"John Frum, He Come." The National Government's stubborn promotion of the Trans-Pacific Partnership has been likened to the post-World War II Melanesian "Cargo Cults" whose followers constructed their own "runways" and "aircraft" to entice the recently departed GIs "John From America" (John Frum) to return bearing the miraculous "cargo" that had so suddenly enriched their lives.
IT WAS ONE OF THE MOST EXTREME REACTIONS to a speech that I
have ever witnessed. I had written it for the newly-elected Mayor of Dunedin,
Sukhi Turner, and she had made it her own. Delivering it with her trademark forthrightness,
she set the Dunedin Establishment ablaze. The offending paragraph had been the
one in which she accused the Dunedin business community of having a “cargo
cult” mentality.
The anthropological term, “cargo cult”, arose from the
responses of a number of isolated Melanesian populations whose subsistence
communities had been overwhelmed during World War II: first by soldiers; then
with all the things that soldiers need. When the war ended, and the soldiers
and their “cargo” departed (as suddenly and mysteriously as they had arrived)
the islanders were distraught. Desperate for the return of these
bringers-of-all-good things, they laid out jungle runways and fashioned crude
facsimiles of aircraft. “John Frum [John from America] he come”, they intoned
to the heavens. “John Frum, he come.”
The point I was making in the speech, and which Sukhi
embraced, was that our own local (and national) business elites were behaving
very similarly to those Melanesian islanders. They also believed that if they
laid out the equivalent of jungle runways (financial inducements, deregulated
markets) then John Frum’s precious “cargo” – in the form of big, one-off,
economy-rescuing, foreign-investment projects – would follow.
The firestorm created by the speech took a great deal of
hosing down. (Unsurprisingly, I wrote no more incendiary mayoral speeches!) It
did, however, teach me a couple of very valuable lessons. First. What are
presented as highly sophisticated economic arguments in favour of globalisation
are driven by some very unsophisticated (some might even say primal) human
impulses. Second. The people advancing such arguments do not take at all kindly
to being labelled cargo cultists!
That being the case, the veteran journalist, Gordon
Campbell, should probably watch his back. Because, in his latest analysis of
the Bill English-led National Government’s peculiar obsession with keeping the
Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) alive, Campbell writes:
“New Zealand – and other nations – made concessions and
spent their political capital in order to meet American corporate demands. The
likes of English are still promising to observe these commitments to the
letter, even though the Americans won’t be there to keep their side of the
bargain. The TPP has literally become a cargo cult ritual that’s being
performed in the hope that someday, one day, the Americans will return, bearing
gifts.”
No surprise, then, that the National-led Government is so
keen to enrol the Labour Party in this, to date, fruitless ritual. Labour’s return
to the Free Trade fold would represent a much-needed infusion of political
capital to the project. Without it, the New Zealand political class’s
considerable reputational investment in TPP stands to be lost.
Exactly why Labour would offer its company to all this
pro-TPP misery is far from clear. Such an about-face would not only alienate
its prospective coalition partners in the Greens (whose opposition to the TPP
remains staunch) but also enrage the September election’s likely arbiter,
Winston Peters – whose adamant opposition to such agreements is well known on
both sides of the parliamentary aisle.
Accordingly, by far the most fruitful course of action for
Labour would be to make common-cause with the Greens and NZ First against any
and all attempts to revive the TPP in its current, unamended, form.
Such an alliance would constitute a stern warning to the
political class that its participation in such absurd cargo cult rituals must
end. It would also signal that the days of electoral politics being a “heads we
win, tails you lose” proposition for New Zealand’s “permanent interests” are
over.
The National Party (which certainly likes to think of itself
as the spokesperson for those permanent interests) should recall the fury of
the tangata whenua at the
sovereignty-threatening clauses of the TPP – especially the Investor-State
Dispute Settlement provisions. Is its relationship with the Maori Party strong
enough to withstand such a test of loyalties?
The three (possibly four) parties currently positioned to
bring National’s nine-year-reign to an end could hardly have wished for a
better issue around which to gather the forces seeking a change of government.
It offers the Left a rare opportunity to bestow upon its parliamentary
representatives the benediction of mass political action: the chance to allow
Labour, the Greens and NZ First to be carried all the way to the Beehive’s
Ninth Floor on a vast wave of popular discontent.
All of which poses the question: Why would English and his
allies (both inside and outside of Parliament) willingly hang the weighty
carcass of the deeply unpopular TPP around their collective neck? Do they
really intend their final words, as the rising tide of change closes over their
heads, to be: “John Frum, he come”?
This essay was
originally published in The Press of Tuesday,
23 May 2017.
