No Time To Think: Ageing Boomers, Laurie & Les, Talk Politics.

“Members of Parliament don’t work for us, they represent us, an entirely different thing. As with so much that has turned out badly, the re-organising of MPs’ responsibilities began with the Fourth Labour Government. That’s when they began to be treated like employees – public servants – whose diaries had to be kept full-to-bursting, in case they found themselves with enough time on their hands to talk to their constituents and start thinking for themselves.”

“WHAT THIS PLACE NEEDS”, declared Les, depositing two brimming glasses of ale on the table, “is a fire”.

“Do pubs even have fires anymore?” Les’s friend Laurie replied, having carefully tested the quality of the beverage placed before him. “Haven’t open fires been banned?”

“Not all of them”, Les insisted, “a friend of mine was telling me only the other day about this pub with a brewery attached – or was it the other way round? – anyway, he swears there was a roaring open fire in the bar, and another one outside for the smokers.”

“However did they get that past the Fun Police? For God’s sake, don’t tell your Green Party mates, or they’ll be in there with buckets of water before you can say ‘Consent Variation’!”

“Truth to tell, Laurie, I don’t really have any friends in the Green Party, not anymore.”

“But you used to have heaps of Green Party ‘comrades’. I had to listen to you singing their praises for years. Hell, you even voted for them, if I recall correctly.”

“You do, Laurie, and I did – many times.”

“So, what went wrong?”

They did, mate. They did. When I had friends in the Greens, the party was led by Jeanette Fitzsimons and Rod Donald, and it boasted old lefties like Sue Bradford and Keith Locke in its ranks. Back then the Greens were eco-socialists – an ideology I was happy to vote for.”

“They’re still bloody eco-socialists as far as I can see.”

“Yeah, but when it comes to the Left you’ve never been able to see very clearly – have you Laurie?”

“So, what are they, if they’re not eco-socialists?”

“That’s a bloody good question! As far as I can make out, they’re an unholy mixture of Treaty-freaks, trans-gender defenders, and homespun, patchouli-scented, simple-lifers, deeply suspicious of anything ‘more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom’.”

“What’s that? Tolkien?”

“It is indeed, Laurie, straight out of the prologue to The Lord of the Rings – ‘Concerning Hobbits’.”

“Hmmm”, Laurie mused, setting down his glass. “Nothing very Hobbitish about Julie Anne Genter’s performance in the House last week. Poor old Matt Doocey looked like he’d just been admonished by the Witch Queen of Angmar.”

“Well, it’s all in the hands of the Privileges Committee now. But, you know what? I actually feel sorry for JAG. She’s an enormously talented politician with a huge amount to offer.”

“Whether people want it or not.”

“Yes, yes, I know, she is prone to letting her political passions carry her away. But that’s a side-effect of the parliamentary life itself. Nobody should be expected to live that way – in that dreadful, hot-house, environment.”

“They’re paid well enough for putting up with it.”

“True. But it wasn’t always such a crazy pressure-cooker. I remember listening to Phil Amos – Minister of Education in the Kirk Labour Government – recalling the advice given to him when he was a brand new backbencher, way back in the early 1960s. He’d just been elected as the Member for Manurewa and had no idea what he was supposed to do. So, he called his boss, Arnold Nordmeyer, Leader of the Opposition. ‘Well,’ says Nordy, ‘we’ll have a caucus meeting sometime in February, and the Nats won’t call Parliament together until about June.’ (This is the beginning of December ’63, don’t forget.) ‘So, you just use the time to get to know your electorate.’”

“And we paid him for that?”

“Yes, we bloody did, Laurie, but not because he was our employee. Members of Parliament don’t work for us, they represent us, an  entirely different thing . As with so much that has turned out badly, the re-organising of MPs’ responsibilities began with the Fourth Labour Government. That’s when they began to be treated like employees – public servants – whose diaries had to be kept full-to-bursting, in case they found themselves with enough time on their hands to talk to their constituents and start thinking for themselves.”

“Yeah, well, as I said, they get paid more than most employees.”

“But don’t you get it? That’s the whole point! Phil Amos was a secondary-school teacher. His parliamentary stipend wasn’t a whole lot more than his old salary. That, and having time to talk and think, kept him grounded. Prevented him from melting-down like JAG.”

“By keeping him a safe distance from the fire.”

This short story was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 10 May 2024.

Who Do The Greens Think They Are?

On Life Support: Most activists would assume that an ecological party of the Greens’ pedigree would be in the vanguard of the struggle against climate change: advocates for the most radical and uncompromising means of defending the biosphere. Most activists would, however, be wrong.

“WHAT WE THINK, we become”, observed Siddhartha Gautama, the Enlightened One. What then, have the Greens, particularly their parliamentary representatives, been thinking to become the confused collection of MPs we see today?

The easy answer would be to say that thinking is the one activity the Greens have not been engaging in since facilitating the formation of the Coalition Government. In part, the party’s shambolic unmindfulness is the consequence of sheer panic. The destruction of Metiria Turei caused considerable collateral damage. The party lost a lot of talent – much of which it has yet to successfully replace.

Even more serious than temporarily losing its collective head, however, was the Green Party’s loss of direction. Ever since the 2017 election, the Greens have been spinning around in their own aimless eddies. No longer caught up in the strong currents of ecological activism which had propelled them forward since entering Parliament in their own right in 1999, the Greens energies have been swallowed up in the constantly multiplying micro-conflicts of identity politics.

Such appears to be the fate of all left-wing and progressive organisations that lose the impetus supplied by a single, unifying cause. In the absence of the latter, all the essentially irresolvable conflicts of identity politics – Male vs Female; Black vs White; Cis vs Non-Cis; Trans vs TERF – rush in to fill the vacuum. Regaining the movement’s forward momentum is never easy in these circumstances, but without effective and inspiring leadership it is practically impossible. Tragically, this is precisely where the Aotearoan Greens have ended up: unmoved by a great cause and uninspired by ineffectual leaders.

On the face of it, the Greens predicament is absurd. Most activists would assume that an ecological party of the Greens’ pedigree would be in the vanguard of the struggle against climate change: advocates for the most radical and uncompromising means of defending the biosphere. Most activists would, however, be wrong. The Green Party of Aotearoa is not in the vanguard of the struggle against climate change: it’s best and its brightest are holding down ministerial jobs outside of the Cabinet; diligently toiling in the bureaucratic vineyards of mainstream politics.

In spite of the fact that the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) calls for massive sacrifices from the world’s wealthiest nations and a fundamental transformation of the global economy, the Aotearoan Greens have committed themselves to “the technological fix” that will, somehow, allow the planet to survive without its most dangerous species having to change very much of anything.

This is nothing short of tragic. Defeating anthropogenic global warming has always depended on humanity treating it as the moral equivalent of war. But, instead of green warriors urging their fellow citizens to fight and, if necessary, die for the planet, Aotearoa has been blessed with a party of conscientious objectors. To the question: “Is anybody standing up to the big corporates? The farmers? The road transport lobby?” James Shaw, Julie Anne Genter and Eugenie Sage reply that they are doing the best they can. That politics is the art of the possible. Moreover, there’s the Budget Responsibility Rules to consider – not to mention the wishes of Labour and NZ First. Not to worry, though, because Marama Davidson is rehabilitating the word “cunt” and sticking it to the misogynist “bros” on social media. Right-on, sister!

The Green Party’s key strategic error, post-election, was to want anything to do with ministerial warrants – or coalition partners. They should have told Labour and NZ First that if push came to shove on the floor of the House, then they would always vote to keep them in office and the National Party in opposition, but, beyond that, all bets were off. They would wield the hammer of justice, ring the bell of freedom and sing the song of love between their brothers and their sisters exactly as they saw fit – while fighting for the planet with all their might.

In the end, the increasingly urgent need to keep Planet Earth liveable is going to burn off the denialists and the compromisers; the incrementalists and the technological fixers. And when that moment comes there needs to be one party that has steadfastly refused to buy into the dangerous optimism of the she’ll-be-righters and the let’s-hope-for-the-besters. A party ready to step forward with the hard answers where all other answers have failed. A party that is willing, after many, many years in the political wilderness, to offer a terrified electorate the same terse instruction that Kyle Reese gave to Sarah Connor in The Terminator: “Come with me if you want to live!”

If the Greens think anthropogenic global warming is real; if they think that only ecological-wisdom-in-arms can defeat it; then that is the sort of party they will become. Sorting out the bros can wait until the planet stops burning.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 26 October 2018.

Will Marama Davidson Grow, Or Shrink, The Green Party Vote?

From The Left: For the first time in their history, the Greens have used a leadership election to shift their party to the left, not the right. Marama Davidson’s defeat of Julie Anne Genter by 110 votes to 34 would have delivered an important message to the electorate even if the Greens were still in opposition. Sent at a time when the Greens are in government, the signal to voters is potentially catastrophic.

“THIS IS WHAT you get when the Greens are in government.” In the mouth of the Greens’ male co-leader, James Shaw, it had the unmistakable ring of a campaign slogan. A good campaign slogan, which would have fitted Julie Anne Genter like a glove. Whether it can be worn by the Greens’ new female co-leader, Marama Davidson, remains to be seen.

For the first time in their history, the Greens have used a leadership election to shift their party to the left, not the right. Davidson’s defeat of Genter by 110 votes to 34 would have delivered an important message to the electorate even if the Greens were still in opposition. Sent at a time when the Greens are in government, the signal to voters is potentially catastrophic.

That the Green Party was returned to Parliament at all in 2017 was in no small measure due to those New Zealanders who would otherwise have voted Labour casting their Party Vote for the Greens – just to keep them in Parliament. In this rescue effort, the steady, back-to-basics leadership style of James Shaw was crucial.

Implicit in Shaw’s moderation was the clear acknowledgement that Metiria Turei’s radicalism had hurt the Greens much more than it had helped them. Without that acknowledgement and unaided by the Centre-Left’s strategic voting, the party would have struggled to clear MMP’s 5 percent threshold.

The decisive margin of Davidson’s victory over Genter indicates a rank-and-file membership that is either unable or unwilling to accept that turning their party sharply to the left is an extremely risky electoral gesture.

In 2017, the parties of the left fell well short of a parliamentary majority. They are only in government because NZ First’s conservative nationalists were unwilling to entrust the fulfilment of their populist agenda to Bill English’s National Party. The political significance of Peters’ decision to exclude the Greens from the Labour-NZF coalition appears to have eluded Davidson’s supporters entirely.

The coalition partners will now be watching anxiously as the full implications of Davidson’s decisive victory begin to manifest themselves in the Greens’ parliamentary caucus. Its two young firebrands, Golriz Ghahraman and Chloe Swarbrick will draw considerable satisfaction from the result. With Davidson’s election as co-leader offering incontrovertible evidence of the party’s radical aspirations, they will feel emboldened to (in the words of Davidson’s acceptance speech) “go even further, be even bolder”. Neither Peters nor Prime Minister Ardern will be looking forward to discovering exactly how far, or how bold.

That the Green Party’s 144 delegates chose to cast their votes the way they did reflects the “mood” of the Left both locally and internationally.

At the heart of that mood lies a deep-seated antagonism towards power-structures seemingly resistant to all but the most intense political pressure. Be it Harvey Weinstein in the US, or Russell-McVeagh in New Zealand, the effort required to sensitise powerful individuals and institutions to public outrage is enormous.

Right alongside this antagonism towards the elites, however, is a growing sense of alienation from the restraints of democracy itself. Young activists in particular find it less and less acceptable that numerical majorities have the power to over-ride and/or set-aside their demands. Why should old people, white people, straight people and male people be permitted to thwart progressive change? Why should a majority so egregiously in the wrong be able to defeat a minority so manifestly in the right? If that is all that democracy has to offer, then what, practically-speaking, is its political value?

Isolate these sentiments in their own self-reinforcing social-media bubble and the result is often a ferocious up-tick in self-righteous intolerance. Far from being perceived as virtuous, the democratic politician’s admonition that ‘we must take the people with us’ is derided as proof of political weakness and moral cowardice.

It would be interesting to discover how many of the Young Greens who threatened to quit the party if Davidson was not elected female co-leader would respond to Senator Barry Goldwater’s in/famous assertion that: “Extremism in defence of liberty is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.”, by clicking “Like”.

Few, if any, however, would object to the passage in Davidson’s acceptance speech enjoining her parliamentary colleagues to rise as one and “turn our faces to the streets”. Not, presumably, the streets of the leafy suburbs where the Greens get most of their votes, but the mean streets of Manukau East and Mangere – where they attract the least.

Those Green voters from the leafy suburbs would likely have responded positively to Julie Anne Genter when she pointed to her own and her party’s ministerial achievements and told them: “This is what you get when the Greens are in government”.

Whether Marama Davidson’s “green shoots of hope” grow into a bumper harvest of new voters in 2020 is considerably less certain.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 10 April 2018.

Gender Diversity Easier To Campaign For Than Class Diversity.

Who Should Fill The Seats Of Power? Stripped of its cloying political candy-floss, the diversity project is a pure-and-simple power grab. It’s core objective is to fundamentally shift the balance of power in favour of those currently excluded from the inner sanctums of privilege, where political and economic power is wielded decisively by members of the dominant class/race/gender. How are we doing? Well, there's some movement (not enough) on race and gender. Just don't mention class.

MATT McCARTEN understands the practical consequences of political idealism better than any left-winger I’ve ever known. “It’s always about the numbers”, is one of his favourite sayings. Another is: “How big is your army?” Both reflect an unsentimental grasp of the brute numerical realities of democratic politics all-too-frequently lacking on the Left.

Back in the 1990s, when Jim Anderton’s remarkable coalition of insurgent political parties, The Alliance, was regularly outstripping Labour in the polls, it was part of Matt’s job to convey the realities of progressive diversity to his white, male, socialist comrades.

Working from the latest poll results, he would offer them his estimate of the maximum number of seats the Alliance was likely to win. Matt would then remind them of the quota of seats allocated to each of the Alliance’s constituent parties. Of the quite modest number of seats available to the socialist NewLabour Party, at least half were automatically set aside for women. Proper consideration also had to be given to the Waitangi Treaty Partner – before assessing the NLP’s Pakeha comrades.

As the ambitious socialist males gathered around Matt performed the necessary arithmetical calculations, their faces fell. Clearly, the chances of an ambitious Pakeha socialist making it into Parliament were somewhere between slim and non-existent. “Diversity” was indisputably an important progressive objective – but it was not without its downside.

Julie Anne Genter’s unfortunate remarks about diversity (unfortunate because, like David Cunliffe’s “I’m sorry I’m a man” comment, they will be hung around her neck for the rest of her political career) were jarring for exactly the same reason’s Matt McCarten’s triennial lecture to the NLP’s left-wing males was jarring. They revealed what lies on the obverse side of the “positive discrimination” coin: the inescapable obligation of the old order to make way for the new.

“Speaking to students at Christchurch’s Cobham Intermediate School on Thursday [22 March],” reported Stuff’s Adele Redmond, “Genter said the private sector needed to address the low level of female representation on New Zealand company boards if more businesses were to be led by women.

“About 85 per cent of board members were male, and many were ‘old white men in their 60s’.

“‘Some of them need to move on and allow for diversity and new talent,’ she said, later clarifying she had ‘no problem with old white men’ on company boards generally.”

Really? Why not? Stripped of its cloying political candy-floss, the diversity project is a pure-and-simple power grab. It’s core objective is to fundamentally shift the balance of power in favour of those currently excluded from the inner sanctums of privilege, where political and economic power is wielded decisively by members of the dominant class/race/gender.

As the Minister for Women, it is Ms Genter’s job to have a problem with men on company boards. Assuming that it’s a core part of the Minister’s remit to ensure that the percentage of women on company boards matches the percentage of women in the population as a whole, then some blokes will, indeed, have to “move on”.

“It’s all about the numbers.”

That those blokes should, preferably, also be white and over 60 is, presumably, because their ethnic origin confers a power advantage every bit as decisive as their gender; and because their advanced years make them statistically more likely to harbour reactionary views about women, Maori and other minorities, than younger, more enlightened New Zealanders.

“Reactionary” is not an accusation anyone could fling at those two “old white men” Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn.

Ah, but Bernie and Jeremy are self-confessed socialists whose core mandate is all about delivering justice and equality not only to women, people of colour and the LGBTQI community – but also to the working-class.

That’s the awkward thing about socialists: they’re forever bringing class into discussions about diversity.

‘How is inequality reduced by bringing an extremely wealthy business-woman with reactionary views about Maori and the poor onto a company board?’, the socialists demand to know. ‘Wouldn’t a much more substantive blow for both diversity and equality be struck by appointing a sixty-year-old working-class trade union secretary to the company’s board of directors? After all, a man who’s spent the last 40 years of his life scrutinising the company accounts and whose knowledge of the needs and capabilities of the workforce is second-to-none, is likely to bring many more progressive ideas to the table than a ruthless female lawyer from the Big End of Town!’

How would history have unfolded if the Alliance had selected its candidates purely on the basis of merit? Would Nigel Murray’s nemesis, Dave Macpherson, have made a better MP than Mana Motuhake’s Alamein Kopu? We will never know.

Six out of the eight members of the Green Party caucus, including Ms Genter herself, are women. That’s splendid – but how many of them are socialists?

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 27 March 2018.