Work, Work, Work!

Laughing With The Poor Folks - Or At Them? Christopher Luxon took rapper LunchMoney Lewis’s lyrics at their face value. “Bills”, as heard by Luxon, is a cri-de-cœur from a hard-working man determined to pull himself and his family up by their own bootstraps. It simply wouldn’t occur to him that LunchMoney’s rap was a tribute to his own escape from the bills ordinary people gotta pay and the “work, work, work” they gotta do to fill all those mouths they gotta feed.

“BILLS” by LunchMoney Lewis, must be the all-time strangest theme-song ever chosen by a National Party leader. Christopher Luxon made the whole weird musical theme even weirder by attempting his own personal rendition of LunchMoney’s tongue-in-cheek tribute to the world of work. 

Bizarre, because the lifestyles and values of rap artists are about as far from the hardscrabble existence of the average working family as one could imagine. LunchMoney Lewis has bills to pay, no doubt, but they are for products and services well beyond the reach of most African-Americans! This artist is a businessman.

Now, it would be nice to think that Luxon gets LunchMoney’s joke. That he understands the Kiwi battler’s bills, and his bills, are truly chalk and cheese. Such sly self-knowledge and brutal political honesty would be refreshing in our hyper-mediated world. By bounding onto the stage to LunchMoney’s rap, Luxon would be admitting (sub-textually) that a man who owns seven houses, and the centre-right party he leads, are cats every bit as fat as the Florida rapper. Such transparent inauthenticity would, paradoxically, make the Leader of the Opposition a more – not less – authentic politician.

But, that would be too much to hope for. In all probability, Luxon took LunchMoney’s lyrics at their face value. “Bills”, as heard by Luxon, is a cri-de-cœur from a hard-working man determined to pull himself and his family up by their own bootstraps. It simply wouldn’t occur to him that LunchMoney’s rap was a tribute to his own escape from the bills ordinary people gotta pay and the “work, work, work” they gotta do to fill all those mouths they gotta feed.

Luxon’s crude literalism is reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s use of Bruce Springsteen’s anthem “Born in the USA” in his re-election campaign of 1984. The Gipper simply had no idea that Springsteen’s song was about the tormented existence of a Vietnam veteran robbed of his buddies, his peace of mind, and the possibility of a good life, by the murderous demands of Uncle Sam.

“America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts”, intoned Reagan. “It rests in the message of hope in songs of a man so many young Americans admire, New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen. And helping you make those dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about.”

In the end, being born in the USA was the only thing the song’s hero had left. Far from being a hymn of praise to Reagan’s “shining city on a hill”, Springsteen’s song is laced with bitter irony and bankrupted hope. It is, however, doubtful that Reagan ever realised his mistake.

Doubtful, too, that Luxon’s journey into the bright lights and dark alleys of popular culture will be a long one. Doubtless, there is a huge amount to be learnt from the rappers and hip-hop artists of South Auckland. Who knows what insights he might come away with if he sat down with them in a place without cameras, without microphones, and just listened to the life-stories of these often spectacularly successful artists and businessmen?

That is, after all, what another National Party leader, Rob Muldoon, did, more than 40 years ago, with representatives of Black Power and the Mongrel Mob. The Project Employment Programmes which, in part, grew out of these encounters, set many young gang prospects on a new path, leading them away from crime, and towards steady employment, family life, and an altogether more productive existence.

Rob Muldoon sat his final accountancy examinations in between fighting the Germans in Italy in 1944. He became a moderately successful businessman, comfortably off, but not rich: an Auckland suburbanite with a family bach at Orewa. The National Party he came to lead was a huge organisation, filled with people very like himself. The experience of “The War” bound National Party members together in those days – as it did Labour’s. What came to be called the “RSA Generation” understood that, when the bullets start flying, who your father is and where you went to school doesn’t matter a damn. Character is not determined by class – but by courage.

Luxon’s speech to the National Party’s annual conference could have used the Covid-19 Pandemic – the closest contemporary New Zealanders have come to the solidarities and vicissitudes of war – as a new starting-point for the state’s efforts to get disengaged young jobseekers into the habits of learning and working that the whole country so desperately needs them to acquire.

He came close:

National believes those closest to the problems should be closest to the answers. That’s why we back community-led solutions. For example, the Covid vaccine roll-out showed that bureaucrats in Wellington don’t always know best how to reach people. Just ask the Māori organisations who had to take the Government to court so they could get people vaccinated.

If young New Zealanders are to re-engage with learning and working successfully, it will be through the efforts of autonomous, community-driven initiatives akin to those that ensured Māori rates of vaccination matched those of the rest of the population. The key words here are “autonomous” and “community-driven”.

Sadly, National’s policy-makers lack the courage to trust the poor to take charge of their own destiny. Luxon’s plans for moving young jobseekers “From Welfare To Work” (where have we heard that slogan before?) by contracting “community groups” to “coach” the long-term unemployed out of their “welfare dependency” and into paid employment, will undoubtedly be met with the approval of conservative New Zealanders. Many will welcome the reappearance of Bill English’s “social investment” approach. But, will it work?

Those on the receiving end of policies setting them up as “suitable cases for treatment” are seldom grateful. Community organisations funded by the tax-payer have a long history of offering their “clients” little more than the condescension of middle-class professionals. Before successful coaching can begin, it is necessary to have a team. If National could only find the courage to allow these teams to form themselves, with sufficient resources to hire their own coaches, then the party’s social investment policies just might succeed.

Taken in its entirety, LunchMoney Lewis’s rap is not the positive statement Christopher Luxon obviously believes it to be. In the accompanying video, the artist makes clear his scepticism that the “work, work, work” of ordinary people will ever get them out from under all those bills. Rappers speak of a world rigged by the Man, for the Man. That’s why they portray working for the Man as a fool’s game. Luxon and the National Party would have a lot more credibility if they offered the young unemployed the chance to become their own bosses.

Then they’d be businessmen. And businessmen don’t have bills – they have accounts payable. And, as the former CEO of Air New Zealand knows, the larger your pile of accounts payable, the more likely it is that someone else will pay them for you.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 8 August 2022.

In A Wizard's Garden.

In The Wizard’s Garden: George Dunlop Leslie, 1904

IT ALL SEEMS so long ago now, and, to be fair, in human terms, 48 years is a long time. New Zealand was a different country in 1974. Someone unafraid of courting controversy might say it had achieved “Peak Pakeha”. Although the Labour Government of Norman Kirk had struck out boldly in the direction of a truly independent foreign policy: recognising “Red China”, and sending a New Zealand frigate to “observe” (but really to protest) the French nuclear testing at Mururoa Atoll, this was still a very “European” place. In the South Island, particularly, the two largest cities – Christchurch and Dunedin – had been built to look as though they were founded in the Middle Ages – not the mid-Nineteenth Century.

Born and bred in the South Island, I had not been back there since 1969, when the family moved to Heretaunga in the Hutt Valley. Barely 18, and in search of – well, I wasn’t quite sure – I boarded the Union Steamship Company’s inter-island express steamer, the TEV Rangatira, and sailed south to Lyttleton. Yes, that’s right, Lyttelton. Forty-eight years ago it was still profitable to run a ferry service a wee bit further than Picton. I’ve seen many beautiful places since that journey in 1974, but none of them could match for sheer wonder sailing up Lyttelton Harbour on a brisk Autumn morning, as the sun came up behind the Rangatira’s stern and bathed the hills and houses in a magical golden light.

Magical, yes, that’s the word. Magic is what this essay is about. The magic of art and memory.

It was on that journey south, in the autumn of 1974, that I first encountered George Dunlop Leslie’s mysterious painting, “In The Wizard’s Garden”. It was hanging in the Robert McDougall Art Gallery, situated behind the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch’s splendid Botanic Gardens. Leslie’s painting stopped me in my tracks. The room in which it hung was deathly quiet, I was the only person in it, and I felt myself drawn to it like Edmund and Lucy in C.S. Lewis’s “Voyage of the Dawn Treader”. The melancholic gaze of the young woman, the painting’s principal subject, held me spellbound. Who was she? Where was she? And who was the dark figure striding through the garden’s narrow gate?

I can’t remember registering the artist’s name. If I did, then I soon forgot it. But the painting itself, its eerie stillness and its disconcerting sense of menace – that I did not forget. Passing through Christchurch many times in the latter half of the 1970s, I always made a point of making my way to that quiet room, and to the half-sad, half-challenging gaze of the young woman in the garden, and the dark figure who kept her there.

Until the day came when I entered the room and found Leslie’s painting had been replaced by another. Not unusual, of course, for art galleries to rotate the works in their collections, but I was devastated. “In The Wizard’s Garden” had become a kind of talisman, a corporeal reminder of a time in my life when magic seemed very close. It’s removal struck me as both a judgement and an instruction: time to put away childish things. But, the child in me preferred Leonard Cohen’s poetry:

Magic is afoot
It cannot come to harm
It rests in an empty palm
It spawns in an empty mind
But Magic is no instrument
Magic is the end

And so the years passed, and New Zealand changed, and I changed with it. Magic seemed very far away indeed in the narrower and more materialistic nation we had become. If I thought of the painting at all, it was only as a symbol of what had been lost. Our culture had become much less European and much more global in its focus. This was thought to be a good thing. A better thing, though, was the indigenous culture of the Māori, unfurling from the cracks in the colonisers’ concrete, and shimmering with a magic all its own.

And then, just a few weeks ago, I saw it. No more than a tiny circle of colour beside Lynda Clark’s Twitter handle, but the human brain is a marvellous thing and mine instantly recognised the sad figure of the young woman in the red dress. Not hesitating for a moment, I messaged Lynda and shared with her my longstanding fascination with the image she had chosen. Turns out I wasn’t the only person enchanted by Leslie’s painting: Lynda, too, had visited it whenever she could, transfixed, like me, by the young woman’s soulful gaze.

It was Lynda who supplied me with the artists name and the painting’s title. (I had thought it was called “The Magician’s Garden” – which was close, but not close enough for Google Images!) With the correct details, the Internet flooded me with images and information.

According to the Christchurch Art Gallery:

“In response to the adverse impacts and uncertainties of the industrial age, many late Victorian and Edwardian British artists were drawn to somewhat escapist historical or literary themes. Lavishly displaying this tendency, George Dunlop Leslie’s In the Wizard’s Garden was first shown at the Royal Academy in 1904, and in New Zealand at the 1906–07 Christchurch International Exhibition. Because the painting puzzled visitors, Leslie was asked for an explanation of its meaning. Its unhappy subject was a young medieval noblewoman who had sought an alchemist or wizard’s guidance to discover the secrets of the future. The theme originated from American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘Rappacini’s Daughter’, a macabre tale featuring a garden filled with poisonous plants. The setting of the painting was, however, English rather than Italian: it is known to be based on Leslie’s own garden in Wallingford, Oxfordshire. London-based, former Dunedin merchant Wolf Harris, a friend of many leading artists, bought the work almost as soon as it arrived in Christchurch and then gifted it to the Canterbury Society of Arts.”

The secrets of the future, ah yes, that is the stuff of wizardry. For me, however, the joy of being able to look again into the wizard’s garden served only to unlock memories of the past. Like the works of those Victorian and Edwardian artists among whom Leslie’s skills shone so brightly, the New Zealand of 1974 strikes me now as an elaborate lie, designed to protect its Pakeha inhabitants from the “impacts and uncertainties” of their inescapably Pacific destiny.

The Christchurch I arrived in that autumn morning in 1974 is no more, shaken to bits by the constantly moving tectonic plates upon which Aotearoa does its best to stand upright. “God is alive, magic is afoot”, wrote Leonard Cohen. “It moves from hand to hand”. And it is moving now. Perhaps, in her half-sad, half-challenging way, the young woman in the wizard’s garden is urging us to step, finally, beyond its enchanted walls, and discover who, and where, we really are.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 5 August 2022.

Seating Arrangements

Proximate Cause:  Tellingly, it was Helen Clark who was seated close by when, earlier this week, Jacinda Ardern delivered a speech carefully crafted to keep New Zealand’s dairy exports heading China’s way. Photo by Politik

PURISTS WOULD ARGUE that New Zealand’s foreign policy should not be determined by who its Prime Minister sits next to. Their preference would be for consistency of message and predictability of action at all times.

Easier said than done, of course. Contradicting the President of the United States when you’re seated next to him in the White House would be a diplomatic incident in its own right. Small wonder, then, that Jacinda Ardern decided that when in Washington, talk like a Washingtonian.

Ms Ardern is not so naïve, however, as to imagine that both the tone and the vocabulary of her Washington pronouncements would go unnoticed by those who speak the language of Beijing.

Aware that the New Zealand Prime Minister’s next stop would be the Nato summit meeting in June, China’s diplomats opted to remain silent. They were keen to hear what she would say when she was seated next to the Nato Secretary-General, Jens Stoltenberg.

In the official White House communique of 31 May 2022, President Joe Biden and Ms Ardern jointly singled out the Peoples Republic of China as “a state that does not share our values or security interests”, noting that any Chinese attempt to establish “a persistent military presence in the Pacific” would, by fundamentally altering the region’s strategic balance, give rise to national security “concerns” in both New Zealand and the USA.

One month on, the heady incense of Ukraine’s heroic resistance to Russian aggression which suffused Nato’s Madrid summit (28-30 June 2022) seemed only to brighten the militaristic glint in the New Zealand Prime Minister’s eye. Impressed, no doubt, by the lengthening geopolitical reach of the Nato partners – now extending all the way to the Indo-Pacific – Ms Ardern wound her diplomatic rhetoric up a notch. China, she said, “has in recent times also become [like Russia] more assertive and more willing to challenge international rules and norms.”

This was too much for Beijing. China’s Wellington embassy described Ms Ardern’s comments as “wrong and thus regrettable” and “not helpful in building trust”.

To the untrained ear, this may sound like a mild rebuke. But to those, like the Australians, who have, in the relatively recent past, forfeited China’s trust, the economic penalties following such rebukes have been anything but mild.

It’s all very well to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the shieldmaidens of Finland, Sweden, Estonia and Denmark and breathe in the heady perfume-du-jour – L’air du Cordite. But, eventually, all New Zealand Prime Ministers are obliged to get off at the World’s last bus-stop and breathe in L’air du Cow.

Not for nothing is our foreign service dubbed MFAT – the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. By asserting the indissoluble linkage of New Zealand’s diplomatic and economic interests, our diplomats might just as easily have called themselves the Ministry of Milk Fat. It has always been thus. In two world wars we traded blood for butter, and, even today, it is the brute calculation of who pays for what that ultimately determines our allegiances.

Ms Ardern may have thrilled to the martial music of our “traditional allies” and longed to strike the heroic poses of her North European counterparts but, for all their war songs, the Americans and the EU nations weren’t offering to bankrupt their own dairy farmers by taking all the milk solids we can send them.

Thankfully, at least some of the employees of MFAT still have their eyes on the only prize that matters – the well-being of New Zealanders. Thankfully, some still understand that the only “national security” worth a damn is the security that comes from being able to pay your country’s bills. And the only country making it possible for us to do that; the only country willing to take all the milk solids we can send; is the Peoples Republic of China.

To her credit, Prime Minister Ardern always comes back to that single, crucial, fact of New Zealand economic life. It helps that the National Party’s foreign affairs spokesperson, Gerry Brownlee, “gets it” too. Even more helpful is the fact that the woman who negotiated New Zealand’s free trade agreement with China is as alive and alert as ever.

Tellingly, it was Helen Clark who was seated close by when, earlier this week, Jacinda Ardern delivered a speech carefully crafted to keep those milk solids heading China’s way.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 5 August 2022.

Crossing the Line: What Lies Behind the Surge To Te Pāti Māori?

Rising To The Challenge: Te Pāti Māori is reassuring the angry and the alienated that in 2023 voting will make a difference. Aotearoa is changing. Pakeha – especially young Pakeha – are changing. The racism is still there, of course, heightened, it would seem, by the prospect of Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori having the numbers to keep the changes coming. But Te Pāti Māori is also telling them the country had moved on from 2005, from Don Brash and his “Iwi/Kiwi” election billboards. An awful lot of elderly National Party voters can die in 17 years!

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN people who don’t usually participate in elections decide to vote? Things turn weird – that’s what happens. This is because the people who don’t vote are very different from the people who do. The motivations relied upon by the pundits to explain the behaviour of habitual voters are not the motivations of non-voters. That’s why, when these folk cross the line separating the passivity of non-voting from the world of active political citizenship the results can be startling.

It’s why political entrepreneurs like Dominic Cummings and Steve Bannon work so hard to reach and motivate the people perennially dismissed and abandoned by the smug political campaigners of the mainstream. The Cummings and the Bannons know these marginalised individuals: the people that shit happens to; the people who live in the shit; are extraordinarily combustible. Strike a match in the right place, at the right time, and – Kaboom! – the “deplorables” explode into action.

It is precisely the “otherness” of these non-participants that makes them so potent politically. An across-the-board expansion of the electorate: one in which exactly the same proportion of National, Labour, Act, Green and Te Pāti Māori voters simply stepped across the line separating non-voting from voting; would make no appreciable difference in either the opinion polls or the polling booths. Indeed, this is pretty much what happens when people step out of the “Don’t Know” category to express a clear preference. They tend to break the same way as those who have already disclosed their electoral choices. But non-voters: the sort of people who tell pollsters and phone canvassers to fuck-off; they are different.

Non-voters come in two flavours. There are those who never got into the habit of voting, and those who, for a whole host of reasons, got out of the habit.

The habit of voting, like the habit of going to school, is a reflection of a settled family environment. In such households, all manner of social and economic connections serve to keep their inhabitants tethered to the local community and its values. The absence of these connections produces individuals estranged and alienated from the community and its concerns. The impact of politics on their daily lives being neither perceived nor explained, they do not care about elections – or vote in them.

Those who have gotten out of the habit of voting usually have a sad story to tell. For some reason, the ties that bound them to their community have been severed. It may have been the result of family disintegration, substance abuse, criminal offending and incarceration. Alternatively, it could have been job loss, prolonged unemployment, indebtedness, homelessness and/or severe mental illness. Something happened to set these individuals on a downward spiral to economic privation and social isolation. What had been citizens with rights, become invisible un-persons with nothing. Politics was for winners – not losers like themselves.

Breaking into the world of these non-voters isn’t easy. Somehow, a political movement has to convince them that the vote they cast will produce a direct and positive impact on their lives. Non-voter politics tends to be grounded in the not unreasonable observation that participating in elections, voting, changes nothing. Their cynicism is encapsulated in pithy anarchic aphorisms: “Don’t vote, governments always win”, or, “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal”.

The crucial thing to note about these aphorisms, however, is that they identify an enemy. “Governments.” “Them.” For non-voters, politics is what the people with power do to you. The idea that politics could be about what you do to “them” is dismissed as absurd.

The critical insight of Cummings and Bannon was that it is possible to persuade these non-voters to use their votes as weapons. Deployed strategically, the right number of votes, cast in the right number of places, can make “governments” quail and cause “them” to weep. Sell non-voters that message and you will have given them a truly visceral reason to vote. Their unlooked-for participation can ruin the whole day of the Powers-That-Be – delivering a massive one-fingered salute to the whole, evil, vicious system that ruined their lives. By voting, they can say “Fuck You!” to the people in charge, and – lo – the people in charge will find themselves unexpectedly and irremediably fucked. As happened with Brexit. As happened with Trump.

So, where would the Kiwi equivalents of Dominic Cummings and Steve Bannon go looking for estranged and alienated non-voters? What part of the New Zealand population is most likely to have been uprooted from family and community? Which citizens are most likely to fall foul of the Police, MSD, Oranga Tamariki and Corrections? What sort of New Zealander is the most likely to end up in jail – and the least likely to vote? Who, if they used their votes as weapons, could strike a mortal blow against the status quo? The urban Māori underclass – that’s who!

And who has the best chance of reaching the urban Māori underclass? Te Pāti Māori .

Not that Te Pāti Māori has its very own version of Cambridge Analytica to identify the angry and the alienated and bombard them with carefully crafted social media messages. TPM just doesn’t have those kinds of resources. What it does have, however, is its own place in the networks created to fight the Covid-19 pandemic. These networks led Māori service providers to places and people undetected and ignored by the state and its agencies. More importantly, they began the process of reconnection and tethering that allows political messages to be taken in, rather than simply thrown away.

And when these folk lifted up their heads, looking around through eyes brightened by unfamiliar feelings of pride and hope, TPM was there with the promise that, this time, this special time, voting could make a difference. Aotearoa was changing. Pakeha – especially young Pakeha – were changing. The racism was still there, of course, heightened, it would seem, by the prospect of Labour, the Greens and TPM having the numbers to keep the changes coming. But TPM also told them the country had moved on from 2005, from Don Brash and his “Iwi/Kiwi” election billboards. An awful lot of elderly National Party voters can die in 17 years!

To the bigots still breathing, however, the Māori non-voters could deliver a very special gift – one that would ruin the racists’ whole day. In the spirit of the community that had discovered them in their time of need, and which they had rediscovered, Māori non-voters could step across the line that separates the un-person from the citizen. By casting a vote in the 2023 General Election, not only could they re-make themselves, they could re-make their country.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 4 August 2022.

A Grand Coalition For Peace, Unity and Democracy.

Co-Leaders? The uncomfortable truth is: not the Army, not the Police, not the Spooks, and not even a combination of all three, could defeat the scale and violence of White Supremacist and Māori Nationalist resistance which the imposition of radical decolonisation – or its racism-inspired defeat – would unleash upon the country. A Grand Coalition of Labour and National is one of the few correctives available to halt New Zealand’s steady drift towards civil war.

THOSE RESPONSIBLE for New Zealand’s national security face problems considerably greater than anti-vaxxers issuing bomb-threats. (Although with an anti-vaxxer currently being held in what sounds suspiciously like preventive detention, on a charge of sabotage, perhaps they’re mistaken!) Over the next 12 months, the NZ Defence Force, the Police, and the SIS – The Forces of Order – will have to decide which group of potential insurrectionists they have the best chance of beating: White Supremacists or Māori Nationalists?

These two extreme tendencies, both of them hostile to democracy, currently stand outside the arena of practical politics. For them to remain there, however, a political environment supportive of traditional democratic principles and, most crucially, supported by all key state institutions, will have to be actively promoted. Not only that, but an emphatic majority of citizens will have to believe the such official promotion is sincere, and that it will not simply evaporate if ordered to do so by radical political actors.

This is a predicament without precedent in New Zealand history. At no point in the 170-year history of responsible government in these islands has the arbitrary introduction of fundamental constitutional change turned on the outcome of an election. Radical changes have been made in the past, but always within the parameters of parliamentary democracy and the rule of law. It is one of the great strengths of our Westminster system of government: that change is always reversible. What’s done can be undone – if the people will it.

If, however, the next general election produces a Labour-Green-Te Pāti Māori coalition government, then fundamental constitutional changes, of the sort recommended in the He Puapua Report, will be introduced. This can be stated with confidence for the very simple reason that an unwavering tripartite commitment to the “decolonisation” and “indigenisation” of Aotearoa’s governing arrangements would be a precondition for any such coalition’s formation. The Māori Caucus of the Labour Party would demand it. The Greens would expect it. And the support of Te Pāti Māori (TPM) could not be contemplated without it.

These constitutional commitments could not be kept hidden from the electorate. Their necessity would be loudly proclaimed in the run-up to the election by TPM as a means of mobilising Māori voters generally, and energising young Māori voters in particular. TPM’s most obvious electoral strategy would be seek all seven Māori seats, while freeing their supporters to cast a Party Vote for Labour by way of compensation. Should TPM win all seven seats, but fail to win a commensurate share of the Party Vote, then the next Parliament would have an “overhang” of Left seats – making it even more difficult for the Right to secure a majority.

Would Labour consent to TPM’s strategy? Almost certainly. On the issues of decolonisation and indigenisation the Labour Party Caucus has demonstrated a firmness of purpose not seen since its predecessor’s embrace of “Rogernomics” back in the 1980s. It was not unusual in the late-80s to hear Labour MPs declare that they would rather lose their seat than reverse their support for Roger Douglas’s radical economic reforms. Faced with the option of repudiating the Treaty “partnership”, and the co-governance measures they believe it mandates, this present Labour Caucus (with a handful of exceptions) would almost certainly evince a similar determination to win through or leave Parliament altogether.

Such a coalescence of the Left around te Tiriti and co-governance would, naturally, generate an equal and opposite reaction from the Right. Any notion the National Party may have entertained of attempting to ride the Treaty-and-Co-Governance tiger would have to be jettisoned hastily. Christopher Luxon would have no choice but to embrace Act’s maximalist anti-separatist/pro-democracy policies as his own. David Seymour’s plans for legislatively defining the meaning of the Treaty, and having the resulting law either ratified or rejected by referendum, would thus be presented as the rock-solid commitment of the National-Act coalition government-in-waiting.

Faced with the possibility of losing every centimetre of ground they had won since 1985, Māori nationalists would make no bones about the consequences of a National-Act Government. The re-colonisation of Aotearoa would be resisted – by any means necessary.

Not to be outdone, White Supremacist groups would make it clear that any attempt to “re-tribalise” New Zealand society, by stripping its citizens of their democratic rights and property, would be met with armed resistance.

How would the Forces of Order respond to such threats? Their first move would likely be against the most ardent promoters of the decolonisation and indigenisation agenda. Senior public servants, vice-chancellors and media editors would be “invited” to moderate their radical stance on the politics of partnership. With “radicalisation” occurring apace among the activists of both camps, the Forces of Order’s top priority would be to “depressurize” the increasingly tense political atmosphere.

At the same time “the usual suspects” of the activist Right and Left would be made the subjects of heightened surveillance. All forms of intelligence gathering would be utilised in an attempt to keep abreast of the White Supremacists’ and Māori Nationalists’ activities. From the perspective of the Forces of Order, the best outcome of such a surveillance programme would be the uncovering of plans by both sides to launch a series of attacks on their opponents – up to and including the assassination of the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition.

In these circumstances, the Forces of Order would be presented with the opportunity to persuade the leaders of the Centre-Left and the Centre-Right to dispense with their respective coalition partners and announce their intention to go into the election as a Grand Coalition for Peace, Unity and Democracy. The urgent necessity for such a dramatic solution could be demonstrated by a few suitably terrifying leaks to the most co-operative media outlets. Poll data, real or concocted, would indicate the public’s overwhelming support for the Grand Coalition. Dissenting MPs from Labour and National could then be purged ruthlessly from their Party Lists. At the electorate level, the candidate from the party assessed as most likely to win would be given a clear run by their coalition partner.

With the Grand Coalition parties promising to respect both the Treaty and New Zealand’s democratic traditions, while spending billions to “close the gaps” between Māori and Pakeha, the political prospects for Act, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori would take a decided turn for the worse.

The Forces of Order would breathe a massive sigh of relief. Principally because the question originally posed: who could they beat? – is a trick question. The uncomfortable truth is: not the Army, not the Police, not the Spooks, and not even a combination of all three, could defeat the scale and violence of White Supremacist and Māori Nationalist resistance which the imposition of radical decolonisation – or its racism-inspired defeat – would unleash upon the country. An uncompromising government’s pursuit of one or the other would simply topple the nation into a bloody civil war.

And who would win that conflict? The answer, almost certainly, is – The Australians. Canberra could not afford to have a failed state on its eastern flank – ripe for the picking by a Chinese regime only too happy to sail to the rescue of whichever side seemed most likely to prevail. The Aussies’ pre-emptive intervention would see Aotearoa-New Zealand become the eighth state of the Commonwealth of Australia.

We would all have lost.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 2 August 2022.

Fifty Wasted Years.

Beyond Fixing? The critical question confronting New Zealanders is whether we any longer have the resources to repair our physical and human infrastructure?

WHO WILL MAKE the New Zealand of the next 50 years? We had better hope that, whoever they are, they make a better job of it than those responsible the last 50 years. The condition of the country in 2022 offers a stark contrast to the New Zealand of 1972. The country of 50 years ago offered young New Zealanders world-class education and healthcare, full employment, an affordable home of their own, and a future secure enough to contemplate starting a family without trepidation.

The country has been riding on the back of that much stronger New Zealand right up until the present day. As my friend Dr Chris Harris pointed out to me just a few weeks ago, the modern and highly efficient infrastructure of 1965 served a New Zealand population of 2.5 million. In the space of less than 60 years, our population doubled. Harris’s jarring question: Is the infrastructure required to service a population of 5 million in place? Do we have twice the number of hospitals? Twice the number of schools? Have we made sure that the New Zealand of 2022 still possesses the same high-quality scientific, engineering, medical, teaching, commercial and skilled-trades expertise as the New Zealand of 1972?

The answer to that question is the stuff of contemporary headlines. The construction of the physical and human infrastructure necessary for the maintenance of a strong, first-world economy and society has not kept pace with New Zealand’s burgeoning population. On the contrary, it has languished far behind. Not only have we mended and made-do, but we have also relied upon a qualified workforce that is growing older, but not larger, to keep the social and economic engine ticking over. These experts are rapidly running out of puff. But, when they look over their shoulders, what do they see? Too few replacements, and too far away.

The explanation for New Zealand’s crumbling infrastructure is, almost entirely, bound up with politics. The right-wing populism of Rob Muldoon was effective but expensive. His cancellation of Norman Kirk’s contributory superannuation scheme, which could easily have funded our required infrastructure investments, left him politically marooned and fiscally vulnerable. His increasingly idiosyncratic style of economic management also set up the conditions for the economic and social revolution unleashed by the Fourth Labour Government in 1984.

The neoliberal ideology which drove that revolution (and swiftly captured the National Party) was a reaction to, and an implacable foe of, the active state that produced the prosperous New Zealand of the 1960s and 70s. The “hands-on” style of nation-building which had been a feature of both Labour and National governments since 1935, was unceremoniously dumped. If infrastructure was in genuine need of refurbishment and/or replacement, then the Market would step in to claim the profits.

Except that capitalism has always relied upon the state to construct and preserve the physical and social infrastructure necessary for the realisation of private profit. If the behaviour of sovereign states since the global financial crisis of 2008-09, and during the current Covid-19 Pandemic, has not made that clear then it is difficult to imagine what could! Free movement of capital. Free movement of goods. Free movement of labour. Such is the neoliberal catechism – and New Zealand has been an apt pupil.

It was the free movement of labour that hurt New Zealand the most. By forcing tertiary students to take out loans to pay for their tuition, neoliberal education policy more-or-less forced the country’s best and brightest to join the “Anywhere” class of globalised professionals and managers. By destroying organised labour, neoliberal workplace relations policies drove New Zealand’s best workers across the Tasman to Australia where wages were 30 percent higher.

It was a deadly cocktail. In order to secure and retain some form of democratic mandate, successive neoliberal governments were obliged to offer tax cuts to their most reliable voters. This hollowing-out of the state’s fiscal position meant key infrastructure was either overburdened with demands it could no longer safely fulfil, or simply shut down. To this ailing physical infrastructure was added a human infrastructure no longer equal to the nation’s needs. The only way to keep the state even semi-functional, was by opening New Zealand’s borders to tens-of-thousands of immigrant workers.

When traffic is reduced to a crawl, and broken water pipes send geysers soaring into the air, the neglect of the past 50 years can no longer be ignored. When crippling shortages of medical specialists and nurses render our hospitals unsafe, and there are no longer sufficient qualified teachers to adequately staff our schools, polytechnics and universities, then the crippling infrastructure deficit simply has to be addressed. The critical question confronting New Zealand, however, is: can these deficiencies be made good?

It is not just a question of finding the huge amounts of capital need to repair, replace and augment the nation’s physical infrastructure – it’s the strings that are attached. At the heart of the Three Waters controversy, for example, isn’t the fraught issue of “co-governance”, but the non-negotiable requirement of international lenders that the administrative entities needed to oversee the spending of the billions of dollars needed to bring our drinking-, storm-, and waste-water up to scratch are hermetically sealed-off from democratic interference.

Of even more concern is the quality of New Zealand’s human capital. Young New Zealanders of 2022 are simply not as literate, nor as numerate, as they were 50 years ago. Google, Wikipedia and YouTube notwithstanding, their general knowledge is abysmal. This is far from being a trivial objection. A good general knowledge is essential if young people are not to fall prey to misinformation, disinformation and the wild conspiracy theories that infest social media. It is what we don’t know we don’t know that leads so many of us down the rabbit-hole.

Most terrifying of all, when considering the scale of the repairs and renovations required of New Zealand over the next 50 years, is the question: who is going to do it? If the best and the brightest graduates New Zealand’s taxpayers can produce are snapped-up by overseas recruiters, who are we left with? The graduates the recruiters didn’t want? Who wants to live in a country built by the second-best engineers?

And then there are those who not only fail to make it to university, but don’t even make it to school? The unprecedented number of truant kids who struggle to read simple instructions and perform basic calculations. How do you build a country with the people our over-stretched and understaffed education system failed to engage – failed to teach?

From somewhere, New Zealand needs to find the hope and the energy that built the physical and human infrastructure we’ve been living off these past, tragically wasted, 50 years. The only place to start looking for either of these qualities is at the bottom. God knows, we’ve done little enough to foster much in the way of hope or energy in our social depths, but we’re not going to find it anywhere else. Because the people who robbed this country of both were the people at the top – and most of them don’t even live here anymore.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 1 August 2022.

The Greens’ Unhappy Relationship With Power.

Rule-Breaker? It is easy to see why poor James Shaw found himself brutally deposed as the Greens’ co-leader. By seeking the responsibilities of leadership – and exercising them – he violated the first rule of Green Party governance. Then, by accepting the limitations of the Green Party’s electoral mandate (7.8 percent of the Party Vote) and practicing the art of the possible with Labour and National, he violated the second.

THE GREENS have a problem with power. The whole concept of leadership makes them uneasy. Who should have power? How should it be wielded? These are questions radical environmentalists have struggled with since the Values Party was formed 50 years ago. If nothing else, the peculiarly self-destructive actions of the Greens over the course of the past week have exposed how urgently the party needs to address and resolve the problems of political power.

Perhaps the first question that the Greens need to answer is: How much power do they want? This may sound like a silly question, but exactly how powerful the Greens see themselves becoming has never been all that clear. Unlike most parties, the Greens do not ask the electorate explicitly for a decisive parliamentary majority.

Now, you may say this reflects a commendable humility on the part of the Greens. By accepting that securing a parliamentary majority is beyond them, and that the best they can hope for is to partner a much larger party in a broad progressive coalition, they are, surely, acknowledging political reality? True, but they are also accepting that the amount of power they will ever be able to wield in their own right is limited.

Except, in the face of global warming and all the other environmental threats to the planet, isn’t the Greens’ acceptance of relative powerlessness a little self-defeating? Examining their manifesto, it is clear that unprecedented state power will be needed to achieve the goals the Greens have set themselves. Power that only a determined Green Prime Minister, Cabinet and Caucus, commanding a huge parliamentary majority, could hope to wield.

All of which confirms the Greens’ deeply contradictory relationship with power. Green Party members seem unusually diffident about exercising power in their own right, but are resentful of the power exercised by other party members over them. At the same time, the Greens aren’t the least bit fazed, collectively, by the idea of the entire population being required to submit to their party’s radical environmental remedies.

Blend these contradictions into a single Green political style and what do you get? A party deeply mistrustful of effective leadership. A party which gives more weight to the objections of minorities than it does to the affirmations of majorities. A party which compensates for its crippling internal contradictions by demanding unquestioning public compliance with Green Party policy. A party, moreover, which makes these demands fully aware that, on a good day, it represents barely a tenth of the electorate – and yet considers that enough.

With all this in mind, it is easy to see why poor James Shaw found himself brutally deposed as the Greens’ co-leader. By seeking the responsibilities of leadership – and exercising them – he violated the first rule of Green Party governance. Then, by accepting the limitations of the Green Party’s electoral mandate (7.8 percent of the Party Vote) and practicing the art of the possible with Labour and National, he violated the second.

Shaw’s first violation bespoke an unhealthy amount of un-Green ambition. His second dispelled the membership’s cherished illusion that maximum policy gains can be extracted, without compromise, on the basis of 10 out of 120 seats in the House of Representatives. His thumping victory notwithstanding (71 percent of the AGM’s voting delegates supported Shaw) the man obviously had to go!

It’s tempting to interpret Shaw’s landslide “victory” as evidence that the core of the Green Party membership retains a healthy measure of common-sense. Unfortunately, that same membership recently ratified a revised Green Party constitution that militates aggressively against common-sense. Only a party deeply ambivalent towards effective leadership, and deaf to the appeals of political realism, could endorse a process allowing 29 percent of voting delegates to declare an unopposed candidate with 71 percent support – not elected.

More to the point, the Greens’ constitution also attests to an ambivalent relationship with democracy itself. It takes a particularly virulent strain of individualism to construct a political ideology in which majorities are, at best, suspect, and, at worst, instruments of tyranny. Certainly, it places the Greens well outside the great movements for human liberation that have illuminated the past 250 years.

To save the world, you must be willing to lead it. If you would have us trust you to do that, then, for the planet’s sake, trust yourselves!

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 29 July 2022.