Australia's Dysfunctional Democracy.

"Don't think of it as a hand on your shoulder, Malcolm. Think of it as a knife in your back." The ultimate beneficiary of the Liberal Party meltdown, Scott Morrison, is a deeply conservative evangelical Christian from one of Sydney’s leafiest suburbs. He replaces Turnbull largely because his name isn’t Peter Dutton – and because his face doesn’t remind the voting public quite so much of Harry Potter’s Lord Voldemort! In policy terms, however, there is very little that distinguishes Morrison from his ultra-conservative colleagues.

NEW ZEALANDERS WATCHED, with mounting incredulity, the meltdown of Australia’s Liberal-National coalition government. What unfolded appeared to be driven almost entirely by a toxic mixture of personal antipathies and oversized egos. Nowhere in the whole unedifying political saga did the interests of the Australian people appear to get a look in.

Mind you, the Australian people had made it easy for Malcolm Turnbull’s enemies. When questioned by the pollsters they had failed to draw a sufficiently clear distinction between the Prime Minister and his increasingly dysfunctional Party Room. Had they praised Malcolm Turnbull, and damned the Liberal Party, then the cause of governmental integrity and stability might have been strong enough to repel Tony Abbott, Peter Dutton and their reckless co-conspirators.

As it was, the polls and a swag of dispiriting by-election results in Queensland and elsewhere across Australia provided Abbott and Dutton with the pretext they needed for a leadership spill. Never mind that the declining popularity of the Liberals was almost entirely attributable to the party’s conservative faction’s blank refusal to accept that most Australians wanted nothing to do with their reactionary ideas.

Not even the decisive result of the informal plebiscite on Gay Marriage was enough to convince them that they were out-of-touch with mainstream Australia. They clung to the demonstrably false notion that “Real Australians” were with them.

Though fantastical, this conservative conviction was constantly reinforced by reactionaries in the news media. The views of a decided minority of the Australian electorate were thus supplied with amplification out of all proportion to their true demographic weight. As Dr Goebbels discovered more than eighty years ago: a fantasy repeated often enough will, eventually, take on the colour of reality.

Poor Malcolm Turnbull was, therefore, dammed if he did attempt to reassert the liberalism implicit in his party’s name; and damned if he didn’t. The deeply conservative ideology of the Liberal PM, John Howard, has become practically ineradicable from Liberal Party ranks. Turnbull may have been able to oust Abbot from The Lodge, but he could never muster the numbers to oust the conservative faction’s racism, misogyny, homophobia and purblind climate change denialism.

The ultimate winner of the Liberal Party leadership, Scott Morrison, is a deeply conservative evangelical Christian from one of Sydney’s leafiest suburbs. He replaces Turnbull largely because his name isn’t Peter Dutton – and because his face doesn’t remind the voting public quite so much of Harry Potter’s Lord Voldemort! In policy terms, however, there is very little that distinguishes Morrison from his ultra-conservative colleagues.

But, it is with these largely cosmetic considerations that the Australian political system’s willingness to be guided by the wishes of the electorate ends. The notion that the major political parties might still aggregate and organise the interests of clear and readily comprehensible chunks of the population: businessmen and professionals; shopkeepers and farmers; workers and intellectuals; has long since ceased to correspond to any recognisable description of political reality on either side of the Tasman.

To be fair, most of the voting public has enthusiastically reciprocated the politicians’ lack of interest. Over the course of the past 30-40 years membership of political parties in both New Zealand and Australia has plummeted. Most voters now draw little distinction between a Member of Parliament and any other variety of highly-paid public servant. The crucial democratic role which the people’s representatives are supposed to play is no longer generally appreciated. As the unedifying spectacle of Malcolm Turnbull’s deposition unfolded before their eyes over the third week in August, the response of most Aussies was to angrily instruct MPs to: “Do your f***ing job!”

But, if the people are no longer sovereign – then who is? It’s a tricky question. In the days of Robert Menzies or Rob Muldoon it was pretty clear to everyone who ran the show. Nowadays, however, respect for the party leader tends to last only as long as the polls remain favourable. But, when public support falters, the most treacherous and ambitious politicians look in the mirror and ask the oldest question is politics: “Why not me?”

The historical precedent, therefore, is not that of a powerful monarchy like England or France, but of Poland or Scotland. Weak kingdoms brought down by the unceasing intrigues and inveterate treachery of aristocrats who cared more for themselves than they did for their country.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 31 August 2018.

Governing For The Boardroom – From The Barroom.

Cheers, Tony! As an opposition leader, Abbott made the Barroom his own, championing its prejudices and magnifying its fears. Upon becoming prime minister, however, he attempted to ram the Boardroom’s agenda down the Barroom’s throat. As a strategy it proved fatal. The Barroom turned decisively against him, driving his government underwater in the polls. It’s hard to help the Boardroom when you’re drowning.

 

THE ROLLING of Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, offers some interesting lessons in the conduct of right-wing politics. The multi-millionaire businessman and lawyer, Malcolm Turnbull, who instigated the “spill”, is generally identified as the candidate of Australia’s boardrooms – someone to finally make good on his predecessor’s promise that “Australia is open for business!” Abbott, on the other hand, might best be described as the candidate of the Australian barroom. A politician with whom the “little Aussie Battler”, and his mates, were more than happy to have a beer with.

 

Turnbull caught many Kiwis off-guard by holding up their own prime minister, John Key, as the very model of a modern conservative leader. Was Turnbull’s fulsome accolade inspired by the fact that Key (also a multi-millionaire) seemed to be as comfortable in the barrooms of New Zealand as he was in its boardrooms – maybe even more so? Acutely aware that in the Party Room he had just left, Boardroom and Barroom were at daggers drawn, and that he faced a Herculean task in drawing the patrician and plebeian Liberals back together, Turnbull can be forgiven for envying Key’s ability to keep a foot in both camps.

 

The prime minister John Key defeated, Helen Clark, had tried to do the same, but with only limited success. No matter how many times she speeded to an All Black test-match, or waved at the Warriors’ Rugby League fans, very few (if any) New Zealanders were fooled. Everyone knew that Clark was more comfortable at the Opera than the footy. And the blokes who drank beer never really saw themselves sipping Chardonnay with “Helen”.

 

On the face of it, this shouldn’t have mattered. Clark was, after all, a Labour Party leader. The loyalty of the blokes in the barroom was, supposedly, a political given. And, for a little while, it held. Clark’s gender, which, normally, would have counted against her in many barrooms, was neutralised by the fact that the Nats had also chosen a woman to lead them – and a pretty scary one at that! It did not take long, however, for the Barroom’s welcome to wear out.

 

No matter how hard she tried to signal her endorsement of the plebs’ pleasures, the conviction grew that it was all a little disingenuous. To the blokes in the barroom, Clark came across as someone who inhabited a different world. Not the boardroom, exactly, although she was doing everything she could to be accepted there, but another sort of room. They might have struggled to recall its proper name, but they knew exactly what sort of room Clark would feel most comfortable sitting in – a university common-room.

 

Key observed the steady alienation of Clark’s barroom allies and drew the appropriate lesson. Whatever else he did as New Zealand’s prime minister, he must never allow the blokes in the barroom to form even the faintest outline of a notion that he thought he was better than they were, or that he considered their views to be bigoted and ill-informed. If the Barroom listened to Newstalk-ZB, or Radio Sport, or The Edge – then he would talk to them from there. The listeners to Radio New Zealand’s “Morning Report” would just have to suck it up. The ones who voted National would forgive his nonappearances. The others didn’t matter.

 

John Key: Just one of the guys.

 

The Boardroom might have sniffed at this sort of pandering to the hoi-polloi, but Key knew better than to worry too much about the prejudices of the “1 Percent”. They may control an obscene percentage of the nation’s wealth, but their share of the nation’s votes would always and only be – 1 percent. Not that as a One-Percenter, himself, Key was in any way unsympathetic to the Boardroom’s needs – far from it. What he’d learned from Clark, however, is that, in a democracy, it pays to make haste slowly – always allowing time for the doubters to be persuaded.

 

As an opposition leader, Abbott made the Barroom his own, championing its prejudices and magnifying its fears. Upon becoming prime minister, however, he attempted to ram the Boardroom’s agenda down the Barroom’s throat. As a strategy it proved fatal. The Barroom turned decisively against him, driving his government underwater in the polls. It’s hard to help the Boardroom when you’re drowning.

 

If Malcolm Turnbull’s wise, he’ll cultivate John Key’s taste for beer.

 

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, 25 September 2015.

Memory and Forgetting: Why Knowing Labour’s History Is So Important.

The Spirit Of Progressivism: The Czech-born writer, Milan Kundera, wrote that: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”. In a curious way, the Labour Party was founded to keep the memory of the Liberal Party’s achievements, and of its vision of an economically just and socially progressive New Zealand, alive.

 

IT WAS 99 YEARS AGO, this week, that the principal elements of the New Zealand Left began arriving in Wellington. At a time of extraordinary social stress, they were gathering in search of unity and a clear way forward. Yes, the trade unions were well represented, but they were by no means the only progressive voices present. The New Zealand Labour Party, which was born 99 years ago, in July 1916, saw itself, rather, as a vehicle for the “democratic public” – that fraction of New Zealand society for whom political participation has always meant more than simply endorsing the decisions of the powerful.

 

The trade unionists and journalists, clergymen and temperance campaigners who came together that July were both alarmed and appalled at the imminent introduction of military conscription. They saw it as evidence of just how completely the war was swallowing New Zealanders’ civil liberty. The ruthless brutality of Bill Massey’s government; it’s willingness to deploy deadly force against its opponents; was raising doubts about the true purposes of the war.

 

What, exactly, were so many young men dying to defend? What had become of progressive New Zealand? Of “God’s Own Country”? The relentless din of wartime propaganda made it difficult to remember the 20-year-long Liberal Era of John Ballance and Richard Seddon. Censorship and sedition trials made it difficult – even dangerous – to object to what had taken its place. War mania had rendered rational argument impossible. The “democratic public” of New Zealand felt themselves to be (and, almost certainly, were) a beleaguered minority.

 

Over the course of the next twelve months much will be written and spoken about the formation of the New Zealand Labour Party. The celebration of the party’s centenary will be used, as all such occasions are, to bolster the authority of those currently in command of both the party and the wider labour movement. Every effort will be made to convince the Labour Party members and trade unionists of today that their present leaders are worthy successors to the men and women of 1916.

 

That is why it is so important that New Zealand’s left-wing historians spend the next twelve months acquainting today’s progressives with the facts of Labour’s history. They must loudly give the lie to those who attempt to deny the radicalism of Labour’s past; and who argue that moderation and compromise have always been the party’s watchwords. The blatantly political purpose of such historical revisionism is to promote the idea that the extreme timidity and ideological conservatism of today’s Labour Party is nothing out of the ordinary; that Labour has always been timid and conservative.

 

Nothing is more likely to ensure Labour’s demise than the triumph of this right-wing revisionist account of its history. Labour’s future depends upon how truthfully her struggle on behalf of the “democratic public” is retold. The progressives of today deserve to know how a beleaguered minority, in spite of vicious government persecution and constant media vilification, eventually transformed itself into a radical majority, and how that radical majority changed this country forever – and for the better.

 

The Czech-born writer, Milan Kundera, wrote that: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”. In a curious way, the Labour Party was founded to keep the memory of the Liberal Party’s achievements, and of its vision of an economically just and socially progressive New Zealand, alive. Over the course of the next year the struggle to prevent Labour’s huge contribution to the history of New Zealand from being forgotten, or, worse still, misrepresented, must be waged unceasingly.

 

If the “democratic public” is ever again to become a radical majority, then the memory of how it fought – and won – the battles of the past needs to be kept alive in the hearts and minds of every progressive New Zealander.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 10 July 2015.

Let Them Eat Cheese

 Cheese On Toast: Not for New Zealanders the reckless, ideologically-driven fiscal mayhem that Joe Hockey saw fit to visit upon their Australian cousins. Here in the Shaky Isles, Finance Minister Bill English delivered up a steady-as-she-goes financial statement so wholesome and tasty that even Labour’s own supporters could not resist giving it a big tick when the pollsters came calling.

 

FINDING A CONTRAST more dramatic than the respective receptions of the Australian and New Zealand budgets would not be easy. With hardly a sector of Australian society spared the heat of Joe Hockey’s fiscal blowtorch, a bushfire of dissent has erupted across a broad political front. Not surprisingly, Australian public opinion has turned decisively against the Liberal-National Coalition. So much so that, according to the New Zealand National Party’s pollster, and well-known blogger, David Farrar:

 

“I don’t think the question anymore is whether Tony Abbott has lost the next election, and the Coalition will be a one term Government. I think the question is now how many terms in opposition will they have?”

 

What has angered Australians the most are the crude ideological justifications offered up by Tony Abbott’s government. Treasurer Joe Hockey’s swingeing fiscal cuts were, he insisted, a necessary response to a genuine fiscal crisis. Rescuing Australia from the long-term economic imbalances inherited from the previous Labor Government would require sacrifices from every sector of Australian society.

 

Hockey’s economic justifications have been greeted with scorn by just about every Australian economist not infected with the Australian Centre for Independent Studies’ (CIS) uniquely virulent strain of neoliberalism. These resistant economists have pointed out that Australia’s economy is more securely foundationed than most comparable countries, and that bringing the deficit under control in no way necessitates the social carnage Hockey’s budget threatens to create.

 

So why did Abbott, Hockey and their colleagues sign up to such a self-defeating document? To answer that question it is necessary to examine the Australian neo-liberal virus more closely. Cultured for nearly forty years in its New South Wales laboratory, and marketed under the “Classical Liberal” brand, Australian neoliberalism not only features all the usual justifications for restoring to the ruling elites as many of the powers stripped from them by successive waves of progressive reform as possible, but it also insists that this can be done without incurring a democratic backlash.

 

Much like the ACT Party here in New Zealand (which maintains close personal and philosophical associations with the CIS) the far-Right faction of the Australian Liberal Party purports to believe that if its policies are explained calmly and rationally to ordinary voters, then eventually the scales will fall from their eyes and they will understand that policies which hitherto had appeared to be directed against their interests are, in fact, aimed at propelling them into prosperity.

 

Joe Hockey: Expecting ordinary people to vote for their own impoverishment.

 

In spite of all historical evidence to the contrary, these neoliberals simply refuse to give up their belief that ordinary people, rationally propositioned, can be made to vote for their own impoverishment. It is an ideological affliction which both Labour and the conservative parties on both sides of the Tasman have struggled to confine to the margins of electoral politics since the early 1980s – not always successfully.

 

The Australian Labor Party negotiated the international neoliberal surge of the 1980s and 90s with particular skill (and thus avoided the decade-long civil war that so debilitated the New Zealand labour movement). The Australian Liberals under the (mostly) pragmatic John Howard were similarly successful. (Setting aside the brief reign of the arch-neoliberal ideologue, John Hewson.)

 

The equally pragmatic National leader, Jim Bolger, was unable to drive his own arch-neoliberal, Finance Minister Ruth Richardson, out of his cabinet until the fall-out from her “Mother of All Budgets” had driven National to the very edge of destruction and contributed substantially to the demise of New Zealand’s First-Past-the-Post electoral system. The resurrection of arch-neoliberal extremism under Dr Don Brash came very close to unleashing fiscal savagery of the sort Abbott and Hockey are currently perpetrating. With a little bit of luck, however (not to mention the Labour voters of South Auckland) National and New Zealand managed to dodge Dr Brash’s bullets.

 

Which brings us to John Key, Bill English and New Zealand’s 2014 “Cheese-on-Toast Budget”. Not for New Zealanders the reckless, ideologically-driven fiscal mayhem that Joe Hockey saw fit to visit upon their Australian cousins. Here in the Shaky Isles, Finance Minister Bill English delivered up a steady-as-she-goes financial statement so wholesome and tasty that even Labour’s own supporters could not resist giving it a big tick when the pollsters came calling. With increases to paid parental leave, and free doctor’s visits for children under 13 years, how could they not?

 

Which is not to say that English’s budget is entirely ideology-free – it isn’t. It’s just that the history of the past thirty years in New Zealand (if not in Australia) has taught the more thoughtful and moderate elements of the Right that it is better to give a little than to take a lot. The protection of elite power, conservatism’s fundamental mission, is best achieved by surrounding the privileged with crowds of contented citizens munching cheese-on-toast – not with angry mobs waving pitchforks.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, May 27, 2014.

A Lurch To Sanity

Reaching For The Red Pill: David Cunliffe and Labour have a rapidly dwindling period of time in which to convince "Middle New Zealand" that its programme represents not a lurch to the left - but a lurch to sanity.

BOLDNESS IN POLITICS is rare. Major political moves are routinely pre-tested in focus groups and opinion polls before being announced. The untested, out-of-left-field appointment of Matt McCarten as David Cunliffe’s new chief-of-staff consequently caught New Zealand’s political class almost completely off-guard.

 

Nowhere was this more embarrassingly apparent than in the reaction of Helen Kelly, President of the Council of Trade Unions (CTU). Asked to comment on the rumour that McCarten was in line to replace Wendy Brandon as Cunliffe’s CoS, Kelly retorted that such an appointment was “highly unlikely”. (A spectacular demonstration of out-of-the-loop-ness which should dispel, if only for a moment, the right-wing notion that the Labour Party takes its marching orders from the CTU!)

 

Like all genuine coups (and make no mistake, McCarten’s appointment was very much an Independence Square moment for the Labour Opposition) Cunliffe’s decision has hit the fast-forward button on Labour’s internal politics. Just as well, really, because until last Wednesday it appeared to be operating in slow-motion.

 

Exactly how long McCarten’s galvanising influence will last, however, rests entirely in Cunliffe’s hands. The boldness of inviting this country’s leading left-winger to occupy the office next to the Leader of the Opposition’s does require some explanation.

 

Not, of course, to the Labour voters who sat out the 2011 election on the grounds that the party’s parliamentary team really didn’t seem to have their hearts in the fight. They will have “got” McCarten’s appointment instantaneously and it will have cheered them up no end.

 

Can the same be said of the middle-class professional or the small business owner?

 

It is Middle New Zealand that needs to hear the reasons why the appointment of the “hard left” McCarten is not, in the words of political journalist, John Armstrong: “confirmation that Labour is shifting markedly and permanently to the left under Cunliffe's leadership”. And, if it is, why they should not be feeling afraid – very afraid?

 

In framing an answer to that question, Cunliffe could do a lot worse than let himself be guided by McCarten’s own response to the Prime Minister’s insinuation that his appointment represents a lunatic lurch to the Left.

 

“I’m bemused that the Prime Minister calls my appointment in a non-policy-making role a lurch to the left […] When did it become so outrageous to call for the hourly minimum wage to be raised to $15, or argue that the breadwinners of a family deserve a living wage for a decent day’s work? When does affordable housing for all, a decent job and support for families to support children get a good start in life become so unreasonable?”

 

For practically the whole of its democratic history, New Zealand has been the home of what one French visitor called “socialism without doctrines”. Beginning with the Liberal Party in the 1890s, most New Zealand politicians (including a number of right-wing leaders like the Reform Party’s Gordon Coates and National’s Keith Holyoake) have looked to the state – as the only reliable possessor of the resources and expertise required to develop a very lightly populated country – to take the lead in nation-building.

 

New Zealand’s relatively tiny population probably also explains its inhabitants’ longstanding hostility to entrenched economic inequality and the social injustices that follow in its wake. New Zealanders insist that every citizen be given a “fair go” and that their access to education, health-care and a decent place to live should not be determined by the size of their bank balance. The ravages of the Great Depression added a job, a living wage and the maintenance of a social welfare safety-net to this list of things that every Kiwi has to have.

 

In many countries default policy-settings of such collective generosity would be condemned as  “socialist”, and fiercely resisted. But, between 1890 and 1984 large-scale state involvement in the New Zealand economy and the provision of universal social services became the equivalent of our political wallpaper.

 

Cunliffe’s challenge is to make middle-class New Zealanders understand that it is not the policy package of a Labour Party determined to return to roots that they have to fear, but the extreme policy prescriptions of the neoliberal Right. He needs to explain that between 1983 and 2013, the policies which caused the number of Kiwi kids living below the poverty line to nearly double were not the policies of Richard Seddon, Mickey Savage or even Rob Muldoon, but of Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson.

 

It was the policies of the latter (and, yes, Cunliffe needs to acknowledge that one of them was a Labour finance minister) that were “outrageous”. That it was the sudden and utterly unmandated lurch towards neoliberalism that unleashed the economic and social madness of the last thirty years.

 

To win, Cunliffe must convince voters that Labour’s “lurch to the Left” is actually a long-delayed lurch to sanity.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 4 March 2014.