Numbers Game.

Respect Existence, Or Expect Resistance? There may well have been 50,000 pairs of feet “Marching For Nature” down Auckland’s Queen Street on Saturday afternoon, but the figure that impresses the Coalition Government is the 1,450,000 pairs of Auckland feet that were somewhere else.

IN THE ERA OF DRONES and Artificial Intelligence, how hard can it be to provide an accurate count of protesters? Knowing how many Aucklanders were willing to make the effort and join the Greenpeace-organised “March For Nature” on Saturday afternoon (8/6/24) would make the calculation of its significance so much easier. If the figure of 20,000 offered by some participants is correct, then the turnout was good, but not spectacular. But, if the old rule-of-thumb which reckons that if Queen Street is tightly-packed with protesters, from Aotea Square to Britomart, then you’re looking at turnout well in excess of 30,000 citizens – then that would be an excellent result.

In earlier times, reports of Britomart filling-up as Aotea Square was still emptying-out would have sparked estimates of 50,000 protesters – a monster march. Certainly, some of the photos taken on Saturday have that look about them. Either way, Greenpeace deserves a solid pat on the back for its ability to mobilise its supporters.

But, does any of it matter? Because even a march of 50,000 protesters, out of an Auckland population of 1.5 million, would struggle to satisfy the definition of a “revolutionary crowd”. To get some idea of what that looks like, check out the huge demonstrations overwhelming the Hungarian capital, Budapest, in the run-up to the EU parliamentary elections. (6-9/6/24) It’s been a while since New Zealanders turned out in those sort of numbers for a political cause – although the School Strike 4 Climate demonstrations of 2019 came close.

The answer to the question “Does any of it matter?” delivered by Resources Minister, Shane Jones, less than 24 hours after 20,000-50,000 protesters marched down Queen Street, was brutal: “Government to reverse oil-exploration ban.”

The decision to cease oil and gas prospecting, announced by Jacinda Ardern and Megan Woods in 2018, ranks as one of Greenpeace New Zealand’s proudest achievements. By reversing that decision, almost before the paint on the “March For Nature” placards was dry, Jones and his Coalition colleagues were telling Norman, Greenpeace, the Greens, and all the putative defenders of “Freddie the Frog”, that they could stick their placards where the sun don’t shine. The only slogan registering with “Matua Shane”, for the foreseeable future, will be Sarah Palin’s fossil-fuel classic: “Drill, baby, drill!”

“Natural gas is critical to keeping our lights on and our economy running, especially during peak electricity demand and when generation dips because of more intermittent sources like wind, solar and hydro,” said the Minister. “I want a considered discussion about how we use our natural resources to improve the security and affordability of energy and resources supplies, stimulate regional economic development opportunities, and increase New Zealand’s self-sufficiency to protect against volatile international markets.”

But, “considered discussion” isn’t really on anybody’s agenda at the moment. Jones has a long-standing and deep-seated contempt for the people he dismisses as “greenies”. In 2014 he told the NZ Herald’s Claire Trevett that “he once told Labour’s leadership he would not be a minister if he was ‘second fiddle’ to [then] Green co-leader Russel Norman as deputy prime minister or in a senior economic role.”

That contempt continues to be passionately reciprocated by virtually the entire environmental movement. Unsurprisingly, the response from Greenpeace to Jones’s media release was blunt:

“Shane Jones is dreaming. The oil exploration industry won’t risk coming back to Aotearoa because they know that it’s not worth coming all this way to fail again”, sneered its spokesperson (and seasoned exploration disrupter) Niamh O’Flynn. “For nearly a decade under the Key Government, together with iwi and hapū the length of Aotearoa, we fought tirelessly to push oil company after oil company out of the country and we succeeded. Oil and gas won’t win in Aotearoa.”

The political parties responsible for the original ban, Labour and the Greens were no less direct:

“Minister Jones is hell-bent on ignoring options of energy that are future-proofed and up to global standards,” said the co-imposer of the 2018 ban, Labour’s Megan Woods.

“This is a manufactured crisis. We know there are reliable and cost-effective energy sources available to New Zealand that can be used without destroying the country. New Zealand is being taken backwards. This government is being cruel to future generations, this will take decades to undo – if the damage can be undone at all.”

Green Party co-leader, Chloe Swarbrick, was equally uncompromising:

“The science is clear that fossil fuels must stay in the ground to limit global warming within 1.5 degrees of warming. This Government’s actions are anti-science and show a flagrant disregard for international climate commitments which could lead to huge costs down the line.”

Swarbrick also had words for the Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon:

“The climate crisis is the defining issue of our time. If Christopher Luxon is unwilling to look in the mirror and deal with the gap between his rhetoric and the reality of his government’s actions, the least he could do is face up to the New Zealanders he’s selling down the river.”

What, then, is the explanation for the Coalition Government’s confidence that neither the environmentalists’ political rhetoric, nor their feet on the street, pose a serious threat to the Coalition’s electoral chances? The answer is bound-up with Jones’s conspicuous reference to “keeping the lights on”.

National, Act and NZ First have convinced themselves (or allowed pollsters and focus groups to do the job for them) that a very large number of voters have a great deal in common with those raised-in-the-faith Catholics who genuflect reflexively before the holy imagery of their religion without giving the gesture much, if any, thought. Like conservatives the world over, New Zealand’s Coalition Government is of the view that although, if asked, most ordinary voters will happily mouth environmental slogans, considerably fewer are willing to freeze in the dark for them.

Minister Jones’s wager is that if it’s a choice between watching Netflix, powering-up their cellphones, and snuggling-up in front of the heater, or, keeping the fossil fuels that power our extraordinary civilisation “in the ground”, so that Freddie the Frog’s habitat can remain pristine and unmolested, then their response will be the same as the Minister’s: “Bye, bye Freddie!” No matter what people may say; no matter how superficially sincere their genuflections to the “crisis” of Climate Change; when the lights go out, all they really want is for them to come back on again. Crises far away, and crises in the future, cannot compete with crises at home – right here, right now.

The Transport Minister, Simeon Brown, knows how this works. Everyone supports public transport and cycle-ways, right up until the moment their holiday journey slows to a snail’s pace among endless lines of road cones, or a huge pothole wrecks their new car’s suspension.

Idealism versus realism: that’s the way the parties of the Right frame this issue; and they are betting their electoral future on the assumption that the realists outnumber the idealists. There may well have been 50,000 pairs of feet “Marching For Nature” down Auckland’s Queen Street on Saturday afternoon, but the figure that impresses the Coalition Government is the 1,450,000 pairs of Auckland feet that were somewhere else.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 10 June 2024.

“Where Our Ambition Lies”

Time To Choose: Climate Change Commissioner, Rod Carr’s advice to Jacinda Ardern’s Government is uncompromising. The measure of our success at coping with global warming will be determined by how profoundly New Zealanders are willing to change their way of life.

“WE GOT THIS”, would seem to be the Labour Government’s response to the Climate Change Commission’s (CCC) uncompromising report. The media statement released on Sunday, 31 January, under the names of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and the Minister for Climate Change James Shaw, is nothing if not calming and reassuring.

“The report demonstrates we have the tools we need to achieve our target, but calls on us to accelerate our work. As a Government we are committed to picking up the pace and focusing much more on decarbonisation and reducing emissions rather than overly relying on forestry.”

Such remarkable sang-froid in the face of what some commentators are already describing as a change agenda every bit as revolutionary as Roger Douglas’ and Ruth Richardson’s. Having steadfastly refused to achieve transformation, the Prime Minister and her government are at risk of having transformation thrust upon them.

It is encouraging to learn that the Government is confident it possesses the tools to do the job. Encouraging – but not surprising. No one has ever suggested that successive New Zealand governments lacked the means to address the rapidly intensifying problems of global warming. For the best part of three decades, the question has rather been: “Do they have the will?” And for 30 years the answer has come back as: “No.”

The CCC’s report makes it clear that this lack of commitment is no longer acceptable if the target of reducing New Zealand’s net carbon emissions to zero by 2050 is to be met:

“[T]he Government must pick up the pace. Aotearoa will not meet its targets without strong and decisive action now to drive low emissions technologies and behaviour change across all sectors. 2050 is not far away – particularly if you consider the life span of infrastructure, vehicles, buildings – and people.”

It is about here that the problems begin. Outside the exceptional spheres of the Christchurch Mosques Massacre and Covid-19, the Ardern Government has, to date, offered no persuasive evidence that it knows how to do “decisive”.

Promise decisive action? Check.

Ask for advice on how best to take decisive action? Check.

Deliver decisive action? Ah well, you know, there are no silver bullet solutions to the problems this government inherited from its predecessors.

If the CCC’s recommendations are to be implemented, however, this government is going to need a significant quantity of silver.

Two of the principal contributors to our carbon emissions profile are the agriculture and transportation sectors. If our recent history is any guide, then driving down emissions levels in these key areas will be resisted furiously by industry lobbyists of every stripe.

To resist such pressure will require of our political leaders and senior public servants a so far unmanifested degree of staunchness. The exploiters of our soils and the users of our roads are not known for their willingness to compromise. They are, however, in/famous for getting what they want. And, at this moment, what they want most, and will move heaven and earth to get, is time.

For decades the industries in the crosshairs of carbon emissions reduction (most particularly the oil industry) devoted the greater part of their defensive effort to denying the reality of anthropogenic global warming. In this they were tragically successful, most notably in the United States, where, for the last four years, big emitters have enjoyed the protection of a climate-change-denying President. With the arrival of the Biden Administration, however, that protection has been removed. What the industries at the heart of the climate emergency in both the United States and New Zealand are rolling-out as fast as they can is a strategy of distraction, diversion and delay.

New Zealand’s dairy industry has begun already. Pre-empting the release of the CCC’s “Advise to Government” report by several days, Dairy NZ released a report indicating that the New Zealand dairy industry is already delivering the world’s lowest carbon footprint.

Measures intended to further reduce this country’s already small footprint, the Ag-Research produced report argues, will compromise seriously its international competitiveness and bring about an economically damaging reduction in New Zealand’s dairy production. The report further argues that any serious reduction in New Zealand’s dairy exports will only lead to foreign dairy producers, with much larger carbon footprints, making up the shortfall. New Zealand dairy farmers will suffer; the New Zealand economy will suffer; the New Zealand people will suffer; and the quantity of greenhouse gasses emitted globally will not be reduced. In short: a lose, lose, lose, lose situation.

As Richard Harman, writing for his Politik website, sees it:

“[A]s far as Dairy NZ is concerned the real point of the [report] and its publication [on Wednesday, 27 January 2021] is to try and get in ahead of what starting on Monday will be a national debate on who should cut what to enable New Zealand to reach its Paris Agreement targets.”

The road transport industry and private vehicle owners will be no less interested than dairy farmers in making sure that they are not the “who” lumbered with the burden of fulfilling New Zealand’s obligations.

So it has ever been when push comes to shove on Climate Change: everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.

The CCC’s boss, Rod Carr, is only too aware of this problem. He knows that the measure of our success will be determined by how profoundly New Zealanders are willing to change their way of life:

“Now we must decide where our ambition lies. For my part, I want to be able to say I did as much as I could as soon as I knew about the impact I am having on this world. Increasingly I am sharing this sentiment with my fellow New Zealanders. To achieve a cleaner, greener, healthier and more sustainable future, no emission reduction is too small – or too soon. All of us have a part to play and a contribution to make.”

As ever, Greenpeace NZ Director, Russel Norman – the bane of the dairy and road transport industries alike – cuts to the heart of the matter in his tweet on the CCC’s report:

“The Climate Commission message in its draft advice today that fossil gas is no bridge to zero energy emissions and that pine forestry can only be a marginal part of the NZ strategy is really welcome.”

If Norman’s right, then this is a truly revolutionary admission on the part of the CCC. Contained within it is the crucial recognition that ours is a civilisation based on the ready availability of coal, oil and natural gas. That this extraordinary twenty-first century world we inhabit could not exist without the cheap and abundant energy extracted from fossil fuels. Unfortunately, those same fossil fuels lie at the heart of the threat posed to humanity’s future by runaway climate change. So if, as Norman alleges, the CCC’s draft advice to the government envisages a fundamental shift away from fossil fuels, then the level of economic and social transformation New Zealanders will be expected to shoulder between now and 2050 is enormous. It is not only the source of our energy that the CCC is calling upon us to revisit, but the entire shape of our society.

In the report’s own words:

“We have heard consistently through our engagement that localised transition planning will be needed where communities work together to tailor a transition plan to their particular needs and aspirations. We also heard that this localised transition planning will need to be proactive, inclusive and transparent, and co-developed through a bottom up approach that involves iwi/Māori, local government, local communities, businesses, civil society groups and other stakeholders.”

What’s being demanded here is not a silver bullet, Jacinda, but a red/green one. You got that?

This essay was posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 1 February 2021.

The Greens' "Economic Cred": Hard Won - Easily Lost.

Little Feet: Candidates vying to succeed Dr Russel Norman as the Green Party's Male Co-Leader. From Left: Gareth Hughes MP, Kevin Hague MP, James Shaw MP and Vernon Tava. When tasked by The Nation's Lisa Owen with supplying the answer to a simple economic question, three out of the four candidates failed dismally. His successor will have to work very hard to reclaim even a little of Dr Norman's hard won economic credibility.

 

IT WAS IMPRESSIVE – but it wasn’t real. The Greens’ apparent mastery of economics turned out to be just one man’s – Dr Russel Norman’s – achievement. Hopefully, Dr Norman’s successor will attain an equal level of economic literacy.

 

Because most commentators agree that, throughout John Key’s second term as Prime Minister, the Greens’ co-leader, Dr Norman, easily outstripped his centre-left rivals as the best informed and most articulate economic spokesperson on the Opposition benches.

 

With rare political discipline, Dr Norman acquired a good working knowledge of economics and spoke its language as fluently as Finance Minister, Bill English. Perhaps more so.

 

Quite rightly, Dr Norman had identified the Greens’ unfamiliarity with mainstream economics as a serious weakness. Why should the voters take them seriously if they cannot talk convincingly about the exchange rate’s impact on manufacturing; the effectiveness of the Reserve Bank’s handling of monetary policy; or whether employers are responding adequately to rising levels of worker productivity?

 

It was all very well to talk about a future based on “Green Growth” and “Green Jobs”, but voters living in the here-and-now needed to feel confident that the Green Party understood what was happening in New Zealand’s economy – to their jobs.

 

To become a great artist, it is said, the art student must first learn all the rules and master all the techniques of painting. Only then will he be ready to break all the rules and develop new techniques of his own. Dr Norman clearly believed that the same applied to economics. Only after familiarising themselves with the “dismal science” of classical economics would the Greens be ready to preach the more joyful gospel of sustainability and self-sufficiency.

 

Dr Russel Norman: Big shoes to fill.

 

Dr Norman’s efforts in this all-important sphere of politics did not go unnoticed. Mr Key’s second term had hardly begun when the Parliamentary Press Gallery began referring to Dr Norman as “the real Leader of the Opposition”. This wasn’t solely due to the fact that the Labour caucus’s internal feuding was wreaking havoc upon the Party’s political credibility. It was also about the way Dr Norman, as the Greens’ economic spokesperson, was going head-to-head with the Finance Minister in the House – and not losing.

 

Did all this praise go to Dr Norman’s head? Is that why he raised the possibility that, in a future Labour-Green coalition government, the Finance portfolio might well end up in his own hands? (The very idea was enough to cause serious conniptions in Labour’s ranks!) Was Dr Norman’s much derided suggestion that New Zealand embark on a limited degree of quantitative easing all the evidence his critics needed to prove that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing?

 

Actually, neither of these accusations stack up. Subsequent events were to reinforce Labour’s serious lack of talent in matters economic. And the journalists, so quick to pour scorn upon Mr Norman’s QE proposals, revealed much more about their own, and their government briefers’, ignorance of economics than they did about the Green co-leader’s.

 

In spite of the fact that Labour’s policies on superannuation and capital gains had been in place for more than three years, neither the party’s leader, nor its finance spokesperson, proved equal to the task of selling them to the electorate. A Labour-Green coalition could have done a lot worse than making Dr Norman its Minister of Finance.

 

Not that any of this matters now: not after last week’s edition of The Nation on TV3. In the course of introducing the four candidates competing for the co-leader’s job Dr Norman is stepping away from (Gareth Hughes, Kevin Hague, James Shaw and Vernon Tava) the show’s co-host, Lisa Owen, asked each man to answer a quick-fire question on the economy. What’s the unemployment rate? The inflation rate? The Reserve Bank’s official cash-rate? The economic growth rate?

 

Only one of the candidates, Mr Shaw, even came close to supplying the correct answer. In less than five minutes, Dr Norman’s hard graft over more than three years: his gift of (as Ms Owen put it) “economic cred’”; was needlessly thrown away.

 

None of the questions were difficult. A few seconds on the Statistics New Zealand website was all that they required. That none of the candidates had devoted even this much time to acquiring the answers, makes Dr Norman’s economic literacy an even more singular achievement.

 

Some very hard yards await his successor.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 20 March 2015.

Repositioning Rightwards: The Political Consequences Of Russel Norman's Departure

Victim Of Labour's Failure: Had they but known it, Russel Norman was Labour's best hope for an uncomplicated left-wing coalition partner. Norman promised the doubters in his party a seat at the table - if Labour could but win the election. Labour's failure rendered Norman's political project untenable. His decision to stand down as co-leader means that the party's long-delayed move to the right can now begin.

 

RUSSEL NORMAN’S DECISION to step down as the Greens co-leader reflects the party’s longstanding determination to reposition itself rightward. For eight years Norman’s personal energy and political discipline succeeded in turning aside the pleas of a clear majority of the Greens’ membership to break the party out of its left-wing ghetto. Only by exploiting to the full the party’s consensus-based decision-making processes was he able to keep it anchored firmly on the left of New Zealand politics.

 

For eight years Norman strove to fashion a Green Party manifesto that was not only compatible with the Labour Party’s policy platform but would, to a remarkable degree, serve as its inspiration. His astonishing and largely successful mission to master the challenges of contemporary economics; an effort which allowed him to participate in policy debates with an authority sadly lacking in his predecessors, and to drag Labour along in his wake, is probably the most impressive achievement of his leadership.

 

It was this ability to render the Greens’ left-wing policies economically intelligible that allowed Norman to spike the guns of the Greens’ very sizeable “moderate” (for want of a better description) faction. The latter had demonstrated its power by installing Metiria Turei as co-leader – rather than the overtly left-wing Sue Bradford – following Jeanette Fitzsimons’ retirement in 2008. Had the rules made it possible, this same faction would have radically repositioned the Greens as an ideologically agnostic environmentalist party of the political centre; one capable of forming a coalition with either of the main political parties.

 

Norman was only able to appease these moderate Greens by holding out to them the promise of real power as members of a Labour-Green coalition government. Following the party’s record level of electoral support in 2011, and the narrowness of National’s victory, Norman's vision, at least initially, looked like a realistic prospect. What Norman could not have anticipated was the Labour Party’s self-indulgent descent into fratricidal factional conflict. Three Labour leaders in as many years destroyed any chance of a Labour-Green coalition. It also fatally compromised Norman’s political position.

 

The intrusion of Kim Dotcom and the Internet-Mana alliance only made things worse.

 

The coup de grace that finally extinguished the Green Left’s survival chances was the Labour Party’s very public spurning of the Greens’ (i.e. Norman’s) invitation to campaign together. Labour clearly regarded the Greens as mad, bad and dangerous to know, a judgement reinforced in the last few weeks of the election campaign when it became increasingly obvious to Green Party members that David Cunliffe was much more disposed to forming a coalition with NZ First’s Winston Peters than Norman and the Greens.

 

The final, ignominious defeat of the Left on 20 September 2014 undoubtedly caused cries of “We told you so!” to reverberate through the Green Party organisation. Combined with the slight, but unexpected, decline in the Greens’ Party Vote (the polls suggested, and the Green leadership were anticipating, an outcome of 14 percent-plus) the Labour Party’s abysmal performance, not to mention its unreconstructed hostility, when the chips were down, towards all things Green, rendered Norman’s position untenable. It sealed his fate.

 

It is highly unlikely that Labour fully grasps what a friend they have lost in Norman, nor how very uncomfortable their relationship with the Greens is about to become.

 

If Labour is lucky, the Greens’ transition from Left to Centre will be gradual. The supporters of Kevin Hague, widely tipped to be Norman’s successor, will be arguing that his accession offers the best chance of taking the party from its present position of political irrelevancy to that of permanent kingmaker in good order.

 

For those who favour a much more decisive break with the traditional Green “brand”, by electing co-leaders who can make a plausible case for representing a Green Party which has moved on from its radical left-wing past, James Shaw is the obvious choice. One has only to look at the official video of his maiden parliamentary speech to realise that this is a very different sort of Green to Russel Norman – and Kevin Hague.

 

Much depends on whether the moderates want to play softball or hardball. If they opt for the latter, then expect to see a full-scale challenge mounted for the Green Party leadership. That would not only entail the nomination of Shaw, but also of the fearsomely capable and articulate Julie-Anne Genter.

 

A Shaw-Genter ticket would constitute a re-branding exercise with a vengeance. Telegenic, articulate, non-threatening and business-friendly, Shaw and Genter would signal in a way no other pairing could hope to replicate that the Greens are ready to take their place at the Cabinet Table – regardless of who holds the lease.

 

Under Rod Donald and Jeanette Fitzsimons, Russel Norman and Metiria Turei, the Greens belonged to the Left. Under its next set of co-leaders, especially if their names are Shaw and Genter, the Greens will belong to whoever offers them the best deal.

 

So long, Russel – you’ll be missed.

 

This essay was posted simultaneously on The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road blogsites on Friday, 30 January 2015.

Three’s Company: Labour-Greens-NZ First may just be the coalition New Zealanders are looking for.

Conservatively Radical: The leaders of the Labour-Greens-NZ First combo have just 11 days to campaign for a Government possessing the collective wisdom to distinguish necessary from unnecessary change, and the political courage to make it happen.

 

WITH LESS THAN A FORTNIGHT to go until Election Day, the broad outlines of the voters’ choice are becoming clear. Labour has refined its position to one of anticipating a tripartite arrangement with the Greens and NZ First. The National Party, unmoved by recent polls, is hoping the voters allow them to begin their third term with the same support partners as their first and second: Act, United Future and the Maori Party. John Key cannot, however, discount the possibility of having to enlarge his support combination by including Colin Craig’s Conservative Party.

 

Both of these configurations reflect the central political reality of this election campaign: that New Zealanders have become considerably more cautious and (small-c) conservative than they have been for many decades. If, for whatever reason, voters desert National in sufficient numbers to allow Labour, the Greens and NZ First to make a centre-left government, it is clear that it will be a coalition shorn of radical policy.

 

David Cunliffe is sending three important messages to the electorate. 1) That he considers NZ First indispensable to effecting a change of government. 2) By very publicly ruling out any kind of accommodation with either Internet-Mana or the Maori Party he is signalling that he understands “Middle New Zealand’s” current distaste for radical ideas. 3) He is inviting them to interpret his reaching-out to NZ First as proof of his moderate bona fides.

 

John Key faces a very different set of problems. On the right of New Zealand politics there is a growing impatience with what it scorns as “Labour-Lite” policies. In this context, Nicky Hager’s revelations concerning Judith Collins will have come as a Godsend to the Prime Minister. They have allowed him to temporarily spike the guns of Ms Collin’s and her Far-Right faction of the National Party caucus and reassured nervous National supporters that the Government is not about to embark on any Tea Party-like excursions into ideological extremism.

 

The downside of Hager’s disruption of the election campaign is the bleeding away of votes it has occasioned to National’s right-wing rivals.  Both NZ First and the Conservatives have benefited from these defections (the former more considerably than the latter) and this raises the very real possibility that Key, in order to remain in office, will be forced to make the sort of political concessions that could seriously destabilise his government.

 

If he opts for NZ First, he will be obliged to anchor his government very firmly in the harbour of Mr Peter’s caring, paternalistic and overtly interventionist “one nation” conservatism. This will outrage his own neoliberal colleagues, strengthen the hand of Collins’s supporters, alienate Act and empower those Conservative MPs (we are assuming here that the Conservative Party crosses the 5 percent MMP threshold) excluded from Key’s political solar system.

 

On the other hand, if he throws in his lot with Colin Craig’s Conservatives he will have hitched his wagon to a new and untested band of political eccentrics and Tea Party-type “ultras” with the capacity to drag his hitherto unthreatening and predictable centre-right government into the ideological badlands. In the finely balanced Parliament both sides are expecting post-20 September, the Conservatives could very easily prove to be much more trouble than they’re worth. And, if they were seduced into making common-cause with the equally eccentric Ms Collins, the Conservatives could conceivably end up threatening the Prime Minister himself. Craig’s messiah complex is unmistakeable – and there can be only one!

 

Clearly, the potential for instability and ideological confusion is considerably greater on the right of New Zealand politics than it is on the left. Once Internet-Mana are excluded from the constellation of acceptable Opposition stars, what the electorate is presented with in a Labour-Greens-NZ First combination is a coalition government erected on two extremely solid foundation-stones: economic nationalism and environmentalism.

 

Popular antipathy to land sales to foreigners (almost certainly intensified by Act leader Jamie Whyte’s ill-considered intervention over the weekend) is reflected in the manifestoes of all three parties. Combine Labour, Green and NZ First pledges to put the heft of the state behind a major effort to improve the productivity of New Zealand Incorporated with the growing public concern about the health of New Zealand’s waterways because of “dirty dairying”, and the populist potential of the Labour-Green-NZ First policy agenda is readily apparent. All three parties will find themselves free to manoeuvre on extensive common ground.

 

David Cunliffe, Russel Norman, Metiria Turei and Winston Peters have just 11 days to convince a confused and jittery electorate that although a Labour-Greens-Internet-Mana combination may have represented an unmistakeable and unwarranted lurch to the Left, a Labour-Greens-NZ First combo could turn out to be something much more palatable.

 

All three parties must campaign hard for a Government possessing the collective wisdom to distinguish necessary from unnecessary change, and the political courage to make it happen.

 

This essay was posted on Bowalley Road  and The Daily Blog blogsites on Monday, 8 September 2014.

Shouting From Beyond The Crossroads

Green Marx: The growing awareness that Capitalism, unchecked, will ultimately consume the life-giving properties of the planet itself is challenging Green parties' reliance on "Green Technology" and the technological fix. Karl Marx saw the overthrow of the capitalist system as a social and ethical necessity, but it is now clear that revolution and human survival are no longer separable.

DO YOU SHOUT at the television? Indulge in lengthy harangues at the radio? I’m afraid I do. Increasingly so, given that it’s an election year and there’s a growing number of things to shout at television about. Time was when I’d have attributed this habit of berating inanimate objects to advancing years. But young people assure me that nowadays they do it too.

 

Last Sunday I gave my lungs a good workout during TVNZ’s current affairs programme Q+A. Bryce Edwards, the University of Otago’s peripatetic commentator on all things political (and compiler of that utterly invaluable compendium of political news and commentary, NZ Politics Daily) was criticising the Greens for attempting to use Green Capitalism to save the planet.

 

“Awh, jeez, Bryce, give us a break!”, I yelled at the offending collection of electronic circuitry, “How many viewers do you suppose are going to hold that against them? And how many extra votes do you reckon they’ll attract by decking out Karl Marx in a green suit?”

 

Later that morning, however, after my blood pressure had returned to normal, I began to think more carefully about Bryce’s criticism. By mid-afternoon I’d already half-convinced myself that the young political studies lecturer was right.

 

If even the Greens aren’t prepared to call things by their true names – who is?

 

Can you really prefix “Green” to the global phenomenon that’s pouring more and more Carbon Dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere? From Brazil to Indonesia: in all the world’s denuded tropical rainforests, what else but Capitalism is powering the chainsaws of the tree-fellers? Could the gaunt and exhausted construction workers recruited from across the Muslim world really distinguish between the Capitalism that vomited up their squalid shanty towns and the Capitalism that’s erecting Dubai’s towering “eco-friendly” architecture? And, much closer to home, can Green Capitalism really displace the Cow-Cockey Capitalism pouring nitrates and phosphates into our waterways? Or the Carbon Capitalism sinking drill-shafts into our deepest seas?

 

Green Capitalism? You might as well speak of Green Cancer. But, if you’re looking for alternatives – why not ‘Man Crusher’? Or, ‘Earth Eater’?

 

I’m old enough to remember when the first whispers began to spread about the limits to capitalist growth. When individuals like Rachel Carson and groups like the Club of Rome first connected the insatiable appetites of industrial capitalism with the gaping rents that were appearing all around the globe in the fragile webs of life we were only just beginning to call ecosystems.

 

It was around the time when, in the manner of a glittering cosmic cue, the Apollo astronauts began sending back to humankind the first images of its tiny blue planet floating – so beautiful, so vulnerable and so alone – in the infinite reaches of space.

 

And it was here, in New Zealand, that those whispers first cohered into an audible political voice. Formed in 1972, the Values Party was the first to openly question the idea that economic growth could be pursued endlessly and without cost.

 

It was heresy, but it stuck. Tens-of-thousands had just signed the ‘Save Manapouri’ petition. The Labour Party’s election ads depicted the environment in an Agee preserving jar! Tantalisingly close to the surface of the voters’ minds, not only in New Zealand but all across the developed world, a realisation of extraordinary power was taking shape. That humanity had reached a cross roads.

 

Down one road lay something new, something transformative. A new, lighter and less destructive way of being human. Charles Reich called it “The Greening of America”. Values promised to take us "Beyond Tomorrow".

 

Down the other road lay more: much more; unbelievably more. Waiting for us was a cornucopia of technological wonders that also offered something new and transformative. A human society increasingly wired to its machines, and those machines becoming more and more human.

 

But such magic technology could only ever be the distillation of processes fatally destructive of the planet’s capacity to maintain ecosystems conducive to human survival.

 

Capitalism’s technological fix, founded upon the shifting sands of cheap energy, finite resources and cheap labour is, ultimately, unsustainable. Its ever-more miraculous industrial alchemy can only be sustained by cannibalising its own children and heating up the planet’s atmosphere.

 

These are unglad tidings for any political party to bear. Values tried to warn New Zealand about the ultimate cost of Capitalism but only succeeded in splitting itself apart. Like the rest of us, Values’ members (and now the Greens’) have found it easier to believe in the power of science to resolve all contradictions.

 

Hence Russel Norman’s promise that Green Capitalism, wielding Green Technology, will rescue us from the twin threats of Global Warming and critical resource depletion. I suspect he knows this is nonsense. The Devil is not defeated by weapons manufactured in Hell.

 

From the road we’ve chosen there is no turning.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 20 May 2014.

Worse Than It Looked

Bringing Out The Worst: For reading the words of Yeb Sano, a Philippines' delegate to the Warsaw conference on Climate Change, into the parliamentary record, the Greens' co-leader, Russel Norman, elicited howls of outrage from the National Government's MPs. Their response is emblematic of the Right's growing contempt for science and the evidence-based reasoning that underpins it.

 

LAST WEEK’S UNCOUTH DISPLAY by National Party MPs revealed as much about its authors as its target – Dr Russel Norman. It spoke of a political mindset quite unable to distinguish occasions when rowdy interjection is appropriate, from those when it most emphatically is not. More than that, however, it exposed an unwillingness – now alarmingly widespread among conservative politicians – to accept the findings of empirical science.

 

The Green Party’s co-leader had risen to add his party’s response to a parliamentary statement expressing New Zealanders’ sympathy and support for the Filipino victims of Super-Typhoon Haiyan. In doing so he drew heavily on the comments of Yeb Sano, a member of the Philippines delegation to the international conference on climate change in Warsaw.

 

Speaking to his fellow delegates just hours before, Mr Sano had declared:

 

Passionate Advocacy: Climate Change Conference Delegate, Yeb Sano, spoke for the people of the super-typhoon-ravaged Philippines, demanding international action to curb anthropogenic global warming: "If not us, then who? If not now, then when? If not here, then where?”

 

“I speak for my delegation. But more than that, I speak for the countless people who will no longer be able to speak for themselves after perishing from the storm … We can take drastic action now to ensure that we prevent a future where super typhoons are a way of life.

 

“Because we refuse, as a nation, to accept a future where super typhoons like Haiyan become a fact of life. We refuse to accept that running away from storms, evacuating our families, suffering the devastation and misery, having to count our dead, become a way of life. We simply refuse to.”

 

Dr Norman’s intention in quoting extensively from Mr Sano’s speech was to draw his parliamentary colleagues attention to the fact that Super-Typhoon Haiyan wasn’t simply an Act of God but a terrifying example of what climate scientists call “anthropogenic global warming”. In other words, that it was a man-made disaster. And if the New Zealand Parliament was not to find itself expressing sorrow and support for the victims of climate change with ever-increasing frequency, then its members would have to respond to Mr Sano’s urgent plea for action.

 

Quoting a student hero of the Philippines’ long and bloody struggle for democracy, Mr Sano had challenged the Warsaw delegates:

 

“If not us, then who? If not now, then when? If not here, then where?”

 

A more mature National Party would have listened to the quoted words of this Filipino scientist in  respectful silence. Startled, perhaps, that a member of the House had moved beyond the platitudes that traditionally accompany such ritual expressions of sympathy, but willing, nevertheless, to at least try to understand why he was stepping beyond the norm.

 

But, because the words of scientists no longer command the respect of conservatives, the National Party members of the House (including at least one Cabinet Minister) began braying like tethered asses for Dr Norman to resume his seat. Such incivility has, sadly, become reflexive on the right of politics – especially when anyone attempts to engage its representatives in serious discussion about the consequences of anthropogenic global warming.

 

The contrast between these Tory “know-nothings” and “climate-change deniers” and the leading conservatives of fifty years ago is stark. The Soviet Union’s successful launch of Sputnik in October 1957 had so shocked the United States that the Eisenhower Administration felt it had no option but to defy the ingrained religious obscurantism of huge swathes of the American Right and embark on a campaign to place science and its myriad applications (not least its military spin-offs) at the centre of American life. If science reigned to such obviously good effect in Red Russia, argued the President’s advisers, then it must also rule in the Land of the Free.

 

The debt we owe the extraordinary era of scientific competition between the USSR and the USA is huge. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine what the world of 2013 would look like had it never happened.

 

The vast expansion of scientific research and development did, however, bring with it an extremely worrying political problem. How to ensure that the revelations of science – the outcome of rational thought and disciplined experimentation – would be received by equally rational and disciplined politicians? If the findings of science contradicted the deeply-held prejudices of politicians, then which of the two – the scientist or the politician – would be required to step back?

 

In a 2012 article for The New Yorker, Ryan Lizza quoted Thomas Mann, of the Brookings Institution, and Norman Ornstein, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, from their book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks:

 

“One of our two major parties, the Republicans, has become an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme, contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime, scornful of compromise, unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

 

Following last week’s uncouth display, it is clear that, when it comes to rational right-wing responses to anthropogenic global warming, it’s looking pretty bad here too.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 19 November 2013.

Making Money

Printing Money! The knee-jerk outcry from New Zealand's politicians, journalists and right-wing economists is that Quantitative Easing is the same as "printing money". In reality, QE its a IMF-endorsed method of freeing-up the flow of credit to businesses large and small. The Greens' QE proposal was much more limited: to provide urgently needed capital for the Christchurch re-build.  Strangely, the fact that private banks "print money" every day elicits no outcry at all from the critics of QE. 

ARE YOU MAKING ANY MONEY? It’s a common enough question – to which most of us reply with a rueful “Not enough!” A fortunate few (they would call themselves the ‘hard-working’ and ‘talented’ few) might venture a smug “Oh, well, I can’t complain.” But the truth of the matter is that only two things in this world “make” money: governments and banks. (If you’re ‘making’ money and you’re NOT one of those two things, then you’re a counterfeiter.)

 

The funny thing about money – given how vital it is to our lives – is that hardly anyone knows anything about how governments create their currencies, and even fewer understand why banks are allowed to ‘make’ money at all. Indeed, a recent British survey revealed that most people assume that a bank’s lending cannot exceed the value of its deposits. The idea that banks can, by means of a simple accounting entry, create hundreds of millions of dollars, tends to be greeted with considerable scepticism.

 

Take the recent kerfuffle over the Green Party’s (now abandoned) proposal to use “Quantitative Easing” (QE) to both assist the Christchurch rebuild and lower the value of the New Zealand dollar. Earthquake Recovery Bonds, to the value of 1 percent of New Zealand’s GDP (approximately $NZ2 billion) were to be purchased by the Reserve Bank.

 

Adding such a large sum to the stock of Kiwi dollars would have devalued the currency by several cents against the US dollar – making our exports more competitive on international markets. Conversely, imported goods would have become more expensive, reducing consumer demand and thereby improving the country’s balance of payments.

 

The additional $2 billion – available immediately from New Zealand institutions – rather than being drip-fed to us from the grudging hands of foreign-based reinsurance corporations – was also to have been used to kick-start Christchurch’s still sluggish reconstruction, boost the country’s economic growth, and reduce the level of unemployment.

 

A reasonable policy, you might have thought, in the light of New Zealand’s over-valued dollar and the damage it is doing to the economy. But, no. The Green co-leader’s QE proposal was decried by politicians, journalists, bloggers and bank economists, as tantamount to “printing money”.

 

Were Dr Russel Norman’s QE to be adopted, they wailed, we would very soon find ourselves in the position of Zimbabwe: facing hyperinflation and using million-dollar notes to buy a single loaf of bread.

 

Worthless Currency: Weimar Germany's hyperinflation (1920-23) was the result of its government's attempt to monetize its reparations debt to the victors of World War I. In 1938, New Zealand's first Labour Government's use of "Reserve Bank Credit" to fund its massive state house construction programme did not result in a similar inflationary surge because the money was used to create tangible assets.

 

Now, if Dr Norman’s proposal had been to monetize New Zealand’s debt by repaying her creditors with newly-printed $1,000,000-bills issued by the Reserve Bank, then the jibes of his critics would have been well deserved. But hyperinflation only occurs when the expansion of the nation’s money supply isn’t matched by an answering expansion in the value of its material assets.

 

The $2 billion Dr Norman was proposing to inject into the New Zealand economy wasn’t ear-marked for the repayment of debt, but for the reconstruction of its devastated second city, Christchurch. It would have become the steel and concrete of a reborn central business district. Transformed into the weatherboard and roofing tiles of new and refurbished homes, it would have brought desperately needed relief to Christchurch’s long-suffering earthquake victims.

 

Sadly, the cacophony of ill-informed criticism directed at Dr Norman’s QE proposal was sufficient to bring about its withdrawal.

 

As I watched the Greens back away from their perfectly reasonable and generous plans, I wondered why we have heard no similar outcry against the QE being practised by this country’s Australian-owned banks.

 

Every month, New Zealand’s privately-owned financial institutions conjure billions of dollars out of thin air in the form of mortgages. No printing presses are required to ‘make’ this money – a computer does the job in a fraction of a second. And, when the mortgage is granted on an existing property, adding nothing to the nation’s stock of material assets, is the effect inflationary?

 

You betcha! So much so, in fact, that the Reserve Bank is casting about frantically in search of some way to prevent yet another housing “bubble” from blowing up and bursting.

 

And yes, you’re right, the Global Financial Crisis was caused by banks and finance houses “making money”. And, yes, it was governments – using their power to make money – that baled them out. And, yes, you’re right again, the mechanism still being used to painstakingly reconstruct the shattered global economy is called – Quantitative Easing.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 28 June 2013.

The Name Game

A Spectral Green: John Key (with apologies to Sir Arthur Conon Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles) has labelled the Labour-Green alternative government a "Devil Beast" of the "Far-Left". But the names our politicians attach to their opponents very seldom correspond to their actual position on the ideological spectrum.

 

A CHOICE BETWEEN the Centre-Right and the Far-Left. That’s how the Prime Minister and his National Party colleagues intend to frame next year’s General Election. It’s a shrewd strategy. Most Kiwis feel considerably more comfortable with “centre” than they do with “far”.

 

Nobody wants to be far away when they could be at the very centre of things. And who doesn’t enjoy being the centre of attention? Indeed, the discovery that we’re not in this happy position leaves most of us feeling very far from happy.

 

By attaching the word ‘centre’ to the word ‘right’ National is also adding a crucial political modifier. Very few New Zealanders will own to being unequivocally “Right” or “Left”. It smacks too much of the sort of ideological inflexibility they associate with places where peace tends to be as short-supplied as freedom.

 

“Right-wingers” and “left-wingers”, alike, are deemed to lack the easy-going temperament and the pragmatic approach to problem-solving that we Kiwis (and, apparently, the rest of the world) find so appealing. ‘Laconic’ has always suited us better than ‘histrionic’. If asked to choose a path between two extremes, most of us generally head for the middle of the road.

 

And then, of course, there’s History.

 

Invoke the Right and people immediately think of Adolf Hitler receiving the “Sieg Heil!” salute, as rank after rank of jack-booted Brownshirts goose-step their way towards the Holocaust under a forest of swastika banners. Mention the Left, and the mental image is of Joe Stalin smiling wolfishly from Lenin’s Tomb as a May Day parade of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles rumbles by and the Red Army Choir belts out the “Internationale”.

 

But how dramatically the picture changes when “right” and “left” are prefixed with “centre”.

 

Ask Kiwi baby-boomers to think of a “Centre-Right” politician and they’ll probably recall the ridiculously pompous – but essentially harmless – Sir Keith Holyoake. Ask a member of Generation-X, and five’ll getcha ten they think of John Key escorting Aroha to Waitangi, or swigging Steinlager from the bottle in the garden of Premier House.

 

Say “Centre Left” to the Boomers and they’ll recall David Lange informing a startled young American at the Oxford Union that he could “smell the uranium” on his breath. Gen-Xers will (hopefully) remember Helen Clark refusing to join George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

 

It’s wonderful political shorthand – but is it the truth? Apart from conjuring-up both positive and negative political images and memories, does the Prime Minister’s use of the terms “Centre-Right” and “Far-Left” truly correspond to the Government’s and the Opposition’s objective location on the ideological spectrum?

 

The answer must be an emphatic “No!” National and Labour both subscribe to the same basic tenets of neoliberal economic theory that have dominated the policy-making of the OECD countries for the past thirty years. The Greens, too, recognise the marketplace as the most effective means of allocating scarce resources. Their “Green Capitalism” might be “cleaner”, and turn out a more environmentally friendly range of products than the Smoke-Stack Capitalism of the past, but the social relations underpinning that production are just as dirty.

 

Mr Key lambasts the Green Party co-leader, Russel Norman’s, enthusiasm for “Quantitative Easing” – citing it as proof of his “Far-Left” lunacy. But this charge merely reveals the Prime Minister to be either economically ignorant or deeply cynical.

 

Quantitative Easing is the official policy not of North Korea, Cuba or Venezuela, but of the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan. Mr Norman’s ideas about lowering the value of the currency by expanding the money supply are proof not of his revolutionary fervour – but of his economic orthodoxy.

 

Mr Key would be better advised to stick with his “Devil Beast” description of the Opposition parties. Using the term “Far Left” to characterise a Labour-Green coalition is intended to elicit exactly the same emotional response as likening it to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles, but comes at much greater cost to the Prime Minister’s credibility.

 

The truly ironic aspect of this name game is that the New Zealand electorate is almost certainly well to the left of its political leaders and their parties. A visiting French journalist once described New Zealanders as “socialists without doctrines”. Talk to most Kiwis about the sort of country they’d like to live in and you’ll find that most of us still are.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 31 May 2013.

An Appointment With Reality

Making Greens See Red: German Green Party leader (and Foreign Minister in Germany's first Red-Green Coalition Government) Joschka Fischer, copped an earful of abuse (and red paint) after endorsing the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999. Paint-bombs notwithstanding, the special Green Party conference which convened at Bielefeld to debate Fischer's decision voted to put the retention of political power ahead of its pacifist principles. Sometime between now and 2014 New Zealand's Greens face an equally uncomfortable appointment with reality.

“WARMONGERS! WARMONGERS!”, chanted the protesters as Green Party delegates, escorted by police, made their way into Bielefeld’s Seidensticker Hall. It was May 13 1999 and the Children of May 1968 had an appointment with Reality.

 

Over the rogue state of Serbia NATO bombers were staging a “humanitarian intervention” on behalf of the threatened citizens of the breakaway province of Kosovo. For the first time since the end of World War II, German forces were engaged abroad.

 

Joschka Fischer, Green Party leader and Foreign Minister in Germany’s first Red-Green Coalition Government, had endorsed the decision to intervene. At Bielefeld, 800 delegates would decide whether or not his dramatic departure from the Green Party’s founding principle of “Non-Violence” would stand. The long-simmering battle between the right-leaning “Realos” (Realists) and the left-leaning “Fundis” (Fundamentalists) was about to be decided.

 

As it usually does, “Reality” won the day at Bielefeld. The German Greens, faced with the choice of modifying their principles or stepping away from their coalition with the Social Democrats, decided (415/335) to modify their principles. All violence might be awful – but some forms of violence were more awful than others.

 

The NATO sorties continued.

 

Whether they believe the German Greens grew up – or sold out – at Bielefeld, New Zealand’s Greens, at some point during the next three years, will inevitably be faced with a Bielefeld of their own.

 

It is entirely unrealistic for a political party to join a coalition government without first acknowledging the inevitability of compromise. This is especially true if the party in question attracted fewer votes, and thus has fewer seats, than its prospective partner. The larger party cannot be expected to re-order its policy priorities or sacrifice its leading personnel merely to keep its junior partner happy. To do so would attract – and merit – universal scorn.

 

Such are the brutal realities of coalition politics. Parties either accept them – and become genuine players in the political game. Or, they reject them and remain permanent political spectators.

 

It is really only the world’s Green parties which struggle to accept these largely self-evident rules. As the ideological offspring of May 1968 (the year in which the great counter-cultural uprising of the world’s youth reached its zenith) the prototypical German Greens eschewed all political hierarchy in favour of “Appropriate Decision-Making” – by which they meant “grass-roots”, “bottom-up”, consensus-based democracy. And this was no mere rhetorical flourish: Greens really do believe that the way they arrive at major decisions is every bit as important as the decisions they make.

 

All of which lays a heavy burden on the shoulders of Russel Norman and Metiria Turei. Rather than laying claim to portfolios their prospective coalition partners in the Labour Party couldn’t possibly agree to assign them (not without opening up huge divisions within its own ranks) the Greens’ co-leaders should be thinking about how to reconcile their fellow party members’ to the unavoidable compromises of coalition politics.

 

Because these are likely to be both numerous and unpalatable. On practically every economic and social issue that matters the Greens have positioned themselves well to the left of Labour. That being the case, very few, if any, of the Greens’ preferred solutions to the high dollar, unemployment, child poverty, homelessness, climate change and dirty dairying, will win Labour’s unqualified endorsement.

 

As a political party on its way to the Treasury Benches, the New Zealand Greens would be wise to learn from the experience of their German counterparts. Tumultuous gatherings on the model of the Bielefeld Conference make for the most stunning political theatre, but the long-term consequences in terms of preserving ideological coherence, or even the enduring good-will and commitment of the party rank-and-file can be extremely debilitating.

 

It wasn’t just an earful of red-paint that the “warmonger”, Joschka Fischer, received in the Seidensticker Hall. His role in undermining the Green’s pacifist traditions won him a new and much less flattering image than the “principled activist” persona he had worn since 1968.

 

Reality plays no favourites.

 

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 7 December 2012.

Parker's Stance on QE Bodes Ill for Labour-Green Coalition

Deal Breaker: Labour's finance spokesperson, David Parker's, public re-statement of his party's allegiance to core neoliberal convictions - like the political "independence" of the Reserve Bank - means that any coalition agreement with a weaker Green Party is bound to end in tears.

 

THE MOST DEPRESSING CONTRIBUTION, so far, to the debate over Quantitative Easing (QE) belongs to Labour’s finance spokesperson, David Parker. Responding to the Greens’ call for two billion dollars’ worth of QE, to bring down the value of the Kiwi Dollar, Mr Parker stated: “I’m not in the camp that says the Government should direct the Reserve Bank as to what monetary policy tool it uses, whether it should be lower interest rates, or loan to valuation ratios or some sort of levy on capital inflows or quantitative easing”.

 

This is the old economic orthodoxy speaking, and proof of Labour’s inability to free itself from the neoliberal ideology of the 1980s. It also gives the lie to all those who have taken comfort from Mr Parkers’ much publicised “conversations” with internationally renowned economists like Joseph Stiglitz.

 

Had Mr Parker been genuinely influenced by the likes of Mr Stiglitz and his colleague, Paul Krugman, he would have been willing to challenge the notion that interfering politicians’ hands must be kept away from the big economic levers. But, by pointedly distancing himself from those who are willing to direct the Reserve Bank to use its monetary tools for the public good, Mr Parker has proved that Labour, like Louis XVIII, has “learned nothing and forgotten nothing”.

 

He has also provided an alarming glimpse of what is likely to happen if National’s increasingly inept economic management leads to a change of government in 2014. Should a David Shearer-led Labour Party emerge from that election with the largest share of the Left Vote, and with Mr Parker as its preferred Finance Minister, it’s clear that the Greens’ much more radical, people-first, approach to economic management will be over-ruled.

 

New Zealand will experience again what it was forced to endure between 1996 and 1998: a coalition government at odds with itself; seething with intrigue; and prone to sudden and destabilising political lurches. In this scenario, Russel Norman will play the role of Winston Peters to Mr Shearer’s Jenny Shipley and Mr Parker’s Bill Birch. And, just as the National-NZ First coalition government, riven by ideological differences, fell apart after less than two years, so too will any Labour-Green coalition in which the primacy of politics is not the activating principle of both parties.

 

Presented with Mr Parker’s proof of Labour’s unreconstructed neoliberalism, what should the Greens do? Mr Peters’ experience as New Zealand’s one and only “Treasurer” should warn them that the smaller party in a coalition government cannot expect to exercise more than a token amount of economic influence. Treasury, as the most powerful ministry, will always end up in the hands of the most powerful coalition partner.

 

But denied effective control of the next government’s overall economic direction, what hope have the Greens of avoiding the fate of every other small party which has nailed its colours to the mast of a much larger vessel? While Labour remains a neoliberal party what chance has it of effectively addressing problems caused by neoliberal policies? And what chance have the Greens of avoiding being cast as part of the problem, instead of what they have always claimed to be: the beginning of the solution?

 

Mr Norman’s advocacy of QE and his championing of New Zealand’s exporters and manufacturers is not only politically courageous – but very shrewd. By promising to take the QE lever of economic power into their own hand the Greens have forced Labour to reveal its own.

 

Mr Parker, backed by his leader, has signalled Labour’s unwillingness to abandon that creaking foundation of neoliberal statecraft, the “independent” (i.e. subservient to the financial sector) Central Bank. In doing so, he has confirmed Labour’s unwillingness to do any more than administer New Zealand’s economic decline.

 

The Greens’ path forward is as challenging as it is clear. Mr Norman should announce that a coalition with the Labour Party will only be contemplated from a position of strength. Only if the Greens are the Left’s largest party.

 

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 12 October 2012.

Be Careful What You Wish For

Only A Superficial Likeness: With the electoral logic of the 2014 General Election driving Labour and the Greens in opposite ideological directions, the prospect of David Shearer and Russel Norman negotiating a viable (let alone a durable) coalition agreement grows steadily more remote.

THE BURDENS OF SUCCESS are often as heavy, or heavier, than the dead weight of failure. Contemplating the latest poll results, the Greens could be forgiven for thinking that their party’s rising level of public support contains as many risks as it does rewards.

As Labour’s more adventurous supporters abandon David Shearer’s sprawling centrist encampment, their places are being taken by refugees from National’s suddenly inhospitable political territory. If this process continues, the ability of both the Greens and Labour to negotiate a workable coalition agreement in 2014 will steadily diminish.

The Greens’ planning up until now has been based on the assumption that Labour will remain a distinct political destination: a party whose foundations are sufficiently solid to carry the weight of a joint, red/green, policy platform. But what will happen to Labour’s foundations if Mr Shearer decides to make his erstwhile National supporters feel more comfortable?

Was the closed strategy session at last weekend’s Green Party AGM called to address the worrying possibility that, by 2014, Labour may have ceased to be a genuine ideological terminus and become, instead, a place where voters pause, temporarily, on their way to somewhere else?

If Labour does indeed become an electoral transit station, then the political calculus of the 2014 election becomes extremely problematic. The Greens intend to grow their support by offering voters a clear and uncompromising alternative to both Labour and National. But Labour can only replace the voters it loses to the Greens by luring supporters across from National’s ranks.

The two parties that, together, constitute the most likely electoral alternative to the incumbent regime, will, thus, end up working at cross-purposes to one another. To enlarge their electoral base the Greens must appeal to Labour’s left-wing supporters. To make itself more acceptable to National moderates, Labour must move to the right. Instead of drawing closer together, ideologically, these two putative coalition partners will end up moving farther apart.

This ideological disjunction will not be improved by the obvious need for Labour and the Greens to share out the twenty-or-so Cabinet seats between them. If, for example, the Greens attract 15 percent of the Party Vote and Labour 35 percent, Russel Norman will have every right to demand 6 or 7 seats at the cabinet table for his party. Who will Mr Shearer sacrifice? Are the disappointed prospective cabinet ministers more likely to come from the left of his caucus, or the right?

Given that Mr Norman’s choices are all likely to be more left-wing than anyone Labour puts forward, Mr Shearer’s most sensible choice – unless he wants a Cabinet top-heavy with leftist ministers – would be to choose his ministers from Labour’s centre and right-wing factions. Where will this leave David Cunliffe, I wonder? Or Phil Twyford?

Long before the first vote of the 2014 general election is cast, a significant number of Labour politicians will be casting a jealous eye in the direction of their caucus colleagues and asking themselves: “How can I make sure that it’s s/he who misses out and not me?” This is not a question calculated to lift a political party’s morale, or help it come together as a match-fit electoral team.

The Greens, too, will be asking themselves some daunting questions. Most obviously: “How can a party committed to clear and uncompromising economic, environmental and social policies possibly cohere with a party whose policies have been carefully fudged so as not to offend the right-wing prejudices of middle-class suburbia?” And, equally importantly: “How can we prevent six ideologically isolated Green Party cabinet ministers from been drawn into the vortex of collective cabinet responsibility, without (quite impractically) dissenting from virtually every decision the right-wing Labour majority makes?”

How long will it be before the Greens’ cabinet ministers start seeing themselves as half-a-dozen virgins in a brothel?

 “Be careful what you wish for – you just might get it.” For the Green Party, that time-worn cliché could hardly be more apposite.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 8 June 2012.