The Extinction Of Rebellion.

Not Even Close, Comrades! Occupy made it all the way to New Zealand, but its fate here did not differ substantially from its fate everywhere else around the world. The political praxis of identity politics, its extraordinary disintegrative power, made the organisation of any kind of credible threat to the status quo impossible.

JOHN MINTO IS RIGHT, New Zealand needs nothing more urgently than a mass movement committed to ending the wealth crisis. He is right, too, that those who can have a moral duty to do something about the obscene maldistribution of wealth in this country and across the planet. Nor would I quibble with the list of those we cannot and/or should not rely upon to intervene – i.e. the principal economic and political beneficiaries of wealth inequality, and the mainstream political parties. As John says: “only a broad, well-organised people’s movement will be able to end the wealth crisis.”

Where I suspect John and I would part company, however, is over the question of whether a “broad, well-organised people’s movement” is any longer achievable in the New Zealand of 2023.

John reckons it is. He cites the people’s movements of the past as proof of what can be achieved when New Zealanders get organised – and then get active. Certainly, the broad mass movements he cites: women’s suffrage; halting sporting contacts with apartheid South Africa; opposing the war in Vietnam, abolishing conscription, outlawing discrimination on the basis of sex and sexuality; declaring New Zealand nuclear-free; were all successful in achieving their aims. Unfortunately, all of John’s examples peaked around four (or more) decades ago.

The only appreciably younger mass movement I recall achieving its objective is the early twenty-first century campaign to keep genetically-engineered organisms out of New Zealand. There were others – most notably the mass movement against the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the mass movement against the Trans-Pacific Partnership – but they did not achieve their objectives.

Some may object that I have left out John’s reference to the 1975 Māori Land March, and the protest activity at Raglan, Bastion Point and Ihumatao. (To which I would add the impressive hikoi against the Foreshore & Seabed legislation of April 2004.) My reasons for doing so turn on John’s use of the crucial qualifier, “broad”. Māori have been successful in achieving a great many of their political, economic and cultural objectives, but these have, perforce, been sectional victories: “by Māori, for Māori”. As such, they do not fit John’s paradigm of the mass movement extending across class, race and gender boundaries to engage the broadest possible cross-section of the New Zealand population.

It is precisely the immense difficulties encountered by those attempting to surmount the barriers of class, race and gender identity that leads me to question the practicality of John’s appeal for a mass movement against the wealth crisis. The “Occupy” movement which swept across the English-speaking world in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09 serves as a tragic test case for whether “broad, well-organised people’s movements” can any longer be constructed.

Certainly, it is difficult to imagine circumstances more conducive to the formation of a mass-movement against the obscene maldistribution of wealth than the GFC. Nor is it possible to fault the inspired slogan of the “1 Percent vs the 99 percent”. If any formula could generate unity across the broadest possible cross-section of society, then including on your side of the barricades everyone except the tiny group of super-exploiters memorably referred to by President Theodore Roosevelt as “the malefactors of great wealth” should have been the formula to do it.

And it did do it – but only briefly. Those who rallied to the cause, expecting to find an organisation with a clear statement of aims and objectives, a constitution, elected leaders, and sections dedicated to communications, fund-raising, and keeping the thousands of people eager to get involved in “Occupy” occupied, found something else entirely.

Occupy’s originators, activists drawn from the many manifestations of what people call, for want of a better description, “identity politics”, had no intention of building a movement on the organisational principles of the Boy Scouts of America. There were no elected leaders, speechifying was frowned upon, and rather than applaud or cheer, people were encouraged to wave their hands in the air – but only after they had “checked their privilege”.

Entirely unsurprisingly, most of the people encountering this brave new world of intersectional anarchy turned around and walked the other way. The authorities, initially terrified of this burgeoning political movement, received the reports of their informers and very soon realised that Occupy posed no threat at all. They waited until the Occupy gatherings were reduced to a fractious remnant of their former selves, and then sent in the pepper-spray, tear-gas and billy-clubs to, once again, make the world safe for the 1 Percent.

Occupy made it all the way to New Zealand, but its fate here did not differ substantially from its fate everywhere else around the world. The political praxis of identity politics, its extraordinary disintegrative power, made the organisation of any kind of credible threat to the status quo impossible. Ruling classes, throughout history, have always understood the effectiveness of the “divide and conquer” strategy. In the aftermath of the GFC, however, the “1 Percent” were astounded to discover that its deployment would not be necessary. The “Left” (or what passed for it in the 2000s) was doing it for them.

It is interesting to note that the mass movements cited by John conform neatly to the mode of mass political interventions listed by historian Michael King in his Penguin History of New Zealand. He mentions the visits of America’s President Johnson in 1966 and Vice-President Agnew in 1970. He covers-off the angry reaction to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and recalls the student protests against the installation of the US Omega spy navigation system near Blenheim. Mentioned, too, is the mass campaign to “Save Manapouri”.

Missing from John’s and Michael’s lists, however, is any reference to the movement responsible for organising the 1960s’ and 70s’ most impressive demonstrations: the biggest and broadest mass movement of them all; the trade unions. Certainly, one of the largest demonstrations of the late-1960s and early-1970s coincided with what was effectively the half-day general strike of 12 May 1970, which managed to shut down most of the capital city’s industry and infrastructure. On that day, tens-of-thousands of workers and their families gathered outside Parliament to protest the soaring cost of living.

In the thick of that massive gathering was CARP – the Campaign Against Rising Prices. Formed in 1966 in Auckland, and 1967 in Wellington, CARP was a radical outgrowth of the Housewives Association. It was spurred to action by the abolition of government subsidies on key food items such as bread and milk. Led by the wives of trade unionists from both the private and public sectors, CARP became a household name for the best part of a decade, and a thorn in the side of both National and Labour governments.

New Zealand’s working families are again experiencing severe cost of living pressures. A movement dedicated to easing those pressures, organised by those most directly affected, and unafraid to take their message directly to the powers-that-be, would be a most welcome development.

Except, of course, the New Zealand of 2023 is not the New Zealand of 1966-67. A Housewives Association would be laughed off the political stage in 2023. It is also true to say that the sort of working-class communities that gave birth to political organisations like CARP, no longer exist. Poorly-paid wage-workers by necessity, de-unionised, ill-housed, isolated, with those forced to live outside the workforce under the constant surveillance of the state’s welfare agencies, the working-class women of today would find in difficult to even conceive of such autonomous and uncompromising interventions.

Although, to be fair, they would probably find it easier than the Council of Trade Unions!

It’s hard to mount a sincere fight against the wealth crisis when your union boss is taking home a six-figure salary. Hard, too, to construct a “broad, well-organised people’s movement” when those same people are immediately divided into their respective identity groups, discouraged from indulging in excessive individual assertion (i.e. leadership) and forbidden from applauding it.

Much and all as I agree with John, that a mass mobilisation against the malefactors of great wealth is what we need, I cannot see how it could be done.

I remain transfixed by the tragic image of all those revolutionary hands refusing to come together.

They’re not waving, John, they’re drowning.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 2 June 2023.

Carefree Calumnies: Vaccination Policies Under Nazism and Communism.

Revolutionary Duty: Up until the death of Stalin in 1953, the primary focus of the People’s Commissariat of Public Health was on the education of the masses – mostly by means of unceasing propaganda. Being a healthy Soviet citizen was a revolutionary duty.

ACCUSATIONS OF NAZISM are being flung around “in a carefree manner”. That, at least, is the observation of Dr Kate Hannah, Lead Researcher of the Disinformation Project. Established in 2020 under the auspices of Te Pūnaha Matatini at the University of Auckland, the Disinformation Project seeks to separate fact from fiction in the increasingly fetid ideological climate of the Covid-19 Pandemic.

“We’ve really witnessed a downgrading of social discourse”, argues Hannah, “an acceptability of really vulgar, obscene, denigrating, rude, misogynistic, racist terminology just being used.” She reports that terms such as Nazism, Communism and Authoritarianism are being attached almost casually to political opponents.

Certainly, the prospect of New Zealanders having to carry Vaccination Passports, and Government-mandated “No Jab. No Job” regulations coming into force, have raised the ideological temperature considerably. Nor is it the case that strongly expressed reservations about increased levels of state coercion are restricted to the Right. In a widely read Daily Blog post entitled “This Is Wrong”, the veteran leftist John Minto comes out swinging at the idea of dividing New Zealand society into the Vaccinated and the Unvaccinated.

More pronounced upon the Right than the Left, however, is the tendency to compare the Labour Government’s Covid-19 strategies with the behaviour of the totalitarian regimes of the 1930s and 40s. The conservative clergyman, Pastor Peter Mortlock, for example, recently warned the congregation of his evangelical City Impact Church that: “Nazi Germany has arrived in New Zealand”. Adding for good measure that the unvaccinated were at risk of becoming “Yellow Star citizens”. (The reference is to the yellow Star of David all European Jews were required to wear by their Nazi tormenters.)

Perhaps inspired by the Pastor’s words, a group of Anti-Vaxxers last weekend posted a photograph of themselves, all wearing Yellow Stars, on Twitter.

If Pastor Mortlock, and those he has inspired, had “done their research”, however, they might have hesitated to include the Nazis in their propaganda sermons and stunts.

As Branko Marcetic explains in a sharply pointed piece for Jacobin magazine, the Nazis were far too sensitive to right-wing public opinion to enforce the compulsory vaccination legislation that had been on Germany’s statute books since the Imperial Vaccination Law of 1874.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the 1874 law was actually in abeyance. A tragic medical misadventure, in which 70 children had died three years earlier, had mobilised the already large anti-vaccination movement in Germany, and the Government had responded by simply ceasing to enforce the law. Far from re-instating compulsory inoculation, Hitler and his confederates decided to keep the moratorium in place.

Partly this was in response to the very strong anti-Semitic flavour of the German anti-vaccination movement which, like the anti-vaxxers of today, was prey to all kinds of lurid conspiracy theories. Mostly, however, it was because the Nazis were enthusiastic eugenicists.

For Hitler and his comrades vaccination was regarded as a Darwinian test of evolutionary fitness. Intelligent and conscientious German citizens would not hesitate to get vaccinated. Those who refused were declaring themselves to be either politically or congenitally unfit to remain a part of the German volk. When it came to the conquered peoples of Eastern Europe, the eugenic message was unequivocal. Vaccination was only for the Master Race – among the untermenschen Nature must be left to take its course.

Hitler had no need of Vaccination Certificates, he would have looked upon Pastor Mortlock and his ilk as a self-correcting problem.

Marcetic’s article serves as a timely reminder that there really is nothing new under the sun. Human nature remains a depressingly consistent factor in the way politics unfolds. Equally bracing, however, is the realisation that Hitler’s Darwinian cast of mind is very far from being dead. The briefest scan of Twitter and/or Facebook will produce numerous examples of eugenicist thinking. Indeed, as Auckland’s Level 3 Lockdown threatens the Christmas plans of thousands, the notion that the anti-vaxxers should be treated as a self-correcting problem is only likely to find additional supporters.

But if Hitler (teetotaler, non-smoker and vegetarian that he was) was less than keen to enforce compulsory vaccinations on the civilian population of Germany (the armed forces were a very different story!) what about his Soviet equivalent, Joseph Stalin?

Up until the death of Stalin in 1953, the primary focus of the People’s Commissariat of Public Health was on the education of the masses – mostly by means of unceasing propaganda. Being a healthy Soviet citizen was a revolutionary duty. Campaigns were waged against smoking, drinking and sexual promiscuity (i.e. Venereal Disease). Basic sanitation was drummed into a population that, historically, had known nothing of such matters.

Essentially, the People’s Commissariat made a virtue of necessity. In its early years, the Soviet Union simply had too few doctors, and nothing like enough medicines, to do much more than exhort the population to look after their health.

The extraordinary population losses experienced in the Soviet Union, first as the result of the Stalin-led Communist Party’s murderous policies, and then under the hammer blows of the Wehrmacht, forced a major re-think of Soviet health policies. Human labour was now too precious for the Communist Party to squander in the manner of Stalin and his homicidal comrades. With Stalin dead, however, and the gulags “downsized”, public health provision became a way of demonstrating the “benevolent” aspects of Soviet rule.

As Stephen L Hoch writes in his 1997 paper The Social Consequences Of Soviet Immunization Policies, 1945-1980:

Soviet society used coercive immunization campaigns to demonstrate the superiority of an administrative order over a legal one . The state mandated compliance with a public good and in the process demonstrated the benefits of vigorous state control in the public realm . The public was to be passive in this process. Vaccination campaigns were used to show that if a good was truly important the state would do it, indeed, the state must do it. And, it must be recognized that in spite of all the abuses of Soviet power, the political leadership in the former Soviet Union repeatedly pointed to immunization campaigns to illustrate the success of its administrative order.

That enforced public passivity was to come back and bite the Russian people when the Soviet system finally fell in 1991. In the “new” Russia, the human and material resources required to continue the massive state-run immunisation campaigns of the Soviet era were no longer available. Until Russian parents learned to take the immunisation of both themselves and their children into their own hands, many of the diseases conquered in the post-war years were bound to reappear – which they duly did.

History is seldom a clear-cut thing. Hitler declined to enforce vaccination out of a combination of political and eugenicist considerations. Similarly, while Stalin reigned over the Soviet Union, public health campaigns were largely exhortative, propaganda-driven affairs. Following Stalin’s death, however, coercive vaccination was presented as evidence of the Soviet system’s paternal benevolence. No longer a regime that killed millions without compunction or remorse, the Soviet Union presented its post-war compulsory mass vaccinations as proof that it was now committed to saving millions of lives.

As the Delta variant of Covid-19 sweeps through the largely unvaccinated Russian population with renewed energy and alarming lethality, there will be many older Russian citizens who recall with some nostalgia the regime that lined them up and jabbed them whether they liked it or not. To avoid the evils of the Soviet Era, however, a great many younger Russians will happily run the risk of contracting Covid. After all, as diseases go, it is considerably less deadly than Stalinism.

A proposition with which – “carefree” Anti-Vaxxer accusations of Nazism, Communism and Authoritarianism, notwithstanding – New Zealanders from both the Right and the Left will likely find themselves in rare agreement.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 9 November 2021.

Working Alongside Maori Capitalism To Enrich “Aotearoa Inc.”

Culture Clash: The Samoan Chief Justice, in his very English ceremonial robes, tests the locked doors of the Samoan Parliament. The crisis now gripping Samoa is the product of an almost entirely unanticipated collision between the traditional Samoan way of doing politics, and the formal requirements of Samoa’s democratic constitution. Would the recommendations contained in the He Puapua Report produce a similar collision of political cultures?

THE CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS currently gripping Samoa calls into question John Minto’s optimistic conclusions regarding the He Puapua Report. Underlying the political stand-off in Samoa is the as yet unresolved tension between the democratic institutions inherited from New Zealand, and the much older set of political and cultural expectations inherited from pre-colonial Samoan society. So long as democracy was able to accommodate traditional leadership hierarchies and decision-making customs, the two traditions rubbed along together with minimal friction. The crisis now gripping Samoa is the product of an almost entirely unanticipated collision between the traditional Samoan way of doing politics, and the formal requirements of Samoa’s democratic constitution.

John’s core argument in favour of the recommendations contained in He Puapua is that they will give Maori and Pakeha more democracy – not less. He quite correctly points to the anti-democratic motives driving New Zealand’s nineteenth century colonial governments’ efforts to contain the potential political power of Maori – in deliberate contravention of Article III of the Treaty of Waitangi. Successive settler regimes were determined to do no more than was absolutely necessary to keep the peace between the two peoples. The four Maori seats (established in 1867) were a reluctant acknowledgement of the decisive role played by kupapa Maori (also known as “Friendly Maoris” or “Queenites”) in the recent armed conflicts over land and sovereignty.

The question raised by New Zealand’s 2010 decision to sign up to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is: To what degree is it possible for a colonial regime, founded on “a revolutionary seizure of power” (the phrase used by the New Zealand legal scholar, Professor Jock Brookfield, to describe the effective nullification of the Treaty of Waitangi occasioned by the establishment of on-the-ground settler supremacy in the 1850s and 60s) to unpick the political and cultural needlework of nation building? Helen Clark’s straightforward answer was: No. It’s not possible. Which is why she refused to sign New Zealand up to the Declaration. John Key, under pressure from the Maori Party, not only decided to sign the document, but in 2014 agreed to produce some sort of roadmap towards its eventual implementation. He Puapua is that roadmap.

The first stage of the He Puapua journey is, as John suggests, all about bringing Maori into the places where important decisions are made about their health, housing, education and employment. But, is this equation of participation and democracy justified? Although every Pakeha citizen enjoys exactly the same political rights as every other Pakeha citizen, how common is it for poor, working-class Pakeha to be found in the places where critical decisions about the allocation of economic, social and cultural resources are being made? The answer, of course, is: Not very often – if ever. Our capitalist society, like the feudal society which preceded it, reserves seats at the decision-making table for members of its ruling class, their most trusted servants – and bugger-all others. Are the exclusively Maori power structures proposed by He Puapua likely to prove any less careful about who gets invited to sit at their tables?

An answer, of sorts, is provided by the fate of Maori Television. When it began, Maori TV was based in Auckland, staffed by an outstanding bunch of extremely talented journalists and broadcasters. Its news and current affairs section was particularly effective at bringing the stories of Maori and Power to its viewers. Too effective – as it turned out. In retaliation for turning the media spotlight on the management of Kohanga Reo, Maori Television was gutted of its best and its brightest talent and relocated to Rotorua. As in Samoa, the expectations of democratic scrutiny and accountability ran head-first into traditional cultural expectations of discretion and respect.

Over the course of the past 30 years, the brutal imposition of neoliberalism on Maori communities has required the colonial New Zealand state to do all within its power to thwart the rise of effective Maori resistance. It has done this in two ways. First, by working closely with traditional Maori power structures to foster the development of what the academic writer Elizabeth Rata calls “Neo-Tribal Capitalism”. (Treaty Settlements have played a crucial role in this process.) Second, by facilitating the growth of the educated Maori middle-class needed to run this new “Maori Economy”.

There is scant evidence, to date, that Neo-Tribal Capitalism is any more inclined to encourage democratic participation than the common-or-garden Pakeha variety. It is, almost certainly, no accident that the radical recommendations contained in He Puapua owe a great deal to the ideas contained in Matike Mai Aotearoa – the report on “constitutional transformation” commissioned by the neo-tribal capitalist “Iwi leaders Group”.

If any more evidence is required for the essential incompatibility of traditional and democratic expectations within Maoridom, one has only to consider the fate of the participatory governance structures set up to co-manage the resources handed over by the Crown in the Tainui Treaty Settlement. This brave attempt to hold chiefly power accountable did not end well.

In his post, John makes much of what he calls “the dictatorship of the majority”. This is, indeed, an aspect of the democratic process that has come in for much criticism over the centuries. In almost every case, however, those complaining most loudly about the tyranny of the majority are those most likely to suffer a reduction in power and wealth should the needs of the many ever be permitted to outweigh the greed of the few.

John simply does not admit the possibility that this might also be the case in Maoridom. He seems to see Maori as an undifferentiated mass of poor and oppressed people, held permanently in that condition by the undifferentiated racism of their colonial masters. Unaccounted for in his description of the problem are the power structures – both traditional and modern – which have been encouraged to concentrate political and economic power in the hands of tribal capitalist elites.

It is these elites who have most to gain from the changes proposed in He Puapua. Allied to the elites attached to the Crown, and the elites which still control Pakeha society, the Maori elites will be well placed to enjoy the rewards, and strengthen the defences, of “Aotearoa Inc”. The prospect of ordinary New Zealanders, of any ethnicity, working alongside the Maori, or any of the other elites, in this enterprise, is neither anticipated, nor desired.

As the people of Samoa are discovering, when push comes to shoves, it’s those with the power already in their hands who push and shove the hardest.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 25 May 2021.

Building an “Active Democracy” through “Constructive Engagement”. Chris Trotter responds to John Minto.

 Woman In The Hot Seat: New Zealand needs to develop new relationships with the countries of the Pacific Rim. And those new relationships need to be based on progressive ideals, mutual protection and solid economic self-interest – with the latter being underpinned and facilitated through mutually beneficial multilateral trade agreements. Throughout history, trade and peace have marched hand-in-hand. New Zealand diplomacy needs to reflect that fact.

“UNBELIEVABLE! WRONG! IDIOTIC!” One of the many admirable qualities about John Minto is that he never leaves anyone in any doubt about where he stands. His rejection of the strategy of “constructive engagement” with the Labour-NZ First-Green Government is unequivocal. For John, only “active democratic opposition” to Labour’s rather tentative embrace of the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) will suffice. In spite of the fact that barely thirty days have passed since Winston Peters anointed Jacinda Ardern as New Zealand’s first progressive prime minister in nine years, John is ready to call the Left onto the streets in protest at her government’s refusal to walk away from the CPTPP.

John’s argument for actively opposing the coalition government on this issue is driven by his conviction that the CPTPP is, substantially, the same document that the previous National Government signed up to in 2016. If this is true, then his question – “Why would any self-respecting New Zealander oppose the TPPA when National was in government and then excuse Labour for signing up to it?” – is entirely fair. But is the CPTPP substantially the same document as the TPPA? Unfortunately for John’s argument, the answer is an emphatic “No!”

The withdrawal of the United States from the TPP has fundamentally weakened the agreement and prompted its signatories to set in motion a plethora of revisionist initiatives. In the absence of the US, most of the worst clauses of the TPP are in abeyance until the Americans are ready to return to the fold – at which point the remaining signatories are practically certain to demand their renegotiation. True, the hated Investor/State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions stand part of the new CPTPP, but only in an attenuated form, and with a majority of the signatories actively pursuing bi-lateral “side agreements” intended to render them toothless.

These agreements are evidence of the growing global effort to diminish the power and scope of corporate interference in the affairs of nation states which the ISDS processes represent. This resistance to corporate power is not limited to “working people around the world”, as John suggests. On the contrary, it is being spearheaded by the same national governments which were forced to bail-out the delinquent financial institutions responsible for the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09. Donald Trump, himself, is a fierce opponent of the ISDS provisions of multilateral trade agreements – quite rightly perceiving them as a threat to United States’ sovereignty. John is insisting that Jacinda’s government lop-off the ISDS provisions as some sort of grand anti-corporate gesture. She and her advisers, wisely in my view, are content to let them wither on the vine.

The Coalition Government’s circumspection in regard to the CPTPP is admirable in another, very import, respect. It indicates the Labour-led Government’s determination to avoid being drawn into the looming geopolitical stand-off between the United States and China.

Many New Zealanders would have noticed the diplomatic bonding that took place between Jacinda and the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, in Danang and Manilla. This relationship is important – especially in the light of Australia’s recent, heavy-handed pushback against Jacinda’s Manus Island initiative. The new government is clearly looking to build diplomatic relationships untainted by America’s and Australia’s aggressive geopolitical ambitions. Wooing Canada is a good start. If followed by a strengthening of New Zealand’s relationships with the peoples of South America, it may allow us to “respectfully decline” to participate in Donald Trump’s, Shinzo Abe’s and Malcolm Turnbull’s “Indo-Pacific Strategy”.

With Australia as its southern pivot, the Indo-Pacific Strategy envisages the United States, Japan and India running a two-ocean-straddling policy of economic and military containment against the People’s Republic.

This is not a strategy New Zealand should have any part of, and yet, as John rightly points out: “The big Australian banks have been [plundering our economy] for decades. In 2015 for example the BNZ, ANZ, ASB and Westpac took over $4.4 billion in profit from this country.” New Zealand needs to prepare – and quickly – for the day when it may need to unequivocally distance itself from the increasingly bellicose policies of the US, Japan, Australia and India. When that day comes, the Australian bullying we have witnessed over the past week will be made to look like child’s play!

New Zealand needs to develop new relationships with the countries of the Pacific Rim. And those new relationships need to be based on progressive ideals, mutual protection and solid economic self-interest – with the latter being underpinned and facilitated through mutually beneficial multilateral trade agreements. Throughout history, trade and peace have marched hand-in-hand. New Zealand diplomacy needs to reflect that fact.

Is the CPTPP perfect, John? Of course, it isn’t. But, it is a substantially different document from the TPP-11, and the original TPPA. Rather than see the as-yet-unsigned agreement as a reason to get out and protest on the streets, it is my contention that we should view it as an opportunity to construct a new, progressive consensus about New Zealand’s place in the world – one which eschews the dangerous ambitions of our larger neighbours. It seems to me that Jacinda has already caught a glimpse of this radically different future, and she is as determined as we are to reposition New Zealand in a way that keeps its people safe, prosperous and independent.

My term for this drive towards a new consensus encompassing New Zealand’s diplomatic, military and economic future is “constructive engagement”. John might prefer to call it “active democracy”. Whatever its name, I do not believe it is in any way unbelievable, idiotic or wrong to call for a united front of progressive activists on the ground, to complement and energise the united front of progressive parties – Labour, NZ First and the Greens – in Parliament.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 21 November 2017.

Compromised Integrity

Defining Moment: Non-violent Direct Action provokes overt state violence. It was Rob Muldoon's squandering of the State's moral authority which guaranteed the Anti-Apartheid Movement's ultimate victory. To conflate the alleged actions of the "Urewera 18" with those of the Springbok Tour protesters (as Valerie Morse and John Minto did last Sunday) is to compromise the historical integrity of one of New Zealand's pivotal political events.

THERE ARE EVENTS that stand alone in our history: the ANZAC landing at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915; the 1951 Waterfront Dispute; the 1981 Springbok Tour.

They’re the sort of events which helped to define us as a nation; events which exerted a profound influence on New Zealand society and helped to shape the perceptions and expectations of a generation. Such events merit our respect – and under no circumstances should they become the occasion for political mischief-making.

In seeking to preserve the integrity of these key historical moments we can, of course, only appeal to the innate decency of our fellow citizens.

The Supreme Court of New Zealand recently quashed the conviction of Valerie Morse – the young woman found guilty of disorderly behaviour in the lower courts for setting fire to the New Zealand flag at an ANZAC Day ceremony.

I salute that decision.

A great deal of the meaning we attach to ANZAC Day is bound up with the idea of democracy and the sacrifices New Zealanders have made in its defence.

Ms Morse’s behaviour may have been ill-judged, ill-mannered and emblematic of the infantile solipsism of the Far Left, but the Supreme Court acted correctly in upholding her right to free speech.

But, freedom of speech cuts both ways. Ms Morse may have been attempting to draw attention to New Zealand’s military engagement in Afghanistan by disrupting an ANZAC Day ceremony, but her actions achieved a great deal more than that.

In the eyes of most New Zealanders she’d demonstrated an extraordinary level of ignorance about the country whose good name she was, ostensibly, so determined to defend.

And that’s not all. Ms Morse’s behaviour also rendered the many thousands of Kiwis who shared her disquiet about New Zealand’s presence in Afghanistan guilty, by association, of desecrating their country’s flag.

By cynically exploiting the symbolic power of ANZAC Day, Ms Morse gave offense to thousands, alienated potential allies and deeply compromised the entire anti-war movement.

It is precisely this fear of being lumped in with the extremism of the Far Left that has prevented me from joining in all the ballyhoo surrounding the so-called “Urewera 18” – the individuals arrested, initially on terrorism charges  for allegedly participating in military-style training camps in the Urewera Ranges in 2006-2007. [Correction: While the Police intended to lay charges under the Terrorism Suppression Act, the required permission to do so was denied on the advice of the Solicitor-General. The defendants were actually arrested on charges relating to the Arms Act. C.T.]

In what can only be described as a triumph of their defence lawyers’ skills, these defendants (now facing firearms charges) have been transformed into the blameless victims of state oppression.

Within 72 hours of their arrest, they were already being presented as martyrs to freedom; harmless activists caught up in a world-wide, post-9/11, United States-directed campaign to stamp out political activism of all kinds.

As such they have become the cause de jour among that peculiar sub-culture of leftists who simply cannot conceive of anybody taking their ideals seriously enough to die – or kill – for.

“Tame Iti’s not a terrorist,” they declare, snorting derisively into their chardonnay “he’s an artist!”

These are the sort of people who turn out to special screenings of “Operation Eight” – the outrageously one-sided “documentary” about the 2007 “police terror raids”. Or, as they did on Sunday, to a Wellington art auction fronted by “key organiser of the 1981 Springbok Tour protests” (and prospective Mana Party candidate) John Minto, and one of the 18 accused – our old friend, Valerie Morse.

Well, it’s a free country. If Mr Minto and Ms Morse decide to host an art auction – it’s no skin off my nose.

Except that it is.

Because it wasn’t just an art auction that they were fronting, but an event to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Springbok Tour protests.

And I object to that in the strongest terms.

Because whatever was going down in the Urewera Ranges in 2006-2007 bears no comparison whatsoever with the mass protests of 1981.

Those demonstrations were a testament to the power of mass, non-violent protest.

The only training camps the anti-tour movement sponsored were set up to teach the principles of non-violent direct action; the same principles that animated Te Whiti O Rongomai, Ghandi and Dr Martin Luther King.

For Mr Minto and his “Concerned Citizen” sponsors to conflate the ideals and activities of the 1981 Anti-Tour Movement with the legal defence strategies of the 18 individuals arrested in relation to events alleged to have occurred in the Urewera Ranges in 2006-2007 is political legerdemain of the most cynical kind.

Those who broke the law in 1981 did so openly and proudly, and they wore their sentences as badges of honour. The witness they bore against Apartheid made a real difference and was ultimately morally vindicated by the peaceful political liberation of black South Africa.

Ms Morse has not only burned her country’s flag, with Mr Minto’s help she’s compromised the integrity of one of its great and defining moments.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 7 June 2011.