Is Another Aotearoa Possible?

The Utopian Viewpoint: The dream of building a new and much improved society is as old as Plato. The perennial problem with such utopian schemes, however, is that what promises to be a collective dream all-too-easily translates into an individual nightmare. New Harmony by F. Bate 1838 (This carefully planned industrial community was proposed by the utopian British Capitalist, Robert Owen.)

"ANOTHER AOTEAROA Is Possible" – that’s the hopeful title of a conference getting underway in Mangere tomorrow morning. This grand political hui – featuring some of New Zealand’s leading leftists – was conceived with not one, but two agendas. Or, to employ the steely jargon of yesterday’s revolutionaries: a Maximum Programme and a Minimum Programme.

For the Maximum Programme to prevail, the radical Unite Union leader, Matt McCarten, had to attract 5 to 10 percent support in last Saturday’s Mana by-election. If he’d ended the evening with 1,200 to 1,500 votes, Te Wananga O Aotearoa’s Mangere campus – the conference venue – would almost certainly have witnessed the birth of a "New Left Party".

Unfortunately for the Conference organisers, Mr McCarten ended up attracting the support of just 3.6 percent of Mana voters. This failure to surpass even the 5 percent MMP threshold means that tomorrow’s conference agenda will default to its Minimum Programme: "a day of dialogue with activists against injustice and inequality".

Apparently, "Another Aotearoa" is not possible – at least, not this weekend. Rather than the perennial struggle against injustice and inequality, surely this is the problem everyone attending tomorrow’s conference should come to grips with:

"Why isn’t it possible?"

The British historian, Simon Schama, argues that revolutions are born of two volatile and often conflicting emotional states: Hope and Desperation. What, then, are New Zealanders’ hopes? And how desperate are they to fulfil them? That’s what the "New Leftists" attending tomorrow’s conference have to determine.

There can be little dispute that many of the people living in electorates like Mana are becoming increasingly desperate. Recently released statistics detailing the declining real incomes of Maori and Pasifika families make that shamefully clear. But, to give their desperation a radical political edge, someone or something must inspire them with hope.

If the low turnout of 55 percent is any guide, hope’s in pretty short supply among Mana’s desperate poor. With so many of the Left’s natural constituency unwilling to even participate in the by-election, the best Labour’s Kris Fa’afoi and Unite’s Matt McCarten seemed capable of inspiring was either an apathetic shrug of the shoulders or a grudging trip to the polling booth.

This lack of enthusiasm on the part of the poor was in sharp contrast to the mood of the actually wealthy or "aspirational" supporters of National’s Hekia Parata. Their generally hopeful disposition brought the Right’s feisty Maori diva perilously close to relieving Labour of it’s ninth safest seat.

The genius of Capitalism lies in the way it combines the promise of personal transformation with "equal" access to the cultural, legal and financial mechanisms required to bring it about. Of course, not everyone possesses the knowledge, the confidence, or the skill to make these mechanisms work for them. But most people do not attribute these deficiencies to weaknesses in the capitalist system – they attribute them to weaknesses in themselves.

Social-democracy’s appeal lay in its determination to make the capitalist’s promise of equal access to the mechanism’s of personal transformation real. Public health, public education, gainful employment: make these things universally available and the social barriers to individual achievement will disappear.

After that, however, it’s up to you.

The Far Left has always rejected this "reactionary" proposition. And therein lies its problem.

Presumably, the new Aotearoa will be a place from which injustice and inequality have been banished – an unquestionably desirable Minimum Programme. But this new, this "other" Aotearoa must offer the individual something more than just social security. Our brave new world needs a Maximum Programme.

Because, if the urge to enlarge the scope of individual achievement; "to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield" until one has tested the boundaries of human experience, "become all that you can be", is also banished from the New Left Party’s utopia, then I fear it will never clear even the lowest threshold of public acceptance.

"A man’s reach should exceed his grasp," wrote the poet Robert Browning, "or what’s a heaven for?"

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 26 November 2010.

Getting The Message

Loud and Clear: The Mana By-Election result not only shows the importance of getting people to vote, but of giving them something to vote for.

SOMETIMES all it takes to set off a landslide is the sudden dislodgement of a couple of pebbles.

Today, the "green" political brand is so potent that no major party can afford to issue a manifesto without at least paying lip-service to its core principle of "sustainability".

It was not always so. In the early 1970s New Zealand was still the sort of country where drowning lakes and rivers in the name of cheaper power was considered good politics by both the Right and the Left.

That was before the "Save Manapouri Campaign" – a mass political movement which for the first time successfully challenged, on a national scale, the view of "progress" which attributed no intrinsic value to New Zealand’s wild and beautiful places.

That was the first pebble.

The second pebble was the Values Party. Launched just a few months out from the 1972 General Election by a young journalist named Tony Brunt, Values was the world’s first "green" political movement to wage a nationwide electoral campaign.

Though Labour ran away with the 1972 election, the Values Party exerted an extraordinary influence on the campaign. Its superb advertising (produced virtually free-of-charge by a couple of sympathetic cinematographers at the National Film Unit) gave focus to the widespread longing, especially among the young, for a political vision that encompassed something more than the endless accumulation of material wealth. Though it only secured a minuscule 2 percent of the popular vote, the Values Party opened a door for Labour: a door upon which was written: "Another world is possible".

Much of this has been forgotten. The landslide upon which most political historians focus their attention is the landslide that swept Robert Muldoon’s National Party to victory in 1975. Viewed from the perspective of 35 years, however, it is clear that the dramatic shift in people’s perceptions of the environment – the shift represented by Values' best-selling manifesto, Beyond Tomorrow – has proved to be the more enduring.

Analysing last weekend’s Mana by-election results, I’m wondering if we may be witnessing another seminal political moment. Like the 1972 General Election, it’s possible that the closely fought Mana contest holds some crucially important lessons for the major parties.

At the most superficial level, the result was a clear moral triumph for the Government and its very effective candidate, Hekia Parata. In a country only slowly emerging from recession; in an Opposition-held electorate perfectly positioned to send the Government "a message"; it almost beggars belief that the by-election campaign ended with a 14 percent swing towards the governing party.

Indeed, without radical left-wing trade unionist, Matt McCarten’s, last minute entry to the by-election race it's possible Ms Parata could've won the seat.

Mr McCarten saw the Mana by-election as an opportunity to send his own message. Not to the National Government of John Key, but to Phil Goff’s Labour Party.

Like the Values Party in 1972, he was determined to make Labour understand that "another world is possible". A world in which it is possible to campaign (and, ultimately, to govern) "as if you were free".

His challenge to Labour was to give on-the-ground, practical expression to the progressive policy initiatives announced at its Annual Conference by campaigning – as he did – on the issues of low wages, inadequate housing and the urgent need for job creation.

Labour’s candidate, the woefully inexperienced TV journalist, Kris Fa’afoi, wasn’t equal to meeting this last-minute challenge, and Mr McCarten’s dramatic intervention prompted the by now thoroughly alarmed Labour hierarchy into pouring everything it had into the Mana campaign.

It was this massive intervention which ensured Mr Fa’afoi’s victory – albeit with a sharply reduced share of the popular vote.

To the cynical observer, Mr McCarten’s 3.6 percent share of the Mana vote may seem derisory. But then, so did the 2 percent share won by Values in 1972. Besides, there are moments in politics when, as Prime Minister Key told Ms Parata’s jubilant supporters on Saturday night: "losing is winning."

Hopefully Labour’s "got the message" Mr McCarten was sending it throughout the campaign. That, if it is to successfully counter Mr Key’s (obviously still effective) appeal to "aspirational" Kiwis, it has to maintain the sort of "on the street" presence for which Mr McCarten and his radical Unite union are justifiably famous, and which, ultimately, is all that rescued Mr Fa’afoi from catastrophic defeat.

But, even more important than getting Labour out on the street, Mr McCarten’s candidacy – like Values' campaign in 1972 – should remind Labour that getting people to vote is only half the battle: the other half is giving them something to vote for.

In 1972, that was the environment. In 2011 it should be for the two million hard-working New Zealanders whose greatest aspiration is simply to make ends meet.

Get that message, Labour – or lose.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 23 November 2010.

As If You Were Free

The "right time" is right now: Matt McCarten's campaign for the working-class parliamentary seat of Mana is a timely reminder that the fight for justice preceeds us, envelops us, and will go on long after us. And though, as Marx observed, working people are everywhere in chains, the most important revolutionary lesson is learning to act "as if you were free".

WHEN MATT McCARTEN told me he was thinking of putting his name forward for the Mana by-election, I shuddered inwardly.

"For God’s sake, Matt," I wanted to say, "what about your health?"

I didn’t, of course. I just waited for Matt to make his case and, as always, he produced a host of compelling reasons for proceeding with his plan.

By choosing Kris Faafoi, a journalist with no discernible links to either the Labour Party or the wider progressive movement – until he became Phil Goff’s press secretary – Labour’s leadership have made it very clear that, as far as the Mana electorate is concerned, it’s going to be business as usual.

Even though, as Matt pointed out to me in the most forceful terms, "business as usual" in the streets of Porirua means poverty, unemployment, homelessness, crime and despair.

The political analyst in me pursed his lips and shook his head.

"With the Labour Party moving steadily to the Left," he intoned disapprovingly, "this is precisely the wrong time to challenge Goff’s hand-picked candidate in an important by-election in one of the party’s safest seats."

Then I caught the gleam in Matt’s eye, and I told my inner political analyst to go stick his objections where the sun don’t shine.

Because if being on the Left means waiting for the "right time" to fight for your principles, then, as the hero of Howard Spring’s wonderful political novel, Fame Is The Spur, discovered, when the fight comes to you, the bright sword of principle can no longer be drawn. Through all those years, while you were waiting for the "right time", the sword’s blade was rusting fast to the scabbard.

Matt McCarten has never been that sort of leftist. His sword never rests long enough in its scabbard to gather a speck of rust. And the trade union he built from scratch – Unite! – has never waited for the "right time" to do anything.

The way Matt set about organising the supposedly "unorganisable" workers of the service sector always reminded me of General Woundwort, the fearless rabbit leader in Watership Down. No matter how formidable the enemy, he always attacked. Watching Unite’s young, low-paid workers take on MacDonald’s, Sky City Casino, and Restaurant Brands, you could almost hear General Woundwort’s rallying cry rising-up from the picket lines: "Come on lads, dogs aren’t dangerous!"

And now Matt’s out there in the Spring sunshine, standing on the street-corners of Mana with his crew, talking to state house tenants about homelessness; to low-paid workers about a minimum wage of $15.00 per hour; to unemployed workers about creating jobs.

And there’s work to be done. Matt’s canvassers have already discovered several empty state houses, while just a few streets away a young family, crowded into a friend’s garage, waits for Housing New Zealand to find them somewhere to live. The empty properties are already being vandalised and the copper piping is long gone.

"What do we need?", asks Unite organiser, Joe Carolan: "We’ve got carpenters, we’ve got plumbers, we’ve got electricians. We can fix this place up. We’ve got people in need. A young family in need … Are you telling me that the only thing we need is to wait for a bureaucrat for another year or two years? We should move people in now."

That’s the way the Labour Party used to talk – back in the days when it still remembered how to fight.

I asked Matt if he’d heard of Slavoj Zizek – the Slovenian socialist currently setting a principled cat among the fat, pragmatic pigeons of the European Left.

"I’m busy, Chris", he chuckled, "of course I haven’t."

"Well, Matt", I replied, "Zizek is challenging Europe’s social-democrats to stop looking over their shoulder at the European Central Bank; to govern ‘as if they were free’.

"Maybe that’s what you should ask the Mana electors, Matt. To stop looking over their shoulder at Labour.

"Could be your slogan.

"Vote – as if you were free."

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 12 November 2010.