a quality of which this government appears to be in short supply.”

“Ever the idealist, dear boy. You surely didn’t expect this government to tell all those lovely people from British Intelligence and the FBI, who just happened to be in town this week, that, in spite of their oh-so-discretely conveyed objections, Spark’s deal with Huawei would be going ahead.”

“Forgive me, but I was under the impression that it was the Government of New Zealand’s job to define the parameters of its ‘national security’ – not the FBI’s. Does the continuing economic strength and welfare of the country not fall under the heading of ‘national security’? Or, making sure that the goodwill of the country’s largest trading partner is retained, and maybe even enhanced? I thought that might also be a matter of ‘national security’? Clearly, I was wrong.”

“If that was what you thought, dear boy, then, yes, you were wrong. Very wrong. The idea that one of the Five Eyes might sign up to a deal that could put all the other eyes at risk has absolutely no feathers, dear boy, none at all. It is never going to fly.”

“Ah, yes, the Five Eyes. A vast electronic eavesdropping network dedicated to plucking all manner of classified information out of the air and sending it on, sight unseen, to the United States of America. The Five Eyes. An operation whose sole purpose is to steal other people’s secrets. This is the outfit that’s demanding we jeopardise our economic and diplomatic relationship with the Chinese because the Chinese might use their state-of-the-art 5G technology to do what? Oh, yes, that’s right – to steal other people’s secrets!”

“The most important noun in those impassioned sentences, dear boy, was United States of America. You named the most powerful nation on the planet. Knowing when you did so that what the most powerful nation on the planet wants, the most powerful nation on the planet gets. And, right now, what it wants is to make sure the nation aiming to take its place is not in a position to weaponise ‘The Internet of Things’ against it.”

“You’ve been reading to many thrillers.”

“Actually, dear boy, it’s you who hasn’t been reading enough. Cyber-warfare is the greatest threat we face. Why? Because, in just a few years, the interconnectedness of the world and the breath-taking speed at which information travels will confer upon the technology organising its distribution the power to simply shut down the economic, social and political systems of its owner’s rivals. What would you do if you went to the nearest ATM and discovered that every one of your bank accounts had been deleted? That all your money had gone? Poof! Just disappeared? What if the same thing had happened to everybody else’s bank accounts? How does a government ‘fix’ a problem like that?”

“Okay – suppose I buy into this sci-fi scenario. It still boils down to Lenin’s fundamental question: ‘Who? Whom?’ Someone’s got to be in the omnipotent position you describe. So, what you’re actually telling me is that the omnipotent one cannot under any circumstances be China. Which is just another way of saying that it has to be the United States.”

“It’s not what I’m saying, dear boy, it’s what the United States is saying.”

“Regardless of the consequences for the economic and social welfare of New Zealanders? Do the Americans and their lickspittles in London and Canberra not understand that Beijing will exact a price for being treated so shabbily by Wellington?”

“Of course they do. They just don’t care. Why don’t they care? Because they know that anything Beijing decides to do will take time to manifest itself in a way that impacts upon the ordinary person in the street. Anything they decide to do to punish a maverick New Zealand government, by way of contrast, will take effect almost immediately. With the Australians acting as their proxies, the Americans can make our economy scream a lot faster than the Chinese. What’s more, in its upper echelons, New Zealand society is so stuffed with US “assets” that the political destabilisation of a recalcitrant government would be over in a matter of weeks, not months.”

“So we just have to sit back and take it – or the Yanks will rip our guts out?”

My companion looked out the window for a moment, taking in the hurrying Willis Street crowds, umbrellas raised against the wind-driven rain, and sipped his wine.

“Do you know, dear boy, that it wasn’t so very far from here that Bill Sutch was apprehended. All his life he had struggled to find a way for New Zealand to strike out on its own: to cut herself free from the apron strings of Mother England; to step out from Uncle Sam’s shadow. The problem he was never able to solve was, how? How does a tiny country escape the clutches of an imperial superpower? In the end, the best answer he could come up with was: by enlisting the help of another superpower. Do you remember, dear boy, how that story ended? The same delightful outfit that has been entertaining the boys and girls from MI6, and the FBI were on to poor old Bill in a flash. They put him on trial. Crushed his spirit. Within twelve months he was dead – and so was the government he had tried to help. Not a happy ending, dear boy. And not a course of action I’d recommend – especially not to a government as callow and inexperienced as this one.

Now it was my turn to stare out into the rain. To take in the purposeful haste of the capital city’s busy ants.

“More wine, dear boy, and a plate of the chef’s truly outstanding club sandwiches. In forty years they, at least, haven’t changed.

This short story was posted simultaneously on The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road of Friday, 30 November 2018.