Petrol Pump Politics.

Unaffordable?  Labour supporters should brace themselves for a National Party-driven social media campaign built around the slogan: “At $2.40 a litre, we can’t afford Jacinda.” Re-cycled though this catch-phrase may be, for Kiwis on low incomes paying far too much for gas it’s likely to have a catchy ring to it. (And anyone on the Labour team thinking about telling these folk to “go electric” should, perhaps, recall the effect on the breadless masses of the thoughtless suggestion that they should consider eating cake!)

“AT A DOLLAR a gallon we can’t afford Rowling.” Given his latest media release (8/10/18)  “Government Pricing Kiwis Out Of Their Cars”, someone’s obviously been schooling up young Simon Bridges on the way Rob Muldoon smashed Labour in 1975.

[Bill Rowling, for all you millennials out there, was the Labour Prime Minister of New Zealand from September 1974 until December 1975, and a gallon (4.5 litres) was the unit of measure at the petrol pump. So, yes, you’re right, the motorists of 1975 paid roughly a tenth of what we pay today to fill up our tanks! – C.T.]

But even back when petrol was only a dollar a gallon, Kiwi motorists were hurting. Ever since the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, during which Egypt and Syria came within an ace of destroying the State of Israel, the price of oil had soared. Saudi Arabia and the other Arab oil-exporters had imposed an embargo on the USA and its allies for resupplying the Israelis with arms and ammunition. The resulting price-hikes delivered a stunning blow to the Western economy. The so-called “Oil Shocks” of 1973-79 marked the end of the Great Post-War Boom. Almost overnight, New Zealanders – along with just about everyone else in the Western World – lost confidence in the future. Even worse, they began casting about for someone to blame.

Hence, the National Party’s propaganda blaming soaring oil prices on Bill Rowling. Of course, anybody who had been following current affairs over the previous two years knew perfectly well that National was peddling what today we would call “fake news”. But, those weren’t the people Muldoon was after. The voters he was seeking to enlist alongside National’s habitual supporters were the disoriented, frustrated and just flat-out angry working-class Kiwis who were struggling to work out what had all-of-a-sudden gone wrong with their world.

Like the former Democratic Party supporters backing Trump in 2016, these bewildered Labour voters found it increasingly difficult to identify with “their” party. Labour was supposed to stand for “the working man” and his values, but now, following the tragic death of that quintessential working-class battler, “Big Norm” Kirk in August 1974, the party was led by a training-college lecturer. What’s more, he and his colleagues were advancing policies which seemed to have more in common with the demands of the long-haired hippies and protesters in the streets than they did with the “ordinary Kiwi joker” and his concerns. Not the least of these being the soaring price of petrol.

Muldoon and his campaign advisers were only too aware of the culture war that was brewing in the Labour Party and they couldn’t wait to exploit it.

Over the course of the 1960s and 70s, Labour’s membership had dwindled. The party branches were peopled predominantly by people who may have been young and radical in the 1930s and 40s but who were now very settled in their ways – and views – which tended towards the socially conservative. Many Labour stalwarts were Roman Catholics, Baptists and Salvation Army members. They bitterly resented the small but active groups of liberals and radicals who had begun drifting into Labour from 1969 onwards. They were seen as middle-class carpet-baggers without the slightest idea of what it meant to be a working-class Kiwi.

These were the people for whom National’s election slogan, “New Zealand the way YOU want it”, was created. The people who had begun to feel neglected, misunderstood and even a little bit despised by the people at the top of the Labour Party – and their intellectual friends. Some of the more prominent of these had banded together in the group called “Citizens for Rowling”. In the ears of a great many Kiwis, that sounded a lot more like “Citizens Against Muldoon”.

It was a huge strategic error on the part of Labour’s hifalutin supporters. Instead of turning people against the pugnacious National leader, it drew them towards him. Just as liberal America’s hatred of Trump only served to entrench his support among aggrieved Americans without college degrees or six-figure salaries, Labour’s near-obsession with Rob Muldoon proved to be one of the key factors in the growth of “Rob’s Mob”. This was the peculiar assemblage of “ordinary blokes and blokesses” for whom Muldoon felt more like a Labour leader than the thoroughly decent but doggedly uninspiring Rowling.

Forty years on, Labour supporters should brace themselves for a National Party-driven social media campaign built around the slogan: “At $2.40 a litre, we can’t afford Jacinda.” Second-hand though it may be, it’s bound to acquire some measure of political purchase. How could it not when, for Kiwis on low incomes, $2.40 a litre for gas is just one more burden for them to bear. (And anyone on the Labour team thinking about telling these folk to “go electric” should, perhaps, recall the effect on the breadless masses of the thoughtless suggestion that they should consider eating cake!)

National’s big problem is that Simon Bridges is not Rob Muldoon. Bridges simply does not possess Muldoon’s ability to inspire both confidence and hope, fear and dread. Nor is Jacinda Ardern even remotely like Bill Rowling. The latter always came across as the person for whom the saying “nice guys finish last” was invented. And although stardust was intermittently available to politicians back in 1975, the historical record makes it very clear that nobody ever got so much as a speck of it to Bill.

About the only thing Bridges has got going for him is that, unlike the 1973-79 oil shocks, the steady rise in the price of petrol over the period 2018-2021 cannot be sheeted home to greedy Arab oil magnates. This time, a large measure of it is Labour’s own work.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 9 October 2018.

The Ultimate Guarantor.

Don't Mess With Me! The knowledge that a nation possesses nuclear weapons is usually enough to dissuade its enemies from launching any kind of attack or invasion. For those unfortunate states caught in the cross-hairs of the great powers, it is difficult to imagine a stronger incentive to risk everything on acquiring the ultimate guarantor of national independence.

 

WITH THE IMPORTANT EXCEPTION of Israel, no nation in possession of nuclear weapons has ever been invaded. It is difficult to conceive of a better incentive for any state threatened with aggression to risk everything for the deadly technology History has taught it to esteem as the ultimate guarantor of national independence.

 

Exactly how many nuclear weapons Israel possessed when she was attacked by her Arab neighbours in 1973 is unclear, but she certainly possessed some. Exactly how close she came to using them, however, remains even more historically hazy.

 

To the south, the Israelis had the buffer of the Sinai Peninsula in which to absorb Egypt’s thrust across the Suez Canal. In the north, however, the situation was much more fraught. Had the Israeli Defence Force not been able to halt the advance of Syria’s armoured columns in the first 72 hours of the Yom Kippur War, Prime Minister Golda Meir may have concluded that she had no choice except to threaten Damascus and Cairo with obliteration if hostilities were not halted immediately and their troops withdrawn.

 

In the deadly chess game that is nuclear strategy, the very possibility that Israel might feel obliged to make such a threat, required the United States to signal that a nuclear counter-threat against Israel, issued by the Soviet Union in defence of its Arab allies, would not be countenanced. That signal took the form of advancing the US armed forces to DEFCON 3 – a “Defence Condition” positioned just two perilously short steps away from Armageddon.

 

The Nearest Run Thing You Ever Saw: The Israeli PM, Golda Meir and her Defence Minister, Moshe Dyan, visit the Golan Heights in the hours following the Syrian army's thwarted attack. Had things gone differently, Israel's leaders would have been forced to threaten the use of its small stockpile of nuclear weapons.

 

Fortunately for the world, the Russians were not about to initiate World War III on behalf of Egypt and Syria. With the benefit of hindsight it is also clear that the mere possibility of an Israeli nuclear strike was sufficient for the leaders of Egypt and Syria to limit their military and diplomatic objectives to the restoration of Sinai and the Golan Heights, and the Israeli evacuation of the West Bank and Gaza.

 

In the light of these facts, the Israeli case is not as exceptional as it might, at first, appear. Even when they possessed the military resources to launch a war of annihilation against the State of Israel, the Egyptians and the Syrians dared not do so. No one doubts the willingness of the Jewish people to defend themselves against a second genocide with every weapon at their disposal – including Israel’s atomic bombs. Like the biblical hero Samson, Israel, in extremis, will not hesitate to bring down the Temple upon the heads of its enemies – even at the cost of being crushed itself.

 

These lessons in invulnerability were not lost on Israel’s middle-eastern neighbours. Does anyone seriously suppose that the United States and the United Kingdom would have launched a conventional invasion of Iraq if Saddam Hussein had possessed even a small stockpile of nuclear weapons? And is anyone truly surprised that the revolutionary government of the Islamic Republic of Iran very early on began diverting resources to what Israel and the United States were convinced was an all-out effort to create a nuclear arsenal?

 

That Iran has been persuaded to abandon its, geopolitically-speaking, extremely strategically destabilising nuclear-weapons programme, is not due entirely to the United Nations’ crippling economic sanctions. The Iranians have witnessed the exemplary fate of, first, the Iraqi, and then the Syrian, attempts to construct and operate a nuclear reactor capable of enriching Uranium and/or producing weapons-grade Plutonium.

 

The Israelis call it the “Begin Doctrine” – after Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who, in 1981, authorised a pre-emptive air-strike against Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor at Osirak. Begin described Osirak’s successful destruction as “anticipatory self-defence at its best”. In 2007 the Israelis did it again. “Operation Orchard” utterly destroyed the nuclear reactor constructed (with North Korean assistance) in the remote Deir ez-Zor region of Syria.

 

Although the Iranians took the precaution of locating most of their nuclear facilities deep underground, their military chiefs were never entirely convinced that the Israelis wouldn’t deploy tactical nuclear weapons to take them out. The bloodthirsty threats of Israel’s hard-line Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu (whose bellicosity frightens even his own generals!) upped-the-ante still further. In 2015, sanctioned and intimidated, the Iranians finally abandoned their bid for the ultimate guarantor.

 

One question, however, remains. Does Israel’s acceptance of Iran’s diplomatic assurances have anything to do with Pakistan’s possession of nuclear weapons?

 

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, 22 January 2016.