THE FUTURE THAT SLEEPING DOGS PREDICTED HAS NOT ARRIVED. YET.

 

Sam Neill's first feature film was Sleeping Dogs, released in 1977. It predicted a near-future New Zealand where a totalitarian government suppresses resistance to the political and status quo. But that future has not yet arrived. Yet.

SAM NEILL'S first feature film, Sleeping Dogs, released in 1977, was marketed as an action thriller. But its real purpose was far more subversive:  it was a warning about how a liberal democracy, complacent and self-satisfied, can slide into a police state with the full blessing of its political establishment. Its premise — a near-future New Zealand under martial law, ruled by a totalitarian government desperate to suppress unrest and an organised resistance — was not fantasy. It was a provocation aimed squarely at a country drifting toward crisis.

The film appeared at the tail end of the post-war social democratic consensus, just before the political earthquake of 1984. Within seven years, the fourth Labour Government would dismantle the Keynesian economic framework that had defined New Zealand for decades. Without a popular mandate, Labour imposed monetarist policies, privatisation, deregulation, and the cult of 'individual freedom' — a euphemism for freeing capital from democratic constraints. 

If fascism is capitalism in decay, if it represents the last defensive formation of a ruling class losing control, then New Zealand never needed the tanks and torture chambers that accompanied neoliberalism in Chile or Argentina. The future Sleeping Dogs sketched out has not arrived. Yet. The irony is that neoliberalism was first imposed by military dictatorships in developing countries, but in wealthy nations like the United States, Britain, and New Zealand, it was ushered in through the ballot box. In Chile, Salvador Allende’s socialist government was destroyed by a US-backed coup. In New Zealand, Labour’s neoliberal coup was carried out under the banner of democratic legitimacy. The result was the same: the supremacy of capital over society.

Since then, resistance to the neoliberal order has been sporadic, fragmented, and easily contained. And when Labour returned to power in 2017 promising 'transformational change', even that sporadic resistance evaporated. 

For decades, the New Zealand left has sustained itself on the comforting illusion that its interests were aligned with those of the working class. That illusion has become impossible to maintain. The left’s loyalty to a Labour Party that long ago abandoned any transformative project has severed it from the very people it claims to represent.

The occupation of Parliament grounds in 2022 — messy, uneven, politically confused, but undeniably an expression of working-class anger — brought working-class interests into direct conflict with the Labour-aligned left. Rather than engage with the grievances of the poor, the precarious, and the excluded, Labour and Green politicians, trade union officials, and progressive commentators smeared the protesters as neo-fascists. It was easier to pathologise them than to confront the political decay that produced them. As commentator John Moore observed, liberals and leftists suddenly found themselves cheering on the police and even the army, treating state repression as a necessary defence against a 'rabble'of poor and angry citizens. The left that once saw millionaires, billionaires, and the coercive power of the state as the enemy had vanished.

What happened on Parliament grounds was not the birth of an alt-right movement as many liberals still claim. It was a symptom of a political system that no longer functions. A system where capital has captured not only the economy but the political architecture itself. New Zealand’s 'representative democracy' is neither representative nor democratic. It is a stage set maintained by parliamentary parties whose sole purpose is to preserve the status quo. They offer platitudes, false premises, and managerial tinkering while inequality deepens, public services erode, and social cohesion fractures.

This is why Sleeping Dogs still matters. Its warning was not about a specific future but about a political trajectory — what happens when a political class becomes hostile to dissent and incapable of addressing structural crises. In the film, the government responds to unrest with militarisation, surveillance, and emergency powers. In today’s New Zealand, the political establishment responds to unrest with moral panic, demonisation, and appeals to authority. The mechanisms differ; the instinct is the same.

As the country sinks further into recession, and as the parliamentary parties reveal themselves to have no real answers, the conditions that Sleeping Dogs imagined begin to feel less remote. More people may start insisting that the political and economic elite bear the cost of the crisis they created. That demand will not be welcomed by a political establishment that has spent forty years shielding capital from accountability. And when a political class is unable to solve a crisis, unwilling to confront capital, and hostile to popular mobilisation, it reaches for the tools of repression — whether rhetorical, legal, or physical.

The future Sleeping Dogs sketched out is not inevitable. But it cannot be confidently dismissed. The film’s message remains painfully relevant: a democracy that refuses to confront its economic foundations, that treats dissent as a threat, and that governs on behalf of capital rather than the public, is a democracy in name only. The question is not whether New Zealand will become a police state. The question is how long a hollowed-out political system can survive before people demand something more than managed decline.

If the political establishment continues to offer nothing but austerity, platitudes, and repression, the warning issued in 1977 may yet become a prophecy. As we head toward another general election, all that is offer from the liberal left is another Labour-led government that will do nothing but protect the status quo. Next to no effort is being made to reconnect with a working class it still claims to represent.