Sleeping Lions

The Shock

In 2007 Naomi Klein wrote The Shock Doctrine. She focused on the economic shock therapy that was administered, from Santiago to Sheffield, Nablus to New Orleans. The following year the Global Financial Crisis plunged the world into a capitalist twilight that seems to darken each year.

The revenant of Austerity Britain looms over Aotearoa New Zealand today as the current Government insists that they can cut their way to surplus, provide tax cuts, and promise recovery. In 2010, the UK Conservatives cut the state deep, instituted a punishing regime of changes to the welfare system, reduced funding for local authorities, the justice system and the arts. The economy did not recover, as promised, and average pay in the UK is the same in 2023 as it was in 2008.

It’s a fractured and exhausted nation. The 2016 vote for Brexit was a response to a right-wing campaign against the dead-eyed technocracy of the E.U, still deemed too left wing. Many saw false promises of ‘taking back control’ as a way to shake themselves out of malaise, especially when the Remain campaign could only offer more of the same. The same wasn’t great. The result hasn’t been great either. Sound familiar? It should.

The Other War

Culture war is a core element of the post-2008 shock doctrine. The ‘left’, who have never been in power in the U.K, U.S or N.Z during my lifetime, have too much power. They control the civil service, they are in the media, they stop the real will of the people. They turn your kids gay, force diversity upon you, make you Sharia law compliant. It’s the World Economic Forum, it’s George Soros, it’s the United Nations and their Agenda 31. They are the reason why the country’s going to shit, they’re to blame. 

This all sounds like conspiracy, it is. It’s what you’ll find in the frothier comment section of almost any news story on Facebook these days. But it’s also said by Ministers of State and elected representatives, it’s reported by right-wing commentators in the papers of record, it’s broadcast on surprisingly well-funded right-wing radio stations. It supports the idea that the country has been taken by these enemies, but can be taken back, by true believers.

Look at the comments below any Newshub story, following announcement of their shuttering. Or any TVNZ story, following announced staff cuts. There is a vocal component cheering on the demise of news media in this country, celebrating the end of the mainstream media. Some of this is related to the deep infected psychological wound that COVID-19 conspiracy has had on many in this country. Others are those that are lost to a world where the ‘other’ is to blame. 

Some of it echoes the Deputy Prime Minister, David Seymour, complaining that TVNZ criticises the Government and covers their slip-ups and then have the gall to ask for public money to maintain news reporting. The horror that a news organisation covers what a Government actually says and does! The same David Seymour who used the closure of the only commercial TV news gathering station to question if TVNZ was somehow to blame, as a state-owned but commercially funded station. 

What’s Going On?

We are at the beginning of a coalition government which plans to fund a multi-billion dollar tax-cut by taking a blunt axe to the state. Projects are being canceled at a dizzying pace; the desperately needed Cook Strait upgrade and new ferries, classrooms for kids from Kaitaia to Invercargill, the Affordable Water Act to address the infrastructure issues plaguing the country. 

The world-leading SmokeFree legislation has been repealed (apparently not to ensure a tidy tax-take), as has the Maori Health Authority. Government departments have been told to find 6-7% of savings, purportedly in ‘back-office’ except as it’s become increasingly clear - staff on the front line will have to go, from customs to conservation.

Simultaneously, 50% of the televised news media in this country is going off-air permanently by July. Of the remaining, a cut of 10% of the workforce is due around the same period. The ability to identify the contradictions between Government policy and the reality, and report upon the consequences, is being reduced. Think of the reporting done on politics in the last six years, then halve it. Then cut another bit off. That’s the best politics news reporting we have now.

No wonder some Ministers are so pleased, they know there’s less chance of being held to account.

This is something new

The change in the ideology of government and governing from Chris Hipkins’ bloodless and apologetic tail-ender to the brute-force Frankenstein’s monster Chris Luxon assembled is radical. It’s a change that some members of the Opposition, especially Labour, don’t fully understand. And by not understanding the nature of the new coalition, they empower the Government.

This government is not self-doubting, is not easily swayed and does not lean toward delay, deferral and withdrawal. This government dismisses their critics immediately and brutally, regardless of evidence, in a mirror of the way the last Labour government tried to appease their critics, time after time, whether or not there was any substance to the criticism. This government has the will-to-power that their predecessors lacked so sorely, and god damn it they are going to exercise it.

If this sounds like praise, it is not. It’s a reality that must be accepted.

I fear NZ Labour think that it’s a one-term government, the same mistaken belief that led to three terms of National between 2008 and 2017. The current Government is far less restrained than John Key and Bill English’s, not just in legislating but in prosecuting the culture war that National’s support parties so badly need to maintain their support.

Could you have imagined Peter Dunne unfussedly answering a question about whether there should be a pogrom of academics? Could you have imagined 2015 David Seymour doing that? Things have changed, and not for the better of the country, but for the betterment of NZ First and ACT.

Cultural and Economic Synthesis

To implement their economic ideology this government is intent on rolling back the state, ensuring tax revenue is funneled into wasteful Public Private Partnerships for generations, and altering the social contract and even the constitutional underpinnings of the country. They’re intent on doing this quickly in a way that Opposition parties will find incredibly difficult to undo.

We’ve seen it from the overlooked rise of Viktor Orban in Hungary, Trumpism in the US and the slow trudge to annihilation of the UK Conservatives - right-wing populism that disregards established and institutional norms to pursue an economic and cultural agenda which undermines and degrades the ability to critique and respond, and turning managed decline into the only option available. It has arrived in Aotearoa New Zealand, it is here now.

The free-speech supporting Libertarian Deputy Prime Minister calling for an academic to resign or be sacked for tweeting about Government policies. The other free-speech supporting Social Conservative Deputy Prime Minister lashing out at a women’s rugby team for daring to call them out in a pre-match haka. That was just this week. Where’s the Prime Minister? He’s making corporate noises, but being rapidly overtaken by the culture warriors he’s empowered.

To implement their cultural ideology, one of fracture, rupture and isolation, both Deputy Prime Ministers need to continue their campaign against their ‘enemies’. The media, academic criticism, anyone protesting their policies at all. The LGBTQi community, but also Tangata Whenua, must be publicly degraded and shamed to ensure diversion, distraction and to keep the facebook comments section laugh-emoji’ing along with them until the next election.

What is to be done?

Labour are reaching for the same toolkit that the last Labour Opposition used; “We’ll start petitions, and make people sign it!” “We’ll get some good footage on Parliament TV of the leader being angry”, that nobody will watch. We’ll announce that Labour at the next election will be “very different from the last election”, which truly could be a curse or a blessing. In short, we’ll just be very quiet and wait our turn. 

They’re the biggest party of Opposition, which means they get first shout to respond to Government issues. If all they can muster is lukewarm platitudes, or vaguely upset comments, that’s just not good enough. We’re about to lose 50% of our televised news media, if the Labour Party cannot make those on-air minutes count then what the hell are they doing?

It’s time to get serious about stoking public outrage about what the Government is doing. That means more than just playing by the rules that their opponents absolutely refuse to. It’s time to get out of Wellington, to get into every region, town and city, community and cultural group and clearly point out “what the government took from you” and raise the temperature.

If that means sticking Kieran Macca in a truck and trailer and running him around the country, so be it. It’s about getting your elected representatives in front of the people who represented them. We need to see fewer Labour MP’s on TV, and more of them in the community. They also need to radically up their media response game. There needs to be incisive comment on everything, whenever the Government do anything, there needs to be a snappy quote to go in the article from an opposing view. No more free rides for Government bullshit.

(Same goes for you Te Paati Maori and Greens, it’s time to write back and fight back)

It’s also time to actually make good on Labour’s long-standing relationship with the unions. The public sector is under attack, and the knock-ons from the wide range of Government cuts is going to stick people on the unemployment line across the country. The CTU was better than the entire Labour Campaign at the last election, maybe Labour could learn something from them.

The Risk

The big risk here is that Labour drift, that they watch the economic and cultural transformation take place in front of them. They decide that actually the Government aren’t that radical, and they surely won’t implement all of the policies they are dead-set on, and really they’re just hard-working Parliamentarians like us. We just have to play the game the way they want us to, and eventually we’ll work ourselves back in.

They spend the next year doing the bare minimum as an opposition party, using their trusty opposition toolkit of failure. Eighteen-months before the next election triangulate towards whatever the Government has done. Maybe resurrect a policy that didn’t work last time, but surely will work this time. Nothing too radical though, because they don’t want to be attacked in a way which they have never attacked themselves.

They meekly accept that the right-wing in this country sets the agenda, and that their job is to manage it sensibly. This would also mean that the ire of this Labour Party would be more often turned on the Greens and Te Paati Maori, to prove to hardcore National voters that they can be trusted. They still won’t vote for you, mind. Especially after three years of DPM’s Winston and David conducting their culture war.

Or they could accept that the economic, political and cultural conditions of Aotearoa New Zealand are at stake. Not in 2026, but right here and now in 2024. If they do, then maybe they’ll finally decide to rise like lions. After all, they’ve been slumbering for decades. Time to shake the dew, and make people remember that they are many, and the Government is few.

John Palethorpe is a former educator and current communications professional.