Discordant Realities.

When Reality Goes West: New Zealanders unrepresented by the Mayor of Westland, Bruce Smith, might struggle to accept the proposition that their fellow citizens are kept alive by businesspeople rather than health professionals.

THERE ARE MOMENTS when the existence of many New Zealands, as opposed to just one, becomes undeniable. The presence of these many, often discordant communities, all claiming to represent the “real” New Zealand has seldom been made plainer than during Saturday morning’s (28/8/21) riveting interview between Newshub Nation’s, Simon Shepherd, and the Mayor of Westland, Bruce Smith.

“Discordant” is an altogether inadequate adjective to describe the forthrightly delivered views of the Westland Mayor. What the viewers heard was a description of a world radically at odds with the one inhabited by New Zealanders living in the major urban centres. Reality, as understood by these city-dwellers, was given short shrift by Bruce Smith. His world, the world of the West Coast, is “real” in a way he clearly believes the big cities are not. It was the Mayor’s certainty, and the confidence it imparted to his pronouncements, that made the interview so compelling.

And what pronouncements they were:

“It’s a bit frustrating you know, to have Wellington, with say 14 active cases, and the South Island with none, and for us all to be at the same level doesn’t make a lot of sense to me”, Smith told Shepherd. Adding for good measure: “I have to say my thoughts last night were with the business community. We see lots on TV and it’s always health professionals – we don’t see our business community that keeps us alive. My thoughts are with them.”

The inference here is that unless official guidance makes sense to the Mayor of Westland and, presumably, to the no-nonsense people who elected him, then a very good prima facie case exists for rejecting it.

A politician less immersed in his own narrative would probably have left it at that. After all, the Government makes no secret of the fact that it is guided by “the science”. It’s a pretty big call for a lay person – even one referred to as “Your Worship” – to dismiss expert scientific advice as not making a lot of sense.

But the Mayor pressed on, declaring that his thoughts were with “our business community”. How much better it would be, he inferred, if instead of health professionals clogging up the airwaves, New Zealanders were allowed to hear the views of businesspeople – the group that “keeps us alive”. Those same New Zealanders, or, at least, a good portion of them, might have a little difficulty accepting the proposition that their fellow citizens are kept alive by businesspeople rather than health professionals. What exactly was he saying?

Well, Mayor Smith was almost certainly expressing sentiments not dissimilar to those printed on placards during last month’s “Groundswell” protests. “No Farmers, No Food” declared the cockies who paraded their tractors into the provincial towns and major cities of New Zealand. This rather brutal example of rural reductionism was intended to remind the sort of townie who thinks milk comes from the supermarket, that, ultimately, everything that keeps humanity alive is derived from the land – and the people who bring forth its bounty. The sub-text being: piss-off the nation’s farmers at your peril!

Whether Mayor Smith’s claim that the “business community” enjoys a life-sustaining status comparable to the people who grow our food isn’t quite so incontestable. After all, agriculture preceded capitalism by several millennia. What’s more, the specialisation that gave rise to artisanal production and trade – “business” if you like – was inconceivable without the food surpluses produced by farmers. Never forgetting that makers need users, and sellers buyers, a fact that confirms the indisputably social character of commerce.

So, if it is true that the “business community” keeps “us” alive, then, equally, it is true that without “us”: the people who work in the factories, offices and shops; the people who drive the trucks and trains; the people who operate the warehouses and stand for hours at the supermarket checkouts; the users, buyers and consumers of the nation’s production; the business community would perish.

Hence the wage subsidy offered by the Government. Hence all the other measures to keep the workforce safe and reduce to a minimum the length of time the nation and its regions are kept in lockdown. A point the Newshub Nation’s presenter attempted to drive home to the Westland local government leader. But, Mayor Smith wasn’t having a bar of it. Those who advocated the Elimination Strategy that had kept New Zealand’s Covid-19 death-toll to a world-beating 26, were not to be trusted:

“I think the people who say that are all being paid by the state. They get their pay every Thursday, doesn’t make a lot of difference to them. Coming out into the real world, you’ll find it’s totally different.”

This was the point in the interview when it became clear just how many New Zealands there are out there – and just how hostile some of those New Zealands are to the rest of us. Listening to Mayor Smith unleash on the likes of Ashley Bloomfield, Michael Baker, Sir David Skegg, Shaun Hendy – and all those other New Zealanders “paid by the state”, one was reminded of just how easy it is for people to surrender to the siren-songs of sectoral chauvinism. It requires an effort of imagination to grasp just how interdependent human communities are; to understand that epidemiologists paid for by the state are playing a vital role in making sure that the small-scale, private tourist operator in Westland gets back to business in the shortest possible time.

For Mayor Smith, however, a more “balanced” response is required from the Government. The mix between “our economy and our health”, he suggested, needs a course correction. The Government was too bound up with the threat to people’s health. Insufficient attention was being paid to the business community. The public’s wellbeing was being protected at their expense.

Once again Mayor Smith appealed to a “reality” dangerously divergent from any condition recognisable to science:

“The reality is Covid is with us. It’s no different to polio back in my grandparents’ days. The only way that we can fix it is we’ve got to be vaccinated. I’ve encouraged everybody to get vaccinated, but even then it’s still going to come in. It’ll come in from overseas. It’s part of our lives from here on in and we need to adapt.”

When Simon Shepherd objected that those who talked about “living with the virus” were leaving unspoken the epidemiological certainty that hundreds – perhaps thousands – would be “dying of the virus”, Mayor Smith responded with the observation: “There’s lots of people who have different opinions, different agendas”.

It is against this New Zealand that all the other New Zealand’s must, for their own safety, unite. The New Zealand that rejects “the science” as nothing more than someone’s “opinion”, or, worse still, someone’s “agenda”. The New Zealand in which only those inhabiting the “bubble” of business have any interests worthy of protection. The New Zealand in which all those unfortunate enough to exist outside the “real world” of “our business community” are reduced to mere means to its ends. The New Zealand in which life continues only for so long as there are profits to be made and unavoidable losses to be accepted without complaint. The New Zealand in which no real Kiwi would wish to be found dead – or allowed to die.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website of Monday, 30 August 2021.

Now It's Time For Realism

Bernie Madoff in a Vee-Dub? There are times when good intentions simply aren't good enough. As the war poet, Siegfried Sassoon, wrote of another old man who cost people all they had: "'He's a cheery old card,' grunted Harry to Jack/As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack./But he did for them both by his plan of attack."

THE COLLAPSE of South Canterbury Finance (SCF) is just the latest in a long line of serious business failures. What’s different about the latest debacle is that, this time, it’s taxpayers who are picking up the tab.

More than $1.5 billion is being paid out to SCF investors – a sum greater than the entire amount set aside by the Government for new spending in the coming year.

The Finance Minister, Bill English, has been quick to reassure us:

"The up front cost to the Crown of repaying South Canterbury's depositors is about $1.6 billion, but we would expect to recover the bulk of that as the receiver sells the assets over time."

An expectation is not, of course, a guarantee. Time alone will tell whether Mr English’s sanguine response to SCF’s collapse is based on fact or folly.

Right now, however, it’s time to face the brutal fact that New Zealand’s business community has become this country’s biggest liability.

For the best part of thirty years business-people have been telling us that all they need to restore New Zealand’s prosperity is for the State to get out of the way and let them get on with the job.

Labour’s Roger Douglas and National’s Ruth Richardson took them at their word.

And even though it cost us of tens-of-thousands of well-paid jobs and scores of thriving communities, we stoically and selflessly "bit the bullet" of radical economic "reform".

By the time Rogernomics and Ruthanasia had run their course, New Zealanders had lost control of their finance sector, most of their news media, and much else besides. Valuable state assets, the product of more than a century of public investment, had been sold-off to foreigners for a song.

Undeterred, we kept on chewing the business community’s ammunition. Why? Because they’d successfully brainwashed us into believing that the "long-term gain" would, ultimately, be worth the "short-term pain".

Unfortunately, "ultimately" turned out to be a moveable feast.

And while we waited for that ultimate pay-day, things went from bad to worse. The 1987 Stockmarket Crash revealed not only that New Zealand’s business titans had feet of clay, but that some them were also just plain, old-fashioned crooks.

If we’d been smarter, we’d have realised back then, in the early 1990s, that the entire neoliberal project was one almighty scam: a weird sort of political Ponzi scheme in which the early converts reaped all the benefits, and the late-adopters paid all the bills.

And pay we did – with the Employment Contracts Act.

The ECA absolved the business community of all responsibility for learning the lessons of the excesses of the 1980s. Instead of upgrading their technology and upskilling their workforce, New Zealand’s businesses spent the 1990s stripping their staff of hard-won conditions and allowances and putting an end to penal rates.

By the turn of the century thousands of New Zealanders were living off their credit-cards just to make ends meet. Indeed, the whole New Zealand economy seemed to be adrift on a limitless ocean of debt. Like Tennessee William’s fragile heroine, Blanche DuBois, New Zealanders had become hopelessly dependent on "the kindness of strangers".

Also, like Blanche, they no longer wanted Realism – but Magic. And, as it has done so often in our history, this unwavering faith in the "unseen hand" of the market, and the superhuman powers of entrepreneurial capitalists, has led thousands to financial ruin.

"Kindness" and "Magic" are certainly the operative words in the tragic demise of Alan Hubbard’s empire. How else should we explain the quaint anachronism of a man who, in an age of instantaneous data and light-speed capital flows, was still willing to put his faith in the unwritten contract of a handshake; the reliability of a Canterbury cockey’s spoken word?

Now it’s time for realism.

From Vogel to Muldoon, the growth and development of New Zealand’s economy has not been driven by the daring visions and fluctuating fortunes of individual capitalists, but by the cautious intelligence and financial solidity of successive New Zealand governments.

Over and over again, throughout our history, we’ve had to learn this lesson. That we are too small to let big things fail. And that the only institution with both the collective resources and the collective wisdom to make big things succeed - is the New Zealand State.

Who else could have rescued SCF?

This essay was originally published in The Dominion-Post, The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 3 September 2010.

Bored of the "Mood"

"Control, Smithers, control. It's the only thing worth having!": But why should the "mood of the boardroom" count for more than the mood of the common-room, the smoko-room, or the staff-room?

IT’S the sub-text of the "Mood of the Boardroom" exercise that rankles most. The idea that a poll conducted of businessmen, by businessmen and for businessmen can somehow reveal the nation’s forward path. Even if New Zealand’s business leaders were famed throughout the world for the length of their education, the breadth of their social and scientific interest, and the depth of their cultural intelligence, the inherent conceptual narrowness of the commercial mindset would still rule them out as useful guides to national regeneration.

Sadly, the New Zealand business class possesses only the last of the attributes mentioned above. Indeed, when it comes to narrowness of vision it has few serious rivals.

With the honourable exception of Sir Robert Jones, and a handful of other cultured entrepreneurs, the Kiwi businessman has nothing but contempt for the liberally educated individual. Practical skills, rather than critical or creative thinking, is what he prizes most highly, and his reflexive anti-intellectualism may be relied upon to keep New Zealand’s productivity levels firmly at the bottom of OECD rankings (no matter how many reassuring noises he may offer to Business NZ’s pollsters.)

As the political wing of the business community, the National/Act condominium naturally mimics its masters’ failings with puppy-like enthusiasm. Dimly aware that a well-educated population is an indispensable pre-requisite for sustained economic growth, it has proudly squeezed out a policy of "national standards" and "national testing". No matter that expert opinion is unanimous in its condemnation of the policy, or that overseas experience has only grim tales to tell about the disastrous educational consequences of "teaching to the test" regimes, National’s education minister, Anne Tolley, backed by her Prime Minister, John Key, is absolutely determined to press ahead.

Addressing a Wellington business breakfast on Wednesday, 15 July, Key declared:

"The Government wants to introduce National Standards constructively, in a cooperative spirit ….. But there should be no doubt about the Government’s commitment to National Standards. Parents want them, this Government is going to deliver them, and I am backing the Minister of Education 100 percent."

If the PM’s words have a certain Churchillian ring to them, that’s because they really are a declaration of war on the education sector.

The introduction of the government’s "national standards" regime will only take place over the prostrate bodies of the powerful education unions, whose professional educators have quite rightly identified the government’s plans as a direct threat to the nation’s children. Naturally, the prospect of full-scale war with the trade unions is something from which neither the nation’s business leaders, nor their political factotums, have the slightest intention of resiling. Never mind the disruption, the trashing of professional expertise, or the lingering legacy of bitterness and mistrust: in education – as in all other things – business knows best.

This same wantonly destructive approach to all matters intellectual, critical and professional is reflected in the National Government’s decision to not only cancel the previous government’s dramatic expansion of research and development funding, but to proceed from the assumption that, in the PM’s own words: "Universities and Crown Research Institutes need to be more responsive to the needs of firms."

Not to the needs of scientists and their research teams, you will note, but to the needs of "firms". As if any New Zealand "firm" has ever possessed the wit to foresee the next great conceptual breakthrough, or anticipated the sort of scientific insight that flows only from the ability to conduct pure research free from the "insinuating tutelage of intelligent authority, and pressure weighted with gold." (Although, for most scientists, domination by "intelligent" authority would be considered a major advance!)

"Domination" is, of course, the central organising principle around which all such "Mood of the Boardroom" exercises revolve. Ever since the mid-1980s, when Treasury’s revolutionaries staged their bureaucratic coup d’état on behalf of a business community too lacklustre to do it for themselves, the necessary fiction of the omniscient Kiwi businessman has lain at the heart of the neo-liberal regime.

And that is the terrible irony of the "Rogernomics Revolution": that New Zealand’s historical shift towards the free market, master-minded and unleashed by a cabal of highly-educated civil servants, should be predicated on the notion that the very people who made the change possible, along with the social-democratic society which produced them, must, of necessity, be among its first sacrificial victims. Like the Soviet regime its adherents purport to despise, the neo-liberal state is doomed to moral and intellectual disintegration. It may have been started by men of brilliance, but its natural progeny will always be nasty, brutish, and short on talent.

Who, then, could be surprised to discover that 95 percent of the nation’s CEO’s identified the civil service as the prime target for government retrenchment? The experts, the specialists, the possessors of professional and scientific knowledge: what possible purpose could they serve in a society such as ours? The doctors, nurses, teachers and social workers who daily confront the consequences of a society driven by greed and fear: what remotely useful service could they render their fellow citizens?

It is this extraordinary conceit that makes the "Mood of the Boardroom" exercise so offensive: that the sellers of farm implements and telephone connections; book-keepers, cow-cockies and money-lenders; men and women who will never agree on anything more uplifting than that government expenditure – and hence their taxes – should be constantly and savagely reduced; should be turned to for sensible and disinterested advice by the rest of the population.

One day New Zealanders will recall that the era of their nation’s history during which its citizens experienced their most sustained period of economic, social and cultural uplift, was the era when the "mood of the boardroom" counted for no more than the mood of the common-room, the smoko-room, or the staff-room. An era when the fiction of the omniscient businessman was simply unequal to the population’s memory of the squalor, deprivation and injustice that constituted its real-world legacy.

Perhaps the current world-wide recession – the worst in 80 years – will supply a new generation of New Zealanders with a similar store of prophylactic memories, and they will come to understand, as their grandparents did, that, in a democracy, it’s not the "mood of the boardroom" that counts – but the mood of the people.

This essay was originally published in The Independent of Thursday, 23 July 2009.