Time To Choose.

To Have And To Hold: And now, as if the malevolent spirit of the times has not destabilised our world enough, New Zealanders’ adherence to the values and processes of democracy is being put to the test. Once again, the dividing line is horizontal, not vertical, with the “decolonising” project of Māori nationalism sundering the supporters of democracy from the partisans of ethnic exceptionalism. 

TO BE POLITICAL in the fourth quarter of 2023 is not easy. Yes, New Zealand has just passed through a general election, but the outcome of that contest was signalled well in advance by the polls. That the government lost came as no surprise, even if the vehemence of the electorate’s judgement came as a shock to many of the defeated party’s supporters. But, it wasn’t Labour’s thrashing, and the victory of the Right, that made politics so hard. The explanation for the souring of political discourse here, and around the world, may be traced to Southern Israel, Hamas’s hideous rampage of 7 October, and the furious reaction of the Israeli state.

These events have hacked a bloody line through religious faiths, political movements, parties, families and friendships. Where people stand in relation to that dividing line is determined by many factors. Their understanding of history. Their perception of what politics should, and should not, permit. The reach of their hate. The strength of their love. The persuasiveness of their fear.

Significantly, the line runs horizontally, not vertically. Where one stands on the Israel-Hamas War is not a straightforward matter of Left versus Right. On both sides of the classical divide, friends and comrades draw away from each other: blue and white above the line; red, white, green and black below.

Discussing the times and the morals with an old comrade, just a few days ago, we reflected on the fast decreasing utility of the terms “Right” and “Left”. He recalled the ease with which, as much younger men, we were able to sort the issues of the day into neat ideological piles; separate the protagonists from the antagonists; and know a kind of ontological peace. Now, he told me, the only political idea with which he still identifies unequivocally is Democracy. In the past, he proudly proclaimed himself a socialist. Today, he would own to being a “radical democrat” – nothing more.

And now, as if the malevolent spirit of the times has not destabilised our world enough, New Zealanders’ adherence to the values and processes of democracy is being put to the test. Once again, the dividing line is horizontal, not vertical, with the “decolonising” project of Māori nationalism sundering the supporters of democracy from the partisans of ethnic exceptionalism. Like Palestine, the meaning, purpose, and future of Te Tiriti O Waitangi has become an issue over which an amiable ‘agreement to differ’ is no longer possible.

The day that was always going to dawn has arrived. The day when the unmandated revision of the meaning, purpose and scope of the Treaty of Waitangi runs into the numerical majority of New Zealanders who, according to the pollsters, have run out of patience with the “Treatyists” insistence that ‘Non-Māori’ have an open-ended obligation to acknowledge and fulfil what are now their unabashedly revolutionary constitutional claims. This loss of patience has taken the form of the Act Party’s democratic counter-revision of the Treaty: a political formula it seeks to ratify with a referendum involving – and binding – the whole adult population of New Zealand.

The political leadership of Maoridom, and their Pakeha supporters, have been quick to declare their opposition to any resolution of Treaty differences by way of counting votes. The former Minister of Māori Affairs, Willie Jackson, has warned that elements within the Māori world are willing to “make war” on any attempt to re-write the Treaty’s meaning. (That the Waitangi Tribunal and the Judiciary have been doing exactly that for the best part of 50 years appears to have slipped the former minister’s mind.)

Considerably less ferociously, the distinguished Treaty historian, Dame Anne Salmond, has also taken up an anti-referendum position. Writing for the Newsroom site, she argues that “the idea of putting the ‘principles of the Treaty’ to a popular vote is unjust and unwise, and should not be entertained by any responsible government ….. a referendum on ‘the principles of the Treaty,’ given its populist appeal to the majority and its inflammatory potential, is not the right (tika) way to conduct this kind of discussion. It would be unjust and divisive, inciting extreme views in all directions and fostering misinformation, anger and ill-will.”

The central difficulty with Dame Anne’s position is that it fails to acknowledge that the manner in which the (re)interpretation of the Treaty has been carried out since the passage of the Waitangi Tribunal legislation in 1975 has not been all that “tika” either. The re-conceptualisation of New Zealand’s democratic system of government was undertaken by institutions and individuals not subject to the judgement of the citizenry. Attempting to re-construct the nation’s constitutional edifice without reference to those obliged to live within it was always a very risky venture.

Dame Anne is not alone in her view that holding a referendum on the Treaty would not be wise. Rather than leave the decision to the electors, the former National Party Defence Minister, and present Law Commission member, Dr Wayne Mapp, argues for a Royal Commission of Inquiry “charged with coming up with an acceptable set of ‘Principles of the Treaty’, that could form the basis of legislative definition of the principles. The term itself is a creature of statute but it has never been statutorily defined. So over the last 36 years the Courts have fulfilled that role, supplemented by the bureaucracy.”

Presumably, Dr Mapp is channelling the wisdom of King Solomon, since nothing less would be required to select a panel of Royal Commissioners acceptable to all the parties involved in the Treaty Debate. Any line-up receiving the thumbs-up from Iwi leaders, Te Pāti Māori and Willie Jackson would, almost certainly, get the thumbs-down from David Seymour and Winston Peters. Which is, precisely, why a referendum is necessary.

Dr Mapp is not convinced. “The reason why I oppose a referendum is that it will be an explicit removal of minority rights. Māori are a minority, mostly contained in the 18%. They will not agree to an ACT imposed definition of the principles of the treaty. I am well connected to Māori views on this matter, primarily through my wife [Denese Henare - C.T.]. I know the level of response and division that such a referendum will cause.”

Once again, the apparent absence of concern at what manner of response and division might ensue when those Mapp describes as “conservative senior politicians” are successful in persuading Christopher Luxon to rule out a referendum. Clearly, the levying of war against the Crown is something only Māori have the wit to threaten.

And, therein, lies the conundrum Luxon will have to face. If he bows to Māori threats to “make war” on his coalition government by scotching Act’s referendum proposal, then what’s next? What does he suppose will be the lesson drawn by those Māori determined to persist with co-governance, with Three Waters, with the Māori Health Authority?

“The last thing National needs over the next 3 years is an intemperate ‘debate’ over the principles of the Treaty.” Opines Dr Mapp. “There is a smarter approach to this issue.” So the Crown has insisted, ever since the 1980s, when it became frightened of what Māori might do if it dared to say “No”. But, it was those “smarter” approaches, driven by fear, that prompted the decisions that have led us, concession by concession, one legal judgement inspiring and empowering the next, to this present position. Thus we find ourselves located, dangerously, between a rock and a hard place.

But, being political has never been easy – not even when one takes the easy way out. The moment always arrives when a choice has to be made. Democracy? Or Ethnic Exceptionalism? And what determines the choice? That, too, does not change:

Our understanding of history. Our perception of what politics should, and should not, permit. The reach of our hate. The strength of our love. The persuasiveness of our fear.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 13 November 2023.

'Third Way' No Way To Go: A Reply To Wayne Mapp.

Pragmatic Idealists: When it becomes clear to both our new prime minister and her finance minister that the price they are being asked to pay to keep the neoliberal guard-dogs away from their throats is too high for any discernible good that it is doing, then we must hope that they will dig deep into the collective experience of the New Zealand labour movement and find there not only the courage to speak socialist words, but also to rally the New Zealand people behind socialist deeds.

I FEEL SORRY for Dr Wayne Mapp. He has always struck me as one of those National Party types who want to do good in the world – but not in a left-wing way. The political paradox in which such politicians are trapped, however, is that it is only under the conditions of a significantly modified capitalism – conditions created by the Left – that their benevolent aspirations can be fulfilled. Rather than acknowledge this, however, they are forever trying to convince the electorate that the Left only ever succeeds when it moves to the Right.

This is the fundamental thesis of Mapp’s latest contribution to The Spinoff, “Jacinda Ardern Is No Radical, But The 21st-Century Face Of Blair’s Third Way”. His argument, essentially, is that:

“In the latter part of the second decade of the twenty-first century, 22 years since Blair first became prime minister, his spiritual successors, Justine (sic) Trudeau and Jacinda Ardern, seem to have wholly adopted Third Wayism. The basic tenets of the neo-liberal settlement are accepted, but the state employs its power and resources to assist those who the market does not fully provide for.”

Putting to one side his transgendering of Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, Mapp’s fundamental misunderstanding of what Tony Blair represents merely confirms his inability to understand the central realities of our recent political history.

The core mission of conservative politicians like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan was to tear down the Left’s modifications of capitalism and reconfigure it as closely as possible to its original nineteenth century form as was politically feasible. Thatcher and Reagan loathed politicians who, like Mapp, were happy to operate within the parameters of the “kinder, gentler” capitalism that the labour and social-democratic parties had created in the 1930s, 40s and 50s. The New Right project was best summed-up by the American, Grover Norquist, who famously declared: “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

Mapp simply does not understand that what we now call “neoliberalism” was a last-ditch and, as things turned out, highly-successful attempt to rescue the western ruling-class from the consequences of what it perceived to be a collection of out-of-control social-democratic governments. What the citizens of those countries: most especially the citizens of the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; have been living with for nearly 40 years are the consequences of their rulers’ ongoing counter-revolution.

In the course of that counter-revolution, the world has witnessed, inter alia: the collapse of actually existing socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union; the dramatic expansion of the global proletariat; the general collapse of trade union power and influence; stagnating wages; the privatisation of publicly owned enterprises; an extreme concentration of media control and influence; the imposition of economic austerity; and the obscene enrichment of the owners and managers of the world’s largest corporations and financial institutions.

It is fascinating to read the way in which this counter-revolutionary world order is bowdlerised by Mapp into the innocuousness of: “an open economy with low tariffs, the private sector owning virtually all parts of the competitive economy, relatively modest tax rates so that the size of government is around one third of the total economy.”

The inevitable corollaries of Mapp’s ‘common-sense’ political-economy: rising inequality, precarious employment; poverty; homelessness; collapsing health services; a deteriorating environment; hardly  rate a mention.

What Mapp does make clear, however, and with considerable accuracy, are the sort of policies which Jacinda Ardern and her finance minister, Grant Robertson, would find it extremely dangerous, politically, to adopt. Changing the neoliberal paradigm, he rightly says, would require a different approach:

“The government would not have signed up to the [Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership]. A fund would have been established for the renationalization of at least the electricity companies. The top tax rate would be at least 40% to reverse inequality. Some form of compulsory unionism would be restored, though perhaps the promised industry wide agreements are intended to be exactly that. An economy so deeply regulated that official permission would be required for even the simplest of business transactions.”

What Mapp, rather predictably, doesn’t say, is that the response to such a radical departure from the status-quo, from the upper-echelons of the civil service, the business community, the mainstream news media and, of course, by his own National Party, would be swift and devastating. Neither Ardern, nor Robertson, require any lessons in the effects of such a backlash. The example of the so-called “Winter of Discontent” of 2000 is there in front of them all the time – reminding them of just how little real power governments exercise in the neoliberal order. Neither of them have any wish to be drowned in Norquist’s bathtub!

The “Third Way-ism” that Mapp extols, and which he believes Ardern to be the twenty-first century exponent of, has always been, at best, a pragmatic recognition of the narrowness of the political and economic stage upon which progressive politicians are permitted to operate in the neoliberal era; and, at worst, an ideological manifestation of the “Stockholm Syndrome” in which fearful left-wing politicians start identifying with the terrorists who have taken them hostage.

On one thing, however, Mapp and I are in complete agreement. The creation of the Labour-NZF-Green government has, indeed, excited me and enlivened my hopes that, when it becomes clear to both our new prime minister and her finance minister that the price they are being asked to pay to keep the neoliberal guard-dogs away from their throats is too high for any discernible good that it is doing, then they will dig deep into the collective experience of the New Zealand labour movement and find there not only the courage to speak socialist words, but also to rally the New Zealand people behind socialist deeds.

Neither Tony Blair, nor Bill Clinton, ever believed that such a course of action could lead to anything except electoral catastrophe. And, in their time, the early-1990s, they may well have been correct. But, as Mapp is so keen to remind us, this is the twenty-first century, and the skies are thick with neoliberal chickens flapping home to roost. As both Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn have made clear, to call yourself a socialist in “the latter part of the second decade of the twenty-first century” is not the one-way ticket to political oblivion which Blair and Clinton assumed it to be. With the grim consequences of the neoliberal counter-revolution all around us, the imminent prospect of a peaceful, democratic-socialist, revolution no longer seems so bad.

This posting is exclusive to Bowalley Road.

“TPPA, Or Not TPPA?” – Table Talk No. 5 At The Ika Seafood Bar & Grill.

Star Of The Show: Professor Jane Kelsey takes her role as an academic and public intellectual seriously. For her, the universities’ statutory obligation to be the “critic and conscience” of New Zealand society is keenly felt and courageously expressed. For much of her adult life she has criss-crossed the globe, from one set of trade negotiations to the next, making contacts, developing information networks, and struggling ceaselessly to bring the dark and dirty secrets of global capitalism - like the TPPA - kicking and screaming into the sunlight of public scrutiny.

 

CONGRATULATIONS ARE DUE to the organisers of last night’s (11/8/15) “Table Talk” at Laila Harré’s Ika Seafood Bar & Grill. The fifth such event, “TPPA or Not TPPA?”, was emceed by the irrepressible Wallace Chapman, and featured a panel which, for the first time, was evenly split between protagonists and antagonists.

 

And, it was a wee ripper!

 

In support of the Trans-Pacific Partnership were Dr Wayne Mapp (former Cabinet Minister under John Key and currently a member of the Law Commission) and Michael Barnett (CEO of the Auckland Chamber of Commerce). Opposing the TPPA were Professor Jane Kelsey (Professor of Law at the University of Auckland and author of the just published deconstruction of neoliberalism in New Zealand, The Fire Economy) and Dr Joshua Freeman (Clinical Microbiologist at Auckland City Hospital and an honorary academic at the University of Auckland School of Molecular Medicine and Pathology).

 

The huge benefit of having Wayne and Michael debating with Jane and Josh was that the audience (which, let’s be fair here, was overwhelmingly anti-TPPA) got the chance to compare and contrast, weigh and evaluate, the arguments of both sides of the issue. This is not always possible in those panel discussions where every participant pretty much agrees with every other. These might make people feel better (having one’s preconceptions confirmed is always gratifying) but it does not test them. To do that a genuine debate is required.

 

There’s no disputing that, over the course of an hour or so of lively discussion, the arguments, both for and against the TPPA, were tested. Equally indisputable, in my opinion, was the identity of the winners. Neither Wayne nor Michael were even close to being a match for Jane and Josh. Indeed, beyond a meagre collection of conventional “free trade” tropes, the TPPA protagonists had virtually nothing to offer.

 

In this they were, ironically, the victims of their own side’s obsession with secrecy. Operating almost exclusively on the tiny amount of information the Key Government has seen fit to release to the public, and utterly reliant on the solemn undertakings and promises enunciated by Messrs Key and Groser, Wayne and Michael could do little but point to the “success” of the NZ-China Free Trade Agreement and raise fears about what would happen to “poor little New Zealand” if it allowed itself to be “locked out” of an agreement as important as the TPPA.

 

Jane and Josh demolished these stock “free trade” arguments without breaking a sweat. Though I wouldn’t have said so before the debate, by the time it was over, it was painfully clear that the protagonists were out of their depth. As a clinical microbiologist, and the TPP spokesman for Ora Taiao, the New Zealand Climate and Health Council, Josh was absolutely on top of the likely consequences for Pharmac, and by extension, the future health of New Zealanders, should the transnational pharmaceutical corporations succeed in having the life of their patents extended. On more than one occasion during the hour, the facts and figures at Josh’s fingertips left Wayne and Michael floundering helplessly in their own ignorance.

 

But it was Professor Jane Kelsey who truly stole the show. Astonished by her encyclopaedic knowledge of just about every item of leaked information concerning the TPPA (as well as the details of all the other FTAs New Zealand has signed) Wallace could not restrain himself from demanding to know “How do you manage to read all this stuff?!” It was an entirely forgivable outburst.

 

The answer, of course, is that Jane takes her role as an academic and public intellectual seriously. For her, the universities’ statutory obligation to be the “critic and conscience” of New Zealand society is keenly felt and courageously expressed. For much of her adult life she has criss-crossed the globe, from one set of trade negotiations to the next, making contacts, developing information networks, and struggling ceaselessly to bring the dark and dirty secrets of global capitalism kicking and screaming into the sunlight of public scrutiny. It is easy for the Right to dismiss her arguments when she isn’t there to defend them, but put her on the same stage as people like Wayne and Michael, or pit her against Mike Hosking, live, on Seven Sharp, and her critics’ arguments are swept away like so much summer gossamer.

 

By the end of the hour, it was clear to everyone that the TPPA – like War in the old 60s poster – “is harmful to flowers, children and other living things”, and that only a truly mendacious government would commit its citizens to what is, in effect, an empowering charter for transnational capital.

 

In conclusion, the answer to the question: “TPPA, or Not TPPA?” is “Not TPPA!”

 

Be sure to join the Anti-TPPA protest march in your town on Saturday, 15 August.

 

This review was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 12 August 2015.