No Joke: Why I'm Not Laughing At Labour's Latest Speeches.

Waiting For The Punchline: If "energy generation" isn't even on the "closed list" of state-owned assets David Parker is determined to keep in public ownership, then everyone collecting signatures and marching in protest to save the energy SOEs has just become the butt of a very bad Labour joke.

IF LABOUR’s a “joke”, as the Prime Minister insists, then I’m not laughing. Now, my sense of humour has always veered toward the traditional, so it’s possible that what we’re dealing with here is a very esoteric variety of black humour. Perhaps Labour’s finance spokesperson, David Parker, was pitching to this darker side when he told the following side-splitter to the corporate head-hunters at Robert Walters Finance:

We also think infrastructure assets with monopoly characteristics are especially important to the functioning of the wider economy. Labour published a closed list of assets that we believe ought to be run in the New Zealand interest because they have monopoly characteristics - assets such as electricity line networks, water and airports.

The list excludes telecommunications and electricity generation.

If you enjoy your humour at other people’s expense, that’s quite a punch line. What Mr Parker was telling his audience of top-level banking and accounting talent spotters was that Labour does not include electricity generation on its list of “infrastructure assets” that ought to be “run in the New Zealand interest”.

So, all those people standing on street corners with clip-boards collecting signatures for a Citizens Initiated Referendum on asset sales; all those thousands of people planning to march in the “Aotearoa Is NOT For Sale!” protest this Saturday; all those hundreds of Labour Party members who’ve been reassuring their workmates and neighbours that the Caucus is rock-solid against the sale of Mighty River Power and Genesis Energy; all of them are wasting their time. Because “energy generation” isn’t even on Labour’s “closed list” of assets that should never be sold.

Some joke!

While we’re on the subject of Mr Parker’s speech, it’s worth noting the language he uses when talking about state assets. Rather than saying that industries and businesses with “monopoly characteristics” should be ‘kept in public ownership’, or ‘remain in government hands’, Labour’s finance spokesperson says that they “ought to be run in the New Zealand interest”. Could a former state owned enterprise be “run in the New Zealand interest” by a private New Zealand company? His audience undoubtedly thought so.

Mr Parker’s repertoire of drolleries was not confined to the fate of New Zealand’s publicly-owned assets. Consider these statements about the nature of the Labour Party:

Labour is a progressive party: fundamentally it is the party of change, the party that is willing to make structural changes when necessary ..... It’s always up to Labour to make the case for why change is needed, and why the status quo isn't working. So the difference between [Labour and National] is not that the Government is pro-business, and we are anti. Nor are we talking about ‘tax and spend’, or ‘cutting the pie differently’. Those are tired clichés. What we are talking about is the need to modernise because we can’t keep going as we are. We need to take some hard decisions and shatter some orthodoxies that are past their use-by date.

Who do you think Mr Parker was more likely to have been channeling when he wrote those words: Mickey Savage or Roger Douglas? And what sort of “change” does Mr Parker have in mind? The sort that empowers working people? The sort that gives them more say in their workplace? More security of tenure in their rented home? A better set of outcomes for their children from our health and education systems?

Let’s see:

What I’ve laid out for you is a comprehensive sweep of modernising reforms across superannuation, pro-growth tax reform, help for innovation and exporting, and modernising our savings and investment policy.

Once again, that sounds a lot more like Roger than Mickey!

What’s truly unfunny about Labour at the moment, however, is that Mr Parker is not the only senior member of its caucus who is talking like this. The Leader of the Opposition, himself, has picked up the same 1980s dialect of economic modernisation and sweeping structural change.

On 12 July, Mr Shearer addressed the Arbitrators and Mediators Institute of New Zealand. After regaling them with tales from his time as a United Nations administrator, he moved into a peroration that had more than a little of the “short term pain for long term gain” about it:

If we don’t make big changes, we stand a fairly good chance of becoming a 21st century peasant economy. And this is where you have to ask a fundamental question about leadership. Is it fair to people to go on doing what we are, when you know that what we’re doing is not enough? The Prime Minister said in a lecture last week that it's not constructive politics to get ahead of people – that if you don’t take them with you, your reforms will run out of engine power. That’s right, as far as it goes, but the lesson I take from that is that leadership is also not being timid and giving people only small and imperceptible change. The lesson I take from it is that you should listen, find the right words and the right arguments to paint the picture or vision of where we should be – and set out where we could be if we’re prepared to make big changes.

Once again, we are left wondering about the precise nature of these “big changes”. Unfortunately, Mr Shearer does not spell them out. And it is here that the difference between the Labour Party of Mickey Savage, Walter Nash and Norman Kirk stands in such stark contrast to the party of David Shearer and David Parker. Theirs was also a party of change – radical change. But it was also a party which spelled out in the clearest terms how the policies driving that change would work, and how working people would benefit from them.

With the bleak example of the Lange-Douglas Government before it, the electorate has every right to feel a shiver of dread run up its spine when it hears a Labour leader talk about leadership “not being timid”. After all, it was no less a Rogernome than Richard Prebble who used to talk about how brave the Fourth Labour Government was: about how much courage it took to defy the will of the people and sell Telecom.

In his speech to the Arbitrators and Mediators, Mr Shearer spoke movingly about how important it was to “understand as much as you can about the person on the other side of the table … If you can put yourself in their shoes, if you can imagine how the world looks through their eyes, you’ll have something solid to work with.”

If the Labour Leader were to do that now: if he were to try and understand how his words might sound to an electorate grown wary and weary of politicians who think there are more important political priorities than taking the people with them; then he might begin to understand why so many of us disagree with John Key.

Because when Labour talks like this the joke is usually on us, and when it’s all over nobody feels like laughing.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

John Key's "New Men" Could Learn A Lot From National's "Wise Heads"

Risen Without Trace: John Key and Steven Joyce are the true heirs of Muldoonism which overturned the "natural" social hierachy of Old Values, Old Families and Old Money. If Jack is as good as his masters, then, eventually, his masters will end up being no worse, and no better, than Jack.

THERE WAS A TIME when even the National Party had some class. It might have given us Sid Holland and Rob Muldoon, but it also gave us Ralph Hanan, Tom Shand, Brian Talboys, Alan Highet, Les Gandar and Simon Power. Following every election, former provincial chairmen of Federated Farmers and sharp-eyed small town accountants would be met at the doors of Parliament by a sleek collection of urbane professionals. These men knew how to smooth the rough edges off their doltish country cousins and how to keep them at a safe distance from all those responsibilities of government requiring just a little more in the way of intellectual refinement than the average backbencher could muster.

It was, of course, an era when most conservatives (and even some on the Left) still respected the “natural social hierarchies”. Old money wisely invested, an excellent education at expensive private schools, a decent law degree leading to a partnership in a well-established practice – these were the things that gave a man the “right to rule”.

Privately, such men would acknowledge that their side had rather seriously “dropped the ball” in the 1920s and 30s. They knew how large a debt they owed to men like Savage, Fraser and Nash who had pulled local capitalism’s irons out of the fire of the Great Depression. The value of Labour’s stabilisation policies – especially in the countryside – were quietly acknowledged and National was in no hurry to get rid of them. The unions needed a firm hand, of course, which is why they elevated a man like Sid Holland every now and again to put a bit of stick about. But, after the thrashing, it was to “Kiwi Keith” Holyoake that the “wise heads” of National turned. Someone who could keep the peace.

Though people were slow to register the fact, it was Rob Muldoon who undermined the “natural hierarchies” of New Zealand politics and opened the gates of New Zealand conservatism to the barbarians.

Some historians have described Muldoon as “the best leader Labour never had” and that, of course, was the explanation for his political success. As Labour, in its own way, began paying homage to the “natural social hierarchies” by selecting young urban professionals like Dr Michael Bassett and Richard Prebble to represent its solid working-class constituencies, Labour’s supporters began edging away. Muldoon’s pugnacious populism gave them somewhere to go.

Political Superstar: Rob Muldoon kept Labour out, and let Neoliberalism in.

“Rob’s Mob”, both within the National Party and the wider electorate, represented the revolt of the “average Kiwi” and the “ordinary bloke” against the “natural social hierarchies” of education, intellectual and cultural accomplishment and inherited wealth. Muldoon’s appointment of Merv Wellington as Minister of Education and Bert Walker as Minister of Social Welfare was all the proof sophisticated New Zealanders required that the Visigoths had entered Rome.

That Muldoon turned out to be the staunchest defender of the “stabilised” New Zealand society which emerged from the Second World War is ironic. Well before most New Zealanders, he understood how deadly a threat the “free market” ideology posed to the unlikely alliance which, since the early 1950s, had united the fortunes of New Zealand’s conservative working-class with its paternalistic, state-subsidised, ruling-class. Neoliberalism was a radical economic and social doctrine destined to sweep away not only the organised labour movement, but also the social power of both intellectual accomplishment and “old money”. Muldoon’s populism undermined the “wise heads” by proclaiming the “Mob” their equals, but in doing so he opened the door to a radical right-wing movement that would undermine the “Mob’s” security forever. Henceforth, the only hierarchy that mattered would be the hierarchy of money.

And so, in 2012, the National Party is led by a man with a personal fortune of $55 million. Not old money, either, but as new as computerised currency trading. His right-hand man, Steven Joyce, is another of these “new” men, these National politicians who’ve “risen without trace”. Entrepreneurial in politics as well as business, their values are those of self-made people everywhere. Only results count. Intelligence must pay its way. The world does not reward you for what you know, only for what you do. The successful man backs his judgement by any and all available means. Truth counts for a great deal less than utility.

Overwhelmingly, they are men and women who dwell in the present. Because nothing is more subversive of their self-perception than the past. History reminds them that, ultimately, more men fail than succeed, and that nothing has more utility than the truth. History reveals that the only deeds which endure are those that enrich the human condition and extend the range and depth of human knowledge: that giving counts for more than taking.

History tells them that the quality which gave the governments of National’s “wise heads” both their class, and their longevity, was humility.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 10 July 2012.

Caption Competition

Warning: All those considering an investment in Labour Political Futures should be aware that the party's current leadership is interchangeable and essentially 'armless.

ONLY LABOUR would voluntarily supply the nation with such an extraordinary opportunity for mockery. Keep up the tweeting, Jacinda!

Your captions should be witty and political - outright unpleasantness will not be published.

The winning entry will replace my own effort beneath the photo.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

"Illogical, Captain."

Illogical: Mr Spock, reading the Enterprise's sensors, would find it difficult understand the reluctance of Planet Earth's political and economic elites to act on the incontrovertible scientific evidence of anthropogenic global warming.

MR SPOCK, the starship Enterprise’s ultra-rational Science Officer, would’ve had only one word for the Government’s procrastination over ETS:

“Illogical.”

Mind you, Mr Spock would have to utilise a fair swag of his impressive Vulcan intelligence to convince Tim Groser, easily the smartest man in John Key’s Cabinet, that, on the Emissions Trading Scheme, Government policy is running counter to our national interest.

Mr Groser, unlike so many of his colleagues these days, hasn’t the slightest of qualms about defending his position in the news media. His rather arrogant assumption: that he will not be bested by any journalist this country cares to throw at him; is, sadly, yet to be disproved. Hearing him defend Government policy makes me very glad that, as New Zealand’s Trade (if not its Climate Change) Minister, he sits on our side of the negotiating table.

And yet, even the talented Mr Groser is having difficulty justifying the Government’s decision to defer, yet again, the full implementation of this country’s “all sectors, all gasses” Emissions Trading Scheme.

How would those aboard the Enterprise see it?

IN ORBIT, high above the earth, Mr Spock examines the readings of the Enterprise’s sensors, and shakes his head.

“There can be no doubt, Captain, that this planet is undergoing rapid climate change. The rate at which its polar ice-cap is melting, of itself, merits notification to the Galactic Science Foundation. You will also note these smoke plumes, characteristic of significant forest-fuelled conflagrations, on the smaller of the northern continents, as well as the sharply elevated temperature readings on its eastern seaboard. 

“And yet, a cursory analysis of intercepted planetary communications suggests that its political and business elites are proving remarkably reluctant to heed the repeated warnings of their scientific advisors. Such consistent evidence of psychological denial among so many responsible individuals is troubling, Captain, and puzzling.

“I have found only one political entity willing to advance an all-encompassing scheme for reducing its carbon and methane emissions. It is located here, in the lower reaches of the planet’s southern hemisphere. Clearly, at some point, its political and business elites responded to the scientific evidence and formulated a scheme for reducing their country’s emissions. And yet, for some reason, they keep delaying its comprehensive implementation.”

“Perhaps they’re afraid of getting too far ahead of their neighbours”, replied Mr Spock’s commanding officer and friend, Captain James T. Kirk. “The planet’s crudely competitive economic system would likely penalise any nation state that imposed excessive costs on its major export industries.”

“Illogical, Captain. This relatively small nation’s long-term economic interests can only be served by aggressively challenging the hesitation of its much larger trading partners. It’s remote location on the planet places it at an extraordinary disadvantage. As the effects of accelerating climate change take their toll on the human populations inhabiting the larger land masses, the planet’s complex webs of communication and transportation will begin to break down. The citizens of this nation will find themselves isolated at the bottom of an increasingly torrid world.

“Their only logical course of action, Captain, is to provide the global population with a powerful demonstration of the measures necessary to retard the climate trends already threatening the planet’s higher life forms. If their elites believe the science, they must act. Yet their constant procrastination signals only doubt. It’s tantamount to declaring that the crisis is not yet acute; that there is time to spare. But their scientists already know that this is not correct.”

"They're human, Spock, all too human."

“They’re human, Spock, all too human. Your Vulcan half cannot fathom how such an intelligent primate can behave in ways so damaging to its chances of long-term survival.”

“It is certainly difficult, Captain.”

“Believe me, Spock, when I say that if we were to hit their largest cities with photon torpedoes, human civilisation would unite in a second against the common enemy. They’re genetically programmed to resist immediate dangers, Spock – not slow motion threats.”

“Then I fear, Captain, they will not survive.”

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, 6 July 2012.

We DO Need Another Hero

Two Men Enter. One Man Leaves: Does Labour need another hero? David Shearer's failure to pull the metaphorical sword from the stone bodes ill for his looming battle with the National Party's (and the nation's?) "monomythic" leader.

“WE DON’T NEED ANOTHER HERO” sings Tina Turner in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. It’s a curiously contradictory song because, if you listen to the lyrics, it soon becomes painfully clear that a hero is exactly what these captive children, “the last generation”, need: someone who does “know the way home”; someone who can lead them “beyond Thunderdome”.

Perhaps the popularity of the 1985 hit recording is attributable to the worldwide collapse in the public’s – and especially the young’s – faith in political leaders and political ideologies. This was, after all, an era dominated by the polarising figures of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, leaders who made it very clear that they would rather be dead than red and were quite willing to enlist the rest of us in proving the point. Mad Max was itself set in a post-nuclear-apocalypse world. In the eyes of many young people, heroes weren’t the solution – heroes were the problem.

And yet, as even the most cursory glance at the historical record makes clear, people not only need heroes but they are ready and willing to follow them. Indeed, modern political marketing is about little else. Just take a look at a professionally produced campaign ad. Note the camera angles, the lighting, the music, the symbolic references: the entire exercise is devoted to making the candidate look taller, wiser, braver, more patriotic, more heroic that his or her rivals.

The great American socialist, Eugene Victor Debs, warned his working-class followers against putting their faith in leaders:

I am not a Labor Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, someone else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition; as it is now the capitalists use your heads and your hands.

By the same token, however, Debs never came close to being elected President of the United States and his Socialist Party remained forever in the shadow of the Democratic Party.

Nor is it certain that Debs’ contention is even true. Ramsay MacDonald, Britain’s first Labour Prime Minister, was hailed as a hero by his working-class followers as the world spiralled into financial ruin in 1929. But when, in 1931, bereft of ideas about how to stem the rising tide of unemployment, MacDonald threw in his lot with the Conservative Party and led a rump of Labour into a coalition “National” government, he was vehemently denounced as a traitor to both his country and his class.

The notion that a hero is someone who wields great physical and/or moral power in his own right, though widely held, is misconceived. A hero isn’t something that you are, it is something you become. Joseph Campbell, in his seminal 1949 work The Hero of a Thousand Faces, describes what he calls the “monomyth”, the narrative structure common to all hero tales:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

Heroes succeed because they embody the virtues and have acquired the skills necessary to overcome or divert the forces their communities feel most threatened by. The hero is the distillation of collective aspiration, not its creator.

Local Hero: John Key is the distillation of New Zealanders' aspirations - not their creator.

John Key’s extraordinary success as a political leader owes a great deal to how closely his own career conforms to the heroic monomyth.

The story begins with John, an ordinary Kiwi joker with a head for figures, setting out on a risky journey into the fantastic world of high finance, where all but the hardiest and most cunning traders are eaten alive. Having mastered the magical art of making money, and acquired a vast fortune, John returns home from his adventures determined to put his hard-won skills to good use among his own people.

It is difficult to imagine a “hero” better suited to the needs of twenty-first century New Zealand. John Key’s very ordinariness confirms his “Everyman” status, and amplifies the potency of his success. The power he wields is not his own, but a weapon forged from the capacities inherent in every Kiwi: those mysterious qualities that allow New Zealanders to “punch above their weight”; that national essence which sanctions John Key’s followers’ vicarious participation in his personal and political success. He is Us, and We are Him. It’s why, until an even more emblematic hero comes along, John Key will remain invincible.

For a while, it looked as though Labour had found just such an emblem. David Shearer’s story, like John Key’s, begins with an ordinary bloke setting forth on a journey, during which he encounters all manner of monsters – from Somali warlords to murderous Israeli settlers – learning in the process the magic spells for opening the human heart to compassion, justice and reconciliation. He, too, returns to his people and, at the crucial moment, steps forward from the shadows to declare that he is the one destined to lay low the National Party usurper.

Except he hadn’t learned the spells, or, if he had, he could no longer remember them.

Forgotten Magic: What if the Once and Future King had grabbed the sword in the stone - and it hadn't budged?

It’s as if Arthur stepped up to the sword in the stone, gave it a confident tug – and nothing happened. Instead of a sword flashing in the sunlight above his head, proof positive that he was “rightwise King born of all England”, the weapon stays exactly where it is, and the hero, with an embarrassed shrug, picks up a guitar instead.

There are, of course, many variations on the classic hero tale. Instead of acquiring forbidden knowledge and inheriting mysterious powers, the hero is often required to overcome a series of obstacles and/or eliminate a host of adversaries before completing his quest. In doing so he blazes a trail and lays a path for those who follow after him. Think of the Labours of Heracles, or Theseus’s struggle with the Minotaur, or Luke Skywalker’s destruction of the Death Star in Star Wars.

Does Labour have another hero? And, if it does, can we assume that the first obstacles and adversaries he must overcome are all inside his own party?

In the words of the Bartertown mob in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome: “Two men enter! One man leaves!”

Or, as Savannah Nix (more generously) declares in the movie’s closing sequence:

Still in all, every night we does the tell, so that we ‘member who we was and where we came from ... but most of all we ‘members the man that finded us, him that came the salvage. And we lights the city, not just for him, but for all of them that are still out there. ‘Cause we knows there come a night, when they sees the distant light, and they’ll be comin’ home.

We DO need another hero.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

All Of Us? Reflections On The Trial Of Ewen Macdonald

Dark Journey: How many of us came away from the Macdonald trial concerned at how large the cancer growing in the nation's heartland has become ... and wondering how far it has spread?

“THE GUY FAMILY are all of us.” Or so the Manawatu Standard would have us believe. But they’re not. The Guys are a wealthy Manawatu farming family – so wealthy they could afford to pay their son, Scott, and their son-in-law, Ewen, $100,000 p.a. each to run the family business. So wealthy that the bitter struggle between Scott and Ewen for eventual control of the property provided a plausible motive for murder.

All of us simply don’t live in a world where Dad, or our father-in-law, has enough money coming in to pay us a six-figure salary for attaching suction-cups to cows’ teats and driving around on tractors. Most of us live in a world where years of schooling and training leave us earning considerably less than the 32-year-old cow cocky who left school at 16, went to work on a neighbouring farm, and somehow persuaded the boss’s daughter to marry him.

All of us were interested in the Shakespeare-in-Gumboots drama played out in a Wellington courtroom this past month for exactly the same reason that (nearly) all of us used to watch Dallas back in the 1980s. Not because JR and Bobby Ewing were like us, but because the privileged lives of those wealthy Texas ranchers were nothing like us. Dallas drew us into a world where money was power, and where both could be had for nothing more praiseworthy than being a father’s son, his daughter’s husband, or the parents of his grandchildren.

If that all sounds a little feudal, then award yourself full marks for historical perspicacity, and get used to it. Because in the trial of Ewen Macdonald we all caught a glimpse of the vicious, class-ridden and quasi-dynastic society New Zealand is becoming. A society in which we no longer make our own fortunes but attach ourselves to someone else’s. A society in which arrogance breeds resentment potent enough to burn down one house and vandalise another. A society in which men settle scores in the dark … with shotguns.

No, “all of us” are not like the Guys – nothing like. The more fascinating – and worrying – question is: “How many of us are like Ewen Macdonald?”

On the surface he was everything the “ordinary” Kiwi admires: taciturn, hard-working, quietly ambitious; the sort of guy who rubs along well with everyone; mans the barbecue at fundraisers; gets elected to the local school board of trustees.

But, below the surface? Ah, well, that’s a different story. Gordon McLauchlan still insists we’re a passionless people, but Gordon has always been wrong about that. What defines so many New Zealanders – especially Ewen – isn’t a lack of passion but a surfeit of repression. That sinister expression: “You’ll keep!”, sums it up nicely. For what can it possibly mean except: “You’ve wronged me, but I’m not going to confront you now. No, I’m going to bury your insult deep, wait until it putrefies, collect all the poison, pour it into your beer when you’re not looking, and then watch you drink it.”

Two Ewen Macdonalds: Ewen of the Day and Ewen of the Night.

This repression was revealed during the trial, where we encountered two Ewens. The bluff cow cocky that was Ewen of the Day, and the deeply disturbing criminal that was Ewen of the Night. The man on a “mission” who crept into his neighbours’ farms under cover of darkness and poached their livestock. The man who torched his brother-in-law’s house for a laugh. The man who, accompanied by his faithful “childlike” partner-in-crime, Callum Boe, (a name worthy of Harper Lee or William Faulkner!) took an axe to Scott’s wife Kylee’s nearly-finished dream-house and scrawled “bitch slapper fucking whore” on its shattered walls.

Ewen’s outstanding lawyer, Greg King, asked the Jury to accept that these were “crimes against property” not against people. Well, that may have been true of the $20,000 stags he shot in the dark and then buried. But surely the arson and the vandalism were crimes against people? Surely they were blows directed against Scott and Kylee?

How well Mr King understood the mind-set of the ladies and gentlemen of his jury. How clever he was to call the brutal slaying of Scott Guy a “whodunit”: to turn the trial into a parlour game; to invite the eleven jury members to sit back and enjoy the ride he was about to take them on. He understood equally clearly how vital it was , in an era when the world’s television screens seem to feature nothing but crime and forensic detection, that his ride should make them think only of CSI and never of Criminal Minds.

The very last thing the Defence wanted was for the Jury to use their imaginations. Under no circumstances should they be invited to follow the evidence down the dark staircase that led to Ewen of the Night’s state of mind.

Fortunately for Mr King we live in an age where only a tiny minority of the population has even the slightest grasp of the literary canon of their civilisation. A better read Jury, when told by Mr King that the quarrel between Scott and Ewen had been mended; that they’d become the best of friends; might have recalled Shakespeare’s famous line from Hamlet: “That one may smile and smile, and be a villain”.

And so Ewen Macdonald was acquitted. The Crown failed to make the Jury stare long enough into the abyss that was Ewen of Night, and Mr King, with extraordinary forensic flair, unplaited the circumstantial rope with which the Prosecution had hoped to hang the Defendant. The Guys will go on asking: “Who killed our son?” And the Macdonalds will ask themselves a very similar question. The little town of Feilding will close ranks and keep quiet. In rural communities you either follow the lead of the big landowners, or leave.

And all of us? What will we take away from the past four weeks? Some will recall Hamlet and King Lear. Others will think of Dallas and CSI. But how many, I wonder, will register how large the cancer growing in the heartland has become. How many will ask themselves if it has metastasized into New Zealand’s cities and suburbs. This all-consuming greed; this murderous impatience; this contradictory urge to both curry favour and cast down: the cancer that’s eating us alive.

How long must we go on muttering: “You’ll keep!” Waiting there in the darkness before sunrise; listening for the sound of the ute’s tyres on the gravel; cringing from the sudden glare of the headlights; feeling the weight of the shotgun in our hands?

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

MoBIE: Socialist Instrument Or Steven Joyce's Great White Whale?

Nemesis: Steven Joyce will be hoping that his "super-ministry" - MoBIE - does not prove to be his undoing, as the Great White Whale, Moby Dick, did for the obsessional Captain Ahab in Melville's famous novel.

IT’S HUGE, it’s “business facing” and, in the right hands, it could give Treasury a run for its money. What is it? The official designation is the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, but it’s called MoBIE (as in “Moby Dick”) for short. Will this new “super-ministry” become the critical driver of John Key’s Government’s economic plans; or will it turn out to be the Great White Whale that drags its creator, Steven Joyce, to the bottom? Interestingly, not everyone hoping for the latter is located on the Opposition side of the aisle.

There’s no doubt that the amalgamation of the Ministry of Economic Development, the Department of Labour, the Ministry of Science and Innovation, and the Department of Building and Housing is a high-risk gambit. Not only because the critical responsibilities of the former stand-alone ministries and departments are at real risk of being blurred, downgraded or even elided in the new structure, but also because Mr Joyce’s bureaucratic behemoth may simply prove to be too large, too complicated and too cumbersome to achieve its minister’s ambitious goals.

Officially, MoBIE’s purpose is to create a more efficient and effective Ministry focused on lifting overall productivity and supporting the growth of competitive businesses in order to create more jobs, paying higher wages, and boosting our standard of living. It is hoped that by grouping formerly discrete bureaucratic functions into a single structure businesses and companies will find it easier to access innovative ideas, markets, capital, skilled workers, resources, and the supporting public infrastructure.

“The Government has a comprehensive business growth agenda to assist business, and a single focused business-facing government ministry will further boost our momentum”, said Mr Joyce, in a statement announcing the creation of the new super-ministry on 15 March 2012.

The crucial question posed by MoBIE’s creation is: “What will fuel this new bureaucratic machine?” If the present government’s past behaviour is any guide, it will be fuelled by foreign capital.

What Mr Joyce appears to be offering overseas investors is a ministry to normalise and co-ordinate the sort of ad-hoc deal we saw struck between Mr Key’s Government and Warner Bros. over The Hobbit. In that deal New Zealand’s labour law was made fit for Warner Bros.’ purpose; the innovative prowess of Sir Peter Jackson and Weta Workshops buttressed, and New Zealand’s film industry jobs protected. MoBIE’s mission would appear to be to make that sort of one-off accommodation to the needs of both domestic and foreign capital routine.

If that is correct, then it’s easy to see why the NZ Council of Trade Unions has expressed its profound unease about MoBIE. CTU Secretary, Peter Conway, is concerned that: “plans to have a sole ‘business facing’ purpose for the Department responsible for safety at work, holidays, parental leave, minimum wages, and for wider workers’ employment conditions and rights poses great risks for the interests of the over two million New Zealanders who are in the workforce.” Unsurprisingly he drew the Government’s attention to the serious shortcomings exposed within the stand-alone Labour Department by the Pike River Disaster inquiry:

“Tragedies such as Pike River have shown that the Government is already struggling to provide adequate resourcing to the health and safety inspectorate, and to adequately carry out their health and safety functions.” How likely is it that the new “business-facing” MoBIE will turn around and become a “worker-facing” organisation?

The Labour Party’s opposition to MoBIE’s establishment is somewhat harder to fathom. In the hands of an unashamedly interventionist social-democrat (David Cunliffe take note!) MoBIE could become the dominant instrument of government policy, consigning Treasury to a distant second place. Fuelled by the capital reserves of the Cullen Fund and a state-run Kiwisaver, with powers to determine minimum wages and conditions, union rights, research funding, regional development and housing construction, MoBIE could swiftly take on the nation-building role of the 1930s Ministry of Works. Its capacity to create tens of thousands of jobs – principally by building new homes and upgrading New Zealand’s decaying infrastructure, would make MoBIE the most valuable tool in Labour’s workshop.

The precedent is there not only in our own Ministry of Works, but in the United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW). Brought into existence by Presidential decree in 1953, HEW became the principal architect and builder of America’s post-war welfare state, especially President Johnson’s “Great Society”. What made it work was the powerful common objectives of its component divisions. Until its demise in 1979 (when Education was calved-off to form a separate department) HEW oversaw the continuation and elaboration of President Roosevelt’s “New Deal”.

Infused with HEW’s sense of historic mission and reformist zeal, MoBIE could become the driver of twenty-first century social-democracy in New Zealand. The reason, perhaps, why not all of Mr Joyce’s cabinet colleagues are celebrating its birth.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 3 July 2012.