Spit & Polish: A National Party Story.

Consensus Politician: Following his victory in the 1960 general election, National’s second prime minister, Keith Holyoake, stretched himself out like a smug family cat over the sunny years of the early 1960s and purred.

THERE’S A STORY about the National Party that always struck me as important. It concerns National’s most successful leader, Keith Holyoake.

The year was 1938 and Holyoake was fighting to retain his Motueka seat. It was a particularly bitter campaign. After three years in office the Labour Party was seeking re-election on the strength of its impressive record of achievements and the promise of a radically expanded welfare state. National’s leader, Adam Hamilton, had described Labour’s legislation (due to come into force in April 1939) as “applied lunacy”. Labour’s Mickey Savage had responded by calling it “applied Christianity”. Everybody understood that an awful lot was at stake.

Even in the predominantly agricultural Motueka electorate, voters were keyed-up and anxious about the Election’s outcome.

Workers feared a return to the desperate conditions of the Great Depression’s worst years. The years when the main cities were convulsed by riots and unemployed men were sent to the hated “hunger camps” – where they toiled in remote locations to keep the Government’s meagre “dole” flowing to their families. So bitter was the social climate in those days, that a rumour claiming a right-wing MP had told the unemployed to “eat grass” was widely believed.

The idea of going back to those times inspired a dangerous mixture of panic and rage. When Holyoake turned up to an election meeting in Motueka he was greeted by an angry crowd of Labour supporters. Struggling to enter the hall he was showered with spittle.

Most people who are spat on generally emerge from the ordeal hating the spitters. It is to Holyoake’s eternal credit that he did not respond in this way. Instead, he pondered upon the intense fear and loathing that must have inspired it. He asked himself how bad things must have got; how much suffering people must have endured; to provoke such uncouth behaviour? Most importantly, he asked himself how the National Party could ever hope to be elected while people continued to believe that its members had once told desperate men and women to “eat grass”?

It took National many years to live down its association with the “Hungry 30s”. Indeed, it was not until National abandoned its plans to roll back Savage’s welfare state that the electorate was willing to vote it into office. Not that this concession signalled a softening of National’s intense hatred for the labour movement. Barely a year into its first three-year term, the National Government, led by Sid Holland (a former member of the proto-fascist New Zealand Legion) had plunged New Zealand into the “temporary tyranny” of the 1951 Emergency Regulations – promulgated to crush the staunchly left-wing Waterside Workers Union and its allies.

Through all this class conflict and Cold War paranoia, Holyoake held fast to his vision of a very different National Party. Conservative, yes, but not reactionary in the vicious tradition of Hamilton and Holland.

Recognising that a shift towards an accommodative conservatism was National’s only ticket to long-term survival, Holyoake’s caucus colleagues elected him to lead the party into the 1957 general election. National lost – but only very narrowly. By 1960 New Zealand was ready for Holyoake, and Holyoake was ready for New Zealand.

Thirteen years ago, I wrote: “Following his victory in the 1960 general election, National’s second prime minister, Keith Holyoake, stretched himself out like a smug family cat over the sunny years of the early 1960s and purred.”

Not that it was all plain sailing. There was a war to support (although not too strongly) in Vietnam, and a balance-of-payments crisis to be overcome. But, through it all “Kiwi Keith” remained the amusingly “plummy”, but always accessible, first minister of the “Half-Gallon, Quarter-Acre, Pavlova Paradise”.

Over the course of National’s twelve-years in office (yep, twelve!) the spat-upon man of 1938 oversaw New Zealand’s consolidation into a “property-owning democracy” of unparalleled prosperity and security.

As New Zealand’s most successful party, National is prone to forgetting how it became so, and what sort of leader is required to keep it so. For every Keith Holyoake, Jim Bolger and John Key, there’s a Sid Holland, Rob Muldoon and Jenny Shipley. For every leader who understands that a party calling itself “National” must govern “for every New Zealander”, there’s another drawn, irresistibly, to the sort of policies that make working-class voters want to spit on its candidates.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 27 November 2020.

Nobody Left Behind.

Solidarity Forever: All over the world, the arrival of the Covid-19 virus has exposed the fragility of the walls we erect around ourselves and our loved ones. It has shattered our illusions of autonomy and revealed to us how utterly dependent we all are on other human-beings. Finally, we see the state for what it truly is: the institutional expression of our interdependence; the place where everybody comes together – and nobody gets left behind.

ALL THOSE who criticised Finance Minister Grant Robertson for refusing to break his Budget Responsibility Rules owe him an apology. Steadfastly, for more than three years, Robertson has reiterated his conviction that maintaining surpluses; keeping Government debt levels low; and tightly managing public expenditure; was the only responsible course for an economy as vulnerable as New Zealand’s. His argument: the we needed to keep plenty of economic headroom in anticipation of that proverbial “rainy day”; has been vindicated. Just take a look out the window – it’s bucketing down!

Not that the Finance Minister is sticking to his Budget Responsibility Rules now. The emergency economic package announced on Tuesday afternoon makes it very clear that the Coalition Government will spend whatever it takes to keep the New Zealand economy afloat.

The $12.1 billion of emergency spending announced by the Finance Minister represents 4 percent of New Zealand’s GDP. This is a massive commitment. Proportionately, it is more than twice the size of the Australian Government’s response. Robertson told journalists that his package was inspired by the expansionary policies of the First Labour Government. Certainly, his decision to increase benefits by $25 per week and double the Winter Energy Subsidy for all welfare recipients and the elderly conforms absolutely to the generous spirit of Mickey Savage’s Labour Party.

Though politicians are notorious for not learning the lessons of history, on what, and more importantly, what not to do in response to a sudden economic shock, Robertson and his colleagues have proved themselves more than willing to take instruction.

In the wake of the 1929 Wall Street Crash, the advice tended to President Herbert Hoover by his Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew W. Mellon, was as brutal as it was blunt: “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate.” In other words, allow the ruthless surgeons of finance to exact the pounds of flesh now owed them by millions of  stricken Americans. Mellon and his fellow laissez-faire capitalists were convinced that encouraging the survival of the fittest, by sending the weak to the wall, was the President’s only rational course of action. The ideology of Social Darwinism, to which all the world’s ruling elites subscribed, demanded nothing less.

Mellon’s advice, as we now know, was wrong in every respect. It transformed a savage sharemarket correction, which was recoverable, into a devastating global depression that lasted more than a decade.

In fairness, the cause of the current economic shock cannot be attributed to Mellon’s neoliberal successors. The unfolding Covid-19 Pandemic is one of those exogenous events (like the asteroid strike that wiped out the dinosaurs) that defy all but the most inspired soothsayers. The species jump that precipitated this crisis cannot be laid at the door of any particular ruling elite.

Where human agency does come into view, however, is in the way responsible authorities’ respond to Mother Nature’s random interventions. For more than three decades, the promoters of the “free market” have been telling us that the state is an impediment to human welfare and prosperity; that “sovereign individuals” are far better placed to promote their personal welfare than politicians and bureaucrats. Well, they are not so vocal now. Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are precious few rugged individualists in pandemics. Indeed, it is nothing short of miraculous how rapidly the spread of a deadly infectious disease has reinvigorated sovereign individuals’ faith in collectivism!

All over the world, the arrival of the Covid-19 virus has exposed the fragility of the walls we erect around ourselves and our loved ones. It has shattered our illusions of autonomy and revealed to us how utterly dependent we all are on other human-beings to keep us fed, and watered, and well. For a great many of us that revelation has been both devastating and liberating. Finally, we can see the state for what it truly is: the institutional expression of our interdependence; the place where everybody comes together – and nobody gets left behind.

As the Federal Government intervened decisively in the financial crisis of 2008-09 to rescue the commanding heights of American capitalism, the cover of Newsweek summed up the new zeitgeist. Watching Grant Robertson unfurl our collective umbrella against the Covid-19 Pandemic’s rainy day, I couldn’t help recalling the words emblazoned on Newsweek’s front page:

“We are all socialists now.”

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 20 March 2020.

People Like Me

People Like Me: In the English-speaking world the Welfare State was born out of two vast historic events, the Great Depression and World War II. The sense of social solidarity engendered by these all-embracing experiences extended the definition of "community" to include everyone who had lived through them - right up to the British Royal Family.

 

IS IT POSSIBLE to renew our social contract without a sense of community?

 

Heather McGhee, who heads up the Washington Office of the UK-based research and advocacy group, Demos, calls it “the great question of our time”.

 

According to the 33-year-old graduate of Yale and the Berkeley Law School, this is because “if you look at all this hostility and anxiety around public solutions, at its root is the anxiety about who the public is. And I think that’s happened because of the real explosion in diversity.”

 

McGhee is not alone in identifying diversity as one of the most potent solvents of the social contract that underpins our Welfare State. But, as a young African-American, she has a better appreciation than most of how all those “hostilities and anxieties” play out in a non-academic context.

 

Because no matter how earnestly we are encouraged (by people like Ms McGhee) to think otherwise, the ordinary person’s understanding of “community” is generally reducible to just three words: “people like me”.

 

In the English-speaking countries the welfare state was born out of two world-shattering events: Economic Depression and Total War. In both situations it proved virtually impossible for ordinary citizens to remain unaffected by the great happenings in which they found themselves entangled, and these common experiences fostered powerful feelings of social solidarity. Everyone could see they were “all in this together” and relying upon one another to make it through to the “broad sunlit uplands” promised by Winston Churchill in the finest hour of that darkest of years – 1940.

 

So pervasive was the impact of the Great Depression that the experiences of poverty and marginalisation began to lose much of their social stigma. Working-class and middle-class citizens alike were winnowed by the near collapse of the capitalist order, and even those whose material well-being remained unaffected – like the Prince of Wales – could see that “something must be done”.

 

And later, when the bombs were falling, that sense of solidarity only grew stronger. In spite of pleas to remove themselves to safety in Canada, the Royal Family refused to leave the capital. When Buckingham Palace was hit during the Blitz, Queen Elizabeth told the press: “Now, at least, I can look the East End in the eye.”

 

On the battlefields, where men of every rank and station quite literally rubbed shoulders, the essential equality of all human-beings was daily demonstrated. The roughest working-class battler could prove himself a bloody hero and the bloodlines of a thousand years produce nothing more than a craven coward. Nobility came not from class or money but from character. In war, only deeds mattered.

 

This, then, was the historical forge in which the welfare state was fashioned. When people used the word ‘community’; when they thought of people like themselves; the picture included everyone from the King and Queen to the local “night-soil” collector. Everyone who had been through the fire together – and come out the other side.

 

To live for longer than that single generation, however, the social contract that had been fashioned in “blood, toil, tears and sweat” would need to be sent to the forge again. A new generation would need to feel the hammer blows of history.

 

Some did.

 

On union picket-lines. Registering voters in the Deep South. Opposing the obscenity of war. Demanding entry for all those who were not “like me”. Envisioning a more diverse and democratic definition of ‘community’.

 

A More Diverse Definition of Community: America answers Amerika. The Pentagon, 21 October 1967.

 

Too few.

 

The moment the social contract was deemed to include people with darker skins and different gods; the moment people’s taxes were doled out to those whose behaviour flouted the values and conventions of the ‘community’; that was when the solidarities born of depression and war began to fade and wither. The mental picture of who was – and was not – “people like me” narrowed radically. Class and money regained their lost prestige and all the old stigmas attached to poverty and marginalisation returned.

 

A social contract is never for “people like them”.

 

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 28 March 2014.