A Sorry Excuse For A Green Party.

Cuckoo In The Nest? Unlike Rod Donald, Jeanette Fitzsimons, Russel Norman and Metiria Turei, Shaw has never shown any recognisable affinity for the kind of Green Party they represented. Nothing I have ever heard from Shaw has ever reassured me that he subscribes to either the hardcore anti-capitalist critique of the ecological socialists, or the radical anti-materialist ideas of the Greens’ visionary forerunners in the Values Party. On the contrary, Shaw has always struck me as the sort of Green politician you would be sent if you asked a high-powered corporate public-relations agency to supply one.

JAMES SHAW is sorry. Yes he is! Genuinely, abjectly, politically and electorally sorry – as he damn well should be! His decision to grant 12 million public dollars to a privately-owned Taranaki “school” (which appears to specialise in promoting every cliched remnant of the 1970s hippy culture) was way beyond stupid. If the Greens sink below the crucial 5 percent MMP threshold on 17 October, then a fair old chunk of the responsibility will belong to Shaw.

 All over the country, people are asking each other: “How could he have been so dumb?” Leaving aside the school’s promotion of New Age mumbo-jumbo which, of itself, raises serious questions about the adequacy of Ministry of Education oversight, there was the small, but hopefully still important, matter of Green Party policy. How could Shaw not have known that what he was doing contradicted his party’s long-standing opposition to the public funding of private education? Did he really think that Green Party members and supporters wouldn’t notice?

 Maybe he did. Unlike Rod Donald, Jeanette Fitzsimons, Russel Norman and Metiria Turei, Shaw has never shown any recognisable affinity for the kind of Green Party they represented. Nothing I have ever heard from Shaw has ever reassured me that he subscribes to either the hardcore anti-capitalist critique of the ecological socialists, or the radical anti-materialist ideas of the Greens’ visionary forerunners in the Values Party. On the contrary, Shaw has always struck me as the sort of Green politician you would be sent if you asked a high-powered corporate public-relations agency to supply one.

 Unkind? Probably. But the transformation which has led the Greens to this unfortunate fork in the road has been driven by the corporate world’s urgent need to, first, disarm, and then, absorb, its most serious threat. The above reference to public relations is, therefore, not intended as an insult. It speaks directly to the way in which the world’s largest corporations have expended billions on convincing the world’s peoples that, while capitalism may have got the planet into its present predicament, it is also – paradoxically – the only viable means of getting it out.

 Shaw’s career, prior to entering Parliament, was built upon this dubious proposition. He became an indefatigable promoter of “Green Capitalism”: a guide, if you will, leading consumers to the promised land of “sustainable” capitalist production. He offered living proof to the rising generation of ambitious Green Party activists that they could look sharp, rub shoulders with the rich and famous, and still be non-gender-specific siblings in the struggle to save Parent Earth. Just like Bono.

So, why not throw a wad of taxpayer cash at a couple of millionaires committed to training-up an army of green warriors and sending them forth to take their rightful places around the boardroom tables of a climate-change-stricken planet? Fully conversant in the idioms of wokefulness; tested adepts of ceremonial magic; shrewd manipulators of social-media and spreadsheets: what’s not to like?

 How like the masters of capitalism to simply toss all the contradictory elements of the green worldview into their cultural blender and flick the on-switch. Gaia-worship and Marxism; Reason and Unreason; Science and Mysticism; mix ‘em all up. Throw the empirical proof of climate-change and the radical paranoia of the anti-vaxxers into the same swirling potion and invite all the wide-eyed seekers after a better world to drink deep. When your only purpose is to render effective resistance impossible, feeding people contradictions makes perfect sense.

 Just so long as the Greens cease to be the party of well-informed idealists that bought this country 20 years of freedom from genetic engineering. The party that forced all the other parties in Parliament to at least pay lip-service to the reality of climate-change. The party that offered voters the inspiring examples of Rod Donald’s great heart and Jeanette Fitzsimons’ brilliant mind; the principled activism of Sue Bradford; the wisdom and courage of Keith Locke; the resinous mysticism of Nandor Tanczos. The party that, for however brief a moment, vouchsafed their fellow New Zealanders a glimpse of what the world could look like if we loved it and each other with equal fervour.

 The only school fit to teach young New Zealanders the geography of this new heaven, this new earth, is a genuine Green Party. The sort James Shaw wouldn’t want to be found dead in.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 4 September 2020.

Shifting Sand.

Beneath The Beach - The Rocks! Once famed for its broad beaches of golden sand, the coastline of Morocco is in the grip of an ecological catastrophe. Millions of tons of precious sand are disappearing on the backs of lorries, donkeys and the poor. Jagged rocks now stand exposed where once the backsides of wealthy western tourists rested comfortably.

IT’S THE PERFECT PARABLE for capitalism. Set in Morocco, it’s about the sand that’s fast disappearing from the country’s tourist beaches.

 Once famed for its broad beaches of golden sand, the coastline of Morocco is in the grip of an ecological catastrophe. Millions of tons of precious sand are disappearing on the backs of lorries, donkeys and the poor. Jagged rocks now stand exposed where once the backsides of wealthy western tourists rested comfortably.

 It's illegal, of course, this mining of Morocco’s precious sand, and were the laws protecting it enforced there would be no problem. But, those laws are not enforced. They never are: not when the choice is between protecting the environment and protecting business. So the big trucks roll out, passing with a roar the urban poor toiling away with their shovels.

 Where does it go? Into the big coastal cities, naturally, where corrupt property developers, hand-in-glove with equally corrupt local and national politicians, are throwing-up long lines of luxury hotels to accommodate the vast herds of foreign tourists who (pre-Covid) flocked to enjoy – you guessed it – Morocco’s golden beaches!

 But wait, there’s more. The illegally acquired sand which these developers are pouring into their concrete-mixers contains perilous quantities of highly corrosive sea-salt. Concrete structures built with this kind of sand are tragedies waiting to happen. In just a few years they will begin to crack, crumble, and collapse in a cloud of salty dust.

 Just about everybody in a position to prevent this from happening is well aware of the danger. That none of them will do anything about it is explicable, almost entirely, in terms of the intricate, mutually-rewarding relationships capitalism creates and protects to facilitate the generation of wealth and the realisation of profit.

 Protecting the beaches is, obviously, in the long-term interest of everyone involved. Without the beaches there will be fewer and fewer tourists; fewer and fewer guests to pay for the construction of all that additional accommodation; and fewer still when all those structurally unsound hotels begin collapsing on top of them. Unfortunately, the long-term interest of everyone is being sacrificed to the short-term interest of the individuals and corporations deriving immediate monetary reward from the shifting of Morocco’s sand.

 The failure of humanity to respond proportionately to the existential threat of climate change is really just a case of Morocco’s disappearing beaches writ large. Every politician in a position to take effective remedial action against anthropogenic global warming will restrict their response to a great many words and a handful of symbolic gestures, because taking truly effective action would harm the economic welfare of far too many of their constituents.

 It was George “Dubbya” Bush’s vice-president, Dick Cheney, who put it best when he informed those clamouring for action on climate change that “the American way of life is non-negotiable”.

 No Republican (or Democratic) President is going to bankrupt the big oil companies, crash the automobile industry, vastly increase the price of private travel, or mandate the radical scaling back of personal consumption, that any realistic effort to halt global warming would necessarily entail. Rather than surrender their immediate interests and comforts, the beneficiaries of industrial civilisation will go on backing it until, harking back to our Moroccan example, all the tourists disappear and the hotels start falling down.

 Capitalism’s most extraordinary achievement is to have created what the French “Situationist” philosopher, Guy Debord, called “The Society of the Spectacle”. In capitalism’s glittering palace of commodities, human relationships take second place to the relationships consumers form with their purchases.

 In the Society of the Spectacle watching replaces doing. It’s the place where we either become spectators to our own lives, or spectators to the lives we aspire to. That’s the clincher: those inside the glittering arcade watch themselves, while those outside watch them watching. The masses’ political dreams, contra Marx, are not about torching the theatre – they’re about being seated in the audience. What brought down the Berlin Wall? Pornographic videos and blue-jeans.

 What can those who grasp the civilisation-destroying potential of climate change possibly put up against the capitalist spectacle? What will they tell the huddled billions yearning to breathe air-conditioned air? Drive a sleek European car? Watch a jumbo-sized hi-def flat-screen TV?

 “In the interests of the human generations yet to be born, you must go on living in a corrugated iron shack on a rubbish dump.”

 Good luck with that!

 You might as well tell those poor Moroccan day-labourers with their shovels to stop digging. Why would they, when behind you they can see the corrupt construction companies’ big lorries carting away sand by the ton? If they decide, instead, to keep on digging – so their families can keep on eating – who can blame them?

 The question today’s socialists run from is the very same question yesterday’s socialists answered with such confidence and conviction: “What have you got that’s better than capitalism?” For a brief, enthralling period they pointed to the revolutionary society taking shape in the Soviet Union. By the late 1920s, however, it was becoming increasingly clear that the ebullient Soviet newsreels were not telling them the truth. Disillusionment would have set in much sooner had it not been for the beating capitalism took from the Great Depression. Post-World War II, however, and post-Stalin, the world of “actually existing socialism” had nothing to set against the astonishing abundance and novelty of the capitalist West. When an old comrade – a paid-up member of the Moscow-aligned Socialist Unity Party, no less – was asked where he’d rather live, Russia or New Zealand, there was only one honest answer he could give.

 When you’re shovelling the beach into bags, your mind is focused on the money it will bring, not the wasteland that will be left behind. Until runaway climate change finally switches off their bright lights forever, the day-labourers of Planet Earth will keep their eyes firmly fixed on the glittering spectacle of capitalism’s magic cities.

 Built out of, and on, the corrosive sands which they, themselves, have shifted.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 3 September 2020.

What Just Didn't Happen?

The New Old Triumvirate: Jacinda Ardern, back in 2017, confers with her longest-standing political allies, Grant Robertson and Chris Hipkins.

 

WHAT JUST HAPPENED? Over the course of the past 72 hours something changed. Exactly what isn’t clear, not yet, but something has. New Zealanders feel it in their bones, in their hearts, and they’re scared.

 When it’s impossible to know what has happened, the next best thing is to try and establish what hasn’t happened.

 Accordingly, I would like the Director-General of Health’s, Ashley Bloomfield’s, reassurance that the ridiculous – not to say dangerous – Covid-19 Alert, which more-or-less ordered every person living in South and West Auckland to be tested for the virus, was NOT a deliberate attempt to destabilise the New Zealand Government’s management of the pandemic.

 Because, what civil servant in their right mind would send out such a message without the formal, traceable, approval of those at the very summit of the civil service hierarchy? More to the point, what sort of senior public servant could fail to appreciate the sheer absurdity of the order and its potential for inducing something close to panic amongst the population of South and West Auckland?

 Occam’s Razor allows of only two reasonable explanations. 1) That the action was deliberate and its consequences foreseen. 2) That the calibre of the staff responsible for its release was so abysmal that the notice’s glaring deficiencies passed unnoticed. Neither explanation offers us much comfort. The first admits to sabotage. The second to utter incompetence. The question to be decided, therefore, is whether we are looking at a conspiracy or a cock-up?

 What motive would the individuals responsible for that errant notice have for sabotaging the Government’s orderly transition from Level 3 to Level 2.5?

 The most obvious answer lies in the all-too-evident trepidation among scientists, civil servants, and members of the general public, that the move out of Level 3 might be premature – dangerous even. Those holding this view have argued that the “perimeter” of the South Auckland Cluster had yet to be conclusively established. The alarming possibility therefore arises that the offending notice may have been issued as a form of institutional protest against what a faction within the All-of-Government Committee (AOGC)  responsible for managing the pandemic considered a reckless government decision? A decision driven not by the science, but by political and commercial interests no longer willing to be guided by expert opinion.

 Please Dr Bloomfield (wherever you are!) please tell me this is NOT what happened. Because if I’m right, and the release of that notice wasn’t simply another demonstration of massive institutional incompetence (to set alongside the many others) then public trust and confidence in the Government’s handling of the Covid-19 Pandemic, already visibly shaken, will crumble and collapse.

 Moreover (as if the above speculation isn’t wild enough) there’s the additional concern that extreme events, like the publication of that Covid-19 Alert, seldom happen in isolation.

 And that is why I would like the reassurance of the Prime Minister that she has NOT – at the insistence of the Finance Minister and the Health Minister – abandoned her hitherto rock-solid determination to put the welfare of the New Zealand people ahead of the profits of New Zealand businesses. Please, someone – anyone – tell me, tell the nation, that this is NOT what happened.

 While they’re at it, they could also tell us why it was that Chris Hipkins, interviewed on Magic Talk Radio just a couple of hours ahead of Jacinda’s appearance in the Beehive Theatrette at 1:00pm on Sunday, 30 August, insisted that the government would be “ploughing-on” with the transition from Level 3 to Level 2.5?

 The Health Minister confirmed at today’s (31/8/20) 1:00pm Covid Update that he was well aware of the situation relating to the “mistaken” Covid-19 Alert at the time of that Magic Talk interview. So, the question arises: Did Hipkins make the statement about “ploughing-on” to signal to our supposed AOGC rebels that their protest had been in vain?

 More to the point, was it also a very public warning to Jacinda that there could be no stepping back from the plan already agreed upon with her longest-standing and closest political allies – Grant Robertson and Chris Hipkins? Any deviation from the scheduled 11:59pm level-change could hardly fail to be interpreted by the news media as evidence of a serious split in the uppermost reaches of the Coalition Government. Not something a prime minister heading into a general election would be eager to acknowledge!

 The problem with this sort of speculation is where to call a halt. Viewed through my admittedly dramatic political prism, Jacinda’s decision to keep her former health minister, David Clark, in Dunedin – and his job – for a great deal longer than he had any right to expect begins to look like a shrewd method of ensuring the state’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic would be decided by the Prime Minister and her Director-General of Health. (Where is Ashley, BTW, he wasn’t at today’s update?)

 Did the Director-General’s failure to properly implement the Cabinet’s directives relating to border security so weaken his position that Robertson and Hipkins were able to elbow him aside and transform the wildly popular, science-driven, duumvirate of Jacinda and Ashley into a new, much more business-friendly, triumvirate of Grant, Jacinda and Chris?

 And if that is what happened, then what does it say about the government’s new direction of travel? Jacinda’s and Ashley’s decision to “go hard and go early” represented a revolutionary reversal of the usual neoliberal priorities. In effect, they opted to put people first and profits second. The immense and very obvious outpouring of public gratitude and affection that followed the extraordinary success of this strategy made Jacinda effectively invulnerable to attack. Until the saintly duumvirate could, somehow, be destabilised, the furious business community (ably assisted by their right-wing allies in the news media) could only whinge and moan. But then Ashley stumbled, and the business community seized its chance.

 This morning, on RNZ’s Nine-to-Noon political panel, Labour’s pollster, Stephen Mills, wondered aloud why Jacinda – backed in the polls but upwards of 80 percent of her fellow New Zealanders, had apparently chosen to abandon her hugely successful go-hard, go-early “elimination” strategy, in favour of a new strategy of Covid-19 “containment”.

 Please, someone – anyone – confirm for me, and the rest of the 80 percent, that the explanations offered in this post are nothing more than the fever-dreams of an ageing left-wing commentator. Please tell us that the sequences of events outlined above bear absolutely no relation to reality. That there has not been a coup against Jacinda’s “people first” Covid elimination strategy. That the 20 percent haven’t prevailed. Please, please, please, reassure Jacinda’s loyal team of four million that this is NOT what just happened!

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 1 September 2020.

Putting The People First.

Putting People First: Here in New Zealand, by a miracle of historical alchemy, we were blessed with a prime minister and a government who, against all expectations, reversed the neoliberal formula. In “going hard and going early”, Jacinda Ardern’s government had opted to put people first.

IT’S EASY to identify the people in charge – they’re the ones whose needs are attended to first. Remember the global financial crisis of 2008-09? In the United States, the question posed by that catastrophic economic meltdown was stark in its simplicity. Who will the government save: Main Street or Wall Street? The answer that came back was chillingly unequivocal. Wall Street.

 When the US House of Representatives for once attempted to live up to its name by voting down the financial sector’s self-drafted “rescue package”, the reaction of Wall Street was ferocious. Its minions in the Executive Branch descended upon the Capitol Building en masse, making it crystal clear to the errant legislators that they had chosen the wrong side. The vote was held again. Wall Street was saved.

 That’s what makes New Zealand’s response to the Covid-19 Pandemic so remarkable. With the example of the global financial crisis to guide them, many Kiwis were resigned to the needs of “business” being put ahead of everybody else. After all, that’s what they saw when they looked abroad – especially to New Zealand’s ideological kith and kin in the United States and the United Kingdom. Here, too, many predicted grimly, it will be profits first, people second.

 But they were wrong. Here in New Zealand, by a miracle of historical alchemy, we were blessed with a prime minister and a government who, against all expectations, reversed the neoliberal formula. In “going hard and going early”, Jacinda Ardern’s government had opted to put people first.

 For thirty-five years it has been a very different story. For thirty-five years New Zealanders have been told that their welfare is utterly dependent on the health of the business sector. Looking after the business sector, we have been encouraged to believe, is the same as looking after ourselves. Because, in the final analysis, if you don’t have a thriving business sector, then you don’t have anything.

Jacinda Ardern turned that proposition on its head. Looking after the people, she said, is the same as looking after the business sector. If you don’t have a healthy people, then you don’t have anything. To the utter astonishment of the nation’s business leaders and their media mouthpieces, the state intervened unreservedly and decisively. It locked the country down.

 And we got it. Blessedly free of the sort of economic expertise that insists such policies are completely counter-productive, New Zealanders cheered-on a government prepared to borrow tens-of-billions of dollars to keep them and their loved ones safe. When was the last time anyone had done that?

 Older New Zealanders recalled the stories their parents had told them about the Second World War. Stories about people united in a common cause. Stories about sacrifice and valour. Younger New Zealanders hardly dared to believe it was actually happening. Jacinda was defying economic gravity. But, when she talked about “the team of five million”, the vast majority of New Zealanders’ chests swelled with pride.

 Not everybody cheered Jacinda on. Almost from the moment the country went to Level 4, the volume of the complainers’ chorus began to swell. Instinctively, the social classes which had benefitted the most from the Neoliberal Revolution, grasped the enormous potential dangers that were set to flow from Jacinda’s reversal of social and economic priorities.

 It’s the motive force behind the talkback hosts’ spittle-flecked expostulations. The explanation for the business “community’s” endless whining and moaning. The reason why academics (who should know better) are lending their prestige to “Plan-Bs” which, when stripped of all the obfuscating non-science, are about allowing the aged and vulnerable members of our society to be sacrificed on the altar of “The Economy”. Some of the nation’s professors have even called for our democratic institutions to be set aside in favour of an administration of technical experts – like themselves.

 Neoliberals have every reason to fear what ordinary people have learned from the Covid-19 crisis. How are all those arguments about there not being enough money for all the things they so desperately need going to sound after the dollar-downpours of 2020? All those trite phrases about not being able to solve problems by “throwing money” at them – who’s going to believe that now?

 And if Jacinda and her team are re-elected on a landslide? Will they even try to put the genie back in the bottle?

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 28 August 2020.

The Left’s Dilemma.

All Hands On Deck: As the clock ticks down to polling day, the Left’s priorities are, therefore, clear. Keep Labour in office (hopefully with just the Greens for coalition company) and inflict as much damage on the National Party and Act as possible. Having achieved those goals, however, it will be necessary to calculate with all speed the co-ordinates of a whole new set of targets. Covid or no Covid, all is not well in New Zealand. Much remains to be done. And the Left’s dilemma has always been that only the Labour Party can do it.

 

POLITICALLY SPEAKING, the Left is currently in a very awkward place. It is clearly in the whole country’s interest for leftists to do whatever they can to prevent the election of a National-Act government. A right-wing victory would not only place vulnerable New Zealanders at the mercy of the most reactionary elements of the political mainstream, but also embolden and empower the even more reactionary groups operating at the political fringes. In a world ravaged by Covid-19, such an outcome would be little short of catastrophic.

 But if the Left has a strong moral obligation to swing in behind the Jacinda Ardern-led government, it is also obliged to maintain a watching brief on its non-Covid activities. John Minto’s latest posting on The Daily Blog – “Labour’s Shame!” – provides a welcome reminder of the multiple policy failures attributable to the Labour-led coalition. John’s piece alerts us to the fact that even if the virus could be wished away, and life return to its “normal” pre-pandemic state, then all would be far from well in New Zealand.

 The crisis currently gripping the Canterbury District Health Board (CDHB) for example, is a classic case of how absolutely the neoliberal ideology still governs the provision of crucial social services in New Zealand. While the crisis, which has seen 7 out of the 11-strong senior management team of the CDHB – including its CEO – tender their resignations, is mostly attributable to the built-in deficiencies of the DHBs’ operational model, its immediate causes are entirely Labour-generated. The former Minister of Health, David Clark, is responsible for setting in motion the machinery that is steadily demolishing the effectiveness of the CDHB.

 Clark’s principal adviser, however, was the Chief Executive of the Ministry of Health, Dr Ashley Bloomfield. Yes, that Dr Ashley Bloomfield: the saintly Director-General of Health who, until recently, represented, alongside the Prime-Minister, the State’s highly successful response to the Covid-19 Pandemic.

 Bloomfield’s critical role in both the CDHB debacle and the fight against Covid-19 epitomises the Left’s dilemma. While the global pandemic has necessitated, in much the same way as the existential threat of Nazi Germany did during World War II, a temporary setting aside of ideological divisions; the virus’s eventual defeat will, inevitably, see those divisions reassert themselves. Just as Winston Churchill remained at heart an unreconstructed Tory, the New Zealand public service – and most of the ministers it advises – remain happily wedded to Neoliberalism. The Left is obliged to face this dilemma squarely, with the same unflinching honesty as John Minto.

 The difficulty, of course, is that having sung the praises of Jacinda Ardern and her Labour and Green comrades all the way up to 17 October, it is extremely jarring to then turn around and start piling on the criticism. In the mind of the Labour apparatchik (never a very spacious place) that sort of behaviour will be taken as proof of the “Far-Left’s” irredeemable perfidy. To the people surrounding Jacinda, victory is always the ultimate riposte. “If we were so bad,’, they will object, “however did we win?” Labourites always resist the obvious answer: because their party was the lesser of two evils. Not least because that conclusion requires of them the mental and moral clarity to recognise that though it may be the lesser, their party is, nonetheless, evil.

 Driving this point home is the only effective strategy available to the Left. Pointing out, as John does in his post, the all-too-real consequences of neoliberalism. Labour, once safely re-elected, needs to be assailed with the brute facts of the poverty and marginalisation its policies have done so little to alleviate.

 Almost as effective as rubbing the government’s nose in the misery it refuses to mitigate, is pointing out the naked class advantage which Labour’s policies confer upon people who look and sound uncomfortably like its own members of parliament. It takes more steel than most Labour MPs possess to openly acknowledge that they are not, and, for the most part, never have been, “leftists”. Most of them get a kick out of seeing themselves as part of working-class New Zealand’s long march towards social and economic equality. Demonstrating to them, with irrefutable data, that they are actually responsible for measures guaranteed to halt the forward march of Labour, causes them genuine distress. Nobody wearing a red rosette likes to be called a scab.

 As the clock ticks down to polling day, the Left’s priorities are, therefore, clear. Keep Labour in office (hopefully with just the Greens for coalition company) and inflict as much damage on the National Party and Act as possible. Having achieved those goals, however, it will be necessary to calculate with all speed the co-ordinates of a whole new set of targets. Covid or no Covid, all is not well in New Zealand. Much remains to be done. And the Left’s dilemma has always been that only the Labour Party can do it.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 27 August 2020.

Keeping us Listening.

Canary In The Coal Mine: As a graduate in Communication Studies, the Prime Minister will undoubtedly take Polly Gillespie’s (pictured above) professional feedback extremely seriously. She will understand that while the vast majority of her supporters are a long way from growing weary of her “Team of Five Million” rhetoric, people like Gillespie are akin to the proverbial canary in the coalmine. What “Polly” is sick to death of today, there’s a better-than-even chance the rest of us will be sick to death of tomorrow.

WHEN MY DAUGHTER was in her tweens, the trip to school was considerably enlivened by “Polly & Grant”. The often inane – but always entertaining – banter between Polly Gillespie and Grant Kereama taught me a lot about the skills required of a successful commercial broadcaster. It didn’t really matter whether you were whip-smart or really dumb, so long as you kept your contributions inside the lines of your audience’s colouring-book. I remember Polly discoursing with real passion on the situation in Iraq. I also remember Grant waxing lyrical about the relative merits of the many varieties of toilet paper. Sublime or ridiculous? Beside the point. Polly and Grant kept you listening.

 That’s why Jacinda Ardern should give heed to Gillespie’s latest foray into political commentary: “Jacinda, I like you, but please shut up about the team of five million”. Far from being an unforgivable betrayal, Gillespie’s light-hearted critique of the Prime Minister’s rhetorical style should be read as a gentle warning that her verbal crayon is beginning to stray outside at least a slice of the public’s lines. Not everybody’s, obviously, but of an appreciable number of the voters who used to hang on “Jacinda’s” every word. (The column’s also a pretty good job application letter – but that’s another story!)

 Not that Jacinda is likely to be among those frothing with rage that Stuff dared to publish such an egregious example of lèse-majesté. As a graduate in communication studies, the Prime Minister will undoubtedly take Gillespie’s professional feedback extremely seriously. She will understand that while the vast majority of her supporters are a long way from growing weary of her “Team of Five Million” rhetoric, people like Gillespie are akin to the proverbial canary in the coalmine. What “Polly” is sick to death of today, there’s a better-than-even chance the rest of us will be sick to death of tomorrow.

 “It’s been a wee while coming, but I’ve finally had enough of the platitudes, and sentimental psycho-babble ….. Yes, she’s a great person, an incredible communicator, and could spin any spin doctor. I like Jacinda and have a particular affection for Grant Robertson and Andrew Little, but I’m just finding it irritating being spoken to like I’m a slightly IQ-deprived child. It’s starting to wear very thin. If anyone says “we’ve got this” one more time I will squeal!”

 There’s some real meat buried in all this over-sweetened pastry. Translated into hard-core political-speak, Gillespie’s message reads like this:

 “At the beginning of Covid, Jacinda, we were all frightened and in need of reassurance. We needed to know that your Government was taking a whole-of-country approach: no exceptions. So, all that “Team of Five Million” stuff was perfectly pitched – exactly what we wanted to hear. On this, the second time around, however, our mood has changed. We’re pissed-off now. Impatient. We want this bloody nonsense to be over with, and we really don’t appreciate discovering that the things you told us were being done weren’t being done. We’re looking for straight answers now, Prime Minister. Grown-up answers. We’re not your children, Jacinda. You’re not our mum.”

 Like a pack of hyenas with the scent of blood in their nostrils, the National Party, as they always do, have picked up on this new mood of frustration and impatience. Their solutions may not be particularly credible, but they don’t have to be – not really. So long as National can convince people that they get the new normal: that their crayons are staying inside the new lines; the electorate will respond. What’s more, National now has someone whose demeanour is perfectly suited to this new mood of straight-talking seriousness. Dr Shane Reti is really good at colouring-in the Covid-19 picture.

 Regardless of whether Gillespie’s right-wing “lover” is real or imaginary, by introducing him to her narrative she is conveying another important message to the Prime Minister. Ironically, it’s the radio celebrity’s very own version of the despised “Team of Five Million”. Gillespie’s salacious ménage is all about the reality of New Zealanders’ common predicament. Regardless of whether we hang to the right or to the left, our Covid experience cannot help but be a shared one. We all have an equal stake in the people in charge doing their jobs properly.

 Gillespie’s final sentences make the sale:

 “Look, Polly,” he said affectionately (not kindly), “we just need to vote for balance. We don’t have to like our leaders. They don’t need to be saints or fairy godmothers. We just need people who are doers not just communicators.”

 Like it or loathe it, “Polly’s” commentary kept us listening.

 If this afternoon’s little speech announcing the four day extension of Auckland’s Level 3 Lockdown is any guide, Jacinda was listening, too. Her address was a clear and sober affair, which told us straight and without unnecessary embellishment what her government has decided to do.

 The expression “Team of Five Million” did not pass the Prime Minister’s lips.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 25 August 2020.

Laws Do Not Rule – People Do

Trying Our Patience: Quite rightly did the nineteenth century British novelist, Charles Dickens, proclaim: “The law is an ass!” Laws do not rule – people do. This is the incontrovertible fact which Mr Andrew Borrowdale, the man who required the High Court to rule on his challenges to the legality of the Covid-19 Lockdown, singularly failed to grasp.

THE ENABLING ACT was passed by the Reichstag on 23 March 1933. With this single piece of legislation, every act of the Reich Government and its Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, was given the force of law. Any conscientious German lawyer seeking to test the legality of the Nazis’ subsequent, democracy-crushing, edicts in Germany’s highest courts, would have been reassured that the “Rule of Law” remained inviolate.

 Quite rightly did the nineteenth century British novelist, Charles Dickens, proclaim: “The law is an ass!” Laws do not rule – people do. This is the incontrovertible fact which Mr Andrew Borrowdale, the man who required the High Court to rule on his challenges to the legality of the Covid-19 Lockdown, singularly failed to grasp.

 Not that Mr Borrowdale lacked encouragement for his Quixotic endeavour. All manner of pedants and purists were quick to figuratively pat him on the back for his services to the “Rule of Law”. As if the judgement of a few lawyers – albeit lawyers in flowing robes and horsehair wigs – should somehow be permitted to stand above the straightforward, self-protective judgements of ordinary men and women threatened by a global pandemic. As if the decisions made by the people’s elected representatives – for their protection – can be reasonably and responsibly struck down by a gaggle of job-for-life jurists elected by nobody at all.

 Thank God the judges of the High Court turned out to be a great deal more intelligent than the individuals who put so much stock in Mr Borrowdale’s appeal. Andrew Geddes, a law professor at the University of Otago summed it up nicely:

 “So it’s not that the Court got the decision wrong. Rather, it seems clear that the Court’s perception of its job, and the law at issue, was very much coloured by the same collective concerns that drove the government’s response to the virus. Preventing lots of people from dying from a disease is perhaps the government’s highest obligation, and the law has to be seen as enabling the government to carry out that task.”

 Or, as the celebrated Roman statesman, Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE) so succinctly put it: Salus populi suprema lex – The safety of the people shall be the highest law.

 Obviously, preserving the people’s safety is, above all else, a political obligation – not least on the part of the people themselves. Consider the passage of the Enabling Act in 1933. Had the German Social Democrats and Communists not been at daggers drawn; had the German army not been so consumed by its desire to wipe out the humiliations of the Treaty of Versailles; then the farcical conditions in which the Enabling Act was passed (the German parliament was ringed with Nazi Stormtroopers, and the Communist Party MPs, having all been taken into “protective custody”, were absent from the Chamber) could not have arisen.

 Thirteen years earlier, in 1920, an attempt by extreme German nationalists, backed by the army and right-wing paramilitaries, to overthrow the Weimar Republic had been foiled by the decisive action of the Social-Democratic Party-led government. Its call for all German workers and civil servants to come out in a nationwide general strike was backed by all the other parties of the German Left. Twelve million workers and civil servants responded. The country ground to a halt. It was the largest and most successful strike in Germany’s history. The so-called “Kapp Putsch” collapsed.

 Three years after Kapp, in 1923, Adolf Hitler’s attempt to stage his own putsch (coup) was foiled by the Munich police. Formed up in a skirmish-line, the armed policemen ordered Hitler’s brownshirts to halt their march through the city. The Nazis (also armed) refused and came on. The Police commander gave the order to open fire. Those Nazis who still could (sixteen of them were killed) fled.

 In both cases, the German judiciary had nothing useful to contribute. It was not the Rule of Law which saved the Weimar Republic in 1920 and 1923, but the German people themselves. Just as, in 1933, it was not the Rule of Law which transferred all effective executive power into the hands of a political psychopath. That was the work of a Depression-ravaged and politically exhausted German population – just enough of whom were ready to trade their liberty and decency for economic security and an end to the Weimar Republic’s intractable political divisions. As clear a case of “be careful what you wish for” as one could hope for.

 In New Zealand, in 2020, the people have also prevailed. A leader they trusted, and who very clearly had their interests at heart, implored New Zealanders to unite against Covid-19 by staying home inside their bubbles. The New Zealand people responded by doing just that. Thus did Jacinda Ardern’s prioritisation of her fellow citizens’ welfare elevate her words to the status of suprema lex – the highest law.

 Jacinda acted hard and early on our behalf, and we should all be exceedingly grateful that she refused to abdicate her responsibility to the courts. That the courts appear to agree is welcome proof that there are at least three judges left in New Zealand who still understand Latin.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 21 August 2020.