Frail And Confused: National Succumbs To Political Alzheimer’s.

"Dammit! Where Did I Leave My Party?" What we saw over the weekend of 6-8 August 2021 was a party which no longer knows how to play the game of electoral politics. Neither its leaders, nor its members, any longer have a clue what’s required of them. They no longer know who they are, what they believe in, or how to reacquire a competitive electoral edge. National has succumbed to the political equivalent of Alzheimer's Disease.

WHAT NEW ZEALAND WITNESSED over the weekend (6-8 August 2021) was the demise of the National Party. That parties are often divided and fractious after a significant election defeat is a fact of political life. Indeed, it would be worrying if passionate disputation was absent from a party’s post-election AGM. People would probably be more alarmed by a party that accepted it defeat by exuding a sort of Zen calm. Not that National was demonstrating anything like Zen acceptance from the Manukau Events Centre.

Proof of the party’s decline was not, however, to be found in either an excess of passion, or the lack of it, but in the sheer political ineptitude of the entire 700-strong gathering. What we saw over the weekend was a party which no longer knows how to play the game of electoral politics. Neither its leaders, nor its members, any longer have a clue what’s required of them. They no longer know who they are, what they believe in, or how to reacquire a competitive electoral edge. National has become frail and confused.

What else but a frail and confused party could possibly have acquiesced in the re-appointment of Peter Goodfellow as its president? This is a man who failed to perform on not just one, but many fronts. After leading the party to its second-worst defeat ever, and insisting on playing a decisive role in the selection of some truly appalling candidates, Goodfellow’s resignation wasn’t just expected – it was required. He needed to supply his party’s 2021 AGM with his own head on a platter – garnished with heartfelt apologies and seasoned with a passionate call for rejuvenation.

That Goodfellow didn’t understand that; that his fellow board members didn’t understand that; that the delegates who replaced the retiring board members didn’t understand that; is all the proof one could possibly need that National has succumbed to the political equivalent of Alzheimer’s disease.

Judith “Crusher” Collins ended-up piling failure upon failure. Either she wanted Goodfellow back, or she lacked the political chops to prevent his return. Whichever explanation is correct, National’s leader emerged from last weekend’s AGM looking stupid, weak, or (more accurately) like an uninspiring combination of the two. Her references to the certainty of sunrises notwithstanding, Collins did not give the appearance of a women who either wants, or expects, to lead her party into the 2023 election. That she may end up doing exactly that will merely confirm that there is no one in National’s parliamentary caucus who could do the job better – or wants to!

Can you imagine Rob Muldoon, Jim Bolger, Don Brash or John Key dutifully reciting this abject excuse for a political pitch to the disaffected and disappointed?

Over the next two years we will engage with experts and the public and you, our members, to develop solutions. We will listen and we will discuss. We will demonstrate we are the Party that can deliver on our promises, and has the ability to deliver solutions for the country’s big problems. Outlining a vision to the New Zealand public. And releasing policy in each of these and other areas as we go.

It is hard to know where to begin with this glutinous heap of political blancmange. Perhaps by re-emphasising that a political party seeks power to implement the policies advanced by its members, and the socio-economic forces those members represent. A viable political organisation contains within its ranks all the expertise it needs to knock the rough edges off the membership’s policy ideas. Moreover, why would any political party worthy of the name want to “engage” with the public? That is what it does every time an election is held! Only when the ballot boxes have been emptied, and the votes counted, does a political party discover whether or not its proffered “solutions” have been deemed equal to the public’s problems.

This is political Alzheimer’s with bells on. National has simply forgotten how to play “Democracy”. It also seems to have forgotten that the Opposition cannot deliver on its promises until it becomes the Government: that the delivery of solutions comes after the people have voted – not before. There is something both tragic and embarrassing in the spectacle of a once great party losing its wits.

National brought it on itself, of course, when the party decided that it could no longer be trusted to play the Democracy game successfully. After the debacle of the 2002 general election, when its Party Vote plummeted to a risible 21 percent, National allowed Steven Joyce to transform it into a sort of electoral holding company.

Instead of living, breathing, thinking citizens, National’s membership transformed themselves into a bunch of largely powerless political shareholders. Henceforth, they would not be turning up to an annual conference. [For readers under 35, annual conferences were where the members of political parties used to gather, in full view of the public, to argue about policy and elect themselves a President and a National Executive Committee.] No, what the Nats turned up to after 2002 was an AGM – where they dutifully rubber-stamped their “Board of Directors’” decisions and cheered-on the CEO. Safe enough when your CEO was a Don Brash or a John Key. Not so safe when your leader was a Simon Bridges, a Todd Muller or a “Crusher” Collins!

The medical experts say that the best defence against real Alzheimer’s is to keep one’s mind as active as possible. At 85-years-of-age, the National Party should be doing everything it can to stay sharp. Reading books, listening to invited speakers with exciting new ideas, writing and thrashing-out policy, debating the great issues of the day, vetting and choosing candidates, and making sure its office holders are up to snuff. Allowing all those jobs to be done by others (and done badly!) is not the way to stay sharp and remain a competitive player of the Democracy game. (At 105-years-of-age, Labour should probably be contemplating something similar!)

Though only a handful of the delegates attending last weekend’s AGM realised it, National was wandering dangerously close to the edge of a deep political hole. If it was to avoid a fatal fall, the party needed to wake itself up with a painful slap in the face. Having slapped itself, National should then have grabbed itself by the scruff of the neck and shaken itself until all the dead wood dropped off. Had it done that, then it just might have found the courage to reclaim its proper role as a living, breathing, thinking political party, in a living, breathing, thinking parliamentary democracy. But, that’s not what it did. Instead, frail and confused, it forgot what and where it was – and fell into the hole.

Which just leaves Act.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 10 August 2021.

Whistling “Dixie”.

Bottom Rail On Top: Two powerful forces are driving the surges of right-wing populism which, for more than a decade, have been transforming the politics of the West. The first, as always, is the actual, or feared, impact of adverse economic conditions. The second is composed of citizens fearful that their once dominant position in society is being challenged by “subordinate” minorities. “Bottom rail on top!” – as African-Americans colourfully described the social inversion inherent in Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation of the slaves.

TUCKER CARLSON is Fox News’ most persuasive voice. Mild-mannered, wide-eyed, and softly-spoken, he is a much deadlier proposition that his tiresomely stentorian colleagues. So persuasive is Carlson, that some Republicans are already talking him up as a potential presidential candidate in 2024. It is, therefore, a very big deal that Tucker Carlson, with the backing of Fox News and the Hungarian Prime Minister, Victor Orban, has recently been broadcasting live from Budapest. Tucker, as New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait wryly paraphrased, has seen the future – and it is illiberal democracy.

No more than the Labour and Green parties right here in New Zealand, does the Democratic Party in the United States fully grasp the danger represented by illiberal democracy and the authoritarian regimes it is bound to usher in. At either end of the Pacific Ocean, the Centre-Left is displaying a singular incomprehension of cause and effect.

Two powerful forces are driving the surges of right-wing populism which, for more than a decade, have been transforming the politics of the West. The first, as always, is the actual, or feared, impact of adverse economic conditions. The second is composed of citizens fearful that their once dominant position in society is being challenged by “subordinate” minorities. “Bottom rail on top!” – as African-Americans colourfully described the social inversion inherent in Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation of the slaves.

The period in American history known as the “Reconstruction Era”, which lasted, roughly, from 1869 until 1877, was an heroic effort to ensure that the bottom rail remained, if not on top, then at least not on the bottom. As such, it offers historians (and social reformers) a powerful lesson in the dangers of legislating “against the grain” of entrenched power.

For eight remarkable years, the federal government of the United States attempted to give practical effect to the equality now constitutionally guaranteed to the freed slaves of the defeated Confederacy. Nowhere on earth had such an attempt been made to politically, economically and socially empower a formerly servile population. During the two terms of President Ulysses S. Grant, former commander of the Union army, African-Americans were elected sheriffs and judges, won seats in state and federal legislatures, established schools and hospitals, and with assistance from the frankly socialistic Freedman’s Bureau, set up their own farms and businesses. “Bottom rail on top!”, indeed.

The fatal flaw of the Reconstruction project was that it could only be carried out under the protection of federal bayonets. Without the US army of occupation billeted across the South, the constitutional guarantees to African-Americans weren’t worth the paper they were printed on. In the fateful compromise thrashed out between the Republican and Democratic parties to resolve the bitterly disputed presidential election of 1876, the Republicans held on to the White House – but only at the price of withdrawing federal troops from the solidly Democratic South. It required less than 20 years for all the gains made by African-Americans since 1869 to be undone. By 1900, all-white city councils and legislatures were erecting statues to the military heroes of the lost Confederate cause all over the Jim Crow South.

The bottom rail was, once again, on the bottom.

As he was praising Orban’s regime, did Carlson detect in the Hungarian Prime Minister’s success in constructing a democratic system in which the “right” people always win, an all-too-audible echo of the American South’s elaboration of an outwardly democratic system in which the “white” people always won?

Orban has taken over the news media, suborned the Judiciary, redrawn electoral boundaries to the advantage of his party, and made it appreciably more difficult for his opponents to both cast a ballot and have it counted. By his very presence in Budapest, Carlson was signalling his endorsement of this debased form of democracy.

It is a form already familiar to Americans living in the 30 (out of 50) states already controlled by the Republican Party. By choosing to go to Budapest, Carlson was signalling to Republicans that if, by 2024, their party has reclaimed both Congress and the White House, then an American version of Orban’s illiberal democracy will be introduced across the entire United States. Such an outcome would further signal that, finally, the Southern inventors of Jim Crow democracy had their vindication, and “Dixieland” its long-delayed victory.

And the lesson Labour and the Greens should draw from this jaunt down the backroads and interstate highways of American political history is – what? Simply, that if progressive change has to be imposed and enforced by the naked power of the state, then the political reaction will likely be strong enough to undermine progressivism and democracy in equal measure.

If we think of the He Puapua Report as the blueprint for an “Aotearoan Reconstruction”, then we must also ask ourselves how it might be enforced. Are we sufficiently evolved politically to accept its radical changes without demur? Or will Pakeha, contemplating the imminent loss of their power and privilege, shout like them good-ole southern boys: “Hell, no!”? Confronted with such open resistance, who could the Government rely upon to fix bayonets?

Such questions are jarring. Only seldom are New Zealanders asked to confront the deep fissures running through their society. Since the crushing of Māori military resistance in the Land Wars, there has never been the slightest doubt as to the state’s ability to prevail over its internal enemies.

New Zealand’s long-lived and deeply-entrenched democracy further strengthens the state by furnishing its political rulers with a popular mandate for their policies. By first obtaining the permission of the electorate, even a radical programme of reform can be accepted. Introducing such a programme without a popular mandate, however, is a much riskier proposition. In buoyant economic circumstances a government might get away with it – just. But, should the economy turn sour in the midst of unpopular reforms, the party responsible will soon find itself in serious trouble.

Hard times and unmandated reforms are the classic catalysts for populist surges. Whether these surges draw their energy from the left or the right of politics is largely determined by the ideological complexion of the incumbent government. There are occasions, however, when the severity of the economic downturn and the radicalism of the government’s reform programme produce in the minds of voters fears that can only be called ‘existential’. Convince voters that both their economic security and cultural ascendancy are fundamentally threatened, and the party presenting the most convincing promise to eliminate such threats will win not only power, but be given a mandate to smash those deemed responsible for putting the rights of “the people” at risk. In these circumstances, the rights of minorities are ruthlessly overridden.

Labour and the Greens are whistling in the dark by dismissing all such considerations as “culture wars” distractions. Given that the wars are of their own making, this is a little hard to swallow. It was Labour who commissioned He Puapua – and then kept in secret. It was Labour and the Greens who promoted laws on “Hate Speech”, and defended giving nearly $3 million to the Mongrel Mob. While unemployment continues to fall, wages continue to rise, Covid-19 is kept at bay, and the National Party remains a moribund hulk, the culture wars Labour have started will smoulder rather than blaze. Let Covid breach the border, and the economy crash, however, and New Zealanders won’t need Tucker Carlson to teach them how to whistle “Dixie”.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 9 August 2021.

Dancing With The 400,000 You Came With.

The Dancing Queen: The lesson delivered was as old as electoral politics itself: Dance with the person you came with. Or, more prosaically: before looking after anybody else, a wise political leader looks after the people who brought her victory.

LABOUR’S 2005 WIN was, in the Duke of Wellington’s words, “a damn near run thing”, and Helen Clark knew it. For most of Election Night the blue line on TVNZ’s Party Vote graph had been ever-so-slightly above of the red. Broad grins spread across the faces of National’s strategists: Don Brash was going to do it! But then, unbelievably, at the last minute, the red line tilted upwards and crossed the blue. The “big South Auckland booths” had come in – and saved Clark’s government.

It would be heartening to record that Labour never forgot the help it received from the Pasifika and Maori voters of South Auckland. Certainly, Clark left her caucus in no doubt, when it met in the aftermath of their narrow victory, that the loyalty of the brown working-class would have to be rewarded. Bread and butter policies – not liberal crusades – must be the order of the day.

By 2008, however, Labour came across as a party more interested in helping Sue Bradford’s anti-smacking legislation across the line, than in building enough state houses to accommodate South Auckland’s poorest families. National’s new leader, John Key, cleverly underscored this perception by visiting the economically-stressed residents of McGeehan Close in Clark’s own electorate. His message was clear: “I haven’t forgotten the brown working-class.”

The lesson delivered was as old as electoral politics itself: Dance with the person you came with. Or, more prosaically: before looking after anybody else, a wise political leader looks after the people who brought her victory.

If Clark didn’t pass that lesson on to Jacinda Ardern, then she should have. And, if she did, how could Jacinda have forgotten it? Because, nearly a year into her second term, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Jacinda is in danger of forgetting who, by delivering her Government its unprecedented parliamentary majority, brought her to the dance.

Conservative political commentator, Matthew Hooton, has put the number of habitual National Party supporters who crossed over to Labour in the 2020 general election at approximately 400,000. It was to this enormous number of voters that Jacinda was speaking on election-night when she promised to govern “for all New Zealanders”. Like Clark in the aftermath of 2005, the present Prime Minister, at least initially, seemed to understand that the hearts and minds of these temperamentally conservative voters were precious. Having won them, she could not afford to lose them.

It did not require a rocket scientist to explain how those 400,000 hearts and minds had been captured. Just one hyphenated word will do the trick: Covid-Nineteen. So long as Labour continues to keep New Zealanders safe from the Coronavirus, those former National Party voters who lifted Labour from 37 percent in 2017, to 50.1 percent in 2020, will not be dancing with anyone else.

If someone hasn’t affixed a post-it note saying: “It’s the pandemic, stupid!” to the PM’s computer-screen, then, quick, do it now!

Because there’s something happening out there in the electorate. It’s probably too much to call it disaffection, but one wouldn’t be drawing too long a bow to call it unease. With the Delta variant of Covid-19 raging across the planet, the Australian bubble on “pause”, and the percentage of vaccinated Kiwis alarmingly small; this government is just one significant community outbreak away from an electorally catastrophic loss of confidence.

Because it’s not as if it’s doing superlatively well on all the other battle-fronts of the political war.

Homelessness and housing affordability are no closer to being brought under control. Only last week the Child Poverty Action Group released a report blaming the Government’s “inadequate” Covid-19 social support measures for tipping a further 18,000 children into poverty.

In the midst of a “Climate Emergency” we are importing more coal than ever, and burning it to keep the lights on.

It is also apparent that, very slowly, the volume of discontent over everything from the “Ute Tax”, to He Puapua, to “Hate Speech” legislation, to contracting the Mongrel Mob to fix the problems created by … the Mongrel Mob … is rising.

While New Zealanders can lift their eyes to the rest of the world and see only danger and derangement, Jacinda’s 400,000 Tories will waltz with her in breathless gratitude. But, just let that danger and derangement cross the border, and see how fast everybody’s dance partners change.

POSTSCRIPT: This essay was penned prior to the release of the latest Roy Morgan and Newshub-Reid Research polls. The sub-40 percent showing of Labour in the former, and the nearly 20 percent drop in support for the Government in the latter, merely confirm the analysis that Labour is in danger of forgetting who its friends are. - C.T.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 6 August 2021.

Neither Passionless, Nor Zombies.

Once Again With Feeling: What the parties on both sides of the aisle need to understand, however, is that New Zealanders are not passionless, and they are certainly not zombies. They are voters – and they want change. Now.

I NEVER BOUGHT Gordon McLauchlan’s Passionless People argument. The book was published in 1976 – barely a year since Rob Muldoon ran over Bill Rowling’s Labour Government in his big blue bus. Liberal-Left intellectuals like McLauchlan were appalled. It had never occurred to them that Labour – sitting on a 23-seat majority – could possibly lose the 1975 election. But, lose it did, and McLauchlan’s response was to do what all democratic politicians tell us we must never do – blame the people. New Zealanders, he said, were without passion – “smiling zombies”. As if a country filled with such people could ever have produced a song like Nature Enter Me!

The decisive argument against McLauchlan’s thesis came five years after the book’s publication, in 1981. No one could honestly accuse a nation that had just spent 56 days convulsing itself over Apartheid and Rugby of lacking passion. McLauchlan quickly found other things to write about.

Imagine my consternation, then, upon discovering that Karl du Fresne, hardly an ideological soulmate of McLauchlan’s, had nevertheless appropriated his “smiling zombies” description of New Zealanders and used it to diss them in the pages of the Australian Spectator.

Entirely unsurprisingly, given his right-wing predilections, the target of du Fresne’s wrath is the Labour Government of Jacinda Ardern. She stands accused of rushing through “an agenda of radical transformation quite unlike any the country has experienced.” (Given that this is the same country that went through the ‘Rogernomics Revolution’, that’s a pretty bold claim!) At the core of this “hostile takeover” is what du Fresne calls “Maorification”. Pursued “aggressively” by “activists of mixed Māori and European descent”, Maorification is, according to du Fresne, all about allowing these activists to “exercise power and influence that would otherwise not be available to them.”

It’s about here, I suspect, that we arrive at the nub of the issue. Du Fresne is by no means alone among Pakeha males of a certain age in sensing that the power they have carried in their hands for so long is beginning to slip through their fingers. While they have dozed in their comfortable armchairs, new social, economic and political forces have not only made it past the “Establishment’s” front gate, they’re through the front door! To say that du Fresne and his ilk are not happy, is to seriously understate matters. Just listen to this!

“So far, the smiling zombies – five million of them – have tacitly encouraged all this radical transformation through their silence.”

Whoa! Let’s just take a few seconds to parse that sentence. When du Fresne talks about five million New Zealanders, he’s talking about all of them – Jacinda’s whole “team”. This is, of course, hogwash. It is a matter of public record that in the 2020 General Election Labour attracted an astonishing 50.01 percent of the Party Vote, and the Greens 7.86 percent. A resounding vote of confidence in the parties of the Left. The Right, however, still managed to attract 33.4 percent of the Party Vote. Of the 2,919,086 votes cast, 957,306 went to National and Act. So, not quite five million, then. In fact, not even close!

Rather strangely, du Fresne also omits from his commentary any reference to the impressive demonstration mounted by New Zealanders living in rural and provincial New Zealand. The convoys of tractors and utes prompted much spontaneous applause from the “townies” who encountered them. Not everybody in New Zealand is silent.

Also missing from du Fresne’s analysis is any reference to the findings of the Aussie-based Roy Morgan polling agency. The last two of its polls have registered a fairly substantial decline in the Labour Party’s popularity – from 50 percent to less than 40 percent. In the latest Roy Morgan, the two major blocs, Labour-Green and National-Act are separated by just 7.5 percentage points. And there are still two years to go until the next election.

So, what is it, really, that’s eating Karl du Fresne? He’s been practicing the craft of journalism long enough to know that this government’s grasp on power is very far from being unassailable. Indeed, should the Delta variant of Covid-19 make it past New Zealand’s border and start spreading at speed among this country’s still largely unvaccinated population, then, for Labour, the political weather could turn very nasty, very quickly.

I suspect that the following sentence from du Fresne’s Spectator piece holds the key to his all-too-evident alienation:

“In mainstream media, Maori place names, most previously unheard of by most New Zealanders and unused even by people of Maori descent, have displaced official names bestowed by British colonists — ignoring the inconvenient fact that New Zealand cities and towns are British, not Maori, creations.”

Du Fresne is very far from being alone in finding this development extremely hard to swallow. Quite literally, it is hitting people where they live. As any Māori New Zealander will attest, it is no small thing to have the names you grew up with – and all that they signify in the history of your life – unceremoniously shoved aside by those speaking an unfamiliar tongue. Simply re-iterating that Māori is an official language of New Zealand is too cute by half for a lot of Kiwis. The arbitrary re-naming of their home towns is felt by many as an almost physical blow, and those responsible are considered guilty of attacking something fundamentally important to their sense of national – and personal – identity.

Du Fresne articulates their acute sense of alienation with considerable eloquence:

“New Zealanders returning after a few years abroad might wonder whether they’ve blundered into a parallel universe. A government that is pitifully thin on ministerial ability and experience is busy re-inventing the wheel, and doing it at such speed that the public has barely had time to catch its breath. To quote one seasoned political observer: ‘It seems like a hostile takeover of our country is underway and most people feel powerless to do anything about it’.”

Except, as Gordon McLauchlan discovered all those years ago, there is something people who feel themselves to be the target of a hostile political takeover can do about it. They can vote the politicians responsible out of office.

As a young man preparing to cast his first vote in 1975, I did not share McLachlan’s (and so many others’) carefree confidence that the Third Labour Government was unbeatable. I used to hitch-hike my way across the country in those days, and dutifully listening to my vehicular benefactors, I had heard the anger and alienation building slowly in their voices. When Rob’s big bus rolled over Bill Rowling I was not surprised. Too many Kiwis had lost faith in “Big Norm’s” dream.

What du Fresne, and all those who cling to the Right’s discredited neoliberal dream, need to grasp is that a very similar loss of faith has taken place in the hearts and minds of Māori, Pasifika, women and young New Zealanders. Jacinda Ardern’s “politics of kindness”, and her handling of the Christchurch massacres and Covid-19, continue to hold them – for the moment. They’re not irretrievably alienated – yet.

What the parties on both sides of the aisle need to understand, however, is that these people are not passionless, and they are certainly not zombies. They are voters – and they want change. Now.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 2nd August 2021.

The Sin Of Cheapness.

Commodities, Commodities, Everywhere - And None Of Them Are Cheap! No less an authority than the Commerce Commission has determined that New Zealanders are paying too much for their food and groceries. An apparent aversion to aggressive competition has led the dominant players to match one another’s’ prices rather than better them. This is not the way a “healthy” market is supposed to work. Ergo, the whole industry needs a shake-up. 

IS THE EDITOR of The Daily Blog correct? Would New Zealanders benefit from the creation a state-owned supermarket chain? Unburdened by the obligation to return a healthy dividend to private shareholders, would “KiwiShop” really be free to supply the highest quality food and groceries to the public at the lowest possible prices?

Let’s see.

The rationale for this level of state intervention is, presumably, to break up the cosy duopoly of Woolworths and Foodstuffs. No less an authority than the Commerce Commission has determined that New Zealanders are paying too much for their food and groceries. An apparent aversion to aggressive competition has led the dominant players to match one another’s’ prices rather than better them. This is not the way a “healthy” market is supposed to work. Ergo, the whole industry needs a shake-up.

The first question, naturally, is whether or not the present government possesses the will to involve the state directly in the distribution of such crucial commodities. Given that the Minister in charge of the process is David Clark, the chances seem slim. This former Treasury boffin remains firmly wedded to the Neoliberal economic model. It is, therefore, difficult to see him pushing such a democratic-socialist project through Cabinet. Nor, if we’re being truthful, is it very likely that the Minister of Finance, Grant Robertson, would give such a project his blessing. Both Labour politicians still subscribe to David Lange’s famous taunt: “You can’t run a country like a Polish shipyard!” (Or, they would probably add, a Soviet supermarket.)

It would be easy to stop at this point, and simply close the argument with a terse: “It’s not going to happen.” But, let’s not do that. Let’s assume, instead, that the entire Cabinet, after a special screening of “Reds”, decides to embrace the “cheap food for the people” proposition with both arms. Let’s follow the idea through to some sort of conclusion.

The first point to make under this scenario is that Woolworths and Foodstuffs will continue to trade. KiwiShop is there to compete with all the New Worlds, Pak n Saves and Countdowns – not replace them.

Hmmmmm. Tricky.

Part of KiwiShop’s remit is to give the growers and suppliers of food products a fair price for their offerings. Presumably, this would be a higher price that the price offered by either Foodstuffs or Woolworths? But, if they’re paying their suppliers more, wouldn’t they be required to charge their customers more? That would not be a very good way to start: with the private supermarkets offering their customers cheaper fruit and vegetables than the state-owned store. People would laugh. Right-wingers would crow. Jacinda would not be impressed.

The situation would not be improved if the private supermarkets embarked on a policy of driving up the wholesale prices of everything the state supermarket needed to purchase in order to remain competitive. If successful, this strategy would also lead to KiwiShop’s prices displaying no appreciable advantage over those of the private distributors.

The pressure would be on KiwiShop’s management to undercut their competitors’ prices – even at a loss to its public owners. It’s easy to imagine the Opposition parties demanding to know the cost to the taxpayer of this expensive counter-strategy. The luckless Minister would soon be inundated with Official Information Act requests. Jacinda would be even less impressed.

One way out of this rapidly deteriorating situation would be to announce that staple items – bread, cereals, rice, milk, cheese, meat, fruit and vegetables – would be significantly subsidised in KiwiShop supermarkets. Subsidies not available in privately-owned supermarkets.

Problem solved? Well, no, not really. The private supermarket owners would immediately file a complaint with the Commerce Commission, quite rightly asserting that the Government was screwing the scrum.

Moreover, Woolworths and Foodstuffs would not be the only complainants. New Zealand has puts its signature to a host of international agreements outlawing the state subsidisation of commodities – especially subsidies intended to disadvantage private sector suppliers. The Commerce Commission wouldn’t be the only body telling the Government to cease and desist. By now, one suspects, Jacinda would be getting really pissed-off.

At this point the NZCTU might well suggest that an even better way to run Foodstuffs and Woolworths out of the market would be to start paying KiwiShop workers much higher wages. Failure to match the state’s wage-rates would spark a major worker push-back. On the other hand, conceding wage parity with KiwiShop employees would slash the supermarket owners’ profits.

You know, that strategy just might work.

Or, it might not. It is difficult to see the Opposition parties – let alone the employers’ representative bodies – sitting back and doing nothing in the face of such a blatant attack on the capitalist system. If the Labour Government was allowed to get away with rendering the privately-owned distribution sector unprofitable, then what was to stop it from doing the same to any other sector it fancied taking over? Faced with what they would undoubtedly interpret as an existential threat, the capitalist ruling-class would start gearing-up for a God Almighty fight.

It always ends up here. Deploy the full resources of the state against one profitable capitalist player, and very soon you’ll be faced with the necessity of deploying its resources against them all. The capitalist class has no objection to the state taking over businesses which cannot provide a return on their owners’ investment. (It’s called “socialising the losses”.) But the state attempting to muscle in on money-making enterprises, well, that’s a whole different ball-game. A ball-game called Socialism. A ball-game which capitalism cannot afford to let the state, or anybody else, play – let alone win!

Which means that even a project as benign and necessary as providing affordable food and groceries to the poorest New Zealanders will, in the end, require a full-scale revolution. Now, I’m confident that Comrade-Editor Martyn “Bomber” Bradbury is more than willing to mount the barricades for social and economic justice. But can anyone see Jacinda, Grant Robertson, the Cabinet, or the rest of the Labour caucus, joining him in the violent overthrow of New Zealand’s capitalist system? Why not? Because the bosses cannot be defeated with kindness.

The basic necessities of life are sold as expensively as possible, because the capitalists owe it to their shareholders not to commit the unpardonable sin of selling them cheap.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 30 July 2021.

Should We Trust The Science – Or Ourselves?

“Pure” Science: The lesson to be drawn from the history of science, however, is that knowledge is always and everywhere embedded in culture. That the one cannot be separated from the other. Culture can empower knowledge, or suppress it; advance it or divert it to the utmost wickedness. Knowledge goes where it’s told.  

“TRUST THE SCIENCE” – those three words have become the mantra of the global fight against Covid-19. That the population must be exhorted to trust the advice of scientists, however, speaks directly to humanity’s diminishing faith in the scientific ethos. There was a time when politicians didn’t have to ask.

Nowhere has this loss of faith been demonstrated more dramatically that on the streets of London, Paris and, closer to home, Sydney. Once revered as a secular priesthood, scientists are now depicted as the willing accomplices of tyrants hellbent on the elimination of all human freedoms. One utterly deranged London protester breathlessly recalled that doctors and nurses had faced the judges at Nuremberg – “and they were hung!”

Leaving aside the absurdity of equating NHS doctors and nurses with Joseph Mengele and his entourage, the reference to the Nazi era is curiously apposite. Scientists of every kind flocked to the new Nazi regime. From rocketeer Werner von Braun, to atomic scientist Werner Heisenberg, scientists embraced Hitler’s new order as the invincible vector of rational modernity. The intellectual promoters of “scientific racism” and eugenics looked forward to working at the cutting edge of a ruthless, ultra-radical, technological society; unburdened by sentiment and driven exclusively by unfettered science.

So, what does this tell us about “the science”? The lesson to be drawn is that knowledge is always and everywhere embedded in culture. That the one cannot be separated from the other. Culture can empower knowledge, or suppress it; advance it or divert it to the utmost wickedness. Knowledge goes where it’s told.

In the guise of scientists, the holders and manipulators of knowledge often pretend to a status entirely independent of the inexactitude of cultural impulses and individual prejudices. But, as the horrific history of the Third Reich bears witness, those calling themselves scientists proved no less susceptible to the ethno-nationalist culture of Nazism than the most thuggish stormtrooper.

Unsurprisingly, scientists resist these assertions with considerable energy. Here in New Zealand, battle has recently been joined between those who argue that “Matauranga Maori”, the Maori way of knowledge, is no less deserving of respect and inculcation than “Western Science”; and those who insist that science and the scientific method transcend all indigenous understandings of the way the world works.

The seven highly respected scientists who penned a letter to the New Zealand Listener (31/7/21) expressing similar reservations, were particularly perturbed by an NCEA working group’s claim that “science is a Western European invention and itself evidence of European dominance over Maori and other indigenous peoples.”

From an historical perspective, however, the seven letter-writers’ objection to this characterisation of science is extremely difficult to uphold. The relationship between race and science in the history of Western imperialism is simply too strong; and the brutal uses to which the fruits of scientific inquiry were put, too irrefutable. Science both enabled – and justified – the European conquest of the world.

By contrast, Matauranga Maori recognises the wisdom of knowledge and culture working together: each one both tempering and expanding the other. Or, as the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor, Dame Juliet Gerrard, wrote back in 2019:

“[Matauranga Maori’s] approach of embedding practice in society and grounding the project in a community of acceptance before it starts is the very model of ensuring impact and connectivity. Often those trained in Western traditions, however fine, struggle to grasp this until it is perhaps too late. How many technologies will be developed in isolation before we learn that we need to engage our publics sooner, not later, to make sure there is cultural license to proceed?”

Another way of describing this approach might be “the democratisation of science”. Certainly, the tradition of citizen scientists, operating independently of big business and the state, and applying their scientific discoveries in ways that brought obvious benefits to ordinary people, goes a long way towards explaining why Europeans initially embraced the achievements of science.

It was what Churchill called “perverted science” that sowed the seeds of popular doubt and scepticism. Science without scruple or sanction; science driven by national self-aggrandisement and/or private profit.

Dame Juliet suggests that: “To turn the tide on anti-science sentiment, we need to reframe our science as ‘here to serve’ and ‘here to listen’.”

This is all Matauranga Maori asks. Not that we “trust the science”, but that we trust ourselves.

This essay was originally published by The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 30 July 2021.

Holes in the Tundra: Why Burping Cows Are the Least of Our Worries.

The Great Escape: If the Eurasian permafrost mantle melts, then the gigatons of stored Methane released will trigger runaway global warming. Basically, we – and just about all the other animals on the planet – will be cooked. And, guess what? The permafrost is melting: at an alarming rate and in the most spectacular fashion. For more than a decade now, huge holes in the tundra have been appearing all across Siberia – evidence of massive methane eruptions.

THE GREENS would like to see New Zealand’s dairy herd diminished … substantially. Not only would this go a long way to reducing the farming sector’s excessive methane emissions, but it would also assist mightily in cleaning up New Zealand’s waterways. Fair enough. Just so long as those same Greens are willing to tell the voters that a policy of reducing the number of cows is, at the same time, a policy of reducing their living standards. Now, it’s possible that upwards of 10 percent of Kiwis are happy to wear that – for the planet. Much more likely, however, is that upwards of 50 percent are not.

New Zealand’s dairy herd has increased substantially for a very good reason. More dairy cows were needed to compensate for the falling revenues from meat and wool. The year-on-year increases in New Zealand’s dairy production bear testimony to the energy and skill of her dairy farmers who, in the space of barely 25 years, have transformed the New Zealand countryside to accommodate their industry’s phenomenal expansion.

Did they know this would come at a huge environmental cost? You bet your life! As did successive governments. Did they go ahead anyway? Of course! Had they not, this country would be a lot poorer, and its people considerably unhappier. Unhappy voters may be acceptable to the Greens, but as far as the other political parties are concerned, courting the voters’ displeasure is a less-than-optimal election strategy.

Herein lies the problem with Climate Change. Everyone knows it should have been stopped. Everyone knows it could have been stopped. Everyone knows it’s not going to be stopped. Or, rather, no one’s going to make a serious effort to stop Climate Change until its far too late. And it’s already far too late.

In Norway, just a few days ago, in a little town well north of the Arctic Circle, the temperature topped 30 degrees Celsius. Temperatures even more extreme have been recorded in Northern Siberia. What’s that drip-drip-dripping sound? Well, yes, it’s what’s left of the Arctic ice shelf melting away. More ominously, however, it’s the sound of the Eurasian mantle of permafrost turning to slush. Now if you think cows pose a methane problem, then the methane problem arising from melting permafrost is just going to ruin your whole day.

Not to put too fine a point upon it, if the Eurasian permafrost mantle melts, then the gigatons of stored Methane released will trigger runaway global warming. Basically, we – and just about all the other animals on the planet – will be cooked. The melting of the permafrost would, therefore, constitute an extinction level event – essentially, it would be unsurvivable. And, guess what? The permafrost is melting: at an alarming rate and in the most spectacular fashion. For more than a decade now, huge holes in the tundra have been appearing all across Siberia – evidence of massive methane eruptions. And that’s just for starters! Eurasia has barely begun to belch!

So, please forgive my guffaws when the likes of Andrea Vance start lecturing New Zealand’s farmers on Climate Change. As if the burps of our cows are in any way comparable to the vast methane burps already wafting up from the Siberian tundra. Do these folk not realise that we could slaughter every last dairy cow in New Zealand and the world’s climate scientists would struggle to measure the effect? Don’t they know that New Zealand contributes just 0.17 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions? Are they unable to grasp that the ever-increasing frequency of extreme weather events is proof that humanity is already in the grip of a planetary crisis from which it cannot extract itself? Certainly not by purchasing electric cars and embracing a vegan lifestyle? Why do we applaud this kind of empty virtue-signalling? It’s nuts.

Just how nuts is demonstrated by the fact that New Zealand is now importing dirty Indonesian coal to keep the Huntly Power Station’s furnaces glowing. Yes, that’s right, having shut down our own coal mines, we are reduced to loading the stuff onto huge ships and sailing it across the ocean. When, finally, it reaches our shores we transfer it into specially designed railway wagons and transport it to the Waikato, where Genesis Energy sends the fatal by-product of its combustion up two mighty chimneys and into the atmosphere. According to the hapless Energy Minister, Meagan Woods, we are going to have to keep on doing this for at least the next ten years – by which time a vast hydro project in the South Island will apparently be ready to take up the slack.

Not good enough for Forest and Bird. Its Director, Kevin Hague (a former Green MP) is insisting that burning coal is just plain immoral, and that Huntly be decommissioned immediately. New Zealanders, he says, will just have to make do with less electricity.

Huh! That means when the hydro lakes are too low; when there’s insufficient sunlight to power-up the solar panels; and when the wind’s not blowing hard enough to turn the big turbines; the lights will go out. The stove won’t work. And, if we’re in the grip of a heatwave like the one frying western Canada and the United States, the air-conditioning will stop keeping us cool. Since keeping the lights on, and the air cool, is the very least we expect from our politicians, those deemed responsible for plunging us into an overheated darkness are bound to get a real electoral kicking.

Which pretty much brings us back to where we started. Coming to terms with the fact that Climate Change is a bit like Heaven. Everybody wants to get there, but nobody wants to die. We know the planet must be saved, but we are unwilling to make the sacrifices necessary to save it. When the American Vice-President, Dick Cheney, fresh from his secret 2001 conclave with the big oil companies, declared: “The American way of life is not negotiable.” He knew what he was talking about. It would be foolish to think that New Zealanders are any different.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 27 July 2021.