Brian Easton has been researching the New Zealand economy for about 60 years. He writes that the present analysis is offered as a summary of his life's work. By focussing on the economy, Easton wants to emphasise that it is how people earn a living that shapes social relations. As a text to explain who New Zealanders are and why, readers will find the book invaluable.

The title is derived from the poet Allen Curnow, whose often quoted thoughts about NZ were of "two islands not in narrow seas/Like a child's kite anchored in the indifferent blue". British migrants had ventured to a "A land of settlers/With never a soul at home". Echoing Curnow, who wrote in the 1940s, the leading literary journal called itself Landfall. In 1933 Gordon Coates, the last Reform Party Prime Minister, remarked that before refrigeration, that is up to the 1870s, we were an isolated island.

Bruce Jesson* observed this cringe, which he saw as the immaturity of a "hollow society". Unlike, say, America, which had evolved its way of life for generations before its successful war of independence, the migrants were starting from scratch. In these musings, Maori are absent, the general attitude being that they could mostly be ignored. * Murray Horton's obituary of Bruce Jesson is in Watchdog 91, August 1999. Ed.

When Curnow wrote I was a small boy, but shortly after he was fretting about his narrow seas, I had my first political thought. My grandmother, born in Waimate, had referred to the UK as "Home". I told her off. Despite that, I recall not being sure what country I was in. We kept hearing about England, the producer of books, singers, games, famous people, and there were waves of Brit immigrants in the immediate post-war years. Discussing this with a contemporary in my university years, my friend said she remembered the same confusion.

Perhaps this was a Christchurch thing? But Easton might say that it was in fact a countrywide thing. He points out that most of the early migrants were either from small farms in southern England or from Presbyterian Scotland. As a result, the crude Church of England versus (Ireland and) Catholic hostilities were not imported to any great extent (but note the final paragraph below). Many wanted nothing more than to own enough land to be able to farm and to be left alone. The culture was marked by pragmatism and moderation. Migrants wanted to escape the rigid class divisions and urban slums of the old world.

So, real life meant that the Wakefield plan to transplant British habits of class and ethnicity failed. He had wanted to set a "sufficient" price for land so that workers could not buy-in. He had envisaged an economy based on crops, but pastoralism dominated. In any case there was very little money around. Maori had some as they sold food to the settlers but most Pakeha struggled.

The widespread lack of capital meant the early farms often failed. Imported animal pests depressed productivity. Rabbits took over parts of Otago, forcing farms to be abandoned (astonishingly, only in the last few years has the importance of biodiversity and conservation values begun to attract serious attention. Seven generations after the rabbits first plagued and the gorse first spread, there are still political leaders who think looking after the environment would detract from economic performance).

Myths

Easton talks a lot about myths, pointing out that the frequent use of "myth" to denote a false story is not its main meaning here. Easton's myths are stories that might or might not be true. Often, they describe something that was real but has become less so. Myths are what we like to see, whether true or not. A unifying theme is that the popular political myths from history are almost always distortions, the Left being not as radical as its champions deem to be the case, and the Right being not as reactionary as it is often said to be.

This applies to the first Liberal and Labour governments, not really all that radical, and to Reform and National governments, not really all that awful. Circumstances create policies, and not vice versa, Easton insists, and NZ governments have (almost) always reacted to them as circumstances seemed to suggest, without preconceived notions.

The defining circumstance of post-European settlement has been town versus country. In this context the Liberals, personified by Richard (King Dick) Seddon, and Labour, by Michael Joseph Savage, are the townie tradition, and Julius Vogel was the chief architect of Reform and National. Perhaps so, as his ambitious public borrowing could be seen as foreshadowing Piggy Muldoon's "Think Big" schemes, but a social democratic history of investing in public infrastructure is also Vogelian (Murray Horton's obituary of Piggy Muldoon is in Watchdog 71 (November 1992. Ed.).

The Quarry Economy

Both traditions were reacting to circumstance. Theory and grand ideals have seldom been in play. Another central theme in the book is what Easton calls the "quarry", the extractive enterprises which the Governments of the UK and NZ saw as the purpose of New Zealand. Before organised migration to the main towns began in 1840, the islands that Abel Tasman had named were of interest only to restless men who hunted seals and whales.

The first Europeans were adventurers who saw the new colony as a resource for immediate exploitation. Untroubled by the thought of a permanent or regulated future, they hunted seals and whales to near extinction. Then, following organised migration, came the flax economy. Gold rushes saw Dunedin becoming the main city, whereas, after the kauri gum market declined, so did early Auckland, which was evolving past being just a quarry, but with links to Sydney, it became a focus for manufacturing and finance, and after Waikato's swamps were drained, dairy boomed.

Coal was first mined as early as 1849, and is still being dug up, but with at least some environmental awareness these days, it is going the way of the pre-Adamite seals and whales (in some parts of the country "Pre-Adamites" refers to the Europeans who pre-dated Government sponsored migration). The quarry economy attached itself to the town and country division. Coalmining, for instance, was at the core of support for Seddon, who represented Westland. Sheep farmers and suppliers tended to the Vogel strain; shearers and freezing workers, quarriers, to the Seddon strain.

One Big Sheep Farm

The product which most shaped the country was wool, which helps explain the historical dominance of conservative interests. The east side of both islands from Hawkes Bay to Otago was virtually a sheep farm. In 1882 the first refrigerated ship set off for the UK with frozen lamb and mutton. Butter also became a viable export, so the relative dominance of wool was eased as the economy became a bit more rounded.

The myth has it that a radical Scot in the Seddon government was so enraged by the feudalistic landowners in the old country that he led the charge to break up the huge sheep farms. Easton does not even mention the brave warrior (John McKenzie), preferring a more mundane explanation. He discusses Ready Money Robinson, who farmed 90,000 acres around Cheviot in North Canterbury. He says the estate was broken up because of a family dispute, in the context of the emerging meat export market rendering the vast wool farms no longer viable.

According to Wikipedia, the farm, heavily in debt, was subdivided after Robinson's death. His will had left the matter to his four daughters. They could sell if all agreed, as they did. Is Easton too eager in his myth busting? It wasn't about just one family. In all, across the country 1,000,000 acres were subdivided, creating 7,000 smaller farms. That changed the country. Another historian has written that the difference in wealth between the Ready Money class and the poorest was more extreme than what had existed in France before their revolution.

Whatever. It was during King Dick Seddon's day that the ethic that Jack was as good as his master began to dominate social discourse. Smaller farms meant more jobs and services in the provinces. The role of women became more appreciated, Seddon saying that they were a civilising influence. Easton's essential point is upheld. It was changes in the economy and technology that led to Liberal dominance, not Liberal dominance that led to this enhanced democracy.

Yet it remained the case that only two animals, sheep and cows, and only one market, Britain, accounted for pretty much all NZ's place in the global economy until the UK joined the European Economic Community in 1973. Or so goes another myth, but Easton argues that diversification of both products and markets was already under way. Otherwise, NZ would not have adapted to the new order as successfully as it did.

While the influence of the Liberal Party lifted living standards generally, for Maori, not living in sheep country, it was less so. The first land sales were limited to Governments, but this lapsed as private sales to settler farmers came to be allowed. Easton suggests that a reason for this was that the UK government never wanted to spend more than it needed to for basic law and order in its quarry, so cash-deprived NZ governments were relaxed about allowing private sales. They would have wanted to speed up settlement.

Maori land, communally owned and thereby less able to adapt readily to change, was less likely to prosper. Much of it was in the central North Island, remote from markets and rail links. So, Maori poverty persisted. Some lived frugally by choice, preferring traditional subsistence farming, as did quite a few Europeans. An impatient State, with a "use it or lose it" ethic, was unimpressed.

Easton provides statistics from 1900, by when early trends had settled in. Life expectancy for non-Maori New Zealanders, at an average of 58, was considerably longer than what the average Briton, American or Australian could expect, but for Maori it was considerably less than all four others, reaching the 1900 non-Maori level only by the 1960s.

Similarly, non-Maori New Zealanders were more literate than Britons, and taller, but Maori were often more literate than both, because Protestant missionaries wanted them to read the Bible. Life was tough for most. In 1900 11 of every 12 non-Maori babies survived, but less than half of English babies, and only a third of Maori babies, survived. In England more babies survived in the country than in (industrially polluted) towns. NZ now sees five in 1,000 non-Maori and seven in 1,000 Maori die in infancy.

In all these health and welfare measures, Maori have been closing the gap with other New Zealanders in every decade since the settlers arrived, but as we know only too well, the gap persists. Of course, the statistics are relative. NZ might have been more progressive and more egalitarian than the UK and the US, but, by present standards, for the majority life was a struggle through the first 100 years.

The tradition of moderation and compromise that held - until the 1980s' Lange government's assault on living standards - is exemplified by the consensus about the benefits of social security. Here again, Easton is keen to take us down the middle of the road. While Liberal and Labour governments were typically the original sponsors of welfare measures, Reform and National tended to accept the changes once they were in place.

But not always. Harry Atkinson, who put out early feelers for a Welfare State in the 1870s, was accused of being "subversive of the social order". In 1882 George Grey (sounding very much like Donald Trump) held that any attempts to better the lot of the working class would be "anti-family, anti-Christian, extreme communism". Savage, the first Labour PM, saw them as "applied Christianity". Sid Holland, the first National PM, saw them as "applied lunacy".

Wanting a minimalist State, Governor Hobson in 1840 and his immediate successors - effectively the first Governments - had not taxed income and they did not invest in education and health, which is part of the reason that the 1918 flu pandemic claimed 8,550 lives. Following the conventional wisdom, Easton suggests that the start of modern policy came in two stages, the first from the Liberals at the turn of the 20th Century. They introduced pensions, female suffrage, industrial arbitration and other measures which, together, saw off the minimalist State.

The second stage could be dated to the first (1935-1949) Labour government. They built State houses and raised working class living standards. In 1938 the Savage government passed a Social Security Act, enabling the tradition of social democratic policy that still informs (if hesitantly) Labour today. By 1944 health, previously surviving on crumbs, was allotted 2% of GDP. It is now 7%. Significantly, in this time of Covid and recession, it should be borne in mind that, because of the Savage/Walter Nash investment in public welfare, NZ recovered from the Depression earlier than did the austerity regimes in the old world.

That progressive and humanist impulses have always co-existed with the minimalists is indicated by the 1852 thoughts of James Fitzgerald, Superintendent of Canterbury: "There is something awful to my mind in the prospect of a great mass of the community increasing in wealth and power without the moral refinement which fits them to enjoy the one or that intellectual cultivation which enables them to use the other".

Or, take the recommendation of Bill Sutch, one of the country's great civil servants, who argued in 1962 that "the greatest need was for the development not of 'land' nor of 'capital' but of the third, the 'human' factor in production". The next year Sutch wanted to persuade Wellington that in "the mature economy... (an emphasis on) education, the arts, industrial design, housing and town planning and infrastructure" is needed to guide policy. Without that focus NZ would remain dependent as a "neo-colony". He was not just talking about the economy. To achieve real independence, NZ needed a social and cultural transformation. In Easton's terms, Sutch was talking about how NZ might become more than a quarry.

What a pity it is that, 170 years after Fitzgerald and 60 years after Sutch, the minimalists still among us reject a humanist culture and think the only purpose of public education is to turn out products for the labour market. And what a pity that their quarry mentality holds that productivity is enhanced mainly by lowering wages, extending working hours, and exporting raw materials (in Canada, once another quarry, historians refer to how the country's early migrants were seen to be "hewers of wood and drawers of water").

After the early benefits of trading with unprepared colonists, Maori were mostly either on the land or in the quarry. Apirana Ngata, the much-celebrated champion of Maoridom, thought that most were "satisfied to live on minimal reserves, with seasonal excursions into the labour field". He advocated "modernisation", the need to move to towns and cities. In 1901 the Maori population was 45,000. In 1951 it was 135,000. At that stage, when economic growth in the country at large was surging, most Maori were still farming. Others were typically working in freezing works or construction.

More recently, the increased importance of urban jobs encouraged a significant Maori uprooting from the country to the cities and the ethnic wealth gap began to close. "A Maori born in 1974 had about as much training as a non-Maori born 30 years earlier". 38% of Maori worked as managers, professionals, technicians or trade workers as compared to 53% of non-Maori jobholders.

As the national economy grew, so too did an increased Pasifika immigration, but Rogernomics was soon to betray both demographics by closing down many of the very enterprises which had encouraged them to move in the first place. This was the root cause for much of the urban unrest and dislocation that worries us now.

Reluctance To Acknowledge Class

Easton, though, warns against the present obsession with associating brown people with child poverty, crime and unemployment, even if well-meaning liberals hope thereby to champion their cause. He points out a simple fact that the national conversation seldom acknowledges: the majority of poor households are non-Maori. "Part of this confusion arises because of the reluctance of New Zealanders to contemplate the existence of socioeconomic class. The consequence of the neglect is that the existence of a Maori meta-class - despite its considerable social graduations - is often used as a proxy for class analysis".

A result of this bias is that "policies which target only Maori fail to address most of the poor". This is why "middle class good intentions sometimes result in working class racism". There is good reason to assume that, were NZ to have shared the severely racist past of, most obviously, the US, and were it to have encouraged a present tense Trumpist politics, we would have been suffering a comparable Deplorable breakdown into tribal division and hate.

Individual prejudices might exist, whether based on ethnicity or religion, but how much do we need to prioritise race relations? Easton suggests that as "most Maori have some education, have jobs, live peaceful and enjoyable jobs in societies, the current emphasis on culture and language has created a stereotype of Maori as failures".

Referring to 2013, Easton looks at the comfortable class who were enjoying an income of at least $100,000 a year. It included 5.9% of non-Maori, but also 2.6% of Maori. The poorest, defined as those existing on less than $15,000 a year, comprised 29% of non-Maori and 36% of Maori. These numbers are close. What is not close is the difference between 100,000 and counting and 15,000 and not counting. The one big underlying fault line is not ethnicity but inequality, which hampers everyone. Here again the popular mythology is inaccurate. "Gross income inequality is slightly less for Maori" than for the country as a whole.

A reader of the main parties' platitudes who did not have experience of living in NZ might be surprised that the 2017 election saw 29 Maori MPs in Parliament (a number essentially unchanged after the 2020 election). They included Winston Peters, Simon Bridges, David Seymour and Jami Lee Ross, but not Paul Goldsmith. As a quartet they do not strike one as being notably put upon, nor as champions of an equality of life chances. What all four happen to have in common is a distaste for placing ethnicity at the core of what public policy should consider. They are not alone. Easton reports that one in six New Zealanders report Maori ancestors (how many of us know all about our ethnic antecedents?).

To see how we all got to where we are now, we could go back 75 years to the third period of policy development, when the present Labour/National dominance emerged. For the first two decades after World War 2 pastoral exports were humming along so well that there was no pressure for governments to adapt policy to suit a world that was changing. Easton thinks that is part of the reason NZ policy makers succumbed to the Rogernomic attack so readily. They had not been thinking about the need for fresh approaches.

Nation Yet To Recover From Neo-Liberalism

Easton counts five long stagnations in NZ's post-colonial history, all but one of which were brought about by external factors that little NZ was powerless to resist. The exception is the Lange/Douglas recession. That wound was self-inflicted. For ten years from 1985 the dogma of neo-liberalism went unchallenged and unabated, resulting in an economic contraction so severe that it was not until 1995 that the economy returned to the level from which it had started. In the meantime, deep austerity and National's subsequent Ruthanasian slashing of welfare investment and benefit payments created generations of deprivation that disproportionally affected the poor. The nation is yet to recover.

Easton shows that at the core of neo-liberalism was a wish to transfer wealth to the already wealthy through tax cuts. A severe increase in inequality was the intended and necessary result. Giving the one per centers more did nothing to help the country at large, there being none of that mythical trickling down that resulted. Public resources were reduced by the same amount as private riches were increased. End of story.

Earlier complacency was one thing, but another reason for the lack of progressive response to the Rogernomes was that the Kirk/Rowling Labour government (1972-1975), admirable in other ways, had done nothing to anticipate life after the collapse of wool prices from the mid-60s, Kirk having little interest in economics. The pastoral economy had peaked in 1966 when wool provided 91% of exports. It now reaches 3%. Then followed nine years of Muldoon's very traditional ministrations. So, almost everyone outside the Beehive when Labour's coup against its supporters was launched was unready.

We're given an insight from as far back as 1904, when Andre Siegfried remarked that a New Zealand propensity to be "scornful of scientific thought makes them incapable of self-distrust. Like almost all men of action they have a contempt for theories; yet they are often captured by the first theory that turns up. They propose simple solutions to the most complex problems with astonishing audacity".

He could have been talking about 1985, when the State was in thrall to a handful of young economists just back from picking up the fad of economic libertarianism, largely from American academies. We've critiqued them all in these pages ever since, and nothing we have said needs to be amended now. When Lianne Dalziel, Christchurch's Mayor, sought financial advice - should the city sell its assets? - she went to Rob Cameron. Cameron is known for a long history of pushing for all and any public assets to be privatised. That is what his company is there for.

Dalziel knew what the answer would be. Even after 35 years of neo-liberal failure, some (at least) Labour politicians have not changed their spots. In the name of growth, growth and more growth Cameron and his mates contrived to shrink the economy, which through the Rogernomic years grew at 15% less than it had previously. The experiment was "an abject failure". Siegfried would not have been surprised that the ideologues despised empirical research so they did not know that in the Savage/Peter Fraser era the economy had grown faster than even their own imagined rate would have achieved.

In contrast, during the manic years between 1988 and 1993 unemployment averaged 8.7%. Just as you can simultaneously develop human social potential and financial wellbeing (Savage) so can you simultaneously deprive human potential and shrink gross domestic product numbers (Roger Douglas). Helen Clark used to point out that if you are in a hole you should stop digging, but this was not advice that the Rogernomes, with their cult-like faith in untested theories, would have appreciated. They preferred the "ludicrous argument" that the failures were the result of the Lange, Palmer, Moore and Bolger governments not having dug themselves even deeper into debt and inequality.

Easton quotes Geoffrey Palmer's 2014 opinion that the civil service then would have been unable to carry out 1985 reforms, so massive had been the assaults on administrative capacity and institutional memory. Implicit in the narrative is that the first two years of the Kirk government were pivotal. Big Norm, enormously popular, has assumed an iconic (mythical?) status in Labour circles. He left school at 12. He built his own house. Only the third Kiwi-born prime minister, he was also its first genuine working class leader, being neither a former union official nor a full time party official. And he will certainly be the last such leader.

It was the Kirk team that introduced the country to the idea that NZ could challenge the foreign policy assumptions of the UK and the US, and it was the first to take internationalist perspectives such as expressing support for the UN. Kirk spoke up against South African apartheid, and the 1975 Treaty of Waitangi Act introduced the country to all the related policies and processes that have followed.

In some ways Kirk was a child of his time. He seemed unaware that women were burning their bras and looking up at glass ceilings, and he did nothing to reform and democratise economic policy. Looking back, it might seem surprising that it was not until 1977 that the National Anthem asked God to defend NZ rather than asking Her to save our gracious Queen. Kirk had gone by then but he had prepared the ground for this simple flowering of independence and maturity.

Labour's Focus On Identity, Not Economics

The subsequent Labour focus on identity, diversity and culture, as opposed to economics, can be dated from this time, as can the trend for the Party's politicians and supporters to emerge from the professional classes rather than the working classes (is this another reason for Norm's big reputation? Did Labour feel it had to reward the retiring era with a gold watch?).

Curiously for such a moderate and unemotional observer, Easton flips in the occasional unsupported generalisation. He talks of NZ's "extraordinarily effective system of governance", and even of an economic "miracle". He's probably referring to the bureaucracy, which gets more credit, even if it is often implicit, than the politicians do. Some civil servants are expressly praised. Clarence Beeby, in education, is singled out, which is fair enough, but why not Sutch?

As part of Easton's myth busting, none of the PMs who are habitually exalted are much so here, but a couple who are usually ignored are picked out for praise. NZ's first settlers might have thought they were in narrow seas but, following Kirk, the Ardern government has the potential to look up from the provincial quarry and see across the oceans.

When Jacinda was reminding Judith that Collins is living in the past, she was saying that the time when the needs of the quarry economy dictated policy about everything else has been and gone. In common with successful societies around the globe, a mature post-colonial NZ is moving beyond crude extraction.

Time For Quarry Economics To Be Scrapped

As Thomas Piketty insists (see my review below) jobs based on sheer physical labour are inevitably becoming fewer and remuneration for toiling at them will continue to lag. Technology and services will continue to dominate. Education is going to become increasingly necessary. This much should be obvious.

Easton does not try to forecast where to from here, but we can give it a shot. The 2020 election could be seen in Eastonian terms as being at least, in part, an expression that the country is ready to move beyond the quarry economy and the quarry culture, the incoming Government not having to endure the carping of New Zealand First, the one Party that has been all quarry.

There's a myth that Easton treats only lightly, the one that has it that only the National Party can understand economics. This is myth in the sense of being untrue, and there has never been a rational reason to believe it. And now, at last, the 2020 election has purged the fake news. Neo-liberalism has long been discredited. Could quarry economics join it in the scrap heap?

As a hint as to what changes in attitude and policy might suggest themselves, consider the lot of the Irish. Up until about World War 2, male Irish New Zealanders tended to be hampered by an imported discrimination which induced them to be stuck in the various quarries or else, as in America, in limiting alternative ambitions to being a cop or a priest. Yet, as the economy broadened in the era of post-war growth, this long anachronistic hangover of imperialism vanished. After just a few years any lingering class or ethnic or religious biases based on British history were unimaginable.

CAPITAL AND IDEOLOGY
by Thomas Piketty, Harvard University Press, 2020

Greg Waite previewed this important book in Watchdog 153 (April 2020), so I won't elaborate on the main points, except to mention that Piketty's lasting contribution to contemporary economics is his demonstration that unearned wealth will always tend to grow at a faster clip than income from jobs. That means that any policies which reward the rich at the expense of everyone else are not just unfair. They make matters worse. What we need least is the sort of tax cut for the very rich as enacted in the US and proposed by National here. For a society that allows opportunity, we need less inequality, not more.

The other big idea follows from this. A tax on wealth and inheritance is one obvious way of mitigating systemic injustice (Piketty thinks that income tax on billionaires should be set at 90%). Piketty gives an extreme example to show why he thinks a tax on wealth, levied annually, makes more sense than death duties. Given present policy, it is theoretically possible that the children and grandchildren of the billionaires who own outfits like Amazon and Facebook could become trillionaires. Imagine they were nasty and evil and that the American electoral system had not been reformed. They could boss the world.

"Superseding" Capitalism

This probably won't happen, but a Trumpist tendency towards such a dystopia certainly will - unless the US and other influential countries adopt some of the policies Piketty recommends. Piketty calls himself a socialist, but he uses the term rather differently from how it's been understood up till now in that there is no talk of a revolutionary change. Rather, he says his ideas would help us to "supersede" capitalism. He wants the economy to benefit more people. "Participatory socialism" would include workers within the directors. He's dismissive of neo-liberalism's cult-like emphasis of lavishing huge sums to the Chief Executive Officer and top managers. This has done nothing to improve productivity.

Much of the book traces the history of capitalism, concentrating on the US, the UK and his own France, but he is emphatic that the whole world follows similar patterns. Piketty makes much of "human capital". This is enhanced by education, which along with (money) capital is the basis for people to reach their potential. Citing the US (but other rich countries are similar) he points out that, in 2010, only 30% of the children of the poorest 10% of parents received a post-secondary education, whereas 90% of the children of the top 10% of wealth owners did so.

This is unfair and inefficient - and an unearned advantage for the better off, an advantage that will only continue to widen in the absence of a more responsible fiscal policy (older readers might bear in mind that to qualify for many of the best rewarded and satisfying careers a university education is equivalent to a high school diploma of generations past).

Neo-Liberalism Has To Go

Poverty and illiteracy trap the disadvantaged into stressful and often unfulfilling lives which can reach down generations. The way to stop this waste and violence is to grant all young people a decent amount of money so they can get themselves an education and afford a decent home for their family. We might think of that as an investment, not a cost. In the longer term it would be less expensive than spending billions cleaning up the mess created by inequality.

At the end, there's a welcome punchline. Of all the bad ideas that plonked us in a hole, "most notable are those concerning the free circulation of capital that came into effect in the 1980s-1990s because they stand in the way" of an economy that works for everyone. Neo-liberalism has to go. These are just a few themes from this massive 685-page book, most of which explains how countries like NZ got to be where they are. His general take is not dissimilar to Brian Easton's (reviewed above).

ISLANDS OF THE EMPIRE
A Documentary by Vanguard Films

The islands of New Zealand are not the only ones that the empire enfolds. There's the south west Pacific, Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia, and the Philippines archipelago too. They are all contained within the emperor's domain. They are all (in the opinion of American leaders) vassals of the United States. This important record charts the history of NZ foreign and "defence" policy in the context of the last 75 years, the era of what some (but probably not the people on display here) dub the "American Century".

The film starts with the month the Second World War ended, August 1945. That's when the US dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, with massive loss of lives. Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain the only two targets to have received such treatment, though we now know that the world has subsequently teetered on the edge several times, and there might well be other occasions that we will never hear about.

It seems that the American President back then, Harry Truman, gave little thought to the devastating human and environmental implications of the bombs. The rationale, that too many American casualties, already heavy, would result from prolonged "conventional" war, was undoubtedly the main motive, but debate still continues over other possible considerations. The former Soviet Union had announced that it would soon join the attack on Japan. Did the Americans want to pre-empt a Soviet advance? Or were the bombs a warning to the Russians - and the world - that the Yanks were top dog and not about to mess around?

Cold War

In any case that was the result. Hiroshima marked the start of the Cold War on this side of the planet, and for the next 40 years New Zealand - and all the other islands - were locked into a rigid obedience to the needs of the empire. The first hysterical years culminated in 1951 - the year of the McCarthy "witch trials" in the USA and the waterfront lockout here - with the ANZUS Treaty. ANZUS was said to be a guarantee to hapless Australia and NZ that big brother would rescue us from the supposedly inevitable invasion that would otherwise be our fate. The source of the barbarity had become China, which had, in the meantime, itself succumbed to a Communist revolution.

China was a useful stand in for the Russians, being closer, and also populous and poor and racially not too different from the Japanese, the prospect of whose imminent and unwelcome arrival a few years earlier had terrified the country. In reality the US had committed only to "consult" if Australasia was threatened, and there is good reason to doubt whether it would have intervened if Indonesia, say, had attacked Australia - an event as unlikely as a Chinese invasion.

So, the Cold War played to various fears and prejudices. It was also a useful tool for the State to keep the lid on domestic opposition. The short-back-and-sides years were the era of conformity. These considerations need to be borne in mind now that the country has evolved into a more relaxed tolerance of social and ethnic variations and there is no foreign bugbear to rival earlier monsters.

When "Islands" was filmed, in the early 1980s, the Prime Minister was National's Rob Piggy Muldoon, an angry and bitter little man of a strongly reactionary bent, whether the issue was economic or social. His world view was similarly simplistic. There were the good guys and the bad guys, just as there had been when the Cold War first froze foreign relations.

Two years later, when the original doco came out, David Lange was leading a Labour government. Although temperamentally a very different type from Piggy, Lange was not really into peace, his reputation as the brave leader who defied the bully in Washington having been forced upon him by the pressure from the likes of Campaign Against Foreign Control In New Zealand (CAFCINZ, now CAFCA) and its mates, but he came to enjoy the role.

Behind the rhetoric, though, not much had changed and a vital service provided by the peaceniks over the years has been to expose the inconsistencies and evasions. Or it might be more accurate to speak of hypocrisy and lies. In the 1970s and 80s forays were mounted into US sites like Mt John, near Tekapo, and Black Birch in Marlborough. Both of these US military observatories are now gone, with Mt John now hosting the much more sensible activity of looking at the night sky.

Invaluable Film Makers; Dedicated Activists

Three invaluable film makers captured the 1980s and are back now. Russell Campbell, Rod Prosser and Alister Barry all have a distinguished record of highlighting progressive themes. A quartet of dedicated activists feature in the 2019 update: Keith Locke, Maire Leadbeater, Nicky Hager and Murray Horton. Two of them appeared in the original film as well (Maire and Murray), having long been talking truth to power. The four work independently, but by a happy coincidence their campaigning styles complement each other's.

Locke was a Green MP from 1999-2011 inclusive, alerting the country to what would otherwise have been swept under rugs, at a time when the bulk of Parliament was either indifferent or hostile to peace issues. He had to put up with the often-puerile insults from politicians like Winston Peters. Leadbeater, Locke's sister - the issue of Jack and Elsie Locke, also indefatigable progressives - has published insightful analyses on Timor-Leste and West Papua (Murray Horton's obituaries of Jack and Elsie Locke are in Watchdogs 84, May 1997, and 97, August 2001, respectively. Elsie appeared in the original "Islands". Ed.).

Hager has recently exposed the NZ Army's sometimes less than perfect role in Afghanistan, and previously published other powerful accounts of successive Governments' policies. And Horton, of course, is the Organiser of both ABC, the Anti Bases Campaign, and Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa (CAFCA). It has been the focus on foreign policy as it intersects with economic and defence policy that created both campaigns, as Murray explains in his article about "Islands" elsewhere in this issue.

The common factor of the quartet is that they have informed the country about what would otherwise have been mostly unremarked. Whether the focus has been on education and analysis, or demonstrations and protests, the work has been essential. Knowledge about the world or action to change it? You need both in equal measure to have any hope of success. In the original film, we see a lot of the late Owen Wilkes. Is it fair to suggest that he was pure activism? It was through Owen's forays around the country and indeed the world that much of our knowledge of what the warmongers were up to first emerged.

The new part looks at Waihopai, another happy choice, and not only because the international disorder as it affects NZ is essentially unchanged from what it was in 1985. Waihopai is a clear and present - and future - concern. NZ's involvement in Five Eyes makes us complicit in anything that the real powers, the US and the UK, are up to, and we won't know what that is. Neither will present or future PMs. Lange once complained that he had no idea what went on at Waihopai or who or what the Eye was spying on.

This secrecy is even worse when it is remembered that it's not just about snooping on supposed enemies and their weapons. The Five Eyes are an imperial club with a general political and economic interest. It was said - a lie as it turned out - that the members of the club did not snoop on their own people, but others could do it for them. And they spy on countries that are supposedly their mates for reasons that have nothing to do with national security. Another lie. To say that the governments of America or Britain or Australia act in the sovereign interests of New Zealand rather than their own interests is to stretch credibility beyond breaking point.

Have we emerged from the "American Century"? Numerous commentators point to the rise of China as a counter to Yankee dominance, but the US remains the one global superpower, its military being bigger than those of all of the next biggest countries combined. And even if China's economy keeps surging, US reach won't be seriously challenged in the foreseeable future. What has changed is what they call soft power.

America had emerged from World War 2 as the world's superpower not just in matters military but also culturally. In the post-Hiroshima years its influence peaked. The world wanted American movies, music, nylons, bubble gum. The war foes were ruined. Only the Soviet Union rivalled the US, and that rivalry did not extend beyond the nuclear standoff. Economically the Soviets were comparatively insignificant.

This cultural influence has been weakening as other cultures and products emerge, an inevitable shift that the buffoon in the White House has accelerated. Trump's America is an embarrassment to Americans and a joke internationally. Then there's the direct attack on the alliances themselves, as Trump insults his North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) partners and heaps praise on dictators and thugs who his generals have always seen as the problem.

After The Present Chaos, Where Will We Find Ourselves?

Some might welcome a shrinking NATO; others might fear an unpredictable one. The thug that the moron likes most is Vladimir Putin, but despicable as he is, Putin had a point when he complained that there is no justifiable need for NATO, as the former enemy, the Soviet Union, the reason NATO even existed, has gone. Why still encircle Russia? Maybe we have an opportunity to think afresh. But the doco shows Jacinda Ardern in glowing praise of NATO, a reminder that her Government has done nothing to move NZ to a more independent position. Is Ardern scared of economic reprisal if she strays outside the tent?

Helen Clark had previously suggested that NZ is in a "benign" strategic position, a remark which could have implied that our military budget, a whopping and unnoticed $4.6 billion, could be cut or at least spent on internationalist peacekeeping rather than the hugely expensive - and surely unnecessary in a purely military sense - ships and planes that the immediate past Defence Minister Ron Mark so adored. But neither of the main Parties has shown any hint they might find better uses for our taxes. The trend is actually veering the other way, towards closer integration with the warriors.

Foreign policy as an election issue did not exist and it's not easy to see how it might be resumed. A good starting point could be stepping up attempts to close one of the Five Eyes, the one at Waihopai, but as things stand there is no chance of that. The Green Party alone, and probably only one part of Greenery, has shown that it has thought about our entanglements with the US. Labour has long been silent.

More's the pity. The nuclear ban and other progressive, internationalist gestures had raised NZ's profile. When the talk is of how we are "punching above our weight", it often means that NZ is exercising soft power. We saw it after the nuclear ban and the withdrawal from ANZUS, and again when the Ardern government responded to crises with skill and empathy. These moments have undoubtedly been helpful in projecting the country favourably and - to point out something that Rightwing types might not have considered - even helped economically.

We could build on this legacy. I'm writing this before we know the result of the 2020 election, but whatever it was, the PM won't be talking about foreign relations. The last time an NZ PM did so was when the Lange government spoke up only because peace activists were pushing it. They are the true patriots. As a record of the peace movement in NZ the doco is not going to be bettered. It can't be, as much of its material would not otherwise exist. As part of telling future generations our history, it will be a treasure.

Of course, we do now know the 2020 election result, an outright Labour government - which is still saying nothing about foreign relations, defence, intelligence, Five Eyes or Waihopai. All par for the course. For a more detailed examination of this, see Murray Horton's "A Deafening Silence On Foreign Policy, Defence & Intelligence" in Peace Researcher 60, November 2020. Ed.

THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7
A Film By Aaron Sorkin

On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was shot as he stood on a motel balcony in Memphis. On June 6, 1968, Bobby Kennedy was shot as he walked through a hotel kitchen in Los Angeles. In (the former) Czechoslovakia Soviet troops had invaded. Americans - and the world - worried that the US might be on the verge of both a civil collapse and a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union.

It was that sort of year. It was also the time when seven people were put on trial for objecting to their Government's foreign wars. The charge was that they had crossed a state line to provoke a riot, a proposal that was blatantly contrived, the law having been drafted to impede black civil rights activists, not to prevent white men (as all seven were) from exercising their right to express an opinion. The Seven were actually heading to Chicago to demonstrate against the Democratic Party at the convention which would pick its candidate for the election that was scheduled for November.

Kennedy, JFK's young brother, was a Senator who had entered the race to the Presidency and had been picking up support as he was staking out ground on the Left edge of acceptable opinion. The Seven wanted out of the war on Vietnam. Growing opposition to the carnage in Asia had induced the sitting President, Lyndon Johnson, to withdraw, he having announced he would not be seeking a second term. Would the Democrats pick a peacenik or a warrior? With good reason, the Seven expected a warrior, and this they were determined to thwart.

Culture War; Political Process

The film does not mention much of this, because that's not the topic. It isn't a documentary or a history lesson. It's about the trial. The defendants differ. Abbie Hoffman, played by Sacha Baron Cohen, is the archetypal hippie, though for his group he took the name Yippies (derived from Youth International Party. Ed.). He's all about taking it to the man, man.

Eddie Redmayne, who plays Tom Hayden, argues that you have to operate within the system to be taken seriously. Unless we court public opinion, he tells Hoffman, 50 years from now people will look back at us with dismay. That year would be about now, so the remark's authenticity is dubious. But you get the point. Hayden subsequently became a long serving politician in California. Twenty years later Hoffman was to commit suicide.

For Hoffman it's a "culture war"; for Hayden it's a political process. It's clear that for director Aaron Sorkin, to effect real change you need both at once. You need to combine agitation in the streets and electoral coalitions. This advice is what Barack Obama might have said had he been around back then. It's what he was suggesting in 2020 to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) demonstrators. There's a parallel difference in approach between the two prosecutors, one of whom comes to be unhappy with the ruthlessness of the State's case. He knows that the real target is not legal but political.

Before the trial opens, we get to see John Mitchell, who was soon to become President Richard Nixon's Attorney General (AG). He is presented as wanting to get revenge on the present AG, a Democrat, who was "soft on crime" and all that. It helped that the defendants were key components of Leftist protest. Mitchell had his pretext for silencing opposition.

This is but one of several ways in which 1968 foreshadowed 2020 (Mitchell was to disgrace himself many times until his involvement with Watergate ended the corruption, but compared to the current Trump AG, William Barr, he was benign. The guy there now wanted to bring back the "crossing states lines" law to block BLM demos). There was to have been a Chicago 8, but trumped up charges against Bobby Seale, a Black Panther, were dropped before the trial began and race, a huge issue at the time, does not resume as a theme.

1968 USA Through My Own Eyes

I happened to be in the US in 1968 on my first big OE. In New Orleans the American Legion, their RSA, were holding a national convention, at which on three successive days, the Presidential candidates spoke. The Democrats had ended up with Hubert Humphrey, Johnson's Vice President, and the candidate that the Seven had wanted least. I left the hippies and wandered into the hall with them.

The biggest reaction from the Legionnaires inside the hall came when George Wallace, the last candidate - until Trump - to openly run on a segregation platform, got stuck into the hippies, referring to an incident when a demonstrator lay down on the road in front of LBJ's car. If he became President, Wallace assured the delighted audience, "that'll be the last car he ever lay down in front of". Huge applause. Leaving the building with the Legionnaires, we were confronted by protesters. "Dump the Hump", my hippie mates were chanting. It turned out that the electorate did dump the Hump.

Hoffman was right. There was a culture war being waged. The hippies infuriated the old guys and their wives. Beside me a Legionnaire whose hat proclaimed that he was from Sioux City, Iowa, worked his cheeks as he summoned up the worst abuse to hurl back at the layabouts as they switched to a new chant. "If you liked Hitler, then you'll like Wallace". Sioux City had a devastating riposte: "Where did you sleep last night?".

WINNERS TAKE ALL
The Elite Charade Of Changing The World
by Anand Giridharadas, Knopf, New York, 2018

- Greg Waite

This book begins with familiar American statistics. Since 1980:

• The average pretax income of the top 0.001% has risen sevenfold
• The average income of the top 1% has tripled
• The average income of the top 10% has doubled
• The average income of the bottom half of Americans has stayed almost precisely the same
• The average American's health is worse than their peers in other rich countries

All that wealth, all that inequality, leads to anger - so global philanthropy is on the rise to put a positive new spin on "free markets" - after their fourth Government bailout since 2000 (the tech wreck, "Asian" financial crisis, global financial crisis and Covid crisis). Giridharadas explores how the wealthy are able to shape public perceptions through sponsorship of "thought leaders" touting win-win solutions which don't threaten the rich.

Trust Me, I'm A Billionaire

This is not just about whitewashing the reputations of dodgy billionaires. The new storyline is that Governments fail, democracy and regulation can't be relied on - so only the super-rich can solve our biggest global issues, only corporations and technological breakthroughs will give us growth and jobs. The assertion that today "economics trumps politics" is a key example of their exploitation-friendly language. That's a powerful idea when the majority feel "the system" is rigged against them. Phrases like this feed misguided opposition to Government and hopes that business-friendly policies will deliver better jobs.

In truth, "the system" is global corporatism undermining Government through tax avoidance, bailouts, lobbying and bribes for deregulation - but you don't earn the big dollars on the speaking circuit by being negative. Global philanthropy will always attract supportive unchallenging experts who are happy to promote wealth-friendly solutions so they get a share of the rewards.

Giridharadas describes many interviews with bright young thinkers who were tempted into the slippery world of consultancy, the first step on this ladder towards jet-setting with the super-rich, probing them on the moral dilemmas faced along the way. This is the most interesting part of the book, because their stories spell out the impact of today's corporations on ordinary citizens, i.e. just how bad modern American life is.

Amy Cuddy was an established academic who studied prejudice, discrimination and systems of power. But in 2011 she became a cross-over star in the world of thought leadership with the second most popular TED (technology, entertainment and design) Talk ever. How? Because in that talk she followed the unspoken rules:

1. Focus on the victim, not the perpetrator
2. Personalise the political
3. Be constructively actionable

Instead of talking about sexism, Amy talked about and demonstrated the "power pose" as a tool for women to gain equality. The consequences for Amy were not so positive; she was inundated with invites to lucrative corporate seminars which wanted one-hour quick fix presentations, and her high profile made her a target for online sexism so disturbing she eventually backed away from active opposition to sexism and racism. I was reminded of the endless supply of sexist texts received by our own Radio New Zealand interviewer Kim Hill. Lucky for us she's smart enough to make them look stupid by reading them out...

Life Among The Precariat

Another telling story is about the software application "Even", designed to even out the incomes of low-income households with erratic income from their exploitative employers. This is a great example of market-friendly "win-win" solutions which appeal to entrepreneurial philanthropists. Not for them the hard slog of reeling in corporate excess to provide decent wages and working conditions. Much easier to start something new and familiar, so let's develop an app. And here is one of the many stories of modern American working hardship which surfaced during their market research:

"X works for a corporate massage chain for 26-32 hours per week, plus private or gym sessions where she isn't paid but can keep the tips; when the company was busy she is paid $18 per hour but if not she gets the minimum wage and her hours are cut; her pay varied between $90 and $700 fortnightly; she drove a 44 mile commute to keep this job; she was paying down student debt for her husband who was a delivery driver studying at night; and every month she went "slightly crazy" when the money wasn't enough to pay the bills; 'I don't deal very well with a lot of stress' so I have to get medication, which costs about $60 a month; they used to shop at Walmart but have downshifted to the Dollar Store and are putting on weight from the cheaper processed food...".

Giridharadas also talks to established experts like Michael Porter, a hugely influential Harvard professor whose work was central to creating today's ruthlessly efficient corporate systems. By 2011 Porter saw the system wasn't working and coauthored a paper which characterised modern corporations as divorced from their production locations and their employees, directed only at short term shareholder gains - even if it damaged their own supply chains and long-term markets.

And he explores how the digital giants Airbnb, Uber and Facebook see themselves - as rebels, underdogs, disrupters of outdated business models relying on Government-mandated protection and tolerating union "cartels". When things go wrong, each of these companies - which has total dominance of their market and total data on their services - claimed to be simple providers of service platforms, unable to mandate better behaviour.

Need To Debate Alternatives

With the incomes of today's super-rich now rivaling many nations' gross domestic product (GDP), global philanthropy is inescapable, but these super-rich "citizens of the world" are really citizens of nowhere, living in neighbourhoods of their own class, out of touch with real life. Their solutions will never reduce inequality because their lives are built on it. Their projects are divorced from democratic political processes and avoid debate with citizens.

As Giridharadas sums it up, the inescapable answer to the overwhelming question - Where do we go from here? - is: Somewhere other than where we have been going, led by people other than those who have been leading us. It's time to start debating alternatives to the global policy agenda, because otherwise we are on a roadmap which leads only to a global expansion of the American way.

LLEW SUMMERS
Body And Soul
by John Newton, Canterbury University Press, Christchurch, 2020

- Murray Horton

Watchdog does not usually review books about art and artists. But we're happy to make an exception for this big, beautiful book. Llew was one of us. He was a CAFCA member pretty much continuously from 1984 until his 2019 death. He was a political activist and he was a friend. My obituary of him is in Watchdog 152, December 2019, so I refer you to that, rather than go over his biography again.

I learned things about Llew from this book that I did not previously know. Likewise, I learned things about his partner Robyn Webster, who is once again our neighbour, having moved back to her own home in our little Addington street after more than a decade away. And I learned things about our mutual friend and famous painter, Tony Fomison, who was Llew's great mentor. Tony was also a CAFCA member for many years. My obituary of him is in Watchdog 63, April 1990, (Llew and I went to Auckland together to Tony's funeral. I spotted myself as a face in the crowd in one photo in the book of Llew as a pallbearer.

CAFCA is not mentioned in this book. We won't take offence. Llew was not famous for being a CAFCA member. This is an extensively illustrated book about Llew the sculptor, who was a household name in Christchurch and whose works can be found in public spaces the length and breadth of the country. The only aspect of his extensive political life to rate more than a passing mention was his heavy involvement in the 1981 Springbok Tour protests, which included being arrested, having to strip naked and being bashed by cops at the former Christchurch Police Station.

Llew was justly famous for his monumental outdoor nudes (very recently, a fellow of my acquaintance who had never previously heard of Llew, said that he had his works explained to him in two words: "big bums". Yes, indeed. Big everything, actually). I'm no art critic but I know what I like. And I love the vitality and joie de vivre of Llew's huge body of work (pun intended - he produced many huge bodies).

The sheer quantity of what he produced in 40 years of virtually non-stop sculpting - from his very biggest to his very smallest works - are wonderfully displayed in this book. As they were in the monthlong Christchurch exhibition which the book launch accompanied (I visited the exhibition twice to admire both the quantity and the quality of Llew's output, big and small).

Being dead for a year hasn't stopped Llew from being where he loved to be - in the thick of controversy. At the time of writing the Catholic Bishop of Christchurch is hellbent on demolishing the severely quake-damaged Catholic Cathedral, with no guarantee that Llew's sculpted Stations of the Cross can be, or will be, rescued from the ruins. They were installed in 2005 and only after Llew, very reluctantly, put a loincloth on his naked Jesus (at least it wasn't a fig leaf).

My favourite photo in the book is of a line of protesters demonstrating against the consecration of the sculptures (one holds a placard referring to "blasphemous and putrid images"). A smiling Llew is standing behind them, directly behind a young girl holding a placard reading: "Not fit for the eyes of God's children".

Artist For The People, Not The Art Establishment

John Newton makes the central point that Llew was shunned by the art Establishment. Astonishingly, the Christchurch Art Gallery holds nothing more recent of his than 1982. Why? Newton argues that it is because he was a figurative artist throughout his entire career (which only ended when terminal illness prevented him from working) and figurative art is wildly unfashionable among the culturati. His was very much art from the heart, not from the head. He was self-made and self-taught. He didn't go to art school or university, nor did he even do art at high school.

And he was a public artist, whose big works are made for public spaces, not to be hidden away in galleries or the homes of collectors. Because of that, Llew and his work are known to a huge audience who wouldn't be seen dead in an art gallery. Newton compares Llew to Sam Hunt, the populist poet who is shunned by the literary Establishment but whose work has brought poetry to the people for decades.

Llew was not worried about being "unfashionable" or being shunned by the art Establishment - he didn't need them. He went around them and connected directly with the people. Nor was he an artist starving in a garret (the amazing home that he built is the polar opposite of a garret). He did it all himself, through sheer hard work and a wonderful talent.

And he made a living, a good living, as a fulltime artist for decades. He was incredibly generous with the proceeds of his art - I was a regular beneficiary of his largesse. His work lives on past his death and it is still extremely sought after. When I visited the exhibition which the launch of this book accompanied, I noted that the largest work on display was priced at $150,000 and it had sold. Quality doesn't go out of fashion.