Frightening The Government

Frightening Their Government: Students gather for a demonstration on 16 October, 2010 in Paris against pension reform. Since the Student-Worker uprising of May 1968, French politicians have evinced a healthy respect for demonstrations and strikes. There was a time when the New Zealand state was similarly unwilling to risk the wrath of its citizens.

THERE’S A LINE in Michael Moore’s Sicko documentary that every democratic citizen should commit to memory. The radical film-maker declares: “Governments should always be afraid of their people, but people should never be afraid of their government.”

Mr Moore was comparing France with the United States, and wondering how two countries, both with revolutionary traditions, could end up so far apart. Americans’ fear and hatred of “Big Government” is legendary. But the French will challenge government policy at the drop of a chapeau.

In the USA you strike and demonstrate at your own risk. French governments do not like to risk demonstrations and strikes. In 1968 – well within the memory of senior French politicians – demonstrations and strikes brought the Fifth Republic to the very brink of revolution. It took the active intercession of the French Communist Party, and a ten-percent pay rise, to separate the workers from their youthful student allies. 

Governments in New Zealand were also afraid of the people – once. And the people gave them good reason.

The National Party was elected for the first time in 1949 on a rock-solid promise to abolish what they called “compulsory unionism”. In 1951 they provoked a fight with the Waterside Workers Union. If they could make an example of New Zealand’s toughest and most progressive union, then abolishing compulsory unionism would be a piece of cake.

What they got was a very different sort of example. For 151 days the wharfies and their allies fought Sid Holland’s government toe-to-toe. The Government “won” – but only because the Machiavellian boss of the Federation of Labour agreed to keep its 300,000 members “neutral”.

It would be another forty years before the National Party was prepared to have another crack at organised labour. And the only reason Bill Birch’s Employment Contracts Bill passed into law without serious amendment in 1991 was because the Council of Trade Unions, dominated by “moderate” state-sector union bosses, lacked the courage to give Mr Birch and his mates a bloody nose.

Well, we’ve had twenty years to appreciate the benefits of “moderation”. Perhaps we’ve all been much too polite for far too long.

Then again, civility and moderation are qualities highly prized by New Zealanders. Our country is one of the oldest, continuously-functioning democracies on Earth. As far as possible, we prefer to communicate with our political leaders through the Ballot Box. It’s only when they deliberately and stubbornly refuse to be advised by the democratic process that we get angry.

I guess that’s why Labour, the Greens, the CTU and Grey Power have opted to fight the partial privatisation of the state-owned energy companies by launching a Citizens Initiated Referendum. Between elections, it’s one of the few ways of using the Ballot Box to make your point. CIR’s are, of course, non-binding, but a Government refusal to be guided by its undoubted success, would be extremely provocative. Knowing a majority of the electorate was against their policy – but proceeding anyway – the National-led Government would be positively inviting the people to organise a more robust response.

The precedent is there in Greenpeace’s campaign against mining Schedule Four land. The spectacle of 50,000 New Zealanders marching up Auckland’s Queen Street was more than enough to throw Mr Key’s and his Government’s big blue bulldozer into reverse.

Greenpeace's 50,000 demonstrators threw National's big blue bulldozer into reverse.

Discretion will, once again prove to be the better part of National’s valour if Kiwis respond to the Labour/Green/CTU/Grey Power call for volunteers. If anything, the spectacle of ordinary citizens, muffled against the Autumn gales, standing on tens-of-thousands of street corners clutching clip-boards and ball-point pens, or knocking on the doors of tens-of-thousands of former National Party voters, is likely to prove even more terrifying than Robyn Malcolm, Lucy Lawless and their Greenpeace legions.

The task of gathering the 307,000 signatures required to force a referendum on asset sales is not a small one – but it can be done.

And, frankly, we need to do it. As citizens, we’ve been passive for far too long. As the veteran British Labour politician, Tony Benn, tells Michael Moore in Sicko: “An educated, healthy and confident nation is harder to govern.” Much harder than a nation that’s beaten-down, demoralised and genuinely frightened of its own government.

Democracy is not a political system for fearful people: to function properly it requires regular displays of unreasonable and immoderate courage.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 9 February 2012.

The Duty Of Care

The Good Samaritan: When someone is being attacked, or is in need of our help, we all have a duty of care to those afflicted. Whether it's on the road to Jericho or down on the Auckland waterfront, we are never justified in passing by on the other side.

YOUR BEST MATES are being attacked by a gang of thugs – what do you do? Most of us wouldn’t need to think twice. We’d pile on in, fists swinging, to back them up. It’s the most human of responses: defend your friends and protect your loved ones from harm.

What sort of legal system would expressly forbid people from standing up for their mates? What sort of law-maker would try to stop us helping our fellow citizens?

Nobody would do that – right? I mean you hear about cases of mothers being charged with failing to provide their children with “the necessities of life”; or for failing in their “duty of care”. Because that’s a universal duty – isn’t it? To care for each other?

Well, no. It isn’t. Not when it comes to people being attacked by their employers. Not when a Board of Directors is beating up their own staff; stripping them of their livelihoods; impoverishing their families.

If you see that happening, and you try to do something about it, you’ll end up in court.

New Zealand prides itself on being a good international citizen, but when it comes to the rights of working people we are seriously delinquent.

Convention No. 87, Article 8, of the International Labour Organisation (of which New Zealand is a member) clearly states that:

1. In exercising the rights provided for in this Convention workers and employers and their respective organisations, like other persons or organised collectivities, shall respect the law of the land.

2. The law of the land shall not be such as to impair, nor shall it be so applied as to impair, the guarantees provided for in this Convention.

The guarantee provided for is, of course, the right to organise with the intention of  furthering and defending the interests of workers.

How, then, are we to account for Section 86 of New Zealand’s Employment Relations Act (2000) which states:

Participation in a strike or lockout is unlawful if the strike or lockout relates to … a dispute.

It is this section of the Act which prevents workers from taking action to protect and defend other workers – by means of “secondary picketing” and “sympathy strikes”. We have seen this section of the Act in operation at the ports of Tauranga, Wellington and Lyttelton, where workers attempted to prevent the unloading of ships serviced by non-union labour at the Port of Auckland. These men were subsequently forced by the Courts to do violence to their own consciences, and the interests of fellow union members, by obeying their employers’ “lawful” orders to unload the ship.

Interestingly, this is not something we ask citizens to do when their country goes to war. If a person can demonstrate a genuine “conscientious objection” to bearing arms he or she is excused from active service. Strange, then, that when ordered to do something that he or she knows is bound to hurt a fellow worker, citizens are afforded no such opportunity to conscientiously object. On pain of losing their jobs, paying a fine, or even being sent to prison, working people are obliged to put the boot into other working people.

Which brings us back to our earlier question: What sort of legal system, what sort of legislator, requires people to behave in this way? The answer, of course, is a legal system and legislators dedicated to facilitating the accumulation of private wealth. It is Capitalism which tells us that we cannot go to the aid of our mates; and that, when ordered to do so, we must put the boot into our comrades.

Is such a system morally acceptable? I would argue that it is not. Any more than the old “Jim Crow” system which (quite legally) denied African-Americans their basic human rights was acceptable. The laws that kept white Southerners in a position of social and economic dominance were fundamentally immoral, and they were laid low by the direct action of ordinary people who simply refused to obey statutes deliberately framed to oppress them.

It has long been understood by students of democratic theory that the citizen is not obliged to co-operate in his or her own oppression. As Thomas Jefferson put it in the American Declaration of Independence:

[W]hen a long train of [government] abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

The train of abuses of New Zealand’s working people has indeed be a long one, and perhaps its most depressing aspect is that when the party ostensibly dedicated to the rights of “labour” had the opportunity, it did not abolish the legal prohibition against sympathy strikes. Through nine long years in government, the New Zealand Labour Party declined to allow even its own voters to come to the aid of their mates.

Even now, in 2012, Labour’s new leader, David Shearer, declares his anxiety not to “take sides” in the Ports of Auckland dispute – not even as members of MUNZ, a trade union affiliated to his own party, are being stripped of their livelihoods. And, in spite of the fact that ILO Convention No. 154 stipulates that:

In order to secure the greatest social advantage of new methods of cargo handling, it shall be national policy to encourage co-operation between employers or their organisations, on the one hand, and workers’ organisations, on the other hand, in improving the efficiency of work in ports, with the participation, as appropriate, of the competent authorities.

Auckland’s Labour Mayor has very publicly elected to “pass by on the other side”.

For the sake of our mates, and our own consciences, the sooner we provide “new guards” for their “future security” the better.

How else can we honour our duty of care?

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

No Ifs, No Buts, Be There!

Steady, Comrades, Steady

No Surrender! New Zealand workers have counted for nothing for far too long. If they mean to have a class war - let it begin here.

STEADY, COMRADES, STEADY. This is the worst they have. This is all they’ve got left. After this, they have nothing. So, hold steady, comrades, hold steady.

Nothing has changed down on the wharves. The ships are still sailing past. There’s still only a handful of useless scabs sitting on their hands. The people who keep the Port of Auckland running are the members of MUNZ. You were out yesterday. You’re out today. And you’ll be out again tomorrow.

Gibson still has no workforce. The port still lies idle. Yes, he’s announced your dismissal – but you all knew he was going to do that sooner or later. That he’s opted to do it sooner is a measure of how much and how badly you’ve hurt him.

The tipping-point was the demonstration of international and local solidarity. The ships that have not – and will not – dock at Auckland. The heroic secondary picketing at Tauranga and Wellington which held up those scab-loaded ships for 24-48 hours. What choice did Gibson and his Board of Directors have except to “go nuclear” and issue the redundancy notices?

It’s time for cool heads now. Time to sit back and have a quiet think.

Where’s Gibson going to get 300 stevedores? Australia? Really? The same show of international solidarity that saw all those ships steam past Auckland will stop all but the most scabrous of Aussies from crossing the ditch. And why would they come here anyway? What sort of wages and conditions can they look forward to receiving from any stevedoring company willing to sign Gibson’s contract?

No. Gibson and his minions can only recruit a new workforce of stevedores from the stevedores he’s already got – yourselves. Stay strong, don’t waver, and the Port of Auckland will stay closed.

Gibson’s made a mistake. He’s left you with no option now except to fuck him and his mates completely. It’s no surrender now, comrades, and no quarter asked or given. This does not stop until Gibson and the POAL board are sacked. He’s trying to take your jobs. That leaves you with no choice but to take his.

So, don’t worry, and don’t flinch. There are thousands of Kiwis standing with you in spirit. They’re ready to dig deep into their pockets for you and your families. And if Gibson tries to moves scabs onto those wharves, you just wait and see. There’ll be hundreds ready to stand at your shoulder. As General Petain assured the soldiers of France at the Battle of Verdun: “They shall not pass!”

And there are other means of defence. You’ve got some of New Zealand’s best legal brains at your disposal. The POAL’s lack of good faith is there to be exposed; their actions are just begging to be struck down. There are good men and women ready to take this all the way to the Supreme Court – if that's what's required.

Political support is there, too. Labour, the Greens, Mana – even Winston – will take up your cause. They know that you are New Zealand citizens: people with rights; not slaves. Working people have counted for nothing in this country for far too long. As the American militia commander told his men before the Battle of Lexington and Concord in April 1775: “Stand your ground; don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.”

So stand steady, comrades. If it seems dark now, it will be lighter soon. You are not alone. You have right on your side - and time as well. Every day and every ship that passes brings the moment of reckoning for Tony Gibson and his mates one day and one ship closer.

And the same goes for that filleted jellyfish formerly known as Len Brown. If I may conclude by paraphrasing the Australian Labor Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, on the day he was dismissed:

“Well may you say ‘God save Auckland’s port’ – because nothing will save Auckland’s mayor!”

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

Intensifying The Vicious Circle

More Of The Same: In spite of the ongoing shortfall in the National Government's anticipated Core Crown tax revenues, Finance Minister, Bill English, has reaffirmed his intention to keep tightening the screws on New Zealand's economy.

BILL ENGLISH claims to have cut core Crown expenditure by $1.24 billion. Just as well, given a $1.4 billion shortfall in Government revenue. The latest monthly Financial Statements of the Government paint a dismal picture of relentless economic contraction with Core Crown tax revenue a staggering $946 million below the amount forecast in last year’s Pre-Election Economic and Fiscal Update.

In spite of the Treasury’s consistent failure to provide the Government with even vaguely accurate fiscal forecasts, Mr English’s faith in its policies of austerity remains undimmed. The data’s brutal exposure of the Government's economic inadequacies will, however, powerfully reinforce the criticisms of Mr English’s critics.

The Treasury’s figures certainly vindicate the Opposition parties’ argument that the National Government’s cost-cutting fetish is hampering – not helping – the New Zealand economy’s slow climb out of recession. The falling tax take, exacerbated by the effects of National’s earlier tax-cuts, continues to run well ahead of the austerity drive’s much-vaunted savings.

The situation is likely to deteriorate still further as “slightly weaker labour market conditions” indicate a further rise in the number of New Zealanders without work. With more people unemployed, economic activity is predicted by the Treasury to slow even faster, leading to yet another shortfall in Government revenue.

New Zealand is thus caught in a vicious circle, with falling revenues necessitating further cuts in spending, triggering more economic contraction, more unemployment, reduced consumer spending, lower profits and falling real wages. The Government’s tax-take will fall correspondingly, depressing its revenues still further.

Mr English talks about “limiting our debt to foreign lenders”, but if he wishes to avoid plunging the country into a new and even deeper recession, it is difficult to see how extensive borrowing from overseas sources can be avoided. The value of the New Zealand Dollar will rise on the back of the higher interest rates needed to attract foreign lenders. Kiwi exporters will, as always, pay the price for the National Government’s refusal to raise the taxes of New Zealand’s wealthiest citizens.

Rather than reduce Government expenditure, Mr English should reverse the last two rounds of tax cuts and engage in a quantitative easing of the money supply sufficient to fund a massive state house-building programme. In tandem with the Christchurch re-build, and backed by an all-out effort in trades-training for young, unemployed school-leavers, such a building programme would dramatically reduce the number of people out of work. A commitment to source its building needs locally would further stimulate economic activity, lifting tax receipts and lowering the Government’s borrowing requirement. Interest rates and the NZ Dollar would fall – boosting export receipts.

Mr English will not, of course, adopt such a stimulatory strategy. In response to the latest Treasury release, the Finance Minister simply stated that the official data “reinforces the need for the Government to be disciplined and stick to its plan to get back to surplus in 2014/15, so we can start repaying debt.”

At least for the foreseeable future, New Zealand’s economic performance is set to remain well below the level commensurate with rising employment and fiscal surplusses.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

Living In One Dimension

Ticky-Tacky Existence: Malvina Reynolds' wickedly subversive 1962 song Little Boxes (which later became the theme of the HBO hit series, Weeds) captures to perfection the one dimensional nature of existence in "advanced industrial society". Herbert Marcuse's One Dimensional Man (1964) further elaborated the ideology of "ticky-tackiness". Sadly, New Zealand continues to experience the social and political effects of one dimensional living.

THERE’S A CERTAIN TYPE of New Zealander, I’m sure you’ve met him – or her. Pinched, unsmiling, always angry: the sort of person who is quick to condemn (and eager to punish) an ever-expanding list of social and political “deviants”. The “normal”, “right-thinking”, “decent” sort of Kiwi who writes letters to the editor of the local newspaper.

If you visit these New Zealanders’ homes you’d find order and cleanliness. There’ll be a flat-screen TV in the living-room, but no books; evidence of money and “success” everywhere you look, but hardly a trace of life, or love, anywhere.

There must be an enormous number of these angry and loveless New Zealanders because both of our major political parties pander to them shamelessly. Our politicians’ knee-jerk recourse to increasingly punitive (but evidence-free) “solutions” and its inevitable corollary, the steady dilution of our civil rights, is directly attributable to the electoral clout of this sad, mad segment of the population.

The radical German sociologist, Herbert Marcuse, dubbed this cruelly diminished variety of human-being “one dimensional man”.

Driven from his homeland by the Nazi takeover in 1933, Marcuse came to rest in the uttermost west of the United States; Los Angeles, California. As it would do so often in the decades to come, California in the late-1930s was pre-figuring the culture of mass affluence. In LA’s sprawling suburbs Marcuse discovered human-beings defined not by what they were, or even by what they did, but by what they owned. In the mass consumer society which California anticipated, people’s sense of self was determined by the things they possessed. Happiness had ceased to be something they discovered, and was fast becoming something they acquired.

New Zealand’s post-war social development followed closely Marcuse’s one dimensional model. In Auckland, particularly, the sprawling “ticky-tacky” suburbs, snaking motorways and ubiquitous private automobile paid imitative homàge to the USA’s consumption-driven society.

The big question, which even Marcuse struggled to answer, is: what sort of human-being is likely to emerge from a consumption-driven society whose members have known nothing else?

We hear a great deal from the Right about inter-generational “welfare dependency” and how it threatens to exclude citizens from the paid workforce and the socially integrative functions it performs. We hear much less about inter-generational “consumption dependency” and its effects on individuals, families, and the planet it is devastating.

If “one dimensional man” can overcome the personal challenges of everyday life through the acquisition of things, then surely social challenges can be met in the same way? If the answer to personal unhappiness is to surround oneself with more commodities, then social ills should similarly be curable by “more”.

Pervasive “welfare dependency” can be overcome by providing more “incentives” to return to the workforce. More crime by more police, equipped with more weapons and invested with more coercive powers. And if more policing doesn’t do the trick, then more laws, more punitive sentences and more prisons must be the answer.

In a political order dominated by one dimensional men, the state increasingly assumes the role of a glorified supermarket or shopping mall. If one dimensional individuals’ hunger for authenticity can be assuaged by simple consumption, then one dimensional society should be capable of healing itself with solutions of equal simplicity. This has to be true because complexity is the one thing that one dimensional society can neither acknowledge nor tolerate.

Why? Because if there are some hurts that things cannot heal; some wrongs that simple solutions cannot right; some qualities, like wisdom, compassion and solidarity, that stockpiling commodities will never confer; then the implicit bargain at the core of the our consumption-driven society, you work for things, and things make you happy, breaks down.

At that point books suddenly become more important that flat-screen TV sets, and the notion that simply by giving your vote to a political party you can solve all of society’s problems stands revealed for the nonsense it always was. At that point anger and the urge to punish are acknowledged as lying at the core of our problems, not applauded as the necessary precursors to fair and just solutions.

And surely this is the explanation for the peculiar distemper of contemporary society? That the continued accumulation of things is palpably insufficient to the maintenance of our own (let alone the planet’s) happiness, but that no one (with the noble exception of the Greens) is offering anything resembling an alternative. Behind the anger and the sadness of New Zealand’s one dimensional citizens, and the intellectual poverty of one dimensional political parties peddling simplistic non-solutions to ever-more-complex problems, lies the frustration of the consumer whose happiness-creating commodities have stopped working.

In the end, what’s the point of offering three-dimensional flat-screen TVs, if all they reveal is the ever-expanding quantum of happiness our one-dimensional citizens have yet to acquire?

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 6 March 2012.

Just Leave Us Alone

Second Term Confusion: After a first term of effortless government, followed by a resounding electoral victory, John Key has foolishly succumbed to the blandishments of a noisy minority of right-wing social sadists. If he really wants to carry the National Party into a third term, he needs to re-acquaint himself with that old right-wing adage about the government that governs best being the government that governs least. Or, as they used to call it: Laissez-faire Capitalism.

IT’S WEIRD, a government which seemed to have discovered the secret of political longevity is now trying to kill itself. Honestly, I feel like grabbing the Prime Minister by his lapels and demanding to know:

“What is it about winning nearly 48 percent of the Party Vote that you don’t understand, John? For Pity’s sake! You were doing your job brilliantly! People really liked you. Or, if they didn’t really like you, they definitely liked your opponents less. That old saying about the government that governs best being the government that governs least was borne out before your very eyes: first in the polls; then at the ballot box. So, seriously, John, what was not to like about the way you governed New Zealand between 2008 and 2011?”

It really is a mystery. With the rest of the world slowly, painfully, yet unmistakably, hauling itself out of the worst global recession in eighty years, and the reconstruction of Christchurch about to inject a massive dose of economic adrenalin into the stalled heart of the New Zealand labour market, the political prognosis was looking pretty good.

The numbers on the dole and the DPB were ready to fall, just as they had under Helen Clark when the economy started growing. More people in work would have lifted the tax take and reduced the deficit. Big dividends from the State’s energy assets would also have contributed to reducing the nation’s debt. To make matters even better, commodity prices were holding firm and the cockies were (at long last) reaching for their cheque-books.

The indications are strong that if Mr Key and his government were to do nothing at all, by the middle of their second term they’d be more popular than ever.

But, “nothing at all” is not something Mr Key and his government are permitted to offer. All around them, people who call themselves ‘supporters’ are clamouring for action.

“Where is the economic plan?” “Why hasn’t something been done about the unions?” “Where are the welfare reforms recommended by Paula Rebstock?” “Why are so many state-owned assets still sitting around unsold?” “What are Mr Key and his government waiting for?” “You’ve won the damn election – get on with it, Man!”

Not that the people making all this racket represent a majority of the population – far from it. The clamour for neoliberal “reforms” has always come from a tiny minority of New Zealanders – about the same number of people as vote for the Act Party. The National Party’s problem is that they’re the sort of people to which it’s always felt obliged to pay attention: CEO’s of powerful corporations; Rich Listers; right-wing media commentators. The “One Percenters” who can usually be relied upon to make generous donations to the party’s campaign coffers.

What Mr Key fails to understand is that such people are in the grip of a peculiar and very dangerous social pathology. Where a normal person would happily sit back and enjoy their superfluity of wealth and power, these folk cannot rest easy until they are satisfied that their “More” is the product of someone else’s “Less”. Their comfort is made from our misery; their pride from our humiliation; their strength from our weakness.

Why Mr Key has decided to serve this bunch of social sadists is a question only he can answer. But he should know that, if he persists, then his ranking as New Zealand’s preferred prime-minister, and his party’s electoral support, will sink lower and lower.

If you would save yourself and the National Party from certain defeat in 2014, Mr Key, then you must renew your faith in the benign indifference of your government’s first term. Abjure the sadistic interventionism of the neoliberal ideologues, Prime Minister. Embrace instead the oldest principle of effective Capitalism: laissez-faire.

The best thing you can do for this country right now, Mr Key, is nothing. Take your hands off New Zealand's economic machinery and, please, just leave the rest of us the hell alone.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 2 March 2012.