WHAT ABOUT THE CRACKPOT THEORY OF NEOLIBERALISM?

By attacking the New Zealand Public Party and its leader Billy Te Kahika, its critics are simply pouring gasoline on the fire. 

CONSPIRACY THEORIES have recently leaked into local mainstream politics to the extent that mainstream politics now feels it is obliged to respond to a fringe movement that it has usually ignored. Billy Te Kahika, leader of the New Zealand Public Party, has suddenly leapt to media attention on the back of his conspiratorial claims about the coronavirus. When Covid-19 emerged, Te Kahika latched on to claims that the virus was a bio-weapon engineered by the Chinese state. He has since moved on to argue that the virus is all part of a cunning plan by a secretive alliance of politicians and billionaires to subvert democracy. Something like that, anyway. His claims seem to shift depending on what's trending on the internet among like-minded individuals.

This is looney tunes stuff that can be filed alongside dozens of other  mad theories circulating on the net. Yet this is crazy stuff that appeals to a discernible slice of the New Zealand population. This is a wackiness that has attracted over 20,000 followers to the Facebook page of the New Zealand Public Party in just two months. I know of many left wing groups who would be delighted to have such a following on Facebook.

While such fringe loopiness is alternatively attacked or sniggered at by the chattering class, there is real material basis for the growth in the popularity of such views. The core theme, that there is a small group of powerful people, operating in the shadows, who are seeking to advance their agenda to the detriment of the rest of us - resonates with folk who feel as if they have been permanently locked out of the political system. John Minto has put it this way:

'Most of the people drawn into the New Zealand Public Party and its conspiracy theories see little reason to believe in a “team of five million”. Many have spent their lives without being treated with dignity or respect by politicians or government agencies. They have seen their living standards go backwards for decades and are no longer listening when politicians talk about better times ahead under this or that party. Betrayal is their experience of politics. (If you don’t understand those last three sentences, then you haven’t been paying attention and you are part of the problem).'

Whether they realise it or not, those who attack the followers of people like Billy Te Kahika are trying to put out the fire with gasoline. That's because they are invariably defenders of the very economic and political status quo that has spurred the growth of such fringe politics in the first place. The New Zealand Public Party is after all, the product of a widespread dissatisfaction with the existing parties. Its simply not enough to patronisingly condemn such people as deluded and uneducated. And its certainly not enough to assert moral superiority and claim that Te Kahika is abusing his right to free speech.

Indeed some of the people who have attacking Te Kahika and others like him, who write newspaper columns and appear on shows like RNZ's ' The Panel' - who enjoy access to the media channels of the establishment - are invariably the supporters or at least the enablers of another extreme ideology that has already done far more damage than the New Zealand Public Party will ever do. That's the ideology of neoliberalism.

 

Neoliberalism has become so pervasive that most of us no longer recognise it as an ideology. Its just there. Like the weather. We have forgotten that neoliberalism began to move in from the fringes of political and economic thought in the late 1970s. But now we support and vote for political parties who are loyal to an ideology that grew out of Friedrich Hayek's book The Road To Serfdom, in which he argued that government planning, by crushing individualism, would lead inexorably to totalitarian control.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern might warn of the dangers that conspiracy theories represent but her Labour-led government has remained steadfastly Loyal to a neoliberal orthodoxy that has wreaked considerable damage over the past thirty years.

While the economic impact has been obvious - increasing inequality and deepening poverty - it is perhaps the political crisis that has had the greatest impact. As the power of the state has reduced at the same time as the parliamentary parties have, one by one, pledged their loyalty to neoliberalism, our ability to bring about real change through voting has disappeared. It doesn't matter who we vote for, 'the market' still wins. As parties of both the right and former left have adopted similar neoliberal policies, disempowerment has led to disenfranchisement. Large numbers of people have been shed from politics. It is little wonder that some have been seduced by the conspiracy theories of people like Billy Te Kahika. Another 700,000 or so of us no longer vote.

Yet such has been the complete failure of the New Zealand left, most of it anyway, is that its only response to the political crisis is to continue supporting the Labour Party. Even when neoliberalism collapsed in 2008 the majority of the  New Zealand left continued to peddle  the fiction that a Labour Government remained the solution. And, now, even after Jacinda Ardern has proven to be yet another centrist market politician, it has nothing more to offer than to call for the re-election of Labour. It continues to argue that it can somehow pressure Labour to turn leftwards. This is as nonsensical as the crackpot theories that Billy Te Kahika promotes.