Impasse

Stalemate: New Zealand can move neither forwards, nor backwards, and yet it cannot stand still forever - but try telling New Zealanders that!

NEW ZEALAND stands at an impasse. Though New Zealanders’ deep-seated desire to break free of the economic and social constraints in which they find themselves remains undiminished, fears are growing that escape is no longer possible. At every turn, arguments for change are met with counter-arguments for doing nothing. For every bold step the National-led Government takes forward, it then takes two cautious steps to the side. Pundits mutter darkly of "government by opinion poll" and lament the lack of "strong leadership". New Zealand has stalled – and refuses to be re-started.

New Zealanders’ reactions to this impasse vary. The business community, for example, shows every sign of being in a state of denial. Confidence surveys reveal a wild optimism almost entirely lacking in evidentiary justification. Most economists agree that economic recovery – where it is happening at all – is occurring at a snail’s pace, and that there is significant risk of a second downturn. When required to focus exclusively on their own firms, most business-people share the experts’ pessimism. But ask them to pronounce on the prospects for the nation as a whole and what can only be described as "magical thinking" takes over.

It’s as if they cannot – or will not – allow themselves to entertain the thought that "their" Government is economically out of its depth, bereft of credible policies and drifting ineffectually on the unpredictable currents of public opinion. Rather than admit such a crushing dénouement to their hopes and dreams they’re attempting to will an unequivocal economic recovery into being through the collective projection of positive thinking.

But if the country’s business-people are wildly and unreasonably optimistic, its trade union movement is mired in a state of industrial and political passivity without precedent in New Zealand’s recent history. While the CTU’s fraternal peak organisations in Greece and France pour workers onto the streets in loud protest at their respective governments’ retrenchment policies, their Kiwi counterpart seems to have forgotten how.

Like the business community, the CTU is also in denial. Rather than admit its cowardly failure to defend trade unionism in the face of the 1991 Employment Contracts Bill – an admission that would at least allow it to "move on" from its current passivity to a more assertive stance – the CTU doggedly continues to repress its shameful historical memories.

The moral and organisational inertia created by this repression is manifested in the anti-democratic control-freakery and addiction to process that distinguishes today’s trade union leaders from the militant battlers of the past. In this respect, at least, the industrial wing of the labour movement is in perfect harmony with the political wing.

Ever since New Zealand became an unwilling host to the neoliberal army that ideologically occupied its intellectual landscape 25 years ago, both the CTU leadership and the Labour Party’s parliamentary wing have adapted themselves more-or-less willingly to life in the Occupation’s "Green Zone". The implementation of neoliberal policies in New Zealand’s workplaces and homes would’ve been next to impossible without the Labour Movement’s active collaboration.

"Waitakere Man" – the aspirational working-class battler who deserted Labour in the 2008 General Election – is almost entirely the product of this betrayal. Denied the opportunity to fight for his class through union and party, he has – since the debacle of "Rogernomics" – learned to fight for himself and his family alone. The diminished ideological horizons of this struggle have produced a corresponding diminution in the scope of his political engagement. Matters that impinge upon him and his family directly – interest rates, taxes, crime, healthcare costs and the education of his children – have retained their political salience. Those that do not have not.

For younger workers with no memories of New Zealand’s solidaristic and collectivist past, the narrow individualism which neoliberalism enforces is simply the norm. And yet, like their parents and grandparents, they also feel the loss of the worker-friendly economic order that neoliberalism swept away. Like the itch in an amputated arm, it bears witness to something that no longer exists – and that absence is resented.

Labour has yet to grasp the way in which Waitakere Man’s resentment is being played out politically – as punishment. It simply can’t understand why more and more "Labour people" are willing to cut off their noses to spite what they see as their erstwhile Party’s supercilious and unrepentant face.

Middle-class New Zealanders are also at an impasse.

Though not averse to the fundamental principles of the new economic order (which were, above all, the bourgeois principles of private enterprise and individual responsibility) they are nevertheless struggling to accommodate Neoliberalism’s practical consequences.

The social pathologies generated by burgeoning inequality are forcing middle-class people all across the Western World to embrace harsher and harsher methods of social control. It’s only recently begun to dawn on them, however, that these hard-line "solutions" necessarily entail the surrender of the moral and political foundations upon which bourgeois culture ultimately rests.

Increasingly, the progressive and humanitarian achievements of middle-class reformers in the 19th and 20th centuries are being challenged by extreme neoliberals touting remedies (like torture) which pre-date the era of bourgeois democracy.

That neoliberal and democratic values may not, in the end, be compatible is a frightening thought – but not as frightening as the sort of measures decent middle-class people will eventually be forced to condone once the cords of democratic accountability are severed.

Not surprisingly, these are prospects few middle-class New Zealanders are ready to contemplate. They, too, are in denial.

And thus we come to the very heart of the impasse in which New Zealand finds itself. We long to rid ourselves of the economic and social constraints that have steadily shrunk the space in which individual liberty can be meaningfully exercised, but we are not yet ready to accept that the origin of these constraints is the very neoliberal order we embraced more than a quarter-century ago to expand our freedom. That’s hardly surprising: who, after all, relishes confronting a difficulty without a solution? Or participating in an argument where no agreement is possible?

"The crisis", wrote the Italian socialist, Antonio Gramsci, "consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."

Thus is the impasse defined. Though "morbid symptoms" are driving our politics, we find ourselves both unable and unwilling to treat them.

This essay was originally published in The Independent of Thursday, 15 April 2010.

Dangerous Anomalies

House of Representatives? Have the seven Maori Seats become a dangerous anomaly in New Zealand's system of representative democracy?

THE LAW REQUIRES that New Zealand’s House of Representatives contain 120 seats. Thanks to the peculiarities of our electoral system it may (as it does at present) contain more than that number – but it must not contain less.

Of those 120 seats, seven are currently reserved for Maori. Only those citizens who enrol on the Maori Roll – an electoral register separate and distinct from the General Roll – may vote for candidates nominated for election in "Maori Seats".

These seven Maori Seats are without doubt a constitutional anomaly. Their existence owing a great deal more to political expediency than they do to democratic theory.

Separate Maori representation came into existence in 1867. The settler parliament saw the creation of four "native" seats as the most expedient way of getting around the fact that most Maori couldn’t meet the property qualifications of the franchise.

Colonial politicians point-blank refused to recognise the "beastly communism" of collective Maori property relations. But, with war still raging between Maori and Pakeha, the settler parliament thought it advisable to include "loyal" Maori (if only symbolically and temporarily) in the legislative process.

Had our colonial forebears been at all concerned to accord Maori political representation commensurate with their numbers, then four seats were nowhere near enough. No one knows precisely how many Maori adult males there were in 1871, but the number is unlikely to have been less than 10 percent of the total adult male population. At the very least, there should have been eight – not four – "Maori Seats" in the 78-seat chamber.

By the turn of the 19th Century, however, the Maori population had crashed. The cumulative effects of war, disease and cultural demoralisation had brought the indigenous people close to extinction. In 1900 the four seats provided for in the 1867 legislation almost certainly over-represented the Maori electorate.

But the Settler State, having extinguished indigenous military resistance, and confident that the Maori "race" was about to disappear altogether, was willing to let the anomaly of the Maori Seats linger-on a little longer.

Besides, having Maori parliamentarians could be very helpful – as when the Northern Maori MP, Hone Heke, defused the so-called "Dog-Tax War" in 1898. Having Maori MPs supporting your political party could also be very helpful in a close electoral contest. Labour was by no means the first party to build a relationship with the Maori electorates – and certainly not the last.

And so this constitutional anomaly persisted. Not even the 1985-86 Royal Commission on the Electoral System – which argued that the introduction of proportional representation would make the four Maori Seats both superfluous and unnecessary – could prise them out of New Zealand’s political culture.

It is not always wise, however, to allow anomalies to persist in the body politic. Like free radicals in the human body, constitutional anomalies have the potential to trigger potentially dangerous mutations.

Rejecting the Royal Commission’s recommendations on the Maori Seats, for example, meant that instead of the 120 seats of the House of Representatives being divided equally into 60 Electorate and 60 List Seats, the split was 65:55. By 2008 the steady increase in the number of Maori seats had exacerbated the numerical imbalance of Electorate over List Seats to 70:50. Ever-so-slowly our MMP electoral system is being transformed into the Supplementary Member system decisively rejected by the voters in 1992.

The fact that we have an "overhang" of two seats in the current House of Representatives is due to the Maori Party winning more seats than its share of the Party Vote warranted. And, a quick analysis of the voting statistics of the 2008 General Election shows that while it took 35,446 votes to elect a General MP, only 20,476 votes were needed to elect a Maori MP.

The Maori Party co-leader, Dr Pita Sharples, argues strongly that democracy is not simply a matter of "one man, one vote" – i.e. all votes being of equal value – but that it’s also about protecting the minority from the majority. That’s true, and if the Maori Seats can claim any justification – then surely this is it.

But, isn’t it equally true that no minority has the right to protect itself at the expense of the majority?

In political theory, a minority whose rights and privileges are accorded greater political weight than the majority’s has a name, it’s called – an Aristocracy.

This essay was originally published in The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 9 April 2010.

Whanau Ora: Faith-Based Charity?

The architect of Whanau Ora: Encouraged and empowered by National's John Key and Act's Rodney Hide, Tariana Turia has constructed a culturally unassailable vehicle for the privatisation of social welfare delivery in New Zealand.

THE FIRST THING to grasp about the Whanau Ora programme is that it occupies in the New Zealand political environment precisely the same evolutionary niche as the so-called "Faith-based Charities" (FBCs) in the United States.

In the battle to wrest the provision of social services from federal and state authorities the FBCs acted as American Neoliberalism’s "Trojan Horses" – hiding the fundamental goal of welfare privatisation behind the culturally unassailable front of Christian community service.

Being a much more secular society that the United States, and being nowhere near as enthralled to the fundamentalist/evangelical Christian Right, New Zealand presented its home-grown neoliberals with a significant presentational problem. New Zealand’s established charities are by-and-large still relatively free of neoliberal contagion and in any case completely fail the "culturally unassailable" test – being as subject to media scrutiny as any other participant in New Zealand civil society.

Only one group in New Zealand is culturally unassailable – the tangata whenua. Any person or institution foolhardy enough to subject Maori to the same degree of critical scrutiny as other groups in our society runs the very real risk of being branded "racist". "Maori-bashing" has been politically ghettoised in the socially and intellectually disreputable milieu of the unsophisticated Right. "Respectable" New Zealand journalists and politicians are as loathe to attack Maori as American politicians and journalists are to attack Christianity.

All of which makes Maori community organisations the ideal vehicles to lead the private sector’s assault on the hitherto state-dominated welfare "marketplace". The concept of whanau ora is being advanced with exactly the same intention as the concept of "a personal encounter with Jesus": as a way of "turning people’s lives around" by means of an "experience" or "force" that is ultimately untestable – even supernatural.

Which is why the Whanau Ora Report is so full of what critics have called "waffle" and "psychobabble". It is proof positive that the policy we are dealing with is not in any way empirically mandated or scientifically verifiable. Tariana Turia and her hand-picked advisory taskforce are simply (and shamelessly) asking the rest of New Zealand to take "Whanau Ora" on faith.

And it’s working. A group of public servants who approached a journalist with the line: "Hi, We're from the Government and we're here to help" would be subjected to the most rigorous scrutiny – and quite possibly ridicule. But a few months from now, when someone says: "Kia ora, I’m from your local Whanau Ora service provider and I’m here to help" he or she will be received with unstinting respect and everything they say will be recorded at its face value.

The other thing which the presentation of the Whanau Ora Report has done is reveal the full measure of John Key’s political skill. His wooing of the Maori Party – like Ronald Reagan’s wooing of the Religious Right in the United States – has augmented the forces of New Zealand neoliberalism in a way very few people believed possible, and even fewer predicted.

Key had both the wit and the nerve to take on board what the more intelligent members of the neoliberal community (like the Business Roundtable’s Rob McLeod) were saying. That the Treaty settlement process was slowly but surely creating what Dr Elizabeth Rata calls a "neo-traditionalist elite" of tribal capitalists with sufficient economic power to co-opt the Maori middle-class – a group which, hitherto, had owed its primary allegiance to, received its salaries from, and been under the ideological guidance of the State Sector.

Key and his National Party colleagues (along with their ACT allies) have long understood that this situation conferred a considerable political advantage upon the Labour Party (whose connections to the State Sector are numerous and deep). But what if those connections were broken?

If the bulk of Maori middle-class employment could be transferred from public to private bureaucracies – especially bureaucracies masked by the culturally unassailable language of kaupapa Maori – then the outer walls of the public sector’s welfare delivery institutions would be breached, and the principles and practice of privatised welfare delivery firmly established.

No one can say we weren’t warned. The way GEO, the private US corporation which set up the Mt Eden Remand Centre, screened its naked profit-seeking behind an ethnically sensitive programme involving the tangata whenua showed us as long ago as the late 1990s how easily Maori could be persuaded to turn themselves into a culturally unassailable swipe-card for privatisation.

And just as privatised correctional facilities are on their way to becoming highly profitable cogs in the machinery of social control, Whanau Ora, too, will see private individuals, trusts and corporations (albeit brown-faced ones) profiting from the unrelenting institutional discrimination and structural inequality that drives working-class Maori and Pakeha alike into the arms of those who long ago mastered the art of doing well by doing good.　

Unjustified Dismissal

Ministers Nick Smith and Rodney Hide have behaved like a bad employer by constructively dismissing Environment Canterbury’s elected representatives. Do New Zealand voters still care enough about democracy to order their reinstatement?

SOMETHING’S VERY WRONG when it’s easier to dismiss Environment Canterbury’s (Ecan’s) 14 democratically elected regional councillors than it is to dismiss a single troublesome employee.

A friend of mine has just been through the tortuous process of dealing fairly with an employee whose performance was causing him concern. As most New Zealand employers know all-too-well, it’s not an easy process. Every effort must be made to, first, gather all the facts, and second, give the employee every opportunity to either explain and/or improve his performance. If the facts and/or the judgements of either side are disputed, then there’s the option of mediation. And, if mediation fails, there’s the Employment Court.

In spite of its complexity, the process is one of which New Zealanders can be proud. Citizens required to sell their labour in order to sustain themselves and their families have every right to expect their employers to treat them fairly. In the event of their arbitrary and unjustified dismissal, it is only right that they be empowered to seek and be awarded reinstatement and/or compensation.

Given the legal obstacles placed in the way of arbitrarily and unjustly dismissing a humble employee, one might be forgiven for thinking that there’d be much greater obstacles to dismissing a whole layer of democratic government.

In the words of the Regulatory Impact Statement prepared for the Government by the Ministry for the Environment:

"There are significant risks associated with the … recommendation to temporarily suspend planned triennial elections for regional councillors (scheduled for October 2010) and to transfer the functions and responsibilities of … elected councillors to government-appointed commissioners until elections in 2013 at the latest. Elections are a right and privilege of any citizen in New Zealand. The suspension of such a right should only be considered in exceptional circumstances."

What, if any, were the "exceptional circumstances" that justified the dismissal of ECan?

The Canterbury regional council’s problems can be sheeted home to the 2007 local authority election which produced seven regional councillors with a mandate to conserve Canterbury’s water resources, and another seven councillors mandated to exploit them. The resulting political impasse made effective and sustainable resource management in Canterbury extremely difficult to achieve.

Difficult – but not impossible. In the event of political deadlock, the traditional solution is for elected representatives to seek out and defer to the recommendations of professional and/or scientific experts. Any other course risks substituting subjective political/commercial considerations for objective scientific analysis.

The scientific consensus in regard to Canterbury’s water resources is that their extreme fragility requires a policy of cautious conservation. This was not what those determined upon the commercial exploitation of the region’s water wanted to hear. If Canterbury agriculture (especially its dairy industry) was to remain profitable, ready access to reliable supplies of water had to be guaranteed.

The change of Government in 2008 provided the exploitation faction with an opportunity to break the political impasse arising from the previous year’s local government election by force majeure.

National’s victory was in no small measure due to a hardening consensus in rural and provincial New Zealand that a decisive break is needed from the rational/scientific approach to resource management. Increasingly, farming and business interests are of the view that New Zealand can have environmental protection, or it can have economic growth, but it can’t have both.

With this pro-growth/anti-green viewpoint firmly entrenched in Canterbury’s city and district councils, it wasn’t hard for the exploitation faction to gather the signatures of the region’s mayors on a petition demanding central government intervention. Even some of those on the conservation side of the argument were persuaded to sign. Sometime, somehow, someone had to break the political impasse on what had become, after two years of constant and increasingly vicious in-fighting, a clearly dysfunctional regional council.

The Government’s response was to commission the former National Party cabinet minister, Wyatt Creech, to lead an investigation into ECan’s failure to come up with a coherent plan for managing Canterbury’s water. Creech’s appointment was highly controversial. Since leaving politics he had become a major player in the dairy industry and conservationists feared that his ties to the agricultural sector would cause him to come down heavily on the side of exploitation.

These fears appeared well-founded when Creech finally presented the Environment Minister, Nick Smith, and Local Government Minister, Rodney Hide, with a report fiercely critical of ECan’s handling of the water issue. He accused the regional councillors of relying too heavily on "the science", and suggested that ECan’s professional advisors were too "green" to be entrusted with the task of enforcing its resource management policies. Accordingly, he recommended that ECan’s elected representatives be dismissed and replaced by an appointed commissioner.

Now, if an employer behaved in this way the Employment Court would, quite rightly, throw the book at him. What Smith and Hide have done, in employment terms, is to ask a friend to draw up a report on their employee’s behaviour. That report (compiled without significant input from the subject of the inquiry) damns the hapless worker’s performance and lays all the blame for the breakdown of the employment relationship at his door. Citing the report, Smith and Hide peremptorily order "Mr Ecan" to clear his desk and leave the building.

What’s missing from this process is any semblance of fairness. Where was the impartial mediator in the battle between the conservationists and the exploiters? When did the Government tell ECan exactly what was expected of it? When was it given the chance to demonstrate that it was both willing and able to follow the Government’s lead?

Radio New Zealand’s reporters have documentary proof that ECan repeatedly asked not only the present government, but its Labour predecessor, for legislative assistance to break the policy log-jam. The record shows they never received a reply.

Old hands at Employment Law will recognise immediately what’s going on here. ECan’s case bears all the hallmarks of what’s known as a "constructive dismissal". The Boss – in the form of Smith & Hide – wanted rid of "Mr Ecan", and deliberately set about "constructing" the circumstances that made his dismissal inevitable.

The voters of Canterbury – and, indeed, New Zealand – if they place any stock at all by the democratic values of their forebears, must assume the role of the Employment Court in this case – and order ECan’s reinstatement.

This essay was originally published in The Independent of Thursday, 8 April 2010.

Apologising For Victory

Final Shots: Titokowaru's Taranaki War (1868) was one of the last major clashes of arms between Maori and Pakeha. The redoubtable Titokowaru may have won every battle, but the final outcome of the Land Wars (1845-1872) was never in doubt.

A CENTURY and a half ago, on 17th March 1860, Imperial British forces under the command of Colonel Charles Gold attacked a band of Te Atiawa warriors sent by their chief, Wiremu Kingi, to peacefully re-occupy 243 hectares of disputed territory just outside the settlement of New Plymouth.

Those hectares comprised the infamous "Waitara Purchase" – the then Governor’s, Thomas Gore Browne’s, carefully contrived pretext for war against the Maori King Movement. For months the Governor and his advisers had been itching to teach the natives "a sharp lesson". Kingi’s bold assertion of Te Atiawa sovereignty at Waitara gave them the opportunity.

That Kingi and his people were asserting no more than their rights under the Treaty of Waitangi cut little ice with Gore Browne. British settlers were demanding access to Maori land, and he was determined to give it to them.

The 150th anniversary of the Taranaki War was marked last Wednesday [17 March 2010] by a sombre day-break ceremony of commemoration and reconciliation. Prime Minister, John Key; Maori Affairs Minister, Pita Sharples; and Treaty Negotiations Minister, Chris Finlayson were all there to commence the negotiations which will, it is hoped, offer a belated measure of compensation to the victims of Gore Browne’s trumped-up war.

The sombre nature of such gatherings is readily understood from the perspective of Maori, but it is impossible to resist the thought that, on the Crown’s part, there is more than a little play-acting and a great deal of hypocrisy on display. No one on the Government side of the table is about to offer full compensation for the loss of land and cultural coherence suffered by the Taranaki iwi - whose "full and final settlement" will almost certainly represent less than one cent on the dollar.

The Crown may issue Royal Pardons to long dead tribesmen branded rebels and traitors by Gore Browne and his successors, and, if past practice is any guide, it will apologise for the pain and loss it inflicted on Te Atiawa and its kindred tribes. But no one in this Government – or any other – will ever attempt to wind back the clock to 17th March 1860.

That being the case, why the long faces? Why the solemn apologies? Are we seriously expected to believe that the Crown (and the post-colonial population it represents) is genuinely sorry that Governor Gore Browne and his successor, Sir George Grey, crushed the Maori King Movement; reduced the Treaty of Waitangi to a "simple nullity"; and set about constructing the unitary state of New Zealand upon the ruins of Maori society?

If we are, then rank hypocrisy should officially be declared our national sport.

Let’s consider, for a moment, the historical counter-factual to Gore Browne’s and Grey’s decisions to put an end to the Maori leaders’ assertion of tino rangatiratanga. Let’s imagine that both Governors loftily ignored the demands of the newly-established settler parliament, and stalwartly upheld the Treaty of Waitangi. How long do you suppose they would have lasted?

Now, let’s go way out on a limb, and imagine that the British Foreign & Colonial Office backed the Governors’ decisions. Let’s say they refused to send Imperial troops against the Maori, and commanded their vice-regal representatives to punish severely any person convicted of trading illegally in Maori land. What would have happened?

Even if we abandon all semblance of historical credibility and assume that a British Government responsible for such a self-evidently self-destructive colonial policy was re-elected, and persisted in protecting the Maori, one brute fact remains. Britain’s colonial rivals would never have permitted 268,000 square kilometres of prime real estate, located conveniently in the temperate zone of the Southern Hemisphere, to remain in indigenous hands.

If Britain didn’t have the stomach to rob the Maori of their patrimony, you may be certain that France, Germany, Spain or the United States would have "taken up the White Man’s burden" with alacrity. And while, for Pakeha, a French Nouvelle Zélande may well have been an improvement on Mother England’s (as the recent hit comedy Le Sud wittily confirms) it would still have been a disaster for Maori.

We are not, after all, talking about a few specks in the ocean like the Kingdom of Tonga, which the great powers left to its own devices for diplomatic – rather than moralistic – reasons. An independent Kingdom of Aotearoa, equal in size to the British Isles (but woefully underpopulated) would have fallen victim to Western imperialism even faster than the strategically-located Kingdom of Hawaii which, after years of destabilisation by American sugar interests, was finally annexed by the United States in 1898.

The white settlers who built the New Zealand nation were as hard-headed and unrepentant about their role in dispossessing its indigenous population as any of their Anglo-Saxon "kith and kin" in Australia and North America. Like the latter, they confidently anticipated their own "natives" imminent surrender to the Darwinian imperative. When they stubbornly refused to depart, New Zealand’s "progressives" (particularly Edward Tregear) shrewdly declared Maori to be fellow "Aryans" – and therefore assimilable as "Better Britons".

Interestingly, "progressives" were also responsible for ending the New Zealand Government’s policies of assimilation. Inspired by the post-war anti-colonial and anti-imperialist "struggles", and stricken with guilt by the historical revisionism of American authors like Dee Brown and Alex Haley, not-to-mention our own Dick Scott, Michael King, Judith Binney and James Belich , New Zealand’s formerly hard-headed progressive intellectuals went soft.

Kiwi nationalists, who, in the interests of mobilising our national energies had promoted a homogeneous, monocultural and unified social order, were forced to give way to a new generation of bi- and multi-culturalists whose watchwords were "identity", "indigeneity" and "diversity".

That the elevation and promotion of difference might lead to disunity – and thus to the dissipation of national energy – did not give them pause. The Kiwi nationalists’ conviction that a divided population could never be mobilised to achieve the prosperous future New Zealanders were demanding had always sounded a little too much like "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer!" for the progressive Left to mourn its passing.

And so our leaders shuffle solemnly through endless powhiri. Anxious to demonstrate their historical empathy – but unwilling to accept its political logic.

How the ghosts of Governor Gore Browne and Sir George Grey must sneer at their successors: when conquerors start apologising for their victories – their conquests are already lost.

This essay was originally published in The Independent of Thursday, 25 March 2010.

Scraps of Evidence

The Burke River in Mt Aspiring National Park. Since 1990, mineralogists have known that deposits of "Baotite", a carbonatite rock containing the "strategic mineral" Niobium, exist in and around the Haast Pass area. Niobium is crucial to the maintenance of the United States' global air superiority.

ON 23 FEBRUARY, Foreign Affairs Minister, Murray McCully, was forced to relinquish (if anyone would have them) his 184 shares in Widespread Portfolios Ltd.

"Murray McCully has shares in a company that stands to benefit directly from National’s mining policy", thundered the Labour-friendly blogsite, The Standard. "As a member of Cabinet deciding this policy McCully has a significant conflict of interest."

McCully’s holdings in Widespread Portfolios – a New Zealand-owned investment company specialising in mineral and oil exploration – was hardly a secret. The Standard’s story was based on information which the Minister himself had provided for the parliamentary Register of Pecuniary Interests in January 2009.

But, like Caesar’s Wife, our Cabinet Ministers must be above suspicion. Accordingly, McCully announced his intention to divest himself of the offending shares (worth a princely $NZ31.63) at the earliest opportunity.

End of story?

In most respects it was. But, in one crucial respect, the story rolled on.

The revelation of McCully’s shareholding in Widespread Portfolios – like the revelation of the Prime Minister’s tiny stake in the Australian-owned Jackson Mining company a few days earlier – had whetted their political opponents’ appetite for even the smallest scrap of evidence linking the policies of the National-led Government to the needs of the mining industry.

A "scrap" like Inner Mongolia.

The link was tenuous, to say the least: Widespread Portfolios Ltd had invested in an outfit called King Solomon’s Mines Ltd, a prospecting company searching for gold on the windswept plains of the Chinese Autonomous Region of Inner Mongolia. But what could this remote part of the world possibly have to contribute to our understanding of the New Zealand Government’s proposal to permit mining in its national parks?

Enter the Daily Mail.

On 10 January 2010, Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper ran an exclusive story entitled "Inside China’s Secret, Toxic Unobtanium Mine". The Mail’s Richard Jones had somehow made it all the way to the heart of Inner Mongolia and been smuggled in to Baiyun Obo, a vast, open-cast mine off-limits to foreigners.

According to Jones: "The rare-earths blasted out of rocks here feed more than 77 per cent of global demand for elements such as terbium, which power low-energy lightbulbs; neodymium, which powers wind turbines; and lanthanum, which powers the batteries of hybrid cars such as the Toyota Prius.

"They are also used in mobile phones, computers, iPods, LCD screens, washing machines, digital cameras and X-ray machines, as well as missile guidance systems and even space rockets. Industries reliant on the rare-earths are estimated to be worth an astonishing £3trillion, or five per cent of global GDP."

Rare-earths?

These highly-prized minerals with names mostly ending in "ium" have surfaced again, in documents released to the news media by New Zealand’s Energy & Resource Minister, Gerry Brownlee, on Monday, 22 March.

In a document headed "Maximising our Mineral Potential: Questions & Answers", the Minister explains that:

"Rare earth elements are strategically important. There are very few players in the global market, which is likely to influence their value in the future. They include dysprosium, terbium, erbium and ytterbium, which are fundamental to technologies such as hybrid and electric cars, wind turbines, computer disk drives, fibre-optic telecommunication cables, low-energy light bulbs and military equipment."

Brownlee is quite right to say there are very few players in the global market for rare- earth elements. As Jones notes in his article: "In 2008, China supplied 139,000 tons worldwide, 97 per cent of the world's total rare-earth production."

In other words, China is in the enviable (not to say worrying) position of holding a near monopoly over the minerals which lie at the heart of the emerging "green economy". What’s more, according to Jones, China is steadily reducing the quantity of its rare-earth exports – a policy which will, eventually, require the manufacturers of "green technology" to re-locate their operations on Chinese soil.

Nor are the serious strategic implications of China’s rare-earth monopoly restricted to the realm of economics, for the United States, in particular, the military implications are grave.

"Baotite", for example, nearly all of which comes out of that huge hole in the ground at Baiyun Obo, contains not only a number of rare-earth elements, but also the "strategic mineral" Niobium. Without Niobium the turbine blades of jet engines cannot not be made strong enough for sustained supersonic performance.

At present, the Americans, who have next to no Niobium of their own, get the bulk of what they need from Brazil (along with a tiny fraction from Canada). But no super-power enjoys being dependent on a single supplier – especially one located in the politically volatile continent of South America.

What if Brazil went the same way as Venezuela and Bolivia? Where else, apart from China’s Baiyun Obo mine, could the United States turn for the Baotite/Niobium so vital to the maintenance of its global air superiority?

How about Mt Aspiring National Park?

Since at least 1990, New Zealand mineralogists have known that deposits of Baotite may be found along the South Island’s Haast and Burke Rivers, both of which are located in the Mt Aspiring National Park.

In December 2009, the Green Party informed the news media that the Ngai Tahu iwi had been approached by the Crown for its likely response to the Government’s plan to remove the protected status of up to a fifth of the Park – an area to the north of Lakes Wanaka and Hawea, centred on Haast Pass. Interestingly, this is precisely the location of New Zealand’s Baotite deposits.

Re-enter the Foreign Affairs Minister, Murray McCully.

Long an advocate of the New Zealand pinky-finger being reabsorbed into the Anglo-Saxon Fist (the other "fingers" being the USA, the UK, Canada and Australia) would McCully be likely to refuse an American request to, at least, prepare this country for the day when its Baotite might be needed?

He certainly wouldn’t encounter much in the way of opposition from Messrs Brownlee, Power and Joyce – the other members of Key’s "Kitchen Cabinet". And the Prime Minister’s (and Tourism Minister’s) attitude toward managing the economic/environmental trade-off is, as we have seen over recent days, entirely pragmatic.

Quite how Trade Negotiations Minister, Tim Groser, would react is harder to predict. Certainly, he’d be unlikely to relish the prospect of explaining to the Chinese why New Zealand is undermining their rare-earth monopoly.

This essay was originally published in The Independent of 1 April 2010.

Forlorn Embassy (An Easter Story)

"Suffered under Pontius Pilate."

"MORE WINE! Oi – you there – another jug of the same for me and my stiff-necked friend!"

Pontius Pilate might have aged, but he’d lost none of the habits of command. The relentless passage of the years might have bent his back, but his eyes still glowed with the same fire they glowed with thirty-five years ago when the Emperor Tiberius’s treacherous Praetorian, Sejanus, made him Governor of Judea.

Tiberius. How long ago that all seems now. The faces on Rome’s coins have changed three times since then: Caligula, Claudius and now, Nero – the Emperor my countrymen have sent me to see.

"A forlorn embassy!"

Pilate had thrown back his head and laughed when I had tried to explain what I, Yosef Ben Matityahu, was doing in Rome.

"Asking clemency from that simpering boy? That glittering peacock? That pretentious, poetry-spouting pederast? You might as well ask for clemency from a scorpion. Your priests will never see Jerusalem again, Yosef Ben Matityahu. You have been sent on a fool’s errand. Nero’s heart is not the melting kind."

"A man after your own heart, then, Pontius Pilate."

This was a risky gambit, and I knew it. The old man in front of me had been recalled to Rome in disgrace after massacring hundreds of Samaritans at Mt Gerizim. Had Tiberius not died while Pilate was on his way back to Rome, who knows what would have become of him.

"Oh, you stiff-necked Jews! You never forget, and you never forgive!" Pilate lurched forward, spilling what was left in the wine jug, and seizing me by the collar of my tunic. The smell of sour wine on his breath made me retch, but he pulled me closer still.

"Your pride will be the death of you", he whispered. " Pride – and that habit you have of hearing the voice of God in every dust-devil that blows out of the desert."

"Not recently", I countered, trying not to look away from the fierce old Roman’s imperious gaze. "You’re thinking of Moses and the whirlwind."

"The Hell I am!" Pilate shouted, pushing me back into my seat, and calling for more wine. "What was the name of that madman who set up shop on the banks of Jordan? The one who tried to drown his followers? Reckoned he had been sent by God to prepare the way for the prophesied Jewish King. Bad move. My old friend Herod Agrippa had his heart set on that particular job. He had the fool’s head cut off.

"Dammit, what was his name?"

"John," I said softly, "his name was John."

"Yes, that’s right, John." Pilate leaned back in his chair and bit off a mouthful of the bread he’d been using to soak up the spilled wine.

"John … Yes, but he was weak beer compared to the other fellow: the one who turned up a few years before I was recalled by that imbecilic old paedophile, Tiberius. Curious fellow. Never met anyone quite like him. Jesus."

For a moment he seemed lost in thought until, once again, he lurched forward, stabbing me in the chest with an arthritic finger.

"Your lot hated him. Couldn’t get rid of him fast enough. I’ll never forget the night that Caiaphas, the High Priest – wild-eyed and his robe in tatters – came banging on my door.

"‘The blaspheming rogue claims to be the Messiah!’ Caiaphas cried, ‘Jesus must die!’

"Damned odd business. I’d sentenced scores of Jews to death in my time - crucified them without a second thought.

"But not this fellow. It was uncanny. In the midst of all that shouting and bloodlust – and it was his blood they were lusting for, Josephus – he actually smiled at me.

"I asked him straight out: ‘Are you the prophesied Jewish King – the Messiah?’ And do you know what he said? I’ve never forgotten. He said: ‘My kingdom is not of this world.’

"My kingdom is not of this world! What’s that supposed to mean? Kingdoms are always and only of this world. Why else are you here in Rome, Yosef Ben Matityahu? Why else have you come to me for help?"

"What did you do?" I asked, reaching for the jug.

Pilate shuddered, spilling more wine on the table. His crimson-stained fingers trembled as he spoke.

"To keep the peace, I crucified him."

This short story was first published in The Otago Daily Times of Thursday, 1 April 2010.