The Progressive Agenda for the Next Decade
E nga mana, e nga reo, e nga iwi o te Motu, tena koutou, tena koutou, tena koutou katoa.
I'd like to begin by acknowledging the Cuban Ambassador Jose, my parliamentary colleagues Claire Curran and Damien O'Connor and my former parliamentary colleague and very old friend Sue Bradford, and by expressing my thanks and admiration to the committee that has once again brought together a Mayday programme that is stimulating and fun.
Several of the speakers at the opening ceremony for the Memorial today talked about the task we have to preserve our tradition of collectivism for future generations That principle of seeing issues through the lens of "how do we want things to be for our children and their children?" is one that's pretty natural for the green movement in general, and the Green Party in particular. So a decade is much shorter than the timeframes we often try to apply, but has the compelling virtue of forcing us to move quickly from big picture thinking to immediate practicalities.
My starting point is the relationship between our economy, the environment and society. I remember a time in the mid-1980s when sharemarket news suddenly moved from a small item buried late in the TV News to the lead item each evening. In retrospect we can understand that this was the point at which it would have been useful to already have read the Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, and thus to understand that a step change in our conquest was occurring.
One of the critiques of how Rogernomics was imposed is that very many of us in the progressive movement, and particularly in the Labour Cabinet, had a poor understanding of economics, and saw the movement as essentially a social and environmental one. It suited Roger Douglas and the beneficiaries of his policies for us to believe that the economy was somehow a force of nature, unamenable to change by human efforts.
Bill McKibben, in his book Deep Economy asks the question: "What's the economy for, anyway?" and underlying that question is the truth: the economy is an entirely human construct. It is designed to achieve some particular goals, and it can be remade to instead achieve different ones.
A progressive agenda first has to recognise that our social and environmental goals need to be paramount, and that "the economy" is actually one of the sets of tools we can use to achieve these. We set our goals and then we re-engineer the economy to best meet these.
I know this sounds obvious, but in fact this deceptively simple truth is the polar opposite of our current arrangements, where people and planet both serve the economy, and we tolerate this because most of us have come to believe either that we have no option or that this system is somehow in our interests. Noam Chomsky and his work on "Manufacturing Consent" tell us how this has been achieved.
In fact the economy has been developed and refined to do one thing really, in two ways: its interaction with people is maximise the value it can squeeze out of our labour, while minimising what it returns to us in services to meet our needs. It does the same thing with the natural world, extracting the maximum commercial gain possible from the exploitation of "the common treasury for all", either by using it to make things or for waste disposal, and minimising what it returns in protection or enhancement for the environment. The goal of the machine is to maximise the efficiency with which people and planet are exploited to the profit of a very few.
This economy has some underlying problems of course: the greatest of these is its need to constantly grow to remain stable. Everything that occurs in the economy is inevitably a sub-system of the biosphere, but while the economy has been geared to need to grow, the biosphere cannot grow, meaning that the economy will reach a crisis point when natural limits to the availability of raw materials or to the planet's ability to absorb waste are reached. The great American writer and environmentalist Edward Abbey called this "the ideology of the cancer cell", and it has the same result.
That's what globalisation is about, in fact. The point of it is to enable capital to have access to natural resources and cheap labour from as wide a range of places as possible, again maximising returns and minimising costs. The current obsession with so-called "free trade" is entirely to facilitate the efficiency of capitalism at exploitation on a global scale. Ultimately this must become untenable too, of course, but capital's concern is in maximising short-term profitability, not thinking about what we leave future generations.
It's a pleasure to be able to share this platform with my friend Claire Curran from Labour tonight, and the Progressive Agenda certainly will require Labour and the Greens to find ways to work better together, but if there were two things I could get Labour to change in their philosophy and policy it would be their adoption of an economic growth strategy, and their enthusiasm for free trade agreements.
And of course this next decade may well see us start to reap some of the whirlwind that has been sewn. The terrifying reality of climate change is that we probably won't see major changes (at least in New Zealand) in the next decade, but globally catastrophes will become more intense and more frequent. On the other hand it is extremely likely that we will need to deal with Peak Oil, and the massive increases this will bring not only to the cost of transport, but to the cost of nearly everything, especially food. The impacts of these changes will fall most on the poor, increasing inequalities that will in turn drive poorer outcomes in health, education, crime and the quality of life for nearly everyone.
In the meantime every part of the world will, in a cruelly ironic form of "competitive advantage", become a monoculture producer of some commodity that can most efficiently be extracted there on the global stage. For Malawi it's coffee (I think), for Haiti it was mangoes - lot of help in the aftermath of the hurricane - and we are to be, for a little while at least, one of the world's monoculture dairy farms. We are currently turning ourselves inside out to meet this "aspiration" for us, converting every inch of land we possibly can to this purpose, and enlisting every drop of water to maximise the stocking intensity it can support.
So let's leave aside the analysis for a moment and focus instead on our agenda. If we are to turn the economy to be the servant of people and planet then we need to agree on some goals.
How about a society where everybody's basic needs, (safe healthy food and water, warm secure housing, the opportunity to live in a functional community where their human rights are respected) are met, and where everyone has enough with the fruits of society being shared equitably? And a sustainable relationship for human activity with the environment, so that our activities at least sustain and preferably enhance the opportunities for future generations to interact with the environment that we have, also valuing the natural world for its own inherent value.
How might we go about that?
The Green Party has, in this term of Government, returned to the approach of President Roosevelt with his New Deal, in which he responded to massive failure of the US economy by banking and finance reform, civil rights and union rights legislation, and massive redirection of the State's spending power to create work for Americans in building the infrastructure of the future.
Rather than following Roosevelt's programme, we have instead appropriated his formula of responding to a financial crisis with a broad programme of reforms to reboot our economy and reposition it on a path to achieve the goals we seek for our society and our environment. Our Green New Deal is not unique in the world, as many other nations sought to create jobs through activities with a positive effect on the environment, but unfortunately has not yet been embraced by this Government beyond the Green Party's major home insulation scheme.
Green New Deal measures we have proposed so far have included energy efficiency investments, redirection of some of the Government's spending on roads towards public transport and the infrastructure for cycling and walking, an investment in community development and community-directed projects in areas such as housing and waste minimisation, a programme to protect waterways by fencing and riparian planting, a suite of measures to facilitate a major forest-planting programme, wilding conifer control, ground-based (non 1080!) animal pest control and, largest of all, a major investment in new state housing.
All of these measures were fully costed and practicable, and calculated the creation of many thousands of "green collar jobs". [details available on the Green Party website http://www.greens.org.nz/gnd]. We will shortly be announcing a fresh batch of measures in tandem with the Budget, aimed at financial and taxation reform, and targeting social injustice. All are based on the premise question: "If we were the Government right now, what would we do?" There are plenty more of these initiatives that a progressive government could and should pursue over the next decade.
Another great source of policy ideas for the next decade is the NZCTU Alternative Economic Strategy developed by Bill Rosenberg. It has a great deal in common with Green Party ideas, and some of the themes to be pursued include:
- Replacement of the Gross Domestic Product - essentially just an aggregation of all economic activity, regardless of whether it is productive or destructive - as our means of measuring success with a measure or measures that reflect our social and environmental goals. The Genuine Progress Index is one such idea, and my colleague Kennedy Graham is promoting a Member's Bill along these lines.
- Making taxation more progressive, to reduce inequalities.
- Introduction of a Capital Gains Tax (excluding a family's home) to help pull investment out of the speculative housing market, freeing up capital for more productive purposes and helping to make housing more affordable for all.
- Other measures to deflate the parasitical speculative economy and redirect investment into transition measures and Research and Development, especially in innovation for a more sustainable future.
- A return to State control of strategic assets such as power generation and transmission and telecommunications infrastructure. Here on the West Coast we are right now presented with a stark example of how dumb our power generation decision-making framework is, with no place for the public good to be considered, and only those options in the best interests of the power companies ever even put on the table.
Again, that's just a smattering of the ideas that we could and should pursue to reposition the economy as our servant. There are many others in the CTU strategy, Green Party policy and, no doubt, many other sources that we need to involve in our agenda.
We need to reorient social services to be able to work across silos - too often now our Government Departments operate as if they were separate companies and are almost in competition with other Government departments. Yet the interest of the State and of the individual or community using services is in an integrated approach. We also need services that see their jobs as meeting the needs of people, both at individual level and at community level, rather than spending as little as possible. Some of that sounds a bit Whanau Ora, and I make no apology for that. I like the approach of community development at the heart of a whanau ora approach. I just don't trust this Government to "get it" or to deliver this empowerment.
Somebody this morning expressed some scepticism about the Transition Towns movement. I have to say I'm a big fan of Transition Towns, because they engage communities in working together in realistic planning for our future. In particular they play a very important role in overcoming the inertia of denial and paralysis in the face of the impending environmental and social disasters that are looming, and engaging people in doing something about it.
In fact I'd like to see the Transition Towns process replicated at a national level with a Transition Commission, that engages the whole community in planning how we will respond to these challenges. We need to:
- Relocalise our economies, making our communities more self-reliant and robust
- Reverse this headlong rush towards monoculture with diversified food production
- Rekindle all those manufacturing and other industries that have been winking out across the nation in the face of globalisation
- Regear all of our activities to a low Carbon, low energy reality
- Retrain our workforces into the kinds of work that will be required in this kind of economy and away from unsustainable activities.
And all of this needs to be a just transition. For the rich and powerful, transition to new ways of living is relatively easy. The costs and hardship of transition typically fall on those with the least control over their own lives, who can least afford these costs. Part of the progressive agenda must be to engineer the transitions required in a way that shares challenges fairly and assists people to make transitions according to their needs. Here on the West Coast many people have made their livings coal mining, an inherently unsustainable activity, particularly if the destiny of the coal is to be burned (as opposed to some higher tech use). There will be a greater diversity of work available for these people, but it is unlikely to be as well paid. We need to provide some solutions to enable them to maintain quality of life through this transition. Perhaps one model is that of the West Coast Development Trust, where a very substantial community development fund was made available in return for the end of the logging of native forests and the loss of jobs thus incurred.
Right now we are facing environmental degradation at a massive scale. Some of this can be overcome simply by a Government that does not have an agenda of maximising the exploitation of natural resources. Threats to mining in Schedule 4 areas and decimation of Water Conservation Orders could be overcome immediately. Other threats require more concerted action. A great start would be a National Policy Statement on freshwater, imposing universal high standards with the goal of all rivers returning to first swimmable standard, and mandatory compliance with the Clean Streams Accord.
I want to say a few words about the Treaty of Waitangi. Around 1990 when we celebrated the sesquicentennial of the signing of the Treaty the then Labour Government had invested a significant sum in community education about the Treaty, and a genuine community goodwill was being built amongst Pakeha to not only settle historic grievances around land and resources but also to engage with Maori in an honourable, good faith way to negotiate what our Treaty relationship means today in a constitutional sense. Unfortunately that momentum has been all but lost, and our progressive agenda must rebuild it. Until we are able to do this these issues will continue to fester and blight our nation.
Before closing I want to make one or two remarks about MMP. Without MMP I would not be an MP, Sue would not have been and maybe not Claire either. The Parliament we have now has more Maori, more Pasifika people, more Asian people, more women, more gay men and lesbians, and more people with disabilities than ever before. It is the closest parliament to representative democracy that we have ever achieved. I like to take visitors to Parliament for a walk around the corridors of Parliament House where there hang photographic portraits of all New Zealand's parliaments. These provide a stark visual reminder of the change wrought by MMP, with all of the older parliaments being dominated by older, Pakeha men, and all those since MMP looking much more like the New Zealand society we should be striving to represent.
But make no mistake: the big capital interests I spoke about earlier don't like MMP, perceiving it, correctly, as an obstacle to their achieving their goals. Peter Shirtcliffe and Graham Hunt and their other big capital friends are again campaigning against proportional representation, and the Government's Bill setting up the decision-making structure is proposing no spending caps in campaigning on these referenda, setting up an unfair contest between those with the deepest pockets and the people. We simply must win this battle.
Finally I want to come to the single most pressing task of our progressive agenda for the next decade: to get rid of this Tory Government.
These are the hollow men; these are the stuffed men. Smiling and waving; pretending to be relaxed and reasonable. All this is a façade. Their plan is to not take stands where they don't need to, in order not to alienate support where they don't need to, in order to protect their agenda: increasing the efficiency with which capital is able to exploit people and planet in this country.
Right now they are still riding high in the polls, but the single biggest obstacle to a progressive government next year is to believe the pundits who say a second term for National is inevitable. It is not inevitable but could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. In 2008 the difference between a National-led government and a Labour/Green/Maori government was just a few percentage points. It will be similarly close next year, and our urgent priorities must be to work across the common ground of progressive political parties, unions, NGOs and wider civil society to articulate our collective vision for a better Aotearoa, and to work with the progressive in everyone to believe that we can win, and we must win.
Thank you.
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