What If Jacinda Was Suddenly Taken From Us – Like “Big Norm”?

God Forbid - But, What If? Recalling Kirk’s death raises some troubling thoughts about New Zealand’s current prime-minister, Jacinda Ardern. God forfend that it should happen, but if she were to die, suddenly and unexpectedly, in the second year of her premiership – how would she be remembered?

ON SATURDAY, 31 August, it will be 45 years to the day since Norman Kirk died. He was no age at all, just 51, and although he died in hospital, hardly any New Zealanders were aware that his reasons for being there were likely to prove fatal.

That’s why the shock of his passing was so devastating. For a brief moment it brought the whole country together. Bosses and trade union leaders stood side-by-side to pay their respects. RSA men wept alongside long-haired hippies. Pakeha and Maori mourned according to their own traditions, but, as always, the Maori did so in ways that both enriched and enlarged the moment of national grief. For the first time, the Maori proverb: Kua hinga te totara i te wao nui a Tane – A Totara has fallen in the forest of Tane, imprinted itself upon the cultural consciousness of the Pakeha nation.

The tragedy of “Big Norm’s” passing was by no means contained within his homeland’s borders. Upon hearing the news in faraway Tanzania, its President, Julius Nyerere, burst into tears. In Beijing the Chinese premier, Chou Enlai, bowed three times before Kirk’s photograph in solemn acknowledgement of his worth. Australia’s Gough Whitlam hastened across the Tasman to stand by his casket.

Though few were willing, or able, to articulate exactly what it might be; the feeling that something vitally important to the country’s future would now be left undone was palpable. Long before he was buried amidst rain and an all-enveloping mist (as befitted a rangatira of such great mana) the myth of Norman Kirk and his all-too-brief prime-ministership was sending its taproots down deep into the nation’s collective memory.

Recalling Kirk’s death raises some troubling thoughts about New Zealand’s current prime-minister, Jacinda Ardern. God forfend that it should happen, but if she were to die, suddenly and unexpectedly, in the second year of her premiership – how would she be remembered?

Only the most churlish (and dishonest) of observers would suggest that the death of “Jacinda” would inspire anything less than a truly massive outpouring of national grief. The public’s sense of shock and bereavement would be every bit as great as that which greeted Kirk’s demise. Indeed, it would, almost certainly, be greater. Young New Zealanders, in particular, would feel that they had lost not only a personal friend, but a generational champion. Jacinda’s defining quality of empathy would be reflected many times over in the over-brimming emotions of the nation’s stricken youth.

The parallels would not end there. As a living Prime Minister, Kirk had towered above his political contemporaries. The NZ Labour Party contained no one within its parliamentary ranks who could hold a candle to “The Boss”. His eventual successor, the intelligent and thoroughly decent Wallace “Bill” Rowling, was never able to escape Kirk’s huge shadow. The only political leader of any substance left upon the national stage following Kirk’s departure, was the Leader of the Opposition, Rob Muldoon. Everyone who understood the politics of the day grasped immediately that he was the man who, in just 15 months, would be leading the country. The moment Big Norm’s heart stopped beating, Labour became a dead man walking. Without Jacinda, Labour would, similarly, be transformed instantly into a zombie party.

The Myth of Jacinda, like Kirk’s, would swell rapidly to epic proportions. “If only Grant Robertson, Winston Peters and James Shaw had let Jacinda be Jacinda!”, would be the cry that went up from her bereft followers, “Instead of always coming up with reasons why everything she wanted to do couldn’t be done. If only she had been allowed to spend the money needed to end child poverty and homelessness. If only all those men hadn’t prevented her from making Climate Change – as she had promised – the Nuclear-Free Moment of her generation. Jacinda knew what had to be done – why wasn’t she empowered to simply forge ahead and do it?”

Like Kirk before her, a Jacinda taken from her people many years before her time, would rapidly become the righteous receptacle for an ever-increasing multitude of what-ifs and might-have-beens.

Nearly always, the counterfactuals swirling around Kirk posit an alternative future in which all of the Third Labour Government’s reforms – NZ Superannuation in particular – bear healthy fruit and prosper. Hardly ever do those who ask “What if?” raise the possibility that, even in the New Zealand where a healthy Norman Kirk contests the 1975 general election, a rampantly populist Rob Muldoon might still have delivered a knockout blow against the big man’s government. What if the  widely-held assumption that “Big Norm” would have defeated Muldoon easily is dead wrong? What if, as is demonstrably happening to Jacinda as she approaches the second anniversary of her prime-ministership, the gloss had well-and-truly come off Kirk?

In 1974-75 a great many New Zealanders were frightened and angry. Frightened by the power of the trade unions; by New Zealand’s growing indebtedness; by inflation eating away at the purchasing power of their salaries and pensions; by hippies and protesters calling the shots at home (hadn’t they persuaded Kirk to cancel the 1973 Springbok Tour?) and by Third World nations defeating the United States, and pushing up the price of oil, abroad. Young people, women and Maori had forgotten their place. Many of the old certainties were under serious challenge – along with the authority figures who defended them. Conservative working-class voters, no less than National’s traditional middle-class supporters, were looking for a strong leader: someone prepared to give them New Zealand the way they wanted it.

Who’s to say that, under a first-past-the-post electoral system, that fear and anger would not have been enough to overpower even Norman Kirk’s hopeful visions of the future?

We shall never know. Forty-five years on, Kirk’s might-have-beens, like the lustre of the man himself, are still sufficiently tantalising to inspire us. Courage. Vision. A principled refusal to step back when confronted with the concentrated malice of the Powers-That-Be. These remain the sacred political talismans handed down by the Labour Prime Minister who died on Saturday, 31st August 1974.

All nations need a mythologised Totara to shelter under.

Even after it has fallen.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 29 August 2019.

Jacinda's Library

A Long Time Ago, In A Parallel Universe Far, Far Away: The political journalist scratched his head in confusion. Only then did he notice the name of the building: ‘The Jacinda Ardern Presidential Library and Public Resource Centre’. Making his way inside to the information desk, he asked the librarian for an explanation.

SOME COSMOLOGISTS SAY that ours is but one of an infinite number of universes. It’s a wild thought, because, if they exist, this infinity of parallel universes grants us an infinity of parallel lives. Whatever we can imagine ourselves doing has already been done, is happening right now, or will be done at some point in the future, in one of these alternate worlds. In this universe we may be powerless paupers, but elsewhere – in at least one of these parallel universes – we are kings.

How’s that for a comforting thought the next time you’re feeling down?

The idea that there are other worlds, adjacent to this one, is far from new. In the myths and legends of many cultures we find tales of people who left their homes on hum-drum errands, only to encounter mysterious beings who, in the twinkling of an eye, transported them to places of wonder and enchantment. When they return home, time itself seems to have been stretched and twisted. By their reckoning, their absences can only have lasted a few hours, but in the country they left behind, many years have passed. Loved ones have died, or grown old, and our baffled heroes pass, unrecognised, down streets that did not exist when they set out – only a day before.

All very Einsteinian (or should that be Schrodingerian?) but rest easy, there is a purpose to all this esoteric speculation.

Nowhere is the experience of contingency stronger than in the realm of politics. Politicians and political activists may live in this universe, but their heads and hearts are filled with the multiple worlds that could exist – if only the voters; the proletariat; the national community; were courageous enough to bring them into existence.

This multiplicity of possible worlds is often expressed in the musings of what are called “counterfactual” historians. How often have we heard someone pose the question – “What if?”

What if the Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s car had turned down another street in Sarajevo – instead of the one where his assassin, Gavrilo Princip, was eating his lunch?

What if JFK had toured Dallas in a standard – instead of an open-topped – presidential limousine?

What if Roger Douglas had been hit by a Wellington trolley-bus on his way to Parliament in 1983?

Whenever questions like these are posed, we sense the presence of alternate pasts: histories of worlds that might have been – but never were.

So now, arriving at the crux of the matter, I intend to pose a question of my own. A question which, simply by being asked, raises before us that shimmering membrane which separates the world as it is, from the world as it might be. A world that, even now, could break through the web of contingency – but only if the leaders of the Labour-NZ First-Green Government can find the courage to change course.

It has been nearly 40 years since the imaginations of New Zealanders hungry for change have been seized so forcefully by an incoming prime minister and government. The last time the thin membrane separating the parallel worlds of political reality and political aspiration shimmered so brightly was in 1972.

The difference between now and then, however, is that Norman Kirk and the Third Labour Government actually attempted that most dangerous of all political manoeuvres: the merging of “what is” with “what could be”. Kirk made a wonderful start, but like so many other political leaders who have attempted the manoeuvre, it proved too much for him. With his death, the two worlds straightaway began to disentangle themselves. On election night 1975, the once bright membrane shimmered faintly – and went dark.

At this point, I feel duty-bound to explain the enormous difference between attempting to bring into being that which has never before existed – which his immensely difficult – and allowing the ideas and practices of the past to break through into the present.

The relative ease with which this can be accomplished was demonstrated by the prime ministers and governments that followed Kirk’s. Political and economic concepts that many believed dead and buried passed effortlessly from the world of “what was” and into the world of “what is”. Once inside this world, the world of the present, these ghost concepts began to transform it. More rapidly than many believed possible “now” began to look like “then”. Mass unemployment returned. Inequality grew by leaps and bounds. Homelessness became commonplace. The streets filled with beggars. New Zealand soldiers went off to fight in other people’s wars.

The ghosts of the past are easily summoned. The angels of the future require considerably more persuasion.

What then should Jacinda and her government do?

I will answer that question with a story.

It concerns a political journalist who, in fulfilling some hum-drum errand, found himself in the company of a mysterious band of revellers who insisted that he accompany them to a marvellous party.

He awoke the next morning in a deserted mansion shaded by tall macrocarpa trees and enclosed by a tumble-down and ivy-covered wall. Pushing open the rusted front gates, he stumbled into the streets of a city that seemed greatly changed.

What has become of all the cars? He wondered. And why is the Tino Rangatiratanga flag flying above the library?

When he put these questions to a passer-by, the person looked at him strangely.

“That the flag of the Aotearoan Republic, stranger, and has been these last 25 years.”

The journalist scratched his head in confusion. Only then did he notice the name of the building: ‘The Jacinda Ardern Presidential Library and Public Resource Centre’. Making his way inside to the information desk, he asked the librarian for an explanation.

“It’s named after the Prime Minister who ushered-in the Republic back in 2022 – after the uprising.”

“Uprising? What uprising?”

The librarian shook his head in disbelief.

“What uprising? Where have you been for the past quarter-century? When Jacinda and her coalition introduced what was soon being called “The Rollback”, the neoliberals did everything they could to prevent it from happening. When a crazed junior staffer from the Treasury attempted to assassinate the Prime Minister in the Beehive Theatrette, hundreds of thousands turned out to demand the passage of her government’s reforms. The protesters, led by rangatahi, stormed Parliament and proclaimed the Bi-Cultural Republic of Aotearoa. With the neoliberals ousted, and Jacinda elected President, the real changes began. Aotearoa rapidly became a beacon for equality, freedom and ecological wisdom across the whole world.”

“And Simon Bridges?”, asked the journalist, hardly able to believe what he was hearing.

“Bridges! That rogue! Hah! He fled to Australia – still there as far as I know.”

“And Jacinda? Is she still alive?”

“Still alive! Where have you been! Jacinda Ardern is Secretary-General of the United Nations!”

Wide-eyed, the journalist, had only one more question.

“So, who’s running the country now?”

“Why, President Swarbrick, of course. She’s halfway through her second term. In two years’ time, the presidency will pass back to the Tangata Whenua. Most people are picking Pania Newton to succeed Chloe.”

The journalist, thanked the librarian and, plucking a free map of the city from the counter, headed off in what had, only the day before, been the direction of his home.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 23 August 2019.

If We'd Been Lucky.

The Big IFs: We are so unlucky that it has come to this. Especially when, had things worked out just a little differently we might have had a chance. If Florida’s voters had swung decisively behind Al Gore in the 2000 US Presidential Election. If the Baby Boom Generation hadn’t abandoned their idealism for cycling holidays in France and a renovated kitchen. If the Millennials possessed an attention span just a little bit longer than a goldfish’s. If the Internet hadn’t allowed us all to become so stupid.

NOBODY WANTS TO KNOW. That 150 academics have put their name to a letter urging the government to do something – anything – about  climate change: nobody wants to know. The letter itself is a response to the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). That report gives the world just 12 years to fundamentally refashion industrial civilisation or face runaway global warming. But, nobody wants to know.

We are so unlucky that it has come to this. Especially when, had things worked out just a little differently we might have had a chance. If Florida’s voters had swung decisively behind Al Gore in the 2000 US Presidential Election. If the Baby Boom Generation hadn’t abandoned their idealism for cycling holidays in France and a renovated kitchen. If the Millennials possessed an attention span just a little bit longer than a goldfish’s. If the Internet hadn’t allowed us all to become so stupid.

Al Gore would almost certainly have got Bin Laden before he got America. (The Democrats recognised Osama as a threat, the Republicans were more focussed on Iraq and Iran.) So, no 9/11. No War on Terror. No invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. A less crazed world. A real chance that the big global players: the USA, the UK, the EU, China, Japan and the Russian Federation might have trusted each other enough to come together around the science and take climate change seriously.

What would that have looked like? Well, if we’d been lucky, the Big Six would have pooled their resources and “internationalised” the fossil fuels industry. The slow and painful process of weaning the world off oil and coal could have begun – unimpeded by the oil industry’s denialist propaganda.

Encouraged by their success, the Big Six might then have embarked on an equally grand international effort dedicated to moving the world towards the adoption of renewable energy. Unburdened by ruinous levels of military spending, the leading economies would have been free to invest billions in the development of sustainable industrial processes.

The effect on the world’s peoples of all this global co-operation in the name of bequeathing a healthy planet to future generations is readily imagined. The audience for the promoters of jihad would have shrunk away to nothing – especially after the Big Six imposed a just territorial settlement on Israel and the Palestinians and then guaranteed the peace that followed. Rather than the disillusionment and despair that followed the world’s horror-filled descent into post-9/11 extremism, the example of the great powers working together would have engendered a global spring of hope.

Global finance would not have been happy but, in the new atmosphere of “can do” internationalism, the nostrums of neoliberalism would have lost much of their persuasive force. “Globalisation” would have acquired a new and extremely positive set of associations and the electorates of the world’s nation-states would have been quick to punish any political party which set its face against the humane and ecologically-informed values of the new era.

The United Nations, now lavishly funded by the Big Six, would not so much have assumed a greater role in global governance as had that role thrust upon it. At long last, the idea of a single world army was no longer being dismissed out-of-hand by the five permanent members of the Security Council. Indeed, driven by the Big Six, a new World Security Force, composed of contingents contributed by all of the UN’s member states, would soon be standing guard over the Pax Humanitas.

Not that there were very many enemies left to fight. With the production of weapons now a strictly controlled UN monopoly, the promotion and extension of human conflict was no longer a paying proposition. Indeed, because we had been lucky all those years before, the commemoration of World War I became the excuse for a very special international undertaking. On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month 2018, the last nuclear weapon in the world was decommissioned.

Except, of course, we weren’t lucky. The world has not drawn closer together, it has grown farther apart. In the eighteen years since November 2000 the urgent remedial effort required to slow anthropogenic global warming has not taken place. The scientists see what’s coming. They’re begging us to, please, do something!

But nobody wants to know.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 23 November 2018.