Why can't we get what we want? Inequality and the early discursive practice of the sixth Labour government

ABSTRACT

Focus groups convened in New Zealand in 2014 confirmed a major finding of previous research: that while most people are concerned about existing levels of economic inequality, there is considerable uncertainty over whether and how a more equal distribution might be achieved. In asking why participants acquiesced to views that they did not like, the article suggests that they lacked a language in which to imagine or articulate their preferred alternative, partly because structural critiques of the status quo have become increasingly marginal within the wider public sphere. This observation sets the scene for an analysis of the discursive practice of Jacinda Ardern and the Labour Party during the 2017 election campaign and in the November 2017 Speech from the Throne. The article asks whether this practice represents a departure from – and a challenge to – the discursive dominance of ‘capitalist realism’. It finds signs of significant change relative to previous governments, particularly in the explicit articulation of values. At the same time, significant moments of ambivalence remain, especially on the question of how the new Government’s social and environmental objectives might be achieved.

KEYWORDS:

• Inequality
• deliberative democracy
• critical discourse analysis (CDA)
• New Zealand politics

Introduction

Focus groups convened in New Zealand in 2014 confirmed a major finding of previous research: that while most people are concerned about existing levels of economic inequality, there is considerable uncertainty over whether and how a more equal distribution might be achieved (Humpage 2014; Skilling 2016). Despite deliberative theory’s claim that citizen deliberation on political questions can lead to decisions that are more considered, more empathetic and more progressive (Miller 1992; Fischer 2009), the strong majority of focus group participants who stated a preference for greater equality were easily persuaded that this preference was not achievable, given the ‘realities of the market’ (Skilling 2016).

In this article, I ask why the market-as-truth trope was accepted even though (a) participants overwhelmingly expressed opposition to the distributional outcomes of the market, even though (b) many participants had discussed alternative arrangements in prior one-on-one interviews, and even though (c) the discussion took place within a deliberative focus group designed and curated so as to call forth and respect the widest possible diversity of views. I argue that participants struggled to imagine or articulate an alternative to ‘capitalist realism’ (Fisher, 2009) – in part – because coherent alternative narratives have become increasingly marginal in the public sphere. At a more practical level, and drawing on Stone’s (1989) conceptualisation of problematisation, the article argues for the need for a range of civil society actors to de-naturalise ‘the market’ and ‘the economy’ by drawing attention to the interested and deliberate ways in which these institutions are constructed.

If the above argument (that people would prefer a situation of greater equality, but that they are not sure whether this is possible or how it might be achieved) is plausible, then it implies that there is a potential audience for political actors able to articulate an alternative vision. Indeed, in the 2017 election campaign, the ascendency of Jacinda Ardern to the Labour Party leadership, and her explicit focus on poverty and inequality (and her explicit rejection of neoliberalism) was associated with a dramatic reversal in Labour’s electoral popularity. Drawing on publicly available texts (speeches, interviews and statements during the election campaign; the November 2017 Speech from the Throne) the article presents a preliminary analysis of the discursive practice of Ardern and the (early days of the) sixth Labour government to assess whether it constitutes a distinct alternative to the dominance of market realism.

The article finds within moments of novelty within the sixth Labour government’s discursive practice: moments where the discursive dominance of capitalist realism is contested. It answers in the affirmative the question of whether a more equal distribution of resources is possible; that the state is able to manage and direct market forces. At the same time, there is significant ambivalence on the question of how this equalisation might be achieved, in a continued acquiescence to the disciplines of budgetary responsibility and fiscal prudence.

Inequality and market realism

Opinion surveys in Western societies consistently find overwhelming support for a more equal distribution of wealth and incomes (Skilling 2016). This support, however, does not reliably translate into support for policies and parties that promise to reduce inequality (Taylor-Gooby 2013). Louise Humpage (2014) for instance, brings together quantitative and qualitative work to demonstrate that people’s egalitarian preferences founder in the face of scepticism and doubt as to whether and how they could be achieved. Deliberative focus groups convened in late 2014 confirm these findings.

The design and conduct of these groups are discussed in detail in Skilling (2016). In keeping with Morgan’s (1996, p. 130) definition of a focus group, it was interaction between participants (not between each participant and the researcher) that generated the relevant data (see also Bloor et al. 2001; Parker and Tritter 2006). More specifically, the groups had a deliberative aspect. They sought to understand not just participants’ individual views (as in a mass interview) nor merely the interactions between their views (as in a typical focus group). They sought, rather, to see how participants and their perspectives interacted with each other when they were presented with a range of scenarios and information, and asked to reason towards a shared outcome on specific issues (around tax, welfare and earnings distributions within firms, for example). While participants were asked whether they could converge on an agreed outcome, they were not compelled to. In each of the three groups, disagreement on some issues appeared intractable when some participants argued that the logic of market forces made change (even change that was desired by most participants) impossible. Witness, for example, this exchange between Jessica and Roger (all names changed), where Jessica was arguing that low-paid workers should be paid more, and Roger responded:

Roger:

…  The wages that a person gets for the job they do, in my view, is simply governed by the laws of supply and demand, and there’s a million people who can be cleaners, and very, very few who can be CEOs, and that’s what governs the money that those people get. If there’s very few, they’re worth a lot more, if there’s very many, they’re worth a lot less.

Jessica:

You mean they’re valued less

Roger:

Well it’s the law of supply and demand, it’s a basic law

Jessica:

It’s unfortunate

Roger:

It is unfortunate but it’s the truth.

It’s unfortunate but it’s the truth. The market and its mechanisms for distributing rewards were accepted within the focus groups not as ideal and desirable (the market’s distribution of rewards was described as ‘unfortunate’ and as ‘obscene’). If there was an ‘ideological’ acceptance of market outcomes, it did not consist in a cognitive acceptance of these outcomes as normatively optimal. There was, more minimally, a resigned acceptance that they were natural, inevitable and (therefore) immutable. This dynamic was evidenced in statements such as ‘that is done by the market, and you can’t change that’, ‘I wish we could bring [pay disparities] down, globally, but it’s impossible’, and ‘it’s market driven, so we’ve got no control over that’. On this dominant view, extreme inequality of wages was simply the logical (if unfortunate) outworking of a natural law. As another participant said, ‘there’s a million people who can be cleaners, and very, very few who can be CEOs, and that’s what governs the money that those people get’.

The argument here is not that individuals rationally assent to the key neoliberal norms of individual responsibility and endless competition. Rather, these norms are accepted as natural and immutable because they are also and already embedded in the structures and underpinning values of many modern social institutions (such as the healthcare and welfare systems, the labour market and the modern university (Brown 2003 S.15)). Since participation in these institutions gives people ‘their roles, relationships, resources, and routines’, key norms become naturalised, and certain kinds of subjects are formed (Lawrence et al. 2011, p. 53). This might be thought of as the ‘institutionalisation’ of market values: these norms and values justify certain policy changes and institutional settings and then – over time – become the objective reality within which people live, move and have their being.

An effective counter to the dominant ‘market realism’ trope in the Focus Groups would have required showing that the market’s distribution of income is not natural, but rather is determined – at least in part – by patterns of power and privilege. Indeed, many participants, in one-on-one interviews conducted prior to the focus groups, had agreed that women, ethnic minorities and the poor faced disadvantage and/or discrimination within the labour market. In the three Focus Groups, however, no-one attempted to construct a structural argument that the labour market was systematically biased against the poor and (specifically, in this case) against low-paid workers. There was very little evidence of interpretations that foregrounded structural factors, or the deliberate choices of particular interests in creating our current situation of huge disparities in income. There was, moreover, not even a consistent call for an extension to the wide range of social interventions (minimum wage legislation, union activity, the welfare system, for example) that mean that the existing distribution of income is by no means the outcome of undistorted market signals.

There was no logical reason why participants should not have argued such mechanisms where existing income inequalities are deemed to be unfair or socially damaging. These or other potential counter-narratives, however, did not emerge to challenge the discursive dominance of market realism, even though the discussion took place within a deliberative focus group designed and curated so as to call forth and respect the widest possible diversity of views. There was, instead, a consistent acceptance that individuals are, ultimately, responsible for their own outcome.

Deliberative exercises are designed to give participants an opportunity to move (in Kahneman’s 2011 terminology) from our normal intuitive, habit-driven mode of fast thinking, to a more reflective, considered form of slow thinking. They are designed to endow participants with ‘both the information and impetus’ (Niemeyer 2004) to explore the complexity of social issues, and the reasoning that lies behind their instinctive responses. Deliberation’s facilitation of a slower, more considered way of thinking is held, in the literature, to be democratically important and normatively desirable (see Miller 1992; Chambers 2003; Gutmann and Thompson 2009; Warren 2007).

But these posited benefits rest on the assumption that deliberators are ‘capable of moral reflection on their actions’ and that they are ‘at times, willing to collaborate with fellow citizens in the achievement of common interests’ (Fischer 2009). So while deliberative exercises create a context of public exchange that facilitates thinking through exposure to ‘new insights from others’ (Stoker et al. 2016) it remains possible that ‘fast thinking’ is so dominant in human life ‘that even when humans move to a slower, reflective mode their judgements are often still influenced by intuitive thinking’ (Kahneman, cited in Stoker et al. 2016) This observation that mental habits and short-cuts preclude a fully rational consideration of information and values was largely borne out within the deliberative focus groups. Presented with a range of informational inputs from competing perspectives,¹ participants spoke in support of the information that aligned with their own pre-existing position. There was no evidence of a re-assessment of belief based on new information. Indeed, participants could be observed paying noticeably more attention, nodding, and taking down notes on the information that supported their own initial (fast-thinking) position. There were, most to the point, no substantial changes in participants’ perspectives, or in their support for different policy proposals after the deliberative exercises.

In linguistic terms, ‘the market’ and ‘the economy’ were typically used by participants as nouns. Norman Fairclough refers to this dynamic – offering a complex process, such as globalisation, the market, or the economy as a noun – as ‘nominalisation’. The process, according to Fairclough (2000, p. 26) is based on an ‘abstraction from the diversity of processes going on’. Constant nominalisation of ‘the market’ and ‘the economy’ naturalises the idea that they are objective ‘things’ that have their own reality independent of the actors whose interests and actions constitute them. By eliding ‘questions of agency and causality’, nominalisation deflects attention from the real actors with real interests making real decisions. To use Stone’s (1989) terminology, nominalisation de-problematises social issues. As Stone (1989, p. 281) observes,

difficult conditions only become problems when people come to see them as amenable to human action. Until then, difficulties remain embedded in the realm of nature, accident and fate – a realm where there is no choice about what happens to us.

Defenders of capitalist realism can thus be expected to assert that inequality – even when it is seen as a difficult or unfortunate situation – exists beyond human control, in the ‘realm of nature, accident and fate’.

It is clearly salient here that arguments that foreground the human decisions and power asymmetries that give rise to inequality (arguments, for instance, that labour tends to systematically exploited by capital, given their asymmetries of power) are increasingly marginal within public discourse. Fairclough (2000, p. 16) notes that Labour governments around the world during the 1990s dropped a language of fundamental class conflict and adopted instead a ‘rhetoric of reconciliation’ that insisted that economic, social and environmental goals are not in tension, but compatible. Mouffe (1998) describes this as the ‘denial of antagonisms’: the idea that the interests of all groups within a society are meaningfully shared (see also Skilling 2010). There is a discursive path-dependency at work here, where the marginality of competing discourses makes them less available within society. It may be, then, that many people were so easily persuaded by the ‘market realist’ position because they simply did not have a language in which to express their desire for their preferred alternative.

The Labour Party’s movement away from a politics of irreducible class conflict was an especially important shift within the political context of Aotearoa New Zealand. Jesson’s (1999) notion of New Zealand as a ‘hollow society’ understands the remarkable vulnerability of New Zealand society to the neoliberal transformations of the 1980s in terms of the country’s colonial background. Jesson’s idea is that the institutions of civil society in New Zealand were created by the state and existed at the state’s pleasure. This reliance on state sanction meant that when the state removed its protection and support (of unions, for example) ‘New Zealand society proved unable to resist the finance culture’ (Jesson 1999, p. 205). This ‘hollow society’ thesis can be applied to the discursive dimension of institutions. Once the parliamentary Labour Party stopped arguing that the state needed to regulate the unequal relations between capital and labour, there were few other recognised voices able to do so in the New Zealand public sphere.

Problematising ‘capitalist realism’ (Fisher 2009) means, in this context problematising market processes and market outcomes by foregrounding the ways in which ‘the market’ is not a natural or biological fact but a social construct, constructed by deliberate and interested human actions and amenable – therefore – to human control. For political actors committed to reducing existing inequalities, this is a question not just of getting the message ‘right’, but also of attending to the credibility of the messengers, and to the relationships within society through which messages are spread. Given the weakening of traditional networks of political association (for example, the dramatic collapse of political party (Edwards 2008) and union membership numbers (Ryall and Blumenfeld 2016)) political actors have been constrained to find and develop new channels of communication. It is for this reason that Living Wage Aotearoa organiser Annie Newman (2013, pp. 64–65) claimed that the greatest long-term impact of the movement would lie not in its specific prescriptions or in the evidence it presented, but rather in the ‘bold new relationships being formed across civil society’ and ‘the activation of civil society around a common purpose’.

#Jacindamania 2017

The argument of the article so far is that (1) while most people express a preference for a more equal distribution of resources within society, many people have been persuaded that this preference is not viable, given the constraining power of ‘the market’; and that (2) this stasis is due in part to the absence of a compelling counter-narrative in the public sphere, leaving equality-desiring citizens unable to articulate and defend their preferences.

If this argument is plausible, then it suggests that there is a latent appetite for a clear articulation of an alternative political vision. Indeed, when Jacinda Ardern took on the leadership of the Labour Party in August 2017, her case for change – including an explicit focus on inequality (Radio NZ 2017a) and an explicit repudiation of neoliberalism (Radio NZ 2017b) – drastically increased Labour’s popularity and ultimately saw her installed as Prime Minister. (It is important here not to over-state the extent of this positive response. While the appointment of Ardern as leader dramatically increased Labour’s popularity (from 23% in late July to 37% on election night, two months later) the increase in the Labour-Green bloc rose more modestly (from 38% in late July to 43%) and National’s election result (44%) was an improvement on its late-July number (Electoral Commission 2017; Trevett 2017). Still, there was a positive response, and that response led to a change of government.)

In this section, I draw on publicly available texts (speeches, interviews and press releases during the election campaign; the Speech from the Throne that set out the agenda of the new government) to present a preliminary analysis of the discursive practice of Ardern and the (early days of the) sixth Labour government: to what extent does the early discursive practice of the new Labour-led government constitute a meaningful problematisation of capitalist realism and the market? The article’s purpose here is not polemical as such: it does not seek to prescribe what the government should do. Rather, it evaluates the extent to which the new government’s discursive practice matches its own self-declared rejection of neoliberalism. And, given the consistent finding that most New Zealanders state a preference for greater equality, it assesses how convincingly the new government makes the case that this desired outcome is achievable. The data are subjected to a thematic analysis guided by the question of whether this discursive practice represents a distinct alternative to the dominant tropes of capitalist realism. Following Stone (1989), the analysis asks to what extent market processes and market outcomes are ‘problematised’. To what extent are they presented as deliberate human choices rather than as the natural outcome of a natural process?

Viewed through the lens of these questions, there is much of interest in these texts. In my analysis I note especially (1) the explicit critique of the free market; (2) the explicit focus on values; (3) the positioning of economic and social objectives as inherently (rather than instrumentally) important; (4) the articulation of new measures of success and (5) the insistence that the state has a role to provide for everyone within society. In that sense, the language of the new government might be seen provisionally as a challenge to capitalist realism. I note, however, that much of what seems new in the rhetorical practice of the sixth Labour government was also present in that of the fifth. I note also the many moments of ambivalence and ambiguity, and the general unwillingness to return to an acceptance of irreducible structural conflict in the production of current levels of economic inequality.

The controllability of the market

In her first public statements as the new leader of the Labour Party, Ardern announced that her ‘plan for a better and fairer New Zealand’ included an explicit focus on inequality. The issue, she said, was a key motivating factor for her life in politics (Radio NZ 2017a). This concern for inequality was related to an explicit critique of de-regulated markets. Ardern stated that while ‘a strong economy’ was vital, the economy would not be left to its own devices: in a mid-September interview (Radio NZ 2017b), she claimed that ‘New Zealand has been served well by interventionist governments’, and stated that the market is ‘a poor master but a good servant’. In the focus group findings reported above, equality-desiring participants found it difficult to challenge the argument that their preferences were simply not achievable. In this context, Ardern’s explicit statement that market forces can (and will) be managed in the service of politically and socially defined objectives stands as a prominent insistence that greater equality is indeed possible.

There are strong echoes here of the early days of the fifth Labour government, which to a large extent defined itself against the neoliberal reforms initiated by the fourth. ‘Pure market forces’, Helen Clark (2000) declared, ‘haven’t delivered the goods. The gaps just get bigger’. The ‘radical economic change’ started in 1984, she argued elsewhere, ‘had not brought about recovery’ (Clark 2002). Clark insisted on a privileged role for government leadership, stating that the ‘nature of the change agenda will be driven by the values of those in the driver’s seat’ (2001).

In both cases, the economy is accepted as an important and as a more or less neutral, technical zone that will generate certain outcomes. Where these outcomes are normatively unacceptable, they can be controlled and modified by the government to achieve certain desired outcomes. The analysis, however, only goes so far. When a strong economy is accepted as ‘vital’, there is no consideration given to the idea that the market is instituted by certain interests and that it has a logic that makes it very difficult to control. When Ardern claims (in Radio NZ 2017b) that the market is ‘a good servant’, she implies that market actors can easily be directed into the service of the collective well-being, despite evidence that the logic of the market tends towards self-interest and the concentration of wealth. The link, for instance, between economic power and political influence, is not considered: the preference is for the government and the business sector to work together towards shared objectives.

The centrality of values

Fisher (2009, pp. 15–16) observes that ‘neoliberalism has sought to eliminate the very category of value in the ethical sense’. Market forces are represented as neutral: value-free natural laws. As Dardot and Laval (2014) and Brown (2015) note, neoliberalism eclipses the values that traditionally held sway in the more-or-less independent political, religious and aesthetic spheres with the over-riding value of market-competitiveness. It is thus important to note the centrality of explicitly ethical values in the texts analysed here. This is expressed most clearly in the November 2017 Speech from the Throne, which foregrounds and highlights the values that underwrite changes in policy settings and outcomes: ‘This government wants to foster a kinder, more caring society’. It will ‘lift up those who have been forgotten or neglected’, since everyone is ‘entitled to respect and dignity’ and to ‘care and compassion’. The government set out a vision for a New Zealand ‘where children live surrounded by creativity and love’. Crucially, respect, compassion and well-being were the right of everyone:

All who live in this country are entitled to respect and dignity; all are entitled to live meaningful lives; all are entitled to care and compassion. Everyone should have a roof over their head and be warm in winter. Everyone should have food and a table to put it on … a nation where all cultures and human rights are valued … a country where all are accepted … for we are all connected. (emphasis added)

This universalism is based on a re-imagining of the status of the political subject: people in this text stand in the relationship of fundamental equality proper to political citizens rather than the relationship of fundamental inequality that marks economic actors (Brown 2015). To put it another way, this universalism can be read as a rejection of Tony Blair’s proclamation of the ‘end of the something-for-nothing’ days. By contrast, this Labour government asserts that one receives certain rights and protections simply by virtue of being a member of society: in this sense, ‘something for nothing’ is the fundamental premise of social citizenship.

Social and environmental objectives as intrinsically important

I have argued elsewhere (Skilling 2017) that ‘these statements – even if read cynically as election-time political rhetoric – are significant' and noted Wendy Brown's (2015) argument that under neoliberalism, social and environmental objectives are legitimated primarily on their capacity to enhance economic competitiveness. Brown notes that even the progressive policies pursued by the Obama administration were typically justified on their contribution to this over-riding, legitimating criterion. Ardern's statements, however, insist that social objectives are inherently – as opposed to just instrumentally – important. Reducing child poverty, she says, is not merely a means to an end of but, rather, an end in itself. ‘Child poverty’, Ardern (2017b) stated, ‘is a moral issue' and it is ‘degrading to us all'. There was, further, a degree of acceptance that addressing social problems would actively hinder economic performance, at least in the short term: Labour accepted that it would take two years longer than National to reduce public debt to 20% of GDP (though it still accepted this debt target as worthy and desirable.)

Peter Hall (1993) notes that, to be meaningful, political change must seek not just to alter or change policy settings but, more deeply, the purpose of policy. To a large extent, the purpose of policy is defined by how its outcomes are measured. When Ardern (2017a), in her speech to the Campaign Launch, said that ‘a successful economy is one that serves its people. Not the other way round’, she continued that this ‘means judging success differently’. The Public Finance Act, Ardern (2017a) said, would be altered to require that beyond reporting ‘surpluses and deficits’, it also takes account of – for example – ‘how many kids we have lifted out of poverty’. Following the management dictum that ‘only that which gets measured gets managed’, there are many instances in the Speech from the Throne where the new government promised to reform policies and institutions by changing how outcomes will be valued and measured. It is said, for instance, that:

• New Zealand needs to measure success in new ways. We need to move beyond narrow measures and views of value and broaden the definition of progress. The economic strategy will focus on how we improve the well-being and living standards of all New Zealanders.

• This government will put child poverty at the heart of government policy development and decision-making. It will establish targets to reduce the impact of child poverty and it will put these into law.

• The Reserve Bank Act will be reviewed, and a new objective added to include a commitment to maximising employment.

• This government will also change the Public Finance Act so that, every Budget, New Zealanders will hear about how many kids have been lifted out of poverty and we can all see clearly what more needs to be done (Ardern 2017b).

• The Speech also identifies the specific places where the government will insert itself into the economy: NZ Forestry Services; government-backed Green Investment Fund; Kiwibuild, Housing Commission, for example. There is much of interest in this speech then, if one is looking for evidence that Labour understands that policies and outcomes are the result of deliberate choices, and that it is possible to intervene in the market to achieve certain outcomes.

Moments of ambiguity

Of course, a speech is only a speech, and it is important to reserve judgment. It is argued above that people’s political views (their views on what outcomes are desirable and possible) are shaped not just by free-floating ideas but also – and crucially – through the policy settings and institutional structures that they live within. In that sense, it may be important to foreground a set of explicit values – kindness, care, compassion – but it is more important to embed those values in the policy and institutional settings that constitute the everyday experience of citizens. The ideological task confronting a progressive government is not to persuade people that its preferred values are desirable, but rather to persuade them that they are possible. Further, and to repeat, many of the social and environmental objectives stated so strongly in the early days of the sixth Labour government (inequality, climate change, low-value exports, low investment in skills and R + D, low wages, a greater recognition of Treaty issues) were also present 18 years earlier in the 1999 Speech from the Throne, and in the broader discursive practice of the fifth Labour government. Helen Clark’s (2007) Prime Minister’s Statement, which held that ‘the pride we take in our quest for sustainability and carbon neutrality will define our nation, just as our quest for a nuclear free world has over the past twenty three years’, is a particularly direct precursor of Ardern’s (2017a) claim that ‘climate change is my generation’s nuclear-free moment’.

In line with the arguments set out above, we might also ask whether Labour’s vision amounts to a structural analysis of the causes of social and environmental problems, and we might ask whether it constitutes a full problematisation of the market economy. The new government insists that key social issues are amenable to human response, but it is less than clear on whether and how these problems are caused by particular causal actors. In that sense, it is unclear whether the sixth Labour government moves these issues out of ‘the realm of accident, nature and fate’ (Stone 1989, p. 281). Perhaps more importantly, the new government has remained a little ambivalent on the question of whether its social and environmental objectives will necessarily come at the expense of the over-riding neoliberal desideratum of economic competitiveness. I argued above that it is significant that Labour has promoted its objectives as important in their own right, rather than as merely means to long-term economic competitiveness. On the other hand, it has been less willing to note the ways in which its policies will require funding. This absence is important – and also understandable – because it avoids contesting the long-term effort from the right to frame taxes as a self-evident bad: a violation of the ‘right’ of ‘hard-working New Zealanders’ to ‘keep more of their own money’ (Brash 2005).

A generalised (or assumed) social opposition to tax – and an underlying acceptance of market-as-truth – continue to establish constraints for the new government. During the campaign, Ardern was willing to reject or overturn several policy positions associated with her predecessor. She made the choice, however, to endorse the previously adopted Budget Responsibility Rules that committed Labour (and the Greens) to deliver a ‘sustainable operating surplus’ and to ‘keep core crown spending to around 30% of GDP’ (Dann 2017). Further, she appeared to rule out new sources of revenue. When asked about Labour’s tax plans, Ardern said that ‘we have not focussed on revenue gathering at all’ (Radio NZ 2017b). This ambivalence – the desire both to address serious social problems and to adhere to fiscal rectitude – left Labour open to criticism. When Ardern rejected the suspicion that Labour’s plan was to run significant surpluses for six years while children still live in poverty (Radio NZ 2017b), it remained unclear on what grounds she rejected it: the basic justification was that Labour would still be spending more than National. Labour's reluctance to raise the possibility of additional tax revenue was electorally ‘understandable, but it also seemed opportunistic' (Skilling 2017). It did not appear to align with Ardern’s (2017a) campaign promise to be ‘bold and brave’ to address ‘the hard issues’.

This is no unqualified criticism of Ardern, or of Labour’s choices during the campaign. Labour’s ambivalence around tax, for example, has to be understood in the context of an election campaign in a specific place and time. The argument of this article is that it is important that counter-narratives to the dominant ‘capitalist realism’ trope be articulated within the public sphere, and that a Labour Party has an important role in normalising such narratives. But the task is not and cannot be the Labour Party’s alone. There is also an important role for actors and voices across civil society. Those committed to a fairer and more flourishing future have a responsibility to make the necessary steps appear possible, sensible and necessary. As Godfery (2016) notes, progressive change cannot be left as the sole responsibility of the governing party. Rather, ‘it is up to [progressive voices within civil society] to ensure that history travels towards justice – and love’. In this regard, an illuminating case study might be the attempt to re-frame taxation in a positive light. In 2017 and 2018, a robust debate developed in the public sphere around the trope that ‘tax is love’ (see Eaqub 2017; Louisson 2017, Harris 2018, Seymour 2018). The key point here is that the re-framing came initially from sources outside of government, in an attempt to re-shape the terrain on which the government could construct its own narrative around taxation.

Conclusion

Focus group data show that even people with strong egalitarian commitments often find it difficult to counter the argument that a more equal society is not possible due to the supposed ‘realities of the market’. This article has argued that this inability is due – in part – to the relative absence or marginality of structural explanations of inequality within the New Zealand public sphere. With this in mind, it has assessed the early rhetorical practice of the new sixth Labour government to assess whether they might coherently express an alternative vision that escape the logic of ‘capitalist realism’ (Fisher 2009). While the analysis found some positive aspects within the texts analysed, there are also clear moments of ambivalence, and a stark reminder to those committed to progressive change that the presence of a centre-left government might be necessary for the change they seek, but it is certainly not sufficient.

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2017 New Zealand Political Studies Association Conference at the University of Otago. Some of the ideas had previously been expressed in a blog post at impolitikal.com. Many thanks to participants at the NZPSA Conference, and to Sarah Illingworth at Impolitikal for their constructive feedback. Thanks also to the editor and the anonymous reviewers of this journal. The focus groups reported on in this article were part of a project supported by a Marsden Fund Fast Start Grant.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Royal Society of New Zealand [Marsden Fund Fast Start Grant 12-AUT-013].

Notes

1 Within the discussion of the tax system, participants were presented with two conflicting analyses of the existing tax code in New Zealand: a right-wing perspective that drew attention to the high proportion of income tax paid by a small proportion of high-income earners (Farrar, 2013), and a left-wing perspective that showed – in international comparison – how heavily New Zealand taxes low-income earners (Salmond, 2011).