One of the great pitfalls of political nostalgia is that the protagonists of the present can all too easily be mistaken for the antagonists of the past

By Chris Trotter*

What do politicians do when the present is a mess and the future promises more of the same? Mostly, in these all-too-familiar circumstances, politicians turn for help and solace to the past. They go looking for policies that seemed to work once and attempt to make them work again.

Take our present Finance Minister, Nicola Willis. She has asked Treasury to become more assertive in its advice. It is to forget all about Jacinda and Grant’s “wellbeing”, and strive to be considerably more generous with the vinegar, and much less enthusiastic with the sugar.

It is important to note at this point that Willis’s “nostalgia” for the Treasury that injected uncut neoliberalism directly into Roger Douglas’s bloodstream isn’t real. In 1984, when the Fourth Labour Government unleashed the policy revolution that had long been in the planning at No. 1 The Terrace, our present Finance Minister was just 3 years old.

By the time Willis was old enough to pay serious attention to her country’s politics the neoliberal blaze had faded to a pile of glowing embers. Floating the dollar, GST, privatisation, the Employment Contracts Act, the Mother of All Budgets: all of these were done and dusted by the time Willis turned 16.

But there are all kinds of nostalgia. Left-wing Boomers reached adulthood in the 1960s and 70s – the peak years of the post-war economic boom. They can actually remember when New Zealand was suffering from over-full employment. When a student could get a room in a flat for $5 per week. When a BA or a BSc was all anyone needed to walk into a well-paid job … for life.

Then again, those lefty Boomers were also there when the golden weather ended in the late-1970s and early-1980s. The ugliness and brutality of the Muldoon years was hard to forget. This gave them what Willis never really had: lived experience of New Zealand before, and after, the Rogernomics Revolution; the ability to compare and contrast.

Not that they always used this historical gift wisely. So many young New Zealand leftists were nostalgic for the sort of politics they’d read about in histories and memoirs of the First Labour Government. That this variety of politics was already past its prime in the late-1940s, well before most of them were born, did not trouble them. They yearned for the “heroic” period of the labour movement’s history. The stellar achievements of which Roger Douglas and his allies, followed closely by Ruth Richardson and hers, were methodically smashing to pieces.

Vicarious nostalgia is fraught with danger. Missing entirely is the day-by-day, headline-by-headline, absorption of the events that not only made radical change economically and socially necessary, but also politically feasible. Vicarious nostalgia inspires by recalling what happened – not why.

Yet it is clear that Willis hankers for the ideological clarity of the past, and for the political ruthlessness with which the nascent neoliberal ideology was imposed. Ruth Richardson’s tenure as Finance Minister clearly resonates with her successor as an “heroic” moment in the history of the National Party – and the country. There were things that needed to be done – and they were done. Treasury handed Richardson a list of designated targets, along with the ordnance required to take them out, and she opened fire. Willis wants the same – now.

From a privileged background, and having won her political spurs serving first Bill English and then John Key – both National Party moderates – Willis’s embrace of neoliberalism’s sharp ideological edges cannot have been pain-free. That said, late converts are often the least compromising. Certainly, the Finance Minister’s “Scrutiny Week” encounter with the Greens’ co-leader, Chloe Swarbrick, during which she excoriated the party’s fiscal strategy as confiscatory, offered strong evidence that Willis’s conversion is … robust.

There is nothing of the Johnny-come-lately about David Seymour and Brooke van Velden, however. Their neoliberalism is bone-deep. What’s more, Act’s ideological leadership is not in the least nostalgic, they are convinced that neoliberalism’s best years lie ahead of it, not behind it. The line written by George Bernard Shaw: “Some men see things as they are and ask why, I dream of things that never were and ask why not?” A quotation popularised in the 1960s by Robert F. Kennedy (the good one, not the kooky one) could have been written with Seymour and van Velden in mind.

It is this ideological confidence and lack of historical encumbrance that gives Seymour and van Velden their political edge over the National Party. Christopher Luxon and his team quail before a future they strongly suspect contains little for the Centre-Right but difficulty and disappointment. Act, in the face of a directionless and internally fractious Left, and undaunted by their coalition partners’ fears, cries “Onward!”

NZ First’s cry, however, is “Backward!”

Until Winston Peters’ frankly colonialist response to the Cook Island’s agreement with China, the title of Reactionary-in-Chief seemed destined to remain firmly in the hands of Shane Jones.

Even as a member of the Labour Party, Jones struggled to understand the political phenomenon of environmentalism. Neither the science, nor the politics, made the slightest headway against Jones’ unshakeable faith in the human species’ capacity to extract resources and extinguish species without consequence. His belief that extraction/exploitation should be undertaken without hesitation whenever the opportunity to realise a profit presents itself is rock solid. Jones dismisses the scientists’ warnings of imminent and irreversible climate change as hot air.

No admirer of neoliberalism, Jones allegiance is to the older paradigms of nation-building and economic development. The irrefutable evidence of colonial capitalism’s power to reshape entire ecosystems for the benefit (at least in the short-term) of human-beings long ago captured Jones’ imagination, and grips it still. Men and women prepared to tear down mountains and dam rivers in the name of progress and prosperity are his heroes, and the great civil-engineering projects of the 1950s, 60s and 70s define Jones’ idea of a heroic age.

Peters and his party are driven by the related conviction that if the future is not compelled to acknowledge and be guided by the truths and lessons of the past, then New Zealand’s interests are best served by delaying its arrival. From its inception in 1993, NZ First has been fuelled by very little else but nostalgia. The turbulence and betrayals of neoliberalism have persuaded Peters and his followers that their mission is to bar the door to the future until present tumults have been quelled and those responsible for unleashing them have been punished.

The conflict with the Cook Island’s government has made clear one of the great pitfalls of political nostalgia. All too easily, the protagonists of the present can be mistaken for the antagonists of the past.

A staunch Cold Warrior, Foreign Minister Peters looks at the Chinese of the 2020s and sees only the Soviets of the 1960s. In the profoundly isolationist America of the present, Peters sees only the brave internationalists of the post-war era.

Just as it was sixty years ago, Peters sees the present duty of this country’s leaders to keep order in New Zealand’s “back-yard”. Pacific Island leaders can be patronised, condescended to, and, when necessary, bribed with aid dollars, by their big New Zealand brother. What they must never receive, however, is the freedom to accept a better offer.

Mind you, the maxims of the past are not always without relevance to the present. It was President Teddy Roosevelt who said: “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Now, President Donald Trump has never been one to say quietly what he could shout out to the world on Truth Social. When it comes to big sticks, however, Trump’s MOP (Massive Ordnance Penetrator) offers the world a frightening glimpse of its future.

*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.