SHANE JONES GOES TO BLACKBALL

While the Minister of Mining might want to use Blackball's past to justify his damaging mining policies of today, its history also offers a new way forward for the New Zealand left. But will it listen?

SHANE JONES has an obvious affection for amateur theatrics. That meant he decided to go to the old coalmining town of Blackball on the West Coast to announce that his National-led coalition government was going to open New Zealand up to the mining industry again. He even used a megaphone in a crude attempt to shout down the anti-mining protesters who were waiting for him outside the meeting hall. He can look forward to being dogged by protesters for many months to come.

While the Minister for Mining seems to think that Parliament is a convenient and suitable arena for him to perform his ham-fisted sub-Shakespearean theatrical antics, the decision by Jones to go to Blackball had a serious political intent. He wanted to suggest that by opening up the country to the environmentally damaging and largely overseas-owned mining industry, the Government was faithfully representing the interests and concerns of ordinary New Zealanders. The opposition to the mining industry, Jones said repeatedly, is being led by extremist 'lefties' and 'greenies'.  He dismissed concerns about climate change and its growing impact on New Zealand as 'catastrophisation'. 

The suspicion is that Shane Jones is a climate change denier and little wonder that Forest and Bird have described his plans as 'a love letter to the mining industry'.

Blackball, suggested Jones, might be commonly referred to as 'the birthplace of the Labour Party' but Labour had disowned its working-class roots and become a 'metropolitan, identity-driven party.'

Given the swathe of attacks the coalition government has launched on the working class on behalf of capital, it's an empty and dishonest boast for Jones to suggest that his government have the best interests of New Zealanders at heart. Nevertheless, there is truth in the view that Labour is a middle class party representing middle class concerns and where any form of class-based politics has been abandoned for identity politics. Indeed, Labour's dalliance with identity politics contributed to its election defeat. 

But what Jones does not say, either by ignorance or design, is that Blackball was also the birthplace for the New Zealand Federation of Labour. Its members were dubbed the 'Red Feds'. A coalition of mining unions, it was an avowedly revolutionary and socialist organisation that pushed backed against capitalist interests and became an increasing threat to the political and economic status quo. 

The Great Strike of 1913 was a series of strikes between mid-October 1913 and mid-January 1914. It was one of New Zealand’s most violent and disruptive industrial confrontations. Between 14,000 and 16,000 workers went on strike, out of a population of just over one million.

The strike was opposed by the New Zealand Employers’ Federation and the Farmers’ Union, whose members acted as para-military troops on behalf of conservative Prime Minister William Massey. The Red Feds were eventually smashed by the capitalist state.

Three years later the Labour Party was formed. But this was a Labour Party far removed from the politics of the Red Feds. This was a Labour Party that made its peace with the economic status quo and abandoned any form of revolutionary politics in favour of the reformist 'parliamentary road to socialism'. Over a century later that reformist road has led to a dead end and the conservative and neoliberal Labour Party that we know (and hate) today.

While Shane Jones might want to dishonestly use Blackball's past to justify his government's damaging mining policies of today, Blackball also reaches out to the New Zealand left. It suggests that there is another way forward, one that rediscovers its revolutionary impulse. We certainly need that new politics today.