The Future Of Act: Climate Change Cannot Be Stopped, But It Can Be Ridden.

Back To The Land: Act understands that rural New Zealanders are feeling put upon and devalued by urban New Zealanders; that they are chafing under an ever-increasing number of government rules and regulations. Keen to draw these voters away from National, David Seymour is not about to tell his audiences that, thanks to Climate Change, life on the land is going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.

ACT HAS A PROBLEM: one which it shares with just about every other Western conservative party; Climate Change. William F. Buckley, who founded, and for many years edited, the thoughtfully right-wing magazine, The National Review, described a conservative as “someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.” All very well when the forces driving history are human; but not helpful at all when inhuman forces are driving events, and yelling “Stop!” will in no way slow them down.

At present, Act isn’t really addressing the Climate Change crisis seriously. Oh sure, it pays lip service to the reality of anthropogenic global warming, but its policies show scant evidence of serious thought about the problem that is going to dominate the economics and politics of the next fifty years.

Out in rural and provincial New Zealand, for example, the Act Leader, David Seymour, and his colleagues are attracting big audiences. Farmers, their families, and voters working in businesses associated with farming, are angry with the Labour Government, and disillusioned with their traditional electoral champions in the National Party.

Act understands that rural New Zealanders are feeling put upon and devalued by urban New Zealanders; that they are chafing under an ever-increasing number of government rules and regulations. Keen to draw these voters away from National, Seymour is not about to tell his audiences that life on the land is going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.

Instead, he promises to abolish the Climate Change Commission and make a bonfire of the Government’s regulations and red-tape. The cockies, of course, applaud, and Act’s poll-numbers rise. For the moment, that’s all Seymour and his party care about. Their mission is to drag National’s numbers down to around 20 percent, and pump their own up into the high teens. At that point (as Labour discovered vis-à-vis the Alliance) the whole equation on the Right could very easily unravel – leaving Act as the runaway favourite of conservative voters.

All very well, but if the ultimate balance of political forces leaves the Right sharing 40-45 percent of the Party Vote, and the Left in firm command with 55-60 percent, then Act will find itself all dressed up, but with nowhere to go.

What’s more, without a coherent and believable policy response to the unrelenting pressures of Climate Change, Act could easy end up becoming the top-dog in a conservative kennel that gets smaller and smaller with every passing year.

In ten years’ time, the big political and economic arguments will have moved well beyond the Neoliberal shibboleths that defined the period between 1979 and 2008. In ten years’ time, Capitalism itself will be struggling to retain the support of a majority of citizens – even in the West.

Parties like National and Act will find themselves in the same unenviable position as the reactionary political movements that advocated for the return of absolute monarchy in the early-to-mid nineteenth century. It won’t be a case of them having no supporters, merely of having too few to count any longer as a serious force. History will have rolled right over them. Their last, unheeded, words will be: “It’s not stopping!”

Regarding the politics of the future, the lines of division are already becoming clear. The battle will no longer be between capitalists and socialists: comprehensive state control of the economy will be taken for granted. How else could humanity have responded with any degree of effectiveness to devastating floods and droughts; heatwaves and cold-snaps; rising seas and advancing deserts? No, the political battles of the future will be between those who still believe that science can and will rescue humanity from the ravages of Climate Change; and those who offer a new “green” paradigm for the way in which human societies interact with the natural world.

In the elections of the future, the followers of Scientism will contend for power with the followers of Ecologism. A meritocratic technocracy will find itself opposed by an anarchistic collectivity of simple-lifers. The technocrats, based overwhelmingly in the cities, will be trapped in a frustratingly symbiotic relationship with the simple-lifers – for the very simple reason that, overwhelmingly, it will be the rural simple-lifers who grow the food. Dependent upon one another, and united in their struggle to survive in an overheated world, the parties of Scientism and Ecologism will be constantly re-defining and re-negotiating the terms of their co-existence, while contending jointly with an increasingly hostile planet. Parties determined to rehearse the arguments for and against capitalism/socialism will have become utterly irrelevant.

Ironically, it was the recent “Groundswell” protests that anticipated the fundamental political proposition of the Climate Change-driven future: those Tractors bearing placards declaring “No Farmers, No Food” spoke more truly than they knew.

For Act, that fundamental division between technocrat and simple-lifer offers a straightforward path to political survival. Ever since the father of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke, wrote Reflections Upon the Revolution in France conservatives have celebrated the slow rhythms of the seasons and the tiny, incremental changes that shape the world beyond the mad rush (and even madder ideas) of the city. A party that celebrated the stoic virtues of rural living and was content to be instructed by Mother Nature, would find many followers. Alternatively, as a party of libertarian individualists, an urban culture – based upon the unsentimental rigors of scientific expertise, might offer Act’s followers a better fit. As they used to say in the Middle Ages: “City air makes you free.”

The world to come: the world shaped by Climate Change; will not be a neoliberal, or even a capitalist, world. The state will offer and organise whatever defence still avails humanity. It will hold the ring while the children of Climate Change weigh the relative merits of the “technological fix” versus the simple life of the ecologically-friendly farmer.

William F Buckley’s peremptory demand that History stop in its tracks was profoundly unrealistic. The key conservative insight has always been that, while History cannot be stopped, it can be ridden.

While National resigns itself to going “gentle into that good night”, Act just needs to learn how to hold on tight.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 13 August 2021.

The Coming War Against Climate Change.

Code Red: In its latest report, released on Monday, 9 August 2021, the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change warns humanity that it has less than ten years to limit the average global temperature rise to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels – or face catastrophe. Putting it even more bluntly: unless the governments of the world treat Climate Change as the moral equivalent of war, humanity will kill itself.

CODE RED. Red Alert. Or, as the robot in Space Family Robinson used to say: “Warning! Warning! Danger!” In its latest report, released on Monday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns humanity that it has less than ten years to limit the average global temperature rise to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels – or face catastrophe. Putting it even more bluntly: unless the governments of the world treat Climate Change as the moral equivalent of war, humanity will kill itself.

War has many, many downsides, and very few upsides. One upside, however, is the way it dissolves ideological objections to the policies required to secure victory. To win World Wars I and II, governments repurposed their economies and mobilised their populations in ways which, under normal circumstances, would have been unthinkable.

So successful was the banker and businessman, Walter Rathenau, at marshalling the resources of the German nation for war, that the Russian revolutionary leader, Vladimir Lenin, transformed his methods into a template for the socialist economy he and his fellow Bolsheviks were determined to construct. Confronted with the existential threat of a Nazi invasion, Winston Churchill availed himself of the Defence of the Realm Act, which placed all the property of the United Kingdom – public and private – at the disposal of His Majesty’s Government for the duration.

The seriousness with which the world’s governments are taking this latest and most unequivocal warning of the IPCC may be judged by their willingness to place their nations on a war footing. The maturity of the world’s political parties may be similarly assessed by their readiness to shed their ideological skins to win the fight for humanity’s future.

In this regard, the New Zealand National Party (whose AGM concluded the day before the release of the IPCC’s report) has a great deal of work to do. If last weekend’s performance is any indication, National is still a very long way from “getting” Climate Change. Far from seizing the opportunity provided by its AGM to make the party’s stance on the issue clear and unequivocal, National’s leadership relegated Climate Change to the status of a second-order issue. Certainly, it was not among the seven key issues identified in the Leader’s, Judith Collins’, keynote address.

This is an extraordinary political failure on Ms Collins’ part. She does not appear to understand that a party which is seen to downplay the seriousness and urgency of the climate change threat, risks being dismissed by the electorate as an irrelevant throwback to a bygone era. Just imagine if, in September 1939, the National Party had dismissed the German invasion of Poland as a second-order issue, of little immediate interest to New Zealanders, about which they had yet to develop a clear policy position. They would have been laughed off the political stage!

New Zealand’s governing party, Labour, cannot avoid formulating and implementing a broad range of responses to the climate change threat. As Greta Thunberg has already made embarrassingly clear, we still have much to do, and the world expects us to do it. If the right of New Zealand politics declines to participate in the global “war” against climate change, then the future contours of New Zealand politics will end up being shaped by the differing strategies adopted by Labour and the Greens.

Over the next four or five decades, the key political dividing lines may run between parties convinced that some kind of “technological fix” will rescue humanity from the ravages of climate change; and those who argue that only a fundamental shift in the way human-beings interact with the natural environment will generate an effective response to the threat of anthropogenic global warming.

The 200 year stand-off between capitalists and socialists may, in the course of the long fight against climate change, evolve into a clash between those who continue to put their faith in the “solutions” developed by scientific and managerial elites; and those who look to the ecologically-sensitive and collectively-driven lifeways of indigenous peoples for inspiration.

It is easy to see how Labour versus Green political competition could, over time, morph into a contest between meritocratic scientism and collectivist ecologism. It is much more difficult, however, to see a future for National and Act. If capitalism, itself, falls victim to the Climate Change War, then what chance have the capitalist parties?

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 13 August 2021.

Take Back Your Power! What A Real Labour-Green Government Might Do To Combat Climate Change.

“Come On, Kiwis, It’s Time For Action!” In our dreams the Government-inspired “Take Back Your Power!” campaign brings an impressive number of New Zealanders on to the streets. At what is billed as the campaign’s “Struggle For Tomorrow” rally, the Prime Minister delivers an impassioned speech about the need to fight Climate Change the way our parents and grand-parents fought fascism.

ON THE SAME DAY as the IPCC warned us of impending doom, half the country’s lights went out. It was a sign. Like the chilling wailing of air-raid sirens that echoed across London just seconds after Neville Chamberlain told the people of the United Kingdom that their country was at war with Germany, the IPCC report and Transpower’s enforced “load reduction” signalled a shift from one state to the next. Except that no one in charge seemed to notice. Energy Minister Megan Woods huffed and puffed at Genesis Energy, but none of her Labour colleagues were in any hurry to blow the profit-driven electricity market down.

And the Greens? Astonishingly, they were in no greater hurry to call time on profit-driven energy than Labour. Proof – if further proof is needed – that the Greens’ commitment to fighting global warming is about as serious as the Exxon Valdez’s commitment to clean ice. Tragically, there isn’t one member of the current House of Representatives willing to urge the utterly obvious and desperately needed next step: moving Aotearoa-New Zealand on to a war-footing against Climate Change.

Only the assumption of full war powers will equip this, or any other, government with the legal authority necessary to reprioritise the economy and mobilise the population against the existential threat of an overheated world. But, since it is not yet possible, in this country, to point to a flesh-and-blood enemy at the gates (although, one might have thought that all those recent floods came pretty close!) obtaining the electorate’s permission for such a drastic and irrevocable decision will require a bit of fancy political footwork.

Since neither the Labour nor the Green caucus possesses a person with the requisite dancing skills, it will be necessary, from here on, to imagine a Labour-Green Government positively overflowing with politicians who know all the steps and who are willing to make all the necessary moves.

So, it’s Monday night, the PM and her colleagues have their noses deep in the IPCC report and the phone rings. It’s TVNZ’s political editor, Jessica Mutch McKay, asking for comment about the Waikato black-out. Just as soon as everyone calms down, and the Energy Minister stops heaping all manner of unprintable curses upon the heads of Transpower and the profiteering “gentailers”, the Prime Minister suggests that everybody takes a deep breath and spends a few moments considering the extraordinary opportunity which this unique confluence of events has dropped into their lap.

As understanding slowly dawns in her Cabinet’s eyes, the Prime Minister presses on. She suggests that, in the light of the “Code Red” IPCC report, and the abject market failure evident in the deliberate shutting-down of the power-grid across much of New Zealand (not to mention the fact that the Government only got to hear about the blackout from the news media) the Cabinet determine that the re-nationalisation of the entire energy sector is now an urgent necessity.

Naturally, the Labour-Green Government experiences immediate and massive pushback. The National and Act parties are the least of their worries. Most of the pressure comes from the public servants employed by Treasury, MFAT and MBIE. Nobody re-nationalises whole industries anymore, the Cabinet is informed. At least, not with any intention of holding on to them for any longer than it takes to rescue those that are “too big to fail”. Very soon, the officials are leaking like sieves to employer lobby groups, right-wing think tanks and the news media. The whole neoliberal establishment pitches in, confident that the Government will soon buckle under the weight of so much “mainstream” opposition.

The Prime Minister just smiles. This is exactly the response she anticipated, and she is ready with her counter-move. The word is passed along to Greenpeace, Action Station, School Strike 4 Climate and the CTU that the Government could use a little help on the streets. The PM’s spin doctors prepare a list of talking-points to emphasise, in what it hopes will become a popular campaign to re-nationalise the energy sector.

Re-nationalisation will:

• Hasten the shift from fossil fuels to renewables
• Keep electricity prices under control
• Ease the transition from the internal combustion engine to electrically-powered motor vehicles and facilitate the full electrification of the railway network
• Allow for coherent long-term energy planning
• Simplify the funding and construction of new energy generation facilities

The Government-inspired “Take Back Your Power!” campaign brings an impressive number of New Zealanders on to the streets. At what is billed as the campaign’s “Struggle For Tomorrow” rally, the Prime Minister delivers an impassioned speech about the need to fight Climate Change the way our parents and grand-parents fought fascism:

Nobody complained then about the state taking over the economy and asking everybody to play their part in securing victory. And yet, today, with the future of humanity itself hanging in the balance, the promoters of profit and private gain insist that we cannot mount a collective defence against Climate Change. They do not, even at this eleventh hour, understand that we are confronted with the moral equivalent of war – a total war for the survival of life on earth. If we cannot rely upon their co-operation, then we must insist upon their acquiescence. In the war against Climate Change we will not tolerate a fifth column of do-nothing-deniers!

With the cheers of her supporters still ringing in her ears, the Prime Minister drives through the re-nationalisation legislation under urgency. With many voters urging her government to take the next logical step and put the country on a full war-footing (as she hoped they would) the Prime Minister bolsters the already declared Climate Emergency with a comprehensive legislative package giving the Labour-Green Government powers equivalent to those wielded by Labour prime minister Peter Fraser during World War II.

In a Facebook post to her followers, the Prime Minister recalls Winston Churchill’s grim observation that he had nothing to offer the beleaguered British people but “blood, toil, tears and sweat”. Smiling, as only she can, the PM declares:

I am confident that I can spare the Team of Five Million Churchill’s blood, but toil, tears and sweat there will be in abundance. You have my solemn promise, however, that the burden of rescuing our planet will be borne equally. And when we are safe, you may rest assured that the lessons learned in the struggle for tomorrow will not be forgotten.

Now, if we could just lay our hands on 60 or 70 of these “do-something” politicians, then hoping for a cooler future might not seem such a pointless exercise.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 12 August 2021.

Frail And Confused: National Succumbs To Political Alzheimer’s.

"Dammit! Where Did I Leave My Party?" What we saw over the weekend of 6-8 August 2021 was a party which no longer knows how to play the game of electoral politics. Neither its leaders, nor its members, any longer have a clue what’s required of them. They no longer know who they are, what they believe in, or how to reacquire a competitive electoral edge. National has succumbed to the political equivalent of Alzheimer's Disease.

WHAT NEW ZEALAND WITNESSED over the weekend (6-8 August 2021) was the demise of the National Party. That parties are often divided and fractious after a significant election defeat is a fact of political life. Indeed, it would be worrying if passionate disputation was absent from a party’s post-election AGM. People would probably be more alarmed by a party that accepted it defeat by exuding a sort of Zen calm. Not that National was demonstrating anything like Zen acceptance from the Manukau Events Centre.

Proof of the party’s decline was not, however, to be found in either an excess of passion, or the lack of it, but in the sheer political ineptitude of the entire 700-strong gathering. What we saw over the weekend was a party which no longer knows how to play the game of electoral politics. Neither its leaders, nor its members, any longer have a clue what’s required of them. They no longer know who they are, what they believe in, or how to reacquire a competitive electoral edge. National has become frail and confused.

What else but a frail and confused party could possibly have acquiesced in the re-appointment of Peter Goodfellow as its president? This is a man who failed to perform on not just one, but many fronts. After leading the party to its second-worst defeat ever, and insisting on playing a decisive role in the selection of some truly appalling candidates, Goodfellow’s resignation wasn’t just expected – it was required. He needed to supply his party’s 2021 AGM with his own head on a platter – garnished with heartfelt apologies and seasoned with a passionate call for rejuvenation.

That Goodfellow didn’t understand that; that his fellow board members didn’t understand that; that the delegates who replaced the retiring board members didn’t understand that; is all the proof one could possibly need that National has succumbed to the political equivalent of Alzheimer’s disease.

Judith “Crusher” Collins ended-up piling failure upon failure. Either she wanted Goodfellow back, or she lacked the political chops to prevent his return. Whichever explanation is correct, National’s leader emerged from last weekend’s AGM looking stupid, weak, or (more accurately) like an uninspiring combination of the two. Her references to the certainty of sunrises notwithstanding, Collins did not give the appearance of a women who either wants, or expects, to lead her party into the 2023 election. That she may end up doing exactly that will merely confirm that there is no one in National’s parliamentary caucus who could do the job better – or wants to!

Can you imagine Rob Muldoon, Jim Bolger, Don Brash or John Key dutifully reciting this abject excuse for a political pitch to the disaffected and disappointed?

Over the next two years we will engage with experts and the public and you, our members, to develop solutions. We will listen and we will discuss. We will demonstrate we are the Party that can deliver on our promises, and has the ability to deliver solutions for the country’s big problems. Outlining a vision to the New Zealand public. And releasing policy in each of these and other areas as we go.

It is hard to know where to begin with this glutinous heap of political blancmange. Perhaps by re-emphasising that a political party seeks power to implement the policies advanced by its members, and the socio-economic forces those members represent. A viable political organisation contains within its ranks all the expertise it needs to knock the rough edges off the membership’s policy ideas. Moreover, why would any political party worthy of the name want to “engage” with the public? That is what it does every time an election is held! Only when the ballot boxes have been emptied, and the votes counted, does a political party discover whether or not its proffered “solutions” have been deemed equal to the public’s problems.

This is political Alzheimer’s with bells on. National has simply forgotten how to play “Democracy”. It also seems to have forgotten that the Opposition cannot deliver on its promises until it becomes the Government: that the delivery of solutions comes after the people have voted – not before. There is something both tragic and embarrassing in the spectacle of a once great party losing its wits.

National brought it on itself, of course, when the party decided that it could no longer be trusted to play the Democracy game successfully. After the debacle of the 2002 general election, when its Party Vote plummeted to a risible 21 percent, National allowed Steven Joyce to transform it into a sort of electoral holding company.

Instead of living, breathing, thinking citizens, National’s membership transformed themselves into a bunch of largely powerless political shareholders. Henceforth, they would not be turning up to an annual conference. [For readers under 35, annual conferences were where the members of political parties used to gather, in full view of the public, to argue about policy and elect themselves a President and a National Executive Committee.] No, what the Nats turned up to after 2002 was an AGM – where they dutifully rubber-stamped their “Board of Directors’” decisions and cheered-on the CEO. Safe enough when your CEO was a Don Brash or a John Key. Not so safe when your leader was a Simon Bridges, a Todd Muller or a “Crusher” Collins!

The medical experts say that the best defence against real Alzheimer’s is to keep one’s mind as active as possible. At 85-years-of-age, the National Party should be doing everything it can to stay sharp. Reading books, listening to invited speakers with exciting new ideas, writing and thrashing-out policy, debating the great issues of the day, vetting and choosing candidates, and making sure its office holders are up to snuff. Allowing all those jobs to be done by others (and done badly!) is not the way to stay sharp and remain a competitive player of the Democracy game. (At 105-years-of-age, Labour should probably be contemplating something similar!)

Though only a handful of the delegates attending last weekend’s AGM realised it, National was wandering dangerously close to the edge of a deep political hole. If it was to avoid a fatal fall, the party needed to wake itself up with a painful slap in the face. Having slapped itself, National should then have grabbed itself by the scruff of the neck and shaken itself until all the dead wood dropped off. Had it done that, then it just might have found the courage to reclaim its proper role as a living, breathing, thinking political party, in a living, breathing, thinking parliamentary democracy. But, that’s not what it did. Instead, frail and confused, it forgot what and where it was – and fell into the hole.

Which just leaves Act.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 10 August 2021.

Whistling “Dixie”.

Bottom Rail On Top: Two powerful forces are driving the surges of right-wing populism which, for more than a decade, have been transforming the politics of the West. The first, as always, is the actual, or feared, impact of adverse economic conditions. The second is composed of citizens fearful that their once dominant position in society is being challenged by “subordinate” minorities. “Bottom rail on top!” – as African-Americans colourfully described the social inversion inherent in Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation of the slaves.

TUCKER CARLSON is Fox News’ most persuasive voice. Mild-mannered, wide-eyed, and softly-spoken, he is a much deadlier proposition that his tiresomely stentorian colleagues. So persuasive is Carlson, that some Republicans are already talking him up as a potential presidential candidate in 2024. It is, therefore, a very big deal that Tucker Carlson, with the backing of Fox News and the Hungarian Prime Minister, Victor Orban, has recently been broadcasting live from Budapest. Tucker, as New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait wryly paraphrased, has seen the future – and it is illiberal democracy.

No more than the Labour and Green parties right here in New Zealand, does the Democratic Party in the United States fully grasp the danger represented by illiberal democracy and the authoritarian regimes it is bound to usher in. At either end of the Pacific Ocean, the Centre-Left is displaying a singular incomprehension of cause and effect.

Two powerful forces are driving the surges of right-wing populism which, for more than a decade, have been transforming the politics of the West. The first, as always, is the actual, or feared, impact of adverse economic conditions. The second is composed of citizens fearful that their once dominant position in society is being challenged by “subordinate” minorities. “Bottom rail on top!” – as African-Americans colourfully described the social inversion inherent in Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation of the slaves.

The period in American history known as the “Reconstruction Era”, which lasted, roughly, from 1869 until 1877, was an heroic effort to ensure that the bottom rail remained, if not on top, then at least not on the bottom. As such, it offers historians (and social reformers) a powerful lesson in the dangers of legislating “against the grain” of entrenched power.

For eight remarkable years, the federal government of the United States attempted to give practical effect to the equality now constitutionally guaranteed to the freed slaves of the defeated Confederacy. Nowhere on earth had such an attempt been made to politically, economically and socially empower a formerly servile population. During the two terms of President Ulysses S. Grant, former commander of the Union army, African-Americans were elected sheriffs and judges, won seats in state and federal legislatures, established schools and hospitals, and with assistance from the frankly socialistic Freedman’s Bureau, set up their own farms and businesses. “Bottom rail on top!”, indeed.

The fatal flaw of the Reconstruction project was that it could only be carried out under the protection of federal bayonets. Without the US army of occupation billeted across the South, the constitutional guarantees to African-Americans weren’t worth the paper they were printed on. In the fateful compromise thrashed out between the Republican and Democratic parties to resolve the bitterly disputed presidential election of 1876, the Republicans held on to the White House – but only at the price of withdrawing federal troops from the solidly Democratic South. It required less than 20 years for all the gains made by African-Americans since 1869 to be undone. By 1900, all-white city councils and legislatures were erecting statues to the military heroes of the lost Confederate cause all over the Jim Crow South.

The bottom rail was, once again, on the bottom.

As he was praising Orban’s regime, did Carlson detect in the Hungarian Prime Minister’s success in constructing a democratic system in which the “right” people always win, an all-too-audible echo of the American South’s elaboration of an outwardly democratic system in which the “white” people always won?

Orban has taken over the news media, suborned the Judiciary, redrawn electoral boundaries to the advantage of his party, and made it appreciably more difficult for his opponents to both cast a ballot and have it counted. By his very presence in Budapest, Carlson was signalling his endorsement of this debased form of democracy.

It is a form already familiar to Americans living in the 30 (out of 50) states already controlled by the Republican Party. By choosing to go to Budapest, Carlson was signalling to Republicans that if, by 2024, their party has reclaimed both Congress and the White House, then an American version of Orban’s illiberal democracy will be introduced across the entire United States. Such an outcome would further signal that, finally, the Southern inventors of Jim Crow democracy had their vindication, and “Dixieland” its long-delayed victory.

And the lesson Labour and the Greens should draw from this jaunt down the backroads and interstate highways of American political history is – what? Simply, that if progressive change has to be imposed and enforced by the naked power of the state, then the political reaction will likely be strong enough to undermine progressivism and democracy in equal measure.

If we think of the He Puapua Report as the blueprint for an “Aotearoan Reconstruction”, then we must also ask ourselves how it might be enforced. Are we sufficiently evolved politically to accept its radical changes without demur? Or will Pakeha, contemplating the imminent loss of their power and privilege, shout like them good-ole southern boys: “Hell, no!”? Confronted with such open resistance, who could the Government rely upon to fix bayonets?

Such questions are jarring. Only seldom are New Zealanders asked to confront the deep fissures running through their society. Since the crushing of Māori military resistance in the Land Wars, there has never been the slightest doubt as to the state’s ability to prevail over its internal enemies.

New Zealand’s long-lived and deeply-entrenched democracy further strengthens the state by furnishing its political rulers with a popular mandate for their policies. By first obtaining the permission of the electorate, even a radical programme of reform can be accepted. Introducing such a programme without a popular mandate, however, is a much riskier proposition. In buoyant economic circumstances a government might get away with it – just. But, should the economy turn sour in the midst of unpopular reforms, the party responsible will soon find itself in serious trouble.

Hard times and unmandated reforms are the classic catalysts for populist surges. Whether these surges draw their energy from the left or the right of politics is largely determined by the ideological complexion of the incumbent government. There are occasions, however, when the severity of the economic downturn and the radicalism of the government’s reform programme produce in the minds of voters fears that can only be called ‘existential’. Convince voters that both their economic security and cultural ascendancy are fundamentally threatened, and the party presenting the most convincing promise to eliminate such threats will win not only power, but be given a mandate to smash those deemed responsible for putting the rights of “the people” at risk. In these circumstances, the rights of minorities are ruthlessly overridden.

Labour and the Greens are whistling in the dark by dismissing all such considerations as “culture wars” distractions. Given that the wars are of their own making, this is a little hard to swallow. It was Labour who commissioned He Puapua – and then kept in secret. It was Labour and the Greens who promoted laws on “Hate Speech”, and defended giving nearly $3 million to the Mongrel Mob. While unemployment continues to fall, wages continue to rise, Covid-19 is kept at bay, and the National Party remains a moribund hulk, the culture wars Labour have started will smoulder rather than blaze. Let Covid breach the border, and the economy crash, however, and New Zealanders won’t need Tucker Carlson to teach them how to whistle “Dixie”.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 9 August 2021.

Dancing With The 400,000 You Came With.

The Dancing Queen: The lesson delivered was as old as electoral politics itself: Dance with the person you came with. Or, more prosaically: before looking after anybody else, a wise political leader looks after the people who brought her victory.

LABOUR’S 2005 WIN was, in the Duke of Wellington’s words, “a damn near run thing”, and Helen Clark knew it. For most of Election Night the blue line on TVNZ’s Party Vote graph had been ever-so-slightly above of the red. Broad grins spread across the faces of National’s strategists: Don Brash was going to do it! But then, unbelievably, at the last minute, the red line tilted upwards and crossed the blue. The “big South Auckland booths” had come in – and saved Clark’s government.

It would be heartening to record that Labour never forgot the help it received from the Pasifika and Maori voters of South Auckland. Certainly, Clark left her caucus in no doubt, when it met in the aftermath of their narrow victory, that the loyalty of the brown working-class would have to be rewarded. Bread and butter policies – not liberal crusades – must be the order of the day.

By 2008, however, Labour came across as a party more interested in helping Sue Bradford’s anti-smacking legislation across the line, than in building enough state houses to accommodate South Auckland’s poorest families. National’s new leader, John Key, cleverly underscored this perception by visiting the economically-stressed residents of McGeehan Close in Clark’s own electorate. His message was clear: “I haven’t forgotten the brown working-class.”

The lesson delivered was as old as electoral politics itself: Dance with the person you came with. Or, more prosaically: before looking after anybody else, a wise political leader looks after the people who brought her victory.

If Clark didn’t pass that lesson on to Jacinda Ardern, then she should have. And, if she did, how could Jacinda have forgotten it? Because, nearly a year into her second term, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Jacinda is in danger of forgetting who, by delivering her Government its unprecedented parliamentary majority, brought her to the dance.

Conservative political commentator, Matthew Hooton, has put the number of habitual National Party supporters who crossed over to Labour in the 2020 general election at approximately 400,000. It was to this enormous number of voters that Jacinda was speaking on election-night when she promised to govern “for all New Zealanders”. Like Clark in the aftermath of 2005, the present Prime Minister, at least initially, seemed to understand that the hearts and minds of these temperamentally conservative voters were precious. Having won them, she could not afford to lose them.

It did not require a rocket scientist to explain how those 400,000 hearts and minds had been captured. Just one hyphenated word will do the trick: Covid-Nineteen. So long as Labour continues to keep New Zealanders safe from the Coronavirus, those former National Party voters who lifted Labour from 37 percent in 2017, to 50.1 percent in 2020, will not be dancing with anyone else.

If someone hasn’t affixed a post-it note saying: “It’s the pandemic, stupid!” to the PM’s computer-screen, then, quick, do it now!

Because there’s something happening out there in the electorate. It’s probably too much to call it disaffection, but one wouldn’t be drawing too long a bow to call it unease. With the Delta variant of Covid-19 raging across the planet, the Australian bubble on “pause”, and the percentage of vaccinated Kiwis alarmingly small; this government is just one significant community outbreak away from an electorally catastrophic loss of confidence.

Because it’s not as if it’s doing superlatively well on all the other battle-fronts of the political war.

Homelessness and housing affordability are no closer to being brought under control. Only last week the Child Poverty Action Group released a report blaming the Government’s “inadequate” Covid-19 social support measures for tipping a further 18,000 children into poverty.

In the midst of a “Climate Emergency” we are importing more coal than ever, and burning it to keep the lights on.

It is also apparent that, very slowly, the volume of discontent over everything from the “Ute Tax”, to He Puapua, to “Hate Speech” legislation, to contracting the Mongrel Mob to fix the problems created by … the Mongrel Mob … is rising.

While New Zealanders can lift their eyes to the rest of the world and see only danger and derangement, Jacinda’s 400,000 Tories will waltz with her in breathless gratitude. But, just let that danger and derangement cross the border, and see how fast everybody’s dance partners change.

POSTSCRIPT: This essay was penned prior to the release of the latest Roy Morgan and Newshub-Reid Research polls. The sub-40 percent showing of Labour in the former, and the nearly 20 percent drop in support for the Government in the latter, merely confirm the analysis that Labour is in danger of forgetting who its friends are. - C.T.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 6 August 2021.

Neither Passionless, Nor Zombies.

Once Again With Feeling: What the parties on both sides of the aisle need to understand, however, is that New Zealanders are not passionless, and they are certainly not zombies. They are voters – and they want change. Now.

I NEVER BOUGHT Gordon McLauchlan’s Passionless People argument. The book was published in 1976 – barely a year since Rob Muldoon ran over Bill Rowling’s Labour Government in his big blue bus. Liberal-Left intellectuals like McLauchlan were appalled. It had never occurred to them that Labour – sitting on a 23-seat majority – could possibly lose the 1975 election. But, lose it did, and McLauchlan’s response was to do what all democratic politicians tell us we must never do – blame the people. New Zealanders, he said, were without passion – “smiling zombies”. As if a country filled with such people could ever have produced a song like Nature Enter Me!

The decisive argument against McLauchlan’s thesis came five years after the book’s publication, in 1981. No one could honestly accuse a nation that had just spent 56 days convulsing itself over Apartheid and Rugby of lacking passion. McLauchlan quickly found other things to write about.

Imagine my consternation, then, upon discovering that Karl du Fresne, hardly an ideological soulmate of McLauchlan’s, had nevertheless appropriated his “smiling zombies” description of New Zealanders and used it to diss them in the pages of the Australian Spectator.

Entirely unsurprisingly, given his right-wing predilections, the target of du Fresne’s wrath is the Labour Government of Jacinda Ardern. She stands accused of rushing through “an agenda of radical transformation quite unlike any the country has experienced.” (Given that this is the same country that went through the ‘Rogernomics Revolution’, that’s a pretty bold claim!) At the core of this “hostile takeover” is what du Fresne calls “Maorification”. Pursued “aggressively” by “activists of mixed Māori and European descent”, Maorification is, according to du Fresne, all about allowing these activists to “exercise power and influence that would otherwise not be available to them.”

It’s about here, I suspect, that we arrive at the nub of the issue. Du Fresne is by no means alone among Pakeha males of a certain age in sensing that the power they have carried in their hands for so long is beginning to slip through their fingers. While they have dozed in their comfortable armchairs, new social, economic and political forces have not only made it past the “Establishment’s” front gate, they’re through the front door! To say that du Fresne and his ilk are not happy, is to seriously understate matters. Just listen to this!

“So far, the smiling zombies – five million of them – have tacitly encouraged all this radical transformation through their silence.”

Whoa! Let’s just take a few seconds to parse that sentence. When du Fresne talks about five million New Zealanders, he’s talking about all of them – Jacinda’s whole “team”. This is, of course, hogwash. It is a matter of public record that in the 2020 General Election Labour attracted an astonishing 50.01 percent of the Party Vote, and the Greens 7.86 percent. A resounding vote of confidence in the parties of the Left. The Right, however, still managed to attract 33.4 percent of the Party Vote. Of the 2,919,086 votes cast, 957,306 went to National and Act. So, not quite five million, then. In fact, not even close!

Rather strangely, du Fresne also omits from his commentary any reference to the impressive demonstration mounted by New Zealanders living in rural and provincial New Zealand. The convoys of tractors and utes prompted much spontaneous applause from the “townies” who encountered them. Not everybody in New Zealand is silent.

Also missing from du Fresne’s analysis is any reference to the findings of the Aussie-based Roy Morgan polling agency. The last two of its polls have registered a fairly substantial decline in the Labour Party’s popularity – from 50 percent to less than 40 percent. In the latest Roy Morgan, the two major blocs, Labour-Green and National-Act are separated by just 7.5 percentage points. And there are still two years to go until the next election.

So, what is it, really, that’s eating Karl du Fresne? He’s been practicing the craft of journalism long enough to know that this government’s grasp on power is very far from being unassailable. Indeed, should the Delta variant of Covid-19 make it past New Zealand’s border and start spreading at speed among this country’s still largely unvaccinated population, then, for Labour, the political weather could turn very nasty, very quickly.

I suspect that the following sentence from du Fresne’s Spectator piece holds the key to his all-too-evident alienation:

“In mainstream media, Maori place names, most previously unheard of by most New Zealanders and unused even by people of Maori descent, have displaced official names bestowed by British colonists — ignoring the inconvenient fact that New Zealand cities and towns are British, not Maori, creations.”

Du Fresne is very far from being alone in finding this development extremely hard to swallow. Quite literally, it is hitting people where they live. As any Māori New Zealander will attest, it is no small thing to have the names you grew up with – and all that they signify in the history of your life – unceremoniously shoved aside by those speaking an unfamiliar tongue. Simply re-iterating that Māori is an official language of New Zealand is too cute by half for a lot of Kiwis. The arbitrary re-naming of their home towns is felt by many as an almost physical blow, and those responsible are considered guilty of attacking something fundamentally important to their sense of national – and personal – identity.

Du Fresne articulates their acute sense of alienation with considerable eloquence:

“New Zealanders returning after a few years abroad might wonder whether they’ve blundered into a parallel universe. A government that is pitifully thin on ministerial ability and experience is busy re-inventing the wheel, and doing it at such speed that the public has barely had time to catch its breath. To quote one seasoned political observer: ‘It seems like a hostile takeover of our country is underway and most people feel powerless to do anything about it’.”

Except, as Gordon McLauchlan discovered all those years ago, there is something people who feel themselves to be the target of a hostile political takeover can do about it. They can vote the politicians responsible out of office.

As a young man preparing to cast his first vote in 1975, I did not share McLachlan’s (and so many others’) carefree confidence that the Third Labour Government was unbeatable. I used to hitch-hike my way across the country in those days, and dutifully listening to my vehicular benefactors, I had heard the anger and alienation building slowly in their voices. When Rob’s big bus rolled over Bill Rowling I was not surprised. Too many Kiwis had lost faith in “Big Norm’s” dream.

What du Fresne, and all those who cling to the Right’s discredited neoliberal dream, need to grasp is that a very similar loss of faith has taken place in the hearts and minds of Māori, Pasifika, women and young New Zealanders. Jacinda Ardern’s “politics of kindness”, and her handling of the Christchurch massacres and Covid-19, continue to hold them – for the moment. They’re not irretrievably alienated – yet.

What the parties on both sides of the aisle need to understand, however, is that these people are not passionless, and they are certainly not zombies. They are voters – and they want change. Now.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 2nd August 2021.