A long time ago, on a building site looking out over the gulf on a blue-and-gold weekend like this last one, a well-educated ex-pat sat me down and enlightened me on the Norman conquest of Britain in 1066 that lives on in England’s sclerotic class system to this day.
On our Kiwi OE in the 1970s, we had encountered the landed gentry, the upper 10,000 and the insurmountable boundaries of aristocracy, nobility and commoners knowing their place, which our primary school syllabus had blurred into a drudging litany of (mostly unlikeable) British kings and queens.
Seeing it for ourselves brought it into a whole new focus – a 20th century glass ceiling threaded through contemporary film, fiction and world affairs inherited at birth in the old world.
A Guardian editorial by US political commentator and author Robert Reich last month had something of the same quality of fundamentally changing perceptions. Of something new and unhealthy in the weirdly amoral global norms.
By now, most of us have given up trying to make sense of living in the Trumpian world. Clearly, our collective judgement makes no difference, but we may also have been missing the boat by characterising Trump as merely breaching ethical standards he never had. A strategy which has worked very well for him.
“The difficulty most of us have of imagining such a world is itself the key to Trump’s power. Whether you’re president of the United States or anyone else, it’s always possible to extract personal benefits by being the first to break a widely accepted norm,” said Reich, a veteran American commentator who has been included in the Wall Street Journal’s list of the most influential business thinkers.
“Think of a small town where people don’t lock their doors or windows because of the unwritten rule that no one steals.”
The first thief to arrive can walk right in. Huge advantage.
Of course, that first-mover advantage disappears as soon as people catch on and start locking doors and windows. Community trust is lost in an immediate need for the hassle of purchasing locks and protections against future violations.
“That asymmetry – small costs for the violator of trust, large costs for everyone who has to thereafter protect themselves – is the very essence of Trump’s modus operandi,” said Reich. “He gains wealth, power and glory for himself by shattering norms, after which everyone else has to pick up the pieces.”
“As president, he has far bigger norms to shatter than a small-town thief, and at far greater benefit to himself.”
“The thuggery has paid off, at least for him, but also damaged all sorts of institutions that the world and America’s institutions based on the trust that no American president would ever do what he has done.
“When [Trump] has gone, all of us will be paying to clean up the mess; to buy an infinite number of locks for an endless number of doors and windows and spend huge amounts of our time installing them and then keeping them locked.”
Our own election-year discourse seems infected with the same unthinkable permissiveness that is filtering down from Washington.
This week, the prime minister’s office is defending comments Christopher Luxon made to Rotorua’s business community. New Zealand businesses, he said, often had a “parent-child mentality” and too often looked to the government for help.
Authoritarian and centralised governance were never the choice of educated, working people in our once admirably egalitarian young country and Labour finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds was quick to label the lecture patronising, pointing out that businesses were asking for an “economy that works”, not a handout.
Backpedalling, Luxon told Morning Report that he acknowledged businesses were doing it tough, but his point to the Rotorua audience was that they and the government needed to work together. “I believe very strongly that government, business, community leaders actually are equal in our society,” he said. “They do different things, but they need to work together on the challenges and the obstacles, and also the opportunities that we have.”
They each played a part in driving economic growth, said Luxon.
In May, RNZ reported that a total of 163,000 people were unemployed, 7000 higher than a year ago, while July inflation was projected to hit a two-year high. Meanwhile, New Zealand’s wage growth was the worst in the developed world according to an OECD report.
The government’s ‘stewardship’ has also left Waiheke this week grappling with the loss of much of our local home care support in a repeat of the debacle around trashing the successful school lunch programme as regional or national ‘efficiencies’ replace proven local solutions.
The coalition government has passed more legislation in one term under urgency than any other Parliament since records dating back to 2008, raising concerns public scrutiny of proposed laws is diminishing.
During an unlovely year of the government breaking and papering over the work of its predecessor government we have watched mountainous reams of pet-peeve legislation bundled through Parliament, often reversing hard socially valuable progress won by the Opposition with no attempt at collegiality, mitigation or basic research for the dire plight of the hard-pressed public and businesses tightening their belts for a further three years. So much corporate waste.
Regrettably any thought that calm ‘normality’ will soon make a comeback seems to be fading fast, according to ANZ chief economist Sharon Zollner.
“Will businesses decide to just get on with their required investments and hiring?
“Will households get on with their normal lives? Or will the uncertainty see many batten down the hatches and go into survival mode? Time will tell; the consequences could be long-lasting,” she said.
Business confidence was currently at a “very good level”, Luxon said, perhaps rather unfortunately.• Liz Waters
