State of The Nation: NZ Election Round-up
Russel Brown
Hard News
Prospects: November 07, 2008
Our last November election took place on November 27, 1999. The day before, I delivered a Hard News commentary looking back at the election campaign and forward to tomorrow. It’s instructive to observe what hasn’t changed: John Campbell did most of the talking in the TV3 leaders’ debate, for example. And the polls suggest a change of government. It is not a done deal, and the change could happen in a number of ways, but the odds are certainly with change.
If that does prove the case, I doubt that history will assess the Clark-Cullen Labour governments as dismissively as their critics do now. Labour’s real achievements — net government debt reduced from 20 billion to two billion before the current crisis; unemployment down to levels many people didn’t think possible; a huge drop in the number of welfare beneficiaries, especially per capita; real wage growth; GDP growth that outstripped the OECD for years; a historic turnaround of trends in poverty; the repair of a public sector that was in dire straits by the end of the 90s; a serious attempt to address our savings problem via KiwiSaver and the Superannuation Fund; and a degree of stability that we now all take for granted — outweigh any counterfactual.
In 20 years’ time, those achievements will be regarded as prodigious and defining of an era. The fact that Helen Clark signed a painting for charity, or that her car once went really fast with a police escort on an open road; or the absurd mythology constructed around the departure of an under-performing police commissioner; none of these will be thought of as anything important.
It’s a measure of success that a string of key initiatives are now part of the landscape: National has had no choice but to accept and embrace Working for Families and the Super Fund if it wants to be in government. It has been obliged to promise that it will not sell Kiwibank or anything else.
And yet it would be rational to be concerned about some of National’s policies, insofar as they can be determined. Let’s take ACC. The PriceWaterhouseCoopers report this year found that on virtually every measure it applied, ACC “adds considerable value to New Zealand society and economy and performs very well in comparison to alternative schemes in operation internationally.” It costs us less and delivers more. Depending on how you parse it, “opening ACC up to competition” as National proposes, is either a poor idea or a really rancid one. Seriously — there is simply no rational public interest case for privatising ACC.
I’m also in the curious position of finding some of National’s policies too left-wing for my tastes. I’m disturbed in particular by the intention to introduce political direction of the Superannuation Fund investments. That would critically undermine the fund’s real purpose — to provide for a generational liability in 20 years’ time — and do conceptual damage to practices of governance and transparency of which post-economic-reform New Zealand can be proud. National’s willingness to politically direct the decisions of Pharmac speaks of much the same thing.
Its broadband policy is also remarkably statist: it implies quite some degree of command in getting a bunch of unwilling telcos to tear up their business plans, ignore market signals and hand over ownership of their networks to a new entity half-owned by the government. The stated time-frame and costings are also unrealistic, and the “download a movie in seven seconds” sales pitch is bullshit.
Labour, on the other hand, deserves the benefit of the doubt in opting for a contestable funding model. It has already seen through historic telecommunications reforms that are beginning to truly bear fruit. Given the daunting complexity of such regulation, and the powerful interests at play, I would say that telecommunications reform has been this government’s most impressive legislative achievement.
It would also be fair to say that Labour’s legislative virtuosity has frequently gone missing in the past three years. Perhaps that’s the curse of tired governments: reading the 1999 Hard News reminded me of the debacle that was Max Bradford’s attempt to write legislation to reform the electricity sector.
Bradford (who, in saltier days, I referred to as “a platinum-plated prick”) is gone, but I can’t see why I should feel glad at the prospect of Murray McCully, Tony Ryall and Gerry Brownlee returning to the Treasury benches. Indeed, I find the prospect of McCully as foreign minister quite alarming. (Roger Douglas, if he re-enters Parliament, will largely be irrelevant; an old man chosen because he is the leader of a cult.)
On the other hand, my respect for Bill English, his intellect and work-rate, remains much as it was in 1999. I like Chris Finlayson too, because I like intellectuals in politics.
John Key? I still can’t get a handle on him, or shake the feeling that he sees becoming Prime Minister as a mere career goal, but I think he has performed quite well through the campaign.
But if he is to be Prime Minister, he will not enter the role with the political capital or momentum that Clark possessed in 1999, and National does not have the policy depth or philosophical cohesion that Labour developed while it waited for power through the nineties. Perhaps it will be a straitened government for straitened times. I expect it to be competent.
The polls portend some interesting things: 10 Green MPs and a Maori Party that could yet choose the government, and bright new Labour MPs, like Phil Twyford and Grant Robertson. I would prefer that, if National can form a government, it needs support from other parties, and I actually expect the race to be tighter than the polls suggest. I will, as ever, vote for the party whose policies I prefer.
But in a week when our election has seemed dull in comparison to what happened in America, I’d like to do what I did in 1999, and pay tribute to the people who play an active part in our democratic process: who join parties, attend meetings and conferences, raise money, deliver leaflets and stand for office. Those of us who do not should feel grateful to them. Because it’s too easy to be cynical.
Congratulations, Mr Key: November 10, 2008
I fancied at times that John Key looked more pleased for himself than anything else on Saturday night, but there is no denying his mandate. Labour has been told to take a rest by the voters — thousands of whom, in Auckland at least, just stayed home this year. The message has been underlined with a series of dispiriting electorate defeats.
Key can take much personal credit for the victory, if only because the campaign strategy focused so heavily on him. Not only were National’s old guard kept out of the spotlight, we simply never saw the likes of Stephen Joyce, the new list MP and (we are told) anointed Cabinet minister.
If his victory speech was that of a man without a lyrical bone in his body, Key finished the campaign in much better shape than he began it. A critical bloc of voters decided they did trust John Key, personally.
It cannot go unremarked here that it’s my generation that takes office now. Key and his deputy are both just a year older than I am, although it would be fair to say our life experiences do not greatly cross over.
Key’s opponent, Helen Clark, hailed her people on Saturday night with an exuberant multi-lingual greeting, and departed with the authority and decisiveness you would expect of her. It was a strong performance from a Prime Minister who, as past Prime Ministers do, will soon enough enter the affections of even those who opposed her.
Matthew Hooton made a useful observation on Sunday last night: that Clark had changed the National Party as Margaret Thatcher reshaped the British Labour Party. I think this is the case not only in terms of policy, but people. Maungakiekie was won on Saturday by a Samoan-born New Zealander with a Cambridge MBA. Perhaps his face would not have fit in 1999.
But the most striking performance of the evening was surely the belligerent, threatening interview given by Roger Douglas to TV3. He growled “we’ve got some changes to make” as if he were a man with an influential mandate, rather than the revival candidate on the list of a party that won fewer votes than Winston Peters did.
We unexpectedly got a look at his soul, and I’m very sure John Key wishes we had not. Douglas was weird and he was angry; so much so that Hooton, on TV3, was driven to spend the rest of the night assuring the nation that the centrist, consensus-loving John Key would pay him no heed.
Earlier, Peter Dunne had barely begun to drone on (or should that be “barely begun to get his drone on”?) before TV3 cut away from his speech to follow Winston Peters to the rostrum in Tauranga. Peters had clearly taken a drink or two, but he has the charisma or an old prizefighter.
I’m not sorry to see him depart but I am mindful that more people voted for Peters’ party than gave Sir Roger Douglas his barking mandate. If New Zealand First now comes undone, there is a distinct community of interest looking for a home.
The settings were sometimes evocative: Peter Dunne seemed to be on his own, Winston’s was an old folk’s home, Tariana was with her whanau, and Labour’s do was full of women drying each others’ tears. Only the dancing Sikhs saved National’s gathering at Sky City from looking more like a drunken eastern suburbs theme party than it did. (The hooting Parnell types outside Key’s gate as he left for Sky City briefly made me think of a zombie flick. I imagined bands of them roaming St Stephen’s Ave, clutching bottles of pinot gris.)
The centre-left is hardly bereft. This is hardly of the order of the 21% drubbing National sustained in 2002. It would not require too many votes to swing back (or return to the polls) in 2011 for another shot at government. The Greens have two more MPs, and Labour’s new talent includes people already committed to refreshing the party’s ideas via its Policy Council. They clearly have somewhere to go, and seem to be swiftly setting the course. Whether they should have started heading there sooner is now a moot point.
Hooton’s argument is that the need to remain electable in 2011 will stay Key’s hand on policy — indeed must do so. And I hope he’s right, because Act’s new caucus looks like a horrorshow; rounded out as it is by Sensible Sentencing Trust hardliner David Garrett. Act and National will undoubtedly agree on a clutch of populist law and order policies that we’ll pay for in various ways down the line.
But it’s not correct to say that National does not need the Maori Party’s support to govern. Governing is more than confidence and supply, and National will need a partner for a majority on legislation that Act doesn’t like, and a broader base for when the novelty drains away.
The Sunday programme yesterday drew a line under that idea. Pita Sharples respectfully declared himself willing to talk with National, emphasising that any accord would need to be good for both parties (”mana enhancement” he called it).
Rodney Hide’s performance on the same programme verged on the disgraceful. It was the first time the two leaders had sat together since the election. Yet twice, he taunted Key about being “to the left of Helen Clark”, and declared that National’s “spending promises have been way over the top”, airily presumed that National would “be persuaded” to support Act’s three-strikes policy and put forward the ditching of the emissions trading scheme as a fait accompli.
And then came this:
“John’s gotta keep faith with his voters and so too does Act — people voted for Act and we got a very clear message … Act is actually where National’s philosophy is and where their vote support is — and John Key has to be careful because he knows that half his core support actually agrees with Act.”
Has to be careful? It sounded like a threat, and I think it was meant to. Jovial Rodney has been put away: switched with a man with the manners and countenance of a Ferengi trader. It was an extraordinarily arrogant and presumptuous display, and the man who won 12 times more votes just sat there opposite and looked uncomfortable with it.
John Key claims he will run a government for “all New Zealanders”. He should start by putting the Act Party very firmly in its place.
Chris Trotter
Sunday Star Times
The night MMP couldn’t save us from ourselves: November 09, 2008
WELL, THE New Zealand Left has woken up to its very own 9/11.
Last night’s result represents not just a slap in the face for Helen Clark and her Labour-led government, it sets the seal on the political values of a whole generation.
Clark and her colleagues stood for all that was good about the baby-boomer generation: its idealism and its 40-year refusal to bow down to the reactionary values of an uptight, male-dominated society driven by a dangerous determination to discipline and punish.
That’s what triumphed last night: the hunger to punish - and a crippling fear of social change.
And, like most things in this world, it’s happened before.
The New Zealand electorate doesn’t often behave selfishly or stupidly. In fact, apart from last night, I can recall only one other occasion when it has done so - 1975.
In every other election I can remember, the New Zealand electorate has demonstrated an acute grasp of what was necessary politically. They didn’t always get it, but that was because of the way the first-past-the-post electoral system worked to frustrate the will of the majority. Had the popular vote been reflected in the composition of its parliaments, New Zealand would have had a very different post-war history.
Even in the 1975 election “Rob’s Mob” did not achieve a majority of the popular vote. Had MMP been in place 33 years ago, Bill Rowling would have continued to be prime minister of New Zealand at the head of a Labour-Social Credit-Values coalition government. Nevertheless, with 47.6% of the popular vote, National came very close in 1975.
Thirty-three years ago the feral nature of Muldoon’s support was discernible everywhere. You could see, as well as sense, the curious social chemistry that was fusing the interests of lanky Young Nats with tousled locks, smart pullovers and slacks, with grizzled old working-class battlers in oil-stained overalls. They wanted no part of Bill Rowling’s “New Society” - in fact it scared them to death.
Thirty-three years on, that same queer chemistry is again in evidence. You can smell it on the blogosphere, as rank and rangy as a young man’s student flat. You can read it on the pages of the right-wing media: the smug certainties of our genteel suburban fascisti - regurgitated to order by publications long-used to dripping the oleaginous phraseology of “responsible journalism” all over the jagged edges of their readers’ class-advantage.
And it’s been there for all of us to absorb in the polls - though many of us simply refused to believe our fellow citizens could be so dumb - or so mean.
But, we were wrong. They were.
Looking at the result, you realise just how much this country and its people have changed. So much so that, last night not even our proportional system of electoral representation could rescue us from ourselves.
So, what was it in the end? What led a majority of the New Zealand electorate to reject a government that has not only done it no great harm (as National-led governments are historically prone to do), but might even be said to have done it some good? Why did voters reject a prime minister with nine years of hard-won experience in government, for a chap who’s barely spent six years in parliament?
Last night’s result was manufactured out of the besetting sin of the last 150 years of western history - the crisis of masculinity. What, exactly, is a man in a world of corporate and public bureaucracies? A world of tin-pot bosses, impossible schedules, and unrealistic expectations? A world where to show your feelings is to reveal your weakness? A world where girls can do anything, but boys make a virtue out of boorish stupidity? A world where cynicism trumps heroism, and where simple human decency is dismissed as political correctness?
It was these: the men who just couldn’t cope with the idea of being led by an intelligent, idealistic, free-spirited woman; the gutless, witless, passionless creatures of the barbecue-pit and the sports bar (and the feckless females who put up with them); who voted Helen Clark out of office.
John Key - you’re welcome to them.
