Time to end the enshittification of New Zealand

I live in the great green heartland of New Zealand; a biologically ruined grassy waste created to serve cows. And when out in this countryside – dead rivers rich with brown foam, man-made fountains of cow piss raining down on paddocks to percolate into the groundwater and poison it with nitrates, the occasional lonely oasis of native trees standing to remind us of what has been lost – I often see ‘STOP 3 WATERS’ signs.

Which is darkly funny, for the following reasons.

The word of the last several years has been "enshittification." Coined by the author and activist Cory Docotorow, it means "the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking," according to the Macquaire Dictionary, which crowned it as Word of the Year, 2024. "We’re all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit," Doctorow says.

Enshittification is also a fantastic term for what's happened to New Zealand. It applies evenly to our infrastructure, our services, our media, and our politics. And nowhere can it be seen more clearly than in the failure of Wellington's Moa Point sewage plant, which has led to a literal enshittification of Pōneke's beaches and ocean environment. 70 million litres of raw sewage is being pumped, daily, directly into the ocean. If the weather turns, Chief Executive Pat Dougherty warns, they might have to start spilling it closer to land.

Lucky the weather's always so good in Wellington.

Wellington's sewage spill is just one of many examples of public service and infrastructure enshittification, begun by Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson, and continued by neoliberal factions across government, business, media, finance, and the public. These factions often seem disparate but they are ideologically aligned on the same premise: public services don't work, they should be privatised, and any public services remaining should serve "the individual" – i.e. the rich, or the corporation.

The process of public sector enshittification is better known as austerity, and looks like this:

1. Take a public service that's either a.) not running well, often because of lack of investment or b.) create the perception that it's not running well.
2. Under the guise of saving money, gut the public service of investment and make it impossible to do its job, often by firing everyone who works there.
3. Point out how badly the public service is running now, and either privatise it, neuter it, or transform it to serve private capital.

The Coalition Government has given us almost too many examples of enshittification to count, but high-profile ones include:

• The scrapping of Three Waters, a Labour program designed to take costly water assets like sewage plants off Council books, meaning they could be built, upgraded and maintained with Government money instead of rates. Screeching about "co-governance", local Atlas Network toadies the Taxpayers Union led an astroturf campaign against the legislation, with a roadshow offering the anonymous-donor-subsidised ‘STOP! 3 WATERS’ signs that now dot the countryside. The Coalition took years to replace the scrapped legislation with... nearly identical legislation. Meanwhile, water and rates bills soared;
• Huge cuts across public services to reinstate billions in tax deductions for landlords, sparking a recession;
• The arbitrary cancellation of new Cook Strait ferries (which would have arrived this year!) leaving us with ancient ferries that cannot fulfil the sole purpose of seagoing cargo vessels: to not drift aimlessly into the land;
• And, most recently, the announcement of a billion-dollar boondoggle: a Liquefied Natural Gas power plant. Under the guise of bringing public costs down, it will immediately bring public costs up (it's being funded by a new tax levy), comes with no guaranteed savings (Prime Minister Luxon "hopes" that the electricity gentailiers will pass on savings, which they absolutely will not do, as they are set up to make the largest profit possible, not offer consumer savings). The only reason to build this thing is as a favour to fossil fuel companies, which is why they're doing it.

Meanwhile, the Coalition's assault on Māori rights and Te Tiriti continues unabated, most recently with Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour repeating the lie that Māori "benefited from colonisation."

The audacity of this one takes my breath away: it's like saying that cancer is great because it's led us to develop so many cancer treatments.

Much of what was or remains good about the New Zealand state was created to offset the most egregious absurdities of colonialism and capitalism - public housing, public health, public schooling, even a pitiful measure of the self-determination promised to Māori under Te Tiriti. It's no coincidence that all these have suffered mightily under the Coalition's aegis. The only thing the Coalition seems interested in building, as the Bad Newsletter predicted several years ago, is environmentally ruinous fossil fuel and extraction infrastructure.

The result? The Coalition is widely despised. Polls consistently show Christopher Luxon in the running to be the least popular first-term Prime Minister and the Coalition as the least popular first-term government since records began. As they speed-run late-stage enshittification under the withering blows of an escalating climate crisis, the nation cries out for a government that will do the needful.

Unfortunately, what's on offer is Labour.

There is so much that needs doing. The climate crisis, intentionally exacerbated by neoliberalism, will only get worse as long as CO2 concentrations increase. As a result, extreme weather events are killing and maiming people with increasing frequency, and entire towns are becoming uninsurable.

They need to be either abandoned, or moved. Under the status quo – just kind of leaving them to it – the impact on communities will be beyond catastrophic.

In catastrophe lies possibility for democratic governance focused on the public good. The sheer amount of work that needs doing means we could have full employment.

Imagine - unlike the present situation where unemployment is deliberately engineered by Government and Reserve Bank policy - everyone who needs or wants a job could have one.

Communities where jobs or homes are impacted could have a just transition. Unlike neoliberal capitalism, which sheds human resources whenever it can and leaves them to rot in an economy that deliberately engineers unemployment, a just, democratic transition would offer workers in affected towns or industries retraining, relocation, a stipend to get by on.

And a rapid rollout of solar, wind, and stored hydro power could mean $0 power bills for practically the entire country, as well as an abundance of cheap power for industry and commerce.

Policies like this are already advocated for by the Greens. But what of Labour, with their roots in the working class and union struggle, the only other party seen – rightly or wrongly – by pundits and possibly even the public as having the ability to lead Government?

Instead of embracing possibility and the mantle of leadership, Labour seems committed to the lemming trajectory of failing left-ish parties around the world. British Labour leader Keir Starmer, trying to defeat rising fascism by being really quite fascist, has led a crackdown on immigrants, protestors and trans people to become the least popular British Prime Minister since records began. Yes, less popular than Liz Truss.

In Australia, the ruling Labour party enthusiastically destroys free speech by banning protests and promising to grade universities by how well they prevent students from mentioning the genocide perpetrated by Israel against the Palestinian people.

Democrats in the United States are… you already know.

Everywhere, "Third Way" leftist parties face a dismal failure to rise to the occasion, or do anything meaningful to stem the rise of fascism. And here, faced with a startlingly unpopular Coalition government, and more needful to do than ever, the best Labour leader Chris Hipkins can offer is a solemn promise not to be aspirational.

There are only a few rays of light in this dark time for the left, and one of them is the Mayor of New York (and the World,) Zohran Mamdani, whose underdog election victory set centrist heads spinning.

Naturally, Chris Hipkins' Labour is trying to ape Mamdani's distinctive branding. Perhaps under the extremely mistaken belief that iconography alone won Mamdani the Mayoralty, Labour has produced this rip-off poster that should carry a content warning for cringe:

Perhaps there's hope. Perhaps Labour will realise that the only time they were genuinely popular - winning an outright majority in an MMP election - was when they did the needful with a degree of competence, during the Covid pandemic. And they didn't even need to be fully competent! People awarded them points for trying! It was only with the return to the dithering Third Way status quo that their star started to fade.

Meanwhile, Mamdani shows the way. He was elected because he was deliberately aspirational, and the hope he kindled enabled him to run a powerful get-out-the-vote ground game. His continued popularity is because, in a marked contrast with nearly every other ostensibly liberal or leftist leader, not only does he articulate the needful, he actually does it.

Labour had better start being aspirational, because the Coalition and their think tank allies definitely are.

They aspire to fuck things up even worse than they are now: if you don't believe me, fortify yourself with a litre of coffee and read the Taxpayer's Union's batshit insane Pathway to Surplus, a document that all but calls for the privatisation of the entire country.

The Coalition and their allies are well-armed and are backed by the richest and most powerful people in New Zealand. They can spin up astroturf campaigns on a moment's notice that the media will dutifully report on as if they were reality. Because the media too is enshittifying: The mainstream was already rampantly pro-corporate and pro-capital; and with steadily declining revenue and audience share they will become ever more so as malign billionaire influencers buy ever more influence. (Or, if one of the news organisations should collapse, they'll just buy the paper outright.)

If we want a de-enshittified country and the ability to mitigate and adapt to the changing climate, we have to embrace this reality. The Coalition cannot be allowed another term, and if Labour will not voluntarily be aspirational and transformational, they must be forced into it.

The only thing that will get us out of our enshittification spiral is aspiration: a hope for a brighter future, and the good ground game that hope can inspire.

Which brings us back to those ‘STOP! 3 WATERS’ signs.

The former Labour Government's Three Waters reforms were stopped several years ago now, with the election of the Coalition Government, but none of the farmers can be bothered taking the signs down. So they've sat in the paddocks ever since, and because red print fades faster than black in sunlight, they now almost all read "3 WATERS".

A reminder, perhaps, of how desperately real reform is needed. And of how quickly the neoliberal dogma that has held sway in this country for so long might fade if we can replace it with something real, something of the people and by the people.

Something aspirational.