Progressive-minded Kiwis after the 2023 election are in the throes of a rude awakening.
Despite Chris Hipkins remaining at its head in its worst thrashing since 2014 and Greens and Maori Party making gains, unity across progressive forces at the end of 2023 shows no sign of life.
Working class and Maori voters turned away from Labour. In liberal cities like Dunedin and Wellington and western and central Auckland, voters were in open revolt against progressive policies and their representatives.
Labour spent six years seeking to form institutions that would endure beyond any change of government, in a pattern implemented by Clark, Cullen and Anderton from the 1999-2008 government. This was their way of cementing in liberal ideas and progressive intent into the foundations of all future governments.
The new National-led government is however quickly turning many of those new institutions into ash.
It is not uncommon now to blame wokeness for the poor electoral result. The pursuit of progressive causes based on human rights such as transsexual rights, indigenous language and culture promotion, and water quality allocation rights (amongst others) are the usual mixture of “wokeness” that many turned against. It’s not coherent and nor is there a Christmas dinner answer to it.
Why citizens reacted so swiftly against Prime Minister Ardern when her government essentially underwrote the entire economy and saved thousands of lives in the course of two years cannot be explained by sexism or any other ‘ism’ alone.
But we can look back even now and see Labour-Greens 2017-2023 as a high sharp point of liberal effort. That era we will never see again.
Among the many crises New Zealand has endured since 2008’s GFC, COVID was the crisis with the widest societal interventions, deepest legislative and martial controls upon our behaviour, and most expensive tax subsidies for businesses up and down the country. They worked.
So it appeared to stand to reason that we needed stronger public institutions to deal with the next mess coming down the pipe.
But crisis also removed the weird idea of an ‘Overton window, whatever that was. Crisis, instead of opening the possibilities of reform, has instead made most of us more grumpy, more conservative, more retrograde in what we will accept in any power resting within the state. I suspect it’s because New Zealand has just had one damn deep crisis after another that we are no longer coherent about what we will accept as a civic bargain between state power and state service provision to get us out of crisis.
Our common pact with the state has weakened. In response, Labour sought to amalgamate public sector entities that had been splintered and corporatised in the 1980s and 1990s into new more robust state institutions.
Polytechs had previously been allowed to grow within conditions of higher unemployment and high unskilled labour imports, but were withering fast, so Labour sought to strengthen them once and for all. They nearly made it.
Water entities and local governments had previously been allowed to charge or meter any kind of water with little requirement for anticipating population or water demand growth. The legislation was finally put in place to help water entities raise debt and plan with water entities for that future. They nearly made it.
Health entities were on the verge of amalgamating into a centralised system that might eventually resolve the gross health service inequality that had built up over two decades of regionalised service levels. They were also geared up to focus service provision on Maori as far and away the sickest sector of the population. Parts of that may yet survive.
In field after field of government service provision, from 2017 Labour pressed ahead building new institutions that could withstand the test of time and withstand future more conservative governments. It was reversing the splitting and metastasising of government entities following the imposition of New Public Management into pure policy agencies and corporatised delivery agencies, in turn bringing back a measure of direct Ministerial democratic accountability.
After all, large and lumpy public service institutions had served New Zealand well in its high modernist form between the 1930s and 1980s, from housing to education to transport to telecommunications to rail to airlines. Why wouldn’t institutional reaggregation work again?
But what we missed was the high liberal turn from within. From the late 1990s inside each of those dozens and dozens of smaller entities both public and para-public (ie service provision trusts), specific internal cultures formed that were exceedingly righteous in the defence of their existence; each generated policy efforts more liberal than the other, each encouraging enclaves of liberal practice from nouns to language programmes, gender equality promotion to bicycling. That’s a quarter of a century of cultural formation within Wellington and its branches in Auckland and the regions. Public sector liberal culture was in many senses stronger than any change of government (perhaps until this one).
Instead of new institutions having a powerful policy effect upon New Zealand, the core poor policy outcomes remain and in most cases got worse in housing, education, transport, rail, health, justice, defence, wealth and economic innovation, poverty alleviation, climate change resilience, ecological degradation, and many others.
There doesn’t yet appear to be an alternative to institutional strengthening as a champion of liberal change. That’s a conceptual challenge for a future generation.
What we now see with the 2023 National coalition is a hard lesson: amalgamated institutions are not a protection against a committed small state movement.
Some institutions that have had enough time to make a difference to market dominance just haven’t done the job. Kiwibank remains tiny. NZ Superfund is still many years away from making its contribution and even then will be minor. Kiwirail is shrinking and poorly suited to a low-carbon economy as it continues to haul coal and milk powder. Kainga Ora has essentially outsourced most of the poor to social agency partners, but over-reached as a large scale housing developer. The amalgamated defence force isn’t able to help properly even in a major local crisis. Neither ACC nor NZTA have brought the road toll down anywhere near enough. And so on.
The public media code for institutional failure is “woke”. It really doesn’t matter if they have little to do with each other. It’s impossible, as with the rise of Trumpism, to draw a causal line between long term institutional failure and finishing your email with she/they. It’s a meme posing as a portal.
Nor is there a perfect epochal alignment between peak liberal in New Zealand and peak liberal in the United States or United Kingdom. Our activist peak in the late 1980s was waaay later than their activist peak in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Arguably the liberal peak in the United States was between the fall of Yeltsin and 9/11. Our liberal peak was most certainly Jacinda Ardern.
As the new government burns down the institutional improvements of the Labour-Green government, it remains for those who wish to activate to join together. Particularly since no opposition party is attempting it: it’s up to us. We don’t have to wait for new theoretical groundwork to arise beyond this paradigm of public institutional failure.
In the meantime we look back over the smoking ash at Jacinda Ardern as the one champion who brought us through our greatest modern crisis, was our greatest liberal idealist and most appreciated international leader we’ve had in multiple decades, and but wonder at our once shimmering liberal peak.
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