The Post: How we progress by reaction and counter-reaction

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As the year turns, my thoughts turn likewise to the withering appraisal that the poet John Dryden, writing in 1700, delivered on the century that had just passed. “All, all of a piece throughout,” he wrote in The Secular Masque. “Thy wars brought nothing about / Thy lovers were all untrue / Tis well in old age is out / And time to begin a new.”

In a similar vein, few New Zealanders will look back on 2023 with fondness – except perhaps those leading the National Party, for whom the exultation of electoral success may rapidly be eroded by the frustrating grind of actual governance.

National will also find that an unfeasibly large part of 2024 is taken up with an ugly debate about the political importance and meaning of the Treaty of Waitangi/te Tiriti o Waitangi. It is not a debate that I suspect Christopher Luxon really wants, but since he has agreed to support – at least to a first vote – ACT’s bizarre attempt to rewrite the Treaty along libertarian lines, it is a debate he is going to get.

This move, alongside attempts to rewrite legislative references to the Treaty and reverse schools’ guidance on gender and sexuality education, has led some to proclaim this the most right-wing government since the 1990s. But although true, this simply implies that Luxon is more right-wing than John Key – hardly a very high bar.

Luxon’s agenda is also a predictable reaction to recent politics. Governments always push against their predecessors, and Jacinda Ardern’s administration was – in intent if not in delivery – more left-wing than Helen Clark’s one. Recent attempts at co-governance and devolution to Māori, however half-hearted, have surpassed anything Clark initiated; and so the backlash is stronger.

This can make life frightening and unpleasant for Māori, transgender people and others. But it doesn’t have to spell bad news forever.

When negative steps are taken, progressives tend to fear they will be made permanent, as if the immediate past was the peak of a mountain that will never be regained. And some societies do decline, for long periods, if their self-correcting mechanisms are inactive or overridden.

A free and trusted press, for instance, plays a vital role, informing the public and curbing power’s excesses. Societies where the media are either repressed, as in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, or distrusted by half the electorate, as in America, can suffer permanent damage.

More commonly, though, history progresses by reaction and counter-reaction. In 16th-century Europe, the Protestant Reformation challenged a corrupt Catholic Church. This was met by a Counter-Reformation that sometimes took violently negative forms, as with the Spanish Inquisition, but also positive ones, as the church reformed its worst practices.

Backlashes always occur. Indeed when I was at university – a slightly more recent bit of history than the Reformation, even if it seems an eon ago – one of the key political texts was a book by Susan Faludi entitled, quite simply, Backlash, which described the 1980s counter-reaction to the 1970s women’s movement. As Faludi wrote last year, that backlash “has never relented” – but progress can be achieved in spite of it.

Very little of this ebb and flow is easily predicted. Most people have famously limited foresight, largely because they take a single trend and extrapolate it remorselessly forward. Professional futurists, by contrast, provides scenarios in which competing forces vie: a less satisfying, but more accurate, way to think about the years ahead.

The near future may, for the rights of Māori and others, prove to be a step backwards – but also a platform for progress. Opposition to co-governance and Māori political structures may stem partly from racism, but many New Zealanders are simply unsettled by change or unclear on the concepts. This is hardly surprising, given the last government’s notorious reluctance to actually define or defend co-governance.

The upcoming debate will be a chance to explain that ‘by Māori for Māori’ services and structures – in education, healthcare, welfare and elsewhere – are simply the means for an indigenous people to recover the ways of governing themselves that they enjoyed pre-colonisation; that they do not imply ‘segregation’, since there will be countless social spaces in which different ethnicities continue to mix; and that, by allowing Māori to live more authentically and healthily, co-governance and devolved services will create widespread benefits for everyone. Attitudinal surveys, which show New Zealanders becoming more accepting of the Treaty over time, are a solid base on which to build such arguments.

This is not to imply that the coming years will be all sunshine and roses. The nastier side of the New Zealand psyche is no doubt emboldened. But there is also a chance to create, out of the current backwards ebb in politics, a forward-moving flow. The future is never pre-written.