Work, Work, Work!

Laughing With The Poor Folks - Or At Them? Christopher Luxon took rapper LunchMoney Lewis’s lyrics at their face value. “Bills”, as heard by Luxon, is a cri-de-cœur from a hard-working man determined to pull himself and his family up by their own bootstraps. It simply wouldn’t occur to him that LunchMoney’s rap was a tribute to his own escape from the bills ordinary people gotta pay and the “work, work, work” they gotta do to fill all those mouths they gotta feed.

“BILLS” by LunchMoney Lewis, must be the all-time strangest theme-song ever chosen by a National Party leader. Christopher Luxon made the whole weird musical theme even weirder by attempting his own personal rendition of LunchMoney’s tongue-in-cheek tribute to the world of work. 

Bizarre, because the lifestyles and values of rap artists are about as far from the hardscrabble existence of the average working family as one could imagine. LunchMoney Lewis has bills to pay, no doubt, but they are for products and services well beyond the reach of most African-Americans! This artist is a businessman.

Now, it would be nice to think that Luxon gets LunchMoney’s joke. That he understands the Kiwi battler’s bills, and his bills, are truly chalk and cheese. Such sly self-knowledge and brutal political honesty would be refreshing in our hyper-mediated world. By bounding onto the stage to LunchMoney’s rap, Luxon would be admitting (sub-textually) that a man who owns seven houses, and the centre-right party he leads, are cats every bit as fat as the Florida rapper. Such transparent inauthenticity would, paradoxically, make the Leader of the Opposition a more – not less – authentic politician.

But, that would be too much to hope for. In all probability, Luxon took LunchMoney’s lyrics at their face value. “Bills”, as heard by Luxon, is a cri-de-cœur from a hard-working man determined to pull himself and his family up by their own bootstraps. It simply wouldn’t occur to him that LunchMoney’s rap was a tribute to his own escape from the bills ordinary people gotta pay and the “work, work, work” they gotta do to fill all those mouths they gotta feed.

Luxon’s crude literalism is reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s use of Bruce Springsteen’s anthem “Born in the USA” in his re-election campaign of 1984. The Gipper simply had no idea that Springsteen’s song was about the tormented existence of a Vietnam veteran robbed of his buddies, his peace of mind, and the possibility of a good life, by the murderous demands of Uncle Sam.

“America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts”, intoned Reagan. “It rests in the message of hope in songs of a man so many young Americans admire, New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen. And helping you make those dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about.”

In the end, being born in the USA was the only thing the song’s hero had left. Far from being a hymn of praise to Reagan’s “shining city on a hill”, Springsteen’s song is laced with bitter irony and bankrupted hope. It is, however, doubtful that Reagan ever realised his mistake.

Doubtful, too, that Luxon’s journey into the bright lights and dark alleys of popular culture will be a long one. Doubtless, there is a huge amount to be learnt from the rappers and hip-hop artists of South Auckland. Who knows what insights he might come away with if he sat down with them in a place without cameras, without microphones, and just listened to the life-stories of these often spectacularly successful artists and businessmen?

That is, after all, what another National Party leader, Rob Muldoon, did, more than 40 years ago, with representatives of Black Power and the Mongrel Mob. The Project Employment Programmes which, in part, grew out of these encounters, set many young gang prospects on a new path, leading them away from crime, and towards steady employment, family life, and an altogether more productive existence.

Rob Muldoon sat his final accountancy examinations in between fighting the Germans in Italy in 1944. He became a moderately successful businessman, comfortably off, but not rich: an Auckland suburbanite with a family bach at Orewa. The National Party he came to lead was a huge organisation, filled with people very like himself. The experience of “The War” bound National Party members together in those days – as it did Labour’s. What came to be called the “RSA Generation” understood that, when the bullets start flying, who your father is and where you went to school doesn’t matter a damn. Character is not determined by class – but by courage.

Luxon’s speech to the National Party’s annual conference could have used the Covid-19 Pandemic – the closest contemporary New Zealanders have come to the solidarities and vicissitudes of war – as a new starting-point for the state’s efforts to get disengaged young jobseekers into the habits of learning and working that the whole country so desperately needs them to acquire.

He came close:

National believes those closest to the problems should be closest to the answers. That’s why we back community-led solutions. For example, the Covid vaccine roll-out showed that bureaucrats in Wellington don’t always know best how to reach people. Just ask the Māori organisations who had to take the Government to court so they could get people vaccinated.

If young New Zealanders are to re-engage with learning and working successfully, it will be through the efforts of autonomous, community-driven initiatives akin to those that ensured Māori rates of vaccination matched those of the rest of the population. The key words here are “autonomous” and “community-driven”.

Sadly, National’s policy-makers lack the courage to trust the poor to take charge of their own destiny. Luxon’s plans for moving young jobseekers “From Welfare To Work” (where have we heard that slogan before?) by contracting “community groups” to “coach” the long-term unemployed out of their “welfare dependency” and into paid employment, will undoubtedly be met with the approval of conservative New Zealanders. Many will welcome the reappearance of Bill English’s “social investment” approach. But, will it work?

Those on the receiving end of policies setting them up as “suitable cases for treatment” are seldom grateful. Community organisations funded by the tax-payer have a long history of offering their “clients” little more than the condescension of middle-class professionals. Before successful coaching can begin, it is necessary to have a team. If National could only find the courage to allow these teams to form themselves, with sufficient resources to hire their own coaches, then the party’s social investment policies just might succeed.

Taken in its entirety, LunchMoney Lewis’s rap is not the positive statement Christopher Luxon obviously believes it to be. In the accompanying video, the artist makes clear his scepticism that the “work, work, work” of ordinary people will ever get them out from under all those bills. Rappers speak of a world rigged by the Man, for the Man. That’s why they portray working for the Man as a fool’s game. Luxon and the National Party would have a lot more credibility if they offered the young unemployed the chance to become their own bosses.

Then they’d be businessmen. And businessmen don’t have bills – they have accounts payable. And, as the former CEO of Air New Zealand knows, the larger your pile of accounts payable, the more likely it is that someone else will pay them for you.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 8 August 2022.

A Smooth Performance.

In A Word: The new Leader of the Opposition, Christopher Luxon, has very clearly chosen to reject the option of presenting a “flinty-faced” National Party to an electorate grown accustomed to the rhetoric of “kindness”. If the message of National’s new leader could be compressed into a single word, then that word would be: Moderation.

COVID HAS A LOT to answer for. Todd Muller, in particular, has good cause to feel aggrieved. How much more smoothly his induction to “the hardest job in politics” might have gone if he had been able to sit down, in familiar surroundings, and answer his inquisitors calmly and with due consideration.

What New Zealanders saw, instead, was Muller standing all alone in the echoing darkness of the Old Legislative Chamber. Starkly lit, and filmed from a low angle, he was forced to respond to questions directed at him from hundreds of kilometres away. Fixed to his position in front of the camera, he attempted to enliven the strained encounter by raising his voice and gesticulating energetically. The effect was unsettling: a big, shouty man, waving his arms about randomly it the dark. In short, a performance most unlikely to inspire either confidence in, or affection for, the National Party and its new leader.

The contrast with Christopher Luxon could hardly be sharper. Interviewed by Jack Tame for TVNZ’s Q+A current affairs show on Sunday, 5 December, the new National leader was seated comfortably in what one must assume was his own (very stylish) Auckland residence. The interview set-up was so much more conducive to useful communication than the desperately uncomfortable environment inflicted upon Muller. The lighting was flattering, the camera-angles professionally determined. With both men seated comfortably, eye-to-eye, Tame’s questions, and Luxon’s answers, resulted in the sort of unforced, self-revelatory dialogue that permits the voters to get a good measure of the Opposition’s new leader.

One can only speculate about the to-ing and fro-ing between TVNZ, the Q+A team, and Luxon’s people, that presumably preceded the interview. What seems clear, however, is that the advice being tendered to the new National leader is several orders of magnitude superior to that supplied to his hapless predecessors. This is important.

For most of her term as Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern has had at her disposal the formidable expertise of, initially, Mike Munro (Helen Clark’s superb media manager) and then the equally competent Andrew Campbell. Combined with her own not inconsiderable talents as a communicator, the highly professional media management of Ardern’s Government has contributed significantly to its political success.

There is a story (possibly apocryphal) which illustrates the vital importance of what would now be called the “situational awareness” of a good media manager. It harks back to a post-election period when Winston Peters was, not untypically, denying all interest in the “baubles of office”. When, however, it became clear that his support would be needed to keep Helen Clark’s Labour-led Government in power, Peters’ disinterest began to slacken.

Waylaid at one of the country’s larger airports by a scrum of journalists, Peters was repeatedly challenged to explain his sudden change of heart vis-à-vis said baubles. It was then that Mike Munro, who fortuitously happened to be present, noticed that Peters was standing in front of a Christmas display featuring a plethora of – you guessed it – baubles. Understanding immediately how damaging this “Winston with Baubles” image would be: Munro gently nudged the NZ First leader in front of a less compromising backdrop.

Silly? Petty? Well, yes, of course. But one has only to recall the images of Don Brash attempting (unsuccessfully) to climb in and out of a racing car, or “walking the plank” from a speed-boat to the jetty, to grasp just how much careful thinking and planning needs to go into how a political leader is presented. Even in 2021, one picture is still worth a thousand words.

It should, therefore, be a source of real satisfaction to National’s backers and strategists that Luxon has around him a team capable of setting up something as politically constructive as the Q+A dialogue with Tame. Quite apart from all the non-verbal communications: the sophisticated and stylish surroundings; the subject’s relaxed demeanour; Luxon was able to deliver his pitch without any of the weird distractions that prevented Muller from communicating effectively with his audience.

What, then, was the substance of Luxon’s pitch and how effectively did he present it? If the message of National’s new leader could be compressed into a single word, then that word would be: Moderation.

Luxon made it clear that he will be making full strategic use of Bill English’s “Social Investment” policy – “surging” resources to where they can do the most good for those deemed likely to make a prolonged call upon the state’s resources. While declining to offer a full endorsement of former National Prime Minister Jim Bolger’s call for a “reimagining of capitalism”, Luxon made it clear he was no hard-line adherent of the laissez-faire policies of Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson. (Not to mention Act’s David Seymour.) Nor was he prepared to put a cap on state indebtedness as a percentage of GDP. (As both Labour and the Greens did in 2017.) Lower taxes: while something he would “love” to do, is not something he’s committing National to – just yet.

All this will be music to the ears of the 400,000 National “deserters” of 2020. Luxon has, very clearly, chosen to reject the option of presenting a “flinty-faced” National Party to an electorate grown accustomed to the rhetoric of “kindness”. There are simply too many women voters the party needs to win back from Labour.

Conservative males will likely interpret Luxon’s pitch in slightly different terms. The priority for these voters is a National leader capable of restoring the New Zealand ship of state to an even keel. Radicalism of all kinds: be it of the Right or the Left; is unsettling. Moderation is exactly what they are seeking: a return to business as usual.

Perhaps the most important of Luxon’s answers to Tame’s questions were the ones he gave on Māori-Pakeha relations. After displaying an impressively succinct understanding of the Treaty of Waitangi’s three articles – an understanding conspicuously lacking in the Prime Minister when similarly questioned in 2018 – Luxon drew a very clear line in the sand on the issue of Māori co-governance.

Foreshadowed here, is what, for many New Zealanders, will be a welcome rejection by National of what is fast becoming the “official” version of the Crown’s Treaty obligations. Members of the political class have been given a thoroughly polite, but timely, warning that a change of government will bring with it a considerably less radical interpretation of the Treaty’s meaning. Those senior public servants anticipating an inexorable, bi-partisan advance towards the full realisation of Māori co-governance, in time for the Treaty’s bicentennial in 2040, should think again.

Naturally, not every one of Luxon’s replies were as polished, or filled with political heft, as his response to Tame’s questioning on the Treaty. Indeed, it would be astonishing if they were. National’s new leader has been in Parliament for barely a year, and there is still a lot of polishing to do. Labour’s problem, however, is that Luxon is not a rough-hewn work-in-progress, still bearing the marks of the chisel. On the contrary, the man already offers a remarkably smooth surface to the camera’s gaze.

Two more years of polishing. Two more years of coming to grips with the insatiable hunger of the 24-hour news cycle. Two more years of drawing the best from a caucus team already buoyed by the palpable change of mood across both party and country. Two more years of favourable poll numbers. Two more years of rising donations from the fabled “big end of town”. Two more years of refining National’s message and upgrading the means of delivering it – and Labour will be in a world of pain.

How eagerly the Prime Minister must be awaiting medical science’s final judgement on the Omicron Variant. The worse, the better.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 6 December 2021.

Rating The Contenders.

There Can Be Only One: Some might ask why National MPs would install yet another “successful business person” at the helm of their party? Isn’t one Todd Muller enough? Especially when Simon Bridges could become the first National politician of Māori descent to become Prime Minister.

LET’S GET SOMETHING out of the way from the get-go. There is nothing unprecedented about a former leader of the National Party reclaiming that position some years after losing it. Those “pundits” who blithely dismiss the likelihood of New Zealand following in the footsteps of Australia’s political parties, really don’t merit the description. Was it not Bill English who led the National Party to the worst defeat in its history in 2002? And was it not the same Bill English who succeeded John Key as National Party leader – and Prime Minister – in 2016? That established, I hope readers will find the prospect of Simon Bridges Redux (if that is the final outcome of this contest) just a little bit easier to accept.

Whether Bridges is the right person for the job is, obviously, a very different question. One worthy of just as much careful consideration as the putative candidacy of Christopher Luxon. Given the general agreement among National Party watchers that one of these two contenders will be the next Leader of the Opposition, it seems only sensible to weigh the pros and cons attached to both men.

Bridges first.

That Simon Bridges could become the first National politician of Māori descent to become Prime Minister is, potentially, a very big deal.

Though very few people engaged in mainstream politics are prepared to admit it, the future of Māori, and the future of Aotearoa-New Zealand, are becoming ever more closely entwined. The country’s politics cannot escape being caught up in this uncomfortable fact. The young people of 2021 – as the bitter recriminations surrounding the Pfizer vaccine roll-out attest – are disproportionately Māori. Far too many of these youngsters are inadequately prepared to shoulder the burden of preserving their country’s economic and social well-being in the years ahead.

The aforementioned Bill English understood the frightening dimensions of Māori underperformance better than most of his parliamentary colleagues. It was one of the primary drivers of his “social investment” strategy – an imaginative policy initiative that was, sadly, allowed to falter under Bridges 1.0, Todd Muller and Judith Collins. If he proves successful in his bid to reclaim the National Party leadership, Bridges 2.0 could do a lot worse than to take English’s idea and run with it.

Dramatic policy changes in education, health, housing and corrections cannot be avoided in the years ahead if Aotearoa-New Zealand is to avoid crippling skill deficiencies in its national workforce. A country that becomes dependent on imported skills cannot hope to exercise a decisive influence over its future development. Were Bridges to put himself at the forefront of this debate, and give his party the ideological space to develop new and innovative solutions to the problem of Māori underperformance, then National could steal an election-winning march on Labour.

The Government, urged on by its large Māori caucus, clearly grasps the urgency of indigenous underperformance. Its solutions, however, are of a race-based radicalism that many Pakeha (and not a few Māori) reject as constitutionally objectionable. If Labour proceeds along the lines suggested in the He Puapua Report, considerable political division seems inevitable. A National Party led by a Māori politician no less seized of the importance of indigenous underperformance, but promoting policies intended to benefit all underperforming citizens equally, could position itself as a force for unity and progress.

There is strong evidence in Bridges’ autobiography that he has given considerable thought to what it means to be a New Zealander in the twenty-first century. National is not the party most people think of when it comes to these sort of questions – especially those touching upon the future of Māori. It is, nevertheless, the party which, under Jim Bolger and Doug Graham, got the Treaty Settlement ball rolling. Nor should it be forgotten that it was John Key who sent Pita Sharples off to New York to sign the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

In the chapter on race in Bridge’s National Identity, he contrasts his own way of being Māori with that of the Māori Party MP, Rawiri Waititi – with whom he went to school:

“Today Rawiri has a full face moko, which is beautiful and fierce and which I am in awe of. But you couldn’t pay me a billion dollars to get that done to myself. The pain would be one reason; the other is that it would change who I am – it’s not me. Rawiri’s tikanga is not a daily part of my life and never will be. Nevertheless, New Zealand needs to realise that I am just as Māori as Rawiri. Let’s not look down on him, and let’s not look down on me. He’s not too Māori and I’m not too Pākehā. Let’s celebrate [New Zealand’s] diverse garden.”

Is it really that difficult to see Bridges offering National its own “Nixon recognises Red China” moment?

Meanwhile, the other half of the National caucus will be asking themselves whether the former Air NZ CEO, Christopher Luxon, can give the party another John Key moment.

Those of a more ruthless mindset will demand to know how any intelligent right-wing politician could possibly entertain the idea of installing yet another “successful business person” at the helm of the National Party? Isn’t one Todd Muller enough?

When is the National Party finally going to understand that John Key didn’t become one of its most successful leaders on account of his career in business, but because he had an unerring instinct for where “Average Kiwis” positioned themselves politically. That, and a flair for institutional politics that could just as easily have made him head of the CTU as the Nats.

To put it bluntly: Christopher Luxon is no John Key.

Then there’s the question of Luxon’s religious beliefs. Obviously, he’s not the only member of National’s caucus who professes the Christian religion. Bridges, himself, is a pastor’s son who, like Luxon and a not inconsiderable number of his caucus colleagues, proclaims himself to be an evangelical Christian.

Therein, lies the problem. What sort of evangelical is Luxon?

Essentially, there are only two kinds of evangelical. The first (and the most faithful to the biblical injunctions) is the evangelical who proclaims the “good news” of Jesus Christ to the whole world, unceasingly. The second kind of evangelical sees the hand of God at work in society and, in the case of far too many evangelical politicians (especially in the United States) feels the Almighty’s hand guiding them into preordained leadership roles. New Zealanders, a secular bunch for the most part, soon grow weary of the first kind of evangelical, and are profoundly wary of the second.

Now, Luxon is at pains to reassure New Zealanders that he regards his religion as a private matter, not to rammed down people’s throats, or enshrined in their country’s laws. All well and good, but if that really is his position, then he cannot truly call himself an evangelical. Ramming righteousness down the sinner’s throat is the noisy evangelical’s Christian duty. A quiet evangelical, on the other hand, is almost certainly convinced that God has a special plan for him – and the country. Something which should give both his colleagues, and the voters, pause.

On the other hand, Christopher Luxon strikes just about everyone who meets him, or watches him on television, as an intelligent, diligent and resourceful individual. His newness, seen by some as a distinct handicap, is just as easily construed as a recommendation. No, he doesn’t have parliamentary dirt under his fingernails, but neither does he have fratricidal blood on his hands.

By all accounts, Luxon was a very capable CEO. It is entirely possible that, by 2023, that is all most New Zealanders will be looking for.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website of Monday, 29 November 2021.

Who Is The Best Judge Of The People’s “Wellbeing”?

Happiness Relocated: The revelation that the model, and her young daughter, whose smiling faces adorned the cover of Grant Robertson's "Wellbeing Budget" had departed New Zealand in search of a better life on Australia's Gold Coast, provided a powerful symbol of the disconnect between the  experts' top-down approach to wellbeing, and the practical judgements of real people, on the ground, about their wellbeing - or the lack of it.

“THE WELLBEING BUDGET.” What a fantastic public relations confection this year’s budgeting exercise has turned out to be! Who could possibly raise a reasonable objection to the idea of gearing all the Government’s revenue-gathering and spending efforts towards securing the “wellbeing” of the New Zealand people?

Not Simon Bridges, that’s for sure. The Opposition’s case seems to rest on the assertion that they thought of it first. That “wellbeing” is just another name for former National Party leader Bill English’s programme of “social investment”.

And that’s a worry. Because the thinking behind both the “Wellbeing Budget”, as well as English’s “social investment” programme, runs counter to the most fundamental tenet of parliamentary democracy. Namely: that before money can be appropriated from the people in the form of taxes, their consent must first be obtained; and that such consent must be renewed annually, on the people’s behalf, by their freely elected representatives.

The entire Westminster System rests on the notion that there can be “no taxation without representation”. For breaching this fundamental principle, King Charles I lost his head, and King George III lost his 13 American colonies.

These grim precedents notwithstanding, the “wellbeing” principle enunciated by the Finance Minister, Grant Robertson, in yesterday’s Budget Speech, involves shifting the responsibility for signing-off on how the people’s money is to be spent from their elected representatives to their supposed servants in the Public Service.

Apparently, the whole notion of Members of Parliament determining and overseeing how the people’s taxes are spent has become woefully outdated. How much more efficient to simply vote money to a collection of government agencies and allow them to spend it as they see fit over the next four or five years. Annual appropriations, voted by the House of Representatives, is such an archaic way of operating what has become a fearsomely complex state machine. Much better to leave matters to the “experts”. They will keep their Minister informed, and s/he will tell Parliament when it’s time to wield its rubber stamp.

“Experts.” Aye, there’s the rub. For at least a century, the notion of government by experts (also known as “technocracy”) has enjoyed a solid following among … well … experts. Indeed, in the years following the First World War, a whole new approach to “manufacturing” the consent of the masses was developed by an arcane combination of journalists, psychologists and political scientists. It was the most accomplished of these manipulators, Edward Bernays, who refined the process into what we today recognise as the profession of “public relations”.

From a democratic perspective, the only true experts are the people themselves. That MPs need their votes to enter the House of Representatives means that, in theory at least, they enter that august institution with a pretty good idea of what a substantial number of voters regard as important and unimportant. It is on the basis of this knowledge that they appropriate money and frame legislation. To further inform and refine their thinking, MPs invite the people to make submissions to parliamentary select committees. At this point in the process, the contributions of experts are welcomed.

Political parties, once again in theory, are supposed to amplify the expression of the people’s needs and wants by organising them into a coherent package of proposed reforms. This is referred to as the party’s “manifesto”. It represents a kind of political contract with the electors, and the parliamentary representatives of the party, or parties, commanding a majority in the House of Representatives are expected to honour their manifesto’s “mandate” by conscientiously fulfilling its promises. The funding of these promises, via the elected government’s annual Budget, is the people’s most effective guarantee for securing their wellbeing democratically.

The only legitimate role for public servants in this process is to advise the elected Government on how best to implement its manifesto promises. The Public Service is not there to substitute its own judgement for that of the people’s – as expressed through the electoral process. Nor is it the business of elected politicians to ask bureaucrats to do the job they were chosen to do. All the “working groups” and “expert committees” in the world cannot relieve the people’s representatives of their sacred duty to – represent the people.

If the wellbeing of the people can only be secured by “experts”, then democracy is a lie.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 31 May 2019.

Virginia Crawford's Duty To Offend.

Tough Love: It is impossible to listen to the Fraser High School Principal, Virginia Crawford’s, speech without hearing in every word and phrase her passionate understanding of just how important education is to freeing people from the social conditions – and expectations – that imprison them.

THE PRINCIPAL OF Hamilton’s Fraser High School, Virginia Crawford, has been roundly criticised for warning her students about the strong correlation between truancy and failure in the world beyond high school. The push-back against Crawford’s address culminated in a walkout by around 100 of Fraser’s senior students on Monday 24 September 2018. But, what if she was telling the truth?

Very few people have been willing to test Crawford’s claims empirically. To ascertain whether the behaviours she warned her students against: truancy, substance abuse, petty crime; are, indeed, common factors in the much more serious social indices of functional illiteracy, long-term unemployment, prolonged periods on social welfare, repeated incarceration, mental health problems, sexual assault, domestic violence and, most disturbingly in relation to young New Zealanders – suicide.

This is strange, since a great deal of work has already been undertaken in this area by those convinced of the efficacy of the National Party’s “social investment” initiative. The whole point of the social investment project was to identify the “warning signs” of individual and/or family dysfunction so that the authorities could intervene and, hopefully, forestall, that individual’s and/or family’s decline into irremediable social pathologies. Those warning signs were precisely the behaviours alluded to in Crawford’s address.

“Every student who walks out of the gate to truant is already a statistic of the worst kind, highly likely to go to prison, highly likely to commit domestic violence or be a victim of domestic violence, be illiterate, be a rape victim, be a suicide victim, be unemployed for the majority of their life, have a major health problem or problems, die at an early age, have an addiction - drugs, gambling, alcohol or smoking.

“The more you truant, the more likely you are to end up as one or most of those statistics. I don’t want you to be one of those statistics. Economic research confirms everything I am telling you. It’s been proven. Some young people at Fraser today are still proving that message to be true.”

One of the Principal’s sternest critics is Herald columnist, Deborah Hill Cone, whose argument is best summed-up in the old aphorism: ‘Give a dog a bad name and hang him.’ “Being told by an authority figure you are certain to become a grim statistic is more of a danger to young people than skipping class”, Hill Cone warned Crawford. “In some very pervasive, unconscious and dogged ways we become what we are expected to be.”

There is something quite touching about Hill Cone’s faith in the individual’s ability to rise above the awful impetus of social causation and statistical correlation. “And try to remember this,” she advises the students of Fraser High in her Monday column, “your principal, Virginia Crawford, has absolutely no idea what your life is going to be like. None of us do. And she has no right to tell your story.”

Many would argue, however, that Crawford not only has the right, she has the duty, to speak plainly and forthrightly about the awful statistics to which so many of the students attending Fraser High School are likely to contribute in the months and years ahead of them. Telling them, as Hill Cone would have her do, that: “It’s your soul, and your story to construct” is all very bracing and Kiplingesque, but it is highly debateable as to whether it will do as much good as telling them that buckling down and working hard at school is just about the only way out of the dead-end working-class suburbs which for so many of them constitute the boundaries of the known world.

A number of the parents of Fraser High School students have taken offence at Crawford’s comments and are threatening to withdraw their offspring from the school until such time as its errant principal is replaced. Like so many of us, they do not like to think too much about the uncanny ability of insurance underwriters to correlate specific behaviours with specific outcomes in the setting of their clients’ premiums. Rather than condemn Crawford for her predictions, might it not be more helpful for their children’s futures to ask themselves whether the behaviour they have been modelling in their own lives bears out or refutes the Principal’s fears?

Nothing did more to shatter the rigid boundaries separating New Zealand’s social classes than the First Labour Government’s ringing affirmation that every New Zealander “whatever his [or her] level of academic ability, whether he [or she] be rich or poor, whether he [or she] live in town or country, has a right, as a citizen, to a free education of the kind for which he [or she] is best fitted, and to the fullest extent of his [or her] powers.”

It is impossible to listen to Crawford’s speech without hearing in every word and phrase her passionate understanding of just how important education is to freeing people from the social conditions – and expectations – that imprison them. She knows that there is a vast, beautiful, exciting and intensely rewarding world beyond the borders of “Nawton or Dinsdale or Western Heights” – just as she knows that the students of Fraser High School who play truant on a regular and prolonged basis are, statistically-speaking, the ones least likely to ever get to see it.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 25 September 2018.

Is "Social Investment" Bill English's "Think Big"?

Think Big Data: In many ways Muldoon’s Think Big and Bill English’s Social Investment policies are alike. Both feature ideas more associated with the left than the right, and both, if sensibly implemented, could be of immense benefit to New Zealand. Unfortunately for Muldoon and, almost certainly, for English, the essentially left-wing character of the programmes they are advocating makes it practically impossible for the National Party to implement them in a sensible fashion.

 

“SOCIAL INVESTMENT”, as promoted by Prime Minister, Bill English, is one of those policies that can make or break political parties. “Social Security”, for example, was the policy principally responsible for lifting the Labour Party’s share of the popular vote from 46.1 percent in 1935 to 55.8 percent in 1938. The “Cradle to Grave” welfare state it established kept Labour in office until 1949 and remained the foundation of New Zealand social policy for the next 50 years.

 

By contrast, National’s “Think Big” economic development programme of the late-1970s and early-1980s, very rapidly turned into an albatross around the neck of Rob Muldoon’s government. By the mid-1980s, the very expression, “Think Big”, had become political shorthand for the unwisdom of large-scale state intervention.

 

It was in the context of Muldoon’s increasingly costly and strike-plagued Think Big projects that the Leader of the Labour Opposition, David Lange, delivered his devastating put-down: “You can’t run a country like a Polish shipyard!”

 

With the benefit of hindsight, however, Muldoon’s alleged political folly looks more and more like economic and environmental prescience. Conceived as a means of escaping New Zealand’s dependence on foreign oil (which had skyrocketed in price during the 1970s) and of substituting domestically produced agricultural and industrial inputs (such as electricity, fertiliser and steel) to improve New Zealand’s precarious balance of payments, Think Big bore a startling resemblance to the industrial development programme pitched to Walter Nash’s Labour Party in the late-1950s by the left-wing New Zealand economist, W.B. Sutch.

 

The electrification of the North Island main trunk railway line, for example, was one of Muldoon’s Think Big projects. Had it been completed we would not now be witnessing the environmentally retrograde replacement of KiwiRail’s fleet of electric locomotives with carbon-dioxide-belching diesels. Indeed, a mischievous commentator might predict that if the Greens ever come up with a comprehensive industrial development programme, it will look more than a little like Think Big!

 

In many ways Muldoon’s Think Big and Bill English’s Social Investment policies are alike. Both feature ideas more associated with the left than the right, and both, if sensibly implemented, could be of immense benefit to New Zealand. Unfortunately for Muldoon and, almost certainly, for English, the essentially left-wing character of the programmes they are advocating makes it practically impossible for the National Party to implement them in a sensible fashion.

 

One of the reasons Think Big became such a gift to National’s opponents was the Economic Development Minister, Bill Birch’s, unwillingness to assign the job of building the energy and industrial projects solely to the New Zealand State. Rather than expand the public sector’s capacity, Birch entered into a succession of largely secret contract negotiations with an assortment of multinational construction firms. Not only did this substantially increase the projects’ costs, but it supplied the Government’s opponents with a smorgasbord of extremely tasty political meals.

 

English’s Social Investment policy will very likely suffer the same fate as Think Big.

 

On its face, the idea of using the government’s dramatically improved capacity to gather and cross-match critical data streams from the Social Development, Vulnerable Children, Justice, Corrections, Health and Education ministries, in order to improve the targeting of public services to those individuals and families most in need, is a good one. If additional resources and assistance can be channelled to these vulnerable citizens before they become the state’s permanent, eye-wateringly expensive and essentially intractable “clients”, then Bill English’s claim that Social Investment, introduced now, will save the taxpayers billions of dollars, later, is entirely justified.

 

English’s problem is that the implementation of Social Investment policies will require a substantial increase in spending on the people National most loves to hate: the poor, the brown, and the “welfare-dependent” working-class. The only way English will be able to “sell” his Social Investment policy to the National caucus, therefore, is by showering resources on the tiny number of people fingered by the State’s data-crunching algorithms, while simultaneously reducing assistance to all the other beneficiaries on its books.

 

English’s problem is Labour’s problem, too. Ever since David Shearer waxed eloquent about his (apparently apocryphal) “beneficiary on the roof”, it’s been clear that most Labour MPs are extremely wary of identifying their party too closely with the despised “underclass”. So, rather than embracing the principles of Social Investment, Andrew Little and his colleagues, like the Lange-led Labour Party, will focus public attention on the inevitable stuff-ups associated with the application of the prime minister’s pet project.

 

Social Investment: a policy offering potentially huge improvements in the delivery and effectiveness of social services; will thus go the way of Think Big. A good idea undermined by the ideological hostility of those responsible for its implementation and politically demonised by a Labour Opposition much more interested in breaking the right than in making its policies work.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 17 January 2017.

In The Bonds Of Love We Meet

Ready To Work? The National Government's use of "Social Bonds" to reintegrate the mentally ill into the workforce will test the limits of the private sector's willingness to risk serious cash in attempting to resolve what the State long ago recognised as a knot of extremely complex and often intractable clinical conditions. How many corners will investors feel obliged to cut in order to protect their investment?

 

IMAGINE YOU’RE A SMALL EMPLOYER, and in need of an appropriately qualified and experienced assistant. You place an ad’ on Seek and, to your intense irritation, nothing happens. A not uncommon experience for small employers seeking qualified staff. New Zealand, it seems, has an overabundance of people without marketable skills, and a serious shortage of the sort of people small businesses need to become large ones.

 

Then, a week or so later, an e-mail arrives from an outfit calling itself the Employment Therapy Trust. Funded by the sale of Social Bonds to an impressive array of “good corporate citizens”, the Trust’s mandate is to facilitate the transition of mentally ill persons from state-supported living to productive work.

 

“The Trust is aware that your company is seeking the services of an appropriately qualified and experienced person”, the Trust’s e-mail observes. “We are confident that one of our current clients fulfils all of the requirements specified in your advertisement. Should you wish to discuss this offer further, or arrange an interview with our client, please do not hesitate to get in touch.”

 

What do you do? Your need for a capable assistant grows more urgent with every passing week, but the stigma of mental illness is very strong. How will your other employees react? Not to mention your customers? What if the “therapy” doesn’t work and the person becomes disruptive – dangerous even? There are a lot of factors to consider.

 

You decide to have a chat with someone from The Employment Therapy Trust.

 

What she tells you makes you wonder whether or not you’re in the right business.

 

The Trust is only a few months old, but already it has amassed working capital of around $5 million through the sale of special, government-issued, Social Bonds. Using this money, the Trust is offering Employers a substantial subsidy on the salary of any client hired for a period of not less than 90 days. Clients still in employment at the end of three months, the Trust’s representative informs you, are deemed by the Ministry of Health to have made a successful transition from welfare to work. If the Trust repeats this exercise to the extent specified in its contract with the Ministry, the holders of the Trust’s Social Bonds receive a generous dividend.

 

“Why only three months?” you ask the Trust’s representative. “Why not six months – or a year?”

 

She tells you that a period exceeding the specified three months would not only be too expensive for the Trust to subsidise, but that there was also considerable reluctance on the part of potential bondholders to support a longer transition period. Investors were fearful that the Trust’s clients might not be able to cope with a period of paid employment longer than 90 days.

 

“And the Government is prepared to wear this?” you ask, incredulously.

 

She explains that the Government’s priority is to reduce the cost to the taxpayer of supporting beneficiaries over the course of their whole lifetimes. The best way to do this, she says, is to come up with new ways of getting beneficiaries off the welfare rolls and keeping them off.

 

“That’s much easier to do”, she says, winking wickedly, “if the responsibility for helping beneficiaries transition from welfare to work is taken out of the hands of traditional service providers – public servants – and transferred to purpose-built private-sector providers like the Employment Therapy Trust.”

 

“Because once you’ve signed off a client as having held down a job for three months,” you respond, “that’s it. He’s cured. Off your hands.”

 

“And off the Government’s books!” she replies triumphantly.

 

“And everybody wins! The Government, by reducing the fiscal burden of long-term state dependency. The Trust, by keeping its contract. The Social Bond holders, by receiving a whacking great dollop of interest. The company, by filling its vacancy. And, hopefully, the client, through the multiple therapeutic benefits of re-joining the workforce!”

 

“That’s it exactly”, smiles the Trust’s representative.

 

You peruse, once again, the excellent CV she has handed you.

 

“And what happens if your client’s mental illness reasserts itself four or five months into his time with the company? What if his medication has to be increased and he’s no longer capable of doing the job?”

 

“Well,” she smiles, handing over her card, “you just give me a call. There’s plenty more where he came from!”

 

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 June 2015.

A Gangster's Charter: Bill English's "Social Investment" Budget.

A Gangster's Charter: Just think about everything that lay behind Tony Soprano’s cynical description of himself as a “waste management consultant”, and you’ll have a pretty good grip on what Bill English's 2015 Budget is all about.

 

NEXT THURSDAY, 21 May, is Budget Day. No, don’t yawn, because if the veteran political journalist, Richard Harmon, is right, then “next week will be a defining moment in the third term of this government and a critical point in its campaign to retain power in 2017.”

 

That “defining moment” will mark the commencement of the next great campaign in Neoliberalism’s thirty years war against collectivism and the public sphere.

 

Some will call it privatisation but that’s not really what this next phase is all about. If John Key and Bill English really wanted to privatise the provision of social welfare they would simply shut down the Ministry of Social Development, close all the Work and Income offices, and sell off every one of the country’s 60,000 State Houses to the highest bidder. The public schools and hospitals would suffer a similar fate.

 

No doubt most of the Decile 10 schools would be snapped-up at a good price. The big public hospitals in the main centres would, similarly, attract plenty of interest. But all those Decile 1 schools? Who would want to pour good money into them? And provincial hospitals? Not much scope for profit there.

 

No, what Bill English is planning is something very different from a straightforward reversion to the “night-watchmen state” so beloved by the followers of Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises.

 

In any case, it’s doubtful that such a radical step would save the government all that much in the way of expenditure. Casting adrift the poor on such a massive scale would necessitate huge increases in Vote Defence, Vote Police, Vote Courts and Vote Corrections. Much of the money saved by shutting down the welfare state would end up being spent defending whatever replaced it from the ravages of tens-of-thousands of desperate citizens with nothing left to lose.

 

The “Better Public Services Programme” that Bill English launches on Thursday (almost certainly under a new and catchier name) won’t be about relinquishing all state responsibility for the poor, the sick and the young, it will be about funding private entities to provide the services which, hitherto, have been provided by public servants.

 

In English’s own words to the Institute of Public Administration on 19 February 2015: “Testing for spending effectiveness will be core to this process. If we can’t measure effectiveness, it won’t be funded through social investment. We’ll be systematically reprioritising funding to providers that get results.”

 

To anyone who’s been following the commissioning of the new privately-run prison at Wiri, south of Auckland, all this talk of “social investment” and “providers” will sound very familiar. The taxpayers have spent millions on the construction of the Wiri facility, and the Government has just announced the laying-off of close to 200 prison officers from around the country in order to supply it with a core of highly-trained staff, but the actual running of the prison has been contracted-out to the multinational firm, Serco. For the next quarter-of-a-century a private entity will be permitted to extract a substantial profit for the provision of “services” for which the state has, quite rightly, accepted responsibility (without seeking a profit) for the past 200 years.

 

How has it come to this? Why is the National Government preparing to pay (with our money!) the private sector for taking over the provision of services the public sector is still perfectly capable of providing? In essence, the answer is: because in mature capitalist economies like New Zealand there’s bugger-all new profit-making opportunities available to the private sector. Hence its growing interest in “social investment”, a new kind of venture which promises to pay the private shareholder a handsome dividend without the necessity of massive capital outlays for plant and machinery – all of which is supplied up-front by the generous taxpayer.

 

This isn’t capitalism in any accepted sense of the word. It is, however, instantly recognisable to any enterprising gangster as an officially sanctioned opportunity for skimming-off-the-top.

 

A public body contracts a private institution to supply a much needed social service. The latter offers a price – which includes a hefty chunk of cash for its trouble – and then proceeds to utilise every possible means of cutting corners and short-changing its “customers” so that it can (in the unlikely event of being asked) present the public with a passable facsimile of the service it undertook to provide.

 

Just think about everything that lay behind Tony Soprano’s cynical description of himself as a “waste management consultant”, and you’ll have a pretty good grip on what Bill English and his government’s “defining moment” is all about.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Saturday, 16 May 2015.