What Would It Take For Labour To Win?

New Leadership For A Rejuvenated Party: Flexible thinking and political courage are the qualities most needed by the New Zealand Left as it campaigns to restrict the National-Act-NZ First Coalition to a single term. For better or for worse, it is the New Zealand Labour Party that will determine whether the Left is successful, or unsuccessful, in its endeavours.

SURVEYING LABOUR’S savagely diminished caucus, only two MPs stand out as credible future leaders: Kieran McAnulty and Ginny Andersen. Before such a combination could accede to the leadership, however, both the Labour caucus and the Labour Party would have to undergo a profound reconfiguration.

For a start, the party membership and a clear majority of the caucus would need to have rejected neoliberalism as Labour’s economic lodestar. The malign legacy of Michael Cullen – for thirty years the party’s ruthless enforcer of neoliberal dogma – needs to be scrubbed off Labour’s escutcheon. Meaning, of course, that Grant Robertson’s legacy (such as it is) would also need to be cleared away. Robertson’s almost childlike dependence on Cullen (especially in the Sixth Labour Government’s first year) meant that new economic thinking had almost no chance of emerging under either Jacinda Ardern or Chris Hipkins.

In the absence of an ideological break-out on a par with the Fourth Labour Government’s adoption of neoliberalism between 1984-1990, there can be no solidity to the radical programme Labour will need if it is to restore its level of voter support to at least 35 percent of the Party Vote. If Labour’s economic and fiscal policies are not being decried as dangerous lunacy by the Coalition Government (as were the First Labour Government’s) then the party and the caucus are not doing their job. Something along the lines of the US Democratic Party Left’s “Green New Deal” and/or the British Labour Party’s “For the Many, Not the Few” 2017 manifesto, would constitute a useful starting-point.

Just getting that far, however, presupposes an extraordinary amount of intra-party conflict. A substantial chunk of the New Zealand Council would need to be replaced. A new and charismatic party president would need to be elected, and a new General Secretary appointed. Only once these bridgeheads were seized could the necessary reforms of Labour’s constitution be implemented. These would restore full control to the party membership over both the choice of the party leader and the formulation of party policy. (No more Captain’s Calls!)

The only possible source for the political heft required to make any of this happen is the Labour Party’s affiliated trade unions – backed-up by the Council of Trade Unions. Something in the form of a manifesto for organised labour, perhaps? A radical document, pointing the way towards reclaiming the Treasury Benches for ordinary working people in three years or less, might be a useful way of mobilising those elements in Labour feeling let down by the party’s parliamentarians. Such a manifesto might also serve as a back-stiffening device for caucus members not willing to wait the six-to-nine years before it could, again, be “Labour’s turn” at the crease.

Fortunately for those who see democratic government as something more than a glorified game of parliamentary beach cricket, the Coalition Government and its policies are certain to drive its victims decisively towards the Left. Even the likes of Hipkins and Carmel Sepuloni will have to at least feign anger and a determination to offer New Zealanders something better than vicious austerity for the poor, and special favours for the Right’s most generous donors. What Hipkins and Sepuloni are likely to discover, however, is that, having climbed on the back of the left-wing tiger, getting off it, uneaten, can be a little tricky.

Certainly, it will not take very long for Labour’s leadership deficit to be cruelly exposed by the surfeit of political leadership to Labour’s left. Against the dynamism and inspiration on display from both the Greens and Te Pāti Māori, Hipkins and Sepuloni will need to be selling the working class and rangatahi something just a little more appetising than bread and butter. It is, arguably, the only good reason for keeping Hipkins and Sepuloni in place: to give them the time necessary to demonstrate their utter incapacity to front the sort of rejuvenated Labour Party that will be required to win in 2026.

Limiting the Coalition’s tenure to “Three Years – And Not One Day More!” is a campaign in which all three of the left-wing parties could participate eagerly. Anticipating the three-party coalitions which now, and for New Zealand’s immediate electoral future, appear unavoidable, Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori could grow comfortable with each other, and gain confidence, by demonstrating their combined political effectiveness to a public growing increasingly impatient with the Right’s performance.

It is even possible to contemplate the three left-wing parties, the trade unions, and Māori organisations coming together in a national hui dedicated to explaining the shape and purpose of the “New Aotearoa” that must now – in the face of the Right’s reactionary agenda – be the core objective of all progressive New Zealanders. Such a gathering would be a wasted exercise, however, if it was not also the opportunity for an open-ended and free-wheeling debate concerning the constitutional shape of the New Aotearoa. If Te Tiriti o Waitangi is to lie at the heart of that new nation, then its defenders must be brave enough to let it face and answer Pakeha fears, even as it carries Māori hopes aloft.

Rather than making a free discussion, even a referendum, about the principles of the Treaty something to be avoided at all costs – up to and including threats of violence if it is allowed to go ahead – wouldn’t the needs of Māori, and the Left, be best served by embracing the process and making it their own? Why not go to the country in 2026 with plans for a full constitutional convention? Why not promote the election of 120 constitutional delegates to draft Aotearoa’s first written constitution – with Te Tiriti at its heart? Where could the Right go then?

The sixth century BC Chinese military strategist-cum-philosopher, Sun Tzu, wrote: “Thus, what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy’s strategy.” The Right has observed the unwillingness of Māori to engage in open debate about Te Tiriti, its principles, and the co-governance it more-or-less mandates, and they have made that unwillingness their strategic target. The harder Māori resist the call for a full debate on the Treaty, the harder the Right will push for that debate to be forced upon them. Their goal is to keep Māori on the defensive. Sun Tzu would say: “Stop doing what your enemy wants you to do. Do what he does not expect, and has not prepared for – embrace the debate, and win it.”

Flexible thinking and political courage are the qualities most needed by the New Zealand Left as it campaigns to restrict the National-Act-NZ First Coalition to a single term. For better or for worse, it is the New Zealand Labour Party that will determine whether the Left is successful, or unsuccessful, in its endeavours.

Paradoxically, the battle against the right-wing coalition can only be fought with any prospect of success after the battle against the right of the Labour Party has been successfully concluded. If Labour is not committed to progressive change, then it will not happen. But, against a united and progressive Labour Party: a Labour Party backed by its allies on the Left, the trade unions, and the rangatahi of Aotearoa; no combination of the Right has ever, or will ever, prevail.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project website on Monday, 18 December 2023.

Hollow Laughter, Mixed With Tears.

Guarding The Stable Door: In the absence of the hard evidence only an actual terrorist atrocity can supply, the ability of New Zealand’s national security apparatus to pre-empt such attacks is legally and politically compromised. Indeed, even in the aftermath of an all-too-real terrorist massacre, the judicial and bureaucratic machinery of the state proved criminally inadequate to the task of keeping New Zealanders safe.

They all laughed at Christopher Columbus

When he said the world was round
They all laughed when Edison recorded sound.

“They All Laughed”, Ira and George Gershwin, 1937


THERE IS absolutely no humour in the tragic sequence of events that unfolded in the New Lynn mall on Friday. Perhaps the only positive aspect of this latest terrorist attack is that, to date, the only fatality has been the terrorist himself. There was plenty of heroism in the bloody aisles of that Countdown supermarket, however, and plenty of cool professionalism also. On a shaky cellphone video, now viewed by millions, the clearly audible sequence of rapid-fire pistol shots indicated an officer determined to bring the Isis-inspired, knife-wielding perpetrator’s stabbing-spree to a halt.

Why quote the Gershwin brothers, then? What is there to laugh at?

The black humour of this situation derives not from the terrorist attack, but from a review of the way elements of the New Zealand Left have, by turns, scoffed at the very idea that terrorism might constitute a genuine threat to this country’s national security; castigated the national security apparatus for failing to prevent the atrocity of 15 March 2019; and then, reversing direction once again, cautioned against an excessively draconian response to the events of the past few days.

One of the reasons the New Lynn terrorist, Ahamed Aathill Mohamed Samsudeen, was not safely incarcerated on Friday afternoon, is because, as the judge overseeing an earlier trial pointed out, securing a conviction on a charge of planning and/or preparing to carry out a terrorist attack in New Zealand is just too difficult. Only when an act of terrorism has been committed does the law have anything useful to contribute. The judge’s speculation that this weakness in New Zealand’s anti-terrorist legislation might turn out to be its “Achilles Heel” has been dramatically vindicated.

Why nobody spotted this deficiency in the Terrorist Suppression Act 2002, which was passed by the New Zealand Parliament in response to the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, remains a mystery. It is, after all, rather difficult to imagine how terrorism might be suppressed if, when preparations for launching a terrorist attack are detected, the loose wording of the Act effectively prevents the authorities from intervening until after the event had taken place. They would have been better advised to entitle the legislation the “Shutting the Stable Door Act”.

It took the curious case of the alleged Urewera military training camps to fully expose the inadequacies of the Terrorism Suppression Act. As things turned out it proved to be next-to-useless in dealing with activities suggestive of a terrorist campaign in its preparatory stages. Alerted to the existence of armed groups engaging in military-style training exercises in the Urewera mountains, the Police mounted an extensive surveillance operation culminating in the arrest of 17 individuals in October 2007.

There were many reasons why the Police’s “Operation Eight” failed. The inadequacy of the Terrorism Suppression Act was one of them; the excessively intimidatory raid on the little town of Ruatoki another. Critical to the whole exercise’s failure, however, was the extraordinarily successful campaign waged on behalf of the defendants by the Far Left.

At the heart of this campaign was the carefully cultivated perception that the whole exercise was farcical – a bit of a joke. New Zealand just wasn’t the sort of place where terrorism was seriously contemplated. The Police had grossly overreacted to what was no more than a bit of harmless play-acting. The only people terrified by Operation Eight were the traumatised Māori residents of Ruatoki. Those in serious search of terrorism need look no further than the racist and colonialist depredations of the New Zealand state.

They all laughed at Police Commissioner Howard Broad and his damned-if-he-did, damned-if-he-didn’t, predicament. The nation’s politicians, however, were quick to draw the obvious lessons.

What the Urewera debacle made clear was that not only will intervention before the fact of a terrorist attack expose the national security apparatus – and its political masters – to the ruthless excoriation of the Far Left, but also, crucially, to serious criticism from the news media. As the Far left critics of “Operation Eight” proved, pre-emptive policing is all-too-easily presented as the action of a “police state” over-eager to put its new-found powers to the test.

Small wonder, then, that both major parties became extremely wary of displaying too much interest in correcting the all-too-obvious defects in the Terrorism Suppression Act.

How differently New Zealanders might have responded to “Operation Eight’s” videos of armed individuals moving stealthily through the Urewera bush if they had been recorded subsequent to the terrible events of 15 March 2019. By then, of course, the notion that domestic terrorism was a bit of a joke had been tragically and decisively dispelled. Fortunately for the Left, those twelve-year-old Urewera images had been largely forgotten – along with the Far Left’s insistence that they conveyed nothing sinister.

Harmless Play-Acting? “Operation Eight” surveillance footage of military-style training exercise in the Ureweras, 2007.

Indeed, within days of the Christchurch Mosque Massacre, the Far Left’s position had changed dramatically. Not only was the threat of terrorism dangerously real, but it was also latent in a colonialist Pakeha population fatally tainted with both the legacy and the actuality of “white supremacy”. The cry from the Far Left, now, was not that the national security apparatus was too heavy handed, but that it was not heavy-handed enough. Why had the SIS not subjected the Alt-Right and militant ethno-nationalist groups to the same oppressive surveillance it reserved for Muslims?

The Māori Party demanded to know why the Police and the SIS weren’t working together to root out the white supremacist threat. Radical leftists called for the curtailment of “hate speech” – especially against New Zealand’s Muslim population. The Labour Government promised to oblige.

Which was odd. Because long before Brenton Tarrant unleashed terror in Christchurch, Ahamed Aathill Mohamed Samsudeen had been giving the government of Jacinda Ardern nightmares. Ever since 2016, three years before Tarrant’s attack, New Zealand’s national security apparatus had been grappling with the clear and present danger of a dangerously radicalised Islamist who made no secret of his support for and admiration of the actions of the murderous Islamic State. If Tarrant slipped past the SIS, GCSB and Police Intelligence watchers, it was for the very good reason that they had another predator in their sights. What’s more, they could not be absolutely sure that Samsudeen was the only Isis-inspired “lone wolf” in the forest.

George and Ira Gershwin’s 1937 hit, “They All laughed”, concludes with the lines:

Hee, hee, hee!
Let’s at the past laugh
Ha, ha, ha!
Who’s got the last laugh now?

Faced with the Far Left’s cynical gyrations on the subject of terrorism, and whether or not it poses a threat to ordinary New Zealanders (like Muslim New Zealanders at Friday prayers, or the seven unsuspecting Kiwis stabbed in the aisles of their local supermarket as they innocently shopped for groceries on a Friday afternoon) the answer to the question “Who’s got the last laugh, now?” offers a variety of answers.

First and foremost, the last laugh belongs to those who, fourteen years ago, attempted to protect the New Zealand public from terrorism, only to discover that, in the absence of the evidence only an actual terrorist atrocity can supply, the ability of the national security apparatus to pre-empt such horror is legally and politically compromised. Indeed, even in the aftermath of an all-too-real terrorist attack, the judicial and bureaucratic machinery of the state proved criminally inadequate to the task of keeping New Zealanders safe.

Also entitled to a final, grim chuckle, are those stalwarts of the Old Left who never wavered in their conviction that the infliction of violence for political purposes must never be treated as a purely tactical issue. The Far Left’s argument that: in one context, training with weapons in the bush can be forgiven as harmless play-acting; but, in another, treated as evidence of the criminal plans and preparations of murderous white supremacist terrorists; must be rejected as ideologically-driven moral relativism of the worst kind.

Finally, a rough grunt of vindication is due to all those who have argued consistently that no matter what the location: Central Christchurch or West Auckland; the paying of History’s debts with innocent blood is always and everywhere a crime.

But, when these principled New Zealanders laugh at the Far Left’s tawdry equivocations on who is, and who isn’t, a terrorist; that laughter will not be light or mirthful. It will be hollow, filled with rage, and mixed with tears.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 7 September 2021.

The Third Referendum.

Let's Do This Again: What else can Jacinda do in a political environment so bereft of imagination and courage but seek a continuance? If she trades upon the extraordinary personal qualities that she has, miraculously, carried with her into the office of Prime Minister, then I, for one, will offer no criticism. In the absence of the great collectivities upon which the historic Left relied to enrich the poor and make the weak strong, progressive New Zealanders are left with an intelligent, kind, brave, and very competent young woman.

JACINDA ARDERN’S STRATEGY for this election is now clear. She will be inviting New Zealanders to vote in three referendums. The referendum on Cannabis. The referendum on Euthanasia. And the referendum on her government’s handling of the Covid-19 Pandemic. Otherwise known as the General Election, this third referendum will be presented as an opportunity to endorse the course Jacinda has set for the country. While a reasonable amount of doubt surrounds the outcome of the first and second referendums, the outcome of the third is regarded as a “dead cert” by most voters. “Captain Jacinda” and her Labour crew will be urged to “stay the course” and sail the good ship New Zealand safely home.

 Many on the Left, caught up in the excitement of a prospective electoral victory so emphatic that Labour may be in a position to govern alone, are imploring the party to seize the time and enact the most comprehensive reform of New Zealand institutions since 1984. All the things the Left was hoping for: the “transformation” promised by Jacinda but countermanded by Winston Peters; will become possible in a House of Representatives dominated by Labour and the Greens.

 Really? How much is the New Zealand Left (as it used to be understood) willing to bet? Which of those institutions that, historically, have been thought of as “progressive” (left-wing political parties, the trade unions, universities, the teaching profession, tertiary student bodies and the arts community) will step up to insist that Jacinda and her ministry enact a genuinely transformative programme? Let’s examine each of these collectivities in turn.

 It is a sad – but entirely fair – question: Do any left-wing parties still exist in New Zealand? Over the course of the past thirty years, the number of political organisations dedicated to the full emancipation of working people and their families and committed to an unequivocally internationalist and anti-imperialist foreign policy, has shrunk uncomfortably close to zero.

 In the 1990 general election, two such parties – the NewLabour Party and the Greens – between them accounted for a very respectable 12 percent of the popular vote (219,086 votes). Three years later, those same two parties, now united in the Alliance, won 18.21 percent support (350,063 votes) and two parliamentary seats. (A remarkable feat under the then prevailing First-Past-the-Post electoral system!)

 By 1990, Labour, which had once been included among the parties of the New Zealand Left, could no longer be accounted such. Following the policy “revolution” unleashed by David Lange and Roger Douglas, the party had shrunk very rapidly to the point where it could no longer be considered a mass party. The split which gave rise to NewLabour in 1989 left it smaller still.

 Perhaps the best that can be said of Labour in the years following 1984 is that it remained relatively progressive on social issues. On the all-important issues of working-class emancipation, redistributive economic justice and anti-imperialism, however, it had shifted decisively to the right – and remains there.

 The secret of Labour’s survival as a viable political party, and the reason why so many New Zealanders still think of it as “left-wing”, is due to it being the party people vote for to keep the much more recognisably right-wing National Party out of government. It is this core electoral function which gives it so much political gravity. Inevitably, all its smaller rivals become either orbiting moons (the Greens) or are spun off into the inter-stellar darkness (New Labour).

 In other words, Labour, like National, is defined almost entirely by what it is not. The moment either party abandons this essentially negative function – as Labour did between 1972 and 1975, and National did between 1990 and 1993 – they are instantly perceived as threats. Those deemed responsible for turning their parties “rogue” are either removed or tamed. New Zealand democracy, in its essence, is about the voting public enforcing political restraint. Politics as a process of driving radical economic and social change is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

 All those other “progressive” institutions – unions, universities, students associations, the arts – drew their social and economic power from the radical changes ushered in by the first and second Labour governments. For fifty years these bastions of progressivism acted as the guarantors of the social-democratic reforms that gave rise to the Welfare State. It was precisely because they served as social-democracy’s bodyguards that the instigators of the neoliberal counter-revolution of the 1980s and 90s, like so many Mafia hit-men, made it their business to take them out of the picture.

 What are the unions of today? Fighters for the rights and living-standards of their members? Hardly! Today’s union is a structure filled with well-remunerated officials holding convivial negotiations with the bosses whilst perched on the backs of workers who have never been so carelessly exploited – nor so indifferently defended.

 And the universities? Do they still act as havens for inquiring minds? Are they the fiercely independent guardians and disseminators of their civilisation’s canonical truths? Not really. Today’s university is a white-anted corporate ruin which is only prevented for collapsing into post-modern sawdust by all the neoliberal termites holding hands. Students are paying customers – nothing more.

 And the Artists? What have they become? Idiots telling tales only the rich can afford to listen to, and from which the state’s cultural commissars have extracted every last drop of power and pity. In the immortal words of the Kiwi poet A. R. D. Fairburn: “The mushroom grows in the open ground; the toadstool under a tree.”

 What else can Jacinda do in a political environment so bereft of imagination and courage but seek a continuance? If she trades upon the extraordinary personal qualities that she has, miraculously, carried with her into the office of Prime Minister, then I, for one, will offer no criticism. In the absence of the great collectivities upon which the historic Left relied to enrich the poor and make the weak strong, progressive New Zealanders are left with an intelligent, kind, brave, and very competent young woman.

 To the question posed in the Third Referendum: Should Jacinda stay at the helm of our ship of state – yes or no? I’ll be standing on my desk and shouting: “Oh captain, my captain, yes, stay!”

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 4 August 2020.

How The New Zealand Left Transformed Southern And Molyneux From Unknown Rightists Into Free Speech Heroes.

From Right-Wing Moles To Free Speech Mountains: Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux were confident that all they needed to do to spread their ideas in New Zealand was announce their intention of staging an event. The Left could be relied upon to do the rest.

WHAT A PITY there is no “Politburo” of the New Zealand Left. A central committee of knowledgeable and experienced left-wing strategists and organisers who could make decisions on behalf of the wider progressive movement. Had such a body existed when the news of the impending visit of Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux broke, then what happened next would have been very different.

The Politburo would have perused the available information on the Canadian duo and very quickly realised that the best course of action for the New Zealand Left was to do absolutely nothing. No media releases. No posters. No protests. Certainly no threats to disrupt the speakers’ public meetings. In response to Southern and Molyneux, the New Zealand Left would do precisely zero, zip, nada, nothing.

Why? Because even a cursory glance at Southern’s and Molyneux’s modus operandi would have alerted the Politburo to the fact that protests and threats of disruption were absolutely indispensable to the success of the pair’s political touring. 

Without the threats of disruption from Peace Action Auckland, the Auckland Council would have had no grounds for denying Southern and Molyneux access to the Bruce Mason Theatre in Takapuna (along with every other council venue in Auckland!) on health and safety grounds. The meeting would have taken place and, if the Canadians were lucky, they might have merited a few brief paragraphs in the NZ Herald. Most Kiwis would have remained blissfully unaware that Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux even existed.

If provocateurs fail to provoke, do they make any sound at all?

We’ll never know. Because, of course, the New Zealand Left does not have a Politburo to provide it with sagacious strategic advice. It is a wild, anarchic melange of individuals and groups, united only by the fierce conviction that all those who challenge the phantasmagoria of sectional sensitivities which constitute the contemporary “progressive” movement must ipso facto be fascists whose every public utterance, being “hate speech”, must be suppressed – by any means necessary.

Knowing this, Southern and Molyneux would have been confident that all they needed to do to spread their ideas in New Zealand was announce their intention to hold a meeting. The Left could be relied upon to do the rest.

That the Canadians’ first infusion of power came from the Mayor of New Zealand’s largest city must, however, have struck them as more than usually fortuitous. Phil Goff’s naked assertion of the right to determine what the citizens of Auckland could and could not hear was bound to rouse the defenders of free expression to action. Better and better! Southern and Molyneux could now count on tens-of-thousands of New Zealanders googling their names and watching their YouTube channels.

The next step was to begin the game of “will they or won’t they be able to secure a private venue?”. With social media crackling with ideological thrust and counter-thrust and “anti-fascist” coalitions being announced, the next phase of the propaganda operation was ready to unfold.

It was a phase Southern and Molyneux could hardly lose. Either the secured venue would stand firm against the inevitable threats and the meeting would go ahead. Or, the venue’s owners would be subjected to such intolerable pressure that the meeting was cancelled. If the former eventuated, then it would inevitably attract hundreds, if not thousands, of screaming left-wing protesters. If it was cancelled, the Canadians could present themselves as the victims of left-wing intimidation. Either way, the mainstream news media would feel obligated to step into the story.

Which, with the Powerstation’s decision to first hire out, and then deny, its facilities to the duo, is exactly what happened.

Had the proposed meeting at the Bruce Mason Theatre gone ahead without incident, Southern and Molyneux would have been able to preach to, at most, 800 already converted enthusiasts. As they wing their way back to Canada, however, they will be congratulating themselves on being presented to the tens-of-thousands of Kiwis watching the television current affairs programme “Sunday” in prime-time.

Many socially-conservative New Zealanders, seeing the Canadians for the first time, will doubtless have wondered how anyone could be offended by two such telegenic and articulate individuals. The stridency of their opponents, by contrast, must have appeared strange – even slightly sinister.

Had it ever been the intention of the Left and its kindred souls in the Human Rights Commission to extend and strengthen New Zealand’s laws against “hate speech”, then its fruitless attempts to suppress the views of Southern and Molyneux can only have rendered such an exercise significantly more difficult.

The debate stirred up by the repeated denial of both public and private stages to the pair on account of threats and intimidation has placed the issue of free speech squarely on New Zealand’s political agenda. The Left will find it much harder, now, to sell its arguments in favour of limiting New Zealanders right to free expression that would have been the case if Southern and Molyneux had simply been allowed to come and go without incident.

The Powerstation, Auckland, graffitied.

The person who sprayed graffiti on the Powerstation’s walls over the weekend described Southern’s and Molyneux’s foray into New Zealand politics as the “FREE SPEECH - EULOGY TOUR”. Given that eulogies are only pronounced over the dead, the graffitist is clearly someone who believes the Left has either already killed free speech, or is intending to do so in the near future.

He, or she, is wrong on both counts.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 7 August 2018.

The Number Of The Beast: The New Zealand Left's Abiding Obsession With John Key.

The Left's Burdensome Beast: The New Zealand Left’s animosity towards John Key is curiously reminiscent of the early Christian Church’s animosity towards the Roman Emperor, Nero. Both leaders found themselves assailed by a self-righteous minority whose lurid accusations repeatedly failed to stick. To date, not even the notorious "Panama Papers" have yielded sufficient ammunition for the New Zealand Left to bring down its beastly nemesis.

 

BRINGING DOWN JOHN KEY has become an abiding obsession of the New Zealand Left. As if all of New Zealand’s problems have their origins in the actions of a single individual. As if the Prime Minister hasn’t been shaped by the people he governs every bit as much as they have been shaped by him. As if Key’s uncanny ability to extricate himself from scandal after scandal hasn’t been made possible by the electorate’s willingness to look the other way while he does it.

 

All of which suggests that the Left’s obsession with bringing down Key isn’t about the National Party Leader at all, but about its own inability to attract and hold the same level of popular support that keeps him in power. All of which raises the possibility that the Left’s real problem isn’t with Key at all – but with the democratic process itself.

 

Over the past fortnight, for example, the Left has been outraged by revelations contained in the so-called “Panama Papers”. These have been seized upon as conclusive proof of John Key’s determination to transform New Zealand into a tax haven.

 

That the New Zealand-related documents contained in the Panama Papers might be interpreted as the legal firm at the centre of the controversy, Mossack Fonseca’s,  back-handed tribute to this country’s reputation for honesty and fair-dealing does not appear to have occurred to the implacable prosecutors of the Left.

 

Similarly failing to register with them is the indisputable fact that the formation of trusts (both foreign and domestic) is a perfectly legal activity engaged in not only by dubious South American businessmen, but also by thousands of ordinary New Zealand families. The purposes of these legal instruments is much the same in both instances: to shield the assets of their beneficiaries from the fiscal and/or administrative exactions of the state.

 

That is why John Key is not about to get on his high moral horse about trusts. Not when to do so would put him offside with tens-of-thousands of his most loyal supporters!

 

The Left constantly fails to register the brute realities of living in a society driven by the neoliberal imperatives of twenty-first century capitalism. In a world where the interests of the successful individual trump everybody else’s, avoiding and/or evading tax has become an industry in its own right.

 

Whether these sovereign individuals are the heirs to old family fortunes, or the lumpenproletarian leaders of methamphetamine-distributing street gangs, makes little difference. Large piles of cash must first be sanitised, and then they must be protected. If the Panama Papers prove nothing else, it’s that law firms dedicated to providing such services are not confined to the pages of John Grisham novels!

 

It takes a touching degree of innocence, not to say naiveté, to assume that the whole nation will rise up as one against the spectacle of extremely wealthy individuals and families setting up trusts in foreign lands to avoid paying tax at home. The Left clearly does not grasp the huge number of people who, aspiring to become extremely wealthy individuals themselves, observe the depredations of the One Percent with feelings more akin to admiration than disgust.

 

The New Zealand Left’s animosity towards John Key is, thus, curiously reminiscent of the early Christian Church’s animosity towards the Roman Emperor, Nero. In both cases we are presented with a minority utterly convinced of its moral righteousness, and absolutely unwilling to compromise its principles. Unsurprisingly, such stiff-necked insistence on their own rectitude, asserted aggressively in the midst of an avaricious and morally undemanding society, not only got these groups offside with their neighbours, but also with the authorities. Finding themselves under political pressure, it is hard to blame either Nero, or John Key, for making scapegoats of their unpopular critics.

 

Not that John Key has gone so far as to transform his left-wing opponents into human torches! Like Nero, however, he has boosted his own popularity at their expense – and they hate him for it.

 

The Early Christians worked Nero’s name into their identification of the Beast of the Book of Revelation: “Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.”

 

The New Zealand Left is equally obsessed with numbers – even if, in the case of John Key, they are the numbers hidden in the spreadsheets of the Panama Papers.

 

This essay was posted on The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road on Tuesday, 10 May 2016.