A corporate agenda by any other name

Neoliberal governments dominate most of the West partly thanks to the language they use to package their policies

The Heritage Foundation in the US’ now infamous Project 2025 was a good example of how to promote free market ideology under the guise of objective research and opinion. Photo: Getty Images

Imagine a political party that runs on a campaign of defunding public health and education, cutting taxes and regulations for corporations, rolling back laws that protect workers and tenants from exploitation, and implementing policies that produce racial discrimination.

Such a platform would not likely garner much voter support.

Now imagine another campaign based on expanding freedom of choice for healthcare and education, freeing up money and opportunity for investment and growth, providing workers and tenants more choice and flexibility in their work and tenancy agreements, and ensuring equal rights for all.

This platform would be much more likely to gain broad support.

Here’s the rub. It’s the same party and the same political agenda. The only thing that has changed is the language used to describe the platforms.

This type of euphemistic language has been deployed as a cover by free market advocates since the mid 20th century.

In her book The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism Jessica Whyte details how neoliberal thinkers began to cast their economic ideology in euphemistic terms in response to the crisis faced by global capitalism following World Wars I and II.

In the late 1940s, the international community came together to address the social and economic devastation wrought by World War II. Delegates to the United Nations met in 1947 with the purpose of hammering out a list of universal human rights.

Because of the economic exploitation and oppression that characterised the colonial period, postcolonial diplomats sought to enumerate a list of social and economic rights that would guide government policy in the wake of the war. Newly minted democracies were eager to exercise their democratic power to curtail and prevent colonial (most often, corporate) exploitation.

Neoliberal thinkers, who gathered together in Mont Pelerin, Switzerland in the same year as the United Nations human rights delegates, on the other hand, viewed any state interference in economic or social affairs as an affront to the natural market order, and in to Western civilisation itself.

Funded by a capitalist class that had seen its wealth severely curtailed by the redistributive Keynesian economic policies that held sway in much of the West following the Great Depression, neoliberal thinkers founded a coalition of think tanks: research and policy groups with the explicit agenda of promoting free market ideology under the guise of objective research and opinion, often by training politicians and placing members in advisory positions or providing templates for legislative agendas (for example the Heritage Foundation’s now infamous Project 2025 in the US).

This coalition, which George Monbiot refers to as the “Neoliberal International”, began a sustained campaign to reshape the human rights debates by stripping away any political guarantees of social and economic rights.

Their campaign was waged over the course of decades with the funding of billionaires and corporations, with the explicit goal of depoliticising human rights and defining concepts such as freedom, agency, equality, democracy etc … in terms of their effects on the market, not their impacts on individuals and society.

Freedom and agency, then, came to refer not to freedom from starvation, homelessness, or exploitation. It meant freedom for the market to decide winners and losers based on the natural order without any state interference.

Equality did not mean assurance of equal opportunities and support according to individual needs, but rather equality before the market, which dispassionately decides who will succeed and who will fail.

Democracy, if it is in favour of the free market, must be preserved. But if it seeks to rein in the free market with taxes, welfare, or redistribution, democracy must be curtailed, as illustrated in the poster boy of forced neoliberal policy, Pinochet’s Chile.

When the world lost faith in Keynesian economics with the ‘stagflation’ crisis of the late 1970s, neoliberals, waiting in the wings, swooped in and offered an alternate world order based on the now newly defined principles of freedom, agency, equality, and democracy.

In the years since, neoliberalism has shaped a global order in which corporate welfare takes precedence over individual and societal welfare, corporate rights take precedence over human rights, and the market is insulated from democracy by a global organisation of banks, legislative frameworks, and legal tribunals. If democracy threatens the market, the capitalist class retaliates swiftly and ferociously.

There are rumblings abroad, however. Many in the international community are becoming more aware that 50 years of neoliberal hegemony has not ushered in an era of global prosperity, but has rather resulted in the largest upwards transfer of wealth in the history of the world.

But still, neoliberal governments dominate most of the West. They do so, in part, by packaging their policy agenda of upwards wealth distribution in euphemistic human rights terms.

The current coalition Government is no exception to this. After dividing the electorate with a campaign focused on law and order and reining in government spending, the first breakneck year of their policy agenda shows it intends to govern for the corporate class.

Nevertheless, the policies and legislation are always cast in more palatable language to avoid a public revolt.

And so we have Workplace Relations and Safety Minister Brooke van Velden’s policy changes to the law stipulating how workers vs contractors are defined, which she says will increase certainty and benefit workers and businesses by increasing clarity.

The policy change, however, has recently come under scrutiny due to its similarities with the contractor vs worker distinctions as defined by Uber, a company well-known for its exploitative labour practices.

The Government announced that it was bringing back charter schools, which funnel money that could be spent on the state education system into private hands. It said the move was to give parents and students more freedom in their educational choices.

Act Party leader David Seymour’s recent announcement that regulations around foreign investment would be loosened, which is neoliberal language for making it easier for public services to be privatised by corporations, was cast in terms of being “a vote of confidence” in New Zealand by the international investment community.

Minister Chris Bishop’s changes to the tenancy laws, which favour landlords, were referred to as a corrective to the last Government’s “war on landlords” and sold as “sensible, pro-tenant changes”.

Finally, Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill, which would remove significant, and until now, insurmountable barriers to Act’s neoliberal programme of privitisation and deregulation, is framed as a good-faith effort to engage in the democratic process and ensure equality for all.

Over the past 50 years, the ‘Neoliberal International’ (now numbering in the hundreds of think tanks globally) has honed its campaigns and rhetorical strategies to a fine point. It behooves us to recognise them when they are deployed. As the chorus against corporate hegemony grows, the New Zealand public should be ready to see through human rights language used to push a corporate agenda – and to demand governments and policy that allows all in society to flourish.¹

1. This article first appeared in Newsroom