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Dr Michael Bassett

Former Minister of Health. Member of the Waitangi Tribunal 1994-2004. Michael Bassett was born in Auckland 1938, and educated at Owairaka School, Dilworth School and Mt Albert Grammar. He completed his BA (1958) and MA degrees in history at the University of Auckland before winning a James B. Duke Fellowship to Duke University in 1961. There he completed a PhD in American history before returning to lecture at the University of Auckland in 1964. He was Senior Lecturer in History when elected to the Auckland City Council in 1971 and to New Zealand's parliament in 1972. He was a backbench MP in the Labour governments of Prime Ministers Norman Kirk and Bill Rowling (1972-5), and then a senior opposition figure before becoming Minister of Health and Local Government (1984-7) in the Labour administration of Prime Minister David Lange. Between 1987 and 1990 he was Minister of Internal Affairs, Local Government, Civil Defence and Arts and Culture. He was Chairman of the New Zealand Lottery Grants Board and of the 1990 Commission that commemorated the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. Since retiring from active politics in 1990 Dr Bassett has worked with the New Zealand Expo team in Seville (1991-2), been J.B. Smallman Professor of History at the University of Western Ontario (1992-3, 1994 and 1996), and taught courses at Auckland University Medical School (1997-2000). In 2002 he was Fulbright Professor of New Zealand Studies at Georgetown University, Washington DC. He is the author of ten books on New Zealand History.

The 2023 Election in Retrospect


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Posted on November 11, 2023
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Our finally completed election results need to be viewed on several levels. On the surface, the change of government was caused because Jacinda Ardern’s and Chris Hipkins’ Labour ministries were weak in personnel and unable to extract even respectable performance from the current feeble bureaucracy when dealing with bread and butter issues.
 
Early in the Covid pandemic the ministry splashed money about, contributing to inflation which Kiwis suffered from disproportionately through the world-wide lift in mortgage rates. Ministers failed to deliver on new housing but overall house prices still subsided when immigration briefly contracted. Educational standards slid for some years prior to 2017 but went into free fall when Hipkins was minister. Constant chaotic restructuring of the health services produced no discernible improvement in services, and none is yet in sight. There were never-ending cost over-runs with infrastructure. Nothing changed for the better when Hipkins became PM early this year. His ministry partially collapsed on him, leaving voters increasingly convinced that the whole government needed to be laid to rest. At the 2023 election Labour secured barely half the portion of the total vote of three years earlier.
 
Dig a little deeper and it becomes obvious that more serious cultural issues were bubbling below the surface contributing to Labour’s poor performance at the polls, particularly in Auckland where Labour’s heartland deserted it. For example, most of the area covered by the current electorate of New Lynn first voted for Labour in a by-election in 1926 and stuck with the party through thick and thin until the hapless Deborah Russell lost it. Mt Albert, first formed for the 1946 election, stood staunchly by Labour until 14 October when a terminally bewildered Helen White saw the majority drop from 21,000 to 20.

What is now obvious is that Labour lost touch with its electors. As late as 1990 when I retired from Parliament my Labour supporters were mainly, but not entirely, working folk, skilled and unskilled workers, public servants, especially teachers, and a smattering of ideologues who supported Labour’s nuclear-free stance and its opposition to any form of racism. A majority of the large number of Maori in the electorate were on the general roll as were the growing numbers of Pacific Islanders. Accelerating numbers of Asian immigrants from China, along with Indians, many of them initially refugees from Fiji following the 1987 coups, became firm supporters. Overwhelmingly, they wanted to work as they sought to get ahead in their new country.But a counter movement was underway. After 1974 the Domestic Purposes Benefit emerged as an alternative to a working career for many young women. By 2006, 113,000 DPBs were being paid. Coupled with Unemployment and “Job seeker” benefits, more than 10% of the country’s potential work force are now getting paid to do little or nothing. In 2023 more than 40% of them identify as Maori. The growing number of Waitangi Tribunal settlements with iwi saw few of them let the money out of tribal leaders’ control. The Maori aristocracy, with only a few exceptions like Ngai Tahu, accept little or no responsibility for their followers.

However, over the last twenty years the tribal elites began inventing arguments that under the Treaty of Waitangi Maori were entitled to more and more from the taxpayer. A growth industry in Treaty fiction emerged. Before long, a 1987 Court declaration that the Treaty of Waitangi was “something akin to a partnership” between Maori and the Crown developed into a call for a 50-50 split in governance over all resources, despite Maori numbering barely 17% of the population. There was no notion amongst the noisy elites that they might encourage their followers to acquire skills. It’s all been a one-way street. Tribal governance by its very nature is undemocratic. And as all governments have learned to their cost, when privileges and cash are being distributed, there is a supply and demand problem: demand outstrips the taxpayers’ capacity to supply.

The Ardern-Hipkins government with its big numbers of Maori in the Labour caucus bought into the tribal elites’ argument that special assistance, to be enjoyed by no other ethnicity, should be delivered to Maori. Nanaia Mahuta was allowed to embark on her Three Waters scheme, intended eventually to deliver control over all water to Maori. In the health sector where it was obvious to everyone that Maori were less careful with their lifestyles than others, and showed fewer signs of giving up smoking, or eating more carefully, or properly parenting their children, a new separately funded health structure was put in place to try to ensure Maori lived longer. There was nothing stopping them from taking greater care of themselves, or making sure that their children received the multiple services already available to them like childhood vaccinations and free GP visits.

This is where another layer of the 2023 election results becomes understandable: the surge in the Maori Party’s and the Greens’ seats. As I said, no government promising special privileges for any group can ever fulfil expectations. The Maori Party, with support from the socialist Greens who only have one real environmentalist left amongst them – James Shaw – has kept on pushing for more privileges for Maori. Some of them, like Marama Davidson and John Tamihere, are now implying violence if Christopher Luxon’s new government does what has to be done if we are to survive as a multicultural liberal democracy: stopping special favours on the basis of race. Christopher Luxon has one hell of a challenge ahead of him! But it has to happen, despite the threats.

Between 2017 and 2023 Labour’s caucus failed to realise that privileges for Maori were seen by the newer immigrants to New Zealand as penalising them. The same for fourth and fifth generation Pakeha. As more and more of the tribal elites strutted around with tattoos and moko, demanding additional Treaty “entitlements”, and Labour tried to find ways to satisfy them, first the Chinese, then the others, and finally the Indians, all of whom who had come to New Zealand to work, and to get ahead, joined other Kiwis resenting this racially-charged largesse to the many who were work shy. When Kelvin Davis set about emptying large numbers (disproportionately Maori) out of prisons, and Chris Hipkins presided over an educational system where on any school day six out of ten Maori kids were truanting, an underclass of out-of-control Maori youngsters joined gangs, converted cars, and ram-raided shops, many owned by Indians. It’s all been out there for everyone to see. Not surprisingly, the new immigrants who dominate in many of Auckland’s formerly hard-core Labour seats turned against Labour. The only people who couldn’t work this out were Labour‘s MPs! When will some kind of awakening take place? Until it does, Labour is doomed to remain in opposition. Even more, given that it has very few seats left in the North Island, it needs to remember my old professor Robert Chapman’s dictum that the South Island historically has been the graveyard of dying parties.And this is just the beginning to the job of unwinding the horrors in so many sectors during the Jacinda Ardern-Chris Hipkins era.

This article was first published HERE.