Making A Difference.

The Jacinda and Ashley Show: Before the neoliberals could come up with a plausible reason for letting thousands of their fellow citizens perish, the Ardern-led government, backed by the almost forgotten power of an unapologetically interventionist state, was producing changes in the real world – changes that were, very obviously, saving the lives of real New Zealanders.

“ROGERNOMICS” didn’t just transform New Zealand’s economy and society, it profoundly changed its politicians. Members of the “political class” of 2024 display radically different beliefs from the individuals who governed New Zealand prior to 1984. The most alarming of these post-1984 beliefs dismisses Members of Parliament and local government politicians as singularly ill-qualified to determine the fate of the nations they have been elected to lead.

This paradox is readily explained when the core convictions driving the political class are exposed. The most important of these is that ordinary voters have absolutely no idea how, or by whom, their country is governed. The ordinary voter’s conviction that “the people” rule – as opposed to the “loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires” whose worldwide corporate interests are protected by globally organised media and public relations companies – is offered as proof of their all-round imbecility. Politicians might just as well be guided by baboons as by the ordinary voter!

This contemptuous view of the people who elect politicians to public office is, naturally, kept well-hidden from the electorate. Indeed, these disdainful “representatives” are forever celebrating in public what they denounce privately as dangerous, “the principles of democratic government”. Why? Because the alternative to perpetuating the myth that the people (demos) rule (kratos) – i.e. by making it clear to them that they don’t – is much, much worse.

Ruling a country by force, rather than by consent, not only turns most of the population into the rulers’ enemies, but also leaves the political class acutely vulnerable to the institutions responsible for perpetrating the violence that keeps it in power. All too often these “men with guns” decide to cut out the political middlemen and rule directly. Historically-speaking, this is the royal-road to graft, corruption, extortion, and, ultimately, to the formation of a brutal kleptocracy. NOT a situation conducive to either making, or keeping, one’s profits!

That feudalism, and the absolute monarchies that grew out of it, were, in essence, arrangements predicated on the maintenance of well-organised bodies of armed and violent men might, given contemporary capitalism’s distaste for such regimes, be considered ironic. Living under the sway of these “gentlemen”, and being required to pay their protection money the swingeing taxes they imposed, did not make for a happy life – or, at least, not for the 95 percent of the population – including the merchant class – forbidden from owning swords!

The popularity of democracy, as a system designed to reduce sharply the power of bullies and extortionists, tends to be greater the nearer in time its beneficiaries are to the oppressive political regimes from which “people-power” liberated them. Even as capitalism began to hit its stride in the nineteenth century, such democratic (or quasi-democratic) legislatures as existed (and there weren’t many) proved remarkably reluctant to bow before the doctrine of laissez-faire. (French for “let the capitalists do what they like’.) The Victorians who founded New Zealand, and wrote its Constitution Act, were impressively unconvinced that a man with a plan (women were yet to be included in their discussions) could not improve the lives of his fellow citizens by persuading them to elect him to Parliament.

This conviction that politicians could make a positive difference to the lives of ordinary people took root more tenaciously in New Zealand than just about any other country on the face of the earth. The radical reforms of the Liberal government (1890-1912) and the first Labour government (1935-1949) earned New Zealand the title “social laboratory of the world”. Politicians who were similarly determined to make a difference came from Europe and America to observe first-hand New Zealand’s own special brand of “socialism without doctrines”.

The people who rendered making a difference unsafe were, of course, the socialists with doctrines. The unfortunate Russians and Chinese would pass from feudalism to communism without any extended period of democratic government in between. From noblemen with swords, they passed into the hands of commissars with pistols. The taxes were just as swingeing, but at least Communism’s bullies and extortionists contrived to paint Paradise in colours more exciting than white.

Lest their workers decide to paint their own countries red, Western capitalists were persuaded, very reluctantly, to let them be painted pink. The problem with social-democracy, however, was that if you conceded it an inch, it would, albeit incrementally, take you many miles down “the road to serfdom”. Such was the grim thesis of the Austrian, arch-capitalist economist, Friedrich von Hayek, founder of the Switzerland-based free-market think tank, the Mont Pelerin Society, and spiritual father of neoliberal political economy.

Labour’s Roger Douglas was a member of the aforesaid Mont Pelerin Society, as was National’s Ruth Richardson, along with quite a number of the bureaucrats and businessmen who first set New Zealand on the road to neoliberalism. At the heart of their project was a very simple imperative: Don’t let politicians near anything even remotely important. Leave all the important decisions to the market, or, at least, to those who own and control the market.

Those who struggle to understand why neoliberals are constantly presenting mild-mannered social-democrats as fire-breathing communists should view their behaviour as pre-emptive ideological law enforcement – pre-crime-fighting. Politicians determined to “make a positive difference” may begin by building state-houses, the neoliberals argue, but they always end up creating gulags. Better by far to create a society in which “making a positive difference” is restricted to capitalist entrepreneurs. Don’t let the political do-gooders get started.

Clearly, no one sent the memo to Jacinda Ardern. Or, if they did, she profoundly misunderstood it. Making a positive difference was what New Zealand’s young prime minister all-too-evidently believed the Labour Party had been established to enable. But, when she said “Let’s do this!”, all those around her, either gently, or not-so-gently, said “You can’t do that!”

It may have looked as though there were levers to pull to set up a light-rail network, build 100,000 affordable houses, end child poverty, and combat global warming, but they weren’t attached to anything. “Jacinda” could pull on them all she wanted, put on a good show, but the cables linking politicians’ promises to real-world outcomes had all been cut decades earlier. She didn’t appear to understand that disempowering politicians was what Rogernomics had been all about.

But, as is so often the case in history, the story was changed by something its author’s had failed to imagine, or anticipate. The onset of a global pandemic made it absolutely necessary that the lever labelled “Keeping New Zealanders Safe” was at the end of a cable that was very firmly attached to the real world, and that the person pulling the lever was empathically qualified to make a real and positive difference.

Before the neoliberals could come up with a plausible reason for letting thousands of their fellow citizens perish, the Ardern-led government, backed by the almost forgotten power of an unapologetically interventionist state, was producing changes in the real world – changes that were, very obviously, saving the lives of real New Zealanders.

It couldn’t last. Neoliberalism, like rust, never sleeps, and in less than a year the lever Ardern and her colleagues had pulled on with such energy had been quietly reconnected to less effective – but more divisive – parts of the state machine. But, not before “Jacinda” and her party had done the impossible. Not before Labour had won 50.01 percent of the Party Vote in the 2020 General Election.

There’s a lesson in there somewhere. Maybe, just maybe, politicians, acting in the interests of the people who elected them, aren’t always ill-qualified to lead? Maybe, just maybe, it is still possible for men and women of good will to make a positive difference?

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack on Tuesday, 20 August 2024.

Where The People Walk.

Walking Us Back:  It required no great brilliance on the part of National, Act and NZ First to grasp the enormous motivational power contained in the word “back”. They could see that a clear majority of the electorate were growing increasingly anxious about the way their country was being led. Voters wanted to go back the way they had come, to the beginning of the strange and unfamiliar footpaths they’d been asked to walk. 

WHAT PASSES for “Left” commentary these days insists that New Zealand is living under a “hard-right” government. Clearly, these commentators are unfamiliar with what constitutes a hard-right government. Equally clearly, they know next to nothing about New Zealand political history. Compared to the governments of Bill Massey, George Forbes, Sid Holland and Rob Muldoon, the coalition government of Christopher Luxon is a decidedly mild affair. The Left has mistaken a moderate and well-signalled political course-correction for a reactionary reversal of progressive fortunes.

What the Coalition Government is attempting to accomplish is the restoration of the state of affairs inherited by the coalition government of Jacinda Ardern and Winston Peters in 2017. Ardern’s political rhetoric indicated a determination to “transform” New Zealand. Exactly what their country was to be transformed into was never made clear to New Zealanders. Indeed, it seemed that the Labour-led government was itself was uncertain of its ultimate purpose. Events – unforeseen and deeply disruptive of New Zealanders lives – turned out to be the driving force of the Sixth Labour Government.

Without the Christchurch Mosque Massacres and the Covid-19 Global Pandemic, the serious weaknesses in Ardern’s ministry would have come to light much sooner – and it may not have lasted longer than a single term. But, Ardern’s superlative handling of the Christchurch tragedy won her international acclaim, and her country was hailed as a bastion of progressivism. Her management of the first stages of the Covid crisis proved similarly inspirational – both domestically and internationally – delivering her the seemingly impossible, an absolute majority in New Zealand’s unicameral Parliament.

It was the possession of this unassailable majority that spurred Labour’s Māori Caucus into action, and encouraged Labour’s social liberals to proceed as if their radical ideas enjoyed wide popular support. These misapprehensions: that New Zealanders were ready to become a Te Tiriti-based nation; and that the peculiar notions of the educated urban middle-classes could be imposed upon the rest of the country without provoking passionate resistance; were what convinced Labour and the Greens that they could move sharply leftward without generating a significant conservative backlash.

The late Jim Anderton understood, as did his hero, Norman Kirk, that, at heart, New Zealand was a conservative country. That said, when confronted by profound economic and/or moral challenges New Zealand voters have demonstrated a willingness to embrace new and unorthodox policies: Savage’s Welfare State; Lange’s Nuclear-Free New Zealand. What is noteworthy about both of these historical examples, however, is that significant public support had been assembled for them patiently, over many years. They were unmistakably popular measures. This was the political point embedded in Anderton’s aphorism: “Always build your footpaths where the people walk.”

Initially, at least, the footpaths laid down by Jacinda Ardern were well-trodden. Her rapid outlawing of semi-automatic rifles and shotguns in the wake of the Christchurch massacres enjoyed broad support domestically, and won her the loud applause of tens-of-millions of American progressives. It was her appeal to the “Team of Five Million”, however, in the first months of Covid, that inspired the deep affection of the New Zealand people. It had been a long time since the collective welfare of the nation had been put ahead of the individual rights of entrepreneurs, consumers, and taxpayers. New Zealanders liked standing together, and they became confused and angry when the evolution of the Covid virus required the government to break them apart.

The footpaths laid down by Labour in the direction of co-governance, the curbing of free speech, and the erasure of biological sex differences were not, however, trod by the masses. Indeed, they appeared to most New Zealanders to be leading them into wild and unknown territory. Not only did they not want to go there, but they became increasingly suspicious of the motives of those who kept insisting that they should.

Had the economy been in tip-top condition and the citizens’ standard-of-living rising steadily, then perhaps these other initiatives could have been tolerated. Labour’s problem was that all these radical departures from familiar termini were being demanded by people who did not seem to be up to the job of running the country. Why go haring-off into the ideological Badlands at the behest of politicians who could not keep inflation under control – or bring just one major project to fruition on time and on budget?

What the Left still doesn’t seem to have got its head around is that the defeated Labour Party is not the innocent victim of “red-necks” and “cookers” – reactionaries determined to drag New Zealand kicking and screaming back to the “half-gallon, quarter acre, Pavlova paradise” of the 1960s and 70s. Labour lost because, after 2020, Jacinda’s political skills deserted her and, following her departure in January 2023, Chris Hipkins and his colleagues were exposed as a pretty hopeless bunch of politicians. What those Labour MPs celebrated as “progressive”, a great many voters considered either loopy, or dangerous, or a volatile mixture of the two.

It required no great brilliance on the part of National, Act and NZ First to grasp the enormous motivational power contained in the word “back”. They could see that a clear majority of the electorate were growing increasingly anxious about the way their country was being led. Voters wanted to go back the way they had come, to the beginning of the strange and unfamiliar footpaths they’d been asked to walk. At the very least this meant returning to 2020. Or, just to be on the safe side, 2017.

National, Act and NZ First did not need to keep their intentions secret – no He Puapua reports for them! Being parties of the Right, their preferences were all on the side of businesspeople, employers, landlords and farmers. It’s not that the electorate didn’t understand who they were voting for on 14 October 2023. It’s just that, from their perspective, there was more upside to a vote for the Right than the Left. They wanted rid of the Labour Government, and that meant voting for a party (or parties) of the Right.

Did that deliver New Zealand a “hard-right” government? Well, compared to the government of the Russian Federation, or even the governments of the US states of Texas and Florida – not hardly. Nor is it likely that Christopher Luxon will be signing-up Special Constables, or sending the unemployed to work camps in the countryside, or promulgating Emergency Regulations temporarily extinguishing democracy, or welcoming the sporting ambassadors of a viciously racist regime, any time soon. Not unless Te Pāti Māori and their Tangata Tiriti allies leave him no other choice.

For the moment, at least, New Zealanders seem happy to walk along National’s, Act’s, and NZ First’s footpaths. Not so much a “hard-right” government, as one committed to showing New Zealanders the “right” way home.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project website on Monday, 8 January 2024.

Labour In 2023: No Place Left To Grow.

Missing The Point: It’s the element of punishment – the mood of ‘anyone but Labour’ – that Labour stubbornly refuses to accept. It certainly wasn’t evident in Chris Hipkins concession speech on the night his government was so resoundingly voted out of office. 

“I HAD BEEN HOPING that this election would resemble 2005 more than 2014. Clearly this was not the case.” So said the pseudonymous “Mickey Savage” on the Labour-leaning website, The Standard, the morning after. A spectacular understatement, obviously, but the observation also confirmed just how out of touch Labour’s membership has become.

The election-night which Saturday evening (14/10/23) most resembled wasn’t the election night of 2014, with its calamitous Party Vote of 25.13 percent, but the election night of 1990 when, after six tumultuous years in office, Labour was punished with exemplary viciousness by an electorate which had, very clearly, had enough. 1990 was also the other occasion when the voters of the “safe” Labour seat of Mt Roskill ejected their local MP (one Phil Goff) in favour the National candidate.

It’s that element of punishment – that mood of ‘anyone but Labour’ – that Labour stubbornly refuses to accept. Certainly, it wasn’t evident in Chris Hipkins concession speech. Although politicians invariably reach for tidal metaphors when confronted with significant defeats, the identification is far from apt. Politics is not a matter of gravitational attraction, it is constructed out of the hopes and fears – and rage – of human-beings. When parties lose, it’s not on account of the position of the moon, it’s because they have done things that cause even their supporters to vote for someone else – or stay at home.

The things that Labour did between 1984 and 1990 – “Rogernomics” and all that – turned New Zealand upside-down. Concepts and theories which had guided the politicians of both parties for decades were jettisoned with a speed and a ruthlessness that made effective opposition extremely difficult. Difficult, but not impossible. The New Zealand in the 1980s was still the sort of society in which dissent and debate, even in regard to what was fast becoming the state’s official ideology, was still permitted. The mainstream news media still saw the virtue of offering citizens both sides of the story.

Herein lies the difference between that earlier wholesale clean-out of Labour, and the 2023 General Election. Between 2017 and 2023, the Sixth Labour Government also turned New Zealand upside-down – but not in the same way as Roger Douglas and Richard Prebble.

When the Fourth Labour Government closed down freezing-works and sold state-owned enterprises, it was front page news. Protests were staged and documentaries were made. The responsible Cabinet Ministers were forced to explain and justify their actions publicly which, to a creditable degree, they did. The introduction of neoliberalism in New Zealand did not end up requiring (as one trade union leader had predicted) tanks in the streets.

That’s not how its been for the past six years. Massive changes in education and health policy were introduced without adequate explanation or justification. Jarring changes in the linguistic structure of official communications were implemented without consultation, leaving many New Zealanders feeling culturally disoriented and politically ignored. Distracted by the Christchurch terrorist attack and the sudden onrush of the Covid-19 Pandemic most of these developments went unnoticed until Labour, freed from NZ First’s moderating influence by the “Thankyou Jacinda!” election of 2020, began stepping up the pace of change.

Missing from this “revolution” (as Dame Claudia Orange described it) was anything approaching the coherent explanatory framework provided by Roger Douglas and his colleagues courtesy of the neoliberal intellectuals in Treasury, the Reserve Bank and the Business Roundtable.

The highly controversial report, He Puapua, for example, proposed wholesale constitutional reform – to a degree which would have left New Zealand politically unrecognisable. Far from being conceived as the starting point for a wide-ranging public debate, the report was prepared in secret and only released by the Sixth Labour Government after it was leaked to the Act Party.

Although disavowed by Jacinda Ardern, sharp-eyed members of the public recognised a remarkable degree of congruence between He Puapua’s recommendations and government policy. They were told, none too politely, that they were seeing things.

Undeterred, those taking a close interest in public policy noticed something else: the deep reluctance of Labour ministers to engage in the sort of head-to-head ideological confrontations that were common during the unrolling of Rogernomics. After 2020, all attempts to debate the future of Te Tiriti o Waitangi and Māori-Pakeha relations tended to be framed as manifestations of racist, white supremacist, prejudice. Tellingly, a long-delayed discussion document on Treaty-based constitutional reform was deemed too inflammatory for public release by Māori Development Minister Willie Jackson. It still hasn’t seen the light of day.

Even more concerning was the mainstream news media’s extreme reluctance to entertain any debate over the many contentious issues – “co-governance” in particular – that were growing out of the Crown’s newfound commitment to “indigenisation” and “decolonisation”. Increasingly, voters came to understand that there were topics which could not be questioned or debated without “consequences”. Around this new ideology they further observed the erection of a complex array of protective barriers. Those who attempted to breach these barriers were accused of spreading “misinformation, disinformation and malinformation” or, even worse, of deploying “hate speech”.

Inflation, the cost-of-living, rising mortgage interests rates: if the pollsters’ efforts were to be believed, then these were the issues driving the voters towards National, Act, and a change of government. Concerns about co-governance did not feature in these lists of voter concerns. Nonetheless, they persisted. In places where no one was likely to cluck their tongues in disapproval, or send an anonymous complaint to the HR department, the state of ethnic relations in New Zealand was the subject of intense unease. It kept Act’s numbers at record levels and fuelled the re-emergence of NZ First. It was the political dissidence that dared not speak its name, but it existed – and it would prove extraordinarily motivational.

When the defectors from Labour punished their old party in 1990, it was an act of bitter revenge. David Lange and Roger Douglas had promised “transformation” and they had delivered it. New Zealand the way Muldoon’s followers had wanted it, no longer existed. The votes of those who lamented its passing were cast against Labour in anger and despair. A final “Take that!” gesture of defiance before the new order became irretrievably bedded-in.

Thirty-three years later, voters threw their support behind National, Act and NZ First with much higher hopes of achieving something positive. While freezing works could not be re-opened or privatised state enterprises repurchased, the indigenisation and de-colonisation of New Zealand society can still be halted at the stroke of a ministerial pen.

It is to be hoped that New Zealand’s new Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, understands this. That among all the other things he has to do, he must not fail to honour the expectation of his conservative voters to defend democratic “New Zealand” from Te Tiriti-Centric “Aotearoa”.

The 2023 election result signals a decisive shift of the non-Māori, non-Pasefika, and non-Woke elements of the electorate to the right. Labour’s massive losses in Auckland put it at serious risk of being reduced to a South Auckland-based Pasefika party. In forthcoming elections, what National, Act and NZ First haven’t already taken is in grave danger of being stripped off Labour’s electoral carcass by the Greens and Te Pāti Māori.

For as long as its manifesto fails to overtly distance itself from the authoritarian radicalism of today’s “progressives”, the party of Mickey Savage, and “Mickey Savage”, seems destined to fade into historical irrelevance.

From where it stands now, Labour has run out of places to grow.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 16 October 2023.

So Little To Defend, So Much To Punish.

Weapon? Shield? Tool?: How will the majority of voters use their votes in the forthcoming General Election? As a weapon to punish their enemies? As a shield to protect them from their enemies? As a tool to build a better world? Given the febrile political temper of the times, only the bravest punters would put their money on the constructive option.

MOST OF US use our votes in one of three ways: as a weapon; as a shield; as a tool. With early voting commencing in a month’s time, the overwhelming majority of New Zealanders would appear to be preparing to use their vote as either a weapon or a shield. All the signs point to those intent upon weaponising their vote being the largest fraction of the electorate. The number intending to use their vote as shield against their enemies is, however, unlikely to be significantly smaller than that of the weaponisers. Sadly, only a tiny minority of voters will be brave and/or principled enough to cast their votes positively in 2023. This is not going to be a happy election.

It was never going to be easy for Labour to live up to the hopes and encouragement of the voters in 2020. Not since the joyful election of 1972 made Norman Kirk New Zealand’s twenty-ninth prime minister, and gave him a whopping parliamentary majority of 23 seats, had so many Kiwis used their votes constructively, as a tool. Not only were their ballots deployed as an enormous “Thank you, Jacinda!”, but many were also given to Labour as a way of facilitating the “transformation” which its leader had promised, but which Covid-19 had interrupted so dramatically.

Tragically, the Labour cabinet, caucus, and party organisation proved unequal to the challenge of using the tools which an astonishing 50.01 percent of the voting public had given them. Something strange and sinister appeared to overtake Jacinda Ardern, darkening her sunny political disposition. Her Cabinet was no help, and neither was her caucus. It was almost as if they were annoyed and/or affronted by the tools thrust into their hands. It was for them to set the agenda, not 1,443,545 presumptuous voters.

All of Labour’s team had failed to read the events of 2017-20 correctly. Most especially, they had failed to grasp that the success of their Covid response was based almost entirely on the state’s decisive intervention on behalf of the “Team of Five Million”. Those aligned to the ideologies of the Right knew exactly what they were looking at as the government seized control of the pandemic response. That’s why they were so furious. Allow the voters to see what a mobilised state could do for them and, inevitably, they would want more.

Painful though it may be to acknowledge, Labour’s ministers were as ill-disposed to keeping the state’s shoulder to the wheel as the Right. Rather than being inspired by the mass support for their Prime Minister and Party, they seemed terrified of it. Rhetoric was one thing, reality another. On the re-elected government’s agenda their was just one item: getting everything back to normal as quickly as possible.

In politics, executing such an unheralded handbrake-turn will always exact a high psychological price, and the Ardern-led government proved no exception. Working against the expectations of her supporters changed “Jacinda” – and not in a good way.

But, the political price incurred by Labour’s refusal to keep on moving forward was much, much higher. Hopes raised, and then dashed, will swiftly curdle into a witches’ brew of disappointment and fury. When next they enter the polling-booths, those who believe themselves betrayed by “Jabcinda” will wield their ballot papers like a butcher’s knife.

In doing so they will add their numbers to the roughly one-third of the electorate who have always wielded their votes as weapons against those who would upend what their “betters” still believe to be the natural order of things.

At the core of this army of nay-sayers are the inhabitants of rural and provincial New Zealand. These “Heartlanders” have always looked upon the cities as sinks of iniquity and havens for the undeserving poor. Every three years, National and Act supporters grind their teeth in fury as impoverished citizens, many of them brown, turn out in support of Labour’s redistributive policies – using their votes as shields against the threatened depredations of the Right.

In uneasy alliance with the Heartlanders are the wealthy citizens of the big cities. Although they live, safely sequestered from the poor and the brown, in the leafiest suburbs of the cities, it is more difficult for these citizens to weaponise their votes in the manner of the farmers and their small-town allies.

The people who work in their factories and warehouses, clean their offices, serve in their shops and fast-food joints, and build the nation’s infrastructure for them to make profits out of are, after all, people they see every day. Somewhere in the recesses of their social consciousness, they understand that the working-class is something their own class cannot do without. When things are going well, they may even be persuaded to help the workers. When things start going badly, however, or when – God rot them! – their employees start joining unions and taking their destiny into their own hands, that’s when the wealthy turn their ballot papers into pistols and start shooting.

It is the working-class voters who, most of all, yearn to use their votes in the way their grandparents and great-grandparents did, as tools to build a better world. Every three years they hope-against-hope that Labour will ask them to create something worth having with their votes, but election-after-election they are disappointed. Reluctantly, and without enthusiasm, they lift the protective shield of the franchise against the worst the Right can offer – keeping Labour viable solely out of fear of meeting something worse.

Labour, as the lesser of two evils, remains the workers’ choice. Even if, in 2023, it no longer represents the working-class who peopled its ranks in 1923. Labour, now, is the party of the people who teach the working-class; who take care of it when its sick; who keep it afloat when jobs are scarce and puts its worst casualties up in hotels when they have nowhere else to go. They’re the people who, when the kids of the working-class start breaking bad, defend them in court, write reports about them, give them counselling, and mange them when they’re released from prison. There are tens-of-thousands of these people: not quite bosses, but not quite workers either. The American sociologists, John and Barbara Ehrenreich, called them the “Professional-Managerial Class” – and they have made the labour and social-democratic parties of the world their own.

The problem with this intermediate class is that its top two priorities are: to preserve the institutions that employ them; and, to keep the power relationships within those institutions from changing in ways that threaten their status. These essentially conservative priorities make the Professional-Managerial Class extremely difficult to like. They may talk the talk of “progressive politics”, but they are far too risk averse to walk it. Indeed, they offer living proof of the early-twentieth century “muck-raking” American journalist, Upton Sinclair’s, famous quip: “It is very hard to make a man understand something, when his salary depends upon him not understanding it.”

In this election, the National Party has its knives out for the professionals and managers of the public service, so no one should be surprised to see them voting defensively for their own party. Labour’s problem, however, is that it has given far too many New Zealanders far too many good reasons for wanting to punish it.

Because, when all is said and done, Labour was the party which, in 2020, led half the country to the mountain-top, only to decide that if the promised land had no need of bosses, then it might also have no need for managers and professionals like themselves. Daunted by this terrifying prospect, they opted to proceed no further.

But you cannot show people the gates of heaven, and then turn around and go home. Not when there’s another election in three years’ time. Not when your party has ended up giving the New Zealand electorate so little to defend, and so much to punish.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 1 September 2023.

Captain’s Call.

Not Now, Not Ever, Never! That Labour has meekly accepted Chris Hipkins’ “Captain’s Call”, nixing both a Wealth Tax and a Capital Gains Tax while he’s in charge, is deplorable. Given the centrality of tax policy to everything a political party seeks to accomplish when in office, his decision to rule out key instruments of revenue gathering without consultation, debate, or vote indicates that tangible accomplishments are no longer on the party’s agenda.

IT WAS THE AUSSIES who came up with the “Captain’s Call” tag, and we Kiwis have followed along behind. In the context of sport, the term has a rough and ready legitimacy. After all, our national teams are not democracies, so the idea of allowing the team captain (instead of the team coach) to make the occasional decision on strategy, tactics, and/or personnel, seems entirely reasonable. Otherwise, why bother having a captain at all?

But political parties are not sports teams. No matter how often politicians and journalists talk about “the team”, politics is not a sporting fixture. Indeed, the more a nation’s politics comes to resemble a sporting fixture, the more certain you can be that nothing important is riding on the outcome of the “game”.

In the past, people joined political parties to change the world. It is a moot point as to whether this is still the case. What is certain, however, is that a political party whose only objective is to beat the other team/s has long since degenerated into something else. The members of such a party might well accept a “Captain’s Call” as the end of the story, but only because they’ve forgotten how to make decisions for themselves.

That the New Zealand Labour Party has meekly accepted the Captain’s Call of its Leader, Chris Hipkins, that his government will not introduce either a Wealth Tax or a Capital Gains Tax (CGT) while he’s the one in charge is deplorable. Given the centrality of tax policy to everything a political party seeks to accomplish when in office, the decision to rule out key instruments of revenue gathering without consultation, debate, or a vote – not even around the cabinet-table – indicates that tangible accomplishments are no longer on the party’s agenda.

When political leaders issue a Captain’s Call, they are effectively inviting their parliamentary colleagues to either back them or sack them. They are signalling that key policies, key decisions, are no longer to be decided democratically by Cabinet, Caucus and/or the wider party; but from above, by the Leader and his/her closest advisors. Where democratic leaders are content to let the party determine policy, seeing themselves as simply the chief salesperson of its policies to the electorate; autocratic leaders have no interest in discussion or debate. It is their judgement, their will, which alone determines whether a policy lives or dies. This sort of leader, once they have made their “call”, can no longer be persuaded, or outvoted. They can only be deposed.

What has led Chris Hipkins to this crucial Captain’s Call on Labour’s taxation policy? That he was the unanimous choice of his colleagues to lead Labour into the 2023 General Election suggests that Hipkins and, at least, the parliamentary party were on the same political wavelength. His bonfire of Labour’s unpopular policies also seemed to have the blessings of the caucus, and was well received by the voters. Hipkins appeared to be on track to win his party a third term.

But, somewhere amid the havoc unleashed by storm and cyclone, the bonfire went out. The Māori caucus refused to countenance the jettisoning of co-governance, and so fiercely were a clutch of expensive pet projects defended by their originating ministers, that it seemed prudent to leave them in place. Even more troubling, from the new Prime Minister’s perspective, was the news that policy development on radical tax reform targeting the super-wealthy was well advanced. Hipkins, who had introduced himself to the country as Mr Bread-and-Butter (with positive results in the preferred prime minister stakes) was not at all keen on being re-branded as Mr Fire-and-Brimstone.

Hipkins’ colleagues, Finance Minister Grant Robertson and Revenue Minister David Parker, found it impossible to persuade the Prime Minister that their tax reform plans were a plus, not a minus, for the Labour Party. Nor could they convince him of the wisdom of their time-line. Robertson and Parker wanted to introduce their tax package in the May 2023 Budget, but delay its coming into force until 2024. By explicitly seeking a popular mandate for the reforms, Labour could set the tone of the forthcoming election campaign: pitching hope and fairness against fear and greed.

Hipkins wasn’t convinced. His advisers had warned him that focus-group reports indicated that a radical tax policy would be a very hard sell. More to the point, all of Hipkins personal political experience told him that most of the privately-owned news media, and all of the interest-groups representing the big end of town, would wage an unrelenting campaign against Labour’s tax package. A campaign loud enough to drown out the Government’s message of hope.

It is also likely that Hipkins feared the consequences of unleashing such a left-populist campaign. Temperamentally, Hipkins is ill-at-ease with the sort of politics that mobilises too many ordinary people. Ever since the political divisions unleashed in the 1980s, the strongest factions in the Labour Party (which Hipkins has been careful to cultivate) have thought it wiser to keep control of the losing side in the class war, than lose control of the winning side.

Hence Hipkins’ Captain’s Call from Vilnius.

That there were public servants in Treasury and IRD willing to tell National’s Nicola Willis exactly what questions to ask and which documents to seek in relation to Robertson’s and Parker’s tax plans, had already put the government on the back foot. If the tax package had been released in the Budget, as planned, Labour might have avoided looking shifty and secretive on tax. But, Hipkins had put a stop to that. And, now, he would put a stop to this.

The upshot of all this political caution is that Labour will go into the election with very few achievements to boast of, and with next to no policies bold enough to persuade the electorate to overlook its many failures. Hipkins’ refusal to risk his own and his party’s future on a policy platform that would’ve helped to make New Zealand a fairer and more hopeful country, coupled with his refusal to let the Greens and Te Pāti Māori make the same promises with any credibility, have made the victory of fear and greed a near certainty.

It was a chance for Captain Hipkins to show his quality, and sadly, he has.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 14 July 2023.

Don’t Need A Weatherman: Is New Zealand about to experience storm-force winds from a radicalised Māori electorate?

Coming Home: Very few commentators were willing to call Chris Hipkins’ decisions what any reasonable observer could hardly avoid calling them: the ruthless reassertion of Pakeha power and control. What Meka Whaitiri’s defection to Te Pāti Māori made clear, however, was that Hipkins’ “bread-and-buttering” of Maoridom would not be cost-free.

THE EXTRAORDINARY MUDDLE into which the Labour Government manoeuvred itself over “Three Waters” was entirely avoidable. At its heart lay the all-too-common failing manifested over-and-over again by the senior Pakeha politicians of both major parties. Unconsciously, for the most part, Pakeha political leaders consign “all that Māori stuff” to the agenda space reserved for non-urgent and/or too-difficult-to-explain issues.

This Pakeha failure to treat Māori issues with the same seriousness as those referred to them by Treasury, MFAT, MBIE, Health, Education and Social Development is made a lot easier when Māori colleagues are willing to take responsibility for their own advancement. In the case of Three Waters, Labour’s leadership was quite happy to leave pretty much the whole thing to Nanaia Mahuta. Until it all started turning to custard.

When that happened, the response of Labour’s Pakeha leadership was instructive. First, the person in charge when everything started to go wrong, Jacinda Ardern, decided it was time to go and do something else. Second, Ardern’s successor, Chris Hipkins, took the whole Three Waters project away from Mahuta, demoted her, and then sent her into what looked suspiciously like near-permanent exile. Third, Mahuta’s replacement, at the helm of the now renamed “Affordable Water Reform”, was that emphatically Pakeha Kiwi bloke, Kieran McAnulty.

The political meaning of these decisions was not at all difficult to understand. In the words of Bob Dylan: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

“You” may not, but a surprisingly large fraction of the New Zealand news media found it well-nigh impossible to feel (let alone explain) the wind-shift. Very few commentators were willing to call Hipkins’ decisions what any reasonable observer could hardly avoid calling them: the ruthless reassertion of Pakeha power and control. Nor was there much discernible enthusiasm for reporting on the ramifications of the Labour Māori Caucus’s successful defence of the co-governance elements of Three Waters. A more hands-on style of Pakeha leadership had clearly come at the price of keeping co-governance in play. How else to explain McAnulty becoming a more eloquent defender of tino rangatiratanga than Willie Jackson?

There was a similar failure on the part of many journalists to link the defection of the Labour MP for Ikaroa-Rāwhiti, Meka Whaitiri, with the Government’s arguably racist “bread-and-buttering” of Māori policy. A gleeful John Tamihere might hail Labour’s loss of Whaitiri as Te Pāti Māori’s gain, but he forbore from explaining her departure in terms of the Labour leadership’s unconscious prejudices concerning the responsibility – or otherwise – of their Māori colleagues. Hipkins’ refusal to reinstate Whaitiri as a full member of Cabinet may, or may not, have been justified, but the Māori woman who leap-frogged the Ikaroa-Rawhiti MP into Cabinet, Northland MP Willow-Jean Prime, presents as a very different sort of Māori politician to the woman who preserved the flax-roots nurtured by her kaiako, Parekua Horomia.

The defenestration of Elizabeth Kerekere raises some very similar questions about just how far down the road that leads to “transformation” Pakeha politicians – even Green politicians – are prepared to go with their Māori colleagues. It’s one thing to blithely swear fealty to the “principles” of te Tiriti o Waitangi, quite another to put those principles into practice in ways that ruffle the feathers of the status quo. Blaming the world’s ills on “Cis White Males” has a revolutionary ring to it, but it is not at all the same as promising te iwi Māori control over Aotearoa’s water, or restoring “stolen” Māori land to its rightful custodians.

While the polls continue to identify Te Pāti Māori as the holder of the votes necessary to keep Labour and the Greens on the Treasury benches, however, the contemplation of revolutionary demands is something the centre-left will find extremely difficult to avoid.

Of course, contemplation and implementation are two very different things. Jacinda Ardern contemplated a revolutionary anti-capitalist transformation in the early days of her prime-ministership. More than that, she went to Waitangi and instructed Māori to hold her government accountable for how faithfully it upheld the principles of the Treaty. Ardern soon discovered, however, that implementing Labour’s promises was a lot harder than making them. This was serious, because nothing is more likely to cause a revolution than raising the expectations of the poor and the marginalised – and then failing to meet them.

Ultimately, the management of expectations may turn out to be as big a problem for Te Pāti Māori as it is for Labour and the Greens. If Whaitiri is going to win Ikaroa-Rawhiti for her new party, then she is going to have to paint her former Māori colleagues as politicians who talk big, but, whenever the Pakeha majority shows signs of restiveness, allow their colleagues to slam on the policy brakes and throw Labour’s political vehicle into reverse.

It is vital that Te Pāti Māori does not do the same. Its promises of transformation must be unequivocal and non-negotiable. Either, Labour and the Greens embrace the revolution, or, they shuffle-off to the Opposition benches. Regardless of the centre-left’s choice, Te Pāti Māori must not loosen its grip on the radical bunting.

It is difficult to see the Labour Party that abandoned the transformational policy agenda of its Māori caucus for a “bread-and-butter” manifesto being willing to radicalise itself in sympathy with the Greens and Te Pāti Māori. Frankly, it is easier to see Labour quietly reconciling itself to electoral defeat. Sitting back and watching National and Act attempting to solve New Zealand’s rapidly growing list of intractable problems must, surely, have its attractions?

But, what if the New Zealand electorate refuses to let Labour throw the electoral fight? What if Te Pāti Māori mobilises younger voters in unprecedented numbers? What if the Greens do the same? What if, in spite of Labour’s best efforts, the electorate swings sharply to the left? What if, when all the votes are counted, National and Act simply do not have enough to form a government? What then?

One answer is that Labour and National might suddenly discover that they have more in common with one another than they do with the parties representing the extremes, and agree to form a Grand Coalition. Such a solution would, however, offer only a short-term respite, since the processes of radicalisation on both the right and the left would, almost certainly, intensify.

The choice facing voters in three years’ time might not even include Labour and National. “All that Māori stuff” may no longer permit the reassertion of Pakeha power and control. It is even possible that Pakeha may no longer want it.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 8 May 2023.

An Ugly Demonstration.

Mobbed! As Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull’s (Posie Parker’s) opponents surged forward, her only protecters were a handful of burly security guards who surrounded their client and began forcing a path through what was now a howling mob. At least one video recording shows the diminutive Keen-Minshull, a terrified rag-doll, eyes dulled by the effects of shock, being heaved past individuals with faces contorted by fury and hate.

WHAT SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED on Saturday morning, 25 March 2023, in Auckland’s Albert Park is easily described.

At 11:00am, Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull (a.k.a “Posie Parker”) a small (just 155 centimetres tall) bottle-blond mother of four from the United Kingdom, would have stood behind the microphone set up in the Albert Park band rotunda and delivered a speech.

To a small crowd of about 250 people, she would have detailed her objections to transgender women (i.e. persons born biological males and, in some cases, retaining their male reproductive organs) having the right to enter spaces hitherto reserved for biological women and girls; being incarcerated in biological women’s prisons; and permitted to compete against human females in sporting events intended for biological women only.

Keen-Minshull would have been followed by a line-up of New Zealand speakers (most of them biological women and feminists) concerned about the linguistic erasure of their sex from official discourse (as in the expression “pregnant persons”) and alarmed at the efforts of transgender women and their supporters to silence the public expression of their concerns.

At a distance of about 50 metres, a much larger crowd of transgender persons and their supporters, safely corralled behind sturdy barriers, and a cordon of police officers, would have kept up a noisy barrage of objections to the content of the speakers’ speeches. Above their heads, banners and placards proclaiming their support for the rights of transgender New Zealanders would have been clearly visible to the “Let Women Speak” organisers in the rotunda.

The news media would have been there in force to record the confrontation for posterity. When the meeting came to an end, roughly 90 minutes later, and the crowds began to disperse, journalists would have been seen interviewing participants from both sides of the barriers for their media employers.

Spokespersons for the Transgender community would have set forth their objections to Keen-Minshull’s claims, drawing the journalists’ attention to the lack of evidence for any widespread abuse of women and girls by transgender women in toilets, changing-rooms, women’s refuges or prisons, and pointing out how extremely hurtful such suggestions are to the members of one of society’s most fragile and vulnerable communities. The journalists’ professional commitment to fair and balanced reporting would have ensured that the views of both groups were presented to the public.

By 2:00pm, Albert Park would again have become the preserve of Aucklanders enjoying a sunny autumn afternoon.



WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED on the morning of Saturday, 25 March 2023, bore very little resemblance to the civilised political ideal described above.

As Keen-Minshull stepped forward to speak she was physically assaulted by a person pretending to be a supporter. This attack caused the counter-protesters, estimated at more than 2,000, to surge forward, thrusting aside the flimsy barriers erected to separate them from the much smaller crowd which had gathered to hear the speakers. They were able to do this because there was no police cordon to enforce that separation. Within seconds, the counter-protesters were pressing in on Keen-Minshull’s audience, screaming abuse, hurling projectiles, and lashing out with fists and placards.

Fearing for the safety of Keen-Minshull and her audience, one observer implored a nearby police officer, who was looking on impassively, to intervene. He refused, allegedly declaring that Keen-Minshull: ‘is in a public space. If she feels unsafe she needs to leave’.

At this point, Keen-Minshull’s only protecters were a handful of burly security guards who surrounded their client and began forcing a path through what was now a howling mob. At least one video recording shows the diminutive Keen-Minshull, a terrified rag-doll, eyes dulled by the effects of shock, being heaved past individuals with faces contorted by fury and hate.

Only when the police present realised that if they did not place Keen-Minshull under their protection, then her bodyguards would be forced to exit the melee by driving through it in their own vehicle – with all the attendant risks to the counter-protesters’ health and safety such a manoeuvre would entail. Keen-Minshull was, accordingly, bundled into a police car and driven from the scene.

Not all the scheduled speakers were so lucky. This is how Ani O’Brien, from the group Stand Up For Women, described her experience:

No sooner had Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull arrived at the Rotunda, a protestor (who had managed to get past the barrier) ran at her and threw a red substance all over her and a security guard. As she attempted to clean up, the protestors pushed over, crushed, and dismantled the barriers and swarmed around her.

At this point, I was caught in the angry crowd. I had whistles blown in my face, abuse screamed at me, and I was fearful for my own safety. This was nothing compared to what Kellie-Jay endured. She was trapped and surrounded by a mob screaming abuse and trying to get past her security guards.

Chris, there were no police in sight. Despite widely publicised threats of violence, the police were nowhere near the protest frontlines to prevent the event from devolving into chaos as it did. I had to call the police from the middle of the screaming crowd! And even then they weren’t particularly concerned that a woman was trapped in the midst of a mob determined to get to her.

Keen-Minshull’s rally was over before it had even begun – victim of the Thug’s Veto. Her right to free expression had been illegally and violently curtailed. Left in possession of the park, the elated counter-protesters took to Twitter to celebrate their historic victory over bigotry and hate.



WHAT ARE WE TO MAKE of the events of Saturday, 25 March 2023? The most urgent questions are those that will, over the coming days, be levelled at the Police. Who was in command? What intelligence did they have regarding Keen-Minshull and her increasingly vocal enemies? Why, in the face of credible threats to her person, was police protection denied to Keen-Minshull and her followers? Why, as the situation spiralled out of control, did the police officers present not intervene?

Predictably – and entirely appropriately – the Free Speech Union, has raised these issues in a letter to the new Police Minister, Ginny Andersen:

We call on you, and the Police Commissioner, to acknowledge the lack of action to defend the basic speech rights of those who turned up to the ‘Let Women Speak’ rally, and reassert that those who express unpopular or controversial views in public are entirely in their right, and deserve to be protected from threats, intimidation, and violence.

There will be considerable public scepticism, however, concerning the willingness of the Labour Government, and Party, to defend New Zealanders’ freedom of speech and assembly. There will be scepticism, also, that the Minister and her colleagues are any longer capable of perceiving the ethical issues which Saturday’s ugly demonstration laid bare.

All through the preceding week, Labour Ministers, Members of Parliament, and activist party members were telling those seeking to silence Keen-Minshull that, as far as Labour was concerned, they were doing the Lord’s work. In this they were echoed, even more vehemently, by the Greens. When the governing parties of the day publicly back a political movement, its followers may be forgiven for believing they have been given the green-light for coercion. The parliamentary Left did not balk at describing Keen-Minshull’s views as “abhorrent” and “incorrect”. Not quite in the same league as King Henry II’s “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest!” – but close.

Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of this incident is the crucial role played by the mainstream news media in creating the preconditions for the violent suppression of free speech which ensued. Throughout the preceding week, journalists had denigrated Keen-Minshull – who describes herself as an “advocate for women” – as “an anti-trans activist” – finding her guilty, by association, of endorsing far-right, even Neo-Nazi, groups. That she, and people who shared her concerns, had a case to make was simply not acknowledged journalistically. In a synergy worthy of Putin’s Russia, the views of the Government, and the views of the mainstream media, had become interchangeable.

Certainly, the state media appeared incapable of perceiving the role it had played in the events of Saturday, 25 March. Television New Zealand’s Jack Tame even offered the violence unleashed by Keen-Minshull’s opponents as an ex-post-facto justification for denying her entry to New Zealand. In other words, allowing those threatening to exercise the Thug’s Veto to determine who should be allowed to speak in New Zealand, and who should not. Nothing could better illustrate the yawning generational gulf into which journalistic ethics has disappeared.

Over the next six months, the New Zealand electorate will discover just how effectively the parties of the Right are able to exploit the Labour-Green failure to uphold the Bill of Rights Act and the democratic polity it underpins. Chris Hipkins may soon regret that he did not step in immediately to set the political tone on Keen-Minshull. Because, whatever the reasons that set New Zealanders against one another so aggressively on Saturday, 25 March 2023, they had absolutely nothing to do with bread and butter.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 27 March 2023.

Pruning The Consultancy Money-Tree.

In Need Of Pruning: Small wonder the National Party chose the massive government spend on consultants as its most promising source of savings. Ceasing to pay these parasitic characters $9,000 per week, and then applying the money saved to something as wholesome as reducing child-care costs for Kiwi families battling inflation, must have struck Christopher Luxon as an absolutely crackerjack idea.

THE NATIONAL PARTY has demonstrated considerable political skill in funding its new “FamilyBoost” policy by savagely pruning the consultancy money-tree. I’m sure I’m not the only New Zealander who has scratched his head at the shocking figure of $1.7 billion spent on consultants by this Labour Government. Why would they do that?

New Zealand’s present over-reliance on consultants raises all sorts of questions about the quality of its public service. Is it really so bereft of talent and expertise that outside advisers must be brought in to show them what to do? And, if that is the case, then why hasn’t the government recruited the talent and expertise its short of, rather than renting it for a few months at exorbitant expense?

All those additional public servants Labour has hired since 2017 – roughly 14,000 of them – surely they should have reduced the need for expensive consultants? And yet, the government goes on injecting them into the body politic with all the desperation of a drug addict.

Small wonder, then, that the National Party has chosen the massive government spend on consultants as its most promising source of savings. Ceasing to pay these parasitic characters $9,000 per week, and then applying the money saved to something as wholesome as reducing child-care costs for Kiwi families battling inflation, must have struck Christopher Luxon as an absolutely crackerjack idea.

There will be some who dismiss National’s latest policy as crude populism. As if giving people what they need is a bad thing? But what is so bad about delivering the greatest good to the greatest number? Isn’t that what democracy is supposed to be all about? Who could possibly object to that?

Except, anyone posing that question seriously clearly hasn’t been paying attention to the way this country has been run for past 40 years. Responding to public needs; delivering the greatest good to the greatest number; that’s what New Zealand politics used to be about. Political parties might squabble about the best way to do these things, but very few politicians disputed the idea that they had to be done.

The problem which eventually grew large enough to make politicians question their most basic democratic assumptions was: How to meet public needs that never seem to grow smaller? Or, to put it more crudely: At what point does the cost of delivering the greatest good to the greatest number become fiscally unsustainable?

Forty years ago, this was the question keeping New Zealand politicians awake at night. The top tax-rate was already at 66 percent, inflation seemed untameable, and “fiscal drag” was causing even relatively low-paid workers to squint hard at their pay-slips. Business leaders complained that the country was unnecessarily swaddled in controls and regulations. Workers complained that their unions couldn’t keep pace with the constantly rising cost of living.

Labour’s new leader, David Lange, thundered: “You can’t run a country like a Polish shipyard!” His finance spokesperson, Roger Douglas, had written a book called There’s Got To Be A Better Way. There were many who agreed with both sentiments.

Those Kiwis who voted out Rob Muldoon’s National Party Government in 1984 weren’t to know that Roger Douglas’s cure for what ailed New Zealand would be much, much worse than the complaint. Too few of them thought through the consequences of not responding to public need, or of ceasing to deliver the greatest good to the greatest number, but to a handful of obscenely wealthy businesspeople instead. Even fewer grasped the disturbing truth that if democracy is, indeed, about responding to the people’s needs and wants, then it is politically incompatible with lower taxes, less regulation, weaker unions, and fewer public servants.

Which brings us back to those expensive consultants – the most costly of whom are employed by giant multinational accountancy and investment firms. They are brought in by governments not because our public servants are bad at their jobs, but to prevent our public servants from doing their jobs.

If the medieval Catholic Church was a transnational institution dedicated to preserving the Christian faith, then so, too, are these massive global consultancies. They are contracted to ensure that no heretical policy initiatives are ever permitted to disturb the orthodoxy of the Neoliberal Church.

Christopher Luxon may cut back on some consultants, but not the ones that cost – and count – the most.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 10 March 2023.

A Modest Exercise In Arithmetic.

Buttering Up Labour's Electoral Base: At his post-Cabinet press briefing of Wednesday, 8 February 2023, Chris Hipkins executed a major and politically adroit course alteration which will not only steer Labour away from Treaty revisionism’ s revolutionary rocks, but also deprive National and Act of the angry political breezes that have, of late, been filling their sails.

THE DAILY BLOG’S EDITOR, appears convinced that there exists in New Zealand a great silent majority of Treaty revisionists. He seems to believe that the revolutionary interpretation of Te Tiriti o Waitangi which underpins, ideologically, both the notion of a “Treaty partnership” and “co-governance”, enjoys widespread and enthusiastic support among New Zealand voters – especially those under forty. Interestingly, the numbers presented to us in the latest Roy-Morgan poll point in precisely the opposite direction.

The poll shows National with 32 percent, Act with 13.5 percent, and NZ First with 5 percent support – a total of 50.5 percent. Labour, meanwhile, comes through with 30 percent, the Greens with 12 percent, and Te Pāti Māori with 4.5 percent – a total of 46.5 percent. On the face of it, therefore, the Great Silent Majority lines up with the parties of the Right. If asked whether Māori ceded sovereignty to Queen Victoria on 6 February 1840, these New Zealanders would most likely answer “Yes, they did.” Having said that, their support for the key Treaty revisionist concepts of partnership and co-governance would be … limited.

Well, okay, but the Treaty revisionists could point out, with some justification, that 50.5 percent is hardly a ringing endorsement for the traditional reading of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. With 46.5 percent in support of the Treaty revisionists’ reading, isn’t it more accurate to say that on this matter the electorate is pretty evenly divided?

Not really.

Unlike the Greens, whose membership would, indeed, line up overwhelmingly behind Treaty revisionism, Labour’s electoral base is more likely to share a view of the Treaty’s meaning that is not wildly at odds with National’s and Act’s. Labour’s working-class voters – Māori as well as Pakeha – are considerably more likely to view the Treaty as the document that made one nation out of two peoples, each of them equal in rights and obligations, than as an enforceable contract binding two cultures together in a relationship “akin to a partnership”.

Surely, this is why Chris Hipkins has been so keen to step back from the brink of what one of this country’s foremost Treaty scholars, Dame Claudia Orange, describes as the “revolutionary changes” unleashed by Treaty revisionists like herself? Any further advance down the partnership/co-governance road and Labour risked seeing its working-class Māori and Pakeha voters peeling away from the party and moving (albeit reluctantly) to the Right.

Which is why, in his post-Cabinet press briefing of Wednesday, 8 February 2023, Hipkins executed a major and politically adroit course alteration which will not only steer Labour away from Treaty revisionism’s revolutionary rocks, but also deprive National and Act of the angry political breezes that have, of late, been filling their sails.

And it’s not just in relation to the vexed Three Waters project that Hipkins has signalled a significant course-change, he has also unceremoniously thrown overboard Willie Jackson’s proposed public media merger, Grant Robertson’s social insurance scheme, and Kiri Allan’s hate speech legislation. It’s a veritable Night-of-the-Long Knives for the pet projects of Labour’s wokesters.

Announcing a $1.50 increase in the Minimum Wage to $22.70 per hour was the new Labour Leader’s pièce de résistance. Nothing could better signal Labour’s return to its political roots – a movement dedicated to the welfare and uplift of ordinary working-class New Zealanders. For these voters, Hipkins’ turn away from wokeism will have been the “bread” of this afternoon’s briefing, but his announcement of a new $22.70 per hour Minimum Wage was, unquestionably, the butter.

Nor is it likely, that Hipkins’ turning away from Treaty revisionism will cost him all that many votes among New Zealanders under forty. Those who have given themselves, body and soul, to the revolutionary politics of partnership and co-governance are more likely than not to vote either Green or Te Pāti Māori. Rather than angst about the Treaty, younger voters will now be asking themselves: “If Chippy’s willing to raise the Minimum Wage by $1.50 per hour, might he not also be willing to freeze rents and raise the taxes of the wealthy?”

That’s a good question. Because, in terms of political arithmetic, such “bread and butter” moves, precisely because they are so very far from being woke, are bound to subtract even more votes from National and Act, and add them to Labour’s growing electoral tally.

A sum which, after today, looks set to re-configure the Great Silent Majority of New Zealand voters in the Left’s favour.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 8 February 2023.

Making It Look Easy.

So Long - And Thanks For All The Fish: In the two-and-a-bit years since Jacinda Ardern’s electoral triumph of 2020, virtually every decision she made had gone politically awry. In the minds of many thousands of voters a chilling metamorphosis had taken place. The Faerie Queen had become the Wicked Witch. From a resplendent balloon, carrying Labour effortlessly to victory, Jacinda showed every sign of becoming Labour’s Hindenburg – a disaster waiting to happen.

WASN’T IT ALL TOO SMOOTH? The official explanation for the textbook transition from Jacinda Ardern to Chris Hipkins – “nothing left in the tank” – is beginning to strike more and more political journalists as inherently implausible.

What sort of political party manages the acutely volatile business of swapping one leader for another so seamlessly? Was the sole nomination of Chris Hipkins’ strictly kosher? Why did no challenger step forward? Ambition, in Shakespeare’s words, should be made of sterner stuff. Contrariwise, if this leadership change was a stage-managed affair, then Labour’s stage-managers are second to none!

Before conspiracy theories take root and spread like briars across the political landscape, it is worth recalling that Labour has pulled-off such a transition before.

Hadn’t the woman who, on 19 January 2023, announced her intention of stepping-down from Labour’s leadership stepped-up and into that role with an equal absence of fuss and bother back in 2017? Relying, once again, on Shakespeare: is it not true that nothing so became Jacinda’s leadership like her elevation to it? And should we really be all that surprised to discover that the Labour MP who did the most to ensure Jacinda’s effortless ascent was none other than Chris Hipkins?

How interesting it would be to read the reports of Labour’s focus-group convenors and to study the confidential data of its pollsters. Because, if the transition from Jacinda to “Chippy” really was a premediated and carefully-planned affair, then the chances are high that the story the experts were telling the three people at the top of the Labour Party – Jacinda Ardern, Grant Robertson and Chris Hipkins – was a grim one.

In the two-and-a-bit years since the Prime Minister’s electoral triumph of 2020, virtually every decision she made had gone politically awry. In the minds of many thousands of voters a chilling metamorphosis had taken place. The Faerie Queen had become the Wicked Witch. From a resplendent balloon, carrying Labour effortlessly to victory, Jacinda showed every sign of becoming Labour’s Hindenburg – a disaster waiting to happen.

It is a measure of just how tight Labour’s leadership troika had become during their 15 years in Labour’s caucus that they could contemplate the grim psephological data set before them and conclude dispassionately that the “Jacinda” brand – once Labour’s most important asset – was now its most significant liability.

It was time for her to go.

That Jacinda did not demur is explicable largely in terms of the extraordinary burdens she had been required to carry between 2017 and 2022. Very few Prime Ministers are called upon to lead their nation through events like the Christchurch Mosque Massacres, the fatal eruption of White island and the most deadly pandemic to strike New Zealand in 100 years. In the post-war period, only National’s John Key has weathered storms of equivalent severity. Interestingly, he also decided to make an early departure.

With equal stoicism, the Finance Minister Grant Robertson declined to meet the expectations of the pundits by stepping into Jacinda’s shoes. He would stay exactly where he was – a key figure on the Bridge of the Ship of State, his safe pair of hands welded to the economic tiller. Like his two closest political allies, Robertson’s mission was a simple one: to steer Labour to a third parliamentary term.

Which left only Chippy to slip his feet into the stirrups of power. With weeks to think through and war-game every aspect of the transition, as little as possible was left to chance. In the finest tradition of Hengist and Horsa, not to mention Game of Thrones, Hipkins made sure that all the crucial players were gathered together in one place (Napier, for Labour’s annual “retreat”) before allowing Jacinda’s axe to fall.

Shocked and disoriented, Labour’s stunned caucus offered scant resistance as the Troika’s most trusted allies went to work, furiously spinning the narrative that the smoothest possible transition was an absolute electoral necessity. Anyone attempting to make a fight of the succession would be seen as a traitor to the party. Constrained by a lack of time, outmanoeuvred by Team Hipkins at every turn, potential rivals sensibly opted to fight another day.

Chris Hipkins wasn’t elected – he was crowned.

Once sworn-in as Prime Minister, everything would turn on the public opinion polls proving Hipkins’ colleagues had made the right choice.

On Monday night (30 January 2023) they duly obliged.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 3 February 2023.

Blowing Off The Froth: Why Chris Hipkins Must Ditch Three Waters.

Time To Call A Halt: Chris Hipkins knows that iwi leaders possess the means to make life very difficult for his government. Notwithstanding their objections, however, the Prime Minister’s direction of travel – already clearly signalled by his very public demotion of Nanaia Mahuta – must be confirmed by an emphatic and unequivocal pledge to repeal the Three Waters legislation and start again.

THERE’S FROTH, AND THERE’S BEER. What we see happening on the Waitangi Treaty Grounds every 6 February, not to mention the political performance-art on the lower marae, is froth. The beer of Māori-Pakeha relations is to be found in the private meeting rooms of Waitangi’s Copthorne Hotel & Resort, where the National Iwi Chairs Forum (NICF) deliberates in secret upon Maoridom’s next moves. It is there, in the days leading up to Waitangi Day, that New Zealand’s new Prime Minister, Chris Hipkins, will either face down the men and women driving the stake of co-governance into the heart of the Settler State – or see Labour spiral slowly to defeat.

The designation “Iwi Chairs” seems so innocuous. It conjures up the image of a roomful of corporate bureaucrats working their way through a very boring agenda, and breaking-off every now and then to listen to equally boring presentations from bankers, accountants and the occasional politician. In reality, the NICF represents the High Command of Maoridom: the strategic hub of the campaign to take back control of Aotearoa from its Pakeha conquerors. Those gathering at the Copthorne are not a bit like the rag-tag groups of Māori nationalist activists that came together in the 1970s and 80s. If tino rangatiratanga means “the power of the chiefs”, then these are the chiefs who wield it.

Thanks to thirty years of Treaty Settlements, the NICF is both well-positioned and well-resourced to flex its muscles. Between them, the iwi represented at the Forum command assets valued in the billions. That buys them all the big law firms and all the big lawyers they need. It buys them top-of-the-line lobbyists and public relations experts. It buys them influence in the news media and the universities. It means that, when the NICF whistles, serious politicians from all the major parties tend to come running – up to and including prime ministers.

In short, the NICF is what you get when you don’t want hundreds-of-thousands of working-class Māori demanding their fair share of the national cake. An uprising of marginalised urban Māori (the primary focus of Māori political agitation in the 1980s) could hardly avoid inspiring an even larger number of marginalised Pakeha. Such a potent socio-economic alliance would be extremely harmful to capitalism and other exploitative creatures. Hence the Crown’s inspired prophylactic against the further radicalisation of the Māori working-class – the Treaty Settlement Process. Make a handful of Māori aristocrats and other assorted high-flyers rich and powerful, and not only can they then be relied upon to keep the urban Māori poor quiet, but also to co-opt anyone of a mind to stir them up.

For a while.

The great risk of re-establishing a well-resourced and powerful indigenous elite is that, a generation or two later, those responsible will be faced with confident, highly educated young Māori who can think of no good reason why they – the privileged beneficiaries of the Treaty Settlement Process – should continue to provide a buffer between the heirs of their colonial conquerors and the tens-of-thousands of Māori families made poor, and kept poor, by colonisation.

What’s more, this generation will evince no interest in constructing a Māori-Pakeha working-class alliance against either Pakeha Capitalism or the Neo-Tribal Capitalist sub-system brought into being by the Treaty Settlement Process. The generation raised under this ethnically-charged neoliberal regime will not be socialists, they will be ethno-nationalists. If wealth is to be redistributed, it will not be from the rich to the poor, but from the descendants of the Pakeha colonisers to the descendants of the colonised Māori. It will be a revolution driven by race, not class.

There could be no better example of the policies generated by the iwi elites and their political representatives than the project known as Three Waters. Putting Private Members Bills to one side, it is rare to encounter a piece of legislation so closely associated with and shaped by a single member of Cabinet – in this case, the then Local Government Minister, Nanaia Mahuta. Nor is it common to see a legislative project preceded by an advertising campaign subsequently condemned as both misleading and inaccurate. The Labour Government’s decision to reverse its earlier affirmation that local authorities would be free to opt-out of the scheme only compounded the ethical problems besetting Mahuta’s project.

At the forefront of these was the legislation’s commitment to “co-governance”. In the midst of structures specifically designed to protect the relevant “entities” from all forms of democratic accountability, the legislation located a body split 50/50 between members supposedly chosen to represent the interests of local consumers, and those indisputably chosen to represent the interests of local iwi.

NZ First’s Shane Jones’s description of Mahuta’s Three Waters Project was typically robust:

What was initially an attempt to fix some drinking water has turned into a highly divisive and pulverising social experiment that has got nothing to do with poo pipes and infrastructure. Now it’s got everything to do with whether or not tribes should have a superior right [over water].

Jones also argued that Jacinda Ardern’s government had “lost control” of Mahuta’s project:

She was unable to control Nanaia Mahuta, who has proven to be one of New Zealand’s most divisive politicians that God ever put breath into.

Nowhere was Ardern’s loss of control more evident that in the parliamentary debacle which followed the last-minute, constitutionally-dubious, attempt to entrench “anti-privatisation” clauses in the legislation setting up the Three Waters project as it neared the end of its passage, under urgency, through the House of Representatives.

If ever a project needed to be abandoned completely, and the rebuilding of New Zealand’s drinking, storm and wastewater infrastructure reconceptualised in ways that keep it both affordable and accountable, then that project is Three Waters.

Not that the Iwi Chairs gathered at the Copthorne Hotel are likely to see it that way. Mahuta’s project had brought them closer to Jones’s “superior right” over water than any of her predecessors. Their message to Chris Hipkins is likely to be blunt: repeal Mahuta’s legislation at your peril.

New Zealand’s new Prime Minister knows that the National Iwi Chairs Forum has the means to make life very difficult for his government. Notwithstanding their objections, however, Hipkins direction of travel – already clearly signalled by his very public demotion of Mahuta – must be confirmed by an emphatic and unequivocal pledge to repeal the Three Waters legislation and start again.

If Labour is to secure a third term, then Hipkins must make it clear to all New Zealanders – Māori and Pakeha – that his government is not about fulfilling the agendas of corporate/tribal elites. It is about making sure that every New Zealander in need of a job, a living wage, and a warm, dry house, gets one. That their family’s right to publicly-provided, quality health care and education is not denied. And that the promise of equality, enshrined in Article Three of the Treaty of Waitangi, is kept. Because that’s the only beer that’s electorally fit for Labour to drink: the beer of class – not race.

Everything else is froth.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 2 February 2023.

Does Chris Hipkins Have The Spinal Steel To Force A Change In Labour’s Course?

A Different Kind Of Vibe: In the days and weeks ahead, as the Hipkins ministry takes shape, the only question that matters is whether New Zealand’s new prime minister possesses both the wisdom and the courage to correct his party’s currently suicidal political course. If Chris “Chippy” Hipkins is able to steer Labour into less contentious and more bounteous electoral waters, then Jacinda Ardern’s sacrifice will not have been in vain.

IT REMAINS to be seen whether Chris Hipkins can overcome the political contradictions which drove his predecessor from the prime-ministership. Jacinda Ardern resigned her office in recognition of her personal incapacity to confront and overcome the problems that were driving her government inexorably towards defeat. When she told New Zealand that she had “nothing left in the tank”, Ardern was courageously acknowledging that after five-and-a-half years of unrelenting crisis management, she simply could not summon the energy for the political fight required to save her government, her party, and, ultimately, her country.

In many respects Ardern was the author of her own misfortune. In dealing with core challenges confronting the New Zealand state – practically all of which are traceable to the consequences of colonisation – the former prime-minister had demonstrated both excessive cultural generosity and insufficient political realism.

Predictably, the resulting “revolution of rising expectations” so clearly evident among Māori, especially young Māori, has generated an equal and opposite political reaction among the Pakeha population – especially older Pakeha – which is driving the electorate sharply to the right. The prospect of arguing her caucus, her party, and a good chunk of her electoral base into abandoning Labour’s commitment to the radical decolonisation project of its Māori caucus was simply too big an ask for Ardern – so she quit.

A prime minister possessed of less “kindness” and goodwill would have coldly informed Labour’s Māori leadership from the get-go that their programme of constitutional transformation was much too broad and far too radical to impose upon an electorate insufficiently prepared for such a revolutionary “break in the wave” of New Zealand’s political evolution. Ardern should have put it bluntly to Willie Jackson and Nanaia Mahuta, that prior to any enduring legislative changes being attempted by her own, or any, government, the unavoidable philosophical, cultural, and practical political arguments would have to be won – decisively.

All-too-clearly, such an ultimatum was never put to Labour’s Māori caucus. Like so many well-educated and well-meaning Pakeha, Labour’s non-Māori MPs – led by Ardern – were unwilling to challenge the programme being promoted by their Māori colleagues. Fearful of the charge of racism, and mindful of the bitter recriminations that followed Helen Clark’s 2004 Foreshore & Seabed legislation, the Prime Minister and her caucus waved through policies that could only be described as revolutionary.

Except, of course, they were not described – not to the broader electorate. Mahuta commissioned the report that became known as He Puapua in so quiet a fashion that Labour’s NZ First coalition partner was unaware of its existence. The electorate was similarly kept in the dark concerning the document setting 6th February 2040 – the 200th anniversary of the signing of te Tiriti o Waitangi – as the date by which the transformation of New Zealand culturally, politically and economically was to be accomplished.

When, inevitably, the document was leaked, and the public acquired some inkling of what was being considered, Prime Minister Ardern was forced to deny unequivocally that the document in any way represented official government policy. By this stage, however, the electorate was growing sceptical.

That scepticism was not diminished when the full extent of Nanaia Mahuta’s “Three Waters” legislation became known. Putting to one side the bitter controversies arising out of the Labour Government’s handling of the Covid-19 Pandemic, no other government initiative has aroused so much public opposition and suspicion as “Three Waters”. Indeed, it has become a talisman for that part of the electorate which purports to feel the political ground shifting under its feet – even as its government lies, prevaricates, and at times appears to be led by the nose by those with the most to gain from the “Three Waters” legislation’s passage.

And still the case for co-governance, decolonisation and indigenisation is not made. The construction of an argument from first principles may indeed have been accomplished by the project’s Māori initiators, but, if it has, then it has been presented in the absence of Pakeha, a critical news media, and always behind firmly closed doors.

Moreover, it is not a case which the Māori Development Minister, Willie Jackson, is prepared to put in front of his Cabinet colleagues. He knows that, even among Pakeha as sympathetic as Labour’s, the arguments and recommendations contained therein simply would not fly. In recognition of their sheer unacceptability, Jackson has announced his determination to keep the revolutionaries’ interpretation of te Tiriti o Waitangi and its constitutional implications under wraps – at least until the general election is out of the way.

But it is precisely this sort of political cynicism that is fast eroding Labour’s support in the opinion polls. “Three Waters” may be the leading cause of voter disillusion, but it is merely emblematic of the voters’ growing unease that this government is hell-bent on doing things to them, rather than for them.

In considering Labour’s deteriorating electoral position, and its causes, over her summer break, all the while contending with the unrelenting torrents of misogynist and conspiracist hate pouring down upon her head from social media, Ardern correctly concluded that the task of righting Labour’s ship was beyond her powers. Without Winston Peters’ ability to stare down her Māori caucus, Ardern had conceded far too much ground to Jackson and Mahuta, more than she could hope to reclaim personally.

Boxed into a corner ideologically, electorally, and personally, Ardern rightly concluded that her best (and only sensible) move was to exit the game entirely. Only someone coming into the top job fresh, and unburdened by the concessions of five-and-a-half prime-ministerial years, could entertain the slightest hope of prevailing upon his colleagues to change course.

There is little doubt that Ardern’s successor, Chris (“Chippy”) Hipkins, has the necessary spinal steel to demand, and be given, a new set of political co-ordinates. On the vexed questions of co-governance, decolonisation and indigenisation, the new prime minister need not even repudiate the Māori caucus’s revolutionary ambitions, merely state the obvious truth that they have so-far failed to convince their fellow citizens that such radical constitutional changes are either necessary or desirable. In the same breath, he can then reassure the Pakeha electorate that Labour will never connive in the arbitrary imposition of a new, ethnically-bifurcated, constitution from above. To be accepted, constitutional changes must first be ratified, democratically, by all the people.

Were Hipkins to make this position clear to the Māori leaders gathered at Ratana – that they must win the debate for change before attempting to legislate their programme into being – a significant fraction of the Pakeha electorate, quite possibly a winning fraction, would be both relieved and reassured. As a consequence, both the National and Act parties would be forced to discard some pretty important face cards from what had been their very strong electoral hands.

In the days and weeks ahead, as the Hipkins ministry takes shape, the only question that matters is whether New Zealand’s new prime minister possesses both the wisdom and the courage to correct his party’s currently suicidal political course. If “Chippy” is able to steer Labour into less contentious and more bounteous electoral waters, then Jacinda Ardern’s sacrifice will not have been in vain.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 23 January 2023.