In part one of a two-part series on farm politics in New Zealand, Professor Hugh Campbell explores the declining influence and privilege of farmers across the country
Comment: One of the curious dynamics in New Zealand political history is that there have been relatively few farmer protests.
Such events are regular occurences in places like France, where farmers using their high powered muck spreaders to coat municipal council offices with bovine excrement makes for entertaining television, but in New Zealand the most powerful industry in the land almost never takes to the streets.
Only three times in recent history - in 1986, 2003, and now in the Groundswell protests of 2021 - have lines of tractors rolled into the cities in memorable, large-scale protest.
There are some obvious common elements to all three. Each was directed at a Labour Government and their main impetus seems to be to collectively let off a bit of steam and allow the rural community to gather in solidarity.
And, while each seems to have been triggered by some or other issue of the moment, they all repeat the usual platitudes of a pernicious rural vs urban divide in New Zealand and a need for urbanites to ‘learn and accept what rural folk do’.
But in this year’s farmer protests there is one very important difference.
Previously, the key rationale behind these protests was to make a unified show of strength, linking multiple farm sectors, lobby groups, and political interests to send a message to a Labour Government that politically, farming was still the biggest game in town.
This time is different. Federated Farmers are conspicuous by their absence and were called out by Groundswell protesters demanding a ‘change of leadership’ for rural New Zealand.
Most of the big agricultural industries were entirely silent, and in fact have quietly participated in negotiating many of the exact same environmental measures the Groundswell tractorcades are protesting against.
As farmers, families like mine received an enormous amount of benefit from the state, had almost no constraints on our actions, and often paid almost nothing in tax. In terms of per capita investment by the state, there has never been such a privileged class in New Zealand history.
And the National Party was not even invited, despite historically being the political wing of rural New Zealand, and has been subjected to scorn by many farmers who are now jumping ship to support the ACT party.
It is this level of fracture and disunity of purpose that marks out the farmer protests of 2021 from all its predecessors.
What is also clear in all these protests is how deeply rooted in nostalgia they are. There is real passion, and genuine anger motivating the Groundswell protesters, but much of what they are mourning relates to a sense of enormous loss of power and prestige.
In just under 50 years, pastoral farming has declined from being the utterly dominant player in the economy - the group that determined the overall political direction of New Zealand life - to being just another powerful industry lobby group. To outsiders the distinction may seem trivial. To many insiders it feels like a slowly unfolding calamity.
To understand how much influence farmers have lost, some historical background is needed. The nostalgic memory of the older participants of the Groundswell protests is of a time when they experienced a remarkable and, in the end, unsustainable level of privilege.
From the 1920s to the 1980s, pastoral farming was the central concern of any New Zealand government. It provided the vast share of national income, peaking in the early 1950s at over 90 percent of New Zealand’s export earnings.
It was favoured in the tax regime, provided with a range of concessions and incentives, the central actor in any discussion of town and country planning, and entirely immune from any accusation of environmental harms.
Successive governments lavished tax dollars on agricultural science, on farmer education, on a massive quasi-governmental infrastructure to support agricultural exporting, and on expensive rural infrastructure to serve farming communities.
As farmers, families like mine received an enormous amount of benefit from the state, had almost no constraints on our actions, and often paid almost nothing in tax. In terms of per capita investment by the state, there has never been such a privileged class in New Zealand history.
This extraordinary level of privilege was facilitated by two important political dynamics.
At heart their message is simply a plea to stop the clocks. For some, it is proving very hard to move on from living in a past version of New Zealand where they were the nation’s most privileged citizens.
First, the FPP electoral system of New Zealand delivered disproportionate power to the votes of rural New Zealanders. As a result, the rural heartland of the Reform Party and then the National Party delivered a procession of farmer MPs to represent the sector’s interests in Wellington.
During the long years of the Holyoake National Government in the 1960s, up to half of ‘Kiwi Keith’s’ cabinet ministers were pastoral farmers. While this was an astonishing level of political power for a group that represented around six percent of New Zealand’s population, it was unsurprising in a world where the direct interests of pastoral farmers were equated with the overall economic interests of the nation.
Alongside the disproportionate reach of pastoral farmers into the formal realm of government, a second political dynamic was potentially even more influential. This was the huge and interconnected infrastructure of Producer Boards, quasi-government organisations, university and agricultural college boards, research institutions, and a private network of farmer organisations, boarding schools, clubs and export company boards, all of which provided roles for a close community of Pākehā farming men.
Sadly, for the folks protesting around the country in 2021, that world has gone and they no longer can mobilise a single, unified voice speaking for pastoral farmers. This is what marks out these current farmer protests. They demonstrate a profound breakdown of the old political order and an increasingly distanced relationship between an older group of pastoral farmers and their sectoral representatives, export industries and political representatives.
There is no coherent political rationale to the protests, other than the public service of giving a whole lot of rural folk a chance to get out express their displeasure at a Labour Government.
Even as a significant number of younger (and a few older) pastoral farmers are moving and adapting to both dramatically changing world market conditions and a complex emerging regulatory environment, this older remnant just feel stuck in the past. The complex transition to becoming just another business lobby group - and being forced to contend with a range of groups and economic forces that simply can’t be controlled from within the farming sector - is proving hard to swallow.
At heart their message is simply a plea to stop the clocks. For some, it is proving very hard to move on from living in a past version of New Zealand where they were the nation’s most privileged citizens.
There should probably just be a sense of relief among New Zealanders, and for its local government offices in particular, that the weapon-du-jour in protests here is a proudly buffed John Deere tractor and not a high-velocity Leboulch muck spreader.
Stay tuned for part two: what changed and why we can never go back to the way things were.
