Taking The Greens Seriously

Worth Waiting For: The people of South Africa, oppressed for decades by a system which conferred exclusive political, economic and social authority upon a militant ethnic minority, queued in the sun for hours to exercise "one person, one vote". The New Zealand Greens dismiss this fundamental democratic process as "the limited concept of conservative Pakeha that one man, one vote is the only manifestation of democracy possible in Aotearoa".

THE MOST DANGEROUS thing a journalist can do when dealing with radical politicians and parties is fail to take them seriously. The news media is supposed to function as the public’s ears and eyes. If journalists fail to scrutinise a party’s policies for no better reason than they regard them as a joke, then ideas and policies of the most extraordinary and pernicious kind can easily pass unnoticed into a nation’s bloodstream.

The radicalism of Green parties, for example, extends a lot further than criticising consumerism, opposing military aggression and trying to stave off global ecocide. The movement can trace its ideological genealogy all the way back to William Morris and Prince Kropotkin; to the promoters of garden cities, vegetarianism, and post-World War I pacifism; or, in the case of the original German Greens, to the folk-singing nature ramblers, nudist colonies and adolescent sex hostels of the Weimar Republic.

It was precisely this "wackiness" that encouraged chief reporters and news editors to transform the Greens into figures of fun. To be fair, the Greens made it easy for them. Television footage of a troupe of Morris Dancers performing at an early Green Party conference in New Zealand was replayed over and over again.

The message: these people should not be taken seriously; was all too clear. Not surprisingly, other politicians were quick to take advantage of the Greens’ alleged enthusiasm for hemp suits, composting toilets and organic wine. "The Greens love for this planet is quite remarkable", quipped one Labour wit, "considering how little time they spend on it."

But, among all the merriment, some pretty strange stuff was passing most journalists by. At their 1985 conference in Ludenscheid, for example, the North Rhine-Westphalia Green Party called for the decriminalisation of "nonviolent sexuality" between children and adults.

Believe it or not, the idea of consensual paedophilia had won broad acceptance in the radical sub-cultures of Western Europe in the 1960s and 70s. (Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who, as "Danny the Red", became the face of the 1968 student revolution in France, and is now a leading Green Party Member of the European Parliament, openly explored the subject in his 1975 autobiography Le Grand Bazar.) Consequently, the policy was endorsed and included in the party’s comprehensive election manifesto. It’s discovery by a sharp-eyed conservative journalist in the midst of the subsequent state election campaign proved electorally disastrous for the Green Party and its supporters.

In New Zealand, it wasn’t the Greens’ (largely conventional) attitudes towards sexual behaviour that generated moral panic, but their commitment to decriminalising marijuana. Interestingly, the outcry came not from the news media (most of whose senior journalists had at one time or another "inhaled") but from those front-line fighters for Conformity, Conventional Wisdom and the Kiwi Way – school principals. Ignoring his status as a Member of Parliament, conservative headmasters adamantly refused to allow the Greens’ Nandor Tanczos onto the nation’s secondary school campuses.

The United and NZ First parties backed the principals’ stance and, by refusing to serve alongside any party advocating the decriminalisation of marijuana, successfully manoeuvred the Labour Party into excluding the Greens from its second- and third-term Cabinets.

Much more significant than the New Zealand Green Party’s marijuana policy, however, is its almost unqualified support for the key demands of the Maori nationalist movement. Like the German Greens’ willingness to decriminalise consensual paedophilia, the New Zealand Green Party’s rock-solid determination to atone for the sins of the nation’s colonial fathers emerged from the deepest layers of the radical political sub-cultures of the 1980s and 90s.

A willingness on the part of Pakeha leftists to be guided by the Maori nationalist advocates of tino rangatiratanga had by the mid-1980s become the litmus test of authentic revolutionary praxis. As proof of their commitment to the cause of the tangata whenua individuals and institutions were required to elevate Te Tiriti o Waitangi to the status of holy writ. In these matters, the Greens proved to be no exception.

Commitment to the cause of tino rangatiratanga is, however, incompatible with a commitment to the fundamental principles of representative democracy. In pledging to uphold the rights of an indigenous minority, the Greens have rendered themselves incapable of upholding the right of an ethnically undifferentiated majority to pursue a course of action to which the indigenous minority is opposed.

Consider the following Parliamentary speech from the Green List MP, Catherine Delahunty. Responding to criticism of legislation establishing Crown/Tainui "co-management" over the Waikato River, Delahunty declared:

I was not going to take a call on the Waikato-Tainui Raupatu Claims (Waikato River) Settlement Bill, but sometimes the rhetoric around one is overwhelming. I am very excited that we are moving into a more sophisticated era under Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and we are moving beyond the limited concept of conservative Pakeha that one man, one vote is the only manifestation of democracy possible in Aotearoa. I stand as a Pakeha, proud to live with Te Tiriti o Waitangi as our founding document, and absolutely committed to finding new ways through the colonisation effects of the past. Only people who do not understand what colonisation means would say that this is not a step forward, and that the co-management that is being proposed is not an incredibly positive model for Pakeha, for tangata Tiriti, for tauiwi katoa as well as for Maori.

Had an Act MP publicly suggested that his party was moving beyond the "limited concept" that "one man, one vote is the only manifestation of democracy possible in Aotearoa" it would have been headline news. Act – unlike the Greens – is taken seriously by journalists, and so are the statements of its representatives.

It is entirely possible, however, that eighteen months from now Act’s parliamentary representation will be reduced to a single seat, and that the Greens and the Maori Party will find themselves in the media spotlight.

As these two contenders bicker and haggle with the major parties over seats at the cabinet table and support for radical social, environmental and constitutional reforms, it is surely in the wider interest of the New Zealand electorate to know that, when it comes to sealing the deal, the core democratic tradition of one person, one vote is a constitutional taonga to which neither the Maori Party, nor the Greens, have declared a serious commitment.

This essay was originally published in The Independent of Thursday, 27 May 2010.

Farmers - Not Peasants

To lose land is to lose sovereignty: This was the lesson Maori learned from Pakeha. Are all New Zealanders about to be taught the same lesson by the Chinese?

THE OUTRAGE was as plain as a Chinese pikestaff. Responding to Agriculture Minister, David Carter’s, comment that the sale of sixteen dairy farms to the Chinese-backed Natural Dairy (NZ) Ltd was "unlikely to go through", the company’s vice-chairman, Graham Chin, cut straight to the chase.

Not only were the Minister’s comments "completely unacceptable", snapped Mr Chin, but they also raised "serious questions as to how genuine and understanding the Minister of Agriculture is in relation to New Zealand’s trading and investment relationship with countries such as China."

Forget the "such as". Mr Chin was bluntly reminding our government that, along with all the international kudos and commercial opportunities, New Zealand’s highly prized Free Trade Agreement with the Peoples Republic of China also included a number of fundamental obligations and responsibilities.

Foremost among these is the New Zealand Government’s obligation to ensure that the same commercial opportunities made available to New Zealand investors in China are fully reciprocated in relation to Chinese businesses seeking to invest in New Zealand.

China will not tolerate a trading partner who attempts to have it both ways. If Beijing is willing to open doors for Fonterra, then Wellington must be equally hospitable to Mr Chin and his Hong Kong backers.

And it would be very foolish to suppose that Chinese officials will be fooled by New Zealand politicians attempting to wash their hands of all responsibility by pointing to the "independence" of our Overseas Investment Office (OIO). China’s ambassador will know as well as the Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa (CAFCA) spokesperson, Murray Horton, that the OIO hasn’t turned down a land purchase application in twenty years.

Once Natural Dairy’s application is granted, however, New Zealand’s farmers, and the politicians who represent them, are going to have to do some very serious thinking.

China’s purchasing plans for New Zealand are unlikely to stop at the Crafar family’s former properties. Indeed, Natural Dairy (NZ) Ltd’s principals have made it clear that their long-term objective is to construct a New Zealand-based, wholly-Chinese-owned, vertically integrated dairying operation in direct competition with Fonterra.

It must be as obvious to Chinese business interests as it is to this country’s Australian-owned banks that for more years than we care to admit, New Zealand’s dairy farmers have been in business not to sell milk, but to realise the enormous capital gains engendered by the ever-rising price of rural land.

With the global financial crisis having brought New Zealand’s rural property boom to an abrupt halt, a great many dairy farmers (and their bankers) are now stuck with properties their cows’ udders can no longer finance. Overextended in their rural lending, the Australian banks want to effect a quick exit from our agricultural sector with the minimum possible damage to their bottom-lines. They are looking for buyers of agricultural land, and, as luck would have it, the Chinese are looking for anyone with agricultural land to sell.

What is a Kiwi cow-cockey, technically insolvent and unable to borrow, supposed to do when Natural Dairy (or something like it) comes calling with an open cheque-book? As one veteran farmer of my acquaintance put it recently: "If a Chinese buyer offers me $3 million, cash, for my property – I’m not going to turn him down."

There’s only one way New Zealand can avoid losing, farm by farm, its core agricultural assets, and that is to make it illegal to sell agricultural land to anyone except the Crown.

Like the Maori before us, we face the prospect of seeing our most valuable taonga, land, and the key resource which will soon be worth even more than land, water, being sold out from under us. Only then will we discover, as they did, that losing one’s treasure means losing one’s sovereignty.

Turning our farmers into Crown Tenants, or, if they bridle at that term, into "Stewards" of the nation’s most treasured resources, would allow them to do what they do best: grow protein. Rather than farming for capital gain they could, once again, farm to feed a hungry world.

And to China’s inevitable protests our response should be:

"As a people, you have known the humiliation of being brought low by foreigners, but also the exhilaration of rising, proudly, to your feet.

"We are happy to be China’s farmers – but we will not be her peasants."

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, 28 May 2010.

Coming Apart, Or Holding Together?

Ethnic Defection - Balkan Style: The fate of the former state of Yugoslavia offers a tragic rejoinder to all those New Zealanders (Maori and Pakeha) who see no dangers in posing the question: "Why not apart?"

IT WAS the NZ Political Review’s most unorthodox article. Written by Roger Openshaw, then a Senior Lecturer (now an Associate Professor) of Education at Massey University, "Why Not Apart?" was published in July 1992 and called for the deliberate, carefully managed, dissolution of New Zealand’s unitary state.

In Openshaw’s utopian scenario, an implausibly disinterested "interim" government would, "invite the tending of charters on behalf of any group or syndicate for the setting up of an independent successor state somewhere within the present boundaries of New Zealand." None of these "successor states" could have a population of less than 15,000, or more than 100,000, citizens.

I was never quite sure whether Openshaw was pulling the collective leg of NZPR’s readers, or whether he was offering them a serious constitutional alternative. All I would say now is: "Be careful what you wish for!"

Because until John Key rather belatedly slammed the door in the Tuhoe negotiators’ faces, Openshaw’s deconstructed New Zealand was on the point of becoming reality.

Those same negotiators expressed "surprise" at Key’s intervention in the Treaty settlement process. According to their spokespeople, Tuhoe and the Crown were only a few days away from announcing the return of the Urewera National Park to the Tuhoe "nation". The tribe’s negotiators were also confident of securing a large measure of mana motuhake – self-government – for Tuhoe.

As one of the very few tribes not to have signed the Treaty of Waitangi, the ultimate objective of Tuhoe leaders was to oversee the creation of an independent tribal polity alarmingly akin to Openshaw’s "successor state".

Well, I’m surprised they were surprised. How’s it possible that grown men and women, living in a sophisticated, unitary and democratic 21st Century state, could seriously entertain the notion that their Government was about to voluntarily surrender its sovereignty over 200,000 hectares of national territory?

They may say they were encouraged to hope for such an outcome by the Prime Minister, or the Treaty Negotiations Minister, Chris Finlayson, or both. But that only deepens the mystery. Regardless of what was said to them by the Crown’s negotiators, Tuhoe should have known enough about their Pakeha compatriots to realise that any decision to hand back the territory confiscated by Settler Governments during the 19th and 20th Centuries wouldn’t be allowed to stand.

The fate of Yugoslavia (still in the brutal process of unravelling at the time Openshaw wrote "Why Not Apart?") stands as a stark warning of what can happen (even to a federal state) when ethnic defection is permitted to gather momentum. No sooner had Slovenia been allowed to secede from Yugoslavia, than Croatia – emboldened by its neighbour’s success – followed suit. Serbia, intent upon protecting Serb interests in the defecting entities, mobilised its superior military resources. The Bosnian Muslims, caught geographically between Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats, had no option but to declare their own independence. The cost in terms of human suffering was immense.

But can anyone doubt that something very similar would have happened here, had the National-led Government’s Treaty negotiators not been reined in by the Prime Minister?

Had Tuhoe been granted mana motuhake, could Tuwharetoa (who, like Tuhoe, never signed the Treaty) have demanded anything less? And if self-government was granted to Tuhoe and Tuwharetoa, how long would it take Tainui to reassert its rights in the Waikato? Certainly no less time than it would take the largest Maori tribe, Ngapuhi, to reassert its rights across the whole of Northland.

In their current presentations to the Waitangi Tribunal, the Ngapuhi people are already advancing the argument that, because the Northern Chiefs never surrendered their sovereignty to the British Crown, the New Zealand State’s writ should no longer, strictly-speaking, be permitted to run in Ngapuhi territory.

If such challenges to the sovereignty of the New Zealand State are not forcefully refuted – and soon – life in New Zealand is destined to take a very decided turn for the worse.

Not that Pakeha should blame Maori for attempting to recover what was taken from them by force or fraud over the course of the past 170 years. On the contrary, they should ask themselves what they would do if a foreign power began buying-up their turangawaewae: farm by farm, mine by mine, business by business? Wouldn’t they resist?

Interestingly, Openshaw’s argument in "Why Not Apart?" is that the unitary state constructed by Pakeha New Zealanders since 1840 is simply not worth defending:

"[I]f we should indeed decide to dismantle our failing unitary state, we will be able to exploit the one considerable advantage New Zealand has over other countries; namely that there is no strong national culture. There is no genuine New Zealand nationalism nor is there any New Zealand people in the sense that there is a French people, an American people or even an Australian people."

This view is more common among the deracinated left-wing intellectuals of New Zealand academia that many of their compatriots may realise. And it is matched on the Right by the neoliberal conviction that the unstoppable processes of globalisation have made the nation-state a historical anachronism. In the current round of Treaty negotiations these two world-views have come together – with potentially disastrous results.

Because, as the Foreign Minister, Murray McCully, who reportedly led the charge in Cabinet against the signing away of the Urewera National Park, understands – there is a New Zealand people, and they do have a national culture, and they will not sit idly by while their country and their culture is casually dismembered and thoughtlessly destroyed.

The Prime Minister is to be congratulated for heeding the advice of his more experienced Cabinet colleagues. And his party was no doubt hugely relieved to hear him say: "there is no room for separatism in New Zealand".

Now all he has to do is convince his allies in the Maori Party that they have reached the outer limits of what is politically "workable".

For make no mistake, if New Zealand is Yugoslavia, then the Pakeha are the Serbs. And just as Yugoslavia was the historical achievement of the Serbs, New Zealand is the historical achievement of its settlers and their descendants who built it, and defended it, and who still, in spite of separatists and globalisers, love it.

Why not apart?

Because New Zealanders, Maori and Pakeha, only have a future – together.

This essay was originally published in The Independent of Thursday, 20 May 2010.

Paying The Ransom - Again

The rich aren't like us - they get bigger tax cuts.

WE’VE BEEN FED the same message for twenty-five years. Over and over again it’s been stuffed down our throats: "The Rich aren't like us. They have different needs. They follow different rules. They require different incentives." And if we’re all feeling just a little bit queasy this morning, it’s because we’ve been forced to swallow that same bilious stew of self-serving lies all over again.

There were moments when I thought John Key was a different kind of National Prime Minister. Times when I actually believed that the combination of a childhood lived under the protection of the Welfare State, and an adulthood spent accumulating enough wealth to snap his fingers at National’s paymasters, had produced something new on the Right: a genuinely compassionate conservative.

But, no. Mr Key has proved himself to be just another shill for selfishness and greed: just another defender of privilege and plutocracy.

Earlier in the week he was urging us not to react jealously, or enviously, to a Budget which has poured millions of dollars into the pockets of the people who deserve it least, while raising the living costs of those families most in need of relief.

"We can be envious about these things", purred the Prime Minister, "but without those people in our economy all the rest of us will either have less people paying tax or fundamentally less services that they provide."

Thus does the Prime Minister pass on to us the contents of the ransom note delivered to him by this country’s wealthiest citizens.

Translated into plain English, it reads: "We’ve got your economic system under our control. Hand over hundreds of millions of dollars – or your helpless little economy will be made to suffer, and you’ll never see Prosperity again."

And last night, Bill English paid up – just as every other Finance Minister has been forced to pay up since the 1980s.

It was a bad move then and it’s still a bad move. Negotiating with economic terrorists is as craven and foolish as negotiating with any other kind. Because once they realise you’re willing to pay for their co-operation, they will hold your economy to ransom again, and again, and again.

Of course Mr Key has attempted to paint the primary beneficiaries of Mr English’s "tax package" as good, hard-working professionals: "Those who pay the top personal rate fit into some of the core critical categories for our economy. They include doctors, entrepreneurs often, scientists, engineers, lawyers, accountants, school principals, nurses".

Well, no, actually. While it’s true to say that a great many professional people are on or slightly above the top rate, they are not the tax package’s primary beneficiaries. At best, most of the people Mr Key cites will benefit from Mr English’s largesse to the tune of about $40 per week. Of that about $20 will be swallowed up by the increase in GST, leaving them just $20 per week better off. Subtract the increases in most people’s ACC levy and these hard-working professionals might end up with an extra $10-$15 per week. Wow.

But even "generosity" on this paltry scale must be paid for by someone. Our public health system is about to suffer the death of a thousand cuts. Our universities will be forced to turn away more and more young New Zealanders. Our prisons will become ever more squalid – and dangerous – repositories for the victims of an economic system which has, for the umpteenth time, been unfairly skewed in favour of the Rich.

Perhaps it would all be bearable if, in return for the extra $300-$500 per week we’re allowing them to keep, our captains of industry, financial wizards and heroic entrepreneurs would guarantee the "step-change" this country so desperately needs.

But if History is any guide, that’s not what we will get. If History’s any guide, we’ll just see more of our industries fall into the hands of foreigners; more "Mum & Dad" investors lose their life’s savings; more holes in the ground; more half-finished palaces; more angry denials of any and all social responsibility.

And why, in God’s name, would we expect anything else? The Rich did not get rich by giving – but by taking. It’s what they do. It’s all they’ve ever done.

And until we stop meeting their demands – they’ll go on doing it.

This essay was originally published in The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 21 May 2010.

Ten Years Ago This Week: "On The Back Of The Beast"

Monsters from the Id: In 2000 Global Capitalism's voracious animal spirits were already testing the regulatory boundaries. By 2008 the barriers had fallen and the Beast was loose.

WINZ, TVNZ, Airways, Terralink: the march of folly gathers momentum. Now, at last, the hard truths about governing in the ruins of New Zealand’s social-democratic culture are becoming clear to Labour and Alliance ministers: that all the moral signposts have rotted away beneath the garish signage of commercialisation; that the men in suits are beyond their control; that the media doesn’t care; that they are alone.

How have they responded? Michael Cullen talks of building bridges to the business community. Helen Clark reaches out to Maori. Jim Anderton courts favour in the provinces. Manic gestures – the autonomic responses of late-20th Century labourism – designed to mask a rising sense of panic in Government ranks.

It’s all gotten too big, too fast, too clever, too malevolent: the apparatus of the state totters precariously on the back of the global capitalist beast, and even those politicians who are its friends find it difficult to keep their seats. The idea that, somehow, the Beast might be controlled, guided – even tamed – is now exposed for the fantasy it always was.

The High Priests of the New World Order - the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank, the Fed - mutter their spells to the colossus, vainly attempting to convince their global congregation that it is moved by such imprecations. But the Beast heeds them not. Wreathed in a shimmering cloud of uncountable electronic conversations, it strides away towards a dark horizon.

Meanwhile the Order’s lesser acolytes - Don Brash, Gareth Morgan, Alex Sundakov - keep up the pretence of omniscience for the benefit of local believers. The Beast is angry, they intone. The Labour-Alliance Government’s attempts to rein it in – tax increases, the re-nationalisation of ACC, the Employment Relations Bill - have only succeeded in sharpening the focus of its panoptic gaze on this South Pacific backwater. The falling Kiwi Dollar, petrol price-hikes, rising interest rates: these are but the first manifestations of the Beast’s displeasure. Repent before it is too late! Beware the wrath of the Behemoth!

The talk-back hosts pick up the drum-beat. Day-in, day-out, the messages of futility and mismanagement are hammered home. Never mind that most of what passes for commentary from these dollar-stuffed ventriloquist dummies is a rancid mixture of deep-seated prejudice, unfounded rumour, and downright lies; the essence of all effective propaganda is repetition, repetition, repetition. The damage inflicted in the first six months of a left-wing government’s term may be slight, but by the thirty-sixth month the poison will be bubbling away nicely in the veins of the body politic.

How wistfully Helen Clark and Jim Anderton must look at the dismantled levers of the old machine. Ten years ago the state owned a nationwide radio network. In every New Zealand town, from Invercargill to Whangarei, there was a radio station with its own reporters and news editors, linked to a national news service. Fifteen years ago there was a state-owned television network, with a vibrant regional production arm, and a serious news and current affairs division. Back then there was at least the possibility of an alternative message being received by the electorate. Today the New Zealand media is owned by Independent News, News Corp, Australian Consolidated Press, and CanWest – all of them convinced that "there is no alternative". For its part, TVNZ appears to be out to get this government before it gets them.

It’s in the air, this awful presentiment of disaster, odourless, colourless and deadly - like Sarin Gas. Labour-Alliance know they rode to power on a tide of fear and exhaustion – not confidence and energy. All that’s been keeping them up is the polls - and the polls are falling.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion of Friday, 19 May 2000.

Jus Soz U Knoz

CHRIS TROTTER’S POLITICS

As calibrated by The Political Compass

Economic Left/Right: -10.00
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.82

Discover your own political orientation at
http://www.politicalcompass.org/

An Open Letter to the National Party

The benign face of National: Ideological extremism, in alliance with radical Maori Nationalism, threatens to destroy the National Party's "brand" in exactly the say way that a similar combination destroyed the much-loved, New Zealand-based aid organisation, Corso.

Dear National Party Member,

I wonder how many people belonging to today’s National Party remember Corso? Older members of the party may vaguely recall Sir Robert Muldoon’s savage critique of Corso back in the late-1970s, but among the younger members of the National Party the name probably doesn’t ring any bells at all.

That’s a pity, because as I watch what is happening in today’s National Party I am strongly reminded of the political tragedy which overtook and ultimately destroyed the once-mighty Corso brand.

Corso is, of course, an acronym. The organisation began its life back in 1944 as the Council of Organisations for Relief Services Overseas. It’s charitable mission was to gather much-needed clothing and footwear for the millions of people around the world which the Second World War had uprooted and impoverished.

These needs persisted after the war and by the 1950s Corso had become New Zealand’s pre-eminent overseas aid organisation. It's annual appeals attracted donations from tens-of-thousands of New Zealanders from all walks of life. By December 1964 Corso had raised more than £4 million in cash and dispatched more than £8 million-worth of clothing and footwear to the world’s poor. The organisation boasted thousands of volunteers and was universally respected as the quintessential Kiwi charity: practical, non-political, down-to-earth, effective.

The radicalism of the late-60s and 70s precipitated a sequence of dramatic changes in Corso. Increasingly, the charitable model of overseas aid was being challenged. "Give a man a fish", went the oft-quoted slogan, "and you will feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and he will feed himself for the rest of his life." A powerful left-wing element followed this anti-colonialist philosophy into Corso.

By the end of the 1970s the organisation – now thoroughly politicised – had decided that "justice begins at home". Rather than assist the poor overseas, Corso determined to tackle poverty right here in New Zealand. Not surprisingly, this radical change of direction attracted the ire of Prime Minister Rob Muldoon. In 1979 government support for Corso was withdrawn, and the amounts collected in subsequent public appeals plummeted.

Worse lay in store for the beleaguered organisation. Throughout the 1980s Corso was steadily infiltrated and eventually taken over by radical Maori nationalists and their Pakeha supporters. Led by the Harawira family, the radicals insisted that Corso recognise and promote tino rangatiratanga – the Maori right to self-determination. To prove its bona fides to the cause of the tangata whenua, Corso undertook to devote two-thirds of its aid budget to New Zealand-based (which usually meant Maori) projects.

When Corso workers and supporters objected to this takeover they were subjected to excoriating verbal and, on at least one occasion, physical assault. By 1990, the organisation was little more than a hollowed-out shell. New Zealand’s largest and most successful home-grown aid organisation had been destroyed: initially, by ideological extremism; and finally, by radical Maori nationalism.

If you, the members of the National Party, do not rouse yourselves, then your own, once-proud, political brand will suffer the same fate as Corso’s.

Already, ideological extremism has driven thousands of members out of the party. And now those same extremists, working hand-in-glove with radical Maori nationalists, are getting ready to tip both your government and your (dramatically re-structured) party organisation into the same death-spiral that destroyed Corso.

Never forget that it was with the best and most noble of intentions that Corso’s demise was set in motion. Men and women of good-will, seeking only what was "right" and "just", allowed themselves to be persuaded that the organisation’s steadily dwindling institutional membership was a case of "fewer, but better". And those who complained; those who warned; those who pleaded with them to reconsider the direction in which they were dragging Corso; were dismissed as being either pathetically misguided, or avowedly racist.

National, as its name attests, has always seen itself as the party not of one class, nor one race, but of the whole nation. When New Zealanders believed that, and when National’s policies reflected that, its membership numbered close to quarter-of-a-million.

In May 2010, can you honestly claim that National is governing for the whole nation? Can you really affirm that its brand is safe? And is it even remotely credible to suggest that, if it doesn’t immediately cease conniving in the dissolution of its own country’s core institutions, it will be in any position to win a general election in 2011?

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, 14 May 2010.