Someone To Follow, Something To Blame.

Poshing The Proletariat: As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, the question for New Zealand politicians is a simple one. Will workers’ expectations of fair treatment erode faster than their rising political determination to find someone to follow and something to blame? Significant sections of the United States’ and the United Kingdom’s working-classes have already answered this question by following along behind populist politicians – Donald Trump and Boris Johnson – who are only too happy to blame “illegal immigration” and/or “the free movement of peoples” for their troubles.

I NEVER BELIEVED it was possible, and, in a way, I’ve been proved right. Workers who have grown up in, or hearing about, the “old” New Zealand, would never consent willingly to accept the wages and conditions of “Third World” workers. Being paid a decent wage and treated fairly by your employer are expectations deeply ingrained in the New Zealand worker. Enormous pressure is required to secure the abandonment of such expectations. The consequences: economically, socially, politically; are potentially quite significant – and dangerous.

Expectations of fair treatment arrived here with the very first wave of European migrants. Samuel Parnell, a carpenter, insisted on an eight-hour day and, in colonial conditions of acute labour scarcity, he got it. That scarcity: New Zealand’s small population more-or-less guaranteeing a sellers’ market in labour power; underpinned this being “God’s own country” for the ordinary working person for nearly a century. From 1894 until 1991, or, more specifically, from the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act to the Employment Contracts Act, the collective strength of the New Zealand working-class was nurtured and protected by the New Zealand state.

During that century it became an accepted part of working-class life that wages would be sufficient to raise a family in, if not luxury, then relative comfort. State house construction kept rentals low. Cheap, state-provided and/or guaranteed loans put private home-ownership well within the reach of most working-class families. A world-class health and education system made it possible for the children of workers to move up into professional and managerial occupations. Those with entrepreneurial flair could set up their own businesses. The country’s comprehensive welfare system meant that personal misfortune or commercial misjudgement did not automatically result in financial misery.

New Zealand’s was as solid a social-democratic society as any to be found elsewhere in the world. It could not, however, withstand the sudden and enormous expansion in the quantity of labour available to global capitalism which accompanied the opening up of the People’s Republic of China and the demise of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European empire. Over the course of a single decade, what had been a sellers’ market for labour in the Western economies became a buyers’ market. Workers who valued themselves too highly saw their employers’ businesses relocated to places where the labour was cheaper – much cheaper – and trade union protections non-existent.

The economic and social consequences of globalisation in the West have been evident for some time. Not only here in New Zealand, but all across what used to be called the “First World”. Factory closures; mass lay-offs; depopulation; urban decay: these were just the start. In their wake came the social pathologies of homelessness, drug addiction, domestic violence and the pernicious expansion of organised crime. What had been proud working-class communities simply imploded. Those who could escape, got out. Those who couldn’t, rotted from the inside out.

Not that there wasn’t still a lot of work to be done in the First World. Much to the frustration of employers, however, expectations of fair reward and treatment proved to be astonishingly resilient. Once strong and proud working-class towns and cities were an unconscionably long time dying. The answer to this irksome longevity of working-class pride was the same in New Zealand as elsewhere: import workers with lower expectations.

Maintaining a steady downward pressure on workers’ incomes by means of increased immigration was especially important in New Zealand where profits have for so long been underwritten by low wages. Indeed, this system, supported for nearly three decades by both Labour- and National-led governments, has produced industries in which the imposition of a “living wage” would render an alarming number of individual businesses uneconomic.

As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, the question for New Zealand politicians is a simple one. Will workers’ expectations of fair treatment erode faster than their rising political determination to find someone to follow and something to blame? Significant sections of the United States’ and the United Kingdom’s working-classes have already answered this question by following along behind populist politicians – Donald Trump and Boris Johnson – who are only too happy to blame “illegal immigration” and/or “the free movement of peoples” for their troubles.

For the present Coalition Government, raising the minimum wage was a very good start. Now it needs to cut immigration – to the bone.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 3 January 2020.

People Like Me

People Like Me: In the English-speaking world the Welfare State was born out of two vast historic events, the Great Depression and World War II. The sense of social solidarity engendered by these all-embracing experiences extended the definition of "community" to include everyone who had lived through them - right up to the British Royal Family.

 

IS IT POSSIBLE to renew our social contract without a sense of community?

 

Heather McGhee, who heads up the Washington Office of the UK-based research and advocacy group, Demos, calls it “the great question of our time”.

 

According to the 33-year-old graduate of Yale and the Berkeley Law School, this is because “if you look at all this hostility and anxiety around public solutions, at its root is the anxiety about who the public is. And I think that’s happened because of the real explosion in diversity.”

 

McGhee is not alone in identifying diversity as one of the most potent solvents of the social contract that underpins our Welfare State. But, as a young African-American, she has a better appreciation than most of how all those “hostilities and anxieties” play out in a non-academic context.

 

Because no matter how earnestly we are encouraged (by people like Ms McGhee) to think otherwise, the ordinary person’s understanding of “community” is generally reducible to just three words: “people like me”.

 

In the English-speaking countries the welfare state was born out of two world-shattering events: Economic Depression and Total War. In both situations it proved virtually impossible for ordinary citizens to remain unaffected by the great happenings in which they found themselves entangled, and these common experiences fostered powerful feelings of social solidarity. Everyone could see they were “all in this together” and relying upon one another to make it through to the “broad sunlit uplands” promised by Winston Churchill in the finest hour of that darkest of years – 1940.

 

So pervasive was the impact of the Great Depression that the experiences of poverty and marginalisation began to lose much of their social stigma. Working-class and middle-class citizens alike were winnowed by the near collapse of the capitalist order, and even those whose material well-being remained unaffected – like the Prince of Wales – could see that “something must be done”.

 

And later, when the bombs were falling, that sense of solidarity only grew stronger. In spite of pleas to remove themselves to safety in Canada, the Royal Family refused to leave the capital. When Buckingham Palace was hit during the Blitz, Queen Elizabeth told the press: “Now, at least, I can look the East End in the eye.”

 

On the battlefields, where men of every rank and station quite literally rubbed shoulders, the essential equality of all human-beings was daily demonstrated. The roughest working-class battler could prove himself a bloody hero and the bloodlines of a thousand years produce nothing more than a craven coward. Nobility came not from class or money but from character. In war, only deeds mattered.

 

This, then, was the historical forge in which the welfare state was fashioned. When people used the word ‘community’; when they thought of people like themselves; the picture included everyone from the King and Queen to the local “night-soil” collector. Everyone who had been through the fire together – and come out the other side.

 

To live for longer than that single generation, however, the social contract that had been fashioned in “blood, toil, tears and sweat” would need to be sent to the forge again. A new generation would need to feel the hammer blows of history.

 

Some did.

 

On union picket-lines. Registering voters in the Deep South. Opposing the obscenity of war. Demanding entry for all those who were not “like me”. Envisioning a more diverse and democratic definition of ‘community’.

 

A More Diverse Definition of Community: America answers Amerika. The Pentagon, 21 October 1967.

 

Too few.

 

The moment the social contract was deemed to include people with darker skins and different gods; the moment people’s taxes were doled out to those whose behaviour flouted the values and conventions of the ‘community’; that was when the solidarities born of depression and war began to fade and wither. The mental picture of who was – and was not – “people like me” narrowed radically. Class and money regained their lost prestige and all the old stigmas attached to poverty and marginalisation returned.

 

A social contract is never for “people like them”.

 

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 28 March 2014.

Expendable: Unemployment - Past & Present



Fearful Memories: Recaptured here, for the New Zealand television drama, Life's a Riot, is one of the many anti-eviction protests that wracked Auckland during the 1930s. The Welfare State had been built to ensure such scenes were never repeated. Full employment, everyone knew, was the key to working-class security and dignity.

THE FIGURE STRUCK New Zealand like a bombshell. It had been thirty years since numbers like these had been published. Memories were stirred. Fearful memories of one’s own or one’s parents’ abject surrender to the pitiless forces of an economic system in extremis. It was October 1967 and the number of New Zealanders registered as unemployed had risen to 5,458. Worse was to come, by June the following year the number stood at 8,665.

 

New Zealanders’ horrified reaction to the economic recession of 1967-68 and the rapid rise in unemployment which accompanied it was entirely reasonable. Forty-five years ago people possessed a much clearer understanding of the essential elements underpinning the Welfare State. They knew that it could only be paid for by a workforce that was fully employed and in receipt of incomes sufficiently large to maintain a healthy demand for goods and services. Everyone accepted that any return to mass unemployment would first weaken and then destroy the foundations of the Welfare State.

 

Throughout the 1950s and well into the 1960s the number of New Zealanders registered as unemployed seldom rose above three figures. People used to joke that the Prime Minister knew each unemployed citizen by name. Some economists even advanced the theory that New Zealand suffered from “over-full employment”; that skilled-labour shortages were hampering the country’s economic advancement.

 

Going Up? New Zealand economist Keith Rankin has produced this graph indicating the real levels of unemployment in New Zealand 1950-2000. His calculations factor-in the number of women who could not find a place in the workforce. Even with this important modification, New Zealand's success in keeping its people employed throughout the 1950s, 60s and 70s is remarkable.

 

For ordinary wage and salary-earners, however, full employment stood for personal, family and social security. It also guaranteed a measure of working-class dignity. If an employer treated workers unfairly, or paid them too little, there were always plenty of other employers looking for staff. Bad bosses could be told to stick their jobs where the sun don’t shine, and with more than half of the workforce enrolled in trade unions there wasn’t a helluva lot he could do about it.

 

In rehearsing these facts we are also measuring how very far New Zealand has travelled since the 1960s and 70s. The history of the last thirty years is, in many respects, the history of the slow and deliberate dismantling of the economic and social settlement negotiated by the Labour Party in the 1930s and 40s, and preserved (at least in its essentials) by the National Party right up until the critical year, 1984.

 

In a week which saw the number of unemployed New Zealanders swell to more than 175,000, or 7.3 percent of the workforce, the moral gulf separating 1967 from 2012 appears vast. And yet, had the Government been able to announce that the number of unemployed had fallen to 125,000 it would have been loudly congratulated. To keep the all-important inflation rate within the desired range of 1-3 percent per anum, the unemployment rate needs to be pegged at around 6 percent. That’s how successive New Zealand governments have preferred to manage the economy since the late-1980s – and there’s precious little evidence of a change of heart.

 

Keeping more than 100,000 New Zealanders enlisted in this “Reserve Army of Labour” does, however, require a very considerable hardening of the heart. A political class which can watch with impassive detachment while individuals, families and whole communities are stretched and broken on the rack of enforced idleness is not one that answers to anything but the crudest utilitarianism.

 

The biggest problem these comptrollers of human suffering face are the altruistic impulses of the unemployed’s fellow citizens. The natural human urge to extend a helping hand to those in need (an urge once institutionally embodied in the Labour Party) must be constrained. With the cynicism only the truly emotionally dead are able to wield, the victims of neoliberal economics are transformed into vicious parasites and anti-social monsters: “baby-breeders” and “child abusers” – depraved criminals as unworthy of our pity as they are of our taxes.

 

Having recast these largely innocent victims of capitalist dysfunction as members of the feckless and undeserving poor, it requires cruelty of particular refinement to then order them, on pain of being deprived of life’s necessities, to enrol in a labour market already over-subscribed to the tune of 175,000 souls.

 

It was long ago (1972) and far away (Scotland) that the radical trade unionist, Jimmy Reid, addressed the students of Glasgow University – who had just elected him Rector:

 

“To appreciate fully the inhumanity of [unemployment] you have to see the hurt and despair in the eyes of a man suddenly told he is redundant without provision made for suitable alternative employment … Someone, somewhere has decided he is unwanted, unneeded, and is to be thrown on the industrial scrap heap. From the very depth of my being, I challenge the right of any man or any group of men, in business or in government, to tell a fellow human being that he or she is expendable.”

 

How very, very much we have forgotten in forty years.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 13 November 2012.

The Domain Of Pain

Striking a Balance: How much unnecessary suffering must our fellow citizens endure before we can be persuaded to take action on their behalf?

"THE DISTINCTION between necessary and unnecessary suffering defines the limits of political rationality", writes Dr Maurice Glasman, Director of the London Metropolitan University’s Faith & Citizenship Programme. "In delineating a domain of pain which is amenable to concerted amelioration from a sphere of grief that is immutable, it defines the power of society to respond to the miseries of life."

Ah, yes, Dr Glasman, but where does "the domain of pain" end and "the sphere of grief" begin? At what point, exactly, does it become politically irrational to attempt to ameliorate the pain of one’s fellow citizens? How immutable does a person’s situation have to be before we’re willing to consign her to that hopeless "sphere of grief"?

These were the sort of questions I wrestled with for most of last Friday at a public forum jointly organised by the University of Auckland and the Child Poverty Action Group.

"Rethinking Welfare For The 21st Century" attracted some pretty heavy hitters – most notably two, top-flight Australian academics, Professor Paul Smyth and Dr Peter Saunders, who’d crossed the ditch to add their intellectual firepower to the artillery of the CPAG angels in what is becoming an increasingly bitter social policy debate.

In addition to being Professor of Social Policy at the University of Melbourne, Peter Smyth is also the General Manager of the Research & Policy Centre of the Brotherhood of St Laurence (a Christian socialist outfit founded by the radical Anglican priest, Father G.K Tucker, in the 1930s).

The work of Paul Saunders – former Director of the Social Policy Research Centre at the University of New South Wales – has been focused on the non-monetary indicators of social disadvantage. His research has pushed the concept of "adequacy" to the forefront of contemporary academic discussion about poverty relief.

The visitors’ contributions, like their country of origin, were large and sprawling. Information and statistics were applied impasto to a succession of broad canvasses. Indeed, the aptly named Peter and Paul turned out to be a couple of academic evangelists: "big picture" men, engagingly keen on wrenching the welfare debate from the clutches of the Right and "re-framing" it. They came at their Kiwi audience like Aussie pace-bowlers with a new ball.

It took the presentation of another Australian, Eve Bodsworth, to remind us that in spite of the fact that the "Lucky Country" has so much more wealth to distribute, its success in reducing the quantum of unnecessary suffering is really no greater than our own.

Eve had recorded the experiences of Australian solo mums struggling to navigate their way through the labyrinthine cruelties of state and federal welfare bureaucracies. In the plain speech of these institutionally battered women, the "domain of pain" and the "sphere of grief" were brought vividly and heart-wrenchingly to life.

Their words, and those used later by Kay Brereton of the Wellington People’s Centre, was Reality’s answer to the mumbled neoliberal liturgy of Paula Rebstock with which the forum began.

I suppose it was gutsy of the Chair of the Government’s hand-picked Welfare Working Group to show up at all. Certainly it was valuable to learn exactly how vast is the gulf between the world of the Government’s advisers – and its victims.

Ultimately, of course, the Government’s principal advisers are the people themselves, and it was that singularly inconvenient truth that kept breaking through the presentations of Susan St John, Paul Callister, Keith Rankin, Louise Humpage, Cindy Kiro, Manuka Henare, Mike O’Brien and Sue Bradford.

Seventy years ago, New Zealanders won international acclaim for their "concerted amelioration" of unnecessary suffering. The Welfare State decisively re-defined our society’s capacity to "respond to the miseries of life".

Seventy years after Savage & Fraser, and aided by a quarter-century of neoliberal social-policy, New Zealanders’ "pain threshold" has risen dramatically. And though the good people gathered at last Friday’s forum would be loathe to admit it, the "political rationality" of 21st Century capitalism is much less compromised by social sadism than social justice.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 17 September 2010.

Scrooge's Ghosts

"Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?" The heartless cry of Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol was intended to expose the moral vacuum at the heart of laissez-faire capitalism. The same "airless quality" is present in the first report of the Welfare Working Group. The Painting is Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward by Luke Fildes, 1874. Food and shelter in the "Casual Ward" of the parish workhouse were made available to all comers - but only for a single night.

GORDON CAMPBELL described the report as having a "peculiarly airless quality". It’s authors, hermetically sealed in their ideological cocoon, could have been writing "at any time over the past four decades".

The veteran journalist is right. The report of the Government’s Welfare Working Group (WWG) makes not the slightest attempt to interrogate the flesh and blood world of contemporary unemployment, sole parenting, chronic illness and invalidism. But, then, why would it – when it already knows all the answers?

In the WWG’s own words:

"We have come to the view that the scale and consequences of long-term benefit receipt are deeply concerning and that the system is not achieving what New Zealanders could reasonably expect. It is not sustainable, it does not provide equal and fair opportunities for those people on different benefit types and it is associated with poor social outcomes."

Let’s unpack that extraordinarily dangerous statement.

To begin with, who are the people identified by the WWG Chair, economist Paula Rebstock, as being in "long-term benefit receipt". Overwhelmingly, they are those on sickness, invalids, and domestic purposes benefits: people who can’t work; people whose physical or mental disability makes ordinary paid work impossible; and people engaged in the raising of babies and small children.

What on earth is so "deeply concerning" about providing long-term support to such people? If you’re suffering from a temporary or chronic affliction; if you lack the resources required to look after a young family; then to whom should you appeal for assistance – if not your fellow citizens?

What would be "deeply concerning" is a society which defined sickness, invalidism and sole parenthood as self-inflicted conditions – sins which can only be expiated through the pain of social humiliation and the self-redeeming qualities of unrelenting toil.

The grim workhouses of Victorian England were erected on the flint-hard foundation of these vicious bourgeois prejudices. Deliberately constructed to terrify the poor into righteousness, they were known colloquially as "Bastilles" – after the grim Parisian fortress. So harsh were the regimes within these institutions that many risked death, rather than enter their prison-like gates.

In his celebrated 1843 novella A Christmas Carol, Dickens parodies the harshness of laissez-faire capitalism in the character of Ebenezer Scrooge. Listen to the exchange which a request for a donation to assist the poor provokes:

‘Are there no prisons?’ asked Scrooge.
‘Plenty of prisons,’ said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.
‘And the Union workhouses.’ demanded Scrooge. ‘Are they still in operation?’
‘They are. Still,’ returned the gentleman, ‘I wish I could say they were not.’
‘The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?’ said Scrooge.
‘Both very busy, sir.’
‘Oh. I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,’ said Scrooge. ‘I’m very glad to hear it.’

When pressed, Scrooge’s parsimony turns deadly:

‘I wish to be left alone,’ said Scrooge. ‘Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can't afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned – they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.’
‘Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.’
‘If they would rather die,’ said Scrooge, ‘they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.’

There it is again, that airless quality, which Dickens’s storytelling makes explicit by enveloping Scrooge’s counting house in a dismal and noxious fog.

In the 167 years since A Christmas Carol’s first appearance, the world appears to have turned full circle. By the 1970s the Welfare State, which Mickey Savage described as "applied Christianity," had consigned the workhouse and the treadmill to history’s dustbin. But in the ensuing four decades, as Mr Campbell rightly observes, the noxious fog of laissez-faire capitalism has returned – along with the prejudices of epochs past.

And who will melt the hearts of these modern-day Scrooges?

For all their squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching and covetousness, the Victorians still knew themselves to be sinners, and were thus receptive to Dickens’s marvellous parable of Christian redemption.

In 2010, when only the spirits of Gain and Greed are admitted to Society’s feast, who will risk the WWG’s censure by insisting that we can afford to – and should – "make idle people merry"?

This essay was originally published in The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 13 August 2010.

"Government 2.0" - Returning Power to the Community

Participatory Democracy: In Venezuela the government of Hugo Chavez has fostered the growth of Consejos Comunales - Communal Councils - in an attempt to bypass the formal, state-run bureaucratic structures responsible for administering (badly) the country's rudimentary welfare system. Western welfare systems might also benefit from the competitive challenge of democratic, community-organised service delivery.

FOR NEARLY THIRTY YEARS NOW, and in every country where it succeeded in constructing one, the Left has struggled to defend the Welfare State. For the most part Leftists have campaigned not for the Welfare State as it is, but for the Welfare State as they meant it to be. It’s been a losing strategy. There is simply no sense in battling for a dream, if it means ignoring an increasingly nightmarish reality. In the end, the urgency of ending the nightmare overwhelms the longing to save the dream.

Just how nightmarish the reality of the modern welfare state has become is clearly evident in the places that were intended to be its most potent and persuasive expression: public housing projects. In the sunny optimism of the early post-war era these municipal- and state-facilitated developments were envisaged as islands of rational planning and design in a sea of privately organised squalor.

In Britain’s "new towns", America’s "projects", and New Zealand’s state-house suburbs there was, to quote the rhapsodic rhetoric of New Zealand’s National Film Unit, "space for sunlight". Seventy years on, the reality is immeasurably darker. Where they still exist (many having been, quite literally, blown-up) these vast experiments in public housing have become by-words for appalling social dysfunction.

Built to free the poor from the rack-renting private landlord, social housing swiftly degenerated into a convenient spatial fix for the problem of how to keep the races and classes separate. By herding the lowest of the low into discrete geographical corrals, and maintaining them out of the public purse, the upwardly mobile sectors of post-war capitalist society (and their rising incomes) were made available to the private sector.

What the architects of the Welfare State had confidently predicted would become the benchmarks for rational and socially uplifting urban living, rapidly degenerated into their opposite. High-rise ghettos for the frail and impecunious; or sprawling internment camps for the immigrant labour which now performed the tasks that "white men" wouldn’t do; it made little difference: public housing was something to flee.

I see it every time I go for a walk around my neighbourhood.

The state-housing developments in the Auckland suburb of Three Kings were among the very first to be constructed, and in their day (the late-1930s) they far outstripped the low-cost efforts of private developers. By the 1960s and 70s, however, Three Kings was characterised colourfully by National Party canvassers as "Tiger Country": one of those places where geography and class combined to render middle-class proselytising next-to-impossible.

It’s a lot easier now. Thanks to National’s 1990s policy of selling-off a significant proportion of the nation’s public housing stock, Three Kings is being transformed. The bleak uniformity of the old publicly-owned subdivision is steadily giving way to the remodelled, repainted and tastefully landscaped effects of state-house gentrification. In the last election, for the first time, National’s Party Vote in the Mt Roskill electorate exceeded Labour’s.

Why did the state fail so spectacularly to live up to the expectations of those optimistic social-democrats (and socialists) who entrusted it with the citizenry’s welfare? The answer lies in what might be described as the "authoritarian personality" of state-run institutions – they are totally obsessed with the exercise of power and control.

This is hardly surprising – given that the state itself is, fundamentally, a coercive political instrument. Regardless of whether it directs the activities of a capitalist, socialist, or "mixed" economy, the state’s coercive instincts render it utterly unwilling to entrust the running of its institutions to the citizens they’re intended to serve. Public housing projects in the Soviet Bloc were as bleak and unresponsive to their tenants aspirations as any London "Council Estate" or New Zealand state-house suburb.

Tim O’Reilly, the founder and CEO of the computer book publisher O’Reilly Media, and the man who, in 2004, coined the expression "Web 2.0", would probably refer to the instrumental state – its basic functioning modelled on the machine – as "Government 1.0".

As he argues in "It’s All About The Platform", a guest posting on the TechCrunch website: "Too often, we think of government as a kind of vending machine. We put in our taxes, and get out services: roads, bridges, hospitals, fire brigades, police protection … And when the vending machine doesn’t give us what we want, we protest. Our idea of citizen engagement has somehow been reduced to shaking the vending machine."

While O’Reilly’s focus is predominantly on the IT aspects of government/citizen interaction, his deep understanding of the architecture of complex computer software has given him a new and very interesting perspective on the political architecture for the state.

"Imagine if the [state] were to re-imagine itself not as a vending machine but as an organising engine for civic action … Can we imagine a new compact between government and the public, in which government puts in place mechanisms for services that are delivered not by government, but by private citizens? In other words, can government become a platform?"

Could this "government-as-platform" idea constitute the kernel of a new left-wing dream? After all, it’s a reasonably straightforward matter these days to set up a commercial company on-line, so why not a community-based organisation dedicated to looking after the more vulnerable individuals and families in one’s neighbourhood – up to and including the construction of pensioner and other specialised housing stock?

The state would provide the basic resources (premises, plant and labour) but subject to the general organisational rules and auditing requirements laid-down by Parliament, the deployment of those resources would be undertaken locally and, most importantly, democratically.

Not surprisingly – when you consider who has been on the receiving end of the welfare nightmare these past fifty years – Maori New Zealanders are already leading the way with this mode of community-based service delivery, but there’s nothing to stop the rest of New Zealand society from joining them. The REACs (Regional Employment & Access Councils) of the late-1980s stand as a tentative (if disappointingly undemocratic) precedent.

Social welfare was supposed to free the citizen from the tutelage of private power, but ended up replacing the limited domination of the boss and the landlord with the absolute authority of the state. "Government 2.0" offers to restore the link between Liberty and Progress. If it was only willing to shake off the nightmare of the authoritarian state, what couldn’t a Libertarian Left dream into existence?

This essay was originally published in The Independent of Thursday, 17 September 2009.