Labour's history lesson

Like Chris Trotter I enjoyed the election broadcast the Labour Party made on TV One last Monday night, and found the contrast with National's broadcast fascinating.

While Labour offered up an historical 'long view' of the present, using photos and newsreel footage disinterred from the archives, and then introduced a series of its members of parliament, each of whom seemed intended to represent some segment of New Zealand's diverse population, National's broadcast marooned John Key without his fellow MPs in what looked like a corporate conference room.

In an era where a twenty-four hour news cycle and social media like twitter and facebook sometimes seem to have created the political equivalents of amnesia and aphasia amongst wide segments of the population, Labour's insistence on the significance of the past to the problems of the present was welcome.

Labour offered viewers a rough timeline of the last century of New Zealand history, which took in events like the World Wars, the Great Depression, the post-war boom and its dissipation in the '70s and early '80s, and the trauma of Rogernomics. The party argued that, throughout the last century, thoughtful state intervention in the economy, and in society in general, had been vital to social progress. The Labour Party was presented as the means by which the New Zealand working class had taken hold of the machinery of the state and reformed society. Using their party, the workers had founded the welfare state, built state houses, created fair industrial practices, and ended discrimination against minorities. In the 1980s Labour temporarily slipped from the control of the Kiwi majority, and became the party of neo-liberalism, but that was, we were assured, an aberration.

National was presented throughout the broadcast as the party of the wealthy elite, with policies that sow class war and racial discord.

Some National supporters have criticised Labour's broadcast for making a tidy partisan narrative out of the complexity of the past. Like the Conservatives trying to interfere with the teaching of history in Britain at the moment, these folks seem not to understand that every historical narrative highlights certain events, and downplays or ignores others. History can never be a neutral procession of facts.

Accepting that there are different narratives which can be made out of the same past does not mean falling into some sort of crude historical relativism, of the sort associated with certain postmodernist thinkers. We can compare and evaluate different accounts of the past by asking which of these stories has the most explanatory power. We can ask, especially, whether the interpretation which the narrative is supposed to demonstrate fits with the events that make up the narrative.

This blog has at times discussed the ramblings of Kerry Bolton, New Zealand's most prolific neo-Nazi. Bolton's texts generally discuss the same events as those of more conventional historians, but they embed these events in a very particular and very peculiar narrative. Bolton believes, for instance, that when Roger Douglas and David Lange brought neo-liberalism to this country in the 1980s they were acting at the behest of a cabal of Jewish communists and Jewish bankers.

Bolton's story about the 1980s is not taken seriously because it is so clearly out of tune with the facts it seeks to explain. There weren't many commies in the Backbone Club, after all. Bolton is an extreme case, but he illustrates how we can assess a narrative by examining how well it explains the facts it contains.

How sucessful, then, was the history lesson Labour offered in its election broadcast?

I want to suggest that a number of the events in Labour's narrative actually contradicted the party's claim to be the historical agent of the Kiwi working class and of social progress.

Labour's broadcast began by talking about the formation of the party in 1916, and showing a photo from one of its early meetings. Explaining that Labour grew out of the struggles for better working conditions and wages in early modern New Zealand, the broadcast introduced a photo taken during the bloody Waihi Strike of 1912. This image, which was used on the cover of The Red and the Gold, Stanley Roche's book about the strike, shows workers protesting the death of Fred Evans, the miner who was shot in a Waihi union hall by a gang of drunken cops and scabs. The Waihi Strike was run by the 'Red' Federation of Labour, an organisation which used slogans like 'For the abolition of wage labour' and 'To the world's workers the world's wealth'. Inspired by the Industrial Workers of the World, which was enjoying its heyday in North America in the years before World War One, the 'Red Feds' refused to become involved in parliamentary politics, planning instead to seize power and overthrow capitalism with a general strike. In the 'Great Strike' of 1913 the Red Feds confronted the right-wing government of William Massey, fighting gunbattles in the streets of Wellington and setting up revolutionary councils in several West Coast towns. Cossey eventually defeated the Red Feds by deploying thousands of armed farmers on horseback, and the power of the union movement was much reduced.

The men and women who founded the Labour Party in 1916 were making a conscious effort to chart a new direction for the union movement and for the left. Where the Red Feds had talked of smashing capitalism, the new party talked of regulating and reforming the system. Fair wages and not the abolition of the wage system were to be the new aim. Where the Red Feds had eschewed 'ordinary' politics, Labour made parliamentary elections its focus.

Labour quickly became the dominant force on the left and inside the union movement, but the tradition inaugurated by the 'Red Feds' did not disappear from this country in 1916. A number of organisations, most notably the Communist Party, reaffirmed the revolutionary tradition of the Red Feds in the inter-war years. The Red Feds' example influenced militant post-war unionists like Jock Barnes, the leader of the watersiders during their epic 1951 confrontation with the New Zealand state. In the 1970s and '80s a new generation of radical leftists founded organisations with names like the Socialist Action League and the Workers Communist League, and played a major role in the union movement and in protests over issues like war and racism. Today many members of the left-wing faction in the Mana Party identify with the radical politics of the Red Feds and their various successors.

The Red Feds and their progeny create certain problems for Labour's propagandists. Last Monday's election broadcast tried to present Labour as the sole political representatives of the Kiwi working class, but the Federation of Labour was a mass organisation which espoused a politics very different from the social democratic ideology of Labour. And, although it has been nowhere near as popular as social democracy since 1916, the tradition represented by the Red Feds has persisted in a variety of organisations.

Last Monday's broadcast tried to deal with the Red Feds by making them part of the prehistory of the Labour Party, and this sort of interpretation might be supported by certain historians. Michael King, for instance, argued in his Penguin History of New Zealand and elsewhere that the revolutionary turmoil of the pre-war years was something exceptional in our national history, and that the Labour Party which emerged from the ashes of the Red Feds was, with its moderate ideas and constitutional methods, much more representative of the New Zealand working class than its revolutionary predecessor. King suggested that the leaders of the workers' movement had to be defeated, and to learn from their defeats, before they could found a durable and successful political organisation. The minority which still held to the politics of the Red Feds was rendered irrelevant. But the revolutionary tradition in the New Zealand left was not absent from Labour's election broadcast, even after that broadcast had moved its focus forward from the turbulent first decades of the twentieth century. Even if the revolutionaries were never acknowledged by the broadcast's voiceover, they could again and again be seen, on picket lines and in protest marches.

Labour's broadcast repeatedly referred to campaigns against injustice in New Zealand, and sought to associate Labour with these campaigns. Often, though, it was the members of the tradition represented by the Red Feds who were in the vanguard of the struggles that Labour wanted to claim as its own.

Labour's broadcast discussed the Great Waterfront Lockout of 1951, and expressed sympathy with the locked out wharfies who had their civil rights annulled by Sid Holland's National government. In 1951, though, Labour refused to throw its weight behind the embattled wharfies, who turned instead for support to the Communist Party.

Labour's broadcast went on to discuss the massive anti-Springbok protests of 1981, but it gave no hint that groups to Labour's left, like the Socialist Action League and Nga Tamatoa, played vital roles in running these protests.

During a discussion of the deeply unpopular National governments of the '90s, Labour's broadcast showed footage of the eviction of pensioner Len Parker from his state house in Balmoral. Supported by the State House Action Coalition (SHAC), Parker had barricaded himself in his home in protest at the charging of market rents for state tenants. Hundreds of people turned up to try to protect Parker, and to protest his eventual removal by heavily armed police. Despite repeated requests, though, Labour refused to throw its weight behind Parker's cause. Parker himself was a member of the Socialist Workers Organisation, and many of the activists in SHAC were linked either to the Alliance Party or to small Marxist groups like the SWO or Workers Power.

Labour wants to present itself as the sole political representative of the workers' movement and the sole agent of progressive politics in New Zealand, but when it attempted to tell the story of progressive politics over the past century on Monday night its claims to exclusivity began to unravel.

The voiceover in Monday night's broadcast may have avoided mentioning men like Jock Barnes and Len Parker and organisations like the Communist Party and the Red Feds, but the events the broadcast described and the images it provided hinted at a story more complicated and more interesting than the one Labour wanted to tell.

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'Vote for Moises!'

My father informed me last night that his boyhood friend Winston Peters is about to hold an election rally out Franklin way, in some war memorial hall or bowls club. "Busloads of old people are coming up here from Tauranga" Dad reported. "The buses will have a reduced capacity, of course, because of all those wheelchairs and oxygen machines they'll have to fit in. And I guess Winston will have to organise ambulances to wait outside the venue, because some of his supporters are liable to collapse with excitement or fatigue."

Apparently forgetting temporarily about his own advancing age, my father went on to joke about "the stroller and rest home vote", and to mock the way Winston's billboards airbrush his face to make him look younger than his sixty-six years.

Winston Peters may be one of the older players in New Zealand's political game, but he is a mere spring chicken compared to Moises Broggi, a senatorial candidate for the Republican Left of Catalan ticket in Spain's upcoming general election. Mark Derby, the Poneke-based historian whose works include a study of New Zealand's links with the Spanish Civil War, recently sent me an e mail about the extraordinary Broggi:

Moises Broggi is 103 years old...I spoke with him (through an interpreter - he doesn't speak English and my Spanish is embryonic) by phone a few years ago, because he worked as a surgeon with the International Brigades side during the Spanish Civil War. One of his medical colleagues and close friends in that period was Doug Jolly, the New Zealand-born surgeon later described as "perhaps the most important volunteer to come to Spain from the British Commonwealth". Moises remembered Jolly warmly and vividly and gave me a great deal of useful information about him. His information came too late for inclusion in the English-language version of my book, but has been incorporated into the forthcoming Spanish-language version...

The global economic crisis which began in 2008 has had a fateful impact on Spain, leaving both businesses and local governments heavily indebted, and making nearly a fifth of the working age population jobless. As protesters fill the centres of Madrid and other cities, the more radical parts of the Spanish left are suddenly getting a hearing from the public.

While Spain's shaky social democratic government is responding to the the country's economic malaise with measures borrowed from the political right, like cuts in the public sector and attacks on trade unions, its radical left is calling for a fundamental shift in power away from business and towards what the Occupy movement calls 'the 99%'. The protesters on the streets and outfits like the Catalan Republican Left are calling for the nationalisation of businesses threatened with bankruptcy, and for a punitive tax on the bankers who helped create the disaster of 2008.

Mark Derby sees a partial parallel between the unstable political situation in contemporary Spain and the turmoil of the 1930s. Back in the '30s the radical left won massive support from Spanish workers and peasants tired of living under the yoke of a semi-feudal landowning class and a deeply conservative Catholic church. When a left-wing government was elected in 1936 the forces of reaction responded with war, but this only radicalised the Spanish people. In Moises Broggi's beloved Catalan region, workers and peasants seized virtually all the factories and farms from the old ruling class and began to run them collectively. Arriving in the Catalonian capital Barcelona in 1936, George Orwell found 'a town where the working class was in the saddle'.

With the help of Hitler and Mussolini the Spanish right eventually won their war against democracy, but the memory of the radical 1930s has been kept alive by men like Moises Broggi.

As my father is all too well aware, Winston Peters has reinvented himself again and again over the decades, adopting and dropping political ideologies and allies with an ease that has sometimes seemed contemptuous. Moises Broggi, by contrast, has remained steadfast in his beliefs. For Catalan socialists, he is a living link between the present and a past which is at once distant and urgently relevant. As Mark wrote, at the end of his message to me:

Who could believe that events and individuals that appear irrevocably buried in the somewhat distant past could reappear to play a part in the exhilarating present? Vote for Moises!

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Hiding on the edge of the world

A couple of months ago I posted an interview with Sebastien Bano about the botany, culture and politics of the Canary Islands, where he has lived for several years. Mark Derby, the historian whose works include a study of New Zealand's manifold and fascinating connections with the Spanish Civil War, e mailed me to say how much he'd enjoyed Sebastien's talk.

In recent weeks Sebastien has been doing some research on El Hierro, the smallest and westernmost of the Canary Islands. The rocky, dry island was for a long time considered by Europeans to sit at one of the edges of the world.

Sebastien sent me this e mail from El Hierro:

I am honoured that Mark Derby enjoyed the interview. I wonder if Derby knows about the peculiar situation of El Hierro during the Civil War.

Once Franco's Nationalists conquered a region, Republicans were in big trouble. They knew they would be shot if they were caught. On the mainland of Spain, or even on Gran Canaria, the largest island in the Canaries group, Republicans could seek shelter in caves and abandoned houses, in extremely remote valleys and amongst mountains.

El Hierro was the worst place for Republicans to hide, because it is so small. El Hierro also had a very limited population, where everybody knows each other (not only were there tensions on the island between Francoists and Republicans, but there was also a history of rancour between some families and clans).

Despite the difficulties created by their island's small size and divided population, many Herreños showed fantastic courage in supplying shelter to Republicans after Franco's forces conquered the island.

I wonder, however, how these Republicans fared in the long term. Did they carry on living in their hiding place, or did they escape to a foreign country? I imagine that leaving the country was a very difficult project even decades after the end of the Civil War, the national police had lists with the names of the Republicans and anyone who was intercepted went to jail.

My grandfather was only a child when he left Spain for France, but because he was the son of Republicans he had a very bad surprise when he decided to spend his holidays in the country of his birth at the very end of the 60's. He was kicked repeatedly and punched very hard in a police station just across border from France. So I don't want to imagine the fear a Republican soldier hiding on El Hierro could have, and the difficulties he had to find freedom.

We'll send you photos of El Hierro when we get back home.

Sebastien's e mail got me thinking about other small islands which have been subjected to fascist rule. One of Skyler's grandmothers fled with her family from Jersey, the largest of the Channel Islands, just before a German occupation force arrived there in late 1940. After the fall of France and the Dunkirk evacuation, Churchill had decided that a few small islands off the coast of Normandy were not worth defending from a rampant German army. The British flag was lowered, and Jersey's local government and police force were instructed to cooperate with the incoming Nazis.

The story of the Nazi occupation of Jersey and the other Channel Islands has fascinated historians, scriptwriters, and counterfactualists because it seems to jar with the notion that the British were incorrigible opponents of Hitlerism. Most of the inhabitants of the Channel Islands submitted to Nazi authority, even when the Nazis began to deport Jews and import slave labourers to help them build forts and gun emplacements. It is perhaps understandable that the small, communist-led resistance movement which did form on Jersey eschewed violent confrontation with the enemy. With its tiny size and flat, open landscape the island offered little cover for the sort of irregular force which might make hit and run attacks on the Germans, and the decision of the local establishment and much of the population to cooperate, however grudgingly, with Nazism increased the danger of betrayal and detection. The Jersey resistance did succeed in sheltering many enemies of fascism - Jews, escaped slave labourers, well-known communists - until the German abandonment of the islands late in the war.

By the time that the Nazis were being thrown out of France and the Channel Islands, many Spanish Republicans were growing hopeful that their country would be liberated from Franco's rule. Thousands of exiled Republicans who had served in the anti-fascist resistance in France crossed the Pyrennes, and attempted to start a guerrilla war against Franco. But their efforts fizzled out, partly because of the alliance Franco forged in the late 1940s with America, which had decided that his regime was an admirable bulwark against communism. It is sad to imagine Republicans waiting in the basements and copses of El Hierro for a liberation which would not come.

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Labour's Janus head

At the end of June Greece's governing party began to push another austerity programme through parliament, and came a little closer to collapse. After expressing unease at mass lay-offs of public sector workers and cuts to pensions, and refusing outright to support a law which rolled back the legal rights of unions, the long-serving member of parliament Panagiotis Kouroublis found herself expelled from her party.

Kouroublis may have lost some friends in parliament, but she has become a heroine to the hundreds of thousands of Greeks who have been protesting against the austerity programme with marches, occupations, strikes, and riots. Political analysts have taken to describing Greece as 'ungovernable', and a report by the CIA suggested that a military coup might be the only way to get protesters off the streets.

It is worth noting that the government pushing radical neo-liberal policies on an unwilling Greek working class is filled not with evil bankers or a set of emissaries from European Union headquarters in Brussels, but with social democrats. The Panhellenic Socialist Party (PASOK) has traditionally enjoyed the support of the majority of the Greek working class, and includes in its leadership many former trade unionists. But it is not unprecedented for a social democratic party to respond to an economic crisis by attacking unions, wages, and the welfare state. When the Great Depression came to Great Britain in 1929, the Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald decided to cut spending on pensions and schools, acquiesced in mass sackings of workers, and refused, despite the urgings of John Maynard Keynes, to borrow money to stimulate the economy. Businesses were delighted.

In New Zealand the Labour government elected in 1984 was greeted by a debt repayments crisis and a run on the Kiwi dollar. Under the leadership of David Lange and Roger Douglas, the party responded with one of the most thoroughgoing and devastating set of neo-liberal policies seen anywhere in the world. State assets were flogged off at bargain basement prices, tens of thousands of public sector workers found themselves in the dole queue, student fees were increased by several hundred percent, and a Goods and Services Tax which hit the poor hardest was introduced at the same time that company tax rates were lowered. 'Rogernomics' was a blow from which poorer Kiwis and the trade union movement have never altogether recovered.

Labour itself has never quite recovered from the Lange-Douglas era. The party suffered a massive membership decline in the 1980s, and it remains a relatively small organisation today.

Ramsay MacDonald and David Lange were condemned as traitors and as lackeys of the rich by many of the grassroots supporters of their parties. Today similar insults are aimed at PASOK leader George Papendrou by the crowds on the streets of Athens and Thessaloniki. But the likes of Lange and Papendrou are not aberrations so much as expressions of one side of the contradiction which is social democratic politics.

At the beginning of the 1920s, when Ramsay McDonald was promising that the Labour Party would govern Britain in the interests of workers rather than employers, Lenin wrote his famously bad-tempered book Left-wing communism: an infantile disorder in an attempt to sum up the nature of social democracy. Lenin described organisations like Labour as 'bourgeois workers parties' - that is, as parties which claim to represent workers, which have mass working class support, and which advocate some policies beneficial to workers, but which side, in the final analysis, with capitalism and the employing class.

During good economic times, Lenin argued, social democratic governments can reward their supporters by delivering them better state services and higher wages. When capitalism goes into crisis, though, and profit levels have to be restored, the bourgeois workers party comes under pressure to save the system it has sworn to work within, by cutting wages and state spending, and siding with bosses against trade unions in industrial disputes.

Lenin was writing before the 1930s, when a number of bourgeois workers parties, including New Zealand's Labour Party, got elected to government and implemented the sort of policies Keynes had unsuccessfully urged on MacDonald. These governments increased rather than cut state spending, borrowing money to cover rises in benefits and wages as well as public works projects designed to stimulate the economy. Keynesian policies were generally pursued because of pressure from trade unions and unemployed workers' organisations, and in spite the protests of big business and the political right.

Like the Roman God Janus, then, social democratic parties have two faces. They can, depending on the state of the economy and the balance of social forces, adopt either moderately progressive or revanchist, pro-business policy programmes. Keynesianism and austerity are both aspects of the social democratic tradition.

The contradictory quality of social democracy is evident in the Labour Party's campaign for November's general election. On the one hand, the party is demanding a rise in the minimum wage and the substitution of a Capital Gains Tax for some of the tax burden the poor presently carry. These measures would, if implemented, increase the spending power of the working class and - in theory, at least - stimulate the economy in traditional Keynesian fashion.

But a very different Labour Party has been campaigning in the wealthy Epsom electorate, where shadow spokesman for Economic Development David Parker is trying to win votes away from Act candidate and former Auckland mayor John Banks. In a recent guest post for David Farrar's right-wing Kiwiblog, Parker revealed that he was trying to appeal to Epsomites by presenting Labour as a 'fiscally responsible' party. Parker wrote that:

John Banks tripled Auckland City Council's debt...This recent history is very damaging for Key as well as Banks, given their repeated assertions that they are fiscally responsible...Labour under Michael Cullen ran substantial surpluses and reduced government debt, which Key and Brash opposed. There is a widening acceptance that Labour were fiscally responsible, at a time when the USA, UK, and most of Europe were not...

In a time of economic crisis, Parker's enthusiasm for 'fiscal responsibility' and his espousal of balanced budgets should send shivers down the spines of left-leaning Labour supporters and trade unionists. It is, after all, in the name of 'fiscal responsibility' and against the perceived excesses of the pre-crisis years that the governments of nations like Greece, Britain, and Spain are forcing through neo-liberal austerity programmes today. For politicians like George Papendrou and David Cameron, balancing budgets means gutting public services, laying off hundreds of thousands of workers, and selling state assets. (The fact that Parker throws an allusion to the Occupy Wall Street movement and a criticism of neo-liberalism, aka 'the Chicago School of Economics', into a later section of his article doesn't detract from the significance of his rhetoric about 'fiscal responsibility'; it only shows his shamelessness.)

Parker's rhetoric should also remind us of the Lange-Douglas government of the 1980s, which took pride in positioning itself to the right of its National opponents during debates about state ownership of assets and public spending.

If the global economic crisis continues and New Zealand experiences the sort of meltdown which has been the fate of Greece, will a Labour government respond by turning to the Keynesian policies of the 1930s, or to the scorched earth neo-liberalism of the '80s? The lack of influence of Labour's few grassroots members over the party's parliamentary wing and the lack of power of the contemporary Kiwi trade union movement make a repeat of Rogernomics a distinct possibility. Parker's revival of the rhetoric of the 1980s certainly shows how little commitment senior Labour MPs have to left-wing principles and policies.

As the Greeks are learning, social democratic governments can be the most ruthless defenders of crisis-ridden capitalism.

Footnote: Labour offered another bad omen today.

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An experiment in credulity

Yesterday Skyler, her father and I explored a few of the rutted and pitted roads of Mamaku, that forested pumice plateauland whose strange beauty James Cowan celebrated in a 1929 essay for the wonderful New Zealand Railways Magazine. As we rattled along between stretches of regenerating rimu and doomed radiata, my father-in-law and I swapped complaints about the irrationality of the world.

Alan bemoaned the Ufologists, psychics, crystal wielders, reiki-enhanced masseurs, and questers after the lost continents of Atlantis and Lemuria who have infested the Steiner schools where he has spent most of his career; I countered with gripes about Celtic New Zealand conspiracy theorists. We soon reached a comfortably smug consensus about the incorrigibility of human credulity.

My father-in-law has been collecting material on what he calls 'delusional thought disorder' for some years, and has talked about writing some sort of grand polemic against the impact of delusion on the Steiner movement. A couple of days before our adventure on the forestry roads of Mamaku Alan had, apparently in the name of research, watched a documentary, or faux-documentary, which attempted to demonstrate the truth of Erich von Daniken's claim that extra-terrestrials not only intervened in human evolution but eventually gave us all of our major religions. He'd been struck by the ability of the Danikenians to balance the weightiest of conclusions atop the most insubstantial facts.

After our return from Mamaku to the safety of Hamilton's newly-minted outer suburbs, Alan decided to conduct an experiment in credulity. He uploaded a few of the photos we'd snapped during our drive, made a slide show out of them, added some rather paranoid captions and some spooky music and posted the end result online under the title 'Mamaku Unexplored Forest Oddities Display'.

Will the Ufologists, Steiner-worshippers, pseudo-archaeologists, Danikenians, and pseudo-geologists be taken in by Alan's little slidehow? Is Mamaku about to become some sort of New Zealand equivalent of Roswell, or the Bermuda triangle, and attract flocks of paranoid pilgrims and crackpot investigators? Alan told me today me that one or two Ufologists have already picked up on his 'evidence'...

Footnote: since I've just been guilty of advertising one of the numerous pieces of silliness on youtube, let me try to atone by urging everybody to check out this marvellous clip at the same site, in which Tomas Transtromer, winner of this blog's Old Thumper Award in 2007 as well as the 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature, reads and discusses a poem about Franz Schubert. Tomas' introduction to his poem reveals that it was written partly in response to the campaign against Schubert's notoriously bourgeois music in Maoist China. Richard Taylor may not be amused...

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Why they hate Quade

In his classic essay 'Our Sea of Islands' the late and much lamented Tongan anthropologist and satirist Epeli Hau'ofa discussed the massive movements of people which have been such a feature of postcolonial Pacific history. Hau'ofa argued that, far from fleeing their cultures or selling out to capitalism, Polynesians who move to large foreign cities in search of work and other opportunities are breaking out of the narrow political and conceptual boxes colonialism made for them, and resuming the tradition of inter-island travel which flourished in pre-colonial times.

Quade Cooper's family are part of the great modern migration which Hau'ofa's most famous work celebrates: a decade ago they left Tokoroa, the depressed timber town in the south Waikato region of Te Ika a Maui, and settled in Queensland. Cooper’s father had lost his job after one of Tokoroa’s dwindling number of mills had closed, and he could see no future in New Zealand.

In Brisbane the young Cooper quickly became known as an uncommonly promising rugby player. Before he was twenty Cooper was playing for the Wallabies, and over the last couple of years he has become the side's star player.

Over the last few weeks, though, Quade Cooper's fame has turned, in New Zealand at least, to notoriety. From the time he stepped off the plane with the rest of Australia's World Cup Rugby Squad, Cooper has been the target of a stream of condemnation, mockery, and threats. Fans, sports commentators and pundits, and the coach of the All Blacks have all joined in the chorus of abuse. Facebook pages with names like I Hate Quade Cooper, Quade Cooper Traitor Disgrace and Kill Quade Cooper have appeared, unflattering photoshopped images of Cooper have been widely circulated, and a talkback host on the popular Radio Sport station has encouraged listeners to stalk and harrass Cooper as he moves through New Zealand with the Wallabies squad.

Instead of distancing themselves from the abuse of Cooper, New Zealand's rugby and media establishments have suggested that the young man deserves what he is getting. During a typically rambling, graceless press conference last weekend, Graham Henry said that Cooper had "brought a wee bit" of abuse on himself, and claimed that the player did not deserve to be respected by his opponents or by the New Zealand public. Henry's comments were reported reverently by the New Zealand media, which also mocked Cooper when he complained about 'getting it from all angles' during his time in this country. How can we explain the extraordinary outpouring of hatred against Quade Cooper in recent weeks? The Quade-haters typically explain their feelings by citing Cooper's New Zealand birth, his flamboyantly combative sporting persona, and the series of on-field clashes he has had with All Blacks captain Richie McCaw.

These excuses do not stand up to scrutiny.

Cooper may have been born in New Zealand, but he has lived in Australia since he was thirteen. It is curious that the Kiwis who label him a 'traitor' do not throw the same label at Wallabies coach Robbie Deans, who was born in this country, grew up here, played his rugby for Canterbury and the All Blacks, and then decided, after being passed over for the All Blacks coaching job in 2007, to cross the Tasman. Despite his much deeper ties with New Zealand and the blatant self-interest behind his defection to Australia, Deans remains a very popular figure in this country.

Cooper is a competitive player who likes to tease his opponents on and off the field. He has used a twitter account to celebrate Aussie victories and hit back at his critics after defeats. Sometimes Cooper seems intent on winding up All Blacks players and supporters. He has questioned the abilities of several All Blacks players, and he seems to enjoy talking while the New Zealand national anthem is being played before games.

But Cooper is hardly the first Aussie sportsman to have a cocky attitude. Many of Cooper's predecessors in the Wallabies have been admired for their cockiness. Back in the 1980s and early nineties David Campese regularly teased his opposite number John Kirwan and other All Blacks in the lead up to big trans-Tasman tests. But 'Campo' was celebrated as a 'character' who added to the colour of the game, not subjected to hate campaigns.

Cooper's clashes with Richie McCaw have been widely-publicised, but they have not gotten him into serious trouble with rugby administrators. After the final of the Tri-series competition in August Cooper was accused of maliciously kneeing McCaw in the head, but a disciplinary panel decided that his action was probably not deliberate. Many other players have committed far more egregious offences in recent years than Cooper. Quade Cooper is hated not for any legitimate reason, but because he unsettles the categories and assumptions beloved of many Pakeha rugby fans.

The All Blacks were one of the earlier integrated institutions in New Zealand, but traditionally there was an ethnic division of power within the team. For decades the All Blacks were nearly always captained by Pakeha. Maori were a loyal minority, except when the team toured South Africa, when they were dispensed with altogether. The All Blacks were often cited by politicians as a reflection of the country's supposed racial harmony, and many Pakeha internalised this notion.

In recent decades the growing diversity of New Zealand society, the increased power of Maori, and the professionalisation of rugby have all led to major changes in the All Blacks. Polynesians have sometimes been a majority in the team, the lure of foreign money has given players more power and made a number of them turn their backs on All Blacks careers, and repeated World Cup failures have reduced the mana of the team.

As observers like Chris Laidlaw have noted, the unease which many Kiwi rugby fans feel about the future of their game and team mirrors the uncertainty they feel about the economic and political future of their nation in the twenty-first century.

Amidst all the uncertainty of today's rugby world, Richie McCaw has come to seem, to many fans, a throwback to the glorious and safe days of the 1950s and '60s, when the All Blacks were consistently the best team in the world, and players never worried about contracts or sponsorship deals or their media image. With his rock jaw, old-fashioned haircut and sparse, homespun vocabulary, McCaw recalls heroes of yesteryear like Pinetree Meads and Brian Lochore. McCaw inspires extraordinary reverence amongst Kiwi rugby fans, and his team's quest for this year's World Cup has been portrayed, in the media and on fans' discussion fora, as a sort of effort at redemption, an attempt to revive a lost golden age.

McCaw is less popular outside New Zealand. Many overseas fans see him as a dirty player, who habitually lies on the wrong sides of rucks, daring referees to penalise him, and who has a penchant for throwing punches from the safety of the bottom of a maul.

New Zealand journalist Chris Rattue, who has a habit of dissenting from orthodox rugby opinion in this country, has suggested that the campaign against Quade Cooper began after the player 'got under the skins' of the All Blacks earlier this year. Cooper is, Rattue reckons, one of the 'very few people' who have been able to 'upset Richie McCaw'. Rattue believes that Cooper's flashy, unpredictable play and his willingness to take McCaw on physically and verbally rattled the All Blacks captain, who had become accustomed to intimidating his opponents.

Rattue suggests that McCaw began to give Cooper special attention, and that New Zealand rugby fans noticed his confrontations with the troublesome Aussie, took a hint, and began to direct their wrath towards Cooper.

Rattue's argument explains how Quade Cooper became a target for All Blacks supporters, but it does not explain the incredible intensity of the hatred for Cooper.

To explain the excesses of the campaign against Cooper we have to examine what he means to the Pakeha rugby fans who have been following, abusing, and threatening him. Cooper has expressed his pride in his ancestry, but he has no sentimental attachment to the All Blacks, and has no time for New Zealand nationalism.

Cooper is not even overly loyal to rugby: he seriously considered signing on with league team the Paramatta Eels last year, and was only kept in the rugby union fold by a one-year contract and the prospect of a World Cup. He has been tipped to defect to league next year.

As a brash, articulate young man proud to be Maori yet contemptuous of shibboleths of New Zealand identity like the All Blacks and the national anthem, Cooper confounds many assumptions still common amongst conservative Pakeha. He seems to them disloyal, self-centred, and aggressive. His confrontations with Richie McCaw, that embodiment of all that is pure in New Zealand society and rugby, are unforgivable.

At the same time that the media has been attacking Cooper, they have been busy praising Piri Weepu, the man who has become, in the absence of the injured Dan Carter, the most important part of the All Blacks backline.

A series of newspaper, radio and television profiles have discussed Weepu's continuing close connections with Wainuiomata, the poor outer Wellington neighbourhood where he was raised, and his decision to refuse the lure of foreign cash and remain in New Zealand and in the All Blacks. Weepu has been praised in rather patronising fashion for his 'loyalty' to his neighbourhood, his country, and his captain.

It is hard not see an implicit contrast being drawn between Cooper, the 'cheeky Maori' who turns out for a 'foreign' team, mocks the sacred symbols of New Zealand nationalism, and pursues his own interests, and the 'good Maori' Weepu, who knows his place and sticks to it.

But not everybody in this country hates Quade Cooper.

Epeli Hau'ofa celebrated emigrant Polynesians, and rejected charges that they were somehow self-centred or disloyal to the nation where they were born. Why, Hau’ofa indignantly asked, should people be criticised for refusing to be bound by lines on a map made by their colonisers? Why shouldn’t they take themselves and their culture wherever they want?

In much the same way, a number of Maori, including Tokoroan members of Cooper's Waikato iwi, have defended the player. Some have asked why Cooper should be expected to show loyalty to the New Zealand state which colonised his people, and to an All Blacks side which for long decades excluded Maori from leadership positions. In debates at the I Hate Quade Cooper Facebook page Cooper's defenders and detractors seem split along ethnic lines.

Ultimately, the hate campaign against Quade Cooper tells us more about the deformities of New Zealand society than it does about Cooper.

The real meaning of Rena

The wreck of the cargo ship Rena on Astrolabe Reef off Tauranga has managed the difficult feat of pushing the Rugby World Cup off the front pages of New Zealand newspapers, as journalists and opposition MPs talk about an 'environmental catastrophe' in the Bay of Plenty. The breakup of Rena and the appearance of oil and dead birds on the Bay's beaches is even set to erode poll support for the National government, if the latest report from ipredict can be trusted.

The accident off Tauranga is certainly lamentable. Nobody likes the sight of oil-flecked beaches and dead birds. In context, though, the wreck hardly rates as an environmental disaster. It has closed a handful of beaches, and killed about a thousand birds. But as many as twenty-five million birds are killed by predators - stoats, ferrets, rats, cats, dogs - every year in New Zealand, and whole lakes and streams in regions like the Waikato have been rendered off-limits by pollution from dairy farms. I'd rather try to swim off Tauranga than at Ngaroto, the historic lake southwest of Hamilton which has for years now been infested by noxious weeds fed by the poisons that flow and seep from surrounding farms.

National's handling of the Rena wreck certainly seems to have lacked competence and compassion - Steve Joyce, the overburdened Minister charged with responding to the wreck, didn't even turn up in Tauranga until four days after the event - but that is hardly surprising. National has failed to offer any practical response to the impact of the global economic crisis on this country, and its reactions to the Christchurch earthquakes and the Pike River Mine explosion have not been particularly empathetic.

Why, then, has there been such an outcry over the wreck off Tauranga? Why is this and not some other issue eroding support for the government? To answer these questions we have to consider the peculiar way many New Zealanders see their country, and the peculiar but not quite unprecedented relationship they have developed with John Key over the past three years.

In one of the many caustic asides in his relentlessly amusing autobiography The Gatekeeper, Terry Eagleton mocked the obsession that middle class Westerners have with their health. Eagleton pointed out that the advocates of 'detoxification' and special diets and other fads always present sickness as some alien presence inside the body. 'Health' is, for neurotic Westerners, all about guarding the body against alien intrusion. The notions that sickness might be the flipside of health, and that certain illnesses might be inevitable, are anathema to many contemporary Westerners.

It seems to me that New Zealanders - Pakeha New Zealanders, in particular - have long had a tendency to think about their island nation as something apart from, and in many respects better than, the rest of the world. This tendency has been encouraged by the relative isolation of New Zealand, and by the way it avoided the foreign occupations and revolutions which were visited on so many other countries at one or another time in the twentieth century. New Zealand is a healthy body, we think, and if it becomes sick, the sickness will have come from outside.

During times of crisis the need of Kiwis to think themselves apart from and safe from the rest of the world becomes particularly intense. During the Great Depression of the 1930s New Zealanders developed a deep affection for Michael Joseph Savage, the outwardly amiable leader of the country's first Labour government. Savage's government is remembered nowadays for its progressive reforms, but these measures were largely the work of left-wing Cabinet Ministers like John A Lee rather than the Prime Minister. Savage's popularity came from the kindly, almost avuncular image he projected to voters, and from his ability to assure them that New Zealand would be spared the wholesale destitution and the civil wars which the Depression was inspiring elsewhere.

Over the past three years the determinedly affable John Key has managed to be, like Savage, a reassuring figure in a time of crisis. Again and again he has told Kiwis that their country is different from and apart from the rest of the world, and won't suffer the economic meltdowns and social turmoil seen in places like Iceland, Greece and Spain. The idea that economic and political crises might arise in New Zealand because of contradictions already present inside our country - the contradiction between capital and labour, and between the dictates of the market and the needs of communities - seems as alien to Key as it still is to most Kiwis. The wreck of Rena has cast doubt on Key's reassurances of safety. On a practical level, the wreck has shown that twenty-first century New Zealand, with its globalised, deindustrialised and deregulated economy, struggles to deal even with a minor environmental emergency. On a symbolic level, the wreck of the Rena represents the invasion of the healthy body of New Zealand by a dangerous alien. With its dodgy captain, Liberian flag of convenience, low wage Third World crew, and leaking oil, the Rena is the emissary of a chaotic and deeply undesirable outside world.

Is it a surprise that the crew of Rena, who were blameless for the mistakes of their captain, were subjected to so much public vitriol and so many threats of violence that they quickly had to be spirited out of New Zealand? The reception given to these men shows us the paranoia and xenophobia which go hand in hand with New Zealanders' sense of themselves as apart from and safe from the rest of the world.

The response to the wreck on Astrolabe Reef also shows the fragility of the government's popularity. If the public begins to suspect that John Key is incapable of keeping New Zealand safe from alien forces, or if it begins to suspect that New Zealand has its own, homegrown crises brewing, then it will turn on National.

[Posted by Maps]