Mr T 2

Kathmandu. It was a wonderful time and a wonderful country in which to be young. There was time to
grow up, time to learn, time to become a real human being.
And that’s what I miss most about the world that passed away in the 1980s and 90s – the automatic
assumption that, as New Zealanders, we had all the time in the world.
It was an assumption that could only be made in a workers’ – not a bosses’ - world. The ability to limit
the amount of time individuals are able to devote to themselves and their families is the true measure of
Capitalism’s social, political and economic power. The more time you are forced to spend working for
the money you need to survive, the more dependent you are on your employer, and the less freedom
you have to tell him to get stuffed.
Have you ever noticed how angry politicians and business people get about unemployed people on the
dole "going surfing"? Even if the capitalists cannot find a job for you, they and their minions in the
State apparatus still expect you to devote all of your time to looking for work, or acquiring skills, or
visiting your case worker at WINZ. In societies like ours, Time and Liberty are very closely related.
So, how much time do you have in 2003 – and are any of the principal political parties proposing to
offer you more of it?
This is not so abstract a question as you might think. One of the earliest demands of organised labour –
dating back over a century – was for a limitation of working hours. And one of the first things the First
Labour Government did in 1936 was to reduce the length of the normal working week from 48 to 40
hours.
In a very real sense the entire socialist programme was about how to disengage the individual from the
tyranny of the employer’s clock. What, after all, is profit, if it is not the time you spend working for the
capitalist rather than for yourself? Public ownership, by doing away with the need for profit, was
supposed to reduce the amount of time required to keep society functioning – thereby making more
time available for individuals and families.
Let’s begin with Labour. How much time are they offering you?
Not a great deal, I’m afraid. Even though the Labour Party itself is in favour of legislating for an extra
week of annual leave, the Labour Government has announced that it will not be happening before the
next election.
There is, however, a real possibility that paid parental leave may be extended from 12 to 14 weeks – a
small but very welcome donation of time to mothers and their babies.
Michael Cullen’s "Super Fund" – into which so much of the State’s income is now being poured, may -
and I emphasise "may" - be enough to prevent future governments from extending the time we have to
spend working for a living – which is good. Not as good as Rob Muldoon’s reduction of the age of
retirement from 65 to 60 in 1976, but better than nothing.
For students, however, no time seems to be available. Labour still expects you to compress the years it
takes to acquire the necessary tertiary qualifications to the absolute minimum consistent with retaining
your sanity.
The idea of pursuing knowledge for knowledge’s sake, which still had some purchase on reality in my