History Lessons.

“That’s a C- for History, Kelvin!” While it is certainly understandable that Māori-Crown Relations Minister Kelvin Davis was not anxious to castigate every Pakeha member of the House of Representatives for the crimes committed against his people by their ancestors; crimes from which his Labour colleagues continue to draw enormous benefits; the direction of his prosecutorial rhetoric at National and Act MPs exclusively was historically indefensible and morally obnoxious.

I SURE HOPE Kelvin Davis wasn’t a history teacher before he became a principal and then Te Tai Tokerau’s MP. Why? Because his grasp of what happened in this country between the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi and today isn’t just wrong, it also has the potential to create great mischief.

The speech he delivered to the House of Representatives on Wednesday (11/5/22) is a particularly grim example of the Minister for Māori-Crown Relations historical ignorance. In it he appeared to equate the Opposition parties with the entire Pakeha population – past and present. This was more than just racially inflammatory, it represents a dangerous distortion of reality.

Addressing the Opposition Benches, Davis declared: “They conveniently overlook the fact that their wealth, their privilege and their authority was built off the backs of other people’s misery and entrenched inequality across generations.”

This is interesting. National’s leader, Christopher Luxon, was born in 1970, and the Act leader, David Seymour, in 1983. At the ages of 52 and 39 respectively, that doesn’t leave them many generations across which to have inflicted misery and entrenched inequality! He would have been on slightly firmer ground if he had been addressing his remarks to Labour’s Roger Douglas – whose policies did indeed inflict misery and inequality. Perhaps not across generations, but certainly since 1984. Except, of course, Labour MPs don’t like to draw attention to those policies – mostly on account of the fact that their party has done so little over nearly 40 years to reverse them.

Davis did considerably better, historically, when he described to the House the fate of his ancestors at the hands of Nineteenth Century colonial authorities. The gradual consolidation of the colonial state, its laws and regulations, effectively dispossessed Davis’s forebears, leaving them destitute and demoralised.

What Davis failed to mention, however, is that the Nineteenth Century dispossession of the Māori was Crown policy. More importantly, it was a process cheered to the echo by the overwhelming majority of the burgeoning Pakeha population. Rich and poor alike understood that their future prosperity was contingent upon the immiseration of the “native” population. Meaning that it wasn’t just the ancestors of the present Opposition MPs who built their wealth and privilege off the backs of his tupuna, but also the present crop of Pakeha Labour MPs seated alongside him.

While it is certainly understandable that Davis was not anxious to castigate every Pakeha member of the House of Representatives for the crimes committed against his people by their ancestors; crimes from which they continue, as a people, to draw enormous benefits; the direction of his prosecutorial rhetoric at National and Act MPs exclusively was historically indefensible and morally obnoxious.

If Davis is unaware that the single most devastating economic and social assault upon Māori of the last 50 years occurred on the Fourth Labour Government’s watch, then he has no business being an MP – let alone the Minister of Māori-Crown Relations. Certainly he cannot have forgotten that it was the Fifth Labour Government which oversaw the passage of the Seabed and Foreshore legislation. Or, that it was a Labour Prime Minister, Helen Clark, who described the leading opponents of that legislation as “haters and wreckers” – preferring to meet with an excessively woolly ram than with the tangata whenua her proposed law had so enraged.

Maybe the reckless willingness of the Sixth Labour Government to embrace the co-governance agenda of its Māori caucus is a delayed reaction to the actions of the Fourth and the Fifth. If so, then it is a very foolish reaction. Had Helen Clark and her Attorney-General not moved with speed to reverse the Court of Appeal’s overturning of what had been considered settled law, then Don Brash would, almost certainly, have won the 2005 General Election. Given that a National victory in 2005 would have meant the effective re-nullification of the Treaty and the abolition of the Māori Seats – thereby provoking civil war – Māori and Pakeha both owe her a tremendous debt of gratitude.

The depressing thing about the politics of the moment is the apparent historical amnesia of just about all its practitioners. The Settler Nation responsible for extinguishing the Treaty in the 1860s is simply not prepared to see it reinstated as New Zealand’s de facto constitution in the 2020s. The way Davis chose to deliver his thoughts to the House of Representatives: in the form of an attack on the Opposition; shows just how impossible it is to construct an argument about our history that does not inevitably boil down to the equivalent of Sir Michael Cullen’s memorable taunt: “We won. You lost. Eat that!”

The most frightening aspect of Davis’s performance is that it showed no signs that the Minister of Māori-Crown relations has the slightest idea of what will happen to that relationship if co-governance is forced upon an unwilling Pakeha nation.

Davis’s colleague, Willie Jackson, has labelled the Act leader a “useless Māori” and “a dangerous man”. But David Seymour is no more or less “useless” than those Māori iwi and hapu that saw which way the wind was blowing in the 1850s and 60s and ended up fighting alongside General Cameron’s imperial troops. As for being a dangerous man. Well, Jackson’s description can only be proven if Seymour and his party attract sufficient support to enforce the implementation of Act’s radical policies. He will be a dangerous man only because his fellow New Zealanders have made him one – by voting for him.

It’s not Seymour that poses a danger to you and your people, Willie, it’s democracy. But, then, you already knew that, didn’t you?

By the same token, it’s not the Opposition that has somehow cornered all the privilege, Kelvin, nor is it the exclusive property of the 63 percent of the New Zealand population known as Pakeha. These fair-skinned Polynesians are not – and never will be – “Europeans”. Just as contemporary Māori are not – and never will be again – the Māori who inhabited these islands before colonisation. Both peoples are the victims of historical forces too vast for blame, too permanent for guilt.

It is high time we stopped using History as a weapon, and started relying upon it as a guide.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 13 May 2022.

What Is A White Supremacist?

The Original White Supremacists: The current misuse of the term “white supremacy” is highly dangerous politically. By singling out this particular form of racism and misapplying it to famous figures from the past, as well as to people living in the present, the users of the term risk not only its rapid devaluation, but also the angry retaliation of those who feel both themselves and their beliefs to have been wrongly and unfairly condemned.

THE TERM “WHITE SUPREMACIST” is rapidly replacing the more straightforward “racist” in mainstream journalism. The term is also being used to describe the belief system of Philip Arps, the self-confessed Nazi who was sentenced earlier this week to 21 months imprisonment. On social media, especially Twitter, the term is being used, anachronistically, to characterise the ideas of explorers and colonialists living in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While it is not unusual to encounter such terminological misuse in the writings of radical post-modernists, it is worrying to see the mainstream media subsume so many different historical and ideological phenomena into this single, catch-all, expression.

The current misuse of the term “white supremacy” is also highly dangerous politically. By singling out this particular form of racism and misapplying it to famous figures from the past, as well as to people living in the present, the users of the term risk not only its rapid devaluation, but also the angry retaliation of those who feel both themselves and their beliefs to have been wrongly and unfairly condemned.

Because the number of New Zealanders subscribing to the beliefs journalists now describe as “white supremacist” is by no means a small one. Indeed, it is likely that a majority of older Pakeha New Zealanders still adhere, either wholly or in part, to the notion that the achievements of western civilisation – of white people – far outstrip those of any other. They may be careful about who they share these ideas with, but they hold them nonetheless.

It is certainly the case that this assumption of western superiority informed the response of practically all the western nations to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. When President George W. Bush explained the terrorists’ murderous attacks by saying: “they hate our freedoms, they hate our way of life”; very few white Americans, or whites living in any other western nation, failed to grasp his racially-charged sub-text: they are less than us.

The mainstream media, itself, is equally guilty of assigning considerably greater value to the lives of westerners than to human-beings living in other parts of the world. A cruise liner carrying wealthy Europeans runs into a Venice wharf, injuring half-a-dozen, and it’s headline news around the planet. An overcrowded ferry-boat collides with another vessel and sinks, drowning 200 Indians, and all it rates is a one-line mention three-quarters of the way down the news bulletin. What other message can we draw from that, other than – whites are more important?

So, racism is a hard habit for westerners to break. The use of the term “white supremacy”, however, should properly be restricted to the specific political actors and the particular historical context from which it emerged. It refers, primarily, to the political regimes which arose in the southern states of the USA in the years following the American Civil War – most particularly in the decades immediately following the withdrawal of federal troops from the states of the defeated Confederacy in 1877.

These regimes were built on the bedrock requirement that whites must in all conceivable circumstances: economic, social, cultural, legal and political; be placed ahead of and above blacks. The poorest and most ill-educated white farmer had to be able to count himself better off, both subjectively and objectively, than his black neighbours. White supremacy wasn’t just a matter of personal racial animus, it described a comprehensive and internally coherent system of race-based rule. A “white supremacist”, accordingly, is a person who not only subscribes to the principles underpinning the infamous “Jim Crow” system, but also – like the contemporary Ku Klux Klan – strives for its return. Obviously, the term may also be legitimately applied to the very similar systems of race-based rule erected in South Africa and Rhodesia between 1948 and 1992.

It is important to acknowledge that a political entity driven by the principles of genuine white supremacy will be very different from one in which the official goal is racial assimilation, as was formerly the case in New Zealand. It will also be quite distinct from a regime, such as Nazi Germany’s, whose official goal was the physical elimination of all races deemed to be a threat to the herrenvolk – the master race. This is because, in both the American South, and in Southern Africa, blacks were absolutely essential to the successful operation of the white-controlled economy. Without plentiful and criminally cheap black labour, the white supremacist regimes on both continents would not have been economically viable.

This is why it is so dangerous to conflate all economic, social and political systems in which racial prejudice and inequality thrive as “white supremacist” regimes. Simple racial chauvinism is very different from the conscious creation of a race-based economic and political system. If, however, the media persists in lumping together every Pakeha who takes pride in the achievements of western civilisation with avowed Nazis, like Philip Arps, or genocidal eco-fascists, like the Christchurch shooter, then not only will the charge lose all its definitional and moral force, but, sooner or later, those so lumped will come to the conclusion that they might as well be hung for sheep as lambs.

Those on the Left who are promoting the use of this term, presumably as a way of shaming Pakeha New Zealanders into acknowledging and renouncing their “white privilege”, may soon come to regret driving their boots so forcefully into such a large pack of sleeping dogs. Giving these mutts the bad name of “white supremacists” will in no way blunt, or shorten, their political teeth.

What happened at Orewa in January 2004, can happen again.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 20 June 2019.

Voter Motivators 2017: Immigration.

A Big Wide World Out There: Familiarity with “foreign” cultures has rendered “foreigners” a lot less frightening to young New Zealanders than old ones. New Zealanders raised entirely in the globalisation era know there’s a big wide world out there – a world which values highly the Kiwi’s celebrated ability to get along with just about anybody. Racism no longer pays.

 

IMMIGRATION has set the world on fire. The debt owed by both Brexit and Trump to the issue’s inflammatory power is huge. With record volumes of migrants pouring into New Zealand, immigration policy is widely expected to be among the biggest voter motivators of 2017.

 

But will New Zealanders react to these new arrivals in the same way as British and American voters? Or will the circumstances underpinning this country’s record migration flows smother the flames of racism and xenophobia before they take hold?

 

If New Zealand history is any guide, probably not. Net inward flows of migration have always been the signal of economic prosperity and growth. Just as net outward flows have been the surest sign that all is not well in God’s Own Country. There’s an ancestral voice in the racial memory of Pakeha New Zealanders which commands their attention during periods of rapid population growth. A voice which reminds them that, in these stolen islands, more non-indigenous people are always a good thing.

 

For Maori New Zealanders, the opposite is true. The more immigrants that arrive on these shores, the more the indigenous essence of Aotearoa-New Zealand is diluted. The Treaty the Maori chiefs signed with the British in 1840 seemed a wise and timely concession when barely 2,000 Pakeha were sprinkled lightly across their lands. Twenty years later, when the number of British settlers overtook the population of tangata whenua, the promises given at Waitangi proved to be as cynical as they were unenforceable.

 

What is it, then, which stops the latest population projections from Statistics New Zealand from setting the fern leaves of Kiwi nationalism alight? Released on 18 May 2017, these projections indicate that over the next 20 years the number of immigrants from East and South Asia will double. By 2038 the number of New Zealanders of “Asian” ethnicity will represent nearly a quarter of the country’s population. Maori, by contrast, will see their share of the population rise by just 2 percentage points – from 16 to 18 percent. “European” New Zealanders’ share of the overall population is projected to fall from roughly three-quarters to two-thirds.

 

In times past, projections such as these would have generated a massive public backlash against the political party, or parties, responsible for such a dramatic reconfiguration of the nation’s ethnic profile. Twenty years ago, media headlines decrying an “Asian Invasion” were exploited by Winston Peters’ to secure 13 percent of the Party Vote for his NZ First Party. Why, then, twenty years later, is NZ First not polling twice or three times that number?

 

The explanation is, almost entirely, economic.

 

Chinese immigration has encouraged Auckland property prices to soar – producing a “wealth effect” (courtesy of tax-free capital gains!) for which, justifiably or unjustifiably, Chinese investors are held responsible. Bolstering this shift in perception across the entire country has been the steady rise in China’s consumption of New Zealand’s exports. Rather than bite the hand which is, increasingly, feeding them, many Kiwis have considered it more prudent to retire the worst of their old prejudices.

 

In regional New Zealand, likewise, the sterling contribution of Filipino dairy farm workers is encouraging a hitherto undetected enthusiasm for multiculturalism.

 

Even in the working-class heartlands, the money to be made hiring-out the spare room to overseas students is often enough to defang traditional blue-collar hostility towards “low-wage workers” flooding “their” labour market.

 

The other factor which explains New Zealanders reluctance (so far!) to respond to nationalistic dog-whistles is the sheer number of Kiwis who have travelled overseas. Familiarity with “foreign” cultures has rendered “foreigners” a lot less frightening to young New Zealanders than old ones. New Zealanders raised entirely in the globalisation era know there’s a big wide world out there – a world which values highly the Kiwi’s celebrated ability to get along with just about anybody. Racism no longer pays.

 

None of which should be advanced as evidence that racism and xenophobia will find no purchase in the forthcoming general election. There are many thousands of New Zealanders who feel like strangers in their own land. Who miss the comforting homogeneity of the sleepy, white, British dominion in which they were raised. Such voters are, however, a dwindling asset for all but the NZ First Party. Only Winston can afford to make “A Whiter Shade of Pale” his theme song.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 9 June 2017.

Voter Motivators 2017: Poverty.

Making Poverty History: Dorothea Lange's iconic portrait of a Depression Era mother and her children speaks of a time when poverty was a problem to be solved - not a condition to be sneered at.

 

WHEN ENOUGH PEOPLE ARE POOR, poverty changes. Instead of being seen as the outward manifestation of vice, poverty is transformed into the enabler of virtue. In communities where everyone is poor, the merits of compassion, solidarity and generosity are everywhere on display. Poor people support one another, take care of one another, defend one another.

 

In societies where wealth and resources are controlled by a tiny minority, it is the rich who find themselves stigmatised. Their greed, love of luxury and relentless selfishness are everywhere condemned. In the eyes of the poor, wealth and vice are indistinguishable.

 

Eighty-five years ago, at the height of the Great Depression, poverty stalked four out of every five New Zealand streets. More than one in four men of working age were unemployed, and those who still had jobs were forced to accept regular – often savage – reductions in their wages and salaries.

 

As the economic crisis deepened, the spectre of poverty crept out of the urban slums and into the leafy suburbs of the middle-class. Respectable men on respectable salaries found themselves “let go”. Poverty ceased to be something that affected the “lower orders”. Now ordinary “decent” people were staring it in the face.

 

In 2017, with a general election looming, the issue of poverty still ranks as one of New Zealand’s big voter motivators. People sleeping in their cars; children succumbing to Third World diseases; workers lining-up at food banks for assistance; whole families going hungry to pay the power bill and keep the landlord happy: those lucky enough to live in the three out of four streets where poverty does not intrude have been made to feel profoundly uneasy by its evident proximity.

 

In a society where only a quarter of children are being raised in poverty, however, the remedies for privation and despair are hotly contested. With security and comfort now the norm in New Zealand, the question a great many voters ask themselves is: “What is going on in these families which prevents them from living a happy and productive life like the rest of us?”

 

In 1935, the answer to that question could be reduced to two words: “The Slump”. The effects of the Great Depression weighed upon the whole of New Zealand like a leaden overcoat. It made all the old explanations of poverty redundant. Whoever was to blame for the collapse of the capitalist economy – it wasn’t the poor.

 

And, for those who were hurting, the remedy was clear: vote for the party pledged to make poverty history. Let the state take the place of your family, friends and neighbours and become the collective deliverer of compassion, solidarity and generosity. All those things denied the poor: good jobs on good pay; free education and health care; a warm, dry house at an affordable rent; a measure of equality in the workplace; state assistance in old age, infirmity and economic adversity; these were the changes that Labour promised – and delivered.

 

Not only was poverty (in the sense of the harsh economic and social conditions experienced by a clear majority of the population in the early years of capitalism) reduced dramatically by the creation of the Welfare State, but in the decades that followed its moral character underwent an enormous revision.

 

No longer was poverty seen as the consequence of the viciously rich and their failed economic system. No longer was it celebrated as the creator of virtuous behaviour. Now it was regarded as the consequence of individual and familial inadequacy. Now it was the poor who exemplified vice. Laziness, drunkenness, violence, cruelty and crime: these became the new markers of Poverty.

 

The National Party’s twenty-first century response to this re-defined poverty is unequivocal: deal with the individual and familial inadequacies of the poor and the vicious circles of deprivation can be broken. They call it “Social Investment”.

 

Labour’s position is much more difficult. Gone are the days when an economically victimised majority saw themselves as the deserving beneficiaries of a long overdue and radical redistribution of society’s resources. In 2017, the no-longer-poor majority identify much more readily as taxpayers, and are much less certain that Labour’s (and the Greens’) compassion, solidarity and generosity are entitlements to which the “undeserving poor” have any claim.

 

Poverty will be motivating voters in 2017 – but in ways far removed from those of 1935.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 16 June 2017.

The Pilgrim Of Light: Nicky Hager And New Zealand Politics

Admonishing Angel: Nicky Hager descends periodically to trouble our consciences and wreak merry havoc with the orderly conduct of our political affairs. But, more than any other journalist in New Zealand, he has taught us to read the actions of those who wield power over and around us in the twenty-first century.

 

WHAT WILL HISTORY MAKE of Nicky Hager? That slight, perpetually boyish, journalist who descends periodically, like the admonishing angel in a medieval mystery play, to trouble our consciences and wreak merry havoc with the orderly conduct of our political affairs. History will have to make something of him: his interventions have been too important to be dismissed by our political brewers as mere irrelevant froth. But what? That is the question.

 

Perhaps we should begin by telling the world what Nicky Hager is not. Prime Ministerial judgements notwithstanding, he is not “a screaming left-wing conspiracy-theorist”.

 

Hager has never, is not, and never will be some sort of avatar of the “left-wing”. He has far too refined a moral sense to be the representative of anything so fractious and morally compromised as the New Zealand Left. Indeed, most left-wingers have little patience for individuals so weighed down by self-imposed scruples. The preferred left-wing soldier is as reluctant to question the ethics of the party-line as Hager is eager to challenge them. Revolutionary bread is typically made from much more coarsely-ground flour.

 

Nor does Hager scream. His mode of address is invariably polite and carefully measured. Softly-spoken and slow to take offence, Hager is actually the perfect foil for the genuine screamers of the public sphere. These latter cannot abide the fact that Hager is able to inflict so much damage to their cause while speaking in tones of such sweet reasonableness. One imagines their camera lenses, microphones and keyboards flecked with spittle – so great is the rage which he inspires.

 

Of all the epithets hurled at Hager, by far the most common is that he is a “conspiracy theorist”. I recently heard one of Jim Mora’s panellists, a woman who I would wager has never read a single one of his books, dismiss him as “a grassy-knoll fantasist”. I was surprised she didn’t add that he was generally to be found sporting a jaunty tin-foil hat!

 

Methinks the lady – and all those others so quick to dismiss Hager’s work as the rantings of a demented conspiracy theorist – doth protest too much. Such people cannot easily accept that what they happily acknowledge as the truth of things may be something else entirely. That the “official” story is, as often as not, a tissue of lies. Or, that the eruptions of mendacity which periodically disturb the placid surface of public life are anything other than unfortunate accidents: cock-ups – not conspiracies. Hager’s books, so meticulously researched and footnoted, so weighed down with names and dates and places, render the cock-up theory unusable by these poor souls, forcing them to focus on facts as uncomfortable as they are irrefutable. Unsurprisingly, he is not thanked for doing so.

 

Even more upset, however, are the people whose hidden machinations (conspiracies if you like the word better) Hager exposes. Once again, this is hardly surprising. Whether it be the people behind the Echelon spy system; the timber company with its eyes on the native forests of the West Coast; a Labour prime minister who’d neglected to alert the country to the accidental release of genetically-engineered corn; the National Party strategists behind Dr Don Brash’s bid to complete the neoliberal revolution; the New Zealand Defence Force’s strenuous efforts to re-attach New Zealand’s pinky finger to the Anglo-Saxon fist; or, All The Prime Minister’s Men’s e-mail communications with Cameron Slater: these are people who would have preferred their words and deeds to have remained hidden from the public gaze. “Conspiracy theorist!”, in the mouths of such individuals is not a revelation, it’s a diversion.

 

So what has Hager done? In historical terms, he has taught us how to read the actions of those who wield power over and around us in the twenty-first century. Since the publication of his first book, Secret Power, in 1996, Hager has shown us things our leaders would rather we hadn’t seen. He’s taught us to challenge the official media releases; to question the news stories; and to understand the truth of British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli’s (1804-1881) disturbing observation that: “The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.”

 

Hager is one of that rare breed of men with whom even History is uncomfortable. He represents neither class nor creed; is the servant of neither political party nor economic interest. He comes to us out of storms of malice, steering his fragile little boat of truth across a raging sea of lies. In the words of one of the nineteenth century’s greatest historians, Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) Nicky Hager is proof that:

 

“In the true Literary Man there is thus ever, acknowledged or not by the world, a sacredness: he is the light of the world; the world’s Priest – guiding it, like a sacred Pillar of Fire, in its dark pilgrimage through the waste of Time.”

 

This essay was posted simultaneously on the Daily Blog and Bowalley Road blogsites on Wednesday, 27 August 2014.

New Zealand's Progressive Nationalism

Progressive Nationalist: Murray Horton has been the public face of the Campaign Against Foreign Control in Aotearoa (CAFCA) since the mid-1970s. He has just completed his triennial, election year, tour of New Zealand during which he reacquaints grass-roots New Zealanders with the facts, the figures and the consequences of trans-national corporate dominance of their country.

 

LAST FRIDAY I had the privilege of listening to one of Canterbury’s finest sons, Murray Horton. For 40 strenuous years Murray and a dedicated band of supporters have run the organisation called Campaign Against Foreign Control in Aotearoa (CAFCA). The official organ of CAFCA – Foreign Control Watchdog – is edited by Murray, published quarterly, and along with articles and reviews on politics and economics contains a handy compendium of all the latest decisions of the Overseas Investment Office. It always makes for challenging, not to mention sobering, reading.

 

Every election year, for close on 20 years now, Murray has journeyed from one end of New Zealand to the other, bringing to New Zealanders the facts, the figures and the consequences of foreign investment in their country. Though the rigorously atheistic Horton would probably frown at the suggestion, I look upon these nationwide tours as a kind of pilgrimage. Not the sort of pilgrimage where faith is restored through the proximity of saints, shrines and relics, but through a renewed connection with that most essential raw material of Democracy – the people themselves.

 

In trades halls, church halls, community halls (and the occasional university lecture hall) from Bluff to Kaitaia, Murray gives his 90 minute talk to groups ranging in size from half-a-dozen to several score. It’s not for the faint-hearted because Murray’s a political campaigner of the old-school – the sort that eschews sound-bites for hard evidence and patient reasoning.

 

And people love it: asking him questions and arguing about his answers for hours at a time. In this regard the talk I attended in Auckland on Friday was no exception. People arrived at 4 and didn’t leave until after 7:00pm.

 

The gospel according to Horton is a compelling testament not least because the person delivering it is so quintessentially Kiwi. Laconic, sharp, self-deprecating, larger-than-life and with an accent you could sharpen a knife on, he’s the sort of character Labour used to hoist onto the hustings. (Back in the days when describing someone as working-class and clever was not discounted, in rounded middle-class vowels, as oxymoronic.)

 

It is compelling, too, because it is directed at people who still regard themselves, culturally, as members of a national community, and, politically, as citizens of a nation state.

 

It’s no accident that CAFCA was founded in 1974, a year in which the potent, genuinely progressive New Zealand nationalism unleashed by Norman Kirk just 12 months earlier was gathering strength. The nationalism which would reach its apogee in the anti-tour protests and nuclear-free New Zealand movement of the early 1980s. The enduring conviction of what New Zealand should represent – and could represent – that the neoliberal ideology introduced by Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson has worked so diligently to deconstruct for the past 25 years.

 

Kirk’s progressive nationalism – and Horton’s – can trace its origins all the way back to the progressivism of the Liberal Government of 1891-1912. It was during this period that New Zealand acquired the sobriquet “social laboratory of the world”, giving practical effect to the author of God Defend New Zealand, Thomas Bracken’s, prayer that the Almighty would “guide her in the nations’ van” as humanity’s pathfinder to a more just and abundant society.

 

That New Zealand’s most enduring nationalistic traditions should derive directly from the progressive side of politics is hardly surprising. The mobilising sentiment against which they have invariably measured themselves has almost always been generated by this country’s conservative elites on behalf of the supra-national entities in which New Zealand has historically found itself culturally, politically and (most importantly) economically enmeshed.

 

First as a colony and then as a (reluctant) dominion, New Zealand’s conservative leaders have consistently presented these islands and their inhabitants as the British Empire’s most loyal subjects. The awful blood sacrifice of World War I kept the “Mother Country’s” doors open to all the butter, cheese, wool and lamb her Pacific farmers could send. And when, in 1941, the Japanese were unkind enough to sink Mother’s warships Repulse and Prince of Wales, New Zealand was compelled to shift, without so much as a pause of breath, into the imperial embrace of Uncle Sam.

 

While the USA was under the progressive management of Franklin D. Roosevelt that might not seem so bad, but as Uncle Sam swiftly acquired the bloodthirsty habits of all imperial potentates, New Zealand’s conservative elites were only too happy to again subsume their country’s interests in the supra-national, American-led “Free World” and, after the Cold War’s end, into “the global marketplace”.

 

Listening to Murray Horton’s inspirational pitch for progressive New Zealanders to put the interests of New Zealand first, and those of foreign investors second, and, then, to reduce the “Five Eyes” global surveillance agreement to a Kiwi-less four, I suddenly understood Che Guevara’s cryptic observation:

 

“The Revolution is not a portrait – it’s a landscape.”

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 13 May 2014.

Rapt In History

The Mill House, Waianakarua: Constructed in 1879 by a German immigrant, Ernst Diehl, the massive building is now an accommodation-restaurant complex. Born amidst treachery and tragedy, the mill stands as a symbol of both continuity and change in the Herbert-Waianakarua District.

THERE ARE PLACES where history wraps around us like a warm blanket – or a winding sheet. Sometimes, like both at once. The Mill House, located 25 kilometres south of Oamaru on State Highway One, is one such place.

 

Originally a flour mill, it was constructed in 1879 by a German-born immigrant named Ernst Diehl – and it was built to last. According to a contemporary report in the North Otago Times: “The foundation is laid on solid rock, and is 9 feet in depth, the walls being 3ft 3in in thickness.”

 

Alas for Herr Diehl, his mighty structure had hardly been standing a year when it was beset by treachery and tragedy.

 

In the words of local historian, Dorothy McKenzie: “A considerable amount of money was held in the mill safe over the summer, so that farmers could be paid out as they delivered their bags of grain. At the height of the first season of operations, the mill was burnt out and as the local story has it [Diehl’s business partner] Davidson had disappeared, leaving an empty safe behind him.”

 

The Mill may have been burnt out but it was not burned down. Under the management of the appropriately named Phoenix Milling Co., the refurbished mill continued to grind flour for another 60 years, finally closing its doors in 1939.

 

Growing up in the neighbouring village of Herbert in the 1950s and 60s, I remember the mill as a mysterious industrial ruin. Massive and seemingly indestructible it guarded the graceful span of the Waianakarua stone bridge like some misplaced medieval castle. Its blank windows shedding less and less light on a story that fewer and fewer people could remember.

 

Now an “accommodation-restaurant complex” the Mill House wraps its 3ft 3in walls around visitors from all over the world. New stories are daily being added to the old.

 

For me, also, this past week has been a mixture of new and old stories. One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, on 15 March 1864, the contemporaries of Ernst Diehl founded Otepopo (Herbert) School. Aging adults, who, when last I saw them were children, came from as far away as Sydney, to greet the geographic, architectural and human strongholds of their youth.

 

From them I learned how many of the farms of the original settler families had already passed – or were passing – into the hands of faceless foreign corporations. “Bewley”, the property my father farmed, I was told, had gone with them.

 

The great forest that the State had spread over the hills above Herbert in the 1930s is now in the hands of an American forestry firm.

 

Herbert’s beautiful Presbyterian church, St John’s, stands forlorn, its future uncertain. Spiders’ webs seal its padlocked wooden doors.

 

This is not, of course, a tale familiar to North Otago only. All across New Zealand the solid signposts of the past are being dismantled. The family farm, which for 150 years has given this nation a foundation as solid as the Mill House’s, is rapidly fading away.

 

Only a handful of the children I attended Otepopo School with remained in the district. Most were scattered, like gulls blown on a boisterous wind, to Sydney, London, the North Sea, Wyoming. Or simply to places in New Zealand with more to offer than a sleepy North Otago township.

 

But those children did not leave Herbert empty-handed. The values imparted by the teachers of Otepopo School and the ministers of St John Presbyterian Church went with them.

 

And not just with them; because the same values were also imparted to successive generations of New Zealand children by thousands of equally caring rural teachers and clergymen, farmers and farriers; railwaymen and road workers; shopkeepers and country GPs.

 

And now those New Zealanders, rural no longer, are imparting to their own offspring a core of values not so very different from the ones they learned in little places like Herbert up and down the long length of Aotearoa.

 

Thus does history wrap us warm in its blanket, and bind us tight in our winding-sheet.

 

And thus did my thoughts run as I looked down from a window set in the Mill House’s 3ft 3in walls. Listening to the Waianakarua River chuckling in its sun-dappled bed, and the bell-birds tolling the hours.

 

Thinking about where New Zealand has come from – and where it is going.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 21 March 2014.

A Precise Moment In History: Pondering The Legacy Of Waitangi

Mixed Historical Motives: The simple clauses of the Treaty of Waitangi masterfully embraced the complex agendas of both its British and Maori signatories.

 

IT’S JANUARY 1840, two sailing vessels are fast approaching the North Island of New Zealand. His Majesty’s Ship Rattlesnake carries Captain William Hobson bearing instructions from the Colonial Office to organise the voluntary cession of the islands of New Zealand to the British Crown. The other ship, Aurora, carries settlers to the newly established settlement of Port Nicolson. It has been chartered by the privately owned and organised New Zealand Company.

 

Captain Hobson’s instructions are not unrelated to the purposes for which the Aurora and her passengers set sail. The islands of New Zealand, conveniently located in the temperate zone of the southern hemisphere, are large but sparsely populated (the indigenous Maori population numbers approximately 125,000). Not surprisingly, therefore, they have begun to loom large in the sights of European entrepreneurs, missionaries and imperialists.

 

Under pressure from the aristocratic backers of the New Zealand Company, and wary of the pretensions of competing powers – particularly the French – the Colonial Office in London is determined to regularise the confused situation then prevailing in Australasia. If the land titles being sold to settlers by the New Zealand Company are to be legally enforceable, the question of sovereignty must be settled – and quickly. By fair means or by foul, New Zealand is to be annexed to the British Crown.

 

The cheapest, the most politically expedient, and (in the face of the Missionary Society’s strenuous submissions) the most morally defensible means of securing possession of New Zealand is to persuade the indigenous Maori tribes to cede sovereignty to her Britannic majesty, Victoria, voluntarily.  Indeed, British agents and missionaries in New Zealand have been assiduously laying the groundwork for just such a solution since the mid-1830s. The British Resident, James Busby, has even secured a “Declaration of Independence” from his purpose-built “Confederation of Chiefs” so the Crown has something to sit down with when the time to negotiate a plausible treaty of cession finally arrives.

 

As HMS Rattlesnake drops anchor in the Bay of Islands in February 1840, this is exactly what Hobson and his confreres, Busby and Freeman, are preparing to do.

 

THE MAORI LEADERS gathered at Waitangi to korero with Captain Hobson have come with an equally clear set of priorities.

 

First and foremost, they are seeking protection.

 

From the early 1830s a rough “balance of terror” has prevailed among the indigenous people as more and more of them acquired firearms. Even so, the slaughter and dislocation of the so-called “Musket Wars” are still a very recent memory, and nobody’s ready to wager the lives of their whanau and hapu on the blood-letting never breaking out again. Information gleaned from Maori who’ve travelled to Australia – and further afield – suggests that the British Empire holds out the best hope of keeping the peace between the tribes.

 

They’re also keen for the British to keep the roughly 2,000 unruly Europeans who’ve settled amongst them to trade, hunt whales and seals, or simply to outrun the writ of whoever’s justice system is after them, under some semblance of control. There’s a lot of wealth to be had from these folk, but only if the tribes can enlist the aid of an entity with sufficient power to make sure they keep their side of any bargain – and pay up.

 

Having learned the hard way how skittish the Pakeha become when Maori exercise their own robust forms of tribal justice, they reckon it will make things a lot easier if their “guests” are forced to live under their own laws.

 

Among the shrewder Maori – including the wily Hone Heke – there is also a nagging fear that the ever-increasing inward flow of European settlers will not stop. They’ve learned that these new arrivals are different – not the usual traders, whoremasters, grog-sellers, whalers, sealers and fugitives that the tribes have grown used to accommodating.

 

More than anything else, the settlers arriving on the New Zealand Company ships desire land – Maori land. And as more and more of them arrive, that hunger for Maori land can only increase. That’s why the better educated and more travelled Maori are determined to secure their tribal possessions against settler pressure by placing them under the protection of the world’s most powerful nation – Great Britain.

 

Also at Waitangi are the Christian Maori – the products of more than twenty years of missionary effort. To these men and women the Pakeha have vouchsafed an entirely different understanding of the human condition. Christianity has conferred upon its native converts a new kind of power: a new mana.

 

They understand that the Pakeha’s morality, knowledge and technology offer their people a way-in to a world their ancestors could never have imagined. For them the future lies in a voluntary melding of their own and the newcomers’ cultures – and that melding cannot happen soon enough.

 

THE SIMPLE CLAUSES of the Treaty of Waitangi masterfully embraced the complex agendas of both its British and Maori signatories. It is, however, naïve in the extreme to characterise the document as a contract.

 

Treaties are not contracts: at least not in the sense that a mortgage or hire-purchase agreement is a contract. What a treaty actually amounts to is a description of the power relations existing between two peoples at a precise moment in history.

 

Almost always (and the Treaty of Waitangi is no exception) the relationship between the signatories is an unequal one (usually reflecting the stronger party’s military victory over the weaker). What makes the Treaty of Waitangi so interesting is that it was signed in anticipation of – and as a way of avoiding – the military clash which would have become inevitable if a voluntary cession of sovereignty to the British Crown had been refused.

 

But Maori did not emerge from the negotiations of February 1840 empty-handed. The quid pro quo, in return for making things easy for the Colonial Office, was the guarantee of what they had been seeking all along – the protection of the Crown. Protection against any return to the slaughter of the Musket Wars; protection against social disorder and commercial trickery; and protection against the Pakeha they were most afraid of: the ones who were coming to stay.

 

This was the real partnership enshrined in the Treaty: the partnership between the Maori tribes and the Colonial Office, or, to put it more precisely, with the executive arm of the British Government in London. This was the power the chiefs had aligned themselves with: a power which, in the person of the Governor, would stand between them and the predatory approach to land acquisition represented by the New Zealand Company and its growing body of imitators.

 

And there’s no question that the chiefs’ fears in regard to the settlers were entirely justified. Here, for example, is how one of the Governors of the New Zealand Company viewed the Treaty:

 

“We have always had very serious doubts whether the Treaty of Waitangi, made with naked savages by a consul invested with no plenipotentiary powers, without ratification by the Crown, could be treated by lawyers as anything but a praiseworthy devise for amusing and pacifying savages for the moment.”

 

THAT OMINOUS “for the moment” offers us a chilling reminder of just how historically contingent all treaties are. Certainly the Treaty of Waitangi – as a means of protecting the things Maori treasured – did not long survive the moment when the settler population reached a size sufficient to persuade London to grant it a measure of self-government (1852).

 

It was at that point that the Crown effectively ceased to be the protector of New Zealand’s indigenous inhabitants, and became, instead, the protector of the new settler state. In vain did the chiefs appeal to the Governor to uphold the Crown pre-emption clause of the Treaty. And when, in growing desperation, they crowned their own king and attempted to defend what remained of their tribal lands, the Settler Government promptly declared them rebels and traitors, and the British Government in London dispatched a vast army to crush the resistance of the nascent Maori state.

 

It is difficult to envisage any other outcome. The moment London acquiesced in the formation of a New Zealand State, they set in place an entity which could only grow and prosper at the expense of the country’s original inhabitants. Because, as the chiefs rightly apprehended back in February 1840, if the new breed of settlers came to stay – it could only be on Maori land.

 

 

TO SAY that the Treaty of Waitangi was breached is, therefore, an accurate but ultimately trivial historical observation. Had it not been breached, New Zealand – as a colonial society inextricably enmeshed in the political, economic, social and cultural life of the British Empire – wouldn’t have existed. For the Settler State to become real, the Treaty had to become, in Chief Justice Prendergast’s brutal phrase: “a simple nullity”.

 

Was that wrong? Should the undertakings given by Captain Hobson on 6 February 1840 have been honoured? Removed from its historical context, the question is easily answered in the affirmative. Except that those who go in search of such unencumbered moral judgements, do so without understanding that such questions can never be extracted from history.

 

To judge the dead may give some comfort to the living, but no matter how fervently the misdeeds of previous generations are condemned, they cannot be undone. Therefore, whatever justice we seek to do here and now, let it be to right the wrongs of the present – not the past.

 

We fair-skinned Polynesians are not – and can never be – “Europeans”. Just as contemporary Maori are not – and can never be again – the Maori who inhabited these islands before colonisation. Both of us are the victims of historical forces too vast for blame, to permanent for guilt.

 

And both of us have nowhere else to go.

 

This essay was originally published on the Bowalley Road blogsite on 12 May 2011.

The Living And The Dead (ANZAC Day 2013)

Mythos At Work: Collective memorialisation, or mythos, takes our basic values and attitudes and re-fashions them into the patterns of memory and meaning that re-present the past. ANZAC Day's cultural entrenchment is proof that the mythic transformation of this historical moment is almost complete. Waitangi Day, by contrast, remains a living issue whose meaning is yet to be settled.

THE LAST NOTES of The Last Post have faded into the dawn skies of ANZAC Day for another year. The words of Laurence Binyon’s poetic tribute, For the Fallen, have been intoned with due solemnity, and thousands of young New Zealanders, most of them blessedly untouched by war, have again repeated its final pledge: “We will remember them.”

 

Moments of sombre ceremony, in which old and young, past and present, are drawn together in the embrace of collective memorialisation, or mythos, are precious to all cultures. It is why, even in such a resolutely secular nation as New Zealand, christenings, marriages and funerals retain such enormous emotional power. And, almost certainly, it explains why sixty percent of New Zealanders say ANZAC Day means more to them than Waitangi Day.

 

But human memory is a most unreliable transmitter of truth. Indeed, what tends to get transmitted in ceremonies like the ones we engage in on ANZAC Day has almost nothing at all to do with historical reality.

 

Taken Binyon’s famous poem, for example.

 

Loaded upon that final, endlessly-quoted stanza of For the Fallen is all the consciousness of waste and horror that the peoples of the participating nations, ever since the guns fell silent in 1918, have brought to their assessment of World War One. The image conveyed in the words, “at the going down of the sun”, is not merely one of a descending star, but of something much closer to home: of countless fallen sons; a broken generation; the ending of an age.

 

And that is how mythos works. It takes our basic values and attitudes and re-fashions them into the patterns of memory and meaning that re-present the past.

 

Binyon’s poem, written in the thrilling weeks that followed the out-break of war in August 1914, and published a month later in The Times, was romantic nonsense.

 

Consider these lines:

 

Solemn the drums thrill: Death august and royal,
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres.
There is music in the midst of desolation,
And a glory that shines upon her tears.

 

And then consider how all those thousands of young men, “straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow”, actually died. Choking on their own blood. Drowning in pools of stinking mud. Slowly, in agony, on the wire. The only music in no-man’s land was the staccato chatter of the machine-guns. Nothing there you’d call “august and royal”; no “glory that shines”; no one to dry the tears of eighteen year-old boys whose last word was almost always: “Mother.”

 

Binyon’s actual poem, written before World War One took on the hideous aspect that still appals us, bears no resemblance to the poem we recite on ANZAC Day. That poem was written by the men who came back, and by the mothers of the boys who didn’t. It was written by the old men who pondered the empty pews in the local church, the empty tables at the local pub, the empty positions in the local Rugby team.

 

Mythos wrote The Ode of Remembrance.

 

But mythos has not yet re-written Waitangi Day. Unlike ANZAC Day it has yet to congeal into ceremony and solemnity. Waitangi Day is still a living thing: it’s “truths” unsettled. As a nation, we are still working on the patterns of memory and meaning in which the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi will, eventually, be enmeshed.

 

In every community the grim obelisks stand, bearing the names of the fallen and registering the myriad futures that were never fulfilled. In the chill dawn of every ANZAC Day we have a duty to remember them. Not as the tragic, self-sacrificing heroes that mythos has turned them into, but as they really were: teenage boys who died far from home for old men’s dreams of empire and dominion.

 

And on the morning of Waitangi Day, filled as it always is with rancour and resentment, pride and protest, give thanks that New Zealand’s future is still ours to make.

 

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 26 April 2013.

National's Two-Fingered Gesture

Sending A Message: Justice Minister, Judith Collins, has responded to criticism of her appointment of Dame Susan Devoy as Race Relations Commissioner with the highly revealling comment: “The far left does not have a monopoly on caring about race relations.” History suggests, however, that if the Left doesn't have a monopoly on, then the Right isn't even in the market for, improved race relations.

DAME SUSAN DEVOY’s appointment as Race relations Commissioner sends a very clear message. But about what? And to whom?

 

An answer may be found in Justice Minister Judith Collins’ observation that: “The far left does not have a monopoly on caring about race relations”.

 

Ms Collins packs a great deal of political information into this typically belligerent statement.

 

It speaks powerfully and directly to the Right’s long-standing resentment at finding itself, again and again, on the morally indefensible side of history.

 

From the mid-1970s, the National Party positioned itself, politically, as the defender of the Pakeha majority against any and all charges of racism that the Maori minority, and others, were increasingly levelling against them.

 

According to National, race relations in New Zealand were extremely healthy, and it was an affront to this country’s internationally celebrated reputation for fairness and tolerance to suggest otherwise.

 

This position became increasingly untenable as, over the course of the 70s, 80s and 90s, a new generation of historians systematically demolished New Zealand’s great foundational myths: the version of history which the inheritors of colonialism had so assiduously constructed since the wars and confiscations of the Nineteenth Century.

 

The most important to be taken apart was the Myth of the Moriori.

 

For decades, New Zealand schoolchildren were taught that their country’s first inhabitants, the Moriori, had been wiped out by the Maori – the warlike, culturally superior race of settlers who supplanted them.

 

For the Europeans who had replaced Maori as the dominant racial group in New Zealand, the Moriori Myth was morally indispensable. By establishing an historical narrative based on successive waves of settlers, each one stronger and better fitted for survival than the last, the European conquest and despoliation of the Maori could be painted as part of a “natural” progression.

 

“We” (the Pakeha) were no worse than “they” (the Maori) when it came to asserting the right of the stronger to overpower the weaker. We were, however, “better” than they were – because rather than wipe out the people who’d stood in our way, we “advanced” Europeans were willing to share with the vanquished all the “benefits” of Western Civilisation.

 

That the Maori had not fared as appallingly as Australian Aborigines or the Native Americans spoke eloquently of New Zealand’s “progressive” record of race relations.

 

The true and tragic story of the Moriori people (of the Chatham Islands) offered as little to Pakeha as it did to Maori. (Which probably explains why both races were content to connive in its extraordinary distortion.)

 

The myth was , however, of such critical importance to Pakeha self-perception that, even today, you still find many New Zealanders clinging tenaciously to its reassuring message of moral equivalence.

 

Conservative New Zealanders remained highly resistant to the unpalatable truths emerging from their nation’s colonial past. Rather than let the new historical research bring about a re-evaluation of their previous assumptions concerning race, they and their National Party representatives became even more determined to uphold all the old shibboleths.

 

National’s defence of the Springbok Rugby Tour of 1981 not only made it a target for the entire New Zealand Left (from Labour to the Workers’ Communist League) but, as events steadily vindicated the arguments of the protesters, it also helped to foster a deep-seated sense of right-wing grievance.

 

Nelson Mandela Free: The National Party has found it very difficult to accept that on the question of Apartheid - as on so many other racial questions - the Left has been vindicated, and the Right condemned, by History.

 

The Left had accused the Right of being on the wrong side of history, and History had been unkind enough to concur. Politically, National had no option but to accept the enhanced role of the Treaty of Waitangi (and its tribunal) and celebrate the victory of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (once described as “terrorists” by Sir Robert Muldoon) but it rankled.

 

Oh yes, it rankled.

 

And as those historical victories were transmuted into a framework of human rights recognition and protection (building on the more liberal Sir Keith Holyoake-led National Party’s Office of the Race Relations Conciliator, and the Labour Prime Minister, Sir Geoffrey Palmer’s, Bill of Rights Act) the Right’s sense of grievance – of being put-upon by what it labelled “political correctness” – grew and festered in the body politic.

 

Just how large this cancer had grown was revealed in 2004 when National Party Leader, Dr Don Brash’s, “Nationhood” speech, at Orewa, saw his party’s position in the Colmar-Brunton opinion poll advance by a record 17 percentage points.

 

National’s narrow defeat in 2005, and Dr Brash’s successor, John Key’s, tactical alliance with the Maori Party, both muted and diverted the Right’s angry rejection of the Left’s “political correctness”. Anti-Maori prejudice was channelled into hard-line welfare and law-and-order “reforms” – measures guaranteed to hit Maori New Zealanders the hardest.

 

Dame Susan’s appointment is emblematic of National’s continuing denial of its historical moral delinquency. With her controversial announcement, Ms Collins simultaneously delivers reassurance to an aggrieved Right, and an obscene, two-fingered gesture to “the far left”.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 26 March 2013.

A Monstrous Power

Show Me The Money! Walt Disney's view of MB. Scrooge McDuck swims like a porpoise through the all-too-real cash piled up in his money bin . In reality, of course, the loan the bank gives you to buy a house is nothing more than a book entry. In the final anaysis it is your own hard work that secures the value of your mortgaged property - not to mention the bank's interest-derived profit.

EVER WONDERED where home loans come from? It’s worth a moment’s thought. A bank extends someone a line of credit amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars – but from where? Where does the money come from? Is there a vast vault somewhere, filled with cash, like Scrooge McDuck’s money bin? Does the bank simply lower a big basket into the pile and haul up a home loan?

No. In reality, home loans are book entries – nothing more. The bank assesses its clients’ credit worthiness, fixes a repayments schedule, and, over the next fifteen-to-twenty years, in addition to recovering the loan, charges them an eye-wateringly large sum for the privilege of using its purely nominal capital.

So, in the beginning, there’s a book entry, and, by the end, the bank has taken thousands of dollars of its client’s very real cash, cancelled its book entry, pocketed the interest, and started the process all over again with a new generation of dupes – oops! – I mean clients.

Home loans are, therefore, a kind of wager. The bank bets on the debtor’s ability to repay, with interest, a sum of money which, strictly speaking, it does not possess. Since most human-beings are decent sorts, who almost always keep their word, this is a pretty safe bet on the bank’s part. Indeed, if we’re being truthful, the risk of the bank losing on the deal is negligible. (After all, it holds a mortgage on the house!) In fact, you could even argue that it’s the debtor who, through years of honest toil, creates his or her own home loan – while, simultaneously, paying the bank a small fortune for being generous enough to believe that its client was good for the money.

This is a monstrous sort of power, made even more frightening by being placed in private hands. Surely, the ability to financially enslave a reasonably large chunk of the population (mortgage, literally translated from the Old French, means “a death-dealing pledge”) shouldn’t be entrusted to just anyone. If someone’s going to create money out of thin air, and charge people to participate in the conjuring trick, then, surely, that someone ought to be the state?

That is certainly what a great many New Zealanders used to believe. Which is why, thirty years ago, the state used to own the Bank of New Zealand, the Post Office Savings Bank and the Rural Bank. It also, almost certainly, explains why a state-owned institution called the State Advances Corporation could finance couples into their first home at an interest rate of three percent.

The singular advantage states enjoy over both individuals and private institutions when lending money is immortality. Citizens, real and corporate, come and go but the citizenry lives forever. In practical terms, this means the state can afford to extend credit on vastly longer time horizons than any private financier. It also means it can lend with far greater assurance than the largest private bank. Being the institutional expression of its citizens’ collective needs and interests, the state is really only lending to itself.

In Our Own Interest: The First Labour Government availed itself of Reserve Bank credit to construct thousands of state houses for the nation's homeless citizens, creating thousands of new jobs in the process.

Back in the late 1930s, the first Labour Government used precisely this argument to finance its massive state housing programme. The Reserve Bank of New Zealand lent millions of pounds to the Government at nominal interest rates on the security of the thousands of homes it was about to build, and the rentals those houses would provide to the treasury for decades to come. It also knew that by setting such a construction programme in motion, and by using New Zealand sourced materials wherever possible, thousands of new jobs would be created, and that the men and women who were hired to do those jobs would pay taxes to the state instead of drawing welfare payments from its dwindling coffers.

Was the credit advanced to the Government by the Reserve Bank ever repaid? Nobody’s quite sure. What we do know, because they stand all around us, is that thousands of houses were constructed for New Zealand families to live in, at rents they could afford, and that thousands of New Zealanders found jobs that paid them a living wage and freed them from the dole. Some might say that if these achievements are considered as interest on its loans, then the Reserve Bank, and the nation for whom it acted, got a very good return on its investment.

Surveying the global havoc wreaked by the world’s privately owned financial institutions, I am moved to inquire whether any of them should ever again be permitted to create money out of thin air. And looking at the huge number of homes that need to be built in Christchurch and around New Zealand, perhaps the best place to turn for the financial resources required to build a fair and prosperous future – is to ourselves.

This essay was originally published by The Press on Tuesday, 5 June 2012.

The Journey: A Political Memoir - Posting No. 7

And So It Begins ... : Roger Douglas announces radical tax reform in his first Budget, November 1984. The regressive Goods & Services Tax prompted considerable opposition, both within the Labour Party organisation and from the broader labour movement. President Margaret Wilson, responding to rank-and-file alarm, announced a full-scale internal economic debate to coincide with the party's next round of regional remit conferences, scheduled for April-May 1985.

It was supposed to be a book about the birth of the NewLabour Party, but somewhere along the way it became the story of what led me into, and out of, the old Labour Party. In hopes of providing future political studies students with a glimpse of what it was like to be a left-wing Labour activist in the days of David Lange and Roger Douglas, I am publishing The Journey on Bowalley Road as a series of occasional postings. L.P. Hartley wrote: “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.” May these memoirs, written in 1989, serve, however poorly, as my personal passport.

Sunday, 21 April 1985 

WE ARE GATHERED in the back room of the University of Otago’s Adam’s House. Russell Taylor, an organiser for the Otago Clerical Workers’ Union, has dubbed us the Sunday Morning Club (a reference to the Sunday Club, whose rallies for the deposed leader of the National Party, Sir Robert Muldoon, have seriously weakened an already dispirited opposition). The title is apt: already a number of Parliamentary Press Gallery journalists are calling the Left Wing of the Labour Party “the real opposition”.

Our official title is the Economic Policy Group; ostensibly we are here to discuss alternative economic strategies to those of the Government we all slaved to elect barely twelve months earlier. Our true purpose, though unstated, is clear to everyone present: we must defeat GST.

The new president of the Labour Party, Margaret Wilson, has proclaimed a full-scale economic debate – to be held in conjunction with the 1985 round of regional remit conferences. It is an exercise in damage control. Roger Douglas’s first budget has shocked the party. Central to the Government’s monetary and fiscal policies is a dramatic shift from direct to indirect taxation. A ten percent Goods & Services Tax (GST) will be levied on all consumer items without exception.

The trade unions are aghast. A progressive income tax has always been the cornerstone of New Zealand's welfare state. PSA economist, Peter Harris, and FOL national executive member, Rob Campbell, will lead the fight at the regional remit conferences. As Secretary of the Otago Trades Council, I am determined to build an organised resistance to the GST proposal. Sean Fleigner, Youth Representative on the New Zealand Council of the party; Mike Hanifin, former regional organiser for the party in Southland and now a trade union official based in Dunedin; Louise Rosson, an economics teacher at Moreau College; Russell, the Convenor, and myself constitute the core of the fight-back in the southern region.

Mike is the most accomplished tactician among us. He has had the foresight to acquire a full list of the delegations to the Otago-Southland regional remit conference. One by one we go through the names, ticking off our likely supporters, crossing out our opponents. When we add in the block votes of the trade union affiliates it is clear – we have the numbers.

Thursday, 25 April 1985  

THE SEMINAR ROOM is filling up with members of the Castle Street Branch of the Labour Party. Widely regarded as a branch for the University of Otago staff, Castle Street has a surprising number of working class members. Many of them are here tonight: lured by the prospect of hearing Rob Campbell address them on the GST issue. It is my sorry duty to tell them he isn’t coming.

Campbell has sent me a copy of Peter Harris’s speech to the Northern South Island regional remit conference. I don’t like the omens: it’s the evening of Anzac Day – commemorating New Zealand’s most appalling military defeat – and I am supposed to “carry the ball” with speech notes that failed to convince the delegates at Westport.

All over the country Margaret Wilson’s economic debate is proving to be an extraordinary catalyst for organisation and participation. The Northern-South Island regional remit conference, held in the Labour stronghold of Westport a few days earlier, attracts hundreds of delegates. The GST Debate is ferocious. On the speaking order Peter Harris is sandwiched between Associate Finance Ministers David Caygill and Richard Prebble. Personal attacks proliferate. Outside the hall the Communist Party mounts a picket. Anderton – an increasingly vocal critic of the Government’s policies – declares himself and his supporters to be “the only opposition the Government’s got”. The vote, when taken, is very close. The Government is saved by the 17 card-votes of the Canterbury Hotel and Hospital Workers – all of them cast by Graham Harding who, shortly afterwards, is appointed national secretary of the Police Association.

The debate at Castle Street is brief and brutal. The Left has the numbers here and the objections of the good ladies of the university are swept away by an alliance of socialist academics and ordinary workers. We take the precaution of binding our delegates to vote against GST at the remit conference on Saturday. The air after the meeting is full of snide references to “cloth caps” – the Labour Right’s sneering epithet for the union-dominated Left.

Saturday, 27 April 1985

‘THIS IS A SET UP!” Margaret Wilson hisses to Terry Scott, chairperson of the Otago-Southland regional council of the Labour Party. “Get me on the next flight out!”

Wilson’s agitation is understandable. Like some large, pre-programmed machine, the regional conference is rubber-stamping the remits of the left-wing/trade union  alliance. There is no debate. Nikki Larson, the delegate reporting back the decisions of the workshop on economic policy, is reading out the resolutions and the conference is endorsing them without discussion. I am finding it hard to believe myself. Could it be that we are actually going to win?

The GST debate begins. Roger Douglas and Rob Campbell present the arguments for and against. Campbell, a former lecturer in economics at Victoria University, sets out the sums on a blackboard. His presentation is cool and professional – almost detached. The audience listens intently, struggling to absorb the numbers and the jargon. The applause is polite.

Douglas is messianic. He scrawls figures on the blackboard with violent energy, barking out his arguments like a parade sergeant. There is an aura of absolute conviction about the man that is taking its toll on the waverers. Will they hold?

With the opening salvoes still echoing through the packed auditorium of Taieri High School, David Caygill rises to second the Finance Minister. His rhetoric is polished but strangely unmoving. Nevertheless, his argument that a failure by the Party to endorse GST can only be seen as a “No confidence motion in the Government” strikes home.

It is left to Michael Cullen, MP for St Kilda and the Government whip, to clinch the argument for the parliamentary wing. He moves an amendment to our resolution opposing the introduction of GST. The delegates must now decide whether they should make their support for the new tax conditional upon a clear demonstration that the incomes of low paid workers will be fully protected.

It is all the delegates need. Our majority melts away as the Government’s appeal to loyalty over-rides the arguments of equity. Campbell’s figures clearly show that there is simply not enough revenue to fully guarantee the incomes of the poor. But reason isn’t sufficient. Helplessly, I watch our Sunday Morning Club comrades raise their cards in support of the Government. Outraged, I see our Castle Street delegate vote against the instructions of her branch. Cullen’s amendment is carried: 75 votes in favour, 54 against.

Out in the foyer, Roger Douglas and David Caygill catch each other’s eye. Caygill sweeps his hand down from his shoulder, snapping his fingers in a triumphant gesture of domination.

They expected to lose in Dunedin: they have won again.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.