The “Majestic Equality” Of The Law – And Its Challengers.

The Challenger Challenged: What has been so astonishing about the reaction to Metiria Turei's admission that she lied to Social Welfare is just how few New Zealanders identify with Jean Valjean, the hero of Les Miserables, and how many subscribe to the punitive instincts of his relentless pursuer, Inspector Javert. Over the past 30 years, for a significant number of Kiwis, the definition of "a fair go" has changed dramatically - and not for the better!

 

IN JUST SIXTY DAYS New Zealanders will choose a government. All elections are, to a greater or lesser extent, an exercise in collective self-definition. Revealed in each ballot box is the number of electors who use their votes as a tool, a shield, and a weapon. If the outpouring of outrage against Metiria Turei this past week is any guide, then the percentage of electors willing to wield their votes as weapons will not be insignificant.

 

In survey after survey, the value identified by New Zealanders as most reflective of their core identity is the affirmation that every Kiwi is entitled to “a fair go”. But, if the public reaction to Ms Turei’s confession that she lied to the social welfare authorities, rather than see her child go hungry, is any indication, then “a fair go” means different things to different people.

 

Clearly, a large number of Kiwis believe that “fairness” means accepting that the obligation to respect and obey the laws of the land is both universal and inescapable. In the eyes of these citizens, it is grossly unfair for an individual to derive a benefit from breaking The Law when her fellow citizens, by upholding it, place themselves (and their loved ones’) at a disadvantage. To these people, the Greens’ co-leader is guilty of “stealing” from them, and deserves to be punished. Come 23 September, many of them will use their votes as a lash.

 

The problem with this idea of fairness is that it separates The Law from its economic, social and political context. Like the Ten Commandments handed down to Moses on Mt Sinai, this approach to The Law has nothing to do with the need – or the greed – of humankind. Those who subscribe to this notion of legal obligation are simply incapable of accepting that a nation’s ever-changing laws are much more likely to reflect the needs of its dominant classes than the immutable insights of a mountain-dwelling God.

 

The French writer, Anatole France (1844-1924) summed up the absurdity of this “The Law is The Law” position in his famous quip: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” And, he might have added: to fail to acquaint the welfare authorities of any material change in their domestic circumstances vis-à-vis the rent!

 

Absent from the vicious condemnation heaped upon Ms Turei by these partisans of the Law’s “majestic equality”, is any attempt to locate her law-breaking in its historical context. That the right-wing government of the day had made it a matter of official policy to “incentivise” the poor out of welfare and into work by reducing their income by 25 percent, or, in Ms Turei’s own words, to “use poverty as a weapon against its own people”, is simply ignored.

 

That the law could be used by the wealthy against the poor was certainly not ignored by the people who fled from Great Britain to New Zealand in the Nineteenth Century. Sir John McKenzie, who as Lands Minister in the first Liberal Government, broke up the estates of the great run-holders of the South Island, had seen the way the law had driven thousands of Scottish crofters from their homes to make way for the lairds’ sheep. His determination to turn the tables, by using the law on behalf of the many against the few, caused him not a moment’s embarrassment.

 

Neither was the first Labour Government the least bit embarrassed to require the then Governor-General, George Vere Arundel Monckton-Arundell, 8th Viscount Galway GCMG, DSO, OBE, to swear-in a Cabinet fairly bristling with law-breakers (including the future Prime Minister, Peter Fraser). Nor did the Labour Leader, Mickey Savage, think it in any “inappropriate” to put a former guest of His Majesty – the erstwhile “young offender” John A. Lee – in charge of a programme to correct the two great afflictions of which he had the most direct personal experience: rack-renting landlords and homelessness.

 

Until relatively recently, this was the historical context out of which most New Zealanders drew their notion of what it meant to give people “a fair go”. It did not signal a deification of The Law, but an understanding that the statutes written by politicians reflect the needs and interests of those who put them into office. (As well as of those who could, if necessary, remove them!)

 

Middle Class people harbour few illusions about the class nature of legislation. It’s why so many of them regularly and happily attempt to thwart the IRD in its redistributive mission. It also explains why so many of them are expressing outrage: not only at Ms Turei’s challenging confession; but also at her declared determination to lift the legal consequences of weaponised ballots from beneficiaries’ shoulders.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 25 July 2017.

Sins Of Admission: A Response To John Armstrong's Attack On Metiria Turei.

The Guilty Party: Metiria is guilty of a crime – but not the one John Armstrong rails against in his latest column. Her transgression was to break ranks with the socio-political formation that has kept Richardson’s and Shipley’s welfare cuts bleeding and raw for more than quarter-of-a-century.

 

JOHN ARMSTRONG rails against Metiria Turei’s admission that she lied to the welfare authorities. Like so many of the outbursts emanating from the Right on this subject, however, his words speak more eloquently of his own failings than Metiria’s.

Lacking the imagination for empathy, Armstrong and his ilk cling for comfort to the rules, all the rules, and nothing but the rules.
 

“She endeavoured to turn her breach of the law into a launching pad for her party’s welfare policy. That is audacious. It is also the height of arrogance. It is also to enter very dangerous territory. It implies you are above the law. It says it is okay to break the law in order to try and change it.”
 

Yes, John, that’s exactly what it implies. But, tell me, do you think that Mahatma Ghandi, Dr Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela would have any ethical difficulty dealing with those implications?
 

Metiria was required to raise her daughter in the years immediately following the Mother of All Budgets. You must remember that extraordinary act of social violence, John? When Ruth Richardson, with enthusiastic support from Jenny Shipley, slashed the already meagre incomes of New Zealand’s most vulnerable citizens by 25 percent? When the National Government of Jim Bolger did exactly what Metiria told her party a Green government would never do: Use poverty as a weapon against its own people?
 

Do you really expect us to believe, John, that you would have accepted the National Government’s vicious policies without protest or subterfuge – and watched your child go hungry? If that really is your position, then why did you write: “There is sympathy for her past plight and respect for her efforts in pulling herself out of it.”
 

Clearly, you understand that falling into the clutches of Work & Income was, and is, a predicament – a “plight” – and that getting out of it isn’t easy. It requires a working knowledge of every trick in the book. Some of those tricks are legal. Others are not. But, for their children, people do what they have to do. If you would rather they didn’t “steal” from the Government, John, then why not insist that the Government gives them enough to live on?
 

But you don’t want to do that, do you, John? No, you would rather use the poor against the poor. Like when you write: “Turei’s flouting of the law will further alienate low-income families in which both parents work long hours and who consequently cannot abide welfare cheats. Those voters are already deserting the centre-left. Turei’s holier-than-thou disposition is hardly going to attract them back.”
 

And how would you know what low-income families are thinking, John? Has it never occurred to you that those “welfare cheats” (what an odious gob of verbal spittle that is!) are the sons and daughters of the working poor? How many of them, do you suppose, have attempted to support their children at the local Work & Income office and experienced first-hand the icy condescension and bureaucratic cruelty of MSD employees?
 

No, John, you don’t anything about that world of hurt and anger. What you do know, however, is what they should be thinking - and you will not hesitate to tell them at every given opportunity. Because the Right is terrified – yes, terrified – that Metiria’s admission that she was willing to lie to keep food on her little family’s table might persuade a dangerously large number of those low-income families that at least some Green MPs know what their own children are going through. And that the prospect of MSD’s hated “sanctions” being abolished might even convince those families that, this time, it’s worth casting a vote.
 

Metiria is guilty of a crime – but not the one John Armstrong rails against. Her transgression was to break ranks with the socio-political formation that has kept Richardson’s and Shipley’s welfare cuts bleeding and raw for more than quarter-of-a-century.
 

When Metiria Turei told the Green AGM that: “We will not be a government that uses poverty as a weapon against its own people”,  she must have known that she was breaking the biggest rule of all.
 

And that the John Armstrongs of this world would never forgive her.
 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Saturday, 22 July 2017.

The Bright Sunlit Uplands Of Radicalism: Metiria Turei And The Greens Set The 2017 Election On Fire.

Do You Hear The People Sing? Metiria Turei’s pledge that: “We will not be a government that uses poverty as a weapon against its own people”, is nothing less than a call to arms. Requiring the MSD to stop treating its “clients” as second-class citizens: making a bonfire of work tests, drug tests, bedmate tests, and all the other oppressive means of “sanctioning” beneficiaries, will have the same electrifying effect as the cry which swept through Paris on 14 July 1789 – “To the Bastille!”

 

METIRIA TUREI has rescued the 2017 General Election from the timidity and moral squalor into which it was fast descending. In a speech that brought tears to her listeners’ eyes and cheers to their throats, the Greens’ co-leader carried her party out of the shadows of moderation and into the bright sunlit uplands of radicalism that have always been its natural habitat. The Green Party’s AGM of 15-16 July 2017 will go down in history as the moment when it repudiated the “Insider’s” devilish bargains – and reclaimed its soul.

 

Turei’s revolutionary plans for New Zealand’s social welfare system will be examined below, but first a word or two about her prescience in regard to Winston Peters and NZ First.

 

Clearly, there is now no disputing her warnings about the racist implications of NZ First policy. What looked like gratuitous and counter-productive name-calling a week ago has been vindicated emphatically by Winston Peters’ utterances of the weekend just past.

 

It’s one thing to allow race and immigration to become confused (NZ First is by no means unique in this regard!) but it is quite another to call for a binding referendum on the retention of the Maori Seats. The last senior politician to draw a bead on the Maori Seats was Don Brash – and New Zealand only dodged that bullet by the skin of its teeth!

 

So, let’s be clear: there is nothing democratic about demanding a binding referendum on this issue. On the contrary, it is a shameless appeal to the very worst majoritarian instincts of the New Zealand electorate. Allowing 85 percent of the population to determine the fate of a representative institution dedicated to protecting the rights of the country’s indigenous 15 percent is not only reactionary, it is a direct threat to the “public welfare, peace and tranquillity of New Zealand”.  In such circumstances, no progressive New Zealander could possibly consider voting for NZ First.

 

By the same token, The Greens’ revolutionary welfare policies make it difficult for any progressive New Zealander to vote for anybody else.

 

As anyone who has read the heartfelt postings of people living at the razor’s edge of our welfare system (the latest one is here) knows, the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) presides over an empire of cruelty with few precedents in New Zealand history. The National Government boasts about the numbers who have been removed from the welfare rolls since they assumed office. That this is due to the sheer awfulness of being caught up in the Work and Income mincing machine is an “achievement” they are much less keen to acknowledge.

 

Though most Kiwis remain oblivious to what is happening behind the security-guarded doors of their welfare system, there are tens-of-thousands of families with direct personal experience of what it’s like to be a beneficiary – or the loved one/s of a beneficiary. To these folk, Metiria’s pledge that: “We will not be a government that uses poverty as a weapon against its own people”, is nothing less than a call to arms. Requiring the MSD to stop treating its “clients” as second-class citizens: making a bonfire of work tests, drug tests, bedmate tests, and all the other oppressive means of “sanctioning” beneficiaries; will have the same electrifying effect as the cry which swept through Paris on 14 July 1789 – “To the Bastille!”

 

The question is: do the Greens possess the electoral infrastructure to spread the good news to the tens-of-thousands of disillusioned voters who stand to gain from their policies. These marginalised citizens (minimum wage workers as well as beneficiaries) now have a very good reason to enrol and vote. The Greens boast that, this election, they have more campaigning resources than ever before. Here is their chance to prove it.

 

One reason to be hopeful that beneficiaries will hear about the Greens’ revolutionary welfare policies is Metiria’s extraordinarily courageous decision to admit that when, as a solo mum, she was faced with the choice of lying to the welfare authorities, or letting her child go hungry, she lied. Except that the story does not end there. Like Jean Valjean, the hero of Victor Hugo’s novel, Les Miserables, Metiria made sure that the many opportunities which flowed from her transgression were turned towards making her society a better place.

 

Hugo wrote of his sprawling literary masterpiece that:

 

“So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilization, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age—the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of women by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night—are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless.”

 

Any more than Metiria’s confession, or, the Greens transformative welfare policies, can be useless. They are the stuff out of which social justice is made. Meaning that, if Labour wishes to catch up with the only progressive coalition partner now available to them, then they had better start running hard – now.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 17 July 2017.

Let Them Eat Scraps: Bill English's Budget Outflanks The Left By Mollifying The Conscience-Stricken Centre.

Never Mind The Quality, Feel The Love! Bill English's seventh Budget may be weak in terms of economic effectiveness, but politically it's a genuine sand-kicker. Labour's Andrew Little is still rubbing his eyes.

 

IT’S BEEN 43 YEARS since a National Party finance minister rose to deliver a Budget in which real increases to social welfare benefits were announced. In 1972, the then finance minister, Rob Muldoon, increased government spending by a whopping 16.2 percent – and much of it went to beneficiaries. Of course, the level of welfare spending in 1972 was considerably less than today’s. The unemployment rate, for example, was well below 1 percent and there was no Domestic Purposes Benefit. New Zealand’s generous superannuation scheme still lay in the future. Even so, 1972’s was a particularly generous budget. “That’s it,” Muldoon cheekily informed his non-plussed Labour opponents, “I’ve spent the lot!”

 

Muldoon’s cheery admission should alert us to just how different the world was 43 years ago. Economic thinking was still dominated by the ideas of John Maynard Keynes, and, as Muldoon would later quip: “Most New Zealanders wouldn’t recognise a deficit if they tripped over one in the street.” Forty-three years later, the National Party Finance Minister, Bill English, has, with considerable reluctance, increased government spending by 2.5 percent – not quite enough to keep pace with the projected rate of inflation and population growth. New Zealand’s economic performance may be one of the best in the OECD, but nobody in 2015 would dream of increasing state spending by 16.2 percent!

 

All of which gives the lie to those who, like former finance minister, Sir Michael Cullen, insist that John Key does not preside over a neoliberal administration. Because, what Bill English has given with one hand he has ruthlessly snatched back with the other. In 11 months’ time, the poorest New Zealanders will receive a $25.00 per week increase in their benefits – just enough to keep them from the clutches of utter destitution. But, as of 2:00pm on Thursday, 21 May 2015, the Government’s $1,000 kick-start grants to new Kiwi-Saver accounts ceased.

 

Which is not to say that this budget isn’t a highly successful exercise in political mollification and repositioning. In the run-up to last year’s general election, pollsters were reporting that one of the few questions registering a strong lead for Labour was about which party had the best response to the problem of child poverty. Even among National Party voters there was a clear and rising level of concern over the number of Kiwi kids living in need, and the Government’s response was generally acknowledged to be inadequate. Bill English’s budget measures will, almost certainly, have mollified these conscience-stricken voters of the Centre. At the same time they have blocked-off one of the very few remaining avenues into National territory. Labour will now have to find another way of reaching what it still insists are “soft” National voters.

 

But how “soft” are these voters, really? Bill English may have surprised the commentariat by increasing benefit levels, but he was careful to ring his $25.00 bounty with new and tougher obligations on sole parents. From the age of just 3 years, beneficiaries’ children are expected to be enrolled in early childhood educational institutions, while their parents go out to work for a minimum of 20 hours per week. Nothing “soft” about that!

 

Indeed, it was to avoid the charge that they had gone “soft on beneficiaries” (as in “soft on communism”) that Labour, for nine long years, steadfastly refused to restore benefit payments to the levels they were at in July 1991, when Ruth Richardson, in her “Mother of All Budgets”, slashed them by the equivalent of $43.00 in today’s money. No matter how many statistics the academic husband and wife team of David and Liz Craig assembled and presented; no matter how dire the evidence of real and growing hardship among beneficiary families; or even of the alarming spikes in poverty-related diseases recorded by the nation’s public hospitals; the Labour-led government of Helen Clark remained unmoved. It’s neoliberal advisers in Treasury and the Ministry of Social Development insisted that the “incentivising” gap between benefits and wages be maintained – and it was.

 

By 2015, however, the size of that gap had grown to such proportions that even Treasury was prepared to acknowledge that it might be time to relent – just a little. And, God knows! $25.00 per week is not a lot! Still, no one should be under any illusions that English’s minimal adjustments will do anything to loosen the bars of the cruel poverty trap in which as many as a quarter-of-a-million New Zealand children remain imprisoned.

 

Many years ago now, at a swanky Auckland restaurant, I found myself seated next to a well-known right-wing journalist. Not surprisingly, we ended up arguing about Rogernomics and Ruthanasia. I asked her this question: “What would you do if you were told that in order to go on receiving all the good things you currently enjoy, you would first have to consent to a person being chained up in a dungeon and fed your scraps?” Well, she hummed and hawed for a while, and then offered me this quite extraordinary reply. It would be alright, she said, because, as she became richer, she’d make sure the prisoner received more food, and that his chains were loosened, “so he could move about a bit”.

 

If you can be reconciled to that way of thinking, then you will have no difficulty whatsoever in both understanding and endorsing Bill English’s 2015 Budget.

 

This essay was jointly posted on The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road blogsites of Saturday, 23 May 2015.

Linking Benefits To Votes: What's Labour Up To?

Why Link Votes and Benefits? It’s possible that the Labour Party is simply attempting to put some legislative flesh on the bones of its new “communitarian” ideology. At the heart of communitarianism lies the assertion that for every “inalienable right” enjoyed by the citizen, there is a corresponding, and equally inalienable, responsibility.

WHO IS PETER GOODFELLOW? Most New Zealanders wouldn’t have a clue. And that’s as it should be. Generally speaking, people only recognise the name of a political party’s president when that party is in trouble. Or, as was the case with National’s Sir George Chapman, when they’ve played a decisive role in their party’s political victories. National’s current president, the aforementioned Mr Goodfellow, enjoys the well-earned anonymity of success.

 

Alas, the same cannot be said of the Labour Party’s governing body, which last week presented a submission to Parliament’s Justice and Electoral select committee raising the possibility of “making enrolment to vote a pre-condition to receipt of various forms of state support”. In other words: if you’re not enrolled, you won’t get your benefit. There are, Labour submitted, “advantages and potential disadvantages to the approach” and, since it had already been adopted in other countries, “it is incumbent on us to examine all options to see if they are feasible in our context.”

 

Where to begin with this curious proposal? Perhaps by pointing out that s.82 of The Electoral Act 1993 already provides for the compulsory registration of electors – on pain of a $100.00 fine for the first conviction, and a $200.00 fine for the second and any subsequent convictions.

 

If the NZ Council of the Labour Party was unaware of this, then it should not have been. And if it was aware, then why did it consider some further inducement to enrolment necessary?

 

It’s possible that the Labour Party is simply attempting to put some legislative flesh on the bones of its new “communitarian” ideology. At the heart of communitarianism lies the assertion that for every “inalienable right” enjoyed by the citizen, there is a corresponding, and equally inalienable, responsibility.

 

Much of Labour’s current policy platform is permeated with communitarian ideas – especially in the area of social welfare. Beneficiaries in receipt of public support are expected to reciprocate by doing all within their power to return to the workforce. If they have entitlements, Labour argues, then so does society.

 

By what right does any citizen not enrolled to vote lay claim to the support of his or her fellow citizens? If such people refuse to fulfil what is both a legal requirement and a civic duty, then isn’t society entitled to withhold its duty of care until those responsibilities are met? Putting it bluntly: without the pro quo, nobody gets a quid.

 

The other explanation for Labour’s curious submission is considerably less lofty.

 

Despite enormous effort by scores of tireless volunteers, tens-of-thousands of likely Labour voters failed to enrol in time for last year’s election. Though technically in breach of the Electoral Act, these citizens will probably not be prosecuted. Receiving no disincentive to repeating the offence, there’s every chance their names will not appear on the roll again in 2017.

 

If, however, tens-of-thousands of social welfare beneficiaries: people who, most experts agree, are much more inclined to vote for political parties of the Left than the Right; were required (ably assisted by Work and Income staff) to fulfil their legal obligations as electors before receiving their benefits, then the Labour Party would be saved a huge amount of hard political slog.

 

Getting people to the polling booths is one thing, but if they are there discovered to be not on the roll, then the bureaucratic hurdles placed before them can be formidable. Frequently, the sheer volume of paperwork proves too daunting for these often poorly educated and/or non-English-speaking citizens to attempt, and the potential Labour vote is lost.

 

When viewed from this perspective, Labour’s submission not only appears organisationally self-serving, but it could also be construed as a subtle thrust against the emerging strategic preference (among Andrew Little’s principal advisers) for Labour’s effort to be directed at “soft” National Party voters. Many on the left of the Labour Party are convinced that the tens-of-thousands of unregistered voters constitute a more wholesome electoral target than some twenty-first century version of “Rob’s Mob”.

 

That Labour’s submission ended up attracting so much (presumably unwanted) media attention more than bears out the observation with which this discussion began. That one of the best ways of telling whether or not things are going well for a political party is how invisible its organisational wing is willing to become, and how anonymous its leadership.

 

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, 15 May 2015.

Fixing CYFs: Paula Rebstock Is Asked To “Rescue” Another State Agency.

"I'm From The Minister's Office - And I'm Here To Help." Paula Rebstock provided the former Welfare Minister, Paula Bennett, with a far-Right rationale for purging the welfare rolls. The present Minister, Anne Tolley, is now steering her, like a neoliberal battleship, in the direction of Child, Youth and Family.

 

I MUST CONFESS to being unimpressed by Paula Rebstock. The only time I have ever encountered her in the flesh was at a seminar organised by the Child Poverty Action Group’s Susan St John. Ms Rebstock mumbled through a page or two of deadly-dull bureaucratese, failed to answer a couple of questions, and left.

 

This lacklustre performance confirmed my view of Ms Rebstock as, ideologically-speaking, a safe pair of hands. Her review of New Zealand’s welfare system is as bloodless a piece of neoliberal “analysis” as any right-wing government could hope for – and its ramifications are still reverberating through beneficiary households across New Zealand.

 

Not that Ms Rebstock will ever witness the effects of her recommendations. Not for her the moral anguish of Work & Income case-workers forced (on pain of becoming beneficiaries themselves) to purge as many of their “clients” from the benefit rolls as possible. She’s never there to hear the sobs of a woman already down on her luck, when the fine-grinding machinery of the MSD delivers an even bigger sack of shame and misery to her door. It will not be Ms Rebstock who ends up staring into the twin muzzles of a double-barrelled shotgun wielded by a crazed beneficiary with nowhere left to go and absolutely nothing to lose.

 

The Rebstocks of this world are spared the close-up consequences of their recommendations. They are experts at reading between the lines of their terms of reference to discover exactly what it is that their commissioning ministers are expecting from them – and delivering it. So it was with Paula Bennett’s welfare review, and so it will be with Anne Tolley’s review of Child Youth and Family (CYF).

 

Once again in the lead role, Ms Rebstock will not have to work too hard to decode the meaning of Ms Tolley’s comment that: “CYF has drafted its own internal modernisation strategy and while it is a good starting point, it doesn't go far enough.”

 

It is an axiom of the neoliberal credo that civil servants are the last people one should consult to discover what is wrong with the civil service. Where others might see a group of dedicated professionals struggling to do their jobs with insufficient staff and dwindling resources, the neoliberal sees only a clutch of self-aggrandizing empire-builders, hell-bent on squandering as much of the taxpayers hard-earned cash as they can hood-wink their ministers into giving them.

 

For the neoliberal “reviewer”, any “modernisation strategy” prepared by CYF’s own staff could only be a thinly-disguised plea for more staff and more resources. Even worse, it would, almost certainly, be based on the professional judgement of its miracle-working “back room” managers, and informed by the “front-line” experiences of its exhausted social workers. Obviously, such people lack all objectivity – not to mention the “extensive governance experience” of Ms Rebstock. When it comes to developing a “modernisation strategy”, or constructing an “improvement framework”, she will know, to the millimetre, exactly how far is “far enough”.

 

It’s possible, of course, that Ms Rebstock has grown tired of churning out reviews which blithely recommend the application of market instruments, metrics and incentives to the State’s dysfunctional delivery of social services. Perhaps, determined that this commission will be her last, she won’t present a report telling the minister what she wants to hear, but what she needs to know.

 

That would entail a comprehensive critique of New Zealand’s post-colonial economic and social system, and the fate of the colonised peoples it has swallowed. It would expose the profound lack of realism in CYF’s official mission by acknowledging the futility of attempting to repair the damage inflicted upon children and young persons by broken families, when the forces responsible for breaking those families in the first instance form no part of its remit.

 

Such a review would point out the impossibility of accomplishing genuine healing in circumstances where the only people in a position to assist the victims of abuse and neglect are people who were themselves the victims of abuse and neglect – not only by their own families, but by the State.

 

If Ms Rebstock really wanted to be rid of the burden of delivering reports which offer no better solutions than crude cost-cutting, outsourcing a growing number of CYF's functions to the private sector, and imposing ever more draconian sanctions upon the delinquent behaviour of an underclass entirely lacking the wherewithal to be anything other than a social disaster, then she would tender very different advice to Ms Tolley. She would write a report that demanded for children, young persons and their families the dignity of work; the security of a well-appointed and affordable dwelling; a comprehensive mental health service for those whose minds are damaged; and a CYF agency in full possession of the staff and the resources needed to fulfil its legal and moral obligations to this nation’s most vulnerable citizens.

 

In other words, Ms Rebstock and her fellow review panellists ( Police Commissioner, Mike Bush; Charity Director, Duncan Dunlop; Maori Advisor, Helen Leahy; and Psychology Professor Ritchie Poulton) would present a report recommending the dismantling of the entire neoliberal regime.

 

You’ll forgive me if I don’t hold my breath.

 

This essay was post on The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road of Thursday, 2 April 2015.

A Lurch To Sanity

Reaching For The Red Pill: David Cunliffe and Labour have a rapidly dwindling period of time in which to convince "Middle New Zealand" that its programme represents not a lurch to the left - but a lurch to sanity.

BOLDNESS IN POLITICS is rare. Major political moves are routinely pre-tested in focus groups and opinion polls before being announced. The untested, out-of-left-field appointment of Matt McCarten as David Cunliffe’s new chief-of-staff consequently caught New Zealand’s political class almost completely off-guard.

 

Nowhere was this more embarrassingly apparent than in the reaction of Helen Kelly, President of the Council of Trade Unions (CTU). Asked to comment on the rumour that McCarten was in line to replace Wendy Brandon as Cunliffe’s CoS, Kelly retorted that such an appointment was “highly unlikely”. (A spectacular demonstration of out-of-the-loop-ness which should dispel, if only for a moment, the right-wing notion that the Labour Party takes its marching orders from the CTU!)

 

Like all genuine coups (and make no mistake, McCarten’s appointment was very much an Independence Square moment for the Labour Opposition) Cunliffe’s decision has hit the fast-forward button on Labour’s internal politics. Just as well, really, because until last Wednesday it appeared to be operating in slow-motion.

 

Exactly how long McCarten’s galvanising influence will last, however, rests entirely in Cunliffe’s hands. The boldness of inviting this country’s leading left-winger to occupy the office next to the Leader of the Opposition’s does require some explanation.

 

Not, of course, to the Labour voters who sat out the 2011 election on the grounds that the party’s parliamentary team really didn’t seem to have their hearts in the fight. They will have “got” McCarten’s appointment instantaneously and it will have cheered them up no end.

 

Can the same be said of the middle-class professional or the small business owner?

 

It is Middle New Zealand that needs to hear the reasons why the appointment of the “hard left” McCarten is not, in the words of political journalist, John Armstrong: “confirmation that Labour is shifting markedly and permanently to the left under Cunliffe's leadership”. And, if it is, why they should not be feeling afraid – very afraid?

 

In framing an answer to that question, Cunliffe could do a lot worse than let himself be guided by McCarten’s own response to the Prime Minister’s insinuation that his appointment represents a lunatic lurch to the Left.

 

“I’m bemused that the Prime Minister calls my appointment in a non-policy-making role a lurch to the left […] When did it become so outrageous to call for the hourly minimum wage to be raised to $15, or argue that the breadwinners of a family deserve a living wage for a decent day’s work? When does affordable housing for all, a decent job and support for families to support children get a good start in life become so unreasonable?”

 

For practically the whole of its democratic history, New Zealand has been the home of what one French visitor called “socialism without doctrines”. Beginning with the Liberal Party in the 1890s, most New Zealand politicians (including a number of right-wing leaders like the Reform Party’s Gordon Coates and National’s Keith Holyoake) have looked to the state – as the only reliable possessor of the resources and expertise required to develop a very lightly populated country – to take the lead in nation-building.

 

New Zealand’s relatively tiny population probably also explains its inhabitants’ longstanding hostility to entrenched economic inequality and the social injustices that follow in its wake. New Zealanders insist that every citizen be given a “fair go” and that their access to education, health-care and a decent place to live should not be determined by the size of their bank balance. The ravages of the Great Depression added a job, a living wage and the maintenance of a social welfare safety-net to this list of things that every Kiwi has to have.

 

In many countries default policy-settings of such collective generosity would be condemned as  “socialist”, and fiercely resisted. But, between 1890 and 1984 large-scale state involvement in the New Zealand economy and the provision of universal social services became the equivalent of our political wallpaper.

 

Cunliffe’s challenge is to make middle-class New Zealanders understand that it is not the policy package of a Labour Party determined to return to roots that they have to fear, but the extreme policy prescriptions of the neoliberal Right. He needs to explain that between 1983 and 2013, the policies which caused the number of Kiwi kids living below the poverty line to nearly double were not the policies of Richard Seddon, Mickey Savage or even Rob Muldoon, but of Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson.

 

It was the policies of the latter (and, yes, Cunliffe needs to acknowledge that one of them was a Labour finance minister) that were “outrageous”. That it was the sudden and utterly unmandated lurch towards neoliberalism that unleashed the economic and social madness of the last thirty years.

 

To win, Cunliffe must convince voters that Labour’s “lurch to the Left” is actually a long-delayed lurch to sanity.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 4 March 2014.

Here's To You Mrs Robinson

Under Scrutiny: Imagine if the same expectations of "responsibility" underpinning Paula Bennet's new "social obligations" policy were applied to members of the upper-middle-class as well as Domestic Purposes Beneficiaries.

THE OFFICERS of the Social Obligations and Responsibilities Unit knocked on Charlotte’s front door as she was preparing breakfast. She always tried to send her children off to school with something hot and nutritious – not always successfully. Justin and Katherine were both teenagers and did not appear to believe in eating anything at all. Most mornings they simply opened the refrigerator, grabbed the orange juice, took a swig, and then, offering their mother a desultory wave, disappeared for the rest of the day. Charlotte would be left with more French toast, pancakes and scrambled eggs than she could possibly eat. Usually she ended up scraping most of it into the re-cycling bin.

In fact, she was just on the point of throwing out her offspring’s untouched breakfasts when the SORU came a-knocking.

“Mrs Robinson?” The young woman who spoke was thin and angular with a set of teeth that appeared to have been borrowed from a horse. Her colleague, as round as she was straight, wore rimless glasses and resembled an extremely well-fed and intelligent domestic cat.

“That’s me!” Charlotte replied brightly. “Can I help you?”

“By authority of the Social Obligations and Responsibilities Act (2015)”, droned the young woman, reading from a small card, “I am empowered to conduct a mandatory interview and inspection of the domicile of you, Mrs Charlotte Elizabeth Robinson. Failure to fully co-operate with officers performing their duties under the Act is a criminal offense punishable by a $25,000 fine or six months imprisonment, or both. Do you understand?”

The young woman pushed past Charlotte and began inspecting the large, well-appointed property room by room, making notes on a digital clipboard.

“What’s this all about?” Charlotte asked the young woman’s rotund sidekick.

“Complaints have been laid about your excessive energy consumption, your failure to conserve and recycle, your unsound childrearing practices, alcohol consumption and sexual promiscuity – we’re here to help.”

“Now just a minute!” Charlotte snapped. “I don’t know who you’ve been talking to, but these accusations are outrageous. Who the hell told you all this?”

“I’m afraid I cannot tell you that”, the young man said primly, “the identity of complainants is privileged.”

The young woman strode into the kitchen and spotted the duo of as yet unscraped breakfast plates.

“Are we to understand that you were about to throw this food away, Mrs Robinson?”

“I was, yes.” Charlotte murmured, carefully examining the toes of her slippers.

“And are we to further understand that you have allowed your children to depart for their classes without an adequate breakfast?”

Charlotte nodded as the young woman tapped away furiously on her digital clipboard.

The young woman flicked the screen with her fingers and reviewed her notes.

“In this private dwelling I have detected five flat-screen televisions and four personal computers – a number well above the recommended maximum quantity of domestic electronic devices. In your bedside table, Mrs Robinson, there are a large number of prescription drugs – prima facie evidence of an unhealthy dependence on mood-altering medication. In your recycling bin there are a ridiculously large number of wine and gin bottles – prima facie evidence of a serious alcohol addiction. And, as my colleague noted upon entering the property, there is a large sports utility vehicle parked, in blatant contravention of the new regulations on automotive maximums, in your excessively large garage.”

“We’re selling the SUV”, Charlotte protested.

The young woman shot her a disbelieving glance.

“Our complainants also report that your children have been seen imbibing alcopops illegally in the local park, and that your daughter, though under the age of consent, has been engaging in lascivious behaviour with the 18 year old son of one of your neighbours.”

“For God’s sake!” wailed Charlotte, “They’re teenagers!”

“Under the Social Obligations and Responsibilities Act (2015) Mrs Robinson, you have a duty to raise your children according to the generally accepted social norms. Simply because you are a member of the upper-middle-class you are not exempted from those responsibilities and obligations.”

“In fact,” purred the corpulent young man, “it could be argued that the enjoyment of such obvious privileges carries with it an even greater obligation to behave responsibly. People like yourself should take care to offer the less fortunate members of society – beneficiaries for example – a positive role model.”

“Which brings us to the affair you’re currently conducting with Mr Benjamin Braddock.” The young woman touched her keypad and an extremely embarrassing image flashed up on the screen. “Does this sort of behaviour reflect a proper understanding of a wife and mother’s social obligations and responsibilities, Mrs Robinson?”

Charlotte blushed bright red.

“I will be recommending to my superiors that your husband’s taxes be doubled, Mrs Robinson. You’ll be attending drug rehabilitation and parenting classes. Your children will receive counselling. The SUV will, of course, be confiscated.”

This short-story was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 24 July 2012.