“I first became aware of Cafca, improbably enough, you may well think, while I was a visiting Fellow for a term at Nuffield College, Oxford in 2005. I had set myself the task, while away, of writing a book about the global economy, which seemed to me at the time to be a rapidly developing and not entirely welcome phenomenon – and I set myself the task of evaluating its impact on two markedly different economies, the United Kingdom and New Zealand.

The first problem I encountered was that the Bodleian Library, despite its great resources, was somewhat short of up-to-date statistics about the New Zealand economy, so I then gravitated (by what route, I’m not quite sure) to Cafca and Murray Horton, as a reliable source of facts and figures about the New Zealand economy and its place in the global economy.

The book that eventually emerged in 2006 was entitled “The Democracy Sham – How Globalisation Devalues Your Vote”. In the introduction to the book, I defined the global economy as ‘a world economic order in which capital, trade, production, information and technology flow to and from the destinations determined by market forces without having regard to the barriers erected by national or regional governments, policies and jurisdictions.” I went on to say that “ Even this, however, fails to capture the essential element of the contemporary global economy – the freedom it confers on international capital to roam the world, seeking the conditions most favourable to its interests and recognising little obligation to pay regard to the requirements of elected governments and the populations whose interests they represent… International capital has, in other words, fundamentally altered the balance of power between itself and other interests…It is the ability of capital to move freely that has transformed the world economy, so that it is now dominated by a single view of what economic policy should be about.”

I look back in this way because it is easy, in contemporary New Zealand, to focus on individual instances of unwelcome or inappropriate “investments” by foreign interests, and to see only “the trees” and not “the forest”. The “foreign control of Aotearoa” of Cafca’s title is not, in other words, brought about and constituted only by individual purchases or investments, but is – rather – a process, constant and cumulative, by which capital has learnt how to circumvent and bypass the safeguards erected in the public interest by democratic governments, not least our own.

The warnings I issued in 2006 about the impact this would have on our economy and society have – sadly – been more than amply borne out by our subsequent experience. The price we pay for becoming part of a “global economy” run in the interests of international capital is a heavy one and is currently being paid by the dispossessed, the unemployed, the sick, and those who are members of minorities, however defined.

And, our freedom to choose our own way forward (and, hopefully, towards a better and more just society), has been greatly constrained as the nostrums and dictums of international capital have taken hold in our domestic political discourse and now seem to shape that discourse and to define for many of our citizens what is and is not acceptable and supportable.

We need look no further for an illustration of that unwelcome truth than the glee with which Shane Jones has introduced what he describes as a “Fast-Track process” for serving the interests of international capital at the expense of those that would ordinarily be thought of as worthy of protection by our own democratically elected government.