Reconnecting Jacinda With her Inner Swashbuckler.

Let's Do This - Again? If all Labour has to take to the electorate in September 2020 is an automobile-driven infrastructure programme borrowed wholesale from the last National Government, then Simon Bridges is going to make sure that being the prime minister of a one-term Labour government is the only thing Jacinda will ever have in common with Norman Kirk.

HOW DID 2019 END on such a jarring note of neoliberal bi-partisanship? With the Coalition and the Opposition united in their backing for a lavish spend-up on roads, roads, and more roads? It’s possible the two parliamentary groupings may diverge on the question of how all this bitumen should be paid for: directly by the state, or through Private-Public Partnerships (PPPs); but that’s about it in terms of potential disagreement. The year is ending on an apparently unanimous parliamentary assumption that trucks and cars will continue to provide New Zealanders with their prime means of transportation. With this slavish commitment to the automobile, the country’s political class has demonstrated its near-total moral incapacity. New Zealand’s claim to be taking Climate Change seriously stands exposed as utter bullshit.

Also exposed is Labour’s intellectual exhaustion. By returning to National’s pro-automobile vomit so shamelessly, Jacinda Ardern and her senior colleagues are essentially admitting that they lack the necessary competence to translate their promises of “transformation” into reality. It’s a fatal admission. By acknowledging that the big stuff is simply too much for them they have opened a royal road (if you’ll excuse the expression) along which Simon Bridges and his team can now motor to electoral victory.

Bridges’ script is pathetically easy to write: “National and Labour are in full agreement about what needs to be done in New Zealand. But, let’s be brutally honest, only one party possesses the competency required to do it. From KiwiBuild to the Provincial Growth Fund, the Labour-led Government has proved woefully inept. By the time the election rolls around, New Zealanders will be looking back at three wasted years. About the only things our Prime Minister and her Cabinet are good at is making promises, finding excuses and providing hugs. By contrast, National possesses both the will and the talent to get this country moving again – and that’s exactly what it’s going to do.”

Which is not to suggest that Bridges and his team won’t employ Topham Guerin Ltd to mastermind a complementary social media campaign. If the high road of “competency” fails to inspire, then the low road of crude emotional arousal will be primed and ready for all the traffic it can bear. Indeed, Ben Guerin and Sean Topham may advise Bridges to use both roads – at the same time. They’ve already proved they can do it – just ask Boris!

Labour, the Greens and NZ First could beat this style of campaigning easily – if they only had the will and the talent to get even a little bit creative on the propaganda front. But, that, alas, is where the party falls so woefully short. Unless he or she is being kept extremely well hidden, there just isn’t anyone in Labour’s ranks who even remotely fits the description of “a little bit creative”. How could there be? The culture of the Labour Party in 2020 is hardly what you’d call welcoming to the swashbuckler and the maverick. Its ideologically rigid and puritanical apparatchiks simply wouldn’t know what to do with a political gunslinger like Ben Guerin.

Even if Jacinda intervened on behalf of the 2020 equivalent of Bob Harvey – the young swashbuckler who somehow persuaded Norman Kirk to take a punt on him in 1969 and who then proceeded to transform the public’s perceptions of both Labour and Kirk by deploying state-of-the-art advertising techniques – it’s doubtful he or she would last the distance. Ideological Orthodoxy and Art have never been the best of friends.

Which only leaves Jacinda, herself, to take on the role of the swashbuckler and maverick. Looking back, that’s exactly what she did in 2017. There just wasn’t the time – or the script – for anything other than Jacinda’s inspired, seat-of-the-pants, political acrobatics. The party had to let her carry more-or-less the whole campaign because it had nothing else to offer. When it did step back in – remember the sudden about face on the Capital Gains Tax, and the equally sudden reversal of the about-face? – it succeeded only in slowing Jacinda’s momentum and carving 3-4 percentage points off Labour’s final tally of Party Votes.

The best we can hope for is that Jacinda will be put in touch with someone with the same insouciant brilliance as Ben Guerin. Someone who simply doesn’t care if what he’s pushing out there is politically correct or incorrect – only that it works. Only if it causes the person scrolling-down his or her device to stop and read Labour’s latest post. That means engaging them at the level of the heart – not the head. To win “The Battle of the Thumbs”, as Guerin calls this struggle to hold the modern voter’s attention, you don’t have time to make them think – so you have to make them feel.

In the last, crucial days of the UK general Election, Topham Guerin Ltd’s brilliant parody of “Love Actually” was watched by more than 7 million British voters. It held them spellbound for the few minutes it took the equally brilliant Boris Johnson to give them his simple, but winning, messages. “The other guy could win.”, and “Get Brexit done”. Jacinda has the skills to do something similar – just ask Stephen Colbert! The $64,000 question, however, is: “Does she have anyone smart enough, and creative enough, to come up with an idea that good?”

Because, if all Jacinda has to take to the electorate in September 2020 is an automobile-driven infrastructure programme borrowed wholesale from the last National Government, then Simon Bridges is going to make sure that being the prime minister of a one-term Labour government is the only thing she has in common with Norman Kirk.

When Jacinda stood in the Auckland Town Hall in 2017 and proclaimed Climate Change “the nuclear-free moment of my generation” – how we all cheered.

The thing is, we were expecting her commitment to amount to something more than the well-meaning but toothless Zero Carbon Act. Something like announcing a completely new, wider-gauge, electrified, national rail network. An infrastructure programme that would allow New Zealand to replicate the ultra-fast trains that move people around Europe, China and Japan. Something to put the greenhouse-gas pumping road transport industry out to pasture. Something more than a plan to build roads, roads and more roads.

Something to make young and old alike exclaim, at least one more time: “Let’s do this!”

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 20 December 2019.

Grant Robertson Spends Up Large - On The Establishment!

Grant Keeps On Trucking: Out of the $12 billion Robertson has announced for infrastructure investment, $8 billion will be allocated to specific projects, with the balance of $4 billion held in reserve. What does it say about this Government's "transformational" ambitions that 85 percent of that $8 billion is to be spent on “transport projects” – by which, of course, Robertson and his colleagues mean “roads”?

I’VE BEEN WATCHING The Crown on Netflix. The fifth episode in the latest series, “Coup” exposes the 1968 plot hatched by furious members of the British Establishment to overthrow the Labour Government of Harold Wilson. The plotters included not only the pugnacious media-mogul, Cecil King, but also the Queen’s second cousin (and recently laid-off head of the UK armed forces) Lord Louis Mountbatten. Obviously, the planned coup never eventuated. I mention it only because the drama provides a forceful reminder of how the Establishment responds to genuinely democratic-socialist Labour governments.

I think it’s safe to say that after Finance Minister Grant Robertson’s announcement of the Government’s proposed infrastructure spend-up, the New Zealand Establishment will be plotting nothing more dangerous that inviting the Minister to celebratory end-of-year drinks. Out of the $12 billion Robertson has set aside for infrastructure investment, $8 billion will be allocated to specific projects, with the balance of $4 billion held in reserve. That the Establishment feels able to relax is attributable to the fact that 85 percent of that $8 billion is to be spent on “transport projects” – by which, of course, Robertson and his colleagues mean “roads”.

Oh, sure, Robertson’s media release refers to roads and rail, but unless something profoundly “transformative” has occurred within the present Cabinet, the amount spent on New Zealand’s publicly owned railway network is unlikely to represent even a sixth of that $6.8 billion. Which means that this Government, supposedly committed to purposeful action against Climate Change, is proposing to spend billions and billions of dollars on making our roads safe for the road haulage industry’s heavy trucks and the middle-class’s gas-guzzling SUVs. The Establishment doesn’t organise coups against Labour ministers who do it favours like that – it nominates them for knighthoods!

Robertson’s announcement comes after months of just about every major banker and businessperson, every mainstream economic and political commentator, earnestly begging the Finance Minister to take advantage of the unprecedentedly low cost of borrowing to fiscally stimulate New Zealand’s sclerotic economy. I suppose we’re obliged to congratulate Robertson for his discipline. A less cautious politician would have taken the  policy initiative – along with the consequent kudos. But not Robertson. Determined that only good headlines would greet his final determinations, he waited until the pressure for some sort of major fiscal intervention became irresistible. Unsurprisingly, media criticism has been … muted.

But, if Robertson’s caution is bad, then the Greens’ response to his announcement is just plain sad. To be clear, their transport champion, Julie Anne Genter, has been humiliated. The road transport lobby has effortlessly outmanoeuvred whatever policy wonks she’s had pitching the case for rail. The tires on the wheels of the big rigs chewing up our roads are all humming “Hallelujah!”

But, are the Greens’ outraged? Are they cutting-up rough? Not soze you’d notice. How’s this for a media release?

“The Greens in Government have today won a significant investment to help move the public sector estate onto clean, renewable energy, Green Party Co-leader, James Shaw, said today.”

Seriously? Yes, seriously. And, it gets worse:

“As part of the Government’s capital investment package announced today, the Government will support the public sector to reduce its carbon footprint through an infrastructure spend of $200 million.”

Oh, wow! Really, James! A whole $200 million! So the Public Service can buy a few more Prius cars? How can we ever express our gratitude? A Labour-led government, with $12 billion to spend, allocates a breath-taking $200 million to making the Zero Carbon Act mean something. Are we supposed to be grateful? What would Greta say?

And Metiria – what would she say? Twelve additional billions of dollars to spend and from what’s been released today it would appear that not one cent of it is to be spent on beneficiaries. Never mind the recommendations of the Welfare Expert Advisory Group. Never mind that the Job Seekers Allowance is simply too meagre to live on without falling deeper and deeper into debt. Never mind that pouring money into the pockets of our poorest citizens is the fastest and most effective way of delivering our economy a much-needed shot of adrenaline. No, never mind all that. Finance Minister Robertson and Social Welfare Minister Carmel Sepuloni have no intention of upsetting the Establishment by giving beneficiaries anything remotely resembling a Christmas present.

So much for our “transformational” government: our Prime Minister’s “politics of kindness”. The saddest part of this very sad story isn’t just its courage and compassion deficit; or even its complete failure to register the scale of the opportunity that’s been lost. No, the saddest aspect of this disgraceful announcement is that young people will receive it as the best the Left can do. It’s not, kids. Truly. Genuine Labour governments, genuine Labour Prime Ministers, have done way better than this. If you don’t believe me, then take a few minutes to watch this. 

Before concluding, however, I’d like to leave you with this quote. Appropriately, given the way this post began, it’s about Harold Wilson. What he stood for and why, eventually, the Establishment was successful in driving him out of office. (The quote itself is from Smear! Wilson & the Secret State by Stephen Dorril & Robin Ramsay. Published in Great Britain in 1991 by Fourth Estate Limited.)

“Wilson embodied the radical end of the wartime social contract, which not only saw that a dynamic mixed economy demanded a producers’ alliance, but also saw that such an alliance could not succeed with an ascendant City of London. The extraordinary hatred that Wilson provoked on the British right was not irrational: Wilson was a serious threat; he knew who the 'enemy within' actually was. And they knew he knew; ‘they’ – the banker in the City with the elder brother in MI6 and a cousin in the Army – ‘they’ knew that Wilson, virtually alone among Labour leaders of his generation, had pulled aside the whisps of mystification which hid the British Establishment and seen the power of finance capital at its heart.”

If Grant Robertson and his colleagues ever followed the financial sector’s twisting labyrinth to the Capitalist Minotaur’s hidden lair, it wouldn’t be to slay him, but only to slap him on the back, shake him by his bloody hand, and invite him to the Treasury’s next cocktail party.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 12 December 2019.