Something To Put Us In The Mood For The Budget.

From Bob Fosse's incomparable 1972 musical, Cabaret, Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey sing "Money Makes The World Go Around".

Video courtesy of YouTube.

The Cruellest Cuts: Why Joe Hockey's Budget Will Almost Certainly Fare Worse Than Bill English's.

Budget Cutters: In the Anglophone economies it is becoming increasingly clear that the ruling classes' definition of the political nation (i.e. the people upon whom it is still legitimate to lavish taxpayers' money) is shrinking. Accordingly, there is a growing understanding among elite political managers that the electoral equation can only be made to work in their favour by ensuring that an increasingly large proportion of the electorate is dissuaded, for whatever reason, from casting a vote.

 

THE WORLD OWES a debt of gratitude to Scott Prouty, the Florida bartender who videoed Mitt Romney’s infamous 47 percent speech. It was during this speech that the Republican Party’s nominee for President of the United States told his $50,000 per person fundraiser that 47 percent of Americans were dependent on government, saw themselves as victims and believed government had a responsibility to care for them. More than any other single factor, it was Prouty’s recording that derailed Romney’s campaign for the Presidency.

 

The potency of the tape lay in the insight it provided into the minds of the very wealthy men and women to whom Romney was addressing his remarks. Some commentators construed its message as demonstrating how out of touch Romney and his Republican donors were with the realities of American life – especially in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Inasmuch as it grossly overstated the level of dependency and fundamentally mischaracterised the expectations of ordinary Americans Romney’s speech did testify to his political ignorance. What it also demonstrated, however, and more importantly, was the open contempt in which America’s ruling class held nearly half of the American people.

 

Because, of course, that “47 percent” wasn’t a statistic – it was code. What Romney was signalling to his audience was that once you deducted the Blacks, the Hispanics and the Poor White Trash from the raw total of American citizens, 53 percent was all you had left. His comments were thus intended both as a reminder and a warning to his wealthy donors about just how tenuous their position was. If something wasn’t done – and soon – to stem this rising tide of outstretched hands, Romney was saying, then “Real America” – the 53 percent – would find themselves out-voted by the other America.

 

This equation of White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant and economically comfortable America with “Real America” is deeply embedded in the political psyche of the Republican Right. Interestingly, one of the most cogent statements of WASP prejudice comes in Eric Roth’s screenplay for The Good Shepherd – a movie about the foundation and early years of the Central Intelligence Agency. Halfway through the film Roth brings together the hero, Edward Wilson (Matt Damon) a senior CIA officer, with Joseph Palmi (Joe Pesci) a Mafioso chieftain.

 

Joseph Palmi: Let me ask you something ... we Italians, we got our families, and we got the Church; the Irish, they have the homeland, Jews their tradition; even the Niggers, they got their music. What about you people, Mr. Wilson, what do you have?

 

Edward Wilson: The United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.

 

This attitude remained deeply imbedded in the CIA. When the right-wing Republican, Ronald Reagan, became President in 1981, his appointee as CIA Director, William Casey, launched an unofficial purge of the Agency’s hyphenated Americans – especially those whose immigrant parents and grandparents hailed from suspect homelands in Eastern and Southern Europe.

 

AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND are not, of course, the United States, but, like it or not, they (along with Anglophone Canada) remain strong outposts of the great Anglo-Saxon diaspora of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their ruling-classes, like the ruling-class of the United States, are also White, Anglo-Saxon (to which we can now append Celtic) and Christian (Protestants and Catholics having long ago joined forces against the rising tide of “Secular Humanism”) and in relation to their respective states both evince a deep proprietary awareness. They see it as their bounden duty to ensure that Australia and New Zealand continue to be governed by “the right people”.

 

In both countries there is a growing fear that the demographic structures of their populations are turning against them: that, as in the United States, the electoral equation can only be made to work in their favour by ensuring that an increasingly large proportion of the electorate is dissuaded, for whatever reason, from casting a vote.

 

The Australian ruling-class finds itself at a decided disadvantage on this score. The Commonwealth’s compulsory voting legislation means that the participation rate in Australian elections remains exceptionally high. It also means that when the Liberal Party finds itself in power, with its most aggressive ideologues calling the shots, its ability to implement the sort of far-Right programme demanded by it's billionaire backers tends to run into a series of demographic and democratic road-blocks.

 

Joe Hockey’s – the Liberal Party Treasurer’s – Budget is being trumpeted as a no-holds barred assault on the social-democratic reforms of the last 40 years. We shall see. The polls are already registering a gathering public rejection of the Liberal’s hard-line approach. If Hockey’s Budget is as bad as people fear, the Government of Tony Abbot may not see out the year. The precedent set by the Liberal-dominated Senate’s constitutionally objectionable refusal to pass the Budget of Gough Whitlam’s re-elected Labour Government in 1975 may well come back to haunt them.

 

The National Party-led government of John Key and Bill English in New Zealand has much more room to manoeuvre. Their ideological latitude is, paradoxically, attributable to the constitutional ramifications of National’s own attempt to do what Hockey hopes to do – unwind the welfare state and “put an end to the age of entitlement”. Ruth Richardson’s 1991 “Mother Of All Budgets” (clearly an inspiration for Hockey) so deranged the New Zealand political order that, in 1993, the voters threw out the First-Past-The-Post electoral system and replaced it with a form of proportional representation.

 

The conditions of so-called “elected dictatorship”, which had made the whole neoliberal revolution in New Zealand possible, were reconfigured in such radical fashion that the pursuit of a hard-line, ideologically-driven programme became electorally unfeasible.

 

For the foreseeable future New Zealand seemed destined to be ruled by necessarily moderate coalition governments. The former Reserve Bank Governor, Don Brash’s, determination to test this proposition in the election of 2005 brought his radically right-wing National Party closer to victory than many pundits believed possible – but not far enough.

 

One of the (many) mispronouncements and campaigning gaffes that cause Brash to lose the election was a statement he made just 72 hours before the polling booths opened in which he conflated “mainstream New Zealanders” with National Party supporters. The similarities between Brash’s remark and Romney’s are remarkable. The willingness of both men to cast half of their respective nation’s citizens as “The Other” – persons somehow unworthy of either recognition or representation – exposes the enduring weakness of the Far-Right. Its apparent incapacity to practice the politics of inclusion.

 

The contrast between and ultimate fate of Joe Hockey’s and Bill English’s Budgets will be interesting to observe. The former’s, I suspect, will prove the downfall of Tony Abbott’s government. The latter’s, by being framed to include as many of the voting public as English deems ideologically defensible, will, at the very least, give John Key’s government a fighting chance.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 12 May 2014.

New Zealand's Progressive Nationalism

Progressive Nationalist: Murray Horton has been the public face of the Campaign Against Foreign Control in Aotearoa (CAFCA) since the mid-1970s. He has just completed his triennial, election year, tour of New Zealand during which he reacquaints grass-roots New Zealanders with the facts, the figures and the consequences of trans-national corporate dominance of their country.

 

LAST FRIDAY I had the privilege of listening to one of Canterbury’s finest sons, Murray Horton. For 40 strenuous years Murray and a dedicated band of supporters have run the organisation called Campaign Against Foreign Control in Aotearoa (CAFCA). The official organ of CAFCA – Foreign Control Watchdog – is edited by Murray, published quarterly, and along with articles and reviews on politics and economics contains a handy compendium of all the latest decisions of the Overseas Investment Office. It always makes for challenging, not to mention sobering, reading.

 

Every election year, for close on 20 years now, Murray has journeyed from one end of New Zealand to the other, bringing to New Zealanders the facts, the figures and the consequences of foreign investment in their country. Though the rigorously atheistic Horton would probably frown at the suggestion, I look upon these nationwide tours as a kind of pilgrimage. Not the sort of pilgrimage where faith is restored through the proximity of saints, shrines and relics, but through a renewed connection with that most essential raw material of Democracy – the people themselves.

 

In trades halls, church halls, community halls (and the occasional university lecture hall) from Bluff to Kaitaia, Murray gives his 90 minute talk to groups ranging in size from half-a-dozen to several score. It’s not for the faint-hearted because Murray’s a political campaigner of the old-school – the sort that eschews sound-bites for hard evidence and patient reasoning.

 

And people love it: asking him questions and arguing about his answers for hours at a time. In this regard the talk I attended in Auckland on Friday was no exception. People arrived at 4 and didn’t leave until after 7:00pm.

 

The gospel according to Horton is a compelling testament not least because the person delivering it is so quintessentially Kiwi. Laconic, sharp, self-deprecating, larger-than-life and with an accent you could sharpen a knife on, he’s the sort of character Labour used to hoist onto the hustings. (Back in the days when describing someone as working-class and clever was not discounted, in rounded middle-class vowels, as oxymoronic.)

 

It is compelling, too, because it is directed at people who still regard themselves, culturally, as members of a national community, and, politically, as citizens of a nation state.

 

It’s no accident that CAFCA was founded in 1974, a year in which the potent, genuinely progressive New Zealand nationalism unleashed by Norman Kirk just 12 months earlier was gathering strength. The nationalism which would reach its apogee in the anti-tour protests and nuclear-free New Zealand movement of the early 1980s. The enduring conviction of what New Zealand should represent – and could represent – that the neoliberal ideology introduced by Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson has worked so diligently to deconstruct for the past 25 years.

 

Kirk’s progressive nationalism – and Horton’s – can trace its origins all the way back to the progressivism of the Liberal Government of 1891-1912. It was during this period that New Zealand acquired the sobriquet “social laboratory of the world”, giving practical effect to the author of God Defend New Zealand, Thomas Bracken’s, prayer that the Almighty would “guide her in the nations’ van” as humanity’s pathfinder to a more just and abundant society.

 

That New Zealand’s most enduring nationalistic traditions should derive directly from the progressive side of politics is hardly surprising. The mobilising sentiment against which they have invariably measured themselves has almost always been generated by this country’s conservative elites on behalf of the supra-national entities in which New Zealand has historically found itself culturally, politically and (most importantly) economically enmeshed.

 

First as a colony and then as a (reluctant) dominion, New Zealand’s conservative leaders have consistently presented these islands and their inhabitants as the British Empire’s most loyal subjects. The awful blood sacrifice of World War I kept the “Mother Country’s” doors open to all the butter, cheese, wool and lamb her Pacific farmers could send. And when, in 1941, the Japanese were unkind enough to sink Mother’s warships Repulse and Prince of Wales, New Zealand was compelled to shift, without so much as a pause of breath, into the imperial embrace of Uncle Sam.

 

While the USA was under the progressive management of Franklin D. Roosevelt that might not seem so bad, but as Uncle Sam swiftly acquired the bloodthirsty habits of all imperial potentates, New Zealand’s conservative elites were only too happy to again subsume their country’s interests in the supra-national, American-led “Free World” and, after the Cold War’s end, into “the global marketplace”.

 

Listening to Murray Horton’s inspirational pitch for progressive New Zealanders to put the interests of New Zealand first, and those of foreign investors second, and, then, to reduce the “Five Eyes” global surveillance agreement to a Kiwi-less four, I suddenly understood Che Guevara’s cryptic observation:

 

“The Revolution is not a portrait – it’s a landscape.”

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 13 May 2014.

Different Address: Mai Chen Assesses Auckland's Future

Mother Of Dragons: Public law specialist, Mai Chen, argues that "Auckland is now the leader and its fast-growing and multicultural population has to be addressed differently from other parts of the country." Could this lead to New Zealand's largest city becoming a Chinese financial enclave and entrepot dominated by local agents of the vast (and globally expanding) Chinese diaspora?

BY 2040 AUCKLAND’S POPULATION is projected to reach 2.5 million – with half of that number being first generation immigrants. Billions of investment dollars will accompany these new residents, conferring upon them a disproportionate amount of national power and influence. From whatever perspective it is viewed: economic, cultural or political; New Zealand’s future development seems certain to be seriously, and quite possibly dangerously, distorted.

 

Public law specialist and author of Transforming Auckland: The Creation of Auckland Council , Mai Chen, seems less concerned about the possible consequences for New Zealand of having so much of its population and economic wealth concentrated in a single city than she does with ensuring the tax dollars of her fellow citizens keeping flowing north:

 

“Auckland cannot fund its infrastructure, despite its wealth, without Central Government … We need them … Aucklanders just want to get on with it.”

 

Perhaps, as a Chinese-New Zealander and a former member of the Asia-NZ Foundation, Ms Chen is simply bedazzled by the prospect of Auckland’s future becoming inextricably interwoven with the burgeoning Chinese economy. In the course of a recent newspaper interview, for example, she warned New Zealand’s decision-makers:

 

“The bureaucrats and officials in the capital have to start understanding Auckland’s problems and the importance of its rich human and social capital, as well as its economic impact ….. Auckland is now the leader and its fast-growing and multicultural population has to be addressed differently from other parts of the country.”

 

This statement, when unpacked, contains a rather ominous message for the rest of New Zealand.

 

Essentially, what Ms Chen is saying is that the city of Auckland’s population, made up increasingly of people who were born somewhere else (the explanation, presumably, for the richness of its human and social capital) and whose economic and cultural lives are increasingly disconnected from those of non-Auckland citizens, should, accordingly, be “addressed differently” from other New Zealanders.

 

Hmmm? For many decades now Auckland has boasted a “fast-growing and multicultural population”, and yet very few public law specialists over that time felt brave enough to argue that the thousands of unskilled labourers imported from the Pacific islands (also “rich” in human and social capital) should be “addressed differently” from Maori and Pakeha New Zealanders.

 

Could there be a further sub-text hidden within Ms Chen’s demand that Auckland be afforded special treatment by Central Government? Could she also be referencing the fact that within the city’s fast-growing and multicultural population there is an ethnic group that stands out from all the others? A group whose homeland constitutes New Zealand’s largest single trading partner? A group whose investment in the Auckland (as well as the wider New Zealand) economy is rising dramatically? A group whose cultural and financial networks are more than equal to the challenge of transforming Auckland into an outwardly focussed and essentially Asian city?

 

Could it be that Ms Chen is telling us that Auckland must be treated differently from the rest of New Zealand because the fastest growing segment of its population hails from China? Is she trying to persuade us that Auckland’s fate, like that of so many other cities in the Asia-Pacific region over the centuries, is to become a Chinese financial enclave and entrepot dominated by local agents of the vast (and globally expanding) Chinese diaspora?

 

Surely, as a public law specialist, Ms Chen must know that according special recognition to a non-indigenous ethnic group would immediately raise a plethora of fundamental constitutional problems. One has only to think of the enormous constitutional, political and cultural difficulties that have arisen from successive Governments’ attempts to honour the promises made to tangata whenua in the Treaty of Waitangi to get some inkling of the outcry that would accompany any proposal to address Chinese-New Zealanders “differently”.

 

Not that New Zealanders living in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries raised many objections to the very different treatment then meted out to Chinese immigrants by politicians of every ideological hue.  A century ago, anti-Chinese prejudice was as rife in New Zealand as it was in Australia. Immigration from China was restricted to males who could not vote, were required to pay special taxes and denied the right to send for their wives and families. So great was the fear of being “swamped” by the “Yellow Peril” that negative discrimination against the Chinese was not only applauded – it was demanded.

 

Such prejudice may have been buried by twenty-first century politicians, but only in a very shallow grave. It is, therefore, highly unlikely that Ms Chen anticipates anything so problematic as a positively-framed de jure recognition of China’s special interests in New Zealand. Indeed, the only message readers of her book should take away is the very high probability that Central Government will eventually have no option but to grant an Auckland economy increasingly dependent on the inflow of both Chinese immigrants and Chinese capital de facto special status.

 

After all, it was no lesser luminary that the former Commonwealth Secretary-General, onetime National Deputy-Prime Minister, and current Chairman of the New Zealand China Council, Sir Don McKinnon, who warmly greeted “New Zealand’s China Century”:

 

“China is our largest trading partner, our fastest growing source of tourists, our largest source of overseas students, and our greatest source of net migration … Our prosperity, our social cohesiveness, our sense of who we are as a nation is increasingly dependent on how well we integrate this new Chinese dimension into New Zealand’s economic and cultural life.”

 

If you want to know what that means, just ask Judith Collins and Maurice Williamson.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 7 May 2014.

"This Is New."

Game Changer: Labour's finance spokesperson, David Parker, has come up with a credible solution to the many problems associated with New Zealand's Reserve Bank Act mandated monetary policy. Labour now has a more convincing economic story to pitch to the voters than National. Game on!

 

KEYNESIANISM by other means. That’s what David Parker’s new monetary policy offers voters – and they should take it.

 

The measures announced by Parker on Tuesday morning constitute the long-awaited framework upon which the detail of Labour’s manifesto can now be hung. Indeed, without Parker’s proposed changes to the Reserve Bank Act and the Kiwisaver scheme, Labour’s promise to resuscitate the manufacturing export sector and create thousands of new jobs would’ve been empty. But now that Parker has provided the party with an economic skeleton to articulate its redistributive muscle, well: “Dem bones, dem bones gonna walk around!”

 

And it’s all Parker’s doing. Political observers have long dismissed the man behind Labour’s economic programme as an earnest, rather rumpled provincial lawyer and “policy wonk”. There’ll be a lot less of that now. For the first time in more than 40 years, Labour has developed a joined-up economic policy that is all its own.

 

Parker confirmed this himself when journalists demanded to know which other countries were running their monetary policy in the way he’s suggesting. “No one,” replied the Shadow Finance Minister with obvious pride, “this is new.”

 

That’s true – as far as it goes – but a close study of the way the Singaporean government has manipulated its superannuation and public housing schemes over recent decades might suggest that Parker is not alone in recognising the powerful monetary impact of raising and lowering the level of compulsory contributions to citizens’ savings funds. What really sets Parker’s plan apart is the way in which he has grafted what are, in effect, Keynesian demand management imperatives onto that most monetarist of institutions – the Reserve Bank of New Zealand.

 

“We propose an important new tool – varying the employee contribution rate for work based savings”, Parker informed his breakfasting business audience. “The variable savings rate mechanism – or VSR – would allow the raising or lowering of savings rates, rather than interest rates, to reduce or boost local consumption.”

 

Not only is Parker’s scheme sound economics (a judgement with which even the business community, however grudgingly, was forced to concur) but it is also spectacularly good politics.

 

A lower exchange rate bodes well for manufactured export and import substitution industries alike and that, in turn, points to job growth. Real job growth, that is: the sort that generates full-time, densely unionised, high-skill, high-wage employment.

 

And Parker’s story just gets better with the telling.

 

By utilising the VSR, rather than the Official Cash Rate (OCR) to take the heat out of the economy, the Reserve Bank Governor will be able to protect mortgage-holders from the sort of continuous income-squeeze they are currently undergoing. The VSR is unlikely to be wheeled out every six weeks in the manner of the OCR, and its wider application will almost certainly reduce each individual’s contribution. What’s more, the money being withdrawn from circulation will remain in New Zealand. The average Kiwi’s economic nationalist nerve cannot help but be stimulated by the knowledge that the big Aussie banks’ ability to turn New Zealand’s misery into Australia’s profit will be patriotically curtailed.

 

The question now for Parker and his boss, David Cunliffe, is how to bring the good news from Labour’s “war-room” to the party’s electoral base. Tuesday’s announcement has had the effect of binding Labour’s message into a single, coherent narrative – but it is not a story that can be told in a ten-second sound-bite. Social media can help in this respect, but Facebook and YouTube can only take this sort of story so far. Good news is best delivered in person.

 

The ideal vector for this type of message is the nationwide political tour. Cunliffe painting the picture of a kinder, gentler, more inclusive and economically productive New Zealand, while Parker details precisely how Labour proposes to take us from problem to solution.

 



Today He'd Use PowerPoint: In the election year of 1975 Rob Muldoon took his charts and graphs and tables on a nationwide tour to discredit Labour's economic policies - especially its NZ Superannuation scheme.

 

There would be an additional measure of delicious political irony in such a road-trip. Forty years ago Labour’s original superannuation scheme was systematically undermined by Rob Muldoon’s travelling roadshow. From town to town and on into the main centres the pint-sized “economic wizard” advanced with his charts and graphs and tables, and with every stop on his exhaustive itinerary the crowds grew larger and more convinced that Labour’s scheme (which today would be worth $260 billion!) was a bad idea.

 

How satisfying it would be to reverse the process.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 2 May 2014.

A Reason To Vote

The Great Includer: David Cunliffe's speech to the Young Labour Conference argued that politics-as-usual has failed. A prosperous future, he warned them, cannot now be built the same way as the past. It’s no longer enough “to work for our people”, said Cunliffe, “we have to work with them.”

DAVID CUNLIFFE’S SPEECH to the Young Labour Conference on Saturday ended what’s been a hellish week for the Opposition on a surprisingly defiant note.

 

“I believe that our people are a community, not a commodity. I believe that when the least fortunate of us does better, we all do better. I believe that in this great country no-one should be left out or left behind.”

 

Cunliffe is a disconcertingly happy warrior. An exile on the back benches, with the insults of his enemies still ringing in his ears, the man’s confidence that he would come back and win the leadership of his party was indomitable. Even now, in the wake of Shane Jones’s deeply damaging defection, and amidst rumours that Labour is polling in the low 20s, Cunliffe’s confidence remains undiminished.

 

A large part of that confidence is based on what might be called the “technological” aspects of contemporary political campaigning. Labour appears to have got its hands on something similar to the computer software that proved so crucial to both the Obama presidential campaigns. The team around Cunliffe is adamant that with this new technology they will be able to identify precisely the groups most likely to vote for Labour.

 

This technological fix will not, however, be enough, on its own, to secure a Labour victory. A major reason for Cunliffe’s presence at the Young Labour Conference (the largest since the late-1980s) was to reinforce the importance of the role they will play in “getting out the vote”.

 

The Obama Campaign’s success was not only about putting in the technological fix, but also about how efficiently the mountains of data it was crunching could be conveyed and practically applied on voter doorsteps by the tens-of-thousands of volunteers that made up its hugely effective “on-the-ground” organisation.

 

“Change is not a spectator sport”, Cunliffe told his youthful audience. “Our opponents are counting on young people like you, your classmates, friends and flatmates to stay home in September. They are betting on the apathy of young people like you. They are counting on your silence. We need to prove them wrong.”

 

Aware of their imminent dispatch onto the streets of Wellington and the Hutt Valley for an afternoon of door-knocking and political proselytising, the Labour leader told his young listeners: “The conversations you will have today are part of hundreds and thousands of personal contacts we are having all around the country.”

 

Data-mining plus feet on the ground.

 

“That is how we are going to win this election”, Cunliffe assured them. By building “a grassroots movement for change”.

 

Cunliffe’s confidence – symbolised by his permanently fixed cat-who’s-got-the-cream grin – strongly suggests that he’s been convinced that, on election day, this combination of improved technology and inspired grassroots organisation, which Labour intends to operate below the news media’s radar, will leave all the doom-saying pundits struggling – like the hapless Karl Rove on Fox News in 2012 – to explain why the impossible keeps happening right before their eyes.

 

But is the Opposition Leader’s confidence justified? If the rumours concerning poll results in the 20-25 percent range are borne out, how will Labour’s campaign maintain the high level of morale and personal commitment necessary to keep an effective get-out-the-vote operation in play?

 

At an even more basic level, how do Cunliffe and his advisers ensure that the demographic groups deemed “most likely” to vote Labour actually place two ticks on the ballot papers?

 

Recent research undertaken in the United States strongly suggests that electoral success comes to the party whose policies adhere most closely to the preferences of its political base. The progressive American writer, Dave Johnson, argues provocatively that “there is no swing block of voters between the parties”. “The lesson to learn”, he says, is that: “There are not voters who ‘swing’, there are left voters and right voters who either show up and vote or do not show up and vote. If Democrats don’t give regular, working people – the Democratic base – a reason to vote, then many of them won’t.”

 

What Cunliffe must decide, and quickly, is whether offsetting the introduction of a Capital Gains Tax; raising the age of eligibility for NZ Superannuation to 67; supporting the free-trade principles of the TPPA; and tinkering with the Reserve Bank Act against his party’s “Kiwibuild” housing scheme; the proposed single-buyer of electricity, New Zealand Power; and the “Best Start” support payment policy for infants; will be enough to give Labour’s base “a reason to vote”.

 

“I believe that politics-as-usual has failed New Zealanders”, Cunliffe told Young Labour. A prosperous future, he warned them, cannot now be built the same way as the past. It’s no longer enough “to work for our people”, said Cunliffe, “we have to work with them.”

 

Properly developed, that concept could give much more than Labour’s base a reason to vote.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 29 April 2014.

Three Songs For ANZAC Day

 

Eric Bogle:  And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda

 

 

Eric Bogle: No Man's Land (The Green Fields Of France)

 

 

Redgum: I Was Only Nineteen

 

They tell us that at Gallipoli New Zealand came of age as a nation. Well, if that's true, why is it that in all the years since 25 April 1915 no Kiwi has ever penned a song to match even one of these three? It seems to me that the Brits and the Aussies have processed the tragedy and futility of their countries' wars far better than we have.

 

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.