Greed Is Not Good – But It Can Make Good Things Happen.

The Last, Best Hope Of Humankind: New Zealand was once known as the social laboratory of the world; why should it not turn itself into the planet’s climate laboratory? Directing our energy outward is the only viable survival strategy available to New Zealanders. There are no walls that we could possibly hope to build, high enough to keep us safe.

“I STUFFED THEIR MOUTHS WITH GOLD.” So said the Labour politician responsible for creating Britain’s iconic National Health Service (NHS). Aneurin Bevan had been asked to explain how he had managed to silence the British Medical Association’s (BMA) fierce opposition to the keystone of the Labour Government’s socialist programme – and that was his reply. Jacinda Ardern and James Shaw could do a lot worse than be guided by Bevan’s example – especially since New Zealand’s farmers appear to value nothing so much as cash.

The great problem with New Zealand’s current crop of Labour leaders is that most of them would have no idea who Aneurin Bevan was – let alone what he said. Some of them might be able to quote Tony Blair and/or Peter Mandelson (Blair’s equivalent of Boris Johnson’s Dominic Cummings) but the exploits of Clem Attlee’s Labour Government (1945-1951) would likely be dismissed as the irrelevant echoes of the naïve “Clause 4” labourism that Blair’s New Labour replaced. It’s why they have so little to say about Jeremy Corbyn. Ardern and her closest allies, Grant Robertson and Chris Hipkins, regard the British Labour leader as a throwback to the failed left-wing politics of the past.

It’s a pity, because Labour politicians like Attlee and Bevan understood that implementing a “transformative” economic and social programme would require the kind of ruthless pragmatism that only the possession of deeply held beliefs can sanction. Bevan understood that if he insisted on getting everything that he wanted he would likely end up with nothing. To secure his beloved NHS he would have to compromise. When the BMA threatened strike action, he simply made it worth the doctors’ while to accept the NHS. He “stuffed their mouths with gold”.

A progressive government determined to do its part in the global battle against Climate Change would have proceeded from the assumption that, unless they were generously rewarded for doing so, the farming community would strenuously resist any and all attempts to draw them into the fight. It has been a constant of New Zealand political history that resistance to progressive change has always been led by organisations composed of, or beholden to, farmers. Ardern and Shaw should have taken that as a given – and framed their policies accordingly. The historical precedent was right there before them in the guaranteed prices scheme that had bound the farming sector to the new social-democratic order set in place by New Zealand’s first Labour government (1935-1949).

The closer each farm comes to meeting the Government’s targets for greenhouse gas reduction, the more certain it should be of receiving financial rewards from the state. Think of it as an environmentally targeted variant of the US policy which artificially keeps agricultural prices high by paying farmers to keep some of their fields uncultivated. Cleaning up the nation’s waterways could be achieved by a similar policy of rewarding, rather than punishing, farmers for their behaviour. By stuffing their pockets with cash.

As things now stand, the Coalition faces a simmering rural revolt. Farmers are convinced that they are being made the scapegoats for New Zealand’s failure to come to grips effectively with Climate Change. They are in no mood to co-operate with anyone except Federated Farmers and the National Party.

Labour’s coalition partner, NZ First is terrified of this incipient rebellion – rightly concluding that if the party is perceived to be siding with the Reds and the Greens, then it will be wiped out in next year’s general election. This fear predisposes them towards delaying, if not actively sabotaging, the already flawed policies cobbled together by Labour and The Greens. To make matters worse, both Federated Farmers and the National Party are well aware of NZ First’s rising political panic and are feeding it at every given opportunity. As a result, the Coalition’s policies on Climate Change are in danger of being reduced to incoherent and ineffectual nonsense. James Shaw is already being made to look like an inept fool, and Jacinda Ardern’s commitment to make Climate Change her generation’s nuclear-free moment is about to be tossed onto the growing pile of Labour’s broken promises.

It’s a sad end to what could have been a much happier story. New Zealand’s only hope of making any kind of difference to the unfolding horror story that is Climate Change lies in showing the rest of the world what can be done. Our 0.17 percent contribution to the global total of greenhouse gas emissions is much too small to attract the attention of those whose eyes remain fixed on the relentlessly rising contributions of the USA and China. But an unequivocal success story: the achievement of a small nation that found a way to rapidly and equitably reduce its carbon emissions and clean up its waterways; that just might inspire other nations to direct their gaze southward. And with Jacinda selling the story, in all the ways David Lange was prevented from selling New Zealand’s nuclear-free policy back in the 1980s, who knows how many nations might end up tagging along behind the Kiwi Pied-Piper?

The saddest aspect of the week just past is that Greta Thunberg’s incandescent address to the Climate Summit in New York was not seconded by New Zealand’s Prime Minister with a story of real and entirely imitable success. A Prime Minister who could respond to Greta’s righteous wrath with words of hope. Who could say to the youth of the world: “Do not despair, all is not lost, we have found a way. Come to our little country at the bottom of the world and we will show you how to dramatically reduce a country’s carbon emissions in record time. We will help you to become the global disciples of ‘enough’; youthful ambassadors for a world that only awaits those with the courage to make it.”

New Zealand was once known as the social laboratory of the world; why should it not turn itself into the planet’s climate laboratory? Directing our energy outward is the only viable survival strategy available to New Zealanders. There are no walls that we could possibly hope to build, high enough to keep us safe.

As for how best to deal with the enemies of a sustainable future: can we not be guided by Aneurin Bevan? If paying people to do the right thing prevents them from doing the wrong thing – then isn’t that money well spent?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 27 September 2019.

The Great Fear: Why Farmers Won’t Let The Health And Safety Reform Bill Pass.

Hard Going: All attempts to intrude regulations pertinent to the general welfare of all New Zealanders beyond the farm gate has invariably been met with ferocious political opposition. Whether it be the public’s “right to roam”, the doomed “Fart Tax”, the Emissions Trading Scheme, or, in just the last few weeks, the Health and Safety Reform Bill, the cry of New Zealand’s cockies has been – "They shall not pass!"

 

IT WAS GENOCIDE of a special kind. Relentless mass killing inspired not by ethnicity, or religion, but by the victims’ social and economic position. “The liquidation of the Kulaks as a class” was one of Joseph Stalin’s greatest crimes. Farmers around the world looked on in horror, and their instinctive hostility towards the collectivising tendencies of city-based socialists congealed into an implacable hatred.

 

As a political designation, “Kulak” is derived from the Polish word for “fist” – as in “tight fisted” – making it, from the very beginning, a term of abuse for those farmers who had worked harder and smarter than their neighbours, produced a surplus, sold it on the open market, purchased some basic agricultural machinery with the proceeds, hired a little help – and made a profit.

 

Even in Tsarist times (when Poland was a part of the Russian Empire) the Kulaks were objects of envy and suspicion. After the Bolshevik Revolution, however, to be classed (and the word is used here advisedly) as a Kulak all-too-often meant persecution, confiscation, and, with the advent of “the collectivisation of agriculture” in late 1920s and early 30s, arrest, deportation, enslavement in the gulags [Soviet forced labour camps] and death.

 

With the Revolution’s ruthless elimination of the old Russian aristocracy, the Kulaks – though only marginally better off than their neighbours – had found themselves elevated to the status of the new capitalist class in the countryside. The smarter Bolsheviks had wanted to harness the drive and entrepreneurial flair of the Kulaks to secure the volume of exportable agricultural surpluses required to make socialism affordable for the rest of the USSR’s population.

 

Stalin was having none of it. The great Soviet experiment could not be held hostage to the capitalistic proclivities of its peasant farmers – no matter how economically productive. Agriculture must be collectivised and industrialised. Peasants must become workers. “Now”, Stalin boasted in 1929, “we have the opportunity to carry out a resolute offensive against the kulaks, break their resistance, eliminate them as a class and replace their production with the production of kolkhozes [collective farms] and sovkhozes [state-owned farms].”

 

"Do Not Trust Him! This Czech poster, from the 1940s, depicts the Kulak as the most hardened enemy of Socialism.

 

Ancient history? Not a bit of it! The fate of farmers under conditions of “actually existing socialism” has stood as a cautionary tale to generation after generation of Kiwi cockies. The very idea of the state and its minions attempting to impose their will beyond the farm gate fills New Zealand farmers with a combination of fury and dread. Resistance, loud and implacable, has always been their first response.

Except, of course, when collective solutions were manifestly in the farmers’ interest – as was the case with the guaranteed prices and massive state subsidies that underpinned New Zealand agriculture from the 1930s to the 1980s. Like so many other Kiwi capitalists, farmers have never had a problem with socialising the costs and privatising the profits of their endeavours.

 

Well, hardly ever. When, in 1972, the National Government suggested the compulsory acquisition of the entire New Zealand wool clip, the parliamentary candidate for the Southland seat of Awarua, a farmer named Aubrey Begg, thundered that: “If this measure is allowed to proceed, we might as well paint a hammer and sickle on every barn door in New Zealand!” (And he was the Labour candidate!)

 

The farmers’ great fear of socialism is nowhere better displayed than in their unwavering refusal to recognise workers’ rights. Such recognition would only open the door to the trade unions – long resisted (think "Massey’s Cossacks") as both the harbingers and hand-maidens of every socialist burden ever imposed upon the long-suffering cockie.

 

One imagines the fate of the doomed kulaks looming large in the farmers’ fevered imaginations when, in 1936, the First Labour Government passed the Agricultural Workers Act. No doubt its provision of a minimum wage, four weeks paid holiday, and radically improved housing, for all farm workers, was regarded as proof positive that the Kiwi Kulaks’ one-way trip to the gulags was imminent!

 

Though the word “Kulak” may have faded from twenty-first century cockies’ vocabulary, their visceral fear of trade unionists and the socialist aspirations they embody, has not. Which is why any and every attempt to intrude regulations pertinent to the general welfare of all New Zealanders beyond the farm gate is invariably met with ferocious political opposition. Whether it be the public’s “right to roam”, the doomed “Fart Tax”, the Emissions Trading Scheme, or, in just the last few weeks, the Health and Safety Reform Bill, the cry of New Zealand’s cockies has been the same as the cry of the communist defenders of the Spanish Republic: ¡No pasarán! – They Shall Not Pass!

 

The rest of New Zealand must understand that allowing farm workers to manage their own health and safety would open the door for trade unionism – and socialism!

 

And what could possibly be more dangerous than that?!

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 25 August 2015.