NZ First’s Radical Conservatism Must Triumph Before Labour-Greens’ Radical Progressivism Can Succeed.

Putting NZ First's Things First: The crucial political failure of Labour and the Greens is that they have yet to appreciate that without the realisation of the radical conservatives’ programme, the chances of a radically progressive programme succeeding are nil. Until the slums of neoliberalism have been cleared, a New Zealand fit to live in cannot be built.

LET’S GET ONE thing straight: this government is not a “pure MMP coalition”. On the contrary, it is a most impure political arrangement. A “pure” MMP coalition is one in which all of the component parties share, to a greater or lesser extent, a set of common philosophical convictions. The National-NZ First coalition government of 1996-97 was one such; likewise the Labour-Alliance minority coalition government of 1999-2002; which was, it is often forgotten, kept in office by a confidence-and-supply agreement with the Greens.

Jim Bolger and Winston Peters – the two principal players in the National-NZ First coalition government – had for many years sat in the same caucus. Both of them grew up in large, and far from affluent, rural families. Neither politician had much in the way of sympathy for trade unions. It was Jim Bolger who commissioned his long-time friend and ally, Bill Birch, to shepherd the Employment Contracts Bill through Parliament. And, it was Winston Peters who voted for that extraordinary piece of union-busting legislation without demur. Both men were staunch supporters of private enterprise.

Significantly, the Labour-Alliance coalition government was also led by two politicians who had sat together in the same party caucus. Helen Clark and Jim Anderton had been friends and comrades for many years until, as happened to so many friends and comrades in the Labour Party, they fell out over what came to be known as “Rogernomics”. By 1998, however, the civil war on the left of New Zealand electoral politics had been brought to a close. Labour and the Alliance were pledged to form a “loose” progressive coalition if the votes went their way in the 1999 election – which they did.

This current government, however, is a very different proposition from nearly all of the coalitions which preceded it. The votes of all three of its component parties: Labour, NZ First and the Greens; must be combined before any piece of government legislation can pass through the House of Representatives. Accordingly, the withdrawal of support by any one of this governing troika of parties can kill any bill.

To make the politics of this coalition government even more intractable, the NZ First Party is philosophically out-of-step with its allies. It has thrown in its lot with the parties of the left for one reason, and one reason only: because it allowed itself to be convinced that Labour’s and the Greens’ hostility to the neoliberal order was as unflinching as its own. In the nearly 12 months that have elapsed since the 2017 general election, however, NZ First and its leader have been given more and more cause to believe that Labour’s and the Greens’ opposition to neoliberalism is more rhetorical than real.

In the absence of genuine and decisive moves against the core elements of the economic and social order erected by Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson, Winston Peters and his party have felt obliged to protect their electoral flanks by either vetoing or delaying the “progressive” legislation promoted by Labour and the Greens.

Peters’ “partners” have been aggrieved by these interventions. But, if Labour and the Greens really believed that NZ First: the law-and-order party; the anti-immigration party; was going to vote for the repeal of the “three-strikes” legislation, or a doubling of the refugee quota, absent the political cover provided by an uncompromising roll-back of neoliberalism; then they were dreaming. Likewise, with the key amendments to the Employment Relations Act. Without the covering fire of “Big Change”, the instinctively anti-union Peters has opted to keep his right-wing powder dry.

The leader of NZ First has no intention of emulating the behaviour of the Alliance leader, Jim Anderton. Once seated at the cabinet table, Anderton, felt obliged to follow Labour’s lead in all things: a strategy that saw the Alliance’s electoral support evaporate at an alarming rate. Peters has done his best to avoid being precipitately or unreasonably obstructive. He did, after all, swallow the dead rats of the resurrection of the TPP and the Labour-Green decision to call a halt to offshore oil and gas exploration. The problem, from NZ First’s perspective, is that the more compromises the party makes to its left-wing partners, the more it is expected to make. Peters is simply making it clear that there are limits to his co-operation. A warrior he may be – but he’s not a Social Justice Warrior!

Which brings us to the truly original aspect of the current coalition: the potential for at least one of its partners to go over to the Opposition, break up the coalition, and bring down the government – without the need for a new election. It would be a dangerous move, but what other option would NZ First – an essentially conservative political party – have if it found itself expected to vote for one piece of radical legislation after another? Coalitions are not suicide pacts.

What Labour and the Greens have apparently failed to grasp is that Peters is committed to facilitating not a radically progressive, but a radically conservative revolution. NZ First’s political programme is dedicated not to carrying our nation forward but to taking their country back. The New Zealand which Peters and his colleagues is seeking to restore is the New Zealand whose provinces thrived; whose families felt secure; whose culture was proudly British (with just a smidgen of Maoritanga thrown in for good measure) and whose future was something to be shaped by the hands of its own people – not the talons of a rapacious and globalised capitalism.

The crucial political failure of Labour and the Greens is that they have yet to appreciate that without the realisation of the radical conservatives’ programme, the chances of a radically progressive programme succeeding are nil. Until the slums of neoliberalism have been cleared, a New Zealand fit to live in cannot be built.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 14 September 2018.

Settling In: How Was The Last Labour-Led Government Doing Two Months Out From Election Day?

Entitled “The View From The Seventh Floor”, this article was published on 26 January 2000, sixty days after the election of the Labour-Alliance coalition government on 27 November 1999. The circumstances and challenges confronting Helen Clark’s new government, when set alongside those facing Jacinda Ardern and her colleagues, are at once strikingly similar but also jarringly different. By reproducing my seventeen-year-old article today, I hope to provide the readers of Bowalley Road with an opportunity to compare and contrast these two historical moments of significant political departure. - Chris Trotter

WHAT HAPPENS on the Seventh Floor of the Beehive affects everyone. From a handful of cramped offices thirty metres above Lambton Quay, issue forth the media releases, speech notes, bills and regulations intended to shape ­- and re-shape - the New Zealand economy. For the next three years, the speed and direction of economic policy will be determined by the two politicians currently occupying the Seventh Floor – Labour’s Treasurer and Finance Minister, Michael Cullen, and Jim Anderton, the Alliance’s Minister for Economic Development. The success or failure of these two ministers will have an enormous bearing on the fate of the Labour-Alliance Coalition. Voters respond most vociferously to Government decisions which have a direct impact on their material standard of living. If they wish to remain on the Seventh Floor, Cullen and Anderton will have to get it right much more often than they get it wrong.

Five years ago, the idea that Michael Cullen and Jim Anderton might one day be working alongside one another would have been greeted with derision. As Labour and the Alliance staked out their respective economic positions, the responsibility for articulating the issues which divided the two parties fell to the two men who must now – somehow – unite them. It must be said, that both Cullen and Anderton embraced the former task with all the fervour and vitriol for which the Left is famous. Cullen christened the Alliance Leader “Jim Il Sung” – equating Anderton’s protectionist predilections with the North Korean command economy. Anderton, not to be outdone, never tired of reminding Alliance audiences that Cullen’s air-fare to an exclusive seminar in Aspen, Colorado, had been paid for by a member of the Business Roundtable so that Labour’s finance spokesperson could be further indoctrinated with New Right economic theory.

These were blunt rhetorical instruments, however, when compared to the razor-sharp analysis of Laila Harré, who, in her maiden speech to Parliament, provided by far the best summary of the policy issues separating Labour and the Alliance:

“A government cannot both embrace the full force of globalisation and retain sovereignty over key economic decisions. A government cannot deliver a first class health and education service accessible to all regardless of wealth without a substantially more progressive income tax system. A government cannot deal with fundamental issues of biosecurity and ecological diversity by adopting a market model which will by definition subsume these needs to the perceived interests of foreign investors. These fundamental issues of difference between the Alliance and Labour must be resolved, and not simply disguised by clever packaging.”

It is now clear that Harré’s words were directed as much towards her own party’s leadership as they were to Labour. The 1996 election débacle brought about a decisive shift in Jim Anderton’s

long-term political strategy, the first sign of which was his June 1997 speech to the NewLabour Party conference in Hamilton, where he proposed a substantial revision of the Alliance’s taxation policies. This rightward shift brought the smouldering civil war within the Alliance’s ranks to flash-point - precipitating a battle in which the Marxist Left of the NLP was pitted against an opportunistic coalition made up of Anderton supporters, Mana Motuhake and the Democrats. The Greens, rather than become involved in another three years of fratricidal bloodletting, opted to withdraw from the Alliance altogether.

Anderton’s faction – as so often in the past – emerged triumphant from the repositioning argument, thereby clearing the way for the formal rapprochement with Labour which took place at the Alliance Annual Conference held on Massey University’s Albany campus in August 1998. The decision of the latter to opt for a “loose” coalition with Labour – rather than a detailed National/NZ First-style agreement – signalled a further defeat for the NLP Left. Harré and her allies had argued strongly for a much less accommodating approach.

From Helen Clark and Michael Cullen’s perspective, Anderton’s demonstrated capacity to master the Left of the Alliance was a necessary precondition to any reciprocal shift of position on the part of the Labour Party. The Labour Caucus’s decision to confirm a six cent tax hike for those earning more than $60,000 per annum was Clark and Cullen’s answering gesture to Albany’s warm fuzziness – and proof positive that the process of “policy convergence” was now an accomplished fact.

Astute readers will recognise in this brief historical narrative a political motif strikingly similar to the one imposed on NZ First by Michael Laws in 1996. Before either party could “coalesce” with a mainstream political force, it first had to be shorn of its more radical elements. That this process necessarily entailed the shedding of large chunks of its electoral support, and the steady disillusionment of its most active supporters, was considered by both the Alliance and the NZ First leadership to be the unavoidable price of power.

All attempts by the Left of the NLP to arrest this process of de-radicalisation proved fruitless. In spite of Alliance Director Matt McCarten’s best Machiavellian efforts to supplant Mana Motuhake and Democrat candidates with NLP Leftists on the Alliance List, the tax issue once again provided Anderton with the means to demote and exclude the radicals from serious contention. By aligning the Alliance’s initial tax rate with Labour’s, Anderton not only eliminated the progressive elements of Alliance fiscal policy, but also undermined its capacity to offer a truly radical alternative to Labour’s economic direction. The NLP Left’s last ditch defence of Progressive Taxation did little more than reveal the true extent of its isolation and weakness within the wider Alliance coalition.

Walking around the Seventh Floor of the Beehive today, one gets the feeling that Jim Anderton has “come home”. Surrounding the Minister of Economic Development is exactly the same group of individuals who supplied him with advice and support back in the late 1980s. Just across the circular stairwell is the office of Peter Harris - the former CTU economist who, alongside the redoubtable Pat Kelly, was one of the key driving forces of the Labour Party’s “Economic Policy Network” – a group set up by Anderton in the mid-1980s to contest the Douglas/Prebble assertion that “There is No Alternative”. Interestingly, Peter Harris is now advising Michael Cullen. Advising Anderton, as they have done since 1988, are Integrated Economic Services’ John Lepper, Petrus Simons, and Len Bayliss. The other long-term advisor from the 80s with easy access to Anderton’s office is constitutional lawyer, Andrew Ladley. It was Ladley who successfully argued the case for Anderton’s readmission to the Labour Caucus following his suspension for refusing to support the privatisation of the BNZ in 1988.

Matt McCarten’s request to keep the Alliance’s Parliamentary and Organisational staff in close physical proximity – i.e. on the same floor of the Executive Building - was over-ruled by both Anderton and Clark. If you want to chat with the radicals nowadays you have to move out of the Beehive altogether and make your way through a maze of corridors to their new offices in the old parliamentary complex. Nothing could better illustrate the changes that have swept over the Alliance as it has moved steadily towards the political mainstream.

It was a series of tactical – not ideological – differences which separated Cullen, and Anderton back in the late-1980s. Ten years on, even those have disappeared.

This essay was originally published in The Independent Business Weekly of Wednesday, 26 January 2000.

Playing Sergeant Pepper.

“It was twenty years ago today,” according to the famous Beatles’ track, that “Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play”. Unfortunately, the files on my computer don’t go back quite that far. What I can show you, however, is how “the one and only” Helen Clark taught Labour’s band to play exactly fifteen years ago today. Read this excerpt from my “Politics” column, published in the weekly business newspaper, The Independent, on 19 December 2001, and you’ll be amazed at just how dramatically Labour has gone “in and out of style” between then and now.

 

“WITH FIFTY-ONE PERCENT SUPPORT in the latest CM Research poll, the Labour Party is cruising towards the Year’s end on an enormous wave of public support. What is the secret behind Labour’s winning political formula – a formula which has so far eluded all of its competitors? To hear Helen Clark, or Michael Cullen, or Steve Maharey tell it, the story of Labour’s success is a simple one: “Under-promise and over-deliver”.

 

According to this theory, New Zealanders no longer believe in big promises – so don’t make any. Nor do they expect “the gummint” to do very much of anything to help them out. So, keeping those small promises, and, even more astonishing, actually doing a little bit more than you promised, leaves the voters feeling pathetically grateful.

 

More cynical observers point to Labour’s utter infatuation with opinion polling and focus groups. Its apparatus for taking the public pulse is state-of-the-art, and provides the political leadership with more-or-less instant feedback. Knowing how the electorate is responding to Government policy allows Clark and her ministers to remain in lock-step with public opinion. As the French revolutionary, Danton, is supposed to have remarked, seeing a throng of Parisians passing below his host’s window: “Excuse me, I am their leader – I must follow them.”

 

But these explanations are simply not sufficient to explain Labour’s almost effortless domination of New Zealand politics. Somehow, Clark and her colleagues have plugged themselves – or perhaps that should read “found themselves plugged” – into the zeitgeist of the early 21^st Century.

 

Nothing else can really explain Labour’s apparent imperviousness to 2001’s political disasters – and there have been a few: the Hobbs and Bunkle allowances scandal; the Peter Davis brouhaha; the scrapping of the Skyhawks; the fiscal implications of Michael Cullen’s Super Fund; the underwhelming impact of the Knowledge Wave Conference; the Colonel’s letter and the General’s shredder; Air New Zealand; the war in Afghanistan; Bathgate-gate. It’s a pretty long list, but in spite of them all Labour remains 21 percentage points ahead of its nearest rival. Clearly something else is going on here.

 

The French would call it ennui. Throughout 2001 a feeling of enervation has pervaded New Zealand society, a listlessness that renders outrage and anger altogether too exhausting. It’s almost as if the past fifteen years have left the population feeling numb, shagged-out, too tired to care. Political life is seen as being vaguely ridiculous – filled with people who very badly need to get out more. Political emotion – in particular – is almost universally seen as ersatz, fake, phoney, and too transparently manipulative to be taken seriously.

 

This is where Helen Clark comes to the fore. Her dry - bordering on bored - approach to the business of government perfectly matches the public mood. Politics is a bloody silly business, the Prime Minister seems to be saying, but since somebody has to do it, it might as well be somebody intelligent, experienced and unflappable - like me. To which nearly four out of ten New Zealanders consistently respond “Amen.”

 

Clark’s ministers take their cue from “The Boss” – presenting a public face of stolid competence almost totally devoid of colour. Like the rest of New Zealand, they seem resigned to just getting on with it, and as far as most of the electorate is concerned, that’s just fine.

 

The whole essence of this style of government was summed up by one of the Prime Ministers spin doctors at the recent Labour Party Conference: “Sure it’s dull”, he said, “but that’s okay. Dull is good.”

 

Fifty-one percent of the country seems to agree.”

 

I’m just not sure whether all of that is “guaranteed to raise a smile” … or a tear.

 

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 19 December 2016.

Red & Green Must Move Beyond Left & Right.

Sharp Focus: An alarming lack of spin-control by Labour and the Greens meant that for several days the story of their "understanding" went flapping-off in all directions – many of them extremely negative. It was only after Andrew Little had delivered his rip-roaring speech to the Greens’ AGM, and been eloquently seconded by the Green co-leader, James Shaw, that the virtues of the new relationship finally came into focus.

 

THE ANNOUNCEMENT LAST WEEK of an “understanding” between Labour and the Greens demonstrated the critical importance of spin-control. Given less than an hour’s notice that something big was in the offing, most – perhaps all – of the Parliamentary Press Gallery was left guessing.

 

Given that journalists, no less than Cabinet Ministers, hate surprises, this was remarkable. Worse still, it was the sort of behaviour that makes journalists wonder why they expend so much energy building relationships of trust and confidence with senior politicians and their spin-doctors.

 

If something big is looming, the expectation of the fourth estate is that it will be given slightly more than an hour’s warning. A little help in answering those five all-important questions – What? Who? When? Where? Why? – while not mandatory, is also appreciated.

 

The major consequence this curious deficiency in spin-control from Labour and the Greens is that for several days the story went flapping-off in all directions – many of them extremely negative. It was only on Saturday, after Andrew Little had delivered his rip-roaring speech to the Greens’ AGM, and been eloquently seconded by the Green co-leader, James Shaw, that the virtues of the Red-Green “understanding” finally came into focus.

 

Whatever the reason for Labour’s and the Greens’ initial failures in communication (and there are some intriguing explanations currently doing the rounds) the clear priority, now, is for the news media to continue debating the political meaning of this new Red-Green entente.

 

The most important question arising out of this debate is: Will the new relationship grow or shrink the combined Labour-Green Party Vote?

 

The current journalistic consensus holds that it will shrink.

 

Under the new relationship, runs this argument, the Greens can only increase their support at Labour’s expense; leaving Labour to grow its vote at the expense of National and NZ First. This strategy is unlikely to bear the required electoral fruit, however, because neither National nor NZ First voters will embrace a government-in-waiting which includes the ‘weird and wacky’, ‘Far Left’, Greens.

 

Those advancing this argument go further: insisting that not only will Labour be unable to attract the 5-10 percentage points it needs from National and NZ First if it and the Greens are to win a plurality of the Party Vote, but also that Labour’s more conservative supporters – alarmed by their party’s new relationship with the ‘weird and wacky’, ‘Far Left’, Greens – will desert Labour for the altogether more familiar fleshpots of Winston Peters and the Tories.

 

The alternative – much more optimistic – argument in favour of the new relationship takes as its starting-point an alleged majority of voters’ disquiet with the way New Zealand society is developing. This disquiet, it is claimed, extends right across the traditional political spectrum. It is fuelled by a deep concern that the nation has lost its way: that far too many New Zealanders are turning their faces from the demonstrable distress of their fellow citizens; and that unless there is an immediate and radical change of direction, then the country they grew up in, the country they love, will become unrecognisable.

 

For a change in voting behaviour on this scale to have the slightest hope of occurring, Labour and the Greens will have to convince the electorate that the 2017 election is not going to be a battle between Left and Right, but between simple human decency and self-centred social indifference.

 

The choice Labour-Green needs to be offering voters is: to start moving forward again as a nation; or, to continue the present downward slide into more inequality, more poverty.

 

Crucial to the success of this strategy will be the degree to which the Labour-Green alliance can convince the nation that it’s the Right – not the Left – who have become slaves to an ideology. Labour and the Greens must persuade voters that theirs are the policies offering practical, common-sense solutions; and that if New Zealanders want to be part of a progressive future, then they must reject the regressive policies of a ruthless, market-driven dogma that is demonstrably failing.

 

The great virtue of this argument is that it reserves for Winston Peters and his voters an honourable and influential role in the destruction of the present government, as well as in constructing the next.

 

John Key’s reign will not be ended by one party, or two. It’s going to take the whole Opposition.

 

UPDATE: Following the announcement of the Red-Green "understanding", Colmar-Brunton's pollsters registered a statistically significant shift towards Labour of approximately 5 percentage points. This additional support had, however, come at the expense of NZ First and the Greens. National's support hardly budged. It is, of course, early days, but this result suggests that the anti-Government vote is beginning to consolidate around the Labour Party, as those who had more-or-less given up on Labour ever getting its act together thankfully return to the fold. - C.T.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 10 June 2016.

Third Term Temptations.

First, Fill Your War-Chest: With its radically innovative and politically transgressive “Future of Work” policy package, Labour should be able to pass the hat around New Zealand’s major enterprises with every hope of receiving more than polite refusals.

 

THE THIRD TERM in Opposition is always the most dangerous. It’s the time when sticking to one’s principles is hardest, and when the blandishments of “professionals” promising easy victories are at their most persuasive. The prospect of another three years in opposition: of feeling powerless and useless; looms ahead of Opposition MPs like a prison sentence. They’ll do anything to escape. To win.

 

In 2016 Labour is in its third term of opposition, and it’s easy to imagine how desperately its caucus is looking for a way out. The party is heading into its hundredth year without a charismatic leader, shorn of just about all of the policies it campaigned on in the 2011 and 2014 elections; and as close to broke as any major party should ever be. What Labour needs is reinvigoration – reinvention even. Otherwise it risks being rejected by the electorate as too old and too irrelevant to make a difference. Yesterday’s party, filled with yesterday’s politicians.

 

Labour’s been here before – most recently in 1998. That, too, was the middle year of a National-led government’s third term, but it’s there that the similarities end. The government of Jenny Shipley was a government of rebels and turncoats and it was deeply unpopular. It was also a government made up of politicians elected under a radically new and different electoral system – MMP.

 

The Bolger-led National Government’s opponents had split their votes between three parties: Labour, NZ First and the Alliance; and most of them expected a government composed of all three. Winston Peters confounded those expectations by throwing in his lot with Bolger – a decision which inflicted near-fatal damage on his party. NZ First’s generosity notwithstanding, however, by December of 1997 Shipley had rolled Bolger and split Peter’s parliamentary ranks in two.

 

The Shipley Government never took. Lacking democratic legitimacy it was widely regarded as a political “dead man walking” towards the 1999 electoral gallows. It’s only hope of survival was the bitter enmity between Labour and the left-wing Alliance, led by Jim Anderton. If these two parties were to contest the 1999 election as rivals, and the Left presented to the voters as hopelessly divided, then there was a chance – a very slim chance – that National could come through the middle.

 

Would Labour risk it? Could Helen Clark beat Anderton’s Alliance into a poor third and win power in its own right? There were those in Labour’s caucus who believed it could, but following the Alliance’s surprisingly strong showing in the Taranaki-King Country by-election of May 1998 (Labour polled 17.53 percent to the Alliance’s 15.46 percent) Helen Clark opted to accept the olive branch offered by Anderton and publically announced Labour’s readiness to form a loose coalition government with the Alliance following the 1999 general election.

 

The rest, as they say, is history.

 

In 2016, is the Labour leader, Andrew Little, also faced with Clark’s 1998 predicament? Is he, too, confronted with the prospect of a National Party Government only too willing to repeat its propaganda victory of 2014, when the Labour/Green/NZ First/Mana opposition (not-to-mention Kim Dotcom) were successfully portrayed as a ship of fools, with everyone rowing in opposite directions? And, if so, does he really have any other option except to follow Clark’s 1998 example and announce Labour’s readiness to form a coalition government with the Greens in 2017?

 

That is certainly the option progressive New Zealanders are hoping Labour will take. Their not unreasonable assumption being that a coalition with the Greens will anchor Labour firmly on the Centre-Left, and decisively weaken the right-wing faction of Labour’s caucus. There are, however, a number of problems with this analysis.

 

First and foremost is the undeniable fact of the Prime Minister’s – and his government’s – still astonishing levels of popularity. John Key is no Jenny Shipley, and his government certainly isn’t cobbled together from rebels and turncoats. Far from being a “dead man walking”, Key’s government shows every sign of robust political health and is more than ready to make a successful bid for a fourth term. It’s a level of confidence that’s likely to keep National’s election war-chest full-to-overflowing (and Labour’s empty). It also serves as a warning to the all-important news media that, as things now stand, changing sides would not be a good idea.

 

In this gloomy context, the recent statements from Grant Robertson make bright and sunshiny sense. With his eyes not on 1998, but 1983, Robertson is readying the Labour Party for another bid to win the backing of big business. Like Roger Douglas before him, he is inviting his party to become, once again, New Zealand’s great political facilitator. Last time it was the Free Market Revolution of 1984-93 that Labour facilitated. This time it will be what the one-percenter luminaries gathering for the World Economic Forum at Davos are calling “The Fourth Industrial Revolution”.

 

It’s an extraordinarily clever move on Robertson’s part. The NZ Herald’s “Mood of the Boardroom” revealed that, while appreciated as a canny election-winner, Key is not regarded as the political and economic innovator New Zealand so desperately needs. With his radically innovative and politically transgressive “Future of Work” policy package, Robertson should be able to pass the hat around New Zealand’s major enterprises with every hope of receiving more than polite refusals.

 

Nor will he be alone. The Greens’ James Shaw is perfectly placed to act as Robertson’s seconder in the nation’s boardrooms. With his assurances that the Greens, too, are committed to developing a whole new political and economic paradigm – one equal to the enormous challenges of the 21^st Century – the business community’s fears about the Greens can be sufficiently allayed to make the announcement, at Labour’s hundredth annual conference, of a Red-Green Alliance something big business can welcome – rather than condemn.

 

Will it be enough to defeat the Third Term Blues? Possibly. But it will certainly be enough to render Labour electorally competitive in ways the New Zealand electorate has not seen for 18 – maybe even 33 – years.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 18 January 2016.

Behind Prison Walls

Signal Failure: Following the change of government in 2008, the "model" Spring Hill Correctional Facility’s inmate muster went from 650 to 1,038. In 2013, Spring Hill prisoners staged one of the largest and most destructive prison riots in New Zealand history. Under-resourcing in New Zealand's prison system is not confined to Serco's privately-run facilities, it afflicts the public prisons as well.

 

MAKING MONEY out of locking people up. How would you do it? Presumably, by making sure that the costs of looking after prisoners never amounted to more than the income you received for imprisoning them. In a more brutal society than ours, this would be easy. Those convicted of crimes could be sent to dank, dirty prisons, fed on slops, and allowed to die as Nature ordered. Very few staff would be required, and very little money need be spent. Provided none of the prisoners escaped to harry and harm the public, only a handful of simple-minded do-gooders would ever want to know what goes on behind prison walls.

 

The problem with making prisons profitable in today’s world, however, is that the State has an internationally mandated duty of care towards all incarcerated persons. Regardless of whether a prison is publicly or privately run, its inmates have rights that must be acknowledged and enforced by the people in charge. Unfortunately for profit-seekers, human-rights cost lots of money.

 

For those seeking to make a profit out of prisons, the challenge is, therefore, to present the State with a plausible plan for upholding the inmates’ rights, while surreptitiously cutting the institutions’ running-costs to the bone. Obviously, this requires a large measure of collusion on the part of the State. There will, accordingly, be plenty of scrutiny of the plans for rehabilitating their inmates, but very little, if any, of the budgets showing how these will be paid for. Likewise, the State will give lots of publicity to the private prisons’ promises; but none at all to their actual performance.

 

Why would the State collude so blatantly with private sector incarcerators? The explanation, sadly, is the same as the private sector’s: to make a profit. Except, the State doesn’t call what it does “making a profit”. It’s preferred term is “achieving a surplus”. In brute, political terms: it reduces expenditure on the prison system, which the public doesn’t like, in order to free-up funds for spending on things the public does like – such as schools and hospitals, or tax-cuts.

 

It requires a very strong-minded government to push back against this kind of political logic. A government determined to uphold its duty of care to prison inmates – even in the face of concerted public opposition. Rather astonishingly, in the light of recent events, New Zealanders elected such a government just 16 years ago.

 

Matt Robson - Minister of Corrections 1999-2002

 

In the Labour-Alliance Government of 1999-2002, led by Helen Clark and Jim Anderton, the Minister of Corrections was a man named Matt Robson. As a lawyer, Mr Robson knew a thing or two about the shortcomings of our prison system. Indeed, he is reported to have said that the best thing that could happen to Auckland’s dank and dirty Mt Eden Prison would be for it to be bulldozed flat. Sadly, that did not happen. What Mr Robson did do, however, was order the construction of Spring Hill Prison in North Waikato.

 

Spring Hill was to be a model, state-owned and operated prison for a maximum of 650 inmates. Each prisoner was to have his own cell, and the institution’s commitment was to rehabilitation through education and skills acquisition. The collapse of the Labour-Alliance Government, in 2002, brought an end to Mr Robson’s short stint as Minister of Corrections. He left Parliament in 2005 – two years before the Spring Hill Corrections Facility finally opened.

 

A year later, in 2008, a much more conventional Minister of Corrections was appointed to oversee New Zealand’s prison system. Judith Collins, like so many of those who had come before her, was determined to reduce expenditure on, and improve the efficiency of, the business of locking people up.

 

It was Ms Collins who contracted the global conglomerate, Serco, to manage the Mt Eden Corrections Facility. She was also responsible for the “double-bunking” of prisoners nationwide. This decision, bitterly criticised by inmates and criminologists alike, was seen as a sure-fire means of increasing prisoner stress levels through institutionalised over-crowding. The Spring Hill facility’s inmate muster, for example, went from 650 to 1,038. In 2013, Spring Hill prisoners staged one of the largest and most destructive prison riots in New Zealand history. Mr Robson’s “model” facility lay burned and broken.

 

The unfolding scandal at the Serco-managed Mt Eden Corrections Facility, while shocking, is only one aspect of the under-resourcing crisis afflicting our entire prison system. Yes, the privately-run facility is chronically under-staffed. And yes, the State does appear to be covering-up some of its deficiencies. But many of our state-run prisons are equally under-resourced. The State’s duty of care is being called into question on a daily basis – in both the public and private sectors.

 

As citizens of a civilised nation, we have a duty to care about what is being done, in our name, behind prison walls.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 28 July 2015.

More "West Wing" Than Left-Wing

Magical Thinking: So compelling was Aaron Sorkin's script for the hit TV series The West Wing that it was easy to forget that "President" Jed Bartlett was a right-wing "New Democrat" in the mould of Bill Clinton. Many Labour and Alliance staffers (some of them now MPs) were won over by Sorkin's hard-headed 1999 definitions of feasible politics. Thirteen years after the series first aired, and in spite of the Global Financial Crisis comprehensively discrediting "Clintonomics", they remain more West Wing than left-wing.

 

THE SAME YEAR New Zealanders elected the Labour-Alliance Government, 1999, NBC launched Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing. The fast-moving, fast-talking television drama series soon became compulsory viewing for Labour and Alliance staffers. Sorkin’s intelligent, razor-sharp dialogue revealed a world of politics very different from that portrayed by the cynical members of the Press Gallery. “President” Jed Bartlett’s staffers offered much, much more than the usual smarts and wisecracks. What transformed the day-to-day activities of characters like Josh Lyman, “Ceejay” Cregg, Sam Seaborn and Toby Ziegler into such compelling television was that they were motivated by real and passionately articulated principles. Sorkin had done the seemingly impossible, he had made back-room politics sexy.

 

The model for The West Wing was, of course, the Clinton White House. As the first “Baby Boomer” President, Clinton brought a looser (as it turned out a much looser) and more informal style to the administrative warren which gave Sorkin’s series its name. The fictional Bartlett (played superbly by Martin Sheen) may have hailed from straight-laced New Hampshire (a far cry from Clinton’s sleazy Arkansas) but viewers warmed to the younger characters who were as “cool” as they were competent. Characters who commented on blogs and confronted protesters – not with billy-clubs and tear gas, but with weapons fashioned out of (shock, horror) facts and figures. These were people who could command arguments.

 

But among all the “walk and talk” tracking shots and fast-talking riffs on everything from Middle Eastern politics to stem cell research, it was easy to miss the underlying political identity of the “Bartlett Administration”. This was not a collection of New Deal Democrats (except, maybe, for Toby Ziegler). President Josiah ‘Jed’ Bartlett was a Nobel Laureate in Economics – neoliberal economics. Sorkin’s politics were and are the “liberal” politics of the so-called “New Democrats” and their “moderate” Democratic Leadership Council. In short, Sorkin was channelling the Clintons’ politics: Bill’s and Hillary’s.

 

It’s the politics that gave the world NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) and declared “the era of big government” to be “over”. The politics that put an end to “welfare as we have known it”. Sorkin's Bartlett Administration is a paean to the virtues of Anthony Gidden’s “Third Way” – presented to the world by a master screenwriter whose persuasive powers not even Tony Blair’s master manipulator, Alastair Campbell, could equal. There was a darker side too. On matters of “National Security”, Bartlett’s chief-of-staff, Leo McGarry, was as hard-line as Sorkin could imagine: an avenging American Eagle in a White House briefing-room already bristling with hawks.

 

Such were the role models that Labour’s and Alliance’s young staffers attempted to emulate. And Sorkin’s pithy justifications for everything from fiscal responsibility to free-trade were to leave a deep impression. When the young men and women who filled the offices around Helen Clark and Jim Anderton (Grant Robertson, Jacinda Ardern, Chris Hipkins, John and Josie Pagani) recall the exemplars of “modern social democracy” do they think only of Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroeder, or are Jed Bartlett, Josh Lyman and “Ceejay” Gregg also in their minds?

 

That The West Wing was able to present itself as a progressive drama was only because the Right (especially in the USA) had become so utterly bereft of anything even remotely resembling principle. That, and a long economic boom which appeared to confirm everything its neoliberal architects preached and predicted. Helen Clark and her Finance Minister, Dr Michael Cullen, floated on these economic updrafts for nearly nine years: long enough for those who worked on their staffs to become convinced that while the “reforms” of the fourth Labour government may have been poorly sequenced, and much too brutally imposed, they were, in the context of their time, the right thing to do.

 

Today, the grim legacy of the magical political and economic thinking that Aaron Sorkin so brilliantly gave voice to in The West Wing lies all around us. The Third Way we bought from Clinton and Blair, Clark and Cullen turned out to be a pup. The Fed’s credit-fuelled boom turned to bust. The middle class maxed-out its credit cards. The working-class fell off a cliff. Social inequality spreads through the body-politic like a deadly, metastasizing cancer. Only the rich are smiling.

 

Sorkin, himself, has recognised the shift. His new television series, The Newsroom, lays bare the moral and material legacies bequeathed to America by the political-economy of his West Wing characters. Tellingly, the smart, sassy and principled heroes of this, Sorkin’s latest paean to the faltering American dream, are no longer politicians – they’re journalists.

 

Here in New Zealand, however, the young staffers of 1999 have become the middle-aged politicians and senior advisers of 2012. And although their waistlines have widened, the ideological path followed by these ageing West Wing fans remains as straight and narrow as a Jed Bartlett budget. Their understanding of the electorate is still rooted in the expert analyses of poll data and focus groups. (Sorkin’s satire was never sharper than when he made Joey Lucas, Jed Bartlett’s hot-shot pollster, deaf). Worst of all, the economic and social arguments these unreconstructed "utopian realists" continue to hurl against their critics (both Right and Left) all come from the era of dot-com bubbles and sub-prime mortgages.

 

Arguments that sound more West Wing than left-wing.

 

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

What If The Boss Went On Strike?

Armageddon Outa Here! Confronted with the brute economic power of a recalcitrant business community, Dr Michael Cullen, Minister of Finance in the Labour-Alliance Government of 1999-2002 was forced to repudiate the radical implications of his infamous "We won. You lost. Eat that!" quip to the National Party Opposition.

THE IRREPRESSIBLE Martyn “Bomber” Bradbury, displaying an entrepreneurial spirit not generally associated with the Left, has persuaded some of New Zealand’s largest trade unions to back The Union Report, a half-hour television show about unions and unionism which he hosts every Monday evening on Auckland’s Triangle TV and, via web-casts, across the country. Occasionally, Bomber invites me to participate.

This week’s show featured James Ritchie, former head of the Dairy Workers Union, who’s just taken up a prestigious post with the International Foodworkers in Geneva. The discussion ranged over many matters, but the topic that provoked the liveliest discussion was how constrained both unions and union-friendly governments have become under the present, globalised, variant of capitalism.

With an extension of Paid Parental Leave (PPL) once again on the parliamentary agenda, we recalled the infamous “Winter of  [Employer] Discontent” that gripped the country in the first year of the Labour-Alliance Government of 1999-2002. The left-wing Alliance MP and Associate Minister of Labour, Laila Harré, was proposing an employer-funded PPL scheme, and New Zealand’s bosses were not happy. It seemed to them that Helen Clark had a socialist tiger by the tail and its claws were threatening their bottom lines. In debating the new Employment Relations Bill, hadn’t the new Finance Minister, Dr Michael Cullen, taunted his National foes with: “We won. You Lost. Eat That!”

The degree of employer disaffection could be read in the sudden and sustained fall in the value of the New Zealand dollar, which bottomed-out at an alarming US$0.32. As the opinion polls turned against the government, and business confidence plummeted, Dr Cullen warned that the Right’s propensity for “Armageddon economic analysis” could become self-fulfilling.

By late May 2000, with economic Armageddon getting closer – the Government caved. At a series of breakfast meetings, Dr Cullen set about reassuring business leaders that his government was not composed of sharp-clawed socialists: “We want to be a government that moves forward with business,” he told a Wanganui business audience, “not one that watches indifferently from the sidelines.” For good measure, the Prime Minister declared that employer-funded PPL would be enacted “over my dead body”.

It was a U-turn executed under duress. In early June, at the funeral of Jock Barnes, the militant leader of the watersiders in 1951, CTU President, Ross Wilson, quietly informed me that, only days before, the Prime Minister had warned him the country was facing an “investment strike”.

Shortly after Monday’s screening of The Union Report a viewer contacted me with a question. What would have happened, he asked, if Helen Clark had gone on television and told the country what the bosses were doing? If she had challenged the business community, both at home and abroad, to let New Zealand’s democratically elected government carry out its mandate, and called her supporters out into the streets. Would the Prime Minister have prevailed?

Possibly. But in doing so she would have raised the political stakes to a such a dangerous degree that 99.9 percent of politicians (even social-democratic ones) would simply have run the other way. To openly pit “the people” against “the bosses” is to place the option of full-scale revolution – or repression – on the table. Having done so, Ms Clark would very quickly have discovered that breaking an “investment strike” is in no way comparable to breaking an ordinary strike. In the latter case, only the future of a single company and its employees is on the line. With the former, you’re hazarding the future of an entire social class. Most political parties, even left-wing ones, would rather keep control of the losing side than lose control of the winning side.

Perhaps this explains why the Labour Party remains so reluctant to promise the opponents of partial privatisation that it will renationalise the assets if re-elected. Global markets take a dim view of such uncompromisingly anti-capitalist behaviour. The world would simply stop lending us money.

And even revolutions (some might say especially revolutions) need credit.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 3 August 2012.

Buying Back The Farm

On The Right Track: But Labour's embrace of public ownership owed less to the party's socialist ideology than it did to rescuing privately-owned infrastructural companies that were too important to fail. If Labour really is interested in "buying back the farm" there are many well-tested ways of going about it.

THERE WAS SOMETHING immensely reassuring about Dr Don Brash’s outrage. His angry media release, in which he railed against Trevor Mallard’s “wanton economic thuggery”, vividly illustrated the Right’s abject terror at even the threat of effective state intervention in the economy.

All it had taken was a warning from Mr Mallard and his colleague, Clare Curran, that a future Labour Government would review and, if necessary, revoke legislatively, any contract/s conferring monopoly wholesale powers on the company (or companies) chosen to roll-out ultra-fast broadband across New Zealand.

According to Dr Brash, such statements – even when uttered by Opposition MPs – amount to nothing less than “economic sabotage”,  and immediately render the political party responsible “unfit for the Treasury benches”.

Strategically-speaking, Dr Brash’s outrage was extremely unwise. One should never allow one’s enemies to identify the weak-points in your defensive edifice. But identify them he did: warning that: “The threats about retroactive increases in fines for breaches of requirements are especially insidious.  Mr Mallard may just as well have erected a sign at Wellington airport saying, ‘Invest here at your peril. If we get in, all bets are off.’”

In those two pithy sentences, Dr Brash revealed to Labour exactly how it could prevent the National-led Government’s planned privatisation of state assets. They also show how, if it was of a mind to do so, Labour might set about “buying back the farm”.

A simple statement from the Labour Party that any sale of publicly owned businesses would be overturned legislatively and the purchaser/s compensated with slow-maturing government bonds, would instantly send potential investors running (and quite probably screaming) in the opposite direction.

But, in the nine years it was out of power (1990-1999), the Labour Party refused to issue any such threat, a fact that speaks volumes about its true level of commitment to the maintenance and revitalisation of a mixed, social-democratic economy.

For a brief period during the early 1990s the Alliance and NZ First did that job for them, with both of the insurgent parties promising to take the privatised state assets back into public ownership. The exigencies of coalition government, however, proved incompatible with the Alliance’s and NZ First’s re-nationalisation programmes – to the point where, by 2001, the very mention of the idea was enough to send Jim Anderton into a towering rage.

One of the reasons for abandoning the policy was its enormous cost. If the purchasers of state assets were to be fully compensated for the loss of their property rights the state would have to come up with nearly $20 billion. That international lenders would stump up the cash for such an ideologically passé programme was highly unlikely. Nor was outright confiscation a realistic option. (Not if one wanted to continue sending expensive airliners around the world without having them impounded.)

There are, of course, many more ways to skin a privatised cat than by re-purchasing it at market price or confiscating it outright, but so long as Labour remained uninterested (except when required to rescue the key infrastructural companies Air NZ and Tranzrail from abject market failure) no one was very interested in discovering what these might be.

To facilitate this process of discovery, it is necessary to take a look at how revolutionary regimes have handled the task of moving from an economy dominated by the private sector to one controlled, at least at the level of its “commanding heights”, by the state.

In this respect, the People’s Republic of China offers some interesting models.

The final victory of Mao’s People’s Liberation Army in 1949 did not, as many right-wingers probably assume, lead to the immediate socialisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange. In reality, the transition from capitalism to socialism took the best part of a decade.

The most successful technique for socialising private concerns involved a law requiring private and publicly-listed companies to issue shares to the state. Initially, this public shareholding was quite small – 5 to 10 percent – just enough to ensure that at least one of the company’s board of directors was an appointee of the government.

Not surprisingly, the passage of this law caused huge alarm among private investors, most of whom made haste to sell their shares to whoever was willing to buy them. With the price of publicly-listed companies’ shares plummeting, the opportunity naturally arose for the state to step in and acquire (at a huge discount) an even greater share of the nation’s leading businesses. [Labour Finance Minister, Michael Cullen, could have done the same with Tranzrail when their shares hit rock-bottom in 2003. His refusal to do so cost the taxpayers approximately $400 million!]

With the socialist writing now extremely clear on China’s wall, the remaining large-scale privately-owned Chinese businesses negotiated whatever deals they could with the Communist Government and exited the market. By 1960 the private-sector economy of China had all but ceased to exist.

China’s re-embrace of the market in the 1980s offers ample proof that the process is readily reversible (even if “Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics” is a very different beast from the neo-liberal variety familiar to us in the West).

It should be clear, however, even from this brief description of the socialisation of the Chinese economy, how very right Dr Brash was to be alarmed at what he called the “political caprice and retrospective vandalism” of Mr Mallard. The financial spigot that prevents capitalism from becoming fatally dehydrated is, in practice, pathetically simple to shut off. Investors confronted with the prospect of even modest state interference at the microeconomic level will almost always cash-up and run.

And, of course, such microeconomic intervention is almost always complemented by a series of equally “persuasive” macroeconomic “reforms” – particularly in relation to taxation and the re-organisation of the labour market.

The deliberate undermining of investor confidence, combined with a concerted weakening of managerial prerogatives by the state and its legislatively empowered trade union allies, is all that a genuinely socialist government really needs to do to send the edifice of capitalism crashing to the ground.

Dr Brash gets it.

I wonder if Labour ever will?

This essay is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

Ten Years Ago This Week: "On The Back Of The Beast"

Monsters from the Id: In 2000 Global Capitalism's voracious animal spirits were already testing the regulatory boundaries. By 2008 the barriers had fallen and the Beast was loose.

WINZ, TVNZ, Airways, Terralink: the march of folly gathers momentum. Now, at last, the hard truths about governing in the ruins of New Zealand’s social-democratic culture are becoming clear to Labour and Alliance ministers: that all the moral signposts have rotted away beneath the garish signage of commercialisation; that the men in suits are beyond their control; that the media doesn’t care; that they are alone.

How have they responded? Michael Cullen talks of building bridges to the business community. Helen Clark reaches out to Maori. Jim Anderton courts favour in the provinces. Manic gestures – the autonomic responses of late-20th Century labourism – designed to mask a rising sense of panic in Government ranks.

It’s all gotten too big, too fast, too clever, too malevolent: the apparatus of the state totters precariously on the back of the global capitalist beast, and even those politicians who are its friends find it difficult to keep their seats. The idea that, somehow, the Beast might be controlled, guided – even tamed – is now exposed for the fantasy it always was.

The High Priests of the New World Order - the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank, the Fed - mutter their spells to the colossus, vainly attempting to convince their global congregation that it is moved by such imprecations. But the Beast heeds them not. Wreathed in a shimmering cloud of uncountable electronic conversations, it strides away towards a dark horizon.

Meanwhile the Order’s lesser acolytes - Don Brash, Gareth Morgan, Alex Sundakov - keep up the pretence of omniscience for the benefit of local believers. The Beast is angry, they intone. The Labour-Alliance Government’s attempts to rein it in – tax increases, the re-nationalisation of ACC, the Employment Relations Bill - have only succeeded in sharpening the focus of its panoptic gaze on this South Pacific backwater. The falling Kiwi Dollar, petrol price-hikes, rising interest rates: these are but the first manifestations of the Beast’s displeasure. Repent before it is too late! Beware the wrath of the Behemoth!

The talk-back hosts pick up the drum-beat. Day-in, day-out, the messages of futility and mismanagement are hammered home. Never mind that most of what passes for commentary from these dollar-stuffed ventriloquist dummies is a rancid mixture of deep-seated prejudice, unfounded rumour, and downright lies; the essence of all effective propaganda is repetition, repetition, repetition. The damage inflicted in the first six months of a left-wing government’s term may be slight, but by the thirty-sixth month the poison will be bubbling away nicely in the veins of the body politic.

How wistfully Helen Clark and Jim Anderton must look at the dismantled levers of the old machine. Ten years ago the state owned a nationwide radio network. In every New Zealand town, from Invercargill to Whangarei, there was a radio station with its own reporters and news editors, linked to a national news service. Fifteen years ago there was a state-owned television network, with a vibrant regional production arm, and a serious news and current affairs division. Back then there was at least the possibility of an alternative message being received by the electorate. Today the New Zealand media is owned by Independent News, News Corp, Australian Consolidated Press, and CanWest – all of them convinced that "there is no alternative". For its part, TVNZ appears to be out to get this government before it gets them.

It’s in the air, this awful presentiment of disaster, odourless, colourless and deadly - like Sarin Gas. Labour-Alliance know they rode to power on a tide of fear and exhaustion – not confidence and energy. All that’s been keeping them up is the polls - and the polls are falling.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion of Friday, 19 May 2000.

Ten Years Ago This Week (The First 100 Days)

The Helen & Jim Show: The signing of the Labour-Alliance coalition agreement (above) ushered in a period of frenetic promise-keeping by the new government. Not everyone, however, was impressed. By the winter of 2000 the business community was threatening Clark and Anderton with a full-scale investment strike.

MEMO TO: Heather Simpson – Dept. of Prime Minister & Cabinet
FROM: Prolewatch Public Relations
RE: The Government’s First 100 Days

Gidday Heather,

Here’s the cut-down version of our assessment of the Government’s first 100 days that you asked for.

So far so good, we reckon. Even Phil Goff’s mob admits that Helen’s doing brilliantly, and as for the bleeding heart liberals and the arty-farty types – well – who needs Ecstasy when you’ve got a progressive woman Prime Minister! No, as far as the mood on the street’s concerned, you can tell Helen that Labour’s got it sussed.

We’re a bit worried about Jim though. What the hell was all that BS on Holmes about! Jeez, he made that Aussie journo sound intelligent – and that’s not an easy thing to do! Old Jimbo’s going to have to watch himself. Rhetoric’s fine in opposition, but when you’re in government people expect you to know the answers.

To be fair though, it’s not just Jim who’s got people worried, the whole Alliance has a big question mark hanging over it these days. People are saying: "What’s the point of having two left-wing parties? Why doesn’t the Alliance just get back together with Labour?" It’s a fair question. We foresee all kinds of difficulties for Jim and his team as the next election rolls around. Who should they compete with – your lot or the Greens? Jim’s a shrewd bugger, but he might have met his match with this problem.

Still, it’s an ill-wind etc. If Jim has led the Alliance into a dead-end, Laila Harré might be just the gal to lead them out of it. She’s young, smart, politically very savvy – and people are beginning to notice.

Her work with Margaret Wilson on the Employment Relations Bill got all the union heavies into a right old tizzy. Seems she actually forced them to do some thinking – not a pretty sight!

The bosses have noticed her too. They keep asking Matt McCarten: "Is she really as Hard-Left as people say?" To which Matt replies: "Well, she’s hard, and she’s left – and that’s a much more dangerous combination!"

Speaking of the bosses, you’re going to have to keep an eye on them over the next few months. Our spies in the Employers Federation tell us that they’ve never seen their members so rarked up. Re-nationalising ACC was bad enough, but Margaret and Laila’s Employment Relations Bill has driven them into a cold fury.

Don’t underestimate them, Heather. Labour, the Alliance, and the Greens might command a majority in Parliament, but the bosses still rule in the workplace, and all those pen-pushers in the bureaucracy sing from the New Right’s song-sheet – not yours.

And whatever else you do, never mistake silence for compliance. Plots are being hatched and plans are being laid, and none of them are designed to do Helen and Jim any good.

Check out One Network News - you’ll catch our drift. Coverage of the Employment Relations Bill is inter-spliced with scary footage of scuffles on the picket lines and monster trade union marches. Michael Cullen’s Super Scheme is trashed by a couple of workers from a roading gang.

Helen might have picked a fight with the wrong people when she let fly at TVNZ. Getting rid of Roseanne Meo was all very well, but Marian Hobbs will have to take a few more scalps before that lot settles down.

Still, they’ll keep. Right now Kiwis are just enjoying the novelty of a Government that actually keeps its promises. Enjoy what remains of the honeymoon – but don’t forget: it’ll be the Coalition’s last 100 days – not its first - that keeps it in power.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion of Friday, 17 March 2000.