Debating Debating.

Arguments-To-Go: Trained to espouse only the “correct” version of reality, the idea of giving “incorrect” ideas access to the mass media, must strike a large number of young journalists as just plain wrong.

THAT TELEVISION NEW ZEALAND saw fit to run a news item on the subject of political debate tells us something. Unfortunately, it is that we have a very big problem on our hands.

A generation has grown to adulthood for whom the idea that all important issues have at least two sides has acquired a counterintuitive aspect. It is a generation raised to believe that all the great questions that formerly divided society have been resolved.

To indicate otherwise, by affirming ideas that have been consigned, with extreme prejudice, to the dustbin of history, is to signal a form of individual and social pathology. Such persons may merit treatment, but what they absolutely must not be given is an audience.

What was it, then, that prompted TVNZ’s Laura Frykberg to pull together an item on political debate? The answer would appear to be the events surrounding the visit to New Zealand of the controversial women’s-rights campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull – also known as “Posie Parker”. Those events have clearly caused a number of journalists to re-examine the way New Zealand’s mainstream news media responded to Keen-Minshull’s visit. A much smaller number may even have asked themselves whether the media’s response played a part in stoking the violence which Keen-Minshull’s presence unleashed.

Frykberg’s framing of the item was, however, rather curious. Viewers were introduced to a clutch of high-school debaters – as if their highly formulaic “sport” in any way resembles genuine political debate. Skilled debaters are expected to acquit themselves effectively regardless of the subject matter. Being on the “Affirmative”, or the “Negative”, team should be a matter of supreme indifference to these “sporting” debaters. They expect to be judged solely on the organisation and delivery of their team’s arguments.

Genuine political debate could hardly be more different from this argumentative cleverness. When real human passions are engaged, debates can become extremely fraught affairs. One has only to encounter the fiercely committed protagonists and antagonists of abortion in the United States to gain some appreciation of the powerful emotions that are all-too-easily aroused by profound differences of opinion.

It is possible that the increasing disinclination to debate contentious issues, a trend already evident in the nation’s universities, is a reflection of the emotional frailty of many younger New Zealanders. More and more we hear the argument that free speech causes real harm to persons of a sensitive disposition. Certainly, hearing one’s cherished beliefs trashed by someone in possession of finely-honed rhetorical skills can be a devastating experience. Especially so, if one’s personal identity has been, to a large extent, constructed out of those beliefs.

In order to avoid upsetting their paying customers, universities have begun to downplay the idea that there are multiple ways of looking at contentious issues, in favour of the notion that there is only one “correct” viewpoint which, if not acknowledged by students, may severely limit their academic success. From this position it is but a short step to denying those with “incorrect” views a “platform”, or to the shouting-down of any dissenters who make it as far as the stage.

Emerging from this environment, it is easy to see why university graduates – especially those from the liberal arts and communications studies – might find it both strange and intolerable to end up in institutions where the tradition of allowing all sides of an issue to be aired remains deeply entrenched. Trained to espouse only the “correct” version of reality, the idea of giving “incorrect” ideas access to the “bully pulpit” of the mass media, can only strike a large number of these youngsters as just plain wrong.

But, what to do about it? The experience, both overseas and here in New Zealand, is for younger journalists to stage in-house uprisings against what they see as excessive editorial tolerance of incorrect ideas and practices. Rather than defend the tradition of ideological diversity in journalism, most editors, publishers and broadcasters are opting to bow to the will of the young people destined to replace them.

Thanks to the events surrounding Keen-Minshull’s visit, however, at least some journalists have been given cause to re-think their attitudes. The news-media’s repetition of the charge that Keen-Minshull was an “anti-trans activist” – rather than a “women’s-rights campaigner” – contributed significantly to the aggressive temper of her opponents. Educated to regard the exercise of the “Heckler’s Veto” as an entirely legitimate tactic, trans-gender activists felt morally entitled to monster Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull off her stage and out of the public square.

That this led directly to serious assaults against those who had gathered to hear Keen-Minshull speak (much of it captured on video) only made it harder for mainstream journalists to square their consciences with the behaviour a growing chorus of critics has condemned as overtly partisan media incitement.

Frykberg is to be congratulated for addressing the pros and cons of political debate on the Six O’clock News. Traditionalists might quibble that it would have been more enlightening to examine the way in which Members of Parliament deal with the passions aroused by genuine political debate, rather than the amoral artifice of school debaters. She might also have touched upon the highly contestable claims of Sarah Hendrica Bickerton of Tohatoha – a not-for-profit outfit dedicated to a “just and equitable Internet” – and Sir Geoffrey Palmer’s discombobulation at social media’s subversive mobilisation of non-elite opinion.

Taken as a whole, however, Frykberg’s item constitutes a welcome indication that the mainstream media is finally engaging in a little self-reflection. And it’s catching, at least within Television New Zealand. Frykberg’s Saturday item was followed the next morning by the Q+A programme’s decision to interview the former head of the American Civil Liberties Union, Professor Nadine Strossen, whose forthright defence of freedom of expression – even Keen-Minshull’s – left the host, Jack Tame, looking ever-so-slightly (and uncharacteristically) contrite.

Back in the 1970s, the Right used to joke that a liberal was a conservative who had yet to be mugged by reality. Both Frykberg and Tame, while not exactly the victims of a mugging, show signs of having, at the very least, witnessed something uncomfortably close to one.

As an old lefty, I can attest to the emotional wrench involved in having to own-up to the wrongs of people you once believed were doing the right thing. It took me a long time to realise that exposing bad behaviour – especially by those who purport to share your values – is by far the best way to ensure the survival of those values. Journalists, in particular, must never play favourites. There will always be two sides to an important story – usually more than two. The trick is to give every side the opportunity to present its case – and then allow the audience to make up its own mind.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 17 April 2023.

Debating Debating.

For The Sake Of Argument: Blandness is not the stuff of which exciting political contests are made. If neither Labour nor National are willing to challenge the neoliberal status-quo, then they will have to find something else to fight about.

WHERE IS NATIONAL in the co-governance debate? It is tempting to respond “missing in action”, but that would be misleading. When she was in charge, the party’s former leader, Judith Collins, made her antipathy to the whole concept of co-governance abundantly clear.

As so often happens in New Zealand politics, leadership change in one of our major parties is assumed to render all its former statements and positions “inoperative”. As if the caucus and party organisation have had an encounter with the Men in Black, whose handy gizmos have wiped their memories clean of every policy they ever endorsed – or rejected.

It’s an approach which speaks tellingly to the general reticence of both the “mainstream” parties to any longer engage in serious debate on substantive issues.

This unwillingness to facilitate debate contrasts sharply with the expectations of the politicians and journalists of the past. Right up until the 1980s, it was accepted that the National and Labour parties stood for an easily distinguished set of political beliefs which were, to a greater or lesser extent, in conflict with one another. That these beliefs represented the broad economic interests of New Zealand’s contending social classes was similarly accepted. Debate and democracy were, accordingly, regarded as inseparable.

The neoliberal revolution of the 1980s and 90s put an end to these understandings. After 1984, it became increasingly clear that National and Labour, far from representing antagonistic class interests, had become the joint promoters, and defenders, of the new status-quo. That there were no viable alternatives to the free market and free trade policies guiding the fortunes of the planet was an article of political faith on both sides of the House.

Unsurprisingly, the process of convincing the members of both major parties to accept this new political paradigm was not without its trials and tribulations. Both parties suffered splits and defections. Labour gave birth to “NewLabour”, and then the Alliance, under Jim Anderton. National to NZ First, under Winston Peters. When the dust settled, however, it was clear that the days of lively internal political debate were over. To suggest otherwise was extremely career-limiting.

It was not in the interests of either major party to expose the sameness of each other’s core policies. Expecting the leading politicians of National and Labour to go head-to-head over policies they all supported was patently unrealistic. Disagreement between the parties was, therefore, confined largely to questions of competence.

Who was better at “managing” the economy – National or Labour? By which the nation’s political journalists generally meant: Who is better at following the advice given to them by the Treasury, the banks, and the business community? Or, sub-texturally: Who is better placed to fend off the demands of the poor?

Blandness is not, however, the stuff of which exciting political contests are made. If neither Labour nor National could campaign on a platform that threatened the neoliberal status-quo, then they would have to find something else to fight about. With issues relating to class inequality and exploitation off the table, the emancipatory agenda of “The Left” was reduced to matters of identity. Race, gender and sexuality, and the injustices pertaining thereto, offered huge scope for fundamental political differentiation vis-a-vis the socially conservative. Enter the ‘Culture Wars”.

Few Labour MPs have been more staunch in their prosecution of the identity agenda than Louisa Wall. How then to explain her party’s decision to drive her from the safe Labour seat of Manurewa and, after a decent interval, from Parliament itself? What was it that prompted Labour’s leader, Jacinda Ardern, to tell Wall (the successful champion of the Marriage Equality Bill) that she would never be a member of her Cabinet? Is it possible for a Labour MP to be too woke?

Wall’s own answer to this question makes it clear that it was not being too woke that got her into trouble with the Labour hierarchy, but being insufficiently wedded to the neoliberal economic order. It was Wall’s decision to throw her support behind the only-very-slightly-heretical David Cunliffe – rather than Ardern’s great ally, the not-heretical-at-all Grant Robertson, that sealed her fate. (That the leadership race between Cunliffe and Robertson took place nearly nine years ago, not only indicates how seriously the neoliberal order is defended within the Labour Party, but also just how ruthless “kind” Jacinda, and her friends, can be.)

The Left’s problem, of course, is that the Right can end the Culture Wars any time it chooses, simply by embracing a large measure of its identity-politics agenda. One has only to recall National MP Maurice Williamson’s speech describing the “big gay rainbow” shimmering over his Pakuranga electorate on the morning of the day he voted for Wall’s Marriage Equality Bill in 2013. Or, John Key’s visits to the Big Gay Out throughout his prime-ministership, to grasp just how easily the liberal Right can outmanoeuvre the liberal Left.

Is this the explanation for National’s determination not to take a clear – let alone a socially conservative – position on the question of co-governance?* Are National Leader Christopher Luxon’s key advisors determined to avoid the party being identified with what Labour, given half-a-chance, will brand the Racist Right? Does it explain why they seem content to allow Act Leader David Seymour to carry the Right’s colours into this particular engagement of the Culture Wars?

Possibly. Or, National could simply be hedging its bets. Waiting to see how large the right-wing “trash vote” is shaping up to be in 2023, before committing itself wholeheartedly to opposing co-governance. The latest Roy Morgan poll puts National-Act well ahead of Labour-Green, but it also shows a rising number of votes going to parties further to the right than either National or Act. If that far-right vote continues to grow – not least because National will not come out clearly against co-governance and the Treaty “partnership” – then an increasing chunk of the overall right-wing vote may end up being dissipated across parties that cannot clear the 5 percent MMP threshold – and wasted.

Labour’s problem is not one of co-governance being too radical for “Middle New Zealand” to swallow. Its strategists understand that there is a growing impatience, intensified by Māori and Pasifika experience of the Covid-19 pandemic, with “business as usual” and the status-quo. Labour’s pollsters reassure them that there is a willingness among the young to embrace policies that are new and radical. Labour also knows that it absolutely cannot afford to lose the Māori vote. Its problem is not the policy, but how to sell the policy.

It has been so long since Labour embraced genuinely radical policies; so long since it sent out the likes of David Lange, Roger Douglas and Richard Prebble to win hearts and change minds about the future direction of the country; so long since it felt confident enough to debate its opponents in the clear light of day, with the cameras rolling; that it no longer has the confidence to take on its opponents.

When Willie Jackson announced that he had Covid and wouldn’t be able to debate co-governance with David Seymour on TVNZ’s Q+A, many in Labour’s upper echelons breathed a huge sigh of relief. But, Labour will not beat National by joining it under a cone of silence. Parties do not win elections by keeping quiet. They win them by making noise.

* Luxon has vowed to dismantle the proposed Maori Health Authority, but it is far from clear whether this is on the grounds of National’s in-principle opposition to co-governance, or because it represents a new, expensive, and unnecessary bureaucracy.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 11 April 2022.