Buying Back The Whenua.

Dangerous Visionaries: Rex Connor wanted to “buy back the farm” (i.e. nationalise Australia’s mineral wealth) and ended up bringing down the government of Gough Whitlam. Nanaia Mahuta’s Three Waters Project is seen by many as a first step to “buying back the whenua” (repatriating Māori lands and waters). A policy which threatens the longevity of Jacinda Ardern’s government.

REX CONNOR is remembered in Australian political history as the Labor Party minister who wanted to “buy back the farm”. In the rough language of Gough Whitlam’s 1970s Labor Party, “buying back the farm” meant bringing Australia’s phenomenal mineral wealth under public control for the benefit of all Australians – rather than a handful of obscenely profitable mining companies. Unlike the Australian Labor Party of today (or the New Zealand Labour Party, for that matter) the party of Rex Connor, MP for Cunningham, New South Wales, still boasted some honest-to-goodness socialists.

Sadly, Rex Connor is remembered for more than wanting to buy back the farm, he’s remembered for actually trying to do it. Bull-headed and scornful of political compromise, Connor stepped beyond the accepted bounds of Cabinet Government and allowed himself to be duped by a charlatan almost certainly in the employ of the Central Intelligence Agency. In doing so, Connor brought down not only himself, but also the charismatic Labor Treasurer, Jim Cairns, and, ultimately, the government of Gough Whitlam itself.

Connor’s economic nationalism was about as strong as it gets. He was fond of quoting the Australian poet, Sam Walter Foss. These lines in particular:

Give me men to match my mountains,
Give me men to match my plains,
Men with freedom in their visions
And creation in their veins.

By and large, politics and the poetic temperament do not mix. Had Whitlam paid more attention to the visionary gleam in Connor’s eye, he might have avoided the “dismissal” that brought his stellar career to a sudden and ignominious end. Creativity can be equally dangerous – especially when it extends to swallowing the too-good-to-be-true promises of shadowy “bankers” like Tirath Khemlani.

Connor’s tale is a cautionary one. So much so, that between 1975 and 1984 the lessons to be drawn from the Lands and Minerals Minister’s pig-headed economic nationalism were dinned into our own Labour MPs. Two lessons in particular were emphasised. One: It is impossible for a Cabinet Minister to operate secretly without the tacit support of his officials. Any attempt can only end in disaster. Two: Threatening the core economic interests of your country’s capitalist class is always a bad idea. They will get you long before you get them.

Connor’s tragic history therefore contributed in no small way to the readiness of both Antipodean labour parties to be convinced that there were no viable political alternatives to the free-market economic policies urged upon them in the mid-1980s. Rex Connor’s failure to buy back the farm, and Roger Douglas’s eagerness to sell it, are not unrelated.

But what have these fifty-year-old experiences got to do with the New Zealand of 2021? Surely our own government contains no one even remotely like the recklessly quixotic Rex Connor?

Actually, it does. Her name is Nanaia Mahuta.

Labour’s Minister of Internal Affairs is not an economic nationalist, but she is a Māori nationalist. Her mission is not to buy back the farm, but to redeem the whenua out of which New Zealand’s farms were fashioned. And not just the whenua. Mahuta’s sights are firmly set upon Aotearoa’s waters as well.

Though she is extremely guarded about the potential of her controversial Three Waters Project to provide an answer to the question: “Who owns the water?”; the Waitangi Tribunal evinces no such reticence. According to the Tribunal, Aotearoa’s waters do not belong to the Crown. Nor do they belong to “no one” – as Prime Minister John Key insisted, when 50 percent of New Zealand’s hydro-electric assets were being floated on the share market. No, Māori and water cannot be justly separated. Hence the “co-governance” provisions embedded in Mahuta’s Three Waters reform package.

Mahuta does, however, possess advantages Rex Connor lacked. In the Aotearoa of 2021 there is no Rupert Murdoch figure ready to publish devastating leaks from senior bureaucrats outraged by their Minister’s secret manoeuvrings. On the contrary, a great many journalists and public servants share the transformative visions contained in the Mahuta-commissioned He Puapua Report. Nor is it the case that Mahuta’s colleagues are being kept in the dark, as Connor’s were, about the implications of the Minister’s radical plans.

On one thing, however, Mahuta’s colleagues need to be very clear. Her version of “buying back the farm” cannot avoid buying a political fight every bit as consequential as Rex Connor’s.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 19 November 2021.

The List Candidate: Winston Peters and the Looming Covid-19 Depression.

Economic Nationalist: The NZ First leader, Winston Peters, has lived long enough to know that what New Zealanders did once they can do again. That economic change is the product not simply of improved technology but of political will.

WHY IS IT, that of all the party leaders only Winston Peters fully understands the economic ramifications of the Covid-19 Pandemic? Perhaps it’s his age. That might sound snarky, but it isn’t. None of the other party leaders are old enough to possess a solid mental picture of what New Zealand was like before the Neoliberal Revolution of 1984-1993.

Just do the maths. Jacinda was born in 1980 – which makes her 4-years-old in 1984. Simon Bridges, born in 1976, was 8. James Shaw and Marama Davidson, both born in 1973, were 11. The Act leader, David Seymour, born in 1983, was hardly out of nappies!

Now, consider Winston Peters. He was born in 1945, just as the Second World War was drawing to a close. He grew to adulthood in the “golden years” of the post-war boom, nurtured by the political, economic and social infrastructure of Mickey Savage’s cradle-to-grave welfare state. In 1984, as Labour set about dismantling this crowning political achievement of the New Zealand working-class, Peters was already 39-years-old.

The eldest of the other party leaders, Shaw and Davidson, will possess only the haziest memories of pre-Rogernomics New Zealand. What I remember of New Zealand in 1967, when I was 11-years-old, is made up mostly of family events, popular songs, movies and television programmes. As far as political memories go, I struggle to recall any names beyond Keith Holyoake, Harold Wilson and President Johnson. I had only the vaguest notion of what capitalism was, but I was pretty sure that “communism” was a very bad thing. Now, it’s entirely possible that the Green Party co-leaders were much more politically aware than I was at the age of 11, but it’s much more likely that they, like me, were far too busy being children.

Five years on, however, in 1972, my political memories are much more vivid. I shall certainly never forget that Saturday evening in November when for the first time in 12 years there was change of government. There had been a Labour government in my lifetime, but I was no older in 1957 than David Seymour was in 1984. For me, “Big Norm” was a political phenomenon: a breaker of moulds; a man who made it possible to believe in a better world; my hero.

What would Shaw’s and Davidson’s memories of 1989 have been? Of a riven Labour Party tearing itself to pieces over “Rogernomics”? Of a National Party, circling like a flock of vultures over the bloody entrails of a discredited government? Of the unsettling sense of a world they’d never really known being dismantled before their eyes? Of its replacement being full of sharp edges and dangerous spikes: a world that promised winners everything and losers nothing? Did they celebrate their sixteenth birthdays dreaming about building a better world, or wondering how to navigate their way through such a shitty one? A world where walls came down; students were shot down; heroes fell down; and history itself was said to be winding down.

Winston Peters, meanwhile, possessed a very clear picture of what his country looked like before Rogernomics and after “Ruthanasia”. He and the National Party had been elected on a “no ifs, no buts, no maybes” promise to restore “the decent society”. What was that? For Peters it was a society that allowed a dirt-poor cow-cockey’s son from Northland to become a pin-striped lawyer in a double-breasted suit. It was a society that offered work to all who wanted it – and felt only disdain for those who didn’t. It was a society that knew better than to leave the rich in charge of an economy. A society smart enough to know that in such a small country only the state was big enough to guarantee both prosperity and fairness.

Most importantly, Peters had lived long enough to know that what New Zealanders had done once they could do again. That economic change is the product not simply of improved technology but of political will.

A whole generation before Columbus set foot on the islands of the Caribbean, the Chinese were sailing 600-foot ocean-going junks all the way to East Africa. They had the technology to become the masters of the planet, but not the political will. The great sailing junks ended up rotting at their moorings. Voyages beyond the horizon were forbidden. Europeans conquered the world.

Peters loves these historical counterfactuals. He revels in knowing who Friedrich List (1789-1846) was and how his “national system” of economics transformed Germany into an industrial behemoth second only to the United States. He would write articles lamenting the fact that while the university book stores of South Korea were full of List’s economic nationalist ideas, most Kiwi students have never heard of him – let alone been taught about his kind of economics.

Friedrich List (1789-1846) Economic Nationalist.

Certainly, it’s a pretty safe bet that Jacinda, Simon, James, Marama and David could not tell you very much at all about List and the state-led capitalism which he championed and which has, historically, always outperformed the laissez-faire variety so beloved of the English-speaking capitalist countries. Not that their ignorance of economic nationalism worries them unduly. Having no clear memory of the world that existed before the triumph of Neoliberalism, they find it difficult to imagine that countries and economies could possibly be run successfully according to principles not sanctioned by their Treasury advisors.

The other party leaders may snigger at Peters now, but when the unemployment rate is climbing steadily towards 15 percent, and a third of New Zealand’s small businesses have shut down, there will be much less to snigger at. When Neoliberalism’s failure can no longer be hidden – even from those politicians who have grown up knowing nothing else – the man who has lived long enough to know that his alternative economic model works will be the man to know. And, when all the votes have been counted, he will still be the man who decides which of all those young leaders, born in the 1970s and 80s, becomes New Zealand’s next prime minister.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 1 May 2020.