The Crowd That Booed.

Social Distancing: Student protesters make their way carefully around the working class. Dunedin 1994. Photo Otago Daily Times.

IT WAS THE LARGEST CROWD I had ever addressed – and it booed me. In 1990 the Labour Government of Geoffrey Palmer (look him up!) announced that university tuition fees would rise from $129.00 to $1,250.00 per year – an eye-watering 969% increase! Unsurprisingly, the news was not well-received by New Zealand’s 100,000 university students. When Labour's policy was first floated the year before, the then Education Minister, Phil Goff, was mobbed by hundreds of angry students at Victoria University who followed him all the way down Wellington's Terrace hurling abuse. In Dunedin, students from the University of Otago turned out to protest Labour’s fee increase in unprecedented numbers. I was one of a large number of people invited to address them.

Why? Because only a matter of months before Goff's announcement the Labour Party had split. Jim Anderton, followed by thousands of others, had abandoned the party of Rogernomics to form the NewLabour Party. The students’ association wanted to know NewLabour’s policy on user-pays education – and I – naïve fool that I was – told them.

It started well. There were cheers when I told them that the NewLabour Party was committed to providing a free tertiary education to every young New Zealander who wanted one: that Goff’s hated $1,250.00 fee would be scrapped. A more sensible aspiring politician would have stopped right there. For better or for worse, however, I did not fall into that category. Promising to abolish tuition fees was only part of the story, I told the assembled thousands. In order to fund free tertiary education for all, New Zealand would have to re-introduce the sharply progressive income tax which the Fourth Labour Government had dismantled. To make the first promise without making voters aware of the second would be dishonest. Zero student fees could only be paid for by higher taxes.

That’s when the booing started. I quit while I was behind – a sadder but a wiser man.

I was 34 years-old in 1990 – roughly fifteen years senior to the crowd in front of me. People were just beginning to refer to these youngsters as “Generation X” – Jacinda Ardern’s and Grant Robertson’s generation. Many of these kids would fight the good fight against user-pays education with energy and dedication right through the 1990s. Grant, himself, was elected President of the Otago University Students Association in 1993 and would go on to co-lead the national student organisation three years later. That said, I couldn’t forget those Gen-Xers’ cheers for free education, nor their boos for higher taxes. Neither, it would appear, could Grant.

Few economists and even fewer political journalists are predicting that Thursday’s Budget will feature a sharp rise in taxes. Envisaged instead is a massive increase in Government borrowing. Some younger commentators have worked out that the burden of repaying the enormous foreign debt this government is racking-up will be borne by them and their children – and they’re not happy about it. There is talk about extracting at least some of the repayment from older New Zealanders. After all, they argue, all of this uniting against Covid-19 has been for their benefit. The least they can do is give something up for the generations who will bear the brunt of the economic crisis which combatting the virus has precipitated. One of the Aussie bank economists has even, in the finest Shock Doctrine style, called for drastic action on superannuation, the retirement age, and untaxed capital gains.

Not wanting to provoke the election-compromising boos that such measures would elicit – not least from New Zealand’s most assiduous voters, the Over-60s – Grant is most unlikely to do any of those things. He, at least, is not so naïve as to waste all the election-victory-enhancing cheers which his Thursday promises to spend whatever it takes to get New Zealand out of trouble are certain to produce, by idiotically going on to explain how he intends to pay for them! Instead, he will reassure us of just how much scope for borrowing his prudent fiscal management of the New Zealand economy has provided. And there’s plenty of money on offer! In the immortal words of John Clarke (aka Fred Dagg) “If we stand in the queue with our hats on, we can borrow a few million more.” Verily, we don’t know how lucky we are to have such a government.

Few New Zealanders see as clearly as John Minto what will be sacrificed to pay the vastly expanded mortgage that Grant is negotiating with overseas lenders. All the fine ideas about overcoming child poverty, humanising the welfare system, building state houses, tackling mental illness and doing something real about global warming will, to use Grant’s own words: “be put on ice”. If politics is the language of priorities, then almost without exception it speaks with a middle-class accent.

Because, in the subsequent hours and days – and years – in which I relived the humiliation of that booing crowd, I was finally blessed with the consoling insight that, big as it was, it represented only a very narrow slice of the New Zealand population. Moreover, it was not a slice that was ever going to welcome the news that its parents and, eventually, itself, would be called upon to pay, and pay handsomely, for the maintenance of the sort of society that offered all its young people a free tertiary education. That consolation came when I remembered that I was not the only speaker to be booed that day. The young Maori woman who spoke of the needs of her people, and of their just historical claims upon the resources of the Pakeha nation – they booed her, too.

The bourgeoisie, you see, has always been extremely keen on getting into heaven; but it’s damned if it’s ever been willing to die to get there. Always, that’s been somebody else’s job – somebody poor.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 12 May 2020.

The Safety Of The People Shall Be The Highest Law.

Salus populi suprema lex

The safety of the people shall be the highest law.

- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC) Roman Jurist and Statesman

SIMON BRIDGES and his supporters (witting and unwitting) aren’t quite chanting “Lock her up!” Not yet anyway. But they’re headed in that general direction. Faced with a prime ministerial performance that the rest of the world, and most of her own compatriots, have judged to be outstanding, the Right, in desperation, is attempting to criminalise Jacinda Ardern’s “Go Early – Go Hard” strategy against the Covid-19 Pandemic. Shown the way by a couple of liberal professors, Bridges and his media allies are now demanding to know the legal basis for locking down New Zealand. If the Cabinet’s decision, made in haste under extreme conditions, is deemed to be ultra vires (beyond its powers) the way will be opened to endless and politically vexatious litigation.

What these legal purists and panic-stricken politicians do not appear to understand is that if it is the people who are ultimately the fount of all legal authority, then those same people must also possess the power, in extremis, and in the interests of keeping themselves and their loved ones safe, to elevate that existential imperative above all other legal and juridical considerations. With an election looming, any political party foolish enough to attempt to punish Jacinda Ardern and her team for keeping New Zealanders safe will be punished severely at the ballot box. And, if the people are not the ultimate source of all legal authority, well then, who is? Law professors? Lobbyists? The National Party!

The declaration of a State of Emergency is, by its very nature, an exceptional occurrence. Among the most extreme of all the powers wielded by executive authority, it is reserved for those moments when the normal appurtenances of state power are no longer deemed sufficient to maintain public safety. That only those constitutionally sanctioned to do so can declare a State of Emergency is less important than whether or not the persons so empowered believe that such a declaration will be effective. The declaration of a State of Emergency which does not enjoy broad popular support is, in effect, a declaration of war by the state upon its own citizens. Or, to put it another way: the safety of the people can only be maintained by exceptional legal means if the people themselves feel sufficiently threatened to abandon legal norms.

But who, in these situations, falls within the definition of “the people”? Clearly, not everyone can be included if the threat is located within the borders of the state. A nation under foreign attack; responding to a natural disaster; or facing down a global pandemic; will have no difficulty in accepting emergency regulations. Declaring a State of Emergency in the context of a political and/or economic challenge to the smooth functioning of society, however, is a much riskier proposition. Interfering with the free movement of individuals and/or the free disposition of their property in such circumstances can only be made effective by excluding the challenger/s from the usual definition of “the people”. For emergency measures to succeed, such individuals or groups they must first be transformed into “the enemy within”.

This what happened during the last great extended State of Emergency in New Zealand history: the 1951 Waterfront Dispute. The National Party Prime Minister of the day, Sid Holland and his uncompromising Minister of Labour, William “Big Bill” Sullivan, were able to brand the Waterside Workers Union “wreckers” and curtail their rights because the dispute arose in a context that made the demonization of the watersiders and their allies considerably easier than it would have been at just about any other time.

The Cold War had just turned “hot” in Korea. The militant trade unions had walked out of the Federation of Labour and viciously attacked its leaders: a situation which played into the hands of the FOL’s Machiavellian “boss”, Fintain Patrick Walsh. Between 1946 and 1949, the Labour Party, itself, had quite deliberately isolated, vilified and, in at least one instance, deregistered, militant, communist-led trade unions. This vilification, especially of the Waterside Workers Union, had continued on the pages of the country’s newspapers (most effectively through Gordon Minhinnick’s cartoons in The NZ Herald). Holland and Sullivan could, therefore, rely upon Walsh, the FOL and the daily press to back any attack on the WWU. They could also, crucially, be relatively confident that the Labour Party would remain neutral in the ensuing industrial war.

Because it controlled one of the economy’s crucial choke-points, the wharfies’ union had always been vulnerable to a government determined to destroy its power. Any lengthy period of industrial action could be successfully portrayed as constituting a clear and present danger, not only to the country’s exporters and importers, but to the whole community. This was due to the fact that in the 1950s vast quantities of everyday items were still distributed around the country by ship. Holland was able to argue that shutting down New Zealand’s ports constituted a very real threat to the public safety. As a consequence, his invocation of the draconian Public Safety Conservation Act (1932) was held to be justifiable.

It was enough – just – for the majority of New Zealanders to accept the National Government’s comprehensive restriction of their civil liberties, and the harsh persecution of their fellow citizens, that Holland’s quasi-fascist Emergency Regulations permitted. Had the Korean War not been raging; had the FOL not been split; had Labour been less hostile to the trade union left; and had the public been less vulnerable to a protracted shut-down of New Zealand’s ports; then the National Government probably wouldn’t have risked declaring a State of Emergency. But, with all these factors working in its favour, and with its decisive victory in the Snap Election which Holland called to secure the electorate’s ex post facto endorsement of his treatment of the watersiders, the National Party was given ample proof that, for most Kiwis, the famous maxim of the Roman statesman, Cicero: Salus populi suprema lex; the safety of the people shall be the highest law; was indisputable

In the light of New Zealanders’ conscientious adherence to the “Unite Against Covid-19” rules, Cicero’s maxim continues to meet with their approval. Kiwi acceptance of draconian emergency measures cannot be guaranteed, however, in the absence of two crucial provisos: 1) An overwhelming majority of the people must believe that the threat to their safety is real. 2) They must also be convinced that only the imposition of extreme measures will avert a national catastrophe.

Neither of these provisos applied to the political crisis confronting New Zealand in 1981. Invoking the provisions of the Public Safety Conservation Act was a move the Rob Muldoon-led National Government was unwilling to make in relation to that year’s highly controversial Springbok Tour. It knew that there was insufficient support across the whole country for hard-line emergency measures to be enforced without the use of deadly force. Such was the temper of the country in 1981 that the killing of protesters by police or soldiers would only have made the disorder on the nation’s streets ten times worse.

New Zealand history thus confirms that its people are, indeed, the best judges of their own political security, and will make an exception to the rule of law only when they believe their own and their loved ones’ safety is genuinely imperilled.

The Jacinda Ardern-led Coalition Government is the first since 1951 which, confronted with a clear and present danger to the public’s safety, has felt confident enough of their broad support to promulgate and enforce a stringent emergency regime of indefinite duration. The New Zealand people’s subsequent willingness to “Unite Against Covid-19” constitutes a ringing endorsement of both the Ardern-led Government and Cicero’s militant-democratic slogan.

As their own constitutional guardians, the people are uniquely positioned to recognise those (thankfully rare) moments when the only effective means of keeping themselves safe is by allowing their leaders to operate (temporarily) outside the black letters of the law. And woe betide anyone who tries to stop them!

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 8 May 2020.

A Creative Solution To Tourism’s Demise.

Paradise Lost: The millions of tourists who collectively constituted New Zealand’s largest single source of overseas funds will not be returning to these shores any time soon. For the foreseeable future, tourism and the multitude of businesses that serviced its voracious appetites, will be – to use a technical term – buggered.

LET’S BE HONEST, most sectors of the New Zealand economy will recover relatively quickly from the Covid-19 Pandemic. Our primary production sector and all the businesses that support it will bounce back. Our secondary industries will, in large measure, do the same. Indeed, pressures are already building for our industrial sector to step up to the challenge of increasing New Zealand’s economic resilience. Winston Peters is far from being the only person who regards the virtual elimination of this country’s import substitution capability in the 1980s and 90s as a singularly unwise policy.

But, the millions of tourists who collectively constituted New Zealand’s largest single source of overseas funds will not be returning to these shores any time soon. For the foreseeable future, tourism and the multitude of businesses that serviced its voracious appetites, will be – to use a technical term – buggered.

There simply aren’t enough New Zealanders with enough time and money to fill the tourist void. For the past twenty years we have struggled to keep pace with the demands of our international visitors. For every hotel we built; every new adventure we devised; every taste-bud-titillating restaurant we opened; there were always more and more customers to satisfy.

They came on vast cruise ships – floating towns that disgorged virtually their entire populations to spend, spend, spend for hours – sometimes days – at a time. All the cruise liners in the world, however, could not compete with the unending stream of airliners touching down at our international airports. Most of them packed full of passengers eager to enjoy their very own New Zealand experience.

Future historians will look back with wonder at the age of hyper-tourism. They will observe how cost-cutting innovations in aviation technology combined with the exploding numbers of newly enriched middle-class citizens from countries hitherto priced out of international travel to produce a surge in tourist numbers so great that the attractions they travelled thousands of miles to enjoy threatened to collapse under the sheer weight to their numbers. In the late twentieth century the New Zealand tourist industry looked forward to welcoming a million visitors a year. By 2020 it was gearing up to entertain five times that number.

But the Covid-19 Pandemic arrived instead and now this country finds itself with more tourist-oriented enterprises than can possibly be sustained by its tiny population.

The first and most obvious victim of the pandemic was the national carrier, Air New Zealand. Practically overnight, the airline lost 80 percent of its business. Of necessity the Government bailed it out. Located as they are at the bottom of the world, New Zealanders simply cannot do without their own airline. What other carrier, in the prolonged absence of the tourist hordes, would come so far, and at such cost, except Air New Zealand?

Sadly, not every carrier has a state to bail it out. From the hundreds of airlines traversing the skies in the age of hyper-tourism, the post-pandemic world will likely be serviced by no more than a few dozen. Fares will sky-rocket and the number of international tourists will plummet. The days of the golden tourist weather will be well and truly gone.

And what of the cruise ships? After the horrors of the Diamond and Ruby Princesses, the world may have to wait many years for the return of those floating towns and their wealthy pensioner passengers. Indeed, History may record the cruise ship craze as the last hurrah of the death-defying Baby Boom Generation. The cost of insuring themselves against involuntary quarantine should, alone, be more than enough to put off their children and grand-children!

The urgent problem remains, however, of how New Zealand fills the tourist void. What can possibly take the place of those millions of international travellers and their oh-so-precious hard currency? An expanded “bubble” encompassing the whole of Australia? It’s a nice thought, but hardly a practical one. Making it work – without reigniting Covid-19 – poses a truly daunting number of questions. What’s needed is a product the world is willing to buy: a product unique to New Zealand.

If the world can no longer come here by ship or plane, then why not invite it to tour the landscape of our imagination? Let’s invest in movies, television series, plays, music, novels, computer games. Encourage the world to partake of New Zealand’s unique creativity.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 8 May 2020.

Our Hometown.

Bitter Sweet Song Of Farewell:  Bruce Springsteen's achingly nostalgic ballad "My Hometown" chronicles the decline of a US textile town. New Zealand's tourism industry is poised to become yet another victim of the same ruthless forces of globalisation: "These jobs are going boys, and they ain't coming back."

ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND: that’s the number of jobs likely to be lost as New Zealand’s tourist industry collapses. Very few of those involved in the accommodation, refreshment and entertainment of international visitors are open to the idea that most of their enterprises are gone for good. Many appear to believe that domestic tourists will fill the gaping hole in their business plans. Others are counting on Winston Peters’ trans-Tasman bubble to save the industry. Such hopes are almost certainly vain. As the foreman in Bruce Springteen’s classic song “My Hometown” puts it: “These jobs are going, boys, and they ain’t coming back.”

Those tourism jobs, though, they’re not like the jobs in Springsteen’s soon-to-be-closed textile mill. The factory jobs of the post-war boom underpinned a whole way of life. Unionised and well-paid, they conferred dignity and security on a working-class that was still conscious of its power and purpose. Those jobs paid for houses, cars, household appliances and holidays at grandad’s batch or a seaside holiday camping ground. Those jobs were solid and they made the people who did them solid too. When the factories closed and the solid livelihoods they provided simply melted into air, New Zealand’s proud but fragile working-class culture evaporated along with them.

When all the hotels and restaurants constructed to accommodate the millions of international visitors who poured into New Zealand during the age of hyper-tourism shut down, their workforces will simply scatter. Mostly young, mostly untethered, and mostly flexible – in  the approved neoliberal fashion – they will suffer, struggle, adapt and survive. The vast majority of these hospitality workers will experience the collapse of their industry as a purely individual misfortune. The mass unionism of 1936-1991, which made the closure of any workplace a powerful collective experience (and generally resulted in some form of redundancy compensation) has not been a feature of working-life in the private sector for quarter-of-a-century.

Overwhelmingly, the collapse of hyper-tourism in New Zealand will be a small-business tragedy. These enterprises were the Remora fish who fed off the massive shark of international travel. Their fate will be the fate of all businesses born out of the extraordinary expansion of global markets which has defined the economic history of the past fifty years. Having taken advantage of global forces over which they exercised not the slightest control, they now find themselves caught up in an equally uncontrollable, exogenously generated, sequence of global events. Sadly, there is almost nothing that the small business owners can do to prevent these new global realities from smashing their enterprises and shattering their dreams.

Naturally, they will turn to the Government for assistance, even though the Government is almost as powerless to redirect the global tide as the small business-person.

The brute facts of the Covid-19 catastrophe toll over the tourist industry like a funeral bell.

The unprecedented affordability of global travel – largely the effect of cost-saving innovations in the aviation industry – cannot endure. The Pandemic is destroying the world’s airlines. When it ends, the number of carriers will have shrunk significantly. Where there were once hundreds, experts are predicting that there will be only a few dozen airlines. That means fewer flights and higher fares. The number of international travellers will plummet. New Zealand will find itself in possession of a tourist infrastructure several times too large for its dramatically reduced visitor traffic.

There is nothing any government can do about this. No politician can conjure up millions of tourists out of thin – or even smoky Australian – air. Covid-19 has transformed those streams of passengers pouring off the airliners and cruise ships from prized spenders into potentially dangerous carriers of deadly diseases. Borders will become a lot harder to penetrate. Foreigners will no longer receive such a warm welcome.

Not that the foreigners will be much inclined to come anyway. It is a universal feature of economic crises that the ordinary person in the street becomes extremely risk averse and reluctant to spend. People become very careful with their money. Having being thoroughly drenched by the rainy day overhead, they immediately begin saving for the largest possible umbrella to protect them during the next. From seeing one last carefree hurrah aboard a cruise ship as their bound and due, the Baby Boom Generation may even start thinking about the generations coming after them.

Nothing politicians can do about that, either.

It all sounds very grim, and it will be, but only for a while. That strange combination of creativity, thrill-seeking and greed, which propels the entrepreneur towards new ventures will soon respond to new incentives and new opportunities. It is here that politicians can do something. In fact, it is here that they can do quite a lot. Governments can help with finance and advice; they can help with the imparting of new skills to new workforces; they can build affordable homes and lodgings for new workers to live in; they can re-empower those workers with the right to organise and participate in the new ventures – growing into new industries – that, phoenix-like, will rise out of the ashes of the old.

New Zealanders were surely made for nobler occupations that making beds, cooking food, pouring drinks and providing thrills and entertainment for wealthy foreigners. It is one of the great paradoxes of the Covid-19 Pandemic, that the places so many millions travelled so far around the world to see only revealed their true selves when the tourists stopped coming. Fish swam in the fresh clear water of Venice’s canals. The Taj Mahal glittered under azure skies. And we, in our bubbles, looked into the faces of the people we loved and realised for the first time in a long time how very beautiful they were. There is so much more to see in our hometowns when, like the little boy riding with his father in Springsteen’s song, we are given the opportunity to “take a good look around”.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 7 May 2020.

Are We In A “New Security Environment”, Or Just The Same Old Anti-Chinese One?

Dragon Replaces Bear: If New Zealand’s economic survival wasn’t at stake, the current spate of anti-Chinese propaganda, so reminiscent of the paranoid Cold War rhetoric of the 1950s, would be laughable.

HOW SHOULD NEW ZEALAND make its way out of the Covid-19 crisis? More and more powerful and influential players are lining-up to answer that question. At stake is considerably more than the nation’s physical and economic health. Domestic policy choices cannot avoid having foreign policy consequences. Covid-19 has further deranged what little remained of the US-led post-Soviet world order. Faith in the American hegemon is faltering and the OECD Club’s fear of China is increasing by the day. Aware of the pivotal role the Chinese play in maintaining the global economy – not to mention their own – America’s European and Australasian allies find themselves torn between the equally urgent demands of their US patron and their own populations.

The situation in Australasia is particularly fraught. A major regional player, Australia stands resolutely alongside its American “mate”, dutifully repeating all of the United States’ foreign policy and defence lines. That China absorbs at least a third of all Australian exports is known by Canberra’s elites, but somehow this central economic fact of the country’s economic life is simply excluded from its diplomatic and military calculations. At some point – and perhaps quite soon – this central contradiction at the heart of Australian foreign policy will become critical. If Canberra chooses Washington over Beijing, then the Australian economy will tank. If it chooses Beijing over Washington, then Australia will be plunged into a profound identity crisis.

New Zealand’s economic wellbeing, like Australia’s, is dependent upon its exporters’ access to the Chinese market. Unlike Australia, however, New Zealand’s foreign policy establishment has so far managed to avoid taking a side in the growing stand-off between Washington and Beijing. Wellington is neither as diplomatically nor militarily committed to the United States as Canberra. As a consequence, it has substantially more room for diplomatic manoeuvre between the two great powers. In the present, highly volatile strategic environment, that confers a considerable advantage.

In Washington and Canberra, however, Wellington’s diplomatic manoeuvrability has become a source of considerable aggravation. It would suit the Americans and the Australians much better to have New Zealand safely and securely in the “ANZUS” tent. In geostrategic terms, a US-aligned Australasia is crucial to Washington’s new “Indo-Pacific” plan for containing China’s ambitious “Belt and Road” project. It has become a matter of some urgency, therefore, to facilitate a decisive shift in New Zealand foreign policy towards Washington and away from Beijing.

In conformity with the maxim that it is shameful to let a good crisis go to waste, the pro-Washington faction within New Zealand’s foreign policy establishment has persuaded the University of Canterbury to oversee a “pop-up” think tank dedicated to assisting the New Zealand Government “devise a resilience strategy that will ensure New Zealand’s independence and sovereignty are protected during the Covid-19 pandemic and after.”

The think tank has been “popped-up” by SSANSE (presumably pronounced “sanes”) an international research institute dedicated to exploring the challenges facing “Small States and the New Security Environment” (i.e. the world since Russia and China stopped playing nice). Based in Iceland, with funding from NATO, the institute would likely have passed without notice in this part of the world had it not been for the prominent role played in SSANSE’s activities by our very own Professor Anne-Marie Brady.

Professor Brady is, of course, the academic face of the campaign to reorient (if you’ll pardon the pun) New Zealand foreign policy away from Beijing and towards Washington. Alongside her fellow SSANSE directors and co-directors, Professor Margarete Šešelgytė, Professor Baldur Thorhallsson and Professor Alan Tidwell, Brady composes the “Editorial Board” of the new think tank. Its pitch is nothing if not portentous:

“The global environment has not been so challenging for New Zealand since 1942 when British forces in Singapore, who were New Zealand’s shield, fell to the advance of the Japanese. New Zealand must now face up to the national security risk of the Covid-19 outbreak. The current situation poses a risk not only to New Zealand, but collectively, for our Pacific, Five Eyes and NATO partners, as well as like-minded states who uphold the international rules-based order.”

With the Chinese clearly taking the place of the Japanese in this grim geostrategic scenario, and the “One Belt, One Road” project standing in for Imperial Japan’s “Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”? If New Zealand’s economic survival wasn’t at stake, this sort of re-heated Cold War rhetoric would be laughable.

Professor Brady is not, however, without powerful friends in high places. Not the least of whom is New Zealand’s Foreign Minister, Winston Peters. Since his in/famous “Georgetown Speech” of 15 December 2018, Peters has made it clear that he, too, favours redirecting New Zealand’s diplomatic effort away from the nation that takes the lion’s share of this country’s exports and back towards its traditional friends and allies – who don’t. The Foreign Minister referred to this reorientation as “The Pacific Reset”:

“The Pacific Reset […] reflects New Zealand’s response to the increasingly contested strategic environment in the Pacific in which more external actors are competing for influence. This calls for close cooperation with Pacific Island countries, Australia, the United States, and other partners with historic links in the region–countries such as Japan, the EU, UK and France–to uphold values that we share and want to promote in the region; values like democracy, good governance, greater women’s participation, and above all the rules based systems on which the region relies.”

There they are again, those “rules”. The same ones, no doubt, that sanctioned the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003!

Was it just one of those incredible coincidences that the man who heads up the Center for Australian, New Zealand & Pacific Studies at Georgetown University (which hosted Peters’ visit) is none other than Professor Alan Tidwell, SSANSE Co-director and Professor Brady’s associate on the editorial board of the University of Canterbury’s pop-up think tank? No greater coincidence, I’m sure, than Professor Brady following Foreign Minister Peters on “Newshub Nation” last Saturday morning. If you missed it, Peters used the occasion to voice his support for Australia’s call for an inquiry into China’s mishandling of the Wuhan outbreak of the novel coronavirus we now know as Covid-19.

Australia is about to pay a high price for once again shouldering the burdens of America’s “Deputy-Sheriff”; and unless the growing influence of the pro-Washington faction of our foreign policy establishment is stopped in its tracks – so will we.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 5 May 2020.

The List Candidate: Winston Peters and the Looming Covid-19 Depression.

Economic Nationalist: The NZ First leader, Winston Peters, has lived long enough to know that what New Zealanders did once they can do again. That economic change is the product not simply of improved technology but of political will.

WHY IS IT, that of all the party leaders only Winston Peters fully understands the economic ramifications of the Covid-19 Pandemic? Perhaps it’s his age. That might sound snarky, but it isn’t. None of the other party leaders are old enough to possess a solid mental picture of what New Zealand was like before the Neoliberal Revolution of 1984-1993.

Just do the maths. Jacinda was born in 1980 – which makes her 4-years-old in 1984. Simon Bridges, born in 1976, was 8. James Shaw and Marama Davidson, both born in 1973, were 11. The Act leader, David Seymour, born in 1983, was hardly out of nappies!

Now, consider Winston Peters. He was born in 1945, just as the Second World War was drawing to a close. He grew to adulthood in the “golden years” of the post-war boom, nurtured by the political, economic and social infrastructure of Mickey Savage’s cradle-to-grave welfare state. In 1984, as Labour set about dismantling this crowning political achievement of the New Zealand working-class, Peters was already 39-years-old.

The eldest of the other party leaders, Shaw and Davidson, will possess only the haziest memories of pre-Rogernomics New Zealand. What I remember of New Zealand in 1967, when I was 11-years-old, is made up mostly of family events, popular songs, movies and television programmes. As far as political memories go, I struggle to recall any names beyond Keith Holyoake, Harold Wilson and President Johnson. I had only the vaguest notion of what capitalism was, but I was pretty sure that “communism” was a very bad thing. Now, it’s entirely possible that the Green Party co-leaders were much more politically aware than I was at the age of 11, but it’s much more likely that they, like me, were far too busy being children.

Five years on, however, in 1972, my political memories are much more vivid. I shall certainly never forget that Saturday evening in November when for the first time in 12 years there was change of government. There had been a Labour government in my lifetime, but I was no older in 1957 than David Seymour was in 1984. For me, “Big Norm” was a political phenomenon: a breaker of moulds; a man who made it possible to believe in a better world; my hero.

What would Shaw’s and Davidson’s memories of 1989 have been? Of a riven Labour Party tearing itself to pieces over “Rogernomics”? Of a National Party, circling like a flock of vultures over the bloody entrails of a discredited government? Of the unsettling sense of a world they’d never really known being dismantled before their eyes? Of its replacement being full of sharp edges and dangerous spikes: a world that promised winners everything and losers nothing? Did they celebrate their sixteenth birthdays dreaming about building a better world, or wondering how to navigate their way through such a shitty one? A world where walls came down; students were shot down; heroes fell down; and history itself was said to be winding down.

Winston Peters, meanwhile, possessed a very clear picture of what his country looked like before Rogernomics and after “Ruthanasia”. He and the National Party had been elected on a “no ifs, no buts, no maybes” promise to restore “the decent society”. What was that? For Peters it was a society that allowed a dirt-poor cow-cockey’s son from Northland to become a pin-striped lawyer in a double-breasted suit. It was a society that offered work to all who wanted it – and felt only disdain for those who didn’t. It was a society that knew better than to leave the rich in charge of an economy. A society smart enough to know that in such a small country only the state was big enough to guarantee both prosperity and fairness.

Most importantly, Peters had lived long enough to know that what New Zealanders had done once they could do again. That economic change is the product not simply of improved technology but of political will.

A whole generation before Columbus set foot on the islands of the Caribbean, the Chinese were sailing 600-foot ocean-going junks all the way to East Africa. They had the technology to become the masters of the planet, but not the political will. The great sailing junks ended up rotting at their moorings. Voyages beyond the horizon were forbidden. Europeans conquered the world.

Peters loves these historical counterfactuals. He revels in knowing who Friedrich List (1789-1846) was and how his “national system” of economics transformed Germany into an industrial behemoth second only to the United States. He would write articles lamenting the fact that while the university book stores of South Korea were full of List’s economic nationalist ideas, most Kiwi students have never heard of him – let alone been taught about his kind of economics.

Friedrich List (1789-1846) Economic Nationalist.

Certainly, it’s a pretty safe bet that Jacinda, Simon, James, Marama and David could not tell you very much at all about List and the state-led capitalism which he championed and which has, historically, always outperformed the laissez-faire variety so beloved of the English-speaking capitalist countries. Not that their ignorance of economic nationalism worries them unduly. Having no clear memory of the world that existed before the triumph of Neoliberalism, they find it difficult to imagine that countries and economies could possibly be run successfully according to principles not sanctioned by their Treasury advisors.

The other party leaders may snigger at Peters now, but when the unemployment rate is climbing steadily towards 15 percent, and a third of New Zealand’s small businesses have shut down, there will be much less to snigger at. When Neoliberalism’s failure can no longer be hidden – even from those politicians who have grown up knowing nothing else – the man who has lived long enough to know that his alternative economic model works will be the man to know. And, when all the votes have been counted, he will still be the man who decides which of all those young leaders, born in the 1970s and 80s, becomes New Zealand’s next prime minister.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 1 May 2020.

If The Answer Is "Treasury", Then Ask Another Question!

Ground Zero: It was the Treasury which planned, and in large measure led, the neoliberal revolution in New Zealand. In 1984, its official “briefing paper” to the incoming Labour Government – presented in book form and entitled Economic Management – became the Finance Minister’s, Roger Douglas’s, “Little Beige Book”. Step-by-step it led the new government down the most radical path of deregulation, privatisation and marketisation yet attempted in a western democracy. 

JACINDA ARDERN had the Director-General of Health, Dr Ashley Bloomfield, to stand alongside her in the Beehive Theatrette. Who should Grant Robertson stand alongside? The Finance Minister tells us he is talking with Treasury’s top people. Together, he assures us, they are charting a course out of the unfolding Covid-19 Recession. In effect, Robertson is inviting us to trust Treasury. If economics were a real science, like microbiology, then trusting Treasury would be a reasonable option. But economics isn’t a science. In fact, it’s not even close.

Treasury could send out it’s top person, Chief Executive and Secretary Caralee McLiesh, to stand alongside the Finance Minister, but unless she possesses presentation skills so far undisplayed in her short career at the top of New Zealand’s most powerful government department, it just wouldn’t be the same.

That’s because it was the Treasury which planned, and in large measure led, the neoliberal revolution in New Zealand. In 1984, its official “briefing paper” to the incoming Labour Government – presented in book form and entitled “Economic Management” – became the Finance Minister’s, Roger Douglas’s, “Little Beige Book”. Step-by-step it led the new government down the most radical path of deregulation, privatisation and marketisation yet attempted in a western democracy. Three years later, a second volume, ominously entitled “Government Management”, instructed Labour and National in how to finish the job.

Nothing released by the NZ Treasury in the last 36 years has indicated that it has deviated in any significant way from the ideological position it staked-out so boldly in the early 1980s. That no government elected in the last 36 years has felt confident enough to defy Treasury advice (at least, not in any meaningful way) merely confirms how enduring its ideological and organisational victories have been.

If the Finance Minister invites Ms McLiesh to stand at the other podium on the Beehive Theatrette stage it will tell us at least two things: 1) That the co-ordinates to economic recovery have been set using a neoliberal compass. 2) That the Finance Minister is happy to steer by Treasury’s stars.

New Zealanders are confident that the advice of their Director-General of Health, grounded solidly in medical science, is sound. We can trust Ashley. But, unless there’s been another revolution in the upper echelons of Treasury, its advice will continue to be grounded in the demonstrably unsound neoliberal ideology. That being the case, Caralee can be trusted to prescribe exactly the same medicine New Zealanders have been forced to swallow since 1984. Moreover, if Grant is standing there alongside her in the Beehive theatrette, nodding sombrely as she speaks, then he can be trusted absolutely to administer it.

It is only fair to acknowledge at this point that the Finance Minister isn’t exactly spoiled for choice when it comes to alternative ways out of the economic disaster inflicted upon us by the Covid-19 virus. So crushing were Treasury’s victories of the 1980s and 90s that until very recently the opponents of neoliberalism have lacked the intellectual confidence to advance anything approaching a credible alternative to the economic status quo.

Where, we may ask, is the comprehensive recovery plan submitted to the Finance Minister by the Council of Trade Unions? Where is the progressive equivalent of the plethora of books penned by the disciples of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek in the 1970s and 80s? If the French economist/historian Thomas Piketty is supposed to be the twenty-first century’s answer to that great prophet of managed capitalism, John Maynard Keynes, then the Left has been sold a very soggy croissant.

Once again, being fair to Grant Robertson, it was Labour’s “Future of Work” exercise – over which he presided in the run-up to the 2017 General Election – that equipped the Finance Minister with such heterodox ideas as he has been willing to draw on in responding to the Covid-19 Crisis.

Rather than attempt to replicate the Prime-Minister’s highly effective daily briefings with Dr Bloomfield, perhaps it would be wiser for the Finance Minister to draw upon his Future of Work’s consultative precedent. Would it not constitute an “essential service” to New Zealand’s economic wellbeing to convene (with appropriate social-distancing) a conference embracing all the significant sectors of our society: bosses, workers, farmers, bankers, bureaucrats, professors, students, artists, beneficiaries, priests and non-profiteers; to collectively chart an equitable course to national recovery?

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 1 May 2020.