by Miles Lacey

In New Zealand there is a phrase that is commonly used in all walks of life: "She'll be right".  Until recently the term generally had positive connotations, reflecting our laid back attitude to life.  In more recent times the term has become increasingly negative as it often refers to a complacent attitude that leads to poor decision making, often of a financial nature.

While the phrase may be unique to New Zealand the mindset behind it is not.  In businesses, government agencies and capitalist societies as a whole the "She'll be right" mindset can be found.  This attitude has often been the reason why so many survivable incidents have turned to tragedies that have claimed the lives of many people.

The Titanic, the Grenfell Tower and the levees of New Orleans were all engineering marvels of their time but all three of these marvels were undermined by the "She'll be right" attitude both in their construction and the way in which decisions relating to them were made.  When these marvels of engineering were put to the test they failed - with deadly consequences.

When the Titanic docked at the port in Southampton it made such an impression that some trade publications were calling her practically unsinkable.  It was the largest ship afloat at the time, it had some of the most advanced safety features on board and the passengers - even in steerage - enjoyed a level of comfort far superior to that available on most ships at the time.  There was only one problem.

When it came to lifeboats only the minimum number of lifeboats required by British maritime law were provided.  That is, only twenty lifeboats.

Even if every lifeboat was filled to capacity only 117 people would’ve been able to get on board yet the Titanic was carrying 2224 passengers and crew.  It’s true there were enough life jackets and life vests for every person on board but they would prove to be useless.  Many, if not most, of the people who died when the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank froze to death in the icy cold waters of the Atlantic Ocean rather than drowned.

What is truly shocking is the “She’ll be right” attitude adopted by the White Star Line (the owners of the Titanic resulted in the reduction of the number of lifeboats from thirty-two to twenty so that the passengers didn’t have to put up with a “cluttered deck”!  (The Titanic: Lifeboats, www.historyonthenet.com)

One would’ve hoped this “She’ll be right” mindset would’ve sunk with the Titanic but it would rear its ugly head again in the Grenfell Tower fire in London in 2017.

The Grenfell Tower was an ugly concrete and glass structure built in 1974.  It was an example of the Brutalist style of architecture that was popular at the time.  Because of its reinforced concrete construction, only the absolute minimum of safety features was installed.  Other safety features, such as water sprinklers, were fitted later retrospectively.  These safety features would prove to be useless when the fire that claimed seventy-two lives broke out.

Because the Tower was built in one of the wealthiest areas of London there was always pressure placed upon the council to do something to improve its appearance.  After many years the Royal Kensington and Chelsea Borough Council began to improve the outward appearance of the building by putting up cladding.  The problem was the company that had won the cladding contract - Arconic - had a product that had been linked to high rise building fires in the United Arab Emirates.  The only reason why Arconic won the contract was that their cladding was cheaper than that of their nearest bidder whose product was fireproof.  To save several thousand pounds the Council allowed the Tower to be converted to a death trap.

The fire broke out in one of the tower floors in one of the fourth-floor apartments.  It was the result of an electrical fault that caused an electrical fault.  If the cladding had not been installed the fire would’ve almost certainly been confined to the apartment concerned.  However, the moment flames came into contact with the cladding the fire raced up the side of the building.  As the fire drills had assumed any fire would be contained within one or two apartments most people had no idea what to do when they were confronted by flames coming from outside the building.  The speed of the fire also made it impossible for many of the residents to get out of the building in time.  (BBC, Grenfell Tower Inquiry: Cladding firm “knew of fire risk”, February 20th, 2021 and BBC, “How the tragedy unfolded at Grenfell Tower”, May 18th, 2018 and others.)

During the inquiry (which is still on-going at the time of writing) it was highlighted how the obsession with saving money saw regular replacing of contractors and project managers.  This led to contractors who answered to no one except their own bosses.  This led to many problems both during and after the refurbishment - and it has also made it difficult to determine who is ultimately at fault for causing those seventy-two deaths.

In contrast to the sinking of the Titanic and the Grenfell Tower fire, the failure of the levees in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina was the product of both nature and the “She’ll be right” attitude.  

In the case of the sinking of the Titanic the ship had sunk after striking an iceberg while travelling at high speed in an area known to have icebergs at that time of year (April 1912).  In the case of the Grenfell Tower fire, an electrical fault triggered the fatal fire.  The electrical fault was caused by years of poor maintenance by the building’s managers.  Both were the result of poor decision making.  In contrast, the collapse of the levees of New Orleans was the result of a Category Three hurricane.  However, nature had little to do with why the levees failed.  As that sounds contradictory, an explanation needs to be provided.

According to the article “The Broken Promise of the Levees that Failed New Orleans”,  which was published in the Smithsonian magazine in September 2015, the levees were constructed out of “a lot of poured concrete, on swishy sand and poor soil; that wasn’t properly maintained”.  Because the levees were constructed out of substandard concrete, used soil that was prone to becoming heavily saturated and had the calculations used for constructing the levees based upon the most conservative interpretation of the data the levees weren’t capable of doing what they had been designed to do.

What made matters worse was the agencies responsible for maintaining the levees and the pumping stations - primarily the United States Army Corps of Engineering - were so confident the levees would hold that they neglected the maintenance of both the levees and the pumping stations.  Tragically, the belief the levees would hold prevailed among many New Orleans residents so many of them refused to leave their homes.

While it is true that the storm surge created by Hurricane Katrina simply swept over the levees in some places the vast majority of the fatalities in New Orleans occurred with the breaching of the levees in several places, in particular the 17th Street Canal.  These breaches should not have come as a total surprise to the authorities because, for over a year before Hurricane Katrina, people in the area had been complaining about their front yards being flooded because of seepages along the levees in the area.  These concerns had not been acted upon.  Perhaps if these concerns were listened to, the weaknesses of the levees may have been detected and measures undertaken to strengthen them.  That failure to act killed nearly seven hundred people in New Orleans, the majority of whom were black working-class people.

It is foolish to claim that a Socialist society would eliminate the “She’ll be right” mindset that had such tragic consequences in the Titanic, the Grenfell Tower and Hurricane Katrina disasters.  The fire and explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the (then) Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1986 proved that.  However, unlike Socialism, the “She’ll be right” mindset is able to flourish within Capitalism because the foundation stone of Capitalism is the profit motive. 

The profit motive often leads to appallingly bad decision making such as reducing the number of lifeboats on an ocean liner, contracting out the installation of cladding on a building to a contractor offering the cheapest rather than the safest product and the designing and construction of essential infrastructure like levees on the basis of the most conservative data available and with the shoddiest materials available.

It is worth mentioning that the loss of lives caused by the sinking of the Titanic and the Grenfell Tower fire could’ve been prevented.  However, in the case of Hurricane Katrina, lives still would’ve been lost for there were many factors that caused the deaths of so many people in that tragedy.  Yet, the death toll in Hurricane Katrina would’ve almost certainly been much lower if the levees had been better constructed using higher quality building materials and if they had been properly maintained.

Disasters don’t happen in isolation.  They happen because of decisions that took place a few years earlier (as in the case of the Titanic) or because of decisions made decades earlier (as in the cases of the Grenfell Tower fire and the failure of the levees during Hurricane Katrina).  They are made worse by decisions influenced by cheap-skate penny-pinching and complacency about how (supposedly) indestructible a marvel of engineering or construction is.

Poor decision making, cheap-skate penny-pinching and complacency are all hallmarks of the “She’ll be right” mentality that flourishes within Capitalism.  Creating a Socialist society won’t eliminate disasters or the “She’ll be right” mindset entirely but it will eliminate the profit motive and the cheap-skate penny-pinching that so often leads to disasters.  Eliminating the profit motive will prevent many, if not most, disasters from happening and reduce the impact of those disasters that can’t be prevented.

Article by Rufus Tyler

The Covid-19 virus most likely originated from the wet markets of Wuhan, China. It is certainly not a manufactured disease as proposed by former United States President Donald Trump – who claimed that it came from a Chinese lab - and it wasn't spread deliberately by American military personnel during the 2019 Kowari trilateral military exercises that were hosted by Australia and attended by the US and China in Northern Queensland as claimed by Chinese propagandists.

The wet markets are ideal places for the disease to jump the species barrier; the animals - whose immune systems are compromised due to stress and a poor diet - are kept in cramped cages, in high heat and humidity, in close proximity to many other species. There's no need to resort to conspiracy theories to explain the emergence of new zoonotic diseases in these conditions.

The outcome of the disease has varied from country to country. China, Taiwan, Korea and New Zealand have, so far, had the most success dealing with Covid-19. These places all share certain strategies that have helped achieve their relative success.

The best way to deal with the new pandemic has been enforcing “lockdowns”: closing non-essential businesses, using close contact tracing, encouraging people to work from home whenever possible and wearing masks when out and about. Frequent handwashing is one of the best ways to prevent infection. Some expect that a vaccine may soon be able to return life back to normal.

Other nations where the government has failed to act decisively have seen soaring infection rates. Just five countries: the USA, India, Brazil, Mexico and the UK account for half of all Covid deaths (https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n314). Together these places make up about 27 percent of the world population or 2,120,385,217 people out of a world population of 7,794,798,739 people in 2020. (https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/population-by-country/)

Social media has been a breeding ground for false claims. These include:

• Drinking bleach will kill the virus that causes Covid-19
• Snorting cocaine can cure Covid-19.
• Covid-19 is caused by 5G networks.
• Drinking boiled garlic water can prevent a person from getting Covid-19.
• Masturbation can protect a person from getting Covid-19.

Perhaps it's understandable that people want to take concrete action to help themselves. Not everyone, however, is motivated by the desire to help. Some hucksters have tried peddling snake oil cures for a quick buck. Most notably a "miracle mineral solution" has been touted as a cure.

Seeking a profit at the expense of people's health is deplorable, especially at times when there is genuine fear and anxiety about Covid-19. What is even worse is that some political leaders are among the worst offenders. Trump has ill-advisedly told people that drinking disinfectant might help.

Another populist president, Jair Bolsonaro, who is sometimes known as Brazil's Trump, has pushed this sort of thing further by insisting his government recommend chloroquine as a cure for Covid. Although he himself was afflicted by the disease, it hasn't stopped him from deliberately misinforming his people. He is reported as saying that if he'd had chloroquine at the time he would have recovered quicker. (https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/using-misinformation-as-a-political-weapon-covid-19-and-bolsonaro-in-brazil/)

Shockingly, he has admitted in private that the drug is simply a placebo. He has said that it's important to let workers feel a false sense of security by giving them some little pill that will encourage them to go back to work.

According to NPR, the ability of the Brazilians to address the challenges posed by Covid-19 have been hampered by how fragmented the health system in Brazil is. Brazil has a three-tier health system that works something like this: (a) there is one public health system that aims to be universal, (b) workers in the formal economy are covered by their work health insurance (with a high out of pocket excess) and (c) wealthier people use private hospitals.

In Brazil, 60% of ICU beds are in private hospitals that serve 25% of the population. The poorest people only speak to a doctor or pharmacist when they are ill and go to the chemist to buy medicine.

Brazil is not the only country in Latin America where Covid-19 has proven to be a difficult challenge. The reasons have been as much socio-economic as they have been political.

According to The Lancet, the Americas account for 48% of all Covid deaths. Crowded conditions, poverty, social discord, poor governance, fragmented and underfunded health systems have contributed to the disease's spread. Underlying health conditions like diabetes and obesity have made the virus more deadly. In Peru, 85% of deaths were in people who were either overweight or obese.

Some 54% of people in Latin America work in the informal economy. In Peru, this number may be as high as 70%. These people have no option but to continue working every day because they have no safety net of any sort. Lockdowns are ineffective in these conditions.

Quality of life, as measured by life expectancy, infant mortality rates and other statistics have improved as a whole but this progress is unequal within Latin American countries. Cuba and Venezuela have bucked this trend over the last ten years.

Putting profits ahead of people's wellbeing is the crux of the problem. The countries that have had the worst outcomes all have tried to put the so-called needs of the economy ahead of public health. This strategy has failed catastrophically. Attempting “soft” lockdowns, ones with a myriad of exceptions – such as classifying businesses like hairdressers and nail salons as essential - has exacerbated the effects of the pandemic in terms of both the economy and contagion/fatality rates.

In Latin America, Pfizer has been accused of "bullying" various countries through practices such as asking for cover against civil lawsuit indemnification and requesting collateral in the form of assets like embassy buildings overseas. 

The lack of social distancing has made sure the “first wave” never really abates before being hit by the “second wave”, all the while the “third wave” looms.

Capitalism is directly responsible for the tragedy that is currently unfolding. The hunters and trappers that supply the wet markets in underdeveloped countries have been driven to eke out a living further and further into the bush, where countless new diseases lurk, because they have been denied opportunities elsewhere. Many of these hunters in China were at one point peasant farmers, smallholders who were unable to compete with large corporations practising industrialised farming.

The cramped, overcrowded conditions in these factory farms are the perfect breeding ground for disease. The industry's solution is the use of prophylactic antibiotics, which causes problems of its own – namely the rise of antibiotic-resistant pathogens. We can certainly expect more outbreaks of new zoonotic illnesses in the future.

Being the source of the problem hasn't stopped capitalism from profiting from the crisis. One way has been through stimulus packages that line the pockets of the ruling class.  The relief packages are espoused as a way to help out the poor but vast quantities of money go directly to corporations, ostensibly to ensure that they continue to pay their workers. In the United States the majority of these stimulus packages went to companies with multi-million dollar yearly profits, many took the payout while still laying off employees. The labouring classes have been left to feed off the table scraps of the rich, and what little money has reached them overwhelmingly went straight to landlords and banks as mortgage repayments.

As the only productive class in society, it will be the working class who will have the onerous task of repaying all this deficit spending through ever more drastic cuts to social services, through increased taxes on consumption and wages. Capital gains will probably go untouched, though.

Another way the ruling class has wound up benefitting from the pandemic has been the introduction of draconian measures which aim to control the population. Protests demanding social justice have been stifled in the Americas through the selective use of social distancing. Large gatherings of people have been banned effectively curtailing dissent.

The clearest example would be the waning strength of Chilean demonstrations against the Pinochet era constitution. The Piñera administration wasted no time in bringing in legislation that framed meeting in large groups as criminal, making them seem irresponsible for risking an increase in Covid-19 transmission. Black Lives Matter in the United States has been treated in a similar way.

In Spain lockdowns have been instituted on a neighbourhood by neighbourhood basis, heavily targetting working-class areas, where there are fewer jobs and fewer medical facilities. These people have been denied a way to seek better treatment. It is a way to instil fear in the population to control them more completely.

In summary, the tragedy has been aggravated by capitalism. It is unlikely, although possible, that the virus would have started without it. The ruling classes' measures and inaction have made the death toll far worse than would've been the case otherwise.

The current nationalistic fighting over who gets the vaccine first will also cause issues. For the vaccine to work it is important that it be rolled out as fast as possible over the entire globe – the pandemic is an international problem that knows no borders.

According to CNN, the Russian Sputnik V vaccine is making inroads in Latin America where the bourgeoisie fear Russian influence and prestige is increasing. Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay, and Venezuela have approved its use. Colombia's soon to follow. Brazil, Chile, and Mexico (again) are going with the Chinese vaccine.

Health officials in these countries have stated that it's easier dealing with a government than a private company. Thus, even the bourgeoisie media and many Latin American health officials have conceded that the answer to addressing the Covid-19 pandemic has been to deal with governments rather than with corporations like Pfizer.

Phasing inoculation slowly, giving it to whoever can afford it first, will simply allow Covid-19 to mutate, rendering the solution useless.

Only a Socialist society, working along internationalist lines can organise an effective response to a true pandemic like this one. Make no mistake, there will be other pandemics in the future, which could very well be more virulent and more destructive. Greedy, grasping capitalist actions – like the ones we've witnessed lately - will doom us. Socialism is the only way forward for humanity.

Image: Mass graves in Brazil for Covid-19 victims. Copyright: antiguaobserver.com

Prior to the European settlement of New Zealand, most Maori lived in small villages where the very notion of ownership was unheard of.  Housing was usually allocated according to the position held by a person, or more commonly, a family within the community.  The houses were usually made of whatever materials were available, especially raupo.  They were also quite small because most of the activities undertaken within the villages were done outside or in communal buildings such as the marae (meeting house). 

The earliest European inhabitants were whalers, ship repairers and missionaries who generally lived in small stone or wooden cottages that were constructed from the same materials used by the local Maori.  By about the 1840s pre-fabricated housing was being brought in from Australia.

Earthquakes in 1848 and 1855 in the Wellington region made builders reluctant to use bricks and masonry for building materials.  Instead, strong timber from native trees, especially rimu and kauri, became the most common building materials.  This, combined with readily available land, meant that most housing tended to be single or double-storey dwellings.  By the outbreak of the First World War the Californian bungalow had become the most common building type in New Zealand.  

Apart from certain inner-city areas or areas with steep terrain (such as Wellington city), the vast majority of homes were privately owned single storey stand-alone dwellings on their own sections.  Many of these private homes were not owned by those who lived in them.  In mining towns like Denniston on the West Coast of the South Island and railway towns like Cross Creek on the Rimutaka (now Remutaka) railway incline in the lower North Island, the homes were owned by companies.   In other places, the homes were owned by landlords and property speculators.  And, of course, slum lords.  

Charities and local councils sometimes provided cheap housing for old age pensioners and certain groups in need of help but, until the 1930s, anyone who was unfortunate enough to end up sick, unemployed or otherwise unable to afford the rents being charged found themselves living in slums.   Discrimination against non-Europeans when it came to trying to buy or rent property also resulted in many people reduced to living in housing that was often little more than wooden and corrugated iron shacks.   Until the Depression, in the 1930s this poverty was mostly confined to a few inner-city areas or in rural areas where it was largely out of sight and out of mind.

During the Depression, many companies went bankrupt while others dismissed some, if not most, of their workforce.  Those employers who did keep their workers slashed their wages.  Public servants faced pay cuts of 20% or more with the result that many people began to default on their mortgages or rents and were evicted.  Slums began to expand and so did extreme poverty, malnutrition, diseases, social unrest and political militancy.  For young unemployed men, their already dire situation became worse as they were sent to work camps in remote areas to do heavy labour such as road construction and were forced to live in work camps where the accommodation was often nothing more than tents.

Traditionally, charities were able to step in and help if people fell on hard times but the demands placed upon the charities by the Depression proved too much for them.  Not only were the numbers of people needing help too great to cope with but they couldn't raise the money they needed to provide help.  

Many of the more liberal clergy, such as the much-beloved “Uncle Scrim", were so shocked by what they saw they began to support the Labour Party and its policy of building state housing.  There is no doubt that Labour's state housing policy was a key factor in their election victory in 1935.

The first state house didn't become available for rent until 1938 and the image of Michael J Savage – the first Labour Prime Minister of New Zealand – helping to move the furniture of the first state tenant into their state home remained a lasting image for generations of Labour supporters.  The house is nothing spectacular to look at: it's a plain-looking timber house with plenty of sun sitting on a quarter acre section in Miramar, Wellington.  Yet this house would be the prototype of thousands of state houses.

During the Second World War state housing construction took a back seat as resources were diverted to fight the war against fascist aggression but, once the war had ended, the government resumed its state housing building programme.  It was motivated, in part, out of honouring its pledge to look after returning servicemen but also by the need to provide employment for them.  Whole suburbs of state houses were constructed and assistance, such as cheap housing loans and rent to buy agreements, were introduced to make homeownership as affordable as possible.  

In eastern Porirua, Lower Hutt, Wainuiomata and south Auckland (to name but a few places) state housing areas grew rapidly.  However, the growth of these areas wasn't fast enough to cope with two major demographic changes.  The first was the rural to urban drift of (mostly) Maori workers who'd lost their jobs on the farms thanks to growing mechanisation and the second was the arrival of Pacific Islanders to work as cheap labour in the factories and on the farms.   

Maori and Pacific Island workers moving to the new state housing areas underwent a major culture shock as they found themselves in an environment where there was no sense of community and where there was little use – or value – attached to their languages, cultures and traditions.  This, combined with their struggle to find work due to racial discrimination and language barriers (in the case of Pacific Islanders), led to many social problems of which alcoholism, crime and gangs were among the more prominent features.

It was from about the early 1950s that state housing areas began to get a bad reputation among the bourgeoisie, especially when it came to young people.  My father was one of those “juvenile delinquents" of “questionable moral character" who were the subject of the Mazengarb Report: a government inquiry into juvenile delinquency in Lower Hutt launched in the 1950s.  (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazengarb_Report)  

Not only did social attitudes towards state housing and those who lived in state housing change from about that time but the type of state housing that was being built.  The stand-alone single-story house on a quarter-acre section was giving way to terrace housing and semi-detached two-unit dwellings.  The quality of the materials was declining as the emphasis switched from quality to building as many cheap state housing units as possible.  The switch to poorer quality building materials led to problems like leaking roofs and pipes, mildew on the ceilings and walls, and homes that were bitterly cold during winters and unbearably hot during summers.  This led to many health problems among state tenants, including children, who were getting illnesses like asthma, whooping cough and rheumatic fever that resulted from poor quality housing.  (https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/regional/291866/porirua-says-bad-housing-a-central-govt-problem)  Those who thought this was only a state housing problem were soon to find out that going for the cheapest building materials and builders to save money were about to find out the hard way that this could also happen with private housing.

The proliferation of state housing helped keep private rents down and dramatically increased the quality of private homes.  In many cases, the private homes were being built by the same companies being contracted to build state houses, such as Fletcher.  However, with deregulation of the housing and construction sectors, the watering down of building codes and the opening up of the housing market to foreign property speculators during the 1980s and 1990s would have devastating consequences.

In 1984 David Lange became the Prime Minister of New Zealand and his Labour government began to embark upon a radical programme of deregulating the economy, privatising local and central government services and amalgamating various local governments.  While this was promoted as a means of reducing debt and making both the economy and government departments more efficient and competitive the reality proved to be very different and this was reflected in what happened to housing.

Deregulating the construction industry opened the way for so-called cowboys to enter the construction industry.  Many of them were hired because they were cheap labour rather than trained to any reasonable standards.   According to the October 12th, 2016 Newshub article “The Causes of the Leaky Homes Crisis” was caused, in large part, by building code changes in 1995 that allowed untreated timber to be used in housing frames.  The use of cladding also contributed to leaking homes that effectively made them uninhabitable and worthless.  (https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2016/10/the-causes-of-the-leaky-homes-crisis.html)  

To make matters worse the amalgamation of local councils resulted in many people losing their jobs, including building inspectors.  This resulted in over-worked building inspectors being unwilling or unable to provide more than a cursory examination of buildings before signing them off as fit for the purpose for which they were built: a point that was highlighted in the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the collapse of the CTV building during the February 11th, 2011, Christchurch earthquake.

However, what proved to be just as toxic was the combination of the benefit cuts, the wage cuts that followed the introduction of the Employment Contracts Act in 1991 and the sale of state housing to property investors that were introduced by Jim Bolger's National Government that was elected in 1990.  Not only did these changes help create a housing shortage, especially for low-income people and the working classes, but they left many more people impoverished to the point they could no longer afford to pay their rent or mortgages and they ended up being evicted.  Some state tenants found themselves forced to pay market rental rates.

After the Christchurch earthquake in 2011, the National-led government used the earthquake as an excuse to evict state tenants and demolish the houses, as happened in Cannons Creek in Porirua and much of Lower Hutt, or to sell them, as happened in Titahi Bay.  

Add to this mix the Resource Management Act 1991.  This Act was supposed to restrain urban sprawl and protect the environment.  Instead, the Act was used as a powerful weapon by bourgeoisie property owners to prevent the construction of housing for low-income people, usually by citing the impact on property values.  The costs of complying with resource consents made it uneconomic for construction firms to build housing for low ìncome and working-class people.  It also failed to prevent widespread environmental pollution and water contamination, especially in rural areas.  (https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/opinion/122284651/the-end-of-the-resource-management-act-is-nigh)  

From the 1990s onwards immigration policies were relaxed to encourage skilled workers to migrate here, especially ones whose skills and expertise was needed.  New immigration policies also allowed wealthy foreigners to invest in housing and various types of businesses in New Zealand.  This led to large scale purchasing of housing, particularly in Auckland.  Whole suburbs were built to meet the demand for housing that were created by these investors.  Some bought houses to rent them to affluent tenants but others bought houses to simply leave them empty until the value of the properties had doubled or even trebled before selling them in a practice referred to as land banking.

A ban on non-resident foreign ownership of existing housing stock (other than Singaporeans and Australians) was introduced by the Labour-led government in August 2018 (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-45199034) but this did little to curb the rise of house prices and rent not only in major centres like Wellington and Auckland but also in areas traditionally shunned by most private property owners such as Porirua where the average rent is now $700 a week – the highest in New Zealand!

Article by Sione Ma'u 

After the formation of the Labour-led coalition government in 2017, there were hopes that the housing crisis was going to be tackled. Labour promised a mass house-building programme called “Kiwibuild” that would build 100,000 new houses over a decade. The Government would play an active role in driving this programme and work together with developers, city councils and other landowners (such as iwi) to deliver high-quality housing at affordable prices for first-home buyers.

After Joe Biden was elected President of the United States in November 2020 the big question on most people's minds was if Trump would go peacefully.

That question was answered on January 6th, 2021.

From the moment the election results began to roll in Trump insisted that he had won the elections but that the media and the Democrats had stolen it from him.

Barely a day went by when he did not accuse election officials of counting what he regarded as invalid votes, ignoring ballots and rigging election voting machines. He also made accusations of widespread voter fraud. Yet, when these accusations were made in various court hearings, even the judges whom Trump appointed declared that the elections were conducted correctly and there was no evidence of ballot or voter fraud

From the White House Trump crowed “Stop the steal!” and his administration continued to repeat this mantra to a media and a nation that had, with few exceptions, ceased to take him seriously.

The people who did take him seriously were the MAGA (Make America Great Again) cult that treated Trump as if he was an American Messiah, white supremacist groups like QAnon and Proud Boys and far-right private militia groups. Pro-Confederacy groups, Nazi and Fascist groups who had been emboldened by the Trump Administration also supported Trump's “Stop the Steal” mantra.

On January 6^th, 2021, Donald Trump gave a speech outside the White House in which he called upon his supporters to march on the U.S Capitol building. The reason this date was chosen was that this was the day the U.S election results were due to be made official in Congress.

His supporters not only marched to the U.S Capitol but they stormed it. They occupied the building briefly before they were cleared out. Violent clashes between Trump's supporters and the police took place which left five people dead: one supporter, one police officer and three other people.

Almost immediately the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) launched an investigation of what even the most restrained American media were now calling a coup.

Initially, Trump was accused of inciting a riot by calling upon his supporters to march to the U.S Capital to stop the steal but the FBI investigation and the huge amount of information posted on the Internet quickly revealed that these protesters had been planning the takeover of the U.S Capitol for several weeks. The combat gear, the zip ties and the weapons they carried left no doubt they had come to kill or harm specific people.

Two people who were specifically singled out were Mike Pence, Trump's Vice-President because he was the one who was to formally announce the election results to Congress, thus certifying the results, and Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat Speaker of the House and very vocal critic of Trump.

The mob had not been whipped up into a frenzy by Trump as had been believed on the day.

Indeed, the New York Times article “Capital Siege was planned online. Trump supporters now planning the next one” that was published on January 7^th, 2021 stated:

“The planning for Wednesday's assault on the U.S Capitol happened largely in plain view, with chatters in far-right forums explicitly discussing how to storm the building, handcuff lawmakers with zip ties and disrupt the certification of Joe Biden's elections – in what they portrayed as responding to orders from President Trump.

“This went far beyond the widely reported, angry talk about thronging Washington that day. Trump supporters exchanged tactical advice about what to bring and what to do once they assembled at the Capitol to “conduct citizen's arrests” of members of Congress. One poster said, '[Expletive] ties! I'm bringing rope!”

“Such comments were not confined to dark corners of the Web. They were scooped up by researchers who made their findings public weeks before a seemingly unprepared Capitol Police force was overwhelmed by thousands of rioters, in an incident that left one officer, one rioter and three other people dead.”

Indeed, on January 26^th, 2021, the Wall Street Journal published the article 'FBI Capitol Riots Investigation Shifts Gears' stated that the FBI had extended its investigation to “building broader conspiracy cases after making arrests on lower-level offences”.

It is believed that around 400 people have been arrested for their role in the riots but the FBI is expected to lay more serious charges and indict many more people as they ramp up their investigation to include conspiracy charges. According to the Wall Street Journal article, the FBI has had to bring in a lot of investigators to sift through over 200,000 digital tips gathered from social media, members of the public, confidential informants, local news and surveillance footage. The FBI field officers have spread out across the United States to make arrests, search homes and interview witnesses, family members and associates of those who've been arrested or have been implicated in their involvement in the riots.

Michael Sherwin, the acting U.S Attorney for the District of Columbia, was quoted in the article stating:

“The scope and scale of this investigation and these cases are really unprecedented not only in FBI history but probably DOJ [Department of Justice] history.”

That the riots were not only planned but that such planning extended all the way up to Trump and his key advisors, which include the far-right conspiracy theorist Steve Bannon of Brierbart News (and one of the top twenty people in QAnon), raises serious questions about just how much of a threat to the United States the far right poses and the extent of their influence during the Trump Administration. It is partly to address these issues that the U.S Congress voted to impeach Trump on January 14^th, 2021 (BBC website same day).

As of today (January 27^th NZDST, January 26^th EST), the majority of members of the Senate voted to impeach Trump but most Republicans have voted to call the impeachment “unconstitutional”, which only goes to show how divorced from reality the Republican Party has become from reality.

In the immediate aftermath of the January 6^th riots there were fears that similar violence would flare up again on Joe Biden's inauguration day, January 20^th, with the result about 25,000 National Guards were brought into Washington D.C, key sites including the National Mall and the Washington Monument grounds were closed off to the public and everyone waited to see what would happen. One protester turned up!

Joe Biden's speech, which was broadcast live around the world, was only a short one that lasted barely 26 minutes. It was generally regarded as an ordinary speech that was only made remarkable because it wasn't Trump giving it.

It was a general consensus at the time of the election of Joe Biden, and certainly, a sentiment expressed quite forcefully by our American comrades in several articles that were posted on the In Defence of Marxism website, that Joe Biden was almost certainly going to be a lame-duck President who would do nothing to advance the interests of the working class. Even by the standards of bourgeois reformism, he was unlikely to deliver anything much.

Thus, Joe Biden must've caught many people on the political Left by his actions within twenty-four hours of his inauguration. Among them was the issuing of the following Executive Orders:

• The United States will rejoin the Paris Climate Accord.

• Removing the ban on trans people serving in the United States military.

• Ending the process of the United States withdrawal from the World Health Organisation.

• Revoking the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline.

• Launch an initiative to advance racial equity and end the 1776 Commission.

• Revoke order to exclude undocumented immigrants from the U.S Census.

• Require the wearing of face masks and the practice of social distancing in all Federal buildings and facilities.

• Stop the construction of the U.S – Mexico border wall.

• Reverse the travel ban from Muslim-majority countries.

• End harsh and extreme immigration enforcement.

• Reverse discrimination on grounds of gender identity and sexual orientation.

• Implement various measures to curb the spread of Covid-19 in the United States.

• Restore collective bargaining power for federal workers.

• Ask agencies to boost food aid and improve the delivery of stimulus cheques.

• Lay the foundations for the establishment of a federal minimum wage of $15 an hour.

As Marxists, we have no delusions that these are anything other than mildly reformist policies. At best they may provide some short term relief for workers and marginalised groups within the United States but not the sort of changes that only a Socialist society will bring about. However, they must seem almost revolutionary after four years of the Trump Administration during which many basic rights for millions of Americans were trampled over, such as the right of a woman to have an abortion.

Biden's reformist policies have been driven by a perceived need to unite Americans but the problem that neither he nor those whom he has brought into his Cabinet, such as the first black female Vice-President Kamala Harris, is that Trump's Administration has exposed many serious flaws within the American version of bourgeoisie democracy.

As our comrades in the United States have correctly pointed out American democracy is in crisis.

Arnold Schwarzenegger recently tweeted a video in which he repeated a claim often made by many Americans. That is, American democracy provides a beacon of hope and inspiration for the rest of the world. In reality, that sentiment has never been entirely accurate and, within the last few decades, has been nothing more than a bare-faced lie. In an increasing number of countries around the world, the American version of democracy has been held up as a shining example of how not to run a democracy.

The American version of democracy has four key flaws:

1. The President is determined by an Electoral College rather than the popular vote. Every state has a certain number of votes in the Electoral College that is determined by the population of that state. If the majority of votes are cast for a particular Presidential candidate all the votes in that state (with a couple of exceptions) goes to that candidate. This often means that the Presidential candidate who won the popular vote often doesn't become the President, as was the case in 2016 when Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but lost the Presidential election to Donald Trump because he won the majority of Electoral College votes.

2. There are very few legal safeguards in the U.S Constitution or anywhere else in their legal system to protect against abuses of power by the incumbent President, not least because the President gets to appoint the very judges and other public officials who are responsible for holding the President and their officials to account. Trump, in particular, appointed many cronies to positions of authority including Supreme Court judges.

3. The President can override Congress by ruling by Executive Order. There are no legal restraints placed upon Joe Biden or any other President to prevent them from ruling by Executive Order, apart from the highly partisan impeachment trials where guilt or innocence is determined by party loyalty rather than by whether or not the President did anything illegal and the occasional defiant Supreme Court judge.

4. The mid-term elections ensure that the politicians are always in election mode and, therefore, making decisions based on how it would be received by their financial backers and those who would vote for them rather than what's in the interests of the American people, especially the working classes.

As Marxists, our key criticism of American democracy is that it's not a Socialist state of the workers, by the workers and for the workers. Despite the fact the wealth of the United States was built upon the sweat of the working classes and, for much of its history, slaves the wealth of the United States has been pocketed by a privileged elite that accounts for less than one percent of the population.

Here in New Zealand we often complain about the domination of the Labour Party by reformists, Blairites and the bourgeoisie but there's no doubt there are differences between them and the National Party. From time to time the Labour Party has even passed laws that have benefitted the working classes. For this reason, the working classes still continue to vote for and support the Labour Party and a key factor in why we support entryism in regards to that party.

In the United States, this distinction between the two major political parties does not exist. Both parties have largely dismissed the working classes as an unredeemable, stupid, poorly educated, lazy and bigoted rabble whose votes are only courted in key battleground states where their votes could make a difference. Little wonder that our comrades in the United States believe that the only hope for the working class is for them to form their own political party run on Socialist principles and practices rather than through the Democratic Party.

Covid-19 and the events of January 6^th have changed the United States forever. There will be no return to the way things used to be and this has been grudgingly admitted through the executive orders passed by President Biden. He knows, as well as most Americans, that the burden of the economic and health consequences of Covid-19 has fallen disproportionately upon the American working classes. This has led to the growing radicalisation of the working classes. The problem they face is they don't know who to trust or who to turn to for answers.

Many of them threw their support behind Trump because he at least paid lip service to the need to create jobs and look after the working classes. The fact his policies left them worse off economically, did nothing to improve their job security or standard of living and cost many thousands of them their lives due to his incompetent handling of Covid-19 enabled the Democrats to win many seats in Congress and Senate and may have finally forced both President Biden and the Democratic leadership to accept that “business as normal” just won't cut it in 2021.

Ironically, Trump's MAGA thugs and their extreme right mates may have helped push the Democrats further left than its leadership feels comfortable with because of their actions on January 6^th. It also opens up a very small window of opportunity for the American comrades to stage an intervention, especially as Bernie Sanders still has a lot of grassroots support within the Democratic Party that could be mobilised and even radicalised along Marxist lines.

Regardless of how one interprets the extraordinary events of January 2021 the one thing that cannot be denied is that American democracy has been exposed for the sham that it really is. Those who have borne the brunt of the suffering and pain that American Capitalism has created and which their so-called Democracy entrenched have had enough and they want practical and proven solutions to their misery. Thus, only a Socialist United States of America of the workers, run for the workers and chosen by the workers of America can free them from the evil that is American Capitalism.

State of parties after the count on election night (Turnout 82.5% - up 2.7% on 2017)

(*Special votes (overseas votes) yet to be counted ** Māori Party lead Labour in electorate -special votes will determine outcome)

A political earthquake struck New Zealand on general election night with the Labour Party securing a second term in office with an absolute majority. This is the first time since the MMP voting system was introduced in 1996 that a political party has won such a majority.

The New Zealand Minister of Finance, Hon. Grant Robertson, delivered the budget on 14 May 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the original budget had to be scrapped.  The new budget is  dubbed "Rebuilding together" and its main focus is on jobs.

The main budget item, whose cost dwarfs all others by an order of magnitude, is the $50 billion COVID Response and Recovery Fund (CRRF). Most of the money is to save businesses with wage subsidies and tax relief, and launch a number of major infrastructure projects to create more jobs.  About $30 billion of this fund has already been committed.   This also includes ongoing costs associated with keeping COVID-19 eliminated from New Zealand.  Everyone entering the country is put up, for 14 days, in hotels which have been repurposed as quarantine facilities.  People are tested twice during quarantine - near the beginning (day 3) and near the end (day 12) of the quarantine period, before being cleared to enter the country proper.

Alan Woods comments on the uprising in the USA, which was sparked by the police murder of George Floyd, and has become the catalyst for an explosion of anger by the downtrodden in America that has sent shockwaves throughout the world. What is the way forward?