From Emancipation To Denunciation: The Sad Descent of the Contemporary Left.

Going Down: The priorities of the Contemporary Left aren’t just depressing, they’re scary. Ordinary folk begin to ask themselves: if the urge to condemn and punish is all the now drives the Left, then how far is it willing to go to shut down and/or shut up the bad guys? Not many people are happy with the idea of living in a society where citizens have to weigh carefully every word and action, or fall victim to a regime in which punishment is the first resort, and forgiveness the swiftest path to ruin.

HOW TO PROMOTE a radical left-wing agenda when so few people today can even imagine such a thing? The emancipatory impulse that guided so many of the left-wing programmes of the past has almost entirely faded away. In its place we find a denunciatory political culture. Far too many contemporary leftists are driven by the desire to condemn and punish. Where once the Left’s purpose was to create a better world, its chief preoccupation today appears to be making it a less evil one.

A more realistic goal, some might say. Except that, as a goal, reducing evil rests upon the dismal presupposition that malignancy is humanity’s resting state. Striving to reduce the severity of the planet’s daily torments is not at all the same as believing it is possible to overcome them. Directing one’s efforts towards making humanity’s prison more bearable, differs fundamentally from a project dedicated to reducing that prison to rubble and setting its prisoners free.

As the Second Wave of Feminism swept across the Western World in the early 1970s, its adherents spoke with tongues of fire about the end of patriarchy and the emergence of not only a new kind of woman, but also of a new kind of man. They argued persuasively that the bloody re-ordering of male hierarchies – which men liked to call “revolutions” – were not revolutions at all. The only revolution worthy of the name, they argued, would be the one that brought the full emancipation of women. Only when the 10,000 year-old patriarchal system of sexual and gender repression was no more, could real human history begin.

Fifty years on, so many of those fiery tongues have been stilled. As The Platform’s Ani O’Brien wrote on 8 March, International Women’s’ Day:

In New Zealand - and perhaps elsewhere - International Women’s Day has become a farcical parade of corporate pink-washing overlaid by a nepotistic circle-jerk of privileged and influential liberal (mostly white) women giving each other awards at champagne breakfasts […..] And the issues they focus on? Usually not particularly high on the priority list for your average Kiwi woman – certainly not for those who are under-privileged.

On matters of race the picture is equally depressing.

Sticking with our earlier prison metaphor, the attention of the Contemporary Left seems fixated upon the ideas and actions of the prison guards, and how important it is to make them understand the enormously harmful impact of their prejudices and practices upon the well-being of the prisoners. If the purpose of “re-educating” these oppressors was to persuade them to make common cause with the oppressed, then its inherent negativity might be overlooked. Unfortunately, that is not its goal. The ambitions of the Contemporary Left do not extend beyond ensuring that the guards and the prisoners administer the prison together – “partners” in penology.

When it comes to issues of class, the picture is even bleaker.

In tragic contrast to the leftists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Contemporary Left seem mortally afraid of offending the boss. The very notion that “the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle” strikes them as decidedly career-limiting. Located firmly in the Professional and Managerial Class, whose task it is to administer capitalism smoothly, with a minimum of fuss, on behalf of the people who own it, the Contemporary Left has taught itself to look at the working-class and see … nothing.

Without the determination to emancipate, the Left has no ability to inspire. Lacking the stimulus of their common advancement, the political inertness of “the people” is only to be overcome by outrage. By exposing the wickedness and brutality of those who wield power over them, individuals can be roused to anger. Rather than the emancipatory programmes spawned by the Old Left’s creative political imaginings, the Contemporary Left offers the marginalised and oppressed only the sterile alternatives of condemnation and punishment.

The “Me Too” movement replaces the New Woman and the New Man. “Black Lives Matter” replaces Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream!”

The problem with constantly parading wickedness and brutality before people’s gaze is that pretty soon they begin to think that’s all there is. Intuitively, they arrive at the dismal conclusion that the condemners and the punishers are not only fighting a never-ending battle, but a losing one. For every Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein who falls, countless other abusers will go unpunished. For every racist cop that gets put away, a thousand more contrive to hide their racism more carefully.

Not only are these conclusions depressing, they’re scary. Ordinary folk begin to ask themselves: if the urge to condemn and punish is all the now drives the Left, then how far is it willing to go to shut down and/or shut up the bad guys? Not many people are happy with the idea of living in a society where citizens have to weigh carefully every word and action, or fall victim to a regime in which punishment is the first resort, and forgiveness the swiftest path to ruin.

Abandon the Left’s quest for emancipation in favour of the politics of denunciation, and what is left to the ordinary citizen but material aspiration? If building a better world is no longer on the Left’s agenda; and this one is dominated by forces against which the Left fights and fights but cannot overcome; then surely the only sensible course of action is for individuals and families to get and keep as much as they can while the getting and keeping is good?

For the past thirty-five years this is the only consistent message the New Zealand electorate has been sent. Certainly, it is the message which the National Party never tires of sending to voters. The Old Labour Left (think Mickey Savage and Norman Kirk) was condemned for wanting to upset the settled order of things – a prospect which the comfortably situated can always be relied upon to abhor. The New Labour Left (think Helen Clark and Jacinda Ardern) National condemns for its puritanical obsession with punishing the sins that make comfort possible. (The Greens are even worse!)

Since the Old Labour Left died with the Alliance twenty years ago, and the current incarnation of the Greens regards its policies as ideologically suspect relics of a bygone age, the New Labour Left has very little incentive to develop a manifesto in which the impulse to confront and overcome the evils of the status quo is blended with a determination to emancipate its victims. Evil can only be vanquished by the creation of a world in which it cannot thrive.

But, persuading voters this is true is no easy task. It requires a political party that never stops making the case for radical change. Sadly, no such party exists in the New Zealand of today. Offer voters a radical left-wing agenda in 2022 and its content will most likely inspire not enthusiasm, but a mixture of doubt and scorn.

As in this comment from a former National Party Cabinet Minister:

Is it really credible that Labour will become akin to a Corbynite party, since that is effectively what is being suggested. If they did, and that was clearly signalled before the election, I reckon you could pretty much guarantee Labour a few years in the political wilderness to contemplate the consequences of such a decision.

There is simply no appetite in New Zealand for a radical socialist change. It is no accident that the biggest selling vehicles are double-cab utes capable of pulling the 6 meter fishing boat [which is, in] fact, owned by the PM’s partner along with the beach house in Tairua. The epitome of the kiwi dream.

Just about every single policy dreamed up by such a fanciful radical coalition would be diametrically opposed to people being able to fulfil such a dream.

The party that actually trumpet the opportunity to fulfil such a dream are much more likely to electorally succeed.

The tragedy of these times is that Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Party would almost certainly agree. And the even bigger tragedy – so would 98 percent of the voters.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 18 March 2022.

A Caucus Of Velvet Gloves.

Uniformly Diverse: There is one very simple reason why this government, comprised overwhelmingly of members of the Professional-Managerial Class, will find it almost impossible to understand what the bottom half of New Zealand society needs: because it is supremely confident that it already does.

NEW ZEALAND now boasts one of the most diverse parliaments on the planet. In terms of gender, ethnicity and sexuality, the governing Labour Party’s caucus, in particular, bears testimony to the work of many progressive politicians, over many years, to transform “diversity” from a pious ideological aspiration into a flesh-and-blood political fact. Quite an achievement.

But, it is also an achievement fraught with danger. Because, as Bryce Edwards points out in his recent Guardian article, the Labour Party’s diversity does not extend to class. The fact is that New Zealand has a parliament – and a government – drawn overwhelmingly from the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC). The perils of this social monoculture should be obvious. It can only raise a formidable barrier to understanding – and hence addressing – the needs of those living in the bottom half of New Zealand society.

This is not simply a problem founded on ignorance: a case of Labour not knowing what it doesn’t know about life in the Otaras and Flaxmeres of New Zealand. It’s much worse than that.

The PMC is distinguished by the role it plays in mediating Capitalism’s relationship with its most injured victims. Without the PMC army of lawyers, probation officers, social workers, health professionals, academics, teachers, journalists and “communications specialists” to extinguish the fires ignited constantly by economic exploitation and social exclusion, the whole of capitalist society would soon be engulfed in flames.

The PMC is what you create when the price of relying exclusively upon police officers, judges, jailers and soldiers to keep the bottom half under control grows too high. It’s the velvet glove that Capitalism pulls on to hide and soften its iron fist. For this subterfuge to work, however, the PMC has to believe that it knows much better than Capitalism’s casualties what’s good for them. There is one very simple reason why a government comprised overwhelmingly of members of the PMC will find it almost impossible to understand what the bottom half of New Zealand society needs: because it is supremely confident that it already does.

Nowhere has this “we know best” attitude been on display more clearly than in Oranga Tamariki. A more compelling example of the PMC’s inability to comprehend the sheer scale of its failure is hard to imagine. The idea that the “lower orders” might actually have a better grasp of what is needed to keep their children safe is simply inconceivable to the bureaucrats set in authority over them. These people are the “problem” – so how could they possibly be included in the search for solutions?

One has only to watch Melanie Reid’s harrowing Newsroom video to see the PMC at work. The employees of Oranga Tamariki quite literally put themselves between the victim and the Police – not to protect the young Maori mother, but to do everything possible to ensure that the “uplifting” of her child is effected without recourse to actual force.

The PMC’s stock-in-trade is institutional violence. The injuries it inflicts may be no less severe, but they are certainly more easily hidden than those caused by physical violence. For Capitalism, internal bleeding is always preferable to blood on the streets.

Those Labour supporters feeling confused and distressed by the Government’s apparent deafness to the cries of need arising from the poorest and most exploited New Zealanders should understand that when it comes to Labour’s caucus that deafness is a feature, not a bug. Alert Labour MPs to overt displays of misogyny, white supremacy, anti-Islamic prejudice and/or homophobia, and watch them spring into action. These are injustices that Capitalism is only too happy to help progressive politicians eradicate. Socio-economic injustices, however, are a different matter.

Any serious attempt to eradicate these wrongs would constitute a direct challenge to the capitalist system as a whole, and since the PMC looks upon capitalism as the most effective and efficient system for allocating resources that humankind has so far developed, undermining its operation in any serious way would be considered irrational. While it is perfectly acceptable to help those “doing it hard” to respond to capitalism’s needs, expecting capitalism to respond to their needs (in any meaningful way) is politically unrealistic.

The Ministry of Social Development (the clue to its mission is in the name!) will organise job clubs and offer help with beneficiaries’ CVs, but it will not pay a benefit which ensures them a secure and dignified existence. What incentive would there be to kowtow to the boss if, secure in the knowledge that they could live easily on the unemployment benefit until a better opportunity came along, employees felt free to tell employers where to stick their lousy jobs? For capitalism to work, so must the rest of us, at wages and under conditions set by the bosses – not the workers. Employees who no longer fear the sack are capitalism’s worst nightmare.

The members of Labour’s parliamentary caucus – the largest ever – will undoubtedly bridle at the very suggestion that they belong to a class made up of capitalism’s little helpers. Many will, no doubt, wax eloquent about their working-class origins, or the years they spent on the DPB. Not the point. The effectiveness of the PMC is, in large measure, guaranteed by so many of its members’ historical proximity to poverty. Being able to say: “I know what you’re going through, I’ve been where you are.”, makes the PMC’s advice and solutions all the more credible. After all, if these important people got up and away from the shitty world in which the poor remain trapped, then maybe they can too.

This is, of course, capitalism’s oldest and most persuasive narrative: from rags to riches (or, at least, from a benefit to a six-figure salary). Except of course, the story is only ever about individual – not collective – emancipation. Capitalism can cope with people moving from rags to riches one at a time; but not all at once. Celebrating identities over which we have no control (ethnicity, gender, sexuality) poses no threat to the institutions that keep the capitalist system on its feet. Telling people that they have the collective power to build a new world, on new foundations, does.

I, for one, would be delighted to hear capitalism’s little helpers in the Labour caucus giving voice to such dangerous ideas. I am much more likely, however, to hear them bragging about their caucus being, at last, a true reflection of New Zealand society. And if, by that, they mean Labour’s team faithfully reflects the forces preventing New Zealand society from becoming a fairer and more compassionate society, then I can only agree.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 26 November 2020.

The Political Economy Of Pride And Prejudice.

For The Few, Not The Many: In the face of the widening gulf between the rich and the poor, successive New Zealand governments have opted for the same role that Jane Austen chose to play while her beloved England busied itself defeating Napoleon Bonaparte and the revolutionary egalitarian impulses he embodied. They have transformed a narrow and privileged layer of New Zealand society into the only part of New Zealand society that matters. 

JANE AUSTEN’s literary skills are so prodigious that they distract us from the political landscape in which her novels unfold. Historically-speaking, the England of Pride & Prejudice, of Elizabeth Bennett and Mr Darcy, was a brutal place. For all but the very narrow social layer in which Austen’s novels are uniformly set: the world of aristocratic, genteel and commercial families; life was an unrelenting struggle to keep oneself and one’s family out of the clutches of the cruel and oppressive English state.

This was, after all, the era of the press-gang, indentured labour, transportation to Australia, imprisonment for debt, and those semi-festive demonstrations of state power – public hangings. On the hills outside Austen’s charming rustic villages and stately homes, gibbet-cages (and their decaying contents) swayed in the wind. Grim reminders of the fate that awaited those who violated the sacred laws of private property.

Not that genteel families like the Bennetts were entirely exempt from the iron laws of inheritance and property. Mr Bennett’s landed estate, Longbourn, is entailed – that is to say it can only be inherited by his closest male relative. As the father of five daughters, this leaves his family acutely vulnerable to the whims of his cousin, the sycophantic clergyman, Mr Collins. The law of entail thus provides the motive force for Austen’s plot. Making it, unintentionally we must presume (although with Austen one can never be sure!) a treatise on the political-economy of marriage in Regency England.

It was only 27 years after the publication of Pride & Prejudice that New Zealand became a colony of the British Empire. Indeed, one of the prime movers behind its colonisation, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, bears a more than a passing resemblance to Austen’s charmingly wicked Mr Wickham! It was Wakefield’s intention to reproduce in New Zealand a more-or-less exact replica of that rigidly class-divided rural England so lovingly depicted in Austen’s novels. Unfortunately, for Wakefield and his ilk, this version of England, with its “rich man in his castle, poor man at his gate” was precisely what the Scots, Irish, Welsh and English settlers who arrived here were fleeing.

If the settler history of New Zealand has any coherent theme (apart from the methodical dispossession of the Maori) then it is surely the multi-generational effort to beat down the political, social, economic and cultural privileges of class. For more than a century-and-a-half, New Zealanders have struggled to make it possible for every responsible and industrious citizen to acquire his or her own version of “Longbourn” – a home to call their own.

Alas, that vision of a New Zealand unencumbered by a parasitic landlord class, where a young person can make their way in the world on their own merits, irrespective of what they stand to inherit from their parents, is fast dissolving. A vast and politically dangerous gulf is opening up between the very wealthiest New Zealanders and their multi-propertied enablers in the professional and managerial classes; and the rapidly expanding mass of precariously employed, under-employed, and exploited workers, before whom the mirage of home ownership shimmers ever more distantly.

In the face of this widening gulf between the rich and the poor, successive governments have opted for the same role that Austen chose to play while her beloved England busied itself defeating Napoleon Bonaparte and the revolutionary egalitarian impulses he embodied. They have transformed a narrow and privileged layer of New Zealand society into the only part of New Zealand society that matters. Like Austen, they have deleted this country’s beaten-down and exploited working-class from the narrative’s list of serious characters. If they appear at all it is incidentally. Like Austen’s ubiquitous but inconsequential servants, they are necessary, but undeserving, ultimately, of serious attention: politically, economically, socially or culturally.

It’s a situation that cannot last. Jane Austen was followed by Charles Dickens: Pride & Prejudice by Bleak House. Austen’s rustic England swiftly succumbed to capitalism’s “dark satanic mills” – and their socialist dismantlers.

A similar reckoning lies in store for us, 18,000 kilometres from Austen’s shires, should this present government persist in behaving like Mr Collins in the presence of Lady Catherine De Bourgh. If our prime-minister, channelling Austen, continues to insist that:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a Labour Government in possession of a good majority, must be in want of the will to behave like one.”

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 20 November 2020.

To Remain The Same, Everything Must Change.

A New Day: A middle-class concerned about preserving its own social status, and determined to prevent its children being forced to accept an inferior position in the socio-economic hierarchy than themselves, will do just about anything. Given sufficient incentives, it can be persuaded to vote for the Left. Given a big enough fright, the middle-class will flee in panic to the Right. Cartoon by "Riddell".

CONSERVATIVE NEW ZEALANDERS are up for grabs. Not since the 1990s, when Winston Peters and Jim Anderton harvested thousands of votes from deep inside National’s heartland, has there been a better time to engineer a profound realignment of this country’s politics. If Jacinda Ardern, Labour and the Greens play their cards right (or, more accurately, centre-left) New Zealand could become a social-democratic haven to rival Scandinavia.

Let’s begin by acknowledging the upwards of 250,000 former National Party voters that Labour already has in its column. The pollsters of both parties have confirmed that most of these switchers are women aged 45 years or older. Obviously, a large number will also be mothers with deep and abiding concerns about their children’s future. Already, by shifting their vote from National to Labour, they have signalled their openness to new economic, social and environmental priorities. Though very far from being radicals, they do recognise that if the conditions they value most are to remain the same, then everything else will have to change.

This is the political mood that gives rise to the oxymoronic concept of “radical conservatism”: a state of mind distinguished by a willingness to embrace new strategies to achieve old goals. A middle-class concerned about preserving its own social status, and determined to prevent its children being forced to accept an inferior position in the socio-economic hierarchy than themselves, will do just about anything. Given sufficient incentives, it can be persuaded to vote for the Left. Given a big enough fright, the middle-class will flee in panic to the Right.

The left-wing Chilean academic, Ariel Dorfman, who worked closely with the 1970-1973 administration of Chile’s socialist President, Salvador Allende, makes some important observations about the middle-class and how it should be treated by left-wing activists. In his 1999 memoir Heading South, Looking North, he writes movingly about the way Allende’s young followers simply “evaporated” those who did not accept their vision of the future:

It was difficult, it would take years to understand that what was so exhilarating to us was menacing to those who felt excluded from our vision of paradise. We evaporated them from meaning, we imagined them away in the future, we offered them no alternative but to join us in our pilgrimage or disappear forever, and that vision fuelled, I believe, the primal fear of the men and women who opposed us … [T]he people we called momios, mummies, because they were so conservative, prehistoric, bygone, passé … [W]e ended up including in that definition millions of Chileans who … were on our side, who should have been with us on our journey to the new land and who, instead, came to fear for their safety and their future.

If Dorfman’s words strike a chord with observers of contemporary New Zealand politics, it is surely because so many of our own young leftists evince a similar degree of impatience with those who refuse to adopt immediately, and without reservation, their own “woke” vision of paradise. It is one of the biggest challenges that Labour and the Greens will face: learning how to communicate with conservative New Zealanders. How to reassure them that the Left’s goals and their own are congruent – not conflicting.

The most obvious issue around which a large measure of unity can be built is housing. For middle-class families, the inability of their offspring to enjoy the independence and security that comes from having a place to call one’s own is deeply disturbing. A state-funded and executed programme to construct not only state houses but also state apartment buildings would draw off a significant amount of pressure from the housing market, flattening prices and expanding the supply of affordable houses as rents fell and landlords offloaded their properties to first-home buyers.

Such a dramatic expansion in state-owned, rent-controlled properties (built by the state’s own construction corporation and workforce) would also have an immediate impact on the poverty and inequality afflicting working-class New Zealanders. The money freed up by significant reductions in rent; the educational and health benefits flowing to children from the provision of permanent, well-constructed and healthy places for their families to live in; as well as the employment opportunities provided by the state’s crash housing programme; all would go a long way towards rapidly improving the living standards of the poorest New Zealanders.

Another means of cementing-in the support of professional middle-class New Zealanders, and small-business owners, would be to embark on a comprehensive expansion of tertiary and trade-training across New Zealand.

The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed the extent to which this country relies upon foreign (read cheap) labour to keep a multitude of its industries running smoothly. A strong commitment to “indigenise” the New Zealand workforce: firstly by training the necessary numbers of workers required; and, secondly, by requiring employers to pay all New Zealanders a living wage, and to provide working conditions conducive to lifting productivity across the board. A subsidy could be paid to small, under-capitalised employers, to ease their transition from the old system to the new.

The pandemic has similarly exposed the tertiary sector’s reliance on full-fee-paying foreign students. A reduction in the number of New Zealand universities, the abolition of student fees, and a strict limit on the number of foreign students would restore a measure of sanity to these necessarily elite institutions. They could once more become places of higher learning and public-good research, bringing to an end their tawdry existence as over-priced and commercially-driven degree factories.

These are but two proposals that could be described as middle-class and conservative friendly. A government prepared to listen to its people would be certain to hear many more.

The restoration of New Zealand to its former status as a “property-owning democracy” – a goal as enticing to its working-class as it is fondly remembered by its middle-class – holds out the promise of a political journey upon which the overwhelming majority of voters can embark together. Making home ownership something to which all New Zealanders could aspire, transformed National into the “natural party of government” for nearly four decades. By making it available again, Labour can acquire the time it needs to transform New Zealand into the Sweden of the South Seas.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 30 October 2020.

Red Noise: Should RNZ Be Promoting “Progressive” Causes?

Advocacy Journalism: Should a radical resetting of Auckland City’s priorities ever be undertaken in the way the “expert witnesses” quoted in Kate Newton's "White Noise" investigation (posted on the  RNZ website on 21/1/19) suggest, then it would entail a profound redistribution of municipal resources away from the leafy suburbs and towards the city’s poorest and most marginalised communities. To believe that Auckland’s upper- and middle-classes would sit idly by while this was happening is fanciful in the extreme.

THAT RICH, OLD, WHITE PEOPLE dominate decision-making in New Zealand hardly qualifies as news. Having taken barely a quarter-of-a-century to dispossess its indigenous Maori inhabitants; rich, old, white people set about creating a society and an economy in their own image. In terms of whose views count, the New Zealand of today differs only marginally from the New Zealand of 150 years ago. Why, then, was RNZ moved to produce “White Noise”?

The tag-line for RNZ journalist Kate Newton’s investigation summed it up nicely: “It’s our most culturally diverse city, but older, wealthier, Pakeha people have the loudest voice when it comes to shaping the city’s future.” What follows is a series of geographical, social and statistical vignettes featuring four Auckland suburbs: Devonport, St Helliers, Avondale and Mangere. Emerging from Newton’s examination of the data is the entirely unsurprising conclusion that older, richer and whiter Aucklanders forward more submissions to Auckland Council than anybody else.

The truly intriguing question arising out of Newton’s “White Noise” (reported in depth on RNZ’s Morning Report of 21/1/19) is: How did the national public broadcaster expect its listeners to respond? Were they supposed to be shocked and horrified at this prima facie case of white privilege? Were RNZ’s listeners (a very large percentage of whom will be older, richer and whiter than the average Kiwi) supposed to be wracked with guilt? Were Auckland listeners, in particular, expected to contact their local board members and/or councillors and demand that something be done to counteract this all-too-obvious racism?

The answer could very easily be “Yes” to all of the above. One of the people Newton turns to for “expert” commentary on the findings of her investigation is Dr Jess Berentson-Shaw, currently a senior associate at Victoria University of Wellington’s Institute for Governance and Policy Studies. The Institute’s website describes Berentson-Shaw as a “researcher, writer and communicator, interested in the values that inform the development and implementation of evidence-based policy”. The Institute is not, however, the only body with which Berentson-Shaw is associated. She is also the co-director of a “think and work tank” called “The Workshop”. This collection of high-powered social activists describes its vision as: “a more inclusive New Zealand” driven by “compassion and manaakitanga to others”. Exactly the sort of group to take umbrage at the fact that rich, old, white people are exercising a disproportionate degree of influence over the future direction of Auckland and (presumably) the rest of Aotearoa-New Zealand.

In Newton’s posting on the RNZ website, Berentson-Shaw is described simply as a “public policy researcher”. Her co-directorship of “The Workshop” is not mentioned, nor is there any reference to the latter’s unabashed enthusiasm for thinking about and working towards radical social and economic change in New Zealand society. Newton’s failure to fully inform her readers about Berentson-Shaw’s political mission casts a worrisome shadow across the entire “White Noise” investigation.

Also absent from Newton’s investigation is any significant reference to the decisive relationship between social class and political power. Her readers are asked to focus on the ethnicity, age and household income of those participating in the Auckland Council’s consultation process. Unexplored were such factors as whether those participants were unskilled wage-workers or salaried professionals. Closely related factors, such as levels of educational attainment, were similarly neglected.

These are significant omissions. Not least because had social class and educational attainment been the focus of Newton’s study, then it is entirely possible that instead of old, rich, white people emerging as the villains of the piece, the culprits would have turned out to be self-interested members of the highly-educated middle- and upper-classes. Viewed through this lens, the degree of exclusion of ethnic communities would have taken on a very different aspect. Indeed, it would almost certainly have confirmed that people’s political influence is principally determined by their position in the socio-economic hierarchy – not by their age and/or ethnicity.

This conclusion may have been considerably harder to sell, however, than one fixing the blame on old, rich, white people. For a start, class and conflict go together in a way that leaves precious little room for inclusion, compassion or manaakitanga. Should a radical resetting of Auckland City’s priorities ever be undertaken in the way Newton’s “expert witnesses” suggest, then it would entail a profound redistribution of municipal resources away from the leafy suburbs and towards the city’s poorest and most marginalised communities. To believe that Auckland’s upper- and middle-classes would sit idly by while this was happening is fanciful in the extreme. The very skills and advantages identified (and implicitly condemned) in Newton’s posting would be turned instantaneously to the task of bringing such a redistributive exercise to a shuddering halt.

It would not be a pretty process. The ugly intent of protecting class privilege would be carefully masked in the populist rhetoric of racial defence. Not all of Auckland’s ethnic communities would opt to identify with the poor and the brown. Nor would the rest of New Zealand. One has only to recall the fate of Labour’s “Closing The Gaps” initiative; or the extraordinary reaction to Don Brash’s Orewa Speech; to appreciate the political fragility of Newton’s optimistic assumptions.

The closest “White Noise” comes to anticipating this kind of push-back is in its description of Old, Rich and White Auckland’s jeering dismissal of “Generation Zero’s” vocal endorsement of the Auckland Unitary Plan in 2016. Newton describes an incident in which the representatives of this highly articulate group of young professionals found themselves under attack in a hall filled with elderly white property-owning opponents of the Plan. That naked self-interest could express itself with such shameless antagonism clearly came as a shock to these youthful champions of progressive urban design.

The core mission of change agents such as “The Workshop”, “Generation Zero” and, one suspects, journalists like Newton herself, is to find a way around the political obstacles erected against “progressive” reform by self-interest and prejudice. “White Noise” attempts to do this by delegitimating the contributions of well-heeled, well-educated and well-connected Pakeha Aucklanders, so that a more just distribution of the city’s resources can be effected. Whether or not this is viewed as a worthwhile project will depend, almost entirely, on the reader’s ideological standpoint. The question for RNZ’s managers is whether or not investigations like “White Noise” should be undertaken by a supposedly politically neutral public broadcaster at the taxpayers’ expense?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 24 January 2019.

“Nothing Without A Demand” The Need For A New Union Movement.

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favour freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without ploughing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” - Frederick Douglass

FOR 27 YEARS wage workers in New Zealand have been forced to endure “labour market flexibility”. In the guise of, first, the Employment Contracts Act (1991) and then, the Employment Relations Act (2000) a workplace regime specifically designed to advantage employers has steadily whittled away workers’ collective economic security.

Their legal power to act as a class, by striking in solidarity with other workers engaged in industrial action, has been nullified by the legislative strategies of both the National and Labour parties. The consequent engorgement of employer power has fundamentally redrawn the contours of class relations in New Zealand. Until they are redrawn again – this time in the workers’ favour – New Zealand society will continue its long, slow slide into narcissism and cruelty.

So entrenched has the employers’ advantage in the workplace become that the Labour-NZF coalition government’s promised restoration of the core content of the Employment Relations Act: those rights steadily whittled away during nine years of National Party rule under John Key and Bill English; is being represented by the employers as an example of how “ideology rather than solid public policy [is] driving decisions”.

The bare-faced affrontery of this assertion is stunning. As if the Employment Contracts Act wasn’t the product of the most clear and uncompromising ideological calculation. The Act was widely regarded as a legislative marvel, celebrated by right-wingers around the world as the most effective means of taming the unions (short of deploying tanks and guns) which the promoters of “free markets” had yet devised.

Its successor, the Employment Relations Act was, if anything, even more ideological. Its Labour Party sponsors took care to give just enough – but no more – to the battered trade union bureaucracies. The changes contained in the Act permitted what remained of the New Zealand trade union movement to survive – but not thrive. What it most emphatically did not do was encourage the mass re-unionisation of the workforce, with all that implied about bringing ordinary working people back onto the country’s political stage.

Not that the surviving union bureaucracies would have been at all keen to see such a decisive shift in power relations. Prior to the Employment Contracts Act, the “electorates” of the major trade unions ran into the tens-of-thousands. To become a union secretary (the equivalent of a CEO) one had first to be elected by the rank-and-file membership. This could involve anything up to 35,000 union electors being eligible to cast a postal ballot. Today, union leaders are elected by a few dozen hand-picked conference delegates.

The annual conferences of the old Federation of Labour (1936-1989) which attracted hundreds of politicised working-class delegates have been replaced by the profoundly undemocratic Council of Trade Unions’ biennial get togethers. Gatherings that seldom attract more than fifty souls – most of them paid union officials.

It’s facts like these that make the National Party’s claim that the Labour-NZF Government’s reforms will “return us to 1970s-style adversarial union activity” so utterly nonsensical. The “Fair Pay Agreements” which, of all the proposed changes, come closest to resurrecting the bargaining structures of the 1970s, cannot be secured by industry-wide strike action. The employers have the Prime Minister’s word on that.

What’s more, the National Party’s Workplace Relations and Safety spokesperson, Scott Simpson, has stated bluntly that: “The Employment Relations Amendment Bill will go down as one of this Government’s biggest economic mistakes and a future National-led Government will repeal the provisions”.

The rights of working people will thus be traded back and forth like chips on the political poker table. Neither National nor Labour are really interested in hearing how workers themselves would prefer the modern workplace to be organised, or in learning about ways that the twenty-first century economy, with all its technological miracles, might be so regulated as to ensure that the benefits of robotics and artificial intelligence accrue to the benefit of the whole population – and not just to the shareholders of the transnational corporations who own the patents.

What will it take for that to happen? Well, it will take a lot more than simply voting for the Labour Party, the Greens or NZ First. [Who are already showing signs of backing away from Labour’s proposed reforms.]

The first step towards the construction of a new union movement is a commitment to learn from the past. Grasping the key historical fact that the trade unions were not the creation of the Labour Party; the Labour Party was the creation of the trade unions. That only a broad-based and independent workers’ movement can generate the necessary industrial and political heft to ensure that the interests of working people are not simply shunted aside by the bosses and their enablers.

Such movements have happened before in New Zealand history. Massive waves of unionisation, often followed by militant industrial struggle, during which the employing class was given good reason to fear the power of organised labour. In place of strife, the employers were moved to search for some way of living in peace with the trade unions: an arrangement that was capable of benefitting both parties to the employment relationship. Absent that fear; absent that independent organisation; neither of the major political parties will feel under the slightest obligation to address the interests of working-class New Zealanders. National will look after its own, and Labour will look after itself.

Frederick Douglass (1817-1895) the freed African-American slave and tireless toiler in the anti-slavery cause, wrote movingly of the unavoidable nature of struggle:

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favour freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without ploughing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 11 September 2018.

Working For Families: Keeping The Wheels Of Capitalism Turning.

The Way We Were: If what used to be called the social wage (education, health, welfare payments such as Working For Families) had to be picked up by the bosses, then our society would very rapidly degenerate into something resembling early industrial Britain. The capitalists couldn’t pay their workers enough to cover the now non-existent social wage, so they wouldn’t. Human-beings would, wherever possible, be replaced by machines, and those without a stake in the new order of things would be left to starve in squalor.

SUSAN ST JOHN’S INDIGNATION at the way the Working For Families (WFF) payment has been cast as an employer subsidy is palpable. “Blaming WFF for low wages”, exclaims Susan “is a bit like pointing to our high rate of suicide and blaming it on the existence of the mental health services.” Neither is she slow to sheet home the “true cause of low wages”. This, she says, is to be found in “casualised hours, precarious employment, automation, globalised labour markets and falling wage share of output due to loss of union power.”

St John is scathing in her condemnation of the purveyors of what she regards as the “subsidy myth”. Matthew Hooton, Eric Crampton on the Right; Bryce Edwards on the Left; and “others”.

Well, among those “others” I must acknowledge myself. Until relatively recently, I, too, was convinced that WFF, by topping-up the manifestly inadequate wages paid to workers, acted as a multi-billion-dollar subsidy to the employing class. Instead of the bosses paying their workers a living wage, those workers were being kept afloat by the taxes paid by other workers. How could that be fair?

But then I found myself seated next to Susan at one of Laila Harré’s “salons” and was set straight on WFF in the most forthright fashion.

Where were the critics of WFF prepared to call a halt? Susan demanded. If this particular “subsidy” was torn away, why not the taxpayer-funded public education system? Or public health? Just imagine how much more the bosses would be required to pay their workers if their wages were to cover not only the additional costs associated with raising children, but also the cost of private education and private health insurance? And what about the roads and the electricity grid? What about the water supply? Or sewerage disposal? How high would wages have to be lifted if every man and woman in the country was required to pay for all this crucial infrastructure directly – rather than by means of taxation?

The fact of the matter, Susan informed me, is that the entire capitalist system is subsidised. The viability of the present economic system; the ability of every company – private or public – to return a profit to its shareholders; rests upon the willingness of the state to pick up the lion’s share of the costs of raising, educating and keeping healthy all those workers whose daily labours keep their employers in business.

It was not always so. In the very early years of capitalism workers were paid just enough to cover the cost of keeping a roof over their heads and food in their bellies – less if demand faltered or prices increased sharply. The contribution of the state was limited to providing the soldiers necessary to restore order if the capitalists’ workers, driven to utter desperation, rebelled; the courts in which the ringleaders could be convicted; and the prisons (or penal colonies) in which such miscreants could be safely immured.

It didn’t work. As industrial technology grew ever more sophisticated, the need for a well-educated workforce grew ever more urgent. Likewise, with workers’ health. Deadly diseases left gaping holes in the working population. Clean water, hygienic waste disposal, unadulterated food, safe housing: all of these improvements, supplied collectively via rates and taxes, were crucial to improving the quality of life of the working-class. They were no less important, however, in keeping the capitalists profitable. Assessed from the perspective of the long-suffering wage and salary earner, the whole edifice of industrial civilisation looks suspiciously like an employer subsidy!

Which is precisely Susan St John’s point. If what used to be called the social wage (education, health, basic infrastructure) had to be picked up by the bosses, then our society would very rapidly degenerate into something resembling early industrial Britain. The capitalists couldn’t pay their workers enough to cover the now non-existent social wage, so they wouldn’t. Human-beings would, wherever possible, be replaced by machines, and those without a stake in the new order of things would be left to starve in squalor.

And, yes, you’re right, what this all adds up to is the far-from-novel conclusion that capitalism is an economic system subsidised by the many to the inordinate advantage of the few. Working For Families is, therefore, a very long way from being the most egregious example of society picking up the tab for meeting at least some of the needs of its most vulnerable members. Suggesting that the bosses take over this responsibility is pointless: they have neither the means, nor the inclination, to do so.

And, no, you’re not wrong, capitalism is, indeed, a grossly exploitative and unjust system which only goes on working because the people who keep the wheels turning get up every morning and, well ….. keep the wheels turning.

One hundred years ago, working people understood this. Hell, they even sang about it:

They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn,

But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel could turn.

We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom, when we learn

That the union makes us strong.

Solidarity forever!

Solidarity forever!

Solidarity forever!

For the union makes us strong.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 28 August 2018.

Gender Diversity Easier To Campaign For Than Class Diversity.

Who Should Fill The Seats Of Power? Stripped of its cloying political candy-floss, the diversity project is a pure-and-simple power grab. It’s core objective is to fundamentally shift the balance of power in favour of those currently excluded from the inner sanctums of privilege, where political and economic power is wielded decisively by members of the dominant class/race/gender. How are we doing? Well, there's some movement (not enough) on race and gender. Just don't mention class.

MATT McCARTEN understands the practical consequences of political idealism better than any left-winger I’ve ever known. “It’s always about the numbers”, is one of his favourite sayings. Another is: “How big is your army?” Both reflect an unsentimental grasp of the brute numerical realities of democratic politics all-too-frequently lacking on the Left.

Back in the 1990s, when Jim Anderton’s remarkable coalition of insurgent political parties, The Alliance, was regularly outstripping Labour in the polls, it was part of Matt’s job to convey the realities of progressive diversity to his white, male, socialist comrades.

Working from the latest poll results, he would offer them his estimate of the maximum number of seats the Alliance was likely to win. Matt would then remind them of the quota of seats allocated to each of the Alliance’s constituent parties. Of the quite modest number of seats available to the socialist NewLabour Party, at least half were automatically set aside for women. Proper consideration also had to be given to the Waitangi Treaty Partner – before assessing the NLP’s Pakeha comrades.

As the ambitious socialist males gathered around Matt performed the necessary arithmetical calculations, their faces fell. Clearly, the chances of an ambitious Pakeha socialist making it into Parliament were somewhere between slim and non-existent. “Diversity” was indisputably an important progressive objective – but it was not without its downside.

Julie Anne Genter’s unfortunate remarks about diversity (unfortunate because, like David Cunliffe’s “I’m sorry I’m a man” comment, they will be hung around her neck for the rest of her political career) were jarring for exactly the same reason’s Matt McCarten’s triennial lecture to the NLP’s left-wing males was jarring. They revealed what lies on the obverse side of the “positive discrimination” coin: the inescapable obligation of the old order to make way for the new.

“Speaking to students at Christchurch’s Cobham Intermediate School on Thursday [22 March],” reported Stuff’s Adele Redmond, “Genter said the private sector needed to address the low level of female representation on New Zealand company boards if more businesses were to be led by women.

“About 85 per cent of board members were male, and many were ‘old white men in their 60s’.

“‘Some of them need to move on and allow for diversity and new talent,’ she said, later clarifying she had ‘no problem with old white men’ on company boards generally.”

Really? Why not? Stripped of its cloying political candy-floss, the diversity project is a pure-and-simple power grab. It’s core objective is to fundamentally shift the balance of power in favour of those currently excluded from the inner sanctums of privilege, where political and economic power is wielded decisively by members of the dominant class/race/gender.

As the Minister for Women, it is Ms Genter’s job to have a problem with men on company boards. Assuming that it’s a core part of the Minister’s remit to ensure that the percentage of women on company boards matches the percentage of women in the population as a whole, then some blokes will, indeed, have to “move on”.

“It’s all about the numbers.”

That those blokes should, preferably, also be white and over 60 is, presumably, because their ethnic origin confers a power advantage every bit as decisive as their gender; and because their advanced years make them statistically more likely to harbour reactionary views about women, Maori and other minorities, than younger, more enlightened New Zealanders.

“Reactionary” is not an accusation anyone could fling at those two “old white men” Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn.

Ah, but Bernie and Jeremy are self-confessed socialists whose core mandate is all about delivering justice and equality not only to women, people of colour and the LGBTQI community – but also to the working-class.

That’s the awkward thing about socialists: they’re forever bringing class into discussions about diversity.

‘How is inequality reduced by bringing an extremely wealthy business-woman with reactionary views about Maori and the poor onto a company board?’, the socialists demand to know. ‘Wouldn’t a much more substantive blow for both diversity and equality be struck by appointing a sixty-year-old working-class trade union secretary to the company’s board of directors? After all, a man who’s spent the last 40 years of his life scrutinising the company accounts and whose knowledge of the needs and capabilities of the workforce is second-to-none, is likely to bring many more progressive ideas to the table than a ruthless female lawyer from the Big End of Town!’

How would history have unfolded if the Alliance had selected its candidates purely on the basis of merit? Would Nigel Murray’s nemesis, Dave Macpherson, have made a better MP than Mana Motuhake’s Alamein Kopu? We will never know.

Six out of the eight members of the Green Party caucus, including Ms Genter herself, are women. That’s splendid – but how many of them are socialists?

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 27 March 2018.

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.

Populism With A Smile: The Fourth In A Series Of Articles Examining The Four Main Political Parties.

And A Smile On The Face Of The Tiger: New Zealand has been fortunate in its political encounters with populism. Whether manifested in the Social Credit Political League, the Alliance, or NZ First, Kiwi populist movements have typically been pretty good-natured affairs. Bruce Beetham’s toothy grimace; Anderton’s manic giggle; Peters’ sunburst smile: all have reassured voters of their owners’ fundamentally honourable intentions.

 

DON BRASH has a story he likes to tell about Winston Peters. The Leader of NZ First had just been appointed “Treasurer” and had accepted the Reserve Bank Governor’s invitation to discuss the Exchange Rate. For years, Peters had been thundering away about the New Zealand Dollar being overvalued. Now that he was Treasurer, and his party was all that stood between National and the Opposition benches, Peters was finally in a position to do something about it. As Governor of the Reserve Bank, Brash considered it his duty to dissuade the populist Samson from pulling down the monetary temple.

 

As Brash tells the story, Peters just wasn’t that interested – dismissing the whole issue with one of his trademark grins. A few years later, Labour’s Steve Maharey would excuse his own party’s failure to follow through on a promise with the observation that it was just one of those things you say in Opposition and then forget about in Government. Had the Treasurer anticipated Maharey’s insouciance? For Winston Peters, is the journey always more important than the destination?

 

Throughout his long and eventful career, this curious disjunction between Peters’ fiery pursuit of power, and his considerably less than incendiary application of it, has both infuriated and intrigued his followers. It’s as though, blackballed from the exclusive club of his dreams, Peters has vowed vengeance. Invoking the most dire punishments against arbitrary power and privilege, he’s recruited a vast and menacing army, marched it up to the club’s front door, and incited his followers to smash their way in. Then, having informed his followers that “Winston will take it from here”, Peters carefully replaces the shattered timbers, saunters into to the club bar, flashes the horrified members his most winning smile, and orders … a whiskey.

 

For Peters it has always been about vindication. The National Party refuses to acknowledge his obvious capacity for leadership? Very well, he will prove it to them by forming a party of his own and leading it into Parliament. The Left brands him a racist? Very well, he will take all of Labour’s Maori seats. The advocates of the Free Market insist that “There Is No Alternative”? Very well, he will demonstrate the electoral appeal of NZ First’s paternalistic capitalism.

 

Vindication – but not revolution. That was the Alliance’s problem. Its activist base (and on some issues even Jim Anderton himself) wanted to roll back completely the reforms of Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson. It was a mistake. The MMP electoral system, which transformed both the Alliance and NZ First into viable electoral propositions, was designed specifically to preserve the status quo – not overturn it. The Alliance firebrands were unwilling to live with the compromises of coalition government. Peters and NZ First, by contrast, resigned themselves to racking-up only small victories.

 

Small – but not unimportant – victories. Making visits to the doctor free for children under six. Securing a “Gold Card” discount scheme for citizens over sixty-five. Gifting them free off-peak public transport. These were the sort of changes that people appreciated every time they took advantage of them. They did not bring the new economic order crashing down, but they did chip away at its ideological pretensions. Peters and NZ First proved that a helping hand could be extended to one’s fellow citizens – without the sky falling.

 

New Zealand has been fortunate in its political encounters with populism. Whether manifested in the Social Credit Political League, the Alliance, or NZ First, Kiwi populist movements have typically been pretty good-natured affairs. Bruce Beetham’s toothy grimace; Anderton’s manic giggle; Peters’ sunburst smile: all have reassured voters of their owners’ fundamentally honourable intentions. Peters in particular, has always taken care to offset his ferocious rhetorical forays into such fraught areas as Maori-Pakeha relations and Asian immigration by offering the public his most mischievous of conspiratorial grins. As if to say: “What did you think of that? Impressive? Good. Just don’t take any of it too seriously!”

 

As the years have passed, however, New Zealand’s “Populism With A Smile” has become increasingly difficult to sustain. In relation to the rest of the world, the Alliance and NZ First were movements ahead of their time. Over the past two years, however, the global populist herds have overtaken us with a feral strength not encountered since the darkest years of the 1930s. And, while anger has always driven populism forward, today’s populists are super-charged with unreasoning hatred and rage.

 

This leaves Peters in a difficult situation. Historically, his aggrieved followers have always allowed themselves to be halted at the gates of power: always willing to “let Winston take it from here.” But, placing himself at the head of a populist movement in 2017 may prove to be an altogether riskier undertaking.

 

This time the people might insist on going in with him.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 27 June 2017.

Allies On The Inside: The Third In A Series Of Articles Looking At The Four Main Political Parties.

Inside Man? Green Party Co-Leader, James Shaw: For the best part of a decade the Greens have been wrestling with the Outside/Insider dilemma. Tired of being ignored by the insiders “who make the important decisions” they have steadily de-prioritised “their freedom to speak their version of the truth”, and devoted themselves, instead, to proving that they are equal to the task of following the “sacrosanct rule”.

 

IT’S ABOUT AS CLOSE to a conversation with the Devil as any decent politician should get. Not that the former Chief Economist of the World Bank, Larry Summers, hails from the infernal regions – far from it! Nevertheless, the question he put to the then Greek Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis, contained the choice with which Lucifer, in whatever guise, eventually confronts every person who enters political life with serious intent.

 

So, what was the question that Summers put to the system-challenging Greek economist?

 

“There are two kinds of politicians,’ he began: “insiders and outsiders.

 

“The outsiders prioritize their freedom to speak their version of the truth. The price of their freedom is that they are ignored by the insiders, who make the important decisions. The insiders, for their part, follow a sacrosanct rule: never turn against other insiders and never talk to outsiders about what insiders say or do. Their reward? Access to inside information and a chance, though no guarantee, of influencing powerful people and outcomes.

 

“So, Yanis, which of the two are you?”

 

Varoufakis chose to go on speaking truth to power – and remains an outsider.

 

It would be comforting to believe that the Green Party of Aotearoa, when presented with the same choice as Varoufakis, made the same decision. Comforting. Yes. But it would not be true.

 

For the best part of a decade the Greens have been wrestling with the Outside/Insider dilemma. Tired of being ignored by the insiders “who make the important decisions” they have steadily de-prioritised “their freedom to speak their version of the truth”, and devoted themselves, instead, to proving that they are equal to the task of following the “sacrosanct rule”.

 

This shift, from Outsider to Insider status, is all-too-evident in the way they present themselves to the public.

 

The seven Green MPs elected to Parliament in 1999 were a genuinely radical assortment. When asked to pose for the cameras their response was to clasp each other’s hands high above their heads like a team of counter-cultural prize-fighters who had just – to their utter amazement – delivered a painful left-hook to the Establishment.

 

But, oh, what a transformation 18 years and six general elections have wrought upon the Greens. The May 2017 edition of North & South features an extraordinary cover photo of Green Party MPs and candidates – all of them posed in conscious imitation of Vanity Fair’s annual “Who’s Hot In Hollywood” cover shot.

 

Nothing counter-cultural here. The Green Co-Leader, James Shaw, impeccably turned-out in a sharp business suit, adopts the posture of an up-and-coming CEO. The Green women, shimmering in designer evening-gowns, smile demurely at the camera. As a full-on application for Insider status, the photograph is a little masterpiece. (This time, Lucifer obviously came disguised as the photographer!)

 

If New Zealand’s Greens do achieve insider status at this year’s general election, then their political trajectory should not be interpreted as something unusual. When it comes to moving inside, the inventors of the green brand, Germany’s Die Grunen, have already been there and done that.

 

Born out of the 1980s militant pessimism, Die Grunen’s apocalyptic visions of an industrial civilisation in irreversible decline succumbed relatively quickly to the argument that, in politics, all that really matters is the ability to “influence powerful people and outcomes”. If that meant abandoning the “fundamentalism” of uncompromising planetary defence, for the “realism” of promoting corporate evolution through green technology, then – so be it.

 

The Right’s fear and loathing of the Greens is, therefore, unwarranted. It is also counter-productive. North & South’s cover, alone, should convince political conservatives that the Greens are now a party they can do business with. Indeed, it is the reflexive hostility of those who never met a tree-feller, river-polluter or climate-change-denier they didn’t like, that makes the Greens’ bid for insider status so difficult to sell to its followers.

 

Capitalism has never faced a more serious challenge than the militant environmentalism which its relentless ecological devastation continues to inspire. If the increasingly obvious consequences of global warming are not to become eco-socialism’s most effective recruiters, then the smarter sort of capitalist, along with his/her political representatives, needs to enlist the Greens as their allies on the inside – and quickly.

 

The Greens’ Memorandum of Understanding with Labour expires at midnight on Election Day. How desperately they must be hoping that the electorate delivers enough support to get them safely admitted to the House of Insiders. Those New Zealanders looking for a more uncompromising party of planetary defence will be hoping for a different outcome. Never has there been a greater need for political outsiders committed to prioritising the truth.

 

What the Devil knows, and ambitious politicians forget, is that once admitted to the House of Insiders, the only “powerful people” to whom they can speak the truth are the ones demanding their silence.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 20 June 2017.

Labour Breaking Bad: The Second In A Series of Articles On The Four Main Political Parties.

"Just when I thought I was out ..." The New Zealand Labour Party, like the New York Mafia, is a seething cauldron of thwarted ambitions, petty jealousies and unresolved grievances. Why is the Labour Party so fractious? So willing to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? The answer lies in the huge discrepancy between what the Labour Party was supposed to be, and what it has actually become.

 

“JUST WHEN I THOUGHT I was out … they pull me back in.” Michael Corleone’s oft-quoted protest from The Godfather Part III could just as easily have escaped the lips of Andrew Little.

 

The New Zealand Labour Party, like the New York Mafia, is a seething cauldron of thwarted ambitions, petty jealousies and unresolved grievances. It takes a Godfather (or Godmother) of exceptional strength and ruthlessness to keep all that bad feeling under control and out of sight. Peter Fraser and Norman Kirk could do it. So could Helen Clark. For a while, Little appeared to be getting the hang of it. Such optimism now seems misplaced.

 

Why is the Labour Party so fractious? So willing to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? The answer lies in the huge discrepancy between what the Labour Party was supposed to be, and what it has actually become.

 

Just consider the following words – spoken by Labour’s first parliamentary leader, Harry Holland, during his maiden speech to the House of Representatives in 1919:

 

“We of the Labour Party come to endeavour to effect a change of classes at the fountain of power. We come proclaiming boldly and fearlessly the Socialist objective of the Labour movement throughout New Zealand; and we make no secret of the fact that we seek to rebuild society on a basis in which work and not wealth will be the measure of a man’s worth.”

 

These were revolutionary sentiments, which, if repeated outside the House, would very likely have seen Holland charged with sedition. As such, they clearly identified Labour as the party of disruption; the party of discontinuity; the party that everyone yearning to change the status quo could get behind.

 

And get behind it they did. Just 16 years after Holland’s maiden speech Labour became the government.

 

Except that the government Labour formed was very far from being revolutionary (even if an awful lot of New Zealanders believed it really was committed to ushering-in the Red Dawn). By election night 1935, the avuncular Mickey Savage had already spent the three years since Holland’s death methodically smoothing-off the sharper edges of Labour’s “Socialist objective”.

 

Now that the ballots had been counted there was a Cabinet to form, portfolios to allocate, angry rivals to subdue and disappointed friends to placate. There was a civil service to be reconciled with the political party it disdained. Now, Savage’s newly-elected Labour government had to work out how to rebuild capitalist society – without first knocking it down.

 

As the late Bruce Jesson (a political analyst of no mean ability) shrewdly remarked: “The National Party knows how to govern for capitalists; but only Labour knows how to govern for Capitalism.”

 

It’s the paradox that explains Labour’s perpetual state of internal distress. Like the Mafia, all social-democratic governments are obliged to present themselves to their communities as faithful friends and protectors (Godfathers!) even as they organise and grow fat off the very activities that are tearing those communities apart.

 

The trick, of course, is to accentuate the former while drawing a hefty veil over the latter. The corrupt union leader brags to his members about extorting higher wages from their cowering bosses. He does not boast about emptying the Union Pension Fund in return for Mafia muscle.

 

Loyal Labour voters will balk at this Mafia analogy. The very idea that social-democracy involves giving with one hand, while taking with the other, will strike them as outrageous. But this kind of brute transactional politics has always come naturally to the trade unions out of which Labour grew – and working-class voters expect no less. If Capitalism cannot be taken down, then, at the very least, it should be shaken down.

 

Take this too far, of course, and the bosses begin enlisting muscle of their own. When that happens Labour makes a point of being “neither for, nor against” the targets of employer violence. Voters need to understand that this sort of treachery isn’t personal – it’s just politics.

 

Labour’s problem in the 1980s was exactly the same as the Mafia’s. The boss-class finally decided to stop paying. Like the big crime families, the trade unions were taken down. Deprived of their working-class muscle, Labour in New Zealand, and social-democrats all around the world, had little option but to go straight and turn legit. Now it is Capitalism they are pledged to building up.

 

The problem, of course, is that the capitalists already have their own political party. Accordingly, Labour’s current electoral strategy seems to involve: waiting until the National Party runs out of puff, and then presenting itself to New Zealand Capitalism as a temporary alternative government while the exhausted Nats get their breath back.

 

Andrew Little may dream of getting out of this Fake Labour Party, but his dysfunctional political family will always pull him back in.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 13 June 2017.