Claims and Counter-Claims.

Whose Foreshore? Whose Seabed? When the Marine and Coastal Area Act was originally passed back in 2011, fears about the coastline becoming off-limits to Pakeha were routinely allayed by National Party politicians pointing out that the tests imposed were so stringent  that only a modest percentage of claims (the then treaty negotiations minister, Chris Finlayson, predicted 10 percent) would end up being granted.

A PRIVATE MEETING involving two Cabinet Ministers, sundry departmental officials and representatives of the seafood industry has achieved headline status. According to the 1News Māori Affairs Correspondent, Te Aniwa Hurihanganui, evidence exists of Minister for Treaty Settlements, Paul Goldsmith, and the Minister for Oceans & Fisheries, Shane Jones, offering industry representatives reassurance that proposed Government changes to the Marine & Coastal Areas Act would likely see the percentage of New Zealand’s coastline subject to customary marine title claims plummet from 100 to just 5 percent.

The 1News report has the ministers’ meeting occurring on 21 May 2024 – two months before the July announcement of the Coalition Government’s proposals regarding the Act. The inference being that favoured elements within the New Zealand fishing industry have been promised ongoing access to marine resources at the expense of mana whenua.

But is this inference justified? Is this really a case of “crony capitalism”, or, even worse, “racist crony capitalism”? The answer, thankfully, is: “No.”

For a start, the meeting between Goldsmith, Jones and seafood industry representatives took place in the context of a Coalition Agreement undertaking to roll back the highly controversial 2023 Court of Appeal decision which upheld customary ownership claims from Māori iwi and hapu, claims now affecting, collectively, 100 percent of the New Zealand coast.

The Court of Appeal’s judgement construed the Marine & Coastal Area Act in such a way that it effectively negated the onerous proofs of customary title demanded by Parliament. The justices argued that in an Act which also entrenched the undertakings of the Treaty of Waitangi, such proofs of ownership could not be taken literally.

The surge of claims to customary marine title which followed the passage of the 2011 Act was driven by the requirement that no further claims would be considered after 2017. The Court of Appeal’s 2023 decision greatly enhanced these pending claims’ chances of success. This, in turn, generated sufficient political pushback to secure the NZ First Party’s support for legislative rectification. Parliament would nullify the Court of Appeal’s interpretation of the Marine & Coastal Areas Act and secure the restoration of the status quo ante. In the post-election negotiations between National and NZ First, this rectification was agreed and included in the two parties’ Coalition Agreement.

It is not, therefore, a case of the seafood industry prevailing upon the Coalition Government to grant it special favours at the expense of Māori, but of the two government ministers most closely involved in the issue seeking industry input regarding the most likely consequences of the Coalition Government’s pledge to roll-back the Court of Appeal’s decision.

Consultations of this nature are not uncommon when a government is contemplating legislative measures likely to affect a major industry. In this respect, the meeting between Goldsmith, Jones, relevant officials and industry leaders is hardly newsworthy.

More interesting, from a journalistic perspective, is how the notes of a private ministerial meeting, held under the auspices of Te Arawhiti – The Office for Crown-Māori Relations – ended up in the hands of 1News’s Māori Affairs correspondent. Was it simply part of a “catch” netted by 1News’ own OIA “fishing expeditions”? Or, were these notes passed on to Hurihanganui as part of a concerted effort to embarrass the Government and impede its fulfilment of the Coalition Agreement pledge?

Certainly, some of the ministerial comments minuted during the meeting were highly embarrassing – most notably the comment relating to the percentage of the coastline likely to be affected by customary marine titles once the Coalition’s restorative legislation is passed. That said, the minister’s comment is only embarrassing because the public’s political memory is so short.

When the Marine and Coastal Area Act was originally passed back in 2011, fears about the coastline becoming off-limits to Pakeha were routinely allayed by National Party politicians pointing out that the tests imposed were so stringent – the coastal area under claim had to have been exclusively used by the claimants since 1840 without “substantial interruption” – that only a modest percentage of claims (the then treaty negotiations minister, Chris Finlayson, predicted 10 percent) would end up being granted.

The shock-value of Hurihanganui’s story lies in the misapprehension that established claims to customary marine title are to be pared back from 100 percent to just 5 percent of the coastal area, which, if true, would be a very grave injustice indeed. The reality is somewhat different.

The Court of Appeal’s 2023 decision to effectively reverse the legislative intent of Parliament made it much more likely that the plethora of claims lodged between 2011 and 2017 would be upheld in the High Court. The triggering figure of 100 percent thus refers only to the extent of the coastline currently affected by pending claims – not to the percentage actually awarded customary marine title by the High Court. Goldsmith’s figure of 5 percent represents his best guess at the coastal area likely to be impacted when the original tests have been reconfirmed and the undecided claims nullified. Proving exclusive use, without substantial interruption, for 184 years, is a daunting challenge for any New Zealander!

A journalist with a slightly broader brief than Ms Hurihanganui’s might have been moved to enquire as to why the Court of Appeal thought it appropriate to reverse the clear intent of New Zealand’s democratically-elected legislature. The constitutional convention of “comity” enjoins each of the three branches of government, the executive, the legislature and the judiciary, from encroaching upon the powers of the others. Why, then, did the judiciary (in the form of the Court of Appeal) whose role it is to interpret and apply the law, not re-write it, presume to correct the nation’s legislators in relation to the Marine & Coastal Areas Act?

It stretches credulity to suppose that the Court could have been entirely unaware of the impact its controversial decision would have upon the outcome of claims as yet unresolved by the High Court. Nor is it credible to suggest that the Court of Appeal is entirely innocent of courting precisely the political backlash that led to representatives of the seafood industry meeting with Ministers Goldsmith and Jones in May of 2024.

The responsibility for making the laws of New Zealand lies with the men and women elected to the House of Representatives, not with the men and women appointed to the Court of Appeal. The latter’s dramatic negation of the legislature’s intentions vis-à-vis the Marine & Coastal Areas Act 2011 left the Coalition Government with no honourable option but to reassert in the plainest language the original evidential requirements needing to be fulfilled before customary marine title can be granted.

To suggest otherwise is to posit a revolutionary constitutional revision which places unelected judges at the summit of the state. Judges with the power to not only interpret and apply the laws, but to re/write them. And if that is what lies at the heart of this controversy, then it is passing strange that such a naked bid for unaccountable power has yet to headline the 1News bulletins at Six O’clock.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack page on Wednesday, 28 August 2024.

Unmistakably Labour Legislation.

The Age-Old Question: The idea of laying a solid floor of wages and conditions beneath the feet of workers in industries notorious for engaging in exploitative “races to the bottom”, but keeping the way clear for improving upon these base “Free Pay Agreement rates” in case-by-case collective bargaining, will act as a highly effective recruiting sergeant for the unions.

AT LAST! The Sixth Labour Government has finally introduced legislation the First Labour Government might recognise. Labour Minister Michael Wood’s “Fair Pay Agreements Bill” is the first real effort since the Labour Relations Act of 1987 to materially strengthen the hand of New Zealand’s beleaguered trade union movement. If the Bill’s intent is not watered-down in the process of making its way through Parliament, and if the Labour Government is re-elected, then trade unionism in this country is likely to expand rapidly.

The reason for this is simple: the Bill not only makes joining a trade union look like a good bet; it makes it look like a safe bet. The idea of laying a solid floor of wages and conditions beneath the feet of workers in industries notorious for engaging in exploitative “races to the bottom”, but keeping the way clear for improving upon these base “FPA rates” in case-by-case collective bargaining, will act as a highly effective recruiting sergeant for the unions.

Something very similar happened when the First Labour Government made membership of a trade union a legal prerequisite for enjoying the fruits of compulsorily arbitrated “awards” – the model for Wood’s FPAs.

Following the legislation’s passage in 1936, vast, hitherto unorganised, swathes of the workforce were swiftly enrolled in a clutch of new trade unions. The largest of these was the Clerical Workers Union which, for the first time, allowed the overwhelmingly female workforce of office clerks to join the ranks of the industrial army. In the years that followed, workers as varied as journalists and law-clerks were enrolled. There was even a Musicians’ Union.

The “Awards” negotiated by these unions were the brainchild of the Labour Party’s predecessor in progressive social reform, the Liberal Government of 1890-1912. Its 1894 innovation, the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act, was hailed across the world for its enlightened approach to labour relations.

The IC&A Act empowered an Arbitration Court, composed of judges representing the employers, the unions, and the state, to issue legally binding sets of minimum wages and conditions, negotiated by the representatives of workers and employers from across entire industries. The Arbitration Court could also issue “General Wage Orders” lifting the incomes of workers across the entire economy.

The problem, of course, was that if an industry remained unorganised, then the Court was unable to “award” its workers and employers wages and conditions minima. Caring and responsible employers soon found their less scrupulous competitors undercutting them on price by requiring their employees to work harder and longer for less.

Such were the tactics that set off the aforementioned “race to the bottom”: a business model predicated on the maximum exploitation of an industry’s workforce. Putting it bluntly: the lower the wages, the higher the profits.

This was the problem the First Labour Government’s introduction of universal union membership was designed to remedy – and it worked.

The National Party’s spokesperson on “Workplace Relations & Safety”, Paul Goldsmith, was quick to respond to Minister Wood’s introduction of the Fair Pay Agreements Bill, promising to oppose it “stridently”. It was, he said: “an ideological overreach, deliberately going to war with employers at a time when we’re facing huge economic challenges”.

One can only admire Mr Goldsmith’s cheek. The political party guilty of “ideological overreach”; the party guilty of “going to war” against its fellow New Zealanders; is not the Labour Party, but the National Party.

The Employment Contracts Act 1991, introduced by Mr Goldsmith’s predecessor, Sir William Birch, stripped New Zealand workers of workplace rights they had enjoyed for nearly a century. It set in motion the relentless shift of corporate surpluses from wage-earners to shareholders that has seen today’s workers earning thousands of dollars less per year than would have been the case had Mr Goldsmith’s “flexible labour market” not destroyed the inherent Kiwi fairness of the system it replaced.

The destruction of the trade union movement is the most important achievement of New Zealand’s Neoliberal Revolution. In 2022, fewer than 10 percent of the private sector workforce is unionised. In dramatic contrast to 1990, today’s typical union member is a tertiary-educated female, working in the public sector, and earning a salary well above the median New Zealand income of $59,000 per year.

Michael Woods Fair Pay Agreements Bill represents a first – and unmistakably Labour – step towards re-empowering all Kiwi workers.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 1 April 2022.

Marching To Class War.

“We’re from the Employing Class, and we’re here to help”: What the bosses are saying, in effect, is: “We are having none of this. We will not participate in the creation of a minimum set of employment conditions across New Zealand’s industries. If you want Fair Pay Agreements, then you will have to impose them upon the employing class without its consent.” 

AROUND THIS TIME last week, I was thoroughly enjoying myself, writing a parody of “Onward Christian Soldiers” for Christopher Luxon. My take on the old hymn’s refrain had “Luxon’s soldiers” marching to “class war”. Some readers thought that was a somewhat inflammatory characterisation. Class war was soooo Twentieth Century, they insisted. Apparently, my paleo-socialist slip was showing.

Well, maybe not. Today (9/12/21) we learn that Business New Zealand has refused to partner with the State and the NZ Council of Trade Unions (CTU) in the roll-out of Labour’s long-awaited – and well-mandated – Fair Pay Agreements.

This decision can only be interpreted as a deliberate attempt by New Zealand’s employers to sabotage the tripartite structure of the FPA model. What the bosses are saying, in effect, is: “We are having none of this. We will not participate in the creation of a minimum set of employment conditions across New Zealand’s industries. If you want Fair Pay Agreements, then you will have to impose them upon the employing class without its consent.”

I don’t know about you, but that sure sounds like a declaration of class war to me.

How have “Luxon’s soldiers” responded to Business New Zealand’s decision. Well, Luxon’s Workplace Relations and Safety spokesperson, the dry-as-dust neoliberal, Paul Goldsmith, doesn’t really do “unbounded joy”, but, in a media statement released earlier today he certainly comes across as a Happy Chappy.

The Government should ditch its Fair Pay Agreement policy following Business New Zealand’s refusal to be the Government’s preferred partner,” crows Goldsmith. “The agreements would remove the flexibility and autonomy modern workplaces need to grow and flourish.

Oh boy, it’s been a while since we heard that kind of language. It takes me back thirty years to 1991, the year when the Employment Contracts Act came into force.

Goldsmith would have been 20 years old in 1991. For someone of his ideological inclinations, the ECA must have represented the capstone of the Neoliberal Revolution unleashed by Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson. This crowning achievement, the one big “reform” that Labour dared not undertake, would have struck the young Goldsmith as absolutely sacrosanct. The effective destruction of the trade unionism across the private sector was the critical “reform” that made all the other “reforms” work. Confronted with a unified and confident working-class, Neoliberalism cannot succeed.

Hardly surprising, then, that Goldsmith’s statement included this little gem:

Business New Zealand’s withdrawal lays bare the fact that the national industry awards would have to be imposed by force – denying workers and businesses the right to sort out pay and conditions for themselves.

As if the ECA was not imposed. As if the Act did not, with one ruthless stroke of the legislator’s pen, wipe out rights which New Zealand workers had fought for and won, and which had remained entrenched in the country’s laws for close to a century. As if the people controlling the means of production, distribution and exchange; and those with nothing to sell but their labour – economic and social equals that they so obviously are! – were both clamouring for the right to arrive at mutually advantageous agreements without the pesky intervention of a trade union. As if the 500,000 New Zealanders who marched, rallied and struck against the ECA in March-April 1991 had only done so for a lark – because they had nothing better to do.

Flexible labour markets have been an essential element in New Zealand’s progress in the past 30 years, Goldsmith continued. They have enabled consistent economic growth and job creation, which is the only sustainable way to increase living standards in the long-term.

Umm, no, Paul, that’s not what flexible labour markets brought to New Zealand. The ECA was nothing more, nor less, than an open invitation for New Zealand employers to distil their profits from their workers’ sweat: making them work harder, and longer, for less.

In sophisticated capitalist countries, the state understands the value of an organised labour movement powerful enough to keep workers’ wages high. It is a necessary adjunct to the process of “creative destruction” that allows capitalism to rejuvenate itself. High wages encourage employers to replace workers with machines, or more efficient work practices, thereby lifting productivity – and profits – while building up an increasingly skilled workforce. Win–Win.

The ECA’s “flexible labour markets” – i.e. the destruction of the trade unions – excused the New Zealand capitalist class from doing business better and smarter. It condemned the New Zealand economy to appallingly low and seemingly unimprovable levels of productivity. That made us a low-wage country and sent our best and our brightest across the Tasman to Australia – where the equivalent of FPAs had kept wages high and boosted the productivity of Australian industry.

Though dry-as-dust Neoliberals like Goldsmith are too ideologically blinkered to see it, the ECA – far from being “an essential element in New Zealand’s progress in the past 30 years”, fundamentally weakened both its economy and its society. It drove our most talented citizens offshore, denying the taxpayers, who had contributed so much to the making of these highly-skilled workers, any hope of ever seeing a return on their investment.

There is, accordingly, considerable irony in Goldsmith’s claim that:

There should be a relentless focus on improving our productivity and lifting incomes.

If he was serious about either of those objectives, Goldsmith would be castigating Business New Zealand for undermining what is quite clearly the best hope of improving this country’s appalling productivity, while materially improving the wages of its workforce. Instead, “Luxon’s soldier” offers us this:

Unions now only represent 16 per cent of the private sector workforce – this is all about strengthening the role of unions.

He hasn’t even grasped the fact that union density in New Zealand’s private sector workforce long ago fell below 10 percent. In that brutal statistic is contained not only the tragic story of the National Party’s cold-blooded elimination of trade unionism as a mass movement wielding significant political power on behalf of the New Zealand working class; but also the shameful failure of the CTU to either fight for that class when they still possessed the power to bring the state to the negotiating table, or to do what was necessary to rebuild mass unionism when the political climate changed. (The reasons for the NZCTU’s failure must be left for a future posting.)

What Goldsmith needs no tutoring in, however, is the fundamental elements of class conflict – which achieved their clearest expression in the “flexible labour markets” made possible by the Employment Contracts Act:

Fair Pay Agreements will take us back to the failed policies of the past and should be scrapped, says Goldsmith.

With Business New Zealand drawing up their forces alongside the National Party and Act, it is pretty clear that the employers and their political lackeys have already declared the opening of class hostilities.

The real question now, of course, is whether Labour and the CTU have the guts to declare class war right back at them.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 10 December 2021.

Hard Questions - Hard Answers.

Bodies On The Line: Unsurprisingly, in the aftermath of the 1981 Springbok Tour, Maori asked their Pakeha friends and comrades to explain why they were willing to get their heads broken for the rights of indigenous Africans, but had yet to put their bodies on the line for the rights of indigenous New Zealanders?

NATIONAL’S PAUL GOLDSMITH has become the target of considerable criticism for his stance on the impact of colonisation on Maori. Most particularly, he has been attacked for expressing the view that “on balance” the legacy of colonisation must be adjudged positive. Goldsmith’s explicitly historical perspective is, necessarily, a broad one. Politically-speaking, however, his opinions are downright incendiary. If he didn’t anticipate the fierce reaction his words were bound to provoke, then much of the National Party’s tone-deafness on Maori-Pakeha relations is explained.

Certainly, it is hard to fathom how National could have been part of the general political discourse in Aotearoa-New Zealand without grasping the centrality of colonisation to the current debate about the future shape of this country’s institutions. How could the party have missed the way in which the colonisation of Aotearoa-New Zealand has come to play the same role here as slavery plays in the race-driven ideological conflicts currently convulsing the United States?

Is National genuinely unaware of just how many of the ills currently afflicting Maori are attributed to the impact of colonisation? Every set of negative statistics: from consistently low levels of educational attainment, to the grossly disproportionate number of Maori in Aotearoa-New Zealand’s prisons; the whole sad saga of a people’s on-going under-performance has been laid unhesitatingly – and with undeniable justification – at the door of colonisation. How can the country’s largest political party not know this?

Part of the answer, perhaps, lies in the common misconception that “colonisation” is a word to be conjugated exclusively in the past tense. That it relates only to long-dead statesmen wearing wing-collars and staring out at us stiffly from the black-and-white plates reproduced in history books. Something that happened long ago. Something done and dusted. Something about which it is possible (and permissible) for Opposition National MPs to offer considered historical judgements.

Well, it’s not – and it really is astonishing that Paul Goldsmith and his colleagues could possibly believe that it is. The clearing of Bastion Point didn’t happen in the Nineteenth Century, it happened just 43 years ago, in 1978. That’s well within the lifetime of the Baby Boomers – and even of some Generation Xers. Paul Goldsmith, for example, would have been a 7-year-old the last time a pugnacious National Party prime minister staged a full-scale demonstration of the political, legal and military power of the New Zealand colonial state – for the benefit of tangata whenua.

It was that same prime minister, Rob Muldoon, who, just three years later, communicated an equally unmistakeable message to his core supporters – i.e. that the rights of people of colour counted for much less than the rights of White Rugby supporters living in Aotearoa-New Zealand and Apartheid-era South Africa. Unsurprisingly, in the aftermath of the 1981 Springbok Tour, Maori asked their Pakeha friends and comrades to explain why they were willing to get their heads broken for the rights of indigenous Africans, but had yet to put their bodies on the line for the rights of indigenous New Zealanders?

Could it be, they wondered, that fighting for South African Blacks cost them nothing, except a few bruises and a few nights in jail (for which they could claim bragging rights for the next 40 years!) while fighting for the lost lands, language and dignity of the original Maori inhabitants of Aotearoa could end up costing them everything that 140 years of colonisation had bequeathed Pakeha?

That was a hard question – and only a few of the Springbok Tour protesters were willing to give Maori an honest answer.

Forty years later, exactly the same question is being put to all Pakeha – with even greater force. More importantly, it is not just Maori doing the asking. Two generations after the Tour, the same challenges that were once laid at the feet of a relatively small group of left-wing activists are being laid down for the whole nation of Aotearoa-New Zealand to pick up. The children and grandchildren of those Springbok Tour protesters are looking at their elders with a steadfast gaze. As if to say: “It’s time.”

And still, apparently, Paul Goldsmith and his National Party colleagues, do not get it.

Perhaps Abraham Lincoln, who ended slavery in North America, can help them. These words are from his second inaugural address, delivered on 4 March 1865:

Fondly do we hope ─ fervently do we pray ─ that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether’.

Paul Goldsmith appears to believe Maori are in some way indebted to Pakeha. In truth, it’s the other way ‘round.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 11 June 2021.

A Failure of Tone: The National Party’s Week of Woe.

Tone Deaf? From a party-political point of view (and what other point of view should a National Party MP be taking?) Paul Goldsmith’s comments regarding the “benefits” of colonisation merely played into the fast-solidifying narrative of National being a stale white bread party that can’t get out of its own way when it comes to voicing outdated racial attitudes. What’s more, given the events of the week just past, National’s attitudes on race are beginning to look like the least of its worries.

PAUL GOLDSMITH, on the “benefits” – to Maori – of colonisation. First of all, and obviously, he shouldn’t have said it. From a party-political point of view (and what other point of view should a National Party MP be taking?) such a comment merely plays to the fast-solidifying narrative of National being a stale white bread party that can’t get out of its own way when it comes to voicing outdated racial attitudes. What’s more, given the events of the week just past, National’s attitudes on race are beginning to look like the least of its worries.

As with so much of National’s recent behaviour, Goldsmith’s comments raise some very dangerous questions. The most obvious being: ‘What’s wrong with these people?’ and, ‘In what, strange, alternative universe is conduct and attitudes like these considered okay?’ Questions that lead, inevitably, to a much broader concern about the quality of National’s due diligence when it comes to candidate selection. People begin to wonder whether the reason so many National candidates turn out to be embarrassing duds, is because their general demeanour and mode of discourse is construed by the selectors as entirely unremarkable. Or, to put it more bluntly, because National’s awfulness is now a feature, not a bug. They’re all like that.

Now, back in the days when the National Party boasted upwards of 200,000 members, what National’s candidate selectors recognised as good, solid, middle-of-the-road New Zealand-ness corresponded pretty much exactly with the perceptions of the ordinary voter. Back in those days, when memories of the Second World War and the enforced egalitarianism of the trenches were still fresh, unusual and/or disturbing idiosyncrasies were much easier to spot. People still recalled the stereotype of the “spiv”: the black-market con-men who were “all Brylcreem and no socks”. Both of the major parties were tolerant of a wide range of political beliefs and priorities, but the men and women they chose to represent them all evinced a reassuring sameness.

The effective destruction of New Zealand’s mass political parties, along with the thoroughgoing de-democratisation of the decision-making structures that remained, which the introduction of neoliberalism more-or-less mandated, robbed them of their almost automatic capacity to pick the “right” sort of person to represent them. The new economic order also required the major parties to abandon their former tolerance of heterodox ideas. Ideological orthodoxy now trumped social conformity. Especially after the arrival of MMP and its backroom-assembled Party Lists, the party bosses cared less-and-less about what MPs did privately – so long as they didn’t do it in front of the cameras and frighten the markets.

And it got worse. The political culture of neoliberalism bred its own, very special, kind of politician. Just as the producers of reality TV shows like Survivor are careful to screen out anyone displaying what most people would consider the “normal” human traits of compassion, co-operation and honest-dealing, in favour of the selfish, the ruthless and the faithless; so, too, are political parties careful to screen out those who display an excessive independence of mind and/or a principled unwillingness to subordinate their conscience to the dictates of the party leadership. The days of so-called “maverick” MPs like Mike Minogue and Jim Anderton are long gone.

The upshot, for the National Party, was John Key and his affably cynical amanuensis, Steven Joyce. Those of an older generation may have grumbled into their single malts about the party falling into the hands of a quintessential “spiv” and his backroom Machiavelli, but nobody who mattered cared. In a world where all that counts is the ability to buy and sell, the currency trader should be king. In a political environment where the ability to fake sincerity rates as the ultimate accomplishment, calling someone Machiavelli is a fulsome compliment.

Like it or not, these were the sort of role models National was happy to present to the next generation of aspiring MPs. Unfortunately, younger generations have a nasty habit of noticing attitudes and behaviours their elders would prefer them to overlook. This propensity to model themselves on the real – rather than the ideal – may be a perverse sort of compliment to the generation in charge, but the final product, when it steps into the public spotlight all-too-often proves to be an accident just waiting to happen – as National has discovered to its cost.

The ultimate guard-rail against these political eruptions is the party’s organisational leadership. The party president, in particular, must have an especially sensitive nose for potential stinkers. It’s a huge responsibility: in effect the president, and his/her colleagues on the party’s executive committee, must substitute their own judgement for the mass party’s homogenising instincts. In this regard, the incumbent National Party President, Peter Goodfellow, must be adjudged a costly failure. To put it crudely: far too many stinkers have been given the nod. National urgently requires a more sensitive pair of nostrils.

Not that Goldsmith is one of the stinkers, far from it. He’s one of National’s few remaining conservative intellectuals. As a politician, he is refreshingly open about expressing his opinions. The problem he has, however, is a very obvious lack of the common touch. Goldsmith is the polar opposite of Simon Bridges – a National politician who has not the slightest difficulty with the diction of the ordinary Kiwi. The bookish Goldsmith, one suspects, would struggle in the average public bar: too concerned about the facts; not concerned enough about the tone.

Factually, Goldsmith has a case to make. Colonisation has not been an unequivocal evil. What it has done, however, by forcing them to respond to its ever-increasing impact, is divide Maori.

Since the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, the internal divisions within Maoridom have resolved themselves into three broad factions: the Loyalists; the Adapters; and the Rejectionists. For the Loyalists, the British Crown has remained a symbol of power and authority over and above the treacherous settler state. Having secured its protection under Article Three of the Treaty, successive generations of Maori leaders have continued to appeal to the only institution which has been willing to defend them from the “democracy” of the Pakeha majority.

Strong believers in the hereditary principle, and inheriting all the aristocratic mana of their forefathers, they have found it hard to believe that the British sovereign – the ultimate rangatira – reigns over her subjects but does not rule them. Even today, many Maori leaders evince a profound mistrust of the democratically elected legislature, and show a decided preference for working with the executive and judicial branches of the New Zealand State. Cabinet, and a sympathetic judiciary, have taken the place of well-disposed Governors and the Church Missionary Society.

The Adapters continue to seek an enduring modus vivendi with the world of the Pakeha. Their original vision of the 1840s and 50s: of the Pakeha in their place, the tangata whenua in theirs, and the Treaty over them all, continues to inspire a significant minority of contemporary Maori – not least the authors of He Puapua.

More numerous, however, are those for whom the Treaty and the Maori tribes’ heroic resistance form just one part – albeit an important part – of their family heritage. For two centuries they have taken the Pakeha’s tools and used them to construct a new identity. One-hundred-and-fifty years after the Sovereignty Wars, and with the genealogies of tangata whenua and tauiwi inextricably intertwined, they think of themselves – and call themselves – New Zealanders.

For the Rejectionists, however, the British Crown turned out to be nothing more than the glittering bauble which ruthless settler politicians raised above their heads as proof that their government’s bare-faced larceny would soon enjoy all the security of legal title.

The rejectionists cast aside Crown and Treaty in favour of a return to the old ways. One thinks of Rua Kenana, lost in the mists of the Ureweras. Or of the fiercely independent Maori communities of Northland, the King Country and the Waikato and Whanganui Rivers. Among these proud tenders of te ahi kaa – the home-fires of inextinguishable possession – the incantations of their forefathers continue to work their magic, and, in the very bones of the land, they hear the echoes of Rewi Maniapoto’s last, defiant challenge: Ka whawhai tonu matou, ake ake ake! – “We will fight on, forever and ever and ever!”

Goldsmith’s mistake was his failure to appreciate that, for the moment, it is the rejectionists who have the floor.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 7 June 2021.

Adrian Orr – The Reserve Bank’s Revolutionary Governor?

New Zealand's Underarm Banker: It bears recalling that the “independence” of the Reserve Bank Governor was for decades held up by neoliberal capitalists as the most compelling justification for passing the Reserve Bank Act. Interesting, is it not, how the ruling class’s support for the Bank’s independence lasted no longer than its Governor’s first attempt to regulate (albeit modesty) the behaviour of Australasian capital?

I’M BEGINNING to suspect that Reserve Bank Governor, Adrian Orr, is, at heart, a revolutionary. The decision of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand to nearly double the “Big Four” Australian banks capital requirements – from 10.5 to 18 percent – has deeply shocked financial communities on both sides of the Tasman. What Orr has triggered in the minds of the Australian bankers is a truly fateful question: “At what point does our involvement in the New Zealand finance sector become unprofitable?” It’s a question fraught with potentially revolutionary implications for New Zealand’s economic sovereignty.

The reaction from the Right confirms the boldness of Orr’s move. The consensus among those opposed to the Reserve Banks’s decision is that it will make it harder for the Australians to perform to their shareholders’ expectations. In other words, Orr stands accused of reducing the Australian banks’ profitability. New Zealanders are being warned that they will have to endure higher interest rates on their borrowing, and lower rates for their savings, as a consequence of Orr’s actions. National’s Finance Spokesperson, Paul Goldsmith, is predicting a substantial hit to the country’s growth prospects:

“The two primary effects of today’s decision will be higher borrowing costs than would otherwise have been the case and businesses and farmers will find it harder to access the funds they need to grow.”

The NZ Initiative (the successor organisation to the dark knights of Business Roundtable) echoes Goldsmith’s fear:

“The RBNZ’s decision to increase the capital banks are required to hold will have adverse effects for borrowers and the wider economy. The effects are likely to be felt most acutely by high loan-to-value borrowers, the rural sector and small-to-medium-sized enterprises.”

Exposed in these statements, however, is a reality which both authors would undoubtedly prefer to keep hidden from New Zealanders. Namely, the degree to which we have become slaves to the financial power of Australia. Not only that, but how little – if anything – our ruling class is prepared to do to defend (let alone rebuild) New Zealand’s economic sovereignty.

A party calling itself “National” might have been expected to applaud the Reserve Bank Governor’s decision to protect New Zealand depositors from the worst effects of a catastrophic financial collapse. Instead, we have its finance spokesperson chiding the Bank for daring to twist the Kangaroo’s tail. Meanwhile, the front organisation for the country’s biggest capitalists mutters darkly about the need to curb the Reserve Bank’s powers.

It bears recalling that the “independence” of the Reserve Bank Governor was for decades held up by these same neoliberal capitalists as the most compelling justification for passing the Reserve Bank Act. Interesting, is it not, how the ruling class’s support for the Bank’s independence lasted no longer than its Governor’s first attempt to regulate (albeit modesty) the behaviour of Australasian capital?

For those few adherents of “democratic socialism” (still the official ideology of the NZ Labour Party BTW) who continue to soldier-on, the reaction of big capital is extremely instructive. It points the way to how the Australian banks might one day be “persuaded” to relinquish their dominant position in New Zealand.

Way back in the early-1990s, when Jim Anderton’s Alliance was considerably more popular than the Labour Party, I remember being contacted by one of the Alliance’s policy activists with an intriguing question. He wanted to know, in practical terms, how one might go about re-nationalising privatised public enterprises without the legally required compensation payments bankrupting the nation.

Whew! That was a poser! Where to begin? Why not with a country that had already confronted and solved the problem? How did the largest surviving communist state – the People’s Republic of China – deal with/to the private sector? The answer proved to be both remarkably shrewd and surprisingly simple.

What the new communist government of China did, in the early 1950s, was to pass a law requiring all existing capitalist businesses above a certain size to make the Chinese state a 25 percent shareholder in the enterprise. Naturally, such a large shareholding would also entitle the state to be represented on the enterprise’s board of directors. As the years passed and the new regime consolidated itself, the legislation was amended constantly. Year by year, the state’s shareholding in the enterprise was increased – along with the number of its directors.

Unsurprisingly, the value of these enterprises’ shares plummeted. Seeing which way the wind was blowing, all those Chinese capitalists with a lick of sense offered-up their business’s remaining shares to the state. The latter generously agreed to take these off their hands – albeit for a handful of cents on the dollar. In this way, China’s largest capitalist enterprises were legally, peacefully – and cheaply – acquired by the state. As an added bonus, most of the by-now-former capitalists took what was left of their money and ran – to Taiwan, Singapore and the United States.

So, that was how you did it. By deploying the state’s legislative and administrative powers against the entrenched economic power of private enterprise. Far from sending in the revolutionary guards to seize, in the name of the people - and without compensation – the banks, insurance companies, department stores and factories, a democratic-socialist government would send in … its lawyer.

Like the ruthless, clear-eyed hero of the television series McMafia, the state’s representative will patiently explain to the people who used to be in charge, the new rules of the game:

“From now on” he’ll quietly inform the Chairman and his CEO, “your bank will be obliged to meet a capital requirement of 18 percent. In two years’ time that will rise to 25 percent. Three years after that the Reserve Bank’s CR will be 33 percent.”

“But that will ruin us!”, the Chairman and the CEO of the Aussie bank will wail. “We will have nothing to offer our shareholders.”

“With respect to that”, the young, clear-eyed lawyer will respond, with just the flicker of a smile, “the Minister of Finance has authorised me to make you the following offer …”

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 6 December 2019.