The Spinoff: When Chlöe met Corbyn – and Varoufakis and Piketty and Polanski and Mazzucato and…

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It was, one of her Instagram followers declared, “a tour of legends”. Another described it as “a full bingo card”. And it does look as if, on her recent European trip, Chlöe Swarbrick met everyone there is to meet on the political and intellectual left.

The list of figures the Greens co-leader encountered during two weeks in September was imposing. Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Newly appointed UK Greens leader Zack Polanski. Mariana Mazzucato, one of the world’s most-cited economists. Fellow economic superstar Thomas Piketty and his wealth-tax offsider Gabriel Zucman. YouTube sensation Gary Stevenson of Gary’s Economics. Manon Aubry, the leader of the European Parliament’s Left bloc. Economist, ex-politician and left-wing idol Yanis Varoufakis. Guardian columnist George Monbiot. Influential economist Daniela Gabor. And plenty more.

Although primarily in Europe to attend an insurance conference, Swarbrick seized the opportunity to meet these leading figures – and think about how to apply their insights back home. She arrived at a “pretty crazy” time, she tells me when we meet at parliament: 100,000 British far-right supporters were mounting anti-immigration protests, the latest UK left-wing political venture, Your Party, was descending into internecine warfare, and Zucman’s wealth-tax proposals were being bitterly attacked by France’s richest man, Bernard Arnault.

Swarbrick’s encounters covered a vast intellectual terrain, taking in “technofeudalism” with Varoufakis, state capacity with Mazzucato, the carbon transition with Gabor, and wealth taxes with, well, pretty much everyone. Front of mind was the growing evidence that widened material disparities – and the resulting economic insecurity – are the key driver of the public’s growing disenchantment with political institutions. “Pretty much everybody was talking about that interconnection between inequality and democratic decay.” And, consequently, the need to give ordinary people greater control over their economic situation. “Democratising the economy was a very strong thread of all of that [discussion].”

One of her key meetings was with Polanski, a self-described eco-populist who, since becoming leader of Britain’s Greens, has nearly doubled the party’s polling (from 8% to 15%) and membership (from 65,000 to 120,000). The “phenomenal” Polanski, Swarbrick says, has realised that “you cannot get people to care about the end of the world … if they cannot afford to put food on the table at the end of the week”. (Polanski, meanwhile, has returned Swarbrick’s approval, telling the Guardian that she is the living person he most admires, someone “demonstrating the bold leadership that I look to do every single day”.)

Another highlight of her trip came from meeting Mazzucato, who has been hired by multiple countries wanting to know more about her idea that governments should pick national “missions” to drive economic development. The Italian-American economist’s key insight, Swarbrick says, was the need to break the intellectual “deadlock” in which “the right are going ‘Shred the bureaucracy,’ and then the supposedly left-wing argument is, ‘We will keep the bureaucracy.’” The bigger question, as Mazzucato puts it, is, “What is the function of the bureaucracy?” While Swarbrick’s discussions with Mazzucato, Gabor and others took in specific policy ideas (national investment banks, for instance), all were adamant, she says, about the more general need to rebuild state capacity after decades of disrepair.

It wouldn’t, of course, be a Swarbrick trip without at least one “really nerdy breakthrough”, which came courtesy of Piketty, whose 2014 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century restored wealth disparities to their central place in political debate. As much a data nerd as the “economic rock star” he is sometimes labelled, Piketty somehow knew that New Zealand councils levy rates. He pointed out, Swarbrick says, that this means New Zealanders “actually do have exposure to a wealth tax … and isn’t it unfair that that applies only to property and not to financial assets?” That sparked a “hah!” moment in which Swarbrick asked herself, “Why have we not talked about it from this perspective?”

Her meeting with Varoufakis, at one point the intellectual “poster boy” for the European left, was equally memorable. Is he, I ask, as intense as everyone thinks? “Yes,” says Swarbrick, laughing heartily. “He is. But it was honestly really, really cool.” The two talked about the banking system, the military-industrial complex, and potential new forms of international relations. That said, he didn’t appear to her as an oracle, Greek origins notwithstanding. With all these figures “who I have admired for a long time”, Swarbrick says, “you’re sitting in front of them and [you realise] it’s just guys, you know? At the end of the day, we’re all just guys – just people – trying our best!”

Earlier in the interview, she had said, bluntly: “Nobody has all the answers.” And this was her point about Varoufakis – and indeed the other economists she met. Each of them “was able to answer with a huge amount of detail on their specific areas of expertise. But when I would ask them about the crossover and the cross-pollination and what the new economic paradigm looks like, they said that they didn’t feel comfortable, necessarily, to give that answer … They could answer for their part in that, but not necessarily the whole.”

If, in short, Swarbrick had hoped to be handed an economic blueprint, she would have been disappointed. Instagram clips from her encounter with Polanski show him acknowledging she has “a better answer” than he does on the global economy, while her appearance on Gary’s Economics starts with Stevenson asking her for advice about “how to influence [the] politics” of wealth taxes.

Did she, I ask, travel to Europe hoping to be schooled by its political leaders and instead end up schooling them? Swarbrick laughs uproariously, then sensibly pivots to talking about the task ahead. As she sees it, some 40 years after the advent of the market-fundamentalist, hyper-individualist ideology sometimes known as neoliberalism, a new overarching left-wing narrative remains to be written. “We are very much now in a place [where] we have to build the new house we want to move into. And we know what some of the foundations and some of those building blocks look like. But there are a lot of decisions we have to make about design.”

And for all that the figures Swarbrick met on her trip were left-wing heroes, they were also united by another characteristic: none had ever won power. (Except Varoufakis, who was part of the Greek government in 2015 – but even he was famously unenthused by the experience, jumping ship after just six months.) Does it worry Swarbrick that she didn’t meet any outright electoral winners? She laughs again, and says: “I think nobody so far has done what we want to do.”

She was, however, heartened by hanging out with Stevenson in London and “just watching regular people come up to him and be like, ‘Tax wealth!’, and for that to be such a normalised conversation in the UK.” Meanwhile, Piketty and Zucman were “feeling good” despite – or perhaps because of – being assailed by the French elite. “They understand that having entrenched power attack you, because you are speaking truth to that power, provides you with a platform. And if you can stand calmly in that space, can continue to hold that mirror up and speak that truth, then that cuts through in a way that resonates with people.”

For all that, the forces currently taking power across Europe come from the far right, not the radical left. But Swarbrick still believes victory is on the way – if the left can build a big enough volunteer army.

At this point, a conversation ostensibly about ideas becomes one about political organisation. “I think we’ve got very good academic and economic credibility for our arguments,” Swarbrick says. “But translating that into the real world, building trust in people’s belief that there is possible [change], and then actually enacting that … is a very different proposition.”

This, she says, “is where organisation is still the big missing piece – organisation on the ground”. She points to Polanski’s success in boosting the British Greens’ membership, to the point where it has reportedly surpassed that of the centrist Liberal Democrats and even the “natural party of government”, the Conservatives. (On her trip, Swarbrick also met the two leading figures behind Your Party, Jeremy Corbyn and left-wing firebrand Zarah Sultana, but is unsurprisingly more guarded about those encounters, noting only that the nascent party’s internal fighting is “rough as guts”.)

In New Zealand as elsewhere, it tends to be centre-left Labour and Democratic parties that have the strongest ground game. So could the Greens really surpass them? “Over time, yes,” Swarbrick says. One central task is “building coalitions” with faith groups, community organisations and the union movement, although the latter’s historical ties to Labour means any relationship with the Greens “will look different”.

The task for politicians, as she sees it, is to “think beyond electoral cycles” and generate public trust by being less opportunistic. “People, when you talk to them on the ground, don’t just want politicians to turn up when it’s election year and times are easy and they’re cutting ribbons. They want you to turn up when they’re having a bad day and stuff is hard. That process of constant accountability – that is where you build trust.”

This insight serves, in fact, as Swarbrick’s “major takeaway” from her trip. “I think we have … a really good diagnosis of the problem, we have clarity on a number of the tools that are necessary to move forward. But the gap that we have to bridge is trust.”

The Post: Why this might be the ‘angry centrist’ election

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The current paradox of New Zealand politics is that the public is the angriest it’s been for decades – but has in no sense shifted decisively left or right.

The country isn’t doing well: everyone knows that. The health system is a mess, our infrastructure is crumbling, and thousands are leaving for Australia. Still in the grip of the long pandemic-era hangover, the public’s ambient mood is bad.

None of this, though, has pushed middle New Zealand into the arms of either the right or the left. Big change may well be waiting in the wings: in this country we get it every 40 to 50 years, starting with the 1890s Liberal creation of a bare-bones social welfare state, continuing with the first Labour government’s 1930s-era fulfilment of that dream, and culminating in the fourth Labour government’s betrayal of it in the 1980s.

But even on that timetable, the next sweeping shift might not arrive until the next decade. Right now, one can feel the pressure build without any clear sense of where it will burst out.

Partisans on the right point to an increased ACT vote share, up at 8% versus less than 1% last decade. But that’s counterbalanced by a strengthened Green Party, comfortably polling twice the 5% threshold it once looked set to fall below.

Feeling these opposing pulls, middle New Zealand remains exactly where it was: dissatisfied with life but unsure about the proffered solutions. Which is where the latest theory from the New York Times comes in.

Mapping hundreds of recent American electoral contests, the Times has found that the politicians who can win crucial swing states and voters are what it calls “angry centrists”. As the name suggests, these are not the bland, status-quo-defending moderates of days gone by.

They are, instead, people like Ohio Democrat Marcy Kaptur, who happily attacks “the far right taking away women’s rights and protecting greedy corporations at every turn” but also lambasts “the far left ignoring millions illegally crossing the border and trying to defund the police”. Kaptur got re-elected in a state Donald Trump won by seven percentage points.

Such politicians, in short, are left-wing on economic issues and right-wing on cultural ones. They want to break up corporate oligopolies but take a tough line on crime. Far from being boring, angry centrists are “combative and populist”, the Times argues, promising sweeping change while criticising mainstream elites as out of touch.

If middle New Zealand is indeed resolutely centrist but also very angry, such an approach could be electorally potent. Analysis by the Post’s Henry Cooke shows 71% of 2023’s swing voters thought the economy had got “a lot worse”, but only 2% wanted further progress on Treaty issues.

Angry centrism is, of course, what New Zealand First does already. And one can also see the appeal for Labour.

The party knows that the cost of living is the dominant issue in New Zealand politics. Its MPs talk glowingly of their Australian counterparts’ decisive victory in May, one underpinned by Anthony Albanese’s relentless focus on household budgets and material issues.

New Zealand Labour’s greatest problem is that, having chosen a minimalist capital gains tax that garners equally minimal revenue, it will be unable to spend much on alleviating cost-of-living pressures. This puts even more onus on areas like competition policy.

Populist moves to break up oligopolies in energy generation, supermarkets and elsewhere could both lower prices and harness public anger. The bargaining strength of workers could also be boosted without any strain on the government’s books.

Such a focus on economic issues, at the expense of cultural ones, might be hard to justify ethically. Women still face horrendous levels of domestic violence; Israeli forces have killed 20,000 innocent children in Gaza; Māori live seven years fewer than Pākehā and are discriminated against in hospitals and courtrooms.

Middle New Zealand doesn’t have hard-right views on these issues. But it almost certainly doesn’t want to hear politicians focusing on them. The more that Labour does so, the less likely it is to win next year.

Winston Peters will still try to fight the culture war fight. But his attacks on “woke” politics and gender-neutral toilets will be, as much as anything else, wedges used to separate Labour from middle New Zealand.

Watching the main centre-left party trying not to engage on these cultural issues, while also not going so far right as to alienate its base, is unlikely to be an edifying experience.

But as the British pollster Michael Ashcroft once wrote: “If an election is an exam, voters will set the question; parties that choose to answer a different question will be marked accordingly.”

The state of the economy is foremost in the public’s mind and, like it or not, looks set to dominate the year ahead.

The Spinoff: Why does it feel like everyone hates the state?

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In September, the commentator and PR expert David Cormack stirred up his readers by writing: “I long believed [the existence of] charities indicated that the state wasn’t doing its job …. But maybe I’m looking at it the wrong way. Perhaps the real issue is expecting the state to show care at all. The evidence is clear: they don’t. And maybe they never will.”

Such comments would be unremarkable coming from the hard right, but Cormack is a former Greens staffer. He’s also channelling an ambient despair about the state of the state. Grant Duncan, an honorary researcher at the University of Auckland, wrote in October that New Zealand’s state “is eroding like a sandcastle, as public confidence and political consensus crumble beneath the waves of global change”.

Rhetorical exaggerations aside, such sentiments are now relatively common. Around Wellington, I often hear the public service described as inward-looking, out of touch with ordinary New Zealanders, or unable even to deliver decent services. It still employs driven and talented people. But even among its usual defenders – those who work in it – I hear a growing concern that government has somehow lost its way.

The state has always had its critics, especially among right-wingers and the radical left. Māori have long resisted it. But the lineup of critics now includes many social democrats, the authoritarian new right, and some government staffers. Although it retains immense power, the state has paradoxically few friends. Indeed it faces a greater challenge than any I can remember.

Nor is the chorus of critique specific to this government, although the coalition’s actions alarm many. The challenge, rather, is to the state itself – the collected agencies and departments that regulate the country, or, defined more broadly, the power of governing that each successive administration wields but must relinquish to its successor. The question is whether the current negative sentiment is merely a dip, a localised depression that can be lifted by well-judged tweaks, or whether we stand on the edge of something much more profound.

One plausible argument is that, in a decade’s time, the state as we currently know it – its schools and hospitals, its health and safety regulations, its justice system and so on – will be largely intact. 

As recently as 2017, the elite consensus was that the state could deliver services tolerably well. By this I don’t mean that New Zealand was a utopia. It endured racism, poverty, environmental degradation and many other ills. But that was all plausibly a result of the kinds of governments we elected, not a basic inability of the institutions of the state to deliver those governments’ pledges.

Now, though, there is a widespread belief – rightly or wrongly – that state agencies are a little like a slack piece of string: push one end, and nothing happens at the other. This sense is strongly connected to the perceived failings of the last Labour government.

Labour, as it happens, delivered rather more than is now remembered, including the legalisation of abortion, a rapid ramping up of state house-building, and an effective free school lunch programme. But it also famously struggled to implement policies like Kiwibuild and Auckland light rail. An extra $2 billion was spent on mental health services without anyone being able to show what it achieved. Overall, government spending rose by around one-quarter, adjusting for inflation and population growth, with decidedly mixed results.

The question, though, is whether those failures represent an existential problem for the New Zealand state, or whether they largely reflect one-off events – the pandemic, most obviously, but also the mosque shootings and the Whakaari White Island disaster – as well as Labour’s evident unreadiness for government. 

National’s argument is that the issues are relatively self-contained. Quarterly plans and KPIs will focus efforts. Social investment will measure “what works” and ensure that spending is effective. Better contracts for NGOs will break down enervating governmental silos.

The actual implementation of this approach is easily critiqued: social investment, for one, currently looks more like social disinvestment. But National’s approach is not wholly implausible. And it is complemented by other, under-the-radar work in areas like building projects, where the Infrastructure Commission is slowly bringing more rigour to the way that we plan for hospitals, roads and the like. 

Confidence in public agencies is also more robust than people think. Overall trust in government was higher in 2023 than it was in 1993, even if it has probably fallen since. Four-fifths of New Zealanders are satisfied with the public services they receive. Trust in the public service “brand” is higher than it was in 2015, albeit lower for Māori and Pacific Peoples than for other ethnicities.

On this reading, the challenges to the state are relatively superficial, focused on questions of delivery and amenable to targeted measures. But what if the problems run much deeper?

Many of the alleged defects of government date back decades. Most observers believe agencies struggle to comprehend the mega-trends of the age – population ageing, climate change, AI. The auditor-general has repeatedly warned that we know precious little about the effects of many government programmes. Far-sighted governance is, ironically, seldom sighted. Effective cross-agency working is even rarer. 

Free and frank advice, meanwhile, is generally thought to be on the wane. The public service no longer seems to be a home for bold, creative problem-solvers. And its staffers often appear profoundly distanced from the communities they are supposed to serve.

The system still contains well-motivated public servants trying to make a difference and defend the common good; especially at the frontline, some staff go above and beyond. But the agencies and structures in which they work often thwart their initiative.

Nor does government appear to be future-proofed. AI, for instance, is not just a tool to speed up service delivery; it will irrevocably change how we work, establish shared truths, and even determine what it means to be human. But is our government well-prepared for these profound shifts? Only the foolhardy would say yes.

The underlying environment in which government operates has also become harder to manage. The past was, admittedly, a more complex place than people recall; memory has a habit of flattening out such wrinkles. But societies are undeniably becoming more diverse and more fluid: less ethnically homogenous, less oriented around predictable career structures. The world is increasingly riven by geopolitical conflict, trade wars, and actual war.

Meanwhile we live in a less deferential age. Unquestioning acceptance of authority is rare. Most people exercise unprecedented consumer choices, and expect something vaguely similar from government. Young people in particular have a greater expectation of being heard, and are frustrated by being ignored instead. The world has changed; the way the government works, by and large, has not.

The state also faces an ambivalent challenge from the authoritarian new right, exemplified by Donald Trump and his fellow travellers. Their vision of the world is one part hyper-individualist: hence Trump’s sweeping tax cuts for the rich. But it is also one part big-statist: witness the whole tariff saga, a story that has offended libertarians more than anyone else.

The populist challenge, as it manifests in New Zealand, is less about cutting back government and more about denigrating the idea that state agencies have any independent role in protecting due process, any separate guardianship of the public interest. Every time Shane Jones threatens to “exterminate” public servants and their pesky procedures, every time ministers arrogate more powers to themselves under the fast-track process, the traditional ideal of the neutral and competent state is noticeably degraded.

These are all hard challenges. The most comprehensive, however, is coming – has always come – from Māori. The legendary sociologist Max Weber famously described the state as the organisation that exercises “a monopoly over the legitimate use of physical force”, but Māori thinkers and activists have long made it clear that they do not regard the state’s use of force as legitimate (to put it mildly). Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the version that rangatira signed, preserves their sovereignty; even the English-language version arguably leaves their domestic autonomy untouched.

And for all that the current government is winding back Māori rights, we are witnessing the emergence of indigenous economic and political institutions that arguably have state-like qualities. Māori have long enjoyed a distinct education system in the form of kōhanga reo and kura kaupapa. Now, iwi like Ngāti Toa are using their economic base to slowly repurchase land; they also run chains of health clinics and other services.

All this operates, for the moment, within the Crown’s authority. But thinkers like Moana Jackson have started to sketch out a world in which Māori construct their own political institutions, operating peacefully alongside – and frequently interacting with – the departments and agencies of the Crown. How quickly this vision will become a reality is anyone’s guess. But it unmistakably challenges the traditional idea of the state.

None of this suggests that the state’s problems can be solved with a few KPIs and a dash of social-return-on-investment analysis. The state is, in some senses, alienated from its citizens. This alienation, and the failure to deliver improved living standards, are what lie behind the authoritarian-populist revolt. Over a decade ago, the writer Peter Mair argued that many ostensibly democratic administrations were in fact “governing the void”.

It is hardly surprising, then, that writers like David Cormack think it’s time “to stop relying on the government altogether” and to build anew, through “communities taking care of themselves” and other institutions of local self-help. (Libertarians, with their long-standing distaste for the big state, would argue for something similar.) Such utopias would face large obstacles: the time taken from daily lives, the difficulties communities would experience trying to build national grids and all the other things the state does at scale, the reliance on solidarity trumping self-interest almost every time. But the longer the social-democratic state degrades, the more appealing such visions will become.

The alternative, for social democrats like myself, is to rethink the state, to simultaneously revitalise and humble it, to bring it up to date with 21st-century needs and local realities. Any worthwhile conception of social democracy must, for starters, be flexible enough to accommodate indigenous autonomy and the institutions that will give it life.

Within the Crown’s sphere of governance, I would bet big on age-old political traditions that include participatory democracy – in which ordinary citizens take more decisions and elected representatives fewer – and deliberative democracy, which privileges listening, reciprocal turn-taking in speech, and, where possible, a search for consensus. Together, these two forms of decision-making are sometimes called everyday democracy because of the way they weave political decision-making and public freedom into people’s day-to-day lives. They combine, on the one hand, the pragmatic need for some kind of state to do all the national-level governing that the modern world requires and, on the other, a devolution of as much control to communities as possible.

The state has, of course, done immense harm to some communities, not least Māori. But I don’t think that means it is inherently incapable of care. What else do nurses and teachers do every day, except express their love and care for patients and children? And they are, in workforce terms, the single biggest part of the state. 

Of course even teachers and nurses carry out their work imperfectly, sometimes inequitably. The state needs to be far better than it is now. As multiple questions about its ability and authority coalesce, it faces a greater challenge, a more pervasive distrust, than I have ever seen. Though not about to collapse, it risks a slow degradation and erosion. In the face of this danger, reform is essential – and not in some far-off future, but starting right now.

The Post: The left needs to come up with a coherent message on the economy

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Pop quiz: could you tell me the Government’s narrative about how we fix the economy? Pop quiz part two: could you tell me the Opposition’s version?

Whatever your political beliefs, I suspect you’d find the former easier to describe than the latter. The Government, Christopher Luxon constantly tells us, has got inflation under control by curbing Labour’s “wasteful” spending, and is now “laser-focused” on getting rid of red tape so that Kiwi entrepreneurs can build flourishing businesses and we all become better off.

If he has a little more time, and is trying more directly to win over Labour voters, the prime minister will add something about lifting school standards, building infrastructure and reforming the RMA, all actions notionally designed to lay the foundations of long-term prosperity. But the core of his message is short and simple.

It may not be especially accurate: falling inflation, for instance, has had almost nothing to do with his Government’s actions, and everything to do with the Reserve Bank’s hiking of interest rates. But Luxon sticks to his message, as do his ministers and coalition partners; the public, accordingly, absorbs a clear and comprehensible story about how we raise our living standards.

By contrast, the opposition’s narrative about the economy is … what, exactly? Labour, the Greens and others have done a reasonably good job of prosecuting the Government’s failures, notably the calamitous decision to cut back on state house-building, classroom construction and other infrastructure projects just as the economy was in a state of collapse and crying out for stimulus.

When it comes to solutions, however, the picture becomes much muddier. Occasionally the Opposition talks about shifting investment away from housing and into more economically productive areas. Ideas are floated about boosting savings and backing Kiwi businesses.

The Greens in particular have a detailed fiscal strategy that makes the case for higher taxes to deliver better public services and greater borrowing to deliver the infrastructure future generations will need. But a strategy isn’t the same thing as a story.

If, as I suspect, many left-wingers could more clearly articulate their opponents’ economic message than they could their own, it suggests there has been a significant failure to develop an alternative narration. And that matters in a week when even a commentator like Bernard Hickey, long sceptical about the promised economic recovery, has acknowledged “green shoots” in the form of increased retail spending and rising business activity.

The Government’s critics may argue that no matter how strong National’s message discipline, the public aren’t buying the story. Unemployment has spiked, people are fleeing the country in droves, and Labour is now the party most trusted on the economy.

But as business activity regathers strength, the Government’s message will become more convincing, amplified by the public’s underlying belief that the right are better economic managers than the left. Time-poor and disengaged from politics, swing voters may be easily persuaded by the Government’s simple message, often repeated.

Constructing an alternative story is far from impossible. And it needn’t be especially original; National’s isn’t. (Indeed it is just a variation of the age-old right-wing fable: get government out of the way and watch the economy boom.)

The best alternative tale is probably a variation on bottom-up economics. The economy will thrive only if everyone, especially those who are currently struggling, can contribute to their full potential.

That requires foundational government investments in housing, education and healthcare, to help people maximise their abilities, and employment policies – higher minimum wages and so on – to ensure ordinary Kiwis’ hard work is rewarded. To put it in metaphorical terms: we’re all on the same waka, and that waka will forge ahead only if we make sure everyone on board can paddle at top speed.

This is, of course, far from the whole story. A fuller narrative would have to encompass the government’s role in shaping the economy’s direction – industrial policy, in other words – and the need to ensure any economic growth is compatible with protecting the planet.

This reflects an innate disadvantage the left faces in politics. The right’s story – not just on the economy but about life in general – is always much simpler: individuals are to blame for their success or failure.

The left, conversely, has to construct an account of the many and varied forces – poverty, discrimination, difficult upbringings, failures of public services, neighbourhood effects and so on – that can conspire to cast people down or lift them up. It is just an inherently more complex story.

Be that as it may, coherent narratives are still needed. And those narratives are only ever the wrapping, the covering, the envelope. The thinking that lies inside them must also be coherent.

Just as bad prose often indicates muddled argument, an unclear narrative often points to a lack of a comprehensive plan. That, in fact, may be the left’s biggest weakness.

The Spinoff: The warning signs for New Zealand in England’s ‘back to basics’ school reforms

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New Zealand education minister Erica Stanford’s controversial curriculum reforms are not without precedent. Around a decade ago, a right-wing English education secretary, Michael Gove, instituted a sweeping set of changes designed to make instruction – in a phrase now deeply familiar to Kiwi teachers – “knowledge-rich”. 

Stanford and Gove have, unsurprisingly, met and shared notes, and the former has been explicit about the inspiration she takes from England’s experience. So it should concern us that a landmark review of the latter’s reforms has just found that, alongside some notable successes, they created exactly the kinds of problems that Kiwi teachers worry will crop up here.

Like Stanford, Gove was driven by a core belief that teaching had become too focused on developing broader competencies and thought processes, and insufficiently attentive to imparting core facts and knowledge. He sought to set out a clearer list of exactly what children “should” learn, privileging a “core” curriculum while invoking ideas of rigour and structure.

None of these ideas is inherently unhelpful. But Gove was – and is – a famously complex person; despite being known as “Mike the polite” for his old-school courtesy, he was also capable of the most vicious backstabbing imaginable. And that duality can be seen in his curriculum reforms.

Last week’s review, commissioned by the current Labour government and staffed by experts, feels comprehensive, nuanced and thoughtful, a world away from the political hatchet jobs that often result from such exercises. So it is important that the review finds Gove’s reforms “have had a positive impact on attainment”. English 15-year-olds perform above the developed-country average in reading, maths and science, while 16-19-year-olds do “substantially better” than average in literacy and problem-solving, having made “significant improvements” since 2012.

Given New Zealand’s well-publicised slide down the developed-country rankings, these results will be music to Stanford’s ears. The rest of the review, however, bears many cautionary tales.

The first is that the gap in achievement between poorer and richer pupils “remains stubbornly wide”, and those with special educational needs struggle. Some gaps “are widening rather than narrowing”. This is less a criticism of curriculum reforms, of course, than a reminder of their limitations.

As educationalists constantly point out, but the public struggles to comprehend, most of what affects students’ marks happens outside the school gates. Socioeconomic factors – poverty prominent among them – account for 60-80% of the variance in children’s test scores. The failure of Stanford’s government to tackle poverty will always be a roadblock to her potential success.

Gove’s reforms, by emphasising a “core” curriculum, have also narrowed the learning experience. That “core”, extending as it did to languages, history and geography, was thankfully less narrow than our own government’s borderline obsessional focus on English and maths. Nonetheless the review finds that England’s curriculum measures have “unnecessarily constrained students’ choices”.

Predictably, the arts and other enrichment activities have been badly hit. Theatre-related content has been “significantly reduced”, the review concludes, and student numbers are sharply declining. The same story broadly holds in music and dance. And these subjects are not nice-to-haves: the arts are fundamental to the human experience, a crucial source of beauty and understanding, and cannot be sidelined without great damage.

Nor is that the end of the problems identified by the review. It highlights an obsession with tests and exams, which in England are administered at twice or even three times the volume of other high-performing countries such as Ireland and Canada. 

Critics have also stressed the rigidity of Gove’s reforms, their unyielding belief that people holding power can dictate a minutely detailed list of facts that pupils “must” acquire. The review finds “a disproportionate focus on rote learning to pass exams”, impeding students’ efforts to comprehensively understand their subjects and acquire the skills needed to grapple with the real world. 

Most history teachers want the level of prescribed content “reduced significantly”. In maths, meanwhile, too many terms are rapidly introduced and then rigidly drilled, again at the expense of a deep engagement “with foundational mathematical concepts” and “non-routine problem-solving”. This leads to “only a superficial understanding of the fundamentals” and limited ability to apply knowledge to real problems.

It is a similar story in English, where the curriculum reflects Gove’s obsession with teaching grammatical terms like “fronted adverbials”, resulting in instruction that is overly theoretical, unengaging to pupils, “and, crucially, does not help them to write well”. In art, meanwhile, works by ethnic minority artists are seldom used. Young people, presumably including many from non-white backgrounds, told the review panel that not seeing people like themselves in curriculum materials was demotivating – a point that the review panel noted was supported by wider evidence.

Given the above rigidity, it is not surprising that the review echoes concerns – often expressed by England’s teaching profession – that an overly prescriptive curriculum can sap motivation or simply prove unworkable. The review notes that the curriculum must ensure “the professional autonomy of teachers”, adding that those teachers should be able “to bring the curriculum to life … to reflect their students’ lives and experiences”.

In all this, the resemblance to Stanford’s proposed reforms is unmistakable. Although there has been substantial goodwill among New Zealand educators to fix some of NCEA’s shortcomings, there is now also a substantial backlash against a new curriculum that, like Gove’s, can seem at times old-fashioned, overly narrow, and too focused on western “classics” at the expense of everything else. The review does not argue that Gove’s reforms have been an outright disaster, as some claim. Many aspects, it says, “are working well”. But it also lays bare the all-too-real dangers of a rigid curriculum.

The Post: How kids are the key to our KiwiSaver future

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The trans-Tasman “rivalry” has always had an embarrassing edge, because – as with all such contests between countries of disparate sizes – it means so much more to the smaller party. Australians, as far as I can tell, barely register New Zealand’s existence outside of sports matches; some Kiwis, by contrast, are obsessed by events across the Ditch.

As the two countries’ economic fortunes diverge, and the malaise surrounding New Zealand’s standard of living deepens, the rivalry on the Kiwi side takes an ever-more-envious tone. Forget the fine weather and the golden beaches: it’s Australia’s incomes, infrastructure and overall development that now excite especial jealousy.

This Ocker prosperity has multiple roots, including a resources boom that New Zealand probably cannot – and to an extent should not – try to emulate. But another crucial factor, many economists argue, is the bigger country’s radically different approach to savings.

Decades ago, our two nations took alternative paths. In the 1970s, New Zealand – in the persona of Robert Muldoon – rejected proposals for compulsory savings; in the 1990s Australia embraced the idea wholeheartedly.

Aussie firms now have to pay superannuation contributions equivalent to 12% of each employee’s salary. According to the Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia (ASFA), this has helped generate NZ$4.6 trillion – yes, trillion– in savings. By contrast, KiwiSaver is worth around $120bn, and the Cullen Fund – effectively a down-payment on the future cost of New Zealand Super – another $90bn.

Australia’s stronger savings culture is not only good in itself: it also boosts investment in domestic ventures. Although the country’s superannuation funds sensibly invest large amounts offshore, they also own one-fifth of the Australian stock-market. That local investment helps create more jobs and higher wages.

It looks, on the surface, a near-perfect scenario, and unsurprisingly the calls for us to copy it are only growing louder. But we need to look deeper before we take that leap.

First of all, the Australian system, in the words of ANZ’s Fiona Mackenzie, “hard codes” working-age disparities into later life. Minimum-wage workers and corporate millionaires will effectively be saving 12% of radically different salaries, and enjoy radically different retirements.

As our own Retirement Commission has concluded, New Zealand’s system – based around a universal and relatively generous public pension – reduces income disparities in retirement. Australia’s system perpetuates them.

Second, the compulsory Australian scheme is buttressed by expensive tax breaks for saving. The income diverted into superannuation accounts, and the returns earned by those investments, are both taxed at just 15%.

For people earning over A$250,000, that rate is doubled to 30%. But that’s still well below the top income tax rate of 45%.

As a result, Australia spends tens of billions of dollars on tax breaks for pension savings – around 2.5% of GDP, the equivalent of $11bn-12bn here. And such tax breaks typically provide the biggest gain to those who have the most to save – that is, the well-off.

This, in a nutshell, is the problem with the calls for New Zealand to likewise stop taxing savings. It can sound eminently sensible until one understands its potential to be both enormously expensive and hugely regressive.

What, then, is the alternative? This week the think-tank I helped found, the Institute for Democratic and Economic Analysis, put forward a policy that could be an alternative – or at least a complement – to the Australian system.

We’ve proposed a Kids KiwiSaver scheme in which every child would be enrolled at birth. The government would give their account a kick-start payment, match small annual contributions from their parents, and potentially provide direct assistance to low-income families, ensuring their children weren’t disadvantaged.

Because the scheme would draw on the magic of compound interest and stock-market returns, its first-year cost to government would be relatively small – potentially $20m-80m – while generating tens of billions of dollars over time.

From the young person’s perspective, the scheme could plausibly produce savings of $10,000-20,000 by the time they hit 18. Those savings could then roll over into standard KiwiSaver accounts, giving every young adult a clear pathway to home-ownership and retirement savings, and building a firm foundation for their future success.

Especially if the scheme were weighted towards poorer children – for instance, through direct government payments into their accounts – it could be a much more sensible way to build savings than big tax breaks for higher earners.

It could also be a valuable complement to compulsory KiwiSaver. If we went down that path, it would be all the more important to ensure everyone was starting their adult savings journey on an even footing. Kids KiwiSaver could do that job.

We would still need to narrow income disparities in the workplace, and preserve New Zealand Super’s poverty-reduction power. But a Kids KiwiSaver scheme could be one step towards a better savings future for all – a long-lasting legacy that gives us the chance to reverse some of our past economic missteps.

The Spinoff: One reason the left keeps losing economic arguments

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It is often said that in politics, explaining is losing. No wonder, then, that the left’s explanation-heavy forays into debating economics typically look like one defeat after another.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the discussions about government debt – the amount our politicians have borrowed from financial markets in order to pay for things they cannot currently afford. This is a hugely consequential issue. A political party’s attitude towards government debt not only determines what we can and cannot build, it also serves as a metaphor for their economic credibility and, thus, their electability.

When National argues that the government needs to curb its borrowing, it relies on the readily comprehensible metaphor of the domestic economy. As finance minister Nicola Willis always says around budget time: “Like Kiwi households, we are tightening our belt.” Middle New Zealand, by and large, nods in agreement.

The left then launches into a complicated explanation of why, actually, the government is nothing like a household, citing reasons such as counter-cyclical policy, monetary sovereignty and intergenerational equity. It promptly loses the public argument. 

How to escape this trap? Though some would find it a bitter mouthful to digest, the left would be better off accepting the “government as household” metaphor – and turning it to its advantage.

One of the weaknesses in the right’s argument, after all, is the claim that we shouldn’t run up debts for the future. Yet this is precisely what households – and indeed businesses – do all the time.

The point about borrowing, when done sensibly, is that it enlarges one’s future means. Without it, individuals and organisations would be hopelessly constrained by their day-to-day income.

A business may, for instance, borrow $100 million from a bank in order to build a new factory. The $5 million it pays every year in interest on the borrowing (assuming a rate of 5%) could be attacked as unaffordable. But if the factory increases the firm’s revenue by $20 million a year, the annual interest charge is a tiny price to pay (and the borrowing is soon repaid). The company can easily afford the expense because the borrowing has permanently enlarged its capacity to pay.

Households, too, are constantly borrowing – most obviously in the form of mortgages. This allows them to purchase homes they could never afford based on their current means. The advantages are less about economics and more about building a nest. But the associated security and stability undoubtedly have flow-on financial effects.

This logic gives the left a readily comprehensible way to defend government borrowing. If the state relied solely on current tax revenues, it could not afford the new water pipes, hospitals and power generation on which this country’s future prosperity depends.

And once it has, through extra borrowing, built that infrastructure, our means will be permanently enlarged. As with households, that enlargement comes in non-financial forms: safer drinking water, better health, lower carbon emissions. And as with businesses, it comes in financial forms: the higher tax revenues generated from the extra economic activity this infrastructure makes possible. 

It may seem alarming that the government’s annual interest charge – the amount it pays lenders for the privilege of borrowing their money – has reached $8.9 billion. But not only is it a very small proportion of New Zealand’s annual income of around $450 billion, it’s simply the cost of enlarging our future means. 

As long as the borrowed money is well spent, we will generate far more than $8.9 billion – in financial and non-financial benefits – from the infrastructure that this borrowing has enabled. On these terms, borrowing is far from irresponsible; not borrowing would be the irresponsible move.

This argument gains extra strength from an element that does – to give the left some credit – make governments slightly different from households: their intergenerational nature. Future generations will benefit from the infrastructure built through borrowing, so they should pay some of the cost of said infrastructure, via interest charges spread over the coming decades. This, though, is an argument that can be bolted onto the “government as household” metaphor; it does not directly contradict it. 

The household metaphor also provides a simple way to explain whether borrowing is appropriate. Although households legitimately borrow to buy the family home, they shouldn’t put their groceries on the credit card. That’s what day-to-day income is for. On parallel lines, governments can legitimately borrow for infrastructure, but not to pay nurses’ salaries. That’s what tax revenue is for.

The “government as household” metaphor faces its greatest challenge during recessions, when the state must prop up the economy by borrowing and spending more precisely because households are not. If everyone “tightens their belt” at the same time, the resulting contraction can be disastrous, as this government has discovered.

That insight provides Labour with a defence of its past economic record: by and large its borrowing was a necessary way to counteract household retrenchment during the pandemic, just as Bill English borrowed to get us through the GFC. But that insight will be far less relevant next year when – barring unforeseen disasters – the economy will be growing again.

In 2026, National will be once more telling voters that, like a household, New Zealand needs to live within its existing means, borrowing and spending less and – in consequence – unable to afford the things it might like. National will also claim that because the opposition doesn’t understand this reality, it cannot be trusted with the public finances.

The left can launch into another series of explanations about why the government isn’t like a household, arguments that, though correct in part, will be basically unintelligible to swing voters. Or it can accept the “government as household” metaphor, flawed though it may be, and start pointing out why it supports a much bigger government than Nicola Willis would like to admit.

The Post: The narrow path the left can tread that should lead to success

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This week, a left-wing agenda for the next election began to coalesce.

Item one, Labour’s proposed tax on property investment income, was impossible to miss, its announcement the culmination of two years of fevered speculation and heated debate.

Item two, the Council of Trade Unions’ New Deal for Workers, went largely unnoticed – except by my fellow columnist Max Harris, in Friday’s paper – but was just as significant in its own way.

Alongside something old – a demand for Labour to actually deliver its long-promised Fair Pay Agreements – the unions are asking for something new: a provision that, in workplaces covered by a collective agreement, any new hire is automatically enrolled in the union, while retaining the freedom to opt out.

This move, long promoted by Waikato University’s Mark Harcourt, would act as a “nudge” towards union membership, pushing back against the 40-year squeeze on wages that has seen a growing proportion of corporate revenue taken by owners instead.

If the share of revenue going to workers had remained at its 1980s level, the average wage would be a startling $14,000 higher. The decline of union membership has been central to this sad story.

A more egalitarian narrative, however, can be pieced together from this week’s announcements. A left-wing government, if successful next year, could shift the economy’s rewards away from property speculators and towards people working in productive ventures and vital public services.

More export earnings could be generated via Labour’s Future Fund tech start-up investments. That wealth could then be distributed more fairly through widespread union membership and Fair Pay Agreements that raise the “floor” of terms and conditions across whole industries.

Problems with public services, and the cost of living, could be at least partly addressed through Labour’s Medicard proposal for free GP visits.

Many questions remain unresolved, of course. Raising just $700m a year, Labour’s small-scale capital gains tax won’t generate the revenue needed to fully repair public services or repay the billions of dollars National took from working women’s pay equity claims.

Unresolved, too, is perhaps the biggest issue of them all: when one lifts one’s head from the policy detail, can a wider vision for the country be discerned?

Next year the left, in its usual way, will not lack for policies. This week’s announcements can be readily augmented with the Greens’ free dental for all, guaranteed minimum income, and comprehensive emissions reduction plan. Te Pāti Māori, assuming it’s still a functional entity, will throw more ideas into the mix.

What, though, will be the thread running through all these ideas – the vision that depicts a better world, gives coherence to disparate policies, and conveys something immediate to time-poor median voters?

Some would argue that a lack of political ambition, from Labour in particular, will neuter any attempt to construct such a vision. But modest aspirations may actually be a good fit for the times.

Unless one can turn out vast numbers of current non-voters – something the left spent part of the last decade trying and failing to do – elections are largely won in the middle. The shift away from the two main parties, now attracting less than two-thirds of the electorate, doesn’t change the fact that Labour needs to poach votes from National.

And those voters are not in the mood for soaring rhetoric. The Ardern years, now remembered – rightly or wrongly – as being characterised by vaulting ambition and precious little delivery, have cured them of that.

I’m told that, at the last election, a non-negligible number of voters didn’t believe Labour could deliver even something as modest as free dental care for the under-30s. There’s probably a parallel here with Jeremy Corbyn’s experience in the 2019 British election, when many voters felt that his vast array of manifesto pledges – including free broadband for every man, woman and child in the UK – was simply implausible.

That’s not to say that people don’t want hope. They do. But the centrist public, ground down by the cost of living and generally in a foul mood, is suspicious of anything that seems too good to be true.

And because the shift to the wings is happening with equal force on both sides – ACT and the ‘culture wars’ faction of New Zealand First rising, while the Greens and Te Pāti Māori do likewise – the centre hasn’t moved all that much. It’s grumpy, but isn’t in the mood for ideologically driven change.

Polling suggests most people don’t want to pay more tax in order to tackle child poverty or climate change. And only 2% of swing voters, according to analysis by The Post’s Henry Cooke, want further progress on Treaty issues.

That doesn’t mean Labour should offer nothing. The promised change does have to be big enough to seem meaningful – just not so big as to be implausible.

What one might call the narrow path, to be trodden carefully while offering neither too little nor too much, remains open. It is paved, however, not with grandiose visions but with hope that is grounded – hope people can believe in, hope they can touch and feel.

The Spinoff: What, exactly, will Labour’s new Future Fund achieve?

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With the announcement of its Future Fund, the Labour Party has started to answer the charge that it has no policies, and in doing so stepped into an area of politics – namely, industrial strategy – that is both full of promise and studded with pitfalls.

The fund, as announced on Monday, would be established by transferring into it unspecified state-owned assets (the power companies would be an obvious choice), not to sell them but to invest the dividends they return to the Crown. The fund would also get a $200 million initial grant. The combined monies would be invested in a mix of public infrastructure projects and early-stage private firms – all of them, crucially, based in New Zealand – in order to boost the country’s long-term prosperity.

That Labour feels this is safe territory tells us something about how radically politics has changed this century. The world in which we live, with its low tax rates and privatised utilities, still bears the traces of the neoliberal 1980s – but it has also become a very different beast.

Long shunned as a relic of the 1970s, industrial policy – the idea that government can direct economic activity into certain areas rather than others – is once again fashionable. Even under a right-wing Conservative government last decade, Britain had an explicit industrial policy. Joe Biden’s drive to have semiconductors manufactured in America was industrial policy. One of the world’s most influential economists, Mariana Mazzucato, is an arch-exponent of industrial policy.

Many states have so-called investment banks, which direct public money into areas of the economy their governments have deemed especially important. Meanwhile, states have established over 90 sovereign wealth funds that control more than $8 trillion in assets. Even Donald Trump wants to set up an American version. The big state is back, baby.

These different forms of government action, though, have different rationales. And the challenge for Labour lies in clearly articulating what exactly its Future Fund will achieve.

Although it has been billed as a sovereign wealth fund, most such vehicles run on different lines. The standard sovereign wealth fund takes surplus government cash – often generated from state asset sales or oil booms – and invests it wherever the returns are highest. If, the thinking goes, private commerce is generating big profits, the state might as well get a slice. And, judging by the immense returns enjoyed by the Norwegian and Gulf State sovereign wealth funds, that is exactly what happens.

This approach does not seek to develop local industry, or pursue goals other than maximising profits. Often, though, left-wingers still love the idea, because at scale – Norway’s sovereign wealth funds own over one-third of the Oslo stock exchange – these vehicles effectively start to socialise the returns on capital. One logical left-wing extension is the social wealth fund, which would invest commercially but return its annual dividends to citizens, each of whom would own one equal, non-saleable share. 

Labour’s Future Fund, however, will not roam the world chasing maximal returns. It will instead blend commercial and public-good imperatives, seeking to make money but also help local companies grow, promote clean energy, and support infrastructure projects.

It is unlikely to make us mega-rich, then, at least in financial terms. If Labour won’t flog state assets to help seed the fund – indeed it wants to make them harder to sell off – the starting stake will be relatively small. Returns on Kiwi infrastructure projects, meanwhile, are typically steady but modest, and many investments in New Zealand startups will presumably fail. All being well, the Future Fund might still grow in size, but not at the dizzying rate of other sovereign wealth funds.

Nor does investing in infrastructure, important though that is, constitute a sufficient objective, given that such investment could be funded the typical way, through government borrowing. What, then, is the Future Fund’s distinctive contribution, apart from a (potentially successful) appeal to nationalistic sentiments?

Its main selling point seems to be the investments in New Zealand startups. And critics will immediately ask how the government can know which companies to back.

Labour is not the only party that sees a role for the state here, however. In this year’s budget, finance minister Nicola Willis put an extra $100 million into the state-backed Elevate venture capital fund “to boost high-growth technology companies with strong export potential”, RNZ reported. The view is not necessarily that the state will pick winners that the market has not. Rather, one theory goes, there are promising Kiwi firms that cannot attract enough capital because the New Zealand funding market is simply too small. 

One possible model for Labour’s venture is the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund, a state-owned vehicle that pursues a dual investment mandate of boosting economic growth and employment. It claims that its €6.5 billion in funding has, over a decade, unlocked €10.2 billion of private-sector co-investment, all of it essentially focused on Ireland. Mazzucato’s concept of the economic “mission”, in which state investment can “crowd in” private funds, sits in the background of Labour’s policy – but isn’t fleshed out.

Balancing commercial and public-good imperatives, moreover, can be tricky. The Future Fund’s governors, acting at arm’s length from ministers, would have to decide how to balance financial returns, jobs created, and environmental goals like fostering renewable energy. While many organisations juggle competing demands, this runs the risk of muddled thinking. 

Relatedly, the now-canned New Zealand Green Investment Fund, which was supposed to catalyse investment in renewable projects, actually invested on the same terms as private firms, leading people to question what value it added. New Zealand’s state investment vehicles have often suffered from having unclear aims. 

Backing local startups would also land Labour right in the trickiest parts of the industrial-policy spectrum. There are reasons governments may sensibly invest where the market has not: when there are positive spillover effects that individual firms won’t capture, or multiplying advantages from clusters and hubs, or co-ordination failures in which overseas market A won’t open up unless processing factory B is developed and vice versa. But these justifications have to be clearly articulated and followed through; otherwise the risk of money being wasted is high.

Labour is clearly up for the challenge, though. One can sense an attempt to slot building blocks into place: if, totally hypothetically, one of Labour’s next announcements was some form of tax on residential property investment, it would make sense to have prepared the ground for a shift away from property speculation by fostering a pre-existing narrative about where that money might go instead. 

Sovereign wealth funds are also music to the ears of potential coalition partners like New Zealand First, which mooted its own larger version last year. Much depends, however, on whether the Future Fund, and related policies, can amount to a coherent plan for reshaping the economy.

The Post: When violence beckons as a political solution, we must find a better way

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If you are in a party of seven people around a restaurant table, one of you – on average – will believe that political violence is now justified. This was the grim finding of a Curia poll, reported earlier this week, that had 14% of New Zealanders saying violence may be needed “to get the country back on track”.

Such surveys are, of course, a free hit, a chance to vent; I suspect few Kiwis would actually bear arms for their cause. But still: the poll points to something bad. And so do other stats.

Earlier this month, psychology researchers reported that 17% of white New Zealand men – around one in 10 of the total population – believe they are victims of discrimination. And while some of those men will genuinely be struggling, at least economically, many are simply reacting angrily to having their behaviour challenged by #MeToo and other such movements.

One-third of young men believe, against all the evidence about gender pay gaps and domestic violence, that equality for women has “gone too far”. Political insiders, meanwhile, predict an especially ugly election campaign next year, one potentially scarred by a renewal of anti-immigrant rhetoric.

On the populist front, we already have New Zealand First’s Shane Jones threatening to “exterminate” any public servant activity that slows down his beloved fast-track process, while Winston Peters calls broadcasting regulators “the Stasi” for daring to hear complaints against Sean Plunket’s The Platform.

Each data point, like a reading on a political thermometer, signals a rising temperature. Although New Zealand is not yet overturned by the roiling anger that we see in places like America, a non-negligible segment of the population is poised for unrest.

And there are lessons to learn from overseas. The political scientist Katherine Cramer, who has spent years interviewing rural Americans, argues that Trump voters feel they are denied their fair share of three key things: good incomes and the other fruits of the economy, political decision-making power, and respect for their way of life.

One can see all three forces – economic, political and cultural – at play in New Zealand, where 60% of the population lack the liquid assets needed to sustain themselves for just three months at the poverty line. Economic precarity is, global research suggests, the single greatest predictor of support for authoritarian populists.

OECD data shows most Kiwis think their government doesn’t listen to them. Politics is too top-down, too distant from ordinary people’s lives. No wonder disaffection is growing and local election turnout lamentable.

How, then, can reasonable, non-violent people respond to this rising tide of anger?

Central here are two forms of security, their duality embodying a wider need for both “hard” and “soft” responses.

On the hard side, our politicians – especially the women and ethnic minorities most often targeted – will need greater physical protection, and the police must take online threats more seriously.

But as well as facing down the unacceptable elements of political anger, we should acknowledge that it sometimes has comprehensible roots. So we also need a politics that provides people with material security: one that reduces economic disparities, ensures everyone has the financial foundation of a better future, and restores the Kiwi dream in which hard work buys an affordable house and a good family life.

Our outdated political system, meanwhile, must open up more space for people to participate in democracy – not just on election day but on every other day of the year.

Cramer’s final driver of authoritarian support – a perceived lack of respect for certain lifeways – also merits a dual approach.

Respect shouldn’t be accorded to authoritarian worldviews where they involve xenophobia and other bigotry. We must be clear that some politicians are now testing democratic limits and weakening human-rights norms. We have to defend persecuted minorities and turn up to protests.

But we also mustn’t fall into the trap of screaming “dictator” at every turn. We have to recognise that urban liberal politics can sometimes seem condescending.

I frequently disagree with farmers, for instance, over their unwillingness to take responsibility for their planet-heating emissions and riverine pollution. But I am uncomfortable with the reflexive urban dislike of farming, the failure to appreciate the hard manual labour and care for the natural world that – at its best – that sector represents.

In short: we won’t get far with either a purely “soft” approach (“we just need to hear everyone’s opinions”) or a purely “hard” one (“anyone who dissents from metropolitan liberalism is a proto-fascist”). We need a complex double movement, navigating between extremes.

Alongside the hard space of protest, then, we must create the softer spaces of encounter: the forums where reasonable people from different backgrounds can meet each other and articulate their views robustly – but with an underlying respect for one another.

We have to find ways to take down the political temperature, lest it take us down instead.