Max Harris (2017) The New Zealand Project, Wellington,

Bridget Williams Books, 332 pages, ISBN 9780947492588.

Sylvia Nissen

for New Zealand Sociology

It is an ambitious task to write a book that takes on New Zealand as a project. At age
26, Max Harris was accepted as a prestigious Examination Fellow at All Souls College
in Oxford University, with seven years of no-strings-attached funding to work on
topics that were meaningful to him. At the same time, he was diagnosed with a
potentially life-threatening heart condition and underwent surgery, which
encouraged him think about the contribution he wanted to make. To the bemusement
of some of his colleagues, Harris’ response to these circumstances, in his words, was
to ‘write about New Zealand politics’.

There is much to love about The New Zealand Project. The book is timely, written at a
point of political juncture in which mainstream politics appears increasingly
inadequate to address domestic and global challenges, while the alternatives are not
yet fully articulated. At the opening of the book, Harris effectively captures this
incipient frustration as well as hope when he describes his motivation for writing as
an ‘instinct that something is not right in New Zealand, that politics is partly to blame
for this, and that collective political action might be able not only to address these
challenges but to create new ways of thriving together’ (p. 11). The urgency that
underscores Harris’ writing throughout the book, coupled with his defiant optimism
and belief in human empathy, makes this book compelling and difficult to set aside.

The value of The New Zealand Project also lies in Harris’ unapologetically big
expectations for politics in New Zealand and abroad. Much of the book reads as a
challenge to the incremental pragmatism that tends to underscore political discussion
in New Zealand and the ‘what works’ ethos of Third Way politics. That technocratic
decision-making, Harris suggests, together with the dominance of market rationality
is contributing to growing numbers of citizens leaving behind mainstream politics.
Instead, Harris calls for a larger, more inclusive political discussion that is value-
based. He proposes three ‘cornerstone progressive values’ that might underscore this
politics: care (concern for others, aroha), community (connectedness and
interdependence, whanaungatanga) and creativity (imagination, playfulness) (pp. 12-
17). Although Harris leaves these specific values open to debate, his unwavering
assertion that it is possible – and vital – to think more imaginatively about politics is
an important intervention to disrupt a sometimes stagnant and diminished political
debate.

The New Zealand Project is likely to be prized among politicians, officials, researchers
and activists alike, as well as a more general audience, for collating many progressive
ideas and policy proposals into a single volume. Following the introductory chapters,
Harris explores the challenges facing New Zealand in nine key domains – foreign
policy, justice, social investment and environment to name a few – before identifying
some practical solutions for change in each of these fields. In doing so, he draws on
interviews with key thinkers within New Zealand that many will recognise, such as
Jane Kelsey, Susan St John or Nicky Hager, as well as reports that have perhaps not
been given as much coverage as they deserve (one example is Harris’ discussion in
Chapter 5 of the Matike Mai Aotearoa report). Besides these New Zealand sources,
Harris also highlights proposals that are more well-established in Europe and North
America but have had less mainstream coverage here, such as Piketty’s call for a
broader tax base or debates around universal basic income. These sections are very
carefully and deliberately argued, with each policy proposal evaluated by Harris in
straightforward and almost conversational language that is accessible in its clarity and
presentation.

Within The New Zealand Project there is much to enrich political discussion in New
Zealand, and there is not enough space here to do justice to each individual strand of
argument. Nevertheless, for all the strengths of the book, there are three aspects that I
would cautiously query. First, there is the question of who is given a voice in The New
Zealand Project, especially since New Zealand is framed, quite literally, as a ‘project’.
There is a risk associated with expert interviews that a relatively narrow range of
people are given a platform to voice their concerns and proposals, as Harris himself
acknowledges (p. 280). Yet while Harris has sought to ensure some diversity of
perspectives, the informants for The New Zealand Project were nevertheless primarily
those who already have quite high profiles within New Zealand’s democracy. All are
worthy of attention, but the risk remains that the voices already most heard are
reproduced – an outcome potentially at odds with Harris’ call for an enlarged public
sphere. In the context of a New Zealand ‘project’, I was left wondering about the
perspectives of other, less-heard citizens about their visions and concerns for New
Zealand’s politics and future.

Second, The New Zealand Project is primarily structured around public policy fields. As
I have noted, each of the middle chapters of the book, from Chapter 3 to Chapter 11,
deals with a separate policy field, ensuring good coverage of issues and making it easy
to retrieve information. Yet in adopting this topic-based focus, less scope was given
for Harris to explore and draw out the interconnections between in each domain. The
effect was to somewhat silo debate. Problems were defined for each specific policy
area, and solutions subsequently identified, but relatively little attention was given to
the relationships between these challenges and the ways that these issues might
interact to support different ways of flourishing socially and politically within
environmental limits. It also left Harris’ proposed values of care, community and
creativity somewhat side-lined in the discussion. Perhaps structuring the discussion
around these concepts might have helped to cut across some of these fractures.

Third, and related, was the emphasis in The New Zealand Project on identifying specific
‘solutions’. Harris explains his reasons for sketching out these practical
recommendations in the introduction as offering hope and concrete ideas to stir
political debate. Given the urgency of some of the challenges facing New Zealand and
the planet more generally, this specificity is understandable and likely to be well-
received by some. Yet for a book that sought to explore different ways of thriving
together, the solutions offered seemed at times unnecessarily narrow and even
premature. Solutions are only as wide as the problem defined, and as challenges
facing New Zealand were considered by policy fields, this limited the scope for Harris
to provide a more fundamental rethink of how we might interact socially and
politically. There is also a risk that the emphasis on solutions within The New Zealand
Project will side-line the more radical aspects of Harris’ work in which he does open
up a much bigger discussion about how we might collectively thrive. Of particular
note is Harris’ comments on the conditions needed to support ‘genuine people power’,
and his ‘exciting hope’ that these circumstances will enable ‘developments beyond
what can easily be foreseen today’ (p. 19). These reflections do genuinely stir political
debate and challenge assumptions of what politics might be, but there is also the
potential for them to be overlooked in solutions-focused discussions of the feasibility
and practicality of specific policy proposals.

In saying that, it is rare to be confronted by a book that is at once ambitious, earnest,

idealistic, cautious, personal, honest and hopeful, and which unashamedly demands
more of New Zealand politics. It is a brave book that I will undoubtedly go back to
again and again, and it has rightly received significant acclaim within New Zealand
and abroad. Read this book.