Tricky Customer: Why Is Matthew Hooton Accusing John Key’s Government Of Lurching To The Left?

Trickster-in-Chief? Right-wing PR maven, Matthew Hooton, pushes the line that National is lurching leftwards, because he wants Labour to "trump National to the right".

 

MATTHEW HOOTON is a very tricky customer. To hear him tell it, Bill English’s seventh Budget represents a decisive break with the policies of Roger and Ruth. Effectively, the end of the neoliberal settlement. It’s nonsense, of course. But that only makes me wonder why he’s saying it.

 

There are only two probable explanations for Matthew’s latest foray into the realms of make-believe. The first is that he actually believes what he is saying. The second is that he is saying it for effect.

 

To hear for himself just how silly he sounds, he has only to answer the following questions about Bill English’s Budget.

 

1. Did the Budget foreshadow the repeal of the Reserve Bank Act?
2. Did Bill English signal his government’s intention to resuscitate organised labour?
3. Did he announce New Zealand’s imminent return to trade protectionism?
4. Did he raise the top marginal rates of income tax?
5. Did he abandon his goal of returning the Government’s accounts to surplus?

 

The answer to every one of these questions is, of course, a resounding “No.” There is absolutely no question of this National Government abandoning the neoliberal settlement of the past 30 years. For Matthew’s benefit, however, let us briefly enumerate the key features of that “broad policy consensus”:

 

1. Price Stability.
2. Labour Market Flexibility.
3. An Open Competitive Economy.
4. Broad-based, Low-Tax Structure.
5. Government Surpluses and Debt Repayment.

 

To strengthen those key features, successive neoliberal governments (both National and Labour) have pursued at least one – sometimes all – of the following policy goals:

 

1. The legislative curtailment of trade union rights - especially the right to strike.
2. The steady elimination of progressive taxation – to the advantage of the wealthy.
3. Permanent downward pressure on both the size and scope of the public sector.
4. Continued privatisation of state assets.
5. Creating incentives for beneficiaries to move off benefits and into training and/or work.

 

The very most that Matthew could say, in terms of Bill English’s Budget moving away from the Neoliberal Settlement, is that his decision to increase some benefits by up to $25.00 per week (after 1 April 2016) represented a marginal reduction in the incentive to transit from welfare into work. That said, however, and given the fact that even that bastion of neoliberal rectitude, The Treasury, was prepared to acknowledge that the gap between benefits and wages had grown so wide that tens-of-thousands of children were suffering actual hardship, one can only wonder what Matthew would rather Bill English had done.

 

Should the Finance Minister simply have ignored all those children careless enough to have been born into poor families? Should the cumulative long-term effects of childhood poverty have been similarly disregarded by this present generation of politicians – leaving the butcher’s bill for all its entirely predictable social pathologies to be paid by the taxpayers of the future? Matthew doesn’t say.

 

Let us, then, turn to the second probable explanation for Matthew’s curious obituary for the Neoliberal Settlement: that he is saying it for effect. What effect could that be?

 

The most likely effect which Matthew is striving to produce is the general public acceptance of his proposition that the National Party, under John Key and Bill English, has moved sharply to the left. So dramatic has this shift been, Matthew told Radio New Zealand–National’s Kathryn Ryan, that National “is well to the left of the Clark Government, and well to the left of the Greens.”

 

Now, why on earth would a radical conservative like Matthew want to persuade ordinary centrist voters that John Key was slowly-but-surely turning the National Party into a socialist outfit more radical than either Labour or the Greens? Let’s allow the man, himself, to answer the question. This is what he said to Kathryn Ryan on Monday, 25 May 2015:

 

“I think that [Labour is] in the most terrible trouble – perhaps in their history ….. Look, [these] are their choices: John Key is chasing them to the left, there is no doubt about that. As I said, Helen Clark didn’t do anything this radical. They have to accept what’s happening here. If they think that moving left is going to help them, then John Key is just going to chase them. So, I think they’re going to have to – and I don’t know how they’ll manage this – but they’re going to have to trump National to the right, somehow.”

 

Kathryn Ryan asks Matthew if he’s suggesting that Labour do what it did in the 1980s.

 

“Well, exactly! That was forced upon Labour, wasn’t it? When you had Muldoon going so far to the left, in that third term, in particular, the incoming Labour government had no alternative – because there was no position or place in the political spectrum for it.”

 

Stripped of all its fanciful historical analogies and preposterous ideological comparisons, Hooton’s analysis reduces down to this bleak electoral proposition.

 

National can only hope to continue in office by conceding more and more ideological ground to the Left. In terms of internal National Party politics, the scope for many more such concessions is rapidly narrowing. The only hope of holding the neoliberal line, therefore, is to persuade the Labour Party to embrace the very principles that National has already identified as electoral poison.

 

Why would Labour do that? – As opposed to endorsing, and then extending, the left-wing political gestures upon which National has pinned its hopes of re-election? What could possibly persuade Labour to refrain from forcing an electorally fatal split in National’s ranks, in order to adopt a suite of policies guaranteed to re-open the bitterest divisions within its own?

 

Sadly these are not rhetorical questions. Labour’s caucus already contains within its ranks a number of MPs to whom neoliberalism still presents itself as the solution – not the problem. Strengthen the hand of these individuals by orchestrating the same sort of media about-face that sank the National Government of Rob Muldoon. Heap praise upon Andrew Little for having the courage to “think the unthinkable” (and let him know that he can expect strong media backing for silencing the Labour Left) and History could very easily be persuaded to repeat herself.

 

And if/when she does, you can bet that Matthew Hooton’s PR firm will be writing her media releases.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 25 May 2015.