“RODERICK DEANE:
His Life And Times”
by Michael and Judith Bassett, Viking, Auckland, 2006

To hear the Bassetts tell it, Roderick Deane’s life has been inspirational. A title about “life and times” tips us to the central theme: Deane defines his era. More, he made it. New Zealanders who follow politics and finance might know of Deane as a key figure in the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s and ’90s, but even in our corner of the world, his is scarcely a household name. Yet Deane is presented here much as, say, General Charles de Gaulle or Napoleon Bonaparte have been depicted in books about France. Others have looked at Deane and seen a functionary or a careerist. Frequently he has been dubbed a technocrat. Yet, to the Bassetts, he is a heroic figure (it is, of course, entirely relevant that Michael Bassett was a senior Minister in the 1984-90 Labour government, a leading Rogernaut and an unrepentant advocate of Rogernomics to this day.To ensure that the correct party line continues to be followed, the Christchurch Press entrusted its review of this book to none other than the Business Roundtable’s Roger Kerr. Ed.).

How can this divergence be explained to a reader innocent of recent New Zealand history? A look at Deane’s career gives one clue. Twenty years ago, when the David Lange-Roger Douglas government staged its neoliberal coup, Deane was Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank. As the blurb gushes, he was “at the very heart of the dramatic introduction of Rogernomics”. He then successively headed the State Services Commission, Electricorp (ECNZ) and Telecom, from which he has retired to the boardrooms.

As Deane told the authors, in the modern New Zealand economy the vital sectors are telecommunications and electricity. If you want to knock sense into bureaucratic heads, that’s where you might start - after having groomed that level playing field as a bank economist and restructurer of the civil service. Between his Wellington jobs, Deane had a gig at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington, where (about the only accurate claim in the whole book) the Bassetts say that domestic NZ policy is made. So the Bassetts are right to claim for Deane a central role, but whether he was more important than his Rogernomic mates is doubtful.

The Bassetts think he’s the best thing since the theory of comparative advantage. Deane went through university at a time when “more market” notions were trendy and the NZ economy was in trouble. Neoliberalism being the flavour of the decade, that’s what Deane and his contemporaries imbibed. From this account you get the impression that they did not reject alternatives; they never knew them. Deane comes across as a conventional, smart and ambitious young systems man with a knack for ingratiating himself with the influential.

The Bassetts make him out to be a charismatic genius. Like their subject, they assume their own perspective is the only way to see the world. Discussing Deane’s conventional middle class Kiwi childhood, they remark that Mum and Dad brought up their children to appreciate “rational enjoyment”. We all like to enjoy ourselves, and to do so without being too irrational, but saying so doesn’t make it so. The Bassetts place no distancing quotation marks round the phrase. To them, as to Mr and Mrs Deane, the provincial Methodist values they held are self-evidently superior. Young Roderick, authors and subject agree, was a happy enough child, sheltered from irrationality and favoured with great intellect.

Deane was to join the the Australian branch of the Institute of Policy Studies, a thinktank inspired by Friedrich von Hayek*, a long-gone neoliberal extremist whose fifteen minutes of fame had come. The Institute’s Website notes that along with its all-life-is-a-market mania, it espouses “social conservatism”. That’s the language of interventionist - Muldoonist - conservatism. This matters insofar that the Rogernauts’ claim to be new and different is misleading. They were traditional Tories seizing the moment to enact the economic measures that had seemed too hard in the Muldoon era. * Friedrich von Hayek (1899-1992), a reactionary economist who opposed the Welfare State and championed market forces. Ed.

When you’re a swat, especially when you’re focused on one aspect of economic theory, hurrying from school to university to those big, impersonal institutions, your experience is narrow. Deane’s seems to have been claustophrobic.The Bassetts point out that Deane’s life was spent “with small numbers of intelligent, well-educated people, wrestling with intellectually challenging problems”. Deane has always insisted that his knowledge is theoretical, so that no distinction should be made between his academic and professional activities. He is proud of spending his life exclusively with a like-minded (and rigorously rational) Elect - let’s call them his exclusive brethren - making sure that real world experience never intrudes.

The Public Are A Hindrance To The Smooth Functioning Of A Democracy

The Bassetts suggest that Deane’s problem in leading us to his promised land was that he had to go through the motions of responding to the primitive souls who constituted the people of New Zealand. “He was obliged to explain many more issues to a wider public”. Policy “had to be appreciated by more than an elite group”. Nowhere, however, neither in this account nor in any other record of the events of 1984-1990, is there a suggestion that public opinion - irrational opinion - mattered. Douglas, who wrote the textbook (“Unfinished Business”, 1993) on how to avoid democratic scrutiny, insisted that the electors be kept out of the loop. As it was clear that the irrationals would oppose the revolution, they had to be bypassed.

The Bassetts indicate that Deane liked to prepare for his ministrations by briefing only those few reporters “deemed sufficiently knowledgeable that they would understand what was being done”. Only about six or so Kiwis were deemed sufficiently knowledgeable. Beyond them Deane had to contend with a dumb Cabinet where the new order was not “fully understood”. They, poor lost mortals, dared no heresy. Deane’s “penetrating stare and the huge intelligence he instantly displayed when people spoke to him could be daunting”.

Yet, despite Deane’s masterful manner and huge IQ, and despite his earnest desire to preach his sermons and convert his lost flock, there are repeated instances of his timing key announcements for when the attention of those dumb reporters and that irrational public was elsewhere. The shock therapy would be administered on the last day of a Parliamentary sitting or on Christmas Eve or during a “distracting major strike”. Bassett and Deane congratulate themselves on this supposed cunning - standard practice in politics and business - unconcerned that the boast undermines all the protestations about how they tried and tried to teach the country but it was just too hard to make us understand. In reality, Deane and Douglas always operated in as much secrecy as they could.

In the meantime “Labour gradually pulled away in the polls as the public relished” relief from Muldoon. But all Bassett has to say about the fourth Labour Government’s social, foreign and defence policies, the policies which brought it popularity, is to express gratitude for “Lange’s masterly diversions from matters economic”. As every other reference to the Prime Minister in this miserable, petty and self-serving puffpiece is either malicious or dismissive, the adjective might be intended as irony. David Lange had a restricted understanding of economics, and, especially in the vital first few years, he went along with the plotters in the Treasury and the Reserve Bank. It’s also true that Lange’s support for the big attention grabbers like the nuclear-free legislation was absent minded and opportunistic. But what Bassett is conveying here is his own spite, his own contempt for those parts of the Government’s agenda that were still informed by traditional Labour values. The fools, he sulks, never knew what was good for them.

Deane must never have strayed from the straight and narrow. In a book supposedly devoted to them, not even all of the Lange Government’s economic measures are discussed. And when it comes to policies which are generally reviled, or legislation which even Bassett knows to have failed, Deane somehow was not around. At best he might have “participated in some of the discussions”. In putting out this book the Bassetts have two purposes.The less important one is to fawn over Deane. The main purpose is to revise history to make the Rogernauts look good. Deane is portrayed as single minded in advancing his career. The authors tell us, for instance, that Deane goes to Wellington concerts, and that he regularly travels overseas to take in opera, but they give the impression that he does so not because he loves music but because his wife told him it would be expedient to hobnob with the social elite. They imply that he exploited his daughter’s poor health to advance his career. We should be wary about the personal information we are given about Deane. It’s the authors whose moral compass is shonky, whose values most obviously intrude. Save me from my disciples, Deane must think.

When the Bassetts claim that “the fight against inflation went to the core of his being”, they are doing the saviour no favours. The guy might be a nerd, but does any healthy person talk about inflation the way others talk about God or country? What is the moral content of inflation? Before the Rogernauts obsessed with the money supply, the rate of inflation, a means to an end, was not thought in itself to be either a good thing or a bad thing. Neither had Deane, Douglas, and their mates minded inflation when it served to fatten profits at the expense of (fixed) wages and pensions. What changed was that by 1984 global economic trends had opened an opportunity to clawback popular gains. So they mystified a political purpose. At the core of Deane’s being was a desire to hold down wages. Mixing morality and reason is not a good idea, and when the two are seen as the same thing the result can be lethal. It means that you cannot, or will not, distinguish between what is the case and what you wish to be the case. Intolerance belongs to the mullahs and the cultists. It has no place in a secular democracy. Bassett includes without comment a picture of Douglas at a whiteboard lecturing those moronic politicians. The Minister of Finance is pointing to a list, going years into the future, of precise numbers which establish the enormous wealth that his revolution was about to create. If you look them up you’ll see that they were farcically high. They even go up when they should have gone down. Douglas’ heading is “Correct Analysis”. That’s political correctness gone mad.

Trickle Down For The Great Unwashed, Trickle Up For Deane

What did Deane do for his country? His unqualified successes were the contracts he negotiated for himself. Bassett notes with approval that when Deane transferred from the Reserve Bank (RB) to the State Services Commission he “wanted to keep his association with the RB... as well as the generous employment conditions he currently enjoyed there, including his house loan, superannuation rights (which in his case had been enhanced by the deal regarding portability that he had made with Muldoon in 1982), his expense account, car, club fees, telephone rentals, medical insurance, first-class air travel and holiday entitlements”. It was a good deal. You might even say it was inflationary.

Deane got all manner of perks, like “sign-on bonuses” that are, the Bassetts remind us, routine in that no free lunch corporate world but had been unknown in the civil service. It was quite an achievement, the Bassetts and Deane smirk, to maintain “relativities” and then get his already generous pension “topped-up”, when his job was to remove “relativities” and pensions from his diminishing workforce. These were prices his taxpaying employers had to bear if they were to encourage the great rationalist in his crusade. Public servants had to remember that looking after himself went to the core of Deane’s moral being. Deane told Bassett that he learned the culture of greed and irresponsibility from his days at the Reserve Bank. When it came to looking after its own, it had always been “less rigorous” than the government departments the RB lectured on austerity.

Author and subject treated the Prime Minister with disdain. If expediency required, they might deign to let him know what they were doing to the country he was elected to govern, and when the law required that the PM had authority,”Lange’s input was sought”. These occasional condescensions were a pain. Bassett makes repeated remarks to the effect that “the process was complicated by political decisions”. Deane told Bassett that “all the complexities of working within Government drove me bananas”.

Of course the politicians were plods. Aren’t they always? It’s such an easy target, such a cheap shot. It’s also disingenuous. The real point is that the Rogernomes hated democracy. The two Bassetts, one of whom is a historian, consider that “from the beginning of democratic government, public servants have often found themselves left in the lurch by ministers fearful of the ballot box, and anxious to cut political deals at short notice”. Politicians are said to be forever “meddling” in matters they’re incompetent to understand. On and on the pseudo-populist muckraking drivels onto the page.

What are they saying? That we should forget all the stuff we used to get in school about our hard won freedom. Forget all the natter about Magna Carta and the American and British civil wars. Forget that malarkey about the French Revolution and the right to vote. That’s old thinking. These historians want to legislate the divine right of foreign banks to replace Parliament. All power to careerist bureaucrats, they cry - as long as they obey the dictates of the IMF. Otherwise, fire them.

Deane revels in his sheer lack of knowledge of the industries he played with, telling Bassett that it was “the practical application of the theory he was steeped in that appealed most about the new challenge”. Asked by a reporter why he was running companies which made things he knew nothing about, Deane got yet another opportunity to pout. He was giving us his “thinking skills. ECNZ and Telecom were often like theoretical economics”.

More’s the pity. That’s why the electricity and telecommunications sectors have been such disasters. Deane might not have ever been an entrepreneur, he might never have run a business, and he might not have known anything about the existing nature of his product. But he sure knew its future. Like Douglas, like so many intellectuals who separate theory from practice, Deane was a bit of a futurist. Again like Douglas, he succumbed to the vulgar tendency to exaggerate the home team’s chances. In 1995 Deane was happy to predict that by 2000 “telephones as we know them will not exist. Neither will televisions, fax machines or modems’” Yet, in that dreary world inhabited by us mere irrational billpayers, little had changed. Telecom still made most of its money from overpriced phones and it was still doing all it could to retard innovation and efficiency.

Hagiography

It’s an odd way to claim prescience. Imagine if Henry Ford had mused in 1900 that cars would be obsolete in five years. Imagine if Fonterra were to predict the imminent extinction of cows. At the core of the Rogernomic reforms was a stated strategy of breaking government departments into smaller, supposedly thus more efficient, parts. Yet on all three occasions (Telecom, Fletcher Challenge and Electricity Corporation NZ) when he was at the centre of a restructuring, Deane opposed such action. To avoid embarrassment, the Bassetts do not tell us why their man was heretical about such an article of faith. But they do say why Deane agreed only reluctantly to the break up of electricity.

Bassett reveals that the real purpose of splitting the old Electricity Department was to enable a later flogging off of State assets to private interests. “Deane and John Fernyhough (chairman of ECNZ) had already concluded that (a division into separate parts) would not necessarily bring advantages to the electricity sector but they now realised that a break-up might be the only path to privatisation”. This desire had to be hidden from the oafish citizens who owned the service. As an admirer of corporate monopoly, Deane did not really think that government departments were bad just because they were natural monopolies. Their sin was that they were at least potentially subject to democratic control in the interests of the public. So, among all the unconscious confusion at the core of Deanery is a deliberate lie. Power shortages and unfair and erratic prices are the proof of that over-cooked pudding.

If you want to research “The New Zealand Experiment”, you’ll find nothing here. Beyond the stock phrases, the Bassetts have nothing to say about neoliberalism. But their Business Roundtable platitudes and tired assertions are quite the best parts of the book. When it comes to an analysis of their political opponents, the Bassetts are childish. Differing views are attributed to “Luddites” or welfare cheats. The views of conservatives like Helen Clark and Michael Cullen are said to emanate from “the flakier end” of the Labour caucus. Lange is portrayed in terms so petulant and abusive, so obviously vindictive, that one wonders how it is that Michael Bassett is retained as a media commentator. The authors indicate that Deane was similarly malicious and conceited. He tells Bassett that his many differences with Fernyhough - and of course all the policy failures - were the result of Fernyhough’s weak brain and character.

This appalling scribble is not biography. It’s hagiography. But the more they praise their paragon, the more the Bassetts damn him. Deane, they bang on,”has continued to sing from the songbook he’d learned by heart during his research, and proven to his own and many others’ satisfaction”. What does this tell us? It tells us what we already feared. As a naive provincial boy Deane picked up some - to him - new ideas and, an ideologue and a convert, he’s grasped them ever since. It’s not that he has rejected contrary evidence. By living solely amongst like-minded yes-men, he is still unaware of possible refutation. It is the Bassetts’ proud and justified boast that this rejection of the democratic and scientific traditions is alien.”By New Zealand standards” they gush, the great man has “an almost unparalleled willingness to study, think, and learn from reading and modelling.... We can go further than this. Deane had developed a management style that is his own. ‘Most of my management was self-taught’, he says, ‘and what I learned from others was just by observation’”.

It could well be that many of us aren’t too smart. Never mind. Being smart doesn’t guarantee wisdom. All sorts of smart people have read lots of books but believe stupid things, and all sorts of smart people believe wise things. The intellectuals on display here haven’t grasped one simple truth: clever people believe conflicting things. IQ is not the issue. The Enron crooks, who defined themselves as “The Smartest Guys in The Room” *, had the same neoliberal faith and the same obsessive need to prove their brains were bigger. It’s the main reason their company collapsed. If the boss sees alternative opinions as a challenge to his macho intellect, he prevents the very exchange of ideas that he purports to be fostering. * See Jeremy’s review of “Enron: The Smartest Guys in The Room” in Watchdog 111, April 2006, which can be read online at http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/11/10.htm. Ed.

Better judgement would have allowed Bassetts-Deane to reconcile - assuming they would want to - their basic contradiction. The flexibility and initiative that the Bassetts claim for Deane are the very attributes that they want to deny voters and the Government. Deane, the Bassetts sum up, repeating their one big idea for the umpteenth time, is determined not to learn from experience. He has been “guided by theory to an extent that is most unusual”. Yes, we’ve got the message and we agree. It’s most unusual.

“I SEE RED”
by Judith Bell,Awa Press, Wellington, 2006

Near the start of this engaging book, Judith Bell remarks that for 200 years it was standard practice in the United States to foster its domestic economy through subsidies and tariffs. As she says, a growing economy needs help to compete with established rivals. Even now, despite its rhetoric to the contrary, America taxes imports that threaten local jobs, and spends public money to allow selected industries to compete with cheap imports. So do Japan and South Korea. So does Europe. So does almost everybody.

It should not be necessary for Judith Bell to have to remind us of this. Go back two decades and no-one would imagine otherwise. But in the Rogernomic age, in which a Michael Bassett can claim - as he does in his hymn of praise to Roderick Deane - that State intervention has never worked, you can take nothing for granted. In the past, perhaps, NZ shielded some businesses for longer than necessary, and certainly our exporters are still thwarted by undeserving foreign farm lobbies. But the neoliberal conceit is that protectionism can only be inefficient and that fiscal and monetary policy should pay no regard to social or cultural factors.

Bell is better known as Stephen Tindall, or Stephen Tindall the Woman, a name she adopted to remind us of her unhappy relationship with another Stephen Tindall, the founder of The Warehouse chain. This Tindall the Man has the reputation of being a Kiwi battler with an ethical focus. He got on board the “loyal” America’s Cup campaign. He wants us all to get a bargain. Bell will have none of it.

Judith and Nelson Bell contracted to make gas cylinders for The Warehouse just as the chain was starting. Bell claims the product was good and its price was competitive. It would have been a great deal for their small company and a good opportunity for the Warehouse to back NZ. Bell insists she wasn’t asking for charity, just good business practice. Yet, just as the Bells’ production was getting into top gear, Tindall the Man cancelled his order.

Other reviews of “I See Red” have praised both the book and its author, while insinuating that the Bells have no real complaint. As the Prime Minister might say, it’s time to move on. Having lost her court case and a subsequent appeal, Bell accepts this. She is a resilient woman. To suggest she caused her own problems, however, as has been the gist of some commentators, is unfair. The Bells lost partly because in taking on The Warehouse they were up against a bigger and richer opponent, a behemoth by local standards. The Bells had one product line and few alternatives and they had no natural business allies. They lost also because in a showdown between an aggressive corporation with good public relations and Nelson and Judith Bell, other characters in this sad drama, with all sorts of murky motives, had no incentive to respect a husband and wife in Mount Maunganui. Even so, the Bells vaulted a series of obstacles to get their cylinders made and apparently lost their case on legal technicalities.

The Costs: Job Losses, Increased Welfare Bill

The wider indictment of The Warehouse is its effect on the national landscape. Bell calculates that by rejecting her liquidified petroleum gas (LPG) cylinders and importing others, The Warehouse has cost the country 20 jobs, increased the national welfare bill by $455,000, while the taxpayers have to spend an extra $70,000 in welfare administration. That’s the effect of her one factory closing down, but it’s been happening all over. In the two Rogernomic and Ruthanasian decades, 1981-2001, 87,230 jobs were shed. And for every $1 spent on the resulting imports, the national economy had to waste 62c on new State costs.

Bell notes that “free trade” apologists are wont to point to cars, household appliances, shoes and clothes as items that now cost less, benefiting consumers. Up to a point that’s true. In the high-tide neoliberal years from 1987 to 1998 these products were from 16% to 5% cheaper. That’s not much. Bell quotes CAFCA’s Bill Rosenberg, who asks: “At whose expense did the reduced prices come? Some of the people remain unemployed; others found jobs at lower incomes. 70% of household incomes fell between 1986 and 1996”. Then there’s the lost government tariff income and those higher unemployment benefits.

When The Warehouse revealed plans to move into Gisborne, an outcry ensued. The Red Shed, locals charged, would dominate the town’s centre. A hardware industry journal considered the proposal “an atrocity of unparalleled proportions”. Gisborne already had 40 empty stores. The project was blocked, but the decision was reversed by the Environment Court. Now The Warehouse occupies 10,000 square metres of the downtown; the rest of central Gisborne hosts only 14,000 retail square metres. Around the world, in those places where such disproportion is allowed, notably with Wal-Mart, the resulting blank walls strangle towns’ vitality. Small businesses go under; school leavers can work for tiny money in the sheds or they can drift to the big cities. There’s another way. Bell says that there are restrictions on big box stores in UK, Ireland, Norway and even the free market paradise of Thailand.

Like Roderick Deane, Stephen Tindall the Man is said to fancy the company of deep thinkers, which he says he finds at the New Zealand Institute, a thinktank resolved to “generate new thinking”. Stephen Tindall the Woman finds it all a tad abstract, a bit unfocused, a bit too redolent of the boardroom and the club, a little too unrelated to the actual hard work and ingenuity that is involved in the making of LPG cylinders in the Bay of Plenty. To replace the airy theory of globalism, she offers a motto that is as new as “the new localism” and as old as human experience: “localisation, self-suffiency, self-reliance”.

The particular appeal of the book is its merging of the details of the Bells’ contractual hassles with its wider understanding of the making of policy at the national level. There’s a further level of analysis as Bell discusses the impact of “free trade” on the developing world. She reserves a particular scorn for China, but always her critique is directed at policy makers in all the complicit countries. She never takes on exploited Chinese workers, who are fellow victims. So her nationalism is not defined in opposition to foreigners. On the contrary, she’s expressing a global perspective. This internationalism, a sense of solditarity, is an aspect of “the new localism”. It’s the antithesis of what the free traders’ call globalisation. Outside the boardrooms, globalisation has no home.

We know that the person formerly known as Stephen Tindall the Woman was an inventive publicist. Nelson Bell has always invented and adapted products. As a pair Judith and Nelson embody that Kiwi ingenuity and Number 8 wire adaptability that we used to pride ourselves on. Perhaps we still should. The Bells might have found that the Red Shed is not where everyone gets the bargain they had hoped for, but they’ll find other places.

“THE LAST RESORT”,
A Film By Abi King-Jones & Errol Wright, CutCutCut, 2006

How does it come about that a camping ground near a beach in Mahia gets to be the subject of a documentary about the loss of control that New Zealanders have over their land, their heritage and their way of life? A caravan beside the sea should be a fun place. Unfortunately there can be few Kiwis who don’t know the answer. Market forces came to visit, saw that seaside and lakeside spots would appeal to foreign investors, and sold them. Blue Bay was “surplus to requirements”, its owner, Landcorp, thought. So Landcorp sold the camping ground to a local private owner and he proceeded to sell it, for a tidy profit to a “developer”, who promptly applied to turn it into a housing subdivision for the wealthy. The Wairoa District Council approved it at the Resource Management Act hearing and the rest is history.

With the restructuring of local government a systemic problem has emerged. The best campsites tend to be in isolated, beautiful sites. This places them within the responsibilities of the councils with the fewest people and the longest roads. The way to raise cash is to increase the rating base by subdividing, often with dodgy consents. In NZ these days a sustainable cash flow and a sustainable environment can be incompatible.

In Mahia - and this is another common factor - we’re talking about what was always thought to be Crown land. In 1940 locals asked for a seaside park to be made available for camping. Some parts of the park devolved to private ownership over the years as people sought to raise mortgages to improve their sites. Campers who went back year after year to the same spot identified with their own possie near the beach. In a sense, if you’ve paid for the facilities, you’ve got “private” property, but it’s closer to the real sense of the campground to think of it as “personal” property.

The present privatisation of the park is the opposite of this affirmation. It’s the alienation of the land from local people. It involves the replacement of custom by contract. It replaces the values of tradition with the logic of money. The campers who wanted to commit to their personal space at the beach were confirming their place among the community of campers. The present privatisation is the formal repudiation of these values.

To present the case for the economic rationalists is the ubiquitous Roger Kerr from the Business Roundtable. Whatever the issue, wherever the destruction, Kerr and his mates spout the same old stuff. To hear them say it, the Resource Management Act (RMA) is the trouble because of its “fuzzy definition” of “environment”. Kerr says he can’t be sure what constitute “intrinsic values”. It’s debating club stuff, the purpose of which is to eliminate all such criteria so that nothing may impede the land grabbers. In the postmodern market that the Roundtable wants, all values are equal, especially that very measurable value, the value of a dollar. To back up Kerr, former Act MP Deborah Coddington asks another of those smart arse rhetorical questions: should there be “restrictions” on ownership? Yes, she answers: “You’ve got to have the money”.

This Is All For Your Own Good

How sad it is, continues a developer spin doctor, that Mahia should have such a “vexatious” matter to consider. How unfortunate that it has “divided communities”. By this he can mean only that if his client had immediately been granted everything he wanted there would have been no aggro. Resistance is futile. It’s “holding the country back”. Those pesky and indefinable “values” have slipped back into the park, uninvited. Is the value one that holds that the whims of persons who control money and hire lawyers are good? Yes, but intrusive building is not so great once you’re outside the resource hearing room, because the lawyer then lets us know that “I don’t like it round my bach”.

By admitting that he agreed with the scheme’s opponents, the lawyer ruled out the spiel about “nimby” (not in my backyard) that usually enters the discourse at this stage. If you don’t want a development “in your backyard” because it’s a bad development, you’re said to be selfish. People with lots of value (lots of dollars) and lots of unselfish love of their community (lots of lawyer acquired with lots of dollars) don’t suffer from the nimby bug. They know, as the lawyer here knows, that some backyards are better than other backyards. He is thus able to explain that he desires only “good change” - by which he means that rich backyards should be respected but poor backyards need to embrace change. It’s all a game. You say one thing at work and another thing at home. You earn your fee.

Developers are said to see the beach with a “fresh set of eyes”. This “threatens the local community” because “some people don’t like change”. The trouble with the locals in Mahia is that they exist in a “backwater”. Such talk is chockfull of assumption. You could say that it’s value-laden. For his immediate purposes, the lawyer doesn’t like the simple life at the bach. He suggests that the campers and the runanga are stuck at the back of beyond. He knows that the fee for this case will pay for a winter’s escape to an upmarket resort in Fiji or Thailand - or any foreign place where the hapless locals have been similarly kicked out for his holidaying convenience.

The big money lads like to say that the exploitation of the coast will do wonders for the economy. Up in Mahia they don’t agree. They point out that their beach has been given 40 houses to replace 10,000 campers. The 40 houses will be occupied only seasonally, and few items will be sourced locally. For months on end the mansions will loom over an empty beach. In contrast, the 10,000 engaged with the local community and its economy.

All the privatisation of the coastline will achieve is to artificially put up prices for all New Zealanders, the market forces involved being unconnected to the host economy. Once there, the subdivision will allow for more coast to be taken. This is because, despite Kerr’s complaints, the RMA is a boon to developers as it is based on allowing incremental change. As one of the campers says: “It rips your jandals”.

The rationalists need to know that the Kiwi way of life doesn’t have to define itself or explain itself. Kerr is right - or would be if he were sincere in his scepticism about the possibility of being too precise about these things. Values are implicit. Cultural concepts are part spiritual, part aesthetic, and entirely organic. They express what we are and what we have become. You might say that tents and caravans represent some of our intrinsic values. Even if it washed in on a wave, the rationalists at their round city tables wouldn’t recognise an intrinsic value unless it was listed on the quarterly report.

The effects of building oversized big-noting houses on our beaches are many, various and almost all bad, so submitters against the development were legion. Besides local campers and residents, we see anglers, local iwi and pensioners, each of whom explained the scheme’s adverse aspects as it affected them. The last word (in the film, it’s the second to last) goes to a certain Murray Horton, who remarks that when we’re looking at the concerns of all the disparate groups opposed to the sale of NZ’s rural land to foreigners and the local rich, in the final analysis they’re all “different symptoms of the same disease”.

“THE BODY HUNTERS”
By Sonia Shah, The New Press, New York, 2006

In 1957, when Marilyn Monroe, President Dwight D Eisenhower and Elvis Presley ruled, America was in the middle of that almost mythical era of post-war optimism when everything seemed possible. So many cliched images merited a cliched name so the Fifties are routinely tagged as “the age of innocence”. For Sonia Shah, 1957 was the year when the drug industry became America’s most profitable.

The US, richer than ever, was also healthier than ever. This was bad news for the drug industry because healthy people don’t need medication. Meanwhile, in what was termed the Third World, lots of people were wasting away, but they were not in a position to fatten profits. So a use was found for the Third World as a testing ground for products that Big Drugs would prescribe to healthy people in the First World.

In the 19 th Century slick and fraudulent conmen - we now speak generically of snake oil salesmen - peddled “remedies” to the gullible and the desperate. Hucksters like Eli Lilly, serpents in the Garden of Eden American grass, were a rival archetype. The entrepreneur, with nothing to sell but his own hype, contributed nothing to the health of Americans, who came to rely on science. Selectively toxic “magic bullet” drugs became available after 1932, followed by penicillin and antibiotics. The other ingredient in a successful prescription was government regulation. Shah considers the 1906 Food and Drug Act, which mandated the listing of ingredients, to have been vital.

On the lookout for marketing opportunities Big Drugs wanted to co-opt scientists and lawmakers. It wasn’t hard to loosen standards. In 1961 a new “wonder drug”, thalidomide, was touted as a nausea treatment for pregnant women. In Europe and Africa it was branded as being “as safe as mother’s milk”. Its manufacturer didn’t have to prove its efficacy or its safety. As marketing geared up, lab test animals were dying and patients were suffering side-effects “suggesting that the drug was penetrating the blood-brain barrier and could likewise cross into the placenta in pregnant women”. Nevertheless in 1960 the company launched into a major clinical trial.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) wanted delay; the company wanted to press ahead. Babies were being born with deformities which an Australian obstetrician linked to thalidomide. German reports indicated that a single dose of the new drug was enough to radically deform foetuses. Only after eight further months and after 40 American babies had exhibited the same symptoms, did the American media pick up the story. The FDA sent out investigators, only to find that doctors had not kept records of how much thalidomide they had received or doled out. Finally, in 1962 the Food and Drug Act was amended to increase recall powers. New products would have to be proven safe before they could be prescribed. And they’d have to be proven to work. Soon 300 drugs had been withdrawn.

Drugging The World, For Profit

That was the good news.The bad news was to get worse.The immediate trouble was that, because at-risk people (in this case, the pregnant) tended to be excluded from testing, more thalidomide babies were born. The more significant result was the development of the pharmaceutical transnational corporation. The “more market” mania of the 1980s allowed scientists to patent their discoveries. Because rich world consumers are generally healthy, the inevitable result has been to exploit our insecurities - and even to invent new conditions for us to fret about. As examples, Shah discusses our obsession with cholesterol and Prozac (see Jeremy’s review of “Selling Sickness”, Watchdog 110, December 2005, which deals with the rich world aspect of this topic. It can be read online at http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/10/05.htm Ed.).

In 1991, when deregulation fever was fiercest (it was the year the NZ economy was prescribed Ruthanasia), the FDA surrendered to the drug companies by introducing what it called a “surrogate end point”. Shah writes: “…New drugs would no longer have to prove that they alleviated disease and improved patients’ lives. Now FDA regulators would be willing to allow drug companies to prove their drugs ‘worked’ by showing that they possessed some quality more easily measured than the ability to make patients better....Instead of having to prove that a new cardiovascular drug reduced mortality for heart disease, for instance, drug companies could show simply that the drug reduced cholesterol levels”.

The next year testing rules were adapted so that drug companies could directly pay the FDA to speed up testing. From 1997 drug companies were exempted from listing all side effects. “Instead television ads could simply mention the very worst side effects, dispensing with the others by suggesting that consumers consult a Website or call a 1-800 number”. Corporations could now appeal directly to the consumer, bypassing the doctor, who, like other professionals, had been diagnosed as unnecessary. The consumer (the person formerly known as the patient) was flattered into feeling “empowered” by her dependence on a profit-driven corporation. It’s all very postmodern. One intriguing note: according to Shah, old people in the emergency departments of hospitals are 50% more likely to be suffering from too many drugs than from too few drugs.

If the rich world has been seduced by the promise of eternal youth and vigour, the poor world is being asked to accept that nothing can be done to make it better. It is being prescribed despair. As a fatalistic International Monetary Fund (IMF) noted, “the real world is exceedingly painful” (is the IMF saying that the corporatisation of health in their own rich world is “unreal”?). The “real world” is the poor world, and the sin of the poor is that there’s no money to be made by providing them with medicine. The IMF responds to critics by remarking that for Africa “improved water and sanitation is... not cost-effective”. The rest of us, unreal though we be, know that clean water is what it needs above all else.

Shah’s book deals mostly with this poor Third World, where guinea pig humans, often without genuine consent, trial drug products intended for the rich world. The “free market” of the 1990s has caused a big setback to global health standards. Shah looks closely at AIDS, a typical scourge in that it hit mostly people who could be victimised and ignored. World Trade Organisation rules which disallow cheap generic drugs aid and abet the body hunters. Other bad medicine is the nutrition deficiency resulting from what others have dubbed the Coca-Colonisation of the planet. Exploitation of vulnerable people in the name of science was not long ago common in the rich world too, ending only about 30 years ago. Drug companies have been forced to less selective locales. Shah’s thesis is that “the main business of clinical research is not enhancing or saving lives but acquiring stuff: data. It is an industry, not a social service”.

“OVERCOMING THE ODDS”,
A DVD By Infact, Directed By Kelly Anderson, 2004

Infact is an American lobby group combating Big Tobacco. This short DVD acts as an introduction to its successful campaign for a global “corporate accountability treaty” (the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, the first treaty ever produced by the World Health Organisation. New Zealand was one of the very first countries to ratify it and, as the requisite number of countries have ratified it, the international Treaty is now in force. The grassroots campaign behind this has been driven by the Network for Accountability of Tobacco Transnationals, of which CAFCA is proud to be a small part. Watchdog has followed the issue of tobacco control, and the progress of the campaign for years, most recently in number 112, August 2006, “Maori Lead Fight Against Killer Tobacco TNCs”, by Murray Horton, which can be read online at http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/12/05.htm Ed.).

Around the time it put out this film, Infact renamed itself Corporate Accountability International, with a subtitle indicating that its role is “challenging abuse, protecting people”.Tobacco is just one malevolent industry, they warn. Others will be targetted. This sense of solidarity is evident in Infact’s account of its fight against smoking. We listen to delegates to an international conference with an encouraging willingness to stick together against Big Tobacco’s attempts to subvert their societies. The delegates resented the fact that, having been rebuffed by an educated citizenry in rich countries, the cigarette makers have poorer countries in their sights. A delegate from Palau tells us that a tobacco executive explained it thus: “We don’t smoke that shit. We reserve that right to the young, the poor, the black and the stupid”.

Infact emphasises the need to stub out the cigarette peddlers by isolating them. There should be no seat at the table for Big Tobacco when the world’s health authorities meet. Big Tobacco has a conflict of interest - and a history of bribery - so they should not be allowed access to government decisions. Big Tobacco has no way to rebuff the evidence that its product is lethal. All it can do is advertise. So ads should be stopped cold turkey. The corporates’ only other recourse is to babble on about “free trade” and “free speech”.

Corporate Accountability International looks like a no-nonsense outfit. It doesn’t pretend that it will be easy to end smoking, and it doesn’t need to be told that treaties like these are not easily enforced. But this agreement is a powerful setting of an agenda for health. We can look forward not just to a tightening of opinion against the promotion of tobacco but to further campaigns against other corporate abuses.

“SAVING TREES, STOPPING WARS”
WJ Foote, The Glen Press, Christchurch, 2006

WJ (Will) Foote wants a new national day to mark the date “when we really grew up”. Gallipoli was “a military disaster caused by bone-headed politicians and top military brass, the same people whose only strategy was to push thousands more to their deaths in the mud of Flanders. Let’s keep Anzac Day for remembrance. Let’s keep June 8, 1987 as New Zealand Celebration Day, the day we stood up to be counted”. That was when Parliament passed the law that made NZ nuclear-free.

This, one of Foote’s few specific recommendations, is the essence of his latest book. We will stop wars, he says, if we don’t fight them. As nuclear war would threaten the entire planet, the opting out of nuclearism is a good idea. And, if we want to celebrate our nationhood, what could better a declaration of independence from all that tired imperial posturing? Foote is too wise to serve up too many prescriptions. Despite never straying from his single theme - that pacifism is humanity’s last best hope - Foote’s book is never didactic and never argumentative. His tone is unfailingly optimistic. Violence doesn’t work. It’s an ideal that is often expressed but seldom with the integrity contained within these modest pages.

Will Has Been A Peace Activist All His Adult Life

His experience spans from the years between the World Wars, a period when pacifism was abhorrent to the powers-that-were. As a young man, Foote was prepared to risk acceptance, security and popularity in order to do what he thought was right. For the best part of a century he’s never stopped speaking truth to power. It’s easy to forget that, although now pacifist sentiments are risk-free (who cares? who listens? what’s at stake?), 60 years ago they could land you in prison (see Jeremy’s review of the documentary “Sedition: The Suppression Of Dissent In World War 11 New Zealand”, by Russell Campbell, in Peace Researcher 32, March 2006, which can be read online at http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr32-120b.html. Will was among the conscientious objectors locked up for several years. Ed.).

When you’ve seen the same mistakes being made, generation after generation, you could get frustrated, but there’s no trace of that here. Foote must be a patient man. He’s also unfailingly fair-minded. The result is a pleasingly conversational tone, as Foote draws on his experience to provide a context to his themes, to guide, to suggest further lines of inquiry, and then he leaves us to draw our own conclusions. His book is at once concise, economical and relaxed. It’s not easy to imagine a better summary of pacifist thinking.

As he has a deft way of allying the idealistic with the pragmatic, Foote’s take on domestic politics is interesting. He would like to see progressive MPs from outside the two main parties “stirring the pot within the Labour Party ranks”. To join or to stay out? It’s an old debate and it won’t soon be resolved. Foote worries that, with no coalition with the Greens (and now that the Alliance is out of Parliament), “the party of the common people moves remorselessly to the Right”.

Foote notes that there are potential allies on the Right. “They don’t all grind the faces of the poor. Most want peace just as much as I do. They just go the wrong way about it”. To make this point he quotes that prophet of Rogernomics, the property tycoon and iconoclast, Bob Jones. Jones proposed that NZ had no enemies, and like Costa Rica, it could do without armed forces. He ridiculed (in 1989) “war-games childishness”. They’re fair points. They remind us of the sometimes bitter split between the rationalist, neo-liberal wing of Tory opinion and its Muldoonist rival. Peace people do well to note the tactical advantages such ideological differences can present.

The bulk of the book is practical. Foote provides reading lists, hints at strategies, discusses ideas, and sketches historical explanation. His wry sense of humour is never far away. For many years Will Foote, a cricketer of note for decades, played in the Hawke Cup (second class competition) for Nelson and Wairarapa. His writing has the qualities of a good batsman who long ago saw off the opening attack. He’s content to deflect and nudge his singles and put the odd loose ball away to the fence. The pace men breathed their fire but Will’s still out there in the middle, 87 not out.

”Saving Trees, Stopping Wars” can be bought for $20 from The Glen Press, 79 Lowry Avenue, Christchurch 8051.

This review was originally published in Peace Researcher 33, November 2006, the journal of the Anti-Bases Campaign. Will Foote is a much valued member of both CAFCA and the Anti-Bases Campaign, and, until he was well into his 80s, a regular at Waihopai spybase protests, from the outset of the campaign to close it, nearly 20 years ago. He is one of the hardy souls who always turn up to help with Watchdog mailouts. He is a prolific writer, and several of his books have been reviewed in Peace Researcher, most recently “Going Uphill Backwards”, reviewed by Robyn Dann in PR 26, October 2002, which can be read online at http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr26-71.htm. Ed.