The Beneficiary Of Chaos: Television New Zealand’s current affairs flagship, Q+A, interviewed Stephen Jennings, the former Treasury official and New Zealand investment banker who took advantage of the collapse of the Soviet Union to make himself a billionaire.
IT WAS A LONG TIME AGO, the late-1970s, possibly, or the very
early 1980s. My father and I were watching one of the many current affairs
shows then broadcast by the state-owned television network. The guest was a
very young Alan Gibbs – at least that’s the way I remember it. If it wasn’t
him, then it was someone who looked and sounded very much like him.
It was an odd interview. Not in terms of the production
itself, but because in those days people espousing the views of businessmen
like Alan Gibbs were very few and far between. In New Zealand, at least, the
post-war Keynesian settlement still reigned supreme. Lassiez-faire capitalism was something students read about in
economic history textbooks. In the 1970s, most responsible intellectuals
dismissed unregulated capitalism as a ruthless and highly exploitative form of
economic management, long since discarded by civilised nations.
That’s what made the interview so memorable. The young
businessman (Gibbs?) withstood the interviewer’s rather condescending line of
questioning without flinching. Every aspect of the post-war settlement: the
welfare state; public ownership; compulsory unionism; import-licencing;
guaranteed prices; came under his withering critique. My father and I looked at
each other in alarm. We’d never heard anything like it. At the conclusion of
the interview, my father turned to me and said: “Men like that are dangerous,
son. If they ever gain a serious following in this country they will cause
tremendous harm.”
It was New Zealand’s first encounter with what we today call
“neoliberalism”. Within five years of that interview, however, Keynesianism was
on the defensive. Businessmen like Gibbs and his fellow asset strippers were
being lionised in the business press. Defenders of the status quo, like Rob
Muldoon, were being pilloried. The new economic order, guarded by Margaret
Thatcher in the UK, and Ronald Reagan in the USA, had made the world safe of
dangerous men. Here in New Zealand – just as my father had predicted – they
were all getting ready to inflict tremendous harm.
What made me think of this prophetic television encounter
from 40 years ago? Unsurprisingly, it was another current-affairs interview.
On Sunday’s Q+A
(17/7/16) Corin Dann interviewed Stephen Jennings, the former Treasury official
and New Zealand investment banker who took advantage of the collapse of the
Soviet Union to make himself a billionaire.
Jennings’ firm, Renaissance Capital, made five billion
dollars buying and selling the property of the Russian people. The new, laissez-faire economy Jennings and his
fellow oligarchs constructed on the ruins of the USSR proved to be more than
usually dangerous. Perhaps the most dramatic measure of the tremendous harm it
inflicted was that, as the Oligarchs and their kleptocrat political allies
imposed capitalism on their nation from above, the life expectancy of the
Russians actually fell.
Today, Jennings oversees a continent-wide property
development enterprise constructing massive suburbs on the outskirts of African
largest cities. As low-wage economies cascade out of Asia and into the last,
great, untapped pool of cheap labour on the planet, Jennings will be there to
ensure that their new, middle-class overseers have somewhere suitable to live.
Whether Africans prove to be as biddable as Russians remains
to be seen. All the signs point to the great wave of globalisation, out of
which Jennings extracted his super-profits, as having already broken. As it
recedes, the neoliberal doctrine, which for forty years has been used to
justify the globalisers’ moral and environmental excesses, is beginning to
sound increasingly hollow.
Not, of course, to the members of the NZ Initiative
(successor organisation to the NZ Business Roundtable) who were happy to
provide an audience for Jennings’ unreconstructed neoliberalism. Nor, indeed,
to Act’s David Seymour, in whose “Free Press” newsletter Jennings is lauded
like a rock-star. But to those of us who have heard enough neoliberal rhetoric over
the past 40 years to last several lifetimes, Jennings performance came across as
just one more iteration of a policy prescription that has succeeded only in
making the world a less equal, less habitable, and less free place in which to
live.
As Dann concluded his interview with Jennings, it occurred
to me that I had been witness to both the beginning and the end of an era.
Gibbs and Jennings are neoliberal proselytisers of formidable energy and
unwavering certainty. That much, at least, remains unchanged. The difference,
of course, is that in that first interview the ideas expressed had yet to be
tested in a modern context. In Jennings’s case that is obviously no longer
true. The world now knows what happens when capitalism is unbound. Its harm is
all around us.
My father knew, instinctively, that business leaders like
Gibbs and Jennings were dangerous men. Would that he had lived long enough to
see the self-serving character of their ideology made
obvious to everyone.
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog of
Monday, 18 July 2016.
