The spectacle of competence: global pandemic and the redesign of leadership in a post neo-liberal world

ABSTRACT

This discussion piece examines the role that New Zealand played in the global media narrative about Covid-19 responses. The New Zealand Government’s response in general, and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s leadership in particular, came to stand as an example of functional governance to a world experiencing the accelerating fragmentation of Western neo-liberal geo-political economy. The ‘spectacle of competence’ that has characterized Ardern’s leadership is bound up in a pre-existing set of political fault lines that the pandemic has served to amplify. New Zealand’s geo-political cultural position, and the competence (both spectacular and actual) that its leadership has come to represent reveal something of the fracture of political economy of the global North and West, not least because the construction of New Zealand as representing a successful ‘Western’ response is geographically, economically and culturally inaccurate. Contrasting the New Zealand government’s pandemic response to the failed responses of Western models of governance, this piece argues that Jacinda Ardern’s leadership is important, not because it represents an example of Western success but rather because it represents a departure from the deadly consequences of neo-liberal norms.

KEYWORDS:

• Covid-19
• neo-liberalism
• New Zealand
• leadership
• nationalism
• bio-politics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Further information

This Special Issue article has been comprehensively reviewed by the Special Issue editors, Associate Professor Ted Striphas and Professor John Nguyet Erni.

Notes

1 New Zealand’s refusal to join the five eyes alliance in a joint communique regarding Hong Kong is an example of the increasingly complex geopolitical tightrope act the country is attempting to walk.

2 The phrases ‘Global North’ and ‘West’ are used somewhat interchangeably in this article and reveal something of the limitations of both concepts. I have felt it necessary to reference both the ‘Global North’ and its preceding ‘Western’ conception though both are limited by their ontological shortcomings as the Post War order wanes.

3 It should be noted that both leaders profess to support the notion of free trade whilst wielding nationalist populism to assert that the current problem lies in the distortion of its original tenets (for the UK in the form of the EU and for the US in the form of a World Trade Organisation that supposedly now favours China).

4 Something of this is encapsulated in Pankaj Mishra’s excellent London Review of Books essay ‘Flailing States’.

5 Through both traditional national media and social media.

6 However, the enactment of these rules contained a telling signal as to its primary aims. Foreign citizens could in fact own houses in New Zealand but were required to build them first: a move intended to prevent global capital flows inflating housing stock that Labour felt should be a public necessity rather than a global commodity. By forcing foreign capital to build rather than purchase, the government signalled an openness to global capital investment but a rejection of global free market mechanisms for an essential public good.

7 In part because of a failure to implement a subsequently recommended capital gains tax.

8 Comparing the New Zealand government’s pandemic response with that of its earlier actions against foreign capital in its housing market is potentially fraught. Not least for its xenophobic potential to associate foreign house buyers with a pathogen. For this reason it is important to stress that this was about capital flows and protection of the country's residents rather than human migration. The New Zealand Ardern government has been active in consistently raising its quota of refugees including during the pandemic itself though admittedly from a low base.

9 So far, amongst the Western nationalist projects that have gained ground since the collapse of the global financial system in 2008, with the exception of Scottish and Catalonian separatist projects, the direction of political travel has seemed to favour a combined strategy of appeals to working- and middle-class voters to reject ‘globalist’ economic technocracy, mixed with a reactionary protectionism that ultimately serves the interests of elite capital. The result of these incompatible but electorally successful contradictions (Strongly reminiscent of Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the European masses’ alignment with both capital and elites in the nineteenth century pre-war periods) has been the manifestation of governments in both the United Kingdom and United States that deploy spectacular constructions of national leadership while failing to perform meaningful actions within the social, political and economic frameworks which they rose to power attacking, and which have disenfranchized their voters.

10 The point here is not that the current New Zealand government is a radical one, (that Leilani Farha, UN special rapporteur on housing rights accused the New Zealand government in February 2020 of presiding over a human rights crisis testifies to its continued timidity in intervening in excessive market mechanisms) rather, it is that it is characterized by one significant though so far muted departure from all previous governments since the neo-liberal market reforms of the mid 1980s in being willing to acknowledge a failure of global capital where its citizenry are concerned.

11 As of writing the first draft, polls heading into a September election had placed the Labour government on and unprecedented 54% and the Conservatives on 29%. It had seemed likely that these numbers would shift significantly but, in the end, Ardern’s Labour Party won a historic outright majority landslide of 49.1% against the Conservative National party’s equally historic 26.8% meltdown.

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Leon Gurevitch

Leon Gurevitch is Associate Professor and Associate Dean of Research at Victoria University of Wellington’s Faculty of Architecture and Design. Leon’s work focuses on design sociology, labour and the global creative industries, transformative technologies and complex systems design. Leon has held Royal Society of New Zealand funding for research on global computational industries, he is a member of the Visual Effects Society and has published research and exhibited design work around the world. Leon teaches data design, photographics, and eco-computing in the Media Lab at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.