Brian Easton says political bullying does happen in New Zealand - and local autonomy suffers

This is a re-post of an article originally published on pundit.co.nz. It is here with permission.

While Donald Trump may be democracy’s greatest political bully, he is not alone. It happens in New Zealand, not only in the offices of politicians and whips dealing with caucus. Cabinet ministers practise it in public, not least towards local government.

Local governments are legally required to forecast investment over at least 10 years including the infrastructure necessary to meet additional demand, to improve service levels and replace existing assets. You probably think that is a good thing (although meeting the requirement almost destroyed my local council). Central government agencies do not have any such legal requirement;  the vast majority do not do it. The bully says, ‘you do what I say, not what I do’.

The contempt for local government is deeply embedded in the way we run the country. They are treated as handmaidens rather than independent agencies of government. The attitude is deep in our political culture with Parliament commonly overruling local preferences. It is not just the current government; the drive to centralise operates throughout the political spectrum. Among the centralising actions of the Ardern-Hipkins Government were to disempower localities in the management of their healthcare, polytechnic education and water as well as imposing Māori wards even where locals had already rejected them.

When in opposition, this government promised to reverse these actions – one of its few coherent policy approaches was to promise to reverse whatever the incumbent Ardern-Hipkins Government had introduced. While it has made some reversals, they have typically been partial and painfully slow.

Meanwhile, this central government has been willing to get into other stoushes with local governments. Take, for instance, the quarrel between the Minister for Housing and Infrastructure and the Auckland Council over local housing policy. A feature of Auckland Council is that it is getting big enough and politically strong enough to fight back, although because it is less united than a minister-sole backed by cabinet, it is not so even a fight.

The people’s Republic of Canterbury used to be bolshie, but the Canterbury earthquakes left it dependent on central government, which had all the funding. It will return to that more independent view.

The central government has two powerful weapons in any fight. It can change the law, ignoring whomever it wishes, and it has the funding, which it doles out to local government in return for acquiescence. The Minister for Local Government wants to take a proposal for capping local council rates to Cabinet before Christmas. The effect would be to further restrict what local governments can do, except where they can go to Scrooge central government and wheedle further funds out of them, giving central government even more control.

I don’t particularly like my rates rising, but I also want locally responsive cultural, environmental and social services. Those activities will be the first to be restricted if there is a rates cap, and my locality will be the nastier for it. Such matters are not easy trade-offs. But they are ones the locals should make, not bullies in Wellington.

Getting a new deal for funding localities is not easy, but central government is not even interested in trying. (Hence the grim joke that there is a ministry against local government in Wellington.) It would reduce its power to bully and we cannot have that, can we?

We are currently about to elect our local councils for a three-year term. There does not seem much enthusiasm for the exercise, in part because councils have so little power relative to central government. What happens locally over the next three years is likely to be far more influenced by central government decisions. I don’t know about yours, but my local candidates seem little interested in standing up to central government.

The issue of political bullying is wider than just local autonomy. There is increasing diversity on many dimensions – age, culture, gender, ethnicity, region, religion, sexual expression, taste ... The traditional approach of ignoring the diversity and assuming we are all the same (and you will better bloody conform) is increasingly not working. To give the Rogernomics Revolution credit, it recognised the diversity pressures by handing over more decisions to individuals – to the market (although neoliberalism has little recognition that for the market to work well requires fair income and wealth distributions). However, it never recognised that there remains a need for lower-level collective institutions like local authorities and unions.

Once the paths of many MPs to Parliament were through local councils (or other collective mid-level institutions like Federated Farmers and unions). The apprenticeship gave them a connection with ordinary people. The Fabian roots of the Labour Party evolved from (English) local body activity. National once prided itself on its grassroots foundations – giving priority to selecting those candidates the electorate knew. Overseas, the evolution of Greens was founded on local activity, but New Zealand’s show little interest in local politics. (ACT is putting up a handful of candidates in these council elections.) Perhaps the lack of local input explains a number of eccentric – but not long-lasting – MPs.

Today the ambitious politician skips such formative experiences; they are more likely to have entered from having worked as political advisers in Parliament and then onto an MMP list. The traditional Saturday morning clinics have been delegated to paid underlings so that on this dimension also, the humble task of engaging with ordinary people is diminished.

Getting into power seems to make one a natural bully, forgetting that once the role of politicians in a democracy was to serve the people – all people, not just the ones who elected them (typically only a minority of the population – often a small minority). Nor was it to serve only the interests of the pressure groups which funded their election. Imposing one’s personal beliefs on the majority of the population was not a part of a modern democracy. Getting into power often involves the bully politician claiming to know things better than experts (although they rarely have the time to master the subjects). It can be an ignorance compounded by arrogance.

Trump is an extreme example of political bullying. American legal, political and social institutions seem unable to restrain him in the short term; whether they will be able to restrain his authoritarianism in the longer term is yet to be seen. In the interim, his attacks on localities, diversity, and knowledge and expertise are damaging the future of the United States – perhaps irretrievably. (He is certainly accelerating the decline of American global power.)

He is not unique – although his personality may be. There are other bullies, even here. Our bullying is usually not as vigorous, but it could evolve that way, especially if someone with a Trump-like personality got into power. New Zealanders need to stand up to any bullying but also to create and strengthen institutions which play their part in resisting it.

*Brian Easton, an independent scholar, is an economist, social statistician, public policy analyst and historian. He was the Listener economic columnist from 1978 to 2014. This is a re-post of an article originally published on pundit.co.nz. It is here with permission.