Posted
7th August 2001
Malice in Blunderland
by Chris Wheeler
b Twenty years of the "New Zealand Experiment" have
taught the NZ Royal Commission on Genetic Modification nothing.
They wasted $6.5 million of taxpayer money producing a report
written by the gene jockey industry which just gave New Zealand
some more empty slogans - "Bio-tech Revolution" & "Knowledge
Economy" - and lost that country probably its only chance this
century to make a real difference. Chris Wheeler surveys 20
years of Kiwi blundering in the dark.
New Zealand has lost the opportunity of a lifetime to ban general
field release of genetically engineered food crops and maintain
this island nation's developing status as one of the last producers
of genuinely GE-free and organic food crops on the planet. A
farming nation that has most recently built a reputation on
winning boat races has totally missed the boat on the one issue
it could have easily built a world marketing advantage around,
and demonstrated in the world spotlight just how open to political
manipulation a government-appointed advisory body can be.
International focus has been on New Zealand for the past twelve
months as a Royal Commission on Genetic Modification deliberated
the issues surrounding genetic engineering and New Zealand was
being widely seen as a test bed for the whole GE debate with
far-reaching implications for the scientific as well as the
commercial arguments in the case. Unfortunately, any hope of
a proper examination of the issues involved was doomed from
the outset by the nature of the Commission itself and the way
it conducted its affairs by legal cross-examination.
Four elderly, well-intentioned, but gullible, middle class New
Zealanders - Sir Thomas Eichelbaum, Drs Jacqueline Allan and
Jean Fleming and the Right Reverend Richard Randerson - were,
in the end, led by the nose through a process they lacked the
expertise and intellectual gumption to query, by a team of high-priced
legal counsels employed by major genetic engineering corporates
and consortia whose daily presence ensured that this Royal Commission
could only come up with answers which would favour a genetic
engineering case.
This was neither an objective nor an even-handed appraisal of
the major GE issues.
What the world community of interest in the New Zealand Commission's
deliberations do not know is that access to the Commission was
subject to application being made by the various interest groups
involved in genetic engineering issues and that such applications
were then carefully vetted, ensuring that at least 70 percent
of the finally approved "interested parties" were strongly in
favour of the introduction of Genetic engineering. From then
on out it was easy to put a solid PR gloss over proceedings
to give the appearance that the public was being widely consulted.
Yes, public meetings were held. Individuals COULD make written
submissions - and thousands did. Indigenous Maori opinion was
sought. But all this was done accompanied by a tightly controlled
publicity exercise that hid the inevitable reality that the
final report would give virtually no weight to the thousands
of anti-GE petitions received by the Commission.
How it was done
95 percent of the arguments received by the Commission, including
those presented by respected international genetics scientists
such as Drs Peter Wills and Arpad Pusztai, and Monsanto-battling
Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser, were against genetic engineering,
so how did it come about that its report is so whole-heartedly
in support of GE?
Lacking the financial resources and legal expertise to mount
an effective counter campaign and with the largely international-corporate-owned
NZ media against them, the GE opposition were out-manoeuvred
and out-gunned at every turn of the Commission process by a
pro-GE machine that was prepared to throw immense resources
into controlling not only how the Commission itself would perceive
the evidenCe presented to it, but how the media and even the
greater bulk of opinion makers and politicians in the New Zealand
Parliament would perceive the issues.
It would be wrong, however, to say the Royal Commission was
captured by the GE industry. Its personnel and its agenda was
chosen from the outset to guarantee the result it got - carte
blanche approval of the GE industry's full research and promotion
agenda and whole-scale use of genetic engineering and GE crops
and products in New Zealand.
Because there was such wide public opposition to GE (in various
polls over the past two years a majority of NZers have demanded
controls over GE) and because there was such significant and
vocal opposition to its employment by the NZ Green Party, Greenpeace,
food safety and organics lobbies, the NZ Government HAD TO mount
a cosmetic exercise which would give the APPEARANCE of proper
public consultation, but would deliver a verdict comprehensively
in favour of genetic engineering.
The Commission's report in favour of GE has now become an effective
tool for beating the GE opposition and the Green Party in Parliament
around the head - probably the only reason for this whole $NZ6.5
million taxpayer-funded farce in the first place! As PM Helen
Clark, her Parliamentary colleagues and the GE industry are
now saying all across the NZ media: "You got what you asked
for - a complete and comprehensive review of GE policy and science.
The expert view resulting from the Royal Commission's deliberations
is that GE is an essential part of New Zealand's economic survival
and a leading aspect of our new 'Knowledge Economy' and must
be allowed to go ahead with the minimum of restrictions. Now
shut-up. Stop complaining, and accept the majority opinion."
Of course there are some derisory "controls" being recommended
in the Royal Commission report, but in my past 20 years of direct
involvement in agriculture issues and membership of official
bodies deliberating on environmental control strategies in New
Zealand, I have yet to see effective legislation or regulation
controlling ANY aspect of the agrichemical abuse that New Zealand
is notorious for in informed world environmental circles and
GE abuse will fare little better. The Environmental Risk Management
Authority (ERMA) cited in the Commission's report as the responsible
agency overseeing GE trials and releases has been controlled
from the first day of its establishment several years ago by
powerful industry lobby groups with the necessary financial
resources to fight any environmental group's submissions to
a standstill.
For 20 years I have been involved in various attempts to place
effective controls over the profligate application of carcinogenic
pesticides by New Zealand farmers, which contributes to New
Zealand's record levels of breast, prostate and bowel cancer,
childhood leukaemia and birth defects, and have met with continual
official apathy and obstruction, particularly from official
regulatory agencies. I and the knowledgeable anti-GE community
in New Zealand have absolutely no faith in the new GE review
apparatus being suggested by the Commission because we know
that just as with appointments to the food regulatory Australia
New Zealand Food Authority (ANZFA) and ERMA, membership will
be heavily weighted with GE industry stooges and political appointees
guaranteed to preserve the status quo.
Now, with the Royal Commission's recommendation that "conditional
release" of GE food crops be permitted under a cosmetically
modified but virtually unchanged regulatory structure, an opportunity
for New Zealand agriculture to become a world leader in organic
production has been lost forever. Now only Tasmania, off the
Australian coast, is left in the Southern Hemisphere as the
one relatively isolated landmass where a sound GE-free policy
could reasonably work.
Why? - the historic background
Knowing New Zealand as well as I do, I have had to continually
remind my offshore friends watching the deliberations of the
NZ Royal Commission on Genetic Modification from the other side
of the world, that New Zealand is truly the land of the sub-editors'
joke headline, "Malice in Blunderland", where the village idiot
can attain to political office and bad decision-making is a
national way of life.
The intelligent world out there beyond the seas surrounding
New Zealand needs to understand something of the economic holocaust
that has overtaken this country in the past 20 years in order
to fully comprehend exactly why a GE Commission here could never
responsibly and objectively deal with the ethical and scientific
issues involved in genetic engineering.
Whatever New Zealand's current Prime Minister Helen Clark may
say to the contrary and however much the tiny NZ Green Party
who keep the minority Labour Government in power may protest,
this environmentally beautiful but ethically bankrupt nation
still resolutely pursues the dream of a "Light at the End of
the Tunnel" solution to its self-induced woes - a solution which
the wholehearted pursuit of biotechnology is now seen to be
part of.
There is something of a New Guinea Cargo Cult colouring to this
national myth, which makes the addition of genetic engineering
to the dream of eventual deliverance so potentially attractive
to the average New Zealander or Kiwi, as we like to call ourselves.
For nearly twenty years now, Kiwis (appropriately, perhaps,
a flightless bird that digs for worms in the dark) have waited
for the light at the end of the tunnel promised by the 1984
Lange/Douglas Labour Government, which initiated the savage
Milton Friedman/Let Market Forces Rule bloodbath, while experiencing
huge social dislocation, dramatic drops in household income
and spending power, huge increases in violent and property crime,
and the disappearance of guaranteed employment and leisure time.
Regrettably we never seem to learn, having re-elected in the
current minority Labour Government many of the very team - including
the Prime Minister Helen Clark - who instituted the disastrous
"New Zealand Experiment" in the first place! Clark, it should
be added, is a wholehearted supporter of genetic engineering.
The GE Commission's decision will thus take a fitting place
alongside that long list of disasters that epitomise the past
nearly twenty years of New Zealand history.
In the words of one critic of the Experiment, Murray Dobbin
of the Canadian Centre of Policy Alternatives: " There are lessons
from New Zealand, but they do not involve adopting that tortured
country as a model. The first lesson is that the unfettered
application of ideology is inevitably destructive - not just
to democracy, social peace and equality but to the economy.
Even as the revolution continued to deliver disastrous results,
its promoters claimed it was because it had not gone far enough."
(1)
Failed promises
Every promise made by 1984 Finance Minister Roger Douglas to
justify the pain New Zealand was to go through has since proved
to be a lie.
Growth has not occurred. As Dobbin points out, in the years
1985-92, average economic growth in the OECD countries totalled
20%, while in New Zealand it was negative, at minus 1%. Promised
creation of enormous new wealth went into reverse: Real GDP
in 1992, at 5%, was below the 1985-86 level. A burst of growth
from 1993 to 1995 petered out, and the economy steadily declined
until it dipped into negative territory in 1998, posting the
fourth-worst growth in the OECD.
This situation has worsened considerably since that time, prompting
Professor Robert Wade of the London School of Economics to warn
attendees at a recent Auckland University economic seminar (2)
that New Zealand has had one of the slowest economic growth
rates in the developed world since 1985 and now risks becoming
the first country in 50 years to lose its "developed" status.
The promised removal of overseas debt has only occurred via
the sale of New Zealand, lock, stock and barrel, to overseas
corporates. Debt in 1984 was $NZ22 billion, but after 10 years
of experimenting, it had doubled to $ NZ45 billion -in spite
of the sell-off of $NZ16 billion in government owned assets
including state banking, the national power, rail and telephone
services and state public works facilities.
Under the Labour Government "reforms" nearly half a million
New Zealanders have been put out of work in the past fifteen
years as state enterprises like the railways, post and telephone
services dumped workers by the tens of thousands and de-regulation
of industry and the removal of tariff barriers to shoes, clothing,
electrical goods and a host of common consumer items put workers
on the dole queues. As productive factories nation-wide were
closed down or bankrupted, production machinery was sold offshore
to S.E. Asia, Indonesia, India, Taiwan and Korea in receivership
auctions, skilled workers migrated and trade education courses
closed down as funding was withdrawn by a succession of governments
that declared industrial skills were not the state's business.
True unemployment in 2001 is probably 16 percent - the highest
anywhere in the developed world - but employment statistics
are typically fudged by a succession of governments which defend
Market Forces mythology as if it was written somewhere on Mosaic
tablets of stone. A youth denied hope in a viable economic future
commit suicide at a rate which has drawn the attention of the
WHO and the route of tertiary education, which in other more
effective economies offers a nation's young hope and a way out
in pursuit of professional skills, is denied by a government-backed
policy of crippling User Pays education fees ensuring education
remains the privilege of the children of the wealthy.
New Zealand is increasingly being promoted to Northern Hemisphere
tourists as a vast Club Med holiday camp and unemployed New
Zealanders, dumped by business close-downs, ordered into re-training
as casino black-jack dealers, hotel cleaners, taxi-drivers and
tourist guides. The New Zealand Parliament in the meantime has
voted itself huge pay increases as a reward for its ineptitude
in governance, stripped away the last laws limiting the power
of international corporates, weakened the rights of workers
to organise themselves or seek redress for employer wrongs,
tripled the rents on housing for the poor and opened the nation's
borders to cheap junk imports manufactured in Asian sweatshops.
Blunderland realities
In typical Blunderland fashion the New Zealand clone of Wal-Mart
which imports all this shoddy rubbish, the ubiquitous Warehouse
chain (where "Everyone gets a bargain"), is held up to Kiwis
as an example of entrepreneurial acumen and its owner, Stephen
Tindall, feted as a national benefactor. Meanwhile the two who
made his fortune possible, ex-PM David Lange and Finance Minister
Roger Douglas, would, in a more rational world, be placed on
trial for crimes against humanity. Instead an increasingly incoherent
Lange makes money in retirement from the business talk-fest
circuit, selling breakfast food on TV and suing critics of his
eight catastrophic years in office. Roger Douglas, in an episode
reminiscent of Orwell's "Animal Farm" in reverse, dabbled in
a pig farm investigated for cruelty by the RSPCA and described
by one farm inspector as the filthiest she had ever seen, but
now travels the world spreading economic disaster, supported
by the IMF, the World Bank and New Right economists.
Neither man could be trusted in charge of a lawn-mowing franchise.
New Zealand put them in charge of a country for eight years
during which time they did more damage to the social structure
and economy than was managed by previous Parliamentary incompetents
in even the worst days of the 30s Great Depression. Their "reforms"
promised increases in productivity, but after eight years of
restructuring and massive labour deregulation, New Zealand's
productivity was set on a decline from which it has never recovered.
For example, between 1990 and 1998 Australia posted a 21.9 percent
increase. New Zealand managed a miserable 5.2 percent. This
decline has been steady and reflects the profound loss of manufacturing
facilities and skills.
Only the wealthy in New Zealand have seen any benefit from this
destructive exercise in social engineering. Between 1984 and
1996, the top 10 percent of income earners increased their net
worth by 50 percent or more while the lowest 10 percent lost
21.6 percent of their 1984 income. Many of the top 10 percent
became multi-millionaires under the Douglas/Lange regime and
those who have not hoisted their ill-gotten gains and themselves
overseas - as notorious winners in the "reforms" such as Michael
Fay, David Richwhite and Douglas Myers have done - now work
under the umbrella of the Business Roundtable (sic) to pressure
PM Helen Clark into releasing the last unsold state assets (TV
broadcasting, the Post Office, etc) into their relentlessly
grasping hands.
More than 50% of the total working population now have considerably
lower real income than they did in 1984, work sweat shop hours
and typically have more than one job, reflecting employment
conditions in the factory slums of 19th Century England, rather
than the socially secure paradise those of us from an older
generation can still remember. Little wonder that many New Zealanders
have lost heart in the tunnel light myth and now flee the country
in droves, producing a situation where Prof Wade warns: "Once
a threshold density of skilled people is lost, the rate of out-migration
is likely to accelerate, companies and organisations will have
increasing trouble meeting staffing needs, the quality of public
services will decline, the tax base will erode..." (2)
As
a consequence of all this radical mismanagement, New Zealand
is now Australia's poor neighbour, de-industrialised, de-skilled,
and largely dependent on the technological and industrial know-how
and products of former peasant economies who had the foresight
to govern their nations in the diametrically opposite direction.
To its closest neighbour, Australia, New Zealand now has a status
approximately equal to that of New Guinea or Fiji and the relationship
between the two countries is typified by the one-way flow of
skilled labour north-west across the Tasman Sea. Apart from
the occasional mention of Kiwi sporting teams and oddities like
an elephant seal squashing a car, New Zealand receives less
mention in the Australian media than the weather in Moscow.
History repeats itself
This is the reality on which understanding of New Zealand's
flirtation with genetic engineering has to be understood. A
crippled nation which exports its best and most creative brains
overseas can only be expected to come up with another crippled
formula for the future. The Royal Commission on Genetic Modification's
report rambles on about "New Zealand taking a leading place
in the Bio-tech Revolution", but has produced a blueprint which
shows all the short-sightedness, lack of planning and stupidity
which ushered in the original New Zealand Experiment.
A distinguishing feature of that experiment has always been
recourse to the latest faddish expressions as if resorting to
a topical label would somehow change national thinking and turn
the economy around by the pressure of semantics. "Think Big",
"User Pays", "Market Forces", "Filter Down Mechanism", "Information
Age", and now "Bio-tech Revolution" and "Knowledge Economy"
- we New Zealanders have lived through them all without seeing
them make one iota of difference to the general state of the
nation and no one here believes the emerging Bio-tech Revolution
will lead anywhere but overseas, where an average 11,000 Kiwis
settle permanently every year.
Crucially, the Royal Commission on Genetic Modification has
failed completely to clarify to New Zealand and the rest of
the world the real issues involved in the whole debate regarding
genetic engineering - that from beginning to end the whole Frankenstein
technology that present GE experimentation represents, is directed
towards corporate control and ownership and the personal profit
of a squalid group of third-rate scientific brains lacking the
moral and intellectual fortitude to see where their lunatic
experiments are leading.
I do not believe that Greater Nature will easily forgive what
New Zealand has joined North America in unleashing. They who
have sown the wind may yet live to reap the whirlwind.
References
1. Murray Dobbin, "The lesson in New Zealand Economic Policy",
reported on
<<http://www.pl.net/>www.pl.net>, July 16, 2001.
2. Simon Collins, " 'Developed' status in danger",
NZ Herald, 1.8.01, page 3.
ABOUT THE WRITER Chris Wheeler
is former president of the NZ Soil & Health Association, New
Zealand's foremost organic agriculture lobby group and a Southern
Hemisphere writer on environmental and health issues who has
been widely published in Australia and New Zealand. . . .
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