Clearly, Israel is intent on de-populating Gaza for Israeli re-settlement, and is using military force as a form of state terrorism to depopulate swathes of southern Lebanon. To similar ends, it is also indiscriminately bombing Lebanese rural villages and civilian neighbourhoods in Beirut. Israel’s ultimate aim appears to be to instigate a regional war with Iran.

All of these aggressions, and the ever-expanding breaches of international law, are being carried out behind the smokescreen of Israel’s right to “defend” itself. Russia used the same self-defence excuse to invade Ukraine. Our moral double standard over the invasion of Ukraine has been evident all year. Even before Russia invaded, we called in Russia’s ambassador for a dressing down. Then- Opposition leader Christopher Luxon even called for the Russian ambassador to be expelled, because as Luxon told RNZ’s Morning Report back then, the time for diplomacy was over, and Russia’s leader had shown "absolutely no intention of engaging constructively through diplomacy anymore".

Right. Yet Israel’s leader Benjamin Netanyahu’s total disinterest in diplomatic solutions is being treated with kid gloves. That’s despite Israel’s repeated violations of the rules of war, and its refusal to seriously engage with negotiations for a Gaza ceasefire – let alone embrace the two state solution that Luxon and Foreign Minister Winston Peters continue to bleat on about. For the record, Netanyahu explicitly ruled out the two state solution (again) last January, and the Israeli parliament voted overwhelmingly in July to reject it. It is quite hard to find diplomatic solutions when one side persists in assassinating the people with whom it is supposed to be negotiating.

Regardless, New Zealand obediently keeps on parroting the US/Israeli message lines. It denounced the recent “escalation” by Iran while remaining silent about Israel’s prior (and mounting) acts of aggression. Retaliation is a response that only Israel is permitted to indulge. To curry favour with the Americans, we have sent troops to help keep the trade lanes open through the Red Sea, while ignoring the implications of what Israel’s war with Iran would mean for regional sea lanes, and for the transit of New Zealand’s trade, and oil supplies.

The gospel of failure

Choosing the next Conservative party leader in Britain has once again put the centre right’s incompetence on full display for all to see. Last week, James Cleverly – the most popular and centrist candidate of the then-remaining trio – fatally allowed his supporters to vote tactically for Robert Jenrick in the hope this would knock Cleverly’s real rival Kemi Badenoch, out of the race. Instead, so many MPs took the hint that Cleverly succeeded only in knocking himself out of the race.

The remaining duo – Badenoch and Jenrick – are both from the far right of the Conservative party, and Badenoch’s likely victory this week will anoint a leader likely to command the support of only about a third of her caucus colleagues. How could the Tories – after the robotic Theresa May, the buffoonish Boris Johnson, the unhinged Liz Truss and the insipid Rishi Sunak – still end up, in all likelihood, with Badenoch, who has railed against maternity pay, said that 5% of public servants ought to be in prison, and complained because kids with autism get special treatment from the public health system?

Explaining this path of decline is where things get interesting for New Zealanders. The explanation that Bloomberg News recently published does sound very, very familiar:

The last 14 years have seen the total failure of virtually every element of Conservative ideology. That isn't idle polemic — the Tories lost because nothing works, and because nothing they did, worked. “Small state” austerity left public services in a state of collapse. Proposed tax cuts threatened to blow up the economy under Liz Truss.

De-regulation achieved few upsides, and helped contribute to the Grenfell disaster...Targeting immigrants left public services understaffed, and resulted in policy fiascos...A hard line on law and order, without commensurate public spending, ended in over-crowded prisons and dysfunctional police. All this without even mentioning Brexit.

Blimey. Right now, New Zealand is being force fed every single one of those failed Tory policies. One quarter of the way through the 21st century we are being led by politicians who still seem to be enchanted by the free market fundamentalism of the late 20th century. Even worse, the coalition government’s policies on race relations hark back to the 19th century.

Bloomberg blames the centre right’s ongoing infatuation with Margaret Thatcher for much of this.

Ever since Margaret Thatcher was driven from office, the party has functioned as a devotional cult to their defining 20th century leader, emphasizing free market fundamentalism, ardent Euro-scepticism, or both. This created an ideological zealotry that, combined with the strategic need to outflank Labour from the right, meant the party either didn’t realize, or simply ignored, how much of the Thatcher settlement was maintained by New Labour.

Exactly. The self same process played out here. The devotional cult to free market prescriptions that is still being practiced by the coalition partners– and their friends in the business sector – was equally as short-sighted. As a result, the free market policies maintained by Grant Robertson were portrayed as rampant socialism and Soviet -style central planning. (For much the same reasons, Jacinda Ardern was commonly portrayed as a jackbooted tyrant.)

Like the Blair-Brown Labour governments in Britain, the Ardern/Hipkins administrations here were not “Thatcherite.” Yet they did consciously work within the overall economic framework that Thatcher – and her New Zealand disciple, Roger Douglas – had created. On economic policy over the past 40 years, National and Labour have had more in common than they have had differences. That’s why the international credit rating agencies have been happy with the orthodoxy followed by both.

Bloomberg again, on Labour in government, there (and here):

...The aim was to secure the best public services and maximum re-distribution as could co-exist [my emphasis]with the underlying economic principles that Thatcher [and Douglas] put in place. Funding for public services increased, but without Old Labour’s “soaking” of the rich. [To placate the market gods, Chris Hipkins opposed a wealth tax.]

Public services were often run under the principles of New Public Management, with an emphasis on efficiency, competition and private sector partnerships. The benefit system was expanded, but mainly in ways that fitted within a “work-first” approach to welfare — in-work benefits were rolled out, but the unemployed were subjected to harsher conditions than before.

At Election 2023 in New Zealand voters were given the “choice” between Labour’s soft-line version of market orthodoxy, or the undiluted version of public service cutbacks and austerity for its own sake to which we are now being subjected. Austerity has failed everywhere it has been tried, post GFC, post Covid. Hardship is always an easier sell though, politically. There’s no success like failure, as Bob Dylan said, and failure is no success at all.

Performing Anxiety

The high functioning anxiety that can mask depression? There’s a lot of it around. It also crops up in recent tracks by two equally talented yet quite different New Zealand artists: the alt-country singer/songwriter Holly Arrowsmith, and the dream pop/electronica musician Fazerdaze, aka Amelia Murray.

Arrowsmith’s “Neon Bright” (“makes the darkness look light”) may have a deceptively pretty and upbeat melody, but the “neon, neon” repetition eventually conveys the darkness that’s front and centre of the lyrics:

Sadness wants to talk

Well put her on the line

Sadness at the door

So I let her inside

She looks hollow

Barely alive

How could I send her out

Into the cold white...

The song is done no favours by its somewhat clunky video, so I’d advise checking out Arrowsmnith’s recent Blue Dreams album on Spotify, and also this recent RNZ live set. Better yet, Arrowsmith is touring the new album right now, backed by an excellent band that includes the virtuoso violinist Anita Clark, aka Motte. There’s a Wellington gig at Meow on October 27, and an Auckland show on November 2 at the Tuning Fork.

Arrowsmith’s recent setlist has included several well chosen covers, including songs by the likes of Tamara Lindeman of Weather Station, Craig Finn of the Hold Steady (namely, his great“Rescue Blues”)and best of all, Arrowsmith and the band do a knockout version of Karen Dalton’s signature tune “Something on Your Mind.”Go see her.

Fazerdaze’s “A Thousand Years” is the latest single from her upcoming album Soft Power, the full length follow-up to 2017’s shimmering debut, Morningside. As was evident on her 2022 EP Break, Murray is changing up from the deliberately simple dreampop of her early tracks, into more fully formed shoegazey dance pop, and electronica.

For example: the (decelerating) motorik pulse of the title track on the Break ! EP re-surfaced again earlier this year on “Cherry Pie” from the new album. (The spectral riff that anchors “Cherry Pie” reminded me a little of the high desert synth figure on Avalon Emerson’s club anthem “The Frontier.”)

The new single “A Thousand Years”is even better – a more confident, more substantial handling of the performance anxiety (in every realm of her life) and the best-foot-forward coping mechanisms that characterised her deceptively jaunty breakthrough hit “Lucky Girl.” You can read more here about what she thinks of the “Thousand Years” track /new album.

As Murray indicates in that same article, that suit she wears in some shots from the video can be the kind of wordly armour that we all deploy at times, to conceal the tensions within :

As long as I stay still

It's almost bearable

I don't stop to think about it

No use trying to get out of it

Cos there’s no way out of here

Play to the crowd, til I disappear

Play to the crowd, til I dissappear...”

Yikes.

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