My Enemy's Friends: Until the Maori Party ceases to support the neoliberal agenda of the National Party and its allies, it must remain the un-natural enemy of all progressive New Zealanders.SOMETIMES important political questions just have to be answered – no matter how much we might prefer to avoid them.
A few weeks ago, I encountered a posting by "Lew" at the Kiwipolitico blog entitled "Memo to the Left: The Maori Party is not your enemy."
I was sorely tempted to respond: "Memo to Lew: Yes it is." But blogosphere debates with well-meaning but misguided political naïfs like Lew are never-ending, and I had better things to do with my time.
The question, however, refused to go away – resurfacing at a PPTA field officers’conference in Auckland.
As I was the guest speaker, I could hardly avoid answering, and I’m afraid my reply was rather brutal.
"Yes, the Maori Party did make a huge mistake by throwing in its lot with National. No, I do not think the Maori leadership had a very clear view of their long-term political interests. Yes, the National Party did trick them. And no, I do not believe – even after six months – they realise how very wickedly they’ve been deceived, nor how much damage their relationship with National is about to inflict on both Maori and Pakeha New Zealanders."
To properly understand the Maori Party/National Party relationship, it is first necessary to comprehend the scale of the betrayal represented by the Foreshore and Seabed Act.
For Maori, the Fifth Labour Government’s decision to nullify the Court of Appeal’s judgement on Maori customary rights was every bit as egregious – and just as devastating – as the Fourth Labour Government’s betrayal of the broader labour movement under Rogernomics.
The Maori Party was born out of the same sort of deep political anguish that saw an embittered working-class battler scrawl on the wall of the Christchurch Trades Hall: "You were supposed to help." The same sort of anger that led to the formation of the NewLabour Party in 1989, and the Alliance in 1991.
It took nearly ten years for the rage of the people who walked out of the Labour Party to subside sufficiently for Helen Clark to be invited to the 1998 Alliance Conference, and for the delegates to vote unanimously in favour of a coalition with her despised party. For most of that decade the emotional intensity of the Alliance’s attacks on Labour had always been much greater than its criticisms of National. How could it be otherwise? Pain inflicted by someone you love is always more hurtful than the blows of an enemy.
With feelings running so high, the old proverb, "my enemy’s enemy is my friend", takes on a grim logic.
But, of course, your enemy’s enemy can just as easily be your enemy too – and in the case of the foreshore and seabed debacle this was especially true. Labour’s erstwhile deputy-leader, Michael Cullen, was telling no more than the truth when he pointed out that his government had no room to manoeuvre over the Foreshore & Seabed Bill.
From the moment the Court of Appeal’s decision was announced, Labour’s pollsters began to register a rising level of anti-Maori feeling in the Pakeha population. Clearly, it would require a strong, bi-partisan effort to withstand such political pressure. Of course, National’s pollsters were picking up the same racist vibes as Labour, but, rather than stand against them, the strategists surrounding National’s new leader, Don Brash, opted to exploit them.
The Orewa Speech delivered by Brash in January 2004, and the extraordinary shift in political allegiance from Labour to National that it accomplished, destroyed any hope of a bi-partisan approach to resolving the issues raised by the Court of Appeal.
Labour was left with just two choices: It could either take a principled stand against National’s racism – and watch its electoral support evaporate; or, it could bend before the racist gale, pass the most generous legislation it could get away with, and wait for better weather.
Labour’s Maori MPs – with the obvious exception of Tariana Turia – knew enough about te riri pakeha (the white man’s anger) to grasp that, in the long term, their constituents would be better off under Labour’s reluctant racists, than they would be under a National Party eagerly exploiting anti-Maori feeling to stay ahead in the polls.
It’s the failure of the Maori Party leadership to make the same differentiation that is setting up their people for disaster.
Driven by its nationalist ideology, the Maori Party refuses to draw a distinction between the Pakeha Right and the Pakeha Left. Both the National Party and the Business Roundtable have exploited this ideological colour-blindness with consummate political skill. John Key has deployed his considerable personal charm to engage with and befriend the Maori Party MPs. (Something Labour, unaccountably, refused to do.) Meanwhile, the Business Roundtable, in an astonishing display of ideological legerdemain, somehow persuaded Turia and her co-leader, Pita Sharples, that tino rangatiratanga and laissez-faire capitalism amounted to the same thing.
On the strength of this (false) identification, both National and the Business Roundtable have been quietly transforming the Maori Party into a stalking-horse for a new round of neo-liberal "reforms". Maori Party MPs are already supporting the privatisation of prisons, and their endorsement of education vouchers and private-public-partnerships in healthcare delivery is widely anticipated.
Seduced by the Right’s uninhibited "love-bombing" (not to mention the "mana enhancement" of ministerial salaries and prestige) Turia and Sharples seem oblivious to National’s and Act’s continuing promotion of anti-Maori prejudice among their conservative base.
While "that nice Mr Key" has been playing volleyball at Ratana Pa, paying court to the "underclass" of McGeehan Close, and hongi-ing furiously with every Maori leader he can find, the National and Act parties have been indulging in "dog-whistle politics" like there is no tomorrow.
In place of the "Maori privilege" of Brash’s Orewa speech, the two right-wing parties have substituted the over-heated rhetoric of "law and order". Why? Because whenever terms like "child abuse", "violent crime" and "dysfunctional families" appear in the news headlines, the stereotype conjured up in the mind of the "right"-thinking Pakeha voter is black – not white.
Not content with becoming a stalking-horse for neo-liberalism, the Maori Party has also allowed itself to be cast in the role of the Judas-sheep: bleating dutifully about Maori "empowerment", even as it leads its trusting followers into the slaughter-houses of poverty, ill-health, educational failure and incarceration.
Although they dearly wish it were otherwise, until the Maori Party stops advancing the Right’s extremist agenda, it must remain the un-natural enemy of all progressive New Zealanders.
This is a slightly amended version of an essay originally published in The Independent of Thursday, 28 May 2009.
