Abandoning Key’s Pledge: An Act Of Astonishing Political Folly.

Cunning Plan Or Suicide Note: The scale of English’s political folly is astonishing. His refusal to honour Key’s pledge on NZ Superannuation has front-footed the very political combination that National should be doing all it can to destabilise: Labour, NZ First and the Greens.

 

WE’LL PROBABLY NEVER KNOW whether yesterday’s announcement on NZ Superannuation was carefully planned, or simply inept political improvisation. Either way, it is highly likely that Bill English has just cost National the 2017 General Election.

 

As if high-interest student loans and unaffordable houses were not intergenerational injustice enough for Generation X, a Baby Boomer Prime Minister has just advanced their retirement age from 65 to 67.

 

For older New Zealanders, English’s announcement has stirred-up bitter memories. Fears that John Key’s pledge to leave NZ Super alone had put to bed for nine years have been reawakened.

 

Very early on in his career as leader of the National Opposition, John Key realised that he and his party were vulnerable on the superannuation issue. In the bluntest terms, he understood that, in the minds of most older voters, his party had “previous form”.

 

Too many of them remembered Jim Bolger’s “no ifs, no buts, no maybes” promise to restore NZ Super to its former universal, non-means-tested and un-surcharged status. The Bolger government’s subsequent promise-breaking on NZ Super inflicted huge damage on National’s brand.

 

It was the making of NZ First.

 

Among the many “To-Do” items confronting Key in the run-up to the 2008 election were, firstly: pushing Winston Peters and his party out of Parliament; and, secondly: eliminating NZ Super as a negative issue for National.

 

Strategically, these two objectives were inextricably intertwined. If Key was to secure the required ideological head-room for his new “Labour-lite” government, then Winston Peters’ voters would have to become John Key’s voters. A National government obligated to Peters and NZ First would make the John Key = National, National = John Key equation impossible. If centre-Right New Zealanders were to repose their faith and trust in Key’s “Everyman” brand, then Peters would have to go.

 

Key’s pledge: That he would resign as Prime Minister before he would countenance any changes to NZ Super; was his inspired tactical solution to his own, and National’s, double-headed strategic problem.

 

As it became increasingly certain that Helen Clark’s government would fall, and the National/Act assault on Peters reached its crescendo, Key’s pledge encouraged a crucial fraction of Peters’ followers to believe that their damaged champion could be abandoned safely. Henceforth, that “Nice Mr Key” would be there, right at the top, to look after them.

 

It was a definite “twofer” for National.

 

Clark had gone to considerable lengths to look after New Zealand’s older voters and ensure as many as possible remained in Labour’s column. Unfortunately, her support for Sue Bradford’s anti-smacking bill had fatally undermined older voters’ trust and confidence in the Clark-led Labour Party’s values.

 

Ordinarily, that would have prompted these voters to shift from Labour to NZ First. Not this time. Peters’ “disgrace” and Key’s unequivocal pledge had laid down a royal road to National as the pragmatic custodian of “Mainstream New Zealand’s” core values. They defected in droves.

 

All of which makes English’s decision to advance the age of eligibility by two years electorally incomprehensible. All he had to do to keep National’s elderly supporters on side was to re-confirm Key’s pledge. ‘No change to NZ Super’ was the simple and straightforward formula for removing the issue from the 2017 election agenda.

 

So, why didn’t he do it?

 

The critics of NZ Super (which, unfortunately, includes the Retirement Commissioner, Diane Maxwell) will do their best to paint English’s decision as a brave attempt to prevent New Zealand Superannuation from becoming “unsustainable”.

 

But English’s past pronouncements make it clear that he does not believe the scheme is unsustainable. Immigration flows and the over-65-year-olds remaining in the workforce for longer will take NZ Super over the Baby-Boom hump quite comfortably – after which the demographic stresses will reduce significantly.

 

The only explanation that makes any sense is that English sees NZ Super as the last remnant of the welfare state’s universalist heritage – and he hates it. His whole “social investment” approach to state support reflects his determination to substitute “tightly-targeted” services for the demonstrably more efficient and cost-effective policies of universal entitlement.

 

In other words, English has allowed ideological extremism to undermine his predecessor’s phenomenally successful pragmatism.

 

All that Little and Peters need to do now is loudly recommit themselves to honouring Key’s pledge. Not only will this reassure older voters, but it will also incentivise younger New Zealanders to get out and vote. After all, if National can advance the age of eligibility in 2017, what’s to stop it introducing a means test in 2018? Or changing the formula for calculating the pension’s value in 2019?

 

The scale of English’s political folly is astonishing. His refusal to honour Key’s pledge has front-footed the very political combination that National should be doing all it can to destabilise: Labour, NZ First and the Greens.

 

The proud defenders of NZ Superannuation.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 7 March 2017.

From Good Guys To Fall Guys: The Spinoff And Generation Zero Fail To Endorse Mike Lee.

Generation Hero:  Mike Lee’s record of service to the people of Auckland is extraordinary. From the protection of municipal assets (especially the Ports of Auckland) to the creation of regional parks, his contributions to the city are large and tangible. Even his critics acknowledge Mike as a “campaigner” for “good public transport”. It’s one way of describing the guy who secured the electrification of the Auckland rail network - I can think of better ones.

 

UP UNTIL TUESDAY of last week I’d always thought of The Spinoff and Generation Zero as the good guys. A wee bit hipsterish perhaps, in the case of the former; a little hard to distinguish from the Green Party in the latter – but these were minor quibbles. Overall, both organisations came across as fresh, creative, and definitely on the side of the progressive angels.

 

Not anymore.

 

On Tuesday morning The Spinoff, in collaboration with Generation Zero, released their list of endorsed candidates for the Auckland Council elections. Following the embedded links, I read, with a mixture of disbelief and outrage, the following sentences:

 

“At first glance [Mike] Lee seems like a pretty good councillor. He’s in favour of the CRL, [Central Rail Loop] and his bio says he’s a campaigner for good public transport. Dig a little deeper, and you’ll see he’s an ancient Waiheke sea goblin intent on imprisoning Auckland in a 1950s time prison.”

 

It goes without saying that this assessment is as wrong as it is vicious. Mike Lee’s record of service to the people of Auckland is extraordinary. From the protection of municipal assets (especially the Ports of Auckland) to the creation of regional parks, his contributions to the city are large and tangible. Even the author of the above-quoted outpouring of bile, Hayden Donnell, couldn’t avoid acknowledging Mike as a “campaigner” for “good public transport”. It’s one way of describing the guy who secured the electrification of the Auckland rail network - I can think of better ones.

 

None of this matters, however. Not in the “post-truth politics” of our times. Virtually none of the young readers of The Spinoff will have the slightest knowledge of Mike Lee’s life-long dedication to progressive politics. They won’t remember his time as Chair of the Auckland Regional Council, nor his contribution to restoring Tiritiri Matangi. They’ll never have read his doctoral thesis on the islands of the Hauraki Gulf, nor his articles in the New Zealand Political Review. All they’ve been given to work with is Hayden Donnell’s gratuitously insulting and outrageously unjustified censure.

 

That the editorial team at The Spinoff were happy to allow such a journalistic abomination to go out under their name says a great deal – not only about their ethics, but also (and more importantly) about their politics.

 

Because the flip-side of The Spinoff’s trashing of Mike Lee’s reputation is their endorsement of the “charismatic former media boss renowned for his long lunches”, Bill Ralston. There’s no examination of Ralston’s record (apart from his heroic wielding of the company credit-card) no warning that he has never represented his fellow citizens on any elected body, and certainly no heads-up about his being very, very, very good friends with John Key’s National Government.

 

No, the only reason Ralston gets The Spinoff’s appropriately coloured blue circle is because he has pledged his allegiance to the Auckland Council’s Unitary Plan. For Generation Zero this is all that matters. The slightest expression of doubt; the merest suggestion that this property developers’ charter, unmitigated by the democratic intervention of councillors like Mike Lee, will disfigure beyond repair one of the world’s most beautiful cities is enough to get you accused of wanting to lock Auckland up in “a 1950s time prison”.

 

What the whole distasteful incident reveals is that although The Spinoff affects a hipsterish cynicism about all things political, the precise opposite is true.

 

A real hipster would look at Bill Ralston and see a former mainstream media boss impatient to help out his right-wing mates by moving up to the top table. The same hipster would look at Mike Lee and venture a wry smile that although the left-wing tide has been going out for three long decades this ageing baby-boomer has never lost his faith in a better tomorrow – and has solid achievements to prove it. That sort of hipster would know exactly who to endorse.

 

But the boys and girls at The Spinoff are not cynical hipsters, they’re true believers. Members of a generation which, knowing nothing else, have absorbed the ideological assumptions of neoliberalism without conspicuous protest. Now they want their reward. They’re hungry for economic and political power and bitterly resentful that it has not yet been given to them in anything like the quantities they deserve. What Lightbox and The Spinoff’s other sponsors have given them, however, is cultural power – and they are deploying it with ruthless strategic skill.

 

On the “About” page of Generation Zero’s website, the group describes its mission as:  “providing solutions for New Zealand to cut carbon pollution through smarter transport, liveable cities & independence from fossil fuels”. It’s failure to endorse a candidate with Mike Lee’s record of protecting the environment, promoting public transport, and standing up for an Auckland built to a human scale, makes a mockery of the organisation’s stated aims and objectives.

 

Mayoral candidate, Penny Bright, said it best when she described Generation Zero as “the youth wing of the Property Council”. That the not-so-hipsters at The Spinoff have provided these fake defenders of the planet with such a powerful amplifier is something genuine progressives should bear in mind as they fill out their voting papers.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Sunday, 25 September 2016.

Intergenerational Mischief-Making.

Natural Allies: What a tragedy it would be if, at the precise moment that the inevitable real-world effects of neoliberalism – poverty, indebtedness, homelessness, precarious and/or under-employment – are manifesting themselves in ways that can no longer be hidden or explained away, the urgently needed political programme uniting old and young was forestalled by a cynical ideological project aimed at setting the Baby Boomers and Generation Rent at each other’s’ throats.

 

A WAR BETWEEN THE GENERATIONS looms, unless we move swiftly and decisively to avert it. Those born after 1966 will be pitted against those born in the first two-thirds of the Twentieth Century – most particularly, that massive demographic bulge born in the 20 years immediately following World War II: the Baby Boomers.

 

The narrative justifying this war is already in play. Among younger New Zealanders it takes the form of a bitter litany:

 

The Baby Boomers, who had everything given to them, are making us pay.

 

The Baby Boomers, who enjoyed state support into tertiary education, employment and housing, have pulled up the ladder after them – forcing us into lifelong debt.

 

The Baby Boomers, who are now in or approaching their 60s, are not only keeping us out of their well-paid jobs, by continuing to work, but also demanding that our taxes be used to fund their superannuation.

 

The Baby Boomers, who are selfish, greedy hypocrites, should be made to pay for the many injustices they have visited upon their children and grandchildren.

 

There’s more than a little truth in these accusations. Certainly the Baby Boomers constituted a significant proportion of the electorate during a period of extraordinary economic, social and political change.

 

But, hold on a moment, couldn’t a series of very similar arguments be constructed by pitting other social groups against one another? Maori against Pakeha, for example? Or Women against Men? And wouldn’t most of us pause before marching-off down those particular roads? After all, people do not choose to be born Male or Female, Black or White – any more that they chose to be born between 1946 and 1966. The other reason to pause, of course, is the very long list of evil consequences that flow from stereotyping whole classes of people. How would those who see nothing wrong in branding all Baby Boomers “selfish” and “greedy” respond to someone branding all Maori “violent” and “lazy”? Or, all women “weak” and “foolish”?

 

There are more than a million Baby Boomers in New Zealand – roughly one quarter of the country’s population. That’s a helluva lot of people! Can every one of them be “selfish”? Are they all “greedy”?

 

Let’s take a look at housing – a subject guaranteed to enrage the members of so-called “Generation Rent”. To hear them tell the tale, every Baby Boomer is the smug owner of multiple properties, as well as the grasping landlord of every young New Zealander condemned to a lifetime of living in other people’s houses. A truly depressing picture – but is it accurate?

 

Unfortunately, there is no legal requirement for landlords to register with a government agency. According to the Minister for Building and Housing, however, there were (as of 5 May 2015) 129,450 landlords who had registered one or more bond(s) with the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment. Which strongly suggests that only about 1 in 10 Baby Boomers are landlords. (And that’s after assuming, almost certainly incorrectly, that every landlord is also a Baby Boomer!)

 

What percentage of all those generations who came before the Baby Boomers were landlords? We might well ask. Was it lower, higher, or about the same? Whatever the correct answer, the above figures demonstrate the rank unfairness of stereotyping people purely on the basis of when they were born.

 

Young New Zealanders need to be very wary of the growing number of individuals and groups who are inviting them to buy into a simplistic and extremely dangerous conspiracy theory. Because the Baby Boomers are no more conspiring to ruin the lives of young Kiwis (who are, after all, their children and grandchildren!) than the Jews were conspiring to ruin the people of Germany. Rather than make war upon their own parents and grandparents, “Generation Rent” should ask themselves the critical question: cui bono? Who benefits from transforming a whole generation of New Zealanders into scapegoats?

 

As the co-authors of Generation Rent, Shamubeel and Selena Eaqub, make clear, the rise of what they call “housing apartheid” is directly traceable to the late 1980s and early 1990s. The same, roughly 30-year period during which the neoliberal reforms of Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson have, so dramatically, re-shaped New Zealand society.

 

What a tragedy it would be if, at the precise moment that the inevitable real-world effects of neoliberalism – poverty, indebtedness, homelessness, precarious and/or under-employment – are manifesting themselves in ways that can no longer be hidden or explained away, the urgently needed political programme uniting old and young was forestalled by a cynical ideological project aimed at setting the Baby Boomers and Generation Rent at each other’s’ throats.

 

Those who would punish the Baby Boomers for Neoliberalism’s crimes against the Welfare State should first be satisfied that the vicious political marginalisation of their parents’ generation, is not followed by the economic destruction of their own.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 9 June 2015.