Global Protests Rage On: But Slogans Are Not Plans.

Feeding The Flames: It is simply not enough to demand an end to “corruption”, or “inequality”, or the overbearing influence of the authorities in Beijing. These are just “lowest common denominator” demands: the sort of slogans that pull people onto the streets. They are not a plan.

WHERE’S THE PLAN? Across the planet massive protests, like Californian forest fires, rage out of control. In Santiago, Chile, hundreds-of-thousands march and are met by tear gas and water cannons. In Hong Kong, the confrontations between protesters and police have become almost routine. In Beirut, the crowds, having already brought down Lebanon's Prime Minister, are now going after its President. But what do they want? Where’s the plan?

It is simply not enough to demand an end to “corruption”, or “inequality”, or the overbearing influence of the authorities in Beijing. These are just “lowest common denominator” demands: the sort of slogans that pull people onto the streets. They are not a plan.

There’s reason for this lack of specificity. The moment a protest movement begins to consider specific reforms it opens itself up to debate and division. Unity, difficult to maintain at the best of times, seldom survives the democratic consideration of political alternatives. The moment competing reform programmes are presented, and the mass protest movement begins sorting itself into supporters and opponents of the specific measures being proposed, politics rears its ugly head. The intoxicating unanimity of chanting slogans in the street gives way to the peevish horse-trading of constructing a viable political alternative.

In the end, you can’t keep politics out of politics. A crowd is not a deliberative instrument – no matter how earnestly the Beirut masses insist that it is. Faced with the protesters’ fantasy, the exasperation of Lebanese parliamentarians is entirely understandable. In spite of their guarantees that the grievances of the people have been heard, and will be answered, the crowd stubbornly refuses to disperse. Their massive presence is all they bring to the table. It is not enough. Short of embracing the direct democracy of Ancient Athens, the crowd must, at some point, allow their elected representatives to do what they do.

The unreality in Hong Kong is even more pronounced. What do the protesters expect the Territory’s administrators to do? Set up an independent city state on the model of Singapore? Except, of course, their city state – unlike Singapore – will be defiantly democratic. But, no one seems to have a believable answer when sceptics demand to know under whose protection this independent democracy will be established?

Are the young people in the streets proposing to throw themselves back into the arms of the United Kingdom? Or do they want Trump’s United States to be their new sugar-daddy? And China? What do they suppose the People’s Republic will be doing as the Hong Kong population lines up for a second helping of imperialism? Do they really suppose that Beijing will cheerily wave good-bye as its most important financial hub simply walks away?

It is precisely to keep Hong Kong within its grasp that Beijing has ordered the Territory’s police to avoid the use of deadly force. Clearly, it is the Chinese Government’s intention to wait the protesters out. At some point, Beijing knows, these youngsters will begin to ask themselves how long they’re prepared to postpone completing their university studies. They will also begin to wonder whether the Territory’s extensive surveillance capabilities have placed their personal details on file. And, if they have, how might that affect their future careers?

If, however, the protesters are able, somehow, to convince the rest of Hong Kong’s population to follow them into the arms of the imperialists, then Beijing would no longer have any reason to exercise restraint. The People’s Liberation Army would be unleashed upon the youth of Hong Kong with exactly the same orders it carried into Tiananmen Square in 1989. The resulting bloodbath would be carefully scaled to put an end to any thoughts mainland Chinese youth might have of emulating Hong Kong’s example.

The poor and the marginalised throughout Chile should also give thought to the intentions of their country’s armed forces. It took the democratic elements of Chilean society 17 years to persuade the generals to return to barracks. How likely is it that they will stay there if buildings continue to be torched and shops continue to be looted? How long will the Chilean middle-class remain committed to democracy in the face of the poor’s open contempt for the rights of private property-owners?

Over recent days, the language used by Chile’s right-wing President, Sebastian Pinera, has carried frightening echoes of the language used by Augusto Pinochet – the general who overthrew Salvador Allende, Chile’s democratically elected socialist president, in 1973. Rioting and looting, while undoubtedly cathartic, is not a plan.

Popular rage can frighten politicians: sensibly directed it can even chasten them. What rage cannot do, however, is serve as a substitute for reason. The young, well-educated Lebanese who are tired of economic mismanagement and corruption, and who long for the day when secular politics is able to replace the careful balancing-act that keeps the country’s Christian, Sunni and Shia citizens from engaging in communal slaughter, would be most unwise to confuse themselves for the Lebanese “people”. They may represent the best and the brightest which Lebanon has to offer, but they do not represent all of it. Has Hezbollah joined the protests in the streets? And what will happen if/when it does?

When the world witnessed the “Arab Spring” it waited in fervent hope for an Arab Summer that never came. The young, middle-class Egyptians who crowded into Cairo’s Tahrir Square demanded democracy. But, when they got it, the answer it provided to the question: “Who are the people, and what do they want?” was not at all to their liking. Within months, the soldiers were back in charge, and the people’s choice, the Muslim Brotherhood, were back in jail – or dead. In politics, as in no other human activity, people should be very careful what they wish for.

Planning for the future will always produce a richer harvest than merely wishing away the present. Protest, if it is to be effective, has to make more than noise – it has to make sense.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 4 November 2019.

Gainful Employment: A Cautionary Tale.

Transformative Politics: The idea is to turn each recipient into an unwitting accomplice in their own transformation. From interested observer to hyped-up activist, sharing our messages promiscuously with ‘friends’. You’ll be part of an ever-expanding circulatory system, Jennifer, for the ideas that will win us the election.”

JENNIFER SKITTERED her chair back from the workstation and sighed. Three more hours. And then what? Pick up something to eat and back to the flat. A glass of wine and bed. Life. Wow. She’d been expecting more.

Not that she didn’t value the job. It wasn’t all that taxing and the pay was great. But is this what a degree in Political Science and English Literature got you? Managing “Paulabots” in a National Party troll farm?

It was her old school-friend, Toby, now high up in the Young Nats, who had asked if she was interested in making some easy money for a couple of months. Some friends of his, he said, major cyber-geeks, had spent months fashioning a vast army of bots, priming them to swarm, on command, all over social media. Their content favoured raw emotion over reasoned argument and was micro-targeted. “Wake-up calls”, Toby called them, designed to provoke a visceral response.

“That’s where you come in”, Toby explained. “You’ll have a hundred or so of these bots to manage. The moment someone responds to one of them, it’ll look exactly like an ordinary account, you’ll reply – keep them talking. You’ll have all the day’s talking-points in front of you and the links to be sent. The idea is to turn each recipient into an unwitting accomplice in their own transformation. From interested observer to hyped-up activist, sharing our messages promiscuously with ‘friends’. You’ll be part of an ever-expanding circulatory system, Jennifer, for the ideas that will win us the election.”

Jennifer wasn’t sure that she agreed with those ideas, but she knew enough to appreciate that this was now the way a modern political party communicated with the electorate – or, at least, with the key demographics its pollsters and the focus-group moderators identified as being potentially receptive to its pitch. Toby called them “The Persuadables”: voters who, if stimulated correctly, might be moved off “Undecided” or “Not Voting” and into “Definitely Voting”. Or, as her old PolSci lecturer used to say: “Off the sofa and into the polling-booth.”

And that had to be a good thing – didn’t it? Better than letting all those thousands of people, once again, sit out a general election. Young men in the past had fought and died defending Democracy. So, even if the means might be a bit dodgy, the end, lifting voter turn-out, more than justified the dissemination of little bit of fake news – didn’t it?

Ooop! That was another ping. Another person responding to the “A Hand Up – Not A Hand-Out” bot. Jennifer screwed up her nose as she read the commenter’s racist screed. She checked her cheat-sheet and rattled-off the relevant stats regarding welfare fraud. A little voice in her head was objecting that the stats she was using couldn’t possibly be true.

“Not your department”, her supervisor had told her, very firmly, on her first or second day on the job. “Stick to the talking-points provided. We’re not paying you to be a fact-checker.”

The commenter came back immediately. Those numbers she just sent had nailed it. Exactly what he had always thought! Did she have a link? Jennifer smiled. Do I have a link? She sent it off without hesitation. Telling the little voice in her head to STFU.

Even so, it wasn’t easy, not altogether. Surely there was a moral question here? Ethics – that was the word. Was she behaving ethically? Jennifer gave her head a little shake – as if she had a twig caught in her hair. She recalled some lines from T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

Coffee is what I need, she told herself. A nice strong cup of coffee. She wandered up distractedly between the neatly arranged workstations – their grey carpeted walls illuminated by the soft glow of the monitors – towards the expensive coffee-maker.

“S’it going, Jen? Alright?”

“Yep, all good. Lots of responses.”

“Tell me about it. This latest one has triggered all the nutcases!”

Jennifer sat down and sipped her coffee. J. Alfred Prufrock put in another appearance.

For I have known them all already, known them all –

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons

Much later. After a bus ride, a microwaved risotto, and a glass of wine, the doorbell rang.

The man on the doorstep seemed a bit ancient to be out after dark, knocking on doors. He wore, of all things, a cloth cap. In his hand he clutched a clipboard.

“Excuse me, young lady, I’m sorry to trouble you so late. My names Gerald, and I’m canvassing on behalf of the Labour Party. I was wondering, are there any Labour supporters in the household?”

Jennifer stared at the old man for a few flabbergasted seconds and burst out laughing.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 1 November 2019.

On The Rebound.

Signed, Sealed, Delivered, They're Yours: Is there any person more vulnerable than a jilted lover on the rebound? Or, anything more certain than that the charmer, the predator, the glib spinner of lies and promises will seek such broken people out? Yes, of course, he will love every one of them truly, madly, deeply and forever. If only they will give him their vote.

WHILE NEW ZEALANDERS were kicking-back over Labour Weekend, Germans and Argentinians were kicking out. In what is fast becoming a familiar story, “normal” politics has been suspended, incumbents unseated, and voter anger given free rein.

In German states dominated since re-unification by the centre-right Christian Democrats, the far-right AFD (Alternative for Germany) has surged ahead. In Argentina, the political descendants of quintessential populist, Juan Peron, have been returned to power by a vengeful electorate grown weary of neoliberal austerity. Everywhere the centre’s hold is tested – as things fall apart.

There was a time when growing inequality and entrenched poverty would have seen the Left swept into power. Why isn’t that happening? What has the Left done to put its traditional supporters in the electoral market for new friends and causes? The shortest and the most brutal explanation: the Left has abandoned them.

Not rhetorically, it must be said. When elections roll around, talk of solidarity and commitment is heard everywhere. The glorious past is invoked and the grimy glass behind which the old heroes still smile benignly is given its triennial clean. For many, the rhetoric is enough. That number, however, is dwindling. For more and more voters around the world the rhetoric of the traditional centre-left parties is not enough – nowhere near enough.

What they, quite rightly, suspect is that the leaders of the traditional working-class parties don’t really understand them anymore. This is hardly surprising. The incomes and lifestyles of legislators lifts them far above the stress-filled, cash-strapped lives of the people who are expected to vote for them. In Western countries particularly, it is now most unusual to find a member of the legislature without a university degree. Legislators who have risen to political office from anything other than a professional background are even rarer. The socio-economic gulf between the great mass of ordinary voters and their parliamentary representatives grows ever-wider.

What’s worse, many of these voters have begun to suspect that “their” party doesn’t even like them anymore. The worldview of the well-paid, highly-educated, professional politician is, they are pretty sure, radically different from their own. So different, in fact, that they have real difficulty in identifying anything about their electoral base that they could honestly say they admired. While the world of these “left-wing” legislators is chock-full of “tolerance” and “diversity”, their perception of the world inhabited by their party’s traditional supporters is of a place grunting obscenely with prejudice and hate. Hillary Clinton branded them “deplorables”. Less euphemistic centre-leftists call them sexists, homophobes and white supremacists.

That immigration policy has, in so many Western democracies, become the issue over which the traditional centre-left parties have finally parted company with their traditional supporters is not accidental. The emotions charging this issue are simple and raw: as raw and simple as the break-up of a love affair. Traditional voters for the centre-left parties feel abandoned and betrayed; their long-standing trust and affection cast aside in favour of a whole new slew of demographics: younger, smarter and allegedly free of prejudice and hate. Even worse, some of these new demographics are being invited to move in next door!

How else to explain the former Communist Party voters of France who now vote for Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National? The former supporters of the German social-democratic party, the SPD, who now vote for the neo-fascist AFD? The former Great Society Democrats who now vote for Donald Trump?

When the party you love and trust: the party that made sure you had a good job and a decent place to live; the party that guaranteed your kids a better economic future than their parents’; turns suddenly into something else. When it tells you, sadly, like the guy in the Bruce Springsteen song: “Those jobs are going boys – and they ain’t coming back”? Well that’s when you and your workmates, your neighbours, your congregation, begin to ask: “How did it happen?” and “Why did it happen?” and “Who do we fight?”

Is there any person more vulnerable than a jilted lover on the rebound? Or, anything more certain than that the charmer, the predator, the glib spinner of lies and promises will seek such broken people out? Yes, of course, he will love every one of them truly, madly, deeply and forever.

If only they will give him their vote.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 1 November 2019.

National's Going Gangbusters.

Criminal Enterprises: Gangs are not welfare institutions. Nor are they a substitute for the family their members never had. They are ruthless, violent, criminal money-making machines. That is all.

OKAY, first-things-first. Gangs exist for one purpose – and only one. They are a sure-fired, time-tested institution for making crime pay – and pay big. National is right to go after them, not only because most voters will cheer them on for doing so, but also because gangs injure individuals and damage society. Pushing any other kind of argument simply makes National’s job easier. “Look at the Left”, Simon Bridges will crow. “Soft on crime. The gangster’s best friend!”

In their essence, gangs are based on the notion that there is safety in numbers. This doesn’t just apply to violent conflict where, obviously, the more “soldiers” you bring to the fight the better chance you have of winning it. Safety in numbers also applies to practical criminal behaviour.

Hierarchy is the key. At the top, a handful of leaders, thoroughly insulated from actual offending, give orders to “patched” crime managers who, in their turn, send out wannabe gangsters to do the actual selling, thieving, hustling, whatever. All proceeds flow upwards. Those at the bottom get the least, those at the top the most. Patched membership of gangs is strictly rationed to preserve the organisation’s essential pyramidal structure.

A gang can only remain effective if its hierarchy is respected. Absolute loyalty is demanded and ruthlessly enforced. Among gang members and associates no person is more despised than the “nark”. This animosity is entirely rational. Nothing brings down those at the top of a gang hierarchy more effectively than an informer.

Keeping the hierarchy safe explains the aura of danger and violence that surrounds every effective criminal gang. It is a feature, not a bug, because without the ever-present threat of serious and/or fatal violence – against outsiders who would do it harm, and insiders who dare to flout its discipline, the gang would swiftly fall victim to its criminal competitors, or the Police.

Gangs are not welfare institutions. Nor are they a substitute for the family their members never had. They are ruthless, violent, criminal money-making machines. That is all.

National knows this. Its members and supporters see the effects of gang activity all the time. Small businesses and farmers fall victim to their depredations almost every day. Local professionals in the provinces see their effects everywhere. In their surgeries, if they’re doctors. In their classrooms, if they’re school principals. On the town streets, if they’re the local Police Sergeant. They talk about it grimly, over whiskies, at the local Rotary Club – and complain about it loudly to their local National Party MP.

In the major cities it’s even worse. These provide the most lucrative markets for criminal enterprise: for drugs; for stolen goods; for all those other things that “a guy’s gotta have” – but which the state forbids. The cost to metropolitan New Zealand of these gang activities is huge. The methamphetamine trade, in particular, destroys lives, careers, families, entire neighbourhoods. Its victims are responsible for an alarming percentage of serious theft and fraud. Inevitably, their moral, mental and physical deterioration imposes heavy burdens on our health and corrections systems. Those who see methamphetamine’s effects up-close: the resident doctors, nurses, police officers, probation officers and social workers who clean up its mess; despise the gangs who are the drug’s principal distributors. The gangsters also see the enormous harm caused by their offending – but they just don’t care.

So, if National knows this – and frames its policy accordingly – why don’t Labour and the Greens? What happens inside their caucuses when someone like Greg O’Connor, or Willie Jackson, or Stuart Nash stands up and tells them what the gangs are really like? Obviously, their caucus colleagues do not nod their heads and say: “Thanks guys, it’s always good to get the perspective of people with personal experience of the harm gangs do to individuals and communities. What we all need to do now is come up with an effective response.” It can only be supposed that a majority of Labour and Green MPs respond to the anti-gang attitudes of their “right-wing” colleagues with the stock answers of Sociology 101.

When “Big Norm” Kirk promised to “Take the Bikes off the Bikies” in 1972, it wasn’t because he had heard the same sort of slogans repeated endlessly throughout his political career and thought it advisable to do the same. Forty-seven years ago, Kirk’s promise had the punch of the new. That’s because bikie gangs were new – as were the Maori gangs emerging from the rapidly growing provincial industrial towns and urban ghettoes. He couldn’t do it, of course. Putting an end to gangs wasn’t any easier then than it is now.

If overseas experience is any guide, there are two ways of dealing with gangs. The easiest way, adopted by Labour nemesis, Rob Muldoon, is for the government to buy them off. Let them do what they do, but always on the proviso that no “civilians” get hurt. Selling cannabis to their neighbours and their kids – that’s fine. But stay out of the city centres and the leafy suburbs – and stop providing the news media with lurid headlines. The Buy-Off has its merits as a solution, but in the end it is no match for criminal greed. Inevitably, the gangs re-emerge: bigger, better resourced and much more dangerous.

The hard way to beat the gangs is through solid, old-fashioned police work – aided whenever possible by augmented legal powers and the new technology required to make dedicated policing effective. That’s how the FBI brought down the New York Mafia. That, and by using the information obtained through advances in electronic surveillance to apprehend and then “flip” lower level gangsters: promising them immunity and a new identity in return for spilling the beans on the “wise guys” at the top of the hierarchy.

National appears to have chosen the hard way. Yes, forcing suspected gangsters to prove that they are not living off the proceeds of crime before accessing welfare payments is a tough policy. But these are tough guys. Tough – and smart. It always pays to remember that the individuals in question are criminals – well-versed in the art of ripping-off any system incautious enough to offer them something for nothing. Shorn of all its political bells and dog-whistles, National’s policy, by forcing gangsters to rely solely on the income derived from their offending, should make them easier to put away.

It’s not subtle, and it’s not pretty. But, you know what? It just might work.

This essay was posted simultaneously on The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road on Thursday, 31 October 2019.

To Save Democracy, We Must Make The Media Our Own.

New Zealanders' Television: Obliterated almost completely from New Zealanders’ collective memory is the amazing collection of creative talent which was all-too-briefly assembled in the purpose-built Avalon television studios (above) situated ten miles north of the capital. If this period is recalled at all it is only for the purposes of laughing at the posh pronunciation and absurd hairstyles of the era’s ridiculously clunky (by contemporary standards) broadcasters.

WHO WILL RESCUE TV3? Almost certainly not the private sector. Not only is the commercial free-to-air broadcasting model broken, but TV3 remains burdened by its previous owners’ insatiable appetite for debt. These formidable liabilities have fatally undermined the network’s return to profitability. Even without the migration of advertising revenue to Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google and YouTube it would have continued to bleed money. Given these disadvantages, the probability of TV3 finding a private sector buyer is close to zero. Which leaves the obligation to rescue TV3 resting squarely with the New Zealand state – which is to say, with us.

Not that you’ll hear this, the most obvious long-term solution, articulated by many of those speculating on the fate of New Zealand’s most innovative and downright bolshie television network. “Nationalisation” is one of those words it is forbidden to utter in twenty-first century New Zealand without spitting on the ground. Public ownership is almost always rendered by media pundits as “government owned” or “state controlled” – as if Jacinda Ardern, in addition to being New Zealand’s prime minister, would instantly become TV3’s CEO and Editor-in-Chief. Accordingly, public ownership is branded unequivocally as a “bad thing” – the first stumble down the slippery slope that leads to Putin’s state-owned and government controlled propaganda network.

1970s Television: More Than Flared Jeans And Disco.

AS IS SO OFTEN the case in any discussion about who should own what in New Zealand, the historical ignorance of the younger generation stands athwart any progress towards non-neoliberal solutions. Fed horror stories about prime ministers vetting broadcast journalists’ questions and news bulletins crafted in the offices of the Tourist & Publicity Department, younger media players know nothing of the extraordinary creativity, vibrancy and independence of publicly-owned television in the late-1960s and 70s.

The latter decade, which coincided with the introduction of a second publicly-owned television channel, witnessed an extraordinary flowering of news and current affairs, documentary, drama and music programmes. For this very reason, the enemies of public ownership spare no effort in casting the 1970s as the decade that taste forgot – notable only for its flared jeans and disco. Obliterated almost completely from New Zealanders’ collective memory is the amazing collection of creative talent which was all-too-briefly assembled in the purpose-built Avalon television studios situated ten miles north of the capital. If this period is recalled at all it is only for the purposes of laughing at the posh pronunciation and absurd hairstyles of the era’s ridiculously clunky (by contemporary standards) broadcasters.

It is no accident that New Zealand’s golden era of television coincided with the changes initiated by the Norman Kirk-led Labour Government of 1972-1975. The freedom and independence that marked the broadcasting of the mid-1970s reiterated Kirk’s re-definition of New Zealand nationhood – especially his emphasis on steering a new and independent course diplomatically, economically and culturally.

The assertion of government ownership and state control, so often derided by the critics of public ownership, came not from the last democratic-socialist Labour Government, but from the Rob Muldoon-led National Government that ousted it. New Zealand the way Rob wanted it was all about hugging the fictions of the post-war era ever tighter to the ‘RSA Generation’s’ bosom. That the forces of creativity and innovation were injurious to the existing order of things was a prime-ministerial view of which public televisions’ bosses were left in not the slightest doubt. For Rob and his ‘Mob”, the proper focus of state television was the status-quo.

The Revolution That Wasn’t.

THE OVERTHROW OF MULDOONISM in 1984 brought a new status quo. To those broadcasters forced to endure the Big Chill of the late-1970s and early-1980s, the new order had a revolutionary feel – they even made a series about it. The reality, however, was that the new ‘Labour’ government’s ‘free-market’ broadcasting regime was way more insistent on ideological conformity than Muldoon’s government had ever dared to be. Richard Prebble’s Broadcasting Act of 1989 buried ‘public service broadcasting’ forever. A commercially-oriented, ratings-driven TVNZ was Rogernomics’ gift to the shattered remnants of what had once been New Zealand’s vibrant public media.

That’s why the long-awaited third television network was so warmly welcomed. TV3, by some unanticipated quirk of late-capitalist cultural logic displayed more creativity, innovation and independence than the ideologically straightjacketed TVNZ. For the past 30 years, the privately-owned TV3 network has, heroically and paradoxically, filled the vacuum created by the deliberate destruction of public service broadcasting in 1989.

Certainly, there was an attempt to re-inject public service ideals into the state broadcaster under the Clark-led Labour Government of 1999-2008. Unfortunately, the commercial ethos was so deeply entrenched in TVNZ that removing it would require, in the powerful metaphor of veteran broadcaster Ian Fraser “a neutron bomb” – i.e. something that would keep the infrastructure intact while wiping out all the people inside it. The TVNZ ‘Charter’ and its good intentions did not survive the 2008 change of government.

Enter Democracy’s Digital Gravediggers.

IN THE TEN YEARS since then both the global and the local media environment has been utterly transformed. Technological change and the radical cultural responses it has prompted have disrupted not only newspaper publishing and broadcasting, but also the democratic political system they did so much, historically, to construct. While the future of digital communication is assured, the same cannot be said for the gathering and dissemination of news. In the words of The Spinoff’s Duncan Greive:

“Journalism is different. It has been indirectly funded, through advertising, since its birth. Advertising no longer sustains it, nor will it ever again. The new advertising giants make no journalism, nor have any interest in doing so. We are facing a New Zealand in the not too distant future in which information becomes a tightly held and costly commodity (the new premium Herald is $200 a year, the NBR twice that), with access to it limited to those who have the facility to pay for it.”

Put more bluntly, the not-too-distant future will not be democratic.

That does not have to be the way things develop in New Zealand. Democracy and journalism, cultural creativity and innovation, can survive and thrive: but only if sufficient political will is summoned to the task of transitioning the newspaper and television industries out of their current configurations and into publicly managed structures dedicated to preserving the critical thinking and free speaking so essential to the practice and defence of democracy.

Freedom & Funding

OF COURSE the Duncan Greives of this world will object that taking current affairs journalism, and cultural production generally, under the wing of the state will produce exactly the same reduction in diversity that the “pompous relics” at the Commerce Commission deemed so injurious to the public good in relation to the proposed merger of NZME and Stuff. But is that really the only outcome? Is that what actually happened back in the days when television was principally funded from the public purse?

The answer is “No.” The producer-driven television of the 1970s generated programmes that were as quirky as they were challenging. Ranging from the still much-beloved Country Calendar, to the ground-breaking historical drama series, The Governor, the output of the two publicly-owned television channels was formidable. Editorial freedom, moderated by professional responsibility and a strong understanding of and connection with their viewers, empowered New Zealand’s television producers to turn out programmes of impressive quality and impact.

Broadcast live out of the Avalon studios, The Dean/Edwards Show – featuring Brian Edwards and another British import, Michael Dean – anticipated the big, live-audience shows of what came to be called “reality” television. Perhaps their most memorable programme was devoted to the power of advertising. With wicked inventiveness, the production team hired an advertising agency and the actor Ian Mune to “sell” the Cooks & Stewards Union (infamous for going on strike during the school holidays) which they did with extraordinary and highly revealing effectiveness.

All that is required to generate the most stunning television is editorial freedom and the funding necessary to make it real. It is precisely this magical combination that explains the runaway success of HBO and Netflix-commissioned shows.

Public Media, Not State Media.

THE BEST WAY to secure the full benefits of public media is to ensure that it is firmly embedded in the local community. Once again, young New Zealanders have no memory of the time when each of the four main centres boasted an extensive regional television service. Not only did these regional production centres screen their own local news and current affairs, but also produced shows for broadcast on the nationwide network. The award-winning children’s programme “Spot On”, for example, was produced in TV One’s Dunedin studios.

The social, political and cultural impact of the hundreds of staff employed by these regional production centres was considerable. A healthy dose of irreverence and anarchic joy was injected into the inward-looking provincial communities their presence so thoroughly disrupted. With the broader public acting as their patrons, they unleashed the energy of art and the power of critical thinking against conservative regional cliques grown accustomed to smothering both.

Such was the public – the social-democratic – media culture that Rogernomics, Ruthanasia and the whole neoliberal revolution swept away.

Rebuilding Trust In Public Ownership.

AH, YES, but as Kit Marlowe says in The Jew of Malta, “that was in another country; And besides, the wench is dead”. For a while at least a resurrected system of public media ownership would need to be protected by some pretty sturdy walls of public accountability. The taxpayers would have to be assured that their new media system was, as Fox News boasts, “fair and balanced” and that bodies existed to make sure it was.

At both the regional and national level this could be achieved by appointing boards that were genuinely representative of the communities they served. Like the boards-of-directors of the long-gone Trustee Savings Banks, the governing bodies of these new media organisations could include nominees from the business community, the trade unions, educational institutions and communities of faith, along with representatives of management and staff. Such bodies would be there to protect not only the rights of the audience, but also the editorial freedom and independence of producers and journalists. These guardians would, themselves, be guarded by the provisions of statute law.

A Matter Of Political Will.

NONE OF THESE CHANGES will be forthcoming from the present government. Broadcasting Minister, Kris Faafoi, has already made it clear that he and his Cabinet colleagues have not the slightest intention of riding to TV3’s rescue. On the left of New Zealand electoral politics in 2019 there is neither the political will, nor any real political understanding of the vital role played by the media in both preserving and fostering a democratic culture. Like practically all politicians, Labour, Green and NZ First MPs regard the media in general, and journalists in particular, as the enemy. Though most of them had more delicacy than to say so out loud, Winston Peters’ “Good riddance!” response to TV3’s imminent demise was, almost certainly, their own.

The truly radical insight of the Kirk Government was that a genuinely independent public broadcasting system, driven by a desire to serve the public good, and insulated from the tutelage of the advertisers’ almighty dollar, would always end up serving the interests of the citizens it empowered – and hence the interests of the political party most dedicated to their welfare. Only when those same citizens grasp the urgent democratic necessity of rescuing not just TV3 but the entire New Zealand news media, will they be in a position to infuse their parliamentary representatives with the political will to make it happen.

If you don’t like where your country is right now, you should perhaps reflect upon how vital it was for the people who brought you here to first corrupt and then break the media institutions whose democratic duty it was to warn New Zealanders about where they were being taken – and why.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 25 October 2019.

Putting The Check In Right-Wing Prisoners’ Mail.

If we are content to muzzle those with whom we disagree today, we should not be surprised when they muzzle us tomorrow.

IT ALWAYS STARTS SMALL. Colin James, in his masterful The Quiet Revolution, reminds us that what ended as “Rogernomics” began with the humble potato. National’s free-marketeers rebelled at a departmental proposal to regulate the size, shape and quality of New Zealand’s potato crop. It was a small victory, easily missed, but the arguments deployed to win it were destined to sweep all before them in the years to come. That’s why it pays to keep your ears peeled for arguments that sound a little off. What seems preposterous one year has a nasty habit of being enshrined in law the next.

By the time you read these words one of those seriously preposterous arguments will indeed have become law. With the combined support of the Labour, Green, and NZ First parties, the Corrections Amendment Bill sailed through its Third Reading in the House of Representatives on Tuesday afternoon.

I wish I could tell you that the National Party fought a lonely rear-guard action against its passage, but that would be a lie. Because the incident which prompted this law change involved the alleged perpetrator of the Christchurch Mosque Massacres, no politician seeking re-election would dream of turning it into a cause célèbre.

When a letter penned by the alleged Christchurch Shooter was mistakenly permitted to leave Paremoremo Maximum Security Prison, and make its way into the hands of the accused’s white supremacist supporters, and from there, inevitably, onto the Internet, an immediate cry went up for increased legal restrictions on prisoners’ right to communicate with the outside world.

No matter that the power already existed to censor or withhold prisoners’ mail; nor that the failure to exercise that power was Corrections NZ, it was decided by the Coalition Government that the law must be strengthened.

Why?

The truly sinister answer would appear to be that the administrative failure on the part of Corrections NZ offered a wonderful opportunity to place upon the statute books, for the first time, vastly expanded legal powers to restrict New Zealand citizens’ and residents’ freedom of expression. With the passage of the Corrections Amendment Bill, content which, in the judgement of the prison authorities, discriminates against any person on the basis of race, religious belief, sexual orientation, sex, marital status, disability, age, political opinion and employment status will constitute grounds for censoring and/or withholding a prisoner’s mail.

What’s wrong with that? The communications of extremists and terrorists, especially those responsible for events such as the Christchurch Mosque Massacres, have the power to inspire similar acts of extreme violence elsewhere in the world. Of course they must be withheld!

Indeed they must. Any prison charged with detaining a terrorist of such lethality must exercise extreme vigilance. All of their communications must be carefully studied by experts whose prime responsibility must be keeping the public safe. That’s what should have happened with the alleged Christchurch Shooter. The powers to censor and withhold his letters were there – they simply were not used.

There is, however, a very big difference between a prisoner like the Christchurch Shooter and your common-or-garden variety criminal with right-wing ideas. It’s a difference the new legislation declines to recognise. In addition to being punished for the crimes they have committed, right-wing inmates are to be further punished by having their internationally recognised right to communicate with the outside world made subject to the political judgements of their jailers. Offensive material published by persons living outside prison will continue to escape censorship. Prisoners’ opinions, on the other hand, may be legally suppressed.

How fortunate for the world that the First Amendment to the American Constitution made it impossible for Alabama’s prison authorities to avail themselves of legislation such as New Zealand’s Parliament has just passed. Had they possessed in 1963 the legal authority we have vouchsafed to our prison wardens in 2019, can it be doubted that Dr Martin Luther King’s celebrated “Letter From Birmingham City Jail” would never have seen the light of day? A few sentences from that letter bear repeating:

Dr Martin Luther King in the Birmingham City Jail, April 1963.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

If we are content to muzzle those with whom we disagree today, we should not be surprised when they muzzle us tomorrow.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 25 October 2019.

Paying For Our Pakeha "Guilt" And "Privilege".

Shouldn't That Be: "Wrong White Crowd"? Rather than apportion guilt, would it not have been wiser for the makers of Land Of The Long White Cloud to accept that the Pakeha of 2019 are not – and never will be – “Europeans”? Just as contemporary Maori are not – and can never be again – the Maori who inhabited these islands before Cook’s arrival. Is it not the case that both peoples are victims of historical forces too vast for blame, too permanent for guilt?

PERHAPS THE BEST WAY to assess the quality of the NZ Herald’s “Land of the Long White Cloud” is by studying Tom Clarke’s characterisation of James Cook. Clarke begins by making Cook a member of the British aristocracy. He gives him the accent of Hugh Laurie’s Bertie Wooster, along with most of his mannerisms. Clarke then proceeds to deliver a false description of Cook’s mission – complete with jokes about planting flags and claiming countries. All done with a smile, of course, in the interests of lightening what the series’ creators clearly believe to be a very serious matter. Even so, if you’re trying to dispel some of the myths surrounding New Zealand’s origins, then falsifying the historical record would seem to be a very peculiar way of going about it.

Because James Cook was not a member of the British aristocracy, he was a plain-speaking Yorkshireman of humble origin. Tom Clarke should, therefore, have based his accent more on the characters of Heartbeat and Last of the Summer Wine than on Jeeves & Wooster. Indeed, had Clarke bothered to read anything written by a reputable historian concerning Cook’s voyage of 1769 (Anne Salmond’s springs to mind) he would have encountered a clever, considered and compassionate man of (for his time) unusually enlightened opinions. Trouble is, satirising that sort of Englishmen would have required more of the actor than he was either able, or permitted, to give.

Clarke’s representation of Cook does, however, speak directly to the profound intellectual weakness at the heart of this so-called documentary about “white guilt”. The expression “begging the question” is often used erroneously to indicate a failure to raise the obvious and most important question/s about an issue. While LOTLWC certainly fits this description, it also conforms to the expression’s classical meaning. LOTLWC begs the question because the conclusion arrived at by the series’ makers – that “whites” are guilty – is derived entirely from their original premise – that “white guilt” exists.

It certainly explains why the makers selected the eight individuals whose opinions constitute the series’ content. Originally pitched to NZ On Air (the series’ principal funder) under the working title “After White Guilt”, the first of the six recorded episodes contains not the slightest hint that attaching the word “guilt” to New Zealanders of European origin might be in any way problematic.

LOTLWC simply assumes that the Pakeha settlement of New Zealand was a crime. (Why else use the word “guilt”?) Accordingly, New Zealand’s colonial history is presented as the work of murderers and plunderers. The descendants of these criminals – the Pakeha New Zealanders of 2019 – find themselves cast in the role of people living off the proceeds of crime: receivers of stolen goods. The suggestion, so far unspoken, but lurking just beneath the surface of the participants’ remarks, is that these crimes must be acknowledged and atoned for, and the stolen property returned to its rightful owners.

One must assume that the participants in and the creators of LOTLWC really are as naïve and innocent of political reality as they appear. To assume otherwise casts them in the role of conscious and deliberate inciters of hatred and division between Pakeha and Maori – to the point of risking full-scale civil war. Nothing in the history of the human species suggests that people can be persuaded to part with their property, or their autonomy, without a fight. Nor does the historical record attest that such wholesale dispossession can be accomplished except in the aftermath of their complete and unalterable defeat.

“But that is exactly what we are saying!”, one can imagine LOTLWC participants expostulating. “That is what our ancestors are guilty of – and we are the beneficiaries of their crimes!”

Except, when viewed in its entirety, the history of human occupation in these islands suggests that what happened between Maori and Pakeha in the middle of the nineteenth century was far from exceptional. For the best part of 500 years, the killing of human-beings and the appropriation of the survivors’ property and autonomy, had been the norm. All the Europeans brought to the game were more effective weapons and superior tools – both of which the Maori acquired and mastered in a very short space of time.

Indeed, what distinguished the 70 years between the arrival of Cook in 1769 and the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, was an astonishing escalation in warfare, killing, dispossession and dislocation – not at the hands of the Europeans, but by the indigenous people. When Cook arrived, New Zealand boasted approximately 100,000 inhabitants. By the end of the Musket Wars, in the mid-1830s, between 20,000 to 30,000 Maori had disappeared. The Europeans were impressed, but not surprised, they’d been doing the same things to one another for the best part of 3,000 years!

When the Pakeha settlers finally launched their own war of conquest in the Waikato in 1863, not only could they rely upon the 12,000 soldiers sent from Britain to support the colonial government, but also on the military support of Maori tribes unwilling to turn the clock back to the time before Cook’s arrival. They wagered on their people being strong enough to survive te riri Pakeha, the white man’s anger, and his greed, and they were right. Two-hundred-and-fifty years after Cook’s arrival, the Maori population of New Zealand is five times what it was in 1769. That is not a claim which many of the planet’s indigenous peoples can make – especially those inhabiting its temperate zones.

The brute facts of New Zealand history suggest that if it’s blame Maori and Pakeha are looking for, then there’s plenty to go around. Rather than apportion guilt, would it not be wiser to accept that the Pakeha of 2019 are not – and never will be – “Europeans”? Just as contemporary Maori are not – and can never be again – the Maori who inhabited these islands before Cook’s arrival. Would it not, therefore, be wiser to accept, finally, that both peoples are victims of historical forces too vast for blame, too permanent for guilt?

Which immediately raises another interesting question: Why NZ On Air felt moved to promise the makers of LOTLWC (aka “After White Guilt”) close to $140,000 of public funding? As already noted, the series is not an exploration of the way in which Pakeha have responded to a dramatic expansion in the range and depth of historical understanding in New Zealand – that would have been a very useful exercise to have supported. It is, instead, the result of taxpayers coughing-up a lot of cash for eight individuals, all subscribing to an extreme and highly tendentious interpretation of New Zealand history, to lecture them on what awful people their ancestors were, and what they should be doing to assuage their “guilt” and off-load their “privilege”.

That $140,000 question deserves an answer, especially given the fact that LOTLWC’s sponsoring institution, the New Zealand Herald, was founded in December 1863, five months after after the invasion of the Waikato, for the express purpose of ensuring that the colonial government (also based in Auckland) did everything possible to extinguish the “native rebellion” and seize the “rebels’” lands. In the light of that little snippet of New Zealand history, would it not have been more appropriate for NZME to assuage its “Pakeha Guilt” out of its own pocket?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 22 October 2019.