I recently saw a front page newspaper advert for a new “Power Company” for the people. The ad would have caught a lot of people’s attention as frustration with eye gouging corporations in NZ is a daily norm.
But for me it was just a reminder that I live in a country that has been, since 1984 a corporate wonderland, a kind of social experiment to see what happens if you make New Zealander’s collectively into a kind of “Tyrannosaurus Rex’s goat” — you know, the famous scene from the first Jurassic Park movie in which a goat is tethered to a feeding station in order to entice the giant lizard into the view of the waiting tourists. Well since 1984, corporations have been enticed here to do business in NZ by a tasty helpless goat — aka the New Zealand public.
I have been hooked by these adds before. Those clever corporations that sell us our power and our phone plans, our financial services and insurance to name but a few of their products have pulled off an audacious coup. They know we feel taken advantage of so they actually use messaging to the underdog to suck us in. The underdog is a part of the Kiwi psyche, related to the ‘Kiwi battler’, and the ‘Kiwi digger’, it is a sentiment derived from a tradition of thinking of ourselves as getting it done smarter and cheaper and is perhaps best summed up in Ernest Rutherford’s quote “we haven’t got the money, so we’ll have to think”.
Along with appealing to the underdog, corporations in NZ today ingratiate themselves to us by making perfectly charming and delightfully off kilter representations of us to ourselves. Whether it’s cars, banking, insurance, hardware etc we are bombarded by expensive advertising meticulously designed to look and feel like it’s not meticulously designed at all and is in fact just like us. Turn on the telly or watch Youtube for a bit and there is big business, constantly telling us who we are as they walk alongside us in our Kiwi dream, and gosh it feels heart warming.
But it’s bullshit.
One of the identifiable marketing strategies we constantly see especially with mobile phones and power companies is the “stick it to the man and jump in with our new low cost service!” messaging — just like the power company front page ad I noted at the start of this article. But in many cases the so called breakthrough company is actually a division of a larger corporation, a company set up to look independent but actually owned by a larger parent company and it isn’t in competition with that parent at all, it is just offering services with low profit margins in order to recruit a whole lot more customers. Once they have been recruited those plans and add-on services subtly become pricier and pricier. The strategy depends on two things, one, our busyness fogging our perception of the changing service cost and two, the fact that we are a captive market. I will come back to this. What is important to note off the bat is that when a company starts selling you heart warming images of yourself they have well and truly hidden themselves. Businesses are there to make money. Once upon a time advertising was generally thus: “3 cans of baked beans for $2 bucks!” which was an honest summation of what they were about. Today they have ingratiated themselves into our lives and this means they can no longer be honest about about who they are and what they do, not that they were terribly good at that in the first place, but the sophistication and resourcing of modern brand and image management really speaks to a deep lack of transparency.
A recent example is Mitre10’s latest offering depicting an earnest but inept customer who develops a kind of “bro-crush” with the tall handsome Mitre10 guy as he is guided through all his home DIY projects. The ad culminates in our diminutive customer pushing past a handshake and going in for a hug at the completion of his project. Mitre10’s marketing creatives have read the mood of the nation and cast a Pasifika actor for the staff person which, you know, is a good thing I suppose; if only they had had the balls to do that 10 or 20 years ago but let’s leave that for now. The ad has waltzed into our living rooms and assured us that we need and love Mitre10… But hang on. If I’m not mistaken Mitre10 needs and loves us, and our money more specifically. If this ad was an honest representation it would be the needy Mitre10 staff guy looking with doe eyes into the face of the implacable customer.
Just last week an article in the NZ Herald on our locked up supermarket environment noted that there are only two supermarket chains in NZ although they have several different brands. They use their position to bully suppliers, threatening to shut them out of the market and implementing buy-back policies that put all the risk on the suppliers themselves. More sinisterly they use their buying power to prevent suppliers selling to any new competitors and seem to exert undue influence on the retail property market for potential new competitor sites. This while NZ is noted as being one of the most expensive places to buy food in the world, along with having an outrageous cost of living for an economy that is now considered largely low income.
So where did we go wrong and can we do anything about the situation? We went wrong when the 1984 Labour government committed us to severe neo-liberal economic reform and successive Labour and National governments have only tweaked that ever since. But we can do something about it and to do so we need to re-imagine or in fact, remember, what government is.
Neo-liberal economics is not really an economic theory at all. It is a socio-political agenda that values autocracy and detests democracy eg: human equality. The great irony of neo-liberal market reform is that it was touted as the answer to Communism as the old Soviet Socialist regime of the U.S.S.R fell. But that regime fell precisely because it was mired in cronyism and the very autocracy neo-liberal market reform went on to install in western democracies around the world. Just for a refresher, autocracy means that a big, usually unelected, boss makes decisions for everyone else. Corporations are for example which have hierarchical layers of increasingly less important people being controlled by a few or sometimes one person like Elon Musk or Jef Bezos at the top. Fitting in the Venn diagram circle of “Autocracy” alongside corporations are monarchs, emperors, tyrants and such notable historical examples as Ghengis Khan and Hitler.
As Neo-liberal market reform swept the world in the 80s it dismantled democratic, publicly owned state departments and companies by which people provided non-profit health, education, power, communications and transport services for themselves and replaced them with autocratic corporate structures which then charged profits for those same services. Also very important to note: the people who have lead western society on this path of constant growth and economic development are really very unwell, apparently very psychologically damaged people who, like the ads, have had us convinced how much we love and aspire to be like them. You can tell this because the desire to endlessly have more and also to have so much control seems quite an obvious symptom of an emotionally imbalanced individual who has substituted drive and ‘success’ for emotional well-being. A person with such behaviours would have been banished from any ancient human community because of the danger they pose to successful social function.
Today we are told constantly that if we’re not rich it’s because we don’t have the habits, drive and discipline of successful people, but actually it’s more likely that we don’t have the issues of ‘successful’ people. Unlike them we feel the intrinsic unhealthiness of wanting and having so much wealth and we feel troubled by the prospect of having authority over others which, it turns out is an innate quality and value of our ancestral hunter gatherer cultures. Sadly we live in a world shaped by these people so that we have to keep trying to get more whether we want to or not. In a very real way we should in fact understand that debt is the root cause of both our social and environmental problems — particularly housing and property debt. We are trapped in a cycle of debt driven consumerism because neoliberal market reforms destroyed public collectives and our collective ability to provide for ourselves. These ‘successful’ people need help. But first of all we need to prize their fingers from the wheel because they are steering us straight into a social and environmental apocalypse that strangely seems to reflect their inner psychological realities.
We the public, the hapless goat, have accepted this situation in no small way because of the cleverness of corporate messaging. We have allowed public airlines, power and communications companies to be sold off because of the enduring backlash of the supposed failure of socialism and the easy, ‘apple pie’ sound bites about ‘individual hard work’ and ‘tax grubbing bureaucrats’ until we have come to believe that our own greatest power, democratic collective action, is something to be ashamed of; whilst the corporates laugh their way to the bank with our dopey money. The grand coup of neo-liberalism was its success in vilifying the notion of collective action as some sort of filthy communist failure when in truth it was frantically replacing democratic public collectives with private, autocratic collectives — corporations. So neoliberalism was in a strange way the revenge of the unelected, autocratic elite.
We have even given many of those companies and others like banks more of our public money when they have foundered in messes of their own making so helpless have we become. After being sold to private interests, Air New Zealand was bailed out twice by the tax paying public of New Zealand to keep it solvent. This points to the unavoidable truth that if the public can’t do without it, the public must own it. Electricity can in this day and age be considered a human right, so we should declare it as such and assign a profit free daily allocation for each adult and child. Perhaps after this allocation has been used power companies could add margins and such a model may well encourage more efficient use but ultimately I think we need to provide power for ourselves on a not-for-profit basis.
But the core of the matter is that we need to build a new economic environment in which people can form collectives through their governments to provide services for themselves and so protect themselves from the profiteering of corporations. Key among these services must be lending which we can do collectively much more fairly than banks by offering flat fee loans rather than compounding interest loans (Fat flea loans?). A public company offering flat-fee loans could easily outcompete private compounding interest lenders — yet strangely the market hasn’t produced that as neoliberal proponents say it should have? Hmmm…
Unlike our present situation, a sustainable economy will be one that is informed by human nature and millions of years of social evolution. There was always such an economy and it is as old as our species. This economy was shaped by the necessity of working together, some things could be privately owned but the big important things were shared and were the product of collective action. This economy developed as a product of our own evolution so it is hard wired with the same innate values of fairness, equality and shared decision making that we evolved in order to function effectively as social animals. Instead of requiring people to commit 1/4 or more of their life time productivity to paying for a house this ancient economy got everyone together and made a young family a house in a week or two. No mortgage, moving on. The rule of this new/old economy we need to re-discover is ‘not-for-profit’ and also that if it is a social necessity it must be publicly owned and non-profit. It is time to expect this of our governments again. In order to do that we need to break out of the brainwash of corporate and neoliberal messaging and assert that government of the people, by the people, for the people, is the super power that can save the world.
