FARMERS ARE REVOLTING, or at least they’re getting pretty damned mad. Within weeks hundreds, perhaps thousands, of farmers, their families, and those provincial businesses dependent on farmer support, will gather to protest. What? That’s the curious thing. When it comes to concrete measures directly affecting the profitability of farming there’s not that much farmers can point to. Much, however, is pending. On the issues of climate change, water quality and the Resource Management Act, farmers are fearful that they are about to be lumbered with an unfair burden of responsibility. That fear is in the process of being translated into anger.
As any experienced politician will tell you, fear and anger are more contagious than measles. The power of that contagion is only increased when those not directly affected by other people’s grievances are nevertheless persuaded that their grievances are real. That’s when political anger swells to epidemic proportions. Incumbent governments have every reason to feel threatened by such epidemics of political rage – they seldom survive them.
The most fruitful strategy for New Zealand’s fearful farmers is, accordingly, to convince metropolitan New Zealand that their grievances are real. Even more effective would be a strategy designed to convince townies that the grievances afflicting rural New Zealand today, will be the grievances of urban New Zealand tomorrow. Uniting cockies and townies against the status quo is, in strategic terms, a sure-fire winner.
Does the National Party understand this? Does Federated Farmers? Not entirely. There is much in National’s policy that carries the whiff of the countryside’s traditional disdain (bordering on hatred) for city-dwellers – especially working-class city-dwellers. The same is true of Federated Farmers, which is still struggling to shrug-off the widely-held perception that cockies are all inveterate whingers and moaners: a pampered special-interest group which insists on the rest of the country baling them out of difficulties that are just about all self-inflicted.
Asking the average city-dweller what they think of farmers and the polling-data which Federated Farmers itself has commissioned, reveals that a large percentage of them still respect and admire the farming community. Descriptions such as “hard-working”, super-efficient” and “backbone of the economy” trip off urban New Zealanders’ tongues in a surprisingly positive fashion. This essentially favourable view of the agricultural sector is, however, constantly undermined by the public utterances of individual farmers who express views that seriously alarm the average townie.
The loudly expressed minimisation, scepticism and, in too many cases, outright denial of climate change by these individual farmers, outrages many urban New Zealanders. It reinforces their perception that the average farmer is an unashamed ‘redneck’. Climate change denial, they assume, goes along with a deep-seated antipathy towards environmentalism in general and environmentalists in particular. Added to that assumption are many others. Urban liberals write off these ‘good ole boys’ as gun-loving racists, sexists and homophobes. For a sector in search of understanding and assistance, these stereotypes are unhelpful – to say the least!
How, then, to build the strategic unity between town and country, so essential to calming the agricultural sector’s fears and securing the National Party’s return to government? The trick, surely, is to enrol both communities in a common cause against a common enemy.
That common enemy cannot be Jacinda Ardern, or her Labour Party. Simple partisanship on its own will not suffice – not after just three years in office. National and its allies in the agricultural sector need to drill deeper into the population’s discontent. Why are so many New Zealanders fearful and angry? Why are governments, regardless of their ideological flavour, so utterly ineffectual when it comes to fixing things?
The answer is to be found in the layer of managers and professionals that has settled and solidified across the whole of New Zealand society. Not the “One Percent” so dear to the hearts of the Occupy Movement, but the ten percent who keep the One Percent where they are.
Dubbed by some as the “political class”, this is the layer most responsible for ensuring that all the things that the rest of society urgently desires to happen – don’t happen. Those within its ranks have only contempt for the democratic process and take great care to ensure that the people’s elected representatives succumb as early as possible to the learned helplessness that’s become their stock-in-trade. The only changes this political class are willing to countenance are those designed to enrich and/or protect the interests of the individuals and institutions at the very top of the social pyramid. While the people below them peer upwards in confusion, the political class looks even higher – for instruction.
It is this social layer and the all-powerful elite which it serves that constitute the common enemy of town and country. Be they debt-laden farmers and harried small-business people in rural and provincial New Zealand, or overworked and underpaid workers in the big cities, the curtailment of political class power is the only cause which holds out the possibility of uniting the citizens of New Zealand in common political endeavour.
Like Sir Robert Peel, the Tory Party leader who broke the political and economic power of the landed aristocracy and their hangers-on by making common cause with the hungry poor and repealing the protectionist Corn Laws, New Zealand conservatives need to shatter the shackles of the status quo. Peel, author of the Tamworth Manifesto, which laid the foundations for the modern Conservative Party, coined the phrase “reform to survive”. What was true in 1834, is even more true in 2019 when survival has become more than a mere rhetorical flourish. Repealing the Corn Laws, which made bread affordable to Britain’s burgeoning working-class, may have cost Peel the prime-ministership, but it opened the way for Benjamin Disraeli and his enormously successful “One Nation” Conservatism.
If New Zealand farmers want to see what fear and anger can do to the status quo, they need look no further than the United Kingdom. That is where a terrified political class, consistently out-organised and out-thought by a powerful cross-class alliance, spearheaded by Conservative Party rebels, stands ready to “take back control”.