Gut Reactions

Horizontal Revolution: Labour's (and Labor's) inspirational leaders of the 1960s and 70s, Norman Kirk and Gough Whitlam, both grasped the decisive electoral potential of suburban voters who longed to escape the relentless sameness of their days. The votes of the women who lived in the "Hill's Hoist suburbs" around Sydney were crucial to Whitlam's 1972 victory.

 

GETTING ELECTED has always been the Number One priority of parliamentary democracy. It follows, therefore, that the role of a parliamentary leader is to identify and remove every obstacle to his or her party becoming the government. Partly, that’s a matter of opinion polls, focus groups and communication strategies but, mostly, it’s about a leader’s instinctive feel for the hopes and aspirations, the gripes and disappointments, of the people who have the power to make him or her Prime Minister.

 

It’s John Key’s indisputable ability to divine what’s eating the average New Zealand voter that makes him such a formidable political figure. Yes, he may slip up from time-to-time, say foolish (or downright offensive) things, but always the needle of his political compass recovers the location of electoral North and he’s back on track.

 

Much as I hate to admit it, David Cunliffe simply does not have Key’s knack for staying on course. The Labour leader has many intelligent advisers, a good polling agency, pages and pages of Focus Group reports and (allegedly) a speechwriter. What he doesn’t have, however, is Key’s feel for where the voters’ heads are at; that unerring ability to find true electoral North.

 

What makes me even more depressed is I don’t believe that ability can be instilled. You either have it, or you don’t.

 

Consider the case of Norman Kirk and what he understood about the lives of the people who could make him Prime Minister. Read these lines from the first chapter of the autobiography he began but never finished. The place described is the street in working-class Linwood, in Christchurch, where he grew up.

 

It did not brood. It had no character. Instead it conformed. The people were drab. The street was drab. The people were poor. The street was poor. It was there because it had to be. It had nowhere else to go. Neither did the people. It did not inspire. It was a sponge. It soaked up hope. And at night it counted its people like a warder counts his prisoners.

 

Kirk understood that there were hundreds of thousands of Kiwis who’d been raised on identical streets and, like him, yearned to escape the confinement of such hope-consuming suburbs. In these lines you’ll find no romantic celebration of working-class existence, only a visceral longing for something better; for somewhere else to go.

 

Kirk’s contemporary, Gough Whitlam, understood a very different kind of suburb. The bare, amenity-starved, post-war subdivisions that had sprung up on the outskirts of Sydney in the 1950s and 60s. They were a step-up from the inner-city tenements of the 1930s but the people who lived in them felt almost as constrained as they had in Sydney’s slums. Even in the years of Menzies and the Great Boom there was still so much that was denied to them.

 

Whitlam, alone of all his colleagues in the near-moribund Australian Labor Party, grasped the progressive political potential of the “Hill’s Hoist” suburbs.

 

But first he had to clear all the obstacles to getting elected, and in the Australia of the late-1960s that included the proudly proletarian and staunchly left-wing Victorian Labor Party. On the 9 June 1967, as the ALP’s new leader, Whitlam bearded these socialist lions in their den. In what many Aussie historians consider the best speech of his career, Whitlam addressed directly the defeatist political mindset that had produced eight consecutive Labor defeats.

 

We construct a philosophy of failure, which finds in defeat a form of justification and a proof of the purity of our principles. Certainly, the impotent are pure. This party was not conceived in failure, brought forth by failure or consecrated to failure. Let us have none of this nonsense that defeat is in some way more moral than victory.

 

That killer line: “Certainly, the impotent are pure”, provoked an uproar – but it was a necessary uproar. Because, as Whitlam reminded them: “We are in the business to serve and preserve democracy. Parliamentary democracy.”

 

Kirk and Whitlam understood instinctively the intense dissatisfaction building up beneath the National/Liberal status quo. Both men’s political intestines told them that the Hill’s Hoist generation – and their increasingly restive children – would not remain prisoners of their own streets forever.

 

So, Mr Cunliffe, which obstacles to “getting elected” will you remove? What is your gut telling you to do?

 

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, 13 June 2014.

The Politics Of Negativity

The Wages of Timidity: A hung Australian Parliament has become the outward manifestation of Julia Gillard's (above) and Tony Abbott's negative approach to political leadership.

TONY ABBOTT’S rapturous reception by hundreds of delighted supporters last Sunday morning was more than merited. The leader of the Australian Liberal Party had done what only a few weeks ago the pundits were telling us was impossible: he’d stripped Julia Gillard’s Labor Government of its majority.

Eighteen Labor seats fell in last weekend’s Australian elections, nine of them in Queensland, home state of the man Ms Gillard deposed, Kevin Rudd. For the first time since 1931, a first-term government had been, if not quite thrown out, then at the very least firmly escorted to the front door.

The Australian election result has much to tell us about modern democratic politics.

The first and the most important lesson to be drawn from Labor’s debacle is the ominous power of negative politics.

The Australian Labor Government’s unique success in bringing the country through the global economic crisis virtually unscathed should have been enough to see it returned to office with an increased majority. Astonishingly, Mr Abbott was able to persuade the Australian electorate that – far from being a triumph – Labour’s handling of the economy had been an untidy and extravagant botch-up.

Mr Abbott also successfully re-ignited (and then ruthlessly re-exploited) the fears of many Australians that their country was being "over-run" by sea-borne refugees. With great skill he persuaded his countrymen that Labor had "gone soft" on these so-called "boat people" – a charge which slyly invited voters to question Labor’s membership of "Middle Australia".

The sudden "rolling" of Prime Minister Rudd in a brutal, faction-driven coup spectacularly confirmed Mr Abbott’s characterisation of Labor as a collection of reckless, ruthless and boorishly arrogant ambition-heads, who wouldn’t recognise a political principle if it jumped up and bit them on their over-upholstered rear-ends.

Unfortunately for Ms Gillard, Mr Abbott’s crude caricature of Labor as inept, disloyal and unprincipled had just enough truth in it to stick.

Less than three years ago, Mr Rudd was describing Climate Change as "the great moral issue of our time". One of his first actions as Australia’s new Prime Minister was to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. With the enthusiastic support of most Australians he set about devising an Emissions Trading Scheme.

Absolutely predictably, the Labor Government’s Climate Change policies ran into a hailstorm of right-wing opposition. At that point, Mr Rudd’s job was to stand firm and make the case for change. This he did not do. Rather than face down his Climate Change-denying opponents, Mr Rudd cut and ran. Australians were appalled. Labor’s poll-ratings plummeted.

This sudden voter disaffection reflects another, deeply troubling aspect of negative politics. It’s not just about the unkind accusations an opposition levels against a government; it’s also about the unkind impressions a government leaves in the minds of its own supporters. The political dynamic to be avoided at all costs is the one that sees a government assailed with renewed energy by its enemies, even as it is being deserted by its friends.

Finding herself in this unenviable position, Ms Gillard’s winning strategy was clear: carry the fight to Mr Abbott and the Liberal-National Coalition; and rebuild trust and faith in Labor’s mission among her wavering and/or outright rebellious supporters.

This Ms Gillard did not do. Rather than repudiate Mr Rudd’s timidity, she endorsed it and, to the utter dismay of her followers, took it further.

"The great moral issue of our time" was unceremoniously booted into touch by the new prime-minister. Then, in a craven closed-door-deal, Mr Rudd’s one genuinely radical economic policy, taxing the super-profits of the mining companies, was watered down. Ms Gillard was even willing to resurrect the Coalition’s internationally decried "Pacific [or, in her case ‘Timor Sea’] Solution" to the sea-borne refugee "crisis". Anything, to thrust Mr Abbott’s attack-dogs back inside their kennels.

Of course the new prime minister’s strategy of appeasement instantly vitiated whatever moral justification Labor’s fractious barons may have advanced for deposing Mr Rudd.

Mr Abbott’s critique of Labour as an unprincipled band of ruthless opportunists had been vindicated. The Coalition, scenting blood, redoubled its attack. Left-wing voters, disgusted, struck-out for the Greens.

Taking stock of the 2010 Australian election I am reminded of the Muldoon-led National Party’s ruthless demolition of Bill Rowling’s Labour Government back in 1975. That, too, was a relentlessly negative campaign, conducted by a man the pundits insisted could not win, against a Labour Party curiously oblivious to the size and ferocity of the political monsters massing around it.

If, over the next few days, Ms Gillard succeeds in cobbling together a Labor-led minority government, it’s hard to see it representing anything other than the timidity, lack of principle and cynical opportunism which gave it birth.

Australians seem fated to endure either Mr Abbott’s passionate intensity, or Ms Gillard’s lack of conviction.

The politics of negativity come at a high price.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 24 August 2010.