The Odd Couple.

Strange Political Bedfellows: Matthew Hooton’s support for Winston Peters’ New Zealand Futures Fund reflects the Radical Right’s newfound reluctance to bet everything on the efficacy of market forces.

AS IF HE WASN’T IN ENOUGH TROUBLE, Matthew Hooton has now come out for Winston Peters’ New Zealand Futures Fund (NZFF). Not only that, but he is also calling upon Peters to lower the company tax rate:

“A 12.5% company tax rate, not the current 28%, would be a much better bet [when it comes to attracting foreign investors] than relying on his or any other Prime Minister’s sales skills, along with limos or helicopters from the airport and PowerPoint presentations for visiting funds managers.”

Hooton has been calling for a radical re-design of the New Zealand economy for some time now. But, as the above quotation makes clear, he holds out very little hope that the National Party – let alone its present leader – is either ready, willing, or able to accomplish anything resembling substantive economic change.

Hooton’s support for Peters’ NZFF not only reflects his own personal disillusionment with National, but the Radical Right’s newfound reluctance to bet everything on the efficacy of laissez-faire. Hooton is doubtful, now, that even an economy geared rigorously to the preferences of the market will automatically allocate resources in the most effective and efficient fashion. Judging from his latest NZ Herald column, this gadfly of the Right has grown sceptical even of Act.

It is, however, difficult to tell whether Hooton’s scepticism of Act is fuelled by his perception that the party is too radical, or not radical enough. After all, by roughly halving the company tax rate, the New Zealand state would be denying itself close to nine billion dollars of revenue. The size of expenditure cuts required to fill a fiscal hole that big would likely render the country ungovernable. It is important, always, to bear in mind the extremity of Hooton’s economic and political radicalism.

That political commentators of Hooton’s ilk are losing confidence in both the virtues of right-wing centrism, and strict free-market orthodoxy, indicates an ideological shift of some significance. Just how significant will be indicated by whether or not the USA once again embraces, or rejects, the leadership of Donald Trump.

A victory for Trump would represent not just a repudiation of Kamala Harris’s half-hearted social-democracy, but a rejection of the whole concept of self-regulating markets. It would signal that the intense personalisation of leadership, long a feature of the political sphere, has migrated to the economic sphere. Right-wing voters have long sought a leader willing to bang politicians heads together. Now, it would seem, those same voters are wanting, and expecting, a leader who will bang corporations’ heads together.

The loss of confidence in Christopher Luxon’s leadership, registered in the polls, and unmistakeable in Hooton’s column, may be a reflection of the Prime Minister’s failure to manifest the head-banging qualities so many right-leaning voters were anticipating. Luxon may believe himself to be the sort of guy who can bounce India into a free trade agreement because he “gushes at them or squeezes their shoulder” – to deploy Hooton’s withering phrase – but a surprisingly large chunk of the Right’s electoral base simply aren’t buying it.

Another indicator of this economic personalisation was the readiness of Chris Bishop, Shane Jones and Simeon Brown to assume personal responsibility for setting New Zealand on a “fast track” to economic growth and prosperity. Were they, like Hooton, registering the rising impatience of at least a sizeable fraction of the electorate with conventional decision-making processes? “Just get the bloody job done!” Was that the message being sent to the Government in National’s focus-groups? And, if so, why did the Coalition refuse to heed it?

The answer to that question was on display in RNZ’s “30 With Guyon Espiner” interview with Labour’s finance spokesperson, Barbara Edmonds. In the course of that unedited half-hour, Edmonds exposed the acute tension that now exists between the intelligent politician’s understanding of just how critical the economic situation confronting New Zealand has become; the radical measures required to address it; and the dispiriting combination of intellectual lassitude and political cowardice that more-or-less guarantees that nothing will happen.

Bishop’s, Jones’ and Brown’s enforced backdown on the Fast Track legislation simply confirms that, in National’s ranks, as well as in Labour’s, doing nothing will always find more takers than doing something.

Could this be why Hooton opted to sing Peters’ praises on the pages of the Herald? Whatever else he may represent, “Winston” has always stood for the idea that “the man in the arena” has more to offer the world than those content to be guided by process and convention.

Following the rules of the game was a sound strategy when the game produced a society in which those who worked hard and kept their noses clean could anticipate a comfortable life for themselves and (more importantly) for their children. But, as the imminent prospect of a Trump victory makes clear, that anticipation lost what little purchase it had on realism long, long ago. At a time when so many of the promises of the powerful are best read as threats, more and more people are abandoning the whole democratic idea in favour of putting a strong leader in command, and giving him the freedom to get on with it.

National’s problem is that Christopher Luxon is a successful, private-sector bureaucrat. He has little time for the man in the arena, seeming more at home with the persons in the boardroom. Fond as he is of invoking the waning “mojo” of New Zealanders, Luxon displays an equal deficiency of that quality in his performance as prime minister. For all we know, of course, Luxon may possess all the qualities needed to haul New Zealand out of the Big Muddy. It’s just that, to date, he has declined to manifest them.

There was time when, presented with a faltering capitalism, the electorate could turn leftwards towards the bright (if untried) promises of socialism. No more. Half-a-century has passed since a Labour Government even vaguely reflecting socialist principles held office in New Zealand. That said, if Edmonds’ responses to Espiner offer any guide, the Labour Party of 2024 is miles away from unleashing Rogernomics 2.0, but no nearer to raising the revenue needed to keep what remains of New Zealand’s welfare state on life-support.

And, right there, the grim reality of New Zealand politics reveals itself. Labour has nothing to offer but process and convention, a failure of imagination and courage that it shares with the National Party. Act can only suggest that neoliberalism’s so-far-unavailing remedies be applied with increased rigor. The Greens and Te Pati Māori display nothing but messy ideological incontinence.

NZ First may not, in the end, have what’s needed to lead New Zealand into the “broad sunlit uplands” that Winston’s namesake promised, but, as Hooton’s column suggests, it still has “a man in the arena” shrewd enough to point the way.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 21 October 2024.

Chaotic Destinations.

Heading For Trouble - Or Away From It? Arguably the most effective pro-MMP poster stated simply: “If you’re looking for a good reason to vote in favour of MMP, just take a look at the people who want you to vote against it.” By the same logic, if National, Act, and the whole right-wing establishment are trying to scare New Zealanders into voting against a Labour-Green-Te Pāti Māori government, then maybe that’s the best possible reason to vote for their “Coalition of Chaos”.

“THE COALITION OF CHAOS”, that’s how Matthew Hooton and the right-wing commentariat are describing the putative Labour-Green-Te Pāti Māori parliamentary alliance. Which is a contradiction, of sorts, since the notion of New Zealanders voting in favour of chaos is, on its face, nonsensical. Then again, Hooton is more than shrewd enough to grasp that the mood of the electorate may be sufficiently volatile to generate precisely this result. As he has pointed out in recent commentaries, the combined vote of the two main parties, at 70 percent, is historically low. Nearly a third of electorate is “grumpy”. That’s a lot of pissed-off people. Chaos is an option.

But, Hooton’s chaos will only eventuate if Te Pāti Māori and, to a lesser extent, the Greens, are able to attract the support of a great many more young and/or disillusioned voters than usually make it to the polling-booth. Since neither party has the political organisation to mobilise a mass vote on their own, a higher than usual turn-out on 14 October will be a sociological – not a psephological – phenomenon. For some as-yet-unrecognised reason, tens-of-thousands of young and/or marginalised citizens will have arrived at the same conclusion: this time, casting a vote will make a difference.

What could lead them to such a conclusion? Paradoxically, it could be the Right’s crazy-screaming-horror campaign against the “Coalition of Chaos”.

Between them, National and Act already have approximately $7 million to spend – most of it over the next four months. More than enough to spread crazy-screaming-horror far and wide. Undoubtedly “Middle New Zealand” will run wild-eyed into the arms of the Right, terrified that a bloodthirsty mob of socialists, eco-warriors and revanchist Māori are coming for the family trust. The question is: will such a scare campaign only make those voters who were already walking towards National and Act break into a panic-stricken sprint? Who will it get them that they haven’t already got?

Advertisers – including political advertisers – generally create their product with a specific demographic in mind. The message they craft is for that particular demographic, and if they get the message, then the ad is counted a success. But, most ads contain multiple messages which, in the demographics not specifically targeted, may excite responses which were not in any way anticipated by their makers.

An ad for a motor vehicle retailing for $80,000, for example, will not be framed for a person living on the dole. And yet, such a person may well see the ad. He or she may notice that the people driving the luxury vehicle are all beautiful, thin, and moving through a physical and social landscape light-years from their own. The fast-moving sequence of images may, therefore, arouse intense feelings of exclusion and deprivation: angry fantasies of conquest and vengeance. Not at all what the ad’s makers intended.

In much the same way, a party political message contrived to inspire crazy-screaming-horror in middle-class Pakeha women who usually vote National, but who gave a vote-of-thanks to “Jacinda” in 2020, may convey a very different message to angry young Māori determined to escape from the impoverished environment in which they feel imprisoned. If the prospect of Te Pāti Māori becoming part of a governing coalition strikes such abject fear into the hearts of the Pakeha, then casting a vote for TPM might begin to look like a very good idea.

If the Left is smart, it will take a leaf out of the playbook of those who campaigned in favour of adopting MMP. Arguably the most effective pro-MMP poster stated simply: “If you’re looking for a good reason to vote in favour of MMP, just take a look at the people who want you to vote against it.” By the same logic, if National, Act, and the whole right-wing establishment are trying to scare New Zealanders into voting against a Labour-Green-Te Pāti Māori government, then maybe that’s the best possible reason to vote for their “Coalition of Chaos”.

Labour, the Greens, and Te Pāti Māori might also decide to simply turn the tables on National and Act by spelling out for the electorate the chaotic consequences of a right-wing victory predicated on thinly-disguised racism, climate-change denial, and the upper-classes’ mortal fear of being required to pay their fair share of tax.

Te Pāti Māori, in particular, could politely enquire of National and Act how they propose to squeeze a million aspirational Māori back into the colonial box from which they have only just begun to emerge?

The Greens could demand to know how a National-Act Government was planning to explain to the rest of the world why Aotearoa-New Zealand isn’t pulling its weight on climate change?

And Labour could invite the voters to decide which combination of parties had the best chance of dealing effectively and fairly with the urgent and inescapable challenges of delivering ethnic, social and ecological equity to Aotearoa-New Zealand: National-Act, or Labour-Greens-Te Pāti Māori?

That the two ideological blocs remain so close in terms of their overall voter support (see the latest Taxpayers Union-Curia poll) suggests that very close to half of the electorate knows that Aotearoa-New Zealand must change. Business-as-usual sounds wonderful, as does the return of racial harmony, and the weather getting back to normal. But, deep-down, half the population understands that a “return to normalcy” is not a realistic proposition. Maybe the other half, the half telling the pollsters that they intend to vote for National and Act, also know that things cannot go on as they are, but they’re resentful that so many difficult challenges have fallen to their generation, and frightened that they may not be equal to them.

Raising the spectre of a “Coalition of Chaos” offers this apprehensive half of the electorate an acceptable excuse for running away from the changes every New Zealander should be steeling themselves to embrace on 14 October. The changes necessitated by the Treaty. The changes necessitated by Climate Change. The changes necessitated by the extreme disparities of wealth in Aotearoa-New Zealand.

That’s what makes the expression so despicable. Electing a National-Act coalition government won’t protect New Zealanders from chaos, indeed, the probability is that swinging hard to the right it will only make their lives more chaotic. Change may be delayed for a while, but it cannot be denied indefinitely. Those who try to stop it are almost always overwhelmed by it.

In chaos there is fertility. Out of chaos new worlds quicken and grow.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 11 May 2023.

Eighty-One Thousand Votes.

Going Down: The question to be answered, then, is a simple one. If the controversial changes to the Green Party’s co-leadership rules proceed, how many formerly Green voters is the party likely to lose? If the answer is greater than 81,000, and Chloe Swarbrick fails to hold Auckland Central, then the Greens will cease to be a party represented in Parliament.

IF THE GREENS proceed with the constitutional changes mooted by political commentator Matthew Hooton, then their electoral future is bleak. The public has learned to live with the Greens’ male and female co-leaders, especially after the rule was adopted by Te Pāti Māori. Doing away with the male co-leader position, however, and replacing it with a co-leadership position open to “any gender” – Hooton’s prediction – will likely strike a great many Green Party supporters as both self-indulgently radical and blatantly unfair.

If Hooton’s second prediction, that the Green constitution will be further amended to require at least one of the party’s co-leaders to be Māori, also proves accurate, then the loyalty of Green voters will be tested even more strenuously.

The reasons for this are fairly straightforward.

The Greens are engaged in electoral politics: being so, they are bound by the rules of the New Zealand electoral system. The most relevant of these for any party promoting radical policies is that they must attract more than 5 percent of the Party Votes cast (or win an electorate seat) to gain a seat or seats in the House of Representatives. Crossing that 5 percent threshold in 2020 meant attracting somewhere in the vicinity of 145,000 votes. With 226,757 votes (7.8 percent) the Greens easily made it into Parliament.

The question to be answered, then, is a simple one. If the mooted constitutional changes proceed, how many formerly Green voters is the party likely to lose? If the answer is greater than 81,000, and Chloe Swarbrick fails to hold Auckland Central, then the Greens will cease to be a party represented in Parliament.

Eighty-one thousand votes may sound like a lot, but consider the fate of the Alliance – a coalition of radical parties of which the Greens were once part. Between the 1999 and 2002 general elections, 133,971 of the Alliance’s party voters took their support elsewhere. Its share of the Party Vote fell from 7.7 percent to 1.3 percent, and it ceased to be a parliamentary party.

Such is the fate of political parties which, for one reason or another, forfeit the trust, confidence and respect of their supporters. The transition from hero to zero can be brutally quick.

All too often the risk of alienating a critical number of party supporters is seriously underestimated by party members. The latter are dangerously prone to believing that their electoral support base is, in all practical respects, indistinguishable from themselves.

Except, this is almost never the case – especially for those parties capable of cresting the 5 percent threshold. Support is won on the strength of a great many considerations – and sometimes for the party’s position on just a single issue. Voters are not required to be either rational or consistent, and an alarming number of them are neither. Party members are almost always more ideologically consistent than party supporters.

All of these factors are acutely relevant to the Green Party.

A large chunk of its support (perhaps most of it) is based upon the perceived urgency of state action to combat Climate Change. Other voters’ will back the Greens for the party’s original commitment to social justice (long since attenuated to “social responsibility”). Some will back the Greens on account of their pacifism and because the party is committed to an ethical foreign policy. Many more will vote Green simply because they are in favour of decriminalising cannabis.

The number attracted to the Greens because they have altered their constitution to reflect their opposition to binary, heteronormative gender relations is likely to be considerably smaller than any of the groups of voters mentioned above. Outside of a very small fraction of the highly-educated professional middle-class, and a similarly modest percentage of their offspring studying at university, such matters display something pretty close to zero political salience.

Certain to display much greater salience with progressive voters will be the obvious disdain evinced by a large number of Green Party members for the political performance of their male co-leader, James Shaw, along with their equally obvious determination to remove him from his position.

While a great many Green voters are dissatisfied with the current government’s performance on Climate Change, this does not necessarily mean that they are dissatisfied with Shaw’s handling of the Climate Change portfolio. Most will realise that the Greens exercise very little influence over the behaviour of the Jacinda Ardern-led Labour Government, and more than a few will applaud Shaw for having parlayed the very weak hand he was dealt to such good effect and with such political skill.

The idea that he is being eased out of his male co-leader’s role by means of a transparent piece of constitutional revision may not sit well with these voters. By them the manoeuvre may be judged both cowardly and dishonest. Many will feel unable to go on supporting a party that is prepared to countenance such shabby political tactics.

Other Green supporters will attempt to match up the proposed constitutional changes with the four core tenets of the global Green movement: Ecological Wisdom, Social Justice, Grassroots Democracy, and Non-Violence. They will struggle to see very much in the way of wisdom, justice, or democracy in any of these proposals. But, they will not miss the venomous emotional violence inherent in the execution of a political manoeuvre that protects the jobs and careers of some politicians while ruthlessly sacrificing those of others. These supporters, too, may feel unable to go on voting for a party capable of deploying such toxic levels of passive aggression.

Finally, there is the crucial question of political perception. What do these mooted constitutional changes make the Green Party look like?

Do they make the Greens look like a political organisation welcoming to all New Zealanders?

Do they make the Greens look like a group of politicians capable of prioritising the environmental, economic and social outcomes that New Zealand and the planet so desperately need?

Do they make the Greens look the way they used to look, back in the days of Rod Donald, Jeanette Fitzsimons, Sue Bradford, Keith Locke, Sue Kedgley and Nandor Tanczos: like a group of people who both like and support one another in the promotion of causes no rational voter can fail to acknowledge?

Or, do they make the Greens look like a political party that would rather be politically correct than politically successful?

A party on course to lose a great deal more than 81,000 votes.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 12 April 2022.

Why Todd Muller – and National – Are Toast.

Not Ready: Todd Muller’s lack-lustre and self-contradictory performances offer conclusive proof that a political leader cannot be managed into competence. National’s new boss has Janet Wilson handling his media and Matthew Hooton writing his speeches. Both are highly professional political and public relations specialists, and Muller is lucky to have them. But, they can’t be Leader of the Opposition for him.

TODD MULLER is toast. All the signs are there. The weird contradictions contained in his own public statements. The constant leaking of damaging information from inside his own caucus. The obvious delight of former colleagues as they lower their lifeboats and pull away from National’s sinking ship. The party’s been here before. Unfortunately, it was in 2002.

Just think about Paula Bennett’s bravura exit performance. Dancing up a storm with Tom Sainsbury – as if to say: “You always thought Tom was exaggerating, didn’t you? Nah, the boy never even got close!” There was something very P.J. O’Rourke about Bennett’s departure: something subversively liberating. When right-wingers turn out to have a sense of humour strong enough to make even hard-bitten lefties chortle, it says something very reassuring about our common humanity. Though some of us are loathe to admit it, we are all much more the same than we are different.

One of O’Rourke’s most memorable lines was: “First we got all the money. Then we got all the votes. Now we’ve got all the power!” Bennett’s celebration boogie, in anticipation of Muller’s failure to win O’Rourke’s electoral trifecta, has about it the same bracing honesty. Speaking of her hardcore National colleagues, she once told a startled journalist: “We didn’t come to Wellington to fuck spiders!” And wasn’t that the truth?

Muller’s lack-lustre and self-contradictory performances offer conclusive proof that a political leader cannot be managed into competence. National’s new boss has Janet Wilson handling his media and Matthew Hooton writing his speeches. Both are highly professional political and public relations specialists, and Muller is lucky to have them. But, they can’t be Leader of the Opposition for him.

It was exactly the same with David Cunliffe. Not even Matt McCarten, a.k.a “Mattiavelli”, could transform the ambitious climber who deposed David Shearer into a credible alternative prime minister. In the end, the person has to want the job enough to do what it takes to get it. Also needed is a clear idea of what to do with “all the power” once you’ve got it. This is where Muller falls short. Quoting Mickey Savage is all very well, but when a traditional Catholic talks about “applied Christianity” – what, exactly, does he mean?

It’s something which, I suspect, Muller’s evangelical Christian colleagues would also like to know. Their right-wing, fundamentalist version of the Christian message would see National taking a very different stance on a broad range of social issues from the one so clearly favoured by Muller and his liberal allies. A couple of months back, David Cormack (another PR maven) offered up his own take on National’s Christian conservatives:

“There is a large bloc in National of Christians with some pretty extreme views. They’re not traditional Christian National Party folk, but more fire and brimstone. Muller is a traditional National Party Christian, he voted No on the abortion bill’s second and third reading, he voted No on all three readings of the euthanasia bill. But he is considered not right wing enough by the large Christian bloc.”

According to Cormack:

“All of the highly conservative Christian MPs want to fight their very own culture wars here in NZ; think GOP level. Staunchly pro-Israel, really strongly anti-abortion, anti-women and gay rights. They want to fight the ‘Marxism’ that they believe has infested our schools, universities and even Labour (!)”

Contrast these hardline views with the gentle conservatism set out by Muller in his Te Puna hometown address in mid-June. Beautifully crafted by Hooton, the speech enunciated a set of values radically at odds with the proudly reactionary beliefs of Chris Penk and his comrades. Reading that speech, Muller’s opponents in the National caucus must have wondered whether their party was any longer big enough for the both of them.

On the one hand stands Muller (and Hooton) eager to keep the two main political parties committed to delivering the same neoliberal lines (albeit with some relatively minor differences in emphasis) that have bound the precious “median voter” to the aspirations of the broad centre of New Zealand politics for the best part of four decades.

On the other hand stand what might best be described as the “Radical Conservatives”. Their principal objection to the existing neoliberal order is its acceptance of what they see as the immoral and socially-destructive consequences of the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 70s. With some justification, they see identity politics as intrinsically hostile to the unequal distribution of power and wealth under patriarchal capitalism. Take patriarchy out of the capitalist equation and, in the view of the Radical Conservatives, it will fall.

These are not the sort of ideas to earn more than a curl of Nikki Kaye’s upper lip. Rightly, she foresees the wholesale rejection of such an avowedly sexist National Party by the overwhelming majority of middle-class Pakeha women. Indeed, it was to forestall such a radical-conservative deviation into Trumpland that the coup against Simon Bridges was mounted. That it succeeded only because the erratic Judith Collins anticipated taking more satisfaction from shafting Bridges and Bennett than from saving them, merely reinforces the scale of the dysfunction currently besetting the National Party.

Such dysfunction is essentially ineradicable by anything other than the annihilation of one of the two contending factions. This is, after all, what happened in the Labour Party when the Rogernomes and their careerist enablers made it more-or-less impossible for the left faction to remain within the party without surrendering their most deeply held convictions.

For National’s Radical Conservatives, the path to this annihilation solution is clear: engineer a defeat on a par with the disaster of 2002. The principal victims of such a strategy would be the party’s liberal faction. In Lenin’s famous phrase, it would lead to “fewer – but better” National MPs. A solid foundation of radical-conservative patriarchal Christian capitalism upon which National’s electoral recovery can be built.

You see now why Todd Muller is toast! Also clear, is why so many National women are now determined to give their votes to Jacinda.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 2 July 2020.

"Plan B" - Pitching The Devil's Bargain To Generation X.

Have I Got A Deal For You! Ah, yes, the Devil’s Bargain. Transacted in all manner of guises, but always with the same intent: the transformation of the human individual from an “end” into a “means”.

THE SPEED at which the ruling elite has moved to defend itself has been surprisingly slow. It should have been clear from the first onset of the Covid-19 crisis that it was capable to wreaking havoc upon the political-economy of the global status quo. Its first defensive moves were, however, politically clumsy and morally grotesque. Expecting grandparents to make the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of their grandchildren, as the more outlandish members of the American Right advocated, struck most people as horrific. Clearly, a more nuanced solution was required.

Accordingly, the key demographic target of neoliberal capitalism’s defenders shifted from the elderly Baby Boomers (1946-1965) to the notoriously prickly Generation X (1966-1985). This is, after all, the demographic which has made intergenerational injustice its special study. To hear Gen-Xers tell the story, the Boomers managed to get through most of their lives without experiencing much more than a few relatively mild recessions. Admittedly, the American Boomers had the Vietnam War to contend with (and doesn’t it show!) but New Zealand’s Boomers cruised blissfully through the post-war sunshine with the barely a trouble in the world.

Generation X’s bad luck was clear to comedians and cartoonists from the get-go. One of the best of their early jokes depicted a Boomer wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the classic Seventies formula for happiness: Sex. Drugs. Rock&Roll. His Gen-X companion’s T-shirt was less upbeat. Its three words referenced the grim Eighties’ declension of the Boomer’s hedonistic trinity: Aids. Crack. Punk&Rap.

No sooner was all the fun taken out of promiscuity, recreational drug-taking and popular music, than the unlucky Gen-Xers were hit by the full force of the neoliberal revolution. All the benefits of the social-democratic state – enjoyed to the full by their fortunate parents – were whipped away from them. Indebted, de-unionised, unhoused: life wasn’t so much a bowl of cherries, as a plateful of fleshless cherry-stones.

Was the arrival of the Internet and the smartphone sufficient compensation for the Global Financial Crisis and the onrush of Climate Change? Maybe. Even so, for too many of the years they have been alive, the news has made pretty grim reading for Generations X, Y and Z. And now, as if all of the above trials and tribulations weren’t enough, the world’s under-55s find themselves in the midst of a global pandemic.

Where’s the justice in that?

Although the academic Judas Sheep promoting their evidentially-challenged and scientifically tendentious “Plan B” (essentially a plea for pursuing ‘herd immunity’ from Covid-19) don’t make it explicit, they presumably see an element of divine justice in the virus’s preference for older people’s vulnerable immune systems. Their own generation and their children’s are much less likely to die from Covid-19 than Mum and Dad and/or Grandma and Grandpa. It’s almost as if God has finally relented and thrown these younger generations a chunk of good luck.

But, has he?

The dissident academics’ preference is for science, not theology, so expecting them to spot the profound moral challenge which the Almighty has just set down on the younger generations’ plate is probably too tall an order. It lies there, nonetheless, and all of these scientists’ crude consequentialist philosophising cannot remove it.

They do their best to ignore it, however, by reaching for the utilitarian philosopher’s substitute for God: “The greatest good for the greatest number.” It’s a formula that has always appealed to the kind of hard-line, ideologically-driven capitalists who presumably recruited these (to borrow Lenin’s trenchant epithet) “useful idiots”. Certainly, the individuals fronting “Plan B” all possess a facility for fine calculation to make a bean-counter proud. 

Which should be accorded more value, these ethical accountants now demand: The right to life of the elderly and the chronically ill – a quarter of the population; or, the right to a prosperous economic future of the other three-quarters? The contention being, that a point will surely be reached in the course of the current crisis when protecting the rights of both fractions becomes impossible. It is then that the Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, and her ministers will be required to answer the very hardest of questions.

In the words of the Plan-B-Boys’ advance guardsman, Matthew Hooton, opining in the NZ Herald of Saturday, 4 April 2020:

“The first unbearable question is at what point, if ever, we decide that the immediate social and economic costs are too high to continue with a lockdown, if elimination or suppression fail. The second is who pays those costs, and when.”

Hard? Oh yes – and it only gets worse:

“Ardern and all of us have no choice but to take [the] risks [flowing from the harms attendant upon catastrophic economic collapse] into account while grappling with the ethics of the decisions ahead. It may be repulsive to express it explicitly, but a protracted suppression strategy would materially and perhaps permanently damage the lives of the two million New Zealanders under the age of 30 to briefly maintain the life expectancy of some thousands of people in their 80s.”

Or, rephrasing Hooton’s argument even more repulsively: At what point do we let Grandpa die, so that we, his grandchildren, can have a crack at the sort of life our grandparents and parents were able to live?

Ah, yes, the Devil’s Bargain. Transacted in all manner of guises, but always with the same intent: the transformation of the human individual from an “end” into a “means”. Here’s how the nineteenth century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky presents the Devil’s Bargain in The Brothers Karamazov, when Ivan confronts his brother, Alyosha, with the classic utilitarian dilemma:

Tell me straight out, I call on you—answer me: imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy in the finale, of giving them peace and rest at last, but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature, and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears — would you agree to be the architect on such conditions? . . . And can you admit the idea that the people for whom you are building would agree to accept their happiness on the unjustified blood of a tortured child, and having accepted it, to remain forever happy?

What Dostoyevsky grasps here is what always slips through the fingers of the crude utilitarians. Happiness cannot be created out of unhappiness. Life cannot be purchased with Death. Another great Russian novelist, and dissident, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, grasped it also. When the young pacifists of the Eighties put it to him that if the choice was between Communism and nuclear annihilation, then surely it was better to be Red than dead? His answer was always the same: “No. Better to be dead than to live as a scoundrel!”

And, if memory serves, there was another seeker after the truth who had something to say about the Devil’s Bargain. A carpenter and teacher from Nazareth, in First Century Galilee. His words may be old, but even after two thousand years they bear repeating:

“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, but lose his soul?”

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 16 April 2020.

Losing Labour's Mills-Tone.

Nothing Left To Say: Labour's pollster, Stephen Mills, remains swaddled-up in the comforting myths of the 1980s. As if the experience of Roger Douglas’s genuinely radical post-Muldoon policy agenda was literally a once-in-a-lifetime thing – as much as the party could possibly absorb for at least the next 50 years.

MEMO TO THE Prime Minister’s Office: Please tell Stephen Mills to stay off the radio. When the boss of Labour’s polling agency, UMR, comes across on RNZ’s Nine to Noon “Politics” slot (14/10/19) as considerably further to the right than both Kathryn Ryan and Matthew Hooton then, believe me, it’s time to tell your pollster, very politely, to stick to his stats.

Listening to Mills in the aftermath of Justin Lester’s shocking loss to Andy Forster in the Wellington mayoralty election provided depressing confirmation of Labour’s current malaise. The party has no use for new thinking – about anything. It remains swaddled-up in the comforting myths of the 1980s. As if the experience of Roger Douglas’s genuinely radical post-Muldoon policy agenda was literally a once-in-a-lifetime thing – as much as the party could possibly absorb for at least the next 50 years.

Mills confirmed this quite unconsciously, when Matthew Hooton noted the irony of Muldoon’s massive energy projects taking on a prescient quality in light of the massive infrastructure challenges currently facing New Zealand. All Mills could offer by way of reply was a reflexive jibe about Hooton coming out in favour of “Think Big”. The man showed no inclination to step outside the dusty orthodoxy of the past 30 years. It’s as if Mills’ watch stopped in 1984 and he’s never felt the slightest inclination to re-wind it.

These jibes are a not uncommon feature of Mills’ commentary repertoire. A little while ago he derided a critic of government policy as “one of the last seven Marxists living in New Zealand”. At least that little joke raised a smile, but only if one was willing to ignore its unpleasant, red-baiting subtext.

Because, as the sorry fate of David Cunliffe testifies, open hostility towards anything further to the left than Tony Blair’s bland Third Way has long been de rigueur in Labour’s senior ranks. It’s why you will never hear Jacinda Ardern (who worked for a time in Blair’s administration) or Grant Robertson (who remains Michael Cullen’s prize protégé) offer a word of support or praise for Jeremy Corbyn. This hostility to any hint of socialism (even the “democratic socialism” enshrined in the NZ Labour Party’s constitution) is even stronger among those of Jacinda’s political advisers who learned their trade from the Clinton/Obama Democratic Party in the United States.

The kind of politics such rigidly orthodox and pathologically risk-averse conduct produces leaves most voters cold. It’s grey practitioners accept as gospel the fundamental neoliberal proposition that the last people who should be allowed within a mile of important policy decisions are politicians. These latter, say the neolibs, are best left to senior bureaucrats – preferably those with a background in the private sector. It explains why, in ordinary people's eyes, today’s politicians appear more interested in addressing the priorities of business leaders and bureaucrats than those of the broader electorate. It also explains why the priorities of the voters are addressed so selectively.

The fate of Wellington’s Justin Lester illustrates the learned helplessness of modern political leaders to perfection. Faced with the utter failure of the Regional Council’s public transport re-vamp, Lester responded that, as Wellington’s Mayor, it was not, actually, his responsibility to fix the bus service. Ditto with the proposed, highly controversial, property development at Shelly Bay. That was a private sector initiative. All of these excuses were grounded in administrative fact. But, it is very poor politics to keep telling people that there is nothing you can do to help them – especially in an election year!

Which is why, with Lester’s fate firmly in their minds, Jacinda’s advisers in the PM’s Office should urge Mills to get off the air. As the supposed voice of the “Left” his only contribution to the progressive cause is to rubbish every idea that doesn’t come straight out of The Big Blairite Book of Conventional Wisdom. The notion that democratic politics was once, and could be again, about something more than securing the narrow interests of big business – as interpreted by its bureaucratic and media enablers – is conspicuous by its absence from Mill’s Monday morning political discourse. Astonishingly, RNZ’s listeners are more likely to hear that sort of talk from Hooton, speaking for the Right, than from the Left’s supposed spokesperson.

Quite why RNZ continues to offer-up the likes of Mills (and his stand-in, the former Labour Party boss, Mike Williams) as representatives of the Left is a mystery. There was a time when genuine left-wingers like Laila Harré were given the job. Back then, listeners could be assured of hearing ideas that most assuredly did not fit the description of “conventional wisdom”. Nor was it the practice of the Left’s champion to tell her audience what they couldn’t have, because what they were asking of their elected representatives were things they couldn’t do.

It is difficult to imagine an approach to political debate more likely to foster voter disengagement than the one currently in evidence on RNZ. Kathryn Ryan and her producer are certainly not doing the Left in general, nor Labour and the Greens in particular, any favours by allowing them to be represented by a person so strongly wedded to the notion that his clients will always be better served following public opinion than leading it. Or, that the art of politics consists in persuading the voters that their political leaders are making new mistakes – rather than repeating old ones. Indeed, the real question that is left hanging in the air after half-an-hour listening to Stephen Mills is not why anyone wanting real change would vote for the parties of the Left, but why they would bother voting at all.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 15 October 2019.

Here Be Dragons: The Ika Seafood Bar & Grill’s First “Table Talk” Looks At The Year Ahead - Through Right-Wing Eyes.

"Have a care when fighting dragons, lest ye become a dragon yourself." Nietzsche's famous aphorism remains as confronting as ever. To beat the likes of the Right's Matthew Hooton, should the Left attempt to match their Machiavellian amorality? Or, should it simply decide not to invite them onto "Table Talk" panels?

 

I LEFT the first Ika “Table Talk” for 2016 feeling very down – and I know I wasn’t the only one. The panel discussion, on “The Year Ahead”, could have been an enlivening rehearsal of the challenges facing the New Zealand Left in 2016 – but it wasn’t. Instead Ika’s patrons endured an hour-long demonstration of the Right’s remarkable skill at kicking the Left’s ass.

 

Moderated by broadcaster Lisa Owen (of TV3’s The Nation) the panel was made up of the ubiquitous far-right political commentator, Matthew Hooton (proprietor of Exeltium Public Relations) arbiter of all-things-Auckland, Simon Wilson (Editor at Large of Metro Magazine) and Maori educationalist, Dr Ella Henry (AUT Faculty of Maori Development).

 

Dr Henry adopted a position of wry detachment from her “bourgeois” audience of mostly inner-city leftists. Her comments throughout the evening suggested that she regards "Table Talk" as little more than an additional course which Laila Harré has tacked on to Ika’s menu. A heaped ideological platter in which, this time, the sour easily overpowered the sweet.

 

Only once did she cut through the relentless conservative discourse of her fellow panellists and that was in relation to the forthcoming local government elections. Her uncompromising description of the world inhabited by West and South Aucklanders: Maori, Pasifika and immigrant; was as compelling as it was unsparing. Intruding, as it did, a jarring note of brutal social reality to the proceedings, Dr Henry’s intervention was easily the most uplifting of the night.

 

There was a period in Simon Wilson’s life when he mixed almost exclusively with the sort of people who attend the Ika Seafood Bar & Grill’s events. As the Editor of the Victoria University Students Association’s newspaper, Salient, and later, as the Maoist President of NZUSA, Wilson’s youth was an emphatically left-wing affair. The journey he has undertaken since then, from the Left to the Right, has been a slow one. The Maoism he ditched early in favour of the well-mannered leftism of the Wellington liberal intelligentsia. It was only when he bade farewell to Wellington, and Consumer magazine, to take up the editorship of the yuppie gourmand’s glossy guidebook, Cuisine, that the shift to the Right began in earnest.

 

Wilson has a newshound’s nose for a shift in the political winds. As a Metro writer, he’d correctly predicted John Key’s comprehensive electoral victory in 2008, and two years later used his new position as Metro’s Editor to deftly reposition the magazine as the voice of the socially liberal, economically conservative and aggressively acquisitive Auckland middle-class. Nowhere was this repositioning more in evidence than in his choice for Metro’s political columnist. Where the magazine’s founder, Warwick Roger, had turned to New Zealand’s best left-wing journalist, Bruce Jesson, for political commentary, Wilson’s choice was the National Party’s leading ideological skirmisher, Matthew Hooton.

 

Those skirmishing skills were displayed to considerable effect from the get-go on Tuesday night (9/2/16) when Hooton accused the writer of seeing the 4 February anti-TPPA demonstrations as “the beginning of a revolution”. It is precisely this acidic mixture of smile and sneer that makes Hooton such a formidable opponent. That, and his ability to master a complex political brief very quickly and then fashion it into a political argument that is at once simple and subtle. Hooton, when he’s in control of himself, is both a superb manipulator of the truth and a master at identifying his opponents’ weak spots.

 

Out of control, Hooton can be rabid. One of the reasons the numbers were down for Ika’s first Table Talk for 2016 was that many people simply refused to be in the same room as the man who has constantly and viciously impugned the integrity of Professor Jane Kelsey. This penchant for abusing progressive New Zealanders publicly has turned Hooton into something of a hate figure, and it seriously undermines his political credibility. If he ever learns to control it, he will instantly become an even more deadly opponent of the Left.

 

As it was, the Good Cop/Bad Cop routine of Wilson and Hooton was deflating enough. Between them they succeeded in making their left-wing audience wince, sigh, squirm and shake their heads in disbelief. A different set of panellists may have blunted some of the worst thrusts from Hooton, but the one we “bourgeois” leftists had to endure on Tuesday night left Lockwood Smith’s political adviser; the man who makes RNZ’s Kathryn Ryan sound like a moderate; in undisputed possession of the field.

 

Now the more hard-headed leftists amongst us would no doubt say that Tuesday’s Table Talk was an important wake-up call for the Left. Unused to the punishing performance that Hooton excels at delivering, an hour-long pistol-whipping at his hands might be exactly what the Left needed if it is to muscle-up and become politically competitive.

 

But if the only way to defeat a dragon is to become a dragon oneself, then what’s the point? What distinguishes the Left from the Right is its belief that the world should be – and can be made – a better place. Against all the contrary evidence that the cynics and trimmers delight in throwing in their path, the world’s progressives must somehow continue to muster the faith, hope and love to continue fighting. That’s why Laila Harré’s gatherings at the Ika Seafood Bar & Grill are so valuable. They provide an opportunity for the beleaguered Auckland Left to recommit itself to a more just and equal future. The cause that Simon Wilson long ago abandoned, and Matthew Hooton openly despises.

 

So, Laila, please. No more dragons!

 

This essay was posted on The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road on Thursday, 11 February 2016.

Spinning, Spinning, Spinning: Are Matthew Hooton's TPP Musings Personal Or Professional?

The Sultan Of Spin: Matthew Hooton has been delivering superior quality spin about the TPP across the entire media spectrum ever since the deal was signed in Atlanta. The question is: Is he spinning for love - or money?

 

MATTHEW HOOTON runs a PR company, Exeltium. His clients include some of New Zealand’s largest companies. Joseph Stiglitz, is a winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, and he recently told the readers of the New York Times, that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is “an agreement to manage its members’ trade and investment relations – and to do so on behalf of each country’s most powerful business lobbies.” Do you think, perchance, these two events might be related?

 

In the fortnight since the deal was done in Atlanta, Hooton has been all over the media (social as well as mainstream) with his analysis of the TPP. The essence of what he’s been saying is that both the proponents and the opponents of the TPP are guilty of grossly over-selling its content. The free trade boosters claimed it would usher New Zealand into a land of milk and honey (or, at least, a land of milk powder and beef) while the fair traders claimed to see the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse galloping over every ridge.

 

The truth, argues Hooton, falls somewhere in between. Moreover, New Zealand’s chief negotiator, the wily Tim Groser, determined to preserve this country’s bipartisan approach to free trade issues, was at some pains to bring back an agreement that met (more or less) the Labour Party’s famous five TPP preconditions.

 

“What’s not to like?” is Hooton’s upbeat refrain. Groser’s deal is something both political parties can sign-up to with a clear conscience. In fact, adds Hooton, mischievously, if Labour had been smart, it would have claimed the whole thing as a triumph. “By standing firm on our five preconditions,” Andrew Little could have said, “Labour gave Groser no choice but to bring home the bacon. So, what’s everybody waiting for? Fire up the barbie!”

 

Now, this is spin of a very superior sort: carefully crafted to calm people’s fears about the TPP, and convey a sense of cautious optimism about its content. The National Government comes out of it looking good – but also humble. Because, after all, it had to fashion a deal that Labour could live with. And Labour? Well, if the Left had only possessed a modicum of common-sense, it could have come out of this whole thing smelling of the finest red roses. That Little and his team have managed to cock things up so comprehensively is just, well, astonishing.

 

Seriously, as spin, this really sparkles.

 

So, why has the news media not made a determined effort to discover whether this excellent line in pro-TPP spin is nothing more than Hooton’s personal thinking on the matter. Just his idle cogitations, which, as a good citizen, he feels duty-bound to share with the rest of New Zealand. Or, whether he’s actually acting on behalf of a client?

 

Because if, just for the sake of argument, I belonged to the New Zealand United States Council, a body committed to “fostering and developing a strong and mutually beneficial relationship between New Zealand and the United States.” And if, as an American member of the Council, I was a strong “advocate for the expansion of trade and economic links between the two countries including a comprehensive free trade agreement achieved either bilaterally or in the context of an expanded Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement.” And if the Council was Exeltium's client. Well then, I'd feel that Matthew was giving us truly excellent value for our money.

 

Not that I have any way of knowing who – if anyone – has contracted Hooton to sell the TPP to an apprehensive New Zealand electorate. But, you know, were I the editor of a major New Zealand newspaper, I’m pretty damn sure I’d be asking one of my best reporters to find out.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 20 October 2015.

Re/Defining Neoliberalism

The March Of Neoliberalism: Not a coherent economic philosophy, but a fearsomely coherent political project. Its purpose: to use the coercive power of the state to thwart and/or reverse any and all attempts to empower the many at the expense of the few. Those who try to pass neoliberalism off as the crackpot economic "religion" of a handful of Act supporters, are simply attempting (like Tony Blair) to carve out a political space for themselves within the Neoliberal Settlement.

 

THE DEBATE which Matthew Hooton kicked off in earnest on Radio New Zealand this week is hotting-up. In dispute is that much-used, but imperfectly understood, political term: “Neoliberalism”.

 

Some, including economist, Brian Easton; former Finance Minister, Sir Michael Cullen; and Wellington blogger, Danyl McLauchlan; have claimed that John Key, and the government he leads, no longer fits the neoliberal description. They have not, however, moved as far down the revisionist road as Mr Hooton. His claim is that the Key Government has not only moved on from neoliberalism, but that it has also crossed the line into the full-blown leftism of that arch-socialist, Rob Muldoon.

 

Wellington-based academic, Jack Vowles, joined the fray a couple of days ago - posing the question: “Neoliberalism: Half-Full or Half-Empty?”

 

As Professor of Comparative Politics at Victoria, Jack’s purpose in entering this debate appears to be the rather dubious one of muddying the waters about what neoliberalism is – and is not. In its turn, this obfuscation seemed to be aimed at keeping open the political space currently occupied by what he calls “market pragmatists” – those particularly pusillanimous neoliberals known as Blairites.

 

Vowles’s case: that neoliberalism is a kind of economic religion, adhered to by a tiny number of extreme Hayekian economists, and only ever imperfectly applied in New Zealand, is, like most erroneous conclusions, based upon an erroneous premise.

 

Neoliberalism as never been, and is not, a coherent set of economic principles, the presence or absence of which in any given policy prescription determines the strength or weakness of its ideological credentials. Indeed, neoliberalism, far from being some sort of neo-classical economic crusade, is what it has always been: the fearsomely coherent political project of global capitalism’s ruling elites.

 

Its anti-state/free market propaganda notwithstanding, neoliberalism’s purpose has always been to use the coercive power of the state to thwart and/or reverse any and all attempts to empower the many at the expense of the few.

 

As Professor David Harvey notes in his A Brief History of Neoliberalism:

“Redistributive effects and increasing social inequality have in fact been such a persistent feature of neoliberalisation as to be regarded as structural to the whole project. Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, after careful reconstruction of the data, have concluded that neoliberalisation was from the very beginning a project to achieve the restoration of class power.”

 

It is no accident that neoliberalism’s origins, as a politically effective force, may be traced to the economic, social and political upheavals of the 1970s. This was, after all, the decade in which the power of the capitalist ruling classes came under maximum pressure: the decade in which both individual capitalists and the principal organs of capitalist power (especially in the USA and the UK) commenced their still-advancing counter-offensive against the unnerving encroachments of social-democratic redistribution and reform.

 

It also explains why, in practical terms, neoliberalism has always been a more-or-less constant set of political and economic objectives rather than a coherent philosophy. The whole point of neoliberalism is to have the coercive powers of the state deployed to the exclusive advantage of the elites. This may be seen not only in the largely successful campaigns to reduce the influence of organised labour, but also in the ongoing efforts of neoliberal regimes to decouple the regulatory and administrative powers of the state from those sectors of the economy that the forces of social-democracy had once been powerful enough to wrench from private hands.

 

Vowles’s plaintive cry, that not all of the defining features of a neoliberal regime are in and of themselves bad, misses the point entirely. Of course trade liberalisation can be seen “a good thing” – but not when it’s used to gut the domestic manufacturing sector and eliminate the social milieu out of which strong social-democratic values grow. Relieving the pressure on income tax to meet all of the state’s fiscal needs may, similarly, be a good thing, but not when a deeply regressive goods and services tax is imposed on the working-class to fill the fiscal hole created by easing the “burden” of progressive taxation on the wealthy.

 

Why is Vowles unable to see this? Primarily, because he is desperate to avoid acknowledging both the Neoliberal Revolution, and the Neoliberal Settlement which it enabled, as the central political (and, increasingly, cultural) realities of our time. Were he ever to accept that neoliberalism will manoeuvre swiftly and decisively (principally through its enablers in the news media) to thwart “the alternatives that do exist to promote [a] more inclusive and egalitarian society”, then all his talk of “responsible economic management” and of not taxing and spending “without any apparent constraints” would stand revealed for what it is: mealy-mouthed Blairite blather.

 

It is, however, in the midst of all his Third Way apologetics that Vowles let’s slip the very insight he’s trying so hard to pretend he has not had. It’s when he declares: “The implicit alternative to neoliberalism implied by many on the left is simply not feasible in the 21st century.”

 

This is the crucial admission, and the crucial explanation for why Vowles and his Blairite comrades are so keen to reduce neoliberalism to something only a handful of Act supporters take seriously. What Vowles is really saying is that the Left’s alternatives are not feasible while the Neoliberal Settlement endures. And if that is true, then the only possible programme for a genuine left-wing party is the one committed to challenging that settlement head-on and reclaiming the coercive powers of the state for the many, from the few. (The sort of coercive powers that John Key’s indisputably neoliberal National Party refuses to deploy even in the name of ensuring that working people are not seriously injured or killed on the job!)

 

I have followed Jack Volwes’s highly successful career in political science for more than quarter of a century. His scholarship in dissecting the crucial general elections of the 1990s – not to mention the arrival of MMP – always possessed the reassuring feel of work undertaken by a man comfortable in his own radical skin.

 

What happened, I wonder, to the Jack Vowles who seemed to see, in the epic struggle between Labour and the Alliance, the acting out of the urgent mission to make left-wing policies “feasible in the 21st century”? When did it become okay for the Professor to put down the opponents of neoliberalism as inhabitants of a political ghetto, communicators of despair, weakeners of their own cause?

 

Was it about the same time, Jack, that you decided that if neoliberalism could not be beaten, then it could, God forgive you, be joined?

 

This essay was posted simultaneously on The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road of Saturday, 30 May 2015.

Tricky Customer: Why Is Matthew Hooton Accusing John Key’s Government Of Lurching To The Left?

Trickster-in-Chief? Right-wing PR maven, Matthew Hooton, pushes the line that National is lurching leftwards, because he wants Labour to "trump National to the right".

 

MATTHEW HOOTON is a very tricky customer. To hear him tell it, Bill English’s seventh Budget represents a decisive break with the policies of Roger and Ruth. Effectively, the end of the neoliberal settlement. It’s nonsense, of course. But that only makes me wonder why he’s saying it.

 

There are only two probable explanations for Matthew’s latest foray into the realms of make-believe. The first is that he actually believes what he is saying. The second is that he is saying it for effect.

 

To hear for himself just how silly he sounds, he has only to answer the following questions about Bill English’s Budget.

 

1. Did the Budget foreshadow the repeal of the Reserve Bank Act?
2. Did Bill English signal his government’s intention to resuscitate organised labour?
3. Did he announce New Zealand’s imminent return to trade protectionism?
4. Did he raise the top marginal rates of income tax?
5. Did he abandon his goal of returning the Government’s accounts to surplus?

 

The answer to every one of these questions is, of course, a resounding “No.” There is absolutely no question of this National Government abandoning the neoliberal settlement of the past 30 years. For Matthew’s benefit, however, let us briefly enumerate the key features of that “broad policy consensus”:

 

1. Price Stability.
2. Labour Market Flexibility.
3. An Open Competitive Economy.
4. Broad-based, Low-Tax Structure.
5. Government Surpluses and Debt Repayment.

 

To strengthen those key features, successive neoliberal governments (both National and Labour) have pursued at least one – sometimes all – of the following policy goals:

 

1. The legislative curtailment of trade union rights - especially the right to strike.
2. The steady elimination of progressive taxation – to the advantage of the wealthy.
3. Permanent downward pressure on both the size and scope of the public sector.
4. Continued privatisation of state assets.
5. Creating incentives for beneficiaries to move off benefits and into training and/or work.

 

The very most that Matthew could say, in terms of Bill English’s Budget moving away from the Neoliberal Settlement, is that his decision to increase some benefits by up to $25.00 per week (after 1 April 2016) represented a marginal reduction in the incentive to transit from welfare into work. That said, however, and given the fact that even that bastion of neoliberal rectitude, The Treasury, was prepared to acknowledge that the gap between benefits and wages had grown so wide that tens-of-thousands of children were suffering actual hardship, one can only wonder what Matthew would rather Bill English had done.

 

Should the Finance Minister simply have ignored all those children careless enough to have been born into poor families? Should the cumulative long-term effects of childhood poverty have been similarly disregarded by this present generation of politicians – leaving the butcher’s bill for all its entirely predictable social pathologies to be paid by the taxpayers of the future? Matthew doesn’t say.

 

Let us, then, turn to the second probable explanation for Matthew’s curious obituary for the Neoliberal Settlement: that he is saying it for effect. What effect could that be?

 

The most likely effect which Matthew is striving to produce is the general public acceptance of his proposition that the National Party, under John Key and Bill English, has moved sharply to the left. So dramatic has this shift been, Matthew told Radio New Zealand–National’s Kathryn Ryan, that National “is well to the left of the Clark Government, and well to the left of the Greens.”

 

Now, why on earth would a radical conservative like Matthew want to persuade ordinary centrist voters that John Key was slowly-but-surely turning the National Party into a socialist outfit more radical than either Labour or the Greens? Let’s allow the man, himself, to answer the question. This is what he said to Kathryn Ryan on Monday, 25 May 2015:

 

“I think that [Labour is] in the most terrible trouble – perhaps in their history ….. Look, [these] are their choices: John Key is chasing them to the left, there is no doubt about that. As I said, Helen Clark didn’t do anything this radical. They have to accept what’s happening here. If they think that moving left is going to help them, then John Key is just going to chase them. So, I think they’re going to have to – and I don’t know how they’ll manage this – but they’re going to have to trump National to the right, somehow.”

 

Kathryn Ryan asks Matthew if he’s suggesting that Labour do what it did in the 1980s.

 

“Well, exactly! That was forced upon Labour, wasn’t it? When you had Muldoon going so far to the left, in that third term, in particular, the incoming Labour government had no alternative – because there was no position or place in the political spectrum for it.”

 

Stripped of all its fanciful historical analogies and preposterous ideological comparisons, Hooton’s analysis reduces down to this bleak electoral proposition.

 

National can only hope to continue in office by conceding more and more ideological ground to the Left. In terms of internal National Party politics, the scope for many more such concessions is rapidly narrowing. The only hope of holding the neoliberal line, therefore, is to persuade the Labour Party to embrace the very principles that National has already identified as electoral poison.

 

Why would Labour do that? – As opposed to endorsing, and then extending, the left-wing political gestures upon which National has pinned its hopes of re-election? What could possibly persuade Labour to refrain from forcing an electorally fatal split in National’s ranks, in order to adopt a suite of policies guaranteed to re-open the bitterest divisions within its own?

 

Sadly these are not rhetorical questions. Labour’s caucus already contains within its ranks a number of MPs to whom neoliberalism still presents itself as the solution – not the problem. Strengthen the hand of these individuals by orchestrating the same sort of media about-face that sank the National Government of Rob Muldoon. Heap praise upon Andrew Little for having the courage to “think the unthinkable” (and let him know that he can expect strong media backing for silencing the Labour Left) and History could very easily be persuaded to repeat herself.

 

And if/when she does, you can bet that Matthew Hooton’s PR firm will be writing her media releases.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 25 May 2015.