EXTRACT. That phrase: “a licence to govern” brings into sharp focus so much which has been unclear to the tens-of-thousands of New Zealanders who voted Labour-Green in confident expectation of ushering-in a period of much-needed, but long-delayed, change. It explains why – in spite of her outstanding communication skills and empathy – Jacinda Ardern finds it impossible to follow the examples of Mickey Savage and Norman Kirk. Those leaders believed the only “licence” a party needed to govern was the one given to them by the voters in a general election. Forty-eight years on from the Labour landslide of 1972 .... Jacinda Ardern knows better. To drive a capitalist economy, it is first necessary to obtain a licence – from the capitalists.
But, securing the “tolerance of business and other sceptics” is not an easy thing to do. There are so many self-denying ordinances one has to offer-up:
- no capital gains tax; no wealth tax;
- no return to universal union membership; no restoration of the unconstrained right to strike;
- nothing to empower or embolden that reserve army of labour we call beneficiaries;
- nothing that might upset the business community, dairy farmers, or the fishing industry;
- and certainly nothing to combat climate change which in any way threatens the capitalists’ sacred right to make a profit.
Nothing, in short, that could possibly upset the status-quo.
The most frustrating aspect of Jacinda’s “licence to govern” proposition is that in both historical and practical political terms she is, almost certainly, correct.
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