New Zealand's Government Must Save New Zealand's Media.

No Free Society Without A Free And Functioning News Media: If we are to surrender our civil rights to the broader cause of defeating Covid-19, then foreign corporations must, likewise, surrender their right to inflict immense economic and cultural harm on New Zealanders simply because it improves their bottom line.

I’M NOT SURE, after today, if we’re going to come through this global pandemic in one piece. I just don’t think this government contains enough decisive individuals to guarantee that what emerges on the other side of this crisis will still be recognisably “us”. Where, for example, was the outrage; the cold fury; the swift and ruthless response to the reckless cultural vandalism of the German media conglomerate, Bauer’s, decision to destroy the New Zealand magazine industry?

This government has voted itself almost unlimited emergency powers to protect the people of New Zealand from the worst effects of the Covid-19 virus. That mandate must go beyond simply looking after their physical well-being. If it is to mean anything at all, it must extend to emotional and cultural well-being also. If we are to surrender our civil rights to the broader cause of defeating the virus, then foreign corporations must, likewise, surrender their right to inflict immense economic and cultural harm on New Zealanders simply because it improves their bottom line.

Where were the Prime Minister, the Minister of Heritage and Culture, the Finance Minister, and the Attorney-General when we needed them? Where was the cease and desist instruction to Bauer? Where was the threat of instant nationalisation if it failed to heed the Government’s clear directive? Where was the reassurance to all of Bauer’s New Zealand employees that this nation’s most venerable and beloved periodicals would not be permitted to simply blip-off the nation’s radar screen like so many downed airliners?

The answer, of course, is that none of these responses were in evidence. It impresses me not one whit that Kris Faafoi released a media statement clearly signalling his displeasure at Bauer’s decision. It might have made him feel better, but it did nothing to preserve The Listener, North & South, Metro, and the NZ Woman’s Weekly – or the jobs of the journalists, artists, designers and administrators involved in their publication.

New Zealanders are now entitled to know why the need for a functioning national airline (however shrunken) was accepted by this government, but the need for a functioning media industry (without which no democracy can long survive) was not. If close to a billion dollars could be diverted more-or-less instantly to the preservation of Air New Zealand, then why wasn’t $100 million made available to purchase – at the very least – the mastheads and the archives of Bauer’s New Zealand operation?

The preservation of these iconic magazines’ archives is especially vital. The NZ Woman’s Weekly’s first issue came out in 1932, the New Zealand Listener’s in 1939. The files and back issues of these two, and all the other magazines in Bauer’s possession, contain a priceless and irreplaceable record of this country’s cultural, social and political history. To let a boardroom of foreigners living on the other side of the planet consign these taonga to the skip would be a crime.

A truly New Zealand Government would have grasped these issues immediately and moved decisively to stop Bauer in its tracks. But then, a truly New Zealand Government would never have acquiesced in the almost complete deregulation of their country’s news media in the first place. It may have been a National Party cabinet minister, Maurice Williamson, who oversaw this process in the early 1990s, but in the nine years that the Labour Party was in control of the country’s fortunes not the slightest effort was made to re-regulate the media industry.

Had they done so, New Zealand would never have ended up in the situation where a roomful of German businesspersons could, in one fell stroke, eliminate a swathe of its most iconic publications. Nor would it be in a position where the fate of its second television network rested in the talons of a bunch of vulture capitalists. Or, where the future of all its daily newspapers south of Auckland and north of Dunedin depended on the whim of a cabal of Aussie media moguls who really couldn’t give a rat’s arse whether the Kiwis’ daily press lives or dies.

What sort of country behaves like this? The answer, sadly, is the sort of country which agrees to lend its national carrier $900 million, but then lumbers it with an interest rate roughly twice as high as the current bank rate. Yes, that’s right, Air New Zealand is being charged 9 percent on its majority shareholder’s loan. Why? Because, that way, it will be incentivised to follow only the most cold-blooded and ruthless path to recovery. If the private shareholders in Air New Zealand wish to avoid a complete government takeover of the airline they will demand nothing less.

Nothing could illustrate with more clarity the neoliberal strangle-hold Treasury still has over government decision-making. Even when the market fails; even facing the fallout of a global pandemic; the Treasury boffins are there to ensure that the logic of neoliberalism marches on regardless. Like the American commander in Vietnam, they will not flinch from the necessity of destroying the village in order to save it. Any New Zealand Finance Minister looking to Treasury for support as his cultural heritage goes up in flames – will look in vain.

Over the next few weeks more bad news is almost certain to emerge from New Zealand’s collapsing media organisations. What’s needed is a comprehensive rescue plan: something along the lines of a government takeover of the entire industry pending a more considered re-organisation when the pandemic has passed. Is there no one in the Labour-NZ First-Green Government with the vision and courage to step in and save the single most important guarantee of our democratic political system?

I know there are tens-of-thousands of New Zealand workers who also need help from their government. I know that many of them will forcefully object that there are more important things to save that a handful of magazines with weak balance-sheets and dwindling readerships. My answer to them is simple: “You’re right! And I will be just as loud in my criticism of this government if it fails to protect your jobs. But, I also know how fragile a nation’s culture becomes in moments of crisis. That’s why I am so vehement in my objections to the seeming unwillingness of Jacinda and her colleagues to save New Zealand’s daily newspapers and its very best periodicals.

Our country is on fire. The first priority is to get its people safely away from the flames. The next most important move, however, is to save as much of the people’s house and its contents as possible. To just stand there and watch it burn to the ground, especially when the hoses and water necessary to save it are at hand, would be an unforgiveable dereliction of political duty.

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

A Stranger Kind Of Magick.

Something Wicked This Way Comes: The ultimate ambition of the Golden Dawn’s adepts was to utilise the “magical imagination” – a process which involved “visualising a desired reality”, concentrating one’s will on it, “moulding its form in astral light” and bringing it, finally, into “the plainest physical reality”. As a description of the process that saw neoliberalism imposed upon the world, this is pretty good. (Assuming, of course, that the mass media counts as “astral light”!)

 

THERE’S A LOT OF INSPIRATION to be found in waiting rooms. At my dentist’s, just the other day, I discovered a veritable treasure-trove in Greg Roughan’s extraordinary contribution to the March 2016 edition of North & South magazine – “Bewitched in the Bay”.

 

Much to its dismay, Havelock North is now inextricably linked with campylobacter poisoning. There was a time, however, when this well-heeled Hawke’s Bay village was regarded as “the Vatican” of esoteric spirituality.

 

According to Robert S. Ellwood, author of Islands of the Dawn: The Story of Alternative Spirituality in New Zealand, at least one American adept is said to have declared: “If you want to hear Elizabethan English, you go to Appalachia; if you want to see what the original Golden Dawn was like, you go to New Zealand.”

 

And, yes, he is talking about that Golden Dawn, or, to give it its full title, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. This late-nineteenth century British-based occult society will forever be associated with the “wickedest man in the world” and self-proclaimed Beast of the Book of Revelation, Aleister Crowley; and, somewhat more respectably, with the celebrated Irish poet, William Butler Yeats. Roughan’s fascinating article, inspired in part by Ellwood’s book, retells the story of how, long after the original Golden Dawn collapsed amidst scandal and recrimination, its colonial Hawke’s Bay offshoot went on practicing “magick” well into the 1970s.

 

Roughan’s revelations got me thinking about two other imported belief systems which took off and thrived in New Zealand long after their offshore inspirations had faded – or disappeared altogether. The first of these was “social credit” – the esoteric monetary theory formulated by the British engineer, Clifford Hugh (“Major”) Douglas. The second, forever associated with another Douglas, is the extraordinarily pure (some would say extreme) variant of free-market economics which took root here in the 1980s. Neoliberalism, as it is now known, has thrived in New Zealand ever since. To the point where, like gorse, it has driven both its native and exotic competitors into the shade.

 

Social Credit never really took off in Great Britain but, like the magick of the Golden Dawn, it possessed sufficient power to spellbind colonials. In Canada and New Zealand, particularly, social credit-inspired political movements exerted considerable influence over domestic politics – principally during the 1930s. For many years, the Canadian provincial government of Alberta was dominated by social creditors, and several MPs in the First Labour Government (1935-1949) were vocal advocates.

 

With the widespread adoption of the expansionary economic ideas of John Maynard Keynes by progressive post-World War II governments, the numbers following social credit’s monetary theories began to dwindle. In New Zealand, however, the movement refused to die.

 

In 1953, despairing of ever again wielding influence in a major political party, the social creditors reconstituted themselves as the Social Credit Political League. At its first electoral outing in 1954 the League secured 11 percent of the popular vote (an extremely creditable result by today’s MMP standards) and immediately became New Zealand’s third party. At the peak of its popularity in 1981, Social Credit’s share of the popular vote rose to an astonishing 21 percent.

 

By 1987, however, New Zealanders were under the spell of a much more potent variety of monetarist magick. Curiously, the policy prescription which became known as “Rogernomics” (after Roger Douglas, the Labour finance minister who drove it forward) may be traced to another esoteric collection of adepts and initiates, the Mont Pelerin Society.

 

Appalled at the rapid expansion of economic and social democracy unleashed by Keynesian economics, the “classical liberals” of Mont Pelerin, laid out their plans for counter-revolution before the discomforted capitalists of Britain and America, and waited patiently for the right political moment to unleash them.

 

The ultimate ambition of the Golden Dawn’s adepts was to utilise the “magical imagination” – a process which involved “visualising a desired reality”, concentrating one’s will on it, “moulding its form in astral light” and bringing it, finally, into “the plainest physical reality”. As a description of the process that saw neoliberalism imposed upon the world, this is pretty good. (Assuming, of course, that the mass media counts as “astral light”!)

 

Following precedent, New Zealanders seized upon this latest manifestation of esoterica with a zealotry unequalled in the rest of the world. As before, elite enthusiasm for neoliberalism proved crucial. It intensified and gradually took control of practically all of New Zealand’s significant institutions. As though, in the mid-1920s, New Zealanders had woken to discover that everyone in high places, from Governor-General to Chief Justice, Prime Minister to Police Commissioner, were Magister Templi in Havelock North’s occult society

 

Overseas, political support for neoliberalism is fading. But, if its tenure here turns out to be as enduring as the Golden Dawn’s in Havelock North, then New Zealand will not be neoliberal-free until 2046.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 20 December 2016.