The Sunday Long Read and Listen
I had the very enjoyable experience of interviewing Chlöe Swarbrick last Thursday. I’d never met or spoken with Chlöe before and I was taken by how the MP for Central Auckland and Co-Leader of the Greens, has carefully thought through in detail big issues such as What is the role of government in the economy? and How can we pay for better housing, healthcare, education and all the other things people in our society need ?
Authenticity comes from knowing who you are and what you believe. Authenticity comes from walking the talk.And authenticity, born of social conscience, is as freshing as it is inspiring.
So, if you are in need of a little hope for the future,you might like to find 25 minutes today to listen to the very authentic Chlöe Swarbrick.
Or, you may prefer to read the transcription.
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TRANSCRIPTION
Hello, I'm Bryan Bruce and welcome to Head to Head
My guest today is the co-leader of the Green Party and MP for Auckland Central, Chloe Swalbrick.
Kia ora, Chloe.
Chlöe :Kia ora, thank you for having me.
Bryan :You've been an MP for nine years now, is it? Since 2017?
Chlöe : Nearly nine years.
Bryan: A lot of people will know your name, but not much about your background.Just fill me in a little bit about where you grew up, how you got interested in politics.
Chlöe : Yeah, how long have we got? (laughs)
So I grew up all over kind of central, south central Taumaki Makaurau, Auckland. So me and my little sister were trying to count up the number of rental properties that we lived in the other day, but couldn't, a few dozen. But long story short, you know,
I spent a lot of time with my dad and in those conversations, what some would call arguments as I was growing up. I learned a lot about how you can flesh out your worldview by trying your best to understand other people and their perspectives. As my old man used to always say, different people see different things differently.
I later went to uni, did one of my undergrad degrees in philosophy and realized my old man was not Socrates, did not come up with the idea of subjectivity. ( laughs)
But, you know, in doing so, I guess that's part of the intellectual framework or ideological framework that I approach things with, where I'm just, obviously very clear about where my views and values have landed, but I'm fundamentally interested in understanding other people's points of view, because otherwise you can't move forward.
So yeah, I then went on to study my law degree. While I was at university, I spent about four and a half years at 95 BFM, number one alternative radio station in Auckland, where I thought that I might actually eventually become a journalist because I was really interested in, again, trying to understand the shape of the world, the motivations of different players and that. And I was consistently interviewing these community leaders and researchers and people who had dedicated their lives to solving and understanding these problems…and then the politicians!!
And I did not understand that the massive gap between the reality of what people were saying on the ground and then what the politicians were coming to the table with, let alone the gap between what politicians said and what they did. So all of that was bubbling away in the background as I also got involved in running a few different small businesses with my former partner- Alex.
We were involved in producing menswear clothing for a little while, we ran a bunch of events,particularly in arts and culture and nightlife across Tamaki Makaurau,particularly in the central city.
And up until the point that I was elected, I was running a little art gallery, coffee and donut shop on Mount Eden Road next to the Crystal Palace.
So that's, I guess, a bit of a grab bag of all the things that I'd been doing,
How I got involved in politics is I was interviewing the kind of top four candidates as prescribed by the mainstream media for the Auckland Mayoralty in 2016, and I was just really frustrated by the fact that I didn't feel as though they were addressing issues that mattered to me or to my community or to my friends.
At the same time, we were sitting in the context of the brain drain, you know, with the former national government, and I was watching a bunch of my mates who are incredibly talented all go offshore for a lower cost of living and a higher quality of life, and I just kind of had to go and say, stay and fight, you cowards. You know, I love this city and I love this country and nothing changes if nothing changes!
So, yeah, I was complaining about this to my producer at the time and she said,just shut up while we go and do something about it.
So I Googled how to become the mayor of Auckland. And it turns out there's three barriers.
You need $200 for administrative fees.
You need two people to nominate you, which I'm not sure if you're familiar with local government elections -t here's some interesting characters, but those two nominators are probably the sanity bar.
And you had to be over the age of 18.
And I was 22 at the time, which became kind of my defining feature.But I just, was really conscious of how I wanted to try and model the kind of politics that I felt was missing.
So I never pretended to have all of the answers. Obviously, I was 22 years old. But also I think any politician who stands in front of people and says that they know everything is either lying to people or completely lacking self-awareness, and I'm not sure which is worse.
Which brings me back to the point that I was making earlier about the approach that I take to trying to solve problems, which is understanding how we got here and how everybody thinks about the issue.
Bryan : Let's get on to politics and economics.
I mean, I grew up in what I call the We Society. I was a poor kid. I got a free education right up to and including university and I'm able to talk to you today because, you know, I got the break.
And then in 1984, I think about 10 years before you were even born, we switched to what I call the Me society with neoliberalism - the idea that government ought not to be involved in the marketplace.
Whereas in the society I grew up in, we understood that the The State meant all of us and that the government really ought to be involved in the marketplace.
What do you think is the role that government should play in the marketplace.
Chlöe: I think that if we take a step back and ask ourselves what the government is and what parliament is and what it's supposed to be, then we actually get a far better insight.
So I think part of the problem is that right now we tend to conceptualise of government as a sector, like business or like civil society, as opposed to what I believe it's supposed to be as far as the democratic ideal goes, which is simply the manifestation of the will of the people, of all of us.
And if we take that really pure version of democracy about how we allocate our resources,
which, again, is actually a point that I often kind of try and unpack for people because there's a tendency to present politics as though it's really complicated but, you know, sure,it's imbued in jargon and all of this other gatekeeping terminology, but at the end of the day,all politics really is, it's about power, it's about resources, and it's about who gets to make decisions that saturate and shape our daily lives.
So when we understand that context, to your question of what the role is that the government or the state should play in the economy per se, well,I'd say that it should ensure that everybody has their basic needs met so that they are able to participate in this thing that we call democracy.
Otherwise, we experience the decline of said democracy like we are at the moment.And to give some colour to that statement, you know, we've experienced not just,you know, obviously the last 40 years or the last four decades of kind of trickle-down economics, and I think very much Margaret Thatcher encapsulated it best in terms of that project when she said that there is no such thing as society, there is nearly individual men and women. by which I think she lifted the lid on the fact that the neoliberal economic project, which individuated people and forced them into competition for basic needs and basic survival, was very much not only an economic project, but one that had substantive cultural ramifications.
So, you know, this is where when we think about how at hyperspeed over the last 18 months as this government has been demonstrating what cronyism looks like in practice,setting up not only a two-track economy where they preach growth, growth, growth, but that growth seems to only be in the form of profits for the supermarket banking and electricity sector while regular people are suffering because that profit is the cost of living for regular people.
We're now also seeing that manifest in a two-track democracy because those who canafford it get special access, whereas regular people are now also explicitly, as of this last week, going to have their voting rights suppressed.
So I think it's impossible to see the economy as this kind of walled-off, pseudo-natural thing, which obviously more right-wing economists want us to see it as,it's simply an area of public policy and that's where,as we've released our green budget and fiscal strategy, and we've been touring around the country trying to unpack these seemingly mystical concepts for regular New Zealanders for whom we think that the economy and our democracy should actually serve,
It's been really interesting asking people what they think the economy is, which we have done at many of these public meetings. And the first kind of few things that are thrown back at me are always ideas of the cost of living, always ideas of profit and, you know, unemployment or GDP or whatever else.
And I kind of have to say to people, well actually, again,mif we boil it all down at a basic level, all the economy is, is you and me and us and the stuff that we create and the planet that we live on..and the rules that we put in place in order to try and govern those relationships.
And those rules are man-made. They're all made up. They can change when they don't work for the majority of us because we don't live in a game of monopoly.
Those rules can and should change when they're not working for us.
So yeah, that's what I think that the role of the state is to ensure that everybody has their basic needs met. And I think that that's a pretty common sense proposition.
Bryan: When I look at a budget, what I'm looking at, I think, are a whole lot of moral decisions. They're not necessarily divine economic decisions- You have to do it this way.
There are moral decisions. If we decide that we're going to spend more money on children than we are on defence, then that's a moral decision.
Talk to me about the green budget. What are your top priorities for the next election
Chlöe:Yeah, so our top priority is, in a nutshell,stepping back to ensure that everybody's basic needs are met and that our planet islooked after because we believe that the economy has very clearly been geared,as Jeanette Fitzsimmons actually said back in the day,towards the exploitation of people and planet.
We can flip that on its head and ensure that this economy, this set of rules that we have made up, is instead geared towards the well-being and the health of people and planet.
So the basic things that we've got in our budget is obviously very clearly tax reform, which will allow us to unlock the resources which are currently being bound up and
not only unproductive uses, but also set in such a way that things are so deeply unfair where the wealthiest 311 households in this country pay half the effective tax rate of the Average New Zealander.
Our firefighters and nurses and teachers who go to work every single day to actually build this country and ensure that it functions. And in unlocking those resources and in using debt more productively and actually, again, in a more common sense way, i.e. the opposite of the paying for tax cuts, which this government is doing, which has created no jobs and is not adding to productivity.
Then we can pay for those universal basic services like free GPs for everybody, free dentistry, free early childhood education. We can rapidly lower climate changing emissions. We can create a ministry of green works and guarantee 40,000 sustainable good green jobs, particularly to revitalize rural Aotearoa.
So we're trying to paint a picture for people, obviously fully costed and evidence-based, of the world that we can move towards. And this actually strikes a really important chord for me because, you know, I've been in so many hui, particularly with working people over the last 18 months who are just so fatigued and so exhausted by this government's death by a thousand tax cuts approach that they've resigned themselves and they've switched off and they feel powerless.
So I've taken it upon myself to ask these rooms of people, oftentimes hundreds of people in these rooms, “Who here is excited about the future?”
And in a sea of hundreds of people, oftentimes fewer than half a dozen will put their hand up. And I'll say, you know, Ete Whanau, this is our problem definition.
Right now, so many of us are so exhausted, so backed into our corner that people are primed to come out swinging basically on the end defense of the status quo because that's all that we can kind of see ahead for us.
But what if we were instead to become unified around something so much bigger tofind those threads of solidarity, which historically have allowed people to unify across these far bigger purposes than just individual needs of individual communities, the kinds of things that actually build societies.
And that's where I find the thread of hope.
Bryan : Okay, fairer taxation. What would you do to our taxation system?
Chlöe: So we've got a number of proposals in our green budget,and I want to be really clear here that the purpose of showing our hand and kind of flying the flag for all of these different policy proposals is so that we buy the very overdue public debate about what meaningful tax reform looks like in this country.
So as context, we're obviously the only country in the OECD that does not have any form of kind of intentionally redistributive tax policy in terms of a wealth tax, stamp duty, capital gains tax, inheritance tax, or otherwise.
We are an outlier internationally, and as you will well know, Bryan, many political parties, particularly those who deem themselves of the so-called illusory centre, are just unwilling to engage in the terms of this debate to the detriment of unlocking the resources necessary to build the productive, modern country that all New Zealanders deserve.
So the proposals that we put on the table are a suite of income tax reforms that would see 91% of New Zealanders paying less income tax.
How we help, to afford that is through a shifting of the tax burden. So that shifting of the tax burden would include a wealth tax on the wealthiest 3% in this country. We have also proposed an inheritance tax for those who, are inheriting in excess of a million dollars.
And again, this is pretty normal stuff internationally. And also a trust tax, again, for sake of floating the argument,because I think you'll be aware that we don't have a heck of a lot of transparency with regard to how trusts currently operate in this country.
And we'll probably have more to say about that in the not too distant future Obviously, our former Minister of Revenue did some good mahi in that space.
And then finally, we've also got a private jet tax which is a bit more of a thought provocation,I think, for people because the amount of revenue that we would generate from that,if I recall correctly off the top of my head,is only about $25 million per annum. But it is just one of those prompts to basically say it is rather bizarre that at this point in the climate and biodiversity crises,we are still seeing regular people being pushed into making decisions to not useplastic straws while billionaires are burning carbon at a rate of knots.:
So, yeah, it's just a little bit more fairness.
Bryan: One of the things that you raised earlier in this conversation was that you got upset by seeing your talented friends go overseas.We're seeing that now.We're seeing plane loads of talented New Zealanders disappearing to.Australia and what have you.
And that is a consequence of how we're running our country. I mean, economics is tied up with the environment, it’s tied up with how we see ourselves as a nation, what we think we believe we're about and those sorts of things.
Do we need to see a moral shift in our society before some of the things that you're hopeful of bringing in can actually happen?
Chlöe : So I have a very, very strong view, which might not surprise you, that the majority of New Zealanders care about each other on the planet that we live on, which then prompts the question of, well, what the hell is the barrier to politicians who are supposed to represent those regular New Zealanders actually implementing policies that are wildly popular?
Because I find it really interesting whenever we float the ideas of our tax reform,for example,the wealth tax, that we're constantly under attack.Yet if you look at all of the polling data, this stuff resonates.I t's wildly popular with the New Zealand public.
So in fact, the barrier, I think, is more so the so-called received wisdom of the commentariat and of the mainstream of politicians.Which then begs the question of who is influencing that landscape?
And this is where I think that we also need to be honest about who really gets disproportionate say in the way that we run this thing that we call our economy andin our democracy.
And yeahthe honest answer to that is those at the top are getting disproportionate influence over the way that things are working at the moment.And to that effect, you know, we are seeing worse and worse outcomes for regular people. And I'm really encouraged not only by you know, the popping up of some amazing advocacy locally through Tax Justice Aotearoa,but there's some amazing stuff happening internationally as well, particularly in the UK at the moment.
Of course it's not going to be easy of course it's not going to be easy to radically transform our tax system but radical by definition just means to grab the problem at its root and just because something may be challenging to change or to create doesn't mean that we shouldn't do it.
So I feel very much that we are, if we're to reflect on,just the socioeconomic political history of even this country, we realize that every 40 or so years we have a form of economic transformation, as you alluded to in the 30s and 40s after world wars and the Great Depression and the advent of the welfare state.public health care, public education, public housing, all of these things that were previously thought of as totally impossible, happening and being paid for by higher taxes on those who had profited handsomely during a time of hardship for many.
In the 80s and 90s through to this day, we've seen that social safety net shredded and we're grappling with the consequences of that.
So, 41 years on from 1984 I do think that we are standing on the precipice, at the moment in which everything could change quite quickly.
Bryan: I do think that we are at a moment.
I remember making a couple of documentaries..one was Inside Child Poverty in 2011, and I finished it by saying that poverty was not a PC word - that people didn't want to talk about.
And then it all broke loose, but now we've got a piece of legislation that recognises and says we should measure it.
And then I went and revisited it 10 years later with Child Poverty Revisited, and I finished that one by saying the un-PC word to talk about now is Wealth!
But I find that people are actually now talking about wealth and the problem of wealth. And they're worried about their families going overseas and all of that. And I think we are at this moment.
And the question is, how can we capitalize on it?
Because I had some hopes for COVID.
There was that moment when we were talking about, the team of five million or something and people were walking around the streets and talking to each other.
And then as soon as it was over, they couldn't wait to get their McDonald's and get back to life as how it used to be, as far as they were concerned.
And a lot of people made money during COVID by doing up their houses and pushing up house prices and stuff.
So I know that you have hopes for it.
How realistic do you think this is that we are at this moment and things could change?
Chlöe :Yeah, I think you raise a really good point regarding COVID because I had very similar hopes.You know, the pandemic was a portal and could have offered us an insight into the world that we could have.
I was reflecting on the fact at that point in time and actually wrote about it in my regular Herald column that all of these things that we were told for so long were economically or politically or fiscally impossible, whether it be flexible working arrangements for single parents and people with disabilities or direct payments to people who needed it or rent freezers.
All of these things happened virtually overnight, which exposed that they were always simply a matter of political willpower.
You also flag, in part, the unconventional monetary policy that rolled out during that time. And I think that it's worthwhile taking a second to just unpack that because weknow that at the end of 2019, start of 2020, before the pandemic hit our shores,that we were looking at potentially approaching 0% with regard to the OCR interest rates.
So we were looking at, or rather the Reserve Bank and Treasury were looking at the efficacy of monetary policy in an environment like that,and it was really interesting because prior to the pandemic treasury and rbnz issued a paper to grant robertson then moff saying if we were to roll out unconventional monetary policy the likes of the large-scale asset program which obviously did roll out then you know we would basically see an increase in what they call distributional impacts i.e inequality and fiscal policy i.e the tax and spend that only government has control over given that monetary policy is a blunt instrument
But that fiscal policy, those political decisions, would have to mitigate the inequality that would be caused through that unconventional monetary policy.And if you look back at the questions that I asked and the briefings and the hearings that I tried to get during that 2020 to 23 term,
You will find me on the record.Actually,I would say very strongly the antithesis to what Nicola Willis was doing from that side of the opposition. You know, I actually had a question that I asked Grant in Finance and Expenditures Select Committee as to whether he considered himself a compassionate conservative because of the way that I saw that fiscal strategy was rolling out. where we were pretending as though monetary policy was this mystical thing that we somehow had no control over and that the government didn't seemingly have any ability to mitigate against or to redistribute where those gains were aggregating at the top of the pecking order.
So I think it's just a really important first point that we actually have a trackrecord of trying to, throughout the COVID period,address and arrest that widening of inequality, which was the consequence of intentional political decisions.
So where that leaves us,Bryan,is I think people,just in terms of my honest analysis of things,over the last six years, people were promised transformation and largely delivered tinkering.
I think that the unfortunate byproduct of that is that so many people are really anxious about promises of transformation and they just want the basics to be met in terms of providing for their families and getting a sense of stability.
You know, my younger sister,for example, who has two young children, couldn't care less about what I do for a job.But early childhood education and the cost of it, which is effectively the equivalent of her rent each week,is the thing that has radicalised her.
So for so many New Zealanders, this point of the cost of living and connecting the dots to how that is driven bymerciless profiteering from large corporations is, I think,going to be the thing that helps them to understand that politics belongs to those who turn up.:
And that's where we are going to have to do a lot of work on the ground, which we are currently doing, to help people understand that better is possible if regular people realize their power and unify on that basis. Well, what I hope COVID taught people was that my well-being depends on your well-being.
Bryan : And the other thing I think people are beginning to realise is that big money and big corporations have got control of our democracy and we have to do something about that.
Chloe, it's been lovely to talk with you this morning.I hope we can do this again because there's so much more that I'd like to talk with you about.
I know that your time's limited.Thank you so much for joining with me.
Chlöe : No, thank you so much, Brian.I think, as you say, so much more we could unpack. So let's do a four-hour one next time! (laughs). See you later, mate!
Bryan: Okay, bye-bye. Thank you.
This interview has been made free to listen to thanks to the generosity of my paid subscribers who support my independent public journalism.
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I post something everyday and all subscriptions go to meet production costs .
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