Category: Public services

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No surprises versus plausible deniability.

The sordid saga of Jevon McSkimming reminds us of the inherent tension between two largely unspoken axioms of democratic politics. These are the “no surprises” and “plausible deniability” rules. Infrequently formalised in written instructions and more commonly shared as unwritten understandings between government officials, these axioms require delicate juxtaposition in order to strike the right balance between institutional accountability, individual responsibility and partisan fortunes. Balancing the oft-counterpoised understandings speaks to the vertical and horizontal dimensions of institutional and individual accountability as well as issues of institutional self-preservation, bureaucratic “capture,” individual and partisan interests. It is a tough mix to get right and yet if democracy is to be served, that is exactly what must happen.

What will not be addressed here are the specifics of the McSkimming case or whether this balancing act occurs in authoritarian regimes. The former has been covered extensively by political commentators detailing the chronology of and participants in events leading to recent revelations. The latter usually do not concern themselves with addressing matters of public accountability so do not place as much emphasis on the axioms in question. They may not like surprises and tend to deny responsibility when called out on failures or misbehaviour, but authoritarians mostly discount the governance implications of their actions because mass contingent consent is not the basis of their rule.

In contrast, mass contingent consent and attendant faith in institutions, leaders and policies constitute the foundation of the social license that is given to political leaders and government institutions to perform their duties and responsibilities in democracies. That is the foundation of the vertical accountability that lies at the core of democratic governance–both leaders and institutions are accountable to the people that they ostensibly serve. Several mechanisms ensure vertical accountability–elections being the ultimate adjudicator of government performance–including entities like inspectors general of agencies, comptrollers, auditors, boards of inquiry, independent commissions, parliamentary committees and in-house regulation enforcement of institutional and personal standards of conduct. Electorates vote for governments to carry out a given policy agenda, and the institutional apparatus is responsible to the electorate via independent means as well as through the mediation of that government for implementation of that agenda within the framework of the law.

Unfortunately in practice many oversight agencies like the Independent Police Complaints Authority (IPCA), the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security prior to the Zaoui case and various parliamentary committees developed reputations for having been the subjects of “bureaucratic capture” whereby the entities that they are supposed to monitor wind up controlling what they can see and do when it comes to their oversight and investigation functions. In some instances they and Royal Commissions of Inquiry have been suspected of being “whitewashing” devices at the service of the government of the day or the agencies they oversee or investigate. This erodes public trust and promotes insularity, unethical behaviour and organisational defensiveness within public bureaucracies, especially those in the security and intelligence arenas.

Whether they are subject to bureaucratic capture or not, where institutional traditions in NZ government agencies and amongst some parts of the political class reward unaccountable practices, there may exist the sense that there will be limited to no consequences for untoward behaviour because the agencies in which they serve or depend on close ranks and shield them when things “hit the fan.” If vertical accountability mechanisms are weak or rigged against honest and transparent scrutiny and responsible exercise of duty, then the institutional culture in government agencies may develop forms of self-preservation that usurp legitimate public accountability.

This organizational pathology is known as a culture of impunity. Officials and agencies get away with misbehaviour because they are protected by their peers and political superiors, and the more that happens and the longer a tradition of doing so exists within any given agency, the more likely that, absent major institutional reform, that will be the default response when individual and organisational problems arise.

It is in this context that the tension between the “no surprises” and “plausible deniability” axioms come into play. The “no surprises” policy is simple: subordinates inform superiors in advance of problems or trouble (personal, political, institutional) that may be coming their way. This provides government leaders the opportunity to prepare contingency plans for what they know is coming. That involves more than crisis management and PR spin campaigns that “get out in front” of the emerging story. It may or may not involve diversion tactics and “flooding the zone with s**t.” It also offers leaders the chance to engage in proactive reforms that are already underway when the issue in question reaches the public domain.

“No surprises” is a discrete foundation of vertical accountability in democracies that is critical to informed decision-making and government stability. It prevents smaller problems from metastasizing into institutional or political crises and reassures and reaffirms public faith and trust. It has a horizontal accountability dimension in that warnings embedded in the “no surprises” (or “head’s up) policy can be shared with other agencies not specifically involved in the matter at hand. For example, the Police could have shared information about the Christchurch terrorist that was derived from investigations into criminal matters with their intelligence counterparts had they not been governed by a “siloed” inter-agency information-sharing policy. In other words, there was an institutional antipathy towards horizontal accountability between the NZ Police and other security agencies that prevented proactive action that might have prevented the March 15 mosque attacks.

Conversely, the intelligence community warns the Police about potential foreign government involvement in criminal enterprises targeting NZ. In may instances this is part and parcel of inter-agency information sharing, but it also is clear that does not always happen and that in NZ accountability between agencies (again, the horizontal dimension of public accountability) is not a commonly observed standard in practice.

Tension in governance occurs because there is another side of the coin when it comes to institutional and political accountability: “plausible deniability.” Modern democratic leaders have learned that often the best way to deal with crises is to deny any knowledge or involvement in them and to that end ensure that no evidence can come to light tying them to any specific event, order or action. Instead, the problem is blamed on people or entities further down in government organisational charts. Reagan and George H.W. Bush denied any involvement in the Iran-Contra affair even thought the plotting and scheming was done down the hall from the Oval Office in the West Wing. Donald Trump denies knowing who the people are that he pardons or consorts with (consensually or not) before they become controversial, and instead uses diversions and personal character assassination to shift attention onto others. Helen Clark knew nothing about the Urewera raids before they happened and John Key knew nothing in advance about the Kim Dotcom raids or assorted acts of cabinet misbehaviour. They were then “surprised” when these events hit the public eye but could plausibly deny that they were involved in them, thereby escaping responsibility for the excesses committed in each case (in which the NZ Police were heavily involved). Although McSkimming rose to senior rank in the NZ Police during the Ardern/Hipkins government, Mr. Hipkins apparently knew nothing about his problematic proclivities, as is the case with the current government leadership, including the Minister of Police.

I have experience with this axiom. During my stay in the US Department of Defense I was advised to make sure that the paper trail ended at the desk of someone above me in the Pentagon pecking order. Otherwise I would be made the scapegoat should controversial actions that I was involved with became a matter of public interest. It did not matter that these actions “came from the top,” that is, were ordered by people much higher up in the US security policy-making food chain and way above my pay rate. Instead, senior officials made sure that should things hit the fan, so to speak, on some policy issue in my field of responsibility, that the lowest ranking subordinate would take the blame/be blamed and those giving the orders would get a free pass on the accountability scales because there was no evidence specifically connecting their orders to subsequent actions taken further down the chain of command.

Those were the days of physical paper trails. Today they are email trails or even text trails, but their evidentiary worth is the same. The buck stops not with the higher-ups but with some schmuck further down the bureaucratic line. As it turns out, I was lucky. My immediate superior, a military man, told me that so long as he was kept informed about my “grey zone” activities, he would take responsibility for them should things go awry. In other words, he was combining “no surprises” with “plausible deniability” on my account. He was an honourable man dealing with difficult and complex situations involving security policy, bureaucratic practice, partisan politics and national interests.

Closer to recent events in NZ, revelations that emails directed by McSkimming investigators were re-directed to the Police Commissioner’s office on the latter’s orders raises the question as to wether plausible deniability outweighed the no surprises axiom in the handling of the investigation. It opens the question of retrospective accountability with regard to the Ardern government (what it knew and when it knew about McSkimming’s behaviour while it was in power). It raises questions about the possibility of outside influences and pressures on the investigators and their work, and if there were any, in what form and by who. In other words, both vertical and horizontal accountability appears at cursory glance to have been compromised in the handling of the matter.

To its credit, the IPCA pulled no punches in its assessment of the handing of the McSkimming case. It remains to be seen what consequences derive from its report, or whether a line will be drawn on the affair in the interests of–you guessed it–organizational reputation. Much will be made of the need to “move on” from this unfortunate episode, and already the civilian and uniformed leadership speak of a “few bad eggs” spoiling the otherwise good reputation of the NZ Police. You can insert your Tui ad here.

Again, it is very worth detailing the specifics of the IPCA report findings and the details of other potential acts of institutional coverups by the NZ Police (for example, handling of the investigation into the Roastbusters rapist gang that included the son of a police officer). But those are incidents that of themselves do not address patterns of institutional behaviour and the implications that they have for democratic governance. For that, dots must be joined and trends analysed in order for broader syndromes to be. identified and addressed.

In the end it appears that deeper reflection on accountability mechanisms, institutional culture, organizational practice and individual responsibility within official settings needs to be undertaken. Getting rid of a few “bad apples” from public institutions does not stop organizational pathologies from reproducing and infecting public agencies as a whole, especially when they are the product of long-standing traditions of institutional impunity in which the balance between “no surprises” and “plausible deniability” is tilted in favour of those who dishonour the public trust contingent consent given to them.

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A Fool’s Pied Piper.

For a while I have mentioned that too much of NZ political “thought” is re-hashed and often washed up ideas brought in from abroad. Both neo-liberalism and “Third Way” Labour positions were imported rather than organically generated from inside the NZ body politic and/or academia. With importation of foreign political ideas all too often comes stripping of the original ideas of any intellectual depth and nuance, particularly in the fields of public policy and political debate.

The latest example of this is ACT’s pimply-faced Ann Rand adolescent devotee’s use of libertarian thought as the basis for its policy approach. In recent years its leader, an Alfred E. Newman look-alike with serious racist and misogynist inclinations, has taken to exalting the virtues of the incestuous gnome that is currently president of Argentina, a Trump-loving mutton-chopped heavy metal grunting, formerly cross-dressing evil munchkin who takes advice from his cloned dogs, thinks orphaned children should be sold on open markets, denies that the Argentine dictatorship engaged in a “dirty war” that resulted in 30,000 deaths and countless tortured and disappeared people, believes blue-eyed people are more aesthetically and intellectually superior to brown eyed people, and who is now embroiled in a crypto currency meme fraud and a narco-trafficking scandal, all while his “chainsaw” approach to public sector reform has resulted in increased poverty, lower health and education standards, increased basic good prices like those of groceries and electricity, a hollowing out of the nation’s productive base and resultant wide-spread public unrest that is answered with indiscriminate police repression. Yep, that guy.

Which is why I say again, we are currently being governed by a crazy clown posse pushing a dumpster fire of anti-social, foreign inspired ideological garbage disguised as public management best practice. Stuff that.

But do not take this just from me. Have a look at this:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/this-is-why-you-dont-let-libertarians-run-your-country?fbclid=IwY2xjawNaSotleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHrKnIv4av64qdH339gFOGvGkGitLcQD-i6TN5dvgzWwXKTzCETs-JBy8FVUw_aem_6RfYz1vosbUC6-WP9FIxxg

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Comparative value versus comparative worth.

Recent NACTFirst government assaults on female pay equity, public sector employment, labour regulations and other worker’s rights (to say nothing of trying to roll back Maori Treaty rights and enshrine the primacy of property right in NZ law), got me to thinking about how we measure value and worth in society. I tend to think of society being made of contributors and freeloaders. Contributors add value to their communities, be they large or small. They can be paid or unpaid, employed or volunteers, able-bodied or disabled. To me, these people are of high value and therefore of high worth. Freeloaders, on the other hand, are those who ride on the backs of others’ contributions. They can be criminals or hedge fund managers, financial advisors and consultants, rightwing bloggers and conspiracy theorists, gossip columnists or politicians. They do not create value in or for society. They appropriate worth when they can by appraising and selling themselves for more than their real value.

To be clear, this measure is not about surplus value in production and by whom it is appropriated. It is about the relationship between real value and actual worth, which may or may not be related.

Three illustrations of the spurious relationship of value and worth come to mind. There is an old saying in Latin America that a great bargain is to buy a person for their real value and then sell them for what they say they are worth. On another front, someone I know runs a financial advisory service where he caters to what he initially called “high value people.” When it was pointed out to him that he was conflating material worth with human value, he changed his firm’s logo but we have not had a good relationship since (he caters to clients with disposable investment assets of USD 10 million or more, including professional athletes). In a similar but opposite vein, my late mother, an organic intellectual if there ever was one, used to say that our wage scales are completely upside down. We should pay rubbish collectors and sewer cleaners the highest salaries and pay professional athletes and entertainers the minimum wage. Her reasoning was that athletes and entertainers provide some value to society but will receive many more benefits, material and otherwise, from the public adulation that they engender, and they will receive these benefits long after their active careers are done. Their material worth far exceeds their social value.

Conversely, those who do what in India is considered Untouchable work are essential to the good functioning of modern society and in fact critical to maintaining public health and well-being. Because of the nature of their work and the negative exposures involved in it, their careers are short and often brutish. And yet in modern society the reverse is true when it comes to their value and worth. They are paid far less (as a measure of worth) than their actual value to society. Why is that? Even if we factor in things like education, entrepreneurship and other intervening variables and admit for the existence of objectively fair measures of value and worth (and by this I do not mean the stupid comparisons of nurses and teachers versus cops and firefighter’s pay or any other gendered work comparisons), it seems that oftentimes the relationship between actual societal value and perceived worth is perversely skewed in inversely proportional ways.

That brings me back to the secondary teacher’s strike this past week. Although I left academia over a decade ago before the academic Taylorists turned universities into scholastic sweatshops whose focus is on revenue generation rather than intellectual advancement, and who believe that Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (now sometimes replaced by “Economics and Management” as the back end of the “STEM” mantra) should be the sole focus of university research and teaching (eliminating the Arts and Social Sciences), I maintain contacts with a number of academics who have managed to keep their jobs and still pursue the life of the mind while teaching within the limits of current Taylorist curriculum paradigms and business models.

One of these contacts has just been made redundant by the NZ university to which they are affiliated (which is in the process of dismantling its social science programs while still recruiting students for admission in to them), so is considering turning to secondary school teaching as a new career path. They are also thinking about working in a policy analyst role, including in a parliamentary or political party setting. As part of the research and preparation process for that transition, and in light of the current stand-off between the government and secondary teacher’s union about cost-of-living (COLA) wage increases, they reached out to fellow colleagues who do research on related subjects in order to get a comparative idea of wages in those career fields. Although there are a number of interesting facts that came from the materials that my contact received that are worth discussing at another time, this one was shared with me. It involves the comparative base remuneration of backbench MPs and the upper end of teacher’s pay scales.

The data begs some questions. Who brings more value to NZ society, MPs or teachers? How is their value measured? What is worth more to NZ society, politicians or teachers? How is their (comparative) worth measured? Comparatively speaking, in terms of their contributions to NZ society, who is valued more and who is worth more? More broadly, is there a relationship between value and worth in NZ?

As for the specifics of the chart. Why is is the worth of backbench MPs (as measured in wages) significantly higher than that of the most experienced and well paid teachers? Since MPs also receive non-wage benefits such as accomodation and travel allowances and are often “comped” by lobbyists and other interlocutors in the form of meals and other incidentals, why is the wage gap between them and the most experienced teachers so significant? As for work equivalence, it can be argued that both MPs and teachers work long hours beyond their assigned time in class or in the parliament debating chamber, and both sacrifice family life and other leisure pursuits in order to do so. Both have formal work hours and yet engage in much informal work (say, coaching sports teams or participating in civic groups). Both MPs and teachers have invested much time and resources into their own educations and qualifications as well as through practical experience. So why the difference in worth if their value to society is similar if not equal? Or is their value not equal and hence their worth simply reflects the difference?

That last question is key. Does NZ society value MPs more than teachers and thus pay them more as a measure of their worth? Admitting for a degree of autonomy in setting institutional wage standards, are the average parliamentarians worth that much more than the most experienced teachers? Is their comparative worth–and that of teachers–based on any measure of value?

Perhaps there is a market-based answer to the question such as “politicians are rare gems that are hard to find while teachers are a dime a dozen because they are like pebbles on a beach, etc.” But even if this were true, perhaps scarcity of a resource is not a true measure of value. Memecoins such as $TRUMP may be worth much (+USD8.36/coin with a market cap of over USD 1.6 billion) but do they have any intrinsic or tangible value?

I will leave it for readers to ponder these questions and the more general question about the relationship of social value and material worth. However, one thing should be clear. Only when that relationship is defined and put into practice can we begin to speak of working towards a fair and equitable democratic capitalist society.

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Some comments on NZ politics.

I had some time on my hands the past few days so spent more attention than usual consuming news about NZ domestic politics. My interests tend to lie further afield, but recent government assaults on Maori rights, women’s pay equity, constitutional neutrality, environmental, health and safety regulations, equitable taxation policy, state sector employment, Labour’s pandemic response and assorted other lesser insults have drawn me, perhaps like a moth to flame, to seek some illumination on the local political scene. These are a few tidbits that I took away this week., translated into social media posts.

  1. Chloe Swarbrick’s remarks about the government’s cowardice on the issue of Palestinian statehood in the wake of Israeli actions in Gaza.:

First all, Swarbrick is correct. If only six coalition MPs had some moral-ethical courage, then NZ could join the majority of the international community, including three of the 5 Eyes partners, in condemning Israel’s collective punishment of all Palestinians for the sins of Hamas on October 7, 2023, including the IDF’s use of ethnic cleansing and mass starvation as a means to that end. For that she was told to apologise by the Speaker (and National MP) for using the phrase “if six…members had a spine” and when she did not, ordered to leave the debating chamber. and later “named.” This is my comment on social media: “Peters, Jones and Seymour voice ugly boorish insults against their opponents (including racist taunts) and are allowed to remain in the House. Swarbrick correctly points out the spineless behaviour of government MPs regarding Gaza and gets thrown out. So much for Speaker impartiality” (referencing routine remarks made by the NZ First and Act leaders).

Also, as an aside to the particulars of this case, I should note that in light of prior history by Brownlee and other conservative MPs when it comes to progressive female members, there is a whiff of misogyny in the ruling. As a relative said to me (paraphrased here), male MPs can be loud, rude, condescending and bombastic when speaking to the House, but women cannot get angry or raise their voices even in defense of universal values. Now, I realise that Brownlee fashions himself as “old school” when it comes to parliamentary ethics and protocols, but if these boy’s club unwritten rules are part of the “old school” way of doing parliamentary politics, I say that he and others of his ilk need to be woken from their Rip Van Winkle stupor and shown the door.

By way of a broader backdrop, we should be clear that for all of its talk about foreign policy independence and having stood up to the US and its Anglophone allies with the 1985 non-nuclear declaration, NZ is a diplomatic follower, not a leader. It waits until other States make a move or show initiative on sticky international issues or events, then coattails on whatever seems most beneficial over the short-term. It pays lip service to international rules and norms but sniffs the wind when foreign policy smoke is in the air.

This syndrome has been accentuated in recent decades, particularly by National-led governments, and is now at rock bottom when it comes to NZ supination to other’s interests. The governing coalition’s current lack of resolve when it comes to denouncing the Palestinian catastrophe and upholding the right to Palestinian self-determination can be attributed to slavish obsequiousness to the US (Trump) position on the matter, perhaps abetted by the influence of the NZ Israeli lobby. Whatever ulterior ends the coalition of chaos may think that this approach may serve vis a vis the bilateral relationship with the US, they are sorely mistaken. NZ is just another squirrel looking for that elusive US nut.

2) On the decision to remove Maori words from schoolbooks :

I wrote “a main tool of cultural erasure is to remove all public references in a language other than that of the dominant social group. The CCP does it to the Uyghurs in the PRC. The excuse for doing so is usually to promote assimilation and social cohesion. The real motive is darker.”

I could go on about the attempts to erase indigenous languages and dialects in the public sphere is a host of places, particularly in Latin America, the region I am most familiar with, but also in Canada, the US, Africa and parts of the Pacific. The practice was so common in the colonial past that some linguists have written about the cultural genocide that follows erasing of a native language. When ti comes to identity and cultural preservation, language (and words) matter.

What is also remarkable is that it is well accepted that, rather than “confusing” in the Education Minister’s words, learning other languages at an early age promotes brain development and complex thought. Defending the removal of Maori words from children’s books is therefore doubly retrograde: it is the first step of an attempt at cultural erasure (at least in the public space), bookending similar attempts to remove te reo from public buildings and signage; and it is counter-productive (and counter-factual) as a pedagogical approach. Shame on Erica Stanford and her acolytes! And if a few Maori words are confusing, why not remove all non-English words from school books? Sacre bleu!

3) On the refusal of former Labour Ministers to front up to a public hearing of the Royal Common of Inquiry into the Pandemic Response:

“Why front up to a kangaroo court when the kangaroo judges are the political opposition? Especially after providing written answers to documented questions supplied by the kangaroos about events long in the public domain? Smacks of an ex-post political beat-up best avoided.” The fact that the Inquiry was instigated by ACT and NZ First as a partisan bludgeon after listening to conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers appears lost on the corporate media (partisan media like Plunket, Bridges and Hoskings just megaphone the anti-Labour lines). In fact, Labour should be pushing back harder at the political instigators, for example by questioning how they came to get involved in the witch hunt after actively supporting Labour’s pandemic response at the time, and who feeds them their talking points.

4) On a serving NZDF member is standing trial for espionage.

“The espionage charge against a serving NZ soldier is remarkable. The defendant is accused of working for, at the behest, or on behalf of a foreign State. Many questions arise from soldier’s court martial/trial. 1st: Which State? 2nd: what motive(s)? 3rd: what was compromised?”

Charging an active duty NZDF member with spying is remarkable because that charge–espionage– is only brought if the accused is suspected of working as a covert foreign agent. It does not refer to any domestic interlocutor., patron or client. I seem to recall at the time of the arrest that the soldier was detained for having objectionable material, presumably extremist literature (the military does not court martial people for having porn unless it is of the illegal variety). The soldier was also said to have links to right wing white supremacist groups. So it would be premature and very possibly wrong to finger the PRC as the puppet master (as the usual suspect). Given its other dark activities in NZ, Russia is a possibility. Or some other State. What should be clear is that it would not be an ally of the NZDF like the US, UK, Australia, Canada, France or other countries that routinely share higher-level intelligence with the NZDF (say, on operations, deployments, capabilities and tactics) that the soldier could not easily access unless s/he was in a military intelligence billet.

There could be a mix of motives involved, including money, sex and ideology. The counter-intelligence aspects of uncovering the suspected spy are also worth considering. In that light the trial should be interesting and revelatory, assuming that coverage is not effectively shut down for reasons of national security (yeah, right).

Should it be your inclination, feel free to weigh in within the KP rules of discourse.







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Sending in the Marines.

One of the basic foundations of democratic civil-military relations is that the active duty military is organised and trained to fight and defeat foreign enemies in combat–that is, by using organised lethal force until the enemy is defeated. Domestic security is a matter of national/federal, state and local law enforcement. Their training and organization is in ensuring via non-combat means civilian adherence to the rule of law. Although use of lethal force is one component of domestic law enforcement, it is constrained by legal and social frameworks in a way that military combat lethality is not (and even then the military is supposed to adhere to the Laws of War, both in terms of jus ad bellum (reasons for going to war) and jus in bello (conduct in war)). Domestic security is about keeping the peace and maintaining control of civilian populations; external security is about prevailing over armed adversaries of the State.

Domestic and external security represent the Janus faces of what Althusser and others labeled the repressive state apparatuses (RSAs). Both internal and externally-focused repressive apparatuses are wrapped around an inner core of ideology, usually framed as patriotism, nationalism and selfless sacrifice (for external agencies) and community service, protection and duty of care (for internal agencies). There are elements and agencies other than the military and uniformed constabulary services in the RSAs, including such things as paramilitary units and criminal courts, that involve several shades of grey when it comes to repressive focus. The US is an exemplar in this regard, what with its proliferation of security agencies and militarization of local police forces, but the principle of separation between domestic and external repression has long been considered sacrosanct in US civil-military relations. So much so that the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act (18 U.S.C. 1385) specifically prohibits the use of active duty troops for domestic security purposes unless authorized by Congress.

In the US reserve military units such as the National Guard are called upon during periods of serious security crisis as a backup to local law enforcement. This usually happens at the orders of the State government but can happen by order of the president in extenuating circumstances. In the majority of cases they do not carry combat weaponry, instead deploying non-lethal tools appropriate for their law enforcement support roles (say, tear gas for crowd control).

Both reserve and active duty military can and are used for natural disaster and humanitarian relief, but they do not carry live weapons when doing so. Their assistance is focused on provision of critical goods and services to affected communities, not enforcing security.

While Trump appears to be within his authority to order the California National Guard into Los Angeles for law enforcement purposes, “federalising” what should normally be the Governor’s decision, and may even have authority to order other state’s National Guard units to join the forces gathered in LA (there is debate on this), his ordering of a US Marine infantry brigade into LA is an egregious assault on the separation of internal and external security functions under democratic conditions and a major erosion of a core tenet of US civil-military relations. The Marines are trained and organised to seek out and destroy the enemy, not practice crowd control. Their entire orientation is towards prevailing in lethal combat, not convincing rowdy crowds engaging in protest and dissidence to go home.

Perhaps the deployment of Marines is an intimidation tactic and they will not be carrying combat weapons or live ammunition. But if they are, we are now facing the real prospect of US soldiers killing US citizens and residents on home soil.

Years ago I shared space with the Haiti Task Force in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. I heard them discussing sending in Marines to quell anti-American violence in Port-au-Prince (there is a history of US Marines in Haiti). I chimed in from the sidelines that I thought it was a bad idea to use combat troops to engage in what was supposed to be civilian peace enforcement operations. The US has military police and paramilitary units like the US Marshalls and Border Patrol (and now ICE!) who train in those sort of things. I was ignored by my colleagues and a brigade of Marines were ordered and deployed to enforce the peace. When confronted by a rock-throwing mob they opened fire, killing over 100 people. The streets did in fact go quiet.

I asked the head of the Haiti Task Force why they chose that option when there were others available. He simply said that the people to be confronted where foreigners on foreign soil, so it was permissible to use combat troops for crowd control under those circumstances. In fact, today US private military contractors have been engaged to do exactly the same thing in Haiti given the breakdown in law and order there. It seems like in Haiti history repeats, but in different garb.

More importantly, deployment of Marines to LA is not a case of lethally confronting foreigners on foreign soil. For all the talk of “illegal aliens” and “invasion,” the protesters are on US soil exercising their right to peacefully protest and dissent. Those who act violently certainly can be handled by local law enforcement without the resort to combat-oriented troops whose missions primarily involved killing people abroad.

This is more than authoritarian-minded over-reach by a fear-mongering president. It is what a democracy’s slide into dictatorship looks like.

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A culture of cruelty.

In February I wrote a post about “the politics of cruelty” in which I highlighted the mean-spirited commonalities of recently elected rightwing governments in the US, NZ, Italy and other democracies. In this post I shall expand on them with reference to some of the authoritarian features that I researched and wrote about when I was a young academic.

In the 1980s and early 1990s when I wrote about Argentine and South American authoritarianism, I borrowed the phrase “cultura del miedo” (culture of fear) from Juan Corradi, Guillermo O’Donnell, Norberto Lechner and others to characterise the social anomaly that exists in a country ruled by a state terror regime like the “Proceso de Reorganizacion Nacional” in Argentina from 1976 to 1983. In those circumstances individual psycho-pathologies are often rooted in the pervasive feelings of dread, vulnerability and hopelessness brought about by the regime’s use of death squads, disappearances and other violent authoritarian measures to enforce public compliance with their edicts. That pervasive sense of fear extends to collective life, something that was and is a deliberate objective of authoritarians because it produces a sense of survivalist alienation and social atomisation in the body politic, thereby disrupting basic horizontal bonds between and within groups in civil society (you can see one of my essays that uses this concept here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2111080).

In recent years and especially since Trump’s re-election in the US, Javier Milei’s election in Argentina and the election of the right wing “chaos coalition” in NZ, I see an extension of this concept in what I will call the culture of cruelty. A culture of cruelty is one in which social groups and organisations, including governments, engage in particularly cruel behaviour in order to punish, humiliate and revel in the plight of others, particularly political opponents and scapegoated social out-groups. We only need to think of Trump’s deportation policies and the behaviour of his immigration Gestapo, ICE, to see the culture of cruelty at work. We can see it is the DOGE chainsaw approach to public sector employment and federal regulations. We can see it at MAGA rallies. It is personalised in the behaviour of Trump advisors like Stephen Miller, Karoline Leavitt and Tom Homan, who show utter contempt for the suffering their policies have caused and in fact appear to relish being able to rub in the fact that they can act with apparent impunity due to the weakness of the courts and congressional or partisan complicity. 

In fact, the “culture of impunity” is another characteristic of authoritarianism that I and others wrote about three decades go, and it goes hand-in-hand with the culture of fear because it is the feeling of impunity that leads dictatorships to use wanton repression as an instrument of subjugation of the popular will. In other words, the culture of regime impunity leads to the imposition of a culture of fear in society. That is what is at work, to various degrees, under Trump, Milei, the evil clown circus currently ruling NZ (especially in the ACT and NZ First parties) and in other former liberal democracies today.

This culture is mean-spirited and malicious. In many instances it is fuelled by hatred of “others,” be they immigrants, indigenous people, people of colour or different faiths, those who are sexually “deviant” from “traditional” norms (i.e. non-binary) and others who do not conform to a given set of social mores or expectations or are simply easy scapegoats given public attitudes. It is facilitated by the increased vulgarisation of social discourse and erosion of societal norms regarding behaviour and civic exchange, now megaphoned and accentuated by social media. It is cruelty for cruelty’s sake, and uses cruelty as a punishment, as an intimidation tactic and as a dark reminder of what is possible when one is targeted for any number of perceived transgressions

Cruelty can be physical, mental, emotional, social or any combination of them because its impact is not confined to just one dimension or aspect of human existence. It is “unusual” in that its objective is to cause disproportionate anxiety, anguish, stress and suffering to targeted people and groups beyond whatever duress might (or might not) be warranted under the circumstances. The term “scarred for life” is an accurate depiction of the broader long-term effects that cruelty can have on the human subject. And when it comes to public policy or social exchange among groups, that is exactly what perpetrators hope to achieve via its use: it psychologically traumatises people and groups in the moment as well as their individual and collective memories, something that renders asunder the social fabric into which they were previously woven.

As is the case with torture (which is inherently cruel), social and political cruelty works. Not so much as an instrument to induce cooperation from those otherwise disposed not to give it, but as a disincentive, revenge or retribution tool against them.

I could write more about the subject but this is not the place to do so. However, I hope that the notion is clear. We are now in an era where the culture and politics of cruelty have become integral features of democratic politics in at least some Western societies (I will leave aside for the moment the fear that exists in countries ruled by authoritarian regimes like those in Russia, China or Nicaragua). And if the cultures of impunity that have led to the imposition of these growing cultures of cruelty and fear in Western societies continues unchecked, then another social pathology will follow–the reaping or harvesting of fear (“cosecha del miedo,” in O’Donnell’s words) in the form of a legacy of damaged people and institutions resultant from the practice.

Should that happen, then democracy as a social construct and a method of governance will never be the same.

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Personal Link: The Cool One has Gone.

Most KP readers will not know that I was a jazz DJ in Chicago and Washington DC while in grad school in the early and mid 1980s. I started at WHPK in Hyde Park, the U. Chicago student radio station. In DC I joined WPFW as a grave shift host, then a morning drive show host (a show called Sui Generis, both for its meaning and as a hat tip to the Argentine rock group of that name). I also had a carrell at the Library of Congress (LoC), first up under the dome of the main building with its extraordinary views of the Mall looking west towards the Lincoln Memorial, and then in the building behind the dome when refurbishments were made on it.

At some point I met one of the few other white DJs at WPFW (part of the Pacifica network that had stations in LA and NYC), which was a community sponsored black majority-staffed public radio station that still operates and features jazz, blues, world music and plenty of progressive news shows, including one hosted by the Nation of Islam (a guy called Askia Muhammed was the host). It was a cool place in which to to do music and after a short bumpy start with some of the old-timers I was well received and had good listenership numbers.

It turns out the other white guy, whose show was named Sounds of Surprise, worked in the Library of Congress in its Recorded Sound division. That division was located on the lower floors of the Law Library across Independence Ave from the main building. I used to go over there because I had a stacks pass for the foreign law archives given to me by the LoC’s Hispanic Division, something that I needed for my Ph.D. thesis research on the Argentine State because it was the only place where the complete records of Argentina’s Boletin Oficial were located (since various Argentine military regimes were prone to destroying all records of previous governments, especially those of the 1946-55 Peronist regime that was the starting point of my research). Since the LoC records were the most complete in the world, better than what could be obtained in Buenos Aires, I was very fortunate to have applied for and received that carrell as a LoC Visiting Scholar.

I mentioned this to the white DJ guy at WPFW and we started doing lunches at the Law School penthouse cafeteria (nice views to the south) and, during the warmer months, at his apartment in a brownstone down the street SE of the Library in Capitol Hill. He played incredibly rare old records (even 78s!) for me from his personal and the library collections that he was working on, and because he knew that I was especially a fan of Thelonious Monk, he always had some Monk on tap as well as a cold bottle of beer with which to enjoy the music. Those were some special days.

We stayed good friends during that time (1982-85) even though I travelled to Argentina regularly for field research and eventually gave up my WPFW show to write up the thesis in residence back at the University of Chicago. Whenever I was in DC we would catch up for more music (sometimes live gigs) and liquid lunch sessions where he opened my eyes and ears to a range of music and technologies (such as CDs) that I would not have understood had he not guided me through the intricacies of them. During that time he introduced me to his long-standing Eastern European partner (a journalist) and his newer apartment off of Dupont Circle in a building that they shared with Christopher Hitchens, among others of political bent.

Most notably, he came down to Rio for Carnaval when my first wife and family and I were living there in early 1987 during a Fulbright Scholarship research trip to Argentina and Brazil. Let’s just say that it was an eye-opening experience for him on a number of fronts, but he did get to enjoy some baile das panteiras (dance of the panthers–think of it as a lot of women and guys wrapped in very tiny lepoard skin outfits) close up and personal. He did not drink much but learned the joys of cacacha and the constant drumbeat of the street batucadas that echoed throughout the 10 days of Lent. That trip left an indelible impression on him and he even got some sun (unusual, for such an indoors kind of guy).

Sadly, after I moved to California, then Arizona, then Florida and then to NZ over the ensuing decade, we slowly lost touch, although we did communicate through a music blog that he ran in parallel to all of his other endeavours. We talked about his coming to NZ but it never came about because his health began to fail and I got wrapped up in triathlons and security related things that compounded the tyranny of distance that prevented us from maintaining closer ties. I regret that very much. In any case, you can find his extraordinary blog Lets Cool One here (its name comes from a Monk song): https://larryappelbaum.wordpress.com/

His name was Larry Appelbaum, and he was an extraordinary person.

May there always be a rhythm and musical surprise wherever you are, querido Larry!

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/11/arts/music/larry-appelbaum-dead.html?fbclid=IwY2xjawI-08xleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHYL9tRk_UaMZqN5KSQxY64SKrnhOzG6wNoMvgq0BHffWVQyqkwCShhOZAg_aem__jD224k3NskcWJtwXzq7cQ

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School meals as human capital investment.

Although I do not usually write about NZ politics, I do follow them. I find that with the exception of a few commentators, coverage of domestic issues tends to be dominated by a fixation on personalities, scandals, “gotcha” questioning, “he said, she said” accusations, nitpicking about the daily minutia of pretty trivial matters and clickbait hysteria about usually inconsequential issues (such as the recent freedom of navigation/power projection exercise conducted by a small Chinese flotilla/task force that in no way presented a serious threat to NZ interests). The world is blowing up before our eyes and NZ media fixates on parliamentary bullying, politician’s name-calling, assorted partisan spin attempts and even the rhyming word salad vitriol spewing from one bloated onanist’s mouth. Rarely is there a reflection on the why of some policy controversies that extend beyond the immediacies of the moment. Worse yet, what starts out in corporate media coverage then gets siloed and echo-chambered down into social media cesspools where hatred and contempt for “others” is the most salient distinguishing feature of discourse.

As a short response, here I would like to very briefly do a reflection on the why of school meals.

Here is why: The most precious resource that a country has is its human capital. The creativity/productivity of its people are the true measure of its strength. Investment in human capital involves short- and long-term direct and indirect costs in human capital development, one of which is schooling. Since it is proven that well-fed kids do better academically and are more socially adjusted than hungry or poorly fed kids, school meals have long been considered to be an integral part of the indirect investment in (future) human capital. If for whatever reason parents cannot provide nutritious school meals for their kids to take to school (there are many, most not due to parental negligence), most societies accept the need to provide them in the school system using taxpayer-provided funding. This is not just a trait of democratic educational systems, Authoritarians well understand the concept of human capital development so are often just as prone to providing nutritious school means (often with propaganda associating the regime with school meal-provision programs).

For example, Argentina (where I was raised asa child), Brazil and Chile (where I researched and worked as an adult) all provide school meals at no or small cost to caregivers. This happened during periods of democratic rule as well as dictatorship, with the exception that the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile selectively closed entire schools and health clinics in working class neighbourhoods in order to weaken what it considered to be sources of class resistance to its murderous neoliberalism (from which NZ took many lessons, including its Labor Law reforms of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the legacies of which remain to this day). Similarly, some of the biggest protests against the chainsaw cost-cutting approach adopted by ACT Party favourite Javier Milei in Argentina involves cutting back on school meals, something that because of its extensive history in Argentina is considered to be a birthright, especially amongst the working classes. Along with other socio-economic indicators like the over-all poverty rate (now nearly 60 percent of the population), child malnutrition has surged in the (again, poor and low income) areas where school meals are the most needed and yet where meal cutbacks have been zealously applied.

That may be by design, like in the Pincohet regime’s approach in its day. Milei’s sociopathy simply sees the lower income strata as vermin that should be eliminated, not nurtured. Parsing David Seymour’s rhetoric on his school meal program and leaving aside the dubious circumstances in which the contract for his program was let, one gets the impression that he shares Milei’s Social Darwinistic worldview. We can only hope that he does not share Milei’s view that “blue eyed people” are “aesthetically superior” to dark-eyed folk (true story: Milei actually said this in a country where the majority of the country do not have blue eyes). But then again, Seymour’s attacks on the Treaty and adjacent attacks on Maori “privileges” seem to be cut from the same cloth as Milei’s.

That having been duly noted, the bottom line is that in most countries and certainly in the developed world, current tax dollars are used to invest in pursuit of future human capital returns. It complements immigration policy in that regard, as immigration provides short-term human capital inflows that over time can be transferred into inter-generation human capital development through education and the infrastructures that go with it (like school meals). In fact, dividends on this investment come in the form of productive adults upon whom less public money is spent on welfare, health and crime mitigation services, and who in fact pay more in taxes than those who wind up as dependents of those public services. Surely the trade-off is worth it.

It is therefore mistaken and short-sighted to claim that it is not the NZ school system’s responsibility to provide student meals. Those meals are a collective good that serve both the present and future commonweal. As such, they should be nutritionally sufficient to help a young person’s development, not just a cost that must be kept low. Scrimping on meal costs and arguing about parental responsibility at the expense of boosting NZ’s future human capital is folly.

But that is where NZ is today.

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On the DOGE data sweep.

Among the many other problems associated with Musk/DOGE sending a fleet of teenage and twenty-something cultists to remove, copy and appropriate federal records like social security, medicaid and other supposedly protected data is the fact that the youngsters doing the data-removal, copying and security protocol and filter code over-writing have not been properly security vetted and have at best been temporarily deputised into public service to do the retrieval tasks. They are loyal to Musk first, second and third and MAGA/Trump fourth. They are not loyal to the US public whose data they have now appropriated. This means that all that data collected is potentially being compromised or at risk of wider exposure and can even be data-mined, gifted or sold off to third parties for purposes other than public sector auditing or transparency.

That is pretty mind-boggling. As someone who held a S/TS/SCI clearance before leaving the US for a better life overseas, I had to undergo two polygraph and background checks conducted by the Defence Intelligence Agency before being granted the clearances, and upon leaving the security community I was placed under a 20 year gag order on what I had seen/done, with any material that I wanted to use after the 20 year gag window period ended subject to DoD censoring and editing (should I have decided to write or speak about topics that included using classified materials). I say this because I handled material that was just pertinent to my official duties, not wide swathes of data about everything under the sun, so the lack of security vetting of Musk’s minions is, again, astonishingly wrong.

This has the potential to end very badly, not just for the US government or what will be left of it after this reckless DOGE wrecking ball is done with it, but for the millions of people whose data can now be manipulated and used for untoward ends. We must remember that Musk is a dishonest and unscrupulous person, his cult minions and other “techbros” subscribe to variant of an anti-democratic and Social Darwinistic ideology known as “neoreactionism,” and MAGA acolytes like Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Pam Biondi and the authors of Project 2025 now installed in the corridors of power are all too happy to use any means to pursue the Trump/Musk agenda. Since all of these people are disreputable curs, none can be trusted to prevent misuse of personal confidential data for revenge, profit or other non-accountable purposes.

The questions then become: who benefits from the data-grabbing move? The GOP? Putin? The techbro oligarchy? What is the end game?

Whatever it is, it is a disaster in the making.

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Political societies and economic preferences.

Much discussion has been held over the Regulatory Standards Bill (RSB), the latest in a series of rightwing attempts to enshrine into law pro-market precepts such as the primacy of private property ownership. Underneath the good governance and economic efficiency gobbledegook language of the Bill is a desire to strip back regulations in order to give capitalists of various stripes more latitude of action.

The RSB is interesting for two reasons. One, it is the type of omnibus bill that is designed to supersede other legislation in the policy enforcement chain. It is a “mother of all laws” or foundational stone type of legislation that its proponents hope will serve as a basis for future legislative reforms and policy-making and to which all existing laws must be retro-fitted. Although it varies in its NZ specifics, it emulates the “Ley Omnibus” (later named “Ley Bases” (Base Law) pushed through by Argentine president Javier Milei last year, which basically allows for the dismantling of the Argentine State bureaucracy, reform of labor and environmental laws, slashes the public budget, and opens the economy to foreign investment.

As a result, although the inflation rate has been drastically reduced and some foreign investors have taken interest in the Argentine economy, the poverty rate now reaches nearly 60 percent, health indicators (and facilities) have cratered, pension and social welfare plans have been decimated, unemployment and crime have risen, and basic public services are on life support (including power and water provision in some areas). Despite these deleterious effects, Milei’s “chainsaw” approach has been celebrated by the ACT Party, sponsor of the RSB and its predecessors, so here again we see an example of NZ politicians borrowing concepts from similarly-minded foreign governments.

They are not alone: the incoming Trump administration’s Project 2025 and Project 47 copy aspects of Hungarian president Viktor Orban’s authoritarian-minded constitutional reforms (since it centralises power in the Executive Branch and restricts civil liberties and opposition rights). More ominously, because it is an omnibus bill that redraws the NZ constitutional map in a preferred image, it echoes the Nazi “Empowerment Law” that Hitler pushed through in the German parliament after the was named Chancellor in 1933, albeit without the repressive powers later confirmed upon him. As in the case with Milei and his Base Law (and Hitler at the beginning of his legislative campaign), the RSB depends on securing a slim parliamentary majority in order to to pass into law.

What is important to note is that such omnibus legislation is most often used in democracies by authoritarian-minded politicians who are afraid that they cannot get their policy reforms passed and accepted otherwise. It is a soft form of constitutional coup whereby the “rules of the game” are stacked via legislative reform in favour of a specific set of interests, not the public good. It is a “soft” type of coup because it uses lawful/constitutional means to achieve its ends. In a perverse way it is a sign of weakness that its proponents do so, as if they know that their preferred policy prescriptions will be rejected by the electorate in the absence of an overarching law forcing the public to follow them.

To be clear, here the focus is on omnibus or foundational laws, not more specifically drawn laws that follow from them. For example, commercial and environmental law cover aspects of social and economic life but are not “foundational” in the sense that they do not provide cornerstone underpinnings to civil and criminal law, which in turn address detailed and specific rights and obligations regarding various aspects of social life, including enforcement of those rights and obligations by an independent judiciary. “Penalties under the law” refer to this level secondary of judicial oversight, which in turn is governed by foundational principles enshrined in omnibus legislation (which is the province of constitutional law).

There is a second, more fundamental problem with this approach. It involves the distinction between political society and economic society and why they should not be intertwined.

Political societies are aggregations of people within given physical boundaries who agree upon or are forced to accept certain universally-binding rules regarding representation, leadership and collective decision-making. Because NZ is the subject of this post, we shall leave aside for the moment various authoritarian political communities. As a liberal democracy, NZ has a form of rule based on majority contingent consent to the system as given, formally expressed through elections but more granularly in the everyday actions of voters who accept their positions in the social order. People go to work, play, attend school, have relationships and generally comport themselves as members of society in accordance with commonly accepted notions of acceptable behaviour (e.g., “live and let live,” “due onto others as one would do onto oneself,” respect difference and the rules of the road, etc.). But that majority consent to any given democratic rule is contingent on public expectations being met, both materially as well as politically. Political and economic societies are formed to address (and shape) those expectations.

Economic societies are aggregations of people operating within a given productive structure, making things and generating surpluses from their labor and labor-saving inventions while exchanging goods and services. “Homo economicus” is non-political. S/he maximises economic opportunities in order to pursue material interests. The ways of doing so are many and can involve collective as well as individual effort, which is often determined by the type and modalities of production (industrial, agricultural, mixed, etc.) and the material goods being pursued.

Vulgar structuralist thought holds that the type of economic society determines what type of civil and political society emerge from it. To this day, proponents of things like (neo)modernisation theory adhere to this belief. But such views offer a simplistic read on the interplay between economic and non-economic factors, so claims such as “free markets lead to democracy,” and ” political parties are the political equivalent of economic agents in the productive process” are overdrawn at best. A more nuanced take is that civil and political life may have a grounding in economic life but are not reducible to or epiphenomena of it. In some instances, say in the cultural sphere, human behaviour is not a surface reflection of an underlying economic reality or framework.

Political society is about collective governance and civil engagement. In democracies it involves a “legal” agreement, compact, or contract about the way in which the political order should be governed, which involves ostensibly neutral institutions and processes, As such, it can co-exist with a number of economic arrangements and is not inherently linked to any one. For example, over the years democracy has coexisted comfortably with varieties of capitalism and socialism. Authoritarianism has also co-existed with capitalism and socialism. The particular combination of economic framework and governance structure defines specific variants of regime type: NZ is a “liberal” democracy because it is based on a capitalist economic foundation (first settler colonialist, now primary good export, real estate ownership and services dependent production). North Korea is a Stalinist country because it combines one-party authoritarian rule with State control of the mixed industrial/agrarian economy.

What this means is that laws in a democracy are basically a means of adjudicating disputes, avoiding collective conflicts and regulating individual and collective behaviour regardless of economic status (think of the “justice is blind” adage). Ideally, they should be agnostic or neutral with regard to economic preferences because it is possible that future generations of voters will elect to support different types of economic arrangements that they believe suit their collective and individual material interests better than current schemes.

But that is not what has happened. In NZ and elsewhere in liberal democracies, things like private property rights have been enshrined in law and thereby protected by the State. The evolution of this marriage of political and economic societies is complex but the bottom line is that NZ is a capitalist society governed by a democratic capitalist State that enforces the primacy of capital above all other things. To be sure, much lip service is given to civil liberties, human rights, equality before the law, even adherence to the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. But the foundation of the modern NZ State is not based on a contract between interested parties such as the agents who signed the Treaty, or on respect for the rule of law per se, but on the structural dependence of NZ society on capitalism. The role of the NZ State is to help resolve the contradictions that inevitably emergence in a political system where a minority of voters control major parts of the productive apparatus but rely on the labour of others (wage labour) in order to generate the material surpluses (profits) that allow them to exercise (indirect) political as well as (direct) economic control in NZ society.

The RSB seeks to further deepen that structural dependence of NZ society on capital by giving certain capitalist fractions more leeway in the conduct of their self-interested affairs. When fully implemented it will atomise wage-labor both in and out of production while consolidating specific types of capitalist structural control. In that light the RSB codifies the State’s role (or non-role) in facilitating capitalists’ (aka businesses) self-interested pursuit of profit. From then on self-interested maximisers of opportunities, individual and corporate, will seek comparative advantages in the deregulated marketplace.

The problem, again, is that enshrining a specific set of economic preferences or biases in a political charter interferes with voter’s freedom of choice when it comes to their own economic interests and desires. Depending on their circumstances and structural location in the productive apparatus, not everyone may be a fan of capitalism or accept the primacy of private property rights. Some may even prefer socialism, however that is defined. Prioritizing and facilitating the pursuit of specific economic preferences contravenes the commonweal (public interest) basis of democratic political charters such as that governing Aotearoa. Instead, it rigs the societal “game” in fair of a select few.

Other, more astute minds have already voiced their opposition to the RSB on a variety of grounds. Here the point is to remind readers of why omnibus bills are inherently anti-democratic even if they are legally constitutional, and why democratic political society is distinct from and should remain “above” economic society however construed. The former deals with universal values and interests; the latter involves specific sectorial interests and their material objectives in a system structurally based on the pursuit of profit. Although they may be overlapped in fact because of NZ’s history of structural dependence on capital, the public good is best served when the political/legal framework is agnostic or neutral when it comes to sectorial interests. That is what democratic collective bargaining systems are for and why political lobbying needs to be tightly regulated. Instead, the RSB seeks to tilt the game board in the direction of a specific set of interests, not the public interest at large.

Alas, although it is not meant to be, the rightwing NZ economic and political twain have met, and the outcome is the RSB. For the reasons outlined above, that is why it should be opposed.