The Quest for Security

Masses of people could see the effect of this in their daily lives. Higher wages, shorter hours, longer holidays, better pensions, these were manifestations that all could understand. Even the Nationalists, therefore […] could not deny that the Government had made a radical and far-reaching effort to place the claims of welfare before those of wealth.

From a report on New Zealand in The Round Table of March 1939

This year is one of those years when we get to have a fight to defend welfare. It has well and truly begun, of course: the Welfare Working Group has reported to the government, and whilst some columnists have taken issue with its findings, I think we can reasonably expect the media to fall in line with all but the most grotesque right wing measures and campaign accordingly in the lead up to the election. In the opposite corner, the Alternative Welfare Working Group has had its say and will continue to agitate, and there are a number of dissenting voices with a not insignificant capacity to make themselves heard: Sue Bradford at Pundit, Gordon Campbell at Scoop, and the Unity blog, to name a few. I don't despair that we can have the semblance of an informed debate, and organise effectively. Fought against the backdrop of the reconstruction in Christchurch – which will likely sharpen our reckoning of the model of society that the country wishes to pursue – it's a campaign that is going to test our solidarity, our cohesiveness and our social imagination, but I have every confidence that it can be won. (Much as this confidence derives partly from having defined ‘victory’ down considerably, but I’ll get to that.)

My own very modest contributions to the debate are going to be primarily centred, as they have been in the past, around historical vectors and the recovering of earlier stages of this particular struggle. I do this as an outsider, educated in quite a different set of historical and ideological circumstances, with no lived experience of the reforms of the Eighties or familial recollection of their pre-existing conditions. But this is not meant by way of disclaimer, for having to rely mostly on books is not altogether a bad thing.

I think it says something of New Zealand’s relationship with its past as much as of the workings of its publishing industry that W.B. Sutch’s The Quest for Security in New Zealand is no longer in print. The first edition of the book, published in 1942, was enormously successful, having sold over 100,000 copies. The extensively revised and updated 1966 edition is widely regarded as a classic. Yet both books are only available in second-hand shops and fairs, or through the library systems in the main centres, and even then often by way of research stacks or the reference desk. For a country that supposedly prides itself on its pioneering record in the area of welfare, I think this is lamentable, for there are few other books (and none, unless I am mistaken, in the area of history) of comparable focus and scope.

Writing in 1966, Sutch proposed to tell the story of social security in New Zealand from 1840 up to the present day. The book is extensively researched and documented, but unabashedly polemical in tone. Central to the argument is Sutch’s conviction that the economic system that the country inherited from England in the nineteenth century bred poverty, most especially in the colonies, and that the imperative was to transition from a monocultural economy at the service of the mother country into a diversified sovereign economy, in order to insulate the citizenry from the recessions and depressions created by the cyclical downturns and long-term downtrend of the prices for its narrow range of primary exports. While Sutch undoubtedly had some Marxist sympathies, this was a broadly socially democratic project in which he himself played a role initially as an advisor to conservative politician Gordon Coates, in 1933, before joining Labour under Savage and Fraser and returning to the fray in the Fifties as one of the principal architects of the second stage of that transformation, for which he is mostly and somewhat reductively remembered today.

All this is to say that there is no pretence of neutral observer positioning in Sutch's account, nor there could have been given his very public role. But neither is the book an hagiography of the first Labour government or of the trades union movement, that come in for their share of heavy criticism. It is, more simply, the story of that aspiration for security and employment, which motivated so many of the colonial immigrants and later came to be broadly shared by Māori, and of the social and political forces that worked for and against it (roughly along the lines of workers and manufacturers versus the propertied classes, and farmers and financiers in particular). As such its usefulness is not solely historical and documentary, for it reminds us also of how the limits of the political discourse in New Zealand changed over time, and how even some of the most crudely retrograde attitudes are still to be found in some form today. Thus in documenting the opposition to the Old Age Pension bill of 1897, Sutch records that the Conservatives

objected to the Bill because it might mean higher income and land tax, and would make workers more independent—they preferred that the workers make weekly contributions; hence they argued that it would sap the self-reliance of the working classes, discourage thrift, pander to criminals and drunkards, attract degenerates and imbeciles to the country, create an army of sturdy beggars, demoralize the old people, break up the family and 'gradually destroy our civilization'. [91]

Of some interest in our present circumstances are also Sutch's vivid accounts of the worker relief schemes in vogue during the Depression, when the zombie idea of work for the dole reached extremes that were at times paradoxical:

'16 sturdy New Zealanders hitched to a set of chain harrows, after the style of Volga boatmen' – Sutch mentions this photograph on page 130 of The Quest for Security, and I was delighted to find it on Timeframes.

at times openly sadistic:

[In Christchurch] it was a rule that men under 65 who could not do heavy work had to report for light work. At one time 500 of these men were 'working' with one grubber and three shovels at Bottle Lake. Some of the men suffering from asthma, arthritis, rheumatism and epilepsy took from 8 o'clock to noon to cover 2 miles to report for duty; one woman pushed her husband in a wheel chair to Bottle Lake and called for him again in the evening. This was administrative incompetence, but there was no invalidity pension and the principle laid down was 'no pay without work'. [136-137]

But we should be heartened even at this far remove by how far the ground shifted in the space of less than a decade, and that as late as 1949, and in spite of the climate created by the Truman doctrine (under which 'the stage was quickly reached when those who sought to change economic institutions were regarded as worse enemies than those who sought to reduce the minimum standard of living' [336]), the Tory campaign manifesto going into the election included the following statement:

The National Party fully recognizes the desirability of providing various forms of Social Security Benefits and pledges itself not only to maintain all existing benefits at their present value but also to introduce improvements as circumstances permit or require. Nevertheless, the Party believes that by ensuring full employment and by a nation-wide campaign to remove, or at least, reduce greatly the causes of sickness and disability, it will be possible to lessen the need for people to apply for sickness, medical and pharmaceutical benefits. Good health and productive employment are much better than medicines or sick and relief payments. [461]

All this reminds us that the history of how our national attitudes to welfare have changed is above all just that – a history. The admirably egalitarian streak that New Zealand society still clings to is not a fixed given: it is the fragile but nonetheless lasting legacy of past struggles and movements that saw enlightened moderate politicians join forces with radicals who were in the main not revolutionaries themselves, but reformists. It is discomfiting to contemplate the juncture that we have come to, with no option but to defend pallid, regressive and discriminatory provisions such as the Working for Families scheme, or punitive ones such as the current benefit system for the sick, the disabled and the unemployed. But defend them we must, and the coalition needs to be broad, to the point of refraining from pointing out or in fact even appearing to have noticed what a huge tit Phil Goff is, and how complicit he and is party are in the narrowing of our political horizon. (See, I'm not even mentioning it.)

This rear-guard, conservative battle is one we can win, as it is an old-fashioned battle for the electoral centre that is going to ask little of the shared political imaginary. But The Quest for Security spurs us to be more ambitious than that. Above all, and somewhat unusually for a reformist, Sutch is relentless in pointing out at each step and in every area of social intervention the gap between what was achieved and what was left to achieve, reserving his greatest contempt for the politicians on the Left who pushed back or declared that the work was done, like Labour Social Security Minister W.E. Parry did in 1947 in front of a small group of critical but sympathetic public servants:

I don't understand you young blokes. Labour has achieved the programme it battled for, and it was battling before some of you were born. The family benefit to all is the coping stone. We have the best social security in the world. Everybody has a job. We have the protection of the Arbitration Court. Everything is done. [341]

This kind of talk is anathema to Sutch, who – armed with an admirable capacity to detect and denounce capitalist realism – rejects at every available opportunity the contention that adopting social justice as the State's overarching political objective is incompatible with having an economy.

There would be much more to say about this remarkable book, but it's best left to the author himself: and so, also in the interest of producing a manageable post, I've compiled separately some extended quotations on the Old Age Pensions Act of 1898, education and the role of public intellectuals, the burning down of the new Social Security Department offices in Aitken Street, and housing under the first Labour government. These will give you a sense of Sutch's lucid and impassioned humanism, and of the continuing relevance of his writing, whereas if you're after an evaluation of Sutch's political economy, I refer you to the sterling work of Brian Easton linked at the end of this post.

But there remains another aspect to account for, and it has darker undertones. You cannot read the deeply concerned and scathing sections of the book on wartime censorship, Cold War-era anti-sedition legislation and the smearing tactics used against the likes of Cecil Holmes and Jack Lewin without shuddering at the thought that the remnants of those illiberal measures would end up striking Sutch himself, who at the end of his life was famously charged with espionage, under suspicion of having disclosed unspecified information to a Soviet agent in Wellington. The trial, that he is said to have endured in reasonably good spirit, ended in his acquittal but is still likely to have hastened his death the following year, in 1975, aged 68. I won't go the details of the case, and refer you instead again to a useful summation of Brian Easton's, except to note a New Zealand Herald editorial written only five years ago, in the wake of the publication of a book by one of Sutch's persecutors. With the benefit of thirty years of hindsight and in spite of the complete lack of evidence and due process that led to the shameful trial of one of the nation's foremost intellectual figures, our paper of records chose on this occasion to remark that the Sutch case was nonetheless 'the single known example of the necessity for counter-intelligence in this country'. The title of the piece? 'An enduring study in treachery'.

'Demonstrators outside the Supreme Court, Wellington, during the Sutch trial, protesting about the Security Intelligence Service.' Image from Timeframes.

In the preface to the 1966 edition of the book, Sutch recalls with what must strike us as bitterly ironic prescience Joseph Heenan's advice – upon the shelving by Prime Minister Fraser of the first edition – that his friend should lock the papers away, 'and leave them there a long time' [xiv]. And so The Quest for Security, as if punning with its own title, reminds us that dissent is still fraught with risk, and that not just the headline-grabbing raids but also the intimidation and harassment suffered by the likes of Tao Wells are by no means minor or benign incidents, but belong to the same violent history and repressive logic. Stay united in the months ahead, and be mindful of this.

W.B. Sutch. The Quest for Security in New Zealand, 1840 to 1966. Wellington: Oxford University Press, 1966.

For an extended biography and critical evaluation of Sutch's work, including his ideas on the economy, see chapters 8 and 10 of Brian Easton's The Nationbuilders (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2002). Brian Easton's site is a wonderful resource on Sutch and he has made the two chapters available online here and here.

Sutch's secret service file and target assessment are available as PDF files through Public Address, and Russell Brown wrote about their publication here. It may be worth repeating the link to Brian Easton's analysis of the court case.

Tim Bollinger's 2008 piece on Sutch for White Fungus magazine is available online through Scoop.

All the quotations from the book that I compiled externally are available via this link.

With many thanks to Hilary Stace for introducing me to the book and being so wonderfully staunch.

Work-Slash-Life

Late capitalist society is engaged in a long-term historical process of destroying job security, while the virtues of work are ironically and even more insistently being glorified.

(David Aronowitz and Jonathan Cutler)

If you can say of an unemployed person that they are between jobs, then you could also say of the North-facing office on the third floor of the commercial property at 50 Manners Street, Wellington, that it is currently between tenants. At times of economic strife, you need upbeat euphemisms. But is the empty space comforted? Is it ever lonely? Does it look forward to becoming again a place of work, or would it rather be left alone, to mind its own lack of business?

A vacant commercial space is a site of anxiety, more so than a vacant dwelling. If it happens to include a shop front, its emptiness becomes a concrete representation of crisis. An empty shop on the corner can bring down the whole neighbourhood. We use phrases like that: to bring down, to depress. Things take on mood.

Image by SomeDriftwood

Sophie Jerram and Mark Amery have been exploiting this mood for some time in their Letting Space series, in which empty commercial premises are repurposed as temporary art spaces. I wrote some time ago about Dugal McKinnon’s Popular Archaeology, but of more interest to today’s proceedings is the Free Shop set up last May by artist Kim Paton at a former nut store in Ghuznee Street. ‘A social exercise in interrogating the false economics of production in capitalism and in particular the murky terrain of wastage,’ is how David Cross summed it up. I recall asking myself at the time if those premises, which had accommodated a picture framer before becoming a nut store, and before that who knows what else, had ever been as crowded as they were on the day of my visit. But then of course at that point it had really become the opposite of itself, an anti-shop, existing solely by virtue of temporary arrangements with regular shops and their suppliers.

And so too The Beneficiary’s Office which has installed itself at 50 Manners Street is the product of careful mediation: with the property owners, with funding bodies, with the welfare provisions that allow Tao Wells to call himself an artist and not charge an admission for it, all on the taxpayers’ dime. Another murky terrain, another interrogation – of the nature of labour, of what are the products of art, and of who should pay for them.

The work itself is an exercise in misdirection. It is called The Beneficiary’s Office, but if you visit the premises the sign on the door says The Wells Group. (No, not that Wells Group.) Inside, you’ll find the artist, the receptionist, a couple of desks. Go on, you can talk to them. Or you can visit the website. It won’t tell you much. The home page is all sidebar, no content. The Media section is where all the meat is, in the form of the responses that the project has garnered. All it took was for Jerram and Amery to send out a press release in which Wells was quoted saying things like

[t]he average carbon footprint of the unemployed person is about half of that of those earning over $100,000 […] Surely, an advanced society would see us work less, and enjoy the benefits of unemployed time. We need to work less, so we consume less.

The mainstream press became aware that this very timid and relatively uncontroversial critique of our economic system received public funding from Creative New Zealand, and that Wells himself was on a benefit pursuant to the artists-on-the-dole scheme. Lane Nichols of The Dominion Post duly proceeded to prepackage the news so that it could be gnawed at by the predictably outraged.

The first to bite was blogger Inventory2 over at Keeping Stock, immediately followed by David Farrar. Regular readers know that I don’t make a habit of linking to that particular forum, but the first post at Kiwiblog on the topic is a remarkable case study of the downright irrepressible anger of the over-entitled and over-employed. Writes Farrar:

It’s unfair that I have to work 60 hour weeks to fund your fucking life style, you bludging wanker…
Not just a greedy selfish bludger, but a stupid one also…
He refuses to work, but is happy to apply for grants so he can preach about why people should bludge like him…
Listen Mr Fuckwit, you are not forced to take a job. So long as you don’t want those of us who do work to pay you a benefit, you do not need to ever work again…
Having a layabout wanker who is illegally claiming the dole, promote dole bludging as a lifestyle choice is not innovative. Would Creative NZ give money for a tax felon to set up an office and advise people not to pay their taxes?…
This makes my blood boil…

As the righteous indignation spread, Work and Income swiftly responded by suspending Wells’ benefit. Except, contrary to Farrar’s claim, the benefit wasn’t ‘illegally claimed’ at all, and the artist managed to have it reinstated in short order. In a second, less expletive-filled post, Farrar shifted his focus and intimated he would put his influence to good use and lobby for the funding of Creative New Zealand to be cut. And while ACT MP Heather Roy, whose unit of measure of public spending are glue ear operations, managed to sound like the moderate, composed voice of reason, the time came for a new issue of The Listener – formerly our weekly magazine of ideas, now the bastion of the sagging, propertied middle class – to hit the stands.

Once again, don’t get used to my linking to such disreputable sources, but the editorial of the October 30 issue of the magazine must be read in its entirety to be fully appreciated or, indeed, believed. Wells’ installation is nothing less than A Blow to the Art, shrieks the heading, going on to rhetorically inquire: ‘When an artist bites the hand that feeds it, does he deserve that public funding?’ The analysis of the merits of the project runs as follows:

To further bedevil our sense of the balance between free speech and public decency, Wells has accepted public money to create an art installation in which he disparages working people, and exhorts them to ditch their jobs, live off the state and become minimalist consumers. Officials deemed it art for the 37-year-old long-term beneficiary to glorify the notion of slacking and bludging off one’s fellow citizens.

The conclusion, in equal parts veiled threat and stern warning, is just a smidgen more oblique than Farrar's avowal to deal with the blaspheming funding agency directly:

The risk for [Creative New Zealand] if it continues to make similar funding choices is that soon taxpayers may not be asking the question of the artworks, but of CNZ itself.

So this is it: a $3,500 grant ($2,000 to Wells, plus expenses), and the ongoing support of a scheme that puts artists on the same footing as the regular unemployed, are enough to buy off your freedom to make statements that are minimally provocative. It should be pointed out that Wells never called for a universal living wage, nor for an actual policy of degrowth. Nor did he at any point advocate or postulate the end of work. He simply set up shop, and used the word ‘beneficiary’ to mean something other than ‘welfare recipient who ought to be bloody grateful’. It’s literally all it took.

In another breach of my usually high standards, Wells’ op-ed in the print edition of The Dominion Post made me buy a physical copy of the paper. By that stage the controversy had died down somewhat, as reactionary and liberal pundits alike became more interested in the industrial dispute surrounding The Hobbit. Now I'll confess that I didn’t think that Wells' piece was particularly incisive, certainly not very radical: it emphasised the consequence of ever-increasing production and consumption on the environment, and the consequences of being forced to take work, any work, on the sense of self of job-seekers. Its conclusion petered out somewhat into a vague series of statements:

What we have been advocating for, is to do those things that we love, not because we are told that we love them, but because we have found real love there, enough to share.
We need to explore the idea, intellectually, of embracing our collective welfare - by taking a break.

But then I closed the paper, and my eyes fell on the main headline.

You can read the full article here.

Twenty-two (more) years of dumping, a simple statement that contains all of our dogged determination to run down the clock on the capacity of our environment to sustain us, in the name of the Economy. The value, the force of Wells' work is to be found in these juxtapositions, just like his rhetorical and artistic masterpiece isn't the opinion piece that he wrote himself, but rather the one he had The Listener write for him: a brilliantly succinct formulation of capitalist realism, with its coolly enraged curtailing of the slightest departure from the script that says that growth equals work equals wealth equals equity – a belief as entrenched on the Right as it is on the Left.

As for Mr Farrar we might wish to ask: what is it that makes him work 60 hour weeks. Is it fear? Greed? Or is he just another inmate, a prisoner of society, bereft of options? (In which case, is work going to set him free?)

He’d likely respond that it is the dissenters, the bludgers, who are forcing him to always be working, so that he can support them as well as himself. But two years ago and then again this year his taxes were cut. Is he working any less? I doubt it somehow, and he doesn't appear capable to even entertain the question without exploding into a fit of rage. But somebody should, it is perhaps the single most important question of our time: how to revolutionise society and the very concept of labour, no longer in the name of equity and justice, but the survival of the species. David Aronowitz and Jonathan Cutler wrote this over ten years ago: 'What has been called utopian in the past is now a practical necessity.' To work less, so that we all can work. To discriminate between the work that makes us richer, and the work that makes us poorer. To imagine a post-work society and create the material conditions for its existence.

In the meantime, The Wells Group will close its doors this Tuesday; Tao Wells will go back on the dole while he works on his next project; the North-facing office on the third floor of the commercial building at 50 Manners Street will be emptied again; and on Wednesday, all over the country that has chosen a currency trader as its Prime Minister and where questions cannot be asked, thousands of beneficiaries will wake up wishing for work, (almost) any work, as without a doubt in their place would I.










The Beneficiary's Office closed on November 2nd. It would be remiss of me not to link to the thoughtful reviews of the exhibition by David Cross at EyeContact  and Lew at Kiwipolitico. 

The Aronowitz  and Cutler quotations are from Post Work: The Wages of Cybernation (New York: Routledge, 1998), pages 40 (the epigraph) and 69 (the quotation in the post).

The Lives of Others

The extent of the reforms in New Zealand was so great that it is difficult to describe them in short compass.
(Don Brash)

The situation could not be clearer: either we stop them or they finish us off.
(Richard Seymour)

In June of 1996, Don Brash travelled to London to deliver the fifth annual Hayek Memorial Lecture at the right-wing Institute of Economic Affairs. It was a tribute to the decade of radical economic reforms of which Brash had been one of the principal architects and, while it conceded that the reforms remained bafflingly unpopular, it blamed the successive governments that had promoted them for not adequately communicating their benefits. Brash concluded his speech with another statement that is often found in the speeches of fellow champions of the New Zealand experiment, namely that

[t]he best security against the reversal of recent reforms is to continue with reform in order to encourage growth and employment.

Therefore: if the reforms are unpopular, it is because they haven’t been explained well enough, and not because they have actually failed to raise living standards; and if they haven’t raised living standards, it’s because they haven’t been pushed hard enough, or are not entrenched enough, because politicians have been too fearful to do what is necessary. So it comes back again to an issue of consensus. But in fact, that the governor of the national Reserve Bank could deliver such a politically charged speech is due to the extraordinary bipartisan support that those reforms enjoyed, which effectively made the New Zealand public unable to vote their proponents out of office in election after election. (The speech by Phil Goff covered last week may in fact be the first actual disavowal of the neoliberal turn by either of the major parties.)

Brash’s speech was published with a very upbeat title, New Zealand’s Remarkable Reforms, and a rather wonderful cover in which the country surged upwards, as if via a massive tectonic shift, lifted out of the very ocean by all that remarkableness. Of course if one had to plot our relative growth compared to that of Australia, or the stagnation of the median incomes against those of comparable countries, it might have been more of a sinking. But who can argue with the evidence of a pretty picture, even when it’s a graph unsupported by actual data?

Much as I am impressed with the semiotic audacity of the cover, there is another reason why I’m rather fond of this book, and it’s the handiwork of an unknown reader on the frontispiece of the copy held at my local library.

I know many people whose lives were destroyed by the ‘remarkable reforms’. It intrigues me that the withering comment is written in pencil, respectfully, perhaps to give the librarians the option to delete it and restore the integrity of the book and its message. Nonetheless, I think it’s a significant gesture. I wish I could date it, in order to evaluate better the climate in which it was made, how monolithic the neoliberal consensus was at the time. Since the book was published in December of that year, I know for a fact that it post-dated David Lange’s reference to the ‘people whose lives were wrecked by us’ in his valedictory speech, of which the pencilled comment is a most interesting echo.

Lives were wrecked, but whose exactly? In the UK, the debate rages: on one side, the coalition government and its apologists are touting the massive public expenditure cuts announced last week as progressive; on the other, economic analysts, community advocates and social and political critics are showing whom the worst hit will be: those on lower incomes, welfare recipients, disabled people . The political success of this round of cuts, which doesn’t equate to the structural reforms of Thatcher and Douglas but is rather the latest plunge of the dagger that they unsheathed, will be played again on the background of a discursive struggle for who can best document and communicate these outcomes. From the point of view of the Left, this translates into making those regressive effects visible, shining a light on the lives that are about to be affected. The Right will respond, as it always does, by trying to elide the concept of class altogether.

David Cameron is second from the left, top row. Image via K-Punk.

Mark Fisher justly excoriated last week the current incarnation of the ‘we’re all in this together’ rhetoric, highlighting how it represents an opportunity to be exploited:

The "we're all in this together" slogan may turn out to be a phrase that comes to haunt the Tories in the way that "Labour isn't working" dogged Labour for a generation. Classlessness might have seemed plausible for a moment when fronted by John Major, who didn't go to university, or by Tony Blair, the poster boy for (leftist) post-political administration. But that moment has long passed, and cuts of this kind being forced through by a cabinet of aristocrats and millionaires make brutally apparent a class antagonism that the New Labour government obfuscated. Whenever the ruling class tells us that "we're all on the same side", it is a sure sign that we can hurt them.

I would add to this a further qualification: neoliberal reformists will always be largely unaware of this weakness of theirs and of how it can be exploited simply because they just can’t help themselves. When last year French minister Pierre Lellouche apologised for calling the British Tories ‘autistic’ with regard to their relationship to the EU, he explained by way of justification that his own Prime Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, often gets called autistic too. While I agree with Charlotte Moore that we shouldn’t condone the use of the term, I think we can probably agree on its meaning in this context: the inability to perceive the psychological life of others which to this day is still commonly (and incorrectly) attributed to autistic people. In fact neoliberal would be a far more accurate descriptor for this systemic failure to empathise, and the total lack of self-awareness that comes with it. Consider this image.

If you didn’t know better, you might think that this is a thriller involving a heartless serial killer, rather than Roger Douglas’ impassioned defence of himself and his ideas. And for all of his protestations that the principal beneficiaries of the reforms will be the most disadvantaged, one needs only close the book and look at the cover to get the full, chilling impact of Douglas’ brand of caring, a Charles Bronson-like approach in which helping can be phrased much as one would taking revenge.

Three years later, Douglas could be seen smiling at us from behind his desk, the title of his new oeuvre softened into the less ghoulish Completing the Circle, but even that move seems forced, a crude and obvious massaging of the image. In real life, for instance in this recent BBC interview, Douglas still has the same sharp, cold edge in his voice, the same fondness for gliding over the real-life repercussions of his ideas.

And the neoliberals still protest far too much. It’s a point I made last year when covering Brash’s 2025 Taskforce Report, but it bears making again: when a politician needs to repeat to the point of obsession that they are on the side of the weakest members of society, the reality is likely to be the opposite, and this needs to be shown just as relentlessly.

It is not simply a matter of hammering home the sacrosanct notion that both the crisis and the resulting deficit are themselves the result of neoliberal policies, and that bankers are the real bludgers, but also of telling the story of the human casualties, and bringing to light the class rifts that the dominant media narratives – which are all about reducing the populace to a largely homogenised consumer class fitting the principal viewer and reader demographics – would rather conceal. The persistence of class and of race and gender discrimination, the changing face of work: if at times this blog seems to be about little else, it’s because I believe uncovering and recovering these realities to be a vital task, and central to the social and political work of memory.

Medialogically, it’s not an altogether impractical undertaking: quite often the stories of these other lives – ruined or otherwise – have what is known in the business as a human interest angle. I routinely recommend Alister Barry’s films on these pages not just for their value as social documents, but also because they make for very compelling viewing on precisely those grounds. And they exemplify quite brilliantly the further, necessary step in the process: suturing those stories into their political and social context and the history of the antagonist movements, highlighting past struggles and their languages and strategies. Much as one might at such times lapse into brief moments of nostalgia, this doesn’t have to be a backward looking move, and is especially valuable if it allows to establish useful genealogies and recreate the discursive spaces in which alternatives to the status quo could be spoken.

But mostly, these stories can sharpen and give contextual substance to the anger that is always simmering in our societies. To the extent that I share Mark Fisher’s optimism regarding the possible outcomes of the anti-capitalist struggle at this juncture, it comes from the knowledge of times in history – and more specifically, the history of my country – when such an anger found creative outlets, rapidly and with lasting effects, in experiences that haven’t been wholly submerged by what came after, the tidal wave of reaction and quiescent conformity. It looks like we might just get to have another wack at it; there may in fact soon be no alternative.







A couple of things I didn't manage to include: China Mieville's impassioned appeal to/indictment of progressive Liberal Democrats; Philip Challinor's take on Nick Clegg's charm offensive at Desert Island Discs on the Beeb. Hilary Stace has offered further details (PDF) on the ongoing assault on provisions for disabled people, and her information has led me to this petition that I offer for your consideration.

The two Brash quotations are from New Zealand's Remarkable Reforms (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1996), on pages 24 (the epigraph) and 47 (the quote in the post proper) respectively.

The Dream Is Over

It was only a matter of time before the National government started harassing beneficiaries in earnest. Every indication concerning Paula Bennett’s eventual portfolio since long before the election campaign - it was in 2004 that then-spokeswoman Katherine Rich charted the course that the party would follow - pointed to the resurrection of the zombie idea of a work for the dole-type scheme, the introduction of work tests, tighter controls on disability benefits and a time limit for the DPB, all based on the core belief that the ideal welfare system should be ‘a genuine safety net’ and not ‘a lifestyle choice’ (Key again, from the same speech). So you knew that it was only a matter of time, and that it would most likely come when National needed a distraction, something to take the heat off another policy, or a Minister fumbling with his figures.

Thus last week, right on cue, Paula Bennett called a press-conference in which she announced that she would start mining the nation’s unemployed to bolster the government’s reserves of political consensus. And since Bennett herself is a woman who spent time on the Domestic Purposes Benefit, her primary target were women on the Domestic Purposes Benefit. For she is a reformed single mother and unemployed person, you see? So she knows what it’s like to live a life of welfare dependency, and she reckons she knows just the way to help you out of it. Not through schemes like the Training Initiative Allowance, no. She scrapped that, as a matter of fact. What she has in mind is a lot closer to bullying. In fact the person who came up with the idea, American political scientist Lawrence Mead, didn’t even bother to search for an euphemism. ‘Helping and hassling’, he called it.

Here’s how it will work: approximately forty thousand mothers on the DPB whose youngest child is over the age of six will face part time work tests, which translates into having to engage in the employment-seeking activities mandated by Work and Income and turn up to job interviews scheduled on their behalf by their case managers. Failure to comply will result in the halving of the benefit. Everybody else on the dole will have to reapply once a year and go through a work assessment exercise. From May next year, sickness beneficiaries deemed able to work part time will also have to engage in mandatory employment-seeking activities, or risk facing even harsher penalties than DPB recipients: halving of the benefit following the first non-compliance, then suspension of the benefit, then cancellation of the benefit on the third strike. People on the invalid’s benefit deemed able to work part time will be moved on to the sickness benefit, with the attendant increase in the number and frequency of compulsory reviews.

Those are the contents of the proposed Welfare Reform Bill, but what’s missing is just as significant: work creation schemes, training programmes, childcare provisions - the Minister will have none of that. Bearing in mind that her portfolio covers employment as well as welfare, she intends to increase the roll of active jobseekers by 50,000 units without increasing the pool of available jobs. What this will achieve is ratchet up the competition for what little work is available - and for minimum-wage work in particular - by means of an influx of people who aren’t allowed to say no, and whose marginal salary in many cases, according to Treasury’s own calculations, will be as little as one dollar per hour. As a consequence, the capacity of the workforce to negotiate better wages or conditions for this kind of work - a capacity already weakened by the ongoing crisis - will take a further hit, which is good news for the Reserve Bank in its titanic struggle against inflation and the nightmare of a high-wage society.

Don Brash with Ruth Richardson in 1991.

What the policy will also achieve is to victimise women and their children, and further exacerbate the feminisation of poverty. In her analysis of the beginnings of the assault on single mothers on the DPB under the tenure of Ruth Richardson, Jane Kelsey writes:

The moral responsibility argument was aimed mainly at the domestic purposes beneficiary. The prevailing image was of a young woman who had deliberately got pregnant knowing she could bludge off the state for the next fifteen years. She was never the victim of rape and incest, or the beaten wife who had escaped with her life but had no means to support herself or her children on her own, or a mother who had been deserted and left to fend for herself. She was frequently assumed to be cheating not only the state, but those of her fellow citizens who were prepared to make sacrifices, pay their taxes and obey the rules. (Kelsey, 281)

I wonder sometimes if there’s enough of an appreciation of how this supposedly hard-nosed yet rational approach to welfare policy is tinged with a downright archaic moral conservatism: for isn’t it the case here that we are asking women and the poor to pay for the sins of our society? And the chief of these sins is the imperfect application of economic theory, the vast, measurable gap between neoliberal reforms and their stated goal of making society more prosperous and just, even, if not primarily, for the people at the bottom.

Most of the original proponents of these reforms under Labour have since migrated to ACT, as is well known, but I wasn’t aware until quite recently that the name of the party is an acronym for Association of Consumers and Taxpayers. A beneficiary, and especially a woman on the DPB, is neither of those things, insofar as their modest acts of consumption are made possible by the taxes paid by others, and their economic output is nil, even if they happen to raise children, look after elder members of their whanau or carry out volunteer work in their communities. Not possessing a taxable income - except to the extent that some of the benefits themselves are taxed - the beneficiary is a non-person, a ghost, but a ghost who must be periodically and ritualistically summoned in order to underscore a fundamental message: that government spending in general, and social spending in particular, are an unnecessary evil, the thing that stands between the country and the triumph of its new economic model.

These ideas appeared to have saturated the public conversation when I arrived in New Zealand, in late 1997. Christine Rankin was about to follow Lawrence Mead's script in the restructuring of Income Support, and ads such as this one polluted the airwaves.



Demonising welfare recipients wasn't a wholly new phenomenon - Reagan had blazed that particular trail in 1976 with his description of a ‘welfare queen’ largely of his own invention, and the myth of welfare fraud goes back in America to the early Sixties - but in post-war New Zealand, where successive governments had pursued full employment until as late as 1984, convincing people that the unemployed are a drag on society as opposed to its victims was always going to require a more concerted effort. Hence the need for state-sponsored propaganda through ad campaigns such as the one above. Yet it also seemed to me at the time that the nation’s psyche was singularly vulnerable to crude narratives of that nature, and that even without being able to tap into a history of resentment against the poor, those ideas could be grafted onto the body politic with surprising and dispiriting ease. Some years later, I found resonance in Bruce Jesson's description of New Zealand as 'a hollow society, a society without texture, a society without centres of resistance' (Jesson, 70).

Jesson's history of the decade of neoliberal reform in New Zealand in Only Their Purpose Is Mad includes a chapter entitled The State of Amnesia. Here he shows that abandoning the cornerstone policies of full employment and universal social participation that had been so integral the country’s development and sense of nationhood required both a sudden rupture - the financial crisis that Douglas and his colleagues found themselves in charge of as soon as they took office - and a self-serving reinvention of what the time before that rupture had been like. As an immigrant, I have heard those stories first-hand many times: New Zealand in the Muldoon era was backward and insular, the pubs closed at six o'clock, the food was universally bland; the verdict on politico-economic issues is less unanimous, but I’ve heard many left-wing moderates say that while the old system was admirably equitable, it was no longer affordable, and there was no alternative except radical reform. In fact, as Jesson himself, Easton, Kelsey and others have extensively argued, the New Zealand economy in 1984 wasn’t in a deep state of crisis, nor was extreme market liberalism the only way forward. But it seems to me that the history has quite successfully been rewritten not just for the benefit of the victors who carried the day - the Roger Douglases, Ruth Richardsons and Roger Kerrs of this world - but also of the moderate Left that, having returned from its well-deserved time in the wilderness, found it more expedient not to reverse those traumatic changes, but simply to alleviate them. We still don’t have a capital gains tax, or a levy on financial transactions. We still have GST. Critically, we still allow the Reserve Bank to manufacture unemployment in order to keep a lid on wages and control inflation on behalf of the wealthy.

Don Brash with Michael Cullen in 1999.

What the last few months have shown is that New Zealand society isn’t any less hollow today than it was before the nine years of Clark’s government; it has no more texture. It is a fairer society, and in some areas significantly so, but it lacks in institutional and organised civil society barriers between the rapid implementation of further reforms and its most vulnerable citizens, who are bound to bear their brunt. So when Mr Finlayson found the Welfare Reform Bill to be in breach of Bill of Rights Act, Ms Bennett and Mr Key were able to shrug off the non-binding advice of their own Attorney General. ‘Those changes are hugely popular,’ said Bennett. And that’s all that matters.

As was the case when I first arrived in the country, it was the language in which the policies were presented that I found most extraordinary, most foreign. Key described the measures as a welcome ‘kick in the pants’. Bennett, in describing the consequences of non compliance, said this:

‘If a real, demonstrable effort has been made, their benefit will be reinstated. If not, well, I'm afraid the dream is over.’

‘The dream is over.’ She let it roll of the tongue. Think about that. The dream? Does she have any idea…? Well, of course she does. She was a beneficiary herself, wasn’t she? And that’s when you realise how shrewdly she was chosen for the job, how important it is to have a woman with her background deliver those hits. One of us, one of them. Not a ghoulish technocrat like Douglas, or the heir to a political dynasty, like Richardson, yet a person fully capable of delivering lines of devastating cynicism against her former kind. ‘The dream is over’. And while we sit on the sidelines, fretting and organising around campaigns that are closer to the interests of the middle class - against mining in national parks, whaling, budget cuts at Radio New Zealand; all worthy causes in their own right - thinking that perhaps we are making society less hollow, more textured, the dream, or more precisely the memory, really does evaporate, of a caring society that knew how to look after its own.








Scoop has an excellent roundup of the proposed changes to the benefit entitlements and the reactions from various quarters. Read also In a Strange Land and No Right Turn (1, 2).

A brief bibliography on welfare and Rogernomics, as an antidote to the State of Amnesia:

Brian S. Roper. Prosperity for All? Economic, Social and Political Change in New Zealand since 1935. Southbank: Thomson, 2005.
Bruce Jesson. Only Their Purpose Is Mad. The Money Men Take Over NZ. Palmerston North: Dunmore Press, 1999.
Jane Kelsey. The New Zealand Experiment. A World Model for Structural Readjustment? Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1995.
Brian Easton (ed.). The Making of Rogernomics. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1989.

In a Land of Plenty, dir. Alister Barry, New Zealand 2002.