Bad Bargains

A different kind of wealth: Aquatic ecologist, Zeb Hogan, thigh-deep in the pristine headwaters of Mongolia's Eg River, holds a juvenile specimen of the rare Taimen - the world's largest species of trout. Several hundred miles to the south, huge gold-mining dredges are extracting a fortune from - and laying waste to - Mongolia's wild rivers. Is New Zealand's National-led Government about to make the same bad bargain as its Mongolian counterpart - trading the environmental integrity of our pristine wilderness for the mineral wealth that it contains?

THE EXPRESSION on the face of aquatic ecologist, Zeb Hogan, said it all. The host of the National Geographic Channel’s television series, Monster Fish, had been chasing the elusive taimen – the world's largest species of trout – in the pristine headwaters of Mongolia’s Eg River, and now he was confronting a vast alluvial gold mining operation on the Urr River – many miles to the south.

A huge machine – three of four stories high – had dug its metallic snout into the earth along the river’s banks. Using its waters to wash the rock, shingle, sand and soil away from the precious gold, the colossal contraption then spewed the tailings back on to the ravaged countryside. Hectares of black sand and shingle marked the passage of this behemoth. Zeb surveyed the damage in grim silence – letting the images speak for themselves.

A fellow of the World Wildlife Fund, Zeb had been working with the Mongolian Government to protect the taimen. By charging wealthy US fisherman $US5000 for a chance to catch and release these extraordinary fish, eco-tourist entrepreneurs were offering Mongolians living along the Eg the opportunity to do well by doing good.

Can the Eg and its massive (up to 2 metres long) trout be saved?

It’s a slim hope.

As of 2005 there were 135 alluvial gold mines operating across Mongolia. Lured by the prospect of massive direct foreign investment (Mongolians sit upon vast deposits of coal and fluorite as well as gold) their Government, like so many of its counterparts in the Developing World, has been eager to profit from the industrialised countries’ insatiable demand for minerals.

Still, the mining of Mongolia’s pristine rivers, and the threat posed to rare species like the taimen, are both very remote from New Zealand. What has Zeb Hogan and his monster trout to do with us?

More than you might think.

Thanks to The Standard blogsite (whose contributors have been doing a little digging into our MPs’ Register of Pecuniary Interests) it’s been revealed that our Foreign Affairs Minister, Murray McCully, owns shares in a company called Widespread Portfolios which, according to its website, has an investment in King Solomon Mines Ltd – a company exploring for gold in Chinese Inner Mongolia.

Widespread Portfolios – described as a "mining sector venture capital investor" – also has a stake in a number of New Zealand-based mineral prospecting operations.

All well and good. Providing such investments are properly registered by our representatives, there’s surely no reason to worry?

And yet, I cannot help but worry that New Zealand, deeply enmeshed in the global economy, and financially dependent upon the generosity of financiers and industrialists eager to lay their hands on what remains of our nation’s untapped natural resources, might feel as obliged to respond to "economic realities" as Mongolia.

As someone who’s had (and as far as we know retains) a financial stake in the quest for those resources, Mr McCully is well-placed to advise his Cabinet colleagues on the rewards that lie in store for countries which assist in the discovery and exploitation of mineral deposits. No less than the Mongolians, New Zealanders could benefit hugely by opening their wild and pristine environments to the world’s mining companies.

Maybe so. But wealth comes in many guises. Gold, oil and coal can make a nation rich, but so can wild, free-flowing rivers and forest-clad hills. The wonder inspired by megafish like the Mongolian taimen – or by birds believed to be extinct, but found again, like New Zealand’s takahe – these, too, are a kind of wealth.

We live in a part of the world as remote, in its way, as the headwaters of the Eg River in north-west Mongolia. And it is only in such far-flung places that the unblemished face of Planet Earth remains visible.

It would surely be a tragedy if one day, in the not-too-distant future, New Zealanders find themselves, like Zeb Hogan, standing in tight-lipped silence before the reeking wreckage of some mining company’s waste-spewing behemoth, and meditating upon the awful bargain that a Government desperate for overseas funds was willing to strike.

The ancient historian, Tacitus, famously observed that "Rome made a desert – and called it Peace." Will the historians of the future (if there are any) say of us: "Human-beings turned the wild places of the Earth into slag-heaps – and called it Wealth."

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

Epic Fail

The sharp end of Japanese Foreign Policy: The Japanese whaling fleet's security ship Shonan Maru No. 2 deliberately rams the New Zealand boat Ady Gil in the waters off Antarctica. New Zealand's Foreign Affairs Minister, Murray McCully's response? He accuses the protesters of wanting to kill people!

JAMMER looks like he should stink to high heaven – but he doesn’t. At least, not in a bad way. Those brown dreadlocks piled high behind his head, like he’s carrying a furry octopus up there, exude a resinous, piney-wood scent (special oils, apparently) which is actually rather pleasant. And his gypsy wardrobe, which looks like it’s been assembled at random in the nearest Salvation Army store, carries the reassuring aroma of Sunlight soap and Janola.

With Jammer, appearances can be deceptive.

"’S’up?" He asks as he slumps down at my table.

"Not a lot", I reply. "How about you? Keeping out of trouble?"

"Nope."

Jammer lifts a squat bottle of Australian ginger-beer in mock salute to "trouble".

"Let me guess," I say, raising my own glass of pinot in reply, "Stanley Street? Shahar Peer?"

"Nope. Palestine was last week. I’ve just come from the Japanese Consulate."

"Ah", I shake my head in what I hope is an appropriately sympathetic fashion. "Bad business."

"Business is right", says Jammer. "And what’s with this dude McCully? A New Zealand boat is rammed by the Japanese whalers’ attack-ship, a bunch of people are nearly drowned, and our Foreign Affairs Minister goes on National Radio and accuses the anti-whaling protesters of sailing down to Antarctica to kill people. I mean, that is just so fucked-up. So wrong. You know all these politicians, Chris. What’s the guy into?"

The emphasis which Jammer lays on "into" communicates a world of youthful disdain.

"You’ve got to understand where McCully and his colleagues are coming from, Jammer. What they’re trying to achieve."

"What? Earn a few brownie-points with the Japanese? Keep our trading partners happy? That sort of thing?"

"Actually, no, I don’t think that’s what’s driving McCully at all. From a short-term political perspective, his indifference to what is taking place in the waters off Antarctica is doing the National-led Government a lot of damage. And he’s far too well-versed in the dark arts of public relations not to know it. Sure, Japan’s an important trading partner of New Zealand – but with the rest of the world as pissed-off with the Japanese as we are, there was nothing to be gained, and a lot of public support to be lost, by down-playing this country’s opposition to ‘scientific’ whaling."

"So why all the aggro towards the Sea Shepherds? Why the refusal to speak out against the sinking of the Ady Gil?"

"Well, partly it’s just McCully’s Tory reflexes kicking-in. As you and John Minto discovered last week, conservative New Zealand still has no great love for protesters."

"Yeah! Did you see all those comments on John’s blog? Five hundred of them! People just don’t get it, do they?"

"Nope, they don’t. And believe me, Jammer, they were just the same at the beginning of the anti-apartheid movement fifty years ago. And that, really, is the point. It’s that very Kiwi impulse to come out in support of the under-dog; to stand up and be counted in the face of injustice – even if it pisses-off the French and the Rugby Union, like Norman Kirk did; or the Americans, like David Lange and Helen Clark did – that McCully’s out to eradicate."

"No way!"

"Yep, I’m afraid so. National has always hated the way progressive and idealistic New Zealanders have hauled this country kicking and screaming onto the moral high-ground. It’s always detested, and done its best to douse, the beacon fires of principle we’ve lit there for all the world to see. As Foreign Minister, McCully wants New Zealand to become a follower – not a leader. He wants to show the big powers, America and China in particular, that we’ve finally abandoned our troublesome predilections for standing-up and being counted. He means to show the world that, henceforth, New Zealand will be only too happy to take things lying-down – and count for nothing.

"So that’s why, for the first time in 10 years, this country wasn’t represented at the International Whaling Commission by a Cabinet Minister?"

"Yep. And it also explains why we’ve got the SAS in Afghanistan, and why we hardly said boo to a greenhouse-gas-emitting goose at Copenhagen."

"And why the cops were so bloody heavy-handed with us outside the tennis?"

I nod. Jammer puts down his ginger-beer, shaking his dreadlocks sadly.

"Epic fail, dude" he sighs. "Epic fail."

This essay was originally published in The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 15 January 2010.　

Without Prejudice

Staunch: What the players who high-tackled Maori Television’s bid for Rugby World Cup broadcasting rights failed to factor-in, was John Key’s determination to keep his promises to Pita Sharples.

"WHAT’S LEFT?" Having dismissed every one of the Government’s excuses for stymieing the Maori Television Service’s (MTS) bid to broadcast the Rugby World Cup, that was the question Derek Fox threw back at Nine-to-Noon host, Kathryn Ryan, on the morning of Wednesday, 14 October.

"What are we left with?"

It was the very best kind of public broadcasting: immediate, critical and crackling with powerful emotion.

As a veteran broadcaster, Fox must have known – even as he put the question – that Ryan couldn’t answer. That she could not speak the word that hung in the air between them. The only word equal to the extraordinary spectacle of two state-owned broadcasters frantically out-bidding one another with the taxpayers’ money.

Racism.

Finally, the godfather of Maori broadcasting ended the silence by answering his own question. "What are we left with?" he repeated softly. "We’re left with prejudice."

　
A FEW HOURS BEFORE he spoke to Ryan, Fox was the Maori Party’s chief media spokesman.

Not any more.

It’s easy to join the dots. A man of passionate conviction, Fox wasn’t the sort to take what was happening to the Maori Party and the MTS lying down. Every instinct would have told him to take the offensive. But to do that he had to resign.

Fox’s departure, and Pita Sharples’ tight-lipped assurances that he and his colleagues were not about to "throw the toys out of the cot" told a grim story. It revealed just how strained the relationship between National and the Maori Party had become.

After all, if the Maori party co-leaders, Tariana Turia and Sharples, were willing to put up with racism on this scale, it’s difficult to conceive of the insult they couldn’t put up with.

And the insults which the Minister for the Rugby World Cup, Murray McCully, and the Broadcasting Minister, Jonathan Coleman (in collusion with TVNZ and TV3) were already delivering to the Maori Party – and Maoridom – went way beyond a simple breach of "etiquette".

On full display in the ministers’ attempts to sabotage the MTS bid for the World Cup free-to-air broadcasting rights was National’s ugly underbelly: social attitudes more usually associated with McCully’s and Coleman’s ex-pat South African constituents.

The words "patronising" and "condescending" don’t do justice to such attitudes. A better description might be "sly".

Think of the expression people wear when they’re participating in a practical joke. When everyone else in the room, except the victim, knows what’s afoot. It’s never pleasant.

In this case "the joke" was that dear, silly old Pita really did believe that the National Party had abandoned the ruthless racial stereotyping that fueled Orewa I, and that Key would keep his promises.

How had National’s right wing been able to conceal their bad faith from the Maori Party? The answer lies in the strong affinities between Maori political culture and the noblesse oblige traditions of Western conservatism.

Both are founded on a careful recognition of hierarchy and prestige. Both are governed by an elaborate and highly nuanced code of etiquette. And both rely upon the other side’s ability to read between the lines of the obligatory courtesies.

Essentially, it’s an aristocratic style. When John Key, as Leader of the Opposition, ran into Maori Party MPs in the Koru Club, he always greeted them warmly, sat down, and had a friendly chat.

Labour’s style, reflecting its trade union origins, is very different. Relationships are based squarely on what the parties bring to the table. If Labour doesn’t like, or can’t use, what’s on offer, then the deficient party is automatically relegated to "last cab off the rank" – and its members will seldom merit a friendly nod in the Koru Club.

　
WHEN NATIONAL negotiated its agreement with the Maori Party following the 2008 election, it is clear that a number of its senior figures fully expected Turia and Sharples to "read between the lines" that Key’s promises ought to be taken with a very large grain of salt.

In return for the lustre of political preferment, and a handful of largely symbolic policy concessions (a mea culpa from the Crown over the foreshore and seabed, recognition of the tino rangatiratanga flag) National’s new-found friends were supposed to keep their mouths shut and stay out of the Government’s way.

Sharples refused. Though the number of obfuscations, deferrals and outright rejections of Maori party initiatives steadily mounted, Sharples’ faith National’s leader never faltered. Hadn’t Key acknowledged the mana of the Maori people? And hadn’t he given the Maori Affairs Minister the power and resources to act independently on their behalf?

Yes, he had. So, when Sharples saw an opportunity to introduce Maori culture to the Rugby World Cup’s vast international audience he acted - independently.

　
INSTANTLY, the genial masks of the National Party’s conservative political grandees were cast aside, and their true faces revealed. Harmless ethnic tokenism was one thing, assertive ethnic commerce was something else altogether.

Not only was the Minister of Maori Affairs threatening to put a Maori face to the Pakeha nation’s pre-eminent cultural icon – Rugby – but the MTS bid was turning an unwelcome spotlight on the full extent of TVNZ’s political sycophancy and cultural bankruptcy.

Twenty years of relentless commercialisation have produced a public broadcaster perfectly adapted to National’s needs; an institution uniquely positioned to transform the Rugby World Cup into a cultural support-vehicle for the Governments in an election year. Rather than see TVNZ’s "national town hall" functions usurped by the MTS, McCully and Coleman were willing to let National’s new relationship with Maori fall apart.

As documentary film-maker, and Chair of the Screen Directors Guild, George Andrews, archly observed to Kathryn Ryan a few minutes after her interview with Fox: "When the chips are down the rules [forbidding political interference] go out the window."

　
BUT, BY TWO O’CLOCK on 14 October, Key had shut McCully and Coleman down. In a remarkable display of moral leadership, the Prime Minister over-ruled his over-mighty colleagues and restored the initiative to the MTS. In negotiations with the IRB, TVNZ and TV3 would work with Maori Television – and follow their lead.

Just as he had over the anti-smacking legislation, Key refused to shift his party to the Right. National’s outreach to Maoridom will continue.

Fox had correctly diagnosed the nature of National’s disease – racial prejudice. What he’d failed to identify was the cure – Key’s decency.

This essay was originally published in The Independent of Thursday, 22 October 2009.　

Backroom Boy

Re-framing the new political environment: Murray McCully, like his fellow neo-conservative, Dick Cheney, knows that the best deals are done when nobody is looking.

IT’S A CHILLING image. In the foreground we see the face of the former US President, George W. Bush, wearing that wide-eyed, open-mouthed, slightly goofy expression so beloved by the world’s caricaturists. Behind Bush, his features ever-so-slightly out-of-focus, hunches Vice-president Dick Cheney. While the President looks towards the camera, the Vice-president’s eyes remain fixed, proprietarily, upon his boss. Points of light reflect off his steel-rimmed glasses. His mouth is forming into just the faintest hint of a smirk.

Small wonder TIME magazine chose this photograph to illustrate their special report on "The Final Days of Bush & Cheney". A thousand words could hardly match its deeply creepy depiction of the relationship between Cheney and his hapless Texan protégé.

Has a New Zealand photographer to captured a similar "moment" between our own Prime Minister, John Key, and his Foreign Minister, Murray McCully? It wouldn’t require much effort, because there is definitely something in McCully’s political relationship with Key that recalls the sorcerer’s apprentice aspects of the Cheney-Bush combination.

Perhaps it’s the boyish and disarmingly ingenuous demeanour of the New Zealand Prime Minister that makes one think of Bush, or the talent both men possess for inflicting grievous bodily harm upon the English language. More seriously, it could be the uneasy feeling one gets when watching the public performances of Bush and Key that their grasp of public policy is only as strong as their last verbal briefing. In this respect, the sharpness of the contrast between Key and his predecessor, Helen Clark, is only exceeded by that of the man who succeeded Bush, Barack Obama.

The parallels are also there between Cheney and McCully.

In terms of the recent political histories of their respective nations, both men have been around forever. Cheney (like his close ally, the former Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld) began his career in the days of Richard Nixon (1968-74). He was elected to the House of Representatives five times during the Reagan era, and, before becoming George W, Bush’s running-mate in 2000, served in George Bush Snr’s administration (1988-1992) as Secretary of Defence.

McCully was first elected to Parliament 22 years ago, in 1987, but his career as a National Party insider stretches all the way back to 1973 when, at the age of 20, he was elected President of the Young Nationals. Those 36 years in the trenches have fashioned McCully into the ultimate political insider. Few within his party (perhaps Michelle Boag?) could match the intricacy or extent of his political networks, or challenge his encyclopaedic knowledge of who did what to whom, when, and why. It is taken as an article of faith in National Party circles that, since 1987, no leadership coup has proceeded without McCully’s blessing.

All of which suggests that Key is in McCully’s political debt, and is, therefore, bound to take the MP for East Coast Bays’ ideas on both domestic and foreign policy extremely seriously. TIME magazine writes of Cheney that: "Both by habit and by design, he cultivated a relationship that suited Bush’s view of their roles: the President as the ‘decider’ and Cheney as the éminence grise who counselled him. In reality, by wiring the bureaucracy and being the last person Bush spoke with on many key decisions, Cheney became [as his biographer Barton Gellman put it] a ‘sounding board for advice he originated himself’." It’s a description that could, with only a small amount of editing, be used to describe McCully’s relationship with Key.

McCully’s influence over National’s conduct of domestic policy is more apparent in the present Government’s evolving "tone", than in any specific policy.

It should not be forgotten that, as National’s Communications Director in the late-1970s, McCully observed at close hand the crudely authoritarian and deeply divisive style of Sir Robert Muldoon, and how effective it was at driving wedges into Labour’s traditional support-base. That the raw meat of "Laura Norder" and beneficiary-bashing has become the staple diet of Labour’s disillusioned deserters, is in no small measure attributable to McCully’s strategic insight.

McCully understands, in a way that Key almost certainly does not, the critical importance of keeping the deep-seated social resentments of the New Zealand working-class bubbling merrily away. Certainly, MSD Minister Paula Bennett’s release of the income details of two politically active domestic purposes beneficiaries recalls the very worst excesses of Muldoon’s right-wing populism.

McCully’s influence is, however, most pronounced in matters relating to diplomacy, trade and defence. It is in these fields that the impact of the neo-conservative ideology he shares with Cheney is clearest.

The Foreign Affairs portfolio, McCully’s reward for giving Key the nod, allows him to pursue (well away from the prying eyes of the news media) his long-held objective of restoring New Zealand to its proper place in the Anglo-Saxon fold. His impatience with the diplomacy of grand moral gestures – epitomised by Kirk’s despatch of a frigate to the French nuclear testing-ground at Mururoa Atoll; Lange’s Nuclear-free legislation; and Clark’s refusal to join the invasion of Iraq – underpins his determination to re-couple New Zealand to the train of its traditional allies.

Working in Cheney-like secrecy with the Defence Minister, Wayne Mapp, and Trade Minister, Tim Groser, McCully has spent the last nine months radically reorienting New Zealand diplomacy. The days of New Zealand lecturing the world from a lofty ethical perch, held together by the diplomatic equivalent of No. 8 Wire, are over. Foreign policy under McCully is guided by the more conservative thinkers of Canberra, Washington and London – just as it was in the days of Sir Keith Holyoake and Muldoon.

Almost without them noticing, McCully has enlisted New Zealanders as eager participants in the War on Terror; foot-draggers in the campaign against climate change; and mini-imperialists in the economic re-conquest of the South Pacific.

McCully is also pressing Key to send the SAS back to Afghanistan in a combat role. If the blood of Kiwi soldiers is the price New Zealand must pay to convince her erstwhile allies that she is once again ready to play her part as the fifth finger of the Anglo-Saxon "fist", then he will not demur.

Like Cheney, McCully is perfectly content to let his protégé claim personal ownership of "advice he originated himself". Thirty-six years of political skulduggery have taught this backroom boy that the best deals are done when no one’s looking.

This essay was originally published in The Independent of Thursday, 6 August 2009.