For several reasons this book is encouraging.

First, as a BWB Text, it’s part of the series which publisher Bridget Williams Books produces as “short books on big subjects from great New Zealand writers”. At around 100 small pages, “Ruth, Roger And Me” could slip into your purse or pocket. We keep hearing how people are too busy texting or tweeting to concentrate on anything longer than 140 characters, but you could finish this one on your bus ride into work.

We’re given a note “about BWB texts”. They’re “short books on big subjects: succinct narratives spanning history, memoir, contemporary issues, science and more…” A glance at the list of recent contributors bears up this claim of relevance.

Andrew Dean is an Ashburton native identified as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. His topic, the impact of Rogernomics a generation on, sounds like pure economics, but Dean’s studying English literature. That’s the second reason to be encouraged. He’s literate. Unlike the classical economists, with their notorious obsession for obscurity and jargon, Dean is happy to offer us allusions from the wider culture. He’s a throwback to the times when educated laypersons could look at what used to be called “political economy”, an enterprise that assumed that understanding economics was enhanced by appreciating the role of disciplines like history and politics.

“Economic Man”

The Rogernomes believe in what they call “economic man”, a being who makes all decisions based on an entirely rational and selfish way of acting always in a way that maximises money. Despite legions of observers with a more empirical view of what people are really like pointing out that this take on human nature is false, they continue to believe that some people make rational choices and are therefore rich and some people are stupid and are therefore poor. Dean isn’t one of them.

Dean’s balanced, humanist understanding allows him to look at the evidence without the clutter of preconceptions that have confused the Rogernomes. As a young man in the 21st Century he’s supposed to conform to the stereotypes favoured by the commentators you read in the papers and see on TV. He’s supposed to be Generation X or Y or Z or whatever lazy substitute for thought is trendy this week. Dean isn’t into generation war theory, in which people his age are wont to blame baby boomers for being selfish and the baby boomers blame him for being a whinger.  So a third welcome aspect of this little book is this rejection. Dean sees that the essential changes are best seen in the context of the Rogernomic coup.

The thrust of his monograph is a discussion of what he dubs “discomfort” and “disconnection”: “’Discomfort’ reflects a set of policies that have made our lives less certain, less protected, and more stressful. We know that these circumstances are good for us – living an uncomfortable life will make us strive further, and adapt to an increasingly complex and fast-changing world. ‘Disconnection’ is the product of changes to social policy and political organisation that have estranged us from the communities to which we might belong”.

That’s as accurate a summary as any of the world that the Rogernomes have engineered, and to react to it in terms of generations is to evade understanding. It’s not about moral fibre; it’s about economic policy. People Dean’s age are being shaped by policies designed to engender unease. It’s supposed to encourage them to become “economic men”.

To catch the essence of the mood other observers have coined the term “precariat” (i.e. precarious proletariat. Ed.), and it’s to Dean’s credit that he doesn’t employ this sort of language. Neither does he emphasise what he has every right to point out: that the politicians and bureaucrats who engineered the Rogernomic coup themselves benefitted from being born into an era where the State provided affordable housing to their parents and free tertiary education to them. The ethos then was to provide the basis for security rather than to demand that life be precarious. So he can’t fairly be accused of whinging.  

Banal Self-Satisfaction

The Ruth of the title is Ruth Richardson, Finance Minister in Jim Bolger’s National government, who, in 1991, produced the “mother of all budgets” which slashed public expenditure, especially funding for social welfare. Ruth wanted the poor to be incentivised to get on out there and become “economic”. The Roger of the title is, of course, Douglas, whose tenure as Finance Minister had ended near the end of the outgoing 1984-90 Labour administration. 

Dean’s latter-day interviews with Ruth Richardson and Rod Carr (Vice-Chancellor of Canterbury University since 2009) provide the structure for the book. Much of the comment in the mainstream press spoke of how charming and hospitable were both the former Finance Minister and the present Vice-Chancellor. In this dumbed down age we’re supposed to think that if Ruth Richardson has a nice garden and a friendly smile then her budget of 24 years ago must have been OK.

Well, no. They’re doubtless very nice people, but we’re not talking about their rose garden. We’re trying to have an adult discussion about political economy. 

Ruth Richardson does indeed come across as a Southern Woman, and determined that she be seen as such. She tells Dean that her background is “quintessentially New Zealand, which is a farming family, a lot of self-reliance”. Her family has always had a “strong civic thread”, she continues. Most importantly, she knows “what makes a business tick”. At the same time she’s very much a New Woman, and within the National Party her “philosophical deviancy” challenged the old boys’ network.

Everything on the record from Ruth, from the heady days in 1991 through her subsequent career as a privatising consultant, has this ring of banal self-satisfaction. She seems unable to express herself other than in cliché, and all the wisdom she expounds is received wisdom. You can imagine her strolling among the roses telling her VIP guests that New Zealand punches above its weight or that it was the can-do pioneering spirit of farming stock that enabled NZ to lead the world in this and that.   

As the evidence refutes their central claims, believers in the cult of “economic man” necessarily express themselves in slogans. The hackneyed generalisations might impress those willing to be impressed, but in a Finance Minister it is not a good quality. The country has still not recovered from the Ruthanasia experiment.

Dean reminds us that Ruth’s 1995 autobiography “Making A Difference” - a title much favoured by unimaginative self-promoters - advocated market rents for State housing to “maximise competition” and “empower the consumer”. Sounds good, doesn’t it, and at Chamber of Commerce dos they probably rise to their feet cheering when they hear such self-evidently wise advice. But, 20 years on in South Auckland, tenants might have a different view.

Always nimble with his references, Dean remarks that neo-liberal rhetoric carries with it echoes of Victoriana, when the conventional wisdom knew that the poor could be classified as “deserving” and “undeserving”. However objective the Richardsons of the world see themselves as being; their language suggests that they are informed by the same prejudices of time and place as the rest of humanity. If you are self-reliant, empowered with the truth, and advise other rich people around the world, then it stands to reason that poor people must be stupid, and stupid people aren’t her problem. And if you’re “quintessentially New Zealand, which is a farming family”, are the urban poor aliens?

Underpinning all of Ruth’s faith is the idea of incentives. Take away State help from the disadvantaged and they’ll smarten up. People who are poor, she assumes, have made bad choices. It’s truer to say that the reverse holds. People make bad choices because they’re poor. Money gives options that the precariat lack.

A key concept, one that the Rogernomes have successfully appropriated, is freedom. Dean considers the idea from a perspective unavailable to economic man, who is limited to seeing freedom only as being “freedom from” governments and regulations. But equally there’s “freedom to” do something, an ability which poverty restricts (these definitions derive from Isaiah Berlin, known as a champion of conservatism).

As they wander in the garden Ruth assures Dean that “I’ve never deviated” from her belief in market infallibility. This, she knows, indicates courage and certainty. Like Margaret Thatcher Herself, she who was Not For Turning, Ruth doesn’t harbour doubt. Both well knew that in the very male world of classical economics a girl has to try harder to prove that she belongs. The mother of all budgets proved that there was a new species stalking the country. Economic Woman was here to stay.

Incestuous Back-Scratching World

In 1991 Rod Carr was designing the Rogernomes’ health policy, and he’s been involved with public policy ever since. Now, in his locally visible job as Vice-Chancellor, his responses were more measured than Richardson’s. Dean credits Carr with at least giving him a good hearing, voicing appreciation of the young man’s disappointment that universities were axing courses which weren’t crudely connected to the job market. He sympathised with graduates struggling with debt. Fair enough, but what else could he say? Rod always came back to money. Where was it to come from?

Pleading poverty is always going to go down well with everyone who’s not part of a university, and it’s notoriously easy to play to the gallery by bashing students, so Carr could play a more subtle game than the enthusiastic Richardson. But there’s nothing in his background to suggest that he’s any less of a Rogernome than she is. For all his working life Carr has been at the heart of the enterprise.

Dean in fact lets him off lightly. There’s no indication from the book that he pressed Carr on matters ideological, yet when the universities were being shaken up there was much philosophising from the neo-liberal camp that the benefit of education was a private matter, so that the traditional assumption that an educated populace was a public benefit was wrong. Neo-classical theory held otherwise. If so, the reforms were at least partly – and, more probably, only – inspired by the ideology of extreme individualism.

Carr’s university has certainly given every indication of being as unlikely to deviate as one that Richardson might rule. Consider its choices of honorary degrees. One recent award went to Alan Gibbs, who has not lived in Canterbury since he graduated. He’s the guy who became extremely rich through his role in flogging off Telecom. These days Gibbs is the Act Party’s major benefactor (see Jeremy’s review of Paul Goldsmith’s “Serious Fun: The Life And Times Of Alan Gibbs” in Watchdog 131, December 2012, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/31/12.html. He reviewed it along with Owen Glenn’s autobiography, which is titled – you guessed it – “Making A Difference”. Ed.)

And – Dean’s starting point – in 2011 Canterbury University awarded an honorary doctorate to Ruth Richardson. It’s an incestuous back-scratching world after all. In her acceptance speech Ruth opined that she had received “the mother of all honours”. The highlight of her life, she keeps boasting, is the day she ensured that poverty and inequality were here to stay.

THE PEOPLE’S UNIVERSITY

by Ian Dougherty, Canterbury University Press, Christchurch, 2015

We’ve been hearing all throughout 2015 that this is the centennial of the Anzac landings, but it’s also the 100th birthday of a much more positive idea, the Christchurch Workers Educational Association (WEA). In 1915, as young men wasted away on the beaches at Gallipoli, the first classes were held in a dingy room in Hereford Street. Rather than being served up as cannon fodder, New Zealand’s youth might open their eyes to more creative pursuits.

The WEA had started in the UK a few years earlier at a time when, in all countries, very few men, and even fewer women, received more than a rudimentary education - and those few were virtually all from the upper middle classes. The WEA would seek to widen the horizons of workers through offering courses, largely in the humanities.

Ian Dougherty’s history of the subsequent 100 years reads like a who’s who of progressive Canterbury. One influence was the Christian socialist movement. Others were the Labour Party and trade unions. With interlocking relationships these three traditions were integral to local democracy. Mayors like George Manning and Robert Macfarlane were early stalwarts of the WEA, and it seems as though the whole of Michael Joseph Savage’s first Labour Cabinet had been enrolled at some stage in WEA courses in Christchurch, Wellington or Auckland.  

University teachers like the ubiquitous James Shelley devised courses which travelled round the province in boxes. During the Depression there were 41 study circles with between eight and 30 students in each. The Railways pitched in by charging only a quarter of the normal price to take them into the country. They went everywhere. In 1939, for instance, study circles began in Anama, Barrytown, Seafield, Oaro, Parnassus and Strathcona. Haven’t heard of them? Neither would most Cantabrians.

When the Depression hit the Government cancelled its modest funding, its notions being that when people are suffering and idle, it’s best to deprive them of small comforts, just as when the economy is depressed, it’s a good idea to depress it further. 50 years on, and the Muldoon regime axed funding again. In characteristic Labour fashion, the Lange government that followed restored a third of the grant, but the next Jim Bolger National government stopped it yet again – and this time it hasn’t been restored.

Conservative politicians often find it difficult to understand why working class people need an education, especially when general interest courses are offered that deviate too far from the 3R’s. In this, ironically perhaps, their view coincided with a view within the WEA itself, where some thought that the emphasis should be specifically Leftist. If there were differences they were resolved in a 1997 statement. Both the New Zealand and Canterbury WEAs said their aims were “education for personal growth and a just and equitable society”.

Another tension might astound. It used to be that the WEA saw itself as being in competition with Canterbury University, which was offering adult education courses of its own.

Yes, times have changed.

The one big shift is in students over the century from being mainly male, young and working class to being mainly female, old and middle class. This shift reflects obvious societal changes. So many trends in fact are inhospitable to the ideal of gathering working people in a room to study that the survival of the movement is a tribute to the dedicated volunteers who have steered the ship over the last century.  The challenges to the WEA are many, but the impulse is robust. The Christchurch branch might have retreated from the wider province, but legacies have left it solvent. Five other WEAs survive: Southland, Wellington, Kapiti Coast, Waitakere and Auckland.

CAFCA congratulates the Canterbury WEA on its centenary. We (firstly as CAFCINZ, now as CAFCA) have had, and continue to have, a long and productive working relationship with it. Although not for quite the full 100 years. Ed.

HACK ATTACK:

How the Truth Caught Up With Rupert Murdoch

by Nick Davies, Chatto and Windus, London, 2014

Rupert Murdoch is the feisty bantam cock Australian who owns much of the Western world’s media, including key newspapers like the Australian and, in the UK, the Times. These are opinion leaders, conservative in outlook and routinely dubbed “quality” papers. They used to be known as broadsheets, but now that the Times has followed the trend to ever smaller pages, they are tabloid sized. Not that they can be called tabloids, a term which refers to the dailies (the Sun and the News Of The World) which gave Nick Davies his title, and whose criminal excesses he exposed. The mild NZ press has no equivalent. One Murdoch vehicle available locally – but best avoided – is his manic Fox network, “tabloid” TV.

It is because of Davies, a reporter for the Guardian, that we came to hear about Murdoch’s nasty papers. His detailed exposure of the corruption reads like a novel, and a far-fetched one at that. Not so long ago we would not have imagined the shenanigans in the British media. They’re the product of the UK elite’s culture – and the triumph of neo-liberal excess.

How the Murdoch press hacked people’s phones is a story that’s been told. It won’t be repeated here. Suffice it to emphasise the scale of the enterprise. In an appendix Davies lists private eyes whose beat was the UK media, investigators whose working lives are given over to spying on people so that the next day’s paper can carry a fresh scandal. There are 41 names.

Davies’ account of how he tracked down the hackers is compelling. At every step of the way he was blocked. Against him was not only the power of the Murdoch empire, before which governments lay prostate, but also the police, themselves compromised. It’s always been the case that the big money media have echoed the views of the 1%. The point about the recent scandals is that the pressures were more than influence, of sycophants knowing where their bread was buttered. The hack attacks were all about direct fear and loathing, the weapon of very big money with enough dirt to make its potential targets run for cover. Even when the State put the tabloids on trial, Murdoch was spending 30 times more on lawyers than the prosecution.

The period under review covers the decades when the last four UK Prime Ministers were in office, if not in power. Margaret Thatcher didn’t need to be subverted as she was exactly what Murdoch wanted, and Tony Blair, the Tories’ Labour successor, was eminently flexible, ready and willing to serve. Under his watch Murdoch employees “learned to treat the Government with a bullying contempt”, with the tabloid editors having a direct line to the Prime Minister, often dictating the details of policy. The next Labour man, Gordon Brown, wanted to resist, but by then the web had trapped all.

Corporate Domination & Vulgarity On Massive Scale

Rupert, the father, has two successor sons. As Davies sees it, the old man “adopted the language of neo-liberalism as respectable clothing for the otherwise naked ambition of his plans for global corporate expansion; the son really believes it”. For James the assault on anything that stands in the way of corporate domination is ‘a moral crusade.’ Unlike Dad, who sticks mainly to hatching his deals, he’s inclined to a grandiose self-promotion. One boardroom manoeuvre he dubbed Project Rubicon, an allusion to a decisive move towards total power by Julius Caesar.

Together father and son can be relied on to splash out vulgarity on a massive scale. To show the courtiers that the family had transcended normal human possibilities, the Murdochs like to remind the disciples that their power extends beyond the temporal. Like the great Caesar, they are beyond mere mortality. So that when Rupert baptised the daughter from his latest marriage it was in the River Jordan with the guests all in white, one of whom - inevitably - was that other moral crusader, Tony Blair.

You can’t argue with that sort of authority, a supreme union of spiritual and temporal power. There’s the father who bathes in the waters of Jesus Christ; the son who marches with Julius Caesar, and the Holy Ghosts - the Sun and the News Of The World - who spread the word.

The Murdochs seem to be seeking a global spiritual reach. Davies tells us that Pope Benedict had a private meeting with James, who reportedly gave ₤100,000 to fund a Papal visit to Britain, while a former Archbishop of Canterbury gave a character reference to one of the sleaziest of his journalists.

Or perhaps the Murdochs become spiritual only when cameras have been summoned. Most times they’re competing with each other in an alpha-male sort of way. Davies says that once when they had to get together to sort out a crisis, the father wouldn’t leave New York and the son wouldn’t leave London. So they met in the Azores, islands in the Atlantic.

Davies expounds some key moments in the rise of the empire of sleaze.

In 1981 when Rupert wanted to buy the Times, the rules demanded that his bid be sent to a Monopolies and Mergers Commission, set up to guard against the concentration of corporate power. The Thatcher government did not refer the bid, one that set up an unprecedented degree of monopoly ownership.

Davies suggests that Rupert got a flying start in the UK because “he was not Robert Maxwell, the ego-driven and corrupt millionaire whose lust for power was as subtle as a snake bite”. Murdoch outbid Maxwell to buy the News Of The World, seen back in 1969 as “warm and cheerful, good for a laugh, with a flash of stocking top too”. It proved a winning formula.

So it was that, in 1986, when Murdoch wanted to stop Maxwell from buying another paper, the Thatcher government referred the bid to the Commission, which blocked the sale. Yet, the next year, when Murdoch wanted to buy the same paper, the Commission did not act. And, soon after, Murdoch was allowed to create TV’s BSkyB in similarly murky circumstances.

In 2001, when Gordon Brown, then Blair’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced an imminent increase in the health budget, the Sun wrote that he wanted to raise taxes. Brown met a Sun editor that day “for an interview which, according to one of those present, rapidly became a negotiation about policy. Brown should accept the advice in that morning’s Sun for the NHS (the National Health Service) to start buying in services from private medical businesses. This was no part of Brown’s policy. The result was that the NHS would achieve more funding only if it introduced ‘reforms’ and ‘modernisation’. Soon there was talk of ‘freedom hospitals’”.

And in 2007, when Brown cut the standard tax rate from 22% to 20%, three independent advisors said that he had done so solely to placate Murdoch, whose interest has always been to shrink government.

Any pretext to destabilise and humiliate would do. When Brown wanted to delay sending more troops to Afghanistan the tabloids waxed hysterical, pretending to believe that the PM was motivated by anti-war sentiments. “Every new death falls at No. 10’s door”, they screamed, and “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” A letter, said to be from grieving parents, began, “Dear PM, you killed our boy”.

UK Governments Take Orders From Murdochs

The fourth PM to serve the Murdochs is the present one. With an upmarket background of Eton schooling and a seemingly natural inclination for dirty politics, Cameron is the climactic expression of hackerdom.

In 2010, with a Conservative election win expected, Cameron, a former public relations manipulator, met with Andy Coulson, the editor who was to be jailed for his key role in the hacking. Coulson, a “behind-the-scenes fixer and thug”, had started out as a showbiz reporter “obsessed with the private lives of rock stars, film stars, TV stars, anyone who could sprinkle glitter on the column’s gossip. Coulson was pitched into a world of A-list celebrities and class A drugs”. He became the PM’s media advisor.

More than the dowager Thatcher and the prince hypocrite Blair, Cameron is at one with Rupert and James and their editors. In Cameron country, where Rupert’s favourite, Rebekah Brooks, lives nearby, the Chipping Camden set, “the consciously casual Conservative elite”, affect “a kind of Camelot: a land of cocaine and shepherd’s pie, where the very rich and famous live a baggy-jeans-and-T-shirt kind of life”, wandering of an afternoon to the village store to shop for expensive organic foods.

A journalist with experience of Coulson told Davies that his papers operated under a code of silence “so strict that it would secure a nod of appreciation from the heads of the New York crime families”. At News Of The World he was “presiding over what can only be described as a flourishing criminal concern”.

Davies spoke at the 2015 Christchurch Writers’ Festival, where he suggested that the Murdochs are all “about power…the power of the playground bully…. It’s about fear”. This assessment certainly fits the evidence. There are lots of such people around who are of no interest to the rest of us. The thing about the Murdochs is that they’re messianic billionaires with extreme neo-liberal prejudices and no scruples. The boast of his papers that the last few British governments serve at the whim of the Murdochs is largely true. They literally take orders from them. 

In the epilogue Davies makes the essential point about all the filth: that the election wins of Thatcher in 1979 and Reagan in 1980 constituted a neo-liberal coup, and while there were, of course, various factors in play, insofar as any single person plotted and enabled their successes, that person was Murdoch (correctly, he mentions NZ as an early fellow traveller, but Muldoon as our Thatcher? When it comes to economic policy that dishonour rests with Muldoon’s successor).