After the Treaty: a new fiction

Bruce Jesson Memorial Lecture

Colin James
14 November 2005

This is an honour and an astonishment: an astonishment because this occasion is grandly titled a “lecture” and I am a journalist — journalists write stories; and an honour because I think Bruce Jesson was worthy of having a lecture named for him.

I don’t claim familiarity with Bruce. But on a couple of occasions I went fishing (well, sitting on a boat) with Bruce and his generous friend Peter Lee. Once we became marooned when the motor in Peter’s venerable vessel would not start. As Peter communed with his engine and we gently rocked far out of swimming distance from Peter’s little bay on Waiheke, Bruce suddenly grinned at me. Imagine the story, he said, if the news media were to report our loss at sea, each in the incongruous company of the other, he of the “left” and I supposedly of the “right”.

In fact, we shared, I think, two interests: in policy, where it originates, how it works and what it does to people; and in the ingredients of this place, this country, which we who perch here sometimes fancy we can call a nation. But Bruce was an activist as well as an observer; as much a politician as an analyst of politics; he shaped as well as described. I just watch. The price I pay for the incalculable privilege of watching up close is to have to write down some of what I see. Moreover, Bruce was, Andrew Sharp wrote, a “patriot”. My roots are too shallow and my ambitions too small to be a patriot. I am ephemeral; Bruce has a legacy.

Bruce had a framework, marxism, into which to fit the world he studied and wanted to change. I have no such framework.

I did fall under Marx’s spell as an instantly impressionable 17-year-old university fresher. “From each according to ability, to each according to means” seemed as indisputable as “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”.

But, while my grandfathers were working class, my parents were teachers, which stranded me in the petty bourgeoisie and so doomed me to fail the class-consciousness test. (I am a life member of the Engineers Union but that is another story). So it would not have surprised Bruce that Marx lost his grip on me when the following year my French lecturer, Max Adereth — incidentally, a marxist — introduced me to the bleak, and for me, as it turned out, inescapable, limbo of existentialism where there are no bearings other than those one makes up for oneself. My journalism reflects that: no right answers, just a stumbling search for questions, confined to the empirical, not the theoretical, to the event, not the imagination, to human muddle, not tidy templates. Journalism the way I live it operates by its own version of the uncertainty principle, all the more uncertain because its role is to haphazardly freeze-frame that everlasting wide- screen movie, The Human Condition.

My freeze-frame this evening is the Aotearoan/New Zealander of 2005. Like all freeze- frames, however, it is of a subject in motion. And, as I shall make clear later, I am here to ask for help.

By definition, to talk of the Aotearoan/New Zealander is to talk of someone who belongs in Aotearoa/New Zealand — or in Aotearoa or in New Zealand or in New Zealand/Aotearoa, for different people belong in different place-names.

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So who belongs and how do they belong? Many sorts. Here’s some ways people might stake their claims:

“I belong here because my ancestors came here 650 years ago.”

“I belong here because my ancestors, or my kin, brought to these benighted shores the fruits of the finest civilisation then invented.”

“I belong here because me and my mates are in a gang or football club.”

“I belong here because my ancestors came to work the tailings after the gold rush and stayed to work the soil in the market gardens, even though they could not be citizens.”

“I belong here because I chose this place for a more prosperous or peaceful or close-to- nature life than I could have where I came from.”

“I belong here because my parents or their parents or their parents came to live a better or more prosperous life than where they came from.”

“I belong here because I was driven out of my homeland and this country kindly gave me refuge. I need very much to belong.”

“I belong here because I feel this land in my bones, its colours and mysteries, its grandeur and softness, its bounty and its ghosts.”

“I belong here because my family has farmed this place for generations and is embedded here.”

“I belong here because I share a special way of seeing and knowing the world in sport, songs and writing and art and dance.”

“I belong here because this is home and there is no other.”

This babble of belonging has prompted some to assert a hierarchy, to say: “I belong more than the others” or “I belong and those others don’t” or “I am indigenous and they are not.”

The most insistent claim to superior belonging has been from Maori. Over the past 35 years Maori have reasserted their first-arrival status, reinvigorated and claimed respect for the language, culture, spiritual beliefs and traditions, asserted self-determination and demanded redress of past wrongs.1 And the political elites have responded to those claims in law and administrative practice to a degree near-unimaginable 20 years ago. The assertions and responses have amounted to a revolution. That has made large numbers of non-Maori feel culturally insecure. Some have responded with deference; some with rejection. We have seen both in our politics in the past few years and most recently in this year’s election. It is not pretty.

But is indigeneity a sort of finders-keepers? Can only Maori be indigenous?2 I think there has been another powerful claim to indigeneity, a claim that was asserted through an “independence revolution” from the colonial mother-country.

This revolution came about not by guns or civil unrest but initially by way of an outpouring of plays, novels, music, film, dance and revisionist historical writing from the late 1970s onwards. This proclaimed a new confident expression that was a decisive

1 I have canvassed much of what follows in more detail in speeches and writing over the past two years. They are on my website, www.ColinJames.co.nz.
2 Jeremy Waldron, Indigeneity? First Peoples and Last Occupancy, Quentin Baxter Memorial Lecture, Victoria University of Wellington, 5 December 2002

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break with the self-conscious and half-apologetic differentiation from mother-Britain which marked both popular culture and the arts up till then. Britain stopped being Home. This place became home. This relocation was not, as many think, a response to Britain leaving us for Europe. It was a brash young generation asserting its own place in the world and stating that that place was here, in mind, spirit and body. This new expression was adolescent, for sure, and it was still British in derivation. But there has been no going back. Instead the new brash overturning of the old order infused our way of doing business and politics; it added up to a change in the value-system. There were dramatic, swift and deep policy changes, especially in economic and foreign policy. We were independent. We belonged here. We were — and are — indigenous.

One revolution is a big shock for any society to accommodate. Two at once is doubly a shock — and the policy and economic upheavals were highly disruptive and earned Bruce Jesson’s dismay and disgust. Yet our society has absorbed these shocks with remarkable resilience. The institutions, though modified, still stand. The middle class, though remodelled, still runs the show. No bus has been blown up, no political leader has been assassinated, no mass popular movement has stormed the parliamentary heights.

But there is more to come. To be indigenous requires a strong, confident culture that can accommodate new influences without losing its integrity.

That requires, in the case of the newly indigenised British-derived New Zealand culture, the reclaiming of the pre-colonial heritage, the rich history of Britain and Europe, and its integration with the new. For now the 650-year association Maori have with the land, against only six or seven generations at most for non-Maori, give Maori the firmer cultural base. The folk history of those with Maori ancestry is deep; that of the ex- British still in infancy.

But we are now, I think, on the brink of a mixing of the two cultures.

In one direction is now beginning to flow an increasing Maori and Pacific influence on the majority culture — language, kapa haka, sport, ways of seeing things in graphic arts, music, especially popular music, ceremonial ritual. No longer is the Maori dimension place-names, Ka Mate at sports events and plastic tikis. We will all over the next generation or two become of the Pacific instead of just in the Pacific — and I say “Pacific” because the link between Maori and Polynesia is being re-forged in South Auckland and Samoan and other Pacific influence is also beginning to be felt.

I call that influence on the majority culture Pacific-ation. It will profoundly unsettle many people, particularly older people. It challenges what had seemed to be settled notions about religion, family, how we speak and how we govern ourselves.

In the other direction will flow a challenge to traditional Maori culture and governance. It will not be imposed, as during the colonial period, the monocultural British period. It will develop organically with the now rapid growth of a Maori middle class.

Middle classes make wealth in their societies. And they modernise, individualise, and democratise those societies. So this rising middle class will, as it grows, challenge tradition and tikanga and those whose positions and power depend on tradition and tikanga. When will top Maori women refuse to play second fiddle to second-rate men? When will the indiscriminate display of powhiri tail off? And at what point will those on the rolls which iwi and hapu are building use their voting power to decide who governs them and how? Middle classes value science and technology and the rule of law and good management and the material wealth that can bring. So they will challenge the

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capacity of whakapapa to explain phenomena and challenge whanaungatanga as a principle of organisation and say that it makes mistakes in handling commercial enterprises and social services delivery agencies.

You might call this the second advent to te ao maori of the Enlightenment — this time grown from within, not imposed from without.

This remix of the two cultures will disturb and enrich both. At some point haka will have English words, which will be right and proper when a haka speaks for the nation. Maori words adopted into English will take on new meanings. If traditionalists object the response will be: “It’s our haka, too. Those are our words now.” Cultures are not frozen, they live and evolve. So don’t be surprised if the New Zealand accent changes to reflect Maori intonation — if it shifts from New Zealand to Aotearoan. South Auckland has a lot more to say to us yet.

This intermixing will eventually take us beyond the fraught business of claiming and conceding rights, which has been at the nub of much of our politics of the past 20 years and has divided us more than it has united us. But as over the next 20 years we leave behind the rights argument and the overburdened Treaty of Waitangi on which the rights claims have been hung, that does not mean we will elide into a new monoculture, a convenient nation. Animism and the Enlightenment do not fit easily in the same mental and spiritual space. There is a great deal of cultural insecurity ahead of us yet, on both sides. And there are ethnically visible disparities in achievement, the products of underclass disadvantage, which have enormous implications for social cohesion and economic performance. Will this ethnic drag on the economy trigger white flight to other countries in search of cultural and material comfort? Already there are signs of that, at least in some of the emails I get from expatriates.

I mentioned “nation”. In my simple journalist’s calculus there are two ways to make a nation (apart from abitrarily drawing lines on a map, as after Vienna and for Africa). One is by long occupation of a place by a folk so that the land and the folk become one. Maori might lay such a claim but non-Maori are the majority and their six or seven generations is not long enough here to embed a nation. The other way to be a nation is by way of an “idea”, the American way — perhaps one might cite also the Jewish way. If we once thought we had candidates for a nation-forming idea they are unconvincing in 2005: “frontier”, “No 8 wire”, “mates”, “progress”.

Some think the idea of the Treaty, two cultures in one space in harmony, might do. But the Treaty is now too loaded with fears and invested with hope to bear such a weight. It was the creature of an imperial moment; it has more recently served as a momentary instrument of revival and reconciliation. But it is not a charter for a nation. Not least, it sets some of us apart from the rest. In a democratic age, that can’t work.

Moreover, there is a bigger earthquake building under us, which will shake this half- nation to its foundations.

We are becoming used to a world in flux: turbulence in trade, huge flows of people fleeing tyranny or seeking riches or getting an education, environmental interdependence, random terror. Many of the old nations, particularly in Europe, are losing their cultural integrity as burgeoning immigrant groups import discordant customs. Their material security is under threat from cheap or efficient Asian producers and energy is becoming expensive. Even the most powerful city in the world was not immune from attack. Some talk of a “clash of civilisations”, God v Allah. We in this tiny corner of the world are a pingpong ball on this cauldron.

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But something bigger is coming for us.

For nearly two centuries we have sourced our people, our investment, our science and our ideas from Europe, North America and their offshoot, Australia — what might be called the North Atlantic sphere.

For five centuries the North Atlantic has dominated the world economy and devised its economic mechanisms. It has bestrode the world strategically, for much of the time through direct colonial occupation. It has found almost all the new science that has enriched us materially and lengthened our lives. It has thought up the ideas by which we govern ourselves and run our societies. It has produced the great innovations in art and music and writing.

We are kin with the North Atlantic. We have a privileged place at the fount of riches and ideas. This is our cultural wellspring. I say “we” because Maori are, through miscegenation, North Atlantic as well as Pacific.

Now China and India are on the rise. Of course, China has growing internal social and political tensions, economic imbalances and pressures, serious water shortages and pollution, which it must navigate on its way to sustainable prosperity and in the short term it will be buffeted when the world’s serious economic imbalances are unwound. And India is a turbulent democracy beset by grinding poverty so its economy develops at most in fits and starts. But both have great energy and strong commercial instincts which are now being given space to breathe. And both are very big.

China has long exported people. Increasing numbers of that diaspora have fetched up here. That has fuelled cultural insecurity over the past decade. Its people save. A growing proportion of investment here already comes from east Asia; that proportion will surely grow. And, of course, China is a vital trade partner and east Asia as a whole is bigger than Europe and the United States.

China is also investing in science. Over time some, and in due course a lot, of the world’s science will come from China. We might not have such ready access to Chinese science as we have had to North Atlantic science. And as China asserts itself on the world stage, it is likely also to challenge the North Atlantic’s hegemony of ideas and ideologies for political and social organisation. Our self-confidence will be tested to the core if we have to comprehend very different ways of thinking. (Just as, in the nineteenth century, the Maori had to.)

For us this rebalancing of the world will be especially intense because we are already in Asia’s strategic sphere in geography and trade and, to come, in people. In due course we will have to work out how to live with China’s assertion of its strategic interests. We are kin of the North Atlantic but not of China, though as Chinese come here in increasing numbers a growing minority will be kin of China. And India is coming up and Indians are coming here in rising numbers. We might find ourselves perched unstably at the apex of an Asian triangle.

And this will be happening at the very time we are groping for a key to nationhood. Our cultural security will be deeply disturbed.

Which brings me to the request I flagged earlier: I am here to ask for help. This is a university and as I understand universities, they are places for thinking. If I am half right about the changes looming over the next generation or so in our place in the world and in what makes a New Zealander/Aotearoan, some hard thinking is needed to develop appropriate analytical frameworks.

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Hard thinking is your job. You are underfunded, understaffed and crammed with undergraduates (at least a third of whom should not be here). But that is no excuse. Jeremy Waldron, arguing the Treaty of Waitangi’s “obsolescence” in a lecture at Otago University in August, put it this way:

“We have a responsibility as tenured academics to explore different frameworks and new and perhaps disconcerting pathways of thought. If we are not prepared to do that, we don’t need our tenure and many of us are wasting our salaries.”3

The “we” in question are academics in this country, not those in the great northern hemisphere cloisters to which we customarily genuflect. And “new” is not some minor reformulation of the great authorities of the past. “New” is “new”.

And the hard thinking must be unique to this place.

Bruce Jesson recognised, Andrew Sharp tells us in the introduction to the book of his collected articles, that he was observing a unique society which required unique analysis. One of his articles refers to “working class, not in a cloth cap English sense but in a New Zealand black-singlet sense”. So he did not plonk orthodox marxism on New Zealand and expect a fit. He searched the byways of modern marxist writing for ways to make sense of this unique society, for example to explain Maori sovereignty arguments which eluded orthodox marxist analysis.

In short, Bruce respected facts, including inconvenient ones. And I respected him for that.

So, in memoriam of that respect for facts, let me offer some facts as starting points for your hard thinking. (I am aware, by the way, that “facts” are elusive and changeable and that “events” are a more convenient word. But I am using “fact” in the journalist’s sense of what I see in front of me that has not been falsified.)

My first fact is this unique society’s bicultural nature.

Bicultural here is not a subset of multicultural but an issue of power and of belonging. Many people think they can wish or ideologise it away, that if they change a few dozen acts of Parliament they can return us to a golden age when taniwha didn’t get in the way of roads and sacred Maori places were a matter for private contemplation, not public respect. But too much has changed. And the cultural intermix now under way which I talked about earlier is embedding that change. One indicator is the number of National party people, including some in high places, who feel the party’s election race policy was wrong or inappropriate or unworkable.

Tied up with this is the inescapability of dealing with Maori claims to rights and Maori educational, economic and social performance. First, Maori are not a tiny minority, as are the original indigenes in Japan or North America or Australia, nor an eradicable irritant, as in Brazil. There are too many Maori and the demographics tell us there will be many more. Their demands cannot lightly be ignored. Second, Maori became an alienated migrant underclass, similar in that to blacks in Watts in 1965 and Brixton in 1981and North African muslims in France today. Leave them alienated and this economy and society will underperform. So these matters are not just ethical matters or matters of “justice”. They are matters of self-interest for all of us who live here.

There is much to get right on rights yet. But I increasingly find younger Maori, while

3 Jeremy Waldron, The Half-Life of Treaties: Waitangi, Rebus Sic Stantibus, F W Guest Memorial Lecture, University of Otago, 22 August 2005

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giving no ground on rights, are focusing on development. And that is the overriding issue for Maori now: prosperity and dignity in the modern, internationalised world. That is to fully belong.

My second fact is the Treaty of Waitangi. Logically, it should not be a fact. Times and circumstances have changed beyond recognition since 1840. But the Treaty was brought back to life in the 1980s, to heal some of the wounds from the injustices of the past and in that sense is an agent of reconciliation. It now infuses our policy, our jurisprudence and our administrative practices and some of our ceremonials. It has become, for better and for worse, part of the national consciousness. It cannot be wished into thin air.

But, third, the majority is also a fact. Neo-romantic notions about a partner-state that gives article 2 of the Treaty the same weight as article 1 run into a majority brick wall. The Foreshore and Seabed Act made that bluntly clear. The Treaty cannot dismantle the majority and it cannot disaggregate the unitary state. In any case many who have Maori ethnicity choose the majority. We are not two absolutely separate peoples.

Moreover, to give the Treaty life in the 1980s we invented two fictions: its “principles” and “partnership”. These have been valuable as public policy mechanisms to meet the particular needs of that time. But they are fictions, the majority thinks they are fictions and some future Parliament will likely trim them. So I think we can say the second Treaty period is within a decade or two of its end.

So what do we do instead? If the Treaty cannot make a nation, what can?

Maybe there is a clue in that word “fiction”. Maybe there are not two bases for nationhood but one — that “folk” and “idea” are in essence fictions, so every nation rests on a fiction. If so, it must be a fiction to which the great majority, preferably all, the people subscribe and draw spiritual nourishment from. (The French fiction is fraying right now in Paris’s suburbs.)

But if we are to find such an enduring fiction, who is to formulate it?

I can think of three candidates.

The first is you, here, in this thinking place. And that requires some of Professor Waldron’s “new and disconcerting pathways of thought”. The Lockean fiction and its derivatives, which lie behind “one law for all”, are insuffiicent in the face of the fact of biculturalism and likewise the neo-romantic indigenous rights fiction, which lies behind “Maori sovereignty”, is insufficient in the face of the fact of the majority.

The second candidate is the creative arts. Perhaps their weaving together of ex-British and Maori (and ex-Maori) will in time generate a fiction.

My third candidate is the people. We have muddled through not badly so far in our republican manner (to call up another of Bruce Jesson’s preoccupations — we are a republic in all but form in that the people ultimately do the deciding, often with only half an ear and eye on the political elites’ actions and justifications). Perhaps we can just muddle through the tensions and upsets — and the cultural intermixing — of the next generation or so and find our fiction written then in the interstices of our daily lives.

If so, if we can somehow make or find a fiction to make a nation here, I hope I am given the time and opportunity to watch, up close, a bit more of the process. A journalist — at least of my sort, a watcher not a shaper, a taker not a maker of ideas — cannot ask for more. Thank you for having me. Go and think hard.

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Are we all New Zealanders now? A Mäori response to the Päkehä quest for indigeneity.

Ani Mikaere

Racial conflict was one of the formative experiences of New Zealand society. Pakeha New Zealanders are the products of an invading culture. As individuals we can be magnanimous or guilt-stricken, according to our inclination. But as a society we have this amazing capacity for self-deception. For more than a century we smugly believed that this country was a model of racial harmony, that we were one people. Maori radicalism has put an end to that particular delusion, and we are now in the process of putting down new layers of hypocrisy.

Those among you who knew Bruce Jesson well or who are familiar with his writing will doubtless recognise his voice in the extract I have just read: he wrote it in 1986,1 in the wake of Michael King’s book Being Pakeha.

Unlike those who have gone before me in presenting this address, I never met Bruce Jesson. From what I have been able to find out about him, however, I wish I had. I am well aware that he commanded enormous respect and I am honoured to celebrate his memory by participating in this event. And I was particularly pleased, while working on this lecture, to come across material written by him that was so relevant to the topic that I have chosen to talk about tonight.

My attention was drawn the notion of Päkehä indigeneity by a speech that Trevor Mallard made shortly after his appointment as Co-ordinating

1 Jesson, B “Race and Identity: Looking the Other Way?” Sites no.13 (Spring 1986) 14, at 15.

Minister, Race Relations. Entitled “We are all New Zealanders now”, his speech emphasized the need to put the difficulties of the past behind us in order to forge a collective sense of nationhood. Mallard expressed the hope that this new century would be about “perfecting our nationhood”, “banishing the demons from our past” and “cheering each other on as New Zealand citizens”. Of particular interest to me was his claim that:2

New Zealand has to get its British imperial past behind it. Mäori and Päkehä are both indigenous people to New Zealand now. I regard myself as an indigenous New Zealander . . .

Of course, Mallard is not the first Päkehä to speak of his feelings of indigeneity: in 1999 Michael King insisted that “[p]eople who live in New Zealand by choice as distinct from an accident of birth, and who are committed to this land and its people and steeped in their knowledge of both, are no less ‘indigenous’ than Mäori”.3

Don Brash, meanwhile, continues to pursue Hobson’s dream that we will all become one people, embracing with enthusiasm the emergence of what he calls “a distinct South Seas race of New Zealanders” and minimalising the significance of ethnicity altogether by asserting that most people treat their ethnic allegiances fluidly, with matters such as religion, profession, sports club, gender and political allegiance mattering more to them than their ethnicity.4

2 Mallard, T “We Are All New Zealanders Now”, speech to the Stout Research Centre for NZ Studies, Victoria University, Wellington, 28 July 2004.
3 King, M Being Pakeha Now: Reflections and Recollections of a White Native (Auckland: Penguin Books, 1999) at 235.

4 Brash, D “Nationhood”, speech to the Orewa Rotary Club, 27 January 2004, at 6-7.

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It may surprise some of you that I speak of Mallard, King and Brash in the same breath: no doubt there will be those among you who cannot see the similarity in their positions. But while there are differences between them, from a Mäori point of view they also have much in common.

Brash’s eager anticipation of the growth of a single multi-ethnic New Zealand race is prefaced by a discussion which takes us back to the days when it was thought that identity could be measured by blood quantum. His focus on the amount of intermarriage that has taken place and the fact that anthropologists say there are no full-blooded Mäori left in the country can only be described as bizarre: many of us thought that such ideas had been safely put to rest thirty years ago. Brash’s vision of a “multi-cultural melting pot” future whereby we will all be merged into one people is so out-of-date that it would almost be entertaining were it not so blatantly assimilationist. Entertainment aside, a central feature of Brash’s argument is the somewhat petulant insistence that non-Mäori have just as much right to be here as Mäöri.

While neither Mallard nor King hankers for the day when we will all be one people, their claim to indigeneity is similarly an assertion of their right to be here. But what does such an assertion really entail? Avril Bell has this to say about the Päkehä claim to indigeneity:5

If Pakeha are to be indigenous they are cut off from their history as the descendants and inheritors of the privileges of the colonisers of Aotearoa. This history is discarded as Pakeha are ‘born’ post colonisation out of the New

5 Bell, A “We’re Just New Zealanders: Pakeha Identity Politics” in Spoonley, P et al Nga Patai: Racism and Ethnic Relations in Aotearoa/New Zealand (Palmerston North: Dunmore Press, 1996) 144, at 156.

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Zealand soil. Such a move represents a desire to be ‘born again’ New

Zealanders, disowning their parents and imagining themselves adopted . . . Little wonder, perhaps, that Päkehä seem to suffer from a deep-rooted sense of insecurity about their identity. From a Mäori perspective, there is almost an element of desperation in this quest for indigeneity, calling to mind John Mulgan’s description of Päkehä as being “a queer, lost, eccentric, pervading people looking for satisfaction”.6

This insecurity has some curious manifestations, among them defensiveness, bordering on hostility. By way of example, in 1998 New Zealand First MP Tau Henare suggested that the North and South Islands be known instead by their Mäori names, Te Ika a Mäui and Te Waipounamu. Legal academic David Round objected strenuously to the proposal, appearing on national television to debate the issue with Henare. The Evening Post ran a story headed “when biculturalism goes too far” in which it was observed:7

Round made it clear that the reason he objected to a name change was that he was fed up with what he called forced biculturalism. . . It was one of those rare moments when someone had the courage to articulate what a lot of New Zealanders privately think, but are either too polite or timid to say.

While the programme was on air, viewers were asked to call in to register their approval or otherwise of the proposed name change. At the end of the programme the results of the digipoll showed that 87 percent of those who called were opposed to the idea while just 13 percent were in favour.

6 Quoted in Simpson, T Te Riri Pakeha:The White Man’s Anger (Auckland: Hodder & Stoughton, 1986) at 12.
7 Du Fresne, K “When Biculturalism Goes Too Far”, Evening Post, 7 October 1998, at 4.

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The Evening Post took this as proof that most New Zealanders opposed the proposed name change, suggesting the reason as being that:8

[L]ike David Round, they resent the feeling that this thing called biculturalism is increasingly being imposed upon them, and their own cultural heritage devalued and pushed aside in the process, with very little regard for the will of the majority.

What is fascinating about this analysis, aside from the characterisation of our colonisers as “polite” and “timid” and the assumption that an 87 percent majority in a Holmes Show digipoll is conclusive evidence as to what “most New Zealanders” want, is the suggestion that the names “North Island” and “South Island” somehow represent Päkehä cultural heritage, which must be defended at all costs. Little wonder that Päkehä New Zealand struggles with the question of identity, seeking to create cultural icons of gumboots, black singlets, pavlova, kiwifruit and the buzzy bee toy. When travelling overseas, Päkehä leap forward to perform bastardised versions of the haka and “Pökarekare Ana”, and adorn themselves with Mäori pendants in an attempt to identify themselves as New Zealanders: when in Aotearoa it is often those same people who decry any assertion of Mäori language and culture as a threat to their identity. Their cultural insecurity appears to know no bounds. Interestingly, Bruce Jesson saw a connection between these shaky cultural foundations and the status of coloniser:9

New Zealand had such a shallow culture that most New Zealanders knew little about their country’s history. Amnesia is not a recent development, but is part of the colonial condition.

8. 8  Du Fresne (1998) 4.
9. 9  Jesson, B Only Their Purpose is Mad (Palmerston North: Dunmore Press, 1999) at 70-71.

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This takes us back to Bell’s point about the Päkehä desire to be cut off from their history as the descendants and inheritors of the privileges of the colonisers of Aotearoa. That many Päkehä would like such unpleasant matters to be forgotten or overlooked is undeniable. Brash, for example, complains:10

None of us was around at the time of the New Zealand wars. None of us had anything to do with the confiscations. There is a limit to how much any generation can apologise for the sins of its great grandparents.

Mallard insists that Päkehä “want to be trusted by their Mäori fellow- New Zealanders . . . New Zealanders do not want to be condemned and cursed as if they are the British imperialist white ascendancy colonialists”.11 And last year King argued that Päkehä were seeking what he called a ‘mutuality of respect’:12

As another manifestation of that respect, just as Pakeha were now decades away from the stance which viewed Maori culture as ‘primitive’, ‘backward’ or ‘barbaric’, so Pakeha felt that they ought not to be viewed by Maori as tau iwi or aliens, representatives of a colonising power that merely stole material and cultural resources from Maori and gave nothing in return.

Such sentiments reveal the sizable burden of guilt that many Päkehä carry about the means by which they have come to occupy their present position of power and privilege. Brash’s way of dealing with this guilt is simply to deny personal responsibility for the detrimental impact on Mäori of colonisation. Mallard’s response is essentially to demand that

10. 10  Brash (2004) at 3.
11. 11  Mallard (2004) at 6.
12. 12  King, M The Penguin History of New Zealand (Auckland: Penguin, 2003) at 516.

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Mäori forgive and forget. King’s approach is more sophisticated: he suggests that both sides have made mistakes by unfairly stereotyping each other, thereby implying an equivalence of fault on both sides. This has the effect of masking the fact that the wrongs were overwhelmingly committed by one side and inflicted upon the other: to suggest any kind of equivalence here, in my view, is deeply problematic.

These exhortations from Brash, Mallard and King are heavily dependent upon the need for the past to be forgotten, or at very least, not spoken about. Yet, as Jeremy Waldron has pointed out, “the determination not to forget is part of the moral respect we owe to human identity; the task of remembrance is bound up with the very being of community and individuality in the modern world”.13 To euphemise the impact of colonisation on Mäori is to fundamentally disrespect the memory of those who suffered as a result of resources wrongly taken, of language denied, of spirituality suppressed. It is also to deny the true cause of the disadvantage that so many Mäori are faced with today. Does this matter? Waldron suggests that it does:14

[T]he neglect or forgetfulness urged on us is seldom the blank slate of historical oblivion. Thinking quickly fills up the vacuum with plausible tales of self-satisfaction on the one side and self deprecation on the other. Those who as a matter of fact benefited from their ancestors’ injustice will persuade themselves readily enough that their good fortune is due to the virtue of their race, while the descendants of their victims may too easily accept the story that they and their kind were always good for nothing.

13 Waldron, J “Historic Injustice: Its Remembrance and Supercession” in Oddie, G & Perrett, R (eds) Justice, Ethics and New Zealand Society (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1992) 139, at 143.
14 Waldron (1992) at 142.

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To forget history is to allow myths to spring up in its place, myths which serve to ease the conscience of those upon whom history does not reflect well. For Mäori to collude in the forgetting of history requires us to remain silent so that the business of Päkehä myth-making and self- deception can proceed unhindered. However, I cannot accept (in the words of Mohawk legal academic Patricia Monture-Angus) that it is our responsibility to carry the guilt of the oppressor, or to silence ourselves for the sole purpose that the oppressor will not feel badly.15 To do so would be an extraordinary act of denial. Yet it sometimes appears that our colonisers demand nothing less from us, in their determination to forget or disguise the past beyond recognition and in their quest to convince themselves that history has nothing with which to reproach them. A commitment to forget is clearly something that the asserters of Päkehä indigeneity share.

Brash, for example, looks forward to the day when the categories Mäori and Päkehä will be forgotten altogether, as we amalgamate into a single new breed of New Zealander. Like King, he employs the device of false equivalence to gloss over the stark differences in Mäori and Päkeha experience over the last two hundred years. His version of our shared history, ironically headed “the myths of our past”16 engages in some major myth-making itself, suggesting equivalence of blame on both sides for the massive land-grab that took place. He opines, for example that “[a]ny dispassionate look at our history shows that self-interest and greed featured large on both sides”17 and suggests that Maori were separated from their land “partly through settler greed” and “partly through a

15 Monture-Angus, P Thunder In My Soul: A Mohawk Woman Speaks (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 1995) at 63.

16. 16  Brash (2004) at 2-3.
17. 17  Brash (2004) at 2.

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couple of generations of deficient leadership by some Maori”.18 His approach has the effect of conveniently “forgetting” that the vast majority of wrong-doing was committed on the Päkehä side.

Amusingly, Labour appears to regard it’s own stance on these matters as progressive by comparison. In 2003, for instance, Michael Cullen accused Bill English of seeking “a coalition of Pakeha fearful as to the impacts of the Treaty of Waitangi”.19 As Brash’s Orewa speech makes plain, a change in National party leadership has not altered the party’s policy in this respect. Mallard revels in making fun of National’s position, accusing them of being “backward-looking. . . stalled in the 19th, or perhaps the 18th century, . . . the inheritors of the original assimilation project” and labelling them “the successors of the Victorian colonialists who wreaked havoc in so many countries”.20 Brave words from a freshly-appointed “Coordinating Minister, Race Relations”, eager no doubt to bring some intellectual vision to the debate. Yet, just as Brash continues to cultivate a coalition of the fearful, it is equally plain that Mallard is intent on forging a coalition of the forgetful: Mäori must forgive and forget, and Päkehä must be allowed to forget, so that we can all live together as one big, happy, amnesic family.

Well, Mäori will not forget. As Mohawk Taiaiake Alfred has said “today’s challenge must be shouldered proudly because it is no less than the sacred heritage passed on by generations of ancestors who sacrificed

18. 18  Brash (2004) at 3.
19. 19  Cullen, M, Speech to Region Two Labour Party Conference, 5 April, 2003) at 3.
20. 20  Mallard (2004) at 3.

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and died to preserve the notion of their being”.21 Mäori understand only too well our obligation, to generations past and future, not to forget.

And the truth of the matter is that no matter how hard they try, Päkehä cannot forget either. As Bruce Jesson stated so simply, Päkehä are the products of an invading culture. Brash can bluster all he likes about the limits to which he can be made to apologise for the sins of his ancestors; Mallard can appeal to Mäori to trust him; King can insist that the colonisers did not simply take without giving anything in return; Round can defend the cultural significance of the names North Island and South Island as if his life depends on it. But whatever they might say I do not believe that any of them can truly forget. A sense of underlying unease, of unresolved guilt pervades their words. One barely has to scratch the Päkehä surface to find the guilt lying immediately beneath, guilt which manifests itself as denial, self-justification, defensiveness and, incredibly enough, a sense of victimhood.

I am aware that the picture I have painted so far is a fairly gloomy one. Yet I can see, even in the words of those whom I have criticised, some cause for optimism. To begin with there is an implicit acknowledgement from each of them that the key to their desire to feel that they “belong” here somehow lies in the relationship between Päkehä and Mäori. There is also a sense that in order for that relationship to be put on a sound footing, something has to change.

These are sentiments with which I am in complete agreement. It is plain to me that the relationship between Mäori and Päkehä is deeply

21 Alred, T Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto (Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 1999) at 33.

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dysfunctional. The cost to Päkehä, as I have already said, is a burden of shame that they cannot escape. The cost to Mäori is also high. When in 2000 Tariana Turia spoke about the phenomenon of Post Colonial Traumatic Stress Disorder22 many leading politicians scaled new heights of sheer absurdity in their reactions, such was their horror at being reminded of a past they wanted so desperately to forget. As a result of the madness that erupted in the wake of her speech to the New Zealand Psychological Society Conference (and it is pertinent to note the head of the Psychological Society’s public statement that her speech had been entirely appropriate in the context of the occasion) a whole new vocabulary of words that should not be mentioned in public emerged. We now know that, in relation to the Aotearoa context at least, the “g” word (genocide) is considered impolite, the “h” word (holocaust), simply unmentionable.

Regrettably, amidst all the stupidity the message that was being conveyed was completely lost. Turia referred to Native American Psychologist Eduardo Duran who suggests that the colonial oppression suffered by indigenous people inevitably wounds the soul.23 There is no doubt in my mind that Mäori continue to bear the scars of colonisation. I have already said that Päkehä guilt lurks just beneath the surface; Mäori grief and rage inhabit the same psychological and spiritual space, often unleashed by the smallest of triggers.

But I for one do not accept that this is how things have to remain. The prospect of being forever locked into the roles of oppressor and oppressed must surely be as unfulfilling for Päkehä as it is frustrating for Mäori.

22. 22  Turia, T, Speech to NZ Psychological Society Conference, 29 August 2000.
23. 23  Turia (2000) at 3.

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The foreshore debacle has provided a timely reminder of the ease with which the Crown slips into its time-honoured pattern of threats and coercion, consigning Päkehä yet again to the role of oppressor. I find it hard to believe it is a role that Päkehä relish. I doubt whether our collective grief is something of which Päkehä are proud. I also know that the very last thing we need is Päkehä wallowing in guilt. All of us, Mäori and Päkehä hope for a better world for our children and grandchildren. If the key to creating that better world does not lie in forgetting our past, where does it lie?

I suggest that the answers may well be found in tikanga Mäori. Tikanga Mäori has been defined by Charles Royal as “ethical behaviour”, based upon fundamental principles or values.24 While the practice of tikanga may adapt over time, the underlying principles or “conceptual regulators” (as Justice Taihakurei Durie has called them),25 comprising values such as whanaungatanga, manaakitanga, aroha, mana, tapu, noa, wairua and utu, do not. Durie has pointed out that Mäori society was open to change but “protective of the fundamental norms or principles of the conceptual regulators” and that this approach “enabled change while maintaining cultural integrity”.26

I regard tikanga as the first law of Aotearoa.27 It arrived here with our ancestors and it operated effectively to serve their needs for a thousand years before Päkehä came. It was the only system of law in operation when the first Päkehä began living here amongst us. Had the

24 Royal, C “Kaupapa and Tikanga”, paper presented at the Mai i Te Ata Hapara conference, Te Wananga-o-Raukawa, Otaki, 11-13 August, 2000, at 1.

25. 25  Durie, T “Custom Law”, unpublished paper, 1994, 4-5.
26. 26  Durie (1994) at 8.
27. 27  See Mikaere, A “The Treaty of Waitangi an Recognition of Tikanga Mäori” in Belgrave, M et al

Waitangi Revisited: Perspectives on the Treaty of Waitangi (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 2004) 330 for further discussion of tikanga Mäori as the first law of Aotearoa.

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reaffirmation of Mäori authority in the second article of Te Tiriti o Waitangi been adhered to, the relationship between Päkehä and Mäori would have been regulated by tikanga Mäori throughout our shared history. I believe it would have resulted in a far healthier relationship than the one we currently have. While tikanga has largely been displaced by the operation of the coloniser’s law, it is still an important determinant of Mäori behaviour. It embodies a number of highly relevant principles and precedents, the application of which in a contemporary context would suggest an exciting range of possibilities for Mäori and Päkehä.

The fundamental purpose of Mäori law, as the Waitangi Tribunal has noted, is to maintain appropriate relationships of people to their environment, to their history and to each other.28 The first relationship that must be mentioned is that of people to the land. Mäori are born out of the land, conceived and given life by Papatüänuku. When a Mäori child is born, the placenta or whenua is returned to Papatüänuku. These spiritual and genealogical connections to her are what make us tangata whenua. It is a concept that can only have meaning within the context of a Mäori world view.

The spiritual connection to Papatüänuku is strengthened on a hapü level by occupation of a particular area of land, with which an intimate connection is formed over time. Landmarks within the area are associated with hapü identity, ancestors are buried there and the attachment to the land is, in the words of the Waitangi Tribunal “reinforced by the stories of the land, and by a preoccupation with the accounts of ancestors, whose admonitions and examples [provide] the

28 Waitangi Tribunal, Muriwhenua Land Report (1997) at 21.

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basis for law and a fertile field for its development.”29 Thus the term tangata whenua, while referring to all Mäori by virtue of our descent from Papatüänuku, is also applied more specifically to the iwi and hapü associated with a particular area of land.

Having considered the connection between people and land, it is appropriate now to turn to the matter of human relationships. Let us begin by talking about the relationship between tangata whenua (loosely translated as hosts) and manuhiri (visitors or guests). When manuhiri go into the area of another people, it is understood that the tikanga of the tangata whenua apply. While there are variations between iwi and hapü in way in which tikanga is practised, there is no question that within the domain of the tangata whenua, it is their interpretation and application of the principles underpinning tikanga that prevails. Manuhiri from Tainui, for instance, would never dream of telling their hosts in Te Taitokerau or Te Tairäwhiti, how they should conduct themselves on their own marae or in their own area.

Nor would manuhiri ever assume tangata whenua status in another people’s domain. That is not to say that people from outside an iwi area never took up residence within that iwi’s boundaries: there are precedents that show such arrangements took place, whether on a seasonal basis (for example, for food-gathering purposes) or otherwise. But arrangements of this type were always carefully negotiated, and the consent of the tangata whenua was imperative, as was the fulfilment of any conditions they laid down. And always, it was the relationship between the two parties that mattered most. Both sides were expected to actively nurture the relationship, with the concept of utu or reciprocity

29 Muriwhenua Land Report at 23.

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operating to bind them together more closely as time passed. Naturally, this understanding applied to Päkehä individuals who took up residence amongst iwi during the earliest days of Mäori-Päkehä contact. Sometimes such incorporation of outsiders in this manner brought with it an allocation of land. The Waitangi Tribunal has this to say about such situations:30

Land allocations to outside individuals. . .were not an alienation of the land but the incorporation of the individuals. A rangatira who allocated land to an individual augmented not the recipient but the community the rangatira represented, for it was the recipient who was the most obliged. The purpose was not to elevate the individual but to build the community.

It was not uncommon for marriages with local people to be arranged in such instances, as the children of any such unions would give a stake in the land by ancestry. Nevertheless, the outsider who married in would never become tangata whenua in the true sense of the word. Nor could they ever presume to take on for themselves that status. If I lived my whole adult life in my spouse’s village, for example, I would never reach a moment when I would refer to myself as tangata whenua of that place. That does not mean that I could not fulfil an important and valued role as a member of that community: it simply means that I could not assume for myself the status of tangata whenua there. I would remain manene, a stranger in a sense, albeit one who forged a powerful connection with the hapü and iwi of that place by virtue of sharing in their lives and producing children who could claim such tangata whenua status. It would be exactly the same for my spouse in the event of his coming to live in my area.

30 Muriwhenua Land Report at 25.

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The point is that it is never possible for manuhiri or manene to take upon themselves the status of tangata whenua. An outsider may be incorporated into the tangata whenua group, be allocated land and other rights and may even have their place within the community cemented by marriage and children. But ultimately, it is for the tangata whenua to determine the way in which they view the outsider in their midst.

A second relationship that is worthy of consideration in the context of Mäori-Päkeha interaction is that of wrong-doer and wronged. Colonisation the world over has resulted in oppression of indigenous peoples, and Aotearoa is no exception. Despite the occasional somewhat desperate suggestion to the contrary, the fact is that iwi and hapü the length and breadth of Aotearoa have suffered almost unimaginable injustice at the hands of Päkehä, injustice that has been either sanctioned or actively perpetrated by the Crown. According to tikanga Mäori, when a wrong is committed it creates a depletion of mana and a situation of serious imbalance, not just between the parties concerned but also amongst their respective whänau and hapü. Relationships are damaged. Action is necessary to restore the mana of the people and groups involved, thereby re-establishing the balance and returning the various relationships impacted upon to a healthy state.

One of the chief means of achieving such an outcome in earlier times was the institution of muru. This required the whänau or hapü of the wrongdoer to submit to a process whereby the whänau or hapü of the victim would be free to take for themselves the offending group’s belongings, goods or produce. Treasured personal items along with food- stores and other valuable goods could legitimately be taken, houses could

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be destroyed and in some instances it was possible that lives might be taken or injuries inflicted. The greater the significance of the parties involved, and the more serious the wrongdoing, the greater the extent of the muru that could be expected.31 It has been noted that whakamä, the notion of embarrassment or shame, was a pivotal concept in muru. Whakamä was felt, not just by the individual who had committed the wrong, but also by his or her whänau or hapü. The consequences of the individual’s actions were suffered by the collective group. There was also a powerful element of trust involved: in submitting themselves to the justice meted out by the wronged whänau, the whänau of the wrong- doer had no option but to trust in the other party’s ability to gauge the extent of action required to mend any damage to the multiple relationships affected. Muru was essentially restorative in nature, having the effect of restoring mana to the whänau and hapü of both offender and victim, and thereby re-establishing balance between them. Muru rehabilitated not only the victim but also the offender.

What do each of these examples offer us in a contemporary context? Crucial to the acceptance of manene or manuhiri in the domain of an iwi or hapü is their compliance with the tikanga of the tangata whenua: the outsider is granted such status and rights as the tangata whenua determine. Central to the resolution of a wrong-doing is the commitment of the wrong-doer’s whänau to submit themselves to the measures taken against them by the wronged party.

Let us return now to the relationship between Päkehä and Mäori today. It is generally assumed that the Treaty settlement process that has been in

31 Ministry of Justice, He Hinätore ki te Ao Mäori: A Glimpse into the Mäori World (2001) at 99-103; Mead, S Nga Tikanga Tuku Iho a Te Maori: Customary Concepts of the Maori (Department of Maori Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, 1984) at 31-46.

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progress over the past twenty years represents an attempt to resolve the injustices of the past, and that steps such as the incorporation of Mäori terms into legislation (for example, the Resource Management Act or Te Ture Whenua Mäori) represent a genuine effort on the Crown’s part to bridge the divide between Mäori and Päkehä. But how do these developments measure up against the tikanga Mäori principles governing the relationship between tangata whenua and manuhiri, or between the wrong-doer and the wronged party?

Put simply, they don’t. The Waitangi Tribunal, for instance, while having achieved a great deal through its meticulous report-writing and its ability to operate on the proverbial smell of an oily rag, is a creature of statute, its powers subject to legislative interference – as happened, for instance, following the Te Roroa report.32 Appointments to the Tribunal are made upon the recommendation of Ministers of the Crown, it is ritually starved of resources, and its recommendations routinely ignored by the Crown. When negotiating settlements with the Crown, claimants are typically presented with a “take-it-or-leave-it” bottom line, with the Crown prepared to negotiate on minor matters only. Any legislative provisions that have unforeseen consequences (unforeseen to the Crown, that is) are either amended to ensure that the impact of Mäori concepts on the operation of Päkehä law remains minimal, or they are interpreted restrictively by the courts, or both.

The problem with this approach, in terms of a tikanga Mäori analysis, is that it is the manuhiri who are dictating the way that things should be done in the tangata whenua’s domain. It is the wronged party who is being expected to submit to terms imposed by the wrong-doer. Such a

32 Waitangi Tribunal, Te Roroa Report (1992).

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method of dealing with the injustices of the past cannot possibly hope to achieve resolution. The irony of being lectured by Trevor Mallard on the necessity for Mäori to trust the perpetrators of our oppression is, quite frankly, breathtaking.

For Päkehä to gain legitimacy here, it is they who must place their trust in Mäori, not the other way around. They must accept that it is for the tangata whenua to determine their status in this land, and to do so in accordance with tikanga Mäori. This will involve sorting out a process of negotiation which is driven by the principles underpinning tikanga, a process which Päkehä do not control. There is no doubt that many Päkehä will find this challenging: their obsession with control over the Mäori-Päkehä relationship to date could almost be categorised as a form of compulsive disorder. Giving up such control requires a leap of faith on the part of Päkehä. In my view, however, nothing less will suffice if they truly want to gain the sense of belonging they so crave, the sense of identity that until now has proven so elusive.

This may seem rather intimidating to a people more used to “putting down new layers of hypocrisy”33 than confronting their most deeply-held prejudices and fears. Yet I am encouraged by the fact that there are some who are prepared to do just that. In 1986 Ray Nairn wrote of the need to get Päkehä to “name the fears they have about relinquishing control”, and looked to a time “when we can come as two peoples: Maori and Pakeha, tangata whenua and manuhiri, to negotiate a basis for our society”.34 Of course, there are Päkehä individuals who have discovered that the sky does not fall if they negotiate their personal relationships with Mäori on

33. 33  Jesson (1986) at 15.
34. 34  Nairn, R Sites no.13 (Spring 1986) 17, at 18.

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such a basis. While that in itself is cause for optimism, I encourage them not to settle for building positive relationships with Mäori on a personal level only: I urge them to use their experiences constructively, to bring about the mind-shift required amongst Päkehä society as a whole.

Perhaps it is Mike Grimshaw who best addressed the question of Päkehä identity when earlier this year he observed: “I am a Pakeha because I live in a Maori country”.35 When you think about it, there is nowhere else in the world that one can be Päkehä. Whether the term remains forever linked to the shameful role of oppressor or whether it can become a positive source of identity and pride is up to Päkehä themselves. All that is required from them is a leap of faith.

35 Grimshaw, M “What Lies Beneath”, Listener 4 September 2004, 40, at 41.

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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.