A Few New Zealand Firsts

Last week, Trade Minister Tim Groser made the curious statement that it "wasn't New Zealand's place to position itself out ahead of where international negotiations were at". He's speaking in the context of climate change, of course; but as was quite rightfully pointed out by Generation Zero, it's a statement about whether New Zealand should be a world leader that many Kiwis would look at and go "Eh?"

Everyone's familiar with the really big New Zealand Firsts.

We all know that in 1893, New Zealand did something incredible and world-beating and granted the vote to women. In fact, the carrying out of this particular "first" has become so integral to our national psyche that the woman associated with the campaign appears on our banknotes, and has recently been brought back to front an anti-domestic violence campaign. It's slightly less well known that a year later, we produced the first democratically elected female Mayor in the British Empire, in the person of Elizabeth Yates, or that this was followed up just over a hundred years later in 1995 by the world's first transsexual Mayor, and then world's first transsexual MP in 1999, both in the person of Georgina Beyer. Although given that the 1999 election also saw Beyer beating a young Paul Henry running as a National candidate by three thousand votes in what's usually a pretty conservative and right-leaning provincial electorate like the Wairarapa, I'm surprised this isn't more frequently commented upon.

The extension of the right to vote to women was carried out by the ground-breaking Liberal government of Richard Seddon; and while legislation that finally recognized that a woman is just as capable as a man of doing something immensely stupid like voting for ACT deservedly takes pride of place when we talk about the achievements of that government, I'd feel remiss in my duties as an NZF person if I didn't remind you that this was *also* the government which enacted world leading pension legislation designed to ensure that the state would support New Zealanders in their old age. Of course, it's not *quite* fair to describe this as a "world first", on grounds that the Old Age Pension Act of 1898 was passed some nine years *after* Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's very similar Old Age And Disability Insurance bill of 1889 in Germany; but the idea of a state that actually took care of its citizens through active interventions in the economy and transfer payments so that being too old to work didn't mean a huge drop in living standards and pauper-hood, was an awesome one which apparently hadn't been taken up anywhere else in the Anglosphere to that point.

A genuine New Zealand First, however, was the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act 1894; which attempted to establish the world's first corporatist bargaining structure for industrial relations arbitration and disputes. Whereas previous models had hinged around an adversarial relationship between workers and unions on one side, and entrepreneurs (and frequently the state) on the other and thus left pay and conditions as a matter for argument between the respective parties, the Liberals instead sought to have a compulsory system whereby the state would appoint representatives from each side to a national Conciliation Board, which would take the lead in reviewing and resolving disputes. This may not necessarily sound too impressive to our modern ears, but it's worthwhile considering that the fundamental principles this act enshrined within our law and way of doing things were to stand basically unmolested for nearly a hundred years - finally giving way in 1991 with the National Party's Employment Contracts Act (this was the legislation so repugnant that despite its party of origin, Sir Robert Muldoon could not bring himself to vote for it due to what it would do to the Kiwi worker). I'm a great fan of corporatist industrial relations and economic planning frameworks, by the way, and would thoroughly encourage readers interested in alternatives to neoliberalism to look into them.

Keeping on the theme of workers' rights, we were also the first country in the world to formally institute an 8 hour working day, again under the Liberals, in 1899. This is why we celebrate Labour Day. The same government *also* established the world's first government-funded tourism organization; which leaves me wondering whether Seddon ever found himself in London, skewered by some British journalist for flapping his guns like some form of introduced pest in the headlights trying to defend a blatantly inaccurate marketing campaign in the tourism sector.

The other big New Zealand First that everybody's aware of is the way our country really took a position of international leadership when it came to nuclear issues during the late eighties under the 4th Labour Government. While it's fair to say that David Lange's position on nuclear ships was potentially a little lukewarm in tenacity up until it became politically ill-advised to do anything *but* give effect to the the broad mass of public opinion about the issue, the fact remains that in that instance at least, New Zealand was *very* quick to "position itself out ahead of where international negotiations were at".

To give you a sense of how well-known, remarked upon, and respected this paragraph in the New Zealand Story actually is ... when I was much younger, I used to hit up international Model UN conventions and things like that. Straightaway, as soon as people from other countries would find out you were a Kiwi, they'd tend to rush to compliment us on our nuclear free stance, and talk about how it was an inspiration etc.
While noting that these were International Relations students and what not, and therefore likely to be slightly better informed about diplomatic history than the average bear - and without meaning to produce a Steinlager commercial - it's definitely fair to say that on this issue, New Zealand carved out a strong and deserved reputation as someone who "positions ourselves out ahead of where international negotiations are at".

See, this is the proud legacy of innovative and principled policy-making that I instantly think of  when New Zealand's record is being talked about - either domestically, or on the world stage. We're pioneers, as a people - so much so we even have a national idiom based around creative things you can do with fencing wire. It therefore absolutely makes my blood boil when Nats like Groser decide to dissipate and denigrate that history by pretending that we're some sort of small and apron-stringed young democracy that's got to wait for the big boys of the international arena to be done talking before we can even pipe up with a whisper about how it's our world and our future that's at stake, too.

Anyway, to return to that Steinlager commercial for a moment ... when Tim Groser says that New Zealand ought not be standing out ahead of where international negotations are at, screaming through a loud-hailer at everybody else to catch up ... Willem Dafoe pops into my head to remind us that "some things are worth protecting".

In this instance, our international reputation as world leaders when it comes to doing what's right ... and our climate and environment.

I'm justifiably proud of New Zealand's record at leading the world. Too bad Tim Groser isn't.

(P.s.: This blog-post has contained my own cutting-edge New Zealand First experimentation with subliminal messaging. Hope you don't mind :P )

Communehagen

To clarify, I believe the climate is changing, and I'm not denying that humans may have a role in that. In fact, I don't think it would be fair to say that the climate only appears to be static on the human scale; take any great length of time, such as a million years, in earth's history and the climate has always changed There are an enormous number of things we have done to change the world - city scapes and deforestation change the way the world absorbs heat from the sun, we alter the contents of the atmosphere which changes how the atmosphere retains heat and we pump out heat itself in the form of mechanical activity - that trying to deny we have any impact on the world's climate seems to me far-fetched. Despite this, I also think it stretches credibility to deny some other explanations for climate change such as changes in the energy coming from the sun, or natural cyclical variations such as changing ocean currents may have impacts as great or even greater than human impacts on the climate. I'd say my position is that of a rational sceptic.


What I've seen from the Copenhagen conference however leaves me less than impressed. The parade of third world officials and guests decrying the "Rich countries" for "creating the pollution in the first place" and demanding "they must pay". Between the BBC and al-Jazeera news I've heard the same thesis advanced half a dozen times: 'the West' got rich by polluting the world, at a time when other countries didn't. This pollution is bound to imminently destroy the lives of billions of people in the poorer countries, leaving the West with a moral legacy to support those people in developing first world lives without adding even more to greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere.

There are a number of problems I have with this. First, there is a moral difference between the industrial development of 18th Century Britain and modern China: no one in Britain can have been expected to know that developing a steam engine that runs on coal would lead to the industrial civilization it would and have such drastic impacts on the surface of the world. The Chinese and other developing nations that are polluting like crazy can not claim the same. This is the difference between someone accidentally hitting a child that runs out in front of them on the road and someone intentionally running over the same toddler. In the first instance, if the person in no way could have prevented the event but was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time by random chance, we do not hold them responsible for anything. In the second instance, we hold the person responsible for murder. To put it another way, we consider Marie Curie a great scientist for her work on radioactivity, and mourn that she could not have known how dangerous it was as it most likely lead to her death. We would consider that anyone who, knowing the dangers, replicated her work without taking precautions to shield themselves and others from the effects of radiation a maniac.

Secondly, to say "The West got rich by polluting while the rest of the world wasn't" is a flawed point to score. The obvious place to start is by asking why the rest of the world wasn't taking advantage of these wonderful new technologies: and the answer was that by and large only Europe could develop them. It had gone through the enlightenment and thrown off the tyrannical shackles of superstition, and developed a culture that not only tolerated but gloried in the intellectual development of man. It was unique in this regard, aside from the classical Athenians, and the rest of the world has been raised from the depths of poverty by it. The other side of the enlightenment is that it lead to British subjects in the American colonies deciding to challenge the authority of the British King and committing to living in a country based on freedom. It is this element of personal freedom which has made America and Europe the wealthy, pleasant countries they are today, more than a measurement of pollution output. After all, if pollution output had a direct correlation to material wealth, the Soviet Union would have been the richest country on earth. The key point to make however is that if Western polities can be said to have responsibility for their actions in creating pollution, so other polities can be said to have responsibility for their citizens poverty; for example Haiti is not poorer than almost any other country in the America's because it as an entity faced a lack of opportunity compared to other countries in the Caribbean and South America. It is poor because it has had a succession of brutal dictatorships that have robbed the citizens of that country of the opportunity to work and build up wealth for themselves. If the West must pay Haitians and other developing nations off for the simple fact of their poverty, then we have ceded the role that effort plays in life. All nations must have the same relative outcomes per capita; regardless of the responsibility their Governments have in the inputs which determine those outcomes.

Thirdly, if the effect of Copenhagen is to limit human activity and transfer wealth from producers and innovators to those who are not productive but wish to enjoy the living standards and lifestyles of westerners, there is the very real danger of limiting the whole world's ability to fight climate change and its effects on human life by means of innovating, developing and producing new technologies. After all, it is the same freedoms that produced the wealth and intellectual muscle that have produced the very science that allows us to identify not only climate change but all manner of environmental deficiencies our lifestyles and industries produce, and regulate those accordingly.

In sum, the aims of the Copenhagen summit and the values that underpin are flawed and deeply troubling. They rely upon a reading of history that places Western achievement at the centre of everything that is wrong and sees countries as blocks that should have equal outcomes regardless of their merit. This is in effect a new international mantra of communism. There is a very real risk that the outcome of the Copenhagen summit will be to limit human development, not only reducing the living standards of those in the west but reducing our collective ability to identify and respond to new challenges in the future. Worst of all, there is no reason to expect that if its measures are followed it will do enough to stop climate change or even that it can, as the planet may heat or cool due to factors completely beyond human intervention, such as changes in the amount of solar energy reaching earth.

So what should be the alternative? Western Governments should invest in potential new green energy resources, such as the recently featured experimental tidal harness in the Orkneys, as well as researching projects that may solve climate change, from carbon capturing towers to a giant soletta that can reduce/increase the amount of energy reaching the planet from the sun and every other plausible idea in between. Globally, the effects of climate change should be monitored and where humanitarian disasters arise, such as drastically altered weather patterns or rising sea levels making Islands uninhabitable, assistance should be offered - as nations should in any case, regardless of cause. By following this course, we can maintain our civilization with its freedoms intact, and also provide help to those who have become victims of natural forces outside of their control.