2024: A Year of Dishonouring the Past and Ignoring the Future.

Three Wise Men? Successful political leadership embodies a keen awareness of past, present, and future, along with the wisdom to adjudicate what is owed, and should be paid, to each. Sadly, such leadership has not been much in evidence during 2024. Indeed, New Zealanders have seen just how badly things can go wrong when both respect for the past, and wise adjudication in the present, are lacking. It does not make for a safe future.

KIA WHAKATŌMURI TE HAERE WHAKAMUA: “I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on my past”. To anyone with a love of history, that whakataukī really hits the spot. It is both dangerous (as well as practically impossible) to go forward without consideration for what we leave behind. Which is not to say that watching where you’re going is a bad idea. Clearly, observation and anticipation are vital, not only when it comes to navigating the present safely, but also to keeping the future safe.

Successful political leadership embodies a keen awareness of past, present, and future, along with the wisdom to adjudicate what is owed, and should be paid, to each. Sadly, such leadership has not been much in evidence during 2024. Indeed, New Zealanders have seen just how badly things can go wrong when both respect for the past, and wise adjudication in the present, are lacking. It does not make for a safe future.

Had the National-Act-NZ First coalition government had more respect for the past, it would not now have to contend with so many besetting difficulties.

Certainly, it is difficult to comprehend how any group of politicians who hadn’t spent the 36 months between January 2020 and December 2022 living under a rock could have been so unaware of the grim fiscal legacy bequeathed to all New Zealanders by the overwhelming historical experiences of those three years – the worst years of the Covid-19 global pandemic. But, astonishingly, Christopher Luxon, Nicola Willis, and their colleagues have managed it.

Unmoved, seemingly, by the disastrous fiscal consequences of doing so when the monetary consequences of addressing the urgent needs of the pandemic were everywhere apparent, the National Party promised, and delivered, tax cuts. At the very moment when responsible economic management demanded measures to increase state revenues; measures that would not only have eased the nation’s debt burden, but also dampened demand in an economy afflicted with historically high inflation; National opted to strip the state of billions of tax dollars that might otherwise have been used to address critical social needs.

Reducing the fiscal responsibilities of the National Party’s friends and allies brought many other malign consequences. Not the least of which was the need to impose harsh, across-the-board cuts in public spending. The impact of these cuts would not be felt, or, at least, not as acutely, by National’s friends and allies, but by the friends and allies of National’s electoral opponents. That these included the poorest and most vulnerable New Zealanders did not appear to give Christopher Luxon and his colleagues pause.

A political party which respected, and allowed itself to be guided by, the past would have recalled the impact of previous rounds of drastic cost-cutting by conservative governments. It would also have been aware of the store of trouble that such historical austerity programmes had built up for future generations of political leaders.

But Christopher Luxon’s and Nicola Willis’s National Party appears not think in such terms. It seems not to recognise the overwhelming infrastructure challenges now facing New Zealand as the direct consequence of political leaders who were too afraid to impose the taxes necessary to keep a humane society functioning, and too fixated on the political needs of the present to anticipate the future disasters that such cowardice, if left unaddressed, was bound to produce.

How else to explain the Coalition Government’s fast-track legislation as anything other than the “Oh f**k!” response of Chris Bishop and Simeon Brown, the Ministers, respectively, of Infrastructure and Transport, to the discovery that their country is falling apart? (A condition, incidentally, about which ordinary Kiwis, after four decades of political indifference and neglect, were fully aware!)

Once again, National’s indefatigable “presentism” blinded it to the historical precedents for this sort of “Get-out-of-the-way!” solution to the public resistance engendered by governments attempting to do everything, everywhere, all-at-once. Is there no one left in the National Party who remembers Rob Muldoon?

Not that National stands alone in this regard. Act leader David Seymour is not the least bit afraid of austerity, indeed, he welcomes it. Slashing spending is, for Act, much more than a temporary economic necessity, it’s an ideological mission. How else is the state to be got down to the size where, in the vicious phrase of the American free-market enthusiast Grover Norquist: “we can drown it in the bathtub”?

Drowning the state is not, however, the goal of NZ First. A disciple of the nineteenth century German nationalist economist Friedrich List, the NZ First leader, Winston Peters, looks upon New Zealand’s great nation-builders, Sir Julius Vogel and, yes, Sir Robert Muldoon, as politicians to be celebrated, not shuddered-at. Peters’ deputy, Shane Jones, gleefully piles pounds of rhetorical fat on his leader’s bare theoretical bones, being only too pleased to tell Greens, environmentalists, and every other unmanly defender of Freddy the Frog to “Get out of the way!” – albeit in te reo.

That Peters has just had himself appointed Minister of Railways is no accident. It is difficult to imagine a more disreputable example of National’s reckless presentism, nor of its sublime indifference to the nation’s future, than the cancellation of the iRex Project.

That Peters and his party, in a last-ditch effort to protect New Zealand’s state-owned rail network from the truckers who would happily wave it good-bye, were willing to interpose themselves between the privatisers of National and Act is vintage NZ First. It reflects Peters’ small-c conservative conviction that those who inhabit the present are not only morally obligated to meet the needs of those who are, but also to protect the achievements of those who were. How else to deliver a world worth living in to those who will be?

But, if NZ First retains a firm grasp of the past’s importance, it is every bit as guilty as its coalition partners of failing to appreciate the scale and urgency of Climate Change. Likewise, the radical transformation of public policy that is needed to address the crisis effectively. Not to deal seriously with the ever-more-apparent consequences of global warming requires a political mindset unwaveringly resistant to looking either forward or back. A mindset which, at least historically, has been associated with political parties in thrall to ideologies, private interests, or both.

The Coalition’s failure to respond adequately to the Climate Crisis pales, however, when set alongside its treatment of tangata whenua. In no other aspect of government policy has its resistance to understanding the power and importance of the past been more evident.

As a radical, right-wing libertarian, David Seymour’s impatience with the restraints placed upon the sovereign individual by considerations of lineage and tradition is understandable – if not forgivable. But, what is NZ First’s excuse? Both Peters and Jones need no lessons in the central role of te Tiriti in shaping post-European contact New Zealand. Certainly, they would have been in no doubt as to the hurt and fury that would be sparked, not only by Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill, but also by their own equally aggressive policy of removing all references to the principles of the Treaty from New Zealand legislation. The commitments insisted upon by the leaders of Act and NZ First, post-election, amounted to playing with fire – and they knew it.

And National? The party of Rob Muldoon, Jim Bolger, Dough Graham, John Key and Chris Finlayson. Why didn’t it just say “No.”? Was there really no one in its ranks capable of appealing over the heads of the Act and NZ First negotiators to that huge part of the New Zealand electorate that is proud of its relationship with Māori. The part that believes in the Treaty – or, at least, in the Treaty they learned about in school.

Was there truly no one with the courage and understanding to call Seymour’s and Peters’ bluff? To dare them to force the country to a new election on this issue, and this issue alone? Someone who understood what the American novelist, William Faulkner, meant when he said: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past”. Someone prepared to turn his back on the nay-sayers and march towards the future facing, and drawing strength from, all those who had gone before him.

Someone resembling a prime minister.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website of Monday 16 December 2024.

By Any Other Name.

The Natural Choice: As a starter for ten percent of the Party Vote, “saving the planet” is a very respectable objective. Young voters, in particular, raised on the dire (if unheeded) warnings of climate scientists, and the irrefutable evidence of devastating weather events linked to global warming, vote Green. After all, what sort of person votes against a liveable future?

THE GREENS remain a persistent political puzzle. In spite of espousing ideas and promoting policies that would keep any other party well below the five percent MMP threshold, recent polling places the party between 12 and 14 percent. If replicated in a real election, that level of support would earn the Greens 16-18 seats, making them an indispensable player in any putative government of the Left.

Clearly, the Green brand is doing almost all of the party’s heavy political lifting. What New Zealand’s own Green Party is actually committed to achieving matters much less than what Green parties, as generally understood by the world’s voters, are assumed to be committed to achieving – the salvation of the planet.

As a starter for ten percent of the Party Vote, “saving the planet” is a very respectable objective. Young voters, in particular, raised on the dire (if unheeded) warnings of climate scientists, and the irrefutable evidence of devastating weather events linked to global warming, vote Green. After all, what sort of person votes against a liveable future?

Young voters are not, however, the Greens only source of electoral support. They can also rely upon a substantial number of older voters to tick the Greens’ box on the ballot paper. Some of these will be unreconstructed hippies, the New Zealanders who cut their political teeth on the Values Party back in the early-1970s, and who then fell into the Greens’ welcoming arms with huge relief in 1990, following six years of the apostate Labour Party’s “Rogernomics”.

No one grasped the power of the Green brand more firmly than Jim Anderton, whose uneasy coalition of free-market-unfriendly parties, the Alliance, would not have been electorally viable without the Greens’ participation, and did not long survive their departure. As a centre-left politician determined to bring Labour back to its social-democratic senses, Anderton was determined to provide the many thousands of disillusioned former-Labour-voters with a progressive alternative that was guaranteed to win seats and, thereby, to wield at least some measure of determinative power over policy.

The Alliance’s demise, in 2002, left only the Greens to supply this critical support to the Labour Party. Precisely how many Green voters were voting for the global Green movement’s core principles: Ecological Wisdom, Social Justice, Grassroots Democracy and Nonviolence; and how many were voting for the Greens to keep Labour honest; is difficult to calculate. Suffice to say, when Labour does well the Green vote tends to fall, only recovering when voter support for its progressive competitor declines.

Since breaking free of the Alliance in 1999 the Greens have never failed to crest the 5 percent MMP threshold. (Although, they have come perilously close to falling below it on a number of occasions.) A reasonable working assumption would be that; in a good election for the Greens the ratio of strategic left-wing voters to ideologically-committed Greens will be roughly 50/50; and, in a bad election, that ratio will skew sharply in favour of the true-believers.

What the Greens’ true-believers believe, however, has changed.

Like the Values Party which preceded it, the Green Party that entered Parliament in 1999, under the co-leadership of Jeanette Fitzsimons and Rod Donald, took pride in affirming its allegiance to empirical science. In conformity with the political practice of Green parties around the world, the New Zealand party drew a sharp distinction between the bought-and-paid-for “science” of the big corporations, and the findings of hero scientists who presented their findings to the world fearlessly and without regard to how many corporate toes were trampled on in the process.

This science-driven Green Party reached its apogee under Rod Donald’s successor, Russel Norman – now the Executive-Director of Greenpeace Aotearoa. Working alongside freshwater ecologist Dr Mike Joy – the very epitome of a fearless hero-scientist – Norman and the Greens waged an unrelenting war against “dirty dairying” and the pollution of New Zealand’s waterways.

The success of this environmentally-focused Green Party was reflected in the 11.06 percent share of the Party Vote it received, along with 14 parliamentary seats, in the 2011 General Election. (In the 2023 General Election the Greens received 11.60 percent of the Party Vote and 15 seats.)

More than a decade has passed since the Greens campaigned as an unequivocally environmentalist party. Along with virtually every other element of the New Zealand Left, the Greens have embraced what their conservative opponents delight in castigating as the politics of “wokeness”.

In less pejorative terms, the Greens’ re-orientation involves the forefronting of issues that, while always present in the party’s policy mix, were hitherto given less emphasis. The Greens’ straightforward recognition and celebration of te Tiriti o Waitangi, for example, is now couched in the uncompromising vocabulary of decolonisation and indigenisation. Simple support for trans-gender New Zealanders has morphed into the aggressive assertion and enforcement of radical trans-gender ideology. Any external and/or internal criticism of these developments is condemned by the party as “hate speech”. Freedom of expression is no longer an unchallengeable aspect of “grassroots democracy”, or, as the New Zealand Greens have re-named it, “appropriate decision-making”.

A sense of this change of tone in the Greens is readily apparent in the most recent Green Party policy document. Ostensibly a presentation of the party’s latest thinking on how best to reduce greenhouse emissions, He Ara Anamata, contains a great deal more than the promptings of environmental science.

“For generations,” writes Green Co-leader Chloe Swarbrick in her introduction, “extractive systems have treated the natural world as a resource to exploit, without regard for its limits or the intricate relationships that sustain life.”

Similar sentiments were expressed 25 years ago. It is, however, doubtful whether Swarbrick’s subsidiary claims would have been advanced so forcefully:

“Colonisation has done the same to people and cultures. It has severed connections between tangata whenua and their whenua, prioritising profit over protection, and imposing systems that strip away self-determination and reciprocity. The impacts of this legacy persist, deepening inequalities and undermining resilience.”

Certainly, the expression of unabashed hostility towards capitalism is a more recent rhetorical trend:

“These inequalities have their deep roots in violent land and resource theft of iwi Māori. Capitalism – this current insatiable, unsustainable economic system – requires colonisation and the constant assimilation of new frontiers to exploit and extract from.”

That the above is not simply the ideology of the Greens’ firebrand leader is made clear in the body of the policy document. Te Tiriti’s role in reducing greenhouse emissions will, if the Greens have their way, involve: “An equitable transition, developed by Māori and the Crown [which] will actively prioritise te iwi Māori and the Māori economy.”

Would any other political party (apart from Te Pāti Māori) that so openly attacked capitalism, promised to advance the interests of indigenous citizens ahead of later arrivals, and announced its intention to advance the entire population, whether it likes it or not, towards “[a]n economy based on climate justice [with] policies that are underpinned by Te Tiriti, [and supported by] circular systems, renewable energies, and just transitions for workers” be given such a free pass?

Another expression which encompasses the notion of “circular systems” is “autarky”. That history records a strong association between authoritarian regimes and autarky is probably worth remembering. So, too, the enormous difference between “just transitions” arranged for workers, and the securing of economic and social justice by workers.

But that’s the great advantage of having a brand as immune to critical examination as that of the Greens. Try calling anti-capitalism, ethno-nationalism, statist imposition of societal priorities, and a barely disguised disdain for the principles of democracy, by any other name – and see if it smells as sweet.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 9 December 2024.

Something Important: The Curious Death of the School Strike 4 Climate Movement.

The Hope That Failed: The Christchurch Mosque Massacres, Covid-19, deep political disillusionment, and the jealous cruelty of the intersectionists: all had a part to play in causing School Strike 4 Climate’s bright bubble of hope and passion to burst. But, while it floated above us, it was something that mattered. Something Important.

THE YOUNG MAN is every centimetre the twenty-first century revolutionary: youthful, indigenous, and draped in the keffiyeh of martyred Palestine. Like so many of his generation, raised with-on-by the smart-phone, he communicates faultlessly with his audience. And what he says is every bit as revolutionary as his looks.

Except … Except his message is aimed at an audience that until this week had not, generally, been associated with the Palestinian, or the Toitū te Tiriti o Waitangi, causes – secondary school students.

Posted on “X”, the young revolutionary’s video-post was intended to mobilise the tens-of-thousands of students who had turned out five years ago to play their part in the global “School Strike 4 Climate” (SS4C) movement. Presumably, he and his comrades had reasoned that their own causes would be immeasurably strengthened through this “intersectional” linking of the Treaty, Palestine and Climate Change.

In his own words:

“The primary tool used against the people is division – divide and conquer. Our response must be to unite. We cannot win with fragmented movements.”

Had the young revolutionary’s expectations been met, it would, indeed, have been a political triumph.

On Friday, March 15 2019, an estimated 170,000 New Zealand secondary school students took to the nation’s streets. RNZ still ranks that turnout as the “second largest” protest in New Zealand history. There is no precedent, however, for 170,000 demonstrators turning out on a single day. Those kids represented an astonishing 3.5 percent of the total population!

On Friday morning (5/4/24) RNZ was carrying the SS4C protest organisers’ predictions of a turnout in excess of 100,000. Protest rallies were scheduled from Whangarei to Invercargill. RNZ was also careful to share with its listeners the six demands of the protesters:

• A ban on oil and gas exploration 
• Halting the Coalition Government’s fast-track approvals bill 
• Honouring Te Tiriti o Waitangi 
• “Climate education” for all 
• Lowering the voting age to 16 
• Free Palestine - Stop the Genocide

By the end of the day, however, it was clear that something very serious had gone wrong with the plan to unite the Left’s fragmented movements by, in effect, piggy-backing on the huge numbers formerly responsive to the SS4C’s summonses. Rather than a turnout in the range of 100,000: across the whole country, and by the most generous estimate, the organisers of the “Strike” turned out a derisory 5,000 people.

By any measure, the “Strike” was a disaster. Indeed, the whole event turned out to be less than the sum of its parts. That is to say, more people turned out to rallies organised in solidarity with the people of Palestine, and/or to protests against the Coalition Government’s Treaty policies, when these were staged as separate events, than turned out for SS4C’s unity demonstrations on Friday afternoon. As for New Zealand’s secondary school students, well, apart from a few hard-core “intersectionists”, they were nowhere to be seen. The largest turnout of 5 April was in Wellington, where a few hundred kids gathered in Parliament Grounds to chant “From the river, to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

What the hell happened?

To answer that question we have to go back to 2021, and the tragic demise of SS4C Auckland at the hands of the very same intersectionist forces responsible for Friday’s debacle.

The young people behind the Auckland chapter of SS4C were responsible for turning out 80,000 protesters in 2019 – beating Labour legend John A Lee’s 1938 record of 70,000. Predictably, such extraordinary support bred deep resentment and hostility among less fulsomely supported activists. Homing in on the whiteness of the SS4C organisers’ and their middle-class origins, the “decolonisers” and “indigenisers” within the Auckland chapter’s ranks “persuaded” the leadership to shut down the most successful protest organisation in the city’s political history.

In their final communique to the people of Auckland, SS4C’s local leadership stated:

“We are disbanding because, since 2019, SS4C AKL (as well as the wider national group, though we can’t speak on their behalf) has been a racist, white-dominated space. SS4C AKL has avoided, ignored, and tokenised BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, People of Colour – C.T.] voices and demands, especially those of Pasifika and Māori individuals in the climate activism space. As well as this, the responsibility and urgent need to decolonise the organisation has been put off for far too long. SS4C also delayed paying financial reparations for the work BIPOC groups/individuals within and alongside the group have done for this organisation in the past.”

There is much, much more, all in the same vein, in this cringing example of polemical self-criticism (which would not have been out of place at a Maoist Red Guard rally circa 1967) admirably concluding with this, its guilt-tripped authors’ parting admonition:

“We fully discourage any future and current Pākehā-led groups from occupying the space we leave behind.”

Strangely enough, neither this incident, nor the subsequent collapse of the fight against global warming in Auckland’s secondary schools, is mentioned on the SS4C website promoting the 5 April “Strike”. Those intending to join the demonstrations are, however, urged to chant: “The people united – Can never be divided!”

Equally strange, but much less excusable, is the almost complete absence of mainstream media analysis of this mass-event-that-wasn’t. How could a movement that had put 3.5 percent of the country’s population on the streets, on a single day, have crumbled to virtually nothing in the space of five years? How could the organisers of Friday’s event have deluded themselves to the point of predicting a turnout of 100,000? And what do those same organisers make of New Zealanders’ apparent indifference (if not downright hostility) to the causes in support of which they had been invited to demonstrate?

These are important political questions.

Certainly, the dismal turnout must have given Green co-leader, Chloe Swarbrick, considerable pause. After all, she has staked a great deal of her political credibility on the proposition that she and her party can mobilise, electorally, the young, the alienated, and the disenfranchised. After Friday, however, transforming the 2026 general election into a people’s crusade would appear to be a much taller order.

Contrariwise, the failure of the “Strike” offers Messers Luxon, Seymour and Peters considerable cause for celebration. Their coalition is described on the SS4CNZ website as: “the most conservative government in our history” – a claim that would doubtless bring a wry smile to the lips of Bill Massey, Sid Holland, and Rob Muldoon. Still, if Friday’s flop is the best the New Zealand Left can set against the Great Strike of 1913, the 1951 Waterfront Lockout, and the 1981 Springbok Tour protests, then our Coalition Government can breathe a huge sigh of relief.

Perhaps the most important lesson of Friday is that political consciousness cannot be assembled like so many Lego blocks. The huge SS4C mobilisations of 2019 were symbolic of a confrontation as old as history. The intergenerational hostility encapsulated in the young Swedish founder of the movement, Greta Thunberg’s, choked challenge: “How dare you!” She spoke for the children and grandchildren of the men and women who run this world. “If you cannot save the planet for yourselves,” she seemed to be saying, “then, in Gaia’s name, save it for us – your own flesh and blood!”

The Future confronted the Present – and demanded action. Its partisans may not have displayed the revolutionary chic of the young man in the video with whom our story began, but they made their parents simultaneously proud and penitent. One-hundred-and-seventy-thousand strong, they convinced the system, if only for a little while, to stop, and listen.

The Christchurch Mosque Massacres, Covid-19, deep political disillusionment, and the jealous cruelty of the intersectionists: all had a part to play in causing the SS4C’s bright bubble of hope and passion to burst. But, while it floated above us, it was something that mattered.

Something important.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 8 April 2024.

Fair Enough!

Sounds About Right: It would seem that the realities of practical politics makes utilitarians of us all.

DOING THE GREATEST GOOD for the greatest number has long been the ethical rule-of-thumb for New Zealand politicians. At least, that is how they would argue if challenged to justify their own, or their government’s, actions. What’s more, if they present their crudely utilitarian arguments with sufficient force, then most New Zealander’s will nod decisively, and bestow upon them that supreme Kiwi benediction: “Fair enough!”

It was not always thus. Within the living memory of more than half the New Zealand population, the ethical quality of a political decision would have been judged according to how closely it followed the precepts of Christianity. But, are the moral calculations of “Do as you would be done by” really all that different from determining government policy on the basis of how many will benefit from its introduction?

A utilitarian calculation indicating that a policy’s benefits are likely to be received by 90 percent of the population will, in almost every case, allow it to proceed. Providing they are not too severe, the policy’s detrimental impact on the remaining 10 percent, will not be enough to stop it. It is this, the ruthlessness of utilitarian reasoning, that has contributed to the popular uneasiness that often accompanies its application.

Certainly, the utilitarian calculations that led to Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Government introducing the vaccination mandates left a bitter aftertaste. Pushing vaccination rates up to 90 percent was generally accepted as being “a good thing” – even “the right thing” – to do by a clear majority of citizens. With the benefit of hindsight, however, the pain and suffering inflicted upon the 10 percent of Kiwis who refused the Covid-19 vaccine – not to mention the fury of their reaction at being made outcasts in their own land – raised considerable doubts as to its moral safety. The utilitarian arguments presented by those who believed that, for the sake of the economy, Covid-19 should be allowed to do its worst, were no more palatable, and even more unsafe from an ethical point-of-view.

Christian reasoning, however, is no less fraught. If we are bound to do unto others as we would have them do unto us, then the art of godly politics is immediately reduced to making the same political calculations as all the others.

Would a farmer welcome the construction of a hydro-dam that drowned three-quarters of his farm? No. After he had been offered generous compensation for the land lost? Probably. After he has been told how many people will benefit from the energy generated? Of course! If the farmer, no less than the hydro-electric company, is bound to do as he would be done by, then his objections will, perforce, be tempered by the Golden Rule.

It would seem that the realities of practical politics makes utilitarians of us all.

What, then, should the political philosopher make of the Coalition Government’s decision to repose with just three Cabinet Ministers – Shane Jones, Chris Bishop, Simeon Brown – the power to decide upon the utilitarian merits of nationally significant, if environmentally questionable, development projects, personally?

In many respects, the use of words like “nationally” and “significant” makes the Ministers’ jobs considerably easier. Half the utilitarian battle is won before the ministerial calculation has even begun. If what is being proposed is in the interest of the nation, and will be to the significant benefit of its people, then, for the arguments of environmentalist objectors to be upheld, they, too, will have to demonstrate that a significant national issue is at stake.

By the very nature of environmental issues, that is no easy matter. Especially since Economic Development Minister Shane Jones has already made it abundantly clear that arguments claiming a project will threaten the survival of a rare species of native frog will no longer be enough to stop it. It is the greatest good for the greatest number of human-beings that is being weighed in the ministerial balance – not the greatest number of frogs.

It is difficult to see how environmental issues – most especially those relating to Climate Change – can be judged according to anything other than anthropocentric considerations. Since concern for the environment is an entirely human phenomenon, the political response to deforestation, species extinction and global warming will be determined according to the usual utilitarian question: What is the policy response that produces the greatest good for the greatest number?

To your average Greenpeace member this question is a no-brainer. Obviously, the planet, and all the living things that depend upon it for their existence, must come first. Unfortunately, while such simple sentiments look fine on a T-Shirt, the politics of “saving the planet” are just a little more complicated.

For a start, neither the planet, nor all but one of the living things dependent upon it, get to vote. Indeed, in the more than 4 billion years of its existence, the planet has seen species come and go with monotonous regularity. What’s more, as a ball of hot rock, circling an average-sized star, in an average-sized galaxy, it really doesn’t care who, or what, is circling with it. The quality and duration of the ride on the planet’s crust is of importance only to the 8 billion murderous apes who call themselves homo-sapiens.

Tell these homo-sapiens that their lives must be made inconvenient by, for example, the banning of all fossil fuels, and see how the utilitarian calculation unfolds. If, for a very large number of the voting public, the “greatest good” is interpreted as meaning “free access to the latest, gas-guzzling SUV”, then the Greenpeace member better hope that the “greatest number” of voters, like her, defines it differently.

Tell these clever apes that, in order to save an utterly indifferent planet, the overwhelming majority of them will have to renounce all the wonders of fossil-fuel-based civilisation and make do with the subsistence existence “enjoyed” by their ancestors, and they are likely to insist that you run the utilitarian calculation again – this time remembering that it is they who constitute the greatest number. Chances are high that the resulting definition of the greatest good will have little to say about the planet.

All of which may suggest that it is better to leave the judgement of what constitutes the greatest good to those who fully appreciate what’s at stake. Problem being, that even Philosopher Kings and/or Philosopher Technocrats cannot, indefinitely, ignore the interests and preferences of the greatest number.

Which can only mean that the essence of successful politics (which is not at all the same as rational politics) lies in persuading the greatest number of voters that your party’s definition of the greatest good, while not entirely fair, is “Fair enough!”

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 1 April 2024.

Nobody To Shoot.

Unbridled Consumption: This civilisation we have built (we being the whole human species) is the most astonishingly wonderful thing homo sapiens has ever seen. We love it. We cannot imagine how awful life would be without it. And, we most certainly are not going to co-operate with anyone who advises us to throw it away.

THERE’S A SCENE in John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” where an embattled dust-bowl sharecropper struggles to defend his land. He threatens to shoot the man sent to demolish the farm buildings on behalf of the bank. Don’t blame me says the demolition man. The farmer then threatens to shoot the bank president who signed the foreclosure papers. Patiently, the demolition man explains that the bank manager is only carrying out the instructions of the bank’s owners back East. Utterly defeated, the propertyless sharecropper cries plaintively: “But where does it stop? Who can we shoot? I don’t aim to starve to death before I kill the man that’s starving me.” To which the demolition man replies: “I don’t know. Maybe there’s nobody to shoot. Maybe the thing isn’t human at all.”

It’s an exchange I always recall whenever I hear people advocating going after “the man that’s starving me”. The latest target of this “who can we shoot” proposition are the 100 companies allegedly responsible for 71 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. Not surprisingly, the first of these planetary polluters to fill the gunsights of Earth’s angry sharecroppers are the oil companies.

Former One Tree Hill-feller, Mike Smith, now working for the Iwi Leaders Forum, is aiming to bring Rainer Seele, CEO of the Austrian oil-giant OMV, before the International Criminal Court for “genocide and other climate crimes impacting on indigenous communities now and in the future”. It would be churlish not to wish Mr Smith well, but the chances of Mr Seele being convicted (or even indicted!) by the ICC are about as good as Steinbeck’s sharecropper bagging a New York banker with his gopher gun.

The Iwi Leaders Forum may have deep pockets, but they are unlikely to be as deep as OMVs when it comes to keeping a team of international law experts on retainer for the length of time between Mr Smith launching his legal case – and its inevitable abandonment. Inevitable? Of course. The idea that the CEOs of those 100 companies will ever be brought before a criminal court for doing what their billions of customers and clients around the world demand of them is ludicrous.

That’s the nub of the problem, isn’t it. Those giant corporations would wither and die in just a few months if the peoples of the world unanimously agreed to stop purchasing their products and services. What could be simpler? Just throw away your lap-top and cellphone. Junk your car – and your ready-to-wear wardrobe. Leave the city you’re living in. Stop using electricity. Throw away your prescription medicines. Easy-peasy! Take away the demand, and rest assured, there will be no more supply.

Except, the demand for all those goods and services isn’t going anywhere – is it? In fact, it is set to grow, exponentially, as all the peoples on earth currently shut out of the Western lifestyle determinedly amass the wealth needed to acquire it. Now, the Mike Smiths of this world will undoubtedly urge the people of India and Brazil, and the poorest nations of Africa, to embrace their poverty as the surest means of saving the planet, but I would advise them to put on their running shoes before they start making their pitch.

There will be many who object that this is nothing but a crude exercise in victim blaming. Most people really do want to save the planet, but the relentless battering of journalists, advertisers, public relations consultants, lobbyists, corporate fixers, corrupt politicians – many of them on the payrolls of those 100 companies – keep us all running, like so many demented consumerist hamsters, on the great wheel of capitalism.

But, once again, all we have to do is stop. Except, we don’t stop – do we?

This civilisation we have built (we being the whole human species) is the most astonishingly wonderful thing homo sapiens has ever seen. We love it. We cannot imagine how awful life would be without it. And, we most certainly are not going to co-operate with anyone who advises us to throw it away.

We like our lap-tops and our cellphones. We like our cars and our cheap RTW clothes. We like living in vast, vibrant cities built out of concrete and steel. We like being able to flick a switch and get all the energy we can use. We like turning on a tap and being able to drink the water that comes out. We like it that there are hospitals and clinics full of clever doctors and nurses, and pharmacies full of clever drugs. And we don’t actually care if every last Polar Bear in creation is reduced to a pathetic heap of skin and bones – just so long as our super-civilisation, powered by its indispensable and irreplaceable (at least for the foreseeable future) fossil-fuels, keeps on a-rockin’.

So, much and all as Mr Smith might wish it were otherwise, Mr Seele and all the other CEOs of those miscreant 100 companies have nothing to fear from virtue-signalling activists. They know, just as the demolition man in Steinbeck’s novel knew, that there’s nobody to shoot.

Because the thing that is frying the planet – and all our futures – isn’t human. It’s a vast and impossibly complex economic machine, and it absolutely does not care what we think or say – only what we buy.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 14 March 2023.

Adapting To Climate Change.

Climate Change Gothic: In retrospect the mitigators’ cause was always hopeless. So long as the effects of global warming were not going to be felt for many years, climate activists would never be able to force the changes necessary to prevent them. Once heatwaves, wildfires, storms, floods and rising sea-levels start ruining people’s lives, however, their attitudes will change. “Okay, we believe you about climate change,” they will say. “So, now you have to show us how to adapt to this new normal?”

IT IS ONLY SLOWLY DAWNING on climate change activists that the fight against global warming is lost. Locally, Cyclone Gabrielle has rendered their cause hopeless. By insisting that Gabrielle is slam-dunk proof that climate change is real, and demanding immediate action to mitigate its impact, the activists have, politically-speaking, over-sold their case. The idea of mitigating a weather event as destructive as Gabrielle will strike most people as nuts. If this is what global warming looks like, then most New Zealanders will want their government to help them adapt to it as soon as humanly possible. Increasingly, politicians and activists who bang-on about reducing emissions and modifying human behaviour will be laughed-off the political stage. It will be the parties that offer the most practical and responsibly-funded adaptation policies that win the elections of the future – including the one scheduled for October 14 2023.

In retrospect the mitigators’ cause was always hopeless. So long as the effects of global warming were not going to be felt for many years, climate activists would never be able to force the changes necessary to prevent them. Tomorrow, as everybody knows, never comes – especially not in politics. Once heatwaves, wildfires, storms, floods and rising sea-levels start ruining people’s lives, however, their reactions will be different. “Okay, we believe you about climate change,” they will say. “So, now you have to show us how to adapt to this new normal?”

The other, even bigger, problem facing the mitigators – especially in New Zealand – is this country’s infinitesimal contribution to climate change. Kiwis and their industries pump out just 0.17 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and yet the mitigators keep telling them to completely change their economy, and the lifestyle it funds, so as to keep some barmy promise that all the largest greenhouse gas emitters are happy to break every single day. Since the Paris Climate Accords of 2016, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has gone up, not down. Collectively, the human species is burning more coal, more oil, and more natural gas than ever before. So, how likely is it that New Zealand pulling on a metaphorical hair-shirt and crying “Follow our mitigation example!” is going to stop them?

New Zealanders aren’t the only people asking inconvenient questions about mitigation. All across the developing world the penny is beginning to drop that the extraordinary civilisation brought into being by the exploitation of fossil fuels in Europe and North America; the civilisation responsible for anthropogenic global warming; is not a goal the climate change mitigators believe they should aspire to.

Practically speaking, the mitigators have a point. The huge boost given to climate change by the dramatic economic and social development of China, if amplified by equal “economic miracles” in India, Indonesia, Brazil and the nations of Africa, will make a complete nonsense of the Paris Climate Accords. The mean surface temperature of Planet Earth will rise to levels not seen since the dinosaurs roamed a planet without ice-caps.

But, just how receptive are the poorest peoples on Earth likely to be to a message delivered to them by their former colonial masters which boils down to: “Please don’t try to become as rich as we are – the planet can’t take it.” Are they likely to say: “Yes, Master, we are happy to remain poor – for the planet’s sake.” Or, will they not-so-politely suggest that if the peoples of the West really are so determined to save the planet, then how about they agree to spread their extraordinary wealth evenly across it? Will either side agree to mitigate climate change by making such huge sacrifices? Or, will both sides move as swiftly as they can to implement an adaptation strategy?

Not that adaptation will be easy in the developing world. Not when it’s the poorest countries that are most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Their leaders have appealed to the richest nations for funds to help them recover from catastrophic weather events – like the floods that put a third of Pakistan under water. Alas, in spite of the West’s solemn promises to set aside billions, billions have yet to be set aside.

Inevitably, as the world warms, nation states will become even more selfish. When cyclones as devastating as Gabrielle lay waste to forests, farms and orchards, and make plain the worst errors of urban planners, every available dollar is going to be spent on recovery and adaptation. Pleas for financial assistance from developing nations confronting similar challenges are likely to fall on deaf ears. Charity, the voters will insist, begins at home – and their political representatives will not dare to disagree.

It has not helped the mitigators’ cause that so many of them seem to be located on the left of the political spectrum, or that those not identifying as left are fervent advocates of indigenous rights. These climate activists characterise “Carbon, Capitalism and Colonisation” as the three evil giants that must be slain before climate change can be effectively mitigated. They are less forthcoming, however, when asked how this slaughter might be accomplished. This is understandable, given that the chances of destroying Carbon, Capitalism and Colonisation peacefully and democratically are rather slim.

Not that these difficulties are likely to bother the true revolutionaries, since for them global warming has always been the most wonderful excuse for imposing the sort of regime that nobody who believes in individual rights, private property, and the Rule of Law would ever willingly submit to. In the grim summation of George Orwell: “Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.” For far too many climate activists, mitigation has always been a Trojan Horse.

For those more moderate socialists, however, a strategy of adaptation can only be a good thing. Preparing a nation for the worst a warming world can throw at it will, necessarily, involve a wholesale revision of the economic nostrums responsible for leaving New Zealand – and many other nations – so vulnerable for so long. Setting in place the infrastructure needed to fend-off the worst that Mother Nature can throw at us will not be cheap and will require as its first major project the wholesale re-strengthening of the state. New Zealand can follow a strategy of adaptation, or it can remain shackled to the doctrines of neoliberalism, but it can’t do both.

It’s an ill ex-tropical cyclone that blows nobody no good.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 21 February 2023.

Gabrielle’s Lesson.

Mitigate That! Cyclone Gabrielle’s lesson is that New Zealand’s climate change adaptation efforts have been woefully insufficient, and that much more work is needed if we are to survive this “time of consequences”.

THERE IS A LESSON to be learned from Cyclone Gabrielle, but far too many New Zealanders are refusing to learn it. From Climate Change Minister James Shaw’s portentous quoting of Winston Churchill, to Jack Tame’s hectoring of Finance Minister Grant Robertson for supposedly moving away from “mitigation”, Gabrielle is fast becoming one of those crises that political actors deem “too good to waste”.

But, if we are, indeed, entering a Churchillian “time of consequences”, then a moment’s reflection should tell us that the “mitigation” ship has sailed. The best we can hope for is a government committed to doing everything within its power to help us adapt to unstoppable global warming.

One of the most frustrating aspects of the climate change debate is how little attention those demanding “action” pay to what is actually happening. From a planetary perspective, all the efforts directed at mitigation – i.e. at stopping and, hopefully, reversing global warming – have not appreciably dented humanity’s consumption of fossil fuels. In spite of all the global gatherings, all the impassioned speeches, all the target-setting, there is scant evidence that more than a tiny percentage of human-beings are willing to renounce the dazzling amenities of the civilisation made possible by coal, oil and natural gas.

The central problem confronting the world’s leaders is a brutally simple one: to combat global warming effectively, four-fifths of humankind would have to foreswear the life that the burning of fossil fuels makes possible; and since no leader would dare demand that his people make such a sacrifice, global warming cannot be significantly mitigated.

Which is why, whether they are willing to admit it or not, governments around the world are focusing their efforts increasingly on adapting to the consequences of a warming planet. The primary lesson which Cyclone Gabrielle delivered to New Zealanders last week is that, domestically, these adaptation efforts have been woefully insufficient, and that much, much, more work is needed if New Zealand is to function (and hopefully flourish) in this “time of consequences”.

Successful adaptation cannot occur, however, while this country’s economic settings remain fixed by the dogma of the 1980s. Practically all of the adverse events unleashed by Cyclone Gabrielle have at their root the unwillingness of successive governments to properly maintain, improve and/or extend New Zealand’s basic infrastructure. The active nation-building overseen by central and local governments in the century following the end of the Land Wars in the 1870s was drastically curtailed by the economic reforms of the 1980s and 90s. The low-tax, privatised and de-regulated New Zealand demanded by the reformers left the New Zealand state weaker and poorer. Infrastructure was ignored until it failed, and then fixed on the cheap.

In a selfish game of pass-the-parcel, competing political parties did their best to bequeath the growing infrastructural crisis to their successors. Our political class understood perfectly well that a day would come when the infrastructural problems could no longer be ignored without sacrificing New Zealand’s status as a First World country. Everybody knew that something had to be done, but everybody also hoped like hell that it would happen on somebody else’s watch.

Their reluctance is understandable, especially when telling the private sector what to do is generally regarded as politically suicidal. According to neoliberal economists, market signals are sufficient to compel private enterprises to behave responsibly. Nobody thought too much about the consequences of the state declining to send the market strong enough signals to produce a change in private companies’ behaviour.

Such “light-handed” regulation was always bound to end in disaster. The forestry “slash” washed down the rivers of the North Island’s east coast revealed the true cost of central and local governments’ failure to make the leaving of unwanted timber on clear-felled hillsides too cripplingly expensive for forestry companies to contemplate. The result, as New Zealanders have witnessed with mounting fury, is environmental and infrastructural damage on a massive scale. Successful adaptation will require extremely heavy-handed regulation – backed-up by extremely painful consequences for those who ignore it.

Adaptation will also require a substantial expansion of the state’s revenue base. It is no accident that New Zealand’s century-long period of nation-building occurred in a fiscal environment that recognised the ongoing and substantial cost of building and maintaining a modern society and economy. To meet the massive costs of upgrading the country’s infrastructure – to the point of being able to withstand significant weather events like Cyclone Gabrielle – new and higher taxes will be needed.

A transport policy that looks beyond roads, roads, and more roads, is another vital component of any serious adaptation strategy. Where possible, a reintroduction of coastal shipping services should be included in the transportation mix. A seriously upgraded rail network would, similarly, help to relieve the pressure on New Zealand’s roads. The increasing severity of rain events generated by global warming may even force a “managed retreat” from the hill- and mountain-hugging roads that recent downpours have sent slip-sliding away.

Cyclone Gabrielle’s severe disruption of energy distribution and telecommunication services has shocked the nation. Their fragility has been exposed in the most disconcerting fashion to a population hitherto unaware that such essential services could be knocked out of action for so long.

Watching Gabrielle lay so many services low, many older New Zealanders will have recalled the “gold-standard” reticulation networks set in place by the “government departments” of yesteryear. Unconstrained by the profit motive, the engineers who designed and oversaw the construction of these services asked themselves only: “How strong and reliable is it possible to make these vital links?”

Politicians will find it difficult to avoid confronting the all-too-obvious shortcomings of privatised energy and telecommunications companies. Successful adaptation to global warming is going to place public ownership of vital infrastructure back on the political agenda – with a vengeance.

Finally, any successful adaptation strategy to the challenges of global warming will have to reign-in the power of private property developers. With the steadily rising premiums demanded by insurance companies acting as the state’s battering-ram, New Zealand’s developer-driven local government regimes must eventually give way to organisations dominated by civil engineers and urban planners. Decision-makers responding not to the hunger for profit, but to the promptings of utilitarian ethics and dispassionate climate science.

Cyclone Gabrielle, in all her exogenous fury, has left our political parties with scant room for manoeuvre. The damage inflicted by the storm must be fixed, and the funds to do the fixing must be found. Moreover, politicians who insist Gabrielle’s primary lesson is that the personal and societal sacrifices bound up with climate change mitigation cannot now be avoided, are likely to get a very short shrift from those whose houses, farms, orchards and livelihoods have been destroyed.

The political party that promises to make good the damage of Gabrielle, while offering an adaptation strategy for ensuring that such destruction does not become an annual event, is going to be much more warmly received than one which asks every voter to don a hair shirt and do without the wonders of our fossil-fuelled civilisation. When U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney said “the American way of life is not negotiable”, he wasn’t kidding.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 20 February 2023.

After The Deluge.

On that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. And rain fell on the earth.

Genesis 6:11-12

THE TORRENTIAL DOWNPOURS that dumped a record-breaking amount of rain on Auckland this anniversary weekend will reoccur with ever-increasing frequency. The planet’s atmosphere is warming, and since warm air carries more moisture the likelihood of such extreme weather events is similarly increased. New Zealanders are no longer entitled to write-off the sort of deluge that flooded much of Auckland on 27-28 January 2023 as a one-in-500-year event.

Not that New Zealanders are particularly receptive to the dire warnings of climatologists and meteorologists. With considerable justification, they demand to know what they are supposed to do about it. How, precisely, are the human-beings at the end of “atmospheric rivers” carrying mind-boggling quantities of water supposed to prevent them from dropping it on their heads? The air and ocean currents which determine New Zealand’s climate are not subject to the will of its human population – or their leaders.

Indeed, for those Aucklanders who lived through the events of Friday and Saturday, the power and indifference of the natural world was terrifyingly reiterated. Ours is a proud and headstrong species, but in the face of what one Aucklander described as “apocalyptic” precipitation, our arrogance is swiftly beaten down. The images of men and women wading through floodwaters chest deep, their faces frozen in a rictus of fear and uncertainty were biblical in their eloquence.

On Friday and Saturday the natural world also plunged Auckland into a fast-moving political crisis. In extremis, people turn towards those in authority for guidance and reassurance. Sadly, “Authority’s” response left much to be desired.

Auckland’s Mayor, Wayne Brown, who should have been all over the mainstream and social media, dispensing such information as he possessed, publicly ordering all the relevant Auckland Council bodies into action, and gathering what intelligence he could concerning the intensity and destructiveness of the weather “bomb” that was devastating his city, instead maintained an frustrating radio silence.

Hour after hour of torrential rain went by. Streets became rivers. Homes were flooded. Parks became lakes. Cars were abandoned. People drowned. It was not until 10:17pm, however, that Mayor Brown declared a local state of emergency – thereby allowing the Central Government to swing into action on behalf of Auckland’s citizens.

Those who were following the unfolding tragedy on Twitter were soon made aware of the rising fury of those Auckland City Councillors struggling to assist the flood’s victims. Members of Parliament, too, some of them Ministers of the Crown, were equally aghast. The equivalent of cheers went up on Twitter when the Minister of Transport and MP for Mt Roskill, Michael Wood, peremptorily ordered Waka Kotahi to get its shut-down website up-and-running and to post transport-related up-dates every half-hour.

The Minister’s rage was entirely justified as first the state highways in and out of Auckland, and then the domestic and international terminals of Auckland Airport, succumbed to the floodwaters. The city’s bus fleet struggled to carry its passengers out of the rising waters. In some of them the murky-brown flood-water sloshed back and forth along the access-aisle as alarmed passengers willed the vehicle forward. Private motor cars were quickly overwhelmed and abandoned. Citizen journalists captured eerie images of cars floating: their lights still glowing in the failing light; their windscreen wipers still thrashing ineffectually against the unceasing rain.

Mayor Brown insists that he was guided by the advice of his “professionals”, and that the moment they asked him to declare a state of emergency, a state of emergency was declared. He has further avowed that, as the person responsible for organising the city-wide response to what was fast-becoming a full-scale disaster, he did not have the luxury of delivering hands-on assistance at the ward and community-board level. Someone had to remain at the calm centre of the crisis.

All true, but a leader must also be seen to lead. He must be there – or, at least, his voice and image must be there – consoling, inspiring, thanking and guiding his city’s people. But, on that frightening Friday night, Brown wasn’t there. Very few Aucklanders will be prepared to swear – hand-on-heart – that, in the Great Auckland Flood of 2023, their Mayor did all that was expected of him. The response of Christchurch’s Mayor, Bob Parker, when Mother Nature shook his city to ruins in 2011, offers the people of New Zealand a particularly telling contrast.

Certainly, the country’s new Prime Minister, Chris Hipkins, did not need to be told that his place was in front of the electorally crucial voters of the nation’s largest city. Hitching a ride on an RNZAF Hercules transport, and then on an air-force helicopter, Hipkins was given a birds-eye view of the damage. But, even as he said all the right things and made all the right promises, the Labour Leader must have been asking himself whether the New Zealand state was up to a challenge of this magnitude.

New Zealand’s cities were founded and grew to their present size in the bounteous years before global warming was recognised as a problem. Their waste and stormwater infrastructure simply wasn’t built to cope with the sort of deluge that descended on Auckland.

“Flooding happens when stormwater can’t drain away fast enough”, writes James Fenwick in an opinion piece posted on the Newsroom website. “So what we need are bigger drains, larger stormwater pipes and stormwater systems that can deal with such extremes.” Except, as Fenwick notes: “The country’s stormwater drain system was designed for the climate we used to have – 50 or more years ago. What we need is a stormwater system designed for the climate we have now, and the one we’ll have in 50 years from now.”

Hipkins despair at being forced to confront even bigger challenges in managing New Zealand’s three waters (drinking, waste and storm) than the ones already on his plate is readily imagined. Also gnawing away at his confidence – as well, no doubt, as Christopher Luxon’s – will be the frightening conclusion that the highly-urbanised nation that is New Zealand is going to have to be rebuilt from top to bottom. Or, failing that, left to simply decline and decay for want of the billions-upon-billions of dollars needed to re-fit it.

After the deluge, the questions around climate change become even starker. This country’s contribution to global warming is infinitesimal – barely two-tenths of one percent. We could revert to the Stone Age tomorrow and not only would the rest of the world fail to notice or appreciate New Zealand’s sacrifice, but also – and much more ominously – those devastating atmospheric rivers would not stop turning warm air into disasters.

It would appear that the choice between rolling-back global warming, and seeking to mitigate its worst effects, is being made for us.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 30 January 2023.

2022: Annus Horribilis.

Trauma: The catastrophic conclusion to the anti-vaccination mandate protest in Parliament Grounds on 2 March 2022 is seared in the minds of New Zealanders. Those dramatic scenes were, however, easily eclipsed by the planetary violence of Climate Change, the biological violence of Covid-19, the political violence of Three Waters, and the deadly military violence of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine.

AS THIS TERRIBLE YEAR, this annus horribilis, draws to a close, we must all hope that 2023 brings us happier days.

As we watch the Chinese Government transition from its old, hardline, Covid-19 elimination strategy, characterised by long and uncompromising lockdowns, to a new, laissez-faire, wide open borders (and bugger the health system) strategy, uncannily like our own, we have confirmation that not even the totalitarian regime of Xi Jinping’s Communist Party can operate indefinitely without a social licence.

Not that our own government is returning the compliment by acknowledging the lack of genuine social licences for its own flagship policies – and changing them. There is more than a whiff of totalitarian indifference to public opinion in the Labour Caucus’s blunt refusal to change course on Nanaia Mahuta’s Three Waters project.

When the results of the local government elections made it painfully clear that whatever limited social licence central government might have claimed for Three Waters had been withdrawn, the Labour Government refused to flinch. The former National Party Cabinet Minister Nick Smith, now Nelson’s Mayor, implored the Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, to back away from the project. Failure to do so, he suggested, would indicate that her government had a “death wish”.

Undeterred, Labour doubled-down. Constitutional conventions became confetti. The co-governance provisions of Three Waters became stronger and their likely impact on Māori-Pakeha relations even more divisive.

And this situation looks set to be made ten-times worse the moment the public cottons-on to the fact that the cost of borrowing the billions required to “fix” their drinking-, storm- and waste-water systems is to be extracted from the pockets of the poor schmucks who “own” – but do not control – the four vast “entities” at the heart of the Three Waters project. A bitter realisation, that will hit home about the time they open their new-fangled water bills.

The Labour Government’s intransigence on Three Waters was not, however, matched by its response to the ever-increasing clamour for decisive state action on global warming. Far from becoming this government of Gen-Xers’ “nuclear-free moment”, the Labour-Green tag-team on Climate Change has impressed New Zealanders only by its prodigious ability to dilly, dally and delay. If the New Zealand football team possessed this government’s talent for kicking the can down the road, they could have won the World Cup!

Maybe, if Labour possessed an environmental faction as strong as its Māori faction more progress might have been made on Climate Change. But, if the Government refuses to be guided by public opinion on the deeply unpopular policy of co-governance, it is acutely sensitive to the social and economic realities that continue to keep SUVs at the top of the list of motor-vehicles purchased in New Zealand. When pushbikes replace four-by-fours in Kiwi affections, it is then – and only then – that our carbon emissions will plummet.

Covid, Co-Governance and Climate-Change may have helped to shape the domestic politics of New Zealand in 2022, but they have done so in the shadow of something much larger and more terrible than anything we Kiwis could conjure-up.

War.

Russia’s bloody invasion of Ukraine has dealt what looks like being the final death-blow to the “international rules-based order” overseen by the United Nations. What we deplored, then ignored, in Syria, has come home to the cursèd bloodlands of Eastern Europe.

The global economic system, already rendered dangerously fragile by the financial measures required to fight the Covid-19 pandemic, has received a vicious kick in the gonads from Russia’s combat boots. Rising inflation has ignited multiple cost-of-living crises – even in the world’s wealthiest countries – precipitating social and political conflicts not seen for nearly half-a-century.

But Vladimir Putin’s aggression has done something else. It has stimulated martial feelings long thought dead and buried in the materially abundant (but spiritually impoverished) societies of the West.

The Russo-Ukraine War has not produced a global peace movement – even under Putin’s constant threats of nuclear escalation. On the contrary, it has generated a “war movement”. Prior to 24 February 2022, Volodymyr Zelensky would not have struck most people as the man to revive the Latin verse: Dulce et decorum est pro Patria mori – Sweet it is and fitting to die for one’s country.

When the heroism and sacrifice of war seem preferable, and more honourable, than an enervated peace, it is, truly, a terrible year.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 30 December 2022.

The Problem Of Evil.

“Stare not too long into the abyss, lest the abyss stare back into you.” - Friedrich Nietzsche.

 

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL – ah yes – an old and flavoursome chestnut. How many nights, fuelled by Velluto Rosso (and other brave attempts at a palatable New Zealand red) did I wrestle with my fellow undergraduates as to why, or even if, evil exists in this world.

“How could a benevolent God allow bad things to happen to good people?” That was one of the questions. Inevitably followed by: “And isn’t a God that allows bad things to happen to good people himself one of the bad guys? Or, if not bad himself, then powerless to prevent evil from doing its worst?”

Except, of course, that a powerless deity is not a deity at all – but a fraud. Which not only means that evil is more powerful than good, but also more powerful than God. And that is not a comforting thought.

Nor, I’m afraid, a very original thought. Indeed, the notion that this world is in the grip of a malevolent deity harks all the way back to the earliest decades of Christianity. Some called this evil being “Rex Mundi” – King of the World. His was the realm of matter. It was Rex who personally made certain that our all-too-solid flesh would melt, burn, decay, and otherwise fail to endure.

Given the fate of those who subscribed to this, the Gnostic, heresy, it is difficult to fault their theology. Over the centuries Rex Mundi has got a lot of blood on his hands.

I wonder, sometimes, whether undergraduates still argue over the problem of evil. Certainly, it is difficult to imagine them arguing about the nature of God – not when surveys show most of them rejecting the notion of divinity altogether. That said, it isn’t in the least bit difficult to imagine them arguing about the problem of climate change.

Ideally, this would be a rigorously scientific exchange, but I strongly suspect that any argument about climate change will very quickly morph into our old friend, the problem of evil.

Not that God will be standing in the dock at this trial. Much more likely the discussion will turn on whether there is enough good in the human species to warrant its survival, or, whether our overwhelming propensity to tear apart the delicate threads of Nature’s ecological web has led humanity to an evolutionary dead-end.

It is not a debate to which Rex Mundi would be invited. In my imagination, I see Gaia as the smiling hostess of this existential colloquium. Proving just how difficult it is for the human mind to free itself entirely from the notion of a benign and/or just deity.

Then again, voting for their own species’ extinction is a pretty hard ask of the undergraduates of the Twenty-First Century. But, if the species itself isn’t all bad, then, perhaps, the “problem” of evil is best resolved by examining who has done the most.

Who was it who enslaved the peoples of Africa? Who wiped out the world’s indigenous cultures? Who planted their flags in the soil of sovereign nations and claimed them for their own? Who spread their capitalistic economic system across the face of the whole planet without thought for the exorbitant human and environmental costs? Who denied women their rights? Who persecuted homosexuals and the gender-diverse? Who invented racism, heavy artillery, poison gas and the H-Bomb? Who is the living embodiment of evil?

Yes, well, we all know the answer to those questions, don’t we?

Us, the world’s white, heterosexual, males: marching down the centuries with our swords and guns and bombs; slaying the innocent; enslaving the weak; bending all to our implacable will; consuming the whole world to satisfy our insatiable appetites. Us, seated upon our ivory thrones, white as death, ruling the world of matter absolutely. Rex Mundi in human form. Evil personified.

It’s all our fault.

And it’s not just undergraduates who argue this way – their professors write books about it!

They characterise evil as the problem born out of power over others. The power that creates victims. The power to be overcome only when its victims seize their own power – and use it.

Making evil a paradox. When we fear it, we feed it. In attempting to defeat it, we only make it stronger.

“Stare not too long into the abyss,” warned Nietzsche, “lest the abyss stare back into you.”

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 7 October 2022.

Centering The Right.

It's All In Our Heads: Prefixing right and left with the word “centre” was once a gesture of moderation, intended to reassure voters that the people being put up for election by these “mainstream” parties weren’t crazies. Today, however, the use of the word in relation to parties like America’s Republican Party, Britain’s Conservatives and Australia’s Liberals is, simply, inappropriate. These are no longer centrist parties, they’re unabashed promoters of the policies of the far-right.

IF PETER DUTTON is the answer, then the question should never have been put! The predicament of the Australian Liberal Party, left with no choice but to go from bad to worse, encapsulates the dilemma confronting all of the world’s centre-right parties.

Prefixing right and left with the word “centre” was once a gesture of moderation, intended to reassure voters that the people being put up for election by these “mainstream” parties weren’t crazies. Today, however, the use of the word in relation to parties like America’s Republican Party, Britain’s Conservatives and Australia’s Liberals is, simply, inappropriate. These are no longer centrist parties, they’re unabashed promoters of the policies of the far-right.

As such they have nothing positive to offer an electorate slowly becoming aware of just how much the planet will have to face – and overcome – in the years ahead. If they do not already, these voters will soon comprise a clear majority of their respective populations. In order to rip-up this emerging majority’s preferred policy track, it will be necessary for the parties of the far-right to rip-up democracy as well.

America’s Republican Party is leading the way in this regard: passing voter suppression legislation and shamelessly gerrymandering congressional districts in its favour. Britain’s Conservatives are more dependent on the fundamentally undemocratic first-past-the-post electoral system than ever. Boris Johnson’s 80-seat majority in the House of Commons was won with just 43.6 percent of the popular vote!

The fate of Australia’s Liberals was sealed by many factors, but their country’s complicated (and rort-resistant) preferential voting system must be counted among the most important!

Now, it may be that a comprehensive rorting of the democratic system is the far-right’s preferred option. Being the sworn enemy of moderation and compromise, extremism may simply be unwilling to countenance either. Assuming, however, that the far-right’s objective is not the “illiberal democracy” currently on display in Hungary, Brazil, and the Russian Federation, what must these errant movements do to earn the reapplication of the trusted centre-right label?

The answer provided by the Australian general election is unequivocal. No party of the centre-right can any longer afford to do anything other than affirm its unqualified belief in the science of Climate Change.

The social and economic consequences that follow logically from that crucial affirmation explains why far-rightists are so unwilling to make it. To meet the challenges of Climate Change it will be necessary to rebuild the machinery of collectivism. The state will have to become much, much larger, and the taxes of the super-wealthy will have to be set much, much higher. Since a small state and low taxes have constituted the sine qua non of centre-right parties since (at least) the late-1970s, what does that leave for them to champion?

The answer, surely, lies in what liberal democracy has always demanded, and will continue to demand, of the party system. At least one major party that is devoted to the protection of the rights of the small against the depredations of the large.

Individual liberty, with all its trappings – most particularly the freedoms of speech, communication, and association – would seem like the logical place to start. Building from there, a centre-right party should champion entrepreneurial enterprise and the creation of small businesses. It should also argue for what the Europeans call “subsidiarity” – the idea that decision-making bodies should remain as close as possible to those most directly affected by their decisions.

The new rule-of-thumb for the parties of the centre-right should be: big is oppressive, small is beautiful.

The political-economy of fighting Climate Change will ensure that this contention between bigness and smallness remains a constant theme of political debates for the foreseeable future. Accordingly, left-wing parties will also find themselves struggling to retain their centrist credentials. The temptation to simply crush any opposition to their radical measures will be very strong. Already, right across the planet, citizens of democracies have experienced how forcefully the state feels entitled to respond to a system-threatening emergency. The global Covid-19 Pandemic has revealed just how difficult defending the rights of the few can become when governments are confronted with the urgent demands of the many.

In the new political configuration that is fast approaching, individuals and communities will have need of centre-right champions. If only to remind us that a planet without freedom isn’t worth saving.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 3 June 2022.

Out! Morrison Is Bowled.

From Public Housing To The Lodge: Anthony Albanese wins the Australian Federal Election, bringing the career of Scott Morrison and his boofhead Coalition government to an end. The defeat of the boofheads was the victory Australia had to have.

CRIKEY! Those Aussies are pissed-off. To appreciate just how pissed-off they are it is instructive to look back at the last time Kiwis moved against their two major parties so aggressively. In 1996, National and Labour, between them, accounted for just 62 percent of the Party Votes cast. Taken together, NZ First, the Alliance, Act, United Future and the Christian Coalition accounted for 34.76 percent. The comparison with Saturday’s vote, of which the centre-right coalition of the Liberal and National parties attracted just 35.4 percent, Labor 32.8 percent, and their challengers 31.8 percent of the Primary Vote, is compelling.

The 1996 General Election in New Zealand was the first to be conducted under the new MMP electoral system, offering electors the novel opportunity to have their political choices much more accurately reflected in the final tally of seats. The 2022 Australian federal election, by contrast, was conducted under the well-established (if complex) Compulsory Preferential Vote system. The electoral havoc wrought across the Tasman is, therefore, even more telling. Angry Australians have dealt a massive blow to the two main political groupings, along with the political culture of bullshitters and boofheads in general.

These latter accretions to the Australian political system have multiplied alarmingly over the last 25 years – and not just in the Liberal and National parties. Some of the blame undoubtedly must be sheeted home to the One Nation Party, whose founding figurehead, Pauline Hanson, somehow succeeded in transforming ignorance into a political virtue. Like her fellow populist, Donald Trump, Hanson and her minders love the poorly educated – who reciprocate that love with unnerving passion.

The conservative coalition of Liberal Party toffs and National Party country bumpkins could not ignore Hanson’s vulgar intrusion into the hitherto settled politics of the Right. The Boofhead Vote was notoriously ill-disciplined, being as likely to award its second preferences to Labor as its more respectable conservative fellow-travellers. If Hanson couldn’t be beaten (and John Howard gave that option his best shot) then the only other alternative was to join her boofhead crusade.

But those second preferences came at a price. Yes, it was an unlooked-for blessing to witness the defection of that part of the Australian working-class which balked at embracing the socially-liberal supporters of feminism, multiculturalism, Aboriginal rights, sexual diversity and environmentalism who were becoming more-and-more entrenched in the Labor Party. But, how to transform Hanson’s party into a reliable electoral way-station for the Right? Part of the answer involved hitherto decent and responsible conservatives forcing themselves to pretend that these new recruits were not dyed-in-the-wool racists, sexists, homophobes and xenophobes who’d never met a lump of coal they didn’t like.

The ethical corrosion which these new electoral calculations inflicted on both the Centre-Right and the Centre-Left was devastating. By requiring their more sophisticated followers to hold their noses and adapt themselves to the needs of the Boofhead Vote, both parties had opened a pathway to power for their most ambitious and unscrupulous opportunists. Parliamentary politics, never all that refined in Australia, was coarsened still further.

Making matters worse, especially for the Liberals, was the vicious class politics at work on the Right. The upwardly-mobile working-class, and the middle-class suburban “battlers” who idolised “Little Johnny Howard”, felt keenly the lofty condescension bestowed upon them by the Liberal Party’s aristocratic grandees. Safe in their leafy, blue-ribbon redoubts (or sprawling squatter estates) these worthies felt more keenly than ever the pull of noblesse oblige. Boofhead votes were all very welcome, naturally. But, you couldn’t have boofheads running the party, or, God forbid! – occupying The Lodge!

To which the boofheads (Tony Abbot, Peter Dutton, Scott Morrison) responded: “Well see about that, mate. You just watch us.”

But, the boofheads could never have succeeded, or at least, not so completely, had it not been for Climate Change. With Australian coal fuelling the furnaces of China, and Australian iron and copper holding up and connecting much of the world, the inconvenient scientific truths of global warming prompted Australia’s richest and most conservative industrialists to go in search of politicians who could be relied upon to make damn sure that nothing of any significance was ever done to curb it.

To the many boofhead prejudices already injected into Australia’s political bloodstream was added the manifold dangers of Climate Change Denial. It was an affectation adopted without hesitation by a worrying number of the well-paid workers in Australia’s mining industry. The latter’s powerful trade unions made the formulation of a science-driven Climate Change policy extremely difficult for Labor. Meanwhile, on the right, the unholy boofhead alliance of ignorance, anti-intellectualism, evangelical Christianity and rank opportunism had destroyed the career of the leafy-suburbs’ Liberal standard-bearer, Malcom Turnbull.

The 2019 Federal Election, was won by Scott Morrison who succeeded in mobilising every available boofhead vote where it most mattered. (Which was not, as Labour and most of the pundits assumed, in the left-leaning cities.) Unfortunately for the Coalition, 2019 also marked the moment of Peak Bullshit. In the years that followed, the all-too-real impacts of global warming – in the form of devastating bush-fires and floods – left the denialists with an ever-decreasing audience among intelligent Australians.

Labour’s equivocation on the Climate Change issue had already fuelled the rise and rise of the Greens, threatening the party’s left flank and forcing it further and further away from Boofheadism. This became easier, and much less costly electorally, as even the dimmest working-class boofhead began to realise that having his prejudices tickled by Scotty From Marketing did nothing to halt the rapidly rising cost of living.

But if the Greens were challenging Labor for the support of young, non-boofhead Australians, the Liberal Party was about to fall victim to what might best be called “The Revenge of the Grandees”. The good and the great of the leafy suburbs had had enough of watching highly-intelligent and accomplished Liberal moderates whipped into line by the likes of boorish National Party leader, Barnaby Joyce. It was time to strike back against the corrupt political meddling of the Mining Industry and its refusal to accept the reality of Climate Change.

With what might be called “progressive capitalist” backing, a team of first-rate female “independents” was enlisted to destroy the Liberal’s moderate wing in its blue-ribbon seats - thereby making it impossible for the Morrison-led Government to win re-election. This rich admixture of regal blue and environmentalist green produced what, on the night, proved to be a “Teal Revolution”.

The Liberal-National Coalition now faces an historic fork in the road: either abandon Boofheadism and keep the Centre-Right in play; or, double-down on the failed politics of ignorance and prejudice. Dwindling to a vague political memory in the cities, and dying, unloved and unlamented, in some dusty bush electorate.

The editorial published on election day in the Melbourne-based small-l liberal weekly The Saturday Paper, said this of Australia’s boofhead PM:

Morrison, this cruel and bilious man, now asks for a fourth term. He says he’s just getting started. He plans to be different. He looks out at the carnage behind him, all of it the result of his ineffectiveness and ineptitude, and says he is a bulldozer. There is no crisis that doesn’t begin and end with him imagining himself as a small boy playing with a toy truck.

Yes, the Aussies are an angry people. Too pissed-off to give Anthony Albanese and his Labor Party a ringing endorsement, they have grudgingly made him their ‘lesser evil’ prime minister. What they enthusiastically made certain, however, was that Scott Morrison and the Coalition did not win.

The defeat of the boofheads is the victory Australia had to have.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website of Monday, 23 May 2022.