They Say We Want A Revolution – But Do We?

The Writing's On The Wall - But Who's Wielding The Spray Can?  There are those who, remembering the bitter political turmoil of the Rogernomics Era, have enquired, gently, of Labour’s apparatchiks as to whether they might be getting just a little too far ahead of the voters on the issues of bi-culturalism and climate change.

IF IT FEELS like a revolution is happening all around you, then you’re not far wrong. The New Zealand state is on the verge of unleashing profound and irreversible changes. The sort of lifestyles New Zealanders have grown accustomed to are themselves now living on borrowed time. Not that anyone in authority has thought to ask the New Zealand people if such stonking radicalism is what they want. It’s not that sort of revolution.

We’ve been here before, of course. Thirty-seven years ago New Zealand was subjected to “The Quiet Revolution” of “Rogernomics”. It, too, ushered-in a raft of profound and irreversible changes without so much as a constitutional by-your-leave. We were told that there was no alternative, that the Fourth Labour Government’s “reforms” could not be avoided. All would be well, however, Labour reassured New Zealanders. Out of all this short-term pain, the nation’s long-term gain was guaranteed.

Think about that promise the next time you step over a homeless rough-sleeper begging on the pavement, or pass by the fogged-up windows of a car in which one of your fellow citizens is trying to sleep. Ask yourself how far down the social pyramid the Quiet Revolution’s long-term gain ended up trickling. How keen are you, really, for another round of life-altering changes imposed upon the people living at the bottom, by the people living at the top?

Sometimes the way History unfolds makes you laugh out loud. As a “free-marketeer” of no mean ability (the man has a PhD from the prestigious Wharton School of Business) Rod Carr could contemplate the installation of cash registers in public hospitals without flinching. Thirty years later, an equally rigorous Rod Carr (having swapped his corporate tie for a finely carved piece of pounamu) is advising the Government to tackle the challenges of Climate Change by transforming New Zealand society from top to bottom. Once again were being told to suck-up the certainty of short-term pain – this time for the planet’s (theoretical) long-term gain.

Not that Dr Carr’s revolution is the only instance of transformational change in motion. Although no one in the Labour Government is yet willing to admit it, the process of reconfiguring New Zealand’s key institutions in conformity with the Maori self-government (rangatiratanga) promises enshrined in te Tiriti o Waitangi is already well advanced. Get ready for comprehensive cultural and constitutional upheavals.

Once bitten, twice shy, however. There are those who, remembering the bitter political turmoil of the Rogernomics Era, have enquired, gently, of Labour’s apparatchiks as to whether they might be getting just a little too far ahead of the voters on the issues of bi-culturalism and climate change.

Not a bit of it! Labour’s people are not only supremely confident that they are right, but also that they possess more than enough in the way of persuasive power to “sell” their revolution to their admittedly more hesitant compatriots. They will simply not be told that phasing out New Zealanders’ beloved utes and SUVs, and changing the country’s name to Aotearoa without bothering to hold a referendum (which John Key was careful enough to do in relation to the New Zealand flag) is not quite the same as “going hard and going early” on Covid-19. Kiwis rewarded Jacinda for keeping them safe. They may not be quite so inclined to vote for a party that makes them feel “deplorable” or, even worse, cancelled.

The Labour Government’s confidence is undoubtedly boosted by what might best be called the “awokening” of the mainstream New Zealand news media. Trapped in the coils of “confirmation bias”, Labour’s strategists are clearly finding it impossible to grasp how emotionally jarring much of the news media has become to New Zealanders who have yet to graduate with honours in Critical Race Theory, speak Te Reo with the insufferable fluency of Guyon Espiner, or learn to feel dutifully re-educated upon hearing Otepoti substituted for Dunedin, or Kirikiriroa for Hamilton.

Having the media so obviously “on side” isn’t always the advantage politicians believe it to be. Labour would be wise to remember the Trump rally where the audience were invited to turn and confront “the lying media”; the purveyors of “fake news”; the “enemies of the people”.

Revolutions from the top down have a nasty habit of inspiring insurrections from the bottom up – and they’re not always “progressive”.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 25 June 2021.

How Powerful Is Labour's Maori Caucus?

You're Move: What would a genuinely powerful Maori Caucus do? What policies would it insist upon? More to the point, since the single most important question in politics is always “Or you’ll what?”, does the Maori Caucus possess the wherewithal to enforce its demands?

THAT LABOUR’S MAORI CAUCUS is potentially powerful cannot be doubted. It is large, has a strong leader in Willie Jackson, and is surrounded by well-meaning Pakeha progressives who struggle to say “No” to its demands. For Maori, it is difficult to imagine a more encouraging political environment.

The key metric, however, will be what the Maori Caucus is able to deliver. Creating Maori wards is not the same as creating jobs. Building support for profound constitutional change in Aotearoa-New Zealand is not the same as building houses. Labour  reclaimed the Maori seats in 2017 by re-presenting itself as the party that cared about the basics: jobs, homes, education and health. In 2020 it started losing them again for not caring enough.

What, then, would a genuinely powerful Maori Caucus do? What policies would it insist upon? More to the point, since the single most important question in politics is always “Or you’ll what?”: does the Maori Caucus possess the wherewithal to enforce its demands?

In case you’re wondering what sort of threats a powerful Labour Party faction might make get its own way, here’s a story from Labour’s past.

Way back in 1988, when it began to look as though the Labour Left had acquired sufficient clout within the party organisation to start de-selecting the leading lights of the “Rogernomics” faction – starting with Richard Prebble in Auckland Central – the reaction was swift and brutal. According to Matt McCarten, upwards of 17 “Rogernomes” told the leadership of the party organisation that, faced with de-selections, they would quit the party altogether and collapse the government. The leaders of the trade unions were cowed by a different threat. They were told that unless they “persuaded” their younger activists (like Matt McCarten) to pull their heads in, then the crucial protection of compulsory membership would be legislated away. Not to be outdone, Prebble himself obtained a court injunction against the NZ Council of his own party which, essentially, secured the status-quo in the Auckland Central seat. Needless to say, the party caved-in to every one of the “Rogernomics” faction’s demands.

That’s what a powerful faction looks like – that is what it can do.

Which raises the obvious questions: “Is the Maori Caucus that powerful?”, and, “Is it willing to go that far?”

On the evidence to date, the answer to both of those questions is “No.”

Were the Maori Caucus as absolutely determined to see their policies enacted as those ruthless Rogernomes, they would long ago have issued a démarche to Jacinda Ardern and Grant Robertson on the vexed questions of welfare and housing – issues of critical significance to Maori, and precisely the sort of issues that Labour candidates in the Maori seats had promised to address hard and early. They would have pointed out to their Pakeha colleagues the huge risks attached to not making progress quickly in both areas. Their people were suffering and Labour would be judged by how quickly and how comprehensively it tackled the closely related problems of poverty and homelessness.

Had any of their colleagues been foolhardy enough to put the question: “Or you’ll what?” The cold political logic of their position dictates a very obvious reply. “Or we’ll abandon the Labour Party and offer ourselves to the Maori Party. From a relatively powerless two MPs, the Maori Party’s parliamentary strength will swell to 15 MPs – without whose votes Jacinda’s government will hang by a thread – held by Marama Davidson.”

If Labour fails to deliver for Maori, then the Maori Party will be the prime beneficiary of the Maori Caucus’s inability to secure the assistance of their Pakeha colleagues. Labour’s Maori MPs will, accordingly, be replaced by politicians much more willing to exercise the leverage made possible by their party’s possession of the Maori seats. If the Maori Caucus can’t follow this logic, and if it is unwilling to act on it, then how powerful is it, really?

Sadly, the fact that none of the recommendations of the Welfare Expert Advisory Group (WEAG) have been fully implemented; and that the necessary mobilisation of state resources required to get on top of a waiting-list for social housing which now exceeds 22,000 has not been ordered; strongly suggests that, when it comes to delivering the basics, the members of the Maori Caucus have proved to be no more effective than the Maori Party MPs who opted to throw in their lot with John Key’s National Party.

This conclusion is only strengthened when the Maori Caucus’s policy victories are analysed. Such budgetary successes as they have been able to rustle-up were modest: the sort of sums that will keep a programme or two going for a couple of years; nothing more. Unable to unlock the funds necessary for genuine transformation, Labour’s Maori MPs – just like the Maori Party MPs before them – have opted to settle for fiscally undemanding victories on the cultural front. The most obvious of these being the new, compulsory history curriculum, and the legislative facilitation of Maori wards in local government.

While these cultural “wins” may not be all that costly, fiscally-speaking, they have the potential to unleash an electorally expensive political backlash from aggrieved Pakeha voters. The tumult surrounding the foreshore and seabed legislation generated an electoral response that came perilously close to delivering power to a National Party leader pledged to diminish the Treaty of Waitangi, quash the whole notion of a Treaty “partnership” and abolish the Maori seats. That was a very big bullet for Maori to have dodged. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that conservative Pakeha are going to keep on missing.

If the Maori Caucus has set its sights on bringing forward some, or all, of the constitutional changes arising out of the consultation exercise headed-up by Moana Jackson, then it is likely to encounter the same polite refusals that John Key offered to Tariana Turia and Pita Sharples. Progressive Pakeha MPs are known to talk a good game when it comes to the Treaty and Te Reo, but they are also acutely aware that this is still the Crown’s country – and the Crown does not share power. Neither is a Labour government which owes its absolute parliamentary majority to the votes of “Middle New Zealand” – i.e. Middle-Class Pakeha New Zealanders – likely to embrace policies radical enough to frighten them back to National.

Back in 1988, the Rogernomes were so convinced that their policies were what New Zealand needed that they were willing to abandon their party and destroy their government rather than see their achievements watered down or rolled back. How convinced is the Maori Caucus that its policies are what their people need? And how far are they willing to go to make sure that the bi-cultural future they’re seeking is not, once again, put on hold?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 23 February 2021.

Defining Issues

Courtroom Drama: There is no off-switch in a courtroom. Neither is it possible to turn the page in disgust. Ill-formed and ill-defended opinions will be exposed ruthlessly and unapologetically. As Shakespeare put it: “Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving.” Sometimes the best course of action is to take no action at all.

UNFOLDING, IN A WELLINGTON COURTROOM, is a drama which speaks directly to the defining issues of our time. What is racism? How central is racial discrimination to the moral deficiencies of our society? What is Hate Speech? More importantly, what is the relationship between Hate Speech and Free Speech? And, lastly, what sanctions – if any – should be imposed upon those whose opinions give widespread offence?

It is, of course, forbidden to comment upon the rights and wrongs of a trial in progress. My apologies, then, to all those anticipating a right royal roasting of either the plaintiff, or the defendant, or both, in the matter of Sir Robert Jones versus Renae Maihi.

What can be observed of defamation cases in general, however, is that it is possible to be too protective of one’s good name. A court of law is a fearsome and dangerous place for those unaccustomed to having their ideas and opinions publicly scrutinised and dissected by persons whose ability to marshal and present contrary evidence has been honed by years of legal training and experience. There is no off-switch in a courtroom. Neither is it possible to turn the page in disgust. Ill-formed and ill-defended opinions will be exposed ruthlessly and unapologetically. As Shakespeare put it: “Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving.” Sometimes the best course of action is to take no action at all.

Let us then turn, then, to the broader issues at play in that Wellington courtroom: Racism, Hate Speech, Free Speech, and the most effective response to willful offensiveness.

Increasingly, in this country, as in other countries dominated by Europeans, racism is being viewed as the fundamental driver of social, economic and political injustice. Fifty years ago this was not the case. For most of the Twentieth Century, unequal class relations were deemed to be the primary cause of injustice. With the demise of actually existing socialism, however, and the global triumph of neoliberal capitalism, class inequality has become, to paraphrase Lord Alfred Douglas: the lack of love that dare not speak its name.

The neoliberal ruling-class, with considerable political finesse, has tapped into the energy once devoted to uplifting the working-class (within whose ranks are many, many people of colour) and diverted it into identifying and demanding atonement for the sins of slavery and colonisation committed by the ancestors of contemporary Europeans. The process of elevating racism to the status of the West’s original and abiding sin was greatly assisted by the inspirational examples of Martin Luther King’s non-violent campaign for African-American civil rights, and the African National Congress’s four-decades-long struggle against Apartheid. The impact of these historical struggles on the indigenous victims of European colonialism was direct and enduring.

The development of Maori nationalism in New Zealand offers an excellent example of the process. As the neoliberal experiment gathered momentum in Aotearoa, the formerly close ties between Maori, the traditional left and the trade unions were broken. By the early 1990s, what Dr Elizabeth Rata has dubbed “neo-tribal capitalism” was rapidly transforming Maori nationalism into a vital political adjunct to the all-conquering neoliberal project. The nightmare of working-class Maori and Pakeha making common cause against what was fast becoming a strategically bi-cultural ruling-class faded away, to be replaced by the new and rapidly expanding Maori middle-class’s scorn for the irredeemably racist redneckery of the Pakeha proletariat.

In this context, any unabashed expression of white ethnic chauvinism is almost always construed by Pakeha intellectuals as an unforgivable affront to the state’s steadily evolving anti-racist and decolonisation projects. For those Maori deeply embedded in these processes, however, such reiterations of white supremacist ideology are a godsend. Every such outburst reinforces the anti-racist and decolonisation critique and highlights the baked-in character of the colonisers’ prejudices.

Why then condemn such racially charged outbursts as “Hate Speech” and seek to punish its purveyors? Surely, by constantly exposing their racism, white supremacists provide ongoing and invaluable confirmation of the colonisers’ moral deficiencies? This may well be true, but it’s also irrelevant. The decolonisation process can only be advanced in an environment of hair-trigger outrage and demonstrable indigenous distress. Racism must, therefore, be confronted and condemned whenever and wherever it raises its ugly head, and the offending and offensive racists held accountable for the harm they have inflicted.

It is, accordingly, entirely unsurprising that the liberal-democrats’ passionate defence of the citizen’s right to freedom of expression is viewed as a serious obstacle to the success of the anti-racist and decolonisation projects. At the core of the free speech argument is the proposition that every citizen is obliged to uphold the right of every other citizen – even those whose views fundamentally contradict their own most cherished beliefs – to express their opinions freely and without the fear of any retribution beyond their opponents’ vigorous refutation.

The problems begin when the vigorous refutation of offensive speech is no longer considered sufficient. When the paucity of intellect and the absence of evidence so obvious in the arguments put forward by the racially prejudiced cease to be the best reason for fair-minded people to reject not only the content of those arguments, but also the morally dubious claims of the people making them. When the citizenry, in their confusing and contradictory entirety, are deemed inadequate to the task of determining the proper shape of their society and its future. When the responsibilities of government are entrusted exclusively to those powerful enough to determine which opinions are “correct”. And when those who deviate from such opinions are subjected to the full rigors of the law. At that point, it is possible to give these problems a name.

Totalitarianism.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 13 February 2020.

Biculturalism Is A Lie.

Power Grab: With the benefit of hindsight, it is possible to argue that the economic, administrative, social and cultural institutions mandated by New Zealand’s much-praised bicultural project were simultaneously a means of releasing political pressure and mechanisms for securing the control of Maori, by Maori.

WHAT DO WE do now? For more than forty years, the New Zealand State has embraced the idea of biculturalism and attempted to give it legal and administrative force. Beginning with the Waitangi Tribunal in the mid-1970s, and proceeding through the host of consequent bicultural building blocks, “official” New Zealand has doggedly claimed to be moving beyond its colonialist origins and towards the new hybrid, Pakeha/Maori, nation the biculturalists insisted was possible. Except that, more than forty years into the process, we are required to acknowledge that biculturalism is a lie.

The brute facts of the Pakeha/Maori relationship: a grim record of Maori disadvantage and marginalisation; have proved highly resistant to meaningful improvement. The official pursuit of the bicultural ideal may have created a Maori middle-class dedicated to its advancement, but only at considerable cost. As that Maori middle-class grew, the Maori working-class – once large, well-organised, and well-paid – shrank, and in its place there arose a sprawling Maori underclass. Imprisoned in poverty, and the multitude of social dysfunctions which economic deprivation spawns, the Maori underclass has become the prime generator of the most malign social statistics – and they are getting worse.

The great historical irony of this situation is that it mirrors almost exactly the fate of Maori in the aftermath of the first great assertion of the colonial state’s interests over those of the indigenous population. In the decades following the Land Wars of the 1860s, the overwhelming majority of Maori were reduced to a state of abject poverty and subjected to the most rigorous control by the triumphant settler state. A thin layer of Maori leaders mediated this grossly unjust relationship, brokering the survival of their people with the only indigenous asset the Pakeha had ever truly valued – their ever-dwindling stock of Maori land.

The only upside of this grim situation was that the country was so thinly populated that it was still possible for Maori – concentrated overwhelmingly in rural New Zealand – to sustain themselves as they had learned to do in pre-European centuries.

This ceased to be an option for the increasing number of Maori drawn into the cities by the steady advance of New Zealand’s secondary industries following the Second World War. This massive migration did, however, bring Maori into close contact with the Pakeha trade unions which were, in their turn, closely aligned with the Labour Party. Labour’s electoral pact with the millennial politico-religious movement created by Wiremu Ratana, forged in the mid-1930s, was powerfully reinforced by the steady growth of the Maori working-class.

For a period of roughly 30 years, Maori workers’ votes played a critical role in the struggle between Left and Right. Their economic importance within New Zealand’s import-substituting and meat-processing industries had made Maori politically influential in a way not seen since the 1840s and 50s.

It was not to last. By the late-1980s, globalisation and the neoliberal revolution it spawned was wiping out the industries upon which Maori communities, both urban and rural, had come to depend. Once again, it became necessary for the Settler State to both contain and control the indigenous victims of Pakeha capitalism’s “creative destruction”.

The New Zealand State’s quest for bicultural harmony takes on a very different character when viewed from this perspective. With the benefit of hindsight, it is possible to argue that the economic, administrative, social and cultural institutions mandated by New Zealand’s much-praised bicultural project were simultaneously a means of releasing political pressure and mechanisms for securing the control of Maori, by Maori.

By indigenising at least some of the processes required to prevent the Maori underclass from exploding, the Settler State was once again able to rely upon a thin layer of Maori intermediaries to blunt the sting of racial and economic pain. The location of colonial oppression may have shifted from the devastated rohe of the defeated iwi, to the state-owned slums of New Zealand’s largest cities, but the time-honoured imperial policy of divide and rule remained the same.

And so we are treated to the awful spectacle of a terrified young Maori mother being confronted by a group of implacable Maori social-workers determined to ‘uplift’ her tiny child. And, just as happened all those years ago, it has required all the efforts of courageous Maori leaders to first defuse and then resolve the situation.

While “we” look on – appalled.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 21 June 2019.

Welcome To Middle Earth

Re-imagining New Zealand: Forty years of official biculturalism and assertive indigeneity have failed to suppress the colonisers' desire to refashion their new world in the image of the old. In this regard, "Middle Earth" has proved to be a much more comfortable cultural fit than "Aotearoa".

 

ONE HUNDRED PERCENT Middle Earth. That’s how the tourism industry has decided to promote New Zealand. Our national airline has even contributed one of its airliners, emblazoned nose to tail with images from The Hobbit movie, to elevate the promotional cause. This flying billboard will wow those attending the film’s “red carpet” premiere with a low-level fly-past.

 

Asked by a local journalist for his response to Air New Zealand’s generosity, an executive from the movie’s maker, Warner Bros, didn’t know whether to laugh out loud or titter. His consternation is understandable. Very few countries have been as willing to abase themselves quite so completely to the “soft-power” of Hollywood as we poor deluded Kiwis.

 

Having successfully persuaded New Zealand’s government to re-word its labour and immigration laws to industry specifications, increase its financial incentives and provide Warner Bros with millions of dollars’ worth of free publicity, the Hollywood moguls should be blushing with shame. More likely they’re kicking themselves for not demanding more.

 

And considering what we’ve been willing to do unasked – who could blame them! A friend of mine, returning from a trip to the United States, told me of his cringing embarrassment upon discovering that Air New Zealand’s passenger safety instructional video now doubles as a trailer for The Hobbit (complete with the Gollum character crawling up the aisle in search of  his “Prescioussss” – presumably the nearest exit!)

 

Why are we doing this to ourselves? Why are we so quick to dismiss even the slightest criticism of the Middle Earth franchise? How has The Hobbit’s director, Sir Peter Jackson, acquired such a powerful grip upon the public’s imagination and affection, and thus upon the direction of Government policy? What has caused a little nation located in the South Pacific to expend so much time, energy and money transforming itself into a bucolic version of medieval England?

 

Perhaps, after nearly forty years of official decolonisation, Sir Peter’s masterful adaptation of Tolkien’s masterpieces has opened a long-locked door to the colonisers’ cultural storehouse. Most New Zealanders are, when all is said and done, English speakers and (as Maori have been telling us for nearly forty years) culture and language are inextricably linked.

 

Transported half way across the planet our ancestors lost little time in reshaping Aotearoa’s natural landscape with flora and fauna appropriate to their vocabulary. And alongside the oaks and elms, sheep and cattle they’d introduced, they also constructed churches, schools, town halls and railway stations designed to “age” their young colony. It’s why the centre of Christchurch used to, and the heart of Dunedin still does, look like it’s stood there for centuries.

 

Ageing The Colony: St Andrew's Presbyterian Church, Auckland: "A baroque tower in Symonds Street that appears to have stood there since 1730." (Photo by Chris Harris)

 

Two great waves of cultural change have laid much of this “Better Britain” flat. The first was the wave of brutal modernist architecture which reduced the neo-classical and Gothic buildings of our Victorian forebears to rubble. And as modernism flattened New Zealand’s constructed landscape, so the second great wave: officially sanctioned bi-culturalism and assertive indigeneity; deconstructed its fondest cultural assumptions and undermined its intellectual confidence.

 

This great laying to waste of the West’s best stories, which goes by the name of Post-Modernism, is described by the social theorist, Frederic Jameson, as “the cultural logic of late-capitalism”. It’s most devastating characteristic is its power to dissolve boundaries. High and popular culture mingle promiscuously in the post-modern societies of the 21^st Century; as do past and present, fact and fiction, science and religion.

 

Sir Peter Jackson floats freely in this post-modern world – as his mischievous 1995 faux documentary, Forgotten Silver, made very clear. Who better, then, to overlay Tolkien’s Middle Earth upon a New Zealand landscape already transformed by the ecological imperialism of its Victorian colonisers? The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and now The Hobbit, may “only” be movies, but that has not prevented them from turning Mt Ngaurahoe into “Mt Doom” and Matamata into “Hobbiton”.

 

Tolkein’s writings may be fictional but they possess a cultural power that is very real. And thanks to the cinematographic skills of Sir Peter Jackson and the digital magic of Weta Workshops, Pakeha New Zealanders have been given reference points that owe nothing to their country’s indigenous culture. In our post-modern world, where reality has taken on an alarmingly subjective quality, “Middle Earth” is a much more comfortable fit than “Aotearoa”.

 

More comfortable, too, for dwellers in a “West” beset with economic, political, environmental and cultural challenges. A West in whose eyes New Zealand stands as a refuge every bit as wholesome and protected as “The Shire”. New Zealanders’ desire for cultural reassurance and comfort is thus reinforced by an international audience desperate to escape the daunting challenges of multiculturalism and austerity.

 

No, the tourism industry and Air New Zealand should have little difficulty in filling those airliners. Not while Middle Earth is so much more enjoyable than the real one.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 27^th November 2012.

New Myths For Old

A landscape to swallow souls: Alone in their empty land, New Zealanders have a murderous need to feel at home.

RONALD HUGH MORRIESON saw New Zealand through a whiskey-glass - darkly. The provincial society his novels describe oscillates uneasily between the sunny certainties of rural life, and the pitch-black nightmares of small-town dysfunction.

Obsessions born of boredom and isolation:

"What’s really going on behind the perpetually drawn curtains at Number 13?"

"That body the cops dug up from under the big Macrocarpa hedge surrounding the old Thompson place – did they ever find out who it was?"

What is it about New Zealand society that encourages these gothic outpourings? What transforms sullen misfits like Stan Graham and David Gray into homicidal gunmen? What leads so many "good blokes" to turn their hunting rifles on their wives – and then themselves? What’s our best guess when we hear that: "The Police are not seeking anyone else in relation to the incident."

Is it something in the water – or something in ourselves?

We’re a prickly people, prone to sudden mood-swings – as Helen Clark could testify. One minute she’s riding high in the polls, and the next thing you know she’s the grim commissar of politically-correct Helengrad.

Maori, too, know exactly how volatile Pakeha New Zealanders can be: from "bi-cultural partner", to seething enemy of "Maori privilege" – and all in the blink of Court of Appeal judge’s eye, or the time it takes to deliver a speech to the Orewa Rotary Club.

Pakeha sensitivity on racial issues is, of course, understandable. It’s difficult to feel positive about a country founded on bad faith, violence and the wholesale expropriation of the indigenous inhabitants. Much easier to construct a national mythology which declares the exact opposite to be true.

Up until the mid-1970s, New Zealand’s founding myth went something like this.

In the beginning were the Moriori – a primitive Melanesian people who were easily defeated and exterminated by a proud and warlike Polynesian race called the Maori. The arrival of Europeans profoundly disrupted Maori society, forcing their chiefs to seek the protection of the all-powerful British Empire. Almost alone among Britain’s colonies, New Zealand was founded peacefully and in good faith. The 1840 Treaty of Waitangi guaranteed native property rights and gave Maori the legal status of British subjects. Unfortunately, the warlike Maori tribes proved incapable of keeping the peace, and the British Government was required to subjugate them by military force. As the Moriori succumbed to the more powerful Maori, so were the Maori forced to give way before the more civilised Europeans. However, the dignity and valour of their Maori adversaries left a deep and favourable impression on the victorious "Pakeha" settlers. Convinced they were descended from the same Indo-European stock, the two peoples intermarried freely, producing a vigorous hybrid nation famed throughout the world for its racial harmony.

Over the course of the last thirty years, this myth has been relentlessly deconstructed by both Pakeha and Maori historians. For some New Zealanders, learning the truth about their country’s past has been a liberating experience, but for many others it has been profoundly disorienting and unsettling. Particularly galling has been the State’s effective endorsement of the revisionists’ work. For a surprisingly large number of citizens, this official repudiation of the nation’s founding myths is something akin to treason.

In small town, provincial New Zealand – Morrieson country – the State’s bi-cultural "treachery" has led to the growth of an alternative historical narrative. A curious collection of rogue anthropologists, pseudo-historians, New Age mystics, and old-fashioned racial supremacists have combined to produce a bizarre new version of New Zealand’s past.

Since rigorous historical research has made the country’s original founding myth untenable, the new "home-made" myth has been relocated in New Zealand’s pre-history.

The first people to reach these islands were not, it seems, Melanesian Moriori, nor Polynesian Maori, but a highly sophisticated band of proto-Europeans. More than a millennium before the birth of Christ, these daring sea voyagers established a dazzling antipodean civilisation. Long-since buried beneath bush and sand, it is remembered now only by the name the Maori gave to its remnants: "Waitaha".

The Waitaha myth, like the Moriori myth before it, answers a number of urgent needs in its provincial Pakeha creators. It destroys the Maori claim to indigeneity. It reaffirms the historical superiority of European civilisation. And, by extending out the length of time civilised people have dwelt in New Zealand from hundreds to thousands of years, it renders Maori culture irrelevant. Most importantly, however, these new myth-makers reassure historically disoriented Pakeha that their cultural "connection" to these islands is far stronger than that of the brutal primitives who destroyed the wonder and glory that was Waitaha.

In the tiny Northland town of Dargaville the Waitaha Myth briefly crossed the line from unofficial to official history.

While wandering through the town’s museum, Scott Hamilton, a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Auckland, spotted a "pou" – or carved gatepost marking the entrance to a Maori settlement.

According to the museum’s curator: "The carving, called Pouto Ki Rongomaraeroa, is the only one of its kind to be restored and put on display in a public place. It is different in type and design to Maori carvings, reinforcing the theory that the Waitaha had different origins and a longer history in New Zealand than Maori. The Waitaha lived in settlements around much of New Zealand’s coast."

When Hamilton took the Museum’s staff to task for passing-off pseudo-history as anthropological fact, he was told that "Maori communities and the archaeologists and historians who work with them have a ‘vested interest’ in suppressing information about a pre-Maori people."

(Visit http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2009/10/pseudo-history-at-dargy-museum.html for the full story.)

Welcome to the parallel universe of provincial New Zealand. A universe in which the remnants of an ancient, seafaring, pyramid-building civilisation lie buried beneath the sands of your local beach. A universe where non-indigenous Maori and wicked urban intellectuals conspire to keep ordinary Kiwis ignorant of their country’s "true" history.

To the well-educated and well-travelled inhabitants of metropolitan New Zealand, the fevered mental landscapes of their provincial cousins will give rise to genuine alarm. But Ronald Hugh Morrieson: whose Kiwi-gothic novels described every crooked feature of provincial New Zealand’s weird physiognomy; would’ve known exactly what he was looking at.

Adrift in these empty seas, New Zealanders will turn almost anything into an anchor. Alone in their empty land, Kiwis have a murderous need to feel at home.

This essay was originally published in The Independent of Thursday, 12 November 2009.

Comrades, Quo Vadis?

He who would sup with the Devil must needs have a long spoon. – Old Proverb

IN the penultimate issue of the NZ Political Review, published in the spring of 2004, I published an article by Dr Elizabeth Rata entitled "Trading on the Treaty" in which she wrote prophetically of the way in which the Maori nationalist slogan tino rangatiratanga was being remorselessly co-opted by ethnic elites espousing the "neotraditionalist" ideology of "neotribal capitalism" and practising what she called "brokerage politics". (Unfortunately I cannot provide a link to the NZPR article, but this link should take you to a very similar piece of writing by Dr Rata from 2005.)

Summing up her case in the NZPR, Dr Rata wrote:

It is likely that governance will be promoted as a relationship between two complex political systems based upon an idealised politics that bypasses the material realities of how people actually work, live and interact …

… Neotribal capitalism, however, [operates] in the real world, a world where ownership and control over economic resources acquired through the Treaty settlements leads to real material advantages that enable some people to take up opportunities, to overcome limitations and to live without the real hardships of poverty, while others remain excluded.

The motivating force of the bicultural project which led to the Treaty settlements was to improve the material conditions of real people struggling to overcome marginalisation and the social and economic consequences of New Zealand’s colonial past.

The issue remains today what it was three decades ago. The specific socio-economic realities of affordable housing, educational opportunities of a standard enjoyed by the rest of society, and the chance to earn a reasonable livelihood, are the essence of politics in New Zealand society today, as [they are in] any society.

It is the political regulation of this reality that provides the opportunities for improved life chances or for permanent inequalities.

Regulation by brokerage politics leads away from the more just society promised by pluralist politics, and, in the New Zealand example, the society promised by biculturalism. By institutionalising the influence of the neotraditionalist ideology, it leads towards the permanent capture of economic resources and political power by a privileged ethnic elite.

It isn’t often that reality confirms a writer’s theoretical speculations quite so fulsomely, but the deal stitched together between the National Party and the Maori Party provides more than ample proof of Dr Rata’s thesis.

Nowhere was this better illustrated than at a gathering to which my old friend and comrade Matt McCarten was invited earlier this week.

According to Matt, it was a function that brought together the Business Roundtable and the Maori "Brown Table". Here, amidst the self-congratulation and barely concealed political triumphalism, Dr Rata’s worst fears were made flesh. The leaders of Maori businesses, Maori tribal authorities, and the providers of Maori welfare services shook hands with the leading players and ideological commissars of New Zealand capitalism. The unstated cause of the celebration was, of course, that the power-brokers of the new regime were men and women who accepted and embraced the tenets and institutions of the settler-capitalist state. The capitalists’ worst fear, that the "political regulation" of "improved life chances" for the majority of Maori would take place under the auspices of parties and individuals hostile to capitalist ideology, had – thanks to the Maori Party leadership’s decision to throw in their lot with National, ACT and United Future – been dispelled.

Quite what Matt was doing there I cannot say: perhaps he had been summoned to witness to the final defeat of one of the Left’s fondest political dreams.

There were other witnesses to that defeat.

A young comrade of mine told me of her feelings of utter dismay upon hearing the leader of the National Distribution Union, and former Alliance cabinet minister, Laila Harré, addressing a group of workers protesting the Farmers department stores owners’ risible pay offer. Laila urged these workers to throw their support behind the Maori Party, United Future (?!) and (almost as an afterthought) the Greens. Only by supporting these parties (especially the ones in league with National) she said, could they hope to see the Minimum Wage raised to $15.00 per hour.

Some hope!

There is an apocryphal tale, hailing from the early days of the Christian Church, in which St Peter, warned that the authorities propose to unleash yet another wave of persecution against his co-religionists, flees the city of Rome. Alone on the road, not far from the city walls, Peter encounters his master, Jesus. "Lord," asks Peter,"quo vadis?" (Whither goest thou?) And, Jesus answers him: "To Rome, to be crucified." Instantly, Peter realises that he must return to the city; understanding, at last, that the road to salvation leads towards pain and persecution – not away from it.

Hearing about the recent deeds of Matt and Laila, I feel like asking them the question Peter put to Jesus: "Comrades, quo vadis?"

"Where are you going?"

Four years ago, in my penultimate editorial for the NZPR, I wrote:

"My own view, after reading Dr Rata’s research, is that the Maori Party will become the new face of brokerage politics. Post-Orewa, the cosy back-room relationships between Maori power-brokers and the Crown have become less and less sustainable. Neotribal capitalism, in need of a new brokerage strategy, appears to have decided to test the viability of the electoral option. [Tariana] Turia’s flat refusal to rule out forming a parliamentary coalition with the National and ACT parties certainly points in that direction.

Whatever the Maori Party leadership’s ultimate intentions, by its very existence it has brought the New Zealand Left to a fork in the road. Some, out of historical guilt or a misplaced sense of solidarity, will take the path of the tangata whenua – hoping like mad that by doing so they can exert a progressive influence on the content of the Maori Party’s election manifesto. Others, all too aware of the fearsome historical consequences of ethnic chauvinism and religious obscurantism, will stick with the values of the European Enlightenment, and keep to the narrow path of old-fashioned social-democracy.

If I may paraphrase the early 20th Century German social-democrat, August Bebel’s, memorable judgement upon the anti-Semitic illusions of the European working-class:

Neotraditionalism is the socialism of fools.

There is, however, one bright aspect to all these dismal events. At least, I now know what to buy Matt and Laila for Christmas.

A pair of very, very, very long spoons.