So, the time has finally come to analyse John Key’s “legacy” (the latter being the obsession of all political leaders, no matter how insignificant their country). Key’s December 2016 sudden resignation certainly took everyone, me included, by surprise. With exquisite timing, he announced it the very same morning that I had just sent the completed December Watchdog off for layout. I had to make a snap decision on whether to proceed or to rewrite the issue in light of the sudden new post-Key reality. I decided to proceed with it as it was – if I’d chosen the other option, it would have been a major rewrite and there would have been no way that issue would have been ready, let alone printed, by Christmas. It wasn’t a big deal – Watchdog is a journal of analysis, not a newspaper.

But I was very pleased that, months earlier, I had asked our excellent cover artist, Ian Dalziel, to not feature John Key on the cover for a change (he was a constant presence for years on end). There was a John on the cover of that December Watchdog but it was the much worthier John Minto. Maybe that’s the reason that Key resigned – once he got wind that he was no longer deemed newsworthy enough to be lampooned, yet again, on Watchdog’s cover, he must have thought: “That’s it, the game’s up, I’m a has been”. I assure you that I had no inside knowledge – the only explanation must be that I’m psychic.

The Parachutists

As I said, Brash nearly won the 2005 election. But he didn’t and he went on to rapidly become a liability for National. So, they made a special effort to pick a new Leader whose central quality had to be that he wasn’t Don Brash. As I wrote in my analysis of the 2008 election: “He (Key) is National’s main asset, because of his inoffensive personality and his (public) willingness in the election buildup to say or do anything that would ensure that National got into power. But plenty in his own Party, let alone his Rightwing coalition partner and Big Business and the transnational corporate media, are angered by his whole series of flipflops, his selling of National as ‘Labour lite’. There are plenty of unreconstructed Rogernauts in National and Act, who entertain fantasies about ‘finishing the business’, whose standard denial of reality for the past two decades has been that if only they’d been able to inflict more pain there would have been some gain. They belong to ‘the operation was a great success, the patient died’ school of politics and economics” (Watchdog 119, February 2009, “Heeeere’s Johnny!”, Murray Horton, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/19/02.htm).

National’s Prime Asset

I was proved wrong. Key was not rolled by National, he retired undefeated, unchallenged and unstabbed in the back (or even the front). National, very wisely, realised that not only was Key their main asset during his eight years as Prime Minister – he was their only asset. I wrote on this subject in my analysis of the 2011 election: “Now that elections are fought on the US Presidential model, it all comes down to the individual who is fronting the campaign. And National recognises that its’ greatest and, in many ways, only asset, is John Key. Its 2011 campaign was personalised to an unprecedented degree. We weren’t exhorted to vote for the National Party but for ‘John Key’s National Party’. No other Tory got a look in – which was probably a wise move. Because if the unthinkable happened and Key broke his neck from smiling too much, who would they have to replace him?”

“His Cabinet is not exactly brimming with talent. The Deputy PM, Bill English, led National to its worst ever defeat in 2002 (yes, even worse than Labour’s in 2011) and ran the most appallingly inept election campaign I’ve ever seen from any party. Nobody else springs to mind as a winning leader. For instance, Steven Joyce is filling the same sort of Minister of Everything role that Bill Birch did in the 1990s’ National government but Joyce is only a pale shadow of the man who earned the nickname of the Prince of Darkness (Birch even had the king size nose suitable for sticking into everything). Can anybody honestly say that they see Gerry Brownlee as Prime Ministerial material? If you do, ask a Cantabrian for a reality check”.

“Both major parties play this game. When Helen Clark was elevated, first to Labour Leader and then to Prime Minister, she was glammed up beyond recognition and Labour’s campaigns were heavily reliant on her as its greatest asset. But she did have a genuine potential replacement working alongside her, namely her formidably talented Deputy and Minister of Finance, Michael Cullen. When they both abruptly resigned after Labour’s 2008 defeat, the Party had to hurriedly find two replacements, and what they got was the shop-soiled pair of Phil Goff and Annette King”.

“What National has learned is that to break the cycle of familiarity breeding voter contempt, you need to bring in a charismatic outsider, a game-breaker. They tried it first with Don Brash and he came very close to winning the 2005 election. But then he proved himself to be a suicide bomber in the ranks of his own parties, firstly in National and now in Act. So, the Tories’ Plan B to defeat Helen Clark was John Key and he was parachuted in to do the job. It’s the same stratagem Labour adopted when it recruited David Lange to beat Piggy Muldoon (both Clark and Muldoon were defeated at their third election as Prime Minister)”.

“Key is extremely popular personally and to all appearances he is an easy-going, nice bloke (or, at least, his carefully cultivated public persona is). Basically, it is his popularity alone that won National 47% of the vote, the party’s highest tally since 1951 (but, crucially, not the 50% that it had been polling right up until the election and which would have enabled it to govern alone, something never achieved under MMP). I’ll never vote for Key but I’ll give the man credit for fronting up after Christchurch’s series of catastrophic earthquakes in 2010/11. Indeed, at one point, what with the quakes and the Pike River coal mine tragedy, Key was fronting up so frequently that he was in danger of being mistaken for a professional mourner”.

“But the politics of perception are very important, particularly in a huge natural disaster (ask George Bush, who provided the opposite example after the 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans). And that, plus the perception that the Government is ‘doing something’ to help earthquake victims, paid big dividends at the election, with the previously Labour city of Christchurch giving its party vote to National (even in Wigram, which was Jim Anderton’s stronghold for 27 years), and the decades-long Labour seat of Christchurch Central going National for the first time ever”.

“So, Key is perceived as that nice man who smiles and waves (hey, it works for the Queen), plus he must know how to run the economy because he made a lot of money as a foreign currency trader, right? Add a suitably meaningless campaign slogan such as ‘Building A Brighter Future’ (politicians never promise jam today, it’s always jam tomorrow) and you’re home and hosed. Personalising National’s election campaign to saturation level with Key puts New Zealand on the same level as those scorned Third World countries that base everything on the cult of personality around the Great Leader. Perhaps we should make it official and rename the country Johnkeyistan” (Watchdog 128, December 2011, “Welcome To Johnkeyistan! Don’t Worry, She’ll Be Right [In Every Sense Of The Word]”, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/28/01.htm).

Others Did His Dirty Work

One of the major differences between John Key and Donald Trump is that Key made sure that he got other people to do his dirty work and that the ugly side of his personality was kept firmly out of sight (whereas the flagrant brandishing of the very ugliest of personalities is Trump’s signature political style, as indeed it was in this country for Muldoon, albeit on a much more reduced scale). So, Key’s third, and what turned out to be his final, election – in 2014 – was the “Dirty Politics” one, where his essential ugliness was laid bare for all to see.  I wrote about this at length in my analysis of that election. Here are some extracts:

“National recognises that John Key is its greatest asset and has been since he was parachuted in to replace the hapless Don Brash as Party Leader and then went on to defeat Helen Clark (who, likewise, was Labour’s greatest asset during her three terms in power). A major part of that is the careful cultivation of Key’s image as being a good bloke, one of the boys, someone above all the routine tawdriness of politics. Hence the classic ‘Monty Python And The Holy Grail’ quote (with which I started that article, namely ‘Large Man: Who's that then? Dead Collector: I dunno. Must be a king.

Large Man: Why? Dead Collector: He hasn't got shit all over him’) – the king musn’t be seen to have shit all over him”.

“But something didn’t go according to script for King John in the buildup to his 2014 coronation. The mask slipped, the curtain was pulled back, and the excremental reality of Key, National and their grubby mates was laid bare for all to see. That, of course, was courtesy of ‘Dirty Politics’ by Nicky Hager, the proctologist of the body politic (which was reviewed by Jeremy Agar in the same issue of Watchdog – 137, December 2014, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/37/13.html). Suffice to say that ‘Dirty Politics’ revealed the true way that Key and National operate, and the methods they used to ensure that they stay in power”.

“Nicky’s book, combined with Kim Dotcom’s September (2014) Moment of Truth public meeting in the Auckland Town Hall – deliberately timed to have maximum impact on the election just five days later – made for the most interesting election campaign in years. It was certainly the most unscripted. Their combined effect led to some nervous last minute handwringing by National’s apologists fretting about the election. They needn’t have worried – any electoral impact was, in fact, adjudged to have helped National to win with an increased majority. In short: a backlash…”

“Key had long been expecting and dreading these revelations about his Government’s systematic crimes against its own people, and its wholehearted participation in the international organised crime group known as Five Eyes. As far back as his much-vaunted January 2014 Hawaii game of golf with President Obama he had said that he expected revelations about NZ in 2014 from Edward Snowden’s US National Security Agency (NSA) files. Indeed, the political and media commentariat went into a frenzy when Nicky Hager announced that he was releasing a new book the month before the election – the assumption (wrong, as it turned out) was that it would be material from the Snowden files”.

“It was fascinating to see how history repeats; as John Key, badly rattled by the Moment of Truth revelations, resorted to that faithful tool of all Tory politicians wanting to deflect attention from their lies and crimes, namely to ignore the message and shoot the messenger. So, even in advance of the event, Key was heaping disgraceful insults onto Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist Glenn Greenwald*, calling him ‘Dotcom’s little henchman’, ‘a conspiracy theorist’, and that favourite epithet from Key’s former life as an international money trader, ‘a loser’”.

“He and his political and media allies were able to get great mileage out of the fact that all of the major figures at the Moment of Truth – Greenwald, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and, most importantly, Kim Dotcom (who didn’t help his case by cackling throughout like some sort of oversized German villain in a James Bond movie) are foreigners. *Jeremy Agar’s review of Greenwald’s “No Place To Hide: Edward Snowden, The NSA And The Surveillance State” is in Watchdog 136, September 2014, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/36/11.html“.

The New Muldoon

“And we New Zealanders don’t like foreigners telling us what to do, do we. Well, only if they’re good foreigners, like the President of the US or the Director of the NSA – but that’s different, isn’t it. And I wondered: who was the last Tory PM to shoot unwelcome foreign messengers and whip up populist resentment against foreigners from the progressive side of the argument telling us what to do in relation to a national and international disgrace in which New Zealand had been very much caught with its pants down?”

“The answer was none other than our old mate Piggy Muldoon, who used to rail against African and other Third World politicians telling us to cut our sporting ties with apartheid South Africa (with the dog whistle message that not only were they foreigners but, worst of all, black foreigners). So, that nice Mr Key, smile and wave John, selfie John, is none other than the reincarnation of Piggy Muldoon, minus the dimple. The Muldoonist parallel continues with ‘Dirty Politics’, showing how Rightwing attack blogs like Cameron Slater’s Whale Oil now carry out the political dirty work, smears and character assassinations that in Piggy’s day were done by old dead tree media, Truth. Even the relationship with the Security Intelligence Service (SIS) is the same. So, nothing changes in Torydom, it’s just that the weapons get upgraded”.

“Very specifically, Key and his spin doctors proved themselves to be true Muldoonists. Piggy’s greatest weapon was the counter-attack. He used to attack his attackers, quite often before they’d actually attacked him (the first strike school of nuclear warfare). So, Key, whilst simultaneously looking shifty, tried to dismiss ‘Dirty Politics’ as a ‘Leftwing conspiracy’. He was able to distance himself from the muck and slime exposed in it by saying that it didn’t involve him personally. He proclaimed himself to be at arms’ length from the repulsive Cameron Slater (even his name is appropriate, a slater being something that scuttles away when you lift a rock”.

“Having denounced Nicky Hager for publishing ‘stolen e-mails’ (Nicky was subjected to a lengthy Police raid on his home, and seizure of computers, etc., following a complaint from Cameron Slater – in 2016 Nicky won a court case arising from that), Key had no qualms in using a separate stolen e-mail (not one of those published in ‘Dirty Politics’) to publicly humiliate and force the resignation from Cabinet of Judith Collins, a rival and constant source of political embarrassment. Above all, as in the above quote from ‘Monty Python And The Holy Grail’, he must be the king because he hasn’t got shit all over him or, more correctly, not seen to have shit all over him”.

“There is a deeper reason why ‘Dirty Politics’ et al didn’t tip the election. It’s called depoliticisation, whereby people are deliberately alienated from feeling that they have any stake in the running of their own country; that democracy is a theoretical concept only. One million people didn’t vote; those who did were led to believe that ‘Dirty Politics’ was only a ‘Beltway issue’. This phrase, another example of American cultural imperialism (it actually refers to the area of Washington DC within a defined set of expressways) means that it doesn’t register as a ‘real issue’ in the ‘real world’”.

“President Richard Nixon, who set the gold standard for criminal politicians, used as his benchmark of any issue or policy: ‘Will it play in Peoria?’. Thirty years of dog eat dog Rogernomics’ toxin has had the effect of leaving people deeply apathetic and cynical about politics and politicians. And that’s exactly the way Key and those behind him want it. Don’t you little people take any interest in what we’re doing, all the better so that we can keep doing it to you… “

“And we, the Left, need to learn the lessons of history as well. It’s not all about John Key. I’m old enough to remember the huge amount of energy expended in getting rid of Piggy, who revelled in his role as a pantomime villain. And his replacement was – Roger Douglas, a man who had had a personality bypass, and who did far more damage to New Zealand than Muldoon ever did, damage that is still occurring today. Changing the face, or even the party in power, is nowhere near enough. What is needed is systemic change” (Watchdog 137, December 2014, “What’s That Terrible Smell? The 2014 Election”, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/37/01.html).

Why Did He Quit When He Did?

Before going any further, I need to address the question of why Key quit when he did. I don’t ascribe any conspiracy theory to it, I doubt that any great scandal was about to break that could only be quashed by his abruptly resigning (ponytail-pulling fetish, anyone?). His stated reason was that he’d done as much as he felt that he could and wanted to spend more time with his family. Plenty of people will sympathise with that – being a politician, let alone a Prime Minister, is a relentlessly punishing job which is murder on relationships and family life (you watch those guys age and go grey at a much faster rate than us mere peasants. Unless you’re Donald Trump, whereby you stay orange).

But there’s obviously more to it than that – John Key is a consummate individualist, who personified exactly the self-centred, self-obsessed, egotistic and narcissistic spirit of the age. Being so in tune with that popular culture is a major reason why he remained so popular throughout his years in power. But, by definition, all those personality traits put yourself and your interests first and foremost in any decision to be made.

I’d always expected him to go when he got sick of it and that’s exactly what he did. In his resignation speech, he stressed that he was not a “career politician”, so he quit abruptly and left the career politicians to deal with the consequences. He would have seen what happened to his predecessor, Helen Clark – she fought one election too many, lost it and abruptly quit, as a loser. Key’s overriding obsession was to be a winner and he knew, from his previous career as a successful money trader, that the best move is to quit when you’re ahead. He knew that when you’re on top there are only two choices – to go down or to get out and let it become someone else’s problem. By keeping it secret from everyone except his anointed successor, Bill English, and then quitting at a week’s notice, Key showed his fundamental selfishness. “I’m no longer interested in this. So long, suckers”.

Just as importantly, he could see which way the global wind is blowing – his brand of neo-liberal economics and politics have had their day. 2016 saw, first Brexit, then the Trumpocalypse – he’d be very happy to not have to deal with that (i.e. with the consequences of failed neo-liberalism). It was one thing playing golf in Hawaii with his best friend forever Barack Obama; it would be quite another to have to endure being publicly insulted and humiliated by Mad King Donald, as has already happened to Key’s ideological soulmate, Australian PM, Malcolm Turnbull (whose name Trump’s court jester couldn’t even get right). If that’s the thanks you get for donkey’s years of assiduous arse licking, who needs enemies?

So, What Was Key’s Actual Legacy?

There’s not a lot to write home about. Press columnist Joe Bennett summed up 2016 poetically (although I suggest he should stick to doing so prosaically). Here’s the relevant extract:

“John Key also called one*. He wanted to sack

Our colonial flag with its Union Jack

For something more dashing and Twenty-First Century,

Voicing a modern New Zealand identity.

Sadly, the choices he offered were not

Remotely appealing – we kept what we'd got.

Did Key feel rejected? It's tricky to tell

But just seven months later he left us as well

And though he's been only two weeks off the scene

All I remember of him is his grin”

(Press, 21/12/16, http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/opinion/87761416/joe-bennett-making-rhyme-and-reason-of-2016. *The “one” referred to is a referendum. MH).

That “poetic” extract reminds me that we never even bothered to mention the flag referendum in Watchdog, because it was a non-issue. John Key wasn’t interested in tackling the real vestiges of the Old British Empire - namely dumping the monarchy -  only the side issues like the flag (and he set himself up to fail on that one. I know people who deliberately voted to keep the mediocre existing flag solely because Key wanted to get rid of it). And he sure as Hell wasn’t interested in doing anything to threaten the interests of the New American Empire – after all, he said that New Zealand is a member of “the club” (we’ll come to that).

I’ll give the man credit for a few things – for example, as Leader of the Opposition he took the Parliamentary heat out of what was misleadingly called “Sue Bradford’s anti-smacking Bill” by teaming up with PM Helen Clark to ensure it got passed. He openly embraced the gay community, a long overdue move from the National Party, and voted for basic human rights for them, such as gay marriage. I wrote, in my analysis of the 2011 election: “I’ll give the man credit for fronting up after Christchurch’s series of catastrophic earthquakes in 2010/11. Indeed, at one point, what with the quakes and the Pike River coal mine tragedy, Key was fronting up so frequently that he was in danger of being mistaken for a professional mourner”.

But it didn’t take long for a major public backlash to develop among the people of Christchurch at the heavy-handed Government-led response to the Christchurch quake rebuild, with its priority being the interests of Big Business (convention centre, anyone?) and pressurising the City Council to sell public assets to pay for it. As for the 2010 Pike River tragedy – by the time Key walked off the job, in December 2016, he was Public Enemy Number One as far as the families of the 29 dead miners were concerned.

Key was undoubtedly very popular right throughout his eight years in office. His predecessor Don Brash mocked him for having squandered that popularity by not ramming through a hard Right agenda (the fabled “unfinished business” sought by 1980s’ Rogernauts). But both National and Labour know that is the route to political suicide – the New Zealand people have had a gutsfull of Rogernomics and punished the politicians for the undemocratic way that both parties operated in Government by forcing MMP onto them (and Key proved himself much more adroit at the MMP game than Labour ever has). Neither party has ever actually rolled back one scintilla of Rogernomics but both go to elaborate lengths to pussyfoot around and deceive “the punters” whilst trying to stealthily turn over ever more of the public domain to “the market”.

The reality of the legacy of that “nice smiley Mr Key” includes nasty, non-smiley words like: inequality, child poverty, homelessness, housing crisis, food banks, unemployment, zero hour contracts, Third World diseases, record numbers in prison, beggars in the streets, polluted rivers, and democratically elected local bodies sacked to make things easier for agribusiness (just to give a few examples). Key’s New Zealand was the continuation of the radical Rightwing social experiment that started 30+ years ago, in New Zealand and other First World capitalist countries – to create a two-thirds/one-third society (meaning that as long as the system keeps the two-thirds happy, the one-third can be written off. Better still, brainwash the two-thirds that the one-third are a threat to them and that the one-third are the problem, rather than the system. What’s that called again? I remember now – divide and conquer).

“Tenants In Our Own Country”

As far as core (key?) CAFCA issues are concerned, Key’s legacy is exactly what you would expect from a multi-millionaire currency trader who became a Tory Prime Minister – the same old same old. He was a devoted fan of the “open economy” i.e. flogging the country off to transnational corporations and foreign buyers of rural land. On the latter subject, he had to take into account the profound national unease, including among National’s own voters (not to mention the all-important “floating voters”). For example:

“Prime Minister John Key recently said he could not comment directly on the Crafar farms issue while it was before the Overseas Investment Office. However, he said New Zealanders should be concerned if 'huge tracts of our productive land' were sold. 'Now, that's a challenging issue given the state of the current law and quite clearly it's evidentially possible and has been achieved that individual farms can be sold. Looking four, five, ten years into the future I'd hate to see New Zealanders as tenants in their own country and that is a risk I think if we sell out our entire productive base, so that's something the Government will have to consider’'' (Press, 26/7/10, “Greens Tackle Foreign Ownership Issue”,  http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/farming/3958932/Greens-tackle-foreign-ownership-issue).

And: “The concern, I guess, is that there is so much wealth out there that they could literally buy New Zealand’s productive base. It’s not impossible. That’s the question – what do we want to be? Do we want to be tenants in our own country or do we want to own our own destiny?” (Press, 28/7/10, “Rethink On Overseas Landowner Rules”, Martin Kay and John Hartevelt, http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/3963863/Rethink-on-overseas-landowner-rules).

This is what I said in a February 2011 speech, in response to Key: “…I want to make it clear that we (CAFCA) won’t work with racists, but I don’t see any problem in working with nationalists and by that I include people in the National Party. The issue of land sales to foreigners, which was highlighted by the rejected Natural Dairy bid to buy the Crafar farms, has obviously caused great disquiet within the ranks of National supporters and voters”.

“Indeed, it caused an obvious difference of opinion at the highest ranks of the National government, with Key saying that he doesn’t want New Zealanders to become tenants in their own country (language that no senior Labour figure has ever used), and with Bill English and Treasury forced to accept a review of the Overseas Investment Act that did not, as predicted, liberalise it further but tacked on a couple of cosmetic measures to give the appearance of toughening it in relation to land sales. I am not suggesting that we are going to recruit John Key or any of his cronies but you might be surprised at the number of Tory supporters and voters who could well be sympathetic to this campaign. …” (“New Zealand Is Not For Sale: Why Building A Campaign Is Important”, Murray Horton, Watchdog 126, May 2011, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/26/03.htm).

The Crafar Farms fiasco was only the most high profile of innumerable sales of prime NZ rural land to foreign buyers during Key’s term. What happened there proved illustrative: the farms were sold, in 2012, to a Chinese transnational but with a “safeguard – they would be managed by State Owned Enterprise, Landcorp, which had been an unsuccessful bidder for them. But the “safeguard” proved meaningless, as explained in this December 2016 CAFCA press release:

“In September (2016) Landcorp announced that it is selling nine sheep and beef farms. Included in those are farms that it was running on behalf of Chinese company, Shanghai Pengxin. Landcorp running those farms was a condition of the consent granted to Shanghai Pengxin by the Overseas Investment Office (OIO) when it approved the Chinese company buying them”.

“So, what happens to Shanghai Pengxin’s OIO consent? CAFCA wrote to the OIO to find out. We got this reply from Pedro Morgan, Senior Solicitor (9/12/16): ‘The consent was conditional upon the consent holders maintaining their contractual relation with Landcorp on the same terms as contained in two particular agreements. The terms of those agreements include an end date of May 2017. Accordingly, ending the relationship in May 2017 will not breach the conditions of consent’”. To which CAFCA can only say: What a pathetic condition! This will be a revelation to the people of New Zealand who may have got some comfort from the idea that Landcorp was required to be in control and will be upset it can be tossed aside so easily and will wonder what protections remain. The OIO’s ‘conditions’ are not worth the paper they’re written on” (“Overseas Investment Office's Conditions On Shanghai Pengxin's Farm Purchases Prove Meaningless”, 12/12/16). By that stage, of course, John Key was gone.

Asset Sales

Land sales wasn’t the only issue of interest to CAFCA. “The very same John Key who doesn’t want us to be tenants in our own country has also announced the partial privatisation of several public assets if National is re-elected (in 2011). Who would benefit from that? Forget about the ‘Kiwi mums and dads’ that Key extols as the buyers. Very quickly, as with a raft of previous privatisations (including those to ‘mums and dads’), those assets will fall into the hands of transnational corporations…” (“New Zealand Is Not For Sale: Why Building A Campaign Is Important”, ibid.). National was re-elected in 2011 and claimed a mandate for the partial privatisation of State-owned power generators, Meridian, Mighty River Power and Genesis.

A national campaign (in which CAFCA was involved) forced a citizens’ initiated referendum in 2012, which overwhelmingly rejected the partial privatisation. Key ignored that and went ahead. Here is an extract from my 2014 national speaking tour speech (“Who’s Running The Show? And In Whose Interests”, Watchdog 136, September 2014, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/36/01.html. The extract is from the sub-section headed “Public Service Not Private Profit”).

“…One thing needs to be made clear - privatisation of public assets is wrong, regardless of whether the new owners are transnational corporations, local Big Business (pakeha or Maori) or ‘mum and dad’ (ditto). No matter how much Key and English and co tart it up, the central, glaringly obvious fact is that ‘mum and dad’ already own these State-Owned Enterprises, and all other public assets, because that’s what public ownership is. It means ownership by the public”.

“It’s not very difficult to work out; you don’t need a Master of Business Administration degree from Harvard. The Government has been brazenly stealing public assets - all sugar coated as ‘partial privatisation’ or ‘the mixed ownership model’, because it is only stealing 49% of them - and laughing in our faces by urging us to buy back a little bit of this stolen property in the form of shares. Forget about Nigerian scams; this is the much worse New Zealand scam”.

“We have paid for them by our taxes, why should we be expected to pay for them again by buying a few shares in them and diluting our ownership to the status of a minority shareholder? What happens if one of these privatised companies goes bust? The obvious fact is that, in the share market, there are always highs and lows, winners and losers. So, in the event that one of them goes bust, mum and dad will go to the back of the queue as unsecured creditors, just as happened with the shonky finance companies that toppled like dominos. And mum and dad will be left with nothing, exactly as they were by the finance companies. Isn’t that a great bargain!”

“Key makes the facile claim that restricting private ownership to 49% provides some sort of protection. Crap! Ever since 1973 the Overseas Investment Act has defined a foreign-owned or controlled company as one with more than 24.9% foreign shareholding. It doesn’t matter whether that percentage is held by one or many foreign owners; if it totals anything higher than 24.9%, it is recognised as a foreign company”.

“In other words, Key is talking about accepting a level of private, inevitably foreign, ownership which is double the legal definition of a foreign company. Even in the unlikely event that these SOEs do end up in continued New Zealand ownership or, in the unlikeliest event that they do end up being owned by ‘mums and dads’, that doesn’t make it right. It would still be the privatisation of what is rightfully public; the expropriation of the common wealth for private profit”.

“There are no sound economic reasons for selling these State-owned electricity generators and any other SOEs that may be also being eyed up for sale. As in the past, the reason cited for selling assets is to help to pay off public debt. But the Government can borrow money at cheaper rates than the private sector, so why is that a worry? It’s the equivalent of selling your house to pay off the mortgage. You’ve cleared your debt, but you’ve no longer got your prime asset. More importantly, you no longer own the roof over your head”.

“You have to downsize to being a tenant – everyone knows who calls the shots in the landlord/tenant relationship. I’ve been both a tenant and a homeowner, and I know which one I prefer. That’s the path Key and co is setting us onto – becoming tenants in our own home.  That is ironic because, it’s only two to three years ago, that Key himself said that he didn’t want to see New Zealanders become tenants in our own country. Well, he’s doing everything possible to bring that about”.

Private Profit Before Public Service

“And there is an inherent contradiction in the economic justification offered for selling assets – they’re being put on the market because they’re attractive to private owners, TNCs in particular. Why? Because they’re profitable; they’re not distressed assets being offered at a bankruptcy sale (Solid Energy, the only SOE in that situation, has been withdrawn from the auction block). To whom do they deliver those profits at present? The Government: on behalf of their owners, the New Zealand people. So, the Government is blithely waving goodbye to that guaranteed income stream of hundreds of millions of dollars per year (well, at least, to 49% of that income stream)”.

“Only a certain amount of weight should be attached to the economic argument for retaining the SOEs. Indeed, by concentrating on that aspect, the whole debate can be diverted down a slippery slope. The emphasis should not be on how profitable they are or aren’t, because that accepts the validity of them having been set up as SOEs in the first place, by the 1984-90 Labour government, as one of the central pillars of Rogernomics (and Labour’s policy of opposing the privatisation of these SOEs does not propose any change in their status from profit-oriented State-owned businesses)”.

“Who said this? ‘I am not sure we were right to use the argument that we should privatise to quit debt. We knew it was a poor argument but we probably felt it was the easiest to use politically’. Answer – none other than Sir Roger Douglas, in a book praising the sale of State forests (‘Out Of The Woods’, Reg Birchfield and Ian Grant; 1993). So, there you have it, from the horse’s mouth or, more likely, the other end. Privatisation is not about money; it’s all about ideology. And it is truly nothing more complicated than that – the wilfully blind zealous belief of both major parties, since the 1980s, that public ownership is bad and private is good”.

“What is needed instead is a political commitment that State-owned companies supplying an essential service actually be a public service rather than profit-obsessed corporations, which are publicly owned whilst exhibiting all the worst characteristics of privately owned Big Business corporations. That requires a political decision to change the business model of those and other State-Owned Enterprises from profit to service. Now there’s a scary, radical concept – but it was the status quo in NZ until the 1980s and early 90s. The country’s electricity system existed to ensure nationwide, coordinated, uninterrupted supply of an essential service, at cost. It functioned from one end of the country to the other and was characterised by planning”.

“The operative words here are ‘public service’. Being State-owned is not enough by itself, if the sole priority of that State ownership is to generate a profit. What would a society look like that prioritised public service over private profit? It would have as its central principle the concept of ‘the public interest’. So, for a start, we would see a stop to the erosion and downgrading of the public education and health systems. I’m old enough to remember both free public education including at university level, and free public health, including visits to GPs”.

“It would see the State resume the role it used to play in providing thousands of jobs for the unemployed, and provide direction for the economy as it did in the past in sectors such as forestry. The State would once again commit to housing the poor and vulnerable, rather than leaving them at the mercy of the market. It would see the central Government once again committed to local and regional democracy, rather than what has been the case in Canterbury for several years, where this Government fired the regional council and replaced it with unelected functionaries whose top priority is to serve the interests and profits of the dairy industry, which is now the dominant agribusiness in the country”.

“It would, once again, see a commitment to a public service broadcaster, rather than a lowest common denominator TV network existing solely to deliver customers to advertisers and dividends to the Government. The State would, once again, recognise public transport as a top national priority and invest in the infrastructure that has been allowed to run down over the decades.  It would do all of those things because they are in the public interest…”.

Putting The Boot Into Christchurch

Those words remain as true today as they were in 2014, indeed, more so. The opposition to those power company privatisations gave birth to the Keep Our Assets campaign, which still continues today in Christchurch, because of the pressure placed on the City Council by the Government to sell off its extensive portfolio of publicly-owned assets in order to pay for “its share” of the cost of the quake rebuild. This is called disaster capitalism or shock doctrine. Keep Our Assets Canterbury (KOA, of which I am the Convenor) has waged a years-long battle to keep Christchurch’s public assets in public ownership. That campaign has been more successful than what we might have hoped and certainly more successful than what plenty of people expected.

Key’s spin doctors milked his Christchurch back story for all it was worth – that he spent part of his childhood in a State house in Bryndwr being raised by his mother. There is a cruel irony then in the actions of Key the Prime Minister in repudiating that which helped the Key family when it was needed most – not only did Key’s government put the boot into Christchurch when it was on its knees following the 2010/11 seismic reign of terror, but also Key, the Christchurch State house boy, started the policy (enthusiastically followed through by his successor, Bill English) of selling thousands of State houses, including around 2,500 in Christchurch.

This massive privatisation of what is not only a public asset but a social asset will be one of the major issues of the 2017 election year as far as both KOA and CAFCA are concerned. In CAFCA’s case, the issue is not only one of these houses potentially being sold to foreign buyers but of actually being marketed directly to foreign buyers (Australians, to be specific).

There were other high profile and totally disastrous privatisations under Key – look no further than British transnational Serco at Auckland’s Mount Eden Prison. Serco made such a pig’s arse of running the place that the story provided an endless stream of fodder for the mainstream media (rivalled only by the coverage given to Australian company Talent2 and its woeful “administration” of teachers’ pay via Novopay). In both cases – Serco and Novopay – a Government ideologically committed to privatisation had to reluctantly face facts and relieve them of their contracts, returning the victims of their “service” to the public sector.

Serco came second in the 2015 Roger Award for the Worst Transnational Corporation Operating in Aotearoa/New Zealand (the Judges’ Report is at http://canterbury.cyberplace.co.nz/community/CAFCA/pdf/roger-award-2015-judges-report.pdf). Talent2 was a finalist in the 2013 Roger Award  and won the online People’s Choice Award by a landslide, which led us to believe that some highly pissed off teachers must have dominated the voting (the 2013 Judges Report is at http://canterbury.cyberplace.co.nz/community/CAFCA/publications/Roger/Roger2013.pdf).

Captain Key Went Down With TPPA Ship

And then, of course, there was the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TTPA). I must confess that after years of referring to the TPPA in the, apparently imminent, future tense, it is a great feeling to refer to it in the past tense. The two greatest champions of the TPPA were Barack Obama and John Key. There was a fascinating symmetry involved -  US and NZ elections only coincide every 12 years. In 2008 not only did they coincide by year but they took place only days apart, which is very unusual. So, Obama and Key came into office at the same time. And they went out of office within weeks of each of other – Obama expectedly; Key very unexpectedly. In their eight years in power they became besties (Key dined out for years on his golf with Obama in Hawaii, where both own homes).

Both nailed their flags to the TPPA mast – and that particular ship went down without a trace. Key demonstrated his undying love for the TPPA by hosting the February 2016 Auckland signing ceremony at the entirely appropriate venue of Sky City Casino and rubbing New Zealanders’ faces in it by holding that ceremony just days before Waitangi Day. This provoked the biggest protests seen in this country for years (see Mary Ellen O’Connor’s report on them in Watchdog 141, April 2016, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/41/03.html).

Signing the thing was not in itself enough. It still had to be ratified by enough signatory countries to bring it into force. Naturally, New Zealand rushed to do so. But it was meaningless unless the US ratified it. Donald Trump takes the credit for killing it stone cold dead. But it must be remembered that Hillary Clinton also came out against the TPPA in her unsuccessful Presidential campaign (although, I suspect that if she had won, she would have changed her position, which was always one of electoral convenience, not underlying belief).

And the fact remains that Obama never attempted to send the TPPA to Congress and the Senate for ratification, because he knew that he didn’t have the votes. He was pushing the old proverbial uphill. What defeated the TPPA was not Donald Trump or any other politician, but a stunningly effective international campaign, in which the people of New Zealand played a leading and honourable role. It was an exact repeat of the international campaign, once again with the NZ people in a vanguard role, that defeated the proposed Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) 20 years earlier.

I won’t go into the details of the TPPA – it featured prominently in every Watchdog of recent years. And CAFCA was very actively involved in the fight against it from the outset (as we had also been in the 1990s’ fight against the MAI). We were there from the very beginning when it started off being tacked on to an obscure existing agreement among a handful of Asia/Pacific countries, including NZ (never let it be forgotten that it all started under Labour, with Helen Clark and Phil Goff as its proud parents) and then  ballooned into the Big Daddy of such agreements, which the US hoped to use to cement into place its’ “pivot to the Pacific”, to reassert its self-proclaimed role as the world’s sole superpower (the “pivot” is no longer a priority for Trump, but being the sole superpower certainly is).

Agreements such as the TPPA are always misleadingly and deliberately called “free trade” agreements. In reality they are not about trade at all, or certainly not in the way that you and I understand that word. In a nutshell they are about making things easier for transnational corporations in every sense imaginable. The abortive TPPA was an attempt to formalise the privatisation and corporatisation of global governance.

So, that was John Key’s crowning legacy – he tried very hard to sell out his “own” country to the transnational corporations to which he feels greater kinship and loyalty They, truly, are his own “country” -  the stateless State of the 1%. He tried his damnedest to get the TPPA through; he failed, he saw which way the wind was blowing, so he took his bat and ball and buggered off. Things weren’t going his way anymore, so he decided that he had other (doubtless lucrative) fish to fry. He and Obama now have all the time in the world to play golf with each other in Hawaii.

NZ A Doormat At “The Club”

No analysis of Key’s legacy would be complete without mention of his services to the covert State and to the US military/intelligence empire. Undoubtedly the most high profile rich foreigner allowed into NZ during Key’s term was Kim Dotcom, despite ample grounds for not letting him in (see Watchdog 130, August 2012, “Kim Dotcom And The Good Character Test: Money Versus Power”, by James Ayers, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/30/06.html). I bet Key regretted that for the rest of his term. And the ironic thing is that, in 2017, Key is gone but Dotcom is still here, despite having been ordered extradited to the US.

The Dotcom case became an inadvertent entry point for the revelation that the NZ Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB, the agency that runs the Waihopai spy base) had been illegally spying on Dotcom. Not only him but more than 80 other New Zealanders. To quote from a 2013 Peace Researcher article that I wrote: “Within days of the revelation of long-term and systematic illegal GCSB spying…Key seized on it as an opportunity, not to punish the criminals but to legalise and institutionalise the crime. He said that the GCSB should be able to spy on New Zealanders, even ludicrously involving ‘weapons of mass destruction’ as being among the various terrors that the GCSB is protecting us from (no wonder the Coalition of the Killing couldn’t find the elusive WMD when they illegally invaded Iraq in 2003 – that crafty old Saddam Hussein must have hidden them in New Zealand)”.

“…Retrospective legalisation of State crimes and law changes to get rid of laws that have become inconvenient to the State have been a recurring feature of this Government: the Waihopai Domebusters were acquitted by a jury, so the Government changed the law to eradicate future use of their defence; charges had to be dropped against most of the ‘Urewera terrorists’ because a court ruled that the evidence against them was illegally gathered, so the Government changed the law to legalise those methods” (PR 45, June 2013, “Crime Pays! Government Legalises GCSB Culture Of Impunity”, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr/45/pr45-001.html).

There were massive national protests against the GCSB Bill throughout 2013, on a par with those against the TPPA, but it squeaked through Parliament to become law. And the powers of both spy agencies – the GCSB and the NZ Security Intelligence Service (SIS) -  were strengthened further by the 2016 Intelligence and Security Bill, which is scheduled to become law in 2017 (see PR 52, November 2016, “Intelligence & Security Bill 2016: Giving The Spooks Yet More Powers”, by Warren Thomson, https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwcB6Aysm_HHOW5iQWdHdHhaczQ/view).

To his credit, Key did not get NZ involved in the disastrous Iraq War in his first two terms in office, 2008-14 (although he inherited and maintained NZ’s military involvement in the endless war in Afghanistan, which persists until this day). But that had changed by the beginning of 2015, when he did a BBC interview in London: “Prime Minister John Key says New Zealand’s likely military contribution to the fight against Islamic State ‘is the price of the club’ that New Zealand belongs to with the likes of the United States, Australia, Britain and Canada in the intelligence alliance known as Five Eyes”

“In his strongest hint yet that the Cabinet will approve a deployment of troops to train Iraqis alongside Australians, Mr Key drew heavily on New Zealand pulling its weight as a part of ‘a club’. ‘Ultimately, are we going to say we are going to be part of club like [we] are with Five Eyes intelligence? Are we ultimately going to be able to rely on members of those clubs to support us in our moment of need? And we do know that when it comes to the United States and Canada and Australia and Great Britain and others, that we can rely on them’”.

“‘If New Zealand did not have the resources to fly someone out of a country or have the resources to help a citizen in another part of the world, others would. ‘Even if the contribution is small – of course, it will be proportional – there has to be some contribution. It is the price of the club’” (New Zealand Herald, 21/1/15, “Military Protection ’Price We Pay’ For Five Eyes Protection”, Audrey Young), . And, so, Key sent NZ troops to Iraq, where they remain in 2017.

“Each time a power vacuum is created in Iraq by ‘our side’ a fresh batch of even worse villain pops up to fill it. We already know the story of this ultimate disaster movie, featuring oil, lots of explosions, the theft of whole countries, murder by remote control, torture, kidnappings, police state laws, an endless supply of cartoonish villains who started off on ‘our side’, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of innocent people. And at the end of every movie in the endless ‘War on Terror’ series we know that there will have to be a sequel involving more of all of the above. That’s the tar pit that Key has wilfully led us into”.

“Because, according to him, that’s the price of belonging to “The Club” (which should more properly be referred to as a gang or, even better, The Mob). Key should have followed the advice of Groucho Marx, who was famously quoted as saying that he didn’t want to belong to any club that would have him as a member. Quite. Be careful, John, as you will be judged by the company that you keep” (PR 49, June 2015, “Good Dog, Johnny! Iraq War Is The Price Of Belonging To ‘The Club’”, Murray Horton, https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwcB6Aysm_HHSFY1VDA0blc1ZU0/view?pli=1). 

The Real Battle Is Outside Parliament

So, what now for National with Bill English as Prime Minister?  It’s worth remembering that it’s not his first time as National’s Leader and that things went disastrously for them the last time he led them into an election (as Leader of the Opposition in 2002). As I wrote in Watchdog 119 (February 2009, “Heeeere’s Johnny!”, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/19/02.htm): “Labour was at its apex in the 2002 election when they were given a dream run by National under Bill English running possibly the most inept campaign in New Zealand’s history, which led to National’s worst ever result (the only thing that I can remember Bill saying from that campaign was the immortal line ‘Oi loike poies’ when filmed eating one. Good on you mate, so do I. But oi still wouldn’t vote for you, even if you promised me a free one for every doie of the rest of my loife)”.

And, again, in Watchdog 100 (August 2002, “Righto! An Even More ‘Business Friendly’ Government”, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/00/01.htm): “The Opposition parties are worth a word. Losers is the one that comes to mind. National suffered its worst defeat ever and it couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of people…I am not alone in saying that I’ve never seen such an appalling election campaign. The TV ads made hapless Bill English, the Dipstick from Dipton, look like he hadn’t been able to find his way back to his coffin before daybreak. The newspaper ones resembled something put together as an occupational therapy project”.

Doubtless, Tory apologists will say that was then, this is now. Let’s see, shall we. It is also worth remembering that the last long serving and electorally popular Tory PM to resign not long before an election and drop his Deputy into it was none other than Kiwi Keith Holyoake. His successor as a very short serving PM was Slack Jack Marshall and the result was the 1972 victory of Big Norm Kirk’s Labour government. I’m not saying that this foretells what will happen at the 2017 election (Andrew Little is no Norm Kirk, for a start). It remains a fact that Governments lose elections rather than that Oppositions win them.

I’m not in the business of predicting election results but one thing that I can predict is that nothing will change with English as PM. He was Key’s right hand man (more accurately, Right hand man) all the way from the start, in 2008, and was Key’s anointed successor. Here is what I wrote to conclude that above quoted Watchdog analysis of the 2002 election (which Labour won). It is as true today as it was then: “We (CAFCA) have never entertained any illusions about Parliamentarism nor have we put much stock in whatever party has been in power. Our concern is with who owns and operates New Zealand, not those whose job it is to wave them through the traffic lights. The real battle is, and always has been, outside Parliament and that is where we focus our attention. So, let’s get on with it”.