In January this year, I was invited to give a talk to the Ōtaki Summer Camp, an annual gathering for people aged 17-35 who are interested in progressives politics. The investigative journalist Nicky Hager was one of the organisers and he suggested the topic: the worst government of my lifetime.

I had to think about that. Is it? Why? I decided he was right. Here’s the talk, which covers the political history that got us where we are today, why the people running the country today are worse than those who came before, and a whole lot of things we can do about it. Because nothing that’s happened since January has made me change my mind. It’s kinda long, but I hope you like.

I’d like to start on a note of hope. It’s from a novel: The Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. Some of you will have read it.

The book itself doesn’t start hopefully at all. Chapter 1 is horror and despair: sometime in the near future, a heat sink in India kills 20 million people.

But that catastrophe propels a global response to the climate crisis. The book is like a kaleidoscope, with dozens of different storylines: economic, scientific, political, community-focused, diplomatic, military, radical activist, propagandist, and mass movements.

It’s about everything happening everywhere, all at once. Apologies if you were hoping for a talk about parallel universes, but this is the meaning of “everything everywhere” I’m going to focus on.

In the book there are sail-powered container ships, blimps instead of aeroplanes, scientists in Antarctica drilling under the ice shelves. The titular Ministry for the Future is the lead agency and provides the through-line.

The book was published in 2020, so written before Covid, but the financial mechanism the ministry pursues may sound familiar: it’s a globally coordinated version of what turned out to be most countries’ response to the pandemic: quantitative easing. They produce a new currency called a “carbon coin”.

In effect, it’s used to pay the fossil-fuel industry to keep oil, gas and coal in the ground and trees standing in the rainforests.

The book ends on a remarkable note, which I won’t spoil, but I will say that like all good stories and all good journeys, it’s the getting there that really counts.

There are some key concepts:

• All the science and technology, all the politics and financial proposals come from the real world. They’re credible. This isn’t Dune; there’s no Spice.

• The carbon coin, like the zero-emissions goal itself, will only work if central banks believe it will be good for their economies and polluters believe it will be good for their profits. This raises a core concept for all politics; actually, all human interaction: You’ll make faster progress if you can show the other side what’s in it for them.

• Related: Is it the end of capitalism? The book doesn’t resolve that question. What it does instead is argue for an economic system fit for a society that lives within planetary boundaries, rewarding initiative and regulating excess, within a democratic framework. Can capitalism evolve to do that? I don’t know. It’s very good at evolving, so maybe it can. What I do know is that if it can’t, or won’t, it’s no use to us.

• The importance of doing everything everywhere all at once.

The importance of doing everything everywhere all at once.

This means strong democracy and parliamentary politics, effective diplomacy, financial pressure, good science and technology, strong civic institutions.

Also: Direct action.

Also: Community resilience and engagement, and a strong moral code.

Radical ideas, and change that is achieved both incrementally and in much bigger steps.

Skilled, focused and inspirational leadership.

And an enormous mass movement. We’ve got an ecosystem to save, democratic practices to reinforce and an economy to reform. These things won’t happen without a great movement to make sure they do.

The right-wing economic historian Francis Fukuyama has called The Ministry for the Future “ludicrously unrealistic”. Kim Stanley Robinson, he says, “posits the most optimistic possible political developments at every turn”.

Well he would say that. In the 90s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Fukuyama wrote a book called The End of History, which proposed that open, unfettered market economies were the final, natural state of human relations. When states intervene to get better outcomes, he argued, they just muck it up.

This is called neoliberalism.

It’s staggering that neoliberals believe they’re doing a good job. It was governments, and not the market, that abolished slavery, gave women the vote, brought the world out of Depression in the 1930s and defeated fascism in the 1940s. And governments didn’t do these things on their own, but were pushed to it by mass movements, civil disobedience and even war.

It was governments that saved the neoliberal finance houses after the global financial crisis of 2008.

Meanwhile, it is market economies, enabled by governments, that have led the world to the brink of environmental collapse. But hey, those neolibs. They’re nothing if not confident.

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One thing Fukuyama is right about, though. The Ministry for the Future is an optimistic book. This is a good thing. It shows us a way forward. It doesn’t say the good and necessary work we need will all be done, but it insists that it can be done. It sounds a note of hope.

But hope isn’t wishful thinking. Hope doesn’t mean if you believe in fairies they will be real. Peter Pan isn’t about being a child forever, it’s about growing up.

Hope gives you strength for the fight. And it is a fight. Progress, always, everywhere, has to be fought for.

It’s true with the climate crisis, true with the current government.

There be dragons

The fight today is against the worst government of my lifetime, in an election year where everything has to be focused on defeating it.

It’s also, as I’ve said, a fight to defend the planetary ecosystem against catastrophe. This has to frame everything.

And it’s a fight against a resurgent enemy: a loose but powerful alliance that includes established corporate interests, especially in the financial and fossil-fuel sectors, and the new corporates of the techbros of Silicon Valley, and white male supremacists.

Many of them are driven by a simple, very powerful idea: Chaos is a great way to make money.

Those forces come together in the person of Donald Trump, of course, and of his homeland security adviser and deputy chief of staff: Stephen Miller.

Miller likes to rage about the naked truth of power. “We live in a world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time,” he said while threatening to seize Greenland. He might just as easily have been talking about the use of National Guards in American cities and the state terrorism being practiced domestically by ICE.

And here’s what Miller said at the memorial service for the hard-right “free-speecher” Charlie Kirk.

“We are the storm. And our enemies cannot comprehend our strength, our determination, our resolve, our passion ... You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness, you are jealousy, you are envy, you are hatred. You are nothing ... You have no idea the dragon you have awakened.”

Dragons? “The iron laws of power since the beginning of time”? This is the world reconceived as Game of Thrones, which means, along with everything else, we’ve got a dragon to slay. So let’s do it.

A bit about me

I’m an advocacy journalist. As I see it, my role is to explain, analyse, expose and comment: to reveal how power works and what it means for us. I advocate for progressive change.

I was editor at Metro magazine in Auckland, where one of the things I wrote was a big feature explaining how half a metre of sea-level rise would flood Auckland’s wealthy seaside eastern suburbs. Homeowners were outraged that we’d ruined their property values. You can’t help some people.

I debunked the standard academic achievement tables for schools. I published an international award-winning expose by Nicky Hager’s former associate Jon Stephenson about our SAS troops in Afghanistan breaching the Geneva Convention.

I worked for a year at The Spinoff and I’ve just finished 8 years at the NZ Herald.

I’ve written a lot about social housing, poverty, race relations, the climate, transport, local government. Stuff that mainstream media editors often think readers find boring, so I’m always looking for ways to make it interesting. And through it all, I’ve tried to explain how politics works.

“We’re even-handed,” they liked to say at the Herald. “Yes, there are lots of right-wing voices but look, we’ve got Simon.” There are many good journalists at the Herald, but when it comes to opinion writers, now I’ve resigned I don’t know what they’re going to say.

Back in the day I went to Onslow College in Wellington, during the years when we abolished corporal punishment, uniforms and boys’ hair regulations. We did it with protest, civil disobedience (nobody got their hair cut) and effective lobbying of the board. Early lessons. If there’d been an Ōtaki Summer Camp back then, I would have loved to come.

I did an Engl Lit degree at Victoria University and heartily recommend it, not just because literature is stimulating. It puts you inside the hearts and minds of other people and it teaches you storytelling, an essential skill for anyone who wants to reach those hearts and minds, especially when they belong to people who don’t already think like them.

I was editor of the student newspaper Salient and then president of the NZ University Students Association, NZUSA. I got myself arrested that year for spray-painting anti-nuclear graffiti on a wall.

The ship in question was the USS Truxtun and I’d love to tell you the slogan was Fuck off Truxtun. Nicky Hager told me this week he remembers it as Truck off Fuxtun, which is even better, but still not right. We were scared of being caught so we went for the quicker No Truxtun.

We got caught anyway. There were half a dozen graffiti teams out that night and after we’d finished we drove around to see what the others had done. The cops stopped us and there was me, the can had leaked and I had red paint all over my hands. Caught red handed. For some reason prime minister Robert Muldoon banned me from parliament.

Political graffiti, by the way, it can be very powerful. You don’t see enough of it.

The Springbok Tour campaign

I want to talk a little about the Springbok Tour. 1981. Despite large-scale protests over the previous decade, apartheid South Africa sent its rugby team to play 16 games here: a full tour, two games a week, and there were protests nationwide on every game day. It split the country.

In Wellington we had what was called a “united front” organisation, COST, or Citizens Opposed to the Springbok Tour. We held an open public meeting every week, to debate tactics and strategy. What was acceptable civil disobedience? Blocking streets? Sure. Damage to property? No, said most. Disrupting air traffic? Well, yes, but safely, and Air NZ was a legit target because it was carrying the teams around the country. I was in a group arrested for running onto the runway in front of a taxiing plane at Wellington Airport.

The form of the COST protest was pretty good. A publicly elected and accountable leadership; public meetings with democratic guidance to the leaders; but confidential planning of specific protest events, by a Marshals Committee selected by the elected leadership committee. I was on the Marshals Committee.

But while the form was good, the content wasn’t. The public meetings were full of shouting and self-important speeches, mainly by Pākehā men. I think it was the last time people who looked like me would have such unbridled prominence in a progressive movement here. But I don’t know that. I hope it was.

It rained on the day of the Wellington test at Athletic Park in Newtown, and it was August. Winter. We divided the protesters into several groups, all colour coded: Pink, Brown, Blue. This was 11 years before Mr Pink and Mr White in Reservoir Dogs. Brown group, all volunteers, was going to try to get into the ground, which meant they risked violence and arrest.

I was in charge of Yellow: hundreds of people who’d said they would break the law, but peacefully. We marched to the intersection of Riddiford St and Constable St and sat down in the wet, so rugby fans from the east couldn’t walk to the game. Things were thrown at us. The police formed a flying wedge, with batons and boots, and ran through the middle of the crowd, trying to force protesters to stand up so they could push a path through. I had a megaphone and my job was to keep everyone sitting, in the rain, while the police charged over the top of them. Repeatedly.

The people stayed and I was very proud of our success. I was also horrified. I discovered I could do that, but also that I didn’t want to. And I agreed with the complaints about the COST meetings: men shouting at each other is no way to build a movement.

So I went into journalism. Actually book publishing first, for a few years, and then journalism, advocating for this and that, trying not to shout at people on the page. I was 25 when the Springboks arrived. As I said, if there’d been a Summer Camp for young progressives then, I’d love to have been there.

A few years ago I wrote a book called HomeGround. It’s about the Auckland City Mission’s new building on Hobson St. A centre for the “housing first” approach to caring for rough sleepers, with apartments, full medical services, a big kitchen and all sorts of community amenities. It’s a green building, creating 80% fewer emissions over the whole of its life than other comparable buildings, and when it was built it was the tallest wooden-framed building in the country. It got built because of a bi-partisan political commitment, supported by National and Labour, and it’s full of remarkable people: those who work there and those who live there.

HomeGround is a model for how to make a better world and guess what? All it took was strong public and private funding, political will, lots of community support and very determined leadership.

The climate crisis is more than the climate crisis

I started this talk with the climate crisis, for several reasons. Here are some of them.

1. It’s not just a risk to the way we live. A planet inhospitable to life is the predicted outcome: it’s going to happen unless we change. I think this, or the knowledge of it, is new.

2. What’s also new: the incremental progress that has been made is now being systematically rolled back, as part of the core programme of governments here and abroad.

3. Climate change is a force multiplier or accelerator of every inequality, hardship and injustice. It makes them all worse. This is why it’s not just an environmental or “green” issue: the climate crisis exacerbates housing hardship and all the other manifestations of poverty. It reinforces colonialism, racism, social disintegration, far-right politics, the decline of democracy, economic pain, regional neglect and national security risks. it also supercharges the wealth of billionaires.

4. On the flipside, because of this, confronting the climate crisis has the potential to help overcome all those things. Climate action is also a force multiplier. Lowering transport emissions and planting an urban ngāhere, for example, can have significant benefits to public health and the cost of living.

5. Climate action, linked to biodiversity loss, also has the potential to become a mass movement.

6. It’s not fringe, so there’s ready potential for growth. Greta Thunberg and the movement she is a leader of have proved that.

7. Understanding the threat of climate change means, in various ways, understanding how power works (especially political and economic power), how environmental issues are linked to other issues, and how change can be achieved. These are all part of what’s called politicising people.

   

This is not normal

Climate policies are not the only things being undone by this government. It’s also happening in social housing policy and other elements of the welfare state, treaty principles, education, primary healthcare and environmental and conservation strategies.

You have to go back to the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s and 90s to find this kind of destruction of the social fabric. Back then, regional economies, which had long been a treasured feature of NZ society, were abandoned.

You know the song Poi E? It was written for the Pātea Māori Club, who performed it in 1984 as part of the community fightback against the closure of freezing works like the one at Pātea. And, uniquely in the whole world, it kept Michael Jackson’s Thriller off the top of the charts. Tells you a lot about how the public lined up.

The biggest single blow came in 1991, with the Employment Contracts Act. It gutted the unions. In 1986, close to 50% of workers were in a union, but that quickly fell to less than 20% and it’s stayed low ever since. Unions were our great organising force for progress and, for as long as they were a normal part of our economic fabric, they provided something else: class consciousness.

People understood there were workers and bosses and while you could be friendly with the boss, they weren’t your friend. Not when it came to deciding who kept their jobs and what you were paid.

In my view, bringing the unions to their knees was neoliberalism’s most impactful achievement, because it made all the others so much easier.

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But even during that period and until end of 2023, we had progress on other fronts. From the 1970s, you could say we’ve had a kind of liberal democratic project.

• The Equal Pay Act was introduced in 1972 and compulsory military training was stopped.

• The next year the government protested French nuclear testing in the Pacific by sending a warship, with a cabinet minister on board, to the test zone. Imagine that.

• Abortion was decriminalised in 1977, although that didn’t go as far it should have.

• The Waitangi Tribunal was established and then opened up to historic claims.

• Nuclear ships were banned.

• We had the Homosexual Law Reform Act in 1986 and marriage equality in 2013.

• MMP was introduced in 1996, after a referendum in which people made it very clear they wanted stronger controls on politicians abusing their power.

• There was more in the Helen Clark years, including KiwiBank, KiwiSaver, Alliance MP Laila Harre’s paid parental leave amendment act, passed in 2002, and Sue Bradford’s so-called “anti-smacking” bill. That was a Green MPs’ bill with support from Labour and National, another thing very hard to imagine today, but it was passed in 2007.

• Bipartisan attempts to deal with climate responsibilities included the Paris Accord, the ETS and the Climate Change Commission and Zero Carbon Act.

Almost all of these things happened off the back of powerful mass movements making it possible for politicians to crusade for legislative reform. We have a long, proud tradition of protest in this country.

The period also saw widespread social changes. This hasn’t been a smooth process and certainly not always a peaceful one, especially during the Springbok Tour and over many years at Waitangi. But from the 1960s on, Aotearoa NZ has been refashioning itself, largely on a wide consensual basis, as a more tolerant, liberal society with a deeper sense of what being “fair minded” means, all the while seeking to come to terms with its own colonial history.

Lots of small steady steps, some disappointments, sometimes even going backwards, occasionally leaping forwards. Progressive reform is always an ongoing project. The American civil rights leader Martin Luther King had a famous phrase for it: The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

That’s stronger democracy, reduced inequality, expanded human rights, diversity embraced, less fear of “others”.

Now, at a time when there is absolutely no excuse for not knowing what is happening to the planet and the people on it, all that progress is being rolled back. Wilfully, determinedly, cruelly, stupidly and extremely dangerously.

The abasement of politics in Aotearoa today

You can see it everywhere you look, especially in the appalling electoral opportunism. This includes:

• Putting lives at risk with the rollback of employment safety law and higher speed limits on the roads.

• Ridiculing climate action and the wider environmental movement.

• Beating their chests about law and order while doing almost nothing effective to stop the rise of gangs and meth. That’s two interlinked crises being caused by government policies.

• The lack of progressive tax reform, despite even the business groups advocating for it.

Electoral opportunism is different now. It used to mean clinging to the values of “middle New Zealand”. Tax relief, say, or having national standards in schools. Now it panders to the right-wing fringe. There are no votes in middle New Zealand for climate denialism, but National engages in it anyway, because it’s competing with Act and NZ First for those fringe votes.

Some of the opportunism is especially cynical and harmful.

• They put great store in the rituals of treaty settlements, while undoing the social progress and the legal protections those settlements have framed.

• They’ve closed emergency accommodation for homeless people, including children, and say it’s not their job to know what happens to the people who lose their shelter. This has real consequences and it’s also symbolic. It’s the government saying to the poor, to care workers, to every soft-headed liberal in the land: “Poverty? We don’t give a shit.”

The abasement of politics is also clear in this government’s approach to democracy.

• There are record levels of funding for right-wing parties. Extremely wealthy people in the property and mining sectors, among others, have spent a lot of money to put National and Act into government.

• Sometimes the political funding is corrupt, and to date this has been tolerated by the police, the courts and parliament itself.

• The government has caved in to lobbyists from the tobacco industry, fishing, mining, trucking, fast foods, alcohol, property developers, animal exporting, sugar, school catering corporates, forestry, farming, construction, fossil fuels, firearms, military suppliers, healthcare, private education, banks, supermarkets, energy companies, I’m sure I’ve missed some out …

• They’ve caved in to social media warriors.

• The minor parties in the government are more focused, more coherent and have much stronger leaders, and therefore their influence far exceeds their actual support. This is anti-democratic. It’s also bad because of the fringe policies it enables. And it’s bad because it gives MMP a bad name.

• And the government is changing the Electoral Act to make it harder for people to enrol and vote. This will disproportionately disenfranchise people who vote to the left rather than the right.

A couple of other factors play to the abasement of politics today. One is serious, the other ridiculous.

On the serious side, the hard right is on the rise. This is clear in relation to race, women, immigration, climate and much more.

And the ridiculous? That would be the prime minister, who talks like a wind-up doll and appears to have no understanding of the lives of ordinary people. Worse, he is either unaware of how his own wealth privileges him, or he knows full well and doesn’t care. Even business leaders laugh at him.

How bad is bad?

Things are bad. Although I should say, bad but not irredeemably terrible.

Our democracy is still pretty strong. We still have a high level of civic order, functioning institutions, relatively free and fair elections, a broad welfare state, relatively open and free media, and rights of speech, assembly, protest and organising. Democracy in Aotearoa could be better, for sure. But it works.

And yet. When it comes to inequality, we’re experiencing the entrenchment of poverty and the rise of the megawealthy on a scale not seen since the mid-19^th century. This is not well understood by my generation, who tend to believe we still live in the relatively egalitarian age we grew up in, the one where you could afford to buy a house.

When it comes to the climate, a similar change is happening. From mining to vehicle emissions to methane, our progress over the last 10 years is being systematically undone.

It’s true they like to say they’re building more wind farms. But that’s bullshit. It’s no good doing a few of the right things if you don’t stop doing the wrong things.

This is a worldwide phenomenon. The leaders of global capitalism – banks, finance houses, sovereign wealth funds, other corporate interests and some key governments – have abandoned the cause.

Donald Trump is their patron saint. He shows us better than anyone how chaos is a great way to make money.

What is all means is this: After decades of a general liberal consensus about progress, the right is fighting back.

The right is on the rise and so is the left

Why is the right fighting back, if they’re already winning? Because they don’t believe they are winning. Actually, they could be right.

Neoliberal capitalism, with its hatred of regulations and blind faith in market efficiency, has failed. This was brutally revealed in 2008, when the greed of unrestrained lending institutions caused the Global Financial Crisis, the GFC.

But we’ve seen it here too, over and over. Leaky buildings have cost us billions. Pike River cost the lives of 29 men. The current Manage My Health scandal should see every neolib acolyte laughed out of town.

But no. Enormous effort goes into obscuring this failure. We are constantly told by politicians and media commentators that, not only is there no alternative to capitalism, there is no alternative to the neoliberal way capitalism is practiced.

This is what that absurd proposal for a debate between finance minister Nicola Willis and the Taxpayers Union’s Ruth Richardson was all about. “We’re doing neoliberalism with a human face,” Willis wants us to believe. To which Richardson says, “The only problem with neoliberalism is that it hasn’t been fully unleashed, so it hasn’t had a chance to work properly.”

This is the standard response of neolibs to the evidence they have failed, but it’s still astonishing. The global economy has been run their way for more than 40 years.

Debating which form of neoliberalism is best is a bridge to nowhere, but we’re stuck on it. Yet the experience of Nordic countries shows there are other roads we could travel.

So does the work of many really good progressive economists and analysts, including Muhammad Yunus, Kate Raworth, Mariana Mazzucato, Gary Stevenson, Bill McKibben and Jason Hickel. In this country, Teina Boasa-Dean has created a Māori version of doughnut economics, and there are also Shamubeel Eaqub, Ganesh Ahirao, Bernard Hickey and many more.

Sadly, though, progressive economics are usually marginalised by mainstream media. About the only commentary you’ll get on Thomas Piketty, who revealed how capitalism eats itself, is that his books are quite technical.

And yet. One excellent sign the neolibs don’t have it all their own way: Zohran Mamdani. Last year in New York, the epicentre of global neoliberalism, a Muslim democratic socialist got himself elected mayor. This was instructive in so many ways.

One of them was what it told us about neoliberals. Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York, spent $9.5m trying to stop Mamdani. Even though Mamdani is the most effective anti-Trump politician in America, and Bloomberg is a social liberal who is so deeply opposed to Donald Trump he tried to run against him in 2020.

To Bloomberg, the democratic socialist anti-Trump was a bigger threat than Trump himself. That’s neoliberalism for you.

What the right is doing

Bloomberg failed. But don’t be fooled: the right has got good at democratic politics.

• NZ Initiative personnel are embedded in government: in the PM’s office and in finance, education, climate and other policy fields.

• The Taxpayers Union and others associated with the Atlas Network (including the Free Speech Union and the NZ Initiative) regularly create and define the news.

• Social media and mainstream media commonly reinforce each other, especially at the most popular radio station in the country, NewstalkZB. The hard right effectively controls the NZ Herald, the country’s largest newspaper, where I used to work. It does this through shareholder and board dominance, a specially constructed editorial board and that solid lineup of columnists.

I can never decide who is more dangerous: Act’s David Seymour or the Taxpayers Union’s Jordan Williams. Seymour is rude to me every time he sees me, which suggests he knows who his enemies are. Williams is unfailingly polite and friendly, which I think means the same thing.

They know their tactics.

• Control the language. This is long-standing. In the 1980s, neolibs used powerful phrases like “TINA” (there is no alternative) and “in the real world”, which meant that if you opposed selling state assets to private interests you were an ignorant fantasist. Today, phrases like “win-win” and “NZ Inc” are window dressing for the old “trickle-down theory”.

This is the idea that if the rich get richer, they will create more economic activity and that benefits everyone else. Trickle-down is the only justification neoliberalism has ever produced for itself, but it’s been so conclusively debunked, no self-respecting economist would even say it out loud anymore.

Oxfam reported last year that since 2015 the world’s wealth has increased by about US$50 trillion. Two-thirds of it went to the wealthiest 1%. When the rich get richer, they do it at everyone else’s expense.

• Another tactic: Shifting the Overton window, the frame that defines which ideas are acceptable in mainstream debate. You can do this by insisting your views are mainstream, a tactic used to very good effect by the hard-right farming group Groundswell.

• Constant barrage. The Taxpayers Union and Free Speech Union are both in my inbox many times a week.

• Endlessly complain. Irrespective of how successful they are, the right complains all the time that they’re losing. This is a powerful tactic for resisting change and is used by Nimbys everywhere. Also by so-called anti-Wokesters, Hobson’s Pledge supporters and the anti-cycling brigade.

• Raise a lot of money. National MP David MacLeod received $178,394 in undeclared donations in the last election, notably from mining interests, after which parliament appointed him to its Regulations Review Committee.

And neolibs have joined with white-male supremacy.

Neolibs and supremacists

Financiers, Proud Boys, techbros. Billionaires and oligarchs of the fossil-fuel and weapons industries. They’re all lining up.

Why is this happening? Why would socially liberal freedom-junkies join forces with book-banning misogynists?

One reason is that neolibs are exceptionalists: They believe they’re special, because they’re the only people bright enough to run things properly. Like Francis Fukuyama, they claim to represent the triumph of liberal western democracy, but what they push for is less democracy, more managerialism, crushing the unions, eliminating workers’ rights and creating a precarious gig economy, fewer regulatory safeguards and more power for lawyers, accountants and entrepreneurs like them.

This is all deeply anti-democratic and it points to what they have in common with the racists and the misogynists: They share a supremacist instinct. They’re better than everyone else.

They also share a survivalist instinct. They know society tends to progress and they’ve realised that if they want to continue as they are, they will have to fight the forces of progress into the ground.

In my view, they see themselves as being in an end game.

They fear that left unchecked, the arc of history, bending towards justice, will one day call time on oppressive ideologies like patriarchy, racism, neocolonialism and reactionary nationalism. And on the fossil-fuel industry and the financial powers that sustain it.

And on neoliberal capitalism itself.

Despite the rhetoric, they don’t believe in win-win. They believe that if they don’t win this battle, they will lose.

There’s another way to put this: The neoliberal reforms of the 1980s and 90s were a reaction to the restraints put on capitalism during the Depression of the 1930s, and kept in place for 50 years. Until Margaret Thatcher was elected in Britain in 1979, Ronald Reagan in America in 1980 and David Lange and Roger Douglas in New Zealand in 1984.

From the 30s to the 80s, economies were capitalist, but mixed: private enterprise thrived but governments set the rules and taxed accordingly. At the same time, social reform meant women and people of colour were able to advance their interests. All those markers of progress I listed earlier.

Many neoliberals have recognised that the forces behind these reforms are the same forces that restrained capitalism. For example, if a woman’s place is not “in the home”, the tax base has to be high enough to provide good public healthcare, social housing, subsidised childcare and so on.

But what about Jacinda Ardern? Barack Obama? All those neoliberals who believe in liberal democracy? They sustain the market-first philosophy but don’t they also try to make social progress?

Yes they do. You could say the central aim of the Labour Party today is to put a human face on neoliberalism. Labour wants to make social progress, with prosperity, while not enraging neoliberals so much they crash the economy and force it from office.

But how much progress can you make like that? Can you eliminate poverty and effectively address the climate crisis if you aren’t prepared to abandon neoliberalism? No one has been able to show how.

And for all those unscrupulous neoliberal capitalists, the chaos is looking pretty good right now. There’s just so much money to be made. In new sources of fossil fuels (methane from melted permafrost!) and in wind and solar, for that matter. In rare earths. In war. In new foods. In construction and all the other things we’ll need to make our homes and our cities safe from droughts and storms and from other people. In putting colonies on the Moon and Mars and calling it a win for humanity.

And in security. Did you know that John Key supports Trump? Why? He’s on the board of a Silicon Valley IT security company: global chaos suits them very nicely.

But. We should take heart from all this. If they believe they live in the end times for their version of hope, we should believe it too.

In my view, the people of the world won’t stand for endless climate denialism, even if it does keep promising them shiny new double-cab diesel utes.

The arc of history does bend towards justice. Climate change can be managed. People can live well together. The Ministry for the Future suggests how, and its prescription is neither fanciful nor unique. But we do need hope. And planning. And action.

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The goal this year is to change the government. The climate crisis is one of the big reasons: the government is on their side.

Winning doesn’t always look like winning

Winning doesn’t always look like winning. Three examples:

The Toitū te Tiriti march didn’t stop Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill in its tracks. But it helped, and it was a massive win for the movement.

Partly because the bill was stopped anyway, and the march made it clear to many waverers in the National Party how important it was to do that.

But mainly because of all the other things the march did:

• Organised from almost a standing start, it showed that the treaty movement is far bigger than most people would have realised.

• It inspired people: learning you’re not alone is invaluable and essential.

• It created and reinforced nationwide networks of activists.

• It helped identify new leaders, organisers and other key support personnel.

• It shored up the idea that NZ has not fallen for the anti-Māori narratives of racists. We’re not scared of the Treaty of Waitangi.

The Springbok Tour: The National government lost the popular vote in the election that year, even though, under First Past the Post, it won just enough provincial seats to stay in power.

And in 1995, when the newly liberated South African president Nelson Mandela visited, the National government was delighted to accept his praise for this country’s opposition to apartheid. I felt a little bit sick about the hypocrisy of that. But the thing is, we didn’t stop the tour but we did win the war.

With a global effort, apartheid in South Africa was beaten. That’s a note of hope for Palestine.

School Strike for Climate/Fridays for Future: The Guardian in Britain has a climate advocacy journalist called George Monbiot. He’s worth reading. He believes the movement was on the cusp of a tipping point in late 2019, but it was ruined by Covid.

That movement rose very fast. Greta Thunberg began it only in August 2018 and by December, 270 cities around the world were involved.

In February 2019, the European Union announced it would spend hundreds of billions of euros, a quarter of its budget, on climate mitigation. Greta was standing next to the EU president, Jean-Claude Junker, for the announcement.

On 20 September, over 4 million people participated in protests worldwide; several more massive days of action followed.

But then came Covid. Everything had to stop and the fossil-fuel sector and its allies got the chance to regroup.

That movement can be rebuilt.

How? As I’ve outlined, change comes from a combination of things: radical action, endless debate, modelled behaviour (people being the change they wish for and showing it works), institutional weight, technological breakthroughs, incremental reform, determined leadership at all levels and in all areas, and finally political opportunism, by which, I mean politicians making the absolute most of the opportunities the rest of the movement provides for them.

Everything everywhere all at once.

Telling a good story

Some of you will know the Common Cause theory about progressive narratives. Campaigning is about storytelling, and we have to keep telling the story, all the time. This is where we want to be. This is what’s stopping us, so this is where we are. But we have this potential to change and this is what we can do.

That book I mentioned, The Ministry for the Future, is a great example.

One key to a good story of hope is to remember that things always seem impossible until they’re inevitable.

Nobody thought the Irish would vote to reform their abortion laws, until they did. In 1969, not many people thought Lake Manapouri would be saved from hydro plans and in the 70s and 80s not many thought nuclear ships would be banned. In both cases, mass protests inspired a Labour government to act. And afterwards, everyone said: of course.

We don’t have to persuade everyone. Just enough to get to the tipping point.

Flat earthers are everywhere: even when their houses float away in a flood, they’ll deny the reality. This is literally true: the West Coast town of Granity has been harder hit by floods and storm surges than any other place in the country, but still there are locals who say, “It’s just the weather.”

And in this area, along the Kāpiti Coast, some of the people living here forced the council to change their property reports so they ignored the threat of coastal erosion.

And, sadly, some people will vote for a human slug rather than any centre-lefty, no matter how competent. In Wellington last year, 7000 people voted for Ray Chung for mayor.

You don’t have to win these people. You just have isolate them and win against them.

And telling a story of hope doesn’t mean proclaiming that young people are the great hope of the future. That is my generation being morally bankrupt. Put it back on them. Remind them they’ve always taught their own children to clean up their own mess. Older people should too.

What do we need? Resistance and resilience. All progress comes from people who get knocked down and stand up again and go back for more. It makes for great storytelling: We are all Frodo.

The goals are achievable.

• For the climate: To live sustainably within the boundaries of planetary resources (look it up, it’s called doughnut economics). To restore a thriving prosperous planet, for all of us and for life. Of course it will take time, but it is achievable if we stay focused on social change and political power.

• The immediate goal for Aotearoa: Changing the government. This year. It’s not inevitable, far from it. But it is doable.

And there’s another achievable goal to think about.

• Building the cities of Aotearoa into bastions of progressive politics.

Seize the cities

Changing the government isn’t an end goal. There’s a long-term movement to build, and cities are critical to doing it. Why?

• Because most of us live in one.

• Because progressive politics are naturally stronger in cities.

• Cities can do a lot. Globally, they’re far ahead of countries on climate action.

• The political life of cities also provides experience for national politics: in parliament, and in activism and in civic institutions.

• City politics are often neglected or trivialised, which perversely can make it easier to win elections and get stuff done.

It’s very possible. There are already three Green electorate MPs in urban seats and one, in the urban seat of Tāmaki Makaurau, held by Te Pāti Māori. Several of our cities have progressive councillors. Progressives dominate many community and local boards. There are some progressive mayors, too.

• It’s effective. You can build a movement and change the country through city politics.

There’s a template for winning at the city level and it can be applied to progressive political activism everywhere.

• Work in a group. For support, stimulus and reach. Even if it’s just a bunch of friends, neighbours, workmates, customers at your local café who meet there once a week.

• Join local organisations: school, sports, activist groups, community service, unions. The Karangahape Rd Business Association in Auckland is in progressive hands. You’re doing this to build wider community support.

• Set up a community group. Pest eradication is a really good cause: it’s all about community action, support is available, no one will stop you and you’ll get widespread buy-in. Safe play areas for kids is another good issue. It’s harder but also doable.

Community groups have important goals in themselves, but are also a vehicle for building support for wider goals: building a mass movement, climate action, winning the city, changing how power works.

• Stay focused on the bigger picture and don’t just settle for the quick wins.

• Tell stories, command the narrative.

• Hold meetings and ask people to bring other people, raise money, build contact lists, ask people to do things, ask people to get others to do those things with them. A graffiti squad, perhaps? You’re building an engaged support base.

• Mobilise support wherever possible for progressive parties in the general election.

• Stand for local and community boards in 2028: they have some power in their own right and they’re also the pathway to council. In Auckland, all new councillors now come from local boards: they’re who people trust enough to vote for. Those community group links get you elected (the right does it with Rotary).

• In some places, you’ll need to belong to a progressive party; in others, you might need to get involved in a progressive united front group. City Vision in Auckland combines Labour, Green and progressive independents.

• But also build your own profile.

• Test and train people at local level and promote the best retail politicians to stand for higher office. A retail politician is someone people like hearing from, is trustworthy, can competently and appealingly deliver the message and doesn’t say stupid things. They command attention, also known as sucking up the oxygen. You want them doing it for you, not against you.

• These political leaders are different from the best thinkers, organisers, researchers, the social glue, etc. Those people all have other extremely important roles.

• Politicians might also be different from the radical activists, because politicians have to compromise and activists have to lead the way. We need both. Activists climb into a coal bucket, politicians get the law changed on coal mining. Although I think it would be great if a politician climbed into a coal bucket too. Adam Currie from 350 may have a view on this.

• Get media profile through sticky actions, ideas and personalities. Sticky means: they get stuck in the public imagination. Shane Jones is good at being sticky, with his “bye bye Freddie the Frog” comments. We need some sticky takedowns of him.

• Keep telling stories, commanding the narrative.

Remember that mass movements are, by definition, united fronts. You’re trying to bring together people with a range of views who share a common goal.

This isn’t easy. Leftist sectarianism was common among my generation and for the life of me I don’t know why. It hurt us. I would say, now, the same thing that I hear all the time from Te Ao Māori: Are people “on the journey”? If so, welcome them.

These are the goals:

• Achieve the reform objectives of the group.

• Change the narrative to build the idea you’re part of a mainstream mass movement.

• Get people elected to higher office.

• Strengthen communities and neighbourhoods.

• Build popular support for the reforms you achieve, so they’re hard to undo.

In praise of Clement Attlee

I want to end with a story about a little old man in a bowler hat, with a toothbrush moustache and a suit with trouser legs wide enough for five people.

Clement Attlee was the leader of the British Labour Party who took on the great wartime leader Winston Churchill in the general election of 1945, held straight after the war.

Atlee offered the British people a reward for all the hardship and loss they had endured: a new, improved welfare state. With a National Health Service, full employment, better housing, more workers’ rights, better pensions and nationalised utilities. The people, he said, had fought fascism in the name of a democratic society that cared for its people and it didn’t matter that the state was almost bankrupt. He was going to give them that reward.

While Churchill talked about the war, Attlee talked about the peace. He’d been in the war cabinet and had made sure the necessary economic research was done: the institutions of democracy played their role.

And he made his promises in writing, to everyone. Booklets and pamphlets explaining how the welfare state would work were widely distributed. Radio reinforced the message.

The comms strategy (although they didn’t call it that in those days) was simple. It was the same strategy used by Zohran Mamdani in New York. A message of hope, connecting directly with ordinary people, in language they understood, with promises that aligned with their own aspirations. It was inherently democratic. And in 1945, it was also revolutionary.

Attlee won. In a landslide.

We can do that with the climate movement. And with the fight against poverty and inequality and neocolonialism and the attacks on democracy.

Aotearoa has always been one of the easiest countries in which to make something happen. The suffragist Kate Sheppard discovered that in 1893 and it’s been proven over and over since.

It’s about the story we tell: This is where we are, this is where we want to be and this is how we’ll get there. Defeat this government and, while it will take a little time, if we want, we could make Aotearoa our very own Ministry for the Future.

Find out about the Ōtaki Summer Camp here.

Hopetown: a place to do things differently

Thanks for reading all the way to here. I like to think Hopetown is a place to celebrate the wonder of doing things differently and the possibility of doing them better, in music as in politics and all the rest.

Here’s the Florida R&B musician Jac Ross in 2024, with his stripped-back version of Sam Cooke’s great song of hope, from the civil rights movement, A Change is Gonna Come. Cooke released the record in 1964, the year of the Civil Rights Act, also the year the hard-right Republican Barry Goldwater was completely smashed in the American presidential election.

Or if you need something more lively, here’s another song from 1964, which Marvin Gaye had a hand in writing and was originally performed by Martha and the Vandellas. This is Mick Jagger and David Bowie’s version, with a video they made for the Live Aid benefit show in 1985. Because, as the great Lithuanian anarchist Emma Goldman supposedly said, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.”

It’s hard to find anybody who thinks it’s a good idea to build a liquid natural gas (LNG) terminal in Taranaki. Apart from the government and the gas industry itself, that is. So why is it happening?

And why has the government allowed the resumption of gas and oil exploration? Are these things by any chance related?

Why yes. Several studies and reports from overseas point to a disturbing answer to these questions. The fossil-fuel industry knows the clock is ticking on oil, so it has pivoted to gas and worked hard to line up governments, media and public opinion to support the move. It’s got our government fooled.

Natural gas and asthma

It feels, I don’t know, unsurprising, somehow, that the minister of health and the minister of energy are the same person: Simeon Brown. Because when it comes to gas, the portfolios overlap.

Before we get into the energy side, a note about “natural gas” and health. Being natural, it’s probably better than gas that’s artificial, or unnatural, or unclean, right?

Well, no. Natural gas got its name in the 19^th century to distinguish it from “manufactured” or “town” gas, which is made by burning coal in the absence of air. Natural gas occurs naturally, hence the name. But it’s a major greenhouse gas. Mainly, it’s methane.

And when it’s used in our homes, it’s a significant health problem. In July, public health researchers in Ohio discovered what seems to be a remarkably effective way to reduce asthma: replacing stovetop gas cookers with induction cooktops.

“We were surprised when we analysed the results and found a very large effect size,” said the project leader, professor Ashwiri Sehgal. “The improvements in asthma symptoms following stove change were similar to – or even greater than – those reported in clinical trials of commonly used asthma medications.”

What he’s saying is that turning off the gas hob has a good chance of helping more than an inhaler.

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The Ohio study began with a study sample of 1200 people in Cleveland. But guess what happened? The Trump administration shut it down, because it doesn’t want anyone undermining the gas industry. And yet, although only 72 homes were able to be included, even in that small sample size the findings were clear.

The study is here and you can read more about it in this story published last week.

We already knew this

This information isn’t actually new. Gas burned indoors has been linked to respiratory problems since the 1950s. In September 2024 the Conversation carried a story from Australia, picked up in media here, that highlighted the harm done by stovetop cookers. A year later a study commissioned by our own Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (EECA) reinforced the findings.

Despite New Zealand having some of the worst rates of child asthma and other respiratory diseases in the world, there was no big media splash and very little political response. The EECA study prompted the Asthma and Respiratory Foundation to call for “better ventilation” in homes.

As it happens, we are transitioning away from gas for residential and commercial use anyway. The government has just announced a loan guarantee scheme for businesses.

But that measure wasn’t prompted by health concerns. There wasn’t a word about that. The reason for the transition is that gas supply is precarious.

“Since the last government banned oil and gas exploration, there has been a significant reduction in natural gas supplies – they fell 23%,” says energy minister Simeon Brown. “This leaves businesses finding it increasingly difficult to secure long-term affordable gas contracts.”

But that’s not right. The difficulty has nothing to do with the Labour-led government’s 2018 ban, which was restricted to offshore exploration. That is, it banned the search for new gas supplies, which would have taken years to come onstream even if they had been found.

We have a precarity of gas supply because, one, the gas industry has successfully beaten up demand globally; and two, Donald Trump’s war on Iran has made supply from the Middle East unreliable.

These factors are likely to remain in place more or less permanently. Trump’s singular success in the Strait of Hormuz has been to show the world that America can’t guarantee security of trade in the region.

All of which leaves New Zealand in an odd position. We are transitioning away from gas as a fuel for commercial and residential use, but building a new terminal for imported gas, and encouraging the resumption of offshore drilling. Why?

The power of the fossil-fuels lobby

The government wants the gas as a “transition” fuel for generating electricity at times when renewable generation can’t meet demand. In time, we are told, hydro, geothermal, wind and solar will be up to the task. But not yet, we are also told, so we need something to see us through until that time. And gas, we are repeatedly told, is a cleaner option than coal.

The sobering link between gas and asthma is not, in most respects, relevant to the issue of using gas for power generation. It needs to be addressed on its own terms, with a public health publicity campaign and a rapid transition away from stovetop gas. It’s not enough just to hope people will open a window.

But there is one respect in which the public health story is extremely relevant to using gas for generation. It illustrates the persuasive power of the gas industry.

The industry continues to exercise that power today, in relation to climate change. In the same way as we were convinced gas was better for cooking, we are now being told it is good for the environment. If you know anything about the way the tobacco industry has kept itself in business and the oil industry has done the same, you will recognise the pattern in what follows.

The myth of natural gas

The fossil-fuel industry knows the future of oil is in doubt. The indicators are everywhere. Renewables now account for most new energy generated globally. Electrification of transport proceeds apace. Some estimates suggest oil use will have peaked by 2030.

The oil companies are still marketing oil as aggressively as they can, but as climate researcher Bill McKibben has reported, their strategic focus pivoted some time ago to gas.

The message: it’s cheap, it’s plentiful, it’s great for cooking and heating, and especially for generating electricity. And most of all, because it’s clean, it’s just what we need right now.

It’s not true. A 2020 story in the magazine Mother Jones revealed how the industry pays Instagram influencers to promote cooking with gas. (“Cooking with gas” itself being an advertising phrase invented for the American Gas Association in the 1930s and popularised through such techniques as paid placements in Bob Hope radio scripts. Media, especially radio, has always been full of influencers, they just weren’t called that.)

Just last month, the Centre for Climate Integrity published a new report, by researchers Rebecca Leder, who wrote the Mother Jones story, and Rebecca John. It tracks how, from the 1970s, the AGA and others have marketed gas as a safe, environmentally friendly choice. It also reveals that industry documents show oil and gas companies have known since the 1960s that natural gas causes extensive methane pollution and other greenhouse gas emissions.

Much of the world’s natural gas comes from fracking: a process in which water and other materials are pressure drilled into rock beneath the Earth’s surface. It’s controversial, because it’s extremely water intensive and can contaminate water supplies and cause minor earthquakes.

And yet, the idea gas (and fracking) is environmentally friendly became so well established in the US, in the 1980s the fossil-fuel industry began promoting it as the ideal “bridge fuel”: the fuel we will need to transition to a fully renewable energy future. But bridging wasn’t the real plan. Extending the life of the fossil-fuel industry for as long as possible was their goal, and gas was one of the best ways to do it.

The wedges deceit

In 2004, a pair of Princeton scientists called Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala produced a paper that was to have an extraordinary influence. It became known as the “wedges paper”, because it appeared to show that seven “wedges” using existing technologies, if applied well, would be enough to control global warming. Greater fuel efficiency in cars, more wind farms, using biomass for fuel and so on. One of the wedges was replacing coal-fired energy plants with natural gas. More research grew the number of wedges from seven to nine, and then to 15, but none of that undermined the basic concept.

The paper’s credibility was called into question almost immediately. “Success”, it said, would be holding atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide to 550 parts per million, or double the level before the Industrial Revolution. But as NASA scientist Jim Hansen and others have shown, the safe limit is 350ppm. The biomass wedge required a sixth of the planet’s entire arable land to be used to grow crops for burning: obviously not realistic. And natural gas production would have to rise fourfold.

But the doubts were overridden. Al Gore used the wedges theory in his 2006 movie An Inconvenient Truth.

This year, researchers at Pro Publica and Drilled have revealed the wedges paper was funded by BP.

In fact, it was BP’s chairman, John Browne, who came up with the snappy name. The wedges paper turns out to have been a foundation document of a sophisticated and highly successful campaign to keep the world dependent on fossil fuels, especially gas, for as long as possible.

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In concert with this, industry-funded studies downplayed the dangers of methane, arguing that carbon dioxide does more long-term damage. Environmental groups were co-opted to the cause. The Sierra Club’s leader, Carl Pope, toured America to promote fracking as a “solution” to the climate crisis.

The gas lobby didn’t present themselves as climate denialists. Instead, they worked to focus attention on carbon dioxide, which lasts in the atmosphere for far longer, while constantly pushing the message that gas is cleaner than oil and coal, and therefore valuable as a transition fuel.

Fossil-fuel lobby groups with impartial-sounding names like the Gas Research Institute in the US and our own Energy Resources Aotearoa have been prominent.

Politicians were also co-opted. Barack Obama spoke often about fracking as a great way to reduce emissions and boost the economy. For several decades across America, as coal-fired power plants closed, they weren’t always replaced with wind or solar generation. Often, the solution was gas.

But there are a couple of problems with methane and fracking. It’s true methane doesn’t have a long life in the atmosphere, and therefore emissions now won’t be there in hundreds of years in the same way carbon emissions will. But during its short life methane is at least 80 times more damaging. This means reductions in methane emissions now would be a tremendously valuable way to reduce GHG.

The second issue is that fracking is inefficient: as satellite surveys have shown, the process leaks. Scientists at Cornell University have discovered that because of the potency of methane, even leakage of as little as 3% would be more harmful than coal, and their data suggests fracking leaks about twice as much as that.

The fallacy of imported gas

What does this mean for us? It suggests extraction of the gas we’re going to import will have already done more harm to the environment than any coal it might replace. And that gas will definitely be more harmful than the renewable generation we might have built, if Energy Resources Aotearoa and the rest of the industry had not persuaded the government that gas is a necessary and desirable transition fuel.

The fossil-fuel industry’s strategy has been so successful that gas consumption is growing globally. But supply isn’t keeping up, especially in the wake of the war on Iran. So prices are rising – some analysts expect gas will soon be 80% more expensive – and new exploration is underway.

This is the context in which the New Zealand government has acquiesced to the fossil-fuel industry’s desire to import more gas and renew offshore drilling. We’ve been incorporated into its strategy to keep burning fossil fuels for as long as possible.

Not all countries have responded like this. China’s energy strategy involves becoming less dependent on imported fuels, including gas, and it now has the world’s largest construction programme of new renewables. The New York Times reports that the Philippines, Vietnam and other Asian countries are reducing their dependence on gas.

Bill McKibben summarises things this way: “The natural gas industry is destroying the climate, and destroying people’s lungs, and it’s trying to lock us into this expensive practice for decades to come.”

He suggests we stop calling it “natural gas” and use a term that more accurately explains what the gas is. “Fracked gas”, perhaps, or “fossil gas”. Or “asthma gas”. Let’s make it a dirty word, he says. I agree.

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Just for the record, there is no reason at all why our government can’t abandon its plans for gas and rapidly scale up the generation of renewable energy. It doesn’t need to rely solely on controversial new energy farms, although they will be valuable. Modern rooftop solar-panel-plus-battery technology is available to be deployed across the nation, on homes, schools, factories, everywhere.

But here’s the thing: the whole world is moving to do this, so production of the panels and batteries is now under pressure. Are we going to be part of it, or will the stupid obsession with an LPG terminal mean we miss out?

And what are It feels, I don’t know, unsurprising, somehow, that the minister of health and the minister of energy are the same person: Simeon Brown.

Hopetown: a place to do things differently

Thanks for reading this far. I like to think Hopetown is a place to celebrate the wonder of doing things differently and the possibility of doing them better, in music as in politics and all the rest. But how sad this week, to hear of the death of Irish singer Glen Hansard, who crashed his motorbike after a pub gig in Dublin, aged 56.

Hansard is most famous for starring with Markéta Irglová in the movie Once, with their beautiful song Falling Slowly from that film winning an Oscar in 2007. But there was more to him than that. Here he is on the mandolin in a Polish wideosesja, or video session, singing Lowly Deserter with Curtis Fowlkes on trombone.

And then there’s Carrickfergus: is there a better exposition anywhere of the wretched glory of Ireland? I sang this on stage a few years ago, and I still don’t know what came over me because I can’t really sing. But oh boy, Glen Hansard could.

And if that’s a bit angsty for you, check out Hansard performing with Lisa Hannigan at the Shakespeare and Co bookstore in Paris: just the first track, Blue Moon, should set you right for a bit.

Elon Musk and his keyboard army of the underworld got so upset that Lupita Nyong’o, a Black woman, was cast as Helen of Troy in The Odyssey. But that will fade to nothing compared to the wrath of Hobson’s Pledge when they find out about this movie. It runs on manaakitanga.

The entire film – which is wonderful, see it on the biggest screen you can – is fuelled by the concept that Zeus has a hospitality rule, abused at your peril: you treat strangers as honoured guests, and if you are such a guest, you are gracious in return. It’s called philoxenia, or love for a stranger, although the movie sticks to “Zeus’ law”. Sounds familiar, right?

Philoxenia is a reciprocal deal, abused often in the story but especially in the two episodes that film-maker Christopher Nolan uses to frame his telling: the suitors besieging Odysseus’ wife Penelope, and Odysseus’ “gift” to the Trojans of that giant wooden horse. At both the beginning and end of the film. Nolan cuts relentlessly between the two, unveiling the full horror of what happens when philoxenia is broken.

(Apologies if any of this comes as a spoiler but the story is almost 3000 years old so I’m guessing most people know what happens.)

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Manaakitanga shares xenia’s deeply embedded value of generosity and kindness based on mutual respect. And they’re not alone: similar concepts are fundamental to Christianity and Islam and in many of the cultures of Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Philoxenia is underpinned by the notion that the stranger at your door could be a god in disguise; that’s similar to the Hindu idea of Atithi Devo Bhava, which literally means treat your guest as a god.

If you want to push the Aotearoan dimensions of the idea a bit, it’s not hard to get to Tāmaki Makaurau on 18 September, 1840, when Āpihai Te Kawau, paramount chief of Ngāti Whātua o Ōrākei, sold 1200 hectares of land to Governor Hobson for goods worth about £340. This was a tuku whenua, or ceremonial gifting, whose purpose, as Ngāti Whātua puts it, was to “build an enduring relationship and partnership” on the site of what would become the new capital city.

As we know, that partnership never happened. Hobson’s government promptly started selling the land to settlers at far greater prices and, over time, the process was repeated until only the small urupa at Ōkāhu Bay remained with the iwi. Waitangi settlements notwithstanding, there has not yet been a proper accounting for this.

The point is not that The Odyssey is a metaphor for colonialism. There’s far more to the movie, and to Homer’s original, than that.

It is, after all, an epic story of love and war, full of the grand and the grotesque, and the imagination on show in the movie is every bit as breathtaking as in the poem. The giant and lonely Cyclops, the terror of Poseidon’s wrath, Circe turning men into pigs, that horse and the horror it unleashes. It’s riveting, and reaching through it all, this film is a heartbreaking account of the suffering that can await us when we lose our way in the world.

That’s the big metaphor. Odysseus’ long journey home is the journey of a lost soul. For thousands of years, the movie reminds us, we have had the values to live well by. We know what they are. But when we forget them we are doomed to wander, piling mistake upon mistake, betraying those who trust us, abandoning our purpose, spiritually lost on Calypso’s barren beach. Trying to come to terms with our shame that we have let this happen.

There are two big reasons to revisit the classics. You can do it to revel in the wonderment and beauty of a thing from long ago. This is the museum approach: to ask, what can we learn of those distant times from this magnificent skeleton, this pottery bowl, this poetry, these granite menhirs standing in a circle? It’s not to be sneezed at: the past has much to teach us and much pleasure to give.

The other reason is to ask what that great work of the past can tell us about us now. Homer, if he was real, lived around 400 years after the fall of Troy, if that was real, and the Homeric stories contains themes and messages aimed at a contemporary audience. It is entirely true to the spirit of Homer that a retelling of The Odyssey today will aim its messages at us.

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Coming to terms with shame is not a Homeric idea. Which is fine: we live in a world made and controlled not by gods but by humans. Shame is a powerful motivator, especially as we’re not good at being gods. Nolan has already reminded us very explicitly of that in Oppenheimer.

Which points to a whole lot of reasons Elon Musk and his whole gang of techbros, supremacists and blowhards should be upset about this movie. It’s about them.

The casting of Lupita Nyong’o is the least of it. (Besides, what about Matt Damon? As Homeric scholar Daniel Mendelsohn observed in the New York Times, he doesn’t look Greek either.)

Donald Trump’s war on humanity and the folly of Musk’s Martian ambitions lurk everpresent in this movie, but Odysseus himself is no stand-in for either of them. Although he’s a king, in this story he’s Everyman: he’s ordinary folk; in particular, ordinary men.

The ruination we have brought upon the world is also there, and the shame of Odysseus is our shame, or at least the shame of America. But he does have the superhero’s ability to vanquish all his foes in the final battle, so maybe we do too. How’s that for hopeful.

Nolan reminds us that war is not inevitable, but arises from the follies of the powerful: men, in our world, not gods. Neither is it noble, however much individuals in a war may behave nobly. And nor is it grandly romantic. In one of the many ways he tells us these things, Nolan has Penelope wonder at the entire supposed rationale for the Trojan War: that the Trojan hero Hector stole Helen from the Greek king Menelaus and the Greeks want her back. Penelope’s question is a good one: wouldn’t the Trojans have just handed her over?

Odysseus tells Penelope it’s not about Helen. Agamemnon, supreme king of the Greeks, wants to secure the Mediterranean trade routes. It really does sound so familiar.

A bit more golden weather

Speaking of culture, Bruce Mason’s play The End of the Golden Weather is having a very short run in Auckland, right now. Just like The Odyssey, it’s a tale of shame and learning how to live in a broken world, although the two shows have almost nothing else in common except this: they’re both unbelievably good.

Golden Weather is a solo show by Stephen Lovatt, directed by Shane Bosher, that pitches you deep into a 1930s childhood summer on the beach at Te Parenga, Mason’s fictionalised version of Takapuna. It’s the complete opposite of a blockbuster: just one man and a chair (and a beautiful backdrop). And Lovatt’s performance is wildly entertaining: hilarious, anguished, charming, traumatic, sly, roiling its audience through childhood pleasures and pains to the awfulness of adulthood and also, finally, celebrating the grace of generosity.

It’s not an odyssey, exactly, because the boy telling the story is already home, with Rangitoto right outside his window, but it is a deeply experienced journey into what it means to be human. I bet Christopher Nolan would love it.

The End of the Golden Weather is playing in repertory with Not Christmas but Guy Fawkes, another Mason one-hander, also performed by Lovatt, at Q Theatre only until August 2. Honestly, The Odyssey is terrific but it does go on forever, so I’d see this first because, like golden weather itself, it isn’t going to last.

Hopetown: a place to do things differently

Thanks for reading this far. I like to think Hopetown is a place to celebrate the wonder of doing things differently and the possibility of doing them better, in music as in politics and all the rest. Because, like Odysseus, we’re all trying to find our way home and there are so many ways to get there.

Blind Faith had a song about it. The band was a “supergroup” formed in 1969 by Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker from Cream, Stevie Winwood from Traffic and Ric Grech from Family, and fans of Clapton and Baker always insisted they were, respectively, the best blues/rock guitarist and drummer in the world. But Winwood was a songwriting genius with the voice of a drunken angel and formidable talents on both keyboard and guitar.

Didn’t last. They made one eponymous album before collapsing in acrimony, but despite its appalling paedophiliac cover the music survived. Can’t find my way home, written and sung by Winwood, is one of its standouts. Here they are in 2010, Winwood and Clapton, 41 years older and better than ever. They may not have known it, but this is their song for Odysseus.

“Predatory delay,” said Auckland councillor Julie Fairey last week, and she might have been lobbing a hand grenade into the meeting, except by that stage, early in the evening, most of her colleagues seemed too exhausted to care. One councillor denied it, quietly, and that was that. They were debating housing density and although the outcome wasn’t in doubt (the split was 15-7), the going had been tough.

Accusing your fellow councillors of predatory behaviour of any kind is no small thing. But Fairey was right. What did she mean?

The debate was over urban development: which plan would be chosen for yet another round of public consultation, with the responses to be put before an Independent Hearings Panel (IHP). Those seven councillors wanted to delay the choice, which could have derailed the whole process, which has already been going on for years.

The term “predatory delay” was invented by climate activist Alex Steffen in 2016. He used it to describe the way big polluters, while fully aware of the damage they cause, find ways to postpone structural or systemic change so they can keep on profiting from their destruction of the environment.

Steffen gave it a moral dimension. “Life on a hotter, dangerous and destabilised planet is not something we would wish to have inflicted on ourselves,” he wrote. Therefore, “we really don’t really have the ethical right to inflict it on our descendants”.

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Note: This post now contains a postscript on the latest report of the Climate Change Commission. See below.

The thing about predatory delay is that it doesn’t seem predatory at all. People advocating it can sound very reasonable. “They want change, they claim,” said Steffen. “They just think we need prudent, appropriately paced change, mindful of economic trade-offs and judiciously studied.”

But delay builds on delay and nothing happens. Their goal, said Steffen, is merely “cosmetic change for the foreseeable future”.

HOUSING DENSITY HAS a climate dimension and fits this pattern, although it is also about equity, traffic congestion, public health, property rights and the beauty of the city. And the decision-making delays have sometimes seemed endless.

Auckland Council has been fretting its way through the minefield ever since the first draft of the first Auckland Unitary Plan (AUP) was released for public consultation in 2013. Three years later, amid disputes that councillor Christine Fletcher said would turn into “civil war in Auckland for the next 20 years”, a much-revised version was adopted.

I wrote about the AUP debates several times, including in a Metro article called The Miserables of Kohimarama.

The council had to produce new plans after Labour required the city to zone for 2 million homes (including the 550,000 we have now), then National mandated a new plan but retained the 2 million figure, then National reduced the figure and then reduced it again. The proposal is now for 1.4 million, which still sounds like a lot: at current rates of construction it would take more than 50 years to achieve.

But it’s far more than required for a very good reason: only a few property owners will ever build to the maximum capacity in their zone, and they can’t be compelled to build more.

At every step, the council has looked for some kind of balance between two goals. One, to retain “special character” housing, which means colonial villas and cottages in the city-fringe suburbs. Two, to get lots more homes built in places with good services and amenities, so more people can see a viable future for themselves in the city. It can’t be either/or. The city needs both, and therefore needs compromise. And at every step there have been fervent attempts to delay the plan.

Fletcher, by the way, no longer says the AUP will lead to civil war. She’s transferred that warning, in various language, to each new iteration of the plan, and now praises the AUP as a model of how to do it well. Little known fact: the AUP allows for a capacity of 1.2 million. Only a little less than is proposed now.

At last week’s meeting, a compromise plan was tabled: 85% of the city’s homes (mainly, those outside a 10km radius from the city centre) will not be zoned for greater density, and most streets in “special character” zones will not be subject to high-rise development.

The new plan is a compromise on a compromise and now has strong council support. It’s politics as the art of the possible. But the call went up from the hold-out few: let’s decide this some other time!

There’s a real cost to predatory delay. As councillor Shane Henderson reminded that meeting, the council had previously rejected a housing density plan with the potential to generate $3.9 billion in economic activity. The reason: too much high-rise.

“IT’S BECOME CLEAR,” wrote Alex Steffen, “that many of our leaders’ definition of a reasonable amount of time … is for things to change sometime after they’re dead.”

He also said: “Many wealthy people understand that their profits are extracted through destructively unsustainable practices, and they’ve known it for decades. By and large, they no longer deny the need for change, they simply argue for delay, on the basis that to change too quickly would be unfair to them.”

He was writing about climate action, but his comments resonate uncannily through the housing density debate.

“In every country on Earth,” he wrote, “policies made at the top are still overwhelmingly designed not to meet our planetary crisis at the scale and speed it demands, but to protect the institutions, companies and systems causing that crisis from disruptive change. This is true at every scale, from large incumbent industries unfairly undermining newer, more sustainable competitors to wealthy Nimby property owners blocking new housing.”

HOUSING IS JUST one area in which predatory delay has run rampant in New Zealand’s climate response. While our energy-related emissions have risen 20% since 1990, the power generators have been slow to build even the wind farms they have consents for, and they’re holding back the transition to rooftop solar with batteries.

E-bikes, which are technology that really does have the potential to make a difference, get no support. Cycleways, the enabler of safe cycling, have been subsumed in culture wars.

And now the government is bailing out Golden Bay Cement, wholly owned by Fletcher Building, because the company says it can’t sustain its costs under the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). This is a classic consequence of predatory delay: do nothing, do nothing, and then, when some kind of crisis hits, declare the climate goal must be abandoned.

“The ETS is the problem,” we’re told about this debacle. That is, climate action is too hard. It’s a disgrace.

The ETS is supposedly a mechanism to send price signals to greenhouse gas emitters, making it more expensive to keep emitting carbon than to invest in reducing those emissions. It is neoliberal theory made manifest: the market will be the most effective manager of climate action.

Well that’s a fail. Now the price of concrete emissions is rising, the government has stepped in to prevent the market signals doing their work.

It’s true there’s no easy fix for Fletcher’s rising costs. But low-emissions cement exists. So does cross-laminated timber for use in high-rise construction. And so do transport alternatives to the car dependency we’re told requires a constant “pipeline” of cement-based motorways and tunnels. If New Zealand had put a climate-framed construction strategy in place years ago, Fletcher’s problem might not have become a crisis.

But that would have meant overcoming predatory delay by the construction industry and successive governments. Which, even now, despite the best efforts of the Green Building Council, is still happening.

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The ETS will probably always fail like this. Price signals won’t lead to lower emissions because governments won’t allow carbon pricing to do its job. In turn, this exposes the true nature of the ETS. Despite the high hopes of its originators, emissions trading has become the country’s leading mechanism for predatory delay over climate action.

We should already know this, following the revelation that Z Energy and Fonterra lobbied the government to stop them being sued for their approach to emissions.

Fundamentally, that dispute is not about the role of the courts. It’s about emissions. We know this because of a simple truth: if Z Energy and Fonterra were seriously committed to reducing emissions, as opposed to predatory delay, they’d find it easy to stand up in court and say so. But, of course, they can’t do that.

FONTERRA, ALONG WITH Federated Farmers, Dairy NZ, Beef and Lamb and others, have set the gold standard for predatory delay.

They’ve been at it for more than 20 years. Agricultural emissions have risen 9% since 1990, almost entirely because of methane from expanded dairy herds and increased fertiliser use, and still account for half our total emissions. This should be in the forefront of our climate response.

Instead, in 2003, the agribusiness lobby stopped the first attempt to legislate, ridiculing the proposed law as a “fart tax”. In 2008, when Labour introduced the ETS, agriculture was to be excluded until 2013, the delay giving it “time to adjust”. National extended the delay by another two years, then removed the deadline altogether. The next Labour-led government, with the Greens’ James Shaw as Climate Change Minister, reintroduced the issue. But in 2019 the industry came up with He Waka Eke Noa, involving a new five-year delay in which it would create its own emissions-pricing plan outside the ETS.

The result, released in late 2022, was complicated, put the burden of compliance on individual farmers and not Fonterra and the other large processing companies, and was expected to reduce emissions by less than 1%. In an entirely predictable response, farmers were outraged. So was the environmental lobby.

The government responded to He Waka Eke Noa in good faith, with policy based on the plan: it was weak but it was, finally, a start. Then, just before Christmas, the Federated Farmers’ president outed himself as a full-blown climate denier. He told RNZ he didn’t believe we would know if climate change was real for another 50 years, and he opposed the new methane targets he’d helped draft.

That was Andrew Hoggard, now an Act MP and a minister in the current government. Within months, Federated Farmers and other industry groups had abandoned the whole He Waka Eke Noa process. The new government killed it off formally in 2024.

Russel Norman at Greenpeace says, “Agribusiness never had any intention of agreeing to the pricing of their emissions,” and I agree with him. Their predatory delay is now decades old. They’ve agreed to research and plan with ever-longer lead times, but instead of seeking to reduce emissions, they’ve invested in lobbying to shore up their denialism.

Agriculture isn’t a monolith and a great many individual farmers have been excellent stewards of the environment. They deserve our gratitude. But the big business interests that run the sector don’t. They’re given us environmental degradation, shrouded in a culture war we didn’t need to have.

They’ve also put the entire economy at risk, because we are now exposes to shifts in global markets that appear inevitable and could be catastrophic. About a third of our dairy exports go to China, but as my fellow Substacker Anna Fifield has pointed out, China is now planning to become self-sufficient in food. It will take them several years, but does anyone doubt they will do it?

Predatory delay dresses itself up as consensus building, and that’s often a valuable goal. But consensus is not always possible or desirable. Grant Robertson and James Shaw desperately wanted He Waka Eke Noa to provide a plan for agricultural emissions that could be locked in because everyone supported it. It was a noble intention. But it produced that miserable 1% reduction target and even then it was abandoned by the sector.

Sometimes, the noblest of intentions turn out to be fantasy. One of the functions of predatory delay is to disguise this.

As Julie Fairey discovered at Auckland Council, even when you reach an apparent compromise, some people will just take that as an invitation to demand more.

EZRA KLEIN AND Derek Thompson have a lot to say about predatory delay in their book Abundance, which is about the barriers to progress in a 21^st century liberal democracy.

They applaud the progressive activists of the last century who fought “to protect the public from the unchecked consequences of growth: the bulldozers of urban renewal and the pollution of industrialisation”.

But this new constrained world, they say, now has “systems attuned to the harms of action and not its benefits”. And that enables something else: people who once took to the barricades to advocate social change now take to the courts to prevent urban development. Especially in housing.

Typically, their challenge is not about the substantive issue, it’s about the process. Councillor Fletcher, for example, never says, “I don’t want urban density.” Instead, she says, “I am all in favour of density, but you’re going about it the wrong way.” The regulations intended as safeguards against abuse have been conscripted to prevent progress.

I think there are things wrong about what’s now called “abundance theory”, but Klein and Thompson are right about this. And they’re not dry neoliberals: they count themselves on the centre-left. They want a “liberalism that builds” and they say that’s blocked by people who believe in equity and the redistribution of wealth, but oppose changes they think will undermine their quality of life. They are talking about Nimbys.

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In 2016, in “The Miserables of Kohimarama”, I wrote that Don Stock, representing residents’ associations in the leafy suburbs, told a council meeting, “The only issue is the process.” Which he said was being abused.

Sudhvir Singh from the youth-oriented lobby group Generation Zero agreed the debate was focused on “process”. But, he said, that disguised the real issue, which was whether a scattering of apartment blocks should be allowed in the leafy suburbs.

Last week, 10 years after that final year of sparring over the Unitary Plan, the same arguments were in play. It was odd to discover that the councillors from Howick, who had won their fight to exclude almost all the density from their area, were still opposed to the plan. Consensus wasn’t possible and, for them, compromise wasn’t acceptable either. They wanted more delay.

The politics of urban planning is just like the politics of climate action. You have to find enough agreement to proceed, without endless delay, without compromises that eviscerate the whole project. Because you do need to proceed.

The councillors had before them the striking example of Mt Eden and Mt Albert, the part of Auckland that will see the most growth, because it’s near the central city and includes five railway stations. The ward is represented by both Fairey and Fletcher: they’ve got one each way.

The local board is also split almost down the middle, on informal party lines that mirror the Fairey/Fletcher divide. But on this issue, after large public meetings and extensive debates, the board voted 5-2 in favour of the new compromise plan. They voted for the greater good. There’s hope for the leafy suburbs yet.

Postscript: What the Climate Change Commission says

It was remiss of me not to mention the latest report of the Climate Change Commission in this post.

Last week the commission reported to parliament on emissions reductions. It said “progress stalled in 2024, and current policy settings are not delivering at the pace needed”, promoting chief executive Jo Hendy to call the findings “a clear warning sign”. The commission says the rate of decarbonisation will need to “more than double” to get us to net zero by 2050, the 2030 interim target is now “at significant risk, and that risk has increased in the last year”, and we are likely to miss the 2035 target as well.

“Government choices in the next 12-24 months will be critical to getting the country back on track,” she said. In particular, this should include strengthening the Emissions Trading Scheme, boosting transitional measures for agriculture, incentivising EVs and getting more people onto public transport.

But in reality, the government has actually removed the requirement for a methane emissions target, which the commission says is incompatible with the 2050 goal

“The government has absolutely screwed it,” said Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick.

But not according to Prime Minister Christopher Luxon. He breezed past Hendy’s “critical choices to be made now” warning to declare we are already “on track” for the 2030 and 2035 targets and might even get to net zero a few years early.

Predatory delay, dissolving into fantasy. You can read the report here, an excellent summary by Joel McManus at the Spinoff here, and another excellent piece on the methane target by Marc Daalder for Newsroom here.

Different ways to do things

Hopetown! It’s a place dedicated to different ways to do things. Including song covers. Prince recorded “When Doves Cry” in 1984 and this version is by the Be Good Tanyas, released on their album Hello Love in 2006. This is not an official video: it’s called “N’arrettes pas” (“Don’t stop”) and was recorded in Paris in 2017 by the dancer John Degois.

I’ve had several encounters with Paul Henry over the years. Three stand out.

Many years ago, when I was editor of Metro magazine, we organised a celebrity photo shoot at Soul in the Viaduct. The idea was to run a single photo over several spreads, Vanity Fair style. It was a massive undertaking, with cables and equipment everywhere, technical crew, makeup and hair, more than 30 celebrities and several hangers-on. As you might imagine, there was a little bit of ego in the room.

Paul Holmes was there. That sweetest of men, he behaved that day like a dreadful prima donna. Helicoptered in from Hawke’s Bay, arrived late, got in the way, made ridiculous random demands and kept saying, “Who are all these people? I don’t know these people.” We coped, as you do.

Paul Henry was there, too. A man who often seems to revel in being obnoxious, on this day he was courteous and professional, making no silly demands, doing what he was asked, showing no displeasure at the inevitable waiting around. He put up with the Holmes show without once trying to compete, although they were at the time fierce rivals.

So the bad guy was great and the nice guy was a shocker. People are complex. Perhaps especially when they’re celebrities.

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On the second occasion, memorable to me although I’m sure to no one else, I was a guest panellist on Henry’s breakfast TV show when the topic of a classic Kiwi sweet getting a new wrapper came up. He asked me which wrapper I preferred. I said I didn’t care, because I’m a dullard and I wanted to talk about something a little more substantial. But no. He repeated the question, I repeated my answer, he got annoyed and showed it, and that was the last time I was asked onto the show. Fair enough. I was being stupid: you’re supposed to play the Yes game in those moments and it was his show.

But for a man who rails all the time against the stupidity and triviality he finds everywhere he looks, it did seem a little thin-skinned.

The third occasion was Henry’s keynote speech to the Act Party rally in Auckland in 2024. Henry has told us he decided quite suddenly that he wanted to be an Act MP, which may be true, but his relationship with the party goes back some time. His appointment to the TVNZ board had Act’s fingerprints all over it.

I wrote about that speech for the Herald, calling it “long, entertaining and superbly well crafted”. Henry’s a great showman and, I said, “he knows how to hold a staunchly right-wing crowd”.

He railed against all sorts of stupidity, as he saw it. The Labour government, which had lit matches “to incinerate more of New Zealand”. Queen St, which was a “disaster zone” and “we can’t fix it because it is politically incorrect to hoover the streets of the antisocial”. The whole of New Zealand, which was “a sad little country squabbling amongst ourselves”.

He thought Act might be that sad country’s “last hope”, but “it’s possible it’s beyond repair, in which case I’ll relocate”. Which is exactly what he did.

I wrote then that it was “a masterful mash-up: grievance, superiority over the ‘sad little squabblers’ and a smug acknowledgment of the privilege of wealth. He got a standing ovation.” Paul Henry is a maestro at flattering a like-minded audience.

He’s announced his candidacy at a critical time for the coalition, with all three parties locked in a fierce battle to steal each other’s voters. He may not attract many from the other side, but Act hopes he will be irresistible to disaffected National and NZ First supporters.

Already, we know National won’t get near the 48 seats and 38.1% of the party vote it won in 2023. It might improve on the <30% showing it’s been getting almost all year, but probably not by much. That means if National does get to form a new government, it will have an even weaker role in it than it has now.

In this context, Henry must fancy his chances. Even though, as someone who hates this “sad little country squabbling amongst ourselves”, he won’t naturally fall in love with parliament.

But he isn’t doing this just to breathe through his nose on the backbenches. He’ll demand a cabinet role, soon as, and the precedent has been set. In the last coalition talks, Christopher Luxon gave both Andrew Hoggard (Act) and Casey Costello (NZ First) ministerial roles, despite neither having previously been MPs.

Henry will expect to be minister of broadcasting, for starters, and incumbent Paul Goldsmith may be very happy to leave it to him. And pretty soon he’ll want more than that.

But even if he rises quickly, will Paul Henry like being in parliament? And despite his affinity with Act philosophy, will he like being an Act MP?

Newsroom’s Mark Jennings, who was Henry’s boss at TV3, has told us he’s a team player and a professional. That aligns with my experience of him in that photo shoot. It’s not always about him.

But often it is. The hard-right broadcaster Peter Williams says, “I can … vouch that if he’s not the centre of attention he tends to lose interest pretty quickly.” Goodness. I wonder what a politician with a malicious streak and a superiority complex might do when he gets bored.

Jennings described “politically incorrect humour” as “a big part of Henry’s on-air persona”. But it’s not an on-air persona: it’s him. When Henry insulted Indian politician Sheila Dikshit on TV in 2010, repeatedly mispronouncing and laughing at her name and saying his insults were “appropriate because she’s Indian”, it wasn’t just an off-colour joke. He was being racist. He was celebrating racism.

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Being professional when he wants to be does not make Paul Henry a good person to have in politics. He’s not the first politician to stir up racial hatred or want to “hoover the streets” of people he finds undesirable, but his professional skills might make him dangerously good at it. Especially if he thinks it’s funny.

The fact Henry can be considerate and helpful, as he was on that photo shoot, and the fact he can laugh at trivial things, like the sweet wrappers: these things don’t define him. Every good populist knows how to be a nice guy, and Paul Henry has the makings of an outrageously good populist. He’s a super smart and gleefully gifted speechmaker, but those “gifts” include cynicism, impatience and narcissism, and he seems to love abusing and hurting people for laughs.

In Britain, Australia and elsewhere, the hard right has risen fast in the polls. Act hopes Henry will be their new prince of populism, casting shade on Winston Peters and helping them assume the mantle of Nigel Farage and Pauline Hanson here. Henry’s doing this to make a difference, and not in a good way.

God knows, from their point of view, Act needs to do something. As mentioned, National’s vote has fallen, but the main beneficiaries of that have been NZ First on one side and Labour on the other. Act’s own poll numbers are resolutely stuck a little below the 8.64% it achieved in 2023.

Some commentators say this is because party leader David Seymour is being more ministerially collaborative than his rival Winston Peters, but I think his problem lies elsewhere. The simple fact is that Act in government has been a disaster.

From pay equity to school lunches, boot camps to climate denialism, the party disgusts and dismays many voters. Including, surely, Paul Henry. Seymour’s signature school-lunch policy has exposed exactly the kind of incompetence Henry scoffs at all the time.

No matter. Cometh the hour, cometh the showman: the entertaining bully who cannot hide his superiority and does not try. The ultimate flash harry.

Henry has conducted many probing interviews in his time, but his trademark was always to sneer at people he doesn’t like. It’s hard to know if he has any serious interest in policy, or governing for the greater good, and he does not appear to have even a shred of the compassion we should hope for in all our politicians.

“New Zealand is in the sh*t” say the new Act billboards, with a grinning photo of Paul Henry. If politicians had to wear their core values branded on their foreheads, “You’re all shits” would be on his.

The stakes were already high for this election. The prospect of Paul Henry in cabinet raises them a whole lot higher.

Hopetown: where there are different ways to do things. Here’s Marlon Williams, an infinitely better kind of showman, with “The first time ever I saw your face”, a song written in 1957 by British singer-songwriter Ewan MacColl for Peggy Seeger and turned into a smash hit in 1969 by the great Roberta Flack.

Actually, it’s not just one question. Qiulae Wong, known as Q, leader of the newly reinvented Opportunity Party (TOP), has pulled off a remarkable trick. She has successfully presented her party as the answer to every question. Whatever distresses you about politics today, the answer is: TOP.

You’re a greenie who wants a party that will work with National? TOP. You’re a libertarian disgusted by Act’s law-and-order numbskulls, and/or its climate deniers and gun lobbyists? TOP.

You want a high-wage economy but don’t think Labour has a clue how to achieve it? TOP. You want to honour the Treaty of Waitangi without honouring the nepotism of the Tamihere whanau? TOP. Maybe you support National but not when it extinguishes the pay-equity rights of women, or you want less poverty but not more government debt, or meaningful tax reform but not if it empowers Chloe Swarbrick: TOP.

And, most of all, if you want to put an end to the absurdity of 30 years of MMP in which we all vote and then Winston decides: TOP!

That’s the big one. Despair at the cynical gamesmanship of NZ First, and both National and Labour’s craven obeisance to it, has surely become the thing that unites more New Zealanders than anything else, probably including support for the All Blacks and a fondness for the buzzy bee.

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But hang on. Why would TOP getting into parliament mean the end of the Power of Winston? A party that undermines NZ First will have to take votes from it to do so. But TOP won’t do that. It stands for tax reform, climate activism, social liberalism and expert-oriented managerialism. NZ First voters hate all that. TOP is about as pure an expression of anti-NZ Firstism as we’ve ever seen. It might draw votes from all the other parties, but not from Winston’s lot.

The sad fact is that votes for TOP won’t hurt him.

In judging the likelihood of TOP success, people point to precedents. But their significance is hard to read.

In Australia, for example, the Teals have done well – and TOP here has adopted the colour. But Australia is different: outright climate denialism on the centre-right there gave rise to Teal, but it’s different here. National’s blue-green voters might detest the gung-ho anti-environmentalism of Shane Jones and Simeon Brown, but are they really looking for a new home?

On the contrary, they may even have been heartened by National’s election-season burst of enviro-conscience: attacks on the conservation estate abandoned, new loans for residential solar, more wind farms being fast-tracked.

Another precedent: Colin Craig’s New Conservative Party polled 4.7% leading into the 2014 election, before finishing a shade under 4%. But it signifies little. Craig’s run was a vanity project at a time when voters had much more confidence in the mainstream parties. He appealed only to a fringe.

That’s not where TOP’s appeal comes from. These days, it’s almost as if National and Labour have conspired to undo our confidence in the mainstream, while NZ First has gathered much of the right-wing fringe to itself. So although TOP is riding a wave of discontent, it has little to do with conservative disgruntlement. It comes from everywhere else.

And in Wong, the party has a leader with far more charisma than the string of grumpy men who went before her. Never underestimate that: we want to like the people we vote for.

There’s another reason TOP appeals: it’s what the party itself calls “stop the division”. Everyone wants a functional health system, but very few people would say the war between National and Labour will help deliver it. TOP wants to change that.

Similarly, it’s obvious we need a bipartisan approach to long-term infrastructure planning, and the main parties even agree. But they don’t agree on what infra should be planned. National’s Ghost Roads of National Significance, unfunded and unfundable, have followed hard on Labour’s absurdly expensive Auckland Light Rail tunnels project. We can’t keep on like this and TOP wants to fix this too.

It’s just not all that clear how.

Where will TOP votes come from this election? Political advertising consultant Paul Gunson has done a deep dive into New Zealand Election Study (NZES) data and produced some fascinating results.

In 2017, the party drew mainly on former National and Green voters. Not Labour. In 2020, it appealed more to former Labour and National voters, but not much to Greens. Last election, in 2023, its voters came from Labour and the Greens, with few from National.

Get the picture? Hmm. One read of this shifting pattern is that TOP has always been a home for the non-fringe disillusioned, whatever the cause of their disappointment.

But Gunson also discovered a deeper trend: half of all people who identify as TOP voters want the Greens in government with them, and a third want Labour. Few want the current coalition parties back in government. In 2023, 66% of TOP voters identified themselves as left or centre-left. Only 12% said they were right or centre-right.

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There’s a red flag for TOP in that data, because Wong says if TOP has the chance to negotiate a new government, it will do so with the party that gets the largest number of votes.

What if TOP gets into parliament on the strength of Labour defectors hoping to make it a viable partner for Labour, but this makes National the largest party? That would be Labour supporters sinking Labour’s vote and pushing TOP into National’s arms. (For that matter, the reverse could also happen.)

The lesson: tactical votes are dangerous, for the outcome and for the party in question. On this, there is ample precedent. In 2005 and again in 2017, NZ First went into government with Labour, making its conservative supporters so angry they abandoned the party at the next election, booting NZ First out of parliament altogether. The same fate befell the Māori Party in 2017 after it supported National. Parties that betray their voter base will be punished by those voters.

And yet there’s a lot of talk about voting tactically for TOP.

What if the party finds itself propping up National, without managing to win many concessions for doing so?

As for stopping Winston, how will that happen? Barring some extraordinary crisis, NZ First will be in the next parliament. And if the centre-right forms the next government, NZ First will almost certainly be in it: National and Act will be lucky to get to 40% combined; another 5% from TOP still wouldn’t be enough keep NZ First out.

We could end up with a National/Act/NZF/TOP coalition, which doesn’t seem like an outcome anybody wants.

What if TOP gets 4.9% and doesn’t win a seat? In a tight election, that would be a suicidal waste of around 140,000 votes: potentially enough to deny the centre-left the chance to form a government. That doesn’t seem like something most TOP voters would want either.

Perhaps the biggest question for TOP is how it will overcome the mismatch between what it wants to achieve and how it says it will go about it.

The plan to negotiate first with the largest party is ridiculous. TOP should focus on the parties it believes it could join in government in order to best advance its programme.

TOP knows our economy needs asset-tax reform of some kind, so why support parties that will veto such reforms? It wants more consensual and participatory approaches to decision-making, so why abandon this with parties that don’t agree?

These things are not nice-to-haves for TOP, they’re core issues. They should inform the party’s rallying cry and they should guide it in whatever negotiations it might pursue.

For TOP to do otherwise is to risk betraying its own voters.

This goes to the heart of why we vote, and the resurgence of TOP doesn’t change it. In my view, it comes down to this. You should vote for the party you believe in. That’s the way we get a parliament that represents the will of the people.

If you want tax reform, poverty taken seriously and the same for the climate crisis, vote for a party that wants the same. TOP might qualify. If you want a stronger democracy, an economy dedicated to the needs of the great majority and not the greed of a few, vote for these things. TOP still might qualify. But National, Act and NZ First don’t. If you want the malign influences of David Seymour, Simeon Brown and Winston Peters consigned to history, vote for a party that is committed to doing it. Not one that might keep them in power.

It’s only when everyone who wants these things votes for them that progressive parties win a majority of votes and get to form a government.

Party vote, that is. Party votes determine the outcome. Don’t give your electorate vote to your heart’s desire and do something tricksy with your party vote.

Party vote for the party that wants what you want.

This post is the third and final part in a series on election choices. Part 1 looked at the idea of a grand NatLab coalition and part 2 explained why I was voting Green. I’m not impartial and I confess the post above should be read in that light.

What an arsehole. But I guess one thing you can say about Brian Tamaki is that he reminds us that free speech is not an abstract, high-principled thing. Words can be dangerous. People can get hurt.

The free-speech debate got a good airing on Thursday night, when two teams squared off in the second annual Keith Locke Memorial Debate. The moot: “That hate speech laws threaten free speech.”.

Arguing the affirmative were Bradbury Group podcaster and political commentator Martyn Bomber Bradbury, Stuff columnist and Substacker Verity Johnson, and Thomas Beagle from the Council for Civil Liberties.

I was on the negative team, along with human-rights activist Anjum Rahman and Yasmine Serhan, a Green Party candidate who has been active in Te Tiriti o Waitangi Justice and Palestinian Liberation.

Personally, I don’t think it’s possible to give a simple yes/no answer to the question. Hate speech is a serious problem with no obvious solution. I think the other speakers felt the same. But it doesn’t follow we should do nothing.

On both sides, we did our best to clarify the issues as we saw them. It was notable that both were highly critical of the Free Speech Union and both claimed that Tamaki’s racist incitements revealed the rightness of their arguments.

In a way, we should have all thrown out our speaking notes and instead debated the question that’s very real and in front of us right now: What should we, Aotearoa New Zealand, do about Brian Tamaki?

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In recent years, the Christchurch mosque murders have framed our debate on hate speech and free speech. We have also to contend with our long specific history of hate speech against Māori. But last weekend Tamaki upped the ante, calling for the expulsion of entire immigrant communities and the burning of places of worship.

Should he be ignored? Locked up? Or something inbetween?

Legally, you would think there was a straightforward case for him to answer: he incited violence and that’s illegal. Dave Dobbyn was arrested for inciting a riot during a concert in Aotea Square in 1984, although he didn’t, and was completely exonerated in court. Tame Iti was arrested for planning violence in 2007, in an illegal police raid, and he was also exonerated. But Tamaki has avoided arrest. What the hell?

Is the law not strong enough for the police to believe he’d be convicted? If so, that’s an argument it should be stronger. Or have the police decided it’s all too hard? Is Brian Tamaki Exhibit A for the prosecution, that we need a hate speech law, or is he Exhibit A for the defence, that such a law undermines too many other civil liberties?

He’d turn himself into a martyr if he was arrested, and perhaps that’s what he wants, but that’s no reason not to arrest him. The Christchurch mosque murderer wanted to be a martyr too, but it’s utterly right he’s behind bars. What will Tamaki and his followers learn from the relative lack of consequences he currently faces for his actions?

We referred to all this in our debate this week, although we didn’t get to the bottom of it. You can watch the whole thing here.

By the way, we won. The audience in the room and online voted at the start on which side of the moot they supported, and that showed a small advantage to our team, the negative. They were then polled again at the end, to see which side had succeeded in swaying more votes. That revealed our majority had increased. But as I say, nobody on the platform thought the issue was straightforward.

Here’s my opening speech (trigger warning: contains references to Donald Trump) …

Why are we talking about free speech?

The thing about free speech is that everyone thinks of it like the setting this evening: A rational discussion among decent civilised people – and Martyn Bradbury – just like in the days of Plato. But that’s not it. Even Plato wasn’t all that Platonic. The laws the Athenian Assembly had around freedom of speech weren’t hate laws, as such. They were just the natural order of things. Slaves couldn’t speak there, nor could women, or conscientious objectors, which will be relevant to one or two people here tonight.

Free speech is an extremely valuable construct. But that’s what it is. A construct, like democracy itself. Something made by a group of humans to serve their interests.

As for Plato himself, he didn’t like democracy, because the construct could be too easily manipulated. The Assembly voted for his hallowed mentor Socrates to be put to death. The tyranny of the righteous is something our team will return to.

The construct of free speech is not absolute. It’s great that Bomber knows he is not allowed to call fire in a crowded cinema, unless there is a fire. So the question is, where and how do we draw the line. My colleagues this evening will be exploring that in detail.

They have pedigree in this. Anjum Rahman, whom I feel very humble to be sharing a platform with, has possibly had to endure more hate speech that anyone else in this room.

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Yasmine Serhan cops a fair bit too. She’s ranked 18^th on the Green Party list, so if the Greens get 15% of the party vote, she’ll become an MP.

Anjum is going to talk, among other things, about the Christchurch mosque murders, because this debate makes no sense unless someone does that. She’ll tell us how the terrorist was radicalised and why he did what he did.

Yasmine will also talk about what hate speech is and the harm it does, and she, also, has some personal experience to share. Both Anjum and Yasmine will talk about free speech and the treatment of Māori, because that is also central to this debate.

All of which leads to the question of why we need hate speech law. They’ll explain how human rights laws work, and what good law about the right to speak looks like.

As for me, I’m going to talk about the Enlightenment. And the Free Speech movement, which is the reason we are even having this debate. What it represents, and the menace it has become.

I loved that Bomber criticised the Free Speech Union in his speech, but let’s remember that this evening they’d be on his side.

The free-speech debate comes from America, land of the free and the brave and more guns than there are people to shoot them. America has 4% of the world’s population and 46% of the world’s privately owned guns.

In 2023, a famous American said: “I think it’s worth it to have … some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”

Charlie Kirk. Two years later he was murdered.

It’s pertinent to this debate that Kirk’s precious Second Amendment protects the “right” to bear arms, in a country where he complained endlessly about cancel culture. You know what cancel culture looks like? An angry young man with a semi-automatic weapon. Gun culture is the threat to “freedom” Americans should be worried about.

Charlie Kirk’s death was framed as a free-speech issue. Why? The assassinations of the Kennedys, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King weren’t seen like that. They were attacks on the substance of what the murdered leaders stood for. Civil rights. Black civil rights, especially. Free speech was just one part of it.

Making free speech the supposedly fundamental issue today corrodes the history of the civil-rights movement, because it denies that structural inequality and the subjugation of people of colour should be integral to the debate about human rights. That is, it whitewashes racism.

I wrote about the murder of Charlie Kirk in the Herald last year. I said it was nonsense to suggest, as the Free Speech Union does, that free speech is a “safety valve”. Often, the exact opposite is true. When that happens, free speech stirs hatred, as every tyrant in history, including the tin-pot ones, has demonstrated.

Donald Trump did it ahead of the January 6 insurrection. Brian Tamaki did it last weekend, calling for ethnic communities to be expelled and their places of worship to be burned down. He hasn’t been arrested. That looks like a good reason we need tougher laws.

Free speech is precious. Not because of the fatuous reasoning that it’s a “safety valve”, but because the clash of ideas is an invaluable dynamic of humanity and progress.

But let’s be clear: if we wish to claim the right of free speech for ourselves, we must allow that it should not be weaponised. That it should not become the means to erode the freedoms of others.

That requires society to make space for those who are intimidated, harassed and attacked by people insisting on their right to say whatever the hell they like.

This is a fundamental challenge to what Plato’s mates thought of as the natural order. Now that everyone has the right to be heard, we have a new “natural order”. It requires the free-speech construct to evolve, to recognise that important freedoms are lost if free speech is used to bully people into silence and cause them to live in fear of the hatred around them.

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Charlie Kirk didn’t agree with free speech for everyone. He campaigned for academics whose views he didn’t like to lose their jobs.

At the Herald, after I published, there were vexatious and extremely time-consuming attempts made by some readers to restrict my freedom of speech. This is a tactic often used by followers of the Free Speech Union, and of their compatriots gathered around Hobson’s Pledge and the Taxpayers Union – there’s another so-called “union” that is not a union at all. Using their free speech to tell porkies about who they are.

All of them, of course, are part of a hard-right network that includes the Atlas Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, the American Enterprise Institute and an outfit called the Claremont Institute, whose alumni, known as Claremonsters – I’m not making this up – can be found throughout the Trump administration.

These are the people insisting “free speech” is under terrible threat. Even while they steer American democracy off a cliff.

It’s not widely known that newsrooms struggle to deal with vexatious complaints and legal threats, so some stories just never happen. I once wrote a column about NZ billionaires’ contribution to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is a floating island of plastic and other waste in the Pacific. It’s three times the size of France. I couldn’t get it into print, not because I was wrong, but because the superwealthy people in question were judged to be too litigious.

You want to talk about threats to free speech? That’s a real one. Our restrictive defamation laws, which inhibit media.

The Free Speech Union acknowledges this, but seems much more interested in distracting us with the horrors of so-called “cancel culture”.

Why has the important value of free speech been hijacked? Is it because the great rights movements of the 20^th century – anti-fascism, civil rights, feminism, the queer campaigns, anti-colonialism – all waged their struggles against white male supremacy and for many of them the enemy was also corporate greed?

Those forces are not the enemy identified by the Free Speech Union and its fellow travellers. Some of them, especially in Hobson’s Pledge, are white supremacists themselves. They’re part of the global “freedom” movement, celebrated recently by Donald Trump with as bloated an example of the supremacist instinct as you could imagine. Freedom 250: cage fighting on the White House lawn.

Which brings us to the Enlightenment. The Free Speech Union hates it when anyone attacks the Enlightenment. That great flowering of ideas, commerce and culture. All true. But it was built on slavery, imperial conquest, genocide, the near-obliteration of indigenous cultures and a concept called “free trade” that destroyed entire economies.

And, as the Industrial Revolution grew from the Enlightenment and led to the runaway capitalism of today, we now understand these forces threaten the ruin of the whole planetary ecosystem.

This is the dark underbelly of the Enlightenment, in which the techbros and fossil-fuel oligarchs become bloated with unimaginable wealth, safe in the belief they will be immune to the damage they are doing. In a Queenstown bunker, perhaps, or, more probably, on the Moon.

They are the threat to democracy and human rights we should be talking about. Especially because we have never enjoyed more freedom of speech. Social media empowers us all, even as it eats away at us.

A wee irony for the fretful folks in the other team.

Why are we supposed to worry about free speech? Because it’s a distraction. Martin Luther King, and Te Whiti at Parihaka, and Rachel Carson, and everyone who waged a real struggle against a real enemy: if they knew we had become so distracted, if they knew we had let the hard right corrupt the cause of genuine freedom to shore up the interests of the rich and powerful, they would be horrified.

Free speech isn’t in danger: My speech in reply

And here’s my speech (reconstructed from notes) to finish the debate.

Here’s one way to put it. It’s perfectly legal to whitewash racism out of the rights debate. But woe betide anyone affected by that who complains: they’re accused of wanting to trample on freedom of speech.

The lesson, as always, is that them with the power makes the rules.

One simple takeout from this debate is that hate speech, protected in the name of “free speech”, allows racists, misogynists and others to insult people with impunity. This reinforces their hatred because it establishes public tolerance for it. And that isn’t dissolved by sunlight. It just keeps getting worse. Anjum has described the wealth of evidence we now have in this country, showing that hate speech leads to violence.

Yasmine has reminded us that freedom of speech should never equate to freedom from consequences. Just as defamation laws have a place, and we have censorship laws and many other laws that restrict freedom of speech, so to do we need hate speech law that performs the same function.

But there is more to the argument.

Rights are nowhere expressed absolutely, and when people try, it is a lie. Rights always exist in a qualified form. Democracy itself is qualified: even the equal status of our votes is never the rule, except in a small group.

Sometimes, as with the British House of Lords and the American Electoral College, the qualification is done for bad reasons. But it can and should be done for good reasons. If and when a right is qualified, it should be done principally to safeguard the interests of vulnerable groups: to avoid the tyranny of the majority, to ensure space and opportunity are given to the persecuted, the marginalised, the voiceless, those without power. The debate is, or should be, about how we do that. Not whether we do it at all.

And if it’s established, as my colleagues have done so movingly, that there are vulnerable, minority, less powerful groups whose rights are undermined, it is not acceptable that the powerful and their lackeys and propagandists should be the only ones who decide the rules, or that they can simply dismiss the dissent.

The powerful have always dominated public discourse, but it does not lead to justice.

Especially when it is done sanctimoniously, in the name of “rights” and “freedoms”. That is no more than a Declaration of the Rights of Man that does not recognise women or slaves.

Related to this: while democratic rights of all kinds are invariably established in noble language, they are often instruments to reinforce existing power. A legal system that is too expensive for most people to use, and incomprehensible to many, does not dispense even-handed justice. We all enjoy the right to go out in public and mind our own business, but that is what rough sleepers do, and if this government gets its way, their rights to do that will be removed. In an inequitable society, “rights” are not abstract levellers.

All of which is a way of saying: When free speech becomes a weapon, the target is usually those least able to defend themselves.

And it has consequences. We used to think we were immune to that in this country. March 15, 2019 disabused us of that idea. But actually, we should have known it from long before. The newspaper I used to work for was founded in the 1860s with the express purpose of promoting hatred of Māori, in order to build support for Governor George Grey’s assault on the Waikato.

The truth about free speech is that it can be weaponised, and this has violent consequences. Hate speech is the very definition of that weaponisation. So it needs limits. Those limits should be well-written laws.

The arguments of the other team have been abstract and absolutist: they’re about the principle. But as explained, we already accept the need to constrain absolute freedoms. Thomas Beagle told us that “we can agree that incitement of violence goes too far”: so the debate is really over how we legislate for socially valuable limits to free speech.

He told us this is “tricky”, but that’s not a reason not to do it, as Yasmine explained.

And Verity told us the law moves too slowly, while speech, especially in a social-media world, moves far too fast to be constrained by cumbersome laws. It’s true, but a hate speech law would be just one part of a package of responses.

And yes, social media companies are a big part of the problem. This goes to one of our main arguments. We need a global movement to rescue humanity and the planet from the billionaire class. What we have instead is deliberately manufactured culture war.

We’re surrounded by bots and trolls and AI, vast amounts of it state-sponsored. “Freedom of speech”? We should be talking about how we safeguard fundamental democratic rights and how we shore up the psychological, emotional and material security and wellbeing of people in a world where those things are being driven from us.

But it isn’t happening. Instead: culture war.

We should be building a movement to end the climate crisis, overturn neocolonialism, shut down the oligarchs and stand up to hatred. Free speech isn’t in danger. But a whole lot of other things are.

Again, here’s the whole debate.

When the Green Party faithful assembled for their annual “State of the Planet” address in Wellington in April, there was another party going on out the back: music and noisy voices, disrupting local MP Tamatha Paul’s warm-up speech.

The venue was an atrium that joins a collection of boutiques, offices and hospo ventures in buildings just off Courtenay Place. It was a good event space, except that behind the screens it opened onto a bar, which is where all the noise was coming from. Somehow, organisers from the Green Party managed to shut down the party party before Marama Davidson and Chlöe Swarbrick took to the stage, but it did feel a touch symbolic: the party wasn’t being taken seriously enough by the public. The public prefers the other kind of party.

And yet they forged on. It’s what they do. After two terribly difficult years, 2024 and 2025, recent polls show a consistent rise in support. This month 1News Verian and Talbot Mills both had them at 13% (up 2% and 4% respectively), while the Taxpayers Union Curia poll recorded 11.5% (up 1.8%). This suggests the Greens are at or even ahead of their 2023 election result, which was 11.6% and gave them 15 MPs, their best result ever.

While Labour has still revealed very little of what it might do in government, the Greens are thinking big: this year they’ve released a plan to electrify the economy, a plan to end homelessness and a comprehensive tax reform package.

If, as looks very possible, there’s a change of government, the Greens will likely form an important part of it.

“In the words of the undefeatable, indomitable Warriors,” Paul declared in her opening speech, “This is our year!”

Plenty of Warriors fans could have told her April is a cruel month to be making predictions. As Helen Clark used to say, it’s usually better to under-promise and overdeliver. Still, while the Greens may be no more indomitable than the Warriors, it is true they’re both having a good year.

All they have to do is get the people in that other party out the back to put down their drinks and join them. So to speak.

Swarbrick used her speech to deliver some old-fashioned inspiration. “Nearly 100 years ago,” she said, “following world wars and the Great Depression, regular people across the world made the choice to work together not to fight against something, but to fight for something. Our great-great-grandparents created something humanity had never before seen: a social safety net that meant everyone would be able to survive and contribute. Those who came before us fought for free healthcare and education, guaranteed jobs and state housing. They made the seemingly impossible possible. We’ve done big things before, and we can do them again.”

I know it’s campaign rhetoric, but that doesn’t make it untrue. Who doesn’t believe, looking at the world today, that we have to make the seemingly impossible possible? Who doesn’t want to believe we can do it?

THE GREENS HAVE two core messages. They’re both simple enough to express, but they can be difficult to explain.

The first is that we have to change. We’re living beyond what’s called “planetary boundaries”, which is a way of saying we are using up Earth’s finite resources, destroying biodiversity and making the planet inhospitable to life.

There’s no “fix the economy and then we’ll sort out the planet”. The way we’re “fixing the economy” is the problem.

This means that if we want the wellbeing and prosperity we need for decent, secure lives, if we want to make good on our values of fairness, equity and opportunity for all, we cannot keep on living the way we do. Our consumption habits, the way we behave towards each other, the way we make political decisions and, most of all, the structure of our economy: all of them must change.

And yes, change is hard, but it also offers great possibilities.

The second message is that the problems we face have a common cause. It’s the super-rich. Not “people who are well off”, but a tiny elite: Elon Musk and all who travel with him, the tycoons of the fossil-fuel industry, the financiers who enable them. They have created the climate crisis, the menaces of social media, the funnel that sucks wealth upwards even while they pretend it trickles down.

The oligarchs and techbros are not trying to solve the world’s problems, although they have the resources to do so. They’re causing them so they can make money from them.

These two messages are not the views of the two main parties. Both Labour and National want us to believe we can have the things we value without having to change and without having to confront the billionaires.

Theirs is an easy message to deliver, because it’s reassuring. It asks nothing of us and it doesn’t threaten the most powerful people in the world or in this corner of it.

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Green policies turn those core messages into action plans. Energy reform, to leave fossil fuels in the ground and introduce rooftop solar with batteries at massive scale. Urban networks of electrified public transport, cycling and walking that are so frequent, reliable, safe and cheap they offer genuinely better travel options for many people much of the time. Conservation strategies to clean up our waterways. A proper commitment to social housing.

And tax reform, targeting the super-rich and offering a tax cut to 96% of us.

These things are all doable. They’re also essential, aren’t they?

WHENEVER ANY PARTY announces a policy, its opponents go looking for holes in it. Sometimes they find them. This month alone the Greens have reminded us there’s a $5 billion hole in the government’s emissions plans and they also found a $500 million hole in its new KiwiSaver policy. And National found an error in the Greens’ tax plan. On it goes.

It’s fair enough to complain when political parties get their homework wrong, that’s an important part of the cut and thrust of political progress. But mistakes shouldn’t always become the main story.

In the Greens’ tax plan, $100m in annual spending was wrongly counted as revenue, creating a $200m annual error, or $800m over four years. As the consultancy Infometrics has now confirmed, the correct net revenue projection for the tax plan in the for the 2027/28 year is not $5.35b as originally announced, but $5.15b. This extrapolates to $20.6b over four years.

Pause on that. Twenty billion extra revenue over four years, contributed by the people who benefit handsomely from our current economic settings, for the government to spend where it’s most needed, while offering tax relief to nearly everyone. That’s the main story.

“But,” say the opponents of wealth taxes, “they’ll all leave!” Really? Where will they go?

“But wealth taxes don’t work!” This is true when they are filled with exemptions, but it doesn’t have to be true.

“But Labour won’t stand for it!” Well, look at it this way. Most people believe we have to stop burning the planet and most people believe we should live in a more equitable society. The central question is: how are we going to achieve these goals?

As the Greens say, it would be a good start to frame all our political decision-making with those goals. And the cornerstone is tax reform.

GOLLY, RECENT TIMES have been tough for the Green Party. Getting that record result in the 2023 election was good, but overall the centre-left lost the election, so they were out of power. That was bad.

Then it got really bad. The worst of it was the tragic death of Fa’anana Efeso Collins, a new and immensely well-liked MP, a brilliant orator who seemed, at age 49, to be surging into his political prime.

There was lingering internal strife around the former MP Elizabeth Kerekere and scandals over the behaviour of MPs Golriz Gahraman, Darleen Tana and Benjamin Doyle. In March 2024, co-leader James Shaw resigned; in June the same year Davidson stepped away from politics to deal with breast cancer. She wasn’t able to return until February 2025.

That all gave Swarbrick quite a lot to do. She had to manage the party’s MP problems. As spokesperson for climate change, finance and revenue she was responsible for the signature policies. And she had to lead a strategy for growth and regeneration, with a stronger party list, a united and well-functioning caucus, and clear policies and purpose.

In my view, it’s remarkable how well the Greens have survived the pressures on them this term. They didn’t collapse. They didn’t adopt the Labour path, shrinking into their shell and declining to produce policy. They didn’t implode with infighting, as National did in 2018-2020. They didn’t indulge in the kind of outrageously opportunist politicking that’s become the hallmark of NZ First.

That’s to the credit of the caucus they have now, and to the dignified and determined way Davidson has managed her illness and come back fighting. And most of all, it tells us a lot about Chlöe Swarbrick. Fiery crucibles? She’s been there.

MARAMA DAVIDSON TOOK part in an Oxford Union debate last November. The same forum David Seymour and Winston Peters have spoken in; the same one David Lange made world famous in New Zealand when he told the American evangelist Jerry Falwell he could smell the uranium on his breath. Seymour and Peters lost their debates; Lange won. Davidson won.

She told a supporters’ meeting on a wet night at the Māngere Mountain Education Centre recently that the debate had featured “some of the most awful and violent racism” she had ever encountered. And some of it was received with a standing ovation. But, she said, for her own speech she got “an even bigger” standing ovation.

The moot was, “This House believes the sun should have never set on the British Empire” and Davidson told them the phrasing was insulting. “The sun never has set on the Empire,” she said. “But the sooner it does, the better.”

In Māngere she said when she received the invitation she thought it was a joke. Discovering it wasn’t, she realised she had to do it but found it so frightening she decided not to tell anybody. Which is what happened: she flew to Britain with one assistant and kept it a secret even from the sister she stays with when she’s in Wellington.

She was the first wahine toa ever invited to speak at the Oxford Union and she decided she would tell her own story and let that be the argument. “I can’t say anything about this without saying who I am and where I’m from, and that is the point, I assure you, of speaking against Empire ... I am the river and the river is me.”

She said she believed in a future where power was “shared instead of weaponised” and the colonialism some of them seemed to hanker after was “the vessel to carry out the cruelty of capitalism”.

In Māngere, she said she was disappointed the media had not covered the debate, although she did acknowledge her secrecy hadn’t helped. That is very true. If you want journalists to write about an event, you’re supposed to tell them it’s on.

Davidson missed a trick there, but she didn’t miss a trick with the speech. It’s terrific, and you can watch it here.

THE GREENS GET it from all sides. You’d expect complaints from the Government parties, climate denialists and the hard right. But it’s surprising how often others take their shots, including Labour, many in the media, leftists who think the Greens have sold out, conservative greenies who want more pest-trapping and less politics, and everyone who fears climate action will be too costly or just too inconvenient.

Sometimes, these critics even echo the complaints of the culture warriors of NZ First, that the Greens are obsessed with Gaza and transgender issues.

This is not borne out by the facts. Of course the Greens care about the war on Gaza: they’d be a poor sort of progressive party not to. They care about gender politics, too, and don’t resile from it. But these are not the things they spend most of their time on.

One indicator of how the Greens deploy their time and energy is its media releases. This year, at time of writing, there have been 97.

Thirty address environment and conservation issues, including 16 on the biggest single topic on the list: climate change.

Another 30 have been in the broad economic sphere, including the cost of living, tax reform, poverty and homelessness.

Six have focused on democracy concerns and another six on Māori and the Treaty of Waitangi. Social issues account for 18 statements, with education getting the most attention (five) and transgender issues the least (one). There have been two statements about the war on Iran and none about Gaza.

I’ve also looked at the questions Green MPs ask ministers in Question Time in the House, and the pattern is similar. There’s a big focus on children and young people, especially in relation to poverty, abuse in state care, emergency housing and education. And another big focus on environment and conservation issues, including climate change and transport.

NATIONAL WANTS US to believe the Greens’ new tax policy is “economic lunacy” and a “wrecking ball for economic growth” that would discourage investment and drive talent and capital overseas.

This is hilarious. Which party refuses to entertain tax reform, keeping capital locked up in property? National. Which party underfunds essential core services? National. Theirs is the economic lunacy that sabotages development and productivity, reinforces our low-wage economy and drives record numbers of young and talented people away.

Other critics say the Greens are “not green enough”, that they focus too much on economic issues. This complaint is weird.

Political parties are supposed to care about the things voters care about, and right now the cost of living is top of the list. Why should the Greens be absent from the debate? Conversely, if they were, wouldn’t they be accused of being out of touch with ordinary voters?

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There’s another reason the Greens talk about the economy a lot. As Swarbrick said in her State of the Planet speech in April, “We don’t have to trade-off between fixing the cost of living, the fossil-fuel crisis and the climate crisis. They are the same problem, all created by the same man-made rules.” Poverty is a climate issue. Energy security is a climate issue. The climate crisis is an economic issue.

And climate change is a multiplier of every other problem. If your housing or your health is poor, climate change will probably make it worse.

Critics sometimes say they preferred James Shaw as co-leader, because he was less into poverty and social issues. That simply isn’t true. Shaw spoke often about the related goals of fighting poverty and the climate crisis and is working on that relationship in a green economics role now.

Sometimes, the complaint is simply that the Greens are dreaming: Swarbrick’s “seemingly impossible” really is impossible. The wealth tax won’t work, emissions won’t reduce fast enough, the transition to a clean economy will be too hard. We won’t drive less, we won’t reduce our dairy herd, we won’t eat less meat. We’re good, thanks.

AND YET TRANSITIONS are already happening. More importantly, for transition to become popular and effective it needs the government to lead.

You can’t leave the car at home unless the government funds good networks for public transport, cycling and walking. To transition away from fossil fuels the government has to ban coal mining and drilling for gas.

As for rooftop solar, to achieve massive scale it needs more than Christopher Luxon and Simeon Brown mumbling talking points they’ve half-remembered from the Greens, as they did this week when they belatedly got on board with the idea. It needs the right regulations, industry training, incentives and a pro-active marketing campaign. Luxon and Brown have said nothing about how to roll out their new policy at scale. Just leave it to the market and keep drilling.

That puts the emphasis on individual choice. But the key is not what you or I choose to do by ourselves, it’s political and economic reform. This is why we need parties in parliament committed to strong climate action. National is laughably not committed. And Labour, on its own, has not shown that commitment either.

The reality is that the next centre-left government will be as progressive as the Greens are strong. And they’ll be as strong as the number of party votes they get.

Remember that central question? If we know we have to stop burning the planet and we should be living in a more equitable society, how are we going to do it?

Answer: With a government that uses climate and equity goals to frame its decision-making. No other party says this.

This post is the second in a three-part series on electoral options. The first examines the case for a “grand coalition” of Labour and National. The third, on the Opportunity Party, will follow shortly.

Tami Neilson was there. She revealed that at the start of her career in New Zealand, the Topp Twins took her on tour.

“It was a masterclass,” she said, “and I don’t mean just the singing. The Topps taught me how to treat people. How to be a good human.”

Jools and Lynda Topp, those good humans. Well over a thousand people packed Auckland’s Viaduct Events Centre on Friday to celebrate the life of one twin while sharing what we could of the grief of the other. Jools died three weeks ago of cancer, aged 68.

Neilson said you saw the goodness in everything they did. “Usually, the headliners on a tour, you don’t see them much. But before a show there they were, Jools and Lynda, cooking hamburgers and sausages for everyone.”

At airports, she said, Jools would disappear into the Koru Lounge, but not to escape. Out she would come moments later, “every pocket in her clothes bulging with cookies”.

Neilson said she wasn’t sure who was chief executive of Air New Zealand at the time. And then she sang her beautiful song Beyond the Stars, to thunderous applause.

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The honour guests – Lynda, their brother Bruce, his partner Richard and a few close friends – were bagpiped into the hall and met with a karakia from Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei. A big screen behind the stage showed the now-famous photo of Jools, body-painted as an Amazon with her Arabian grey Unique. “Let the wind of heaven be that which flies between your horse’s ears”, says the legend on that image: it’s an Arabian proverb. Rows of silk banners hung to either side.

Call it a Kiwi event, call it Aotearoa, call it New Zealand, it doesn’t really matter. It felt like a very good version of us.

“Jools,” said MC Miriama Kamo, “believed that every day above ground is a good day. She liked to say, ‘We walk in sunshine everyday.’” Kamo was wearing her special cowboy boots for the occasion.

Lynda got a standing ovation before she even said a word. She had thought she would write a eulogy. She brought the notebook Jools gave her, in which she was going to do it. The notebook was empty. She said she didn’t know how to write anything down. “It’s a day to speak from the heart.”

For the last year she has been Jools’ palliative carer, “giving her the meds, bathing her, making her laugh. It was pretty much a good year.”

At the end, four beloved friends held Jools as she died. “It was a true honour,” said Lynda. I don’t know how she managed to say anything; she was gulping and choking on the tears and she wasn’t alone in that.

Then she turned it, remembering Jools for her creativity, her commitment to truth, love, honesty, compassion, kindness. “I reckon you could run a country that way,” Lynda said. “I know there’s a lot of politicians in the room,” and she was right, the Greens, Labour and Te Pāti Māori were all there. “If you want a good election campaign you will hire me as an adviser.”

The way Lynda tells it, Jools gave her written instructions for when she died. They were brief: “Carry me up the hill.”

The hill, on Jools’s property in Kaipara overlooking the harbour, is high. The way up is steep. “What if we drop her?” asked one of the friends.

“Then she’ll roll back down and we’ll have to get the neighbours to bring her back up.”

They laid her at the summit, naked. “I nearly insisted that we all be naked, but then I realised the neighbours could see.”

Back home again, they wrapped her in another shroud, Bruce made “a bouquet of every weed on the property” and Lynda stayed the night with her, alone. The next day, with the funeral directors, they began to dress her in “the best cowgirl outfit ever”, only to discover “stuck in her bumcrack, the largest piece of horse grass I’ve ever seen”.

“That stays,” Lynda insisted.

They laid her out. Jools’ two dogs came to say goodbye. So, said Lynda, did the 32 chickens. Jools’ miniature horse came and leaned his chest on her heart, “for a good five minutes”.

Lynda told the funeral directors that if there were any roundabouts on the way out, they were to drive the hearse around twice. There were nine.

Jools had a totem animal, a hawk, gifted to her in Canada. Lynda has seen the hawk flying overhead, out walking the dogs on the farm.

The songs were so good. The Jubilation Choir poured their love into the Topps’ Milestones and, later, got full gospely fierce with Don McGlashan’s Bathe in the River, with Hollie Smith magnificent in the lead. Near the end Jennifer Ward-Lealand led them in a beautiful Po Atarau, Now is the Hour.

Neil and Sharon Finn, who were overseas, sent a video of them singing a lovely version of the Topps’ Palomino Moon.

And then there was Anika Moa.

She said she had idolised the Topp Twins ever since she was a little girl and saw them on TV. They had hairy armpits.

“Mum,” she asked, “are they men or women?”

Her mother said, “No darling, they’re lesbians.”

“Well,” Anika announced, “I’m going to be a lesbian when I grow up.” And then she sang us Calf Club Day, which, I don’t mind saying, broke me in pieces. I wasn’t alone.

“We’re not technically brilliant but we like to be emotionally fantastic,” Jools said once. True that.

“I dreamed that whole song in the middle of the night,” she also said. “I just sat up in bed and wrote it all down in about two minutes.”

Brother Bruce told the crowd he was two years older than the twins, but it was immediately clear that wouldn’t count for much. As soo as they were brought home from the hospital, “Jools sat me down and said, “Look, we’re all going to be gay, I’m going to get a pony and when Lynda turns 16 she will learn to yodel and all hell will break loose.”

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Helen Clark was there. Way back in 1996, the Topps had called her “a political goddess” and when she took to the stage to speak, she got a standing ovation. She listed some of the causes the Topps had championed: lesbian and gay rights, Bastion Point and treaty rights, the Springbok Tour campaign, the Homosexual Law Reform Bill, about which she said, “They weren’t easy times, but we won.”

In London, Clark had introduced the Topps at a 60^th birthday concert in Hackney, with a crowd full of enthusiastic New Zealanders. “How homesick that concert made them feel,” she said.

Singer and activist Whaea Mereana Pitman called them “the Che Guevaras of the Pākehā lesbian movement”.

“They taught me not to be afraid,” she said.

Neilson said the Topps were “the shoulders on which I stand and the standard to which I strive”.

Lynda’s speech to arts minister Paul Goldsmith at the music awards was referenced often. “We are not defined by politics and politicians, but by our art. Music makes us human.”

Clark said it wasn’t possible to talk about one Topp and not the other. If the event was a commemoration of Jools, it was also a deeply felt thank you to Lynda and a celebration of them both.

“It is very hard,” said Clark, “to accept this will never happen again.”

There was another standing ovation for their long-time friend, manager and TV producer Arani Cuthbert.

She said Jools had called the TV shows “subversive”: getting dairy farmers and big-city lesbians to laugh at the same things. Ken and Ken, Camp Leader and Camp Mother, all the preposterously funny good things.

Speaker after speaker talked about this: the reach of the Topps. At the start they busked to crowds on Queen St who couldn’t quite believe what they were hearing: explicitly feminist and radical country music, with jokes, sung in perfect synchronicity.

Back then it was Brian Sweeney, chair of the Students Arts Council, who got0 them going. He booked them for a full university Orientation tour and he took them everywhere else: five towns on the West Coast, ending on a Saturday night in Blackball; a 28-night gig at Circa Theatre in Wellington.

Sweeney said the Topps always had all the ingredients: “all the politics and the funny stuff and the joy was already there”.

Joy is powerful stuff, he said. “Joy dissipates fear.”

Cuthbert had a different way to describe the same thing: “I don’t think there’s any corner of New Zealand,” she said, “where the Topps haven’t sprinkled their fairy dust.”

Projected slides told the story: “Jools and Lynda are Topps!” proclaimed a Broadsheet cover, and later on the mass-market mags, Woman’s Weekly and Woman’s Day and the rest, gave them cover after cover. Everybody loved them.

The Topps brought us together by inviting us to rise up, to be our best selves, ready to laugh, ready to sing and dance, loving the goodness in all our cultures, and always, as a bedrock to everything, there to fight for what’s fair and just.

Cuthbert said she felt so fortunate to have been a part of it, and, as she gave in to the tears, “even more fortunate to have been your friend”.

We saw clips. All those ridiculous get ups, always so loved. “We’re 52,” says Lynda to the camera, “and we both look good in frocks.”

“Or Y-fronts,” says Jools.

Off-the-cuff, a subversively perfect Topp joke.

Kamo had interviewed them, separately, when they were both dealing with cancer. She asked each of them what they would do if the other died. Jools told her you have to go on. There’s a strength to living and you have to embrace it, however hard it is, and sometimes it’s very hard.

And then we heard from Jools. She’d recorded a farewell message, which Kamo said no one had yet seen.

“Howdy doody New Zealand,” Jools said from her bed, before thanking all of us. “You were the ones who kept us going. You made it happen. Thank you for being our greatest fans. Love you.”

She also had a message for Lynda, “the person I love most in the world”.

“When you hear the wind blow,” she said. “When you hear the line on the water, with the trout waiting for it. When you feel that little flick of wind on your ear. That will be me. I will always love you.”

And then she couldn’t help herself. “Till the cows come home.” She kind of mooed, and grinned. “Love you.”

Lynda got back onstage. “Finally got my message,” she said. “You made me work fucking hard for it.”

Before turning again to the politicians in the room. “I meant it, I’m available as an adviser. Arani Cuthbert is a brilliant organiser. There are thousands of lesbians out there, ready to march for a different kind of society. Hippies. Suits. All kinds of people. And there are people who do not know how they’re going to get through next week. Do not forget them.”

And everyone got to their feet to sing with her: Untouchable Girls.

It’s alive! On Wednesday Labour announced its first new policy in over 200 days: a $20 public-transport fare cap in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, with a $10 cap everywhere else. And I am here for it. Lots of people aren’t: hoo boy, the snarkiness is out there. But this policy is great. Not perfect, but definitely great.

I’m picking low-capped fares will soon be normal all over the world, quite possibly as soon as the end of this decade.

And from the looks on the faces of transport minister Chris Bishop and his cabinet colleagues Nicola Willis and Christopher Luxon on the TV news that same night, I’d say they know it.

Labour framed the policy as a response to the cost-of-living crisis, which it obviously is. What’s more, unlike a fuel subsidy, it targets many of those with higher transport costs who need relief the most. If you’re paying $150 a week for the “convenience” of driving your time-wasting commute, having a $20 option invites a rethink of what that “convenience” really means.

Several critics have said it’s a timid policy, notably when compared to the Greens fares-free approach. But that isn’t true. The thinking seems to be: Labour is timid (true), so this policy must be timid too (but why?). It’s radically different from the panicky and universally derided election pledge in 2023 to take GST off fruit and vegetables. (More on fare cap v fares free below.)

This fare cap is not a token gesture or a quietly incremental change. Statistics NZ says average household spending is $1598 per week, of which 15.7% goes on transport. That’s $251 per week. A $20 fare cap per person will give a great many households the chance to achieve a real financial benefit.

That’s not all. The policy is great because it’s good for everything. A low fare cap, when combined with good services, will grow public transport use and entrench the habit. This helps reduce road congestion, improves both road safety and public health, and therefore improves economic productivity. It could lower inflation.

And although Labour didn’t even mention it (there’s your timidity), more public transport use means lower carbon emissions, especially with major cities’ fast transition to electric buses. Commuter trains are already electric and ferries are heading that way too.

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There’s more. The policy is easy to understand and will be easy to use. When you reach the weekly limit, your smart travel card will simply stop deducting more money: this is how Auckland’s $50 fare cap operates now. It will also be easy to run, at least in Auckland and Christchurch, although transport authorities in Wellington and other centres have work to do.

Labour says the policy will cost only $65 million a year, which does call into question its ability to count. Auckland University’s macroeconomics professor Robert MacCulloch broke down Labour’s figures to come to a cumulative cost of $175m, even without allowing for growth in passenger numbers.

But this hardly undermines the policy. The cost could be five times higher and it would still be value for money. In fact, the higher the cost, the better the value, because the size of the subsidy will be a marker of how successful the scheme has become.

And, last but not at all least, the greater our use of public transport, the less exposed we are to shocks in the supply and price of oil. Along with cost-of-living, productivity, public health and the climate, this is an energy-resilience policy too.

All of that is why low fare caps will become the norm globally. Queensland already has a 50c flat fare, parts of Britain cap fares at £2 and Germany has a low monthly cap. This is one of the good things about what the world will be, and god knows we don’t have a lot of them.

But is there a downside?

“Critics are calling the policy, ‘Just another taxpayer-funded free ride,’” according to TVNZ, but it didn’t say which critics.

“Where is the money coming from?” beseeched Bishop. Answer: the National Land Transport Fund (NTLF), which is available for, you know, land transport projects.

“It’s classic Labour,” said Willis.

“It’s classic Labour,” said Luxon. “You’re going to take money out of the NTLF, which is already oversubscribed, which means you’ve gotta cut something … so that means they’re gonna increase taxes and increase borrowing.”

What? This isn’t Labour promising expensive light-rail tunnels. The NLTF has about $7.8 billion to disburse. Even if the fare cap costs two or three hundred million it will still be a rounding error on the price of even one of the government’s multi-billion Roads of Nationally Significant Fantasies.

As for the complaint that the NLTF is oversubscribed, that’s true. It’s always been true. There are more demands on the money than can be met. This is also true for health, predator-free programmes, policing, arts funding, you name it. The difference is supposed to be that the NLTF is self-contained, whereas money for other things comes from the general account.

But the outcome is the same: in every field of government spending, projects get prioritised and some miss out. This is not a reason to dismiss a cheap policy that will make a difference. On the contrary, it’s a reason to adopt more such policies.

TVNZ also revealed that, according to Bishop, officials have advised him “it would make more sense to invest in public transport services rather than actually subsidising public transport, because it’s just not targeted enough”.

If that’s an accurate report, the minister was being disingenuous. On three counts. First, all transport, including public transport and every road you drive on, is subsidised: the debate is about the levels of subsidy.

Second, it’s not what officials will have told him. The question of what works best to boost public-transport patronage has been widely studied internationally and clearly reported on by the Ministry of Transport and Waka Kotahi. I know this because I’ve seen the reports. What they say is that good service is essential: this includes frequency, reliability, good security, the time a trip takes and having a comprehensive network. But they also say low fares are critical too.

The truth is, for patronage to grow, the public must believe the service is efficient, reliable … and cheap to use. But the evidence is mixed about the impact of going beyond cheap to free. It may not make a big difference.

One of the reports, a Cabinet paper from Labour’s last term, advised that “price alone will not encourage greater public transport patronage, particularly for low-income households”. Some commentators have interpreted this to mean low fares are irrelevant. But that’s not what the paper says. The key words are “price alone”: good service is also required.

The third bit of disingenuousness: the idea that fare caps are untargeted. That would be true of a fares-free policy, but a fare cap is extremely targeted: it helps people in lower-income suburbs away from town centres, much more than it helps those living in the wealthy city fringe.

National’s complaints seem fixated on problems with a fares-free policy. But that’s not what Labour has proposed.

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There’s a big caveat in all this: the services do have to be good enough. Public transport almost everywhere in New Zealand could be better, but in our three main centres it’s a myth that it’s bad.

Take Auckland. It definitely was bad in the mid-1990s. But in the 30 years since, and especially in the last 15, an awful lot has changed. Under the Public Transport Operating Model, Auckland Transport took responsibility off the private sector and produced the New Network: a core of permanent frequent services running at least every 15 minutes, every day of the week. It now has 45 frequent routes in place (or about to be) throughout the greater urban area, with even the outer suburbs now enjoying one of the most frequent services in Australasia. Here’s the map: that’s a lot of lines.

Not shown on the map: all the other feeder services and smaller local routes, whose number is also growing. The map also pre-dates the CRL, which will open soon and transform the frequence of the rail services, well before Labour gets the chance to introduce its fares policy.

Still, what Labour should also commit to is good marketing of the services, and funding to expand them, and ongoing funding for maintenance and renewals. This is all essential and it will test them, but it is far from impossible.

Looking at Nicola Willis on the TV news last Wednesday, you could almost see the brain cogs whirring behind her eyes as she digested the news of Labour’s fare cap. “Shouldn’t have listened to Simeon, shouldn’t have listened to Simeon, we should have done that in the Budget” is how I read it.

And so they should have. A cheap policy with a big impact, an easy way to show they care about the cost of living and the climate, a very effective way to stop Labour in its tracks, so to speak. A policy that will soon be the norm globally anyway. There was no downside for them.

Maybe you’re thinking this is all a bit Labour-lovey. To that, I would say it’s very rare that Labour produces such a demonstrably good policy or that I’ve ever given them this much praise. Besides, and this is the honest truth, I would be thrilled to have the chance to write a post like this about a policy of the current government. All I can say is that I live in hope. This is Hopetown, after all.

What if Iran wins the World Cup? The odds, apparently, are 5000:1, but mathematically improbable is not the same as impossible. Everyone can dare to dream, right? That’s the point of the whole thing.

There’d be a downside, I know. One of the most appalling regimes in the world would get the boasting rights. But what a smack in the face on global TV that would be for Donald Trump.

Actually, it would be much better if Mexico wins. Mexico is co-hosting, has never won although it’s always there, and is ranked 17^th this time. That’s doable. Mexico is a democratic country with a progressive president, Claudia Sheinbaum, working hard against enormous odds to make its way in the world. What a marvellous moment it would be, if Trump was forced to hand over the trophy to Mexican captain Edson Álvarez.

I’m a sports fan, but not all sports. I’m definitely a football fan, every four years and sometimes inbetween. I do find it hard to get excited about Auckland FC because, frankly, of Mowbray and Foley. Billionaires should be helping to save the world, not hastening its collapse.

For me, football can be hard to love. Saudi Arabian horrors, Russian oligarchic horrors, racist and thuggish fans, unbelievable corruption at FIFA, all-too-believable megalomaniac narcissism from the White House. Without question, Trump sees the FIFA Men’s World Cup as a celebration of himself as supreme monarch of the world.

Also without question, FIFA boss Gianni Infantino has encouraged him to believe it. Infantino is a shocker. He connived in the forced labour and deaths of immigrant workers in Qatar for the 2022 World Cup. He’s a good friend to Vladimir Putin and Mohammad bin Salmam, an even better friend and frequent visitor to Trump at Mar-a-Lago. When the American president was “snubbed”, again, by the Nobel committee, Infantino invented a FIFA Peace Prize to give him.

FIFA is among the most corrupt and oligarch-loving sports regimes on Earth and Infantino is neck-deep in it. About the only thing you can say in his defence is that he didn’t invent the corruption: he came to power in 2016 off the back of scandals that disgraced his predecessor, Sepp Blatter. But Infantino has gloried in it.

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And yet, here’s the thing about football. Despite all the money and power and sheer awfulness, the sport doesn’t belong to Infantino, or Trump, or bin Salman, or any other member of the global oligarchy. It belongs to the fans.

This is true despite the way FIFA and the United States are gleefully gouging money out of those fans, and despite the way the US is restricting fans’ travel plans. It’s not just Iranians. Even the Scots, that most harmless of folk, say that despite having ESTA approval some of them are being turned away at the US border. Is this because Trump thinks Scottish people laugh at him? I mean, I’m sure they do, but doesn’t everyone? This is big for Scotland, they haven’t been at a World Cup since 1998.

Football is the beautiful game, and not just because of the way it combines elegance, collective achievement and individual brilliance. It’s beautiful because the poorest kids in the world play it, in every country on every continent, and because in most of those countries, if the kids are good enough, some of them become stars.

It’s beautiful because it’s simple: there’s a no-hands rule, an offside rule, some anti-violence rules, and that’s about it. No machines, no animals, no endlessly resetting the play, no equipment except a pair of boots and shin pads. It’s beautiful because it’s about one-touch passing and turning defenders inside out and kicking a ball so it curves up and over and around and comes to rest in the top far corner of the net. Not convinced? You try it.

Football gives physical expression to collective human aspiration, not with brute force, but with skill, creativity and teamwork. It’s beautiful because it celebrates the complete ethnic diversity of our planet.

With the World Cup in that place, at this time, the rosters of the European teams (among others) serve as the best advertisement for immigration you could imagine. At the very heart of this contest, the big game unfolding on everyone’s TV screens will be the World v Donald Trump.

And while all those things are parts of the whole, they’re not the main thing. Millions of people have the ball-control skills, although they’re harder in a game. The main thing is having a team where everyone knows where to be at every moment, and everyone knows what to do next and has the skill to do it. At speed. Against another team trying to do the same.

It doesn’t happen very often, but you wait for it, hope for it, dream of it, because to watch it unfold is to witness beauty.

Although everyone knows it is also not beautiful. As well as the racism and thuggery beloved of some fans, there’s cheating and arguing with the ref, there are ugly outbursts of tribalism and nationalism. And sometimes it’s boring. It’s sport.

Okay. Who’s going to win? France and Spain, both at 9:2 according to BetMGM, are the favourites. A final showdown between the two could be a game for the ages, especially as they haven’t played each other in a world cup for 20 years. But I really hope it doesn’t come to that. Other countries are much more deserving.

I don’t include England, which is now ranked third. It’s been 60 years since their only triumph, 30 years since they got it embarrassingly into their hearts that “football’s coming home”, when it wasn’t and didn’t. Do those long-suffering fans deserve another chance? Why? If England plays against Croatia and Ghana the way they played against New Zealand last Sunday, they won’t even get out of the group. Croatia are good: they finished second in 2018 and third in 1998 and 2022.

Besides, England did win it once, so they’re hardly at the head of the “who deserves it most” queue. As well as Croatia and Mexico, perennially close-but-never-the-glory teams include the Netherlands (ranked 8^th), Norway (9^th), Belgium (10^th), Colombia (11^th) and Japan (15^th). And most of all Portugal (6^th), although it would be nice to think they’ll win it only when their preening Hollywooding peacock Cristiano Ronaldo retires. If there’s a risk of him and Trump hugging over the trophy, I don’t know what I’ll do. Turn off the television, I guess.

Still, suck on this Tim Payne: Ronaldo has 665 million followers on Instagram. It seems the fans have spoken.

What about Africa, which has 11 countries in the final 48 and is well due for something wonderful? Keep an eye on Morocco (13^th) and Senegal (21^st).

The thing about New Zealand, which is also true for Canada, the US and Australia, is that we don’t need it. We know from rugby what football means for Brazil, Argentina, England, Mexico, Spain, Croatia, Morocco and so many more, and we know it doesn’t mean that much to us. We can just enjoy the fun.

We also know that in Iran, Iraq, Colombia, Croatia, Mexico, Turkey, Ecuador, Czechia, Ivory Coast, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Egypt, Tunisia, DR Congo, South Africa and Haiti, there is widespread suffering right now or in their not-so-long-ago past. For a great many of their citizens, games won at the FIFA World Cup will bring escape and real joy. Who would deny them?

Yes, I know, the All Whites would. It’s a little bit weird our guys will be trying to make Iranians and Egyptians miserable, but I do hope they go all out to thrash Belgium.

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We’re ranked 43^rd, by the way, with odds of 10,000:1. If it helps, that’s better than Haiti, ranked 47^th at 25,000:1, although these numbers are obviously made up. As we know from Haiti’s humiliation of the All Whites last week.

Haiti has Brazil and Morocco in its group, so it might be hard to progress. But if they were in the New Zealand group, they’d be a shoo-in.

For more perspective, odds of 10,000:1 are also better than the odds for Greece, China, Nigeria, Hungary, Russia, Denmark, Poland and Chile. All respectable footballing nations, in their day, but none of them even qualified. Nor did Italy, a four-time winner which has not managed to qualify for the last three finals. Imagine what would happen if that was the All Blacks. Actually, don’t. Your head might explode.

Enough about the sport. Hey wow, isn’t capitalism having a moment. America the omnipotent started a war that could yet trash the entire global economy, and America the impotent has no idea what to do about it. Our tech overlords have made social media frightening and AI terrifying. Our fossil-fuel overlords are in command everywhere from Canada’s new pipelines to America’s newly boosted commitment to coal to New Zealand’s incomprehensible loyalty to imported gas. And now we have the FIFA World Cup.

People used to talk about late-stage capitalism, but then capitalism said hold my beer you fucking libtards it’s party time. That’s what this is. Capitalism does better spectacle, better nationalism, better corruption, better destruction, better showtime, better excess, and the FIFA World Cup is its showcase.

Just on climate alone. With 104 matches in 16 cities across the North American continent, the 2026 World Cup will be the most polluting tournament in history, generating at least nine tonnes of carbon dioxide (some estimates put it much higher). Air travel will be four times as polluting as the average of the previous four world cups.

This is because there are 48 teams playing in widely flung venues on absurd schedules. Bosnia & Herzegovina has to train in Salt Lake City and play in Toronto then Los Angeles then Seattle. Did the planners even think for a moment about the climate? Well, no, of course not.

It’s not like the event will escape the consequences: in half the venues, players and fans alike are at risk of extreme heat stress. Wildfire smoke and hurricanes are expected.

But gosh, FIFA loves to greenwash. Qatar in 2022 was going to be carbon neutral, until climate control for stadiums in the desert created what the Guardian called “a carbon bomb in sporty form”. This time, FIFA has a four-year sponsorship with the largest corporate greenhouse gas emitter on the planet: Aramco, the energy giant of Saudi Arabia. More than 100 professional female footballers signed a letter protesting that “Fifa is choosing money over women’s safety and the safety of the planet”, but FIFA didn’t care.

And in Dallas, greenwash turned to whitewash when they made way for a football sign by painting over a famous 30-year-old mural of whales by the artist Wyland.

On it rolls. Tickets cost an average US$3000 and many are ten times that. Host cities are shut out of most of the ways they might recoup their costs, so they’re resorting to ridiculous measures: a train fare from New York to games in New Jersey, usually $10, will be over $100.

And Iran was not allowed to play in neutral Mexico.

Am I being silly? Shouldn’t we all be boycotting this monument to greed, this travesty of every good thing sport represents, this Infantino/Trump narcissist nonsense?

Well, no. Because despite everything, as I said earlier, it’s not their world cup. It belongs to the players, and the fans, and the countries taking part, and the world.

Nobody is celebrating Infantino or Trump. The president got booed when he showed up to the Knicks’ game in New York this week. At the World Cup it will happen again.

This isn’t like the campaign against sporting contact with apartheid South Africa. I know about that: I was one of the leaders of the Springbok Tour protest movement in Wellington.

So what’s the difference? In 1981, rugby was a powerful symbol of apartheid. Protest against the tour was part of an even more powerful global movement. There are better parallels in the Olympics. In 1936, Black American athlete Jesse Owens punctured the Aryan supremacy of Adolf Hitler by winning four gold medals in the Berlin Games. In 1968, Black American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised Black Power salutes from the victory dais in Mexico. Sport can stand for freedom.

Players and nations will rise to it at this World Cup.

Football as a game is as close to idiot proof as you can get. It’s also megalomaniac proof, administrator proof, ground-staff proof and weatherproof. For comparison, try watching rules-ridiculous rugby. For another comparison, think about what just happened at Lords, the home of cricket: the England-NZ test was rendered senseless by a shockingly bad pitch. How does that even happen? But that’s peak old-world cricket for you: a game run by Englishmen full of snobbery and without an ounce of pride.

At the FIFA World Cup, kids who learned to kick a ball on the streets will bedazzle us.

I’ll be watching. I wouldn’t dream of going to America, even if I could afford it. But I’m all in favour of the normal commerce and community of great events, of pubs and fan zones and tailgating and party at ours.

I want to say Senegal, or maybe Norway, but actually any team at all that hasn’t won it before. Except the United States, obviously, for all the reasons.

And I also want to say the overlords are not really overlords and their day of reckoning will come. Because nobody wins, in life as in sport, if we let capitalism ruin everything.

Mike Smith is not alone

Mike Smith is not alone. The activist who wants to take major carbon emitters in New Zealand to court for sabotaging our climate goals has many counterparts around the world.

In the US, a 20-year-old student called Eva Lighthiser and 22 other young Americans are locked in a legal battle to hold Donald Trump and his government to account for “boosting planet-warming fossil fuels”. Their case has been dismissed, but now they’re seeking reinstatement.

“We are challenging this administration for sacrificing the lives of myself and my fellow plaintiffs by expanding fossil fuels for the sake of power,” Lighthiser told supporters last month outside a courthouse in Portland, Oregon. She described the experience as “nerve-racking, but invigorating”.

“Eva v Trump” is just one of more than 1500 climate-related civil actions underway in America and there are hundreds more in other countries. We’ve had some ourselves, notably the case taken by law student Sarah Thomson in 2015 arguing the minister for climate change had not kept our 2050 emissions target in line with climate science. The high court agreed with Thomson that, in her words, “you can’t just set a target to reduce emissions and forget about it”. But although the minister “had acted unlawfully”, the court declined to order the government to review its position.

And Lawyers for Climate Action have a judicial review before the courts right now. They argue the minister has misused the Emissions Reduction Plan in relation to climate goals.

Let’s be clear. Legal action alone will not save the world. That’s going to take all kinds of action from all kinds of people. But Smith and Lighthiser are right that the big emitters, along with the politicians and others who protect them, should be the focus. They’re the ones responsible for the climate crisis and they have the most power to address it.

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The aim is not only to succeed in law, although what a good thing that would be. It’s also, as Mike Smith has done brilliantly, to expose how those responsible for the crisis protect each other. Doing that is part of building the larger movement.

It’s not easy and as we’ve discovered from Smith’s case, they are capable of breaking the rules to defend their position. And of making tougher rules for everyone else: in Britain, environmental activists and Gaza protesters now face harsh penalties for some protest action, including lengthy jail terms for non-violent civil disobedience. The Guardian says this has created “a new class of political prisoner”.

A poem for the agents of doom

As Lynda Topp implied at the music awards last month, art may yet save us all. In the Parable novels, the late, great and extremely prescient Black American writer Octavia Butler envisaged a dystopian America ruled by a tyrannical president under the slogan “Make America Great Again”. The books, published in the 1990s, contain this poem, which our Defence Minister Chris Penk might like to study before his next encounter with Trump acolyte Pete “I love war” Hegseth.

I think I’ll send it to Substacker Anna Fifield, too. She reported Hegseth’s speech and Penk’s response at the Shangri-La Dialogue meeting in Singapore. Perhaps she could read it aloud next time she’s in a conference room with a Trumpian agent of doom.

Speaking truth to you know who: the People’s Emergency Briefing

In November 2025, an organisation in Britain called the National Emergency Briefing brought together leading experts to brief politicians and other influential people on the latest evidence on the climate crisis. Those briefings covered nature, the changing climate, health impacts, weather extremes. tipping points, food security, national security, economics and energy transition. Videos of each of the briefings are available here. There’s also a film, currently showing widely in Britain and available for hire.

The information in all this is focused on Britain, but a lot of it applies directly to us as well. The National Emergency Briefing is not a British government initiative, which is a shame, but something like it could be an official campaign here, couldn’t it?

With an election rushing towards us, there’s enormous scope for political parties to produce a decent strategy to deal with the climate crisis. At least some of them will want to show they take it seriously, won’t they?

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A climate conference with no fossil-fuel lobbyists

If it wasn’t clear before, last year’s COP conference in Brazil drove home a terrible message: the fossil-fuel industries have taken over the UN’s diplomatic strategy for dealing with the climate crisis.

But that doesn’t mean they’ve won. In April, Colombia and the Netherlands convened the first Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels, in the Colombian city of Santa Marta. Fifty-seven countries and the European Union showed up – that’s about half of all countries in the world – to find ways to “move decisively” past coal, oil and gas. And the fossil-fuel lobbyists were not welcome. Climate commentator Bill McKibben called it “a hinge moment for Planet Earth”.

The conference focused, as COP was supposed to have done in Glasgow in 2021, on the financing needed to transition to solar, wind and other renewables.

Despite Big Oil’s best efforts, things are changing. As the conference got underway, Donald Trump was busy destroying the credibility of the gas industry and America’s own military capacity to ensure safe passage for oil tankers.

China has reported that half of all vehicles sold in that country last year were EVs. The India Times revealed on May 1 that it isn’t all about giant SUVs, either: “Increasing penetration of ⁠EVs, especially ⁠two- and three-wheelers, and rapid deployment of Battery Electric Solar Systems across Southeast Asia and South Asia is now viewed as guaranteed by those in the industry.” The paper said that in the battery market, sourcing materials is now a bigger concern than generating demand for EVs and distributed solar systems.

The New Zealand government did not send energy minister Simeon Brown or anyone else to the Santa Marta conference. If it had, they would have heard UN envoy Selwin Hart tell the meeting: “Renewables offer something fossil fuels never did: stability and sovereignty. There are no embargoes, price shocks or tariffs.”

And yet Brown and co cling to their plan for an LNG terminal in New Plymouth, even as Qatar’s LNG export terminal lies in smoking ruins. Bloomberg has reported that India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines and other Asian nations are rethinking their interest in gas. No wonder the gas suppliers are so desperate to sell their product here.

The conference adopted a Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative with three pillars.

First, a just transition to “fast track the adoption of renewable energy and economic diversification away from fossil fuels so that no worker, community or country is left behind”.

Second, non-proliferation, which means adopting a plan to “allow governments to stop building out the problem by ending the expansion of coal, oil and gas production”.

And third, a fair phase out among all the nations: “An equitable plan for the wind down of existing fossil-fuel production, where nations with the capacity and historical responsibility for emissions transition fastest, providing support to others around the world.”

Yes, we’ve heard all this before. But we do have to keep hearing it, we do need governments to agree and mean it, and if COP is to regain its credibility it should take notice. How about starting by locking the fossil-fuel lobbyists out of the room?

Just say no: the AI Resist List

When journalist and AI specialist Karen Hao was at the Auckland Writers Festival last month, she told her audience about a website soon to launch, dedicated to resisting everything bad about AI. Here it is: the AI Resist List.

I’m going to write more about this soon, but for now, here’s the preamble:

AI takes many forms. Like the word “transportation”, it refers to a collection of technologies as diverse and distinctive as bicycles to rockets. But today, one version of AI takes all the oxygen: large-scale, generative systems that power products like Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT.

These systems consume an unfathomable amount of data, land, energy, labour and water. They are rooted in profoundly disturbing ideologies that seek to flatten the world into a “one size fits all” abstraction and to replace humans with machines.

We call the companies leading this form of AI development “empires”. Under the guise of a civilising mission to “benefit all of humanity”, they use large-scale AI development as cover to consolidate resources, destroy ecosystems, centralise information, hollow out institutions, and gain paramount economic and political power.

As for the Resist List itself, it’s organised under a few headings: call out the hype, follow the funders, take back our data, fight extractive data centres, combat resource extraction, advocate for the rights of workers, challenge permissive government, reject surveillance and just say no.

When communities care: dementia

How much can local communities do to look after their vulnerable members? Heaps. Here’s a tough, heartwarming reminder of what’s possible, from Three’s The Hui, from Wairoa in northern Hawke’s Bay. A town, like many others, where it must sometimes feel like everyone else forgot about them.

Power surge: the clean electric revolution

There’s good data to back up claims the world is going clean electric. The energy think tank Ember has reported a small but significant worldwide decline in fossil-fuel use for electricity in 2025. While demand for electricity grew by 850TWh (terawatt hours), solar and wind generation met most of that demand with 840TWh of new generation, while other renewables contributed 43TWh. Gas also grew, but the net output of coal, oil and gas was down by 41TWh.

This is pre-war data and it looks like a tipping point. Despite Trump, despite Simeon Brown.

Two big things have made this possible. The first is the rise of affordable, efficient battery storage, especially for solar energy. Ten years ago, one gigawatt of additional solar energy was stored for every 56 generated. That’s not great for times when the sun don’t shine. Now, the ratio is 1:4.

The second is China. Last year, according to Bloomberg, the country accounted for 54% of new solar battery capacity. Yes, it’s still building coal plants, but China is way in front in the transition to renewables.

Buses doing the business

Greater Auckland has analysed the latest public transport data for the city, and the news is good.

Both February and March this year – before the fuel crisis – saw more people catching the bus than before Covid and the March figure of 7.5 million trips was the highest on record. The 12-month figure hasn’t topped 2019 yet, but Great Auckland says that on current trends, that should happen “later this year or early next year”.

Weekend bus use has been above pre-Covid levels for some time and now it’s climbed up to 24% above 2019. That’s more people realising that weekend trips don’t all need to be by car, and the fare structure should help: weekend fares are lower and children aged up to 15 travel free.

To nobody’s surprise, it hasn’t been such good news for rail. Disruptions to service caused by Kiwirail’s enormous maintenance and refurbishment programme have underminded confidence in rail services, but that work is supposedly nearing an end, prior to the CRL opening. The smart money appears to be on August.

Heaven at the Kennedy Centre

Art will always triumph? I like to think this clip is from the world we actually live in: it’s from a Led Zeppelin tribute at the Kennedy Centre in Washington DC, when the building stood for good stuff, long before Donald Trump pushed us into an alternate reality with his name carved illegally into the facade.

From left, in the clip, that’s Led Zep’s John Paul Jones, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page in the audience, with the performance of Stairway to Heaven featuring the Joyce Garrett Youth Choir, lead vocals by Ann Wilson, acoustic guitar by Nancy Wilson, both from Heart, drums by John Bonham’s son Jason and lead guitar by Shayne Fontaine.

Humanity, eh: it does the most amazing things.

There’s a moment in the movie Oppenheimer when the Hungarian physicist Edward Teller, played by Bennie Safdie, reveals the nuclear bomb they are about to test in the New Mexico desert could destroy the whole planet. There’s a risk of a runaway fusion chain reaction, he explains. It’s a very small risk, but it’s bigger than zero. They took the risk (and Teller, finding himself still alive, went on to become a cheerleader for hydrogen bombs).

The Cambridge researcher Luke Kemp has a question. What would happen, he asked during his visit to the Auckland Writers Festival last month, if you asked a group of ordinary citizens to make that decision? Get them together, ask them to be open-minded and curious, brief them on all the relevant circumstances, encourage them to ask questions and debate the issue, and then ask them to decide: is that small risk of global annihilation worth taking?

Kemp thinks such a group would say no. His audience seemed to agree and so do I.

Kemp’s point is that ordinary people, well informed and free to discuss a complex issue in a supportive environment, are very capable of coming to good decisions. Which is more than can always be said for the quality of decisions made by politicians. Especially when they selfishly prioritise their own interests, in their party hierarchies and with the voters, above the public good. Even worse when their decision-making is hidden from public view and favours those who fund them.

Kemp was in Auckland to promote his book Goliath’s Curse, in which he analyses 340 civilisations over 4000 years in order to discover what made them fail. His findings are challenging and I’ll come back to them properly in a future post. Here, I want to focus on the process he outlined for his Teller experiment. It’s called deliberative democracy and it’s a real thing.

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Citizens’ assemblies, citizens’ juries and other versions of deliberative democracy are being used in Canada, Australia, Europe, Britain and many other places. It’s really good for addressing big, complex issues: Ireland, famously, used deliberative democracy, some of which was televised, to help decide on the future of both abortion rights and marriage equality. And deliberative democracy is being used right here in Auckland.

In recent times on the North Shore, they’ve been through one of the biggest and most-fiercely fought disputes in the city for years. At stake: the future of the council-owned AF Thomas Park, better known as home to the popular Takapuna Golf Club and the even more popular Eventfinda Stadium. A deliberative forum played a central, although not decisive, role in deciding the outcome.

The park sits in the heavily commercial and residential Wairau Valley, just over the motorway from the suburb of Milford. During the 2023 Auckland Anniversary Weekend storms, Milford and the Wairau Valley were the worst affected zones in the city. People died; the damage ran to tens of millions of dollars; the stadium flooded and its sprung wooden floor was ruined. More homes were red stickered than in any other part of town.

Auckland Council has a programme called Making Space for Water, which involves creating flood-detention areas to hold floodwater when the drains can’t cope, preventing it from devastating communities.

Making Space for Water already operates in some parts of the city, including the newly redeveloped Northcote, just south of Wairau, where the 2023 floodwaters were contained by local playing fields. The housing and shopping centre there had very little flooding. Making Space for Water works.

Last year, after much agonising and public input, the council approved the plan for a wetland for flood detention on about a third of AF Thomas Park. The golf club would have to close.

The public was then asked what should happen to the rest of the park. There were many competing demands and emotions ran high.

The stadium has to relocate. It hosts a thousand people a day playing and training in gymnastics, basketball and other sports, and attending large-scale community events, and it will lose its insurance if there’s another flood.

There’s also a shortage of facilities for other sports and, with a growing population, there are many other demands for recreational amenities.

And sport itself is changing: golf has a short-form version called pitch-and-putt; the tennis-derived pickleball is on the rise; volleyball is the fastest-growing sport in high-school kids, especially among girls.

There’s strong support for golf to continue, but with a shorter course, a driving range, a putting green and a pitch-and-putt course.

Critical to all of this is that the wetland plan requires 600,000 cubic metres of earth – that’s 60,000 truckloads – to be moved. The council doesn’t want to put 120,000 truck journeys onto the nearby roads, so it proposes to leave most of the earth on the park.

Where it goes and what it’s used for are part of the decision-making. Everyone wants there to be a “dig once” or “move it once” approach, so they’re trying to get all the planning in place.

The concept most in favour is for a new stadium to be built on a packed-earth platform raised above the flood plain. That earth could also be used to flatten the land for playing fields.

This isn’t community v council, and it doesn’t need to be golf v flood-prone residents. It’s about how a range of different and often intersecting communities can come away with something worthwhile. And it’s about the process: how those communities are heard, how the engineering and other expert advice is heard, how the decisions get made.

It’s also about how green spaces in the city should be treated. Nobody has suggested housing on the park: it seems clearly understood on all sides that parkland is essential to the urban environment. It’s the lungs of the city and we all need to be among trees.

While the governing body of council decided on the wetland, the park is a local park, so decisions on what else should happen there are for the Kaipātiki Local Board, representing the suburbs west of the motorway, including Northcote, Birkenhead, Glenfield and Beach Haven.

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To help guide its decision-making, the board set up a deliberative forum late last year. The process was remarkable.

Forty people from the Shore, chosen randomly and weighted to represent the ethnic, age and gender demographics of the area, were invited along to a conference centre on the edge of the golf course. Over three Saturdays, they heard from experts and all the interested parties, and discussed the issues in small groups and as a plenary. The group facilitator also gave them a lot of information about group dynamics, decision-making and how to manage data.

I sat in on all three Saturdays. There was none of the shouting and sneering I’ve seen in public meetings on this issue. The forum participants were quieter, keen to learn, some of them taking a while to speak up, all of them appearing to care quite deeply about both the topic and the process.

Respect was high and the process made them well informed. Incredibly, the dropout rate over the three Saturdays was zero.

They found ways to steer conflicting perspectives to common ground and their decisions were based on “super-consensus”: nothing was adopted unless it gained at least 85% support. That is, at least 34 of the 40 participants had to agree.

With that super-consensus, the forum recommended that golf should indeed continue, but that the stadium’s needs were also paramount, so it should be rebuilt in a safe location. They also wanted a range of other uses to be catered for, including not just organised sports but picnicking in informal parkland and other general enjoyment.

On March 25, the local board and many members of the public squeezed into the board’s meeting room attached to the Glenfield library, across the road from the mall. It was decision day, and the board had before it the forum’s recommendations, the results of wider community consultation, submissions from golf groups and other sports, and advice from officials.

This issue has provoked a lot of anger. Board chair Danielle Grant told the meeting, “Some of our community have demonstrated a side of themselves I imagine they would not be proud of. The vitriol directed at me, and at our staff, it has not been good.”

But there has also been a democratic robustness. People have had every chance to have their say and many have taken it. The council went to great lengths to ensure it heard from people, especially locals, who don’t usually jump up and down about things.

Council officials engaged in good faith, with considerable expertise, seeking good outcomes for the city. Iwi were well consulted and the government was kept in the loop.

And something remarkable happened. Despite all the feuding, the final recommendations of the officials aligned with the core demands of the golf community, and the stadium, and most other park users.

They also aligned with the preferences expressed in the community consultation process. The two local iwi, Te Kawerau ā Maki and Ngāti Pāoa, were also on board, as was the neighbouring Devonport-Takapuna Local Board.

And, critically, they aligned with the recommendations of the deliberative forum. Consensus. Super-consensus. Everyone agreed.

But at that board meeting, Grant proposed a motion that effectively rejected the consensus advice. It passed unanimously. What happened?

At the heart of it was a debate over numbers. Everyone agreed that golf would have those core facilities: a shorter course, a driving range, a putting green and a pitch-and-putt course. But the golf community, represented by the club, and by the Golf Warehouse which wants to build and run the new facility, and by Golf NZ, said they would need 20 hectares to make it work.

Their model was the recently redeveloped Miramar course in Wellington, which has all the golf facilities proposed for AF Thomas.

The council officials said the desired outcome for golf could be achieved on “a minimum” of 15ha. This would allow enough room for a new stadium, a couple of playing fields and other recreational amenities to be developed as well. They recommended the 15ha target allocation for golf be adopted.

The officials also pointed out that while Miramar has 20ha, that allocation includes car parking and forested “buffer zones”. At AF Thomas, the proposed 15ha was purely for golf. A separate 5ha of parking and buffers was also proposed. In effect, therefore, golf would get its 20ha.

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Council official Tom Dixon told the board its recommendations would “enable the delivery of all the outcomes”, but warned about changing the space allocations. “Any additional land allocated to one user,” he said, “is likely to compromise the others. Especially the Eventfinda Stadium and the sports fields.”

Despite this, Grant proposed to allocate 18ha for golf. She asked Dixon what this would mean.

“I think we’ve quite clearly explained the risks,” he said. “If you say it should be 18ha, of course we’ll try to do that. But we’re flagging the risks to you now.”

Board member Tim Spring asked, “If we go with 18, what sports codes will be most at risk?”

Dixon replied, “The platform for the stadium and a platform for two sports fields.”

When Brian Blake, chief executive of the stadium, was asked where else the stadium could go, he said he didn’t think there was anywhere.

The board ignored all that. One member said, “I will advocate for golf above all. It’s about golf and stormwater, keeping it simple.”

She added, “I’ve got no issue with any other codes and I support the fact they’re struggling. But I know that I’ve heard what the people have to say. They prioritise golf.”

Another said, “There’s massive demand to keep golf there.”

These comments were hard to follow, because no one was proposing to remove golf from the park. And it wasn’t true “the people” have “prioritised” golf.

The deliberative forum explicitly did not want golf to compromise the stadium or several other park uses. In the wider community consultation, 33% wanted “a balanced mix of golf and other recreational uses”, while 21% wanted “mostly other recreational uses with limited golf facilities”. That’s 54% who asked for “balance” or a skew against golf.

Only 37% of individual responses wanted “mostly golf with limited other recreational uses”. But the board went with that 37%.

One board member, referring to the stadium, said, “The success of this whole project comes down to whether we can find a place for it. That’s not yet clear.”

But then she and the others voted for a resolution that puts the stadium at risk. Why?

She also said New Zealand is “going to have a lot of controversial decisions like this coming our way”. The need for flood resilience, our changing demographics and growing pressures on community resources all make this true.

And with all the public consultation to be done, she said she was aware how important it was to “hear the quiet voices”. But that’s what the deliberative forum allowed. Did the board really hear those quite voices?

I put these questions to Danielle Grant after the meeting, but all she could say was that it was difficult and they’d done their best. I remembered the belligerence I’d seen in public meetings and her own comment about the “vitriol” she and other board members had been subjected to. How much did that affect the democratic decision-making process?

Luke Kemp, in his analysis of why civilisations fail and how we might be able to prevent it, puts great store in democracy. He argues that the power structures of tyrants are often fragile, while democratic processes can be much more resilient.

But he also says we need to get better at doing democracy well. For deliberative democracy to be valuable, it shouldn’t be possible that its outcomes are ignored, or that abuse on social media can win the day.

Democracy is difficult and it will always be a work in progress. The Kaipātiki experience contained a great example of the deliberative approach, but it also revealed how it can be undermined.

One interesting note. The deliberative forum asked the golf club: “If you could keep only one facility, the golf course or the driving range, which one would it be?”

Their answer: the driving range. It’s popular and a money-spinner.

One board member told the meeting it was a matter of mental wellbeing. “After having children, I know it’s so good to get out there at night and hit golf balls into the dark.”

We’re stuck. Stuck with governments paralysed by inflation, the demands of the property market, declining social cohesion and overwhelming demands for more spending in health, housing and infrastructure. Even in these last few pre-Budget days, when the current government is getting praised for being decisive, in reality it’s just trotting out some very old ideas. Here’s our punishment stick, say Nicola Willis and her colleagues, and look, there are the public servants, social-housing tenants, disability carers, rough sleepers and beggars, even the ones just minding their own business, which is most of them. Whack, whack, whack.

Willis knows she made a mistake to say people in social housing have “won the Lotto”, but she thought it. How appalling.

We’re stuck. Trust in politicians and political parties is low. AI threatens everything, in ways it’s almost too hard to think about. And thanks to the megalomaniac narcissist in the White House, we face both climate devastation and a war that could destroy the global economy. Not that the techbros, fossil-fuel oligarchs, manospherians and almost the entire Republican Party seem to mind: they, presumably, figure they’ll just keep on making money and accumulating power.

Christopher Luxon and Willis are not to blame for the war on Iran, any more than Jacinda Ardern and Chris Hipkins were to blame for Covid. But all four of them and their colleagues share some responsibility for many of the other problems we face. We’re stuck, at least in part, because of them.

What should they do? What should we want from them, as voters?

In my view, the political views of most people now are motivated by two great desires. We want change, and we want reassurance.

It’s as true for supporters of Te Pāti Māori as it is for fans of Act and everyone inbetween, and it’s true globally.

We want change because what we’ve got is not working. It’s time for something else. And we want reassurance that change will not hurt. We remember better times and we want them back.

We really are stuck, and it’s not good. The major parties, National and Labour, are keen to offer reassurance. But do many people believe them? Meanwhile, schooled up by Nigel Farage, Winston Peters has found a way to offer change and reassurance. If our other parties don’t start looking more effective, the appeal of NZ First’s divisive, climate-denying, nostalgic fantasies will just keep growing.

This post is the first of three, which I’ll publish among other posts over the next few weeks. The focus is on some of the ways we might get ourselves unstuck, so that we do make progress as a society and don’t succumb to the rank populism of the right.

This one’s about the idea of a “grand coalition”: a wartime-style government formed by National and Labour working together. NatLab, if you like.

Also in the series: Why is it still not easy being Green, even though, uniquely among opposition parties, they have an actual policy platform? And how credible is the newly refreshed Opportunity Party, which says it can break the deadlock?

The problem with a NatLab government

NatLabs? I’m not a fan. A grand coalition is valuable in times of genuine national emergency: both New Zealand and Britain had one during World War II. But we’re not there, at least not yet.

For the rest of the time, the idea is incoherent and ignores some of the basic realities of politics. But I do think it contains within it the germ of a really good idea. I’ll come back to that.

The reality of politics was sharply exposed when Labour and National agreed to a housing accord in 2021. Both parties knew three things: urban development required greater housing density; councils were too scared of voters to zone for that density; and if only one party was to take the lead in instructing councils, the other would gain electoral advantage.

In effect, the accord was intended to take political risk out of the issue. If the two parties agree an unpopular thing should be done, they might succeed if they do it together.

But National abandoned the accord a mere two years later, because there were votes in it.

That experience tells us a grand coalition would be inherently unstable. Politics is about jockeying for advantage. It requires parties to remain true to their supporters and define themselves as different from the other lot. But if they’re in a coalition, it’s hard for them to promote policies their own voters don’t support: what would be the point in voting for a party that lines up with its main opposition?

Maybe that’s wrong. Maybe a NatLab government would turn out to be stable. Almost certainly though, for that to happen, it would be because it adopted only the policies they both agreed on.

This is not a better option. We’d have a government with a supermajority doing very little: “managing” the status quo but not improving it. A stable government where nothing much changes.

That is not going to satisfy the widespread societal discontent or build trust in politics. If we want change, why vote for an arrangement that won’t deliver it?

Where good ideas come from

Nobody wants the same anodyne government forever. I want policies that are more progressive than either Labour or National has been prepared to implement; you might want the opposite. We vote in the belief it might happen.

Related to this, let’s remember where good ideas come from: usually, it’s the edge. Societies progress through conflict and debate, the clash of vested interests, the search for better ways to do things and, over time, the adoption of new norms of behaviour and belief. Many of the things that define us now came from a once-radical fringe: basic workers’ rights, votes for women, the welfare state, our proudly anti-nuclear tradition, the idea that we are a nation of the south Pacific.

Radical ideas move into the mainstream. The process is dynamic and often troubled: we all know state institutions don’t work as fairly, justly or efficiently as they should. But they do work and they’re improveable. Democracy is alive and progress happens.

It’s not perfect, but there is no perfect form of democracy. In this, perfect is the enemy of good.

(And right now, just to mention in passing, our democracy is doing much better than some others. The contest of ideas in Aotearoa is not accompanied by ICE goons snatching people because of the colour of their skin, breaking up families, killing citizens in the streets.)

If we want new ideas to infuse our parliamentary processes and decision-making, the minor parties need a role and need to believe they have a future.

Some of the people advocating a grand coalition don’t see this, or perhaps they don’t value it. They seem a little less motivated by a desire, not for progress, but for the status quo. Auckland mayor Wayne Brown, for example, wants to keep the “pesky” minor parties out of government, because they have “nutter” ideas.

Yes, sometimes they do. But so do the major parties. Last year, National increased the speed limit around most schools. Last election, Labour thought taking GST off fruit and vegetables was a better way to address cost-of-living hardship than asset tax reform.

A political setup designed to shut minor parties permanently out of power would be disastrous. Their bad ideas might be sidelined, but their good ideas would be too. Their voters would feel alienated and betrayed.

This points to the biggest reason of all that a NatLab government would be bad for us. The fresh thinking of minor parties saves the major parties from atrophy. Without them, their own policies would probably be rubbish.

What they share

And yet. Despite their deep tribal enmity, National and Labour do have many things in common. They’re both neoliberal: fully committed to low debt, restrained government spending and a market-based economy. They’re also both moderate in this: to varying degrees, they believe the state has a role in overcoming market failure and providing a welfare safety net.

Both parties have moved towards integrated land-use planning, where transport, housing, utilities, schools, shops, parks and other services and amenities are planned together. They’re not great at it yet, but they’re moving in the right direction.

They both use immigration to boost GDP and provide essential workforces in several sectors. They are roughly aligned on free trade, following the US in foreign policy but not too overtly, and maintaining a relatively small conventional defence capability.

All up, they’re both orthodox “mainstream” parties in a social democracy.

There’s something else they share: an inability to build back better out of a crisis.

Covid and the US/Israeli war on Iran offered one party then the other the chance to reform the economy so we become, as a society, more resilient and more able to seize the opportunities in front of us. Both failed to seize that chance. Perhaps they don’t want to, or they don’t know how, or they’re too scared, or they just don’t see the world in those terms: whatever it is, they’re useless at it.

This failing has had long-term consequences, including low productivity, a chronic inability to manage healthcare needs, car dependency that chokes our cities, absurdly high fossil-fuel dependence, a tragically distorted housing market and, related, a deeply flawed tax system. Banks, supermarkets and electricity gentailers are allowed to keep profiteering at our expense. And there is a shocking deficit in the creation and preservation of long-term assets, including water services, transport, flood resilience and the natural environment.

The truth is, neither National nor Labour have the policies or the courage to overcome these things. The neoliberalism within which they operate has nothing to offer.

What they don’t share

There’s another problem. Whether you lean left or right, you probably hope that if your lot gets into government, they will pursue the things that distinguish them from the other lot, not abandon them. Because despite their similarities, in many ways National and Labour are not the same. And those differences are important.

Perhaps the best way to describe this is that while the major parties stand quite close to each other, they face in different directions. Quite often, they walk in different directions. Here’s a by-no-means exhaustive list of ways they really don’t align: treaty partnerships, tax reform, climate action, workers’ rights, social housing, environmental protections, energy independence, road safety, benefit access, school curriculums, primary healthcare …

A better way to do it

So what’s the good idea lurking inside the bad one? How do we not remain stuck in the middle with those two?

The two major parties should work together more often, but not in a formal coalition.

MMP needs to evolve. Its current iteration is widely regarded as giving too much power to the minor parties of the government. This undermines democratic accountability and trust in democracy. When a majority of voters can say, “This isn’t what we voted for,” over and over, cynicism takes hold.

The prospect of the two major parties working together more often offers a way forward.

We’re in this situation because of how badly the National Party has mishandled its coalition relationships. Act and NZ First both secured many specific policy commitments in the 2023 negotiations to form a government that National itself clearly did not want. And since then they’ve both been free to attack their own government, seemingly whenever they want.

They’re playing National for fools. Which means they’re playing us for fools too.

So let’s have them do it differently. After the election this year, coalition negotiations should not produce long lists of specific legislative commitments. They should, instead, focus on principles, parameters, and the direction of travel. Nothing wrong with a few key policy commitments, but there’s everything wrong with pandering to niche obsessions, payoffs to influential party supporters and culture-war obsessions that everyone knows will be inflammatory.

The major parties should seek confidence and supply support from minor parties, in return for roles in the government they form. But they should also tell prospective partners they are willing to seek wider parliamentary support for measures the minor parties aren’t keen on.

And they should tell us as well. National and Labour should both make public commitments, before the negotiations, to a willingness to work together to stop tails wagging dogs.

Ad hoc bipartisan support is already a reality, but it’s surprisingly rare. On the other hand, it’s been frightful how many of NZ First and Act’s kookier policies have been allowed to waste parliament’s time and get turned into bad law.

As per above, there’s no perfect form of democracy, but perfect is the enemy of good. This is a way forward: it should produce better decision-making, it will almost certainly help rebuild public trust in politics, and it will make our parliament more fit for purpose as it, and we, face the new crises to come.

It is, in essence, a commitment to parliament.

Elsewhere in Hopetown

More good news from home and abroad.

The floating gardens of Copenhagen

In the harbours and canals of Copenhagen, the Danish government has installed floating platforms planted with wildflowers and native vegetation. They’re a way to attract birds, bees and other pollinators into the city, but the benefits for everyone are also plain to see. It’s not a new idea. The same thing has been done on the Charles River in Massachusetts.

And before Hernán Cortés introduced smallpox to the Aztecs, the city of Tenochtitlan relied for much of its food on floating gardens called chinampas. They had frames made from wood and reeds, often with willow trees at the corners whose roots held the gardens. The soil was a mix of nutrient-rich canal mud and organic waste: yes, they recycled their kitchen rubbish. Chinampas were so fertile, they could produce up to seven harvests a year. The Spanish drained most of the canals, although chinampa remnants still exist in the Xochimilco district of Mexico city.

Bike trips on the rise

Auckland in April saw a 20% jump in the number of bike trips recorded by Auckland Transport’s 26 counters around the city, compared with April 2025. In all, 309,197 trips were recorded: that’s about the same as the pre-Covid peak of 2019.

The obvious reason for this is the fuel crisis, but that doesn’t explain the pretty consistent longer-term trend, which is also up. More cycleways means more safe cycling means more people on bikes.

Among the latest to open: Pitt St and Vincent St, which together connect the entertainment precinct around Aotea Square with Karangahape Rd, Mercury Lane and the pink pathway, the Northwest Cycleway and the cycleway on Great North Rd. An ever-more joined-up network, emerging from all those roadworks, and these latest lanes have been done cheaply and well: even Wayne Brown should be happy.

There’s heaps more data, some of it live, courtesy of analyst Tim Welch, right here.

Zohran v Amazon

Delivery vehicles from Amazon, a company worth US$2 trillion, had racked up millions of dollars in fines in New York by the time Zohran Mamdani became mayor. Not for parking illegally, but for idling: churning diesel fumes into the city air while their drivers made deliveries. Mamdani says, “We collected every dollar they owe the people of this city.” That’s US$9 million. “No company,” he added, “no matter how large or small, is above the law.”

In 2015 the great Indian writer Amitav Ghosh started asking why the world’s fiction writers weren’t addressing the climate crisis. He praised a small list of writers who had done it, but confessed that he himself had found it much more difficult than he had expected. Even though he has the material: he’s from Bengal, the most flood-devastated place on the planet. Ghosh himself had been caught in Kolkata’s first recorded tornado.

He coined the term The Great Derangement, to explain a phenomenon of our times: we know what’s happening, but we’re letting happen anyway. He wrote a non-fiction book with that name, and now he’s found the way to put the climate crisis into his fiction, too.

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Ghosh’s new novel is Ghost-Eye, which begins in Kolkata in 1969, with a small child in a strictly vegetarian family demanding to eat the fish she remembers from a previous life. The narrative bounces between her and a middle-aged man in contemporary America who gets involved with a group of radical climate activists. Along the way, we dive deeply into the relationship of science and traditional belief systems, the ongoing wreckage of Britain’s colonial empire in South Asia, the beauty and terrors of the tidal mangrove jungle of the Sundarbans, that vast delta of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra that stretches from Indian West Bengal to Bangladesh. And all through it, there’s a great, lyrical thread about the possibility of bringing all this together to defend the world against the ravaging climate.

Amitav Ghosh is a guest at the Auckland Writers Festival this week. He’s doing three sessions, including an hour with him than I’m chairing, 4pm on Saturday. Tickets are available.

Since his callout in 2015, things have changed: cli-fi is now a thing. But one of the early adopters named in Ghosh’s shortlist 11 years ago was Ian McEwan. He addressed climate change directly in Solar (2010) and again in Lessons (2022) and has returned to the topic with his latest work, What We Can Know. It’s set, in part, 100 years in the future, at a time when people refer to our own period as … the Derangement.

Uncannily, I am also chairing an hour with McEwan during the writers festival, 7pm on Friday. Tickets here. It’s a virtual interview, he’s at home in England, but don’t let that get in the way. We’ll bring it alive.

In the 2119 of What We Can Know, climate change and a nuclear “accident” in the 2040s, known as the Inundation, have had terrible consequences: most of the world’s coastal cities annihilated, hundreds of millions dead, America run by warlords. Nigeria is the new global power and it has the internet under control.

Britain is now an archipelago of small islands. So much has been ruined, but what remains can still be beautiful. McEwan’s tone is not apocalyptic and the central quest in the book is not to do with politics, but poetry. It is, as one reviewer noted, “a very British dystopia—measured, melancholy and devastatingly polite”. Although the book does have a murder and many people in the future time look back at us as “ignorant, squalid and destructive louts”.

“What we can know” refers not only to the changing climate. It’s about history and our sense of the future, events, our values, our friends and family, ourselves. The book proceeds with an almost forensic analysis, from the vantage of the 22^nd century, of a major incident in the life of a poet and his friends in 2014. But having given us a rich array of conflicting perspectives from which we discern some sense of truth, it then proceeds to trash them all.

In both time zones, it’s a story of people whose lives go awry because they misunderstand the people around them, especially those they love. Which stands as a metaphor for the larger question. How could we be so deranged as to let this climate catastrophe happen?

What we can know, it turns out, is more than we do know. But we can know it only if we start paying attention.

McEwan is a novelist capable of stirring politics vigorously into his plots, and so is Ghosh. The Ibis trilogy of novels brings to life the 19^th century opium trade, which Britain, through imperial control of India and military supremacy over China, used as its new source of colossal wealth once the slave trade was abolished. Britain forced an “opium war” on China at exactly the same time Hobson was signing the Treaty of Waitangi here, and Ghosh writes about colonialism in ways I suspect will resonate deeply with many readers in this country. We’ll talk about that.

But his novels are not tracts. One of their greatest strengths is the richness of their human stories: the aspirations and talents of girmitiyas, or indentured labourers, lascars on the ships, rural peasants, subsistence fishing villagers, people brutalised in so many different ways by the British.

Ghosh and McEwan are both great storytellers and deep thinkers about the climate crisis. There’s hope in those Ibis books, and even more so in Ghost-Eye, as there is in McEwan’s What We Can Know. But the hope does turns on that simple, urgent thing. We’re supposed to recognise what’s going on around us.

If you’re a McEwan fan and you’re thinking, What? Too much climate! What about escaped balloons and wedding nights gone wrong and creepy strangers and missing children and Keira Knightley in a green dress? Don’t worry. With McEwan, as with Ghosh, there’s an enormous amount of stuff to talk about that isn’t at all climate related, and we’ll do that too. They won’t be one-track conversations. Ghosh even has revelatory things to say about nutmeg, and I do hope we get to that.

The Auckland Writers Festival is one of the city’s great cultural celebrations (they say it’s the biggest literary festival in the southern hemisphere), with big crowds expected in all the venues of the Aotea Centre, hour after hour, until late on Sunday. There’s so much good stuff: sessions with Louise Erdrich, Tayari Jones, Yann Martel, Roddy Doyle, R.F. Kuang, and that’s only a few of the visiting writers. Big names and names to discover, heaps of events for families and kids, lots of free sessions, and a long lineup of local favourites.

It’s such a great place to get un-deranged. Check it all out here.

Three other writers I’m keen to hear

Asher Emanuel is a New Zealand author whose book The Valley isn’t quite published yet so I haven’t read it, but I’ve been hearing great things. It’s about young men “enmeshed” in the criminal justice system: the valley of the title is the Hutt Valley. Emanuel is appearing in a session on investigative journalism with New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe and foreign correspondent Barbara Demick.

Luke Kemp writes, in his book Goliath’s Curse, about what he learned from studying 400 civilisational collapses over 5000 years. Yes, there’s a pattern: the concentration of resources in the hands of an elite, which makes a society powerful, also leads to its destruction. Details here.

The Trump session. Actually, it’s not called that, and it’s three writers, not one. In Writing in Today’s America, Toby Manhire is talking to novelist Louise Erdrich, novelist and thriller writer SA Cosby and biographer Deborah Baker about the expectations on, and responsibilities of, writers in America right now. How do you do it? And what is it you’re meant to do anyway?

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Kia ora e te whanau. I live in Hopetown, a place where hope is possible because it’s what we all want. So I am hopeful. But not merely wishful. Hope takes effort. It demands determination.

Hopetown is all around. It’s a town, a suburb, a village, a city. A country, a world, a state of mind. A place to dream and a place for action. A place where better things are possible, even if we sometimes have to fight for them.

In this Substack I’ll be covering politics, the climate and the environment, urban design and development, social issues, books, culture and movements for change. I live in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland and I’m especially interested in cities, but I’ll write about events and ideas from all over.

I’ll be exploring how we can live within planetary limits and also thrive and prosper. How we can strengthen democracy and live with each other in ways that are just and fair. Who’s doing these things and what can we learn from them?

I’ll be keeping a close eye on issues of the moment, too. Asking how they relate to the larger political forces of our world, how we can extract hope from the hardship.

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That hardship is real. We have rising poverty in the midst of plenty, the Child Poverty Action Group has consistently reported, and it’s because 50 years of social and economic progress was followed by 40 years of neoliberalism and corporate greed. Climate change threatens to destroy the global ecosystem and we’re not immune in Aotearoa New Zealand. The damaging monthly storms of just a few years ago are now arriving weekly, says the Climate Change Commission, but we’re doing precious little to reduce the risks.

We have crises in housing and health, but although they’re fixable, hope that they will be fixed is undermined every day. Other social services are also severely strained, urban infrastructure is underfunded and sometimes broken altogether, confidence in the institutions of civil society is weak. A vigorously racist and misogynist far right is on the rise. Our information systems and our sense of community are corrupted by social media, and by many in the new media, and by many more in the old mainstream. Most political parties offer slogans designed to win votes instead of plans to fix problems.

It’s not just us. The nuclear arms race poses renewed perils and, in Ukraine and Gaza, militarist nations have waged wars of total annihilation. Human rights are terribly abused. The most powerful country on the planet is led by a vainglorious despot who seems unaware, or uncaring, or both, that he might collapse the entire global economy.

Hopetown? I know. We’re in what’s now called a polycrisis and hope seems like a stretch. This is a world run by and for elites. That’s the true elites: the billionaire class, the techbros, fossil-fuel tycoons, major financiers and investors, the oligarchs who control our biggest companies, the royal families, the rulers of fascist regimes, the friends of Jeffrey Epstein.

They are served by many willing servants: the influencers and public intellectuals, the lobbyists, spin doctors and politicians who do their bidding. Thanks to those servants, the elites have accumulated vast wealth and power. Much of it very recently: last year alone the wealth of billionaires jumped 16%, or US$2.5 trillion. That’s enough, according to Oxfam, to overcome extreme poverty globally 26 times over.

But they don’t use that wealth to overcome poverty. They fight against climate action, they undermine democracy and they widen inequality.

All of this poses a question for the force that sits at the heart of it: Big Capital. Will it degenerate into rogue corporates profiting outrageously from a wild world, or will it be part of the transition we need to a more stable, hopeful civil society? The latter is possible: capital has all the economic levers, political power, institutional structures and public support it needs to enable the transition. But it won’t happen inevitably or by accident.

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And yet I live in Hopetown. I believe we can do something about all this. In fact, I think we can do a lot. Making the world a better place – making our own towns and cities and regions into better places – is up to us. We don’t need to wait for oil tycoons to see the light or for miracle technologies to save us. We already have the means.

The Manchester revolt

To kick off, I want to talk about a place called Gorton and Denton.

It’s in Britain. Gorton and Denton is a parliamentary seat near Manchester, and earlier this year it held a by-election. Although barely reported here, the outcome was astonishing.

The electorate is one of the most deprived places in the British Isles. The locals are working class, many are unemployed. A little over half of them are white; more than a quarter are Muslim. Gorton has had a Labour MP for nearly 100 years.

It’s the kind of place that’s become central to British politics, where the Labour Party is engaged in a massive battle with Nigel Farage’s ethno-nationalist Reform UK. At stake: the hearts and minds of white working-class Britain.

Reform appears to be winning. For more than a year it has consistently topped the opinion polls (and in this week’s local body elections it surged to power in many places). In the Gorton and Denton by-election, Labour’s strategy was to campaign on fear of Farage. Only Labour, the party said, could beat him.

But that didn’t happen. Labour came third. Reform came second. And well out in front of both, with about 50% more votes than either of them, was the Green Party.

(The Greens also rose sharply in the local body elections. One highlight: in the east London borough of Hackney, Zoë Garbett became the party’s first directly elected mayor.)

How did the Greens do it? Gorton and Denton isn’t a liberal urban seat. The Greens themselves, in the last election, ranked it only 127^th on their target list.

What happened? You can’t put a result like that down to just one thing. But you can say the Greens got a lot right and Labour got a lot wrong.

How they did it

For starters, the Greens had “Hannah the Plumber”: a smart, charismatic and “authentic” candidate called Hannah Spencer. She really is a plumber and she spoke from the heart, knew her stuff and endeared herself to the electorate.

They also had a relentless focus on the cost-of-living crisis. This had three components.

1. Like Zohran Mamdani when he won the mayoral race in New York, the Greens had real policies to lower the cost of living.

2. They named their enemy. The Greens are just as determined as Labour to keep Reform out of power, but the enemy they focus on is the group that causes people’s hardship: the super-wealthy. In her victory speech, Spencer said, “Instead of working for a nice life, we’re working to line the pockets of billionaires … We’re being bled dry. And I don’t think it’s extreme or radical to think that working hard should get you a nice life.”

It’s about time someone reclaimed the slogan “hard work” from right-wingers who think they own it. Labour doesn’t talk about class conflict much at all.

3. The Greens appealed constantly to the unifying power of class politics. They said workers aren’t the enemy of each other, depending on the colour of their skin. All workers share a common foe. As one commentator put it, the Greens understood that “contrary to media caricatures, most working-class people are not knuckle-dragging racists”. Labour, not grasping this, shifted its immigration policies towards Reform and that fed the racism. Spencer called out “the politicians and divisive figures who constantly scapegoat and blame our communities for all the problems in society”.

The Greens have a new leader, Zack Polanski, who drives all this. “Class politics is not a relic but a necessity,” he says. “Anger must be acknowledged and channelled, and fused with hope.”

The party had a good social-media game, full of that anger and hope. And more fundamentally, it had a grassroots army of people on the phones and knocking on doors. Observers said that by polling day the Greens seemed to have “more volunteers than they knew what to do with”.

Campaigners also pointed to a late surge of support, as undecided punters realised that a Green vote would not be a wasted vote. Keeping hope alive is a powerful motivator.

None of this is a secret sauce. Gorton and Denton showed that policies that resonate with people’s real concerns, and offer hope, will be supported.

Critically – this is the thing that eludes Labour parties everywhere – they need to be radical enough to make a difference, not mild enough to avoid offending anyone.

They need to be pitched as real solutions to real problems, not gestures in the general direction of something. And good solid boots-on-the-ground campaigning makes a difference.

All of this is possible for any party that wants to win and get things done. The Greens achieved 13% in the 2024 general election in that seat, but they surged to over 40% in the by-election. The leading pollster, YouGov, reports that the Greens in Britain are now roughly as popular nationwide as Labour.

Could Labour take back the lead from Nigel Farage, if it had the courage to adopt the Greens’ approach?

In the New Zealand Labour Party, MPs and new candidates are already singing from the Mamdani/Hannah the Plumber songsheet. They talk all the time about the cost of living and jobs, health and housing. But it’s not enough just to know the words. Real policies have to be there too.

People want hope, but they’re not likely to invest it in empty slogans.

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I live in Hopetown, a place inspired by the meaningful policies and hard campaigning of the Greens in Gorton and Denton. Hannah the Plumber lives in Hopetown, too.

And already I have a long list of issues to analyse, topics to explore and stories of hope to share.

Three more reasons for hope

1. Victory in Hungary

In Hungary in April, the authoritarian government of Victor Orban, which MAGA champ Steve Bannon called “an inspiration to the world”, was defeated in elections. It wasn’t even close. Some lessons in there, most obviously that democracy is more resilient than we often realise. Orban spent 16 years rewriting the constitution, gerrymandering the electorate, stacking the courts and changing the law to shore up his position, but it came to nothing.

He waged a strident culture war against immigrants and what he called the scourge of liberalism, but he also made Hungary the most corrupt country with the worst-performing economy in Europe. The lesson there: the “strongman saviour” theory of politics creates economic stagnation, poverty and misery.

Orban was defeated not by a democratic socialist or Green movement, but by a centre-right opponent. That’s another big lesson: moderate parties and politicians have a vital role to play in preserving democracy. A lesson the US Republican Party has, to date, chosen to ignore.

I spoke about Orban’s defeat on RNZ on April 23.

2. Blueprint for Prosperity

“The economy was designed, it can be redesigned,” says WEAll Aotearoa, the Wellbeing Economy Alliance. As campaigning for the general election warms up, WEAll has suggested how, with the launch of a Blueprint for Prosperity.

Inspired by the work of Italian-American economist Mariana Mazzucato, the Blueprint contains “five principles of modern economic systems design that lead to 10 missions for Aotearoa”, which in turn have produced 33 specific policies.

At a time where it’s easy to say, “Oh, but no one has any answers,” WEAll does have answers and it wants all political parties to take a look. I’ll explore this Blueprint more fully in a post to come.

3. The human chain bike lane

The Wellington City Council has doubled the length of time it will take to complete the Paneke Pōneke bike network, from 10 years to 20 years, and almost halved the budget from $115 million to just under $67 million. But cyclists aren’t giving up. One recent Thursday morning, using a tactic widely seen in Europe and North America, dozens of them stood along a busy downtown street to create a human bike lane.

Patrick Morgan from Cycle Wellington called the council decision “appalling”.

“We know there’s around 2 million bikes in sheds and garages around the country,” he said. “With protected bike lanes, people feel safe enough to use their bikes for everyday trips.”

“We need to build the whole network, especially during this time of high fuel prices. People need more choices of how they get around.”