Extreme wealth and extreme weather. These are increasingly the hallmarks of our age. The twin crises of inequality and climate change threaten to tear apart the fabric of our society and undermine the conditions that allow democracy to function.

Not that you’d know it from the Budget debate. Finance Minister Nicola Willis triumphantly announced to Parliament on Thursday that, according to the Treasury’s rather optimistic forecasts, the government will return to surplus a year early.

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The very same day, Community Housing Aotearoa released a report showing that homelessness is at a record high. On the other side of the world, an unprecedented pre-summer heat wave is scorching Europe as a “monster El Ñino” weather system takes shape; the effects of a warming planet are becoming more intense and are only set to worsen. More frequent and extreme storms have become a fact of life in Aotearoa — a storm hit us once every eight days in the year to February 2026.

Not only is the government ignoring the great crises of our time — they’re doubling down with climate denial and blatant displays of cruelty towards those most in need of support. Their plan to deal with homelessness is to give the police new powers to “move on” rough sleepers away from public places. This callous response to the record homelessness levels, a crisis worsened by the Coalition’s own policies, is an attempt to shift the problem out of view.

In the Budget, the government increased income-related rents for social housing tenants from 25% to 30%. Willis apparently regrets her comment at a pre-budget event claiming that social housing tenants had “won the lotto.” There is more money to house people, but only if it involves putting them behind bars. Funding for prisons was again increased in accordance with the Coalition’s hard-line approach to law-and-order, which Christopher Luxon says he makes no apology for. There was also increased funding for police and the military.

On climate policy, the Coalition had previously scrapped the Ardern government’s 2018 ban on offshore oil and gas exploration and gutted the climate disclosure regime which was heralded as “world-leading” in 2021. The Green Party claims to have found a fiscal hole in the Budget worth $1.4 billion due to failed Emissions Trading Scheme auctions, which Chlöe Swarbrick says are caused by the government “consistently undermining confidence and certainty in its climate policies.”

The Coalition’s latest climate-denying moves have been to abolish the Ministry for the Environment and change the law to prevent citizens from holding companies legally accountable for their emissions. This major law change was specifically brought in to protect seven major corporations responsible for a third of our emissions from a lawsuit by Ngāpuhi and Ngāti Kahu kaumatua Mike Smith, a leading climate activist. Two of those corporations, Fonterra and Z Energy, were revealed to have secretly lobbied government officials in pursuit of this law change, a fact which the Prime Minister’s office is currently being investigated for trying to cover up.

Willis has balanced the books through the harshest austerity programme NZ has experienced since the 1990s. The Finance Minister’s overarching focus in all three of her budgets has been “fiscal responsibility,” her definition of which is to strictly follow targets of keeping government spending and government debt at 30% of GDP. In the context of a stagnant economy and an ageing population — the latter of which is driving a gradual increase in demand for healthcare and the cost of superannuation — this approach requires the government to impose a sinking lid on public spending. These fiscal targets are entirely self-imposed; New Zealand’s government debt is low by international standards, our economy is crying out for investment in public services and infrastructure, and some economic analysts such as Bernard Hickey and Tayla Forward believe that Willis’ austerity has worsened the economic contraction we have experienced.

The public service is creaking at the seams as cuts to funding and jobs take their toll. Trade unions representing doctors and nurses told reporters on Budget day that the headline-grabbing increase to health funding announced by Willis will be inadequate to deal with the crisis in the public health system. ASMS Executive Director Sarah Dalton told TVNZ that all the funding boost will really do is “keep the lights on.”

Last year, this pursuit of “fiscal responsibility” led the Coalition to make shock changes to the pay equity process to make it harder for female-dominated industries to bargain for fair pay. Furious protests followed this announcement. This year, it’s students marching against the Budget, as the government has scrapped the fees-free university scheme and allowed tertiary institutions to increase fees by up to 6% for the third year running.

The government plans to replace the public sector workers it’s laying off with AI. At the Ministry of Social Development, this means that artificial intelligence could soon decide whether families can access benefits and food grants. This is on top of harsher sanctions imposed in previous budgets and a reduction in temporary additional support payments. The number of children living in material hardship has risen by 50,000 in the last three years, with the Coalition’s austerity being a major contributing factor.

The cost of living is out of control. Our economy’s dependence on fossil fuels means that the oil price shock caused by the US-Israel war on Iran — which the Prime Minister wanted us to be more supportive of before it turned out to be a disaster — is sending prices through the roof for motorists. A food price shock is set to follow as a result of both the climate crisis and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. An already painful affordability crisis is about to get far more severe.

There is no need to worry though. The government has set aside funds just in case things get really bad — as if they weren’t already. Perhaps for Luxon and Willis, whose colleagues and friends are “wealthy and sorted,” everything seems fine. They can celebrate an early surplus while the rest of us struggle to keep our heads above water.

Is NZ Becoming an Oligarchy?

The central economic phenomenon of our time — the rapid concentration of wealth in the hands of the few — should be the main point of discussion during every election and every major economic announcement by the government. Yet we are lucky if wealth inequality gets an offhand mention during Budget debates.

The reason for this is clear. Our country is rapidly becoming an oligarchy — a system based on government by and for the super-rich. A small number of oligarchs are quickly increasing their control over the media and the political system, while the Coalition parties represent their interests at every turn.

Gabriel Zucman, a French economist and author of the new book We Need to Tax Billionaires, points out that there is always a fundamental tension in democratic societies between “an extreme concentration of wealth on the one hand and the very possibility of democracy on the other.” Democracy under capitalism is always distorted by the dominance of the capitalist class over the working class. Zucman highlights how this tension was reduced in the mid-20th Century by the postwar economic model where governments taxed high incomes heavily to pay for generous welfare states; his research shows that the level of equality achieved after World War II has long since broken down.

The free market reforms of the 1980s and 1990s empowered the super-rich across the globe, ending the era of relatively low inequality in the capitalist world. The growing wealth and power of the billionaire class accelerated after the 2008 Financial Crisis, and there has been “an acceleration of the acceleration” in the past couple of years. According to Zucman, “the battle between democratic forces and oligarchic forces is the defining battle of our time.”

In Aotearoa, oligarchic forces are prevailing. The free market reforms implemented between 1984 and 1993 in NZ by Labour Party Finance Minister Roger Douglas and his National Party successor Ruth Richardson went further and faster than any other developed country at the time. There was a period of stability under the Clark, Key and Ardern governments; radical reform was put on hold whilst the new economic paradigm of neoliberalism was left intact. However, the Coalition elected in 2023 has resumed the advance towards ever-greater control of Aotearoa by corporate interests, enriching the owners of both domestic and multinational corporations.

The 2025 NBR Rich List showed that the 119 wealthiest families in the country now own more than $100 billion between them for the first time. The number of billionaires in New Zealand rose from 16 to 18; the top four billionaires own more wealth than the bottom 1.8 million Kiwis put together. The 2026 Rich List, due for release in early June, will reveal if there has been yet another increase in the extreme wealth of the elite few.

Our lopsided economy allows a few giant corporations to dominate over the competition. Aggressive pursuit of the free market has not, in fact, produced a competitive paradise — it has produced a trend towards monopoly as the winners take all and the rest of us pay the price. The supermarket duopoly and the Australian-owned banks are able to extract super-profits from Kiwi consumers. Willis has talked a big game about tackling this uncompetitive economy, but her supermarket reforms went nowhere and her bank levy is only enough to cover the cost of running the regulator.

The same system that has rigged the NZ economy is responsible for creating the climate crisis. Fossil fuel corporations around the world are destroying the basis for future human civilisation while bribing governments not to take the urgent action necessary to stop the planet from boiling. The secret lobbying of Luxon’s office by Fonterra and Z Energy is a classic example.

The Best Government Money Can Buy

A key indicator of emergent oligarchy is growing control of the media and the political system by the super-rich. The last three years have seen oligarchic forces tighten their grip over the private media while attacking public broadcasting.

Last year, right-wing billionaire Jim Grenon bought a major stake in NZME, the media company which owns brands such as the NZ Herald and Newstalk ZB. Grenon was subsequently appointed director of the company, with Steven Joyce — formerly a leading figure in the Key government — becoming chair. Grenon increased his stake early this year, closing in on a total acquisition of the company. The billionaire bankrolled an unsuccessful defamation lawsuit by far-right anti-Co-Governance campaigner Julian Batchelor against TVNZ and disinformation academic Dr. Sanjana Hattotuwa; Grenon was apparently outraged when he saw Dr. Hattotuwa taking aim at Batchelor’s “racist rhetoric.”

At the same time, the Coalition is deregulating the media sector by dismantling the Broadcasting Standards Authority. David Seymour has threatened that “changes are coming” for the leadership of Radio New Zealand; politicians from both ACT and NZ First have consistently launched Trumpian attacks against public broadcasters.

Another red flag is the rise in big-money contributions to the right-wing parties. Record donations flowed into the coffers of the victorious Coalition parties at the last election, and that record is set to be broken again. In April, it was reported that New Zealand First was pulling ahead of National and ACT in major campaign donations; now ACT has leapfrogged its Coalition partners with a surge of $600,000 in just 20 days. The oligarchs are purchasing the best government money can buy. All three opposition parties lag far behind their right-wing adversaries.

As they jostle for position in election year, it’s important to note the different interests represented by these three right-wing parties. The National Party is the closest to being the party of “stability” — that is to say that National represents the section of big business that is only willing to push reforms as far as it is possible to go without completely destabilising the country. National has to try and ensure it wins the next election, and can only push its unpopular agenda of austerity and privatisation so far.

The ACT Party has no such concerns. ACT represents the most radical section of the ruling class, the section which believes that the government has not gone far enough in reducing government spending and cutting taxes on the wealthy. The huge sums of money flowing into ACT’s coffers demonstrates that there are a growing number of billionaires and multi-millionaires ready to put their money behind this project.

Roger Douglas was one of the co-founders of ACT, and Ruth Richardson is today the chair of the free market lobby group the Taxpayers’ Union; both of the architects of our rigged economy have piled on the pressure for the government to go further in its reforms. Last year, Richardson challenged the incumbent Finance Minister to a debate over Willis’ “fiscal failure”; Douglas went further, calling on Willis to resign. Douglas, Richardson and ACT represent the vanguard of the emerging oligarchy — they want a far more extreme agenda of austerity, privatisation and deregulation.

A Populist Alternative on the Right?

Winston Peters is old enemies with Ruth Richardson. The New Zealand First leader announced a plan in the lead up to the Budget to buy back the Bank of New Zealand, which was privatised by his long-time nemesis in 1992. He has condemned the “neoliberal nitwits” who have sold off our country. This is despite the fact that Peters has entered into coalitions with all four governments we’ve had since his party was formed, including the hardline neoliberal government led by Luxon since 2023.

Peters is an economic nationalist who seeks to champion domestic capitalist interests over the interests of multinational corporations. He rails against the big banks for ripping us off because they are foreign-owned — and he has a fair point here. Our financial sector is dominated by the ‘big four’ Australian banks (ANZ, ASB, BNZ and Westpac), which hold between them a market share of 84%. The big four extract much higher profits from NZ customers than they do our neighbours across the Tasman; we have among the highest banking costs in the OECD. No comparable country has such a high level of foreign bank ownership. This leaves New Zealand dangerously vulnerable in the event of a financial crisis, lacking a degree of economic sovereignty possessed by our peers.

However, Peters is quite happy to receive money from oligarchs when it serves his party’s interests. Various projects approved under the government’s controversial fast-track process have been linked to industry lobbying and major donations to both NZ First and National. Casey Costello, the minister responsible for cutting taxes on tobacco products, broke ministerial rules by handing tobacco industry-friendly documents to health officials. Costello is a former chair of the Taxpayers’ Union; the fact that she is number three on the NZ First list demonstrates a deepening neoliberal tendency within the party that was founded in opposition to the free market reforms of the early 1990s.

NZ First is increasingly a right-wing populist party. The fact that donations from corporate interests have increased despite Peters’ anti-neoliberal posturing and Shane Jones’ use of anti-oligarch rhetoric is because elements of the ruling class know that they need votes from disaffected working class voters and retirees to keep this government in place. The ever-grumpy and cantankerous Peters is able to use populist rabble-rousing to win over a section of voters who would not otherwise support the Coalition.

A report released this week by Dr. Sanjana Hattotuwa has warned that the far-right has been rising since the 2023 election. Dr. Hattotuwa puts the spotlight on Peters, Jones and their ACT Party colleague David Seymour, arguing that these three ministers in particular have created a “permission structure” for far-right groups and what he describes as the “social-media-based grievance-media ecosystem.” He believes that violent extremists are emboldened by dog-whistle rhetoric from senior government ministers.

Dr. Hattotuwa outlines how Peters, Jones and Seymour seek to portray Māori, trans people, Muslims, migrants, women in public roles, journalists, judges, public servants and opposition MPs as enemies rather than legitimate opponents. He highlights how anti-Treaty and anti-trans legislation echoes the beliefs of more overtly extreme figures such as Brian Tamaki. In an interview on Bernard Hickey’s podcast, he raised particular concern about Shane Jones’ invocation of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which Dr. Hattotuwa says sounded alarmingly similar to rhetoric used in the 2019 manifesto of the Christchurch terrorist.

The rapid concentration of wealth in the hands of a small number of elites necessarily creates huge social and political instability. The right-wing populist strategies increasingly being adopted by NZ First and ACT seek to channel anger and discontent into culture war arguments to distract from the real cause of falling living standards: wealth inequality and the rise of oligarchy. Peters, Jones and Seymour seek to provide cover while the Coalition undermines the social fabric of Aotearoa; donations are pouring into their campaign coffers, and the largest media company in the country is now owned by a billionaire sympathetic to far-right politics.

The fact that the ACT Party represents elite interests is blindingly obvious to the vast majority of people. Their economic policies are extremely unpopular. This makes ACT far less effective at populist politics than NZ First; Peters is a far greater electoral threat than Seymour could ever be.

Peters is a lifelong career politician and insider who has done nothing to overturn the neoliberal paradigm across his four stints in government. He has spent most of his career claiming to occupy the “centre ground” in order to play the role of kingmaker between Labour and National. The NZ First leader has moved in a much more explicitly right-wing direction since his party’s devastating defeat in the 2020 election.

In this term, for the first time, NZ First has gained support whilst in government rather than falling below the 5% threshold as it has in the past. At the ripe old age of 81, Peters’ time has come — the political centre ground is starting to fragment and the populist turn that began overseas in the 2010s has begun to emerge in this country.

Peters has the ability to appeal to angry voters in a similar way to Donald Trump in the US or Nigel Farage in the UK; he is able to make people laugh in spite of themselves, and to come across as a “strongman.” His nationalist agenda means he can rail against transnational corporations and in doing so appear to be representing the interests of ordinary people. Never mind that the policies he tends to implement when actually in government favour corporate power.

We cannot rule out the possibility of an even bigger surge in support for NZ First in the lead up to November’s election, particularly if Luxon and Willis are stupid enough to campaign on raising the age of eligibility for superannuation. No one is better at capitalising on the outrage of angry retirees than Winston Peters. Could he get closer than ever to at long last achieving his dream of becoming Prime Minister? His chances would be higher if only he were a few years younger.

All that being said, more worrying is what will happen when Peters finally exits the stage. Whether it is Shane Jones or some other, more charismatic leader — perhaps Stuart Nash? — a younger and more extreme right-wing populist is bound to emerge in the next 5-10 years. Whether this leader rises through the ranks of NZ First or a new far-right party remains to be seen. In the deteriorating economic conditions produced by accelerating inequality and climate breakdown, right-wing populism is on the rise across the globe; sooner or later it will seek to dominate the politics of this country.

But the rise of oligarchy and the far-right is not inevitable. The power of the emerging oligarchy feels inevitable; but so did the power of the robber barons in the Gilded Age. In the famous words of Ursula K. Le Guin: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”

A genuine alternative to the failing system is urgently needed. An alternative based on hope and vision for the future. Any serious attempt to prevent climate disaster and falling living standards for the majority of people in this country will require the working class majority to stand together and take on the billionaires and multinational corporations who are tearing our society apart. It will require a fundamental and irreversible shift of wealth and power away from the oligarchs and towards ordinary people. It’s possible — if, and only if, enough people are willing to fight for it.

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Welcome to my Substack! Thanks for reading. This is my first post in a while — thank you to all those subscribers who stuck with me during my absence.

My name is Elliot Crossan, and I am a socialist writer and activist based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. I am the Chair of System Change Aotearoa, an ecosocialist campaign group. You can check out our website here. I am also the Co-Chair of Auckland Action Against Poverty.

I am a freelance writer, and I intend to make all posts on this Substack free. The goal of my writing is to help bring about political change — to contribute to the movement for workers’ rights, indigenous rights and climate justice. If you are able to support me financially, any contribution would be greatly appreciated — but I have no plans to publish anything behind a paywall.

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Read more:

• It Is Not Enough Only to Change the Government

• Roger Douglas Has a Lesson for the Left

• What Is to Be Done? Taking the Fight to the Coalition in 2025

• Is NZ as Stable as Luxon Claims?

The following is a recording of an interview I did with for the Frontline podcast a few weeks ago. I spoke to Gary about Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson, the architects of New Zealand’s neoliberal revolution, in the context of both Roger and Ruth calling for the Prime Minister to sack Nicola Willis and take the government down the same dark path of privatisation and austerity that we experienced from 1984 to 1993.

You can find all episodes of the Frontline podcast on Youtube, Spotify or other podcasting platforms. Click here to subscribe to Gary’s Substack and support his work.

You can read my article ‘Roger Douglas Calls For Class War’ here.

Message from the author

Welcome to my Substack! Thanks for reading.

My name is Elliot Crossan, and I am a socialist writer and activist based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. I am the Chair of System Change Aotearoa, an ecosocialist campaign group. You can check out our website here.

I am a freelance writer, and I intend to make all posts on this Substack free. The goal of my writing is to help bring about political change — to contribute to the movement for workers’ rights, indigenous rights and climate justice. If you are able to support me financially, any contribution would be greatly appreciated — but I have no plans to publish anything behind a paywall.

Please subscribe and share this post!

Subscribe now

Read more:

• It Is Not Enough Only to Change the Government

• Roger Douglas Has a Lesson for the Left

• Divide and Plunder: Understanding New Zealand’s Right-Wing Turn

• Roger Douglas Calls For Class War

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Roger Douglas served as Finance Minister from 1984 to 1988. 41 years ago, Douglas unleashed the ‘Rogernomics’ revolution, which transformed our economy at lightning speed from a protectionist welfare state towards the neoliberal free market model which remains with us today. This neoliberal revolution involved fire-sale privatisation, reckless deregulation and regressive tax reform. This radical agenda was carried out with no democratic legitimacy; Douglas was part of a Labour government elected on a centre-left manifesto. Nobody voted for these sweeping reforms.

Rogernomics, in combination with the austerity, welfare cuts and anti-union laws introduced by the National government of the early 1990s, produced an explosion of inequality which has never been reversed. To this day Aotearoa has a low-wage economy, a broken tax system, a housing crisis, and high levels of poverty — all thanks in large part to Douglas.

This period of radical economic overhaul ended in 1993. In the 30 years that followed, a succession of moderate National and Labour governments carefully managed this new neoliberal order, keeping the structural reforms of Douglas and Richardson in place while staying in the political ‘centre ground.’ This changed with the election of the Coalition in 2023.

The Coalition is the most anti-worker government since the 1990s. Its austerity agenda, led by Willis, involves cutting already-underfunded public services to the bone. The health system is straining to breaking point as a result. In May, the government introduced a shock overhaul of pay equity legislation in order to meet their budget targets. State housing is being sold off, while tougher benefit sanctions and restricted access to emergency housing have created an alarming spike in homelessness.

It is not austerity for everyone though; the government has handed out tax breaks to businesses and landlords, increased spending on police and prisons, and acceded to the Trump administration’s demand for US allies to increase military spending. The general public are being made to pay as our services are eroded, the social safety net is slashed and prisons are built instead of houses.

Inequality has spiraled out of control since 1984, and the Coalition’s austerity agenda is designed to hasten this process. In June it was revealed that the net worth of the 119 individuals and families on the NBR Rich List has exceeded $100 billion for the first time. The government represents the wealthiest and most powerful people in society, and is waging class war against the rest of us on their behalf.

Yet none of this is enough for Sir Roger Douglas. He wants deeper cuts to public spending, using the justification that “Treasury's long term fiscal forecasts show out-of-control deficits due to pensions and health-care spending from an ageing population.”

Critics of Rogernomics in the 1980s highlighted the key role that Treasury advice played in laying the ground for Douglas’ neoliberal revolution. Then as now, the Treasury was a highly ideological institution staffed by economists trained to believe that neoliberal theory is the only rational way to run an economy.

So when the Treasury in 2025 is releasing briefing documents sounding the alarm bells about rising public debt, we must bear in mind this ideological commitment to free market economics. Reducing government debt and deficits is a key objective of neoliberal thinking. Debt reduction is regarded as a more important objective than maintaining high quality public services. Indeed, the Treasury recently warned that the government’s goal of reducing public spending as a share of the economy means that Kiwis will have to “accept a lower level of public services provided in some functional categories.”

This ideological commitment to debt reduction also means ignoring the fact that NZ government debt as a percentage of GDP is less than half the OECD average. Our problem is with high levels of private debt, not public debt. Treasury’s own long-term forecasts show NZ public debt rising in coming years, but even after this rise we would still have lower debt than the US, UK, France or Japan have in 2025.

Douglas and MacCulloch blame the country’s current economic malaise on Willis not being austere enough. Their statement was released following Stats NZ data showing a sharp 0.9% decrease in GDP in the second quarter of 2025. The claim that this recession has been caused by recent budget deficits is entirely grounded in ideology rather than a real-world assessment of economic facts; any analysis of the actual state of the NZ economy would note that our public debt levels are very low by international standards.

Further cuts to government spending during a recession will only worsen the current crisis. Cutting spending during a downturn leads to a cycle of falling business confidence which in turn leads to lower private investment. When neither businesses nor the state are investing, the entire system screeches to a halt. The UK has been stuck in this ‘austerity doom-loop’ for over a decade; spending cuts have led to further economic contractions, which in turn have caused government debt levels to rise further, justifying more spending cuts.

Blind adherence to neoliberal ideology has led to economic illiteracy on the part of Douglas and MacCulloch. Their argument is based on the false claim that government spending “crowds out” private spending, and that the government reducing investment will cause the market to step into the gap. This ideological position has been disproven time and time again. It is part of an economic theory which persists not because of evidence, but because it serves the interests of the wealthy few.

The real substance of this debate is a disagreement within the government and the ruling class about how far its austerity programme should go. The National Party is currently attempting to balance its austerity measures with the desire to maintain some measure of social and political stability. There is also the electoral consideration that the National Party leadership has to make — whilst Willis and Christopher Luxon broadly adhere to the same neoliberal theory as Douglas and MacCulloch, they also want to win the next election. Recent polls and surveys, which have shown support for the government falling alongside growing levels of discontent across society, indicate that Willis and Luxon are failing on both of these objectives.

Douglas, MacCulloch and Treasury officials align more closely with ACT. Douglas was one of the co-founders of the ACT Party in 1993, and despite some ideological disagreements with David Seymour’s brand of libertarianism, the architect of Rogernomics still shares the same overall view as Seymour: that attempting to manage the status quo while maintaining stability is impossible, and that Aotearoa needs to enter a second phase of the neoliberal revolution. Douglas’ book Unfinished Business (1993) outlines some of the extreme measures he believes are necessary, including the introduction of a flat tax rate.

The free market radicals believe that another full-scale confrontation between capital and labour is necessary to restart economic growth. Their agenda would once again drive down the living standards of the majority of the population in order to slash taxes for the rich, privatise essential services and boost corporate profits.

New Zealand First was also founded in 1993, and initially the party was opposed to Rogernomics. Winston Peters appears to have made his peace with the free market later in life however, given his party’s main role in the current neoliberal Coalition has been to advance the interests of mining companies and tobacco giants. Even so, the policies announced at the party’s latest conference include major unfunded spending commitments, and Peters has objected to Willis’ demands for savings to be made in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade; NZ First appears to be positioned on the moderate side of the austerity debate within Cabinet.

The Coalition, and the ruling class as a whole, are divided over which approach to take. Working class living standards in Aotearoa have already been falling in the last few years through the cost-of-living crisis, the recession and the government’s current austerity programme. If the fiscal hawks in the Treasury and the ACT Party get their way, it will mean even more severe cuts to public services and the social safety net. The inequality crisis will accelerate even faster.

Naomi Klein’s 2007 book The Shock Doctrine outlines in detail how moments of crisis are exploited by neoliberal governments to introduce unpopular reforms which in normal times would not be palatable. We are experiencing this phenomenon in Aotearoa today: the recession is being used to justify unpopular austerity policies.

It is no coincidence that the Herald chose to run Douglas’ demand for even harsher austerity measures on its front page the day after the dire GDP figures for June were released. The ruling class are attempting to manufacture consent for deeper cuts, heedless of the devastating effect these cuts will have on future growth. This narrative must be exposed for what it is: an attempt to ramp up the class war against working people.

Growing inequality is not inevitable. The continual deterioration of the public sphere is not inevitable. Falling living standards for working people are not inevitable. All of these trends can and should be reversed through a programme to redistribute wealth and invest in the public sector, financed through a combination of raising taxes on the rich and abandoning arbitrary debt targets. This will require a confrontation with neoliberal ideology, and with the capitalist interests that this ideology serves.

If decisive action is not taken to tackle growing inequality, the rising discontent and alienation in our society will turn into mass anger and resentment. We only have to look overseas to see where this leads: far-right mobilisation and anti-refugee riots in the streets of Britain and the authoritarian demagogue in the White House are just two examples among many.

There is no way out of this inequality crisis without a fundamental and irreversible redistribution of wealth and power away from the corporate oligarchy and towards the working class of Aotearoa. The current austerity programme, let alone the harsher measures Douglas is calling for, must be stopped.

Nobody voted for Rogernomics 41 years ago — the free market failed our people in the 1980s and it is failing us today. The legacy of Roger Douglas must be torn down root and branch. It is time to end the era of neoliberalism once and for all.

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Message from the author

Welcome to my Substack! Thanks for reading.

My name is Elliot Crossan, and I am a socialist writer and activist based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. I am the Chair of System Change Aotearoa, an ecosocialist campaign group. You can check out our website here.

I am a freelance writer, and I intend to make all posts on this Substack free. The goal of my writing is to help bring about political change — to contribute to the movement for workers’ rights, indigenous rights and climate justice. If you are able to support me financially, any contribution would be greatly appreciated — but I have no plans to publish anything behind a paywall.

Please subscribe and share this post!

Subscribe now

Read more:

• Roger Douglas Has a Lesson for the Left

• Divide and Plunder: Understanding New Zealand's Right-Wing Turn

• It Is Not Enough Only to Change the Government

The following is an updated edition of an essay written for the System Change website last year entitled ‘Will This Be a One-Term Government?’ The first edition was published on 15 October 2024.

A year on from the 2023 general election, David Seymour responded to a One News-Verian poll, showing a 5% lead for the government, by gloating. “The Coalition is working so much better than our enemies hoped!” Sad to say, but the ACT leader was not wrong.

On 14 October 2023, National, ACT and NZ First swept Labour from power. Weeks later, after extended negotiations, the three parties struck a coalition deal to form the most right-wing government this country has had in decades. Nearly two years later, with a little over a year until the likely date of the 2026 election, hopes on the left that this would be a ‘coalition of chaos’ that would rapidly tear itself apart currently look far too optimistic.

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The Coalition is still ahead in the polls. The three parties won the 2023 election by a combined margin of 11.2% over Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori. In their first 10 months in office, the new government’s polling lead averaged 8.4%. This fell to 2.8% in the 10 months to July 2025.

Christopher Luxon never polled ahead of Jacinda Ardern in the Preferred Prime Minister ratings, and lagged behind Chris Hipkins on that metric for most of the election campaign; but the advantage the Labour leader once held has since disappeared.

This does not mean that the government’s agenda is popular. Most polls consistently show that a plurality of voters believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. The very same poll which gave Seymour cause to gloat last October found that 40% of eligible voters thought that the country was in worse shape than it had been before the election, with 30% saying it was in better shape, and 26% believing that little had changed. Luxon is no John Key; the incumbent Prime Minister’s popularity does not come close to matching that of his predecessor and mentor, who remained virtually unassailable in the polls for a decade.

Cuts to public services are not popular, especially not cuts to health funding. A staggering 35,000 people in Dunedin, out of a population of 135,000, attended a protest last year against the downgrading of the city’s new hospital project.

The widely anticipated civil war between the Coalition parties has not emerged in the form of open conflict. After decades of hostility, ACT and NZ First appear to have called a truce. This has surprised some, given that Winston Peters and David Seymour have been throwing insults at each other for years. During the 2020 election campaign for instance, Peters claimed that if he ever '“faced Seymour in the ring,” he would “put him in an ambulance with a single punch.” Peters has had an actual altercation with an ACT MP in the past — in 1997, he is alleged to have physically assaulted John Banks. As recently as September 2023, Seymour boldly declared that his party was “not going to sit around the Cabinet table with this clown.” Today, both Peters and Seymour seem content to sit at either side of Luxon in Cabinet meetings.

Not only are the Coalition parties thus far refusing to publicly tear each other to shreds; on the contrary, they are doing the exact opposite. They are, in fact, working together closely and efficiently to advance their agenda at an alarming pace. The government’s use of parliamentary urgency in its first 100 days in office was unprecedented in the MMP era, as it moved swiftly to scrap many of Labour’s key reforms. The Coalition is fast-tracking its agenda through the House, heedless of opposition.

The so-called ‘coalition of chaos’ currently appears to be more unified, coordinated and ruthless than anyone anticipated. The Coalition is certainly taking a more transformational approach than the Ardern government did. It is crucial for the left to understand why. The right-wing parties, regardless of past animosity, are able to unite so effectively for a reason: these are organisations which are dedicated to representing the interests of the wealthy and powerful, and each of their leaders, ministers and MPs are directly accountable to the same big-money interests as each other.

Graeme Hart, who recently fell to second place on the NBR Rich List having been the richest man in Aotearoa for more than 20 years, is an example of one of the country’s wealthiest citizens supporting all three right-wing parties at once. During the 2023 election campaign, Hart gave a $400,000 donation to the National Party, $200,000 to ACT and $100,000 to NZ First. This $700,000 offering was part of a trend — the last election cycle saw previous records broken for big money donations in NZ politics. These donations overwhelmingly favoured the Coalition parties, and the difference was not made up in small donations. The right-wing parties received nearly three times as much in donations as the left-wing parties between 2021 and 2023.

According to RNZ, property investors were the biggest contributors to the right-wing parties in 2023. The finance sector was the second biggest contributor to ACT and the third biggest contributor to National and NZ First; manufacturing/retail were the National Party’s second biggest backers. It used to be the case that big business would donate to both National and Labour to win favour with whichever side won the election, but that was not the case in 2023; Labour received no donations from businesses in a pivotal election year.

These huge financial contributions were not charity. The nation’s wealthiest people made their donations for a reason. Business owners wanted the three right-wing parties to take power; they wanted a Coalition that would work together to advance the interests of their companies and their class.

The direct accountability of the right-wing parties to their super-rich donors creates a clear unity of purpose between them. Coalition negotiations may have taken weeks, but as soon as these talks were concluded, Seymour and Peters were able to cast aside their petty squabbles with ease.

A Corporate Ram-Raid

One immediate priority for the new government was to repeal the previous government’s Fair Pay Agreement legislation before its effects were realised. FPAs were designed to strengthen unions, giving workers more bargaining power and threatening to reduce the profits of the top 1% — it is no coincidence that the FPA repeal bill was rushed through before Christmas. The same blitzkrieg approach was used this year to roll back Labour’s changes to how pay equity claims can be made, snatching money from low-paid women workers to pay for increases in defence spending.

Some on the left believed that NZ First may act as a ‘moderating influence’ on the Coalition, whilst others see National as the party most committed to remaining in the ‘centre ground.’ All acknowledge ACT as the most right-wing element in this government. Yet it was NZ First deputy leader Shane Jones who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with National’s Chris Bishop and Simeon Brown to announce the 149 projects initially approved through the government’s hugely controversial Fast-track Bill. 12 of these projects involved companies and shareholders responsible for more than $500,000 in political donations to the three Coalition parties and their candidates. In May last year, Jones held an undisclosed dinner with mining companies seeking fast-track approval for their projects.

Meanwhile another NZ First Minister, Casey Costello, blatantly disregarded calls from public health experts to abandon tax cuts on heated tobacco products. Leaked documents from 2017 published by RNZ show that tobacco giant Phillip Morris specifically targeted their lobbying at NZ First, as well as the Taxpayers’ Union — which Costello used to be the chairperson of. The corporate capture of NZ First, and of the Coalition it is part of, is on display for all to see.

Workers’ rights, indigenous rights and environmental protections are being bulldozed out of the way to clear a path for corporations to plunder Aotearoa, intensifying the exploitation of its people and resources. Te Tiriti o Waitangi is under attack because it presents a barrier to this agenda driven by corporate greed.

David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill, the most egregious of the right-wing attacks on Te Tiriti, was voted down by National and NZ First at second reading. Yet ACT’s Regulatory Standards Bill presents a similar threat to indigenous rights; the RSB has been drafted with the same agenda of embedding libertarian values into our constitution, and the coalition agreements commit National and NZ First to vote for this bill. Meanwhile, the comprehensive review of all Treaty of Waitangi provisions in existing legislation, part of NZ First’s coalition deal, could also result in huge damage to the legislative gains made towards honouring Te Tiriti.

At the same time, the profits of multinational corporations are being prioritised over the future of humanity. In the midst of the global climate crisis, the fossil fuel industry is being given the green light to expand drilling across our land and oceans while the planet boils.

We already had a crisis of worsening inequality in this country; the Coalition is accelerating this process. Workers’ rights are under attack, public services are being decimated, and tax cuts are being handed out to the top 1%. The rich are getting even richer while robbing from the rest of us.

Advancing the interests of capitalist corporations and shareholders binds together this government with the strength of industrial-grade superglue. To wait for the governing parties to suddenly fall out with each other, for chaos to take hold and for the Coalition to be swept from office, is to let them completely off the hook. The richest and most powerful people in Aotearoa are benefitting handsomely from the radical restructuring of our society, and will continue to apply constant pressure to ministers and MPs to keep in line, keep the profits flowing, and stay united.

It is not internal disunity that will bring this Coalition crashing down. It is external pressure. Their biggest weakness is obvious: serving the interests of the top 1% above all else goes directly against the interests of the vast majority of society. The capitalist class and its political representatives must therefore constantly work hard to keep the 99% divided, because a united working class fighting for an alternative, for an economic system that operates in the interests of everyone, could bring capitalism crashing down.

The strategy of “divide-and-conquer” has always been central to capitalist governance. A united working class is unstoppable; but if the ruling class successfully sows division, turning white workers against working class people of colour, men against women, straight people against queer and transgender people, then the corporate elite can continue to rule.

This need for the ruling class to sow division amongst the 99% is especially acute during times of recession, austerity and general economic crisis. Support for the capitalist domination of society is always at its weakest when the system is driving down living standards for the vast majority of people. Right now, with the NZ economy in a deep malaise, unemployment rising and the Coalition implementing savage austerity policies, is the perfect time for the left to organise and fight back. That is why the super-rich and the right-wing parties that represent their interests have gone into overdrive in an attempt to divide Aotearoa.

The ruling class must create false solidarity between itself and sections of the working class. Pākehā elites must convince white working class people that they have more in common with wealthy white people than they do with Māori workers — when in reality, the precise opposite is true. That is why the Coalition parties have made anti-Māori racism central to their political project.

Right-Wing Populism in Aotearoa — a 20-Year Project

The Hollow Men, a documentary based on Nicky Hager’s bestselling 2006 book of the same name, points to the origins of the current-day Coalition’s strategy of divide-and-rule. The book and film chronicle the rise and fall of Don Brash as leader of the National Party between 2003 and 2006.

Brash began his tenure as Leader of the Opposition focused on advancing the free market economic policies he championed in his previous job as Governor of the Reserve Bank. These free market policies — abolishing the minimum wage, slashing taxes for the rich, privatising all remaining publicly owned assets — were deeply unpopular. Brash’s team concluded that he would never become Prime Minister if he based his campaign on arguing for reforms that would benefit nobody except corporations and the super-rich. Aotearoa was still reeling from the explosion of inequality that was caused by the neoliberal revolution of 1984-1993, and had elected Helen Clark’s Labour Government in 1999 on the promise that poverty and inequality would be reduced.

Brash’s team contacted right-wing political consultants overseas, one of whom was Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s key election strategist. Rove’s advice, which Brash followed closely, was to pivot the National Party’s public-facing campaigning away from unpopular economic policies, and to focus instead on “wedge issues.” This meant leading with slogans about being “tough on crime” and believing in “family values” and “One Law for All.” These slogans were thinly-veiled dog-whistles telling socially conservative voters that National intended to reverse policies which over the last 20 years had given more rights to Māori and the LGBT community — rights which had been won through decades of hard struggle. The objective was to weaponise a racist and homophobic backlash against social progress to build a voter coalition who would vote National in spite of the fact that the only section of this voter base whose interests Brash truly represented were the top 1%.

In January 2004, Brash delivered an address at the Orewa Rotary Club which remains infamous to this day. The message of the speech Brash gave was simple: Māori have “special privileges” in Aotearoa, and those privileges needed to be removed, and replaced by the doctrine of “One Law for All.” Never mind that every statistic, then as now, showed that Māori are disadvantaged in terms of housing, healthcare, wages, wealth, incarceration rates and life expectancy. Never mind that Brash’s entire political project was to protect and extend the “special privileges” of the super-rich — a group in which Pākehā have always been disproportionately represented. Brash instead placed the blame for the ills of society — the very free market society he had helped engineer at the Reserve Bank — squarely at the feet of Māori.

In the wake of the Orewa speech, National recorded an unprecedented surge in its polling. Having suffered its worst ever election result in 2002, when National won just 20.9% of the vote, the party had recovered slightly, but nowhere near enough to challenge for victory in 2005. At the end of 2003, National was polling at 28%, seventeen points behind Labour. Then in the first One News poll after the Orewa speech, National suddenly surged up to 45% — seven points ahead of Labour. Heavily assisted by the corporate media, Brash’s race-baiting proved to be hugely popular — far more than his economic policies ever were.

National ultimately failed to win the 2005 election. Even so, Brash did succeed in nearly doubling the party’s vote share, bringing National back up to 39.1% — only two points behind Labour. More importantly for the long term, Brash succeeded in spearheading a racist anti-Māori turn in Aotearoa’s politics, a backlash against the small but significant progress which the Lange and Bolger governments had made towards honouring Te Tiriti o Waitangi. In this, he was actively helped by the Clark Government, who passed the Foreshore and Seabed Act in late 2004, despite ferocious opposition from Māori.

The forthcoming publication of The Hollow Men was seen by many to be the catalyst for Brash to resign as National Party leader in 2006. The leaked emails to be revealed in the book were so damaging that Brash originally took out a High Court injunction to prevent the emails being published — but he relented after his resignation, and Hager’s book was released to the public. Brash was succeeded by John Key, who subsequently won the 2008 election.

The tactic of ‘divide-and-rule’ has been around since the beginning of political history. The specific form of divisive rhetoric which dominates the political landscape of Aotearoa in 2024 has its origins in the US Republican Party of the 1990s, and was taken up across the western world by mainstream conservatives such as Bush and Brash in the early 2000s.

In the decades since however, it has been the radical right that has benefitted overwhelmingly from this increasingly extreme scapegoating of minorities, not the mainstream centre-right. Establishment conservatives who employed this rhetoric paved the way for the rise of ‘right-wing populism’ in country after country in the wake of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, with demagogues such as Donald Trump and Nigel Farage taking advantage in the US and the UK, and outright fascists like France’s Marine Le Pen and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni gaining ground across Europe at an alarming rate.

Once-mainstream parties have survived by cynically moving to the populist right in order to take advantage. An example of this is the UK Conservative Party, which has been on a constant rightward trajectory since the 2016 Brexit Referendum. For many on the centre-right, it has become a question of whether to adapt to more extreme right-wing politics, or fade into irrelevance.

In his tenure as Prime Minister from 2008 to 2016, John Key governed with the support of Te Pāti Māori. The National Party moved away from Don Brash and “One Law For All,” bucking the 2010s trend of right-wing radicalisation, and remaining a moderate centre-right party for the time being. The Government of Key and Bill English even made enough progress on upholding Te Tiriti o Waitangi that Te Pāti Māori were satisfied — even if many Māori voters were not. No significant right-wing populist challenge emerged in that era to apply pressure on National to move rightwards.

The New Zealand Right Today

In the 2020s however, Aotearoa has not proven to be immune to the rise of right-wing populism. The anti-lockdown movement and campaigns against Co-Governance fuelled a radicalisation on the New Zealand right. Brash played a pivotal role in this rightward shift — after a brief failed stint as ACT Party leader in 2011, he went on in 2016 to found Hobson’s Pledge, an extreme right-wing lobby group which has been heavily influential in campaigns to nullify Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Brash, like Johnson, has embraced his role as a populist demagogue.

ACT was originally founded as a libertarian party. Roger Douglas, the chief architect of neoliberalism in Aotearoa, was one of the co-founders — he sought to advance his “unfinished” free market transformation of the country, but held to a thin veneer of progressivism on social issues. Throughout the 2010s, ACT looked to be a party on death’s door, holding on to its sole seat in Parliament across the 2011, 2014 and 2017 elections only thanks to strategic voting by National supporters in Epsom.

David Seymour has revived the ACT Party through his embrace of right-wing populism. In the 2020 election, the party came roaring back to life, winning a record 10 seats, followed three years later by 11 seats and its first ever coalition deal. Anti-Treaty rhetoric is now central to ACT’s platform, and this plays a dual role: through the Treaty Principles Bill, ACT both appeals to anti-Māori racism through the language of “One Law For All,” whilst at the same time taking aim at the threat Te Tiriti poses to its economic agenda as a barrier to further privatisation and deregulation.

Winston Peters was the “kingmaker” who held the balance of power following the 2017 election, and after negotiating with both parties, chose to make Ardern Prime Minister. This meant that Peters was Ardern’s Deputy when the Labour-NZ First Coalition created the Covid guidelines in 2020. In the election later that year, NZ First was unceremoniously booted out of Parliament, receiving its lowest ever share of the vote.

Peters has gone through many political reinventions in his decades-long career, but his latest transformation has been the most significant to date. NZ First has pivoted to hard-right stances on the Treaty and on trans rights, and has made hay campaigning against the very Covid policies it helped create. NZ First has always been a populist socially conservative party, but its underlying nationalism at times led the party to advocate centre-left positions on some issues. The party opposed the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) and long supported raising the minimum wage. Peters was kingmaker thrice between 1996 and 2017, and opted to govern with Labour two times out of three. He always claimed to act as a ‘moderating influence’ on governments led by either party.

But Peters has survived for so long in politics by always knowing which way the wind is blowing. His post-2020 transformation has pivoted the party he leads firmly away from any semblance of holding to the ‘centre ground,’ and towards right-wing populism. There is a reason why #3 on the party’s 2023 election list was the former chairperson of the free market Taxpayers Union; Casey Costello represents the new breed of radical right-wing MPs who now make up the NZ First caucus. Costello also happens to be a former spokesperson for none other than Hobson’s Pledge.

The animosity between NZ First and ACT in previous decades arose not only from personal dislike, but from clear ideological differences between the parties. NZ First was socially conservative, but protectionist on economic policy; ACT had liberal positions on some social issues, but was committed first and foremost to a globalised free market economy. NZ First sought to appeal to disaffected working class voters and retirees, particularly in the regions; the base of the ACT Party has always been small business owners and the wealthiest sections of the middle class.

Perhaps an explanation for why the two parties are now able to work together so effectively is that both are now more committed to right-wing populism than they are to their foundational philosophies. NZ First has embraced the free market agenda of big-money donors, whilst ACT has embraced authoritarianism and cast aside much of its always-shaky commitment to social liberalism. Peters and Seymour can now stand side-by-side in an unholy-if-uneasy alliance within the Coalition.

The Luxon-era National Party remains the largest and most moderate force within the Coalition. Nonetheless, it has adopted right-wing populist elements in its rhetoric and policies. National led its 2023 campaign with law-and-order dog-whistles about being “tough on crime,” and the government has matched this rhetoric with action, with prison expansions included in the list of projects to be fast-tracked. The colonial carceral system imprisons Māori at a hugely disproportionate rate — we know that more prisons means more Māori behind bars.

Another key populist element in National’s programme has been its opposition to the very Co-Governance policies embraced by the Key Government. Christopher Finlayson, who was Minister for Treaty Negotiations from 2008 to 2017, has been fiercely critical of the populist misrepresentations of Co-Governance that his party has since embraced.

The Coalition has scrapped the Māori Health Authority, and is reverting Te Reo names for government agencies back to English. Just two more of the many examples of the Coalition leading a backlash against decades of hard-won gains for Māori. Luxon has allowed ACT and NZ First to drag his party well to the right of where National stood in the 2010s; the Prime Minister is directly complicit in his government’s populist turn.

21 years after the Orewa speech, right-wing populism has infested the New Zealand right. Likewise, Brash’s free market economic agenda has been embraced by the Coalition. The Key Government’s economic policies, like its social policies, were fairly moderate. Yes, benefit sanctions were imposed, services were underfunded, state assets were partially privatised, tax cuts were handed out to the rich, and the TPPA was signed. But the austerity imposed by Finance Minister Bill English was mild compared to the National Government of the 1990s, let alone to the savage cuts being implemented across Europe at that time.

Today, Nicola Willis is imposing harsh austerity measures on the public sector. ACT deputy leader Brooke van Velden is attacking workers’ rights. Jones, Bishop and Brown are unleashing environmental havoc with their Fast-track Bill. If Brash, the Taxpayers’ Union and the ACT Party had their way, this agenda of austerity, deregulation, and the corporate takeover of the country would go even further and faster.

The rise of right-wing populism in Aotearoa represents a clear and present threat to Māori, and to the working class as a whole. Across Europe and America, the evidence is abundant that, once this dangerous form of politics emerges, it is here to stay, and only grows more extreme over time. Right now, it is established right-wing politicians like Brash, Seymour, Peters, and to a lesser extent the National Party leadership who have cynically embraced this populist approach; but it is entirely possible that a genuine far-right party or leader will emerge at some point in the next decade or two, presenting a danger orders of magnitude greater than the current Coalition.

Right-wing populism feeds off the decay of a capitalist system in crisis, and its failure to deliver decent living standards for working class people. Centrist politics-as-usual has proven utterly incapable of dealing with the threat posed by the radical right, as the status quo continues to grow ever more unappealing to the majority of society. The only way to beat right-wing populism once and for all is to expose its true purpose — to protect the wealth and power of the super-rich — and to build a movement for genuine, transformational change in the interests of the many, not the few.

We Need a Socialist Alternative

Austerity and right-wing populism will never be defeated if the left sits back and hopes that the Coalition parties will simply tear each other apart. They are united around advancing the interests of the capitalist class, and are determined to divide their opponents. They will stop at nothing to turn Pākehā against Māori, whilst filling the pockets of their wealthy donors.

The Coalition parties do not care about their obligations under international law to uphold indigenous rights; they do not care about the existential threat to humanity posed by the climate crisis; they do not care about worsening poverty, inequality and hardship. They do not care how many furious citizens sign petitions or make submissions. All that matters to this government is increasing the profits of the capitalists who put them in power and will stop at nothing to keep them in power.

The right-wing parties have chosen this moment to sow racism and division for a reason — because the economy is in crisis, and austerity is making life worse for the vast majority. That means the system is weak. Now is the moment to do what the ruling class fears most: the socialist left must build a movement for an alternative economic system that serves the interests of the many, not the few. We must counter the Coalition’s austerity agenda with a real vision for change.

The fight for an alternative economic system must base itself first and foremost on popular demands that would take wealth and power away from the top 1%, and give it back to the people. For far too long, workers have worked long hours for low wages; housing has been unaffordable for far too many people; the cost-of-living has kept rising; public services have been crumbling into disrepair; the tax system has made the poor pay far too much while the super-rich pay less than the average household; and poverty and homelessness have been a stain on our dignity as a society. Successive Labour governments have failed to address these crises.

Common-sense reforms to immediately tackle these systemic issues must be the starting point of a movement for change. It is the greed of the super-rich that is responsible for society’s ills. We can live in a world where decent, affordable housing, universal public services provided free at the point of use, well-paying jobs, and guaranteed livable incomes for those unable to work, are human rights. But such a world can only be created through widespread public ownership, stronger trade unions, and a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people.

We need a socialist vision to truly inspire people — not just to fight back against the Coalition, but to fight for a better world. Right now, there is a widespread feeling that the Labour leadership has no vision and no alternative. The Coalition is not necessarily popular — the right-wing parties are simply less unpopular than the Opposition.

The Labour Party will not embrace radical policies of its own volition. Only an organised mass movement fighting against austerity and for a new economic system will force Labour to either deliver real change, or make way for a real alternative to emerge.

Such a movement is yet to emerge, and will not emerge without building dedicated socialist organisations. Campaigns dedicated to the fight for economic justice must be built and strengthened. Links must be built between the movement for economic justice and the movements to defend both Te Tiriti o Waitangi and Papatūānuku from the government’s attacks.

The Green Party and Te Pāti Māori are both advocating progressive policies and visions, putting Labour under pressure from its left flank. But there remain concerns about either party’s ability to break out of minor party status. Neither party is a socialist party; neither party is based on the power of the organised working class.

While a vote for the Greens or TPM over Labour in 2026 will be a vote for a more left-wing government, many socialists believe that we need a party based in class struggle and fundamental opposition to capitalism to lead the fight for real change. Leaders such as Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France and Zohran Mamdani in New York City have shown how the socialist left can, in coalition with other progressive forces, lead the struggle against both the centrist establishment and the radicalising right.

The trade union movement will always play a central role in the struggle for an alternative economic system, and all those committed to economic justice must participate in their unions if they can. However, the defensive role that unions play within the capitalist economy must be understood and respected. If unions are sometimes more politically conservative than the radical left would hope for, that is for understandable reasons — unions exist to bargain for the best deal their members can get under the current system.

While unions are slow to move, when they do move they do so with the enormous power of the organised working class behind them. Convincing the unions of the need for a more radical approach is essential over the medium-to-long term. Key trade unions moving to the left is what helped get Jeremy Corbyn elected Labour Party leader in the UK. But it will be a slower process than building new movements and organisations. It will require a pragmatic and logical case that the least risky way forward for a union movement scarred by decades of defeat and retreat is to abandon caution and go on the offensive.

Over the last nine years, union density has increased among workers aged 15-44, but stagnated among older age groups. This increase in younger workers joining unions — workers for whom the catastrophic defeats of the 1980s and 1990s are a vague memory at most — may help give new fighting energy to the labour movement in Aotearoa.

Yet while a campaign to change the system altogether must have union members at its core, it is unlikely to be driven in the early stages by union leaders who are necessarily more risk-averse than political activists. Unions are the shield of the working class. The labour movement needs both a sword and a shield in order to fight back.

The current Coalition is demonstrating how easy it is for the ruling class to unite around their shared interests. All they have to do is gather a small group of people representing a few major corporations around a common programme to enrich themselves and their class, then tell the right-wing politicians what to do. Building a united working class movement is so much harder. We are many, they are few — and building solidarity across the many is a huge and complex task. There are millions of people in Aotearoa and billions across the world who would benefit from the overthrow of the current system, but it is impossible to unite every single one of them.

Yet when enough people stand together to fight for a better world, there is nothing we cannot accomplish. The time is right to organise — capitalism is in crisis, and the Coalition’s divisive and unpopular agenda is providing ample opportunity for resistance to emerge. If the left is able to articulate a compelling alternative to the status quo, we have the opportunity to build an unstoppable movement. We must not let this opportunity go to waste.

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Welcome to my Substack! Thanks for reading.

My name is Elliot Crossan, and I am a socialist writer and activist based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. I am the Chair of System Change Aotearoa, an ecosocialist campaign group. You can check out our website here.

I am a freelance writer, and I intend to make all posts on this Substack free. The goal of my writing is to help bring about political change — to contribute to the movement for workers’ rights, indigenous rights and climate justice. If you are able to support me financially, any contribution would be greatly appreciated — but I have no plans to publish anything behind a paywall.

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Read more:

• It Is Not Enough Only to Change the Government

• Roger Douglas Has a Lesson for the Left

• What Is to Be Done? Taking the Fight to the Coalition in 2025

• Is NZ as Stable as Luxon Claims?

Change the government. This is currently the unanimous goal of trade union leaders, left-wing politicians and progressive NGOs. At rallies, activist meetings and party conferences, everyone can agree: this Coalition must fall.

It’s not hard to see why. The three-party National-ACT-New Zealand First Coalition constitutes the most right-wing government this country has endured in three decades. Christopher Luxon was appointed Prime Minister less than two years ago; his government wasted no time in tearing up the legacy of its predecessors. Progressive reforms won through years of campaigning, from Fair Pay Agreements to the ban on new offshore oil and gas drilling, went up in smoke.

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The Coalition has pursued a harsh austerity agenda in the midst of an economic crisis. Already-struggling public services have been cut to the bone; public servants have been laid off amidst already-rising unemployment; benefit sanctions have increased and people have been thrown out of emergency housing and into the streets. The health system is being starved of funding and the previous government’s pay equity scheme has been gutted in order to fund tax cuts for the rich and more money for prisons and defence. The economy has faltered, despite the government’s attempts to power a new economic boom by opening new fossil fuel projects in defiance of international climate commitments.

At the same time, David Seymour has gone out of his way to provoke an incendiary debate about Te Tiriti o Waitangi. ACT’s rejected Treaty Principles Bill and the subsequent Regulatory Standards Bill seek to remove indigenous rights from the bedrock of our governing structures and replace them with libertarian ideology which prioritises corporate interests over all else.

The left is united in our desire to see Luxon ousted and Winston Peters sent into long-overdue retirement. We all want to see the mocking grin wiped off Seymour’s face. Everyone is against the Coalition’s agenda, and everyone wants to see change. What this change might look like is harder to say.

The next election is now a little over a year away. Anything could happen in 2026; the polls are neck-and-neck. What if our wish is granted? What happens if we do change the government?

The Centre Cannot Hold

There is a void opening up at the heart of New Zealand politics. The country which stood a decade ago as a beacon of stability against the backdrop of global upheaval is now experiencing the same trends we have witnessed overseas. Society is fragmenting as politics on both the left and the right grows more angry, more polarised — more open for contestation. The defenders of the status quo, the ‘centre ground’ which held an iron grip on political discourse at the turn of the century, are feeling the ground beneath their feet begin to shake.

In the mid-2010s, John Key and Bill English led one of the most popular governments in the developed world. His centre-right government held firm as the shockwaves of the Global Financial Crisis and the subsequent European Debt Crisis fragmented politics in the US and Western Europe. Trump was elected President; far-right parties surged in France, Germany, Italy; Britain voted for Brexit.

Sanders ran Clinton close in the Democratic Primary; Corbyn was elected UK Labour leader; radical left-wing parties in Greece, Spain, France and elsewhere threatened to topple the traditional parties of the centre-left. Not here.

2017 saw Jacinda Ardern defeat the National government with the help of NZ First and the Greens. Ardern promised “transformational change” when first elected, yet in practice she led a standard incrementalist centre-left government. She was popular nonetheless as the new decade began, and her leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic earned her an historic landslide victory in 2020. Ardern faced no sustained challenge from her left, and it looked like the centre ground in Aotearoa was holding firm.

Few heeded the lessons we should have been learning from overseas:

One: that growing inequality was the primary force which in country after country was eroding support for the centre ground. Working people across the developed world had spent decades watching the rich get richer as their living standards stagnated. The combination of the economic shocks of 2007-2011 and the austerity that followed was the final straw. The anger and resentment didn’t come from nowhere: the notion that elites were out of touch with public opinion, that peoples’ lives were getting harder while governments actively made the situation worse, was entirely justified.

Given that Aotearoa has had high levels of income and wealth inequality since the neoliberal revolution of 1984-1993, this necessarily meant that it was only a matter of time before the centre started to collapse here. The pandemic years of 2020-2021 saw another record increase in wealth inequality on Labour’s watch.

Two: that when the public mood changes, the tide can turn very rapidly. And it did.

The 2023 Election

Ardern stepped down at the beginning of 2023. Chris Hipkins took over as Prime Minister and immediately shifted Labour further to the right, scrapping several policies in the process. In the lead up to the election, Hipkins ruled out any taxes on wealth or capital gains, despite polls showing that a majority of voters supported both policies.

An IRD report commissioned by David Parker before the 2023 budget revealed that the 311 richest families in the country held between them a combined net wealth of $85 billion — 276 times more than the average Kiwi household — and that the average tax rate of the wealthiest households in the country is less than half the rate paid by most New Zealanders. Tackling this unjust tax system and the inequality it creates will be unavoidable for any government intending to meaningfully transform Aotearoa in the interests of working people.

Unlike Ardern, Hipkins did not even pretend to be interested in delivering transformative change. At the election, the government suffered a devastating defeat. Labour lost nearly half of its vote, breaking multiple records in the process: most votes ever lost by the Labour Party (down 676,310); biggest ever swing between the two parties (18.2% swing to National); largest loss of vote share by any political party in either New Zealand or Australia (down 23.1%). It was the party’s second worst defeat since the 1920s, with a vote share of 26.9% putting it only marginally ahead of the 2014 nadir of 25.1% under the much-maligned leadership of David Cunliffe.

Labour lost votes to both its right and its left. The Green Party won 15 seats, one more than its previous record of 14 achieved in both 2011 and 2014. Te Pāti Māori likewise achieved its best ever result, winning 6 of the 7 Māori electorates; the party that had been part of John Key’s governing coalition in the 2010s had moved firmly to the left. This meant 21 seats for parties to the left of Labour, breaking the previous record of 17 set when the Alliance won 10 and the Greens won 7 in 1999.

The National Party had won, but it had done so with just 38.1% of the vote — fewer votes than it had achieved in the defeats of 2005 (39.1%) or 2017 (44.5%). This meant the party had to form a coalition with both the ACT Party and New Zealand First. The combined vote share for National and Labour in 2023 fell to 65%, close to the historic low of 62% recorded in both 1996 and 2002.

ACT won 11 seats, up from its previous best result of 10 seats last election. No party to the right of National had ever won this many seats before. NZ First now also stood on National’s right flank; Winston Peters had spent years as a ‘kingmaker’ who campaigned mostly in the centre ground, but in the wake of his party’s worst ever result in 2020 he pivoted to a right-wing populist platform and ruled out working with Labour. While 8 seats for NZ First was less than half the party’s 1996 record of 17, it still marked a major recovery.

2023 was the first election in which it was clear that politics in Aotearoa had begun to fragment. In the wake of the pandemic, in the midst of the cost-of-living crisis, the recession and the housing market crash, the centre is losing its grip on the country, and forces are arising on the right and the left. The trend of growing polarisation overseas has come here, and it has come here to stay — all evidence abroad says that this polarisation will only intensify in coming years.

The New Reality

As cracks began to appear in the existing consensus, the right-wing parties rapidly adapted. ACT and NZ First are pulling National to the right, and the Coalition is thus using this moment of crisis to rapidly advance its agenda.

If the fragmenting of politics is caused by increasing inequality, then surely the Coalition, whose policies are accelerating this process, will be voted out in a landslide defeat at the next election?

There are two reasons we cannot be confident of this outcome:

Firstly, the right has learned from overseas experiences how to adapt to the fragmentation of politics and the climate of anger and anti-elite sentiment. It is no coincidence that Seymour and Peters are aggressively pushing ‘culture war’ issues and using the language of ‘anti-woke.’ The aim is to ensure that the political debate is shifted away from questions of austerity and inequality as much as possible.

The right-wing parties will continue to adapt to the changing terrain of politics. These parties, and the ecosystem of think tanks and lobby groups which support them, will always be better funded and resourced than the left. Their task is to divide-and-rule.

Secondly: it is unclear if Labour has any policy positions at all right now, let alone transformative solutions to the crisis our society is experiencing.

The Coalition is not popular. Most polls show that voters disapprove of Luxon and believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. Yet National and Luxon still hold razor-thin leads over Labour and Hipkins, and the combined polling averages show the three opposition parties trailing the Coalition by a small margin (see below).

Anger at inequality and elites is reflected in surveys. The 2025 Acumen Edelman Trust Barometer found that 67% of New Zealanders hold a sense of grievance against business, government and the rich, compared to 62% of Australians and 59% of Americans. Just 19% of New Zealanders believe that the next generation will be better off than they are today. 69% of respondents to a report on Social Cohesion in New Zealand by the Helen Clark Foundation agreed that the gap between the rich and the poor is too high. 11% of respondents believe that our system of government should be entirely replaced; 27% believe that major change is needed, 37% favour minor changes, while just 17% agree that “the system of government works fine.”

The Labour Party appears totally disinterested in capitalising on this sentiment. Sure, Hipkins and his frontbench want to change the government. They rail against Coalition incompetence, against Luxon and Finance Minister Nicola Willis’ obvious failure to help people struggling through the cost-of-living crisis. But when asked about what Labour will do in government, the party goes conspicuously silent.

Labour appears to be pursuing the strategy that Australian Labor leader Anthony Albanese used to win the 2022 election — a “small target” campaign. This involves putting forward as few policies as possible, creating the smallest possible set of issues for your opponents to attack you on. It’s a strategy based on the unpopularity of an incumbent government. The problem is that whilst the Coalition is unpopular, so is the New Zealand Labour Party.

The Australian economy is in better health than ours. Wages are higher and conditions are generally better for workers — hence why so many young Kiwis are moving to Sydney and Melbourne. Australia remains, amongst the developed world, a bastion of political stability and relative economic prosperity.

Aotearoa can no longer say the same. The Helen Clark Foundation noted a growing divergence in social attitudes between Australians and Kiwis. New Zealanders are increasingly alienated by our broken economic model. As a result, societal trends are now heading in the same direction as the US and western Europe.

A “small target” campaign is not going to appeal to voters in the current climate. The economic system is not delivering for working people, and they want to hear what the different parties are going to do to fix it. They will not accept Hipkins simply stating that Labour will make things better without saying how. Vague promises of a focus on “jobs, health and homes” are not enough.

The 2026 election is currently poised to be very close. It is possible that the economic situation will worsen and Hipkins will coast back into office having offered very little. There will be no rhetoric of “transformational change,” like what was promised and never delivered by Ardern. Perhaps Labour will offer a revenue-neutral capital gains tax offset by income tax cuts; means-tested dental care; more funding for health, education, police and prisons; a higher minimum wage.

Labour will reverse the most high-profile and unpopular Coalition policies. But Hipkins has criticised the government for repealing so many of its predecessors’ policies, and claimed that an incoming Labour government will not do the same. This one-sided commitment to ‘bipartisanship’ is nothing more than unilateral disarmament.

It also fits neatly into the pattern we have seen over the last 40 years. Radical right-wing governments, such as the free market reformers of the 1984-1990 Rogernomics era and the Ruthanasia that followed in the 1990s, are followed by moderate centre-left governments which refuse to fundamentally overturn the policies of their predecessors. Neoliberal policies implemented at lightning speed lead to significant increases in poverty and inequality, yet Labour governments — under the leadership of Clark, Ardern and Hipkins — leave most or all of these reforms intact. Zoom out, and you will see a constant trend of politics moving right, the rich getting richer and the working class getting poorer, with no end in sight.

A moderate, incrementalist repeat of the Clark and Ardern governments is the best-case scenario we can expect next time Labour is in power. The other possibility is worse: that Hipkins will follow the example of UK Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer, or his counterparts in much of Europe, and implement austerity in a direct betrayal of his own supporters.

This scenario is contingent on the economic situation. In times of high economic growth, centre-left governments are able to deliver reforms such as increased social spending and a strengthening of workers’ rights in order to benefit their supporters and smooth over capitalism’s roughest edges. During times of economic crisis however, with rising unemployment and falling government revenue, the logic of the capitalist system dictates that governments must reduce spending. Alarm bells are sounded by Treasury officials, bankers and economists, echoed by uncritical media commentators, about “black holes” in the public finances and the need for “belt-tightening.” No matter that it is never the rich who are made to tighten their belts.

These are the economic pressures which produced the Fourth Labour Government in Aotearoa, and the fire-sale of privatisation and deregulation it unleashed. These pressures led the Starmer government in the UK to plummet in popularity almost immediately following its July 2024 election victory; no one voted Labour knowing that the new government would cut winter fuel payments for pensioners and benefits for disabled people. The same pressures in France sent Socialist President François Hollande down in flames along with his entire party after he promised to end austerity only to continue cutting spending once in office. The same will happen here if Labour is elected in the midst of a prolonged recession.

Capitalism relies upon sustained economic growth to deliver just enough wealth to just enough people in order that the fundamental inequality inherent in the system goes unchallenged. When growth dries up in moments of economic crisis, politics suddenly becomes zero-sum. Either the working class or the capitalist class must suffer. In the era of global oligarchy we are currently in, it is invariably the workers who are made to pay.

In a zero-sum scenario, wealth redistribution is the only way that working class living standards will rise. Since the 1980s, we have been experiencing upwards redistribution of wealth, where the rich keep getting richer and everyone else is made to pay. This trend is felt most acutely during times of crisis, where living standards have to fall for someone, and it’s never the rich who suffer.

Hipkins does not speak in the language of zero-sum politics; he does not speak about winners and losers. In his 2025 State of the Nation speech, delivered to the Auckland Chamber of Commerce and followed by a Q&A hosted by former National Party leader Simon Bridges, Hipkins articulated a vision of government working in partnership with businesses and unions to grow the economy and find solutions to the challenges we face. He acknowledged that the neoliberal economic model has created huge inequality over the last 40 years, and that the problems caused by that inequality are “coming to a head,” but his solution is simply for everyone to get along under Labour’s wise leadership. It is hopelessly naïve.

As things currently stand, the rich keep winning and everyone else keeps losing. Under a programme of wealth redistribution on the scale necessary to tackle the structural inequality in our society, the rich will lose out and everyone else will benefit. Hipkins does not speak in these terms, either because he does not comprehend the scale of the crisis; or because he believes in magical solutions which ignore the class conflict that will be necessary to solve it; or because he understands the crisis, understands the radical solutions that are necessary, has no intention of enacting these solutions, and is simply trying to win votes by pretending the problem will fix itself if Labour wins.

The next Labour government will face either one of two scenarios. Either there will be a miraculous economic boom, and Hipkins may be able to get away with merely tinkering around the edges of a broken system for a time. Or the economy will continue to stagnate, following the trend of the entire developed world stagnating since 2008, and Labour’s refusal to redistribute wealth and deliver anything meaningful to its working class supporters will cause widespread feelings of anger and betrayal.

Either way, whether the crisis is immediate or deferred, a political energy will be produced that will eventually go somewhere. The inequality crisis is not going anywhere, it is deepening, and it is eroding the foundations of our society and polarising our political system just as has happened in most of the western world. Discontent is growing, and increasing numbers of people are searching for alternatives.

Yes, everyone on the left believes we need to change the government. But that message alone is woefully inadequate. To stop our society from fragmenting, to address the anger that is festering and to stop the rise of an increasingly radical right, we must stop the upwards redistribution of wealth and send it into reverse.

Wealth must be redistributed, the government must change, and the economic system must change. There is no other progressive alternative.

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Welcome to my Substack! Thanks for reading.

My name is Elliot Crossan, and I am a socialist writer and activist based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. I am the Chair of System Change Aotearoa, an ecosocialist campaign group. You can check out our website here.

I am a freelance writer, and I intend to make all posts on this Substack free. The goal of my writing is to help bring about political change — to contribute to the movement for workers’ rights, indigenous rights and climate justice. If you are able to support me financially, any contribution would be greatly appreciated — but I have no plans to publish anything behind a paywall.

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Read more:

• Is a Left-Wing Leadership of the NZ Labour Party Possible?

• Should Socialists Join the Labour Party? Interview with Justine Sachs

• Roger Douglas Has a Lesson for the Left

• What Is to Be Done? Taking the Fight to the Coalition in 2025

There are no words strong enough to condemn the horror that is currently unfolding in Palestine.

The state of Israel has imposed a months-long blockade on humanitarian aid entering the Gaza Strip. Gaza had already been teetering on the brink of famine since October 7. Last week, the UN-backed IPC agency told the world that “the worst-case scenario of famine is now unfolding in the Gaza Strip.” Millions will soon die if unrestricted aid is not allowed through the Israeli blockade. Even if immediate humanitarian relief is allowed into Gaza tomorrow, many will still carry irreversible damage to their bodies as a result of prolonged starvation.

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In response to backlash in May, the Israeli and US governments launched the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an organisation which has delivered a paltry amount of aid while routinely shooting Palestinians desperate for food. More than a thousand civilians have been killed while waiting in line.

International condemnation of the man-made famine has continued to grow since the GHF was established. In late July, Israel began airdropping food into Gaza — a dehumanising practice — and has created limited corridors to allow some aid to enter.

Aid groups have condemned these moves as woefully inadequate amidst the growing famine. Bushra Khalidi, Oxfam’s policy lead, describes the measures as token gestures. “They’re theatrics, they’re designed from my perspective to deflect scrutiny. We’re being blocked and delayed at every turn.” Previously, aid workers crossing the border have reported that Israel is confiscating from them any items that may be used to alleviate the crisis, including baby formula.

Now Israel’s Security Cabinet has approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to send several IDF divisions in to occupy Gaza. The Guardian reports that the plan “would mean sending ground troops into the few areas of the strip that have not been totally destroyed, roughly 25% of the territory where many of its 2 million people have sought refuge.” This would represent a further escalation by Israel, in yet another breach of the peace negotiations which Netanyahu clearly has no interest in abiding by, and will result in countless more Palestinian deaths.

Meanwhile, incidents of settler violence are escalating in the West Bank. Awdah Hathaleen, an activist and filmmaker who helped create the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, was shot in the chest by an Israeli settler on Monday last week.

International human rights groups have long since labelled Israel’s campaign in Gaza as a genocide. Even leading Israeli human rights organisations have now admitted this to be the case. The horrific images coming out of Gaza are indistinguishable from pictures of Nazi concentration camps; then as now, a campaign of extermination is being waged against an ethnic group.

This genocide is not a response to the October 7 attacks. It is the logical conclusion of a project of ethnic cleansing that began with the event known in Arabic as the Nakba (the Catastrophe) in 1948, when 750,000 Palestinians were violently expelled from their lands to make way for the foundation of the state of Israel.

Zionist ideology claims that the Jewish people have a God-given right to the land in which Palestinian Arabs have lived for centuries — and that they have the right to claim it by force. Israel is a settler-colonial state built on stolen land; it is an ethnostate, one that cannot tolerate the existence of a majority-Arab population, and which must therefore ethnically cleanse Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, Jerusalem and the West Bank. Genocide is the only logical conclusion of Zionist ideology. October 7 merely gave the Netanyahu government the excuse to accelerate this project of ethnic cleansing which has been in progress for nearly eight decades.

A Reckoning

80 years ago, as Europe was liberated from the Nazis, the scale and horror of the Holocaust was revealed to the world. Six million Jews had been killed, along with several million others including Slavs, Romani, LGBT and disabled people, and activists and leaders from trade unions and left-wing political parties. 1945 and the years that followed saw humanity struggle to reckon with the abominable crimes committed by a fascist regime intent on exterminating all those it deemed to be enemies.

The humanitarian laws and conventions that the nations of the world are supposed to uphold to this day were created to prevent such a nightmare from ever occurring in the future. There was a reckoning with fascism. There was a reckoning with the widespread antisemitism which led Hitler’s regime to brand the Jewish people as subhuman before embarking upon its campaign of extermination. The world cried out: Never Again.

This time, it will come as no shock when the full scale of Israel’s cruelty and murder is revealed to the world. Palestinians have live streamed the crimes of the IDF every day for nearly two years. IDF soldiers have proudly posed for pictures amongst the rubble of Gaza.

The same reckoning must happen again today. In 2025, we must reckon with the fascist ideology of Zionism which dominates Israeli society. We must reckon with the Islamophobia which has underpinned Western intervention in the Middle East for a quarter of a century, from Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya to Yemen. We must reckon with the rhetoric of dehumanisation which frames refugees fleeing to Western countries as a “swarm” or a “horde” of “illegal aliens.” The rhetoric which led the Christchurch shooter to kill 51 Muslims and injure 89 at their place of worship in this country just six years ago. The rhetoric which the state of Israel is taking to its logical conclusion with its genocide of the Palestinian people.

Complicit Western Leaders Begin to Change Their Tune

“One day, everyone will always have been against this.”

Omar El Akkad’s prophecy is playing out in front of our eyes. One by one, as the man-made famine in Gaza enters its final stages, Western journalists and politicians are beginning to speak out against Israel’s actions, calling for urgent measures to alleviate the humanitarian catastrophe.

Governments, politicians and media organisations who are speaking out now after giving Israel cover for 22 months of genocide made a choice. They knew precisely what Israel was doing. They justified atrocity after atrocity, yet now claim that Israel has gone “too far.” Only now, as horrific images of starving children roll in and the backlash becomes overwhelming, are they choosing to switch gears and denounce the famine they helped create.

Yesterday, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz responded to Netanyahu’s plan to further escalate the war by halting German arms exports to Israel. However, this export ban will only cover weapons “that could be used in Gaza.” Keir Starmer’s government in the UK announced a similar partial arms embargo in the wake of Labour’s election victory last year — yet Al Jazeera reported in May that thousands of munitions have been sent to Israel since this announcement. Even so, Merz’s decision will have more impact — 30% of Israel’s weapons between 2019 and 2023 came from Germany, making Germany by far the largest exporter of weapons to Israel other than the United States.

Every Western leader who gave weapons to Israel over the last 22 months — Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Olaf Scholz, Rishi Sunak, Merz, Starmer and others — made a choice. A choice to directly arm a state committing the worst crime of which humanity is capable. The deaths of hundreds of thousands, and the suffering of two million people, is on their hands.

In a just world, every single one of these people would join Israeli government and military officials at the Hague. Yet just as Bush administration officials and members of the Blair government continue to live privileged lives to this day after their illegal invasion of Iraq, it is entirely possible that Western leaders will once again escape justice for their crimes. It is up to social movements and civil society to demand full and transparent public inquiries into the role Western governments have played in facilitating Israel’s genocide. All those found to be complicit in allowing these horrors to take place must be prosecuted for flagrant breaches of the international framework of human rights created 80 years ago.

Every world leader who maintained friendly relations with Israel, equivocating on the extent of Netanyahu’s crimes, making excuses, up to and including those who made empty calls for a ceasefire whilst refusing to use any tool available to them to put actual pressure on Israel to halt the genocide, is complicit. Christopher Luxon and Winston Peters are complicit.

Journalists who parroted Israeli talking points, who cast doubt on credible reports that the IDF was deliberately targeting hospitals with its bombs, who had more outrage for musicians Kneecap and Bob Vylan than for an army committing crimes against humanity, and who littered every interview with the constant refrain do you condemn Hamas? Do you condemn Hamas? Do you condemn Hamas? They knew better. They had the historic responsibility to tell the world that the crime of crimes was unfolding in Palestine and that Western governments were complicit. They failed.

Members of the United Nations have a legal obligation to do everything in their power to prevent genocide. This means putting maximum diplomatic and economic pressure on rogue states through sanctions, and it means military intervention where possible. The only acceptable position for any political leader with an ounce of humanity was to push urgently for maximum sanctions on Israel once the war of extermination began in 2023.

To every politician and every journalist who failed to do everything in their power to prevent the Gaza genocide: your actions and choices will never be forgotten or forgiven.

Palestinian Statehood

Last week, the New Zealand government joined 14 other countries including France, Australia and Canada in signing a joint statement which calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, expresses “grave concerns” about the humanitarian situation, and reiterates a commitment to recognising a Palestinian state as part of a two-state solution. Crucially, this would be a demilitarised state, and Hamas would be disarmed and excluded from being part of governance.

As one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, France was the most powerful signatory to this letter. French President Emmanuel Macron has announced his intention to formally recognise the state of Palestine at the UN General Assembly in September. This begs the question: why not recognise the state of Palestine with immediate effect? Why wait until September? How many more innocent men, women and children will Israel murder in cold blood before the next meeting of the General Assembly?

The United Kingdom, another member of the Security Council, did not sign this statement. Instead, Starmer threatened to recognise a Palestinian state in September unless Israel agrees to a ceasefire and commits to a long-term peace process. Starmer is making recognition of a Palestinian state conditional; he is using the basic, inalienable right of Palestinians to their own state as leverage when calling on Israel to do the absolute bare minimum. The British Prime Minister — a former human rights lawyer — is making a mockery of human rights.

The current status quo in the region is a one-state solution. For decades, Israel has been doing everything in its power to prevent the implementation of a two-state solution so that, through conquest and ethnic cleansing, it can take control of the entire region of “Greater Israel” and settle it with a Jewish-majority population. Israel’s genocide in Gaza, expansion of settlements in the West Bank and illegal occupation of the Golan Heights are all part of this project to force a one-state solution into reality. Israel is armed to the teeth by the West, has repeatedly attacked its neighbours in Lebanon, Syria and Iran, and — unlike any of its neighbours — has a nuclear arsenal.

To call for a demilitarised Palestinian state and the disarming of Hamas in this context is empty rhetoric which gives cover to Israel. Even if Israel agrees to allow a demilitarised Palestinian state — which will only happen as a result of overwhelming pressure from the rest of the world — Israel will continue to hold all of the power. It will continue its practices of Apartheid and ethnic cleansing. If the current war of extermination is halted by a ceasefire, Israel will continue the long, slow genocidal campaign it has been waging since long before October 7.

The Palestinian resistance will not stop fighting back. Hamas has remained consistent: it will not disarm itself until an “independent, fully sovereign Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital” is established. Israel claims it is attempting to eradicate Hamas — yet even if it were to succeed in this goal, all it will do is create the conditions for a new resistance group to emerge. Slaughtering civilians en masse is the most effective way to radicalise a population against you. Calling for the victims of genocide to put down their guns while allowing the perpetrators of genocide to get away scot-free is simply a fantasy.

The only path forward for anyone interested in peace and justice is the creation of a single secular democratic state from the river to the sea, where Arabs, Jews and all other ethnic and religious groups can live together free from Apartheid. Palestinians whose land has been stolen must be guaranteed the right of return.

This will not be easy. The scars of the last 77 years will last for centuries, and in particular the scars of the 1948 Nakba and the ongoing genocide will make peace difficult and harmony impossible for a very long time. International peacekeepers from neutral nations will be necessary to protect the Palestinian population from those who have oppressed them for decades.

The Western nations which bear responsibility for the genocide owe billions in reparations to the people of Gaza to finance the reconstruction. It will take a generation to rebuild.

This is the difficult, fragile future that the Palestinian liberation movement is fighting for. Anything short of this future is a non-starter. The Apartheid ethnostate of Israel must be torn down for this future to succeed. Such an eventuality is nowhere near the lips of any mainstream Western politician at the current moment; it will only be possible if there is overwhelming pressure from below, and if Zionist politicians and organisations are defeated and ousted from public life.

Yet as far-off as this hope currently might seem, we must remember that the global movement to end Apartheid in South Africa also faced challenges which seemed insurmountable. The movement to desegregate the United States struggled in vain for decades. The movement to end the transatlantic slave trade faced perhaps an even greater challenge. In the famous words of Nelson Mandela: “It always seems impossible until it's done.”

The Ultimate Litmus Test

If there is any hope at all to be gleaned from the events of the last 22 months — and it feels disrespectful to speak of hope at a time like this — it is in the courageous struggle of the Palestinian people for liberation, and in the Palestine solidarity movement that is growing in strength across the world. Millions have taken to the streets. More and more people are reacting with disgust to the genocide being livestreamed onto their phones. More and more people are speaking out, and more and more people are getting organised.

2025 has seen the Western left begin to recover from the defeats of the late 2010s. This rejuvenation has been fuelled in part by the Palestine solidarity movement. New leaders are emerging such as Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani in New York City and rebel ex-Labour MP Zarah Sultana in the UK. Alongside their commitment to fighting the billionaire class and improving the lives of working people in their own countries is a commitment to support the movement against genocide and fight for a free Palestine.

Rima Hassan, an MEP from the radical left party La France Insoumise (LFI), joined Greta Thunberg and others on the Madleen voyage in June, which sought to break the naval blockade and deliver aid to Gaza. She was kidnapped in international waters by the IDF and held in solitary confinement.

Another attempt was made to break the blockade in July. The Handala was seized two weeks ago along with its crew. Amazon Labor Union co-founder Chris Smalls was singled out by the IDF and assaulted. He was the only African-American aboard the ship, and was beaten and choked by Israeli soldiers. He was released from his illegal imprisonment after five days.

Leadership requires courage. Courage to defy the overwhelming pressure that exists in Western nations to support Israel’s “right to defend itself,” and its justifications for genocide. Any political leader who has failed to show this courage, to show leadership in this dark time, has proven themselves unworthy of support.

This genocide is a litmus test. If our leaders are willing to allow Israel to exterminate the people of Palestine, if they cannot stand up for basic human dignity, we must ask ourselves: will they ever stand up for us? Will they protect us if the going gets tough? Or would they throw anyone under the bus if it was politically convenient for them?

The US, British and German governments are currently proving this point as they continue to escalate crackdowns on the right to protest. Anti-genocide protests across US college campuses in 2024 were met with violent repression; now Trump’s far-right government is illegally detaining anti-genocide protesters, most famously Mahmoud Khalil, who was detained without a warrent by ICE on March 8 and held for 104 days without a criminal charge.

In the UK, the Labour government has proscribed direct action group Palestine Action as a terrorist group, meaning any show of support for the organisation is now punishable by up to 14 years in prison. Palestine Action’s supposed act of terrorism was breaking into an RAF base to spray-paint planes which have been used to assist the Israeli military.

Meanwhile, the German government is ensuring that Germany remains firmly on the wrong side of history by using the memory of the Holocaust to justify its support for another genocide. Palestinian solidarity protests were made illegal in October 2023. Any show of support for the Palestinian cause has been branded as antisemitic and met with fierce repression.

Leaders on the radical left in Britain and France, most prominently former UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and LFI leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, have been consistent in their support for Palestine, despite the smear campaigns waged by establishment forces attempting to brand them as anti-semitic. They are joined by emerging leaders such as the aforementioned Sultana and Hassan in doing so.

The same cannot be said for the leaders of the US left. On the one hand, two left-wing members of the so-called ‘Squad,’ Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, have consistently opposed the genocide. So too has the aforementioned Mamdani, who has refused to compromise his principles despite overwhelming hostility from the Zionist lobby in the New York mayoral race. All three are Muslim-Americans.

The two most prominent figures on the US left, however, have not been so consistent. Senator Bernie Sanders has pointedly refused to use the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions, while Representative Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez has repeatedly voted in favour of maintaining US funding for Israel’s Iron Dome, which she brands as purely a defensive weapons system that protects civilians. Whilst both politicians have condemned Israel’s war crimes and opposed sending Israel offensive weapons, many supporters of Sanders and AOC have been disappointed with their equivocations.

In Germany, the situation is even more dire. A coalition government led by Social Democratic Chancellor Olaf Scholz was in power until May this year, and was responsible for sending military aid to Israel while using false claims of anti-Semitism to criminalise dissent. The Greens were part of this coalition. In the wake of October 7, all parties in the German parliament voted unanimously for a resolution calling for solidarity with Israel. This included Die Linke (the Left Party), which in 2024 expelled party members for pro-Palestine activism. The party is beginning to shift its position now, but this move is too little, too late.

In Aotearoa, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori have been consistent in their support for Palestinian liberation since October 7. Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson was part of a freedom flotilla attempting to break the blockade back in 2016. Chlöe Swarbrick has submitted a member’s bill proposing sanctions on Israel, backed by the Greens and TPM. As a result of sustained pressure from the Palestine solidarity movement, the Labour Party announced in March that it is supporting Swarbrick’s bill. It is a major achievement of the movement in this country that all three parties on the left-of-centre have broken with the Western consensus and backed sanctions.

The strength of the anti-colonial movement in Aotearoa is a factor in why the Palestine solidarity movement is so strong here. Israel is implementing the 21st Century equivalent of the settler-colonial policies that the British Empire used when colonising Aotearoa in the 19th Century. Palestinians today are experiencing what Māori experienced when the state of New Zealand was built on stolen indigenous land.

To again quote the words of Nelson Mandela: “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.” Any movement for liberation and justice is incomplete if it does not represent liberation and justice for all. Anyone who calls themselves a socialist, anyone who identifies with the left and its goals, must therefore oppose imperialism, colonisation, Apartheid and genocide at every turn. That means standing with indigenous struggles for liberation, from Aotearoa to West Papua to Palestine.

What Can I Do?

To those who are reading this who feel hopeless and powerless in the face of the unimaginable atrocities being committed in Gaza: you are not alone. Most people feel revolted when they see this. If given an opportunity to stop this genocide, most people would. Anyone who does not feel this way has lost their humanity.

To give money directly to an organisation working tirelessly to provide food, water, and essential aid to Gazan residents in urgent need, Justice for Palestine is recommending donating to Team Assal via this link.

I spoke to Justice for Palestine activist Nadia Abu-Shanab in March this year, a week after Israel tore up the ceasefire and resumed its attacks on Gaza. Her advice for activists in Aotearoa was to participate in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. She told me the following:

“We need to extend and also fortify support for Chlöe Swarbrick's Sanctions Against Israel Bill, which has united support across the Opposition now, and needs six Government MPs to support it when it's pulled out of the biscuit tin to trigger a conscience vote. So we should target government MPs. However, I would say it’s very worthwhile right now going to talk to Labour MPs about why sanctions and Palestinian human rights matter to you. We are going to need to hold the Labour Party to account, so that when they are leading their next government — and we hope and expect that they will be leading the incoming government in 18 months time — they will make that historic move of being the first Five Eyes nation to sanction Israel. So go and let your Labour MPs, your National MPs, your local electorate MPs know how much this matters to you. Follow up with them.

If you happen to be an ASB Kiwisaver customer, you can join hundreds of people who have already left ASB Kiwisaver over their investments in Motorola Solutions. If you bank with them, switching banks or writing a complaint is also going to help support the ongoing divestment campaign we’re going to keep at until they divest. Of course, there are many Kiwisaver funds with investments in companies complicit in Israeli apartheid, so switching funds is something you can do even if you’re not with ASB. For many of us, our Kiwisavers are the only investments we actually have that we can move in 30 minutes.

You can also support the ASB campaign by helping to pressure NZ Superfund into dropping their investments in Motorola Solutions by writing them a complaint.

You can also participate in consumer boycotts of Obella, Caltex, things like that.”

Above all, Nadia’s message was that people cannot get sucked into despair.

“It’s natural to wrangle with hopelessness and despair at a time like this. Our grief and rage comes from a deeply human and ultimately beautiful part of us — which is that more and more people every day wake up, and they see through the veil of dehumanisation of Palestinians. And they recognise that, just like everyone else, Palestinian children deserve the right to wake up alive, not bombed in their beds for the mere crime of being on a land that somebody else wishes to colonise. That’s one breakthrough that allows us to bind together. But we need to recognise that — as Hera Lindsay Bird said recently — that the antidote to despair is action.”

You can read the full interview with Nadia here.

If you want to find out where pro-Palestine events are happening in your region, go to the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) website and sign up to their email newsletter or follow their social media accounts.

The Palestine movement in Wellington won a victory this week as Mayor Tory Whanau signed a friendly city agreement with the city of Ramallah. In Auckland, we should follow the example set by the 300,000 people who marched across the Sydney Harbour Bridge in the rain.

More broadly, the anti-imperialist movement in Aotearoa needs to oppose closer relations between our country and the US. Israel acts as America’s stationary aircraft carrier in the Middle East. As the focus of US imperialism moves towards a new Cold War with China, the Americans will seek to use Australia and New Zealand as outposts in the South Pacific.

The Coalition has kowtowed to President Trump’s demand that US allies increase defence spending. The government chose to gut pay equity to fund the expansion of the military. Last week, the opening of a permanent FBI office in Wellington was announced. Speculation has been increasing about New Zealand abandoning its independent foreign policy and joining the AUKUS pact, a military alliance between Australia, the UK and the US aimed at “combatting China.”

Our country’s independent foreign policy and anti-nuclear stances were won through hard-fought struggles by the peace movement. As the tide of public opinion turns against Israel’s genocide, we must draw out the broader lesson: that imperialism and colonisation are a stain upon this planet. That means upholding Tino Rangatiratanga and Mana Motuhake at home, and it means opposing the US empire on the world stage. Anti-imperialists in Aotearoa must oppose the presence of the FBI in our country, resist any attempts by the government to drag us into AUKUS, and demand we withdraw from the US-led Five Eyes surveillance network.

However horrific the images coming out of Gaza may be, and however dark the situation gets, we will not stop fighting until the genocide is ended and Palestine is free.

Message from the author

Welcome to my Substack! Thanks for reading.

My name is Elliot Crossan, and I am a socialist writer and activist based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. I am the Chair of System Change Aotearoa, an ecosocialist campaign group. You can check out our website here.

I am a freelance writer, and I intend to make all posts on this Substack free. The goal of my writing is to help bring about political change — to contribute to the movement for workers’ rights, indigenous rights and climate justice. If you are able to support me financially, any contribution would be greatly appreciated — but I have no plans to publish anything behind a paywall.

Please subscribe and share this post!

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Read more:

• “I implore people to not get sucked into despair” — Nadia Abu-Shanab on Palestine and BDS

• Zohran Mamdani Offers Hope in Trump’s America

• Rangatahi Resist as the Rich Get Richer

New York City is the beating heart of the global capitalist system. It is the wealthiest city in the world, home to more billionaires and millionaires than any other city by a significant margin; the diplomatic centre of the world, home to the headquarters of the United Nations; and the financial centre of the world. Every day, an unfathomable volume of money flows through the Wall Street stock exchange, the life-blood of the global economy.

New York is the birthplace of Donald Trump. The current President of the United States began his career there as a real estate mogul; his first campaign to become the Republican presidential nominee was launched in June 2015 when he rode down the golden escalator of Trump Tower, Manhattan, to give the first of many speeches attacking immigrants and Muslims. Ten turbulent years later, Trump is making a spectacle of mass deportations across the US whilst cracking down on dissent; the President deployed the National Guard against anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles, America’s second-largest city, and has threatened to do the same in New York.

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The wealthiest and most powerful people in the world, many of whom live in New York City, may think they run the world from the top of their skyscrapers. Yet like every other city in the world, it is the working class whose labour is required for New York to function. From Trump Tower to the Empire State Building — every landmark, every high-rise building, every house and every shop was built by workers. The iconic taxis, the subway system, the buses and the ferries — every wheel that turns is thanks to working people. The city never sleeps because of this constant labour.

New York is the most populous city in the United States, and is famously a melting pot of diversity. New waves of migration have added to the life and culture of New York for generations; more than a third of the city’s current population are migrants.

One such migrant is Zohran Kwame Mamdani. Born in Uganda and named after Ghanaian revolutionary Kwame Nkrumah, Mamdani’s family moved to New York when he was seven. Mamdani was a rapper before entering politics. In 2020 he was elected to the New York State Assembly as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). In October 2024, Mamdani announced his candidacy in the Democratic primary for Mayor of New York City.

Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was the overwhelming favourite to win the mayoral primary until the final few weeks of the campaign. New York uses ranked-choice voting, which makes counting the votes take longer than usual; when voting closed on Tuesday, 24 June, it was considered unlikely that the winner would be known until the final results were tallied a week later.

However, Mamdani’s lead over Cuomo in the initial results was so convincing that the former Governor was forced to concede defeat on election night. The release of the full results showed Mamdani winning by a 12-point margin, with 56% of the vote to Cuomo’s 44% — an extraordinary slam-dunk victory for a candidate who three months earlier had been polling in the single digits. This victory was driven by an unprecedented surge in turnout among young people and first-time voters.

Mamdani’s shock primary victory was against all of the odds. It was a much-needed win for socialists across the English-speaking world. Whilst he hasn’t been elected mayor just yet, as the Democratic nominee in a safe blue city he remains the favourite to win the general election on 4th November.

The Mamdani campaign contains lessons for socialists in America and across the world. If he wins the general election, the significance will be huge. New York City, the jewel in the crown of the US empire, the 11th largest city in the world, will have a socialist mayor; a mayor who believes that billionaires should not exist, and who stands in solidarity with the people of Palestine.

Inspirational political leaders overseas, particularly in the US, often cause New Zealanders to ask where our own version of that leader is. In 2016, some on the left asked where we could find a “Kiwi Bernie Sanders;” when Jeremy Corbyn won the leadership of the UK Labour Party, there was demand for a “Kiwi Corbyn.” With the socialist movement in this country in desperate need of leadership, some — myself among them — will be wondering how we find a “Kiwi Zohran.”

If we want to see the emergence of a “Kiwi Zohran,” then the left in Aotearoa must closely observe how and why Mamdani was able to pull off this stunning underdog victory. It did not come out of the blue. It was the result of years of unglamorous organising and campaigning work by socialists across New York City. The success of the Mamdani campaign is the result of a mass movement of working people with an independent socialist organisation — the DSA — at its core.

Money vs. People

“We have found exactly the way to defeat organised money, which is organised people. We’re speaking about a scale of a campaign that we haven’t seen in this city in a long time.”

These were Mamdani’s words in his first major interview since his primary victory.

According to Tascha Van Auken, the field director for the Mamdani campaign, more than 50,000 people signed up as volunteers, and more than 30,000 of those people got involved by canvassing and phone-banking for Zohran. The campaign knocked on 1.6 million doors.

This mass grassroots movement was certainly necessary considering what the campaign was up against. By “organised money,” Mamdani is referring to the record-breaking $25 million that was spent on the Cuomo campaign.

Cuomo’s mayoral campaign was an attempt to resurrect his political career four years after scandals relating to sexual harassment and mishandling of Covid-19 forced him to resign as Governor. Millions poured into Cuomo’s campaign coffers in spite of these scandals, and so did the endorsements from the Democratic Party establishment. Former President Bill Clinton, billionaire former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and influential Congressman Jim Clyburn all lent their support to Cuomo.

Cuomo was born into a political dynasty which has held a tight grip on the New York Democratic Party for decades. He was the only mayoral candidate with widespread name recognition. There was a sense of inevitability to his candidacy: of course the candidate everyone’s heard of, who has a colossal financial advantage and the support of party grandees, is going to win. No wonder he considered Mamdani a “nobody.”

Yet the eventual winner of the primary proved that organised people can defeat organised money and institutional support. Tens of thousands of volunteers knocking on millions of doors, inspired to spread a message of hope, can turn the tide. This volunteer army will likely grow further as Mamdani’s campaign turns towards the general election.

Mamdani’s message is laser-focused on the affordability crisis that is afflicting the working people of New York — a crisis all-too-familiar in Aotearoa, where the cost-of-living continues to hit working class communities hard. His popular policy proposals include city-owned grocery stores, free childcare and fast, fare-free buses. The biggest focus was affordable housing, promising a rent freeze, a public house-building programme, and a plan to crack down on bad landlords. He promised to pay for it by taxing corporations and wealthy New Yorkers.

Centrist liberals are trying to spin Mamdani’s success as merely a result of his charisma and social media presence. Some even claim that he won the Democratic nomination for mayor in spite of his policies.

There is no doubt that Mamdani is hugely charismatic and likeable, and that his social media game is extremely effective. Yet the reason he connects with voters is because he has a message that speaks to them, a message he clearly believes in. His videos have gone viral — particularly amongst young people, who turned out in droves to vote for him in the primary — because he is promising to improve their lives in a concrete way. 50,000 volunteers signed up to his primary campaign to fight for a New York where they can “afford to live and afford to dream.”

The biggest attack on Mamdani has come from the Zionist lobby. In the midst of Israel’s active genocide in Gaza, pundit after pundit has attempted to smear Mamdani as antisemitic due to his support for the rights and dignity of the Palestinian people, claiming that Mamdani’s views make Jewish New Yorkers feel “unsafe.”

Cuomo is one of the loudest voices in support of the genocidal Zionist regime. He described himself on the campaign trail as a “hyper aggressive supporter of Israel and proud of it,” and went so far as to volunteer to be part of Benjamin Netanyahu’s legal team, defending the Israeli Prime Minister from charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Mamdani on the other hand has stayed true to his principles in the face of overwhelming Zionist opposition. He has refused to condemn the slogan “globalise the Intifada,” and promised that as mayor he will comply with the ICC warrant to arrest Netanyahu if the Israeli leader visits New York.

The Antidote to Trump’s Poison

Mamdani and the movement he represents face colossal challenges in the coming months and years. To win the general election in November, Zohran will have to overcome an Islamophobic, red-baiting smear campaign that is already going into overdrive. This campaign won’t only come from Fox News — Democratic Senator for New York Kirsten Gillibrand falsely claimed two days after Mamdani’s victory that he had “made references to global jihad.”

Republican billionaire Bill Ackman has offered to help bankroll a candidate to defeat Mamdani. No doubt Ackman will be just one of many oligarchs frantically working to stop the Democratic nominee — the $25 million raised by Cuomo’s primary campaign may pale in comparison to the amount that New York elites are willing to spend to prevent a socialist victory in November.

If he wins, Mamdani will face the even greater challenge of implementing his policies in defiance of the billionaires and millionaires who own the city. Democratic Governor of New York state Kathy Hochul has thus far declined to endorse Mamdani and will also present a barrier to his agenda; not to mention the hostility Mamdani will face from an authoritarian federal government which is committed to defending the oligarchy at all costs.

President Trump initially responded to Mamdani’s primary victory with a Truth Social post calling the Democratic mayoral candidate a “100% communist lunatic” and insulting his looks, voice and intelligence. In the following days and weeks, Trump’s threats have grown more worrying. He has threatened to arrest Mamdani, strip him of his citizenship and deport him. White House officials have falsely claimed that Mamdani concealed his support for terrorism whilst becoming a citizen.

The howling emanating from the White House, Wall Street and the rest of the US ruling class is not a sign of strength. It is a sign of weakness. Capitalists, billionaire-backed politicians, corporate media and the Zionist lobby are all terrified of this 33-year-old socialist and the movement that backs him.

The Democratic nominee represents the ultimate threat to their system. He represents the possibility that at the very heart of the capitalist system, the multi-racial working class could rise up and take away the wealth and power that has accumulated in the hands of such a tiny section of the population. He represents the possibility that the American empire could be threatened from within by people fighting for global peace and justice; by people whose basic human decency means they can no longer tolerate the horrors that the Israeli government, armed and funded by the US, is unleashing in Gaza.

Mamdani’s victory is the ultimate rebuke to Trump. He is a Muslim, a migrant, a socialist — everything Trump rails against. He leads with compassion, dignity, conviction and humanity — the antithesis of Trump’s narcissism, greed and cruelty. At the same time, these attributes mean that Zohran stands as a rebuke to the Democratic leadership, which is utterly devoid of all principles except to support corporate power, the American war machine, and the genocidal state of Israel.

The last decade has seen working class America abandon the Democrats due to the party’s complete devotion to corporate interests at the expense of workers and unions. This resulted in Trump becoming the first Republican presidential nominee since 1960 to win higher support amongst low-income communities than his rival.

Yet Trump’s betrayal of the workers who voted for him is even more egregious than the Democrats’ treachery. His so-called “Big, Beautiful Bill” cut nearly one trillion dollars from healthcare programmes in order to extend tax cuts for the super-rich and allocate more money towards the military and immigration enforcement. Both Democrats and Republicans have spent decades making life worse for American workers — Trump is accelerating this process.

Mamdani’s socialist agenda for New York City represents real hope for real change in the interests of working people. He is offering something that Trump, the Republicans and the neoliberal Democratic establishment are incapable of offering. He represents an existential threat to their interests.

Trump and the far-right across the world succeed when they turn working people against each other, convincing the ‘white working class’ that their problems are caused by immigrants, men that their problems are caused by women, and so on. They succeed when they distract attention away from the minority group that is genuinely tearing our society apart, the billionaire class.

Mamdani represents politics which can unite instead of divide. This unity is not based solely on abstract appeals to diversity, inclusion or shared values. It is not that socialists are opposed to these ideals; but they ring hollow when they come from the mouths of liberal politicians such as Kamala Harris who represent corporations at the expense of working people. Instead, socialists like Mamdani build unity based on working class people standing in solidarity with one another, fighting to transform society for the better, in opposition to the billionaire class. This unity is based on organising around a shared purpose, a shared hope for a better world; it is powerful. That power is the ultimate threat to both establishment liberals and to Trump and the far-right.

Fascism rose across the world in the 1930s in response to the economic crisis that was devastating the lives of working people. In his victory speech on the night of the primary results, Mamdani quoted the words of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, speaking in that dark decade:

“As FDR said, democracy has disappeared in several other great nations, not because the people disliked democracy but because they had grown tired of unemployment and insecurity. In desperation, they chose to sacrifice liberty in the hope of getting something to eat.”

The politics of hope, of improving the lives of working people, is the only way to save democracy. Mamdani and the socialist movement provide the only way forward for those who wish to see Trump and the far-right politics of hatred and division defeated. No wonder Trump and the billionaires are shaking in their boots.

The Tide Is Turning in the Democratic Party

The defeat of Andrew Cuomo at the hands of an insurgent socialist candidate represents a colossal defeat for the neoliberal establishment of the Democratic Party. There were strong echoes of the shock 2018 upset which saw Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez elected to Congress representing New York’s 14th district. Ocasio-Cortez was inspired to enter politics by Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, just as Mamdani was; she was also endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America; and she defeated a titan of the Democratic Party establishment. Her district is split across working class, Latino-dominated sections of the Bronx and Queens.

If he wins the general election in November, Mamdani’s victory could prove to be even more crucial than AOC’s 2018 win. The mood of the Democratic base has turned decisively against the centrist establishment. Hostility from the party base towards the leadership is much deeper than it was in previous years, when Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden were able to prevent Sanders from becoming the party’s presidential nominee. Anger that was simmering as the Biden administration failed to act on the cost-of-living crisis whilst facilitating Israel’s genocide in Gaza is now boiling over in the wake of Harris’ failure to fulfill what is seemingly the only objective of today’s Democratic Party: to defeat Trump.

According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll taken in mid-June, 62% of registered Democrats now want party leaders to be replaced. Mamdani’s win could open the floodgates for a new wave of left-wing candidates to challenge and defeat corporate-aligned incumbents.

Adding to this anger amongst Democratic voters is another crucial factor. Sanders and AOC may have both inspired mass movements to support them by standing up for the working class and campaigning on socialist policies; yet both of their campaigns were based around individuals, isolated from any formal organisation.

Mamdani is not standing for New York mayor as an isolated individual. This is not merely a victory for one charismatic individual with clear messaging and radical policies; nor is it a victory for a spontaneous, disorganised mass movement. It is a victory for the DSA — the largest socialist organisation in the United States, and an organisation which is aiming to build what working class Americans need most: a socialist party that is fundamentally opposed to the interests of the billionaire class.

If we hope to find our own “Kiwi Zohran,” a leader — or several leaders — who can lead the struggle to transform Aotearoa in the interests of ordinary people, then we need to learn what we can from the DSA. That means starting with independent socialist organising, and building towards a party which can organise working people to take on both the billionaires, and the Coalition that is waging class war on their behalf.

Part 2 of this essay will examine Mamdani’s relationship with the Democratic Socialists of America, and what their attempt to build a “party within a party” can teach us here in Aotearoa.

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Message from the author

Welcome to my Substack! Thanks for reading.

My name is Elliot Crossan, and I am a socialist writer and activist based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. I am the Chair of System Change Aotearoa, an ecosocialist campaign group. You can check out our website here.

I am a freelance writer, and I intend to make all posts on this Substack free. The goal of my writing is to help bring about political change — to contribute to the movement for workers’ rights, indigenous rights and climate justice. If you are able to support me financially, any contribution would be greatly appreciated — but I have no plans to publish anything behind a paywall.

Please subscribe and share this post!

Share

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• The Trump Shock

• Trump and Musk: One Big Beautiful Break-up

• Is a Left-Wing Leadership of the NZ Labour Party Possible?

Celebrating ‘Success’

“Isn't it fantastic that we have got people with ambition, aspiration and positivity? [...] I know how hard people work in New Zealand, and there [are] some pretty inspirational stories. [...]

As a country we want people to be able to move themselves from one set of circumstances to a better set of circumstances, and it's okay to celebrate this success.

But I just also say to you that I know New Zealanders are doing it tough and it's important that we are doing everything we can as a government to create the conditions for growth.”

This is how Christopher Luxon greeted the news that the number of billionaires and the wealth of the richest families in Aotearoa has increased in the midst of an economic crisis.

Luxon was responding to Radio New Zealand’s Corin Dann, who challenged the Prime Minister on the findings of the annual NBR Rich List. NBR found that Aotearoa now has 18 billionaires, up from 16 last year, and that the wealth of the 119 individuals and families profiled now exceeds $100bn for the first time, at $102.1bn — up from $95.6bn last year. The wealth of the Rich Listers increased by 6.9% whilst the economy shrank by 1.1%; the richest New Zealanders are now worth more than 40% of the nation’s GDP.

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NBR took an even more celebratory tone than Luxon. The business journal issued a press release describing the Rich Listers as “119 Kiwi individuals and families who are building enterprises, growing the country’s fortunes, creating jobs, and giving back.” The message is clear — what’s good for the wealthy is good for all of us.

So how exactly are Aotearoa’s billionaires and multi-millionaires “giving back?” Bryce Edwards’ summary of the Rich List report gives us a few helpful clues.

Firstly, they’re buying superyachts, helicopters and private jets. In a country where 156,000 tamariki are growing up in poverty — that’s 13.4% of our children, up from 10.5% in 2022 — our wealthiest citizens are living lives of increasing luxury.

Secondly, they’re buying lavish estates. In the midst of the housing crisis that for years has been causing huge insecurity and hardship for working class communities, particularly amongst younger people, Graeme Hart has spent a portion of his fortune on a huge penthouse in New York. The Morbray brothers have bought and renovated Kim Dotcom’s old mansion.

Thirdly, they’re buying our politicians. Multiple Rich Listers spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to support National, ACT and NZ First during the last election, whilst others merely spent tens of thousands. The Coalition owes its victory in large part to these donors. The record for political donations in NZ elections was smashed out of the park in 2023, and is likely to be broken again in 2026.

The super-rich are getting their money’s worth from this government. Their taxes have been cut and their businesses have been given subsidies at the same time as benefit sanctions have thrown more people into poverty, the budget for pay equity has been slashed at the expense of low-paid women, and David Seymour has taken a hatchet to the school lunch programme for low-decile schools.

The health system is in crisis as a result of dangerous underfunding and short-staffing. The government’s solution is to partially privatise essential healthcare services. Mining and drilling projects are being fast-tracked heedless of the environmental or social impact, thanks in part to sweetheart deals between ministers and corporate lobbyists. Kāinga Ora is halting hundreds of state housing developments and selling off vacant land.

The unifying logic behind the government’s agenda is austerity for the poor and welfare for the rich. Austerity is the process of cutting public services and shrinking the welfare state — reducing the living standards of working class people in the process. But it’s not austerity across the board. Finance Minister Nicola Willis’ stated goal of reducing the government’s budget deficit is directly undermined by the Coalition’s generous tax cuts for the rich, handouts to businesses and increases in spending on defence and law-and-order. Cuts are being made to departments which benefit the public as a whole, yet there is money for prisons, the police and the military, and the top 1% are being rewarded handsomely.

The Rich Listers were asked by NBR to outline their ideas of how to improve the country. Bryce Edwards highlighted the key items on their agenda: making it easier for foreign billionaires to buy NZ property; reducing regulation and “red tape;” cutting corporate taxes and creating more tax loopholes for the wealthy. A 2023 Inland Revenue investigation found that the wealthiest New Zealanders pay less than half the tax rate of the average Kiwi household; if those interviewed by NBR had their way, millionaires and billionaires would pay even less.

Growing Opposition to Oligarchy

Multiple surveys of NZ voters show declining levels of trust in government and business alongside an alarming lack of faith that the future will be better than today. The 2025 Acumen Edelman Trust Barometer found that 67% of New Zealanders hold a sense of grievance against business, government and the rich, compared to 62% of Australians and 59% of Americans. Just 19% of New Zealanders believe that the next generation will be better off than they are today.

50% of respondents to a recent report by the Helen Clark Foundation said that they feel isolated from others either ‘some of the time’ or ‘often’ — among under 30s, this number rises to 65%. 25% reported that they sometimes or often go without meals due to financial constraints; this rises to 44% of Māori respondents and 48% of Pasifika. 69% of all respondents agreed that the gap between the rich and the poor is too high. 11% believe that our system of government should be entirely replaced; 27% believe that major change is needed, 37% favour minor changes, while just 17% agree that “the system of government works fine.”

Discontent in society is simmering to the surface. The ACT Party’s attempts to rewrite Te Tiriti o Waitangi have provoked tens of thousands to take to the streets in defiance. The Fast-track Bill has been met with resistance from environmentalists fighting back against pollution in the name of corporate greed. The Palestinian community and their allies rally every weekend to demand the government takes action to end Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and its aggression against Iran and Lebanon.

Yet resistance to the austerity agenda, to attacks on public services and to the social safety net, has been muted. The Council of Trade Unions has held rallies each May Day and Labour Day, and plenty of rhetoric has flown around about this being a government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich, but there has been no mass movement fighting to overturn the neoliberal economic system that is tearing apart the fabric of our society. Meanwhile, the Coalition and its billionaire backers continue to drive the country towards oligarchy, towards a Dickensian Aotearoa where the ever-higher cost-of-living locks working class New Zealanders out of a better future at the same time as a tiny fraction of people sit like dragons guarding their vast hoards of gold.

Rangatahi Fight Back

Last Saturday saw seeds of hope emerge in the form of the Hīkoi to House Our Rangatahi — a march from Auckland’s Karangahape Road along the footpath down to Britomart.

The hīkoi was organised through the youth development organisation Kick Back Make Change, by rangatahi who are currently experiencing homelessness. Auckland Action Against Poverty, Kaiāwhina Tāmaki, ActionStation and System Change Aotearoa were among the organisations who supported the march. Eru Kapa-Kingi spoke for the Toitū Te Tiriti movement, whilst Ricardo Menéndez March and Shanan Halbert spoke on behalf of the Greens and the Labour Party respectively.

I spoke on behalf of System Change. In the past few years I have organised dozens of protests and attended hundreds, and I must say that I have rarely been as moved and inspired as I was by the rangatahi who shared their stories with us on Saturday.

The original idea for the hīkoi came about when two of the young people from Kick Back attended a meeting with National Party MP Tama Potaka — Minister for Māori Development and Associate Minister for Housing. They realised that Potaka had no idea what he was talking about, had no idea what it was like to grow up without safe and secure housing, and had no inclination to solve the youth homelessness crisis that Aotearoa is currently facing. Auckland experienced a 53% increase in rough sleeping between September 2024 and January this year.

Participants in the hīkoi arrived at Britomart for speeches, and heard the powerful words of Kahu, the rangatahi spokesperson who shared the devastating story of her friend who she recently lost due to the homelessness crisis. The hīkoi was called in his name. Kahu called for resistance, demanding an end to the colonial system which has thrown so many Māori into the streets on their own whenua.

These courageous young people should not have needed to call a protest. The hīkoi fell the day before their friend’s birthday. They should have been celebrating with him. His death was entirely preventable. His blood is on the hands of the government, and the ministers whose decisions have made it harder to access emergency housing.

Aaron Hendry, founder of Kick Back, made an impassioned call in his speech to those who have power to make change.

“We talk about homelessness as if it’s just this thing that happens, but it is a crisis and people are dying. This is not just something we can allow to continue.

When we had a virus that none of us could see, we acted. We got up as a collective, as a nation, and we said we will solve this, we will fix it, we will care for each other. But every day up and down this street, we can see our whānau suffering, our children suffering, our kids dying and we do not act.

Today is a day for action, a reminder that it is time for us to end this.”

Building a Mass Movement

So what exactly are the 119 Rich Listers giving back? They’ve given us a cruel government which throws young people out onto the streets. How exactly are they growing our country’s fortunes? They’re growing their own fortunes while thousands go hungry. Should we celebrate their success, Prime Minister? Or should we look upon these billionaires and multi-millionaires with disgust? For it is their hoarding of wealth, the power they hold over society, that has created such poverty.

Aotearoa is a nation with an abundance of resources. To create a decent society for all, where housing is a human right, where everyone has a livable income, where everyone has free access to world-class healthcare, education and public transport, and where everyone can afford to eat nutritious meals every day, would not be difficult. We could be living in that version of Aotearoa right now. But instead we live in this one — the Aotearoa of extreme wealth on the one hand and extreme poverty on the other.

The public does not support this unequal system. Survey after survey shows growing discontent. People are sick and tired of the housing crisis, of the cost-of-living going up, of public services getting worse. People are sick and tired of wealthy oligarchs dominating our society.

The Rich Listers are not immeasurably richer than the rest of us because they are better than us. They are not smarter, they are not more creative, they are not more worthy, and they are most certainly not more compassionate.

They are able to hold on to their hoarded wealth because they are highly organised. They set up publications such as the National Business Review to promote their interests. They donate huge sums to National, ACT and NZ First, and lobby to ensure that even if the Labour Party is elected, their interests will not truly be threatened. The ruling class knows how to defend itself.

The Coalition’s austerity agenda represents a direct attack on the living standards of the working class of Aotearoa. This agenda relies on division; ACT’s assault on Te Tiriti o Waitangi is deliberately intended to polarise society and divide Māori against Pākehā, just as attacks on beneficiaries and homeless people are packaged in terms of punishing the “undeserving poor,” and NZ First’s demonisation of LGBT communities aim to spread homophobic and transphobic hatred.

The sudden changes to pay equity claims were designed to manufacture support for significant budget cuts by pitting male workers against female workers. Ministers framed low-paid women as asking for too much. The same rhetoric was strangely absent when Luxon waxed lyrical about the success of the Rich Listers.

Attacking several sectors of society at once has the pernicious effect of dividing activists into single-issue groups all fighting their own battles at the same time. We are overwhelmed, too often unable to see the bigger picture and fight back together.

But the Coalition’s austerity agenda can be weaponised by activists and turned against it. We can unify our communities around the common themes of resisting the cuts, resisting the agenda which places profit over people, because the bigger picture is clear: this government and this economic system continue to make the rich richer at the expense of the vast majority of society.

If we can bring together youth protesting against homelessness, women fighting for fair pay, doctors and nurses fighting to save our healthcare system, environmentalists fighting the Fast-track Bill, beneficiaries protesting sanctions, disabled people fighting funding cuts, the union members who attended Maranga Ake, the tens of thousands who marched in Hīkoi mō te Tiriti, and every other community fighting against inequality and injustice, we will have a mighty movement capable of bringing down this government and transforming society in the interests of the many, not the few.

The rangatahi involved in Kick Back Make Change shared a powerful message on last Saturday’s hīkoi. They stood up and fought back. Hundreds of people joined them. They serve as an inspiration to all of us.

It is time for thousands more to take to the streets. It is time for us to re-learn the power of organisation. Through trade unions, community organisations and political parties, we must stand together and fight for our interests. If we don’t, the Rich Listers will continue to get their way, and our society will continue falling into ever-more extreme inequality.

The top 1% are waging a class war. It’s time for the 99% to start fighting back.

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Message from the author

Welcome to my Substack! Thanks for reading.

My name is Elliot Crossan, and I am a socialist writer and activist based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. I am the Chair of System Change Aotearoa, an ecosocialist campaign group. You can check out our website here.

I am a freelance writer, and I intend to make all posts on this Substack free. The goal of my writing is to help bring about political change — to contribute to the movement for workers’ rights, indigenous rights and climate justice. If you are able to support me financially, any contribution would be greatly appreciated — but I have no plans to publish anything behind a paywall.

Please subscribe and share this post!

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Read more:

• What Is to Be Done? Taking the Fight to the Coalition in 2025

• Cuts to Disability Services Are Part of a Class War

• Where Is the Resistance to Privatisation and Austerity?

January 2025. The richest man in the world walks into the White House as advisor to the newly-elected President of the United States. A right-wing demagogue with an axe to grind and a tech billionaire who so desperately wants people to like him. Together, with Musk’s vast fortune and Trump’s fanatical base of supporters, they could remake America in their image. What could possibly go wrong?

Trump is no stranger to dramatic fallings-out with officials and advisors. His first term featured a rotating cast of characters who would come and go at a dizzying rate. The President takes glee running his administration like a reality show, knowing that the whole world has no choice but to watch.

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The over-inflated egos of Trump and Musk can both be seen from space. Both are used to getting what they want, and both throw very public tantrums when they can’t get it. Trump encouraged a fascist mob to overthrow the US government when he lost the 2020 election; Musk appears to be utterly incredulous about the amount of backlash his political actions have generated, unable to comprehend the idea that other people disagree with him. Two egomaniacs trying to share the spotlight is never a good idea.

Yet just a couple of months ago, this relationship seemed too big to fail. It cannot be overstated how much firepower Musk’s backing leant to Trump’s electoral prospects; to a man worth hundreds of billions of dollars, throwing millions upon millions at election campaigns is as easy as buying a new coat. Musk spent an eye-watering $277 million on Trump’s successful bid for a second term, and very much believes he is responsible for Republican victories in 2024 congressional elections as well as the presidential race.

Whilst ultra-wealthy elites usually prefer to manipulate politics from the shadows, the Tesla CEO was enthusiastically outspoken in his support for the Republican nominee. Musk’s endorsement came in the immediate aftermath of the attempted assassination of Trump in July, and the South African-born billionaire later joined the once-and-future President at a series of campaign rallies. Musk was seen jumping around the stage in excitement and openly handing out bribes to voters in swing states.

Once Trump was back in the White House, Musk’s financial heft became a threat hanging over every Republican Senator and Member of Congress: thinking of disobeying the White House’s agenda? Musk will throw millions at your primary challenger in the midterm elections. Trump’s cult-like following among the Republican faithful already makes it very difficult for any GOP lawmaker to oppose the President; liberal hopes of “sensible Republicans” reigning Trump in rarely materialise in reality. Republican majorities in the House and Senate may have been small going into 2025, but the combination of Musk’s war-chest and Trump’s base appeared to quash any threats to party unity. Add into the mix a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, and the President was empowered to act in open defiance of the usual checks-and-balances built into the US Constitution.

Fast forward to the beginning of June, and the unholy alliance of Donald Trump and Elon Musk is dead in the water. The prelude to this catastrophic breakdown in relations began in early April when Musk cautiously distanced himself from the President’s tariff regime. Around the same time, Trump stopped constantly name-dropping Musk in press conferences and Truth Social posts. Then at the end of May, Musk left his role as a White House advisor due to the 130-day limit on special government employees not appointed by Congress. An amicable press conference was held to mark the end of Musk’s tenure at the Department of Government Efficiency.

After departing the administration, Musk abruptly turned on Trump and launched a scathing attack on the President’s proposed budget legislation — which is officially entitled “One Big Beautiful Bill.” This budget reconciliation bill is the lynchpin of Trump’s domestic economic agenda, and will require approval from 50 out of 53 Republicans to pass through the Senate. The President hopes to have it on his desk ready to sign by the Independence Day celebrations on 4 July. Musk labelled the bill a “disgusting abomination” and pointed out that it will explode the federal deficit.

Yesterday, this feud exploded into the headlines. Musk escalated his criticisms of the Big Beautiful Bill by digging up and retweeting Trump’s comments from 2012-2013 about the need to balance the federal budget. Trump responded by claiming that Musk knew the details of the bill before he left the administration and didn’t object until he found out that tax credits for electric vehicles were being cut; the President then threatened to cut subsidies to Musk’s companies in order to reduce the deficit. Trump expressed disappointment in Elon; Musk claimed responsibility for Trump’s 2024 victory and called his former ally ungrateful. Trump retorted that he had asked Elon to leave the White House as he was “wearing thin;” Musk then dropped “the really big bomb” (his words) — that the reason the Epstein files haven’t been made public is because Trump is mentioned in them. Musk did not seem to realise the implication of his own statements — that he was directly responsible for the election of a sexual predator.

Musk asked his followers if America needed “a new political party” representing “the 80% in the middle," and called for Trump to be impeached. The latter option would pave the way for Peter Thiel protégée JD Vance to take over as president; Vance’s ascension would represent an unprecedented coup on behalf of the Silicon Valley elite.

The Tesla CEO appeared to calm down later in the evening. When fellow billionaire Bill Ackman tweeted that Trump and Musk are “stronger together than apart” and urged them to make peace, Musk replied “you’re not wrong.” Perhaps he should have considered this before picking a fight with the famously prickly, petty, vindictive President.

There were rumours today that Musk wanted a phone call with the President. A peace offering. Trump doubled down on the feud. “You meant the man who has lost his mind?” was the President’s response when asked about potential reconciliation with the Tesla billionaire. “I’m not even thinking about Elon. He’s got a problem. The poor guy’s got a problem.” The White House confirmed that Trump plans to sell his Tesla Model S — the very same car he showed off in a press conference in March. It remains to be seen whether or not the President will retaliate directly against Musk’s companies; but it is never wise to pick a fight with an authoritarian leader obsessed with asserting his own dominance over others.

Tesla stocks fell sharply on Thursday as a result of this falling out, but recovered somewhat on Friday. Trump’s political capital, already bruised by his humiliating u-turns over trade policy, has also taken a major blow. Ackman is pointing out the obvious — neither side wins from this Big Beautiful Break-up. However, initial reports suggest that the Republican Party on the whole is falling in line behind its President rather than taking the side of the richest man in the world.

Two events in early April foreshadowed the breakdown of the Trump-Musk alliance. Both may spell further danger on the horizon for the MAGA project as a whole.

Musk Humiliated in Wisconsin

The first of these events was a Supreme Court election in the state of Wisconsin, which became the most expensive judicial race in American history after Musk and other right-wing billionaires poured in millions behind the campaign of conservative candidate Brad Schimel. Musk alone contributed $25 million, with a total of nearly $100 million being spent in the race, the majority favouring Schimel. Musk resorted to open bribery just as he had done during the presidential election, handing out two $1 million checks to voters and claiming that the “future of civilisation” was at stake. There had been a liberal majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court prior to the election; Tesla’s business interests in the state were reliant on this majority being overturned.

The results came in on 1 April, and pundits were surprised by the wide winning margin — 55-45% in favour of liberal candidate Susan Crawford. Shockwaves reverberated throughout the Republican Party as a dawning realisation struck: in spite of giving him a colossal funding advantage, Musk’s public support of Schimel ended up hurting the conservative nominee rather than helping him.

The world’s richest man had become a toxic brand. His favourability numbers in opinion polls were falling sharply; Tesla sales were in trouble, particularly in Europe and Canada; voters in red states as well as blue states were furious at the attacks on social programmes and consumer protections unleashed by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Musk was suddenly so unpopular that his support was costing Republicans elections; as a result, his ability to blackmail every Republican in Congress by funding primary opponents became a paper tiger.

This embarrassing blow undermined Musk’s bargain with Trump significantly. It also demonstrated a growing trend that the left across the world must take note of: billionaires buying elections is not popular. Railing against corporate greed and taking on the billionaire oligarchy is popular.

Perhaps it finally dawned on Musk why his fellow billionaires prefer to fund political campaigns from the shadows, through dark money that is untraceable to the source. People don’t like their future being dictated by a tiny elite who are openly rigging the system in their own interests.

Campaign donations by wealthy individuals and corporate investors increased dramatically in the 2023 NZ election, overwhelmingly favouring the three right-wing parties that would go on to form the Coalition. Labour and other opposition parties have two choices. One is to bend over backwards in an effort to appease the top 1%, trying to out-compete National, ACT and NZ First for a share of campaign contributions. The Democrats and the US and the Labour Party in the UK have tried this — they have sold out to the rich and are deeply unpopular as a result.

The other option is to overtly campaign against the corruption inherent in an electoral system where the rich can buy elections; to fight back, and to call for an end to the corporate domination of our society. Musk’s humiliation in Wisconsin proves that this strategy is viable in America, where the campaign financing system is orders of magnitude worse than it is here in Aotearoa.

We must fight back before we allow this country to go further down the same path. With the Coalition imposing austerity on public services, US-style privatisation threatening our health sector, corporations openly bribing ministers for favourable fast-track approvals, and David Seymour attempting to overhaul our regulatory system in the interests of multinational corporations, we are already on a slippery slope.

A Band of Warring Brothers

The second event that spelt the beginning of the end for Musk and Trump’s love-in was the fallout from the Liberation Day tariffs. Trump’s declaration of a global trade war initiated a rapid stock market crash, and the run on US Treasury bonds that followed caused panic across the world. Signs of Musk’s displeasure emerged within the week. He called for a free trade zone across Europe and America, and labelled White House trade advisor Peter Navarro “dumber than a sack of bricks.”

In my April essay regarding Liberation Day, I argued that there was method to Trump’s madness. The tariffs may have been a massive blunder, but to dismiss Liberation Day as a random act of idiocy with no plan behind it was foolish. The trade war was part of a chaotic strategy to reorder the world economy in the interests of the US empire and its corporations.

The fatal flaw inherent in this strategy has already emerged. To reorder the world economy by creating short-term pain and instability would have required committed buy-in from the dominant sections of the US ruling class. Trump and his officials massively overestimated the support they held amongst the Silicon Valley oligarchy.

Musk was the most vocal of the tech billionaires in his support for the President, and is now the most vocal in turning against him. Yet it wasn’t only Musk who broke with tradition by aligning themselves with Trump — Amazon mogul Jeff Bezos, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and the CEOs of Apple, Google and other tech giants lined up together at the President’s 2025 inauguration ceremony. While Musk now openly denounces Trump’s agenda, no doubt the rest of the tech oligarchy is similarly questioning the wisdom of the administration which has deliberately threatened their global supply chains and tanked the stock values of their companies as part of a grand strategy that does not appear to be working.

It is exceedingly difficult to convince capitalists to forego short-term profits for any cause. Even in this instance, when the cause is to try and reassert the dominance of US corporations in the face of increased competition from China, it’s a hard sell for Trump to make to CEOs and shareholders when their bottom lines are threatened. The ruthless competition imposed by the market makes it hard for individual capitalists to sacrifice immediate advantage even to advance their shared interests in the long-term.

Karl Marx described the ruling class as “a band of warring brothers.” In times of political, social and economic crisis, the internal rivalries within the ruling elite can threaten the stability of their entire system.

In 2025, the US empire is entering the worst crisis of legitimacy in its history. The dollar-based global financial system that has been the backbone of the world economy since 1944 has been imperiled by Trump’s recklessness. The run on US Treasury bonds in the wake of Liberation Day was unprecedented. A “sell America” trend developed on global stock markets, threatening the safety of what was once the safest asset in the world. Trump responded to market madness a week after Liberation Day with his 90-day pause to some tariffs; yet the signs of investor panic have not gone away.

Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” has been labelled a “big beautiful bribe” by many. It is an attempt to buy the loyalty of the capitalist class by extending the historic tax cuts implemented in 2017 by the first Trump administration. These tax cuts — which overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy — are set to expire at the end of 2025 if the President’s budget reconciliation fails to pass.

The bill in its current form will throw millions more Americans into poverty thanks to cuts to food stamps and Medicaid. Clean energy subsidies are set to be cut during a climate crisis. Despite these spending cuts, the combination of the tax cut extension alongside an additional $150 billion in defence spending means that the bill will add an estimated $2.6 trillion to the US national debt. With a sell-off of US Treasury bonds already increasing borrowing costs for the most powerful nation on earth, the passage of the “Big, Beautiful Bill” may threaten to send the country into a full-blown debt crisis.

When an empire is in deep crisis, a stabilising figure is required to try and steady the ship. A leader who can unite rival factions of the ruling class behind their agenda, rally confidence in the system and placate the population at large, with concessions to popular demands if necessary. Franklin D. Roosevelt is the perfect example of such a figure — he served as President from 1933 until 1945, led America through the Great Depression and World War II, and staved off the threat of working class resistance with his New Deal policies which created jobs and a welfare system to support those in need.

Admittedly, in the Roosevelt era American power was yet to reach its height, and FDR was a product of an ascendant US empire. American political, economic and military dominance were already on a downward trajectory before Trump rose to power, and were likely to continue trending down regardless of the actions of any president. Nobody can hold back the tide of history. Trump is the product of terminal American decline.

The Trump-Musk alliance entered office and immediately launched an historic attack on the remnants of the New Deal. The administration’s policies have both destabilised the world economy and caused greater hardship for working people across America who were already suffering from a cost-of-living crisis. Neither the capitalist class nor the working class benefits from the economic mayhem being unleashed by the combined effects of the Department of Government Efficiency, the Liberation Day tariffs and the spectre of the Big, Beautiful Bill.

Trump and Musk’s partnership lasted less than five months. The two most powerful men in America are already at each other’s throats. This is no accident — it is merely the most blatant example of ongoing strife within the American ruling class.

The Democrats are showing no signs of producing a figure able to unify the American nation and stabilise the global capitalist system underpinned by US hegemony. Anemic and unable to offer anything except increasingly desperate calls to return to the status quo of the 1990s, the official opposition to the Trump administration looks no more capable of resolving this crisis.

Its strategy may be fatally flawed, and its flailing actions are clearly worsening the situation, but at least the Trump administration is willing to take radical measures to try and solve the problems faced by the US empire. The Democrats on the other hand ruthlessly bludgeoned Bernie Sanders’ 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns, and in doing so shot down any hope of meaningful reform that would benefit the American working class. Their priority was to defend the status quo at all costs, in the interests of the more cautious sections of the ruling class.

Both parties went into 2024 headed by geriatric old men who were utterly out of touch with reality. President Biden only ended his reelection campaign — with great reluctance — once his rapid cognitive decline became obvious through his excruciating debate performance against Trump. Once Kamala Harris took over as the Democratic presidential nominee, she ran a campaign that completely ignored the concerns of working class voters and paved the way for Trump’s return to power.

Out-of-touch elites fighting amongst themselves. Working class discontent going ignored by the powers that be. The rise of a authoritarian demagogues. Increased competition from emerging powers. Failed attempts to win overseas conflicts. This is how empires fall.

Will the Coalition Experience Its Own Break-up?

There are some parallels to the Trump-Musk dynamic within the right-wing Coalition which currently governs Aotearoa. Winston Peters has always been a nationalistic demagogue, and whilst he used to be fairly tame by Trump’s standards, he is increasingly moving away from the centre-ground ‘kingmaker’ role he used to play and towards overtly right-wing populist politics. His vicious personal attacks on Green and Te Pāti Māori MPs are part of a strategy which relies on transphobia and race-baiting. NZ First second-in-command Shane Jones has been just as bad, lashing out at climate activists who oppose the mining and fossil fuel industries. The recent polling increase for NZ First, with Peters also surging in the Preferred Prime Minister stakes, is a warning sign that this strategy is paying off — especially in comparison to the usual trend of NZ First falling below the 5% threshold after entering government.

On the other hand, David Seymour and the ACT Party adhere to libertarian ideology championed by Musk and the Silicon Valley oligarchy. The Ministry for Regulation and the Regulatory Standards Bill represent attempts to take a chainsaw to supposed bureaucracy and “red tape,” just as Musk tried to do. Like Musk, the ACT Party are staunch advocates for free trade and fiscal conservatism; Musk and Seymour both oppose tariff barriers on principle and wish to radically reduce government spending and government debt.

Peters began his political career as an acolyte of Robert Muldoon, the Prime Minister whose protectionism, deficit spending, authoritarianism and demagoguery made him Aotearoa’s very own Trump back in the day. Yet NZ First has not kicked up much of a fuss against the Coalition’s agenda of austerity and free trade.

Today’s National Party is much more aligned with free market philosophy than it is with the legacy of Muldoon. National remains the most moderate of the right-wing parties and is the largest by far; Luxon and Willis appear quite happy to let Seymour’s more radical party behave as the advance guard for their shared agenda of cuts, privatisation and a redistribution of wealth towards the super-rich.

We cannot rely on a homegrown repeat of the Trump-Musk feud to bring down this government. The ruling class of this country remains united in its support for free trade, free markets and fiscal conservatism. There is no support base at this stage for NZ First to embark on a Trump-style offensive championing protectionism and deficit spending.

Whilst there will be increased attempts by ACT and NZ First to differentiate themselves from National and from each other in the lead up to the 2026 election, none of the three Coalition partners benefit from bringing down the government early or triggering a snap election. For Peters or Seymour to have a motive to take such radical action, they would need good reason to believe that making a major gamble was the only way to either maintain their positions of power going forward, or gain significantly more power from the fallout. The situation would have to change markedly for either scenario to become plausible.

If we want to bring down this government, we must fight them. The Coalition might collapse of its own volition, but we cannot rely on that possibility. Fighting the Coalition means fighting their agenda of cuts and privatisation, and it means pointing the finger squarely at the corporations and wealthy individuals who profit from these policies at the expense of the vast majority of the population.

Resisting the rise of oligarchy, in both America and Aotearoa, is the only way forward.

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Read more:

• The Trump Shock

• What Is to Be Done? Taking the Fight to the Coalition in 2025

• Is a Left-Wing Leadership of the NZ Labour Party Possible?

Message from the author

Welcome to my Substack! Thanks for reading.

My name is Elliot Crossan, and I am a socialist writer and activist based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. I am the Chair of System Change Aotearoa, an ecosocialist campaign group. You can check out our website here.

I am a freelance writer, and I intend to make all posts on this Substack free. The goal of my writing is to help bring about political change — to contribute to the movement for workers’ rights, indigenous rights and climate justice. If you are able to support me financially, any contribution would be greatly appreciated — but I have no plans to publish anything behind a paywall.

Please subscribe and share this post!

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The eyes of the world are on Donald Trump once again. The world’s most successful attention-seeker has us all transfixed. It’s a story that has been all too familiar since the real estate mogul-turned-demagogue launched his first presidential campaign nearly ten years ago.

On Wednesday 2nd April — branded “Liberation Day” by Trump — the President unveiled the highest tariff levels that the US has imposed on foreign trade since the early 1900s. Trump’s reality TV instincts were on full display as he declared that America had been “looted, pillaged and raped” by its trading partners — graphic language used by a President who is himself a convicted sexual predator. Not even Israel was exempt, as Trump singled out America’s allies for criticism: “in many cases, the friend is worse than the foe.” Trump declared that his plans would reverse decades of US economic decline and usher in “a new golden age” for Americans.

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The President branded his tariffs as “reciprocal,” falsely claiming that he was retaliating against tariffs imposed by other countries on the US. The numbers did not add up. When questioned, the White House revealed that it had in reality calculated tariff rates by using a formula to estimate the trade imbalance between America and its trading partners. Countries whose exports of goods into the US significantly exceed their imports were thus given the highest tariff rates.

The majority of affected countries were hit with the base rate of 10% — including New Zealand, Australia and the UK — while others were singled out for higher tariff rates. The European Union was given a 20% tariff. Trump had already imposed a 20% tariff on Chinese goods earlier this year; on “Liberation Day” he added another 34%, bringing the total to 54%.

On April 3rd, Wall Street had its worst day of trading since the March 2020 Covid-induced crisis. Markets panicked, and so did economists; Trump’s actions were denounced as madness, stupidity and economic illiteracy. Fears rapidly emerged of a global recession, with prices expected to rise at the same time. This threatened to create the lethal combination of inflation and economic stagnation known as “stagflation.”

China retaliated on April 4th with tariffs on US imports. In response, Trump increased the US tariffs on China to a whopping 104%. A trade war is rapidly escalating between the world’s two largest economies.

Then on April 9th, an economic doomsday scenario began to develop. The interest rate on American government bonds started to rise at an alarming rate. Government bonds are assets sold at auction by nations in order to finance their debt. US Treasury bonds are supposed to be one of the safest assets in the world, as the federal government has historically held firm to its commitments to repay its debts. Seen as a “safe haven” during times of market turmoil, it is usually the case that when the stock market goes down, the bond market goes up in response.

The fact that these Treasury bonds were being sold rather than bought during a stock market crash indicated the beginnings of a crisis of confidence in the US government. The world economy is held together by its confidence in US financial institutions; if confidence were lost completely, nobody knows how far the markets could fall.

The bond market panic proved to be too much for the Trump administration to withstand. The President duly announced a 90-day pause on his “reciprocal tariffs” on every country except for Canada and Mexico — who received 25% tariffs separately and were not impacted by Liberation Day — and China, whose tariff rate he further increased to 125%. However, Trump left the 10% baseline tariff on all foreign trade in place.

This White House de-escalation caused the markets to rally and partially recover from the earlier crash. But the sense of relief induced by this 90-day pause is driven by the view that Trump intends to negotiate; the tariffs that remain in place are still the highest the US has imposed since the 1940s, the trade war with China was escalated further, and the President has indicated that the “reciprocal tariffs” may return after the 90 days are over.

It is too easy to mock the 47th President of the United States. It is too easy to assume that Trump is an idiot surrounded by fools and flatterers, and that all of his policies are motivated solely by narcissism fused with economic illiteracy.

Yet it is essential to ask: is there a plan behind any of this? Is there a method to this madness? To ignore the possibility that Trump and — perhaps more importantly — the people around Trump have a strategy would be a dangerous mistake to make. Top Trump advisors have already claimed that the 90-day pause was all part of the plan.

While the first Trump administration was indeed largely defined by chaos and incoherence, that was in the context of the fact that nobody expected the reality TV celebrity to beat Hillary Clinton in 2016. The policy agenda that Trump implemented in his first term was thus broadly in line with past Republican presidents.

But the Trump team did expect to win in 2024. They spent the last four years in opposition preparing for a second term in the Oval Office.

Trump and his nationalist advisors are not outsiders any more. They have won explicit support from sections of the billionaire class this time, particularly amongst the tech oligarchs of Silicon Valley. Trump’s 2024 campaign was bankrolled by the richest man in the world. The Republican Party, now fully under the control of the MAGA movement, has a plan to radically reshape the prevailing order of both America and the world.

Their aim is to use America’s status as the hegemonic global superpower to increase US economic power and prosperity. While from the outside the actions of the White House may look random and chaotic, we can be sure of one thing: inducing a sense of generalised chaos is deliberate. The Trump administration wants its opposition to be confused, in disarray, and unable to form a coherent response.

Opponents of Trumpism must cut through this outer layer of chaos if we want to understand what is going on. We can find the method in the madness by asking: who stands to gain from Trump’s actions?

Is America In Decline?

Since 1945, the United States of America has been the world’s dominant superpower. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, American power reached new heights, as the global capitalist system became uncontested. The doctrine of free trade and open markets was spread across the world — by force, in instances where Washington deemed it necessary.

In the 21st Century, the precipitous rise of China has made it the main rival to American hegemony. Yet China is currently nowhere near eclipsing the United States. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates the US economy to be more than six times as large as the Chinese economy when adjusted for population size.

The US dollar remains the world’s ‘reserve currency’ — the currency that central banks across the world hold in significant quantities as part of foreign exchange reserves. US gross domestic product (GDP) accounts for more than a quarter of world GDP. American fears about “de-dollarisation” — a global shift away from usage of the US dollar as the reserve currency — and concerns about a declining US share of the world economy both need to be placed into context.

Whilst the dollar’s share of foreign exchange reserves has steadily declined since 2001, figure 2 demonstrates that it has merely returned to levels last seen in 1995 — at the height of America’s post-Cold War power.

Figure 3 shows the share of global GDP for the six largest economies in the world as of 2024. Whilst the US share has declined from its peak, this was inevitable in an increasingly competitive world market; the US regained ground in the 2010s and early 2020s. It is the European Union and Japan that should be worried about terminal decline.

Chinese economic growth is no longer rapidly outpacing the US. China’s economy grew faster than the US in every single year from 1995 to 2015. In 2016, the US grew faster than China for the first time in 22 years; it happened again in 2019; and in 2022-2024, the US grew faster than China for three consecutive years.

When discussing the possibility of China’s economy surpassing the US, it is worth remembering that similar rhetoric was used to describe the rise of Japan in the 1980s and early 1990s. At the time, Japanese economic success resembled what we see from China today. However, major demographic problems contributed to a monumental decline in the Japanese economy from the mid-1990s onwards. China’s one-child policy, in place between 1980 and 2016, has created demographic problems which could similarly threaten the country’s ability to grow at a fast enough rate to surpass the United States.

One significant difference between China and Japan is that the latter is a US ally. China on the other hand is politically independent from the US empire, meaning it has more room to manoeuver than Japan did.

In military terms, the US accounted for 37% of global spending in 2023, and spent more on its military than the next nine countries combined. China accounts for 12% of global military spending. The US maintains at least 750 military bases across the world; China has just one known overseas military base.

The US remains unparalleled in its economic and military dominance of the world. Talk of this being the “Chinese Century” is premature for the time being. The next few decades will be marked by the increasingly intense rivalry between these two great powers.

Whose Interests Does Trump Represent?

It may seem farcical for the population of the world’s only superpower to elect a President who complains endlessly about American decline and about his country being ripped off by foreigners. But whilst the US maintains a dominant position in the world economy, most Americans are not experiencing prosperity. Trump’s populist rhetoric speaks to growing anger against the elites of Washington DC and Wall Street.

Life for working class Americans is tough. Globalisation and the rise of China made many US multinational corporations rich — but this was at the expense of blue-collar working class communities, particularly in the ‘Rust Belt,’ whose well-paid jobs were shipped overseas and replaced with the choice of either unemployment or precarious, lower-paid work in the gig economy. The union movement that once represented these workers was deliberately decimated by the Reagan administration and its successors.

In 2008, Wall Street bankers crashed the global economy. Instead of being punished, the big banks were bailed out. At the same time, millions of working class people had their houses foreclosed after falling victim to predatory lending practices.

Inequality is out of control. Productivity keeps increasing, yet there are no corresponding increases in wages. The economy keeps growing, the rich keep getting richer, and 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. The privatised health insurance system saddles people with unpayable debts if they are unlucky enough to need medical treatment they cannot afford.

America is in decline — in the eyes of the majority of the population. Whilst the Democratic Party preaches about “aspiration” and “abundance,” Trump is telling a different story — one which speaks to American workers whose views on their ruling elites range from hostility to outright hatred. The 2024 election saw Republicans surpass Democrats among low-income voters for the first time since 1960.

The idea that America has been “looted, pillaged and raped” by foreigners speaks to this widespread discontent. Trump constantly blames migrants for America’s problems; his xenophobic rhetoric scapegoats Mexicans in particular, in an attempt to shift the blame away from the rich and powerful who have profited from the economic system.

Yet his rhetoric about American workers suffering due to “horrible” trade deals does have truth to it. His promises to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US strike a nerve in the Rust Belt states that were once the heartland of American industry. Those states handed Trump the presidency in both 2016 and 2024. Traditionally loyal Democratic voters could not forgive the party that had played a pivotal role in sending their jobs overseas.

The Trump administration does not have the best interests of the American working class at heart. The President is a former real estate mogul and a member of the billionaire class. He has publicly joked with Elon Musk about hating unions. The 2018 Trump tax cuts constituted the largest tax break in history for the American super-rich. The administration intends to make these tax cuts permanent, as they are currently set to expire this year.

The three richest men in the world were given positions of high honour at the President’s second inauguration. Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, was joined by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Joining them were the CEOs of Apple and Google. The wealth and power of Silicon Valley elites has multiplied exponentially in recent decades; they are the biggest winners of the globalisation era. While Trump may pose as the champion of the ‘little guy,’ he has aligned himself with the tech oligarchy.

Once Trump was in office, Musk was swiftly granted free reign to take a chainsaw to federal agencies that promote the interests of working class Americans. The cuts unleashed by the Department of Government Efficiency in recent months have already made Musk hugely unpopular; the long-term effects will be devastating. Congressional Republicans are set to double down, signalling plans to cut to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security in their upcoming budget.

Not all of the capitalist class supports Trump. There are a plethora of billionaires who support the Democrats, including Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Michael Bloomberg. Financiers on the New York Stock Exchange generally supported the Democrats over the Republicans even before the ‘Liberation Day’ crash; the depiction of the Democratic Party as the party of Wall Street is not inaccurate.

To say that US politics is a battle between Silicon Valley Republicans against Wall Street Democrats is somewhat of an oversimplification; but there is some truth to this idea. There is a division within the capitalist class. Finance capital generally prefers stability, and is appalled by Trump’s agenda. On the other hand, corporate monopolies such as Tesla, Amazon and Meta are insulated from market competition by their sheer size, and are willing to back Trump in taking risks to achieve future gains — to a point.

The recession and inflation that Trump’s trade war is almost certain to unleash will hurt working class Americans who were already reeling from the cost-of-living crisis. The trade war will also hurt struggling small business owners. The narrative that Trump is the champion of the ‘little guy’ is often extended to include the notion that he is the champion of ‘family capital’ against ‘global capital.’ In practice, small- to medium-sized family-owned businesses will be decimated by a major economic crisis.

Workers, small businesses, and Wall Street traders whose fortunes depend on short-term investments all stand to lose from the coming recession. Only the major monopolies that are ‘too big to fail’ — and can rely upon government bailouts if the going gets too tough — are in a good position to capitalise.

The Twin Deficit Problem

Trump and his advisors have grave concerns about the structural economic challenges that they believe pose a threat to America’s dominant position in the world. They entered office with the belief that drastic action must be taken to preserve US hegemony into the future and combat the rise of China. They have a plan; the trade war is just the start.

Economists generally believe that a government must run a budget surplus if it wishes to run a current account deficit, and vice versa. A budget surplus means that the government’s income is higher than its spending; a current account deficit means that the value of the country’s imports from overseas is higher than the value of its exports to foreign markets.

The US has long defied this conventional wisdom by running twin deficits. Its huge federal budget deficit is fuelled by colossal military spending, and has increased in recent decades as a result of giant tax cuts for the rich implemented by Republican administrations. Meanwhile, the large current account deficit has been driven by the decline of US manufacturing — see figures 4 and 5.

With brief exceptions in the 1990s, the US has run continuous deficits on both its federal budget and its international trade since 1982. This means that America has been taking on a large amount of debt, while pumping out dollars for the rest of the world to hold in reserve.

Trump and his advisors believe that America’s declining share of world GDP makes these twin deficits unsustainable. They believe that rising debt and the decline of US manufacturing put the nation in a vulnerable position in future economic crises. They are concerned that China will be able to take advantage of this vulnerability in its quest to replace America as the world’s leading superpower.

The Mar-a-Lago Accord

Trump’s belief that past presidential administrations signed “bad deals” that allowed foreign nations to get rich by “ripping off America” goes beyond rhetorical attacks on his rivals. Trump has been attacking US trade policy for decades, lamenting the loss of America’s manufacturing base. During his first term, he famously declared: “if you don’t have steel, you don’t have a country!”

The President and his advisors see trade and defence policy as inherently linked. They believe that:

1. The role of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency has led to the dollar being overvalued, and that this is the primary cause of America’s current account deficit.

2. US allies are taking America for granted, assuming that the US with its colossal military budget will come to their aid if they are attacked, and are therefore able to spend less on their own defence.

Trump is not proposing to stop using the dollar as the reserve currency — in fact, he has threatened to punish countries which abandon the dollar. Nor is the President interested in reducing the military budget; in a joint press conference with Benjamin Netanyahu on April 8th, he floated the idea of increasing military spending to $1 trillion. This would represent an increase of $108 billion.

Enter Stephen Miran. In November, swiftly following Trump’s election victory, Miran authored a paper entitled ‘A User's Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System.’ The paper set out an audacious plan to realign the world economy in the interests of the United States. While denying multiple times that the essay was “policy advocacy,” Miran outlined the following key aims for the second Trump administration:

1. Force a devaluation of the US dollar to make American exports more competitive and wipe out the trade deficit. In order to force this devaluation, other countries must be made to sell their reserves of US dollars — boosting the value of their currencies relative to the dollar — and instead buy long-term US Treasury bonds.

2. Force US allies to increase military spending.

3. Encircle and isolate China both geopolitically and economically to forestall its rise. One of Miran’s proposals here is to construct a “tariff wall” around China.

Trump’s team clearly liked what Miran had to say. In December, Trump named Miran as his nominee for chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. The nomination was confirmed by the Senate in March.

It will not be easy for the Trump administration to force America’s trading partners, including its major geopolitical rival, into accepting this proposed realignment of the world economic order. The most telling part of Miran’s proposal is how he intends to bring about this realignment.

Miran urges his readers to “recall that President Trump views tariffs as generating negotiating leverage for making deals.” He continues: “It is easier to imagine that after a series of punitive tariffs, trading partners like Europe and China become more receptive to some manner of currency accord in exchange for a reduction of tariffs.” Referencing the 2018-2019 US-China trade war initiated by Trump in his first term, Miran states: “Because tariffs are a negotiating tool, the President was mercurial in their implementation — the uncertainty over whether, when, and how big adds to leverage in a negotiation, by creating fear and doubt.”

Miran cites Scott Bessent — now Trump’s Treasury Secretary — who has proposed the idea of splitting the world into zones. Countries in the green zone will continue to benefit from US military protection, and in return must increase their own military spending and conform with what the Trump administration considers to be “fair trade” policies — ie, trade policies which benefit American interests. These countries would receive reductions in tariffs. Countries in the orange zone risk losing American protection and facing higher tariffs. Countries in the red zone are threatened with high tariffs and open hostility from the American empire.

In this light, Trump’s dramatic unveiling of the global tariff regime on Liberation Day begins to make sense. Trump forcing the entire world to nervously watch his reality show theatrics was deliberate. The chaos and uncertainty we are seeing in financial markets, the frantic speculation in the world’s media, is deliberate. Fear and doubt is the aim.

The same logic applies to Trump’s infamous February meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Trump and Vice President JD Vance bullied and berated the Ukrainian President in front of the world’s media. Zelenskyy was made into an example for other American allies — past US commitments no longer matter. Fall in line with Trump’s demands or you will be cast aside, no matter how high the stakes.

The Zelenskyy incident highlighted another key demand we can expect to see from the Trump administration: that other countries give the US favourable access to resources, in particular rare earth minerals necessary for the manufacture of weapons, electric vehicles and other technologies. China is ahead of the US in the race to secure access to these crucial resources, and American tech giants are concerned.

There are other points of economic leverage that the Trump administration holds over foreign governments besides tariffs. Another key bargaining chip Miran suggests could be weaponised in negotiations is access to central bank liquidity swaps, otherwise known as “swap lines.”

Adam Tooze’s 2018 book Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World documents how central banks in many countries have become dependent on “swap lines” with the US Federal Reserve in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The US dollar is seen as the safest currency in the world, and access to dollars becomes urgently necessary in times of market turmoil in order for governments to stave off any risk of potential insolvency. During the 2008 meltdown, the Eurozone crisis of the early 2010s, and later in the 2020 Covid panic, the Federal Reserve made swift agreements with central bankers across Europe, the Americas and the Asia-Pacific region to guarantee unlimited access to dollar reserves. Among the many central banks that made use of this agreement was the Reserve Bank of New Zealand.

The global financial system has become so fragile in the last two decades that significant sections of the world economy are entirely dependent on the Federal Reserve to stave off collapse in times of crisis. The US government has huge leverage over all governments that it has swap line agreements with. With Trump now in office, and Miran as his chief economic advisor, the US will be both willing and able to weaponise this position to extract concessions from US allies. A global economic meltdown will place maximum pressure on all these governments who risk going bankrupt without assistance from the US central bank.

Tariff-free access to the US market; security guarantees from the US military; emergency provision of US dollars from the Federal Reserve. These are three powerful tools with which the Trump administration can blackmail other countries. All American trading partners are threatened — and the more reliant you are on the US, the more leverage Trump holds.

In 1985, the Reagan administration made an agreement with representatives of the British, French, Japanese and West German governments to devalue the dollar. This was achieved by America’s four main allies selling their own dollar reserves in order to boost the value of their own currencies. This agreement was known as the “Plaza Accord.”

Miran wants to bring about a “Mar-a-Lago Accord.” But 40 years on from the amicable agreement made at New York’s Plaza Hotel, Miran does not believe that America’s allies — let alone its rivals — will be as willing to agree to dollar devaluation. US trading partners benefit from their ability to import goods to the US at discounted rates as a result of a strong dollar.

Some economists believe that the Plaza Accord was the beginning of the end for Japan’s economic rise. China meanwhile is the direct target of Trump’s aggressive attempt to restructure the world economic order; the President and his advisors actively hope that a dollar devaluation will burst debt bubbles in China and bring about a period of Chinese decline similar to what Japan has experienced since 1994.

This is why Miran does not believe an amicable deal on dollar devaluation is possible. He does not believe the US can afford to play nice this time to secure its interests. The Mar-a-Lago Accord can only be achieved through chaos and fear. Trump is therefore cast in the role he was born to play: the man who bullies the entire world to put America first.

As well as drawing upon the lessons of the Plaza Accord, Miran invokes the memory of Bretton Woods, the 1944 conference which agreed upon the international framework of rules which would govern finance and trade for the western world in the wake of the Second World War. Yet to understand what the Trump administration is doing today, we need to look back not to 1944, but to how the Bretton Woods system came crashing down 27 years later.

Blood on the Floor

Yanis Varoufakis is the former Finance Minister of Greece. He is a renowned left-wing economist, and leader of the pan-European Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25). On “Liberation Day,” Varoufakis wrote an article for the DiEM25 website highlighting the striking parallels between Trump’s actions and the actions of the Nixon administration in 1971.

Varoufakis quotes John Connally, who was President Richard Nixon’s Treasury Secretary. Connally’s words to Nixon in 1971 are eerily reminiscent of the rhetoric used by Trump and his team.

“My philosophy, Mr President, is that all foreigners are out to screw us and it’s our job to screw them first.”

In saying this, the Treasury Secretary was trying to convince the President to trigger “a controlled disintegration of the world economy.” Connally succeeded. On 15 August 1971 Nixon unilaterally withdrew the US from the gold standard. The economic order that had created such stability during the postwar economic boom was shattered. The US dollar became a floating currency, and the capitalist world entered a series of crises that would last for over a decade. The term “stagflation” was coined in the wake of the Nixon Shock.

Writing for the Guardian on Monday, British economist James Meadway cites an example from later in the 1970s as another precedent for Trump’s “Liberation Day” actions. Meadway draws attention to the Volcker Shock of October 1979, when Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker hiked interest rates first to 13%, then 17%, and later to 19% in order to curb inflation. Volcker’s aim was to engineer a recession that would dramatically increase unemployment, weakening the bargaining power of the trade unions and therefore allowing employers to cut wages. Workers were made to pay for the crisis of stagflation unleashed by Nixon.

The Volcker Shock permanently weakened the labour movement, and set the model going forward for central banks to use interest rates to control inflation by increasing unemployment and weakening workers’ bargaining power. Knowing the chaos his rate hikes would inevitably unleash, Volcker reportedly took the editorial team of the Wall Street Journal out to lunch to ask them: “When there’s blood all over the floor, will you guys still support me?” With their constant rhetoric about the need for short-term pain for long term gain, Trump and his advisors echo Volcker’s sentiment; this time, the financial press does not seem so convinced.

It was through these shocks delivered by Nixon and Volcker in the 1970s that the era of neoliberalism was born. The fabled power of the “free market” was unleashed. The decline of the labour movement, the end of full employment and decades of stagnant wages were three hallmarks of this transition. Attacks on the public sector followed, through policies of deregulation, privatisation and austerity. The tax burden was shifted from the rich to the poor, and the welfare state was undermined. An explosion of poverty and inequality was the inevitable result.

The free market economic model was replicated in country after country. Sweeping neoliberal reforms were introduced in Aotearoa between 1984 and 1993, initiated by Labour Party Finance Minister Roger Douglas, and continued by his National Party successor Ruth Richardson. As a result, we experienced the fastest increase in inequality of any advanced economy across this period.

The era of neoliberalism came with it the era of globalised free trade. This meant a race to the bottom as multinational corporations sought to produce goods as cheaply as possible. Wages were further depressed in advanced economies. The rise of China and the expansion of the US trade deficit were facilitated by this globalisation of capitalist production. The seeds were sown for the rise of Trumpism decades later.

From economic crises to natural disasters to wars, the capitalist class and its political representatives in governments across the world have spent the last five decades exploiting crisis after crisis in order to force through neoliberal policies which make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Naomi Klein’s 2007 book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism charts this conscious and deliberate exploitation of societal shocks to implement otherwise unpopular policies. It is no coincidence that the Global Financial Crisis, the Eurozone crisis, the 2020-2021 Covid crisis and the following cost-of-living crisis all saw the rich get richer while working people struggled. The Trump Shock will have the same effect.

The neoliberal era produced the conditions that enabled Trump to gain popularity with angry American workers in the Rust Belt. Trump rails against the world that Nixon and Volcker created, all while engineering a shock of his own that will further impoverish the people he claims to represent.

Will the Trump Shock Achieve Its Aims?

Trump’s trade war is disaster capitalism in action. His tariffs will not protect American workers — the return of stagflation will rapidly worsen the social crisis that already exists for millions upon millions. The austerity being unleashed by congressional Republicans and by the Department of Government Efficiency will add insult to injury.

Even if Trump’s negotiations successfully bring manufacturing jobs back to the US, this will not necessarily raise living standards for the US working class. Trump, Musk and the oligarchy that governs America are fiercely anti-union. Industrial capitalists will pay their workers as little as they can get away with, regardless of which country they move production to. If manufacturing workers collectively bargain for higher wages and better conditions, it will be in spite of the Trump administration and the Silicon Valley billionaires, not because of them.

Trump is an enemy of US manufacturing workers. His plan is designed to boost the profitability of US industrial capitalists, and to guarantee the long-term dominance of America in the world system.

With these objectives in mind, the question becomes: will the Trump Shock succeed?

Trump will drive a hard bargain, and he holds a dangerous amount of leverage. American security guarantees, whether economic guarantees from the Federal Reserve or defence guarantees from the US military, are not something that allied nations can easily replace. Tariff-free access to the US market is similarly vital — America has the largest consumer base in the world. Retaliatory tariffs from US trading partners are an idle threat — in a trade war, the country with a current account deficit is in a stronger position by default.

Trump and his inner circle are clearly willing to accept blood on the floor of the stock market in the short term; they don’t give a damn about the pain that will be felt by American workers. However, yesterday’s bond market panic and the resultant 90-day pause of some tariffs proved that the administration is still sensitive to signs of a full-scale economic meltdown, and willing to compromise if the US government itself faces a crisis of confidence.

Whilst his negotiating position may have been weakened by the events of April 9th, Trump’s pressure on US trading partners is already working. The White House has claimed that more than 50 countries have already reached out to try and renegotiate the tariffs that have been imposed on them. European countries are raising their defence spending in line with Trump’s demands. The German government has taken the historic step of breaking its strict debt rules in order to fund rearmament; the Labour government in Britain meanwhile has decided to stick to its fiscal rules and instead cut benefits for disabled people.

In her forthcoming 2025 budget, New Zealand Finance Minister Nicola Willis will face the same trade-off. Christopher Luxon and Judith Collins announced a $12 billion defence package this week — with markets in turmoil, the money will either come from fresh cuts or from borrowing.

Trump will threaten and cajole nations to pick the side of the US in its rivalry with China. He will attempt to strangle China’s export-based economy by bringing other countries into a “tariff wall.” The European Union was already considering tariffs against China; now faced with a flood of discounted Chinese goods originally intended for sale in the US, Europe may be dragged into this trade war whether it likes it or not.

America sees the South Pacific as a key battleground in its attempt to encircle China. New Zealand will face mounting pressure to join the AUKUS alliance. We will be asked to pick a side between our second and third largest trading partners. Expect to see increased fearmongering about the supposed threat China poses to Pacific nations.

The global economy is weaker than it was in 1971. The Nixon shock came at the end of the so-called “golden age of capitalism,” the longest sustained boom in the history of the system. Today economic growth is feeble across much of the world, particularly the advanced economies.

In Crashed, Tooze details how the US and China barely managed to hold the world economy together in the aftermath of 2008 through Federal Reserve swap lines and the huge Chinese stimulus package. Tooze raises concerns that the two countries will not be able to repeat this trick twice. This is doubly true if the next crisis is caused by the escalating trade war between the world’s two largest economies.

Trump’s brute-force approach, hitting this fragile world economy with a sledgehammer, is an incredibly dangerous move. If capitalism goes into meltdown and the US and China are unwilling or unable to cooperate and revive the system, a second Great Depression could occur. Trump’s controlled disintegration of the world economy could spiral out of control very quickly. We caught a glimpse of what this spiral could look like on April 9th.

In domestic terms, the US President is in a uniquely powerful position right now. He is empowered by a right-wing majority on the Supreme Court which is willing to extend his authority and immunity, seemingly without limit. He has a fanatical following among the MAGA faithful. But the rest of his coalition is more fragile.

Support for the administration among the billionaire class is already wavering. Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman was until recently a Trump loyalist; he is now warning of an “economic nuclear winter.” Apple is suffering particularly heavy losses on the stock market due to the dependence of its supply chain on China; executives will not be happy. A libertarian group backed by Charles Koch and Leonard Leo is suing to stop the tariffs. The Republican Party exists to further the interests of American billionaires. If the billionaire class collectively turns on Trump, he could be forced into a humiliating climbdown.

At a ground level, American voters are about to feel a huge amount of economic pain. They are likely to revolt against Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections, and in the next presidential election. Congressional Republicans must be panicking.

Until now, there was a crucial factor insulating the Trump administration from backlash among congressional Republicans worried about losing their seats: Elon Musk’s fortune. So long as Musk was willing to pay unlimited amounts of money in primaries to defeat any Republican who spoke out against the administration, senators and congressmen alike were cowed into silence.

But Musk’s money alone cannot dictate election results. The Tesla CEO is so unpopular right now that his recent attempt to sway a Wisconsin Supreme Court election spectacularly backfired. His support for Republican candidates may end up harming their electoral chances.

There are also growing signs that Musk himself is opposed to the tariff regime. This weekend he publicly called for a free trade zone across Europe and America. On Twitter, he called Peter Navarro “dumber than a sack of bricks.” Navarro is President Trump’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing.

If Musk abandons Trump, the huge political capital currently wielded by the President in policy making and negotiations could evaporate. Congressional Republicans could even ally with Democrats to pass a bill removing the President’s power to influence trade policy altogether.

Yet we cannot rule out the possibility that frantic negotiations will occur and Trump will be able to pull off his most audacious power play. If so, it will mean strengthening the US economy at the expense of others. This will intensify economic problems and sociopolitical tensions across the rest of the world.

Decades of neoliberal assaults on the living standards of working people have led to huge sociopolitical tension in Europe, Latin America and elsewhere. Australia and New Zealand escaped the 2010s as relatively stable countries amidst an increasingly unstable world, but both countries — especially Aotearoa — are now headed in the same direction.

Both scenarios: a second Great Depression, or a realignment of the world economy in favour of the US — will intensify these pressures. Countries already at boiling point, with far-right parties on the rise, could tip over the edge; the likes of Aotearoa, at an earlier stage on that path, will rapidly accelerate down it.

The most terrifying aspect of these scenarios is the increased threat of world war. Great power conflict and the rise of the far-right both gave rise to Trumpism; both tendencies will be accelerated by Trump’s trade war, and both tendencies increase the likelihood of real war.

The proxy war between Russia and NATO taking place in Ukraine is symptomatic of this trend already emerging; the genocide in Gaza is another symptom of a world in crisis. As climate change and the development of new technologies such as AI compel capitalist states to compete more ferociously over food, water, energy, rare earth minerals and other resources, the drive toward armed conflict grows stronger still.

A full-scale war between two nuclear-armed states is unimaginable, yet the possibility gets stronger as Trump forces Europe, Australia and New Zealand to increase military spending and adopt a more hostile approach towards China. There is a terrifying risk that Trump’s aggression could be the spark that ignites the greatest catastrophe in world history.

Economic crisis, extreme inequality, trade wars, real wars, the rise of the far-right, not to mention climate change — these are all symptoms of a system in deep crisis. As long as we live in a world governed by competition rather than cooperation and solidarity, the ruthless logic of great powers imposing their will upon the rest of the world will continue to wreak havoc.

It is more vital than ever for the left to understand these dynamics, so that we can prepare to organise and fight back. A better world is possible — if, and only if, we change the system.

I will further discuss the possible effects of Trump’s trade war in a follow-up to this essay. See below for recommended readings.

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Welcome to my Substack! Thanks for reading.

My name is Elliot Crossan, and I am a socialist writer and activist based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. I am the Chair of System Change Aotearoa, an ecosocialist campaign group. You can check out our website here.

I am a freelance writer, and I intend to make all posts on this Substack free. The goal of my writing is to help bring about political change — to contribute to the movement for workers’ rights, indigenous rights and climate justice. If you are able to support me financially, any contribution would be greatly appreciated — but I have no plans to publish anything behind a paywall.

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Recommended Reading

This essay draws a lot on the following sources, and in particular on the work of Yanis Varoufakis and James Meadway. Meadway is the host of the excellent Macrodose podcast, a must-listen for informed analysis of the global economy from a left-wing perspective.

To better understand the world economic system that Trump is currently attempting to reorder, I highly recommend the following books:

• The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007), by Naomi Klein

• Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (2018), by Adam Tooze

• The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the World Economy (2011), by Yanis Varoufakis

• A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005), by David Harvey

• Stolen: How to Save the World from Financialisation (2019), by Grace Blakeley

You can read Stephen Miran’s paper here: A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System (2024).

For a deep-dive analysis of Miran’s paper and the geopolitical context behind it, I recommend the podcast episode Trump’s Economic Revolution by Tom McTague and Helen Thompson, hosts of These Times.

For weekly analysis of the political economy of Aotearoa New Zealand, I recommend following Bernard Hickey’s Substack The Kākā.

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“You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.”

These words, spoken by Angela Davis eleven years ago, contain the most important message that NZ socialists need to hear in 2025. The radical left far too often approaches questions of strategy and organisation with a pessimistic, defeatist mentality. Too often we act as if change is simply not possible in this country. It is urgently necessary for us to shake off this mentality.

David Seymour behaves as if it is possible for his party to radically transform Aotearoa. Before the pandemic ACT was a party reduced to one solitary MP, surviving thanks to its pact with National in Epsom, having received a mere 0.5% of the party vote in 2017.

Half a decade later, Seymour is setting the terrain on which the central political struggles of our time are fought. ACT’s Treaty Principles Bill is polarising the nation in a similar way to how the Brexit debate polarised the UK. A myriad of other attacks on Māori are sneaking through the legislative process under the cover of this most incendiary Bill. ACT has transformed itself in half a decade; what was a dying party in 2019 is now the driving force behind reactionary politics in Aotearoa today.

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Last year saw the Coalition’s austerity programme — the harshest per-capita budget cuts in our nation’s history — combine with the Reserve Bank’s steep increases in the Official Cash Rate between 2021 and 2023 to throw Aotearoa into an economic downturn more severe than any comparable developed country is currently experiencing. Whilst our public services are being aggressively squeezed, ACT is again seizing the initiative; Seymour has stated that his priority for this year is to privatise the healthcare system, and is lobbying for a mass selloff of state housing. ACT is acting as an advance guard, clearing the way for National to pose as ‘moderate’ while the Coalition as a whole implements an extreme right-wing agenda.

This rapid intensification of New Zealand neoliberalism, alongside a vicious backlash against decades of progress towards a partial, inadequate honouring of Te Tiriti o Waitangi by the Crown, is only possible because of determined organisation on the right. 1999-2019 was a period of relative social peace in Aotearoa, marked by successive governments taking a ‘moderate’ approach and staying in the ‘centre ground’ in the wake of the neoliberal revolution of 1984-1999. Instead of giving up hope of seeing its agenda implemented in those lean years, ACT used that time to organise and plan — meaning the party was ready once crisis struck to advance the agenda of the most pitiless wing of the NZ capitalist class.

Aotearoa is now well within the throes of the social and economic crisis that the right spent 20 years waiting for. On the left, we were not ready. We were not prepared to advance socialist politics when the time came. Some valiant attempts to organise were made, but on the whole we were scattered and divided when the moment arrived.

Yet ready or not, we do not have a choice. The time has come in which we can either make the case for radical change — for a socialist transformation of society in order to bring about social, economic, environmental and Treaty justice — or surrender to the radical right. We can either act with courage and determination, or give in to defeatism and despair.

We must choose the former option. We must fight back. To do so, we must urgently address the division and disorganisation on the socialist left.

System Change Aotearoa is seeking to re-energise the conversation about the need for a new socialist party. We are not declaring ourselves to be this party; we are not interested in being another small sect which thinks it holds all the answers yet is unable to grow to anything like the scale needed in this time of crisis. We wish to talk to and work with other organisations and activists across the country to create something serious and lasting.

We acknowledge that multiple different political projects in tension with one another is not necessarily a bad thing in a period where the left is grappling with strategy. We can and must work together in solidarity across different parties and projects; we can be honest about political disagreements while respecting each other’s commitment to the kaupapa.

A number of activists have recently joined the Labour Party in order to try and reclaim it as the party of the working class in Aotearoa. System Change believes that this strategy is unlikely to work, as the lack of any existing socialist faction within the Labour caucus, and the tight control that the incumbent caucus has over leadership elections, candidate selections and policy formation, means that there is no opening for a left-wing leadership of the party to emerge.

We believe that the working class needs an independent voice in politics, and that this aim can only be achieved through the formation of a socialist party that is united on the basis of the struggle against capitalism, rather than by operating within a party which is dominated by those who seek merely to tinker around the edges of the fundamentally broken system.

However, the stakes are simply too high for anyone to pretend that they alone have the sole answer to all of our problems. We support any and all shifts to the left made by the Labour Party, and hope to work alongside activists who are pursuing a different overall strategy to us. The same goes for those working within the Greens and Te Pāti Māori, and for those who are against the concept of parties altogether.

One area where the left needs to work together regardless of party affiliations or lack thereof is in building a mass movement against austerity and privatisation. This is because, in the face of the biggest neoliberal assault that the working class of Aotearoa has faced since the early 1990s, a mass anti-austerity movement is sorely lacking. The past year has seen huge protests take place against the government’s attacks on Te Tiriti, the Fast-track Approvals Bill, and the Coalition’s complicity in the Gaza genocide. We wholeheartedly support each of these movements, and will support the advancement of each struggle in turn. Yet the response to the Coalition’s economic agenda has been muted.

This is particularly a problem for socialists, because it is through the struggle of workers to topple the capitalist system that we believe a better world can emerge. The 2010s saw the return of mass socialist and working class politics in a myriad of different forms across Europe and America, as a direct consequence of the neoliberal paradigm beginning to fragment in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. The austerity policies imposed across the western world in this period represented a ruling class squeeze on workers’ living standards; this combination of economic crisis and austerity exposed the notion that neoliberal capitalism could act as a rising tide lifting all boats to be a lie. As a result, mass movements emerged in the streets resisting cuts and demanding an alternative. These movements found their political expression in sudden explosions in the popularity of previously obscure socialist politicians such as Sanders, Corbyn, and many others.

The conditions in Aotearoa were not the same in the 2010s. While workers in the majority of advanced economies were suffering, New Zealand capitalism was held up as a model of a “rockstar economy.” The austerity policies of the Key-English government were mild in comparison to what was seen in Europe.

The opposite is true in the 2020s. The ruling class of New Zealand have chosen this moment to manufacture a crisis and use it to redistribute wealth upwards. We should therefore prepare for the possibility that, just as mass anti-austerity movements and left-reformist politics emerged overseas in the 2010s, similar phenomena will occur here this decade.

As Marxists, the revival of reformist social democracy in the form of the Sanders-Corbyn phenomenon is not our end goal. However, both the revival of mass street politics, and a return to the days when socialist ideas found expression in mainstream political discourse, will undoubtedly create openings for more revolutionary ideas to proliferate. It is the norm, rather than an aberration, that working class movements resisting capitalism in times of crisis turn first towards reformism for answers, before some begin to look for revolutionary solutions. Marxists in Aotearoa should therefore view the potential emergence of anti-austerity movements, and a revival of left-reformism in one form or another as hugely positive developments which could, under the right circumstances, help revolutionary socialist politics to thrive.

We are not just observers of history; we are participants. We cannot sit idly by and hope that the material conditions inevitably lead to the outcomes we wish to see. It is therefore a vital task in 2025 for socialists to try and build organisations and movements specifically dedicated to opposing the Coalition’s agenda of privatisation and austerity.

In 2024, System Change worked with community groups in Tāmaki Makaurau to organise small rallies against the government’s attacks on Whaikaha (the Ministry for Disabled People), against the ‘traffic light’ benefit sanctions system, and against policies which have increased homelessness. We attempted to tie these issues together as part of the capitalist agenda to make the rich richer. We aim in 2025 to work with other activists in Tāmaki Makaurau and across the motu on the task of turning these small protests into mass mobilisations against the government. We also aim to engage in a dialogue with like-minded socialist activists and organisations on how to put class politics into the centre of the political debate more broadly.

Make no mistake — what is happening in Aotearoa today is a vicious class war. The ACT Party is acting as the Coalition’s “radical flank” in an extremely effective way, pulling the entire political debate as far to the right as possible. One effect of the Treaty Principles Bill — though this is by no means its only purpose — is to, in the words of Steve Bannon, “flood the zone with shit.” NZ First’s xenophobic and transphobic rhetoric plays the same role. The Coalition are baiting the left into using all of our energy defending marginalised communities, creating a culture war to divide the working class against itself, and preempting any attempts to mobilise en masse against a government which operates totally and unambiguously in the interests of the super-rich.

Let 2025 be the year in which we stop dancing to Seymour’s music. That does not mean abandoning our defence of Te Tiriti, and it does not mean giving an inch of ground to the hateful rhetoric and policies of the three-headed right-wing monster. What it does mean is attempting to set the agenda ourselves by mobilising a broad-based working class coalition to fight against racism and austerity, and to fight for a better world for all.

Let this be the year in which tens of thousands of us march for an end to the housing crisis; for better wages and conditions for all workers; for universal, well-funded public services; for public ownership; for dignity for beneficiaries and disabled people; and for the corporate elites to pay for it.

In Aotearoa as across the world, the rapidly-radicalising capitalist class are driving society into the ground with their insatiable desire for even more wealth and power than they already have. Austerity-era neoliberal policies are rapidly accelerating already extreme levels of inequality. Techbro billionaires such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are financing far-right parties in order to channel the growing anger in society towards whichever minority is the latest scapegoat. We must not let them succeed. They can only be stopped when the working class is organised and ready to fight for an alternative. It is our task to lay whatever groundwork we can for this alternative.

Above all other crises looms the impending breakdown of our planet’s ecosystems. The capitalist drive for endless profit is quite literally threatening the future of organised human life on earth. We must remember that, amidst the optimistic rhetoric of the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels made the observation 177 years ago that throughout history, class struggle has: “each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”

The climate crisis presents us with the very real possibility that the common ruin of both the capitalist class and the working class will occur within our lifetimes. The urgency of this impending catastrophe must sit at the back of our minds in every conversation about strategy and organisation.

For those of us who believe that building a new socialist party is the way forward, we simply do not have time to sit around and wait for someone else to do it. Unlike ACT, we do not have the luxury of being able to wait around for the fruits of a 20-year strategy to ripen. We do not have time for infighting. We need to have these conversations now, we need to unite, and we need to act decisively to bring about the change our society so desperately needs.

The strategic priorities of System Change Aotearoa are thus:

1. Work with other activists, organisations and community groups to build a mass movement against austerity and privatisation, while advancing demands for wealth redistribution and stronger workers’ rights.

2. Do whatever we can to strengthen existing movements for Te Tiriti, Palestine and the environment, while highlighting the fact that the global ruling class is to blame for imperialism and environmental destruction.

3. When the time is right, join with others across the motu to create a mass socialist party which can fight to change the system once and for all.

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Welcome to my Substack! Thanks for reading.

My name is Elliot Crossan, and I am a socialist writer and activist based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. I am the Chair of System Change Aotearoa, an ecosocialist campaign group. You can check out our website here.

This article has been republished with the kind permission of Commonweal, the journal of the New Zealand Federation of Socialist Societies. You can read the full ‘What Is to Be Done?’ edition, with contributions from a variety of socialist organisations, here.

I am a freelance writer, and I intend to make all posts on this Substack free. The goal of my writing is to help bring about political change — to contribute to the movement for workers’ rights, indigenous rights and climate justice. If you are able to support me financially, any contribution would be greatly appreciated — but I have no plans to publish anything behind a paywall.

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On Saturday, I republished an essay I wrote in August last year entitled ‘Is a Left-Wing Leadership of the NZ Labour Party Possible?’, in which I compared the circumstances that allowed Jeremy Corbyn to be elected leader of the UK Labour Party in 2015 to the current state of the New Zealand Labour Party, and concluded that a successful left-wing challenge to the neoliberal NZLP leadership is extremely unlikely. As a right of reply of sorts, I am republishing an interview I conducted late last year with Justine Sachs.

Justine Sachs is a socialist activist who has been involved in left-wing activism for over a decade. She is a trade unionist, currently working for the New Zealand Nurses Organisation (NZNO) as an organiser, and a leading pro-Palestine voice in the Auckland Jewish community, being one of the co-founders of the organisation Dayenu: New Zealand Jews Against the Occupation. Justine recently went public with the fact that she has joined the Labour Party — and believes other socialists should join, too.

I caught up with Justine in December 2024 to discuss Labour, the alternatives to Labour, and the relationship between Labour and the trade unions. Justine argued the case for socialists to contest spaces and engage in mass politics if we want to change the world.

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How would you describe the current state of the Labour Party in 2024?

Justine: I think that the Labour Party, like many social democratic parties and centre-left parties across the west, is in a state of crisis. I’d describe it as an identity crisis. Following the defeat of organised labour in the 1970s, these parties have struggled to manage what their base should be. We are living in an era where the chickens are coming home to roost from that historical process.

We no longer have that organised labour constituency that the historic parties of social democracy relied on to be their base. A lot of things have come out of that, such as Blairism, and other attempts to equivocate and try to expand the base of social democracy beyond the traditional working class. But we are also seeing the limitations of that. There is an institutional decline in vote share for the centre-left.

The socialist movement in Aotearoa has had a fraught history with the Labour Party, particularly since 1984, when the Fourth Labour Government abandoned its principles and implemented radical free market reforms which increased inequality and devastated the party’s working class base. Labour governments since then have pursued the ‘Third Way’ approach of accepting neoliberalism, but with mild tweaks to mitigate its worst effects. Many on the radical left would be baffled by the idea of joining the Labour Party, but you disagree. Why do you believe socialists in 2024 should join Labour?

The fact that the left doesn’t think that they have to contest political spaces and organise the people that they don’t necessarily agree with is a problem. It’s why the left is in the position it’s in. It’s a self-marginalising position which puts the left on the fringes of society.

So, I suppose I disagree with the entire premise that we shouldn’t be contesting spaces, that the left shouldn’t be involving itself in mass politics. But to be honest, I also think we need to change the way we frame these things. I am someone who seeks to build a working class politics. I think that is actually quite different from how a lot of people on the left understand and relate to politics.

Regardless of what critiques people may or may not have of Labour, the fact is that Labour remains a party whose base is the working class of Aotearoa. That is a meaningful and important thing. For those of us committed to building working class politics in Aotearoa, politics which can meaningfully give working people agency and self-determination, I don’t think that Labour is a space where we can just say, “oh well we disagree, you know, so therefore we will not engage.” I just think we have to come away from that whole idea of doing politics, because I don’t think it has delivered for us.

The Ardern-Hipkins government failed to implement either a wealth tax or a capital gains tax, despite releasing reports in 2019 and 2023 showing the urgent need to make the rich in Aotearoa pay their fair share. You are part of the Win the Wealth Tax group, which is campaigning within the party to make Labour commit to taxing wealth. Tell me more about this — do you think there’s support within the party for the next Labour government to deliver progressive tax reform?

I think working people see the need for tax reform. I think that working people understand that the tax system is stacked against them. I think that David Parker’s excellent work to kind of illuminate that the ultra-wealthy only pay 9% of tax, while someone who gets their income from working is paying 29% on average, shows how starkly unfair our tax system is. So I think there’s absolutely an appetite for some form of a tax on capital and wealth.

I believe that the wealth tax is a far stronger policy [than the capital gains tax]. It’s bolder, it’s easier to talk to people about, because it really does target the ultra-rich. It invites a question about class as well, and it is more difficult for the right to scaremonger that this is gonna impact ordinary working people, because it will affect people who earn over five million dollars, and couples who are worth over ten million, excluding the family home. It raises revenue faster, and that revenue can immediately be put into our ailing public services. So, in terms of telling the public a story about the unfairness of our current system, I think a wealth tax is a really powerful policy, and strategy to take into the next election.

I do think Labour realises it has to enact some kind of reform of the tax system. I think it is fair to say that ruling out a wealth or capital gains tax was a mistake for the Ardern government, a huge mistake. We really shouldn’t underplay the ramifications of that, in terms of not being able to fund our public services…

So yeah, I think working people and the broader left should be absolutely unanimous in our calls for some form of tax on wealth and capital. I am arguing for a wealth tax for the reasons I’ve mentioned. But obviously I also support a capital gains tax. You could say why not both, but then obviously my position might not be that popular.

MMP allows for a diverse range of parties to be represented in our political system. In the last election, Labour — having run an uninspiring centrist campaign — received the second-worst result in the party’s history, after an unprecedented collapse in vote share. This benefitted the Greens and Te Pāti Māori, both of whom campaigned on more left-wing policies than Labour did. This meant a record number of MPs elected to the left of Labour. Current polling suggests the two parties might do even better next time.

Why not join the Greens and support TPM, and try and strengthen the left-wing alternative to Labour whilst the party is weak?

Firstly, regarding Te Pāti Māori, I think we have a responsibility in the Kawanatanga sphere to sort our own affairs. There is an obligation there that rests with us. As Max Harris would say, that responsibility runs through the state, and through organising and building for a progressive government that uses the state to improve the lot of all people in Aotearoa, in all our diversity. So I think it is appropriate for us to engage with Labour and the Greens in that sense.

Labour still has those relationships with the organised working class, as well as working class people, whether we like it or not. Yes, there is the historic decline that we’ve touched on, but that connection is still there. The Greens voting base is traditionally students and urban liberals. It is a much smaller base. I think we have excellent leaders and comrades in the Green party. I will always want to work with them and we share key values. I hope I am not persona non-grata. This is not about dissing the Greens at all.

Labour still has that mass base, and that base is important; therefore, as a trade unionist, the Labour Party still remains my political home. I find it hard to accept the idea that we should concede that space, and not engage in that space, when so many workers are still in that space, yeah? I think I should also admit as a trade unionist and a socialist, I do feel at home in the Labour Party and with Labour’s base. Ultimately, a (small l) labour party is my political home.

I am respectful of whatever position people take, and where they wanna put that work, and I think that many of us share the same vision, is what I’d say. Let a thousand blossoms bloom.

Most major trade unions are not affiliated to the Labour Party, despite the fact that Labour was founded by the union movement. Many on the left would argue that Labour no longer deserves its claim to be the party of workers and unions.

What would you say to those who worry that left-wing trade unionists joining Labour and trying to strengthen the links between the party and the workers’ movement will give Labour unearned legitimacy and credibility? Could this undermine the efforts of those who want the unions to break away from Labour in order to better fight for the interests of workers?

I am yet to see an argument that actually comprehensively answers my question on how the workers’ movement will be better if they broke away completely from Labour. I think that the left actually needs to try and answer that question. Because we haven’t built the power to challenge our dominant economic structure, we haven’t built the power to challenge the power of capital. So it’s not about who deserves what, it’s about how we’re gonna do that.

I mean, how can we even compare Labour to the Greens? How can you compare a party that can get 50% of the vote to a party where — the Greens’ base is around 15%, 12-15%? And I’m not saying that can’t change. But I don’t think it’s a matter of deserves or not; this is a reality that we’re working with, and it is different. It’s a completely different way of seeing politics.

I think socialists need to return to mass politics, I think that needs to be our orientation! I think that’s a different way of seeing things. And I do want to caution socialists away from talking about politics in these moralistic terms, with words like “deserves”, and, you know, we have this sense of betrayal. Whether that’s justified or not, it doesn’t matter. It’s about power, and who has it — and we need to build it. So, for me, as I said, the Labour Party is still, in terms of its base, the party of working New Zealanders. And either that matters or not to us, as socialists — and I think it matters a hell of a lot.

We have seen recent attempts overseas to move mainstream centre-left parties away from neoliberal policies and towards bold, transformational politics which aims to tackle the twin crises of climate change and inequality by taking on the wealth and power of the top 1%. Do you believe it is possible for the Labour Party as a whole to become a party fighting for transformational change? If so, how?

I believe that the answers to our issues lie in mass politics — democratic mass politics — where working people are engaged in politics and contest these spaces, and make their voices heard. I believe that the Labour Party is the vehicle to do this. I do think that it is possible for things to get better — I don’t think I’d be able to be a union organiser if I didn’t.

Look at Bernie Sanders, and look at Jeremy Corbyn, and look what they achieved compared to Ralph Nader, compared to Jill Stein, compared to our attempts to — I think — find a shortcut away from the struggle. Bernie Sanders has been able to reach millions and millions of Americans. Jeremy Corbyn got so close to being the Prime Minister of the UK. In their failure there is a success as well, and it should be an inspiration to us all. So yes, I do believe it is possible.

The Labour Party needs to return to good old-fashioned working class politics. It needs to build class politics. It needs to work hand-in-glove with the union movement, to rebuild the working class as its base. I know that to some people in the party, that’s a terribly old-fashioned view. But the truth is, it’s actually very current, because, as a result of neoliberalism, we live in a new Gilded Age. The material dynamics have moved. And that’s the reality, okay? So, either these parties are going to respond to that and rebuild themselves, or they are going to really struggle, and continue declining. I don’t think that that would be a positive outcome for working people. I think that would result in the further fragmentation of our political power.

It comes back to the MMP question, because Corbyn and Sanders both exist within first-past-the-post systems. If you look at countries that don’t have that model, such as France, Ireland, Germany, Mexico, the left has emerged by starting separate parties, and we do have MMP here.

Sure, MMP is better for democracy, it means we are not trapped with only two parties. But even in MMP systems there still tends to be a party of labour and a party of capital fighting for the masses support. So I don’t think MMP means there are any short-cuts. In New Zealand, every single attempt to build a new party of labour has failed and been short lived. Alliance, New Labour, Mana etc. How do we account for this? I don’t see the left grappling with those big questions or failures. Personally, I think it shows the continued salience and importance of the New Zealand Labour Party.

Finally, what is your elevator pitch to a young activist who wants to help change the world, but is skeptical of the Labour Party because of its history and its uninspiring track record in recent years? Why should they join?

If they care about building working class politics in Aotearoa, they should join the Labour Party. If they’re prepared to engage in democratic contestation, and to not believe that being right means anything. I don’t care about being right! The left has been right for forty years, and it’s a fat lot of help that’s done us. What have we achieved by being correct? We’ve had a great critique of neoliberalism for forty years, awesome work guys! Me included. What have we done with that, you know?

I don’t wanna just be right! I don’t! There’s a world still fucking burning, and actually it’s doing me psychic damage, being correct without having any power to change anything. It’s psychically damaging, and I can’t stand it and neither can you I bet.

Message from the author

Welcome to my Substack! Thanks for reading.

My name is Elliot Crossan, and I am a socialist writer and activist based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. I am the Chair of System Change Aotearoa, an ecosocialist campaign group. This interview has been republished from our website, which you can check out here.

I am a freelance writer, and I intend to make all posts on this Substack free. The goal of my writing is to help bring about political change — to contribute to the movement for workers’ rights, indigenous rights and climate justice. If you are able to support me financially, any contribution would be greatly appreciated — but I have no plans to publish anything behind a paywall.

Please subscribe and share this post!

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This essay was originally published on the System Change Aotearoa website on 16 August 2024. I am publishing an updated version as part of a series exploring the need for a socialist party in Aotearoa.

It is a painful experience, to have fought long and hard for something you knew was inadequate and to have even that taken away.

This whiplash is being felt by activists across Aotearoa, some of whom have spent years and others decades fighting for climate action, workers’ rights, livable incomes for all, access to decent housing, and for Te Tiriti o Waitangi to be honoured. Campaigners spent years organising and marching for a fair and sustainable future, were given crumbs by the last Labour Government, and are now watching aghast as the new government tears up the minimal progress that was made in the previous six years whilst advancing their own right-wing agenda at a breakneck speed.

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The Labour Party has long urged activists to be ‘realistic,’ arguing that only incremental change is possible; that it is impossible to transform Aotearoa overnight, that the voting public will never accept radical reform, and that three year terms and the MMP electoral system force parties to be moderate and tack to the ‘centre ground.’ National, ACT and NZ First have sent these arguments up in smoke.

The Coalition is taking a scorched earth approach to reform. As soon as the government was formed, the three parties launched an aggressive 100 day agenda, using parliamentary urgency an unprecedented number of times to roll back a number of key Labour reforms. High on the list of axed policies were Fair Pay Agreements — the key workplace reform which private sector unions had spent nearly all of Labour’s two terms awaiting — and the ban on new offshore oil and gas drilling projects, a pivotal demand of the climate movement. Nicola Willis is cutting the public service to the bone, embarking on an austerity programme the likes of which Aotearoa has not experienced since the early 1990s.

The government’s campaign against Te Tiriti o Waitangi threatens to send us back decades on the hard-fought rights won by Māori through relentless struggle. The Treaty Principles Bill is vile; but while both National and NZ First intend to vote down ACT’s most extreme policy at second reading, the Coalition is in the midst of unleashing a series of other racist policies. Benefit sanctions and ‘tough on crime’ policies such as the gang patch law will hit Māori harder than any other group; and the Fast Track Bill constitutes a real and present danger to both the Treaty and the planet.

Workers’ rights, indigenous rights and environmental protections are being bulldozed in front of our eyes, all in service of insatiable corporate greed.

A Labour Party in Crisis

The First Labour Government, elected in 1935 and led by Michael Joseph Savage and Peter Fraser, knew how to use three-year terms to deliver transformational change to benefit working people. The Fourth Labour Government (1984-1990) also unleashed radical change, but in the opposite direction; forty years ago, Finance Minister Roger Douglas rolled back the welfare state established by his predecessors. Douglas famously spoke of moving in “quantum leaps” to keep opponents distracted and confused, unable to fight against his uncompromising agenda. This Coalition knows it too — the three right-wing parties know that even if their government only lasts for one-term, moving at speed and scale means they will achieve more than the Ardern-Hipkins government did in two terms, and perhaps even more than the Clark and Key-English governments achieved in three.

Jacinda Ardern in her five years as Prime Minister led a centrist government which failed to deliver the transformational change she had promised in 2017. When Ardern resigned in January 2023, Chris Hipkins took over and swiftly moved the party even further toward the ‘centre,’ ditching a series of reforms and refusing to implement taxes on wealth or capital gains — despite the fact that taxing the rich is popular with voters. At the precise time that the government needed to shift to the left and deliver radical reform in the interests of its working class voter base who were struggling during an acute cost of living crisis, Labour instead moved right.

The government went down in flames as a result. Hipkins led Labour to its second-worst election defeat since the 1920s, recording the biggest fall in vote share that either major party has ever experienced.

The fact that Hipkins remains leader of the Opposition is a clear sign that the Labour Party does not intend to change direction. We cannot tolerate this; left-wing activists in Aotearoa must not settle for another incrementalist centre-left government which fails to bring about fundamental change in the wake of the bonfire of progressive policies we are currently witnessing. In the midst of a climate crisis, a housing crisis, a crisis of inequality and an all-out assault on Te Tiriti, transformational change is not merely desirable — it is urgently necessary, moreso than ever before.

The incrementalist politics of Hipkins, Ardern and their predecessor Helen Clark is part of a broader trend within western centre-left parties, which have adhered to an ideology known as the ‘Third Way’ since the 1990s. Third Way ideology was formulated around the agendas of US Democratic Party President Bill Clinton and UK Labour leader Tony Blair, leaders who sought to adapt their parties to the free market revolution of the previous decade rather than overturn it. Clinton and Blair left the low-tax, low-spend, heavily privatised neoliberal economic model imposed in the 1980s by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in place. Third Way parties offered mild tweaks within the framework of neoliberalism, upholding the belief that the wealth would “trickle down,” — while in reality allowing the rich to get richer and richer.

Third Way politics has been hegemonic within the New Zealand Labour Party (NZLP) since Clark became leader in 1993. The NZLP’s turn towards the Third Way was actually a leftward shift, given that between 1984 and 1993 the party had been captured by hardline neoliberals who imposed free market ideology on the country as zealously as Reagan and Thatcher had done in the US and UK. The Third Way turn was however, here as overseas, a marked shift away from the redistributive politics that had dominated the postwar era.

The 2008 Global Financial Crisis and the austerity that followed discredited the neoliberal economic model in the eyes of many. In the years since, social movements in many countries have attempted to capture the leaderships of centre-left parties in order to force them to adopt transformative politics. Activists have demanded that social democratic parties abandon neoliberalism and austerity, and side with workers instead of the corporate interests that these parties have served for far too long. In response, incumbent Third Way politicians have proven themselves to be fiercely resistant to any real change.

Could this phenomenon occur within the NZ Labour Party? Austerity and increased social and political polarisation have arrived upon the shores of Aotearoa, mirroring what happened across Europe and America in the 2010s. Is now the moment for left-wing activists to attempt to take back the Labour Party, in order to return it to its founding purpose of representing the interests of the working class?

The Corbyn Movement — Could It Happen Here?

The most famous examples of this phenomenon in the English-speaking world were the Bernie Sanders campaigns of 2016 and 2020. Sanders sought to win the Democratic Party nomination on a platform which included taxing and regulating Wall Street, doubling the minimum wage, and establishing a universal public healthcare system. He identified himself as a democratic socialist, railing against the billionaire class and their “greed and reckless behaviour.”

Sanders won an unprecedented number of votes for a socialist candidate in the US; yet he failed twice to win the nomination of his party. As the US uses a presidential system as opposed to a parliamentary system, and as the structure of American political parties is entirely different to what we have in this country, the Sanders campaigns are not comparable to what left-wing activists might hope to see here.

Jeremy Corbyn’s successful campaign for the leadership of the UK Labour Party is a much more instructive example. Thanks to colonisation, the New Zealand Parliament is modelled directly on the British Westminster system. The main differences between their system and ours are that Britain has a House of Lords as well as a House of Commons, and that Britain still uses first-past-the-post, the electoral system we abandoned in favour of MMP in 1993.

Parliamentary parties are structured similarly in the UK to how they are here. This is particularly true in the case of the NZLP, which is a sister party to Labour in the UK. The example of the Corbyn movement is therefore the closest comparison we can make between Aotearoa and a country which has seen a left-wing insurgency within a mainstream centre-left party.

Between 1983 and 2015, Jeremy Corbyn served as a backbench Labour MP. He was among the most rebellious MPs in his party, consistently voting against the neoliberal Blair/Brown Government on issues such as privatisation and the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Corbyn was part of the Socialist Campaign Group (SCG), a small group of between 20 to 40 left-wing MPs committed to returning Labour to its roots as the party of the working class. The SCG vision of socialism was more Marxist than it was Keynesian; although they fought to defend the welfare state against Thatcherism in the 1980s and against austerity in the 2010s, their ambition went beyond the reestablishment of the postwar consensus. Corbyn and his comrades were proudly anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and committed to a socialist vision based on peace, justice and democracy for the many.

Here is the first hurdle that a left-wing insurgency within the NZLP would come up against. If such a faction exists within the current caucus, its existence is a tightly-kept secret. There are certainly ‘soft left’ MPs — social democrats with ties to the union movement who would like to see a slightly stronger focus on workers — but it is hard to see who their leader is at this stage. Michael Wood was seen by some last term as the leading figure on the soft left, but Wood lost his once-safe seat in Mt. Roskill in the 2023 election when the Labour vote crumbled in Auckland. The ‘soft left’ are not radicals like Corbyn — they merely want Labour to move an inch or two further to the left within the Third Way neoliberal paradigm.

There is no hard left faction inside the NZLP caucus. The most outspoken and rebellious wing of the party broke away when Jim Anderton led a split in 1989, disgusted by the right-wing reforms of the Rogernomics period. Anderton’s NewLabour Party went on to become the dominant faction within the Alliance, the coalition of parties to the left of Labour which won 18.2% of the vote in the 1993 election.

Anderton was the most prominent social democrat to oppose Aotearoa’s neoliberal turn. But even he was hardly an equivalent figure to Corbyn — his goal was to return Labour to the Keynesian policies it championed between 1935 and 1984. When it came down to it, he was happy enough to be a Minister in the Third Way Clark Government from 1999 to 2008.

The Alliance collapsed when Anderton along with three of his colleagues voted with the government in favour of the War in Afghanistan. The other six MPs, and much of the membership, were opposed. The Alliance represented the most left-wing tradition of the postwar NZLP; its leadership was barely left-wing compared to the Socialist Campaign Group; and it is now a long-dead party.

At the beginning of 2015, Corbyn remained a relatively obscure figure in UK politics. When Labour lost that year’s election, leader Ed Miliband stepped down. Three Third Way candidates emerged to replace him — Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall. The SCG decided to put Corbyn forward as the fourth candidate. They did so because they believed that an anti-austerity, anti-war candidate was needed in the leadership race to try and shift the debate to the left.

No one in the party, not even in the SGC, thought that Corbyn could actually win. Bookmakers early on put his odds of victory at 200/1.

One year earlier, Labour had changed its leadership rules to a one-person, one-vote system, with members of the party and affiliated trade unions eligible to vote. Additionally, any member of the public who paid £5 to register as a supporter was now also given a vote. The previous voting system had been an electoral college, in which one-third of the vote was allocated to MPs, one-third to party members, and the remaining one-third to affiliates. Under the new system, the only sway MPs held was in the nominating process, as candidates needed to be nominated by 15% of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) in order to stand.

The 2014 rule change was seen as a victory for the Blairite faction of the party against the soft left, as the common sense was that the general public was more conservative than most Labour MPs. Pundits believed that the new rules would drag the party further to the right; and some Blairite MPs nominated Corbyn because they believed his candidacy would be so unpopular that the left as a whole would be humiliated. They were completely out of touch with what was happening in British society.

If they wanted to know who the new leadership rules would favour, journalists and MPs should have looked to the streets. Hundreds of thousands of people had spent five years marching against the Conservative-led Coalition’s harsh austerity measures. A wave of strikes and campus occupations took place — not since the resistance to Thatcherism had unions and social movements been so combative.

Corbyn and his allies supported the movements, linking arms with protesters while the Labour leadership ignored them. Miliband, despite being on the soft left himself, had campaigned in the 2015 election on an ‘austerity-lite’ manifesto which promised to ease rather than end the cuts.

Corbyn only just squeezed onto the ballot, gaining the crucial 35th nomination he needed at the last possible minute. Once debates and public meetings began, his leadership campaign exploded in popularity. People queued around the block to hear this once-obscure figure make a clear and principled case against austerity. Activists flooded into the Labour Party, and membership exploded from 200,000 to nearly 300,000. It would later peak at close to 600,000, as Labour under Corbyn became the largest party in western Europe. More than 100,000 people registered as supporters, overwhelmingly to vote for the eventual winner.

When the final result was declared, Corbyn’s overwhelming mandate was revealed: he won 251,417 votes, or 59.5%. Even among party members alone, excluding supporters and affiliates, he won 49.6% on the first ballot against three opponents. The Third Way MPs, so used to controlling the party with an iron grip, looked shell-shocked — the Blairite candidate Liz Kendall came last, receiving just 4.5% of the vote.

The NZLP did not allow party members to have any say in leadership elections until an electoral college system was implemented in 2012. From 2012 onwards, 40% of the vote was given to MPs, 40% to members, and 20% to affiliated trade unions, with candidates requiring nominations from 10% of caucus to stand.

In 2021, the rules were changed to give more power back to the parliamentary party. Today, the initial round of voting takes place in caucus using a ranked-choice system, to determine if any candidate can secure the support of two-thirds of MPs. Only if no candidate reaches this two-thirds threshold is the electoral college system used, meaning members only get a say if caucus is divided.

Crucially, if a leader either steps down or is removed by a vote of no confidence within three months of a general election, a new leader can be chosen by a simple majority of caucus using the ranked-choice system. In this scenario, members and affiliated unions can be bypassed entirely. A leader who faces significant opposition from MPs can be removed in the run-up to an election regardless of how much support they have outside of caucus.

Corbyn faced overwhelming opposition from his own MPs. He was forced to fight a second leadership election in 2016 after a no-confidence motion was passed by more than 80% of the PLP. The Blairite-controlled National Executive Committee ruled that members who had joined the party in the last six months were ineligible to vote unless they paid the registered supporters fee, which was raised from £5 to £25. Only two days were given to register as a supporter. Despite these obvious attempts to rig the process, Corbyn was reelected with 313,209 votes (61.8%), an increase of more than 60,000.

Even after this increased mandate from the membership, a significant number of MPs spent the entirety of Corbyn’s tenure undermining him. Even MPs from the soft left participated in this campaign to bring down their elected leader — it wasn’t only the Blairites trying to oust him at all costs. Diane Abbott described this campaign as an attempt to “break him as a man.”

In April 2017, Theresa May called a snap election. The campaign would last for less than seven weeks. Labour were polling at just 24%, and the Conservatives were predicted to win an unprecedented landslide majority. Had the UK Labour Party followed the same rules that the NZLP currently uses, Blairite MPs would have simply ousted Corbyn there and then. Thankfully, they did not have the power to do so.

Corbyn ran a campaign so inspired that it captured the attention of socialists the world over. In the face of clear hostility from big business and the mainstream media, the party released an anti-austerity manifesto entitled For the Many, Not the Few. The radical document promised to raise significant taxes on the top 5% of British households in order to bring vital utilities back into public ownership and invest in public services and infrastructure. It included a sorely needed expansion of workers’ rights, a green transition away from fossil fuels, and an end to UK involvement in illegal wars.

The manifesto was wildly popular, with polls showing majority support for its major proposals. An army of volunteers were mobilised across the country to canvas for Corbyn. Many young people felt hopeful about politics for the first time in their lives, and there was a significant increase in youth turnout. Young voters overwhelmingly favoured Labour, in a phenomenon that was dubbed the “youthquake.”

Instead of winning a landslide, Theresa May lost her majority in Parliament. It was the first time Labour had gained seats in an election since Blair’s victory in 1997. The Labour vote surged to 40% — up 16 points from the party’s polling at the beginning of the campaign. This vote share was 9.6% higher than 2015, making it the party’s biggest increase in vote share since 1945. 12.9 million people voted for a party campaigning on a socialist manifesto.

Whatsapp messages leaked three years later revealed that Blairite party staffers — a hangover from Corbyn’s predecessors — were shellshocked when they saw the exit poll predicting Labour gains. They had been hoping that Corbyn would suffer a defeat devastating enough that he would be forced to resign in disgrace. His opponents to this day smear him as unelectable; but the number of votes received by the Labour Party under Corbyn’s leadership remains its high water mark this century.

Corbyn never won a majority, and he never became Prime Minister. The issue of Brexit tore Labour’s voter base apart in the lead-up to the 2019 election, and Corbyn was unable to make wealth redistribution the clear focus of his campaign like he had in 2017. He had no choice to resign after Boris Johnson won a large majority, with Labour’s vote dropping by 7.9%. This defeat was greatly exaggerated by the disproportionate nature of the first-past-the-post electoral system — the ‘unelectable’ Corbyn still won a higher vote share in 2019 than his predecessors had managed in 2010 or 2015.

Nevertheless, Corbyn came closer to winning power than any radical left leader in the Anglosphere ever has before. Had he not been relentlessly sabotaged by his own MPs and party bureaucrats, who knows how many more votes and seats Labour could have won? 2017 was a close enough contest that it is possible Corbyn could have become Prime Minister had he not been fatally undermined.

Instead, Corbyn has been expelled from the party he dedicated his life to by his successor Keir Starmer. The Starmer-led Labour Party won a landslide majority of seats in the 2024 election, but did so with a record low share of the popular vote for a winning party, amidst the second-lowest turnout since the UK adopted universal suffrage. Labour won fewer votes in 2024 than in 2019, let alone 2017. The Starmer Government experienced an ‘historic’ collapse in popularity almost immediately after entering office, as the new Prime Minister ruled out any notion of tackling wealth inequality, committed himself to continuing austerity by implementing cuts that even the Tories refused to consider, and refused to enact an arms embargo on the genocidal state of Israel.

Corbyn is now faced with the need to create a new left-wing party in the UK. He successfully held his seat as an independent in the 2024 election after being expelled from the Labour Party. Four other ‘Gaza independents’ also won seats from Labour; the Greens meanwhile won four seats, having previously held just one seat in their entire history. These results represented unprecedented success for left-of-Labour candidates in Britain.

But the xenophobic right are also on the move. Nigel Farage’s Reform party won a record four million votes. An emboldened far-right street movement started racist riots in the wake of the election. Britain needs transformational change even more today than it did in 2015.

Any left-wing leader of the New Zealand Labour Party would face the same level of hostility from business, mainstream media outlets and Third Way MPs that Corbyn did. The neoliberal establishment is deeply resistant to transformational change, and most Labour MPs are part of that establishment — in Aotearoa as in Britain.

Yet that is not the only barrier to a left-wing takeover of the NZLP. There is no hard left faction in Parliament, not even a single socialist MP who could lead the charge; even if there was, they wouldn’t get the nominations to stand for leader; even if they did, they would be blocked by two-thirds of caucus; even if they weren’t, they would need to win a mandate from an electoral college in which MPs hold hugely disproportionate sway; and even if they won in this system, a simple majority of MPs could oust and replace them three months out from an election.

A campaign to transform the NZLP would need to start from the bottom-up. It would need to involve replacing the majority of the existing caucus with socialist candidates, and campaigning for a one-member, one-vote party democracy.

Such a campaign would take years of hard work. It would require open hostility from the Labour membership towards its own leaders, without any guarantee of this hostility translating into success. Either more than half of current members would have to turn entirely against the party they chose to join, or enough left-wing activists would need to sign up to Labour to overwhelm the existing members — enough activists that it would be easier to simply start a new party altogether.

People flooded to support the Corbyn campaign because they knew that electing a principled left-wing leader would be a shortcut to the mass movements against austerity and war winning mainstream representation in British politics. Although the Corbyn project did not fundamentally change the makeup of the Labour Party, and although Third Way MPs were allowed to remain in a position where they could continually undermine and eventually purge Corbyn, this project did mean that for four years, one of the two major parties in Britain offered real hope of real change in the interests of working class people.

There is no such lightning rod here to attract a sudden rush of momentum for a takeover of the NZLP. The Labour hierarchy in this country is unlikely to repeat the same errors that enabled Corbyn’s ascension — MPs and party bureaucrats here will have learned their own lessons from what occurred in the UK. A soft left leader of the NZLP is possible if Hipkins fails to win in 2026; but a transformational leader opposed to neoliberalism altogether is virtually out of the question.

A Socialist Party Is Needed

The New Zealand Labour Party is what it is. An incrementalist Third Way party, willing to deliver small crumbs to unions and social movements when pressured. But it is incredibly unlikely that Labour will ever return to being a socialist party of the working class; it is unlikely that it will implement Treaty-based constitutional transformation; and it would take an absolute miracle for Labour to adopt the kind of radical programme for climate action that is desperately required for the survival of humanity.

Chris Hipkins remains the leader. He is not going to experience a Damascene conversion to radical politics. Complacent rhetoric about the inevitability of the Coalition being a one-term government is foolish given there is no coherent alternative being presented; Hipkins may well lead Labour to another defeat. If he does, don’t expect his successor to be anything better than a soft left leader who will soften the edges of neoliberal capitalism rather than transform the system.

Thankfully, unlike the UK, Aotearoa has a proportional representation system which has created a multi-party democracy. Whilst neither the Greens or Te Pāti Māori are parties based on the working class, both are currently committed to policy platforms clearly to the left of Labour. Both parties would place some leftward pressure on a Labour Government if they entered into a coalition.

But the need for a party created by and for the working class remains; a party which will not abandon its socialist principles like Labour has. Activists, socialists and trade unionists in Aotearoa are faced with the question: when is the right time for the formation of such a party?

We know that transformational change in Aotearoa is necessary. We know that we need a radical redistribution of wealth from the top 1% to the working class. The situation is filled with desperate urgency by the austerity and racism of the Coalition, and by the looming threat of climate change. We know that Labour will not deliver transformational change. But the impetus for change has to come from somewhere. An alternative to the Labour Party must emerge.

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Welcome to my Substack! Thanks for reading.

My name is Elliot Crossan, and I am a socialist writer and activist based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. I am the Chair of System Change Aotearoa, an ecosocialist campaign group. This article has been republished from our website, which you can check out here.

I am a freelance writer, and I intend to make all posts on this Substack free. The goal of my writing is to help bring about political change — to contribute to the movement for workers’ rights, indigenous rights and climate justice. If you are able to support me financially, any contribution would be greatly appreciated — but I have no plans to publish anything behind a paywall.

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Nadia Abu-Shanab is a member of Justice for Palestine in Pōneke/Wellington. She is a campaign organiser of the Don’t Bank on Apartheid campaign, which is calling on ASB customers to switch their Kiwisaver accounts away from ASB unless the bank divests from Motorola Solutions Inc., a company complicit in Israel’s illegal settlement activities.

Nadia Abu-Shanab is a mum, daughter, sister, partner, educator and union organiser. Her whakapapa is to England, Ireland and Palestine. She has been a learner in various movements for the last 20 years, after walking out of school to protest the War on Iraq in 2003. She told me that her political education “began with learning about Palestine at the laps and ankles of parents, uncles and aunties during the first and second Palestinian Intifadas.”

I interviewed Nadia on Friday. We discussed the end of the ceasefire, and why we shouldn’t exceptionalise Trump and his administration’s role in this genocide. Nadia’s main message was that activists in Aotearoa cannot give in to despair. We have the power to apply diplomatic and economic pressure to Israel through the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement — if we organise to force politicians, banks and companies to take action.

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First of all, could you please summarise for people what's going on with Israel ending the ceasefire and resuming its genocide?

Nadia: I want to start by saying that what is occurring in Gaza right now is a crime that no amount of strong words can adequately summarise. That said, it’s best understood as we Palestinians think of it, as part of the ongoing Nakba (catastrophe) against our people.

There are two things going on right now. One is that continuation of a 77-year-long project of extermination and expulsion waged against Palestinians. And the name for that project is Zionism. This project, built on the ruins of Palestinian villages and founded through massacres, is about a Jewish-only state at the expense of the native Palestinian population. With or without October 7th, Israel has always wanted to “finish the job” of what they began in 1948.

What we see today is an extension of the ideas that built Israel. And if we think about what began happening in the West Bank after the fragile ceasefire deal came into place in January, Operation Iron Wall, you see some of the ideas that existed within early Zionism, when they first settled in Palestine — that the way to achieve that state is through use of brute force and violence against the Palestinian people.

The second thing is that all of this is occurring in a wider geopolitical context where Palestine is essentially the pincushion for every existential issue we face as people on this planet. Land theft, ecological violence, economic violence, the drive to redirect social and welfare spending into technologies of war. Those selling weapons and technologies of population control benefit, in the billions, from promoting a divided world and endless brutality. There's a lot happening globally at this time, but it's clear and plain for everyone to see that what we're getting an education in now is the way in which empire — US empire — is the enabler, is the cheque giver, is the only reason Israel is able to do what it does. Under the Trump Presidency that is laid bare.

There was a sense of confusion among some people when it appeared as if Trump had managed to bring about a ceasefire that Biden had not. Obviously now, we've seen his rhetoric, and we've seen that he's allowed Israel to break this ceasefire two months later. Could you articulate what's going on with the Trump administration's role in facilitating this genocide?

We need to understand the world we live in. We may have moral interests. We — you, me, and all the people reading this article may have moral interests, may be motivated by moral interests — for example, that we want to see all people live in dignity. But in terms of how our world operates, those who lead it are not motivated or governed by an “international rules based order,” or international law. We live in a world governed by material interests.

The reason that the United States of America has supported the Israeli project of settler colonialism, apartheid, occupation, domination, etc. — a genocidal project — is that there are geopolitical and strategic interests in having a close ally in the Middle East. There's also a deep affinity with the settler narrative. That's the background context. So US policy around Palestine has always been in a form — in a different form — what it is today. I think it's useful for us to zoom out and recognise that.

We analyse things wrong when we exceptionalise Trump. But to characterise Trump — we have someone who is literally a real estate agent. A deals guy. One proposition he put forward in his campaign was cutting US spending, both domestically, but particularly abroad. He talked about wanting to see an end to both the Russia-Ukraine War and the War on Gaza — not for the same reasons that we do, because of the crimes against humanity, and the stain on us all that that is — but because what he established as one of his priorities was eliminating some of that spending in the foreign context. We see that with the closing down of USAID, and so on. US empire is less interested in its soft power now.

There was no desire, at large, in either Israeli society or government for a ceasefire agreement. You’ve got elected political leaders who not only reflect back the dehumanising attitudes against Palestinians, they whip it into a genocidal fever pitch. That's what happens when you’ve been getting away with not only the attitudes of apartheid, but the policies and practice of it. The Trump camp was clear with Israel that if they could reach a ceasefire in Gaza, they could have free reign for Israeli settlers to continue to annex the West Bank.

A lot has been said on Trump’s “Gaza plan,” and how outrageous that is. But what I would highlight is that saying the outrageous is a political tactic in itself, as many people recognise. It's a tactic that aims to disorient us and change the arena in which his deals and transactional politics are able to play out.

In all these conversations too, it's important to come back to Palestinian agency. No, the United States didn’t pull levers for a ceasefire because of the human cost of continued war. However, the political cost of the war on Gaza will be real for the United States for all its years left ahead as an empire. The idea of Palestinians as subjects that are just to be moved around like chess pieces on a board, completely actually ignores that even with some of the most advanced military technology in the world, the backing of the United States of America, the most powerful military force in the world, actually, the War on Gaza was not successful in achieving any of its stated aims. Nor was it successful in the aims it stated through its actions – expunging Palestinians from Gaza.

The Palestinian people remain in Gaza, and they have an intent to rebuild in Gaza. The people of Gaza and Palestine have also succeeded in escalating the political cost for Israel, and the USA, as both countries continue down a path which ultimately torches the cloak of rights-based propaganda they’d operated under. Trump is emblematic of this.

You mentioned the “international rules-based order.” There has been a narrative among liberals, and people who have faith in Western foreign policy, that Trump's meeting with Zelensky and his betrayal of Ukraine represents the end of this order. This comes, as we know, both 17 months and 77 years into Israel's genocide in Palestine.

What would your message be, and what should the message of our movement be, to people who are outraged about what Trump is doing in relation to Ukraine, but don't seem to apply that same logic to Palestine?

The framing that I find useful is to remember that, as a result of Israel's own genocidal actions, as a result of the inherent contradictions of Zionism and the fact that so many people have seen them, I think people’s collective ideas on how we make change and the scale of the change we need, are shifting. And rapidly. While some people have that blindspot, most don't.

We have to recognise that the majority of people in this country are supportive of Palestinian human rights. For example, where people know what they think about the issue of sanctions against Israel, they're more likely supportive of the idea of sanctions against Israel. And we are going to continue making and winning that case. The reason we're going to do that is because people are experiencing a political education in the limitations of the moral appeals to the institutions of the rules-based order.

Personally, despite disillusionment with the institutions and their limitations, I’ve come back to a strong position on the need for universal human rights. We've always been, as Palestinians and as people in the Global South, the genuine advocates for an international system of human rights. It befalls on all of us to bring that into meaning.

I think about it much like I think of how organised workers negotiate with the boss in contract negotiations. One thing that we know is that, where the boss can get away with it, they're going to break the law, right? It's a question of what we can get away with, right? That's how US empire works — the law doesn't apply. It doesn't apply to the rich first of all, and it doesn't apply to imperial powers. No one has meddled in democracy and supported fascist regimes more than the USA. No one has so nakedly stated their intent for genocide, and then committed their genocide, in such a recorded and visible way as the current Israeli government, right?

But we can collectively enforce international law and enforce a people's led movement for justice, freedom, equality, and for human rights for all people. That is, in fact, our task. While that might seem like a really daunting task given what we're faced with, I think it's important for us to remember that when you're a worker in a union, when you build and organise the power to properly enforce your rights in your workplace, you’re making it clear that you have a power you’re willing to use to achieve those rights. We can’t plead around international law anymore, we just have to get organised and collectively enforce it.

This is much bigger than Palestine now. The rules based order has been openly torched in front of our eyes. In fact, in a very symbolic act of political theatre, the Israeli representative at the United Nations got up on stage and put the UN Charter through a mini paper shredder. At this point, Israel and its supporters really have no idea how they look to the rest of the world.

It’s not lost on Palestinians that the birth of the UN itself, and the whole promise of these institutions, had an exception for Palestinian rights baked-in. The UN was one of the midwives to Israel's birth in 1948. But these are ideas which have always been ours. They've always been ours to fight for. They've always been ours to gain from. They've always been ours to win. And we will win them.

Thinking back to the outbreak of the Iraq War, the War in Afghanistan, and the so-called War on Terror. How do you compare the societal reaction to the War on Terror, and the reaction in the Global North and in the Global South, to the reaction to what's happening in Palestine right now? Do you think the anti-war movement is similar? Is it stronger? What different challenges does it face?

Sometimes when we're trying to answer political questions, we're navigating a series of tensions rather than looking at things in black and white. So one of the things that you said was, is it similar? Yes, absolutely. It's similar. It's part of the same political trajectory. It's part of a trajectory of global anti-imperialist organising that predates the War on Terror, and will live long beyond this moment.

It also faces different challenges. Again, there are contradictions here, because on the one hand, what a lot of Arabs and Muslims and Palestinians would say to you is that over the last 20 years, in the wake of the War on Terror, one of the things that Zionism exported to the world was anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia. And it worked in their interests.

The War on Terror was perfect for Zionism. It built on and expanded a narrative that they had spent decades generating. The idea that all Palestinians, even the Palestinian child, is innately born to be a terrorist. That process of dehumanisation is part of why Israel is able to get away with what it is today.

But would I say that this is totally distinct from the position that we were in in 2001? Has there not always been a divide between the Global South and the Global North? Have there not always been forms of racism and dehumanisation? Could colonialism and imperialism have been achieved here in the Pacific or across great swathes of Africa, Asia, the Americas, if we hadn't had an idea that indigenous people in these parts of the world were lesser than? You can only steal land and implant your governments, or toy in their democratic processes, with an underlying belief in your own supremacy.

I note of course, we shouldn’t detach racism from its material or economic origins. Racism is the justification for extraction and exploitation.

So this is part of a much longer legacy. And, while there is a distinct legacy of the War on Terror, its Islamophobia, and on a deeper level its anti-Palestinian racism that we witness today, there is also a longer legacy of colonial racism which that was built upon.

But also, as I alluded to in the beginning, we have our own legacies of trying to communicate to the world that we all, no matter where we live, have an interest in universal dignity and rights. That we all have an interest in protecting the rights of people who resist against colonisation, who resist against imperialism; because these struggles are very much also embedded in our own struggles that we experience here, like our own economic struggles, our own struggles against right-wing governments, fascist governments increasingly. So what I think is unique about this time, and what is hopeful about this time, is that people are coming to a greater sense of connectedness.

For our part as Palestinians, our homeland was chosen as the location for this violent project. But also, partly because of the scale of our dispossession and the fact we ended up everywhere, our struggle illuminates internationalism for people. It illuminates the connections between things. People in every corner of the world are invested in seeing our liberation because they want to know that people can struggle together everywhere against power and win.

So are we in a better place politically, materially on the ground, as Palestinians than we were in 2001? No, there's been more land lost. You look at the reality — there's no minimising what's happening on the ground right now. But in terms of our ability, our unharnessed, slightly disorganised ability to be able to confront imperialism, and to be able to pose a real threat to it? We have all the ingredients in the world today, and we’ve just got to cook with them. Just gotta cook with them!

What is the New Zealand Government's role in this imperialist project in Palestine?

It's important to understand how New Zealand positions itself in the global context. New Zealand, Canada and Australia position themselves as softer parts of the imperial core. Of course, it's no coincidence these are all settler colonies. We're a part of Five Eyes alongside these countries and the US and UK, “an Anglosphere intelligence alliance”. The role that New Zealand has played, alongside Australia and Canada, is aligned with, but still distinct from, that of the US. I think it's important to state that difference, even if we know our government is complicit in the genocide in Gaza. Because when we flatten those differences, and we fold ourselves in, or we imagine that we're experiencing the same things that activists in the US are experiencing, we miss some of the unique openings we have here.

To turn our minds to the international is important, and we have to understand what's happening in the imperial core. But it's not the centre of things. We need to de-centre it, and understand that in our context, because of the legacy of the work that activists did here, very much in our place in the Pacific, we did have this notion of an independent foreign policy. Now, I've said, that's in a drawer somewhere. I don't know where the fuck it is, because we haven't seen it. But there have been flickers of it, right?

So, for example, when the UN General Assembly voted on a motion around sanctioning Israel, we were the only Five Eyes country to support that motion. We now have consensus within our opposition parties around sanctions against Israel. I don't think we can underestimate what that's taken, and what a huge move that is from the New Zealand Labour Party as well, because that's a unique position. It's not a position that, for example, the UK Labour Party has taken, or the Australian Labor Party has taken. And that's a testimony to our work — not just the work of our generation, but the work of generations before us — of Māori, Pasifika and Pākehā organising here in this place.

So let's understand, we have the basis of this lofty idea, this notion — kind of like the idea of international human rights — of an independent foreign policy, right? It's not something our leaders are acting on. It's not something they're living up to. It's not something they're particularly interested in. But these ideals are upheld by us when we build the movements that make ignoring these values impossible.

New Zealand? Ultimately, as far as US Empire is concerned, we are completely inconsequential. But in a way, that's why I think we have a unique role to play, probably and hopefully, in being the leading edge of the beginning of a breakaway of that core of Five Eyes nations who will take a position in the coming years diplomatically against Israel, and in favour of sanctioning Israel. It’s not going to be easy, but we have it in us to align differently and orient away from empire. I’m not naïve about what that means, but I don't think any of us look around the world right now and feel naïve about the stakes. In fact, the stakes are exactly why we need to do things very differently.

We need to be ambitious for that. And so not imagine that we're in the context of the US. Because we're actually not. So, we should have different, more ambitious expectations of our political leaders.

Yeah — I do find sometimes that the rhetoric is hard to get right, because there is nuance that's lost if we just treat Luxon as the same as Biden or Trump.

Yeah.

So the most important question is: it's very easy for people who are watching with horror as this genocide unfolds on their phone screens to feel powerless. What can people do to try and make a difference here in Aotearoa?

It’s natural to wrangle with hopelessness and despair at a time like this. Our grief and rage comes from a deeply human and ultimately beautiful part of us — which is that more and more people every day wake up, and they see through the veil of dehumanisation of Palestinians. And they recognise that, just like everyone else, Palestinian children deserve the right to wake up alive, not bombed in their beds for the mere crime of being on a land that somebody else wishes to colonise. That’s one breakthrough that allows us to bind together. But we need to recognise that — as Hera Lindsay Bird said recently — that the antidote to despair is action.

We don’t need to reinvent the wheel. The Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement launched 20 years ago with an accurate analysis of the problems we faced then and today. And that is to say that we cannot expect our Western institutions and leaders to stand for international law, to stand for human rights, to stand for self-determination for Palestinian people; that they must be dragged there. We must alienate and isolate Israel from the ground up as voters, community members, members of organisations and unions.

We have the ability to get our councils to divest, as was done in Nelson Whakatū. We have the ability to change our Kiwisavers. We have the ability to pressure banks and providers. We have the ability to not buy HP laptops, Obela Hummus. When we use our boycotts in an organised and targeted way, we exert real pressure and we undermine the profitability of targets we know play a meaningful role in Israeli apartheid. I understand why, as a matter of conscience, some people want to boycott hundreds of products and companies that might be connected to Israel. However, if we want to be effective and win, it’s better to loudly target a few companies Israel really needs than to quietly boycott brands that don't even know you’re boycotting them. With campaigns aimed at winning, we take seriously our duty not just to be good individual consumers, but to use collectivism and organising to cut-off the oxygen that flows in the form of capital to not only Israeli companies that are complicit in human rights abuses, but also British, US and European companies that also benefit from apartheid and occupation.

I really compel people to think about a quote that I love from Malcolm X, which is, “We are not outnumbered. We are out-organised”. That's why targeted actions to apply pressure to Israel are what will see Israel held to account, because they help us build organisation, leadership and skills together. They already have built into them an understanding that we will see indifference from political leaders, that we will see indifference to Palestinian suffering, that we will see inaction. That understanding that many people are coming to today is built into the very foundations of this 20-year-old strategy.

We also have come to terms with the bitter pill that the liberation of a people, faced with what we're faced with, won't happen overnight. It will happen. Dr. Yara Hawari said to us last week that it's hard to talk about the weakness of Zionism when you've seen its brutality and violence play out as it has in Palestine. But any state committing genocide is ultimately a weak and fragile project. And so I implore people to not get sucked into despair, to not get sucked into the fatalistic narrative that nobody cares about this, to remember that for every person who is indifferent there are three who care. Lots of people care, they’ve just been taught that we’re not the ones who move the needle of history. People need to be reminded of concrete actions that they can take that are meaningful and strategic. And so I would say, talk to the people who care about this issue. Encourage them to participate in organising and in action, because those two things not only connect us with each other, but ultimately, we have the numbers. It's just about channeling people into the kind of effective action that is going to cost Israel. And we're capable of it.

Final question. What ongoing campaigns or immediate actions do you recommend for people to engage in right now?

This week is Israeli Apartheid Week, which is a global week of action that’s been going for 20 years this year. There are four concrete things that people can do over the next week. I'll start with the ASB campaign.

1. If you happen to be an ASB Kiwisaver customer, you can join hundreds of people who have already left ASB Kiwisaver over their investments in Motorola Solutions. If you bank with them, switching banks or writing a complaint is also going to help support the ongoing divestment campaign we’re going to keep at until they divest. Of course, there are many Kiwisaver funds with investments in companies complicit in Israeli apartheid, so switching funds is something you can do even if you’re not with ASB. For many of us, our Kiwisavers are the only investments we actually have that we can move in 30 minutes.

2. You can also support the ASB campaign by helping to pressure NZ Superfund into dropping their investments in Motorola Solutions by writing them a complaint.

3. We need to extend and also fortify support for Chlöe Swarbrick's Sanctions Against Israel Bill, which has united support across the Opposition now, and needs six Government MPs to support it when it's pulled out of the biscuit tin to trigger a conscience vote. So we should target government MPs. However, I would say it’s very worthwhile right now going to talk to Labour MPs about why sanctions and Palestinian human rights matter to you. We are going to need to hold the Labour Party to account, so that when they are leading their next government — and we hope and expect that they will be leading the incoming government in 18 months time — they will make that historic move of being the first Five Eyes nation to sanction Israel. So go and let your Labour MPs, your National MPs, your local electorate MPs know how much this matters to you. Follow up with them.

4. You can also participate in consumer boycotts of Obella, Caltex, things like that.

But I really do say — think about the ‘D’ and the ‘S’ in BDS. Divestment and sanctions. Because that shit is the shit that starts to slap. So that's what we need to be doing.

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Welcome to my Substack! Thanks for reading this interview.

My name is Elliot Crossan, and I am a socialist writer and activist based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. I am the Chair of System Change Aotearoa, an ecosocialist campaign group. You can check out our website here.

I am a freelance writer, and I intend to make all posts on this Substack free. The goal of my writing is to help bring about political change — to contribute to the movement for workers’ rights, indigenous rights, climate action and global justice. I have no plans to publish anything behind a paywall.

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Originally published on the System Change Aotearoa website — 15 February 2025

Being a revolutionary can be a lonely experience. To look at the world and see all the oppression, the injustice, the various crises faced by our society — it is overwhelming. To sit scrolling through horrific images of Palestinian homes lying in rubble, next to images of floods and wildfires caused by catastrophic climate change, next to news stories about Donald Trump and Elon Musk plundering the US state for all it is worth, next to the latest inflammatory statements from David Seymour as he stokes the fires of hatred and division in Aotearoa. It is far too easy to give in, and despair at the prospects of society changing for the better. It is far too easy to feel hopeless and powerless.

The film Pride (2014) provides the perfect antidote to these feelings. It is hard to capture the spirit of the film by describing its plot — it is based on a true story, depicting the activism of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM), a solidarity group which formed to support the National Union of Miners (NUM) in their 1984-85 strike against the Thatcher government in the UK. The members of LGSM travelled from London, where they had raised an impressive amount of money for the miners’ cause, to South Wales, where they handed it over to the Neath, Dulais and Swansea Valleys Miners Support Group.

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Pride is a fitting title for the film, but perhaps an even better name would have been Solidarity. The story pivots around this theme. The initial hesitance of the traditional mining community in Dulais Valley to accept money from a queer organisation gives way swiftly to joy as lifelong friendships are formed and homophobic prejudices evaporate. The catharsis is unmatched. System Change kicked off 2025 with a screening of this beautiful film; if you haven’t seen it already, I would urge you to stop reading this review now and go and watch it.

“There’s a lodge banner down in the welfare. We bring it out for special occasions. It’s a hundred years old. I’ll show it to you one day. It’s a symbol like this — two hands. That’s what the labour movement means. Should mean. You support me and I support you. Whoever you are. Wherever you come from. Shoulder to shoulder. Hand to hand.”

This line from Dai Donovan (played by Paddy Considine), the spokesperson for the local miners support group, encapsulates the central message of the film: that solidarity is power, and that solidarity can only truly exist on the basis of opposing all forms of oppression.

The power of the ruling class is highly concentrated. It is relatively easy for the top 1% to organise collectively to advance their interests. When up against the combined strength of the capitalists, the government, the police and the right-wing media, each individual worker and each community in isolation has relatively little power. We only have power when we organise to stand together and fight back as a collective.

Union miners represented a fundamental challenge to British capitalism because of their ability to cripple the entire economy by collectively withdrawing their labour. The 1974 Miner’s Strike played a major role in bringing down the Conservative government of Edward Heath. This is why the government of Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990) set out so determinedly to crush the miners. In 1984, Thatcher famously branded the NUM leadership as “the enemy within.”

Thatcher’s war against the NUM succeeded, and the consequences were tragic. The Miner’s Strike was defeated in 1985, in a defeat which represented a blow so devastating to the union movement in Britain that the working class is still recovering to this day. In Aotearoa, the National government led by Jim Bolger in the early 1990s took inspiration from Thatcher when passing union-busting laws. In both countries, it is only through recovering from the defeats of the 80s-90s and rebuilding the labour movement that we can restore our collective power to resist capitalism.

LGSM were unapologetic and proud about being a lesbian and gay organisation. They did not try to hide their identities, despite the huge persecution their community faced from the police and from homophobia in the wider public. Some may have argued at the time that LGSM members would have been more effective in supporting the miners if they had organised without being explicit about their queerness. They would have been wrong to do so.

It is through breaking down the divisions in working class society that we bring ourselves closer to our collective liberation. To bring queer issues, women’s issues, black and brown issues, and in Aotearoa indigenous issues to the forefront of the conversation does not divide the working class. The working class is already divided by the capitalists, and deliberately so, through the tools of homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, racism — the list goes on. Solidarity means standing together against the oppression of everyone, not papering over the cracks to forge a false sense of unity.

Forging solidarity on this basis of fighting shared oppression is the task LGSM set out to achieve, as is so evocatively depicted in Pride. This message is hammered home when Bill Nighy’s character, Cliff Barry, comes out as gay towards the end of the film. The homophobia of society was already dividing the mining community, to the extent that Cliff had to hide his identity for most of his life. When LGSM gave their support to the miners and barriers began to break down in Dulais, Cliff was finally able to discover his pride as a gay man. The unity of the miner’s union was strengthened as a result.

It is unfortunate that one of the greatest failings of solidarity depicted in the film was played as a joke. The fact that Lesbians Against Pit Closures was formed as a splinter group, charging LGSM with being a misogynistic and male-dominated organisation, demonstrated an inability to overcome division within the LGBT community. Had LGSM been able to unite on the basis of solidarity against misogyny, and against the different forms of oppression faced by queer women, the organisation and the movement would have been stronger for it.

Yes, it is bloody typical of leftists to splinter into a billion different factions fighting among themselves, hence the eye-roll comedy. But this issue could have been presented more seriously as a very real failure of solidarity which contradicted the entire political project embodied by LGSM.

One other criticism of Pride is that, while the socialist and communist politics of members of both LGSM and the NUM are referenced explicitly, the role of revolutionary organisations is downplayed. This is fairly understandable for a mass-market film — but it is an important fact for revolutionaries to highlight.

Ben Schnetzer portrayed charismatic LGSM leader Mark Ashton in the film, in a performance so vivid that real-life LGSM member Reggie Blennerhassett described it as hard to watch — because it was “like he had come back to life.” Ashton was one of the many victims of the AIDs epidemic, and passed away in 1987 aged just 26.

Ashton was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and the General Secretary of the Young Communist League. Ashton’s writings on LGSM remember the first meeting consisting entirely of members of either the Communist Party or the Labour Party. Other organisations involved in LGSM included the Socialist Workers Party and the International Marxist Group.

That’s not to say that it was only dedicated Marxists who were involved in LGSM. Once the organisation was established, members included: “communists and anarchists, feminists and Trotskyists, liberals and labourites, machos and minis’; and ‘just ordinary, working-class people who have seen the tragedy of the pit closures programme’.

However, it is clear that organised revolutionaries played a major role in the formation and success of LGSM. Ashton’s role in the Young Communist League is not an accident or a coincidence — Marxist organisations provide members with the theoretical and organisational tools necessary to build the solidarity that is needed to fight back against capitalism. By understanding the system in its totality, revolutionaries are able to see where organisation is necessary in order to strengthen resistance. The legacy of LGSM provides a reminder of the vital importance of Marxist politics and organisation.

The Miner’s Strike failed to defeat Thatcherism. But the tear-jerking final scene of the film depicts the ultimate payoff of the solidarity demonstrated by LGSM. NUM members arrive en masse to attend the 1985 London Pride march, and onscreen text tells us that lesbian and gay rights were enshrined into the Labour Party manifesto later that year, thanks in no small part to a block vote from the NUM. Billy Bragg’s anthem There Is Power in a Union is accompanied by a swelling orchestra, and the audience is left with a powerful reminder of the very real change that can be achieved when working people stand together.

Thatcher was eventually brought down thanks to collective action, through the mass movement opposing the Poll Tax, culminating in the riots of 1990. Subsequent governments relaxed and ultimately removed harsh laws which discriminated against the queer community.

Our responsibility as revolutionaries today, in Aotearoa and around the world, is to resist the urge to give in to despair and hopelessness, no matter how bad things get. We are faced in this country with a right-wing government that is directly attacking the living standards of the working class, while simultaneously attempting to divide us by trying to turn Pākehā against Māori. In the process, the Coalition intends to tear up indigenous rights which have been won through decades of determined struggle.

Our task is to build a movement which can resist attacks on Māori and Te Tiriti, while at the same time resisting the economic policies of the government that are designed to the rich richer and everyone else poorer. Austerity and privatisation must be stopped; the war on indigenous rights must be stopped. These objectives can only be won through solidarity between workers, whether Māori, Pākehā or tauiwi. We are only strong if we stand together.

Lesbians and gays were the primary targets of anti-LGBT backlash in the 1980s; today it is the transgender community in the firing line. Just as solidarity between the labour movement and the lesbian and gay movement was crucial 40 years ago, so today it is vitally important that workers stand arm-in-arm with our transgender whanau against hateful and oppressive rhetoric.

The struggle against Thatcherism is merely one among countless examples in history where revolutionary organisations have played a crucial role in leading resistance. It is time to rebuild socialist politics in Aotearoa, and to build socialist organisations in the process. Only when we understand that our ultimate goal is to overthrow the entire capitalist system, and all of the forms of oppression associated with it, can we coherently organise resistance with the political vision and willpower needed to succeed.

We feel lonely when we are not organised. We feel hopeless and powerless when we are not organised. None of these feelings are inevitable; nor is our society’s slide towards the authoritarian right. It is time to build collective power and fight back. Pride serves as a powerful reminder that we are strongest when we stand together. An injury to one is an injury to all. Only through solidarity and organisation can oppression be overcome.

Message from the author

Welcome to my Substack! Thanks for reading.

My name is Elliot Crossan, and I am a socialist writer and activist based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. I am the Chair of System Change Aotearoa, an ecosocialist campaign group. This review has been republished from our website, which you can check out here.

I am a freelance writer, and I intend to make all posts on this Substack free. The goal of my writing is to help bring about political change — to contribute to the movement for workers’ rights, indigenous rights and climate justice. If you are able to support me financially, any contribution would be greatly appreciated — but I have no plans to publish anything behind a paywall.

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Further devastating changes have been announced since. Funding for equipment and housing modifications for wheelchair users was cut. A programme designed to top up the pay of 900 disabled workers to the minimum wage was scrapped. In August, the government removed responsibility from Whaikaha for frontline services.

The government is waging war on the disabled community. The results have been devastating — an outcome which was entirely predictable, given the funding and services being cut are essential for disabled people to live good lives. Incomes, support networks and mobility have all been negatively impacted. Far too many in the community are struggling with mental health problems as a result.

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As a parent of a disabled child put it in Awhi Ngā Mātua’s community survey, released yesterday:

“These changes have done more than just cut funding; they have shattered long-term security, disrupted family continuity, and instilled fear where there should be confidence. The cost of these decisions will not just be financial—it will be measured in lost opportunities, eroded futures, and deepening inequality for generations to come.”

To add insult to injury, the government is now holding a community consultation which the D*List’s Henrietta Bollinger describes as having “the obvious intention to limit both who can access flexible funding and how it can be used.” Bollinger writes: “The options on offer and the narrow scope we are being consulted on seem like invitations to advise the Government on which of us is asking too much from life.”

The community is not satisfied. An open letter has been published by Awhi Ngā Mātua, signed by dozens of community groups, calling on the government to:

• Apologise to disabled people and their whanau;

• Ensure access to adequate mental health services;

• Develop support services that work alongside disabled people, parents and carers.

This war on the disabled community is part of a class war. It is not an accident; it is not ignorance; it is not incompetence. It is the deliberate policy of a government which is advancing the interests of the top 1% at the expense of the 99%.

The Coalition is pursuing what economists call “fiscal austerity.” In simpler terms — Finance Minister Nicola Willis is trying to balance the government’s budget by cutting spending. According to Treasury figures, if adjusted for population growth, Willis is implementing the most savage spending cuts in the nation’s history.

Yet there is no government debt crisis that is provoking the Finance Minister to slash spending. Yes, debt went up during Covid — but we still have low government debt as a share of our economy compared to similar countries. Nothing is forcing Willis to cut spending to disabled communities.

Even if there was a debt crisis, there would be an easy solution. The government could tax the rich to pay down the debt. A 2023 investigation by Inland Revenue found that the 311 wealthiest families in Aotearoa collectively held 85 billion dollars in net wealth, yet paid less than half the tax rate of the average Kiwi household.

If the rich paid the same tax rate as everyone else, the government could afford to expand funding for disabled communities. There would be no need for cuts. A wealth tax could ensure that Whaikaha was fully funded, and allow the implementation of the Enabling Good Lives approach recommended by disability experts.

Yet this government is doing the exact opposite — cutting disability services in order to fund tax cuts for landlords and property developers. If Willis’ cuts were actually about reducing debt, would there really be any spare money for her to dish out tax cuts to the rich?

These cuts are part of a war on working class people across Aotearoa. The Coalition’s austerity approach is not confined to disability funding. Other areas that are affected include:

• The health system, which is heaving under the pressure of fresh cuts in the wake of decades of underfunding;

• The free lunch programme for low-income schools, which David Seymour has gutted;

• State housing, which is being sold off at the exact moment that it has become “nearly impossible” to get into emergency housing thanks to government changes;

• The welfare system, where the ‘traffic light’ benefit sanctions are driving the poorest people in Aotearoa into further hardship in the midst of a recession and rising unemployment.

The list could go on. Higher rates of poverty, homelessness and inequality will be the enduring legacy of this class war.

The disabled community is on the front line of each of these struggles. Poor access to healthcare, housing and benefits hits disabled people disproportionately. But make no mistake: it is the whole working class that is under attack from this Coalition.

It is no coincidence that the government is prioritising the interests of the wealthy above all else. National, ACT and NZ First all benefited from record high donations from big money interests in the last election.

The same agenda of prioritising profit over people is being played out in all areas. The Fast-track Bill and the repeal of the ban on new offshore oil and gas drilling both allow fossil fuel corporations to expand production in the midst of a climate crisis. The government is threatening to partially privatise the health system, meaning that communities will be forced to pay even more for basic health services. Again, the disabled community will be hit the hardest by further restricting access to healthcare.

The Treaty Principles Bill, as well as being a racist attempt to rewrite Te Tiriti o Waitangi, is another part of this agenda. Rupert O’Brien’s article in the Spinoff last year explains how the Bill is an attempt by the ACT Party to remove the barriers to privatisation and deregulation that the Treaty presents.

It is far too easy to feel depressed and powerless right now. We have a government that is prioritising the wealth of the top 1% over basic human dignity for the majority of society.

But we are not powerless.

There is a reason why the government is launching attacks on all fronts simultaneously. The aim is to confuse and distract the opposition. If every community is focusing purely on its own struggle, with Māori mobilising for Te Tiriti, climate activists fighting the Fast-track legislation, trade unions trying to prevent the rollback of workers’ rights, beneficiary and homeless advocates sounding the alarm about poverty, and the disabled community reeling from cuts to vitally-needed services, then each group can be overwhelmed in isolation.

This is what the Coalition wants. Luxon, Willis, Seymour and Co. want us isolated, fighting each battle on our own, writing petitions and submissions that they will ignore.

But we know the richest people in Aotearoa have more wealth than they could ever possibly need. We know that money could be used to reverse the cuts. So what would happen if we brought communities together to stand united, as the 99% against the top 1%, to demand that everyone in society is given the health, housing, education, incomes and support services that every single one of us deserves?

It is time to build a mass movement in the streets, in workplaces and across our communities to oppose the government’s austerity agenda. A mass movement to put people and planet before profit, to honour Te Tiriti, and to assert that we all have the right to live good lives. Existing movements need to stand together — because we have power when we stand in solidarity with each other and refuse to be divided.

If we’re going to build a better society that works for everyone, then we have to take back the wealth that is being hoarded by the wealthy few. We need mass protests, mass strikes and mass resistance to stop this coalition of greed.

This is a class war — and it’s time for the working class to start fighting back.

Message from the author

Welcome to my Substack! Thanks for reading.

My name is Elliot Crossan, and I am a socialist writer and activist based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. I am the Chair of System Change Aotearoa, an ecosocialist campaign group — you can check out our website here.

I am a freelance writer, and I intend to make all posts on this Substack free. The goal of my writing is to help bring about political change — to contribute to the movement for workers’ rights, indigenous rights and climate justice. If you are able to support me financially, any contribution would be greatly appreciated — but I have no plans to publish anything behind a paywall.

Please subscribe and share this post!

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Originally published on the System Change Aotearoa website — 23 August 2024

“According to the Douglas doctrine, you move in quantum leaps. By the time your opponents catch up with what you’re doing, you’re on to the next thing.”

That’s how Toby Manhire summarised Roger Douglas’ approach to economic reform in The Spinoff’s podcast series Juggernaut, which marked the 40th anniversary of the Fourth Labour Government.

Roger Douglas, the most revolutionary Finance Minister in the postwar history of Aotearoa, knew how to change more in three years than most governments do in three terms. Rogernomics transformed the structure of our economy with dizzying speed, from protectionist welfare state to neoliberal free market.

Inequality soared across the world in the 1980s as neoliberal reforms were enacted. Poverty rose as union-busting and unemployment ravaged working class communities. Privatisation and deregulation unleashed an explosion of corporate profit. The domination of society by the super-rich, accompanied by low wages and unaffordable housing, is the enduring legacy of this decade.

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The radical change experienced in Aotearoa between 1984 and 1993 stood out from what occurred in most other OECD countries in three main ways.

Firstly, these free market policies were initiated here by a Labour Government. In most countries, it was conservative torchbearers such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan who spearheaded this agenda. In Aotearoa, it was David Lange’s election which led to what the Prime Minister later described with sorrow as “a juggernaut of the New Right.”

Secondly, no one voted for this devastating agenda. Labour was supposed to be the party of the working class, and had stood in the 1984 election on a social democratic agenda. Once Roger Douglas unleashed the neoliberal juggernaut and National signed up to the same policies, voters did not have a choice. When they voted Labour out in 1990 and elected National on a promise of a return to “a decent society,” they got more of the same — Ruth Richardson took over as Finance Minister and continued an agenda of radical reform in the first three years of Jim Bolger’s government. Rogernomics was followed by Ruthanasia.

Thirdly, the speed and scale of the reforms imposed by Douglas and Richardson was ferocious even compared to the likes of Thatcher and Reagan. There is a reason why Aotearoa experienced a faster increase of inequality in the 1980s and 1990s than any comparable OECD country.

Four decades on, Douglas is still preaching his doctrine of moving in quantum leaps. He has long complained that Lange sacked him before he could implement his agenda in full. He and his allies created the ACT Party to finish the job.

It is high time that the left took some notes from Douglas on how to transform society. If the left leaves it to the right to move in quantum leaps, our political economy will only ever move in one direction: ever-higher levels of inequality.

Douglas’ “quantum leap” approach is what left-wing activist and intellectual Naomi Klein called the Shock Doctrine. In her 2007 book by that name, Klein outlined how neoliberal governments exploit moments of crisis when the public is in shock to ram through unpopular policies. Klein is not making this up — she merely had to draw attention to what neoliberal ideologues themselves were saying to come to this conclusion. In 1982 Milton Friedman, the economist dubbed “the most-revered champion of free-market economics since Adam Smith” by the Wall Street Journal, wrote that:

“There is enormous inertia — a tyranny of the status quo — in private and especially governmental arrangements. Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”

This insight has been seized upon to devastating effect by the neoliberal right. Their dreams of rolling back the welfare state and breaking the power of organised labour seemed impossible in the 1960s; by the 1990s they had become common sense across the world. Once implemented, they sold their vision as inevitable — Margaret Thatcher famously proclaimed that There Is No Alternative.

Neoliberalism has failed for the vast majority of people. Climate change threatens all life on earth; extreme inequality is tearing society apart. The free market has no answers. An alternative economic system is not only possible, it is desperately necessary.

This alternative system must involve a fundamental and irreversible shift of wealth and power away from the corporations who have been colossally enriched by neoliberalism, and back towards working people. It must uphold Tino Rangatiratanga and Mana Motuhake; and it must involve moving rapidly away from reliance on the fossil fuels which are destroying our planet. But we won’t be able to change the entire system without moving, as the right has moved, in quantum leaps. It is the only way to turn back the tide.

A Constant Rightward Drift

It was argued by many academics and pundits that the introduction of the MMP electoral system had replaced the era of radical change with an era of ‘moderation.’ After sacking Richardson in 1993, Bolger led the Fourth National Government in a more moderate direction. The 2008-2017 government of John Key and Bill English pursued a mild, centre-right agenda. The right was consolidating its gains, not wanting to provoke further societal conflict after its application of the Shock Doctrine in 1984-1993.

Since the Fourth Labour Government went down in flames, Labour has won power again twice — for three terms under Helen Clark, and for two under Jacinda Ardern and Chris Hipkins. Neither of these governments followed Douglas in implementing radical right-wing reforms; both Clark and Ardern defined themselves in opposition to the neoliberal free market era. Yet both governments left the fundamental reforms of the neoliberal era in place, and as a result, both failed in their stated missions of tackling our country’s “unacceptable” levels of inequality.

The centre-left held to the notion that MMP had put a permanent break on radical change. The message was that only incremental progress could succeed: maybe one day we would return to a more equal society like what existed before Rogernomics, but it would be a long, slow process.

The Coalition elected in 2023 is shattering that myth. ACT today has a record number of MPs, and as the second-largest party in government it holds more power than ever before. Douglas is urging the party he helped found to take the same approach he did 40 years ago.

In recent years, ACT has moved in a right-wing populist direction, seeking to win votes by appealing to racist sentiment rather than economistic libertarianism. Since the pandemic, NZ First has joined ACT on the populist right — today, both parties align themselves with extremist anti-Treaty groups such as Hobson’s Pledge.

The National Party may be the most moderate element in the government, but it too has allowed itself to be pulled rightwards. The Coalition is thus mounting the most vicious attack on Te Tiriti o Waitangi and indigenous rights that we have seen in a very long time. The Government is further attacking tangata whenua through its law-and-order populism, a thinly-veiled dog-whistle for locking up more Māori, who are disproportionately incarcerated by the colonial prison system.

This racist agenda is accompanied by harsh austerity. Finance Minister Nicola Willis is taking a sledgehammer to the public service in order to pay for tax cuts. ACT’s Brooke van Velden has been appointed Minister for Workplace Relations, and is predictably using this position to attack workers’ rights. Environmental protections are being watered down, with the repeal of the ban on new offshore oil and gas drilling and the dangerous Fast Track Approvals Bill allowing for an aggressive expansion of fossil fuel production.

The Coalition set out its intentions by using parliamentary urgency an unprecedented number of times in its first 100 days. Douglas’ doctrine is being applied. After 30 years of moderate National and Labour Governments, we are back to the era where change happens in quantum leaps — and the pressure on the National Party by its more right-wing coalition partners means that MMP is enhancing the rate of change, not slowing it down.

If a Labour-led Government moves the needle one or two inches to the left, and is followed by a National-led Government which moves the needle five, ten, twenty inches to the right, then overall politics has moved to the right. Zoom out 40 years, and this is the path Aotearoa has taken. Ever since 1984, we have experienced a seemingly-inexorable rightward drift.

The cautiousness of centre-left leaders such as Ardern and Hipkins will never be a match for the ruthlessness of neoliberal leaders prepared to move with speed and ferocity. The approach of the Coalition, inspired by Douglas and Richardson, is to move so quickly from one reform to the next that social movements are left dazed and confused, unable to build resistance against one devastating attack before being faced with another. The left needs to push back on all fronts at once.

A Democratic, Popular Agenda for Radical Change

We live in an era of crisis. Inflation has given way to recession and unemployment. The housing crisis is not going away. Ordinary people work long hours for low pay while the rich get richer. Attacks on Te Tiriti are polarising society; the social division we have recently seen overseas has arrived on our own shores. The climate crisis threatens all life on earth.

This situation is urgent. As Friedman knew, in times of crisis “the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” The left needs to put forward its ideas without equivocation, else the ideas that are enacted will be the ideas of the populist right.

The incrementalist centre-left parties who have failed time and time again to turn back the tide on neoliberalism will never implement radical demands of their own volition, let alone lead the charge towards an alternative economic system. These parties must be pressured from below. At the same time, new organisations must be created that are committed to truly transformational change, including a political party committed to dismantling the entire capitalist system.

We need to organise and demand transformational change to occur in quantum leaps. But the agenda of the radical left — redistributing wealth from the 1% to the 99%, repealing anti-union laws, phasing out fossil fuels, and Tiriti-based constitutional transformation — will encounter fierce opposition. The neoliberals understood that such opposition cannot be reasoned with. It must be overwhelmed.

Douglas’ agenda was completely undemocratic, and, once the outcomes of Rogernomics started to become clear, deeply unpopular. A programme of left-wing transformation would be neither. Such a programme would favour the vast majority of the population. It cannot and would not be a secret agenda, kept hidden until being sprung upon the electorate to exploit a moment of shock. The left needs to discuss ideas and strategy openly and honestly, publicise our ideas as widely as possible, and win a democratic majority for change in the interests of the many, not the few.

The main opposition faced by neoliberalism was the labour movement — trade unionists which represented the majority of society. Resistance to left-wing reform will come from the super-rich — people with extreme wealth and power who will stop at nothing to protect their interests. This makes it even more vital that a left-wing programme is implemented with speed and scale.

The right moves with speed in order to disorientate social movements. The left must mobilise unions and social movements in order to win power, and then keep people mobilised in workplaces and in the streets for as long as possible. The power of the right comes from elites; the power of the left comes from the people. If movements are demobilised or demoralised, a transformative left-wing agenda will get bogged down. Therefore the left needs to move even faster than Douglas did, demonstrating that the will of the people will not be ignored, however much it is resisted by the wealthy few.

The government of Michael Joseph Savage and Peter Fraser transformed Aotearoa in the interests of workers from 1935-1949. Its programme of change began at pace in its first three-year term. The modern left in Aotearoa can take inspiration from the determination shown by the First Labour Government. However, this historical example must not limit us, as we must move further — a transformational agenda today must move beyond the colonial capitalist system, something the Labour Party has historically failed to do.

You can change more in three years than in three decades. Roger Douglas knew this, and the current Coalition knows it too. The modern left needs to wake up and learn the same lesson. The incrementalism of Clark, Ardern and Hipkins has failed. It is time we built a democratic majority to move Aotearoa rapidly towards a system that favours workers, indigenous rights and the future of the planet over the interests of corporations.

A better world is urgently necessary. If the left relies on the power of the people, and moves in quantum leaps, then that better world will become not just possible, but inevitable.

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Welcome to my Substack! Thanks for reading.

My name is Elliot Crossan, and I am a socialist writer and activist based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. I am the Chair of System Change Aotearoa, an ecosocialist campaign group. This article has been republished from our website, which you can check out here.

I am a freelance writer, and I intend to make all posts on this Substack free. The goal of my writing is to help bring about political change — to contribute to the movement for workers’ rights, indigenous rights and climate justice. If you are able to support me financially, any contribution would be greatly appreciated — but I have no plans to publish anything behind a paywall.

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“New Zealand has been and will continue to be a poster child for social and political stability [...] when you look at all the tension, volatility and strife in the world today, I think that makes us pretty special, and a very attractive destination for anyone looking to take shelter from the global storm.”

This was Christopher Luxon’s key message on Thursday in his speech opening the government’s Infrastructure Summit at Auckland’s Park Hyatt Hotel. The Prime Minister’s audience was a room of foreign investors representing multinational corporations worth a combined total of 6 trillion dollars. His pitch was simple: invest in New Zealand, we’re a safe bet.

Why is Luxon selling New Zealand to the highest bidder as a bastion of stability in a volatile world, when at the exact same time his government is engineering the conditions for this country to rapidly become more polarised, volatile and unstable?

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The Finance Minister is currently imposing the harshest per-capita budget cuts in our nation’s history upon the public sector. This austerity comes amidst a crisis in our already-underfunded health system. Voters are concerned — a Horizon poll this week revealed that improving the health system is the top issue for the voters of all six political parties. Health workers are also concerned — last week a survey found that 86% believe the government’s cuts to Te Whatu Ora will make it harder for people to get healthcare. The impact of the cuts is being felt elsewhere too — 65% of voters believe that David Seymour’s revamped school lunch programme isn’t working, with just 17% disagreeing.

Instead of responding to these concerns by tapping the brakes and reversing these unpopular cuts, the Coalition is ploughing ahead with phase two of its plan: privatisation. After Simeon Brown’s announcement last week that the government’s “major overhaul” of health will involve “partnering with the private sector,” it is a fairly safe bet that contracts to run sections of our healthcare system were advertised to the multinational corporations in attendance at Luxon’s summit. The John Key government’s partial privatisation of the energy sector has proven to be a disaster for everyone except the profiteering shareholders; privatisation in the health sector will have even worse consequences.

The ACT Party isn’t satisfied with National’s piecemeal approach to privatisation. In his State of the Nation speech in January, Seymour declared that Kiwis “need to get past squeamishness about privatisation.” He asked: “How many people here would give up their right to the public healthcare system if they got $6,000 for their own private insurance?”

Seymour is advocating a US-style approach to healthcare for Aotearoa. The US has the worst-performing healthcare system of any high-income country. The only people who would benefit from this sell-off would be major corporations; working families would suffer.

ACT’s ultra-divisive Treaty Principles Bill ties in directly to the party’s agenda of privatisation, as Rupert O’Brien highlighted in the Spinoff last September. “The Treaty principles have proved a significant roadblock to both corporatisation and privatisation in the past and present a clear threat to any plans of future development of public assets to the private sector.” ACT is attacking the foundations of our country’s constitution in order to sell off state assets to corporate shareholders.

The Treaty Principles Bill has the added benefit for ACT of polarising the nation, and sowing division among working class communities. ACT is following the exact playbook that Don Brash adopted when he became leader of the National Party in 2003.

As revealed by leaked emails in Nicky Hager’s bombshell book ‘The Hollow Men’ — the contents of which forced Brash to resign in 2006 — Brash was advised by Karl Rove (chief strategist for George W. Bush) to stop emphasising National’s unpopular economic agenda, and instead focus on “wedge issues.” The issue that Brash chose to prioritise, unveiled in his infamous 2004 Orewa speech, was the anti-Māori “One Law For All” campaign. “Iwi vs. Kiwi” was the wedge National used to sow division across Aotearoa. The party nearly doubled its vote share in the next election using this strategy.

When the economic system is rigged in favour of the rich and powerful, and is driving down living standards for working people, the rich — and the right-wing parties which represent their interests — need a scapegoat to blame for society’s ills. The scapegoat chosen by Brash in 2004 was Māori. ACT has taken up this strategy; the Treaty Principles Bill is the culmination of this 20-year right-wing populist project to divide-and-rule.

This combination of austerity, privatisation and right-wing populist attacks on the constitutional order is guaranteed to create a more unstable social and political environment. Luxon should know this. After all, his political role-model is none other than former British Prime Minister David Cameron.

Austerity and Instability: Lessons from the UK

The parallels between Luxon and Cameron are striking. Both claim to be “compassionate conservatives.” Their governments both imposed sanctions on beneficiaries, driving up poverty and homelessness as a result. Both governments cut funding to disabled communities.

The UK’s National Health Service was subjected to dangerous levels of underfunding under Cameron’s Conservative-led Coalition. Two years into this austerity programme, the government unveiled the 2012 Health and Social Care Act, which allowed up to 49% of NHS services to be outsourced to private companies.

These cuts and asset sales were all part of a broader programme of harsh austerity. Luxon is following in Cameron’s footsteps in his attack on the welfare state.

It is no exaggeration to say that austerity kills. Over 330,000 excess deaths in the UK between 2012 and 2019 were linked to austerity policies. Public services are not a luxury — they are a vital part of everyday life for those who lack the money to pay for private alternatives.

Luxon, like Cameron, comes from a wealthy background, and is insulated from this brutal reality. The same deadly consequences that resulted from austerity in the UK will happen in Aotearoa if the Coalition is not stopped in its tracks.

Austerity is invariably the precursor to heightened social and political instability. Cameron learned this the hard way in 2016, when his most right-wing backbenchers successfully lobbied him into agreeing to a referendum on British membership of the European Union. EU rules presented a roadblock to further privatisation and deregulation, and the UK’s most hardline free market radicals wanted out. The Prime Minister, on the other hand, confidently expected voters to opt for business as usual and vote Remain.

A country driven to the boiling point by falling living standards was in no mood to vote for business as usual. Britain voted for Brexit by a margin of 52-48%. Cameron resigned as a result. His mission to defend the stability of British capitalism went up in flames.

By supporting the Treaty Principles Bill to first reading, Luxon is playing with fire just as Cameron did. Even if the Treaty Principles Bill is stopped at second reading, the Prime Minister will have helped greatly widen divisions between tangata whenua and tauiwi on this colonised land; and Seymour has no intention of letting his Bill die at first reading. Phase two of ACT’s plan is a citizen-initiated referendum in 2026.

The Prime Minister is further enabling the rise of right-wing populism by declaring himself open to New Zealand First’s “anti-woke” proposals — i.e. attacks on diversity policies in the public sector, which Winston Peters has lifted straight out of the Trump playbook. Both of National’s coalition partners are trying everything they can to provoke a culture war.

If the Prime Minister had any interest in “social and political stability,” he would stand up to this hateful and divisive rhetoric. Instead, Luxon is playing along. His government needs cover to distract from its economic assault on the working class. A culture war suits his agenda perfectly — he just doesn’t want to get his hands dirty. He wants to present National as the sensible moderate party, while it links arms with ACT and NZ First to destabilise Aotearoa.

Economist Clara E. Mattei has drawn a clear link between austerity policies and the breakdown of social cohesion, the erosion of democratic norms, and the growth of the far-right. By pursuing harsh austerity and enabling populist rhetoric, Luxon’s legacy may end up being the rise of far more extreme elements than Seymour and Peters.

Again, Luxon parallels Cameron. 15 years on from the beginning of Cameron’s austerity agenda, Nigel Farage’s hard-right Reform party has surged to take the lead in some UK polls. It’s not just the UK; far-right parties are currently on the rise across austerity-ravaged Europe.

Will Foreign Investment Help Maintain Stability?

I recently conducted a research project for CAFCA, a group which campaigns against the takeover of Aotearoa by multinational corporations and shareholders. The findings showed that foreign investors took a whopping 26.2 billion dollars out of the NZ economy last year — more than the combined value of our exports of dairy and forest products. NZ investors overseas in return made less than half that amount. We have had a permanent deficit on overseas investment income since records began in 1972; this deficit grew rapidly after foreign direct investment regulations were relaxed by the Fourth Labour Government.

Last year, multinational corporations reinvested barely more than a quarter of their profits into our economy. Despite foreign direct investment being worth the equivalent of 41.2% of NZ GDP, foreign-owned companies employ just 17.1% of our workforce.

11.4 billion dollars — nearly half of the total 26.2 billion — was taken out of the country by foreign-owned banks in 2024. The finance and insurance sectors combined took 16.6 billion dollars — nearly two-thirds. Huge profits are being extracted every year from working class communities in Aotearoa, all to benefit shareholders of overseas banks and insurance companies that we have no democratic control over.

In an increasingly volatile world economy, putting working class communities at the mercy of fickle foreign investors who only care about extracting ever-higher profits from Aotearoa is not a wise policy. Yet the purpose of Luxon’s investment summit was to boost foreign direct investment. Seymour recently announced changes to the Overseas Investment Act which will further deregulate foreign investment rules. Not only are the Coalition not concerned about multinationals ripping us off — they want to flog off our public assets to the highest bidder on the international market.

Climate Shocks

Nicola Willis echoed Luxon’s sentiments in her speech to the Investment Summit, declaring that “stability is our middle name.” The Finance Minister told investors that Aotearoa is “an undervalued stock.” The most revealing line from her speech was the following: “In a world in which people are worried about food supply and the effect of extreme climatic events, I would choose New Zealand.”

The Coalition’s Fast Track Bill allows Ministers to override climate and Treaty obligations to accelerate approval of new infrastructure and housing projects. The government’s commitment to repealing Labour’s ban on new offshore oil and gas drilling permits was singled out by the Climate Change Performance Index as a reason for NZ falling seven places down their global ranking in 2024. We were already marked as a “low performer” by the CCPI before this government was elected.

For Willis to identify extreme climatic events as a reason for multinational corporations to invest in NZ tells you all you need to know about the priorities of her party. National is willing to dismantle environmental protections, pouring fuel on the fire of the climate crisis, even while senior figures acknowledge the catastrophic impacts that global warming will cause in coming years. Apparently, those catastrophic impacts overseas are good for NZ business.

The 2023 Auckland Anniversary floods, followed just weeks later by Cyclone Gabrielle, were a precursor of the devastation climate change is going to unleash upon Aotearoa. Global coffee prices are already soaring as a result of droughts in Brazil and Vietnam — a mere taste of the chaotic impacts climate change is going to have on the global food supply chain. This country will not be a “safe haven,” insulated from the crisis, even if we will likely not feel the very worst effects — unlike many of our Pacific Island neighbours.

The government has a responsibility to communities in Aotearoa, across the Pacific and across the world to rapidly reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Yet once again, the Coalition is prioritising corporate profit over all else — including the “stability” that Luxon and Willis are so proud of.

The Storm is Coming Here

The “global storm” Luxon referenced in his speech to investors has clear causes. One cause is governments colluding with greedy corporations to cut, privatise and deregulate the public sector, prioritising profits over people. Another cause is deliberately divisive “anti-woke” rhetoric from right-wing populists seeking to demonise minority populations to shield the super-rich from the scrutiny of an angry population. Working class communities across the world are suffering, as inequality surges and living standards fall. Climate change and resultant food price shocks will dramatically worsen this suffering over the next few decades.

We are being governed by a Coalition of the rich, by the rich, for the rich. Their policies and rhetoric are hurtling NZ rapidly towards the polarisation, instability and volatility that much of the world has been experiencing in the last two decades. The winds of the global storm are starting to blow in Aotearoa.

Foreign investors seeking to buy up our assets will not find a safe haven from this storm. They will help bring the storm with them.

Message from the author

Welcome to my Substack! This is my second post — thanks for reading.

My name is Elliot Crossan, and I am a socialist writer and activist based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. I am the Chair of System Change Aotearoa, an ecosocialist campaign group — you can check out our website here.

I am a freelance writer, and I intend to make all posts on this Substack free. The goal of my writing is to help bring about political change — to contribute to the movement for workers’ rights, indigenous rights and climate justice. If you are able to support me financially, any contribution would be greatly appreciated — but I have no plans to publish anything behind a paywall.

Please subscribe and share this post!

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Cutting funding for public services whilst simultaneously expanding private “options” is a tactic pulled directly from the privatisation playbook. Step one is to destroy confidence in the ability of the government to provide basic services; step two is to extol the virtues of for-profit “alternatives.” Step three is full privatisation.

Our health system was already suffering the effects of decades worth of underfunding. Labour’s track record on health is less shoddy than National’s, but even the governments of Helen Clark and Jacinda Ardern failed to adequately address chronic underfunding of our health system. The Coalition’s recent savage cuts have dramatically worsened the situation — meaning we were already at step one, with confidence in the service undermined. Brown’s plans for private sector expansion in health means the government is moving swiftly to step two. Meanwhile, the ACT Party is waiting in the wings, lobbying for step three: a full sell-off. David Seymour has cited privatisation of the health system as one of his top priorities for 2025.

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We only need to look at America to see the disastrous consequences of a privatised healthcare system. The US is the only developed country that doesn’t have universal health coverage. It consequently has the worst-performing health system of any high-income country. Its insurance-based model ruthlessly prioritises private profit over human life; American doctors recently described the delays this causes to vital medical procedures as “a death sentence.”

Public anger about this system and the brutal effects it has on working class communities in the US recently boiled to the surface with the fatal shooting of health insurance CEO Brian Thompson. The suspect in the shooting, Luigi Mangione, has garnered huge sympathy and a cult following online, with millions supporting his alleged actions.

Working class Americans are so angry at their for-profit healthcare system that many are openly supporting cold-blooded murder. Is this utter nightmare really what we want to see introduced in Aotearoa?

The ongoing controversy over Seymour’s revamped school lunch programme is another consequence of the Coalition employing underhanded tactics in its assault on the public sector. ACT campaigned in 2023 to scrap the programme, which delivers free school lunches to 230,000 students across more than a thousand schools.

Instead of immediately abolishing free school lunches once appointed Associate Education Minister, Seymour has used “cost-cutting measures” to undermine the programme. Meals have arrived late; not enough vegetarian options have been provided; ham has been served in meals which were supposed to be halal; and on Thursday a student in Gisborne received second-degree burns when a meal was served at a dangerously hot temperature.

There are just two steps in this strategy rather than three: make the service look terrible, then scrap it. Kids in the poorest areas of the country will go hungry as a result. Seymour doesn’t give a damn.

The Coalition’s attacks on healthcare and on free school lunches are just two examples of its all-out assault on our welfare state. Other instances include sweeping cuts to Whaikaha, harsh benefit sanctions, and a freeze on construction for new state housing, just to name a few. Each of these are examples of privatisation and austerity policies — and part of a direct assault by the government on the living standards of working class communities in Aotearoa.

The driving imperative behind these decisions is simple: profit is king. Through tax cuts for landlords and investors, and by bringing in the private sector to operate previously state-run services, the Coalition parties are handing out wealth to their corporate donors as fast as they can get away with. If this agenda drives up inequality, poverty and homelessness, and increases the cost of living for hard-working families who are already struggling — so be it.

The last election saw previous records shattered for election donations, with the right-wing parties receiving twice as much money as the centre-left parties were given. Businesses overwhelmingly donated to National, ACT and NZ First; the trade unions and private individuals that donated to the other parties were simply unable to compete with the influx of corporate funding for the Coalition. Now shareholders and CEOs are getting their money’s worth — at the expense of everyone else.

Christopher Luxon is speaking at an International Investment Summit in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland next week. Our salesman-in-chief will no doubt try to tempt foreign investors with opportunities to make a killing by looting Aotearoa’s public sector. Never mind that the profits of multinational corporations over the past decade have averaged $9.9 billion — higher than our combined exports of milk powder, wool and vegetables. Sale of public assets to overseas investors will mean even more profits being sucked out of Aotearoa at the expense of local communities, while increased foreign ownership will make it harder for future generations to take back control of these assets.

ActionStation is organising a protest against this summit. At 9am on Thursday, activists will make some noise outside Luxon’s festival of privatisation, which is being held at Park Hyatt Hotel.

Thursday’s action is a start. But where is the mass movement fighting back against the Coalition’s cuts and asset sales? The agenda of the John Key government was mild in comparison to the neoliberal assault currently being unleashed by National, ACT and NZ First; yet Key’s policies provoked tens of thousands to take to the streets. Opposition to asset sales and to the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement was strong in the 2010s. The Coalition of today is going further and faster — where is the fightback?

Resistance to the Treaty Principles Bill and (to a lesser degree) the Fast-track Approvals Bill has mobilised huge numbers. This is hugely positive — the government’s racist, anti-Treaty, environmentally destructive policies are rightly causing uproar. Connections have been drawn in those movements between the government’s attacks on the Treaty, its attacks on environmental protections, and its agenda to make the rich richer.

But a mass movement against privatisation and austerity is desperately needed alongside these other movements. The left must fight back on all three fronts at the same time. In doing so, campaigners must explicitly make it clear that Luxon, Seymour and Peters do not have the best interests of “everyday New Zealanders” at heart. They are out to serve their rich mates — plain and simple.

The Coalition, and the ACT Party in particular, is trying to divide-and-rule by fanning the flames of racism against Māori. This too is part of the privatisation playbook. If the “white working class” can be convinced that they will benefit from racist policies, they can be persuaded to vote for right-wing parties whose policies do not benefit them at all — they only benefit the rich and powerful.

The left must fight to defend the welfare state at the same time as fighting for Te Tiriti o Waitangi and for urgent action on climate change. These struggles are directly connected. The Coalition exists to fight for the interests of giant corporations — their agenda makes attacks on working class communities, indigenous rights and environmental protections inevitable. A coherent alternative must be presented to this government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich.

This alternative means not only halting cuts and asset sales, but turning the tide on 40 years of neoliberal policies which have worsened inequality. Public ownership must be expanded; services suffering from decades of underfunding must be properly invested in; and programmes such as free school lunches must be made universal, giving communities across the country a stake in their defence. It is harder to undermine social programmes which benefit every family directly.

Only by directly taking on the interests of the rich and powerful can such an alternative be realised. Privatisation must be reversed; corporations and the wealthiest households must be made to pay much higher tax rates. The top 1% won’t give up their wealth and power without a fight. The only way to create an alternative which works for everyone is to organise a mass movement with the support of the majority of society.

Thankfully, working class people are the vast majority of society. Together, we have an interest in creating a world that works for the many, not the few.

It is time for activists, community groups and trade unions to mobilise in the streets and in workplaces to resist privatisation and austerity. We must oust the government of the rich; and we must replace the Coalition with a left-wing government committed to genuine change. More incrementalism and half-measures from Labour will not do.

Here, we must heed another warning from America. If left unchecked, the wealthy elite will run society into the ground. Donald Trump and Elon Musk are taking a sledgehammer to the already-broken federal government, stripping back every piece of social and environmental legislation they can get their greedy hands upon. The same phenomenon is taking place in Argentina under libertarian President Javier Milei — poverty has soared as a result, with over half of the country now living below the poverty line.

This is the future that David Seymour wants for Aotearoa. The ACT Party represents ultra-wealthy libertarian donors who are hell bent on increasing their profits at all costs. Healthcare privatisation is just the start — this corporate elite will tear our society apart with its insatiable, rapacious greed.

We have to stop them before this oligarchic American horror story is unleashed upon our country.

Message from the author

Welcome to my Substack! This is my first post — thanks for reading.

My name is Elliot Crossan, and I am a socialist writer and activist based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. I am the Chair of System Change Aotearoa, an ecosocialist campaign group — you can check out our website here.

I am a freelance writer, and I intend to make all posts on this Substack free. The goal of my writing is to help bring about political change — to contribute to the movement for workers’ rights, indigenous rights and climate justice. If you are able to support me financially, any contribution would be greatly appreciated — but I have no plans to publish anything behind a paywall.

Please subscribe and share this post!

Subscribe now

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