Why Newshub Failed.

Too Small To Survive: Was it ever realistic to believe that two commercial television networks could profitably share such a tiny market?

TO UNDERSTAND WHY NEWSHUB FAILED, it is necessary to understand how TVNZ changed. Up until 1989, the state broadcaster had been funded by a broadcasting licence fee, collected from every citizen in possession of a television set, supplemented by a relatively modest (compared to present levels) amount of commercial advertising. This arrangement reinforced both the public character and the public obligations of the state broadcaster. As the network’s primary funders, the viewing public constituted TVNZ’s most important clientele. These were the citizens to whom TVNZ’s professional broadcasters believed themselves accountable.

And then everything changed. The Broadcasting Act (1989) transformed TVNZ from an entity dedicated to serving the public, to an entity legally required to conduct its affairs in the manner of a private company. The Broadcasting Licence Fee survived (until it was finally abolished in 1999) but under the new act the funds it raised were funnelled into NZ On Air – a body whose hi-falutin objectives would be forever compromised by its obligation to first obtain a commitment, from what were now commercial broadcasters, to screen the productions they were being invited to commission.

This was a devastating Catch-22 for all those producers and directors dedicated to producing high-quality television programmes. Why? Because before switching-on a single camera, they had to satisfy TVNZ – and later TV3 – that the product they were pitching would deliver the right number of eyeballs to the right number of advertisers. It didn’t really matter to the executives compiling the broadcasters’ schedule if the proposed programme was topical, powerful, much-needed, or culturally outstanding: what they needed to know was whether it could meet – or exceed – the opportunity-cost of not slotting-in a high-rating/high-earning programme in the schedule upon which the production house was asking to be placed?

What this meant was that drama and documentary features – the most expensive to make – had to work so much harder than the makers of the relatively cheap “Reality TV” shows in order to secure that all-important sign-off from the networks. Once those same networks saw how well Reality TV rated, the difficulties confronting the makers of programmes not tailored to the tastes of “ordinary viewers” became practically insurmountable.

For the Minister who drafted the Broadcasting Act this was not a bug, but a feature. Richard Prebble wanted his new State-Owned Enterprise, TVNZ, to tailor its production and its schedule to the signals it was receiving from the entertainment marketplace. The commercial enterprises with advertisements to place before the network’s viewers’ eyeballs, the enterprises now funding the networks’ running-costs, would, henceforth, be the ones sending the most important signals. But the viewers who rated the shows in which the ads were being broadcast, they sent signals that were only marginally less important.

The signals communicated to the networks’ schedulers and programme-makers by viewers could hardly have been clearer. They liked to watch programmes in which one group, or multiple groups, of people were pitted against each other in a highly competitive environment. They lapped-up the nastiness and pettiness that such environments elicited. They relished the betrayals and laughed at the tears. Ancient Rome knew the type – they had filled its amphitheatres and cheered-on its bloodiest gladiators.

Those programme-makers who believed the public deserved something better than these crude theatres of cruelty were scorned. The schedulers demanded to know why they thought their product was superior to the output of Reality TV. Wasn’t it just the teeniest bit elitist, they inquired, to think that your sort of television – which rates like a dog – should take precedence over shows that rate through the roof? Who are you to tell the people what they should be watching? Who are you to defy the rough-and-ready democracy of the remote control? Cultural snobs – that’s who!

There were those who watched, as TV3 attempted to carve out a profitable niche in this increasingly cut-throat broadcasting environment, and shook their heads sadly. New Zealand was a country with a population smaller than Sydney’s – so television’s infamous “money trench” was never going to be all that big. Which raised the questions: Was it ever realistic to believe that two commercial television networks were going to profitably share such a tiny market? Wasn’t it inevitable that one network would claim the lion’s share of viewers and revenue; while the other was condemned to fight off every hungry hyena and vulture for the rest?

It is not well understood (outside broadcasting circles) just how viciously TVNZ fought, from the very beginning, to be the network that claimed the lion’s share. It fought TV3 every single inch of the way: moving heaven and earth to head it off at every conceivable strategic pass; competing with it aggressively for every pair of eyeballs; scheduling against it with ruthless precision.

Ever since 1989, the truth of the matter has been that it was TVNZ that behaved like the rapacious capitalist television network, and TV3 that strove, against all the odds, to produce programmes that had something more to offer than carefully contrived schadenfreude. This weird reversal of roles is attributable to the fact that, from the very beginning, TV3 was driven by the sort of cussèd under-doggery that always brings out the best in New Zealanders. It was the founders of TV3, not the administrators of TVNZ, who believed most fervently that, given the chance, Kiwi broadcasters could astonish the world.

(Which isn’t to say that there weren’t broadcasters in TVNZ who shared their TV3 counterparts’ faith in the possibilities of television, merely that in the years that followed the passage of the Broadcasting Act (1989) they were purged from the TVNZ payroll with an efficiency that would have made Stalin proud.)

Perhaps the saddest part of the lopsided battle between TVNZ and TV3 is that it simply never needed to have happened. The answer to the problem posed by two competing commercial networks in an advertising market as small as New Zealand’s was always blindingly obvious. Turn TVNZ into a genuine public broadcaster. That is to say, a state-owned, commercial-free, broadcaster, paid for by redirecting most of the taxpayer dollars currently funding New Zealand on Air. That would leave the television advertising market, which, even in this digital age, remains large enough to support one (carefully managed) private television network. (Especially if the Government waived its transmission charges.)

Imagine, then, a scene reminiscent of the prisoner exchanges between Ukraine and Russia. All the hard-nosed bastards who regard Reality TV has high-culture trooping in a body from TVNZ headquarters to the studios of the newly resurrected private network. While moving past them, in the opposite direction, go the mavericks, the dreamers, and the journalists who still understand the meaning of the word. All of them eager to claim their place in the genuine public broadcasting network that should always have been their home.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 4 March 2024.

Forty Years After.

Angry Encounters: New Zealand was extraordinarily lucky that no one – on either side of the Police barricades – was killed in the 1981 Springbok Tour protests. So high were feelings running that a murderous cycle of retaliation could very easily have been set in motion – with tragic and politically poisonous consequences.

FORTY YEARS AGO, New Zealand was convulsed by mass protests against the touring Springbok Rugby team. For 56 days, in big cities and small provincial towns, tens-of-thousands of New Zealanders risked injury and arrest to obstruct the South African tourists’ progress. Hamilton’s Rugby Park pitch was invaded by several hundred anti-tour protesters who, aided by what today would be described as a ‘credible terrorist threat’, succeeded in having the game called off. (A Waiuku farmer, Pat MacQuarrie, seemed ready to fly a rented Cessna aircraft into the stands, and the Police Commissioner could not be sure he was bluffing.)

New Zealand was extraordinarily lucky that no one – on either side of the Police barricades – was killed in the Springbok Tour protests. So high were feelings running that a murderous cycle of retaliation could very easily have been set in motion – with tragic and politically poisonous consequences.

Throughout the protests, however, one vital piece of information remained uppermost in the anti-tour movement’s strategic deliberations. They were a minority – and a relatively small minority at that. Set against the scores-of-thousands of Rugby fans who packed the stands, the thousands protesting outside Carisbrook, Lancaster, Athletic and Eden Parks must have looked pretty feeble. New Zealanders who believed that politics and sport should be kept separate vastly outnumbered those who argued that, thanks to Apartheid, the two had become inseparable. In 1981, the battle for the hearts and minds of the majority had yet to be won by the opponents of racism.

Being in the minority does, however, allow protesters to bear witness to their beliefs with the moral strength that numerical weakness often, paradoxically, confers upon a cause. Even their opponents can be impressed by the dogged determination and courage displayed by those willing to put their bodies on the line – non-violently – for a principle they hold dear. Think Gandhi. Think Dr Martin Luther King.

Forty years on, however, I can’t help thinking how self-righteous we must have seemed to a great many of our fellow citizens. There is a famous incident described by Geoff Chapple in his book 1981: The Tour:

“‘What is this? A rising of the workers?’ Yelled a passer-by on his way to the [Hamilton] game. ‘You’d better hope not fella,’ [Tim] Shadbolt yelled back. ‘Because most of the workers are down in the park.’”

The protest movement against the Springbok Tour was, overwhelmingly, a movement of the educated middle-class – and their offspring.

A few years later, in the clutches of Rogernomics, I often asked myself whether the indifference of so many tertiary-educated middle-class New Zealanders to the suffering of the working-class victims of the Fourth Labour Government’s brutal reforms was in some strange way an expression of their contempt for (and fear of) the “Rugby Thugs” who backed the Springbok Tour.

That formative historical event certainly widened many of the fissures dividing New Zealand society in the 1970s and 80s. The Tour exposed a lot of ugly truths about the way Kiwi men regarded Kiwi women. It shone a light on the tortured relationship between Maori and Pakeha. Most of all, however, it revealed the vast gulf between the educated middle-class and the people Rob Muldoon, the prime minister who made the Tour possible, liked to call “the ordinary Kiwi bloke”.

At the end of those eight tumultuous weeks the pollsters of the day discovered something quite remarkable. Public opinion had shifted. No longer was the support for sporting contacts with South Africa anything like so one-sided. Whether New Zealanders’ change of mind was due simply to the vituperation and violence unleashed by the tour; or to the penny finally dropping on the true meaning of apartheid; it became clearer and clearer that they didn’t want any more years like 1981.

It was a victory of sorts.

I suspect that we anti-tour protesters would have considered it an even bigger victory if we’d been told that our children, forty years hence, would be engaged in a revolutionary campaign to stamp out all forms of sexism and racism in Aotearoa. That the 2021 equivalents of those Rugby Thugs who, forty years earlier, had attacked their mums and dads, would soon be facing charges of “hate crime” and “hate speech”. And, this time, the Police would be on their side.

Truly is it said: “Be careful what you wish for.”

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and the Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 9 July 2021.

Revolution in New Zealand? Not Even Close!

No Fires Thanks, We're Kiwis: For the moment, in those close-to-home places where revolutions are born, there may be tetchiness and resentment, frustration and complaint, but nowhere is anybody uttering the cry that will bring a New Zealand revolution into being: “We have found the way to make tomorrow better than today!”

WHERE DO REVOLUTIONS begin? The answer, invariably, is “close to home”. Where demonstrable public need meets unresponsive public authority. Where collective outrage invites violent repression. Where injustice spawns indignation and indignation demands action. Where popular action generates governmental reaction. That’s where revolutions are born.

Once begun, what makes a revolution successful? It is tempting to respond with the purely historical observation that revolutions succeed where they are able to muster sufficient armed force to overwhelm those dedicated to their failure. People with guns allow revolutions to succeed. But is mere armed force enough? Surely, before people are willing to wage war on the Revolution’s behalf, they must first believe its objectives to be both desirable and achievable.

The need for guns, and the willingness to use them, almost always arises when the authorities announce their intention to thwart the people’s intentions. When real change, desperately needed, and now within the people’s grasp, is suddenly faced with the prospect of being halted and/or reversed by forces loyal to the status-quo. That is when people start looking for the means to preserve the imminence of change.

Historically, the people’s determination to preserve the imminence of change is soon extended to ensure the preservation of those who have made them believe that change is imminent. Fearing that the authorities are coming for their leaders, people typically resolve to impede their progress: peacefully if possible; by force if necessary. The leaders themselves, realising that the revolution’s failure will more than likely lead to their demise, are left with little choice but to keep pushing it forward as hard and as far as they can. The revolution’s survival, and their own, become welded together.

The French Revolution of 1789, for example, was kicked-off by the fear that the King’s troops were about to visit retribution upon the revolutionary crowds of Paris. The latter rushed to the Bastille, hated symbol of royal power, because they were convinced that within the fortress-prison’s walls they would find the muskets, cannons and gunpowder they needed to resist the King’s soldiers.

The storming of the Bastille, 14 July 1789.

In the Russian capital, Petrograd, in February-March 1917, the soldiers who had refused to fire on the crowds of women demanding bread for their starving families knew that the Czar would immediately dispatch troops to disarm and punish them as mutineers. If their revolt was not extended, then many of them would die. Accordingly, they reached out to radical left-wing politicians and to their working-class supporters in the factories. By joining forces with the political enemies of the hated Czarist regime, and offering them the protection of their rifles and machine-guns, they helped to turn what had started-out as a protest against bread shortages into a full-scale revolution.

But, the events in Petrograd unfolded more than a hundred years ago. Is there a plausible scenario for revolution in New Zealand in 2020? The short answer is “No.” Nothing has occurred for decades in New Zealand that matches in any way the cultural, intellectual, and political preparations that preceded the French and Russian revolutions.

In Eighteenth Century Europe, for example, the cultural supremacy of the Catholic Church and the political doctrine of Absolute Monarchy had been profoundly weakened by what came to be known as “The Enlightenment” or “The Age of Reason”. Breakthroughs in moral and political philosophy, together with the rapid expansion of science, called into question the existence of the Judeo-Christian God and, thus, the “divine right of kings”. Within the ruling classes doubt grew, and from these doubts ordinary people drew confidence that their own ideas and priorities were as worthy of serious consideration as their lords’ and masters’.

Crucially, in the shape of an elected parliamentary assembly, the people had also identified a mechanism capable of supplanting the autocratic rule of the monarch. The self-evidently desirable objectives of “liberty, equality fraternity” were thus made achievable. In the people’s “deputies”, gathered together in the revolutionary “National Constituent Assembly”, the people’s will had finally found its political vector.

In Petrograd, 128 years later, the critical political vector of the “nation” had been replaced by Karl Marx’s “proletariat”. Likewise, the revolutionary mechanism ceased to be a parliament filled with elected representatives, and became, instead, a multitude of workers’ councils (soviets) filled with instantly recallable delegates elected in the factories and regiments. Replacing the Enlightenment and its philosophers was the revolutionary Marxist party – whose ruthless and highly disciplined “cadres” were determined to inspire and guide the soviets of workers and soldiers.

Other determinants of success were also at work in 1789 and 1917.

Bankrupt of both the ideas and the funds required to address the multiple crises afflicting his subjects, the French king, Louis XVI, set in motion a massive, kingdom-wide effort to identify and collate the grievances of the French people. These Cahiers de doléances provided the core agenda of the Estates General – the feudal body charged with advising the Crown, which had not been called together for 175 years! Thus equipped, the people’s representatives possessed a clear idea of what they had to do.

In 1917, also, the Russian people’s priorities were clear. Czar Nicolas II had led them into a disastrous war with the Austro-Hungarian and German empires. Millions of conscripted peasant-soldiers had been killed, the Russian economy was in ruins, and the Russian people were starving. Their lords and masters had failed utterly to protect them and were either unable or unwilling to feed them. When the leader of the revolutionary workers’ party, Vladimir Lenin, arrived at Petrograd’s Finland Station, his speech to the workers’ and soldiers’ delegates was short and to the point: “Peace! Bread! Land! All power to the soviets!” With these simple but highly effective promises, Lenin’s party ruthlessly blew away the political fog engulfing the ineffectual Russian parliament and set in motion the world’s first socialist revolution.

Lenin promises "Peace! Bread! Land!" at the Finland Station, Petrograd 1917.

It should be clear by now that New Zealand’s cultural, economic and political situation bears no comparison with the two great Western revolutions. Neither Maori nor Pakeha culture offers anything to compare with the devastating ideological critiques which the Enlightenment and Marxism brought to bear on the political regimes of France and Russia. Animism with corporate clip-ons is no more a revolutionary doctrine than post-modernism incongruously blended with the politics of identity.

Nor is New Zealand trapped in the sort of intractable economic and military crises that brought down the Bourbon and Romanov dynasties. In fact, it presents itself as a highly successful neoliberal capitalist economy. Which is not to say that poverty has been eliminated, or homelessness overcome, merely that the levels of inequality and social injustice which beset all but a handful of western states is not dramatically worse in New Zealand than it is in other comparable countries. Certainly, the grave challenge of Climate Change looms over New Zealand’s future but, once again, that is a problem to which the entire world has yet to find a workable solution.

Most importantly, the New Zealand ruling-class retains sufficient faith in its ability to manage the nation’s affairs to render any challenge to its dominance ineffective. No mass movement with a practical programme of revolutionary change exists in this country. Nor does it contain a disciplined revolutionary party dedicated to creating one. Those who proclaim themselves champions of change and fighters against injustice are currently more willing to go to war with each other than with neoliberal capitalism. Indeed, it is possible to argue that identity politics, far from being a revolutionary phenomenon, has become the paradoxical vector for neoliberal consolidation. The ever-more-strident calls to recognise every new construction thrown up by the social kaleidoscope have a way of drowning out the truly revolutionary demands for a radical redistribution of the economic pie.

For the moment, in those close-to-home places where revolutions are born, there may be tetchiness and resentment, frustration and complaint, but nowhere is anybody uttering the cry that will bring a New Zealand revolution into being:

“We have found the way to make tomorrow better than today!”

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 21 January 2020.

Jojo Tamihere Salutes Herr Goff.

Get Back Jojo! The elation in Mayor Phil Goff’s camp may be easily imagined as they watched social media light up in indignation at challenger John Tamihere’s "Sieg Heil to that" quip. Just when JT’s notoriously right-wing, sexist and homophobic stains were beginning to fade back into his ‘colourful’ past, “there he goes again”, handing his enemies a very large stick and inviting them to beat him to death.

GODWIN’S LAW hardly covers it. Drawing a comparison between the person, or persons, you are arguing with and the Nazi dictator, Adolf Hitler, was identified by US lawyer Mike Godwin, way back in 1990, as the point where meaningful debate ends. There can’t be many in John Tamihere’s mayoral campaign team who would disagree. JT’s “Sieg Heil to that!”, blurted out in response to a Phil Goff soliloquy on Auckland’s diversity has definitely become the takeaway comment from last night’s (17/9/19) bruising Pub Politics Mayoral Debate.

The elation in Goff’s camp may be easily imagined as they watch social media light up in indignation at Tamihere’s intervention. Just when JT’s notoriously right-wing, sexist and homophobic stains were beginning to fade back into his ‘colourful’ past, “there he goes again”, handing his enemies a very large stick and inviting them to beat him to death.

To make the whole debacle even worse, Tamihere explained his “Sieg Heil” quip by referencing Goff’s claim to have de-platformed Stefan Molyneux and Cheryl Southern – the two far-right Canadians prevented from holding a public meeting in Auckland in 2018. Given the views of the banned speakers, the comparison with Hitler was ideologically absurd. If Goff really did harbour Hitlerian tendencies, then he would have welcomed Molyneux and Southern with open arms.

If JT had to make some quip, “Long Live Chairman Phil!” would have sufficed. After all, it’s not just Nazis who censor their opponents, the Reds also have ‘form’ when it comes to putting a muzzle on free speech.

The other factor JT failed to consider before blurting was that, in the grim shadow of the 15 March mosque massacres in Christchurch, Goff’s impulse to de-platform the likes of Molyneux and Southern seems much less high-handed than it does prescient. Speaking up for the free speech rights of alt-right Valkyries and “scientific” racists was a lot easier before one of their gruesome tribe gunned down 51 innocent human-beings in their houses of worship.

So, why did he do it? What was he thinking?

The host of Pub Politics and Daily Blog editor, Martyn Bradbury, put his finger on it in his review of the Goff/Tamihere clash: “Trump and Brexit won by tapping into a deep resentment within the electorate, that resentment exists within Auckland and if JT wins, it will be because he understands that.”

“And because”, Martyn might have added, “he gives it a voice.”

Long before the Internet and its lawmakers, New Zealanders used to describe that all-too-familiar Kiwi stereotype – the authoritarian boss who thinks he knows everything and takes great pleasure in making the lives of everybody below him on the pecking order miserable – as a “Little Hitler”.

Those hard-bitten Kiwi soldiers returning from the Second World War weren’t overly tolerant of such people, and in the days when the trade unions still had some kick, they weren’t frightened to let them know. Blokes of a certain age, and blokesses too, will have no difficulty in recalling those moments when one of these Little Hitlers, having rattled-off their orders, provokes one long-suffering staff-member to raise their arm in a mocking “Sieg Heil!” salute to his retreating back.

Tamihere, in blurting “Sieg Heil to that”, wasn’t signalling his membership of some perverse right-wing fraternity. All he was doing was signalling his membership of something much less acceptable – the Maori working-class of West Auckland. (Not too many of them amongst the woke patrons of the Chapel Bar on a Tuesday night in trendy Ponsonby!)

And why might a working-class Maori from West Auckland consider Phil Goff to be a “Little Hitler”?

Could it have something to do with an Auckland Council that appears to only have ears for the bicycle-riders and the public transport theoreticians – by refusing to listen to the men and women who are forced to drive half-way across the city to work every morning in a car that gets harder and more expensive to warrant with every passing six months, and whose gas tank cost more to fill – thanks to Phil.

Could it be because when the Mayor waxes eloquent about diversity, the people in his mind’s eye are the wealthy property speculators and business investors from Asia – the ones who pour hundreds-of-thousands of dollars into the pockets of the New Zealand political class. That’s not the sort of diversity that trickles down the walls of those dank dwelling-places where the Maori, Pasifika and poor immigrant workers of Auckland live. Liberal Neoliberals like Mayor Goff don’t run into very many of them at their fundraisers.

At the doors of the Waipareira Trust, however, John Tamihere meets many such people. They come to see the doctors at its medical centre; the dentists at its dental practice. Many come for help with housing (far too many) or for a food parcel to see their kids through the week. Waipareira serves them all.

John Tamihere doesn’t ask for donations from the rich – he provides services to the poor. Has done for thirty years. His words may leave a lot to be desired at times, but you cannot fault his deeds.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 19 September 2019.

Dark Matter

Dark Realm: Since Friday, 15 March, the Left has been dazzled by Jacinda’s light. So much so, that it has failed to understand that, far from defeating the Right’s darkness, the Prime Minister’s recent illuminations have only exposed the terrifying dimensions of its realm. Light speaks only to light. Political dark matter has always been, and always will be, profoundly deaf to everything except the soundless screaming energy of its black and inexhaustible rage.

ALL IS NOT AS IT SEEMS. That’s the brutal truth to keep in mind. Even in the golden afterglow of last Friday’s extraordinary National Remembrance Service: all is not as it seems.

So many on the Left do not appreciate the true dimensions of the vast and immovable cultural-political consensus that allows Capitalism to survive and thrive. If it wasn’t there: or, if it was there, but amenable to reason and love: then Capitalism would long ago have given way to a more human order.

This grim judgement is a lot easier for the Left to accept when reactionary ideas and parties are in the saddle and riding them hard. In those moments, it is easy to convince Capitalism’s enemies that it is, indeed, a monstrous nightmare pressing down upon the lungs of human hope.

A Left without illusions has a much better chance of organising effectively and, on rare occasions, winning.

The real danger comes when events conspire to make it appear as though the Left has already won.

Consider the events that shook Paris and the rest of France in May 1968. The tens-of-thousands of students in the streets. The barricades. The CRS – France’s brutal riot police – counter-attacking. Parisians rushing to the aid of the beaten and bloodied citizens. Clouds of tear-gas wafting down the boulevards of the capital. Spontaneous strikes in France’s largest industries. Workers turning their bosses away from the factory gates. Surely, in May 1968, France teetered on the brink of revolution?

That is certainly what it looked like and felt like.

Except, that is not what was happening.

After the French Communist Party had bribed the striking workers with a ten percent across-the-board wage rise and the factories had been handed back to the bosses. After President Charles De Gaulle had returned from Germany, where he had taken refuge with the French army units stationed there. After the French Prime Minister, Georges Pompidou, had allowed the scheduled elections for the French legislature to proceed. Only then was it made clear what the people of France really thought about the events of May 1968.

In those elections, the governing Gaullist party and its allies won 387 seats in the National Assembly. The Socialist Party and the Communist Party, between them, just 91. The Governing party had taken 111 additional seats. The combined forces of the Left had lost 99.

What had looked like a revolution was anything but.

In the United States the story was the same.

Between 1968 and 1972, the USA was rocked by some of the most tumultuous political protests of its entire history. Mass demonstrations against the Vietnam War grew ever larger. The “Youth Revolt” filled newspaper columns and the airwaves. Young left-wing delegates to the 1972 Democratic Party Convention secured the presidential nomination for Senator George McGovern – an avowed liberal and fierce opponent of the Vietnam War. The Democrats offered the American electorate the most progressive party platform since Roosevelt’s New Deal.

McGovern’s opponent, President Richard Nixon, appealed to “the great silent majority of Americans” to give him four more years in the White House.

The great silent majority were only too happy to oblige.

Nixon won an astonishing 60.7 percent of the popular vote: McGovern just 37.5 percent. The streets of America may have been teeming with young, idealistic protesters, but they were vastly outnumbered by the silent and invisible armies of the Right.

Closer to home, in 2002, the National Party was routed by Helen Clark’s Labour Party, receiving just 20.9 percent of the Party Vote. Pundits reckoned it would take National several elections to rebuild its support. Some even suggested the party might be over. Three years later, however, the Don Brash-led National Party came within 46,000 votes of winning the 2005 General Election.

Brash’s in/famous “Nationhood” speech, delivered to the Orewa Rotary Club in January 2004, unleashed a vast wave of hitherto unacknowledged Pakeha resentment towards the New Zealand state’s official policy of bi-cultural “partnership”. Responding to the highly-charged mood of racial anxiety which Brash’s speech had whipped-up, Clark felt obliged to pass the deeply divisive Foreshore & Seabed Act. Had she not, it is probable that Brash would have defeated her government, scrapped the Treaty of Waitangi and abolished the Maori Seats. The sleeping dogs of Pakeha racism, kicked into a state of vicious wakefulness, had demanded, and been given, large chunks of raw political meat – by both major parties.

When we look up into the night sky, what do we see? The moon, the planets and the stars ranged across the heavens in a glittering diadem of light. Looking at all this beauty, it is easy to believe that the universe is made up of nothing but light. But, all is not as it seems.

What the physicists and cosmologists tell us is that in between the stars there is something else. Something mysterious and invisible, and yet so powerful that without it the universe could not exist. These unknown forces are said by the physicists and cosmologists to make up 85 percent of the universe. The world of light, they calculate, represents a mere 5 percent. The names given to these mysterious and invisible cosmic forces are “Dark Matter” and “Dark Energy”.

The capitalist universe is similarly held together by dark matter infused with dark energy. Though silent and invisible, these political forces are ubiquitous and immensely strong. Powered by the dark psychic energy that drives capitalism: the lust for power and wealth; the willingness to exploit and consume; the hatred of all that is weak and in need; the worship of force and violence; and the ever-present fear of falling into powerlessness and poverty; dark political matter is not exceptional in the capitalist universe – it is the rule.

Since Friday, 15 March, the Left has been dazzled by Jacinda’s light. So much so, that it has failed to understand that, far from defeating the Right’s darkness, the Prime Minister’s recent illuminations have only exposed the terrifying dimensions of its realm. Light speaks only to light. Political dark matter has always been, and always will be, profoundly deaf to everything except the soundless screaming energy of its black and inexhaustible rage.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 2 April 2019.

What Happened Here?

Our Darkest Day: New Zealand has been horribly scarred by a fanatical follower of the international white supremacist movement. He hid among us in plain sight, masking his murderous intentions from his Dunedin neighbours, the Police, the SIS and the GCSB – until it was too late. He could not have been stopped – except by the most extraordinary stroke of good fortune. And, at 1:40 pm, on Friday, 15 March 2019, New Zealand’s luck ran out.

BRENTON TARRANT isn’t one of us. He may have been born in Australia, but he isn’t really an Australian either. If his own words are any guide, he identifies himself, above and beyond all other considerations, as White. Like so many of the horrors currently disfiguring our world, Brenton Tarrant’s crimes are an expression of pure and murderous racism.

He came here a couple of years ago to plan and to prepare for action in another part of the world, most likely in the United States. Once here, however, he appears to have changed his mind. Something about New Zealand, most probably our acute vulnerability to the sort of terrorist attack he was planning, convinced him that shots fired here would be heard around the world.

New Zealanders have nothing to reproach themselves for in relation to the horrific attack on the two Christchurch mosques. We must not for one moment entertain the notion that there was something we could have done to stop Tarrant. Lone wolf terrorists of his sort are not produced by the ignorant racist mutterings of gun club members. Nor are they inspired by the rantings and ravings of social media. That’s not how it works.

All the literature points to this sort of terrorism being born of real, geopolitical events. Indeed, if the perpetrators could not locate their murderous racist impulses within a global context, then the scale of their ambitions would be commensurately smaller. The ravages of Western and Soviet imperialism, and the asymmetrical resistance launched by the victims of that aggression, have been the drivers of global terrorist extremism for more than a century.

We didn’t start that fire.

It is no accident that one of the heroes of the rambling 73-page “manifesto” which Tarrant posted online is Anders Breivik – the Norwegian white supremacist who murdered 72 of his fellow citizens in 2011. Like Breivik, Tarrant locates himself in a phantasmagorical world of evil invaders and righteous defenders. At stake is nothing less than the survival of the “white race”.

Those who enter this fever dream are utterly inaccessible to reason. And it is precisely this inaccessibility that makes the weaponised hate of Breivik and Tarrant so dangerous. In the memorable line from the first Terminator movie: “[I]t can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop.”

That such individuals are psychologically damaged is axiomatic. No individual capable of empathy can murder men, women and children with the robotic efficiency of a Breivik or a Tarrant. Inevitably, the subsequent psychological assessment of these individuals throws up a toxic mixture of sociopathic cruelty and extreme narcissism. The injustice and suffering unfolding in the real world is reinterpreted by the defective personalities of these lone wolf terrorists as something which is happening not to others – but to themselves. They take it personally. Far from being “the continuation of politics by other means”, their terrorism is a savage quest for vengeance.

As the dreadful events of Friday, 15 March 2019 were unfolding, I couldn’t help recalling the words of King Theoden in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. As his fortress of Helm’s Deep is on the point of being over-run, he asks despairingly: “What can men do against such reckless hate?”

That is now the question which New Zealand must ask of itself.

Part of the answer, the most important part, we have already seen. In the floral tributes outside the nation’s mosques. In the images of the imam and the rabbi embracing each other. In the Pasifika voices raised in a hymn of heart-breaking poignance. In the Maori and Pakeha faces wet with tears, yet set in grim defiance. In the passionate cry of the massacre survivor: “This is not New Zealand!” In the nearly $5 million already raised to support the victims’ families. The answer already given by the people of New Zealand, united in grief, is unequivocal: When confronted with such reckless hate, the only possible answer is aroha – love.

The wrong answer; the answer the terrorist is always hoping the strategic targets of his rage will give; is to meet recklessness with recklessness; hate with hate.

While the ruins of the Twin Towers were still smoking, the American people shackled themselves to the Patriot Act: voluntarily curtailing the very freedoms the Al Qaida terrorists were condemned for attacking.

The contrast between the American response to 9/11, and the Norwegian Government’s response to Breivik, could hardly be more striking. At a memorial service in Oslo Cathedral, the Norwegian Prime Minister, Jens Stoltenberg, declared: “We must not allow this attack to hurt Norwegian democracy: the proper answer to such violence is more democracy, more openness … No one has said it better than the [young woman] who was interviewed by CNN: ‘If one man can show so much hate, think how much love we could show, standing together.’”

It is to be hoped that our Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, allows herself to be guided by Stoltenberg’s example. To date, her handling of the Christchurch tragedy has been faultless. Her sole policy response, an uncompromising pledge to reform New Zealand’s gun laws, was focused, measured and appropriate. It will be an uphill struggle for any person or lobby group foolish enough to oppose her call for stricter regulation of firearms – especially of the semi-automatic weapons that made Tarrant’s attack so costly.

The Prime Minister will, doubtless, come under increasing pressure from angry and misguided persons to curtail the rights of New Zealanders articulating unpopular views concerning Maori-Pakeha relations, the Islamic religion, multiculturalism and immigration policy. In defence of the liberal-democratic values that Tarrant assaulted so violently, Jacinda should calmly resist all such calls. We must not allow the unanimity of our grief to be translated into a demand for unanimity of opinion.

New Zealand has been horribly scarred by a fanatical follower of the international white supremacist movement. He hid among us in plain sight, masking his murderous intentions from his Dunedin neighbours, the Police, the SIS and the GCSB – until it was too late. Brenton Tarrant is a lone wolf terrorist who took advantage of everything that is good about New Zealand to perpetrate a devastating act of homicidal violence against defenceless Muslim worshippers. He could not have been stopped – except by the most extraordinary stroke of good fortune. And, at 1:40 pm, on Friday, 15 March 2019, New Zealand’s luck ran out.

What happened at the Linwood and Al Noor mosques was horrific, but it wasn’t our doing. As we begin the long journey towards recovery, it is vitally important that we keep that fact squarely before us. New Zealand is a good place. New Zealanders are good people. We are not responsible for Brenton Tarrant’s dreadful crime. This is not us.

This essay was posted simultaneously on the Bowalley Road and The Daily Blog of Sunday, 17 March 2019.

Winston Keeps His Pledge To The Small Businesses Of Small-Town New Zealand.

Class Warrior: Like his predecessors in the Social Credit Political League, the NZ First leader is acutely aware that the small rural towns and provincial cities of New Zealand are hotbeds of class conflict. Not simply the classic Marxist conflict of capitalist versus proletarian, but also the no less bitter conflict between large and small businesses. Indeed, it is possible to characterise life in provincial New Zealand as a constant struggle of the particular against the general: of individual agency against institutional power.

WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT that the most accomplished class warrior to emerge from the struggle to improve New Zealand’s labour laws would be Winston Peters? No one else with a dog in this fight saw the class issues at stake as clearly as Winston Peters and NZ First. Not the employers; not the unions; and certainly not the Labour, National or Green parties. Peters and his colleagues can walk away from this debate as the undisputed champions of small provincial business. The electoral consequences of NZ First’s decisive intervention should not be underestimated.

There is a strong temptation on the part of left-wing activists in the major metropolitan centres to write off the people of the provinces as a bunch of undifferentiated reactionaries. To your average Labour or Green activist, provincials are racist, sexist and homophobic “rednecks”. The sort of people who still see nothing wrong with sending a float filled with people in blackface down the main street of their little town. Hopeless and irredeemable, these voters are not worth wooing – unless you’re Stuart Nash. (And the less said about Stuart Nash the better!)

Winston Peters knows better. Like his predecessors in the Social Credit Political League, the NZ First leader is acutely aware that the small rural towns and provincial cities of New Zealand are hotbeds of class conflict. Not simply the classic Marxist conflict of capitalist versus proletarian, but also the no less bitter conflict between large and small businesses. Indeed, it is possible to characterise life in provincial New Zealand as a constant struggle of the particular against the general: of individual agency against institutional power.

People living in large cities have a bad habit of romanticising small towns. They like to think that in a place where everybody knows their neighbours life must be wonderful. The reality is almost the exact opposite. In a small community the social hierarchy is much more sharply exposed. Yes, everybody knows their neighbours – but they also know exactly where they sit in the social pecking-order. Fun, one imagines, if you are positioned at or near the top. Wretched, if you are located near the bottom.

The local lawyers and accountants, for example, are perfectly placed to know exactly how well, or how badly, their neighbour’s are doing. The town’s doctors and teachers are similarly well-positioned. If knowledge is power, then these provincial professionals have a lot to play with.

The senior managers of nationwide chains, salarymen who will not lose their houses if their executive decisions turn out badly, may look down their noses at the senior bureaucrats employed by local and central government but, in truth, their day-to-day jobs are distinguished by the same petty protocols; the same demands from above. Well remunerated, but subjected to unceasing “performance reviews”, many opt to take out their frustrations on those further down the totem pole.

Not that the owners of the town’s small businesses would include themselves among the pen-pushers’ inferiors. In their own eyes – and often in the eyes of their employees – they are town’s true heroes.

Independent of spirit, willing to have a crack, contemptuous of those whose only purpose in this world appears to be making the lives of people like themselves as difficult as possible, it is difficult not to admire these small businesspeople.

It is no mean feat to keep a business afloat in the provinces. Notoriously under-capitalised, they all-too-often keep their operations afloat by paying themselves less than their workers. They are no friend of the trade unions with their one-rule-fits-all approach, but neither are they friends of the banks who bleed them dry or the big firms who expect them to submit ridiculously low bids for the jobs they then take their own sweet time paying for.

But without these small business people the towns and cities of provincial New Zealand would die. Their absence is frighteningly easy to spot. Main streets are dead: their shopfronts boarded-up and the real estate agent’s “To Let” signs fading in the sun. The young people those shuttered businesses might have employed have either fled or broken bad. The only signs of life are around the local office of the MSD.

These are the towns NZ First is pledged to restore to economic health. Winston Peters and Shane Jones want those kids in jobs, earning money, dreaming of one day becoming their own boss – just like the man or the woman who took them on under the 90-day rule, to see whether they had what it took, and then employed them permanently when they proved themselves hard-working and trustworthy. The unions can knock on the boss’s door as often as they like – they will find few, if any, takers here.

Of course there are exceptions – but in small-town New Zealand it is more common to find the small employers and their workers united in solidarity against the people who live on the hill. It’s one thing to be paid by the taxpayers; to grow fat on the fees you charge; or draw the salary only a big corporation can afford to pay. It’s quite another to keep the town’s cars and trucks filled up and roadworthy; or to fill the bellies of its inhabitants with decent tucker. All those engaged in small businesses: both their owners and the people who work for them; have taken a bet on themselves. Very often that bet is lost. Fair enough. Making a small business pay has never been easy. All the players ask is that the game stays honest: that the deck isn’t stacked against them.

That is the pledge NZ First made to them – and that is the pledge it has kept. Wages are not always paid in cash. Sometimes they are paid in dreams. By honouring that currency, Winston Peters and NZ First have made the heroes of small-town New Zealand their own.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 29 November 2018.

Rating Reality Television.

Recognizing Ourselves: When, in the midst of a reality tv show, we observe people cheating, lying and generally behaving reprehensibly, we are reminded of the things we do every day to survive in our workplaces, our families, our most intimate relationships. Unfolding on our screens is something much more visceral and real than anything we’re likely to see on Shortland Street or The Brokenwood Mysteries.

HAVE YOU EVER wondered what the enormous popularity of reality television reveals about contemporary New Zealand culture? Understandably, the nation’s cultural elites do not consider this to be an important question. What the lower orders choose to pollute their minds with is hardly worthy of serious consideration. The only social significance attachable to reality television is the extent to which it uses up space and resources that could, much more profitably, be devoted to genuine cultural production.

And yet, reality television rates its little socks off. The hard-nosed men and women who invest in reality tv shows don’t do so out of a sense of cultural responsibility, they put their money in so they can take more money out. It’s a genre which, unlike so many of its high-tone cultural competitors, actually returns a profit to the production houses that churn it out. Netflix it ain’t – but then Netflix isn’t what it’s trying to be.

I used to think that reality tv was a neoliberal conspiracy. That the programmes were carefully designed to inculcate the values of aggressive individualism and ruthless competition. That the moral emptiness of the shows and the unrelenting narcissism of their participants was intended to faithfully replicate the values of the “real world”.

This was, of course, the purest drivel. The personalities and behaviour of the participants in reality tv are what shape each programme’s content. The producers do not set out with a pre-written script, they simply go with the flow. Yes, they set the tasks that must be accomplished, thereby constructing the rough framework upon which each episode is hung. But the fascination, the sheer drama and entertainment value of reality tv derives from the people who make up the “cast”.

That so many viewers become engrossed in the unfolding “drama” of reality television strongly suggests that they see themselves reflected in at least one member of the cast. This identification is rendered all the stronger by the knowledge that each character’s words and actions are their own and not the work of some script-writer or director. Yes, it’s true that the dramatic coherence of each episode is achieved primarily through careful editing. Even so, what moves the viewers is their firm belief that what they are seeing on their screens is “real”.

The educated elites may sneer at this, confident that it confirms the extreme gullibility of the masses. But what if the popularity of reality tv is derived from its radical difference from the “made up” stories that constitute so much of our televisual fare? After all, “normal” tv dramas feature characters who are impossibly clever, virtuous, beautiful and strong, caught up in plot-lines that are as moralistic as they are predictable. In other words, “mainstream” drama is nothing like reality. Perhaps the gullible masses have simply grown tired of being preached at by their betters?

Consider the greatest reality tv shows of all: live sporting fixtures. Certainly, the rules offer a shape and purpose to the game, but everything else rests upon the skill and fervour of the players. Most important of all, the outcome of the “show” is not known prior to screening. In contrast to the lives of most people living in industrialised society, there is in every live sporting fixture an inescapable measure of unpredictability. For the duration of the game the viewer remains uncertain of the outcome. Small wonder that sport rates through the roof!

Perhaps reality tv shows wouldn’t be so popular if those responsible for funding the production of New Zealand television commissioned programmes which did as much as the average reality tv series to show real New Zealanders doing real things. Programmes which refuse to juxtapose beautiful presenters against ugly punters. Dramas that don’t always end with the “goodies” overcoming the “baddies”. Shows which reflect the facts of life in twenty-first century New Zealand: a country where the rich stay rich and what trickles down into the lives of the poor carries the very strong smell of piss.

“The purpose of epic theatre”, wrote Bertolt Brecht, “is not to encourage an audience to suspend their disbelief, but rather to force them to think introspectively about the particular moments that are occurring on stage and why they are happening a certain way.”

When, in the midst of a reality tv show, we observe people cheating, lying and generally behaving reprehensibly, we are reminded of the things we do every day to survive in our workplaces, our families, our most intimate relationships. Unfolding on our screens is something much more visceral and real than anything we’re likely to see on Shortland Street or The Brokenwood Mysteries. Great theatre – and great television drama – isn’t about good versus evil in the outside world, it’s about how the outside world sets good and evil against each other in our own souls.

Which arguably makes reality television the epic theatre of our age.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 15 November 2018.

Virginia Crawford's Duty To Offend.

Tough Love: It is impossible to listen to the Fraser High School Principal, Virginia Crawford’s, speech without hearing in every word and phrase her passionate understanding of just how important education is to freeing people from the social conditions – and expectations – that imprison them.

THE PRINCIPAL OF Hamilton’s Fraser High School, Virginia Crawford, has been roundly criticised for warning her students about the strong correlation between truancy and failure in the world beyond high school. The push-back against Crawford’s address culminated in a walkout by around 100 of Fraser’s senior students on Monday 24 September 2018. But, what if she was telling the truth?

Very few people have been willing to test Crawford’s claims empirically. To ascertain whether the behaviours she warned her students against: truancy, substance abuse, petty crime; are, indeed, common factors in the much more serious social indices of functional illiteracy, long-term unemployment, prolonged periods on social welfare, repeated incarceration, mental health problems, sexual assault, domestic violence and, most disturbingly in relation to young New Zealanders – suicide.

This is strange, since a great deal of work has already been undertaken in this area by those convinced of the efficacy of the National Party’s “social investment” initiative. The whole point of the social investment project was to identify the “warning signs” of individual and/or family dysfunction so that the authorities could intervene and, hopefully, forestall, that individual’s and/or family’s decline into irremediable social pathologies. Those warning signs were precisely the behaviours alluded to in Crawford’s address.

“Every student who walks out of the gate to truant is already a statistic of the worst kind, highly likely to go to prison, highly likely to commit domestic violence or be a victim of domestic violence, be illiterate, be a rape victim, be a suicide victim, be unemployed for the majority of their life, have a major health problem or problems, die at an early age, have an addiction - drugs, gambling, alcohol or smoking.

“The more you truant, the more likely you are to end up as one or most of those statistics. I don’t want you to be one of those statistics. Economic research confirms everything I am telling you. It’s been proven. Some young people at Fraser today are still proving that message to be true.”

One of the Principal’s sternest critics is Herald columnist, Deborah Hill Cone, whose argument is best summed-up in the old aphorism: ‘Give a dog a bad name and hang him.’ “Being told by an authority figure you are certain to become a grim statistic is more of a danger to young people than skipping class”, Hill Cone warned Crawford. “In some very pervasive, unconscious and dogged ways we become what we are expected to be.”

There is something quite touching about Hill Cone’s faith in the individual’s ability to rise above the awful impetus of social causation and statistical correlation. “And try to remember this,” she advises the students of Fraser High in her Monday column, “your principal, Virginia Crawford, has absolutely no idea what your life is going to be like. None of us do. And she has no right to tell your story.”

Many would argue, however, that Crawford not only has the right, she has the duty, to speak plainly and forthrightly about the awful statistics to which so many of the students attending Fraser High School are likely to contribute in the months and years ahead of them. Telling them, as Hill Cone would have her do, that: “It’s your soul, and your story to construct” is all very bracing and Kiplingesque, but it is highly debateable as to whether it will do as much good as telling them that buckling down and working hard at school is just about the only way out of the dead-end working-class suburbs which for so many of them constitute the boundaries of the known world.

A number of the parents of Fraser High School students have taken offence at Crawford’s comments and are threatening to withdraw their offspring from the school until such time as its errant principal is replaced. Like so many of us, they do not like to think too much about the uncanny ability of insurance underwriters to correlate specific behaviours with specific outcomes in the setting of their clients’ premiums. Rather than condemn Crawford for her predictions, might it not be more helpful for their children’s futures to ask themselves whether the behaviour they have been modelling in their own lives bears out or refutes the Principal’s fears?

Nothing did more to shatter the rigid boundaries separating New Zealand’s social classes than the First Labour Government’s ringing affirmation that every New Zealander “whatever his [or her] level of academic ability, whether he [or she] be rich or poor, whether he [or she] live in town or country, has a right, as a citizen, to a free education of the kind for which he [or she] is best fitted, and to the fullest extent of his [or her] powers.”

It is impossible to listen to Crawford’s speech without hearing in every word and phrase her passionate understanding of just how important education is to freeing people from the social conditions – and expectations – that imprison them. She knows that there is a vast, beautiful, exciting and intensely rewarding world beyond the borders of “Nawton or Dinsdale or Western Heights” – just as she knows that the students of Fraser High School who play truant on a regular and prolonged basis are, statistically-speaking, the ones least likely to ever get to see it.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 25 September 2018.

An Authoritarian Tumour In New Zealand's Democratic Brain.

Marching In Step: What so many of our politicians and pundits appear to expect from government, even when it is composed of two or more political parties, is strict military discipline at every level. The orders of the Prime Minister, like the orders of a generalissimo, must not be countermanded. Cabinet ministers assume the role of said generalissimo’s staff officers and the remaining backbench MPs become her troops.

SOMETHING IS GROWING in the New Zealand brain. An authoritarian tumour whose rapid expansion is triggering increasingly morbid symptoms in the body politic. Institutions and professions upon which New Zealanders traditionally relied for wisdom and good judgement have taken to displaying neither. Our national discourse has taken on a brutish quality: a coarseness and violence which discourages the participation of all but the most resilient of citizens.

Nowhere is the evidence of this authoritarian tumour more clearly on display than in the relentless disparagement of the coalition government led by Jacinda Ardern and Winston Peters. The lively reality of its tripartite character strikes an alarming number of pundits and politicians as evidence of a profound malfunctioning in the country’s political system. That the malfunction identified by these “experts” turns out to be democracy itself is even more alarming.

That there should be sharp disagreements between three quite different political parties and their respective leaders should surprise no one – especially when those parties have collectively assumed responsibility for governing the nation. As citizens, we are protected by the constitutional requirement that our governments must, at all times, command a majority in the House of Representatives. If, therefore, it is to go on governing, all disagreements within and between the component parts of that majority, no matter how sharp, must be resolved. If a resolution of differences cannot be achieved, then the responsibility must be returned to us – the voters.

How, then, to explain the near panic displayed by a phalanx of right-wing politicians and pundits whenever these entirely predictable disagreements between the coalition government’s members are aired in public? What is it that they expect from government, when evidence of debate – even open dissent – can throw them into such an agitated state?

There is only one credible answer to this question – and it is deeply troubling. What so many of our politicians and pundits expect from government, even when it is composed of two or more political parties, is strict military discipline at every level. The orders of the Prime Minister, like the orders of a generalissimo, must not be countermanded. Cabinet ministers assume the role of said generalissimo’s staff officers and the remaining backbench MPs become her troops.

But a political party is not an army. Whoever, outside of a revolution, heard of soldiers electing their generals! Why then do so many professional politics-watchers consider disagreement within a government’s ranks to be evidence of, at best, insubordination, or, at worst, mutiny? Why is the inevitable churn of political “Ins” and “Outs” invariably described as “a leadership coup” – as if changing leaders is an inherently bad thing to do?

Could it be that the reason the Right becomes so agitated at the sight of discussion and debate within the ranks of government is that it comports so uncomfortably with the way the people who elect governments are expected to live their daily lives? The complex hierarchies of the workplace, no less than those of the armed forces, owe nothing to democracy. Whoever, outside of a revolution, heard of workers electing their boss!

Could it be that the politicians and pundits of the Right are more likely than not to consider an undisciplined government to be guilty of letting the side down? After all, if ordinary citizens see their prime minister shrug-off the occasional disagreement between her and her deputy as simply democracy in action, then why can’t their bosses? If debate, even dissent, is treated by coalition party leaders as a healthy sign of political life – rather than a sacking offence – then why shouldn’t they have a say in how their workplace is run?

As corporate-style “governance” has acquired an ever-greater purchase over our lives; as all the countervailing powers within the workplace – viz: trade unions – have shrunk in influence; the huge discrepancy between the democratic freedom and equality that is supposed to characterise our political selves, and the exploitation and servitude which increasingly characterises our economic selves, acquires an decidedly subversive aspect.

The morbid authoritarian tumour which is taking over more and more of the New Zealand brain is in danger of extinguishing completely our national disinclination toward bending the knee to bullies, along with our much admired habit of thinking for ourselves. A government that’s willing to model both of these quintessentially Kiwi characteristics is to be commended – not condemned.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 21 September 2018.

The Politics Of Cannabis Law Reform.

Is Cannabis Prohibition About To End? No, the thing that wrong with the current picture of cannabis law reform is that Labour isn’t in it. What? Yep. The Justice Minister, Andrew Little, when questioned about the Government’s likely response to a “Yes” vote in the forthcoming referendum, made it abundantly clear that the straight person at this particular student party is Labour.

OKAY, SO LET’S get this straight. In last year’s post-election negotiations, the Greens asked for – and got – a referendum on ending cannabis prohibition. Which means that if New Zealanders vote “Yes”, then the Greens will sponsor a change in the law to give effect to that result.

So far, so good.

It gets better, though, because NZ First have been keen supporters of referenda forever. (They don’t call them populists for nothing!) So, if New Zealand votes in favour of dope, then the NZ Firsters will 1) let loose a very long sigh, and then 2) call in the law draughtsperson.

Great!

Yes, it is, but you ain’t heard nothing yet. When asked if the National Party would honour the result of the referendum, Simon Bridges replied in the affirmative. Simon says that if pot is what Kiwis want, then pot is what Kiwis will get.

So, that’s game-over, isn’t it? If a majority of Kiwis vote to end cannabis prohibition, then a majority of the House of Representatives is pledged to making it happen. Time to dust-off that old hookah-pipe!

Or, as stoners used to say, way back in the day: “Solid!”

But, wait a minute, aren’t we missing something here?

No, it’s not David Seymour. As a good libertarian, the Act Party’s sole parliamentary representative (assuming he’s still there after the 2020 election) is bound to vote in favour of ending cannabis prohibition. The state, after all, has no business criminalising behaviour which is, to all intents and purposes, victimless.

No, the thing that wrong with this picture is that Labour isn’t in it.

What?

Yep. The Justice Minister, Andrew Little, when questioned about the Government’s likely response to a “Yes” vote in the forthcoming referendum, made it abundantly clear that the straight person at this particular student party is Labour.

Huh?

Oh yes, it’s Labour. And if that surprises you, then you haven’t been paying attention. Labour hasn’t had a progressive position on the issue of cannabis law reform since Noel Rayner persuaded the Otago Regional Council of the Labour Party to vote in favour of legalising marijuana way back in the 1980s. Hell, if Rob Muldoon hadn’t called a snap election in 1984, it’s even possible that Labour’s Annual Conference might have passed Noel’s remit. Labour was a pretty liberal outfit in the early 1980s: anti-nuclear, pro-gay rights, open to all kinds of progressive ideas. So, who knows?

What has become clear in the intervening thirty-five years is that while Labour has remained a progressive champion of LGBTQI rights, it has grown increasingly conservative on the issue of drugs.

Partly, this is a reflection of Labour’s uneasiness with everything Green. Nandor Tanczos’ energetic promotion of cannabis law reform and the response it elicited from the young and the marginalised in the 1999 election seriously freaked Labour out.

These were not the sort of people Helen Clark, Michael Cullen and Phil Goff wanted to be associated with. The slow but relentless pushback against Tanczos from the conservative establishment – especially secondary-school principals – further convinced Labour that, when it came to legalising pot, political discretion was the better part of principled valour.

Labour’s ultra-cautious approach was confirmed by the Greens themselves when, in election after election, cannabis law reform was allowed to slip down the party’s list of priorities.

The other explanation for Labour’s conservative line on drugs emerges from the party’s dramatically changed relationship with the poor and the marginalised. Where once the Labour Party had been the sword and shield of the disadvantaged in New Zealand society, by the turn of the twentieth century it had become, in effect, their case-worker.

The poor and the marginalised were now a client-class to be monitored and managed: the responsibility of precisely the same managers and professionals who had come to dominate the NZ Labour Party. Drug-taking was just one among many dysfunctional behaviours in need of middle-class intervention.

Far from promoting the liberalisation of drug laws, Labour contributed significantly to the dramatic expansion of the state’s powers of intervention in the lives of those Kiwis deemed to have deviated from the “caring” agencies’ expectations.

No surprise, then, that Labour is resisting the popular movement in favour of liberalising New Zealand’s drug laws – especially those relating to cannabis. The dog’s breakfast that is the coalition’s bill on medical marijuana is not the fault of NZ First, it’s a reflection of the impulse to control that grips so many members of the Labour caucus. National’s bill is better than Labour’s because its MPs are not so deeply enmeshed in the professional-managerial norms of the welfare state’s bureaucratic machinery.

Cannabis law reformers should, therefore, be on the their guard against any attempt to bring the referendum forward. Such a move would be an admission by Labour that it wants no part of the mobilising effect a well organised reform campaign could unleash. An effect which would very likely increase the Green vote in ways prejudicial to Labour remaining the dominant partner in the next progressive government.

Similar vigilance will be necessary when it comes to determining the nature of any public “education” campaign prior to the referendum. Much will turn on who is given the job of overseeing the debate between prohibitionists and reformers. Whoever is given this job must be able to resist the subtle and not-so-subtle pressures of the forces seeking to uphold the status quo.

That it should be Labour standing in the way of cannabis law reform tells us much about the political forces currently shaping our society. Lenin argued that all politics could be reduced to just two words: Who? Whom? On this particular issue it is vital to keep as clear as possible the distinction between those parties determined to exercise control over people’s private pleasures and those who are intensely relaxed about New Zealanders having fun.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 2 August 2018.

Emotion, Not Reason, Is Driving New Zealanders’ Attitudes Towards Crime And Punishment.

Who Do You Love? The battle over crime and punishment is largely determined by who emerges from the debate as the primary recipients of New Zealanders' empathy. Do we focus our emotions on the victims of crime, or on rescuing the perpetrators from the circumstances that led them to commit the offences which put them behind bars?

TRYING TO TALK with New Zealanders about crime and punishment is never easy. In our highly punitive culture, people who break the law generally receive very little sympathy from their fellow citizens. For most Kiwis the blunt formula: “you do the crime, you do the time”; is sufficient.

Asking New Zealanders why some people “do the crime” usually elicits an equally blunt explanation. Criminals are “bad bastards” – pure and simple. In vain do reformers point to the offenders’ dysfunctional upbringings: to the violence and abuse that more often than not has surrounded them since birth. The stock rejoinder thrown back in these “do-gooders” faces is: “Look, I know plenty of people who had difficult childhoods, but none of them ever stabbed a dairy-owner or raped and murdered a teenage girl.”

The reformers’ job is made even harder by the ordinary New Zealander’s genuine empathy for the victims of crime. Nothing inflames New Zealand’s “sleepy hobbits” like the handing down of a prison-sentence deemed manifestly inadequate to the severity of the offence.

The name “Sensible Sentencing” captures this phenomenon brilliantly. Conjured-up is the negative image of an over-educated liberal judge who has clearly paid far more attention to the report of some away-with-the-fairies psychiatrist than he has to the impact statements of the victim and/or her family. In the eyes of these citizens, a “sensible” sentence invariably involves locking-up the perpetrator and throwing away the key.

It does no good to point out that putting a bad person in prison almost never results in a better person coming out. “We don’t put them in prison to make them better”, say the sensible sentencers. “We put them inside to give their victims some justice and to keep the rest of us safe.”

Most of the people who say this sort of thing have absolutely no idea what a real prison is like – never having spent so much as a single hour locked-up in a concrete cell. They’ve never experienced the loss of personal liberty. Never been caged. Never faced an endless procession of grey, featureless days punctuated only by shattering displays of human cruelty. Never had to endure emotional and physical pain without the slightest prospect of care or solace.

Ensuring that most people never find out what prison is really like is one of the key objectives of those who seek to profit out of the incarceration of human-beings. For the big corporations behind private prisons, keeping the focus on the victims of crime is crucial.

All parents at one time or another fear for their children’s safety – imagining the very worst when they don’t come home on time. That’s why it’s so easy for them to empathise with those whose loved ones really have been injured or killed. Directing the fear and anger generated by violent crime against its perpetrators and those who defend them is a lot easier than trying to make the public understand what gave rise to the offending in the first place. The very last thing the private prisons lobby want people to say about the person in the dock is: “There, but for the grace of God, goes my son or daughter.” Or, even worse: “That could have been me.”

Keeping the focus away from the grim realities of incarceration also serves those with a vested interest in downplaying the whole question of the rights of accused persons. If people knew what being locked-up was like, then they’d be very careful to ensure that the presumption of innocence was respected and upheld.

It was the famous English jurist, Sir William Blackstone, who said: “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” It is perhaps the greatest achievement of New Zealand’s Sensible Sentencing Trust that the present reality of dozens of innocent persons spending months in remand cells for offences they will later be acquitted of does not enrage the New Zealand public. Their motto would appear to be: “It is better that ten innocent people remain locked-up than that one guilty person re-offends on bail.”

In a social climate such as this it is quite pointless to simply enjoin the government of the day to “do the right thing” and empty out the remand prisons, or, to bring forward the parole eligibility for those prisoners convicted of non-violent offences. Were the government to respond positively to such appeals its political opponents would have a field-day. “Look at them!”, the conservative politicians would scream. “They’re letting these criminals walk free!” The inevitable political backlash would almost certainly be fatal.

What’s required is a well-considered and well-funded campaign to bring home the realities of crime and punishment: the conditions that breed offending and the circumstances in which convicted offenders are expected to rehabilitate themselves. Such a campaign should aim to recruit not just lawyers and criminologists, but journalists, novelists, playwrights and screenwriters. Rousing human empathy is as much a mission for the arts as it is for the sciences – maybe even more so.

Watching movies like Twelve Angry Men, Dead Man Walking and The Shawshank Redemption will likely win more converts to the cause of improving our criminal justice system and the prisons it fills than reading lengthy learned articles in academic journals. On the vexed question of New Zealanders’ attitudes towards crime and punishment, reason, unaided by emotion, will never be enough.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 22 June 2018.