Utterly Predictable: Anyone seized with the notion that the Nats new leadership team might actually make a serious effort to face up to the enormous challenges confronting New Zealand and the world should now un-seize themselves. The new Opposition Finance Spokesperson, Amy Adams, has made it very clear that National will be governing, as it has always done, for the only New Zealanders who have ever counted for anything in its political universe – farmers and businessmen.
OH, WHAT A SURPRISE – it’s Amy Adams! On the day after
Steven Joyce announced his retirement from politics, Simon Bridges appoints the
runner-up in National’s latest leadership contest as his Shadow Finance
Minister. So far, so utterly predictable.
Equally predictable, but a lot more depressing, were Adams’
announced priorities. In her first press release as Opposition Finance
Spokesperson, she singled out “Labour’s overseas investment changes, employment
law changes, and proposed new taxes as things that would ankle-tap the
country’s medium-term economic performance.”
Anyone seized with the notion that the Nats new leadership
team might actually make a serious effort to face up to the enormous challenges
confronting New Zealand and the world should now un-seize themselves. Adams has
made it very clear that National will be governing, as it has always done, for
the only New Zealanders who have ever counted for anything in its political
universe – farmers and businessmen.
Just listen to Adams assessment of National’s economic
stewardship:
“New Zealand currently has one of the strongest economies in
the western world. That’s not an accident. That’s a result of the hard work of
New Zealanders backed by the strong economic plan of the previous National-led
Government”.
Strong economic plan? And what might that have been? To open
the floodgates to tens-of-thousands of immigrants? To facilitate the
transformation of New Zealand’s agricultural sector into one huge dairy farm?
To quietly inject the trade union movement with yet another cocktail of
immobilising drugs? To dole out millions of dollars in corporate welfare to the
National Government’s most generous friends?
If Adams’ only measure of success is the growth in GDP under
National; or, perhaps, the appreciation in the value of urban real estate; or,
the increasing share of New Zealand’s economic surplus currently being
distributed to shareholders, at the expense of wage- and salary-earners; well
then, yes, her party’s “strong economic plan” may be rated an unqualified
success.
That Adams clearly cannot appreciate that all of these
positive outcomes need to be set alongside a much longer list of negative
economic and social consequences: homelessness, rising inequality, declining
health and educational outcomes, environmental degradation; merely reinforces
her own and her party’s location among the comfortable third of New Zealand
society.
National’s capacity to present itself to the New Zealand
electorate as something more than a crude political vehicle for the advancement
of narrow sectional interests can only diminish while its leaders feel free to
spout such facile and uninspiring rhetoric.
Adams’ words betray her party’s continuing failure to
accurately interpret the result of the 2017 general election. Under a
proportional electoral system, the support of just one third of the population
is simply not enough to guarantee victory.
That National’s support manifested itself in a Party Vote of
44.5 percent only indicates the continuing depressed levels of electoral
participation. If the progressive political parties can secure even a modest
lift in the participation rate of their supporters (and if anybody can do that
it’s Jacinda Ardern) then National’s share of the Party Vote will be driven
down even further. Without a coalition partner commanding approximately 10
percent of the Party Vote, Adams’ hopes of re-booting National’s “strong
economic plan” will be unfulfilled.
Conservatism, as Winston Peters demonstrated so adeptly at
the head of NZ First throughout 2017, is a political philosophy capable of
transcending sectional boundaries. Conservatives appeal to their fellow
citizens from the much more solid foundation of shared values: individual
freedom and responsibility; cherished cultural and religious traditions; the
principles of equity and fairness. Values as likely to be found among the
poorest members of society as the wealthiest.
Certainly, conservatives are hostile to the claims of the
mob, but they are no less hostile to the grasping selfishness of the elites.
The power of the state is important to conservatives not only because it
guarantees law and order, but also because it alone is strong enough to resist
– and, if necessary, overawe – the special-pleading of the heedless rich.
While Bridges and Adams espouse a social and economic
programme which reeks of sectional self-interest, the National Party’s ability
to break out of the ghetto of the comfortable third will continue to be
compromised. If, between them, they are unable to convince the New Zealand
electorate that a principled conservative party called “National” still exists,
then they may soon find it necessary to re-invent one.
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Wednesday, 8 March 2018.
