DELIVERING CONSTITUENCIES

Under the current constitutional arrangements in this country, or lack thereof, the governing party in Parliament can pretty much do what it wants to engineer the society that best promotes its interests.  Even the voting system supports that.

Under MMP, the government of the day can bypass the voter and hand pick much of the legislature and Cabinet.  The government appoint the judges, so if their legislative decisions run contrary to the judicial view, they rewrite the legislation.  If a caucus becomes argumentative, the PM can shuffle Cabinet and play his constituent MPs off against his list members. 

Yes, at the macro level, a government in power in New Zealand today can now pretty much do what it wants. And by and large the Pākeha majority will let them do it.

However, things become less clear in their dealings with Māori.  The Māori world is complex to many Māori; imagine how frightening it must be to Pākeha with little or no knowledge of things Māori.   In response to these fears from its voter base, government deals with Māori from a risk management perspective.  And to help them manage that risk they use two methods; advisory and mandatory.

The advisory method involves setting up and resourcing Māori to fill committees and positions that government can then call upon to advise them on how to manage and neutralise, if not solve, a particular Māori risk. 

The mandatory method involves mandating and resourcing Māori negotiators that the government can then call upon to deliver a constituency of other Māori into its hands, again neutralising, if not solving, particular Māori risks.

The success of both methods hinges upon the appointed Māori advisors and mandated Māori negotiators playing the game by the government’s rules and giving the government what it wants. 

With regard to Māori negotiators, what government want is to be forgiven the massive financial liability it carries over the numerous, well-founded claims that Māori have against it for breaching Te Tiriti o Waitangi.  And it wants to do so for as little as one cent in the dollar. 

It had aimed to complete this exercise of self-determined forgiveness by 2014.  It has now quietly changed that deadline to 2017, but its methodology remains the same. 

It mandates a group of negotiators who originally got their people’s support with stirring rhetoric such as, “100 percent and not an acre less.”  

It then isolates those negotiators from their people through confidentiality requirements, refuses to discuss anything outside its settlement policy, and threatens to send them to the ‘back of the settlement queue’ if they don’t toe the line.

Finally it resources them to take its cheapo offer back to their people and manufacture their consent by telling them, "Take the deal.  It’s the best we can do.”  And it watches the resultant backlash against those negotiators or their supporters with calm detachment because it too is playing the same game, but on the international scene; i.e. manufacturing our consent to deliver the New Zealand constituency into the hands of multinational corporates.

MANUFACTURING CONSENT

In this age of manufactured consent, the current government has shown a willingness to take extraordinary steps in using the media as a tool to shape political outcomes. 

Nicky Hager’s books, The Hollow Men and Dirty Politics, laid out in detail how the current politicians in power, from the PM’s Office down, manufacture consent by using the media to leak sensitive information about opponents, to attack them, and to then dictate talking points about them to mainstream media figures through bloggers and those they call Opinion Makers. 

Use of the media is not in itself unethical.  However when the user is the Government and the Media is Māori, the resultant imbalance for those they attack is hugely amplified, coming as it does on top of the Mainstream media either leading or joining the attack. 

Having seen how real investigative journalists in this country are uniformly attacked by Government and most Media, we can take it as a given that any Māori who oppose or stand in the Government’s way will be treated just as badly, if not worse.

An example is that of Minister of Treaty Negotiations, Chris Finlayson, who last week announced his recently conceived concerns over Tūhoronuku, the Ngāpuhi entity which he has for the past four years either defended or championed as the body with his mandate to settle all of Ngāpuhi’s claims. 

However, in spite of Finlayson’s support, Tūhoronuku failed to deliver its constituency to him, and in last Thursday’s Northland Age (Questions over Tūhoronuku’s mandate) he listed “an array of issues” he now has about Tuhoronuku, including its relationship with hapū and its financial status. 

Poor Tūhoronuku. It seems Finlayson may now be looking elsewhere for a cooperative body to deliver Ngāpuhi to him and to settle according to his and the government’s dictates, just like other iwi entities in the Far North have already done.

Curiously though, a Māori media reporter recently ran an ambush piece from a kūpapa airing the same kinds of criticisms about Te Rūnanga-a-Iwi o Ngāti Kahu as those now coming from Finlayson about Tūhoronuku.

Although the reporter’s producer apologised on air the very next day for her failure to check the kūpapa’s criticisms for accuracy and her failure to contact the Rūnanga for its views in order to ensure she ran a fair and balanced story, that same reporter again contacted Ngāti Kahu Chairperson Margaret Mutu late Sunday night for comment on an interview that she just happened to have done with Mr Finlayson in which he had stated “… that a pair of fresh eyes needs to look over Ngāti Kahu Treaty claims and the Rūnanga mandate ‘doesn’t last forever’.”

Poor Mr Finlayson seems to have forgotten that it was he who walked away from negotiations with Ngāti Kahu, and that it is his warrant that won’t last forever, while Ngāti Kahu’s rangatiratanga will.

In any event the Rūnanga don’t need his mandate to do what their people have already mandated them to do.   

Mr Finlayson’s forgetfulness aside, what is clearly at play here for both Ngāpuhi and Ngāti Kahu is the ongoing efforts of Government, supported by a compliant Media, to obtain an outcome by manufacturing our consent.

SIGNED, SEALED AND SECOND CLASS

“All this criticism by left wing activists before the details were even released.  Pathetic,” wrote a New Zealand Herald reader last week about opposition to the TPPA.  

But isn’t that the precise point of the criticism?  Not only were the details not released, even the broad outlines were treated as classified secrets.  Even now neither we nor our parliamentarians know exactly what’s in it.  That’s a problem the world’s biggest corporations don’t have because, unlike us, they got VIP access to it from day one, and had abundant influence in its drafting and on its negotiations. 

Thanks to Wikileaks, we did learn prior to its signing that the TPPA had less to do with mutual lowering of tariffs, and more to do with enshrining the rights of United States corporates to operate in New Zealand with less regulations and controls than our domestic companies. 

That has huge implications for almost every critical issue from health, education, environment and privacy, through to access to medicines and public services. 

In July, John Key admitted the cost of our medicines would rise, but assured us that would be offset by the increased exports resulting from the deal.  Last week, his Trade Minister Tim Groser confirmed that tariff-free access for our dairy produce into US, Canadian and Japanese markets had been denied. 

It has also been confirmed that the agreement contains the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) which is a secretive international tribunal that allows corporations to sue states over virtually anything that affects their profits.  As a result, US corporations not only get to lock in their power, the TPPA makes it impossible for future governments to reduce or remove that power. 

If a protest affects their profits, a law reduces their profits, or a new regulation impacts what they can do with their profits; they can invoke the ISDS and sue.

Previous ISDS lawsuits include Swedish company Vatenfell suing the German state for $3.7 billion for phasing out nuclear energy; British American Tobacco (BAT) sued Australia for passing a law limiting cigarettes advertising; and the French company Veolia sued Egypt for raising the minimum wage.

Bear in mind that ISDS is available to foreign corporations alone.  Citizens, domestic firms and governments have no access to it.  Based on ISDS history, our sovereignty and democracy are at serious risk.  What, after all, is sovereign or democratic about an enormous imposition of power on this country when we, its citizens and parliamentarians, had no way of debating it or influencing governmental decisions on it? 

The history of these agreements shows that they’re very difficult to change unless people can see what’s in them, and that’s precisely why they’re kept secret until they've been signed and sealed.   

 We can now expect continued PR spin from the foreign corporates and lobbyists while, as Gerard Otto, another Herald reader wrote. "The New Zealand citizen still waits in line. Second Class. Relegated."

TIP OF THE ICEBERG

One of the biggest issues that will impact on all who live inside an iwi is the TPPA, which first came to my notice in 2010 through the Jane Kelsey-edited book No Ordinary Deal: Unmasking the Trans-Pacific Partnership Free Trade Agreement. 

Although the TPPA is currently exciting this country’s opposition MP’s, it is just one of three trade deals being secretively brokered right now by the United States.  The other two are the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA). Together with the TPP, they are known as the 3 Big T’s. 

In these three agreements, the US is rewriting the rules of the global economy for everybody.  Once signed they will cement a key part of the US plan to create a new global bloc that will ensure the dominance of its largest companies.  To understand why the US is pushing these agreements, we need to go back to the 1950s.

After the Second World War the United States accounted for half the world’s economy.  Because its influence was unmatched by any country, it was able to write the early rules of international trade to its advantage.

The World Trade Organisation was created in this context.  But as economies like China and India joined the WTO, it became a more democratised arena and eventually the US lost control.  Needing a new strategy to maintain its global dominance, in the classic American style, it went big. 

Bypassing the WTO, the US is negotiating the biggest international agreements the world has ever seen.  But when you look across all three deals, you see that Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) are all excluded.  Why?  Because those are the emerging economies which lead the threat to US dominance. 

The ultimate goal of these trade agreements is not the normal one of getting member states to mutually lower tariffs between them; the goal is getting ultimate control over everything.

In that context, the TPP, TTIP and TiSA can be seen as part of a new geopolitical war taking place between the United States and the emerging economies, especially China. 

Having moved to militarily encircle China through the Pivot to Asia, the US is now moving to economically encircle it and its fellow BRICS members by constructing a kind of reversed circle that very pointedly leaves them out. 

By integrating Latin America away from Brazil, Western Europe away from Russia and Eurasia as a whole, Southeast Asia away from India and China, and the African nations away from South Africa – the US intends to reorient those geopolitical blocs towards itself. 

To understand why and how this will impact every area of life that you care about, Jane Kelsey’s book is a good place to start.  But be prepared to delve deeper, because what was revealed in 2010 has since turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg.