Simon Opens Fire – And I Apologise For Going Off Half-Cocked.

Fighting Back: What at first looked like political suicide, turned out to be a winning strategy for National's Simon Bridges. His wrecking-ball tactics seem certain to claim the Treasury Secretary, Gabriel Makhlouf, and have seriously damaged the Finance Minister, Grant Robertson, and his much vaunted "Wellbeing Budget".

SIMON BRIDGES this morning delivered the political performance of his career. Controlling his anger (but not hiding it) he sheeted home the blame for one of the most spectacular political omnishambles New Zealanders have witnessed for many years. Quite rightly, he demanded the resignation of the Treasury Secretary, Gabriel Makhlouf, and (with only marginally less justification) that of the Finance Minister, Grant Robertson.

There had been no hack. Bridges, his colleagues, and the National Party’s parliamentary staffers had known that from the moment they began releasing Budget details to the news media. How had they known that? Simple. They were the ones who had located the supposedly secret Budget summaries by executing a simple Google search. At the media conference he called for 8:30am this morning (30/5/19) Bridges even showed the assembled journalists how it was done. (The person who advised making a video of the whole process deserves a hefty bonus!)

Small wonder, then, that Bridges came out swinging against Robertson and Treasury when they began prattling on about a “systematic and deliberate” hack of the Treasury website and shunted the whole matter off to the Police. He knew it was all bullshit. He knew there was no illegality in what National’s staffers had done. And, most importantly, he knew he could prove it – live – on television. Which he did.

All of which means that I owe Simon Bridges an apology – which I now duly tender. He may see it as his first duty, as Leader of the Opposition, to behave like a wrecking-ball, rather than to present himself as New Zealand’s next Prime Minister. But, crikey! What a wrecking-ball! Bridges has almost certainly demolished Makhlouf (whose new Irish bosses must now be scratching their heads) and Robertson, himself, is not out of danger. As an exercise in smashing things up, it doesn’t get much more comprehensive than this.

It’s taught me a valuable lesson about writing political posts. Specifically, that it is always advisable to wait for the smoke to clear before telling people what – or who – has been burnt down.

It has also reminded me of the extreme unwisdom of relying on “official sources”. In the light of the Treasury Secretary’s allegation that his department’s website had been hacked, it was hard to judge Bridges’ actions as anything other than idiotic. Equally difficult was refusing to draw the obvious conclusion that he had been set up. That this was a classic “Sonny ambushed at the toll-booth” situation.

Well, when the smoke cleared from this ambush, Sonny was still standing, tommy-gun in hand, and his would-be assassins were either running for their lives or bleeding-out on the pavement.

Assumptions can be dangerous things.

I really should have known better. Treasury has been making the wildest and most implausible claims ever since it unilaterally unleashed the top-down neoliberal revolution we call “Rogernomics” upon an unsuspecting New Zealand way back in 1984. I suppose, over the course of 35 years, I have come to regard them as immensely powerful and essentially unbeatable foes who just don’t make mistakes. Watching this story unfold has been like watching Tolkien’s Nazgul, the fearsome Black Riders, falling off their horses and breaking their magic swords!

There are still some niggles, though, which I would be remiss to ignore.

First of all, this whole affair was not only never a “hack”, but it was also never a “leak”. To call it one, as Bridges initially did, conjured-up images of somebody arranging for a plain brown envelope, containing a number of Budget summaries, to be left on the Leader of the Opposition’s desk. (Or, more likely, an anonymous memory stick!) Except, of course, it was never that. It was National who had gone looking for this information, and it was National who, against all the odds, found it. And all by doing no more, as Bridges later said, than what a grandchild, or grandparent, does on-line every day.

Mr Makhlouf is, therefore, not the only person who can be charged with misleading the public.

Moreover, I still maintain that the ethical – and politically responsible – thing to have done was alert the Government to the fact that its Budget information was accessible to the most basic Google search – and then inform the news media. Bridges could even have given the Press Gallery copies of National’s “How To Get A Sneak Preview Of The Budget” video and watched the Government squirm with embarrassment. It’s when people start laughing at your enemies that you know you’re on the road to victory.

However. If Bridges had taken the ethical and responsible course, he would not have been handed the opportunity to let the country witness his righteous wrath at the perfidy of Treasury and the failure of its political master to carry out due diligence on its spurious hacking claims.

Today, Budget Day, Grant Robertson’s much ballyhooed “Wellbeing Budget” lies in tatters on the ground. What should have been a crowning moment for Jacinda and her closest political ally has been turned into a tawdry damage-control exercise – at best. Realistically-speaking, no Opposition leader can be expected to let a chance like that go by.

So, once again, Simon: “I’m sorry.”

Finally, and on a Godfatherly note, Newshub’s Political Editor, Tova O’Brien, has reported on being handed a copy of the entire Budget by a young Treasury staffer outside the official “Lockup”, where journalists are kept, incommunicado, while they digest the Budget’s contents before the Finance Minister’s set parliamentary speech at 2:00pm.

“Should I have a copy of this outside the Lockup?”, asks the startled Tova.

“Aren’t you with Treasury?”, responds the flustered staffer.

Honestly, it’s now become impossible to work out who is ambushing who.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 30 May 2019.

It Was A Fair Cop, Hekia, And Treasury's To Blame

Suck It Up, Minister: Education Minister, Hekia Parata, was forced to reverse her government's own policy on class sizes in the face of massive public opposition. Had she possessed sufficient critical intelligence to challenge the policy's prime promoter, Treasury Secretary, Gabriel Makhlouf, she could have saved herself - and her government - a very large serving of very dead rat.

IN THE END, it all comes back to Treasury. Education Minister, Hekia Parata, like so many politicians before her, has taken the advice of Treasury’s ideologues, and paid the price. This willingness of right- and left-wing politicians to drag their careers over a cliff, by following the lead of an agency which has consistently failed to tender either reliable or useful advice to government, bears testimony to ideology’s uncanny knack for over-riding the urgings of electoral common sense.

The debacle over class sizes may be traced back to Treasury’s advice to the incoming Minister of Education following the 2011 General Election. Faced with an intensifying fiscal crisis, Treasury Secretary, Gabriel Makhlouf, saw an opportunity to attend to Treasury’s unfinished business with this country’s disconcertingly independent educationalists.

The proudly professional culture of New Zealand’s highly regarded education system (we rank sixth out of thirty-four OECD countries) continues to stand athwart Treasury’s relentless ideological advance.

It thus constitutes a standing rebuke to Treasury’s otherwise unassailable neoliberal mandarinate. Its collegial values and altruistic purposes sit most uncomfortably within the neoliberals’ highly individualistic and competitive reading of human nature. While achieving a large measure of success in the universities (attributable mostly to New Zealand academics’ timidity and lack of solidarity) Treasury’s neoliberal policies have been staunchly and successfully resisted in New Zealand’s primary and secondary schools. This is due, almost entirely, to the strength of New Zealand’s two main teacher unions – the NZEI and the PPTA.

Before New Zealand’s teaching profession can finally be “neoliberalised”, it will first be necessary to break these teacher unions. There are two ways of doing this. The first, and most brutal, is to do what Scott Walker, Governor of the US state of Wisconsin, did: pass legislation stripping state employees of their right to collective bargaining. The second, and much more effective, way to break a union is to undermine its members’ solidarity: to divide and conquer.

The classic method of decollectivising a workforce is the introduction of performance pay. Once workers’ remuneration ceases to be reckoned by the job to be done, and is set, instead, by the boss’s perception of how well each individual worker is doing the job, the ability of the workforce to maintain collective cohesion and purpose rapidly falls away.

New Zealand has, of course, already attempted a legislative “final solution” to the union problem. But, although the Employment Contracts Act (1991) proved highly successful at breaking the power of private sector unions; public employees – especially teachers – by sticking together and fighting back, have resisted every attempt to set one colleague against another, undermine the union, and hand the education sector over to Treasury (and its political handmaidens) for neoliberal “re-education”.

It is, therefore, very difficult not to read the Treasury Secretary’s advocacy for trading-off a few extra pupils in every class-room for a lift in the quality of the country’s teachers, as a way of admitting performance pay (and undermining the teacher unions) by the back door.

Prime Mover: The author of the "class-size-increase-for-improved-teacher-quality" trade-off, Treasury Secretary, Gabriel Makhlouf.

Citing the highly contestable figure of “one in three” school-leavers entering the New Zealand workforce as an educational failure, Mr Makhlouf argued strongly, and very publicly, that this scandalous “output” of the system could only be rectified by encouraging better teaching. By this he did not mean that we should embrace the Finnish policy of keeping a very high teacher-student ratio while, at the same time, ensuring that teaching remains one of that country’s best qualified and well-paid professions. No, what Mr Makhlouf wanted was an opportunity to pit teachers against one another in a quest to find “the best” teachers, and then, presumably, offer them individual employment contracts and higher pay. This competitive model would also have identified “the worst” teachers, allowing them to be purged from the system. School staff-rooms would thus become battle-grounds where “winners” prospered and “losers” lost their jobs. Collegial values, ill-adapted to Treasury’s new “survival of the fittest” environment, would be driven to extinction – followed closely by the teacher unions.

The triumph of the competitive market model within the teaching profession would, inevitably, see its operating principles installed in every class-room. The transmission of skills and knowledge, the system’s outputs, would be subjected to detailed empirical measurement. Every pupil would be “tested”, and every school’s resourcing determined by the results of those tests. New Zealand’s internationally admired education system would very quickly join the derelict systems of the United States and the United Kingdom.

Was Ms Parata really seeking this disintegration of New Zealand’s education system? Of course not! Why, then, couldn’t she decode Mr Makhlouf’s policy prescription? The answer is simple: to decipher neoliberal ideology one needs to adopt a critical perspective; and that presupposes ideological agnosticism.

Had Ms Parata felt equal to challenging Treasury’s ideologically-driven recommendations, she’d never have been required to undertake her embarrassing political “reversal”.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 6 June 2012.