Fault-Lines In Local Body Politics : The Auckland Super-City And Its Campaigns: An Autopsy

Introduction

No less a personage than former US Secretary of State and widely renowned war-criminal Henry Kissinger once famously stated that the reason certain political arenas were so vicious ... was because the stakes were so small.

Auckland's local body politics present a curious corollary to this rule. Theoretically, the Auckland Mayoralty is the largest political executive office in this country outside of the Beehive. Yet the last round of local body elections in late 2013 featured perhaps the most vindictive, vicious and outright vicissitudinal political smear campaign since that carried out against Winston Peters at the national level in 2008.

Perhaps it's because there's some truth to Kissinger's dictum after all. It's difficult to make headway as an Auckland local body politician - funding decisions vitally necessary to secure new projects and set a political agenda are controlled from Wellington. Large portions of our "SuperCity" local governance apparatus - for example, the Ports of Auckland - are deliberately set up in such a way as to actively 'protect' their operation from "political interference".

All in all, it sadly seems that the Chains of Mayoralty are merely that - symbols of office which tether and manacle the incumbent to the will of other, greater and often vastly more impersonal forces.

But why must Auckland's politics work this way - with as much actual political power as possible concentrated or delegated away from the elected office-holders who should, theoretically, be wielding it on our behalf.

Well, to answer that question we need to go back to the old school, before there ever was such a thing as a SuperCity, and "Auckland" was a sprawling mass of some seven different assorted city and district councils connected by a sewerage system, presided over by a questionably effective wrangler in the form of the Auckland Regional Council.

I: How We Got Here

To be sure, the previous regime wasn't necessarily an ideal system (albeit, at least, a somewhat locally-responsive one) - and certain initiatives which we enjoy today such as city-wide integrated ticketing on public transport would never have been able to take root nor flight under such a patchwork apparatus. It's therefore at least vaguely understandable as to why the Labour Party, during their last term in government, would have called for a review of Auckland's local governance, and put forward the notion of amalgamation into some form of "super city".

This lead to a Royal Commission report being released in 2009. By then, the Government had changed, and the new Local Government Minister was one Rodney Hide - a staunch, if questionably principled 'libertarian' from the ACT Party who'd made his name and career championing small government ... yet now found himself attempting to deliver the largest governing apparatus in the South Pacific not equipped with an army.

As I've often said - those who believe that 'government' is the problem ought to be prevented from getting elected and trying to prove it; so it's perhaps entirely unsurprising that Rodney Hide managed to make a dog's breakfast out of the whole enterprise.

In any case, the Royal Commission report found itself discarded - there's some evidence that Hide never even read it - and the National-led government barreled on with 'reform' regardless. Democracy was systematically stripped out of the system; with Local Boards (which function as sort of intermediate-grade stand-ins somewhere between the old Community Boards and full-blown City/District Councils) being forced to run without staff or proper funding - and important assets like the aforementioned Ports of Auckland carefully parceled up to be ready for prognosticated privatization.

The way this system was basically intended to work, was that a right-wing controlled council with a right-wing Mayor (the presumably already shoulder-tapped by this point John Banks) was supposed to do largely what Central Government told it to do - and, going the other way, leverage their good personal and political relationships with the present occupants of the Beehive in order to get funding and approval for key infrastructural projects, and the like. Although given the way Council assets were being restructured into the oxymoronically titled "Council-Controlled Organizations" to make them easier to privatize, it was probably envisaged that Auckland's future development would be instead funded primarily out of large-scale asset sales rather than much in the way of central government largess.

And then an election happened.

Now unfortunately for neoliberal ideologues the world over, with the notable exception of re-electing Labour in 1987, voters don't tend to have a pretty great record of casting their ballot the "right" way when push comes to shove and the great sweeping right-wing agenda's initiation is on the line.

So it was with Auckland. We picked Brown in 2010 - and Government-nominee-in-all-but-name John Banks was sent packing. Regrettably, the place he was sent packing to was Wellington by way of my own Epsom electorate ... but that's another story for another time entirely.

In any case, the period 2010-2013 was one in which the right-wing agenda's designs on Auckland's local body politics were, broadly speaking, stymied. So naturally, the Powers That Be decided to frustrate the nominally 'leftist' agenda - of things like sensible and progressive public transport - right back. Only this time, the stakes weren't exactly small. They were nearly three billion dollars worth of light rail for Central Auckland.

Perhaps no other single project nor flashpoint better illustrates the (intentionally) dysfunctional relationship between central and local government than the City Rail Link. Announced during the new SuperCity's first term, it was supposed to begin construction five years later in 2016. Due to the immense cost of the project, this would have been impossible without a funding-boost from Central Government. A funding-boost which National basically withheld from granting until 2020 - ten years after the project was initiated.

Interestingly, this was brought forward a few months ago, with the Government boldly declaring that it had finally Seen The Light and being prepared to muck in to get the City Rail Link off the ground - a mere two years behind schedule. Cynics and skeptics noted that the timing of the announcements appeared to suggest that National had been sitting on its hands for the previous six years in a bid to frustrate now-outgoing Auckland Mayor Len Brown. A little over two months after Brown had announced he wouldn't be seeking a third term as Mayor, National reversed its previous stance and switched the funding tap on.

See what I mean about Central Government using its powers over Local Government to spite people for voting the wrong way or being from the wrong 'side'?

The biggest and most obvious manifestation of the Right Wing's spite at Len Brown's continued vaguely centrish-leftish mastery of Auckland, however, was that series of actions which gave us the political joke airing immediately after the last local body election which basically went "What's the sound of a honey-trap closing?" "Chuang".

Because some of you were still in high-school when this took place, here's a quick recap:

Despite a surprisingly strong campaign effort from then-political newcomer John Palino (yes, the same guy who's announced he's running for Mayor again later this year), Brown's position looked unassailable. This lead to a key figure on Palino's campaign team, the National-linked and somewhat improbably named Luigi Wewege, putting pressure upon his on-again-off-again lover Bevan Chuang to release information confirming an affair between her and Len Brown, by threatening to disseminate her nudes. The disclosure of Brown's affair came in the form of a scurrilous affidavit delivered to WhaleOil (whose father, former National Party President John Slater, perhaps not coincidentally, was Palino's campaign manager), the rather luridly graphic details of which had people for weeks joking about our "two minute noodle" Mayor, while also serving to highlight the existence of the previously largely unknown "Ngati Whatua Room" in the Town Hall.

Wewege et co had hoped to secure Chuang's cooperation before polling day - with a view to completely derailing Brown's re-election campaign with the affair revelations. This, they were unable to do, so they instead brought Chuang into play immediately after the election as part of a cockamamie attempt to force Brown to resign and force a by-election - which Palino, as the next strongest polling candidate and a man with a squeaky clean reputation, would presumably be best placed to win.

But Brown didn't resign, instead choosing to weather the storm (albeit at the cost of basically being robbed of the "moral authority of leadership" apparently necessary to set the agenda for Auckland, and seeing figures like Deputy Mayor Penny Hulse increasingly step up during his absence); and the Chuang-plot started to steadily unravel upon the conspirators. Palino and Wewege basically found themselves having to flee the country for awhile in order to evade journalists' probing into their dodgy activities, while the most damaging revelations connected to Brown's affair - that he had accepted and then failed to declare kickbacks from SkyCity at the same time as deciding on city policy which would directly affect the latter's interests (a serious conflict of interest, and arguable grounds for resignation on the spot) - basically found themselves quietly sinking into the miasmatic background noise of the scandal's latter phases.

This has set the stage for much of the last three years, giving an overwhelming impression that local body politics - much like War - is comprised of short periods of interminable excitement punctuated by long moments of terrifying boredom.

That is not to say that there have not been flashpoints, bunfights, and the sort of mass-participatory crises which welcome a certain sort of broad and sweeping civic engagement.

II: Ongoing Issues & Flashpoints

One of the biggest was the initial skirmishing over the 'Council Controlled Organizations' model for Auckland's assets, which drew in everyone from the 'usual suspects' over on the left-hand side of the political arena through to the Employers & Manufacturers Association, Auckland Chamber of Commerce, and occasionally even the Treasury in an attempt to force the Government of the day to be reasonable when it came to maintaining Auckland control of Auckland affairs through Auckland democracy.

The main problem with 'Council Controlled Organizations' is that, in practice, there is very little that is actually 'council-controlled' about them. They're largely independent corporate entities with their own private management, priorities and decision-making structures; set up to exist at a deliberate 'arm's length' away from the publicly elected decision-makers of the Council. This might sound like a largely aesthetic objection to some of the Commerce students in the audience, but the plain fact of the matter was that by decentralizing decision-making and authority for seriously significant parts of the future structure of Auckland (Auckland Transport alone, for instance, consumes somewhere around half the money raised each year by ratepayers) ... we tangibly invited in a lack of co-ordination and direction for the city's future development. Which is rather ironic, because the entire point of having a 'super-city' agglomeration of local government entities in the first place was to make it easier to implement a unitary vision going forward.

I guess confusion, chaos and inefficiency is A-OK in the minds of ACT ... but only when it's done by the private sector!

The CCO model also produced further issues - probably the most significant of which being the four-year Ports of Auckland industrial dispute between the managers of the CCO running the port and the several hundred wharfies previously employed there under the old governance structure. A full treatment of this episode is, sadly, beyond the scope of this piece; but suffice to say that in pursuit of greater profit opportunities, management sought to institute casualization of the Port workforce - and attempted to make redundant those who sought to disagree with the move. This triggered mass demonstrations and country-wide (even international) industrial action. But also revealed just how much of an impotent instrument the office of the Mayor appeared to be in the new political environment. Despite ongoing entreaties to Brown and his councilors (including a rather interesting fellow by the name of Malcolm France assaulting Brown with a lamington in our very own Quad) to do something to resolve the dispute and get the port working again, beyond cursory attempts at diplomacy and conciliation, nothing was done. This appears to have been largely on grounds that nothing COULD be done ... because, as I may have mentioned earlier, the Council Controlled Organizations were deliberately set up by the government in such a manner as to PREVENT popularly elected public officials (or their minions) from actually intervening in or directing the administration and operation of tedious little things like one of the Council's absolutely key assets.

It's perhaps doubtful whether the above constitutes a grand example of 'the crisis doctrine' at work (wherein unscrupulous neoliberal individuals deliberately throw a public asset into a state of crisis, then use the resultant umbrage and hullabaloo to force through demands that it be given over to the alleged 'superior' hands of the private sector instead); but it's not hard to see how, if the dispute and resulting serious disruption had occurred at something like Auckland Transport (which far more of us use far more regularly than the Port, most citizens of Auckland not being container-ships) or one of the other key infrastructural entities, how this might indeed have been used as a justification for full-scale privatization to take place.

Another burgeoning fault-line in Auckland's local body politics was provided by the consultation process and eventual outcome surrounding our future Unitary Plan. Again, a precise run-down of the ins and outs of this issue is beyond the scope of this piece; but suffice to say it's once again an instance of the Super-City working theoretically 'as intended' causing significant disquiet. In this instance, one of the key reasons we put together all our local (and regional) governance bodies in the first place was in order to allow them to deliver us a single and co-ordinated vision going forward into the future. As applies Auckland's previously almost straight-out anarchic approach to future growth ("Hmm, where would a good place be to plonk the local firearm factory? I know! Let's sit it right next to the Mt. Eden Prison!" "Gee, this swanky, posh-as private school needs somewhere to go - we'll just stick it out in what's going to become one of our most destitute suburbs. Rich kids getting jumped at the train-station can form a useful avenue of income redistribution."), there's no effective argument that more co-ordination and future-foresight was needed. We've simply screwed up this issue ourselves so very, very often before.

But all of a sudden, it was the rather more economically well off folks in the leafy-boughed, inner-city boroughs of town which felt themselves detrimentally effected by the process, instead of the often more left-wing folk who'd been protesting the Nats local-body corporate power-grab from the get-go back prior to 2010. It was, apparently, one thing to take away local decision-making power when it came to key and important assets like the Ports of Auckland ... but quite another to suggest to richer (or even upper middle-class) folk that in fifty years' time, their backyard might find itself abutted by town-houses or smaller-scale tower-blocks.

Now to be fair, I do have quite some considerable sympathy for the predominantly older demographic who seem the most conspicuously affeared by the rising specter of housing and land-use intensification.

Historically, when Auckland has attempted to do increased density of housing, the results have - to put it bluntly - been badly designed, ill-fit-for-purpose, and miasmatic misfits for the area they've been put in. The intensified housing area established on the site of the old Saw Mill in between Mt Eden and Auckland Central - or, for that matter, the development on upper Symonds St almost abutting the south side of Grafton Gully - are classic cases in point. The sizes of building were tiny, and ill-suited for familial occupancy; the locations near the CBD pushed prices up out of reach of first-home buyers anyway; nobody appeared to have thought through the minimum modicum architectural conceits like aspect, sunlight, or why, exactly, one might want more than about a half a foot of balcony; and to cap it all off, both developments fairly quickly found themselves being partially demolished and reconstructed (a seriously long-term process still ongoing with the aforementioned cluster on Symonds St) due to substandard construction and building materials leading to toxic, invasive mold. (appropriately enough, the same rough colour of depressing pastel paint with which the outer shells of the buildings were clad in, anyway)

Truly, homes fit for the ages.

But those opposing the perceived Baby-Boomer-Power-Bloc of voters who actually turn up and cast ballots on election day (and who thus seem to command more of the respective ears of both local boards and Councilors) also have a point. The way we've been doing *non-intensified* housing here in Auckland has also not worked. We've effectively found ourselves in a situation wherein a number of pressures (including immigration and a runaway speculative bubble that's fueling many of those high-up enough on the property-ownership ladder in a sort of champagne wealth-delusion plateau due to a single one of their investment properties, on average, 'earning' more per week than the average Kiwi worker) have priced just about anybody who isn't already a well-moneyed landlord-burgher out of the housing market if they want to live anywhere feasibly close to their place of work (say, somewhere between half an hour to an hour's drive) ... leaving many of the only places still within reach of young families or more well-off single workers as those situated so far out of town that they're almost more properly referred to as new satellite-communities than actual integral parts of Auckland proper. (Seriously, when I was growing up, little towns like Puhoi, Franklin, and even Pokeno were just that - small towns and sleepy hamlets far beyond Auckland's fringes. Now, they're being actively incorporated into the long-term plans for dormitory-villages for Auckland because the land out there's cheaper to actually decent housing on - never mind that in doing so, we lose the use of some of the best volcanic agricultural soil in the world)

The Unitary Plan, therefore, was an attempt to provide some measure of 'rationalization' to our city (and surrounding environs') future development; but as exercises in potentially perilous prognostications are wont if not inevitable to do, it wound up pitting those people with a present-stake in the property market against those who felt their path towards a future-stake was being unduly threatened.

In any case, regardless of how one feels about the alleged adequacy or otherwise of the consultation process around the Unitary Plan (replete with so-called 'intergenerational skirmishing', in the form of older submitters apparently heckling youth when the latter attempted to make their voices heard), another key weakness of the SuperCity model is betrayed in the fact that Auckland doesn't - and, in fact, never really - had the tools available to it to meaningfully influence present-day housing availability. It is all well and good to say that the City ought to allow more housing construction - but it already does. The key issues around housing availability in Auckland have been a confluence of private sector intransigence to actually build more affordable houses in the first place (because, in many instances, it's simply more economically worthwhile to sit upon empty land rather than build on it) and private sector indolence when it comes to putting properties already built-and-owned onto the rental market (there are some astonishing figures for the number of perfectly good houses in Auckland which presently sit untenanted, because the capital gain in house-prices for the owner is significant enough that it's not worth the 'bother' of opening it to occupancy for extra cash) on the 'supply-side'; while the 'demand side' of the equation is unbalanced by the fairly massive flows of people from both offshore and the provinces seeking to migrate to Auckland (a situation of more than fifty thousand people from elsewhere turning up in Auckland relative to housing construction that's maybe five thousand per year ... is always going to cause a bit of a squeeze).

Against these rather harsh relative backdrops of 'economic rationalization' of formerly city assets and an apparent forced-march towards tower-block strewn 'development hell', one issue appears to have largely fallen straight into the background. The spinal column of any serious conversation about the Super-City - its relative merits and its future - must surely be the overarching, overweening and overwhelming lack of democracy (at least as compared to what's gone before). And yet with the occasional exception of campaigners for local government promising "greater consultation" if elected, I don't think this campaign season has brought any serious proposals for a radical overhaul of the Super-City structure to forcibly inject more of that vital political quintessence - "democracy". (although when I was weighing up a run for office myself, my exploratory team did identify the possibility of pushing for a referendum on whether Auckland should remain a super-city or devolve back to more local authorities as one perhaps surprisingly popular potential campaign plank)

Regrettably, this should probably not prove especially astonishing. The 'left' often appears far too invested and interested in seeking to seize control of the whole tumbledown edifice to be seriously engaged in incisive questioning about what (different) shape it ought to take. The 'right', by contrast, which has long appeared in the business of taking orders as to its local stances from a mercurial combination of Wellington and the well-heeled, will proffer occasional bouts of largely symbolic 'protest' action, before quieting down and simply demanded lower-or-no rates rises and entirely unnecessary curtailments of public spending.

In other words, nobody has an especially great appetite to go 'upending the applecart' and seriously reforming the edifice when they might well imagine themselves the proprietor in the not too distant future.

All of this together puts one in the mind of the astute observation by Noam Chomsky that "the smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum [...] That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

Hence, 'lively debate' about whether or not to continue to have, say, unelected Maori representatives on local governance bodies is perceived as 'legitimate' (Judith Collins memorably attacked such a setup as an extralegal "unaccountable monster" during the run-up to this year's local body campaign); but serious conversation about whether the Super-City is actually fit for purpose, working well, and still ought to have so much of its actual decision-making presided over by a sizable command-corps of unelected bureaucrats ... is lefty-loopy-lala-land.

On top of this, it's probably worth pointing out that our Government has tended to prove itself fairly actively inimical towards opportunities for greater 'democratization' in local affairs as and when they present themselves. We saw this with, for instance, the Environment Canterbury debacle which was roughly contemporaneous with National's imposition of our questionably democratic Super-City structure. Here, the Government simply hands-up replaced a formerly democratically elected local government organ wholesale with a raft of appointees in order to secure an amenable lack of opposition to their own agenda in that region of allowing more water for farmers' irrigation and the like - sending a worrying message to local authorities up and down the country that to meaningfully protest against National's agenda would be to invite temporary dissolution or even permanent death-by-amalgamation (as appears to be being threatened to a number of small-and-medium-sized-town holdouts in the Wairarapa right now).

But probably the biggest single contributor to the lack of direct agitation about the lack of democracy in our Super-City is the perceptibly broad-ranging field of candidates and campaign-slates seeking to put themselves forward for your approval in this year's Local Body Elections. Against this backdrop of riotous colour, clamour and obvious personal contest, it can be hard to discern that so much of what our candidates are campaigning upon is broadly coterminous with even their theoretically direst opposition. That's that 'narrow spectrum of acceptable opinion' which I pointed out earlier - in action.

Part Two: A Potted History Of The Trenches

With the notable exception of the District Health Boards, local body elections in Auckland are mainly carried out through a First Past The Post model. You get a number of votes equal to however many vacancies there are in your ward (so generally up to four for a Local Board, one or two for Council, and one and only one for Mayor), with the highest polling candidates winning.

This is, obviously, the basic system which many electoral democracies have struggled with the dysfunctions with throughout the Anglosphere - and in most cases, a structure which almost inexorably produces what's known as the tyranny of a 'two party system'. (Probably the best example of which is the United States with its bifurcation of the Polis between Democrats and Republicans - or, in an earlier age here in New Zealand, our own division between National and Labour)

But what makes Auckland in 2016 a little interesting is how we don't - for this election, at least - have anything like the sort of clear-cut two-way division which the mechanisms of our electoral system theoretically ought to have given rise to.

Sure, there's a patchwork of fairly mutually amicable different smaller-scale tickets on the broad-ranging 'left' of things (including City Vision, Roskill Community Voice, Future West - most of which have a predominantly local focus), supplemented by a range of candidacies being run with actual major-party branding from both Labour and the Greens. But once we start to consider the 'right-wing' of politics, all of this neat, dualistic order rather rapidly starts to break down.

For the longest time, those of a National-voting persuasion here in Auckland were represented at the local level by the 'C&R' ticket. Previously, this stood for 'Citizens & Ratepayers' - although in more recent days it appears to have taken a turn for the cuddly, and sought to partially rebrand as the rather less axiomatically self-interested sounding "Communities & Residents". This has occasionally found itself bolstered by smaller tickets and 'independent' candidacies, particularly when it comes to areas like the North Shore - but in the main, from the 1930s to the early 2000s, C&R was it.

That is, up until the SuperCity happened.

I've set out above how the re-organization of local government in Auckland was supposed to be a right-wing powergrab. And how this was to be accomplished through the simultaneous divorcement of much actual power from our local elected officials to questionably democratic figures down in Wellington, while at the same time locally aligned forces friendly to the National and ACT parties would wrap up the job by winning elections and cutting off the prospect of office-holding local-government fightback up here.

In this, they failed - and not just, as is often though, when it came to capturing the Mayoralty.

The Mayor is only one vote on the Council, and even though it might not always have looked like it from the outside, for much of his first term and good portions of his second, Len Brown was able to build and weld together a sufficient enough coalition of councilors to manage to avoid effective political impotence.

Matters did not sufficiently nor significantly change in the subsequent 2013 election, either. In fact, in some areas and wards, it actually appeared that National's local proxies were actually in outright retreat.

So clearly, some on the right felt that the time for desperate measures was at hand.

It started off innocuously enough. Somebody - possibly Mark Thomas - was deputized to begin a comprehensive 'rebrand' of C&R into an organ which could be used to more effectively fight the centrists and left-wingers who appeared to have dug in in office.

But possibly due to the egos involved, this quite quickly became a fratricidal and internecine quagmire which advanced nowhere spectacularly far nor fast. There was considerable resistance towards the 'rebrand' efforts - some of it, perhaps, legitimate. North Shore folk and others who felt that their local wards harboured some considerable animosity to the notion of "Auckland" (as a demonym fairly inexorably tied to the hated CBD and bureaucratic remoteness) balked at the proposed new name of "Auckland Future". Others took issue with the implicit other axial of the rework agenda - namely, the way that this new local body ticket was supposed to function far more directly 'hand-in-glove' with the central government-level National Party. The perception appears to have at least partially been that the 'hand' would have been inserted in locations other than the 'glove' for the purposes of more overt and strong-handed direct puppeteering, if you get my drift.

Whichever way you choose to slice it, the older and more established figures inside C&R entrenched themselves against serious efforts at reform. Perhaps they feared they'd be replaced or their influence (further) marginalized. Either way, it created something of a considerable problem.

Those pushing the 'reform' angle would not necessarily be stymied - so rather than give up, they decided to set up their own (competing) right-wing electoral ticket in the form of the now entirely separate Auckland Future. Perhaps they are playing the 'long game' and feel that they're better positioned to win out in any ongoing 'civil war' on the right. Waiting for C&R to simply collapse in on itself in electoral ignominy rather than being able to deal a decisive blow.

Either way, straight from the get-go it looked pretty messy as well as both tactically and strategically unsound to have the right wing competing AGAINST itself in a number of key battlegrounds. What hope, one might ask, could these people on the right have of unifying Auckland and its servants if they couldn't even unify themselves.

From there, the situation pretty much proceeded to go from bad to worse. First, we had Auckland Future attempt to announce longstanding C&R stalwart Christine Fletcher as one of their candidates. Fletcher was predictably pretty surprised to find out about this via press release, and vehemently protested that this was in error. Auckland Future faced an embarrassing climb-down, and as a result of some form of attempted compromise with C&R ... is only standing a single council candidate against Fletcher and her running-mate, out of a possible two. You can tell that armistice and parlay is going exceptionally well when the other side only winds up putting in HALF the effort they could have levied into ruining your battleplan.

Things were, if anything, even worse in the Maungakiekie-Tamaki ward. There, there is a single spot on Council available. Prior to Auckland Future's snafu, incumbent turncoat Denise Krum (formerly of United Future, then of National/C&R - now, seeing which side the wind's blowing, of National/Auckland Future) seemed odds-on to win the seat (last time, she beat the Labour Party's Richard Northey by around nine hundred votes - a little more than five and a half percent). However, shortly before the campaign period was officially due to start, it was revealed that another Auckland Future candidate's serious incompetence at something as simple as filling out the right form had placed the whole thing in jeopardy. For you see, he'd been supposed to enter himself as a Local Board candidate ... and instead had wound up accidentally running for Council.

Auckland Future is therefore not just running against experienced C&R candidates elsewhere ... but in at least one ward, it is apparently running against ITSELF into the bargain. The local Labour candidate - Patrick Cummuskey - must be absolutely thrilled.

But this isn't the end of it. Oh no.

One area where the Auckland Right have generally struggled for much of the last decade or so, is in finding suitable one-man-band figures to take on the role of Mayoral Candidate. Sure, they once made do with John Banks (who came with the in-built advantages of a previous nation-wide media profile from his days as a radio personality and former Cabinet Minister) ... but after he Ascended back into Parliament atop the flogged-unto-death yellow horse of the ACTocalypse, both National & C&R were left rather short on the candidate-stakes.

The first man to step into that void in 2013 - former TV personality and present restaurateur John Palino - was a bit of a sketchy political figure. Not, at that stage, due to the impropriety which is now arguably synonymous with his name thanks to the Bevan Chuang affair ... but instead because he was pretty much always destined to lose the 2013 run, and appears to have been head-hunted, put up and given a certain amount of (somewhat covert) National backing (including the tender ministrations of both Cameron AND John Slater (that's WhaleOil's former National Party President dad, for those of you playing at home) as self-appointed campaign loudhailer and Palino-appointed campaign manager respectively) - was because it would simply have been too painful and too disastrous for prestige if the Right had had to admit that they weren't up to truly contesting the race.

Palino, as history records, did respectably badly - coming within roughly 56,000 votes of winning (an electoral share of roughly 32%), and then presided over the decidedly unrespectable bad things which followed (whether with direct knowledge, or merely the unwilled assistance of unscrupulous underlings dependent upon whom you believe).

Things were left to settle for about two years, with no clear appropriate aspirant for the mantle of the Right Wing Champion of Auckland in sight. Various personality-figures were sounded out - even including personages as august as Judith Collins - and pretty much everybody thought suitable by National's power-brokers declined and stated their non-interest. Particularly once it started to become known that Labour's Phil Goff was looking in to putting his name forward for the Mayoralty. Nobody powerful and well-regarded enough wanted to 'step down' to the position of fighting a potentially losing campaign for Mayor ... nobody eager and hungry enough to want to 'step up' for the right was deemed appropriate. An impasse of sorts developed.

That is, until a certain figure we've met a number of times before in this piece called Mark Thomas decided to put his hand up.

Thomas has come to national prominence before - as the incredibly ill-starred National candidate for Wellington Central in our first MMP election in 1996. He earns the dubious distinction of being effectively our nation's first MMP-'sacrificial lamb' candidate (in much the same way as Paul Goldsmith is for ACT up here in Epsom) ... but with the even more unfortunate factor of not knowing that he was due to be thrown under the bus by his leader until it was announced live on television. There's a documentary in which this sad moment of NZ political history/trivia features called 'Campaign', and judging by all the writeups I've read of it over the years, the one thing everyone can agree upon is that Thomas handled himself with a considerable level (arguably well above and beyond the call of duty) of dignity for a figure who'd just been rendered a political 'dead man walking'. The incident is particularly sad as polling had Thomas well-placed to win, too.

In any case, over the intervening nearly two decades between then and now, he'd relocated to Auckland and set himself up as an elected official - where, as noted earlier, he's supposed to have played an instrumental role in the early phases of C&R's attempt at getting itself back off the ground after 2010. Seeing the lack of any serious contenders (let alone competent, capable ones) from the National side of things for this year's Mayoral contest, Thomas decided to put himself forward. He issued a fairly impressively comprehensive series of policy, press-releases, and media appearances in which he demonstrated himself to be a cogent, compassionate and knowledgeable figure about local body issues, and even started to seem like a seriously-serious (centre-)right wing contender for the top job despite running as an Independent with fairly minimal involvement/oversight from On High back in National.

Which is a shame, because this appears to have annoyed certain factions and figures within National SO incredibly much that they then decided to spend the next few months casting around in earnest for somebody to function as an 'officially anointed' right-wing Mayoral candidate, rather than let an initiative-exercising independent wind up their de facto representative.

Eventually, they settled upon former Xero executive Victoria Crone - who appears to have been brought into the National-electoral fold by National Party powerbroker Michelle Boag and friends.

This created a number of considerable problems - as now, not only was the National Party effectively split between two allegedly serious candidates (Thomas as the unofficial one whom many party rank-and-file quite liked; Crone as the elite-endorsed 'semi-official' offering) ... but the one the Nats hierarchy was supposed to be publicly backing and pouring effort into, was effectively starting from a position rather considerably behind the Independent-upstart, who'd spent the previous few months rather vigorously campaigning. (Thomas, in other words, had stolen quite a march upon his ideological-cohort-opponents while they were fussing and flim-flamming about attempting to find a candidate to supplant him)

The ways this manifested in practice including Crone and her camp attempting to pressure mayoral debate organizers to sideline Thomas (and, indeed, going so far as to insist that Crone wouldn't front any forums Thomas appeared at - presumably to avoid placing them on the same 'level' of legitimacy by having them appear side-by-side); before eventually watching with self-satisfied smirks as Thomas found himself pressured from On High to effectively suspend his campaign.

The end result of this confusing cluster-bomb of center-right candidacy contention is that two weeks out from Polling Day, we now finally have *a* Right Wing figure whom everybody opposed to Goff from the further-right can happily get behind. Except Thomas is still on the ballot, there's a huge weight of ill-feeling from many ordinary Blue folk about the way he was sidelined (again), and Crone (who has no previous political experience) has effectively had to spend many months of her campaign either learning the ropes or attempting to come out from her theoretically much-less high-powered right-wing quasi-opponent's shadow.

Oh, and as applies Thomas? Well, wasn't it Karl Marx who made that prescient remark about history occurring twice - the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

And that's why I earlier said that there's clearly more than a two-party system going on in this year's local body elections for Auckland.

Now astride this entire mess like a sort of beautifully unaffected Apollonian colossus is, of course, Phil Goff.

I could write many, many things about Goff. That his own record in Parliament - whether in the 1980s under David Lange and Rogernomics, or more recently as applies the TPPA, renders him a questionably 'center-left' option for Mayor. That his announced policies thus far aren't actually wildly dissimilar from Crone's right-wing manifesto, and include questionable proposals to cut the number of public servants for little definite gain and all the rest of it. But Goff is pretty much guaranteed to win anyway regardless of what's said about him (and, indeed, appears to have recently adopted a default position of saying as little as possible, he's so far ahead, on the apparent grounds that at this stage he can only *lose* votes by taking definite stands).

So this leaves us on the nominal left in the curious position of being effectively able to vote for whom we *actually* want to rather than merely that candidate we feel a sense of unctuous obligation to support out of a plaintive duty to keep the other guy out of power.

Choices. Aren't they wonderful. A pity that options only seem to open up when the outcomes of our decisionmaking appear to acquire only symbolic (at best) relevance.

Conclusions

Unfortunately, this evident lack of a seriously substantive choice in the way our city's likely to manage its present or develop into the future is not purely restricted to the issue of the mayoralty. As I stated towards the outset of this piece (some six thousand words ago - but who's counting), the Auckland SuperCity structure was deliberately set up in such a way as to 'marginalize' if not outright 'mitigate' the risk to (National-led) Central Government of democracy breaking out and threatening whatever agenda they might wish to put in play.

It's a situation rather similar to that enjoyed by Greece for much of the early 2010s - wherein despite ballot after ballot (including the more recent mass-electoral endorsement of SYRIZA and its promise of radical change), the E.U. Troika remained FIRMLY in actual charge and pushing through its austerity agenda no matter what citizens actually wanted.

However, even though I remain somewhat pessimistic about the ability of voters to positively influence progressive local (or any other, for that matter) governance at the ballot boxes ... it nevertheless occurs to me that there are (always) worse things that could happen as the result of serious and sustained (greater) democratic inaction. As lackluster as some feel that Len Brown's first term in office was, it seems almost inarguable that three years worth of John Banks - the government's preferred, star-anointed candidate - would have been much, inestimably worse. Concerted democratic action by nearly a hundred and seventy thousand Aucklanders thus helped to stem the tide against the neoliberal darkness ... even if we didn't exactly find ourselves washed up on the shores of seriously inspiring local government (a contradiction in terms, perhaps?) as a result.

This is also not to denigrate the important and good works which certain principled and passionate local body elected officials have been able to accomplish over the past six years. I am personally aware of measures undertaken by the CityVision-affiliated members of my Local Board, for instance, to foster greater uptake and acceptance of the Living Wage by local employers and other such positive measures. Mike Lee may have recently come in for a bit of a drubbing on The Spinoff, but his stirling contribution to the ongoing improvement of public transport in Auckland which many of us use on a day-in day-out basis definitely does not deserve to be ignored. And for all his faults, in a few years' time we'll still be able to look back upon Len Brown's tenure as the one which gave us the Central Rail Loop and avoided the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of asset sales which Central Government wished to undemocratically foist upon us.

So is there a point to voting in this year's local body elections? Most likely, yes.

Will doing so help to expeditiously close up many of the fault-lines (and others) touched upon in this piece?

Questionable.

But in local body politics - arguably even more so than in the regular, national-level contests - we're here to play The Long Game. Specific elections and victories matter perhaps less to the overall shape of things than the general trajectory down which our city is heading. And in a perhaps surprising array of specific scenarios, this is influenced and molded not by numbers of ballots cast for a particular candidate - but instead, by ongoing and extra-electoral engagement with the system. The most obvious instance is, of course, the imposition of the SuperCity structure itself. Despite counter-proposals to the contrary (which are, themselves similar to legislation NZ First MP Ron Mark has been championing to guarantee a referendum before amalgamation can take place), we never had a vote on creating the SuperCity here in Auckland. Alongside this, and potentially more amicably, there are numerous instances of persons and groups getting passionate about an issue and approaching their elected representatives in order to lobby for (often successful) change.

If there's a take-home inspirational message for this piece, it's perhaps not the cliched "you have to go and get out and vote!" But instead, a more cerebral exhortation to engage with our local body politics around and outside of election-time as well, in order to try to influence superior, embedded change.

That, and an axiomatic insistence that if you look closely and choose to get acquainted with the narratives of local body, you can find tales and skirmishing flash-points every bit as interesting and blood-spattered as those narratives which we customarily associate with local's larger, more country-spanning cousin.

Sex, Drugs & Electoral Rolls Part XIV: Checking Out Early To Avoid The Rush

"Besides, the way America's public schools are sliding, they'll all be this way in a few months. I say, lay back and enjoy it - it's a helluva toboggan ride" - Superintendent Chalmers, The Simpsons.

At the time of writing (and, for that matter, for the foreseeable future if not outright perpetuity), the fallout from #Brexit continues.

In my column last week, I sought to address the weaponized misperception that all support for, enthusiasm about or empathy in the general direction of Britain leaving the E.U. had to be motivated by racist sentiment. But thinking about the issue over the previous seven days, another - even greater - misperception has come to light.

That there was actually some sort of semi-mythical choice on offer to maintain the extant allegedly-working status quo in the first place.

Let's be clear about this. That's not what the Remain option was effectively offering; and for one simple reason: the European Union as we know it is fundamentally creaking at the seams. Ever since the Common Market became the Eurozone with the adoption of the single currency and simultaneous necessarily correlated abrogation of individual member-states' monetary sovereignty, there have been an escalating - spiraling, even - set of problems for many of the less-well-off economies which comprise Europe's southern rim.

The poster-child for how ever-closer-union failed in practice was, of course, Greece. Even leaving aside the dread impacts of a lack of the standard currency devaluation option to which an economy can resort in times of fiscal crisis to try and spur some measure of domestic growth; the inability of the Greek government to set or seriously influence its own monetary policy - its own interest rates, investment regulations, money supply and all the rest that goes with that - seriously hamstrung any indigenous Hellenic efforts to meaningfully respond to the crisis then gripping Europe.

Instead, Greece's monetary policy was effectively set in Germany and the other more well-off and less hard hit northern and western members of the Euro club. And while the conditions the European policy-elite thusly rolled out might have been about right for the large and robust virile economies of Germany et co, they were piteously inadequate for attempting to assist the Greeks to get back some modicum of stability - let alone growth and recovery. That's the trouble with attempting to run a continent-spanning monetary union and thus, consequently, a single monetary policy encapsulating an incredibly broad range of differing local economies. Local needs and diversity of circumstance simply get lost amidst the 'big picture' (or, less charitably, are overlooked in favour of catering to the economic needs of the 'big players' whose picture, increasingly, it seems to be).

Making matters worse, as part of the deal by which Greece managed to stabilize at the political and monetary equivalent of death's door thanks to massive (and largely German) economic assistance, the Greeks suddenly found themselves in the unenviable position of having their FISCAL rather than just their monetary policy effectively dictated to them and run from elsewhere in the Eurozone. We all saw how that turned out.

Now I don't just mention this because it's an actually-extant case-study in how the E.U. has historically mismanaged not just a crisis but the needs of an ailing member state. Instead, I draw attention to it because what happened to Greece - in the sense of an escalating surrender of fiscal policy to unelected or foreign Eurocrats to go along with the previously handed over control of monetary policy - is the inevitable pathway further forward for the Eurozone as a whole.

You can't run an ever-closer economic union without an ever more centralized degree of direction for both fiscal AND monetary policy that applies across largely the whole union. To suggest otherwise is tantamount to insinuating that the successful economies such as Germany - whose money, it seems, is increasingly spent subsidizing the state budgets of less salubrious member-states to the south - ought to have a limited degree of say over how what effectively amounts to their own domestic tax-take is spent in their own backyard. Perhaps this is the right thing to advocate - but good luck getting the Germans to agree to that.

More likely, in the not too distant future we are going to see serious proposals put forward for Eurozone-wide taxes, and a European treasury in order to fund such things as European internal spending and control European fiscal policy, in a way similar to and perhaps explicitly modeled on how monetary policy is already centralized and constrained. Perhaps that is why the translation to the phrase Merkel used to refer to the E.U. in a speech recently was more properly rendered "European Unification Project" rather than "European Union". Because this is already being thought about.

The other option, of course, is to go diametrically the other way. Conclude that the Eurozone experiment in its present form has not exactly worked for a number of European economies, and that it might well be time to curtail it and roll it back - at least for those states who have not done particularly well out of it. Certainly, countries such as Sweden, Norway, and Switzerland prove that it's perfectly possible to remain party to the Common Market without having to 'render unto Caesar' by all adopting the same coinage. (Although interestingly, the E.U.'s position on the Treaty of Maastricht is that joining the Euro is not something E.U. member-states are supposed to have a choice over)

Further, 'Renegade Economist' and general Man Against Time Yanis Varoufakis' "Plan B" to save Greece economically proposed in extremis to do exactly that.

But is this likely to take place? In stark contrast to much of the rest of the course of human history, will the technocrats of Europe realize that they're half-in a hole and start scrabbling frantically to get out rather than pushing further on, Pooh-bear style in the hopes that the hole leads somewhere wondrous?

I find it unlikely. Nobody wishes to admit they've made a mistake - particularly when it's a continent-spanning, decades-encapsulating, Zeitgeist-embracing colossus of a potential botch-up.

The response to the twin (and ongoing) European crises of serious economic malaise and states weighing up their options 'on the outside', then, may therefore be cast as one of two options: "All In", or "Fold".

If "All In", then Brexit voters were quite vindicated by seeking to put the brakes on further British integration (particularly sans democratic mandate - the referendum result in 1975 never talked about any of this). A "Remain" vote was cast as being an endorsement for the 'status quo', but as I've hopefully sketched out ... the status quo was unsustainable and the center cannot hold.

If, on the other hand, "Fold" becomes the dominant paradigm du jour (whether for the Eurozone at large - which is fairly catastrophically unlikely; or for more peripheral member-states, the odds of which are increased) ... then Britain has not done something singularly self-mutilating. Instead, it has merely pre-empted what will shortly be a swathe of rumblings from other disgruntled E.U. states.

To quote Death in Good Omens ... "DON'T THINK OF IT AS DYING [...] JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH".

Sex, Drugs & Electoral Rolls Part XXI: A Sea-Change On Government Attitudes To Protesting

In 1973, New Zealand Prime Minister Norman Kirk sent our frigate, the HMNZS Otago, to the French nuclear testing site of Mururoa Atoll. On board was the Kiwi Cabinet Minister Fraser Coleman. The stated - and, indeed, officially mandated - purpose of those two hundred and forty three men was to put themselves in the path of foreign military activity, on a ship, as a protest action.

This was a pretty proud moment in New Zealand history - a real David vs Goliath sort of sentiment pervaded domestic remembrance of that time a small group of Kiwis took on the military (and, earlier that year, legislative) might of an Old World nuclear-armed former colonial power.

I open this piece by referencing the exploits of the HMNZS Otago (and, immediately subsequent to this the HMNZS Canterbury) not simply because it is an incident worth remembering in these modern days of our Government tiptoeing around the internationally expressed wills of the Great Powers. But instead, because there is a clear, present, and utterly immense difference in terms of both principle and courage between what the Kirk Government sought to do 43 years ago, versus what the Key Government seeks to do today.

In case you missed it, the Nats are presently attempting to push through legislation which would criminalize protesting at sea. In fact, it's worse than that. With the bill as presently drafted, you would be liable to be labeled a "terrorist" if you disrupted the actions and activities of a foreign military vessel.

You know, like we used to rightly celebrate and lionize doing in both the 1970s and 80s.

Government MP David Bennett supplied the rationale for deeming maritime protesters to be terrorists:

"This is a foreign power's vessel - a military vessel. You're getting in the way of it - so it's a terrorist act on a foreign country, isn't it."

That's a pretty pithy piece of legal reasoning. In the botanical sense of the term 'pith', of course, wherein it refers to the significantly less desirable bit under the rind of a fruit which surrounds the morsels you actually want to eat. Sounds like David Bennett all up.

Now here in New Zealand, we know a thing or two about nautical acts of terrorism committed against foreign countries. 21 years ago, the French carried out exactly such an act in our waters against the Greenpeace flagship, the Rainbow Warrior. (As a point of historical trivia, it had been preparing to depart for Mururoa, to once again continue the mission of observation and disruption against illegal French nuclear testing begun twelve years before by our very own Navy)

What this bill therefore seeks to do, by apparent conscious design, is place legitimate protest actions such as those carried out in New Zealand waters against American naval vessels in the eighties upon the same opprobium-heaped pedestal that we customarily reserve for craven and cowardly acts of actual terrorism like the Rainbow Warrior bombing.

And while this is a singularly egregious situation, it's not entirely accurate to state that the criminalization of potentially significant dissent is an exclusively National-produced phenomenon. The Terrorism Suppression Act brought into force by Labour in 2002 also has some problematic provisions, including 5 (3) (d), which in concert with 5 (2) (b), could effectively have rendered something as innocuous as the anti-TPPA road and motorway blockade action which took place earlier this year an apparent act of terror.

Even though the Terrorism Suppression Act contains a dedicated subsection (5 (5)) which seeks to clarify that the mere fact of an action being protest-motivated is not, itself, grounds to call something a terrorist act ... the fact that such a clause was necessary in the first place goes some ways to illustrate just how problematic previous New Zealand Government efforts at legislating against terrorism (or, more accurately, to punish 'terrorism' post-facto) have been.

Some cynics might even conclude that exploitable 'flaws' in the legislation such as that outlined above would constitute, as an IT professional would say, "a feature, not a bug".

And lest we think that the New Zealand security apparatus, police, courts, and other arms of state are far too 'benevolent' or 'Kiwi-casual' to want to do dodgy things with the powers we give them ... consider the illegal spying which was carried out on Kim DotCom at the behest of what amounts to an ineluctable combination of a foreign government and big-name overseas corporate interests. We literally had our foreign intelligence service using military-grade hardware to stake out an eccentric German tech-magnate over a case of copyright infringement of all things.

The miscellaneous miscreantery of the NZ Deep State doesn't stop there, either.

I still vividly remember in 2013 getting a visit from the detective who'd been second in command of the Urewera Raids, accompanied by an intelligence service spook. Apparently, the fine boys down at the counter-terrorism unit of the New Zealand Police had had me under wiretap surveillance for the previous eighteen or so months. The reason why? We think they were trying to get Winston for something which they thought I was involved in (in connection to the 2011 Tea Tapes scandal) - and they thought that monitoring my communications would prove it. The *official* reason why? I was allegedly a "threat to national security".

My first thought afterwards was wondering whether there was supposed to be an apostraphe and an S after the word "National".

Followed swiftly after by a sense of mounting horror as I realized that pretty much everything I'd said over the last year and a half via facebook messenger, or through txt had quite possibly crossed the desk of at lest one nameless analyst somewhere in the New Zealand security apparatus and/or Police. An acrimonious breakup with a girlfriend (and the resultant emotional fallout), personal secrets confided in close mates ... all of it was now in the databanks of the state and subject to easy, at-will persual by those with the right security clearance.

And all because I just happened to be in the right place at the right time outside a cafe in late 2011.

(Also, if you're wondering just why I got a housecall - the previous relevant legislation governing search and surveillance mandated a duty to report to the target what had happened once the surveillance was lifted - something which is still somewhat present in the 2012 act which replaced it at 61 (1) (c).

This is apparently a check and/or balance for their power - knowing that some judge, somewhere, will force them to front up to explain to the person under surveillance that all their deep dark secret-communications are now Official Knowledge. I guess the idea is that the (potentially mutual) embarrassment of getting the wrong guy and then having to look them in the eye and TELL THEM that, is supposed to keep our security intelligence services in line. Riiiiight.)

The reason why I cite this incident is because it handily demonstrates that i) laws put in place to protect us from terrorism can and have been misused even very recently in the past; ii) that the specific forms of that misuse very quickly cross over into the realms of the political; and iii) that even seemingly innocuous or rather small-scale acts of potential dissent (like standing outside of a cafe in the presence of a few TV cameras) can quite quickly conjure the Heavy Hammer of the State coming down upon you.

When we talk about not just criminalizing - but 'terrorizing' - protests, we go rather beyond the simple maintenance of public order.

We instead send chilling messages with chilling effects upon certain aspects of public participation in the hallowed apparatus of our democracy.

As I've said earlier, these increasingly seem to be "a feature, not a bug", in the minds of many of our august policy-makers. With the Key Government preparing to lionize itself for effectively normalizing military relations with the US, sanctified by a potentially nuclear-armed ship-visit (you know ... EXACTLY the sort of thing we rose up in (maritime) protest against back in the '80s) - it's not hard to see just whom this new kind of "terrorism"-fighting legislation might be aimed at to please.

Sex, Drugs & Electoral Rolls Part XX: Voting in Self Defence

I'm sitting here writing this on September 11th. A day that I once heard referred to as "The Day Democracy Died".

And yes - it's certainly true that a hazy Wednesday morning in early Spring 2001 represented something of a watershed no-return transition point between the bright, halcyon promise of the 1990s to the gritty, drone-surveilled, NSA-monitored epoch of the War on Terror and today. What had before seemed a zeitgeist of bipartisanship and optimism throughout the Anglosphere so powerful that a certain political theorist dubbed us to be in the "End of History" ... was replaced almost overnight by a lingering culture of latter-day McCarthyism (remember "You're either with us ... or you're with the terrorists" as a line to repudiate criticism?) and combative recriminations.

History, it seems, wasn't over but was instead anew and afreshly on the march. Considering some of the things which ensued over the next few years as the direct and attributable result of that day, it's perhaps not surprising to see it eulogized with such infamy as the semi-mortification of much of the bedrock of our tradition of governance.

But it's not September 11th 2001 which was the day I first heard referred to with that particular sobriquet.

That dubious honour instead belongs to September 11th 1973 - a date which may be vaguely familiar to some of you as the occasion of the US-backed coup against Salvador Allende in Chile. If you haven't heard of this (and really, it's the sort of historical episode which is often in-fashion and in-vogue to somewhat downplay these days, for a number of reasons), a basic run-down is thus:

In 1970, despite considerable external interference, the Socialist candidate Salvador Allende won that year's Chilean Presidential Election. The democratic elevation of a far-left political leader is, even these days, not something which happens easily - and the Americans found themselves outraged at the very idea of a potential Soviet-stooge or independent enclave setting itself up in 'their' hemisphere. So in the wake of Allende's government undertaking serious economic structural reform designed to transform Chile from a quasi-colonial resource-market adjunct to North America into a more fair and self-determining state ... it is perhaps unsurprising (albeit unendorsable) that the CIA, Henry Kissinger et al moved to encourage, foster and support armed efforts to remove Allende from office (with the CIA's Project FUBELT actually attempting to cause an anti-Allende coup to take place before Allende had even assumed office in late 1970).

The much-anticipated anti-democratic action finally happened on the date cited above (after some weeks of buildup and an escalating sense of crisis due to a previous attempted-putsch a month and a half before). And the rest, as they say, is history.

Allende made a beautiful final address as the Presidential Palace fell around him - and then, either died by his own hand using an AK-47 gifted to him by Fidel Castro, or was murdered by a confederate of the incoming Pinochet coup-regime.

Following on from this, a chap by the name of General Augusto Pinochet took power and set about establishing a more friendly and amenable economic environment for US-backed interests. This he did by inviting down to Chile a certain, rather prominent economics professor by the name of Milton Friedman - and quite literally letting the new school of 'Chicago Boy' economists write his economic policy for him - as well as dispatching the armed forces at his command to engage in the mass repressive round-ups of tens of thousands of 'dissidents', both alleged and actual, with the purposes of rooting out any potential indigenous opposition to this impending wave of economic 'rationalization' he sought to preside over. The phrase "helicopter rides" as a sort of implied threat (a term of art frequently deployed by some of the more unwholesome militant libertarian folk you might encounter online or at the wrong corners of the Owen G Glenn Building) derives from a favoured manner of execution employed by the Pinochet regime in service of its agenda.

We, here in New Zealand, often think of ourselves as having been the 'guinea-pig' state for (undemocratically imposed) ardent neoliberalism - but as it turns out, our disastrous flirtations with that economic paradigm was evidently something of an epimethean experiment rather than the breaking of entirely new ground.

But one other element from the dark after-events of the 11th of September (1973) stands out to me, some 46 years later. And that's what happened for some considerable distance afterward (some fifteen years, in fact) while Pinochet ruled.

Being entirely unconfident that they could prevent the forces of the left from once again coming to power via legitimate and democratic means - and also fearful of such a rudimentary thing as mere 'democracy' interfering with the Chicago Boys' ongoing economic machinations - the coup-government outlawed Chileans being able to vote.

This might seem something of a truism. Of course an anti-democratic government or one which has come to power this way and fears losing office via the ballot in answer to the bullet is going to be ill-disposed towards the actual levers of democracy.

But as we head into Local Body Election season here in Auckland - and with the General Election already looming well large upon the horizon for some time next year - I have found myself confronted on an increasing basis with sentiments which basically boil down to: "if voting actually changed anything, then they'd make it illegal".

My riposte to this has always been: "And so 'they' did - many, many times."

Of course, I am something of a cynic. I have seen enough of the way Politics actually works up-close and personal to know that 'mere' voting is only the "necessary but not entirely sufficient" basis-bedrock for engaging with democracy. But I have ALSO seen how much glee various right-wing forces almost invariably have when low voter-turnout rates help to avail them unto victory. What Pinochet (and other nasty regimes throughout the 20th and 21st Centuries) have sought to do by faux-'legislative' imposition, in many local polities we have managed to achieve by force of (lack of) will alone. There is only a minimum modicum of difference, after all (in some views) between being unable to vote and simply choosing not to exercise the right-and-privilege - as somewhere around 6.5 out of every 10 Aucklanders did back in 2013 (or as more than a million New Zealanders did a year later in the Generals).

In an earlier piece, I put together a quotation from the late, great Hunter S. Thompson - that politics, at its purest, is "the art of controlling your environment" - with one from The Departed: "I don't want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me".

These are both worthy maxims. And it's not hard to see how even with something as seemingly less glamorous as local body politics, they thoroughly apply. Electing people to represent our interests who are directly responsible for the local areas and authorities we live both in and under, is pretty much one of the most direct ways we're able to exercise 'control' over our immediate environment, and make the resultant future a tangible product of what we believe.

But there's another side to it, too - albeit one which probably applies with more frequency and ferocity at the national level. The reason why Pinochet and all those other autocrats habitually outlaw voting is very simple.

It allows 'the little people' to fight back. To resist. To represent their own interests. Against unelected bureaucrats, ideologues and tyrants.

Hunter S. Thompson called it "voting in self defence". Ironically, an expression he deployed against the W. Bush administration; but one which has obvious and serious import even here in New Zealand.

So when your ballot-papers arrive later this month - and even more so with the General Election sometime next year - do something radical. Vote. Vote in Self Defence. The one thing that Governments fear.