Legislating For Liberty.

Revolutionary Intentions: The Regulatory Standards Bill sounds like one of those pieces of legislation debated on a dreary Thursday afternoon in an almost empty House of Representatives - it is anything but.

FOR A BILL set to transform New Zealand into a libertarian nightmare, it has an extremely boring name. The Regulatory Standards Bill (RSB) sounds like one of those pieces of legislation debated on a dreary Thursday afternoon in an almost empty House of Representatives. Not because anyone in particular wants it, but because those whose job it is to monitor the efficacy or otherwise of government regulations declares it to be necessary.

MPs protesting to their respective Party Whips that they know absolutely nothing about this sort of bill’s content, are told that participation in such debates is good for them. Speaking for ten minutes about something one knows absolutely nothing about is key political skill. Without it, no politician should expect to do more than shepherd boring bills through a nearly empty House for the rest of their (short) political career.

The RSB may sound like one of those bills, it is anything but. According to one critic, the Bill will “neuter the ability of lawmakers to consider anything outside of individual liberty and property rights”.

That this proposed piece of alleged legislative dynamite is the product of the Act Party is entirely unsurprising. David Seymour and his caucus are the most disciplined band of ideologically-driven politicians in our Parliament. Liberty and Property are their twin lodestars, and by them they navigate the choppy seas of New Zealand’s resolutely non-ideological politics.

Knowing exactly where they want to go has made it much easier for Act to determine, often with alarming and near-revolutionary clarity, what they ought to do. Boiled down to its essence, Act’s political mission is captured in the French expression laissez-faire – loosely translated as “let them do it”.

If the actions of individuals cause no harm to others – let them do it.

If those actions involve only their own property – let them do it.

Contrariwise, if some individuals seek to compel other individuals for any reason other than preventing them from causing harm to others, then don’t let them do it. And if that compulsion involves regulating the use of other individuals’ private property, then definitely don’t let them do it!

Understandably, socialists are not (and never have been) great fans of laissez-faire. The collective welfare is (or used to be) their lodestar. Individuals determined to put themselves, and their property, ahead of measures designed to serve the common good should not be allowed to do it.

Obviously, a great deal rests on how “harm” is defined.

If your dairy farm is polluting the streams and rivers that others are accustomed to fishing and swimming in, does that constitute harm? And, if it does, then, surely, the state is entitled to regulate your farming practices? That is to say, restrict the ways in which you can legally use your private property.

Alternatively, if a friend undertakes to sell you a few grams of cannabis, what business is it of the state’s? Why should smoking weed, which most medical scientists have determined to be essentially harmless, be punishable by law? Why shouldn’t individuals, if they’re old enough to assess and accept the consequences of using cannabis, and it causes others no harm, be allowed to do it?

If pressed, Act will always put the liberty of individual New Zealanders and the sanctity of their private property, well ahead of the nation’s collective welfare. With National and NZ First’s backing, Act’s leader hopes to enshrine his party’s guiding principles in the RSB.

If it becomes law, then all regulatory legislation will be weighed carefully by an appointed board against the claims of Liberty and Property. And, if Parliament, in its wisdom, elects to override the Board’s advice, then, as is already the case with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, it will be required to do so in the basilisk glare of public scrutiny.

Naturally, environmental groups, iwi, trade unionists and the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of NGO-land regard the RSB with horror and dismay. They no doubt believed that, having been soundly defeated several times already, such libertarian legislative forays were things of the past.

The Left, generally, is flabbergasted and outraged that the Coalition remains committed to the RSB’s passage. And, boy, are they making a fuss. To hear them talk, the Bill might have been co-sponsored by Sauron and Voldemort.

But, don’t be alarmed. One parliament cannot bind another. If the RSB looks like transforming Aotearoa-New Zealand into Mordor, then the next government can simply repeal it.

A version of this essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 6 June 2025.

Beyond Question?

Record Numbers: The Hīkoi mō te Tiriti, which began at the tip of the North, and the tail of the South, on 11 November, culminated outside Parliament on Tuesday, 19 November 2024, in one of the largest demonstrations in New Zealand’s political history.

ACCORDING TO TE ARA, the Ministry of Culture and Heritage’s Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, there were 15,000 in 2004. Protesters, that is. Gathered in front of Parliament to demonstrate their opposition to the then Labour Government’s foreshore and seabed legislation.

Twenty years later, on Tuesday, 19 November 2024, the number was 42,000 – a truly vast crowd spilling out of Parliament Grounds and into the surrounding streets. This makes the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti, which began at the tip of the North, and the tail of the South, nine days earlier, on 11 November, one of the largest demonstrations in New Zealand’s political history.

On the surface, David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill, seems too puny a thing to have provoked such an extraordinary outpouring of opposition. After all, no party represented in the House of Representatives – apart from Act – is committed to supporting the Bill beyond its Second Reading debate.

Seymour’s proposed legislation is a dead man walking. It will not be enacted during the current parliamentary term. Those determined to prevent the Treaty Principles Bill from becoming law – thereby precipitating a binding referendum on its content – have already won.

How, then, is it possible that a Bill with just six months left to live, has inspired 42,000 mostly Māori New Zealanders to gather outside the parliamentary complex to demand its instant demise? If they’ve already won – why are they still fighting?

They are still fighting because they know that David Seymour is right. His bill might be killed at its Second Reading, but the issues he has raised will not die. He has placed a question on the parliamentary table. A question which a great many more than 35,000 New Zealanders would like to hear answered:

Is this country to be forever constrained by the content of an agreement entered into 184 years ago, by individuals long since deceased, binding entities that have long since disappeared, in order to resolve issues that have long since been decided?

Another way of framing that question is to ask:

Should the New Zealand that was built after the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, and very largely in spite of it – i.e. the New Zealand of today – be radically refashioned, constitutionally, administratively, politically, economically, and culturally, in accordance with the alleged understandings and intentions of te Tiriti’s Nineteenth Century Māori signatories?

But that question immediately raises another – and this one is much more dangerous.

With the benefit of hindsight, do the Māori of today regret the decision of their ancestors to sign the Treaty, or, at least, do they lament that their tīpuna did not make clearer what they expected to get by entering into a formal relationship with one of the Nineteenth Century’s most powerful states?

Which, in turn, raises another.

Is that what has really been going on these past 50 years: have Māori, alongside their Pakeha allies in the judiciary, the universities, and the public service, been quietly revising the Treaty’s meaning so that it better reflects, and serves, the needs of Māori living in the Twenty-First Century?

It is precisely to prevent these sorts of questions being asked – let alone answered – that Māori are so determined to “Kill the Bill”. It also explains why sending Seymour’s Bill to the Justice Select Committee has been so energetically resisted by so many Treaty “defenders”: everyone from a curious clutch of Christian clergy, to a concerned collection of King’s Counsel. The very last thing they, and the organisers of Tuesday’s extremely impressive hikoi, want, is for the meaning and purpose of the Treaty of Waitangi to be openly debated for months at a time.

David Seymour’s great sin has been to offer an alternative to this covert effort to change the constitution of New Zealand by changing the Treaty’s historical meaning. Those who argue that the Treaty Principles Bill is a blatant attempt to re-write the Treaty are quite right. What they omit to say, however, is that Seymour is only doing openly what Māori nationalists and their Pakeha allies have been doing, quietly, in legal chambers, common-rooms, and public service offices for the past 50 years.

The critical difference, of course, is that Seymour was proposing to give the rest of us a vote on his version.

Leaving us with one, final, question:

Is 42,000 enough to stop him?

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 22 November 2024.

Judge Not.

Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. Matthew 7:1-2

FOUR HUNDRED AND FORTY men and women professing the Christian faith would appear to have imperilled their immortal souls. The second of the Ten Commandments could hardly be clearer: Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image. And yet, in their open letter to the nation’s legislators, these 440 clerics have made it equally clear that, by their adoration of te Tiriti o Waitangi, idolatry is precisely what they are guilty of. Worse still, by publicly bowing down before te Tiriti, and serving it so aggressively, they have called down upon their heads the wrath of a self-confessed “Jealous God”, whose punishments extend – even unto the fourth generation.

Then again, citing the Old Testament probably cuts little ice with these Christians. They do, after all, introduce their attack on Act leader David Seymour’s, Treaty Principles Bill with a quote from the Gospel of Matthew:

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.

A fine old Presbyterian once described the Beatitudes (from which the above verse is taken) as “Jesus’s marching orders”. Such a pity, then, that what the clerics put their names to evinces so little in the way of elucidating the paths of peace. Counselling men and women to use their power to silence the voices of others smacks more of violence and repression than peace-making.

Certainly, David Seymour’s epistolary assailants have given him cause to seek solace in the ninth beatitude:

Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.

For Christ’s sake? Who among the 440 clerics would aver that David Seymour’s Bill is infused with Christian purpose? Not many, if any. Which is disappointing, since the Act leader would appear to have a firmer theological grasp of the issues at stake in this matter than the professors of theology who signed on to the open letter.

“I am not a religious person,” David Seymour tweeted. “However, I do have an enormous respect for the core Christian principle of imago dei – we are each made in the image of God. I like it because it automatically means we all have equal dignity. It is one of the foundations of liberal democracy and whether you are Christian or not, you have to be grateful for the freedom and dignity that idea has given us.”

Well, yes, it does, and we should. The idea that each soul approaches the throne of God naked and alone, no longer cloaked in the pretentions of class, or race, or gender, but only in the artistry of the Creator’s hand, is, perhaps, why the carpenter from Nazareth warned us:

Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

A beam in the eye of 440 clerics? Surely not?

But what else are we to call a letter which so clearly divides the people of New Zealand into sheep and goats – an exercise in separation considered by most Christians to be the privilege of Jehovah alone.

The letter’s depiction of te Tiriti as a “sacred covenant” is also troubling. No deities of any kind are invoked, or included, in the Treaty’s text. It was a document made on earth, by men, and in the nature of all man-made things its meaning has proved as difficult to pin down as quicksilver.

Is it really such an awful sin to ask the voters of New Zealand to validate, or repudiate, David Seymour’s attempt to define the essence of te Tiriti o Waitangi? After all, God leads us through history towards the future, not the past. It is surely blasphemy to suggest that he has forever bound New Zealanders’ imaginations to the confused deliberations of 6th February 1840.

Is a referendum really so unthinkable? After all, as another wise cleric (not one of the 440) memorably declared: Vox populi, vox dei. The voice of the people is the voice of God.

This sermon was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 13 September 2024.

Shrugging-Off The Atlas Network.

Upholding The Status-Quo: The Left’s election defeat is not the work of the Atlas Network. It is not even the work of David Seymour and Act. It is the work of ordinary citizens who liked the Right’s stories better than they liked the Left’s. If the Right’s stories were made more convincing by a sympathetic think tank, then the Left should not be getting mad at their opponent’s effective apparatus, it should be getting mad at itself for not having one of its own.

THE ATLAS NETWORK has been trending lately – in the minds of the New Zealand Left. Devastated by the election result, and further demoralised by recent polling showing the Right increasing its grip on New Zealanders’ political imagination, the Atlas Network has provided the Left with what it most needs – an explanation for its failure.

It is important to state at the very start that the Atlas Network is not the Left equivalent of Q-Anon. It is a real organisation, founded in 1981, by Antony Fisher (1915-1988) devotee of the fanatical anti-collectivist, F.A. Hayek (1899-1992) and a tireless proponent of the monetarist and free-market ideas that ultimately found practical political expression in the government of Margaret Thatcher and the administration of Ronald Reagan.

Fisher’s objective in forming the Atlas Network was to encourage like-minded individuals and groups to do as he had done nearly thirty years earlier: set up “think tanks” dedicated to advancing free-market ideology. His own creation, the Institute of Economic Affairs, was founded in 1955 and played an important role in formulating what would become Thatcher’s economic programme. But, just as Che Guevara wanted “one, two, many Vietnams”, Fisher wanted one, two, many right-wing think tanks. He had witnessed at first-hand what could be achieved by a handful of people “thinking the unthinkable”. The more there were of these ideological handfuls, the faster the “New Right’s” ideas would spread.

None of this information is new, Fisher’s exploits are documented comprehensively in Richard Cockett’s book, “Thinking The Unthinkable: Think-tanks and the Economic Counter-revolution, 1931-83”, published in 1995.

Paying close attention to who is influencing whom behind the scenes is, however, something activists on the New Zealand Left engage in only intermittently. There was a brief flurry of left-wing journalists twitching back the curtains in the late-1980s. They were motivated, mainly, by the dramatic emergence of the Business Roundtable as the New Zealand free marketeers’ ideological powerhouse.

The fact that Roger Douglas, father of New Zealand’s neoliberal revolution, was a member of Hayek’s high altitude think tank, the “Mont Pelerin Society”, prompted even more left-wing interest in the influence of think tanks on New Zealand’s political life.

With the election of the Labour-Alliance coalition government in 1999, however, the power of the Business Roundtable began to wane, leading to a corresponding falling-off of interest in venturing behind-the-scenes by left-wing journalists. This decline was compounded by the death of the Left’s principal keeper-of-tabs on the machinations of the business-backed Right, the editor, author and journalist, Bruce Jesson (1944-1999).

The death of the Business Roundtable’s indefatigable Executive Director, Roger Kerr (1945-2011) was similarly demoralising for the Right. In 2012, having already merged with the New Zealand Institute, the Business Roundtable became a new, much sunnier, think tank, the New Zealand Initiative. Led by the ebullient Oliver Hartwich, the New Zealand Initiative has carefully avoided acquiring the sinister reputation of its big-business-backed predecessor.

Growing alongside the Business Roundtable for most of the 1990s was what began as the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers (ACT). Founded in 1993 by Roger Douglas, the former National cabinet minister, Derek Quigley, and multi-millionaire, Craig Heatly, ACT was to serve as a vehicle for those classical liberal ideas no longer deemed acceptable by either Labour or National. In 1994, a year after New Zealand’s adoption of the Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) electoral system, ACT became the Act Party. In the first MMP general election (1996) Act (now led by Douglas’s former henchman, Richard Prebble) secured 6.1 percent of the Party Vote.

The question being asked by left-wing journalists in 2024 is whether or not the Act Party has always been associated with right-wing organisations like the Atlas Network. Or, is the Network’s sole link with Act its present leader, David Seymour, who, prior to entering Parliament, was employed by two conservative Canadian think tanks, the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and the Manning Foundation, both of which were, at one time or another, members of the Atlas Network.

Neither of these questions make much sense.

To begin with, the Atlas Network has never made any secret of its existence (even if, after years of left-wing attention, it now keeps its membership list secret. It was not illegal to set up such an organisation in 1981, and it is not illegal now. Think tanks, and organisations dedicated to facilitating the establishment of think tanks, have been a feature of the global political landscape for decades – and that is as true of the Left as it is of the Right.

Indeed, the rise of right-wing think tanks in the 1970s and 80s was a direct response to what their big-business backers (including, entirely unsurprisingly, big oil and big tobacco) saw as the near conquest of their capitalist societies by left-wing ideas and left-leaning institutions.

The free-market fightback, pioneered by think tanks like Fisher’s Institute of Economic Affairs, represented UK and US capitalists’ last-ditch defence of their profits and power. They had witnessed the trade unions bring down a British government in 1973, and the liberal press force the resignation of an American president in 1974. These unprecedented defeats had struck them as harbingers of doom – their doom.

That the Right was smart enough to realise that the battle for the hearts and minds of voters living in democratic states would be a battle of ideas – ideas that those same voters could believe in and be inspired by – and against which the Left, still mired in the demonstrably inadequate economic doctrines of the past, could offer nothing remotely competitive, was hardly the Right’s fault.

Nor is it fair to blame a young man, inspired by the libertarian and free-market doctrines of the right-wing counter-revolution of the 1980s and 90s, for accepting offers of employment from conservative Canadian think tanks. Where else was he supposed to go looking for a “political” job – the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions? Greenpeace?

It is highly instructive that left-wing politicians with CVs that show them working for “progressive” organisations, NGOs, and yes, even left-wing think tanks with links to billionaire donors, are not portrayed as evil-doers by the mainstream media. Having a background in the trade unions, student organisations, environmental groups, etc, is seen as perfectly natural. Where else are left-wingers going to learn their trade? Exxon? British & American Tobacco? Pfizer?

David Seymour’s links to the Atlas Network do not make him a villain. Working for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy is not the same as working for Hamas. Morally-speaking, is taking money from oil companies really all that distinguishable from giving money to oil companies every time we fill up our petrol tank? Getting from A to B; winning the battle of ideas; the Devil clips our tickets either way.

The Left’s election defeat is not the work of the Atlas Network. It is not even the work of David Seymour and Act. It is the work of ordinary citizens who liked the Right’s stories better than they liked the Left’s. If the Right’s stories were made more convincing by a sympathetic think tank, or two, then the Left should not be getting mad at their opponent’s effective apparatus, it should be getting mad at itself for not having one of its own.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project of Monday, 12 February 2024.

Luxon Rejects The “Rejection Election” At His Peril.

Fitting Right In: National retailed a reactionary manifesto of right-wing, racially-charged policies to the electorate throughout 2023. No talk back then of ignoring the overwhelming political preferences of the voting public and making a strong stand on principle. If Luxon’s pollsters and focus-groups were telling him that the public was in a mood to discipline and punish – then discipline and punish it would be.

MUCH HAS BEEN MADE of Prime Minister Chris Luxon’s definitive rejection of Act’s Treaty Principles Bill. Why? Because Luxon not only confirmed that National will vote against giving David Seymour’s bill a second reading, but at the same time acknowledged that the only reason he agreed to support it to the select committee stage was because he did not want to precipitate an unscheduled general election so soon after 14 October. In addition to providing us with a useful gauge of Luxon’s prime ministerial fortitude, Luxon’s “slap-down” of Seymour’s bottom-line policy also betrays his fundamental misreading of the election result’s meaning.

The General Election of 2023 was a rejection election, and rejection elections are powered, overwhelmingly, by popular anger. Not only was there a broad-based and vociferous element within the electorate determined to punish the incumbent Labour Government, but also a coterminous movement to roll back what was perceived to be Labour’s extreme, ideologically-driven, cultural agenda.

At no time during the election campaign did either Christopher Luxon or the National Party attempt to draw a clear distinction between themselves and the other right-wing parties – Act and NZ First – on matters relating to Māori sovereignty.

When Winston Peters announced his party’s policies in relation to removing Treaty principles from legislation, and reframing the mission of the Waitangi Tribunal, Luxon did not recoil in horror. Nor did he remind New Zealanders that it was National, under Jim Bolger and Doug Graham, that kicked-off the Treaty Settlement process back in the early-1990s. Or recall with pride that it was John Key who sent Pita Sharples to New York to sign the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

To be sure, when questioned directly about Act’s desire to clarify the principles of the Treaty by way of a binding referendum, Luxon described his most obvious coalition partner’s policy as “unhelpful and divisive”. That this response was a sop to the liberal wing of Luxon’s party, and to its more “moderate” voters, was made clear by his promotion of policies that unequivocally aligned the National Party with the right-wing populist mood of the nation. Most notably, National’s policy of curbing co-governance by abolishing Three Waters and the Māori Health Authority.

A National Party willing to send that sort of reactionary message to the electorate was not in the least bit concerned about being seen as “unhelpful” or “divisive”. And neither was the National Party committed to reinstating English at the top of official government stationery.

But those were only the most openly acknowledged efforts to align National with the majority’s determination to reject, repeal, rip-up and remove the ideological advances of Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori. Voters who understood the secret language of New Zealand conservatism were in little doubt that National had plenty more punishment in store for Māori New Zealanders.

Conservatives have long exploited the tendency of the racist Right to associate the social pathologies of drug use, domestic abuse, gun violence, aggravated robbery, juvenile delinquency, and truancy with Māori New Zealanders. That these are the pathologies of poverty, afflicting the lives of Pakeha as well as Māori, cuts little ice with right-wingers, who reject structural explanations for anti-social behaviour in favour of those highlighting personal and/or racial deficiencies.

Nor does the Right care overmuch that “cracking down hard” on crime will send Māori New Zealanders to prison in disproportionate numbers, leaving behind broken families and ruined lives. Even though, historically, “tough on crime” policies merely ensure that the cycle of crime and incarceration continues, most National Party voters regard the policy not as “a fiscal and moral failure” (as Bill English described it) but as a necessary evil.

National retailed a reactionary manifesto of right-wing, racially-charged policies to the electorate throughout 2023. Spooked by Act’s record poll numbers, and watching NZ First’s steady rise with alarm, Luxon and his team were in no mood to front-foot National’s liberal traditions. No talk back then of ignoring the overwhelming political preferences of the voting public and making a strong stand on principle. If Luxon’s pollsters and focus-groups were telling him that the public was in a mood to discipline and punish – then discipline and punish it would be.

Not that Luxon, himself, was personally suited to playing the Hard Man. Robotically positive, with his happy-chappy platitudes playing on continuous loop, Luxon left the dog-whistling to his lieutenants. The nearest he came to playing rough was when he dressed up as a pirate – and even then he had to be instructed on how to wield his sword. Even so, when all the votes had been counted and there was a three-way coalition to negotiate, Luxon struggled to locate his inner-thug. The National Party leader’s priority (in almost every setting) is to get whatever he is doing, done – whatever it takes.

And what it took was Luxon’s commitment to Seymour that his Treaty Principles Bill would be backed by National and NZ First to the select committee stage. What that meant was that Act’s coalition partners were supportive of the broad, open-ended debate that sending this particularly controversial bill to a select committee was certain to set in motion. It defies all logic to sanction this course of action if, in utter contempt for the consultation process, and regardless of what the debate reveals about the wishes of the New Zealand people vis-à-vis Te Tiriti o Waitangi, your Party’s next move is to vote it down.

Such a profoundly cynical political strategy would be dangerous at the best of times – and these are not the best of times. New Zealand is in the early stages of the same populist distemper that has polarised and paralysed the United States. Luxon and his party opted to climb on the back of this populist tiger, getting off it will be no simple matter.

To the hundreds-of-thousands of right-wing voters who backed National, Act and NZ First to bring together a government committed to disciplining and punishing Labour and its allies, it looks like Luxon’s National pony has refused its very first fence. Spooked by hui, hikoi and haka at Turangawaewae, Ratana and Waitangi, and bowing to the relentless bullying of the “legacy media”, Luxon has publicly slapped-down the Right’s young champion which, as far as they’re concerned, is the same as slapping them down – the people whose votes put National in power.

But that is not how populism works. You can’t just switch it on and off like a lightbulb. Nor can you boast about ignoring the wishes of the “overwhelming majority” of the New Zealand people. Not if you want to remain the dominant right-wing party.

The sharp up-tick in Act’s support in the latest Curia poll should be taken as a warning. So, too, should the findings of the latest Research New Zealand survey. Against all the confident prognostications of the punditocracy, a solid plurality of Men, New Zealanders aged 18-34, Kiwis living north of Taupo, and (astonishingly) Māori, are in favour of confirming the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi by referendum.

Small wonder then, that in spite of Luxon’s very public slap-down, David Seymour is not at all disposed to giving-up the fight.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 12 February 2024.

The Most Unlikely Trinity.

The Three Amigos (Pro Tem): Three politicians, one from National, one from Act, one from NZ First, walk into a bar. Sounds like the beginning of a joke, doesn’t it? The punchline, however, is that all three politicians walk out of that bar as the leaders of New Zealand’s next government.

BY THE END of this week, or the next, New Zealand will have a government. It is unlikely to be a pleasant one. The three political leaders, and the three political parties they lead, comprise the most unlikely trinity. Whether they are able to work together constructively for more than a few months is a dubious proposition – at best. Such overarching visions of New Zealand’s future as exist among them are more likely to divide than unite the members of the coalition government. In a nation already polarised politically – and growing more so by the day – the new regime’s prospectus will struggle to find long-term investors.

National, the new coalition’s dominant partner, has become a party of echoes. Most obviously of the highly successful government of John Key. But, Christopher Luxon has very little in common with Key. Where his political mentor had a keen strategic sense and an instinctive feel for where the majority of his compatriots wanted to go, Luxon is utterly lost without his talking-points. In their absence he reaches for the most banal tropes of the suburban Tory. His ad-lib political observations are peppered with the commonplace insults of his class: “whiney” and “bottom-feeders” being the most memorable examples.

Ask this man for his vision of New Zealand and he will blather-on about building a future where hard-working New Zealanders can “get ahead”. While that is indisputably the baseline ambition of every sensible citizen – who would want themselves and their family to go backwards?! “Getting ahead” is not, however, a vision.

Indeed, the whole structure of the National Party’s desideratum resonates with prejudice and resentment. Identifying only the “hard-working” for advancement presupposes a society containing more than its fair share of shirkers, grifters and malingerers. Luxon and his party see no reason why these sorts – these “bottom-feeders” – should get anywhere at all. Most certainly, they should not be allowed to get “ahead” of all those hard working Kiwis.

Mind you, those “hard workers” may not be the individuals ordinary working-class people think of when they hear the words tripping off Luxon’s tongue. When they hear someone described as a hard worker they may think of their neighbour who gets up when it’s still dark to clean offices in the central city, puts in a shift at the local supermarket, and then prepares the evening meal for her family. That’s a lot of work, and all of it is hard. She’s putting in 14-hour days, six days a week, for just enough to pay the bills. She’s a hard worker, but she’s not “getting ahead”.

In the mind of the National Party’s ideologues, however, “hard work” means something quite different. It refers to the mental agility and stamina required to manage people and resources. Only in the rarest of cases will those resources have been amassed by personal effort. In most cases they’ll belong to the shareholders of the corporation that hired its CEO. Making those resources grow is his job. It means reading reports, attending meetings, making decisions. Often in entails travelling to other cities, staying in hotels, eating out at restaurants. Putting in 14-16 hour days is not uncommon. Where the CEO’s job and the job of the working-class cleaner differ, however, is in how much they get paid for doing it.

For the CEO, earning well into six – sometimes seven – figures, “getting ahead” does not mean being able to put aside a few hundred dollars for family emergencies. No, the “getting ahead” he has in mind means arranging for his income tax to be slashed by tens-of-thousands of dollars. He resents his hard-earned money going to all those “whiney” “bottom-feeders” who haven’t so much lost their “mojo” as never possessed the faintest idea as to what it even means. All those shirkers, grifters and malingerers who have never done an honest day’s work in their lives. All those people without a clue about what people with “mojo” (which some of us refer to as ‘luck’) can do – or what they deserve for doing it.

For the most part, National’s politicians are too clever to say too much of this where anybody unsympathetic to the trials and tribulations of being “well off” might be listening. They expect their supporters (and in most cases these expectations are well-founded) to be able to read the sub-text of their otherwise anodyne political pronouncements. To be a National party member, a National Party voter, means not having, or even wanting, to have things spelt out too clearly. National’s politics is a bit like the hedges, fences and walls they erect around their properties. They are there to conceal what lies behind – lest the little people start getting big ideas about how much wealth is too much wealth.

The difference between National and Act is that the latter is seized by a curious determination to be honest about power and wealth. Raising hedges, fences and walls suggests an unwholesome pusillanimity when it comes to individual prowess. Let the little people see what “mojo” can achieve. Wealth and power is nothing to be ashamed of, indeed, the lack of it can be read as a confirmation of individual deficiency. Act members, Act voters, are comfortable with the idea that all human-beings are not born equal. Nor would they want them to be. Yes, they believe in democracy – but only because it is the best protection against aristocracy and oligarchy: the best political system for allowing the superior individual (rather than the “hard worker”) to “get ahead” without being held back by the leg-irons of class, race and/or gender privilege.

Which leaves us with the classic conservatives of NZ First. Winston Peters and his followers aren’t so much interested in changing the world – or even themselves – as they are in protecting the things they believe should not be changed. They are the sort of people who believe there is a place for everything, and everyone; and that everything, and everyone, should be made as comfortable and secure as possible in that place.

Peters and NZ First despise Act for many reasons, but primarily because, like Mark Zuckerberg, Act believes in moving fast and breaking things. As far as NZ First is concerned, societies cannot be made, societies can only be allowed to grow. And things that grow are not assisted by being hacked at, pruned or cut down. That’s why they’re suspicious of Labour and its recklessly ambitious plans to “build” a better world. But, it is also why they’re reluctant to trust National. Because all-too-often National smiles and smiles at the New Zealand people – and yet proves to be nothing but a villainous pander to the appetites of the ruling-class. The only justification for change, in the eyes of Peters and his people, is to make sure that everything remains the same.

Three politicians, one from National, one from Act, one from NZ First, walk into a bar. Sounds like the beginning of a joke, doesn’t it? The punchline, however, is that all three politicians walk out of that bar as the leaders of New Zealand’s next government.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project on Monday, 13 November 2023.

Taking Charge: Luxon Must Demonstrate That He Can Not Only Win – But Govern.

Tough Assignment: The first lesson Christopher Luxon will have to learn is that being Prime Minister is not at all the same as being CEO. Political power is always and everywhere a matter of negotiation. Even dictators discover how dangerous it is to try and rule arbitrarily, and alone. Those who tried did not remain dictators very long.

CHRISTOPHER LUXON has shown himself to be a fast learner when it comes to mastering the skills required to win. Now, having won, he cannot avoid revealing how quickly he can master the art of governing.

The first lesson he will have to learn is that being Prime Minister is not at all the same as being CEO. Political power is always and everywhere a matter of negotiation. Even dictators discover how dangerous it is to try and rule arbitrarily, and alone. Those who tried did not remain dictators very long.

And, it won’t be long before New Zealand’s new leader’s ability to manage change is put to the test. We must all hope that Luxon takes to governing as readily as he took to campaigning.

Who’s going to test him? Not Winston Peters. The leader of NZ First is in the box seat – and he knows it. Without NZ First’s 8 votes, Luxon cannot inform the Governor-General that he has the confidence of the House of Representatives. No, the person most likely to test Luxon’s political abilities is the biggest loser from the final vote count, David Seymour.

National needed the Act Party to do much better than it ended up doing in the 2023 General Election. In the final tally, Act’s Party Vote, at 8.64 percent, was only 1.05 percentage points higher than the party’s 2020 total. The actual result was well short of the support it was racking-up in pre-election polls – which climbed as high as 14 percent.

No one needed to tell Seymour who was responsible for Act’s collapse from double to single figures. Winston Peters campaigning skills (not insignificantly boosted by several large donations to NZ First) did not take long to manifest themselves – not once the triennial Joker in the pack got back out on the road. It was a test. Could Seymour maintain his winning political persona in the face of Peters’ superb demonstration (best ad’ of the campaign) of just how comfortable he was in the saddle? The answer turned out to be: “Only just.”

The first sign of Seymour’s jitters was his truculent response to the discovery of one or two questionable candidates on Act’s Party List. It was a nothing story. By the time the airwaves were carrying their names, the “unacceptable” candidates were no longer standing. The incident, responded to sensibly, could have reaffirmed Seymour’s impressive control over his party. Yes, someone had blundered, but just look at how quickly the problem was solved. That’s the sort of leader New Zealand needs!

Truculence – bordering on petulance – was a new look for Seymour, and the voters didn’t like it. One didn’t need a degree in political science to join the dots. As NZ First continued its relentless rise towards electoral viability, the Act leader was showing dangerous signs of losing his political composure altogether. How else to explain his otherwise inexplicable threat to get rid of the statutory holiday after New Year’s Day? No one was asking for it. No one wanted it. Act appeared to be going doolally.

Seymour’s threat to take his party onto the cross-benches and restrict its support for National to votes of confidence – but not supply – received much criticism, but it was exactly what Act needed. It served as a jarring reminder, not only to Luxon and National, but also to all right-wing voters, that Seymour and his party were not the sort of politicians to be taken for granted. They may not be able to ride horses, but they sure-as-shit could shoot them.

Christopher Luxon would be wise to bear that in mind as he and his negotiating team flit between Act and NZ First in search of sweet harmony. Seymour absolutely cannot be made to look like an MMP cuckold: watching the object of his political affections lavishing generous concessions upon a third party. Making Act look impotent would be the surest way of making Seymour prove to the whole world what a hard bargainer he can be.

The issue most likely to ensure that Act and its leader become the centre of attention is the future of Te Tiriti. No other policy is more likely to test the mettle of New Zealand’s new prime minister. No other policy is more likely to make National jump the wrong way.

Luxon’s advisers are practically certain to tell him that this is not an issue which engages the concern of more than a very small percentage of New Zealanders, and that exposing his new government to the barrage of abuse that was bound to follow any major concession to Act on Te Tiriti would be a catastrophic mistake.

Luxon should ignore his advisers.

No other issue speaks as clearly to the political and cultural divide presently separating New Zealanders than the current definition of Te Tiriti, and all the highly controversial policy decisions mandated and empowered by its constitutionally transformational elements. If National refuses to address this issue, humiliating Act in the process, then two very dangerous things will happen.

First. Among a significant percentage of the electorate (the people who no longer tell pollsters what they truly believe) the perception will take hold that Luxon lacks the courage to accept the mandate which his election victory has bestowed upon him. At the heart of that mandate is a commission to confront, head-on, the constitutional and cultural assumptions of the judicial, bureaucratic, academic and media elites, as they have grown and developed since 2017, and to roll them back. To make it clear from the very start that “decolonisation” and “indigenisation” are not among the priorities of the incoming government. If Luxon encourages the perception that National is “wimping out” on his mandate, then National’s political hegemony will be put at serious risk.

Second. Any attempt by National to rule out a referendum on Te Tiriti, will leave Seymour and Act with no option but to seize the mandate, which Luxon has spurned, for itself. That can only mean taking up an independent position on the cross-benches, and forcing National and NZ First to win Act’s support for every single item on their legislative agenda.

To avoid this political disaster – the most likely outcome of which would be a new election, throwing up a balance of parliamentary forces little changed from the present – Luxon must display the full range of his leadership skills.

If Seymour and Peters could be jointly commissioned by the Prime Minister with organising and encouraging the broadest possible discussion and debate about Te Tiriti, involving the broadest possible cross-section of the New Zealand population, then Act’s referendum would likely not be necessary. Such a genuinely democratic exercise would expose just how isolated the promoters of decolonisation and indigenisation are from the rest of the nation. Nothing could make clearer the elites’ lack of genuine political support. The revolutionaries embedded in the nation’s key institutions would have to come up with a new and improved strategy.

Luxon, himself, would likely emerge from this process as both a statesman and a peacemaker. Simply allowing Seymour’s plan to proceed, unmoderated, to the point of staging a binding referendum on the meaning of Te Tiriti, would provoke massive – and potentially violent – political resistance. Certainly, Te Pāti Māori and the Greens are gearing-up for a stoush which, according to Labour’s Willie Jackson, would be “five times, ten times” worse than the hugely divisive Springbok Tour protests of 1981. Opting, instead, for an open-ended, state-facilitated, and truly public discussion about the country’s constitutional future would cast Luxon as the wise and courageous champion of New Zealand’s liberal democracy. The last time National had a leader who made that his mission, it was in office for the next 12 years.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 6 November 2023.

Labour In 2023: No Place Left To Grow.

Missing The Point: It’s the element of punishment – the mood of ‘anyone but Labour’ – that Labour stubbornly refuses to accept. It certainly wasn’t evident in Chris Hipkins concession speech on the night his government was so resoundingly voted out of office. 

“I HAD BEEN HOPING that this election would resemble 2005 more than 2014. Clearly this was not the case.” So said the pseudonymous “Mickey Savage” on the Labour-leaning website, The Standard, the morning after. A spectacular understatement, obviously, but the observation also confirmed just how out of touch Labour’s membership has become.

The election-night which Saturday evening (14/10/23) most resembled wasn’t the election night of 2014, with its calamitous Party Vote of 25.13 percent, but the election night of 1990 when, after six tumultuous years in office, Labour was punished with exemplary viciousness by an electorate which had, very clearly, had enough. 1990 was also the other occasion when the voters of the “safe” Labour seat of Mt Roskill ejected their local MP (one Phil Goff) in favour the National candidate.

It’s that element of punishment – that mood of ‘anyone but Labour’ – that Labour stubbornly refuses to accept. Certainly, it wasn’t evident in Chris Hipkins concession speech. Although politicians invariably reach for tidal metaphors when confronted with significant defeats, the identification is far from apt. Politics is not a matter of gravitational attraction, it is constructed out of the hopes and fears – and rage – of human-beings. When parties lose, it’s not on account of the position of the moon, it’s because they have done things that cause even their supporters to vote for someone else – or stay at home.

The things that Labour did between 1984 and 1990 – “Rogernomics” and all that – turned New Zealand upside-down. Concepts and theories which had guided the politicians of both parties for decades were jettisoned with a speed and a ruthlessness that made effective opposition extremely difficult. Difficult, but not impossible. The New Zealand in the 1980s was still the sort of society in which dissent and debate, even in regard to what was fast becoming the state’s official ideology, was still permitted. The mainstream news media still saw the virtue of offering citizens both sides of the story.

Herein lies the difference between that earlier wholesale clean-out of Labour, and the 2023 General Election. Between 2017 and 2023, the Sixth Labour Government also turned New Zealand upside-down – but not in the same way as Roger Douglas and Richard Prebble.

When the Fourth Labour Government closed down freezing-works and sold state-owned enterprises, it was front page news. Protests were staged and documentaries were made. The responsible Cabinet Ministers were forced to explain and justify their actions publicly which, to a creditable degree, they did. The introduction of neoliberalism in New Zealand did not end up requiring (as one trade union leader had predicted) tanks in the streets.

That’s not how its been for the past six years. Massive changes in education and health policy were introduced without adequate explanation or justification. Jarring changes in the linguistic structure of official communications were implemented without consultation, leaving many New Zealanders feeling culturally disoriented and politically ignored. Distracted by the Christchurch terrorist attack and the sudden onrush of the Covid-19 Pandemic most of these developments went unnoticed until Labour, freed from NZ First’s moderating influence by the “Thankyou Jacinda!” election of 2020, began stepping up the pace of change.

Missing from this “revolution” (as Dame Claudia Orange described it) was anything approaching the coherent explanatory framework provided by Roger Douglas and his colleagues courtesy of the neoliberal intellectuals in Treasury, the Reserve Bank and the Business Roundtable.

The highly controversial report, He Puapua, for example, proposed wholesale constitutional reform – to a degree which would have left New Zealand politically unrecognisable. Far from being conceived as the starting point for a wide-ranging public debate, the report was prepared in secret and only released by the Sixth Labour Government after it was leaked to the Act Party.

Although disavowed by Jacinda Ardern, sharp-eyed members of the public recognised a remarkable degree of congruence between He Puapua’s recommendations and government policy. They were told, none too politely, that they were seeing things.

Undeterred, those taking a close interest in public policy noticed something else: the deep reluctance of Labour ministers to engage in the sort of head-to-head ideological confrontations that were common during the unrolling of Rogernomics. After 2020, all attempts to debate the future of Te Tiriti o Waitangi and Māori-Pakeha relations tended to be framed as manifestations of racist, white supremacist, prejudice. Tellingly, a long-delayed discussion document on Treaty-based constitutional reform was deemed too inflammatory for public release by Māori Development Minister Willie Jackson. It still hasn’t seen the light of day.

Even more concerning was the mainstream news media’s extreme reluctance to entertain any debate over the many contentious issues – “co-governance” in particular – that were growing out of the Crown’s newfound commitment to “indigenisation” and “decolonisation”. Increasingly, voters came to understand that there were topics which could not be questioned or debated without “consequences”. Around this new ideology they further observed the erection of a complex array of protective barriers. Those who attempted to breach these barriers were accused of spreading “misinformation, disinformation and malinformation” or, even worse, of deploying “hate speech”.

Inflation, the cost-of-living, rising mortgage interests rates: if the pollsters’ efforts were to be believed, then these were the issues driving the voters towards National, Act, and a change of government. Concerns about co-governance did not feature in these lists of voter concerns. Nonetheless, they persisted. In places where no one was likely to cluck their tongues in disapproval, or send an anonymous complaint to the HR department, the state of ethnic relations in New Zealand was the subject of intense unease. It kept Act’s numbers at record levels and fuelled the re-emergence of NZ First. It was the political dissidence that dared not speak its name, but it existed – and it would prove extraordinarily motivational.

When the defectors from Labour punished their old party in 1990, it was an act of bitter revenge. David Lange and Roger Douglas had promised “transformation” and they had delivered it. New Zealand the way Muldoon’s followers had wanted it, no longer existed. The votes of those who lamented its passing were cast against Labour in anger and despair. A final “Take that!” gesture of defiance before the new order became irretrievably bedded-in.

Thirty-three years later, voters threw their support behind National, Act and NZ First with much higher hopes of achieving something positive. While freezing works could not be re-opened or privatised state enterprises repurchased, the indigenisation and de-colonisation of New Zealand society can still be halted at the stroke of a ministerial pen.

It is to be hoped that New Zealand’s new Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, understands this. That among all the other things he has to do, he must not fail to honour the expectation of his conservative voters to defend democratic “New Zealand” from Te Tiriti-Centric “Aotearoa”.

The 2023 election result signals a decisive shift of the non-Māori, non-Pasefika, and non-Woke elements of the electorate to the right. Labour’s massive losses in Auckland put it at serious risk of being reduced to a South Auckland-based Pasefika party. In forthcoming elections, what National, Act and NZ First haven’t already taken is in grave danger of being stripped off Labour’s electoral carcass by the Greens and Te Pāti Māori.

For as long as its manifesto fails to overtly distance itself from the authoritarian radicalism of today’s “progressives”, the party of Mickey Savage, and “Mickey Savage”, seems destined to fade into historical irrelevance.

From where it stands now, Labour has run out of places to grow.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 16 October 2023.

Reckless Speculation.

Don't Panic! Chris Bishop’s scaremongering may elicit nothing but voter scorn, being seen as evidence of a party in full panic-mode. Presumably, National’s loss of confidence in its capacity to shape events has been brought on by its pollsters’ detection of a steady, and so far irreversible, slide in their level of electoral support.

WHAT HAS CHRIS BISHOP SEEN that has so unhinged him? Why would National’s Campaign Manager, whose party is currently attracting by far the largest share of voter support, suddenly start babbling about a second election?

In all its long history of responsible government: from the 1850s to the present day; New Zealand has never been forced into a second election. It’s just not something New Zealanders anticipate. Having cast our votes, most of us expect a functioning government to be fashioned without delay. What we do not expect is for the party with the largest number of votes to say: “No, we don’t like the hand you’ve dealt us – deal us another one.”

The sort of politicians who do that sort of thing are mostly to be found in the member states of the European Union. When the citizens of an EU member state get it into their heads that they don’t particularly like the latest treaty their political class had signed, successfully petition for a ratification referendum, and win it, they’re surprised to learn that voting a proposition down is nothing like enough to persuade their political class to accept defeat and enforce the will of the people.

Dear me, no – that’s not how things work at all. With the honourable exception of the United Kingdom, the only thing winning a referendum entitles the poor old EU serfs to is … another referendum. Just ask the Danes, who voted “No” to the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, only to discover that “No” was the wrong answer. In 1993, presented with another referendum, the Danes reluctantly voted “Yes”. The lesson was not lost on the Irish, who faced a similar ‘second go’ if they voted down the austerity measures contained in the EU’s fiscal treaty of 2012.

Nothing signals the political class’s contempt for the will of the people as strongly as its refusal to accept the will of the people. The message being sent is unmistakable: We – not you – know what’s best for the nation. So, don’t go getting ideas above your station. Which was the pretty much the gist of Chris Bishop’s reckless speculation. Get it right – or we’ll make you do it again!

The question now, in the backwash of Bishop’s intervention, is how will the voters – especially those currently intending to vote for Winston Peters – respond to National’s threat? Is the prospect of enduring something unprecedented in New Zealand’s political history – a second election – likely to prove too unsettling for the average punter? Will it be enough to extinguish the fluttering flame of rebellion that led them to contemplate a vote for NZ First? Will “instability” simply be coded as “personal insecurity” in conservative voters’ brains, causing them to tug their forelocks and, suitably chastened, step back into National’s ranks?

If that’s what happens (and very clearly that is what National’s strategists are hoping will happen) then the NZ First Party Vote may drop below the 5 percent MMP threshold. National’s Party Vote, and quite possibly Act’s too, may then inflate sufficiently to allow them to come together in the “clean” two-party coalition government Christopher Luxon is begging voters to give him.

To discover that New Zealanders could so easily be cowed into submission would be rather disconcerting. It would signal an almost masochistic desire to be punished for allowing themselves to be seduced by Jacinda Ardern’s “kindness” back in 2020. Lacking Peters’ restraining influence, the resulting National-Act government would have free-rein to impose the swingeing austerity programme required to pay for Luxon’s inflationary tax-cuts. That so many of us are willing to see so much pain inflicted upon our fellow citizens, strongly suggests that there is a fair amount of sadism mixed in with all that masochism. Hardly a pretty picture of our national character, and even less so of those NZ First voters so easily bounced into abandoning their nobler impulses by the prospect of a second election.

Contrariwise, Bishop’s scaremongering may elicit nothing but voter scorn, being seen as evidence of a party in full panic-mode. Presumably, National’s loss of confidence in its capacity to shape events has been brought on by its pollsters’ detection of a steady, and so far irreversible, slide in their level of electoral support. Bishop’s talk of a “hung parliament” may even suggest that notwithstanding NZ First’s support, National-Act may soon be struggling to command the 61 seats needed to govern.

Those same pollsters may also be predicting that if Act’s support continues to decline, and NZ First’s to climb, then, by the evening of Saturday, 14 October, the two parties may be level-pegging. Certainly, such a prospect would induce palpitations in all but the most hardened political campaigners. Not only would it void the best argument for Luxon making Act his first choice, but it would also throw into sharp focus the National Party leader’s singular lack of experience in forging coalitions. Voters would be entitled to query whether Luxon has the political skills needed to manage coalition partners displaying such obvious mutual loathing as NZ First and Act.

Where the polls land in this, the last week of the election campaign, may produce a truly spectacular result. Providing Peters’ support remains solidly above 6 percent, and Act’s determination to hold a referendum on the meaning of Te Tiriti remains firm, something disastrous may happen to National’s support. Seeing only the chaos and instability that Bishop’s reckless speculation has primed them to see, a crucial number of the voters who deserted National for Labour in 2020 – and were then persuaded to return by Luxon’s elevation to the leadership in December 2021 – may opt to return to the devils they know.

After all, a political combination that has already demonstrated its incapacity to deliver very much of anything, may begin to look a lot more desirable than a coalition of parties committed to making the economy scream, and splitting their society into two, mutually hostile, racial camps, with frightening efficiency. The venerable Aesop’s fable about the frogs who grew tired of their do-nothing monarch, Old King Log, only to find his deadly replacement, the altogether too active King Stork, much less to their liking, seems increasingly apposite to the 2023 election campaign’s final days.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project of Monday, 9 October 2023.

National Starts To Panic.

Running Scared? That’s the voters’ choice, if you listen to National’ s panicky Chris Bishop: a clean two-party coalition, or a dirty three-way.

GUYON ESPINER AND ANDREA VANCE kept casting glances towards Ruth Richardson, much as they would towards a batty old aunt. Indisputably, there was something deeply eccentric about Richardson’s performance on Saturday’s Newshub Nation. But, there was also something scary.

Like the Bourbons (the French royal family restored to power following the defeat of Napoleonic France) Richardson appears to have “learned nothing, and forgotten nothing”. Hearing her speak about the New Zealand economy, and what is needed to restore it to health, it was as though the three decades that have slipped by since her brief tenure as Finance Minister were empty of incident. As if all the deterioration in the quality of New Zealanders’ lives and the slow decay of their nation’s institutions – much of it attributable to Richardson’s policies – could be made to disappear by a furious waving of hands.

Richardson is exactly the same person, ideologically, that she was in 1991, when her vicious “Mother of all Budgets” left beneficiary families in tears, and the charities dedicated to their support starved of resources. The same, pint-sized true believer: fizzing with ideological certainty; ready to inflict pain and hardship upon half a nation for its own good – and for the even better of the other half.

That the passage of so many years has not dimmed the fanatical brightness in Richardson’s eyes is only marginally less frightening than the fact that she sits on the Act Party’s Board-of-Directors.

That Ruth Richardson just might have the ear of Act Party Leader, David Seymour, was reportedly enough for a number of the National Party’s biggest friends and donors to take a deep breath and pour hundreds-of-thousands of dollars into the coffers of NZ First. Their argument was straightforward. National could not afford to be driven into the same dangerous territory as Jim Bolger. Winston Peters had applied the handbrake whenever Jacinda Ardern’s government threatened to leave the road – best to have him there if Christopher Luxon’s looked like doing the same.

After all, the only thing that had saved Jim Bolger’s government, following three years of “Ruthanasia”, was the First-Past-The-Post electoral system. The disastrous electoral impact of Richardson’s policies may be measured in the precipitate fall in the National Party’s share of the popular vote. From 48 percent in 1990 to just 35 percent in 1993. Had MMP been in place for the 1993 general election, Labour and the Alliance, with a combined Party Vote of 52 percent could easily have taken power. Bolger would have presided over National’s first one-term government.

If Seymour is permitted to exert the same economic and social policy influence over Luxon’s government as Richardson exerted over Bolger’s, then a Labour-Green government in 2026 will be odds-on favourite. And it won’t be anything like the Labour-Green-NZ First Government of 2017-2020. Assuming the pollsters are correct, and that Chris Hipkins’ government is soundly defeated on Saturday, then a pretty ruthless scouring of the Labour Party is unavoidable. What a National-Act government (unrestrained by Peters’ handbrake) is likely to face in 2026 will be as close to a “coalition of communists” as New Zealand has ever seen.

For a few days, over the course of the past fortnight, it appeared that the moderate faction of the National Party had prevailed over its hard-liners. Luxon made it clear to the voting public that while his preference was for a “clean” two-party coalition with the Act Party, if its preference was otherwise, then he would pick up the phone and call Winston. Almost overnight, NZ First’s numbers improved by a whole percentage point – lifting it to a projected 6 percent of the Party Vote. With NZ First securing that level of support, a National-Act-NZ First government became a dead certainty. The Right was poised to re-take the Treasury Benches.

Or … not. Between Luxon’s confirmation of a week ago that, if required, a three-party coalition, including NZ First, was possible; and National Campaign Manager Chris Bishop’s panicky Sunday predictions of deadlocked negotiations, hung parliaments, and the possibility (probability?) of a second election; something very serious had gone very wrong. Somewhere in National’s caucus, party, or party-donors’ ranks (and, quite possibly, in all three simultaneously) a split has opened up between those who favour simply a change of government, and those who, echoing Act’s election slogan, favour “real change” – Richardsonian change.

Having witnessed the NZ First “surge”, from 5 to 6 percent, these “Real-Changers” were clearly terrified that Act’s recent slump in support, from 15 percent to 10 percent, was not going to stop, and that Luxon might well emerge from Saturday night’s count with a Party Vote between 34-36 percent, followed by Act and NZ First with 8 percent apiece. For the Real-Changers, an Act Party with no more support than NZ First could produce only a lazy, do-nothing, National Government – something on the model of John Key’s. Unacceptable, was their judgement. Act won’t wear it. Seymour would rather face a new election than spend the next three years as National’s and NZ First’s geeky younger sibling. If Chris Bishop wasn’t prepared to tell the public, then Act and the Real-Changers would.

Hence Bishop’s panicky statement regarding fruitless negotiations, hung parliaments and a second election. Clearly, he and his fellow strategists are attempting to spook Peters’ more recent converts into returning to National and Act. Their argument is brutally simple: back a National-Act government – without Peters – or face months of crippling political and economic instability by keeping him in the mix. That’s the voters’ choice: a clean two-party coalition, or a dirty three-way.

Will it work? Is Peters’ recent support susceptible to such threats? Are they Real-Changers, too, or are they after a different sort of change? Not Richardson’s economic rationalism, but Peters’ economic nationalism? And if it’s the latter, then asking them to embrace Ruth and kiss Winston good-bye, may not work. It just seems logical that if a right-wing voter was looking for the real change that Seymour is offering, then he or she would already be safely tucked-up with Act.

Then there’s the Left’s lost and lonely. Driven away from both Labour and the Greens by the latter’s’ support for restricting freedom of expression, re-writing the Treaty, and encouraging transgenderism. These unreconstructed lefties are looking to NZ First for shelter from the wokesters’ storm. Ex-Labour-Alliance-Green voters are not going to oblige Bishop by backing a National-Act government – no way.

Peters, Himself, has described Bishops’ statement as “scaremongering”:

These very concerning comments must be an unfortunate misunderstanding because suggesting the National Party would start scaremongering and threatening to ignore the will of the people on Election Day and ignore the need of our country to form a stable government would be highly troubling to voters. It is telling voters National would instead enforce another costly election on the nation purely because of their own political expediency.

Which is a classically orotund Winstonian way of saying that such behaviour, far from persuading opponents of Labour and the Greens to run towards the National and Act parties, is much more likely to drive them into the arms of NZ First.

Very good news indeed for sly Uncle Winston, but not at all what eccentric Aunt Ruth was hoping to hear.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website of Monday, 9 October 2023.

Calling The Big Dog’s Bluff.

Can This Be Possible? For nearly thirty years the pundits have been telling the minor parties that they must be good little puppies and let the big dogs decide. The parties with a plurality of the votes cast must be allowed to govern – even if that means ignoring the priorities of hundreds-of-thousands of voters.

IT IS THE CONSIDERED VIEW of the political punditocracy that the Act leader, David Seymour, is bluffing. The conventional wisdom of the so-called “experts” has not changed since New Zealand adopted MMP – any small party responsible for forcing an early election will be wiped out. The voters will not be trifled with – not by small parties demanding more than their share of the Party Vote entitles them. That being the case, Seymour must be bluffing. End. Of. Story.

But is it? It was inevitable that at some point, some minor party leader was going to call bullshit on the conventional wisdom. The only real surprise is that it has taken nearly 30 years of MMP coalition governments to produce someone willing to think the unthinkable. Fitting that it should be the leader of Act, because thinking the unthinkable has long been touted as Act’s stock-in-trade.

And, is it really that unthinkable for parties capable of securing hundreds-of-thousands of votes to decide, finally, to make those votes count? What we should all find unthinkable is the bizarre notion that a minor party is morally obliged to shelve 90 percent of its policies, smile sweetly for the cameras, and vote alongside its coalition partner like a robot for the next three years. Especially when most of the senior coalition partners’ members and supporters cordially despise everything the junior partner stands for.

Eventually, any party with even a modicum of self-respect is going to rebel against such unreasonable expectations. Possessing a great deal more than a modicum of self-respect, Act has, over recent weeks, been alarmed by a disrespectful degree of shrinking voter support. Finally, Christopher Luxon’s National Party has the acquired the momentum that makes electoral victory look almost certain. Those voters who had turned to Act, almost in despair, are, in ever-increasing numbers, hauling themselves aboard National’s band-wagon. Somehow, Act has to prevent more defections.

There is only one effective way to do this. Act must play on the widespread fear among right-wing voters that Luxon isn’t much more than a political Ken Doll. Good for joshing and jiving with the punters, but not much more than a handy accessory to a Labour-lite Action Barbie named Nicola. Given the alarming falling away of Act support, isn’t Seymour’s optimum strategy to urge the Right to give the wide-awake David Doll all the muscle he needs to break National out of its plastic fantastic play-world and force it to confront political reality?

It’s why Seymour is telling National that if a detailed coalition agreement, promising to enact the most important of Act’s promises, cannot be negotiated, then it will only be able to rely on Act’s votes in support of parliamentary confidence motions. Act will not pledge to support National on motions of supply (i.e. money bills). It’s support for National’s 2024 Budget would be determined transactionally – it would not be automatic. Seymour’s strategy should be to convince at least one-in-three right-wing voters that they must vote Act – or face a National government even squishier than John Key’s.

Seymour also needs to convince his colleagues that such a hardline approach will not result in what all the pundits regard as inevitable – a new election leading to Act’s destruction. Rather, he must challenge them with these questions:

“Why would the voters punish a party for insisting that politics is not a game? Why would they wipe out a party that is prepared to stake everything on its determination to bring real change? After 15 years of neither-fish-nor-fowl governments, isn’t there a better-than-even chance that at least 5 percent – and possibly much more – of the electorate is in the mood for some honest-to-goodness red meat?”

For nearly thirty years the pundits have been telling the minor parties that they must be good little puppies and let the big dogs decide. The parties with a plurality of the votes cast must be allowed to govern – even if that means ignoring the priorities of hundreds-of-thousands of voters.

But, what if an early election is forced by Act and the party is not wiped out? What if it actually picks up seats? Surely, in those circumstances, the senior coalition partner would be obliged to revise its negotiating strategy?

Not so much a case of the tail wagging the dog, as the tail successfully calling the dog’s bluff.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 15 September 2023.

Act’s Message: Cheerfully Libertarian? Or, Radically Right-Wing?

Mr Pushmepullyou: Pushed by the need for votes, Act's leader, David Seymour, like Richard Prebble before him, has reached out to the dark side of the New Zealand electorate. Much as he would prefer to pull in support on the strength of Act's sunny libertarianism, there just ain't enough Eighteenth Century liberals living in New Zealand to make such a party a viable electoral proposition. Although, God knows, Act has tried!

DAVID SEYMOUR IS DISCOVERING what Roger Douglas and Derek Quigley learned in 1994 – the first year of Acts’s existence. That the sort of supporters the party wants are pathetically few in number – far fewer than the sort of supporters it doesn’t want.

From the moment it was formed, the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers had everything a political movement needs to succeed: leaders and spokespeople who were well known; a coherent political ideology; a detailed economic programme; access to large audiences of potential supporters; and money – lots and lots of money. In Act’s first year, it has been estimated that the millionaire entrepreneur, Craig Heatley, spent one million dollars introducing the new political party to the New Zealand electorate.

On paper, Act should have succeeded, but it did not. After a year of touring the country. After a year of free media, and a million dollars’ worth of ads and pamphlets, the opinion polls showed Act hovering just below, or just over, 1 percent. Not enough. No matter how many factory owners obligingly “invited” their employees to hear Douglas’s pitch; no matter how many university campuses Quigley visited; the result was the same. At the point-of-sale, Act lacked the one thing a political movement must have to succeed: a message people want to hear.

Act’s message was liberal in the classical, eighteenth century, sense. Douglas and Quigley preached the gospel of the sovereign, self-actualising, utility-maximising individual, and located him in an economic and cultural environment where state interference is reduced to the absolute minimum. The principle Act subscribed to most enthusiastically was laissez-faire. The doctrine of laissez-faire – “allow to do” – embraced more than free markets, it looked forward to a world without bullies and/or busy-bodies. A permissive world based on the “freedom to” become the best person you can be. A libertarian world.

Or not. New Zealand’s leading Libertarian, Lindsay Perigo, walked out of the founding Act conference, denouncing its refusal to declare total war on the state, and insisting that what Douglas and Quigley were proposing was anything but libertarian. Perigo was free to split ideological hairs because he, unlike Douglas and Quigley, had no real experience of down-and-dirty retail politics. Purity and practical politics don’t mix.

Also present at Act’s founding conference, even if she had no intention of taking part, was the redoubtable left-wing activist, Sue Bradford. With considerably more political savvy than Perigo, Bradford denounced Act as an extreme right-wing party dedicated to finishing the job which Douglas had started. This description of Act was picked up by the news media and repeated ad nauseum. No matter how hard it tried, the Act Party was never able to convince the nation that Bradford’s definition was mistaken. She had branded Act for life.

Not that the “extreme right-wing” brand bothered Richard Prebble all that much. Watching from the sidelines, he was content to let Douglas discover the hard way how very few votes there were in the philosophical doctrines of the Eighteenth Century, or, for that matter, in Ayn Rand’s Objectivist fantasies of the 1940s and 50s. Prebble knew where to go looking for the votes Act needed: exactly which stones, in which dark places, it would be necessary to lift up.

Prebble understood better than just about anybody what MMP was making possible. Parties of the far-Left and the far-Right had never prospered in New Zealand for the very simple reason that the First-Past-the-Post electoral system (which the country had just discarded) made it virtually impossible for such parties to win seats. The one party which had succeeded in doing so was the Social Credit Political League, but only when popular hostility to both National and Labour was strong enough to transform Social Credit into a repository for “protest votes”. Even then, Social Credit was never able to win more than 2 seats.

Prebble was well aware that in the most propitious of political circumstances upwards of 20 percent of the electorate could be susceptible to the blandishments of a third party. Since Act could not expect many votes from the Left (not with Jim Anderton’s Alliance competing so successfully against Labour) the votes he needed belonged to those right-wing New Zealanders who believed that on matters relating to Māori, law-and-order, public morality, women, gays, unions and the environment, the National Party had aligned itself far too closely with Labour. Where is the advantage, Prebble asked his Act colleagues, in allowing Winston Peters to go on sweeping up all these votes?

Taking his inspiration from the right-wing of the US Republican Party, Prebble set about transforming Act into a far-right populist party – albeit one represented by carefully chosen neoliberal/libertarian candidates whose personal beliefs were often at odds with the prejudices of the ideological troglodytes who voted for them. Perhaps the best historical analogy is with the “Dixiecrats” of the southern US states. From the 1940s to the 1970s, outstanding political leaders – like Senator William Fullbright – owed their seats to the votes of unapologetic white supremacists.

While Prebble led Act (1996-2004) the party polled between 6-7 percent of the Party Vote. With his departure in 2004, however, the party’s fortunes plummeted. To 1.5 percent in 2005, recovering slightly to 3.5 percent in 2008, back to 1 percent in 2011, and then to 0.7 percent under the cheerfully libertarian Jamie Whyte in 2014. In 2017, under the stewardship of Act’s incumbent leader, David Seymour, the party won just 0.5 percent of the Party Vote.

Kept in Parliament by its “Epsom Deal” with the National Party, Act seemed likely to fade into obscurity as a one-MP “appendage party”. Then, like so many aspects of New Zealand society, it was transformed by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. With National a fractious political hulk lying low in the water, many right-wing voters cast an angry protest vote for Act. From a risible 13,000 party votes in 2017, David Seymour’s party garnered a remarkable 219,000 votes in 2020 – beating Prebble’s best result (7 percent) by half a percentage point.

Seymour’s stewardship of the Act Party since 2020 has for the most part been exemplary. The party’s 9 additional MPs have presented themselves as a disciplined and competent team – offering voters a stark contrast to the bad behaviour afflicting all the other parliamentary parties. Act’s staunch defence of Free Speech, and its resolute opposition to much of the so-called “woke agenda” – especially co-governance – has pushed its numbers up and over 10 percent in the opinion polls. Not even National’s recovery under Christopher Luxon has been sufficient to seriously undermine Act’s support.

What does pose a threat to Act’s projected success on 14 October, is Seymour’s failure to be guided by Prebble’s thinking on candidate selection. Given the deeply conservative character of  Act’s newfound support – much of it subscribing to the dangerous conspiracy theories growing out of the Covid-19 crisis – the need to scrutinize the party’s prospective candidates within an inch of their lives was urgent. It was absolutely vital that Act’s next ten MPs were (to continue the American analogy) William Fullbrights – not Marjorie Taylor Greenes.

The withdrawal and/or resignation of five Act candidates over recent weeks – a number of them for making claims alarmingly similar to Marjorie Taylor Greene’s – has the potential to give voters pause. Some, perhaps many, will ask themselves just how much they really know about Act and what it stands for.

Here’s a clue: it ain’t libertarianism.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 11 September 2023.

Signs of the Times.

The Words Of The Prophets: The practice of New Zealand politics, and the reporting of it, has changed – and the voters have noticed. Many more citizens than the major parties appear willing to acknowledge are furious about the changes the political class continues to impose upon them. Nor do they appreciate being gas-lit by politicians, bureaucrats, and journalists who clearly consider themselves a cut above the average voter.

PULLING OUT of the truck-stop at Mercer (home of Pokeno Bacon’s incomparable toasted sandwiches) I noticed three large signs. Hung from a chain-link fence, the signs were hand-painted and impossibly wordy. Whoever it was who placed them there was angry – very angry. They were also completely unskilled in the dark arts of political communication.

It obviously never crossed their minds that the overwhelming majority of those passing their signs would be travelling at 100 kph. Nobody driving a motor vehicle at that speed has time to take in more than a few words. It’s only political tragics like myself who take the time to read these angry manifestoes.

Having done so, however, and for the benefit of my wife, who was driving, I condensed their author’s cries from the heart into three simple statements – one for each sign.

The Government Is Lying.    The Media Is Lying.    Stop The Lies.

When I told this story to an old comrade of mine, he exhaled noisily through his teeth and said: “There are times, Trotter, when I’m really glad you’re on our side.”

The anger and mistrust manifested in that angry Mercer signage came back to me a few days later when I tuned into a RNZ news bulletin to receive the startling information that the leader of the Act Party, David Seymour, wanted to blow-up the Ministry for Pacific Peoples. Now, I was aware that it’s Act’s policy to abolish all of what might be called the “identity” ministries: Women’s, Youth, Māori, Pasifika; along with the Human Rights Commission. I was unaware, however, that the policy mandated the use of high explosives!

And, of course, it doesn’t. What I had heard was what the writer of RNZ’s news copy had distilled from a political quip, uttered by the Act leader on the evening of Thursday, 17 August, during an interview on Newstalk-ZB. The context of the quip is crucial – especially in relation to what happened later. It involved a discussion of the Ministry of Pacific People’s gross overspending ($40,000!) on a farewell bash for its departing Chief Executive. Asked how he felt about the overspending, Seymour replied:

“In my fantasy, we’d send a guy called Guy Fawkes in there and it’d be all over, but we’ll probably have to have a more formal approach than that.”

Though you would never know it from the leaden humourlessness of the party political and mainstream journalistic responses to his words, Seymour was joking. In exactly the same way as the person who came up with the oft-quoted quip: “Guy Fawkes – the only man to enter Parliament with honourable intentions” – was joking.

The Deputy-Prime-Minister, Carmel Sepuloni, did not get Seymour’s joke. Or, if she got it, she didn’t like it: “David Seymour’s remarks are in line with his history of race-baiting and creating divisions, particularly concerning Pasifika and Māori communities”. Clearly, nobody in Labour was laughing. The Greens, too, remained stony-faced: “Just a man who received donations from known white supremacists making a ‘joke’ about his fantasy to bomb brown people institutions” tweeted Golriz Ghahraman.

Here, at least, was the source of the dreary literalism inspiring the writer of RNZ’s news bulletin. A humorous historical reference to Guy Fawkes (who would have posed no threat at all to the Ministry of Pacific Peoples, given that he proved singularly incapable of blowing up the Palace of Westminster on 5 November 1605!) had somehow morphed into the unembellished claim that the leader of New Zealand’s third-largest political party, the man set to become New Zealand’s next Deputy-Prime-Minister, had entertained seriously the terroristic notion of blowing-up a building housing a government ministry and, presumably, everyone in it.

It is, of course, possible that RNZ is, all-unwittingly, harbouring yet another unauthorised “editor” of contentious news items going out under its name, and that the publicly-owned radio network is every bit as outraged at the suggestion that David Seymour has ideas about blowing things up as the 12-15 percent of New Zealanders telling the pollsters they intend giving Act their Party Vote on 14 October.

One can only speculate, however, about the number of New Zealanders who found it strange that a number of mainstream news media outlets had chosen to make a news-story out of the fact that two citizens had entered a government building with some stern questions for the staff about what they regarded as the outrageous expenditure of tens-of-thousands of dollars of public funds on a senior bureaucrat’s farewell function.

There was a time in this country’s history when citizens asking questions of public servants was an entirely unremarkable exercise of their civil rights. A time when, far from causing fear and alarm, the practice of holding bureaucrats to account was regarded as a pivotal feature of a properly functioning democracy. That the questions asked by these two citizens went unanswered, and that they were physically ejected from the building, is, surely, prima facie evidence that our democracy could do with a bit of a shake-up. Oops! Sorry. Some “refurbishment”.

Similar thoughts arise from the fact that it required some heavy-duty interventions from a number of prominent right-wing habitués of social-media to nip in the bud the thoroughly disinformative narrative that placed the “disruptive” individuals at the Ministry of Pacific Peoples after (therefore because of) David Seymour’s remarks on Newstalk-ZB. The facts of the story, however, produce a timeline in which the “threatening” citizens arrive at the Ministry long before Seymour’s quip hit the airwaves.

A small story? A storm in a teacup? Unworthy of all these words? Well, had I not read those signs at Mercer, I might agree. We are, after all, less than two months away from a general election, and peak rough-and-tumble is still weeks away. But, I did read those signs, and they disturbed me.

The point I’m labouring to make is that grown-up politicians are assumed to be capable of differentiating a rhetorical quip dressed-up in Jacobean finery, from an Al Qaeda To-Do list. And so are professional political journalists. The claim that David Seymour spoke seriously about blowing-up the Ministry of Pacific Peoples is, quite simply, a lie; and references to “race-baiting”, and bombing “brown people institutions”, advance the dial well beyond “rough-and-tumble”.

The practice of New Zealand politics, and the reporting of it, has changed – and the voters have noticed. Many more citizens than the major parties appear willing to acknowledge are furious about the changes the political class continues to impose upon them. Nor do they appreciate being gas-lit by politicians, bureaucrats, and journalists who clearly consider themselves a cut above the average voter.

Rhetorically-speaking, an increasing number of citizens would be quite happy to see someone put a bomb under a system they no longer trust. Which is why, heading into this election, nothing is more important than for New Zealand’s political and media leaders to do everything within their power to regain the public’s trust.

Otherwise someone, somewhere, will start hanging signs that everybody can read.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website of Monday, 21 August 2023.