Left To Rot.

Recovering Their Voice: Not bereft – not this time. Anomie cannot survive the rebirth of hope. Alienation flees before a compelling story. In 1984, it came from a party promising to “lift them up where they belonged”. In 2022, it is coming from a party urging them to lift themselves up.

IF YOU WANT TO KNOW why Labour leaves the most disadvantaged New Zealanders to rot in motels – ask the Rogernomes. Ever since Labour abandoned its democratic-socialist beliefs and embraced neoliberalism in 1984, the party has been at pains to keep the disadvantaged politically disorganised and dependent on the good will of the state. They do not do this in expectation of their votes – any votes they get from the welfare underclass are a bonus – they do it because they don’t want them to vote at all.

To fully appreciate the reasoning behind Labour’s demobilisation strategy, it is necessary to go back to the year 1984 and take a look around. New Zealand society was mobilised in a way that “Rogernomic’s Children” – the generations that grew up with no memories of what New Zealand was like before the neoliberal “revolution” – would struggle to accept. Civil society had power in those years. Citizens had power. Even the poor and the unemployed had power.

Right across the country unemployed workers and beneficiaries were being organised. The state bureaucracy still believed that its primary purpose was to help – not hinder – its citizens. Accordingly, the state made funds available to just about any organisation set up to help citizens in need. This included groups set up to assist the unemployed and beneficiaries access the support and services to which they were legally entitled. Centres were established where people on benefits could meet and discuss their problems. By the middle of 1984, more and more beneficiaries were becoming politicised. How politicised? Politicised enough to turn out and vote in record numbers. In 1984, nearly 94 percent of registered voters made it to a polling-booth.

In spite of the fact that these politicised beneficiaries had voted overwhelmingly for David Lange’s Labour Party, the neoliberal cabal of Roger Douglas, David Caygill, Richard Prebble, Michael Bassett and Mike Moore, were acutely aware that politicised workers and beneficiaries were, potentially, their worst enemies. The changes they were about to unleash on New Zealand would swell the numbers of the poor and the marginalised. The last thing the Rogernomes needed was for the victims of their neoliberal policies to find a voice.

The Fourth Labour Government’s solution was as cynical as it was clever.

First, it set up an elaborate employment programme for middle-class people who had lost their jobs called “Access”. Come up with an idea for “helping” the poor and disadvantaged and the government appointed Regional Employment and Access Councils (composed of one third employers, one third unions, and one third representing the rest of society) had money to give you – lots of money.

The key difference between these Access schemes and the Project Employment Programme schemes which had resourced the organisers of the beneficiaries’ movement was that the Access schemes had to be strictly apolitical. The people running them (on excellent salaries!) were to be the poor’s responsible helpers and guides – not their political advocates.

Ostensibly, the people attending these Access schemes were there to be assisted into appropriate paid employment. In reality, they were there to provide a rationale for the generous resourcing of Access managers. Unsurprisingly, very few of these were willing to bite the Labour hands that fed them.

To those unemployed and beneficiaries lacking the entrepreneurial skills to take advantage of the Access schemes, the Fourth Labour Government offered the dole: the whole dole; and nothing but the dole. The bureaucrats in charge of social welfare were not encouraged, as they are now, to micromanage their “clients”. Their “stick” was nowhere near as big and frightening as the one they wield today. The idea was brutally simple: give the poor money, herd them into low-cost housing, and let them rot.

Poverty is only dangerous, politically, when it is widely shared. Confine real poverty to between a quarter and a third of the entire population, rob its victims of the political leadership needed to mobilise them as an electoral force, and the poor become the precise opposite of dangerous – they become harmless.

Once poverty acquires a stigma: once its victims begin to blame themselves for their misfortunes; self-hatred sets in. People begin to withdraw from a society that no longer offers them a place to stand. To alleviate their misery they turn to alcohol, drugs, gambling, sex – anything that serves to dull the pain of unbelonging. In the end they become anomic – beyond caring, beyond acting, beyond help. Or, from the neoliberals’ point-of-view: Safe.

The one weakness in the neoliberal plan for the poor is its cost. If poverty and unemployment grows, then the cost of keeping its victims safe rapidly becomes prohibitive. Ruth Richardson’s “Mother of All Budgets” slashed benefits obscenely. That lessened the state’s burden, but it did not remove it. Welfare roll reduction thus became the new priority: get the poor off the benefit – by any means necessary. It was a song National and Labour sang with equal gusto.

Until Covid.

Turns out that having between a quarter and a third of the population roped-off from the rest of the nation: prey to poverty, plagued by crime, prone to violence, and just not giving a fuck; isn’t all that helpful when it comes to fighting a pandemic. Even less helpful is the inconvenient fact that a disproportionate number of these unreachable ones have brown skins.

The state tried, and the state failed – badly – to reach out to the Māori and Pasifika communities being devastated by Covid-19. To vaccinate as many vulnerable citizens as possible, the hard-and-fast rule, enforced by successive neoliberal governments for thirty-five years, was set aside. Grass-roots advocacy groups were empowered and resourced to get the Covid vaccine out and into the arms of the poor.

The contrast between the “help” provided by the state, and the care provided by their own people, proved to be decisive. Because something else was being injected into them along with the Pfizer vaccine. It was a story in which even they, the poor and the stigmatised, had a place to stand. A story about a country that had once been theirs: about rights and resources guaranteed by a treaty that was not honoured; about a country that could be theirs again – but only if they made a conscious choice to re-create it.

This was a dangerous story for a Labour Government still content, like its predecessors, to push the poor out of the picture. Not into the low-cost housing of the 1980s – that is long gone – but into motels. Out of sight, out of mind. Second-class citizens in third-rate private accommodation. Cramped. Cold. Preyed upon by gangsters in uniform. Desperate. Left to rot.

But not bereft – not this time. Anomie cannot survive the rebirth of hope. Alienation flees before a compelling story. In 1984, it came from a party promising to “lift them up where they belonged”. In 2022, it is coming from a party urging them to lift themselves up.

That party is currently polling 5 percent. After nearly forty years, the poor have recovered their voice.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 8 September 2022.

Crossing the Line: What Lies Behind the Surge To Te Pāti Māori?

Rising To The Challenge: Te Pāti Māori is reassuring the angry and the alienated that in 2023 voting will make a difference. Aotearoa is changing. Pakeha – especially young Pakeha – are changing. The racism is still there, of course, heightened, it would seem, by the prospect of Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori having the numbers to keep the changes coming. But Te Pāti Māori is also telling them the country had moved on from 2005, from Don Brash and his “Iwi/Kiwi” election billboards. An awful lot of elderly National Party voters can die in 17 years!

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN people who don’t usually participate in elections decide to vote? Things turn weird – that’s what happens. This is because the people who don’t vote are very different from the people who do. The motivations relied upon by the pundits to explain the behaviour of habitual voters are not the motivations of non-voters. That’s why, when these folk cross the line separating the passivity of non-voting from the world of active political citizenship the results can be startling.

It’s why political entrepreneurs like Dominic Cummings and Steve Bannon work so hard to reach and motivate the people perennially dismissed and abandoned by the smug political campaigners of the mainstream. The Cummings and the Bannons know these marginalised individuals: the people that shit happens to; the people who live in the shit; are extraordinarily combustible. Strike a match in the right place, at the right time, and – Kaboom! – the “deplorables” explode into action.

It is precisely the “otherness” of these non-participants that makes them so potent politically. An across-the-board expansion of the electorate: one in which exactly the same proportion of National, Labour, Act, Green and Te Pāti Māori voters simply stepped across the line separating non-voting from voting; would make no appreciable difference in either the opinion polls or the polling booths. Indeed, this is pretty much what happens when people step out of the “Don’t Know” category to express a clear preference. They tend to break the same way as those who have already disclosed their electoral choices. But non-voters: the sort of people who tell pollsters and phone canvassers to fuck-off; they are different.

Non-voters come in two flavours. There are those who never got into the habit of voting, and those who, for a whole host of reasons, got out of the habit.

The habit of voting, like the habit of going to school, is a reflection of a settled family environment. In such households, all manner of social and economic connections serve to keep their inhabitants tethered to the local community and its values. The absence of these connections produces individuals estranged and alienated from the community and its concerns. The impact of politics on their daily lives being neither perceived nor explained, they do not care about elections – or vote in them.

Those who have gotten out of the habit of voting usually have a sad story to tell. For some reason, the ties that bound them to their community have been severed. It may have been the result of family disintegration, substance abuse, criminal offending and incarceration. Alternatively, it could have been job loss, prolonged unemployment, indebtedness, homelessness and/or severe mental illness. Something happened to set these individuals on a downward spiral to economic privation and social isolation. What had been citizens with rights, become invisible un-persons with nothing. Politics was for winners – not losers like themselves.

Breaking into the world of these non-voters isn’t easy. Somehow, a political movement has to convince them that the vote they cast will produce a direct and positive impact on their lives. Non-voter politics tends to be grounded in the not unreasonable observation that participating in elections, voting, changes nothing. Their cynicism is encapsulated in pithy anarchic aphorisms: “Don’t vote, governments always win”, or, “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal”.

The crucial thing to note about these aphorisms, however, is that they identify an enemy. “Governments.” “Them.” For non-voters, politics is what the people with power do to you. The idea that politics could be about what you do to “them” is dismissed as absurd.

The critical insight of Cummings and Bannon was that it is possible to persuade these non-voters to use their votes as weapons. Deployed strategically, the right number of votes, cast in the right number of places, can make “governments” quail and cause “them” to weep. Sell non-voters that message and you will have given them a truly visceral reason to vote. Their unlooked-for participation can ruin the whole day of the Powers-That-Be – delivering a massive one-fingered salute to the whole, evil, vicious system that ruined their lives. By voting, they can say “Fuck You!” to the people in charge, and – lo – the people in charge will find themselves unexpectedly and irremediably fucked. As happened with Brexit. As happened with Trump.

So, where would the Kiwi equivalents of Dominic Cummings and Steve Bannon go looking for estranged and alienated non-voters? What part of the New Zealand population is most likely to have been uprooted from family and community? Which citizens are most likely to fall foul of the Police, MSD, Oranga Tamariki and Corrections? What sort of New Zealander is the most likely to end up in jail – and the least likely to vote? Who, if they used their votes as weapons, could strike a mortal blow against the status quo? The urban Māori underclass – that’s who!

And who has the best chance of reaching the urban Māori underclass? Te Pāti Māori .

Not that Te Pāti Māori has its very own version of Cambridge Analytica to identify the angry and the alienated and bombard them with carefully crafted social media messages. TPM just doesn’t have those kinds of resources. What it does have, however, is its own place in the networks created to fight the Covid-19 pandemic. These networks led Māori service providers to places and people undetected and ignored by the state and its agencies. More importantly, they began the process of reconnection and tethering that allows political messages to be taken in, rather than simply thrown away.

And when these folk lifted up their heads, looking around through eyes brightened by unfamiliar feelings of pride and hope, TPM was there with the promise that, this time, this special time, voting could make a difference. Aotearoa was changing. Pakeha – especially young Pakeha – were changing. The racism was still there, of course, heightened, it would seem, by the prospect of Labour, the Greens and TPM having the numbers to keep the changes coming. But TPM also told them the country had moved on from 2005, from Don Brash and his “Iwi/Kiwi” election billboards. An awful lot of elderly National Party voters can die in 17 years!

To the bigots still breathing, however, the Māori non-voters could deliver a very special gift – one that would ruin the racists’ whole day. In the spirit of the community that had discovered them in their time of need, and which they had rediscovered, Māori non-voters could step across the line that separates the un-person from the citizen. By casting a vote in the 2023 General Election, not only could they re-make themselves, they could re-make their country.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 4 August 2022.