The lobby group “Hobson’s Pledge” is a new
addition to the landscape of Aotearoa New Zealand politics since late 2016.
Headed by former National Party leader and Reserve Bank chairman Don Brash, its
cornerstone principles are to oppose racial separatism, affirmative action, and
other ethnic-based politics and policy, and support in its place structures
that lead to a cohesive national identity, including rights for non-white
immigrant peoples. Its recent statements opposing the Māori seats have
reignited debate about Māori representation in Parliament. Winston Peters,
leader of the rather ideologically eclectic and populist party New Zealand
First, has also delivered a number of speeches calling for the Māori seats to
be abolished. The liberal left has essentially monopolised criticism of this
new lobby group, seizing on the fact that everyone in leadership positions in
the trust is white. They also believe (and this is not necessarily wrong) its
sole reason for existence is to covertly entrench what they call “white
privilege” in New Zealand society. With those positions laid out, the liberal
left’s endgame is to reassert their support for ethnic-based policy, including
the Māori seats. There has hardly been any proper entry into this debate from
the more socialist and Marxist Left despite the opportunity opened up by
Hobson’s Pledge. My position, which I base on Marxist theory, is to oppose both
the position of “Hobson’s Pledge” while noting sentiments that should be
reformulated, and also opposing the liberal left’s inadequate answer to it.
A recent interview of Don Brash for Te
Hiku crystallised the important issues both sides have with regard to this
debate. The interviewer was Rukuwai Allen, who is also secretary for a Ngapuhi
hapu. Unfortunately in this interview, it was clear that Allen was trying to
skewer Brash to no avail; he answered most of her questions quite well. She
also made some appalling implications in her questioning – for example that
recent immigrants should not have the right to “decide the political destiny of
this country” – a position more hardline than Brash’s own. She interrogated
Brash on the concept of “Māori privilege”, and invited him to explain his
position on Māori seats. Her argument for keeping the seats – and this is a
problem for the liberal left’s position – was based on disparities between
Māori and non-Māori. This is an argument shared by Marama Fox, leader of the
Māori Party, a centrist political party that has many of its roles filled by
members of the Iwi Chairs Forum. The argument goes: because Māori are more
disadvantaged across the board than non-Māori, they require special
representation. Brash replied that these electorates have existed for over a
century and that they have done very little to address that disparity, which is
no doubt true. He also remarked that because there are only seven Māori
electorates, they are quite large geographically and it is difficult for Māori
MPs to represent their areas. (It may also be argued that Māori currently make
up just shy of one-fifth of the population, more than their proportion of the
population, if we are following this disparity-focused line of argument).
Finally, and this is quite an important argument, Brash claimed that Pacific
Islanders on average have far less incomes than non-Pacific Islanders, but
Pacific Islanders do not have special electorates. So on disparity, there is
very little of consequence that supports the pro-Māori seat position. The
reality of colonisation, which if expressed would have strengthened Allen’s
argument somewhat, was in fact not mentioned (and I will come back to this
point at the end).
Now, it is obvious that Brash, in this
interview, is merely trying to keep up appearances. He is, as Allen says, a
member of the “conservative establishment”. Unless this represents a
significant change in his thinking and activity, he is trying to conceal his
own attitude of separatism and dog-whistling he utilises in front of public
audiences at events run or attended by Hobson’s Pledge. There is definitely a
difference in the way Brash fronts a crowd of enthusiastic trust members and
his more relaxed, compromise-making demeanour on Te Hiku’s radio programme. But
it is important that we extract some positive things from what Brash (probably
unreflexively) highlights here. He even admits in the interview the truth of
what is meant by the concept of “Māori privilege”, which is in my view an
appalling and deliberate misuse of language. So-called Māori privilege is not
held by all Māori, Brash says. It is held by those who are members of the
bureaucratic middle-class and the ruling class. Therefore, it is essentially a
kind of privilege of being members of a certain class. Now, Brash is no stranger to this kind of class privilege.
He is extraordinarily wealthy as well, a position he admits in the interview.
But it is quite clear from these admissions that the road the debate is heading
down is a badly paved one. This kind of class privilege is viewed by both
participants as a necessary evil (Brash only really wants to “open investment
opportunity” by eliminating certain Māori protections, for example), and what
really matters is which ‘ethnicity’ has it best in society. It is a battle of
mutually occurring emotions of ressentiment
where Māori believe they deserve further recompense for colonisation and Pākehā
believe these special protections have already been entrenched to the benefit
of Māori society and to their detriment. On both sides, the ressentiment seem to exist independently
of whatever goes on in reality.
My key argument is that racial ideology of
any kind should not be allowed to be asserted in this way, by any self-defining
group, as primary or foundational. Racial ideology is exclusive – you either
belong to a particular category or you do not – and it is this principle of
exclusivity or incommensurability that is in violation of the principles of any
democratic ideal. In this respect ethnicity and democracy are fundamentally
incompatible. I would argue the increase in affiliation to culturalism over the
past two decades is largely a consequence of neoliberal destruction of the ‘public’
– when there is no discernible ‘public’ left that we can turn to, when
everything is privatised, the false stabilities of ethnicity become refuges
that shelter people (particularly the marginalised) from the seemingly
frightening chaos. World-systems anthropologist Jonathan Friedman argues as
much in his impressive books on globalisation.
There are a number of respects in which
the position of Don Brash and I fundamentally differ. (1) Don Brash is
supportive of capitalism, I am not. I am convinced that Brash, in fact, wants
to simply strip away ‘iwi red tape’ to make it easier for capitalists to do
business. Hobson’s Pledge, then, is promoting a kind of ‘democracy’ that in
fact is based on class inequality, the most egregious and material barrier to
political participation, influence, and self-determination. It is not democracy
because capitalism is also incompatible with universalist democratic values,
representing as it does a false universal – which is the impasse that not only
Brash but also the liberal left seems to face. This is because the liberal left
does not really oppose capitalism in any serious way and so they have over time
ironically become the least committed to democratic principles. That position
of ‘weak opposition’ is highlighted by the liberal left’s focus on ‘disparity’
which I have already mentioned. That focus, as shown in the interview,
continually sidesteps the problematic of fundamental class divides in society
and chooses instead to focus on cultural (whether ethnic, gendered or
sexualised) disparities that are internal to class positions or that ossify
class relations. (2) Instead of focusing on cultural ‘privileges’, and which
‘culture’ or ‘ethnicity’ is apparently more privileged, I focus on the way in
which colonisation and capitalism has produced particular class
reconfigurations that have changed over time. Although racialisation is a real
and enduring process with negative consequences, and certain people are more
likely to be negatively treated than others on the basis of this, its effects
on New Zealand society have arguably decreased relative to the immovable
dynamic of class conflict throughout the capitalist epoch. This can be seen in
the relative stature of Pākehā to Māori in the immediate aftermath of
colonialism when clear racial delineation could be seen in the labour market
and thus in class position. Over time, although Māori have been less socially
mobile, immiseration appears as if it is becoming more generalised regardless
of ethnicity. The extent of racialisation also appears to be correlated with
economic expansion and contraction as well as the degree of class polarisation.
One particular class reconfiguration that has occurred in the last twenty or so
years is the ascendancy of a particular Māori financial and political elite
associated with the ‘new tribal structure’ (Roger Maaka calls it the ‘new
tribe’, Elizabeth Rata the ‘neotribe’ that engages in a particular form of
economic development called ‘neotribal capitalism’, and its existence was also
acknowledged by Annette Sykes in her Bruce Jesson lecture).
However, instead of the liberal left
opposing the entrenchment of this new Māori elite that exists at the expense of
poor Māori – the lower classes of Māori – the liberal left either defends the
existence of this elite, or in some extreme cases refuses to even recognise it
as an elite. This extreme position found its way into the public spotlight
through an article written by Carrie Stoddart-Smith (a Māori Party candidate
who has previously published on “radical Kaupapa Māori politics” in The Interregnum, ed. Morgan Godfery) for
liberal left online magazine The Spinoff.
She argued that the very notion of a “Māori tribal elite” was “racist” and
“erases the lived experiences of Māori in a colonised society”. This argument
is not only incoherent but quite dangerous. For a start, the concept does not
actually contribute to “erasing” anyone’s experience. That phrase is simply
thrown in for polemical effect and is not justified in any way by
Stoddart-Smith. In fact, the concept helps to elucidate the class conflicts
experienced “within” Māori society and how this conflict may operate to
reproduce relations of exploitation. But what makes it dangerous is that
Stoddart-Smith is asking us to ignore the relatively wealthy and powerful
position of this group because it creates opposition and antagonism where there
should, according to her, be unity. She is essentially arguing that dissent on
this basis is unacceptable in the tribal formation, confirming the
incompatibility of tribal society with democracy. She is stipulating that
elites who can justify their position on the basis of tradition or past
grievances be treated differently from other elites, and asserting that, in her
own words, class analysis “distorts how Māori view who they are”.
Where did the liberal left go wrong? How
did it arrive at the position that tribal capitalism was progressive? It is
mostly a middle-class phenomenon that has its roots in the ‘bicultural
compromise’ established in the 1970s. As we know, although the Labour
government elected in the 1980s committed itself to social liberalism as well
as anti-racism, it abandoned class politics and even the politics of
redistribution. Despite its socially progressive stances, Labour shifted unceremoniously to the extreme-right (see Bruce Jesson, Fragments of Labour). Part of the Labour Party’s
capitalist anti-racism was ensuring that there was some diversity among
capitalist and state elites. It is here in New Zealand’s political history
where the term ‘political left’ begins to empty itself of any real meaning.
Groups of Māori with some influence have
been able to redeploy colonial stereotypes of the ‘vanishing race’ in their
favour. Traditional society is reimagined in only positive terms (Elizabeth
Rata calls it a “romanticised Arcadia”) and Māori people are understood as
universally rural, deeply spiritual, connected to the land and organised by
pre-modern arrangements of kinship. Not only can this be done for sympathy, it
can also be done as a way of unifying Māori regardless of class position or their
distance from the kinds of cultural maxim elevated as resembling the ‘good
life’. As the postmodern Left became more influential, cynicism began to take
hold in institutions such as schools. Objectivity was seen as oppressive,
overly calculative and totalitarian. Today, objectivity is viewed by a
not-insignificant group as part of the project of colonisation. Instead,
academics and politicians turned to relativism. Children quickly – and
implicitly – learn about relativism at schools and universities. Everyone has
different perspectives, beliefs and ‘narratives’ that must be respected no
matter how right – or wrong – they are. The Foucauldian view of history –
supported by Māori intellectual activists such as Linda Tuhiwai Smith in Decolonising Methodologies – also took
hold which allowed that discipline to be conceptualised in such a manner.
Historians were understood as constantly blinded by their own perspective,
which precluded the possibility of any kind of objective historical study.
It seems all we know how to talk about on
the Left these days is culture and disparity, with very little beyond lip
service mentioned about social class. This has paralysed the Left, because it
has destroyed its dissimilarity with liberal positions (who also use this
language of disparity) and increased the difficulty of distinguishing itself
from those positions of the political orthodoxy. Russell Jacoby, in The End of Utopia, claims as much:
Almost
everywhere the left contracts, not simply politically but, perhaps more
decisively, intellectually. To avoid contemplating the defeat and its
implications, the left now largely speaks the language of liberalism – the
idiom of pluralism and rights. At the same time, liberals, divested of a left
wing, now suffer from waning determination and imagination… At best radicals
and leftists envision a modified society with bigger pieces of pie for more
customers. They turn utilitarian, liberal and celebratory… The left once
rejected pluralism as superficial, now it worships it as profound. We are witnessing not simply the defeat of
the left, but its conversion and perhaps inversion. (10-11, emphasis added)
Jacoby goes on to argue that liberalism
has become incredibly banal and bereft of new ideas since the revolutionary and
socialist quarters of the Left were virtually eradicated. I would argue that
this eradication has also occurred in New Zealand politics, to the New Zealand
Left, and the scale of that truth is only just becoming clear to the vast
majority of proponents. It will take a lot of effort to regroup and rebuild. Reducing
disparity, as I have argued elsewhere (see my piece “The Race/Class Debate and
the Justice System”) naturalises the status quo. It does not challenge it
despite popular opinion that it does. It merely evens out the outcomes within a
given system. The liberal left, it seems, have yet to understand this fact. I
find it sad that many Māori and Pacific Island leftists have become caught up
in the discourse of cultural incommensurability that various elites deploy.
This only lends itself to a kind of cultural nationalism that as I have already
argued is incompatible with democracy. It is also true of the rhetoric of
‘decolonisation’ that is becoming increasingly common. There are very few
people who exist in the world that can give me a definition of that term which
does not disappoint me. Many others who use the term (once the language is
decoded) do not actually propose any good or realistic changes. For some,
decolonisation is a proxy term for cultural nationalism (bad), and for others
it simply refers to a process of diversifying elites and those in middle-class
professions; i.e. it is a strategic discourse used for ‘getting one over on
white people’ although never recognised as such (also bad).
