Hi-Viz Vests Among The Trees

All That Remains: But, just imagine if the workers in the Hi-Viz vests refused to sink their chainsaws into the flesh of these miraculous trees and their mysterious networks of sentience. Imagine if ordinary working men and women stopped leaving all the decisions to the architects, engineers and accountants. Imagine if they said: “This is our planet, too, and we refuse to allow you to inflict any more damage upon its fragile body. So, to all you planners who won’t see what’s lost; to all you builders who don’t count the cost; we say: ‘Stop! Enough is enough!’”

 ALL ALONG THE MAIN ROAD workers in Hi-Viz vests are getting ready to cut down trees. Some are sharpening the teeth of their chainsaws, others lean casually against the flanks of their utes and vans, pulling deeply on cigarettes. As the sun’s first rays begin working on the chill morning air, these Hi-Viz wearers begin moving towards what’s left of the trees.

 Would asking these workers to stop do the slightest good? The best response one could hope for is a weary “Mate, I’m just doing my job.” Less tolerant Hi-Viz wearers would have less to say – but they would say it much more forcefully!

 It is hard to condemn the impatience of working people accosted by middle-class tree-huggers. Sentimentality butters no parsnips. In the time of Covid, jobs are precious. Only an idiot would put their own and their family’s welfare at risk by giving ear to those lucky enough to live in neighbourhoods with surplus trees to fell.

 Besides, the workers in the Hi-Viz vests are just the contractors. Neither they, nor the firm that summoned them here at the crack of dawn, had the slightest say in the huge development project of which they are but one insignificant component. It was someone else’s decision: some architect’s, engineer’s or accountant’s; to clear the roadside of trees. Just one more tiny step towards the project’s completion. Certainly not something to waste time or money defending. Contractors are ten-a-penny. Those who raise ridiculous objections can easily be replaced.

 All this is so obvious that it hardly merits the space already given to its explanation. We live in a society that assigns to private property all manner of rights and privileges. If the trees, and the land from which their roots have drawn sustenance for the past 100 years, belong to you, then you are free to cut them down. What’s more, if any person, or group of persons, tries to prevent you from cutting them down, then they are breaking the law and subject to arrest. No citizen in possession of their own house and a wee bit of garden would have it any other way.

 Which is, of course, why the globe continues to grow warmer, and why every summer is hotter than the last. Because human-beings simply will not surrender the fantasy that the planet that keeps them (and everything else) alive is theirs: that they can own it; and that they can destroy its fragile ecosystems – the Amazon rain forest, or a line of trees along a suburban road – without being in any way affected.

 The planners and the builders and the tree-fellers could listen to the scientists. They could learn about the impossible complexity of even the smallest tree. Of its awareness of environmental change. Of the signals it sends out to its neighbours. Of a longevity that reduces our own lives to the span of a single, sad season. But they don’t, because they’re pretty sure that if they did, then they would also have to listen to what the trees were saying.

 But just imagine if they did. Just imagine if the workers in the Hi-Viz vests refused to sink their chainsaws into the flesh of these miraculous trees and their mysterious networks of sentience. Imagine if ordinary working men and women stopped leaving all the decisions to the architects, engineers and accountants. Imagine if they said: “This is our planet, too, and we refuse to allow you to inflict any more damage upon its fragile body. So, to all you planners who won’t see what’s lost; to all you builders who don’t count the cost; we say: ‘Stop! Enough is enough!’”

 Except, you don’t have to imagine it, because, for a few brief months, it happened. Way back in the 1970s, in Sydney, Australia, when the workers in the Hi-Viz vests and their union imposed the world’s first “Green Ban” and forced the big developers to think again. It didn’t last, of course, the developers’ money and the corrupt union officials who took it saw to that, but it did happen.

 And if this poor planet of ours is to be saved, and Climate Change brought under control, then it will be the workers in the Hi-Viz vests that do it.

 On the day they tell their bosses to let the trees stand.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 7 August 2020.

Green Vote Down! Is History Repeating Itself?

Red Pressure: Is it possible that the same reckoning that caused Values supporters to return to the Labour fold in 1978 is at work again? Even in the era of Mixed Member Proportional Representation, have the supposedly redundant arguments of FPP reasserted themselves? Have centre-left voters come to the realisation that, if they want to get rid of John Key’s National-led Government, then they are going to have to push Andrew Little’s Labour into a credible second place?

 

THE GREENS’ DRAMATIC FALL in the latest Colmar-Brunton should be a matter of considerable concern to the whole party. If it continues, then we may see the Greens fall victim to the same political phenomenon that led to the demise of the Values Party.

 

Voting for Values peaked at the General Election of 1975 when it attracted 5.19 percent support. Not surprisingly, its members were ecstatic. Anticipating an even bigger surge of support in 1978, they began the process of firming-up and paring-down the policies contained in their extremely popular 1975 Manifesto, Beyond Tomorrow.

 

This turned out to be an unexpectedly fraught process. A large and well-organised fraction of the Values Party argued strongly that the system-changing objectives set forth in Beyond Tomorrow would never be acceptable to New Zealand’s ruling-class, whose power would have to be substantially diminished if the party’s core environmental policies were ever to be implemented.

 

This eco-socialist position did not sit altogether comfortably with the party’s pure ecologists, who believed that once people understood the scientific rationale for radically reorienting Western values, then radical change would follow naturally – and without the class conflict predicted by Values’ eco-socialist wing.

 

Better organised and superior in debate, the eco-socialists gained the upper hand, leading Values into the 1978 General Election with one of the most radical manifestos ever presented to the New Zealand electorate. The votes they hoped to plunder with this document were those of Labour’s more left-wing supporters. On paper, it seemed like a winning strategy.

 

What the eco-socialists hadn’t counted on, however, was just how fed-up the non-National-Party-voting half of the New Zealand electorate had become with Prime Minister Rob Muldoon. Under the First-Past-The-Post electoral system, the sort of oppositional vote-splitting which Values was advocating almost always ended up advantaging the incumbent government.

 

Recognising this, the left-wing idealists who had flocked to Values banner in 1975 underwent a decisive change of heart. In the name of getting rid of “Piggy” Muldoon, they were willing to abandon the idealistic dreams of Beyond Tomorrow. Accordingly, in 1978, the Values Vote almost exactly halved: falling from 83,241 to 41,220 – just 2.41 percent of the votes cast.

 

The eco-socialists’ strategy of taking on Labour had failed dismally. The pure ecologists rallied their supporters and drove the eco-socialists out of the party. But, if they were hoping that a Red purge would recover their fortunes, they were wrong. In the General Election of 1981, Values was more-or-less wiped out. From 41,220 their vote fell to a risible 3,460. In 1984, the party attracted just 0.20 percent of the popular vote. Game Over.

 

Values’ rebirth, as the Green Party, in 1990, saw it win an impressive 6.85 percent of the popular vote. The old FPP realities remained, however, and they were forced to join forces with the left-wing NewLabour Party in 1991 under the rubric of Jim Anderton’s “Alliance”. With the introduction of proportional representation in 1996, however, all the old FPP rationales against vote-splitting became redundant. In 1999, the Greens stood under their own banner and received 5.16 percent of the Party Vote – just enough to secure them 7 seats in Parliament.

 

Between 1999 and 2008 the Greens’ Party Vote fluctuated between 5.16 percent and 7.0 percent. With the defeat of Helen Clark’s Labour-led centre-left government, however, and the onset of what would be six years of internal conflict and lacklustre politics from Labour, the Green vote soared: from 157,613 Party Votes (6.72 percent) in 2008 to 257,356 Party Votes (10.70 percent) in 2014. It looked as though the old eco-socialist strategy of luring away Labour’s left-wing voters was on the point of being vindicated.

 

And then, in February 2016, Colmar Brunton’s pollsters registered a drop of 4 percentage points in the Greens’ numbers. The party had shed one third of its support: falling from 12 to 8 percent.

 

Is it possible that the same reckoning that caused Values supporters to return to the Labour fold in 1978 is at work again? Even in the era of Mixed Member Proportional Representation, have the supposedly redundant arguments of FPP reasserted themselves? Have centre-left voters come to the realisation that, if they want to get rid of John Key’s National-led Government, then they are going to have to push Andrew Little’s Labour into a credible second place – i.e. somewhere closer to 40 percent of the Party Vote than 30 percent?

 

If the answer to all these questions is “Yes”, then the Greens had better brace themselves. They have a lot further to fall.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog on Monday, 22 February 2016.

Figuring Out the Greens

Managing the message: The late Rod Donald's greatest political achievement was in keeping the various currents of Green Party thought - environmentalism, eco-socialism and eco-evangelism - flowing in the same direction. His premature death in 2006 allowed these competing currents to diverge, and the resulting intra-party power-plays have triggered the departure of their most articulate parliamentary representatives.

The exchange of comments between myself and Green Party member "Go Figure" over my 25 September posting "Sue Bradford Resigns" has raised a sufficiently large number of Green Party-related issues to warrant a separate posting of their own.

THE MOST ALARMING ASPECT of the Greens’ political style is the sheer number of heroic assumptions it makes about the world it is trying to save. Foremost among these is the assumption that by exposing the ecological dangers and social pathologies threatening human civilisation, Green Parties can, and will, secure the political changes required to eliminate them.

The social-change model at work here is straightforwardly educative. Since the self-destructive and ultimately unsustainable policies of current governments are (according to the Greens) based on an insufficient understanding of their ecological and social effects, all that is required to remedy the situation is for the evidence amassed by the world’s natural and social scientists to be placed before the world’s politicians, and the problems will be solved.

That’s what my statement: "At the heart of the Green ideology is a conviction that natural science is devoid of political content" means. It describes a world in which scientific evidence arrives without political baggage. And it explains why the Greens have been so spectacularly unsuccessful in translating the reality of global warming into a commanding electoral position.

They have proved singularly incapable of constructing an effective strategic (or even tactical) response to the brute political fact that, in spite of all the evidence amassed by the world’s leading climatologists’, their own country’s – and the world’s – political leaders refuse to act decisively. Their policy-making model: amass the evidence-present the evidence-effect the change; doesn’t work – and they simply don’t know what to do about it.

Another example is the Greens handling of the Genetic Engineering issue. They promoted and (thanks to the Alliance) eventually secured a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the controversy. Their assumption was that, once the Commissioners were presented with all the evidence of the dangers of GE , they’d adopt the precautionary principle and recommend that the Labour-led Government’s moratorium on GE activity outside the laboratory remain in place.

When this didn’t happen they had no real answer – other than to temporarily sever their relationship with the Labour Party. Not even when Nicky Hager’s book Seeds of Distrust revealed to them how effortlessly the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry had prevailed over the Prime Minister’s and her advisors’ initial determination to expose and rectify the accidental release of genetically modified corn, the Greens were unable to mount an effective political attack.

The dangers inherent in the Greens’ educative model are demonstrated in their policy on the Treaty of Waitangi. Though the signing of the Treaty, like all historical events, is the subject of multiple, and often sharply contradictory, interpretations, the Greens have adopted an unequivocal and quite inflexible interpretation of the Treaty’s meaning. So much so that when some of their own members, unconvinced by the official party line, openly questioned it’s accuracy, they were deemed ineligible to stand as Green candidates by the Party leadership.

That the dissidents’ views on the Treaty of Waitangi were actually more in tune with those of the majority of Pakeha New Zealanders was an "inconvenient truth" to be overcome by – yes, you guessed it – a taxpayer-funded traveling road-show which would take the "true" meaning of the Treaty directly to the ignorant Pakeha masses and educate them into full conformity with the Greens’ historical interpretation.

This authoritarian aspect of the Greens’ political style is nowhere more apparent than in their so-called "consensus-based decision-making" constitution. Described as a means of "seeking positions that the maximum number of people can support, rather than a simple majority", what these rules actually make possible is the ability of a tiny minority to over-rule and/or subvert the will of the majority.

In practical terms, it allows the leadership of the party, either directly or through their surrogates, to prevent the membership from directly challenging the Green Party caucus’s political strategy and tactics. Rather than promoting the open contest of conflicting political options, it fosters the cobbling together of compromises. Also, by imposing enormous emotional pressure on dissenters, it drives opposition below the surface of party affairs – a situation which, once again, privileges those in senior positions, and makes rank-and-file challenges to official party policy extremely difficult.

Offsetting these massive political liabilities, however, was the presence in the 1999-2008 Green Party caucus of eco-socialist politicians Sue Bradford and Keith Locke, and the eco-religious activist, Nandor Tanczos. The formers’ Marxist backgrounds provided them with a very different social-change model, one based upon the understanding that ideas – even scientific ideas – arise out of the political, economic and cultural context of social classes in unrelenting conflict, and that the only truly effective means of defending Planet Earth is by organising the victims of socio-economic and/or ecological violence against the economic and social forces responsible for inflicting it. In other words: without assembling the mass movements required to make those responsible for assaulting the planet and its peoples cease and desist, simply presenting governments with evidence of their ecological and social crimes is never going to be enough.

Eco-religious activism can be of enormous help in this regard. By adding a metaphysical gloss to the political exigencies of what remains, fundamentally, a class-based conflict, the existential aspects of the issues at stake can be brought into sharper focus. When all is said and done, the struggle is about nothing less than the long-term survival of our own, and countless other living species. It is a battle for the very possibility of a just and abundant human future.

More than any other Green Party leader, Rod Donald understood the critical importance of keeping all of these aspects of the Greens in play. A natural and highly effective political campaigner, he knew how important it was to have clout on the streets as well as in the House. He knew, too, the value of Nandor’s gentle eco-evangelism in a society increasingly bereft of religious and spiritual nourishment. In Sue and Keith, he recognised two potent links to New Zealand’s radical socialist traditions. And, in the environmental work of Jeanette Fitzsimons, he appreciated the value of a well-argued case, based upon solid empirical research. It was Rod’s great skill to keep all of these ideological currents flowing in the same direction. Tragically, his premature death allowed them to diverge, and the resulting intra-party power-shifts have led to the departure of their most articulate representatives.

Sue is merely the latest of these critical individuals to go.

Others will follow.

They will not be replaced.