New Plymouth has admitted it has investments in companies active in illegal Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land, contrary to New Zealand government foreign policy and United Nations rulings.

The revelation comes a week after Mayor Neil Holdom refused a request from Parihaka Pā and all the district’s iwi to make sure the council was not invested in companies profiting from the settlements.

The shareholdings sparked a hostile debate with Holdom accusing councillor Bali Haque of politicising the district’s nest-egg for virtue signalling, and Haque in turn questioning the mayor’s honesty and integrity.

The investments were made from New Plymouth District Council’s $400 million Perpetual Investment Fund (PIF).

The money is managed by Mercer in a passive fund, which automatically follows an index of companies and chooses which shares to buy.

Eight companies invested in by Mercer have been named by the UN as enabling and profiting from the expansion of Israeli settlements in Palestinian Occupied Territories:

• Motorola Solutions — the security arm of the mobile phone maker.
• Travel companies Expedia, Airbnb, and Booking Holdings which owns Booking.com and other sites.
• French multinational railways manufacturer Alstom
• Three Israeli banks, including the country’s first and third biggest — which often offer concessionary loans to settlers.

Less than $1m involved
Less than a million dollars is involved, just a quarter of one percent of New Plymouth’s PIF.

Haque wanted Mercer to be told that NPDC strongly disagrees with investing in companies active in the settlements and wants the investments ended as soon as possible.

He also proposed that the council-owned company overseeing the fund — the PIF Guardians — bring more advice on the process and cost of divestment if Mercer did not act.

“We need to do something,” Haque said.

“It’s small, I understand less than a million we’re talking about, but it is significant in terms of the impact . . .  This is something we can actually do and control.”

Mayor Neil Holdom repeated his explanation to the Parihaka delegation for opposing any action.

“Given the deeply sensitive and complex nature of the Israeli-Palestine conflict we’ve gotta approach this with a great deal of care and it’s my view that supporting this could be seen as taking a position in a dispute that has profound emotional and personal significance for members of our community on both sides.”

‘A terrible conflict’
The Mayor then turned to Haque.

“It is clear councillor Haque cares deeply about this issue and wants this debate and in the desperation to signal his personal conviction now wants to start playing politics with the PIF.

“It’s a terrible conflict, it’s a disaster for everybody involved but now someone wants to drag our community’s $400 million investment fund into this and make it a political football, to make a political point.”

Haque, clearly shocked, said it was Holdom himself who had told him to bring the motion to the Council Controlled Organisations committee.

“I’m staggered that now you have now done an about face and turned the tables . . .  You were the very person who encouraged me to put this very motion to this committee and now you are attacking me personally for actually acting on the basis of what you asked me to do.

“So my respect — with respect — has declined in your honesty and integrity.”

Neil Holdom: “Wow! Wow, unbelievable.”

Chair Marie Pearce: “Yeah”

Councillor Murray Chong “He didn’t attack you at all

Councillor Anneke Carlson Mathews: “That was a full-on attack!”

Pearce barely kept control of the meeting.

‘Getting out of hand’
“This is getting totally out of hand.”

Once tempers cooled, the Mayor explained that advice from the PIF Guardians was that the low-cost passive fund offered no control over Mercer’s decision and putting the funds in different management could cost up to $3.2 million a year in higher fees.

Holdom said he had told Haque of the advice.

Haque said that he had adjusted his proposal in response and read Holdom’s text message advising him to bring a proposal to instruct Mercer to comply with UN resolutions.

“We heard that it might be expensive but I’d quite like to know what it is we’re up for if Mercer decides not to act on the basis of what we’re saying,” said Haque.

Councillors Haque, Carson Matthews, and Bryan Vickery voted for Haque’s proposal.

They were defeated by Mayor Holdom and councillors Pearce, Murray Chong and Max Brough.

Councillor David Bublitz abstained, wanting the PIF to divest shares linked to any conflict anywhere in the world.

NZ co-sponsored Resolution 2334
New Zealand in 2016 co-sponsored UN Security Council Resolution 2334, declaring Israeli settlements in Palestine a violation of international law.

The resolution obliges states and entities “to withdraw all recognition, aid and assistance to Israel’s illegal presence in the occupied Palestine territory.”

In July this year, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Israel’s settlements in Gaza and West Bank are illegal and ordered Israel to stop building new settlements and evacuate existing ones.

In September, the UN General Assembly — including Foreign Minister Winston Peters — called on all States to make sure their people, companies and entities and authorities “do not act in any way that would entail recognition or provide aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”

LDR is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air. Asia Pacific Report is a community partner of both RNZ and LDR.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

INVESTIGATION: By Wendy Bacon

Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and the West Bank is tearing apart local councils in Australia, on top of the angst reverberating around state and federal politics.

Inner West Labor Mayor Darcy Byrne has doubled down on his attack on pro-Palestinian activists at the council’s last election meeting before Australia’s local government elections on September 14.

‘Byrne’s attack echoes an astro-turfing campaign supported by rightwing and pro-Israel groups targeting the Greens in inner city electorates.’

• READ MORE: Other articles by Wendy Bacon

With Labor narrowly controlling the council by one vote, the election loomed large over the meeting. It also coincided with a campaign backed by rightwing pro-Israeli groups to eliminate Greens from several inner Sydney councils.

In August, Labor councillors voted down a motion for an audit of whether any Inner West Council (IWC) investments or contracts benefit companies involved in the weapons industry or profit from human rights violations in Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

The motion that was defeated had also called for an insertion of a general “human rights” provision in council’s investment policy.

With similar motions having been passed at City of Sydney and Canterbury/Bankstown councils, many had expected the motion to pass in what is supposed to be one of the most progressive areas of Sydney.

It could have been a first step towards the Inner West Council joining the worldwide BDS (boycotts, disinvestments and economic sanctions) campaign to pressure Israel to meet its obligations under international law.

MWM sources attest that the ructions at Inner West Council are mirrored elsewhere in local government. This from Randwick in Sydney’s East:

Global to grassroots
Last week, Portland Council in Maine became the fifth United States city to join the campaign this year, while the City of Ixelles in Belgium announced that it had suspended its twinning agreement with the Regional Council of Megiddo in Israel.

When the Inner West motion failed, some Palestinian rights campaigners booed and shouted “shame” at Labor councillors as they sat silently in the chamber. The meeting, which had nearly reached its time limit of five hours, was then adjourned.

Byrne’s alternative motion was debated at last week’s meeting. It restates council’s existing policy and Federal Labor’s current stance that calls for a ceasefire and a two-state solution.

This alternative motion was passed by Labor councillors, with the Greens and two Independents voting against it. Both Independent Councillor Pauline Lockie and Greens Councillor Liz Atkins argued that they were opposing the motion because it did not do or change anything.

The Mayor spent most of his speaking time attacking those involved with protesting at the August meeting. He described their behaviour as  “unacceptable, undemocratic and disrespectful”. There is no doubt that the behaviour at the meeting breached the rules of meeting behaviour at some times.

But then Byrne made a much more shocking and unexpected allegation. He said that the “worst element” of the behaviour was that “local Inner West citizens who happened to have a Jewish sounding name, when their names were read out by me because they’d registered . . . to speak, I think all of them were booed and hissed just because their names happened to sound Jewish.”

News Corp propaganda
This claim is deeply disturbing. If true, such behaviour would definitely be anti-semitic and racist. But the question is: did such behaviour actually happen? Or does this allegation feed into Byrne’s misleading narrative that had fuelled false News Corporation reports that protesters stormed the meeting?

In fact, the protesters had been invited to the meeting by the Mayor.

This reporter was present throughout the meeting and did not observe anything similar to what the Mayor alleged had happened.

Later in the meeting, the Mayor repeated the allegation that the “booing and hissing of people” based “on the fact that they had a Jewish sounding name constituted anti-semitism”.

Retiring Independent Councillor Pauline Locker intervened: “Sorry, point of order, That isn’t actually what happened. . . . It wasn’t based on their Jewish name.”

But Bryne insisted, “That’s not a point of order — that is what happened. It is what the record shows occurred as does the media reportage.”

Other councillors also distanced themselves from Byrne’s allegation. Independent Councillor John Stamolis also said that although he could not judge how the Mayor or other Labor councillors felt on the evening, he could not agree with Byrne’s description or that it described what other councillors or members of the public experienced on the evening.

Greens Councillor Liz Atkins said that there were different perceptions of what happened on the night. Her perception was that the “booing and hissing” was in relation to support for the substance of the Greens motion for an audit of investments rather than an attack on people who spoke against it.

She also said that credit should be given to pro- Palestinian activists who themselves encouraged people to listen quietly.

Fake antisemitism claims
Your reporter asked Rosanna Barbero, who also was present throughout the meeting, what she observed. Barbero was the recipient of this year’s Multicultural NSW Human Rights Medal, recognising her lasting and meaningful contribution to human rights in NSW.

She is also a member of the Inner West Multicultural Network that has helped council develop an anti-racism strategy.

“I did not witness any racist comments,” said Barbero.

Barbero confirmed that she was present throughout the meeting and said: “I did not witness any racist comments. The meeting was recorded so the evidence of that is easy to verify.”

So this reporter, in a story for City Hub, took her advice and went to the evidence in the webcast, which provides a public record of what occurred. The soundtrack is clear. A listener can pick up when comments are made by audience members but not necessarily the content of them.

Bryne has alleged speakers against the motion were booed when their “Jewish sounding’ names were announced. Our analysis shows none of the five were booed or abused in any way when their names were announced.

There was, in fact, silence.

Five speakers identified themselves as Jewish. Four spoke against the motion, and one in favour.

Two of the five were heard in complete silence, one with some small applause at the end.

One woman who spoke in favour of the motion and whose grandparents were in the Holocaust was applauded and cheered at the end of her speech.

One man was interrupted by several comments from the gallery when he said the motion was based on “propaganda and disinformation” and would lead to a lack of social cohesion. He related experiences of anti-semitism when he was at school in the Inner West 14 years ago.

At the conclusion of his speech, there were some boos.

One man who had not successfully registered was added to the speakers list by the Mayor. Some people in the public gallery objected to this decision. The Mayor adjourned the meeting for three minutes and the speaker was then heard in silence.

The speakers in favour of the motion, most of whom had Palestinian backgrounds and relatives who had suffered expulsion from their homelands, concentrated on the war crimes against Palestinians and the importance of BDS motions. There were no personal attacks on speakers against the motion.

In response to a Jewish speaker who had argued that the solution was peace initiatives, one Palestinian speaker said that he wanted “liberation”, not “peace”.

Weaponising accusations of anti-semitism to shut down debate
Independent Inner West Councillor Pauline Lockie warned other councillors this week about the need to be careful about weaponising accusations of race and anti-semitism to shut down debates. Like Barbero, Lockie has played a leadership role in developing anti-racism strategies for the Inner West.

There are three serious concerns about Byrne’s allegations. The first concern is that they are not verified by the public record. This raises questions about the Mayor’s judgement and credibility.

The second is that making unsubstantiated allegations of antisemitism for the tactical purposes of winning a political argument demeans the seriousness and tragedy of anti-semitism.

Thirdly, there is a concern that spreading unsubstantiated allegations of anti-semitism could cause harm by spreading fear and anxiety in the Jewish community.

Controversial Christian minister
The most provocative speaker on the evening was not one of those who identified themselves as Jewish. It was Reverend Mark Leach, who introduced himself as an Anglican minister from Balmain. When he said that no one could reasonably apply the word “genocide” to what was occurring in Gaza, several people called out his comments.

Given the ICJ finding that a plausible genocide is occurring in Gaza, this was not surprising.

Darcy Byrne then stopped the meeting and gave Reverend Leach a small amount of further time to speak. Later in his speech, Reverend Leach described the motion itself as “deeply racist” because it held Israel accountable above all other states.

Boos for Leach
In fact, the motion would have added a general human rights provision to the investment policy which would have applied to any country. Reverend Leach was booed at the conclusion of his speech.

One speaker later said that she could not understand how this Christian minister would not accept that the word “genocide” could be used. This was not an anti-semitic or racist comment.

Throughout the debate, Byrne avoided the issue that the motion only called for an audit.

He also used his position of chair to directly question councillors. The following exchange occurred with Councillor Liz Atkins:

Mayor: Councilor Atkins, can I put to you a question? I have received advice that councillor officers are unaware of any investment from council that is complicit in the Israeli military operations in Gaza and the Palestinian territories. Are you aware of any?

Atkins:  No. That’s why the motion asked for an audit of our investments and procurements.

Mayor:  I’ll put one further question to you. The organisers of the protest outside the chamber and the subsequent overrunning of the council chamber asserted in their promotion of the event that the council was complicit in genocide. Is that your view?

Atkins:  I don’t know. Until we do an audit, Mayor . . . Can I just take exception with the point of view that they “overran” the meeting? You invited them all in, and not one of them tried to get past a simple rope barrier.

Byrne says it’s immoral to support a one-party state
During the debate, Byrne surprisingly described support for a one-state solution for Israel and Palestinians as “immoral”. He described support for “one state” as meaning you either supported the wiping out of the Palestinians or the Israelis.

In fact, there is a long history of citizens, scholars and other commentators who have argued that one secular state of equal citizens is the only viable solution.

Many, including the Australian government, do not agree. Nevertheless, the award-winning journalist and expert on the Middle East, Antony Loewenstein, argued that position in The Sydney Morning Herald in November 2023.

Mayor in tune with Better Council Inc campaign
All of this debate is happening in the context of the hotly contested election campaign. The Mayor is understandably preoccupied with the impending poll. Rather than debating the issues, he finished the debate by launching an attack on the Greens, which sounded more like an election speech than a speech in reply in support of his motion.

Byrne said: “Some councillors are unwilling to condemn what was overt anti-Semitism”.

This is a heavy accusation. All councillors are strongly opposed to anti-semitism. The record does not show any overt anti-semitism.

Byrne went on: “But the more troubling thing is that there’s a large number of candidates running at this election who, if elected, will be making foreign affairs and this particular issue one of the central concerns of this council.

“This will result in a distraction with services going backwards and rates going up.”

In fact, the record shows that the Greens are just as focused on local issues as any other councillors. Even at last week’s meeting, Councillor Liz Atkins brought forward a motion about controversial moves to install a temporary cafe at Camperdown Park that would privatise public space and for which there had been no consultation.

Labor v Greens
Byrne’s message pitting concern about broader issues against local concerns is in tune with the messaging of a recently formed group called Better Council Inc. that is targeting the Greens throughout the Inner West and in Randwick and Waverley.

Placards saying “Put the Greens last”, “Keep the Greens Garbage out of Council” featuring a number of Greens candidates have gone up across Sydney. Some claim that the Greens are fixated on Gaza and ignore local issues.

Better Inc.’s material is authorised by Sophie Calland. She is a recently graduated computer engineer who told the Daily Telegraph that “she was a Labor member and that Better Council involves people from across the political aisle — even some former Greens.”

She described the group as a “grassroots group of young professionals” who wanted local government officials to focus on local issues.

“We believe local councils should concentrate on essential community services like waste management, local infrastructure, and the environment. That’s what councils are there for — looking after the needs of their immediate communities.”

On Saturday, Randwick Greens Councillor Kym Chapple was at a pre-poll booth at which a Better Council Inc. campaigner was handing out material specifically recommending that voters put her last.

Chapple tweeted that the Better councilwoman didn’t actually know that she was a councillor or any of the local issues in which she had been involved.

“That does not look like a local grassroots campaign. It’s an attempt to intimidate people who support a free Palestine. Anyway, it feels gross to have someone say to put you last because they care about the environment and local issues when that’s literally what you have done for three years.”

She then tweeted a long list of her local campaign successes.

Weaponising antisemitism – extremist astroturfers infiltrate local councils amid Palestine protests#auspol #innerwest #randwick #canterbury
Story by @Wendy_Bacon https://t.co/fqB6PCwLnP

— 💧Michael West (@MichaelWestBiz) September 9, 2024

Never Again is Now astroturf campaign
In fact, the actual work of distributing the leaflets is being done by a group spearheaded by none other than Reverend Mark Leach, who spoke at the Inner West Council meeting. Leach is one of the coordinators of the pro-Israel right-wing Christian group Never Again is Now.

The group is organising rallies around Australia to campaign against anti-semitism.

Reverend Mark Leach works closely with his daughter Freya Leach, who stood for the Liberal Party for the seat of Balmain in the 2023 state election and is associated with the rightwing Menzies Institute. Mark Leach describes himself as “working to renew the mind and heart of our culture against the backdrop of the radical left, Jihadist Islam and rising authoritarianism.

Leach’s own Twitter account shows that he embraces a range of rightwing causes. He is anti-trans, supports anti-immigration campaigners in the UK and has posted a jolly video of himself with Warren Mundine at a pro-Israeli rally in Melbourne.

Mundine was a No campaign spokesperson for the rightwing group Advance Australia during the Voice referendum.

Leach supports the Christian Lobby and is very critical of Christians who are campaigning for peace.

Anti-semitism exists. The problem is that Reverend Leach’s version of anti-semitism is what international law and human rights bodies regard as protesting against genocidal war crimes.

For #NeverAgainisNow, these atrocities are excusable for a state that is pursuing its right of “self-defence”. And if you don’t agree with that, don’t be surprised if you find yourself branded as not just “anti-semitic” but also a bullying extremist.

As of one week before the local government election, the Never Again is Now was holding a Zoom meeting to organise 400 volunteers to get 50,000 leaflets into the hands of voters at next Saturday’s local election.

This may well be just a dress rehearsal for a much bigger effort at the Federal election, where Advance Australia has announced it is planning to target the Greens.

Wendy Bacon is an investigative journalist who was professor of journalism at UTS. She has worked for Fairfax, Channel Nine and SBS and has published in The Guardian, New Matilda, City Hub and Overland. She has a long history in promoting independent and alternative journalism. She is not a member of any political party but is a Greens supporter and long-term supporter of peaceful BDS strategies. Republished from Michael West Media with the author’s permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Analysis by Keith Rankin.

On 12 August, the national-led government announced a new policy program to impose more sanctions on New Zealand’s beneficiaries, meaning people of working age (18-64) whose primary income is a government benefit. (Refer RNZ Government further increases sanctions for beneficiaries, 12 August 2024.)

This policy direction is intended to discourage people from seeking income support from the sovereign state, and therefore income and income support from private sources.

(The official narrative is that a significant number of beneficiaries are ‘workshy’, and are not pulling their weight as wealth-creators for Aotearoa. But the first thing this government did was to reinforce monetary policy in ways to make sure there is enough unemployment in the labour market to ensure that rising wages are not ‘inflationary’. Aotearoa New Zealand is currently in recession; seasonally-adjusted GDP peaked in the third quarter of 2022.)

The principal private source of income support for young adults is the Department of Mum and Dad. (The second most important source of private income support is charity; the third most important source is begging and other forms of recipient-initiated money transfers.)

This is not new. It was the same before the welfare state became a thing; indeed, it extended before 1938 (and increasingly today) to the Department of Aunty and Uncle. The welfare state in New Zealand – essentially 1938 to 1984 – reached its zenith during the Prime Ministership of Robert Muldoon. Pushing people towards Mum and Dad as providers of adult income support is not new in recent times; it was about 1990 that the definition of the age of a child, for the purpose of student allowances, extended to anyone under 25.

People aged 18-29 (and older)

New Zealanders in this age cohort are increasingly likely to be living ‘at home’. In many cases the Department of Mum and Dad has stepped in, giving as much as a 100% subsidy with respect to their adult-children’s living costs. With state accommodation subsidies rapidly diminishing in real terms, this leniency by parental landlords reinforces other incentives for young adults to live in their parents’ homes. And it creates decreasing incentives for adult children – at least middle-class adult children – to even bother with MSD (the Ministry of Social Development which administers a large proportion of benefits in New Zealand).

Is home-dependency a desirable situation: for adult children; for parents of adult children; for the wider socio-economy?

Underclass / Lower Working Class Family Economy, in the context of Modern Class Categories

In Aotearoa New Zealand and other western capitalist countries, traditional labels for socio-economic classes are probably out of date.

This is my preferred categorisations:

• Upper Class: the ‘one-percenters’.

• Upper Middle-Class: the ‘ten-percenter’ ‘bourgeoisie‘; professionals such as managers and lawyers, the ‘political class’, many who would consider themselves politically left-wing and classed in modern statistics as ‘labour’ (albeit high-salary recipients). Their employers, where private sector, might be Upper Class or recipients of government contracts. This class includes small business people with university qualifications supporting practitioner businesses, such as community doctors and dentists. The bulk of ‘the elite’. The Upper Middle Class tend to have a fiscally conservative ‘mercantilist’ mindset, meaning that they see the economic purpose of life as ‘making money’ (or protecting the government’s coin), whether to hoard (miserliness; sovereign wealth) or to accumulate money as a precursor to future spending. They think a lot about ‘nest eggs’, and are smugly ‘financially literate’.

• Lower Middle-Class: successful small and medium businesspeople (‘petit-bourgeoisie‘) and free-lancers; entrepreneurs, ‘tradies’ including builders, successful actors and most professional sports-people, farmers. (The lower middle class, in New Zealand, includes many immigrants.) They are vulnerable to extended recessions. Advantaged lower middle-class people have upper middle class or upper working class partners to soften the cushion of income uncertainty and variability. There are opportunities for upward mobility into upper class.

• Upper Working-Class: skilled salaried people such as technicians, teachers, hospital clinicians, secretaries, librarians; military; have some security of tenure. (The upper working class includes many immigrants.) Some upward mobility to upper middle class, though such mobility has costs as well as benefits; management-type jobs are sometimes what David Graeber called “bullshit jobs”. Vulnerable to extended recessions, though many are less vulnerable than the lower middle class. Consequence of extended unemployment is downward mobility.

• Lower Working-Class: the ‘precariat’, employed most of the time, albeit with uncertain hours and minimal security of tenure; includes stable casual work. They tend to lack formal vocational qualifications. Subject to downward mobility in tough times; may experience upward mobility in good times.

• Underclass: intermittent wage workers, unstable casual work; self-employed without capital (eg sex-workers); long-term working-age non-labour-force (including people in this category for ‘mental health’ reasons); extra-legal entrepreneurs and workers, beggars. Some members of the underclass live ‘at home’ with middle-class parents.

We should also note that those who ‘punch above their weight’ as bearers of children, as creators of the next generation – in 2020s’ Aotearoa – are immigrants and the underclass.

An important feature of both immigrant and underclass life is that the teenage and young adult children contribute to the family economy. (For a good understanding of how the family economy works, look for a good social history of the 1930s’ Great Depression. When I was writing my MA thesis on this topic, I was contacted by an older resident of Holloway Road in Wellington – a lower working class precinct – who told me that that one street had many unemployed single young people who were not seeking help from government agencies because of the terms and conditions which came with such help. Essentially, they were both getting some help from Mum and Dad – for example, free board – while also eking money by undertaking precarious forms of insecure employment and underclass self-employment.)

An important sign of the distressed family economy in contemporary Aotearoa is the significantly increased level of abstinence from secondary school participation. Another part of that family economy is for young individuals to secure a stable fulltime income stream as their contribution to the family economy.

In the idealised form of family economy which prevailed as reality from 1938 to 1984, ‘Dad’ would have a well-paid job that could support a wife and three children. Mum would also be employed once the youngest child was of school age, often returning to a profession such as teaching or nursing.

In the 1985-to-today era, the income of ‘Mum’ became a necessity, not a ‘nice to have’. What then would happen when Mum’s necessary income was lost through unemployment? She never qualified for an MSD benefit; she was expected to get a benefit from the Department of Dad. (Mum and Dad also probably incurred debt, often at high interest rates; for example, payday loans.)

If the Department of Dad could not support a family without a Mum-income, then, when there was no Mum-income, other family members – especially teenagers – would stand up to meet the challenge. This was particularly relevant to lower-working-class families; and increasingly to the increasing numbers of underclass families. Teenagers would leave secondary school as soon as they could; if not sooner.

One way to meet the challenge was to become a beneficiary; maybe a NEET (not in employment, education or training) though there are many near-NEETs who earn around $80 per week in addition to their benefits, or possibly to get a student allowance by pretending to be a tertiary student. For lower-working-class families, the benefits paid to young adult family members had the advantage of not being stood down if another family member became employed. MSD benefits provide a more reliable income contribution than a precarious low-wage job for which hours vary from week to week.

The new welfare policy of the National Government is likely to unravel this lower-class family subsistence economy for which some degree of benefit income is necessary to keep the lights on or the debt-collector from the door. This wider social process of unravelling could turn ugly. And, as we have already seen this month in the United Kingdom, we could start seeing pogroms against immigrants and their families.

Spouses aged 55-64 (mostly women) younger than their partners

I start here by noting that, since ‘marriage equality’, the word ‘partner’ seems to have been used less. Nevertheless, in law and in modern custom, the words ‘spouse’ and ‘partner’ may include people who are not in formal civil unions such as ‘marriage’.

The real ‘squeezed middle’ are married women aged 55-64. Generally, they do not qualify for an unemployment benefit if they are made redundant. Those under 65 with partners over 65 used to have the right to New Zealand Superannuation at a slightly lower level than the full amount. One of the first things the Labour Government did, in 2020, was to repudiate that right. While the spouses of retired people may apply for an unemployment benefit, it’s not automatic. Indeed, retired husbands will get a bigger pension if their income-less wives leave them!

Such women may be providing ‘senior-services’, including palliative services, to their parents. They are often the chief executives of the Department of Mum and Dad, dispensing unemployment benefits and rental subsidies to some of their adult children. They may be significant providers of care to grandchildren. Their older partners may have health issues (older husbands are nearer, on average, to death than the spousal age difference would indicate, because male life expectancies are lower); and on this account the wives may be taking the lead in setting up ‘give-a-little’ pages. These women are also the people who once were the principal principals of the voluntary (ie charity) sector; a sector with reduced capacity yet facing ‘skyrocketing’ demands.

They may have health issues themselves; the numbers of 60-year-old women dying are increasing markedly, in part because such women are in increasing competition for jobs and healthcare resources with each other. (I understand that there is an upsurge in Canada of women in their sixties, along with other demographic groups, who are taking advantage of that country’s liberal ‘assisted dying’ provisions.)

Those who do qualify for a benefit following redundancy may face significant standdowns (eg because of receipt of redundancy pay), or because the labour market is increasingly unkind to older job-seekers. The MSD will be requiring substantial commitments of time towards (often futile) job-seeking, and therefore less time on providing multi-generational family care.

Older married women performing traditional roles have not been well looked after by this government nor its recent predecessors, despite there having been many recent Ministers of the Crown who would be widely accepted as feminists. I am sure that the present Ministers of Finance and Social Development would both consider themselves to be modern feminists.

Conclusion

We need an enabling public income support system; not the present disabling system which increasingly incentivises ‘moral hazard’ behaviours, such as adult children preferring to receive their benefits from the Department of Mum and Dad, and increased financial stress, time poverty, and health burnout being perpetrated upon Mum (and Dad).

Tomorrow I will propose a simple affordable solution which better fits centre-right than centre-left philosophies.

*******

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

This last week I watched Push: The Global Housing Crisis on Al Jazeera, featuring Leilani Farha, Canadian lawyer and former United Nations special rapporteur on adequate housing. She is now leader of The Shift (the global movement to secure the human right to housing).

The central takeaway from this ‘Witness’ documentary is that the housing crisis is a global financial crisis (as opposed to the Global Financial Crisis of 2008).

The problem is essentially the concept of housing (and the real estate that it sits on) as more a form of financial wealth (‘financial wealth’ is an oxymoron, by the way; it means ‘wealth comprised of claims on wealth’) than a human right; as such, whether housing is occupied or not – or whether it is occupied by sojourners rather than residents – is incidental. In this financial view, all that matters is the dollar value attributed to assets, and that wealth is somehow generated through a bidding process that raises that dollar values of financial assets.

Managed Funds, especially Government (or government-mandated) Pension Funds

While we may emphasise the self-perceived entitlement culture of individual speculators in financial assets, the point of emphasised by Leilani Farha was the role of managed funds, which means that – indirectly – many of us, with savings ‘invested’ in these funds, are financial speculators without thinking of ourselves as such.

A particularly important class of managed funds is government funds, including and especially government pension funds. The worst kind of these funds would be the kind such as the New Zealand Superannuation Fund created by Roger Douglas in 1974 and thankfully disestablished by Robert Muldoon in 1976. The Canadian government pension fund is notorious in this regard. And New Zealand does have a smaller-scale government fund of this sort; it came to be known after its establishment in the 2000s as the ‘Cullen Fund’.

We can generalise here, by thinking of Sovereign Wealth Funds, many of which are classed as ‘pension funds’; and we can think of private managed funds – the mainstay of the financial industry – many of which (like KiwiSaver) are government partnerships with that industry. Governments, around the world, have a deep stake in the financialisation of real estate assets; both as governments, and in the private capacity (as speculators) of finance industry and technocratic and bureaucratic and elected elites. In the formal sense, as citizen holders of public equity, we are all speculators when government-directed funds are deployed in the speculative financial marketplace.

Yes, including the homeless and the underhoused among us; the deprivileged among us can still feel good that our unrealisable public equity increases as our housing and other material rights deteriorate. We own notional shares in the lands we are evicted from.

The way around this financialisation approach to ‘wealth management’ is the ‘pay-as-you go’ approach, which was last championed – in New Zealand – by Sir Robert Muldoon. New Zealand Superannuation is still largely funded – as it must be – out of current economic product; and not through the sale of financial assets that we hope can be converted by retirees into goods and services of a certain value. Further, pay-as-you-go is the essence of the Basic Universal Income, an income distribution mechanism based on democratic accounting standards (ie based on basic human rights); a mechanism that can form the basis for the re-engagement of the rapidly marginalising populations of each country in the world.

(The scandal of Covid19 is how the entitled minority of the world’s population has spread this virus to the disentitled – including the disengaged poor – infecting them, and killing them in numbers on a World War scale.)

Pandora Papers

Other stories this week underscore the conjoint problems of financialisation, inequality, and impoverishment. One such story is the release of the Pandora Papers’ leak to global media organisations.

These papers reveal a comprehensive story, not of illegality, but of uber-elite entitlement; of legal theft.

Control of price-appreciating financial assets, as revealed by these papers, is more than ‘mere’ tax avoidance. It is theft in the fullest sense of the word, in that it is increasing the claims of the entitled on the world’s finite economic output, thereby diminishing the claims of the disentitled, and pushing them into unsustainable survival practices. Financialisation is an entitlement mechanism, and it applies to both the demanders and the suppliers of financial products.

Entitlement is not only a problem of the uber-elite. Indeed, through our KiwiSaver accounts and the like, we all come to align ourselves to some degree with the highly entitled. Further, the highly entitled go well beyond the ‘one-percenters’; rather the top nine percent (or even the top nineteen percent) of the ’99-percenters’ tend to have an entitlement mindset towards property values and interest rates, even while blaming the conspicuous ‘one-percent’ for the world’s woes.

One test of entitlement culture is a person’s attitude to interest payments. People who believe that they are entitled to an interest ‘return’ on saved income over and above the inflation rate are people who believe that they are entitled, as a form of self-congratulation, to an increased share of the world’s goods and services. It was in medieval times clearly (and correctly) understood that it was sinful to ‘make money from money’. This is distinct from making a profit from investments, such as planting a crop, irrigating a field, retaining livestock for breeding, or learning a trade.

In reality, the ‘real rate of interest’ is sometimes positive; that’s when lenders (ie savers) are scarce and borrowers (including investors and willing governments) are abundant. Under those conditions – rare in the lifetimes of people alive today – a legitimate premium is payable to people holding rather than spending money. The reverse conditions are much more familiar – an abundance of unspent money, and an aversion to deficit financing – in which, naturally, the real rate of interest should be negative.

Indeed, it was the negative real rates of interest during the global Great Inflation of the 1970s and early 1980s, that rumbled the uber-entitled, and led to the global financialisation coup of the late 1970s and (in New Zealand) the 1980s; the world event that is commonly called the neoliberal revolution. Theft through financial chicanery has prospered ever since.

New Zealand’s Official Cash Rate (OCR)

The first raising of the OCR in New Zealand for several years is indicative of this entitled view that real interest rates (as an indicator of real financial returns) should always be above zero. As such, the management of interest rates is the illiberal intervention in the marketplace that is most used to support economic liberalism.

By and large, the New Zealand public falls for the argument that higher interest rates are needed to slow down the rate of increase of financial asset prices (eg of house prices). There is little evidence for this, and indeed the 2004-08 house price inflation was in large part a result of rising interest rates.

The problem is that genuine economic borrowers are discouraged by high or rising interest rates, and that rising interest rates make very little difference to speculative borrowers. Thus, when interest rates increase, increasing proportions of all borrowed funds are lent to acquire financial assets with a view to making returns through capital gain. (Capital gains’ taxes are rarely sufficient to offset this reality; the main driving force pushing money into speculation is reduced lending to the real economy.) This truth is clearly evident by a cursory inquiry into the behaviour of house prices during periods of rising real interest rates.

In addition to rising interest rates ‘inadvertently’ stimulating financialised markets, the countries which intervene to raise their interest rates the most find that their exchange rates increase, as foreign money increasingly treats domestic money as a speculative asset. While this currency appreciation may dampen inflation in these countries – while exacerbating inflation pressures in the countries with falling exchange rates – it also does much harm to the export industries of these countries. Export industries suffer the double whammy of higher borrowing costs and an appreciating exchange rate. Indeed, the aggressive raising of interest rates to engineer an appreciating exchange rate has all the entitlement hallmarks of a Ponzi scheme. (Just look at New Zealand in years such as 1987, 1995-97, and 2004-08. If you don’t believe me, look at Iceland in the years before 2008.)

We should note that if rising interest rates make any difference at all to the global rate of inflation, they indeed exacerbate rather than diminish inflation. The only proviso to this is that rising global interest rates also create global economic crises, such as 1929-31, 1979-82, 1989-93, 2000-01, 2005-08, and 2010-12. While rising global interest rates are inflationary – they raise business costs, including higher required rates of profit – global recessions are clearly deflationary. Higher interest rates only reduce inflation by creating recessions, an even worse problem.

Basic Principle

Consumption entitlements should be distributed as human rights, and not as greed premiums. They should be paid as we go, and not divvied out from greed funds. As it is, most entitlements are of the greedy, by the greedy, for the greedy. Inasmuch as we are incentivised to contribute to government-sponsored greed funds, most of us are a little bit greedy. We live in a greedocracy, not an economic democracy. A true democracy distributes public equity dividends – as the economy goes – as a human right.

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

The multi-billion-dollar NZ Super Fund  – New Zealand’s state pension fund – has finally divested from five of Israel’s biggest banks due to their funding of illegal settlement construction in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

New Zealand Green Party MP Golriz Ghahraman said the party welcomed the decision, telling The Spinoff:

“Our nation’s values and legal obligations have been long in breach by investments facilitating what the United Nations has consistently called an illegal occupation, causing the suffering of the Palestinian people, and leading to a number of other breaches of humanitarian law.”

A Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) statement last week said that Palestinian supporters in Aotearoa-New Zealand had frequently complained about these banks to the NZ Super Fund, especially following a 2018 report by Human Rights Watch which identified their active participation in settlement building in breach of international law.

In 2012, the NZ Super Fund ended its investment with three Israeli companies on ethical grounds. These were companies that were directly building illegal settlements on Palestinian land.

Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa spokesperson Janfrie Wakim said that the NZ Super Fund had, at last, conducted a thorough investigation and reached a firm conclusion that it would be unethical to continue to invest in these banks.

As documented by @hrw, in a 41 page report, most of Israel’s largest banks are complicit in settler colonialist apartheid as they help support, maintain, and expand illegal settlements by financing their construction in the occupied West Bank.https://t.co/Uq3KNitspC

— BDS movement (@BDSmovement) March 3, 2021

“There is a wealth of reliable information and law that makes any continuing NZ Super Fund investment with these banks untenable. No New Zealand institution should provide any support to the ongoing dispossession of the Palestinian people in their homeland and the brutal Israeli occupation,” she said.

“The fund still has investments in other Israeli companies, and the fund says it will be paying close attention to any future reports from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights about the culpability of other Israeli companies in illegal settlement construction.”

NZ government ‘lagging behind’
Janfrie Wakim also said that the NZ Super Fund divestment decision – and the evidence it had used – had shown up what she called a “dreadful lagging behind” by the New Zealand government.

“The NZ Super Fund divested in weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems in its first round of Israeli disinvestment in 2012,” Wakim said.

“Yet, the New Zealand government has admitted to buying military equipment, ground tested on Palestinians, from Elbit Systems, which is the very same company which the NZ Super Fund dropped from its portfolio in 2012.”

Roger Fowler is a veteran peace activist and community advocate from Auckland, Aotearoa-New Zealand, and coordinator of Kia Ora Gaza which organises support for international solidarity convoys and the Freedom Flotillas to break Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza. Fowler is editor of kiaoragaza.net. This article was first published in The Palestine Chronicle and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.

• The NZ Super Fund document on the Israeli banks is here.

NZ’s $50b Super Fund is divesting from Israeli banks that fund settlement construction in West Bank and Gaza https://t.co/HwnSkXXlcj

— The Spinoff (@TheSpinoffTV) March 4, 2021

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz