Guardian: NZ’s parliament protests were frightening but they don’t mean the country is splintering

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The occupation of New Zealand’s parliament was fractured from the outset: fascists vied for control with controversial pastors, conspiracy theorists and more moderate anti-mandate protesters. And even as the occupation violently collapsed with rioters lobbing cobblestones at police, the divisions remained. Some shouted “burn it down”, while others tried to restrain them.

As New Zealand reacts to some of its darkest days in recent memory, these internal rivalries are, obscurely, a hopeful sign – a reminder there was far more division inside the protest than between the protesters and the wider nation.

Right-wing politicians took the occupation as evidence of a sharp rent in the social fabric. The National party leader, Christopher Luxon, gave a speech headlined “A Divided Society”. ACT’s leader, David Seymour, described the country as “splintered”. But while we cannot erase the images of parliament’s lawn burning, nor should we panic ourselves into a false assessment of how deep our social divisions run.

Hardline anti-vaxxers remain marginal. In the 2020 election, only 2% to 3% of New Zealanders voted for parties promoting Covid scepticism or conspiracies. Today, 94% of the eligible population is double jabbed, even if some signed up only because they feared losing their jobs.

Of course, the 6% of New Zealanders who are unvaccinated does represent tens of thousands of people, and that is alarming. So too the fact that, adjusted for population, New Zealand has three times more consumers of far-right Facebook content than the US. But they are still less than 1% of internet users.

New Zealand is not a house divided against itself. The country does not have two large, permanently opposed blocs – think Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland – whose enmity makes governing next to impossible.

It’s true some polls found 20% of New Zealanders supported the parliamentary occupation (almost all stated their opposition to vaccine mandates as their reason, rather than support for the darker elements of the protest).

Another poll found 25% of New Zealanders believed the government’s Covid response had gone too far.

But that same poll also showed 50% the country endorsed Jacinda Ardern’s policy, while 25% want it tougher still. For a democratic nation confronting a controversial policy that has required the state to curtail core liberties, these are natural tensions.

Disagreement is a sign not of dysfunction but of healthy democratic debate. Countries can also be surprisingly resilient. The 1981 Springbok tour was divisive in the extreme, yet those wounds healed with time.

New Zealand is, overall, a cohesive society. According to Victoria University’s Institute for Governance and Policy Studies, 80% of New Zealanders believe others can generally be trusted. (That is, they rate their trust in others to be at least 5 on a 10-point scale.) The same proportion has faith that the government will solve core social problems. Meanwhile, the Kiwis Count survey shows trust in public services has been high and rising, no matter who is in power.

Seen in this light, the parliamentary occupation represents a small, if frightening, loss of cohesion – a fraying at the edges, rather than a great rip in the social fabric. Some of the protesters were already marginalised – disproportionately poor and Māori, they had undoubtedly experienced racism and a sense of not belonging to their society. They were probably in the 20% who do not trust others, or government, very much.

Such concerns were then easily channelled into conspiracy theories and violence. This non-negligible group of New Zealanders have, with a worrying intensity and conviction, constructed an alternative reality. A world in which, to take just one touted scenario, the government has invented a fake virus in order to poison the population. They have broken away. The task now is to help them reattach themselves where possible, and ensure there are no further breaks.

That is no easy task, for it will require us, paradoxically, to be both tougher and gentler. Tougher in the sense that the police must never again be caught napping, violent and threatening speech must be more forcefully regulated, and something must be done to stop Facebook and other platforms pushing extreme content on users.

But gentler too, in that lectures about “following the science” won’t get people out of conspiracy theory rabbit holes – only slow, non-judgemental conversation with trusted friends will. We must also inoculate individuals against misinformation and help them reconnect with their communities, one of the surest defences against extremism. We must confront racism and the economic disparities that damage trust and suppress political engagement by making the poor feel (sometimes correctly) that the elites have everything sewn up.

This is a matter not of appeasing the protesters but of supporting the countless New Zealanders who are also poor and marginalised yet chose not to join a violent occupation. While the views of parliament’s occupiers do not yet represent a major threat to social cohesion, their wider spread would. That is the danger we must guard against. But we do so from a position of strength, because we are not hopelessly divided against ourselves.

Child poverty keep keeps falling, confounding the commentators

The latest child poverty statistics were released yesterday, showing reductions on the three main measures, even (for 2 out of 3) between July 2020 and June 2021, i.e. through much of the pandemic, thus confounding the claims of many commentators.

(A brief technical note: the first measure shows how many children are living in households with less than half the typical income (are poor households keeping pace with average ones?); the second shows how many children are living in households with less than half the income the typical household had in 2017 (are households getting richer compared to the past?); and the third one shows how many children are in households going without basic items like heating and clothing (are households able to afford the necessities?).)

Some may wonder how this can be, when foodbank use and other indicators of severe poverty are soaring. Well, foodbank use, though an indictment on our society, affects only some people in poverty, while many others have benefited from higher benefits and wages, wage subsidies, accommodation supplement increases, and so on.

Also, calculating poverty rates across hundreds of thousands of people, without access to Statistics New Zealand data and Treasury modelling, is next to impossible – and frankly I think some of the people who try to do it themselves should be more cautious about the claims they make.  

It’s not all good news for the government, of course. Much progress was achieved with the Families Package several years ago, but that progress has slowed up since, or even come to a standstill on some measures. Major negatives include the fact that child poverty rates for Māori are high and not consistently falling, and the same is true for people with disabilities.  

Moreover, only one out of the government’s three main targets for 2021 has been unequivocally met, with another possibly met. The target that was most clearly missed – to sharply reduce the proportion of children living in households with less than half the typical income – is, to my mind, extremely important, because it measures the extent to which poorer households are keeping pace with, or falling adrift from, the standard of living considered normal in their society.

To deal with that issue requires lifting low incomes more rapidly than middle ones. Basically, it looks like the government is going to need an equivalent of the Families Package – which cost more than $1 billion a year – again this term, and next (if it wins in 2023), if it is going to meet its targets. And there is no sign so far that it plans such a move. The hardest parts of meeting the child poverty targets, in other words, lie ahead.

Stuff: Self-improvement won't get us out of this mess

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“It’s exhausting to watch.” So says Dr Morgan Edwards, as she attempts to describe the vaccine misinformation spread by so-called mumfluencers.

Mothers with large online followings, they promote “wellness”, yogawear, supplements, “therapies” of doubtful value and, increasingly, anti-vax conspiracy theories.

As Stuff’s Kirsty Johnston showed earlier this week, mumfluencers are a central component of the Covid Convoy, their influence deriving from the role mothers play in making vaccination decisions for their household.

These bloggers and Instagrammers are not just exhausting but also impossibly irritating. Their relationship with science is tenuous at best, and they have no conception of the advantages they enjoy: their gospel of “wellness” is inaccessible to people who can’t afford organic vegetables or don’t have time to meditate for an hour a day.

Mumfluencers have their roots in the hippy left, but as that was often an individualistic form of protest – the “turn on, tune in, drop out” part lasted rather longer than the commune-building one – it was always vulnerable to overlapping with the libertarian far-right.

And indeed the two movements have now coalesced around fears over bodily freedom and shared suspicion of the state, as documented by Conspirituality podcaster Matthew Remski.

But we shouldn’t let our irritation with mumfluencers blind us to their insights. They understand, better than anyone else, the depth of our frustration with modern life. Tired, stressed, anxious, and working insane hours, in a world where conventional religion offers far less direction and structure than it once did, we naturally seek wellness, a sense of peace, a higher purpose.

As I’ve previously written, mumfluencers have diagnosed a real problem. They just have entirely the wrong answer.

The main issue with modern life, after all, is not that it is too collective, too government-driven, but that it is too individualistic. We blame people too much for their failings, ignoring the deep social and structural causes of illness, unemployment and despair.

And if individualism is the problem, the mumfluencer remedy – a relentless focus on personal self-improvement through mindfulness, supplements and the like – will hardly get to the heart of things.

What, then, is the solution? Take one of our most vexing issues: time. No-one, from shift-laden hospitality workers to stressed public-sector contractors, seems to have enough of it. Many are working longer hours than they would like. (Alongside, of course, those who want more employment.)

That’s partly because where it used to take just one income to raise a family, it often now needs two. The proportion of two-earner families has risen from under 50 per cent in the 1980s to over 70 per cent today. In nearly half of all households, both parents work full-time.

Few of the couples I know would want it that way: they’d rather both work part-time. But they simply wouldn’t earn enough, not if they wanted to pay the rent or mortgage.

That in turn points to two key problems with New Zealand’s economy: wages are pitiful, and housing costs exorbitant. The first problem is caused partly by weak productivity, but more substantially by a fall in the share of company income going to workers (as opposed to owners), from 70 per cent in the 1980s to under 60 per cent today. If it were restored, the average worker would earn $14,000 more each year.

And wouldn’t that allow lots of time off, reducing stress and denting the mumfluencers’ appeal? A four-day working week would help, too.

A similar logic holds for housing, where we need a huge collective effort to drive costs down and reduce individual despair. So too with mental health. Rather than just expecting individuals to meditate​ their distress away, we should also address its social causes, which include the stressful, precarious and casualised work environments many must endure.

Even the treatments for mental distress should be collectively provided, through a fully functioning public health system. The Labour Government has lifted mental health funding, but struggles to convert it into improved services.

Politics must offer these answers; otherwise, things could take a dark turn indeed. If we don’t ensure both parents can happily work part-time, the rise in two-earner households could be twisted to put the blame on women’s entry into the paid workforce, fostering a fundamentally regressive movement that takes the 50s housewife as its model.

Nor is this a notional concern: “trad wives” views, as they are known, have been voiced by some parliamentary occupiers.

We need, moreover, to change not just our political policies but also our values, ambition and delivery. Labour superficially speaks the language of “well-being”, but has never really followed through on it. And that’s part of the problem. Disillusionment with collective solutions helps push people towards mumfluencers. Restoring a sense of shared purpose and mission to politics is part of the task of drawing them away again.

Don’t buy the lie that we are divided

National leader Christopher Luxon’s claim, on Monday, that this is “the most divisive government in recent memory” came as a surprise to people who know anything about this nation’s past. More divisive than the 1980s Labour government – which surely is within “recent memory” – and its undemocratic economic blitzkrieg, which made thousands of people redundant almost overnight?

It’s also worth comparing this Labour government to administrations further back in history. Far more divisive were the nineteenth-century administrations that confiscated millions of hectares of Māori land. So too Sid Holland’s National government, which in 1951 made it illegal not only to report the views of striking waterfront workers but even to feed them.

Historical knowledge, though, doesn’t seem to be in the National leader job description these days: John Key once described the colonisation of New Zealand as “peaceful”, which must have come as a surprise to the iwi who had their land stolen and their people murdered. 

The irony is even stronger when you consider that Jacinda Ardern’s greatest achievements have been feats of unification: eschewing revenge and angry rhetoric after the Christchurch mosque shootings, and helming the “team of 5 million” covid response in which the young and healthy have stayed home to protect their vulnerable elders. 

Yes, the vaccine mandates have excluded many from their normal way of life. But that exclusion was amply justified, and temporary: for all the politicking, most parties want the mandates relaxed as soon as possible. 

Deep differences of opinion may have sprung up. But, far from being irreparable, they are a standard part of democracy. The 75% who back tough covid action is, in fact, remarkably high for such a heated issue.  

Here’s another history lesson: the 1981 Springbok tour famously divided the country, but with time the wounds closed over. Indeed we have an immense capacity for healing, not least because the body politic is fundamentally in good shape. 

Four in five New Zealanders believe our governments will solve key national problems, while trust in public services is high, and rising. Crucially, we don’t have a deep and seemingly irreparable breach between two large groups – think Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland – that makes governing next to impossible. 

So it creates an unnecessary sense of crisis to talk about a torn social fabric – or social chasms, as Act leader David Seymour has done. On the other hand, we mustn’t be complacent about what has happened in recent weeks.  

While some Covid Convoyers have genuine concerns about the mandates, they have largely discredited their cause by standing shoulder-to-shoulder with those issuing death threats to journalists and politicians. Personally, having observed the Parliamentary siege first-hand, and followed the reporting, I’ve been dismayed by the violence – and above all the detachment from reality. Conspiracy theories are rife. 

The views represented by the hardcore occupiers are mostly marginal: just 5% of New Zealanders, after all, are not double-vaccinated. But even that is a worrying number. Some larger figure –perhaps one-fifth – are sympathetic to parts of the protest. Moreover, the occupation is clearly radicalising its more mainstream members; the growing influence of the global far-right can be seen in the conspiracy-theorist Counterspin’s broadcasting; and academics who follow extremism report an eight-fold increase in activity on anti-vax social media channels. The social fabric isn’t rent but, to use a different metaphor, a small group has splintered off. 

So how do we respond? The siege of Parliament must act as a particularly unpleasant wake-up call, like a rooster crowing in a suburban backyard. The police, caught completely unawares, must rethink their approach to extremist gatherings. The Speaker of Parliament, Trevor Mallard, should reflect on his foolish attempts to harass the occupiers. Some commentators must realise they can’t downplay the danger of violent extremism or always take protesters’ statements at face value. 

We need, in short, to be tougher with extremists. But we also need to be gentler in other areas. 

Those who have descended the rabbit hole of conspiracy theory have often been preyed upon by online ‘Mumfluencers’ and the alt-right. Sneering at them won’t help, nor will lectures from distant authority figures. Their rescue will fall to people in their own lives, trusted figures who can listen, empathise, and help non-judgementally. 

We must also build a fence around the rabbit hole. That will require better public health communication, programmes showing people how to spot misinformation, and tougher regulation of Facebook and algorithms that promote hateful content. 

It will also take a wider social mission to ensure that the 5% – if they are even that large – don’t become the 25%. We need to take steps to ensure everyone, as far as possible, feels part of the social fabric. And we don’t need to do that to appease Parliament’s occupiers – they are all steps we should have been taking anyway.  

Anti-poverty programmes that ensure everyone feels economically included; the devolution of public services to Māori providers trusted by their communities; the creation of affordable housing for all; the reduction of wealth disparities that polarise society: none of it is easy, but all of it is possible. And all the more so because we begin from a basically unified starting point.

Stuff: The fallacy of education as a fix for income disparities

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“We have to build a better economic engine that actually lifts everybody, not just a few.” More socialist rhetoric from Jacinda Ardern? Au contraire: it’s National leader Christopher Luxon, speaking to Breakfast’s John Campbell last week.

Luxon’s phrasing shows just how sharply the inequality debate has shifted from a decade ago, when the then finance minister Bill English was denying there was any such problem. And Luxon is right.

Since the 1980s, incomes have more than doubled for the richest New Zealanders, while rising by less than one-third for the poorest. We have built a dangerously unbalanced economy.

When Campbell challenged him on solutions, though, the National leader immediately highlighted education, saying we need to “create the rungs of social mobility, so people can lift up and rise out”.

But this is where politicians so often go astray, misled by two false assumptions: that there need be large rungs separating individuals on the ladder of life, and that it is education’s job to lift people from one to another.

Metaphorically, the rungs represent income disparities between different occupations. But while everyone, save perhaps a few hard-core socialists, accepts there will be some disparities – when people choose to work longer hours, for instance – there’s no reason for them to be especially large.

The old line is that massive inequalities are needed to incentivise entrepreneurship and economic growth, but the Scandinavians have much smaller disparities than us and much stronger economies, so that doesn’t hold.

We would do better, in fact, with smaller economic imbalances. We could ensure the well-off contribute their fair share of tax; currently many pay a lower rate than minimum-wage workers, according to Inland Revenue research. We could raise pay rates for cleaners and aged care staff – and help beneficiaries live with dignity – by strengthening the bargaining power of frontline employees, lifting benefits, and making housing affordable for all.

Then, because the rungs would be much closer together and – crucially – the lower ones much higher, people wouldn’t have to desperately scramble upwards to escape poverty, as Luxon’s “rise out” phrase suggests: they’d already be enjoying a decent life. Individuals might still retrain – from cleaners to lawyers, say – but as a means to fulfil their ambitions, not to leave an intolerable situation.

As the British thinker R.H. Tawney once argued, the good society is not necessarily one in which people can rise but one in which they can lead a decent life “whether they rise or not”.

At this point, the fallacy of Luxon’s focus on education becomes clear. For as long as poverty exists, families will naturally use education to escape it. But they shouldn’t have to, because that poverty shouldn’t exist in the first place.

Luxon also points the arrow of causation the wrong way. The most crucial years of a child’s life are the first few; “education” is too late to help there. We also know that socio-economic status, which includes factors like a family’s income, is the single biggest determinant of whether children do well at school or not. The core problem is not that educational failure causes poverty; it’s that poverty causes educational failure.

Schooling, which is principally about helping children discover their abilities and become well-rounded citizens, does have an economic role. It drives innovation and technological breakthroughs, which in turn boost growth. But – and this is the crucial distinction – that is a matter of raising living standards for a whole society, not lifting individuals above others on the ladder of life.

It generates more wealth, but doesn’t solve the problem of how to distribute it. And because poverty is partly relative, a matter of not having what is needed to participate in current society, we’ll always have to grapple with wealth’s distribution.

We need, in short, to decouple education from the idea of escaping individual poverty, by (significantly) decoupling occupational status from income.

To put it another way, schooling should be about occupational or social mobility, not economic mobility. It should ensure that a child’s occupation isn’t constrained by what their parents did. That’s a useful kind of mobility, one that widens horizons and expands opportunities for all.

But education shouldn’t be about ensuring children can earn more than their parents, because their parents should already earn enough for a decent life, whatever their occupation. That kind of mobility – economic mobility, which is what Luxon is actually talking about, even when he says “social mobility” – is relatively unimportant, if the ladder’s rungs are closer together.

In fact, it’s a zero-sum game, socially. If you educate the children of aged-care workers to become lawyers, it just means that someone else’s children have to become aged-care workers. They then suffer the resultant low pay and poor conditions.

Luxon’s rhetorical embrace of egalitarianism, in short, is welcome – but risks winding up in a dead end.

Stuff: I want Māori to enjoy what I have, life in a society that makes sense to them

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At a recent funeral, I was reflecting on traditional mourning practices, as I have experienced them – the wearing of black, the playing of sombre music – and how well they fit my sense of the way things should be done.

That prompted a further thought, about how easy life (even in death) seems to me, because I live in a society set up largely according to my values. When members of my extended family are born, we perform rituals practised for generations. When they die, they are buried in ways I find familiar.

At all times I can freely speak my native language. My schooling was organised by values largely identical to those of my own family. The health system provides treatment, usually some combination of physiotherapy, scans and pain medication, based on cultural assumptions and practices that I broadly like.

Even in my minimal encounters with the legal and welfare systems, I have known what to expect: treatment based (at least in theory) on classic Western notions of individual responsibility, distributive justice, community

All this is true partly because I’m Pākehā. I live in a society, and interact with a state, founded on values inherited predominantly from Europe. And why does that matter? Because it allows me to be whole. I live in a culture in which I am largely at home. Most days I am swimming with the current. I can, at key moments, be myself.

But I’ve been thinking a lot about how, by contrast, that isn’t true for people from other cultures – notably for Māori, as their leaders have long argued. Recently I enjoyed reading Taranaki educator Keri Opai’s new book Tikanga, which describes its subject as “a Māori way of doing things: the customary system of practices and values that are expressed in every social context”. And those practices differ systematically from Pākehā ones (while sharing some underlying values, of course).

Though iwi protocol varies, as Opai outlines, for most Māori people meetings and events start with greater formality, and a stronger focus on introductions, than is true for Pākehā. At tangihanga, meanwhile, the ceremonials last several days, koha (donations) are brought, and the deceased person is often in an open casket. Such practices are required to give effect to the values Opai identifies, such as whakapapa (roughly, familial connections) and manaakitanga (hospitality).

Colonisation eroded Māori people’s ability to carry out those practices. Now, in response to long-running activism, our country is becoming more accommodating of them: witness the growing use of pōwhiri and te reo in the public sector.

But progress for Māori within Pākehā structures is always likely to be partial. As iwi leaders have long argued, an organisation dedicated to serving a particular culture is best run by people from that culture.

Hence the creation of kōhanga reo and kura kaupapa, run by Māori and allowing Māori to learn according to a worldview that makes sense to them. Hence, too, the proposed creation of a Māori Health Authority, which might ultimately ensure wider use of rongoā, a distinctively Māori approach to holistic health.

Last year iwi health providers did the best job of vaccinating their communities, unsurprisingly: the better you know the people you serve, the better the services will be. Some Māori have also called for welfare budgets to be devolved to iwi, and for justice systems in which they could resolve disputes among themselves using concepts such as utu and mana.

If the principle of people making decisions for themselves holds, though, such steps might only be precursors to fuller political autonomy for Māori.

One report from which I’ve learnt much, and which I’d encourage fellow Pākehā to read, is 2015’s Matike Mai, in which Moana Jackson and Margaret Mutu argue that Te Tiriti o Waitangi guarantees three “spheres” of authority: a tino rangatiratanga sphere in which Māori govern their own affairs, a kāwanatanga sphere in which Pākehā do likewise, and a “relational” sphere in which joint decisions are made. For the tino rangatiratanga sphere, Matike Mai suggests an “iwi/hapū assembly” but also several other models.

This kind of reform would raise complex questions, especially in delineating the boundaries between different bodies. I don’t have all the answers, nor would I try to dictate what they look like. I just think there are solutions to be found, and I support those seeking them.

The inevitable response from some will be to cry separatism. But to me it’s no such thing. Māori and Pākehā will always come together in offices and on sports fields, at holiday camps and in church choirs, in all the venues of everyday life. Their cultural practices will continue to influence each other.

The point, as I see it, is for Māori to enjoy what I enjoy, the ability to live in a society run in a way that makes sense to me and which allows me to express myself. Opai says people should be able to “bring their whole selves” to a given situation. That’s essentially what Te Tiriti guarantees. It also strikes me as, quite simply, an ability that everyone should have.

Stuff: We need knowledge to tackle unfairness in our tax system

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When the government asks wealthy people to comply with the law, sometimes they just laugh. One multimillionaire claimed last year that $15,000, the likely fine for non-compliance with Inland Revenue requests, was “frankly just a night on the town”.

This is one vignette from an incipient battle between tax officials, acting at the behest of Revenue Minister David Parker, and New Zealand’s richest citizens. It’s a battle in which the issues at stake include our ability to determine basic issues of fairness and ensure the rich follow the same rules as everyone else. It’s also a battle in which apparently arcane efforts to collect data have profound democratic implications.

The latest skirmish will play out this month as Inland Revenue writes to roughly 400 New Zealanders, worth more than $20 million each, asking for initial details of their assets and liabilities, what they own and owe. Sounds intrusive? Not really, because it’s the kind of data thousands of ordinary Kiwis regularly provide.

Every three years, some 5000 of us sit down with Statistics NZ interviewers to fill out the “net worth” section of the Household Economic Survey, explaining the value of our houses, investments, cars and other items, as well as our mortgages and credit card debts. Our responses, extrapolated to the whole population, help answer one of the most basic questions any society faces: is life fair?

Our wealth, after all, does much to determine whether we can achieve our ambitions. So we need to know whether wealth is distributed fairly – whether, in other words, it lines up with people’s efforts and contributions to society.

From the 5000 responses above, statisticians estimate the wealthiest 1 per cent have 20 per cent of all assets. Their typical net worth is around 70 times that of the average New Zealander, an already disproportionate sum.

There’s a catch, however: almost none of the 5000 will be extremely wealthy. One year, the biggest fortune surveyed was $20m, in a country with several billionaires. The very rich are, of course, few in number, but there’s also a more insidious reason for their absence: often, they simply refuse to take part. Possibly they fear (mistakenly) the information will be misused; possibly they don’t see themselves as bound by the same responsibilities as others.

Internationally, this is known as the “shy wealthy” phenomenon, and it means household surveys underestimate inequality. Statisticians can try to fill the data gap using the Rich List or other methods, raising the wealthiest 1 per cent’s estimated share from 20 per cent to 24-25 per cent.

Better than estimates, though, is actual data. And that’s one reason for Inland Revenue to write to the very wealthy: to get them to provide the same information ordinary New Zealanders happily volunteer.

The wealth distribution, in turn, affects how much tax people pay. Inland Revenue estimates that 40 per cent of New Zealand’s wealthiest individuals pay a lower rate of tax than those on the minimum wage. The rich, officials believe, take much of their income as capital gains, which are barely taxed.

Again, though, that’s just an estimate. Again, officials are justified in asking detailed questions about people’s wealth, so we can definitively establish how it changes and what capital gains they’ve enjoyed. That helps us better understand how much of their income each group pays in tax, and whether the system operates fairly.

Some of the wealthy, accepting this point, are being cooperative. But not all of them. Our $15,000-a-night friend above may display their contempt by simply stonewalling officials. Others are talking about hiring QCs (just as the infamous Wānaka lockdown-breaking couple did) and launching a judicial review. Big law firms are queueing up for the work. (How many cases, I wonder, do such firms take for beneficiaries complaining about government requests for their data?)

It’s true the law allowing Inland Revenue to carry out these investigations was rushed through under urgency. That’s improper – but not illegal. And Inland Revenue, which for years has had a special unit dealing with litigious “high worth individuals”, will be well-prepared for any court case.

This saga, which will unroll over the next couple of years, is a reminder of the old maxim: knowledge is power. If we, as a society, can better understand where wealth lies and how tax is paid, we will be in a much stronger position to redress the unfairness such data reveals.

Not every wealthy individual wants that. But few New Zealanders will be moved by the Rich Listers’ claim of government intrusion, a lament so insignificant it would have to be played on a violin that could only be seen under an electron microscope.

And even if the wealthy did win a judicial review, all they would have done is exposed their own disproportionate power. Which in itself would tell us something about the world in which we live.

Stuff: Chop off the top of the honours list. They don't need any more rewards

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The turn of the year is always a time of rituals, some of them rather silly; I’m thinking in particular of the never-to-be-kept resolutions that so many people make in all seriousness. But no ritual is so ridiculous as the parade of titles, gongs and awards handed out in the upper echelons of the New Year​ honours list.

The honours are supposed to recognise service to the nation. And that’s fine. But must they take such strange forms? Thanks to John Key, we still have people wandering around with Sir or Dame prefixed to their names, an incongruous sight in a supposedly modern nation that no longer looks up to England.

It’s mildly embarrassing, as if we haven’t quite grown up as a country, or are stuck in the past. When I was a child, one of the houses down the road was owned by my distant cousin and near-namesake, the splendidly titled Vice-Admiral Sir Maxwell Richmond. (Richmond is my middle name.) But he had joined the Royal Navy in 1918, lived extensively in England, and been knighted for his services during the Suez crisis, all events distant in space and time. Such titles might have made sense then, but surely not now. Sir Dave Dobbyn, for instance: I mean, really?

Sir John Key is knighted by governor-general Dame Patsy Reddy at Government House in Auckland in 2017. We have him to thank for the return of knighthoods and damehoods, which were ditched by Helen Clark’s government in 2000.

Worse still, the awards given out at the highest reaches – the companions of the New Zealand Order of Merit, the knights companion​, the dames companion​ and so on – almost always go to those who have already been showered with accolades, commendations and other markers of status. This part of the honours list simply recognises people who are already extremely well-recognised. It is a particularly daft example of the Matthew Effect, named after the biblical passage in which it says: “To everyone who has will more be given.”

Honestly, what use does this serve? What point is there in further rewarding captains of industry and former politicians, who generally do not go unrewarded in life?

Even people in the traditionally more neglected fields – the arts, for instance – will have already been the recipient of multiple accolades if they have got to the point where they might be made a knight or dame companion. Any successful writer, to take just one example, will already have received various awards and grants, had their name blazoned on book covers, been asked to speak on panels, had their opinion sought by the media, and been treated with respect in their community.

Rarely do they go unrecognised.

I should say that none of this is intended as a criticism of the various knights, dames and companions. I’m fortunate enough to count some of them as acquaintances, and they’re all wonderful people. They’re also people who had already been handsomely recognised for their service to the nation, and didn’t need any further titles.

The so-called lower reaches of the honours list, though – the Queen’s Service Order (QSO) and Queen’s Service Medal (QSM) – are a different story. Far and away my favourite part of the system, they actually do something useful, recognising people whose achievements would otherwise genuinely go unacknowledged. Most of them are awarded for services to the community in some form or other.

These individuals deserve extra recognition because the tasks they perform are generally so unglamorous. Take, for instance, people who actually respond to public consultations, and make submissions. This is – let’s be honest – desperately dull work. No-one wants to spend their life making submissions, and those who do get very little by way of thanks. But without them the world we all enjoy would pretty quickly fall apart. We should do far more to praise their names.

My proposal, then, would be a swift and immediate decapitation – not of any individual, I hasten to add, but of the honours system itself. Abolish, in future, all dames and knights, and remove anything above, say, the officers of the New Zealand Order of Merit. Those who already have their titles can keep them, but no new ones will be ordained – unless exceptional circumstances demand it.

That would allow the spotlight to shift to the recipients of the more workaday honours, the QSMs and QSOs (renamed, ideally, to fit the 21st century). Last time round, a Dr Judith Roberta Lowes​, of Tauranga, got a QSM for services “to women and roller sports”; I want to hear more about her. Ditto Rowan Gray Edward Garrett​, of Paeroa, who received his “for services to brass bands”.

So much depends on unsung backroom heroes. I’m thinking here of stage managers, age-grade sports coaches, office managers who hold entire organisations together. They deserve greater accolades. Let’s celebrate not the politicians, so often in the spotlight, but the submission-makers; the roadies rather than the rock stars. Some people labour all their lives with very little light shone their way.

Let’s recognise them.

Stuff: Independent operators shouldn't have to shoulder the biggest risks

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A truck driver, hunched over his wheel, speeds through the night from Hamilton to Gisborne, nodding off but unable to pause for rest because he’s running late. His situation highlights the appalling damage done in this country by a seemingly innocuous force: the transfer of risk.

Economic risks – potential dangers – are all around us, and must be managed by someone. In decades past, that task would have fallen to whoever had the deepest pockets. Governments handled an array of risks: taxes pooled our collective incomes, funding relatively generous welfare payments that cushioned the effects of job loss. Large employers endowed well-funded pension schemes that helped ward off pensioner poverty, and provided employees with risk-cushioning benefits like sick pay.

The biggest players managed the biggest risks because they were best placed to do so. They had the deepest reserves, and could most easily deal with shocks. They had the knowledge and capacity to predict and respond to changing trends.

In line with the hyper-individualistic tendency of the modern world, though, many of the largest economic risks have been pushed down onto the person least able to handle them: the ordinary individual.

We saw this on Thursday in a damning Waka Kotahi report that found Mainfreight truck drivers felt forced into falsifying logbooks and skipping legally mandated rest stops to make deliveries on time.

Once, such drivers would have been directly employed – and their trucks owned – by freight firms. Now they are “owner drivers”, labelled self-employed contractors and forced to maintain their own trucks, despite not being paid enough to do so.

As First Union’s Anita Rosentreter argues, this is an industry-wide issue. Of course conventional employees can also be placed under excessive pressure. But labelling drivers contractors, so that they have fewer rights and find it harder to organise collectively, makes such pressure even easier to apply.

Lacking the holiday pay, sick leave and pensions of conventional employees, these drivers are far more exposed to economic – and safety – risks. It is illogical, too, that they must own and maintain their trucks when firms are clearly best-placed to do so, given their expertise, deep pockets and economies of scale.

The conventional counter-argument is that the flexibility contractors enjoy more than outweighs these disadvantages. For highly paid management consultants, perhaps. But not for those at the other end of the chain.

A recent First Union report on Uber drivers, for instance, shows many of them – between one-third and two-thirds – struggle financially, fail to get enough regular work, effectively earn less than the minimum wage, and only do “gig” work because they can’t find full-time employment.

The economy we have built in the last few decades has been disastrous from the point of view of security. A 2018 OECD report found half of New Zealanders lacked the liquid assets – cash, or things easily converted into cash – they would need to sustain themselves for three months at the poverty line. Just 5 per cent of Japanese people are in the same boat.

On this score, ours is the fourth most precarious country in the developed world. No wonder, too, given how many of us are forced into poorly paid, part-time contracting gigs. When it comes to job loss and redundancy, we also have one of the OECD’s least protected workforces.

And despite this increased precarity, the Government does less to cushion its effects than it once would have. The unemployment benefit, essentially an insurance policy against economic shocks, used to replace over 40 per cent of the average wage; now it’s more like 30 per cent.

Fortunately, some forms of collective insurance against risk – like New Zealand Super – remain. It’s hard for individuals to know how much to save for retirement, people are naturally short-sighted, and private savings can be quickly wiped out in stockmarket crashes. Much better to use taxes to collectively insure against pensioner poverty.

Labour’s social insurance proposal, meanwhile, will do something similar for workers. Benefits have also been raised significantly, and sick leave for employees doubled.

But so much more is needed to reverse the most damaging forms of risk transfer that have taken place in recent decades. The welfare safety net needs further repair, so that long-term job loss doesn’t spell disaster for the families thus affected.

The Government has promised action on so-called dependent contractors: workers who are actually employees but labelled contractors by firms seeking to shirk their responsibilities as employers. That action needs to be sped up, and gig-worker protection strengthened across the board.

But such steps must form part of something larger: a society-wide recognition that the biggest risks – job loss, ill health, recessions, poverty and so on – cannot be shunted onto individuals. They are too big, too complex; often it is out of people’s power to affect them. Those with the greatest resources must bear more of that burden.

Stuff: If Luxon's looking for a new direction, he could start by investing in our kids

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Imagine if, one day soon, Christopher Luxon stood up and announced: “I’d shave $1 billion off the cost of Super – and spend it all on early childhood education.”

I’m not saying I think he’ll definitely do that. But it’s the kind of option that’ll be in the mix as National’s new leader contemplates where he wants to take his party and, potentially, the nation.

Although elections aren’t usually won or lost on specific policies, the public does want what the British comedy The Thick of It called “a policy flavour”: a rough sense of the set of ideas Luxon would implement if he became prime minister. (In the show, the term is used satirically, but it works in a serious sense, too.)

Even centre-right commentators have noticed that National needs new ideas as it tries to define what it is to be a conservative party in the 21st century. Columnist Matthew Hooton has lamented the lack of fresh thinking on display. Pollster David Farrar wants the party to advance a new vision for why government exists.

Several paths are open to Luxon. He could focus less on specific ideas and more on ‘’ability to deliver’’ characteristics like competence, openness and national ambition. But although that would highlight Labour’s Achilles heel when it comes to delivery, a John Key 2.0 approach just isn’t enough these days.

Politics seems darker, the conflicts more pointed, the dangers more menacing. Luxon has to offer some way to unpick the twisted knot of widened wealth inequality, global pandemics and climate change.

New National leader Christopher Luxon, with deputy Nicola Willis, has promised to be “ambitious for New Zealand”. What that means remains to be seen.

Speaking of conflicts: Luxon could of course lean into the culture wars that American right-wingers love so much, and with which Judith Collins flirted. And superficially there would be material to work with here.

Although three-quarters of voters recently surveyed by pollster Michael Ashcroft supported legalising abortion and assisted dying, 51 per cent believed the Government “has done too much to recognise Māori rights” and just 47 per cent thought that “somebody who identifies as a woman is a woman regardless of biological sex”.

But quite apart from the morally repugnant stances that a culture-war campaign would require, it’s unlikely to work. As Ashcroft – himself a centre-right figure – has argued, “There is no mileage for the right in trying to politicise questions like transgender rights, which voters from all parties [say] they consider a private matter of personal decency and social acceptance. Launching any kind of ‘war on woke’ by putting such cultural questions at the forefront of party political debate would be regarded as horrifyingly American and met with distaste.”

Former National leader Bill English talked of social investment – identifying which government programmes have the greatest collective impact, and directing money their way. That’s one option for Luxon to revive, writes Max Rashbrooke.

Another approach would be for Luxon to turn libertarian, slashing taxes and the size of the state. But there’s little public appetite for a hard right shift – especially post-coronavirus, now we’ve all seen government save the economy from meltdown.

As Farrar argues, New Zealanders may spend the next decade feeling “much more positive about a big state than they have in the past”. That forces National to think about repurposing government, not hacking it back. “You need to be able to advocate an alternative vision of government – a smarter government, a more agile government, a tech-friendly government.”

Luxon has already hinted he might revive Bill English’s social investment approach, describing it as “another thought that we need to be able to bring to life”. Social investment is, at its simplest, an attempt to identify which government programmes have the greatest collective impact, and direct spending their way.

It got a bad name because of the brutal way that Paula Bennett, in particular, tried to implement it, but at its core is, in fact, a recognition of the immense, rippling-out benefits created by social spending on schools, hospitals and the like.

Max Rashbrooke: “Rather than an imported culture war or vacuous lines about being ‘ambitious for New Zealand’, I want a proper contest of ideas and scrutiny over public spending.”

Hence this column’s opening pitch. Luxon could, as the economist Susan St John proposes, increase the tax rate paid by wealthy superannuitants who are still in work, shaving $1 billion from New Zealand Super without harming anyone’s well-being or provoking howls of protest about means-testing.

He could then invest the money in transforming the life chances of the youngest, most vulnerable New Zealanders, through stronger early childhood education and related schemes. This approach would play to National’s image as careful economic managers and force Labour to work harder to justify its spending decisions. Indeed, it would show up the current nebulousness of the Government’s much-touted ‘’well-being’’ agenda.

I’m not saying I’d endorse this approach, exactly – or that National would care either way. Luxon has to attend to what will win him power. My interests are wider. Rather than an imported culture war or vacuous lines about being ‘’ambitious for New Zealand’’, I want a proper contest of ideas and scrutiny over public spending.

Maybe I’m being naive; politics is a dirty business, after all. But it doesn’t seem like too much to ask.