Hope Defeats Hate.

Third Time Winner: Daniel Andrews’ Victorian victory is of a piece with the general failure of the American Right to achieve the gains it was expecting in the recent mid-term elections. Generally speaking, voters not already addicted to the Right’s ideological Kool-Aid find very little to like about candidates who manifest the odd and at times frightening behaviour of ideological zealots and outlandish conspiracy theorists. As Simon Holmes-A’Court’s teal candidates have proved in two elections on the trot, moderation + warmth is a winning combination. 

IF JACINDA ARDERN wasn’t congratulating Victorian Labor’s Dan Andrews on Saturday evening, then she bloody well should’ve been. With a third successive Labor victory under his belt, Andrews is set to become the state’s longest-serving Labor premier. In addition to offering her own, and her party’s, hearty congratulations, the New Zealand prime minister must have been sorely tempted to add: “How the hell did you do it!”

It’s a question the whole of the Australian Right will be asking themselves. They were so confident of winning Victoria that they simply failed to notice just how profoundly the politics of the Lucky Country have changed. It simply did not occur to them that a clear majority of the population saw Andrews as something other than a cruel and capricious Covid tyrant who had locked Victorians down for weeks – and months – on end. They could not conceive a Labor premier, whose actions had unleashed street battles between trade unionists and state police, possibly retaining the loyalty of Labor voters.

As far as the Australian Right was concerned, Andrews and the Victorian Labor Party were dog-tucker. Their man, the Liberal Party leader, Matthew Guy, couldn’t lose. Victoria was about to be prized out of Labor’s cold dead hands. (The party has governed the state for all but 4 of the last 27 years.)

Those who ventured onto Twitter to impart the heretical information that there were signs Labor might win, were greeted with scorn, and tweeted with contempt. “Just you wait ‘til Saturday,” crowed the over-confident Right, “then you’ll see!”

Well, quite. And what they saw was a slight slippage in Labor’s support – understandable after 8 years in office – and a reasonably strong performance by the Liberal’s coalition partner, the National Party. But, there was nothing like the Liberal surge needed to topple Andrews’ government. Quite the contrary, in fact. In the innermost of Melbourne’s inner suburbs it was the Greens who racked up gains – taking at least 1 seat from Labor. At the same time, moderate millionaire Simon Holmes-A’Court, author of the “Teal Revolution” which unseated a clutch of Liberal party grandees in the federal election, was claiming victory in two out of the four seats contested by his Climate 200 movement.

What the Liberal Party, and the Australian Right in general, have yet to register and accept is that Australia’s centre of political gravity has shifted sharply to the left. Crucial to this crippling perceptual failure is the performance of the Australian media, the Murdoch press in particular, where right-wing sentiment has become so deeply entrenched that its editors, journalists and columnists no longer even try to understand the other side of the political divide.

Those not dismissed by right-wing “shock jocks” as “woke”, are branded “cultural Marxists”, or “critical race theorists”. It has become almost impossible to persuade the Right that the number of people who actually merit these ideological labels is nowhere near large enough to swing an election. Even more dangerously, the assumption remains (no matter how meagre the evidence) that the overwhelming majority of “ordinary people” share the Right’s rampant prejudices. It is only after the votes have been counted that their misperceptions stand exposed.

On both sides of the Tasman this sort of “bubble thinking” is apt to steer the principal parties of the Right in the wrong direction. No matter how unanimous social-media appears at times, its ideological homogeneity is much more the product of IT engineers’ algorithms than it is of some broad cultural consensus. Such consensus as still exists in the Anglosphere, is far more likely to be found clustering around the shibboleths of the Left than the Right.

Gender Equality, Climate Change, Indigenous Rights, Cultural Diversity: hard though it may be for many on the Right to accept, these causes attract vastly more followers than Racism, Sexism, Homophobia and Climate Change Denialism. Not that Murdoch’s columnists, nor Australian Sky TV’s pundits, will ever concede an inch to such ideological heresies.

Andrews’ Victorian victory is of a piece with the general failure of the American Right to achieve the gains it was expecting in the recent mid-term elections. Generally speaking, voters not already addicted to the Right’s ideological Kool-Aid find very little to like about candidates who manifest the odd and at times frightening behaviour of ideological zealots and outlandish conspiracy theorists. As Holmes-A’Court’s “teal” candidates have proved in two elections on the trot, moderation + warmth is a winning combination – even in traditionally conservative electorates.

What, then, can New Zealand’s Labour leader, Jacinda Ardern, learn from the experience of her Victorian counterpart?

Almost certainly, the most important lesson to be drawn from Saturday’s Victorian result is that it is very wrong to give too much credence to the Right’s predictions of inevitable – and crushing – victory. The political-economy of the mainstream news media makes it considerably easier to shape right-wing than left-wing political narratives. In spite of numerous studies confirming that a majority of journalists lean to the left, it is rare to encounter mainstream journalists willing to cast the conduct of their employer’s principal advertisers in a consistently unfavourable light.

Equally unwise, is the ingrained habit of far too many political journalists to speak with unwarranted confidence about the attitudes of “ordinary” people. All too frequently, such commentary is based on nothing more than the crudest stereotypes. Among the Professional and Managerial Class, in particular, there is a pernicious view of “ordinary” people as repositories of all manner of “deplorable” prejudices and predilections – as if they weren’t discussing human-beings at all, but orcs.

Jacinda Ardern should draw reassurance from both the American and Australian elections that holding fast to a moderate progressivism is very far from being a losing strategy. Refusing to engage in the mud-wrestling so beloved of populist politicians is also unlikely to cost her votes. Nor being willing to engage in a little public humility. People who make mistakes every day of their lives are surprisingly willing to forgive those politicians who admit to being human, all-too-human.

Perhaps the most important lesson our Prime Minister could learn from the Victorian Premier, however, is the one he delivered to his fellow Victorians on election night. Quoting the former Labor prime-minister of Australia, Paul Keating, Andrews told his cheering followers: “Leadership isn’t about doing what’s popular, it’s about doing what’s right.” Alluding to the trials of the Covid-19 Pandemic, he praised his fellow Victorians for maintaining their “faith in science, and their faith in each other”.

It was that sense of kindness, he said, that sense of all being in this together, that carried Victoria through a one-in-one-hundred-year crisis. “Friends,” he reassured his fellow Victorians, “hope always defeats hate.”

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 28 November 2022.

Hi-Viz Vengeance On Melbourne’s Streets.

Fuck The Jab! Are all these protesting Melbourne construction workers right? No, of course not. Covid-19 is not a figment of Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews’ imagination. Nor can one help speculating, just a little, that mixed-in with all this working-class fury there might also be a pretty large dose of toxic Aussie masculinity. What is absolutely indisputable, however, is that the ignorance and aggression on display in Melbourne has not materialised overnight, out of thin air.

THE LAST PLACE a young, well-educated, socially-liberal, mask-wearing Melburnian should be found today (22/9/21) is on the streets of downtown Melbourne. All morning, squads of increasingly angry and frustrated riot police have been clashing with groups of even angrier and more frustrated young men – most of them construction workers – protesting furiously against mandatory Covid-19 vaccination, and Labor Premier of Victoria Daniel Andrews’ decision to shut down Melbourne’s construction sites for a further two weeks. Anyone looking like a supporter of mandatory vaccination, Andrews, or even the “sell out” CFMEU (the construction workers’ union) who fell into these protesters’ hands would be in for a very hard time indeed.

It is most unlikely that Andrews and his advisers anticipated the explosion of anger that has followed their decision to make vaccination mandatory for construction workers. Pandemic decision-making is driven by the data – which showed a very low vaccination rate among this group of workers. Superficially, their reasoning was sound. By making the jab mandatory, unvaccinated tradies, desperate to get back to work, would be quick to comply. Where was the advantage in resistance?

Unfortunately, reason had nothing to do with it.

In the minds of an alarming number of the young, fit, Aussie males who dominate the Victorian construction industry, the so-called “Covid-19 Pandemic” was a crock of shit: nothing but a smokescreen laid down by the “elites”, whose unholy intention has always been to crush the spirit of hard-working working-class men by robbing them of their freedom. Why else did these high-viz demonstrators make a bee-line for the CFMEU’s headquarters as the protests kicked-off? Because if there’s one institution guaranteed to stand up for a working man’s freedom, then it’s his union. Right?

Wrong.

The CFMEU bosses, also acting reasonably, wanted to get their guys back to work as soon as possible. The building sites had been far too quiet for far too long. The members were running out of money. If the price of getting the construction industry up-and-running again was not objecting to a compulsory jab for all the lazy bastards who’d failed to get one during the weeks of lockdown, then the CFMEU would keep its mouth firmly shut. After all, which freedom was more important? The freedom to be a bloody idiot? Or, the freedom to get out and get earning again? It shouldn’t have been that hard a choice to make!

But it was.

And by the time the union bosses realised that way more blokes than they ever expected were not only refusing to get jabbed, but also blaming the union for not defending their right to say No, it was too late. There were hundreds of them right outside their front door. In vain did they demand the right to be heard. These anti-vax unionists were in no mood for explanations. First they hurled insults, then bottles, then rocks. Pretty soon all the CFMEU officials could hear was the chant every union boss dreads: “You sold us out! You sold us out! You sold us out!”

Sensibly, they retreated. This was something for the cops to sort out.

Well, yeah, usually. But these guys are very different from the middle-class sons and daughters that Melbourne’s finest are usually called upon to police during protests. Very few of those kids are willing to mix it up with the coppers – even if they were capable of such non-verbal communication. Young construction workers on the other hand: blokes who know how to handle themselves; they are a whole different story. What’s more, they’re Australians. Mixing it up with the coppers is as old as Ned Kelly – and practically an obligation. No red-blooded, working-class Aussie is going to run away from the Police – until the shooting starts.

And that’s the problem – isn’t it? The last thing Premier Andrews needs right now are half-a-dozen young construction workers bleeding-out on Flinders Street. What’s more, the protesters know it. The Riot Squad can squirt all the pepper spray, and fire all the rubber bullets it likes, but so long as their numbers hold-up, these protesters aren’t going anywhere. Hell, they’ve even drawn up a batshit crazy list of demands – just like the miners at the Eureka Stockade. And if the cops actually do start shooting? Well, who’s for an irrational revolution?

So, where the bloody hell does that leave the political leadership of Victoria and Australia? Where has all this batshit craziness come from? Best guess? It’s come from nearly forty years of working-class blokes being looked straight through – as if they weren’t there. It’s been born out of the yawning chasm between the people who get the respectful nods, and the people on the receiving end of the contemptuous sneers. Between the classy types who talk knowledgably about good wine and boutique breweries, and the guys who drink the same brand of beer as their dads’. If you shove a whole class out of sight, and make it crystal clear that nobody who matters gives a rat’s arse what they think about anything, then winning their trust when it really, really matters, is bound to be a struggle.

After all, the bosses have been telling them for forty years that all these bad things that keep happening to them cannot be helped. Yes they may be painful, but they are also necessary. And besides, there are no alternatives. That was shit forty years ago, and it’s still shit. So, when the working-class hears the people in charge spewing out the same old rhetoric about painful but necessary adjustments – for the good of all – is it any wonder that the first response of a fair old chunk of them is scepticism?

Especially when there are YouTube videos and Facebook posts telling them that this whole Covid thing is a hoax – just another trick by billionaire vampires to deprive them of what little freedom they have left.

Especially when the “nice” people get to work from home on full pay, while the gates to the city’s building sites remain firmly padlocked.

Are all these protesting construction workers right, then? No, of course not. Covid-19 is not a figment of Daniel Andrews’ imagination. Nor can one help speculating, just a little, that mixed-in with all this working-class fury there might also be a pretty large dose of toxic Aussie masculinity. What is absolutely indisputable, however, is that the ignorance and aggression on display on the streets of Melbourne has not materialised overnight, out of thin air.

As W.H. Auden wrote on the eve of the Second World War:

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 23 September 2021.

Getting Tough.

Not Mucking Around: With upwards of 800 dead from the virus’s resurgence in the Australian state of Victoria, leniency is not on Premier Daniel Andrews’ agenda. The Victorian Police are cracking down hard on the protesters the Australian press has labelled "Covidiots".

IMAGES OF POLICE, some in riot gear, others on horseback, charging into Victorian protesters have shocked a lot of Kiwis. We all realise that the second wave of Covid-19 has hit the Australian state of Victoria hard. So, when it comes to people deliberately flouting the rules of lockdown, we are not surprised that the patience of both the state government, and the overwhelming majority of its citizens, has run out. With upwards of 800 dead from the virus’s resurgence, leniency is not on Premier Daniel Andrews’ agenda.

How relieved our own Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, must be that she has not had to face anything like the death toll of her Labour counterpart across the Tasman. And, how thankful, that she and Police Commissioner, Andy Coster, have been excused the grim duty of cracking-down hard on illegal protests. At least until very recently, the New Zealand authorities have been able to secure public compliance exclusively through the power of moral suasion. Resort to force has, so far, been deemed unnecessary.

For how much longer, however, can this happy situation endure? After the mass rally which took place in Auckland’s Aotea Square on Saturday, 12 September, the Prime Minister, Director-General of Health and Police Commissioner must all be wondering.

Organised primarily by Advance New Zealand (Jami-Lee Ross) and the Public Party of New Zealand (Billy Te Kahika) the rally attracted somewhere between 1,500 and 5,000 protesters. In flouting the rules severely limiting the size of public gatherings under Level 2, their purpose was to demonstrate to the country their unwillingness to accept that the Covid-19 virus constitutes a threat of sufficient seriousness to justify either restricting personal liberty, or damaging the economy. These impositions, they insist, confirm the reality of a global conspiracy against our rights and freedoms. Evil elites are intent on enslaving us, they say. A tyrannical world government is planned. And, may God forgive them, leading New Zealand politicians are part of the plot.

The extraordinary danger posed by gatherings of such prodigious size, involving persons holding such extraordinary views, hardly requires spelling-out. The Saturday rally had the potential to act as a super-spreader of Covid-19. It may yet turn out to have been a catastrophe in the making.

What to do? Demanding Police action against political parties active in the current election campaign is a big ask. Especially so, given the official blind eye turned to the breaking of Level 2 rules by Black Lives Matter protesters across the country in early June.

The size of the ask grows even bigger when we consider whether provoking some form of Police intervention may not be part of Advance NZ’s and the Public Party’s election strategy. If your party’s claim is that the New Zealand Government has become tyrannical, then what better way of proving it than encouraging the ugly scenes unfolding in Victoria to be repeated in the parks and streets of New Zealand?

Commissioner Coster will also be wondering whether any such hard-line Police response can be assured of unflinching government support. After all, the historical precedents are not encouraging.

Confronted with a group of radicals and revolutionaries undergoing secret weapons training in Tuhoe country back in 2007, the New Zealand Police organised a raid on the tiny Bay of Plenty settlement of Ruatoki. The imagery of heavily-armed police officers, many of them kitted-out like soldiers, rounding-up women and children, generated a ferocious public backlash. In the weeks and months that followed the public relations disaster of the Ruatoki Raid, the Police found themselves politically and legally abandoned.

The purpose of the raid: apprehending potential guerrillas and terrorists; was forgotten. Assailed by the radical Left, Helen Clark’s government quietly distanced itself from the controversy. Many young journalists were content to relay the Left’s version of events uncritically. The Courts threw out key elements of the Prosecution’s case. The accused found themselves transformed into persecuted heroes, while the Police were portrayed as neo-colonial racists. The career of Howard Broad, the Police Commissioner of the time, and a strong advocate for integrating Treaty of Waitangi principles into New Zealand policing, was blighted by Ruatoki.

Commissioner Coster will not want to share his predecessor’s fate. If his officers are asked to enforce the rules keeping New Zealanders safe, then their Government must undertake to do no less for them.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 18 September 2020.