Communist In All But Name! Is Jacinda About to Oversee the Second Peaceful Transition to Kiwi Socialism?

 That's One Scary Lady! For all its bluster and bullshit, Neoliberalism turns out to be a remarkably fragile ideology. So much so, that the election of Jacinda Ardern – the Kiwi politician who dared describe Capitalism as “a blatant failure” – was enough to give Forbes magazine's readers the heebee-jeebees.

TO HEAR FORBES MAGAZINE TELL IT, socialism was achieved in New Zealand during 1960s and 70s, without bloodshed. In an opinion piece published by Forbes on Monday (20/11/17) former Lehman Brother’s staffer, Jared Dillian, put it like this:

“Not long ago, [New Zealand] was one of the most unfree economies that was not actually Communist in name. Most industry was nationalized, from telecommunications and transportation, to banks and hotels.”

This description is intended to – and probably will – shock the One Percenters who subscribe to Forbes. I, however, would happily wear Mr Dillian’s description of pre-1984 New Zealand as a badge of honour.

Most right-wingers insist that socialism can only be imposed on a country by force. They point to Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba and, more recently, to Chavez’s and Maduro’s Venezuela, as proof that the slightest deviation from the shining path of Neoliberalism can only end in tears – and firing-squads. And yet, according to Dillian, New Zealand cracked it! Accomplishing its transition from Capitalism to Socialism through free and fair elections, and without the need for a single gulag, or a single shot being fired.

Naturally, Dillian does his best to paint for his readers the most lurid picture possible of life under New Zealand’s democratic-socialist regime. One can only imagine his millionaire readers shuddering with fear upon learning that:

“There were strict capital controls and prohibitions on owning foreign assets. And of course, punitively high tax rates, inflation, and extraordinary levels of government debt.”

Now, high inflation and crippling government debt were all-too-common afflictions during the 1970s, and by no means confined to “unfree economies” like New Zealand. The oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 had destabilised the “free” and “unfree” economies of the world with admirable even-handedness.

Not that Neoliberal boosters, like Mr Dillian, will ever admit that these sudden and dramatic increases in the price of industrial capitalism’s most indispensable commodity offer a far better explanation for the demise of post-war prosperity than the Right’s “usual suspects” – meddling politicians, self-serving bureaucrats and out-of-control trade unionists.

Like all good fairy stories, however, Mr Dillian’s has a happy ending:

“The 1980s saw an enormous rollback in the size and scope of government, and the beginning of a supply-side revolution. Of course, economic liberalization was happening around the world at that time, but it was most dramatic in tiny New Zealand.”

On that Mr Dillian and I find ourselves in agreement!

A few sentences back, I made reference to Mr Dillian’s happy ending: in that regard, it seems, I was a little premature. For all its bluster and bullshit, Neoliberalism turns out to be a remarkably fragile ideology. So much so, that the election of Jacinda Ardern – the Kiwi politician who dared describe Capitalism as “a blatant failure” – was enough to give Mr Dillian (and no doubt a good many of his readers) the heebee-jeebees:

“It seems likely that New Zealand will experience a recession during Ardern’s term. Nobody is predicting a return to the bad old days of the 70s, but New Zealand will probably lose its status as one of the most open, free economies in the world. It takes decades to weaken an economy, just like it takes decades to strengthen it. But investors will probably want to avoid New Zealand for the time being.”

For my money, that’s the most heart-warming endorsement of our new Labour Prime Minister that I have read to date. If Jacinda, with just two words, can shake the very foundations of Wall Street, then it’s possible that a “return to the bad old days of the 70s” may turn out to be something more than this old socialist’s pipe dream.

According to Mr Dillian, we Kiwis have pulled off a peaceful transition to something approaching “Communism” (although we didn’t call it that!) once before. If he’s right about that, then who’s to say that he isn’t also right about our new Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, being just the person to do it again!

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 23 November 2017.

Two Very Different New Zealanders.

New Zealand's Janus Face: John Clarke we will long remember for encouraging us to laugh at pomp and power; Sir Douglas Myers for making us fear them.

 

TWO PROMINENT NEW ZEALANDERS died this week. One, a highly successful businessman; the other, a comic genius. Ironically, Sir Douglas Myers will be mourned by the sort of New Zealander who hated the fiercely egalitarian, social-democratic nation that John Clarke’s humour both celebrated and ennobled. That these haters were responsible for destroying “Fred Dagg’s” New Zealand only sharpens the poignancy of his creator’s departure. While John Clarke lived, the society which he chided and cherished maintained a peculiar posthumous existence. With his death, it passes over permanently into the realm of history.

 

The New Zealand which Sir Douglas Myers helped to create is, however, very much still with us. The wrenching economic and social deformations of the 1980s and 90s, which he did so much to promote, have hardened now into a rigid hierarchy of winners and losers. In 1970s New Zealand; the New Zealand of Fred Dagg; Jack wasn’t just as good as his master, he was, in all probability, and after taking all the relevant factors into consideration, better. To suggest such egalitarian heresies in twenty-first century New Zealand, however, would do very little to enhance Jack’s – or Jill’s – career prospects.

 

It was one of Sir Douglas Myers most bitter complaints that, in pre-Rogernomics New Zealand, businessmen were regarded with a mixture of derision and pity. The smartest people became doctors and lawyers, he recalled, or, if the doors to the medical and law schools were slammed in their faces, accountants. But only the real no-hopers, the certified dummies, went into business. The inheritor of the Myers family fortune set out to change all that. Like Ayn Rand, he made it his mission to turn capitalists into heroes.

 

It was an attitude which supplied an endless quantity of grist to John Clarke’s humour-mill. It wasn’t that he found greed funny, far from it. Where the humour lay was in the conviction of men like Myers that greed could somehow be imbued with high moral purpose. That, in the most memorable line from Oliver Stone’s movie, Wall Street: “Greed is good”. Nothing is more deserving of the satirist’s wit than the spectacle of sinners pretending to be saints.

 

But, if Clarke’s celebration of the seditious mixture of fundamental decency and rat-like cunning that makes up the ordinary Kiwi and Aussie won him huge audiences on both sides of the Tasman, it was received with cold fury by New Zealand’s political and bureaucratic elites.

 

There was something deeply subversive about Clarke’s humour. Like Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, his comic success flowed from the revolutionary notion that servants are smarter than their masters. Australia’s cultural gatekeepers took this as a given and happily sponsored Clarke’s genius. Not so, their Kiwi counterparts. As Clarke recalls of his days working for the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation: “I dealt with directors who thought they were comic geniuses and regarded me as a hired hand. I never had those problems in Australia.”

 

Perhaps it was Clarke’s gift for making the pompous and powerful feel that not only were they regarded as ridiculous by the people they bossed around, but also that, at any time, these servants might decide to cast their masters’ ridiculousness aside, that made him persona non grata. It is surely no accident that following Clarke’s self-imposed exile to Australia, New Zealand satire, or, at least, what passed for satire on New Zealand television, ceased to speak truth to power. Becoming, instead, a comedy of cruelty, in which the strong were lionised and the weak were mocked.

 

Which brings us back, neatly, to Sir Douglas Myers and his mission to elevate the businessperson to the highest rungs of the social ladder. Such a transformation could not, obviously, occur while those obsessed with making money were ridiculed. If New Zealand’s cradle to grave welfare state made its citizens comfortable enough to laugh at those who devoted their lives to accumulating wealth, then it would have to go.

 

As Clarke, from the other side of the Tasman, summarised its deliberate deconstruction:

 

“A social democracy with only one previous owner was asset-stripped and replaced by a series of franchises.”

 

We really did not know how lucky we were – until our luck ran out.

 

John Clarke we will long remember for encouraging us to laugh at pomp and power; Sir Douglas Myers for making us fear them.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 13 April 2017.

Heart Of Gold: Why Mike Hosking Is A More Popular Broadcaster Than John Campbell.

All That Glitters: Hosking is not a megaphone for neoliberalism, he is its bright and shining mirror.

 

WHEN IT COMES TO RATINGS, Mike Hosking is a winner. He knows it, his employers know it, and, if they’re honest with themselves, the Daily Blog’s firebrands know it too. What he says to Newstalk-ZB’s listeners is, for the most part, well received. Which is why Newstalk-ZB’s breakfast show is the most popular product on commercial radio. Seven Sharp’s viewers, likewise, are insufficiently offended by Hosking’s opinions to change channels. And that’s all anyone has to do, FFS – if they don’t like or approve of Hosking’s shtick – change the bloody station or switch channels. Their forbearance, in the case of Seven Sharp, is what made the programme roughly twice as popular as Campbell Live.

 

Though it pains the Left to admit it, Campbell Live was a vehicle for values shared by fewer and fewer New Zealanders. Thirty years of neoliberal hegemony will do that to a country. The social-democratic culture in which Kiwis over 50 were raised, while very far from being dead, can be accessed now only through the indistinct portals of nostalgia. By contrast, the culture which succeeded it, whatever people choose to call it, is everywhere you look. Love it or hate it, this is the culture we are all required to move and function in: the culture that counts.

 

Mike Hosking is a perfect fit for this new, market-driven, culture. The social-democratic culture that permeated the old state broadcasting system was never one in which he felt comfortable. It was too sedate, too elevated, too wedded to the Reithian ethic, for a broadcaster of his voluble and quicksilver temperament. [Reithian: Named for John Reith, the first Director-General of the BBC, who held that the role of a public broadcaster was to “inform, educate and entertain” its listeners and viewers – C.T.]

 

The Hosking personality: self-confident, thrusting and ambitious; scornful of those who cannot reach conclusions quickly and definitively; and unshakeably wedded to the idea that if success is not recognised by, and reflected in, increased material wealth and higher social status, then it isn’t really success; was, however, supremely well-adapted to the new world ushered in by the changes of the fourth Labour Government.

 

Who could forget the Hosking interview with a Labour Cabinet Minister during which the hapless politician was incautious enough to ask the, by now extremely well-paid, broadcaster how much he earned. “More than you do!”, Hosking snapped back without missing a beat. Seldom has a Cabinet Minister looked so crestfallen. It was vintage Hosking. In the new era, ushered in by Rogernomics, human worth was measured by the quantum of an individual’s income. If he earned more than a Cabinet Minister, that could only mean that he was better than a Cabinet Minister – and Hosking wasn’t the least bit afraid of letting Cabinet Ministers know it.

 

The Left, of course, rejects Hosking’s world view as utterly repellent, and condemns it as antithetical to everything they believe in and want for the world. From their perspective, it is morally indefensible that such a person should be accorded the privilege of daily addressing hundreds-of-thousands of their fellow citizens. But the corruption they believe his unabashed worship of wealth and status is bound to work in the body politic was already dissolving “Old” New Zealand long before Hosking took possession of Sir Paul Holmes’s prime-time batons.

 

The sad fact is that Hosking is not the problem, merely its artfully tousled personification. His high ratings among 18-35 year-olds is explicable only if we accept that, in the eyes of those who have grown up under neoliberalism, being rich and famous is the indisputable desideratum of twenty-first century life. These youngsters have no wish to tear Hosking down, on the contrary, they want to be just like him. Wealth and fame have become the markers of a life well lived. By this reckoning, reiterated over and over again in Hosking’s speeches and columns: success is well-earned, by definition; and failure is merely Nature’s way of delivering her pink slip to those unfortunates on the wrong side of the Bell Curve.

 

If this is “right-wing bias”, then the whole era through which we are living must be adjudged in precisely the same terms. Hosking is not a megaphone for neoliberalism, he is its bright and shining mirror. And those who accuse him of being John Key’s “stooge” simply do not appreciate the chemistry at work between them. Mike Hosking might earn more than the average Cabinet Minister, but all his thrusting ambition has not come close to earning him a fortune of $55 million. To the Hoskings of this world (and there are many more of them than the Left would like to think) Key’s fortune is proof positive that the Prime Minister is a superior human-being.

 

Mike Hosking’s heart of gold: cold and glittering as any precious metal; goes out to the ubermensch born in a state house. When God and Mammon have become one and the same – where else would it go?

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 19 August 2015.

Reflections On The Christchurch Earthquake: Give Us The Tools

Give Us The Tools: Had the Christchurch Earthquake struck in the years before the dismantling of the social-democratic state, New Zealand would have been much better prepared to deal with the catastrophe. In the Age of Neoliberalism is our anorexic state equal to the challenge of reconstruction?

IT’S IN ALL of us now, a deep sense of foreboding. The nagging feeling that this disaster may be too big for us. Or, worse, that the people whose job it is to fix it may be too small. And the feeling is growing.

For many Cantabrians last Friday’s images from Japan were the final straw. A cosmic punchline without a preceding joke. As if God was determined to prove his point:

"See, I told you things could be worse."

Meanwhile, the political Punch & Judy Show rolls on. The Prime-Ministerial motorcade continues to pick its way through shattered streets to yet another rendezvous with the television cameras. The Mayor demonstrates the use of chemical toilets.

Only reluctantly has the news media been persuaded to turn around and take a closer look at Punch and Judy’s audience. "Refugee City" (as web-designer Peter Hyde memorably described the Christchurch without power, water or sewerage) is grimy, unwashed, smells to high-heaven – and is running on empty.

The adrenaline-fuelled exertions of the first three weeks of the crisis are behind them. They’ve survived. The challenge facing Refugee Christchurch now is how to put the broken pieces of their lives back together. Many have simply no idea. And finding someone – anyone – capable of giving a straight answer to their straight questions requires more energy than many now possess.

For this audience, the Punch & Judy Show is starting to wear a little thin.

Specialists in disaster relief talk about the moment when stoicism and altruism run out. When blaming God or Mother Nature is no longer enough. When those in charge cease to be given the benefit of the doubt. When people stop watching Punch and Judy and start blaming them.

The authorities seldom have more than three months to get ahead of the Blame Game. If the disaster remediation process is not in full-swing by then, things can turn very ugly, very quickly.

Even before the second, killer, earthquake struck on 22 February, there was evidence of rising dissatisfaction with the way the Government and the City Council were dealing with the damage and disruption caused by the first, non-lethal, quake of 4 September. The double-blow delivered to Christchurch almost certainly means that the time available to politicians to produce a road-map to recovery is a lot less than three months.

Hence the sense of foreboding. Hence the sinking feeling that those charged with mastering this crisis may not have what it takes.

If this disaster had struck New Zealand in 1961, 1971, or even in 1981, then the government of the day would have been much better equipped to deal with it. In the Ministry of Works it would’ve possessed not only a team of world-class engineers, architects and urban planners, but a seasoned, highly-skilled and extremely efficient construction force.

Prior to the Rogernomics revolution of the 1980s, Government’s were also able to avail themselves of powerful war-time legislation – such as the Economic Stabilisation Act – to regulate and co-ordinate the economic life of the nation. Prices, wages, rents and dividends could all be controlled with the flourish of a ministerial pen.

Much more important than these advantages, however, was the social-democratic political culture of the pre-Rogernomics era. Back then most New Zealanders looked upon the state as their friend and ally. No sensible person would have questioned it’s central role in the reconstruction of a quake-struck Christchurch. The State’s ownership of banks and insurance companies, telecommunications, broadcasting services, road, rail, air and maritime transport networks would have materially hastened the planning and initiation of the recovery process. Calculating the private sector’s profit margin would not have been permitted to slow it down.

Since 1985, however, New Zealanders have witnessed the wholesale transfer of economic power from the state to the private sector. Our ability to act decisively in our own interest – through publicly owned institutions – has been decisively diminished.

In place of the conscious public activity which gave us the economic and social infrastructure of a modern nation, we have substituted the unconscious co-ordination of the Market.

That’s fine, if all you’re after is a better cup of coffee, or a cheaper television set. It’s not so fine, however, if there are homeless and jobless citizen’s to care for, and a stricken community to rebuild.

We know this – and it worries us. Because we’re not confident that the people who convinced us that a better cup of coffee and a cheaper television set were a fair swap for the public institutions and collective effort which built this nation will ever be big enough to acknowledge their mistake.

Damaged city and damaged nation can only be restored by using the same tools that created them. If we can’t find someone big enough to wield those tools, Refugee Christchurch will soon become Refugee New Zealand.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 15 March 2011.