Through the portal to Tongatapu

[This text began as yet another attempt to write something for the new online arts zine Hashtag500. Once again, I've rambled on past the five hundred word limit set by Hashtag's estimable editors, Lana Lopesi and Louisa Afoa. I can no more write five hundred words for Lana and Louisa than I could write haiku for Richard Von Sturmer...]

In the extended investigation of the magical powers of art he called The Resurrection of Philip Clairmont, Martin Edmond suggested that paintings can emanate light and heat and even health. Edmond described visiting the homes of several very elderly owners of canvases by Colin McCahon, who sat beside their taonga the way other people might sit beside fires on a cold night. McCahon's miraculous arrangements of paint were, Edmond explained, nourishing and protecting their owners.

Outside my Glen Eden home the temperature has dropped to nine degrees; lamps stain the evening mist a mixture of yellow and green, so that it resembles a vast cloud of poison gas. I am protected from the Auckland weather by a heat pump, and by a series of artworks that I bought on Tongatapu, that flat ancient island where winter is no more than a tall story told by returning travellers. It is a quarter to eight, and I know that, two thousand kilometres away, in a shack that leans tipsily over Fanga'uta lagoon, the artists, musicians, and kava addicts of the Seleka Club are beginning their night's work.

I am sitting under a painting by Tevita Latu, who began his career spraying revolutionary slogans on the walls of Nuku'alofa, was tortured and charged with treason after the riot that levelled much of the business district of that city in 2006, and a few years later founded a kava club for Tonga's cultural and political avant-garde.

Seleka is a play on one of the Tongan language's more scatological verbs, and the Selekarians, as they like to call themselves, are notorious for drinking their kava from a toilet bowl. A disco ball hangs from the roof of their clubhouse, near a Tongan flag defaced with a swastika. The club's walls are covered in large, colourfully drawn lists of the names that the club gives its members and guests - my Seleka name, 'Sipi'i', which can apparently mean either 'Sheep' or 'Septic', sits close to that of 'Sosisi', or 'Sausage', which was awarded to the brilliant, troubled rapper Siua Ongosia, who records under the name Swingman. Ongosia recently returned to the kava houses of Nuku'alofa after finishing a stint on Tongatapu's prison farm. 
Some of the posters produced collectively by Seleka members - I remember a strange dragonwoman, who had emerged from the sea to confront Tonga's patriarchal ruling class - will be pinned to the walls, and a few prints of Picasso and Cezanne torn out of old art books will be scattered about a long table, in between pots of glue and a rubble of crayons. A stereo will emit an unpredictable mixture of death metal, rap, and reggae, some of it recorded at Seleka by Ongosia and his friends.

Tevita Latu will be moving up and down the long table, watching the club's young artists draw or paint or paste. Occasionally he will pause to offer praise or advice, or to grab a crayon or paintbrush and add a fish or star or halo to a work in progress.

Outside the shack moonlight and smoke from umu fires will lie over Fanga'uta lagoon, disguising the sight and smell of the sewage that flows endlessly out a pipe from Tonga's national hospital.

I am sitting beneath an untitled image - a mixture of collage and crayon work - by Tevita Latu. Like many of Latu's images, this one is disturbingly ambiguous. Three women stand on a piece of earth, beneath a sky that begins in a peaceable shade of blue and slowly grows purple with cyclonic rage. The women are topless, in defiance of the last one hundred and seventy years of Tongan history, but they are not the erotic South Seas maidens beloved of the palangi imagination: their breasts hang as heavily and ominously as war clubs.

The women's eyes are huge with wonder or alarm, and their three-fingered hands reach towards the sky. Are they waving at me? If they are waving, are they asking me to rise and step forward, into their warmer world, or do they mean to warn me of the storm that is turning their sky the colour of rotten talo? Are the women dancing, and, if they are, do they move in celebration, or for the pleasure of a powerful audience, like the ancient kings of Tonga, who pulled nubile dancers out of palace performances and stowed them in royal bedchambers?

What are not ambiguous, what do not require interpretation, are the heat and light that pour from Latu's image. This work was made in the midst of a permanent summer, where warmth is as reliable as the tapa makers who beat their bark in every village or the waves that wreck themselves on the rotten teeth of Tongatapu's reefs.

The heat has stripped clothes from Latu's women; the light has bleached their wide eyes.

The Selekarians will work until dawn, breaking only to step onto the gangplank at the edge of their shack and piss into Fanga'uta lagoon. They will sleep through the morning, and through the useless hot hours that follow noon, and then rise, and load their art onto the truck they have salvaged, repaired and painted. They will circumnavigate Tongatapu, pausing to swim, to buy bags of peanuts from Chinese shopkeepers, and to hawk their paintings, drawings, and collages to any palangi tourists or middle class Nuku'alofans they encounter. Tomorrow night they will be back in their shack, pouring the heat and light of their island into new images.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Note from a Martian lake

Hi Paul,

because we were talking recently about the aesthetics of pollution, I wanted to show you these photographs, which were taken from the road that slouches between the eastern shore of Lake Waikare and the muddy ramparts of the Hakarimata Ranges. Lake Waikare is New Zealand's answer to the Aral Sea: always shallow and turbid, it has for the last century been robbed by pipes and poisoned by the run-off from dairy blocks. 

As you can see, the surface of Waikare is now as red as the surface of Mars. In the distance, to the west, the history-burdened strip of land called Rangiriri separates Waikare from the abandoned highway known as the Waikato River. It was at Rangiriri in 1863 that the Kingitanga chose to build their largest fortress, and to make their most ambitious stand against the invading army of General Cameron. Farmers pulling up turnips for cows sometimes still discover musketballs, or the fruit stones that the defenders of Rangiriri reputedly fired during the last hours of their stand. 

In 1863 some of Tawhiao's fighters escaped from their overrun pa by swimming or paddling waka tiwai across Waikare. Today they could wade comfortably through even the deepest sections of the lake. Note that duckshooter's shut, which sits half a kilometre from shore, and yet lacks a jetty. Michael Fay will never found a yacht club here. Auckland weekenders will never park their SUVs beside two-storey baches.

The veterans of Rangiriri are not the only outlaws to have sought and found sanctuary in this region. When Sid Holland's National government used bayonets and jails to break the Waterside Workers' Union in 1951, the wharfies' legendary leader, Jock Barnes, was made to break rocks in Mt Eden prison. After his release, Jock and his wife Fuzz left the occupied city of Auckland and found a home in Taniwha, a tiny village just northeast of Lake Waikare, where they set up a drycleaning businesses.

Let's shoot some footage from that duckhunters' hut...

Cheers
Scott

A brief argument with myself about twitter

[I posted this a few hours ago as a dialogue with Hamish Dewe. I did talk with Hamish about twitter recently, but he's pointed out (see the comments box) that the text posted here sees me arguing more with myself than with him. I've adjusted credits accordingly...]

SH: I've joined twitter.

SH: Fool.

SH: Why? You don't appreciate the medium?

SH: I was speaking generally. But, now you mention it, no.

SH: You're such a technophobe.

SH: But my problem is really with the way twitter is used.

SH: The fact that so much twitter traffic consists of gossip and jokes?

SH: That I can tolerate -

SH: I've got one hundred and fifty followers so far, but I don't know many of them -

SH: Followers! Followers! Can you hear yourself? You speak as though you stand like a prophet at the front of some millenarian medieval army! Do you think these people are going to 'follow' you into battle against the Dark Lord Sith in the hills outside Huntly? Followers...

SH: Is the Dark Lord Sith another name for John Ansell? Seriously, though, there's been a tendency for several years, across the internet, for a lot of discussion to move from blogs and other long-format sites to social media like facebook and twitter. I'm writing a series of pieces on Tongan art for the online journal EyeContact. Not a single person has commented on these pieces at EyeContact - and yet there have been multiple discussion threads, some of them quite long, on facebook, and a few on twitter. This is a pattern.

SH: Quite possibly a lamentable pattern.

SH: I think that twitter is the internet equivalent of a formula one racing car. Size, comfort, and politeness are all sacrificed in pursuit of speed.

SH: There are different types of speed.

SH: I think of twitter as a chaotic, sometimes snarled up multi-lane motorway connecting various relatively quiet parts of the internet -

SH: A workable fancy. But the main problem with twitter is its antediluvian nature. You mentioned poetry. Did you know that Ezra Pound, a century ago, invented the digital technology we know today? And he did so in a London garret, with a pen and paper.  No frills. Pound smashed the nineteenth century superstition known as narrative, and put in its place a literature that jumped instantly from one image and throught-fragment to the next -

SH: So 'The apparition of these faces in the [metro station] crowd/ Petals on a wet, black bough', with its famous leap from one image to another, is a sort of hyperlink -

SH: Yes and no. Pound and other key modernists created technology like the hyperlink, by experimenting on, by rewiring, their own brains, so that they could leap from one image, from one idea, to another. But the internet, and sites like twitter, haven't caught up with the innovation. Most of the links you find on twitter are entirely obvious. John Key tweets 'Having fun in the White House' and offers a link: you click on it, and find a photo of Key shaking hands with Obama. It's pathetic. The hyperlink, which Pound and other modernists intended as a new way of thinking, as an exhilarating aleatory ride from one to another revelatory idea, as way of connecting distances, of bring farness near, has been subordinated to the logic of narrative, of linearity. Plod, plod, plod. Is it any wonder why so much of the content on twitter and similar sites is so banal?

SH: Is this in some ways a complaint about certain patterns of contemporary life, as well as about aesthetics? There are some lines by Tomas Tanstromer that I love: 'I went to bed that evening/ I woke up at three am, under the keel/ At the bottom of the sea/ Where the bones of the dead coldly associate with one another.' Those lines make an astonishing leap, a leap we are unprepared for, a leap, or rather a fall, from the comfort and security of the bed to the cold unbreathable strangeness of the ocean. They might seem surreal, but they communicate something of the fragility of human security, the sense that something is waiting for us -

SH: There's no need to labour the point. Linear habits of mind breed linear ways of living.

SH: Perhaps, then, we should take to twitter and reclaim the hyperlink, by using it connect surprising images and ideas and people?

SH: That has already been done. Have you heard of Rickrolling? Look it up. Oh, I forgot: you already have. The radical potential of the hyerlink is satirised rather than exploited. I guess I feel kinda ambivalent about twitter. Hamish Dewe, on the other hand...

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Ozymandias on the Great South Road: three notes about Brett Graham's redoubts

[I wrote this review for Hashtag500words, the forum for art criticism recently set up by the impressive young Auckland artist-critic-curators Louisa Afoa and Lana Lopesi. Louisa works at Papakura Art Gallery, and I met her when I exhibited work there with Paul Janman and Ian Powell. We both grew up in and around Papakura, and were soon swapping fragments of local lore.

As its name suggests, Louisa and Lana's site is designed to carry texts of no more than five hundred words. When Louisa suggested I write something for the site I happily agreed, forgetting how difficult I find it to say anything at all in less than about five thousand words. This text is short by my standards, but still far too long for Hashtag500words. I intend it, nevertheless, in a spirit of solidarity with Louisa and Lana's site. Pay them a visit and, if you're less tiresomely long-winded than me, write something for them!]

Ozymandias on the Great South Road: three notes on Brett Graham's redoubts

1. Brett Graham has made a fool of me. Over the past couple of years I've been intermittently researching the history of the Great South Road, rifling archives, turning the complaining pages of colonial newspapers, and talking my way onto farms where battles were fought and graves dug. I've studied the uniforms of the British soldiers who marched down the Great South Road into the Waikato Kingdom, read telegrams from George Grey and letters from Wiremu Tamihana, and held a small, cold musket ball dug out of the mud of Rangiriri in my trembling hand. As the staff at an art gallery looked on dubiously, I recently filled a long table with documents and artefacts gathered during my research. I've assumed that accumulation equals insight. Brett Graham knows otherwise. 

While I have been hoarding details, Graham has been sculpting a series of simple patterns on limestone, that softest and most articulate of minerals. Graham's sculptures, which were recently exhibited at Bartleby and Company under the name Plot 150, reproduce the outlines of six of the scores of redoubts raised along or near the Great South Road before, during, and just after the Waikato War. Together, they trace the path of the British Army and its local allies from the southern outskirts of Auckland, across the aukati, or border, that King Tawhiao had proclaimed near present-day Mercer, through the coveted plains of the Waikato to Pirongia, at the mountainous southern edge of the region.

Graham's show has coincided with the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the conquest of the Waikato, and it says as much about the meaning of that event as a table-load of wordy documents and weighty artefacts. 

2. When Brett Graham sculpts our redoubts, he is depicting much more than a few temporary military fortifications. Empires expand by dividing smaller societies into pieces, and consuming each piece in turn. As they marched south from their Auckland citadel a century and a half ago, Britain's imperialists established islands of control and familiarity amidst an alien, autochthonous landscape of forests and swamps and thatched kainga. 

Behind the high earth and wood walls of a redoubt, the Union Jack could be safely raised, wells could be sunk, grain and mutton could be hoarded, and theodolites and rifles could be aimed. Coaches escorted by cavalrymen moved like ferries through the invaders' archipelago, keeping one island fortress in touch with the next. 

Redoubts were filled with reminders of the colonial homeland. Drury's redoubt, which is today covered by a service station, featured a library of English literature. When he excavated the Queen's Redoubt in Pokeno, which held six thousand men in the tense weeks before the invasion of the nearby Waikato Kingdom, Nigel Prickett found hundreds of broken brandy bottles. 

The redoubts were eventually abandoned, as the peace of the conqueror spread south from Auckland and other colonial strongholds, but the method they represented persisted. The late nineteenth century system of country inns connected by coaches and trains allowed property speculators and traders to island hop their way through a still-alien Te Ika a Maui. The gated communities of twenty-first century Auckland have substituted security cameras for the sentries of the redoubts, and the comforts of the six bedroom home for the comforts of the inn. 

3. Brett Graham's sculptures show us the redoubts along the Great South Road from a point high in the air, from which only their barest outlines are visible.

Aviation is, we must remember, an ancient invention. The Nazca lines that run for kilometres through the Peruvian desert, the giants that pursue herds of deer across English hillsides, and the Polynesian vision of the North Island as an enormous fish are all the works of conceptual aviators, who were able to imagine what their world looked like from the heavens. The mechanical achievement of flight at the beginning of the twentieth century seems almost anti-climactic, beside the adventures of these ancient aviators. 

From very high in the sky, human civilisation looks both monumental, because it has been reduced to a few bold shapes, and fragile, because it has inevitably been juxtaposed with the vast areas of unregenerate nature - oceans, forests, deserts, mountains - that still cover our planet.

Brett Graham gazes down at the redoubts of the Great South Road and sees a few fragile white lines on fields of white. He might be looking at the ruins of ancient Babylon, surrounded and sterilised by sand, or at Himalayan monasteries overrun by avalanches. The British Empire, with its determination to expand across the globe and its claim to divine blessing, seems as absurd, from the perspective of these sculptures, as the doomed kingdom of Ozymandias. These redoubts, and the empire that made them, are simply another quixotic attempt to impose order on space and time.

In his 2008 exhibition Campaign Rooms, Graham protested the United States-led War on Terror, which involved unprovoked, imperialistic invasions of places as distant and different as Iraq and the Ureweras, by covering symbols of American militarism - the ugly and sinister Stealth bomber, for example - with Maori decorative motifs like the koru. 

The sculptures in Campaign Rooms were big and aggressive, the weapons of an artist angrily preoccupied with the injustices of his era. The manner of the sculptures collected in Plot 150 is distant and ironic, rather than direct and impassioned, but Brett Graham's staunchly anti-imperialist message remains. Look at his works, ye mighty, and despair. 

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

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Martians, landships, and other irrelevancies

Dear Paul,

 I know I'm supposed to be searching, in a relentlessly methodical manner, for images that we can use in our movie about the Great South Road, and avoiding what I think I may have called, with appropriate scorn, 'fascinating irrelevancies'. It is amazing, though, what fascinating irrelevancies one can find, apparently by accident, during even the most motivated, methodical search of that Borgesian archive, Papers Past.

This image appeared in the Auckland Star in 1940, a year when escapist fantasy was perhaps a necessity for New Zealanders, and for many other peoples besides. The caption read: 'If human beings live on Mars, they would have to have enormous chests to hold outside lungs and hearts...they might also be very hairy'. Martians and their more elegant cousins, Venusians, are surprisingly common guests of both Victorian and early twentieth century New Zealand papers.
 
Here's a photograph that turned up in the New Zealand Herald on the 2nd of October 1936, together with a caption explaining that it showed 'a Mr L Beavis of Silverdale' attempting to sail his ship, which was named the Israel, from Auckland to Wellington. Beavis apparently wanted to raise money for a more seaworthy vessel, so that he could bring God's good news to benighted corners of the Pacific.

I haven't looked at any statistics, but I suspect that the 1920s and '30s were a time of heightened religiosity in God's Own Country. Widows and parents of some of the seventeen thousand local men killed in the Great War crowded into new spiritualist and pentecostal churches, straining to hear messages from their loved ones through the murmur of glossalia, or rolling on the ground after being spiritually  'pole-axed' by the British Israelite healer-preacher AH Dallimore, who created hysteria at an overloaded Auckland Town Hall decades before the Beatles.

In Man Alone, his picaresque novel about loneliness, rioting, and road trips in the Great Depression, John Mulgan describes the unemployed men who were exiled from pubs and hearths of suburban Auckland to that high, thickly forested ridge known as the Waitakere Ranges, where they were made to work with picks and gelignite on a half-finished, cruelly named Scenic Drive, and to sleep off their exertions in tents raised over roadside mud.
 
No suffering is evident in this image from 1936, which was produced by the magical and mechanical process called posterizing, and thus lacks both the jaundiced colour that cheap paper acquires in old age and the weary ambiguity we associate with the colour grey. The vehicles on a newly-completed section of Scenic Drive look immobile: the sunshine, which has been strengthened by posterizing, holds them as securely as a bleb of kauri gum or jar of aspic holds a flock of long-dead immortal insects.

Sorry. I'll get back to work.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Interfering with each other

The Tonga Festival of Democracy facebook page has invited us all to respond to a question from Tevita Motulalo, who is a former editor of the conservative newspapers the Tonga Chronicle and Talaki.

Tevita is enjoying the kava served up at the Festival of Democracy, but he is suspicious about the d-word and its proponents. Tevita and I have been having a protracted and bewilderingly rambling series of arguments - the meaning of democracy, the alleged failings of Tonga's Democratic Party, the extent of human sacrifice in pre-Christian Tonga, and the relative fighting abilities of New Zealand's and Tonga's armed forces are a few of the topics we've manage to disagree about - on facebook. This is my favourite passage from our debate:

Scott: I hope you don't drive as randomly as you argue, Tevita, or the traffic on Taufa'ahau Road might be at risk. I have visions of you jumping from first to third gear, doing sudden u turns, spinning your wheels in a cloud of smoke...

Tevita: I am not going to dignify your personal rancour that I may be a helter-skelter driver.

Here is the question from Tevita Motulalo that the Festival of Democracy facebook page has asked its visitors to answer:

What is the difference between pro-democracy advocacy and social engineering?

And here's the response I offered Tevita:

The poser of the question appears to think that 'social engineering' is a bad thing, and seems to believe that it would be damaging for advocates of democracy to be involved in social engineering. But in Tongan Ark, the acclaimed feature length documentary film by Paul Janman about Futa Helu and the 'Atenisi Institute, Helu uses an interview to say "The essence of democracy is interfering with other people'.

Helu was pointing out that anybody who makes an argument in favour of changing some political, economic, or cultural institution is, in a sense, 'interfering' with their fellow citizens, and trying to 'engineer' a different society. And, of course, anybody who argues against changing those same institutions is also 'interfering' and 'engineering'. Just as an ordinary engineer seeks to build objects - bridges, roads, buildings, and so on - that help us live us more effectively, so a social engineer seeks to build and rebuild institutions - parliaments, schools, and so on - that will also serve our needs. And just as different engineers will have different ideas about how to build a bridge, so different people will have different notions about how to create the best parliament, or how to run an education system effectively.

The great thing about democracy, and the reason why it has become such a powerful force over the last couple of centuries, is that it is based on the idea that we should all, as citizens of a society, be able to engage in social engineering. We should all, in other words, have the right to debate and vote on the ways our society should be structured and run. The alternative to democracy is not an absence of social engineering - it is social engineering by a powerful minority, on behalf of the majority. A dictator or absolute monarch engineers all of the institutions of the society in which his subjects are forced to live. I vote for democracy over dictatorship!

Note: the photograph at the top of this post shows 'Ite 'Uhila performing at the opening of the Festival of Democracy art exhibition last Thursday. Although he relocated from West Auckland to the Friendly Islands late last year, 'Ite has deservedly made the 2014 shortlist for the Walters Award, New Zealand's top art prize. I blogged last September about 'Ite's Stowaway, a performance dedicated to the Tongans who travelled to New Zealand in the holds of container ships in the 1970s and '80s. The festival's art show features paintings by both Niu Sila-based Tongans like Tui Emma Gillies and Tongatapuans like Tevita Latu and other members of his legendary Selaka Club.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Cute kids, and other enemies of democracy

Some people maintain that wealthy foreign donors to political parties undermine democracy, but I think that cute kids can do the same job much more insidiously. As a new general election nears in Aotearoa, the Green Party is once again filling billboards and newspapers and facebook messages with soft focus images of kids and flowers and fluffy doggies and hard-hitting slogans like 'For a New Zealand to be proud of'.

I find the Greens' deliberate inoffensiveness considerably more offensive than the campaigning of the nasty right. While the Greens have been lurking on Auckland's volcanic cones, getting carefully blurred photographs of those cute creatures, Act Party's philosopher-king Jamie Whyte has been going from one inner-city hall to another, unashamedly promoting a set of policies that benefit the wealthiest 1% of society. But at least Act lets us know what its stands for, and thus allows us to open a debate.

The Greens are a Janus-faced party - they have some determinedly left-wing members of parliament, like trade unionist Denise Roche and Mana Party co-traveller Catherine Delahunty, and they occasionally take a boldly progressively stand on an issue - their recent call for the reform of this country's abortion law was both sensible and brave. But the Greens have always been far better at wooing well-heeled Kiwis than the residents of struggle street. They grab big slices of the vote in Wellington and Auckland Central and Dunedin North, but embarrass themselves in Porirua and South Auckland and South Dunedin.
As that old mechanical materialist Engels liked to say, social being ultimately determines consciousness, and the Green Party list is now being scaled by a generation of earnest young men and women in expensive suits who believe that the best way to rectify the excesses of global capitalism is to work for Cadbury Schweppes or the Royal Bank of Scotland.

There has always been an individualist, essentially conservative strain to the Greens. Leading members of the party in the nineties and early noughties like Jeanette Fitzsimons and Sue Kedgley often played down the party's left-wing policies with slogans like 'Neither right nor left but out in front', seemed morbidly preoccupied with the shopping habits of their fellow Kiwis, and flirted with conspiracy theories about 9/11 and quacks like reiki 'masters'. The Greens aimed some shameless mating calls in John Key's direction in the months before the last general election, and their sister parties in Germany and Ireland have happily formed governments with parties from the right.

It is hard not to see the Greens' twee, politics-free advertisements as an attempt to disguise their own contradictions. The party doesn't want to alarm friendly Ponsonby lawyers and restauranteurs by emphasising its left-wing policies on employment law and taxation; on the other hand, it doesn't want to antagonise the left-leaning young activists who push leaflets under doors on its behalf in the weeks before polling day. Whether they vote left or right, Kiwis are fond of cute kids and animals, and the party's promise to create 'a New Zealand to be proud of' is so fuzzily inoffensive that it could earn a nod and a smile from John Minto as well as John Key.

The Greens are not the first New Zealand party to adopt a carefully cute approach to election year advertising. During the 1990 general election campaign, Jim Bolger's National Party aired a big budget, low-content television advertisement that showed a group of carefully selected children - half of them were Maori, half of them were Pakeha, and all of them were, of course, impeccably cute - planting small trees beside a gently flowing stream in a forest clearing. A smiling Bolger promised that he would, like those kids, 'build for the future'.

Like the the Greens today, the National Party of 1990 was troubled by extreme political contradictions. A section of the party close to big business was aggressively enthusiastic about the neo-liberal economic policies - the privatisation of state assets, the commercialisation of education, the abandonment of subsidies and tariffs that had protected many domestic industries - that the Labour government had spent six years imposing on an increasingly angry New Zealand. Another wing of the party influenced by farmers and small town businessmen was much less enthusiastic about neo-liberalism, and wanted a return to the much more statist policies of the Muldoon era.

Jim Bolger was smart enough to understand how unpopular Labour's policies had become, and made sure that National went into the 1990 election with a manifesto that promised an end to student fees, the retention of state assets, and other voter-friendly measures. At the same time, Bolger signalled to his shadow cabinet that National's manifesto wasn't to be taken very seriously.

National won the 1990 election easily, after some traditionally left-wing parts of the country, like the West Coast, turned to the party out of frustration with Labour. Shortly after his triumph Bolger junked the manifesto he had taken to the election and set out to deepen the neo-liberal restructuring of New Zealand society that Labour had begun. In 1991 his party pushed the stringently anti-union Employment Contracts Act through parliament, and unveiled a budget that cut many benefit payments by a fifth or more. The economy tanked, unemployment climbed past twelve percent, and National was quickly as unpopular as Labour had been.

Cute kids can be dangerous.

 [Posted by Scott Hamilton]