Category: Bad Newsletter

I did not want to take this newsletter out of hiatus. I really didn’t! I have my kids to look after, I have projects to do, I have lawns to mow. As I write this my absurdly cute 8 month old daughter is chasing my laptop around the house, as she has picked today to learn how to crawl. As much as I’d like to I do not have time to fish around in the incredibly depressing minutia of New Zealand’s one-degree-of-separation think-tank powered politics.

But I have to, because the think tanks are at it again, and somehow the media is mostly neglecting to mention it.

In its latest deeply neoliberal austerity Budget, the Government has managed to find billions – potentially tens of billions, or more – for big businesses, in the form of capital expensing. As usual all this is hidden behind frustrating obfuscatory language, but what it means is that if you’re a mining company that wants to buy the Leveller from Fern Gully you can now claim 20 percent off the cost of the thing upfront, against the taxes you’d otherwise have paid. Tax deductions for depreciation already existed, of course, but depreciation is a recognition that things slowly break down and have to be fixed or replaced and this costs businesses money – as time passes. Capital expensing is going “oh, this would have broken or worn out at some point in the future, so look, why don’t we just kind of buy a bunch of it for you?” And that I suppose is fine if you’re a small or medium business. The issue here is that – as per Marc Daalder’s excellent reporting – there appears to be no limit to how much this misbegotten corporate tonguing will cost the country which means that we’ll soon start subsidising, oh I don’t know, oil rigs.

This is largely the result of months of Taxpayers’ Union lobbying. They’ve been in the ears of MPs, sending them asinine “briefing papers” (their latest is a frothing neoliberal wet dream dripping with outright disinformation about government debt¹ that can be summed up by the words “PRIVATISE EVERYTHING”; naturally, it landed TPU Executive Director Jordan Williams a spot on 3 News). They then spruik these efforts in their horrible newsletters that go out to all their members and anyone who thought they were getting a Ratepayer’s Report from Stuff, and in these missives they meticulously document their policy and public discourse wins.

The TPU’s position was for full capital expensing; that the government should rebate the total cost of the Leveller, not just 20 percent of it. They are calling the upfront rebate – which is, to reiterate, a gigantic sweetheart deal, just imagine if you could write off 20 percent of a shiny new flatscreen TV against your next tax bill! – a flop.

This is posturing. For the TPU and its junk-tank Atlas Network fellow travellers like the New Zealand Initiative, anything other than total victory will always be a flop, and for them total victory would be the government abolishing all taxes and public services, and ceding sovereignty to a consortium of noble captains of industry. They will be privately pleased with the developments in this miserable budget. For them, they represent progress. What bothers me, as always, is that these groups are deeply entrenched in business, media and Government decision making; their policy prescriptions are often picked up either piecemeal or wholesale, and despite this (or because of it) the media tends to take their pronouncements about fiscal responsibility at face value while ignoring the catastrophic cost of the policies they’ve advocated for.

Let’s recap some of those, shall we? Before the latest boondoggle, the TPU took full credit for torching Labour’s 3 Waters, legislation that aimed to take the (very high) capital costs of water infrastructure off ratepayers and on to Government books. Achieved through a racist whataboutism campaign aimed at Maori, the TPU’s successful campaign meant that many councils were forced to massively hike rates to pay for their decaying infrastructure instead of handing it off to Government. Thanks for the enormous tax hike, Taxpayers’ Union!

Before this, the TPU embedded their chair Casey Costello – also formerly an Act party candidate – on the NZ First party list. Upon her election to Parliament, she immediately set out doing practically everything the TPU (and NZI) had lobbied for around tobacco policy; scrapping world-first tobacco legislation, cancelling excise tax increases on tobacco products, and purchasing vapes from tobacco companies to hand out to smokers – policies that came out of mysterious anonymous briefing papers that spontaneously manifested on her desk. The cost of the thwarted and introduced policies once again runs into the billions; the cost of healthcare for smokers, the lost revenue from excise taxes, the subsidies for the tobacco industry’s addictive, environmentally ruinous products, and the deaths of an estimated 5000 New Zealanders each year.

Some media, to their credit, tried to identify links between the TPU and Costello, despite widespread and illegal stonewalling. But in doggedly searching for or turning up the usual paper trails – names on briefing papers, emails, overt commonalities between Costello’s mysterious documents and tobacco industry propaganda – they missed the wood for the trees. Costello is the Taxpayers’ Union! She stepped down as chair of the TPU to be parachuted into a job as an MP, doing many of the exact things the TPU advocated for during her tenure as chair, and once she finishes her catastrophic innings, she’ll be launched right back into the loving arms of some cosy industry body or lobby group. This is New Zealand politics; everyone knows everyone else, and they all gets a sweet job after their time in the trenches is up. (The media are not exempt from the merry-go-round; political journalism is practically a job interview for the job of a party comms person or corporate executive. If you’ve ever questioned the weirdly out-of-touch, navel-gazing, anodyne, optics-obsessed quality of the Labour party’s public statements, you will find your answer in the fact that a chunk of their comms team consists of ex-Press Gallery journalists.)

Given the state of things, it is probably folly for me to beg the media to make the link between the think tanks, the ruinous policy they so successfully advocate for, and the resultant costs to the country – or, to put it another way, the cost to taxpayers. But I’m going to do it anyway. The Taxpayers Union, NZI, and others dress up their advocacy for greater corporate control of the commons in the language of freedom and choice. They are frequently platformed and even embedded in our media, often for sneering at public projects like overly-expensive playgrounds or a set of steps at a beach. But these so-called blowouts pale in comparison to the multiple billions the policies championed by the TPU and their ilk cost the country as a whole. The least the media could do is tell the other side of the story: the outsize effect that these groups have on the formulation of public policy, and the catastrophic cost of those efforts to all New Zealanders.

1. The report makes the case that the Government’s debt is both unsustainable and like a household’s, a nonsense which is still repeated ad nauseam by political and financial reporters. Verity Johnson’s excellent op-ed makes short work of this absurd claim. ↩︎

I am tired, and very cranky.

Audrey Young from the Herald has put out a “Cabinet Report Card” and it’s hard to scrape together adjectives for just how catastrophically useless it is.

Unfortunately, the following passage doesn’t appear until part-way through the article, which might have saved readers from being exposed to several paragraphs of demented, optics-pilled prose about the Prime Minister:

Today’s ratings are out of 10 and reflect a judgment about how effective ministers have been in delivering the Government’s policy, how effective they have been in their public dealings and in leadership roles where relevant. The ratings are not about the merits of policy.

Let’s look at that last sentence again.

“The ratings are not about the merits of policy.”

That’s it, Audrey! That’s the problem! At the risk of editorialising, this is precisely why audiences despise and mistrust political media. They have one job – explaining the merits of policy, as implemented by politicians – and they don’t do it! Instead they present either hagiographies or acidic tongue-lashings of politicians that are utterly subjective and deliver zero value to readers. The “ratings” are based entirely on Young’s (Voyager Political Journalist of the Year 2023) extremely Tory-friendly reading of political tea-leaves and how her computer keyboard (and, possibly, AI assistant) feels at any given point in time. I’d call it valueless, uninformative slush, but for the fact it says so much about political media’s priorities. Their fetishisation of the absurd corporate buzzword “delivery” is exactly like praising Courier Post for delivering parcels on time, while failing to mention that the only way they’ve achieved this miracle is by replacing people’s actual packages with bag after bag of steaming dogshit. This kind of article cares not at all for facts; only for feelings, for optics, for the vibe.

Here is how she chooses to talk about Minister for Transport, Simeon Brown.

Has a dry but important set of portfolios and is turning out to be the Government’s most populist minister – road cones, potholes, motorways and speed limits. Has also overseen the repeal of Three Waters and reintroduction of local referenda on Maori wards on councils. Highly combative in the House. Effective communicator outside it.

The repeal of Three Waters, as reported by Young’s own newspaper, has caused Council rates for many New Zealanders to skyrocket. The repeal of Maori wards is the worst kind of populism; short-sighted and counter-productive for government-Maori relations, and it was accomplished under urgency, with almost no opportunity for scrutiny. And, according to experts, the abolition of speed limits and measures like traffic calming around schools will literally kill people.

For raising rates, increasing racial tension, and bearing ultimate responsibility for a bunch of preventable deaths, Audrey Young gives Simeon Brown a 9 out of 10. Because he’s “populist” and “highly combative” and an “effective communicator.”

She’s awarding him points for being great at being terrible.

We deserve – and need – so much better from political media.

The last thing I wrote here was an agonised obituary for mainstream media, and what horrors might replace it, but this sort of article is irredeemable. The perpetuation of the lie that politics occurs in some kind of consequence-free void is inexcusable. If this kind of journalism dies, we’ll all be better off.

Anyway, I am considerably more tired and crankier having finished writing that, so I thought I’d finish by how it might look if Audrey Young was writing in Italy at some point from 1922 through 1943. Because we deserve a laugh, even if it’s a bitter one.

Fascisti report card: the ministers thriving and those just surviving

Benito Mussolini today is not the same Benito Mussolini of last year.

You might think this is just an artifact of the passage of time or biological reality and thus too unimportant to mention, but trite cliches are the only way to get a column to length in time for publication.

So yeah, he’s not the same guy.

Delegates to the National Fascist Party conference in South Rome this weekend will see that.

He has the same energy but he is tougher, busier and a little more impatient. One imagines that his genitals have enlarged, but in a tasteful manner, like those on statues from the glorious Imperial past.

He has been battle-hardened by a successful March on Rome and the realities of Government.

He developed a large Coalition agreement with the prickliest operators in politics, the Nationalists, Liberals, and the Catholics of the People’s Party. Such leader, very wow.

Mussolini dealt with Giacomo Matteotti and his son-in-law Ciano more swiftly and ruthlessly than his mentor, the “smiling assassinated” Giovanni Gentile.

Mussolini himself, while having accomplished a lot to become Il Duce, has room for improvement.

He talks up his heroic realism but is often defensive or negative.

He has been at his most positive on the numerous international missions he has led to promote spazio vitale, especially in Ethiopia.

But he is not yet as politically dexterous as he needs to be. In press conferences and interviews, he often relies on bluster or sloganeering which makes him sound more robotic than real.

However, the Prime Minister seems confident that his strong relationship with the Reich, and his new venture in Greece, will bring a brighter future for Italy – and for this he rates 8 out of 10.

Straight to the point: News media in this country is getting pulped and it’s an absolute goddamn catastrophe. It’s happening so fast, insanely fast, and I worry we’re not even beginning to grasp the sheer loss to society.

Newshub will soon be gone, disposed of like so much trash by its megacorporate owners Warner Brothers Discovery, who seem to exist for the sole purpose of un-making media. At least Newshub isn’t being killed merely for tax reasons. Meanwhile, the Pantograph Punch is going on a hiatus that looks like it might be permanent, and TVNZ – which, contrary to popular opinion, has frequently been a net funder of Government rather than a recipient of Government funding – is facing enormous cuts, with flagship programs like Fair Go and Sunday set to get the axe.

Naturally, David Seymour, the future Deputy Prime Minister and shareholding minister in TVNZ, is already dancing on journalism’s grave. It’s absurd. Very few politicians or political parties have manipulated or benefited from media the way David Seymour and ACT have; witness this telling tale from The Spinoff, wherein Seymour utterly ghosts the media that have helped him so much the moment he has no more use for them.

There is some truth to Seymour’s allegation that political news media can be more concerned with scalps than with substance. One major problem with his take is that he’s been a huge net beneficiary of their optics-first focus, and that the “scalps” tend to belong to people quite unlike Seymour. Too often they’re young, brown women. Just because there’s accuracy to elements of his critique doesn’t mean it’s being offered in good faith; in fact it seems that as a shareholding minister of TVNZ his comments could be breaking the law. Good-faith media criticism has mostly come out of the (doomed) hope that media might be made better, and none of the recent developments will achieve that. Instead, the mainstream looks like it’s being supplanted by something much, much worse.

News isn’t going to become less popular just because it’s not profitable. People are addicted to it, and there are plenty of pushers. The likes of The Platform and Reality Check Radio are poised to fill the gap left by ad-funded media’s demise; they’re amply bankrolled by dilettante millionaires, mystery money, and easily-fleeced cookers. They can, and will, scale quickly, especially after being lent legitimacy by politicians who prize the need to be seen over good sense. Think tanks and lobby groups like the Taxpayer’s Union, the New Zealand Initiative, and Hobson’s Pledge will happily occupy any niches left – they already partly function as news platforms, doing journalists’ jobs for them, and they have been building up their own audiences via email, podcasts, and the like for years. The loss of mainstream media stands to make the neoliberal grift-tanks and their political actors more powerful, not less.

The great advantage of having a mainstream media was that it allowed audiences to have a shared reality, and I think this loss is incalculable. Sure, the MSM was monolithic, beholden to advertisers, and got a lot wrong. But even if it only pretended to be non-partisan, or frequently focused on ranking politicians by how good their PR was, it often unearthed truths that the powerful would rather keep hidden. I think, on balance, that it succeeded more than it failed. If that’s true, the people celebrating the mainstream’s demise are fundamentally misguided, no matter their brand of politics. Once you see what’s coming to replace the old MSM – and, in many important ways, already has – you’ll miss the devil you knew more than you ever thought possible.

Of course, as bad as things are, media Aten’t Dead yet. Stuff and The Spinoff carry on gamely in the unforgiving commercial marketplace; the Herald keeps heralding (subsidised largely by its overtly right-wing propaganda arm, Newstalk ZB); Government-funded RNZ remains; and TVNZ will keep making news for the moment, albeit horribly diminished. I hope they all find a way to continue, and if you have the means to pay for news – especially news that is owned and operated by journalists – now is a good time to start. Ignoring for a moment the brands and the mastheads, it’s journalism that matters, and the relatively few full-time journalists left are harried, threatened, overworked, overwhelmed, and underpaid. I hope that, as a society, we can find a way to change that. Given the new Government’s myriad assaults on democracy, transparency, and our founding treaty, we need journalism now more than ever.

This one is for the journalists who subscribe to The Bad Newsletter.

There are quite a few of you, which is gratifying! I think it speaks well of the profession – or what’s left of it – that a publication that frequently criticises both media institutions and specific journalists is still subscribed to by those same institutions and people. So today’s newsletter is a helping hand, and a shout-out, disguised as the usual furious missive. Put it this way, journos: I know you read this, and I want to know why you’re not asking a very specific question:

Mr Luxon, do you want full employment in New Zealand?

There is a vicious, obvious contradiction at the heart of our economy, indulged by both Labour and National-led governments. It’s been written about many times, by myself and many others, and yet we seldom see it on the news when politicians are interviewed. The contradiction is that we have a government that denigrates the unemployed – while, simultaneously, we have an economic system that deliberately creates unemployment.

Here are some words I am getting tired of typing: This is not a conspiracy theory. It is mainstream economic and fiscal orthodoxy. You can read about it on the Reserve Bank’s website.

By influencing the cost of borrowing, we can influence the economy. We call our work to influence interest rates and the amount of money in the economy ‘monetary policy’. 

The fact that the Reserve Bank hikes interest rates in order to increase unemployment often comes as a surprise to people who don’t closely follow economics or politics. Many assume that the goal is to have full employment. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Reserve Bank has essentially just one tool at its disposal: hiking the Official Cash Rate, in the hope that businesses will eventually suffer so much from the resulting interest rate rise that they will sack their employees. Unemployment, and the resulting misery it causes in a society where it is unacceptable to not have a job, is intentional.

The economic dogma that rationalises this cruelty, very loosely paraphrased, is this: when everyone has a job, businesses hike prices to make more money. Everything gets more expensive. This is called inflation. Inflation is bad. (Mostly because it makes the rich – who hoard money – less rich, but also because it makes the cost of living higher). Therefore, wage increases are bad, because they cause inflation, and therefore, wages should be suppressed, and the best way to suppress wages is to make sure that people are frightened of losing their jobs so they won’t ask for more, and the best way to keep people frightened of losing their jobs is to make sure that there is a permanent pool of desperate miserable unemployed people who’ll take any job for low wages, and the best way to make sure that unemployment is miserable is by deploying deliberate, systemic cruelty.

Ignoring the many ethical and logical holes in that argument – don’t blame me, blame neoliberal economists who managed to get their cancerous pseudoscience accepted by the world’s governing and financial institutions because it suits the wealthy and powerful – it is still more or less an accurate snapshot of the situation we find ourselves in. Beneficiaries are demonised by government, at the exact same time that financial institutions created by government try to increase unemployment.

So here’s where we find ourselves. The Prime Minister lambasts unemployed “bottom feeders” and calls for “tough love” while glorying “the dignity of work.” Here are his words:

There are 70,000 more people on a Jobseeker unemployment benefit today than there were in 2017. That’s like adding every man, woman and child in Napier onto the Jobseeker benefit in just six years

Simultaneously, that same government removes the Reserve Banks’ mandate to manage inflation whilst maintaining “maximum sustainable employment,” saying – in Finance Minister and New Zealand Initiative alumni Nicola Willis’ exact words:

“Risking higher inflation in the pursuit of unsustainably high employment, just creates the conditions for a more severe hike in interest rates later on to bring inflation back under control.”

The increased numbers of unemployed people that Luxon is complaining about is because of monetary policy supported and enacted by his government. He’s attacking the previous Labour Government for creating more unemployed people, when his own policies intentionally do the same thing. It is impossible for Luxon not to know this. What’s more, if sanctions and job seminars worked, it would be a disaster, by neoliberal reckoning – that might create full employment, which as we’ve already discussed, isn’t allowed. And as they do not and cannot work, the only remaining reason for things like sanctions is to create ever more grinding poverty. As is so often the case, the cruelty is the point.

Governments can’t have it both ways; if unemployment is created intentionally by government policy (and it is) then it’s cruel to demonise beneficiaries. It would only be even slightly ethically acceptable to be mean to beneficiaries if the aim of government was for everyone to have jobs (and it’s not). This is a contradiction. Contradictions create conflict. Conflict, when broadcasted, is spectacle. Conflict and spectacle create emotion, which creates audience interest, which generates clicks. Journalists are being offered a massive ratings win, and yet they’re not taking it. It’s baffling!

So, journos, here are some questions you can ask about the ridiculous heart of darkness that lies at the rotten core of our economy:

Mr Luxon, do you support full employment?

When he blusters but eventually admits he doesn’t, because supporting full employment would call the economist hellhounds down upon on his shiny head:

Why not? Your own speeches talk about the dignity of employment. Shouldn’t everyone who needs a job be able to get one?

More bluster, blah maximum sustainable employment blah, inflation blah:

But your government removed the requirement for the Reserve Bank to consider the employment rate. You’re creating the unemployment you’re complaining about. If the jobs aren’t there, why should people be punished for failing to get them?

Bluster bluster, bitter pills, tough love, sanctions, I used to run an airline:

But it’s not even working, is it? The Reserve Bank has hiked interest rates multiple times and the employment rate is still high. And the unemployment rate remains near historic lows. It’s barely budged. And yet the cost of living keeps getting higher. Shouldn’t we be finding a better way to manage inflation than making huge numbers of people miserable?

Er um, KPIs, key results, going forward, ambitious for NZ, greatest country in the world, beaches, barbecues, delivering on deliverables, airline:

So why should unemployed people be sanctioned for failing to get jobs that simply don’t exist, because of your own policies?

Airline! I used to run a, did you know, did you know? Airline airline airline

So I ask you, Mr Luxon: if you increase the unemployment rate on purpose, what jobs are these beneficiaries you speak of so dismissively meant to get?

There you go, journalists! An easy bit of conflict all wrapped up in a neat little package. It should rate through the roof. Here’s a chance to prove you’re more than optics-addled defenders of the status quo, more likely to opine on the oratorial vibes of a politician’s speech than the effectiveness of the policies the speech advocated for. Because the purpose of a system is what the system does, and it sure does look like the purpose of the economic system advanced by our current government is to keep five percent of people poor and desperate and miserable, all in the name of a cruel, flawed neoliberal theory about controlling inflation.

I want to give the last words to new Green MP Efeso Collins, who died suddenly today. He was just 49. I hope that the message he gave in his maiden speech will live on, because it’s true.

I want to say to this House with complete surety that the neoliberal experiment of the 1980s has failed. The economics of creating unemployment to manage inflation is farcical when domestic inflation in New Zealand has been driven by big corporates making excessive profits. It’s time to draw a line in the sand, and alongside my colleagues here in Te Pāti Kākāriki, we’ve come as the pallbearers of neoliberalism, to bury these shallow, insufferable ideas once and for all. And this, sir, is our act of love.

Let’s talk about hope.

Some of the reaction to my reporting on the likes of the Atlas Network seems to be, roughly paraphrased, “We’re doomed.” This is perhaps understandable. Atlas and their ilk are well resourced, and are deeply embedded in cultural and media ecosystems. But it’s important to note that, in New Zealand, most of the policies and programs they espouse remain incredibly unpopular. Despite decades of effort and millions of dollars spent, the Act party struggles to crack 10 percent of votes. There is a growing awareness of the depth, breadth, and tactics of right-wing think-tanks, and it’s time to see what a truthful campaign against their decades of disinformation might look like. It’ll be hard work to de-entrench them, but it can – and must – be done. Doom isn’t good enough. We need to tell a true story, a better story, a story that builds hope. And it’s important to note that hope isn’t mere optimism; it is the motivating force for hard work and collective action.

On that note, let’s talk about some of the better stories that are already being told.

The Lost Cause

Much has been said about Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, some of it by me in this review at The Spinoff. It’s an extraordinary book, and I’m always on the lookout for more stories like it. When I saw that Robinson had blurbed Cory Doctorow’s new book The Lost Cause – “This book looks like our future and feels like our present—it’s an unforgettable vision of what could be” – I knew I had to read it.

I’ve been a fan of Doctorow’s blogging for long time. I’ve had a more varied relationship with his novels. I liked Little Brother, disliked Makers, and loved Walkaway once I realised that he was doing a kind of techno-anarchist inversion of Atlas Shrugged. It’s one of those books where characters will break into long philosophical treatises. (Those who advocate for bad ideas often wind up suitably chastised later in the plot.) Lefty Atlas Shrugged is a big challenge; it could easily have been a complete disaster, but Doctorow makes it both cheeky and effective. It helps that, unlike in Atlas, Doctorow’s characters are likeable and believable and the philosophical debates and treatises don’t usually run for more than a couple of pages.

The Lost Cause is my favourite work of Doctorow’s yet, because it takes his philosophical and ethical bugbears, mixes them with a notoriously difficult subject (climate change) in a particularly tricky setting (the very near future, as opposed to the distant future) and spikes the whole cocktail with the genuinely thorny question of what the hell are we going to do with all the people who caught brainworms? This isn’t something I’ve seen dealt with in fiction before; the deeply uncomfortable fact that no matter the direction history takes, most of today’s deranged Trump enthusiasts will still be with us in 15 or 20 years, only older and considerably more deranged.

In the world of The Lost Cause, this situation is tempered because somewhere between now and the near future some good, deeply necessary things happened: a progressive President got elected and actually started doing the needful on climate change. The book portrays this well; it’s mostly really hard (but really satisfying, meaningful) work. Robinson’s Ministry had a solid depiction of the sheer effort needed to address climate change but a lot of it was lofty, high-concept stuff – literally up in the clouds, in the case of the stratospheric aerosol-spraying geoengineering program undertaken by India. I loved all the big-think geekery in Ministry, but appreciated how The Lost Cause brings it down to earth. All of the high-concept cli-fi stuff – like a neo-neoliberal fleet of seasteaders who leech off the creaking remnants of global civilisation while preaching about liberty and freedom, in yet another nod to Atlas Shrugged – are seen through the literally and figuratively grounded eyes of lead character Brooks Palazzo, as in the following passage:

The Flotilla believed that some of us were born to be wise kings, and that winning in the market was the modern equivalent to pulling a sword out of a stone.

Brooks is a well-drawn character; a ball of energy bursting with queer joy, contrasted by a lifetime of trauma: first by the deaths of his parents in a vicious pandemic and then by living with his cruel, indifferent grandfather. The entire novel is suffused with the same almost manic energy that Brooks possesses, which is by turns inspiring and exhausting. I always get the feeling that Doctorow books are written fast (probably because they are – the guy wrote five books during the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic) and there’s a rawness and polemic fury to them that I deeply appreciate. It’s probably not for everyone, but it’s for me. Two quotes sum up the book well. The first acknowledges the deep-felt agony of not being able to do anything about the awful state of the world:

There is absolutely nothing worse than the sense that things are going wrong and there’s nothing you can do to fix them

And the second gives a sense of the antidote to despair.

I had arrived at a place of circulating abundance amid all of that tragedy and terror. Wherever I was, I could be happy, fed, surrounded by good people and hard work.

The Lost Cause achieves exactly what it sets out to do: it makes the gargantuan collective effort required to address climate change inspiring, interesting, and exciting. This is remarkable, considering the fact that attending local council meetings is a vital plot point. Another achievement worth noting is the novel’s commitment to non-violence. Robinson’s Ministry included a character who runs a black-ops division to carry out and fund highly effective acts of eco-terrorism, and the book implies that such will be necessary in the fight against climate change. The Lost Cause eschews that sort of thing entirely, and in fact seems to be in dialogue with Ministry and other utopian fictions like those of Iain M. Banks in arguing that violence against other people is counter-productive. While violence is a constant companion and threat in The Lost Cause – the book opens with a frightening would-be terroristic murder that ultimately ends in assassination – and while the characters consider taking up arms, the argument is always won by the proponents of non-violence. Against people, that is; violence against property is practically a given. Readers of How To Blow Up A Pipeline will find a lot to appreciate here.

Despite – or perhaps because of – its thorny, wide-ranging subject matter, The Lost Cause is excellent. It’s a great riff on utopia, and a cracking yarn. Its largest flaw is shared with Ministry in that the fraught, polluted, world-on-the-brink-ruin portrayed is a best-case scenario. Both books engage the conceit that at some stage, someone in power works to swerve the world away from the brink. From 2024, this seems almost impossible, but it’s never been more necessary. A willingness to do the needful on climate should no longer be a secondary consideration when it comes to choosing leaders; it needs to become the number-one prerequisite. This is ground that I hope a new cli-fi book will cover, but for now, The Lost Cause deserves to sit next to The Ministry for the Future in the emerging greats of the cli-fi canon.

The Lost Cause is published by Tor, but you can purchase a DRM-free copy direct from Cory’s website.

A lot has happened in the last few days in the world of New Zealand’s neoliberal lobby groups and their political wings, and I’ve been trying to keep up with it all – but instead of writing it up here, as I usually would, I’ve been using it to prepare for a presentation I’m doing tonight as part of a free webinar. I’d love it if you could come along. Here’s the pitch from the organisers:

The event is free – register here now.

You know what isn’t free but would give my work a really great boost? A paid subscription. If you value what I do, get amongst it here:

The ACT Party’s attempt to neutralise New Zealand’s founding document, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, has not started well. The far-right, ultra-neoliberal party, emboldened by the defeat of Australia’s Indigenous Voice referendum – thanks largely to a campaign orchestrated between dark-money-funded, far-right think-tanks and the Murdoch media – has Te Tiriti in its sights. The result? More than 10,000 people attended a hui at Turangawaewae Marae to declare, collectively: hands off Te Tiriti.

There are some great write-ups addressing the hui’s significance. This, by Newsroom‘s Aaron Smale, is fantastic:

The Crown’s invasion of Waikato, and the violence, death and dispossession that followed were all instigated on the same premise – Māori were getting too big for their boots and needed to be taught a lesson. The lesson always seemed to involve the loss of land and resources but also the loss of any kind of independent power. The Crown was not ‘just’ taking land – it was rearranging the terms of engagement. It was usurping power.

John Campbell and Mihingarangi Forbes also have excellent write-ups.

Of course, media are also giving near endless space to ACT leader David Seymour to advance his arguments for his proposed Treaty principles bill. Despite the fact that his statements on the Treaty and the effects of his party’s proposed bill span a spectrum from specious to ahistoric to false, they’re rarely checked or disputed when he makes them. His disinformation is also couched in language like “fairness” and “rule of law” and “not discriminating on the basis of race” – concepts that no-one opposes, which has the effect of making his disingenuousness appear ethically watertight. But it’s not, and never has been. There is nothing fair in re-writing a treaty that was almost immediately broken and then dismissed as a “nullity”, only to be given reluctant, limited recognition almost a century later. There’s no rule of law in a system that sees Māori imprisoned at twice the rate of Pakeha for the same crimes. (To be fair to ACT, there is plenty of discrimination on the basis of race in New Zealand, but practically all of it is to the benefit of Pakeha.)

Seymour’s prevarication is expected, as someone whose career was born and bred for years in a series of murky Atlas Network think-tanks (Seymour’s real-world work experience is around ten months work as an electrical engineer.) What’s interesting is that the major think-tanks one would expect to play a major role in an attack on Te Tiriti have been – since the hui – mostly silent. Don Brash’s Hobson’s Pledge has, at the time of writing, said nothing. The reliably mask-off NZCPR’s last post is a piece that wishes members Merry Christmas.

Of course, the think-tank adjacent opinionists are still opining. NZCPR’s “Breaking Views” blog is a round-up of reactionary opinion from throughout NZ, and it’s enlightening, in a backwards way. Climate change denier Richard Treadgold, founder of miniature think-tank “Free New Zealand,” has a bit that begins by calling Māori words juvenile, progresses rapidly to cannibalism, and gets worse from there. Sandra Goudie, former National MP and former anti-vax mayor of Thames, is there with a bog-standard piece of Treaty denial that insists that the “principles of the Treaty” don’t exist and that the Treaty doesn’t actually count because “the first real constitutional document was Queen Victoria’s Royal Charter of 1840 establishing New Zealand as a separate British Colony.”

The darkest – and by far the weirdest – response is by Chris Trotter, writing at Bryce Edward’s Democracy Project. He’s not a think tank guy but it’s worth mentioning, because his take is cooked to the point of being 0n fire: the column is an extended fantasia about an imminent actual shooting war between Māori and Pakeha:

As the bicentenary of the signing of Te Tiriti looms ever nearer, the Pakeha settler state faces two, equally unpalatable choices. It will either have to accede to a Māori-led constitutional revolution, or find its own, twenty-first-century equivalent of General Cameron. A Pakeha military leader prepared to shove back harder than the movement for tino rangatiratanga can push.

This is the sort of thing best dealt with by backing away slowly and avoiding eye contact. It’s useful only in that looking at what the weirdo commentariat is churning out might provide clues as to the direction that the think-tanks’ inevitable public campaigns might eventually take. What’s more helpful is to remember what’s actually driving all this. It’s happening for the same reason far-right think-tanks have taken aim at indigenous rights all over the world.

“The last Government quietly paused oil and gas exploration,” is an article by the excellent climate reporter Olivia Wannan at Stuff. The reason cited for the fossil fuel exploration pause is, of course, indigenous rights.

As revealed in an Official Information Act response, Woods’ decision came after a hui (meeting) in January 2022 with eight iwi groups. The leaders asked for a pause on permits, so they could better focus on consultation about how the country will transition away from fossil fuels.

Some activists warn the Government could be in breach of The Treaty of Waitangi (Te Tiriti o Waitangi) if it ignores the request before issuing onshore and offshore exploration permits.

And there’s the rub. To put it very simply: indigenous rights (potentially) stand in the way of what colonist corporations see as their unfettered right to enclose land and dig stuff up for profit. It’s always been like this. Let’s return to Newshub’s Alan Smale:

The Land Wars happened because the Crown would not tolerate being told Māori were not going to sell. But it framed this as a rebellion against its (imagined) authority. The initial impetus for this conflict occurred when the Crown wanted to buy a piece of land from an individual in Taranaki. The senior leader of the iwi in Waitara, Te Rangitake, refused to recognise the sale as the land was collectively owned in line with Māori tikanga. The Crown sent in the troops to force the sale. The rest, as they say, is history.

That’s why the far-right think-tanks fight both climate change measures and indigenous rights with equal alacrity – they’re terrified of what happens if indigenous people finally get given a real say about what happens on the land they never ceded to colonists.

Looks like I missed another race-war alarmist in the reliably unreliable Matthew Hooton. An opinion piece by AUT University chair Rob Campbell in Newsroom reports:

[Hooton] pondered a “full-on confrontation” with “Māori activists” and numbered up police and military strength noting that “it wouldn’t take much for law enforcement to be overwhelmed”.

That’s two! Peddler of imperialist derring-do Ian Fleming had this to say about things that happen twice: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” It’ll be interesting – in a bad way – to see how the “just asking questions about our military capacity in the event of an actual civil war” narrative pans out, and whether that’s one that the think tanks will eventually run with. I hope not, but I expect to be disappointed. The above opinion piece is well worth reading, not least since it shouts out to our friends the Atlas Network. I never stop being happy to see that all-encompassing, media-hacking, neoliberal vampire squid named in the news.

For an article about what Māori are actually up to outside of the imagination of past-it Pakeha columnists, check out Nadine Anne Hura’s fantastic article, “Five climate lessons from Māori communities (that are guaranteed not to depress you).”

Today In (Keeping) Tabs (on the Think-Tank /Media Confluence)

Apologies to Today In Tabs for the headline, but thank you to Today In Tabs for the shout-out to my last piece, All The Garbage I Found On Substack In One Hour.

The New York Times has an incredible expose on “anti-woke” activism targeting American universities that omits only one crucial factor: the outsize role played by the New York Times in “anti-woke” activism targeting American universities. To recap: a media feeding frenzy on allegations of plagiarism made by openly mendacious think-tank employees led to Harvard President Claudine Gay’s resignation. Despite being warned repeatedly that they were being conned by a right-wing hit-job, the Times ran article after article after article. In the end it didn’t matter that the “plagiarism” Gay committed amounted to not plagiarism:

In some works, Gay credits a source in the wrong sentence. In others, she borrows language that even those who were ostensibly plagiarized accept as common phrasing within their field of study. “I am not at all concerned about the passages,” said the political science professor David Canon, whose work the Washington Free Beacon accused Gay of plagiarizing. “This isn’t even close to an example of academic plagiarism.”

I’ve never managed to get my head around this fundamental weirdness – news media seem completely ignorant of the role they play in shaping perception on all kinds of issues, to the extent that it must be deliberate. I guess that’s why this newsletter exists!

The Times story does a good job at identifying the think-tanks driving the the anti-DEI, anti-woke discourse, but it fails to point out that the three main think-tanks mentioned – the Claremont Institute, the Manhattan Institute, and the American Principles Project – are all past or present members of the Atlas Network. This is another inexplicable failing; you’d think that when examining a concerted attack on academic freedom, you’d at least mention the single largest common denominator.