SWMR September 2003

Editorial: Hard Labour
One year into the second term of our Labour government we should, according to Labour's influential defenders, be feeling better.
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Picket heralds press freedom
by Kane Forbes
Around 40 supporters of Palestinian liberation picketed the Auckland offices of the NZ Herald....
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Where everyone gets a protest
by David Colyer
Residents of Kerikeri are opposing plans by retail giant The Warehouse to open a 3,075 square metre "red shed" on the outskirts of town.
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Auckland rates revolt reaches critical point
by Kane Forbes
On August 23 around a thousand angry Aucklanders took to the streets in protest against the Auckland Regional Council's (ARC) rate increases.
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Maori foreshore control protects access for all
by Grant Brookes
The two month campaign by National, ACT and United Future to whip up racism against Maori is floundering as Labour tries to settle the foreshore and seabed revolt.
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Never again
Is it better to ignore small Nazi groups like the NF to avoid "giving them publicity", and focus instead on fighting the racism of NZ First, or even the Labour government? Should apologists for Hitler have the right to free speech? Grant Brookes investigates.
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A 'Third Way' to betray hope
On election night in 1999, Helen Clark explained the reason for Labour's victory; "New Zealanders want a change of direction".
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'Jobs Jolt' A shock for the system
by Daphne Lawless & Grant Brookes
Since the late 1980s, as unemployment became a fact of life for hundreds of thousands of New Zealand workers, governments have told us they need to get tough with beneficiaries and cut welfare spending to "balance the books".
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Gambling away our pensions
by Grant Brookes
The upcoming launch of the New Zealand Superannuation Fund has sparked a storm of controversy.
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Reformism without reforms
What happens, asks British socialist Chris Harman, when the Labour Party's social democracy fails to deliver concessions?
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Can free trade fix global poverty?
by Paul McGarr
In the middle of September, representatives of the world's governments will gather in Cancun, Mexico, for a crucial meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).A key issue will be trade in agricultural products, and agricultural subsidies. The world's major powers, the US and the European Union (EU),proclaim the virtues of "free" trade and trade "liberalisation".
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'Free trade' hurts NZ workers
by Grant Brookes
The closure of L R Wishart's shirt factory in Levin this month brings home the human cost of Labour's commitment to the World Trade Organisation's "free trade" agenda.
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Pacific Forum bullied into submission
by Tom Orsag
Australia, with New Zealand's help, is stepping up its colonial takeover of the South Pacific.
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The empire is on the march
Activist coalition Global Peace & Justice Auckland held a symbolic picket of the Pacific Islands Forum on August 16. Socialist Worker Monthly Review talked with committee member Mike Treen about the Forum and the future of GPJA.
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West Papuan independence betrayed
But out of the headlines, indigenous West Papuan people have been struggling for decades for their independence. Independence activist John Rumbiak was in New Zealand......
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Free Trade At Any Price? The World Trade Organisation Doha Round
Edited by Dr Jane Kelsey, Published by Arena, August 2003.
Reviewed by David Colyer
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'Art and Activism' conference
by Vaughan Gunson
"Art, Activism and Social Change". These words grabbed my attention in an email forwarded to me about a conference in Auckland in a week's time. Given an interest in all three, I thought that this conference would be one not to miss.
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How to get a job on the railways
"Jobs Jolt." That ugly expression sounds like what it is, a swift kick in the pants for this country's many unemployed. Jobs Jolt's attack on workers is fully exposed on page 8 of this paper.
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Hard Labour
One year into the second term of our Labour government we should, according to Labour's influential defenders, be feeling better.
When Helen Clark won the election last year, CTU president expressed "optimism that a Labour led government can continue with a renewed electoral mandate for the active social democratic programme".
Labour continues to ride high in the polls. But there's no sign of more social justice or democracy and people are not happy.
The gap between rich and poor continued to grow under Clark's first government, and the rich are still getting richer.
The wealth of the 157 individuals and 37 families on the 2003 NBR "Rich List" has jumped to $18.2 billion. The $3.2 billion increase on the year before was the biggest rise ever.
Helen Clark, who dipped her toes in the unpopular war for oil in Iraq by sending a frigate to the Gulf, has now taken the plunge and sent troops to support the brutal occupation.
The 'Jobs Jolt' and new housing laws mean that attacks on civil liberties in the name of the "war on terrorism" are now being extended to the unemployed and tenants as well.
Meanwhile, Labour is pushing ahead with profit-driven plans to end the moratorium on GE crops and animals, against the wishes of the majority of people.
But as the articles in the following pages report, there is a hatred of the whole rotten system growing at the grassroots.
Auckland homeowners rallying at public meetings and taking to the streets are applauding anti-capitalist speeches and calls for direct action.
Small businesspeople in Kerikeri are speaking out against corporate power. Timaru Grey Power are denouncing capitalism.
These groups are not usually the first to protest. Their actions are signs of a much wider hatred of the system of corporate rule and war.
Labour are wedded to this system. Sooner or later, the growing anti-capitalist mood is likely to dent their popularity.
The Left must connect with this mood. There are radical forces on the Right who will pose as friends of "the little man" if they do not.
The established Left groups are much more aware of the nature of the system than most people.
But for the most part they are sticking to their "own issues" and not helping the more generalised opposition to grow.
This reflects the politics of parties seeking election to parliament "follow me, support my campaign".
Being wherever masses of ordinary people are starting to move into action helping people to organise, make the connections between their issue and others and generalise the struggle into a fight against the system is part of the socialist strategy of self-emancipation from below.
Building a large socialist organisation at the heart of the Left will be crucial in creating an alternative to more hard Labour

Picket heralds press freedom
by Kane Forbes
Around 40 supporters of Palestinian liberation picketed the Auckland offices of the NZ Herald on August 29. They were protesting against the sacking of cartoonist Malcolm Evans.
The action was organised by the Palestinian Human Rights Campaign and Students for Justice in Palestine and was supported by Global Peace & Justice Auckland.
Evans had contributed a series of pictures critical of the Israeli state's occupation of Palestine.
He was fired from his position as a satirical cartoonist for the Herald after the Jewish Council complained about a cartoon featuring a Palestinian slum and the word "Apartheid" graffitied on a wall.
David Wakim, organiser for the Palestinian Human Rights Campaign gave a passionate speech about the plight of the Palestinians.
He used a map produced by Israeli peace group Gush Shalom to show the position of walls, and proposed walls, running through the occupied territories.
They divide communities into ghettos, just like the Black-only townships or Bantustans of apartheid South Africa.
Other speakers linked the Herald's removal of Evans to its siding with business and the privileged on other issues, such as the war in Iraq, genetic engineering and the Auckland Regional Council's rates increases, suggesting that the Palestinian issue was an important part of a global struggle by ordinary people for justice and control over their lives.
The chant "Give him back his job" rang out.
Despite the presence of TV news crews from both channels and a number of newspaper journalists, not one report of the protest appeared in the mainstream media.

Where everyone gets a protest
by David Colyer
Residents of Kerikeri, a small town of about 5,000 people in the Bay of Islands, are opposing plans by retail giant The Warehouse to open a 3,075 square metre "red shed" on the outskirts of town.
Those who oppose the development say they want to maintain the town's character and protect local small business and jobs.
The Far North campaign follows similar resistance in Napier late last year, involving public meetings and a protest march.
Pam Fenton, a "concerned grandmother" and spokesperson for Kerikeri Warehouse Action Group, talked to Socialist Worker Monthly Review about her concerns.
She described a public meeting organised by the Warehouse on August 14 as "the biggest highjack you can imagine". The company brought people from outside Kerikeri. Warehouse spokespeople "had it covered. It was the perfect spin", she said.
Pam contrasts the vote at the meeting, which was two-to-one in favour of The Warehouse, with the results of a survey by a local newspaper.
The Bay News invited readers to vote "yes" or "no". The results were two-to-one against.
Despite the meeting result, says Pam, "we are still fighting on".
Warehouse boss Stephen Tindall claims to have a "people first" business philosophy, helping create jobs and being "socially responsible" in contrast to the free market extremism of the Business Roundtable.
This image is bolstered by his close links to Helen Clark's government and by the Tindall Foundation, which hands out millions of dollars of Warehouse profits to community groups each year.
But as Green Party co-leader Rod Donald says, Foundation funding is used to "mute criticism" of Tindall, "buying the silence of those who would otherwise be his fiercest critics".
In 2000, The Warehouse was exposed as a union-busting firm when it shut out the National Distribution Union and instead set up a company "union", run by former Warehouse managers and funded by the company, for the 5,000 workers who make its profits.
And as a Bay News editorial pointed out, "The Warehouse (publicly) boasts about the employment they create and then (privately) congratulate stores for reducing the cost of employment."
Warren Snow, who managed the Tindall foundation for five years, is now leading a campaign against The Warehouse.
Much of his inspiration comes from the opposition in America to retail giant Wal-Mart, which Tindall admits he took as a model for his business.
Last year Warren toured the anti-Wal-Mart documentary Store Wars around the country. From this a nationwide campaign has grown.
Speaking at the Auckland screening last November, Warren argued that resistance to "big box" sprawl links many issues from poor wages and conditions for retail and manufacturing workers in the West and the Third World to lack of democracy, as corporate power denies grassroots people
control over their own community.
These problems arise because, despite the "people first" spin, the $2 billion-a-year Warehouse like any other corporation is interested only in profit.
As Pam Fenton puts it, "The developers see a quick buck. Mr Tindall sees a quick buck. It's just money-driven."
Snow believes than in a truly sustainable society, important decisions should not be left to the "free market" and big business.
"These companies are not capable of putting limits on themselves, because of the responsibilities of directors to make a return for shareholders," he said.
The anti-big box movement tends to overlook the fact that the pressures of capitalist competition to make money, while at the same time keeping prices low affect small businesses too. And small businesses often have worse working conditions.
Building a different kind of world, where people really do come first, means not merely restricting the market, but creating new rules to govern human trade and work.
The campaign to stop the Warehouse in Kerikeri and elsewhere contains the seeds of this struggle, because it asserts the rights of ordinary people over corporations.

Auckland rates revolt reaches critical point
by Kane Forbes
On August 23 around a thousand angry Aucklanders took to the streets in protest against the Auckland Regional Council's (ARC) rate increases.
The rally was organised by Auckland City Residents and Ratepayers Association, one of the many groups fighting against the ARC's big business agenda.
Many of the marchers were older homeowners people not normally the first to engage in protest action.
But younger people also marched, including renters who see the danger of the rate rises being passed on by their landlords.
Protester Gemma Ramsay was collecting names of people wanting to join an organised mass boycott of this year's rate rise.
She told Socialist Worker Monthly Review, "We were totally overwhelmed by hundreds of people keen to sign our boycott sign-up sheet. It was clear the call for direct action was the most popular single issue on the day."
The mood on the march was highly charged with loud chanting, the favourites being "can't pay, won't pay!" and "boycott the increase!", as the people marched up Queen Street to a rally at the town hall.
There was a large gap, however, between the supporters of direct action (the majority of marchers) and the official speakers.
Speakers from Poverty Action Network, Grey Power, various ratepayer and resident associations and the Council of Trade Unions addressed the rally.
They expressed no confidence in the council, argued in favour of a government-appointed commissioner to run its affairs until new elections are held, they demanded new rates to be set according to people's ability to pay and a return to collection of ARC levies by district councils.
None of the official speakers mentioned the call for a boycott and no-one from the crowd was able to speak before the organisers officially ended the event.
Sadly, there was no organised presence from any of the main Left parties Labour, the Alliance or Greens. The broad-based activist coalition Global Peace & Justice Auckland provided the sound system, but no more.
Their fuller involvement could have helped to build a larger protest, connected with the mood for direct action and provided an alternative to the more conservative official speakers.
The march and rally were a small expression of a much larger revolt.
The ARC is funding a massive hand-out to the richest business owner by increasing the rates of the poorest homeowner.
The business politicians running the ARC argue that they need to increase rates to fund transport projects, including light rail. But the main reason rates are rising is because the ARC has axed the "business differential" rating system.
The ARC held a sham consultation. Even so, the vast majority of submissions wanted the business differential to be kept.
The ARC ignored this majority and instead listened to the handful of submissions from business groups, like the Employers and Manufacturers Association.
Under the Local Government Act, all councils are supposed to be "accountable to their communities through open decision making processes".
All significant decisions are required to deliver benefits in terms of the "social, economic, environmental and cultural concerns of the community".
With the ARC flouting the law with impunity, it's clear that legal channels alone will not stop the rate rises. The key to winning will be a mass refusal to pay.
Mass meetings of ratepayers and other people concerned by the rate increases where held all over Auckland last month.
Of the nine suburban meetings that Socialist Worker activists attended, all voted in favour of our resolution to boycott this year's ARC rate increase.
In most cases the votes where unanimous.
Meetings from 60 to 300 people, a broad cross-section of homeowners and renters, all seemed to agree that the rates increase was another example of the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.
Rates campaigner Len Parker from Socialist Worker was present at many of these meetings. He explained, "The revolt is the culmination of many issues affecting people that has bought them together.
"People feel an individual powerlessness as a result of increasing business dominance over their lives. The significance of these meetings has been the readiness of thousands of people to engage in collective action as an alternative to business interests."
Hundreds have now signed up to the organised boycott. Many, many more are boycotting the increase as individuals.
Rates were due for over 259,000 households in greater Auckland by the end of August. Nearly one in three 78,000 people had not paid by the due date.
But for a boycott to be sustainable in the face of the council's debt collectors, it needs to be well organised.
Elaine West, chair of the Auckland City Residents and Ratepayers Association, and Len Parker spoke at a public meeting hosted by Socialist Worker on August 28.
A sense of urgency permeated the meeting. Most people wanted to participate in the boycott but knew it needed large numbers and organisation to be a success.
The meeting agreed to work towards a city-wide, broad-based boycott committee, which Auckland's Left should help to build.

Maori foreshore control protects access for all
by Grant Brookes
The two month campaign by National, ACT and United Future to whip up racism against Maori is floundering as Labour tries to settle the foreshore and seabed revolt.
The hypocrisy of Right wing politicians who've worked hand in glove with landowners and business posing as defenders of "public access" was staggering all the more when Maori activists were never threatening to restrict normal enjoyment of the beaches in the first place.
Despite their falling support, the Right wing parties are continuing to demand Crown ownership of the foreshore and seabed.
But as Green Party co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons has pointed out, "We have had nearly 20 years' experience now of what can happen to Crown ownership.
We used to think we collectively owned the railways! The BNZ! The leasehold land in the high country! The plantation forests!
"Maori customary title is arguably less threatening to pakeha access to the beach than Crown title which under a future government could be sold to private owners who really would exclude others."
The flaxroots revolt over the foreshore reflects Maori dissatisfaction with Labour's failure to deliver for them across the board, just as they've failed pakeha workers.
As veteran Ngapuhi activist Titewhai Harawira put it, "Our people have got no homes, our hospitals are closing down and then there's the foreshore and seabed".
The revolt fuelled a near mutiny by Labour's Maori MPs and has forced the government to back down on earlier threats to assert Crown ownership.
This is a victory for ordinary Maori and pakeha alike.
Labour's new plans, however, are still not designed to protect free public access.
The government is taking its proposals to 11 hui around the country this month. While not asserting ownership by Crown, they would extinguish customary title.
Maori anger has not subsided. The chair of the runanga (council) of the Far North's Muriwhenua says, "It'll be bigger that the fiscal envelope row" referring to the massive protests in 1995 which sunk the National government's plans to set a fiscal cap on Treaty settlements.
But as Helen Clark told parliament on August 27, not all Maori share the same goals in the foreshore claim.
"Some of the tangata whenua comment has, of course, come from a quite explicitly commercial angle, while other comment has come from a sovereignty angle", she said.
The government's Treaty claims process of the last decade, designed to defuse the huge Maori struggles of the 1970s and 80s, has delivered next to nothing for flaxroots Maori.
But it has created a tiny class of Maori capitalists who control iwi commercial assets, and a slightly larger group of middle class Maori who dream of one day joining them at the top.
The Maori "Browntable" now see in the foreshore claim their chance to win a lucrative share of the emerging aquaculture industry the new fish and shellfish farms planned around the coast.
Dominion Post columnist Vernon Small reminded readers on August 21 that "the aquaculture claim was the spark that ignited the foreshore and seabed conflagration in the first place".
The government was about to end a two-year moratorium on new marine farms.
Billions of dollars are at stake in new marine farm developments.
Labour's proposals to settle the foreshore row are designed to allow these commercial developments to go ahead. As part of this, it is bringing forward legislation to allocate aquaculture rights to Maori.
Tino rangatiratanga activist Ken Mair told Socialist Worker Monthly Review last month he was "deeply concerned" that the government might do a deal with Maori elite, like they did with the Sealord Deal in 1992.
This deal made Sealord's Maori directors very rich, but to date flaxroots Maori haven't seen a cent of the $700 million settlement.
Jeanette Fitzsimons visited the Hauraki Gulf last month. "There are marine farm plans there from both Maori and pakeha", she said, "opposed by both Maori and pakeha."
The foreshore struggle has the potential to unite Maori and pakeha against the corporations including iwi corporations who want to monopolise the seashores for farming.
Maori are planning protests this month to coincide with the government's consultation process. Mass protests take the issue out of the hands of the Maori corporate elite and closed-door negotiations which might buy off opposition, once again leaving the majority little better off.
Pakeha should support the protests. If flaxroots Maori succeed in winning customary title over the foreshore and seabed, it could not only secure ongoing access to the beaches for all but inspire workers to wrest back their sovereignty from the market as well.

Never again
Debates over how to respond to the Nazis have re-opened.
On August 28, a petition signed by 64 academics defending military historian Joel Hayward was printed in the daily newspapers. Hayward had written a thesis denying Hitler's extermination of 6 million Jews. The petition supported him in the name of "academic freedom".
A month earlier, police in Lower Hutt arrested six associates of the Nazi National Front (NF) after seizing a cache of explosives.
Is it better to ignore small Nazi groups like the NF to avoid "giving them publicity", and focus instead on fighting the racism of NZ First, or even the Labour government? Should apologists for Hitler have the right to free speech? Grant Brookes investigates.
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Hitler seized power in Germany at the height of the greatest crisis in the history of capitalism.
Today the sense of political crisis across Europe, while not as great as then, is growing as support for the parties of the centre cracks and politics polarises to the Left and Right.
The social democratic (ie Labour) parties that were swept to office only a few years ago now face a sharp drop in support and internal confusion. Most have suffered a long term decline in membership.
In the last three years, parties of the far Right have made gains in Austria, Italy, Portugal, Denmark, Spain, Holland and France.
The success of Jean-Marie Le Pen in particular, coming second in last year's French presidential elections, is boosting the confidence of the small number of Nazis here.
The present day fascist plan for growth internationally involves a twin track approach. Firstly, the Nazis seek respectability in the democratic process. Through elections they hope to build a base of popular support that will become a mass movement.
They play upon the anxiety and fear generated by the economic crisis and they target small businessmen and disillusioned "professionals" whose cynicism and petty prejudices they seek to mobilise.
This part of the plan has been picked up here. In an interview with the Sunday Star Times, Wellington leader Brent Gebbie said the NF was "seeking to build its membership to 500 to register as a political party and run for parliament, following the lead of our sister party in France".
But the fascists must also relate to the most desperate people the long term unemployed as well as teenagers who see no chance of a future. They will use more radical rhetoric to do it.
"People's economy yes! Globalisation no!" read the slogans of the Nazi National Democratic Party in German local body elections in 2001. The website of the New Zealand NF, meanwhile, attacks Labour as a "capitalist government" and opposes the privatisation of public assets as "treasonous".
To ground down people, the Nazis present their tough face. Street gangs which organise attacks on minorities attempt to create what they call "nationally liberated areas", and provide a sense of power to the powerless.
"Gebbie said Lower Hutt's National Front was trying to support young skinheads who were becoming involved in street fighting with Maori and Pacific Island youth gangs", reported the Star Times.
Gebbie himself has over 100 convictions, mainly for violence crimes, and has spent 9 years in prison. He also says "there are different factions in the National Front", including "a small minority" training as an armed militia.
Christchurch NF fürher, Todd Sweeney, has declared, "We are working on getting enough people in gun clubs to be able to get the training needed for each individual".
For this reason, fascists are not just Right wingers or repulsive racists who scapegoat immigrants, like NZ First. Despite their smaller numbers, they are a very serious threat.
Fascists aim to control every aspect of society. They want to end elections and believe that trade unionists are, as a British National Party leader said, "people whose freedoms need to be curbed".
The New Zealand NF wants capital punishment, euthanasia and military conscription for all unemployed. If they were stronger, they would target working class activists and even senior members of the Labour Party.
As the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky put it, "The historic function of fascism is to smash the working class, destroy its organisations, and stifle political liberties when the capitalists find themselves unable to govern and dominate with the help of democratic machinery".
Fascism is a full scale attack on the freedoms of the vast majority of society. For this reason Nazis forfeit the right to "free speech", which they only use to spread racist lies which result in racist attacks.
To beat fascism we need mass activity which draws together all the forces threatened by the Nazis. It needs joint leafleting, marches and petitioning involving Labour Party members, Greens, revolutionaries, gay rights groups, peace activists, anti-capitalists, trade unionists, refugee groups and socialists.
To attack Labour politicians in the same breath as the Nazis would be to repeat the disastrous tactics of the German Left, who failed to unite against Hitler.
But fascism grows out of the despair and bitterness created by the misery, poverty and inequality created by capitalism. As long as capitalism continues to wreck people's lives then fascism remains a potential threat.
That's why socialists in the anti-Nazi movement argue that if we want to destroy the threat of fascism for good then we also need to point to a socialist alternative to capitalism which can meet people's needs, and end the hopelessness and despair on which the fascists breed.
Fascism has never "crept up" bit by bit on society. It has only taken power during periods of deep social crisis. Their victory involved persuading important sections of the ruling class that they could deliver what the bosses wanted.
Today there is not a slump like in the 1930s. But there is growing insecurity. While the main trend today is to the Left, the sense of crisis is also enough for the Nazis to get a foothold if we let them. The weaker the Nazis are now, the more difficult it will be for them to exploit a more serious crisis in the future. We can't afford to ignore them.
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"Prior to the Nazis getting into government, the economy was bust. The Nazis built the national pride. I admire what they did."
Brent "the Snake" Gebbie, Wellington fürher of the National Front
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"Only one thing would have stopped our movement if our adversaries had
understood its principle and, from the first day, had smashed with the
utmost brutality the nucleus of our new movement."
Adolf Hitler

A 'Third Way' to betray hope
On election night in 1999, Helen Clark explained the reason for Labour's victory; "New Zealanders want a change of direction".
In order to attract and retain the support of ordinary people, Labour had to appear to offer an alternative.
But Labour is a party committed to managing capitalism, not challenging it.
Party leaders know that despite four years of economic growth, the capitalist economy is much weaker than it was in the heyday of the welfare state in the 1950s and 60s.
This led Clark to call for a "Third Way" government a term that's been recently revived in speeches by Labour strategist Steve Maharey.
The concept of the "Third Way" first appeared in the early 1990s. It was used by former US president Bill Clinton to distance himself from both the
Republicans and the welfare state of previous Democrat presidents like Roosevelt.
The reality under Clinton was a continuation of the Republicans' neo-liberal agenda. He quickly allied with big business and the Republican Right to ram the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993 and dropped the slogan.
But as Maharey acknowledges, the New Zealand Labour Party draws the "Third Way" idea mainly from Europe.
In the late 1990s, the "Third Way" approach was mainly associated with Britain's Tony Blair and German chancellor Gerhard Schroder, who called it the "New Middle".
Both governments are now in crisis. Blair is in trouble over the lies he told to justify war. But the depth of his unpopularity is driven by wider factors.
The gap between rich and poor in Britain has grown in each and every year of Blair's government. The British prime minister has been nick-named "Tory Blair" for his continuation of neo-liberal policies.
In a lecture at Massey University in June, Maharey acknowledged that, "After leading the political debate during the 1990s and early part of this century, the Third Way has fallen on hard times".
This is particularly true in France, where a series of massive workers' struggles pushed the French equivalent of the Labour Party to distance itself from the idea.
"Third Way? New Centre?", asked prime minister Lionel Jospin, "No thank you".
The "Third Way" is the attempt to appear to offer an alternative without challenging the entrenched privilege of the wealthy.
Its "goal is still the egalitarian project" says Maharey, while rejecting "the focus of traditional models of welfare on the transfer of income".
In electing Labour in 1999, workers wanted an end to National's contempt for democracy, their anti-strike laws and growing gap between rich and poor, their neo-liberal "free trade" ideology and underfunded public services, their privatisation plans for remaining public assets like roads and water, their "market rents" and their attacks on tenants, pensioners and beneficiaries.
But like Americans under Clinton and British workers under Blair, the "Third Way" is giving us more of the same.

'Jobs Jolt' A shock for the system
by Daphne Lawless & Grant Brookes
Since the late 1980s, as unemployment became a fact of life for hundreds of thousands of New Zealand workers, governments have told us they need to get tough with beneficiaries and cut welfare spending to "balance the books".
So why now, when the government is running a record $4 billion surplus and unemployment is the lowest in 16 years, is Labour once again cracking down on the unemployed?
Social services minister Steve Maharey announced his "Jobs Jolt" on August 4.
The package strengthens existing policies. Its main initiatives include forcing beneficiaries to move away from "low-employment" regions, tougher conditions for sickness and invalid beneficiaries and requiring those over 55 to submit to a worktest.
The first two are continuations of current government strategies.
For this reason, beneficiary rights activist Stephen Ruth has called Jobs Jolt "political froth, meant to send a signal to case managers. It's window dressing. It's not real", he adds.
But even as a "signal", the package will have real effects. Caseworkers will
be encouraged to make beneficiaries' lives even harder.
The tougher restrictions on sickness benefits will push people into work who should be recovering at home.
And as the Universal Income Trust points out, forcing people to move towns on pain of losing their benefit breaches international human rights conventions on freedom of movement.
Maharey says the package has been ready since the beginning of the year, which suggests it was created as a direct response to complaints from employers about "a shortage of skilled workers".
Late last year, with unemployment running at its lowest levels since 1987, employers became increasingly vocal about a "labour shortage" limiting their profits.
But they were unwilling to pay higher wages to attract the workers they needed.
Jobs Jolt is part of the Labour government's wider efforts to boost their profits and keep the capitalist system moving.
Labour aims to counter the current "skills shortage" by both "encouraging" more people into the workforce, and gearing the education and immigration systems more towards the needs of employers.
Maharey is also tertiary education minister. In June, he told a gathering of tertiary managers, "For every person who is available to work and not working, we are losing their contribution to New Zealand income and wealth".
While the Jobs Jolt is aimed at forcing more people into work, at the same time, says Maharey, "The tertiary education sector is being reformed so that the skills being learnt by students more closely align with those needed by business".
This means "partnerships" between business and education providers which would lead to employers dictating the kind of skills which are taught.
Maharey has called polytechnics and institutes of technology "the engine room of the knowledge society".
His vision of tertiary education is one which puts acquiring job skills far ahead of personal growth.
Likewise, the Labour government's racist attacks on immigrants are tuned to meet business needs.
As immigration minister Lianne Dalziel has pointed out, Labour's changes to immigration laws are not designed to stem the flow of people into New Zealand.
Instead, they are designed to allow into the country only those migrants with skills which local employers want and to accommodate their racist hiring practices by keeping out anyone without a degree from a Western university.
Beneficiary rights advocates are in the forefront of moves to protest against the Jobs Jolt scheme. Activists in Wellington picketed a WINZ office on September 3, and other actions are planned.
But Jobs Jolt is a symptom of problems with the whole system.
Beneficiary-bashing isn't just a short-term scheme for political advantage.
The capitalist labour market requires that people be required to work at whatever wages employers are prepared to pay.
During times of recession, the pressure will be to save the government (and corporate taxpayers) money by cutting the welfare rolls.
In times of strong growth, it's to solve "skill shortages" and keep wages down. At all stages of the economic cycle, the government is concerned with the need to keep employers' profits up.
There are signs that the current growth spurt in the New Zealand economy may be coming to an end.
The high rate of the New Zealand dollar is putting pressure on exporters and is leading to a wave of layoffs in the timber industry, while the IT industry is also in trouble.
If beneficiaries are bashed by Labour when times are "good", what can we expect during the next economic downturn?
That's why we need more than a handful of activists protesting against the victimisation of beneficiaries.
We need action against the whole system which puts profits first, and that requires organisation of masses of people.
Disgracefully, the Council of Trade Unions has praised the Jobs Jolt. Union leaders should stand firm against further job losses and speak out against
Labour's attacks on the unemployed.
But as the Jobs Jolt's relationship to Labour's wider aims shows, not only do we need big protests against the policy.
We also need a socialist alternative to the Left parties who, like Labour, seek election to government in order to become the managers of capitalism.

Gambling away our pensions
by Grant Brookes
The upcoming launch of the New Zealand Superannuation Fund has sparked a storm of controversy.
The Super Fund, dubbed the "Cullen Fund" after finance minister Michael Cullen, is due to start investing its first $2 billion at the end of this month.
Debates have raged, mainly in the business pages, over how much of the golden egg to invest on the New Zealand stock market and how much overseas, and whether it mightn't be better to privatise all pension schemes.
Workers' stake in the pension debate has been hidden under a barrage of financial jargon.
The "Cullen Fund" is a huge attack on workers' rights to a guaranteed living income when they retire.
It marks the end of the "pay as you go" system first introduced by the Liberal government back in 1898.
Under that system, pensions for today's retired workers are paid for out of today's general taxation.
The Cullen Fund aims to increasingly see pensions paid for out of an account built up ahead of time, or "pre-funded".
As Labour MP David Cunliffe, who supports the scheme, has pointed out, "Contrary to the impression some people have, the primary beneficiaries of the fund will not be future retired people.
"They, after all, will not receive any larger entitlement to New Zealand Superannuation because of the Fund. Instead, the beneficiaries will be the taxpayers of the future."
Labour is unwilling to consider that any government in the next 50 years might raise taxes on the rich.
Even in their doomsday predictions for 2053 of an aging population and fewer working age people to support them, the pay as you go system could be retained by raising the average tax rate just 15 percent.
Restoring top tax rates and company tax to 1986 levels alone could pay pensions for all with buckets of cash to spare. And encouraging immigration could boost the working age population.
The other beneficiary of the Cullen Fund will be New Zealand corporations looking for investment capital.
Over next 20 years, the Fund will invest $8 billion in New Zealand companies listed on the stock exchange.
"The fund recognises that as a substantial new investor", said Super Fund chief executive Paul Costello, "it should be a positive influence on the growth of the local market".
This same goal state intervention to forcibly hand over workers' retirement savings to New Zealand companies was behind the National-NZ First compulsory super scheme floated in 1997 by Winston Peters and soundly thrashed in a referendum.
Labour aims to build the Cullen Fund to $38 billion in 10 years and a whopping $100 billion in 20 years.
Two thirds of that will be invested in shares. The next stock market crash will wipe out the guarantee of a living retirement income for a whole generation of workers.
In just two years, the much smaller Government Superannuation Fund, which pays the pensions of some civil servants, has lost $200 million. That's $200 million of workers' savings gambled away on falling stock markets.
The six "guardians" appointed by the government to manage the Cullen Fund include four bankers and former National cabinet minister Douglas Graham.
They don't have the interests of ordinary people at heart. Graham's commitment to workers' pensions was seen in 1998 when his National government moved to cut super from 65 percent of the average wage to 60 percent.
The Cullen Fund will also help perpetuate wars and environmental destruction.
"The government admits that profit is its only consideration in which stocks to invest in", says Green Party co-leader Rod Donald.
"That means our money will end up bankrolling the Lockheed-Martins, Monsantos, McDonalds and Sky Cities of this world, regardless of the misery they might inflict on people and the environment."
The system of pensions paid for through general taxation was won through the massive workers' struggles of the late 19th century which heralded the birth of this country's trade union movement.
Today, the Council of Trade Unions is supporting the its creeping destruction.
The Green Party has attacked the Cullen Fund. But while it's Green Party policy, co-leader Rod Donald has not been campaigning to keep the pay as you go scheme, funded by taxing the rich.
He has focused his attacks instead on the proportion of the fund that will be invested overseas.
Labour's plan to pre-fund pensions is an attempt to solve a future problem without challenging the rotten system we live under. If Left parties and union leaders don't encourage resistance, workers will be paying for it for years to come.
Changes to tenancy laws announced by housing minister Steve Maharey last month have provoked alarm and outrage.
Labour plans to allow addresses held on government databases to be given out, enabling tenants to be tracked down and presented with bills from their landlord.
They will also make it easier for rent arrears to be deducted straight out of a benefit, over-riding people's right to budget their own money.
The new legislation was drawn up by the Property Investors Federation, working with government officials. But Maharey claimed it was balanced, because it also lets tenants check up on "bad landlords".
Maharey hasn't looked for a place to rent recently. If he had, he would know that the housing shortage means people will take whatever they can find.
Checking a landlord's background doesn't enter into it.
Labour's attacks on tenants come as home ownership rates are plummeting.
Mainstream economists are blaming low interest rates. But it's the growing gap between rich and poor that means most workers in the main centres don't earn enough to save for a house deposit.
Meanwhile, the rich with cash to spare are shying away from uncertain stock markets and buying property, driving prices through the roof.
Before the 1999 election, Labour promised a massive state house building programme. Now they admit they have far too few houses to meet the need and are expanding a scheme to rent privately-owned properties.
The scheme is one big gravy train for landlords. Housing corp pays rent 52 weeks a year, regardless of whether the house is let, and pays for all damage to the property.
They also handle all issues relating to the tenancy in effect providing landlords with a free property management service.
"This", said a straight-faced Maharey, "is a good example of the public and the private working together".

Reformism without reforms
What happens, asks British socialist Chris Harman, when the Labour Party's social democracy fails to deliver concessions?
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There is a strange idea going round much of the far left internationally. It is that because capitalism can no longer afford reforms that improve the life of the mass of people, reformism as a powerful ideology within the workers' movement is dead.
From this it is said to follow that the old argument over reform or revolution is no longer relevant.
The idea is doubly wrong. Firstly, it assumes that the hold of reformist ideas among the mass of people depends simply upon reforms being achieved within the system.
In fact, reformism of one sort or another is the natural first reaction of any exploited or oppressed group when it begins to stir into action against its suffering.
Its members have been brought up in existing society and usually know no other. They take it for granted that things have to be organised in existing ways, just as someone who had been brought up wearing red glasses would assume that all possible images must have a pinkish tinge.
"The ruling ideas", as Marx and Engels put it, "are the ideas of the ruling class". As the Italian revolutionary leader Gramsci pointed out, the "common sense" of any society takes those ideas for granted.
People therefore almost invariably put their first demands on existing society in terms which assume the continuation of the main features of that society.
So peasant revolts in feudal society often called for a good feudal lord or king to replace a bad one. The Russian Revolution of 1905 began with demonstrators calling on their "little father" the tsar to correct the "abuses" of police and factory managers.
Under modern capitalism, it is usual for those who first protest to think that simply trade union negotiation or increased parliamentary pressure will solve the problem.
Reformism as a political movement arises as people look to ways to organise such negotiation or to exert such pressure. The first organisation is often carried out by heroic individuals who risk their liberty or their lives.
This was the case with the early trade union activists and the pioneers of Chartism in Britain in the 1830s and 1840s, and it was true 150 years later of those who, for instance, built illegal organisations in apartheid South Africa.
Over time, however, a whole apparatus of officials and representatives develop to hold the organisation together. They come to see their own negotiating or representative role within the existing system as all-important and increasingly expect to be able to enjoy a lifestyle similar to those they negotiate with or mix with in parliamentary institutions.
Such developments take place most easily when capitalism is expanding and can afford to concede real reforms to workers, as was the case in the 1850s and 1860s in Britain, and in the 1950s and early 1960s right across the advanced countries. In such circumstances professional trade union and parliamentary mediators are able to claim the credit for improvements in the
lives of wide numbers of workers.
But the "common sense" of capitalist society and the reformist ideas that flow from it do not disappear when such improvements are no longer so easily obtained. Nor do reformist organisations.
Even when they engage in direct action to protect their conditions by walking off the job or taking to the streets, people can still be persuaded to back off by those who argue to go through the normal channels. Such arguments can have an effect even when these "normal channels" fail miserably.
Again and again in recent years we have had the spectacle of trade union leaders or Labour politicians limiting the scale of action, and then telling people that the failure to make gains shows that action of any sort cannot work.
Secondly, the possibility for reform is never fully closed off. Faced with a big enough threat to them, capitalists will permit the state to grant reforms and the reformists to claim credit for them. They know this is the only way to buy time in which to prepare counterattacks.
France in 1936 was a case in point. Worldwide capitalism was going through the worst crisis it had ever known. But faced with a spreading strike and the occupation of all the major factories, French capitalism allowed the newly elected Popular Front government to introduce a shorter working week and the first ever paid holidays. Then, when the movement had died down, it pressured the same parliament to rescind many of the reforms.
More recently, world capitalism ran into its worst economic crisis since the Second World War in the winter of 1973-74 as oil prices soared. But faced with a highly successful miners' strike, which was bringing industry to a halt, British big business was happy to see the return of a minority Labour government which ended the strike in return for a big wage increase and a
number of other reforms (notably, the repeal of the anti-union laws). It saw this as the only way to win time for itself before returning to the attack, a year later, with massive and successful pressure for the government to introduce wage controls and make huge welfare cuts.
Such experiences are relevant today. The revival of resistance to the system over the last few years is not automatically destroying the hold of reformist ideas.
Thinkers associated with the movement over globalisation as varied as Susan George, George Monbiot and Bernard Cassen are claiming that real and lasting reforms are possible if there is the right combination of political manoeuvring from above and pressure from below.
Many of the new left trade union leaders in Britain are saying we can "reclaim" Labour or return to "Old Labour". And, perhaps most importantly, Hugo Chavez and Lula in Latin America are claiming it is possible to turn away from "neoliberalism" while leaving intact capitalist ownership of the means of production.
In this situation, revolutionaries still have to say what German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg said in her classic debate with Eduard Bernstein more than a century ago.
We are for a struggle for reforms. That is the way in which a movement can begin to gather the momentum to challenge the system as a whole. But ultimately, the reforms cannot be defended without a challenge to the power of the state based upon mass activity from below.
Reformism, old and new, denies the need even to discuss what such a challenge would involve and, in practice, always shies away from it at key moments. For that reason alone, the debate will not and must not go away.

Can free trade fix global poverty?
by Paul McGarr
In the middle of September, representatives of the world's governments will gather in Cancun, Mexico, for a crucial meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
The collapse of the WTO meeting in Seattle almost four years ago, amid protests outside and rows inside, marked the emergence of the worldwide movement against corporate globalisation.
Cancun will certainly see demonstrations outside, and bitter arguments inside. A key issue will be trade in agricultural products, and agricultural subsidies. The world's major powers, the US and the European Union (EU), proclaim the virtues of "free" trade and trade "liberalisation".
In the name of this "neo-liberal" creed they demand countries open themselves up to US and European corporations. Everywhere this leads to a recipe based on the same basic ingredients privatisation, welfare cuts, paying debt to international bankers, export production for the world market and freedom for multinationals.
To enforce the neo-liberal recipe the world's major powers use bodies like the WTO, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.
Yet a stinking hypocrisy lies at the heart of this dogma. Those who preach it the loudest are the worst sinners against their own commandments.
World Trade Organisation figures show that overall US subsidies in agriculture were $67 billion in 1999. The EU did even better, with some $86.6 billion.
The US government pours $3 billion in subsidies into cotton production, equivalent to $230 an acre. That allows US producers to make profits while selling at low prices, so grabbing 40 percent of the global market.
Meanwhile producers in Burkina Faso in Africa, who the IMF and World Bank encouraged to produce cotton for the world market, can't compete with the US and go bankrupt.
This is not accidental. It is the entire aim of US and EU policy. George Bush says the aim of US trade policy is that "we want to be selling our beef and our corn and our beans to people around the world".
The EU is equally blunt. Its official policy is "to consolidate its position as a major world exporter".
US and European subsidies are not about helping small farmers in those countries survive. The richest 20 percent of farmers in Britain get 80 percent of the subsidies from the EU's Common Agricultural Policy.
Some have reacted to all this by arguing that ending US and EU agricultural subsidies is the key to tackling world poverty.
The charity Oxfam cites the first of its "main policy goals" as "improving market access for poor countries and ending the cycle of subsidised agricultural overproduction and export dumping by rich countries".
Aid minister Marion Hobbs, who would like to put a caring face on capitalism, leapt on the Oxfam report. It showed, she said, that "gains from trade potentially outweigh the gains from international aid". But this kind of "free trade" is not the answer to the iniquities of the current system.
Coffee is one agricultural product in which there is something approaching a "free market" or "level playing field". The World Bank and IMF told countries like Vietnam to produce coffee for export to earn cash to service debts. This resulted in ever more coffee being produced and the global price falling.
Big producers like Brazil responded by increasing production to maintain profits, fuelling a vicious spiral of collapsing global prices. This brought ruin and starvation to coffee producers in Central America and Africa. The five global coffee corporations Nestlé, Kraft, Procter & Gamble, Sara Lee and the German-based Tchibo have seen profits soar.
Oxfam has rightly pointed out that "the coffee companies are laughing all the way to the bank. In the free market their global reach gives them
unprecedented options."
Oxfam recognises when discussing the coffee crisis that "existing marketbased solutions Fair Trade and the development of speciality coffees" cannot solve the global problem.
"A systemic not a niche solution is needed," it rightly says. And that "system" is a world dominated by giant corporations, and the powerful states and global institutions which serve them.
This is not an argument for saying nothing can be done until we end global capitalism. There are immediate measures that could begin to tackle global poverty. Sinking the WTO's planned GATS agreement, which enforces privatisation of public services across the world, would be one.
Blocking the TRIPS agreement, which allows pharmaceutical corporations to deny vital drugs to the poor, would be another. TRIPS also helps the corporations impose genetically modified crops around the world.
Perhaps the most effective single step though would be debt cancellation.
All the coffee-producing countries have lost out by $4 billion in the last five years due to collapsing prices.
But just three of those countries Honduras, Vietnam and Ethiopia paid $4.7 billion in debt payments in 1999-2000. Cancelling this crippling burden would transform people's lives.
It would also begin to challenge the mad system where the IMF and World Bank force countries to produce for the world market to earn foreign currency to meet debt payments.
Walden Bello, of Focus on the Global South, is one of the best known spokespersons for the anti-globalisation movement. He argues, "The focus on market access misleads people into believing that it is access to the markets of the North that is the central need and central problem of the global trading system. Far from it. The central problem is the paradigm of free trade that the WTO is relentlessly imposing."
Bello notes that the WTO can "support market access campaigns launched by Oxfam- so that they can increase their leverage on the developing countries to agree to more liberalisation in areas deemed more critical to the WTO and the big trading powers".
This is precisely the message that trade minister Jim Sutton, singing from the same song book as Europe and the US, will be taking to the WTO summit in Mexico.
As Listener writer Gordon Campbell has noted, "Sutton's solution could hardly be more perverse. In order to reassure American farmers and wean them off their subsidies, he urges, Third World nations will need to open up their markets."
A narrow focus on trade rules at best moves away from the real issues and measures which could begin to challenge global injustice and poverty. At worst it can even end up fitting with the agenda of those who want to extend corporate globalisation at the expense of the world's people.

'Free trade' hurts NZ workers
by Grant Brookes
The closure of L R Wishart's shirt factory in Levin this month brings home the human cost of Labour's commitment to the World Trade Organisation's "free trade" agenda.
Not only does free trade impoverish Third World countries. The increased international competition also hurts workers in Western countries like New Zealand.
Our government has sought to stay ahead of the pack in the "race to the bottom", in the hope of securing benefits for New Zealand business in trade forums like the WTO.
Now, 38 clothing workers at Wishart's will lose their jobs at the end of September after attempts to sell the family-owned firm fell through.
Potential buyers were put off by signals that the government will cut remaining tariffs on textiles, clothing and footwear once the current tariff freeze expires in 2005, making imports cheaper compared to locally produced garments.
"It's not just a job to me", said machinist Dierdre Connolly. "When you're with somebody eight hours a day, five days a week, you're with them more than your own family".
Maxine Gay, secretary of the Clothing Laundry and Allied Workers Union (CLAW), told Socialist Worker Monthly Review, "Our members wrote to [local Labour MP] Darren Hughes, saying 'many of us voted for you in the last election and now we need your help'.
"They've been bitterly disappointed." Hughes turned his back and refused to take up their case.
The latest redundancies in Levin come on top 20,000 job losses in the clothing and footwear industry since 1989.
The remaining 18,000 workers still employed in the sector are also under threat, many of them in small North Island towns where other job opportunities are scarce
If they lose their jobs, asks Gay, then what? "Is [social services minister] Steve Maharey going to come along and give them a kick with his 'Jobs Jolt'?"
The corporate champions of free trade in business and government claim that it brings benefits for workers in the form of lower prices for household goods.
But the government's own officials admit that scrapping tariffs completely would only bring down the price of clothes by ' percent.
Meanwhile, even their rose-tinted picture of a free trade future includes 2,000 more job losses for clothing workers.
The union is fighting on to defend jobs. "We've done letter writing, petitions and a postcard campaign", says Gay.
"There's about to be a letter drop to every household in Levin."
The union campaign is focused on asking the government to keep existing tariffs.
But while tariff levels affect employment, campaigning to keep them is not the key to defending jobs.
Hundreds of jobs in the timber industry have gone this year, for instance, and thousands more are threatened.
These were not caused by tariff reductions, as tariffs on imported wood products were already at zero.
In Levin the union has teamed up with Enterprise Horowhenua, the local employers' organisation, in their tariff campaign.
"It's not the normal thing for a union", admits Gay. "We see that what the employer takes home at the end of the day, the worker can't. There is an unequal relationship."
That's true. The union should be organising workers to fight collectively and tip the balance more in their favour.
It's even more important given the growth of sweatshop clothing factories in Auckland, which will put pressure on wages in other plants as they're undercut on the market.
"If we don't make a fist of stamping out the sweatshops", Gay says, "then even if we save the industry, it's going to be a low-wage industry".
But teaming up with employers over tariffs weakens the fight for decent, well-paid jobs that are worth having.
What's more, says union industrial officer Robert Reid, "In order to get an agreement that everyone [including employers] can live with, we would be prepared to look at a scenario of being bound by the World Trade Organisation tariff regime".
While this regime currently doesn't require the kind of tariff cuts that Labour is considering, endorsing the WTO sets a dangerous precedent.
It also makes it harder for the union to appeal to other workers' hatred of corporate power and free trade in building support.
Building that support among workers here and overseas should be the job of the Council of Trade Unions.
The CTU has sent in a submission to government asking for tariffs to stay.
But they've done nothing to build support for the clothing workers under threat among their own 330,000 members not even, say, mass mailing bundles of the clothing union's postcard for workers to send back to the government.
The clothing union is doing some work itself to build international solidarity against the common enemy.
In February, a group of union delegates met with their counterparts in Australia.
While employers here are threatening to relocate across the Tasman if tariffs are cut, some Australian firms are threatening to move to New Zealand, where wages are lower.
Pacific Brands, which operates on both sides of the Tasman, is one of them.
"We made it clear to management", said Gay, "that we're not going to take work from Australia".
Making links like these with workers overseas can defeat the employers' attempts to get workers internationally to compete with one other in the "race to the bottom".
Building practical international solidarity, not teaming up with employers to keep tariffs, is the key to stopping "free trade" from wrecking lives all around the world.

'The empire is on the march'
Activist coalition Global Peace & Justice Auckland held a symbolic picket of the Pacific Islands Forum on August 16. Socialist Worker Monthly Review talked with committee member Mike Treen about the Forum and the future of GPJA.
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SW: Why did GPJA decide to picket the PIF?
Mike Treen (MT): We thought there were a number of issues that have been raised by the actions of the Australian and New Zealand governments, in terms of the Pacific and internationally the invasion of Iraq and the military intervention in the Solomon Islands. We wanted to raise the question, are the Australian and NZ governments seeking to use the crisis in the Solomons as a pretext for beefing up a colonial overlordship of the Pacific? That certainly seemed to be, from the public statements of the Australian government, what they were on about. We didn't think an expansion of that colonial role was going to produce the results the people of the Pacific need.
SW: What did you think of the Forum's outcome?
MT: It was a reassertion of Australian pre-eminence in the Pacific. The Australians said they wanted their man to be the head of the PIF, and they achieved that result despite significant initial opposition. Previously the Australian head of state wouldn't bother attending. Here they
were, present, lobbying and arm twisting, and insisting that Pacific Island states play a subordinate role to Australia's interests. It was a rather sad spectacle. Sad, because the of the ultimate capitulation of the majority of Pacific Island leaders. In fact, they are becoming no more than servants of Australian empire.
SW: What do you make of Helen Clark and New Zealand's role at the Forum?
MT: They played the role they normally do, which is to butter the bread of the Australians. They came out talking about respecting sovereignty, but at the end of the day, they go with it. Despite the language being less overtly colonial, and Helen Clark having a greater sense for the sensibilities of Island nations, it was at the end of the day a good cop/bad cop performance which got the Pacific Island states to toe the line. We can expect the Pacific Island nations to obey the dictates of their paymasters more directly.
SW: How does what we see at the PIF relate to America's so-called "war on terrorism"?
MT: I think that is a part of it. The Australians have made that link themselves. They have said that we have to, in terms of our relationship with the US, demonstrate our ability to lead in our region. So the deputy sheriff role is accepted with enthusiasm by Australia, and by
New Zealand with less enthusiasm, but at the end of the day New Zealand troops are in Afghanistan, in the Solomons, and in Iraq.
SW: Where do you see GPJA heading?
MT: I think they should be playing the role they have been playing as a connecting centre, a networking centre, and as a place where, when things become more possible in terms of activity, that you have institutionalised groups that have some political authority and people willing to get involved to make things happen, without having to go through the ABC's again to get there.
All it can do is be ready for action. The empire is on the march. There are going to be new conflicts unfortunately, and there's going to be the need for new movements. And there are protests against corporate globalisation, GE, and other movements that GPJA can play a role in bringing people together. There is a tendency for Socialist Worker people to look for the opportunity to bring a unified Left-wing movement together. I look forward to the day a strong Left-wing political movement emerges in New Zealand. We're a way off that yet, and to accelerate that you would lose what's good about GPJ in Auckland, in terms of its diversity and its linkages and so on.
SW: Given what you said about being ready for action, wouldn't it be a good
opportunity to bring GPJA to the rates revolt?
MT: I'm not sure that can happen directly. There are all sorts of issues raised by the rates revolt. There are a range of forces mobilising around it. But it is important that progressive people give that movement a progressive direction, and not allow it to be hijacked by the Right wing, the anti-tax, anti-public transport people.

West Papuan independence betrayed
In 1962, Indonesia invaded the former Dutch colony of West Papua. They've been there ever since.
Like the 1975 invasion of East Timor, the Indonesians were backed by the US.
The occupation is supported by Australia and New Zealand.
But out of the headlines, indigenous West Papuan people have been struggling for decades for their independence.
Independence activist John Rumbiak was in New Zealand to lobby Pacific Forum leaders to support the struggle.
Afterwards he did a national speaking tour, including a meeting organised by Peace Action Wellington on August 18 where he talked and answered questions about the situation in West Papua.
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'Still a long way walk'
West Papua has been controlled by a series of foreign powers. We've had a Dutch colonial government, Japanese rule, so-called ³liberation" by the US and then the Indonesians not to mention the missionaries.
In 1969 we had the "Act of Free Choice", which was actually the "Act of No Choice". 1,025 West Papuans, selected by Indonesian officials, out of a population of 700,000, were put in camps and intimidated. They voted to become part of Indonesia.
Of course, the West Papuans, they resisted. The Free West Papua movement started in 1965, fighting in the bush.
West Papua's indigenous population now is nearly 1.5 million. They are dominated by 775,000 immigrants.
There are killings going on, family planning to limit population growth, poor health care, AIDS. The West Papuan people are going through depopulation. They predict that in 20-25 years, the West Papuan people will be extinct in their own land.
The mountains are very rich in gold and copper. One US company owns the Freeport mine. Natural gas is now being exploited by BP.
The Indonesian military have extensive financial interests in West Papua.
They operate legally and illegally.
In 2000-2001 PT Freeport Indonesia, the local subsidiary of the US company, paid the Indonesian military and police US$10 million.
We have experienced human rights abuses, environmental destruction, political rights abuses. But the culture of militarism and impunity is so strong. None of the perpetrators have been brought to justice until today.
This has continued because of the tolerance of the international community, their silence. They don't do anything.
"Special autonomy" was proposed by the Indonesian government. It was a one-sided decision. However, West Papuan elite groups went along with it and tried to draft a law.
New Zealand supported it, "special autonomy", because it would reduce the demand for independence and protect the territorial integrity of Indonesia.
Then at the beginning of this year, Jakarta passed a law dividing West Papua into three provinces of Indonesia, ignoring this draft law. The international community, they let it go.
East Timor's independence leaders looked to the US, Australia and New Zealand governments for support, rather than the pro-democracy movement in Indonesia. So today, "independent" Timor is still under the thumb, its oil and gas taken by Australia.
How can West Papua win genuine independence?
We share this analysis together. The problem is, the civil society movement in Indonesia is very fragmented. People in Indonesia are misled, that West Papua has always been part of Indonesia.
What can you do? We opened an office in Jakarta last year, to educate the Indonesian people. We're targeting the young generations.
What support did you get at the Pacific Forum?
The Pacific Islands Forum? We've just let Australia lead the Pacific. Come on, it's a farce!
We should tell the Pacific Island leaders, "you're not representing us, you're representing Bush and his multinational corporations".
Can armed struggle win independence?
The Papuan Presidium Council, set up in 2000, was in response to the failure of armed struggle. Now the moderates are leading a peaceful movement.
Still, Indonesia murdered their leader in 2001. The Indonesian military don't want to have dialogue. There's still a long way walk.
Key facts
* West Papuan people are Melanesians. Their culture is similar to that of Pacific Island countries like Vanuatu, Fiji and the Solomon Islands.
* West Papua was colonised by the Dutch. In 1962, the Dutch were preparing to grant independence but the US, fearing instability in the region during the Cold War, did a deal giving West Papua to Indonesia. West Papua was renamed Irian Jaya.
* The Free West Papua movement took up arms against the Indonesian occupiers in 1965.
* After brutal suppression by Indonesian forces, the UN accepted the so-called 1969 "Act of Free Choice". West Papuans, hand-picked and intimidated by the military, "voted" for integration with Indonesia.
* Since 1962, over 100,000 West Papuans have been killed by Indonesian forces.
* West Papua's natural resources, especially gold and copper, have been exploited by multinational companies in partnership with Indonesian authorities.
* The Freeport mine in West Papua dumps 125,000 tonnes of waste a day into rivers.
* Three years ago, 3,000 West Papuans representing their local communities declared independence and established the Papuan Presidium Council. The declaration was rejected by Indonesia, and has not been supported by Australia and New Zealand.
* Indonesian forces are continuing to intimidate the population, detaining and torturing people. Yapenas Murib was murdered by the military. He was tied by his neck to the back of a truck and dragged along a road.
* Jakarta is using the US "war on terrorism" as a cover for the brutal suppression of a genuine independence movement.

Free Trade At Any Price? The World Trade Organisation Doha Round
Edited by Dr Jane Kelsey, Published by Arena, August 2003.
Reviewed by David Colyer
For several days at the end of 1999, around 40,000 protesters disrupted the World Trade Organisation (WTO) ministerial meeting in Seattle.
The meeting was supposed to unleash the next stage of capitalist globalisation. Instead it unleashed a new and unprecedented global resistance movement.
The protests brought together a vast range of activists from many countries who were concerned about many issues but who all saw that the WTO and corporate globalisation were making things worse.
Until this time, most of them were used to thinking of their own campaign as a "single issue". At Seattle they realised that their issues were connected through the WTO and the system it's part of.
Many of them identified that system as capitalism. A shocked corporate media picked up the term "anti-capitalism" and beamed it around the world. The global anti-capitalist "movement was movements" was born.
Since then, the movement has grown immensely, feeding into the global anti-war movement this year. The WTO, however, has managed to keep a low profile, with meetings tucked away in the Canadian mountains or the deserts of the Middle East, while other institutions of global capitalism the IMF and World Bank, the G8, the World Economic Forum faced the protesters.
Free Trade at Any Price? The World Trade Organisation Doha Round spells out why it was the WTO that brought the movement together.
The book is published by Arena (Action, research and education network of Aotearoa). It is edited by Jane Kelsey, professor of law at Auckland University.
She and the other six contributing writers do an excellent job of making the complexities of international trade deals relatively clear.
Each page of the book addresses one topic, or one aspect of a topic. The history of the WTO, the various trade agreements that it oversees (GATT, GATS, TRIMS and TRIPS) and the positions taken by different countries, including New Zealand, are addressed page by page.
They reveal how the WTO has broadened its role from governing trade in manufactured goods to promoting privatisation of health, education and drinking water, and corporate ownership of genes.
Labour and National governments have shared a commitment to the most extreme forms of free trade, in the hope that this will help gain access to markets for New Zealand exporters. The book explains the details of this policy, and then exposes some of the faulty arguments used to justify it.
The book's emphasis on the WTO negotiations themselves means the only resistance mentioned is that from the governments of the poor countries.
We should certainly oppose attempts by the big powers to bully and oppress smaller nations. The Malaysian government, for example, has a long history of opposing some aspects of globalisation.
However, as Malaysian socialists will tell you, this is because the authoritarian government is defending the interests of Malaysian corporations, not poor and working class Malays.
The page by page format continues as the book looks at how the WTO impacts on women, indigenous peoples, workers and the environment. The final section looks at some "bigger picture" issues, such as "the threat of US imperialism".
The book does not say, "this is what you can do". However, its analysis is full of useful pointers about the strategy.
It highlights how opposition to the WTO agenda brings together campaigns against GE, poverty, the commercialisation of health and education and America's wars, and for workers' wages and conditions, women's rights and tino rangatiratanga.
The last page re-prints a call for protests at this month's WTO meeting in Cancun, Mexico, ending with a fitting slogan: "No to war. End the tyranny of free trade and the WTO. Another World is possible."
Leigh Cookson, Arena's director, talked to Socialist Worker Monthly Review about the book.
Free Trade at Any Price?, she says, was designed to place the issues in front of people and get them thinking. This, along with public meetings and leaflets, are the first steps in building "a cohesive opposition" to the WTO agenda.
The next step is to "bring people together," because decisions on how to build a mass campaign need to be made by a group much wider than just Arena. Leigh says Arena is hoping to hold a strategy meeting for activists sometime next year.
Leigh described a division in the anti-globalisation movement between those who seek a "seat at the table" and those who want to smash institutions like the WTO.
Arena (like Socialist Worker, the organisation which publishes this magazine) is in the second camp. As Leigh pus it, the WTO's policies are "part of the wider capitalist system, which all has to go".
Internationally, the most successful movements are those that get "out on the streets in force." To build this you have to "teach people the ins and outs of how the WTO effects them".
However, getting information out is not enough. On the one hand, governments can put their negotiations "underground". On the other, they can try and suck non-government organisations (NGOs) into thinking they can have a meaningful say.
New Zealand governments, National and Labour, have used both these approaches. Unfortunately, the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions and many local NGOs have often fallen for this fake consultation.
But a recent change Leigh has noticed is that "people are into hearing that things are interconnected. They want us to talk about the bigger picture capitalism."
This has even included groups like Timaru Grey Power. The war has helped people to see this interconnection, although she fears the wider picture could be lost through narrow anti-Americanism.
Leigh sees tremendous opportunities for anti-capitalist activists to break through the pro-capitalist "free trade" consensus.
However, she is also worried that we could miss the opportunity. Free Trade at Any Price? is a valuable tool to reach out to a wider audience and ensure we make the most of these exciting times.

'Art and Activism' conference
by Vaughan Gunson
"Art, Activism and Social Change". These words grabbed my attention in an email forwarded to me about a conference in Auckland in a week's time. Given an interest in all three, I thought that this conference would be one not to miss.
Cultural Provocation: Art, Activism and Social Change, held in Auckland from 29-31 August, in many respects fulfilled my expectations.
The conference brought together theorists, art historians, artists and activists. It was this diversity of speakers, and the resulting diversity in the audience, especially on the Friday and Saturday at the marae at Manukau Institute, which gave the conference its undeniable energy.
American academics mixed it with Maori activists, while performance artists, film-makers, rappers, and MPs were all given space to voice their thoughts on art and social change. This was not some dry academic conference.
Highlights were Te Miringa Hohaia's passionate introduction to the story of Parihaka and the Maori leaders Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kakahi.
Links were made between the state's use of force to steal land from Taranaki Maori in the 19th century and the current government's legislation against Maori claims to the foreshore and seabed.
Andy Bichlbaum's presentation of videos made by the Yes Men, a group that has impersonated World Trade Organisation (WTO) officials at business conferences and on live TV, had the audience doubled-over with laughter.
The Yes Men use parody and satire to undermine the WTO's free trade agenda.
At one conference, they announced the closure of the WTO to a believing audience.
These "provocations", which generated media attention and have been subsequently collected into a feature film (watch for the businessman's "leisure suit") are intended to draw attention to the truth about free trade and corporate globalisation.
One of the recurring themes of the conference was the importance artists, film-makers and activists placed on breaking through the lies and distortions of mainstream media.
Maori film-maker, Merata Mita, said that media was "an enemy to me and my people. I'm doing something to counter that."
The consensus was that artists and cultural producers could reach and inspire people that these "provocateurs" could initiate reflection on injustice, oppression and dominant ideology.
This might be achieved using realism, humour, irony or shock the full range of approaches available to artists working in different mediums.
While current political issues, like Maori claims to the foreshore or the Iraq war, energized the talks and the discussion, little time was devoted to what tactics and political strategies might be used to achieve real world political goals.
Artists might be able to contribute to the goal of social change, but what that social change might actually be and how it might be achieved was often left as a distant abstraction.
Which leads me to one criticism of the conference, and it is a significant one. Absent was a class analysis of contemporary issues or any reference to the historical struggles of unions in this country; likewise, to artists who have sought to work with the organised working class.
In a conference that boasted such a diverse range of inspiring speakers, this was a telling omission.
For that reason the conference, despite its obvious relevance, was still symptomatic of the abandonment of class analysis by many intellectuals in the 1980s and 1990s, the result of the rampant neo-liberal agenda of successive governments and the postmodern theory that dominated academic and cultural institutions at that time.
There was talk of a similar conference in the near future. Hopefully, such a conference will include more discussion on the importance of the organised working class, essential to bringing about the better world everyone at the conference so desired.

How to get a job on the railways
"Jobs Jolt." That ugly expression sounds like what it is, a swift kick in the pants for this country's many unemployed. Jobs Jolt's attack on workers is fully exposed on page 8 of this paper.
If you're unemployed, you'll want strong action to improve your situation right now.
No presently existing socialist group has the strength to seriously challenge Labour's attacks on the unemployed. That's because socialists currently don't have connection with masses of workers.
Unions have such connections. What are they doing about Jobs Jolt? Council of Trade Unions secretary Carol Beaumont expressed concerns about the scheme's intentions towards single parents, but supported the programme overall.
"The government's 'Jobs Jolt' initiative will succeed if it actively supports people into real sustainable work.
"The CTU is working with the government and employers' to build a high wage, high skill, quality economy", she said. The CTU secretary also OKed Labour's decision to work-test unemployed people who move to low employment areas or who won't leave their homes for what the ministry of social development determines to be "suitable" employment.
Carol Beaumont's thoughts are the latest expression of CTU leaders' "social partnership model of unionism- ready and willing to work with government and business" (CTU central policy document, Unions, Innovation & Sustainable Development).
What use is social partnership to ordinary unemployed workers struggling to get by out in the real world?
What actually happens if you, say, apply for a job clipping tickets for Tranz Rail?
First you must ring up the employment agency and tell them you're interested in the position. They'll take your name and number, promising to call back later.
That may or may not happen. Lucky applicants are called back and asked if they take illegal drugs, or have any criminal convictions.
To advance, say "no" to both these questions. You may then be invited to appear at the agency's office.
On arrival you get a thick sheaf of forms to fill out and sign.
The word "partnership" does not appear anywhere in these documents. Instead there are demands for:
* Full details of your medical history and accident compensation claims.
* Your agreement to be drug tested.
* Your agreement for the agency to obtain all your details from the
Whanganui computer.
* Your agreement for the agency to conduct a "court search".
* Your signature to a "Confidentiality Agreement".
The "Confidentiality Agreement" is not a reassurance that your personal details will be treated in confidence.
Quite the opposite.
The Confidentiality Agreement authorises the agency to "acquire any information that may be required" about you "from any person or company", including police and credit reference cards.
You're also required to let the company "furnish any third party with details of your application".
If you are beginning to think this "Confidentiality Agreement" would be better described as a "Transparency Agreement", you're wrong.
Confidentiality is there for the agency and your future employers. "You should not give interviews or make any comments without expressed permission", "any work you do or any information that comes to your notice must be regarded as confidential" and "your agreement not to disclose anything at all concerning your assignment" is required.
In other words, the company can use any means to spy on you and do what it likes with the information, while you may not say a word about them to anyone.
If you're unwilling to trade in your freedom of speech to become a ticket collector you have a difficult choice to make.
Questioning the one-sided contract means you get no job.
You could just sign everything offered to you and worry about consequences later.
Just remember the contract says instant dismissal may follow any subsequent breach of the agreement on your part.
Those making it through the final job interview and onto the train are rewarded with a high stress, split shift job grossing just over $12 an hour.
These workers are by no means bottom of the economic ladder. As Alliance unionist Matt McCarten recently pointed out, around 400,000 New Zealand workers get less than $10 an hour.
Many of those are casuals with no security of working hours.
Against that background, talk of "partnership" between unions and government and employers is as appropriate as a turd in a punchbowl.
Effective struggle for better pay and democratic workplaces requires scrapping "partnership" illusions. Previously, both here and in other countries, workers have made gains using socialist tactics of united militant action not in partnership with government and employers, but hard out against them.
Future issues of Industrial Action will look at practical ways to bring effective socialist tactics back into the mainstream of workers' struggles.