Precautionary Principles

A Cautionary Tale Of First Principles: Embraced in the desperation of crisis. Abandoned in the hubris of victory. Trending inexorably towards national tragedy.

THE MOST STARTLING ASPECT of the latest two publicly accessible polls is the stubborn refusal of National’s numbers to move. The most common reaction to the Opposition’s continuing failure to break through the 30 percent threshold is to lay the blame at the feet of Judith Collins. Certainly the conduct of the Opposition Leader does not contribute a great deal to National’s prospects of recovery. National’s sequestration in the mid-twenties is, however, about a lot more than its leader’s personality. National’s problem (and Labour’s, too, as we shall see) is its seeming inability to work from first principles.

There will be many who dismiss such a diagnosis as quaint. Politics, they will insist, is not a philosophy class, it’s a blood sport, in which principles serve a purely decorative function. The problem, of course, in seeing politics as a real-life version of The Squid Game, is that the absence of principle only makes the conduct of the “game” increasingly problematic. So much so that fewer and fewer people want to play it. Since democracy itself only works when political power and “The People” are joined at the hip, rendering politics unplayable amounts to the same thing as making democracy impossible.

Another way of demonstrating the importance of first principles in politics is to illustrate the difference in effectiveness between a government that works from these principles, and a government that sets them aside. Fortunately, the government led by Jacinda Ardern and the Labour Party provides us with a powerful illustration of both these phenomena.

It is important to establish from the outset that Ardern’s and Labour’s principled response had very little to do with the “democratic socialist” ideology which the party’s own constitution still requires it to embody. The first principles this government worked from, following the initial outbreak of the Coronavirus in early-2020 were, however, more than equal to the challenge confronting both itself and the New Zealand people. The shorthand expression for these principles was, simply: “the science”.

Medical science, most particularly epidemiology, closely followed by mathematical science’s statistical modelling techniques, provided Ardern and her government with rational, evidence-based advice on the most effective response to the Covid-19 Pandemic. Whether it came from the World Health Organisation, their own Ministry of Health, or the specialist teams assembled by the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, the flow of this scientific advice was powerful enough to generate political decisions that were at once persuasive, consistent and effective. The clarity and power of the Government’s Covid response possessed the additional advantage of easily exposing the weaknesses of the political/economic counter-attacks mounted by the Government’s opponents. Obviously, the greatest advantage of all was that “the science” worked.

Moreover, because the science worked, so, too, did the politics. Ardern and her party were rewarded with the most spectacular electoral endorsement in three-quarters-of-a-century. Ironically, it was this almost unbelievable electoral success that seems to have caused them to cease relying on “the science” for their political – and moral – guidance.

Following the 2020 General Election, the Prime Minister and her colleagues made the cardinal political mistake of forgetting who their friends were. In abstract terms, these friends were the principles of medical science and mathematics. In flesh-and-blood terms, they were the likes of Sir David Skegg, Professor Sean Hendy, Dr Michael Baker, and the irrepressible Souixsie Wiles. When the Prime Minister made the fatal decision to abandon the successful, science-based “elimination strategy”, practically all of the advisers who had guided her to victory over Covid-19 were left in the dark. Ardern and her government had committed the mortal political sin of believing their own spin: first principles – “the science” – had been abandoned for self-serving and opportunistic “politics”.

The consequences are chillingly evident from the Ministry of Health graphs of the Delta Variant of Covid-19’s evolution since 17 August 2021. From the bell-shaped hump of the virus’s rapid advance, and then its steady retreat, under the science-guided Level 4 Lockdown, the eye moves to the terrifying exponential curve of the virus’s explosion following the politically-inspired step-down to Level 3.

As the virus spreads like a bloodstain across the North Island, the Government’s decisions become less and less intelligible – or defensible. Having abandoned “the science” that had guided it to epidemiological and political victory, the Ardern Government flounders from one expedient, politically-driven decision to the next. A cautionary tale of first principles: embraced in the desperation of crisis; abandoned in the hubris of victory; trending inexorably towards national tragedy.

How, then, is it possible that New Zealand’s pre-eminent conservative party – National – is languishing at around 25 percent in the opinion polls? The most obvious answer: because none but the hardest of National’s hard-core supporters can detect very much at all in the way of principle in the Party’s confusing and often self-contradictory responses to the Covid-19 Pandemic.

A genuinely conservative party, operating from first principles, would have crafted its responses to Covid-19 according to the two core principles of the conservative world view: order and hierarchy. Accordingly, the National Party’s instinctive response should have been to ensure the least possible disruption to the orderly functioning of New Zealand society – and economy – by reposing its faith and trust in the nation’s leading scientists, mathematicians and economists. It would have eschewed any attempt to take opportunistic advantage of the Covid-19 crisis, using all its influence with the business and farming sectors to secure the broadest possible acceptance of the measures required to defeat the pandemic.

The electoral effect of such a strategy would have been very different from what actually transpired in 2020. By aligning itself with the Government’s decision to be guided by “the science” and “the experts” – even to the point of offering to join with Labour in a “grand coalition” for the duration of the pandemic – National would have positioned itself as the Government’s wise and responsible “older brother”. The reassuring image of National “standing guard” over this young, inexperienced and, hitherto, remarkably ineffective Labour-led Government would, almost certainly, have produced a much more competitive electoral contest.

By defaulting to the core conservative principles of order and hierarchy, National would also have curtailed the rampaging success of the Act Party. No genuine conservative is ever willing to separate the important right to “Freedom” from the equally important obligation of “Responsibility”. To abandon individual and social responsibility in the name of Freedom, is to immaturely transform Liberty into License.

Genuine conservatives place little store in the ability of human-beings, unconstrained by the forces of tradition, familial obligation and morality, to produce anything other than chaos and violence. The forceful enunciation of these core conservative beliefs would have done much to weaken the appeal of David Seymour’s licentious libertarianism, and exposed to the judgement of all moderate voters the Act Party’s all-too-evident contempt for the health and welfare of the whole community.

It is the worrying absence of this sort of steadying conservative guidance that has allowed those unwilling or unable to support the Labour Government’s increasingly arbitrary anti-Covid-19 policies, to go searching for answers and allies in all the most dangerous places. In the Age of the Internet, in the oppressive atmosphere of social media, the absence of a calming conservative voice, informed by clear, time-honoured first principles, poses a significant threat, not merely to the coherence and efficacy of government policy, but to the safety and security of society itself.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 15 November 2021.

Behold, The Losing-Class.

We Shall Come: Who are these people? The brutally straightforward answer is that they are the people for whom no room can be found on the board game called Neoliberal Capitalism. The people who, 35 years ago, suddenly discovered that the promise of a steady job with good wages and a home of their own to live in, had suddenly and irrevocably been withdrawn. Without the credentials now deemed essential to a minimally respectable existence, the only title they can aspire to is “Loser”.

MANY NEW ZEALANDERS recoiled with shock and disbelief at Tuesday’s (9/11/21) Anti-Government protest outside Parliament. That all manner of crazy stuff could be found on social media was well understood, but to see that online extremism suddenly brought to life on the streets of the capital city was deeply disturbing. That such a frightening combination of ignorance and anger was festering away inside New Zealand’s body politic came as a profound shock.

Who were these people? How could they hold such absurd beliefs? What has gone so wrong with New Zealand’s education system that so many of those emerging from it can no longer distinguish between reality and utterly delusional fantasy? So complete seemed the destruction of the protesters’ critical faculties that it was difficult to look upon the spectacle without experiencing pangs of guilt. These were, after all, fellow Kiwis. How was it possible that they had been allowed to sink so low?

One imagines that many educated English people experienced very similar feelings when they realised that a majority of their fellow citizens had voted to leave the European Union. Or when educated Americans realised with a rising sense of horror that their next President would be Donald Trump. Social layers that had been dismissed, by one of their own, as “a basket of deplorables” could no longer be ignored. The question remained, however: Where had this vast army of the political living dead come from?

The brutally straightforward answer is that they are the people for whom no room can be found on the board game called Neoliberal Capitalism. The people who, 35 years ago, suddenly discovered that the promise of a steady job with good wages and a home of their own to live in, had suddenly and irrevocably been withdrawn. Without the credentials now deemed essential to a minimally respectable existence, the only title they can aspire to is “Loser”.

As hundreds-of-thousands of New Zealanders have discovered, to become a loser is to become invisible. Economically, socially, culturally, politically: their contribution goes unnoticed. Nobody cares what they do; what they think; or how they feel.

That they will always be there, grinding away, is simply assumed. At the check-out counter; behind the wheel of a truck; driving a forklift in a cavernous warehouse; cleaning the toilets and emptying the rubbish bins in a high-rise office block: the people who do these jobs are just the flesh-and-blood cogs whose teeth turn the implacable capitalist machinery. Those who dwell in the world of the winners may thank them politely as they wheel their shopping trolley away from the check-out counter, but the faces of the losing-class are forgotten long before the winners reached the car-park.

A cruel enough existence, the winners might concede, were anyone bold enough to ask them, but most of them lack the imagination to understand just how cruel. In the ad-breaks that punctuate the endless reality shows on free-to-air television (themselves carefully crafted exercises in accentuating the personal failings of all but one of the contestants) the world of the winners, in all its plenitude, is constantly on display. The couples who effortlessly purchase a house with the help of a friendly Aussie bank. The magnificent motor vehicles. The holidays in far-off and exotic locations. A world whose inhabitants wouldn’t be caught dead eating KFC, or shopping at Pak N Save – alongside the losers.

But, if the world of the winners is not for them, then, by the same token, their own world is not for the winners. To be uneducated is not the same as being dumb. The losing-class has its own rules, its own moral code. Heroism is measured by the extent to which the odds, so outrageously stacked against the losing-class, are successfully defied; by how decisively their players emerge victorious from a game so obviously rigged. Freedom means smashing through every obstacle erected to slow the losing-class down. Because no loser ever got very far by following the rules written by the winners.

What, then, did the losers see when Covid-19 arrived upon the scene?

They saw the winners sent home with their laptops and smart-phones. They saw themselves heading out to work every morning, as usual, to do what were once called the “shit jobs” – but were now referred to as “essential occupations”. They wondered about that. If their jobs were “essential”, why weren’t they paid the same sort of wages as the people on “Zoom” meetings, whose jobs clearly were not? They saw a world which kept on working pretty well, even when more that half the workforce was doing nothing more productive than exchanging e-mails. Some members of the Team of Five Million seemed to have a whole lot less to do than others. Something was definitely wrong with this picture.

For the losers without jobs, however, the picture was more confused and worrying. They had learned to live in ways that kept them at a safe distance from the winners and their flinty-faced enforcers. That might mean living in the wop-wops: miles away from the nearest WINZ office; taking under-the-table payments from friends and neighbours; doing stuff that the local cop knew better than to ask about; surviving off-the-grid.

It was harder to remain anonymous and invisible in the big cities. Harder – but not impossible. The trick was to have as little to do with the winners and their rules as possible. The last thing these members of the losing-class needed was the authorities taking an interest in them, personally. As in demanding they come in and get vaccinated against Covid-19 – now.

If one goes looking for reasons not to do something, one will almost certainly find them – especially on the Internet. There were plenty of people, all over the world, who were adamant that the winners were talking nonsense. Really, Covid was no worse than the flu. For some reason, however, the winning-class was dead set on smashing its way into the world it had condemned the losers to live in. They were coming for them, hypodermic syringes at the ready. “It’s for your own good!”, they cried. Like the losing-class had never heard that before! “If you don’t get jabbed, we’ll take your job!” Ah, yes, that was a more familiar tune. Where had they heard it before? Of course, that’s right, in the mouths of Nazis and Commies. Well, fuck that!

It is easy to theorise that the reaction of the losing-class here in New Zealand might have been different if this country had experienced the mass deaths common to the rest of the world. But, one only has to think of the United States and the United Kingdom, and the vehemence of their Covid-19 deniers and anti-vaxxers, to realise that not even the grim reality of hundreds-of-thousands of Covid victims is enough to change losing-class minds.

Neoliberal Capitalism has destroyed the illusion of a united society and driven millions of human-beings off the Monopoly Board it has made out of Western societies. In “normal” times these two worlds: the one made up of those equipped to play; and the one reserved for those with no hope of participating – let alone winning; had few, if any, points of contact. But Covid has forced these two worlds together and, like matter coming into contact with anti-matter, the reaction is fraught with danger.

Who are these people? This poem, written by an anonymous unemployed worker in 1932, captures something of the losing-class’s mood:

We shall come, the unemployed,
The disinherited of this earth,
We shall come into your temples
And your marble halls of mirth.
We shall come as you have made us,
Ragged, lousy, pale and gaunt,
You, the House of Have, shall listen
Unto us, the House of Want.
We are measuring the weed-chip gangs
That stretch from coast to coast,
We shall come, us, the rightless,
Us, the God forsaken host.
We shall come in all the madness
Born of hunger, pain and strife,
On our lips the cry for vengeance,
In our souls the lust for life.
We shall swarm, as swarmed the locusts
That on Pharaoh’s kingdom fell,
And sling your politicians

And your damned police to Hell.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 12 November 2021.

The Escalation Game That Protesters Cannot Win.

Death And The Marchers: What the so-called “Freedom & Rights Coalition” would be wise to factor into their calculations is how quickly the public’s tolerance will evaporate if its followers move beyond the energetic expression of their grievances towards violence and/or the massive disruption of daily life. At that point the forbearance of the state will cease, and the protection of life and property will begin.

PROTESTERS CALLING for the overthrow of the Government should take a deep breath and consider their strategic situation. According to the Ministry of Health’s own polling, the hardcore anti-vaxxers represent – at best – five percent of the population. Even assuming that that many again are in some degree supportive of the protesters’ aims and objectives, that would still leave them confronting the remaining 90 percent of the population – who are not.

Now, it is very easy to forget this grim arithmetic when you are in the middle of a crowd of 5,000 people, surrounded by flags and placards, and breathing in the exhaust fumes of 100 large motorcycles. In such circumstances, the protester’s mind is filled with intoxicating feelings of invincibility. That any force could successfully turn “We, the People” around seems impossible.

It is, however, an enormous mistake for protesters (let alone insurrectionists) to interpret the fact that nobody has so far attempted to stop them, as proof that they cannot be stopped. What they may see as weakness on the part of a corrupt and cowardly government, will be seen by many more as evidence of a Government doing its utmost to facilitate a tiny fraction of the population’s right to express themselves politically. For most New Zealanders this will be taken as proof of their country’s deep commitment to democratic principles.

What the so-called “Freedom & Rights Coalition” would be wise to factor into their calculations is how quickly the public’s tolerance will evaporate if its followers move beyond the energetic expression of their grievances towards violence and/or the massive disruption of daily life. At that point the forbearance of the state will cease, and the protection of life and property will begin.

The Freedom & Rights Coalition will then find itself caught up in a process of relentless escalation that it cannot win. If its followers use their fists and their boots against their fellow citizens, then the Police will don riot gear and equip themselves with pepper-spray, tasers, tear-gas and rubber bullets. If the insurrectionists then decide it is time to arm themselves with knives and firearms, the Government will call upon the armed forces to “aid the civil power” and the rebels will find themselves confronting highly trained military personnel armed with machine-guns and artillery. Anyone foolish enough to put themselves at the mercy of artillery will not be given a lot of time to regret their mistake.

This process of escalation will not be restricted to the armament deployed. Faced with violence and disruption on such a scale, it is highly likely that the Government will resort to measures not seen in this country for nearly 90 years.

Not the least of these will be the swearing-in of “Special Constables”. The last time this happened was in the immediate aftermath of the 1932 Queen Street Riot. Waikato cockies, many of them on horseback, were enrolled to ensure that the unemployed remained off the streets – by any means deemed appropriate.

Twenty years earlier there had been a similar mobilisation of conservative citizens. In the Great Strike of 1913, the Prime Minister of the day, William Massey, had unleashed hundreds of Special Constables against the militant unionists affiliated to the “Red” Federation of Labour. More than a few of these “Red Feds” were unabashed revolutionaries who, like the Freedom & Rights Coalition, believed in the right of the citizenry to overthrow a tyrannical government. “Massey’s Cossacks” reminded them, none too gently, of the resources available to a state which still commands overwhelming popular support.

Interestingly, during the Waterfront Lockout of 1951 the National Government considered, but then rejected, the use of Special Constables. The trade union militants were vastly outnumbered, not only by “ordinary Kiwis”, but even by the moderate unionists affiliated to the Not-So-Red Federation of Labour. Prime Minister Sid Holland’s notorious “Emergency Regulations” were more than enough to bring the Watersiders to heel.

The contemporary equivalent of those Emergency Regulations would, of course, be a Government decision to order a temporary shutdown of the Internet, giving the Police and the rest of the national security apparatus the opportunity to round-up what was left of the insurrection.

Most New Zealanders would likely consider it entirely fitting: if the shutting-down of social media – the prime generator of anti-vaccination militancy – turned out to be its ultimate cure.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 12 November 2021.

Carefree Calumnies: Vaccination Policies Under Nazism and Communism.

Revolutionary Duty: Up until the death of Stalin in 1953, the primary focus of the People’s Commissariat of Public Health was on the education of the masses – mostly by means of unceasing propaganda. Being a healthy Soviet citizen was a revolutionary duty.

ACCUSATIONS OF NAZISM are being flung around “in a carefree manner”. That, at least, is the observation of Dr Kate Hannah, Lead Researcher of the Disinformation Project. Established in 2020 under the auspices of Te Pūnaha Matatini at the University of Auckland, the Disinformation Project seeks to separate fact from fiction in the increasingly fetid ideological climate of the Covid-19 Pandemic.

“We’ve really witnessed a downgrading of social discourse”, argues Hannah, “an acceptability of really vulgar, obscene, denigrating, rude, misogynistic, racist terminology just being used.” She reports that terms such as Nazism, Communism and Authoritarianism are being attached almost casually to political opponents.

Certainly, the prospect of New Zealanders having to carry Vaccination Passports, and Government-mandated “No Jab. No Job” regulations coming into force, have raised the ideological temperature considerably. Nor is it the case that strongly expressed reservations about increased levels of state coercion are restricted to the Right. In a widely read Daily Blog post entitled “This Is Wrong”, the veteran leftist John Minto comes out swinging at the idea of dividing New Zealand society into the Vaccinated and the Unvaccinated.

More pronounced upon the Right than the Left, however, is the tendency to compare the Labour Government’s Covid-19 strategies with the behaviour of the totalitarian regimes of the 1930s and 40s. The conservative clergyman, Pastor Peter Mortlock, for example, recently warned the congregation of his evangelical City Impact Church that: “Nazi Germany has arrived in New Zealand”. Adding for good measure that the unvaccinated were at risk of becoming “Yellow Star citizens”. (The reference is to the yellow Star of David all European Jews were required to wear by their Nazi tormenters.)

Perhaps inspired by the Pastor’s words, a group of Anti-Vaxxers last weekend posted a photograph of themselves, all wearing Yellow Stars, on Twitter.

If Pastor Mortlock, and those he has inspired, had “done their research”, however, they might have hesitated to include the Nazis in their propaganda sermons and stunts.

As Branko Marcetic explains in a sharply pointed piece for Jacobin magazine, the Nazis were far too sensitive to right-wing public opinion to enforce the compulsory vaccination legislation that had been on Germany’s statute books since the Imperial Vaccination Law of 1874.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the 1874 law was actually in abeyance. A tragic medical misadventure, in which 70 children had died three years earlier, had mobilised the already large anti-vaccination movement in Germany, and the Government had responded by simply ceasing to enforce the law. Far from re-instating compulsory inoculation, Hitler and his confederates decided to keep the moratorium in place.

Partly this was in response to the very strong anti-Semitic flavour of the German anti-vaccination movement which, like the anti-vaxxers of today, was prey to all kinds of lurid conspiracy theories. Mostly, however, it was because the Nazis were enthusiastic eugenicists.

For Hitler and his comrades vaccination was regarded as a Darwinian test of evolutionary fitness. Intelligent and conscientious German citizens would not hesitate to get vaccinated. Those who refused were declaring themselves to be either politically or congenitally unfit to remain a part of the German volk. When it came to the conquered peoples of Eastern Europe, the eugenic message was unequivocal. Vaccination was only for the Master Race – among the untermenschen Nature must be left to take its course.

Hitler had no need of Vaccination Certificates, he would have looked upon Pastor Mortlock and his ilk as a self-correcting problem.

Marcetic’s article serves as a timely reminder that there really is nothing new under the sun. Human nature remains a depressingly consistent factor in the way politics unfolds. Equally bracing, however, is the realisation that Hitler’s Darwinian cast of mind is very far from being dead. The briefest scan of Twitter and/or Facebook will produce numerous examples of eugenicist thinking. Indeed, as Auckland’s Level 3 Lockdown threatens the Christmas plans of thousands, the notion that the anti-vaxxers should be treated as a self-correcting problem is only likely to find additional supporters.

But if Hitler (teetotaler, non-smoker and vegetarian that he was) was less than keen to enforce compulsory vaccinations on the civilian population of Germany (the armed forces were a very different story!) what about his Soviet equivalent, Joseph Stalin?

Up until the death of Stalin in 1953, the primary focus of the People’s Commissariat of Public Health was on the education of the masses – mostly by means of unceasing propaganda. Being a healthy Soviet citizen was a revolutionary duty. Campaigns were waged against smoking, drinking and sexual promiscuity (i.e. Venereal Disease). Basic sanitation was drummed into a population that, historically, had known nothing of such matters.

Essentially, the People’s Commissariat made a virtue of necessity. In its early years, the Soviet Union simply had too few doctors, and nothing like enough medicines, to do much more than exhort the population to look after their health.

The extraordinary population losses experienced in the Soviet Union, first as the result of the Stalin-led Communist Party’s murderous policies, and then under the hammer blows of the Wehrmacht, forced a major re-think of Soviet health policies. Human labour was now too precious for the Communist Party to squander in the manner of Stalin and his homicidal comrades. With Stalin dead, however, and the gulags “downsized”, public health provision became a way of demonstrating the “benevolent” aspects of Soviet rule.

As Stephen L Hoch writes in his 1997 paper The Social Consequences Of Soviet Immunization Policies, 1945-1980:

Soviet society used coercive immunization campaigns to demonstrate the superiority of an administrative order over a legal one . The state mandated compliance with a public good and in the process demonstrated the benefits of vigorous state control in the public realm . The public was to be passive in this process. Vaccination campaigns were used to show that if a good was truly important the state would do it, indeed, the state must do it. And, it must be recognized that in spite of all the abuses of Soviet power, the political leadership in the former Soviet Union repeatedly pointed to immunization campaigns to illustrate the success of its administrative order.

That enforced public passivity was to come back and bite the Russian people when the Soviet system finally fell in 1991. In the “new” Russia, the human and material resources required to continue the massive state-run immunisation campaigns of the Soviet era were no longer available. Until Russian parents learned to take the immunisation of both themselves and their children into their own hands, many of the diseases conquered in the post-war years were bound to reappear – which they duly did.

History is seldom a clear-cut thing. Hitler declined to enforce vaccination out of a combination of political and eugenicist considerations. Similarly, while Stalin reigned over the Soviet Union, public health campaigns were largely exhortative, propaganda-driven affairs. Following Stalin’s death, however, coercive vaccination was presented as evidence of the Soviet system’s paternal benevolence. No longer a regime that killed millions without compunction or remorse, the Soviet Union presented its post-war compulsory mass vaccinations as proof that it was now committed to saving millions of lives.

As the Delta variant of Covid-19 sweeps through the largely unvaccinated Russian population with renewed energy and alarming lethality, there will be many older Russian citizens who recall with some nostalgia the regime that lined them up and jabbed them whether they liked it or not. To avoid the evils of the Soviet Era, however, a great many younger Russians will happily run the risk of contracting Covid. After all, as diseases go, it is considerably less deadly than Stalinism.

A proposition with which – “carefree” Anti-Vaxxer accusations of Nazism, Communism and Authoritarianism, notwithstanding – New Zealanders from both the Right and the Left will likely find themselves in rare agreement.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 9 November 2021.

Sweet Surrender.

Who's Ya Mama? What makes Labour’s decision to dilute the power of the Electoral College so puzzling is that Jacinda Ardern would undoubtedly be elected by Caucus and Party with near unanimous support.

THERE IS ALWAYS something deeply depressing about the phenomenon of people voluntarily surrendering their political power. That sense of tragedy is only compounded when the power being surrendered was hard-won. To have power ripped away from you by force is bad enough, but to meekly hand it over is morally reprehensible. Why, then, has the Labour Party chosen to behave reprehensibly?

The hard-won power under scrutiny here is the right of the Labour Party’s rank-and-file members and its trade union affiliates to participate in the election of the Labour Leader – alongside Labour’s Parliamentary Caucus. This was significantly diluted at Labour’s “virtual” Annual Conference which took place over the weekend just passed (6-7/11/21).

Utterly inadequate coverage of the issue by the mainstream news media (assisted greatly by the Labour Party organisation’s decision to bar journalists from witnessing the entire decision-making process) has given rise to a certain amount of uncertainty. Will the new electoral regime operate only when Labour is in government, or all the time? Assuming it’s the latter, then the electoral college will only ever come into force if a candidate for the leadership fails to secure two-thirds of the votes of his or her Caucus colleagues.

The most common argument advanced by those favouring this revision of the Party’s constitution was historical. Members were encouraged to look at the record. The Electoral College delivered Labour David Cunliffe and Andrew Little. The Caucus, on its own (because the election was less than three months away) delivered Labour – and New Zealand – Jacinda Ardern.

Cunliffe led Labour to its worst result since the 1920s. Ardern lifted Labour’s vote to the point where Winston Peters could anoint her Prime Minister. According to this argument, the Electoral College has been road-tested to the Party’s near destruction. Labour’s recent political history proves that party leaders are best chosen by the candidates’ parliamentary peers: the people uniquely positioned to see them up-close and personal. In short: Caucus should elect Labour’s Leaders, because Caucus knows them best.

Superficially, at least, this argument has a powerful attraction. There is no doubt that David Cunliffe was not well-liked by a significant number of his Caucus colleagues. Nor can it be disputed that his conduct of the 2014 election campaign was, at best, erratic. There are, however, a great many reasons why an ambitious member of any parliamentary caucus might end up being despised by his or her colleagues. Likewise, there are many factors contributing to the production of an erratic campaign.

A clever and ambitious parliamentarian who refuses to recognise the political pecking-order, and/or is unwilling to join one or other of the dominant party factions, preferring, instead, to set about constructing his or her own, will very, very swiftly acquire some pretty powerful enemies. Their enmity will only intensify if it becomes clear that the upstart has made him or herself the darling of the party. Throw ideological heterodoxy into the mix (almost certainly the explanation for Cunliffe’s popularity with Labour’s anti-neoliberal rank-and-file) and that enmity will turn deadly. The senior Labour MPs behind the ABC – Anybody But Cunliffe – group certainly recognised a dangerous interloper when they saw one.

A party caucus containing a majority of political enemies can inflict a great deal of damage on the best of leaders. Private off-the-record briefings against Cunliffe began long before he was overwhelmingly elected to the Labour Party leadership in September 2013. His exposure of the yawning ideological gulf separating Labour’s Caucus from the Party’s rank-and-file only made matters worse.

The open and relentless hatred directed against Cunliffe arguably kept him emotionally and politically off-balance. Running an effective Opposition election campaign is hard enough when your party’s heavy-hitters are all behind you. Battling one’s electoral opponents, while attempting to fend off one’s political enemies (and their well-briefed media allies) makes the job well-nigh impossible.

That Grant Robertson failed (by the narrowest of margins) to defeat Andrew Little in the second (and last?) leadership contest was in no small measure due to the membership’s smouldering resentment at the Caucus’ all-too-evident failure to support their choice for leader. That resentment congealed into something approaching despair when it became clear that Little, himself, saw his job as “healing the divisions” within both the Caucus and the Party by more-or-less jettisoning just about every left-wing policy victory that had been achieved since the departure of Helen Clark in 2008.

It was into this dank and sullen slough of despond that Jacinda Ardern descended like a star-shell just a few weeks prior to the 2017 General Election. The Caucus knew that it had no other choice, and the Party was glad it didn’t. Jacinda’s hands were refreshingly clean of fratricidal blood; she made people feel good; and, Jeez! she could hardly be any worse than her predecessors. Hardly! From her very first press conference it was clear that “Jacinda” had been hiding her light under a bushel. From the moment she began to speak, the assembled media’s mouths fell open in frank amazement. Here was a communicator to rival David Lange.

What makes Labour’s decision to dilute the power of the Electoral College so puzzling is that Jacinda Ardern would undoubtedly be elected by Caucus and Party with near unanimous support. For that matter, her most likely successor, Grant Robertson, would, almost certainly, be elected by a similar, unequivocal, margin. For the foreseeable future, therefore, the Electoral College process poses no threat to Labour’s succession planning.

What is it, then, that lies behind the Labour Party organisation’s self-limiting impulses? The answer, sadly, is the general antipathy to the fundamental processes of democracy that characterises so much of the thinking of the Professional and Managerial Class. Since the 1990s, this class has emerged as the dominant social and political force: not only within the Labour Party, but across New Zealand’s public and private bureaucracies.

This frankly elitist mode of governance seeks to achieve two key objectives. The first is to centralise decision-making wherever possible. Handing-off the most important judgements to those with the requisite credentials and experience to make them. The second, related, objective is to insulate and protect these decision-makers from the ill-informed and all-too-easily-manipulated masses. Only in this way can the world (and the Labour Party) be protected from its demagogic Cunliffes. Only then can the ignorant and the importunate enjoy the benefits of its dazzling Arderns.

The tragedy inherent in this narrative lies in its substitution of the broad-based wisdom of crowds for the narrow prejudices of cliques. (A problem all-too-familiar to the National Party!) Expecting a self-perpetuating oligarchy to think beyond its own self-interest is the purest folly. After all, testing the acceptability of a political party’s leadership by regularly submitting it not only to the endorsement of its peers, but also – and more importantly – to the judgement of its members, is, what a properly functioning parliamentary democracy should encourage.

To see demos (the people) surrender kratos (power) to those who put no store by their judgement, is always a distressing sight. Perhaps it is time for the Electoral Commission to take its statutory obligation to ensure that all registered political parties follow “democratic procedures” a little more seriously?

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 8 November 2021.

Freedom Day: “Auckland’s Coming – Ready Or Not.”

Freedom, Or Chaos: There is no safe way to let people out of lockdown while Covid-19 is raging through the community. But, as this Government is fast discovering, there is also no safe way to keep 1.6 million Aucklanders under house-arrest indefinitely.

WHEN BORIS JOHNSON announced England’s “Freedom Day”, I was scornful and dismissive. My reaction was much the same when New South Wales and Victoria announced “Freedom Days” of their own. This was irresponsible politics on steroids, I fumed. People are going to die. Which they did – and still are. Politically, however, “Freedom” appears to be a magic word. Utter it, and the ordinary voter’s crap detector instantly switches itself off.

The events of the past few days have, however, have made me realise that Johnson and his imitators weren’t being irresponsible, they were simply making a virtue of necessity. If you’re looking for an expression to mask the fact that you’ve run out of practical solutions to the problem of how to let people out of lockdown while the Delta variant of the Covid-19 virus is still raging around, then “Freedom Day” fits the bill nicely.

Because, of course, there is no safe way to let people out of lockdown while Covid-19 is raging through the community. But, as this Government is fast discovering, there is also no safe way to keep 1.6 million Aucklanders under house-arrest indefinitely.

Nor would there appear to be a practical means of requiring those same Aucklanders to show a valid Vaccine Passport, and evidence of a recent negative Covid test, before departing the city for their Christmas vacation. When the Labour Government finally comes to terms with this brutal reality, then, inevitably, it will start thinking like Boris Johnson.

Matters are certainly not being helped by the fact that the Vaccination Passports needed to make the Government’s new “Traffic Light” system work, are still at the development and testing stage. On balance, however, this is probably just as well. Because, if they had been ready to go, then the fundamental flaw in the system would have been revealed in real time, rather than presenting itself as a looming problem of massive proportions.

Let’s just walk through this problem soberly and logically.

Our first assumption must be that Auckland has reached its target of 90 percent fully vaccinated by the middle of November – and that not much of the rest of New Zealand has managed to do the same.

On the face of it, this can only mean that the border remains closed to Aucklanders wishing to spend Christmas out of the city. Fine. But how does the Government then propose to require Aucklanders to simply suck that fact up for the good of the country? After more than three months of lockdown, they might not be willing to take another one for the Team of Five Million. More likely they’ve reached the point of telling the Team of 3.4 Million to go fuck themselves.

Okaaay. So the Government, unwilling to see Auckland explode, tells the fully vaccinated and the Covid negative that they – and only they – can cross the Auckland border to visit friends and family and have a much-needed holiday. Hooray! Auckland yells, and then promptly crashes the system designed to let people download the Vaccination Passport app. As if that isn’t frustrating enough, they then discover that 30,000 to 40,000 people, all trying to get a Covid test at the same time, is a recipe for the most gigantic shemozzle.

Right about then, the nit-pickers start querying the practicalities of thousands of Aucklanders all trying to get out of the city at the same time when, on the way out, they are required to stop and have their Vaccination Passports and Covid test results sighted by the Police. How’s that going to work, exactly?

[Chris Hipkins had some ideas about this problem, which were actually pretty funny in a “just shoot me now” kind of way.]

Aucklanders consider this problem carefully, and decide that queues of cars, filled with increasingly fractious family members, and stretching for miles and miles, under a blazing summer sun, does not sound like a winning formula for peace and harmony.

Also having difficulty seeing much in the way of peace and harmony in Auckland’s immediate future are those who understand the racial dynamics of vaccination. A situation in which the fully vaccinated are free to leave Auckland, while the unvaccinated are ordered to remain within the city’s boundaries until the rest of the country reaches the magic 90 percent target, will, very quickly, be presented as a neo-colonialist outrage, which grants freedom of movement to the Pakeha, while keeping Māori locked-up in a Covid cage.

So ….. yeah. You reckon that will work?

Tricky situation, isn’t it? And one not overloaded with good, or even workable, solutions. So, what the hell are Jacinda and her government going to do?

Best guess? Pretty soon she and her colleagues are going to tell the rest of New Zealand that Auckland has done enough – and had enough. It’s reached its 90 percent double-jabbed target and is ready to go on holiday.

In the kindest possible way, Jacinda will inform the rest of New Zealand that it needs to rattle-its-dags on the vaccination front.

“You can’t keep 1.6 million people under house arrest indefinitely”, she will tell the rest of the Team of Five Million. “Auckland has carried the burden of this outbreak in every sense. Nine out of ten of them have done everything we’ve asked them to do – and more. We can’t expect the city to remain in a state-of-siege forever. This is Auckland we’re talking about – not Leningrad! It’s time to give Aucklanders their freedom.”

Right about then, is when the Prime Minister will lay it on the line.

“Those of you who have yet to be jabbed have three weeks to get yourselves vaccinated – twice. If you don’t, then you stand a pretty good chance of getting sick – very sick. Why? Because, New Zealand, in three weeks’ time Auckland is coming – ready or not.”

Freedom Day.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 5 November 2021.

COP26: Good Luck – To All Of Us.

Eyes On The Prize? COP26 is important and necessary: not on account of the messages it will impart to us; and certainly not on account of the workable solutions it will offer us. It is important and necessary precisely because humanity needs to be persuaded that it is still rational to go on believing, or, at the very least, hoping, that the looming and unstoppable climate catastrophe can be avoided.

I WONDER how many people around the world are watching COP26 with their lips curled in a permanent sneer. I have witnessed too many of these gatherings to harbour even the tiniest hope of anything positive emerging from this latest worthy talkfest.

Not even an impassioned Boris Johnson, giving his very best impression of an Extinction Rebellion activist, could remove my sneer. And certainly not dear old “Sleepy-Joe” Biden, sitting there in COP26’s great hangar of a venue, arms folded across his chest, and … well … sleeping.

Not that I’m criticising the US President. His reaction to the droning catastrophism was entirely reasonable. The only responses that topped it were those of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping – who didn’t even bother to show up.

The Russian President has far too much to contend with on the climate change front to waste his time in Glasgow. Roughly two thirds of the Russian Federation is permafrost. Which means that, as of now, roughly two-thirds of the Russian Federation is melting.

This not just a matter of twisted railway tracks and the foundations of houses parting company with their superstructure – although that would be worrisome enough. Right across Siberia, gaping holes are appearing – some of them huge – where Methane, imprisoned beneath the frozen tundra for thousands of years, is bursting forth into the atmosphere.

Methane is, of course, among the most devastating of greenhouse gasses.

As if this wasn’t enough to distract the Russian leader, unprecedented surface temperatures across Siberia are drying out its vast primeval forestlands, transforming them into so much tinder for the seemingly never-ending succession of wildfires that have been exhausting thousands of firefighters for the last two years.

Undoubtedly, Putin has been demanding answers from his top scientific advisers. Being Russians, their answers were likely a dark mixture of pessimism and fatalism. Preventing climate change is no longer an option, they would have told their boss. It’s already here. And, no, there is nothing we can do to save Siberia – unless the President knows of some way to re-freeze half a continent.

What could Putin have said to the COP26 delegates anyway?

“You’re wasting your time. It’s too late.

“Climate change could have been prevented if we had acted collectively 50 years ago. But, 50 years ago we were too preoccupied with the question of whether industrial (i.e. fossil-fuel-based) civilisation should be run by socialists or capitalists.

“We failed to notice that the exponential increase in greenhouse gasses was rendering the entire argument moot. The challenge facing the human species now is the same it has always been: adapt, or die. Udachi!”

And Russia’s contribution to global warming is less than the European Union’s.

Consider, then, the challenge confronting the President of the world’s biggest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions – the People’s Republic of China. What could Xi Jinping possibly say to COP26?

“I have nothing to offer you. Nothing. Because the People’s Republic has attempted to make deep, structural changes to the Chinese economy: changes intended to dramatically reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. It has been a disaster.

“Without the burning of fossil fuels our species could never have come so far, built so high, lived so well. Far too many of us are now dependent on those same fossil fuels. The Chinese people have learned what it means to suddenly stop using them.

“The only possible solution is sudden and massive depopulation.

“But that raises the awful question: who is to die? Because, be under no illusion, billions must perish.

“All I can tell you is that the Chinese people will not be volunteering. And neither, I suspect, will any of the other peoples represented here.

“As always, it will come down to a struggle for survival. Zhù nǐ hǎo yùn!”

Not that world leaders will ever speak so plainly, or so honestly, to their own, or the World’s, peoples.

COP26 is important and necessary: not on account of the messages it will impart to us; and certainly not on account of the workable solutions it will offer us. It is important and necessary precisely because humanity needs to be persuaded that it is still rational to go on believing, or, at the very least, hoping, that the looming and unstoppable climate catastrophe can be avoided.

“Good luck!” – to all of us. (Offered without a sneer.)

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 5 November 2021.