Something Big.

Lange versus Douglas Round Two? Rumours of a prime-ministerial resignation may be intended to head-off something considerably more dramatic on the policy front.

 

THERE ARE ALL KINDS of political rumours, but they don’t get much bigger than: “The PM is about to resign.” When that rumour was relayed to me on Friday morning, my initial reaction was “Bullshit!” Wellington is a very intimate capital city, so the idea that such an important story could somehow be kept from the Parliamentary Press Gallery, struck me as fanciful. Were it not for the fact that my informant was “a usually reliable source”, I would have given the matter no more than a dismissive shake of the head. Instead, I decided to make some calls.

As I suspected, nothing remotely resembling a resignation rumour had been picked up by the Press Gallery. What I did hear, however, were concerns about “Jacinda”. The Prime Minister, I was told, was “out of sorts”, “morose”, “not her usual self”. Among female journalists, I discovered, there was much speculation about whether or not the PM was pregnant. Scuttlebutt, I thought to myself. Although, I had to concede, the PM’s sunny disposition has, of late, given every appearance of having fallen under a cloud. Even to the casual observer, Jacinda seems distracted.

It is doubtful whether her overall mood was uplifted by the latest poll results. Though Labour still hovers around its Election Night 50 percent, the TV1-Colmar Brunton survey showed Ardern falling a statistically significant 15 percentage points in the Preferred-Prime-Minister stakes.

It is likely that these latest numbers only accentuated the PM’s dissatisfaction with the way she and her government are being represented in the newspaper columns and across social media. This dissatisfaction turned out to be one of the most consistent themes of my Friday-morning soundings. The PM, it is alleged, has been stung by the sharp criticisms of her administration which have been growing in intensity since Labour’s landslide victory last October. At the heart of these critiques lie two inter-related questions: “Why the preternatural caution, Jacinda. What, or who, is stopping you?”

While New Zealanders understood the role played by Winston Peters and NZ First in reining-in the PM’s “transformational” aspirations (and were, accordingly, prepared to forgive Labour’s less-than-stellar record of achievement on the big issues of homelessness and child poverty) after 17 October 2020 that excuse was no longer available. Not when Labour, the Greens and Te Paati Maori between them command 77 seats in New Zealand’s 120-seat House of Representatives.

Labour’s caution and timidity were attributed (often none-too-kindly) to the party’s determination to hold on to the huge swag of former National Party voters who had defected to Labour in recognition of the PM’s outstanding handling of the Covid-19 Pandemic. Commentators mused that “Jacinda” was little more than a brand; and that, for all her talk about “the politics of kindness”, Ardern was just another party leader with one over-riding priority – winning the next election. Perhaps the unkindest cut of all came from one of Ardern’s most reliable supporters on social media. Martyn Bradbury, Editor of The Daily Blog. Playing on the left-wing swearword “Neoliberalism”, Bradbury described the PM as a media-savvy purveyor of “Neo-kindness”.

The message coming back to me throughout Friday was that these accusations had hurt. That the PM was feeling keenly the lack of faith in her bona fides – especially from those who are regarded as being (and who certainly see themselves as being) on the Left. I was told that over the summer Ardern’s determination to keep her promises to the homeless, the poor, and the planet had grown ever-stronger. That she refused to go down in history as an instinctively empathic crisis-manager. That someone who could pull off an electoral rout on the scale of 17 October required an altogether more substantial legacy. The word began to spread through Wellington’s labyrinthine corridors of power that “something big” could be expected on the policy front by the middle of the year.

Hearing this, I wondered how much attention Ardern and her closest advisers had paid to the words of the veteran left-wing trade-union leader, Robert Reid. Barely 48 hours had passed since the Red Tide had ripped the infamous “handbrake” from NZ First’s hands, but Reid was already tweeting out a warning to the new Labour majority government:

“No one mentions that every government is a coalition between the elected governing party(s) and the senior bureaucrats.

“The bureaucracy acts as more of a handbrake than NZ First ever did.

“But most 'ruling' parties continue to let it dictate policy.”

What would happen, I asked myself, if the PM made it clear to her Cabinet colleagues that she was no longer willing to play it safe; that, having made promises to the New Zealand people, and been rewarded with an absolute majority, she was now absolutely determined to keep them?

The most obvious starting point for the PM would be the housing crisis. A major initiative here would not only boost the well-being of New Zealanders considerably, it would also make a huge impression on the level of child poverty. Killing two birds with one stone has always been an attractive political proposition. But, to be at all effective, such an effort would have to be on a scale unprecedented since the 1970s – entailing an eye-wateringly large amount of expenditure.

Alternatively, the PM may have decided to give effect to the Welfare Expert Advisory Group’s recommendations on social development – including a massive increase in core benefit levels. This, too, would provoke genuine horror in Treasury. Effectively eliminating child poverty at a stroke does not come cheap.

And, it is here, perhaps, that the rumour about a prime-ministerial resignation may have had its genesis. Faced with ever-higher levels of government borrowing, Treasury officials would undoubtedly have attempted to pressure the Finance Minister, Grant Robertson, into dissuading his friend and ally that what she was proposing was as irresponsible as it was unlikely to succeed.

In normal circumstances, this might have worked. But, from what I have discovered over the past 72 hours, these are not normal circumstances. Only last week, Robertson’s friend and mentor, Sir Michael Cullen, a man stoically succumbing to terminal lung cancer, is reported to have told a select gathering of Labour Party notables that: “It is not enough simply to win – you have to DO something.” Aware of how determined the PM is to “do” as Sir Michael advises; seized also, as his boss is said to be, by intimations of mortality, Robertson, “the reluctant radical” seems ready, for once, to throw caution to the wind.

From all sides, now, comes word of the imminence of “something big” being announced. The Labour caucus is said to be both “nervous” and “excited”.

Writing in The Daily Blog, Martyn Bradbury (whose connections with the Labour caucus are numerous and strong) sums up the situation like this:

“Jacinda has taken the time over the Summer to decide being kind has to mean something, desperate rumours spread by Wellington bureaucratic elites that there is a split between Jacinda and Grant are designed to create a rift not report on one.”

If Prime Minister Ardern’s big policy gamble fails, then her resignation will, indeed, have to be handed to the Governor-General. But, everything I have learned over the last 72 hours convinces me that “Jacinda” is no longer content merely to win: she means to DO something.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 22 March 2021.

What If Jacinda Was Suddenly Taken From Us – Like “Big Norm”?

God Forbid - But, What If? Recalling Kirk’s death raises some troubling thoughts about New Zealand’s current prime-minister, Jacinda Ardern. God forfend that it should happen, but if she were to die, suddenly and unexpectedly, in the second year of her premiership – how would she be remembered?

ON SATURDAY, 31 August, it will be 45 years to the day since Norman Kirk died. He was no age at all, just 51, and although he died in hospital, hardly any New Zealanders were aware that his reasons for being there were likely to prove fatal.

That’s why the shock of his passing was so devastating. For a brief moment it brought the whole country together. Bosses and trade union leaders stood side-by-side to pay their respects. RSA men wept alongside long-haired hippies. Pakeha and Maori mourned according to their own traditions, but, as always, the Maori did so in ways that both enriched and enlarged the moment of national grief. For the first time, the Maori proverb: Kua hinga te totara i te wao nui a Tane – A Totara has fallen in the forest of Tane, imprinted itself upon the cultural consciousness of the Pakeha nation.

The tragedy of “Big Norm’s” passing was by no means contained within his homeland’s borders. Upon hearing the news in faraway Tanzania, its President, Julius Nyerere, burst into tears. In Beijing the Chinese premier, Chou Enlai, bowed three times before Kirk’s photograph in solemn acknowledgement of his worth. Australia’s Gough Whitlam hastened across the Tasman to stand by his casket.

Though few were willing, or able, to articulate exactly what it might be; the feeling that something vitally important to the country’s future would now be left undone was palpable. Long before he was buried amidst rain and an all-enveloping mist (as befitted a rangatira of such great mana) the myth of Norman Kirk and his all-too-brief prime-ministership was sending its taproots down deep into the nation’s collective memory.

Recalling Kirk’s death raises some troubling thoughts about New Zealand’s current prime-minister, Jacinda Ardern. God forfend that it should happen, but if she were to die, suddenly and unexpectedly, in the second year of her premiership – how would she be remembered?

Only the most churlish (and dishonest) of observers would suggest that the death of “Jacinda” would inspire anything less than a truly massive outpouring of national grief. The public’s sense of shock and bereavement would be every bit as great as that which greeted Kirk’s demise. Indeed, it would, almost certainly, be greater. Young New Zealanders, in particular, would feel that they had lost not only a personal friend, but a generational champion. Jacinda’s defining quality of empathy would be reflected many times over in the over-brimming emotions of the nation’s stricken youth.

The parallels would not end there. As a living Prime Minister, Kirk had towered above his political contemporaries. The NZ Labour Party contained no one within its parliamentary ranks who could hold a candle to “The Boss”. His eventual successor, the intelligent and thoroughly decent Wallace “Bill” Rowling, was never able to escape Kirk’s huge shadow. The only political leader of any substance left upon the national stage following Kirk’s departure, was the Leader of the Opposition, Rob Muldoon. Everyone who understood the politics of the day grasped immediately that he was the man who, in just 15 months, would be leading the country. The moment Big Norm’s heart stopped beating, Labour became a dead man walking. Without Jacinda, Labour would, similarly, be transformed instantly into a zombie party.

The Myth of Jacinda, like Kirk’s, would swell rapidly to epic proportions. “If only Grant Robertson, Winston Peters and James Shaw had let Jacinda be Jacinda!”, would be the cry that went up from her bereft followers, “Instead of always coming up with reasons why everything she wanted to do couldn’t be done. If only she had been allowed to spend the money needed to end child poverty and homelessness. If only all those men hadn’t prevented her from making Climate Change – as she had promised – the Nuclear-Free Moment of her generation. Jacinda knew what had to be done – why wasn’t she empowered to simply forge ahead and do it?”

Like Kirk before her, a Jacinda taken from her people many years before her time, would rapidly become the righteous receptacle for an ever-increasing multitude of what-ifs and might-have-beens.

Nearly always, the counterfactuals swirling around Kirk posit an alternative future in which all of the Third Labour Government’s reforms – NZ Superannuation in particular – bear healthy fruit and prosper. Hardly ever do those who ask “What if?” raise the possibility that, even in the New Zealand where a healthy Norman Kirk contests the 1975 general election, a rampantly populist Rob Muldoon might still have delivered a knockout blow against the big man’s government. What if the  widely-held assumption that “Big Norm” would have defeated Muldoon easily is dead wrong? What if, as is demonstrably happening to Jacinda as she approaches the second anniversary of her prime-ministership, the gloss had well-and-truly come off Kirk?

In 1974-75 a great many New Zealanders were frightened and angry. Frightened by the power of the trade unions; by New Zealand’s growing indebtedness; by inflation eating away at the purchasing power of their salaries and pensions; by hippies and protesters calling the shots at home (hadn’t they persuaded Kirk to cancel the 1973 Springbok Tour?) and by Third World nations defeating the United States, and pushing up the price of oil, abroad. Young people, women and Maori had forgotten their place. Many of the old certainties were under serious challenge – along with the authority figures who defended them. Conservative working-class voters, no less than National’s traditional middle-class supporters, were looking for a strong leader: someone prepared to give them New Zealand the way they wanted it.

Who’s to say that, under a first-past-the-post electoral system, that fear and anger would not have been enough to overpower even Norman Kirk’s hopeful visions of the future?

We shall never know. Forty-five years on, Kirk’s might-have-beens, like the lustre of the man himself, are still sufficiently tantalising to inspire us. Courage. Vision. A principled refusal to step back when confronted with the concentrated malice of the Powers-That-Be. These remain the sacred political talismans handed down by the Labour Prime Minister who died on Saturday, 31st August 1974.

All nations need a mythologised Totara to shelter under.

Even after it has fallen.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 29 August 2019.