2000: Closing the Gaps
August 21, 2021
By AHNZ
On 15 June, 2000, Labour 5.0 Minister of Finance Michael Cullen officially announced a cornerstone policy of his government called ‘Closing the Gaps’.
Prime Minister Helen Clark had made it very clear that Closing The Gaps referred to a race-based gap between Maoris and “others” in the Speech From The Throne she authored (Dec 1999.)
By June 2000, when Michael Cullen (recently deceased, August 2021) made Closing The Gaps official the story had changed a bit. Gone, the facade of Treaty++ obligation, now the Gap referred to Pacific brown people in general: Maoris AND Pacific Islanders. This changing of the Gaps was not to be the last story revision before the entire fairytale cover-story came crashing down like the pile of wet cards it always was…
Some of the Maoris and Pacific Islanders selected to be enriched by Labour 5.0’s fiscal policy were quite happy. After all, Cullen budgeted them $12,000,000 to watch Labour do it (“monitor the effectiveness of social policy programmes”) and $114,000,000 to do it themselves, $8,000,000 for Maori lawyers, and $50,000,000 play money. A chance to get your hands on all that loot buys a lot of complicity!
Associate Minister for Maori Affairs, Tariana Turia, picked up and ran with Closing The Gaps. So did new Labour MP John Tamihere but each MP had different ideas about what Closing The Gaps was. Turia’s idea of Maori was heraldic- Maoris are those with traced ties back to their tribe and its organisation. Tamihere, on the other hand, wanted the special race privileges for anyone who self-identified as Maori no matter how much or little they dabbled with poi or te reo or made appearances at marae. Turia and Tamihere were in-fighting over whose Maori base the Closing The Gaps lolly scramble was supposed to enrich.
It was in this context that Turia made a speech comparing the colonisation of Maoris by Europeans to the Jewish Holocaust. Closing The Gaps, then, was a reparation program with no end in sight. Even high and inter-generational domestic abuse rates of Maoris, Turia appeared to be saying, were attributable to this holocaust.
Closing The Gaps was already in big trouble from within quite apart from the pounding it was taking from Richard Prebble and Winston Peters who characterised the policy as “social apartheid.” New Zealanders were not ready for dividing their country into two political classes and so by the end of 2000 the Closing The Gaps scam was put away.
“My government is committed to ensuring that this right is maintained, but it goes further than the rights enshrined in the treaty. As long as the economic and social gaps between Maori and other New Zealanders remain large, the government of New Zealand cannot claim to have addressed the needs of all New Zealanders. My government is committed to closing the gaps.” – Speech From The Throne Opening Of Parliament, 21 December 1999, beehive.govt.nz
The “…most urgent and visible gaps exist between Maori and Pacific communities others…The Budget dedicates $114 million over the next four years to build the capacity of Maori and Pacific peoples to design and deliver their own initiatives…The Government will not stand back on this question. We are determined to close the gaps. Our very foundations as a country demand it.” – Michael Cullen, Budget Speech and Fiscal Strategy Report 2000; treasury.govt.nz (2007)
“Indeed, those with good memories will recall a very similar debate which erupted over the “Closing the Gaps” policy promoted, and then abandoned, by the Helen Clark-led coalition governments of 1999-2008. Exactly as has occurred in Britain, the research undertaken in what appeared to be a race issue came back with the unwelcome news that the “gaps” in New Zealand society were generated overwhelmingly by socio-economic factors.” – Chris Trotter, Bowalley Road (2021)
In coming to office, Labour 5.0 had lots of money laundering and scams to achieve that they intended to cloak under Closing The Gaps. New Zealanders will let politicians rob and misgovern them all day long but only if they can be told a good story for why they’re doing it. The pretext might be for God, for Britain, for the flag, for the environment, the Old Timers, the women, the children, the orphans, the war, the economy, or even the pandemic. Helen Clark and Michael Cullen’s flagship pretext in year 1 was Closing The Gaps but to pull it off they required a Maori face.
Running Out of Maoris
Dover Samuels was the initial Maori face but this Minister of Maori Affairs was disgraced so his portfolio had to go to Parekura Horomia and Tariana Turia. The power and responsibility of this back-up team, or the opportunity, seems to have gone to their heads. Turia, in particular, became a liability to Helen Clark for making Labour 5.0 look bad and would usually have been stood down (even though she did nothing wrong) but instead made an apology for the holocaust remarks.
Political colleagues, including Maori, immediately distanced themselves from Turia’s statements and “..Clark demanded a publi apology in the House.” Turia “..lost further credibility when she and Horomia were accused to attempted to ‘gag’ negative comments made about Maori domestic abuse. Interestingly, when the integrity of other Ministers were questioned, Clark expected a suspension or resignation until each Minister’s name was cleared. However, Clark demanded an explanation, not a resignation, from Turia….well aware of the need to defuse this and other problematic situations withouthaving to appoint another Maori Affairs Minister and threaten Labour’s small majority by losing Maori MPs.” – Closing the Gaps? The Politics of Maori Affairs Policy, Humpage (2002); Massey University
This goes to show that Clark knew she needed Turia if Closing The Gaps was to be saved. New guys, John Tamihere and Alliance Coalition MP Willie Jackson would have gladly offered their salesman services but Clark quite rightly recognised that using either rogue would have made them more powerful than we could possibly imagine.
Closing The Gaps 3.0
Redistribution from what Clark and Cullen call “other” New Zealanders to Maoris and Pacific Islanders had not proven a popular cause. Clark’s publicity managers were eliminated, bickered, and shot themselves in their own feet under the pressure of keeping the Closing The Gaps story going.
Apart from opposition MPs, media, and cartoonists tearing down this facade it was even undone from within Government. Race Relations Conciliator, Rajen Prasad, judged that the Closing the Gaps health policy was racist because it gave Maoris preferential treatment in the health system. And, the Chapple Report (2000) written by a senior analyst of the Labour Department showed that these gaps tracked socio-economic status not race at all.
Besides, it wasn’t too hard to look around at all the fat cat Maoris in suits to discredit the idea that being a Maori is what made a person impoverished. Ngai Tahu had just argued their way into their latest greatest windfall of free taxpayer money, and politician Tuku Morgan’s habit of buying $89.00 pairs of underpants was far from forgotten. Old Uncle Dover Samuels could have sold the humble poor Maori stereotype, as he was intended to do. However, Parekura Horomia’s physical presence didn’t say “Let the poor Maori eat” so much as scream “Don’t let that Maori eat me!”
It’s basic economics: If whites get called racist and then respond by saying ‘here’s some money’ then they’re paying people to call them racist. That was the agenda of Closing The Gaps but it had failed. Losing this great pretext of helping brown folks didn’t stop Labour 5.0 though. They went on with their policies just the same but gave up on saying it was about helping brown people, showing that they were always going to do what they were going to do and the cover-story was dispensable. For advertising purposes only.
Labour’s 3rd version of Closing The Gaps was pure socialism- redistribution of wealth to low-income New Zealanders. Government always achieves the opposite of what it sets out to do. Instead of the gaps closing they widened all the more between both Maori and “others” and rich and poor and between New Zealanders and the rest of the world. The collapse of their key pretext led to the early collapse of the Labour 5.0 coalition with Alliance and a snap election in 2002.
Helen Clark and Michael Cullen would have known what closing the gap between rich and poor meant because they, as part of Labour 4.0, had been the ones responsible for creating them. Their government rushed New Zealand headlong and without guidance into a crash course in the New Economy in the late 1980s. Labour polarised the economy into rich and poor, hollowing out the Middle Class by destroying those jobs and driving entire industries offshore.
In doing so, they had also crashed the essential bridge allowing upward mobility for someone who studied and worked hard to lift themselves from any low to any high. “If we can do it, why can’t you?” the Boomers will cry, because their firmware is pre-1987 and any updates to that would risk their entire identity system crashing.
To actually ‘close the gaps’ would be to de-polarise the economy, to re-form the Middle Class. It would be to radically change the very structure of our economy and our society and civilisation. It would, probably, mean rewinding our economy to the Imperial era or Fortress New Zealand days and de-capitalising so that many men would again swing picks in mineshafts or axes in our forests where one man with a sophisticated machine has since replaced them. It would probably mean giving up shipping containers and returning to tea chests and cargo nets that took the labour of many men to load and unload at our wharves. The abolition of mass factory farms so that, again, it would be economically efficient to grow one’s own crops and do so to get ahead in life. This is the vanity of King Canute whipping the sea and thinking he could, in doing so, change the orbit of the moon that makes the tide!
Labour 4.0 and Labour 5.0 didn’t close the gaps, of course, they made them open wider and more rapidly just as Labour 6.0 continue to do. Creating new national holidays simply makes precarious jobs more so or eliminates them completely. Raising the minimum wage raises the price of labour, destroying some more jobs or perhaps entire industries. By such cosmetic forms of ‘helping’, the government simply ensures more zero-hour contracts or that robots replace operators at our supermarkets, hardware and consumer stores, fast food outlets, and petrol stations.
The rich do not pay tax. They have the best accountants and lawyers, they have trust funds and companies. The tax intended to ‘close the gaps’ simply falls all the more on the Middle Class and turns them into poor people too- thus widening the gaps.
The likes of Michael Cullen knew very well that this is what he was doing, just his Finance Minister counterpart in Labour 6.0 knows it now. They simply don’t care about the harm they do or how impossible their promises are so long as they’re getting what they want. Closing The Gaps can and will be used as a cover story again if a government thinks it can get away with it. The only thing stopping a social apartheid being a pretext for government plundering today is that New Zealanders see though it the same way they did in 2000.
Labour will happily try the same trick twice but they will do so with the refinement of lessons learned these past 20 years. This time it will be called He Puapua and this time the role of Tariana Turia will be played by Nanaia Mahuta and Willie Jackson.
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Image ref. Sandra Lee, Jim Anderton, Helen Clark, Michael Cullen during talks to form the Labour 5.0 Coalition, 30 November 1999; Farfax; RNZ
Image ref. Garrick Tremain, ODT (2004); Alexander Turnbull Library
Image ref. Welcome Parekura, Jim Hubbard, The Dominion (26 July 2000); Alexander Turnbull Library
Image ref. Garrick Tremain (2020); garricktremain.nz
Note: So much for Lange’s Labour 4.0. His words here put in the rear-view by Labour 5.0 and even more so by Labour 6.0
“…only in SA, [South Africa] and no other country, has entrenched racism in its constitution and in the law of the land. Apartheid is a special challenge to NZ where we are trying to build a genuine multi-racial society.” – David Lange, 1985
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