Staying Inside The Lines.

Unfinished: Always, gnawing away at this government’s confidence and empathy, is the dictum that seriously challenging the economic and social status-quo is the surest route to electoral death. Labour’s colouring-in book, and National’s, have to look the same. All that matters is which party is better at staying inside the lines.

DOES THIS GOVERNMENT have the gumption to go on the offensive against its National and Act opponents? The evidence, to date, suggests not. All we have seen from Jacinda Ardern and her colleagues since National eclipsed Labour in the polls is the risible politics of “anything you can do I can do better”. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but, in electoral politics, flattering your enemies is not a winning formula.

At the core of the Government’s supine response to National’s reflexive policy kicks: tax-cuts, reduced spending, fuelling moral panics on education and youth offending, getting tough on gangs, racist dog-whistling at He Puapua and co-governance; is the Centre-Left’s besetting fear that fighting-back against the Right will cost it votes.

Teasing out this core anxiety, it soon becomes clear that the Centre-Left’s fear arises from its conviction that the overwhelming majority of the electorate is susceptible to the ideological arguments of the Right. That being the case, it only makes sense for them to inoculate themselves against the Right’s attacks by saying “Me, too!”

But, if the electorate is susceptible to the Right’s policy pitches, then it is only because it has been years since they heard the Left come to them with anything remotely resembling a passionately argued case for radical change. One would have to go all the way back to the general election of 1993: to the Alliance’s left-wing manifesto (which attracted 18.3 percent of the popular vote) to hear a political party ask for the electorate’s help in upending the status-quo.

It is difficult to understand the Left’s reticence on matters of policy. Certainly the Labour Party’s history argues strongly in favour of implementing radical change without apology and defending the gains made against all comers. After governing for 14 years, Labour had the satisfaction of losing power to a National Party which had only become electorally competitive by pledging to keep the core economic and social reforms of the First Labour Government in place.

It is possible to argue that Labour repeated that feat with Rogernomics, which, following a half-hearted attempt to rally its supporters against the Lange Government’s “more market” reforms in 1987, the National Party embraced with frightening enthusiasm in the days and weeks immediately following the 1990 general election.

To make this case, however, it is necessary to argue that Labour found it impossible to grasp the ideological and electoral implications of National’s wholesale conversion to neoliberalism. Following the Mother of All Budgets and the Employment Contracts Act, Labour’s continued adherence to the core elements of the neoliberal economic order left it stranded in exactly the same position as National between 1950 and 1984. By refusing to abandon Rogernomics, Labour began its long, slow decline into an attenuated version of its principal electoral rival. A party equally committed to maintaining the neoliberal status quo. National Lite.

All attempts by Labour’s rank-and-file membership – especially following the Alliance’s demise in 2002 – to put an end the Parliamentary Labour Party’s love affair with neoliberalism ended in failure. Unfortunately, Helen Clark’s successor, the enthusiastic Rogernome, Phil Goff, was not a remotely credible salesman for the refreshingly social-democratic programme forced upon him by the likes of Helen Kelly, Marion Hobbs and Michael Wood. Labour’s dismal Party Vote of 2011 – just 28 percent – was taken by the Labour Right as proof that stepping away from the status-quo could only end in disaster.

Undaunted, the Labour Left continued to agitate for a final repudiation of neoliberalism, even managing to elect the only mildly apostatic David Cunliffe as the Party’s leader. Outraged at this rank insubordination, a majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party – spearheaded by MPs who are now senior Cabinet Ministers – made it clear that Cunliffe’s support within the Caucus was weak, vulnerable and unequal – intellectually, emotionally and politically – to the task it had set itself. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in the 2014 general election Labour crashed to an even worse defeat – just 25 percent of the Party Vote.

The Party was now in the unenviable position of being unable to go either forward or back. With a clear majority of Labour MPs vehemently opposed to abandoning neoliberalism, and their minions in the party organisation conducting a ruthless purge of all those who had promoted and supported Cunliffe, the leadership of Andrew Little was characterised by a steady retreat from the progressive economic policy positions won between 2008 and 2014. Unsurprisingly, that retreat was matched by a relentless decline in the voting public’s enthusiasm. Had Jacinda Ardern not stepped into the breach, it is likely that Labour’s Party Vote would have continued to decline – quite possibly into the teens.

Ardern’s great achievement in the 2017 general election was to allow her own natural ebullience and rhetorical energy to generate an impression of political rejuvenation. Though she never actually said as much, “Jacinda” did not go out of her way to correct the widespread misconception that Labour had, finally, freed itself from ideological captivity. When she said “Let’s do this!”, a great many people construed her words to mean: “Let’s move beyond Rogernomics!”

Certainly, Winston Peters and NZ First understood the public’s eagerness for a break with the old order. Indeed, so caught up was he in the currents of history that the old campaigner felt moved to have a crack at capitalism itself – a rhetorical blast only half-heartedly echoed by Ardern.

But “kindness” and social-democracy, although closely related, are not identical twins. Had Covid-19 not intervened, the growing gap between the Ardern Government’s rhetoric and its performance would almost certainly have seen it thrown out in 2020. As it was, the country enthusiastically rewarded “Jacinda” for six astonishing months of political heroism. She had faced down the let-it-rippers of the corporate Right and welded the “Team of Five Million” into a remarkable political community. Only someone very special can deliver Ilam and Rangitata to the Labour Party!

But, even with an absolute parliamentary majority, a move away from neoliberalism has proved to be beyond the Parliamentary Labour Party’s imagination. The sixth Labour government’s radicalism on matters relating to ethnicity and gender has not been matched by those relating to taxation, government regulation, poverty and housing. Even on Labour no-brainers like health and education, the government cannot seem to get it right.

Always, gnawing away at its confidence and empathy, is the dictum that seriously challenging the economic and social status-quo is the surest route to electoral death. Labour’s colouring-in book, and National’s, have to be the same. All that matters is which party is better at staying inside the lines.

And so, we can only imagine a Labour Government willing and able to take the fight to Christopher Luxon and his largely talentless caucus. We can only dream of a Prime Minister with the steel to, for example, call out Luxon for inviting George Osborne to address his caucus. Saying something like this:

After all, what is Osborne famous for? (Apart from tipping the Brexit vote in favour of ‘Leave’ by threatening the electorate with economic torture if it voted the wrong way.) That’s right, he’s the Chancellor of the Exchequer who bailed-out Britain’s biggest banks and corporations and then paid for it by imposing years of bitter austerity on its working-class. Yep, he’s the one who ran down the NHS to a point where Covid-19 was able to kill hundreds-of-thousands of his fellow citizens. This is the politician Luxon would like the National caucus to learn from. What does that tell us about the sort of government he intends to run?

Multiply attacks like this a thousand times between now and election day 2023, and how much that was electorally useful would remain of the National Party and its leader? Reinforced by Labour’s unequivocal and irrevocable repudiation of its neoliberal past, and a policy platform dedicated to repairing the damage of the last 35 years, the Prime Minister and her Cabinet might be pleasantly surprised at how enthusiastically a majority of ordinary Kiwis availed themselves of the ballot box.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 10 May 2022.

The First Rule Of Radicalism.

Radical As: Māori healers recall a time when “words had power”. The words that give substance to ideas, no matter how radical, still do. If our representatives rediscover the courage to speak them out loud.

THERE ARE RULES for radicalism. Or, at least, there are rules for the presentation of radical ideas intended to become a part of our daily lives. The most important of these rules requires radical ideas to be explained and justified. Failure to make clear why radical solutions should be embraced and implemented will only ensure their rejection by a decisive majority of the population. Radical ideas and policies are only ever adopted when that same majority has been convinced that refusing to adopt them will only make matters worse.

It is difficult to imagine a more radical idea than the abolition of prisons. And yet, along with a proposal to establish a Māori Education Authority, the abolition of the New Zealand prison system is one of the key recommendations of the iwi-based group charged by the Labour Government with responding to the controversial He Puapua Report on the implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Asked by Q+A’s Jack Tame whether they supported the call for prisons to be abolished, the co-leaders of Te Pāti Māori, Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer, both replied “absolutely”. The question now, having signalled their support for this radical policy, is whether Waititi and Ngarewa-Packer are prepared to explain and justify it to the voters of New Zealand.

On the answer to that last question will turn the broader electorate’s view of Te Pāti Māori. With the last three public opinion polls indicating that the party could well end up holding the balance of power after the 2023 general election, its ability to spell out clearly what it expects to receive in return for its support on confidence-and-supply motions – and why – has become a matter of acute political interest.

A serious response will likely generate increased support from angry and alienated tangata whenua – quite possibly at Labour’s expense. But a flippant, “we’re more radical than you are” response risks cementing in the voter’s mind an image of Te Pāti Māori as a collection of vainglorious political flakes, who should be kept as far away from power as possible.

Te Pāti Māori’s public support for the abolition of prisons cannot now avoid becoming part of the right-wing parties’ argument for giving the potential “Red-Green-Brown” coalition the widest of berths. With so many of National’s and Act’s supporters alarmed at what they see as a sharp rise in violent crime – due largely to the growth of gangs – the very idea that a party in Parliament is willing to countenance radical reforms that would see the Māori perpetrators of serious crimes escape incarceration, leaves the Right with no option but to go on the offensive against the entire He Puapua prescription.

This, in turn, will inspire all manner of fears and doubts within the ranks of Labour and the Greens. While neither party will be anxious to alienate Te Pāti Māori, the so-called “Centre-Left” will, nevertheless, be extremely loathe to endorse a policy as radical as the abolition of prisons. For most Labour and Green candidates the whole concept will appear so outlandish as to be dismissed out-of-hand as “nuts”. For Te Pāti Māori, however, such a reaction would only confirm the “colonialist” mindset of their putative partners – making the formation of a stable coalition even more problematic.

All of which makes clear why it is never enough to simply announce one’s support for a radical policy. Indeed, what the above considerations reveal is the huge potential for an electorally fatal backlash against such radical protestations.

That is not to say that radicalism should be avoided at all costs. As Simon Bridges told Parliament only last week in his valedictory address, there is little point in seeking a political career if the only forces driving you are focus groups and opinion polls. Members of Parliament should come to Wellington on the wings of ambition – not the plodding feet of caution. What the above considerations should reinforce, however, is the crucial importance of the rule about explaining and justifying radical change.

The template for successful radical reform is there for all to see in the unceasing explanations and justifications for the radical economic changes proposed by the “Free Marketeers” of the 1970s and 80s. When these latter “policy aggressors” first emerged on the scene, they, too, had to endure hearing their ideas dismissed as “extreme” and/or “nuts”.

Were they discouraged? Not a bit! As the 70s wore on, and the economic situation deteriorated across the Western World, “Free Market” explanations acquired an ever-expanding audience, and its justifications for a fundamental rearrangement of the way modern industrial economies are run began to sound increasingly reasonable.

The way forward for Te Pāti Māori is clear. It has to demonstrate that the regime of crime and punishment that has grown up in New Zealand over the past 180 years is no longer fit for purpose. The recidivism rate, alone, offers proof that the experience of incarceration is anything but rehabilitating. Similarly, the disproportionate number of Māori behind bars points to there being a great many more factors at work in our justice and corrections systems than straightforward criminality. All of the scientific evidence confirms the proposition that criminals are made not born.

Debbie Ngarewa-Packer observed to Jack Tame that there were no prisons in pre-colonial Aotearoa. A cheap point, some might say, but one worth following up. Obviously, in the centuries prior to European settlement, Māori who offended against the customs and practices of their tribal and sub-tribal communities were required to atone and/or make recompense for their “crimes”. Explaining to Pakeha how that worked would be a good place for Te Pāti Māori to start in its quest to reform fundamentally this country’s treatment of offenders.

Those Pakeha convinced that Te Pāti Māori’s support for the abolition of prisons confirms it as being “soft on crime” might be very surprised to discover the fate of those who breached the norms of Māori society before the arrival of the Europeans. The concept of “utu” – the making of proper restitution for harms done – was manifested in many ways. “Soft” wasn’t one of them!

A more courageous Labour Party might also feel inspired by Te Pāti Māori’s advocacy for fundamental penal reform to interrogate its own history.

There was a time when Labour leaders were not unacquainted with the interiors of prison cells. When the working-class people whose votes they solicited did not universally condemn such familiarity. On the contrary, it made Labour’s claims to represent them all the more authentic. When Jack Lee wrote Children of the Poor, he was speaking from bitter personal experience.

There were times, too, when a Labour Shadow Attorney-General, all-too-well-acquainted with the bleak and soulless quality of Her majesty’s prisons argued that no jail should be escape-proof. The urge to be free, said Dr Martyn Finlay, was what made us human. To render that urge impossible of fulfilment was, accordingly, to make the state complicit in the crushing of the human spirit.

Māori healers recall a time when “words had power”. The words that give substance to ideas, no matter how radical, still do.

If our representatives rediscover the courage to speak them out loud.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 9 May 2022.

The Makers Of Gilead.

Enforced Fertility: The imminent overturning of Roe versus Wade by the US Supreme Court is certain to raise echoes here that are no less evocative of the dystopia envisioned by Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid’s Tale. Gilead can happen here.

WITH THE UNITED STATES seemingly on the brink of becoming “Gilead”, the obvious question is: Could it happen here? The glib answer is: “Of course not! New Zealand is not America.” But that simply will not do. People said the same when Ronald Reagan’s New Right “revolution” swept across the United States. And yet, within a single decade, virtually all the institutions New Zealanders believed to be deeply entrenched features of their society and politics had been swept away – replaced by ideas stamped “Made in the USA”.

A better question, therefore, might be: “What made it happen there?” How was the nation that finally afforded African-Americans the rights promised to them in the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution recaptured by the unabashed promoters of White Supremacy? How was the Equal Rights Amendment defeated? How could the same country that gave the world Jack Kennedy and Barack Obama, produce Richard Nixon and Donald Trump?

Part of the explanation lies in a single word: “Sputnik”. The Soviet Union’s launching into space of the world’s first satellite profoundly shocked the American Government. The generals realised immediately that the rockets that could boost Sputnik into space could also boost nuclear warheads. The rapid advance of Soviet science had made the USA acutely vulnerable. Not only that, it had made America look intellectually weak: a country prey to the absurd fallacies of fundamentalist Christianity, and deeply suspicious of “cleverness” in all its forms.

Thanks to Sputnik, the national security of the United States now required a profound change in America’s cultural style. Science had to be advanced to the forefront of American life – and quickly. Congress would have to fund it, and the anti-intellectual elements, most especially the fundamentalist Christian churches, would have to keep their mouths firmly shut – on pain of been labelled “Un-American”. Overnight, scientists and engineers became the go-to-guys for all matters relating to America’s future.

The problem for red-in-tooth-and-claw American capitalism was that something happens to societies where Science becomes the final arbiter of national policy. Before the forces of conservatism know it, traditional values and prejudices are being asked to justify themselves with tangible evidence. What cannot be rationally defended begins to fall by the cultural and political waysides. Religious faith begins to look antiquated and, in its worst expressions, socially harmful. The educational curriculum soon comes to reflect the new scientific orthodoxy. Bigotry finds itself, to use today’s terminology, de-platformed.

But bigotry is crucial to the health of capitalism. Bigotry obscures the social and economic truths that would otherwise free people from the beliefs that keep them stupid and angry. Bigotry allows ethnic, sexual, and religious communities to be pitted against one another, making working-class unity and solidarity impossible. Bigotry encourages people to mistrust science and fear intellectuals – on the not altogether incorrect grounds that science and socialism are joined at the hip. As the progressives of our own time say: “Science has a left-wing bias.”

Where science reigns, so, too, does social-democracy. Having seen what bigotry produced, the nations of Western Europe – Scandinavia in particular – opted enthusiastically for social and economic policies that sought to provide the greatest amount of “good” things – universal healthcare, free education, affordable and secure accommodation, a rational electoral system – to the greatest number. President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” programmes of the middle-1960s, building upon President Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” programmes of the 1930s, strongly suggested that, with science in the saddle, the USA was headed, irreversibly, in the same direction.

America’s most ruthless and aggressive capitalists were having none of it. To head-off the possibility of a science-driven, social-democratic United States (in which the power of capitalism would inevitably begin to wane) they adopted a dual strategy of resistance.

First of all, they made it possible for capitalism to advance its own “science” against the “left-wing” (i.e. genuine) science that was inflicting so much damage upon their cause. By endowing university departments and setting up their own think-tanks and research journals, the capitalist string-pullers were soon equipped to take the fight to the scientific enemy.

American capitalism’s second line of attack was to do everything possible to encourage irrationality and anti-scientific prejudice – most particularly among working-class Americans. By funding and encouraging the revival of fundamentalist Christianity it was able to unleash the so-called “culture wars”. Religious faith was pitted against scientific knowledge. Creationism confronted Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in school boards across the United States. Before long scientists began to be regarded as the evil agents of Satan.

Kicking-off in the 1970s, American capitalism’s fightback against science had, by the second decade of the Twenty-First Century, forced uncorrupted scientists onto the defensive. From the deadly effects of tobacco and sugar, to the looming catastrophe of Global Warming, the capitalists’ “scientists” had denied and delayed effective remedial action to devastating effect. On the irrational front, things were going equally well. By the year 2020 more than half of all Americans preferred the Bible’s creation story to Darwin’s.

Indeed, so successful was American capitalism’s crusade against science that when the Covid-19 pandemic struck, roughly half of the American population declined to follow the scientific advice of the Centre for Disease Control. The Coronavirus has now killed more Americans than all the wars they have fought in their far-from-peaceful history.

What does this depressing historical narrative have to tell New Zealanders. The most obvious lesson is, surely, that we are no less the victims of the bogus “science” of American capitalism’s propaganda machine than the people of the USA themselves. In the decade between the fall of the Third Labour Government and the election of the Fourth, the neoliberal ideology was injected slowly – and largely invisibly – into the bloodstream of the New Zealand establishment.

What proved more difficult to replicate here was the resurrection of irrationalism, bigotry and religious extremism that had proved so crucial to the rescue of American capitalism. New Zealand Christianity, at least as a mass phenomenon, crashed in the early 1970s (thanks largely to our free, secular, and science-driven public education system) and in spite of the best efforts of the evangelical churches, it has failed to rise again.

But, where the miracle-workers of right-wing Kiwi Christianity have failed, the miracle-workers of Silicon Valley have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. In this country, the rise and rise of social-media has opened the door to all kinds of irrational beliefs and conspiracy theories – greatly facilitating the undermining of scientific authority – especially medical science. This attack on science has been greatly assisted by the Covid-19 Pandemic which has acted as the vector for the rapid spread of American-sourced social pathologies across the New Zealand population.

The consequences of this other pandemic are likely to be severe. We have already witnessed the response of New Zealand capitalism to a government willing to be guided by “the science”. We have also noted the capitalists’ near complete success in reasserting the priorities of commerce over public welfare.

In the cultural context, however, the single-minded campaigning of the business community is largely absent. What New Zealand faces instead is a potentially devastating collision of irrationalities. The quasi-religious certainties of the so-called “woke” – especially those relating to race and gender – are already crashing head-on into right-wing groups angered and frightened by the radical transformation of New Zealand which the Woke propose. What threatens is a perfect storm of competing bigotries: ideological antagonists united only in their determination to shout down and shut out the voices of reason.

The imminent overturning of Roe versus Wade by the US Supreme Court is certain to raise echoes here that are no less evocative of the dystopia envisioned by Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid’s Tale.

Gilead can happen here.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 6 May 2022.

Trespassers?

Not Wanted On Grounds Of Political Rejuvenation: Winston Peters did nothing more than visit the protest encampment erected by anti-vaxxers on the parliamentary lawn. A great many New Zealanders applauded him for meeting with the protesters and wondered why the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition could not do the same.

THE DECISION by Parliament’s Speaker, Trevor Mallard, to trespass Winston Peters from Parliament Grounds is outrageous. For New Zealand’s former Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister to be treated in this fashion raises so many questions that I cannot help thinking that, by the time you read these words, the decision will have been reversed.

After all, Mr Peters did nothing more than visit the protest encampment erected by anti-vaxxers on the parliamentary lawn. A great many New Zealanders applauded him for meeting with the protesters and wondered why the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition could not do the same.

It is probably helpful, at this point, to rehearse the actions that the Speaker took in relation to the occupation of Parliament Grounds.

Once again, we are confronted with the word “trespass”.

It has been argued that, by deeming the protesters to be trespassers and calling upon the Police to evict them from the parliamentary precincts, the Speaker heightened the tensions already developing between the protesters and the authorities; setting up an unhelpful “Us” versus “Them” binary that could only make matters worse.

Then, to the consternation of a very large number of New Zealanders, the Speaker authorised the persistent broadcast – at uncomfortable volume – of music considered likely to drive the protesters from their tents. More seriously, he caused the grounds’ sprinkler system to be turned on, soaking the protesters and transforming Parliament’s green lawns into a muddy morass.

To say that these actions did not improve the chances of a peaceful resolution to the protest would be a considerable understatement. Indeed, they raised serious concerns about the Speaker’s judgement.

And now, Speaker Mallard is advising former members of Parliament that they may not enter the parliamentary precincts for two years. That Matt King (the former National MP for Northland) and Winston Peters are both leaders of political parties preparing to contest the 2023 General Election only renders the Speaker’s actions all the more contentious. Neither of these gentlemen have been found guilty of any crime. They remain citizens of New Zealand in good standing, whose only offence appears to have been participating in a political event of which Speaker Mallard disapproved.

At the time of writing, political commentators of every political hue are either scratching their heads, or pulling out their hair, at Speaker Mallard’s actions. On one thing, however, they are in broad agreement: these trespass notices represent a stupid and dangerous escalation of the political conflict between “the elites” and “the people”.

Which makes me wonder why the Prime Minister and her Cabinet colleagues have not already intervened to forestall the right-wing populist eruption which the Speaker’s actions seem calculated to transform, from a clear and present danger into a stone-cold certainty. Perhaps, as I write these words, they are doing exactly that – intervening.

The $64,000 question, of course, is: will it do any good? The Speaker, once elected by the House of Representatives, cannot be removed from his office by any other entity. If Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern suggested quietly that it might be time for Mr Mallard to step aside, and he refused, her only recourse (other than quietly stepping away) would be to enlist the support of the other parliamentary parties in the embarrassing process of forcing him from the Speaker’s Chair. On the basis of the behaviour we have seen so far, it cannot be confidently predicted that Mr Mallard would go quietly.

The other, even more disturbing, possibility is that neither the Prime Minister, nor her colleagues, want to replace the Speaker. They may well consider his exploits against the noose-waving mob outside ‘The People’s Place’ to be nothing short of heroic. Their collective judgement may be that Messers King and Peters are getting exactly what they deserve. By choosing to align themselves with the “Far-Right extremists” behind the occupation, the former parliamentarians have made their beds – and now they must lie in them.

If this is, indeed, their judgement, then the Speaker’s future is secure. The same cannot be said, however, of this government’s future. With every passing day, the impression grows that Ms Ardern’s party sees less and less to like and admire in the people whose votes elected it. We seem to have become a huge source of disappointment for them.

Democratic trespassers.

Turn on the sprinklers!

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 6 May 2022.

Who Will Fight For Democracy?

May The Force Be With Us: With New Zealanders under 40, nostalgia for a time when politics worked gains little purchase. Politics hasn’t swerved to any noticeable degree since the 1980s, becoming in the Twenty-First Century a battle between marketing strategies, not ideologies. Young New Zealanders critique political advertisements in the way their parents and grandparents once critiqued the content of the major parties’ election manifestoes.

THE TIMING couldn’t have been better – or worse – depending upon which side of the political divide you position yourself. First, Trevor Mallard allows letters to be sent out to Winston Peters, Matt King, and (reportedly) other former MPs, trespassing them from Parliament Grounds for two years. Then, just 24 hours after that story breaks, Hobson’s Pledge inserts a full-page ad’ in The Herald spoofing the Star Wars franchise and announcing an “Attack On The Votes”.

Putting to one side the double standards of The Herald: whose editorial team, in spite of ruling an ad’ from the group Speak Up For Women (featuring nothing more inflammatory than the dictionary definition of “woman”) too much for its readers to bear, was nevertheless prepared to wear whatever harm Hobson’s Pledge’s graphic intervention might inflict on the body politic; the ad’ does reflect the growing public unease at this government’s commitment (or, more correctly, lack of commitment) to core democratic principles.

At present, most of that unease is concentrated in the older age-groups of the population. These are the New Zealanders who came of age at a time when the two main political parties represented clear and distinct approaches to defining and securing the public good.

The votes cast by New Zealanders in those far-off days steered the nation leftwards or rightwards in ways that must seem quite odd to those accustomed to the unchanging neoliberal parameters of MMP. That the National Party won more frequently than Labour was disappointing but not disheartening to Labour’s supporters. They understood that when the electoral planets did finally come into alignment for their party, big changes would follow. Changes which, historically, National was more likely to come to terms with than overturn.

In short, older New Zealanders can still remember when politics worked. More to the point, they can remember when even those who placed themselves on the right of the political spectrum accepted that what Martin Luther King called “the great arc of history” was bending in the direction of justice. They, or their parents, had been brought to the very edge of the moral precipice over which right-wing extremism had attempted to drag humanity. People who still thought that way – even after Auschwitz – were kept at the outermost margins of political life. The vile content of the letters they sent to the nation’s editors never saw the light of day. Their fascistic ravings were routinely filed in the nearest rubbish bin.

With New Zealanders under 40, however, all this political nostalgia gains little purchase. Politics hasn’t swerved to any noticeable degree since the 1980s, becoming in the Twenty-First Century a battle between marketing strategies, not ideologies. Young New Zealanders critique political advertisements in the way their parents and grandparents once critiqued the major parties’ election manifestoes. The “look” and “tone” of a political leader counts for much more than any ideas they might have. What matters most is that the leader of “your” party doesn’t come off looking and sounding like a “dick”.

“Democracy” no longer enjoys the universal admiration it elicited from people all over the world when its stood over the broken bodies of fascism and militarism at the end of World War II. As Dame Anne Salmond reminded Newsroom’s readers just the other day, Article 1 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights admits “no ifs, no buts, no exceptions” when it declares:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

But, if these words carried the unchallengeable ring of truth for the parents and grandparents of today’s younger voters, those same younger voters are more likely to consider them an extremely dubious set of philosophical propositions. Where, for example, does the “spirit of brotherhood” leave the women of the world?

“Democracy” in the Twenty-First Century offers electorates almost nothing in the way of alternative economic policies. Economics is no longer deemed a suitable subject for the sort of robust political contestation that distinguished the political parties of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. In the Age of Neoliberalism, the economic principles by which a nation is governed have become fixed. Politicians do not challenge these principles, restricting themselves to debating which party is best equipped to implement them most effectively and efficiently.

For young people on the losing side of the economic – that is to say class – struggle, it makes absolutely no difference whether Labour or National is in power. Neither party would dream of stepping beyond the bounds of neoliberal orthodoxy. No matter which political formation occupies the Treasury Benches, housing does not become more affordable, poverty is not alleviated, unions remain peripheral, and Climate Change is not seriously addressed. As the Anarchist slogan puts it: “Why bother voting? – The politicians always win.”

The situation we face in 2022 bears comparison with the years following World War I. The much-vaunted concepts of democracy and progress had presided over a slaughter without historical parallel – and for what? The enlargement of the British and French empires? The elevation of American capital to global pre-eminence? The obscene wealth of wartime profiteers? Mass unemployment and homelessness for those who had survived the horrors of the trenches?

The stench of the old doctrines and the old values was worse that the stink of cordite and rotting comrades. Small wonder that veterans responded so enthusiastically to the demagogues of the far-Left and far-Right who denounced democracy as a busted flush.

As in the 1920s and 30s, the most radical political ideologies of the Twenty-First Century are dedicated to the nature of human identity and the possibility of human transformation. Ethnicity and nationality remain the central obsessions of the Far-Right, while the possibility of transformation continues to drive the Left. Where the Soviets dreamt of creating a wholly new kind of human-being – homo sovieticus – the modern identarian Left dream of the evolutionary leaps made possible by the elimination of oppression and privilege.

Dreams on this scale cannot be achieved by the tawdry compromises of democratic politics. The key objective of both the Far-Right and the Far-Left is to conquer the political apparatus and harness it to the all-important task of producing human transformation. The modern ideologue fears nothing more than the democratic mobilisation of ordinary citizens for the modest purposes of achieving all those ordinary things that make life safe and comfortable. Safety and comfort are Kryptonite to the radical political personality.

Guided more by intuition than ideology, Hobson’s Pledge “gets” the totalitarian implications of a political project driven not by what people actually want, but what they should want. Its choice of the Star Wars franchise to hang its publicity campaign on is a shrewd one. For what is George Lucas’s fantasy if not ancient mythology, with all its archetypal heroes and villains, tricked-out in the dazzling accoutrements of space-age technology?

If “Episode 1” of “The Democracy Wars” was the occupation of Parliament Grounds, and Trevor Mallard’s furious response to the mob menacing his marble halls; and “Episode 2” is Labour’s “Attack On The Votes”; then the third episode, due for release towards the end of 2023 can only be – “The People Strike Back”.

But, if Hobson’s Pledge and its allies are to defeat the curious blending of ethno-nationalism and transformative identarianism that constitutes Labour’s “Empire”, then its ageing leadership will first have to convince young New Zealanders that Democracy is worth fighting for.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of  Thursday, 5 May 2022.

The Stuff Of Nightmares.

Braking And Entering: The CCTV recording of the ram-raid against Auckland’s Ormiston Mall is so disturbing, so inspiring of dread and rage, that no amount of rational commentary will make the slightest difference. It confirms in the most powerful fashion the stories so many New Zealanders have been telling themselves: of societal breakdown; and a generation utterly unfazed by laws and rules and social expectations.

THE IMAGES were the stuff of nightmare. Cars being driven at speed – not on the streets, but inside a shopping mall. Jarring enough for most people, but what followed the cars was even more disturbing. Hooded figures moving swiftly and purposefully across the mall’s polished floor: a loose formation of young offenders heading for the shops. Unstoppable, for the very simple reason that no one was present to stem the larcenous tide.

Well-meaning experts – like Professor Ian Lambie – will implore New Zealanders to refrain from making their usual rush to judgement. They will be told that youth crime statistics are actually registering a drop in offending. That the individuals captured on the mall’s CCTV represent only a tiny minority – the product of the very worst instances of familial breakdown and dysfunction. Lambie, himself, in discussion with Q+A’s Jack Tame, suggests that the offenders are drawn from just 200 families nationwide, and all are likely well known to the authorities.

It will do no good.

The CCTV recording of the ram-raid against Auckland’s Ormiston Mall is so disturbing, so inspiring of dread and rage, that no amount of rational commentary will make the slightest difference. Brief and ill-defined though it may be, the recording confirms in the most powerful fashion the stories so many New Zealanders have been telling themselves. It speaks of societal breakdown: of a generation utterly unfazed by laws and rules and social expectations. More dangerously, it prompts questions that are all-too-likely to generate highly prejudicial answers.

The first and most obvious of these is: “What are these kids doing out late at night in the company of unabashed criminals?” Immediately followed by: “Where are their parents?” And then by: “Where are the Police?” A moment-or-two’s cogitation prompts the question: “Why aren’t these kids worried about the consequences of their actions?”

All of these questions are fair and reasonable. It is, however, unlikely that a great many of the public’s answers will be either reasonable or fair.

The idea that the youngsters involved in the ram-raid have parents waiting for them at home is almost certainly erroneous. Most of the individuals caught by the CCTV cameras are likely to have endured seriously dysfunctional relationships with one or both of their birth parents from a very early age. Almost certainly, neglect and abuse will have been constant features of their brief lives. Institutional care, most of it of indifferent quality, and some truly appalling, is their lot. For these kids, “home” is not a word with positive and/or comforting connotations. Nobody is waiting for them.

Such education as these children receive is almost entirely informal. The lessons delivered by their teachers: older kids, mostly, from more-or-less identical backgrounds, will be ruthlessly practical. How to drive a stolen motor vehicle. Which cars have the easiest security systems to circumvent. The most effective way to force a door and/or shatter a plate-glass window. The legal system’s helplessness when confronted with offenders under the age of 14. The importance of offering nothing to the Police. The deadly consequences of narking on your mates.

Certainly, the vast majority of these young offenders will not have seen the inside of a classroom for months, maybe years. The statistics compiled by Charter Schools advocate and private education provider, Alwyn Poole, paint a grim picture of widespread truancy in New Zealand’s poorest educational catchments – approaching 50 percent in some schools. These truants are seldom tracked down and returned to the classroom. A toxic mixture of scandalously under-funded enforcement, coupled with the learned helplessness of under-resourced institutions means that large numbers of children are entering adulthood lacking the wherewithal to pursue anything other than a criminal career.

These are the people referred to by worried politicians as “NEETs” (Not Engaged in Employment or Training). The best of them will be recruited by the gangs, the rest of them will end up as the gangsters’ clientele. To feed their drug habits, these latter unfortunates will be forced to put their criminal educations to more and more frequent use. If their drug of choice is methamphetamine, then the likelihood of extreme criminal violence is high.

Small wonder, then, that in the light of a spate of ram-raids by young offenders, the Education Minister, Chris Hipkins, has announced, pre-Budget, his intention to take steps to improve school attendance rates:

“A regional response fund of $40 million over four years is being established to meet local education needs, with a strong initial focus on ensuring students are going to school and are engaged in their learning.”

Not that “Middle New Zealand” is likely to notice the difference $10 million per year will make to the truancy statistics, nor to evince a conspicuous willingness to investigate the social pathology and institutional inadequacies that gave rise to the shocking CCTV images of the Ormiston Mall Ram-Raid.

Not for nothing are social commentators referencing “the exhausted middle” and its growing disinclination to engage with a political system that itself appears to have become dysfunctional. The stories that New Zealand, as a nation, used to tell itself: that in spite of their differences Māori and Pakeha had contrived to become “one people”; that “fairness” was what counted most in the formulation of public policy; and that the state commanded sufficient loyalty and respect to arbitrate political and cultural conflicts; are attracting fewer and fewer adherents.

Almost certainly, a majority of the middle-class New Zealanders who watched the CCTV record of the ram-raid on Ormiston Mall understood that what they were witnessing was yet more dramatic and disturbing evidence of the crisis that has been gripping working-class Māori and Pasifika for decades. At the same time, however, those middle-class Pakeha would have told themselves that any attempt to identify and comment upon the ethnic components of the ram-raids, and the future they portended, would likely be met with a storm of criticism and angry charges of racism.

The upshot is the worst of both worlds. The images will sink deep into the electorate’s political consciousness, waiting there for a suitably mendacious politician to lift them to the surface. At the same time, the discussion and debate that such a jarring event would once have ignited will not take place. Consequently, the anxiety and anger will remain, unrelieved by the political and cultural engagement that offers the only effective remedy.

The great virtue of democracy is that when citizens are shocked and frightened by events which suggest a breakdown of law and order, they are always able to answer “we, the people” can fix it. Through free, frank, and often hurtful debate, the shape of a solution emerges and consensus develops over the next steps to be taken.

Facing the truth is never easy, but it is always better than the alternative. Because, no matter how diligently we weight it down; no matter how earnestly we hope it will remain sunk, Truth’s body always resurfaces. The challenge then is not simply to deal with it, but to understand how we could ever have considered it wiser to keep the truth hidden.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website of Monday, 2 May 2022.

Armies Of The Dead.

Not Forgotten, Or Forgiven: At this moment our television screens are filled with stories featuring Ukrainians and Russians. Over the course of the past century, both of these peoples have endured almost unbelievable levels of pain, rage and guilt. The statue pictured above, entitled The Bitter Memory of Childhood is part of the national memorial to the Ukrainian Famine in Kyiv.

WHERE DOES PAIN, rage and guilt go? At the level of the individual human-being, psychologists are confident that they go to the construction of a personality which reflects and all-too-often reproduces these searing experiences.

As the British poet W.H. Auden wrote on the eve of war in September 1939:

I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.

The truth of this bleak observation is borne out in virtually every programme screened on the Crime & Investigation channel of Sky Television. In the back-story behind the most terrible crimes there are almost always harrowing tales of childhood trauma and abuse. As the branch is bent, so grows the tree. Serial killers are not born, they are made.

But what about whole collectivities of human-beings? What about the peoples and nations that have experienced pain, rage and guilt? Where does it go?

At this moment our television screens are filled with stories featuring Ukrainians and Russians. Over the course of the past century, both of these peoples have endured almost unbelievable levels of pain, rage and guilt. It stretches credulity well beyond its breaking-point to suggest that what happened between the outbreak of the First World War and the end of the Second did not leave its mark on both Russia and Ukraine.

The deliberate creation of famine in Ukraine by the Soviet government of Russia is estimated to have led directly to the deaths of between 3 and 7 million people – most of them peasant farmers.

The details of this political crime, almost too awful to read, have been compiled by historian Timothy Snyder in his book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.

Those fortunate enough to live in Ukraine’s towns and cities did not die in anything like the same numbers. But their survival came at a price. They were forbidden by the Communist Party commissars from feeding the skeletal creatures that appeared like wraith’s in their streets and squares. They died where they fell, were loaded on to trucks, and buried under cover of darkness in mass graves.

What does that do to people? Where do the emotions stirred up by such behaviour go?

A partial answer to that question came in 1941 when the Wehrmacht rolled across the Soviet border into Ukraine. Hundreds-of-thousands of Ukrainian nationalists collaborated with the German invaders. It was the local knowledge of these Ukrainians which allowed the German Einsatzgruppen to round up and kill their communist neighbours.

Seeking retribution from those they held responsible for the needless deaths of family and friends is, at least, comprehensible. But the ferocity with which Ukrainians fell upon their Jewish compatriots is beyond rational explanation. Only recently has grainy film footage of these 1941 pogroms come to light. It is the stuff of nightmares. The Holocaust had many helpers.

Russians and Ukrainians are not, of course, alone in perpetrating the most heinous of crimes against their neighbours. Like so many others guilty of similar atrocities, however, the perpetrators were required to bury the terrible memories that came with them. Years of silence. Decades of nightmares. Lifetimes of unacknowledged trauma. How can their effects not have bled into the social tissue of the nations involved? A moral gangrene that spread and spreads.

Not only that, but among the many thousands of historical killers were some who actually enjoyed the killing. Deriving pleasure from causing pain and suffering is not information most human-beings are all that eager to share – at least not explicitly. The intergenerational consequences of such psychopathology’s indirect communication can only be guessed at. How have the children of these monsters been spending their emotional inheritance?

For most Westerners, the war unfolding in Ukraine makes no sense. Russians and Ukrainians look the same, speak the same languages, have lived lives that were, until very recently, culturally indistinguishable. Why are they fighting?

The chilling answer is that both sides are commanded by ghosts. It is the unquiet dead, the unpunished crimes, the gagged memories of countless perpetrators and their victims that drive these armies forward. Impulses barely understood, inherited from parents and grandparents who could neither speak about nor forget the horrors they had witnessed or performed.

Two nations to whom great evil has been done are being driven, by dead hands, to do evil in return.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 29 April 2022.