Indisputable Mandate

Key Policy: In 2011 Labour made opposition to a partial sale of the state's energy assets the centerpiece of its election campaign. National's long-signalled privatisation plans were thus thrown into sharp electoral focus. Significantly, the final result put Labour 20 percentage points behind National. With nearly 50 percent of the votes cast, Mr Key's Government not surprisingly claimed a strong mandate to proceed with its sales programme.

THE TARGET of 310,000 signatures has been reached – or so we are told. The coalition of interest groups and political parties seeking a Citizens’ Initiated Referendum (CIR) on the National Government’s plans to partially privatise the state-owned energy generators has yet to submit its petition to the Clerk of the House for checking. But even if this final hurdle is cleared, the petitioners will still have to find their way around a much more daunting obstacle: the Government’s mandate.

 

That the Government has a mandate to sell-off 49 percent of Mighty River Power, Genesis, Meridian and Solid Energy is hotly contested by the four organisations petitioning for a CIR. Grey Power, The NZ Council of Trade Unions, The Labour Party and The Greens all deny the legitimacy of the Government claiming a specific electoral mandate for its partial privatisation programme. According to the petitioners’, the voters have (at best) given the National-led Government a general mandate. To claim a specific mandate, they say, it must first ask the electorate a specific question – hence the need for a referendum.

 

This argument would carry more weight if the National Party’s principal challenger in the 2011 General Election – the Labour Party – hadn’t itself specified National’s privatisation plans as the best reason for voting it out of office. “Stop Asset Sales” was the Labour Party’s most coherent slogan in 2011. That only 27.4 percent of the voters were prepared to back its flagship policy with their ballots strongly suggests that privatisation was not the electoral game-changer Labour’s focus-groups had suggested.

 

The Greens’ were much less willing than Labour to give the privatisation issue such critical electoral salience. They promised New Zealanders “a richer future” of which the retention of state assets was certainly an important (but not an essential) feature. How, then, can the Greens argue that National’s claim to a specific electoral mandate is illegitimate when their own policy pitch was so general? If National isn’t entitled to claim a specific mandate for asset sales, then, by the same logic, the Greens cannot claim one against them.

 

The same applies to all the other political parties offering manifestoes in which, inter alia, the Government’s plans to partially privatise the State’s energy companies were opposed. It’s simply not fair to aggregate the Greens 11.6 percent, NZ First’s 6.5 percent, the Maori Party’s 1.4 percent, Mana’s 1.0 and the Conservative Party’s 2.6 percent of the Party Vote with Labour’s 27.4 percent to claim a minimum anti-asset sales bloc of 50.5 percent. Opposition to asset sales was not deemed important enough to preclude a confidence and supply agreement between National and the Maori Party. Nor would it have been had the Conservatives managed to cross the 5 percent threshold.

 

National, of course, has no need to aggregate percentages for its partial privatisation programme as desperately as its opponents. With 47.3 percent of the Party Vote, the governing party came within an ace of securing an absolute majority of the votes cast. It would have been an outstanding tally even under the old First-Past-the-Post electoral system, but coming within 2.8 percent of an outright majority under our Mixed-Member-Proportional system was close to miraculous. Any political party racking up such a total is entitled to claim a very strong electoral mandate for all its policies.

 

National’s claim to a specific mandate for its asset sales programme is, accordingly, very strong. The policy was announced nearly a year prior to the election and was subjected to the intense scrutiny of not only the parliamentary opposition, but also the news media and a broad cross-section of civil society. The 2011 election was no 1980s or 1990s exercise in duplicity and fraud: the public understood that a vote for National was a vote to privatise 49 percent of Solid Energy, Meridian, Genesis and Mighty River Power. Nearly half of them voted for the Government anyway. If Prime Minister John Key’s government doesn’t have a mandate to proceed with its privatisation policy, then the word no longer has any political meaning.

 

New Zealand’s representative system of government entrusts the administration of the nation to the political party, or parties, which alone, or in combination, command a majority in the House of Representatives. National and its allies played by these rules – and won. Their performance referendum is scheduled for 2014 – and it’s binding.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 11 January 2013.

A Quiet Sunday Afternoon In Blockhouse Bay

Reddening The Burbs: If anyone can persuade the quiet suburbs of New Zealand to accept and embrace the need for change, it’s David Cunliffe.

BLOCKHOUSE BAY is one of those suburbs you drive through without taking much notice. It’s a quiet, tidy community that minds its own business and expects you to do the same. The houses are modest, the hedges trimmed, the lawns mowed and the streets clean. The trendy eateries and funky stores that characterise Ponsonby and Grey Lynn are not in evidence here. Blockhouse Bay is not a fashionable suburb.

But the people who live in Blockhouse Bay, and the scores of suburbs just like it in cities across New Zealand, are important. They may not appear in the lifestyle sections of the Sunday papers, or feature in Metro magazine, but it’s the voters living in the Blockhouse Bays of this world who make and break Governments. Change the minds of the people who live in these unassuming urban communities, and you change the whole political environment. Win their hearts, and you win the country.

As I pulled into the car-park of the surprisingly large and well-appointed community centre at the end of Blockhouse Bay Road, a couple of Sunday’s ago, I wondered what I would discover inside. It had been many years since I attended a Labour Party branch meeting – twenty-five to be precise – and I pondered how much might have changed in that quarter-century.

As it turned out, the changes were minimal – surprisingly so. Gathered there were the same solid citizens that I remembered from my days in Dunedin’s Castle Street Branch. Women in hand-knitted cardigans; elderly gentlemen in caps and windbreakers; younger, professional types; earnest immigrants learning the ropes of politics. After twenty-five years, the rank-and-file of Labour seemed almost unchanged.

Not so the world that so many of them, filled with youthful idealism, had joined the party to improve. The New Zealand into which the majority of these people, now rapidly filling the spacious hall, had been born, half-a-century ago, has changed dramatically. And the bitter irony remains that it was Labour which set those changes in motion. In the great tsunami of reform unleashed by the government of David Lange and Roger Douglas, many of the achievements by which Labour had, for decades, defined itself were swept away. And it’s that menacing historical irony that squats, like a 900lb New Right gorilla, in the corner of every Labour Party gathering.

It was to slay that 900lb New Right gorilla that I had quit the Labour Party, alongside Jim Anderton and thousands of others, in 1989. Our defection was bitterly resented by many of those who opted to stay and fight the good fight from within. A surprising amount of that ill-feeling still persists in Labour’s ranks; so much that, without a personal invitation from the afternoon’s guest speaker, I would not have dreamed of turning up to a meeting of the New Lynn Women’s Branch.

The person these 70-80 people had come to hear was their local MP, David Cunliffe. In last year’s election Mr Cunliffe secured 16,999 votes, 5,190 more than his National Party opponent. In the Party Vote stakes, however, New Lynn, like so many other Labour-held seats in Auckland, went (by 749 votes) to the Nats.

The speech Cunliffe delivered to the New Lynn Women’s Branch on Sunday, 29 April  addressed that peculiar political schizophrenia head-on.

“When the right-wing party says that it’s going to cut your leg off,” Mr Cunliffe told his Labour Party audience, “voters want the left-wing party to say that it’s not going to cut your leg off. Voters don’t want to be told that the left-wing party is also going to cut your leg off, but cut it off a bit lower down and give you some anesthetic.

“I think that’s a major reason that nearly one million voters deserted us at the last election. It wasn’t because we failed to communicate our policies. Quite the opposite. Those voters saw that our policies – with the exception of asset sales – were mostly the same as National’s. So we can’t really be surprised at the result.”

That, in Labour Party terms, is fighting talk. In fact, it’s exactly the same sort of language Jim Anderton employed to attack Rogernomics more than twenty-five years ago. And, just as the Labour rank-and-file applauded Jim Anderton’s defence of core Labour values in the 1980s, so, too, did the Labour audience gathered together in the Blockhouse Bay Community Hall a couple of Sundays ago.

I drove home with three conclusions. One: the deeply cynical and self-destructive folly of Labour’s caucus in refusing to make Mr Cunliffe their leader. Two: the MP for New Lynn’s singular and radical understanding of the need to steer Labour into the new, fast-flowing tides of historical change. Three: if anyone can persuade the quiet suburbs of New Zealand to accept and embrace the need for change; it’s David Cunliffe.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 8 May 2012.

Braving The Snow

Insufficient Deterrent: Even snow could not dissuade electors from turning out to defeat Sir Robert Muldoon's National Government in the snap winter election of 14 July 1984. If people are given a reason to vote - they'll vote.

IN DUNEDIN, on 14 July 1984, it snowed. One of those raw Southern days when the wind blows straight from the pole, Election Day 1984 arrived with the sort of weather most elderly people could have been forgiven for avoiding. But, bundled up against the cold, I found myself trudging up Carroll Street behind a very old woman. Bent against the wind, with snow in her hair, she put one foot in front of the other, using her walking stick to push her frail body up the hill toward the polling booth. As I overtook her, I paused and asked if I she needed any help.

“No thank you, Dear,” she smiled, “I can get rid of that bastard Muldoon all on my own.”

It was the high water mark of voter participation in New Zealand: never before, and never since, have so many registered voters participated in a General Election. One or two electoral contests had come close, but the turnout of 1984, at 93 percent, was the all-time record.

How, then, to explain the record low participation rate of 2011? Barely two-thirds of eligible voters bothered to cast a vote at last year’s election. For one reason or another, an astonishing one million New Zealanders never made it to a polling-booth. Not since the years prior to the introduction of universal suffrage in 1893 has New Zealand recorded such a poor democratic performance.

Sharp explanatory differences have emerged between political scientists in relation to last year’s abysmal turn-out. The veteran psephologist, and Professorial Fellow in Political Science at Victoria University, Nigel Roberts, seems to think the fault lies with us, the people. Too many of us, he suggests, have failed to fulfil our democratic duty, and for this failure we must be punished by Parliament. That’s right, the former professor believes New Zealanders, like Australians, should be legally required to present themselves at the polling-stations.

Mandatory participation, argues Professor Roberts, would have the (presumably beneficial) effect of negating the political advantages accruing to well-organised and well-funded political parties. If we’re all legally required to turn up at the polling-stations, then all political parties will compete for votes on the same footing: the least effective having as much chance of winning support as the most effective.

This approach doubtless outrages Dr Bryce Edwards, a political scientist teaching at the University of Otago, who places the blame for the low turnout of 2011 squarely on the shoulders of the politicians themselves: “It should be embarrassing for politicians and political parties because they’re the people that aren’t having their product bought.”

The findings of a survey of 272 non-voters conducted on behalf of the Electoral Commission tends to support Dr Edward’s contention. Roughly a third of non-voting respondents stated that they either did not trust politicians, or that they “just [weren’t] interested in politics”.

It is instructive (and not a little depressing) to contrast the findings of the Electoral Commission’s survey with the attitude of that elderly woman trudging up Carroll Street in the snow to cast her ballot.

Clearly, she placed no trust in the Government of Sir Robert Muldoon, but that lack of trust, far from being a reason not to vote, was her prime motivation for weathering the snowstorm. And, equally clearly, this woman was interested in politics, and knew exactly what was at stake in the Snap Election of 1984. Her faith in the power of her vote burned brightly on that grey Dunedin day, and so did her faith in the political alternative to the Muldoon-led National Party Government.

On 14 July 1984, David Lange led a Labour Party which had yet to openly embrace the economic policies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Not even I – a Labour activist responsible for the publicity of one of Dunedin’s Labour candidates – had any clear idea of the terrible betrayals that lay ahead (although there were disquieting signs). As I made my own way up Carroll Street I was relishing the prospect of New Zealand being declared nuclear-free; of compulsory unionism being restored; of the wage/price freeze being lifted; and of a decisive break with the apartheid regime in South Africa.

And it is here that my own views, and those of Dr Edwards begin to mesh. On Bastille Day 1984, for those who did not subscribe to Sir Robert’s ideas about how to run the New Zealand economy; for those who rejected his interpretation of the ANZUS Treaty and were furious at his refusal to sever all ties with the South African racists; there was a political alternative.

Or, so we thought.

The Chief Electoral Officer, Roger Peden, says he is deeply concerned at the long-term steep decline in voter participation since the record turn-out of 1984.

The year when voting was still worth braving a snowstorm.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 1 May 2012.

Whatever It Takes

Don't Do It, Josie! Frustrated at Labour's failure to connect with the electors in 2011, Labour's highly talented candidate, Josie Pagani, penned an article for the NZ Herald in which she hints that if abandoning New Zealand's poorest families will help Labour regain the Treasury benches, then that is what it should do. But if electoral victory means embracing the prejudices of your political enemies, then what, exactly, have you won?

“ALL POWER CORRUPTS”, wrote Lord Acton, “and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” But the risk of political degeneracy exists not only in the proximity of power, but is also present in its absence. If winning is the politician’s sole objective, then seeing victory slip through her fingers over and over again surely renders her equally vulnerable to corrupt counsels?

The most persuasive of these siren songs is the one that begins: “One day in Government is worth a thousand years in Opposition.” Meaning: genuine political achievement is available only to those with access to the levers of power. Once this precept is accepted, the idea that serious politicians must be willing to do “whatever it takes” to win office becomes dangerously easy to sell.

And the moment it is purchased, the politician is lost. The means we adopt inevitably shape and determine the ends we arrive at. Being prepared to do “whatever it takes” means being willing to enlist evil in the cause of right; and in that encounter it is not evil which is changed.

Like all stories peddled by the corrupt, the notion that political achievement is restricted to those with access to the levers of power is a lie. The greatest movers of human events are ideas and the moral force they generate. And a person does not need to be in government – or even in Parliament – to advance an idea or exert moral force.

It would be most unfortunate, therefore, if Josie Pagani, the young, compassionate and very talented Labour Party candidate for the blue-ribbon seat of Rangitikei in last year’s election, and all the other progressive candidates who failed to enter Parliament, succumbed to the twin fallacies that only those who sit on the Treasury Benches wield genuine political power; and that parties should, therefore, do “whatever it takes” to get there. Unfortunately, a close reading of her recently published assessment of Labour’s unsuccessful 2011 campaign indicates that she’s at risk of doing just that.

“We lost because [we] were seen as looking backwards, not forwards” says Ms Pagani. “We didn’t sound aspirational, we sounded miserable. We were turning up on people’s doorsteps telling them their lives were gloomy. And anyone who has ever been poor knows the last thing you want is someone telling you your life is crap.”

Well, if Ms Pagani was standing on people’s doorsteps telling them their lives were crap it’s hardly surprising that she lost! And if the perceptions she describes were as widespread in the electorate as she claims, I’m not entirely sure it’s fair to lay the blame exclusively at Labour’s door. Isn’t it more likely that the voters’ negative perceptions of Labour are simply evidence of the superiority of National’s propaganda? Labour had a story to tell in 2011: it lost because it didn’t tell it well enough.

Much more disquieting, however, is Ms Pagani’s statement that: “The hardest week to door-knock was when we were telling people - who had just come home from a day’s work earning the minimum wage - that it was a great idea to extend their Working for Families tax credit to beneficiaries.”

This comment represents a calculated slap in the face to the many Labour members who have struggled ceaselessly for nearly a decade to force the Labour caucus to acknowledge the enormous social damage their policy of denying beneficiaries the economic relief of Working for Families was inflicting on the children of the poor. That Annette King and Phil Goff finally allowed themselves to be persuaded by the irrefutable evidence of the harm this policy was causing represented a genuine moral triumph for them and their party.

To abandon Labour’s new position, as a gesture of appeasement to the ill-informed prejudices of working-class National voters – because that is what it takes – would signal a willingness to march into office over the backs of impoverished families.

It’s hard to conceive of a Labour victory more corrupting – or less worth winning.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 20 January 2012.

Looking Back - A Sketch

"To the Revolution!"

IT’S THE DAY AFTER the 2014 General Election. We’re at Matthew Hooton’s splendid residence in Parnell and the champagne is flowing. Out in the garden Chris Trotter is holding forth to John Pagani and Matt McCarten when Bryce Edwards steps onto the deck clutching a copy of the Herald on Sunday.

CHRIS: Bryce, you Useful Idiot! Get your arse over here and have some Champagne!

BRYCE: (Waving the paper in front of him) Brilliant column Matt. Just the right combination of triumphalism and spite.

MATT: I try to please.

BRYCE: I especially liked the reference to Shearer’s “Un-lefting of the Left”.

CHRIS: Hardly surprising, Bryce – it’s your concept.

BRYCE: (Blushing) Well, that’s true, I suppose.

MATT: No supposing about it! But how far would the idea have got if Trotter and Pagani hadn’t been around to popularise it?

CHRIS: Or if Shearer hadn’t been smart enough to pick it up.

JOHN: (Winking) No fear of that! It’s amazing what a politician will do with a little encouragement from his friends.

MATT: (Raising his glass) To malleable Manchurians!

ALL: (Clinking their glasses) To malleable Manchurians!

Cathy Odgers approaches the group bearing a tray of Russian caviar.

CATHY: I presume the sort of socialist who’s willing to drink Veuve Clicquot won’t turn his nose up at caviar?

CHRIS: Beluga?

CATHY: Of course.

CHRIS: Lovely!

MATT: So how was the Act bash, Cathy? You must have taken some grim satisfaction at seeing Banksie wiped out in Epsom?

CATHY: Yes and no. It was great to see him defeated – but not by Labour!

MATT: Didn’t I tell you that Shearer had cross-over appeal?

MATTHEW: (Depositing a couple of eye-wateringly expensive Pinot Noirs on the table.) Yes, but that’s only because you bastards were so bloody successful at transforming him into a racist, sexist, homophobic, fascist cunt who made Key sound ideological - while he was somehow allowed to present hard-line communism as economic common-sense.

JOHN: (Perusing the wine label, before pouring himself a generous glassful.) Spoken like a true 1-percenter Matthew.

MATTHEW: Hah! But it won't stop you drinking my wine, will it? Still, what the hell is the Right supposed to do when the likes of Time Magazine makes “The Protester” 2011’s Person of the Year? There were just too many people – like those class traitors Gareth Morgan and Bernard Hickey – who were willing to give all that smelly hippie ‘we are the 99-percent’ crap credibility.

CHRIS: That’s no way to talk about our David. Just because he plays the guitar. (Takes another sip of wine.) This is fabulous Pinot, by the way.

BRYCE: (Excitedly) But Matthew’s right! It was the Occupy movement and the collapse of the Eurozone which finally broke the neoliberal spell. That, and the landslide re-election of Obama on a platform of economic populism. It all conspired to open up the path towards a traditionally left-wing Labour programme.

CHRIS: Which opened the doors of the Labour Party to that most extraordinary of creatures – the ordinary New Zealander.

CATHY: Yes, that was the really clever move. Once the party was pumped full of Trotter’s Waitakere Men it was sayonara for the gaggle.

CHRIS: Ah, yes, the “defenestration” conference. How did Shearer put it: “I’ve worked in places where racial, religious and ideological fanaticism have armed themselves with political power, and I can tell you, the results are not pretty – and offer no models for the New Zealand Labour Party.”

JOHN: Definitely one Trotter’s better lines.

CATHY: You think so? I reckon it was Shearer’s “We must move beyond what George Bush called ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations’; it’s time to stop allowing brown skins to excuse black deeds.”

MATTHEW: Bloody disgraceful racist bullshit!

BRYCE: It worked though. The Identity Politicians all marched out in protest.

MATT: With Robertson at their head!

CHRIS: A definite twofer! And not before time. The Clark Years infantilised Labour’s membership. After the upheavals of the 1980s and early 90s they were so terrified of debate and dissent that they forgot how to think for themselves. And when you do that, there are always plenty of people only too willing to do your thinking for you. (Leaning toward the table.) Is there any of that Beluga still going begging?

BRYCE: And after the big walk-out it was pretty much all plain sailing. Because, in most people’s minds, feminism, gay rights, tino rangatiratanga and bossing people around is the Left. When all those people threw themselves out of the window, “Middle New Zealand” breathed a huge sigh of relief. Chris and John hailed Shearer for “de-Lefting the Left”, John Armstrong picked up the quote in The Herald, and ….

MATTHEW: …. I know, I know, iPredict went mad ….

MATT: … and the polls followed suit.

CHRIS: (Spreading caviar on a sliver of rye bread) Eighteen points in a single bound – Don Brash eat your heart out!

MATT: It was amazing really. When Shearer announced he was going to re-nationalise the privatised assets and re-introduce universal union membership, nobody – apart from Business NZ and Federated Farmers – batted an eyelid. Although, I suppose it helped that Obama was doing much the same thing in the States.

CATHY: And that’s it, isn’t it. Parasites in charge from London to Vladivostok. And after the Chinese Communists’ latest anti-capitalist crackdown, I can’t even go back to Hong Kong!

CHRIS: The trick was to make John Key the voice of ideology, and David Shearer the voice of common-sense.

JOHN: Which we did.

MATTHEW: (Rising from the table.) And so bloody well, you Commie bastards! Why do I keep inviting you to these things?

MATT: Because we're good for business?

CATHY:  What do you mean?

MATT: Exceltium’s been offered the job of softening up - I mean preparing - the country for the restoration of universal union membership. A big PR contract, with a big price-tag to match.

CATHY: (Rising to follow Matthew) Hmmm? Does he need a lawyer?

CHRIS:  What was it Lenin said about capitalists competing to supply the rope that will hang them?

MATT: Comrades. (Rising to his feet and raising his glass.) To the Revolution!

ALL: The Revolution!

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

National's High Tide

This Far - But No Further: In spite of his best efforts, John Key could not lift National's vote above 48 percent. Like Rob Muldoon and Jim Bolger before him, it was a matter of "close, but no cigar". Clearly, Stephen Joyce's dream of winning more than 50 percent of the Party Vote must remain just that - a dream. National's tide is at the full: it can only recede.

THE RULE BOOK is safe. The experts told us that, under a system of proportional representation, it is next-to-impossible for a single party to win more that 50 percent of the popular vote in a multi-party election. And so it has proved. Indeed, John Key’s election-night boast that National had achieved its best result since 1951 proved to be somewhat premature. In terms of the popular vote, both Rob Muldoon and Jim Bolger did better than Mr Key, taking 47.6 percent And 47.8 percent respectively.

Nevertheless, 47.3 percent of the Party Vote is an impressive feat – and fully two percentage points higher than the MMP record established by Mr Key’s party only three years ago. In failing to breach that historical limit of 48 percent, however, Mr Key has laid to rest the cherished hope of many in the National Party that a genuine majority lies within their grasp. And, with the emphatic victory of MMP in the referendum, it must now be generally accepted that the tide of National support can rise no higher.

This leaves National’s strategists facing a rather large conundrum. Having swallowed-up all of their right-wing electoral rivals – and still fallen short of their 50 percent + 1 target – in which direction should they now turn? Further to the Right? Or double-back and turn towards the Left?

Prior to the election there were many in National’s ranks quietly praying that most of the four percent of the Party Vote claimed by NZ First in 2008 would end up flowing National’s way. Their shock and anger on election-night is easily imagined.

Unlike the Alliance, Winston Peters’ party did not fracture, and then fracture again into electoral irrelevance. Far from it. NZ First not only held, it grew. The notorious “tea-pot tape” observations of Messrs Key and Banks notwithstanding, Mr Peters support extends far beyond the elderly. As anyone who witnessed the launch of his campaign at Alexandra Park will testify, his base now spans the entire New Zealand population – including, perhaps surprisingly, immigrants from East and South Asia.

That just leaves Colin Craig’s Conservative Party. Absorbing the latter’s two percent of the Party Vote would, however, come at a cost. National would have to step back into the fetid ideological swamp of the Religious Right: that place where Don Brash came to such grief in the 2005 General Election; that place from which Mr Key extracted National’s electability by throwing his party’s support behind the anti-smacking bill in 2007.

Any embrace of the Religious Right would provoke a mass exodus of National’s more liberal supporters. The party might inherit the nearly 60,000 electors who voted Conservative, but it would likely lose twice that number to Labour and the Greens.

If moving further to the Right offers National few, if any, advantages; what about a move to the Left? Much of Mr Key’s first term success is attributable to his decision to bring the Maori Party into his government. Like his very public repudiation of the Religious Right, the National Leaders embrace of the Maori Party silenced the howling dogs of Orewa who, like their evangelical brethren, posed a deadly threat to National’s carefully constructed image of moderation.

But while the embrace of the Maori Party has brought only good to National, to the Maori Party itself it has brought only division and decline. Though the loyalty of its three remaining MPs may be shored up with the perquisites of ministerial office, the party will almost certainly expire as a viable electoral force before the 2014 election.

Which leaves only the Greens as a potential National Party running mate in elections to come. But is this, the ultimate fantasy of the Right’s urban liberals, a practical proposition? Or, would it lead to the fracturing of both parties’ electoral bases?

Reaching out to the Greens would induce both rage and panic among National’s rural and provincial supporters. The offer of anything more substantial than an anodyne “Memorandum of Understanding” would immediately set off wild drumming in the heartland for the establishment of a “Country Party”. In the deep blue suburbs of metropolitan New Zealand such an unthinkable misalliance would pump lungfuls of desperately needed oxygen into the barely breathing body of the Act Party. And with Winston Peters hastening to set up refugee camps in NZ First, National would be faced with imminent disintegration.

And always, over National’s shoulder looms the spectre of New Zealand’s second largest party. No, not Labour, but the party of the one million Kiwis who chose not to vote at all in 2011. It is among these voters that the missionaries of the opposition parties will be moving ceaselessly for the next three years: cajoling them; flattering them; and wooing them back to the ballot-box.

How many of them, I wonder, are National voters?

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 13 December 2011.

Waitakere Woman Beats "Waitakere Man"

Waitakere's Choice: Congratulations Carmel! You and Labour were right - and I was wrong.

CONGRATULATIONS CARMEL SEPULONI! There can be no greater riposte to the pronouncements of a political commentator than to actually do what he says cannot be done.

In a Bowalley Road posting on 10 March 2010 entitled “Outrageous Choices” I stated that:

The clear goal facing Labour in Waitakere was to choose a candidate who can beat Paula Bennett. That candidate needed to be: female, have a solid working-class background (to which, at some point, she had added a tertiary qualification) be either Pakeha or Maori (or, ideally, a mixture of both) and, most importantly, be capable of “talking shit” with the same cheeky facility as the incumbent. Think Outrageous Fortune meets Erin Brocovitch.

A healthy Labour Party would have women like that lining up for the Waitakere seat. That it has ended up selecting a candidate who would, quite frankly, have been much more usefully matched against National’s Sam Lotu-liga in Maungakiekie (where I also happen to think Labour has made a wrong choice) speaks volumes.

Well, by winning Waitakere (albeit with just 11 votes to spare) Ms Sepuloni has vindicated Labour’s choice and proven that Paula Bennett isn’t the only one with a facility for “talking shit”.

Well done, Carmel. The Crow is in preparation. (Dammit – but I hate those feathers!)

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

Rout & Ruin

"When the hurlyburly's done,/ When the battle's lost and won.": Having come within a whisker of winning 50 percent of the popular vote, National's position on the Right has grown even more hegemonic. But what of the Left? What can we expect to see emerge from the rout and ruin in 2011?

“ROUT AND RUIN” was my bleak reply to the e-mail from Glasgow. A friend had asked “How bad is it?” What else could I say? Labour’s 2011 Party Vote was an eye-watering 165,000 votes shy of 2008’s. At 27.1 percent, the Party’s share of the popular vote was only marginally greater than the 24.2 percent it attracted in 1919 – the very first general election it contested.

The crucial difference, of course, was that in 1919 Labour was the new kid on the political block. Barely three years old, it was bursting with enthusiasm and eager to replace the ailing Liberal Party as the principal opponent of Bill Massey’s Reform Party government.

Fast-forward 92 years and it is Labour that is ailing. New Zealand’s oldest political party is being challenged on all fronts by younger, more vibrant organisations – most particularly the Greens. With close to 11 percent of the Party Vote, the latter’s level of support is now approaching half that of Labour’s, an ominous statistic for the party which used to be able to count on attracting seven votes for every one that went to the Greens.

Labour’s dramatic debut on the hustings in 1919 ushered in a decade and a half of extraordinary political turbulence that only ended with the Labour Party victory of 1935 and the creation of the National Party the following year. The 2011 general election result suggests that New Zealand may be about to re-enter the sort of agitated political air it last encountered in the 1990s.

The difference, this time, is that the turmoil within the party system is not being driven by the sound of ideologies clashing (or crashing) as they were (and did) in the days of Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson. This time it is the absence of strong ideological themes in our domestic politics that is generating the instability – especially on the centre-left.

What does Labour really stand for in 2011? It most certainly does not stand for the socialist aims and objectives proclaimed by Harry Holland’s Labour Party in 1919. Indeed, two of the most important policies promoted by Phil Goff’s Labour Party in 2011: the introduction of a Capital Gains Tax; and lifting the age of eligibility for superannuation from 65 to 67; could just as easily have emerged from a moderate conservative party.

Moderation has also been the watchword among Green Party strategists in 2011. Gone are the apocalyptic, doom-saying Green Party MPs of yesteryear, and in their place we find the coolly rational Dr Russel Norman, laconically peddling non-threatening economic solutions in a pale green suit. Dr Norman openly proclaims his party’s intention of taking Green politics “mainstream”: moving out beyond the gentrified streets of the inner-cities to the sprawling suburbs of “Middle New Zealand” where modern elections are won and lost.

There was a time when Labour was extremely competitive in these leafy suburbs. But the Greens’ emergence into double figures, Party Vote-wise, suggests that the well-educated, environmentally-conscious, middle-class New Zealander with a social conscience – the demographic that has provided Labour with its winning electoral edge for the best part of three decades – may, finally, have completed its migration from red to green.

But a Labour Party reduced to what are now its core demographics of Pakeha superannuitants, low-paid Pasifika and Maori, and beneficiaries of all colours and creeds, offers a very poor match for the politics and policies of moderation. The diminishing parliamentary assortment of middle-class professionals, civil servants and trade union officials that sits atop Labour’s demographic rump look less-and-less like the people it purports to represent. So much so, now, that the notion of the brown, the poor and the elderly one day deciding to cut out these middle-men and women, and represent themselves, is acquiring an aura of inevitability. Hone Harawira and his Mana Party will be hoping so.

But Mana has a lot of growing to do before it can hope to compete with the party that re-emerged from the electoral shadows with a pundit-smiting 6.8 percent of the Party Vote: NZ First.

Winston Peters’ success hinges upon his instinctive grasp of the issue that will increasingly come to dominate the politics of the next decade: the issue of economic sovereignty. How to foster not only the domestic control and utilisation of the nation’s resources, but also the cultural and political confidence required for their successful defence.

In this respect, as a party identified with economic sovereignty and national identity, NZ First may prove to be the opposition party with the greatest potential for growth. Because the New Zealand electorate has given Winston Peters and his new caucus that rarest and most precious of gifts: the opportunity to learn from past mistakes, and lay claim again to the gratitude of posterity.

Proof, indeed, that “rout and ruin” can be overcome.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 29 November 2011.

Farewell To Old New Zealand?

Dreams Of Old New Zealand: A glimpse of the curving North Otago shoreline and a swathe of bright blue sky

LAST NIGHT I dreamed of Oamaru. I was born there 55 years ago in the big public hospital which overlooked the little seaside town. In those days, public hospitals were almost always built on hilltops. Set there by the State, they quite literally “watched over” the citizenry they were erected to serve. It was reassuring.

Why was I dreaming of Oamaru? I’d like to think it was because, on the eve of the 2011 General Election, I was reaching back into my past for answers about the present, and the future, of my country. That, at some point in the dream, someone would step forward and answer all the questions my conscious mind has been asking me since the campaign began.

But the unconscious doesn’t work like that, does it?

In my dream the person with the answers was me. A hall-full of people was waiting for Chris Trotter to get up and sing. But he couldn’t sing. His guitar had no strings, and he had forgotten all the words to his songs.

I looked down at the audience from the stage. All the faces were friendly, expectant and curiously familiar. The big doors at the end of the hall stood open, framing a glimpse of the curving North Otago shoreline and a swathe of bright blue sky. Then somebody shut the doors; the audience fell silent; and I woke up.

Except it won’t be a dream from which we wake on Sunday morning; it’ll be a brand new political reality to which we open our eyes. And unless I’m very much mistaken, the most important aspect of this new reality will be how few points of connection it has with our nation’s past. Old New Zealanders, like me, will feel like those people left standing on the quay when a big passenger liner pulls away. One by one the paper streamers connecting us to the departing world will snap. The ship will sail away and we’ll be left behind.

The people on board the ship will breathe a huge sigh of relief. For the past three years they have grown increasingly impatient with Old New Zealand and its passé traditions. They know that the egalitarian values it persists in celebrating have no currency in their brave new world.

A brutal and unreflective fatalism defines these New New Zealanders. For those lucky enough to be born to the right parents, life is good. Is it their fault they’re lucky? Losers’ children (with the right sort of genes) will scrabble and claw their way out of whatever hell-hole they’re born into – and why not? No one’s going to condemn them for the crimes they commit getting out and climbing up. The consideration of others is a choice people make – usually at their own expense. The only real crime is getting caught.

It’s why the Captain of this happy little ship, John Key, is so incredibly popular among passengers and crew alike. He epitomises the strategies for success they long to emulate. Mixing sunny smiles and cheery waves with the most ruthless and unforgiving displays of political management. His enemies called him “the smiling assassin” – never understanding that his friends have come to admire both the killings, and the “aw-shucks” grin that accompanies them, in equal measure.

The most frightening thing about the new ship of state is the number of people who have scrambled aboard for no better reason than the proximity of wealth and power. Even in the bowels of steerage their excitement remains undimmed. They can feel the beat of the band through the ship’s bulkheads, and smell the champagne and caviar wafting through the ventilation shafts. They have no idea that their real purpose is to satisfy the First Class passengers’ pathological appetite for social torture. That, in the neoliberal theatre of pain, the flesh of the poor is the ultimate prop, and their suffering the only acceptable tribute. Not even their children will be spared.

Perhaps that’s why I awoke so suddenly from my dream. Perhaps the closing of the doors was the signal that it was about to descend into nightmare.

And I'm left wondering: is my use of the departing ship metaphor ill-judged? Is it really possible for us Old New Zealanders to avoid embarking alongside the New on Mr Key’s voyage of the damned? Aren’t we all aboard that ship? All inescapably bound to its fate? Aren’t those paper streamers attached to the world we are leaving behind? Isn’t the moment of their breaking also the moment we must bid farewell forever to Old New Zealand?

I don’t believe it is. Neoliberal values are like those plates African tribeswomen insert in their lower-lips. They are alien to the true shape of humanity and are only accommodated by constant application and severe distortion. Once accomplished, however, the effect is much admired by those who have already endured the process. And those who have not are, naturally, despised.

But we plate-less ones at least retain the natural shape of our humanity and inhabit a world in which it is still possible to whistle to, smile at, and kiss one another. In this sense, we Old New Zealanders have indeed been spared the horrors of Captain Key’s voyage.

I dreamed last night of Oamaru and awoke fearing the onset of nightmare. But it need not be so. For hasn’t Oamaru become the capital of that strange art-form known a “steam-punk”? Past and future can be merged to create a potent new hybrid of magic and science. Old songs can find new singers, and old guitars new strings. And, if we all try hard enough to remember, perhaps, in time, the right words will come back to us.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

Coronation or Conundrum?

Giving Or Taking?: With all the polls showing National on track to win an outright majority of the votes cast, the Prime Minister is heading for an electoral coronation. If NZ First crosses the five percent MMP threshold, however, New Zealand faces a conundrum. Will NZ First, by abstaining on Confidence and Supply motions, allow "King John" to govern, or will that wily old kingmaker, Winston Peters, permit Phil Goff to seize his crown?

TOMORROW’S ELECTION will be either a coronation or a conundrum. The pollsters predict the former: that National will canter home with more than half the votes cast. If the voters confirm these prognostications, then Mr Key will more than merit the monarchical moniker. He and his party will have achieved what no other New Zealand prime minister or German chancellor has ever achieved under the Mixed Member Proportional system: outright victory and the ability to govern without the irksome baggage of coalition. If that is the result, then “King John” it’ll be – and who’s to say him nay?

For the Election to become a conundrum two things have to happen. First, and most crucially, Winston Peters’ NZ First Party must rise above the 5 percent MMP threshold. If it doesn’t, then Mr Key’s Government is almost certainly safe. The second thing (and, naturally, it’s closely related to the first) is that National’s percentage of the Party Vote has to fall to the mid-forties. If Mr Peters gets up, and National drops down below 45.5 percent, then it’ll be fair to announce: “Houston, we have a problem.”

Our problem might best be described as a case of multiple and mutual political allergies. Mr Key is allergic to Mr Peters, and Mr Peters is allergic to Mr Key. Fair enough, you might say, there’s no love lost between those two. If Mr Peters adds his 5 percent (6 seats) to Labour’s 32 percent (39 seats), the Green’s 12 percent (15 seats) and Mana’s 1.5 percent (2 seats), then it’s all over. Phil Goff becomes Prime Minister and Mr Key remains uncrowned. (We’re assuming, of course, that Mr Goff’s allergy to Mr Harawira miraculously vanishes on Saturday evening.)

If only it were that simple.

But, unfortunately, Mr Peters’ allergies extend far beyond Mr Key and the National Party. He also claims to be allergic to Labour’s Mr Goff, the Greens’ Russel Norman and Metiria Turei, and Mana’s Hone Harawira. National’s unforgiveable sin is its plan to sell state assets. Labour’s, the Greens’ and the Mana Party’s unpardonable transgression is their support for what Mr Peters’ calls “Maori separatism”. Accordingly, Mr Peters has declared a plague on all their houses. NZ First, he says, will take itself off to the Opposition Benches and there maintain the strictest political celibacy.

Hmmmm.

That could be good news for Mr Key. Let’s assume his worst nightmare with National sliding down to “just” 45 percent of the Party Vote. That would entitle it to 55 seats. Now let’s assume that “the good voters of Epsom” elect Mr Banks, but Act, itself, receives only 1 percent of the Party Vote. National gets one ally. If Peter Dunne holds Ohariu, National has two allies. If the Maori Party wins three of the Maori seats, National’s allies number five and it is able to form a coalition controlling 60 of the 121 seats. That’s a healthy margin above Mr Goff’s 56 seats.

Not so fast. Before he can form a Government, Mr Key must be able to inform the Governor-General that National commands a majority of the seats in the House of Representatives. Can he do that? Only if Mr Peters gives him a firm undertaking that on matters of Confidence and Supply he and his colleagues will abstain.

But, if NZ First undertakes to abstain on votes of Confidence and Supply that’s tantamount to allowing Mr Key to form a government. Is it possible that Mr Peters, having confounded the critics and led his party back to Parliament, will then repeat his extraordinary decision of 1996 and re-seat his arch-enemies on the Treasury Benches?

No, the only way Mr Peters can “punish” his enemies is to pledge his party’s consistent support on matters of Confidence and Supply to Mr Goff. There’s simply no other means of securing his political legacy.

Were I the Governor-General, I’d be praying that the coronation of “King John” spares me the conundrum of Mr Peters.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion-Post, The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 25 November 2011.

Human, All-Too-Human

The Eyes Have It: If "Cuppagate" fails to put an end to the people's trust, John Key will have the general reluctance of human-beings to surrender their most cherished illusions to thank for his re-election.

RIGHT NOW there’s nothing more important than Bradley Ambrose’s recording. Those who lament the salience of “Cuppagate” in the current campaign simply don’t understand the nature of electoral politics. General Elections are a bloodless form of warfare, waged with symbolic weapons. Like it or not, the disputed digital recording of the Key-Banks conversation in Café Urban has become the most potent weapon in the struggle between those who want to keep John Key in office and those who want to remove him.

Team Key need their man to be seen as the victim of a media conspiracy. That’s why they have cast him as the public’s champion, barring the way to the slippery slope down which unethical journalists are preparing to toss the whole nation. That is why he’s had to resist every call to authorise release of the recording. Because if he relented then nobody would be safe. Invoking the memory of Milly Dowler, the Prime Minister’s ranged himself alongside Steve Coogan and Hugh Grant. Like them, he’s standing in front of an out-of-control media juggernaut and crying “Halt!”

The news media cannot quite get its head around Mr Key’s tactics. Most of the time politicians are extremely wary of journalists and their vast audiences. Spin doctors take great care to cultivate the most important media players and do everything they can to ensure that their employer’s messages reach the public without too much in the way of unhelpful journalistic interpretation. But, on those rare occasions when the media sets itself against a beloved leader, a helpless individual and/or a trusted institution, none of this applies. When the media allows its own conduct to become the focus of public attention the result is seldom pretty.

The American networks’ coverage of the police riot outside the Democratic Party Convention in 1968 is the most famous illustration of this phenomenon. News reporters and TV anchors were deeply shocked at the violence meted out, not simply to young anti-war protesters, but to many of the Convention delegates themselves. Images of berserk Chicago cops beating defenceless citizens were broadcast to the nation and the authorities condemned for allowing such violence to take place.

For more than a generation, America’s leading journalists had felt supremely confident they were speaking for the vast majority of decent Americans. But they weren’t. Following these historic news broadcasts, tens-of-thousands of phone calls, telegrams and letters flooded the TV networks. And these messages, far from condemning the Police violence, condemned the journalists for defending the protesters and criticising the authorities.

The US news media’s moral confidence never fully recovered from this experience. Deeply disillusioned, journalists were forced to accept that, far from being automatic defenders of media freedom, most citizens were suspicious of social critics, and resented the space and time news organisations made available to them.

People do not like to receive information which contradicts their most cherished assumptions. The 50 percent of New Zealanders who identify with John Key’s aspirational and anti-political persona do not want to be told that it is nothing more than a carefully constructed mask. They don’t want to know that behind the Prime Minister’s genial and easy-going manner lies a ruthless and unforgiving politician.

The harder the news media pushes for the Key-Banks conversation to be released, the more fearful his supporters become that they will be forced to change their favourable opinion of the Prime Minister. And since that’s something they’re desperately unwilling to do, they’re happily telling the pollsters they support his “principled stand”.

Horizon Research puts the Against Release/For Release split at 53 to 46 – and that may well turn out to be the way the votes are finally distributed between the parties of the Centre-Right and the Centre-Left. Only a handful of political junkies and policy wonks genuinely care about the parties’ policies. Elections are not won or lost on policy. (If they were, then National’s policy on asset sales would already have condemned it to defeat.) Elections, for most people ,boil down to only one question: “Who do you trust?”

Who do you trust to keep your job? Who do you trust to keep your house? Who do you trust to keep you safe? Who do you trust to give your kids a rich and fulfilling life?

Overwhelmingly, and for an unprecedented period of time, New Zealanders have answered those questions with the name of the Prime Minister. That’s why the National Party has put all its eggs into the single basket named “John Key”. It also explains why Mr Key and his party are going to such extraordinary lengths to suppress Mr Ambrose’s recording.

Protecting its contents has been transformed into an act of almost religious fidelity. John Key the people’s saviour must remain inviolate, lest John Key the calculating politician be exposed as human, all-too-human.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 22 November 2011.

If We Were A Nation Of Grown-Ups

Things To Come: A society in its adulthood was the subject of the 1936 film adaptation of H.G. Well's futuristic novel The Shape of Things to Come. Perhaps this Saturday we should all make an effort to put an end to New Zealand's arrested development and vote like a nation of grown-ups.

IF WE WERE a nation of grown-ups, the biggest battle at election time would be the one between Labour and the Greens. They would be arguing about the wisdom of persisting with a system in which the environment is treated as something external to economic transactions, or adopting a new approach in which all human-behaviour is judged according to the severity of its ecological impact. Because, in an age of anthropogenic global warming and peak oil, that is the only argument that matters.

A grown-up nation’s political energies would be devoted to resolving the outstanding ideological objections preventing a productive meshing of the social-democratic and social-ecological programmes. How to keep human welfare at the centre of government action without losing sight of the ecological costs such policies inevitably entail. Not only the Labour and Green parties, but also the news media and the universities would be devoting all their resources to this debate.

A grown-up nation would pause, in the midst of the debate, and give thanks that the parties of the discredited neoliberal past were no longer around to tout the interests of farmers and businessmen. Parties which treated the environment as either a massive sink into which their sponsors were permitted to pour their waste; or, as an inexhaustible quarry from which farmers and businessmen could appropriate the planet’s resources with impunity.

A grown-up nation would shudder at the memory of the politics of distraction in which parties like National and Act engaged. It would recall the way the corporate news media constantly whipped-up fear of crime for commercial gain, and how conservative politicians exploited public fear to justify the incarceration of thousands of citizens in dehumanising penal institutions. It would remember the way criminality and poverty were constantly conflated by the parties of the Right: to the point where whole ethnic and economically deprived communities came to be regarded as either dangerous animals to be controlled, or suitable cases for therapeutic treatment. It would marvel at how effective these tactics were at focusing people’s attention away from the all-too-obvious causes of poverty and crime; economic and social inequality with all their manifold manifestations: unemployment, inadequate and over-crowded housing, domestic violence, family break-up, physical and mental illness and substance abuse.

A grown-up nation would long ago have devoted its energies to eradicating these contributory factors to human misery. It would remember the importunate shrieks and outraged imprecations of the tiny minority of obscenely wealthy individuals (in whose exclusive interests its institutions had been run) as a rigorous and strongly progressive taxation system systematically dismantled the edifices of privilege built up in the old regime’s final phase. It would congratulate itself on the radically democratic structures established in both the workplace and the community, and the speed with which these bodies were able to bring “the wisdom of crowds” to bear on the so-called “problems” of productivity and innovation. It would feel again the sense of wonder at how easily the processes of participatory democracy and consensus-based decision-making were incorporated into the institutions of local and central government.

If we were a nation of grown-ups these are the issues we’d be debating, and these the achievements we’d be gratefully and proudly recalling, five days out from a general election.

But we are not a nation of grown-ups. We are still a nation of moral and political infants reaching out desperately for the hand of a man who would see police constables raid the offices of newspapers and broadcasters rather than share with the voters the contents of a supposedly “bland” political conversation. We are a nation in which so-called “journalists” from major media outlets are perfectly willing to endorse (and even praise!) the state-enforced suppression of political information in the midst of a general election. We are a nation that worships wealth and fame. We are a nation profoundly ignorant of its own past. We are a nation obsessed with limiting government expenditure, but unrelentingly hostile to raising government revenue. We are a nation that still prefers to marginalise, blame and punish the poor rather than lift them out of poverty. We are a nation that is willing to do just about anything except accept what sort of nation we are.

We’re a nation with a lot of growing up to do.

We should all make a start this weekend.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

Two's Company ...

Crowded Out: Act's leader, Dr Don Brash, who might have been expected to be included in this very public tea party, was actually one of the main topics of John Key's and John Banks' now notorious conversation - and not in a good way.

THE AMERICAN HUMOURIST, Mark Twain, once described a conspiracy as “nothing but a secret agreement of a number of men for the pursuance of policies which they dare not admit in public.” Generally speaking, voters are wary of politicians who agree privately to do things they’re too scared to announce publicly. What am I saying? “Wary” simply doesn’t do the voters’ feelings justice. “Mistrustful” would be a better word; “Suspicious” better still. Which is why, if the Prime Minister, John Key, hasn’t allowed the news media to reveal the contents of the notorious “teapot tape” by the time this column is printed, then he’s a damn fool.

But, even assuming he has relented, and everyone now knows exactly what transpired in Newmarket’s Café Urban  between the Prime Minister and Act’s Epsom candidate, John Banks, chances are the true victim of these wily politicians’ tête-à-tête is only slowly grasping his role in the larger conspiracy animating the National-Act tea-party.

Several months ago, at an undisclosed location (but you can be fairly sure it wasn’t Newmarket’s Café Urban ) a number of men and women came together to plot the overthrow of Rodney Hide. At the centre of the plot was the former Reserve Bank Governor and National Party leader, Dr Don Brash, who was convinced that when it came to keeping the National-led Government on the straight-and-narrow neoliberal path he was the only man for the job.

Dr Brash, you’ll recall, had been commissioned by the Prime Minister to lead a taskforce dedicated to closing the wages-gap with Australia. The good doctor’s hard-line neoliberal prescription for lifting New Zealand’s productivity did not, however, impress the Prime Minister, who more-or-less dismissed Dr Brash’s recommendations out-of-hand. Not surprisingly, Dr Brash felt slighted.

His mood was not improved when Rodney Hide’s perk buster reputation was forced to die for love, and David Garrett’s youthful enthusiasm for Frederick-Forsyth-inspired cloak-and-daggering transformed Act from what Dr Brash had fondly hoped would be an invaluable ideological thorn in the Government’s side, to an embarrassing whoopee-cushion under the Neoliberal Establishment’s bottom.

“Hell, I could do better than that!”, mused the Good Doctor, and then proceeded to prove himself wrong.

Dr Brash’s fatal error was to invite Auckland’s former Mayor and National’s former Police Minister, John Banks, to step into the soon-to-be-deposed Rodney Hide’s shoes as Act’s Epsom candidate. Now, the hapless Dr Brash claims to have known Mr Banks for years and years and years, yet in all that time he’s somehow missed the rather important fact that his bosom friend and business partner is an outrageous right-wing populist in the mould of Sir Robert Muldoon. Just how outrageous Dr Brash would soon discover when he mused in public about decriminalising marijuana.

Only then, I suspect, did Dr Brash become vaguely aware of the trap into which his eagerness to rehabilitate Act had led him. Far from becoming a rallying beacon for the neoliberal cognoscenti of the libertarian Right, Act was just an election-day away from reverting to what it had been under the unsentimental leadership of Richard Prebble: a repository for every red-necked, right-wing crackpot who ever ran a small business or operated a dairy farm on what had once been Maori land.

The meeting in the Café Urban: that much bally-hooed “cup of tea” featuring the Prime Minister and John Banks; it would, of course, send a message to “the good people of Epsom” about the desirability of giving “that nice Mr Key’s” government a reliable coalition partner; but that wouldn’t be the only message it sent. To those who knew how to read the tea-leaves in the bottom of the two Johns’ teacups, it also signalled that the electoral alliance being forged was not between conservatives and neoliberals, it was between the centre-right and the far-right. Between the genial and urbane Mr Key and the aggressive and provincial Mr Banks.

Why wasn’t Dr Brash invited to that much-hyped photo-op? Because as soon as the votes of “the good people of Epsom” have been counted, the members of Act’s Board will be holding an election of their own. And when those votes have been counted, Dr Brash will almost certainly find himself joining Mr Hide and Mr Prebble in the Ex-Leaders of Act Club.

Yep, the two Johns have played Dr Brash – and the country – like a guitar.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 18 November 2011.