Supping with the Devil
The political commentators are puzzled. Why, after all the fuss about his links with Cameron Slater, did John Key run the risk of exchanging texts with the Whale Oil blogger about the Inspector-General’s report on the day before it was published?
It is of course true that John Key would not have foreseen that his denials would be so quickly shown to be false, and that he would be forced into a series of increasingly embarrassing and unconvincing explanations as to why he had not told the truth – “I was in a hurry”, “I couldn’t hear what I was asked”, “I misunderstood the question”, “I was trying not to be too specific”.
The price he has paid is clear. We now know that we have a Prime Minister who is prepared to mislead New Zealand if he thinks he can get away with it. But that still leaves the question – why did he take the risk, and why, of all the thousand of texts he says he receives and to which he does not reply, did he choose to reply to the one from Cameron Slater?
The answer is one that should offer no comfort to any citizen of this country. The answer is that he dare not ignore a message from Cameron Slater. And why? Because he is now Cameron Slater’s creature.
The relationship between the Whale Oil blog, the Prime Minister’s office and the Prime Minister himself was initially a convenient one from John Key’s viewpoint. Here was someone prepared to serve the Prime Minister’s interests by doing the nastiest jobs, deep in the darkness and the mire, and to require in return little more than the occasional massaging of his ego.
But as the stakes got higher, and the spotlight began to play, the power in the relationship shifted. Cameron Slater became the custodian of a huge amount of information that the Prime Minister simply could not afford to become public. For Slater, this was pure gold. The bigger the role he was seen to play, the more it inflated his ego and – crucially – the more important he became to the Prime Minister.
Slater has little to fear if the whole sordid story comes out. It would simply confirm the centrality of his role and would confirm an image of ruthlessness he has sought to cultivate. But for John Key, it is imperative that the story stays under wraps.
One word from Slater, in other words – and the Prime Minister is history. Slater holds John Key’s place in that history in the palm of his hand. If Slater calls the Prime Minister, of course that frightened man will jump to it. He will even run the risk of discussing a leaked Inspector General’s report with him – and then trying to bluster his way out of admitting that he had done so.
So, what seemed to be a mystery becomes a much more worrying truth. We have a Prime Minister who is not only careless with the truth but who is obliged, for fear of being exposed, to do the bidding of the nastiest and least principled person in New Zealand politics. Is that the Prime Minister this country wants?
You need a long spoon to sup with the devil.
Bryan Gould
1 December 2014
Kim Jong Key Is Missing
The Latest News Bulletin from CNN
“Concern is mounting in New Zealand over the whereabouts of the country’s leader, Kim Jong Key. The Great Leader has not been seen on television or heard on radio for over two hours. Observers say that his disappearance for such a long period is unprecedented. Speculation is rife that Kim Jong Key may have been the victim of a coup.
Experts suggest that the limited evidence available points to the possible involvement of one of both of his senior colleagues – Joy Stee Ven and Koh Lins Jood. Both are known to have leadership aspirations, and – unusually for a regime where the news is carefully controlled – Koh Lins Jood’s serious falling-out with The Great Leader recently has been obliquely referred to in new bulletins.
Key’s office, however, says that their only concern is that Kim Jong Key apparently suffers from a rare medical condition that means that – without the stimulus of a television camera trained upon him – he is prone to falling into a coma. “It is essential that we get him to a television studio as soon as possible,” an aide said.
His office has revealed that there had been an unfortunate incident yesterday evening when a camera malfunction meant that an interview Key was giving as he lifted weights at the World’s Strongest Man competition could not be broadcast. They say it is possible that this triggered the onset of withdrawal symptoms.
Television news broadcasters have acknowledged to overseas colleagues that Key’s absence for a whole two hours has caused them substantial problems. They concede that if the Great Leader’s absence continues into a second day, they will have to re-schedule their programming to take account of much shorter news bulletins. They also hinted that if he remains missing, there is the risk of job losses among camera crews and of some channels closing down altogether.
There is good news for some, though; the Defence Minister has apparently confirmed that if Kim Jong Key’s whereabouts remain unknown, RNZAF pilots will be given extended leave.
It is understood that an emergency Cabinet meeting has been called by Key’s Deputy, Ing Lish Bil, so that Ministers can be advised on how to answer questions and make statements about their portfolios. “Ministers will need some special coaching,” he said, “since most will never have had the experience of dealing with these matters themselves.”
There has been little impact on the stock exchange so far, and inquiries overseas have only just got under way. A White House spokesperson, asked if he knew anything about the whereabouts of Kim Jong Key, said “Who?”
Now, breaking news. The Great Leader has been found. Early reports suggest that he has no recollection of where he has been but does not intend to ask and no one else will be allowed to. He insists that he is “comfortable” with the situation. He does, however, intend to set up an inquiry as to what he was doing during the two hours of his absence. In view of her expertise in answering questions about the whereabouts of ministers, the inquiry will be conducted by former justice minister, Koh Lins Jood, and is expected to report in six months’ time. Kim Jong Key himself is not expected to give evidence.
Meanwhile, the atmosphere in the remote country has returned to normal and the media are pushing the message that, with The Great Leader back at the helm, all is well.
Bryan Gould
16 October 2014
Breaking the Shackles of Neo-Liberal Orthodoxy
Labour leaders have often been eloquent in articulating a vision of the kind of society they want; it is explaining how that vision is to be realised that seems to be the problem.
We have seen a further demonstration of this sad truth at this year’s Labour conference. Ed Miliband had good things to say about Labour’s goals, but Ed Balls made it clear that those goals would have to be achieved within the constraints of the current neo-classical orthodoxy.
The subordination of lofty aspirations to the harsh and supposedly inexorable dictates of “free-market” economics has a long and sad history in Labour politics. Harold Wilson, for example, destroyed the chances of his 1960s government with his long and ultimately fruitless battle against devaluing the pound.
Jim Callaghan signalled his acceptance that Keynesian economics had run their course when he told the 1976 Labour conference that “you can’t spend your way out of recession”.
The New Labour governments at the turn of the century, of course, had no need to undergo a Damascene conversion. They readily embraced the “free-market” orthodoxy and set about trying to produce a better society on the basis that the filthier the rich, the bigger the crumbs from their table would be.
Ed Balls has placed himself firmly in that tradition by asserting that a new Labour government would allow no let-up in austerity and no resiling from the restraint of public spending. Any progress, it seems, would have to come from re-shuffling the pack, not from cutting a new one.
The commitment to continued austerity is inevitably and correctly seen as validating, of course, the main plank in the Tory platform, and therefore immediately gives rise to the question – why should the voters trust Labour to carry it out when the Tories are available to do it with considerably more conviction?
If the voters did accept Labour’s commitment to maintain austerity, how – they might ask – could Labour promise with any credibility, in an unchanged macro-economic context, to produce different and better economic outcomes? And if Labour were to win power on that basis, why would they want to enter government in a straitjacket of their opponents’ making?
The acceptance by Labour leaders that reducing the government deficit must be the top priority seems explicable only on the basis of either a complete loss of political nerve or a total failure to understand how more successful economies operate.
Austerity policies, as the record shows, are an extremely ineffective way of bringing the deficit down. By reducing the size of the economy, they will inevitably diminish tax revenues, which means that the deficit is therefore bigger than it would otherwise be, both absolutely and as a proportion of a slower-growing GDP.
Further, with low investment in the domestic economy, so that the borrowing and lending of the household and corporate sectors roughly balance each other out, and with no action to address our lack of competitiveness, the consequent foreign payments deficit (and the borrowing from abroad that it necessitates) has to be roughly matched – as an accounting inevitability – by a government deficit.
Cutting public spending, in other words, is beside the point and largely self-defeating as a means of reducing the deficit – even if that is treated as the primary goal of policy. If we really want to get the deficit down, there is no option but to get the economy moving again, not on the basis of an unsustainable asset inflation and brief consumption boom, but of improved levels of investment, competitiveness, and trading performance.
How is that to be done? A complete alternative strategy cannot set out in a couple of hundred words here, but it is certainly not to be helped by reducing government spending. In any case, why do we single out government spending as so dangerous to stability and prudent management, when we look at what happens elsewhere in the economy?
In the real economy (and not that of fevered right-wing imaginations), 97% of our money comes into existence as credit created out of nothing by the banks. That credit is created by the stroke of a computer entry; it rests on nothing other than the banks’ willingness to lend – especially, of course, on house purchase, hence the asset inflation in the housing market.
No one seems to turn a hair at the fact that the money supply is almost totally accounted for by credit created by private companies whose sole purpose is making profits for their shareholders. On the other hand, a government that created credit for public purposes and the good of the economy as a whole (or, as the pejorative term would have It, “printed money”) would be lambasted.
Government-created money is acceptable, it seems, only when – you’ve guessed it – irresponsible lending means that the banks have to be bailed out. Then, the Bank of England will issue up to £350 billion of “quantitative easing” (equally the product of the “printing press” and, incidentally, having no appreciable inflationary consequences).
If vast amounts of money can be created for private purposes, why is it so outrageous that a government serving the public interest might create money for investment, say, in new productive capacity? That, after all, is exactly what the newly dominant economies of the Pacific Rim – China, Korea, Taiwan, and others – have done and are doing, and exactly what Shinzo Abe in Japan has returned to, after two decades of stagnation while his country applied policies recommended to them by western economists – those same economists who apparently still have Ed Balls in thrall.
Isn’t it time the Labour leadership shook off the shackles of a failed orthodoxy and learnt to think for themselves? They might then identify the means that would enable those desirable ends to be met.
Bryan Gould
25 September 2014
The Election That Left One Third of Us Behind
No one should begrudge John Key and the National party the right to celebrate an impressive election victory. It is little consolation to those who opposed them that the win is very much a personal triumph for the Prime Minister rather than for the party and government he leads.
As the tumult and the shouting die away, however, and there is time for more mature reflection, we can register a number of reasons as to why even the victors might feel a sense of unease about the outcome.
The triumphalism in some parts of the media would have us believe that everybody loves John Key and that the country is united behind him. Let us simply observe, as an antidote to such an illusion, that only one in three of eligible voters actually voted National; more than 60% of us did not join the bandwagon.
John Key himself, in his warning to his colleagues that they are not to show any arrogance, seems to understand this very well.
It will quickly be observed that other parties, and particularly Labour, did much worse. Agreed – they certainly have their own problems, but that is not the particular point I am making.
A democratic political process in which nearly a third do not participate is not in good health – especially in a country with a traditionally enviable record in terms of voter turnout.
We need to know who the nearly one million eligible voters who did not vote are, and why they stayed at home on polling day. It is not good enough for the rest of us to say that it was up to them and that, if they couldn’t be bothered, they have only themselves to blame.
We know, of course, who did make it to the polls. They identified themselves as soon as the election result became clear. They certainly included those who – against the wishes of the majority of Kiwis – bought shares in the partly privatised electricity companies and who immediately celebrated a surge in the value of their shareholdings.
It is a reasonable assumption that it also included others who saw their other shareholdings and other financial assets elsewhere immediately rise in value after the election. And those who have seen the value of their houses go up week by week, especially in Auckland, by more than some of our fellow-citizens can earn in six months – and those with good jobs and incomes, able to afford foreign holidays and fees at private schools for their children – they will also have had good reason to get to vote in favour of continuing and extending the good times represented by the status quo.
They all knew very clearly what they were voting for and had good reason to do so. But why did the nearly one million non-voters stay at home? Did they not have an even stronger reason to vote?
We have a pretty good idea of who the non-voters were. They were poor, often unemployed, poorly educated, with worse health than the rest of us, often brown-skinned, living in sub-standard housing and bringing up their children in poverty.
Did they not have everything to gain from change – a change that would not leave them languishing and invisible and falling further behind while the triumphant one in three amongst us celebrated their victory?
Why did they not do at least something to ward off the changes promised by a re-elected National government? Are they really content with the prospect of a next three years that will see their rights at work severely curtailed, that will mean their being “moved off benefits”, that will produce further cuts in the public services on which they especially depend?
The answer to these questions is disarmingly simple – but should nonetheless be of fundamental concern to all those who care about our country. They did not vote because they did not see the point.
They had no confidence that the political process took any account of their interests. They had ceased to believe anything that politicians said. They felt disengaged and confused, and convinced that there was nothing they could do to improve matters.
They are the people who are powerless and literally without hope, to whom things are done by faceless forces who have little idea of how life is for them. People who are without hope do not vote. Hopelessness has, in practical terms, disenfranchised them.
The National party might, if they are unwise, treat this with equanimity. But the party with real questions to answer is the Labour party.
How is it that the Labour party has failed to engage with what many would see as their natural constituency? What has led the Labour party to let down a million people who in earlier times would have looked to Labour to defend their interests?
As the entrails of the election are picked over, these are the questions that, for their own sake – but even more for the sake of the disenfranchised and the country as a whole – Labour must now answer. Our country cannot afford to leave so many of our fellow-citizens behind.
Bryan Gould
24 September 2014
Looking Ahead
Win or lose, there are never any final battles in politics. A defeat simply means the firing of the starting gun for the next round in a never-ending struggle.
And, especially for the left, it is the struggle that matters. Without that struggle and the effort that has gone into it, the values of fairness, compassion and tolerance would be even more submerged than they are now. Keeping them alive and relevant in hearts and minds today will ensure that they will once again be re-asserted as the political tide turns tomorrow.
In fifty years of political experience, I have lost count of the number of times that a general election result – in either New Zealand or the UK – has been hailed by one side or another as signalling a watershed in politics; the winners’ confidence in the permanence of their victory is always revealed – in short order – to be the illusion it is.
It was as recently as 2002 that the National vote slumped to 21%, while John Key’s current victory does no more than replicate Helen Clark’s similar trio of successive wins. And, as a further antidote to the immediate triumphalism of the right, let us remind ourselves that fewer than two out of five of New Zealanders entitled to vote actually cast a vote in favour of National in 2014.
But let us also be honest enough to recognise the impressive political skills that have produced the National victory. John Key is an unusually personable, skilled and effective political operator; he is entitled to the plaudits for what has been a very personal achievement. We may not like him, and dislike even more what he stands for, but the fact that this has been a victory for him rather than his party should give us ground for hope.
In any event, winning the election is “just the beginning”. John Key, with all his presentational skills, now has to face a country in which half the citizens believe that he has lied to them on matters that are central to his integrity and that of his government. As a result, it can hardly be argued that the body politic he heads is in good health.
In the meantime, it is the opposition – and particularly the Labour Party – that is faced with the uphill struggle. The National vote may not be quite as monumental as it is portrayed, but it comfortably dwarfs a Labour vote that represents less than one in five of eligible voters.
A vote as low as this is fraught with danger for an opposition party with pretensions to forming a government. Even those who want to see a change of government will begin, in a fragmented political environment, to look elsewhere for salvation.
I faced this danger as director of Labour’s UK general election campaign in 1987, when the Liberal alliance with the newly-formed Social Democrats threatened to supplant Labour as the best hope of removing the Tories. Labour didn’t win that election, but the effective campaign we ran then saved the party and boosted our vote, re-establishing Labour as undoubtedly the principal opposition and paving the way to 13 years of Labour government.
If Labour is to avoid that danger in New Zealand in 2014, the task now is twofold. First, Labour must show themselves to be an effective opposition. That means they must, in particular, resist the efforts that will undoubtedly be made by a gung-ho right-wing government to “roll back the state” – code for cutting back on public services, further eroding benefits, wages and rights at work and for running the economy even more in the interests of the big battalions. They must demonstrate to public opinion that a policy that undervalues our people and wastes our resources produces not only a society that is less fair, but also an economy that is less productive and sustainable.
Second, they must prepare now for fighting and winning the next election. They must promote a strong team of leading spokespeople (including new faces) to support the leadership – and that support must be united and whole-hearted. They must work constructively with other opposition parties and provide the intellectual and policy leadership that others will follow.
But it also means, as a preliminary step, some real soul-searching. Why is the Labour brand so unappealing? Why does it not enthuse young people in particular? Why does so much Labour policy seem to constrain rather than liberate – and therefore provide reasons for not voting Labour? Why does the new thinking that is supported by informed opinion – on a capital gains tax, on the pension age, on making Kiwisaver contributions compulsory and using them as an alternative or supplement to interest rates as a counter-inflationary tool – gain so little traction with the public?
Why have the past six years meant that the successful nine years in government prior to that count for so little in the public perception? How, in other words, does Labour remain true to the traditional values it shares with so many New Zealanders while applying those values in forward-looking , innovative and appealing ways to resolve the problems familiar to all our fellow-citizens?
Bryan Gould
21 September 2014