Men, the Left, and the “Women’s Vote”.

On Calvary Street are trellises

Where bright as blood the roses bloom,
And gnomes like pagan fetishes
Hang their hats on an empty tomb
Where two old souls go slowly mad,
National Mum and Labour Dad.

James K. Baxter
Ballad of Calvary Street
1969

JAMES K. BAXTER’S stereotypes, “National Mum” and “Labour Dad”, strike a discordant note in the Twenty-First Century New Zealander’s ear. Most obviously because the political loyalties of men and women have, in the 55 years since Baxter wrote his poem, undergone a dramatic reversal. Labour supporters, today, are much more likely to be women, while National’s support-base has become disproportionately male. How is this dramatic shift in the political allegiances of the sexes to be explained?

The most important driver of the so-called “gender gap” has been the steady erosion of working-class power. Many factors have been at work in this process, but the most important is the slow demise of what was formerly the Left’s most important constitutive myth.

The move to drive women and children out of the paid workforce (which, in the early days of industrial capitalism, they had dominated) was seen (at least by men) as a moral and economic triumph. Not only were society’s most vulnerable members rescued from the ruthless exploitation of capitalist employers, but their return to the “safety” of the domestic sphere, by shrinking the pool of available industrial workers, allowed husbands, fathers and sons to drive-up wage-rates and reclaim the “breadwinner” role so central to the sustainability of patriarchy. Accordingly, setting the price of labour, and growing the political strength that flowed from working-class organisation, was seen as the work of men, by men, for men.

As anyone who has ever heard Judy Collins’ inspiring rendition of the song “Bread and Roses” will attest, the idea that the advance of the working-class was the work of men, alone, is nonsensical. In the clothing and textile industries especially women workers vastly outnumbered men, and their struggles for economic justice were waged no less fiercely than those of their “brothers”.

It nevertheless remains an historical fact that in the vast majority of factories, in the coal mines and the steel mills, in transportation and on the docks, it was overwhelmingly a man’s world. The left-wing project, although conceptually inseparable from the steady advance of working-class power under capitalism, was also presented as a cause in which the qualities and responsibilities of masculinity were constantly made manifest.

Culturally, project and cause came together in the artistic and literary figure of the working-class hero. With every economic and social advance, the pride of “working-men” grew. Their unions and their parties were hailed as the engines of the future, generating a muscular progressivism in which males placed themselves unfailingly at the heart of political action.

So much for “Labour Dad’s back-story. How was “National Mum” created?

Fundamentally, the National Party’s assiduous courting of the female voter is a reflection of the New Zealand Right’s desperation to break the Left’s easy domination of the electorate in the late-1930s and throughout the 1940s.

That the “women’s vote” might deviate significantly from that of the men’s was demonstrated with startling force in the British general election of 1931. At the behest of King George V, the British Labour leader, Ramsay Macdonald, joined forces with the Conservatives and the Liberal Party to form the “National Government” – a grand coalition to address the devastating impact of the Great Depression. Predictably, Macdonald’s “treachery” split the Labour Party and divided the working-class.

Appealing to the British people for what he called a “doctor’s mandate” to heal the country’s economic afflictions, Macdonald’s National Government secured the support of an astonishing 67 percent of the voting public. A huge number of these voters were young working-class women, participating electorally for only the second time since the franchise was finally given to all British women over the age of twenty-one in 1928.

That the offer of national unity, over class division, had proved irresistible to so large a chunk of the female electorate was enough to make even dyed-in-the-wool conservative politicians sit up and take notice. In 1931, to the utter consternation of their menfolk, women voters had proved to have minds of their own.

It was a lesson that the New Zealand National Party, formed in the year following Labour’s electoral triumph of 1935, could hardly fail to keep at the front of its mind. After all, it was women voters who had kept National out of power until it undertook to leave Labour’s welfare state intact, and who, weary of post-war controls and shortages, had seated National on the Treasury Benches for the first time in 1949.

Most of all, however, it was women voters who, like their British sisters twenty years earlier, had voted for national unity, over trade union militancy and class war, in the snap-election called by National to validate its handling of the bitter 1951 Waterfront Lockout. National’s share of the popular vote, at 54 percent, secured its most emphatic victory, ever.

Not all women were prepared to break ranks from their families’ deeply ingrained electoral preferences. Indeed, most women, like most men, voted the same way as their fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives. But, enough of them voted against the familial and marital grain to give National the electoral edge it had been seeking since Labour, with 55 percent of the popular vote, had so decisively shifted the political dial in 1938. Between 1949 and 1984, a period of 35 years, Labour would spend just six years in office.

That long period of National Party electoral dominance was aided by the slow decay and demoralisation of both the New Zealand trade union movement and the Labour Party. The heroic component of the movement, the cream of the nation’s working-class, had been comprehensively defeated and dispersed by the National Government in 1951.

Their defeat could not have been secured without the complicity of the Federation of Labour, whose leaders were happy to see the most radical (and democratic) unions, thorns in their sides for many years, humbled. Not that the “moderate unionists” – as National called them – were unaware of just how comprehensively they had been co-opted by the Right. Twenty years hence, John Lennon would argue that “a working-class hero is something to be”. These guys knew that they weren’t.

What’s more, the impression grew in the minds of at least some working-class men that at least some of the working-class women they rubbed shoulders with also knew that there wasn’t much of the hero left in them.

Increasingly, a crass economism, “bread and butter issues”, came to define the mission of both the trade unions and the Labour Party. Throughout the golden economic weather of the long post-war boom it was enough to keep the wolves of doubt from the door – even if the post-war prosperity, upon which the whole, delicate, socio-political compromise rested, was claimed – and acknowledged – as the National Party’s achievement. Upward social mobility, every aspiring working-class mum’s secret hope for her kids, had become the Right’s most potent promise. They were the heroes now.

Sullen, unadventurous, politically-conventional, and materialistic – that is what so many of New Zealand’s working-class men had become. Kiwis may have joked about being a nation devoted to “Rugby, Racing, and Beer”, but the view from where working-class women were now positioned offered little to laugh at. They chafed for change, for something better. If not for themselves, then for their sons and – why not? – their daughters, too.

In the 1970s and 80s those sons and daughters – especially the daughters – would re-energise and redefine the New Zealand Left. But, across the comfortable, but decidedly unheroic, 1950s and 60s, “National Mum” and “Labour Dad” would continue to cancel each other out … almost.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack on Friday, 4 October 2024.

Could There Be Method In Massey University’s Madness?

Protective Zone: Reading the rules and guidelines released by Massey University, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that its governing body considers the whole concept of free speech a disruptive threat to the orderly imparting of orthodox academic knowledge.

IN TRUE ORWELLIAN fashion, Massey University has announced its commitment to Free Speech by restricting it. Beneath the ponderous bureaucratese of its official communications, the University authorities’ censorious impulses are chillingly clear. The process of inviting controversial external speakers onto the Massey campus has been made so daunting, so potentially penalising, that only the most fearless staff members and students will now be game to attempt it. Reading the rules and guidelines released by the University, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that its governing body considers the whole concept of free speech a disruptive threat to the orderly imparting of orthodox academic knowledge.

The Wellington-based lawyer and former Act MP, Stephen Franks, has speculated as to what the students and university staff of the 1960s and 70s would have made of such a blatant administrative power grab. The answer, of course, is “very short work”!

Two examples will suffice – both of them drawn from my old alma mater, the University of Otago. The first dates back to 1972, when the university authorities announced a new and draconian set of regulations. The students responded by occupying the University Registry. Roughly half the student body was involved in the protest, during which, according to legend, they consumed the Vice-Chancellor’s entire supply of chocolate biscuits!

Five years earlier, the poet and prophet, James K. Baxter, the University’ Burns Fellow, had responded to a similar outbreak of official folly by penning his celebrated “A Small Ode to Mixed Flatting” in which he mocked the authorities attempt to ban the practice. He slyly referenced the wild Scottish poet, Robbie Burns – “that sad old rip/From whom I got my fellowship” who liked nothing better than to “toss among the glum and staid/A poem like a hand grenade”.

Needless to say, in 1972 – as in 1967 – the glum and staid lost the fight. The offending regulations were either amended or withdrawn altogether.

The second example is more recent, dating back to the mid-1990s. Students were, once again, in occupation of the Registry building – this time in protest at the impact of student fees. When the University authorities discovered that the Alliance Party leader, Jim Anderton, had accepted the occupiers’ invitation to explain his party’s fees-free policy, they were outraged. As Anderton emerged from the Registry, he was greeted by the University Proctor who threatened to trespass him if he again set foot on Otago’s campus.

It was then the turn of the university’s staff to protest. Hundreds crowded into a lecture theatre to affirm Anderton’s right to discuss politics with the student body. A Vote of No Confidence in the Vice-Chancellor was proposed.  The anger of the meeting was palpable. As in 1972, the University authorities backed away from the controversy precipitated by their errant authoritarian instincts.

What has happened to New Zealand’s universities that the fighting spirit of staff and students, once so evident on the nation’s campuses, has been reduced to a pallid pile of expiring embers? Historically speaking, university bureaucracies have never hesitated to tighten-up and screw-down the turbulent inhabitants of their ivory towers. What is it, then, about the times we live in that allows those same bureaucrats to do their worst and encounter resistance only from former staff and students old enough to remember when they couldn’t?

Talking to today’s academics it would seem that the teachers and students of the modern university are at each other’s mercy. Lecturers and tutors are subject to the detailed written appraisal of their “paying customers” – whose career expectations it is most unwise to set back with anything less than “As” and “Bs”. The students, meanwhile: products of parenting strategies as over-protective as they are over-expectant; cannot take too much in the way of challenging ideas or uncompromising expression. The use of the term “snowflake”, while derisive, is not entirely inaccurate. Academics have learned the hard way just how sensitive these kids can be.

Certainly, the Massey authorities seem confident that it will not be their restriction of free speech that provokes outrage and protest. In their estimation, it is much more likely to be the presence on campus of representatives of ideas and causes deemed “hateful”, “harmful” or “offensive” that gets the staff and students up in arms.

God help us, but there just might be some method in Massey University’s bureaucratic madness.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 15 November 2019.

Separating The Singer From The Song.

The Singer And His Song: Is it possible to judge a work of art purely on its own merits? Can we truly set aside what we know about the artist and focus exclusively on what he or she has created? Can the singer ever be separated from the song?

BACK IN THE DAYS when I boasted much more hair and carried far fewer kilos, I was right into (as we said back then) writing songs. One of those songs, The Other Side of Town, opened like this:

Well, the street has been my teacher

And poverty my nurse

Oh dear, how my family and friends chortled. “You wouldn’t know how to live out on the street if your life depended on it!”, snorted one.

“Raised in poverty?”, laughed another, “you must be writing about somebody else!”

Which, of course, I was. Though the song is written in the first person, it is not in the least autobiographical. The “hero” of the song: a young man from the wrong side of the tracks, who has fallen hard for a young woman from the right side; is entirely fictional.

In fine romantic style, he contrasts his sufficient-unto-the-day approach to life with the complicated mix of expectations and aspirations of his middle-class girlfriend:

But you have built a puzzle

And I’m the piece that just don’t fit

You fret about tomorrow

Whereas I don’t care a bit

Aware of the sheer unlikelihood of two people so dissimilar enjoying a long relationship, the hero anticipates his lover’s decision to break it off and forgives her in advance. All he asks is that he not be forgotten:

I don’t mind that you refuse me

I don’t want to tie you down

Just remember me as someone from

The other side of town.

Banal and adolescent? I’m afraid so. But my family and friends reaction to The Other Side of Town provided me with a very early introduction to a problem that is still very much with us. Is it possible to judge a work of art purely on its own merits? Can we truly set aside what we know about the artist and focus exclusively on what he or she has created? Can the singer ever be separated from the song?

Quite a few of my friends just couldn’t manage it. They simply couldn’t reconcile the rather innocent lad who had written and was singing the song, with the worldly, Luke Perry-type character who was its subject.

“What do you know about any of this stuff? Where do you get off pretending to be a kid from the wrong side of the tracks?”

Forty-five years after the song was written, I suspect a younger generation of listeners would recoil with additional disdain from the lofty condescension and “mansplaining” contained in the lyrics. “Bloody hell!”, they’d guffaw, “the poor girl’s well rid of him! What an obnoxious macho prick!”

To which, in my own defence, I would offer up L. P. Hartley’s famous observation: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

If we are to admire, or condemn, artists – as artists – we should do so solely on the basis of whether or not their creations move us towards a deeper understanding of the drama and the mystery of human experience. As individuals, they may be deeply flawed beings. Indeed, deeply flawed individuals and great art have a curious way of feeding off one another. But does that mean that we should burn all of James K. Baxter’s magnificent poetry, because in a private letter to a friend he admits to raping his wife?  Should Beat It and Billie Jean never be played again, because Michael Jackson stands accused of being a pedophile?

That great beauty, and profound insights into what it means to be human, can emerge from such broken vessels surely only makes the miracle of artistic creation all the more extraordinary. The Italian painter, Caravaggio, was a murderer. Does that require us to turn his dark and deeply disturbing paintings to the wall? Or, does knowing that he killed a man allow us to see just that little bit further into the darkness that dwells in us all?

Because the truth of the matter is that no human-being is entirely guiltless. We are all flawed in ways we hope that none of those who know us and love us will ever discover. Artists allow us to expiate our guilt by making visible in words, paintings, drama and music the hidden sources of human distemper. They are society’s antibodies: the ones who make sure that we possess the strength to resist the sins that devoured them.

As I wrote all those years ago:

The road you walked was steady

While the trail I blazed seemed rough

But, girl, the alley always threatens those

Who will not call its bluff.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 8 March 2019.

Ropes of Sand: Honouring The Memory Of Peter Conway - Trade Unionist.

A New Zealander Worth Remembering: Peter Conway was a man whose efforts in the cause of social justice touched the lives of a huge number of New Zealanders; a man who will be remembered and mourned by clothing workers and shop assistants, truck drivers and storepersons. Of him, the employers’ organisation, Business New Zealand, said: “Peter was an industrial leader of the highest integrity and his passing is a sad loss to New Zealand.”

 

THIS IS HOW IT IS NOW. This is the country we’ve become. These are New Zealand’s priorities – even in the grim business of honouring the dead.

 

A man, his wife and baby daughter, travelling by car along a French highway, are reported to have veered into the path of an oncoming truck. In the ensuing collision, the man and his wife are killed and their baby seriously injured.

 

There is no other word for this bare summary of facts except tragedy. To the family and friends of the deceased is owed the sympathy of all decent and caring people.

 

Except that the victim of this tragic traffic accident was something more than just a man – he was a former member of the All Blacks – New Zealand’s world-beating rugby team. And that is why, for the past three or four days, the country’s newspapers have given this story saturation coverage. The life story of Jerry Collins, his history with both the Hurricanes provincial rugby team and the All Blacks, is related in lavish detail, with considerable empathy and undoubted pride. When his body arrives back in New Zealand, Jerry Collins funeral service will attract thousands of mourners.

 

An 80-year-old lawyer dies following a six year struggle with prostate cancer.

 

Once again, all decent people will acknowledge a life lived well, and with considerable success in the nation’s courtrooms, and express their deep regret at his passing.

 

Except this man was no ordinary lawyer, but the defender of some of New Zealand’s most notorious criminals. Sir Peter Williams QC was the barrister for Ron Jorgesson, the Bassett Road machine-gun murderer, and Terry Clark – a.k.a “Mr Asia”. He also defended Arthur Alan Thomas, the man accused of, and then ultimately pardoned for, the murders of Harvey and Jeanette Crewe. President of the Howard League for Penal Reform for 30 years, Sir Peter was an outspoken critic of the way New Zealand treated the men and women it locked up. A bon vivant and wicked raconteur, he will be remembered as one of this country’s most colourful legal practitioners.

 

We know all this because, aware of the seriousness of his illness, the nation’s newspapers had prepared fulsome obituaries to mark his passing.

 

A trade union leader loses his battle with acute depressive illness.

 

In the NZ Herald of 10/6/15 the death of Peter Conway, former Secretary of the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions – at over 300,000 strong, this country’s largest voluntary organisation – merited precisely 63 words.

 

More than 30 years devoted to improving the lives, wages and working conditions of tens-of-thousands of New Zealand workers was considered unworthy of even a photograph. The stories of how he campaigned alongside the British miners in their doomed struggle against the government of Margaret Thatcher; or, how he organised scores of young New Zealanders to travel to the socialist republic of Nicaragua in the early 1980s to pick coffee under the banner of “The Harry Holland Brigade”; neither of these warranted a mention. Nor did the fact that in his 40s he went back to university to attain a master’s degree in economics – the better to defend the interests of working people against the bosses’ apologists. That he was a fine singer and accomplished player of both the guitar and mandolin was, likewise, left out of the tiny side-bar story.

 

Peter Conway was a man whose efforts in the cause of social justice touched the lives of a huge number of New Zealanders; a man who will be remembered and mourned by clothing workers and shop assistants, truck drivers and storepersons. Of him, the employers’ organisation, Business New Zealand said: “Peter was an industrial leader of the highest integrity and his passing is a sad loss to New Zealand.” The Greens co-leader, Metiria Turei, recalled that: “As Secretary of the Council of Trade Unions, Peter could still be found running a picket line at 3 in the morning, he never shirked the hard work, and never stopped fighting for a fairer New Zealand.” And, of his friend and comrade, the former Secretary of the EPMU – now leader of the Labour Party – Andrew Little said, simply: “He was a good man and he will be held in the hearts of the labour movement.”

 

None of these tributes were considered worthy of quotation by the NZ Herald, and, to be fair, by most of the rest of the mainstream news media. Because, when all is said and done, Peter was not an All Black, nor a renowned barrister – he was a trade unionist.

 

The coverage of this fine New Zealander's death recalls to mind the following verses by James K. Baxter, which seem to have been written for just such a man as Peter Conway:

 

The man who talks to the masters of Pig Island

About the love they dread

Plaits ropes of sand, yet I was born among them

And will lie some day with their dead.

 

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 11 June 2015.

The Glutton Seagulls: Thoughts On A Friday Afternoon In March.

Discovered instead the glutton seagulls squabbling over crusts - James K. Baxter.

 

LISTENING TO RADIO LIVE, this bloke’s telling Willie Jackson what he’d do to the Aussies awaiting execution in Indonesia.

 

“I’d kill ‘em. Yeah, just shoot ‘em. No problem with that at all.”

 

And I’m thinking, what the hell has happened to us. When did we turn into this sort of country?

 

Because it’s everywhere. This viciousness. This absence of civility. This lack of love. What James K. Baxter called “the crushed herb of grief at another’s pain”.

 

God! Just imagine what our right-wing shock-jocks would make of James K. if he suddenly reappeared to point his prophetic finger at the greasy excrescences who have somehow floated to the top of “God’s own country”.

 

Hell, Baxter was an angry man in the 1960s and 70s. The 60s and 70s! When kids could go to Varsity for free. When a young couple could buy their first house at 25 with a 3 percent State Advances loan. When fewer than 5,000 people were unemployed.

 

In his poem, Crossing Cook Strait, Baxter has “Seddon and Savage, the socialist father” raging:

 

I  walked forth gladly to find the angry poor

Who are my nation; discovered instead

The glutton seagulls squabbling over crusts

And policies made and broken behind locked doors.

 

The glutton seagulls, oh yes, they’re still with us. Still squabbling over crusts. They’ve grown obscenely fat over the intervening years. Too fat now to fly. But just you watch them strutting around their enormous piles of crusts. Running furiously at anyone who comes close. Screeching insults. Their angry voices drowning out the songs of the gentle. The warnings of the wise. Eleanor Catton. Nicky Hager.

 

“Kill ‘em all! I’ve got no problem with that.”

 

I was at Radio Live on Election Night as the seagulls racked up yet another win for gluttony. Saw the Seagull-in-Chief on the TV monitor, his vast wings outstretched in a billious benediction. How the flock screeched. And why not? Their crusts were safe for “Three more years! Three more years!”

 

Sean Plunket, wearing the sort of grin more usually found on the face of a wolf who's finally caught up with his exhausted prey, asked me how I was feeling.

 

All I could think of was James K Baxter’s lines from Pig Island Letters:

 

The man who talks to the masters of Pig Island

About the love they dread

Plaits ropes of sand, yet I was born among them

And will lie one day with their dead.

 

I rode home in a taxi as the skies unleashed sweeping showers of Spring rain across Auckland.

 

Like tears, I thought. Like tears.

 

This essay was posted on The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road on Friday, 6 March 2015.