Successful political leadership embodies a keen awareness of past, present, and future: along with the wisdom to adjudicate what is owed, and should be paid, to each; writes Chris Trotter. Sadly, such leadership has not been much in evidence during 2024

By Chris Trotter*

Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua: “I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on my past”. To anyone with a love of history, that whakataukī really hits the spot. It is both dangerous (as well as practically impossible!) to go forward without consideration for what we leave behind. Which is not to say that watching where you’re going is a bad idea. Clearly, observation and anticipation are vital, not only when it comes to navigating the present safely, but also to keeping the future safe.

Successful political leadership embodies a keen awareness of past, present, and future, along with the wisdom to adjudicate what is owed, and should be paid, to each. Sadly, such leadership has not been much in evidence during 2024. Indeed, New Zealanders have seen just how badly things can go wrong when both respect for the past, and wise adjudication in the present, are lacking. It does not make for a safe future.

Had the National-Act-NZ First coalition government had more respect for the past, it would not now have to contend with so many besetting difficulties.

Certainly, it is difficult to comprehend how any group of politicians who hadn’t spent the 36 months between January 2020 and December 2022 living under a rock could have been so unaware of the grim fiscal legacy bequeathed to all New Zealanders by the overwhelming historical experiences of those three years – the worst years of the Covid-19 global pandemic. But, astonishingly, Christopher Luxon, Nicola Willis, and their colleagues managed it.

Unmoved, seemingly, by the disastrous fiscal consequences of doing so when the monetary consequences of addressing the urgent needs of the pandemic were everywhere apparent, the National Party promised, and delivered, tax cuts. At the very moment when responsible economic management demanded measures to increase state revenues; measures that would not only have eased the nation’s debt burden, but also dampened demand in an economy afflicted with historically high inflation; National opted to strip the state of billions of tax dollars that might otherwise have been used to address critical social needs.

Reducing the fiscal responsibilities of the National Party’s friends and allies brought many other malign consequences. Not the least of which was the need to impose harsh, across-the-board cuts in public spending. The impact of these cuts would not be felt, or, at least, not as acutely, by National’s friends and allies, but by the friends and allies of National’s electoral opponents. That these included the poorest and most vulnerable New Zealanders did not appear to give Christopher Luxon and his colleagues pause.

A political party which respected, and allowed itself to be guided by, the past would have recalled the impact of previous rounds of drastic cost-cutting by conservative governments. It would also have been aware of the store of trouble that such historical austerity programmes had built up for future generations of political leaders.

But Christopher Luxon’s and Nicola Willis’s National Party appears not to think in such terms. It seems not to recognise the overwhelming infrastructure challenges now facing New Zealand as the direct consequence of political leaders who were too afraid to impose the taxes necessary to keep a humane society functioning, and too fixated on the political needs of the present to anticipate the future disasters that such cowardice, if left unaddressed, was bound to produce.

How else to explain the Coalition Government’s fast-track legislation as anything other than the “Oh f**k!” response of Chris Bishop and Simeon Brown, the Ministers, respectively, of Infrastructure and Transport, to the discovery that their country is falling apart? (A condition, incidentally, about which ordinary Kiwis, after four decades of political indifference and neglect, were fully aware!)

Once again, National’s indefatigable “presentism” blinded it to the historical precedents for this sort of “Get-out-of-the-way!” solution to the public resistance engendered by governments attempting to do everything, everywhere, all-at-once. Is there no one left in the National Party who remembers Rob Muldoon?

Not that National stands alone in this regard. Act leader David Seymour is not the least bit afraid of austerity, indeed, he welcomes it. Slashing spending is, for Act, much more than a temporary economic necessity, it’s an ideological mission. How else is the state to be got down to the size where, in the vicious phrase of the American free-market enthusiast Grover Norquist: “we can drown it in the bathtub”?

Drowning the state is not, however, the goal of NZ First. A disciple of the nineteenth century German nationalist economist Friedrich List, the NZ First leader, Winston Peters, looks upon New Zealand’s great nation-builders, Sir Julius Vogel and, yes, Sir Robert Muldoon, as politicians to be celebrated, not shuddered-at. Peters’ deputy, Shane Jones, gleefully piles pounds of rhetorical fat on his leader’s bare theoretical bones, being only too pleased to tell Greens, environmentalists, and every other unmanly defender of Freddy the Frog to “Get out of the way!” – albeit in te reo.

That Peters has just had himself appointed Minister of Railways is no accident. It is difficult to imagine a more disreputable example of National’s reckless presentism, nor of its sublime indifference to the nation’s future, than the cancellation of the iRex Project.

That Peters and his party, in a last-ditch effort to protect New Zealand’s state-owned rail network from the truckers who would happily wave it good-bye, were willing to interpose themselves between the privatisers of National and Act is vintage NZ First. It reflects Peters’ small-c conservative conviction that those who inhabit the present are not only morally obligated to meet the needs of those who are, but also to protect the achievements of those who were. How else to deliver a world worth living in to those who will be?

But, if NZ First retains a firm grasp of the past’s importance, it is every bit as guilty as its coalition partners of failing to appreciate the scale and urgency of climate change. Likewise, the radical transformation of public policy that is needed to address the crisis effectively. Not to deal seriously with the ever-more-apparent consequences of global warming requires a political mindset unwaveringly resistant to looking either forward or back. A mindset which, at least historically, has been associated with political parties in thrall to ideologies, private interests, or both.

The Coalition’s failure to respond adequately to the Climate Crisis pales, however, when set alongside its treatment of tangata whenua. In no other aspect of government policy has its resistance to understanding the power and importance of the past been more evident.

As a radical, right-wing libertarian, David Seymour’s impatience with the restraints placed upon the sovereign individual by considerations of lineage and tradition is understandable – if not forgivable. But, what is NZ First’s excuse? Both Peters and Jones need no lessons in the central role of te Tiriti in shaping post-European contact New Zealand. Certainly, they would have been in no doubt as to the hurt and fury that would be sparked, not only by Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill, but also by their own equally aggressive policy of removing all references to the principles of the Treaty from New Zealand legislation. The commitments insisted upon by the leaders of Act and NZ First, post-election, amounted to playing with fire – and they knew it.

And National? The party of Rob Muldoon, Jim Bolger, Dough Graham, John Key and Chris Finlayson. Why didn’t it just say “No.”? Was there really no one in its ranks capable of appealing over the heads of the Act and NZ First negotiators to that huge part of the New Zealand electorate that is proud of its relationship with Māori. The part that believes in the Treaty – or, at least, in the Treaty they learned about in school.

Was there truly no one with the courage and understanding to call Seymour’s and Peters’ bluff? To dare them to force the country to a new election on this issue, and this issue alone? Someone who understood what the American novelist, William Faulkner, meant when he said: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” Someone prepared to turn his back on the nay-sayers and march towards the future facing, and drawing strength from, all those who  had gone before him.

Someone resembling a prime minister.

*Chris Trotter has been writing and commenting professionally about New Zealand politics for more than 30 years. He writes a weekly column for interest.co.nz. His work may also be found at http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com.