Staying Focused: Why Labour Still Won’t Help The Poor.

Still Waiting: Triennium after triennium, this tawdry charade goes on. Labour’s leaders speak of rescuing the poor, not because they have any intention of doing so – the poor don’t even register such promises anymore – but because Labour knows that the kind, well-educated women voters, who now constitute its electoral core, get a kick out of supporting a party that talks about helping the poor – just so long as it doesn’t help them too much.

SUSAN ST JOHN’S latest cri de cœur laments the dire straits in which New Zealand’s poorest citizens still find themselves. As she has so many times before, Susan attacks the criminal inadequacy of state assistance programmes and reaffirms the sheer impossibility of private charities taking up the slack. But, once again, she fails to explain why this government, like the governments which preceded it, simply will not take the steps necessary to substantially improve the lives of the poor.

There must be a reason why a government with an clear majority of parliamentary seats, facing the worst Opposition in a generation, with the perfect excuse of a global pandemic, will still not take the drastic actions necessary to rescue its most vulnerable citizens. What is it that Jacinda and her advisors know, that Susan and all who think like her don’t know? What are the transcripts of Labour’s focus groups telling the Prime Minister that she remains so immoveable? Why, in spite of her many, many promises, does Jacinda’s government refuse to act?

It must be bad – really bad. Those focus groups must be registering consistent hostility to the sort of policy shift necessary to lift the poor and their children out of poverty. Almost certainly, that hostility is born of the focus group moderators’ honestly setting forth what it would take to make a real difference. The participants are presumably being told that such a massive redistributive effort could not be responsibly undertaken without a comprehensive increase in taxation. They’re talking Income Tax hikes, a Capital Gains Tax, a Wealth Tax, a Land Tax, maybe even a Financial Transactions Tax.

This is not the sort of news that goes down well among the 400,000 former National Party voters who gave Jacinda her absolute majority. Hell, it’s not the sort of news that goes down well among the well-heeled, Labour-voting professionals who inhabit the leafy suburbs of New Zealand’s largest cities.

There will be some in those focus groups, more honest than the other participants, who will flat-out refuse to countenance such a policy-shift as contrary to their self-interest. Others, less honest, will insist that it simply wouldn’t work. “You can’t make a poor man rich by making a rich man poor.” Redistribution of wealth on such a scale would be dismissed as counterproductive. “It would disincentivise the most productive citizens on behalf of the least productive.” Inevitably, someone would mention Venezuela.

How many times have we been here? How often have we rehearsed these arguments? Jacinda will be guided by the reports of her focus group moderators because she knows they summarise the attitudes and intentions of the New Zealanders who vote.

If she knew for a fact that the New Zealanders Susan St John so tenaciously goes to bat for would turn out in their hundreds-of-thousands to support a government that supported them, then Jacinda and her Finance Minister might just consider pissing-off a large number of Labour’s most loyal voters. But election after election, the psephologists’ scholarly judgements remain the same: the poor don’t vote. Or, at least, not in numbers to justify Labour going out on a limb for them.

Labour will go out on a limb, however, for the voters once fêted as the heart and soul of the New Zealand working-class. Skilled workers and tradespeople: the people (oh, bugger all this gender neutrality) the men once referred to as “the aristocracy of labour”; the men who used to dominate the trade unions – and the Labour Party. These men were big on “the dignity of labour”, but had no time at all for those who “bludged” off others. Back in the day, when Labour activists could still say such things, they would happily declare: “He who does not work, neither shall he eat.” These men were all in favour of giving workers down on their luck a hand-up. But, allowing fit and healthy workers to live indefinitely off state hand-outs, that they did not favour.

In the twenty-first century these mostly Pakeha men are more likely to be found running small businesses than working in a factory. That they still vote for the Labour Party is probably out of a lingering nostalgia for the days when their fathers and grandfathers were the heart and soul of the party. It’s their way of doffing a cloth cap no longer worn, to a white working-class that no longer exists. But, just let Jacinda threaten to raise their taxes and that nostalgic vote will disappear in an instant. National and Act are always just a polling-booth away.

And so, triennium after triennium, this tawdry charade goes on. Labour’s leaders speak of rescuing the poor, not because they have any intention of doing so – the poor don’t even register such promises anymore – but because Labour knows that the kind, well-educated women voters who now constitute its electoral core get a kick out of supporting a party that talks about helping the poor – just so long as it doesn’t help them too much.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 3 September 2021.

Let’s Hear It For Up-Close-And-Personal, Hard-Copy Democracy!

The Best Way: Missing from the on-line voting debate is any reference to the voting system that produces turn-out figures ranging from 77 to 93 percent of registered voters. The voting system used to collect and count the votes cast in our parliamentary elections. The system that involves citizens making their way to a polling station, marking their ballot-papers privately in a polling-booth, and then depositing them personally in a sealed ballot-box.

WHY ARE RETURNING OFFICERS coming out so strongly for on-line voting? Of all the people in the world willing to advocate for a system of voting so absurdly vulnerable to interference and corruption, returning officers should be the very last. And yet, all week, as fears of a record low voter turnout in this latest round of local government elections have grown, it is returning officers who are among the keenest to give on-line voting a try.

The curious fact about this clamour for on-line voting is that its proponents are offering it as a cure for declining voter participation. Young people, notorious for their poor record for joining-in the democratic process, are seen as the group most likely to benefit from this supposed panacea. Missing from the debate, however, is the voting system that produces turn-out figures ranging from 77 to 93 percent of registered voters. The voting system used to collect and count the votes cast in our parliamentary elections. The one that involves citizens making their way to a polling station, marking their ballot-papers privately in a polling-booth, and then depositing them personally in a sealed ballot-box.

This was, after all, the way New Zealanders used to vote in local body elections. Why was it abandoned? Ironically, because voter turn-out was falling, and it was thought that allowing people to fill out their ballot papers at home, over a fortnight, and then pop them in the post, would make the whole process easier, less stressful and more efficient. Predictably, there was a slight up-tick in electoral participation, followed by another slow decline in voter numbers.

Interestingly, the obvious weaknesses in postal voting were never taken particularly seriously by its proponents. That it essentially did away with the idea that casting a vote was something every citizen had a right to do, alone, in a polling-booth, where they could be safe from the influence of husbands, wives, other family members, and (thinking once again of younger voters) flatmates, was not considered a serious enough defect to rule postal voting out of contention.

The thought that a domineering husband and/or authoritarian mother might commandeer their family’s voting papers and cast them all themselves never appears to have crossed the reformers’ minds. Nor, apparently, the possibility that a flat full of apathetic youngsters might simply invite the one member of the household interested in politics to cast their votes for them.

Exactly the same indifference to the possibility that an election’s final outcome may not be an accurate reflection of the electorate’s will is noticeable in the campaigners for on-line voting.

Similar indifference has been shown by those in charge of the 2019 local government elections to the steadily declining efficacy of the New Zealand Post Office. When postal voting was introduced in 1992, the Internet was largely restricted to boffins and geeks. The mail was delivered on every day of the week except Sunday, and a posted letter could travel from one end of the country to the other more-or-less overnight. Over the course of the last 27 years, however, the time taken for a letter to reach its addressee has increased from one or two days to approximately a week. Likewise, the time taken for ballot papers to be delivered and returned. It will be interesting to discover how many 2019 ballot papers, posted no later than 5 days out from the vote-count (as advised) nevertheless arrive after mid-day on Saturday, 12 October. Since NZ Post no longer date stamps letters, it will be impossible to sort out which ballot papers should be counted and which disallowed. There is a real possibility that hundreds – perhaps thousands – of citizens will end up being disenfranchised by New Zealand’s sclerotic postal service.

The nation’s returning officers will, of course, object that anyone who forgets to post their ballot papers can always deposit them by hand in one of the ballot boxes situated in the local library and at the town hall. In other words, to overcome the growing challenges associated with running an efficient postal voting system, our returning officers have set up what are effectively polling-booths to cater for the stragglers.

Honestly, it’s enough to make you wonder why we just don’t admit that postal-voting, never a particularly good idea, has failed, and return to the original – and by far the most secure – method of discovering the electorate’s will. It could hardly be worse than the present system, and it certainly beats the heck out of sending your vote into the void of cyberspace, where neither you – nor the returning officers of the nation – have the slightest notion of where it has been sent, what happened to it there, and on whose behalf, before it ends up as a configuration of pixels blinking mindlessly on some private-sector contractor’s computer screen.

Stealing a hard-copy election is surprisingly difficult and very hard to hide. Stealing an on-line election, however, is a much easier proposition. If it’s done properly, no one but the people who paid for the hack will ever know.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 10 October 2019.

Don't Riot For A Better Society - Vote For One!

More Effective Than A Molotov Cocktail: Elderly New Zealanders have used their votes to keep NZ Superannuation safe from the neoliberals who would destroy it. Rather than castigating them for preserving this last great remnant of universal welfare provision, young New Zealanders should learn from their example.

 

IT WAS THE LARGEST STUDENT DEMONSTRATION Dunedin had ever seen. Close to 10,000 students had marched the length of George Street and half of Princes Street to completely fill the Exchange. I was just one of many speakers on that overcast day in the winter of 1989. Most of these chose to declare their opposition to the fourth Labour Government’s imposition of student fees in as few words as possible – but not me.
 

Speaking on behalf of the NewLabour Party, I felt obliged to spell out the realities of tertiary education funding. I told them that they could have free education or low taxes – but they could not have both. If the wealthy refused to pay higher taxes, then students would have to pay higher fees. If the middle class (i.e. their family) was serious about keeping young people (i.e. themselves) out of debt, then they would have to vote for a party that was willing to restore a genuinely progressive taxation system.
 

They booed.
 

My party comrades were less than impressed. But, the experience taught me something even more important than “never try to reason with a crowd”, I learned that Rogernomics had unlocked something ugly and selfish in older and younger middle class New Zealanders alike. In the minds of those 10,000 students – the people we would come to know as “Generation X” – a free tertiary education was simply their entitlement. The notion that, by accepting this entitlement, they had enmeshed themselves in a complex system of reciprocal rights and obligations made them very angry indeed.
 

For the fifty years that followed the Great Depression and World War II the idea that older New Zealanders could somehow be absolved of their responsibilities toward younger New Zealanders, and vice versa, would have been regarded as absurd. People simply accepted that living through periods of paying taxes to support others, as well as periods when the taxes of others would support them, was what made a fair and decent society possible. Society benefited enormously from a well-educated and culturally enlivened citizenry. It also benefited enormously by making sure that every older citizen could live in security and dignity.
 

Through a process of trial and error, spanning many decades, New Zealand discovered that the best way to preserve the security and dignity of its older citizens was to pay them what amounted to a universal basic income. Regardless of gender, ethnicity, sexuality or social class, every New Zealander over the age of 65 is guaranteed a modest income from the state. NZ Superannuation has played a huge role in reducing the incidence of poverty among elderly New Zealanders. Its universality makes it both cost effective and sustainable. Providing the progressivity of this country’s tax system is restored, it is also entirely affordable.
 

Not surprisingly, those already in receipt of, or about to receive, NZ Superannuation are determined to preserve it. Politicians have been taught, over successive elections, that messing around (or even threatening to mess around) with “Super” is a sure-fire way to lose, or be kept out of, office. Elderly New Zealanders have used their votes to great effect in this regard. Rather than castigating them for doing so, young New Zealanders should learn from their example.
 

Because it’s simply not the case that older New Zealanders have devised something special for their own benefit at the expense of younger, more deserving, Kiwis. On the contrary, NZ Superannuation is the sole surviving significant remnant of the universal social welfare system that successive New Zealand governments have been attempting to destroy ever since Roger Douglas kicked off the neoliberal “revolution” in 1984. The only reason “Super” has survived is because , election after election, hundreds-of-thousands of its supporters have made their way to the ballot-box and voted to keep it.
 

Rather than urging young people to riot against the cost of the NZ Superannuation system (and thereby achieve the neoliberals’ objectives for them) those in search of a more just society should be spelling out to their contemporaries the clearest political lesson of the past 30 years: that if you want a fair and decent society, then don’t boo those who advocate for a system of reciprocal rights and obligations – vote for them.
 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 16 January 2017.

Homes Are Where The Votes Are.

Working Class Voters' Ballot Papers At Work: A massive programme of state house construction; a graduated Land Tax; a radical and comprehensive overhaul of New Zealand’s tenancy legislation along European lines: each of these measures would lower the cost of housing dramatically. All those suffering from the worst effects of the current housing crisis, the young and the poor, have to do is vote for them.

 

NEW ZEALAND’S HOUSING SITUATION grows daily more perplexing.

 

In the country’s largest city, Auckland, the price of residential housing surges from one scarcely believable peak to the next. Neighbour’s stand open-mouthed as the sale-price of the property across the street is communicated to them in hushed tones and wide-eyed disbelief. Like the purchaser of a Lotto ticket, Auckland homeowners are mentally spending the hundreds-of-thousands of additional dollars they’re absolutely certain to win.

 

Woe betide the politician who tramples on those dreams.

 

Meanwhile, as the amount of the required deposit leaps impossibly far ahead of their ability to save such a sum, younger New Zealanders attempting to purchase their first residential property are growing increasingly desperate.

 

Woe betide the politician who tramples on those dreams.

 

The news media is calling it a housing crisis. But the advocates for state house tenants are crying foul. “How can there be a crisis,” they demand, “when hundreds of Housing NZ properties are standing empty?”

 

What’s going on?

 

The brutally simple answer is that those New Zealanders sufficiently motivated to participate in large numbers in general elections are ruthlessly enriching themselves.

 

With sufficient political will, New Zealand’s housing problems could be resolved quite quickly. To say this, however, is to beg the question of how that political will might best be summoned. A question which, in its turn, raises the perennial and deeply subversive issue of social class – and the bitter conflicts spawned when the interests of social classes clash.

 

For an excellent example of how these class conflicts get played out politically, we have only to look at the final days of the 2005 General Election Campaign.

 

The incumbent Labour Government was on the ropes, and the Don Brash-led National Party Opposition had the scent of victory in its nostrils. It was then that Labour’s campaign manager (and party president) Mike Williams sent out a last-minute letter to state house tenants. The letter warned them that, if Labour lost the election, the new National Government’s housing policies would see many of them evicted from their homes.

 

The letter had the desired effect. As Election Night 2005 drew to its close, and the counting of the ballots cast in the polling booths of the nation’s sprawling state house suburbs was completed, Labour’s tally of Party Votes surged triumphantly past National’s to secure for Helen Clark her final and most dramatic electoral victory.

 

Had those same state house tenants turned out to vote in the same numbers at the 2008, 2011 and 2014 General Elections, then John Key may never have become New Zealand’s prime minister. But they didn’t – and because they didn’t (at least in part) the policies of John Key’s National-led Government have, for the past eight years, exacted a very heavy toll on the nation’s state house tenant’s.

 

The same could be said of the nation’s younger citizens.

 

In 2005, Helen Clark (egged on by former student president, Grant Robertson) announced that Labour would be introducing interest-free student loans. With this prospect before them, scores-of-thousands of young New Zealanders made the journey to the polling-booths on Election Day to vote for the thousands-of-dollars-worth of savings Labour was promising. A significant number of their parents did the same thing – and for much the same reason! They, too, had a role to play in pushing the red line above the blue line.

 

In the 2014 General Election, however, only 49 percent of the 743,200 New Zealanders aged 18-29 years bothered to cast a vote. Of the 864,100 New Zealanders aged 60 years and over (they’re the ones with the houses) the participation rate was 87 percent! The young people struggling to buy their first home in 2016 should, perhaps, consider how much more attention politicians would pay to their housing needs after 2017, if 87 percent of them turned out to vote.

 

At the moment, middle-class Kiwis (especially those living in Auckland) are doing amazingly well out of John Key’s government’s housing policies. With the thumb of unprecedented immigration numbers pressing down on the demand side of the scales, and the supply side embarrassingly light on available residential properties, existing home-owners are laughing all the way to the banks – who are only too happy to lend them the money for a second, third or fourth house.

 

It’s not difficult to guess which party these folks will be voting for next year.

 

Nor should it be difficult for Labour, the Greens and NZ First to work out what they need to offer young and poor voters in 2017.

 

A massive programme of state house construction; a graduated Land Tax; a radical and comprehensive overhaul of New Zealand’s tenancy legislation along European lines: each of these measures would lower the cost of housing dramatically.

 

All the young and the poor have to do is vote for them.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 3 May 2016.