Month: August 2026

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Some recent social media snippets (mine).

A few years ago former KP colleague Lew decamped for more fertile writing territory and to attend to more important priorities. To my surprise he began posting on a word-limited social media platform of some notoriety, and I remember thinking that it was a waste of his talent to limit himself to pithy phrases and snarky asides. Whatever my opinion, he has developed a large and devoted following. and continues to inform NZ political discourse with his observations and critiques.

I held that view on social media posting because in the old days I used to have several types of writing outlets and felt that Lew could do likewise. I used scholarly books and articles for my academic research, opinion pieces in newspapers and magazines as a form of short piece public service, consultant analyses on a dedicated web site, and blog posts that were more personal or ideological than what the other formats comfortably allowed. For a while I did all of them concurrently, as I saw them as different parts of my writing personality.

Then, inevitably, life changed. I began doing some podcasting with a close colleague and slowly stopped academic writing once I left academia. I stopped media writing once editorial standards and word limits dropped along with the pay per word (and in some cases no pay or pay to play editorial approaches). I did media commentary until they stopped paying for “expert” analyses and charlatans entered the field. Think of it this way: If I was going to stop my normal “monetarized” or remunerated activities in order to take the time and make the effort to prepare and offer insights into world affairs when called upon by media outlets with no significant notice, why would I do that for free? Do we ask tradesmen to perform unscheduled specialist services for free? So why ask me to do so? To get my mug on TV? To hear my voice on the wireless? Geez, I have a face made for radio and in fact was a jazz DJ on radio for several years, so neither TV mugging or broadcast audio locution floats my boat. Best to leave that for (with a few exceptions to the rule) the attention-seeking poseurs.

As a result, nowadays I am down to blogging, sporadic consultancy writing and, as fate would have it, social media posts. I opted to do the latter basically to offer quick takes on current events rather than offer “deeper” analyses or opinions.

In that light here are a few recent snippets about NZ domestic politics. They refer to this year’s election and what is looking like Labour handing victory to the coalition of nasty rightwing incompetents in November.

From May: Is the NACT election campaign strategy based on promoting sectarian hatred of public sector workers by private sector ‘battlers?” Or to push public sector cuts so deep that they cannot easily be reversed and private interests can exploit the service delivery gaps? Just wondering.

From August: With a strong female majority workforce, who does ACT expect to use “reasonable force” on unruly middle and secondary school students, some of whom may either be large, violent or both? Does ACT propose to hire school discipline officers to deal with such students? If not, then what? (as the parent of a 13 year old boy this resonates close to home).

More in August:

Thoughts: By kicking the leadership can down the road National is making its election chances/options worse; Given certain contexts, it can be better to lose now and win later;
Labour excels at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, so why make it harder for it to do so?

And: If the opponent’s platform is all about being anti-taxes with no positive policy initiatives, then it truly is snatching defeat from the jaws of victory for Labour to be timid and status quo-ish when it comes to election promises. They must read the room better. Bold is beautiful. Positive policy! (Because they other side has nothing to offer on that score. It is all about what they oppose, not what they propose).

More (revised): Labour must understand that National’s performative pretence that they are doing something about kid’s social media use (i.e., pretending that it is doing something effective about digital harm to children when it in fact it is not), is just kicking the problem down the road while suckering Labour into supporting its political theatre. That is, it is an election neutralising ploy that will leave Labour holding the failure bag when the time comes for it to take office. The current bill is a plaster, not a panacea. It only postpones the hard choices that must be made if kids are to be made safe as effectively as is possible given the circumstances of their lives in an all-encompassing digital era.

Seen differently, National are doing a version of the hackneyed “tough on crime” and “countering terrorism” tactics employed by right-wingers everywhere by enticing Labour into either supporting their political theatrical performance staged to address digital harm against children or opposing what is framed as a common sense solution to the problem (when in actuality it just shifts the burden of responsibility onto households while offering ethereal promises of corporate accountability). After all, who in their right mind is not against crime, terrorism and digital harm to children?

Of course, Labour has taken the bait and supports the plaster bill. What is worse, the extremist Right clustered in ACT and NZ First cloak their concerns about the bill under a “infringement on privacy and parental rights” mantle that undercuts sincere opposition to the ongoing expansion of the surveillance State and its private sector adjacents. Then Labour doubles down on its attempt to cover National’s pre-election moves by supporting National’s rates increase cap without proposing other funding initiatives, in what amounts to another veiled anti-tax measure posing as fiscal relief on households. In doing so Labour is chasing a narrative framed by National at a time when National should be having its feet held to the fire over its gross across-the-board incompetence on virtually all matters of public policy (be it on e.g., health, economic growth, housing, education, welfare or agricultural-industrial-service balance).

In any event, as I wind down my other writing and commentating pursuits I will occasionally cobble together a patchwork of revised and edited social media posts and publish them here. Think of them as an epiphenomenal takes on contemporary events, or in other words, surface reflections on larger realities.

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Adobe Canyon Men

This is a bit of a departure from my usual blogging, but a long-time friend sent me something that made me reminisce. With some license taken, please allow me to indulge the moment and write of other times and places.

In the northeastern Sonoran Desert Basin, where the high chaparral grasslands meet the oak, sycamore and cottonwood-heavy foothills of the Sky Island mountain ranges that straddle the Arizona-Mexico border at 5,000 feet, there have lived very different types of people who are different in different ways. People like Geronimo and Cochise, bandidos, pony express riders, train and stagecoach robbers, cowboys and cattle rustlers, US calvary, hunters, gatherers, ranchers and farmers, vigilantes and fugitives, later hippies, cultists, off-road meatheads and the occasional writer, painter or poet. Although there are no saguaro cactus at this altitude, here the Sonoran landscapes are lush and varied, with skies, especially at dawn and dusk, that are shades of pink, orange, yellow and white set against hues of blue as broad as the eye can see, and nightscapes that are a psychadelic kaldeoscope of stars, planets, meteors and nebula. Wildlife abounds, from the elusive jaguar to the playful coatamundi, with bear, puma, bobcats, fox, wolves, badgers, antelope, deer and other mammals sharing space with hundreds of bird, snake, insect and anthropod species, some only to be found in this part of Earth. It is truly Nature’s Paradise.

Among the people who have passed through this space, in the 1990s there was a trio of wayward travelers, “ruffians” at best, “trouble makers” to some and “riff-raff” as they were affectionately known by their kin. Before they arrived in the Sonoita-Patagonia area on the southeast end of the Santa Rita Mountains, they had traveled far and wide abroad in pursuit of knowledge and adventure, cultural enrichment and earthly pleasures. They accumulated wisdom beyond their years, dodged a few (figurative and literal) bullets, consumed way too much mind-altering substances and worked to re-define themselves in light of their individual and shared experiences. They earned advanced degrees but did not flaunt them. Two studied traditional cultures and one studied comparative politics. All wrote about social organizations. They spoke other languages and listened to jazz, Norteno and borderland blues on KXCI FM. Two drove old American pick-up trucks and all rode fast bikes. They were not feminine and supported feminists. They understood risk but were not always averse to it. They played with sharp objects. They were comfortable with weapons. They could cook for others. They liked dogs.

They were men being boys and boys thinking that they were men. It rewarded and cost them in equal measure.

That was before “woke” meant anything other than rising from slumber. They were Keto before 30-30-40 diets were a thing. They lived macro lives by focusing on micro details. The had situational awareness. They did not need testosterone boosters. The liked their wine dry and their beer cold, sometimes with a shot on the side. They were cool, calm and cordial on first impression but warm and affectionate when the occasion warranted. They shared their opinions and could spin a yarn but listened as much as they spoke. They behaved in a mannerly fashion around women and kids, and confronted ne’er do wells when other options were exhausted. They did not start fights but knew what causes were worth fighting for and what not to back away from. They looked out for each other.

I like to call them “Adobe Canyon Men” because of a certain location near the 32nd North/111th West parallels where they congregated from time to time to discuss the finer things of life as well as the state of current affairs. Alas, those days could not last and the centrifugal pull of other adventures carried them away to other climes, different meridians and a new millenium. But one record of their passage in that special space remains, and it is this:

Adobe Canyon, circa 1993.

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Fear-mongering the “Other.”

One of the signs of desperation of a political campaign, movement or ideology is the resort to fear mongering. Rather than offer a a bias for hope in the form of positive policy initiatives, fear mongerers use stereotypes, scapegoats and distorted narratives to stir anxiety and dread of the “others” in amongst the body politic. The “others” are the usual suspects–immigrants and foreigners, sexual, ethnic, religious and racial communities, social classes, intellectuals (remember Pol Pot?) ideological non-conformists and contrarians, witches and witch doctors, heavy metal Satanists, even tax-and-spend liberals–the list is as long as human history itself. New ones are invented every generation. They often are held to be carriers of disease and other pestilence or are pet eaters, children snatchers, rapists and murderers. They could well be shape-shifters or aliens, so the best precaution against their insidious designs is to beware and vote/follow those who saw the danger first and call it out. Oftentimes fear mongers will try a rock by rock approach, throwing out accusations against one entity to see if they can gain political traction with it, and if not, then move on to another scapegoat. Again, the targets are endless.

In recent times the US Right has focused on Islamicists and communist/socialists. The election of Zohran Mamdani as Mayor of New Youk and Abdul El-Sayed as Democratic candidate for the US Senate from Michigan has galvanised US conservatives into a frenzy of xenophobic bigotry over what they see as the imminent takeover of the self-proclaimed land of the free by Islamocommies. These forces of doom used to be called Islamofacists but once they introduced social democratic views into their political discourse, then they conveniently morphed into “commies” because as we all know, for the Right, socialists and communists are two sides of the same Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-Trotsyite-Castroite coin, with a little Ho Chi Minh, Guevara, Bukharin, Luxemburg and Angela Davis thrown in.

I will leave aside the differences between communism, socialism, social democracy and democratic socialism because my point (beyond the fact that most of the Right would not know the difference between them) is that for the fear mongers the objective is to tar them all with the same “othering” brush, to conflate them as one evil hydra and inflate them as an existential threat to the Republic and the Nation on which it purportedly stands.

NZ has its mini-me variant of that with the peripheral Right parties scapegoating various immigrant communities, most lately Indians (NZ First), and the ACT Party seeing Reds under beds anytime regulations are proposed or rights extended rather than curtailed. They both see Te Pati Maori as Maori-communists and the Green Party as wokester-communists seeking to infringe on the traditional rights of patriarchical white cis male capitalists (or, as they would say, “natural leaders”). The key point is that, because they have nothing positive to offer anyone other than their corporate patrons and pocket-liners and the mouth-breathing troglodytes who find reassurance in their hatreds, the NZ Right, just like the US Right, resorts to fear mongering as its weapon of choice.

Moving past the cut and thrust of the daily political news cycle, this is the lesson of the moment. The Right, both here and elsewhere (there are parallels to be drawn in places like Argentina and Brazil as well), have crested their wave of electoral popularity and run out of ideas for governing besides scripted corporate-speak mantras about financial discipline, governmental efficiency, law and order and traditional values. In fact, it is the lack of new policy ideas and initiatives that have made them electorally vulnerable, which is why they are now resorting to their weapon of choice.

I can only hope that the opposition in the US, NZ and other places like Argentina can focus on this syndrome as a campaign issue while offering a more positive vision for the future based on concrete proposals to improve commonweal conditions in the countries in which they are located. This means rejecting timidity, incrementalism and purely centrist-focused prescriptions in favour of bolder initiatives that move beyond cautious and defensive postures that serve to reaffirm the status quo by tinkering around the margins and onto more progressive actions that seek to accomplish more than just undo the bad Right policies of the recent past. That involves taxation, social policies, macro-economic re-orientation, foreign relations and a re-framing of what government exists to do and what the role of the State is in doing it–both a narrative and a substantive change, in other words–so that the tired recourse to fear-mongering can finally be put to rest based on a new, more inclusive social contract in which the license of consent is granted by the masses, not just by the entrenched elites of the current moment.

All of this must be done as a “sincere” campaign strategy rather than by hiding behind a curtain of centrism while the governing Right defends its position via fear mongering about “extremism” and assorted “other” assaults on the social fabric. Because in doing so, the Right inadvertently demonstrates that the time is ripe for more radical and progressive change. If being radical is to be progressive, then to be status quo is to be regressive. And regression is the breeding ground for fear-mongering “others.”

In this context bold change is not being ideologically extremist. It is being realistic and practical given the circumstances and alternatives. So Carpe diem!

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Reactionary bookends.

Now that election season is underway in NZ, I shall very briefly drift into a subject I usually tend to avoid: NZ domestic politics, and more specifically, policy agendas during election campaigns. In this case I would like to note two examples of what I (and many experts far more knowledgeable than myself) see as a major flaw in MMP, as exemplified by the Right’s embrace of populist themes.

First we have NZ First and its NZ version of MAGA mendacity. Slamming all contrary views as “woke,” sucking up to mining and fishing interests, going full xenophobic racist on Opposition MPs and communities of Chinese and Indian descent, dog-whistling homo- and trans-phobic hysteria, kissing the rear of the gun lobby and generally being grumpy old codgers is pretty rich for a party led by opportunistic rather than self-recognised Maori men in parliament. They may have been born Maori but when it comes to election agendas, they are anything but. In the US such type of MAGA people–people of color who use their color only when it suits them–have some processed snack-related names attached to them.

They are also unimaginative. They might have some One Nation/Hanson tropes in their policy mix but they are simply MAGA lite, Kiwi style. Insults included. It is a pity that a former academic political scientist is one of Peter’s main advisors because he certainly has the capacity to know better about how corrosive that brand of politics is to national cohesion and civilised debate. But for Peters and his colleagues the main goal is to exploit the MMP weakness and carve out the 5 percent needed to stay in parliament and perhaps figure in coalition discussions. Forget the other 95 percent of voters. What matters is to grab that sliver of electoral pie and if that means catering to the baser instincts of reactionary Deep State and other conspiracy theory types as well as religious bigots and assorted other anti-social ideological riff-raff, then so be it. They just need to reach the election threshold to convert their narcissistic self-interest into a parliamentary presence, perhaps as no more than a vanity project but also perhaps as a power-broker faction under MMP (as we have recently and sadly seen).

Phrased differently: The price of Grumpy Winston’s and Greasy-palmed Shane’s baubles is stirring the effluent pools of NZ politics. PM Luxon’s tepid response to NZ First’s antics demonstrate more than his personal weakness. It serves as a passive enabling device that allows racist and xenophobic beliefs to be mainstreamed into election politics. Luxon needs the financial contributions to National from certain ethnic-based business groups, but he also knows that on current polling he can either condemn MAGA-style sectarian and culture war extremism or he can hope to make a pact with the devil. He has chosen the latter.

Then there is ACT. One thing is obvious beyond the racism that is behind its Treaty Principles bill and its corporate pimping with regard to the Resources Management Reform bill. It also does not know or care about children or educators. Take its latest campaign initiative. With a strong female majority employee base, who does ACT expect to be the ones who use “reasonable force” on unruly middle and secondary school students, some of whom may either be large, violent or both. Does ACT propose to hire school discipline officers to deal with such students? If not, then what? Does Seymour, a posterboi for incels who says he has a girlfriend but whose obsession with former Green MP Golriz Ghahraman was more that of the stalker creep rather than the partisan policy difference type, have a clue about how to deal with contrarian, disturbed, distressed or alienated 12 to 18 year olds? And no, I do not include as “experience” chatting up minor females on social media.

Plus, what about teacher safety? Does he really expect teachers, not trained in physical restraint techniques and deescalation procedures, to be on the front line against “miscreant” students once things threaten to or get physical? How would the chickenhawk Paul Henry fare in a tussle with a teenager? Or will it be the Cruella de Ville South African woman who cracks the whip on those do not conform, obey and bow to the rod? And if all of this was somehow achievable, what is the cost and who pays for it? Is not ACT’s schtick about reducing budgetary deficits and bloated public sector expenditures? How does a “reasonable force” policy enter into that equation, both in terms of financial costs but also in terms of the human costs involved in the resort to physical control of young people? Who pays the price for all of this, and how?

Surely ACT know that the proposal is not practicable. But they can blame teacher’s unions for being “soft” on student misbehaviour and pass the buck onto education professionals who know how and why “reasonable force” is not the answer to problems that begin far from classrooms. They can talk about parental failure and inter-generational dependencies resulting in bad school-kid behaviour. They do so not because they care or have realistic remedies, but because as with the NZ First racists and xenophobes, they hope that it stirs the pot enough to keep them in parliament as power-brokers using the same logic as Winston and company.

And true to form, Luxon and fellow National Party leaders dutiful go along with the proposed uncosted “tough on youth crime” overreach.

I say all of this only slightly tongue in cheek because this is what NZ has become, at least on the Right. And from what I can see, the corporate media is happy to give them a platform to spew their nonsense as if it were common sense.

But here lies the rub, because “common sense” is what elites tell us how things should be, whereas good sense is what our hearts and minds tell us what should be regardless of what elites say. Something tells me that, notwithstanding the crackpots in Groundswell and other astroturf outfits associated with the Wellington protests a few years back, in their hearts and minds most Kiwis know that when it comes to public policy, Seymour, Peters and their entourages are no more than grandiloquent turd-polishers posing as politicians.