The Pandemic Has Highlighted Inequality But Nothing Has Changed

Comment

In the aftermath of World War I returned soldiers and resisters saw government continuing to ignore inequality and were key in planning a new type of government. But today’s government has failed to remedy inequalities or address the alienation that existed before the pandemic

In March 2020 we were all very anxious about how the pandemic would unfold. Buying milk at the dairy up the road I discussed this with the owners, recent emigrants from south China. They were very morose – for sure New Zealand would handle it badly. The implication was that unlike China where the population were used to following orders, New Zealanders and their government would be flakey and incompetent.

As it was, experts were being consulted and the government had the opportunity to take heed of international action and science. Speedily and almost by good fortune, the prominent epidemiologist Sir David Skegg recommended to the quickly convened parliamentary pandemic committee that elimination of the virus was possible because of our island status and increasing understanding of the virus. Other academics who had not previously taken public roles upskilled and became important spokespeople and advisers to government. We went early and hard (well, relatively) and, as in all good New Zealand folklore, came from behind to score.

But coming from behind in this case was not a good look and has remained not a good one when ‘behind’ meant lack of preparedness. Governments had for decades underfunded the health system, particularly public health, and created unemployment and poverty by prioritising the deregulation of all facets of society in the name of freedom to make money, often one sector of the population making money out of the other.

This Thatcherite ‘there is no such thing as society’ theme was by 2020 already being timidly revised by the Labour/Green government. By April 2020 that was another conversation starter – ‘Thank goodness we have a Labour government’ (ergo a government that still has some idea of social responsibility and willingness to take control), and we compared ourselves with the incompetent responses in the US and the UK.

The anxiety, though, for our government in early 2020 was that the systemic underfunding and entrenched inequality in the country could expose the culpability of leadership, as the poorest and least privileged would bear the burden of illness and death. Luckily, the pandemic has over the past two years brought forward long overdue reforms. For instance, grudgingly and after lengthy delay, the Ministry of Health was forced to release health statistics to Māori providers to allow them to plan and run their own immunisation programmes.

However, although the team of 5 million rhetoric and the collectivity of the Covid response have been very successful, there has been inequality of suffering – just as was feared.

In mid-2021 my neighbour and I talked over the fence about how interesting it was that both of us had heard not through the media, which was circumspect, but by word of mouth that homeless people and those in temporary housing, sex workers, the gangs and other marginalised groups were taking the biggest Delta toll. It was kind of funny to hear people expressing outrage and surprise at these groups not following government instructions, as if everybody listened to RNZ and obeyed and respected the government, or even followed what they were on about.

Sadly, though, the Labour government has not used the pandemic as an opportunity to remedy inequalities or to try to address the alienation that existed before the pandemic and was denied in the unity rhetoric. An obvious move that may have ameliorated some of the anger now being expressed would have been to give children and families the opportunity to live with dignity by increasing benefits sizably as widely advised, and to increase taxes on property or wealth or both to allow significantly more spending in health, education and housing.

Although I believe the government has shaped its pandemic policies with an intense awareness and anxiety about inequality, it has only implemented new policies when pushed. It has concealed the reality of social division and suffering using unity rhetoric and has fallen far short of addressing the inequality it inherited.

I am struck by how similar this situation is to New Zealand 100 years ago, when government decided on conscription in World War I as a necessity to avoid outrage about unequal sacrifice.

When war broke out in 1914 New Zealand’s impressive social reform history was stalled. In the 1890s an alliance between small farmers and urban workers led to the Liberal government working with the Reform party to pass remarkable land reform legislation to break up large land holdings. Equally innovatively, they introduced pensions and employment rights legislation (the eight-hour day). However, this radical impetus New Zealand is so famed for had gone by the early 1900s. Very high inequality had developed after a large but unshared wealth increase, and New Zealand had fallen significantly behind Australia in welfare legislation.

As the world war worsened in 1916, New Zealand introduced conscription. Fewer men were wanting to enlist as news from the theatres of war was becoming more alarming. The government feared New Zealand’s pacifist and socialist movements would increase discussion particularly among working people who were often already perceiving the war as an imperial one prepared to sacrifice the working class. And that discussion would result in majority votes in referenda against conscription, as they were in Australia by their Labour government. A referendum was not offered and questioning voices were quickly framed as unpatriotic. In December 1916 silence was enforced by legislation suppressing even the mildest of debate.

New Zealand government’s anxiety was the potential social division (and socialist action) that they thought could be triggered if the army remained a volunteer one. They promoted the idea of equal sacrifice across the society, and any resisters or questioners were portrayed as ‘shirkers’. The fear was that without conscription as the war became more cruel, it would be only the less well-off working-classes who would volunteer and die, while the middle-classes would keep their sons safely at home, triggering social outrage. This is what George Orwell, speaking of Britain, called the “outrageous paradoxes in personal self-interested motivation of the upper classes and enforced sacrifice of the working classes that took place in the Great War”.

Māori were treated in a different but even more contradictory way. At the beginning of the war the colonialist policy of the British Empire that indigenous people could not be enlisted was official policy. However, the creation of a Māori contingent was urged by Māori MPs (particularly Apirana Ngata and Maui Pomare) who felt participation in war would support Māori political efforts to have their rights and grievances finally recognised and redressed. In 1916 the war minister James Allen used the familiar terms of sacrifice and shame to encourage enlistment: “If you fail now you and your tribes can never rest in honour in the days to come.”

However, other iwi, particularly those who had had lands invaded and confiscated reacted differently. The whole idea of exhorting Māori to fight in the name of national unity was challenged by another prominent figure in te ao Māori, Princess Te Puea Herangi: “They tell us to fight for King and Country. Well, that’s all right. We’ve got a King. But we haven’t got a country. That’s been taken off us. Let them give us back our land and then maybe we’ll think about it again.” Conscription was extended to Māori in June 2017 and enforced particularly among Waikato and Maniopoto. And though it was eventually abandoned as a policy, arrests of some resisters were made, and men were imprisoned at Narrow Neck in Auckland. Police action against the prophet Rua Kenana in Urewera was also associated with enforcing conscription.

I do not intend to undermine the wisdom of most of the current government’s Covid policies or disrespect soldiers who died in World War I, but looking with another lens one can see that, just as they were 100 years ago, the facts of difference in society are concealed in government policies today. Inequality and different histories are pushed aside and the idea of one nation asserted in an attempt to avoid conflict and loss of face. But without transfer of power and progressive policies, unity used as a mask has long-term outcomes in democratic societies.

What will be the long-term consequences of government policy in the pandemic? Will the example of competent state action suggest that the state can be reasserted, and this extended peaceably and electorally (as it was in the 1930s and beyond) to create a more equal society? Or will the example of the most vulnerable being neglected in a time of claimed social cohesion lead to socialist uprising to force government change? Or will lack of action to address child poverty and disadvantage continue, and this inequality be manipulated to increase right-wing anti-state sentiment?

Obviously, these outcomes will take place on a global stage, but it is interesting to consider the claim by the French economist Thomas Piketty that the socialism and welfare states of the mid-20th century were the result of the highlighting of unequal sacrifice and the incompetence of the elites in the two world wars.

This played out in New Zealand in the immediate postwar decade as returned soldiers and resisters saw government continuing to ignore inequality and disrespecting the poor. These men with women of similar persuasion were key in planning a new type of government. Disaffected soldiers were among those who in frustration wrecked Queen St in 1932 but they also waited in Fort St watching a big screen showing figures going up and up on the night of the reforming Labour party election in 1935.

The writer Robin Hyde describes the mood that night: “They had been without fires, many of them, for months, without the warmth of security for years. They had been shuffled and cut like a pack of greasy cards [into different patronising relief programmes] … The men who had scored the biggest majorities of their lives forced their way into the narrow space before the screen and hoarsely shouted down at the people. Their lit faces were all glowing … Nothing mattered except that the crowd body, a long time cold and scared in its softest spots … should suddenly be awake and singing again.”

That joy in being heard after decades of neglect was in response to genuine political change. Will that happen again?

Mary Paul’s interest in World War I and social history between the wars was sparked by her work on the New Zealand writer Robin Hyde. Her major publication on Robin Hyde is Her Unselfish Kindness: Robin Hyde’s autobiographical writing (Otago University Press).