Getting Our Politics Sorted.

Sorting Us Out: In many respects political beliefs, and the way we respond to them, play a very similar role to J.K. Rowling’s Sorting Hat. An expectation that people will be treated fairly assigns us to one political “house”, while a belief that people must learn to stand on their own two feet sends us to another. A love of Mother Nature pushes us in one direction; a love of Lady Liberty somewhere else.

THE SORTING HAT is one of J.K. Rowling’s cleverer inventions. In the first of her best-selling series of children’s books, Harry Potter and his fellow First Years are sorted into their appropriate Hogwarts houses – Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw and Slytherin – by the all-knowing Sorting Hat. As the Harry Potter saga unfolds, it resolves into a life and death struggle between the evil denizens of Slytherin, and everybody else.

In many respects political beliefs, and the way we respond to them, play a very similar role to the Sorting Hat. An expectation that people will be treated fairly assigns us to one political “house”, while a belief that people must learn to stand on their own two feet sends us to another. A love of Mother Nature pushes us in one direction; a love of Lady Liberty somewhere else.

Such diversity remains healthy only for as long as there is something greater than houses holding the Sorting Hat’s assignments together. In the Harry Potter novels, that greater thing is Hogwarts itself. In societies like our own, it is the nation state which binds us: an indissoluble collection of political principles to which all citizens subscribe.

Looking around the world, it is becoming increasingly clear that the nation state is struggling to retain the universal allegiance that prevents it from descending into a partisan war of all against all. Whether it be Donald Trump’s Disunited States of America, or Boris Johnson’s Disunited Kingdom, the all-important “whole” shows worrying signs of becoming something less than the sum of its parts. The houses have become more important that the school.

One of the first people to notice this phenomenon was the American writer and journalist, Bill Bishop. His 2008 book, The Big Sort, was subtitled: “why the clustering of like-minded America is tearing us apart”.

The natural tendency of birds of a common ethnic/cultural/political feather to flock together – in discrete neighbourhoods, suburbs, towns and (smaller) cities, where everybody does the same sort of work, has the same sort of educational credentials, earns the same sort of money and, crucially, shares the same sorts of views, is making it harder and harder for them to understand (let alone stand shoulder-to-shoulder with) those who don’t.

John Harris, writing in The Guardian, recently raised the possibility that this propensity to “cluster” might produce an historic reversal of traditional political polarities in the United Kingdom:

“If you want a possible vision of the future, picture a liberal, university-educated middle class concentrated – by choice – in the affluent south, while a reactionary conservatism speaks for more deprived parts of the country, and the tensions that surfaced around Brexit burst forth again and again.”

Could something similar happen here? Is New Zealand society sorting itself into similar clusters? And if it is, how likely is it to effect a reversal of our politics?

If New Zealand’s four “houses” are Taking Care of Business, Taking Care of Others, Working With My Hands, and Working With My Brain, then New Zealand Labour is unlikely to suffer the fate of British Labour. The latter lost its supposedly impregnable “Red Wall” when its liberal, university-educated middle class lost touch with (and all-too-often actively alienated) its working-class base. Here in New Zealand, however, Labour’s strong relationship with Maoridom makes a similar rupture most unlikely. Overwhelmingly, the house members of Working With My Hands are brown.

Far from losing touch with its brown working-class base, New Zealand Labour’s liberal, university-educated middle class: the house members of Working With My Brain and Taking Care of Others; are doing everything they can to empower Maori and Pasefika New Zealanders. They are doing this by strengthening their unions; by increasing their benefits; by more appropriately tailoring health and educational services to their needs; and, most significantly, by reconfiguring New Zealand’s constitutional structures to ensure their voices are heard and their cultural needs recognised.

Ironically, this leaves New Zealand’s National Party where British Labour now appears to be standing: with insufficient allies to win a nationwide election. Of New Zealand’s four houses, only Taking Care of Business (especially rural business) is overwhelmingly loyal to National. Increasingly, the house members of Working With My Brain, once more-or-less evenly split between National and Labour, are clustering around like-minded “progressives”.

The Sorting Hat has distributed Labour across Gryffindor, Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw. National’s stuck in Slytherin.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 21 May 2021.

Between The Motion, And The Act, Falls The Shadow.

The Politics Of Gesture: It must be exhilarating to stand shoulder to shoulder with your Green Party comrades on the streets of a New Zealand city, while all around you angry young men and women chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” So easy to get carried away beneath a forest of red, green, black and white Palestinian flags, your ears ringing with righteous indignation. Why not promise to table a motion seeking Palestinian statehood? What else could you do?

THE GREENS have failed to win parliamentary support for a motion supporting Palestinian statehood. Sponsored by the Greens’ foreign affairs spokesperson, Golriz Ghahraman, the motion reaffirmed “the right of Palestine to self-determination and statehood”, and called upon the government of New Zealand to “recognise the State of Palestine among our community of nations”. Both National and Act were quick to signal their opposition to recognising Palestine as a sovereign state. The right-wing parties’ objections abruptly ended Ghahraman’s initiative. Without securing the unanimous permission of the whole House, her motion could not even be introduced – let alone debated.

The Right’s veto was probably welcomed by the Labour Government. Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta hardly needs to be warned by her diplomatic staff at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade that the merest suggestion of New Zealand recognising Palestinian statehood would immediately pitch this country’s relationship with Israel into crisis.

Nor would such recognition be unanimously received by New Zealanders as either justified or wise. Sympathy for the Palestinian civilians caught up in the military exchanges between Hamas and the Israeli Defence Force may be universal, but it should not be construed as support for this country recognising Palestine as a sovereign state. Too many Kiwis have too many questions about what that would amount to in the only place that matters – on the ground – to simply wave Ghahraman’s proposition through the checkpoint of political scrutiny.

Not when so many people on Twitter have read Green MP Ricardo Menendez March’s tweet declaring “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” Not when so many television news viewers have seen Ghahraman, herself, protesting against “Israeli aggression” under placards and banners proclaiming exactly the same sentiments.

Surely, the Greens are aware of how Israelis interpret this Palestinian slogan? That if Palestine occupies all of the territory between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea, then the State of Israel must have ceased to exist.

Ghahraman cannot be so naïve as to believe that the so-called “Two State Solution” is about Israel and Palestine occupying the same territory! Not when Israel’s “occupation” of the West Bank of the Jordan River lies at the heart of the conflict. No, to assert that the sovereign state of Palestine will extend “from the river to the sea”, is to declare one’s support for driving the Jews into it.

This is not, of course, what Ghahraman is saying. Announcing her intention of tabling her statehood motion on the Greens’ website, she states: “The path forward from the latest bout of violence must be lasting peace, supported by the international community. Statehood as part of a two state solution would uphold and celebrate the inherent rights and dignity of Palestinians.”

Well, it might, but an awful lot of things would have to happen first.

For example, Hamas (still designated as a terrorist organisation by the New Zealand government) would have to recognise the State of Israel’s right to exist. Also, the roughly 600,000 Israeli settlers currently living on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem would have to abandon their illegal settlements and return to Israel. The Palestinian Authority, which, fearful of a Hamas victory, recently cancelled the elections which threatened to deliver just that, would have to re-establish democracy on the West Bank and Gaza. (The people of Gaza have not been permitted to cast a vote since they were incautious enough to elect Hamas in 2006.) Similarly, Israeli voters would have to summon up the courage to elect someone other than Benjamin Netanyahu as their prime minister. (Instead of voting over and over and over and over again to make such a transfer of power impossible.) And, last of all, American politicians would have to collectively decide to tell the all-powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to find someone else to intimidate into backing the State of Israel – no matter what it does.

After making all those things happen, the Two State Solution will be a piece of cake!

Politics, politics, politics: it’s no more avoidable in Israel/Palestine than it is in New Zealand. The tragedy that is unfolding in Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank is not an accident, it is the culmination of a series of self-interested political moves undertaken by the most ruthless players on both sides of the conflict.

Netanyahu is fighting for his political life – and to stay out of jail. He is willing to do whatever it takes to win the support he needs to stay in office. If that means throwing red meat to the most extreme Zionist parties, then so be it. Raising the tensions between Jews and Arabs in the Holy City makes perfect sense if you’re desperate to prevent your political rivals from enlisting the support of Arab-Israeli parties in a government of national unity.

Likewise, if you are Hamas. Why wouldn’t you take advantage of the rage being stirred up by Netanyahu and his Zionist allies in East Jerusalem and around the Al Aksa Mosque? Why wouldn’t you demonstrate to the Palestinian people who the true defenders of the Motherland are? Especially in the wake of the Palestinian Authority, a body mired in corruption, calling off the scheduled elections. Get those rockets in the air. Bring down the wrath of Israel’s jets. Watch the body-count grow and grow – as it always does.

Suits Netanyahu. Suits Hamas. A government of national unity made up of Jews and Arabs, ready to at least think about peace, serves the interests of neither.

It must be exhilarating to stand shoulder to shoulder with your Green Party comrades on the streets of a New Zealand city, while all around you angry young men and women chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” So easy to get carried away beneath a forest of red, green, black and white Palestinian flags, your ears ringing with righteous indignation. Why not promise to table a motion seeking Palestinian statehood? What else could you do?

Well, you could listen to a couple of anthems. The first is called Palestine’s Freedom Song, written and recorded by a pair of young Palestinian sisters brim-full of courage and determination. This is what they sing:

We own this home
We own this land
From the river to the sea
Our motherland
We’ll set it free
We’ve got our stones
And the olive tree

The second is called Hatikvah (The Hope) and it really is an anthem – the national anthem of the State of Israel. This is what the Israelis sing:

Our hope is not yet lost,
The hope of two thousand years,
To be a free nation in our land,
The land of Zion and Jerusalem.

If Golriz Ghahraman, or anybody else, can think of a way to reconcile the irreconcilable aspirations expressed in these two anthems, then the world would love to hear it. But people of good will have been searching for a very long time – and nobody has found it yet.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 20 May 2021.

The TV3 Poll: Journalism or Propaganda?

Predictable “News”: Expecting the mainstream media to acknowledge its own deficiencies as the supposed protector and facilitator of democratic discussion and debate has become unrealistic. It no longer sees its role in such terms. Its responsibility, now, is to impart the truth – as officially defined – to the population, while doing everything within its power to ensure that this official version of reality is not effectively challenged by anyone – up to and including the Leader of the Opposition.

TV3’s PRESENTATION of the poll results delivered to them by Reid Research Ltd tells us a lot. The most important message to draw from the way it handled this “news” is how rapidly propaganda is replacing journalism in the mainstream news media. The data supplied by the pollsters confirms that there has been no major shift in political opinion since the general election of 17 October 2020. Given the decisiveness of the 2020 result, and the want of any developments of sufficient magnitude to cause Labour voters to change their minds, this stand-steady result should have come as no surprise. “Voters still happy with Jacinda” is not, however, a headline likely to stop viewers in their tracks. “Support for Judith Collins plummets”, on the other hand, just might.

Had TV3 been polling regularly since the election, with five or six sets of results accurately tracking the public’s feelings about the Leader of the Opposition; and had the latest results confirmed or confounded a rising or falling trendline; then such a headline might have been justified. But, TV3 has not been polling regularly. Indeed, the last poll it conducted was back in October 2020. Yes, that’s right, in the middle of last year’s election campaign. Naturally, the Leader of the Opposition was then polling around 18 percent. More than six months after losing the election by an historic margin, she is polling around 6 percent as New Zealand’s preferred prime minister. Well, gosh! What a surprise! Clearly, Collins’ days are numbered.

But wait, there’s more. Tova O’Brien, TV3’s political editor, would have known that Collins’ numbers were bound to drop back over a period of six months. The temptation would have been strong, therefore, to attach her predictably “plummeting” numbers to her recent campaign to elicit a coherent government response to the He Puapua Report, and whether or not it is guiding government policy.

Any failure to reproduce the extraordinary 17 percentage point surge in National’s numbers generated by Collins’ predecessor’s, Don Brash’s, in/famous “Orewa Speech”, would allow O’Brien and her colleagues to paint Collins’ He Puapua campaign as a flop. Even better, it would allow them to present the poll data as proof that New Zealanders have grown up and grown out of racial politics.

Just to be sure, however, O’Brien inserted a couple of questions to drive that message home. Were the Government’s policies separatist? she had Reid Research ask. And: Were the Opposition’s criticisms divisive? Entirely unsurprisingly, between 40 percent and half of respondents thought the government wasn’t being separatist, and that the Opposition was being divisive. For good measure, the viewers were further informed that roughly a quarter of National voters thought their party was being divisive and about the same number of Labour voters saw their party as separatist. All of which added up to? Almost nothing at all that was helpful.

Of much more use to TV3’s viewers would have been a carefully worded series of questions aimed at discovering just how much people knew about the He Puapua Report, and seeking their reaction to some of its recommendations. Ah, yes, but that would have cost TV3 an arm and a leg. It would also, almost certainly, have shown that most Kiwis know next-to-nothing about He Puapua, or its recommendations; and that, when appraised of some of the report’s more radical proposals, their responses tend to be less than favourable.

Of course, the responsibility for the public’s general ignorance about He Puapua, and the general direction of travel favoured by its authors, rests squarely with the likes of Ms O’Brien. Realistically-speaking, however, expecting the mainstream media to acknowledge its own deficiencies as the supposed protector and facilitator of democratic discussion and debate would be foolish. The mainstream media no longer sees its role in such terms. Its responsibility, now, is to impart the truth – as officially defined – to the population, while doing everything within its power to ensure that this official version of reality is not effectively challenged by anyone – up to and including the Leader of the Opposition.

This is how it works now. If a potentially damaging report like He Puapua makes it into the public arena, do not under any circumstances attempt to inform the public accurately and dispassionately about its contents. Instead, brand any publicly voiced misgivings about the report’s recommendations as “racist”. Give maximum coverage to accusations and recriminations arising from politicians’ responses to the report, and highlight the alleged divisiveness of their attempts to question or challenge its findings. Then, commission a poll, the entirely predictable results of which can be used to discredit the report’s critics: most particularly the leader of the political party most heavily invested in challenging its officially sanctioned version of reality.

It’s a game played out every day in Moscow and Beijing. The only serious distinction between the players there, and the players here, being that ‘there’ they know that the name of the game is “Propaganda”; while ‘here’ they still think it’s called “Journalism”.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 18 May 2021.

Radio Waves.

Waving Us In - Or Away? Increasingly reliant on pollsters and PR people, Nine to Noon has quite consciously narrowed the range of political discussion down to the weekly wins and losses of the major parliamentary players. Only very occasionally does its “Political Panel” venture out into the broader realm of ideas. The sort of discussion and debate listeners might have heard if the programme’s producers had reached out to academics and political iconoclasts was not something that RNZ seemed eager to promote.

LAST MONDAY (10/5/21) Neale Jones and Ben Thomas were Kathryn Ryan’s guests on RNZ’s Nine To Noon programme. Ryan’s “Political Panel” is one of the programme’s most listened-to segments – it’s influential. Listening to Jones and Thomas last Monday, however, I was left wondering “influential with whom?”

Political commentary on RNZ has evolved in a very strange way over the past few years. The original intent seemed pretty clear: to secure independent commentary from competent representatives of right-wing and left-wing opinion about the deeds of government, opposition, and other sundry political actors across the week just passed. There can be little doubt that the Political Panel’s most popular right-wing commentator was the volatile – but never boring – Matthew Hooton. The Left, too, put up some formidable champions: Peter Harris from the CTU; the former Alliance MP, Laila Harré.

Critical to the success of these commentators was their willingness to tackle what were often highly sensitive and contentious issues without feeling the need to look over their shoulders. They were as ready – when it was warranted – to put the boot into their own “side” as they were to criticise their more traditional ideological foes.

For the programme’s listeners, this independence of mind constituted a vital ingredient in the Political Panel’s success. The moment commentary becomes predictable it begins to take on the character of spin. Heterodoxy has another important advantage over orthodoxy: its ability to surprise and provoke; a capacity to make those who encounter it think differently about an issue. In other words, it makes for both a better democracy and great radio.

Why, then, has RNZ abandoned this winning formula in favour of a Political Panel comprised, more-or-less exclusively these days, of pollsters and public relations mavens? Now, to be fair to RNZ, it was their star turn, Hooton, who started this particular ball rolling by establishing his own PR company, Exeltium. Not wanting to lose Hooton’s prodigious talent, Nine to Noon decided to offer its listeners a fulsome disclaimer – and hope for the best.

Gradually, however, the nature of RNZ’s political commentary changed. More and more, it became a forum for major players from inside the Wellington beltway. The official pollsters for National and Labour started turning up, followed closely by former ministerial press secretaries and chiefs-of-staff turned PR specialists.

On its face, this seemed like a great idea. After all, if pollsters and well-placed insiders didn’t know what was going on, then who did?

The problem, of course, is that well-placed insiders and party pollsters don’t remain well-placed insiders or party pollsters by blabbing everything they know about the moving and shaking of the movers and shakers to RNZ’s listeners. For the Nine to Noon audience, these keepers of secrets could not be expected (and, presumably, were not expected) to provide anything other than a carefully framed picture of New Zealand politics.

Carefully framed and ideologically neutered. By relying on pollsters and PR people, Nine to Noon was quite consciously narrowing the range of political discussion down to the weekly wins and losses of the major parliamentary players. Only very occasionally does the Political Panel venture out into the broader realm of ideas. The sort of discussion and debate listeners might have heard if the programme’s producers had reached out to academics and political iconoclasts was not something that RNZ seemed eager to promote.

Which brings us back to last Monday’s discussion between Ryan, Jones and Thomas. Unsurprisingly, one of the topics up for discussion was the Leader of the Opposition’s, Judith Collins’, ongoing effort to get the Labour Government to offer up any sort of coherent response to the He Puapua Report.

If ever there was an issue that called out for a broader discussion, it is the He Puapua Report. Under review is nothing less than the future shape of the New Zealand constitution and a radically reconfigured relationship between Maori and Pakeha New Zealanders.

Rather than venture forth into these stormy waters, however, Ryan attempted to re-frame the discussion as a shrewd Opposition manoeuvre to drive a wedge between the Prime Minister and her Maori caucus. Having thus constricted tightly the parameters of the discussion, Ryan passed the speaking-stick to Thomas. It was at this point that things took a decidedly weird turn.

Riffing off his co-commentator, Jones’s, sneering characterisation of National’s interest in He Puapua as some kind of “conspiracy theory”, Thomas upped the ante by claiming that the report’s critics were treating He Puapua as something akin to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This charge represents a major step-up in the effort of what might best be described as the New Zealand “political class” to stifle all further debate on the issues covered in the report.

What Thomas (PR consultant) had done was to move beyond Jones’s (Managing Director of PR firm Capital Government Relations) strategy of marginalising the Government’s critics as tin-foil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorists, into the much darker realm of virulent anti-Semitism and far-Right mythology.

For those who don’t know, the Protocols were published by fanatical Russian anti-Semites in 1903 as a means of inciting murderous pogroms against the Tsar’s Jewish subjects. They concern a supposedly secret Jewish plot to take over the world. Brought out of Russia in the aftermath of World War One and the Bolshevik Revolution, the Protocols served to inflame Adolf Hitler’s already passionate hatred of the Jews. Copies of this ur-conspiracy theory are still on sale in bookshops all over the Middle East.

By invoking the Protocols, Thomas – wittingly or unwittingly – was associating National’s Judith Collins with the worst excesses of the Nazis and their admirers. And, it appears to have worked. In her keynote speech to the Southern Regional Conference of the National Party in Queenstown (16/5/21) the name He Puapua does not appear.

Listening to last Monday’s Political Panel, the similarity between the attitudes struck by Ryan, Jones and Thomas over He Puapua, and those struck by the British political class in relation to the UK-wide debate over Brexit is … well … striking. There is that same lofty tone of condescension; that same propensity to belittle those who refuse to endorse the “official” policy-line; the same impression that those opposing them are ignorant and powerless peasants who may be safely waved away and ignored.

The Political Panel’s airy dismissal of their fellow citizens’ concerns was bad enough in itself, but what made it worse was the fact that it was being broadcast on a network supposedly owned by, and committed to serving, the people of New Zealand – all the people of New Zealand. A state broadcaster rigorously excluding any and all voices dissenting from the official line, is something most New Zealanders would expect to encounter in Moscow or Beijing – not in Wellington.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 17 May 2021.

Will Labour Defuse The "He Puapua" Time-Bomb?

Tick-Tock, Tick-Tock: Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s current political strategy of artful prevarication has a strictly limited lifespan. The time-bomb that is He Puapua continues to emit a relentless tick-tock, tick-tock. Sooner or later – and preferably before that ominously silent crowd massing outside the parliamentary arena lends its voice to National and Act – the Prime Minister is going to have to defuse it.

THE NUMBER of people outside keeps growing. Where there had once been a harmless handful, there is now a good-sized crowd. And they keep coming. More and more of them. You can hear car doors slamming, footsteps, the soft murmur of exchanged greetings. These people can’t quite believe what they’ve been told, so they’ve come to see for themselves if the story is true.

It was unavoidable: this growing chorus of disquiet. The moment Nanaia Mahuta set the wheels in motion; the moment the relevant Cabinet Committee signed it off. From that moment the logic of te Tiriti began to unfold like a coiled fern. That’s the thing about documents like He Puapua: once written, they can’t be unwritten. Once they are in the world, you only have two choices. Either you embrace their conclusions and make them your own. Or, you cast them away from you like sin.

And, please, don’t blame Labour’s He Puapua problem on John Key. The advice he received on the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was that it was a statement of good intentions – not firm intentions. New Zealand could take it – or leave it in a drawer. That made it a ploy – not a promise. A sop to that irritating old Cerberus, Pita Sharples. The equivalent of beads and blankets to keep the Maori Party sweet. For God’s sake! The man is a former currency trader. If the price is right, he will cut you a deal, make it happen, move on.

No, it wasn’t Key’s fault, or National’s. It’s always been an article of the Tory faith: you do what you have to do to win. Political transactions are about today, not tomorrow.

That’s always been the problem with the parliamentary left: it’s never been entirely sure what game its playing, or what the rules are. Spoiler alert: They have nothing to do with truth or justice. The game is called political survival; it’s about making it to – and hopefully through – the next election. So, the one thing you must never do is offer up hostages to Fortune. Why? because Fortune always ends up killing them. He Puapua is living on borrowed time.

What the hell was Labour thinking? That it could commission a report, pre-programmed to deliver a set of radical Maori nationalist conclusions, and no one would notice? Is the caucus really so far gone in its wokeness that it genuinely believed the New Zealand people were ready to embrace the revolutionary changes mandated by the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People? Christ on a bike! The same Labour MPs who refused to pass a Capital Gains Tax, are now, apparently, happy to be crucified for a te Tiriti approved tricameral parliament!

And naturally, their good friends in the Greens and Te Paati Maori are only too happy to drive the nails through their wrists. It was laughable really, watching Rawiri Waititi and Marama Davidson deploying in the New Zealand House of Representatives the same tactics that brought them success among gaggles of frightened Pakeha leftists.

Where a charge of racism can ruin a person’s career, the mere threat of its use is generally enough to secure ideological conformity. What a shock it must have been for Waititi and Davidson to discover that, on the floor of the House, that particular pistol is prone to misfire. It won’t stop them from pulling the trigger again and again, however. You just wait and see, it won’t be long before they’re accusing National and Act MPs of indulging in “hate speech” and demanding that Parliament’s Standing Orders be changed to shut them up.

Over the top? No. Silencing the Opposition’s investigative effort into the meaning of He Puapua, and its querying of the ultimate trajectory of the Labour Government’s “Maori separatist agenda”, was what Waititi appeared to expect of Speaker Trevor Mallard. And from his perspective, it’s easy to see why. Parliament has power – real power. What happens there matters. What’s more, Members of Parliament have privileges – real privileges. The most important of these being the privilege to speak freely without the threat of being bludgeoned into silence by defamation writs – or woke fatwas.

The crazy thing is, neither the Greens, nor Te Paati Maori, appear to have the slightest idea of what would happen if they got their wish: if, for some unknown reason, the Speaker did decide to muzzle the Opposition. They seem to have forgotten that the National and Act parties, between them, secured the votes of nearly one million New Zealanders. Do they honestly believe those million Kiwis will just shrug their shoulders and say: “Oh, well, that’s too bad. The Government has just thrust a dagger into the heart of parliamentary democracy, and our parties, but we’re not going to do anything about it.” 

Honestly?

Labour knows what would happen. Almost overnight, the 400,000 former National Party voters who swung in behind “Jacinda” in 2020 would swing back. Deep down Labour knows that He Puapua should never have been written; that it has the potential to kill their chances of re-election in 2023. That’s why Jacinda is slip-slip-sliding all over the place. She knows she risks a God Almighty row with her Maori caucus if she disowns He Puapua, and an even bigger one with Pakeha New Zealand if she doesn’t.

Unfortunately, Jacinda’s current strategy of artful prevarication has a strictly limited lifespan. The time-bomb that is He Puapua continues to emit a relentless tick-tock, tick-tock. Sooner or later – and preferably before that ominously silent crowd massing outside the parliamentary arena lends its voice to National and Act – the Prime Minister is going to have to defuse it.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 14 May 2021.

Watching Israel/Palestine Burn.

The Fire And The Fury: There must be something in the water and the soil of the Holy Land that causes those who claim it for their own to lose all sense of strategic perspective. Today, it is the Palestinians who refuse to accept that against the State of Israel there can be no victory. Two thousand years ago, it was the Jewish people themselves. Or, more accurately, it was the nationalist extremists who refused to acknowledge the impossibility of extricating Judea from the Roman Empire. 

IRRESPECTIVE OF WHICH SIDE of the conflict one stands, watching the latest tragedy unfold in Israel/Palestine is heart-breaking. Not the least distressing aspect of the renewed bloodshed is the antagonists’ reflexive defence of long held and deeply entrenched positions. On neither side is there the slightest evidence of new or original thinking. All we hear are the same slogans repeated over and over. But, if both sides insist on standing still, how can there be any movement?

This latest eruption of violence has, however, dramatically exposed the futility of the Palestinians’ uncompromising insistence on the so-called “Right of Return”. Ironically, it has been the actions of the Jews expelled from East Jerusalem in the Arab-Jewish war of 1948 that have revealed the sheer impracticality of this key Palestinian demand.

In demanding the return of the properties their parents and grandparents were forced to abandon in the face of the Jordanian Arab Legion’s successful defence of East Jerusalem in the year of the State of Israel’s birth, Jewish litigants are also demanding the eviction of Palestinian families who have lived in these properties for more than sixty years. Few on either side of this dispute would have been surprised to discover that the present occupants have not the slightest intention of abandoning them voluntarily. Indeed, it has been their resolute refusal to be dispossessed by the Israeli courts, and the mass Palestinian support their resistance has attracted, that set the scene for the latest confrontations.

It is unfortunate that among the Palestinian leadership there does not appear to be anyone with sufficient power to draw the obvious lesson. That the passion of the Palestinians threatened with eviction in East Jerusalem will be matched (if not exceeded) by the determination of the Israelis (and their descendants) who took control of the properties abandoned by Palestinians during the 1948 conflict, to stay exactly where they are.

To insist upon the Right of Return, is to insist upon the rolling back of history to 1948. Except, that simply amounts to demanding that the clock be wound back to a time when the State of Israel did not exist. In other words, the call for all those Palestinians uprooted by Israel’s birth (and their descendants) to be allowed to return to their houses, olive groves and farms, is a call for the dissolution of Israel itself.

If the rest of the world wants to know what a Palestinian attempt at dispossessing the Israeli people might look like, it has only to look at those anti-eviction protests in East Jerusalem, multiply them one-hundred-fold, and then imagine every Jewish protester armed to the teeth and wearing the uniform of the Israeli Defence Force, backed by artillery, tanks, helicopters, jets, and, ultimately, nuclear weapons.

There must be something in the water and the soil of the Holy Land that causes those who claim it for their own to lose all sense of strategic perspective. Today, it is the Palestinians who refuse to accept that against the State of Israel there can be no victory. Two thousand years ago, it was the Jewish people themselves. Or, more accurately, it was the nationalist extremists who refused to acknowledge the impossibility of extricating Judea from the Roman Empire. Again and again they rose in revolt. Again and again, the Romans crushed them in the most brutal and bloody fashion. Eventually, the day came when Rome decided that these stiff-necked Jews had rebelled once too often. They would have to go – but not before they witnessed the complete destruction of their temple and the re-naming of their country as “Syria Palaestina”.

Watching the desperate launchings of Palestinian rockets against Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and the instant and devastating retaliation of the Israeli Air Force, it is hard not to be reminded of the hard-line Jewish nationalists who took refuge in the great Herodian palace-cum-fortress of Masada. They, too, were magical thinkers, convinced that they could escape the wrath of Vespasian’s legions, who, far below, were patiently constructing the ramp that would carry their siege-engines up and over the walls of Masada – to victory.

Surely, there are some Palestinians who, looking at the entirely predictable consequences of their political and military leaders’ intransigence, recall with trepidation the awful historical precedents associated with refusals to accept that the occupiers of one’s homeland cannot be defeated?

More importantly, perhaps, are there none who recall that the Romans did not disperse all the Jewish inhabitants of Syria Palaestina? Some remained. Over the centuries what used to be called Judea was occupied by Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Mamelukes, Franks, Ottomans and the British: the Jews who remained saw them come – and go – until, at length, the Zionists made a great hole in history, and Israel stepped through it.

Holed, or not, History has lessons to teach both the victors and the vanquished about the virtues of patience, and the changes wrought by time.

An optimistic prophet might tell of a mighty Mediterranean entrepot called Gaza City: the glittering prize of an enduring peace settlement between the Palestinian people and the State of Israel. Funded by Arab oil, protected by the United States and Europe, it would fast become a wonder of the twenty-first century world.

A pessimistic prophet might see the Al-Aqsa Mosque in flames and the Dome of the Rock in ruins. He might tell of Israel’s pitiless ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and the Great Jihad it inspired: of Arab and Turkish armies clashing with the IDF at Megiddo; of Pakistani rockets bearing nuclear warheads nearly all being blown out of the sky above Israel’s Iron Dome; and of Israeli jets, hot for vengeance, streaking eastward with their deadly nuclear payloads. He might speak of “The Samson Option” and the end of the world.

There are some who would not care – so long as the Israeli/Palestinian enemy was destroyed. And these are the most dangerous men and women ever to have set foot upon the rocks and stones of the land where David sang, and Jesus spoke, and Mohammed flew up to God. These enemies of compromise, these strangers to wisdom, would make of Israel/Palestine a radioactive desert – and call it peace.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 13 May 2021.

The He Puapua Revolution.

Bastion Point, 25 May 1978: Even when it became obvious that New Zealand’s indigenous population was not going to disappear quietly into history, the sort of political and cultural concessions so clearly required to construct a bi-cultural nation failed to eventuate. If this country is to have a peaceful and prosperous future, however, these long-delayed concessions must be made. Pakeha New Zealanders simply have no choice: the colonial state no longer possesses the power to deny Maori the co-governance they seek – except by ripping New Zealand apart.

WE ARE IN the early stages of a revolution - much like the one New Zealand went through in the 1980s. Traditional leftists will, of course, object that “Rogernomics” was not a revolution. Others will insist that what New Zealanders actually experienced in 1984 was a “bureaucratic coup d’état”. Some will even claim that between 1984 and 1993 this country underwent a “counter-revolution” against the radical economic and social changes that characterised the thirty extraordinary years between the end of World War II and the mid-1970s.

Whatever.

Revolution, at least for me, isn’t about ideology, it’s about how decisively the revolutionaries are willing to break with the doctrines and institutions of the existing order, and how successful they are at replacing them.

By this definition, Rogernomics definitely qualifies as a revolution – albeit a revolution undertaken from the top down. Before the revolution New Zealand was an unabashedly social-democratic country. The state owned a substantial chunk of the economy and the workforce was heavily unionised. Economic regulation was heavy-handed and the domestic market heavily protected. New Zealand’s welfare state guaranteed the overwhelming majority of its citizens a job, a home, healthcare, education and generous financial support in times of adversity.

After the Rogernomics Revolution, New Zealand’s economy was proudly market-driven. State-owned enterprises were privatised and the unions reduced to a shadow of their former strength. Regulation became so light-handed that many businesses simply ignored it altogether. The domestic market welcomed the merchandise of the whole world. New Zealand’s welfare state had been (to use the language of the new regime) “downsized”.

What’s more, these changes stuck. Regardless of whether National or Labour occupied the Treasury Benches, the doctrines and institutions of the Rogernomics Revolution remained firmly in place.

In many respects, Rogernomics resembled that other great “top-down revolution” – the English Reformation. It was King Henry VIII who ploughed under the old feudal order and replaced it with a new, recognisably modern, approach to governance. His separation of the English church from Rome raises thoughts of Brexit; and his ruthless dissolution of the monasteries may count as History’s first great privatisation programme. What’s more, the King’s changes “stuck”. In spite of her best efforts, Henry’s daughter, “Bloody Mary”, could not reverse her father’s transformation of English society.

If Rogernomics represented a revolution in the way New Zealand’s economy and society was run, what may end up being called the “He Puapua Revolution” will thoroughly reshape New Zealand’s constitutional and political institutions and decisively reconfigure its culture. Like Rogernomics, He Puapua’s will be a top-down revolution: conceived and implemented by political and bureaucratic elites – with encouragement from the country’s most innovative and dynamic economic actors.

The He Puapua Revolution, like most revolutions, will be made possible by the glaring failures of the system it promises to replace. The New Zealand state, born of this nation’s colonial past, has consistently failed to serve the interests of Maori. Even when it became obvious that the country’s indigenous population was not going to disappear quietly into history, the sort of political and cultural concessions so clearly required to construct a bi-cultural nation failed to eventuate. If New Zealand is to have a peaceful and prosperous future, however, these long-delayed concessions must be made. Pakeha New Zealanders simply have no choice: the colonial state no longer possesses the power to deny Maori the co-governance they seek – except by ripping New Zealand apart.

Unsurprisingly, it was among the people charged with running the New Zealand state that this impasse first became apparent. Among its senior judges; its more perspicacious bureaucrats; its shrewdest politicians. All of them informed, it must be acknowledged, by its most radical academics. These latter, naturally, passed their insights down to their best and brightest students.

Thus was the doctrine of “Treaty Partnership” born. Thus was the “Treaty Settlement Process” launched. Thus emerged the successful iwi corporates and their dynamic business and political protégés. Thus began the necessary process of building up an ideological cadre capable of making the revolution a reality. Assembling patiently the sort of talent responsible for conceiving the revolutionary constitutional transformations set forth with such disarming candour in the He Puapua Report.

Are people marching in the street for He Puapua’s revolutionary changes? Of course not. The street demonstrations will only assemble, with ever-increasing determination, if the He Puapua Revolution fails.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 14 May 2021.