Jacinda 2.0 is "Licenced To Govern" - But Not By, Or For, Us.

Government By Permission:  That phrase: “a licence to govern” brings into sharp focus so much which has been unclear to the tens-of-thousands of New Zealanders who voted Labour-Green in confident expectation of ushering-in a period of much-needed, but long-delayed, change. It explains why – in spite of her outstanding communication skills and empathy – Jacinda Ardern finds it impossible to follow the examples of Mickey Savage and Norman Kirk. 

WHAT HAS HAPPENED to Jacinda Ardern? What has become of the woman who promised to “transform” New Zealand through the “Politics of Kindness”? Where is the woman who forged a team of five million and coached it through the Covid-19 pandemic? Why is the woman who won 50.1 percent of the Party Vote refusing to respond to the needs of the poorest New Zealanders. What in the Blue Blazers is going on?

Contrast the present Labour Government’s refusal to give the poor a happy Christmas with this little vignette from Labour’s past.

“Shortly after his election as Labour Party leader in 1961, Arnold Nordmeyer was asked by the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation to recall for its listeners ‘My Most Memorable Christmas’. He spoke movingly of the first Labour Government’s decision, in December 1935, to advance the equivalent of an extra week’s relief payment to all the unemployed as a “Christmas Bonus”. That single act of state generosity, he said, sent ripples of hope and goodwill through thousands of destitute families and hundreds of cash-strapped communities. By Christmas, its effects were evident across the whole of New Zealand.”

Alternatively, there’s the extraordinary interview conducted by David Frost with New Zealand’s newly-elected Prime Minister, Norman Kirk, early in 1973. About 3 minutes into the interview Kirk talks about the letter he received from a disabled woman, thanking him for the special Christmas payment he made to all social welfare beneficiaries in December of 1972, and telling him what the extra money had made possible. Here’s the link. 

Jacinda Ardern is rightly celebrated for her communication skills and for her demonstrations of empathy, but set her performances alongside Kirk’s in that interview and the huge gulf that separates the current Labour Government from its predecessor of 1972-75 is immediately apparent. Yes, the world has become a very different place, and the conduct of centre-left politics has changed dramatically. But human compassion and political authenticity are just as easy to spot in 2020 as they were in 1973. Something has been removed from our political leaders, something important. What is it? And who took it?

The answer – appropriately enough – lies in the turbulent history of the 1970s. At the heart of that history was Capitalism’s ruthless fightback against what its intellectual leaders regarded as the unwarranted, and increasingly uncontrollable, inflation of democratic expectations.

Capitalism’s problem, in a nutshell, was that too many people wanted – and were demanding – too much. Across the industrialised West, decade after decade of rising prosperity had freed ordinary people, especially young people, from the relentless pursuit of bread and butter. Having secured their freedom from raw material deprivation, people were seeking the freedom to become something more than an employee, more than a consumer. Working-class men; women of all classes; people of colour; gays and lesbians: all of these groups were demanding the right to be considered – and to become – fully human.

Nowhere is this phenomenon better described than in Ariel Dorfman’s seminal book on cultural imperialism – The Empire’s Old Clothes. In the first chapter of the book, Dorfman recalls being approached by a young woman from one of the shanty-towns that encircled Chile’s capital city, Santiago. Professor Dorfman, and some of his students, had come to help the shanty-dwellers repair the damage wrought by a recent flood.

“She came up to me and asked quite frankly if it was true that I thought people shouldn’t read photo-novels”, Dorfman writes – alluding to his crusade against the “industrial products of fiction.” Comics, soap operas, westerns, radio and TV sitcoms, love songs, films of violence: “you name it”, quipped Dorfman, “I had it under scrutiny.”

“So I stopped digging and answered her. It was true. I thought that photo-novels were a hazard to her health and her future.*

“She did not seem to feel any special need for purification. ‘Don’t do that to us, companerito,’ she said in a familiar, almost tender way. ‘Don’t take my dreams away from me.”

A few years later, about the same time David Frost was interviewing Norman Kirk, Dorfman was in the same shanty-town for the opening of a new community centre – one of the many thousands of collective initiatives funded by the socialist government of Salvador Allende – when he encountered the same woman:

“I didn’t recognize her at first, but she remembered me. She came up to me, just like that, and announced that I was right, that she didn’t read ‘trash’ anymore. Then she added a phrase which still haunts me. ‘Now, companero, we are dreaming reality.’”

For nearly 50 years now, this is the dream/nightmare that has driven the politics of the Capitalist West. How to prevent ordinary people from making their dreams real through collective action. Certainly, it is no accident that the “cure” for too many dreams began in Chile. After the USA had “made the economy scream”, and General Augusto Pinochet’s troops had gunned down Salvador Allende in his Presidential Palace, it was to Chile that the “Chicago Boys” – the followers of Milton Friedman – came to show the world how Capitalism could be kept safe from Democracy.

And the “lessons” from Chicago just kept coming. Across the Tasman, Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s government was deposed in a bloodless coup by his own Governor-General (and CIA asset) Sir John Kerr. Fortunately for ordinary New Zealanders, Norman Kirk’s untimely (and extremely convenient) demise in August 1974 obviated the need for such a dramatic intervention here. (Although the CIA did help out the National Party by facilitating the production of some killer campaign ads for the 1975 general election.) Then, of course, there was the plot to topple UK Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson in 1976, and the final coup de grace against the very possibility of democratic socialism – the capital strike against the French socialist government of President Francois Mitterrand in 1981. If the Left ever wanted to govern again, then it would have to lower its sights – and its red flags.

Back in the 1980s, there was a story, probably apocryphal, about Mike Moore and the powerful Australian television series The Dismissal – which dramatized the sacking of Gough Whitlam’s Labor Government in 1975. According to the story, Moore was determined to remind his colleagues about the dangers that lay in wait for Labour governments.

What Moore wanted his colleagues to appreciate was the overwhelming power that could be brought to bear against a government that threatened the interests of the people who really mattered. How vital it was to keep business on your side. How much damage the news media could inflict upon a political leader it didn’t like. How dangerous senior public servants could be if their ministers refused to accept official advice. Most importantly, he wanted to remind them of the risks posed to labour governments by stubborn idealists: politicians who refused to be guided by principled pragmatism and common sense. So Moore sat all his caucus colleagues down and made them watch every one of The Dismissal’s six, hour-long, episodes.

Was Moore on to something? Had he drawn the correct lessons from the fall of so many democratic socialist politicians and governments? More importantly, had other centre-left politicians, in other countries, reached exactly the same conclusion? Is that why the world ended up with Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroeder, Francois Hollande, Helen Clark and Kevin Rudd? Or, turning the question around, is that why the campaigns of genuine leftists like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders so consistently come to grief?

The beginnings of an answer may be found in the following passage, taken from a speech delivered to the prestigious Wellington Club on 3 November 2020 by the veteran political journalist, Colin James:

“With National weak, Jacinda Ardern has political space to push real reform. Will she? Can she? Will Grant Robertson? Can he?

“Grant Robertson has stuck to fiscal and monetary orthodoxy. Jacinda Ardern told me back in 2018 that earns Labour a ‘licence to govern’, that is, tolerance by business and other sceptics. That is a clue to their cautious mentality.”

A clue, says James. Surely it’s something a little more definitive than that? A key, perhaps? Yes, a key.

That phrase: “a licence to govern” brings into sharp focus so much which has been unclear to the tens-of-thousands of New Zealanders who voted Labour-Green in confident expectation of ushering-in a period of much-needed, but long-delayed, change. It explains why – in spite of her outstanding communication skills and empathy – Jacinda Ardern finds it impossible to follow the examples of Mickey Savage and Norman Kirk. Those leaders believed the only “licence” a party needed to govern was the one given to them by the voters in a general election. Forty-eight years on from the Labour landslide of 1972; forty-eight years after that young shanty-dweller proudly informed Ariel Dorfman that she and her comrades were “dreaming reality”; Jacinda Ardern knows better. To drive a capitalist economy, it is first necessary to obtain a licence – from the capitalists.

But, securing the “tolerance of business and other sceptics” is not an easy thing to do. There are so many self-denying ordinances one has to offer-up: no capital gains tax; no wealth tax; no return to universal union membership; no restoration of the unconstrained right to strike; nothing to empower or embolden that reserve army of labour we call beneficiaries; nothing that might upset the business community, dairy farmers, or the fishing industry; and certainly nothing to combat climate change which in any way threatens the capitalists’ sacred right to make a profit. Nothing, in short, that could possibly upset the status-quo.

The most frustrating aspect of Jacinda’s “licence to govern” proposition is that in both historical and practical political terms she is, almost certainly, correct.

It is important to remember that both Ardern and Robertson were working in the Beehive during Helen Clark’s first term as Prime Minister. They would have heard the stories about the grim “Winter of Discontent” that followed the creation of the Labour-Alliance coalition government in the early summer of 1999. How the New Zealand capitalist class threatened to “put away their cheque-books” if there was even the slightest hint that some of the Alliance’s left-wing policies were about to be enacted. How the Finance Minister, Michael Cullen, had to abase himself before the nation’s “business leaders” at the Auckland Club. How Helen Clark felt obliged to swear that Laila Harré’s employer-funded child-care would only be introduced “over my dead body”.

The old Marxists may rail against Ardern’s and Labour’s “incrementalism” but when challenged to come up with an alternative strategy for operating safely under neoliberal capitalism, the system which, for nearly fifty years, has decreed anything more ambitious than piecemeal and largely inconsequential legislation verboten, they generally mutter something about “revolutionary action” and head for the bar.

They’re right, of course. Neoliberal Capitalism, by declaring democratic socialism and social-democracy out-of-bounds in the 1970s and 80s has, wittingly or unwittingly, left revolution as the only viable option. Not only when it comes to once again making it possible for the wretched of the earth to “dream reality”; but also when it comes to rescuing the only planet we know of in the entire universe where ordinary people’s dreams of becoming truly free and fully human can be realised.

* It would be interesting to know what Ariel Dorfman (who is still alive) makes of the sort of communications hardware and software that has become ubiquitous in twenty-first century societies. So much more powerful and compelling than the photo-novels and comics of the 1960s and 70s, our PCs, lap-tops, tablets and cellphones have made the corporations who manufacture and control them masters of the planet. The “industrial production of fiction” which Dorfman complained of back then seems quaint when compared to the scale of contemporary cultural imperialism’s reach and power. That capitalism has placed a portal to its material and imaginative production in virtually every hand on the planet should give us pause. Perhaps, like the young shanty-dweller, we will only be able to start “dreaming reality” when we throw the masters’ “trash” away?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 13 November 2020.

What Is "Rogerpolitics"?

Hand In Hand: "Rogerpolitics" is the term coined by the New Zealand political scientist, Richard Mulgan, to describe the form of politics required to make sure that Rogernomics “took” in a country which, on the face of it, should have rejected neoliberalism out of hand. Had Rogerpolitics not been so successfully embedded in the key organs of the New Zealand state, then Rogernomics would not have lasted.

“ROGERNOMICS” is political shorthand for the neoliberal economic policies introduced by Labour’s finance minister, Roger Douglas between 1984 and 1988. While most New Zealanders have heard of Rogernomics, nowhere near as many have heard of its inseparable companion, “Rogerpolitics”.

The term was coined by the New Zealand political scientist, Richard Mulgan, to describe the form of politics required to make sure that Rogernomics “took” in a country which, on the face of it, should have rejected neoliberalism out of hand. Had Rogerpolitics not been so successfully embedded in the key organs of the New Zealand state, then Rogernomics would not have lasted.

Critical to the success of Rogerpolitics was the widespread public disillusionment with the style of politics that preceded it. In New Zealand’s case, the principal target of the public’s hostility was the National Party Prime Minister, Rob Muldoon, and his highly interventionist economic policies – “Muldoonism”. An additional factor in the public’s antipathy towards Muldoon was his facilitation of the extremely divisive Springbok Tour of 1981. In the eyes of younger New Zealanders, “The Tour” was proof of their elders’ unfitness to rule. The people referred to by the then prominent political journalist, Colin James, as the “RSA Generation” had, in the eyes of the “Vietnam Generation”, been confronted with a straightforward moral test – and they had failed.

Without Muldoon and Muldoonism; without the Springbok Tour; the hunger for a new way of managing the economy and running the country would not have been so acute. The proponents of neoliberalism, or “free market forces” (as the ideology was more commonly referred to thirty-five years ago) were pushing against an open door.

It was the same all over the advanced capitalist world. The interventionist economic policies that had played such a crucial role in generating the unparalleled prosperity of the post-war period had finally run up against the buffers of the capitalist system. Every attempt to reduce the rising levels of unemployment and inflation that were the primary manifestations of the system’s failure only ended up pushing them higher. Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party captured the growing sense of unease with its 1979 slogan: “Labour isn’t working.” The following year, in the USA, the Republican candidate for President, Ronald Reagan, summed-up the popular mood when he declared: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem, government IS the problem.”

In its essence, this is what Rogerpolitics is all about: getting government out of the way. If politicians, by interfering in the economy, only made things worse, then the obvious solution is simply to prevent them from interfering.

Accordingly, the Economic Stabilisation Act, which had since the Second World War allowed the Cabinet to more-or-less run the New Zealand economy by decree, was repealed. The Reserve Bank of New Zealand was freed from political interference. The State Sector Act, by introducing market disciplines to government departments and agencies, fundamentally reshaped the structure and purpose of the New Zealand civil service. Whenever possible, state-owned enterprises were sold into private hands.

At both the national and the local level the effect of these economic and political reforms was to significantly disempower the country’s politicians. Regulation, where it couldn’t be avoided altogether, was to be “light-handed”. The day-to-day running of things was to be left to the market’s “invisible hand” or, in those places where “free market forces” had yet to make their presence felt, to the new order’s administrative proxies – the CEOs of the new government ministries and local government bureaucracies.

With remarkable alacrity, the ideological and practical political infrastructure required to support the new economic regime was cemented into place. In the nation’s schools and universities; in it’s publicly and privately owned news media; in its local and national institutions, Rogerpolitics became the new orthodoxy. For the next thirty years it would not only inspire the design of the mechanisms by which political power is exercised, but also the moral justifications for their use.

Those New Zealanders born after 1984 – New Zealand neoliberalism’s “Year Zero” – have absorbed the “free market” catechism practically without thinking.

The market organises human activity much more efficiently and effectively than the state.

The freer the market, the better the organisation.

Private ownership generates much better outcomes than public ownership.

Capitalism works best when Money, Goods and Labour are all permitted to move freely around the globe.

Free trade promotes peace, prosperity and global understanding.

Protectionism is an outgrowth of nationalism – both of which are very bad things.

Trade unions distort the signals of the labour market – which makes them very bad things also.

Capitalism celebrates individual freedom and embraces human diversity – racism, sexism and all other forms of discrimination have no place in a properly functioning capitalist society.

In summary, the only sort of politics which it is ethical (and advisable) to practice in the New Zealand created by Rogernomics is the politics which exerts the least influence over the smooth operation of the free markets it brought into being. Rogerpolitics both asserts and insists that the best politician any New Zealander can be is the politician whose actions produce the least effect on the operation of the nation’s economy. The very worst politician a New Zealander can be is the politician who mobilises the envy of the many who have failed in the marketplace against the few who have succeeded.

Rogerpolitics does not believe that democracy is a market friendly form of government, and all Rogerpoliticians are expected to act accordingly.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 15 November 2018.

Dead-End Streets

Big Norm: Haunted by memories of the material and spiritual poverty which characterised the dead-end streets of the working-class Christchurch suburb of Linwood, where he was raised during the 1930s, Norman Kirk devoted his life to breaking the chains of socio-economic deprivation in New Zealand.

 

DAVID GRANT is one of those dogged miners of the past whose unceasing efforts are occasionally rewarded with an historical gem. Last Saturday, at a Fabian Society seminar entitled “The Kirk Legacy”, he shared one of them with the world.

 

Asked to present a paper on the early life of the Labour Party leader and prime minister, Norman Kirk (whose government was elected forty years ago this month) Mr Grant read aloud a short passage Kirk had written for an unfinished autobiography.

 

The 150-strong Auckland audience was astonished. Not simply because Kirk’s stark prose bears comparison with Hemingway and Steinbeck, but also for the glimpse his words offered into the mind of a working-class New Zealander recalling life in the Christchurch suburb of Linwood during the lean years of the 1930s.

 

In Kirk’s description of the short street where he lived one hears not just compassion but also a barely suppressed anger at its inhabitants’ truncated lives. Obvious, too, is Kirk’s desperation to escape the limiting effects of its material and spiritual poverty.

 

For Kirk was a highly intelligent man with a rare hunger for knowledge of every kind. In later life he would refer to his favourite books as “my patient friends”. That drab Linwood street, which had swallowed the lives of so many of his neighbours, would not claim him. But, equally, Linwood would never relinquish its hold over his imagination. It’s no exaggeration to say his life was dedicated to breaking Labour’s people out of such working-class prisons.

 

Perhaps this is what working-class New Zealanders sensed and loved about the man. That here before them was an emancipator; someone who had seen the size and richness of the world from which they were excluded. A political leader determined to win them entry.

 

So many of the contemporary Left romanticise poverty, imbuing it with mysterious moral power. Kirk despised such nonsense. In the brief passage Mr Grant read out (sorry, but you’ll have to wait for his book) this son of the Great Depression makes it very clear that there is nothing noble or pure about the experience of poverty – quite the opposite, in fact. Poverty deadens. It lowers horizons and empties its victims’ lives of hope. Poverty is the thief of dreams; the robber of dignity; an affront to the conscience. For Kirk, to be poor was to be trapped and shackled: forced to live on a dead-end street.

 

Another important contributor to the “Kirk Legacy” seminar was the political journalist, Colin James. Describing Kirk as “a political pivot between two eras”, he painted him as the harbinger of the big changes that would follow the election of the fourth Labour government in 1984.

 

It is certainly possible to see in Kirk’s dispatch of the frigate HMNZS Otago to observe the French atmospheric nuclear tests at Mururoa, and in his cancellation of the 1973 Springbok Tour, clear anticipations of the tumultuous and nationally defining moments of the 1980s. But it is wrong, I believe, to mould his features into some sort of crude Janus mask: one half smiling benignly on what Mr James calls “the apogee of social democracy” in the early-1970s; the other staring with prophetic intensity towards the brave new world of open minds – and markets – just beyond the decade’s horizon.

 

As Margaret Hayward, Kirk’s private secretary (and another contributor to the day-long seminar) revealed in her invaluable book Diary of the Kirk Years “Mr K” feared laissez-faire capitalism more than any other ideology. In his last speech to the Labour Party conference, writes Hayward, he warned delegates against too much social liberalism.

 

The permissive society, he said, was “just another way of saying ‘I can do what I like’ That would include not just the right to use marijuana but the right to exploit, to speculate, to put monetary gain above social duty.

 

“Some customs and laws might well have become irrelevant through the passage of time, but the permissive society, carried to its logical end, meant there was no law. ‘And if there is no law, the freedom of the permissive society is a trap and a prison for the weak in society.’”

 

Those Linwood memories never left him.

 

The great irony of the past forty years, of course, is that as our personal lives have become increasingly unconfined, our political options have narrowed dramatically.

 

Saturday’s seminar rose as one to welcome Sir Owen Woodhouse – principle architect of New Zealand’s world-beating system of accident compensation. But what chance would such a socially progressive scheme have in 2012? Who, today, would dare promote Kirk’s “Ohu” – communes on Crown Land!

 

Norman Kirk was a pivot, yes, but the turn that followed his tragic death in 1974 was from expansiveness towards constriction; from equality towards inequality; from the light towards the darkness.

 

Down a dead-end street.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 6 November 2012.