Getting Labour "Off The Couch" To Break Unemployment's Vicious Circles.

Avuncular Intervention: Regional Economic Development Minister, Shane Jones, tells TVNZ's Q+A programme that he is determined to introduce measures which will ensure that his "ne'er-do-well nephews" get "off the couch" and into work. Historically, breaking the vicious circles of unemployment has required the state to become the employer of last resort.

YOU’VE GOT TO hand it to Shane Jones – he sure knows how to seize control of the political agenda! Ever since his provocative performance on last Sunday’s Q+A, his name has seldom been out of the headlines. More impressive still, his ideas are being debated everywhere.

Sparking a genuine national conversation on anything other than sport and celebrity sex isn’t an easy thing to do. Generally speaking, it’s evidence of somebody, somewhere, striking a nerve. In Jones’ case, the phrase that caused so many Kiwis’ knees to jerk was the one prompted by his determination to get his ne’er do well nephews “off the couch” and into work.

In many ways, Jones’ arguments for unemployed youngsters to be forced into the world of work are classic Labour. Traditional working-class New Zealanders have little patience with slackers and bludgers. Decent men and women measure their worth by the hours they put in. Neither are they fussy about the jobs they put their energies into. The main thing is to be busy; to contribute; and be seen to be doing everything possible to stand on their own feet and pay their own way.

The problem (if problem is the right word) with this “can-do” attitude, is that it’s, almost always, a reflection of the “virtuous circles” in which its exemplars have been raised. Families in which the virtues of hard work, and the need to “better oneself”, have been drummed into children from birth tend, strangely enough, to produce hard workers who better themselves. Success is thus rendered intergenerational: fixing the family’s upward social trajectory; and ultimately carrying them out of their class altogether. No matter how high such families may rise, however, the values that drove their success, providing they continue to be inculcated, prevent them from falling.

But, what about the much less fortunate inhabitants of “vicious circles”? Families broken by massive economic dislocation and enforced idleness. Families in which hope curdles and faith in the future withers. Households where all sense of self-worth is undermined by repeated knock-backs and rejections; where, even when work is secured, it is precarious, wretchedly-paid, and subject to conditions that only further erase any semblance of personal dignity. In these circumstances, the wonder is not that such vicissitudes precipitate addiction, desertion, violence and abuse; but that so many men and women struggle to resist the vicious downward spiral into indifference and despair.

The puzzle which Shane Jones has set himself, and (through sheer chutzpah!) the coalition government, to solve is: how to rescue those trapped in these vicious circles; and how to then install them in virtuous circumstances of sufficient permanence for that virtue to become self-sustaining?

Significantly, Jones is reaching back into New Zealand history for answers. Because, of course, this country has broken vicious circles before. To secure a decent life for the social casualties of economic depression and world war, the First Labour Government expanded dramatically the employment opportunities offered by the state. Tens-of-thousands of workers who might otherwise have subsisted from odd-job to odd-job, found permanent employment, with union-negotiated wage-rates and conditions, in the state-owned railways, postal and telegraphic services, and infrastructure projects. They may not have been the world’s most productive workers, but these state-provided jobs allowed them to establish homes and families, and to raise children untroubled by the viciousness of the downward spiral.

That Jones is experiencing resistance from his former Labour colleagues is one of history’s little ironies. Or, maybe not. Because it was the Fourth Labour Government who made such an issue out of the alleged “inefficiency” of New Zealand’s “feather-bedded” government departments. The much-vaunted process of “corporatisation”, out of which emerged the significantly-titled “State Owned Enterprises”, saw thousands of workers lose not only their jobs, but the economic and social security that came with them. Virtuous circles of fifty years duration were broken, and the vicious circles, which have become such a feature of the free-market era, began sucking thousands of New Zealanders into their whirlpools of dysfunction.

Shane Jones, and his boss, Winston Peters, both know that short bursts of employment, even for the minimum wage, cannot cure the effects of structural unemployment. They’re aware that the vicious circles of dysfunction can only be broken by the state-subsidisation of permanent employment.

And that will require the Labour-led Government to “get off the couch”.

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, 8 December 2017.

"Closing The Gaps" 2.0

Dangerous Politics: Both Jacinda Ardern and Grant Robertson were up-close witnesses of the racist backlash that scuttled the Helen Clark-led Government’s attempt to “Close the Gaps” between Rich and Poor/Maori and Pakeha in the early 2000s. The National Party does not have a monopoly on redneckism. Many Labour voters also have plenty of unpleasant things to say on the subject of “the Maarees”.

THE WORST SIDE-EFFECT of New Zealand’s thirty-year “free-market” experiment is the way the words “Maori” and “dysfunctional” have become interchangeable. That the poor in New Zealand are disproportionately brown has made it much easier for the Pakeha majority to submerge their racial animosity in the less inflammatory vocabulary of socio-economic prejudice. Just like their White American counterparts, Pakeha racists have found a way to communicate their hatred and intolerance of ethnic minorities by couching their attacks in the language of economics and sociology.

As newspaper columnist Dave Witherow, and the former National Party leader, Dr Don Brash have both discovered over the past fortnight: to rant and rave publicly against Te Ao Maori is to invite instant, extensive and very loud condemnation. Condemning the poor for their ignorance, improvidence, laziness and criminality, however, provokes no such backlash. Liberal and progressive New Zealand is content to keep ethnicity and social deprivation in separate conceptual boxes. In the racist imagination, however, being poor, and being Maori, remain kindred categories.

This ethnically-coded discourse about poverty and the poor explains the otherwise puzzling phenomenon of the former National Government’s ability to embrace much of the programme of the Maori Party without provoking the mass desertion of the sort of National voter who had responded so dramatically to Dr Brash’s in/famous “Orewa Speech” of 2004. John Key may have basked in the praise of liberal New Zealand for throwing his arms around Tariana Turia and Pita Sharples, but National’s less “politically correct” supporters had only to observe his government’s hard-line approach to beneficiaries to be reassured that their party’s intolerance of all manifestations of “Maori/Dysfunction” remained as fierce as ever.

As political subterfuge goes, it was a pretty sophisticated double-act. On the one hand stood Chris Finlayson: working his way through the backlog of Treaty claims with admirable dispatch. On the other, Paula Bennett and Anne Tolley: wielding their punishing sticks against the undeserving poor – a disproportionate number of whom just happened to be brown. The urban liberals were moved, but so, too, were National’s provincial conservatives. A win-win strategy for everyone – except the Maori poor.

And on 23 September 2017, the Maori poor had their revenge. Unwilling to give the Maori Party the benefit of the doubt a fifth time, Maori voters drove its two remaining representatives out of Parliament altogether – thereby securing Labour a clean sweep of the seven Maori electorates. Between them, the Labour, NZ First and Green parties making up the current government contain an unprecedented 19 Maori MPs.

For these Maori politicians, the linkage between ethnicity and poverty is as important to the overall conduct of Jacinda Ardern’s government as it was to John Key’s – but for diametrically opposite reasons! Maori, both inside and outside the House of Representatives, will not tolerate an economic and social strategy that is not committed unequivocally to freeing their communities from the consequences of thirty years of racist neglect: those crippling social dysfunctions which so many Pakeha cite as justification for their prejudice.

This is dangerous politics. Both Jacinda Ardern and Grant Robertson were up-close witnesses of the racist backlash that scuttled the Helen Clark-led Government’s attempt to “Close the Gaps” between Rich and Poor/Maori and Pakeha in the early 2000s. The National Party does not have a monopoly on redneckism. Many Labour voters also have plenty of unpleasant things to say on the subject of “the Maarees”.

Enter NZ First’s Regional Economic Development Minister, Shane Jones. His mission, to unite conservative provincial New Zealanders, Maori and Pakeha, around an economic nationalist programme committed to uplifting both communities. Anyone who watched Jones’s bravura performance on TVNZ’s “Q+A” current-affairs programme of Sunday, 3 December – during which he openly talked about forcing his feckless Northland “nephews” “off the couch” and into paid work – can only have felt for Finance Minister Grant Robertson. Jones, undoubtedly speaking on behalf of his boss, Winston Peters, made it very clear that Robertson’s business-oriented commitment to “fiscal and economic responsibility” cut little ice with him – nor, one suspects, with the Coalition Government’s other Maori MPs.

“Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the Coalition Agreement”, quipped Jones, paraphrasing Psalm 20:7, and making it very clear to his political cohabiters that the Maori members of the Government will not be truncating their Maori-centred agenda to satisfy either Robertson’s “Budget Responsibility Rules” – or the prejudices of Pakeha.

What Jones and his comrades have come to understand, finally, is that the “market-failures” which they are determined to correct were also, perversely, politica successes. The free-market policies of the 1980s and 90s contributed to the disintegration of many Maori communities. The resulting “Maori underclass” spawned a host of seriously dysfunctional behaviours – creating fears which were exploited politically to “weaponise” Pakeha racism.

Fix the first problem, and the second falls apart.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 5 December 2017.

Radical Transformers? Doesn't Sound Like It.

Labour's Responsible Fiscal and Economic Manager? Or, will Grant Robertson's unwavering adherence to his own "Budget Responsibility Rules" strap New Zealand into a fiscal and economic straightjacket, the primary effect of which will be to render the Labour-NZ First-Green Government’s “transformational” promises incapable of fulfillment?

TO ACCUSE POLITICIANS of being part of a “tax and spend” government is just another way of calling them social-democrats. By the same token, politicians who explicitly renounce the policies of tax and spend are signalling that they are anything but social-democrats. What, then, should we make of Grant Robertson’s speech to the ANZ Business Breakfast of Friday, 1 December 2017? The short answer is: if Finance Minister Robertson is a social-democrat, then he’s not a very good one.

Let’s begin with the most positive paragraph of his address to the assembled business leaders. Unfortunately, it’s not his. Robertson is merely quoting the core objectives of the Labour-NZ First- Green Government’s “common mission statement”:

 “Together, we will work to provide New Zealand with a transformational government, committed to resolving the greatest long-term challenges for the country, including sustainable economic development, increased exports and decent jobs paying higher wages, a healthy environment, a fair society and good government. We will reduce inequality and poverty and improve the well-being of all New Zealanders and the environment we live in.”

There is no avoiding the radicalism of this declaration. “Transformational government” is what happens when the old ways of doing things are jettisoned in favour of news ways of managing a nation’s economy and society. The 1984-1990 Labour government of David Lange and Roger Douglas was unequivocally transformational. It cast aside the political, economic and social assumptions of the previous fifty years of New Zealand history in favour of a market-led society in which taxing and spending would be relentlessly “downsized”.

Significantly, the current Labour-NZ First-Green Government has, in large measure, come into being because just over half the New Zealand electorate was determined to bring an end to and, if possible, reverse, that downsizing.

Unfortunately, it just isn’t possible – on the basis of Robertson’s address to the ANZ Business Breakfast – to see how that can happen. The Finance Minister makes it very clear that the Ardern Government (its promises to bring about “transformational” change notwithstanding) is absolutely determined to offer “responsible fiscal and economic management”.

In case his audience was in any doubt as to what this entailed, Robertson spelled out Labour’s “Budget Responsibility Rules”:

“To recap, this means that we will deliver a sustainable operating surplus each year unless there is a significant disaster or major economic shock or crisis. We will ensure that government spending as a proportion of the economy won’t rise above the recent historical average of 30% of GDP. We will reduce net core Crown debt to 20% of GDP within five years of taking office.”

It’s important to identify these commitments for what they truly are: a fiscal and economic straightjacket, the primary effect of which will be to render the Labour-NZ First-Green Government’s “transformational” promises incapable of fulfilment.

Robertson’s Budget Responsibility Rules will achieve this result all on their own. Throw in Labour’s election campaign commitment to leave income and company taxes unchanged for three years, and what New Zealanders are faced with is thirty-six months of “Austerity-Lite”. Which isn’t quite the “transformation” New Zealanders had in mind when they accepted Jacinda’s invitation to “Let’s Do This”.

Somehow, Robertson’s rigid adherence to “responsible fiscal and economic management” will have to be overcome. Failure to reclaim the ability to tax and spend, or, to put it in less tendentious language: the ability to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor while accelerating the nation’s infrastructural development in ways that both reduce social inequality and expand individual opportunity; can only result in the Labour-NZ First-Green Government being thrown out on its ear in 2020.

Most of all, the Labour caucus needs to be weaned-off the self-denying-ordinances of neoliberalism. The whole history of our democracy has been about the determination of ordinary people to claim the same rights and privileges that King John’s barons acquired in Magna Carta. Namely, that before the King can tax them, he must first obtain their consent. In other words, determining the quantum and purpose of revenue gathering is the people’s prerogative. Winning control of the Treasury Benches becomes meaningless if the winners then refuse to exercise their right to raise revenue and spend it as they see fit.

If this is, in truth, to be a radical, transformational government, then perhaps its parliamentary majority should consider delivering a small demonstration of radical, transformational politics. All the Labour, NZ First and Green MPs outside Cabinet could agree to meet as a single entity and demand that the “Red October” appendix to the Coalition Agreement be made available for discussion and debate. This revolutionary “Common Mission Committee” could then communicate to Finance Minister Robertson which of the many promises agreed to by Labour were to be financed and implemented. If he refused, a new Finance Minister could be suggested.

Fanciful? Of course, it is! Not least because the Executive could easily thwart such a rebellion by entering into a grand coalition with the National Party. Would that cause the Labour Party to self-destruct? Probably. But wouldn’t that be a more honest outcome than forever putting up with governments run by unelected neoliberal civil servants?

A Labour Party that refuses to tax and spend really should call itself something else.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Saturday, 2 December 2017.

Winston Peters Has Options - Jacinda Ardern Does Not.

Clowns To The Left Of Me, Jokers To The Right: Winston Peters with his crucial nine NZ First seats can make or break the fortunes of both major parties. Jacinda Ardern, on the other hand, cannot lose Winston's support without losing office. It would, therefore, be prudent for Labour to honour the promises that secured them the Treasury Benches.

JACINDA ARDERN needs to get a whole lot smarter – and quickly. Or Bill English might stop behaving like the dimmer half of Dumb and Dumber and start thinking strategically. The object of all this clever, strategic thinking? Winston Peters.

The Prime Minister’s frantic attempts to keep the “annex” to the Labour-NZ First coalition agreement secret, suggests strongly that the rumours about the post-election negotiations are true. Labour, it is said, could not believe the radicalism of the changes Winston Peters and his fellow negotiators were seeking. Unwilling to jeopardise their chances of ultimate victory, Labour’s negotiating team were, accordingly, careful to shunt NZ First’s most radical policy propositions into the now notorious annex.

Describing these as mere “notes”, the Prime Minister is flatly refusing to acknowledge the annex as official information. The moment NZ First’s nice-to-haves become official government policy, she reassures us, they will be made public. Until then, however, the sheer scale of NZ First’s policy ambitions will remain under wraps.

What must Peters be making of all this fancy prime-ministerial footwork?

It’s hard to see him being anything other than aggrieved and alarmed. Is this how Capitalism is to be given a human face? By falling back on the secrecy and manipulation of the Clark years? God knows, there are enough of Helen’s old comrades cluttering-up the Beehive lift-wells as it is! Do they really expect him to abandon his stated preference for “change” over “a modified status quo” before he’s even had time to hang up so much as a single Christmas stocking?

Peters is by no means the first political observer to note just how completely the “Jacinda-Train” has been stripped of its radical political signage. What had looked to many like a replica of Trotsky’s legendary armoured train; a vehicle for carrying the revolution forward against all enemies; has taken on the appearance of a drab KiwiRail locomotive in the process of being rotated 180 degrees on the Wellington turn-table.

This is not what Peters and his party threw in their lot with Labour and the Greens to achieve. Clarks “glacial incrementalism” is not the stuff of which political legacies are made. As he stood beside the young prime minister in the Beehive Theatrette on Monday afternoon, is it possible that Peters was beginning to feel, ever-so-slightly, foolish? Was he wondering whether, somehow, the old grand-master of the political chess-game was being checked?

Had he and his colleagues not been so busy forwarding thousands of written parliamentary questions to the Clerk’s Office, Bill English might have registered just how taut the hawsers holding the Labour and NZ First ships together have become. He might have asked himself what the Prime Minister’s refusal to come clean about all the policy concessions NZ First had demanded, and Labour had nodded through, portended for the Coalition’s long-term prospects. He might have concluded that “a [barely] modified status quo” is the very best NZ First can hope for. He might have thought to himself: “But, National can offer that!”

Indeed, it can. Which is why the Prime Minister needs to rein-in all those lofty Labour condescenders who have plonked themselves down at the coalition table and started explaining the facts of political life to their NZ First and Green Party allies. Most of all, she needs to ban absolutely any further references to Steve Maharey’s infamous quote dismissing political promises as “the sort of thing you say in Opposition, and then forget about in Government”.

Winston Peters had every reason to give the National Party a wide berth in the aftermath of the 2017 general election. Even so, he would never have joined forces with Labour had he not been assured of the policy space necessary to construct an enduring political legacy.

If English senses that Labour is denying the NZ First leader his promised policies of change, then what’s to stop him offering Peters an alternative legacy? By setting-up NZ First as its sister-party in provincial New Zealand, National could avoid becoming “Johnny-No-Mates”: New Zealand’s largest party, but never able to win enough seats to form a government. If English can convince him to become National’s provincial partner, then Peters will be able to bestow upon his beloved NZ First Party the precious legacy of permanence.

Time to smarten-up Jacinda! Give Winston the policies he was promised.

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, 1 December 2017.

Green Party Lesson No. 1: Anticipating The Direction Of Political Sniper Fire.

Not A Good Look: Golriz Ghahraman (then an intern for the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda) poses alongside Simon Bikindi - the Hutu singer-songwriter whose "killer songs" played a deadly role in the killing of 800,000 to one million Tutsi tribes-people during the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Ghahraman has come under intense criticism for not making clearer this, and other, associations with war criminals. That the Greens did not anticipate such attacks should be of real concern to the Ardern Government.

IN POLITICS, as in war, the aggressor’s first strike is almost always directed against the defender’s weakest point. That being the case, the National Opposition has clearly identified the Ardern Government’s lacklustre political management skills as its primary target. Their secondary target, equally clearly, is the Greens. This should be the cause of considerable angst on the Government’s part. The Labour-NZ First Coalition’s political management skills will improve with practice. Improving the Greens political skills is a much taller order!

The Greens face a number of serious problems at the moment, not the least of which is the extremely heavy workloads being borne by the most experienced members of their tiny caucus. James Shaw, Julie-Anne Genter and Eugenie Sage, as Ministers Outside of Cabinet, have their hands full just bringing themselves up-to-speed with their portfolios. Of the remaining five Green MPs: one is an Under-Secretary; one the Party Whip; another is campaigning to become the next Female Co-Leader; and the remaining two are complete newbies.

Unsurprisingly, it was one of the latter, Golriz Ghahraman, who this week found herself in the cross-hairs of David Farrar and Phil Quin, two of New Zealand’s most deadly political snipers.

Both men’s attention had been drawn to what can only be described as the unnecessary grandiloquence of Ghahraman’s CV. Describing her fairly modest role in the massive UN exercises known as the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia and the Special Tribunal for Cambodia (ICTs) in terms that made her sound like Geoffrey Robertson and Amal Alamuddin Clooney all rolled into one, really was asking for, if not trouble, then most certainly some pretty close enemy scrutiny.

That Ghahraman was not well-placed to withstand such scrutiny, raises two obvious and important questions. Why did she draw attention to her participation in these ICTs without fully disclosing her potentially controversial roles as a member of the defendants’ legal team? And, why didn’t the Green Party carry out the same sort of due diligence exercise on Ghahraman’s CV as Quin and Farrar? At the very least, these simple precautions would have allowed Ghahraman and her Green Party colleagues to anticipate precisely the sort of attacks that eventuated.

The obvious lesson which the National Party will have drawn from this incident is that the Green Party – or at least those responsible for its communications strategies – are in the grip of a conception of politics that places far too much emphasis on marketing and spin. Only the most inexperienced (and cynical) public relations flack could consider it “okay” to leave out of a politician’s most immediately accessible biography (the one on her own party’s website!) something as potentially explosive as the information that she had helped to defend people accused of genocide and other, equally horrifying, crimes against humanity.

The incident will also have alerted National to the fact that the Greens have learned absolutely nothing from the parliamentary bullying meted-out to their colleague, the former Green MP, Keith Locke.

It was the Labour Party’s Opposition Research which dug out of the pages of Socialist Action, the Trotskyite newspaper which Locke edited for many years, a nugget of pure political gold. The Socialist Action League had been an enthusiastic early supporter of the Khmer Rouge – the revolutionary party led by Pol Pot which, in 1975, toppled the right-wing military government of Cambodia. As the editor of Socialist Action, Locke had celebrated the Khmer Rouge takeover as a “victory for humanity”.

In vain did Locke attempt to explain to his parliamentary accusers that, at the time the offending articles were written, neither he nor the Socialist Action League were aware of the wholesale “politicide” unfolding in the killing fields of Pol Pot’s Cambodia. John Pilger’s shocking revelations that the Khmer Rouge had murdered millions of Cambodians, however, rendered Locke’s after-the-fact explanations utterly ineffective. He had written in support of Pol Pot – and for many MPs that was enough to place him beyond the pale of political respectability.

The point of this cautionary tale? That a political party – especially one which, like the Greens, attracts radicals and activists of all kinds – not only needs to keep its institutional memory alive, it needs to keep it kicking-in. The most important lesson to be drawn from Locke’s experience is that political parties need to conduct exhaustive research into the backgrounds of all its candidates, so that areas of weakness and vulnerability can be identified early and, if possible, neutralised by preventive revelation.

It is supremely ironic that Ghahraman, Locke’s successor in the role of Green Spokesperson for Global Affairs, was a member of the Special Tribunal for Cambodia’s prosecution team for bringing the mass murderers of the Khmer Rouge to justice. Ironic, too, that she, like Locke, has seen her credibility in the Global Affairs and Justice Spokesperson roles severely damaged by a failure to anticipate how the Greens’ enemies, however unfairly, might turn the actions of her past, no matter how well intentioned, against her.

After Ghahraman’s ambush, Jacinda Ardern will be acutely aware that improving her government’s political management skills is not simply a matter of keeping her own Labour Party safe from political snipers, but that the job also entails teaching the Greens how to anticipate – and then dodge – their common enemy’s bullets.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 30 November 2017.

Genuine Open Government Empowers People And Politicians Alike.

"What I See, You See." In Chris Mullins' political thriller, A Very British Coup, the democratic-socialist prime minister, Harry Perkins, empowers the people by sweeping away all government secrecy. In the process, he makes it easier for his colleagues to resist the temptation to keep the media and the electorate in the dark. What a coup it would be if the Labour-NZ First-Green Government did the same. 

ONE OF THE MOST MEMORABLE aspects of A Very British Coup, is the left-wing prime minister’s commitment to open government. Thirty years may have passed since the television adaptation of Chris Mullin’s novel was broadcast on Britain’s Channel 4, but with a left-wing pacifist Leader of the Opposition poised to become the UK’s next prime minister, the series has taken on a surprisingly contemporary feel. Certainly, the question of how much of the day-to-day business of government should remain hidden from public view has become a very live issue in New Zealand.

Much has been made of the National Party Opposition’s “spamming” of the new Labour-NZ First-Green government. The thousands of written parliamentary questions piling-up in Ministers’ offices have been decried as a cheap political stunt by the Government’s supporters, but other commentators, determined to uphold the principles of government accountability and transparency have defended the Opposition’s actions.

When A Very British Coup first screened here, back in the late 1980s, I very quickly came to think of it as a wonderful primer in how a genuinely left-wing Labour government should behave. Nowhere was the radicalism of the fictional British PM, Harry Perkins, more vividly on display than in the way he treated his government’s “official information”.

Rather than force political journalists and Opposition MPs to file endless OIA requests and ask endless parliamentary questions, Harry simply announced that what he saw, they would see, also. Everything, from his daily appointments schedule, to Cabinet briefing papers and departmental reports, would be released to the news media, and the public, immediately and without distinction. Government secrecy would become a thing of the past.

Chris Mullin (a British Labour Party MP, as well as a thriller writer) was making a truly revolutionary point about political information.

The moment a government decides that some information is simply too sensitive, problematic and/or embarrassing to be shared with the voters, it is entering into a conspiracy against the public good. Why shouldn’t ordinary citizens know who Cabinet Ministers are meeting with – and the nature and content of their discussions? It is, after all, in their name that government decisions are made, and their money which pays for them. Surely, only a politician with something to hide would raise objections to a policy of full and immediate disclosure?

Civil servants and lobbyists would, of course, object that by exposing their interventions to public scrutiny such a government would very quickly end up being told only those things that their advisers would be happy to see on the front page of the NZ Herald. To which I would respond: “And what’s wrong with that?” If their advice is well-founded in fact and devoid of any hint of self-interest, then what possible objection could they have to the public being copied in? Surely, it would only be those offering tendentious, ideologically-driven advice to ministers, or appealing to them on their private clients’ behalf, who would find such a radical open government policy objectionable?

The old adage: “Information is Power”; imposes a real moral burden on democratic socialist politicians. If democracy is all about giving power to the people, then withholding information from them is, objectively, an act of deliberate disempowerment.

A radical open government policy, such as that adopted by Harry Perkins in A Very British Coup, offers something else to democratic socialist politicians: protection from themselves. Unable to hide their words and deeds from the public, deviating from their own principles and/or their party’s policies becomes much more difficult!

Harry Perkins, unlike Steve Maharey, could never quietly abandon a policy with the cynical observation that it was “just one of those things you say in Opposition and then forget about in Government”. His radical open government policy was, at once, a means of further empowering the people who elected him, and of making sure they were governed by decent and more honest politicians.

No wonder the Establishment was so desperate to bring him down!

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 28 November 2017.

When Five Million Seems Like A Very Small Number.

Divided Loyalties: When it comes to settling on a Twenty-First Century protector, New Zealand faces a dilemma. The United States provides military protection, but refuses to offer economic security. China provides economic security, but cannot (for the moment) offer military protection. Neither power is likely to go on contributing the ‘missing half’ of a complete protection package indefinitely.

NEW ZEALAND is a tiny nation living in a big country. It’s one of those mind-boggling facts that in an island roughly the same size as New Zealand’s two largest islands combined, the United Kingdom somehow manages to squeeze-in 66 million human-beings. Greater London, alone, packs twice New Zealand’s entire population into an area smaller than Stewart Island. In the greater scheme of things, Planet Earth’s roughly five million New Zealanders don’t count for much: not in the eyes of the other 7.6 billion human-beings who share it with them.

Given its tiny population, how should New Zealand position itself vis-à-vis the rest of the world? How does it deal with the all-too-obvious discrepancy between its landmass and its population?

This is not a trick question. As Maori discovered in the Nineteenth Century: a large pair of islands, located comfortably in the southern hemisphere’s temperate zone, and peopled by (at most) 150,000 human-beings; is simply too-tempting a prize for the world’s predator nations to ignore. Had the tribes not signed-up with the British, chances are they’d have signed-on with the French.

From a strategic perspective, the Maori decision to place themselves under the protection of what was then the world’s most powerful state makes perfect sense. That their faith in the British Government’s promise to respect the manifold local sovereignties of hapu and iwi was misplaced is hardly their fault! Even after the military defeat and economic marginalisation of New Zealand’s indigenous population, however, the Waitangi signatories’ original strategic insight remains unimpeachable. Two relatively large, but thinly-populated islands, located at the bottom of the world, will always be in need of at least one unanswerably powerful friend.

Unfortunately, that sort of protection comes at a price. (As any victim of the New York Mafia will attest!) And, Dear God! New Zealand has paid dearly! For keeping the sea-lanes open to the endless circuit of refrigerated vessels transporting this country’s lamb, wool, butter and cheese to the port cities of the British Isles, the “Mother Country” siphoned-off a small lake of New Zealand blood.

Less visceral, but arguably even more debilitating, was the oppressive cultural straight-jacket into which the United Kingdom fastened its most loyal dominion. All the worst features of British imperialism: its deeply ingrained class prejudices; the complacent avarice of its monied elites; and, most damaging of all, the Empire’s indefatigable racism; left deep scars on New Zealand’s collective psyche. More than a century after the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, and notwithstanding the tragic losses of two world wars, New Zealanders – Maori as well as Pakeha – could still be reduced to obsequious delirium by the mere physical presence of the reigning British monarch.

There was, however, no disputing the fact that Britain’s imperial sun was setting. If New Zealand was to remain safe, it would require a more credible protector than the over-extended empire whose power-projection pretentions were sent to the bottom of the South China Sea in December 1941.

The United States’ rise to super-power status during World War II, when combined with the UK’s demise as a global player, unleashed a cultural revolution in far-off New Zealand. The official egalitarianism of the American republic, especially when combined with the raw energy of its artistic output – its music and cinema particularly – armed the USA with a historically unprecedented amount of “soft-power”. Though Kiwis have been slow to admit it, the emancipation of their cultural imagination owes an enormous debt of gratitude to their American protector.

New Zealand’s strategic dilemma in the Twenty-First Century arises out of two historically related developments. The first was Deng Xiaoping’s decision to pursue “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” – basically, his Communist Party’s re-invention of traditional Chinese mercantilism. The second, the “Reagan Revolution’s” triumph over Rooseveltian progressivism in the 1980s. This brought about a qualitative change in the character of American soft power. It was a change which many New Zealanders found unpalatable – even frightening.

As the consequences of these two historical shifts worked their way through New Zealand’s economy and society, the maintenance of a coherent foreign policy became increasingly difficult. Economically, New Zealand is oriented firmly towards its crucial Chinese markets. Culturally, diplomatically and militarily, however, the ties that bind remain American. The challenge confronting successive New Zealand governments has been how to reconcile Washington’s insistence that New Zealand remain a US protectorate, while simultaneously refusing to guarantee its economic security.

When it comes to settling on a Twenty-First Century protector, therefore, New Zealand faces a dilemma. The United States provides military protection, but refuses to offer economic security. China provides economic security, but cannot (for the moment) offer military protection. Neither power is likely to go on contributing the ‘missing half’ of a complete protection package indefinitely.

There are times when five million seems like a very small number indeed.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 28 November 2017.