Vox Populi: Ageing Boomers, Laurie & Les, Talk Politics.

“Old Baldy was booed by the Gender Gap.”

“THEY BOOED HIM.”

“Booed who?”

Hannah, the bar manager, couldn’t help overhearing the banter of her two favourite Boomers, right-wing Laurie and left-wing Les. She paused in her rounding-up of empty glasses and dirty plates to listen.

“Luxon, Laurie, the Prime Minister turned up to the netball final, and the crowd booed him. Since when did New Zealanders start booing their prime ministers at sporting fixtures?”

“Oh, come on, Les, your memory’s not that bad. Jacinda Ardern wasn’t our prime minister that long ago.”

“And if I recall rightly, Laurie, she received more abuse than any other New Zealand prime minister. But, it was only a certain sort of Kiwi who came after her. And, the hate they had for her was out of all proportion to her actual conduct as their prime minister. There was something quite deranged about Ardern’s enemies’ animosity. Looking back, I reckon she wasn’t vilified on account of who, or what, she actually was, but on account of the huge event she was conflated with – the Covid-19 Pandemic.”

“Spoken like a true Labour man, Les! But, you try running that line on those who were kept from the bedside of a dying parent. Or, the people who lost their jobs because they refused to be injected with a hastily developed RNA vaccine. Tell it to the retailers who watched their life’s work sicken and die. Tell it to the schoolkids fretting alone at home. Truthfully, Les, I think Jacinda’s ‘actual conduct’ merited quite a lot of animosity.”

“I think you’ve just proved my point, mate!”

“Touche! Les. But Ardern still isn’t the only New Zealand prime minister to have been monstered by her fellow citizens. Have you forgotten the 1984 incident when David Lange was set upon by a mob of Otago cockies? His driver and protection officers had to throw him into the back of the prime-ministerial limousine and power away before the furious farmers could tear the nation’s newly-elected leader limb-from-limb.”

“Hell’s bells, Laurie, I’d forgotten all about that! It was just after Roger Douglas had announced the abolition of all agricultural subsidies. A lot of those cockies faced economic ruin.”

“Not happy chappies, Les, that’s for sure!”

“And it reminds me of an even earlier incident – 1977, I think it was – when Rob Muldoon’s limousine was dented all to hell by the boots of a dozen or so sturdy Dunedin cops trying to hold back an angry throng of Otago students and trade unionists calling themselves ‘The July Front’. The constables had turned their backs to the crowd, linked arms, and, bracing themselves on the prime minister’s car, expedited his entry to the Dunedin Town Hall – where the National Party was holding its annual conference.”

“Let me guess, Les, you were there.”

“Might have been, Laurie. It was a long time ago. As you say, my memory’s not what it was.”

“Proves my point though, doesn’t it? Luxon’s very far from the first prime minister to be poorly received by the voting public.”

“Okay, but it also proves my point, Laurie. Ardern, Lange, Muldoon: they all came under fire from aggrieved minorities. Victims of the Covid regulations. Farmers stripped of their state support. Students and unionists venting their left-wing spleens at Rob’s Mob. But, being booed by the audience at a netball game? That’s a bit different, isn’t it? I mean, these were just ordinary Kiwis out for a night of sport. They hadn’t come to protest, they’d come to cheer. But, when they saw Old Baldy they just saw red – or, in his case, blue – and started booing. That’s got to mean something, surely?

“Could mean a lot of things, Les. It could mean the fans were just pissed-off at Luxon trying to muscle-in on a sporting fixture which, were he not the prime minister, he’d never dream of attending. Maybe they were annoyed at being used, quite cynically, as the backdrop for yet another National Party photo-op.”

“Yeah, well, when you put it like that.”

“And, I’ll offer you another explanation, Les. It was a netball final.”

“So?”

“So, who follows netball – mostly?”

“Women and girls.”

“Exactly! And who, by a scarily wide margin, favour Labour over National?”

“Women and girls!”

“Old Baldy, as you call him, was booed by the Gender Gap.”

“Go it in one, mate”, muttered Hannah.

This short story was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 1 August 2025.

Looking For Labour’s Vital Signs.

Flatlining: With no evidence of a genuine policy disruptor at work in Labour’s ranks, New Zealand’s wealthiest citizens can sleep easy.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN has walked a picket-line. Presidential candidate Kamala Harris has threatened “price-gauging” grocery retailers with price control. The Democratic Party’s 2024 platform situates it well to the left of Sir Keir Starmer’s British Labour Party, which is still “righting” itself after lurching leftwards under Jeremy Corbyn. Australia’s Anthony Albanese is the first Labor Party leader since Paul Keating to show signs of completing a full three-year parliamentary term without being rolled. New Zealand’s Labour Party, by contrast, shows virtually no signs of internal dissent, excitement, or even life.

And it should be showing all those vital signs. What other centre-left party, in any part of the developed world, would sit idly by after its leader – then the country’s prime minister – decided, without Cabinet sanction, and while he was out of the country, to scupper the tax policies of his Revenue and Finance Ministers, and who then went on to halve his party’s support at the next election? None with a political pulse.

Then again, what sort of leader, having delivered his party’s second-lowest share of the popular vote in 80 years, would think it in any way appropriate to remain in the top job? Sadly, such refusals to take personal responsibility for catastrophic failure are far from uncommon in electoral politics. Much rarer, however, are party caucuses so lacking in spine that they allow such failures to cling on to power.

Certainly, when David Cunliffe led Labour to its worst election result in 80 years: attracting a Party Vote of just 25.13 percent; his caucus was utterly unwilling to countenance him remaining Leader of the Opposition. Interestingly, one of Cunliffe’s most vociferous 2014 critics was Chris Hipkins – the same man who, nine years later, would deliver Labour a Party Vote of 26.91 percent. Clearly, that additional 1.78 percentage points made a huge difference!

Those who have followed Labour’s political evolution post-Rogernomics will no doubt attribute this inconsistency to the debilitating factional in-fighting that nearly consumed the party as it struggled to chart a way forward following Helen Clark’s departure in 2008. It was Cunliffe’s election as Party Leader in 2013, over the strong objections of a majority of his parliamentary colleagues, that brought these faction fights to their final, bitter, denouement in the aftermath of the 2014 debacle.

The faction that should have won, and was widely expected to win, in the aftermath of 2014 was the caucus clique led by Grant Robertson, Chris Hipkins and Jacinda Ardern. These were the “Clarkists”, all of whom had served as ministerial and/or prime-ministerial advisers in Clark’s government. They were determined to keep the party in its place, as Clark had done for 15 unyielding years.

A Labour Party liberated from caucus control could not be trusted to maintain the neoliberal order. On the contrary, it was likely to attack it. But, making an enemy of the neoliberal order, or even appearing to, is not a good idea – as Helen Clark and Michael Cullen, then in coalition with Jim Anderton’s left-wing Alliance, discovered in the “Winter of Discontent” that followed the Left’s 1999 victory.

Robertson came agonisingly close to replacing Cunliffe in 2014, losing to Andrew Little by a fraction of 1 percent. One can only speculate as to how successful, or unsuccessful, a Robertson-led Labour Party might have been in the election of 2017. Or, how any government he went on to lead might have performed when compared to those led by Jacinda Ardern. Would his handling of Covid-19 have been better? Worse? Essentially the same? The random contingencies of History can drive a person mad.

The questions that pose themselves in 2024 are mostly inspired by the political tenacity of the Clarkist faction, or, at least, of Chris “Chippy” Hipkins, its sole remaining representative now that Ardern and Robertson have departed the stage. While there are unmistakable stirrings among Labour’s rank-and-file – as there always are following the party’s loss of the Treasury Benches – there is little sign, as yet, of a Kiwi version of Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, or even of Kamala Harris.

About the only political declarations Hipkins’ caucus colleagues have been prepared to make since the 2023 election, apart from the usual boiler-plate media releases, are those in which they vehemently deny even the slightest interest in replacing him. The nearest New Zealand Labour can boast to a political “disrupter” is the principal victim of Hipkins’ “Captain’s Call” on taxation reform, David Parker.

Parker has been addressing Labour gatherings around the country on the urgent need to re-design New Zealand’s fiscal architecture if Labour is to make any credible promises regarding health, education, superannuation, housing, welfare, and any of the other many calls upon the public purse. There are those in the news media, as there always are, who would happily represent such behaviour to Hipkins as a direct attack upon his leadership. For the moment, however, Hipkins is, quite rightly, affecting an easy indifference to Parker’s efforts. He recognises a Quixotic gesture when he sees one.

For the past seven years the Labour Party apparatus has been making it harder and harder for another Cunliffe to challenge the near-absolute power of the Leader and her/his factotums in the Labour Leader’s Office. Working alongside a party hierarchy carefully stacked with loyal apparatchiks – many of them readying themselves for life as an MP – the Labour leader can threaten any MP who fails to maintain caucus discipline (i.e. who demonstrates insufficient loyalty) with quiet deselection and/or a hopelessly low position on the Party List.

The party’s ability to assert itself, as it did with Cunliffe and Little, is weaker today than it has ever been. The collective grip of the Leader, his closest caucus allies, the people in his office, senior party office-holders, and all those ambitious parliamentary staffers in possession of embarrassing information about their bosses, will likely keep “Chippy” in place until he decides its time to go.

About the only thing that could upset this cosy oligarchic arrangement is a palace coup. And the problem with palace coups is that they are best remembered for changing faces – not policies.

With no realistic prospect of a Kiwi policy disruptor like Corbyn, Sanders, AOC, or even Kamala Harris, taking control of the Labour Party, New Zealand’s wealthiest citizens can continue to sleep easy.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 9 September 2024.

Making A Difference.

The Jacinda and Ashley Show: Before the neoliberals could come up with a plausible reason for letting thousands of their fellow citizens perish, the Ardern-led government, backed by the almost forgotten power of an unapologetically interventionist state, was producing changes in the real world – changes that were, very obviously, saving the lives of real New Zealanders.

“ROGERNOMICS” didn’t just transform New Zealand’s economy and society, it profoundly changed its politicians. Members of the “political class” of 2024 display radically different beliefs from the individuals who governed New Zealand prior to 1984. The most alarming of these post-1984 beliefs dismisses Members of Parliament and local government politicians as singularly ill-qualified to determine the fate of the nations they have been elected to lead.

This paradox is readily explained when the core convictions driving the political class are exposed. The most important of these is that ordinary voters have absolutely no idea how, or by whom, their country is governed. The ordinary voter’s conviction that “the people” rule – as opposed to the “loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires” whose worldwide corporate interests are protected by globally organised media and public relations companies – is offered as proof of their all-round imbecility. Politicians might just as well be guided by baboons as by the ordinary voter!

This contemptuous view of the people who elect politicians to public office is, naturally, kept well-hidden from the electorate. Indeed, these disdainful “representatives” are forever celebrating in public what they denounce privately as dangerous, “the principles of democratic government”. Why? Because the alternative to perpetuating the myth that the people (demos) rule (kratos) – i.e. by making it clear to them that they don’t – is much, much worse.

Ruling a country by force, rather than by consent, not only turns most of the population into the rulers’ enemies, but also leaves the political class acutely vulnerable to the institutions responsible for perpetrating the violence that keeps it in power. All too often these “men with guns” decide to cut out the political middlemen and rule directly. Historically-speaking, this is the royal-road to graft, corruption, extortion, and, ultimately, to the formation of a brutal kleptocracy. NOT a situation conducive to either making, or keeping, one’s profits!

That feudalism, and the absolute monarchies that grew out of it, were, in essence, arrangements predicated on the maintenance of well-organised bodies of armed and violent men might, given contemporary capitalism’s distaste for such regimes, be considered ironic. Living under the sway of these “gentlemen”, and being required to pay their protection money the swingeing taxes they imposed, did not make for a happy life – or, at least, not for the 95 percent of the population – including the merchant class – forbidden from owning swords!

The popularity of democracy, as a system designed to reduce sharply the power of bullies and extortionists, tends to be greater the nearer in time its beneficiaries are to the oppressive political regimes from which “people-power” liberated them. Even as capitalism began to hit its stride in the nineteenth century, such democratic (or quasi-democratic) legislatures as existed (and there weren’t many) proved remarkably reluctant to bow before the doctrine of laissez-faire. (French for “let the capitalists do what they like’.) The Victorians who founded New Zealand, and wrote its Constitution Act, were impressively unconvinced that a man with a plan (women were yet to be included in their discussions) could not improve the lives of his fellow citizens by persuading them to elect him to Parliament.

This conviction that politicians could make a positive difference to the lives of ordinary people took root more tenaciously in New Zealand than just about any other country on the face of the earth. The radical reforms of the Liberal government (1890-1912) and the first Labour government (1935-1949) earned New Zealand the title “social laboratory of the world”. Politicians who were similarly determined to make a difference came from Europe and America to observe first-hand New Zealand’s own special brand of “socialism without doctrines”.

The people who rendered making a difference unsafe were, of course, the socialists with doctrines. The unfortunate Russians and Chinese would pass from feudalism to communism without any extended period of democratic government in between. From noblemen with swords, they passed into the hands of commissars with pistols. The taxes were just as swingeing, but at least Communism’s bullies and extortionists contrived to paint Paradise in colours more exciting than white.

Lest their workers decide to paint their own countries red, Western capitalists were persuaded, very reluctantly, to let them be painted pink. The problem with social-democracy, however, was that if you conceded it an inch, it would, albeit incrementally, take you many miles down “the road to serfdom”. Such was the grim thesis of the Austrian, arch-capitalist economist, Friedrich von Hayek, founder of the Switzerland-based free-market think tank, the Mont Pelerin Society, and spiritual father of neoliberal political economy.

Labour’s Roger Douglas was a member of the aforesaid Mont Pelerin Society, as was National’s Ruth Richardson, along with quite a number of the bureaucrats and businessmen who first set New Zealand on the road to neoliberalism. At the heart of their project was a very simple imperative: Don’t let politicians near anything even remotely important. Leave all the important decisions to the market, or, at least, to those who own and control the market.

Those who struggle to understand why neoliberals are constantly presenting mild-mannered social-democrats as fire-breathing communists should view their behaviour as pre-emptive ideological law enforcement – pre-crime-fighting. Politicians determined to “make a positive difference” may begin by building state-houses, the neoliberals argue, but they always end up creating gulags. Better by far to create a society in which “making a positive difference” is restricted to capitalist entrepreneurs. Don’t let the political do-gooders get started.

Clearly, no one sent the memo to Jacinda Ardern. Or, if they did, she profoundly misunderstood it. Making a positive difference was what New Zealand’s young prime minister all-too-evidently believed the Labour Party had been established to enable. But, when she said “Let’s do this!”, all those around her, either gently, or not-so-gently, said “You can’t do that!”

It may have looked as though there were levers to pull to set up a light-rail network, build 100,000 affordable houses, end child poverty, and combat global warming, but they weren’t attached to anything. “Jacinda” could pull on them all she wanted, put on a good show, but the cables linking politicians’ promises to real-world outcomes had all been cut decades earlier. She didn’t appear to understand that disempowering politicians was what Rogernomics had been all about.

But, as is so often the case in history, the story was changed by something its author’s had failed to imagine, or anticipate. The onset of a global pandemic made it absolutely necessary that the lever labelled “Keeping New Zealanders Safe” was at the end of a cable that was very firmly attached to the real world, and that the person pulling the lever was empathically qualified to make a real and positive difference.

Before the neoliberals could come up with a plausible reason for letting thousands of their fellow citizens perish, the Ardern-led government, backed by the almost forgotten power of an unapologetically interventionist state, was producing changes in the real world – changes that were, very obviously, saving the lives of real New Zealanders.

It couldn’t last. Neoliberalism, like rust, never sleeps, and in less than a year the lever Ardern and her colleagues had pulled on with such energy had been quietly reconnected to less effective – but more divisive – parts of the state machine. But, not before “Jacinda” and her party had done the impossible. Not before Labour had won 50.01 percent of the Party Vote in the 2020 General Election.

There’s a lesson in there somewhere. Maybe, just maybe, politicians, acting in the interests of the people who elected them, aren’t always ill-qualified to lead? Maybe, just maybe, it is still possible for men and women of good will to make a positive difference?

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack on Tuesday, 20 August 2024.

The Hollow Party.

We are the hollow men/We are the stuffed men/Leaning together/
Headpiece filled with Straw. Alas! – The Hollow Men, T.S. Eliot 1925

LABOUR’S GREAT GOOD FORTUNE, as New Zealand emerged from the worst of the neoliberal revolution, was to possess Helen Clark. It was Clark who engineered the installation of Mike Moore to “save the furniture” as Labour’s popularity plummeted in 1990. And, it was Clark who made sure that, when Moore failed (albeit narrowly) to win the 1993 general election, she would be the one to replace him. Labour thus acquired a highly intelligent, politically savvy leader, steeped in the Labour tradition, but also fully acclimatised to the new ideological climate. She would remain Labour’s leader for the next 15 years – beating Harry Holland’s daunting tenure by one year!

Clark’s worth to Labour is confirmed by the fact that for 9 of those 15 years she was New Zealand’s prime minister. But, it must also be acknowledged that Clark cost Labour dearly. Her political skills were more than equal to seeing-off anyone who harboured thoughts of replacing her, and she was not the sort of person to groom a popular replacement. As a consequence, when she and her government were defeated by John Key in 2008, the best successor she could bequeath to the Labour Party was the worthy, but uninspiring, Phil Goff.

What followed were nine years of bitter political in-fighting and ideological drift. Labour went through five leaders, the last of which, Jacinda Ardern, improved upon Clark’s losing Party Vote by a derisory 2.9 percentage points, and had to be elevated to the prime-ministership by the NZ First leader, Winston Peters.

Ardern, while no intellectual, was a superb communicator who seemed to pass through history without touching the sides. Her initial response to the global Covid-19 Pandemic laid claim to the hearts and minds of so many New Zealanders that in 2020 Labour attracted sufficient support to govern alone. But, as the Coronavirus continued to evolve, and Labour’s efforts to control it proved insufficient, Ardern and her cabinet began to lose their lustre. The voters turned away.

Aware that the political magic had deserted her, Ardern passed the mantle of leadership to Chris Hipkins. Perhaps aware of just how much love Labour had already lost, Ardern’s most obvious successor, Grant Robertson, had declined to accept her crown. What happened over the next 10 months spoke eloquently of just how hollow, intellectually and morally, the Labour Party had become.

Part of Clark’s aptitude for electoral politics was her understanding of just how far the New Zealand electorate was prepared to tolerate a government stepping away from the politics of “Middle New Zealand”. In spite of the fact that her core personal beliefs were more closely aligned with the Labour Left than the Labour Right, she instinctively kept her distance. Only when there was overwhelming support for the Left’s position – as was the case with the Nuclear Free policy and the US-led invasion of Iraq – would she align herself with the more radical elements of her party.

Understandably, Clark’s reticence gave rise to considerable frustration within the Labour Left which, following her retirement from parliamentary politics, found release when Labour’s Policy Council adopted a large number of policies which Clark and her right-hand woman, Heather Simpson, had for many years sidelined. So it was that, in 2011, Goff, the former Rogernome, was asked to sell the most left-wing Labour manifesto in years.

Labour’s poor showing in 2011 (the worst since 1928) convinced the three young Labour politicians (all of them former Beehive staffers) who had entered Parliament in 2008 – Grant Robertson, Chris Hipkins and Jacinda Ardern – that the Labour MPs and activists responsible for promoting policies that threatened the neoliberal status-quo would have to be weeded-out of Labour’s ranks. Promoting women’s rights, Māori rights and gay rights was fine, advocating state ownership, higher taxes and stronger unions was not.

In Labour’s caucus, the Robertson-Hipkins-Ardern Troika fought its way to supremacy. In the Labour Party organisation, however, it was not always in control. The Left’s success in giving the party’s affiliated unions, and its ordinary rank-and-file members, a major role in electing Labour’s leader earned it the Troika’s unflagging enmity. It is of no small importance that when Grant Robertson offered himself as a candidate for the Labour leadership, which he did twice – first against David Cunliffe in 2013, and then again, against Andrew Little, in 2014 – he was defeated. Had the party rules required Ardern to be elected by the whole party in 2017, rather than by caucus alone (permitted due to the imminence of the general election) would she have won?

In the six years that the Troika dominated Labour (and New Zealand) the work that began with ensuring David Shearer – rather than David Cunliffe – became leader when Goff stepped down from the leadership in 2011, was completed. With Chris Hipkins doing much of the heavy lifting, Labour MPs associated with policies promoted by the Left found themselves politically outmanoeuvred and isolated – to the point where a number simply abandoned Parliament for more rewarding and less stressful careers elsewhere. The party organisation’s independence was similarly eroded, with MPs and their hangers-on exercising an increasingly unhealthy degree of influence over its key functions: policy-making, candidate selection and Party List-ranking.

The long-planned and impressively seamless transition from Ardern to Hipkins in January 2023 showed just how comprehensive the Troika’s victory over the party had been. No one dared stand against “Chippie”, who now attempted to execute a series of policy U-turns in the name of returning to Labour’s “bread and butter”.

Without focus group approval, no policy – not even one promoted by the Finance and Revenue ministers working together – could count on the Leader’s support. Progressive initiatives in justice and corrections were jettisoned overnight for no better reason than the polls had pronounced them unpopular. About the only policies that remained sacrosanct were those related to the aims and objectives of identity politics. These had to remain in place – if only to reassure Labour MPs that they were still on the side of the angels. Unfortunately for Labour’s re-election chances, these were the precisely the policies that a majority of the voters hated most.

When Cunliffe secured just 25.13 percent of the Party Vote in 2014, Hipkins – some say with tears in his eyes – begged his leader to recognise the uncompromising judgement of the electorate and step down. Nine years later, having led his party to a crushing defeat, and after securing just 26.91 percent of the Party Vote, Hipkins thought it best, all round, that he remain in place. Not one member of Labour’s caucus objected. After all, it was nobody’s fault, the changing fortunes of politics, as the theme song of “Only Fools & Horses” puts it, “is like the changing of the seasons and the tides of the sea”.

If ever Labour needed a leader with an instinctive feel for how much Middle New Zealand will bear. Someone steeped in her party’s values and traditions, with the intellect and courage to argue for them positively and persuasively. A politician who understands that the essence of her craft is to be active, not passive; and who grasps that the duty of a leader is to heal, not harm. Then, surely, Labour – and New Zealand – needs that person now.

Maybe Helen could have another go?

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project website on Monday, 29 January 2024.

Losing The Working Class.

Workers' Power. The power of the NZ working-class reached its zenith in 1974, when 10,000 workers marched in protest at the Drivers Union leader, Bill Andersen's, arrest - and secured his freedom. The Labour Government of Norman Kirk was frightened of the organised working-class then. Fifty years later, there's precious little left of the private sector unions to inspire fear in anybody.

I ALWAYS WONDERED what it would take to detach the New Zealand working class from Labour. Not all of the working-class, obviously, but enough to strip the party of the demographic heft that, for more than a century, has made it a decisive electoral player. Now I know, but it took a fair few wrong guesses before I got there.

On paper, it should have been Rogernomics. After such a comprehensive betrayal of Labour’s working-class base it seemed impossible that all but the most mindless loyalists would continue to vote for the party. It was the conviction that underpinned Jim Anderton’s creation of the NewLabour Party – give the ordinary working-class voter an honest social-democratic party to vote for and Labour’s electoral base would shift en masse.

Well, that’s exactly what happened in Jim’s seat of Sydenham, but NewLabour’s message fell on deaf ears just about everywhere else. Labour’s candidates reassured the residents of working-class electorates that Rogernomics had been for them. New Zealand could not have gone on the way it had been under Muldoon. Something had to be done. Our economy had to be shaken-up and set on a new, more productive path. It had all been done for them, so their kids and grandkids to look forward to something better than freezing-works and car-plants. If Mickey Savage had been leading Labour in the 1980s, they said, he would have followed exactly the same policies.

And, you know what? It worked. In Labour’s safest seats Jim Anderton’s candidates hardly made a dent in Labour’s bodywork. The workers stayed loyal right through.

Their dogged faith in the Labour Party reminded me of “Boxer”, the indomitable draught horse of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. No matter how many times the pigs who wielded the power made the lives of all the other animals miserable; no matter how many times they slyly amended the rules of the farm (most famously from “All Animals Are Equal” to “All Animals Are Equal – But Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others”) Boxer remained loyal to the Revolution, exerting all his mighty strength to keep it going. Until, at last, worn out by his ceaseless exertions, he fell ill and was sold to the proprietor of the local knacker’s yard by the self-same pigs he had always believed in and supported.

There had been other tests of working-class loyalty. The abortion issue had sorely tried the patience of Labour’s working-class Catholics of Irish descent in the 1970s. Homosexual law reform did the same, right across the Christian denominational spectrum, in the 1980s. Like the Springbok Tour of 1981, which had pitted young, mostly middle-class, university students and their liberal middle-aged mentors, against the rough-and-ready working-class lovers of Rugby, the struggle for gay rights was overlaid with an ill-disguised contempt for the morally deficient people its promoters were struggling against.

By the late-1980s, however, the issue which had bitterly divided the traditional Left in the years immediately following the Springbok Tour, and hacked a jagged wound across the trade union movement, was turning up on the conference floor of the Labour Party. The radical quest for Māori sovereignty, and its central political demand – “Honour the Treaty” – could no longer be ignored by the party whose 50-year alliance with the Ratana Movement had given it control of the Māori seats.

That was the moment at which Labour should have grappled with the political implications of Māori sovereignty and the Treaty, thrashing them out for good or ill, until its members, and (much more importantly) its voters grasped their meaning. But, that was not what Labour did. When confronted with policy remits requiring Labour to honour the Treaty of Waitangi, conference delegates and MPs nodded sagely and dutifully raised their hands in support. Very few understood that what they were receiving and passing-on was the political equivalent of a live hand-grenade, and that, one day, the pin of that hand grenade, either by accident or design, was going to be pulled out.

Anyone who has ever wondered how the Fourth Labour Government could so blithely legislate for the Waitangi Tribunal’s reach to extend all the way back to the signing of the Treaty in 1840, or how that judicially pregnant phrase “the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi” could so carelessly have been inserted into the State Owned Enterprises Act, should wonder no more. The leaders, and the members, of the Labour Party were so ignorant of both the Treaty’s status in Maoridom, and of their country’s morally dubious colonial history, that they simply didn’t see the harm in paying lip-service to Māori demands.

Donna Awatere had put her finger on the phenomenon in her seminal Māori Sovereignty essays, published in Broadsheet:

The strength of white opposition will be allayed by the fact that Maori sovereignty will not be taken seriously. Absolute conviction in the superiority of white culture will not allow most white people to even consider the possibility.

Lord Cooke of Thorndon, however, had no choice but to take the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi seriously. His ground-breaking judgement that the Treaty was “in the nature of a partnership” would produce a rich harvest of subsidiary judgements and policies that, as the decades passed, would draw the descendants of the settlers who made New Zealand closer and closer to the Dock of History.

One of those judgements related to the foreshore and seabed, and came frighteningly close to tipping New Zealand into fierce racial conflict. It was only Helen Clark’s up-close-and-personal interactions with the hard men and women of the Māori nationalist movement, the people she dubbed “haters and wreckers”, that prevented the 2005 General Election from anticipating the 2023 General Election by 18 years. Clark’s effective nullification of the Court of Appeal’s decision, and her unequivocal assertion that the foreshore and seabed belonged to all New Zealanders, was sufficient to hold enough of Labour’s working-class vote to defeat Don Brash’s attempt to start what Act’s David Seymour is now promising to finish.

Unfortunately, Jacinda Ardern, possessed none of her predecessor’s understanding of the Māori nationalist movement and its revolutionary interpretation of the Treaty. When asked to summarise the Treaty’s clauses by journalists in the first months of her premiership, she could not oblige. A classic example of her party’s dangerous propensity to good-naturedly wave Māori demands through Labour’s policy check-points, Ardern simply lacked the political resources to turn back the political demands of such forceful Māori politicians as Willie Jackson and Nanaia Mahuta.

Neither Ardern, nor her successor, Chris Hipkins, had the intellectual or ideological sophistication to argue either For or Against the revolutionary ideas contained in the He Puapua Report. Nor did they possess the courage to follow Helen Clark’s example of political intransigence.

Labour made no case for co-governance because it couldn’t. For the previous 40 years it had put “all that Treaty stuff” in the too-hard, or the too-scary, basket. When the sovereignty hand grenade finally exploded, in the second term of the Sixth Labour Government, the best Labour could manage was to blame the resulting injury to the New Zealand body politic on the “racism” of the people whose votes it would need to go on governing.

Unsurprisingly, it didn’t get them. Almost accidentally, Labour discovered what it would take to make the working-class stop voting for it. Not the Pasefika working-class, admittedly, but the “settler” working-class – made up of Pakeha New Zealanders and the children and grandchildren of immigrant workers. Making those citizens feel as though they had, somehow, to justify their right to participate in shaping their nation’s future: that was the crucial catalyst for electoral defection.

Like their European and American counterparts, the New Zealand working-class has completed its historical journey from Left to Right.

And it ain’t going back.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project on Tuesday, 17 October 2023.

So Little To Defend, So Much To Punish.

Weapon? Shield? Tool?: How will the majority of voters use their votes in the forthcoming General Election? As a weapon to punish their enemies? As a shield to protect them from their enemies? As a tool to build a better world? Given the febrile political temper of the times, only the bravest punters would put their money on the constructive option.

MOST OF US use our votes in one of three ways: as a weapon; as a shield; as a tool. With early voting commencing in a month’s time, the overwhelming majority of New Zealanders would appear to be preparing to use their vote as either a weapon or a shield. All the signs point to those intent upon weaponising their vote being the largest fraction of the electorate. The number intending to use their vote as shield against their enemies is, however, unlikely to be significantly smaller than that of the weaponisers. Sadly, only a tiny minority of voters will be brave and/or principled enough to cast their votes positively in 2023. This is not going to be a happy election.

It was never going to be easy for Labour to live up to the hopes and encouragement of the voters in 2020. Not since the joyful election of 1972 made Norman Kirk New Zealand’s twenty-ninth prime minister, and gave him a whopping parliamentary majority of 23 seats, had so many Kiwis used their votes constructively, as a tool. Not only were their ballots deployed as an enormous “Thank you, Jacinda!”, but many were also given to Labour as a way of facilitating the “transformation” which its leader had promised, but which Covid-19 had interrupted so dramatically.

Tragically, the Labour cabinet, caucus, and party organisation proved unequal to the challenge of using the tools which an astonishing 50.01 percent of the voting public had given them. Something strange and sinister appeared to overtake Jacinda Ardern, darkening her sunny political disposition. Her Cabinet was no help, and neither was her caucus. It was almost as if they were annoyed and/or affronted by the tools thrust into their hands. It was for them to set the agenda, not 1,443,545 presumptuous voters.

All of Labour’s team had failed to read the events of 2017-20 correctly. Most especially, they had failed to grasp that the success of their Covid response was based almost entirely on the state’s decisive intervention on behalf of the “Team of Five Million”. Those aligned to the ideologies of the Right knew exactly what they were looking at as the government seized control of the pandemic response. That’s why they were so furious. Allow the voters to see what a mobilised state could do for them and, inevitably, they would want more.

Painful though it may be to acknowledge, Labour’s ministers were as ill-disposed to keeping the state’s shoulder to the wheel as the Right. Rather than being inspired by the mass support for their Prime Minister and Party, they seemed terrified of it. Rhetoric was one thing, reality another. On the re-elected government’s agenda their was just one item: getting everything back to normal as quickly as possible.

In politics, executing such an unheralded handbrake-turn will always exact a high psychological price, and the Ardern-led government proved no exception. Working against the expectations of her supporters changed “Jacinda” – and not in a good way.

But, the political price incurred by Labour’s refusal to keep on moving forward was much, much higher. Hopes raised, and then dashed, will swiftly curdle into a witches’ brew of disappointment and fury. When next they enter the polling-booths, those who believe themselves betrayed by “Jabcinda” will wield their ballot papers like a butcher’s knife.

In doing so they will add their numbers to the roughly one-third of the electorate who have always wielded their votes as weapons against those who would upend what their “betters” still believe to be the natural order of things.

At the core of this army of nay-sayers are the inhabitants of rural and provincial New Zealand. These “Heartlanders” have always looked upon the cities as sinks of iniquity and havens for the undeserving poor. Every three years, National and Act supporters grind their teeth in fury as impoverished citizens, many of them brown, turn out in support of Labour’s redistributive policies – using their votes as shields against the threatened depredations of the Right.

In uneasy alliance with the Heartlanders are the wealthy citizens of the big cities. Although they live, safely sequestered from the poor and the brown, in the leafiest suburbs of the cities, it is more difficult for these citizens to weaponise their votes in the manner of the farmers and their small-town allies.

The people who work in their factories and warehouses, clean their offices, serve in their shops and fast-food joints, and build the nation’s infrastructure for them to make profits out of are, after all, people they see every day. Somewhere in the recesses of their social consciousness, they understand that the working-class is something their own class cannot do without. When things are going well, they may even be persuaded to help the workers. When things start going badly, however, or when – God rot them! – their employees start joining unions and taking their destiny into their own hands, that’s when the wealthy turn their ballot papers into pistols and start shooting.

It is the working-class voters who, most of all, yearn to use their votes in the way their grandparents and great-grandparents did, as tools to build a better world. Every three years they hope-against-hope that Labour will ask them to create something worth having with their votes, but election-after-election they are disappointed. Reluctantly, and without enthusiasm, they lift the protective shield of the franchise against the worst the Right can offer – keeping Labour viable solely out of fear of meeting something worse.

Labour, as the lesser of two evils, remains the workers’ choice. Even if, in 2023, it no longer represents the working-class who peopled its ranks in 1923. Labour, now, is the party of the people who teach the working-class; who take care of it when its sick; who keep it afloat when jobs are scarce and puts its worst casualties up in hotels when they have nowhere else to go. They’re the people who, when the kids of the working-class start breaking bad, defend them in court, write reports about them, give them counselling, and mange them when they’re released from prison. There are tens-of-thousands of these people: not quite bosses, but not quite workers either. The American sociologists, John and Barbara Ehrenreich, called them the “Professional-Managerial Class” – and they have made the labour and social-democratic parties of the world their own.

The problem with this intermediate class is that its top two priorities are: to preserve the institutions that employ them; and, to keep the power relationships within those institutions from changing in ways that threaten their status. These essentially conservative priorities make the Professional-Managerial Class extremely difficult to like. They may talk the talk of “progressive politics”, but they are far too risk averse to walk it. Indeed, they offer living proof of the early-twentieth century “muck-raking” American journalist, Upton Sinclair’s, famous quip: “It is very hard to make a man understand something, when his salary depends upon him not understanding it.”

In this election, the National Party has its knives out for the professionals and managers of the public service, so no one should be surprised to see them voting defensively for their own party. Labour’s problem, however, is that it has given far too many New Zealanders far too many good reasons for wanting to punish it.

Because, when all is said and done, Labour was the party which, in 2020, led half the country to the mountain-top, only to decide that if the promised land had no need of bosses, then it might also have no need for managers and professionals like themselves. Daunted by this terrifying prospect, they opted to proceed no further.

But you cannot show people the gates of heaven, and then turn around and go home. Not when there’s another election in three years’ time. Not when your party has ended up giving the New Zealand electorate so little to defend, and so much to punish.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 1 September 2023.

Don’t Walk Away, Chippy – Labour Can Beat National On Tax.

Go Hard, Chippy! Being a magnet for every piece of bad news going is why Prime Ministers cannot afford to just sit still and hope for the best. A do-nothing government is a doomed government. If Chris Hipkins truly wants his government to survive October’s electoral winnowing, then he has to do something.

THE QUESTION upon which the forthcoming election will turn is: “How brave is Chris Hipkins?” If saving his government requires Hipkins to strike out boldly, with policies designed to seriously disrupt the status quo, does he have the cojones to do it?

There is nothing in his political career which suggests that he has what it takes to shake things up. He has succeeded by playing the percentages. Trimming his sails when he had to. Betting the farm when he was handed a sure thing. And it has worked. He is New Zealand’s prime minister. Not by dint of hard-won policy achievements, but by being a political cork. Chippy has floated to the top.

An important aspect of this political buoyancy has been his indifference to how well, or how badly, his policies are performing. Minister of Education for five years, he did not appear to care whether the measures he authorised were actually working. Having implemented party policy, he never looked back.

His pet project, Te Pukenga, was persisted with long after it became obvious that the forced amalgamation of the country’s polytechnics was a very bad (and eye-wateringly expensive) idea. Evidence that New Zealand was tumbling down the international education league-tables, and that the nation’s children were struggling to master the 3Rs, or even turn up to class, failed to produce a serious reappraisal of the Education Ministry’s performance.

Chippy’s choice, when things go wrong, is to keep on walking. It’s a remarkably effective tactic. Don’t hang around, don’t look back, just put as much distance between yourself and whatever is failing as you possibly can. Guilt and proximity go hand-in-hand. Ergo – don’t be found near the scene of the crime.

The problem with being the Prime Minister, however, is that there is nowhere to walk away to. Hipkins’ office is the destination for everything that has gone, is going, or will go wrong in New Zealand society. It’s the place where all the chickens of political failure come home to roost – even when, strictly-speaking – they’re not Chippy’s chickens.

With every passing week, New Zealanders are greeted with more evidence of just what an easy-osey administration Jacinda Ardern superintended. Stuart Nash, Michael Wood, Kiri Allan: how many more ministers and MPs will the news media find cowering under the rug with their fingers crossed? One can’t help wondering whether Ardern, herself, took a leaf out of Chippy’s playbook. Certainly, being able to say “Jacinda has left the building” has its upside – not least for Jacinda!

Being a magnet for every piece of bad news going is why Prime Ministers cannot afford to just sit still and hope for the best. A do-nothing government is a doomed government. Nor is it enough to simply throw unpopular government policies overboard – not when the person doing the throwing had a significant role in formulating and implementing the very same policies! No, if Hipkins truly wants his government to survive October’s electoral winnowing, then he has to do something.

In practical terms, Hipkins needs to announce new policies. Policies that provide the voters with a convincing reason for keeping Labour in office.

Like what?

Given that the 2023 General Election will be held in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis, and that Hipkins’ opponents are proposing to relieve the burden of constantly rising prices by lessening the voters’ tax burden, it would seem that fiscal policy is the battlefield upon which Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori must take the fight to National and Act.

Hipkins’ and Labour’s most obvious first move, tax wise, is to adjust the tax thresholds to offset the impact of rising inflation, thereby eliminating “fiscal drag”. At a stroke, National’s flagship policy would be neutralised. Christopher Luxon and Nicola Willis might (with some justification) claim credit, but they would still be left gasping for political air.

Hipkins’ and Labour’s next step would be to address the Greens’ fiscal policies. Citing the extreme practical (not to say political) difficulties entailed in extracting significant revenue from the richest individuals and families on the Rich List, Finance Minister Grant Robertson should rule-out introducing a Wealth Tax. To soften that blow, however, he would signal Labour’s adoption of the Greens’ policy of making the first $10,000 of personal income tax-free.

On a roll, Robertson would then announce the re-instatement of the policy Labour took to the electorate in 2011: the removal of GST from basic food items. This measure would offer immediate cost-of-living relief to New Zealand’s poorest citizens.

Naturally, National’s finance spokesperson, Willis, and the Act leader, David Seymour, will demand to know how Labour proposes to fill the revenue hole created by such significant reductions in the overall tax-take. What spending plans are Labour planning to curtail and/or eliminate in order to pay for them?

One can easily imagine Hipkins asking Robertson the same question when Labour’s campaign team are war-gaming the party’s radical fiscal strategy. Recalling John Key’s killer line from the 2011 General Election, one can hear the Prime Minister commanding his Finance Minister to: “Show me the money!”

This is the point at which Hipkins will be required to step out of his political comfort zone and embrace a policy that would shake New Zealand’s neoliberal order to its very foundations. The same point Jim Anderton’s Alliance arrived at back in the 1990s when it, too, was tasked with filling the fiscal hole created by its even more generous tax policies.

And, no, the answer is not a Capital Gains Tax (CGT). Upon the foundation of tax-free capital gains New Zealanders have constructed a politically sacrosanct economic model. It’s what keeps the small business-person working all the hours God sends. It’s what underpins the financial security of home-owners in their old age. Capital gain is the pot-of-gold at the end of the Kiwi rainbow – and governments will tax it at the peril of their political lives.

The answer Anderton and his Alliance came up with, the fiscal instrument adopted to fill a gaping fiscal void that would otherwise have to be filled by cuts in government spending so savage that publicly funded health and education could hardly survive them, was the Financial Transactions Tax (FTT).

The FTT is a levy on legislatively designated types of financial transactions. Infinitesimal in itself, when multiplied by the millions of financial transactions which take place every day an FTT soon mounts up to serious money. What’s more, the institutions from which FTTs tend to reap the most spectacular revenue harvests – the banks and finance houses – seldom elicit much in the way of sympathy from the general public. On the contrary, most voters are of the view that the banks “have it coming”.

Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a proposal more likely to inspire fear and loathing at the big end of town that an FTT. Those big-enders will tell you that an FTT would crash the markets, derange the banking system, provoke capital flight, and utterly fail to achieve the objectives of its promoters. Many of the bankers’ objections are rehearsed in an excellent video on the FTT (a.k.a the “Robin Hood Bank Tax”) fronted by the incomparable Bill Nighy. Watch it here.

This, then, is the challenge confronting Hipkins. To embrace a suite of policies that offer genuine cost-of-living relief to the overwhelming majority of New Zealand taxpayers, while, at the same time, stripping National and Act of their principal election sweetener, and throwing into the sharpest relief the difference between tax policies designed to assist the rich, and tax policies intended to uplift the poor.

Not an election strategy for the faint-hearted, it would call upon all the courage and political skills this government and its allies possess. If successful, however, it would, at long last, allow the New Zealand Left to shatter the bonds of neoliberalism and break free into open ground.

Don’t walk away from this one, Chippy.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 30 June 2023.

134 Days Out.

Take Me Home: Bowalley Road, North Otago. The long gravel road after which Chris Trotter’s blog is named. Near the road’s end is the farm where he spent the first nine years of his life.

ONE OF THE JOYS of blogging is the instant feedback you get. Certainly, there are the trolls who strive to disrupt your blog’s community of readers, but they are easily dealt with. More than anything else, a troll wants to register the damage he (it’s almost always a he) works so hard to inflict. Decline to post his deathless prose, however, and there is nothing for him to register. Like the proverbial tree falling unheard in the forest, he makes no sound. This enforced inadequacy generally persuades the trolls to bugger-off.

From the community of your blog’s civilised readers, however, flows a never-ending stream of comments. Some terse and pithy, some that go on-and-on until the blog’s software intervenes – cutting them off in full-flight. From these comments, an attentive blogger is able to glean a reasonably accurate impression of the blog readership’s mood. Irrespective of where those commenting place themselves on the ideological spectrum, their ideas and grievances are what, collectively, constitute the zeitgeist.

Challenged to sum up the mood of this moment, 134 days out from the General Election, I would have to say: “disillusionment”. Unlike the feeling that gripped the nation 134 days out from the 2020 election: that giddy pride at how well we had been led, and how stoically we had come through the frightening Valley of the Shadow of Covid; New Zealanders are feeling disgruntled, discouraged and disappointed by what passes for political leadership in 2023.

Everything that happened after the 2020 Jacindafest, the uncovering of so many clay feet, has made a great many of us feel like chumps. The Prime Minister turned out not to be a saint – not when there was the devil of a pandemic deficit to pay. Then New Zealanders proved with fire and fury that they were very far from being a united team of five million. After the scenes in Parliament Grounds, we began to look at each other sideways, uncertain as to whether our fellow citizens were friends or foes.

Most of all, we fell out of love with our leaders – especially Jacinda Ardern. Her successor, Chris “Chippy” Hipkins, seems like a nice enough bloke, but we cannot overlook the fact that he was right there, in the thick of it, when Labour veered off the rails. Not that the National Party’s Christopher Luxon offers much by way of improvement. If it looks like a corporation man, talks like a corporation man, and spouts clichés like a corporation man, then, chances are, it’s the Leader of the Opposition.

Like The Who, New Zealanders are getting down on their knees and praying “We don’t get fooled again.” In fact, we are determined not to.

And in that determination lies our vulnerability. What those commenting on my own and other blogs reflect, apart from their disillusionment, is a profound and corrosive cynicism. But, that’s not all. Alongside their bitter refusal to go on believing in politicians or their politics, far too many commentators display a dangerously naïve willingness to believe wholeheartedly every vicious and outlandish charge levelled against them. Is there anything more dangerous than this bizarre combination of cynicism and credulity?

The general mood of disillusionment is hardly surprising, however, when, in addition to our politicians not working as intended, neither does anything else. New Zealand seems to be on a trajectory which will take it from the First World to some place considerably less comfortable. The country that was once feted internationally for the success of its national institutions and the obvious well-being of its people, is slowly but unmistakeably sliding down the international tables of achievement.

Back in 2005, the American singer-songwriter James McMurtry released “We Can’t Make It Here” – hailed by one critic as the best song of the 2000s. It describes the slow decay of American competence and coherence, and the corresponding loss of faith by working-class Americans in their country’s future. I think about that song more and more in 2023, as our health and education systems creak and groan, and potholes multiply in the nation’s highways.

And it occurs to me that I may have been too quick to consign the trolls to the outer darkness of the blogosphere. Maybe – just maybe – their reading of the situation, singed though it undoubtedly is with fire and fury, actually comes closest to the truth.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 2 June 2023.

National Must Learn To Be Kind – Or Remain In Opposition.

“Our sympathy for the poor and disadvantaged is this big.” At need, New Zealanders will use their vote as a shield. From preference, they will use it as a tool. But, increasingly, they are refusing to use it as a weapon. Labour grasps the need to “be kind”. Until National does likewise, it will not be the government.

THE POLITICS OF KINDNESS may have left a deeper impression on the New Zealand electorate than is generally acknowledged. Though the nation has not quite arrived at the point of asking: “Jacinda who?”, the speed and thoroughness of the former prime minister’s political eclipse has been remarkable. The temptation, therefore, is to assume that the ideas that characterised her premiership have similarly faded into the background. That the “Politics of Kindness” no longer has electoral currency. But, in George Gershwin’s memorable formulation: “It ain’t necessarily so.”

Certainly, there are strong echoes of Ardernian kindness in Grant Robertson’s sixth budget. The extension of childcare subsidies to two-year-olds, allowing children to ride free on public transport, and, most importantly, the abolition of prescription charges – all point to a still-strong compassionate impulse animating Prime Minister Chris Hipkins’ cabinet. Indeed, the Finance Minister’s strategic preference for borrowing over spending cuts stands athwart the Reserve Bank Governor’s recessionary pathway. In effect, Robertson is demanding to know whether the Governor counts himself among the kind – or the cruel.

Hipkins and Robertson are asking the same question (albeit considerably amplified) of their National Party counterparts. “What will it be, Christopher and Nicola? Responsible compassion, or unkind austerity?” The voters need to know.

Astonishingly, the National leadership replied to Labour’s question immediately, telling the voters that prescription charges would be reinstated by an incoming National Party-led government. Given that Labour’s policy of free prescriptions was the announcement received by the electorate most warmly, National’s pledge to nullify it struck most observers as nuts. It is explicable only if one assumes that Luxon and Willis are convinced that the electorate is counting on them to deliver policy medicine of the bitterest kind. Or, at least, every bit as bitter as Act’s.

Act is fast becoming the biggest single obstacle to National forming a government. It has enlarged its share of the Party Vote almost entirely at National’s expense by arguing that only the Act Party is prepared to manage the New Zealand economy with the rigor it requires. In doing so Act has corralled a significant percentage of those voters who like to use their votes as weapons – primarily against people they perceive as undeserving of the state largesse lavished upon them. They expect any incoming right-wing government to discipline and punish these “parasites”.

National’s problem, assuming it really is planning to get all medieval on the asses of the undeserving poor, is that the women-voters of all ages who deserted it for Labour in 2020, the voters it so desperately needs to win, may not be all that keen to take up their allotted seating in the National-Act Theatre of Cruelty. Contrariwise, if National shows the slightest sign of returning to the “Labour-Lite” days of John Key and Bill English – let alone to “Jacinda’s” Politics of Kindness – then they risk seeing even more of their voters deserting the National mother-ship for Act’s swashbuckling space-cruiser.

Presumably, it was to avoid such damaging descriptions that Luxon and Willis were so quick to announce their intention to restore prescription charges. But, their resolve to be right-wing pirates every bit as scary as David Seymour and his crew turned out to be less-than-adamantine. Within hours, National was walking back its hardline commitment to austerity. Perhaps the holders of Community Services Cards and superannuitants’ Gold Cards could be exempted from paying prescription charges. “Targeted assistance” – that’s what National stands for. That’s what it would be offering.

If only it was that simple. Unfortunately for Luxon and Willis, all that those crucial swing-voters will remember is that, first, National was against abolishing prescription charges, and then, the moment it registered the force of the public backlash, its leaders couldn’t backtrack fast enough. In other words: Luxon’s and Willis’s first response made them sound cruel, and their second made them look weak. Is their anything more pathetic in the world of Sado-politics than a “Dom” too squeamish to wield the whip?

Significantly, this backtrack over prescription charges is very far from being National’s first. Over the past year, Luxon, in particular, has appeared to stumble from one hastily-corrected policy misstatement to the next. The public is perplexed. Is it a case of Luxon having bold right-wing ideas which he simply cannot persuade his timid, more centrist, colleagues to accept? Or, is it simply the Leader of the Opposition talking off the top of his head about matters he is not equipped to discuss, and then having to walk his statements back in the face of unrelenting media questioning and caucus fury?

Regardless of the explanation, the cumulative effect of these gaffes is electorally sub-optimal. Luxon, a man with next-to-no serious parliamentary experience; a man, moreover, who spent a large chunk of the past 20 years living and working out of New Zealand; stands revealed as a man not so much out-of-touch as tellingly unfamiliar with the cues most Kiwis respond to without thinking. His performance is reminiscent of those German soldiers who, during the Battle of the Bulge, were apprehended wearing American uniforms. The GI’s tested these imposters by asking them questions that any genuine American could answer without hesitation. Those who failed the test were shot as spies.

It is Luxon’s ongoing struggle to present himself as an authentic politician that explains his failure to make the sort of steady gains in the preferred-prime-minister polling stakes that are the sure sign of a prime-minister-in-waiting. Even worse, Luxon shows every sign of lacking that “gut feel” for politics that distinguished Rob Muldoon, David Lange, Jim Bolger, Jim Anderton, Winston Peters, Helen Clark, John Key and Jacinda Ardern. Unlike those leaders, he has yet to come up with a political narrative in which not only dyed-in-the-wool Nats, but also a solid majority of ordinary New Zealanders, can see themselves.

Muldoon promised “New Zealand the way YOU want it.”, Bolger talked about restoring the “decent society” following the betrayals of Rogernomics, and John Key held out the promise of “a brighter future” as Labour’s lustre faded. An opposition’s narrative need not be one the whole country can agree with, but it must be one in which most New Zealanders can see themselves living – more-or-less happily.

Jacinda Ardern’s enduring political legacy is that fewer and fewer New Zealanders can see themselves living happily in a society where kindness no longer counts. There was time when Kiwis would vote for bullies – but that time has passed. At need, New Zealanders will use their vote as a shield. From preference, they will use it as a tool. But, increasingly, they are refusing to use it as a weapon. Labour grasps the need to “be kind”. Until National does likewise, it will not be the government.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 22 May 2023.

David Parker’s Tax Ammunition: Use It, Or Lose It.

For Pity’s Sake, Chris, Load Up! Chris Hipkins’ refusal to slip a few rounds of Parker’s ammunition into his prime-ministerial rifle and open fire on National, came as a deep disappointment to a great many of Labour’s members and supporters. Disappointment that was only compounded by his evident lack of enthusiasm for responding to the unfairness exposed in the IRD’s report with tangible tax reform.

NICOLA WILLIS, somehow managing to keep a straight face, claims to be the defender of working people. That the deputy-leader of the National Party, by no means a stupid woman, is prepared to offer up such a ludicrous proposition indicates just how deranged our politics have become. That there are working-class voters out there who will take Willis’s claim seriously should not, however, be received as proof that National has quietly embraced socialism. Rather, it should be taken as a measure of just how emphatically so many of Labour leaders have rejected it.

Not all of Labour’s leaders, however. Not while David Parker remains a member of Chris Hipkins’ Cabinet. Parker is a stern critic of economic inequality, most particularly of the way New Zealand’s tax system allows the über-rich to avoid paying their fair share of tax. For nearly two decades he has championed the introduction of a Capital Gains Tax (CGT) finding sufficient support among his own caucus colleagues and Labour’s rank-and-file to embed the policy in a succession of Labour election manifestos.

Not that this broad-based support within Labour was sufficient to propel a CGT across the line. At the summit of the party there has long been a junta of past and serving Labour leaders who invariably dismiss the whole idea of significant tax reform as electoral poison. Those members brave enough to defy this junta are subjected to the Labour eye-roll – a gesture signalling both political naivety and economic stupidity – from which its victim’s career seldom recovers.

It is worth teasing out both the causes and the consequences of the baleful Labour eye-roll. Above all else, it represents the idea that there are some policies which are simply unacceptable within the context of the neoliberal order introduced by the Fourth Labour Government and consolidated by its National Party successors.

New Zealand’s reasonably flat income tax, supplemented by its highly regressive Goods and Services Tax, is sufficient to keep the country’s no-frills welfare state coughing-and-spluttering along – but that’s all. More importantly, the filing of land, wealth, inheritance and (most especially) capital gains taxes in the “Under No Circumstances” file, makes damn sure the welfare state stays that way. More than that, New Zealand’s tax system presents no serious impediments to the steady accumulation of massive personal wealth. Nominally “progressive”, the tax system’s actual effect is to exacerbate inequality – not reduce it.

Those who position themselves as “centre-left’ on the political spectrum are supposed to know all this and, more importantly, to have come to terms with it. They are further supposed to understand that any attempt to change the arrangements that have now been in place for the best part of 40 years will, inevitably, be met with the most vicious resistance. Any politician, or political party, setting out with the intention of seriously addressing inequality – i.e. of dismantling the neoliberal status quo – are asking for the worst kind of personal and political trouble, and, most assuredly, they will find it.

All of which makes David Parker’s commissioning of the IRD’s and the Treasury’s reports into the “fairness” of New Zealand’s taxation system a decidedly subversive act. Not least because, for the first time, the New Zealand voter has been given the hard data on who gets what out of the system. The conclusions to be drawn are not exactly flattering to the very rich. If those advocating for a CGT and other redistributive tax measures may be compared to a revolutionary band hiding out in the mountains, then Parker’s reports are the equivalent of a bloody great ammunition dump!

The brute fact of these explosive reports on tax, like the brute fact of the controversial He Puapua Report, points to a Cabinet riven by powerful factions that must, somehow, be placated. Or, if placating them is not an option, bringing potentially dangerous moves to a sudden halt by issuing a “Captain’s Call”. Knowing that she could count on the support of Winston Peters, this is exactly what Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern did to prevent her own cabinet, caucus, and Green Party allies from introducing a CGT in her Government’s first term. She made it clear that a CGT would only be introduced over her dead political body.

Those who doubt this analysis should consider the recent statements of Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta. Questioned closely on New Zealand’s stance in relation to the AUKUS anti-China agreement linking Washington, London and Canberra, Mahuta stoutly stood by her assertion that the biggest threat facing her Pacific neighbours was Climate Change. Delivering a stinging blow to those public servants who have been briefing intensely on behalf of those who would have New Zealand become a sort of AUKUS auxiliary, Mahuta declared that her country’s foreign policy would be determined by “the Cabinet” – not unelected “government agencies”.

The only sensible reading of these comments is that serious disagreements exist within both Cabinet and the Labour Party caucus over the merits, or otherwise, of aligning New Zealand too closely with those powers seeking to “contain” China – still the country’s biggest trading partner. It is entirely possible that Mahuta, who (successfully) led the charge on Three Waters, has put herself at the head of the faction determined to confront the negative impact of colonialism in the South Pacific – not just in the past, but today.

All of which suggests that Labour’s ability to hold the neoliberal consensus together is nowhere near as strong as it was under Helen Clark and Michael Cullen, or the troika that emerged triumphant from the ideological conflicts that divided Labour between 2008 and 2017 – Jacinda Ardern, Grant Robertson and Chris Hipkins. Thanks to Peters, NZ First, and Covid-19, Ardern was (just) able to keep Labour’s lid from blowing-off during her first term. Paradoxically, by leading Labour to an absolute majority in 2020, Ardern only made it more difficult to say “No” to her cabinet and caucus.

The carefully planned “coup” which (with Ardern’s assistance) placed Hipkins in the Prime Ministership on 22 January 2023 may now be viewed – at least in part – as an attempt by the Troika to re-establish its control of the Sixth Labour Government’s overall direction – mostly by reining-in the factions’ more outré policies. Clearly, this attempt has met with only partial success. Pressure is building inside Labour for serious change, and Hipkins is struggling to contain it.

Certainly, his refusal to slip a few rounds of Parker’s ammunition into his prime-ministerial rifle and open fire on National, came as a deep disappointment to a great many of Labour’s members and supporters. Disappointment that was only compounded by his evident lack of enthusiasm for responding to the unfairness exposed in the IRD’s report with tangible tax reform.

It is this perception of Labour not being willing to take the bold steps necessary to improve the lot of working-class New Zealanders, that Nicola Willis is exploiting for all she is worth. Those disillusioned by Hipkins’ reticence are, however, unlikely to spot the contradiction in the National Finance Spokesperson’s position.

What is National defending working people from, if not Labour’s refusal to do anything meaningful about the inequities of the tax system? But, if Labour’s not going to do anything about tax, then why is she insisting (on the basis of at least two independent sources!) that redistributive tax reform is exactly what Hipkins, Robertson and Parker are plotting to announce just days out from the October election? Both of these claims cannot be true.

Leaving us with another, related, question: What is a massive pile of ammunition most likely to call into existence, if not the people, and the guns, to use it?

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website of Monday, 1 May 2023.

Making It Look Easy.

So Long - And Thanks For All The Fish: In the two-and-a-bit years since Jacinda Ardern’s electoral triumph of 2020, virtually every decision she made had gone politically awry. In the minds of many thousands of voters a chilling metamorphosis had taken place. The Faerie Queen had become the Wicked Witch. From a resplendent balloon, carrying Labour effortlessly to victory, Jacinda showed every sign of becoming Labour’s Hindenburg – a disaster waiting to happen.

WASN’T IT ALL TOO SMOOTH? The official explanation for the textbook transition from Jacinda Ardern to Chris Hipkins – “nothing left in the tank” – is beginning to strike more and more political journalists as inherently implausible.

What sort of political party manages the acutely volatile business of swapping one leader for another so seamlessly? Was the sole nomination of Chris Hipkins’ strictly kosher? Why did no challenger step forward? Ambition, in Shakespeare’s words, should be made of sterner stuff. Contrariwise, if this leadership change was a stage-managed affair, then Labour’s stage-managers are second to none!

Before conspiracy theories take root and spread like briars across the political landscape, it is worth recalling that Labour has pulled-off such a transition before.

Hadn’t the woman who, on 19 January 2023, announced her intention of stepping-down from Labour’s leadership stepped-up and into that role with an equal absence of fuss and bother back in 2017? Relying, once again, on Shakespeare: is it not true that nothing so became Jacinda’s leadership like her elevation to it? And should we really be all that surprised to discover that the Labour MP who did the most to ensure Jacinda’s effortless ascent was none other than Chris Hipkins?

How interesting it would be to read the reports of Labour’s focus-group convenors and to study the confidential data of its pollsters. Because, if the transition from Jacinda to “Chippy” really was a premediated and carefully-planned affair, then the chances are high that the story the experts were telling the three people at the top of the Labour Party – Jacinda Ardern, Grant Robertson and Chris Hipkins – was a grim one.

In the two-and-a-bit years since the Prime Minister’s electoral triumph of 2020, virtually every decision she made had gone politically awry. In the minds of many thousands of voters a chilling metamorphosis had taken place. The Faerie Queen had become the Wicked Witch. From a resplendent balloon, carrying Labour effortlessly to victory, Jacinda showed every sign of becoming Labour’s Hindenburg – a disaster waiting to happen.

It is a measure of just how tight Labour’s leadership troika had become during their 15 years in Labour’s caucus that they could contemplate the grim psephological data set before them and conclude dispassionately that the “Jacinda” brand – once Labour’s most important asset – was now its most significant liability.

It was time for her to go.

That Jacinda did not demur is explicable largely in terms of the extraordinary burdens she had been required to carry between 2017 and 2022. Very few Prime Ministers are called upon to lead their nation through events like the Christchurch Mosque Massacres, the fatal eruption of White island and the most deadly pandemic to strike New Zealand in 100 years. In the post-war period, only National’s John Key has weathered storms of equivalent severity. Interestingly, he also decided to make an early departure.

With equal stoicism, the Finance Minister Grant Robertson declined to meet the expectations of the pundits by stepping into Jacinda’s shoes. He would stay exactly where he was – a key figure on the Bridge of the Ship of State, his safe pair of hands welded to the economic tiller. Like his two closest political allies, Robertson’s mission was a simple one: to steer Labour to a third parliamentary term.

Which left only Chippy to slip his feet into the stirrups of power. With weeks to think through and war-game every aspect of the transition, as little as possible was left to chance. In the finest tradition of Hengist and Horsa, not to mention Game of Thrones, Hipkins made sure that all the crucial players were gathered together in one place (Napier, for Labour’s annual “retreat”) before allowing Jacinda’s axe to fall.

Shocked and disoriented, Labour’s stunned caucus offered scant resistance as the Troika’s most trusted allies went to work, furiously spinning the narrative that the smoothest possible transition was an absolute electoral necessity. Anyone attempting to make a fight of the succession would be seen as a traitor to the party. Constrained by a lack of time, outmanoeuvred by Team Hipkins at every turn, potential rivals sensibly opted to fight another day.

Chris Hipkins wasn’t elected – he was crowned.

Once sworn-in as Prime Minister, everything would turn on the public opinion polls proving Hipkins’ colleagues had made the right choice.

On Monday night (30 January 2023) they duly obliged.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 3 February 2023.

Jung At Heart.

The Clinical Magus: Of particular relevance to New Zealanders struggling to come to terms with the sudden departure of their prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, is Jung’s concept of the anima. Much more than what others have called “the feminine principle”, the anima is what the human male has made out of women. All women. From mothers and grandmothers, to sisters and cousins. From female friends and colleagues, to wives and lovers. From Nobel Prize-winners to porn stars. Sirens to soulmates. Jung’s anima is the distillation of every human female in which the human male invests his emotions.

CARL JUNG (1875-1961) was a magician masquerading as a psychoanalyst. His psychological theories were conjured out of myths and symbols, and he transmuted the human individual’s fraught journey from birth to death into the hero’s sacred quest for wholeness.

It’s easy to laugh at this little Swiss doctor now, but he developed his theories in a world that did, indeed, seem to have fallen under an evil spell. In the same Viennese streets where he and Sigmund Freud walked, sharing excitedly their ideas about the unconscious elements of the human personality, there also wandered the young Adolf Hitler.

This terrifying embodiment of Europe’s worst psychoses and obsessions (what Jung would later call “the shadow”) seems, in retrospect, to confirm Jung’s key insight that all of us inhabit curiously familiar stories, peopled by characters we have never met, but whom we recognise instantly. Humanity itself, Jung argued, possesses its own unconscious, within which move the archetypes we have collectively fashioned to confer order upon chaos – the characters we once called gods.

Of particular relevance to New Zealanders struggling to come to terms with the sudden departure of their prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, is Jung’s concept of the anima. Much more than what others have called “the feminine principle”, the anima is what the human male has made out of women. All women. From mothers and grandmothers, to sisters and cousins. From female friends and colleagues, to wives and lovers. From Nobel Prize-winners to porn stars. Sirens to soulmates. Jung’s anima is the distillation of every human female in which the human male invests his emotions.

Think about that for a moment. Scary, isn’t it? Because, obviously, not every female in which a male invests his emotions responds as anticipated or desired. The sum total of all these responses – good and bad – adds up to his anima, his unconscious formulation of what being female means.

What, then, does it say about New Zealand’s men and boys that so many of them were so eager to heap abuse upon New Zealand’s young female prime minister, Jacinda Ardern? Quite obviously, she presented a version of the feminine which in no way comported with the inner sheila of the average Kiwi bloke.

Viewed objectively, Jacinda Ardern was remarkably close to her own self-assessment: Kind, but strong. Empathetic, but decisive. Optimistic, but focused.

Since the archetypal leader is often represented as a kingly figure, Jacinda’s leadership says a great deal about the strength of her own animus – the human female’s unconscious formulation of what it means to be male. Her experience of maleness has clearly been sufficiently positive to produce a harmonious personal blending of both the masculine and the feminine. On the one hand, strong, decisive and focused. On the other, kind, empathetic and optimistic.

Such rare psychological harmony should evoke both confidence and admiration – and among most New Zealanders those were indeed the feelings Jacinda inspired. But, for a minority of New Zealanders the woman they listened to on the radio, watched on television, and read about in newspapers and magazines proved to be seriously psychologically jarring.

Called upon to respond to a woman in the top job, many New Zealand males betrayed a stunted and impoverished anima. Their unconscious formulation of the feminine left them utterly incapable of recognising anything at all positive in their country’s leader.

Jung might have surmised that their anima was the product of acutely damaging experiences of emotional and possibly physical abuse meted out by the females who dominated their early lives. Certainly, the psychological concept of projection would explain why so many New Zealand men were eager to describe their prime minister as something monstrous and evil. As a woman in charge she could not, in their unconscious minds, be anything else. Females with power were terrifying, and what human-beings fear, they hate.

Jacinda Ardern’s critics were not exclusively male, however, many New Zealand women joined in the abuse of the Prime Minister and her family. Observing a woman with power over them and their families, their reactions betrayed the impact of terrible experiences not dissimilar to those of abused males. They, too, projected outward the feelings they were too terrified to acknowledge in themselves.

And so the story ended as all Jung’s stories end, with the hero learning and leaving. We are saddened – but not surprised.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 27 January 2023.