An Extraordinary Promise.

An Offer Maori Could Not Refuse: It is hard to imagine a better way of demonstrating the injustice that lies at the heart of our nation’s story. The first time the Māori refused to sell their land to the Pakeha, the Pakeha imported 12,000 imperial troops from Great Britain and confiscated vast tracts of it. Then, having overcome all serious indigenous opposition, successive settler governments passed laws encouraging the Pakeha to take what little productive Māori land was left. Image by Dave Tipper.

THE GREENS MANIFESTO, released on Sunday (9/7/23) contains an extraordinary promise. If it finds itself in a position to do so, the Green Party will “explore” the return of land “wrongfully alienated from the tangata whenua”. To be clear, the Greens are not referring to Crown land. The process envisaged involves giving Māori “a right of first refusal”, enabling “the return of private land to iwi, hapū and whānau at point of sale”.

To describe this policy as “challenging” does it a disservice. On its face, the Greens’ policy is nothing short of revolutionary. Slowly, but surely, Māori could reclaim the lands that were, by war or legal chicanery, taken from them. The processes of colonisation, to which the extinguishing of native title has always been fundamental, would be thrown into reverse.

“But, they can’t do that! All Hell would break loose!” Certainly, that would be the cry. But how loud would it be, really?

After all, the process described has for many years constituted an important aspect of the Treaty Settlement Process. The right of first refusal to land which the Crown no longer wished to own was granted to Ngai Tahu in 1998.

“But, granting first refusal to iwi, hapū and whānau in relation to Crown land is quite different from encouraging them to exercise the same right in relation to private land”, the critics would object. “To give Māori such a right would fundamentally derange our entire system. Individuals and companies must be free to sell their property to whomsoever they please – otherwise the free market economy falls apart.”

Putting to one side the legal nicety that the Crown is deemed to own every hectare of New Zealand already, and that those who purchase real estate generally hold it “in fee simple” from the King. (And you thought feudalism was dead!) What the Greens are proposing is simply that Māori be given the first opportunity to meet the vendor’s price – not that they be given the power to set it! The market will continue to work – at least in the short term. Over time, however, more and more land would, indeed, revert to Māori ownership.

Apart from it being an affront to their colonial amor propre, what respectable reason could Pakeha have for caring who ends up buying what they have chosen to sell? When Kiwis flick on their homes, the identity of the purchaser doesn’t usually signify. What matters is that the transaction goes smoothly, and that the agreed purchase-price ends up in the vendor’s bank account. If iwi corporations were to become major players in the buying and selling of New Zealand real estate who, apart from inveterate racists, would really care?

Certainly not the generations of New Zealanders born after 1965. For more and more of the generations at the end of the alphabet, buying and selling property has become a pipe dream. Some of them might even welcome the steady transfer of real estate from Pakeha to Māori: arguing (with some justification) that large iwi corporations could hardly be worse landlords than the grasping rack-renters who lord it over them now.

No, if the Green’s policy is going to cause trouble, then it will be in the long, not the short, term. Think about it. Once iwi, hapū and whānau have finally reclaimed their lost whenua, how likely is it that they will allow it slip through their fingers a second time? Which can only mean that a time will come when most of New Zealand is in the hands of iwi, hapū and whānau ill-disposed to selling their whenua, their taonga, to any but their own.

Which is why this Green policy comes under the rubric of “Te Tiriti”. It is hard to imagine a better way of demonstrating the injustice that lies at the heart of our nation’s story. The first time the Māori refused to sell their land to the Pakeha, the Pakeha imported 12,000 imperial troops from Great Britain and confiscated vast tracts of it. Then, having overcome all serious indigenous opposition, successive settler governments passed laws encouraging the Pakeha to take what little productive Māori land was left.

By re-creating the disposition of New Zealand real estate at the time of the Treaty’s signing, the Greens’ policy would right these wrongs.

Aotearoa was Māori land – it could be again.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 14 July 2023.

Blowing Off The Froth: Why Chris Hipkins Must Ditch Three Waters.

Time To Call A Halt: Chris Hipkins knows that iwi leaders possess the means to make life very difficult for his government. Notwithstanding their objections, however, the Prime Minister’s direction of travel – already clearly signalled by his very public demotion of Nanaia Mahuta – must be confirmed by an emphatic and unequivocal pledge to repeal the Three Waters legislation and start again.

THERE’S FROTH, AND THERE’S BEER. What we see happening on the Waitangi Treaty Grounds every 6 February, not to mention the political performance-art on the lower marae, is froth. The beer of Māori-Pakeha relations is to be found in the private meeting rooms of Waitangi’s Copthorne Hotel & Resort, where the National Iwi Chairs Forum (NICF) deliberates in secret upon Maoridom’s next moves. It is there, in the days leading up to Waitangi Day, that New Zealand’s new Prime Minister, Chris Hipkins, will either face down the men and women driving the stake of co-governance into the heart of the Settler State – or see Labour spiral slowly to defeat.

The designation “Iwi Chairs” seems so innocuous. It conjures up the image of a roomful of corporate bureaucrats working their way through a very boring agenda, and breaking-off every now and then to listen to equally boring presentations from bankers, accountants and the occasional politician. In reality, the NICF represents the High Command of Maoridom: the strategic hub of the campaign to take back control of Aotearoa from its Pakeha conquerors. Those gathering at the Copthorne are not a bit like the rag-tag groups of Māori nationalist activists that came together in the 1970s and 80s. If tino rangatiratanga means “the power of the chiefs”, then these are the chiefs who wield it.

Thanks to thirty years of Treaty Settlements, the NICF is both well-positioned and well-resourced to flex its muscles. Between them, the iwi represented at the Forum command assets valued in the billions. That buys them all the big law firms and all the big lawyers they need. It buys them top-of-the-line lobbyists and public relations experts. It buys them influence in the news media and the universities. It means that, when the NICF whistles, serious politicians from all the major parties tend to come running – up to and including prime ministers.

In short, the NICF is what you get when you don’t want hundreds-of-thousands of working-class Māori demanding their fair share of the national cake. An uprising of marginalised urban Māori (the primary focus of Māori political agitation in the 1980s) could hardly avoid inspiring an even larger number of marginalised Pakeha. Such a potent socio-economic alliance would be extremely harmful to capitalism and other exploitative creatures. Hence the Crown’s inspired prophylactic against the further radicalisation of the Māori working-class – the Treaty Settlement Process. Make a handful of Māori aristocrats and other assorted high-flyers rich and powerful, and not only can they then be relied upon to keep the urban Māori poor quiet, but also to co-opt anyone of a mind to stir them up.

For a while.

The great risk of re-establishing a well-resourced and powerful indigenous elite is that, a generation or two later, those responsible will be faced with confident, highly educated young Māori who can think of no good reason why they – the privileged beneficiaries of the Treaty Settlement Process – should continue to provide a buffer between the heirs of their colonial conquerors and the tens-of-thousands of Māori families made poor, and kept poor, by colonisation.

What’s more, this generation will evince no interest in constructing a Māori-Pakeha working-class alliance against either Pakeha Capitalism or the Neo-Tribal Capitalist sub-system brought into being by the Treaty Settlement Process. The generation raised under this ethnically-charged neoliberal regime will not be socialists, they will be ethno-nationalists. If wealth is to be redistributed, it will not be from the rich to the poor, but from the descendants of the Pakeha colonisers to the descendants of the colonised Māori. It will be a revolution driven by race, not class.

There could be no better example of the policies generated by the iwi elites and their political representatives than the project known as Three Waters. Putting Private Members Bills to one side, it is rare to encounter a piece of legislation so closely associated with and shaped by a single member of Cabinet – in this case, the then Local Government Minister, Nanaia Mahuta. Nor is it common to see a legislative project preceded by an advertising campaign subsequently condemned as both misleading and inaccurate. The Labour Government’s decision to reverse its earlier affirmation that local authorities would be free to opt-out of the scheme only compounded the ethical problems besetting Mahuta’s project.

At the forefront of these was the legislation’s commitment to “co-governance”. In the midst of structures specifically designed to protect the relevant “entities” from all forms of democratic accountability, the legislation located a body split 50/50 between members supposedly chosen to represent the interests of local consumers, and those indisputably chosen to represent the interests of local iwi.

NZ First’s Shane Jones’s description of Mahuta’s Three Waters Project was typically robust:

What was initially an attempt to fix some drinking water has turned into a highly divisive and pulverising social experiment that has got nothing to do with poo pipes and infrastructure. Now it’s got everything to do with whether or not tribes should have a superior right [over water].

Jones also argued that Jacinda Ardern’s government had “lost control” of Mahuta’s project:

She was unable to control Nanaia Mahuta, who has proven to be one of New Zealand’s most divisive politicians that God ever put breath into.

Nowhere was Ardern’s loss of control more evident that in the parliamentary debacle which followed the last-minute, constitutionally-dubious, attempt to entrench “anti-privatisation” clauses in the legislation setting up the Three Waters project as it neared the end of its passage, under urgency, through the House of Representatives.

If ever a project needed to be abandoned completely, and the rebuilding of New Zealand’s drinking, storm and wastewater infrastructure reconceptualised in ways that keep it both affordable and accountable, then that project is Three Waters.

Not that the Iwi Chairs gathered at the Copthorne Hotel are likely to see it that way. Mahuta’s project had brought them closer to Jones’s “superior right” over water than any of her predecessors. Their message to Chris Hipkins is likely to be blunt: repeal Mahuta’s legislation at your peril.

New Zealand’s new Prime Minister knows that the National Iwi Chairs Forum has the means to make life very difficult for his government. Notwithstanding their objections, however, Hipkins direction of travel – already clearly signalled by his very public demotion of Mahuta – must be confirmed by an emphatic and unequivocal pledge to repeal the Three Waters legislation and start again.

If Labour is to secure a third term, then Hipkins must make it clear to all New Zealanders – Māori and Pakeha – that his government is not about fulfilling the agendas of corporate/tribal elites. It is about making sure that every New Zealander in need of a job, a living wage, and a warm, dry house, gets one. That their family’s right to publicly-provided, quality health care and education is not denied. And that the promise of equality, enshrined in Article Three of the Treaty of Waitangi, is kept. Because that’s the only beer that’s electorally fit for Labour to drink: the beer of class – not race.

Everything else is froth.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 2 February 2023.

Adapt Or Die: Why New Zealand Capitalism Will Let Co-Governance Win.

An Alliance Of Elites: The deep, deep cynicism of the Crown is almost admirable. To forestall a revolt from below – led by the Māori working-class – it first summoned into existence a neo-tribal capitalist Māori elite, and then joined hands with it to keep the poor in check.

GERMAN CAPITALISM adapted itself to Nazi rule with a minimum of fuss and bother. This is hardly surprising, since Adolf Hitler and his National Socialists were the capitalists’ best defence against the Communist Party of Germany – the political force which frightened Germany’s ruling-class the most. So long as the critical cultural and scientific infrastructure of Germany’s economic system remained intact, its capitalists neither criticised, nor resisted (to any significant degree) the Nazi regime’s monstrous crimes.

The question raised by German capitalism’s close collaboration with the Nazis nevertheless remains a troubling one. Was its amorality peculiar to the German people, or is a willingness to set aside moral considerations a feature baked into all capitalist systems – including our own?

In spite of their name, and especially after Hitler and the SS had purged its Stormtrooper militia of all those who took the socialist half of National Socialism seriously, the Nazi regime would prove to be a powerfully reinvigorating tonic for a capitalist system brought to its knees by the Great Depression. The full-scale rearmament of Germany, crucial to the Nazi project of securing “living space” in the east, reduced unemployment dramatically, lifted the living-standards of the ordinary German worker, and restored capitalist profitability – all with astonishing speed.

With the outbreak of war, especially its extension to the Soviet Union, and following Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States, German capitalism’s adaptation to the realities of global conflict involved it increasingly in activities of unprecedented human depravity. Not only were German capitalists forced to accept slave labour as indispensable to the maintenance of the Third Reich’s war production, but they were also required to involve themselves in determining the most efficient methods for keeping their slaves alive and working, and for how long.

Paradoxically, the necessity of boosting war production forced German capitalism to become vastly more efficient than it had been in the pre-war years. In Germany, as in the United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain, mass production and the economies of scale rationalised industrial production in ways that would force the world’s most powerful states to shape the “peace” of the post-war world in conformity with the needs of what came to be known as “Military Keynesianism”.

Following Germany’s surrender in 1945, American capitalists were keen to “compare notes” with their German equivalents. All agreed that while the need to fill the depleted ranks of the Wehrmacht with more and more German workers made the use of first, women, and then slaves, unavoidable; forced labour in the context of complex industrial processes was grossly inefficient.

Not that these inefficiencies prevented the I.G. Farben industrial conglomerate from establishing a vast synthetic rubber production plant on the outskirts of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Now in the territory of the Polish Republic, the plant’s successor operation remains in production to this day – one of the largest such facilities in the European Union.

Capitalism, like the cockroach, is infinitely adaptable – and very hard to kill.

Which raises the question of how New Zealand capitalism (and foreign-owned capitalist enterprises operating in New Zealand) are likely to react to a fundamental cultural and political power-shift from Pakeha to Māori – as envisioned in the He Puapua Report of 2019. Would such a radical and racially-charged re-constitution of the New Zealand state prompt capitalist resistance, or would New Zealand’s capitalists, like their German counterparts of the 1930s, simply adapt themselves, and their businesses, to the requirements of the new regime?

The first point to acknowledge is that German capitalists, regardless of their personal feelings towards the Nazis, were, as a class, in broad sympathy with their objectives. Reassured by Hitler that the “socialist” part of national socialism should not be taken seriously, the leaders of German industry and finance poured money into the Nazi Party’s coffers, and endured the street violence and antisemitism of its brownshirts as an unfortunate political necessity. Not only did Nazism hold out the promise of rising profits, but it was also in sympathy, culturally and politically, with the most powerful elements of German society.

Can the same be said of the most powerful elements of New Zealand society? Broadly speaking, the answer is Yes.

The creation of neo-tribal capitalism, via the Treaty settlement process, beginning under the National Party in the early 1990s, was welcomed by New Zealand’s leading capitalists as infinitely preferable to the radical politicisation of a Māori working-class immiserated by Rogernomics and Ruthanasia. A Māori “renaissance”, guided by traditional iwi leaders working hand-in-glove with the Crown, was containable. An angry cultural “revolution”, fuelled by poverty, and sweeping up poor Pakeha in its wake, was not.

The Māori and Pakeha urban poor, united in pursuit of a bi-cultural and socialist Aotearoa has been the New Zealand capitalists worst nightmare ever since their own, neoliberal, revolution in the mid-1980s. Just as the Communist Party of Germany terrified the German ruling-class, a flax-roots alliance of the brown/white poor, is what New Zealand capitalism has always feared the most.

That is why neo-tribal capitalism and the He Puapua prescription are political manna from heaven for Pakeha capitalism. The deep cultural, social and political divisions which the co-governance project is bound to stir up is the perfect prophylactic against the horizontal unity engendered by a flax-roots rebellion of the poor (of all colours) against the rich (of all colours). The deep, deep cynicism of the Crown is almost admirable. To forestall a revolt from below – led by the Māori working-class – it first summoned into existence a neo-tribal capitalist Māori elite, and then joined hands with it to keep the poor in check.

As the machinery of repression is rolled into place in advance of this new, undemocratic – but te Tiriti affirming – Aotearoa, New Zealand capitalists will hold themselves aloof from all the violence directed against the “racist settler” resistance. They may wince at the shutdown of dissenting media, and shake their heads sadly as the “wrong sort” of parties are proscribed, and defiant democratic resisters are carted off to jail, but, like their German counterparts in 1933, they will not lift a finger to save “New Zealand”. Like the Weimar Republic before it, the good and the bad of the doomed “Settler State” will be swept into the dustbin of history.

Aotearoan capitalism, however, now a proudly bi-cultural affair, will survive – and prosper.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 30 August 2022.

Nanaia Mahuta’s Super-Narrative.

Dangerous Political Narrator? What this Labour Government risks is the emergence of what might be called a “super-narrative” in which all the negatives of co-governance, media capture, and Neo-Tribal Capitalism are rolled into one big story about the deliberate corruption of New Zealand democracy. The guilty parties would be an unholy alliance of Pakeha and Māori elites determined to keep public money flowing upwards into protected private hands. 

WHETHER NANAIA MAHUTA followed the conflict-of-interest rules set out in The Cabinet Manual hardly matters. A dangerous political narrative is forming around the appointment of, and awarding of contracts to, Mahuta’s whanau in circumstances that, at the very least, raise serious questions about this Government’s political judgement. Enlarging this narrative is the growing public perception that the mainstream news media is refusing to cover a story that would, in other circumstances, have attracted intense journalistic interest. The conflation of these two, highly damaging narratives with a third – the even more negative narrative of “co-governance” – has left the Labour Government in an extremely exposed and vulnerable position.

The Government’s failure to adequately prepare the New Zealand public for what Labour clearly regards as the inevitability of co-governance hasn’t helped. The party did not campaign on the issue, and kept He Puapua, the controversial “road-map” to full implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples – i.e. co-governance – by 2040, under wraps. Similarly unheralded was the Government’s determination to establish a separate Māori Health Authority. And the application of co-governance principles to Mahuta’s deeply unpopular “Three Waters” project has done nothing to allay public fears that the country is being changed, in fundamental ways, without the electorate’s consent.

The apparent failure of the mainstream news media to follow up on the story is being attributed to the extraordinary conditions attached to the Public Interest Journalism Fund administered by New Zealand On Air. In essence, these conditions require media outlets in receipt of the Fund’s largesse to subscribe in advance to a highly contentious series of propositions concerning the Treaty of Waitangi – most particularly to the Waitangi Tribunal’s claim the Māori never ceded sovereignty to the British Crown, and that this “fact” requires the Fund’s recipients to accept and support the “partnership” model of Crown-Māori relations. The fear expressed by independent journalists is that the net effect of these conditions will be unquestioning mainstream media support for co-governance.

Since the widespread assumption among Pakeha New Zealanders is that co-governance and representative democracy are fundamentally incompatible, Labour’s willingness to be presented as co-governance’s friend runs the risk of being cast as democracy’s enemy.

Of even greater concern is the inevitability of this anti-democratic characterisation being extended to an ever-increasing fraction of the Māori population. Statements from Māori leaders appearing to discount the importance of, or even disparage, the principles of democracy have done little to slow this process. Neither have the intemperate statements of the former National Party Minister for Treaty Settlements, Chris Finlayson. His comment to the online magazine E-Tangata, describing those opposed to co-governance as “the KKK brigade”, merely reinforces the widespread public perception that the slightest public opposition to the proposed changes will bring down accusations of racism upon the opponent’s head.

The problem with this willingness to indulge in ad hominem attacks on people holding genuine reservations about the Government’s proposals is that more and more of them will decide that they might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, and embrace the very racism of which they stand accused. In this context, the revelations that some members of a Māori Minister of the Crown’s whanau have been the recipients of Government funds, and appointed to roles not unrelated to the furtherance of the Minister’s policies, will be taken as confirmation that all is not as it should be in Aotearoa-New Zealand.

What began as an anti-co-governance narrative, and then merged with an anti-mainstream news media narrative, risks joining with a much older and more deeply entrenched narrative concerning the entire Treaty settlement process. This is the narrative that identifies the primary beneficiaries of Treaty settlements as a collection of Crown-assembled tribal elites, along with their legal and commercial advisers. Over the past thirty years these “Neo-Tribal Capitalists” have been accused of investing hundreds-of-millions of taxpayer dollars in what amount to private tribal corporations, over which the intended recipients of these funds – hapu and whanau – exercise only the most indirect authority and receive only the most meagre of rewards.

The result could very easily be the emergence of what might be called a “super-narrative” in which all the negatives of co-governance, media capture, and Neo-Tribal Capitalism are rolled into one big story about the deliberate corruption of New Zealand democracy. The guilty parties would be an unholy alliance of Pakeha and Māori elites determined to keep public money flowing upwards into protected private hands. In this super-narrative, the structures set forth in He Puapua to secure tino rangatiratanga, will actually ensure the exclusion of the vast majority of New Zealanders from the key locations of power. The only positive consequence of which will be a common struggle for political and economic equality in which non-elite Māori and Pakeha will have every incentive to involve themselves.

The painful irony of this super-narrative scenario is that Labour will have positioned itself as its cause – not its remedy. Rather than repeating in the Twenty-First Century the fruitful political alliance between the Pakeha working-class and the victims/survivors of the deals done between the Crown and the Māori aristocracy in the Nineteenth and Twentieth, Labour will be seen to have facilitated the creation of a Treaty Partnership that not only undermines democracy, but also exacerbates the inequality between Māori and Pakeha, Pakeha and Pakeha, Māori and Māori.

What lies ahead, as the institutions of co-governance take shape, is the coming together of two very privileged birds of a feather: the Pakeha professionals and managers who have taken command of the society and economy created by Neoliberalism, and the Māori professionals and managers created to produce and operate the cultural and economic machinery of Neo-Tribal Capitalism.

This, ultimately, will be the spectre that arises out of the controversy swirling around Nanaia Mahuta. The spectre of the worst of both the Pakeha and the Māori worlds. Worlds in which the powerful trample all over the weak. Where tradition constrains the free exploration of ideas and techniques. And where the petty advantages of separation are elevated above the liberating effects of unity. Where “Aotearoa” creates two peoples out of one.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 31 May 2022.

The No. 8 Wire Prime Minister.

Principles? Seriously?  New Zealanders, as a people, are not much given to following theories of any kind. If we subscribe to any philosophy at all it is the philosophy of pragmatism. If a problem can be fixed by using the political equivalent of No. 8 Wire, then “no worries, mate”.

 

JUST HOURS BEFORE HE RESIGNED, the Prime Minister told RNZ’s Kim Hill that “you can’t right the wrongs of the past”. He was responding to questions about the acknowledged ill-treatment of children in state care during the 1950s, 60s and 70s, and whether his government was prepared to sanction an independent inquiry into multiple allegations of systemic child abuse.

 

It struck me as an extremely odd thing to say. Not least because righting the wrongs of the past is a cause into which this National Government has poured (and continues to pour) hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.

 

True, the wrongs being righted with government money are not those inflicted upon acutely vulnerable children in the care of state institutions – like the Epuni Boys Home. No. The Crown’s cash is being doled out to compensate Maori iwi and hapu for wrongs inflicted by its representatives as far back as the 1850s, 60s and 70s.

 

What’s more, for the wrongs inflicted upon nineteenth century Maori by the colonial authorities, the present government of New Zealand (usually in the person of the Minister for Treaty Settlements, Chris Finlayson QC) has issued multiple apologies. But, issuing a public apology to the hundreds of young people (a great many of them Maori) who were, according to the testimony of their victims, beaten, tortured and raped by public servants acting in loco parentis: that, apparently, is impossible.

 

That John Key failed to recognise the extraordinary inconsistency embedded in his response to Kim Hill’s questions speaks volumes about the way he and his government have played the game of politics.

 

Mr Key and his ministers do not come at the nation’s problems with solutions informed by a common philosophical understanding of the world. If they did, then the need to inquire into the alleged injustices suffered by state wards would be as pressing as the need to inquire into the alleged injustices suffered by Maori iwi and hapu. And if those injustices were proved, then the need for proper compensation, and a public expression of culpability and regret, would be just as apparent.

 

Lacking a common philosophy, National’s ministers are forced to respond to economic and social problems in an ad hoc, piecemeal fashion. They do not appear to recognise that much of the advice they receive is underpinned by philosophical and ideological assumptions with which their party has little affinity. Assumptions flatly contradicted by the arguments ministers use to convince and/or placate the public.

 

Public Choice Theory, for example, seeks to limit the power of state providers to “capture” the processes by which services are delivered to the public. Those who subscribe to the theory are, consequently, searching constantly for ways to disrupt and “downsize” bureaucratic systems. Government ministers, on the other hand, have often attempted to “sell” such measures as the only way of shifting scarce resources to the people on “the front lines” of service delivery.

 

It would be wrong, however, to suggest that philosophical inconsistency is a failing which constantly occupies the mind of the ordinary Kiwi voter. New Zealanders, as a people, are not much given to following theories of any kind. If we subscribe to any philosophy at all it is the philosophy of pragmatism. If a problem can be fixed by using the political equivalent of No. 8 Wire, then “no worries, mate”.

 

The problem with this “pragmatic” approach to politics is that, eventually, one’s society finds itself held together by nothing but No. 8 Wire temporary fixes. When every remedy is ad hoc, and every argument is cobbled together to meet the needs of the moment, then the inconsistencies of approach and internal policy contradictions reach a level that even the most “practical” of voters is no longer able to overlook.

 

If it is simply not possible to right the wrongs of the past, as the outgoing Prime Minister insists, then why is the long-suffering taxpayer called upon continually to address the wrongs inflicted upon Maori in the nineteenth century? If it is unreasonable to become too agitated about the way children in state care were treated in the 1960s, then why apologise for the colonial confiscations of the 1860s?

It is to be hoped that Bill English brings to the office of prime minister a more consistent and coherent political philosophy than his predecessor. No. 8 Wire cannot fix everything.

 

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, 9 December 2016.