Intimidator-in-Chief: For eight years Dr Nick Smith has worked hard to convince voters that he is the National Party's chief point of environmental resistance; the one brave voice raised in opposition to the milk-before-water lobbyists of Fonterra and Federated Farmers. Now we know that it isn't true.
DR NICK SMITH’S crude intimidation of the Fish and Game Council
points to the bleakest of environmental futures should National be re-elected
on 20 September. It is now considerably clearer than 60 percent of New Zealand’s
lakes, rivers and streams that there are no serious points of environmental resistance
in John Key’s Cabinet. For eight years Smith has worked hard to convince
voters that he is, indeed, one such point of resistance, the one brave voice raised
in opposition to the milk-before-water lobbyists of Fonterra and Federated
Farmers. Now we know that it isn't true.
Smith’s threats to “tweak” the legislation establishing the
Fish and Game Council is of a piece with this Government’s proven
impatience with all forms of institutional dissent. It will not, it seems, be
happy until every official check and balance against unbridled executive
power has been neutralised.
Unless it is absolutely forced to (as in the case of
Environment Canterbury) the Government’s strategy is not to make this
suppression of dissenting voices explicit. Its preference is rather to intimidate
these legislatively mandated watchdogs into silence. This can be effected in
two ways. Either by appointing new and more malleable individuals to quasi-governmental
boards and councils, or, by stripping those not subject to ministerial
manipulation (like Fish and Game) of all their effective regulatory and/or advisory
powers.
To casual observers it will appear as though nothing has
changed because all the institutions created to permit democratic
participation in the management of irreplaceable public resources will still be
in place. But they will be looking at a regulatory ghost town. Behind the fading
signage, nobody will be home.
A succession of National Party ministers have perfected this
process by using the Department of Conservation as their guinea-pig. Since 2008
John Key’s government has systematically starved the "DoC" of the
resources needed to properly manage and protect the vast estate it administers
on the public’s behalf. Constant restructuring has allowed the Minister’s hand-picked
managers to purge the Department of its experts and visionaries, wipe clean its
institutional memory and leave in place only those willing to make the best of
a situation which long ago made the transition from bad to worse.
Smith calls Key’s administration a “Blue-Green Government”.
But the veteran conservationists, Guy Salmon and Gary Taylor, who established
the original blue-green political party, the Progressive Greens, would almost
certainly disagree. Much has changed since the early 1990s when
Nick Smith and his fellow “Brat Packers”, Bill English, Roger Sowry and Tony
Ryall, first entered Parliament.
Back then it was still possible for a National Party
Environment Minister, Simon Upton, to seriously pursue the idea of a Carbon Tax.
Over the past twenty years, however, the ideological and political
consolidation of Neoliberalism has downgraded the natural environment to the status of a mere sub-set of the economy when, in reality, it is the other way round.
Neoliberals quickly grasped the deadly threat the science of
ecology posed to the re-emergence of laissez-faire
capitalism. In Marxist terms, the planet’s finite capacity to absorb the deadly
externalities of carbon-based industrial civilisation constituted “the final
contradiction”. Capitalism must either be tamed or it and the civilisation
which created it will perish.
Rather than accept this last, irrefutable, existential
challenge to Capitalism its defenders have opted instead for the politics of
outright denial. But climate change “scepticism” is only the tip of the
rapidly melting iceberg when it comes to the political and cultural
consequences of Neoliberalism’s refusal to face the facts of anthropogenic
global warming.
Resisting “the final contradiction” requires neoliberalism
to destroy the rationalist and scientific foundations of the industrial
civilisation upon which it stands. This can only be accomplished by undermining
the public’s faith in the scientific method and investing all opinions – no
matter how absurd – with a spurious equivalence. Evidence-based
decision-making, which former National politicians like Simon Upton accepted as
the sine qua non of competent and rational governance, is being supplanted
by ‘evidence’ commissioned and purchased on the open market from ‘experts’ who
specialise in telling Capitalism and its political agents exactly what they want
to hear. (Alister Barry’s documentary film, Hot
Air, shows how the Carbon Lobby and Federated Farmers utilised this
technique to delay and/or defeat every attempt by successive New Zealand
governments to combat climate change.)
The politics of denial also requires the complete hollowing
out of those state institutions deliberately constructed to collect evidence
from individuals and groups best placed to provide it. Institutions –
like Fish and Game – whose democratic composition protects the processes of
gathering evidence from those with a vested interest in suppressing information
antithetical to their purposes.
When it comes to the Department of Conservation, Nick Smith
and his colleagues know they have nothing to fear – as the censoring of the
evidence DoC's scientists had gathered about the ecological effects
of the proposed Ruataniwha Dam made clear. But Fish and Game and uncooperative
Regional Councils still have an evidential sword to draw in defence of
Mother Nature.
Shut them down.
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Monday, 28 July 2014.
