When The Country Goes To Town.

Pretty Ugly, Pretty Quickly: That the demographic and cultural divide between rural and urban New Zealand remains a source of deep unease to farmers cannot be doubted. Equally indisputable, historically-speaking, has been the militant, even violent, character of rural New Zealand’s response. In New Zealand history, when the country comes to town, things tend to get pretty ugly, pretty quickly. Morrinsville, New Zealand, 18 September 2017.

YESTERDAY IN MORRINSVILLE farmers rallied against Labour’s proposed “Water Tax”. Why Morrinsville? Because that was the little country town in which Jacinda Ardern grew up. Just think about that for a moment. Think about what it says about the mindset of a distressingly large percentage of New Zealand’s farming community.

The president of the Waikato branch of Federated Farmers, Andrew McGiven, told the NZ Farmer newspaper that farmers were tired of being scapegoated by politicians. Another protest organiser, local farmer Lloyd Downing, complained to the same publication in similar fashion:

“The lack of fairness and consistency in some of the proposed policies, and the laying of blame solely at the feet of rural New Zealand for all of our environmental challenges is what is frustrating farmers – particularly when it is well known that the most polluted waterways are in urban catchments. The water quality issues are a challenge for all New Zealanders. Farmers recognise that, and are spending tens of thousands of dollars each on reducing their environmental impact.”

It was in response to these “continued attacks” on “rural New Zealand” that farmers rallied in their hundreds under Morrinsville’s giant cow statue.

New Zealanders like to think of themselves as people with strong ties to the land. It’s a fallacy which perhaps explains the enduring popularity of the television programme, Country Calendar. Except that, for most of its history, New Zealand has been an urban nation. Certainly, by the early years of the twentieth century most Kiwis resided and worked in towns and cities. In terms of their jobs, lifestyle and political outlook, these “townies” were a very different breed.

That this demographic and cultural divide between rural and urban New Zealand was a source of deep unease to farmers cannot be doubted. Equally indisputable, historically-speaking, has been the militant, even violent, character of rural New Zealand’s response. In New Zealand history, when the country comes to town, things tend to get pretty ugly, pretty quickly.

In 1913, for example, hundreds of armed farmers on horseback (known forever after as “Massey’s Cossacks” after the farmer-friendly Reform Party prime minister, William Massey) were brought into New Zealand’s major cities to crush what would come to be known as “The Great Strike”. According to New Zealand historian, James Belich, exchanges of gunfire between Massey’s Cossacks and the “Red Fed” strikers were common. Many of the trade unionists involved in the Great Strike later became MPs and Ministers in the First Labour Government.

One of those unionists was Peter Fraser. In 1945, as Prime Minister and Labour Party Leader, Fraser presided over the abolition of the infamous “Country Quota”. This was the section of New Zealand’s Electoral Act which, ever since 1881, had added a 25 percent weighting to votes cast in rural electorates.

The reaction of the farming community to Fraser’s long-overdue rectification of what can only be described as a democratic outrage is instructive. In his book, The Quest For Security In New Zealand 1840-1966, W B Sutch describes how Labour’s plans to abolish the Country Quota were met with “country-wide protests from farmers’ organisations, an appeal to the Governor-General asking him to intervene, and threats of direct action.” Quite what the cockies meant by “direct action” remains unclear, but the Dominion Executive of the Farmers’ Union (forerunner of Federated Farmers) was prepared to raise the then quite considerable sum of £250,000 to fund it!

The sort of thing the cockies had in mind only became clear in 1951, when the first farmers’ government since 1935 was willing to shut down New Zealand’s democracy for the 151 days it took Sid Holland’s National Party to replicate its Reform Party predecessor’s success in ruthlessly suppressing militant trade-unionism in the nation’s ports, coal mines, railways and freezing works.

Thirty years later, the reactionary cultural instincts of rural New Zealand were, once again, pitched into a prolonged and violent confrontation with the progressive values of metropolitan New Zealanders. The 1981 Springbok Tour not only bore testimony to the tenacity of rural conservatism, but also to its steady migration into the upper-middle-class suburbs of the largest cities.

When Mike Hosking challenged National’s current leader to name something he would march for, Dipton’s favourite son was at a loss. This was curious, since the photographs of a placard-carrying Bill English, seated jauntily on ‘Myrtle the Tractor’, at the 2003 Federated Farmers’ protest against the so-called “Fart Tax”, in Parliament Grounds, were still in the archives – and easily retrieved.

When Andrew McGiven and Lloyd Downing encouraged their rural brethren to gather under Morrinsville’s giant cow yesterday, they were simply adding another chapter to an already lengthy story of rural antagonism towards the needs and aspirations of New Zealand’s urban majority. The latter looked on, appalled, at the selfishness and ignorance which unfailingly follow the country into town.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 19 September 2017.

The National Party In Gumboots.

Smile For The Camera: Call me a cynic, but the carefully staged photograph of Federated Farmers’ new president, Katie Milne (the first woman ever to hold the post) resplendent in boots and Swandri, kneeling at the side of the Ngaruroro River, while a grinning line of gumbooted corporate cockies look on admiringly, strikes me as too good to be true.

 

IT WAS MAUDE ROYDEN, the English suffragette, who admonished the Anglican Church to “go forward along the path of progress and be no longer satisfied only to represent the Conservative Party at prayer.” Royden’s oft-quoted quip was irresistible to a wit of Sir Michael Cullen’s acerbity. His wicked paraphrase: that Federated Farmers represented “the National Party in gumboots” has always struck me as at least as memorable as the original. The Labour Party would, therefore, be wise to keep Sir Michael’s witticism at the front of their minds as they congratulate Federated Farmers and other “farming leaders” for their pledge to make all New Zealand’s rivers swimmable.
 

And before said “farming leaders” admonish me for failing to do the same, I will concede that, on the face of it, their better-late-than-never embrace of Labour/Green policy just might constitute evidence of a hitherto unnoticed willingness to “go forward along the path of progress”.
 

The operative phrase in this case is, of course, “on the face of it”. Call me a cynic, but the carefully staged photograph of Federated Farmers’ new president, Katie Milne (the first woman ever to hold the post) resplendent in boots and Swandri, kneeling at the side of the Ngaruroro River, while a grinning line of gumbooted corporate cockies look on admiringly, strikes me as just a wee bit too good to be true.
 

First of all, there’s the timing. Surely it is no coincidence that this happy little announcement and artfully composed photo-opportunity have been arranged just four weeks out from a general election? And not just any old general election, either, but one in which the “Water Issue” has featured prominently. When New Zealanders go to the polling stations of 23 September, the appalling state of this country’s lakes, rivers and streams will have persuaded more than a few of them to vote for those parties pledged to do something about it.
 

If Sir Michael Cullen is right about Federated Farmers and the National Party, it is quite impossible to avoid the conclusion that these gumbooted farming leaders’ last-minute conversion to the religion of Gaia – as elucidated in the Gospel of Dr Mike Joy – has been undertaken purely in the interests of protecting the Government’s exposed flank.
 

Presumably, the argument in favour of hauling all these characters out to the banks of the Ngaruroro runs something like this. “If we appear to be conceding the Greens’ and the Labour Party’s points on water quality, and if Nick Smith joins in the inevitable chorus of congratulation, then an issue currently causing the Government a lot of grief will be taken off the table.”
 

And, who knows, it just might work. If the voters fail to notice that there is precious little in the farming leaders’ announcement relating to HOW they, and their respective organisations, intend to go about making our lakes, streams and rivers swimmable; and even less about WHEN this happy state will be achieved.
 

Personally, I’m betting they will notice those rather large holes in Federated Farmers’ cunning plan. Why? Because Greenpeace, Forest & Bird, Fish & Game and every other NGO fighting for swimmable rivers will tell them. I’m especially confident that Russel Norman, the guy who, when he was the Greens’ co-leader, introduced the expression “dirty dairying” into everyday Kiwi conversation, and who is currently the boss of Greenpeace in New Zealand, will find these cockies-come-lately to the clean water party as bogus as I do.
 

Because talk is cheap – especially in the run-up to general elections. And because what I’m being shown in this latest photo-opportunity is just one more image in the lengthy sequence of images presented to New Zealanders as part of a concerted PR campaign to undo the damage caused by the success of the Dirty Dairying project.
 

Cast your mind back over the past 18 months and recall the expensive advertising campaign on behalf of New Zealand’s hard-working, dairy-farming families (along with the big corporations who actually dominate today’s dairy industry, but whose agribusiness systems curiously do not feature in the ad campaign’s soft-focus vision of the Kiwi heartland) and ask yourself this question:
 

“How can Federated Farmers and their allies possibly guarantee to make our rivers swimmable once again, without drastically reducing the size of New Zealand’s dairy herd?”
 

Then ask yourself: “Am I really that gullible?”
 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 25 August 2017.

Voter Motivators 2017: Water.

Worth Protecting? The threat to the nation’s water is real and it demands action. What’s more, the Water Issue comes with a whole cast of ready-made villains: someone to take the blame. Farmers.

 

WHO CAN FORGET that magic childhood moment when you first opened your eyes underwater? I remember mine like it was yesterday. I was splashing about in the Waianakarua River in North Otago. The first thing I saw when I put my head under the water and opened my eyes was a red and green “Pure New Zealand Honey” tin. So clear was the water that I could easily make out the bees and clover-heads printed on its surface. (Quite why the tin was in the river, which was otherwise blissfully free of litter, I never discovered!)

 

We all have memories like this of New Zealand’s rivers and streams. Those deep, clear swimming holes that family and friends frequented during the long, hot days of summer. It may be years since we visited them, but they feature prominently in our mental and emotional landscapes. They are places of the heart.

 

Which is why, when we hear about the extent to which New Zealand’s rivers and streams have become unswimmable, the impact is devastating. Whatever it is that’s polluting and degrading our waterways, it is also befouling our memories.

 

Understandably, these sort of emotional connections are tremendously concerning to the politicians on whose watch our waterways are being polluted. Be they central, regional or local government representatives, all are acutely aware that the “Water Issue” is not only one of the big Voter Motivators of 2017, but that it has also become a symbol of New Zealand’s entire beleaguered environment.

 

The devastations of global warming loom ahead of humanity – and that’s the problem. As a species we are notoriously prone to ignoring all but the most immediate threats. All of the measures which New Zealand (and a great many other countries) refuse to countenance when it comes to mitigating the effects of climate change would be adopted in an instant if we found ourselves at war. Indeed, “Victory Gardens”, compulsory re-cycling, and the strict rationing of fossil fuels were an accepted part of people’s everyday lives during World War II.

 

The threat to the nation’s water, however, is very much in the here and now. It’s real and it demands action. What’s more, the Water Issue comes with a whole cast of ready-made villains: someone to take the blame. Farmers.

 

And don’t they know it! The dairy industry is spending millions of dollars on public relations and advertising in an attempt to repair the damage done to the reputation of New Zealand farmers by the Green Party. The latter’s “Dirty Dairying” campaign, spearheaded by Russel Norman in the run-up to the 2014 election, turned urban New Zealanders off farmers in droves. Justified or unjustified, the connection between the vast expansion of this country’s dairy herd and the degradation of its waterways has been made. And all the beautifully shot images of salt-of-the-earth farming families walking their cows to milking in the dawn’s early light are not going to break it.

 

It gets worse. The National Party, which Labour’s Michael Cullen once described as “Federated Farmers at prayer”, is increasingly being identified as Dirty Dairying’s prime protectors and enablers. More and more voters are noticing that while the Department of Conservation has been wantonly downsized and cruelly starved of funding, the National-led Government has lavished hundreds-of-millions of dollars on irrigation schemes designed to further expand New Zealand’s dairy industry.

 

Put all of the above together with National’s refusal to enlist farmers in the war against global warming and the picture that emerges is not a pretty one. Clearly, the befouled state of our rivers and streams is merely the most visible and shocking evidence of an industry which has for decades traded environmental degradation for profit. It is just the tip of New Zealand’s rapidly melting environmental iceberg.

 

The real wonder of this year’s election is that the Greens have not made more of their former leader’s extraordinary political gift. It’s almost as if the party’s new co-leader, James Shaw, is frightened by the sheer intensity of public feeling against the role played by farmers in the ruin of our waterways. (Not to mention the giving away of New Zealand’s pristine springwater to foreign bottling companies!)

 

If future generations of young New Zealanders are to experience the joy and wonder of their wild water heritage, then today’s voters need to open their eyes.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 30 June. 2017.

Citizens Left Out Of The Water Equation

Enjoy It While You Can: The Tukituki River sparkles in the Hawkes Bay sun, but if the Ruataniwha Dam is built and intensive dairying is made possible further upstream, this iconic river will swiftly be transformed into what Green Party co-leader, Russel Norman, predicts will be "an industrial drain". Water is fast becoming New Zealand's most valuable natural resource and Federated Farmers - aided and abetted by the National Government - is determined to place that resource in private hands.

THERE’S ALWAYS A MOMENT when we realise that power has shifted. Trusted people and institutions suddenly turn against us. Those whose job it is to assess and avert public risk disappear. We hear rumours about wholesale sackings and forced resignations. Obvious and serious conflicts of interest are studiously ignored. And those in charge, while not guilty of telling outright lies, have unquestionably stopped telling us the whole truth.

 

Such extreme power shifts are generally confined to the corporate sector. And while they are never pleasant, and often very costly in personal terms, most of us nevertheless accept the process. The business world is not a democratic world: its unfairness and rapacity is largely beyond our control. Businesses fail, are sold, merged, asset-stripped, re-branded and downsized – and there’s not a lot any of us can do about it.

 

Beyond the business world, however, we do not expect to be left out of the equation. Employees may be required to subordinate their judgement to the entity paying their wages but, constitutionally-speaking, citizens are sovereign: their democratic judgements not subject to private-sector countermand.

 

Citizens do not take kindly to being treated as if they were employees.

 

But this is precisely what is happening. All over the country: from the Canterbury Plains to the Tukituki River in Hawke’s Bay; private interests are muscling in on public resources; compromising the integrity of public institutions; and trampling with ill-disguised contempt upon the rights of New Zealand citizens.

 

And at the heart of this power grab is – water.

 

 

I SHOULDN’T BE SURPRISED. On 19 November 2008, just eleven days after the election of the current government, myself and the right-wing political commentator, Matthew Hooton, were invited to address the National Executive of Federated Farmers.

 

Coming away from that meeting, I was impressed by three things.

 

The first was how much the Federated Farmers CEO, Conor English, looked and sounded like his brother, Bill, the newly elected government’s Finance Minister.

 

The second was the presence of Dr William Rolleston. Until that moment, I had only known Dr Rolleston in his role as one of New Zealand’s most outspoken advocates of genetically engineered agricultural production. That he was so closely associated with Federated Farmers was something I probably should have known, but was still rather disturbed to find out.

 

The third, and by far the most important, thing I took away from that meeting was Conor English giving me a quiet “heads-up” that the most important issue facing Federated Farmers, and New Zealand, over the next few decades would be the issue of who controlled access to what was fast becoming the nation’s most valuable natural resource – water.

 

 

MOST NEW ZEALANDERS don’t think too much about water. Most of us live in cities and towns which, for the better part of a hundred years, have enjoyed a plentiful, safe and remarkably cheap water supply. In the odd drought year we townies may be asked to refrain from watering our gardens, but most of us, for most of the time, don’t give water a second thought.

 

Matters are very different in the countryside.

 

Over the course of the past twenty years the New Zealand landscape has been transformed by the extraordinary growth of the dairy industry. Where once the cargo vessels leaving our ports were loaded down with carcasses of frozen lamb and bales of wool – as well as butter and cheese – our agricultural exports are today dominated the thousands of tons of top-quality milk powder produced by New Zealand’s world-beating dairy farmers.

 

That milk powder earns this country billions of dollars every year, but dairying’s “white gold” comes at a heavy cost. The successful dairy farm not only requires millions of litres of water by way of an input, but its hundreds of cows also discharge equally vast quantities of effluent by way of an output. That effluent inevitably makes its way into the nation’s waterways – polluting them to the extent that the lower reaches of more than half of New Zealand’s largest and most magnificent rivers are no longer safe to fish or swim in. And neither are their tributaries.

 

 

THE SHUTTING DOWN of democracy in the Canterbury Regional Council, and the more recent suppression of a Department of Conservation draft report on the sustainability of the Ruataniwha Dam, represent the working out in political terms of Conor English’s heads-up warning of five years ago.

 

New Zealand’s dairy farmers, and the enormous economic interests they represent, have decided to privatise the nation’s water resources – and the government is helping them do it.

 

Dr William Rolleston has even enlisted the reality of Global Warming to advance Federated Farmers’ cause: While New Zealand has plenty of water, he says, it's not always in the right place at the right time.

But, presumably, it will soon be in the right hands.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 1 October 2013.

A Small History Lesson For Federated Farmers

It Ain't Wellington, Don: Far from being the innovative national icon described by Federated Farmers boss, Don Nicolson, the milk powder manufacturing business founded in New Zealand by 19th Century entrepreneur, James Nathan, was built on imported capital, imported patents and imported technology. The profits, as usual, went offshore - in Glaxo's case, to London.

DON NICOLSON needs a history lesson. In fact the current president of Federated Farmers could usefully invest in an entire history course. A surer grasp of where New Zealand has come from would allow the current leader of this country’s most powerful pressure-group to speak with considerably more authority about where New Zealand is now – and where it should be going.

Mr Nicolson began a recent newspaper article by lauding the achievements of Joseph Nathan, creator of the Glaxo brand of infant formula. "Joseph Nathan leveraged off agriculture and built a leviathan", wrote Mr Nicolson, before going on to sing the praises of the vast multinational corporation, GlaxoSmithKline, which long ago gobbled up Joseph Nathan’s highly successful Manawatu-based business.

Had Mr Nicolson taken the time to research the history of the Nathan family more thoroughly, he would have discovered a record of achievement which remains, to say the least, equivocal. Far from being a great innovator, Joseph Nathan was representative of a class of shrewd colonial businessmen who came to New Zealand in the 19th Century to make their fortune and then, hopefully, return with it to England.

The best business decision James Nathan ever made was to acquire the rights to the newly developed process for turning milk into powder. The process, along with the technology required to give it effect, were all imported. New Zealand’s only significant contribution then – as now – was grass, and the cows to turn it into milk.

The Nathans were fortunate in owning quite a lot of grass. To a degree which had raised eyebrows among their contemporaries, the land required to grow it had been acquired from soldiers returning to civilian life after the Land Wars. For services rendered these men were granted a small share of the lands confiscated from the defeated Maori tribes. By offering the penurious soldiery cash, the Nathans had built up a substantial base for agricultural operations.

Glaxo’s other great claim to fame was its masterful utilisation of advertising. The claim that Glaxo’s infant formula "Builds Bonnie Babies" secured it a significant share of the UK market, and contributed hugely to the decline of breast-feeding in that country – and ours. The consequences of Glaxo’s intervention, in terms of infant health, are difficult to calculate – but they were by no means entirely beneficial.

The history of Glaxo – as Mr Nicolson might have anticipated – is inextricably bound up with the history of New Zealand. The Nathan family’s obvious entrepreneurial talents cannot be separated from the fact that the industry they helped to establish, like so many of our industries, was based on imported capital, imported patents and imported technology transforming local raw materials into repatriated profits. Glaxo also provides an early example of how vulnerable local businesses are to foreign acquisition.

A more thoughtful president of Federated Farmers might have pondered the lessons to be learned from the history of businesses like Glaxo. It points to the huge financial benefits that flow from publicly-funded research and development. It directs our thoughts to the importance of limiting the vulnerability of local firms to foreign takeover. It speaks of the massive returns to the nation from encouraging and funding the expansion of science and technology in our universities. And it also reminds us of how important the teaching of New Zealand history is to forming an intelligent view of our country’s forward path.

Sadly, these are not the conclusions Mr Nicolson draws from his superficial references to successful (albeit foreign-owned) companies associated with New Zealand agriculture. Instead, Mr Nicolson defaults to a series of political demands which are now more than a century old.

It was in the early years of the 20th Century that New Zealand’s farming community first began to conceive of itself as something separate and distinct from the rest of the population. They construed the dominant role of agriculture in generating the nation’s export wealth as proof not merely of farmers’ economic centrality, but of their moral superiority. Indeed, town and city-dwellers in general, and working people in particular, were regarded as the source of all the nation’s vices – and in urgent need of rural reproof.

This lust to punish urban profligacy is still clearly discernible in Mr Nicolson’s prose: "If government spending was at year 2000 levels, adjusted for inflation, $30 billion would be left in the economy each year."

Which is probably true, Mr Nicolson. But, what’s equally true is that $30 billion would not be left in our hospitals, our schools, or our universities. It would not be available to assist and support struggling Kiwi families – your fellow citizens.

It would, however, be there for the modern equivalents of James Nathan – the businessman who died in London, aged 77, with his substantial, New Zealand-made fortune safely tucked away in the vaults of a British bank.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 18 January and in The Waikato Times of Wednesday, 19 January 2008.