The Hollow Party.

We are the hollow men/We are the stuffed men/Leaning together/
Headpiece filled with Straw. Alas! – The Hollow Men, T.S. Eliot 1925

LABOUR’S GREAT GOOD FORTUNE, as New Zealand emerged from the worst of the neoliberal revolution, was to possess Helen Clark. It was Clark who engineered the installation of Mike Moore to “save the furniture” as Labour’s popularity plummeted in 1990. And, it was Clark who made sure that, when Moore failed (albeit narrowly) to win the 1993 general election, she would be the one to replace him. Labour thus acquired a highly intelligent, politically savvy leader, steeped in the Labour tradition, but also fully acclimatised to the new ideological climate. She would remain Labour’s leader for the next 15 years – beating Harry Holland’s daunting tenure by one year!

Clark’s worth to Labour is confirmed by the fact that for 9 of those 15 years she was New Zealand’s prime minister. But, it must also be acknowledged that Clark cost Labour dearly. Her political skills were more than equal to seeing-off anyone who harboured thoughts of replacing her, and she was not the sort of person to groom a popular replacement. As a consequence, when she and her government were defeated by John Key in 2008, the best successor she could bequeath to the Labour Party was the worthy, but uninspiring, Phil Goff.

What followed were nine years of bitter political in-fighting and ideological drift. Labour went through five leaders, the last of which, Jacinda Ardern, improved upon Clark’s losing Party Vote by a derisory 2.9 percentage points, and had to be elevated to the prime-ministership by the NZ First leader, Winston Peters.

Ardern, while no intellectual, was a superb communicator who seemed to pass through history without touching the sides. Her initial response to the global Covid-19 Pandemic laid claim to the hearts and minds of so many New Zealanders that in 2020 Labour attracted sufficient support to govern alone. But, as the Coronavirus continued to evolve, and Labour’s efforts to control it proved insufficient, Ardern and her cabinet began to lose their lustre. The voters turned away.

Aware that the political magic had deserted her, Ardern passed the mantle of leadership to Chris Hipkins. Perhaps aware of just how much love Labour had already lost, Ardern’s most obvious successor, Grant Robertson, had declined to accept her crown. What happened over the next 10 months spoke eloquently of just how hollow, intellectually and morally, the Labour Party had become.

Part of Clark’s aptitude for electoral politics was her understanding of just how far the New Zealand electorate was prepared to tolerate a government stepping away from the politics of “Middle New Zealand”. In spite of the fact that her core personal beliefs were more closely aligned with the Labour Left than the Labour Right, she instinctively kept her distance. Only when there was overwhelming support for the Left’s position – as was the case with the Nuclear Free policy and the US-led invasion of Iraq – would she align herself with the more radical elements of her party.

Understandably, Clark’s reticence gave rise to considerable frustration within the Labour Left which, following her retirement from parliamentary politics, found release when Labour’s Policy Council adopted a large number of policies which Clark and her right-hand woman, Heather Simpson, had for many years sidelined. So it was that, in 2011, Goff, the former Rogernome, was asked to sell the most left-wing Labour manifesto in years.

Labour’s poor showing in 2011 (the worst since 1928) convinced the three young Labour politicians (all of them former Beehive staffers) who had entered Parliament in 2008 – Grant Robertson, Chris Hipkins and Jacinda Ardern – that the Labour MPs and activists responsible for promoting policies that threatened the neoliberal status-quo would have to be weeded-out of Labour’s ranks. Promoting women’s rights, Māori rights and gay rights was fine, advocating state ownership, higher taxes and stronger unions was not.

In Labour’s caucus, the Robertson-Hipkins-Ardern Troika fought its way to supremacy. In the Labour Party organisation, however, it was not always in control. The Left’s success in giving the party’s affiliated unions, and its ordinary rank-and-file members, a major role in electing Labour’s leader earned it the Troika’s unflagging enmity. It is of no small importance that when Grant Robertson offered himself as a candidate for the Labour leadership, which he did twice – first against David Cunliffe in 2013, and then again, against Andrew Little, in 2014 – he was defeated. Had the party rules required Ardern to be elected by the whole party in 2017, rather than by caucus alone (permitted due to the imminence of the general election) would she have won?

In the six years that the Troika dominated Labour (and New Zealand) the work that began with ensuring David Shearer – rather than David Cunliffe – became leader when Goff stepped down from the leadership in 2011, was completed. With Chris Hipkins doing much of the heavy lifting, Labour MPs associated with policies promoted by the Left found themselves politically outmanoeuvred and isolated – to the point where a number simply abandoned Parliament for more rewarding and less stressful careers elsewhere. The party organisation’s independence was similarly eroded, with MPs and their hangers-on exercising an increasingly unhealthy degree of influence over its key functions: policy-making, candidate selection and Party List-ranking.

The long-planned and impressively seamless transition from Ardern to Hipkins in January 2023 showed just how comprehensive the Troika’s victory over the party had been. No one dared stand against “Chippie”, who now attempted to execute a series of policy U-turns in the name of returning to Labour’s “bread and butter”.

Without focus group approval, no policy – not even one promoted by the Finance and Revenue ministers working together – could count on the Leader’s support. Progressive initiatives in justice and corrections were jettisoned overnight for no better reason than the polls had pronounced them unpopular. About the only policies that remained sacrosanct were those related to the aims and objectives of identity politics. These had to remain in place – if only to reassure Labour MPs that they were still on the side of the angels. Unfortunately for Labour’s re-election chances, these were the precisely the policies that a majority of the voters hated most.

When Cunliffe secured just 25.13 percent of the Party Vote in 2014, Hipkins – some say with tears in his eyes – begged his leader to recognise the uncompromising judgement of the electorate and step down. Nine years later, having led his party to a crushing defeat, and after securing just 26.91 percent of the Party Vote, Hipkins thought it best, all round, that he remain in place. Not one member of Labour’s caucus objected. After all, it was nobody’s fault, the changing fortunes of politics, as the theme song of “Only Fools & Horses” puts it, “is like the changing of the seasons and the tides of the sea”.

If ever Labour needed a leader with an instinctive feel for how much Middle New Zealand will bear. Someone steeped in her party’s values and traditions, with the intellect and courage to argue for them positively and persuasively. A politician who understands that the essence of her craft is to be active, not passive; and who grasps that the duty of a leader is to heal, not harm. Then, surely, Labour – and New Zealand – needs that person now.

Maybe Helen could have another go?

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project website on Monday, 29 January 2024.

Jojo Tamihere Salutes Herr Goff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goff And Tamihere Are Both Wrong. (But Bernard Hickey Is Right On The Money!)

Show Me The Money! The alternative to state funding of infrastructure is, of course, to fund it by taking on massive amounts of private debt. On this issue, at least, Auckland mayoral challenger, Tamihere, has some solid points to make. In his own colourful turn of phrase, the incumbent mayor, Phil Goff, and the Auckland Council, have “maxed-out the credit card”. If the City is to preserve its international credit rating of AA, then it simply cannot afford to take on any more debt.

NEITHER PHIL GOFF, nor John Tamihere, are telling Aucklanders the truth about their city, but Bernard Hickey has given it a pretty good shot. In a powerful and deeply insightful article, posted on the Newsroom website, Hickey not only explains why KiwiBuild failed, but why it could never have succeeded. In the process, he lays bare the fundamental failures of political and economic intelligence fuelling New Zealand’s conjoined national and local infrastructure crises. Goff and Tamihere are part of that intellectual failure, and that is why neither politician is giving Aucklanders meaningful answers to their most pressing questions.

Tamihere has proposed selling 49 percent of Watercare to either the Accident Compensation Corporation, or the Superannuation Fund, or both, and using the proceeds (estimated at around $5 billion) to fund Auckland’s urgent infrastructure needs. Goff, who, in his years as a member of the Fourth Labour Government, never once voted against the privatisation of state-owned monopolies, has come out as a staunch defender of the municipally-owned Watercare company. He is warning Aucklanders that Tamihere’s plan would increase the average Aucklander’s water bill by $200-400 per year – falling most heavily on the poorest Auckland families.

What does Hickey say about the funding of local government infrastructure?

“After the mid-1980s, the Government saw the private sector as the provider of housing and saw any infrastructure as a cost that needed to be borne by those building the new houses and local Government, not the wider taxpaying public. Even now, that thinking is infused through Treasury and into the minds of the current Labour leadership, going from Ardern through Finance Minister Grant Robertson to Twyford.”

In other words, the neoliberal principle of “user pays” has been extended well beyond its original target, the hapless individual consumer of government services, to encompass everyone: consumers, businesses, central and local government institutions; everyone. The contrast between the neoliberal approach and the nation-building approach, which, historically, has informed the policies of successive New Zealand governments, could hardly be starker.

As Hickey makes clear:

“[N]neither the National or Labour-led governments of the last 35 years have seen it as their role to pay for [housing’s] underlying infrastructure. Their instincts have been to get others to pay for it, unlike during the golden eras of the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s and early 1970s when governments of both colours used the national balance sheet to build and subsidise that infrastructure through the Ministry of Works, State Advances Corp and various Group Building schemes and child benefit capitalisation policies.”

The alternative to state funding of infrastructure is, of course, to fund it by taking on massive amounts of private debt. On this issue, at least, Tamihere has some solid points to make. In his own colourful turn of phrase, Goff and the Auckland Council have “maxed-out the credit card”. If the City is to preserve its international credit rating of AA, then it simply cannot afford to take on any more debt. What’s more, the rest of the country cannot afford for Auckland to take on any more debt.

Hickey tells us why:

“The technical problem is the Auckland Council is almost at its debt-to-revenue limit ratio of 270 percent, which is the level specified by Standard and Poor’s for Auckland to keep its AA credit rating. This is important because taking on more debt would mean Auckland’s credit rating would be downgraded, which would increase the interest costs on existing debt and force up rates. But it would also breach the rules set by the Local Government Funding Agency [LGFA] about Auckland’s credit rating not falling more than one notch below the Government's AA+ rating. That’s important because Auckland’s rating essentially sets the base for all local government borrowing through the LGFA. It means there is enormous political pressure locally and financial pressure from other councils (and the LGFA) for Auckland not to borrow much more. Councils beyond the Bombays and north of Orewa would scream blue murder if their interest bills went up because the Auckland Council decided to solve a funding problem the central Government won’t solve.”

Unable to take on any more debt, Tamihere knows that the only way for Goff to fund infrastructure development in Auckland is by increasing rates, raising user-charges, and/or adding another 5-10 cents to the price of a litre of petrol. Tamihere is far from convinced that Goff (or anyone else) is willing to risk a ratepayers’ revolt by leading Auckland up that particular garden path, hence his plan to access five billion desperately needed dollars for urgent infrastructure development by selling 49 percent of Watercare.

The politics of this is quite clever, because, by the time ACC and/or the Superfund take the necessary steps to secure their standard rate-of-return from Watercare by taking it out of everybody’s water bill – Goff is quite right about that – Tamihere may have earned himself enough public good-will to be re-elected Mayor in 2022. (Assuming, of course, that this partial privatisation policy enables him to beat Goff in October 2019.) Five billion dollars builds a lot of infrastructure, so, who knows, Tamihere’s use of Peter’s central government funds, to pay for Paul’s local government needs, might just work. “The Mayor who rebuilt Auckland without plunging us all into deeper debt!” – has a rather nice political ring to it.

In the long run, however, Tamihere’s gambit can only be a bust. Liquidating and then spending Auckland’s capital assets can only end up dragging the city to the same point Goff has already reached. Namely, facing the politically unpalatable reality of requiring people to give up an increasing proportion of their income to the Council and/or its commercial arms. While the New Zealand political class – and that includes you, Jacinda Ardern, Grant Robertson and James Shaw – remains incapable of thinking outside the neoliberal box, New Zealand’s crumbling infrastructure, not to mention the many large-scale public works projects that will be required to meet the challenges of the future, cannot be addressed.

Goff and Tamihere would be better advised to jointly demand, as the leading mayoral candidates, that the State once again steps up to the plate of nation-building. In a country whose entire population is smaller than that of a medium-sized global city, there never has been, and still isn’t, any other viable alternative to turning the state into New Zealand’s angel investor.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 4 July 2019.

How The New Zealand Left Transformed Southern And Molyneux From Unknown Rightists Into Free Speech Heroes.

From Right-Wing Moles To Free Speech Mountains: Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux were confident that all they needed to do to spread their ideas in New Zealand was announce their intention of staging an event. The Left could be relied upon to do the rest.

WHAT A PITY there is no “Politburo” of the New Zealand Left. A central committee of knowledgeable and experienced left-wing strategists and organisers who could make decisions on behalf of the wider progressive movement. Had such a body existed when the news of the impending visit of Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux broke, then what happened next would have been very different.

The Politburo would have perused the available information on the Canadian duo and very quickly realised that the best course of action for the New Zealand Left was to do absolutely nothing. No media releases. No posters. No protests. Certainly no threats to disrupt the speakers’ public meetings. In response to Southern and Molyneux, the New Zealand Left would do precisely zero, zip, nada, nothing.

Why? Because even a cursory glance at Southern’s and Molyneux’s modus operandi would have alerted the Politburo to the fact that protests and threats of disruption were absolutely indispensable to the success of the pair’s political touring. 

Without the threats of disruption from Peace Action Auckland, the Auckland Council would have had no grounds for denying Southern and Molyneux access to the Bruce Mason Theatre in Takapuna (along with every other council venue in Auckland!) on health and safety grounds. The meeting would have taken place and, if the Canadians were lucky, they might have merited a few brief paragraphs in the NZ Herald. Most Kiwis would have remained blissfully unaware that Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux even existed.

If provocateurs fail to provoke, do they make any sound at all?

We’ll never know. Because, of course, the New Zealand Left does not have a Politburo to provide it with sagacious strategic advice. It is a wild, anarchic melange of individuals and groups, united only by the fierce conviction that all those who challenge the phantasmagoria of sectional sensitivities which constitute the contemporary “progressive” movement must ipso facto be fascists whose every public utterance, being “hate speech”, must be suppressed – by any means necessary.

Knowing this, Southern and Molyneux would have been confident that all they needed to do to spread their ideas in New Zealand was announce their intention to hold a meeting. The Left could be relied upon to do the rest.

That the Canadians’ first infusion of power came from the Mayor of New Zealand’s largest city must, however, have struck them as more than usually fortuitous. Phil Goff’s naked assertion of the right to determine what the citizens of Auckland could and could not hear was bound to rouse the defenders of free expression to action. Better and better! Southern and Molyneux could now count on tens-of-thousands of New Zealanders googling their names and watching their YouTube channels.

The next step was to begin the game of “will they or won’t they be able to secure a private venue?”. With social media crackling with ideological thrust and counter-thrust and “anti-fascist” coalitions being announced, the next phase of the propaganda operation was ready to unfold.

It was a phase Southern and Molyneux could hardly lose. Either the secured venue would stand firm against the inevitable threats and the meeting would go ahead. Or, the venue’s owners would be subjected to such intolerable pressure that the meeting was cancelled. If the former eventuated, then it would inevitably attract hundreds, if not thousands, of screaming left-wing protesters. If it was cancelled, the Canadians could present themselves as the victims of left-wing intimidation. Either way, the mainstream news media would feel obligated to step into the story.

Which, with the Powerstation’s decision to first hire out, and then deny, its facilities to the duo, is exactly what happened.

Had the proposed meeting at the Bruce Mason Theatre gone ahead without incident, Southern and Molyneux would have been able to preach to, at most, 800 already converted enthusiasts. As they wing their way back to Canada, however, they will be congratulating themselves on being presented to the tens-of-thousands of Kiwis watching the television current affairs programme “Sunday” in prime-time.

Many socially-conservative New Zealanders, seeing the Canadians for the first time, will doubtless have wondered how anyone could be offended by two such telegenic and articulate individuals. The stridency of their opponents, by contrast, must have appeared strange – even slightly sinister.

Had it ever been the intention of the Left and its kindred souls in the Human Rights Commission to extend and strengthen New Zealand’s laws against “hate speech”, then its fruitless attempts to suppress the views of Southern and Molyneux can only have rendered such an exercise significantly more difficult.

The debate stirred up by the repeated denial of both public and private stages to the pair on account of threats and intimidation has placed the issue of free speech squarely on New Zealand’s political agenda. The Left will find it much harder, now, to sell its arguments in favour of limiting New Zealanders right to free expression that would have been the case if Southern and Molyneux had simply been allowed to come and go without incident.

The Powerstation, Auckland, graffitied.

The person who sprayed graffiti on the Powerstation’s walls over the weekend described Southern’s and Molyneux’s foray into New Zealand politics as the “FREE SPEECH - EULOGY TOUR”. Given that eulogies are only pronounced over the dead, the graffitist is clearly someone who believes the Left has either already killed free speech, or is intending to do so in the near future.

He, or she, is wrong on both counts.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 7 August 2018.

Free Speech Denialism Is Fascism In Action.

Whose Hand Is That? Fifty years ago, nine-out-of-ten people would have nominated the totalitarian regimes of the Soviet bloc or Third World dictatorships as the most likely suppressors of free speech Today, the likelihood is that a substantial minority - maybe even a majority - of the population would nominate the "politically correct" Left as the most direct threat to freedom of expression in the West. How did that happen?

IT HAS BEEN DISPIRITING, this past week, to learn how little people who consider themselves leftists know about fascism.

The cause of this ignorance is, I suspect, generational. Those who grew up at a time when fascism was strong, and who later confronted its armies in World War II, are now very few in number. Their children and grandchildren, lacking their elders’ direct experience of fascism and fascists, have allowed the meaning of the word, along with the historical context out of which it grew, to fade and blur. As the recent torrid exchanges between the defenders of free speech and the opponents of right-wing Canadians Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux have made clear, the word “fascist” now denotes little more than conservative views provocatively expressed.

So torrid did these exchanges become that, by the middle of the week, the opponents of Southern and Molyneux were reduced to making the extraordinary assertion that “there’s no such thing as free speech”.

The argument advanced in support of this profoundly anti-democratic claim is as crude as it is curious. “[F]reedom of expression … is a mirage. Real freedom is not what you say, it’s how you live. And we do not live free lives. The world is not free from poverty, is not free from climate change, is not free from fear. Most importantly, we are not free of capitalism, which profits handsomely from our enslavement.”

Exactly how a world without poverty, climate change, fear and capitalism could possibly be achieved without freedom of expression defies the imagination. Without the ability to speak, write, publish and broadcast freely, independent political discussion and organisation cease to exist. One certainly does not debate or organise politically in the totalitarian societies where the suppression of free speech holds sway, one simply parrots the party line and obeys without question the orders handed down from politburo or führer.

The most extraordinary (and, frankly, dangerous) claim of the free speech denialist quoted above is that what the members of the Free Speech Coalition (the group set up to raise funds for a judicial review of the Auckland mayor, Phil Goff’s, decision to deny Southern and Molyneux access to council owned meeting halls) actually wanted was “freedom from consequence”. What does that mean? Well, apparently, it means that if you “chat shit” you “get banged”.

No brown-shirted stormtrooper, sinking his jackboot into the ribs of the communist he has just knocked unconscious, could have summed-up the Nazi Party’s attitude to free speech any better!

“Let’s be clear;” continues our denialist, “fascism is not an intellectual exercise. It’s the epitome of evil, a cancer on humanity. My grandparents didn’t debate Nazis, they shot them.”

These sentences are extremely telling. Not on account of their content (which is entirely fallacious) but because of their tone. The denialist’s mode of expression, as anyone who has read the propaganda of Mussolini’s, Hitler’s and Franco’s followers will tell you, is quintessentially fascistic.

On display is the Fascist’s deep hostility towards intellectuality; his fondness for dividing the world into that which is “good” and that which is “evil”; his readiness to characterise the enemy as a form of disease (just as the Nazis likened the Jews to typhus) and, finally, the same eagerness to substitute violence for debate.

The most tragic aspect of the denialism quoted above is its author’s apparent ignorance of what his grandparents were actually fighting and dying for.

On the 6 January 1941, in his State of the Union speech to the United States Congress, President Franklin Roosevelt outlined the better world which he was determined to bring into existence when the war against tyranny, then raging, was eventually won:

“In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world.
     

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.
     

The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbour—anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium.
     

It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.
     

That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.”

For a free speech denialist to use the sacrifices made by the millions of men and women who fought and died for these goals, in order to justify and encourage the vitriolic verbal abuse of individuals who continue to stand for Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” is beyond despicable. It does, however, makes dispiritingly clear the sheer scale of the political ignorance and hatred against which all genuine defenders of human rights and freedoms continue to struggle.

Free speech denialism also confirms the observation that as the economic and social climate deteriorates, the normally linear configuration of the political spectrum becomes distorted. In effect, the spectrum curves around until the extremes of left and right are practically touching one another and the middle-ground is further away from them than ever. As the political static increases, the gap between left and right is closed by an arc of white-hot intensity. It is in the baleful brilliance of this exchange that the events of the past week have been illuminated.

It has not been pretty.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 12 July 2018.

Testing The Boundaries Of Political Discourse.

Crossing The Boundaries: Kent State University, Ohio, USA, 4 May 1970. The Youth Revolt of the 1960s and 70s was not quelled by Ohio National Guardsmen shooting down student protesters. All the conservative establishment's heavy-handed repression did was fuel the “New Left’s” sense of grievance and drive an iron spike of intolerance into its soul. Today's liberal establishment appears equally determined to make martyrs out of its right-wing critics.

TRANSGRESSION is extraordinarily appealing to the young. Giving voice to opinions that cause older people to throw up their hands in horror is always great fun. Almost as much fun as listening to music dismissed by the old folks as “noise”, or wearing clothes calculated to provoke Mum into inquiring: “You’re not going out dressed like that – are you?”

Adolescent psychologists put this sort of behaviour down to young people’s need to “test the boundaries” of the adult world. A coming-of-age process which helps to firm up the outlines of their future adult selves.

Politics, too, has its own forms of adolescent transgression, and this past week New Zealand has been introduced to two of its more notorious exponents. Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux, both hailing from the mild-mannered nation of Canada, have turned testing the boundaries of political discourse into something of an art form. (Or, at the very least, into a million views on YouTube!)

Like the normal adolescent, who is concerned to discover exactly how far he can go before his parents/teachers/friends bring the hammer down, political adolescents seek to discover how broadly or narrowly society has set the bounds of tolerance.

When I was a young person, political transgressors hailed almost exclusively from the left of the political spectrum. This was hardly surprising, since the prevailing social mores of most western nations in the 1950s and 60s were those laid down by the mainstream Christian churches. Throughout most of the Cold War era, the dominant political values were similarly conservative: unflinchingly hostile not only to the claims of communism and socialism, but also to all but the most anodyne forms of social democracy.

Yet, to the horror and fury of the RSA, young anti-war protesters attempted to lay wreaths commemorating the millions killed in “imperialist” wars – with special reference to Vietnam’s civilian dead. Scandalising the nation’s editorial writers, student leaders (like Tim Shadbolt) and visiting feminist luminaries (like Germaine Greer) uttered the word “bullshit” in public places. Young-at-heart poets also joined the provocation game: most memorably with James K. Baxter’s “A Small Ode on Mixed Flatting”.

Baxter cited the example of Robbie Burns “that sad old rip/From whom I got my fellowship”. A man who liked, as the bearded poet reminded his readers, “to toss among the glum and staid/A poem like a hand grenade”.

Fifty years on, however, most of the rhetorical bomb-throwers (like Southern and Molyneux) hail from the Right – not the Left. What happened?

In a nutshell, the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 70s congealed into an all-embracing liberal establishment. Over the course of fifty years, the transgressive ideas of what Colin James dubbed “The Vietnam Generation” became the orthodox beliefs of the Twenty-First Century’s ruling elites.

Accordingly, young women like Southern are calling “bullshit” on what they see as the constantly encroaching claims of an ever-more-intolerant feminism. Intellectuals like Molyneux are loudly insisting that what they call “the scientific evidence” must over-ride the plans of “politically correct” social-engineers to obliterate even the most obvious human distinctions.

Across the western world these right-wing firebrands are igniting bonfires of controversy over the meaning of nationality; the desirability, or not, of unlimited diversity; and the limits of religious toleration. Whether their agitation constitutes a rebirth of Enlightenment values, or (as the Left insists) the resurgence of ideas more commonly associated with extreme nationalism, even fascism, there is no disputing right-wing populism’s impact on the political complexion of the times we are living through.

Which is why, in my opinion, the Auckland Mayor, Phil Goff, erred in denying Southern and Molyneux access to all the public platforms controlled by the Auckland Council. Quite apart from turning the pair into free-speech martyrs (to the undoubted benefit of their YouTube accounts) Mayor Goff’s actions represented an authoritarian solution to a democratic problem.

The Youth Revolt of the 1960s was not quelled by jailing the Chicago Seven or allowing the Ohio National Guard to shoot down student protesters. Suppression merely fuelled the “New Left’s” sense of grievance and drove an iron spike of intolerance into its soul.

Friedrich Nietzsche, a philosopher of whom the Alt-Right are inordinately fond, wrote: “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” Those who believe they can kill right-wing extremism by denying it a stage are in for a very unpleasant surprise.

DISCLOSURE: Chris Trotter is a member of the Free Speech Coalition which is seeking a judicial review of Mayor Goff’s decision.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 13 July 2018.

Do We Really Lack the Courage to Debate the Alt-Right? Do We Really Lack the Ideas to Defeat Them?

Testing Our Values: Over the past few days Canadian Alt-Right provocateurs Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern (above) have very skillfully tested our tolerance – and we have failed. They’ve also tested our ability to re-state, re-affirm and justify our commitment to freedom of expression. We failed that test too.

STEFAN MOLYNEUX AND LAUREN SOUTHERN gave New Zealanders an opportunity to test their values – most especially their tolerance. Controversialists, almost by profession, these two Canadians espouse ideas which most Kiwis find extremely jarring. We have come to accept human equality and religious tolerance as the unequivocal markers of all decent and rational societies. For a great many people it is deeply offensive to hear these concepts challenged openly.

Over the past few days Molyneux and Southern have very skilfully tested our tolerance – and we have failed. They’ve also tested our ability to re-state, re-affirm and justify our commitment to freedom of expression. We failed that test too.

But just imagine if, instead of asking the Minister of Immigration to prevent Molyneux and Southern from entering the country, the New Zealand Federation of Islam Associations had invited them to debate the Islamic religion with a couple of their faith’s most accomplished scholars. In the face of the Canadians’ openly hostile reading of the Koran, the Federation could have transformed their assailants’ prejudice into a profound “teaching moment” for all New Zealanders. Rather than the caricature of Islam presented by its enemies, we could have heard the true voice of the Prophet and gained a much deeper understanding of his message.

Of course, Molyneux and Southern could have refused to debate the Federations’ representatives (perhaps fearing that in a calm, respectful, and properly moderated setting, their contribution might not have sounded all that convincing) but just think about how bad that would have made them look. They would have been exposed as not having the courage of their convictions: of having “fake views”.

Imagine, too, if the Q+A programme had set aside an entire hour for a televised debate between Molyneux and Southern, representing the Alt-Right; and two representatives of the New Zealand Left. (Annette Sykes and John Minto spring to mind!) For 60 minutes, New Zealanders could have heard debated the ideas and causes that are currently driving global politics. Alternatively, TVNZ could have set up one of its live “town-hall meetings” at which a broad cross-section of Kiwis could have asked questions of the two right-wing provocateurs.

Once again they could have refused. But, once again, that would merely have confirmed their status as rhetorical bomb-throwers – not genuine protagonists of serious ideas.

But what if they restricted their appearances to halls in which only their most fervid supporters were guaranteed entry? What would the correct response be to that situation?

According to Auckland Peace Action's Valerie Morse, the response of those opposed to the views being expressed by Molyneux and Southern should have been to “stand in solidarity with the Muslim community in Aotearoa who are opposing these fascists. If they come here, we will confront them on the streets. If they come, we will blockade entry to their speaking venue”.

Which is, of course, exactly the response Molyneux and Southern would have been hoping for. It has been of enormous assistance to their cause to be able to upload on to social media the hate-filled faces of their enemies. Such images of their left-wing opponents screaming and shouting and doing all within their power to shut down their meetings are pure gold to the propagandists of the Alt-Right.

Everything that Mayor Phil Goff, the Auckland Council, Ms Morse and her fellow extremists have done so far has provided Molyneux and Southern with invaluable material for their one-million-strong YouTube audience. Every attempt to suppress their freedom of expression by administrative fiat, or force, fuels the anger of their supporters and confirms the Alt-Right’s view of the Left as dangerous enemies of liberty.

What they would have been very loath to upload, however, would have been images of them being soundly defeated by Muslim scholars; or floundering before the questioning of participants in TVNZ’s town-hall meeting. Especially useless to them would have been images of a huge and dignified gathering of New Zealanders bearing witness outside the Bruce Mason Centre in Takapuna. Men and women, Maori and Pakeha, Christian and Muslim, immigrant and native-born, gay and straight – all standing quietly with their arms linked under a forest of New Zealand flags and banners proclaiming this country’s unwavering commitment to human equality, religious tolerance and freedom of speech.

Had we been mature enough, as a free and democratic nation, to meet the challenge of Molyneux and Southern in such a fashion, the two Alt-Right Canadians would have had nothing to show their followers. But, we New Zealanders would have had something to show the world.

We could have shown a global audience a nation confident enough to debate those truths proclaimed by Thomas Jefferson to be self-evident with all comers. We could have shown a planet hard beset by the worst kind of right-wing propaganda a people capable of passing the values test set by the likes of Molyneux and Southern with flying colours.

Because, as the great English poet, John Milton, wrote in his famous pamphlet, Areopagitica: “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.”

Truth is not afraid of trigger-words. Truth does not need a safe space. Truth is not a snowflake. Truth can take the heat and most certainly should not be forced to vacate the kitchen in the face of a couple of Alt-Right provocateurs and a politically-correct Mayor.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 10 July 2018.

SPECIAL NOTE:  If readers are of a mind to assist the Free Speech Coalition in its effort to fund and mount a judicial review against Auckland Mayor Phil Goff's refusal to allow Molyneux and Southern access to Auckland Council's meeting halls, please click on the following link  https://freespeechcoalition.nz/

Board Games: Can Phil Goff Really Make Auckland Transport More “Accountable”?

Not Auckland's Emperor - Just Its Mayor: Phil Goff as Auckland’s emperor, before whom the CCOs haughty CEOs must bend their knees and render full account, is an arresting image. Unfortunately, although the Mayor can ask for full accountability from the CCOs, he cannot compel it. Auckland Transport, like the Ports of Auckland, exists at arm’s length from the Governing Body of the Auckland Council. The city may own it, but it does not run it.

 

PHIL GOFF has declined to reappoint Councillors Mike Lee and Christine Fletcher to Auckland Transport’s (AT) Board of Directors. Auckland’s new mayor is unconvinced that councillor directors are the solution to the city’s Council Controlled Organisations’ (CCOs) alleged unaccountability. Rather than maintain the current arrangement linking the citizens of Auckland and their elected representatives with the opaque entity responsible for the city’s public transportation services, Goff intends to make AT and all the other CCOs directly answerable to himself.

 

If only Auckland’s Mayor possessed the legal authority to do such a thing. Goff as Auckland’s emperor, before whom the CCOs haughty CEOs must bend their knees and render full account, is an arresting image. Unfortunately, although the Mayor can ask for full accountability from the CCOs, he cannot compel it. AT, like the Ports of Auckland, exists at arm’s length from the Governing Body of the Auckland Council. The city may own it, but it does not run it.

 

What the Mayor does possess the power to do is nominate two directors to sit on the AT board. Could he nominate himself? The presence of the Mayor would certainly make AT’s other directors sit up and take notice. It would not, however, deliver as much accountability as one might think. Directors are legally responsible to the company that appoints them – and to no one else. They are also legally bound to accept the decisions of their fellow directors. The confidentiality of the deliberations out of which board decisions arise is also legally enforceable.

 

In extremis, the Mayor and the Governing Body of Auckland Council could pass a resolution sacking the board of directors of the legal entity responsible for appointing the boards of directors of the CCOs. The replacement board could then, theoretically, purge the CCO boards of any director insufficiently committed to the radical idea that council controlled organisations should be – in fact as well as in name – controlled by the Council.

 

But even this is doubtful. Faced with a Governing Body of such uncompromising radicalism, it is highly likely that the entity constitutionally located between the Council and the CCOs would send for its lawyers and the whole matter would be taken out of the political arena and placed before the courts. A speedy resolution of the issues in dispute would be … unlikely.

 

And even if the Mayor and the Governing Body won the right to demand accountability from the CCOs, their problems would not be over. Persons with the legal, commercial and administrative expertise required to oversee an organisation as large and complex as Auckland Transport are few and far between. Persons in possession of the requisite qualifications and who are also willing to offer their services to a council whose “commercially irresponsible” actions have been condemned by practically all of their colleagues would be even harder to find.

 

The word would go out to every company director in the city that taking the place of any CCO board member sacked by the Council would be a seriously career-limiting move. Solidarity is not a quality reserved exclusively for the working-class. The bourgeoisie has every bit as much reason to stick together as the proletariat – and they’re surprisingly good at it.

 

They are also surprisingly good at letting politicians know how disappointed they could be should certain individuals be reappointed to certain boards of directors. Someone with Phil Goff’s experience doesn’t need too much in the way of hints to appreciate the political difficulties that could suddenly arise if Mike Lee and Christine Fletcher were to resume their seats at AT’s boardroom table.

 

But those fine young people from Generation Zero; those indefatigable supporters of the Unitary Plan; just think of the impression appointing people like that would make. A new Mayor clearing the way for new blood. Why, the polls would go through the roof!

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday 26 October 2016.

Build The Surge For Chloe Swarbrick!

The One To Watch: If Chloe Swarbrick, backed by the votes of young Aucklanders, surges into second place in the Auckland mayoral election, outperforming both Victoria Crone and John Palino, she will identify herself as a political phenomenon. She will be feted by the news media as the voice of her generation – proof of the Millennials’ potential to completely upset the calculations of “politics” and “politicians”.

 

THE SO-CALLED “MILLENNIAL” GENERATION has been harshly criticised for its lack of political engagement. Clear away the red mist of Boomer rage, however, and the under-30s disinclination to participate in electoral politics takes on a very different aspect. Be it inspired by sophisticated political science, or simple gut instinct, the Millennials’ refusal to validate the politics of neoliberalism by joining in its electoral rituals is easily defended.

 

Sometimes, however, casting of a ballot can inflict a serious blow to the neoliberal order. The most obvious recent example is the British electorate’s decision to leave the European Union. A great many young Britons who hadn’t yet voted in a general election (because “politics” and “politicians” always win) voted for Brexit because they sensed that, if they did, politics and politicians would, for once, be the losers.

 

Chloe Swarbrick’s decision to run for Mayor of Auckland has given the city’s young voters a similar opportunity to make a real difference. With virtually no money, and in spite of being excluded (until very recently) from the mainstream news media’s coverage of the election, a recent poll showed Swarbrick in fourth place, after Phil Goff, Vic Crone and John Palino.

 

Essentially, only 15 percentage points separate this 23-year-old political prodigy from second place. A concerted effort by voters under 30 could easily see Swarbrick surging towards runner-up status in the 2016 Mayoral contest.

 

What good is coming in second? The answer is simple and important. By outperforming both Crone and Palino, Swarbrick will identify herself as a political phenomenon. She will be feted by the news media as the voice of her generation – proof of the Millennials’ potential to completely upset the calculations of “politics” and “politicians”.

 

More than a few political commentators have observed that the next centre-left prime-minister has yet to be elected to Parliament. If Swarbrick is propelled into second place in the Auckland Mayoral election, then Labour and the Greens will soon be competing fiercely to get her to accept a winnable position on their Party Lists.

 

I remember meeting Helen Clark for the first time when I was an undergraduate student at Otago. She was just six years older than me, but I could tell, even back then, in the early 1980s, that this junior political studies lecturer from Auckland was going to play a major role in New Zealand’s political history. I defy anyone to watch Swarbrick’s performance on last Sunday’s Q+A and not reach exactly the same conclusion.

 

The Millennial Generation’s progressives have their representative – now all they need to do is vote for her!

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 19 September 2016.

Reinvent Auckland, Simon? If Only We Could!

A Safe Pair Of Hands: The whole point of the neoliberal Auckland supercity is to ensure that “big visions” and “bold execution” in the pursuit of anything other than neoliberal objectives is rendered impossible. As a tried and tested neoliberal himself, Phil Goff gets this. Producing “incremental improvements with greater efficiency” constitutes the outer limits of his political imagination. It’s what makes him the perfect candidate.

 

SIMON WILSON is an odd fellow – with some odd opinions. Here, for example, is the Metro Editor-at-Large's opinion on the general public response to the National Government’s forced amalgamation of Auckland, North Shore, Waitakere and Manukau cities. “Aucklanders were cynical about everything before he [Len Brown] and the supercity came along in 2010. But we lost that cynicism and we set about reinventing the city.”

 

I would be most annoyed if I thought Simon was including me in that “we”. Long before the legislation setting up the supercity came into force the level of my cynicism was already off the scale.

 

Everything about the supercity’s establishment: from the man chosen to oversee the process (the Act Party leader, Rodney Hide) to the deliberate exclusion of the people of the Auckland region from any meaningful say in whether or not the merger of their four cities should finally proceed; highlighted the profoundly anti-democratic spirit in which the entire process was conceived.

 

The reason for this hostility to democracy wasn’t difficult to discern. Far from being a bottom-up exercise: driven by angry residents’ from across the Auckland region; the supercity was a top-down exercise: the joint creation of local and national elites. Their common purpose? To create a model for local government in the neoliberal era. And the central feature of that model? The almost total disempowerment of the citizens of Auckland and their elected representatives.

 

The full measure of the supercity’s creators’ contempt for democracy was revealed in the proposed size of the supercity’s “Governing Body”. In the equivalent decision-making structures of Auckland, North Shore, Waitakere and Manukau cities, the ratio of elected representatives to citizens was roughly 1:15,000. In the new supercity it would be 1:70,000! Supercity councillors were being asked to represent more citizens than a directly elected Member of Parliament.

 

My own level of cynicism (and, I suspect, the cynicism of thousands of other Aucklanders) was in no way lessened by the Ports of Auckland dispute. It was during this brutal test of strength between the supposedly municipally-owned Port and its employees that Aucklanders learned just how misnamed their “Council Controlled Organisations” (CCOs) truly were.

 

Aucklanders elected representatives turned out to be equally mischaracterised. Far from being the people’s democratic tribunes, Auckland’s elected councillors proved to be little more than powerless pawns. The real game was controlled by legally cocooned CCO boards of directors – over whom the so-called “Governing Body” (including the Mayor) exercised no effective control whatsoever.

 

Indeed, so politically impotent was the Mayor made to feel in relation to the day-to-day management of National’s neoliberal supercity, that the poor fellow felt obliged to demonstrate his potency “by other means”. A better symbol of Auckland’s vast democratic deficit than Len’s and Bevan’s affair is difficult to imagine. Turned out the Mayor’s Office was good for very little else!

 

Even Brown’s signal achievement: the National Government’s final approval of his beloved City Rail Link; owes as much to the projected massive inflation of property values along its inner-city route, as it does to any rational realignment of Auckland’s public transport system.

 

In his latest Metro article, Simon Wilson opines that the job facing the next Mayor of Auckland is “not simply to produce incremental improvements with greater efficiency and better relations with the government in Wellington. Auckland has fallen into crisis. Growth has far outstripped expectations. Housing policies have had a catastrophic outcome. A big vision is required, all over again, and bold execution has to follow.”

 

Except, of course, the whole point of the neoliberal supercity is to ensure that “big visions” and “bold execution” in the pursuit of anything other than neoliberal objectives is rendered impossible. (That the Unitary Plan was so heavily promoted by the National Government and the Auckland City bureaucracy, both of whom threatened dire consequences should the councillors fail to approve it, tells us all we need to know about the document’s ideological complexion!) As a tried and tested neoliberal himself, Phil Goff gets this. Producing “incremental improvements with greater efficiency” constitutes the outer limits of his political imagination. It’s what makes him the perfect candidate.

 

Poor Simon. He seems to have been both surprised and distressed to learn that in a Citizen Insights Monitor survey released by the Auckland Council in June 2016, “just 15 per cent of us said we were satisfied with the council’s performance. Only 17 per cent of us said we trust it. This is disgraceful.”

 

Really, Simon? Disgraceful? Frankly, I’m astounded as many as 17 percent of Aucklanders place any trust at all in National’s neoliberal supercity. I do, however, understand completely why 83 percent of us find little, if anything, to like about the “governance” of the unresponsive bureaucratic monstrosity into whose tender care we were delivered without so much as a confirming referendum.

 

Nor am I surprised that only 35 percent of eligible voters bothered to return their ballots in 2013. Not when the people elected by those ballots are so bereft of power that – even if they wanted to – it wouldn’t be “within the purview of their lawful governance function” to make the trains run on time.

 

In terms of empowering the people who live within its boundaries, there’s nothing I’d rather do, Simon, than “reinvent” the Auckland supercity. It’s why I’m voting for Chloe Swarbrick. Not because she stands the slightest chance of winning, but because, alone of all the Mayoral candidates, she demonstrates some understanding of just how much we have lost.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 13 September 2016.

Blurred Vision: Why Labour Isn’t Trusted To Govern New Zealand.

Impaired Vision: Veteran Rogernome, Phil Goff, is leading his nearest rival for the Auckland mayoralty by an astonishing 33 percentage points in the latest UMR survey. That's 3 points more than Labour's total support! Clearly, Auckland voters have no difficulty in determining what Goff stands for. Unfortunately, New Zealanders are finding it much harder to determine Labour's ideological outline. This is highly problematic, because the electorate's trust and confidence will only be given to a political party whose features are easy to read.

 

STEPHEN MILLS, from Labour’s pollsters, UMR Research, today (7/3/16) confirmed that Labour’s support has slipped back to just 30 percent. He also informed RNZ’s listeners that Phil Goff is leading his nearest rival for the Auckland Mayoralty, Victoria Crone, by 33 percentage points. This is, of course, the same Phil Goff who, as Labour’s leader, failed to squeeze more than 27 percent of the Party Vote out of the New Zealand electorate.

 

It’s a grim parade of statistics for those of us hoping for a change of government at next year’s general election. And what it’s telling us is this: Labour isn’t trusted to govern. Phil Goff may be trusted to lead the country’s largest city – overwhelmingly trusted. But, Andrew Little is not trusted to lead the country.

 

This lack of trust is crippling. If it’s not addressed, and soon, it will produce yet another electoral defeat. Whether Labour can sustain a fourth rejection by the electorate – especially if it turns out to be worse than the 25 percent 2014 result – is highly debateable. A century-old party can only go on losing for so long before it simply fades away.

 

It is the privilege of historians to pinpoint the causes of an institution’s malaise, even when they have little to offer by way of immediate solutions.

 

In Labour’s case, the origins of its malady are easily discerned. The embrace of what were then called “free-market policies”, in the late-1980s, destroyed Labour as a mass party. Splits, first to the Left, and then to the Right, further weakened the organisation. That Labour survived at all as a viable electoral force was due, almost entirely, to the iron will of Helen Clark. All that has happened to the party since her departure in 2008 only confirms her pivotal role in delaying Labour’s disintegration.

 

What Clark was unable, or unwilling, to do, however, was the one thing that might have breathed new life into the Labour Party. To rebuild Labour as a trusted and decisive political force, it was necessary for someone to stand up and publicly repudiate Rogernomics.

 

This needed to be more than simply a half-hearted owning up to “mistakes”. It had to be a root-and-branch condemnation of the entire exercise – accompanied by a process of “rejuvenation” that completely denuded the parliamentary caucus of all its Rogernomes.

 

This latter exercise is crucial. Indeed, the repudiation of Rogernomics can only proceed successfully when the Rogernomes themselves are gone Any attempt to reassert democratic-socialist values and policies while convinced neoliberal MPs remained in caucus can only result in the most vicious kind of public political blood-letting – with all the inevitable electoral damage that such disunity entails.

 

What, then, do people see when they look at the Labour Party in 2016? The answer, sadly, is a blur. In the absence of a clear repudiation of its Rogernomics past, Labour can only present itself as an indistinct, ill-defined political notion. This is especially true of Labour’s parliamentary caucus where – believe it or not – there may still be found remnants of the David Lange-led, but Roger Douglas-controlled, Labour Government of 1984-1990!

 

With these veteran politicians, and their younger allies, still in place, even David Cunliffe’s relatively mild attempt (when compared to Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders!) to dislodge the party from its neoliberal past provoked the most extraordinary backlash. Andrew Little, has striven mightily to avoid his predecessor’s fate, but only at the cost of ideological prevarication and policy confusion. Labour’s stance on the TPPA, for example, gyrates wildly between opposition and grudging support. Meanwhile, Phil Goff (the most senior remaining Rogernome in caucus) gets a free pass to vote against his own party.

 

Auckland’s voters have rewarded Goff’s undeviating ideological clarity by making him their runaway favourite for the Mayoralty. And why not? When it comes to leading a monstrous neoliberal artefact like the Auckland Supercity, it’s difficult to think of anybody better qualified for the job.

 

But, for those of us who not only want to get rid of the National Party-led Government, but also the dangerously unequal neoliberal system that it supports, Labour’s blurred outlines and indistinct values inspire only disappointment and mistrust.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 7 March 2016.

Andrew Little's Labour: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back.

A Big Gesture: Having begun the week clumsily in relation to the TPPA and Mr Goff, Andrew Little was anxious to close it with a State of the Nation speech that, for once, contained more substance than style. Taking a leaf out of US Senator Bernie Sander’s policy book, Labour now promises 3 years of free post-school education. For Phil Goff, the Rogernome who first proposed user-pays tertiary education, Mr Little’s speech could be interpreted as an ideological slap in the face.

 

THERE HAS BEEN PRAISE from a veteran of the “Rogernomics” Labour caucus for Andrew Little’s handling of Phil Goff. Recalling the David Lange-led caucus’s 1988 expulsion of Jim Anderton – for upholding Labour policy! – Jenny Kirk (Labour MP for Birkenhead, 1987-1990) has applauded Mr Little for “making progress on pulling [his own] caucus together – in a difficult environment.”

 

But Ms Kirk’s approbation, while characteristically generous, is misplaced. Not only has Phil Goff’s “dispensation” to support the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) not pulled Labour’s ranks together (quite the reverse!) it has also been seized upon by Labour’s opponents to discredit the party’s anti-TPPA stance.

 

The TPPA endorsements of former Labour leaders: from Mike Moore and Helen Clark, to Phil Goff and David Shearer; have been a Godsend for the agreement’s supporters. “What can be so wrong with the TPPA”, they demand, “when four out of the last six Labour leaders support it?”

 

It’s a fair question, but one which Labour – for fear of re-opening the old wounds of the 1980s and 90s – is loath to answer. At some point, however (and it may have arrived) the Labour Party is going to have to confront the ghosts of its Rogernomics past and lay them, finally, to rest.

 

There is simply no upside to being utterly defenceless before your history. Labour may be ready to reclaim its progressive heritage – as its position on the TPPA makes clear. But, unfortunately, as Mr Goff’s “dispensation” makes clear, it’s still not ready to repudiate 25 years of neoliberalism.

 

Labour members and supporters have been in the ears of Labour MPs for decades, urging them to cast adrift the barge-load of rotting ideological garbage that the party has been towing behind it since the 1980s. They also suggested the enforced retirement of every MP who refuses to acknowledge the stench. All to no avail. The Bible says: “As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly.” Unfortunately, far too many of Labour’s dogs never left!

 

Had Labour’s caucus followed the lead of its own Draft Party Platform in 2013, and condemned unequivocally the toxic legacy of Rogernomics (inequality, poverty, community decay) then, today, Mr Little would have no difficulty answering his critics’ questions about former Labour leaders’ pro-TPPA views.

 

“Mike Moore, Phil Goff and David Shearer are all convinced Rogernomes,” he’d say, “so of course they’re unable to recognise the threat posed to New Zealand’s national sovereignty by the TPPA.” And Helen? “Well, sadly, Helen drank just enough of the neoliberal Kool-Aid over her nearly 30 years in Parliament to render her incapable of telling the difference between a genuine free trade agreement (like her own China-NZ FTA) and yet another, US-sponsored, corporate power grab.”

 

Jenny Kirk would likely argue that the cable which attaches Labour to its stinking barge is old and strong, and not susceptible to being severed by a single, heroic, blow from Mr Little’s reforming sword. Labour members and supporters should, therefore, exercise patience while he works his way through its many twisted strands with a much more practical hacksaw.

 

Certainly, it must be acknowledged that there are many in Labour’s camp who were pleasantly surprised that Mr Little and his colleagues were, at least, willing to cut the TPPA adrift. Clearly, his recent summer sojourn in the United States and the United Kingdom brought him into contact with members of the Democratic Party for whom (as US trade critic, Lori Wallach, has been telling audiences up and down the country this past week) opposition to the TPPA is a “no brainer”, and who couldn’t understand the NZ Labour Party’s reticence on the issue.

 

While in the US, Mr Little also witnessed the surging campaign of the “democratic-socialist” Senator for Vermont, Bernie Sanders. Young Americans, in particular, “Feel the Bern” on account of his promise to restore free tertiary education in America’s publicly owned universities.

 

Labour, like many other Kiwi institutions, seems unaware of just how far its definition of the possible now lags behind the rest of the world’s. It’s as though, having embraced change with reckless fervour in the 1980s, Labour just switched off its critical faculties, smugly assuming that its policies remained at the cutting-edge – even though that “edge” had long since re-located itself.

 

Perhaps Mr Little’s American reality-check explains why, having begun the week clumsily in relation to the TPPA and Mr Goff, he was anxious to close it with a State of the Nation speech that, for once, contained more substance than style. Taking a leaf out of Senator Sander’s policy book, Labour now promises 3 years of free post-school education.

 

For Phil Goff, the Rogernome who first proposed user-pays tertiary education, Mr Little’s speech could be interpreted as an ideological slap in the face.

 

Keep wielding that hacksaw, Andrew. Progress is being made.

 

This essay was originally published by Fairfax Media on Monday, 1 February 2016.

Oh Lucky Man! Phil Goff's "Dispensation" Is As Ill-Considered As It Is Ill-Deserved.

You Bet He's Smiling! Phil Goff has somehow managed to convince Andrew Little that it's okay to have a senior Caucus member telling the world that the Labour Party's policy on the TPPA is wrong, and that the National Government's stance is correct. As they say: "With friends like these ..." And it's not even as if Phil has a proud history of approving dispensations for others - just ask Jim Anderton! For some reason, when it comes to Caucus collective responsibility, no exemptions are ever made for the Left.

 

PHIL GOFF IS A LUCKY MAN. Had Andrew Little extended to him the same measure of tolerance that he extended to Jim Anderton, 28 years ago, he’d no longer be a member of Labour’s caucus.

 

Goff was among those Rogernomes who, on 4 August 1988, passed the following resolution:

 

“This Caucus declares that the following understanding governs the relationship of Caucus members with each other: Members shall vote in Parliament in accordance with decisions of the Caucus. Where a member deliberately abstains from voting, or votes against a Government measure in the House which has been passed by Caucus, such action automatically removes the member from membership of the Caucus unless express permission to take that action has been given by Caucus.”

 

Referred to at the time as the “loaded gun” resolution, it was intended to block any member (but most particularly, Anderton) from either voting against, or abstaining from voting for, legislation setting in motion the privatisation of state assets. Anderton’s colleagues were well aware that the Labour Party’s official stance was one of opposition to privatisation, and that, strictly speaking they were all bound – as Labour MPs – to uphold Labour Party policy. They simply didn’t care.

 

By December of 1988, the circumstances anticipated in the Loaded Gun Resolution had come to pass. A bill enabling the government to partially privatise the BNZ was on the floor of the House. In spite of the Labour Party’s New Zealand Council informing the Caucus that privatisation would directly contravene the party’s 1987 manifesto, and contradict the expressed will of the Labour Party Conference, the David Lange-led Labour Government pressed ahead with the legislation.

 

On Saturday, 10 December 1988, Jim Anderton told a hushed House of Representatives:

 

“I cannot give my support to this enabling legislation. If we are not going to sell the Bank of New Zealand, we do not need this legislation. If we are going to sell it, then I am opposed to it and must show my opposition here, at this time, because there will be no other parliamentary opportunity to protest at or prevent the Government having the power to sell the Bank. As I said at the Committee Stages, I will not vote with the Opposition National Party. Their anxiety to sell the Bank of New Zealand and other state assets is well known. I will, therefore, record my opposition by formally abstaining when the vote is taken on this Third Reading.”

 

On Tuesday, 13 December 1988, the Senior Government Whip, Margaret Austin, wrote to Anderton informing him that he would receive no further Caucus communications and was stripped of his membership of Caucus committees. The Whip had been withdrawn; Jim Anderton was out of the Labour Caucus.

 

Not for Anderton the dispensation granted to Goff by his Caucus colleagues. Regardless of the fact that he was attempting, in good conscience, to uphold Labour Party policy (as required of him, and all of his colleagues, by the Labour Party constitution) permission for Anderton to abstain on the enabling legislation was denied.

 

Twenty-eight years later, the same Phil Goff who had voted to expel anyone who defied the will of Caucus has not only been extended the privilege of abstaining from voting against the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s enabling legislation, but also of actually crossing the floor of the House of Representatives and voting in favour of it.

 

The relevant Labour Party media release of 28 January 2016 sates: “Opposition Leader Andrew Little has given dispensation to MP Phil Goff to take his own position on the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement due to his historic involvement in negotiating its predecessor, the P4.” According to Little:  “Phil has had a longstanding involvement and public commitment to this agreement which differs with the Labour Caucus’ decision that it cannot support the deal in its current form due to its compromise of New Zealand’s sovereignty.”

 

But the 2005 P4 free-trade initiative, which the Helen Clark-led Labour Government had set in motion, and which Goff played a key role in negotiating, is in no way comparable to the TPPA. The P4 was a modest and mutually beneficial free trade agreement involving New Zealand, Singapore, Brunei and Chile. The TPPA, in sharp contrast, is a freedom charter for US transnational corporations. Granting Goff a dispensation on the grounds that he had a hand in negotiating P4 is, therefore, a political non-sequitur.

 

Moreover, in dissenting from his Caucus colleagues’ view that support for the TPPA compromises New Zealand’s sovereignty, Goff is actually asserting that what Labour is presenting to the electorate as the truth is, in fact, a lie. Which means that Little has given Goff a dispensation to declare that up is down, black is white, and the TPPA is a good thing. And why would a party leader anxious to enhance his own, and his party’s, credibility do that!

 

What’s more, the irrelevance of the P4 argument makes Little’s treatment of David Shearer’s dissidence utterly inconsistent and unfair. If Goff is entitled to deny the truth of Labour’s position, then why isn’t Shearer also being granted a pass from the reality-based community? Or, for that matter, any other Caucus member not yet convinced that the TPPA represents a dangerous corporate assault on what’s left of New Zealand’s democracy and independence.

 

What Little and his colleagues all need to find – and quickly – is a measure of the clarity and courage demonstrated by Jim Anderton on 10 December 1988. If the TPPA is a bad thing, then allowing a Labour MP to vote in favour of it cannot be ethically, or politically, justified. It follows, therefore, that those Labour parliamentarians who do not believe the TPPA is a bad thing; and who are unwilling to abide by the contrary judgement of their colleagues; have only one morally consistent course of action to take. They must resign, forthwith, from both the Labour Caucus and the Labour Party.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 29 January 2016.