Democracy's Disappearing Hand

Our Dysfunctional Democracy: With barely a third of New Zealanders bothering to participate in the recent local government elections, the atrophying of our democratic institutions continues apace. At their current rate of decline, our democratic organs may soon be reduced to useless vestigial remnants, like the human tail-bone. Of interest only to political anatomists.

 

IF THE FUTURE is determined by the “invisible hand” of market forces, then what purpose does the democratic hand serve? With barely a third of New Zealanders bothering to participate in the recent local government elections, the answer would appear to be: “Not much.” At their current rate of decline, our democratic organs may soon be reduced to useless vestigial remnants, like the human tail-bone. Of interest only to political anatomists.

 

For more than 30 years we have been encouraged to look upon “politics” and “politicians” as not quite respectable. From the Reserve Bank Act to the Local Government Act, the ability of elected representatives to “meddle” too closely in the administration and delivery of “public goods” has been steadily whittled away. The setting of monetary policy and the efficient delivery of core civic amenities are matters best left to unelected experts. The days when any old butcher, baker, or candlestick-maker could run a city (let alone a country!) are long gone.

 

This “professionalization” of the formerly rather amateur enterprise of democratic government is what lies behind the explosive growth of what has come to be known as the “political class”. Like any group of specialists, these administrators and managers have been quick to spread the self-serving message that the increasingly complex business of modern “governance” (a word which has very little to do with the art of government by the way) has moved well beyond the competence of the average citizen.

 

Just how pervasive (not to say pernicious) this professionalisation has become is illustrated by the presence in practically every large local authority of a special unit devoted to “democratic services”. Its job? To advise and monitor (some unkind souls might say control) the conduct of their “governing body’s” elected representatives. Newly elected councillors are briefed on the “responsibilities” of their new “job” and familiarised with the Codes of Conduct and myriad legal constraints in which all of them are now well-and-truly entangled.

 

Nor should these responsibilities be taken lightly. Woe betide any council attempting to assert its democratic right to know better than its professional advisors. Just ask the people of Canterbury what happens to an elected body which the political class deems to be conducting its affairs “irresponsibly” or, even worse, “irrationally”. Central Government intervention, the sacking of elected councillors and their replacement by appointed commissioners, cannot be far behind.

 

The public has had little difficulty deciphering these messages. Even before the government sacked Ecan in 2010, it was clear to voters that the ability of their elected representatives to translate election promises into practical policies had been seriously compromised. Councils no longer seemed to own and/or control anything. Services that had once been provided by the Council itself were increasingly being contracted out to the private sector.

 

There was a time when, if the bus you took to work was consistently late, you simply picked up the phone and complained to your local councillor. He or she then raised the matter with the municipal transport manager, who, in turn, had a word in the ear of the route inspector and – ta-da! – the punctuality of your service was restored. Unfortunately, what the travelling public regarded as an eminently sensible and highly accountable public transport system was actually hopelessly inefficient. By contracting-out the service to privately-owned bus operators, said the experts, efficiency would be improved dramatically and the council could save millions of dollars. If your privately-owned service starts running late, however, don’t bother calling your local councillor. It’s no longer his problem.

 

Clearly, any candidate promising to do great things for his or her city in the twenty-first century is either naïve or dishonest. “Great things” may well be an excellent description of the achievements of past councils and mayors, but today’s local government politicians would be most unwise to offer the voters anything more than competence and a comprehensive understanding of how the system works. Perspiration counts for much more than inspiration in the neoliberal era. Perspiration and an unwavering adherence to the proposition that local government’s only legitimate role is to hold the ring while self-interested private-sector businesspeople unconsciously, but inevitably, make our cities better places in which to live.

 

That being the case, the argument for mass democratic participation in local elections becomes increasingly difficult to make. When the professionals from “democratic services” are able to transform our democratically-elected representatives into house-trained lap-dogs practically overnight. When even the mildest assertions of local government autonomy are met with central government threats to depose elected councillors and appoint commissioners. And when a council’s only acceptable objective is to facilitate the naked pursuit of commercial self-interest. What possible motivation could voters’ have for treating local government elections as anything other than an increasingly pointless political ritual? A vestigial remnant of the democratic hand that once built nations.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 11 October 2016.

Reinvent Auckland, Simon? If Only We Could!

A Safe Pair Of Hands: The whole point of the neoliberal Auckland supercity is to ensure that “big visions” and “bold execution” in the pursuit of anything other than neoliberal objectives is rendered impossible. As a tried and tested neoliberal himself, Phil Goff gets this. Producing “incremental improvements with greater efficiency” constitutes the outer limits of his political imagination. It’s what makes him the perfect candidate.

 

SIMON WILSON is an odd fellow – with some odd opinions. Here, for example, is the Metro Editor-at-Large's opinion on the general public response to the National Government’s forced amalgamation of Auckland, North Shore, Waitakere and Manukau cities. “Aucklanders were cynical about everything before he [Len Brown] and the supercity came along in 2010. But we lost that cynicism and we set about reinventing the city.”

 

I would be most annoyed if I thought Simon was including me in that “we”. Long before the legislation setting up the supercity came into force the level of my cynicism was already off the scale.

 

Everything about the supercity’s establishment: from the man chosen to oversee the process (the Act Party leader, Rodney Hide) to the deliberate exclusion of the people of the Auckland region from any meaningful say in whether or not the merger of their four cities should finally proceed; highlighted the profoundly anti-democratic spirit in which the entire process was conceived.

 

The reason for this hostility to democracy wasn’t difficult to discern. Far from being a bottom-up exercise: driven by angry residents’ from across the Auckland region; the supercity was a top-down exercise: the joint creation of local and national elites. Their common purpose? To create a model for local government in the neoliberal era. And the central feature of that model? The almost total disempowerment of the citizens of Auckland and their elected representatives.

 

The full measure of the supercity’s creators’ contempt for democracy was revealed in the proposed size of the supercity’s “Governing Body”. In the equivalent decision-making structures of Auckland, North Shore, Waitakere and Manukau cities, the ratio of elected representatives to citizens was roughly 1:15,000. In the new supercity it would be 1:70,000! Supercity councillors were being asked to represent more citizens than a directly elected Member of Parliament.

 

My own level of cynicism (and, I suspect, the cynicism of thousands of other Aucklanders) was in no way lessened by the Ports of Auckland dispute. It was during this brutal test of strength between the supposedly municipally-owned Port and its employees that Aucklanders learned just how misnamed their “Council Controlled Organisations” (CCOs) truly were.

 

Aucklanders elected representatives turned out to be equally mischaracterised. Far from being the people’s democratic tribunes, Auckland’s elected councillors proved to be little more than powerless pawns. The real game was controlled by legally cocooned CCO boards of directors – over whom the so-called “Governing Body” (including the Mayor) exercised no effective control whatsoever.

 

Indeed, so politically impotent was the Mayor made to feel in relation to the day-to-day management of National’s neoliberal supercity, that the poor fellow felt obliged to demonstrate his potency “by other means”. A better symbol of Auckland’s vast democratic deficit than Len’s and Bevan’s affair is difficult to imagine. Turned out the Mayor’s Office was good for very little else!

 

Even Brown’s signal achievement: the National Government’s final approval of his beloved City Rail Link; owes as much to the projected massive inflation of property values along its inner-city route, as it does to any rational realignment of Auckland’s public transport system.

 

In his latest Metro article, Simon Wilson opines that the job facing the next Mayor of Auckland is “not simply to produce incremental improvements with greater efficiency and better relations with the government in Wellington. Auckland has fallen into crisis. Growth has far outstripped expectations. Housing policies have had a catastrophic outcome. A big vision is required, all over again, and bold execution has to follow.”

 

Except, of course, the whole point of the neoliberal supercity is to ensure that “big visions” and “bold execution” in the pursuit of anything other than neoliberal objectives is rendered impossible. (That the Unitary Plan was so heavily promoted by the National Government and the Auckland City bureaucracy, both of whom threatened dire consequences should the councillors fail to approve it, tells us all we need to know about the document’s ideological complexion!) As a tried and tested neoliberal himself, Phil Goff gets this. Producing “incremental improvements with greater efficiency” constitutes the outer limits of his political imagination. It’s what makes him the perfect candidate.

 

Poor Simon. He seems to have been both surprised and distressed to learn that in a Citizen Insights Monitor survey released by the Auckland Council in June 2016, “just 15 per cent of us said we were satisfied with the council’s performance. Only 17 per cent of us said we trust it. This is disgraceful.”

 

Really, Simon? Disgraceful? Frankly, I’m astounded as many as 17 percent of Aucklanders place any trust at all in National’s neoliberal supercity. I do, however, understand completely why 83 percent of us find little, if anything, to like about the “governance” of the unresponsive bureaucratic monstrosity into whose tender care we were delivered without so much as a confirming referendum.

 

Nor am I surprised that only 35 percent of eligible voters bothered to return their ballots in 2013. Not when the people elected by those ballots are so bereft of power that – even if they wanted to – it wouldn’t be “within the purview of their lawful governance function” to make the trains run on time.

 

In terms of empowering the people who live within its boundaries, there’s nothing I’d rather do, Simon, than “reinvent” the Auckland supercity. It’s why I’m voting for Chloe Swarbrick. Not because she stands the slightest chance of winning, but because, alone of all the Mayoral candidates, she demonstrates some understanding of just how much we have lost.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 13 September 2016.

Employing Representatives: How Limiting MPs Pay Rises Increases The Democratic Deficit.

Representatives NOT Employees: The steady reduction in the status of our Members of Parliament: from democratically elected representatives to "our employees in Wellington" reflects New Zealanders increasing disengagement from the political process. Seriously, how much power do employees have in this country?

 

“WHAT HAPPENS NOW?” The newly elected Member for Manuwera, Phil Amos, still not quite believing that his days as a secondary-school teacher were over, had rung the Leader of the Opposition, Arnold Nordmeyer, for guidance.

 

“Well,” said Nordy, “we’ll probably have a Caucus meeting sometime in February. [The conversation was taking place in November.] And since the Nats don’t like to call the House together too early – far too many farmers in their Caucus, with far too much to do – things won’t get really busy around here until about the middle of the year.”

 

“What am I supposed to do until then?”, Phil responded plaintively.

 

The Labour Leader chuckled. “My advice, Phil, is to talk to as many people as possible, and just use the time to get to know your electorate.”

 

Phil Amos: MP for Manurewa 1963-1975

 

That’s the way it was for a brand new MP, in a brand new seat, back in 1963.

 

Fifty years ago New Zealanders held very different expectations of their Members of Parliament. Very few people in 1963 would have considered it either appropriate, or accurate, to refer to Members of Parliament as “our employees in Wellington”. Most voters understood that they had elected a representative: someone whose duty it was to reflect, protect and defend the interests of their electorate.

 

The idea that one’s MP is nothing more than a glorified civil servant: a person expected to turn up for work every day, do their “job”, and collect their (excessive) pay, is a much more recent notion.

 

In 1963, Parliament was still a deeply respected institution: a place through which awestruck school-children were led by school-teachers and guides who informed them, solemnly, that this was where the country’s laws were made.

 

Democracy, itself, was still a highly-valued and hard-won achievement in 1963. Hardly surprising when, just twenty years earlier, a significant number of MPs, Phil Amos among them, had been fighting in North Africa, Italy and throughout the Pacific for its survival.

 

Perhaps that explains why communities informed, in 1963, that their Member of Parliament was coming for a visit felt both pleased and honoured.

 

How was that respect so comprehensively forfeited?

 

Partly, it was the work of the Baby-Boom Generation. Shaped by decades of post-war affluence and the dramatic technological innovations that had fuelled it, the Baby-Boomers  aggressively challenged the conservative moral and political assumptions of their parent’s and grandparents’ generations. Artists, movie directors, television producers and songwriters grew increasingly impatient with yesterday’s values: the times they were a changing.

 

And those changing times were stoking the fears of bankers and businessmen, who were rapidly coming round to the view that democracy was getting out of hand. Politicians were responding to the demands of workers, women, blacks and gays in ways that threatened capitalism’s long-term profitability.

 

Their solution, which in New Zealand went by the name of Rogernomics, was to take as many of the important economic decisions as possible out of politicians’ hands and give them to bankers and businessmen. But, to make this solution work, it would be necessary to turn a whole generation of politicians into liars and cheats. Telling the voters that they were being stripped of the power that had made the post-war era such a levelling experience for the rich and the powerful was, obviously, out of the question. They would have to be tricked into giving it up.

 

The people who copped the blame were, of course, the politicians. Many of these were guilty-as-charged – but some were not. It was important, therefore, to foster the notion that politics was an entirely disreputable profession, to which only entirely disreputable people were attracted. Populist media personalities insisted that, because no politician could be trusted, it was necessary for them and their readers/listeners/viewers to keep politicians on the shortest possible leash.

 

Members of Parliament were, accordingly, re-branded as the voters’ “employees”. Every aspect of their lives was subjected to the closest media scrutiny, and any failings ruthlessly exposed. Inevitably, as the public was increasingly persuaded that all politics are “dirty politics”, politicians felt obliged to surrender what remained of their ancient rights and privileges as political representatives, and to embrace, instead, the democratically empty role of political employee.

 

Many will cheer the Prime Minister’s decision to align their “employees’” pay rises with their own. Fewer will ask whose interests Mr Key is representing.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 6 March 2015.