Which Sort of People? Liberal versus Populist Democracy.

With The Stroke Of A Pen: Populism, especially right-wing populism, invests all the power of an electoral/parliamentary majority in a single political leader because it no longer trusts the bona fides of the sprawling political class among whom power is traditionally dispersed. Populism eschews traditional politics, because, among populists, traditional politics is perceived as the problem – not the solution.

SIR GEOFFREY PALMER is worried about democracy. In his Newsroom website post of 27 January 2025 he asserts that “the future of democracy across the world now seems to be in question.” Following a year of important electoral contests across the world, culminating in Donald Trump’s emphatic recapture of the United States presidency on 5 November 2024, Palmer’s assertion is, on its face, a curious one.

Ordinary citizens around the world celebrated – and continue to celebrate – Trump’s victory, interpreting it as a political, economic, and cultural triumph for men and women like themselves: the poorly housed, poorly paid, poorly educated, and poorly treated people of the planet. In their eyes, at least, 2024 ended on a high democratic note, and 2025 has begun with their billionaire champion making it plain, through scores of Executive Orders, that his “promises made, promises kept” commitment was more than Election Night rhetoric.

Palmer’s personal and political distaste for Trump emerges unmistakably in his post. Certainly, the list of the 47th US President’s faults and flaws is a long one. It is, however, difficult to see how Trump could have succeeded without them. A candidate who conformed to the accepted rules of the political game, and comported himself as a reasonable and responsible member of the political class, would never have placed himself at the head of an angry populist revolt.

Trump’s faults and flaws, his dishonesty and bombast, signalled to those whose votes he was soliciting that although he was richer than they were, he wasn’t better than they were. For Palmer, such ethical insouciance is an affront to what the former prime minister and law professor is pleased to call “liberal democracy”.

Liberal democrats (not to be confused with liberal Democrats!) do not expect those elected to represent the people, to be representative of the people. If that was the case, then elections would not be needed to fill the legislature. One-hundred-and-twenty citizens could simply be chosen at random – like jurors – to make the nation’s laws. Except, without the guidance and discipline imposed by political parties, such a random collection of citizens – most of them strangers to higher education – would, according to liberal democrats, be wholly unequal to the challenges of governing a modern state.

To fill the House of Representatives with MPs capable of dealing with the complexities of contemporary government a properly functioning party system is deemed to be essential. Without one, the task of identifying those with the qualifications and temperament necessary to keep the economic and social system functioning smoothly would be much more difficult. By acculturating their members to the generally agreed principles and processes of good governance[1], liberal-democratic political parties are able to reduce dramatically the chances of the ‘wrong sort of people’ finding themselves in a position to write the nation’s laws.

Unsurprisingly, liberal democracy produces Members of Parliament who are, in large measure, temperamentally and ideologically interchangeable. The overwhelming majority of MPs adhere to the conventional economic wisdom, limiting policy differences between the dominant political parties to matters of emphasis and degree – mostly by avoiding any policy requiring fundamental changes to the status quo.

There are political moments, however, when, as Palmer knows well, conventional economic wisdom is stood on its head and fundamental changes are deemed unavoidable. In 1984, as Prime Minister David Lange’s deputy, Palmer played a crucial role in ensuring that the Labour Party’s sudden abandonment of the Keynesian economic policies that had guided its own, and the National Party’s, management of New Zealand’s economy since the end of the Second World War, was accepted and endorsed by Labour’s parliamentary caucus.

That the impetus for the policy revolution known as “Rogernomics” came from the Reserve Bank and Treasury, and had been stoutly resisted for many years by the National Party Prime Minister, Rob Muldoon, who had just been voted out of office, undoubtedly made Palmer’s job easier. This is simply the way the world is going, he reassured his colleagues, and there is no viable alternative. National’s conversion to the new economic wisdom took a little longer, but by 1990 all but a handful of members of the House of Representatives were singing obediently from the same neoliberal song-sheet.

Liberal democracy, while hostile to popular political pressures bubbling-up from below, will countenance all kinds of fundamental changes without demur – providing they are initiated from above, and can count on the active support of the business community and the mainstream news media. Palmer’s hostility towards Trump, and his obvious fear of Trumpism, stems from his conviction that the fundamental changes Trump is promoting are the wrong sort of changes, and that they are being pursued on behalf of the wrong sort of people.

This is the crux of the matter: that liberal democracy, far from enacting the will of the people, is dedicated instead to enacting the will of the right sort of people. The populist impulse, which Trump embodies, arises when the wrong sort of people are finally convinced that their urgent concerns and fundamental interests form no part of the liberal-democratic agenda – and never will.

This is why successful populist politicians, like Trump, care so little about the rules of the political game. It is why they are so willing to break them. With every lie, with every affront to the ‘proper’ way of conducting politics, the populist leader proves to his supporters that he is one of them, not one of “them” – the despised “elites”.

Populism, especially right-wing populism, invests all the power of an electoral/parliamentary majority in a single political leader because it no longer trusts the bona fides of the sprawling political class among whom power is traditionally dispersed. Populism eschews traditional politics, because, among populists, traditional politics is perceived as the problem – not the solution.

A populist political party does not exist to facilitate the smooth functioning of the system, or to manage carefully the inevitable debates concerning the system’s character and purpose, it exists solely to execute the will of its leader. Only the leader has divined and won the people’s will and confidence. Only the leader can be trusted to give them what they want – which is, usually, to blow the system up. Accordingly, in a populist party, the supreme virtue is loyalty. Without loyalty, unity is unachievable. Without unity, the leader lacks the strength to blow anything up, and traditional politics reasserts itself.

Liberal democrats hostility towards the populist form of democracy arises from their visceral fear of any determined majority that has achieved even a small measure of self-awareness. They are terrified that, like the cyborg in The Terminator, a politically mobilised majority can’t be bargained with, or reasoned with; that it doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear; and that it absolutely will not stop – until the system has been purged of its poisons and, to borrow the Trumpists’ favourite tagline, made great again.

Such a majority will, indeed, act tyrannically. If it behaves in any other way, its goals are unlikely to be achieved. In fine Hobbesian style, the successful populist movement seeks to infuse its collective strength into the sinews of an irresistible political Leviathan, point him in the direction of its foes – and let him go to work.

Obviously, it’s a great deal safer to be behind him than in front of him.


[1] The use of the word governance – as opposed to “government” – by liberal democrats is deliberate. It denotes not decisive power, but rational administrative process. Governance is what happens when the possibility of radical – i.e. system-threatening – change has been taken off the table.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project website on Thursday, 30 January 2025.

Procedures, Processes and Principles: Is It Possible To Defend The Treaty Of Waitangi And Democracy?

Out Of The Loop: The great insight of sympathetic Pakeha jurists, like Sir Geoffrey Palmer, was that, suitably empowered, the judiciary and the executive branch of the state could take on the role formerly played by the non-elected governors of mid-nineteenth century New Zealand. Māori resources could be protected, and past injustices redressed, but only if the Pakeha Parliament could somehow be persuaded to take itself out of the loop.

SIR GEOFFREY PALMER has penned a two-part response to Act Leader David Seymour’s “Treaty Principles Bill”. In its essence, Palmer’s contribution reflects the growing unease of the institutions which have hitherto dominated the Waitangi discourse – the legal profession, the courts, and the universities – that they are in real danger of losing control of the narrative.

Between the lines of Palmer’s analysis one detects a profound hostility to the populist impulse, and a palpable impatience with the machinery of representative government that empowers it. The clear intention of Palmer’s intervention is to deflect the popular desire for a democratically defined Treaty away from the decisive instruments of parliamentary democracy, and towards a much more manageable set of “deliberative” options.

In many ways it is surprising that Palmer, and those who share his ideas about the Treaty, did not anticipate the current populist push for a political solution to the doubts and anxieties raised by the document’s startling legal evolution. From the 1980s to the present day, some kind of democratic revision of the Treaty’s status and meaning was always on the cards.

In an address to the Māori Law Review Symposium entitled Māori, the Treaty and the Constitution on 12 June 2013, Palmer offered his audience the following, highly revealing, admission:

“If the remedying of injustice under the Treaty could only be done by Parliament under our existing constitutional structure, then the big obstacle was what John Stuart Mill called majority tyranny. If the legislation addressed the grievances, then majority tyranny would kick in and the likelihood of the issues being addressed in a principled fashion would be reduced. Elected politicians should not be involved in the investigation and formulation of the appropriate remedy. So Parliament had to be persuaded to initiate action, but not determine the nature of the grievance. A set of procedures, processes and principles was likely to work better. Thus, it seemed to me that the aim could be achieved by having Parliament set up a body to investigate and report. That meant extending the jurisdiction of the Waitangi Tribunal back to 1840.”

As a means of drawing the fangs of this supposed tyrannous and unprincipled majority (which is an interesting way of thinking about the nation’s political leaders and the people who elected them) these “procedures, processes and principles” were to prove their worth many times over. So much so, that Palmer felt able to reassure the symposium that:

“Insulation from the ravages of extreme opinion has been achieved. The settlements have become mainstream.”

But if elected politicians were to be excluded from the investigation and formulation of appropriate remedies for the sins of New Zealand’s colonial fathers, then in whose hands should the whole fraught process be placed? What other answer could a former law professor give except – the courts:

“The courts are better protectors of “discrete and insular minorities” than the majoritarian legislature, even under MMP. I remain of the opinion that the Treaty, like the Bill of Rights, should become part of New Zealand’s new superior law Constitution. We now know a great deal about how the courts will go about the task of interpreting the Treaty, just as we know how the courts go about interpreting the Bill of Rights Act. We have had more than twenty years’ experience of both […] We cannot go backward on these issues, but we need to summon up the political courage to go forward.”

The reference to “discrete and insular minorities” comes from a 1937 judgement of the United States Supreme Court. Such minorities, the justices explained, are “saddled with such disabilities, or subjected to such a history of purposeful unequal treatment, or relegated to such a position of political powerlessness as to command extraordinary protection from the majoritarian political process.”

In citing this celebrated case, Palmer was signalling to his 2013 audience that he well understood the historical predicament of the Māori people.

The Treaty of Waitangi was the initiative of a British Government which, in 1840, was impelled by the political principles then guiding its Foreign and Colonial Office to secure control of New Zealand, but only after obtaining the freely given consent of its indigenous inhabitants.

This was duly achieved by recognising the full authority – tino rangatiratanga – of tribal chieftains to determine the disposition of their lands, forests, fisheries, and other valued resources, as they saw fit, and by giving Maori the same rights and privileges as the people of Great Britain.

Crucially, the chiefs’ lands could only be sold to representatives of the British Government. Thus were Māori protected from the contemporaneous depredations of the agents of the rapacious New Zealand Company – and the French.

Overseeing the evolution of this new relationship would be a Governor appointed by the British Government. Not the least of the Governor’s duties was to protect the Māori tribes from the greed and the larceny of the British, European and American settlers determined to make their fortunes in Britain’s new colony.

While the original parties to the 1840 Treaty, the British Government and the tribal chiefs, continued to be the only parties that mattered, the relationship, though often strained, endured. By the early 1850s, however, the fast-growing population of Pakeha settlers was demanding that the powers-that-be in London grant them self-government.

The settlers objective was brutally simple: to avail themselves of Māori land without having to secure the chiefs’ and/or the Governor’s permission. In other words, they wanted to construct a New Zealand state in which the Treaty could be dismissed as a “simple nullity”. Such a state could only be created by the forcible dispossession of Māori hapu and iwi, but that was a price the Pakeha settlers were perfectly willing to pay.

Putting the matter bluntly, the greatest enemy of Māori, since 1853, has been the Pakeha Parliament. While its power to make the law remained untrammelled there was nothing Māori could do to defend their fast-diminishing patrimony.

The great insight of sympathetic Pakeha jurists, like Palmer, was that, suitably empowered, the judiciary and the executive branch of the state could take on the role formerly played by the non-elected governors of mid-nineteenth century New Zealand. Māori resources could be protected, and past injustices redressed, but only if the Pakeha Parliament could somehow be persuaded to take itself out of the loop.

It is, perhaps, the most remarkable aspect of New Zealand history that, for a period of roughly half-a-century, the nation’s elected representatives were willing to do just that. They made way for the courts, the Waitangi Tribunal, and the Office of Treaty Settlements to right as many of the wrongs done to te iwi Māori as they adjudged Pakeha voters to be willing to accept.

That turned out to be an impressively large number. But, by 2023, Pakeha voters’ – or, at least, a majority of Pakeha voters’ – willingness to go on righting the wrongs of the past had reached its limit. In response, the newly elected Pakeha Parliament, to the utter dismay of the courts, the Waitangi Tribunal, and the Office of Māori Crown Relations, determined to suddenly and dramatically re-enter the loop.

Small wonder Palmer is calling for “deliberative” alternatives to parliamentary action, such as randomly selected citizens’ assemblies, to be substituted for the deliberations of the House of Representatives. These latter, which tend to culminate in legislative action, are to be avoided at all costs lest they precipitate a head-on collision between the legislature, the judiciary, and that part of the executive branch represented by the state bureaucracy.

Palmer, and those who share his outlook, must know that in any contest between Parliament and the rest of the State only two outcomes are possible. Either the coercive agencies of the state – the armed forces and the police – put an end to representative democracy on the Executive’s/Judiciary’s behalf. Or, the key institutions of the state, with varying degrees of rage and reluctance, bow to “majority tyranny” and the “ravages of extreme opinion”.

Otherwise known as the will of the people.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack page on Thursday, 26 September 2024.

The Choice.

Revolution From Below Averted: The critical political choice made by leading Pakeha politicians, jurists and bureaucrats in the 1980s and 90s was to halt the momentum of left-wing Māori nationalism from below, by inserting a layer of elite Māori business-people between the Crown and the economically and culturally impoverished Māori working-class. Waitangi Protest 1982 by John Miller.

“INSULATION from the ravages of extreme opinion has been achieved. The settlements have become mainstream.” The words are those of former Labour Prime Minister Sir Geoffrey Palmer. The “settlements” he refers to are the Treaty settlements negotiated between the Crown and Iwi.

It is to Iwi, New Zealand’s officially recognised tribal entities, that the responsibility for reinvigorating Māori society has been entrusted. Palmer’s confidence that the process has been walled-off from the “ravages” of democratic interference is important. The critical political choice made by leading Pakeha politicians, jurists and bureaucrats in the 1980s and 90s was to halt the momentum of left-wing Māori nationalism from below, by inserting a layer of elite Māori business-people between the Crown and the economically and culturally impoverished Māori working-class.

Only by fostering the rapid growth of a Māori middle-class could the Pakeha state avoid being compelled to negotiate with social, cultural and political forces with precious little to lose. Forces, moreover, whose lack of a meaningful stake in the capitalist system might encourage their leaders to contemplate sponsoring an entirely different set of economic arrangements.

Fostering a Māori middle-class would not only create social, economic, cultural and political forces with a great deal to lose, but, by frustrating kotahitanga – unity – it would protect the Pakeha state from a popular movement it could not defeat – except by the application of overwhelming military force.

Forty years ago, the vital moral truth that Geoffrey Palmer and, following him, Jim Bolger and Doug Graham, grasped was that a New Zealand state strong enough to, once again, frustrate Māori aspirations by force, would not be worth living in.

That historical choice: to forswear force; made by the more enlightened leaders of Pakeha society back in the 1980s and 90s, was crucial. The settlement process – led and controlled by the Crown – would empower and enrich only a fraction of Maoridom. But, this small, highly privileged group would, in their turn, guarantee the integrity of the core institutions of the New Zealand state.

The Iwi institutions constructed out of the capital transfers at the heart of the Treaty settlement process were modelled on the corporate structures of the Pakeha economy. The name given to this phenomenon by Professor Elizabeth Rata is “Neo-Tribal Capitalism”. Like the Pakeha system which inspired it, iwi-based capitalism elevates a very small minority to great wealth and power, while consigning the majority of Māori to a life of exploitation, deprivation and desperation.

Like capitalism everywhere, it isn’t fair – but it works.

Ironically, the man who came closest to destroying this mutually beneficial system, in which the elites of both ethnic communities gave away a little to get a lot, was one of New Zealand capitalism’s staunchest defenders, Don Brash. Perhaps he intuited that, having indicated their unwillingness to contemplate the force majeure deployed at Bastion Point, the Pakeha elites would inevitably find themselves prevailed upon to transfer more and more power and resources to the iwi-based corporations and the Māori middle-class which serviced them. Perhaps he simply refused to contemplate the evolution of a “bi-cultural” state. Whatever the explanation, Brash’s controversial Iwi/Kiwi election campaign of 2005 brought him within a whisker of discovering exactly how much force it would take to trash the principles of the Treaty and restore the colonial state to its former glory.

Brash’s successor, John Key, moved decisively to restore the relationship between the Pakeha and Māori elites. His reaching out to the Māori Party, and the latter’s positive response, confirmed beyond dispute the truth of Geoffrey Palmer’s assertion that the settlement process had moved beyond the sanction of “extreme opinion” and become part of the mainstream.

Over the course of Key’s nine-year (nearly) reign, the rapidly expanding Māori middle-class grew progressively more nationalistic. That they would promote their language and culture with ever-increasing fervour was entirely predictable. Historically, it has been the practice of all colonised peoples to not only claim full equality with their former masters’, but also to elevate the achievements of their own culture well above those of their brutal conquerors. The strong symbiotic relationship in which erstwhile oppressors and oppressed typically become enmeshed is simply edited out of the ethno-nationalist discourse.

The New Zealand state thus finds itself in a position roughly analogous to that of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the turn of the nineteenth century. The dominant group is no longer confident of exerting its formal (but waning) imperial authority without causing the entire ramshackle edifice to disintegrate. So strident and uncompromising have the nationalist claims of its subject peoples become that meeting them would instantly dissolve the constitutional glue holding the state together. To resist their claims means war. Ultimately, there is no winning move – except surrender.

Certainly, it is difficult to read in John Key’s decision to sign the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and Jacinda Ardern’s decision to allow Nanaia Mahuta to commission a report on its implementation, as anything other than a capitulation to the political logic of Māori nationalism.

He Puapua is an imaginative and honest presentation of the steps necessary to establish a te Tiriti-based constitution based on the principle of co-governance. The fact that its recommendations, which included the elimination of majority rule, failed to elicit any significant protest from Ardern and her cabinet colleagues, indicates just how completely Labour has been persuaded that the future of Aotearoa will be driven by Māori.

The Māori nationalists ideological victory will not, however, be costless. Just as the leaders of Pakeha New Zealand were required to make a choice about the use of force, so, too, will the new rulers of Aotearoa.

It is difficult to see how a system of government permitting 15 percent of the population to determine the fate of the remaining 85 percent can end anything other than badly. Pretty early on in the piece, the Māori nationalists, like the Pakeha liberals of the 1980s and 90s, will also be forced to choose:

Do we preserve our ideological victory and defend our hard won political supremacy by force – or not?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 18 January 2022.

Can Judith Collins Make Don Brash’s ‘Nationhood Soufflé’ Rise Twice?

Can She Raise It A Second Time? The question is: Can National’s current leader, Judith Collins, rely upon Don Brash’s Nationhood Soufflé recipe to produce an equally dramatic rise in her party’s fortunes? Or, in the intervening years, has the ideology of “Treatyism” persuaded enough New Zealanders to renounce the ideas which, in 2004, transformed National overnight from a party of the walking wounded into a serious electoral contender?

SEVENTEEN YEARS HAVE PASSED since Don Brash gave his in/famous “Nationhood” speech to the Orewa Rotary Club. On the strength of the sentiments communicated in that address, the Brash-led National Party leapt from a risible 28 percent in the polls to 45 percent. In a single 17-point bound, National was free of the clutches of its crushing 2002 election defeat. Had National’s chief strategist, Steven Joyce, not played silly-buggers with the Exclusive Brethren Church, there was every chance that 18 months later Brash would have become prime minister.

The question is: Can National’s current leader, Judith Collins, rely upon Brash’s Nationhood Soufflé recipe to produce an equally dramatic rise in her party’s fortunes? Or, in the intervening years, has the ideology of “Treatyism” persuaded enough New Zealanders to renounce the ideas which, in 2004, transformed National overnight from a party of the walking wounded into a serious electoral contender? More to the point, does Collins share Brash’s unwavering moral commitment to the ”single standard of citizenship” principle at the heart of his “Nationhood” address.

This is not an idle question. If Collins is unable to convince those voters who are either doubtful of, or openly hostile to, the Labour Government’s radical Treatyist agenda, that her opposition is authentic, then she is most unlikely to emulate Brash’s success. Love him or hate him, only the most rabid of his opponents doubted Brash’s sincerity on the “race issue”. Those who voted for him were absolutely certain that, if elected, he would fulfil his promise to remove all references to the Treaty of Waitangi and its ex post facto “principles” from the statute books; and that the Maori seats would, indeed, be abolished. Collins, if she is to capture the support National so desperately needs, must convince both her party, and the public, that the “separatism” she decries must – and will – be stopped in its tracks.

The slightest equivocation on this matter will convince even those who agree with Collins’ basic proposition that she cannot be trusted to see it through. Anything other than a rock-solid guarantee to uphold the core principles of liberal, colour-blind, democracy will only convince her potential supporters that her brave words are hollow: that, when push comes to shove, she, like all the others, will retreat before the relentless criticism of practically the entire political class. Does Collins have what it takes to hold her ground on the “race issue”? Does her caucus? We shall see.

The feeling that National needs to exploit, if it is to return to office in 2023, is the feeling shared by a great many voters that, no matter which party they vote for, the core settings of New Zealand society will not be changed. That the people “in charge” have absolutely no regard for, or interest in, the opinions of what Richard Nixon called “the great silent majority”. Indeed, many Kiwis are now uncertain whether or not their opinions are any longer shared by a majority of their fellow citizens, or whether they – and people who think like them – now constitute a minority of the New Zealand population.

On the “race issue” and “Treatyism”, this sense of being shut out of the debate is very far from being a figment of their imaginations. The politician most responsible for inserting “the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi” into legislation is the former constitutional law professor-turned-Labour-politician, Sir Geoffrey Palmer. In a paper entitled “Māori, the Treaty and the Constitution” delivered to a Maori Law Review symposium on 12 June 2013, he observed:

“These [legal] developments, and indeed later developments, have meant that substantial grievances of the Māori minority have a good chance of being handled in a principled fashion. Insulation from the ravages of extreme opinion has been achieved. The settlements have become mainstream.”

“The ravages of extreme opinion”. It is difficult to conceive of a phrase that more vividly sums up the way the New Zealand elites view the thoughts and feelings of their less elevated citizens. It would be equally difficult to locate a clearer confirmation of the widely held conviction that nothing ordinary Pakeha New Zealanders might say in relation to the “race issue”, or the Treaty’s place (if any) in this country’s constitutional arrangements, is likely to have the slightest effect upon the conduct of the powers-that-be.

Palmer, himself, confirmed as much in the same address when he stated: “My mail about the Treaty was always adverse and voluminous, but I was not deterred by it.”

What produced that extraordinary 17-point jump in National’s poll-ratings following Brash’s “Nationhood” speech was the electrifying collective conviction that Brash had listened to the opponents of Treatyism, heard their grievances, and was determined to give effect to their wishes.

Nothing mobilises voters faster or more effectively than the belief that, for once, their vote might actually count. Whether it be Dominic Cumming’s invitation to “Take Back Control”, or Donald Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again”, the idea that a visit to the ballot-box just might make a difference, almost always makes one helluva difference.

Collins’ predicament would be made a great deal easier if she and her team could avail themselves of solid data on New Zealanders’ views about the Treaty of Waitangi and the “race issue” generally. Twenty years ago this was a relatively straightforward process. In the 1990s, for example, one could turn to the reports of the New Zealand Study of Values (NZSV) for a very precise take on the public’s attitude to a whole host of economic, social and political issues.

In a little book entitled New Zealand Politics At The Turn Of The Millennium by Paul Perry and Alan Webster, which was based on these reports, New Zealanders attitudes towards the Treaty of Waitangi were set out very clearly.

In 1998 only 5.4 percent of those questioned believed that the Treaty should be strengthened and given the force of law. A quarter believed that Treaty claims should be dealt with through the Waitangi Tribunal “as it is at present”. Nearly 30 percent believed there needed to be greater limits on Maori claims under the Treaty. And 33.8 percent believed the Treaty should be abolished. Only 16.3 percent of those questioned responded positively to the idea of giving Maori special land and fishing rights to make up for past injustices.

When Don Brash delivered his “Nationhood” speech to those Orewa Rotarians in January 2004, his ideas fell upon fertile ground. We cannot be so sure that Collins’ views on separatism will be equally well-received. The NZSV ceased in 1998. For reasons one can only speculate about, academic interest in acquiring and publishing data on inconvenient public attitudes appears to have declined in the new millennium.

A great many of the New Zealanders who participated in those NZSV surveys more than two decades ago are no longer alive. Judith Collins must, therefore, make a big political bet. Have the numbers relating to the status of the Treaty of Waitangi, and to the “race issue” generally, become more favourable to the Treatyists – or more unfavourable? How many New Zealanders have changed their minds? More importantly, how many of them are willing to bet that National’s leader won’t change hers?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 30 April 2021.

Not Debating The Constitution

The Sound of One hand Clapping: The taxpayer funded "Constitutional Conversation" has so far demonstrated little inclination to facilitate a genuine debate on the Treaty's already entrenched place in the legal, administrative and political life of New Zealand. This unwillingness to either recognise or supply a visible platform for the nay-sayers betrays the "Conversation's" essential artificiality. A manufactured consensus is no substitute for a bloody good argument.

 

I DON’T GET ANGRY very often. I’ve been around too long, seen history repeat itself too many times, for all that malarkey. Just occasionally, however, I stumble across something that truly infuriates me.

 

Like discussions billed as debates where everybody is actually on the same side.

 

No, I’m not talking about TV3’s “The Vote”. What’s got my dander up is a four-part series being hosted by the NZ Centre for Public Law (NZCPL) entitled “Debating the Constitution”. All four encounters to be broadcast subsequently on Radio NZ National.

 

And, yes, the series is indeed a response to the Constitutional Review which emerged from the horse-trading between the National and Maori parties following the 2008 General Election.

 

The same review that has been the occasion for more than a little teeth-gnashing among those Pakeha who have declared themselves perfectly happy with New Zealand’s present constitutional arrangements, thank you very much, and who have voiced deep suspicions of both the motives behind its creation and the outcomes intended by its protagonists.

 

Now, you might be thinking: Well there’s the opportunity for a genuine, rip-snorting debate! And I’d be the first to agree. There are a host of noisy individuals who would’ve leapt at the opportunity to voice their doubts and suspicions concerning the whole Constitutional Review initiative.

 

And that’s what has got me all hot under the collar.

 

I’ve examined the personnel invited to participate in this exercise by the NZCPL and can I find any of the names associated with the political movement that has sprung up to oppose the Constitutional Review?

 

No, I can’t.

 

And it’s not as though it would have been at all that difficult for the NZCPL to locate these folk. All it needed to do was send out invitations to the membership of the defiantly christened “Independent Constitutional Review Panel” – a ready-made Negative Team comprising Professors Martin Devlin and James Allan; Associate Professor, Elizabeth Rata; Law Lecturer, David Round; journalist and author, Mike Butler; and the former Act MP, Muriel Newman.

 

Well, I looked through the list of “Debating the Constitution” participants and not even one member of the Independent Constitutional Review Panel was included.

 

The names I did see surprised me not at all. Before my eyes was a veritable roll-call of the good and the great; the wise and the just; the righteously indigenous and the guilty descendants of the Maori people’s wicked colonial oppressors.

 

Here’s a sneak peek at just some of the NZCPL’s line-up: Dame Claudia Orange, Sir Geoffrey and Dr Matthew Palmer, Moana Jackson, Dr Maria Bargh, Professors Margaret Wilson, Elizabeth McLeay and Andrew Geddis, Jim Bolger and Colin James.

 

Now, don’t get me wrong, every one of these illustrious individuals is capable of contributing mightily to a polite “discussion” of our constitutional arrangements. More than a few of them could also say much that was useful about its origins and political ramifications. But, seriously, do any of them strike you as people likely to hoe into the Review with the passion of its self-identified opponents?

 

The NZCPL’s list of speakers is not going to generate a debate on this important topic. No, these folk are going to deliver an academic seminar on the exercise to an audience which will almost certainly be comprised of like and equally lofty minds.

 

It was only after my father was posted to Wellington in 1969 that I encountered the delicious word “twee”. From the moment I heard it used in a sentence I have cherished it. No other word in the English language captures the mixture of exclusivity and effeteness that twee so wonderfully expresses.

 

And twee is exactly the right word to describe this series of debates-that-aren’t-debates.

 

What could have been a down-and-dirty verbal slug-fest; a chance for these grand personages to endure a rare encounter with New Zealanders who most emphatically do not share their “sound” views on the Treaty of Waitangi, bi-culturalism and New Zealand history; an opportunity to squeeze all the poisons inflaming the open wound that is New Zealand race relations into public view – has been missed.

 

And that not only makes me angry, it also makes me sad.

 

As a people, we used to be more open and courageous than this. When Jack was a good as any snooty professor, and a debate was still a bloody good argument.

 

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, 5 April 2013.

Return of the Wowser

Wowserism Redux: Neoliberalism's greatest selling-point was its championing of "Freedom". The Law Commission's report on the supply and sale of liquor, presented by Sir Geoffrey Palmer, attempts to stuff the libertarian genie back into its bottle.

Wowser: A pious prude, one who condemns or seeks to curtail the pleasures of others or who works to have his or her own rigid morality enforced on all. – The Australian National Dictionary, 1900.

SIR GEOFFREY PALMER is a wowser. If he bridles at that description, then let him find a better one. Certainly, his long-awaited Review of Regulatory Framework for the Supply and Sale of Liquor, released last week in tones of moral absolutism that would have done Moses proud, can only be described as wowserism reborn.

For quarter-of-a-century the fast, free-flowing currents of liberalisation have scoured out the authoritarian foundations of New Zealand society. But now Palmer and the Law Commission propose to stem the libertarian flow by erecting a mighty dam of wowserish regulation. It will not stand.

That Palmer genuinely believes the genie of social freedom can somehow be stuffed back into its bottle, simply shows how little he knows about the neoliberal revolution which he and his Fourth Labour Government colleagues unleashed.

Does Palmer really think all those job-shedding, community-shrinking, expectation-shifting neoliberal reforms would have "stuck" if they hadn’t been accompanied by the wholesale destruction of the nay-saying, red-tape-entangling, fun-suppressing culture that made Sir Robert Muldoon’s economic authoritarianism possible? Has he forgotten David Lange’s iconoclastic wit? Sir Roger Douglas’ rigour? Richard Prebble’s wrecking-ball?

Come to think of it, wasn’t it Palmer himself who delighted the nation with plans for a "Great Quango Hunt"? (The Dr Seussian title Palmer invented to describe the necessary culling of dozens of "quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations".)

Neoliberalism’s greatest selling-point has always been its association with "Freedom". So long as the voters construed their Government’s policies in terms of "freeing things up" the neoliberal revolution was safe. That these freedoms were almost always freedoms "to" – rather than freedoms "from" – didn’t seem to matter.

In theory, requiring all workers to join a union freed them from low wages and long hours. In practice, however, any institution upon which the neoliberals could pin the label "compulsory" got a one-way ticket to History’s dustbin.

It is, therefore, very easy to predict how much damage this Government’s reputation will sustain if it’s foolish enough to suddenly execute a 180-degree turn in the direction of those who believe "Nanny knows best".

Oh sure, it will garner armfuls of votes from those whose solution for every one of society’s ills is to do something unpleasant to "young people". They forget, of course, that when they were "young people" the supply and sale of liquor was regulated to within an inch of its life.

These were days of the "Six O’clock Swill", when New Zealand’s "mature" attitude to alcohol was reflected in the tiled walls of the nation’s public bars. (It made them so much easier to hose down after the punters had fled!)

The deep affection and respect in which those anti-liquor laws were held by the ordinary jokers and sheilas of that era is captured beautifully in Peter Cape’s 1958 composition Down the Hall on Saturday Night:

I had a schottische with the tart from the butchers
I had a waltz with the constable's wife
I had a beer from the keg on the cream-truck
And the cop had one too, you can bet your life

An ever-quickening sequence of liberalised liquor laws – beginning with the 1967 legislation that ushered in ten o’clock closing, and culminating in the 1999 Act lowering the "drinking age" to 18 years – put paid to that sort of wink-wink, nudge-nudge, "sly-grogging" hypocrisy. And no one deemed old enough to vote, marry, sign a contract, fight for their country and enjoy all the other rights of New Zealand citizenship is going to thank the political party that tells them they’re not old enough to buy a drink.

So, what on Earth possessed Palmer and the Law Commission to disinter the wowser’s long-dead corpse?

The simple answer, of course, is the enormous harm alcohol inflicts upon New Zealand and New Zealanders. It costs people their jobs, their marriages, their health and, all-too-often, their lives. Alcohol also absorbs billions of dollars every year from Vote Health, Justice and Corrections, and costs the nation billions more in terms of lost production. If alcohol had appeared on the New Zealand scene suddenly, like Ecstasy, the Ministry of Health would’ve classified it as a Class B drug – it would be illegal.

But it didn’t – and it isn’t. Indeed alcohol, in one form or another has been the drug-of-choice for most of humankind for more than five millennia. It’s as old as the domestication of animals; as old as agriculture; and without it civilisation would be much more difficult to sustain.

As the ALAC ads say: "It’s not the drinking. It’s how we’re drinking." But "how we’re drinking" cannot be remedied by either legislation or regulation. In fact, as the Prohibition Era in the US made clear: forcing people to stop being "bad" only makes them worse.

On the positive side, there are countries where people do seem to be able to consume alcohol without turning their streets into battlefields and their emergency rooms into field hospitals. According to Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, authors of The Spirit Level, alcohol abuse is strongly correlated with those countries where high levels of social inequality have induced correspondingly high levels of individual and social anxiety.

But that was not what the Law Commission wanted to hear. Unlike the players in the Monty Python sketch, Palmer and his colleagues never considered indicting the socio-economic drivers of alcohol abuse to be "a fair cop".

Significantly, the most important of the Commission’s recommendations: the measure which all the researchers agree reduces alcoholic consumption most effectively – raising the price – was immediately ruled out by the Government.

It’s one thing, you see, to propose restricting the number and hours-of-operation of liquor outlets in the poverty-stricken suburbs of South Auckland – but quite another to seriously investigate the reasons why the neighbourhood bottle-store has so many eager customers.

Send a happy man into a pub for a few beers, and by the end of the evening you’ll have a happy drunk. Send in a stressed and angry man, and in no time the booze will have him frothing. Alcohol only amplifies the emotions we mix with it.

The fault, dear Wowser, is not in our jars – but in ourselves.

This essay was originally published in The Independent of Thursday, 6 May 2010.