Renationalisation: It's Easy If You Know How

Uttering The Deplorable Word: David Cunliffe has outraged the Right and befuddled the Left by speaking openly of renationalising any assets partially privatised by John Key's Government.

DAVID CUNLIFFE has placed the question of renationalisation back on the political agenda. In doing so he’s provoked an extraordinary flurry of indignant condemnation from Newstalk-ZB’s Mike Hosking, who lost little time in raising the dread spectre of Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. The Labour Party itself seemed rather non-plussed by the suggestion (like the husband whose wife's just encouraged him to visit a brothel). Throughout the election campaign didn’t Phil Goff insist that once the assets were gone, they were gone for good? If they’re as easily recoverable as Cunliffe seems to be suggesting, what was all the fuss about?

The cost of re-purchasing privatised state assets is, of course, the biggest “fuss” associated with any policy of renationalisation. It was a problem that occupied some of the sharpest minds in the Alliance back in the early 1990s. “Buying back the farm” may have been party policy, but no one was really sure how to pay for it. I well recall receiving a call from an Alliance member in search of a cheap alternative to forking out the billions required to repurchase Telecom. I promised to do some reading on the subject.

By far the cheapest option turned out to be straightforward expropriation. The government simply passes a law declaring the telecommunications system, the railways, the banks, etc, to be an inalienable part of the national patrimony. Such assets to remain the property of the people and be administered, on their behalf, by the state.

The only problem with expropriation is that any aggrieved foreign owners will almost certainly seek redress under international law. The offending country may find its financial assets frozen in foreign banks, and its national property (like airliners on the ground at foreign airports) seized. If you’re a small and vulnerable trading nation, this is not a good thing.

The other way to re-acquire your country’s assets on the cheap is to argue that their owners have reaped an unwarranted harvest of super-profits from the privatised business, and that in assessing the quantum of compensation to be paid to the “owners”, these super-profits must be deducted from the business’s re-purchase price. This was the formula employed by Salvador Allende when computing the level of compensation payable to the (mostly American) owners of Chile’s copper industry. And I strongly suspect, had New Zealand applied a similar formula to Telecom, it could’ve taken the company back into public ownership without paying a single cent.

The downside of this approach is that, once again, you lay your country open to retaliation. At the urging of the dispossessed Anaconda Copper Company, President Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, undertook to “make the [Chilean] economy scream”. The rest is history.

Probably the most effective (and safest) way to recover one’s country’s privatised assets is to do so one little bite at a time. Citing the “strategic” nature of the asset, and the vital role it plays in preserving the nation’s security and/or well-being, the Government passes a law requiring an initially small, but annually rising, percentage of the private company’s shareholding to be placed in the hands of the State. At the same time, the Government introduces a raft of perfectly justifiable (but regrettably very expensive) regulations which (again, very regrettably) reduce the company’s profitability quite dramatically.

Not surprisingly, the private company’s share price plummets – whereby the State simply steps in and re-purchases its erstwhile assets for the proverbial song.

Although the situation was not produced by such a policy of renationalisation, there was a point, around the middle of the last decade, where New Zealand’s privatised rail network’s value reached such a low point that the Clark-led Labour Government could have picked it up for about a third of the price the State ultimately paid to bring the railways back under public control. Of course, what happens “naturally” under capitalism, a genuinely socialist government can very easily induce.

David Cunliffe has been severely criticised by both the Right (and elements of the Left) for uttering the deplorable word “renationalisation” in polite neoliberal company. For what remains of the campaigning period, those who've attempted to paint him as the candidate of the more conservative elements within Labour’s caucus will win far fewer converts.

Because the brutal fact of the matter is that if Cunliffe is successful in his bid to become Labour’s leader his statement on the possibility of renationalising partially privatised assets will have a pronounced – possibly decisive – dampening effect on the degree of overseas investor interest. Nobody invests billions in an asset that could be renationalised in a year’s time.

That’s why “renationalisation” is such a dangerous, such a deplorable word. Merely to utter it is to stir to life ideas that have not been seriously debated in this country for close to forty years. The ghost of Norman Kirk must be smiling down on the Member for New Lynn. If he had a vote next Tuesday, I’m pretty confident which way he would cast it.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

Rebuilding Labour - Without The Unions

Growing In The Open Ground: When universal membership made trade unions the most representative institutions in New Zealand society, their affiliation to the Labour Party was an important part of our progressive and democratic political traditions. But the dramatic reduction in union density and the trend towards oligarchical control in union organisations renders their continuing attachment to a similarly reduced Labour Party highly problematic. The rejuvenation of the labour movement requires trade unions without electoral attachments. Affiliation has had its day.

WHAT MUST LABOUR DO to be welcomed back by ordinary Kiwis? What are the things it has to find, and what must it lose?

The first thing it has to lose is trade union affiliation. The big private sector unions still associated with the Labour Party: the Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union (EPMU) and the Service and Food Workers Union; must be cut loose – and soon.

I write those words with a heavy heart, because it was the affiliated union vote that elected me to the New Zealand Council of the Labour Party way back in 1987. In those grim years unionists were the backbone of the opposition to Rogernomics. They kept the flame of the true Labour faith flickering through the party’s darkest days. And it was the block-votes of the trade union affiliates which kept Helen Clark’s political machine ticking over so reliably for the 15 long years it controlled the party.

Even so, it’s time for them to go.

Back in 1987, universal union membership meant that the labour movement was one of the most representative institutions in the country. The Trades Councils in the main centres functioned as embryonic workers’ parliaments where everything from fiscal reform to foreign policy was argued out – often passionately – by delegates representing tens of thousands of working people. The Auckland Trades Council (referred to by some as “The Auckland Soviet”) regularly assembled more than 200 delegates to its sometimes stormy debates.

Direct intervention in the economic life of the country – through widespread strike action – periodically reminded New Zealanders that unions and unionists exercised genuine power. To become a union leader in those days it was necessary to win the support of a majority of the union’s rank-and-file membership. Thousands of postal ballots would be cast and counted to determine the winning candidate. Workers were players in the great game of politics – and so was their political party.

But the days when unions constituted a genuinely representative social, economic and political force are long gone – and with their democratic credentials has gone the rationale for the role they continue to play in the Labour Party. In the private sector workforce barely one worker in ten is unionised. The constitution of the public sector-dominated Council of Trade Unions swept away the democratic traditions which had animated the local trades councils and concentrated all power in the hands of a gaggle of union officials at the very summit of the organisation.

What’s more, the “electorate” responsible for electing these top officials has shrunk alarmingly. In more and more unions leaders are elected not by a postal ballot of the rank-and-file, but by a few score of hand-picked delegates at the union’s annual conference. What were formerly the powerhouses of working-class democracy; and the generators of workers’ power; have become self-selecting oligarchies, against which all dissent crashes and burns.

If Labour wants to do the working-class a big favour it will purge its party of these oligarchs and welcome workers into the party as ordinary rank-and-file members. Who knows, if enough of them join up, they might even be able to persuade Labour’s MPs (including those who owe their positions on the Party List to the machinations of the Affiliates Council’s wise old heads) to rebuild New Zealand’s trade unions to Twenty-First Century specifications – most particularly by requiring them to operate, from bottom to top, as inclusive, transparent and recognisably democratic institutions.

A democratic trade union movement, with members in every workplace and abundant opportunities for them to learn and practice the art of politics, might then be persuaded to re-examine the question of whether or not unions should be affiliated to the Labour Party. But, my suspicion is that a truly democratic trade union movement would run a mile from such a proposition. As the poet, A.R. D. Fairburn, so wisely put it:

The mushroom grows in the open ground,

The toadstool under a tree.

Labour must rebuild itself in plain sight: by reaching outwards, not turning inwards. There are many in the party who cling to the illusion that the affiliates are the guardians of the party’s heart and soul. They are not.

Ordinary Kiwis built the labour movement; and ordinary Kiwis must rebuild it.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 2 December 2011.

Rout & Ruin

"When the hurlyburly's done,/ When the battle's lost and won.": Having come within a whisker of winning 50 percent of the popular vote, National's position on the Right has grown even more hegemonic. But what of the Left? What can we expect to see emerge from the rout and ruin in 2011?

“ROUT AND RUIN” was my bleak reply to the e-mail from Glasgow. A friend had asked “How bad is it?” What else could I say? Labour’s 2011 Party Vote was an eye-watering 165,000 votes shy of 2008’s. At 27.1 percent, the Party’s share of the popular vote was only marginally greater than the 24.2 percent it attracted in 1919 – the very first general election it contested.

The crucial difference, of course, was that in 1919 Labour was the new kid on the political block. Barely three years old, it was bursting with enthusiasm and eager to replace the ailing Liberal Party as the principal opponent of Bill Massey’s Reform Party government.

Fast-forward 92 years and it is Labour that is ailing. New Zealand’s oldest political party is being challenged on all fronts by younger, more vibrant organisations – most particularly the Greens. With close to 11 percent of the Party Vote, the latter’s level of support is now approaching half that of Labour’s, an ominous statistic for the party which used to be able to count on attracting seven votes for every one that went to the Greens.

Labour’s dramatic debut on the hustings in 1919 ushered in a decade and a half of extraordinary political turbulence that only ended with the Labour Party victory of 1935 and the creation of the National Party the following year. The 2011 general election result suggests that New Zealand may be about to re-enter the sort of agitated political air it last encountered in the 1990s.

The difference, this time, is that the turmoil within the party system is not being driven by the sound of ideologies clashing (or crashing) as they were (and did) in the days of Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson. This time it is the absence of strong ideological themes in our domestic politics that is generating the instability – especially on the centre-left.

What does Labour really stand for in 2011? It most certainly does not stand for the socialist aims and objectives proclaimed by Harry Holland’s Labour Party in 1919. Indeed, two of the most important policies promoted by Phil Goff’s Labour Party in 2011: the introduction of a Capital Gains Tax; and lifting the age of eligibility for superannuation from 65 to 67; could just as easily have emerged from a moderate conservative party.

Moderation has also been the watchword among Green Party strategists in 2011. Gone are the apocalyptic, doom-saying Green Party MPs of yesteryear, and in their place we find the coolly rational Dr Russel Norman, laconically peddling non-threatening economic solutions in a pale green suit. Dr Norman openly proclaims his party’s intention of taking Green politics “mainstream”: moving out beyond the gentrified streets of the inner-cities to the sprawling suburbs of “Middle New Zealand” where modern elections are won and lost.

There was a time when Labour was extremely competitive in these leafy suburbs. But the Greens’ emergence into double figures, Party Vote-wise, suggests that the well-educated, environmentally-conscious, middle-class New Zealander with a social conscience – the demographic that has provided Labour with its winning electoral edge for the best part of three decades – may, finally, have completed its migration from red to green.

But a Labour Party reduced to what are now its core demographics of Pakeha superannuitants, low-paid Pasifika and Maori, and beneficiaries of all colours and creeds, offers a very poor match for the politics and policies of moderation. The diminishing parliamentary assortment of middle-class professionals, civil servants and trade union officials that sits atop Labour’s demographic rump look less-and-less like the people it purports to represent. So much so, now, that the notion of the brown, the poor and the elderly one day deciding to cut out these middle-men and women, and represent themselves, is acquiring an aura of inevitability. Hone Harawira and his Mana Party will be hoping so.

But Mana has a lot of growing to do before it can hope to compete with the party that re-emerged from the electoral shadows with a pundit-smiting 6.8 percent of the Party Vote: NZ First.

Winston Peters’ success hinges upon his instinctive grasp of the issue that will increasingly come to dominate the politics of the next decade: the issue of economic sovereignty. How to foster not only the domestic control and utilisation of the nation’s resources, but also the cultural and political confidence required for their successful defence.

In this respect, as a party identified with economic sovereignty and national identity, NZ First may prove to be the opposition party with the greatest potential for growth. Because the New Zealand electorate has given Winston Peters and his new caucus that rarest and most precious of gifts: the opportunity to learn from past mistakes, and lay claim again to the gratitude of posterity.

Proof, indeed, that “rout and ruin” can be overcome.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 29 November 2011.

Farewell To Old New Zealand?

Dreams Of Old New Zealand: A glimpse of the curving North Otago shoreline and a swathe of bright blue sky

LAST NIGHT I dreamed of Oamaru. I was born there 55 years ago in the big public hospital which overlooked the little seaside town. In those days, public hospitals were almost always built on hilltops. Set there by the State, they quite literally “watched over” the citizenry they were erected to serve. It was reassuring.

Why was I dreaming of Oamaru? I’d like to think it was because, on the eve of the 2011 General Election, I was reaching back into my past for answers about the present, and the future, of my country. That, at some point in the dream, someone would step forward and answer all the questions my conscious mind has been asking me since the campaign began.

But the unconscious doesn’t work like that, does it?

In my dream the person with the answers was me. A hall-full of people was waiting for Chris Trotter to get up and sing. But he couldn’t sing. His guitar had no strings, and he had forgotten all the words to his songs.

I looked down at the audience from the stage. All the faces were friendly, expectant and curiously familiar. The big doors at the end of the hall stood open, framing a glimpse of the curving North Otago shoreline and a swathe of bright blue sky. Then somebody shut the doors; the audience fell silent; and I woke up.

Except it won’t be a dream from which we wake on Sunday morning; it’ll be a brand new political reality to which we open our eyes. And unless I’m very much mistaken, the most important aspect of this new reality will be how few points of connection it has with our nation’s past. Old New Zealanders, like me, will feel like those people left standing on the quay when a big passenger liner pulls away. One by one the paper streamers connecting us to the departing world will snap. The ship will sail away and we’ll be left behind.

The people on board the ship will breathe a huge sigh of relief. For the past three years they have grown increasingly impatient with Old New Zealand and its passé traditions. They know that the egalitarian values it persists in celebrating have no currency in their brave new world.

A brutal and unreflective fatalism defines these New New Zealanders. For those lucky enough to be born to the right parents, life is good. Is it their fault they’re lucky? Losers’ children (with the right sort of genes) will scrabble and claw their way out of whatever hell-hole they’re born into – and why not? No one’s going to condemn them for the crimes they commit getting out and climbing up. The consideration of others is a choice people make – usually at their own expense. The only real crime is getting caught.

It’s why the Captain of this happy little ship, John Key, is so incredibly popular among passengers and crew alike. He epitomises the strategies for success they long to emulate. Mixing sunny smiles and cheery waves with the most ruthless and unforgiving displays of political management. His enemies called him “the smiling assassin” – never understanding that his friends have come to admire both the killings, and the “aw-shucks” grin that accompanies them, in equal measure.

The most frightening thing about the new ship of state is the number of people who have scrambled aboard for no better reason than the proximity of wealth and power. Even in the bowels of steerage their excitement remains undimmed. They can feel the beat of the band through the ship’s bulkheads, and smell the champagne and caviar wafting through the ventilation shafts. They have no idea that their real purpose is to satisfy the First Class passengers’ pathological appetite for social torture. That, in the neoliberal theatre of pain, the flesh of the poor is the ultimate prop, and their suffering the only acceptable tribute. Not even their children will be spared.

Perhaps that’s why I awoke so suddenly from my dream. Perhaps the closing of the doors was the signal that it was about to descend into nightmare.

And I'm left wondering: is my use of the departing ship metaphor ill-judged? Is it really possible for us Old New Zealanders to avoid embarking alongside the New on Mr Key’s voyage of the damned? Aren’t we all aboard that ship? All inescapably bound to its fate? Aren’t those paper streamers attached to the world we are leaving behind? Isn’t the moment of their breaking also the moment we must bid farewell forever to Old New Zealand?

I don’t believe it is. Neoliberal values are like those plates African tribeswomen insert in their lower-lips. They are alien to the true shape of humanity and are only accommodated by constant application and severe distortion. Once accomplished, however, the effect is much admired by those who have already endured the process. And those who have not are, naturally, despised.

But we plate-less ones at least retain the natural shape of our humanity and inhabit a world in which it is still possible to whistle to, smile at, and kiss one another. In this sense, we Old New Zealanders have indeed been spared the horrors of Captain Key’s voyage.

I dreamed last night of Oamaru and awoke fearing the onset of nightmare. But it need not be so. For hasn’t Oamaru become the capital of that strange art-form known a “steam-punk”? Past and future can be merged to create a potent new hybrid of magic and science. Old songs can find new singers, and old guitars new strings. And, if we all try hard enough to remember, perhaps, in time, the right words will come back to us.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

Coronation or Conundrum?

Giving Or Taking?: With all the polls showing National on track to win an outright majority of the votes cast, the Prime Minister is heading for an electoral coronation. If NZ First crosses the five percent MMP threshold, however, New Zealand faces a conundrum. Will NZ First, by abstaining on Confidence and Supply motions, allow "King John" to govern, or will that wily old kingmaker, Winston Peters, permit Phil Goff to seize his crown?

TOMORROW’S ELECTION will be either a coronation or a conundrum. The pollsters predict the former: that National will canter home with more than half the votes cast. If the voters confirm these prognostications, then Mr Key will more than merit the monarchical moniker. He and his party will have achieved what no other New Zealand prime minister or German chancellor has ever achieved under the Mixed Member Proportional system: outright victory and the ability to govern without the irksome baggage of coalition. If that is the result, then “King John” it’ll be – and who’s to say him nay?

For the Election to become a conundrum two things have to happen. First, and most crucially, Winston Peters’ NZ First Party must rise above the 5 percent MMP threshold. If it doesn’t, then Mr Key’s Government is almost certainly safe. The second thing (and, naturally, it’s closely related to the first) is that National’s percentage of the Party Vote has to fall to the mid-forties. If Mr Peters gets up, and National drops down below 45.5 percent, then it’ll be fair to announce: “Houston, we have a problem.”

Our problem might best be described as a case of multiple and mutual political allergies. Mr Key is allergic to Mr Peters, and Mr Peters is allergic to Mr Key. Fair enough, you might say, there’s no love lost between those two. If Mr Peters adds his 5 percent (6 seats) to Labour’s 32 percent (39 seats), the Green’s 12 percent (15 seats) and Mana’s 1.5 percent (2 seats), then it’s all over. Phil Goff becomes Prime Minister and Mr Key remains uncrowned. (We’re assuming, of course, that Mr Goff’s allergy to Mr Harawira miraculously vanishes on Saturday evening.)

If only it were that simple.

But, unfortunately, Mr Peters’ allergies extend far beyond Mr Key and the National Party. He also claims to be allergic to Labour’s Mr Goff, the Greens’ Russel Norman and Metiria Turei, and Mana’s Hone Harawira. National’s unforgiveable sin is its plan to sell state assets. Labour’s, the Greens’ and the Mana Party’s unpardonable transgression is their support for what Mr Peters’ calls “Maori separatism”. Accordingly, Mr Peters has declared a plague on all their houses. NZ First, he says, will take itself off to the Opposition Benches and there maintain the strictest political celibacy.

Hmmmm.

That could be good news for Mr Key. Let’s assume his worst nightmare with National sliding down to “just” 45 percent of the Party Vote. That would entitle it to 55 seats. Now let’s assume that “the good voters of Epsom” elect Mr Banks, but Act, itself, receives only 1 percent of the Party Vote. National gets one ally. If Peter Dunne holds Ohariu, National has two allies. If the Maori Party wins three of the Maori seats, National’s allies number five and it is able to form a coalition controlling 60 of the 121 seats. That’s a healthy margin above Mr Goff’s 56 seats.

Not so fast. Before he can form a Government, Mr Key must be able to inform the Governor-General that National commands a majority of the seats in the House of Representatives. Can he do that? Only if Mr Peters gives him a firm undertaking that on matters of Confidence and Supply he and his colleagues will abstain.

But, if NZ First undertakes to abstain on votes of Confidence and Supply that’s tantamount to allowing Mr Key to form a government. Is it possible that Mr Peters, having confounded the critics and led his party back to Parliament, will then repeat his extraordinary decision of 1996 and re-seat his arch-enemies on the Treasury Benches?

No, the only way Mr Peters can “punish” his enemies is to pledge his party’s consistent support on matters of Confidence and Supply to Mr Goff. There’s simply no other means of securing his political legacy.

Were I the Governor-General, I’d be praying that the coronation of “King John” spares me the conundrum of Mr Peters.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion-Post, The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 25 November 2011.

Human, All-Too-Human

The Eyes Have It: If "Cuppagate" fails to put an end to the people's trust, John Key will have the general reluctance of human-beings to surrender their most cherished illusions to thank for his re-election.

RIGHT NOW there’s nothing more important than Bradley Ambrose’s recording. Those who lament the salience of “Cuppagate” in the current campaign simply don’t understand the nature of electoral politics. General Elections are a bloodless form of warfare, waged with symbolic weapons. Like it or not, the disputed digital recording of the Key-Banks conversation in Café Urban has become the most potent weapon in the struggle between those who want to keep John Key in office and those who want to remove him.

Team Key need their man to be seen as the victim of a media conspiracy. That’s why they have cast him as the public’s champion, barring the way to the slippery slope down which unethical journalists are preparing to toss the whole nation. That is why he’s had to resist every call to authorise release of the recording. Because if he relented then nobody would be safe. Invoking the memory of Milly Dowler, the Prime Minister’s ranged himself alongside Steve Coogan and Hugh Grant. Like them, he’s standing in front of an out-of-control media juggernaut and crying “Halt!”

The news media cannot quite get its head around Mr Key’s tactics. Most of the time politicians are extremely wary of journalists and their vast audiences. Spin doctors take great care to cultivate the most important media players and do everything they can to ensure that their employer’s messages reach the public without too much in the way of unhelpful journalistic interpretation. But, on those rare occasions when the media sets itself against a beloved leader, a helpless individual and/or a trusted institution, none of this applies. When the media allows its own conduct to become the focus of public attention the result is seldom pretty.

The American networks’ coverage of the police riot outside the Democratic Party Convention in 1968 is the most famous illustration of this phenomenon. News reporters and TV anchors were deeply shocked at the violence meted out, not simply to young anti-war protesters, but to many of the Convention delegates themselves. Images of berserk Chicago cops beating defenceless citizens were broadcast to the nation and the authorities condemned for allowing such violence to take place.

For more than a generation, America’s leading journalists had felt supremely confident they were speaking for the vast majority of decent Americans. But they weren’t. Following these historic news broadcasts, tens-of-thousands of phone calls, telegrams and letters flooded the TV networks. And these messages, far from condemning the Police violence, condemned the journalists for defending the protesters and criticising the authorities.

The US news media’s moral confidence never fully recovered from this experience. Deeply disillusioned, journalists were forced to accept that, far from being automatic defenders of media freedom, most citizens were suspicious of social critics, and resented the space and time news organisations made available to them.

People do not like to receive information which contradicts their most cherished assumptions. The 50 percent of New Zealanders who identify with John Key’s aspirational and anti-political persona do not want to be told that it is nothing more than a carefully constructed mask. They don’t want to know that behind the Prime Minister’s genial and easy-going manner lies a ruthless and unforgiving politician.

The harder the news media pushes for the Key-Banks conversation to be released, the more fearful his supporters become that they will be forced to change their favourable opinion of the Prime Minister. And since that’s something they’re desperately unwilling to do, they’re happily telling the pollsters they support his “principled stand”.

Horizon Research puts the Against Release/For Release split at 53 to 46 – and that may well turn out to be the way the votes are finally distributed between the parties of the Centre-Right and the Centre-Left. Only a handful of political junkies and policy wonks genuinely care about the parties’ policies. Elections are not won or lost on policy. (If they were, then National’s policy on asset sales would already have condemned it to defeat.) Elections, for most people ,boil down to only one question: “Who do you trust?”

Who do you trust to keep your job? Who do you trust to keep your house? Who do you trust to keep you safe? Who do you trust to give your kids a rich and fulfilling life?

Overwhelmingly, and for an unprecedented period of time, New Zealanders have answered those questions with the name of the Prime Minister. That’s why the National Party has put all its eggs into the single basket named “John Key”. It also explains why Mr Key and his party are going to such extraordinary lengths to suppress Mr Ambrose’s recording.

Protecting its contents has been transformed into an act of almost religious fidelity. John Key the people’s saviour must remain inviolate, lest John Key the calculating politician be exposed as human, all-too-human.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 22 November 2011.

If We Were A Nation Of Grown-Ups

Things To Come: A society in its adulthood was the subject of the 1936 film adaptation of H.G. Well's futuristic novel The Shape of Things to Come. Perhaps this Saturday we should all make an effort to put an end to New Zealand's arrested development and vote like a nation of grown-ups.

IF WE WERE a nation of grown-ups, the biggest battle at election time would be the one between Labour and the Greens. They would be arguing about the wisdom of persisting with a system in which the environment is treated as something external to economic transactions, or adopting a new approach in which all human-behaviour is judged according to the severity of its ecological impact. Because, in an age of anthropogenic global warming and peak oil, that is the only argument that matters.

A grown-up nation’s political energies would be devoted to resolving the outstanding ideological objections preventing a productive meshing of the social-democratic and social-ecological programmes. How to keep human welfare at the centre of government action without losing sight of the ecological costs such policies inevitably entail. Not only the Labour and Green parties, but also the news media and the universities would be devoting all their resources to this debate.

A grown-up nation would pause, in the midst of the debate, and give thanks that the parties of the discredited neoliberal past were no longer around to tout the interests of farmers and businessmen. Parties which treated the environment as either a massive sink into which their sponsors were permitted to pour their waste; or, as an inexhaustible quarry from which farmers and businessmen could appropriate the planet’s resources with impunity.

A grown-up nation would shudder at the memory of the politics of distraction in which parties like National and Act engaged. It would recall the way the corporate news media constantly whipped-up fear of crime for commercial gain, and how conservative politicians exploited public fear to justify the incarceration of thousands of citizens in dehumanising penal institutions. It would remember the way criminality and poverty were constantly conflated by the parties of the Right: to the point where whole ethnic and economically deprived communities came to be regarded as either dangerous animals to be controlled, or suitable cases for therapeutic treatment. It would marvel at how effective these tactics were at focusing people’s attention away from the all-too-obvious causes of poverty and crime; economic and social inequality with all their manifold manifestations: unemployment, inadequate and over-crowded housing, domestic violence, family break-up, physical and mental illness and substance abuse.

A grown-up nation would long ago have devoted its energies to eradicating these contributory factors to human misery. It would remember the importunate shrieks and outraged imprecations of the tiny minority of obscenely wealthy individuals (in whose exclusive interests its institutions had been run) as a rigorous and strongly progressive taxation system systematically dismantled the edifices of privilege built up in the old regime’s final phase. It would congratulate itself on the radically democratic structures established in both the workplace and the community, and the speed with which these bodies were able to bring “the wisdom of crowds” to bear on the so-called “problems” of productivity and innovation. It would feel again the sense of wonder at how easily the processes of participatory democracy and consensus-based decision-making were incorporated into the institutions of local and central government.

If we were a nation of grown-ups these are the issues we’d be debating, and these the achievements we’d be gratefully and proudly recalling, five days out from a general election.

But we are not a nation of grown-ups. We are still a nation of moral and political infants reaching out desperately for the hand of a man who would see police constables raid the offices of newspapers and broadcasters rather than share with the voters the contents of a supposedly “bland” political conversation. We are a nation in which so-called “journalists” from major media outlets are perfectly willing to endorse (and even praise!) the state-enforced suppression of political information in the midst of a general election. We are a nation that worships wealth and fame. We are a nation profoundly ignorant of its own past. We are a nation obsessed with limiting government expenditure, but unrelentingly hostile to raising government revenue. We are a nation that still prefers to marginalise, blame and punish the poor rather than lift them out of poverty. We are a nation that is willing to do just about anything except accept what sort of nation we are.

We’re a nation with a lot of growing up to do.

We should all make a start this weekend.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.