Bruce Jesson: To Build a Nation

Bruce Jesson was probably the first New Zealand journalist of his generation to prove it was possible to write interestingly on politics from an unabashed bias.

Jesson was a Marxist who produced a cyclostyled anti-monarchist periodical, The Republican, personally delivered to a few retailers and bought by perhaps 600 people, before he was plucked from Otahuhu in 1982 to do a column for a new glossy magazine aimed at an emergent yuppie market.

Jesson did not exactly parade his Marxism to the readers of Auckland's Metro but nor did he disguise the fact that he lived far to the left of the Labour Party, and it worked.

It worked because the necessary ingredient of good political commentary is not neutrality, it is intelligent integrity.

The best political discussion, whether on a printed page or over the tea cups, comes from people who care enough to take a position yet do not evade what is inconvenient to their argument.

They follow all reasoning as far as they must. They do not block contrary views with defensive dogma as the merely partisan commentator will do.

It is not necessary to share the honest writer's bias to find his thoughts interesting.

Metro's founding editor, Warwick Roger, realised that and Jesson's column was a jewel of the monthly for 15 years. Jesson died of cancer in 1999 at 54.

This collection, prompted by trustees of a foundation formed in his memory and edited by Andrew Sharp of the Auckland University political studies department, revives people and events of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s as seen through a bluntly rigorous mind capable of fair human insight and occasional foresight.

Sharp prefers to characterise Jesson as a nationalist, hence the title.

No doubt he was but he regarded the national interest as exclusively revealed to those with an insular, protected view of our economic welfare.

Jesson had no urge to see the world. He read about it avidly but almost never travelled. He scorned the impulse to "OE", did not like foreigners investing here, shared Winston Peters' views of immigration and global capital flows and did not much like the overseas models of socialism either.

Anyone like me, who knew him only in Metro, will relish the longer essays in this volume.

They provide the philosophical underpinning of his better-known views and convey more fully the frustration of left-wing thinking as a nation in economic stress turned first to Muldoonism, then market liberalism.

Jesson found his political identity in the late-1960s "new left", which he prefers to call the "independent left".

He detested fads and laments that the antagonisms of his contemporaries to the Vietnam war, apartheid, nuclear weapons and the rest was never founded on a solid analysis of social change.

He blames the Kirk Labour Government for assuaging most of the ephemeral concerns.

In 1981 he wrote, "The protest movement's fatal deficiency was that it was organised around overseas issues ... There was only a slight connection between these issues and the conflicts that were developing within New Zealand's economic and social patterns. It was as though the protest movement felt New Zealand didn't need changing as much as other countries ... "

The paradox was that just as the protest movement was packing up and moving to suburbia in the mid-1970s, New Zealand was pitched into economic turbulence.

The loss of the British market, oil shocks, inflation, added up in Jesson's view to a crisis of capitalism.

But by then the left had little to offer and even working people turned to Muldoon.

Jesson wrote, "The working class is notoriously rigid in its social attitudes, causing a problem for radicals from an educated and liberal background. The conditions of working- class life - the nuclear family, cultural and educational deprivation etc - apparently have a conservatising effect that isn't allowed for in left-wing theory."

Jesson eventually admitted he was no exception to the barren state of practical thinking on the left. When he tries to turn his mind to concrete proposals the essays turn to uncharacteristic mush.

"Policy formation is rather premature given the lack of a viable organisation of the independent left," he wrote in July 1981, "and organisational matters are secondary to the problem of perspective!"

He promises to return to the task in future issues of The Republican but by the time this collection returns to the subject it is July 1985. Labour has returned to power and the left is in dismay.

Rogernomics changed the bearings of everyone in politics. Those to the left of Labour had previously tended to regard the welfare state, trade unionism, the whole mixed economy, as craven compromises with capitalism. After 1984 the defence of those institutions became the left's most urgent mission.

Jesson's writing sometimes lost its fairness in his disgust with the Lange-Douglas regime. He understood the concept of market efficiency that drove all of the economic reforms even though he did not agree with it. Yet at times he preferred to impute a base motive for everything that Government did.

In his Metro column of December 1990, just after the Government's defeat, he quite lost his head. "They were a Government entirely without principle, cynical and untrustworthy, who clung to power for the sake of it ... this was a thoroughly corrupt Government in that hardly anyone in it had any compunction about trading their principles for short-term advantage."

Simon Hope, a Jesson friend, writes in a bibliographic afterword that Jesson was "above all a tactical writer. Many of his pieces were designed to get a reaction ... " It is disappointing to hear that.

In his better moments he wrote, "New Zealand is being tossed around by a turbulent world economy and short of a world socialist revolution there doesn't seem to be much we can do to extricate ourselves. Yet there isn't much comfort in this situation for the Right either ... "

By then he is watching the disintegration of the Soviet bloc, from which he at least finds vindication of his view that New Zealand should not imitate foreign models.

"Our problem remains the same as before," he tells his old readers, "we have to work our way through the debris of the Marxist tradition in order that we may be able to create a socialist vision that is appropriate to turn-of-the-century New Zealand. That will be the role of the Republican for the foreseeable future."

But his path took another turn. He joined Jim Anderton's New Labour Party which formed the Alliance of third parties. Jesson stood for the Alliance against the privatisation of the Auckland port and was elected chairman of the Auckland Regional Services Trust.

He writes disappointingly little of his taste of government. Though the columns contain an occasional criticism of the Alliance they suffer for the commitment. He escapes active politics in time to end his career with some better pieces for The New Zealand Political Review reprinted here.

They complete a highly readable record of one thinking man's fine contribution to our national life.

Bruce Jesson, Collected Writings 1975-1999

Edited by Andrew Sharp

Penguin Books NZ, $35