New Zealand’s “Non-Negotiable” Mythology: Deconstructing The Dairy Industry’s Latest Propaganda Campaign.

The Myth Of Clean, Green, Dairying: The primary production sector’s stance that what is good for New Zealand’s farmers must also be good for the country as a whole has become non-negotiable. Preserving the Kiwi way of life is now synonymous with preserving the economic well-being of the New Zealand farmer. Specifically, the New Zealand dairy farmer.

 

NEW ZEALAND’S DAIRY INDUSTRY was recently compared to the NRA. A better comparison would be the United States oil industry. Like the National Rifle Association the US oil industry’s lobbying power is legendary. To set one’s face against either group is generally considered to be career suicide – especially if you’re a career politician.

 

The US oil industry is the better comparison because, like our own dairy industry, it plays a central role in its national economy. Both industries are strategically positioned to bend governments to their will.

 

Shortly after assuming the office of Vice-President in 2001, Dick Cheney convened a secret conclave of US oil interests. The proceedings of that gathering remain inaccessible to ordinary Americans. By 2008, however, the effects of the decisions taken at Cheney’s Energy Summit were measurable across the entire planet. The Vice-President was unrepentant, reaffirming to Fox News in the dying days of the Bush Administration the message that his boss’s father, President George H W Bush had delivered to the Rio Earth Summit way back in 1992: “The American way of life is non-negotiable.”

 

Equally “non-negotiable” is our own primary production sector’s stance that what is good for New Zealand’s farmers must also be good for the country as a whole. Preserving the Kiwi way of life has thus become synonymous with preserving the economic well-being of the New Zealand farmer. Specifically, the New Zealand dairy farmer.

 

As anyone who watches television will attest, a colossal amount of money is currently being spent to convince New Zealanders that farming – especially dairy farming – is, in some mysterious way, integral to preserving the New Zealand way of life.

 

Dairy farmers are depicted as dedicated protectors of the land. Striding across their paddocks in the early light, breathing in the scent of their lush natural pastures, these quintessential Kiwis are presented as the uncomplicated stewards of modest family farms passed down from generation to generation over many decades.

 

That most dairy farms are now rigorously commercial ventures, owned by private companies or listed corporations, and monitored constantly by the foreign-owned banks to which they are so deeply indebted, are facts which the makers of these advertisements prefer to keep out of their stirring pastoral narratives. Also missing are any visual references to the complex irrigation machinery so essential to meeting their business’s ambitious milk production targets.

 

Nor, in the dawn’s early light, are we vouchsafed a glimpse of the depleted streams and polluted rivers that the doubling and tripling of dairy herd sizes has rendered inevitable. Indeed, the dairy farmers depicted in these ads appear to be throw-backs to the time when dairy farmers drove only 100 or 150 cows towards the milking shed – not the 400-600 cows found on today’s average dairy unit.

 

Such information would, of course, make it much harder to sell the notion that the farmers depicted in these ads are the ones who make it possible for New Zealanders living in cities to remain psychically linked to the clean, green countryside which underwrites their urban lifestyles. By the power of the ad-man’s dubious magic, these entirely fictional representatives of New Zealand agriculture have been enlisted to reinvigorate the nation’s foundation myth.

 

At the heart of that myth lies the “countryside good/cities bad” dichotomy. It is the dichotomy that fuels the sacred ideological fires of the National Party and which informs the ingrained assumptions that sets provincial New Zealanders against their metropolitan cousins. It also the dichotomy behind the suggestion of urban dereliction which constitutes the unspoken message of the latest batch of Fonterra ads.

 

The rural beneficence being celebrated here is Fonterra’s (and, by extension, the New Zealand dairy farmers’) donation of packaged milk to the nation’s school-children. By which, of course, is meant the nation’s “needy” schoolchildren. These little packages of rural generosity are intended for the unfortunate offspring of the indigent (and probably immoral) inhabitants of the wicked cities’ treeless suburbs.

 

Extolling the virtues of Fonterra’s milk-in-schools philanthropy is no less an icon of provincial virtue than the all-conquering All-Black hero, Ritchie McCaw. Seldom has one complex bundle of national myths been enlisted to the cause of another which such seamless effectiveness.

 

It is worth paying close attention to these ads the next time they appear on your television screen. As you take in the sophisticated messages embedded in the text and imagery, ask yourself why they are being broadcast now, with such relentless regularity, to their overwhelmingly urban audience.

 

Think about the success of Greenpeace’s “Dirty Dairying” campaign; about the shocking images of shit-filled streams, dried-up riverbeds and toxic lakes. Think about the dairy industry’s point-blank refusal to accept that it is more-or-less singlehandedly destroying New Zealand’s clean, green image. Recall its role in the destruction of regional democracy in Canterbury: its determination to overcome all opposition to its plans for vast, government-subsidised irrigation schemes. Think about the fact that nitrogen levels across the country are rapidly approaching danger levels – even in the deep, formerly pristine aquifers beneath our feet. Think of the way the Ministry of Primary Industry and the National Party stand guard over the dairy industry in exactly the same way as Dick Cheney and Scott Pruitt stood and stand guard over the US fossil fuels industry.

 

The dairy industry’s way of life is every bit as “non-negotiable” as the American people’s – and just as big a threat to our environment.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 15 March 2017.

Backroom Boy

Re-framing the new political environment: Murray McCully, like his fellow neo-conservative, Dick Cheney, knows that the best deals are done when nobody is looking.

IT’S A CHILLING image. In the foreground we see the face of the former US President, George W. Bush, wearing that wide-eyed, open-mouthed, slightly goofy expression so beloved by the world’s caricaturists. Behind Bush, his features ever-so-slightly out-of-focus, hunches Vice-president Dick Cheney. While the President looks towards the camera, the Vice-president’s eyes remain fixed, proprietarily, upon his boss. Points of light reflect off his steel-rimmed glasses. His mouth is forming into just the faintest hint of a smirk.

Small wonder TIME magazine chose this photograph to illustrate their special report on "The Final Days of Bush & Cheney". A thousand words could hardly match its deeply creepy depiction of the relationship between Cheney and his hapless Texan protégé.

Has a New Zealand photographer to captured a similar "moment" between our own Prime Minister, John Key, and his Foreign Minister, Murray McCully? It wouldn’t require much effort, because there is definitely something in McCully’s political relationship with Key that recalls the sorcerer’s apprentice aspects of the Cheney-Bush combination.

Perhaps it’s the boyish and disarmingly ingenuous demeanour of the New Zealand Prime Minister that makes one think of Bush, or the talent both men possess for inflicting grievous bodily harm upon the English language. More seriously, it could be the uneasy feeling one gets when watching the public performances of Bush and Key that their grasp of public policy is only as strong as their last verbal briefing. In this respect, the sharpness of the contrast between Key and his predecessor, Helen Clark, is only exceeded by that of the man who succeeded Bush, Barack Obama.

The parallels are also there between Cheney and McCully.

In terms of the recent political histories of their respective nations, both men have been around forever. Cheney (like his close ally, the former Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld) began his career in the days of Richard Nixon (1968-74). He was elected to the House of Representatives five times during the Reagan era, and, before becoming George W, Bush’s running-mate in 2000, served in George Bush Snr’s administration (1988-1992) as Secretary of Defence.

McCully was first elected to Parliament 22 years ago, in 1987, but his career as a National Party insider stretches all the way back to 1973 when, at the age of 20, he was elected President of the Young Nationals. Those 36 years in the trenches have fashioned McCully into the ultimate political insider. Few within his party (perhaps Michelle Boag?) could match the intricacy or extent of his political networks, or challenge his encyclopaedic knowledge of who did what to whom, when, and why. It is taken as an article of faith in National Party circles that, since 1987, no leadership coup has proceeded without McCully’s blessing.

All of which suggests that Key is in McCully’s political debt, and is, therefore, bound to take the MP for East Coast Bays’ ideas on both domestic and foreign policy extremely seriously. TIME magazine writes of Cheney that: "Both by habit and by design, he cultivated a relationship that suited Bush’s view of their roles: the President as the ‘decider’ and Cheney as the éminence grise who counselled him. In reality, by wiring the bureaucracy and being the last person Bush spoke with on many key decisions, Cheney became [as his biographer Barton Gellman put it] a ‘sounding board for advice he originated himself’." It’s a description that could, with only a small amount of editing, be used to describe McCully’s relationship with Key.

McCully’s influence over National’s conduct of domestic policy is more apparent in the present Government’s evolving "tone", than in any specific policy.

It should not be forgotten that, as National’s Communications Director in the late-1970s, McCully observed at close hand the crudely authoritarian and deeply divisive style of Sir Robert Muldoon, and how effective it was at driving wedges into Labour’s traditional support-base. That the raw meat of "Laura Norder" and beneficiary-bashing has become the staple diet of Labour’s disillusioned deserters, is in no small measure attributable to McCully’s strategic insight.

McCully understands, in a way that Key almost certainly does not, the critical importance of keeping the deep-seated social resentments of the New Zealand working-class bubbling merrily away. Certainly, MSD Minister Paula Bennett’s release of the income details of two politically active domestic purposes beneficiaries recalls the very worst excesses of Muldoon’s right-wing populism.

McCully’s influence is, however, most pronounced in matters relating to diplomacy, trade and defence. It is in these fields that the impact of the neo-conservative ideology he shares with Cheney is clearest.

The Foreign Affairs portfolio, McCully’s reward for giving Key the nod, allows him to pursue (well away from the prying eyes of the news media) his long-held objective of restoring New Zealand to its proper place in the Anglo-Saxon fold. His impatience with the diplomacy of grand moral gestures – epitomised by Kirk’s despatch of a frigate to the French nuclear testing-ground at Mururoa Atoll; Lange’s Nuclear-free legislation; and Clark’s refusal to join the invasion of Iraq – underpins his determination to re-couple New Zealand to the train of its traditional allies.

Working in Cheney-like secrecy with the Defence Minister, Wayne Mapp, and Trade Minister, Tim Groser, McCully has spent the last nine months radically reorienting New Zealand diplomacy. The days of New Zealand lecturing the world from a lofty ethical perch, held together by the diplomatic equivalent of No. 8 Wire, are over. Foreign policy under McCully is guided by the more conservative thinkers of Canberra, Washington and London – just as it was in the days of Sir Keith Holyoake and Muldoon.

Almost without them noticing, McCully has enlisted New Zealanders as eager participants in the War on Terror; foot-draggers in the campaign against climate change; and mini-imperialists in the economic re-conquest of the South Pacific.

McCully is also pressing Key to send the SAS back to Afghanistan in a combat role. If the blood of Kiwi soldiers is the price New Zealand must pay to convince her erstwhile allies that she is once again ready to play her part as the fifth finger of the Anglo-Saxon "fist", then he will not demur.

Like Cheney, McCully is perfectly content to let his protégé claim personal ownership of "advice he originated himself". Thirty-six years of political skulduggery have taught this backroom boy that the best deals are done when no one’s looking.

This essay was originally published in The Independent of Thursday, 6 August 2009.