Manufacturing Consent - In A Corporate Box?

Manufacturer Of Consent: Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) provided what might be called “The Owner’s Operating Manual” for mass democracy in the Twentieth Century. Whether his theories are relevant to the Twenty-First is increasingly doubtful - as the four Labour MPs who recently accepted Sky City Casinos' corporate hospitality are discovering - to their cost.

SEATED in Sky City Casinos’ lavish corporate box, Labour’s four errant MPs probably weren’t thinking about Walter Lippmann. Their minds were more likely filled with the thrill of watching the All Black’s defeat the French. Even so, seated there, high above the masses, Phil Goff, Annette King, Clayton Cosgrove and Kris Faafoi were offering living proof of Lippmann’s political theories.

 

With the enfranchisement of women in the 1920s, democracy – as a political system – assumed something close to its final form, and Lippmann, though barely in his thirties, was determined to shape its future development. In this regard, the formidably intelligent young American journalist was hugely successful. More than any other political writer of his generation, Walter Lippmann provided what might be called “The Owner’s Operating Manual” for mass democracy in the Twentieth Century.

 

At the heart of Lippmann’s critique of mass democracy lay his pessimistic view of the ordinary voter’s capacity for political decision-making. The average person’s grasp of politics, wrote Lippmann, was that of “a theater-goer walking into a play in the middle of the third act and leaving before the last curtain”.

 

Flesh-and-blood voters were simply not the “omnicompetent” citizens America’s founding fathers had declared them to be. The world had grown much too complex for the direct democracy of the New England “town meeting” – where equal citizens came together to decide what should be done in their little corner of the world. According to Lippmann, the modern citizen was just one small and largely inconsequential member of “the bewildered herd”.

 

Lippmann’s genius lay in understanding that although the management of a modern capitalist society was well beyond the capacity of the ordinary citizen, it nevertheless worked best when ordinary people genuinely believed that their opinions mattered, and that their government really was giving them what they wanted.

 

Democratic government, Lippmann claimed, had become a kind of vast confidence trick.

 

Reposing the “just powers” of government upon “the consent of the governed” was an arresting political principle, but, in practice, could only be made to work when the people best placed to run complex societies: experts, specialists, bureaucrats; “a specialized class whose interests reach beyond the locality”; had, themselves, already “manufactured” the popular consent upon which the system rested. (In manufacturing this consent, Lippmann’s own profession, journalism, would obviously play a pivotal role!)

 

Under the modern democratic system which Lippmann envisaged (and which, through his weekly syndicated newspaper column and his many books, he largely defined and systematised) elected politicians, journalists and “specialists” of every kind constitute a permanent, self-sustaining matrix of governing “elites”, whose purpose is to justify the ways of the democratic capitalist system, both to itself and to the volatile and ill-informed citizens who keep it running.

 

Which brings us back to the four Labour MPs in Sky City Casinos’ corporate box.

 

The four undoubtedly believed that they were engaged in elite interactions that were as normal as they were unremarkable. By inviting leading figures of the Labour Right to their corporate box Sky City Casinos were reassuring them that they understood Labour’s need to make a large public fuss over the vexed issue of Auckland’s new convention centre. Public opinion on this matter was still in a raw state and much more needed to be done before voters could be reconciled to the convention centre. Both parties understood that the right-wing of Labour’s caucus would be crucial to that consensus-building process. The invitation was Sky City Casinos’ way of saying: “We’re all in this together.”

 

Back in Lippmann’s day, the news media would probably have left them to it. It is, after all, precisely at these sort of informal gatherings that specialists and professionals build the networks that keep the system running. Telling “the bewildered herd” that their supposed shepherds had been spotted drinking wine and nibbling hors d’oeuvres with the jackals and the wolves would only confuse and upset them.

 

But, Walter Lippmann never had to contend with Twitter or Facebook. Back in the 1920s and 30s the lucky snap of a sharp-eyed photographer still had to negotiate the labyrinthine hierarchies of a daily newspaper before it reached the public. The gossip columnist was still answerable to his or her editor.

 

Quite what Lippmann would make of today’s “citizen journalists” with their trusty cell-phone cameras, “Instagrams”, “tweets” and all-but-uncensorable blogs, is anybody’s guess. It is also very hard to see how his system of managed democracy can long withstand the insatiable appetites of the 24-hour news cycle. Thanks to the new communications technologies of the Twenty-First Century, the herd is not only becoming increasingly bewildered, anxious and restless, but it is also increasingly prone to dangerous explosions of social and political rage.

 

The days of four Opposition MPs enjoying a few quiet wines in the corporate boxes of their faux foes may be over.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 18 June 2013.

Through A PRISM Darkly

Geek Chic: NCIS-LA's winsome techies 'Eric' and 'Nell' are so busy capturing the top-rating show's viewers' hearts that their constant breaching of citizens' civil rights and privacy passes, if not unnoticed, then, at the very least, unreproved. These, after all, are the people who stand between us and the 'evil-doers'. Against such powerful inoculations of popular culture, CIA whistle-blower, Edward Snowden's, revelations about the PRISM surveillance system are unlikely to spark outrage from more than the usual civil liberties suspects.

 

EDWARD SNOWDEN knows his geopolitics. Where better to seek refuge than in China – the nation most likely to shatter the five fingers of the Anglo-Saxon fist? For the moment, however, the former CIA technician and whistle-blower must be hoping that Hong Kong can hide him from the Anglo-Saxons’ five-eyed “PRISM”.

 

No easy task – as Mr Snowden himself admits: “I could be rendered by the CIA, I could have people come after me, or any of their third party partners – they work closely with a number of other nations … You can’t come forward against the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies and be completely free from risk. Because they’re such powerful adversaries that no one can meaningfully oppose them. If they want to get you – they’ll get you in time.”

 

All of which makes The Bourne Identity read more like a handbook than a thriller. And why Nicky Hager, the man to whom so many of New Zealand’s whistle-blowers have taken their secrets, describes Mr Snowden as “a brave man”.

 

But, does any of it matter? Will the world even be surprised – let alone shocked – at the extraordinary reach of the US National Security Agency’s panoptic surveillance app – PRISM? Isn’t it possible that the citizens of the Anglo-Saxon powers: the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; far from applauding Mr Snowden’s courage, will condemn him for choosing not to stand with us – but with the terrorists?

 

It is, after all, the Anglo-Saxon nations which provide the biggest audiences for television series like 24 and NCIS. The heroes of these top-rating shows (both of which grew out of post-9/11 collaboration between Hollywood and the US national security agencies) are presented to us as the exemplars of courage and decency.

 

Whether it be 24’s Jack Bauer or NCIS’s Special Agent Jethro Gibbs, the message delivered to Anglo-Saxon viewers around the world is simple and compelling: “The US Government has got our back. These are the good guys who stand between us and the evil-doers.”

 

In every episode we witness these “good guys” – or their geeky side-kicks – routinely hacking into people’s computer hard-drives and tapping into their phone conversations/records. Indeed, these techno-savvy youngsters seem to inhabit a global panopticon from which nothing and no one can hide. Every CCTV camera is at their disposal and every GPS micro-chip ready to turn state’s evidence.

 

The simple cry of “Federal Agents!” grants these heroes warrantless entry to anybody’s property. When outraged suspects demand their rights, our good guys exchange knowing glances and ask them if they’ve read the Patriot Act. And, for those who refuse to co-operate there is always the failsafe threat of a one-way ticket to sunny Guantanamo Bay.

 

Fifty years ago, any agency wielding such totalitarian powers would have been listed among the enemies of freedom. That Americans are now quite comfortable with fictional good guys who sound and act like Soviet-era thugs is a measure of just how much Al Qaida took from the United States on 11 September 2001.

 

And not only from the United States. Thirty-six years ago Rob Muldoon’s plans to expand the surveillance powers of the Security Intelligence Service were met with huge demonstrations in all the main centres.

 

No such protests greeted the legislation which has, over the course of the last 12 years, dangerously extended the surveillance powers of the state. It’s as if agents Bauer and Gibbs have convinced us that: “If we have nothing to hide then we have nothing to fear.”

 

But, as Mr Snowden says: “Even if you’re not doing anything wrong, you’re being watched and recorded ... [I]t’s getting to the point where you don’t have to have done anything wrong you simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody – even from a wrong call. And then they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinise every decision you’ve ever made, every friend you’ve ever discussed something with, and attack you on that basis to derive suspicion from an innocent life.”

 

Because, as the civil liberties lawyer, Tim McBride, observes: “[W]e do have something to hide, not because it is criminal or even shameful, but simply because it is private.”

 

The details of our lives belong to us – not the GCSB. We surrender the right “not to be known against our will” – at our peril.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 14 June 2013.

The End Of Merlin: Or, Was Dunne Done-in?

No Fool Like An Old Fool: In the Arthurian legend of Merlin and Vivien, the old wizard's infatuation with Vivien, a young lady of the court, leads to his downfall. The story of Peter Dunne's fall from grace bears a very similar shape and feel.

 

THE SELF-DESTRUCTION of Peter Dunne has unfolded with the dream-like logic of our oldest and unhappiest myths. How could the master shape-shifter have got it so wrong? Made so many mistakes? Let down his guard so foolishly?

 

These are questions Mr Dunne himself found it difficult to answer. Indeed, at the press conference announcing his resignation from John Key’s ministry, the Member for Ohariu observed more than once that he could offer no “rational” explanation for his behaviour.

 

Throughout his encounter with the assembled media pack on Friday afternoon, Mr Dunne maintained an extraordinary dignity and clarity. It was almost as if he was discussing the behaviour of another man – one he barely recognised as himself. Again and again, he denied leaking the Kitteridge Report on the GCSB. It was at home, he said, in his study, in a locked briefcase. But, yes, he had discussed leaking the report with Fairfax Media’s parliamentary correspondent, Ms Andrea Vance.

 

He sounded like a man bewitched.

 

More than one journalist has hinted that Mr Dunne’s fall owes almost as much to Ms Vance as it does to the man himself. Between 30 March and 7 April, the politician and the journalist exchanged more than 64 e-mails. It was to preserve the confidentiality of these exchanges that the Minister was ultimately moved to tender his resignation.

 

These extraordinary events have the shape and feel of a very old and tragic tale. The bones of the story may be found in the mythology of every culture, but I first encountered it in the legends of King Arthur and the Round Table. There it is called the tale of Merlin and Vivien.

 

In the words of Alice M. Hadfield, whose 1953 version of the Arthurian legends I grew up with as a child: “Merlin the Wizard was a wise man nearly all his life, but when he was old he fell into foolishness.”

 

Unwisely, for a person so high in King Arthur’s esteem, he allowed himself to become bedazzled by Vivien, a young lady of the court. “He became quite crazed about her, followed her about everywhere, and told her any secret of his magic she wanted to know.”

 

Though initially “flattered and excited by his attention”, the young woman soon discovered that it was not “altogether comfortable to receive so much devotion from a wizard, and after a time Vivien became very tired of it.”

 

This was hardly surprising since Vivien had been raised under the guidance and protection of another magician. An ominous development because, as Ms Hadfield delicately puts it: “One wielder of magic seldom likes another, and Vivien had grown up to have no love for Merlin.”

 

Merlin’s end came when he invited Vivien to view the treasures hidden in a subterranean cave whose concealed entrance only he knew the whereabouts. Allowing the old wizard to lead her to the cavern, Vivien waited until he was well inside before sealing up the entrance with an incantation Merlin himself had taught her.

 

“Only the person who had said the word could say the other word which would undo it”, writes Hadfield. “Merlin is sealed up in the earth by his own folly and pride till all spirits meet before their Ruler.”

 

Such is the tale of Merlin and Vivien, which, I’m sure you now agree, bears a not unfamiliar shape and feel – even to us, who dwell at several centuries remove from the Middle Ages.

 

For there is much in politics that still carries the whiff of magic. How is it possible that those blessed with every conceivable political advantage fail so abysmally to spark the public’s interest? Why do the voters flock to politicians so bereft of wisdom or imagination? From whence do the words and phrases that inspire nations arise?

 

These matters are not described as “the dark art of politics” for no reason.

 

Few would dispute that, until very recently, Mr Dunne’s career bore all the hallmarks of a master political magician. To have shifted with such ease from Left to Right, and then, without disturbing a hair of his trademark coiffure, from Right to Left, and back again to Right, he must surely have mastered the elements of more than a few political incantations.

 

But he is not the only powerful magician at the court of King John. And, as Ms Hadfield has told us: “One wielder of magic seldom likes another”. It may have been Ms Vance’s own magic that persuaded Mr Dunne to contemplate (at the very least) sharing secret information with her newspaper, but we would be foolish to rule out the possibility that she was working with more than just one political wizard.

 

Speaking on TVNZ’s Q+A, Winston Peters observed: “There’s no fool like an old fool.”

 

Nor, it would seem, an old tale.

 

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

"Hidden" - The New Zealand Version

Hidden In Plain Sight: Philip Glenister plays seedy small-time lawyer, Harry Venn, in the UK television series Hidden. The plot turns on the lethal manoeuvres of sinister business and media figures as they attempt to turn a hung parliament to their political advantage. In eighteen months New Zealand could be living through its very own version of Ronan Bennett's screenplay.

HIDDEN is a gritty BBC political drama series written by Ronan Bennett. Crucial to the plot’s development is a UK general election result from which no clear winner has emerged. As day after day passes without a government, and rioting convulses London, a billionaire businessman, working secretly with a ruthless media proprietor, prepares the public for a right-wing coup d’état. Though the screenwriter never reveals the political identity of the caretaker PM, the inference is strong that he’s a moderate Tory who’s usefulness to the powers-that-be is at an end.

 

Right here in New Zealand, in just 18 months’ time, life could very easily be imitating art.

 

John Key, the National Party’s moderate but unpopular leader, faces the near impossible task of creating a government out of an election result from which no clear majority is readily discernible – for either the Right or the Left.

 

The Governor-General asks Mr Key, as leader of by far the largest party, to try and form a government. Day after day drifts by without any sign of a breakthrough. All eyes turn to the leader of the Labour Party. Can David Shearer succeed where Mr Key is failing?

 

While Mr Key contemplates the election’s intractable political arithmetic, Mr Shearer begins pressuring the Green Party. He needs to know how badly their leaders want to be Cabinet Ministers. Is it possible that, for the sake of the country, they might step aside and allow Mr Peters and his NZ First colleagues to form a minority government with Labour? And would they then be willing to keep that government in office by voting it Confidence and Supply? When the Greens protest, Mr Shearer warns them that any refusal to step aside will almost certainly see Mr Peters pledge NZ First’s votes to Mr Key.

 

The Greens are in a quandary. As the third largest party in the new parliament, they should be in the box seat – but they’re not. On the contrary, pressures are mounting for them to be written out of the political play entirely.

 

Every day the mainstream news media finds a new way of branding the Greens as “too radical for government”. Business organisations warn of dire consequences for New Zealand’s economic future should Russel Norman and Metiria Turei come within a bull’s roar of the Cabinet Table. The country’s international credit rating comes under review and international lenders quietly voice their growing fear of a Labour-Green Government to the Governor of the Reserve Bank.

 

When the Greens point-blank refuse to rule themselves out of government, the political tension is ratcheted up a few notches. The news media immediately seizes upon the fact that National won more votes than any other party. Never before, they correctly claim, has the party which won the most votes been denied the right to govern. That being the case, thunder the nation’s editors, the onus falls upon the “responsible” parliamentary parties to provide National with a working majority.

 

With the Greens’ “irresponsibility” taken as a given, and with NZ First’s numbers falling just short of the majority “the country” so desperately needs, the private cell-phones of certain Labour and Green MPs begin to vibrate.

 

First they are offered the carrot: guaranteed Cabinet seats, High Commission postings, seats around some very important (and well-remunerated) boardroom tables. If that fails, they are shown the stick: video recordings of what they thought were “secret” assignations; terrifying estimates of the tax owing on their undisclosed offshore incomes; pretty-much everything they did last summer.

 

The Governor-General gives Mr Key just 48 more hours to form a government. Mr Shearer, secretly informed that a critical number of Labour and Green MPs are about to defect, announces his party’s unwillingness to enter into any kind of agreement with the Greens. Mr Peters announces NZ First’s willingness to join in a “Coalition of National Unity”. National’s caucus meets to deliver Mr Peters’ price – John Key’s political head.

 

The Governor-General invites Judith Collins to Government House.

 

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 7 June 2013.

Forewarned Is Forearmed

Composite Image: The release by party insiders of material outlining what amounts to a far-right plot to take over and drive the National Party sharply to the right indicates a level of factional intrigue that should give all New Zealanders pause. Godwin's law notwithstanding, the 1930s German precedents bear close scrutiny. Exposing the plotters is always better done sooner than later - before it is too late.

 

THE PHOTOGRAPHS could have saved 60 million lives. They were taken on 4 January 1933, outside the Cologne residence of Baron Kurt von Schroder, a well-connected German banker. Captured on film as they passed through the baron’s gates were Adolf Hitler, Rudolf Hess, Wilhelm Keppler and Heinrich Himmler. A little while later Franz von Papen, the recently dismissed German Chancellor and intimate friend of Reich President, Paul von Hindenberg, joined them.
 

Within hours, this photographic evidence of the Cologne conspiracy was in the hands of  Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher. By the next morning Berlin’s newspapers were denouncing Hitler’s “secret meeting” with von Papen.
 

It proved to be too little and too late. By 30 January Hindenberg had replaced von Schleicher with Hitler. The new Vice-Chancellor was von Papen.
 

Had the saner elements within Germany’s ruling class acted earlier, and with General Kurt von Schleicher’s readiness to expose the Nazi Party’s behind-the-scenes machinations with politically-driven bankers and businessmen, the world might have been spared the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust.
 

As the political philosopher, Edmund Burke, rightly observed: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”
 

New Zealanders should breathe a large sigh of relief that “a few good men” can still be found in their country’s own ruling class, and that they have seen fit to act earlier – and, hopefully, with more positive effect – than their German counterparts of the 1930s.
 

The leaking of documents allegedly penned by the right-wing political consultant, Mr Simon Lusk, should be sufficient to forestall what can only be described as a sinister “long term plan to move the political centre to the right.”
 

Let me state very clearly at this point that I do not consider Mr Lusk to be a Nazi, nor indeed a fascist of any kind. If the material attributed to him (and he has not disowned any of it) offers us any guide, then Mr Lusk’s political beliefs match very closely those of the extreme right-wing of the United States Republican Party.

New Directions: Simon Lusk appears to be drawing his political inspiration from the far-right-wing of the US Republican Party.

 

What he appears to favour is the establishment in New Zealand of an outright plutocracy: a state in which, although the formal institutions of democratic government remain in place, their capacity to impede the interests of the very wealthy has been rendered ineffective by the intimidating tutelage of an ideologically-driven bureaucracy, and pressure weighted with crushing quantities of cash.
 

This impression is, once again, confirmed in the leaked documents, which state quite openly: “This means reducing the size of government, weakening the power of those who believe in big government, and investing for at least 20 years to ensure that these changes are permanent.”
 

Mr Lusk appears to have been pursuing his plans for a plutocratic (or, to use the language of the leaked documents “fiscally conservative”) government, led by members of an ideologically re-booted National Party, for at least three years. Tellingly, the earliest documents look to the United States not only for inspiration but funding.
 

In the document dated July 2010, it is proposed that the highly professionalised political culture of the United States be transplanted to New Zealand so that, over time, and with the interest accruing from an initial investment of $5 million from conservative American donors, “an enduring centre right majority, with a pro United States outlook on the world stage” can be elected to parliament.
 

There are those who dispute the attribution of “evil” motives to the author of these documents. They point to the fact that Mr Lusk has devoted considerable time and energy into making himself one of the very few professional political consultants operating in New Zealand. Is it not possible, they argue, that these documents, intended for the eyes of like-minded National Party members, might simply be Mr Lusk “writing his own job description”?
 

Well, yes, of course it could. But, even if that’s true, the sinister aspects of the plans attributed to Mr Lusk are in no way diminished. He is already credited with assisting four individuals into parliamentary seats: Sam Lotu-Iga; Louise Upston, Chris Tremain and Jamie-Lee Ross. Political commentators are constantly linking his name with the alleged leadership aspirations of Justice Minister, Judith Collins. The documents he is said to have authored speak openly of the present National Government being “a disappointment to fiscal conservatives” and promise “there will be a clean out” following the party’s next defeat.
 

New Zealanders deserve better than a hollowed-out democracy in which government of the wealthy, by the wealthy, for the wealthy becomes the norm.
 

Nor should it be forgotten that any political figure openly promising to make his economic and social programme “permanent”, is also promising to prevent its opponents from mounting a successful challenge. Ever.
 

And when the programme fails?
 

Who will there be left to complain?
 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 4 June 2013.

The Name Game

A Spectral Green: John Key (with apologies to Sir Arthur Conon Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles) has labelled the Labour-Green alternative government a "Devil Beast" of the "Far-Left". But the names our politicians attach to their opponents very seldom correspond to their actual position on the ideological spectrum.

 

A CHOICE BETWEEN the Centre-Right and the Far-Left. That’s how the Prime Minister and his National Party colleagues intend to frame next year’s General Election. It’s a shrewd strategy. Most Kiwis feel considerably more comfortable with “centre” than they do with “far”.

 

Nobody wants to be far away when they could be at the very centre of things. And who doesn’t enjoy being the centre of attention? Indeed, the discovery that we’re not in this happy position leaves most of us feeling very far from happy.

 

By attaching the word ‘centre’ to the word ‘right’ National is also adding a crucial political modifier. Very few New Zealanders will own to being unequivocally “Right” or “Left”. It smacks too much of the sort of ideological inflexibility they associate with places where peace tends to be as short-supplied as freedom.

 

“Right-wingers” and “left-wingers”, alike, are deemed to lack the easy-going temperament and the pragmatic approach to problem-solving that we Kiwis (and, apparently, the rest of the world) find so appealing. ‘Laconic’ has always suited us better than ‘histrionic’. If asked to choose a path between two extremes, most of us generally head for the middle of the road.

 

And then, of course, there’s History.

 

Invoke the Right and people immediately think of Adolf Hitler receiving the “Sieg Heil!” salute, as rank after rank of jack-booted Brownshirts goose-step their way towards the Holocaust under a forest of swastika banners. Mention the Left, and the mental image is of Joe Stalin smiling wolfishly from Lenin’s Tomb as a May Day parade of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles rumbles by and the Red Army Choir belts out the “Internationale”.

 

But how dramatically the picture changes when “right” and “left” are prefixed with “centre”.

 

Ask Kiwi baby-boomers to think of a “Centre-Right” politician and they’ll probably recall the ridiculously pompous – but essentially harmless – Sir Keith Holyoake. Ask a member of Generation-X, and five’ll getcha ten they think of John Key escorting Aroha to Waitangi, or swigging Steinlager from the bottle in the garden of Premier House.

 

Say “Centre Left” to the Boomers and they’ll recall David Lange informing a startled young American at the Oxford Union that he could “smell the uranium” on his breath. Gen-Xers will (hopefully) remember Helen Clark refusing to join George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

 

It’s wonderful political shorthand – but is it the truth? Apart from conjuring-up both positive and negative political images and memories, does the Prime Minister’s use of the terms “Centre-Right” and “Far-Left” truly correspond to the Government’s and the Opposition’s objective location on the ideological spectrum?

 

The answer must be an emphatic “No!” National and Labour both subscribe to the same basic tenets of neoliberal economic theory that have dominated the policy-making of the OECD countries for the past thirty years. The Greens, too, recognise the marketplace as the most effective means of allocating scarce resources. Their “Green Capitalism” might be “cleaner”, and turn out a more environmentally friendly range of products than the Smoke-Stack Capitalism of the past, but the social relations underpinning that production are just as dirty.

 

Mr Key lambasts the Green Party co-leader, Russel Norman’s, enthusiasm for “Quantitative Easing” – citing it as proof of his “Far-Left” lunacy. But this charge merely reveals the Prime Minister to be either economically ignorant or deeply cynical.

 

Quantitative Easing is the official policy not of North Korea, Cuba or Venezuela, but of the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan. Mr Norman’s ideas about lowering the value of the currency by expanding the money supply are proof not of his revolutionary fervour – but of his economic orthodoxy.

 

Mr Key would be better advised to stick with his “Devil Beast” description of the Opposition parties. Using the term “Far Left” to characterise a Labour-Green coalition is intended to elicit exactly the same emotional response as likening it to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles, but comes at much greater cost to the Prime Minister’s credibility.

 

The truly ironic aspect of this name game is that the New Zealand electorate is almost certainly well to the left of its political leaders and their parties. A visiting French journalist once described New Zealanders as “socialists without doctrines”. Talk to most Kiwis about the sort of country they’d like to live in and you’ll find that most of us still are.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 31 May 2013.

A Place At The Table

Showtime! Winston Peters knows how to exploit New Zealanders' long-standing fear of all things Chinese. But he also knows better than to seriously threaten New Zealand's increasing reliance of the Chinese markets - or to undermine the thirty-year effort it has required to ensure this country's continued access to them.

 

IT’S “SHOWTIME!” for Winston Peters. Once again New Zealanders’ fears have found an obliging political impresario. In his latest speech, to a Grey Power audience on Auckland’s North Shore, Mr Peters has targeted New Zealand’s rapidly changing demographic profile – most particularly the burgeoning rate of Chinese immigration. For those accustomed to thinking of New Zealand as the “last, loneliest, loveliest” outpost of European civilisation, this dramatic change in the shape of their country’s population is confusing, alarming – even threatening.

 

Mr Peters’ critics have attempted to characterise his latest observations as “racist” and “xenophobic”. These are easy shots to take. Any immigration trend which suggests that the balance of ethnic power within the national community is shifting will inevitably inspire all manner of racially-inflected political discussions. To condemn such discussions as “racist” is tantamount to ruling all but positive assessments of New Zealand’s current population policy out-of-bounds.

 

There are plenty of Kiwis who would insist that such mandatory positivism is – and has been for years – the firm policy of New Zealand Governments. Regardless of their partisan composition, successive administrations have extolled the virtues of immigration policies that focus almost exclusively on the economic value of each new immigrant. Any consideration of the socio-cultural dislocations historically associated with such policies has always come well behind the professed priorities of reducing New Zealand’s skills deficit and stimulating domestic demand.

 

Which is not to say that there weren’t those within the Department of Immigration anxious to forestall any rebirth of the atavistic anti-Chinese sentiment that shaped the immigration policies of nineteenth and early-twentieth century New Zealand. And these efforts to supress all forms of Kiwi Sinophobia would have been strongly supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Preparing for the increasingly important role the People’s Republic of China was going to play in the New Zealand economy has been a central feature of this country’s foreign and trade policies for the last thirty years.

 

The final triumph of the Chinese Communist Party’s “capitalist roaders” over Mao Zedong’s “iron rice bowl” socialists in the late-1970s anticipated the emergence of the so-called “Washington Consensus” favouring neoliberal capitalism and globalisation in the 1980s. The British called it “Thatcherism”, the Americans “Reaganomics”, and New Zealanders dubbed it “Rogernomics”. At the heart of the new economic paradigm was a vision of the future in which capital, goods (and, ultimately, even labour) would flow freely across a borderless planet.

 

Ever since both of New Zealand’s major political parties accepted globalised neoliberalism as the fixed shape of the future, the policy mandarins at MFAT have worked tirelessly to ensure that New Zealand would have a place at the table of the economic behemoth China promised to become.

 

Viewed from this perspective, the vast influx of Chinese nationals to New Zealand makes perfect sense. Whether in the form of fee-paying students, highly-skilled workers, property speculators or financial investors, official New Zealand has consistently welcomed the people upon whose complex personal, business and political networks this country’s economic prosperity has, increasingly, come to depend.

 

Mr Peters’ North Shore Grey Power audience would undoubtedly receive this largely untold recent history of New Zealand with considerable alarm and dismay. But, tellingly, it’s not the story Mr Peters told. (Even though, as a former Minister of Foreign Affairs, he will know it inside out). Instead, the NZ First leader chose to scratch the familiar itches of Chinese property speculation and the involvement of a very small number of Chinese businessmen in the gambling and sex industries.

 

Mr Peters knows there are votes to be won from the older generations of New Zealanders (especially those living in Auckland) who are having a harder and harder time reconciling the New Zealand they grew up in with the New Zealand they see all around them today. No doubt he has studied recent political trends in the United States and recognised the huge electoral rewards that can flow to a political party willing to identify itself with those ageing, comfortably-situated, conservative whites who, in one form or another, are feeling the demographic pinch.

 

What has clearly been a failing strategy for the far-right-driven Republican Party in the United States (where there are now simply too few conservative whites to win the presidency without at least some ethnic allies) it promises to be a real winner for Mr Peters. NZ First is not in a two-party, FPP, fight to the finish. As the consummate MMP politician, Mr Peters will be perfectly content with anything between five and 10 percent of the Party Vote. A few more, carefully calibrated, appeals to “Old New Zealand’s” Sinophobia ought to do the trick.

 

But Mr Peters remains too much the steadfast patriot to seriously put at risk the place Labour and National have laid for New Zealand at the Chinese table.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 28 May 2013.