LET’S BEGIN WITH THE FERRIES. The decision to pull the plug on the iRex project was one of the earliest – and stupidest – decisions New Zealand’s new conservative coalition government would make in the first year of its parliamentary term. And that stupidity was only compounded as the year wore on.

What began as a pour encourager les autres moment – driven by National’s determination to show the country it was serious about cutting public spending – has turned into an administrative and fiscal calamity. The Finance Minister has exposed herself as an economic cretin. The Coalition partners have proved themselves incapable of agreeing on anything even vaguely resembling a coherent response to the consequences of their own folly. While the long-suffering taxpayer, whose relief from a succession of infrastructure budget blow-outs served as the pretext for Willis’s ill-fated intervention, is beginning to understand that the ultimate cost of canning the iRex Project is likely to exceed, by some margin, the cost of allowing it to proceed.

Largely unexplored (or should that be downplayed?) by those covering the ferries debacle is the not inconsiderable problem of New Zealand’s commercial reputation. This country signed a half-billion-dollar contract with Hyundai Mipo Dockyard (HMD), the South Korean shipbuilders, for two state-of-the-art rail-enabled ferries. This was a bargain-basement price, for which KiwiRail’s negotiators should have been congratulated, not condemned.

In her fatuous accusation that KiwiRail had irresponsibly opted for a Ferrari instead of a Toyota, Willis got it precisely back-to-front. What New Zealand had actually secured were a couple of Ferrari-standard ferries – at a Toyota price.

In unilaterally tearing up KiwiRail’s money-saving contract, Finance Minister Willis has signalled to the world that New Zealand’s signature on an agreement means nothing. No one living in the world’s grown-up countries will accept the excuse that this was not a government deal. KiwiRail is a state-owned enterprise: the clue to who stands behind it is in the name. That the government of this country can no longer be trusted to keep its word should be a cause for much greater public concern than has been demonstrated to date.

New Zealand will pay a high price for pulling out of this deal – just as it did 64 years ago when the Second National Government tore up the contract its Labour predecessor had signed with British and American interests to establish a large cotton mill outside Nelson. The current estimate for HMD’s break fee is around half a billion dollars, meaning that New Zealand will be left dangling on the hook for something approaching a cool billion dollars – with nothing whatsoever to show for it. And it still has to replace KiwiRail’s ageing fleet of ferries and upgrade the portside infrastructure required to support their replacements.

It is worth pausing here to contemplate the fact that pollsters repeatedly report that New Zealanders have much more faith in the National government’s ability to manage the economy than they do in the Labour Party. But when was the last time Labour tore up a commercial contract with New Zealand’s name on it? When was the last time Labour arrogated to itself the extraordinary powers of the Coalition Government’s “fast-track” legislation?

These are not the actions of serious people. Indeed, the last time economic decisions were fast-tracked in the manner favoured by Associate Minister of Finance Chris Bishop, was back in 1982, and the fast-tracker involved was Robert Muldoon.

This was the very same Robert Muldoon who, as one of a group of freshmen back-benchers calling themselves the “Young Turks”, was principally responsible for inducing Keith Holyoake’s government to tear up the contract for the aforementioned Nelson cotton mill back in 1961. Though it’s hard to believe, Muldoon’s need for fast-track legislation in 1982 was born out of the exigencies of his government’s “Think Big” projects – an industrial development strategy stolen directly from the second Labour Government’s import substitution programme of 1957-60. A programme which had included – you guessed it! – a cotton mill situated outside Nelson.

When it comes to economic management, National should not be taken seriously.

Serious economic managers do not expose themselves to the accusation that in making critical economic decisions – like safeguarding and future-proofing New Zealand’s inter-island maritime transport services – they allowed themselves to be swayed by the arguments of the road transport lobby.

The trucking companies are in direct competition with KiwiRail and will welcome the demise of a rail-enabled inter-island ferry service. For the road transport lobby, the canning of the iRex Project thus represents a significant commercial and political victory. Unfortunately, it comes with potentially devastating consequences for New Zealand’s rail transportation system in general, and KiwiRail in particular.

Not that the National Party needs very much persuading to place the interests of road users above rail users. Arising out of an unedifying blend of ideological and psychological impulses, National’s hatred of rail has driven its transport policies for the best part of a century.

By its very nature, rail transport confers benefits that are primarily public, rather than private. Trains are vastly more efficient at moving large quantities of goods than trucks. That this fact is so often obscured by the road transport lobby is because the latter are so very good at hiding what economists call “externalities”.

To be even remotely as efficient as trains, trucks need to be huge. This forces them to use vast quantities of fossil fuel and causes them to chew up the nation’s road surfaces. Their size and weight also makes them extremely challenging for other road users. The trucking companies argue that the cost of these adverse externalities are met by road user charges. While partly accurate, the larger truth remains that road user charges would not be necessary if the nation’s principal freight burden was carried by its much cheaper, safer, and more climate-friendly rail network.

To offer themselves as the more efficient freight option, road transport operators need the rail network to present a public face that is anything but. From the moment the road transport industry began to be deregulated in the 1970s, its promoters have made it their business to persuade the National Party to starve the railway network of investment, and connive in its decay to the point where people dismiss it as a “nineteenth century technology” – irrelevant to the twenty-first.

They were pushing on an open door. From an ideological perspective, the automobile is the quintessential capitalist artifact. It further freed the individual from the limitations of the horse, and continues to liberate him from the enforced collectivism of public transportation. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine capitalism developing in the way it has without the automobile. As the world attempts to mitigate and adapt to global warming, the central role played by the industries that keep our cars on the roads acquires an ever-sharper focus. Curbing the automobile means curbing capitalism.

Cue New Zealand’s Transport Minister, Simeon Brown. His love affair with cars, cars, cars, and the roads, roads, roads they run on, borders on the monomaniacal. Like a little boy varoom, varoom, varooming on the carpet with his toy cars and trucks, Brown demonstrates with particular force the automobile’s symbiotic relationship with the human male’s hunger for power and control.

No real man lets another human-being drive him anywhere, or allows himself to be restrained by petty rules and ridiculous speed-limits. That socialists and their Green doppelgangers prefer trains, trams, busses, ferries and, God help us, bicycles, comes as no surprise to Simeon. Defending capitalism, and allowing citizens to drive really-really-fast, are pretty much the same thing to him.

The ferries debacle, like so many others, arises out of the forty-year worldwide failure of governments to spend the large sums of money needed to keep the capitalist economy they prize so highly functioning smoothly. This failure is driven by the sheer cost of modern infrastructure and the all-too-evident inability of private companies to make the supply of collective goods return a reliable profit. This is a particularly irksome failing, not least because it turns infrastructure maintenance and supply into a core public responsibility, to be paid for out of the public purse and, given the cost of modern infrastructure, higher taxes

Which brings us back to where this discussion began. A year ago, Nicola Willis, fresh from the hustings, was determined to deliver her party’s promised tax cuts. But, the cost of the infrastructure needed to ensure an effective and efficient inter-island passenger and freight service for the next 50 years made those tax-cuts an economic and fiscal non-starter. Unlike her conservative predecessors, however, Willis refused to acknowledge the reality that not only is taxation the price that we pay for civilisation, but also for an economy that works.

What did Willis do? Unwilling to abandon her fiscally reckless promises, Nicola chose instead to do what the Nats have always done – run the country off the rails.

Chris Trotter is New Zealand’s most provocative leftwing political commentator, with 30 years of experience writing professionally about New Zealand politics. He identifies as a “libertarian socialist” and now writes regularly for the Democracy Project, producing his column “From the Left”.

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THE EXTRAORDINARY SUCCESS OF the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti leaves Labour with a serious problem. How is it to reconcile the parliamentary party’s fervent adherence to the now orthodox interpretation of te Tiriti o Waitangi, with the scepticism – even outright opposition – of its electoral base? When it comes to the Treaty Principles Bill, how does Labour stay on the safe side of one red line, without crossing another?

By all accounts, the huge demonstration of Tuesday 19 November left most Labour MPs feeling inspired and vindicated, in equal measure. With the roar of fifty thousand Hīkoi participants ringing in the ears of Labour’s caucus, their unequivocal opposition to the Treaty Principles Bill doubtless struck its members as the party’s only viable political option. Certainly, any other stance would not only have rebounded to the advantage of Te Pāti Māori and the Greens, but also opened up deep fissures in Labour’s own parliamentary ranks.

As the content and purpose of David Seymour’s legislation percolates down to Labour’s electoral base, however, the parliamentary party’s opposition to the Treaty Principles Bill is likely to raise some difficult questions. If the answers provided to Labour’s more conservative Pakeha voters fail to convince, then the party could lose them.

Polling data released by David Farrar’s Curia Research shows around one-third of Labour party-voters supporting the Treaty Principles Bill. In happier and more democratic times, that level of support would have been readily discernible at both the branch and regional levels of the Labour Party. Individual Members of Parliament, acutely sensitive to their electorate’s political temperature in those far-off First-Past-the-Post days, would have cautioned against allowing the caucus’s soft ideological heart to rule its hard political head.

Today, in the Labour Party that first Rogernomics, and then MMP, so radically reshaped, the opinions of Labour supporters don’t carry anything like the same weight. Forty years of upholding the neoliberal order in New Zealand have left their mark on Labour. From a party organically linked to the interests and aspirations of the working-class, Labour has become a tightly-controlled political vehicle for the ambitions of the professional-managerial elites. The moral and ideological imperatives of this supervisory social strata do not include accommodating itself to the reactionary reckons of the retrograde classes.

In the increasingly fraught political environment created by the Treaty Principles Bill, the Labour Opposition’s unequivocal alignment with the Bill’s opponents is only likely to intensify, even as up to one-third of Labour’s support-base grows increasingly restive with the stance of their parliamentary representatives. This is not a situation which Labour can afford to tolerate for very long. The risk of precipitating a decisive break in core electoral allegiances is simply too high.

Presumably, Labour’s senior leadership is banking on the voting-down of Seymour’s bill, in or around May 2025, putting the whole issue to bed. Whatever misgivings Labour’s working-class Pakeha voters may have about the party’s position on the legislation will then fade away and political life return to normal.

But, there is a glaring problem with Labour’s plan. (Which is almost certainly National’s plan as well!) If it is to succeed, then Act must also be willing to let political life return to normal. Quite why Act would do that is hard to fathom. Its coalition partners’ complicity in the defeat of the Treaty Principles Bill presents the party with an opportunity to persuade disgruntled National and NZ First supporters to desert their pusillanimous parties for the steadfast ranks of the libertarian-capitalists. Far from allowing things to quieten down, it is in Act’s clear political interest to rark things up. The ideological divisions exposed during the Justice Select Committee hearings on the Treaty Principles Bill are, therefore, much more likely to widen than close.

The other problem with Labour’s plan is that it does not adequately factor-in the impact of NZ First’s proposal (made known and fully sanctioned in the 2023 Coalition Agreement) to excise all but the most inconsequential references to the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi from existing legislation. It is impossible to see either Te Pāti Māori, or the Greens, acquiescing meekly in the face of what they will doubtless condemn as yet another attack on te Tiriti. And if Te Pāti Māori and the Greens are in the fight, then Labour must be in it too.

There is, consequently, no possibility of political life returning to normal – not when so many parties have a clear interest in keeping New Zealand’s political life as abnormal as possible.

It is possible that Labour has already convinced itself – or soon will –that all the real, on-the-ground, political momentum now lies with Māori nationalism and the Left. Certainly, the forty-to-fifty-thousand people who turned up in support of the Treaty on 19 November argue strongly for that conclusion. It is, however, equally arguable that the political mobilisation represented by the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti was the response of a movement that fears its position is weak, not strong. From the perspective of Māori nationalists and the Left, Curia Research’s finding that 46 percent of New Zealanders support Seymour’s bill, while only 25 percent oppose it, is hardly encouraging. Hīkoi, or no Hīkoi.

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HOW WILL YOUNG AMERICAN PROGRESSIVES, after registering painfully the second coming of Donald Trump, assess the value of democracy? The political choices of more than half their fellow citizens have dashed their hopes in ways that a great many of them will find it impossible to forget – or forgive. They will ask themselves: “Can progressive ideas and policies ever endure under this system?” Many will be sorely tempted to answer: “No.” Some will give up on politics and progressivism altogether. Others, taking in the new political order through narrowed eyes, will give up on democracy itself.

For most of the post-war period, in the United States and across the Western World, democracy has been celebrated as an unequivocally good thing. This is hardly surprising, given the ghastly nature of the political ideology the democratic nations of the West were required to defeat in the Second World War.

And not just the West. Even the totalitarian communist regime of Joseph Stalin felt obliged to at least pretend to be fighting for the American President, Franklin Roosevelt’s, “Four Freedoms”.

The “United Nations” (as Adolf Hitler’s enemies described themselves) promised an exhausted and traumatised humanity that the post-fascist world would be one in which there was Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear. As depicted by the American artist, Norman Rockwell, this new world of freedom promised to make all the wartime sacrifices worthwhile.

In 1940, Britain’s darkest hour, Winston Churchill prophesied that the ultimate defeat of Nazi tyranny would allow the life of the world to move out of peril and into “broad sunlit uplands”. Even if the British Empire, which Churchill loved so dearly, and defended so doggedly, would not long survive its epic victory over the Third Reich, this last grand gesture of democratic defiance was, indeed, its “finest hour”. In the words of former Oxford Professor Nigel Biggar: “There are worse epitaphs than: ‘Died fighting fascism’.”

All of which explains why democracy, and the freedoms it enshrined, had, by 1945, become the desideratum of every existing and aspiring nation-state. Everyone valued it. Everyone wanted it. Everyone defended it – at least in public. For those experienced in the ways of power, however, democracy has always been regarded as an inherently volatile, and potentially highly dangerous, political system.

To remain safe and stable, democracy has to be accompanied by a substantial degree of social and economic equality, backed by a solid political consensus in favour of preserving and, where possible, increasing that equality.

For those generations unlucky enough to have been born too late to enjoy their benefits, the institutions and policies of these post-war “social-democratic” societies must seem quite fantastical. What must be understood, however, is that they were constructed to reward and absorb the millions of young men returning from the War with expectations of the peace that could not safely be denied. Highly trained and experienced in the use of weapons, and imbued with the combat virtues of solidarity and comradeship, these were not the sort of citizens to be disappointed – and they weren’t.

Nor were their children. The great “boom” in babies that followed the return of the men in 1945 both prolonged and intensified the social-democratic policies of successive post-war governments. With little to choose between the policies offered by the parties of the Left and the Right, elections soon became low-stakes affairs for everybody but the candidates.

By the 1970s, democracy and prosperity had become fused in the minds of most Westerners. Certainly, the capitalist democracies outperformed the “peoples democracies” and “democratic republics” of “actually-existing socialism”. Up against the Four Freedoms, the precepts of Marxism-Leninism turned out to be anything but competitive. The outcome of the Cold War was always a foregone conclusion. To emerge victorious, all the capitalists had to do was wait patiently – and carry a big ICBM.

The serpent in this social-democratic Garden of Eden turned out to be the debilitating impact of egalitarianism on the wealth and power of capitalism’s ruling-classes. Since the War’s end, the relative strength of the upper-classes of the western democracies, vis-à-vis their middle- and lower-classes, had been steadily declining. If democracy and equality continued marching in lock-step, then the very survival of capitalism, along with the skewed distribution of economic wealth and social influence that kept it functioning, could no longer be assured.

Accordingly, and for the next fifty years, the economic, social, cultural and intellectual resources of the Western ruling-classes were poured into one, all-encompassing political project: to break-up the partnership between democracy and equality. In accomplishing this system-busting objective nothing was ruled out-of-bounds.

The new social movements born out of the steady expansion of equality in the 1960s and 70s: the civil rights movement; feminism, the struggle for LGBTQI rights; environmentalism; all were transformed into cultural battlegrounds upon which the forces of tradition clashed with the rag-tag armies of social progress.

Both sides quickly discovered the efficacy of mobilising citizens on the basis of racial, sexual, and religious antagonisms. The Four Freedoms ceased to act as unifiers, becoming instead the bitter pretext for zero-sum arguments over whose speech, whose God, whose resources, and whose security ought to be accorded priority.

The Ancient Romans dubbed this strategy divide et impera – divide and conquer – and it proved no less effective in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries than it had in the First and Second.

With society divided, and the forward march of universal – as opposed to sectional – equality halted, the capitalists’ next project was to persuade people that they had more to gain by identifying themselves as producers and consumers than they did as citizens. It was, they argued, through the relentless balancing of supply and demand, and the unerring democracy of the marketplace, that life was made better or worse. Dollars equalled votes in this never-ending global election. Except, in this contest, no one cared how many you cast.

It was no accident that with every significant advance in the acceptance of this new doctrine – neoliberalism – the redistribution of wealth and power from the bottom of society to the top gathered pace. The state was transformed into a mechanism for ensuring that as little as possible was done to impede the upward flow of money and influence to those least in need of either.

The societies fashioned for the men and women who had defeated fascism in the 1940s, and their children, were fast becoming unrecognisable. Nothing worked, nothing was repaired, and no one paid the slightest attention to the victims of the system’s spectacular dysfunction.

The same parties that had once competed to develop and deliver the most effective social-democratic policies, now find it more expedient to compete for the praise and patronage of the reinvigorated ruling-class. Such promises as the centre-left and the centre-right see fit to make to western electorates are seldom kept, and even more infrequently delivered on time or to budget. The forms of democracy remain, but the substance is fast disappearing.

Precisely the moment of maximum peril, argued the first political philosophers more than 25 centuries ago. With democracy and equality diminished, and opportunistic oligarchs redirecting society’s wealth into their own treasure-chests, a disoriented and increasingly distraught citizenry stands ready to succumb to that classical harbinger of doom – the demagogue.

Recalling the golden age that was, but which is now no more than a bitter memory, this silver-tongued devil will whip up the impoverished masses against those deemed responsible for both the state’s decline and their own immiseration. The demagogue will then proceed to direct this mesmerised mob against a succession of terrified scapegoats, with results that are neither just nor pretty. Out of the ensuing chaos, demagoguery gives way to tyranny, and democracy is finally extinguished.

There are many progressive young Americans who see their country poised at exactly this point – between demagoguery and tyranny. Tragically, at this moment of maximum danger for the American republic, the only ideology capable of rescuing it, egalitarian democracy, is being rejected as the racist, sexist, trans-phobic, and generally deplorable author of all its woes. Confronted with the genuine tyrannical potential of Donald Trump and his populist Republicans, the Democratic Party shows every sign of wishing to install, by whatever means its billionaire donors care to make available, its own, unassailable, tyranny of the pure.

Chris Trotter is New Zealand’s most provocative leftwing political commentator, with 30 years of experience writing professionally about New Zealand politics. He identifies as a “libertarian socialist” and now writes regularly for the Democracy Project, producing his column “From the Left”.

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THE DEMON OF UNREST documents the descent of the United States into civil war. The primary focus of its author, Erik Larson, is the period of roughly five months between the election of Abraham Lincoln as President in November 1860, and his inauguration in March 1861. These were the months in which, one after the other, the slaveholding states of the South voted to secede from the Union.

Seldom has the evolution of an implacable political logic proceeded in circumstances where so few effective means of altering its direction lay to hand. Americans had become the prisoners of convictions that could not be set aside without incurring, to employ a key concept of the era, an irreparable loss of honour.

Only a president of Lincoln’s strength and steadfastness could have won the American Civil War, but not even a president of Lincoln’s strength and steadfastness could have prevented it.

The most disconcerting feature of Larson’s historical narrative are the many parallels between the America of then, and the New Zealand of now. There are Kiwis, today, as committed to the decolonisation and indigenisation of their country as Yankees once were to the abolition of slavery. Likewise, there is an answering fraction of the New Zealand population every bit as determined to preserve the colour-blind conception of what it means to be a New Zealander as the slaveholders of the American South were determined to preserve their own “peculiar institution”.

The key historical question arising from this comparison is: which of the opposing sides in the present conflict between “New Zealand” and “Aotearoa” represents the North, and which the South? The answer is far from straightforward.

Superficially, it is the promoters of decolonisation and indigenisation who most resemble the Northern abolitionists. Certainly, in their moral certainty, dogmatism, and unwillingness to compromise, the Decolonisers and the Abolitionists would appear to be cut from identical cloth. Brought together by a time machine, one can easily imagine their respective leaders, so alike in their political style, getting along famously.

By the same token, the defenders of Colour-Blind New Zealand, in their reverence for tradition and their deep nostalgia for the political certainties of the past, would appear to be a more than passable match for the political forces that gave birth to the Confederate States of America in 1861.

These correspondences are, however, more apparent than real. From a strictly ideological standpoint, it is the Decolonisers who match most closely the racially-obsessed identarian radicals who rampaged through the streets of the South in 1860-61, demanding secession and violently admonishing all those suspected of harbouring Northern sympathies. Likewise, it is the Indigenisers who preach a racially-bifurcated state in which the ethnic origin of the citizen is the most crucial determinant of his or her political rights and duties.

Certainly, in this country, the loudest clamour and the direst threats are directed at those who argue that New Zealand must remain a democratic state in which all citizens enjoy equal rights, irrespective of wealth, gender, or ethnic origin, and in which the property rights of all citizens are safeguarded by the Rule of Law.

These threats escalated alarmingly following the election of what soon became the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government. Like the election of Lincoln in 1860, the success of New Zealand’s conservative parties in the 2023 general election was construed by the Decolonisers and Indigenisers as a potentially fatal blow to any hope of sustaining and extending the gains made under the sympathetic, radical, and identity-driven Labour Government of 2020-23.

Just as occurred throughout the South in November and December of 1860, the fire-eating partisans of “Aotearoa” lost little time in coming together to warn the incoming government that its political programme was unreasonable, unacceptable, and “racist”; and that any attempt to realise it in legislation would be met with massive resistance – up to and including civil war.

The profoundly undemocratic nature of the fire-eaters’ opposition was illustrated by their vehement objections to the Act Party’s policy of holding a binding referendum to entrench, or not, the “principles” of the Treaty of Waitangi. Like the citizens of South Carolina, the first state to secede, the only votes they are willing to recognise are their own.

Another historical parallel is discernible in the degree to which the judicial arm of the New Zealand state, like its American counterpart in the 1850s, has actively supported the cause of ethnic difference in the 2020s.

In 1857, the infamous Dred-Scott decision of the US Supreme Court advanced the cause of slavery throughout the United States. Written by Chief Justice Roger Taney, the judgement found that persons of African descent: “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States”. The Taney Court’s decision made civil war inevitable.

In 2022, the New Zealand Supreme Court’s adjudication of the Peter Ellis Case would add a novel legal consideration – tikanga Māori – to the application of New Zealand Law. The Court’s constitutionally dubious decision was intended to, and did, materially advance the establishment of a bi-cultural legal system in Aotearoa. It represented an historic victory for the Decolonisers.

It may occur to some readers, that the argument put forward here resembles the celebrated Mitchell & Webb television sketch in which a worried SS officer asks his Nazi comrade-in-arms, Hans: “Are we the baddies?” It’s a great line. But, over and above the humour, the writers are making an important point. Those who devote themselves entirely to a cause are generally incapable of questioning its moral status – even when its uniforms are adorned with skulls.

Those New Zealanders who believe unquestioningly in the desirability of decolonisation and indigenisation argue passionately that they are part of the same great progressive tradition that inspired the American Abolitionists of 160 years ago. But are they?

Did the Black Abolitionist, and former slave, Frederick Douglass, embrace the racial essentialism of Moana Jackson? Or did he, rather, wage an unceasing struggle against those who insisted, to the point of unleashing a devastating civil war, that all human-beings are not created equal?

What is there that in any way advances the progressive cause about the casual repudiation of Dr Martin Luther King Jnr’s dream that: “one day my four little children will be judged not by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character”?

When will the partisans of decolonisation and indigenisation finally notice the death’s head on their caps? That, driven by their political passion to atone for the sins of the colonial fathers, they are willing to subvert the Rule of Law, deny human equality, misrepresent their country’s history, and abandon its democratic system of government. Can they not see that the people they castigate as the direct ideological descendants of the slaveholding white supremacists of the antebellum South, are actually fighting for the same principles that animated and inspired the Northern Abolitionists?

Does denying human equality and rejecting the principles of colour-blind citizenship place you among the baddies? Yes, I’m afraid it does. The demon of unrest has claimed you for his own.

Chris Trotter is New Zealand’s most provocative leftwing political commentator, with 30 years of experience writing professionally about New Zealand politics. He identifies as a “libertarian socialist” and now writes regularly for the Democracy Project, producing his column “From the Left”.

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IT IS RARE INDEED to encounter a measure as ripe for political exploitation as the Coalition Government’s “fast-track” legislation. Simultaneously, the measure assaults the natural environment, the democratic process, and the rights of te iwi Māori. Serendipitously, on the left of New Zealand politics there are three parties perfectly positioned, at least theoretically, to champion each one of these embattled realms. The damage they could inflict, collectively, upon the Reactionary Right over the course of the next two years is, at least potentially, enormous. In short, if Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori were battle-ready, then they could be governing New Zealand by the end of 2026.

But, how many voters would take that bet?

What New Zealanders face in the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government is an attempt to return the country to the policy settings of half-a-century ago. What Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop’s fast-track legislation is designed to rehabilitate and revivify is the “national development” mindset of the 1970s and 80s.

Driving this reanimation project forward are business-people, investors, and politicians who have convinced themselves that the social and cultural forces ranged against them are nothing like as powerful, electorally-speaking, as they believe themselves to be. If the question is put to voters: “Jobs or Frogs?”, then the Coalition’s and its backers’ money is all on “Jobs”. As far as Bishop and his NZ First attack-dog, Shane Jones, are concerned, Forest & Bird, Greenpeace, and all those other “environmental terrorists” are nothing more than re-cycled paper tigers.

What this old-fashioned “workerist” line of argument ignores is the brute demographic fact that the number of people interested in working down a mine, digging in a quarry, picking fruit, or doing all the other hard, dirty, and dangerous jobs associated with the primary sector is a great deal smaller than it was half-a-century ago. The massive importation of migrant labour is a direct response to the pronounced reluctance of Kiwis – especially young Kiwis – to work in high-risk and uncomfortable industries for lousy pay.

These labour market changes notwithstanding, a large number of New Zealanders still hark back nostalgically to the romance of yesteryear’s heroic toilers. They admire the grainy photographs of long-dead coal-miners, their coal-dust-smeared faces wearing the same expressions as soldiers returning from the front. The problem for Jones and his ilk is that these photographs are most likely to be encountered on the white walls of a Remuera lawyer’s residence.

There’s a very good reason why a lawyer’s grandfather was a coal miner and she is not. Nobody in their right mind spends their life underground filling their lungs with coal-dust for a wage just big enough to pay the bills. Well-paid professionals may celebrate their forebears as working-class heroes, but the heroes themselves wanted something better for their offspring. Something vaguely resembling a choice.

The Coalition Government is, almost certainly, unaware of the sheer magnitude of the political project they have set in motion. It is nothing less than an attempt to rehabilitate the joys of blood, tears, toil, and sweat. An anachronistic effort to drive men back into the raw exploitative enterprises that gave rise to the hard-working, hard-drinking, emotionally unavailable “jokers” of New Zealand’s past.

It’s a forlorn hope. Weather-worn West Coast baby-boomers may applaud Shane Jones’ “Good-bye Freddy!”, screw-the-environment, hommage to the “rip-in, rip-out, rip-off” model of  economic development, but not their long-since-moved-away offspring. These young New Zealanders, and their children, are more likely to be found marching up the main streets of the major cities in protest.

Then again, all this masculinist domination-of-nature rhetoric may be nothing more than political distraction. “Matua Shane” is forever ordering the “nephs” to  get “off the couch” and find themselves a job. It’s a trope that plays well among NZ First voters.

But, there’s another way of telling this story. One could construct a narrative in which the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government encourages foreign investors to take advantage of an under-utilised workforce. Of young, unskilled Māori, trapped in New Zealand’s poorest communities, harried by MSD, just waiting to be driven, as their grandfathers were driven in the 1950s and 60s, to fill the jobs vacated by upwardly-mobile Pakeha. Could this be the dirty little racist secret at the heart of the Coalition’s fast-tracked projects?

All of which poses a host of vexing questions concerning the Opposition parties’ response to the Coalition Government’s first year in office. Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori could hardly have asked for a larger, or more indefensible, target than the one their opponents have so generously provided.

The Opposition’s counter-narrative to the Coalition Government is obvious. New Zealanders are being invited to return to the historical era that preceded the full flowering of environmental consciousness. Back to the period of what might be called “heroic” national development, when rivers were damned, native forests felled, neighbourhoods levelled to make way for motorways, and everyone cheered on the “unstoppable” March of Progress.

This is a story that Labour, the Greens, and Te Pāti Māori are perfectly placed to tell together. Taking turns to expose the sheer madness of pretending that fifty years of history can be cast aside. Highlighting the sheer folly of proceeding as if the insights and advances of ecological science can, somehow, be ignored. Warning the Government that the legislative edifice constructed out of New Zealander’s growing environmental awareness cannot be dismantled without incurring significant political cost. And, finally, if it becomes clear that the Coalition Government isn’t listening, warning the voters that its reactionary programme can only be progressed by riding roughshod over the entire democratic process.

How else should the Fast-Track Approvals Bill be described?

The Treaty, too, cannot avoid being over-ridden. Because the Coalition’s great leap backwards cannot avoid returning New Zealand to the era in which te Tiriti o Waitangi was dismissed as “a simple nullity”. New Zealanders growing understanding of te Ao Māori, and the critical role it is already playing in shaping the nation’s future, simply will not survive the reimposition of a nineteenth century capitalist narrative in which the ruthless destruction and exploitation of the natural world (along with the indigenous people who lived in harmony with it) is presented as both beneficial and cost-free.

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“On Calvary Street are trellises
Where bright as blood the roses bloom,
And gnomes like pagan fetishes
Hang their hats on an empty tomb
Where two old souls go slowly mad,
National Mum and Labour Dad.”

James K. Baxter
Ballad of Calvary Street
1969

JAMES K. BAXTER’S stereotypes, “National Mum” and “Labour Dad”, strike a discordant note in the Twenty-First Century New Zealander’s ear. Most obviously because the political loyalties of men and women have, in the 55 years since Baxter wrote his poem, undergone a dramatic reversal. Labour supporters, today, are much more likely to be women, while National’s support-base has become disproportionately male. How is this dramatic shift in the political allegiances of the sexes to be explained?

The most important driver of the so-called “gender gap” has been the steady erosion of working-class power. Many factors have been at work in this process, but the most important is the slow demise of what was formerly the Left’s most important constitutive myth.

The move to drive women and children out of the paid workforce (which, in the early days of industrial capitalism, they had dominated) was seen (at least by men) as a moral and economic triumph. Not only were society’s most vulnerable members rescued from the ruthless exploitation of capitalist employers, but their return to the “safety” of the domestic sphere, by shrinking the pool of available industrial workers, allowed husbands, fathers and sons to drive-up wage-rates and reclaim the “breadwinner” role so central to the sustainability of patriarchy. Accordingly, setting the price of labour, and growing the political strength that flowed from working-class organisation, was seen as the work of men, by men, for men.

As anyone who has ever heard Judy Collins’ inspiring rendition of the song “Bread and Roses” will attest, the idea that the advance of the working-class was the work of men, alone, is nonsensical. In the clothing and textile industries especially women workers vastly outnumbered men, and their struggles for economic justice were waged no less fiercely than those of their “brothers”.

It nevertheless remains an historical fact that in the vast majority of factories, in the coal mines and the steel mills, in transportation and on the docks, it was overwhelmingly a man’s world.  The left-wing project, although conceptually inseparable from the steady advance of working-class power under capitalism, was also presented as a cause in which the qualities and responsibilities of masculinity were constantly made manifest.

Culturally, project and cause came together in the artistic and literary figure of the working-class hero. With every economic and social advance, the pride of “working-men” grew. Their unions and their parties were hailed as the engines of the future, generating a muscular progressivism in which males placed themselves unfailingly at the heart of political action.

So much for “Labour Dad’s back-story. How was “National Mum” created?

Fundamentally, the National Party’s assiduous courting of the female voter is a reflection of the New Zealand Right’s desperation to break the Left’s easy domination of the electorate in the late-1930s and throughout the 1940s.

That the “women’s vote” might deviate significantly from that of the men’s was demonstrated with startling force in the British general election of 1931. At the behest of King George V, the British Labour leader, Ramsay Macdonald, joined forces with the Conservatives and the Liberal Party to form the “National Government” – a grand coalition to address the devastating impact of the Great Depression. Predictably, Macdonald’s “treachery” split the Labour Party and divided the working-class.

Appealing to the British people for what he called a “doctor’s mandate” to heal the country’s economic afflictions, Macdonald’s National Government secured the support of an astonishing 67 percent of the voting public. A huge number of these voters were young working-class women, participating electorally for only the second time since the franchise was finally given to all British women over the age of twenty-one in 1928.

That the offer of national unity, over class division, had proved irresistible to so large a chunk of the female electorate was enough to make even dyed-in-the-wool conservative politicians sit up and take notice. In 1931, to the utter consternation of their menfolk, women voters had proved to have minds of their own.

It was a lesson that the New Zealand National Party, formed in the year following Labour’s electoral triumph of 1935, could hardly fail to keep at the front of its mind. After all, it was women voters who had kept National out of power until it undertook to leave Labour’s welfare state intact, and who, weary of post-war controls and shortages, had seated National on the Treasury Benches for the first time in 1949.

Most of all, however, it was women voters who, like their British sisters twenty years earlier, had voted for national unity, over trade union militancy and class war, in the snap-election called by National to validate its handling of the bitter 1951 Waterfront Lockout. National’s share of the popular vote, at 54 percent, secured its most emphatic victory, ever.

Not all women were prepared to break ranks from their families’ deeply ingrained electoral preferences. Indeed, most women, like most men, voted the same way as their fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives. But, enough of them voted against the familial and marital grain to give National the electoral edge it had been seeking since Labour, with 55 percent of the popular vote, had so decisively shifted the political dial in 1938. Between 1949 and 1984, a period of 35 years, Labour would spend just six years in office.

That long period of National Party electoral dominance was aided by the slow decay and demoralisation of both the New Zealand trade union movement and the Labour Party. The heroic component of the movement, the cream of the nation’s working-class, had been comprehensively defeated and dispersed by the National Government in 1951.

Their defeat could not have been secured without the complicity of the Federation of Labour, whose leaders were happy to see the most radical (and democratic) unions, thorns in their sides for many years, humbled. Not that the “moderate unionists” – as National called them – were unaware of just how comprehensively they had been co-opted by the Right. Twenty years hence, John Lennon would argue that “a working-class hero is something to be”. These guys knew that they weren’t.

What’s more, the impression grew in the minds of at least some working-class men that at least some of the working-class women they rubbed shoulders with also knew that there wasn’t much of the hero left in them.

Increasingly, a crass economism, “bread and butter issues”, came to define the mission of both the trade unions and the Labour Party. Throughout the golden economic weather of the long post-war boom it was enough to keep the wolves of doubt from the door – even if the post-war prosperity, upon which the whole, delicate, socio-political compromise rested, was claimed – and acknowledged – as the National Party’s achievement. Upward social mobility, every aspiring working-class mum’s secret hope for her kids, had become the Right’s most potent promise. They were the heroes now.

Sullen, unadventurous, politically-conventional, and materialistic – that is what so many of New Zealand’s working-class men had become. Kiwis may have joked about being a nation devoted to “Rugby, Racing, and Beer”, but the view from where working-class women were now positioned offered little to laugh at. They chafed for change, for something better. If not for themselves, then for their sons and – why not? – their daughters, too.

In the 1970s and 80s those sons and daughters – especially the daughters – would re-energise and redefine the New Zealand Left. But, across the comfortable, but decidedly unheroic, 1950s and 60s, “National Mum” and “Labour Dad” would continue to cancel each other out … almost.

Chris Trotter is New Zealand’s most provocative leftwing political commentator, with 30 years of experience writing professionally about New Zealand politics. He identifies as a “libertarian socialist” and now writes regularly for the Democracy Project, producing his column “From the Left”.

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SIR GEOFFREY PALMER has penned a two-part response to Act Leader David Seymour’s “Treaty Principles Bill”. In its essence, Palmer’s contribution reflects the growing unease of the institutions which have hitherto dominated the Waitangi discourse – the legal profession, the courts, and the universities – that they are in real danger of losing control of events.

Between the lines of Palmer’s analysis one detects a profound hostility to the populist impulse, and a palpable impatience with the machinery of representative government that empowers it. The clear intention of Palmer’s intervention is to deflect the popular desire for a democratically defined Treaty away from the decisive instruments of parliamentary democracy, and towards a much more manageable set of “deliberative” options.

In many ways it is surprising that Palmer, and those who share his ideas about the Treaty, did not anticipate the current populist push for a political solution to the doubts and anxieties raised by the document’s startling legal evolution. From the 1980s to the present day, the dangers of some kind of democratic revision of the Treaty’s status and meaning were always on the cards.

In an address to the Māori Law Review Symposium entitled Māori, the Treaty and the Constitution on 12 June 2013, Palmer offered his audience the following, highly revealing, admission:

If the remedying of injustice under the Treaty could only be done by Parliament under our existing constitutional structure, then the big obstacle was what John Stuart Mill called majority tyranny. If the legislation addressed the grievances, then majority tyranny would kick in and the likelihood of the issues being addressed in a principled fashion would be reduced.  Elected politicians should not be involved in the investigation and formulation of the appropriate remedy. So Parliament had to be persuaded to initiate action, but not determine the nature of the grievance. A set of procedures, processes and principles was likely to work better.  Thus, it seemed to me that the aim could be achieved by having Parliament set up a body to investigate and report. That meant extending the jurisdiction of the Waitangi Tribunal back to 1840.

As a means of drawing the fangs of this supposed tyrannous and unprincipled majority (which is an interesting way of thinking about the nation’s political leaders and the people who elected them)  these “procedures, processes and principles” were to prove their worth many times over. So much so, that Palmer felt able to reassure the symposium that:

“Insulation from the ravages of extreme opinion has been achieved. The settlements have become mainstream.”

But if elected politicians were to be excluded from the investigation and formulation of appropriate remedies for the sins of New Zealand’s colonial fathers, then in whose hands should the whole fraught process be placed? What other answer could a former law professor give except – the courts:

“The courts are better protectors of “discrete and insular minorities” than the majoritarian legislature, even under MMP. I remain of the opinion that the Treaty, like the Bill of Rights, should become part of New Zealand’s new superior law Constitution. We now know a great deal about how the courts will go about the task of interpreting the Treaty, just as we know how the courts go about interpreting the Bill of Rights Act. We have had more than twenty years’ experience of both […] We cannot go backward on these issues, but we need to summon up the political courage to go forward.”

The reference to “discrete and insular minorities” comes from a 1937 judgement of the United States Supreme Court. Such minorities, the justices explained, are “saddled with such disabilities, or subjected to such a history of purposeful unequal treatment, or relegated to such a position of political powerlessness as to command extraordinary protection from the majoritarian political process.”

In citing this celebrated case, Palmer was signalling to his 2013 audience that he well understood the historical predicament of the Māori people.

The Treaty of Waitangi was the initiative of a British Government which, in 1840, was impelled by the political principles then guiding its Foreign and Colonial Office to secure control of New Zealand, but only after obtaining the freely given consent of its indigenous inhabitants.

This was duly achieved by recognising the full authority – tino rangatiratanga – of tribal chieftains to determine the disposition of their lands, forests, fisheries, and other valued resources, as they saw fit, and by giving Maori the same rights and privileges as the people of Great Britain.

Crucially, the chiefs’ lands could only be sold to representatives of the British Government. Thus were Māori protected from the contemporaneous depredations of the agents of the rapacious New Zealand Company – and the French.

Overseeing the evolution of this new relationship would be a Governor appointed by the British Government. Not the least of the Governor’s duties was to protect the Māori tribes from the greed and the larceny of the British, European and American settlers determined to make their fortunes in Britain’s new colony.

While the original parties to the 1840 Treaty, the British Government and the tribal chiefs, continued to be the only parties that mattered, the relationship, though often strained, endured. By the early 1850s, however, the fast-growing population of Pakeha settlers was demanding that the powers-that-be in London grant them self-government.

The settlers objective was brutally simple: to avail themselves of Māori land without having to secure the chiefs’ and/or the Governor’s permission. In other words, they wanted to construct a New Zealand state in which the Treaty could be dismissed as a “simple nullity”. Such a state could only be created by the forcible dispossession of Māori hapu and iwi, but that was a price the Pakeha settlers were perfectly willing to pay.

Putting the matter bluntly, the greatest enemy of Māori, since 1853, has been the Pakeha Parliament. While its power to make the law remained untrammelled there was nothing Māori could do to defend their fast-diminishing patrimony.

The great insight of sympathetic Pakeha jurists, like Palmer, was that, suitably empowered, the judiciary and the executive branch of the state could take on the role formerly played by the non-elected governors of mid-nineteenth century New Zealand. Māori resources could be protected, and past injustices redressed, but only if the Pakeha Parliament could somehow be persuaded to take itself out of the loop.

It is, perhaps, the most remarkable aspect of New Zealand history that, for a period of roughly half-a-century, the nation’s elected representatives were willing to do just that. They made way for the courts, the Waitangi Tribunal, and the Office of Treaty Settlements to right as many of the wrongs done to te iwi Māori as they adjudged the Pakeha voters to be willing to accept.

That turned out to be an impressively large number. But, by 2023, the Pakeha voters’ – or, at least, a majority of Pakeha voters’ – willingness to go on righting the wrongs of the past had reached its limit. In response, the newly elected Pakeha Parliament, to the utter dismay of the courts, the Waitangi Tribunal, and the Office of Māori Crown Relations, determined to suddenly and dramatically re-enter the loop.

Small wonder Palmer is calling for “deliberative” alternatives to parliamentary action, such as randomly selected citizens’ assemblies, to be substituted for the deliberations of the House of Representatives. These latter, which tend to culminate in legislative action, are to be avoided at all costs lest they precipitate a head-on collision between the legislature, the judiciary, and that part of the executive branch represented by the state bureaucracy.

Palmer, and those who share his outlook, must know that in any contest between Parliament and the rest of the State only two outcomes are possible. Either the coercive agencies of the state – the armed forces and the police – put an end to representative democracy on the Executive’s/Judiciary’s behalf. Or, the key institutions of the state, with varying degrees of rage and reluctance, bow to “majority tyranny” and the “ravages of extreme opinion”.

Otherwise known as the will of the people.

Chris Trotter is New Zealand’s most provocative leftwing political commentator, with 30 years of experience writing professionally about New Zealand politics. He identifies as a “libertarian socialist” and now writes regularly for the Democracy Project, producing his column “From the Left”.

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THE NATIONAL PARTY has, with an unmistakeable measure of pride, distanced itself from David Seymour’s “Treaty Principles Bill”. The narrative presented by the Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, is of a party acting under the duress of MMP.

According to Luxon, his first responsibility, as the leader of the largest party represented in the House of Representatives, was to give New Zealand a stable government. To achieve that objective, he and his party had no choice but to negotiate with Act and NZ First. The resulting coalition agreements were, inevitably, a collection of compromises.

Had National won an absolute majority, Luxon argues, the Treaty Principles Bill could only ever have made it to the floor of the House as a Private Members Bill. As such, it would not have been given a First Reading, and New Zealand would have been spared months of divisive debate.

But, National did not win an absolute majority, and so Seymour got his debate. Short of calling a second election, Luxon insists, compromising with Act was his only other choice. New Zealand may rest assured, however, that the Treaty Principles Bill will not be read a second time.

It’s a good story, made all the better for being true. In possession of an absolute parliamentary majority, National, the party of Jim Bolger and Doug Graham, John Key and Chris Finlayson, wouldn’t have dreamed of assaulting te iwi Māori with a weapon as crude and obvious as Seymour’s proposed legislation.

That does not mean, however, that te iwi Māori are not being attacked by National ministers wielding weapons every bit as inimical to the interests of tangata whenua as Seymour’s bill. As a political party, National has always worked for a society based on the rigid hierarchies of class, race, and gender. Its purpose continues to be the promotion and protection of private property and private advantage. Such relationships as National has been compelled to form with Māori have invariably reflected the party’s conservative political values.

When a cabal of retired army officers and former members of the quasi-fascist New Zealand Legion persuaded the defeated Reform and United parties to unite under the rubric of “National” in 1936, the values advanced were unashamedly imperialist and white supremacist. Eighty-eight years later, National is at pains to distance itself (coalition agreements permitting) from the most obvious forms of racism. Even so, its attachment to the substance of racial oppression remains disturbingly strong.

Understandably, given the white supremacist assumptions built into the conservative political movements of the British dominions (Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand) National only interacted seriously with Māori when it became politically inescapable.

Labour’s close association with the morehu (remnants of the tribes, survivors) drawn to Ratana, prompted National to cultivate equally close relationships with the chiefly elements of Maoridom. Like National, these rangatira were strong believers in the principles of hierarchy and lineage. They also tended to be the richest and most powerful personalities in their communities. Patriarchal beliefs were similarly shared. For conservative Māori and Pakeha, alike, it was a man’s world.

The post-war mass migration of Māori from the rural periphery of New Zealand to its largest towns and cities presented multiple affronts to conservative Pakeha sensibilities. The sheer proximity of so many brown faces triggered deep-seated fears and prejudices – many of them traceable to the colonial violence and corrupt land acquisitions of the Nineteenth Century. These were in no way relieved by the new arrivals’ easy assimilation into the workforces, unions, and sports clubs of the Pakeha working-class. The political threat represented by this potential Māori augmentation of Labour’s urban electoral base was considerable.

Small wonder, then, that the National Governments from the 1950s to the 1970s used their command of state-housing policy to concentrate as many Māori (and, later, Pasifika migrants) in as few electorates as possible. Under the First-Past-the-Post system it didn’t matter that Labour racked up huge majorities in a few seats. Much more dangerous was the possibility that Māori and Pasifika voters, unconcentrated, but registered on the General Roll, might tip the balance of votes in the so-called “marginal” seats where New Zealand elections, prior to MMP, were lost and won.

By the 1980s it had become a race between the socio-economic pressures bearing down on an increasingly brown – and bolshie – working-class, and the cultural/political aspirations of the small, but fast growing number of Māori middle-class professionals. These latter had as little to gain from an assertive brown working-class, inspired by the ideals of New Zealand’s idiosyncratic brand of socialism, as the economic interests represented by National. That the neoliberal policies imposed by the Fourth Labour Government were exacting an appalling toll on Māori families up and down the country, immiserating thousands, only made the choice facing Māori leaders more urgent. The political stakes had been raised to dangerous levels.

When Labour finally fell in 1990, National faced two daunting challenges. Meeting and defeating the threat of an angry brown proletariat, while diverting the energies of the burgeoning Māori middle-class into cultural politics. Disconnected from the urban Māori poor, these new leaders’ capabilities could be devoted to resurrecting the claims of traditional iwi and hapu, and then transforming them into vehicles for what the Auckland academic, Dr Elizabeth Rata, calls “neo-tribal capitalism”.

The Employment Contracts Act took care of the first challenge, while the Treaty Settlement Process more than met the second. Not only was the old Māori aristocracy given a new lease on life, but the new, settlement-funded, Māori corporations were fast creating a new one.

This elevation of Māori interests and issues was received uneasily by National’s electoral base. Where would it end? Leading Māori intellectuals spoke openly of reclaiming all the lands lost to the Pakeha. Bolger and Graham described a “fiscal envelope” containing one billion dollars! Where was National taking New Zealand? Were the conquests of the 1860s and 70s secure? Farmers and businesspeople needed to know.

It is doubtful whether the Māori cultural renaissance, or the economic compensation awarded to iwi by the Treaty Settlement Process, would have happened had the grim process of pressing down upon the Māori and Pasifika poor not unfolded alongside it. The National Government’s Finance Minister, Ruth Richardson’s 1991 “Mother of All Budgets” may have been billed as the long overdue curtailment of a welfare-state grown large enough to defeat its own purposes, but, looked at another way, it was also a brutal reimposition of economic, racial and gender hierarchies.

Just as the Victorian division of the lower orders into the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor enjoyed a state-assisted come-back in 1990s New Zealand, so, too, did the Nineteenth Century division of tangata whenua into “friendly Maoris” and “rebels”. Not that they were identified as such by late-Twentieth Century National Party politicians. In the 1990s, troublesome Māori were identified as: “gangs”, “welfare fraudsters”, “solo mothers”, and, even less subtly, the incorrigible perpetrators of domestic violence, child abuse, and illegal drug consumption. A dysfunctional collectivity also known as the “Māori Underclass”.

As “progressive” Pakeha oohed and aahed over the Te Māori exhibition, life in New Zealand’s Māori and Pasifika communities endured all the cruelties and indignities of which a systemically racist state apparatus is capable.

White South Africans fleeing the final demise of Apartheid in the early-1990s were astounded at the ease with which Pakeha had established something very similar in New Zealand – and all without resorting to pass-laws, tear-gas, water-cannon, or live-rounds. They found “brown towns” and “white towns”, “brown schools” and “white schools”, and nobody not raised amid signs saying “Blankes” and “Nie-Blankes”, or reminded daily of the dishonoured promises of the Treaty of Waitangi, seemed capable of seeing, let alone acknowledging, New Zealand’s racially bifurcated system.

Only under the leadership of Don Brash did the National Party adopt a policy programme that attempted to meld the racially-charged socio-economic divisions with which it placated its atavistic base, with a disarmingly honest attempt to roll back the divide-and-conquer policies embodied in the Treaty Settlement Process. The neo-tribal capitalism of the Māori corporations; the positive discrimination measures that had fed the steady growth of the Māori middle-class; all of it was to go. That Brash’s “Iwi/Kiwi” campaign lifted National’s Party Vote from 20.9 percent in 2002 to 39.1 percent in 2005 proves just how deeply embedded the question of race has always been in National’s political philosophy.

John Key’s reversion to the Bolger/Graham strategy was as swift as it was successful. His coalition government even included the Maori Party, an inspired MMP manoeuvre which provided him the political cover he needed as the immiseration of Māori and Pasifika proceeded without significant government remediation. The state houses National had built in the 1950s and 60s were either sold-off or allowed to decay. Raw sewerage ran down the walls of “brown” hospitals. Crime and drug addiction in the “brown” towns and suburbs grew steadily worse. National was, however, willing to sanction New Zealand’s adherence to the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

That Luxon would have attempted to steer a similar course to Key’s is certain. Unfortunately, the “decolonisation” and “indigenisation” policies of the Sixth Labour Government were sufficiently radical to re-animate the electoral coalition that had so nearly won power in 2005 – only this time in numbers sufficient to place the racially-agitated right on the Treasury Benches.

National’s – and Pakeha New Zealand’s – problem, in 2024, is that the Māori of the urban slums, the Māori of the iwi corporations, and the Māori of the public sector commissariat, are fast approaching the critical political mass, the kotahitanga, that will make them one, unstoppable, force for change.

The Treaty Principles Bill may not be read a second time, but in the battle between Iwi and Kiwi that now seems inevitable, there is absolutely no doubt that National will be found fighting alongside the white supremacist forces it has always led.

This time, minus the mask.

Chris Trotter is New Zealand’s most provocative leftwing political commentator, with 30 years of experience writing professionally about New Zealand politics. He identifies as a “libertarian socialist” and now writes regularly for the Democracy Project, producing his column “From the Left”.

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WHEN DID HOLDING REFERENDA become a bad thing? What transformed the option of asking voters to decide an issue collectively into a sin against democracy on a par with the Reichstag Fire? In attempting to answer that question, it is important to establish that referenda have been a common feature of New Zealand political life for more than a century.

Voters participated in what was called the “National Licencing Poll” – a referendum – at every general election held between 1919 and 1989. The question put to them was whether New Zealand should embrace “Prohibition”, “Continuance”, or the “State Purchase and Control” of alcohol. More than once, astonishingly, “Prohibition” came within a percentage point of winning!

In August 1949, 77 percent of New Zealanders voted in favour of a Labour Government sponsored referendum calling for compulsory military training in peacetime.

Twice since 1967 New Zealanders have been given a choice between a three-year and a four-year parliamentary term. (Spoiler Alert: Both times they opted to stick with a three-year term.)

In 2015 and 2016, New Zealanders voted in two referenda to decide whether or not the nation’s flag should be replaced.

In 2020, Kiwis voted to legalise euthanasia, and reaffirm Cannabis prohibition, in two separate and binding referenda.

Most significantly, however, New Zealand’s electoral system was changed profoundly, and remained so, on the strength of not one, not two, but three referenda.

How, then, has this tried and tested means of testing the general will been transformed into something so dreadful that 440 Christian clerics recently felt compelled to publish an open letter to the nation’s legislators urging them to reject out of hand a bill defining the principles of te Tiriti o Waitangi, and providing for these legislatively (re)defined principles to be accepted or rejected by referendum at the next general election?

The answer to this question may be found in the unfortunate history of Citizens Initiated Referenda (CIR). Much like the popular campaign for a shift towards proportional representation, the demand for citizens initiated referenda grew out of the public’s immense dissatisfaction with a political system that seemed impervious to the popular will.

In spite of all the promises made to voters in the run-up to general elections, the neoliberal economic and social order erected by Labour in the late-1980s, and reinforced by National in the early-1990s, remained unchallengeable.

The First-Past-the-Post electoral system, by delivering an absolute majority of the seats in the House of Representatives to single parties receiving less (and, not infrequently, considerably less) than 51 percent of the popular vote, allowed doctrinaire governments to defy public opinion. Under the prevailing two-party system, and with Labour and National equally committed to preserving the neoliberal order, root-and-branch change remained the preserve of parliamentarians – not citizens.

To the chagrin of those who had successfully campaigned for proportional representation, the new electoral system – “MMP” – hardly improved matters. While the New Zealand Parliament became more representative of New Zealand’s increasingly diverse electorate, the electoral duopoly committed to the survival of neoliberalism remained strong enough to deny smaller parties the critical policy concessions they and their supporters were anticipating under the new MMP system.

The public push for CIRs was intended to supply the “braces” to proportional representation’s “belt”. Any government foolhardy enough to dig in its toes over dismantling neoliberalism could be forced to do so, albeit in piecemeal fashion, by having specific policy changes mandated by referendum.

With the decisive referendum on MMP looming in 1993, the National Government appeased the CIR campaigners by passing legislation allowing for 10 percent of electors to initiate a referendum. There was, however, a catch. Any referendum thus initiated would not be binding.

Huh? Wasn’t that a pretty massive spanner to throw in the works of plebiscitary democracy? With the benefit of hindsight, the answer seems blindingly obvious. At the time, however, people were persuaded that it might be dangerous to bind the hands of government quite so tightly. More importantly, they bought the argument that no government would be foolhardy enough to ignore the moral force of a successful referendum.

Yeah, right.

Without the assurance of the CIR’s result being binding, a worryingly large percentage of New Zealand’s already cynical electorate consistently declined to participate in the process. But, without a convincing turn-out, the politicians argued, no affirmative result could be taken seriously. Even 100 percent support for a proposition loses its lustre when three-quarters of the population cries-off expressing an opinion.

Unsurprisingly, the public’s enthusiasm for CIRs soon waned.

The initiative for change thus remains where it has always been in New Zealand’s representative democracy – with Parliament. To order a binding referendum, the House of Representatives must first to be persuaded that, on the question proposed, sharing its decision-making power with the people is a good idea.

Not an easy task.

Getting Parliament to devolve its power is made even more difficult if the question to be decided runs counter to the accepted wisdom of the ruling elites and their parliamentary proxies. In the case of questions requiring the jettisoning of neoliberal economics, or messing around with the accepted understanding of te Tiriti o Waitangi, those MPs attempting to give the people the final say should expect to be opposed by an overwhelming majority of their colleagues.

Which is precisely what Act’s MPs have discovered in relation to their leader, David Seymour’s, Treaty Principles Bill.

Every other party in Parliament opposes vociferously the very thought of defining the principles of te Tiriti by referendum. The issues, they say, are far too complex to be resolved by such a crude political mechanism. Treaty matters are best left to the sober deliberations of New Zealand’s most senior judges, the Waitangi Tribunal, and experienced public servants. They must not, under any conceivable circumstances, be left to the tender mercies of the ordinary New Zealander in the street.

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EVERYBODY AND THEIR DOG, it seems, is marking the 40th anniversary of “Rogernomics” by writing about its meaning and legacy. The plain fact, of course, is that any journalist with a serious interest in politics and economics should have been writing about little else since 1984. Rogernomics is the driving narrative of our times.

Over the span of those 40 years, the term for the phenomena described by Rogernomics has changed frequently.

In the years preceding the election of the Fourth Labour Government, when New Zealand journalists still had their eyes on the “overseas” depredations of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the analytical catch-all phrase was “The New Right”. When the nostrums of Thatcher and Reagan arrived on these shores they were bundled together under the heading of “Labour’s Free Market Policies”. Then, Rob Campbell (still a prominent trade unionist in the mid-1980s, as well as a popular columnist for the Sunday Star-Times) translated the US catch-all term Reaganomics into Rogernomics.

That one stuck.

Rogernomics became the short-hand descriptor for all the radical changes that swept away New Zealand’s social-democratic economy and society between 1984 and 1990. In the bitterest of ironies, those changes were introduced by the very same party which had entrenched New Zealand social-democracy 50 years earlier. Labour has yet to atone adequately for its most grievous historical sin.

As the years, and then the decades, passed, however, Rogernomics seemed increasingly inadequate to the task of describing the new society that was taking shape – let alone the ideological foundations upon which it was being built. Some writers, well aware of the historical origins of the ideas that were now driving not only New Zealand’s, but the entire world’s, economic thinking tried, unsuccessfully, to attach the “Classical Liberal” label to them.

For journalistic purposes, however, the word “classical” was just too old and too dusty to characterise an ideology that was relentlessly laying waste to old and dusty things. For reporters without the slightest grounding in economic history, the policies being implemented all around them seemed new and dynamic. Twenty-something journalists weren’t to know that similar policies had been tried, and had failed, a century before they were born. They didn’t care – history was so last millennium!

A better word than Rogernomics still had to be found. Something with intellectual heft – and a twenty-first century ring to it. If the soubriquet “Neo” was good enough for the hero of the Matrix, then it was also good enough to update and turbocharge the rather lame legacy of economic and political liberalism. Thus was born “neo-liberalism”. But, since hyphens, too, were old and dusty, the noun was swiftly shortened to, “neoliberalism”.

That one stuck, too.

There was, however, another reason why the shock of the neo was crucial to the changed economic, social and political order. As everybody who’s ever taken a marketing course (and that includes far too many journalists!) will be aware, describing a product as “new” gives it a palpable edge. Because who wants to buy something “old” – right?

Certainly not the neoliberals, and certainly not the Labour politicians and their advisers charged with making as many New Zealanders as possible cringe when they “remembered” what their country was like before Rogernomics picked it up by the scruff of the neck and set it on the right track to a freer and more prosperous future.

And, boy, were they good at it! Even today, 40 years later, journalists who were barely out of nappies in 1984, will roll out the same terrible hardships listed by the Rogernomes as they set about persuading their fellow citizens that the New Zealand of 1935-1984 was a cross between a Soviet supermarket and a Polish shipyard. Whole bulldozers, they said, could be made to disappear completely by New Zealand Railways. If you wanted to subscribe to a foreign magazine, then you had to apply in advance to the Reserve Bank for the necessary ‘overseas funds’. Everything closed for the weekend. There were no decent restaurants. And, you could not get a decent cup of coffee for love or money!

It would be quite wrong to suggest that there was no truth at all to any of these carefully crafted anecdotes. But, truth or falsehood wasn’t really the point. Their real value lay not in what they encouraged people to remember about the years before Rogernomics, but in what they made it so much easier for people to forget.

We Kiwis are an insecure bunch, and nothing encourages our tendency towards cultural cringe more successfully than suggesting the rest of the world sees us as being out-of-touch and behind-the-times. Who hasn’t heard about the story of the American tourist who, having been dropped-off in downtown Auckland, was obliged to set his watch back twenty years?

In the end, the number of Kiwis who wanted their country to be “just like overseas” was more than enough to make it happen. When the Rogernomes set out to eliminate the “dinosaur” institutions of old New Zealand, they were pushing on an open door.

What New Zealanders failed to grasp (or wilfully ignored) was that the highly-taxed, highly-regulated economy that the Rogernomes and their neoliberal successors set out to dismantle and destroy, was also the economy that made it possible for the overwhelming majority of Kiwis to have a job, own their own home, save for their retirement, and fund a public health and education system that allowed them to predict with confidence a life for their children that would be better and more fulfilling than their own.

Yes, the “opening up of New Zealand” meant 24/7 shopping, excellent restaurants, and world-beating coffee. But, it also meant that the men and women who had cringed at the thought of living in a country that closed for the weekend would, as the price of their unimpeded retail therapy, be required to watch their children grow up in an nation that made them pay for their tertiary qualifications, spend the first 5-10 years of their working lives paying off their student loans, and watching, helplessly, as house prices climbed beyond their reach.

And that was just the middle-class! What the Rogernomes and neoliberals are determined to make New Zealanders forget is that the shift from a highly-taxed, highly-regulated economy, to one guided by the Nineteenth Century doctrine of laissez-faire, was made possible by the deliberate and brutal impoverishment of working-class Māori and Pasifika. God knows, the old New Zealand could, and should, have treated its non-Pakeha population much better than it did, but, at least, in the years prior to 1984 the stats were headed in the right direction. By the mid-80s, close to two-thirds of Māori living in Auckland owned their own home. Within 40 years, that number had fallen to 18 percent.

Everything comes at a price – even a decent cup of coffee.

Chris Trotter is New Zealand’s most provocative leftwing political commentator, with 30 years of experience writing professionally about New Zealand politics. He identifies as a “libertarian socialist” and now writes regularly for the Democracy Project, producing his column “From the Left”.

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A PRIVATE MEETING involving two Cabinet Ministers, sundry departmental officials and representatives of the seafood industry has achieved headline status. According to the 1News Māori Affairs Correspondent, Te Aniwa Hurihanganui, evidence exists of Minister for Treaty Settlements, Paul Goldsmith, and the Minister for Oceans & Fisheries, Shane Jones, offering industry representatives reassurance that proposed Government changes to the Marine & Coastal Areas Act would likely see the percentage of New Zealand’s coastline subject to customary marine title claims plummet from 100 to just 5 percent.

The 1News report has the ministers’ meeting occurring on 21 May 2024 – two months before the July announcement of the Coalition Government’s proposals regarding the Act. The inference being that favoured elements within the New Zealand fishing industry have been promised ongoing access to marine resources at the expense of mana whenua.

But is this inference justified? Is this really a case of “crony capitalism”, or, even worse, “racist crony capitalism”? The answer, thankfully, is: “No.”

For a start, the meeting between Goldsmith, Jones and seafood industry representatives took place in the context of a Coalition Agreement undertaking to roll back the highly controversial 2023 Court of Appeal decision which encouraged customary ownership claims from Māori iwi and hapu, claims now affecting, collectively, 100 percent of the New Zealand coast.

The Court of Appeal’s judgement construed the Marine & Coastal Area Act in such a way that it effectively negated the onerous proofs of customary title demanded by Parliament. The justices argued that in an Act which also entrenched the undertakings of the Treaty of Waitangi, such proofs of ownership could not be taken literally.

The sudden proliferation of claims to customary marine title which this decision prompted generated sufficient political pushback to secure the NZ First Party’s support for parliamentary intervention directed at over-ruling the Court of Appeal’s interpretation of the Marine & Coastal Areas Act and securing the restoration of the status quo ante. In the post-election negotiations between National and NZ First, such intervention was agreed and included in the two parties’ Coalition Agreement.

It is not, therefore, a case of the seafood industry prevailing upon the Coalition Government to grant it special favours at the expense of Māori, but of the two government ministers most closely involved in the issue seeking industry input regarding the most likely consequences of the Coalition Government’s pledge to roll-back the Court of Appeal’s decision.

Consultations of this nature are not uncommon when a government is contemplating legislative measures likely to affect a major industry. In this respect, the meeting between Goldsmith, Jones, relevant officials and industry leaders is hardly newsworthy.

More interesting, from a journalistic perspective, is how the notes of a private ministerial meeting, held under the auspices of Te Arawhiti – The Office for Crown-Māori Relations – ended up in the hands of 1News’s Māori Affairs correspondent. Was it simply part of a “catch” netted by 1News’ own OIA “fishing expeditions”? Or, were these notes passed on to Hurihanganui as part of a concerted effort to embarrass the Government and impede its fulfilment of the Coalition Agreement pledge?

Certainly, some of the ministerial comments minuted during the meeting were highly embarrassing – most notably the comment relating to the percentage of the coastline likely to be affected by customary marine titles once the Coalition’s restorative legislation is passed. That said, the minister’s comment is only embarrassing because the public’s political memory is so short.

When the Marine and Coastal Area Act was originally passed back in 2011, fears about the coastline becoming off-limits to Pakeha were routinely allayed by National Party politicians pointing out that the tests imposed were so stringent – the coastal area under claim had to have been exclusively used by the claimants since 1840 without “substantial interruption” –that only a modest percentage of claims (the then treaty negotiations minister, Chris Finlayson, predicted 10 percent) would end up being granted.

The shock-value of Hurihanganui’s story lies in the misapprehension that established claims to customary marine title are to be pared back from 100 percent to just 5 percent of the coastal area, which, if true, would be a very grave injustice indeed. The reality is somewhat different.

It is only on account of the Court of Appeal’s 2023 decision to effectively reverse the legislative intent of Parliament in 2011 that so many iwi and hapu were inspired to lodge a claim. The impressive figure of 100 percent refers only to the extent of the New Zealand coastal area currently under claim – not to the percentage of the coastline awarded customary marine title by the High Court. Hence the projected drop from 100 to 5. With the original tests reinstated, and the undecided claims nullified, there are bound to be far fewer claimants. Proving exclusive use, without substantial interruption, for 184 years, is a daunting challenge for any New Zealander!

A journalist with a slightly broader brief than Ms Hurihanganui’s might have been moved to enquire as to why the Court of Appeal thought it appropriate to reverse the clear intent of New Zealand’s democratically-elected legislature. The constitutional convention of “comity” enjoins each of the three branches of government, the executive, the legislature and the judiciary, from encroaching upon the powers of the others. Why, then, did the judiciary (in the form of the Court of Appeal) whose role it is to interpret and apply the law, not re-write it, presume to correct the nation’s legislators in relation to the Marine & Coastal Areas Act?

It stretches credulity to suppose that the Court could have been entirely unaware of the incentive its controversial decision would provide for iwi and hapu to lay their claims before the High Court in substantial numbers. Nor is it credible to suggest that, in doing so, the Court of Appeal was entirely innocent of courting precisely the political backlash that led to representatives of the seafood industry meeting with Ministers Goldsmith and Jones in May of 2024.

The responsibility for making the laws of New Zealand lies with the men and women elected to the House of Representatives, not with the men and women appointed to the Court of Appeal. The latter’s dramatic negation of the legislature’s intentions vis-à-vis the Marine & Coastal Areas Act 2011 left the Coalition Government with no honourable option but to reassert in the plainest language the original evidential requirements needing to be fulfilled before customary marine title can be granted.

To suggest otherwise is to posit a revolutionary constitutional revision which places unelected judges at the summit of the state. Judges with the power to not only interpret and apply the laws, but to re/write them. And if that is what lies at the heart of this controversy, then it is passing strange that such a naked bid for unaccountable power has yet to headline the 1News bulletins at Six O’clock.

Chris Trotter is New Zealand’s most provocative leftwing political commentator, with 30 years of experience writing professionally about New Zealand politics. He identifies as a “libertarian socialist” and now writes regularly for the Democracy Project, producing his column “From the Left”.

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“ROGERNOMICS” didn’t just transform New Zealand’s economy and society, it profoundly changed its politicians. Members of the “political class” of 2024 display radically different beliefs from the individuals who governed New Zealand prior to 1984. The most alarming of these post-1984 beliefs dismisses Members of Parliament and local government politicians as singularly ill-qualified to determine the fate of the nations they have been elected to lead.

This paradox is readily explained when the core convictions driving the political class are exposed. The most important of these is that ordinary voters have absolutely no idea how, or by whom, their country is governed. The ordinary voter’s conviction that “the people” rule – as opposed to the “loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires” whose worldwide corporate interests are protected by globally organised media and public relations companies – is offered as proof of their all-round imbecility. Politicians might just as well be guided by baboons as by the ordinary voter!

This contemptuous view of the people who elect politicians to public office is, naturally, kept well-hidden from the electorate. Indeed, these disdainful “representatives” are forever celebrating in public what they denounce privately as dangerous, “the principles of democratic government. Why? Because the alternative to perpetuating the myth that the people (demos) rule (kratos) – i.e. by making it clear to them that they don’t – is much, much worse.

Ruling a country by force, rather than by consent, not only turns most of the population into the rulers’ enemies, but also leaves the political class acutely vulnerable to the institutions responsible for perpetrating the violence that keeps it in power. All too often these “men with guns” decide to cut out the political middlemen and rule directly. Historically-speaking, this is the royal-road to graft, corruption, extortion, and, ultimately, to the formation of a brutal kleptocracy. NOT a situation conducive to either making, or keeping, one’s profits!

That feudalism, and the absolute monarchies that grew out of it, were, in essence, arrangements predicated on the maintenance of well-organised bodies of armed and violent men might, given contemporary capitalism’s distaste for such regimes, be considered ironic. Living under the sway of these “gentlemen”, and being required to pay their protection money the swingeing taxes they imposed, did not make for a happy life – or, at least, not for the 95 percent of the population – including the merchant class – forbidden from owning swords!

The popularity of democracy, as a system designed to reduce sharply the power of bullies and extortionists, tends to be greater the nearer in time its beneficiaries are to the oppressive political regimes from which “people-power” liberated them. Even as capitalism began to hit its stride in the nineteenth century, such democratic (or quasi-democratic) legislatures as existed (and there weren’t many) proved remarkably reluctant to bow before the doctrine of laissez-faire. (French for “let the capitalists do what they like’.) The Victorians who founded New Zealand, and wrote its Constitution Act, were impressively unconvinced that a man with a plan (women were yet to be included in their discussions) could not improve the lives of his fellow citizens by persuading them to elect him to Parliament.

This conviction that politicians could make a positive difference to the lives of ordinary people took root more tenaciously in New Zealand than just about any other country on the face of the earth. The radical reforms of the Liberal government (1890-1912) and the first Labour government (1935-1949) earned New Zealand the title “social laboratory of the world”. Politicians who were similarly determined to make a difference came from Europe and America to observe first-hand New Zealand’s own special brand of “socialism without doctrines”.

The people who rendered making a difference unsafe were, of course, the socialists with doctrines. The unfortunate Russians and Chinese would pass from feudalism to communism without any extended period of democratic government in between. From noblemen with swords, they passed into the hands of commissars with pistols. The taxes were just as swingeing, but at least Communism’s bullies and extortionists contrived to paint Paradise in colours more exciting than white.

Lest their workers decide to paint their own countries red, Western capitalists were persuaded, very reluctantly, to let them be painted pink. The problem with social-democracy, however, was that if you conceded it an inch, it would, albeit incrementally, take you many miles down “the road to serfdom”. Such was the grim thesis of the Austrian, arch-capitalist economist, Friedrich von Hayek, founder of the Switzerland-based free-market think tank, the Mont Pelerin Society, and spiritual father of neoliberal political economy.

Labour’s Roger Douglas was a member of the aforesaid Mont Pelerin Society, as was National’s Ruth Richardson, along with quite a number of the bureaucrats and businessmen who first set New Zealand on the road to neoliberalism. At the heart of their project was a very simple imperative: Don’t let politicians near anything even remotely important. Leave all the important decisions to the market, or, at least, to those who own and control the market.

Those who struggle to understand why neoliberals are constantly presenting mild-mannered social-democrats as fire-breathing communists should view their behaviour as pre-emptive ideological law enforcement – pre-crime-fighting. Politicians determined to “make a positive difference” may begin by building state-houses, the neoliberals argue, but they always end up creating gulags. Better by far to create a society in which “making a positive difference” is restricted to capitalist entrepreneurs. Don’t let the political do-gooders get started.

Clearly, no one sent the memo to Jacinda Ardern. Or, if they did, she profoundly misunderstood it. Making a positive difference was what New Zealand’s young prime minister all-too-evidently believed the Labour Party had been established to enable. But, when she said “Let’s do this!”, all those around her, either gently, or not-so-gently, said “You can’t do that!”

It may have looked as though there were levers to pull to set up a light-rail network, build 100,000 affordable houses, end child poverty, and combat global warming, but they weren’t attached to anything. “Jacinda” could pull on them all she wanted, put on a good show, but the cables linking politicians’ promises to real-world outcomes had all been cut decades earlier. She didn’t appear to understand that disempowering politicians was what Rogernomics had been all about.

But, as is so often the case in history, the story was changed by something its author’s had failed to imagine, or anticipate. The onset of a global pandemic made it absolutely necessary that the lever labelled “Keeping New Zealanders Safe” was at the end of a cable that was very firmly attached to the real world, and that the person pulling the lever was empathically qualified to make a real and positive difference.

Before the neoliberals could come up with a plausible reason for letting thousands of their fellow citizens perish, the Ardern-led government, backed by the almost forgotten power of an unapologetically interventionist state, was producing changes in the real world – changes that were, very obviously, saving the lives of real New Zealanders.

It couldn’t last. Neoliberalism, like rust, never sleeps, and in less than a year the lever Ardern and her colleagues had pulled on with such energy had been quietly reconnected to less effective – but more divisive – parts of the state machine. But, not before “Jacinda” and her party had done the impossible. Not before Labour had won 50.01 percent of the Party Vote in the 2020 General Election.

There’s a lesson in there somewhere. Maybe, just maybe, politicians, acting in the interests of the people who elected them, aren’t always ill-qualified to lead? Maybe, just maybe, it is still possible for men and women of good will to make a positive difference?

Chris Trotter is New Zealand’s most provocative leftwing political commentator, with 30 years of experience writing professionally about New Zealand politics. He identifies as a “libertarian socialist” and now writes regularly for the Democracy Project, producing his column “From the Left”.

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AMONG THE MANY QUESTIONS raised by the Abuse in Care inquiry is the cruel nature of the state’s responses. Among the worst examples of this official cruelty is the way in which, over many years, Crown Law impeded the timely compensation of victims. There is something deeply troubling about the state’s legal division, with its effectively inexhaustible resources (at least when compared to those available to the victims of abuse and their legal representatives) waging a war of financial attrition against these extraordinarily vulnerable citizens. What is it that makes public servants so determined to prevent the state from acknowledging liability for even its most egregious sins? Why is the state so vicious in its own defence?

The best place to start looking for answers is in the psychological realm of human solidarity and institutional pride. One has only to think of military units and the esprit de corps so crucial to their effectiveness. In a social environment where loyalty is identified as the supreme virtue, anything threatening that loyalty must be confronted and destroyed. All other virtues, such as justice, accountability and truth-telling, are deemed to be of secondary importance. Indeed, if the choice is between defending the unit and responding to one or more of these secondary considerations, then loyalty to the unit will always win.

Since almost every state traces its origins to bodies of armed men, it is hardly to be wondered at that state institutions place a similar premium on institutional loyalty. No less than an effective military unit, or army, the state is acutely vulnerable to anything likely to undermine its servants’ morale. Admitting to error, or, worse still, to criminal behaviour, raises fears that the loyalty of the state’s subjects/citizens will be undermined.

A state that admits to making one mistake raises instantly the possibility that it has made others. Its decisions, formerly absolute and unchallengeable, come to be seen as tentative, subject to revision, or even reversal. Such a state will find it increasingly difficult to impose its will. Certainly, it will lose the ability to inspire fear. And a state that is not feared runs a palpable risk of not being obeyed.

Paradoxically, it is the state’s power to enforce decisions that are in clear violation of both reason and morality that inspires the most fear in the minds of its subjects/citizens. The message conveyed is one of savagery and unresponsiveness. Like James Cameron’s Terminator: “It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop” – until it has utterly crushed its challenger/s.

That this is how the New Zealand state sees itself, or, at least, used to see itself, is revealed with particular clarity in the Arthur Allan Thomas case. No matter how much new evidence was presented; no matter how compelling the arguments in favour of Thomas’s acquittal, the Court of Appeal repeatedly upheld his convictions. Undaunted by the public’s outrage at the court’s apparent willingness to uphold an obvious injustice, the Judiciary’s most senior representatives made it clear that they would not be persuaded to set Thomas free. The Court of Appeal simply could not be seen to have got it wrong.

To free Thomas, one part of the state was ultimately required to wage war upon another. The Executive, in the form of New Zealand’s pugnacious Prime Minister, Rob Muldoon, simply outmanoeuvred the Judiciary by convening a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Thomas conviction. Significantly, this was not headed by a member of the New Zealand Judiciary, but by an Australian judge known for his independence of mind.

No longer protected by the courts, furious members of the New Zealand Police (which did not emerge well from the Inquiry) would regularly turn up to the Royal Commission’s hearings and hurl abuse at the Aussie interloper. The cops never did accept their culpability in the false conviction and imprisonment of Thomas, and the Court of Appeal never forgave Muldoon for effectively over-ruling its judgements. Second-guessing the New Zealand state is not a game for the faint-hearted!

But, if the injustices meted out to Arthur Allan Thomas (as well as, twenty years later, Peter Ellis) left an abiding unease in the public’s mind about the trustworthiness of its justice system, then its response to any confirmation that thousands of young New Zealanders had been terribly abused whilst in the custody and under the supervision of the New Zealand state would presumably be several orders of magnitude greater than simple “unease”. No rational citizen could ever again repose the slightest trust in the wisdom and benevolence of state institutions.

Small wonder then that so much was done for so long to prevent the awful truth about abuse in care from penetrating the public’s consciousness. The resistance of Crown Law, no matter how outrageous, was, in purely legal terms, entirely understandable. To acknowledge the state’s responsibility for decades of abusive behaviour would carry the not insignificant risk of leaving taxpayers liable for compensation amounting to billions of dollars. Drawing out the process to the maximum extent possible may not have been in the least bit compassionate – or just – but it did present itself as the most effective way of reducing the state’s liability. While the victims of its failings are all-too-mortal, the state is not. Barring bloody revolution and/or defeat in war, the state is immortal.

The other factor which the state can count on in matters such as the Abuse in Care inquiry is the degree to which so many of its citizens identify themselves with its interests. Imperfect though it may be, New Zealand’s democratic system of government makes it relatively easy for the state to present itself as the servant of the people it purportedly serves.

Like the soldiers of a regiment, many New Zealand citizens offer their country an inexhaustible quantum of loyalty. Like the regimental colours, New Zealand’s flag is seen by patriots as quasi-sacred. Whistle-blowers seeking to besmirch the honour of the nation for which it stands should expect no mercy.

Those dumfounded by the quietude of the New Zealand public’s response to the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care shouldn’t be. Quite apart from the fact that the Inquiry’s most disturbing evidence is buried away in the millions of words printed in the Report’s sixteen volumes, the half-century inquired into (1950-1999) is now at least a quarter-of-a-century removed from the New Zealand of today. That said, at some place, buried deep in the Kiwi Collective Conscience, lies the realisation that abuse on such a scale couldn’t have happened had generations of New Zealanders not quietly decided to look the other way.

In the end, this collective aversion to disreputable realities is what all states rely upon. It is not what the state reveals to us that guarantees our loyalty and obedience, it is what its servants keep hidden.

Chris Trotter is New Zealand’s most provocative leftwing political commentator, with 30 years of experience writing professionally about New Zealand politics. He identifies as a “libertarian socialist” and now writes regularly for the Democracy Project, producing his column “From the Left”.

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NEW ZEALAND’S ENTRY into what would become the First World War was not decided by New Zealanders. Considering the 18,000 young New Zealanders killed in that terrible conflict, the young New Zealanders of today might be forgiven for regarding that as an egregious failure of the country’s political institutions. Explaining their failure is, however, assisted by noting that in 1914 there were no “New Zealanders” – only British “subjects”.

Presumably, that is why the inhabitants of the Dominion of New Zealand made no protest when war was declared by the appointed representative of their King-Emperor. Why would they? When their Prime Minister and their Leader of the Opposition were content to stand loyally to one side while their Governor-General, Lord Liverpool, informed them that they were at war with the German Empire.

A quarter-of-a-century later, in 1939, matters had improved – but only a little. When Great Britain declared war on Germany, for the second time, it was New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Michael Joseph Savage, who declared, loyally:

“Both with gratitude for the past and confidence in the future, we range ourselves without fear beside Britain. Where she goes, we go. Where she stands, we stand. We are only a small and young nation, but we are one and all a band of brothers and we march forward with union of hearts and wills to a common destiny.”

This time the butcher’s bill was only 12,000 young New Zealanders.

There have been some – most notably the distinguished New Zealand historian, Stevan Eldred-Grigg – who have argued that New Zealand could, and should, have declined to sacrifice its citizens (whose number barely topped 2 million) in another war between Great Britain and Germany. Putting to one side the very different moral calculations at work in 1939, the idea that either the New Zealand elites, or the New Zealand people, would have tolerated what pretty much the entire country would have condemned as an act of treachery, is fanciful.

At the heart of this country’s understanding of what its foreign and defence policies should be is the knowledge that its English-speaking citizens inhabit islands a very long way from the two large and powerful English-speaking nations which have, since 1840, protected and defended them. As a colony of Great Britain, the non-Māori inhabitants of New Zealand absorbed, more-or-less completely, the ideas, values, and institutions of the colonising power Lacking the power to defend themselves, New Zealanders not only trusted that Great Britain would protect and defend them, but also accepted that it was their moral and strategic duty to do their utmost to assist the “Mother Country”. Believing that New Zealand could “go it alone” wasn’t just misguided – it was wrong.

The Japanese Navy Air Force’s almost effortless sinking of the British battleships Repulse and Prince of Wales in December 1941 brought home to New Zealanders just how vain their trust and hope in British power had become. For a few terrifying months, the eyes of this tiny nation looked northward in anticipation of a Japanese invasion it could not hope to repel. But then, in June of 1942, the deus ex machina of the American Pacific Fleet swooped in to save the day. As The Who would later sing: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss” – only a lot less stuffy, much, much, richer – and way more fun!

Being on the winning side of World War II presented thoughtful New Zealand politicians and bureaucrats with challenges that threw all the old imperial certainties into doubt. For a start there was the new reality of the USA’s atomic weaponry, closely followed in significance by the seemingly irresistible conventional military might of the Soviet Union. When both of these realities merged into one, following the Soviet acquisition of atomic weaponry in 1949, it became clear to all but the most impenetrable military minds that a global clash of arms involving these new “superpowers” would mean the end of industrial civilisation. But, if New Zealand was to be protected by a superpower whose weapons would inflict as much harm on its friends as its enemies – to the point of sending both back to the Dark Ages, or worse – then what, exactly, was the diplomatic and military utility of such protection?

For the 30 years following the end of World War II, however, posing that question was a surefire way of putting an end to one’s career. If a global “hot” war between the USA and the Soviet Union had become impractical, then any test of their respective strengths, and those of their allies/vassals, would have to take place in the novel circumstances of a Cold War. In New Zealand, and just about everywhere else, this new, inescapably binary and zero-sum power game left absolutely no room for nuance. The whole world found itself reduced to the fratricidal politics of Harlan County, where the only question that mattered was: “Which side are you on?”

Unless you were some sort of Kiwi communist, there was only one correct answer to that question.

Except, the Cold War wasn’t just about signing-on with Uncle Sam (although that was the necessary first step) it was about something much bigger. It was about being one of “the English-speaking peoples” – as Churchill had dubbed them. The peoples who had triumphed over Hitler and Hirohito when all the others (barring the Soviets and the Communist Chinese) had surrendered. In the officers’ mess they talked about the “five fingers of the Anglo-Saxon fist” – USA, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – and keeping those fingers clenched was an obligation that transcended all domestic political considerations. So long as New Zealand’s politicians served the Fist, all would be well. Putting anyone else’s interests ahead of the Fist, even one’s own country’s, would be ….. problematic.

Such have been the marching orders for just about every ambitious military officer and career diplomat since the Cold War became the name of the game in 1948. And it didn’t stop when the Cold War was finally won in 1991. If anything, the demise of the Soviet Union only made matters worse. Because, now, the five fingers of the Anglo-Saxon Fist, blood-smeared but unbroken, could be clenched in triumph above the entire planet. Now there was only one side.

Except, that is, for the pinky-finger of the Anglo-Saxon Fist. Except for New Zealand. To the consternation of the rulers of the other English-speaking countries, New Zealand’s elites proved unequal to the task of over-ruling a Labour Party unaccountably and immovably pledged to making New Zealand “nuclear-free”. Uncharacteristically unwilling to bring the hammer down, as they had on Allende in Chile, the Americans contented themselves with letting it be known that their Kiwi “mates” in the military and the diplomatic corps had just one job – to bring the nonsense of an “independent foreign policy” to an end.

Which, 40 years later, they did – but not before Helen Clark, one of the key protagonists of Labour’s nuclear-free policy, and now Prime Minister of New Zealand, became the first leader of a democratic Western nation to sign a Free Trade Agreement with the People’s Republic of China.

Ah, yes, China. While the USA had been wasting blood and treasure it could ill-afford to lose all across the Middle East, China had occupied the power vacuum created by the break-up of the Soviet Union and the gratuitous impoverishment of the Russian Federation. One did not need to be a student of Thucydides to predict which way this new superpower was bound to end up interacting with the old one. No more than Dylan Thomas, is Uncle Sam willing to “go quietly into that good night”. Once more, the global hegemon is calling its dear friends unto the breach, or else to wall up the strategic gap with their English-speaking dead.

No thanks. The days of being called to send our young to die at the behest of king-emperors must surely be at an end. Career-threatening or not, it must be time – this time – for New Zealand’s thoughtful politicians and bureaucrats to stand athwart the path of those ambitious soldiers, diplomats and scholars for whom all roads lead, somehow, to Washington, London, Ottawa and Canberra – but never to Wellington.

We took the NZ out of ANZUS, there is no good reason to put it into AUKUS.

Chris Trotter is New Zealand’s most provocative leftwing political commentator, with 30 years of experience writing professionally about New Zealand politics. He identifies as a “libertarian socialist” and now writes regularly for the Democracy Project, producing his column “From the Left”.

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CHLOE SWARBRICK has embarked on a brave, but almost certainly doomed, political experiment. She has set out to build a mass movement on the foundations of a political party that rejects majoritarian decision-making, and which, by elevating the particular above the universal, makes the social solidarity that fuels mass action impossibly difficult to achieve. If the transformational movement Swarbrick is hoping to build is ever to eventuate, then she will have to fundamentally remake her party.

Perhaps the best way to illustrate the difficulty of the task Swarbrick has set herself is to reverse-engineer the salutary fate of the Auckland chapter of School Strike 4 Climate. This was the organisation, composed mainly of conscientized middle-class secondary-school students, widely credited with mobilising upwards of 50,000 young Aucklanders for the struggle against global warming back in 2015.

Central to the success of School Strike 4 Climate was its correct assumption that mass support for their cause already existed among those aged 15-20 years, and that to mobilise that support all they needed to do was organise a time and place for them to demonstrate it. The leadership of School Strike 4 Climate was largely self-selected, but the organs of organisation they conjured into existence were open to all. The kids who produced one of the largest political demonstrations in Auckland’s history did not ask permission before proceeding. Instead, they took the advice of the Nike Corporation and Greta Thunberg – and just did it.

And what a price they paid for having the temerity to organise a successful political event without first proving themselves fit “allies” for the victims of white supremacy, colonial subordination and heteronormative oppression. In the months and years that followed School Strike 4 Climate’s 2015 success, its organisers and participants were systematically “re-educated” to the point where their casual exercise of white privilege “persuaded” them to disband their organisation and withdraw into silence. In a statement released in June 2021, Auckland School Strike 4 Climate, declared itself to be “a racist organisation”. Henceforth, the fight against global warming would be led by their systemically victimised comrades.

But, if School Strike 4 Climate’s fate was to start huge and be made small, Swarbrick’s problem is how to take an organisation whose political mechanisms are designed to keep it small, and make it huge.

The Greens insistence on consensus-based decision-making, or, failing that, requiring the support of 75 percent of those responsible for making decisions, is driven by a profoundly elitist approach to politics. Those who framed the constitutional arrangements of the Green Party of Aotearoa were mistrustful of majorities and the political behaviour best suited to generating them. They did not want demagogues, they wanted philosopher kings and queens – men and women whose demonstrable wisdom counted for more than their ability to sway a conference of delegates. Investing these wise elders, and their tight circle of supporters, with veto powers was considered preferable to allowing 51 percent of Greens to overrule the preferences of the remaining 49 percent.

The problem with this constitutional structure is that it not only empowers those gathered around the revered philosopher king and/or queen, but also every other minority with the political smarts to throw a spanner in the decision-making works until its own agenda items are ticked-off. Constitutionally and politically, the Greens could hardly be better suited to advancing the cause of “Identity Politics” which, almost by definition, is hostile to the claims of dominant majorities. So much so that any Green politician demonstrating an ability to enthuse, galvanise, and (most alarmingly) mobilise large numbers of people is bound to attract the suspicion, even the outright enmity, of those whose interests would be compromised by an influx of members advancing policies believed to represent the greatest good for the greatest number.

In her speech to the Greens’ AGM in Christchurch (27-28 July 2024) Swarbrick challenged her audience with what, in the context of Green politics, is a deeply subversive question:

“What would it mean to build the biggest Green movement that the world has ever seen? For me, that’s not just about more seats in Parliament. It’s actually not even just about holding the Government benches. It’s about a country of citizens equipped with the understanding and the time and the resources to actively participate in our democracy. To hold those who make decisions on their behalf accountable. Even and especially if that’s us. It’s tens of thousands more Green Party members – people choosing to wear their hearts and values on their sleeves, organising and practising those values to win transformative change. From our neighbourhood corners to the very fabric of our state, in record numbers. Those people can and must come from all kinds of different backgrounds and walks of life.”

What Swarbrick is proposing here is a very big tent indeed – one stretching sufficient canvass to cover the sort of numbers needed to transform societies, and rescue planets. But such a big tent – “the biggest Green movement that the world has ever seen” – could not possibly endure for more than a few months under the present Green constitution.

What Swarbrick is demanding of her Green comrades is a mass movement, and mass movements are driven by the interests of dominant majorities, not elites, and certainly not by the agendas of ethnic and sexual minorities hostile to people who “come from all kinds of different backgrounds and walks of life” – most of them radically at odds with their own. Working-class people, poorly-educated people, heterosexual people, Pakeha people: people the Greens will have to accept on their own terms – and whom they must on no account attempt to convert to their elitist, anti-democratic, identity politics.

It is unclear whether or not even Swarbrick grasps this central reality of mass, or, as most commentators prefer to call it these days, “populist” politics. Buried in her challenge to the Green AGM is a perplexing reference to “a country of citizens equipped with the understanding and the time and the resources to actively participate in our democracy”. Nowhere does Swarbrick explain how such a country could possibly come into being prior to the revolutionary changes she is seeking. Only after the revolution is it possible to envisage citizens with “the understanding and the time” to make eco-socialism work.

Could it be that the only people Swarbrick is capable of envisioning as co-participants in the construction of a better world are people exactly like herself? Does she not understand that those in possession of the resources needed to participate meaningfully in the processes of self-government will always, this side of the revolution, be those with the most to lose by its arrival. Doesn’t she “get” that those with the most to gain from revolutionary change are unlikely to evince the placidity and equanimity of philosopher kings and queens? Their willingness to join the fight for change will be born of anger and despair, and the certainty that they have bugger-all left to lose. You don’t tell these sorts of people what they should be looking for – you give them what they want.

Chris Trotter is New Zealand’s most provocative leftwing political commentator, with 30 years of experience writing professionally about New Zealand politics. He identifies as a “libertarian socialist” and now writes regularly for the Democracy Project, producing his column “From the Left”.

This article can be republished for free under a Creative Commons copyright-free license. Attributions should include a link to the Democracy Project (democracyproject.substack.com).

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WE’VE ALL MET THEM, blokes who rely on the opinions of blokes just like themselves for guidance and inspiration. The sort of men for whom evidence is much less important than what they “just know”. Tell them that they’re wrong and they’ll tell you that: “No, you’re wrong.” Provide them with evidence, and they’ll accuse you of “making it up”. Whip out your smartphone and allow Professor Google to confirm your claims and, if they don’t immediately punch you in the face, they’ll simply turn away and pretend you’re invisible. Such men are a significant and often dangerous obstacle to human progress at any time – but never more so than when your country’s government is chock full of them.

What makes these blokes so impervious to evidence-based arguments and/or expert advice? Are they simply poorly-educated? It’s tempting to think so, but that would insult all those poorly-educated people who are, nevertheless, hungry for information and always eager to learn.

Working-class people growing up in nineteenth and twentieth century communities where educational opportunities were strictly limited proved this point over and over again by reading everything they could lay their hands on. So hungry for information and knowledge were they that those who had yet to attain full literacy would often club together to pay for someone to read to them while they worked.

One of the many sad stories emerging from the Christchurch earthquake was the loss of the impressive library of socialist, economic and trade union literature collected over more than a century by the Canterbury Trades Council. With the Trades Hall severely damaged by the quake, Christchurch authorities prohibited any recovery attempt. Eventually, the library’s rare and irreplaceable volumes, many of them first editions, were simply gathered up with the rest of that broken city’s rubble and buried.

No, imperviousness to rational argument is not the consequence of an inadequate education. Those who are open to knowledge will never attempt to discourage or silence those who are ready and willing to impart it. Reliance on a narrow set of ideas and assumptions, accompanied by relentless antagonism towards any person, group, or institution daring to suggest that those ideas and assumptions might not be altogether reliable, is most often an indication that ideological diversity would pose a material threat to the impervious ones’ dominant political, economic, social and/or cultural status.

No one has ever summed up this walled-in mindset more succinctly than the “muck-raking” (i.e. scandal exposing) journalist, novelist, and socialist agitator Upton Sinclair (1878-1968). Of such obdurate types he wrote: “It is hard to make a man understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding it.”

Such individuals simply cannot afford to be broad-minded and tolerant of difference and dissent, because if they were they would very soon come to the realisation that the ideas they cling to and the assumptions they make are utterly incompatible with recognising and upholding the rights of other human-beings. Blindness to the rights of others may be evidence of sociopathy, or even psychopathy. Certainly, a lack of empathy offers no impediment to being a successful oppressor. The principal explanation for social sadism, however, is that, having been paid to deliver it, the perpetrators feel obliged to satisfy their paymasters.

If a political party receives millions of dollars in donations from individuals and corporations with a powerful interest in the unimpeded exploitation of human-beings and the natural world, then the chances of that party taking effective measures to protect workers and the environment are slim. If a donor makes huge profits from the sale of fossil fuels, then he, she, or it will not expect the recipient politicians to prosecute the fight against global warming with excessive vigour. Almost invariably these expectations are met. Once bought, it is only right and proper that a purchased politician should stay bought.

And it’s not just politicians who find themselves in need of exculpatory ideologies. All those whose job it is to tell other people what to do and how to live would find it difficult to carry out their responsibilities without believing firmly in the idea that some people are born to be leaders and others are born to be led. By owning or operating a small business, one has already declared for the economic exploitation that makes profit possible. Salaried employees seeking rapid promotion in a large corporation are unlikely to preach socialism in the staff cafeteria. Those who have spent years (and borrowed thousands) studying for their PhD are much more likely to be meritocratic than democratic. Democracy is all very well, but the poorly educated need to be guided by those holding the appropriate qualifications.

As the British Labour cabinet minister Douglas Jay, without the slightest sign of embarrassment put it in his pamphlet, The Socialist Cause. “In the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves”.

Which only proves that it isn’t just those boorish right-wing blokes in the pub (and the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Cabinet) who rely for inspiration and guidance on people as morally compromised as themselves. Revolutionaries as well as reactionaries will defend their interests (and salaries) by trotting-out ideas, assumptions, and justifications unsupported by evidence, and which they will not test in open debate. Not without a bloody big fight anyway, and probably not even then.

Inequality and exploitation extract an enormous intellectual and moral toll from those burdened with their perpetuation. Being the beneficiary of an unjust system comes with a devastating psychological downside. Only through the creation of elaborate strategies of denial and deflection can those whose job it is to keep the system going preserve their sanity. Very few people are able to embrace the injustice they daily dispense, but even fewer are unaware of its impact on their wellbeing.

Is this what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels meant when they penned the final sentences of The Communist Manifesto? That in order to win the world, one must have nothing to lose.

Chris Trotter is New Zealand’s most provocative leftwing political commentator, with 30 years of experience writing professionally about New Zealand politics. He identifies as a “libertarian socialist” and now writes regularly for the Democracy Project, producing his column “From the Left”.

This article can be republished for free under a Creative Commons copyright-free license. Attributions should include a link to the Democracy Project (democracyproject.substack.com).

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AS ANGRY TRUMP SUPPORTERS filed out of the Butler showgrounds, many paused to hurl abuse at the media pack. As they vented their anger upon the assembled “mainstream” journalists, I couldn’t help recalling the behaviour of an even angrier crowd as it filed out of Hamilton’s Rugby Park in 1981.

Tens-of-thousands of Waikato Rugby fans had turned out to watch their team take on the Springboks. When the actions of anti-tour protesters caused the game to be called off they were furious. The abuse they hurled at the broadcasting box, along with unopened cans of beer, reflected their instinctive grasp of the media’s power to shape political perceptions. The Rugby fans knew in their gut that what had just happened would be reported to the advantage of the anti-tour activists, and to the disparagement of New Zealanders like themselves – hence their fury.

When he learned, through friends and media reports, of the violence that had swept through Hamilton following the cancellation of the Waikato-Springboks match, the eminent, Austrian-born, left-wing economist, Wolfgang Rosenberg, who lectured at the University of Canterbury, observed that it reminded him of Kristallnacht (generally translated as “night of broken glass”) when, on 9-10 November 1938, Hitler’s Nazi regime attacked Germany’s Jews, burned their synagogues, and smashed the windows of their businesses.

News of Rosenberg’s dramatic comparison swept through the ranks of the anti-tour movement, further lifting its morale, and conferring a powerful historical dignity upon what had been a frightening and painful (albeit non-fatal) political experience. Rosenberg’s comparison did something else. Wittingly or unwittingly, this refugee from 1930s Austria had compared pro-tour New Zealanders to the Nazis who perpetrated Kristallnacht. A struggle against the importation of South African racism had been upgraded to a struggle against fascism.

Liberal journalists found it almost impossible to resist this significant redefinition of the moral issues at stake in the already deeply divisive Springbok Tour. The principal inspirers of the anti-tour movement were no longer the stubborn Ces Blazey, Chairman of the New Zealand Rugby Football Union, and his chief political enabler, Prime Minister Rob Muldoon. Now they were fighting the good fight against the fearsome shadow of Hitlerism itself. Those who supported the Tour ceased to be simply misguided, and became, instead, the representatives of a much darker system of belief.

In taking on this Manichean aspect, the most significant factor in the Police decision to call off the Waikato-Springbok game faded rapidly from public consciousness. Commissioner of Police, Bob Walton, had been made aware that a stolen light aircraft, piloted by an anti-tour activist, was en route to Rugby Park, and that if the game was not called off, the plane would be flown into the main stand – killing and injuring hundreds of human-beings.

This was a terrorist threat, pure and simple, and Walton could not be sure that the pilot was bluffing. The likelihood that the man at the aircraft’s controls would actually carry out his threat may have been low, but it wasn’t zero. And if the Police Commissioner made the wrong call he would be guilty of failing to prevent an unprecedented national calamity. Not surprisingly, Walton ordered the game’s cancellation and the evacuation of the stadium.

It is worth pausing and reflecting upon this extraordinary incident. In the years after 1981, the pilot of the aircraft became a sort of folk hero. He had presented the Police with a bluff which they could not possibly call. The game was abandoned, the plane landed safely, and nobody in the stands was hurt – win/win. But, paying the blackmailer does not render extortion any the less reprehensible. Walton capitulated because there were hundreds of helpless men, women, and children being threatened with death, and he was not morally entitled to gamble with their lives.

Since 1981, the anti-tour movement has sought refuge in the age-old argument that the end justifies the means. But when the means encompasses turning human lives into bargaining chips there is no justification. It doesn’t matter that the pilot, an RNZAF veteran, would never have carried out his threat. Walton didn’t know that, and the man flying the plane wasn’t about to tell him. He needed the Police Commissioner to be terrified of what he might do, and he used that terror to secure his political objective. That is the definition of terrorism.

The crowd filing out of Rugby Park did not know about the stolen plane, but they knew that what was happening was being transmitted all around the world. The rest of the planet would not see terrorism in the game’s cancellation – only the heroism of the protesters and the murderous rage of the crowd in the stands. Nelson Mandela, himself, would later describe the effect of the Waikato cancellation as “like the sun coming out”.

“Hamilton” is still presented as a great moral victory – the greatest of the ’81 Tour. But, on the day, the embittered Rugby fans knew in their gut that the people and the technology in the broadcasting box were absolutely central to the anti-apartheid movement’s victory – and to their own defeat. That’s why, in lieu of anything more effective, they hurled their beer-cans skyward.

As Trump’s supporters made their way out of the Butler showgrounds, and past the media box, they, like those Hamiltonians of 43 years ago, would have understood that the story that all but a handful of the journalists present at the event, and their networks, would tell would never be their story. It would not capture the horror of the pop-pop-pop of the would-be assassin’s rifle, and Trump going down. Nor would it reflect the sheer elation of seeing their champion rise up and punch the air, still alive, and still telling them to fight-fight-fight!

Oh sure, there is always social media – and Fox News – but what “X”, TikTok and Instagram deliver, and what Fox broadcasts, will never carry the same weight as the media messages directed at college-educated Americans. Just as the wholesome movies made in the Evangelical Christian studios are never as good as the movies made in Hollywood, the Right’s media content will never be accepted as anything more compelling than “misinformation”.

Even when the people in the MAGA caps make a deliberate personal choice to abandon the “lying media” and its “fake news”, a still, small voice continues to insist that the alt-reality they’ve just embraced will always be dismissed by the people with the good jobs and the big houses as “deplorable”.

The high-and-mighty said it to these “deplorables’” ancestors in the Middle Ages, and they’re still saying it today:

“Losers ye are, and losers ye shall remain.”

Chris Trotter is New Zealand’s most provocative leftwing political commentator, with 30 years of experience writing professionally about New Zealand politics. He identifies as a “libertarian socialist” and now writes regularly for the Democracy Project, producing his column “From the Left”.

This article can be republished for free under a Creative Commons copyright-free license. Attributions should include a link to the Democracy Project (democracyproject.substack.com).

IT’S A POLITICAL MYSTERY, this alliance between the Left and well-connected property developers. The Right’s covert dealings with commercial greed-heads has for long been a disreputable feature of its brand. The Left, to its credit, still has to work at corruption. Doing the wrong thing doesn’t come naturally … yet. So, what is it that the Left is telling itself as it lines up behind National’s Chris Bishop? What good thing do they believe themselves to be doing?

When this question is put to them, there’s a certain kind of leftist that will reassure you that increasing urban density is the fastest and most effective way of getting homeless people housed. Constructing high-rise apartments along key public transport corridors will provide affordable accommodation to young workers and students – liberating them for the cold, damp, poorly-ventilated and inadequately maintained properties currently providing landlords with a handsome return on their investment.

With a considerably steelier glint in their eye, these same leftists will tell you that the only people steadfastly refusing to see the wisdom of Bishop’s policy are the selfish Baby-Boomers who long ago purchased what were then cheap and nasty old villas, “did them up”, and watched their value skyrocket to dizzying heights.

Some of these Boomers (many of them card-carrying leftists) sold at the top of the market, pocketing huge and tax-free capital gains, which they then invested in a one, two, many rental properties, becoming fully paid-up members of the landlord class. These “investors” aren’t all that keen on urban density. Flooding the rental market with affordable rental accommodation, a policy which could hardly fail to exert an unhelpful downward pressure on their rents, is not what they were expecting.

These are the sort of Boomers who ask themselves the question made famous by the lead characters in the 1980s classic movie “The Big Chill”: “How did revolutionaries like us get to be so rich?”

Then there are the Boomers who’ve spent their lives immersed in the lyrics of Graham Nash’s “Our House”, with its “two cats in the yard”, open fires, and flower arrangements. These Boomers’ do indeed dwell in, “a very, very, very fine house” and they’re not about to let it be caught in the shadow of a six-storey apartment block lacking even one stained-glass window – let alone a decorative finial.

The feelings these Boomers have for property developers (and their little helpers in local government) bear close resemblance to the feelings they once had for supporters of the 1981 Springbok Tour and members of the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child. As far as they’re concerned, the urban density brigade aren’t leftists, they’re vandals. “Progressives” may deride such people as “Nimby” (Not In My Backyard) naysayers, but in their own eyes they’re heroic defenders of “precious local heritage”.

It’s a horrible combination of intergenerational avarice and envy, fuelled by the grim certainty that none of the generations coming up after them will ever have it as good as the Boomers. To say that this situation rankles among those born after 1965 is to massively understate their distress. As far as those fated to grow up in the Twenty-First Century are concerned, it is NOT “OK Boomer” – not okay at all.

The Devil himself could hardly have devised a scenario more likely to mobilise all seven of the deadly sins. Nor was there any shortage of property investors and developers willing to audition for the roles of Lucifer’s demonic minions. With so much envy and resentment to play upon, all those interested in making outrageous profits had to do was whisper “New Urbanism” in the ears of ambitious Gen-X lobbyists, who would, in turn, pass the concept on to ambitious Millennial politicians who’d never met a Boomer city father whose retreating back did not look better than his aggressive front. “Go to Europe,” they would say, “look at what’s happening there. Ask all these selfish Boomer Nimbys how many Frenchmen and women, how many Germans, live in detached bungalows!”

Wrong question. Frenchmen and women, Germans, and a plethora of other nationalities, live in apartments because only aristocrats, tycoons, and football players get to live in stand-alone dwellings surrounded by lawns and trees. When your population is numbered in the tens-of-millions, it’s difficult to organise your citizens’ accommodation in any other way. But ask those same apartment-dwelling Europeans, Americans and Asians if they would like to live in a stand-alone dwelling surrounded by lawns and trees, and you will elicit a very different response.

If the population of the British Isles was just 5 million, how many of its citizens would prefer to go “up”, as opposed to “out”? Even when the British population numbered in excess of 40 million, those on the left of politics were far more interested in spreading ordinary people out than they were in stacking them up. Indeed, it is strange that the disciples of New Urbanism speak so infrequently about the spacious planned communities of yesteryear. Genuine leftists would be talking a lot less about empowering developers to increase urban density, and a lot more about central and local government designing and building green cities and new towns.

Instead we are invited to accept and grow accustomed to this unholy alliance between right-wing greed-heads and left-wing Boomer-haters. Chris Bishop can make a bonfire of building codes and regulations, and rather than condemn his neoliberal recklessness, Labour and Green politicians turn up with additional jerry-cans of gasoline. Architects and construction firms warn that the Housing Minister’s policies will produce nothing but slums, crime and mental illness. The Left has nothing to say.

It really is remarkable. Housing New Zealand, after six years of fits and starts, finally hits its stride and builds thousands of new state houses annually. What happens? The new Coalition Government commissions a dodgy dossier damning Housing New Zealand, and uses it to justify an abrupt shutting-off of affordable housing supply – just as it was surging. In its place Bishop issues a slumlords’ charter. To the windfall tax-cuts his government has already delivered to the landlord class (which includes two-thirds of New Zealand’s parliamentarians) he now adds every conceivable incentive for the greedy and the tasteless to do their worst.

Bishop has staked his career on collapsing the price of houses and opening the way for the younger generation to reclaim the dream of home ownership. One can only imagine the response of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand and the big Aussie mortgage-holders if this promise is fulfilled. The international credit-rating agencies have already warned the Coalition Government that a collapse in house prices would set the entire New Zealand economy on fire. What will those who insist that Bishop is onto a winning strategy say then?

How painful it must be for genuine socialists to witness the political heirs of the left-wing politicians who designed, funded and built thousands of very, very, very fine houses, having so little to say about the deliberate re-creation of the oppressive “urban density” from which so many of poor New Zealanders, with their government’s assistance, broke free in the 1930s and 40s. How sad that so many on the Left, which used to be about sunlight and space, are throwing in their lot with those who see no profit in either.

Chris Trotter is New Zealand’s most provocative leftwing political commentator, with 30 years of experience writing professionally about New Zealand politics. He identifies as a “libertarian socialist” and now writes regularly for the Democracy Project, producing his column “From the Left”.

This article can be republished for free under a Creative Commons copyright-free license. Attributions should include a link to the Democracy Project (democracyproject.substack.com).

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THERE ARE LESSONS to be learned from the Biden-Trump debate/debacle. Important lessons, which New Zealanders would be most unwise to ignore. The first and most important of these is the need to face some harsh truths.

The American people have been running from the truth for decades. Electing an actor to govern them in 1980 merely confirmed their allergy to reality. Now they are readying themselves to elect Donald Trump for the second time. And, having witnessed Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, who can blame them? That the American Republic will struggle to survive such a final and decisive refusal to correct the consequences of its own corruption is unlikely to dissuade the American people from embracing its liquidator.

New Zealanders should, however, resist the temptation to sneer at the USA’s self-inflicted wounds. A dispassionate survey of New Zealand’s present predicament reveals a nation whose First World status can no longer be considered secure, and lacking a political class of sufficient calibre to retain it.

At virtually every level of the New Zealand state, from the lowliest public servant to the Justices of the Supreme Court, there is an alarming absence of evidence that the nation’s predicament is understood. Distractions there are in great number, but a clear-headed grasp of what it takes to hold a country together is not in evidence among those responsible for New Zealand’s administration.

This lack of clarity also pervades the ranks of New Zealand’s elected representatives. These are, with only a handful of exceptions, inadequately educated, lacking in relevant experience, and unadventurous to the point of actual cowardice. New Zealand’s current crop of politicians are place-holders not nation-builders. Unable to rise above the crude calculation of partisan advantage, an understanding of the broader national interest and of the needs of citizens yet to be born is beyond their capabilities.

Accounting for these alarming deficiencies is not easy. No matter how precariously positioned, New Zealand remains a First World country. Its people are educated, and their health preserved, by public institutions that easily bear comparison with those of much larger and richer nations. That being the case, the administration and government of New Zealand should be more than equal to the challenges faced. Likewise, its entrepreneurs and business leaders should be equal to the task of maintaining a productive and profitable economy.

And yet, when it comes to maintaining and extending the nation’s infrastructure, New Zealand’s leaders – private as well as public – are failing dismally. The political unanimity required to recognise, plan, and pay for the projects required to preserve social cohesion, while enhancing economic competitiveness and growth, is no longer a feature of New Zealand’s national life.

The indelible mark left upon a whole generation of New Zealanders by the Great Depression and World War II; an impression that not only permitted men and women of all classes and races to perceive the need to work together for the common good, but also to know – thanks to the bonding experiences arising out of existential danger – that such co-operation was possible.

Depression and war (but especially war) made brothers out of farmers and freezing-workers, professionals and tradespeople. Bullets and bombs were no respecters of who one’s ancestors were, or which particular sailing vessels they arrived in, but incoming ordnance did make clear who was keeping who alive. Such lessons are not easily forgotten.

But, neither are they easily learnt. In the absence of the near universal experiences of economic hardship, the threat of invasion, and the intense comradeship born of armed conflict, the influences of class, race and gender soon recover their power to separate and divide human-beings. Without the common memories born of working, fighting, and sacrificing together, it becomes easier and easier to believe that “some animals are more equal than others”. And the longer that heresy goes unreproved, the harder it becomes to see the point of building anything that benefits anybody beyond one’s own kind.

There was a time when New Zealand politics was a reflection of the efforts of its two largest political parties to both represent and advance the interests of their “own kind”. Labour stood for the working-class. National for farmers, businessmen and (most) professionals. Thanks in large part to the Cold War, however, both parties understood the importance of keeping political sectionalism on a short leash. The beliefs that held New Zealanders together were accorded much greater importance than political ideologies with the potential to tear them apart.

But those beliefs, absent the experiences which informed them, could not escape the challenges of a generation that had not known privation or war. The ideas that kept New Zealand society tight: white supremacy, male supremacy, heterosexual supremacy, capitalism and Christianity; were deemed oppressive and unjust by the most outspoken of the first generation of New Zealanders for whom tertiary education was something more than an elite privilege.

But if these young intellectuals were successful in loosening New Zealand’s tightly wound society, they had also made it easier for the separate strands of that society to be pulled apart. It would become increasingly practical for New Zealand’s now less-connected citizens to look after their own kind – at the expense of all the other kinds.

Inevitably, it was the wealthiest and most powerful New Zealanders who had most to gain, and gained most, from the post-war generations’ great loosening of New Zealand society. In just two generations the nation reverted to the class-ridden, race-divided, sexually-exploitative society it had been before the election of the First Labour Government in 1935. The country’s politics, likewise, reverted to a competitive struggle between the elite defenders of the nation’s farmers and importers, and the elite protectors of its professionals and industrialists.

The single most important difference between that earlier, elite-dominated, New Zealand society, and the elite-dominated society of today, was the arrival of a gate-crashing new elite comprised of Te Iwi Māori whose children had taken advantage of the expansion of tertiary education in the 1970s to carve out a niche for themselves in the new political power structure. Revisionist history notwithstanding, the key role of this new Māori elite was to distract the urban Māori working-class from its poverty and exploitation – mostly by aggressively promoting the twinned illusions of tino rangatiratanga and mana motuhake.

These elements of New Zealand’s story run parallel to those that gave us the political bankruptcy of the Biden-Trump debate. The USA underwent its own great loosening which, like New Zealand’s, unravelled the social solidarity responsible for uplifting so many ordinary Americans between 1945 and 1980.

It is a process from which the wealthiest Americans have benefited hugely – primarily by disconnecting themselves fiscally from the rest of America. With a much-reduced tax base, the USA, like New Zealand, is undergoing its own slow infrastructural collapse.

New Zealand’s tragedy may lack the compelling duo of Biden and Trump – each in their own way illustrating the moral exhaustion of the American political system – but that is no excuse for Kiwi complacency. Both countries need to face the harsh truths of national decline.

Because, in Bob Dylan’s words:

It ain’t dark yet
But it’s getting there.

Chris Trotter is New Zealand’s most provocative leftwing political commentator, with 30 years of experience writing professionally about New Zealand politics. He identifies as a “libertarian socialist” and now writes regularly for the Democracy Project, producing his column “From the Left”.

This article can be republished for free under a Creative Commons copyright-free license. Attributions should include a link to the Democracy Project (democracyproject.substack.com).

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