Takes One To Know One, Simon: Simon Wilson's denigration of "old lefties" struck some as odd - coming as it did from a former member of the Workers Communist League! His present political orientation, however, is relatively clear. As he wrote for The Spinoff: “[O]ne way or another, everything benefits the agents of capitalism. If you’re a progressive, or a social democrat, or a socialist, you have to suck that up.”
“LABOUR – WTF?” The question said it all. And the packed-out
restaurant confirmed its aptness. Laila Harré has good instincts for the mood
of the Auckland Left, and “WTF?” sums up its assessment of the current state of
the Labour Party with earthy directness.
Less adroit, perhaps, was her decision to allow The Spinoff
to co-sponsor the event. It’s hard to reconcile the Ika Seafood Bar and Grill’s
skilful courting of Auckland’s progressives with The Spinoff’s vicious attack
on one of the Left’s most respected representatives – Mike Lee. That the attack
on Lee could so easily have resulted in (and was quite probably intended to
secure) Bill Ralston’s election to the Auckland Council merely confirmed The
Spinoff’s political incorrectness.
That the choice of Simon Wilson as host of the evening’s
panel discussion’s proved equally unsuitable was not something for which the
Ika team could be blamed. Wilson made himself so by persuading The Spinoff to
post his “Look, there goes the Labour Party – sliding towards oblivion” on the
same day as the Table-Talk event.
It is a very curious piece of writing. Provocative title
aside, Wilson’s posting is mostly an attempt to isolate and ridicule left-wing
critics of his beloved Unitary Plan. Though no names are mentioned, it is clear
that the sort of people Wilson has in mind when he castigates these “old
lefties”, are people like Mike Lee.
“Their dispute wasn’t really defined by age,” writes Wilson,
“but it was about modernising the progressive cause. The old argument is that
when you relax the rules around building and allow more density, you create
conditions for ugly apartment blocks and slums that ruin the quality of life
for everyone who has to live in or near them. There might be more homes but the
big winners are the developers who make a killing.
“That sounds grand, principled, insightful and historically
sound. It’s been true in the past, even the quite recent past. In fact, in
relation to the UP, it’s sentimental nonsense.”
But is it? Auckland’s history offers very little
justification for believing that market-led intensification will produce
anything other than “ugly apartment blocks” and “developers who make a
killing.” More importantly, Wilson offers nothing in the way of evidence that
the Unitary Plan, as approved, will ensure that Auckland’s future does not
resemble its past.
What he does do, however, is set up a straw man. He implies
that Mike Lee and his allies do not understand that “a compact city, with good
quality affordable homes clustered densely around a comprehensive and efficient
public transport system, is essential for any fast-growing city that wants to
offer a decent quality of life to all its citizens.”
This is laughable. One of the reasons the tight little
clique of lawyers, land-bankers, property developers, and roading contractors
that has run Auckland for the past 150 years was so keen to get rid of Mike Lee
was because, as Chairman of the Auckland Regional Council, he refused to extend
Greater Auckland’s boundaries. Lee was arguing for a more compact city when
Wilson was still collecting recipes for Cuisine
magazine. His constant and highly successful advocacy for “a comprehensive and
efficient public transportation system” – especially rail – also put Lee
offside with Auckland’s powerful roading lobby.
Not so laughable is the fact that Wilson knows full well
that Lee is but the latest in a long-line of left-wing politicians and planners
who have fought for an Auckland capable of offering “a decent quality of life
to all its citizens”.
In between his stints at Cuisine
and Metro, Wilson was a jobbing
editor for the Random House publishing group. One of the books he edited was my
own No Left Turn, which included a
chapter entitled “The Auckland That Never Was”. All of the elements making up
what Wilson rather grandly calls “New Urbanism” feature in the plans for
Auckland’s future development that were prepared for the First Labour
Government by the Housing Division of the Ministry of Works back in the 1940s!
That those extraordinarily progressive plans remained unfulfilled may be
sheeted home to the same private sector interests who made their fortunes by
turning Auckland into a cheap copy of Los Angeles, and who now propose to make
themselves even richer by turning Auckland into a cheap copy of Singapore.
How someone in possession of this knowledge could,
nevertheless, attempt to paint Mike Lee as someone guilty of failing “a bedrock
test” for progressive urban planning, is utterly beyond me. But, then, I found
it no less puzzling that the same man who could write: “one way or another,
everything benefits the agents of capitalism. If you’re a progressive, or a
social democrat, or a socialist, you have to suck that up”, was, somehow, able
to begin last Wednesday’s (19/10/16) Table Talk discussion by quoting the late
Helen Kelly’s emphatically anti-capitalist vision of the Labour Party.
Obviously, Wilson’s definition of “progressive”, “social
democrat” and “socialist” is somewhat different from my own.
The rest of the evening was full of depressingly similar
contradictions.
Only a very few minutes had expired before the Labour Party
President, Nigel Haworth, took on the expression of a man who wished he'd stayed at home. Keeping out of the public eye has been
something of a fetish for Haworth, whose principal motivation in taking on
Labour’s presidency appears to have been quieting down the party’s frequently restive rank-and-file. Having to admit that,
had he been in Britain, he would not have voted for Jeremy Corbyn, was almost
certainly something he would have preferred to keep under his hat.
Deborah Russell, Labour’s candidate for the Rangitikei
electorate in 2014, told us she would have voted for Corbyn. That becoming a
Corbynista would have put her offside with a fair swag of her putative caucus
colleagues did not appear to have occurred to her. Which says a lot about her
understanding of the party she defended with such enthusiasm throughout the
night.
Chloe Swarbrick’s reputation for straight-talking was in no
way diminished by her participation in the Table Talk panel. When asked what it
would take to make her join the Labour Party, her quick-fire response, “an
invitation”, raised eyebrows and hopes in almost equal measure.
Head-and-shoulders the most acute political thinker on the
stage last Wednesday night was, however, Andrew Campbell. Formerly the Green
Party leaders’ chief-of-staff, and now – impressively – communications director
for the NZ Rugby Union, Campbell’s insights into the workings of contemporary
New Zealand politics were refreshingly candid. That, in his estimation,
“politics is a PR game” might be a bit depressing for “old lefties” like me,
but only a fool would argue that, in New Zealand, in 2016, our politics is very
much of anything else.
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Tuesday, 25 October 2016.
