Q & A with Murdoch Stephens

By Leila Lois (she/her)

Tell us a bit about the inspiration behind Rat King Landlord. Where did it come from?

We’d just had our rent put up by 19% in the previous year in our flat and our requests for basic maintenance were getting lost between the property manager and landlord. So we tried to find out who our landlord was to talk directly to them, but we just couldn’t connect to them. So, frustrated in the kitchen one night, I guessed that the landlord could be anyone. Hell, it could have been the rat that was making itself at home in our compost bin. From there I wrote the novel and eventually got in touch with Renters United to see if we could collaborate on one that is free for renters.

What’s your background in activism?

I founded the double the refugee quota campaign in 2013 and worked to get a lot of NGOs, media commentators and political parties to join that push. It became government policy in 2018 and I published a book on campaigning in the same year.

I’ve also hung around enough social justice groups in Wellington to be fairly aware of the various groups working in a whole lot of spaces. On the whole, left wing people are just fundamentally more interesting than right wingers. Even conservative friends say the same thing.

Do you like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? What do you think of Grand Master Rat?

TMNT was formative stuff. Splinter was the Grand Master Rat’s name, eh? The rat is almost the official mascot of dirtbag New York City, which is where that cartoon was based. I liked the calm of Splinter, that kind of surety about the mission of the turtles, like an old activist who has seen it all.

Do you like The Nutcracker? The Ballet. What do you think of the Rat King?

I haven’t actually seen it! I really like contemporary dance when I get the chance to see it, but am not really an aficionado of high culture forms like ballet or opera.

In your view, how do books/ illustrations work toward change? How is the book as an act of protest effective? Even in an explicit advocacy campaign, it is really hard to draw a straight line from one intervention to an outcome. So I wouldn’t want to overstate the role of Rat King Landlord in leading to change. But I think there are two things to highlight: first, in my own life, music has been a greater medium to make me aware of injustice and to foster solidarity. Books are good to show the lives of others, and perhaps in this case, for renters to see their own experiences reflected back at them. Specifically for this book, I wanted to experiment with polemic, or agitprop (forms of critical political messaging). I wanted to contrast the usual narrative arc of a novel that fixates on the individual with some burgeoning social movement. As a writer, that was a fun thing to experiment with.

Second, this book is effective as the two pages that follow the conclusion of the book feature Renters United’s Plan to Fix Renting. And not only is it a plan, but in green they’ve shown the changes they’ve been able to get across the line so far. It’s great to be able to point to those pages when we’re giving copies away and some cynical yobbo comes up and asks, “well have you got the solutions, eh?”

Are we coming back into an era of ‘counterculture’ and ‘protest’, like in the 1970s?

I mean, maybe! But that said, almost every decade has had some big mobilisations - the Seabed and Foreshore hikoi in 2004, the anti-Iraq war protests in 2004, the Urewera raids protests in 2007, the TPPA ones, a pretty big one for increasing the refugee intake in 2015. The recent ones we’d probably think of would be school strikes, BLM solidarity and the trans-rights ones.

It sort of feels like there are two theories of when protests emerge, and both are materialist: (1) people protest when the material conditions that they face become intolerablerents are too high, let’s organise! Or, (2) people protest when the material conditions give them free time to get together and organise and attend protests. But what do I think - I have no idea!

I read Mark Amery’s review in Stuff, taking a quote from it: ‘people in Pōneke in the ‘70s were prepared to stage protests at developments or squat vacant properties. Whatever happened to those? Witness a Tenants Protection Association protest in Newtown over a developer’s move to demolish three houses to build a fried chicken bar. The only thing unfamiliar about this picture is our current complacency towards the steamrollering of market forces.’ .... how do we wake people up to this complacency?

I think most people know their own situation better than I could articulate it, but we often muddle along as individuals, aware that things are getting worse, slowly but surely. I guess I’m not a ‘wake others up’ kind of person because I’m not really into the dichotomy of those who sleep and those who are awake… personally I love to sleep!

But more generally the question is about how we build solidarity and to me the answer is that we start from where we are at: we talk to colleagues about unions, we talk to flatmates about tenancy tribunals and joining Renters United and we talk to friends about going to protests together.

How easy was it to Crowdfund Rat King?

We started out really pessimistic about how it was going to go and so we made our minimum ask the lowest amount we needed to get the project over the line. If we got $1500 we could make 2000 copies on the worst paper possible. We ended up with $10,500 and made 10,000 copies on the best paper available!

I think three things really tipped us over the line: first, Renters United do an amazing job and a lot of us feel grateful for them for filling a media void; second, the artists really helped get the word out by sharing our social media and the pictures they were going to use; finally, Rob’s (previous Renters United president) design skills meant we had a constant supply of great images and ideas to share — even after we knocked past our initial goal, we kept momentum right to the end.

So it definitely wasn’t easy, but a degree of shamelessness in promoting the collaboration was essential. It sucks to constantly ask people for cash, but at least we fully believed in what we were doing.

Who’s your biggest inspiration? A thinker/activist that you love?

So many inspirations. Individuals are great and can make a change in a small country like Aotearoa, but I think I am mostly inspired by collective movements. A few that have left a lasting impression: the work of Halt All Racist Tours (HART) that worked for years to stop apartheid South African rugby tours, the ACT UP aids activists, mostly in NYC, formed in the 1980s, the enormous movement of workers at the turn of the previous century to create and embed the union movement. I mean, we didn’t have weekends before the union movement got workers to bargain collectively. If you don’t know what a union is, what this movement was, look it up!

What does Renters United! actively do to fix renting?

What are the best ways that students struggling with evil landlords can get help?

I can’t speak on behalf of Renters United as I collaborated with them on this project and am only a member, not a representative. But from that place, I would suggest people get a copy of the Renters United edition of Rat King Landlord and look at the final two pages. It’s bloody impressive! There are about 37 things, across four categories, that they are campaigning on - and they’ve already helped get many of these changes.

I asked Renters United about the second part of the question. Éimhín O’Shea, from Renters United, said, “to get help your best bet is to connect with the advocates working in your own community.”

You can purchase the book, and others by Murdoch Stephens, on the Lawrence & Gibson website: https://www. lawrenceandgibson.co.nz/ or you can wait to get a free copy, which Stephens will drop into Te Tira Ahu Pae.