Safeguarding Maori Wards: A Significant Treaty Victory.

Nothing New Here: At the level of national affairs, ethnicity has been recognised as a significant aspect of political representation since 1867. That was the year New Zealand’s 13-year-old parliament deemed it expedient to create four “Maori Seats”, for the purposes of giving a voice to, and representing the interests of, New Zealand’s “native” population. Extending the principle to local government does not seem unreasonable.

MAORI HAVE A SIGNIFICANT victory to celebrate this Waitangi Day. Monday’s announcement by Local Government Minister Nanaia Mahuta heralds a significant shift in the representative breadth of local government in New Zealand. Maori wards are about to become a common feature of this country’s democratic architecture. Mahuta’s reforms will be remembered as an important historical step towards realising fully the bi-cultural constitutional assumptions implicit in the treaty signed at Waitangi on 6 February 1840.

Not all New Zealanders will celebrate Mahuta’s legal changes. Many will decry the Government’s decision to retrospectively eliminate the legal rights of New Zealand citizens. They will further lament the damage Mahuta’s reforms will inflict upon the unitary character of the New Zealand state.

The world does not look kindly upon states that openly proclaim the existence of two (or more) categories of citizenship. It condemned the United States of America’s “Jim Crow” South (1878-1954). Likewise South Africa’s apartheid regime (1948-1994). The Israeli state’s legal elevation of Jewish over non-Jewish citizens raises similar misgivings. The liberal-democratic tradition – out of which the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights was born - proclaims the equality of all human-beings, and looks askance at any state which bestows legal rights upon one group of its citizens while statutorily withholding them from another.

In the case of Maori wards, the arguments in opposition are generally represented by the phrase “single standard of citizenship”. Local government representation is based upon the number of New Zealanders living within the democratically determined geographical boundaries of regions, districts and cities. Constitutionally, the ethnicity of those New Zealand citizens (or permanent residents) is not supposed to signify.

Except that, at the level of national affairs, ethnicity has been recognised as a significant aspect of political representation since 1867. That was the year New Zealand’s 13-year-old parliament deemed it expedient to create four “Maori Seats”, for the purposes of giving a voice to, and representing the interests of, New Zealand’s “native” population.

Conceptually, it is but a short step from “Maori seats” to “Maori wards”.

If New Zealand’s constitution has survived its deviation from strict liberal-democratic theory at the national level for 154 years, without serious mishap, then what possible objection can their be to replicating that deviation at the local level? Anomalous though New Zealand’s special “indigenous” provisions may be in terms of liberal-democratic theory, they have proved remarkably successful in practice. Proof to many New Zealanders of their country’s improvisational genius.

Ours may be a No. 8 Wire constitution – but it works.

Why, then, was legal provision made for citizens to challenge councils’ decisions to create single, or multiple, Maori wards? After all, no such provision exists allowing citizens-initiated referenda to overturn the creation/composition of general council wards. What was it that made it acceptable for plans to provide effective local representation for New Zealand’s indigenous minority to be vetoed by its local ethnic majority?

It is very difficult to escape the conclusion that the referenda provision vis-à-vis Maori wards was nothing more than a sop to a deeply racist colonial Cerberus. The well-meaning framers of the legislation understood that it would be impossible for them to deliver Maori wards with their progressive left hand, without at the same time giving Pakeha electors an opportunity to snatch them back again with their reactionary right.

The framers’ understanding of Pakeha prejudice was validated repeatedly when nearly all attempts to establish Maori wards were voted down by huge majorities. The descendants of the Pakeha settlers who made the country called “New Zealand” clearly possessed a strong intuition that the colonial state erected on the tribal lands of its conquered “natives” would not long survive any concerted effort to take the bi-cultural implications of the Treaty of Waitangi seriously.

The results of those referenda make it clear that, were the democratic anomaly of New Zealand’s Maori seats put to the vote, their retention would, almost certainly, be rejected decisively. The Pakeha majority’s disdain for the principle of local Maori representation is likely exceeded only by its antipathy for special Maori representation in the New Zealand parliament.

This is the obverse side to the constitutional coin Mahuta and her Labour, Green and Maori Party colleagues have just tossed.

To the Pakeha majority, the principles of liberal-democracy are morally and constitutionally unassailable. To the Maori minority, they’re simply unbeatable.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 5 February 2021.

“Where Our Ambition Lies”

Time To Choose: Climate Change Commissioner, Rod Carr’s advice to Jacinda Ardern’s Government is uncompromising. The measure of our success at coping with global warming will be determined by how profoundly New Zealanders are willing to change their way of life.

“WE GOT THIS”, would seem to be the Labour Government’s response to the Climate Change Commission’s (CCC) uncompromising report. The media statement released on Sunday, 31 January, under the names of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and the Minister for Climate Change James Shaw, is nothing if not calming and reassuring.

“The report demonstrates we have the tools we need to achieve our target, but calls on us to accelerate our work. As a Government we are committed to picking up the pace and focusing much more on decarbonisation and reducing emissions rather than overly relying on forestry.”

Such remarkable sang-froid in the face of what some commentators are already describing as a change agenda every bit as revolutionary as Roger Douglas’ and Ruth Richardson’s. Having steadfastly refused to achieve transformation, the Prime Minister and her government are at risk of having transformation thrust upon them.

It is encouraging to learn that the Government is confident it possesses the tools to do the job. Encouraging – but not surprising. No one has ever suggested that successive New Zealand governments lacked the means to address the rapidly intensifying problems of global warming. For the best part of three decades, the question has rather been: “Do they have the will?” And for 30 years the answer has come back as: “No.”

The CCC’s report makes it clear that this lack of commitment is no longer acceptable if the target of reducing New Zealand’s net carbon emissions to zero by 2050 is to be met:

“[T]he Government must pick up the pace. Aotearoa will not meet its targets without strong and decisive action now to drive low emissions technologies and behaviour change across all sectors. 2050 is not far away – particularly if you consider the life span of infrastructure, vehicles, buildings – and people.”

It is about here that the problems begin. Outside the exceptional spheres of the Christchurch Mosques Massacre and Covid-19, the Ardern Government has, to date, offered no persuasive evidence that it knows how to do “decisive”.

Promise decisive action? Check.

Ask for advice on how best to take decisive action? Check.

Deliver decisive action? Ah well, you know, there are no silver bullet solutions to the problems this government inherited from its predecessors.

If the CCC’s recommendations are to be implemented, however, this government is going to need a significant quantity of silver.

Two of the principal contributors to our carbon emissions profile are the agriculture and transportation sectors. If our recent history is any guide, then driving down emissions levels in these key areas will be resisted furiously by industry lobbyists of every stripe.

To resist such pressure will require of our political leaders and senior public servants a so far unmanifested degree of staunchness. The exploiters of our soils and the users of our roads are not known for their willingness to compromise. They are, however, in/famous for getting what they want. And, at this moment, what they want most, and will move heaven and earth to get, is time.

For decades the industries in the crosshairs of carbon emissions reduction (most particularly the oil industry) devoted the greater part of their defensive effort to denying the reality of anthropogenic global warming. In this they were tragically successful, most notably in the United States, where, for the last four years, big emitters have enjoyed the protection of a climate-change-denying President. With the arrival of the Biden Administration, however, that protection has been removed. What the industries at the heart of the climate emergency in both the United States and New Zealand are rolling-out as fast as they can is a strategy of distraction, diversion and delay.

New Zealand’s dairy industry has begun already. Pre-empting the release of the CCC’s “Advise to Government” report by several days, Dairy NZ released a report indicating that the New Zealand dairy industry is already delivering the world’s lowest carbon footprint.

Measures intended to further reduce this country’s already small footprint, the Ag-Research produced report argues, will compromise seriously its international competitiveness and bring about an economically damaging reduction in New Zealand’s dairy production. The report further argues that any serious reduction in New Zealand’s dairy exports will only lead to foreign dairy producers, with much larger carbon footprints, making up the shortfall. New Zealand dairy farmers will suffer; the New Zealand economy will suffer; the New Zealand people will suffer; and the quantity of greenhouse gasses emitted globally will not be reduced. In short: a lose, lose, lose, lose situation.

As Richard Harman, writing for his Politik website, sees it:

“[A]s far as Dairy NZ is concerned the real point of the [report] and its publication [on Wednesday, 27 January 2021] is to try and get in ahead of what starting on Monday will be a national debate on who should cut what to enable New Zealand to reach its Paris Agreement targets.”

The road transport industry and private vehicle owners will be no less interested than dairy farmers in making sure that they are not the “who” lumbered with the burden of fulfilling New Zealand’s obligations.

So it has ever been when push comes to shove on Climate Change: everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.

The CCC’s boss, Rod Carr, is only too aware of this problem. He knows that the measure of our success will be determined by how profoundly New Zealanders are willing to change their way of life:

“Now we must decide where our ambition lies. For my part, I want to be able to say I did as much as I could as soon as I knew about the impact I am having on this world. Increasingly I am sharing this sentiment with my fellow New Zealanders. To achieve a cleaner, greener, healthier and more sustainable future, no emission reduction is too small – or too soon. All of us have a part to play and a contribution to make.”

As ever, Greenpeace NZ Director, Russel Norman – the bane of the dairy and road transport industries alike – cuts to the heart of the matter in his tweet on the CCC’s report:

“The Climate Commission message in its draft advice today that fossil gas is no bridge to zero energy emissions and that pine forestry can only be a marginal part of the NZ strategy is really welcome.”

If Norman’s right, then this is a truly revolutionary admission on the part of the CCC. Contained within it is the crucial recognition that ours is a civilisation based on the ready availability of coal, oil and natural gas. That this extraordinary twenty-first century world we inhabit could not exist without the cheap and abundant energy extracted from fossil fuels. Unfortunately, those same fossil fuels lie at the heart of the threat posed to humanity’s future by runaway climate change. So if, as Norman alleges, the CCC’s draft advice to the government envisages a fundamental shift away from fossil fuels, then the level of economic and social transformation New Zealanders will be expected to shoulder between now and 2050 is enormous. It is not only the source of our energy that the CCC is calling upon us to revisit, but the entire shape of our society.

In the report’s own words:

“We have heard consistently through our engagement that localised transition planning will be needed where communities work together to tailor a transition plan to their particular needs and aspirations. We also heard that this localised transition planning will need to be proactive, inclusive and transparent, and co-developed through a bottom up approach that involves iwi/Māori, local government, local communities, businesses, civil society groups and other stakeholders.”

What’s being demanded here is not a silver bullet, Jacinda, but a red/green one. You got that?

This essay was posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 1 February 2021.

Judith Collins’ State Of The Nation Speech Fails To Comfort – Or Connect.

Nothing New: State-of-the-Nation speeches are opportunities for those charged with their delivery to demonstrate renewed political credibility. Those hoping that Collins’ SOTN address to the Auckland Rotary Club on Tuesday, 26 January would constitute a significant step towards restoring her credibility must be feeling disappointed.

JUDITH COLLINS, remember her? She’s the woman who led the National Party to its second-worst defeat in 85-years. In a normal political party, leadership of that quality would have left the politician responsible with only one option: resignation. But, National hasn’t been a normal party for quite some time. Not since the departure of its last credible leader, Bill English, in 2018.

State-of-the-Nation speeches are opportunities for those charged with their delivery to demonstrate renewed political credibility. Those hoping that Collins’ SOTN address to the Auckland Rotary Club on Tuesday, 26 January would constitute a significant step towards restoring her credibility must be feeling disappointed. Certainly, National’s normality hasn’t been reclaimed.

A political party trounced as badly as National in 2020 owes the electorate two gestures – at the very least. The first is an apology to the voters for so egregiously misreading their mood and intent. The second is a promise to move beyond its clearly inadequate diagnosis of the nation’s ills and towards a whole new suite of remedies.

Collins’ speech did neither of these things. For the most part it was content to rehash the promises made to the electorate last October. The balance consisted of all the usual bromides of lazy conservatism.

The worst of these was Collins’ reflexive rejection of the Government’s plan to lift the minimum wage:

“Labour’s intentions are laudable but they are focused on alleviating the symptoms of stretched working families struggling to make ends meet rather than on the root causes of prosperity – supporting businesses to be more productive, investing in new capital, taking on new staff and lifting wages.”

We have heard it all before. The only way to lift wages is not to lift wages.

What would really make New Zealanders sit up and pay attention is an admission from National that it is precisely its own and the business community’s ingrained opposition to lifting wages that keeps New Zealand’s productivity so low. Recognition by Collins that only by winnowing-out our weakest businesses – i.e. removing the crutch of low wages – will this country’s long-delayed investment in skills, innovation and new technology become unavoidable. A brave declaration that low-wage economies are low-productivity economies. Now, that would have shaken the nation out of its Covid fever-dreams!

Another of those lazy conservative bromides holds that households and economies are subject to exactly the same constraints. That living beyond one’s means is as disastrous for countries as it is for individuals. Save all we can, reduce our debts as quickly as possible, keep the government’s nose out of our businesses’ business: these are National’s new remedies – same as the old remedies.

For the homeless, the solution is equally traditional – and facile. Make a bonfire of as many regulations as possible. Collins has promised her party’s support for emergency legislation designed to strip away what’s left of New Zealand’s social and physical environmental protections. It would be open-slather for property investors and developers.

“We need to reform our planning and RMA processes with one goal: freeing up land and getting more houses built”, Collins told the Rotarians. “And if councils won’t do it, we will do it for them.” (Some forms of state intervention, it would seem, cannot be done without.)

So far, so “same-old, same-old” from the Collins-led National Party. That familiar conflating of the particular interests of farmers and businessmen with the general interest of the whole nation.

“[W]e had a strong sense of community”, confided Collins, recalling her childhood in the Waikato. “We were surrounded by farming families who got stuck in and helped each other out, particularly when times were tough. It wasn’t something to be remarked on or exclaimed over, it was just the way things were – as a Collins, as a farmer, as a Kiwi.”

As if working-class families, a layer of New Zealand society considerably more familiar with tough times than Collins’ comfortable cockies, wouldn’t know how to get stuck in and help their neighbours.

It has always been there: National’s profoundly objectionable assumption that the only real Kiwis are people like themselves. That the rest of the nation are either parasites or problems. Probably both.

Collins has yet to learn the lessons of Holyoake, Bolger, Key and English. That National only regains credibility electorally by opening its arms wider – not to crush voters, but to comfort them.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 29 January 2021.

Community Or Chaos: Chris Trotter Talks To Marvin Hubbard.

MARVIN HUBBARD, US citizen by birth, New Zealand citizen by choice, Quaker and left-wing activist, has been broadcasting his show, "Community or Chaos", on Otago Access Radio for the best part of 30 years. On 24 November last year, I spoke with him about the outcome of the 2020 General Election. The podcast may be accessed here. (Just scroll down the list until your reach 24/11/20.)

This posting is exclusive to Bowalley Road.

The Winds Of Change.

Yesterday's Gone: Cold shivers are running up and down the spines of conservatives everywhere. Donald Trump may have gone, but all the signs point to there being something much more momentous in the wind-shift than a simple return to the status quo ante. A change is gonna come.

ONE COULD ALMOST feel sorry for them. Until, that is, their propositions are subjected to robust interrogation. All around the world, conservatives are feeling the fresh winds blowing out of Washington – and they are shivering. They fear that ideas hitherto denied the full imprimatur of state power have been issued arms and are on the march. In short, today’s conservatives are feeling what old-fashioned Labourites and social democrats felt in 1981 when Ronald Reagan was sworn-in as the fortieth President of the United States.

President Joe Biden is 78 years old. He has trod the floor of the Capitol Building for nigh on 40 years, trimming his sails to the prevailing winds as all successful politicians learn to do. All those years of experience are speaking to him now: warning him that the mighty gale currently filling the sails of the American ship of state cannot be tacked against, only run before. This will not be a “trimming” presidency: the Biden years will be a time of surging forward.

As one recent comment on The Daily Kos put it: “This isn’t Biden 2008. Something in the last 12 years has broadened his horizon and pushed him to centre-left territory. He put RFK’s bust in his office along with Caesar Chavez. If that’s where he’s looking for inspiration, I’m happy.”

Which explains the cold shivers running up and down the spines of conservatives everywhere. Donald Trump may have gone, but all the signs point to there being something much more momentous in the wind-shift than a simple return to the status quo ante.

Biden’s victory was built on the votes of America’s youth, America’s women, and, most triumphantly, on the votes of America’s people of colour. “Sleepy Joe” knows that his campaign was dead in the water until the veteran black congressman from South Carolina, James Clyburn, rallied his people behind the former Vice-President and pushed him all the way to the White House. As a long-time mover-and-shaker in the US Senate, Biden also knows that without the astonishing efforts of black activist Stacey Abrams in Georgia, neither he nor his party could have uplifted the legislative tools of change.

Someone else who knows this is the forty-third President of the United States, George W. Bush. Encountering James Clyburn in the Capitol Building on Inauguration Day, ‘Dubbya’ told the veteran congressman that he was America’s “saviour”. Without his intervention, said Bush, the only politician who could have beaten Trump would not have won the nomination.

Most certainly it was no accident that the person who ended up stealing the show on Inauguration Day was young, female and black. Rightly celebrated for the power of “The Hill We Climb”, her poem in honour of the new President, Amanda Gorman was also a flesh and blood celebration of the new America that is rising. Clearly, it is not going to be an America dominated by the values of conservative white males. Equally clearly, that message has been received loud and clear by conservative white males everywhere.

Fourteen thousand kilometres to the south, the Weekend Herald’s columnist, John Roughan, offered words of advice on the best way to reach out to Trump’s defeated army of followers. He addressed his remarks not only to the US Democratic Party, but also the American news media:

“If American Democrats and the country’s respected newspapers and television networks really would like to bridge their country’s cultural divides, rather than simply saying they do, they need to come halfway over the bridge. They need to overcome their aversion to certain views and respect the fact that a lot of people, about half the population, think that way.”

Wrapped up in those two sentences is pretty much the whole of the world view that conservatives believe to be threatened and which they are moving heaven and earth to protect. Under no circumstances should “respected” media outlets give extensive access (and, by implication, validation) to the voices of those on the receiving end of these “certain views” held by “about half the population”. Rather, it is the duty of the mainstream news media to “overcome their aversion” to such views.

Another way of saying this might be to invite responsible journalists to come halfway across the bridge (Selma Alabama’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, perhaps?) to meet the racism, sexism, climate change denial and white supremacist thinking that has allegedly enthralled half their fellow citizens – along with every other ideological defence of inequality the political right sees fit to advance.

Failure to display such tolerance will have consequences. “If the world is not to suffer more populist disasters,” warns the author of hundreds of NZ Herald leader articles, “possibly even an encore for Donald Trump, news media have to find an open mind again.”

Or, it might have to narrow its mind somewhat.

“Many journalists have had a tertiary education in liberal arts and it shows”, writes Roughan. “Some of their news angles reflect the values and explanations of a social science seminar where nobody’s misfortune can be attributable to poor personal decisions, society is always to blame, if an ethnic minority is underperforming it is evidence of ‘systemic’ racism.”

Is Roughan accusing the graduates of New Zealand’s universities and journalism schools of disseminating “fake news”? Or, is he merely giving credence to Kellyanne Conway’s classic Trumpian assertion that it is perfectly acceptable, when debating politics, to advance “alternative facts”?

Then again, if we are not to trust the evidence of social scientists: or, if we are being asked not to rely upon evidence at all; then in who and in what should we repose our trust? In the scepticism of those whose world views cannot survive the introduction of contradictory evidence? In the ‘reckons’ of people who believe democracy consists of one’s own ignorance being regarded in every respect as the equal of others’ knowledge? Or, are we simply being invited to accept that, politically-speaking, everything goes more smoothly when educated citizens agree to meet ignorance and prejudice half way?

John Roughan argues that Joe Biden struck a series of “clanging notes” when he used his inaugural address to call out “political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism . . . anger, hatred, extremism . . . racism, nativism, fear . . . facts that are manipulated, even manufactured”. What the Weekend Herald columnist did not explain, however, is how the new President could possibly have kept faith with the eighty million Americans whose votes put him in the White House if he had refused to strike the Liberty Bell so forcefully.

The consequences of heeding Roughan’s advice are there in American history for all to see. In the decades following the Civil War, politicians and newspaper editors from North and South insisted with ever-increasing fervour that it was time for the people of the United States to put the rancour of those bloody years behind them. Increasingly, it was asserted that far from being about the abolition of slavery and “a new birth of freedom” for the American republic, the war had only been about its noble antagonists’ differing definitions of freedom. Before long, the veterans of Blue and Gray were warmly embracing each other like long lost brothers.

Thus was racism reprieved in the United States. As white men’s willingness to meet each other half way condemned African-Americans to a life that offered them no way at all to the full and equal enjoyment of their constitutional rights.

Amanda Gorman’s poem spells out the moral obligation this historical failure places upon her fellow citizens:

because being American is more than a pride we inherit,
it’s the past we step into and how we repair it.

New Zealanders should learn from America’s experience. Truth owes nothing to falsehood. Knowledge owes nothing to ignorance. Tolerance owes nothing to prejudice. Equality owes nothing to racism. Justice owes nothing to injustice. And anyone who suggests otherwise is most definitely offering you fake news.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 25 January 2021.

The Economic Consequences Of Mr Hickey.

"Come The Revolution!" The key objective of Bernard Hickey’s revolutionary solution to the housing crisis is a 50 percent reduction in the price of the average family home. This will be achieved by the introduction of Capital Gains, Land, and Wealth taxes, and by the opening up of currently RMA-protected real-estate. As revolutionary programmes go, it’s admirably succinct. But, what else would Mr Hickey’s deflationary property revolution bring?

 

JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES, whose economic ideas are enjoying a modest revival in this time of Covid, was a formidable communicator. He shot to global prominence in 1919, following the signing of the disastrous Versailles peace treaty. His hastily written pamphlet, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, prophesied with considerable accuracy Versailles’ fatal economic impact upon victors and vanquished alike. Six years later, leveraging linguistically off his first great success, Keynes published another pamphlet – The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill – in which he set forth with equal prescience the price Great Britain would pay for its Chancellor of the Exchequer’s pig-headed decision to resurrect the Gold Standard.

The tragedy enshrouding both of Keynes’ Economic Consequences pamphlets is that their author had been powerless to prevent the disasters whose outcomes he so clearly foresaw. How much better the world would have fared had Keynes’ advice been heeded – both the Great Depression and The Second World War would likely have been avoided. Against entrenched viciousness and ignorance, however, even intellectuals as prodigiously gifted as Keynes find it impossible to make headway. In a battle between reason and passion the smart money has always favoured the emotionally incontinent.

Right now, in New Zealand, for example, feelings are running high on the vexed questions of homelessness and housing affordability. Perhaps the most passionate spokesperson for those currently struggling to house themselves securely is the financial journalist, Bernard Hickey. His call-to-arms on the housing issue has, of late, acquired a decidedly revolutionary tone. Behind his indisputably cogent expositions of the problem, one senses a rising anger, and what can only be described as a ruthless determination to sweep aside what he unabashedly identifies as the economic, social and political forces barring the path to homes for all New Zealanders.

The radicalism of his analysis is certainly not diminishing. In a recent opinion piece he lamented the absence of a clear bipartisan consensus on the measures needed to solve the housing crisis:

“National and Labour aren’t there on a bipartisan approach yet: not even close. They combined in the late 1980s and early 1990s to wage war on double-digit consumer price inflation by giving the Reserve Bank independence and setting a formal target of keeping inflation around 2 per cent. That involved passing acts of Parliament and essentially promising voters they would stick to that 2 per cent. It worked. Expectations changed.”

They did indeed, but only after New Zealanders were required to shoulder the enormous social costs of the economic revolution driven through with unparalleled ruthlessness by Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson. Was that the sort of transformation Mr Hickey had in mind when he warned listeners to RNZ’s Sunday Morning Show late last year: “Come the Revolution”?

Certainly, Mr Hickey, following the historical precedent of Douglas and Richardson, has already picked out the enemies of the people upon whose necks his revolutionary blade is intended to fall. In the case of Rogernomics and Ruthansia the targets of the economic Jacobins were all those Kiwis too firmly attached to the State’s munificent teats. In Mr Hickey’s case, Madame Guillotine’s guests will be the generation of New Zealanders born between 1946 and 1965 – the notorious “Baby Boomers”. (You know them – they’re the ones with all the houses!)

The key objective of Mr Hickey’s revolutionary programme is a 50 percent reduction in the price of the average family home. This will be achieved by the introduction of Capital Gains, Land, and Wealth taxes, and by the opening up of currently RMA-protected real-estate. As revolutionary programmes go, it’s admirably succinct. But, what else would Mr Hickey’s deflationary property revolution bring?

The answer is, of course, social, economic and political mayhem. Thousands of ordinary middle-class New Zealanders would be ruined. The country’s leading banks would teeter on the brink of failure. Credit would dry up overnight. New Zealand would be plunged headlong into a deep recession. Thousands of “millennial” Kiwis would lose their jobs, closely followed by thousands of redundant Gen-Xers. Poverty would surge upwards to engulf layers of society untouched by deprivation for more than eighty years. In short order, shock and disbelief would give way to unrelenting political rage – and a lust for inter-generational vengeance.

House prices would, however, be halved. By that measure, at least, the economic consequences of Mr Hickey might be adjudged as entirely positive.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 22 January 2021.

Trump's Surprisingly Large Army Of New Zealand Supporters.

The Sincerest Form Of Flattery: As anybody with the intestinal fortitude to brave the commentary threads of local news-sites, large and small, will attest, the number of Trump-supporting New Zealanders is really quite astounding. 

 
IT’S SO DIFFICULT to resist the temptation to be smug. From the distant perspective of New Zealand, the United States is fast becoming incomprehensible. We greet the information that there are now more US troops in Washington DC than there are in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria combined with a dumfounded shake of the head. As we witness National Guardsmen and women securing the streets of the United States capital city against car bombs and IEDs, we struggle to accept that the terrorists against whom these extraordinary measures are directed are not from foreign parts – they’re home-grown.

“Thank God we live in New Zealand!”, has become a common refrain wherever people gather to discuss the images of insurrection and political violence filling our screens. As if the God of Nations has given us some sort of free-pass through the unending vicissitudes of history.

As if …

Bryan Gould who, had the dice rolled differently, might have ended up leading the British Labour Party, has an interesting tale to tell about the political tensions simmering just beneath the surface of New Zealand. Astonishingly, this Oxford graduate and former Vice-Chancellor of Waikato University had a column submitted to his local newspaper rejected. In Gould’s own words:

“In a recent column I wrote for local newspapers, I ventured to suggest that Donald Trump – in addition to being a liar and a cheat, and sexist and racist – was a fascist in the making and would probably try, if he were to lose the election, to defy the democratic will of the people. The column was deemed to be too extreme by my editor who declined to publish it on the ground that it would offend some of his Trump-supporting readers who might write letters to him to complain. So much for a free and courageous press! Our failure to agree on the issue led to my no longer writing my column for his paper.”

Now Gould is very far from being the first person to have his editor reject a contribution. Editorial discretion and press freedom cannot be separated without abandoning both principles. What is remarkable about Gould’s account, however, is the editor’s reference to his “Trump-supporting readers” and their potential to make sufficient epistolary mischief to give him pause.

Now, granted, all this happened well before what CNN delights in calling “The Trump Insurrection”. This event has, presumably, reduced the number of Gould’s editor’s Trump-supporting readers considerably. Nevertheless, as anybody with the intestinal fortitude to brave the commentary threads of local news-sites, large and small, will attest, the number of Trump-supporting New Zealanders is really quite astounding. There are certainly enough of them to raise the question: If a truly Trumpian figure were to emerge from our own political environment, would he or she attract a level of support comparable to the original?

The question isn’t quite as hypothetical as it might at first appear. In the general election of 2005, the Don Brash-led National Party came within 46,000 votes of winning a plurality of the Party Vote. With the support of Act and NZ First, Brash could very easily have become prime minister. And what a prime minister he would have been! The National leader and his party were committed to returning the Treaty of Waitangi to history’s glass case. The Maori seats were marked down for abolition, and all race-based references were to be expunged from the statute books. In the parlance of present-day “progressives”, Brash’s would have been a “ neo-colonialist”, “white supremacist” government.

Not to put too fine a point upon it, all hell would have broken loose.

It does not require too large a slice of the Devil’s imagination to envisage Brash and his allies being left with little alternative but to mobilise their “silent majority” of supporters against the fury his policies had unleashed in the streets. Protest action that resulted in serious property damage or, even worse, to loss of life, would have left him with even fewer choices. Calling-in the military to support the civil power would likely have become necessary quite quickly – with all-too-predictable results. A snap election, called to provide ex-post-facto validation for the emergency powers taken by the government to quell the unrest (as happened following the 1951 Waterfront Dispute) would, almost certainly, have delivered National a stunning victory. New Zealanders would have struggled to recognise the angry mess their country had become.

It didn’t happen, of course, because, as happened recently in Georgia’s run-off Senate elections, people of colour resident in a handful of crucial suburbs came through at the eleventh hour with enough votes to save the day. South Auckland’s Maori and Pasifika voters give Labour’s Helen Clark the leverage she needed to persuade Winston Peters to keep the National Party off the Treasury Benches. (Even though NZ First had actively campaigned on an anti-Treaty manifesto no less radical than Brash’s.)

The other thing that happened over the course of the three years following the 2005 election was exactly what all moderate Republicans must be praying for in the post-Trump era. A young, charismatic and, most importantly, moderate leader of the dominant centre-right party emerged to challenge the incumbent centre-left government.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of John Key’s decade-long reign of moderate conservatism to the political and cultural evolution of contemporary New Zealand. It protected National from the creeping madness which has slowly but surely overtaken the centre-right parties of the USA, UK and Australia. In the fifteen years that have elapsed since Don Brash set his lance against the elites’ decolonisation project, the implacable grind of human mortality has eliminated a huge chunk of the electoral support for Brash’s “Iwi/Kiwi” dichotomy of 2005.

Racist nostalgia for the carefully camouflaged white supremacist New Zealand that endured from the end of the Land Wars in the mid-1860s until the defeat of Rob Muldoon in the mid-1980s still exists, of course, and four years of Trump’s shameless racism have given his Kiwi admirers’ renewed hopes of a National Party committed to making (white) New Zealand great again.

Their hopes are unlikely to be realised. A frankly white supremacist government in power – even if it had only ruled New Zealand for three or four years – could not have failed to extend its electoral base well into younger demographic cohorts. But Brash’s failure and Key’s success have limited significantly the political space available for Trumpism in New Zealand.

They’re here, of course, but not in the numbers needed to generate a politically decisive right-wing populist pulse. Gould’s editor really had no need to worry. The Baby Boomer voting bloc grew up with Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. Hell! A fair number of them wore HART badges and exchanged blows with “Rob’s Mob” on the streets. When the owners of the Steinlager brand start celebrating anti-nuclear protesters as heroes, then you’d have to say that Trumpism’s chances of doing to New Zealand what it has so tragically done to the United States are pretty slim.

Even so, it never pays to give smugness too much room at the table. While there’s precious little scope for right-wing populism gaining significant political purchase here in Aotearoa-New Zealand, the prospects for left-wing populism are looking surprisingly good. What’s more, if this government doesn’t deign to put in an appearance sometime very soon, then that left-wing pulse is only likely to grow stronger.

It might pay to strengthen Parliament’s front doors – you never know these days who’s going to come a-calling.


This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 18 January 2021.