The Freedom Turn

Re-reading Fischer in Coalition New Zealand

Note: I read broadly and often I read something that triggers me to respond. Something I read this week caused me to put the words below down on paper and I would like to share them with you.

Fairness versus Freedom

David Hackett Fischer’s Fairness and Freedom (2012) is one of those books you cannot unread. Fischer — a historian who spent decades excavating American folkways — turned his attention to New Zealand and asked a deceptively simple question: why do these two open societies, both descended from broadly Anglo-settler stock and both committed to liberal-democratic institutions, feel so different?

His answer was that each had organised itself around a different first principle. The United States, from its revolutionary origins, made “freedom” and its companion “liberty” the master concepts — the words that appear in the founding documents, that surface in political rhetoric, that operate as the moral grammar of public life. New Zealand, born later and into different circumstances, settled on “fairness.” While Americans argued over whose liberty was being constrained, New Zealanders argued over whether something was fair. The same dispute would be framed in different vocabularies, produce different policies, and — Fischer’s deepest claim — produce different people.

Living in the Liminal

I have lived inside both vocabularies. I grew up speaking the American one fluently. I have spent thirty years learning to hear the New Zealand one. What strikes me now, sitting on Waiheke watching the coalition government enter its third year, is that the country I moved to is being governed in a vocabulary I recognise from the country I left.

This is not a polemical claim. National, ACT, and New Zealand First did not campaign on importing American conservatism. The rhetoric has been studiously local — “getting New Zealand back on track,” “restoring fiscal discipline,” “common sense.” But the moral grammar underneath that rhetoric belongs to the freedom camp, and once one notices the shift, it is hard to un-notice.

Consider the signature moves of the past two years. The Treaty Principles Bill, whatever one’s view of its merits or its prospects, was an explicit attempt to translate a collective, relational understanding of Te Tiriti into the language of equal individual rights. ACT was unambiguous about this: the goal was to replace what David Seymour described as group-based entitlement with the universalism of citizen-as-individual. That is not a New Zealand argumentative move. It is the move the American Right has made for half a century, from Bakke to Students for Fair Admissions, and it imports a particular metaphysics: the individual as the only morally real political unit.

Or consider the Ministry for Regulation, ACT’s other signature creation. Its premise — that regulation is presumptively a cost to be justified rather than a fairness mechanism to be calibrated — is itself a freedom-camp premise. The cabinet of Michael Joseph Savage did not approach regulation that way. Nor did the architects of ACC, of universal superannuation, of the public health system. They began from a different question: what does a fair society require us to organise collectively? Regulation was an answer to that question, not an imposition on a prior space of liberty.

Then there are the tax changes — the restoration of landlord interest deductibility, the shortened bright-line test, the income-tax threshold adjustments tilted to higher earners. Each is defensible on its own terms. But the cumulative logic is one of returning resources to private decision-makers on the assumption that the private allocation is the morally privileged one. That is a freedom-camp axiom. The fairness camp’s instinct, since Savage, has been the opposite: the question is not what the state takes but what the society owes.

And the cuts — to the public service, to climate functions, to Māori-targeted programmes, to the pay equity regime. The framing has been “efficiency” and “fiscal responsibility,” but the deeper warrant is that collective provision should be small and conditional, with the burden of proof on those who would maintain it. A Savage-tradition Labour Party would have started from the other end: a fair society maintains these things, and the burden falls on those who would dismantle them.

None of this is to say the current government is illegitimate, or that the fairness tradition is the only authentic New Zealand inheritance. There has always been a freedom strand here — Roger Douglas was not a foreign import — and Fischer himself was careful to insist that fairness and freedom are not opposites. A society needs both. The question is which is the master concept and which is the modifier.

The View from the Island

What I notice, watching from the Gulf, is that the master concept has changed. Policy debates that twenty years ago would have been conducted in the idiom of fairness are now conducted in the idiom of freedom. The Labour opposition itself struggles, at times, to find the older vocabulary; “fairness” appears in its messaging, but often as a value among others rather than as the organising principle. Te Pāti Māori and the Greens are doing some of the most interesting work in retrieving an explicitly fairness-rooted frame, though they articulate it in different traditions — mātauranga Māori in the first case, an updated social-democratic and ecological vocabulary in the second.

The deeper question Fischer’s book leaves us with is whether a country can change its master concept and remain itself. The United States has never been able to govern on the basis of fairness for very long without the freedom camp reasserting control; the New Deal was a brief consensus, and even at its height, it was framed in terms of liberty of the people. New Zealand has historically been the inverse: the freedom episodes — Rogernomics most dramatically — were absorbed back into a society that still understood itself in terms of fairness.

I think what is being tested now is whether that absorption still works. Whether the fairness frame remains the bedrock onto which freedom-camp policies are bolted for a season, or whether the bedrock itself is being replaced. Fischer’s intuition was that the bedrock is durable — that countries are slower to change than governments. I want to believe him. But I have noticed, in my own conversations across Auckland and on the island, how often the vocabulary itself has shifted. People who twenty years ago would have asked whether something was fair now ask whether it is affordable, or whether it is the government’s place. That is not a small change.

A country can borrow another country’s policy menu and remain itself. It cannot borrow another country’s first principle and remain itself for long.