Lessons For Labour – But Will It Heed Them?

Mr Fix-It: Wayne Brown’s “Fix Auckland” slogan chimed perfectly with his key demographics. They were less interested in ideological concerns than they were in sorting-out the council. They liked the fact that Brown was abrasive. They did not want a Mayor who suffered fools gladly and allowed himself to be bossed around by city bureaucrats.

THE LEFT have a whole lot of lessons to learn from their “shellacking” in Saturday’s local government elections. Sadly, the chances are high they’ll learn none of them. The response of the Auckland Left has been particularly infantile – and hypocritical. It was National Party activist Hamish Price who responded most effectively to the Woke Left’s horrified reaction to Wayne Brown’s decisive victory over Efeso Collins in the Auckland Mayoralty race, with the wickedly pithy tweet:

“In 2019 Auckland elected an old white guy as Mayor of Auckland against Person Of Colour John Tamihere. But that wasn’t racist because Phil Goff was backed by Labour.”

Not that the Right’s gleeful exposure of the Left’s ethical and political shortcomings will prevent the latter from blaming everyone but themselves for the defeats they have suffered across the country. In their sights are – in no particular order – the Baby Boomer Generation, the postal voting system, the political passivity of the poor, and the dysfunctional design of our democratic political system.

Political analysts will search in vain for evidence that the Left understands that its succession of defeats (Auckland, Rotorua, Whanganui, Christchurch, Dunedin) is attributable only in part to a nationwide turning away from the Labour Government and its policies – especially the deeply unpopular “Three Waters” project. Evidence that Saturday’s losers are coming to grips with their critical failure to master ad-man Mike Hutcheson’s “Three Ms” – Message, Money, Machine – has yet to surface.

In time, one hopes, the Left will come to understand that, in all four of the main centres, it was the winning candidates’ mastery of the Three Ms that delivered their victories.

Wayne Brown had all the money he needed to hone his campaign’s message: hiring specialists to test a variety of pitches on potential voters. These experts were also able to identify which demographics were the most likely to vote for his ideas. Guided by political “hired guns” Matthew Hooton and Ben Thomas (formerly “Exeltium”) Brown’s campaign maintained an impressively tight operational discipline.

The key demographic for Brown turned out to be the “Country Calendar Watchers”. These were the over-55 voters who still relied on radio and television for most of their information. The folk who tuned-in to Newstalk-ZB to hear what people like themselves (and Mike Hosking) were thinking and saying. They watched One News, and snuggled-in tight on Sunday evenings for the reassuring images of the decent, hard-working (mostly Pakeha) New Zealand cockies so beloved of “Country Calendar’s” producers.

Wayne Brown’s “Fix Auckland” slogan chimed perfectly with this key demographic. They were less interested in ideological concerns than they were in sorting-out the council. They liked the fact that Brown was abrasive. They did not want a Mayor who suffered fools gladly and allowed himself to be bossed around by city bureaucrats. They were in the political market for a disruptor: someone who could, in the words of Mark Zuckerberg, “move fast and break things”. That the candidate was also a civil engineer, with a reputation for repairing broken things, certainly did him no harm.

Brown did not have a “Machine” in the classic, feet-on-the-ground, Labour/National door-knocking tradition. He didn’t need one. He could reach his key demographic through Newstalk-ZB. Brown’s advertising spend on Auckland’s most popular radio station was all the “Machine” he needed. Historically, the over-55s are the citizens most likely to participate in local elections. They do not need to be “mobilised” – merely steered in the right direction. Carefully targeted social-media messaging added a sweet layer of icing to Brown’s cake.

The same turned out to be true, mutatis mutandis, of successful campaigns across the country. The Right was well-funded, well-prepared, and presented a message which those most likely to vote were eager to hear.

Even in Wellington, where the supposedly left-wing Tory Whanau rolled over both the incumbent, Andy Foster, and Labour’s Paul Eagle, the result owed as much to the candidate’s mastery of the Three Ms as it did to her ideology. Whanau is a superb communicator, whose message that Wellington needed a Green Mayor resonated energetically in the country’s greenest city – electorally-speaking. With sufficient money to sustain her campaign, all Whanau needed was a machine. No problem. Anyone living in or visiting Wellington could hardly miss Whanau’s ground-game. There were feet-on-the-ground in large numbers and plenty of youthful enthusiasm. The newly-elected Mayor told the media that the size of her win came as a surprise. It shouldn’t have.

It is the common theme linking these successes that should give Labour the most concern. Across the country there is a growing sense of disconnection and disempowerment. So much needs to be done, but the democratic transmission-belts that are supposed to carry the needs and wants of the citizenry to the individuals and entities charged with delivering them, no longer seem to work.

Plans are made, and decisions are taken, but not by citizens: not even by the representatives of citizens. At both the national and the local level, unelected and increasingly unaccountable bureaucrats appear to have taken charge. Everywhere, New Zealanders see evidence of centralisation. Everywhere the checks and balances of democracy are being discarded. Elected councillors are expected to act as rubber stamps. Citizens are the stampees.

Nowhere was this situation more vividly illustrated than in the actions of the Orwellian-named “Council Controlled Organisation”, Auckland Transport (AT). Without warning, AT’s CEO informed the users of Auckland’s rail network that its tracks were about to be torn up and re-laid. This would require a cessation of services – some as long as a year. Hugely disruptive of Aucklanders’ lives though it was, AT’s decision was conveyed to Auckland’s elected councillors only after it had been announced publicly. A peculiar way to demonstrate Council Control!

That the Chair of the AT Board, Adrienne Young-Cooper, upon learning of Wayne Brown’s landslide victory, thought it best to offer him her resignation, has been taken as a good omen by all those who voted for “Mr Fix-It” in hopes of instant action being taken. It also prompted the immediate question: Will the Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, draw a similar message of the need for instant action from the results of the local government elections?

Interviewed by a typically over-excited John Campbell for the Q+A programme’s Local Elections Special on Sunday morning (9/10/22) the newly-elected Mayor of Nelson, National’s Nick Smith, maintained his equanimity in the face of remarks about his political longevity that bordered on the offensive. All of a piece, it would seem, with Campbell’s earlier observation that the Baby Boom generation was refusing to “go quietly”.

Smith took the gratuitous ageism in good part, countering with an observation or two of his own. If the Labour Government was wise, he said, it would interpret the Left’s defeats as evidence of the electorate having had enough of its policies. Identifying the Three Waters project specifically, he warned that it would be permitted to proceed only by a government with a “death wish”.

Ardern’s ministry has just twelve months to prove it is not suicidal.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 10 October 2022.

Something Fishy About Nick Smith's Game

Intimidator-in-Chief: For eight years Dr Nick Smith has worked hard to convince voters that he is the National Party's chief point of environmental resistance; the one brave voice raised in opposition to the milk-before-water lobbyists of Fonterra and Federated Farmers. Now we know that it isn't true.

DR NICK SMITH’S crude intimidation of the Fish and Game Council points to the bleakest of environmental futures should National be re-elected on 20 September. It is now considerably clearer than 60 percent of New Zealand’s lakes, rivers and streams that there are no serious points of environmental resistance in John Key’s Cabinet. For eight years Smith has worked hard to convince voters that he is, indeed, one such point of resistance, the one brave voice raised in opposition to the milk-before-water lobbyists of Fonterra and Federated Farmers. Now we know that it isn't true.

 

Smith’s threats to “tweak” the legislation establishing the Fish and Game Council is of a piece with this Government’s proven impatience with all forms of institutional dissent. It will not, it seems, be happy until every official check and balance against unbridled executive power has been neutralised.

 

Unless it is absolutely forced to (as in the case of Environment Canterbury) the Government’s strategy is not to make this suppression of dissenting voices explicit. Its preference is rather to intimidate these legislatively mandated watchdogs into silence. This can be effected in two ways. Either by appointing new and more malleable individuals to quasi-governmental boards and councils, or, by stripping those not subject to ministerial manipulation (like Fish and Game) of all their effective regulatory and/or advisory powers.

 

To casual observers it will appear as though nothing has changed because all the institutions created to permit democratic participation in the management of irreplaceable public resources will still be in place. But they will be looking at a regulatory ghost town. Behind the fading signage, nobody will be home.

 

A succession of National Party ministers have perfected this process by using the Department of Conservation as their guinea-pig. Since 2008 John Key’s government has systematically starved the "DoC" of the resources needed to properly manage and protect the vast estate it administers on the public’s behalf. Constant restructuring has allowed the Minister’s hand-picked managers to purge the Department of its experts and visionaries, wipe clean its institutional memory and leave in place only those willing to make the best of a situation which long ago made the transition from bad to worse.

 

Smith calls Key’s administration a “Blue-Green Government”. But the veteran conservationists, Guy Salmon and Gary Taylor, who established the original blue-green political party, the Progressive Greens, would almost certainly disagree. Much has changed since the early 1990s when Nick Smith and his fellow “Brat Packers”, Bill English, Roger Sowry and Tony Ryall, first entered Parliament.

 

Back then it was still possible for a National Party Environment Minister, Simon Upton, to seriously pursue the idea of a Carbon Tax. Over the past twenty years, however, the ideological and political consolidation of Neoliberalism has downgraded the natural environment to the status of a mere sub-set of the economy when, in reality, it is the other way round. 

 

Neoliberals quickly grasped the deadly threat the science of ecology posed to the re-emergence of laissez-faire capitalism. In Marxist terms, the planet’s finite capacity to absorb the deadly externalities of carbon-based industrial civilisation constituted “the final contradiction”. Capitalism must either be tamed or it and the civilisation which created it will perish.

 

Rather than accept this last, irrefutable, existential challenge to Capitalism its defenders have opted instead for the politics of outright denial. But climate change “scepticism” is only the tip of the rapidly melting iceberg when it comes to the political and cultural consequences of Neoliberalism’s refusal to face the facts of anthropogenic global warming.

 

Resisting “the final contradiction” requires neoliberalism to destroy the rationalist and scientific foundations of the industrial civilisation upon which it stands. This can only be accomplished by undermining the public’s faith in the scientific method and investing all opinions – no matter how absurd – with a spurious equivalence. Evidence-based decision-making, which former National politicians like Simon Upton accepted as the sine qua non of competent and rational governance, is being supplanted by ‘evidence’ commissioned and purchased on the open market from ‘experts’ who specialise in telling Capitalism and its political agents exactly what they want to hear. (Alister Barry’s documentary film, Hot Air, shows how the Carbon Lobby and Federated Farmers utilised this technique to delay and/or defeat every attempt by successive New Zealand governments to combat climate change.)

 

The politics of denial also requires the complete hollowing out of those state institutions deliberately constructed to collect evidence from individuals and groups best placed to provide it. Institutions – like Fish and Game – whose democratic composition protects the processes of gathering evidence from those with a vested interest in suppressing information antithetical to their purposes.

 

When it comes to the Department of Conservation, Nick Smith and his colleagues know they have nothing to fear – as the censoring of the evidence DoC's scientists had gathered about the ecological effects of the proposed Ruataniwha Dam made clear. But Fish and Game and uncooperative Regional Councils still have an evidential sword to draw in defence of Mother Nature.

 

Shut them down.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 28 July 2014.

One Damn Thing - Or Many?

Follow the money: The work of journalists and spies is often indistinguishable. In both professions, the aim is to expose what is hidden. Where they differ is in the ultimate repository of the facts they uncover. A spy delivers his information to a privileged individual or group; the journalist offers the truth to everyone.

SPIES AND JOURNALISTS have a lot in common. To be good at either profession one cannot afford to interpret events as simply "one damn thing after another" – a random sequence of unrelated phenomena. No, one must see them as elements in a complex, constantly evolving historical picture.

Journalists and spies owe their masters not simply the "first rough draft" of history; they must also provide them with the first rough sketch.

Take the ongoing brouhaha surrounding Hone Harawira and the Maori Party for example. What are we really looking at? Is it "just" a controversy about an MP who went AWOL for a day in Paris, and then had an intemperate online stoush with someone who made a cheap-shot involving his partner? And if so, how have these events led to Mr Harawira facing expulsion from his party?

At first glance the scandal appears to hinge upon a racially-loaded epithet used by Mr Harawira in his e-mail jousting with Mr Buddy Mikaere.

Pakeha New Zealanders have taken understandable offence at being labelled puritanical "White Motherf***ers". Talkback radio amplified this Pakeha outrage, newspaper columnists gave it political shape, and a consensus swiftly congealed around the proposition that the Maori Party must throw Mr Harawira out of its waka.

Such, at least, is the "one damn thing after another" version of the Harawira story. Good enough for a junior political reporter perhaps, but definitely not good enough for a professional spy.

An intelligence agent reporting back to his boss in some distant European capital would have to provide much more in the way of explanatory detail.

Mr Mikaere’s actions, for a start, would require much closer scrutiny.

Who is this man? What does he do? Who does he rub noses with? Did he have anything to gain by becoming involved in the Harawira controversy? Who, if anyone, did he talk to before releasing the offending e-mails?

Asking around, our spy discovers that Mr Mikaere’s professional expertise is currently for hire in the complex (and often controversial) area of resource consent applications. This immediately prompts a flurry of additional questions.

Who are his clients? Is he currently working for any of the major iwi corporations? Is there some sort of environmental deal going down with the major Maori players – a deal that could possibly involve Resource Management Act issues?

Our spy telephones a contact in the Wellington bureaucracy.

"Hell yes!" his contact shoots back. "The five big iwi corporates are just about to be given the sweetest of sweet deals by the Minister Responsible for Climate Change, Nick Smith, in return for the Maori Party’s votes for his revised ETS legislation. Something to do with tree-planting and DoC-owned marginal land."

"How would Hone Harawira view that sort of deal?" asks our spy.

"I’m not sure", replies his contact, "but Hone’s known to be pretty pissed-off about his party’s wheeling and dealing with the Maori elite. He’s simply not convinced that the huge sums of money involved (and we’re talking millions here) will ever trickle down to the sort of people he represents in Te Tai Tokerau."

"Any resource consents required for this sort of thing?", asks the spy.

"There usually are – but who knows in this case? If we’re talking DoC land – and special legislation – the RMA might not even apply."

In an interim report to his superiors, our spy makes the following observations:

"It would clearly be in the interests of the Maori Party leadership (and the Maori corporations which stand to benefit from their agreement with Minister Smith) to eliminate Mr Harawira as an oppositional force within the Maori Party caucus. It would also suit the National-led Government very well – especially given its urgent need to have the ETS legislation passed before the Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change. A straightforward quid pro quo: "You give us the ETS, and we’ll give you the repeal of the Foreshore & Seabed Act" would certainly meet the political needs of both parties."

Perhaps some non-fictional journalists should start asking the same questions as my fictional spy.

Is Mr Harawira really being driven from his party because of a regrettable sequence of "one damn thing after another": that unauthorised jaunt to Paris, and the mouthful of ill-chosen expletives provoked by Mr Mikaere?

Or, are we looking at a whole lot of damnable things happening together?

This essay was originally published in The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 20 November 2009.