Defending the Middle

2009's Politicians of the Year: Both John Key and Phil Goff deserve our thanks for keeping New Zealand safe for democratic moderation.

IT’S BEEN a bad year for extremists – of every stripe – and New Zealanders are happy about that. As a people, we are wary of politicians who turn up on our doorstep (or, more likely these days, on our TV screens) peddling radical nostrums. The politicians who do best in this country are those who reassure us that everything’s under control, and that, both individually and collectively, we’re doing just fine.

It’s almost certainly untrue. But it’s what we want to hear. So even when a party is submitting a genuinely radical programme to the electorate, the exercise is almost always couched in terms that insist the measures on offer amount to nothing more than sound, common sense.

Michael Joseph Savage’s ground-breaking Social Security Act, denounced by the National Party as "applied lunacy", was defended by the diminutive Labour leader as "applied Christianity". And, surely, ran Labour’s (sub-textural) argument in the 1938 election campaign: if Social Security is good enough for Gentle Jesus, and little Mickey Savage, it’s got to be good for you!

And Roger Douglas, when he was busy dismantling Savage’s welfare state, appealed to the electorate not in the flinty language of his neoliberal hero, Frederich von Hayek, but in the language of the Left. The free-market would help the poor much more than it would help the rich. There would be long-term gain for the whole country – if only we were willing, for the common good, to endure a little short-term pain. And besides, as everybody who’s just lived through nine years of Muldoonism surely realises: "there is no alternative".

It’s the country’s strong feelings of gratitude at being so winningly reassured in the midst of a global recession, coupled with his pledge to eschew the sort of radicalism represented by Dr Don Brash’s 2025 Taskforce Report, that has kept John Key at the top of the electorate’s hit-parade for more than a year.

It can’t have been easy.

The Auckland Right: that shadowy group in which the independently wealthy, corporate bosses, PR gurus, local-body big-wigs, academics, school principals, publishers and journalists mix, mingle and plot; has never been content to leave politics to the politicians. They came after Bolger in 1997. They came after Clark and Cullen in 2000. They came after English in 2003. And not even the stratospheric poll-ratings which he continues to post, month after month, may be enough to stop them from coming for Key in 2010.

Indeed, Key’s extraordinary popularity has only made them more clamorous for "strong leadership" and "decisive action". It’s as if they really do see political support as a store of capital: a political bank balance from which a leader can make withdrawals in carefully calculated tranches.

Privatise ACC? That will cost you 7.5 percentage points in the One News/Colmar-Brunton opinion poll ratings – cheap at half the price!

It’s this failure to understand politics as a dynamic – rather than a static – system which makes the Auckland Right so very dangerous to the conservative cause in general, and National in particular.

Perhaps it’s because, as an independently wealthy man, Key owes nothing to, and needs nothing from the Auckland Right, that makes him so unusually successful at resisting its demands.

Neither Bolger, Shipley, English nor Brash possessed this crucial advantage. To secure the funding he required for the 1990 election campaign, Bolger was forced to accept Richardson as his Finance Minister (an appointment that came within a whisker of costing National the 1993 election, and which contributed mightily to the introduction of MMP). The party was bounced into dumping English under similar threats of "No Brash – no money" in 2003.

But Key has enough cash to fund National’s next election campaign single-handed. He can snap his fingers at the Auckland Right (and their threats) with impunity. And so far, and much to his credit, that’s exactly what he’s done.

But Key’s freedom isn’t limitless. The New Zealand state continues to spend much more than it takes in, and is currently funding the difference at the rate of $250 million a week. Rich though he undoubtedly is, the Prime Minister can’t fund the entire national debt out of his own pocket!

He and his Finance Minister have a Budget to present in the first half of 2010. If it’s not going to be a Budget written to the specifications of the Auckland Right, what sort of document is it going to be? If he’s not going to heed the extremists, who is he going to listen to?

　
THE OTHER BLOW struck against ideological extremism this year came from the fist of Phil Goff. It was a great deal riskier than any blow Key has yet struck (with the possible exception of his refusal to bow to the pro-smacking brigade) because Goff had neither the tremendous power of the prime-ministership, nor a seemingly never-ending run of fabulous poll-ratings to protect him.

Goff’s blow was against the "Komissariat" – that political sub-set of Labour’s broader constituency notorious for the strident hostility it ritually unleashes against even the slightest criticism of its identity-driven, social-liberal ideology.

Though small in number, the Komissariat is largely responsible for what might be called the "John Tamihere" view of Labour – i.e. as the natural home of "front-bums", poofters, grievance-mode Maori and every other variety of politically-correct wanker the boys in the Waitakere pubs can think of.

Before Goff can hope to win back these "Waitakere Men" (not to mention their wives, mothers and sisters) he has to be seen to have "dealt" to the Komissariat - in both his own caucus and across the wider party.

His "Nationhood" speech to Palmerston North Greypower did just that. Not only did it break the sacred rule forbidding criticism of the tangata whenua, but, when the Labour Komissariat bit back, Goff was able to force them to publicly recant their opposition.

It was a small, but vital victory for Goff. He goes now into the Christmas break feeling confident that his broader strategy of sharply refocussing Labour’s message around the material needs of low and middle income earners (as opposed to ticking off the remaining items on the Komissariat’s reform agenda) can be rolled out unhindered.

　
FOR THEIR STIRLING JOINT DEFENCE of "democratic moderation", it seems only fair to jointly award John Key and Phil Goff the title of 2009’s "Politician of the Year".

This essay was originally published in The Independent of 17 December 2009.