PO Box 2 Blackball

It’s a confusing time politically. Outrage has proved useless as the millions walking the streets in protest against the genocide in Gaza and the West Bank are ignored. Freedom of speech is curtailed in Western democracies. Surveillance increases. The shift towards a proto fascism gains traction. Feudal rentier billionaires gain authority and control.  The digital world becomes ever more invasive and controlling and AI seriously begins to colonise communication. A new wave of imperialism surges and the Left is disordered ideologically and practically as the New Year brings a cascade of donation requests. A free Palestine becomes a romance as the genocide continues to be funded and abetted. A further slow genocide takes place for Cuba. Air power including drones which simply destroys infrastructure becomes the modus operandi of political thuggery. The climate crisis reaches a tipping point. In the States the economic basis of political advocacy organisations is threatened by a change to tax law. The small beacon of hope, Rojava, where a socialist, anarcho syndicalist state structure based on the liberation of all identities, is seriously threated by Turkey and Iran. Despite a lurch to the right and a return to the neo liberal model we are so far, sufficiently distanced, to potter along half decently but will be drawn into the mess in our usual self-effacing way. The assassination of a health insurance CEO resonated widely as a moment of justice, sending a whole caste scurrying for security and protection.

Are we in fact in a situation somewhat similar to pre revolutionary Russia, where the occasional act of domestic terrorism revealed the realities of the terror of the system, even while it intensified that reality? What must we insist on? For a beginning, innocence is not an option. Organisations that depend on charity are overly vulnerable. Truth telling is necessary and the hard dialogues must be held. What are we aiming for? What world is possible? What has to be given up? What about ‘the workers’? What is ‘the people’? What collaborations are rejected? Do we need to stop being polite? How do we protect our organisations? Where is the rhythm? What is the antithesis? Is there a counter hegemony? And of course, What is to be done?

As Trump assembles a team of fascists and we know a new McCarthyism will take place, the Left are left gob-smacked by the realisation of the depth of the rout, mutterings of equity and justice from the academy increaingly marginalised, shivering from the realisation of who voted for him – even Afro American, Latino, Middle Eastern people, women… Our beliefs can become platitudes and a testing time lies ahead. Are we capable of resisting the terror? Do we have the structures?

It will be horrific for Palestinians as the genocide and Nakbar proceeds. Cuba is also in the firing line bigtime. As is Iran. Expressions of moral outrage will no longer be enough. Is there a generation of disenchanted youth who will eat the beast from within? In some ways the soccer riots in Europea against Israeli fans bring hope. When the violence penetrates to the centre, the establishment may lilsten. They will shout and condemn but when property is threatened, they sometimes listen, despite themesleves.

And what of the UN? Salvageable? And the climate crisis? And BRICS as an alternative global order? Difficult times requiring political organisation of a resolute kind. Webinars and left wing branding will not bring down the Empire. Nor long-winded legal machinations. Nor performative gesturing adding to the spectacle.

This is a fight for life.

With the absolute clarity of the current period of genocide in Northern Gaza, the absolute clarity of Israeli intent on cleansing the West Bank and Gaza of Palestinians whether by death or expulsion and the world’s refusal to intervene, any pretence of there being a moral global order disappears. We are left with the fact that we have reached a new stage in the decline of the Western colonial project and need to acknowledge that nation-state gangs have taken over. This must be accompanied by a further realisation that warring gangs are unlikely to solve any of the pressing issues and that we are left with opportunism and narcissism and that the spectacle which bemuses will become increasing manipulative and psychotic.

But what do we do? – as a residential cruise ship for millionaires named The World (but without any refugees on board) enters Wellington Harbour?

Visiting Invercargill we joined the local Palestinian Support Network as they protested in the local supermarkets against the selling of Israel sourced products, in particular Obela hummus. They were good people and it was a privilege to join them. But when we went home to family only the eleven year old was interested. You what? You went into a supermarket and took stuff off the shelves without permission? They didn’t try and stop you? He took some convincing. Palestinian protestors become in fact a different species. So that the  puzzle of the other 49993 local people who are witnessing a live-streamed genocide without protest becomes slightly less puzzling – and I’m not being critical of Invercargill here – it is the same everywhere. For some, protest is foreign, as is the issue. Some are scared off by visa requirements. There’s the danger of getting known in a smallish city. Some will have registered the ineffectiveness of the moral outrage protest. After all 100 million people protesting the Iraq invasion had no effect. How many have protested this genocide with no response from the Empire?

As the international protest turns more to the boycott, it does take it into the tetchier and more serious territory of economic interests. Quite simply, if Israel was denied weapons and fuel, the war would stop.. The Israeli economy could be crippled by an economic embargo such as is placed on Cuba, and its identity undermined by education, cultural and sporting boycotts.  If weapons were no longer manufactured because workers, supported by unions, were no longer willing to make them, wars would stop. But it’s not seriously happening. And if it started to, there would be a crunch point which would be very volatile indeed.

It all becomes self interested in a way. The group were pleased with their action and they should be. There is always the energy that results from performance, plus the video on facebook, the comments of passers by, the moral reward from having participated. We exist. It is no different from any performance. So, the performances compete for position in the performance cacophony which is the modern political scene.

So, change is incremental. I do wonder whether the constant simple non-judgemental questioning of the uncommitted would be useful? Do you know what’s happening?  How do you feel about it? Why aren’t you with us? A bit of a door knocking campaign, a collation of the answers into a theatre piece. Trying to puzzle the complex web behind it all.

The providers of social services to children and whanau who contract to Oranga Tamariki but sometimes other state institutions like health and education, are currently under attack by the coalition government who seem dictated to by ACT and NZ First to a surprising degree. As Gordon Campbell has pointed out the minor parties, cobbling together something like 12% of the vote are running the policy show. It is far worse than First Past The Post.

The neo liberal and managerial ‘revolution’ in the late 1980s and 1990s created social dislocation and unemployment as production moved offshore or became centralised. The agenda: rid the state of assets and their management, plus the management of social provision, because the state’s bad at management for a variety of reasons: its staff are comfortable, in a job for life, bureaucrats and the system is subjected to vote grabbing, political opportunism.  Where the state must still be involved, separate funder and provider (that is, operate within the structure of managerialism). The state becomes funder of what the private sector cannot really do (although the private sector would like to do everything where there’s a possible profit) and maintains accountability. The providers(whether for profit or not for profit) provide diversity and efficiency.

Initially the community providers were critical of what was happening (and were promoting a better model, or at least a return to social democracy) as, at the same time, they picked up some of the pieces. But by the end of the 1990s the state as funder was controlling the providers through criteria and reporting requirements. Some providers grew as the requirements became stricter and more voluminous – getting rid of the small scale and the amateur (running a performing arts course for 10 students involved as much policy as running a polytech).   You even began to get multinationals entering the scene. Any criticism of the system per se, other than administratively, disappeared.

There have always been tensions: Corporates making product can separate divisions: management, R&D, design, production (go where labour is cheap); and the market (plus the brand) is the reporter of outcomes. But even in business there were problems. The state has sometimes had to buy back assets (Kiwirail, Air NZ for example) for the private sector can sometimes just asset strip then bugger off and then there was the subprime mortgage fiasco …

And when it comes to social provision it is much more complex.  Provision is not a product and outcomes are harder to measure. Sometimes, as with Oranga Tamariki, the state, as well as the funder, has remained one of the providers. In fact, the state continues to provide a great deal: the corrections service, education and health; even though the private sector tries to get hold of as much as it can (private hospitals, private schools, radiology etc). The community-based, not for profit provider has become the NGO, with tendencies toward expansion into corporate scale, even some multinational sinews forming. Tino rangatiratanga makes it even more complicated and dense. Or could it provide clarity?

So, what are the politicians up to at the moment? Ideologically geriatric, they are probably just trying to strip out the state and the NGO sector is seen as part of the state: downsize the funder, downsize the provider. All these dead beats need to get their shit together and get on like everyone else rather than be a burden on the taxpayer. Or go to jail. And then we might start a factory in the prison – return to the workhouse. And get a brown face to front it.

In terms of opposing this latest piece of demolition which it will cost a lot to fix and meanwhile the most vulnerable suffer, the comparison in cost of ‘fixing’ a child and whanau as opposed to accommodating someone in prison is a key argument.

They remain embarrassed by dead or beaten up children.

ACT and NZ First are ignorant shits and National is gutless.

Watching Ka Whawhai Tonu in Greymouth’s Regent Cinema, with whanau and two other people was a revelation. Finally, NZ filmmaking has reached maturity. The action, beautifully restricted to virtually a single location, the defensive stockade at Ōrakau, has the real time flow of a Greek tragedy.  With the emphasis on the young, the future is being preserved via the inevitably doomed but heroic attempt to hold the defensive line against the colonialists. The two teenage protagonists are beautifully imagined: the reluctant spirit channeller and the half caste, traumatised by his guilty, possessive, militaristic  Pākeha father. The te reo dialogue and subtitles are both vibrant and resonant.

But it is the authenticity and honesty of the cultural portrayal which is, for me, new. These are two warrior cultures  clashing, with all the intricacy of the Māori warrior culture on display – from iwi rivalry to slavery, to ritual sacrifice, to the mana, wisdom and occasional irony of the rangatira.  ‘Learn to lie better’ is surely a classic survival tool of realpolitic. The spiritual confusion of recent conversion to Christianity, the mana and self possession of the women, the cheekiness and charm of the kids, are all on display. In contrast, the colonial soldiers are scared and confused, faced with the life and death of serial slaughter. Finally, the fine portrayal of the boy’s complex father: well on the way to the racist ideology that will come to rule the country, an ideology derived from greed, the need to conquer, confusion and guilt, even a parody of love. There is no romanticism here, no persecutor/victim/rescuer syndrome and that is a great relief.

It is a brave and uncomfortable film, occasionally visceral in its impact, the sabre/taiaha duel a symbolic highlight. Finally, the back story, the skeleton in the boy’s closet, is left to near the end, enabling the concluding image of the boy’s kuia, still living in an autonomous zone in Te Urewera welcoming his return to his turangawaewae.

Politically, this becomes the message, the need for the autonomous zone, whether it be the King Country of Rewi Maniapoto or the seclusion of Te Urewera, or an authentic Aotearoa film culture.  

Congratulations to Mike Jonathan and Tim Worrell, both of whom have earned this moment through decades of cultural and artistic pilgrimage. I salute you.

When I was working on bicultural theatre projects in the early 1980s I would on occasion listen to Karlite Rangihau telling stories of pre Pākeha Tuhoe culture and think, What a wondrous film that story would make. Given that this is Mike Jonathan’s first feature perhaps that is a path he might venture upon.