Hayek’s Bastards and the Cooker Pot

As the tide goes out on New Zealand election season after the traditional post-election conference debrief and Hipkins having presented himself for a round of what-me-worry interviews, there’s been a little circuit of right wing discussion in local media about Labour’s loss, praising the Taxpayer’s Union and New Zealand Initiative for consistently putting out press releases, white papers and manipulating media narratives. It’s all out in the open now. The zombified political economy of the 1980s and 1990s is dragging itself onward, with the embedding of this attitude and stance towards reality at the highest levels observable in the networks that surrounded and funded the ACT, National and New Zealand First parties in 2022 and 2023.

Not to say that the much-publicised ‘mood for change’ was a complete fabrication. In the aftermath of the 2022 parliament occupation, a traumatic summer of flooding and storm damage, and the working population being pummelled with interest rate rises and exorbitant housing, power and grocery costs over winter, the election was always going to be vibes-based, more heat than light. Rather, the kayfabe contrivance was to draw all this out as the stopping point for analysis. A vague floating signifier to project onto, enabling specious political marketing constructs like ‘tax relief’ and ‘ute tax’ to be amplified on social media and leach into headlines.

Helping all this along was the unexpected resignation of Jacinda Ardern, followed by a string of blunders and lapses of discipline by senior cabinet ministers drawing the focus of the media and hostile opponents, making it more and more difficult to get policy explanations and values-based messages out to the public. Unfortunately, it wasn’t ever obvious to the public that Labour was committed to strong and clear messaging to begin with. At the end of a three year cycle plagued by a seemingly endless stream of public-funded project failures and infrastructure collapses, the ‘mood for change’ frame seemed self-evident. Labour’s passionless initial campaigning appeared as a fitting conclusion to a term of paper megaprojects that faltered at the ‘shovel ready’ stage, lacking broad explanation and justification to the general public built-up over time. The party was seemingly unprepared and unable to put resources into pushing back against suburban consumerist inertia and increasingly cooked business-as-usual interests.

If you looked at the election through press gallery filters, it didn’t appear like the country was queuing up to vote for a hard right turn en-masse. More that the bean-counting homeowners and landlords who’d unprecedentedly flocked to Labour at the height of the pandemic response (back when public health actually meant something) were a wrecking ball swinging predictably back to National.

Under the surface, another story was roiling. One of multinational coordination, multi-track influence operations and policy development, linking business lobbyists, billionaires, ideologues and enthusiastic politicians. The point this coordination was broadly signalled in public was around the time Christopher Luxon did a London speech to Tufton Street and Westminster Trussites and appointed Matt Burgess from the New Zealand Initiative to a major policy and research role. With more than a year’s lead time before the election, such re-entryism by Rogernomes and Atlas Network cultists could have been widely canvassed and critiqued within the media. In the end, there wasn’t much discussion or debate over this direction at all.

From Alan Gibbs displaying ‘HAYEK’ as a personalised plate at the jubilant height of 1980s reforms to Taxpayer’s Union and Groundswell wheeling around the country in painted-up minibuses amplifying grievances, we’re stuck in a Groundhog Day of perpetual austerity and public debt purity culture where values of empiricism, community and solidarity are continually undermined. Apparently, 40 years after Reagan, Thatcher and Rogernomics, there is still no alternative. Despite being structurally little more than incorporated societies for the niche appreciation of late 20th Century policy arrangements running dial-a-comment services, these local arms of the global ‘freedom movement’ are now staggeringly well resourced in our country, tumescent with cashflow and media access (to the point where the TPU was commissioning major electoral polls in 2023).

Of course, political and social reality is always more fluctuating and irreducible than simple narratives convey. A very common criticism of the left—particularly in Aotearoa—is the paranoid tendency to get far too fixated on the malignancy and illegitimacy of free market think tanks and political donations, misjudging the limits to influence and the relatively banal activities of lobbyists. For many years, academics, left wing writers and organisations railed against the Business Roundtable and Roger Kerr, pioneers of the always-on style of engagement with local media. This ongoing objection had little impact on changing the way this influence was framed. For some, speaking out against Rogernomics led to their media access being cut off and career opportunities curtailed. Given this conflicted background, it’s easy for questions about the role of right wing pressure groups and influence networks to be dismissed as conspiracism. After all (as lobbyists are so fond of telling us), corporations and business leaders have a democratic right to influence government policy as much as anyone else.

For the past few years, the World Economic Forum has been the fall guy for capturing deranged populist attention. Representing the stage-managed public principles side of capitalist technocracy and the neoliberal organisational culture interwoven between politicians, public officials, industrialists and the think-tank world, it was an easy target and perhaps a low hanging fruit. I can only speak for my own perspective on this, but I was massively thrown off guard in 2020 seeing this banal brand of futurism become the target of global right wing conspiracy fervour, because I’d always viewed the Atlas Network and extractivist lobby in a very similar light. All part of a plethora of compromised institutions with diverging conceptions of the future, grown from the cobbled-together ideological ruins of post-Bretton Woods globalisation. In perpetuating coarse-grained cliches of command and control rather than analysing power in all its complex forms, we risk regressive populist discourse becoming common belief across Anglosphere politics. In the red corner: Team L and the United Nations/WEF; and in the blue corner: Team T and the junktanks. Amplifying this lack of nuance feels like a dangerous on-ramp to fascism.

Both the paranoid view of think tanks and its easy dismissal as conspiracy rest on a caricature of power, fixating on coercive domination and top-down control rather than the less overt forms of conditioned power expressed through strategic communications, prioritisation of issues, message discipline, frame-making and belief-shaping. Acknowledging that these organisations are not the root cause of all our problems, but purpose-built vehicles for furthering particular shared interests does not make documenting and critiquing their influence any less important. If these organisations are merely dogmatic virtue signallers and press release factories providing debate, why has their funding increased so much? Why are so many people on the right suddenly so interested in donating to all this? What political outcomes are they striving for?

In the runup to the election, some weeks saw thousands of words of column space in Stuff and the Herald and hundreds of RNZ and ZB minutes filled by more than ten Atlas-aligned think tank staff members and affiliates attacking public service neutrality, RBNZ’s dual mandate, fair pay agreements, progressive tax reform, and the education system. In early December after the coalition government formed, the Herald ran a missive by Roger Partridge under a gloating headline stating that Fair Pay Agreements were never going to work. As with previous columns, Partridge was bylined as chair of the ‘non partisan’ New Zealand Initiative. Electoral Commission records reveal that he had personally donated more than $15,000 to ACT’s election campaign.

Beyond blogs and social media, Newsroom has been the only local press outlet consistently publishing articles that directly question the purpose and agenda of these organisations. Identifying the corrosive effects of unconstrained corporate donations and influence operations on our democracy has become an emerging theme. TVNZ recently put out an unsettling mini-doco about coordinated sealioning of public debate in the Australian Voice referendum, highlighting how the same interests are mobilising to use the same tactics against Māori. This included an astonishingly rare mention of the Atlas Network on primetime TV. While an important step towards wider public understanding of the context, the impact of this analysis was blunted by appearing well after the election. Perspective from critics has been forced to shift towards countering the inevitable rather than shutting it down at the source.

Only a handful of commentators and critics have routinely discussed the tacit bipartisan agreement constraining public debt and tax to GDP ratio (memorably labelled as the ‘30/30 mantra’ by economic and political journalist Bernard Hickey). It’s largely ignored in political discourse, treated almost like an open trade secret or technocratic triviality, so self-evident it has no value to discuss or lead with in headlines. This permanently locked-in state of austerity is one of the leading contributors to systematic underinvestment in infrastructure, education, transport, welfare and other public services. The custom of blaming the previous government for poorly managing public debt (catalysed and amplified in media by the constant drumbeat of partisan reckons cosplaying as impartial analysis) should be understood in this wider context as the narcissism of small differences. After 2020, COVID lockdowns, mask mandates, large bureaucratic reforms and the Fair Pay Agreements became markedly intertwined in the right wing imagination as radicalising influences.

Just when we most need clarity around this, too few are engaged in adequate public discussion of the major competing social theories of social reproduction and spontaneous order. One of the consequences of this for the left is a broad lack of understanding and consensus of common ground and points of disagreement around the role of markets, bureaucracy and public ownership in our society, a sticking point that hampers our ability to effectively mount a cohesive intellectual and organised response to the zone being flooded with shit and the extrusion of pre-written policy and corporate lobbying into our politics and media.

The ongoing efforts of market radicals, libertarians and neoliberals have terraformed society and culture to such an extent that it can’t be put back in the bottle, but this coordinated international project to uncouple market control from democratic oversight has never been complete or total. As the usual suspects stumble and fumble over imported culture wars and cheerlead for genocide while treating extractivism, individualism, inequality, and extreme commodification and privatisation of resources as indisputed and settled facts of moral and social reality, the Aotearoa left has an opportunity to grow a strong resurgent response, building on our cultural strength of synthesising and adapting knowledge and insights from indigenous, union and liberation struggles all over the world to our own unique local context.

Regardless of what happens with this temporary hodge-podge of a government and our fragile hollowed-out media ecosystem, our urgent imperative in domestic politics is to mobilise in support of our Māori and trans whanau already subject to divisive attacks. In 2024, we must also invest as much as we can into the long slow work of building alternative frameworks for power, policy direction and visions for the future of Aotearoa. From transport, urban design and water, through to welfare, wealth taxes and the role of the state and Te Tiriti, we need to widely publicise and practice a cultural shift towards rejuvenating values of maintenance and care of infrastructure and services, alongside a variety of plans for growth and development that are deliverable and inspire popular support. A significant lesson we can learn from Labour’s recent defeat is that successful pursuit of policies such as public housing, higher density walkable neighborhoods and light rail requires building much greater momentum in advance in order to push political parties and media to come to where the public is at, rather than leading the public along.

Mutual aid must also be at the forefront of our planning and action in the face of future risks of droughts, flooding, cyclones, coastal erosion and the looming background threat of an Alpine Fault rupture. With climate change, resource depletion, pandemics and war forcing mass migration, agriculture and supply chain shocks around the world, New Zealand’s fence-sitting and sleepwalking rentier capitalism at the margins of the global economy will be forced to evolve and adapt, one way or another.

Let‘s rise to the moment and meet these challenges, rather than follow the desire of the right to remain wallowing on discounted deck furniture, clinging to suburban car dependency and myths of AUKUS exceptionalism.

Mark Rickerby is a writer, designer, artist and programmer in Ōtautahi–Christchurch.