RECOLONISATION OR DECOLONISATION – WHERE DOES OUR FUTURE LIE?1

I vividly remember the last conversation I had with Bruce. He wanted to talk about the failure of the left to address the theoretical and political challenges posed by global capitalism. I was in one of my populist phases, high on activist politics and fresh from the victory against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, the MAI. Bruce was visibly impatient with the theoretical shallowness of what I was saying. It’s the kind of conversation you wish you could rerun, but you can’t.

Tonight’s lecture is my belated attempt to address the problem in a way that Bruce would have appreciated. His approach was always to look beyond the immediate and identify underlying trends and prospects for the longer term. He also didn’t believe there was much place in the politics of the left for idealists who were driven simply by revulsion for suffering and hopes for a better future. The point is, if you are to change the world, you need to understand it empirically and theoretically.

So here, for Bruce, is my argument. The past 20 years have seen a paradigm shift from the Keynesian welfare state and state socialism to neoliberal economics and government. Economically this transition was driven by the need to restore the flagging profitability of capital, drawing on new technologies and a shift in focus from production of goods to finance capital and services. Yet most attention has focused on the more visible political agencies that have facilitated this transition by changing national laws, policies and regulation – that is the role of national governments and the international institutions, notably the World Trade Organisation.

Today, this support structure appears to be coming unstuck. At the same time, the US as the dominant patron for international capital has decided there are greater gains to be made from striking out on its own. The current combination of economic and military imperialism reflects a new aggression that increases instability as it seeks to extend US hegemony and the dominance of its associated capital. These are not just the acts of a political elite intent on preserving and expanding its power. They reflect a growing sense of insecurity. Since the mid-1990s the prospect that states would voluntarily and comprehensively submit to neoliberal globalisation has receded. Market failures have set in. Poster girls, such as Argentina, have sunk into an economic, social and political quagmire. Competing superpowers, notably China, have emerged on the scene, while renegade governments have been elected, such as Chavez in Venezuela and Lula in Brazil. Social movements, mobilising nationally and internationally, have intensified the pressure on governments. This in turn has helped to sink a number of international initiatives that were intended to promote global economic policymaking.

1 Fourth Bruce Jesson Lecture, Maidment Theatre, Auckland, 17 November 2003 delivered by Professor Jane Kelsey, Auckland University. Thanks to Bill Rosenberg, Joce Jesson, and Andrew Sharp for comments during its preparation.

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Despite these setbacks, however, the power of international capital still seems overwhelming. Its relentless quest to maximise profits creates social, cultural and political fallout. This has been effectively contained in many countries through constant restructuring, new political techniques like the Third Way, and political repression. Yet there are signs, especially in the South, that this is now vulnerable. New transformational possibilities are emerging through the mobilisation of social movements that are influencing what happens on the national and international stage. New Zealanders will need to engage more with these realities if we are to have a say in the shape of our future world.

Let me begin with the ‘here and now’ and build an analysis from there. The collapse of the WTO ministerial meeting in Cancun this September means two of the last three ministerials have failed. Even the ‘successful’ Doha meeting only secured agreement to a new round of negotiations because it was held in the shadow of September 11. What seems extraordinary to me about Cancun wasn’t the outcome – that was utterly predictable. It was that some, including New Zealand politicians, remain in denial about its significance.

It was obvious when the World Trade Organisation was created back in 1995 that it was a tin budgie that was never going to fly. It was a multinational body whose decisions would in theory be based on a consensus of its 140+ member governments, but which in practice would operate on a diet of super- power domination, economic coercion and political bullying. Its rules, reinforced by the IMF and World Bank, were designed to force member governments to surrender their countries to an aggressive new phase of capitalist expansion. The initial agreements on goods, services, agriculture and intellectual property favoured transnational corporations, finance capital and northern elites. Subsequent demands from poorer countries to revisit these agreements were sidelined. The richer countries insisted that in return for even discussing those concerns the WTO should expand into new areas that would increase their dominance and widen the inequalities.

The resolute stand by the Southern governments at Cancun over agriculture and the so-called Singapore issues such as investment and competition represented an important geopolitical realignment. For the first time since the early 1970s, they stood together and refused to buckle to the demands of the superpowers. Equally important, key governments acknowledged the central role played by both the NGOs who worked alongside them and by the ‘uncivil’ elements of ‘civil society’ — social movements who had been mobilising back home, as well as that week in Cancun, insisting that ‘another world is possible’.

The outcome at Cancun further delegitimised an already fragile WTO and has left it paralysed for the time being. This combination of internal division and external dissent is not an isolated development. By 1997 a similar dynamic had deflated APEC’s grand vision of free trade and investment by 2010 for the richer ‘economies’ of the Asia Pacific and 2020 for the poorer ones. In 1998 attempts at the OECD to negotiate a bill of rights for transnational companies,

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known as the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, collapsed under similar pressures.

Warnings that this would occur were, and continue to be, routinely dismissed by politicians, media and business as the rantings of ideologically driven ‘globophobes’. But it is they who are the ideologues, out of touch with reality. Most of the politicians, officials, journalists and industry lobbyists who I talk to barely seem aware that there is a bigger picture, let alone what dynamics are driving it and where it is heading. Those who are aware are often unwilling to say so publicly.

A classic demonstration of this was the parliamentary debate that followed the Cancun meeting’s collapse. This was real headless chickens stuff. ACT blamed Labour for not having a coherent trade policy and supplicating itself to the US. For his part Bill English conceded that the Doha Round might never produce the goods and that there might well be no deals with the US or Australia. Nevertheless he somehow thought that Labour should do better. Peter Dunne, who was in Cancun as chair of the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Select Committee, portrayed the outcome as a hiccup rather than a catastrophe. He conceded that Southern governments would remain a force to be reckoned with in future WTO negotiations, but viewed their resistance as an obstacle for New Zealand and other Cairns Group members to overcome as they rethought how to get agriculture back on centre stage and inject some steel into the WTO leadership.

It was the Prime Minister’s response that I found most disturbing, because she’s intelligent enough to understand what’s going on. First, drawing on a deeply flawed study of alleged gains to New Zealand from the Uruguay Round, Helen Clark denounced those who celebrated the meeting’s collapse as “wreckers” who were prepared to cost this country $1 billion a year. She portrayed the US and EU as flexible and willing to compromise, and the Southern governments who dared to say “no” as recalcitrant. Her patronising terms effectively applied Paul Holmes’ infamous epithet to governments that represent over half the world’s population.

The one thing the parliamentarians all agreed on was that Mike Moore would never have let the WTO meeting collapse. This is the same Mike Moore who oversaw the fiasco in Seattle in 1999, and who is on record as asking one Southern delegate at the Doha ministerial whether he wanted to be ‘consulted or terminated’.

No political party except the Greens recognised that the collapse of Cancun reflects a deeper challenge to the model of globalisation to which they have intractably committed New Zealand. It is clear that New Zealand must now rethink our approach. The WTO is going nowhere. It is very likely that the Doha Round will break down completely. But even if it does eventually produce an agreement, that will not include major agricultural concessions from the US and EU. Any concessions they do make will be driven by their domestic imperatives and be conditional on their gaining further control for their transnationals over the world’s services, manufacturing and intellectual

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property. ‘Consensus’ agreement to such a deal will only be achieved by coercion and will impose undeliverable obligations on many poorer countries.

Negotiating bilateral or regional agreements looks even less promising. The major powers, the US most firmly, believe they have got as much as they are likely to from the WTO for now. To secure a better deal they would have to make concessions that are politically unsaleable. Hence, their shift to focus more on pragmatic bilateral and regional arrangements – a shift designed to further their international ambitions, while minimising the costs at home.

This was already happening before the collapse at Cancun. That is why the US wasn’t too fussed about the outcome. It is now focused on two objectives. The first is to reproduce internationally the conditions that maintain the profitability of US capitalism. The second is to make any economic engagement conditional on those countries surrendering their foreign policy to the US. As one senior US trade official put it in April this year: “Why shouldn’t we use trade policy to reward our friends and hurt those who don’t support us?” A recent trade deal with the 48 countries of Sub-Saharan Africa explicitly says that their activities must not ‘undermine US national security or foreign policy interests’.

What does this mean for New Zealand’s fallback policy of bilateralism? Our trade ministers and senior diplomats have enjoyed privileged access to the inner circle at the WTO because they have taken an ideologically pure position that the US found useful in a multilateral setting. In bilateral negotiations, the US will see New Zealand’s ideological purity as a liability.

Despite reassurances that New Zealand will not accept a deal that lacks significant gains for agriculture, the US will set the terms. For a reality check look at Australia. Despite being the US proxy sheriff in Asia, reports suggest it’s being offered a deal that contains almost nothing on agriculture. In return the Howard government is expected to guarantee extensive and enforceable rights for US transnationals over Australia’s manufacturing, services, culture, natural resources, intellectual property and government procurement. Farmers, manufacturers, service providers and many citizens have objected that Australia has nothing to gain and everything to lose. But they have no say in secret negotiations for a treaty that doesn’t require the Parliament’s approval.

Compared to Australia, New Zealand is economically and geo-politically insignificant. The terms the US sets for any deal with us would be far more draconian and we have a much less diversified economy to survive the impact. Recent US hit lists have objected to New Zealand’s vetting of overseas investments and Fonterra’s ownership and monopoly regimes. As US Ambassador Swindell has made abundantly clear, one pre-condition for New Zealand being invited to negotiate such a lousy deal is the repeal of the anti-nuclear legislation. US foreign policy demands won’t stop there. Even if we comply, they might still say no.

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A free trade and investment treaty would render New Zealand an economic and political satellite of the US. Politicians in ACT and National, supported by many in business, would apparently surrender us tomorrow. Some day they may become the government. Labour’s leaders still insist, genuinely I believe, that the antinuclear policy is not negotiable. Yet they are constantly seeking other ways to appease US imperialism.

They do have a problem. If the WTO remains paralysed and Labour sticks to its anti-nuclear guns, the option is to seek bilateral agreements with other peripheral governments, such as Chile, Mexico and Thailand. Such negotiations are driven more by shared ideology than expectations of any significant economic gains. The deal with Singapore has already shown that New Zealand exporters stand to lose even then.

The proposed deal with Hong Kong has stalled because it would effectively mean unrestricted entry for Chinese clothing and textiles. The likelihood of zero tariffs by 2010 is likely to remove that barrier. But we have no idea of what a free trade and investment agreement with China would really mean. Again, New Zealand seems well down China’s list of priorities; may it long remain so.

The remaining option is deeper integration with Australia through an expanded CER and a common currency. Australia appears profoundly uninterested. It would set the terms for any such negotiations and, given the current penchant for mimicking the US, may demand an equally intolerable price.

Looked at empirically, the current strategy has us heading down a dead end street. The strategy is also futile as a matter of policy theory. Let me explain why. Moves to establish the WTO came relatively late in the transition from the Keynesian welfare state and state-socialism to neoliberalism – a transition prompted by the declining profitability of capitalism by the 1970s. It was a time when finance capital became increasingly delinked from actual production, and services assumed a new commercial prominence. An emerging elite of managers and professionals exploited new technologies to get around constraints that national governments had imposed.

Paradoxically, replacing those policies with a new template that would liberate capital needed the cooperation of those same governments. Often this has been achieved through debt conditions imposed by the US-dominated Bretton Woods institutions of the IMF and World Bank. Sometimes, the so-called Washington Consensus has been adopted voluntarily, as in New Zealand.

The WTO offered a means to achieve near-universal adherence to the new paradigm and to prevent governments from retreating. Countries that break the rules face potentially crippling sanctions – except for the major powers whose economic strength leaves them relatively immune. Countries that stay outside or seek to break away lose the guarantee of market access and face discrimination in most other countries of the world. Increasing countries’ exposure to WTO rules make them more dependent on international capital.

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That dependency dominates government decisions about tax and spending, labour markets, monetary policy, environmental regulation and more, even though these currently fall outside the ambit of the WTO.

Hence, advocates have described the WTO as the first truly global rulemaking body. The WTO’s first Director General Renato Ruggiero explained, in the context of negotiations for the MAI: ‘We are no longer writing the rules of interaction among separate national economies. We are writing the constitution of a single global economy.’

Although the WTO is clothed in the benign language of neoclassical trade theory and comparative advantage – and it is this theory which New Zealand’s policy relies on – it was never about promoting competitive global markets. The aim expressed by the global corporate alliances was and is to strengthen their control over all potentially profitable aspects of life. Their ultimate vision is a world where the mobility of capital is unrestricted; where markets for goods have no borders; where services (whether social, cultural or infrastructural) are fully commercial and controlled by transnational enterprise; where mega-corporations have enforceable monopolies over technologies and knowledge; and where the overriding role of national regulation is to facilitate markets.

The problem for the grand corporate vision is the assumption that economic relations can be detached from the social, political and ideological realms in which they are embedded. Both experience and critical theory tell us this isn’t so. It’s hardly surprising, then, that the WTO has failed to achieve the legitimacy that it requires. When it was being created during the Uruguay Round of the GATT, there was relatively little resistance. The process was shrouded in secrecy. Novel ideas like ‘trade in services’ such as education were not well understood. Nor were the implications of agreements on intellectual property rights and investment measures.

That has changed. Building on critiques of neoliberalism at the national level, social movements, NGOs and intellectuals have severely damaged the claims that are made for the WTO. Some NGOs, such as Oxfam, and the international trade union body the ICFTU, still aim to reform the WTO. But more and more critics are now seeing the WTO as irredeemable. Social movements that span the national, regional, sectoral and international stage are engaged in an increasingly coordinated resistance that is driven by local experience of alienation and exploitation. They are demanding economic and political decolonisation. Their targets are the international regimes that promote and enforce policies that are designed to empower international capital and the governments that try to implement them. And they are having an effect.

This intensifies pressures that paralyse the WTO internally. Under neoliberalism, the state is expected to maintain conditions favourable to capital. But most of the governments that make decisions within the WTO are democracies of one kind or another. Democratic governments are dominated by the interests of competing national elites, but they must also maintain buy

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in or at least acquiescence from ordinary people who need jobs, schools, hospitals, safe water, clean air and personal security. Powerful democracies, especially the Quad countries of the US, Canada, EU and Japan, face contradictory imperatives. On one hand they must placate their domestic constituencies. On the other hand they must advance the interests of their associated capital offshore. Governments that are not democratic, such as China, also aim to advance the interests of their national elites. No-one knows how those interests may end up being defined.

These political imperatives are bound to intrude when the WTO claims to operate through a consensus of every member. As the more dominant powers seek to neutralise that tension through coercion, bullying and bribery, or bypassing formal procedures, they further delegitimise the institution and invite a concerted resistance by governments that give priority to their national objectives – as we saw in Seattle and Cancun. When the most powerful of them set up their own game, a variation of the same contradictions will emerge, especially when they are backed by overt repression.

New Zealand therefore needs to conduct a hard headed debate about the consequences of maintaining an ideologically pure globalisation line and to explore some alternatives. But that’s only part of the challenge. The institutions of global economic policy making may be showing signs of crisis. But the dominance of international capital and its protective shield of neoliberalism remain. This is a stark reality for New Zealand. We are deeply exposed to the power of internationalised capital. Very little of our limited manufacturing capacity has survived and few new industries have risen from the ashes. Almost all our transport, communications, energy, media and financial sectors and many of our natural resources are controlled by foreign investors. These investors have a history of siphoning off short term profits with minimal reinvestment, leaving behind a fragile infrastructure and a chronic deficit in the balance of payments. Several decades of trade liberalisation have created equally chronic import dependency, measured in distressingly recurrent trade deficits. Relentless pressure has maintained a low tax regime and fiscal austerity, at the price of a dilapidated social and physical infrastructure. Market failures in privatisations, such as Air New Zealand and TranzRail, or in light handed regulation of telecoms, electricity, buildings and taxis are forcing a reluctant government to step back in.

These neoliberal policies shape New Zealanders’ lives. Some suffer hugely. Relative poverty remains a reality for one quarter of our families, especially in Maori, Pacific and new migrant communities. There is gaping inequality. Neoliberalism has intensified the legacy of colonisation, racially exploitive immigration, gender and class divides. Yet that reality has now become normalised. We express outrage at each new report of deaths blamed on our dilapidated mental health and children’s services, but we no longer rage against the obscenity of massive budget surpluses or that they are seen as an opportunity to cut taxes for the rich even further.

Charges for essentials, such as water, education and health care are normalised too. Mayors talk in blasé terms about toll roads encircling

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Auckland, with no need to explain how someone on a benefit or the minimum wage is supposed to get around – or what happens when workers who have to rely on public transport routinely arrive at work one hour late. Five percent unemployment is hailed as a success story; we no longer ask what that ‘employment’ means. Instead, we celebrate Labour Day when very few in either the professional elite or the unskilled workforce can remember a 40 hour week.

Many Pakeha express outrage at Maori claims to the seabed and foreshore; yet few objected as a wealthy, often foreign, elite secured private property rights over the same ‘common heritage’. Maori positions are not consistent either. The debacle over who gets to share the dividends from commercial fisheries has obscured the original goal to reclaim rights over the fisheries as a matter of tikanga and tino rangatiratanga to build a development strategy that allows small fishers in local communities to catch and sell fish. Today, the ‘Maori fishing industry’ operates in joint ventures with foreign companies. Few of its earnings have yet to trickle down. According Te Puni Kokiri, itself a Crown agency, the new pathway to Maori liberation is an autonomous Maori economy that floats free of the colonial state in a competitive global market place.

New Zealand is not unique in facing this. Almost every critical analysis I have read recently notes the durability of neoliberalism and the ability of international capital to ride out the crises and contradictions. Some argue that global capitalism is infinitely sustainable. Former Marxist, now committed Blairite, Lord Meghnad Desai in his book Marx’s Revenge bases this conclusion on the process Shumpeter described as ‘creative destruction’. Globalised markets for production and finance face constant cycles, crashes and recoveries. Jobs are destroyed as economies are restructured and capital recovers its profitability. Workers whose livelihoods depend on their own exploitation and who once derived their strength from their ability to combine, find this is neutralised by globalisation because capital is mobile and labour is not. While governments come under pressure to respond, they can only push capital so far before it migrates. So they discipline their responses in ways that maintain conditions that attract and retain capital in the face of competition from other countries. Desai sees nothing to suggest that these cycles of creative destruction won’t endure.

Alternatively, the state may not be able to contain the tensions that are created as economic and political control is progressively concentrated in the hands of international capital. Bob Jessop, for example, in The Future of the Capitalist State explores four political management strategies. Since the 1980s the strategy of neoliberalism has been the driving force. States have limited their own power, liberated market forces and internationalised their domestic economic space. Jessop says this proved effective as a transition strategy from Keynesian welfarism and state socialism. But neoliberalism has a raw impact. That puts governments under intense political pressure to intervene. Today these impacts tend to be smoothed by grafting strategies of neocorporatism and neostatism onto neoliberalism under the rubric we know as the Third Way.

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Neocorporatism tries to relieve the pressure on government legitimacy by balancing competition and cooperation through ‘partnerships’ between various ‘stakeholders’. This takes a broader, but more uneven and selective, form than the old-style of corporatism between government, labour and capital. The partnership with business takes precedence over others with unions, local government or Maori. The state’s role is to implement these ‘negotiated’ outcomes.

Neostatism sees central and local government play a more active role in guiding the development of market forces. For example, government sets strategic targets to increase the dynamic efficiency of the economy by focusing on new technologies and innovation strategies. It provides infrastructure such as roads, schools and hospitals through public/private partnerships. It launches active skill development programmes such as modern apprenticeships. It sets about restructuring declining industries like the clothing sector and supporting new ones, such as export education.

Jessop suggests this political management strategy can only be sustained by a new social compromise where people identify their fate with the success of global capitalism and accommodate themselves to rising inequality, exploitation of the environment and dominance by a few corporations and capitalist powers. Such buy-in becomes more likely when workers’ pension plans and government owned superannuation funds are invested in the international sharemarket. Or when returns from Maori resources such as fisheries or forests depend on favourable global commodity markets, exchange rates and foreign investors. Or where professionals can pay off their student loans by taking well-paid jobs overseas. Or simply because people depend for their income on wages, and can’t find better paying jobs to supplement a dwindling social wage.

Problems arise when that social accommodation can’t be maintained. For example, a commitment to fiscal austerity, based on low debt, low tax and budget surpluses, may mean the provision of core services like health, education, electricity, transport, post and broadcasting can’t be sustained. Risk increases when the collapse of international markets plunges the economy into a recession. Unemployment rises, but there is a minimal safety net and the government says it can’t redress the rising rate of poverty and inequality. Where the impact on already impoverished and disaffected communities provokes social unrest, the veneer of democracy can easily give way to a divisive and authoritarian backlash. Foreign investors or currency speculators who focus on short-term gains can heighten the risk of economic, social and political instability. When those investors have bought or been contracted in partnerships to run the country’s infrastructure, government faces demands to step back in. When these factors coincide, the harsh realities of people’s lives make them much less accommodating. In such a serious crisis, alternatives that were once deemed unthinkable can emerge.

This scenario seems most likely to occur in countries of the South. Argentina is the exemplar. But we should not assume that it could not happen in New

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Zealand – especially with a return to raw neoliberalism under a Brash/ACT coalition. Nor should we assume that New Zealand can remain quarantined from the impacts of such turbulence elsewhere. Even more threatening are the spillovers from countries, such as Afghanistan and Iraq, that are forced to adopt crude neoliberalism by an occupying imperial power that is intent on plundering their resources and syphoning money into the pockets of its transnationals.

Jessop has a fourth scenario, which he calls neocommunitarianism. This is premised on a social economy, as opposed to a market-driven economy. It re- embeds the economic in the specific place and time where it operates. Social use-values take priority over exchange value. Free market competition is limited, especially the extension of capitalist logic to previously non- commodified areas of life, such as culture, education and water. But that’s as far as Jessop takes it. He excuses himself by arguing – as I have myself – that developing such alternatives must be a collective and democratic exercise conducted on a broad-ranging, multi-national stage, not a unilateral dictate delivered by a political theorist.

This exercise is now happening. The most commonly cited example is the World Social Forum where philosophical debates are being fleshed out with examples of actually working alternatives. These are drawn from and fed back into various countries, sectors and regions. But the Social Forum’s potential to provide an effective counter-force tends to be romanticised and it lacks credibility when pitted against the juggernaut of neoliberal globalisation.

To build a belief that there really are alternatives requires something more substantial and concrete. I want to explore one such development that is beginning to transform the debate on agriculture and fundamentally challenges the ideas on which New Zealand’s current strategy is built.

Inside the Cancun meeting the net food importing countries, the impoverished cotton producers of sub-Sarahan Africa and the G20+, led by Brazil, had to frame their demands as exceptions to a WTO agreement that promotes the interests of northern agribusinesses. The failure of Cancun has made that model more vulnerable and creates more space for social movements to insist on a different approach to food and agriculture.

This alternative was showcased in Cancun at the three-day indigenous and farmers forum convened by Via Campesina, whose affiliates claim to represent 60 million farmers across 46 countries. They shared knowledge and strategies around common issues of land ownership, access to food, biodiversity, water, the impact of commercial forestry, fisheries and tourism, and the exploitation of farm workers. Significantly, their message of unity and internationalism was expressed through a rich diversity of cultures and identities.

The forum culminated in a mobilization at the barriers that were erected at Zero Kilometres to protect the WTO meeting from the masses. It was here that the South Korean farmer Lee Kyong-hae climbed the broken barricade

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and sacrificed his life. The placard he was holding – “WTO Kills Farmers” – gave voice to the thousands of desperate farmers throughout the world who commit suicide each year. They were joined in the streets by thousands more students, unions, NGOs and ordinary Mexicans who stood in solidarity over food as a life and death issue. Their short-term goal was the collapse of the Doha negotiations on agriculture. Their longer-term objective is to shift the focus from liberalization of agricultural trade to a food system based people’s right to self determination.

Social movements such as Via Campesina are actively developing alternative agricultural strategies in collaboration with each other across the Americas, Africa and Asia. Their alliances bring together indigenous and peasants, workers and trade unions, intellectuals and sympathetic national and local politicians in an increasingly effective counter-hegemonic movement. Sometimes they are met by repression. Sometimes their governments feel impelled to shift ground. This affects not just the government’s makeup and priorities, but also its alignment with other governments in regional and multilateral negotiations and the more basic relationship of the state to international capital. Such social movements are now reshaping what happens on the national and international stage.

A complementary position has emerged from the International Union of Food, Agricultural and Allied Workers (IUF) whose affiliates represent 12 million workers in 120 countries. This is especially significant because unions affiliated to the ICFTU have historically been weak on globalisation.

For the IUF, agriculture is a life and death issue too. They object that “the right to safe, adequate and nutritious food, and the collective rights and interests of 450 million agricultural workers are affected by the Cancun agenda, but are not on the agenda.” Although the world food system generates over US$500 billion in agricultural exports annually, eight million people die each year of hunger and hunger-related diseases. Another 840 million people go short of food, farmers and agriculture workers among them. The conversion of land to grow non-traditional export crops leaves poorer countries even more dependent on imported food. This fuels the dominance of conglomerates like Cargill, ConAgra and Tyson over the world’s food supply, while agro-chemical giants like Monsanto, Bayer and Dupont require contract farmers to use high yield seeds based on GMOs. Companies like Monsanto and Nestle, meanwhile, are moving to control that other essential of the life and food cycle – water.

The IUF insists that the problem is not with subsidies per se, but how they fuel control of the world’s food system by these few corporations. Most US and EU subsidies go to northern agribusinesses. This allows them to export food at below the real cost of production. Local food producers can’t compete with them. Small farmers in both rich and poor countries suffer the same syndrome. What’s needed, says the IUF, are agricultural subsidies that support socially and environmentally sustainable agriculture, provide public services to rural communities, and promote job creation and an end to rural

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poverty. New patterns of trade based on these priorities are needed on a regional basis and should be supported internationally.

This is not a readjustment that can be achieved within the WTO paradigm where the object of ‘global agriculture’ is to increase the value of agricultural goods exported overseas. The capacity to produce local food to meet local needs and pursue sustainable social objectives in agriculture, including decent work, has no place in the WTO’s corporate-dominated vision.

New Zealand’s obsession with the interests of agriculture exporters means we have almost no understanding of this bigger picture. Yet the debate is as relevant to us as it is to the Third World. Transnational agribusinesses increasingly control the production of food in New Zealand, from the intellectual property over seeds and embryos through to processing, marketing, transport and retail. If shares in Fonterra become tradeable and it ends up like ENZA in the hands of asset strippers such as Guinness Peat Group or a joint venture controlled by Nestlé, farmers will become captives of global corporate strategies and price takers in short-term competitive supply contracts. They will have to plant GE seeds whether or not they – or we – like it. The trend towards corporate farming with tenant farmers is already transforming our rural communities and farm labour practices. That will intensify. In the 1980s we saw deeply indebted farmers committing suicide; we could see that again. Maori especially would struggle to maintain control of land and production practices.

The real question for New Zealand is not how to get more lamb carcases into the US or butter into Europe. It’s what forces will shape our future as workers in farms, meat works, supermarkets and ports; as consumers wanting GE-free food; as rural communities concerned to sustain access to essential services; and as Maori, claiming recognition as the ultimate guardians of the land, fish, forest, plants and knowledge that sustains our existence.

Most fundamentally, and almost inconceivably, for New Zealanders this is about a choice between continued recolonisation by international capital under the mantle of the WTO and bilateral agreements, or decolonisation by reasserting a right to determine our own development and alternative approaches to trade. Realistically, we can only create the space to open that debate by joining forces with each other within the country and building alliances with social movements and sympathetic governments internationally.

For those who expected a talk entitled ‘Recolonisation or Decolonisation’ to centre on constitutional reform, te Tiriti and the flag, or to respond directly to Chris Trotter’s lecture last year, let me offer this final observation. What I’ve talked about are the underlying dynamics that are shaping our future. I’m not predicting the imminent collapse of global capitalism. But we are increasingly seeing social movements engaged in what, in traditional Gramscian terms, we would call a counter-hegemonic war of position. And they are having an international impact. For the reasons I have outlined, these movements are likely to be centred primarily in the South, alongside those, such as indigenous peoples, who constitute the South in the North. But there are

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important opportunities for us to forge alliances. For that to happen we must be able to transcend single-issue politics and to transcend eurocentric and patriarchal stereotypes of class. Any changes we achieve will only be truly transformational if political, economic and cultural decolonisation are seen as inseparable.

The New Zealand we have known for the past century is set to change dramatically in the next decade or two. If we want a say in that future, we need to abandon the current road to nowhere, we need to take off our blinkers, we need to engage with the realities that are already reshaping the future and we need to build alliances with others who believe that together we can create a better world.

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What’s Left?

THANK YOU ANDREW for that stimulating introduction, and thank you ladies and gentlemen (if I may use such a disreputably bourgeois mode of address at a gathering such as this) for coming along this evening to hear the third Bruce Jesson Memorial Lecture.

As Andrew Sharp has told you, my first encounter with Bruce Jesson was at a seminar organised by the Robert Stout Research Centre in Wellington. The paper which he delivered that day reflected all the qualities that I later came to admire most about Bruce Jesson, both as a writer and as a friend. It was clearly argued in the plain, unvarnished, but immensely strong vocabulary of everyday English – that wonderfully democratic style which George Orwell recommended to the Left – but which so few of us have ever mastered. It was also unsparing in its analysis – owing nothing to partisan loyalties or employer prejudices. And, most importantly, it delivered its conclusions fearlessly and without flinching.

Bruce Jesson was that rare intellectual who insisted upon gathering and analysing the evidence before forming an opinion – and who had the courage to back his own judgement. In doing so Bruce demonstrated the truly radical character of rational thought. I remember him telling me once that this was the quality he most admired in the writings of Karl Marx – not the revolutionary fervour, but the analytical rigour.

I regret to say that, on that first occasion, my reaction to Bruce Jesson’s paper was all-too-typical of the New Zealand Left – I was outraged that his hard-headed empirically-derived conclusions entirely failed to match my idealistic expectations. But that was Bruce. More than any other individual on the New Zealand Left he epitomised Antonio Gramsci’s grim dictum: “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”

Like Gramsci, Bruce understood that in order to act effectively one must first see clearly. He also understood that the perceptions of the Left – especially the New Zealand Left -are notoriously unreliable. Because we believe so passionately that justice should be done, we all-too-easily – and all-too-often – fall into the trap of assuming that justice will be done.

I will always be indebted to Bruce Jesson for showing me that the socialist’s true vocation lies in teaching first himself – and then others – how to get justice done.

DELIVERING SOCIAL JUSTICE used to be the Left’s stock-in-trade. Whether it be the eight-hour-day, votes for women, state housing, social security or full- employment, there was something reassuringly tangible and practical about the Left’s agenda. And it wasn’t hard to sell. To the exploited and exhausted wage

worker the idea of an eight-hour day pretty much sold itself. To that half the population excluded from the franchise, the right to participate in the political life of the nation could only be denied at the cost of simultaneously denying their own humanity. To the rack-rented slum dweller, the sturdy state house seemed the living embodiment of social justice – socialism in weather-board and tile, as solid and as permanent as Bakelite and brick.

This was a Left that could command majorities – in unions, in parties, in councils and – yes – even in parliaments. They called themselves socialists and social democrats because they envisioned a society in which the people would exercise political power not just in the narrow sense of electing representatives to sit on this council or in that parliament, but in the much broader sense of determining collectively and directly how they should work – and what they should make – and for whom?

While the liberals contented themselves with miniature portraits of the sovereign individual, the socialists claimed the whole of society for their canvas. Arguing, as Hilary Clinton would later declare, that it takes a village to raise a child. And that the struggle to make a whole human being – which some call freedom – is always and everywhere a collective struggle. Because no one can ever be truly whole – or truly free – on their own. Because Liberty unextended is Liberty denied. Because human beings are social beings – and if there is no such thing as society, then there can be no such thing as humanity.

Such was the rhetoric of international socialism in its heyday; in those halcyon years before the outbreak of the First World War, when the Second Socialist International preached brotherhood, peace and progress in the great “commonwealth of toil” that was to be.

It was a time of intellectual ferment, of constant and illuminating debate, of confidence that socialism and science were marching in step towards the same future. It was a time when superstition was called superstition. When the cruel practices and benighted traditions of humanity’s infancy were exposed and excoriated. When the prospect of emancipation, of liberation, presented itself – like a bright vista glimpsed briefly from a high hill – to the whole human family.

Freedom was the prize. Not just the freedom from class and colonial and sexual oppression – the freedom of the bent body to rise and stand up straight. But freedom for minds – twisted by lies. Freedom for souls – stunted by fear.

In the world-wide congress that international socialism would make possible, all peoples would come together – and no one would be left behind.

THEN WAR CAME and the grand vision failed.

Perhaps the only man in Europe who could have rallied the working classes of the combatants to resistance – the indomitable Jean Jaurés – was shot to death as he sat sipping cognac in a Parisian café. As the news of his death spread through the neighbourhoods of the Parisian poor, his socialist followers shrugged – as only the French can shrug: Jaurés mort. Il est guerre. Jaurés is dead. So it is war.

Nationalism trumped socialism in those sunny August days – as the rulers of Europe so fervently hoped that it would. For the next four years the hope and courage of what was the world’s first – and possibly also its last – socialist generation was turned against itself in a frenzied orgy of killing.

The consequences are with us still. For rising out of the carnage, looking down upon the squalid wreckage of Europe with a basilisk glare, came Lenin’s Bolsheviks. Bolshevism was socialism in arms. Socialism stripped of its warmth, and its joy, and its boundless, reckless optimism. The Bolshevik leader, the brilliant Vladimir Lenin, had sent his Russian socialists to boot camp – where he taught them discipline and obedience. Lenin had not surrendered to nationalism in 1914. Lenin was Jaurés without the shrug, without the laughter, without the pity.

Lenin and his comrades took that miraculous spring of February 1917 – when the Cossacks finally learned that they had more in common with the seekers of bread than the wielders of whips; when the workers in the factories realised that their judgements were as good – if not better – than their masters; when Russian women claimed not only the right to vote, but the right to child-care, and birth control and abortion – they took it, and they destroyed it. With the forces of reaction knocking at their gates, Lenin and his comrades took the great rollicking puppy that was the people’s revolution, and in the snows of November snapped the collar of a new political orthodoxy around its too trusting neck.

Marxism-Leninism – elitist in principle, authoritarian in practice, and preaching a political economy borrowed wholesale from the German Jewish industrialist, Walter Rathenau, whose state-administered version of capitalism had underpinned Imperial Germany’s war effort, rapidly became the unchallengeable template of revolutionary socialism in the 20th century. Except that it was now dubbed “communism” – so as to distinguish it from the despised reformism of social democracy.

So now there were two Lefts. Revolutionaries and Reformists. Communists and Socialists.

ENTERING INTO THE WORLD of left-wing politics as a lad of fifteen, I soon learned to distinguish between the two. The communists were cool and condescending. In appearance they tended towards the thin and angular.
Many wore leather jackets and steel-rimmed spectacles. Some had been invited to the USSR – more had toured the Peoples Republic of China. They talked about revolutionary justice and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The effect was altogether dramatic and very attractive. To my youthful eyes, they looked and behaved like the ideological shock-troops of a vast international army, driven forward by the impetus of world historical forces and the mysterious promptings of dialectical materialism.

The socialists were altogether different. They tended to be fatter and rounder. They didn’t wear leather jackets. They shouted you jugs of beer and told hilarious stories about National Party MPs. You shouted them jugs of beer and they told hilarious stories about Labour Party MPs. They were members of trade unions. They belonged to the working class. They knew absolutely nothing about dialectical materialism – but they knew a huge amount about the cities they lived in. They could tell you which streets voted Labour and which streets favoured the Nats. They could fill in a canvassing sheet, and knew how to organise an election-day system. They didn’t want a revolution. They wanted Labour to win.

I WANTED BOTH.

Of course the communists insisted that social-democracy and revolutionary change were mutually exclusive. The capitalist state had to be smashed, they said, before a socialist state could come into being.

Well I can’t say that I ever much cared for the idea of smashing the state. The historian in me kept objecting that states are not abstract things – they are composed of very real human beings. Which meant that the communist injunction to smash the state was really nothing more than an invitation to smash all the people who disagreed with you.

Left-wing social-democrats have been wrestling with the historical legacy of Marxism-Leninism long before Martin Amis made it fashionable. The idea of becoming one of History’s earthly apostles – freed from all the normal social and political restraints – has always exerted a powerful fascination. To wipe humanity’s slate clean and begin again; to abolish the past; has always been the greatest of temptations. Thus did Mephistopheles whisper to Faustus. Thus did republican virtue seduce Robespierre. Thus did the dialectic corrupt Lenin and Stalin – and Trotsky too.

For what all the fine phrases came down to in the end were a windowless basement cell and a pair of bloodstained bootcaps. Or, to a hastily dug trench in a silent forest at dawn. Or, to a nameless grave in the featureless tundra beyond the perimeter wire of the gulag.

As that stubborn old social democrat Karl Kautsky warned Lenin at the very beginning of the Soviet Experiment: Ends do not justify means – means become ends.

And so, at least for me, it could only ever be Labour. Better by far to accept responsibility for the tawdry misdemeanours of social democracy, than to spend the rest of my life excusing the huge historical crimes of Marxism-Leninism. Not that I was satisfied with Labour as it was – an, old, tired party going through the motions of electoral politics and living off past glories.

I used to shock my party comrades by telling them that I had joined Labour in the same spirit as Alec Guinness joined the Tsar’s armies in Doctor Zhivago. Those of you who have seen the movie will recall the scene. The crowds cheering the soldiers as they march through the streets of St Petersburg – volunteers falling in behind as the young women throw flowers. Alec Guinness – who played the role of Zhivago’s brother – the Bolshevik agitator – joins the marching column with a cynical smile. Shrewdly aware of what lies in wait for these eager idealists, he lets the congratulatory flowers fall from his hand.

I would also remind them of the words of their new, young president, Jim Anderton, who advised his party’s youthful activists to “always build your footpaths where the people walk”.

BUT THERE WAS ANOTHER REASON for taking refuge in the Labour Party – and that was because by the early 1980s the extra-parliamentary Left had become an increasingly difficult and destructive environment in which to operate.

The extraordinary upheavals that accompanied the 1981 Springbok Tour – far from binding the extra-parliamentary Left into a stronger and more coherent whole – produced precisely the opposite effect. Communists and socialists alike found themselves assailed by those late arrivals on the left-wing block – the New Social Movements.

Lesbian Separatist Feminism and Maori Nationalism – the key driving forces of what came to be known as “identity politics” – were driving huge wedges into the Left. Splitting up the small communist parties, sundering decades-old alliances between the intellectual Left and the trade union movement, leaving in their wake the tragic wreckage of personal and political relationships.

This was the time when working-class playwright Mervyn Thompson, was abducted in the dead of night by a gang of separatist vigilantes, physically assaulted, branded a rapist and left tied to a tree. Did the intellectual left rise to his defence? They did not. Did the trade unions defend their own? They did not.

I remember being told of the bitter debate in the Wellington Trades Council over whether the unions should stand behind a boycott of Thompson’s plays by members of Actors Equity. Of how the Chairman of the Council, a working-class scouse from Liverpool by the name of Pat Kelly, watched, with tears in his eyes, tears in his eyes, as the Workers Communist League and their hangers-on threw their weight behind the politically correct actors – instead of the correct political principle.

I remember how an emotionally shattered Mervyn Thompson left Auckland for Christchurch and the relative safety of the South Island.

I remember how the separatists cheered.

Even in Dunedin, dear old social-democratic Dunedin – where for years the Left had worked and played together without worrying too much about which political party one belonged to – felt the sting of this virulent new strain of sectarianism. I well recall the night a hard-core band of Maori Nationalists hi-jacked an anti- nuclear march – to the utter consternation and confusion of the two thousand or so Dunedinites who had come out to protest the presence of the USS Schofield at Port Chalmers. I also remember hearing of the ugly scenes at the de-briefing one week later, when a veteran of the US civil rights struggle of the 1960s – a person who had risked the attentions of billy clubs and fire-hoses and the Ku Klux Klan – was forced to endure chants of racist, racist, racist, for daring to challenge the right of a minority to impose its agenda on the majority.

It was a scoundrel time. When the repellent tactics of a bigoted, elitist, ideologically driven minority drove all but the hardiest souls from radical left-wing politics. We must be grateful that Bruce and Joce Jesson were sufficiently thick- skinned to provide a record of those awful years in the pages of The Republican. Future historians will read those issues with wonder. And those who today lament the fact that so many young women feel obliged to preface their remarks with the words “I’m not a feminist” should perhaps recall the image of Mervyn Thompson tied to his tree. Just as those who wonder how the police could outnumber protesters at the APEC meeting in Auckland in 1998, when tens of thousands of protesters helped to shut down the WTO meeting in Seattle in 1999, should give some thought to how difficult it is to build any mass movement in this country when confronted with the separatist political agenda of tino rangatiratanga.

It is easy to forget that it was the Left – not the Right – who pioneered the tactics of “crash on through” in the 1980s. So, should we really be surprised at how easily the Rogernomics Revolution swept through the professional middle classes? When we recall how accustomed they had already become to being told that this was no longer acceptable, and that was no longer possible, by groups of self-appointed political commissars – is it really any wonder that they succumbed so quickly to the new managerialism? And is it really so strange that

the neo-liberal assault on New Zealand was launched from the parliamentary wing of the Labour movement?

In a very real and alarming sense, the Rogernomes were a mutant species of right- wing Leninists. Their revolution was made possible – like the Bolshevik’s – by a coup d’état, from the top down, without a popular mandate, and over the strenuous objections of the very people in whose name they were purporting to act. Certainly, I was not surprised when so many of the new identity politicians – far from criticising the havoc Rogernomics was causing amongst working class New Zealanders – actually climbed aboard the New Right’s gravy train. After all, identity has never been a problem for capitalism – which cares much less about the race and gender of the exploiters than it does about whether the exploitation for which they are responsible is being successfully carried out. Indeed, the practical application of “identity politics” seemed to make Capitalism’s job easier rather than harder.

As Cybele Locke – almost reluctantly – concludes in her essay entitled Organising the Unemployed: The Politics of Gender, Culture and Class in the 1980s and 1990s – just published in Pat Maloney and Kerry Taylor’s On the Left, the adoption of the New Social Movement’s “non-hierarchical” organising structures fatally weakened the New Zealand Left at a critical time. As Locke ruefully admits: “Maori unemployed formed their own political structure within Te Roopu Rawakore, allowing Maori to organise separately but alongside Pakeha unemployed. This permitted Maori to discuss unemployment issues within the wider Maori agenda of ‘tino rangatiratanga’. However, when more attention was given to Maori and Pakeha caucus time than to setting the agenda of the whole movement, the leadership became paralysed and ineffective.”

Or, as Naomi Klein – writing from a slightly different perspective in No Logo – points out: “The backlash that identity politics inspired did a pretty good job of masking for us the fact that many of our demands for better representation were quickly accommodated by marketers, media makers and pop culture producers alike – though perhaps not for the reasons we had hoped … we found out that our sworn enemies in the mainstream … didn’t fear and loathe us but actually thought we were sort of interesting … our insistence on extreme sexual and racial identities made for great brand content and niche marketing strategies. If diversity is what we wanted, the brands seemed to be saying, then diversity is exactly what we would get.”

And so, as the identity politicians rode off into the sunset with the post- modernists (whose nihilistic ethical relativism was so ideally suited to their needs) the bruised and battered remnants of social democracy fought each other to a stand-still in the Labour Party.

IN A CURIOUS WAY, the ethical arguments enlisted by both the moderate and radical factions of Labour had much to recommend them. Both sides loathed the neo-liberal cuckoos which had taken up residence in Labour’s nest, and both were absolutely determined to be rid of them. But the moderate faction was convinced that the Rogernomes could only be defeated slowly, in three-year campaigns, by means of the party’s candidate selection processes. To that end, they argued, it was vital that the radicals and moderates, together, retain control of the party – even if that meant tolerating Rogernomics in the short term.

The radicals, of course, argued that the Rogernomes must be confronted and routed sooner rather than later – lest the damage their policies were inflicting on working people should permanently undermine the political and economic strength of the labour movement. When the radical Left’s attempt to re-install Jim Anderton as Labour President was thwarted by the Moderates in 1988, a split in Labour became inevitable. I am firmly of the view that the radicals’ decision to form the NewLabour Party was the right one. Defending social-democratic principles behind closed doors could never hope to keep working people engaged in the political process. And, as Karl Kautsky pointed out, a willingness to constantly compromise one’s principles leads inevitably to the modification – and, ultimately, to the corruption – of those principles.

The image I use to illustrate this process is drawn from another political movie; an adaptation of Howard Spring’s famous novel Fame is the Spur – based on the life of the infamous Labour politician, Ramsay MacDonald. At his election rallies the movie hero is fond of brandishing a dragoon’s sabre from the infamous Peterloo Massacre. At the climax of his speech, he draws the weapon from its scabbard as proof that Labour will always be there to defend the rights of working people. But, as the years pass and the compromises multiply, the hero forgets all about his famous electoral prop. Eventually, of course, the moment of crisis comes and he remembers the Peterloo sabre. Proudly he raises the political relic above his head for all the crowd to see, but as he goes to unsheathe the bright sword of socialist defence, he finds that he cannot do it. So many years have passed since it was drawn forth that the blade has rusted to the scabbard.

It was thanks to NewLabour, and later to the Alliance, that the sword of social- democracy did not sleep in the Left’s hand. And not just the sword of social- democracy. For a word or two must here be spared for the Greens. Political scientists puzzle over the Green phenomenon – uncertain of where to place it on the ideological spectrum. To them I say this: cast an eye at the paintings and woodcuts of Walter Crane, or read the curious novels of William Morris. For it is in Morris’s artisan socialism; and in slogans like Crane’s “The plough is a better backbone than the factory.” that we find the historical forebears of the Greens. By their love of the land, and of nature unspoiled, the Greens place themselves squarely in the revolutionary Romantic tradition. Think of Blake’s Jerusalem, of all those “dark satanic mills” corrupting England’s “green and pleasant land” and you have the very essence of Green politics.

In this they identify themselves as the brothers and sisters of early 19th Century socialism – of that youthful and robust socialist movement that flourished before an endless succession of dour trade union secretaries and snobbish Fabians squeezed the life out of it. Squeezed it – but never quite killed it. For did not the tens of thousands of working people who gathered outside Transport House in 1945, to celebrate Labour’s landslide victory, sing Blake’s Jerusalem until they were hoarse? And is it not still the task of all who call themselves socialists to build that shining city? For, has not the wheel of history come full circle? Are we not standing, upon the threshold of the 21st century, where the socialists stood one hundred years ago? Freed at last from the long nightmare of Lenin and Stalin and Trotsky and Mao; released from the sticky webs of identity politics and its stultifying political correctness; is it not time to re-dedicate ourselves to the priorities of a truly majoritarian socialism.

YES, IT IS.

But first – like Bruce Jesson – we must face the facts. And the facts are these. The New Zealand working class and its greatest political achievement – the Welfare State – were smashed to pieces in the 1980s and early 1990s. That much, most progressive New Zealanders can agree on.

But, what is much harder to swallow is that the prime architects and beneficiaries of those extraordinarily destructive years – the local representatives of international finance capital, and the transnational corporations which now dominate the New Zealand economy – could never have done what they did without the active and enthusiastic collaboration of the professional middle class.

I have never subscribed to the theory that the middle class is a force for moderation and rationality. On the contrary, I endorse the thinking of Walden Bello, who, while acknowledging the role of the CIA in the coup that toppled the Chilean socialist, Salvador Allende’s, Popular Unity government, reveals – in the latest issue of the New Left Review – that he puts “equal, if not greater, weight on domestic class forces in explaining the consolidation of the anti-Allende bloc.”
He says that his experience of the Chilean counter-revolution gave him “a healthy scepticism – running clean against much standard American political science on developing countries – about the democratic role of the middle class. I could see that this was a very ambivalent layer.”

My own experience in the Labour Party convinces me that he is right. Between 1983 and 1989 I was a member of Dunedin’s Castle Street Branch of the Labour Party – the university branch founded by Austin Mitchell in the 1960s. Castle Street had a reputation for being a radical branch, but when the left-wing members of Castle Street started organising against Rogernomics all hell broke loose. The liberal academics that had formerly dominated the branch hissed and

spat at our “trade union tactics”, branded us “cloth caps” and refused to be bound by the will of the majority.

The same process was at work throughout the Labour Movement – where whole layers of working class leadership were being quietly – and in a few cases noisily – shunted aside. It had begun in the Parliamentary Labour Party as far back as the 1970s, but by the end of the 1980s virtually the entire Labour Party organisation, and whole swathes of the trade union movement, had fallen victim to the same relentless forces of what was called “professionalisation”.

In reality, however, what we were witnessing was a middle class takeover of the movement. The nadir came in 1991 when the cream of the New Zealand working class rose up in revolt against Bill Birch’s Employment Contracts Act. I am reliably informed that the National Party was prepared – nay, expected – to have to concede as many as a third of the Bill’s clauses in the face of a trade union fightback. But thanks to the PSA, the PPTA, the NZEI, the Nurses Union, and those aristocrats of labour in the Engineers Union, Bill Birch didn’t lose even one.

True to his Socialist Unity Party heritage, Ken Douglas preferred to keep control of the losing side, rather than lose control of the winning side, and, backed by his middle class union allies, refused to authorise a general strike – thereby condemning eight out of every ten workers to a future without union representation. Today, if you are not an employee of the state, or a large manufacturing concern, your chances of being covered by a collective contract are less than five percent.

But, in trashing the working class for the ripe plums of the new managerial revolution, the New Zealand middle class also trashed the key collective mechanisms for the transmission of class advantage – most particularly fully publicly subsidised tertiary education.

Still burdened with Rogernomes, Labour was in no position to offer political leadership to either workers or their middle class managers. It was the Alliance that kept the flame of social democracy alive through the long dark night of the 1990s, and it was the Alliance that eventually proved to Labour that it could not govern New Zealand until it made a genuine attempt to restore some dignity and strength to working class New Zealanders. Without the Alliance, Labour would have had no programme worth speaking of to place before the voters in the 1999 election.

The great tragedy of the past three years has been Labour’s inability to recognise its enormous debt to the Alliance, and the Alliance’s failure to define a constructive role for itself within the constraints of government under the Westminster System. The Alliance Left’s decision to make their stand on Afghanistan was, in my estimation, misguided. In the wake of September 11, New Zealanders by and large supported the United States “War Against

Terrorism”, and were comfortable with the Government’s dispatch of SAS troops to help hunt down al Qaida. But, that said, I cannot forgive Jim Anderton for using their resistance as an excuse to destroy his own party. That was an unconscionable act, the ramifications of which we still cannot fully appreciate. And Helen Clark’s refusal to step in and heal the split was a short-sighted as it was self-interested. History will condemn them both.

The working class of this country will benefit from having Laila Harré in the Nurses Union, and Matt McCarten back in the field, organising a union for low- paid workers, but by God it would have benefited much more from having them in Parliament.

BECAUSE THERE IS STILL SO MUCH TO DO.

One in three New Zealand children are living in poverty, and one in five New Zealand families face material hardship. With eight out of every ten workers not represented by a trade union, we are still a very long way from even beginning to exercise democracy in the workplace. We have a government that is hell-bent on signing up to free trade agreements that will lower our living standards, damage our environment and limit our sovereignty. The moratorium on genetically engineered organisms has less than twelve months left to run.

Working class New Zealanders – of all colours and cultures – need more and better publicly funded education and health services, more state houses, and more police officers who are less interested in what they smoke than they are in curbing family violence and building safe urban communities. Refurbishing New Zealand’s crumbling infrastructure can only be achieved by utilising the collective resources of the state – not through bogus public-private partnerships. Re- nationalisation of the railways is an urgent priority. And we must stop arguing about immigration and develop instead a viable population strategy. New Zealand desperately needs more children – so let’s stop talking about family values and start talking about valued families.

We also need to talk about constitutional change. We need to learn from the Alliance’s struggle against the Westminster tradition. But, most of all, we need to finish what Bruce Jesson started. New Zealand must become a republic.

I do not believe that the Labour Party – alone – is capable of implementing this agenda. I know that the Greens are ready to assist, but I fear that their constituency is too frail to bear the burden of building a progressive future unaided. That puts the onus upon what remains of the Alliance to do all that it can to re-enter the parliamentary fray. And the onus upon all of us who share their social-democratic vision to get stuck in and help them do it.

BUT UNTIL THAT HAPPENS, my answer to the question: “What’s Left?” must be this. An idea. A memory. A bright vista glimpsed briefly from a high hill. It is liberty extended. It is justice being done. It is seeing someone lying on the road and not passing by on the other side. It is signing a petition, participating a street march, and standing on a picket line. It is joining a progressive political party.

And, in the dangerous months that lie ahead, I believe it means standing up and being counted as one of the millions of people around the world determined to prevent a rebirth of naked Western imperialism. The people of Iraq have already sustained a million casualties through the imposition of UN sanctions. Dear God – have they not suffered enough for the sins of Saddam Hussein?! Ending unnecessary suffering.

Ah, yes. The Left remains what it has always been – what it always will be: the collective cry of humankind for right to be done and wrong to be vanquished. And the strength of the Left waxes and wanes in accordance with each individual’s conviction that such a goal is worthy of their effort.

Bruce Jesson’s pessimistic intellect would almost certainly have told him that the Left in New Zealand is finished. That through a poisonous mixture of elitism, sectarianism, political ineptitude and betrayal, it has handed over the future to the forces of greed and violence. But I am not so gloomy. Indeed I am optimistic. Because New Zealanders are full of surprises.

A Frenchman visiting these shores one hundred years ago described us as socialists without doctrines. Looking back at the havoc that doctrines have wreaked in the course of the past, sad century, I find that observation curiously heartening. Perhaps it is our fate to be socialists of the heart and not of the head.

If so, I – for one – will be well content. ENDS

Rt Hon David Lange – November 2000

Bruce believed that people had lost the power of decision which should belong to them in a democracy. In his memory, I’d like to carry on the conversation we had about this.

I should say something about my relationship with Bruce. I first met him in court. I was working, and he was charged with breaking windows in a development in Freeman’s Bay in a protest against the Auckland City Council’s building houses for the rich. We were political opponents for a good few years and didn’t get to know each other until I was winding down my time in parliament. He wrote what I still believe was a lot of nonsense about me when I was in office.

We had differing interests in politics. I’ve always been interested in politics as performance. I like the drama of it. When I was in it, I loved the contest, and I didn’t go into it to be nice to my opponents. Bruce was far more dispassionate. He could reject an argument without dismissing its advocate. He was probably less interested in personality than in ideas and how they worked in practice.

He thought deeply about politics and the nature and uses of political power. I won’t try to match him. What I’m going to do is take as my starting point the last chapter of his last published work. The chapter carries the heading There Is Always An Alternative. In broad terms, it suggests how New Zealand might be rebuilt after its transformation of the last fifteen years.

What strikes me about Bruce’s proposals is that many of them have been adopted, or at least acknowledged, by the present government. Some of them, of course, have been misinterpreted, or rejected. This evening I’m going to look at Bruce’s alternative through my own understanding of the political process, and try to answer the question he put at the very end of his last work, when he said “In the end it comes down to something as basic as that: political power, who wields it and what is done with it”.

In his last work, Bruce described a country in which commercial values have come to dominate. What Bruce called the benign and humane role of the government vanished when government began to make a virtue of doing as little as possible at as low a price as possible. Government is now characterised by its officious or oppressive elements. This, in Bruce’s analysis, is especially unfortunate in a country like ours, where many of our economic and social institutions were the creation of the state. He called it a hollow society, and argued that when the government adopted a commercial culture it left us without much of a society at all. We don’t, he said, have much of a sense of self, and we’re too inclined to think that because we’re small we must be powerless.

These are not the words I’d use to describe what happened, perhaps because I don’t in the least regret that we don’t live in New Zealand the way it was before

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1984. But I don’t dispute the judgement that something has gone badly wrong, and that the failure can’t be separated from the government and what it does.

I entirely agree with Bruce in his refusal to accept that our country is destined to be tossed around on the tide of globalisation. If there is a country called New Zealand, and that country has a responsible government, then we engage with the world on the terms we choose for ourselves. We choose, and we live with the consequences of our choices, for better or worse. What I want to talk about tonight is whether we really have the means to make that kind of choice.

I’ll briefly run through the strategy which Bruce suggested might be adopted by a reforming government, and compare it with what the present government is actually doing.

He argued that there should be curbs on speculation, or the creation of an environment which discourages it, so that investment is channelled towards the productive sector. There are signs, like the new takeovers code, that the government wants an orderly market. Saving should be encouraged, because there are limits to our reliance on foreign capital. I see the plan to pre-fund superannuation as much in this light as in light of a solution to a contemporary political problem. There should be an industry policy. The government is developing one. There should be a return to collective wage bargaining. The law now allows its return.

Bruce also suggested that the government actively manage and develop its assets, and that it should have a planning function. In fact, I think it’s almost impossible for the public sector, in its present form, to do this successfully. Bruce was well aware of its limitations, and argued for its remodelling. I’m not sure that we would have agreed on the form the remodelling should take, but one way or another, remodelling is critical. It is one of the government’s most significant challenges, because the core public service has become an imperfect instrument of policy.

Before I come back to this point, I’ll complete my summary of Bruce’s blueprint for a reforming government.

He argued that a reforming government would have to create a constituency for change. It couldn’t implement an economic programme without creating a constituency to support it. He wanted to encourage institutions which could build a sense of community, because he understood that a stable and cohesive society was the basis of a strong economy. I haven’t heard the government describe the employment relations act as a constituency-building measure, but that will likely be one of its effects. The government’s regional development policy specifically sets out to build consultative and co-operative institutions in areas where they don’t exist or have been eroded. Ministers have frequently spoken

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about capacity-building, in the provision of community health services, and across the board n the voluntary sector.

Now I come to issues which are more problematic.

Members of the executive branch of government are more than our representatives. They’re more than managers. They are, or should be, our leaders.

Bruce clearly identified some of the important elements of leadership, although he didn’t call it that. He was adamant that a reforming government would need a definite point of view, based on its own social, democratic and national goals.

I don’t believe that the government has yet clearly established its goals.

It tells us frequently that it has rejected the past, but I saw, by way of example, a speech made recently by the minister of finance in which he listed the pillars of economic policy of the last decade, and told his audience most emphatically that they hadn’t altered. In this most important area, the government appears to be looking two ways at once. I don’t intend here to be critical of what the minister is actually doing. I’d be dismayed if he suddenly dismantled the whole framework of economic management without having first laid the groundwork for whatever is going to replace it. My point is only that the rhetoric leaves us uncertain if that is actually what is intended.

The prime minister used to say that hers is a social democratic government. With respect, this is a phrase that has no meaning outside a school of political studies, and strikes no chord among the public.

For whatever reason, the government tends not to put its actions in any kind of significant context. There are for instance any number of reasons why the government should have replaced the employment contracts act with something more humane and potentially far more productive. But the impression left with me as an observer was that the government was doing it because it had said it was going to. It sounded just as defensive when it passed the accident compensation legislation.

Here is another example. In my view, one of the government’s most important actions was the full restoration of school zoning, a decision which carries implications for education which go far beyond Epsom property values and the grammar zone. I’ll go into this further when I talk about the public sector, but the decision must mean that the government has rejected the market model of schooling and is attempting to restore the ideal of equality of opportunity in education. But if that is its goal, it hasn’t got it across to the general public, so that it seems to have left the field to a few disgruntled parents who can’t get their children into the school of their choice.

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It’s hard in all of this to identify what Bruce called a point of view, or I would call an idea. This is a way of thinking which can be applied to any particular proposal, and is a yardstick by which the government and others may judge its actions.

The most powerful ideas are very simple, however difficult their implementation might be in practice, and all-encompassing. Equality of opportunity is one. Full employment is one. The knowledge economy doesn’t really seem to be one, because it has nothing to say to a large part of the population. The Greens have an idea which appears to guide almost everything they do. If a proposal can’t meet the standards of sustainable development, they won’t support it. In the eighties and nineties, the idea which came to dominate was the ideal of the market.

What Bruce suggested as a counter to the values of the market was
an exercise in nation-building. It’s obvious from its rhetoric that, consciously or not, the government agrees with him, although some of its members seem to have missed the point of it. In the last few days I’ve heard two very dissimilar ministers inform the public that the government is engaged in nation-building. This must be disconcerting for anyone who imagined that we already lived in one. Bruce can’t possibly have intended the words to be flung around in the abstract, and in fact what he proposed was an exercise which had the establishment of a republic as its focal point. In other words, there has to be an object to the exercise, and one which is capable of commanding broad-based support.

My guess is that the leading figures in the government understand this perfectly well. But what has happened in practice to the government’s attempt to seize the high ground has brought it close to crisis.

When the government took office it announced that it intended to close the gaps between rich and poor. That is an honourable goal for parties on the left of politics and an entirely appropriate stance for a government which wishes to revisit the policies of the recent past. It is quite capable of being what Bruce called an organising concept, the yardstick by which the government measures its actions. But whether the government meant it to happen or not, the goal has been redefined in the public mind. If the government today talks about closing the gaps, it is understood as closing the gaps between Maori and the rest. Rather than unifying, it appears divisive, and the idea has done little more to date than erode the government’s popular support.

I’m not sure what Bruce would have made of this debacle. In the last chapter of his book he identified the obstacles a reforming government would face, but falling over its own rhetoric wasn’t among them. The question I’d like to deal with is whether what happened is really accidental, or whether the government has in

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fact been obliged to follow a course which is both less than it intended and ultimately futile.

Let me look in the first place at the government’s capacity to turn policy into practice.

It’s become commonplace to observe that the more competent among the government’s ministers are overburdened with work. This is an odd reflection on the nature of the restructured public service, since one of the aims of its reform was to relieve ministers from administrative detail and allow them to concentrate on wider issues.

I know from experience that many ministers were overburdened with detail in the 1980s, and I know that there was much that was inefficient, ineffective or downright frustrating in the old public service. A large part of its restructuring was based on principles which had gained currency world-wide by the beginning of the eighties, and which can be summed up very simply by saying that you get the most from your resources if you allow managers enough freedom to manage so that they can be held accountable for their performance.

If that was all we’d done, I doubt there would be much to say that was critical about the performance of the public service. But we didn’t stop at that. The state sector act 1988 and the public finance act 1989 go far beyond the mainstream in their approach to public sector management. They are at the very extreme of practice. This almost certainly seemed like a virtue at the time. Several years of looking at the results has persuaded me that nobody else does it the way we do because nobody else would take the risk. It is not orthodoxy as much as oddity.

The guiding assumption of our modern public service is that people act in their own self-interest. In light of this premise, managers can be made accountable only by means of contract. This is why the public service today is structured on commercial principles, even where there is no obvious commercial focus of its activities, and why ministers must purchase services from their departments, and why departments flood ministers with the reporting necessary to demonstrate their compliance with financial requirements. Ministers must submit to a ritual of purchasing services from departments they ostensibly own, while in practice they can’t act like the owner of an asset because the short-term demands of purchasing always defeat the long-term interests of ownership. Ministers can’t in practice develop the resources of their departments, and departments which might wish to plan for the future find themselves obliged to give priority to the current year’s outputs.

The greatest absurdity of all is that the theory of contracting makes sense only if there is competition between providers of services. Ministers and their departments don’t actually work like this, but they’re condemned to an endless and wearying charade of behaving as if they do.

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Reducing accountability to a matter of contract has given us a wonderfully efficient, but hopelessly limited, sometimes insolent, and ineffective public service.

Leaving it as it is will mean that some of the policies the government wishes to promote can’t possibly work. I include among them its industry policy, its regional development policy, and many of its social policies, including its remodelling of the health sector. I can probably best explain what I mean by using as an example the recent history of the ministry of education.

Here I go back very briefly to the devolutionary system of school administration which has always been known as Tomorrow’s Schools. I’m resigned to dying without ever convincing the left of politics that the whole thing wasn’t a Treasury plot, but I can only say, as I’ve often said before, that, whatever might have become of it, it was originally a democratic scheme of management.

It was a devolutionary scheme because equality of opportunity doesn’t always mean acting as if everybody was the same, and because you can’t run everything from Wellington. The model was designed to allow schools to be different.

It rejected the market model of schooling, and it did so by insisting that children go to the local school. Its driving force was democratic participation in schooling. If the local school was not the best school it could be, parents and others were entitled to make their voice heard, up to and including the point where new arrangements could be made locally for the schooling of some or all of the students. As well as boards of trustees, there was a parents advisory council, long since abandoned, to assist parents in making a case, and community education forums, also a non-starter, to thrash out the issues and communicate local views to the government.

It’s hard to believe all these years on that the scheme was greeted with great enthusiasm, but it was. The government got 20,000 responses to its proposals inside six weeks, and almost all of them were welcoming.

The democratic elements of the scheme were soon subverted.

This was partly a matter of choice by a successor government, which did away with school zoning in an attempt to create a market in education in which schools would stand or fall on the basis of parental preference. But it was also the result of the inability of the public service to respond appropriately to a devolved model of administration, and it’s this which gives most cause for concern about the capacity of the present government to implement its policy.

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The model depended on constructive engagement between government and the school community. This kind of engagement is what the government today calls partnership. It demands at the very least close contact between government agencies and the school community. It requires the government to know local needs and local capacity and have some idea of local intentions, so that it can plan accordingly. In turn the local community should understand the government’s intentions as a funder, a provider or a regulator of services, and perhaps have some influence on those intentions, or be influenced by them.

Critically, the partnership model demands a response from government. In the original scheme of Tomorrow’s Schools, the education review office was designed to monitor not only the performance of schools but also the government’s performance in allocating resources and in maintaining a supportive national infrastructure. Not surprisingly, this function soon fell by the wayside. The model came to be characterised, not by the government’s active engagement with the school community, but with its frequent passivity in the face of school failure.

As far as I know the ministry of education has been through three major restructurings since 1989, and several smaller ones. It became as a matter of choice a hostile environment for staff who identified with the education sector. Collaboration with practising educators was actively discouraged. The ministry closed its small regional offices, so that schools lost contact with officers who could reasonably be expected to know them and their special circumstances. The ministry soon lost touch. It came up with crackpot schemes like allowing schools to set their own holidays, it neglected issues like truancy which have national implications, and you couldn’t get it to intervene in a failing school unless you threatened it with publicity. When ministers in the last government felt the political pressure of issues like disastrous school failure in Northland, South Auckland and the East Coast, they suddenly demanded intervention, placing a hopeless load on the few staff in the ministry who knew what to do. The ministry’s interventions were too often reluctant, clumsy and uninformed.

This experience is the basis of my concern about the government’s efforts to achieve what it calls a rebalancing of its economic policy through initiatives like its industry policy and its regional development policy. Both demand that the government’s agencies engage actively with the community. If they don’t, the government’s planning, if it does any, is uninformed, and its interventions take on the nature of a gamble. But the public service as it is now is not geared for constructive engagement with the community. It doesn’t have the people, it doesn’t have the resources and because of its contractual limitations, it doesn’t have the will.

The same issue arises in the planned reconstruction of the health sector. Again, what is proposed is a devolved model. The contractual bases of relationships in the health sector will be retained, which begs some questions, and a

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representative element injected into the mix through partly-elected local boards. The government obviously doesn’t intend to be a mere spectator while the new boards get on with it, so the question must then arise of whether the agencies of central government are ready to take up their role in the partnership. An effective health sector demands that some agency of central government be ready to monitor performance and improve it, to prevent failure or remedy it, to plan for the future and work constructively with a range of partners in a diverse and inherently difficult sector. As far as we can tell at the moment, the ministry and the health funding authority between them can’t manage a simple national screening programme.

We’re condemned to some years yet of trial and error in the health sector. As happened in education, the democratic elements of the scheme will almost certainly be subverted by its contractual elements.

I don’t want to leave you with the impression that any of this will come as news to the government. The minister of state services says that the public service puts too much emphasis on financial competence, that it’s too fragmented, that it doesn’t have a broad view of the national interest, that it’s lost sight of the values and standards of public service and that it doesn’t have the capacity to engage with the communities it serves.

The minister is not planning to amend the state sector act or the public finance act. He does not anticipate major structural change in this term of office, other than in the health sector, arguing that it is too disruptive and damaging to morale. He prefers to encourage changes in what he calls approach, style and culture. Just as the government leaves the pillars of economic policy unaltered while it rebalances the economy inside the existing framework, it leaves the structure of the public service unaltered while it changes the attitudes of the people who work in it.

The danger for the government is that it gives us nothing to hope for.

It repudiates the economic and social policy of the recent past, and deplores the inequality they have created. It doesn’t say how far its repudiation will go. Until it does, its interventions may seem like tinkering and inevitably foster the suspicion that it doesn’t intend to go very far at all.

I doubt if Bruce would have been surprised at this. He wrote in his last work that Labour politicians in particular seemed intimidated by the situation they faced, and he doubted that there were any contemporary politicians bold enough to remove what he called financial coercion from the public service.

It would be wrong to see that as any reflection on individual politicians. The government can be bold. It has been almost recklessly bold in its dogged pursuit of a wrong idea.

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Here I come back to the government’s aim of closing the gaps between rich and poor, and the way in which it was overtaken in public understanding by the subsidiary goal of closing the gaps between Maori and the rest. I don’t describe the second goal as lesser than the first out of any wish to minimise the effect of growing inequality on Maori people. What I mean is that from the point of view of a democratic government, the first goal can encompass the second, but the second can’t encompass the first. If the government’s goal is to reduce inequality, it follows that it will do whatever it can to improve the position of Maori.

How goals like this are achieved is the whole business of politics. It is not particularly easy politics, because the racial element always makes politics difficult, however you handle it. In this country there is the history of dispossession and displacement. There is the growing number of people who identify as Maori. There is the growing number of those who wish to wield political power as, and on behalf, of Maori, and increasingly have the means to do so. These are challenges to the political process, but they are not insurmountable.

Democratic government can accommodate Maori political aspiration in many ways. It can allocate resources in ways which reflect the particular interests of Maori people. It can delegate authority, and allow the exercise of degrees of Maori autonomy. What it cannot do is acknowledge the existence of a separate sovereignty. As soon as it does that, it isn’t a democracy. We can have a democratic form of government or we can have indigenous sovereignty. They can’t coexist and we can’t have them both.

This brings me to the preoccupation of successive governments with the Treaty of Waitangi.

It is with no disrespect for Maori feeling for the treaty that I have to say it means nothing to me. It can mean nothing to me because it has nothing to say to me. When I was in office I understood that the government had succeeded to certain legal and moral obligations of the government which signed the treaty, and that in so far as those obligations had not been met it was our responsibility to honour them. But that is the extent of it.

The treaty cannot be any kind of founding document, as it is sometimes said to be. It does not resolve the question of sovereignty, if only because one version of it claims one form of sovereignty and the other version claims the opposite. The court of appeal once, absurdly, described it as a partnership between races, but it obviously is not. The signatories are, on one side, a distinctive group of people, and on the other, a government which established itself in New Zealand and whose successors represent all of us, whether we are descendants of the signatories or not. The treaty cannot even resolve the argument among Maori themselves in which one side maintains that that you’re a Maori if you identify as

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such, and the other claims that it’s your links to traditional forms of association which define you as Maori.

As our increasingly dismal national day continues to show, the treaty is no basis for nationhood. It doesn’t express the fundamental rights and responsibilities of citizenship, and it doesn’t have any unifying concept. The importance it has for Maori people is a constant reminder that governments in a democracy should meet their legal and moral obligations, but for the country taken as a whole, that is, and must be, the limit of its significance.

Here I come to the dangers posed by the increasing entrenchment of the treaty in statute. The treaty itself contains no principles which can usefully guide government or courts. It is a bald agreement, anchored in its time and place, and the public interest in it is the same as the public interest in enforcing any properly-made agreement. To go further than that is to acknowledge the existence of undemocratic forms of rights, entitlements, or sovereignty.

The treaty is a wonderful stick for activists to beat the rest of us with, but it could never have assumed the importance it has without the complicity of others. It came to prominence in liberal thought in the seventies, when many who were concerned about the abuse of the democratic process by the government of the day began to see the treaty as a potential source of alternative authority. It’s been the basis of a self-perpetuating industry in academic and legal circles. Many on the left of politics who sympathise with Maori aspiration have identified with the cause of the treaty, either not knowing or not caring that its implications are profoundly undemocratic.

I don’t think it any coincidence that the cause gained momentum in the eighties and nineties, when the government retreated from active engagement in economy and society and in doing so weakened the identification between government and governed which is essential to the functioning of a democracy. It isn’t in the least surprising that undemocratic ideas flourish when democracy itself seems to be failing.

I think that in practice the present government will find it difficult to draw back from its public commitment to the treaty, and that this will almost certainly rob it of its chance to build a more cohesive society and a more productive economy. It has, in the public mind if nowhere else, adopted a goal whose pursuit is inevitably divisive, and it is spending its political capital on it almost by the hour. The result, if the worst comes to the worst, will be a fractured society in which political power will be contested in ways beyond the limits of our democratic experience.

This is the sum of it. In practical terms the government has done very little to change what it says it rejects about the last fifteen years, and very little to equip itself with the tools it needs to build an alternative. What it has done may be the

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groundwork for greater change in the future, or it may be tinkering. It’s impossible to be sure. The government is diffident in its language and has not yet succeeded in associating itself with any unifying idea. On the contrary, it has become too clearly associated with an undemocratic and divisive goal which is likely to deny it more than one term in office. The conclusion which then must be drawn is that the last election has changed very little, and that democratic values are still at risk here.