Klaus Bosselmann: “The gut feeling of most of us is that most things are going the wrong way, that we lack channels of communication.”

Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, in 2000 and at the end of an eight-year process to draft the international Earth Charter, told Klaus Bosselmann she expected New Zealand to be the first country to endorse the charter. 

“We still haven’t done it, even though more people here have contributed to that document than from any other country on the planet” ruefully says the islander who is director of the New Zealand Centre for Environmental Law at Auckland University and chair of the Ethics Specialist Group of the World Conservation Union (IUCN)’s Commission on Environmental Law.

He describes the Charter as the nearest thing we have to a constitution for a global society, the rights of democracy and sharing resources for future generations.

“What’s at stake in these elections is the question: Will we be able as New Zealanders to think of our children or our children’s children? Long term or short term, because at certain levels of poverty, you have to go for what saves lives. Studies have shown a close link between levels of education and what party you choose, and that’s not necessarily what you would expect,” he says. 

“With education, people have a value system to hand.”

The Internet has been the ticket to green and sustainability political parties in his native Germany where he was among the founders of the earliest Green Party. These days the German Left, Greens and the new Piracy party are now on 40 percent of the vote. 

Not least, he says, because a basic tenet of the world wide web is that corporates must be kept at bay.

“People are highly educated on that, and it is very clear what stupid games are going on. And people know that the globe is a village.”

“My property, making money” is giving way to a new version of post-material values. “The promise of Europe and the US is that it predicts that a future will always be better.  That you don’t question growth.

“That is just corporate talk. The growth model is an outdated concept.”

A more useful concept for this election here would be how to prosper New Zealand without growth; beyond growth, says Klaus, who currently coordinates international research collaborations in the area of sustainability law and governance and has an active role in projects and annual conferences of the Global Ecological Integrity Group, a network of 250 environmental scholars. 

Instead, what has been on the table in election 2011 has been asset sales, the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade treaty, mining and drilling. “Now is the time for the Green Party and the thinking parts of Labour to think about sustainability; alternative prosperity without growth; beyond growth.

“And holding the government accountable for securing economic prosperity for the future,” he says.

A long-time acquaintance of Fletcher Challenge head Hugh Fletcher, Klaus says the asset sales that started in the 1980s forced managers into short-term thinking with profit paramount and strategic thinking a casualty.

Assets sold now, he says, will also have to be sold to people wanting high returns on a year-by-year basis. “Long term is secondary”.

“If it is true we have an ecological crisis, they’d better hurry up,” says Klaus.

From a strictly economic perspective, “sales of what little we have left would have to be at a high price and to get the right price, you have to tell the buyers the government won’t interfere. The community loses its voice”, he says.

Nor is leadership a meaningful discussion in this election, a trend he traces back to the introduction of fees for tertiary education. “The message then was: go and make the most money.

“When tertiary education was free, all those young leaders owed society something.

“The erosion of university study is a world-wide disease but it’s more here that the ethos of university has been eroded.”

John Key’s leadership had been created in this model and it mirrors the degrading of our understanding of what leadership, and education, is about, he says. 

It is an investment in the future rather than a commodity. And a fundamental part of human rights.

How, he says, do young people organise their lives to pay back awful levels of personal debt to society without being pre-occupied with looking after their own needs first? 

It is masked to some extent on Waiheke where students achieve well academically in a well-found community where the whole island contributes, he says. However the same doesn’t apply in the greater anonymity of Auckland where the main contact for young people is with their immediate peers.

“The growth economy is the wrong model and the Government knows it. We need to be serious about that; to shrink the material side.”

The Occupy movement is the tip of a change to a global society with a powerful voice, he says. And it’s galling that while that is fairly well understood in Waiheke’s island community, it is not so much in New Zealand which is, in Wellington, following the outdated model.

“We are a proud nation, highly educated and with a reputation that we can make a difference in the world, like the Nordic nations and the Netherlands. In every international forum we are seen as among the most advanced, egalitarian and highly educated nations.

“Even if it’s a bit of a myth, we are still that way.”

“The gut feeling of most of us is that most things are going the wrong way, that we lack channels of communication. And that there is a lack of growth discourses,” says Klaus.

“It’s easy to see that it is wrong, stupidly easy, but to communicate it is very hard, even in election times.”

Almost naturally, talk veers to last week’s teaparty between the prime minister and Act candidate John Banks and is pulled back, with academic precision, to a structural change in the nature of the private domain of the individual and public domain, which encompasses everything from the traditional coffee house outwards.

“Clearly, to me they acted in the public domain,” says Klaus. “The reaction to keep it a matter of privacy smacks of hypocrisy.”

There is an erosion of the ability of the public to function with free and open discourse in an economy and society that is increasingly influenced by commercial commodification of the public, he says. 

“In human rights, the more private and personal a matter is, the more it is in need of protection; the more a part of the public, the less protection, out of what the use of this contribution owes to the public.

“Big companies cannot come along and have the rights of an individual. That’s not correct. There should be the greatest (scrutiny) on how corporates are treated in maintaining their incredible power.” 

By comparison, the core power of democracy in European countries comes from the community in which people live – a bottom-up approach of local autonomy, he says. “And that applies even if all the flags flying round the town are totally red.”

“That’s different from here. Our state has been imposed on us. It’s a factor of not enough people and there is no longer a tradition of townships and communities – except perhaps in Maori groupings.

“The public can be destroyed by centralised decisions, hospitals, post offices and services. The less we have of this sense of community, the more likely we will lessen in the sense of responsibility for each other and the environment.”

The national sense of responsibility, as a small and isolated global community, however, had given New Zealand its own sense of community “but we haven’t heard anything of that in this election,” he says. Instead we have heard neo classic economics of the 1980s. 

“It is so obvious.”

In the 1980s, the climate was of demand and supply and the drive was optimising productivity. “Full employment sorts out the demand side, although it completely ignores the environment.” 

From there, the economy was stuck, balance of supply and demand was ignored and, in a new model, the productivity society didn’t worry about supply at all. The assumption was of higher productivity, low labour costs and higher profits for the corporates and that it would all trickle down.

“That’s been globablisation over the last 30 years.” 

In fact, productivity and salaries need to match, something that has long been recognised in Germany where not killing the golden goose was the most dominant tenet in German and English common law until 1800, he says.

There, the government ensures that workers have participatory rights in their workplaces and there are collective rights conferred on well-paid factory workers who have a much greater say in what is being produced.

“Here we have a market economy that goes back to the pioneering background, similar to the United States’ that ‘you are just on your own, and if you do well, it’s yours’. It’s still in our psyche. If you work hard, you will do well.”

Germany was also highjacked, but reduction of rights were much less, he says.  The result was more privately owned, highly successful businesses that had to be socially fair, in contrast to the sweeping factory closures and switch to offshore production here.

The ancient concept of ecological sustainability is as old as European history, says Klaus. “If you don’t have it, you lose it at your peril.”

First promulgated by a leading economist in 1650, it then applied most significantly to forest management which was the sole source of energy and everything depended on its being sustainably harvested and managed.

Then, as now, a successful economy had to rely on sustainable energy and it was a very academic understanding that to keep functioning, the integrity of ecological systems had to be protected.

It is better understood in his native Germany, says the academic who thinks that Green politics could only have come from Germany and its near European neighbours.

Fundamentally, what does democracy look like in the 21st Century, he asks. “To what extent should forms of government be reflective of the people? What is the benchmark? 

In the last 30 years, democracy (from demos – people – and kratos as power) has been marginalised or perverted “but that doesn’t mean they lose their content and meaning” which was what had driven the Green movement in its widest application as it applied to indigenous people, the peace movement, liberal democratic peace theories and currently the 99 percent movement and its global Occupy campaign, he says.

By comparison with the historically based European model, democracy in an affluent society mixes the concepts and doesn’t distinguish between democracy and capitalism, with the extreme version of corporate capitalism amounting to governments being told by global capital what to do.

The model also depends on economic prosperity which even further equates to corporate power.

“We talk about these things but if you actually benchmark democracy, it’s obvious we need to do a lot, lot better than we are doing,” he says. The question should be: To what extent are any forms of government reflective of the people?

“Government should enable dialogue of citizens making the best decisions in a free dialogue not contained by uncontrolled private, vested interests. That is the benchmark.”

It makes the unfashionable assumption that individuals, in that circumstance, will assume the validity of the common good – in stark contrast, says Klaus, with the assertion by Margaret Thatcher that there is not such thing as society, only individuals making up a sum of common good. “It makes an assumption that for most, the drive is in advancing their private, egoistic interests.

“This is the assumption of political liberalism which is also instrumental in the advance of capitalism.

“You don’t have to be a lefty to say that, it is a fact,” he adds, “but is it the appropriate description of the individual?  

“It is a matter for anthropological discourse whether the individual is capable of having the common good in mind.  In the right there is a tendency to deny it and you get the classic model of selfish consumers.

“The counter position is we as individuals have layers of interest, some of them consistent with immediate wellbeing and also as communities. In the 21st century, the whole globe matters and there is a sense of global citizenship.

“And there is evidence that it matters.” •