Civil Liberties

• Actions to enforce New Zealand's own "Bantustan" policies on Island labour have included stopping anyone with a black or brown skin and forcing them to produce identification, and proof that they are not over-stayers. This violates the important principle of "innocent until proven guilty".
• The suspicious circumstances surrounding the SIS report and the Governments attempts to keep all aspects of that organisation's activities secret.
• The Government's issuing of illegal instructions (for example, The halting of superannuation payments early last year. The Chief Justice ruled that the action was illegal).
• The invitation for nuclear ships to visit our ports with a large bulk of the population, especially in the ports affected, against such visits.
• Persistant attacks on the autonomy of the media culminating in the introduction of the Broadcasting Bill which has the potential to muffle criticisms of the Government.
• The imposition of a huge power scheme on the people of Central Otago which will flood their land.
• Mr Gill's intention to tighten up the Abortion Laws irrespective of the decisions of the Royal Commission.
• The implementation of the Wanganui Computer Centre to monitor information on New Zealanders.
• Threats to throw state tenants out of their homes "if they don't look after them".
• Different types of legislation being rushed through to avoid public scrutiny of them.

Most people will realise that this amount of change is unprecedented in the history of our country. But fewer people are aware of the specific reasons for such a sudden change.

Many people think that it is Muldoon who is doing all these things. True, he is the agent of change, but a politician like him would not have risen to the extent he has, say, ten or twenty years ago. In short he is a product of our times.

In the 1975 election, people knew what was going on. Workers knew that their wages were being cut, that they had bugger all chance of ever buying a house and that they looked forward to a pretty miserable retirement.

The Labour and National parties told different stories. Labour preached that they were doing a marvelous job in keeping New Zealand out of a depression that was sweeping the world, and National preached impending doom but said that with a cut in living standards and hard times ahead we could all pull through.

The people looked at the planks, looked at the realities, and the rest is history. National won the day because they understood the realities that the New Zealander was facing. This is not to say that they intended to do anything about them. Indeed, they also knew that to keep the profits of the companies which control the economy high, they had to cut workers real wages down drastically. Once they were elected, it was the companies that they listened to, not the "ordinary bloke".

The events since then have indicated the measures that Muldoon has had to take to bolster the profits which are the driving force behind our capitalist economy. I will enlarge on this later.

The outlook of people towards the crisis, however, depends on whether they see Government as independently controlling the country's economy or acting simply as 'managers' for the local and overseas capitalists.

If the former approach is adopted, many things go unexplained. Why, for example, did the government decide to have a recession in the first place? Certainly they do not help anyone. They affect workers drastically, yet it is not in the interests of the capitalist class to have one.

The latter view, however, recognises that the capitalist system has the tendency to pass through a series of crises. This is the internal logic of an economic system which is guided by the drive for profit. New Zealand has passed through periodic crises in its history, as have other capitalist countries with us. It is no coincidence that capitalist countries pass through these crises together Capitalist countries are intertwined page 3 in a series of unequal relationships which means that recessions are usually long affairs with no one country able to pull out of the recession.

Instead, all try to get out of the crisis by exporting, although the other countries are in too bad a shape to buy their products, or borrowing, although all other countries are not financial enough to lend money.

The Capitalist World is now in a crisis—a crisis of over-production. It is all the worse for New Zealand because it sells things which no-one basically wants in a recession, and which are also subject to wild fluctuations in price. The economic base of New Zealand is extremely narrow. We are not self-sufficient in industry and have to import most of the raw materials necessary to keep our furnaces burning

Despite propaganda, to the contrary our manufacturing sector is weak and very few countries wish to buy our manufactured products anyway.

In short, and here even the most bourgeois economist will have to agree the New Zealand economy is in the shit. We face more gloom and seem unlikely to pull ourselves out of the recession for many years.

This brings in the question of fascism. If workers' wages are to be forced down, and we have seen why that is necessary, then obviously a rule of law has to be introduced to prevent the workers and their allies from getting too stroppy.

Georgi Dimitrov, a notable thereotician on the question of fascism, defined fascism as "open terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvanistic, and most imperialist element of finance capital". As a significant proportion of capital in New Zealand is invested in the finance sector eg finance companies, banks, mercantile banks (Broadlands etc,), insurance companies, conglomerates, one would naturally expect that sector to wield significant political power. Muldoon represents this finance capital sector, but whether this automatically makes him a fascist agent is another question.

The fact remains: New Zealand now has many fascist like laws on its books which will loom larger and larger as the present recession goes on.

What then should students do about these economic and political restrictions?

All people in New Zealand should become more vigilant towards the restrictions on their civil liberties and students should spearhead this new awareness. Students should attempt to learn the reasons for the offensive by the National Party on the living standards of working people and on the democratic rights of all New Zealanders.

What we are doing is basically trying to retain bourgeois democratic rights under the existing system of capitalism, and to stop the present trend in the National Party toward fascist Government. How long can we do this? It is obviously not a long term solution. We see that capitalism cannot guarantee a stable economic and social system in the long run, so what are the solutions?

We believe that capitalism must eventually break down completely, not in a passive sense, but will actually destroy itself with violent turmoil of the type that we are beginning to see: an offensive by the Government on behalf of the large companies and a report from the working class.

There is a historic economic and social progression from an economic system of capitalism to a system of socialism. We mean socialism, not in the labour party sense, but a situation where political power is held by those that do the work in the society.

Socialist economic systems are not plagued with huge booms and slumps, but can progress even in the worst recession, as shown by the USSR in the 1930's and the Peoples Republic of China at the present day.

This, we believe must be the long term goal of all those who wish to see New Zealand move in a direction of economic and social progress. Not only must nations produce more, but the wealth must be shared more equally in society, or in the words of Marx "to each according to his/ her work".

To conclude, it is all very well to say that all will be well if New Zealand gets rid of the National Party or Muldoon.

But what they forget is that removing the National Party is not removing the economic conditions which put them there. The Labour Party would be forced to do exactly the same things if they were in power now. And as for shooting Muldoon... In our opinion it would bring about the demise of New Zealand and the rise of fascism even quicker.

If you are serious about where New Zealand is going and want to do something about it, then only a correct analysis of present social and economic conditions will allow you to take the right steps. In the long term, the correct and natural step will be to a system of socialism upon which New Zealand will make genuine progress in the well being of its people and for a just world free from superpower domination.

—David Murray