Speaker by Various Artists

On July 20 Chris Trotter raised a very poignant (for Labour anyway) issue: “Should Labour go after the Bogan Vote?”

Because I’m on everyone’s rolodex whenever the dreaded ‘B-word’ is uttered, the message was passed along, and I was encouraged to provide a response. I do not have the political experience of Chris but there is one thing I know and that’s Bogans. I am one myself.

I am also one of those who grew up in the 80s and 90s. Dad voted Labour and Mum voted Labour. That was until Douglas eventuated. Now, neither disclose who they vote for, but I have a firm suspicion that it’s Winston Peters. But I’ll get to that. Overall, I want to thank Chris for his column, as it’s been very thought-provoking and sparked further thinking in an area I’ve been meaning to get to.

First and foremost, there is some initial clarification needed. Being a Bogan is not based on deficit. Perhaps it is due to academic thinking on subcultural groups such as Bogans, typified by the work of academics in the Birmingham tradition such as Hall in Resistance through Rituals, which conceptualised youth cultures as a way for young people to support each other due to class subordination. Their so-called deviant behaviour was viewed as a reaction of working-class youth to structural changes in post-war Britain.

The Birmingham tradition of sub-cultural research is hugely influential to this day, including further research in the 1970s concerning subcultures such as Mods, Rockers, and Skinheads. Chris’s column is reminiscent of this thinking, in his suggestions that Bogans are a response of sorts to Labour’s economic changes in the 1980s, vis-a-vis Roger Douglas.

I am not a political scientist. While more research would be needed in the area before a definitive statement could be made, I will say that working class is not a dirty term. The working class have marketable skills; they build your houses, they fix your car, and they replace that o-ring in the tap in your kitchen sink which you really should have done yourself.

They rent a room and not a house because it means more money to buy that gearbox they wanted. They lack tertiary qualifications not because of a lack of intelligence, but because you don’t need a doctorate to get a job as a mechanic when a certificate will do – a job that they enjoy and gives access to a decent work space.

The problem with the Birmingham tradition was that it portrayed subcultural groups as unwitting dupes or victims who banded together due to a lack of voice. While the Birmingham tradition provides a useful base for research into such groups, to apply such thinking to more modern communities silences those the research purports to give voice to. The Bogan, and by extension the working class, are not victims in a modern sense.

Instead Bogans choose this identity. Mateship is not due to a lack of social connections elsewhere. Social connections are due to their sharing a way of being and associated interests with others. Breaking from the Birmingham mould, they aren’t formed out of a lack of, or as a replacement of something, but as a social process that other groups share.

Bogans value friendships because they are a way of sharing their interest with others. Be that Heavy Metal music, cars, drinking, violent action movies or other working class pursuits that are typically frowned upon by a significant proportion of traditional psychologists. Loyalty is important to a Bogan because those social connections are a strong, positive force in themselves. They are not a replacement that brings us up to functional standards but are instead an addition.

A Bogan never struggles to make social connections. They make them easily, and these connections last for life. Loyalty is an enviable quality that Bogans possess. It’s also important to note that the Bogan is not necessarily a man. The Bogan woman has already read what I’ve previously written and made a mental note to tell me to make proper reference to their gender next time.

All this means that to be a Bogan is not to be on the downward skids of life. It is to be comfortable in your surroundings, to be able to provide for loved ones, and to still have money left over for a new gearbox or a new beer box. Their skills are much needed, but sadly go unrecognised.

And this leads me to the point of the column which is whether Labour should chase the Bogan vote. The answer is, frustratingly, ‘perhaps’. But it’s going to be a very hard sell, and not for the reasons people might think.

It’s not that the Bogans don’t trust Labour due to Douglas. The reason is because Bogans don’t trust politicians at all. They are sort of apolitical. This isn’t due to a lack of awareness or responsibility or an envy of social mobility. A Bogan can quite happily discuss political issues and comment on topics presented in the media. If a voting ballot had a “No Confidence” box, a Bogan would prefer to tick that box.

In a turning of the tables, instead of being the one without transferable skills, a Bogan sees a politician as having no redeeming value to society. A Bogan’s strong sense of loyalty and mateship means that to betray that loyalty or to be self-serving and prone to rhetoric is to be rejected. A Bogan is good with their hands and is very practical-minded, so talking in abstraction leads to rejection.

This would indeed seem to lend itself to a party or politician with working class roots, but would extend beyond a union background. To have a working class background is not enough, as the voice of the Bogans would have to be someone without any form of political background. Toeing the party line is not in our vocabulary, and any voice’s first responsibility would be to the Bogans they represent. Not to the political party. A Bogan politician would then be an oxymoron, and could only really ever be an independent. Politicians are viewed as having their party’s interests at heart first, not the people’s.

The mainstream news media only confirm this belief of the worthlessness of politicians, with stories of who is wearing what scarf or pulling whose ponytail. Political pundits are guilty too, using labels or groups that are in vogue, to try and make opinion columns more relevant and entertaining. But in the process they quickly forget that they are talking about real people and not theoretical abstractions.

The Bogan leaves the political circus to the clowns. This could explain the resurgence of the previously mentioned Winston Peters. Bogans respect a person who attacks politicians. A slogan like “Keeping them Honest” resonates strongly with a Bogan’s values. Beyond that, a Bogan’s political views are their own.

So good luck to Labour, or to any other political party, but before you chase the Bogan vote you have to prove the worth of politicians in general first. And that’s a steep uphill battle that will not be achieved prior to the next election.

So thanks Chris for the column, I thoroughly enjoyed it. But, and this may be your point, the system is not set up in a way that Bogans can make use of easily. So we’ll continue to sit on the fringes, using what voices we have to keep saying “No,” regardless of which party comes a courtin’.

And please, never compare us to Juggalos again.

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 Dr Dave Snell has a PhD in Boganology from Waikato University, and he and his Bogan cohort feature in the new TV show Bogans, coming soon to TV2.

Again this year, James Rae Brown is attending plenty of screenings at the New Zealand International Film Festival and working as an usher at quite a few more. And he's going to make a short video review of every film he sees.

The first batch begins with the gala opening night and The Lobster:

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night:

Marie's Story:

And finally, Winkles:

Feel free to add your own thoughts and reviews. If you want to embed a YouTube video in a comment, paste in the video URL (not the embed code) and it will automagically embed.

Last week I filled in a survey about what the NZ Labour Party should do with itself. Half-facetiously I wrote something like: “Do it like the right does it. Lie about your true beliefs to appeal to ‘middle New Zealand’, win power, then underhandedly push through a radical left-wing agenda to end poverty and inequality.’

Guys, this is not what I meant. Thanks for listening but, to employ an ancient saying of my culture, UR DOING IT RONG. And thank you Keith Ng , for so forcefully explaining many of the reasons why it is wrong, in the manner of a genteel professor tearing your face off and shoving it down your throat in a white-hot stats rage. 

To start with, like Keith I found it hard to separate my stats rage from my race rage.[1] Amid the clusterfuck of Chinese-house-craziness today, American real estate bots have started following me on Twitter. Not kidding.

Phil Twyford and the Herald deserved all they got from the Ng Army. Reporting or communicating statistics is one of the times when it is entirely right to shoot the messenger; to shoot him and stomp on his pitiful corpse. The messenger is the one who does all the harm. But as for the study itself? Let’s get to defending its very existence in a moment, but the methodology and conclusions?

I don’t have any problem with the suggestion that foreign PRC-based investors are buying loads of houses in New Zealand (as are foreign white people but no-one cares about them, because the narrative is about predation from China, not our own stupid lack of regulation).

And even though it’s easy to mock, I also think it’s quite likely that whatever Bayesian analysis the Labour Party used for the ‘Chinese-sounding names’ was a reasonable enough proxy for people of Chinese ethnicity. (Personally, I’d like to get Rob Salmond’s estimate of the probability of the unfortunate ‘Lena Mok’ being Dutch or German.) 

I would even go so far as to say that it’s pretty reasonable that when looking at the proportion of probable Chinese names in the Labour Party dataset as compared with resident Chinese population size, and controlling (or weighting) for demographic and income factors alone, that the overrepresentation of Chinese people buying houses suggests that they are not all local residents.

However there is no realistic way of even guessing the magnitude of that overrepresentation, because even with your Census-based weighting, there is no way of controlling for cultural factors among local Chinese when it comes to buying houses. This is because no-one has researched what they might be. Comparing us to Indians is not good enough, sorry.

Full disclosure: My Chinese parents have been living in Auckland for over 40 years, and in that time, have bought eight houses in their names and sold two. They fucking looooove buying houses. I think my parents caused the Auckland property bubble. If they did, it was because they bought into the ‘Kiwi Dream’ big time, like all the other idiots in this town – and because for immigrants, buying property means security and connection not foreignness and exclusion.  I don’t say this as some anecdotal evidence of how it might be possible that locally resident Chinese bought all the ‘Chinese name’ houses. I say it to show you that it’s very very hard for Chinese people not to take this personally.

Man, for Chinese immigrants in the West, buying houses is almost on a par culturally with food. It’s like you’re giving us shit for eating.

With Phil Twyford lying in a bloody puddle somewhere, my stats rage is somewhat cooler. But my old friend race rage is creeping back.  It doesn’t matter if 90% of those ‘Chinese sounding names’ really are PRC hot-money investors; for the rest of us under suspicion of being foreign, we know Labour was ready to throw us under the bus.

The Labour study is one of those bits of analysis that comes together because no other data is available to answer the question you really want answered; and is convenient simply because – and this is very important – Chinese people are identifiable.

If your identification strategy for locating the cause of the housing bubble boils down to ‘What minority group can we effectively single out because of their weird names?’, this is NOT SOMETHING YOU SHOULD EVER ADMIT. Not only does it make the Labour Party sound inherently racist and not to be trusted, it makes social science sound inherently racist and not to be trusted. In a perfect world, I’d be able to love them both unconditionally, and stats rage and race rage would not be a problem.

I can’t actually remember the last time that this much effort has been put by any political party into singling out Chinese people (as opposed to ‘Asians’) for their probability of being ‘foreign’.

And if Labour put this much effort into programming an algorithm to identify us, I wonder if it also estimated how many New Zealand Chinese votes this study would cost them.

The real question is not ‘oh, ha ha this doesn’t look like a very reliable method for guessing whether someone is Chinese.’  (It probably is).  It is not ‘could local Chinese possibly be buying all of these houses?’ (It is possible, but not very likely).

The real question is what did the Labour Party think it was doing taking this public.  If they just fucked up, so far so familiar. If they did this on purpose for well-calculated reasons – and it works – we Chinese-sounding named people are in way more trouble in New Zealand than we ever thought we would be again.

The National Disability Insurance Scheme was a recommendation from the Australian Productivity Commission in 2011. It was promoted by the first Australian Minister for Disability Issues, Bill Shorten, championed by PM Julia Gillard, and passed into legislation in 2013. It was to be a universal federal disability scheme, funded out of taxation and levies, state and federal.

It's a similar model to the New Zealand ACC scheme – but while ACC only covers injury by accident, the NDIS theoretically covers impairment from any cause. It is overseen by the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA), which seems to have a similar role to ACC:

The NDIS is a key plank in the National Disability Strategy 2010–2020, a cross agency cross jurisdiction agreement between all federal and state governments …. While the Strategy is the overarching Australian policy approach to disability, the NDIS is its most prominent—if not iconic—contemporary element. As such, the NDIS has been widely debated, because its architecture, implementation, and implications, hold considerable importance for disability and indeed Australian social policy in general. (Goggin and Wadiwel, 2014)

It is aligned with the principles of the UN CRPD

The NDIS is, at least rhetorically, informed by a rights approach, in the form of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The NDIS legislation specifically states an aim to ‘give effect to Australia’s obligations under the Convention’ … and cites other international obligations, such as that under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. (ibid)

Before it could be rolled out agreement was required from all states which had to agree to give up some of their state disability budgets for the national scheme. Additionally there was a lot of work done aligning ICT systems, assessment, support pathways and other requirements. Some of the states which had fully agreed to the scheme under state Labour leadership changed their minds or made funding less of a priority after Coalition wins. However, there is now a general agreement on the existence of the scheme itself (again similar to political manoeuvrings over ACC) and varying levels of state support.

In 2013 while at a conference in Adelaide I heard from some of those involved with developing the scheme that eligibility would be wide and anybody could come through the door and ask for support. There would also be attractive funding packages for people to choose their own provider for wrap-around person centred support, and it would be easy to change if they wanted as there would be multiple providers vying for their business, or they could employ their own.

States were able to decide their own implementation priorities and how to roll them out. For example, South Australia chose to start with children. The state implementations had just started when the Gillard government lost office. The Abbott government promised to keep the, by then, already popular scheme.

Last month I went to a symposium on the NDIS at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. The speakers mainly came from critical disability studies and associated disciplines with varying degrees of hands on involvement with the scheme (eg disabled people’s organisations, provider organisations, advocacy or evaluation). My colleague (a wheelchair user) and I went with some degree of NDIS envy - which was the title of his keynote - which bemused our Australian colleagues, and it didn’t take us long for us to have a reality check.

One of the early sites of political contestation in relation to the development of the NDIS was the question over which supports would be considered ‘reasonable’ to be provided by the Scheme … After a public review conducted by the National Disability Insurance Agency, the supports that are now considered ‘reasonable and necessary’ are largely restricted to those supporting ‘daily personal activities’ and employment related support. (Wadiwel and Goggin, 2014)

We also learned:

• Only 10% of disabled people are currently considered to be eligible. Eligibility criteria and assessment is very tight and age restricted to under 65 (which also means certain impairments such as those with post polio syndrome which mainly affect older people are not covered). There is a tier hierarchical system of funding.
• Disability and support are apparently not defined in the Act so decisions are largely left to the all powerful NDIA about who is eligible and what supports are needed.
• The state government of NSW agreed to give all its budget to the federal scheme so has nothing left for monitoring or evaluation or other disability provision.
• Housing support is provided but not housing itself – so shortages of suitable housing cause problems (like in NZ).

• There is limited success in working across sectors/silos. For example, it is still unclear how things like adaptive technology such as for children with autism who need it at home and at school, will be funded or provided.
• Remoteness and racism mean much of the Aboriginal population and other minority groups have minimal access to the scheme.
• Advocacy and political participation which were part of the original alignment with human rights principles are contentious and not funded.

Sadly, far from the ideals I had heard only two years earlier.

So the NDIS is still a great idea in theory but implementation depends on political whim and good faith. Many aspects of the original ideas have apparently been easy to undermine while others are still evolving. There are many similarities to our history with ACC – regular cut backs, sudden change, expansion, little stability or predictability. As with any insurance scheme, actuarial objectives, not equity principles, prevail. However, having one federally-controlled disability insurance system is valuable and needs protection and development as it is better than the fragmented, inequitable system it succeeded. Private, contestable disability insurance will never provide as affordable or widespread cover.

With political support New Zealand could extend ACC into a universal disability scheme, learning valuable lessons on implementation from the NDIS.

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National Disability Insurance Scheme http://www.ndis.gov.au/

Goggin, Gerard and Dinesh Wadiwel (2014). ‘Australian disability reform and political participation’ Australian Review of Public Affairs http://www.australianreview.net/digest/2014/09/goggin_wadiwel.html (full article online via this link - both these writers were impressive speakers at the symposium I attended).

It’s been a bad twelve months for the supporters of Labour in New Zealand and the UK. The similarities between Cunliffe and Miliband’s failed campaigns have already been covered by, among others, Buzzfeed. Both crushing results saw defeated leaders step down, although with some reluctance in the case of David Cunliffe. New Zealand Labour went on to elect Andrew Little in November 2014 while Liz Kendall and Andy Burnham, representing the two faces of Blairism, battle it out in the UK.

Much has been made about how the campaigns of both parties failed to connect with the electorate. But the accusations have often focused on how they, Labour parties, were too left wing or relied upon the perennially unpopular governmental tool of taxation.

Some of these criticisms have been put forward by ambitious successors to UK Labour’s Ed Miliband, others from more traditional opponents of politicised Labour. Many of them focus on the idea that the only way to win against the centre right is to be more like them. Given the scale of their defeats it’s not hard to understand why they think that. But is playing a game the way your opponents want you to play really the way to win?

Let’s rewind first though. New Zealand Labour lost against a two-term, six-year, National Government which had weathered the Global Financial Crisis through tax cuts and asset sales. The Christchurch earthquake of 2011 had the odd but welcome side effect of helping drag the economy out of the worst of the crisis. There had been reductions in government support as, strangely, cutting taxes meant social programmes became suddenly unaffordable. Dirty Politics exploded like a fart in a lift, managing to make everything smell without any visible shit sticking.

And yet the message from National wasn’t policy-specific, but an emotional appeal to ‘Keep the team that’s working’. They were of course aided by the remarkable phenomenon that is John Key, a Prime Minister whose grasp of authentic communication, and deception, left Labour floundering. A surplus was just around the corner, and changing course would prevent New Zealand from being on the ‘cusp of something special’.

UK Labour lost against a one term, five year Coalition Government. The Tories and Liberal Democrats came in well after the frantic days of Lehmann and RBS and actively campaigned on cutting the cost of social security, lowering taxes for the rich and eliminating the deficit.

They managed one of those, to the relief of those people in the top tax brackets of the UK. On everything else though, they failed. Debt expanded and the deficit remained stubbornly resistant to austerity. Surplus however, was potentially there at the end of Parliament, and would require another twelve billion pounds cut from the social security budget.

Their message too, was one of continuity. David Cameron announced that instead of a cusp, Britain was on ‘the brink of something special’. I suppose if you employ the same election strategist, you're bound to get some duplication.

Remarkably, in the aftermath of the utter failure of low-regulation market-based economics, both Labour movements managed to find themselves not so much on the wrong side of the argument, but completely and utterly mute. The necessity of states having to bail out first private financial sector institutions within their borders and then, internationally, entire nations who found themselves unable to pay private financial sector institutions was not a victory for those who criticised rampant capitalism. Instead, parties of the centre right, parties of business and capitalism did what they were ruthlessly brought up to do. They capitalised.

Suddenly the fault was on lefty liberal Governments for both using the benefits of unbridled capital excess to attempt to remedy societal inequality, for not regulating the banks effectively and for bailing them out. The pre-crisis ‘spend the tax’ ‘too much regulation’ and ‘pro-bailout’ stances of these parties evaporated as they sensed weakness in their opponents.

Suddenly the financial mismanagement was not in the private sector, but in the public sector. The role of the finances of Government were recast as those of the household, a surefire way to spark concern and fear as low wages and job insecurity crept into everyday life. The resonance of that analogy became sufficient cover for a recasting of the role of Government in both New Zealand and British society.

Instead of reforming the system, National and the Conservatives decided that the best way to avoid further turmoil was to simply restart it. Corporate tax cuts were introduced to jump-start business and good old fashioned trickle-down economics made a comeback as the top rates of tax were reduced. The already unsustainable housing market became a driver of GDP, and was therefore left to swell and bloat. The problem had shifted from the situation which led to a dramatic reduction in the tax intake, preceding the tax cuts, to the uses to which that tax was put as part of administering education, health and social security. You know, the business of being a Government.

New Zealand Labour spent the post-2008 period realising that the long reign of Helen Clark, as leader and Prime Minister, was based around ensuring any potential successors were not too talented to be a potential challenger to her. UK Labour found itself firmly blamed for the entire global financial crisis and utterly, utterly failed to attempt to counter the narrative in any way. What both parties did next hugely contributed to their recent defeats.

UK Labour tried to gain a reputation for fiscal responsibility by echoing the Conservatives ‘tough on welfare’ rhetoric and eliminating the deficit. NZ Labour looked over the successes of its nine years in power, and went hard on the prospect of surplus. In doing so they both tacitly accepted the idea that it was the Government that needed to demonstrate fiscal control, rather than the private financial sector.

This created a break from what UK Labour had traditionally offered to the electorate, and what their new ‘fiscal responsibility’ or ‘surplus focused’ agendas required them to. In the case of NZ Labour, their abandonment of the party's ideological tradition in 1984 gives them both a breadth of political ideas within the party, but incoherence in their presentation. Which also presented their opponents with another clear opportunity to attack.

For UK Labour, it was failing to effectively rebut the claim that their spending had caused the deficit to rise. A key moment in the election was Ed Miliband denying that the last Labour Government had spent too much, to the disbelief of a studio audience. And yet the financial crisis was due to a sudden collapse of global capital, and the deficit ballooned because of a falling tax take rather than any increase in expenditure. In the five years Labour had been in opposition, they couldn’t get that message across. Approaching an election with promises of both increased public spending then combining an election campaign shift based on fiscal competency was too much for the electorate to believe.

New Zealand Labour went through three leaders, the third being elected fewer than twelve months before an election campaign. Their campaign review took nine months to go public, citing disunity within the caucus, fundraising concerns and bulky policy packages. That it took nine months to deliver that message, in itself, should be concerning in a three year election cycle. The subsequent ‘Future of Work Commission’ is an effective can kick into 2016, while attacking National for failing to deliver a surplus creates more problems in the long term than any short term political benefit.

Here’s why. In both hemispheres Labour attempted to adopt the very successful economic narrative of their opponents to augment their offer to the electorate. In both instances they were wholly rejected by their respective electorates. The ‘household finance’ presentation of Government simply does not fit the sort of policies a centre-left party needs to implement in the aftermath of the GFC.

It is equally misguided to commit themselves to the idea that surplus and deficit measures the success or failure of a Government. In the UK there have been just six budget surpluses since 1979, usually during times of economic boom. In New Zealand the vaunted Cullen surplus run in the first decade of the 21st century occurred in the boom period, ending immediately after the GFC took hold. It’s manifestly clear that, post-GFC, we are nowhere near the domestic or international stability which produced those past results. To believe that we have somehow smoothly returned to economic ‘business as usual’ is to swallow the reality distorting ‘golden days’ propaganda of the centre right’s cheerleaders.

Playing the game by the rules laid down by your opponent is a sure-fire way to lose, lose and lose again. Failing to learn from repeated losses, failing to attempt to change your strategy only creates the conditions for further setbacks, further losses. Sometimes it is necessary to stop, take stock and recognise what it is you are supposed to be good at, so that you can focus on the basics. Trust me on this one, I’m a Blues fan.

If either Labour party wants to win, in 2017 or 2020, they have to be able to present a case for governing which does not depend on the principles which underpin their opponents politics. This is by no means a simple task, as it requires clear direction and the courage of conviction. But the reason for developing an independently consistent and authentic narrative for governing is the same as that for which the two Labour parties were established; because it is the right and necessary thing to do to prevent the societal, moral, ethical and economic impoverishment of their countries.

Otherwise if they continue to merely offer to be a different flavour of the incumbent centre-right party, they are demolishing their intellectual and ideological integrity, and prompting voters to choose the honest bastards, rather than the dishonest cowards.