Luxon And Leadership.

What Kind Of Leader? It’s the only definition of leadership that makes any sense in the world most people live in – which is not the corporate world. A leader has followers. If a person lacks followers, then they are not – by the reckoning of most human-beings – a leader. The other real world distinction between corporate and political leaders is that the former have power given to them, while the latter take it for themselves.

LEADERSHIP. The corporate world is obsessed by it. In the absence of strong corporate leadership an adequate return on the shareholders’ investment cannot be guaranteed. Poor corporate management can lead to poor dividends, lower share prices, disinvestment and, ultimately, disaster. That’s why corporate leadership matters. In theory, anyway.

Many critics of contemporary capitalism argue that corporate managers exercise excessive influence over the businesses they run. That neither the corporate board, nor the shareholders, any longer exert any real influence over the management – until it’s much too late. Poor corporate leadership can, indeed, lead to failure, but the price paid by bad leaders is often in inverse proportion to the size of the disasters for which they are responsible. When they leave the scene of their managerial crimes, it is only very rarely that they depart empty-handed.

Poor corporate leadership is seldom punished.

Poor political leadership, by contrast, is almost always rewarded with the Order of the Boot.

The reason lies in the very different kind of power that corporate leaders wield. Corporations are permanent hierarchies in which vacancies are filled from the top down. Political leadership works from the bottom-up. If corporate leaders are measured against the power and wealth of the corporations they command, then political leaders are judged by the number and enthusiasm of their followers.

It’s the only definition of leadership that makes any sense in the world most people live in – which is not the corporate world. A leader has followers. If a person lacks followers, then they are not – by the reckoning of most human-beings – a leader. The other real world distinction between corporate and political leaders is that the former have power given to them, while the latter take it for themselves.

It is why all the books written about corporate leadership ring so hollow. The behaviour prescribed for leaders in these breathless volumes is the behaviour of a successful courtier – and the only power successful courtiers wield is the power given to them by their sovereign. A courtier retains power by retaining the confidence of the person at the very summit of the hierarchy. Political chiefs stay at the top only for as long as those below them are willing to trust and follow “their” leader. Without the trust and confidence of their followers, political leaders are powerless.

Christopher Luxon has plenty of experience in the intricacies of corporate leadership. He knows what must be done to retain the support of those above him. His successful career as a corporate executive amply confirms that he has mastered the politics of hierarchy. But, New Zealanders are still awaiting confirmation that Luxon has successfully transitioned from the politics of the boardroom to the politics of the caucus-room. Does he fully grasp, even now, that it is only the support of National’s MPs – along with the more than a million party followers who elected them – that keeps him in the top job?

Luxon became the parliamentary leader of the National Party in November 2021. Not, it must be said, after a strong and successful demonstration of his political leadership skills – particularly those relating to the attraction and retention of followers – but because the National Caucus had run out of options.

Bill English, the man who had led them to a Party Vote of 44 percent in the 2017 General Election, while an excellent Finance Minister, and a deep political thinker, had never quite managed to convince himself that he had what it took to lead the NZ National Party. A great pity, because it is one of the ineluctable rules of democratic politics that politicians who doubt themselves find it extremely difficult to convince others.

English’s replacement, Simon Bridges, appeared equally plagued by doubts. At times he seemed like a nervous adolescent, heading-out with his stylish girlfriend for the end-of-year school ball, wearing his father’s suit. Leadership of the National Party never quite seemed to fit Bridges: it was always too big for him.

Bridges nemesis, Todd Muller turned out to be living proof of “Dirty Harry’s” warning that “A man’s got to know his limitations.” Like Labour’s disastrous leader, David Cunliffe, Muller proved himself to be much more adept at winning the leadership of his party than wielding it. The difference being, Muller took only a few weeks to realise that he was completely out of his depth. A conclusion not reached by Cunliffe, even after winning just 25 percent of the Party Vote!

Muller’s replacement, Judith Collins, had long been hungry for the leadership of her party – and her country. It was just that her preferred means of getting there, beneath the daunting mask of “Crusher”, put off a great many more voters than it attracted. The New Zealand electorate has, over the years, displayed a worrying willingness to elect frightening male leaders. Scary female leaders, with the obvious exception of Helen Clark, have enjoyed considerably less success. National’s terrible showing in the 2020 General Election (25 percent) dissolved what little was left of Collins’ political judgement – along with the confidence of her caucus colleagues.

And that just left the man acknowledged by all to be the preferred option of National’s most successful leader since Keith Holyoake – John Key. Never mind that Christopher Luxon had been a Member of Parliament for barely a year, his successful career as a corporate leader – as CEO of Air NZ – was deemed to be more than sufficient preparation for the job of Leader of the Opposition.

But was it, really? Luxon had been seized upon by his fellow Nats with the same desperation as the drowning man seizes upon a lifebuoy. He was new, he was fresh, he had a bright smile and he wore a suit like the boss he had been. But, unlike his patron, Luxon never quite understood that voters are not employees. You can’t just instruct them to vote for you and your party; you have got to give them a reason for voting that way. In a democracy, politicians cannot simply demand people’s votes, they have to earn them.

Yes, yes, yes: National won 1,085,016 Party Votes in 2023, which is a great deal more than Judith Collin’s 738,275 in 2020, but, Luxon’s 38.6 percent of the Party Vote falls a long way short of Key’s winning percentage of 44.6 in 2008.

That’s because Key, unlike Luxon, had spent two years giving New Zealanders a reason to vote for him. Speech by speech, stunt by stunt, goofy-grin by goofy-grin, Key had done what all political leaders do – he had gone out and got himself some followers. Key may have been a highly successful player in the grand financial casino, but he knew the difference between corporate and political leadership. The electorate doesn’t vote for designations, it votes for ideas. 38.6 percent is what Christopher Luxon got for not being Chris Hipkins. It isn’t enough.

And it’s not at all clear, yet, what Luxon’s ideas are. He had very little that was inspiring to say before the election, and he has had virtually nothing even interesting to say after it. The man doesn’t yet seem to understand that he hasn’t been appointed to lead New Zealand, he’s been elected. There’s a difference.

A political leader would have used the three weeks between Polling Day and the counting of the Special Votes to talk to New Zealanders. There were horrors in Israel and Gaza. There were things to say about Te Tiriti and Democracy. About economics and security. About a world gripped by multiple crises, and about the Prime-Minister-Elect’s confidence that New Zealand would get through them all. Because this, the country he has been given the extraordinary privilege to lead, is a remarkable place, filled with remarkable people.

He could then have strode into those coalition talks, and David Seymour and Winston Peters would have risen from their seats and applauded – their nation’s leader.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 20 November 2023.

The Greens’ Unhappy Relationship With Power.

Rule-Breaker? It is easy to see why poor James Shaw found himself brutally deposed as the Greens’ co-leader. By seeking the responsibilities of leadership – and exercising them – he violated the first rule of Green Party governance. Then, by accepting the limitations of the Green Party’s electoral mandate (7.8 percent of the Party Vote) and practicing the art of the possible with Labour and National, he violated the second.

THE GREENS have a problem with power. The whole concept of leadership makes them uneasy. Who should have power? How should it be wielded? These are questions radical environmentalists have struggled with since the Values Party was formed 50 years ago. If nothing else, the peculiarly self-destructive actions of the Greens over the course of the past week have exposed how urgently the party needs to address and resolve the problems of political power.

Perhaps the first question that the Greens need to answer is: How much power do they want? This may sound like a silly question, but exactly how powerful the Greens see themselves becoming has never been all that clear. Unlike most parties, the Greens do not ask the electorate explicitly for a decisive parliamentary majority.

Now, you may say this reflects a commendable humility on the part of the Greens. By accepting that securing a parliamentary majority is beyond them, and that the best they can hope for is to partner a much larger party in a broad progressive coalition, they are, surely, acknowledging political reality? True, but they are also accepting that the amount of power they will ever be able to wield in their own right is limited.

Except, in the face of global warming and all the other environmental threats to the planet, isn’t the Greens’ acceptance of relative powerlessness a little self-defeating? Examining their manifesto, it is clear that unprecedented state power will be needed to achieve the goals the Greens have set themselves. Power that only a determined Green Prime Minister, Cabinet and Caucus, commanding a huge parliamentary majority, could hope to wield.

All of which confirms the Greens’ deeply contradictory relationship with power. Green Party members seem unusually diffident about exercising power in their own right, but are resentful of the power exercised by other party members over them. At the same time, the Greens aren’t the least bit fazed, collectively, by the idea of the entire population being required to submit to their party’s radical environmental remedies.

Blend these contradictions into a single Green political style and what do you get? A party deeply mistrustful of effective leadership. A party which gives more weight to the objections of minorities than it does to the affirmations of majorities. A party which compensates for its crippling internal contradictions by demanding unquestioning public compliance with Green Party policy. A party, moreover, which makes these demands fully aware that, on a good day, it represents barely a tenth of the electorate – and yet considers that enough.

With all this in mind, it is easy to see why poor James Shaw found himself brutally deposed as the Greens’ co-leader. By seeking the responsibilities of leadership – and exercising them – he violated the first rule of Green Party governance. Then, by accepting the limitations of the Green Party’s electoral mandate (7.8 percent of the Party Vote) and practicing the art of the possible with Labour and National, he violated the second.

Shaw’s first violation bespoke an unhealthy amount of un-Green ambition. His second dispelled the membership’s cherished illusion that maximum policy gains can be extracted, without compromise, on the basis of 10 out of 120 seats in the House of Representatives. His thumping victory notwithstanding (71 percent of the AGM’s voting delegates supported Shaw) the man obviously had to go!

It’s tempting to interpret Shaw’s landslide “victory” as evidence that the core of the Green Party membership retains a healthy measure of common-sense. Unfortunately, that same membership recently ratified a revised Green Party constitution that militates aggressively against common-sense. Only a party deeply ambivalent towards effective leadership, and deaf to the appeals of political realism, could endorse a process allowing 29 percent of voting delegates to declare an unopposed candidate with 71 percent support – not elected.

More to the point, the Greens’ constitution also attests to an ambivalent relationship with democracy itself. It takes a particularly virulent strain of individualism to construct a political ideology in which majorities are, at best, suspect, and, at worst, instruments of tyranny. Certainly, it places the Greens well outside the great movements for human liberation that have illuminated the past 250 years.

To save the world, you must be willing to lead it. If you would have us trust you to do that, then, for the planet’s sake, trust yourselves!

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 29 July 2022.

Why Leadership Matters – More Than Anything.

Our Good Fortune: Precisely because she has never been an ideologue (she calls herself a “pragmatic idealist”) Jacinda Ardern has a political nimbleness and spontaneity which, when infused with her exceptional emotional intelligence, produces spectacular demonstrations of leadership. Jacinda's empathic political personality contrasts sharply with the less-than-sunny ways of her principal opponent, Simon Bridges. 

I’M HALFWAY THROUGH Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands – as grim a history book as I have ever felt obliged to read. The territory of the title denotes that vast swathe of Eastern Europe and Western Russia which felt the murderous effects of first Soviet and then German totalitarianism between 1933 and 1945. Reading Bloodlands, one consistent and inescapable truth emerges: the character of a nation’s leadership matters. It matters more than anything.

The diseased characters of Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler incubated death and destruction on a colossal scale – so colossal that it is hard to take in.

Over a period of three months, the Covid-19 Pandemic has claimed the lives of 8,000 human-beings. In the space of just a few days, in the Ponary Forest, not far from the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, in July 1941, “Special Action Unit 9” of the German Police, assisted by Lithuanian “auxiliaries”, shot and buried 72,000 Jews. It is important to bear in mind that the mass murder at Ponary was just one of scores of similar incidents. Equally important is the fact that such mass killings were not the sole preserve of the Nazis. The quantum of blood spilled by Stalin’s NKVD similarly defies the imagination.

Could there have been a Stalin without the First World War? A Hitler without the Great Depression? Of course not. Human-beings may make history, but, as Karl Marx observed, “they do not make it just as they please”. All manner of influences combine to drive historical events: geography, economics, demographics; and yet, when these grand forces propel events towards a moment of crisis, the quality of political leadership assumes more and more importance. How the grand forces of history end up being personified matters. It matters more than anything.

In New Zealand, and across the planet, the Covid-19 Pandemic: exogenous, random, naturally occurring: has profoundly disrupted the global economy and is pushing the social and economic institutions of the world’s nation states to their breaking points. The ideological context in which so many of those institutions are framing their response to the pandemic is one of neoliberal capitalism. A large part of the difficulties currently being experienced by the world’s nation states, as they grapple with the Covid-19 virus, is due to neoliberalism’s implacable hostility to the collectivism and solidarity needed to protect their citizens from the pandemic.

How well, or badly, national leaders fare in dealing with Covid-19 will depend on how willing (or able) they are to step away from the neoliberal paradigm – and how quickly. It is almost certainly no accident that the nations which have dealt most effectively with the virus, China and South Korea, are both more indebted to the economic nationalist ideas of Friedrich List than the neoliberal theories of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Where the nation takes precedence over the corporation, combatting pandemics seems to be easier. Certainly, the leaders of the two countries where neoliberalism first secured control of the state apparatus, the United Kingdom and the United States, both seem to be struggling.

New Zealand, too, is a nation state where neoliberalism has enjoyed a dream run. The ideology permeates just about every aspect of the country’s economic and social life. All the more remarkable, then, that New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, has wrestled herself free of neoliberalism’s grip. Especially when one recalls that it was Ardern’s Labour Party that released the neoliberal virus into New Zealand’s bloodstream. Clearly, Ardern has developed the antibodies needed to step away from the ideology – but how?

The answer may lie in Ardern’s almost accidental accession to Labour’s leadership and, from there, to the prime-ministership. Both events owed more to the personal fears and demons of the two men who cleared the pathway to her success, Andrew Little and Winston Peters, than to any Machiavellian scheming on Ardern’s part. Little’s and Peters’ decisions introduced “the incredible lightness of being Jacinda” to places where she was able to make a tangible political difference. Precisely because she has never been an ideologue (she calls herself a “pragmatic idealist”) Ardern has a political nimbleness and spontaneity which, when infused with her exceptional emotional intelligence, produces spectacular demonstrations of leadership.

“Jacinda’s” empathic political personality contrasts sharply with the less-than-sunny ways of her principal political opponent – the National Party Leader of the Opposition, Simon Bridges. As a fan of the band AC/DC, Bridges will be well acquainted with the concept of “dirty deeds done dirt cheap”. It is one of the darker features of National Party culture that, in order to succeed, their aspiring leaders must consent to being “blooded”. Generally speaking, this requires them to implement policies with which, at a personal level, they may profoundly disagree. The psychic injury inflicted by this requirement to prove oneself “a good soldier” is easily imagined. And the real tragedy is that, having done it once, it gets easier and easier to do it again, and again, and again. The inevitable result is a coarsening of character and an increased susceptibility to harsh and ruthless arguments.

In the case of the National Party, these harsh and ruthless arguments almost always originate from the deep social wounds that were opened up in the course of constructing the global economy that the neoliberal ideology both explains and defends. Perhaps the best description of what the first two decades of neoliberalism wrought was provided by the American liberal philosopher, Richard Rorty. In his 1998 book, Achieving Our Country, he also accurately prophesied our present populist fevers:

“Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

“At that point, something will crack. The non-suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.”

Simon Bridges’ graceless response to the Ardern Government’s Covid-19 Pandemic Economic Response Package was a potent example of the way in which right-wing parties like National remind Rorty’s “suburban white-collar workers” that the best way to prevent themselves from being “taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else” is to put their votes behind those who will not countenance the notion that beneficiaries are citizens too.

Critics of Bridges’ harsh words – and there have been many – cannot fathom how any decent person could fail so abjectly to recognise the needs of their fellow New Zealanders. To these people, the best of us, I would say – more in sorrow than in anger – read Bloodlands. From its grim pages you will learn about political leaders who, over many years, were able to convince their followers that while some human-beings are indeed endowed with rights and are, therefore, worthy of the state’s protection; there are others, masquerading as human-beings, who are not. In the case of Stalin’s and Hitler’s followers, these convictions allowed them to slaughter “class enemies” and “sub-humans” by the thousand – by the million. Those with something to lose; those with something to gain; when set in motion by leaders willing to sanction and facilitate whatever measures are deemed necessary to advance their interests; will do anything, stop at nothing.

We are not an inherently benign species. For good, or ill, we are easily led. That’s why the character of a nation’s leadership matters. That’s why it matters more than anything.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 19 March 2020.

National's Little-Boy-Lost.

Who Are You? About a politician who cannot seem to make the simplest of moral judgements there will always be an air of inauthenticity and impersonation. Bridges has been described (unkindly, but not entirely inaccurately) as a young boy dressed-up in his father’s suit. The jacket’s cuffs extend well beyond his fingertips and the legs of the trousers puddle around his Dad’s too-big shoes. It’s an image that invites ridicule – not respect.

IT MAKES YOU WONDER what it takes to be enrolled at Oxford University and appointed a Crown Prosecutor at 25. Simon Bridges’ CV includes both of these accomplishments, and yet, after ten years in Parliament, five years in Cabinet, and eight months as Leader of the Opposition, what impresses is just how unimpressive he is. Even more puzzling, after the lacklustre quality of Bridges’ performance, is what his caucus colleagues saw in him. Because, clearly, the rest of the country has yet to spot it.

The most worrying aspect of Bridges’ political persona is a complete absence of anything resembling originality. He does precisely what you would expect a young ambitious politician to do – nothing more, nothing less.

Never was this more apparent than in the early months of his Cabinet career when he was assigned – and eagerly carried out – the task of legislating away the right of environmental protesters to place themselves in the path of oil exploration vessels. Political journalists praised Bridges for proving to his boss, John Key, and the other heavy-hitters of the National Government, that he was a “good soldier”: someone who could be relied upon to obey orders and get the job done with a minimum of fuss.

Those same political journalists would probably say that Bridges swift rise to the top of the National Party bears eloquent testimony to the importance of not rocking the boat. But, getting to the top of your party is not quite the same as being elected Prime Minister of your country. Phil Goff, David Shearer, David Cunliffe and Andrew Little all got to the top of their party. None of them, however, were able to secure the top job.

Though few New Zealanders are likely to devote much energy to thoroughly deconstructing Bridges’ political conduct, many have already decided that something important is missing. National’s pollsters have yet to detect a decisive upward swing in the public’s estimation of the Opposition Leader. He remains worryingly underwhelming. People comment on Bridges’ Brylcreemed hair and his appalling diction, but on very little else. There is a knee-jerk quality to his day-to-day political utterances which renders them predictable and forgettable in equal measure.

Bridges clearly has not spent a great deal of time studying the careers of successful National Party Leaders of the Opposition. Had he done so he would have realised the importance of establishing early a significant “point of difference” between himself and his colleagues. Rob Muldoon, for example, made a name for himself by opposing his own Prime Minister’s decision to proceed with the Second Labour Government’s (1957-1960) plans to build a cotton mill in Nelson. Though a callow back-bencher, Muldoon argued – successfully – that the cotton mill project took Labour’s “import substitution” policies too far. That the mill contract had already been signed proved to be no obstacle. The Holyoake Government, under pressure from Muldoon’s “Young Turks”, simply tore it up.

Imagine if Bridges, when asked to smooth the way for the oil prospectors, had refused to curb his fellow citizen’s political rights and resigned his portfolio. Immediately, he would have acquired the status of a principled maverick. A conservative politician who, nevertheless, could be relied upon to pay more than lip-service to New Zealand’s democratic traditions. Someone who was willing to stand up and be counted on civil liberties.

Just as Muldoon had very early on established his credentials as someone who could speak with authority about economic matters, Bridges could have put himself at the forefront of the debate about security versus freedom; surveillance versus privacy. Among the parliamentarians of his generation he would have stood out as a politician of real substance. A potential future leader: not only of his party, but also of the country.

Fortunately for Labour, this was not the Simon Bridges who made it to the top of National’s greasy pole. Even on issues which, for the leader of a liberal-conservative party like National, should require a minimum of serious cogitation, Bridges has slipped and slided all over the place. He came out very cautiously in favour of free speech for Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux, but refused to boycott Massey University when it refused to allow the former leader of his own party, Don Brash, to address the Massey Politics Club. He compounded this failure by backing his colleague, Michael Woodhouse’s, call to deny the US whistleblower, Chelsea Manning, entry to New Zealand.

About a politician who cannot seem to make the simplest of moral judgements there will always be an air of inauthenticity and impersonation. Bridges has been described (unkindly, but not entirely inaccurately) as a young boy dressed-up in his father’s suit. The jacket’s cuffs extend well beyond his fingertips and the legs of the trousers puddle around his Dad’s too-big shoes. It’s an image that invites ridicule – not respect.

It is Bridges’ lack of authenticity: the impression he gives of playing politics by-the-numbers and without conviction; that makes the electorate so unwilling to take him seriously. He can frown, scowl, pout and shout his defiance of the Coalition Government and all its leaders do is laugh. Much as a gathering of youngsters would laugh if one of their number attempted to impersonate the responsible adult in the room.

In the 2018 “Mood of the Boardroom” survey, published in today’s (3/10/18) NZ Herald, one of the business leaders interviewed remarked of Bridges’ performance as leader: “We are all waiting for a real punch to land. Bridges’ best day since Labour got in was the in-house haggle on the floor of Parliament when they were trying to sort votes for the Speaker on day one. He hasn’t got close to that high-water mark since.”

But even that incident (which indisputably impressed his caucus colleagues) reflects poorly on Bridges’ ability to distinguish strategy from tactics. Yes, he succeeded in bluffing Labour’s less-than-stellar Leader of the House, but in doing so he marked himself and his party as ruthless, opportunistic and untrustworthy.

It is an indication of just how low the moral bar of our public life has been set that Bridges’ behaviour was widely interpreted by political journalists as evidence of his fitness to lead. Not so. The failure of Simon Bridges, National’s Little-Boy-Lost, to fire the imagination of the New Zealand electorate merely demonstrates how comprehensively the moral sensibilities of ordinary voters exceed those of the men and women who claim to represent them.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 4 October 2018.

Andrew Little: Wanted And Wondered At

Here Comes The Sun: Andrew Little's political career has prospered in no small way by the care he has taken to mask both his ambition and his talent until the most propitious moment. Like Shakespeare's Prince Hal he has imitated the sun; hiding his brilliance behind "base contagious clouds" until the moment "when he please again to be himself" so that "being wanted, he may be more wondered at".

 

HAS THERE EVER BEEN a leader who commanded absolute loyalty? A king, a party boss, a prime minister so blessed with the attributes of leadership that not even one of his barons, ward-heelers or cabinet ministers ever felt moved to ask the question: “Why not me?”

 

Even in the court of King Arthur, Mordred plotted murder and ruin. The “one brief shining moment” that was the Kennedy White House shivered in the shadow of Lyndon Johnson’s unappeasable ambition. On the plane-ride back from Norman Kirk’s Waimate funeral his colleagues lobbied furiously for the numbers to succeed him.

 

The acid of political power dissolves all friendships, all pacts, all solemn pledges of loyalty. All leaders knows this and conduct themselves accordingly. On the battlefield, they bring victory. At the ballot box, more votes than their opponents. On the Government Benches, favourable polls and reliable majorities.

 

The moment a leader fails to furnish the victories, votes and validation promised to his followers, challenges – and challengers – are inevitable.

 

Power belongs to those with courage to take it – and the skill to wield it.

 

Which is why the initial conclusions of Labour’s election review panel made me chuckle. One of the reasons the party performed so poorly, reported the four wise heads appointed to identify where Labour went wrong in 2014, is that its parliamentary caucus failed to unite around the leadership of David Cunliffe.

 

Well, duh!

 

David Cunliffe knew that he faced a caucus full of enemies when he put his name forward for the Labour leadership. What he did not appear to understand was how urgently he needed to neutralise that enmity.

 

In this respect, the behaviour of Mr Cunliffe’s successor is instructive.

 

To begin at the beginning: Andrew Little’s whole parliamentary career appears to have been inspired by Prince Hal’s soliloquy from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part One:

 

Yet herein will I imitate the sun, 
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds 
To smother up his beauty from the world, 
That, when he please again to be himself, 
Being wanted, he may be more wonder’d at, 
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists 
Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.

 

There are times when one’s leadership ambitions are better served by keeping them hidden than by openly parading them before one’s colleagues and the world. Like Prince Hal, Mr Little was at pains to smother up his leadership qualities until such time as his party had most need of them.

 



Prince Hal In Glasses? Labour's Andrew Little.

 

And what a masterful job he made of it! As far as most of the political class was concerned there was very little to be hoped for from Mr Little’s wafer-thin victory over Grant Robertson. Commentators almost gloated that Labour’s new leader was everybody’s second choice; had never won a seat; carried neither his caucus nor the party membership; and almost didn’t make it into Parliament at all! Needless to say, the wider electorate’s expectations were similarly modest.

 

But Mr Little, like Prince Hal, understood that:

 

By how much better than my word I am, 
By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes.

 

Far from being “a modest little man, with much to be modest about” – as Winston Churchill famously described his nemesis, Clement Atlee – Mr Little burst out of Labour’s corner with his dander well-and-truly up, landing punches on a Prime Minister whose reaction to this new leader’s wholly unexpected onslaught was almost as disbelieving as the Press Gallery’s.

 

For the first time in a long time the whole of the Labour Party experienced that surge of energy and hope that comes from seeing one’s champion lay low the enemy’s best fighter. MPs, party grandees, union bosses and ordinary members alike heard Mr Little tell the Prime Minister to “cut the crap” and knew that Labour had, at long last, a leader worthy of the name.

 

Mr Cunliffe failed dismally to unite his caucus for the very simple reason that nothing he did gave his enemies cause to cease questioning his right to lead them. Like a medieval king defeated on the field of battle, Mr Cunliffe was forced to endure, through the whole duration of his long retreat, the contemptuous scorn and open hostility of his embarrassed barons.

 

Mr Little, by contrast, having demonstrated the requisite courage and skill, can now present that surest proof of leadership.

 

Followers.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 12 December 2014.

Gut Reactions

Horizontal Revolution: Labour's (and Labor's) inspirational leaders of the 1960s and 70s, Norman Kirk and Gough Whitlam, both grasped the decisive electoral potential of suburban voters who longed to escape the relentless sameness of their days. The votes of the women who lived in the "Hill's Hoist suburbs" around Sydney were crucial to Whitlam's 1972 victory.

 

GETTING ELECTED has always been the Number One priority of parliamentary democracy. It follows, therefore, that the role of a parliamentary leader is to identify and remove every obstacle to his or her party becoming the government. Partly, that’s a matter of opinion polls, focus groups and communication strategies but, mostly, it’s about a leader’s instinctive feel for the hopes and aspirations, the gripes and disappointments, of the people who have the power to make him or her Prime Minister.

 

It’s John Key’s indisputable ability to divine what’s eating the average New Zealand voter that makes him such a formidable political figure. Yes, he may slip up from time-to-time, say foolish (or downright offensive) things, but always the needle of his political compass recovers the location of electoral North and he’s back on track.

 

Much as I hate to admit it, David Cunliffe simply does not have Key’s knack for staying on course. The Labour leader has many intelligent advisers, a good polling agency, pages and pages of Focus Group reports and (allegedly) a speechwriter. What he doesn’t have, however, is Key’s feel for where the voters’ heads are at; that unerring ability to find true electoral North.

 

What makes me even more depressed is I don’t believe that ability can be instilled. You either have it, or you don’t.

 

Consider the case of Norman Kirk and what he understood about the lives of the people who could make him Prime Minister. Read these lines from the first chapter of the autobiography he began but never finished. The place described is the street in working-class Linwood, in Christchurch, where he grew up.

 

It did not brood. It had no character. Instead it conformed. The people were drab. The street was drab. The people were poor. The street was poor. It was there because it had to be. It had nowhere else to go. Neither did the people. It did not inspire. It was a sponge. It soaked up hope. And at night it counted its people like a warder counts his prisoners.

 

Kirk understood that there were hundreds of thousands of Kiwis who’d been raised on identical streets and, like him, yearned to escape the confinement of such hope-consuming suburbs. In these lines you’ll find no romantic celebration of working-class existence, only a visceral longing for something better; for somewhere else to go.

 

Kirk’s contemporary, Gough Whitlam, understood a very different kind of suburb. The bare, amenity-starved, post-war subdivisions that had sprung up on the outskirts of Sydney in the 1950s and 60s. They were a step-up from the inner-city tenements of the 1930s but the people who lived in them felt almost as constrained as they had in Sydney’s slums. Even in the years of Menzies and the Great Boom there was still so much that was denied to them.

 

Whitlam, alone of all his colleagues in the near-moribund Australian Labor Party, grasped the progressive political potential of the “Hill’s Hoist” suburbs.

 

But first he had to clear all the obstacles to getting elected, and in the Australia of the late-1960s that included the proudly proletarian and staunchly left-wing Victorian Labor Party. On the 9 June 1967, as the ALP’s new leader, Whitlam bearded these socialist lions in their den. In what many Aussie historians consider the best speech of his career, Whitlam addressed directly the defeatist political mindset that had produced eight consecutive Labor defeats.

 

We construct a philosophy of failure, which finds in defeat a form of justification and a proof of the purity of our principles. Certainly, the impotent are pure. This party was not conceived in failure, brought forth by failure or consecrated to failure. Let us have none of this nonsense that defeat is in some way more moral than victory.

 

That killer line: “Certainly, the impotent are pure”, provoked an uproar – but it was a necessary uproar. Because, as Whitlam reminded them: “We are in the business to serve and preserve democracy. Parliamentary democracy.”

 

Kirk and Whitlam understood instinctively the intense dissatisfaction building up beneath the National/Liberal status quo. Both men’s political intestines told them that the Hill’s Hoist generation – and their increasingly restive children – would not remain prisoners of their own streets forever.

 

So, Mr Cunliffe, which obstacles to “getting elected” will you remove? What is your gut telling you to do?

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 13 June 2014.

We DO Need Another Hero

Two Men Enter. One Man Leaves: Does Labour need another hero? David Shearer's failure to pull the metaphorical sword from the stone bodes ill for his looming battle with the National Party's (and the nation's?) "monomythic" leader.

“WE DON’T NEED ANOTHER HERO” sings Tina Turner in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. It’s a curiously contradictory song because, if you listen to the lyrics, it soon becomes painfully clear that a hero is exactly what these captive children, “the last generation”, need: someone who does “know the way home”; someone who can lead them “beyond Thunderdome”.

Perhaps the popularity of the 1985 hit recording is attributable to the worldwide collapse in the public’s – and especially the young’s – faith in political leaders and political ideologies. This was, after all, an era dominated by the polarising figures of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, leaders who made it very clear that they would rather be dead than red and were quite willing to enlist the rest of us in proving the point. Mad Max was itself set in a post-nuclear-apocalypse world. In the eyes of many young people, heroes weren’t the solution – heroes were the problem.

And yet, as even the most cursory glance at the historical record makes clear, people not only need heroes but they are ready and willing to follow them. Indeed, modern political marketing is about little else. Just take a look at a professionally produced campaign ad. Note the camera angles, the lighting, the music, the symbolic references: the entire exercise is devoted to making the candidate look taller, wiser, braver, more patriotic, more heroic that his or her rivals.

The great American socialist, Eugene Victor Debs, warned his working-class followers against putting their faith in leaders:

I am not a Labor Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, someone else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition; as it is now the capitalists use your heads and your hands.

By the same token, however, Debs never came close to being elected President of the United States and his Socialist Party remained forever in the shadow of the Democratic Party.

Nor is it certain that Debs’ contention is even true. Ramsay MacDonald, Britain’s first Labour Prime Minister, was hailed as a hero by his working-class followers as the world spiralled into financial ruin in 1929. But when, in 1931, bereft of ideas about how to stem the rising tide of unemployment, MacDonald threw in his lot with the Conservative Party and led a rump of Labour into a coalition “National” government, he was vehemently denounced as a traitor to both his country and his class.

The notion that a hero is someone who wields great physical and/or moral power in his own right, though widely held, is misconceived. A hero isn’t something that you are, it is something you become. Joseph Campbell, in his seminal 1949 work The Hero of a Thousand Faces, describes what he calls the “monomyth”, the narrative structure common to all hero tales:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

Heroes succeed because they embody the virtues and have acquired the skills necessary to overcome or divert the forces their communities feel most threatened by. The hero is the distillation of collective aspiration, not its creator.

Local Hero: John Key is the distillation of New Zealanders' aspirations - not their creator.

John Key’s extraordinary success as a political leader owes a great deal to how closely his own career conforms to the heroic monomyth.

The story begins with John, an ordinary Kiwi joker with a head for figures, setting out on a risky journey into the fantastic world of high finance, where all but the hardiest and most cunning traders are eaten alive. Having mastered the magical art of making money, and acquired a vast fortune, John returns home from his adventures determined to put his hard-won skills to good use among his own people.

It is difficult to imagine a “hero” better suited to the needs of twenty-first century New Zealand. John Key’s very ordinariness confirms his “Everyman” status, and amplifies the potency of his success. The power he wields is not his own, but a weapon forged from the capacities inherent in every Kiwi: those mysterious qualities that allow New Zealanders to “punch above their weight”; that national essence which sanctions John Key’s followers’ vicarious participation in his personal and political success. He is Us, and We are Him. It’s why, until an even more emblematic hero comes along, John Key will remain invincible.

For a while, it looked as though Labour had found just such an emblem. David Shearer’s story, like John Key’s, begins with an ordinary bloke setting forth on a journey, during which he encounters all manner of monsters – from Somali warlords to murderous Israeli settlers – learning in the process the magic spells for opening the human heart to compassion, justice and reconciliation. He, too, returns to his people and, at the crucial moment, steps forward from the shadows to declare that he is the one destined to lay low the National Party usurper.

Except he hadn’t learned the spells, or, if he had, he could no longer remember them.

Forgotten Magic: What if the Once and Future King had grabbed the sword in the stone - and it hadn't budged?

It’s as if Arthur stepped up to the sword in the stone, gave it a confident tug – and nothing happened. Instead of a sword flashing in the sunlight above his head, proof positive that he was “rightwise King born of all England”, the weapon stays exactly where it is, and the hero, with an embarrassed shrug, picks up a guitar instead.

There are, of course, many variations on the classic hero tale. Instead of acquiring forbidden knowledge and inheriting mysterious powers, the hero is often required to overcome a series of obstacles and/or eliminate a host of adversaries before completing his quest. In doing so he blazes a trail and lays a path for those who follow after him. Think of the Labours of Heracles, or Theseus’s struggle with the Minotaur, or Luke Skywalker’s destruction of the Death Star in Star Wars.

Does Labour have another hero? And, if it does, can we assume that the first obstacles and adversaries he must overcome are all inside his own party?

In the words of the Bartertown mob in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome: “Two men enter! One man leaves!”

Or, as Savannah Nix (more generously) declares in the movie’s closing sequence:

Still in all, every night we does the tell, so that we ‘member who we was and where we came from ... but most of all we ‘members the man that finded us, him that came the salvage. And we lights the city, not just for him, but for all of them that are still out there. ‘Cause we knows there come a night, when they sees the distant light, and they’ll be comin’ home.

We DO need another hero.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.