Much Worse Than It Looks.

Bad News:  While Labour’s refusal to back away from its most controversial policies is mobilising right-wing voters against them, its all-too-evident failure to address the worsening problems associated with the cost of living, health, education, housing and criminal offending will be having the opposite effect on the voters in its heartland.

THE NEWSHUB/REID RESEARCH POLL is much worse than it looks. Twelve months from now, when the actual voting papers, as opposed to responses to pollsters’ questions, are counted, Labour’s tally is likely to be much lower than 32 percent. Why? Because the level of voter abstention will be higher than it has been for many elections. Higher than the pollsters at Reid Research and other agencies are willing to assume, which means that the pre-election polls will flatter the Left by a significant margin. When the true level of abstention is revealed on Election Night – especially in relation to Māori, Pasifika and Pakeha voters under 30 – the vicious destruction of the Labour Party by older, whiter and righter voters will be explained.

The flight to abstention in 2023 will reflect a turning away from politics that is likely to gather strength as Labour’s contentious legislation on Hate Speech, Three Waters and Co-Governance contributes to a political climate of unprecedented bitterness and strife. While the determination of right-wing New Zealanders to defeat the Labour Government will only be strengthened by Labour’s intransigence, the voters of the centre-left will feel increasingly uneasy about defending Jacinda Ardern’s government. As the political rancour grows, the inclination of “mainstream” voters to “sit this one out” will grow along with it.

Certainly, the overseas experience – especially in the United States – confirms that the nastier politics gets, the stronger the temptation felt by moderate voters to simply walk away from the whole business. The Right’s supporters, by contrast, are energised by their political opponents’ escalations, and typically respond with even more outrageous escalations of their own. The fear inspired by these tactics is even less conducive to normal political engagement. Voters shut their doors against the unpleasantness and determine to have nothing to do with the extremists on both sides.

The dynamic was memorably captured by W.B. Yeats in his poem “The Second Coming”:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

While Labour’s refusal to back away from its most controversial policies is mobilising right-wing voters against them, its all-too-evident failure to address the worsening problems associated with the cost of living, health, education, housing and criminal offending will be having the opposite effect on the voters in its heartland.

Among Labour’s “base”, expectations have been high that the changes promised by the party since 2017 will make their lives easier. That these changes – at least on the “transformational” scale suggested by the Prime Minister – have not eventuated, cannot help but contribute to a mood of disillusionment among “Jacinda’s” most loyal supporters. Indeed, according to the results of a survey commissioned by Stuff Media, fully 35 percent of those asked how the Prime Minister made them feel, responded by saying she made them feel “disappointed”. A third replied, “concerned”. More than a quarter said, “angry”.

To make matters even more confusing, Labour has not spent the last five years attempting to re-define itself in the manner of the Fourth Labour Government. In fact, it has done the opposite, taking every opportunity to distance itself from “Rogernomics” and reaffirm its admiration for the heroes of the Labour Movement, Michael Joseph Savage and Norman Kirk.

To older Labour supporters, this is quite simply baffling, and not a little irritating. Many of them lived through the government of Norman Kirk, and are well aware that Jacinda Ardern’s period in office – putting to one side the exogenous shocks of the Christchurch Mosque Massacre and the Covid-19 Pandemic – has been nothing like “Big Norm’s”.

Undeterred, the PM continues to insist that hers is a government in the finest Labour tradition. In her speech to the party conference on Sunday, 6 November 2022, she reiterated her government’s claim to the historical mantle of its predecessors:

On the 9th floor of the Beehive building in Wellington, sitting directly behind my desk, is a picture of Michael Joseph Savage. You could say he’s on my shoulder but also ever so slightly in my ear.

Of course it was Savage and the first Labour Government that lifted New Zealand out of the depths of the Great Depression. Not by cutting taxes and services, but by investing in jobs, and building a social welfare safety net. They built the country’s first state home. And not long after these social reforms - New Zealand’s living standards were among some of the highest in the world. Not for the few, but for the many.

The Finance Minister who supported Savage, Walter Nash, then led Labour’s second government as it continued to build our nation’s social welfare system, while advocating on the world stage for peace over war after World War 2.

It was Norman Kirk and a Labour government who tilted the country towards a modern future with reforms of trade, health, the arts, and education. They worked hard to foster a renewed national identity and partnership with Maōri - all the while challenging global evil such as apartheid and nuclear testing.

It was a fight David Lange continued, making New Zealand nuclear free, while also righting the wrongs of the past by legalising homosexuality, and fully abolishing the death penalty.

Virtually every claim made by the Prime Minister in the passage quoted above is either historically contestable, or just plain, flat-out, wrong. For that very reason, it is a powerful illustration of the deeply flawed thinking that has led the Ardern Government to the brink of electoral ruin.

At its heart is a cynical contempt for the truth, and a smug conviction that the falsehoods scattered through it will not be noticed by anybody whose opinion matters. Labour’s leaders have been able to get away with this sort of rhetorical flim-flam since 2017 because the intervention of the unpredictable – Christchurch, Covid – helpfully distracted the country from its government’s moral vacuity. The longer the electorate has had to take stock of its government’s ethics, however, the less it has found to like.

It is certainly no accident, that on the issues that have so divided the nation – Hate Speech, Three Waters, Co-Governance – Jacinda Ardern and her ministers have been uncharacteristically tongue-tied. The redefinition of democracy which lies at the heart of all three proposals requires attributes this government simply does not possess. The intellectual ability to frame and present an argument. The straightforwardness needed to persuade even one’s own voters to accept it.

Small wonder New Zealanders feel disappointed, concerned, and angered by their Prime Minister. And, no wonder at all that, come Election Day, a very much larger number of them than usual will steadfastly decline to make their way to the nearest polling booth and cast a vote.

Yes, as they watch their older, whiter, and righter neighbours set off to destroy the Sixth Labour Government, they will experience a pang of guilt.

But, it will pass.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 8 November 2022.

Mistrusting Democracy.

Trust Us – We Know What We’re Doing: Why is this government so determined to shut-up, shut-down and shut-out the Right?

JAN TINETTI, Associate Minister of Education, is firmly of the view that those who subscribe to “an ideology of hate” have no place on a school board of trustees. So convinced is the Minister, that she is actively seeking administrative and/or legislative changes to prevent such persons from being nominated. Though doubtless undertaken with the best of intentions, Tinetti’s initiative is deeply troubling. In a democracy, the idea that the state is qualified to decide which ideologies are acceptable for candidates for public office to hold, and which are not, should be laughed off the political stage.

Prompting the Associate-Minister’s authoritarian musings, is the revelation that the convicted white supremacist, Philip Arp, the man sentenced to 21 months imprisonment for distributing terrorist Brenton Tarrant’s recording of the Christchurch Mosque Massacre, had been nominated for a seat on the Board of Trustees of Te Aratai College. Christchurch city councillor, Sarah Templeton, who has children at the school, angrily voiced her frustration that such individuals cannot be legally prevented from becoming trustees. Clearly, her objections have not fallen on deaf ears.

The problem with characters like Arp is that their behaviour is so prone to causing public outrage that  citizens find it all-too-easy for to switch-off their critical political faculties and remain silent when politicians call for Nazis to be declared ineligible for public office. After all, who wants to be seen sticking up for antisemitic fascists?

The answer, of course, is: we should all want to be seen resisting any attempt by the state to weed-out “undesirable” ideas, and the dubious individuals who hold them, before they get anywhere near a nomination form. As democrats, our firm position must always be that the only body qualified to decide who should, and should not, be elected to public office is the electorate itself. That is to say, You and I – the voters.

Do Tinetti and Templeton seriously believe that the parents of Te Aratai College’s ethnically and religiously diverse student body are in the slightest danger of electing Arp to the school’s Board of Trustees? If they do, then they are guilty of offering them the most outrageous insult. If they don’t, then what they are proposing will rob those same parent electors of the opportunity to condemn in the most emphatic fashion Arp’s vile beliefs and actions.

That Tinetti, a Cabinet Minister, seems unwilling to affirm that, in a working democracy, it is the citizen who possesses the power of decisive political agency, is worrying. It is not, however, an deficiency peculiar to herself. For some time now, both the Labour and Green parties have struggled to acknowledge in the electorate a collective wisdom more than equal to the task of distinguishing good from evil, right from wrong, democrats from fascists. Indeed, both parties show signs of believing the opposite to be true: that the electorate is neither wise enough, nor resilient enough, to recognise Nazi bullshit when they hear it.

Nowhere was this fundamental lack of faith in the fundamental decency and wisdom of the ordinary citizen more distressingly on display than in the days immediately following the Christchurch Mosque Shootings of March 2019. Completely ignoring the evidence of their own eyes, the Greens’ Marama Davidson and Golriz Ghahraman not-so-subtly insinuated that the entire “white” population of New Zealand was in some way complicit in Tarrant’s “lone wolf” terrorist outrage. That tens-of-thousands of New Zealanders – of all colours and creeds – were filling parks and stadiums to express their solidarity with New Zealand’s Muslim community failed to impress them.

Labour’s response was less insulting but, in a way, more troubling. In spite of delivering her internationally-acclaimed repudiation of Tarrant’s crime: “They are Us”; Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern clearly believed that neither “They” nor “Us” were strong enough to endure the harm, or resist the temptation, of “hate speech”. Seconded by the hilariously misnamed Human Rights Commission, the Labour-led Government set out to radically reduce in size democracy’s foundation-stone – the citizen’s right to free expression.

Sadly, Ardern was pushing on an open left-wing door. Once the most determined defenders of free speech, the New Zealand Left has, for more than a decade, been evincing less-and-less enthusiasm for the critical democratic insight that freedom of expression must never become a privilege, to be rationed amongst “our side’s” best friends, but remain a right, freely available even to our worst enemies.

The Covid-19 Pandemic made matters worse. When the fight is with a potentially fatal virus, individuals and groups communicating false information can endanger the health of millions. In these circumstances, the temptation is strong to rank the health of the democratic system well below that of the population as a whole. Or, even worse, to start seeing the key elements of democracy: freedom of expression; freedom of assembly; freedom of association; as the vectors of a dangerous political disease.

This is now the grave danger confronting New Zealand: a Labour Government which has convinced itself that people communicating lies can undermine the health and well-being of the entire population – rather than a tragic fraction of it. Traumatised by the occupation of Parliament Grounds (by people already traumatised by the Government’s imposition of vaccination mandates they had promised not to use) politicians and journalists, alike, have convinced themselves that the purveyors of “misinformation” and “disinformation” now constitute a direct threat to the security of the state.

Which takes us right back to Jan Tinetti and the “threat” of Nazis on school boards of trustees. The political class’s historical mistrust of democracy, long resisted by the Left, has now been embraced by what is left of it. No longer a “bottom up” party, Labour has grown increasingly fearful that its “progressive” policies are unacceptable to a majority of the electorate. Ardern’s government, and its supporters, are terrified that the Far Right will opportunistically seize upon this public unease and whip it into some sort of fascist majority. Hence their determination to shut them up, shut them down and shut them out.

Except, as the recent history of the United States makes clear, this determination to keep the “deplorables” as far away from power as possible, is actually the fastest and most effective way to bring on the destabilising lurch to the Right that the progressive Left most fears. Poorly educated though they may be, ordinary citizens are not stupid. They can tell when they’re not sufficiently trusted or respected to be given a decisive role in the government of their own country.

With distressing speed, New Zealand is dividing itself into two hostile, camps. The smaller counts within it the better part of the better educated, is positioned on the commanding heights of the state, and considers itself the brain and conscience of the nation. The larger camp, nothing like so clever, seethes with frustration and resentment, anxiety and rage. It fears that its world: the world it grew up in; the world it knows and trusts; is shifting on its foundations.

What remains to be seen is which outcome represents the greater catastrophe for New Zealand: that the policies of those occupying the heights should proceed unchecked; or that the depths should find a leader equal to the task of bringing them down?

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 29 August 2022.

Let’s Not Make 2023 About Abortion.

No Common Ground: The destructive and punitive impulses aroused by the abortion issue make a rational, let alone a civil, debate virtually impossible. Indeed, the very idea that those on both sides of the abortion issue might be decent and caring individuals, whose opposing positions are based on reasonable and eminently defensible philosophical propositions, religious principles, medical facts and socio-economic realities, will be rejected as dangerous nonsense.

WHETHER OR NOT ABORTION emerges as a major issue following next year’s elections depends on National’s candidate selections. National lost 13 seats in 2020, and on current polling can be reasonably confident about reclaiming most of them in 2023. Much then depends on the beliefs – pro-choice or pro-life – of the candidates selected over the next few months. If National replenishes its caucus with pro-life MPs, and ACT emerges with a reasonable number of pro-lifers in its own, then the debate may, once again, be set alight.

The reignition of the Abortion Debate will become a dead certainty, however, if Brian Tamaki is successful at bringing together the fractious Far-Right political parties under a single banner. Should his new conservative coalition crest the 5 percent MMP threshold, the outbreak of an American-style culture war will be very hard to prevent. Moreover, if Labour and the Greens sustain significant losses in 2023, as current polling suggest they will, then that war will be very hard to win. Certainly, a woman’s right to a safe and legal abortion will be among the first casualties.

This state of affairs will not be attributable entirely to the electoral success of the Far Right. In both Labour and the Greens a defeat of sufficient magnitude to bring the likes of Tamaki’s Christian soldiers into Parliament will likely generate a particularly vicious backlash against the social-radicalism which conservative leftists will be quick to blame for their party’s punishment at the polls.

After all, it’s not as if Labour’s te Tiriti-driven, feminist and LGBTQI factions will be able to point to a proud collection of policy successes in relation to poverty, housing, health and education – quite the reverse. Working-class party members (if any remain) will have every reason to demand a thorough-going purge of middle-class social-radicals from Labour’s ranks. A similar purge, mutatis mutandis, will sweep away the identarian Greens.

If such purges do not eventuate, and the two left-wing parties remain in the grip of identity politicians, social-radicals and ethno-nationalists, then it is difficult to see them making a swift recovery at the polls. At least initially, the voting public is likely to cast about for a political movement less alienating, and more encouraging, of “mainstream” electoral support. If the rightward tendencies within Labour and the Greens do not succeed in providing these conservative left-wing voters with such a vehicle, then they will call forth somebody better equipped to offer them a ride.

Historically, the damage inflicted by such right-wing re-settings of left-wing parties’ ideological compasses has been enormous. Convinced that a Labour Party as left-wing as Norman Kirk’s could never be re-elected, the rightward elements that would eventually give New Zealand “Rogernomics” spent fifteen years destroying Labour as a party of economic redistribution. After years of bitter factional strife, the party’s left-wingers were finally driven from its ranks. Labour only survived to reclaim the Treasury Benches in 1999 on account of being restrained from veering too far from its electoral base by the competitive presence of Jim Anderton’s Alliance and Jeanette Fitzsimons’ and Rod Donald’s Greens.

The New Zealand of the 2020s is not, however, the New Zealand of the 1990s. Our thoroughly digitalised society no longer possesses the human resources capable of creating new political parties dedicated to the nation-building and/or nation-restoring missions of the Alliance and NZ First. Corny though it may sound, at the heart of these two essentially patriotic electoral projects lay an undeniable love of country.

Thirty years on, the creation of political movements is driven much more by the voters’ intense hatred of what their enemies: neoliberals, colonisers, patriarchs, heterosexuals – take your pick – have done to Aotearoa-New Zealand. Where once the urge was to build and/or restore, today’s activists seek only to attack, punish and destroy.

In relation to the issue of abortion, these destructive and punitive impulses will make it virtually impossible for the debate to proceed on a rational, let alone a civil, basis. Indeed, the very idea that those on both sides of the abortion issue might be decent and caring individuals, whose opposing positions are based on reasonable and eminently defensible philosophical propositions, religious principles, medical facts and socio-economic realities, will be rejected as dangerous nonsense. Pro-lifers are no such thing, they are simply misogynistic religious bigots. Pro-choicers stand condemned as monsters for whom human life matters less than personal convenience.

In these circumstances, simply to raise the issue of abortion is to set up the conditions for the most reckless expressions of hatred and loathing. In the Age of Twitter, Tik-Tok and Instagram, which is to say, in the Age of Declarative Solipsism, extremism will always arrive on the battlefield firstest, with the mostest. Small wonder, then, that Christopher Luxon is so determined to make sure that the battle never takes place.

Sometimes, as the US Supreme Court may yet discover, doing nothing is the only sensible thing to do.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 30 June 2022.