Indisputable Mandate

Key Policy: In 2011 Labour made opposition to a partial sale of the state's energy assets the centerpiece of its election campaign. National's long-signalled privatisation plans were thus thrown into sharp electoral focus. Significantly, the final result put Labour 20 percentage points behind National. With nearly 50 percent of the votes cast, Mr Key's Government not surprisingly claimed a strong mandate to proceed with its sales programme.

THE TARGET of 310,000 signatures has been reached – or so we are told. The coalition of interest groups and political parties seeking a Citizens’ Initiated Referendum (CIR) on the National Government’s plans to partially privatise the state-owned energy generators has yet to submit its petition to the Clerk of the House for checking. But even if this final hurdle is cleared, the petitioners will still have to find their way around a much more daunting obstacle: the Government’s mandate.

 

That the Government has a mandate to sell-off 49 percent of Mighty River Power, Genesis, Meridian and Solid Energy is hotly contested by the four organisations petitioning for a CIR. Grey Power, The NZ Council of Trade Unions, The Labour Party and The Greens all deny the legitimacy of the Government claiming a specific electoral mandate for its partial privatisation programme. According to the petitioners’, the voters have (at best) given the National-led Government a general mandate. To claim a specific mandate, they say, it must first ask the electorate a specific question – hence the need for a referendum.

 

This argument would carry more weight if the National Party’s principal challenger in the 2011 General Election – the Labour Party – hadn’t itself specified National’s privatisation plans as the best reason for voting it out of office. “Stop Asset Sales” was the Labour Party’s most coherent slogan in 2011. That only 27.4 percent of the voters were prepared to back its flagship policy with their ballots strongly suggests that privatisation was not the electoral game-changer Labour’s focus-groups had suggested.

 

The Greens’ were much less willing than Labour to give the privatisation issue such critical electoral salience. They promised New Zealanders “a richer future” of which the retention of state assets was certainly an important (but not an essential) feature. How, then, can the Greens argue that National’s claim to a specific electoral mandate is illegitimate when their own policy pitch was so general? If National isn’t entitled to claim a specific mandate for asset sales, then, by the same logic, the Greens cannot claim one against them.

 

The same applies to all the other political parties offering manifestoes in which, inter alia, the Government’s plans to partially privatise the State’s energy companies were opposed. It’s simply not fair to aggregate the Greens 11.6 percent, NZ First’s 6.5 percent, the Maori Party’s 1.4 percent, Mana’s 1.0 and the Conservative Party’s 2.6 percent of the Party Vote with Labour’s 27.4 percent to claim a minimum anti-asset sales bloc of 50.5 percent. Opposition to asset sales was not deemed important enough to preclude a confidence and supply agreement between National and the Maori Party. Nor would it have been had the Conservatives managed to cross the 5 percent threshold.

 

National, of course, has no need to aggregate percentages for its partial privatisation programme as desperately as its opponents. With 47.3 percent of the Party Vote, the governing party came within an ace of securing an absolute majority of the votes cast. It would have been an outstanding tally even under the old First-Past-the-Post electoral system, but coming within 2.8 percent of an outright majority under our Mixed-Member-Proportional system was close to miraculous. Any political party racking up such a total is entitled to claim a very strong electoral mandate for all its policies.

 

National’s claim to a specific mandate for its asset sales programme is, accordingly, very strong. The policy was announced nearly a year prior to the election and was subjected to the intense scrutiny of not only the parliamentary opposition, but also the news media and a broad cross-section of civil society. The 2011 election was no 1980s or 1990s exercise in duplicity and fraud: the public understood that a vote for National was a vote to privatise 49 percent of Solid Energy, Meridian, Genesis and Mighty River Power. Nearly half of them voted for the Government anyway. If Prime Minister John Key’s government doesn’t have a mandate to proceed with its privatisation policy, then the word no longer has any political meaning.

 

New Zealand’s representative system of government entrusts the administration of the nation to the political party, or parties, which alone, or in combination, command a majority in the House of Representatives. National and its allies played by these rules – and won. Their performance referendum is scheduled for 2014 – and it’s binding.

 

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, 11 January 2013.

Imperial Lessons

Water Rights: If Maori are able to remain united in their attempts to clarify the nature of any proprietary rights they may still enjoy over New Zealand's water resources, John Key's asset sales programme may yet fall victim to an indigenous strategy of "divide and rule".

DIVIDE ET IMPERA – “divide and rule” – was the central principle of Roman imperial government. Identify a conquered people’s long-standing social, economic and political fissures and drive your wedges home – as many as possible. Not for nothing did the British aristocracy set their sons to the systematic study of classical texts. Britain’s imperialists, like Rome’s, were masters at dividing and ruling. The easy British victories in the New Zealand Land Wars owe a huge debt to “the loyal Maoris” who were cajoled into taking Queen Victoria’s shilling.

New Zealand’s colonial elites came rather late to the art of dividing and ruling. Like their counterparts in Canada, the United States and Australia the assumption of the settler societies nurtured beneath Britannia’s imperial shield was that their troublesome “natives” would simply succumb to the Anglo-Saxon invaders’ genetic superiority (or, failing that, their guns and germs). In all but New Zealand’s case these genocidal expectations were largely (if not wholly) fulfilled. The “first peoples” of Britain’s non-tropical empire did indeed dwindle to politically insignificant percentages of the “White Dominions’” populations.

But not here. Successive settler governments’ efforts to “smooth the pillow of a dying race” notwithstanding, Maori numbers recovered and grew. Currently comprising between 10-15 percent of the population, New Zealand’s indigenous people constitute a significant and un-ignorable minority. Too few to win back their lost lands, but far too many to be simply shunted out of sight (and mind?) in the manner of the Canadian, American and Australian settler regimes. How to govern a settler state in which the indigenous population steadfastly refuses to fade into history has thus become one of the New Zealand political class’s most intractable problems.

The looming impasse over the partial sale of the four state-owned energy companies offers an excellent opportunity to see practically all of the New Zealand State’s Maori management mechanisms in play and to assess their effectiveness. Among the many institutions and groups involved are the NZ Maori Council, The Waitangi Tribunal, The Iwi Leaders Group and the Maori Party.

Each, in its own way, represents an attempt by Pakeha to either co-opt and/or pacify Maori resistance, or, by Maori, to exploit and/or challenge the post-colonial Pakeha Establishment. Ironically, the institution established to bring traditional Maori leaders into the Settler State’s tent (the Maori Council) and the quasi-judicial body set up to mollify the angry Maori masses (the Waitangi Tribunal) have become the primary vectors of indigenous resistance. By contrast, the Maori Party, launched to overturn the Foreshore & Seabed Act, which many Maori regarded as another raupatu (confiscation) has taken on the historical role of those “Loyal Maori” of the Land Wars.

Only the Iwi Leaders Group has yet to show its hand in this game of post-colonial poker. How it chooses to play its cards may yet determine whether the National-led Government’s controversial asset-sales programme proceeds smoothly, or becomes hopelessly, perhaps fatally, mired in legal challenges.

The Iwi Leaders Group, like the Maori Council before it, owes this position to the Pakeha Right’s rather belated attempt to copy the divide and rule tactics of the British imperialists from whom it inherited its economic dominance.

By enlisting the men and women of aristocratic lineage and/or great mana, the National Party hoped the Maori Council would off-set the political advantage its socialist rivals had acquired through their electoral alliance with the revitalist religious-political movement of Tahupotiki Wiremu Ratana.

In another historical irony, however, it was the Labour Party’s privatisation drive of the 1980s which gave rise to the judicially-inspired notion of a Treaty of Waitangi-mandated, Maori-Pakeha “partnership”. Seeking to mollify the growing anger of a new generation of Maori nationalists, Labour had extended the purview of the long-disregarded Treaty of Waitangi all the way back to the year of its signing in 1840. The subsequent “Treaty settlements”, negotiated by National Party ministers, saw hundreds of millions of dollars passing into the hands of tribal representatives. The elaboration of these significant capital transfers into powerful tribal corporations gave rise to a new Maori elite which the Right has attempted to fashion into a protective shield against the urgent social and economic claims of the growing Maori underclass.

The choice now confronting the Iwi Leaders Group is, therefore, a profound one. Either, it will facilitate the National Government’s partial asset sales programme by negotiating some form of tribally-based compensation, or, it will throw its weight behind the Waitangi Tribunal and the Maori Council. The latter course would align them in a politically significant way with the needs and aspirations of non-elite Maori: the beleaguered whanau and hapu who constitute the primary victims of National’s neoliberal policies.

Looking at the large number of Pakeha opposed to asset sales, Maori might then decide to practice a little “divide and rule” of their own.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 7 August 2012.

Doing The Right Thing For The Wrong Reasons. Labours "Unprincipled" Opposition To Asset Sales.

Are You Serious, David? Labour's reasons for opposing the partial sale of state energy generators have been as inadequate as they have been changeable. It's position would be improved dramatically if the party's leaders allowed themselves to be guided by the "democratic socialist" principles set forth in Labour's constitution.

“THE NATURAL RESOURCES of New Zealand belong to all the people and these resources, and in particular non-renewable resources, should be managed for the benefit of all, including future generations.” In any debate over the merits of public versus private ownership in New Zealand one might assume that these words, taken from the second, “Principles”, section of the Labour Party Constitution, would constitute the bedrock of the Labour Caucus’s argument.

For, surely, if any resources belonging to the people are alienated from the people, then they should be restored to the people. Indeed, such restoration should be mandatory given Labour’s “principle” that: “All people, either individually or in groups, may own wealth or property for their own use, but in any conflict of interest people are always more important than property and the state must ensure a just distribution of wealth.”

If ever there was a “conflict of interest” between the right of the people to benefit from the resources they own, and the right of wealthy individuals to convert public resources to private profit, it lies in the struggle over the partial sale of state-owned energy generators. On the basis of its founding principles, Labour’s position on these asset sales should be very simple and very clear. First: The assets belong to every New Zealander and should not, under any circumstances, be sold. Second: If the assets are sold they will be repurchased by the state at the earliest practical opportunity.

On this issue, Labour’s principles do not permit very much in the way of wiggle-room. If it is the obligation of the state to ensure a just distribution of wealth, then it is vital that the citizens’ access to something as important as energy not be restricted or rationed according to their ability to pay. The right of commoners to gather firewood on the lord’s estate was recognised as far back as the middle ages. To deny people the means of lighting and heating their homes, and cooking their food, was simply unthinkable. In the social-democratic New Zealand of 1935-1975, the successors of those medieval barons were required to pay their workers “a living wage” which incorporated the cost of energy. Massive state investment in hydro-electric power schemes from the 1940s to the 1980s made this possible by ensuring all New Zealanders had access to cheap and abundant electrical power. A Labour Party committed to its constitutional principles would make energy security a cornerstone of its appeal to Twenty-First Century voters.

Why then did the Phil Goff-led Labour Caucus shy away from basing its opposition to asset sales on the Labour Party’s constitutional principles mandating the public ownership of natural resources and a just distribution of wealth? And why hasn’t its successor, the David Shearer-led Labour Caucus, made a point of re-stating the party’s “democratic socialist” commitments? Could it be that Mr Shearer and his colleagues no longer subscribe to those beliefs?

From the very beginning of this latest privatisation drive Labour’s parliamentary leadership has offered a bewildering combination of explanations as to why the state-owned electricity generators should not be sold. Initially we were told that the energy assets were too profitable to justify privatisation. That the dividends they paid to the Treasury were so substantial that it made more commercial sense to simply borrow the sum any asset sales were likely to realise from international lenders. Then we were told that the sale of the state’s energy generators would see the shares in these strategic infrastructural assets being flicked on from domestic to foreign investors. Now we are told that the National-led Government’s efforts to ensure that most of the shares remain in Kiwi hands can only be achieved by ordinary taxpayers subsidising the Government’s “Loyalty Scheme”. Most importantly, however, from the point of view of first principles, New Zealanders have been told repeatedly that the Labour Party can give no guarantee that a future Labour Government will buy back the private sector’s shareholding in the state’s energy generators.

This refusal to commit to renationalisation is explained, in part, by Labour’s 2010 decision to exclude energy generation from the “closed list” of strategic infrastructural assets that the party’s economic policy-makers had recommended be run “in the New Zealand interest” and which foreign investors should be debarred from purchasing either in whole or in part (see here and here).

A more honest explanation for Labour’s refusal to endorse renationalisation, however, is simple embarrassment. Most Labour MPs would feel “naïve and stupid” advocating such a policy. Business leaders, civil servants and academics would ridicule their “1930s thinking” and they would be branded dinosaurs by their right-wing opponents in Parliament and the media. Labour’s Constitution may still declare that New Zealand’s natural resources “belong to all the people” and avow the state’s duty to “ensure a just distribution of wealth”, but the sort of people who make up Labour's current caucus are no longer prepared to pay even lip service to such “principles”.

That is why the Labour Caucus’s opposition to asset sales rings so hollow, and why the justifications for its position on this issue have been so inadequate and so changeable. Ideologically-speaking, the views of the party’s current MPs are little changed from those of the men and women who introduced and supported Rogernomics (and initiated the policy of full-scale privatisation in New Zealand). They no longer believe that the opportunities for private individuals to profit from the existential needs of their fellow human-beings should be progressively diminished and, ultimately, extinguished. The duty of twenty-first century policy-makers, as they see it, is to inform and expand the choices of free individuals operating in free markets. The only real difference between Labour’s spokesperson, David Parker, and National’s Finance Minister, Bill English, is that the former sees the state playing a much greater role in informing and expanding those choices than the latter.

Labour Party members should be on their guard. The weird peregrinations of their parliamentarians when it comes to explaining their opposition to asset sales is proof that their hearts are not truly in the fight. Eventually (and it may be sooner rather than later) the Caucus and its advisers will realise that the policy preferences of “modern social democracy” are incompatible with Section Two of Labour’s existing Constitution. Like Tony Blair, they will insist that the old commitments to wealth redistribution, public ownership and the “principles of democratic socialism” generally, be jettisoned in favour of a “new” Labour Party.

One that even Tories can vote for with a clear conscience.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

Heading Backwards?

Missionary Zeal: Labour's finance spokesperson, David Parker, seems to be on a mission to reassure the New Zealand business community that a Labour Government will not deviate in any alarming way from the prevailing economic orthodoxy.

“I’M BECOMING INCREASINGLY CONCERNED at the Labour Caucus (and Leader) moving Labour to the Right,” observed a former Labour MP recently in an e-mail to a Labour friend and trade union stalwart of many decades standing. “As a long-time Labour Party member/activist, I find it disturbing to think the Labour Caucus is heading backwards to the Rogernomics era that was so damaging to NZ communities. Comments made by various MPs at the latest Labour Caucus Dinner at Waitangi last week did not reassure me.”

Alas, I have yet to learn what those “various MPs’” were talking about. What I do know, however, is that those who share this former MP’s concern at their party’s political direction don’t need to eavesdrop on the dinner conversations of Labour’s caucus to discover where it’s going. Labour leader, David Shearer, and his finance spokesperson, David Parker, have been telling New Zealand loud and clear, and in public, for weeks.

Speaking to a group of corporate head-hunters on 11 July, Mr Parker spelled out the details of Labour’s policy on foreign investment. Concerned to prevent “infrastructure assets with monopoly characteristics” from being sold to offshore buyers, Labour, in the run-up to last year’s election, drew up a “closed list” – to keep a “bright line” between “what is to be sold and what is not.” Among the infrastructure that was not to be sold was any: electricity line, water storage or irrigation networks; no seaports or airports; and no public hospitals, schools, railway lines or roads.

Not included in Labour’s “closed list” were telecommunications networks and – amazingly – “electricity generators”.

According to Labour’s policy:  “While the electricity market is on the cusp of becoming uncompetitive and exhibits monopoly-like characteristics, generation assets are diverse in nature, location and ownership.”

What this means is that although Labour went into the last general election on a policy of “No Asset Sales”; and in spite of the fact that its campaign advertising showed a vast banner, displaying that very message, being draped over a hydro-electricity generating dam; the party was unwilling to include electricity generators on the list of state-owned infrastructure that “ought to be run in the New Zealand interest” – and never be sold to foreigners.

Am I alone in thinking that Labour’s foreign investment policy fatally compromises its current campaign against asset sales? If the generation of electricity is an activity which properly belongs to the market, and if New Zealand’s electricity generation assets are “diverse in nature, location and ownership” and, therefore, able to be purchased by foreign interests, then I’m at a loss to know why the Labour Party is opposed to their partial privatisation.

Perhaps opposing the sale of state assets is just (if I may quote the former Labour cabinet minister, Steve Maharey) “One of those things you say in Opposition, but forget about in Government”. Certainly, the decision to keep state-owned energy generators off Labour’s “closed list” would explain why Mr Shearer keeps telling New Zealanders that: “Once they’re gone, they’re gone for good.”

I like David Shearer, he’s a good, down-to-earth Kiwi bloke. But, I also fear him. Why? Because he’s been so easily persuaded that what’s wrong with New Zealand can only be fixed by inflicting radical and wrenching change on ordinary working people. (As if ordinary working people have spent the last twenty-five years living with anything else!) He scares me because he and the people he listens to lack the courage to devise a manifesto that imposes the radical and wrenching change where it belongs – on the rich and powerful. And, like the former Labour MP quoted at the top of this column, I’m concerned that those voters too young to remember the devastation wrought by the ideas of Roger Douglas are about to let Labour’s present leader give them another go.

Mr Shearer’s convinced we’ve a “good chance” of becoming “a twenty-first century peasant economy” if he doesn’t. I’m concerned that’s exactly what we’ll become if he does.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 20 July 2012.

Power To The People?

People Power: Radical photographer, John Miller, took this photograph of people gathering for an anti-Vietnam War protest march down Queen Street on Bastille Day 1972. Forty years later another, much smaller, crowd gathered to protest against the partial sale of state assets. One of the saddest themes of the politics of the past four decades has been the steady demobilisation of the citizenry. In 2012, the demonstrators' cries of "Power to the People!" have taken on an increasingly hollow ring.

JOHN MILLER has been taking photographs of demonstrations for more than forty years. On Saturday, as the numbers slowly built for Auckland’s “Aotearoa is NOT for Sale” protest march up Queen Street, we ran into each other in Queen Elizabeth Square. With a wry grin, John handed me a photograph he’d taken of demonstrators at the same assembly point, on the same date, exactly forty years ago – 14 July 1972.

The cause that day was, as so many causes were in the 1960s and 70s, someone else’s. Though American troops were being pulled out of Vietnam as fast as President Nixon dared, the war in Indo-China rumbled on, with New Zealand, at least nominally, a part of it. The thousands of young faces in John’s photograph reflected their generation’s willingness to stand up and be counted as opponents of the morally insupportable contest between a nation of rice farmers and the most destructive military machine the world had ever seen.

“That one was clearly a lot bigger than this one’s going to be”, I commented, looking around the little square and registering how empty it was. Others seemed to share my sense of embarrassment at the low turnout, self-consciously lining the sides of the square. The only people willing to occupy its empty space were a brave band of young Chinese Christians. They held placards saying “Jesus Loves You” and sang hymns to the demonstrators.

“We could certainly use a little divine support!” I thought to myself as John hurried off to share his historical treasure with the other grizzled veterans of protests-gone-by. The first of the “Aotearoa is NOT for Sale” protests, on 28 April, had attracted up to 8,000 people, but it was already clear that this one wasn’t going to be even half that size.

I had feared it would be so. The law enabling the partial sale of the state-owned energy generators has been passed (albeit by a single vote) and the Government’s $120 million promotional effort is about to begin. Many New Zealanders, though deeply opposed to the sale of Mighty River Power, must’ve heard about Saturday’s protests and asked themselves: “What’s the point?”

On the other hand, the country’s attention had been focused for a whole week on the Maori Council’s bid to convince the Waitangi Tribunal that the sale of the hydro-electricity SOEs should be postponed until the vexing question of who does, and who does not, hold a proprietary interest in the water that spins their humming turbines is resolved. It was just possible that people might reconsider their decision that partial asset sales are now a “done deal” – and re-join the protest movement.

It was a false hope. While Maori are obviously concerned to secure a seat at the table when it comes to dividing up the spoils of the partial privatisation process, it is by no means clear that Maoridom as a whole is opposed to the sale of state assets per se. There was encouraging testimony at the Waitangi Tribunal hearings from individual Maori hapu who promised to act as the kaitiaki – guardians – of New Zealand’s lakes, rivers and streams. But, representatives of the much more powerful Iwi Leaders Group spoke elsewhere (and approvingly) of “market mechanisms”, “reserved share-holdings” and “royalties”.

There are times when your enemy’s enemy is not your friend.

And so the drums started beating, the marchers chanted “Power to the People!”, and the ragged column of 2,500 to 3,000 souls began it’s slow trudge up Queen Street. I looked around me and saw the multi-coloured union and political party flags fluttering, and the hand-painted banners bobbing up and down. (The best I saw read: “New Zealand: 51 percent pure – 49 percent for sale.”). “Who’s got the power?” Someone bellowed. “We’ve got the power!” the marchers bellowed back.

I lifted up my eyes and the gleaming towers of the banks and finance houses seemed to lunge towards me: BNZ, AXA, Deloittes, ANZ, National Bank: giants of glass and steel standing like sentinels along the length of Queen Street. I wondered how impressive we looked from those top floors. Did the financiers, looking down, see a torrent of angry humanity pouring through that narrow canyon like a river in flood? Or did they see a line of scurrying ants: too tiny and remote to merit more than a dismissive sneer?

A Question Of Perspective: A raging human torrent - or scurrying ants?

At the end, as always, there were speeches and resolutions. Representatives from the Opposition parties spoke: Phil Twyford for Labour (last time it was David Shearer) Julie Anne Genter and Russel Norman for the Greens. I listened carefully, but only John Minto, speaking for the Mana Party, was willing to make the one political commitment capable of worrying the watchers in those glass towers:

“If elected,” said Mr Minto, “we will renationalise any asset that has been sold, and deduct any dividends paid from the purchasers’ compensation.”

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 17 July 2012.

No Joke: Why I'm Not Laughing At Labour's Latest Speeches.

Waiting For The Punchline: If "energy generation" isn't even on the "closed list" of state-owned assets David Parker is determined to keep in public ownership, then everyone collecting signatures and marching in protest to save the energy SOEs has just become the butt of a very bad Labour joke.

IF LABOUR’s a “joke”, as the Prime Minister insists, then I’m not laughing. Now, my sense of humour has always veered toward the traditional, so it’s possible that what we’re dealing with here is a very esoteric variety of black humour. Perhaps Labour’s finance spokesperson, David Parker, was pitching to this darker side when he told the following side-splitter to the corporate head-hunters at Robert Walters Finance:

We also think infrastructure assets with monopoly characteristics are especially important to the functioning of the wider economy. Labour published a closed list of assets that we believe ought to be run in the New Zealand interest because they have monopoly characteristics - assets such as electricity line networks, water and airports.

The list excludes telecommunications and electricity generation.

If you enjoy your humour at other people’s expense, that’s quite a punch line. What Mr Parker was telling his audience of top-level banking and accounting talent spotters was that Labour does not include electricity generation on its list of “infrastructure assets” that ought to be “run in the New Zealand interest”.

So, all those people standing on street corners with clip-boards collecting signatures for a Citizens Initiated Referendum on asset sales; all those thousands of people planning to march in the “Aotearoa Is NOT For Sale!” protest this Saturday; all those hundreds of Labour Party members who’ve been reassuring their workmates and neighbours that the Caucus is rock-solid against the sale of Mighty River Power and Genesis Energy; all of them are wasting their time. Because “energy generation” isn’t even on Labour’s “closed list” of assets that should never be sold.

Some joke!

While we’re on the subject of Mr Parker’s speech, it’s worth noting the language he uses when talking about state assets. Rather than saying that industries and businesses with “monopoly characteristics” should be ‘kept in public ownership’, or ‘remain in government hands’, Labour’s finance spokesperson says that they “ought to be run in the New Zealand interest”. Could a former state owned enterprise be “run in the New Zealand interest” by a private New Zealand company? His audience undoubtedly thought so.

Mr Parker’s repertoire of drolleries was not confined to the fate of New Zealand’s publicly-owned assets. Consider these statements about the nature of the Labour Party:

Labour is a progressive party: fundamentally it is the party of change, the party that is willing to make structural changes when necessary ..... It’s always up to Labour to make the case for why change is needed, and why the status quo isn't working. So the difference between [Labour and National] is not that the Government is pro-business, and we are anti. Nor are we talking about ‘tax and spend’, or ‘cutting the pie differently’. Those are tired clichés. What we are talking about is the need to modernise because we can’t keep going as we are. We need to take some hard decisions and shatter some orthodoxies that are past their use-by date.

Who do you think Mr Parker was more likely to have been channeling when he wrote those words: Mickey Savage or Roger Douglas? And what sort of “change” does Mr Parker have in mind? The sort that empowers working people? The sort that gives them more say in their workplace? More security of tenure in their rented home? A better set of outcomes for their children from our health and education systems?

Let’s see:

What I’ve laid out for you is a comprehensive sweep of modernising reforms across superannuation, pro-growth tax reform, help for innovation and exporting, and modernising our savings and investment policy.

Once again, that sounds a lot more like Roger than Mickey!

What’s truly unfunny about Labour at the moment, however, is that Mr Parker is not the only senior member of its caucus who is talking like this. The Leader of the Opposition, himself, has picked up the same 1980s dialect of economic modernisation and sweeping structural change.

On 12 July, Mr Shearer addressed the Arbitrators and Mediators Institute of New Zealand. After regaling them with tales from his time as a United Nations administrator, he moved into a peroration that had more than a little of the “short term pain for long term gain” about it:

If we don’t make big changes, we stand a fairly good chance of becoming a 21st century peasant economy. And this is where you have to ask a fundamental question about leadership. Is it fair to people to go on doing what we are, when you know that what we’re doing is not enough? The Prime Minister said in a lecture last week that it's not constructive politics to get ahead of people – that if you don’t take them with you, your reforms will run out of engine power. That’s right, as far as it goes, but the lesson I take from that is that leadership is also not being timid and giving people only small and imperceptible change. The lesson I take from it is that you should listen, find the right words and the right arguments to paint the picture or vision of where we should be – and set out where we could be if we’re prepared to make big changes.

Once again, we are left wondering about the precise nature of these “big changes”. Unfortunately, Mr Shearer does not spell them out. And it is here that the difference between the Labour Party of Mickey Savage, Walter Nash and Norman Kirk stands in such stark contrast to the party of David Shearer and David Parker. Theirs was also a party of change – radical change. But it was also a party which spelled out in the clearest terms how the policies driving that change would work, and how working people would benefit from them.

With the bleak example of the Lange-Douglas Government before it, the electorate has every right to feel a shiver of dread run up its spine when it hears a Labour leader talk about leadership “not being timid”. After all, it was no less a Rogernome than Richard Prebble who used to talk about how brave the Fourth Labour Government was: about how much courage it took to defy the will of the people and sell Telecom.

In his speech to the Arbitrators and Mediators, Mr Shearer spoke movingly about how important it was to “understand as much as you can about the person on the other side of the table … If you can put yourself in their shoes, if you can imagine how the world looks through their eyes, you’ll have something solid to work with.”

If the Labour Leader were to do that now: if he were to try and understand how his words might sound to an electorate grown wary and weary of politicians who think there are more important political priorities than taking the people with them; then he might begin to understand why so many of us disagree with John Key.

Because when Labour talks like this the joke is usually on us, and when it’s all over nobody feels like laughing.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

A "Pessimistic Reformist" Considers The "Aotearoa Is Not For Sale" Demonstration.

Better Than Nothing? Demonstrations can sometimes highlight a movement's weaknesses rather than its strengths. Why did nobody ask the question: Suppose we call for a massive, anti-mining-type, demonstration against the sale of state assets - and only 8,000 people show up?

POLITICAL ACTIVISTS should never be afraid of the truth. Sure, the praise of friends and comrades, good media coverage and inspiring photographs can all make activists feel good about themselves and their achievements. But, when it comes to determining the success or failure of an action, there's no substitute for undertaking a cold, hard analysis of the facts.

Unfortunately, my own cold, hard analysis of the facts of last Saturday’s Aotearoa Is Not For Sale demonstration has led me to the very upsetting (and no doubt highly unpopular) conclusion that, if it was intended to demonstrate to the Government that its “partial” privatisation plans have generated the same level of public opposition as its earlier proposals to permit mining on New Zealand’s conservation estate, then it failed.

The anti-mining march of 1 May 2010, organised by Greenpeace, was estimated by the NZ Herald to have attracted 50,000 protesters, which, if accurate, makes it one of the largest political demonstrations in New Zealand history. The key sentence in the Herald’s report states that: “Marchers left the bottom of Queen St about 11am and by the time the first of them arrived at Myers Park, just below Karangahape Rd, they were still leaving the bottom of Queen St.” That “end-to-end” description is the test of a truly massive Auckland demonstration – and Saturday’s anti-privatisation protest came nowhere near passing it.

So what? With somewhere between 6,000–8,000 participants the anti-privatisation march was still a very large protest. Why shouldn’t its organisers hail those numbers as a resounding success? The answer is brutally simple. A demonstration is called a demonstration precisely because its organisers have something they wish to demonstrate. If your intention is to prevent the Government from privatising state assets, then presumably the purpose of organising a protest march is to demonstrate the scale of public opposition.

And it’s important that the people you mobilise aren’t overwhelmingly representative of groups who would never dream of voting for the governing party. That was one of the most important features of the Greenpeace demonstration. Sure, there were plenty of ageing hippies and lots of young anti-capitalists on the march, but there were also thousands of people who looked and talked like National Party supporters. Greenpeace had mobilised a significant number of well-to-do suburbanites: people with batches on the Coromandel; people who went skiing in national parks; people who just might change their voting behaviour to prevent a mining company from spoiling their “favourite spot”.

Saturday’s protesters were, overwhelmingly, representative of the Left’s opposition to asset sales: people who’d rather die that cast a vote for the Tories.

So, why would the Government pay any attention to the anti-privatisation march? It was less than a fifth of the size of the anti-mining march, and was comprised almost exclusively of people who had voted for the Government’s political opponents. Reporting back to their masters, the Government’s spies undoubtedly reassured them that this was not a cause for which National Party voters were willing to put their feet on the street.

Many of the people I spoke to on the anti-privatisation march realised that there were “not enough” people to give the National-led Government pause, but added cheerily “still, it’s better than nothing”. Not necessarily. I would argue that Saturday’s march was, in fact, worse than nothing. By providing the Government with a vivid glimpse of its most vociferous opponents, and revealing just how few of them there really are (even in the country’s most populous city) the organisers of the anti-privatisation march have told the Government that it can now proceed without serious political risk.

Given the comparatively low turnout, it would have been safer to let the poll data on privatisation do the talking. The latter showed a clear majority of voters (in some polls two-thirds to three-quarters) opposed to “partial” privatisation. Those are scary numbers. But now the Government knows that, unlike the anti-mining sentiment of 2010, the anti-privatisation sentiment of 2012 isn’t strong enough to mobilise more than “the usual suspects”.

Really?

Perhaps anticipating this unfortunate outcome, some of the organisers added a subsidiary slogan to the official “Aotearoa is not for sale”. This new slogan - “What Parliament does, the Street can undo” - implicitly concedes that the Government-sponsored legislation partially privatising our state-owned energy companies and Air NZ has sufficient parliamentary support to become law. Not to worry though, because “The Street” (presumably mass protest on the streets) has the power to “undo” the Legislature’s evil deeds.

Assuming that this slogan is not mere rhetorical bravado, and that it reflects a sober assessment of the relative strength of political forces in New Zealand, how seriously should we take its insurrectionary sub-text?

Well, given the 6,000-8,000 turnout last Saturday, it would be foolish to dismiss it entirely. Six to eight thousand protesters, determined to directly challenge the power of the state, would pose a pretty serious headache for the authorities.

Except, of course, there are nothing like 6,000-8,000 people willing to confront state authority head-on. Of the people who marched up Queen Street on Saturday, I would estimate that no more than 500 would be willing to provoke such a confrontation – and abide the consequences. Saturday’s marchers were members of the Labour, Green and NZ First parties, trade unionists, environmentalists, students and academics: people who, by-and-large, remain attached to the institutions and praxis of our liberal democracy. The state-house tenants from Glen Innes; the radical Maori nationalists from Northland; and the members of the Mana Party and Socialist Aotearoa might sign-up for political insurrection – but that’s all.

And even if we are willing to engage in the thought experiment that concedes the revolutionary sloganeers’ insurrectionary moment. What then? Is the country to be run from “The Street” indefinitely? Are the institutions of the state: its administrative organs; its hospitals and schools; and all of the workers they employ; going to wait for “The Street” to meet their wage-bill? Will “The Street” raise the revenue required to keep society functioning? Will it determine the nation’s spending priorities? Or will the people on the street decide, instead, to elect representatives to do all those things? And, having done so, will these (now successful) insurrectionists be willing to allow a fresh group of revolutionaries (or counter-revolutionaries) from “The Street” to undo them?

The same heedless anarchistic spirit which produced the slogan “What Parliament does, the Street can undo” was clearly evident in the organisation of the anti-privatisation march itself. Its “post-democratic” praxis led to the sort of “issue-creep” that left participants on the day feeling, at best, bemused or, at worst, alarmed. It’s lack of a proper command structure gave rise to simple errors, such as putting an unrealistic figure on the projected turnout, and left the news media uncertain as to who, exactly, they should talk to, both before and after the event. As one veteran left-wing activist said to me: “I hate all this post-democratic shit. You never know who’s calling the shots. One day we’re going to find ourselves marching up Queen Street only to discover that the whole bloody protest’s been organised by the fucking fascists!”

I cannot end this posting without acknowledging that the organisers of Saturday's march put in a Herculean effort. I know that getting 6,000-8,000 people to a protest is no easy matter, and I have nothing but praise for the hard work, creativity and sacrifice that went into the event. What I am saying, however, is that much more thought should have been given to the political consequences of failing to turn out the same sort of numbers as Greenpeace. Why did nobody ask the question: “Suppose we call for a massive demonstration against the sale of state assets – and only 8,000 people show up?”

“Optimism of the will” is all very well, but we should never forget the other half of Antonio Gramsci’s famous formula: “Pessimism of the intellect”. It's important because, like it or not, there are some political occasions when activism for activism’s sake is simply counter-productive. When, sadly, nothing is a lot better than something.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

Frightening The Government

Frightening Their Government: Students gather for a demonstration on 16 October, 2010 in Paris against pension reform. Since the Student-Worker uprising of May 1968, French politicians have evinced a healthy respect for demonstrations and strikes. There was a time when the New Zealand state was similarly unwilling to risk the wrath of its citizens.

THERE’S A LINE in Michael Moore’s Sicko documentary that every democratic citizen should commit to memory. The radical film-maker declares: “Governments should always be afraid of their people, but people should never be afraid of their government.”

Mr Moore was comparing France with the United States, and wondering how two countries, both with revolutionary traditions, could end up so far apart. Americans’ fear and hatred of “Big Government” is legendary. But the French will challenge government policy at the drop of a chapeau.

In the USA you strike and demonstrate at your own risk. French governments do not like to risk demonstrations and strikes. In 1968 – well within the memory of senior French politicians – demonstrations and strikes brought the Fifth Republic to the very brink of revolution. It took the active intercession of the French Communist Party, and a ten-percent pay rise, to separate the workers from their youthful student allies. 

Governments in New Zealand were also afraid of the people – once. And the people gave them good reason.

The National Party was elected for the first time in 1949 on a rock-solid promise to abolish what they called “compulsory unionism”. In 1951 they provoked a fight with the Waterside Workers Union. If they could make an example of New Zealand’s toughest and most progressive union, then abolishing compulsory unionism would be a piece of cake.

What they got was a very different sort of example. For 151 days the wharfies and their allies fought Sid Holland’s government toe-to-toe. The Government “won” – but only because the Machiavellian boss of the Federation of Labour agreed to keep its 300,000 members “neutral”.

It would be another forty years before the National Party was prepared to have another crack at organised labour. And the only reason Bill Birch’s Employment Contracts Bill passed into law without serious amendment in 1991 was because the Council of Trade Unions, dominated by “moderate” state-sector union bosses, lacked the courage to give Mr Birch and his mates a bloody nose.

Well, we’ve had twenty years to appreciate the benefits of “moderation”. Perhaps we’ve all been much too polite for far too long.

Then again, civility and moderation are qualities highly prized by New Zealanders. Our country is one of the oldest, continuously-functioning democracies on Earth. As far as possible, we prefer to communicate with our political leaders through the Ballot Box. It’s only when they deliberately and stubbornly refuse to be advised by the democratic process that we get angry.

I guess that’s why Labour, the Greens, the CTU and Grey Power have opted to fight the partial privatisation of the state-owned energy companies by launching a Citizens Initiated Referendum. Between elections, it’s one of the few ways of using the Ballot Box to make your point. CIR’s are, of course, non-binding, but a Government refusal to be guided by its undoubted success, would be extremely provocative. Knowing a majority of the electorate was against their policy – but proceeding anyway – the National-led Government would be positively inviting the people to organise a more robust response.

The precedent is there in Greenpeace’s campaign against mining Schedule Four land. The spectacle of 50,000 New Zealanders marching up Auckland’s Queen Street was more than enough to throw Mr Key’s and his Government’s big blue bulldozer into reverse.

Greenpeace's 50,000 demonstrators threw National's big blue bulldozer into reverse.

Discretion will, once again prove to be the better part of National’s valour if Kiwis respond to the Labour/Green/CTU/Grey Power call for volunteers. If anything, the spectacle of ordinary citizens, muffled against the Autumn gales, standing on tens-of-thousands of street corners clutching clip-boards and ball-point pens, or knocking on the doors of tens-of-thousands of former National Party voters, is likely to prove even more terrifying than Robyn Malcolm, Lucy Lawless and their Greenpeace legions.

The task of gathering the 307,000 signatures required to force a referendum on asset sales is not a small one – but it can be done.

And, frankly, we need to do it. As citizens, we’ve been passive for far too long. As the veteran British Labour politician, Tony Benn, tells Michael Moore in Sicko: “An educated, healthy and confident nation is harder to govern.” Much harder than a nation that’s beaten-down, demoralised and genuinely frightened of its own government.

Democracy is not a political system for fearful people: to function properly it requires regular displays of unreasonable and immoderate courage.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 9 February 2012.

A New Alliance To Reclaim Aotearoa

The Second Wave: National's connivance in the re-colonisation of Aotearoa-New Zealand has set in place the objective conditions for a powerful alliance of non-elite Maori and Pakeha.

THE EBB AND FLOW of Maori-Pakeha relations: from guilt-ridden patronage to populist recrimination; is as old as the Waitangi Treaty. Economically driven, the relationship’s ups and downs are easily mapped against the booms and busts of colonial development. On the way up Pakeha dismissed indigenous objections as inimical to progress. On the way down Maori were criticised for competing directly (and thus illegitimately) for Pakeha resources, and their needs were given the lowest possible priority. Only when the threat of concerted Maori resistance became too real to ignore did the authorities, with much show of pious benevolence, deign to intervene.

Viewed from this perspective, the political equation determining Maori-Pakeha relations has, for most of the 172 years since 6 February 1840, been relentlessly zero-sum. While productive Maori resources remained to be transferred to Pakeha settler possession, New Zealand’s race relations remained tense and recriminatory. Few people gave much thought to how the Maori-Pakeha relationship might change if New Zealand’s developmental “fortress” economy was ever opened up to the rest of the world.

How would Pakeha fare if their country was to fall victim to a second great wave of colonisation? How would Pakeha react when they realised that, just like the Nineteenth Century Maori, their most prized possessions: farms, forests, public utilities and locally-owned industries; were being taken over by foreigners? What would happen to the Pakeha ruling elites when ordinary Kiwis finally twigged that, far from defending the nation’s “treasures”, their political masters were actively conniving in their alienation?

At that point, and with that realisation, the objective basis for an unbreakable alliance between non-elite Maori and Pakeha would spring into existence. Like the Maori of the 1850s and 60s who demanded that not one more acre of Maori land be sold to a settler regime that was clearly unwilling to uphold the promises of the Treaty, Maori and Pakeha could demand that not one more state-owned asset, not one more hectare of productive farmland, be sold to overseas investors. Especially when those investors were informing the political elites that any legal reference to the Treaty must constitute a serious disincentive to off-shore participation.

That the Treaty might act as an impediment to foreign direct investment in New Zealand assets was understood by the NZ Treasury from the very outset of the neoliberal “revolution” in the mid-1980s. Indeed, had it not been for the intervention of the Maori Council and the subsequent validation of its position by the New Zealand Court of Appeal, the complete alienation of New Zealand’s key assets would almost certainly have occurred.

The now familiar and broadly accepted characterisation of the Treaty relationship as a “partnership” between Maori and Pakeha is a crucial legacy of that historic legal contest. For the best part of two decades it has tranquilised the inherent conflict between the global neoliberal project and the Court’s partnership-based model of Maori-Pakeha relations. The nascent political alliance between the two peoples has been similarly retarded by the compromise enshrined in Section Nine of the State Owned Enterprises Act.

The substantive Treaty Settlements which Section Nine’s existence encouraged the Crown to negotiate may also be seen as devices to obscure and delay the formation of a political alliance between non-elite Maori and Pakeha. Indeed, by fostering the growth of tribal elites and supplying them with the resources necessary to co-opt their most trenchant critics the Treaty Settlement process has effectively demobilised a great deal of Maori activism. At the same time the multi-million dollar financial settlements have generated considerable Pakeha resentment towards “Treaty troughers” and the Iwi “gravy train”.

The Court of Appeal’s decision on the foreshore and seabed further exacerbated Pakeha resentments and set in motion the political processes that led to the formation of the Maori Party.

The National Party under Dr Don Brash came within an ace of fanning these resentments into an open rift between the Treaty partners and thereby igniting significant racial conflict. Under his successor, John Key, National abandoned this strategy of tension in favour of the much less inflammatory strategy of transforming the Maori Party into a mouthpiece for the aspirations of tribal elites.

The result is Hone Harawira’s Mana Party. For the first time in New Zealand history a political party has been formed which takes as its starting point the natural alliance of non-elite Maori and Pakeha.

As National sloughs off the ideological camouflage of its first term, and its second term’s neoliberal programme acquires a sharper focus, the consequences of a reactivated recolonisation of New Zealand are emerging with equal clarity.

The reaction to the Crafar Farms sale is only the beginning of a long and potentially bitter struggle to reclaim Aotearoa-New Zealand for its native sons and daughters: Tangata Whenua, the People of the Land, and Tangata Tiriti, the People of the Treaty.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 7 February 2012.