politics

Just a thought

Given the current global order and its leakage south e.g. the Charlie Kirk vigils held around the country and throughout the South Pacific, it is possible (and without being accused of heading down a rabbit hole) that local lefties and community activists should have structures in place which can resist a fascist revival. Outrage, protest, faith in the judicial system, certain constitutional safeguards and the party system (of late there is talk of reviving the Alliance) may lack sufficient coherence and resilience.

Since, some years ago, sitting and chatting on a bus alongside a committed activist who had literally thrown her adult life into the hands of God and his followers for her accommodation and daily sustenance as she moved around the country, I have been aware of the organisational skill, commitment and capacity of the Christian nationalist right. In the US, tea parties, MAGA and organisations like Turning Point have provided a grass roots base of ambition and resilience.

We could be only an election away from a significant shift to the right in Aotearoa. Of course, hopefully not, but, on the left, is there a need for cells, playing with identity, an increased commitment, keeping an eye out for infiltration, and worrying about communication safety?

Just a thought.

October 1, 2025 0

Working on Brecht

This year we have chosen the German playwright, Bertolt Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle as the classic for our Blackball Bathhouse production. I’ve never directed a Brecht before. The cast size is usually formidable and there’s a sense that it needs a large stage and technical requirements that would be a challenge for the community scale on which I have always worked. And then there’s always the ‘mystery’ of his distancing techniques, using song, scene titles and exposing the techniques of illusion to prevent easy emotional involvement, with a lot of these techniques now run of the mill; but as well the sense that Brecht is very good at emotional involvement – who could ever forget the silent scream of Mother Courage as she discovers the death of her son?

I have though, worked a lot using the techniques of Augusto Boal, acknowledged as Brecht’s successor and someone who has more thoroughly realised Brecht’s aims of making the audience actively aware of the underlying structures of oppression. For Brecht remained in the mainstream theatre, in the West playing to the usual middle class theatre goer. In East Berlin, his theatre had state support and could operate without the stringencies of market forces. In the 21^st century West, Brecht productions professionally have become few and far between but he is often produced by colleges and the amateur actor suits his work, except of late, the consumer – identity politics – social media- individual has a sense of personality that feels a long way away from the peasant or old time soldier.

As I worked on a manageable size script and something that will work in the old bathhouse, I have struggled to find a way in, to find a resonance that will make a production live. Slowly and unusually, I have begun to unpack and personally align with, the subjectivity at work, the personality of the writer, the psychological drivers, the social relations at work or desired, rather than the political dynamics and began to realise that this was his goal, to show the relations beneath oppressive economic and political systems and that this is, in our current society, a useful task. Think of the chaos of Trump era capitalism and the relations of greed, venality, violence and corruption at work, more important than the politics. In fact these social relations are the politics. The market and nationalism are mere disguise.

And with Brecht there is the hope of better relations, of friendliness between strangers, of justice within a society, simple goals, surely realisable, but then? In fact the simplicity is almost overwhelming. Brecht’s aesthetic, which is what productions often focus on, is tied to the mystifications of capitalism. Underneath is this simple desire for a better world which is driving the almost boyishly naïve writer.

September 16, 2025 0

Denouement

As the Gaza genocide reaches its denouement, the horror worsens. Now the starving Palestinians are pushed into a narrow strip of land to the south, where a game of Russian roulette is played as they are picked off when they scavenge for food. Gangs are armed by the IDF to create even more havoc. When the situation becomes equal to that of the death camps the fence which separates the area from the Sinai will be breached and the the remaining population will pour throughthe hole into the desert where presumably, aid organisations will be allowed to tend to a now homeless and stateless population; the fence will be restored and the genocide complete.

Meanwhile a global order without ethical framework watches the event as yet another spectacle. The West, China and Russia continue to trade with Israel, and the Arab nations build super yachts or are subservient to their Western masters. Only the ordinary people express outrage – to no avail – the only hope would be a conscious united working class willing to bring the sorry system down.

The puppeteers trash the puppet stage

Punch and Judy joust with bombs in their teeth

The spies screech with laughter

What a piece of work is man.

June 17, 2025 0

Contradictions

The economic trajectory of the charity is suddenly of interest because of the cuts to human services and a move to dismantle the state and trash its role in the maintaining of what’s left of social democracy.

Charity began as a Christian duty of citizenship, both a material offering from those with plenty to those in need, but also an offer of Christ-like love; something akin to aroha. The church itself, via nuns and monks, gave alms and succour to the poor.

With the advent of capitalism, the very rich gave some of their money to the poor or to support good works done by others for a number of reasons: the limits of private consumption, to continue the concept of Christian charity, to feel good – the poor can be interesting, grateful and sometimes irascible, to flirt with loss, to have control of things at the community level and to avoid revolutionary fervour. The administration became formalised with the creating of charities so that others can add to the coffers of the rich. So you get the Bill Gates Foundation and the like. The state plays ball by giving tax free status to the work of the charity and a tax credit to those who donate.

The NGO charity enters the scene, doing some of the governments work and being paid to do so by the state. This becomes unstable when the entrepreneurial charity spawns profit making companies which donate profit back to the charity, but can also use the model to avoid tax. And then there are multinational charities with a specific expertise setting up and seeking government and sometimes private funds in a variety of countries. A false yet competitive market begins to operate. With charter schools, but also with some health and other initiatives, the relationship with the state provider of similar services becomes tetchy and ideological, for the new right is intent on dismantling the state, with the very rich (with various fancies in mind), wanting to establish and have control of company towns and city states and colonies in outer space or they have the impulse to comfortably bunker down as the planet dissolves.

Diversity becomes a contested model with the private provider arguing that they are filling niche needs. At the same time new right ideologues are rubbishing the diversity established by the ‘woke’ bureaucracy as they administer what’s left of the social democratic state.

On the Left, the anarcho syndicalists are also wishing to radically change the nation state, advocating instead a federalist model, with local control of the commons and the tax take and mutual aid groups providing services. In some ways they mirror the new right but with a different, communist goal in sight.

The only clarity in these puzzling times is to peer with a Marxist eye at the relations of production and to see who owns and/or controls the means of production. If the charter school is owned and run by a co-operative of parents, teachers, students and support workers, leaving the state to provide funding and to monitor overall standards, well and good. If not, forget it. Same with everything else.

This new model could replace the charity model which is increasingly fraught with contradiction.

May 15, 2025 0

Alarum Bells

I seem to remember some years back, ACT leader, David Seymour Dancing with the Stars, which was not a pretty sight. Now he seems to be venturing into the stand up comic business, in which he has greater ability. The routine is that of a pompous little prat who can’t organise a school lunch programme trying to change our constitution and transform the regulatory routine against all advice. From a perfectly sensible framework of local food for local kids made by local providers he is now having to bring in packed lunches from Aussie. Perhaps he’d like to import a tiriti relationship as well? Mmmm.The sight of our David as Deputy Primie Minister is sure to have the audience in stitches.

More generally ACT ministers are proving a disaster, from a Minister for Children with a personal grudge dismembering social service provision, to a Minister of Workplace relations who won’t meet with the unions, to a culturally illiterate Minister of the Arts – this from a party which preached good management.

Like all neo-liberals (I think we have to call them neo neo-liberals by now) they are brain dead zombies chanting slogans, Unfortunately they seem to have led National into the same abyss of idiocy.

And then catching by accident, Winston Peters’ address to the nation, I was reminded of the words of the 20th century philosopher and analyst of fascism, Hannah Arendt: The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.

The Palestinian Solidarity movement, very concerned and ashamed by Foreign Minister, Peters’refusal to make a stand against the genocide in Gaza, were protesting outside the venue where theNZ First faithful had come to listen to their leader’s State of the Nation address. Winston has of course recently been to Washington and met with some of the Trump cabal and being the opportunist that he has always been, has immediately picked up on their jargon. The people outside were ‘ignorant, left wing fascists’, ‘long haired bludgers who have never done a day’s work’, ‘Communists’, ‘anti democratic’, ‘woke’, ‘Marxist whingers, encouraged by the media’.

They don’t know what they’re talking about. He’s had meetings with the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, Indonesia and the President of Turkey and he knows the reality of geopolitics (the Palestinian Authority are collaborators with Israel, Egypt is held over a barrel economically by the US, the President of Turkey is a dictator and Indonesia is a fragile democracy, committing significant human rights abuses in West Papua and cracking down on religious minorities, women, and sexually diverse people). Not a great bunch to take your cue from.

As Winston had trouble with his articulation – he is getting on – there were echoes of Trump. When some protests erupted from the hall, he led cries of ‘shame’, and ‘get them out’. In terms of foreign policy, he has decided there are big changes happening and we should keep our own counsel, not speak out, prepare for what is happening strategically and seize the opportunities to sell our country. Ethically then, he is a barrow boy.

Later in the speech, other than the traditional NZ First’s appeal to the provinces and the need forresource extraction, development and local democracy versus Wellington bureaucrats, he was big on getting rid of diversity, equity and inclusion policies, anti-trans, anti sex education, and in an appeal to the anti-vax people, anti fluoridation, Environmentally, we make no difference anyway, so why be idealistic and wear a hair shirt.

The Labour Party and the unions are both full of university-educated woke people who have never been workers so don’t know what it’s like and have betrayed their roots. Richard Seddon was the man and we need to return to our settler realities and be one people (he forgot to say that a greatdeal of Maori land was alienated under Seddon). He didn’t say the phrase, but it will come, Make New Zealand Great Again, which would be a more emphatic way of saying, NZ First.

The problem is that Winston Peters fits Hannah Arendt’s definition of the ideal subject of totalitarianrule, perfectly. As do his followers. There is no differentiation between fact and fiction, or truth and falsehood.

So, in this coalition, we have one partner who brings the chaos of neo liberal economics and the desire to capture the state for the purposes of the rich, the other who is appealing to populism in its current form, a form which , led by Trump, is very ugly indeed. Both tendencies are essentially undemocratic and potentially totalitarian. Winston is too lazy to be evil, David is too stupid to be a big-time influencer, but together, and with a confused centre-right partner they could nudge NZ down a path of half-arsed fascism.

The election can’t come soon enough.

March 25, 2025 0

The fragmentation of the working class

Once, political and union knowledge was passed on within working class families. That is no longer the case. As a result, there is an uphill battle for unions to prove their effectiveness in the workplace. It is made even more difficult bby the fact that many of the gains made by unions have become workplace law administered by the Labour department. And then there is the free loading by non-union members, with gains made by union members automatically being passed on to all staff.

But as well, there is the fragmentation of community, especially in urban areas. Recently I proposed to a labour history group I belong to, that the new history curriculum in schools, which emphasises local content, presented an opportunity for unionists and labour historians to provide local working class stories to schools in an area. There was something of a stunned silence. How do you make contact with schools? How would you write up the material? Who’s got the time? Doesn’t take long I reassured them. But the making contact proved insurmountable. Yet community unionism is a buzz word?

Generally, the urban left is divorced from the working class communities who have often been pushed into the outer suburbs in order to leave the urban centres to professionals. The gap becomes even wider as the urban left becomes engrossed in identity issues. And of course the academy and the community are rare bedfellows.

The fragmentation therefore continues.

February 3, 2024 0

‘Tis a pity

The coalition government’s proving to be something of a schizoid enigma. There’s money there, so why not give the nurses, the teachers, the midwives, the ambos, the correction staff etc. what they are reasonably asking for? Why not secure the infrastructure? After all, these are the people who voted for them and would continue to do so. As well, these are the jobs that will continue into a precarious age, not replaceable by digital programmes or robots.

Instead, on one hand they’re running around genuflecting to business confidence or lack of it, that highly subjective and not particularly rational category of feeling. On the other hand they’re spraying money around the regions in a display of pork barrel politics. It will benefit some iwi and hapu, and plant some trees, but it ends up being largely handouts to some local (and international) capitalists. It will provide a temporary boost for this and that before the global market mediates once more. In some cases it will be harmful, for example the creating of freedom camping sites without research and undermining the local camping grounds. Regional Economic Development needs to be a grass roots affair.

Meanwhile, on the Coast,75% of orthopedic referrals are rejected. I see the issue first hand. My partner needs a hip replacement. Days and nights are spent in pain. Back follows hip because of necessarily poor posture, pain killers leave the head dozy, fatigue strikes from living with pain. But not bad enough for an op, which while expensive, costs thirty days of Michael Cullen’s fee.

In the next breath, school principals reveal the nonsense of ‘safety’ – kids shouldn’t go to the climate strike because the Risk Assessment Management hasn’t been done. These same regulations mean you can’t take a class for a walk around the block. Meanwhile, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, wildfires occur ever more frequently. Regulations exist without context.

We will continue to be seduced, perhaps for another term, by the less sadistic approach to the underclass, to the coalition being less willing to sell our education and health systems, to them being a little more union friendly, and to Jacinda’s nice moments on the international scene, but the swirl of opinion that has replaced the news will eventually toss them into the next wash, so that a new set of faces, and scandals, can occupy the cover of the Women’s Weekly and fill the Q & A seats. Some vague dents in the body politic will have been fixed, some even undercoated, a couple even having received a top coat, but the machine of neo liberal capitalism will still be speeding along, approaching the cliff of planetary chaos.

It’s always a disappointment and a reinforcing of cynicism. A pity for I felt we were ready for a moment of praxis.

March 13, 2019 0

Congratulations, Theo Spierings

photos: Stuff.co.nz

We read the statistics regarding child poverty: 1 in 4, 300,000, that sort of thing, but what does it mean – even for those who aren’t going to school hungry or living in cars? What does it mean to be seriously under-resourced and stressed and how does it happen?

A relationship doesn’t work out. Immediately the formulas kick in: one for the DPB, another for the accommodation supplement, another for child care, another for child support – this one ensuring a toxic relationship continues into bitterness and often a desire for revenge. When circumstances change, the formulas have to be renegotiated and there is always a time lag. With the increase in precarious work this becomes a constant, daily battle. This is compounded if there is a major expense or a normal life crisis: a rotten tooth, the death of a family member or something wrong with the car. There’s pressure to work, but will that work coincide with school hours and school holidays or does after school care need to be found?

These are still young people who need some social life. If families are not there or unsupportive, baby sitters have to be found, and paid. Otherwise, there is no respite from the 24/7 of providing for the needs of children. And children get sick and children get careless. It is reasonable to occasionally wish they had never happened and regret that the best portion of an adult life is lived in relative misery. Of course, love wins out, but occasionally the resentment must be felt, plus the accompanying guilt. Meanwhile, the battle with the bureaucracies continues. With the increasing ease of ‘dobbing in’ the Ministry for Vulnerable Children might start sniffing around – the Ministry is largely a surveillance agency based on hypocrisy: how can a state that creates vulnerable children rescue them? A job opportunity which might provide some satisfaction means you’re not home at 3pm. The child care occasionally breaks down and the kids are left alone. Meanwhile, in the talk back ear, you’re a bludger, a burden on the taxpayer and in need of micro managing by the state.

It’s a situation where having children is damaging to all involved. Of course, that’s what they want. In the old days, the mother had to adopt. Nowadays you suffer differently, but the intent of the suffering is the same: Take that, you slut. And when people are under-resourced and subject to social revenge, there are under-resourced children who don’t cope with the stresses of adolescence. Living in poverty means the random wash of the digital world is attractive and addictive. The cycle begins again.

And meanwhile the CEO for Fonterra, Theo Spierings, gets $8 million annually. It is not questioned. There is no surveillance involved.

In the wider view, this is about the working class being reproduced as cheaply as possible. And in this case it is providing the bulk of the disposable workers for the precarious occupations. Of course it’s not as bad as the Filipino women leaving their children at home to serve the wealthy matrons in Dubai or London or Rome or New York, but it is the same pattern.

Unfortunately, a change of neo-liberal management, even a resolutely positive one, is not going to fix this issue. It requires a revolution.

In another space, this is interesting: http://upsidedownworld.org/archives/venezuela/rumbas-in-the-barrio-personal-lives-in-a-venezuelan-collectivist-project/

September 26, 2017 0

Green dilemmas

The Greens have the aim of becoming more than a minor party stuck at around 10% of the party vote. In order to do so they have to become more of a broad church, covering a number of tendencies. Occasionally they have the dream of supplanting the Labour Party which, as the working class becomes fragmented consumers or clusters of identities (women, Maori, PI, Gay, Lesbian…), can seem nostalgic. For the Greens encompass social justice issues – have workplace and social policy that is progressive – as well as being focused on the environmental issues that resonate with younger generations. They also see the possibility of growing their Maori vote, their role seamlessly linking with the concept of kaitiakitanga.

Yet growing the vote proves a stubbornly difficult task. What are the problems? The first is a cultural one. Typically, Green party members will be middle class pakeha (with more than a smattering of Europeans, Brits and Americans), politically correct, healthy out door recreationalists, well-travelled, vegetarian, versed in conflict resolution, smile a lot and have a PhD. There’s nothing wrong with any of the above, and perhaps everyone should be like that, but somehow there are a lot of people who aren’t. They didn’t get their PhD, they work with their hands, they can have strange beliefs, they eat meat, go in for chemical abuse, get angry and sad and sometimes obese, stuff up, have arguments, blow the budget, watch crap on television, scowl and curse, drive diggers and dump trucks and deliver the junk mail, and find transgender a difficult concept. It’s not easy to get them to the Green church because they’re not going to feel comfortable. And like any church community, the Greens are capable of closing ranks and intuitively promoting their own kind.

The second issue is the default position of most Greens and the public perception that results. Green = environmentalist = jumping up and down over proposals for development, whether it be buildings or mines or factories. A miner once said to me, You can’t do anything without digging a hole. The perception becomes that whenever anyone wants to dig a hole, or build a building, the Greens will start jumping up and down. This widens to forestry, farming and fishing – there’s always an environmental impact. Of course this perception of the Greens as anti everything that provides a living is not true, for what they are advocating Is sustainable production. But with that concept, the issues are even more difficult (and the PhD starts to become useful). Will a sustainable economy produce enough food for the present level of population? Will the same number of jobs be available? At what rate of pay? Who funds the transition? Is this transition possible under a capitalist regime?

Probably a revolution is required, rather than a reform of the system. Yet the Greens want a broad appeal. The result is the mystification that religion produces: a wished for world which can only be achieved in the after life. Meanwhile, in the real world, the congregation continue to worship the ideal and do some good works. This position is not easily shared, requiring moments of revelation to energise it.

The third issue stems from playing the modern parliamentary political games: of branding, identification of voters as consumers- of politics as marketing, which doesn’t sit well with the Greens. It doesn’t sit well with Labour either. It’s politics as commodity rather than process or praxis, but the only game in town. It produces the false smile and leads to disenchantment. The people at the bottom know about disenchantment and they don’t want any more.

At the same time, disenchantment of gigantic proportions looms in the form of climate change and species loss. We are burning up, flooding up, freezing up, cycloning up at an alarming rate. Unfortunately, the infrastructure is still working, or being rapidly repaired, so the same old shit continues. 21^st century capitalism seems to be able to cope with extraordinary stresses – so far. And the Greens oscillate between trying to resolve conflict with a smile and playing a Cassandra role by issuing dire warnings. The prophetic role has the energy, yet is a marginal one.

Are there any solutions to the above problems? It is essential to attract a broader range of the community and to adjust the culture accordingly. And then what? What do party members do? Any political party has an inevitable hierarchy and a sado- masochism that accompanies this: the leaders pleading for money and voluntary labour (pleasure and pain) and the members giving money and voluntary labour (pleasure and pain) – the goal the orgasm of power (and often a melancholic aftermath). This is not a comfortable fit either, even though the Greens pride themselves on their democratic processes (processes which generate a reasonably dense bureaucracy).

It’s possible that a healthy parliamentary party is actually impossible. Yet the current mess in the US points to the need to maintain something resembling functional representation.

February 18, 2017 0

PO Box 2 Blackball

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