Fortune's Favourite: The Rise And Rise Of Jacinda Ardern.

“Fortune favours the bold.” Though lacking in the more obvious talents of statecraft, the politician who retains both courage and self-belief has every chance of securing an undeservedly long ride on Fortune’s wheel.

 

SO, IT’S JACINDA. At last, Labour’s front-bench is beginning to look like the work of Andrew Little – rather than the cast-offs of David Cunliffe, David Shearer, Phil Goff, Helen Clark and (God help us!) David Lange!

 

The last conspicuous veteran of the plague years of the 1980s has bowed to the irresistible logic of Jacinda Ardern’s by-election victory and announced her retirement. Part of that logic, undoubtedly, was the reaction of Annette King’s caucus colleagues to her spittle-flecked outburst to the NZ Herald’s deputy-political editor, Claire Trevett.

 

Of the Old Guard, only Trevor Mallard remains, blowing softly on the pallid embers of his ambition. If he really means to become the next Speaker of the House, then he would be wise to remain as silent and solitary as the Sphinx for the remainder of the term.

 

Inevitably, there has been speculation that Ardern’s rising popularity could ultimately outstrip that of her leader’s – to Little’s acute embarrassment. What’s missing from this analysis is that up until 23 September, at least, Little remains Labour’s undisputed monarch. That the King’s younger sister is beloved by his subjects matters not at all – providing he leads them to victory in September.

 

Should he lose the election badly, Little will, almost certainly, fall on his sword. Few would now dispute that in such circumstances the leadership of the Labour Party would be Ardern’s to refuse.

 

On the other hand, should Little emerge from the September smoke of battle as the leader of a new government, who among his colleagues would dare to challenge him? It would take a Labour caucus of historic stupidity to reward the person responsible for liberating them from nine years of morale-sapping Opposition by organising a leadership-spill. This is not Australia, and there’s absolutely no sign that Labour’s MPs have been captured by the plot of Frederick Forsyth’s The Fourth Protocol.

 

So Ardern can become as popular as Princess Diana and it will still be no skin off Little’s nose. He’s auditioning for the role of New Zealand’s prime minister – not for the next series of The Batchelor. Besides, as every Labour Leader of the Opposition from Norman Kirk to Helen Clark has discovered: hitherto ground-hugging “Preferred Prime Minister” rankings have a habit of rocketing skyward the moment the mysterious mantel of national leadership is draped across their shoulders.

 

Not that Ardern has ever had to work that hard at being popular. Her career offers startling proof of Oliver Cromwell’s oft-quoted observation: “no one rises so high as [s]he who knows not whither [s]he is going.” Indeed, Ardern bears all the tokens of a political leader for whom “Dame Fortune” has developed a soft spot.

 

“Dame Fortune” (the medieval rendering of “Fortuna” the Roman goddess of luck) was often depicted as a winged (and sometimes blindfolded) goddess balancing lightly upon a ball. In one hand she carries the cornucopia of abundance and in the other the rudder by which men’s fates are steered. In medieval manuscripts, however, she is more often portrayed as the implacable mistress of “The Wheel of Fortune” – upon which, by turns, the ambitious are raised up and cast down.

 

Dame Fortune's Wheel

 

It’s a powerful metaphor, capturing beautifully the strange and random contingencies of political life. A politician may appear to have everything going for him: intelligence, eloquence, diligence, good-looks; and yet make next to no impression on his fellow citizens. Another, meanwhile, may be conspicuously lacking in all of these qualities and yet, with the crucial blessing of Lady Luck, go from strength to strength.

 

And then there is the common English saying: “Fortune favours the bold.” Though lacking in the more obvious talents of statecraft, the politician who retains both courage and self-belief has every chance of securing an undeservedly long ride on Fortune’s wheel.

 

Jacinda Ardern could have stayed in Auckland Central and accepted another bout with National’s Nikki Kaye. Instead she “grabbed Fortune by the hair”, won the Mt Albert by-election, and in a few short days will be elected Deputy-Leader of the Labour Party.

 

Just how high Dame Fortune is willing to carry Jacinda on her wheel – and for how long – only the blind goddess knows.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 1 March 2017.

Labour's Future Has A Single Name.

Heir Apparent: If Andrew Little doesn’t respond to Jacinda Ardern’s emphatic by-election victory in Mt Albert by promoting her to deputy-leader, then he’s a fool. Voters only make prime ministers out of politicians who can see not only what needs to be done, but who also possess the guts to do it.

 

“JACINDA”, was the only name on Labour’s by-election billboards. Andrew Little will have noted that. When the electorate starts identifying politicians by their given name – “Rob”, “Winston”, “Helen” – it signals a significant up-tick in political familiarity. It’s easy to vote for a candidate who requires no second name. “Jacinda” has acquired a winning ring.
 

If Little doesn’t respond to Jacinda Ardern’s emphatic by-election victory in Mt Albert by promoting her to deputy-leader, then he’s a fool. Success merits promotion. Any failure on Little’s part to acknowledge Arden’s pulling-power in Auckland will only fuel suspicions that he lacks the fortitude to shake-up the delicate factional balance of Labour’s caucus.
 

Little simply cannot afford to let such suspicions grow: not inside Labour, and certainly not beyond it. Voters only make prime ministers out of politicians who can see not only what needs to be done, but who also possess the guts to do it. Little should tell Annette King (who first entered Parliament as the MP for Horowhenua in 1984) that she has sat there too long for any good she has been doing. Like Oliver Cromwell, he needs to tell her: “Depart, and let us have done with you. In the name of God – go!”
 

If I may be forgiven for quoting Cromwell a second time: removing King has become a matter of “cruel necessity”. Having embarked upon a radical re-shaping of Labour’s public image: reclaiming its former status as a “broad church” by bringing in the likes of Greg O’Connor and Willie Jackson; Little now needs to reassure Auckland’s young urban professionals (who’ve just voted for Jacinda in droves) that there is plenty of space on Labour’s pews for them.
 

Keeping King where she is for fear of reactivating the “Anyone But Cunliffe” brigade would not only flatter that waning faction’s significance, but also signal a serious loss of political momentum. Over recent weeks, Little has shown the country that he is willing to march right over and through his critics if that’s what it takes to get Labour ready for power. The thing is, once you begin that sort of forward march, you absolutely cannot afford to stop. Like the proverbial shark, you must keep swimming strongly – or drown.
 

Annette King has been in Parliament for all but three of the past 33 years. She was there through all the mayhem of the 1980s: a loyal foot-soldier in Roger Douglas’s all-conquering army. Throughout the 1990s and into the third millennium she served with distinction as a disciplined Labour staff officer. It’s a fine record, but King lacks the “optics” necessary for the 2017 campaign. Younger blood is needed at the top. A truly loyal servant of the party would see that – and make way.
 

Sacrifices will be necessary on Ardern’s part as well. First and foremost she must tear up the “Gracinda” (Grant Robertson + Jacinda Ardern) ticket upon which she ran against Little in 2014. The brutal truth she needs to face is that, in the eyes of the voters, at least, she has moved well beyond Robertson. His big moment arrived three years ago when he came agonisingly close to being elected Labour’s leader. He will not have forgotten, and neither should we, that he lost to Little by less than one percentage point.
 

Three years on, however, that losing margin may just as well have been 50 percentage points. Robertson’s star is fading. Indeed, amidst all the intense jockeying between Labour, the Greens and NZ First which is bound to follow a National defeat, he will struggle to retain his finance portfolio.
 

Ardern needs to move beyond the poignant television images of her and Robertson on the edge of tears, but applauding bravely, as Little’s victory is announced. The deputy-leader’s slot is hers for the taking now, and she should take it. Her star has a long way yet to rise.
 

In making Ardern his No. 2, Little would not only be making a statement about Labour’s future, he would also be moving decisively beyond Labour’s past. Sometimes, party leaders are required to anticipate their own, inevitable, demise by providing the public with a clear line of succession. Like a medieval king, they need to proclaim their dynasty’s strength by holding up a political heir for the people’s approbation.
 

Helen Clark did Labour an enormous disservice by failing to prepare the public for the day of her political death. The result has been a Game of Thrones-style bloodbath as rival contenders hacked and hewed their way towards pre-eminence across Labour’s seven kingdoms. Win or lose in September, Little owes Labour a better future than another three years of civil war. He may not look much like Jon Snow, and “Jacinda” may not look at all like Daenerys Targaryen, but after Saturday’s victory, she comes with dragons.
 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 28 February 2017.

Manufacturing Consent - In A Corporate Box?

Manufacturer Of Consent: Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) provided what might be called “The Owner’s Operating Manual” for mass democracy in the Twentieth Century. Whether his theories are relevant to the Twenty-First is increasingly doubtful - as the four Labour MPs who recently accepted Sky City Casinos' corporate hospitality are discovering - to their cost.

SEATED in Sky City Casinos’ lavish corporate box, Labour’s four errant MPs probably weren’t thinking about Walter Lippmann. Their minds were more likely filled with the thrill of watching the All Black’s defeat the French. Even so, seated there, high above the masses, Phil Goff, Annette King, Clayton Cosgrove and Kris Faafoi were offering living proof of Lippmann’s political theories.

 

With the enfranchisement of women in the 1920s, democracy – as a political system – assumed something close to its final form, and Lippmann, though barely in his thirties, was determined to shape its future development. In this regard, the formidably intelligent young American journalist was hugely successful. More than any other political writer of his generation, Walter Lippmann provided what might be called “The Owner’s Operating Manual” for mass democracy in the Twentieth Century.

 

At the heart of Lippmann’s critique of mass democracy lay his pessimistic view of the ordinary voter’s capacity for political decision-making. The average person’s grasp of politics, wrote Lippmann, was that of “a theater-goer walking into a play in the middle of the third act and leaving before the last curtain”.

 

Flesh-and-blood voters were simply not the “omnicompetent” citizens America’s founding fathers had declared them to be. The world had grown much too complex for the direct democracy of the New England “town meeting” – where equal citizens came together to decide what should be done in their little corner of the world. According to Lippmann, the modern citizen was just one small and largely inconsequential member of “the bewildered herd”.

 

Lippmann’s genius lay in understanding that although the management of a modern capitalist society was well beyond the capacity of the ordinary citizen, it nevertheless worked best when ordinary people genuinely believed that their opinions mattered, and that their government really was giving them what they wanted.

 

Democratic government, Lippmann claimed, had become a kind of vast confidence trick.

 

Reposing the “just powers” of government upon “the consent of the governed” was an arresting political principle, but, in practice, could only be made to work when the people best placed to run complex societies: experts, specialists, bureaucrats; “a specialized class whose interests reach beyond the locality”; had, themselves, already “manufactured” the popular consent upon which the system rested. (In manufacturing this consent, Lippmann’s own profession, journalism, would obviously play a pivotal role!)

 

Under the modern democratic system which Lippmann envisaged (and which, through his weekly syndicated newspaper column and his many books, he largely defined and systematised) elected politicians, journalists and “specialists” of every kind constitute a permanent, self-sustaining matrix of governing “elites”, whose purpose is to justify the ways of the democratic capitalist system, both to itself and to the volatile and ill-informed citizens who keep it running.

 

Which brings us back to the four Labour MPs in Sky City Casinos’ corporate box.

 

The four undoubtedly believed that they were engaged in elite interactions that were as normal as they were unremarkable. By inviting leading figures of the Labour Right to their corporate box Sky City Casinos were reassuring them that they understood Labour’s need to make a large public fuss over the vexed issue of Auckland’s new convention centre. Public opinion on this matter was still in a raw state and much more needed to be done before voters could be reconciled to the convention centre. Both parties understood that the right-wing of Labour’s caucus would be crucial to that consensus-building process. The invitation was Sky City Casinos’ way of saying: “We’re all in this together.”

 

Back in Lippmann’s day, the news media would probably have left them to it. It is, after all, precisely at these sort of informal gatherings that specialists and professionals build the networks that keep the system running. Telling “the bewildered herd” that their supposed shepherds had been spotted drinking wine and nibbling hors d’oeuvres with the jackals and the wolves would only confuse and upset them.

 

But, Walter Lippmann never had to contend with Twitter or Facebook. Back in the 1920s and 30s the lucky snap of a sharp-eyed photographer still had to negotiate the labyrinthine hierarchies of a daily newspaper before it reached the public. The gossip columnist was still answerable to his or her editor.

 

Quite what Lippmann would make of today’s “citizen journalists” with their trusty cell-phone cameras, “Instagrams”, “tweets” and all-but-uncensorable blogs, is anybody’s guess. It is also very hard to see how his system of managed democracy can long withstand the insatiable appetites of the 24-hour news cycle. Thanks to the new communications technologies of the Twenty-First Century, the herd is not only becoming increasingly bewildered, anxious and restless, but it is also increasingly prone to dangerous explosions of social and political rage.

 

The days of four Opposition MPs enjoying a few quiet wines in the corporate boxes of their faux foes may be over.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 18 June 2013.

Lowered Expectations: Labour Party Congress 2011

All Together Now: Like the prospect of a hanging in the morning, a looming election concentrates the mind wonderfully. The brief interregnum between Helen Clark's departure and the bedding-in of Phil Goff's leadership, during which the rank-and-file's influence over Labour policy dramatically increased, appears to be over, and once again the parliamentary and organisational wings of the party are marching in lock-step.
 

“EXCLUDING THE MEDIA might be okay if you were 20 points ahead in the polls”, mused the senior political journalist seated at the end of the table, “but when your 20 points behind? Where’s the sense in having journalists hanging out in coffee shops?”

His colleagues, sipping their espressos, lattes and flat whites at Felix’s on Wakefield Street – just across the street from the Wellington Town Hall where the Labour Party was busy conducting its election-year congress behind closed doors – could only nod their heads in agreement.

The “tradition” (if a practice dating back to 1993 warrants such a term) of excluding the news media from all but the four or five set speeches at Labour’s election-year get-togethers was born of the paranoia that gripped the Helen Clark-led party in the aftermath of the fratricidal blood-letting of the 1980s.

Veterans of the Rogernomics era vividly recalled the 1987 Labour Party Conference where delegates actually booed and hissed the architects of the first two-term Labour Government since the war.

It was precisely this sort of carry-on that led the Labour MPs of that era (including Helen Clark) to view the party organisation as an ungrateful and dangerously unpredictable beast which, at the drop of a contentious policy remit, was perfectly willing to admonish and embarrass its parliamentary representatives while the news media gleefully reported every rhetorical slap and symbolic head-butt.

The decision to uphold the tradition of keeping the media out of Labour’s policy workshops in election year – in spite of the party’s parlous position in the polls – speaks eloquently of both the parliamentary and the organisational leaderships’ determination to lower rank-and-file expectations of exactly how far and how fast the party can be steered to the left.

The contrast with the 2010 conference could hardly have been starker. The buzz that greeted journalists as they entered Auckland’s Aotea Centre last October was unmistakeable. The excited talk back then was all about the party being ready, finally, to take itself out of the neoliberal consensus. Former Alliance members, now back in the Labour fold, grinned smugly and whispered behind their hands that, at long last, the likes of Phil Goff, Annette King and Trevor Mallard had seen the light.

Seven months later the mood of the Labour rank-and-file is much more subdued.

The vicious public backlash against the attempt to improve the wages and conditions of Actors Equity’s members – alluded to triumphantly by the Prime Minister, John Key, only last week in his castigation of Labour as “Hobbit Haters” – caught the labour movement almost entirely off-guard.

The message: that the electorate was nowhere near as ready to embrace radical gestures as the party rank-and-file; was not lost on the more conservative elements of Labour’s caucus.

The result has been a much more engaged caucus when it comes to defining the parameters of Labour’s election policy.

The decision of this year’s Congress organisers to invite 2010 New Zealander of the Year, Professor Sir Paul Callaghan, to deliver the keynote address was a clear signal that Labour’s economic policy was veering back towards the sort of thinking that first hit the headlines at the Helen Clark-sponsored 2001 Knowledge Wave Conference.

Sir Paul’s prescription: that New Zealand can only catch up with Australia by fostering the sort of high-end, high-tech manufacturing represented by exporting firms such as Rakon and Fisher & Paykel Healthcare; indicated, perhaps, that reports of the death of Labour’s “Third Way” had been greatly exaggerated.

This notion was reinforced by Phil Goff’s announcement that Labour would be offering manufacturers $800 million worth of tax credits for Research and Development (paid for by the agricultural sector entering the Emissions Trading Scheme two years earlier than planned) and lifting the minimum wage to $15.00 (a brutal but effective way of weaning New Zealand employers off the teat of cheap labour and forcing them to tool-up and innovate their way towards profitability).

Annette King’s policy announcement: that Labour will be “investing in and supporting people who are willing to raise children” was less impressive. Her proud boast that the next Labour Government would “eradicate child poverty in New Zealand” rang tragically hollow in the absence of any firm commitment to restore the purchasing power of the Domestic Purposes Benefit to pre-1991 levels.

While 225,000 children are being raised on the demonstrably inadequate post-Jenny Shipley DPB, child poverty can only endure.

Labour’s 2011 Congress marked the end of the heady period of radical policy innovation that followed the departure of “The Boss” to UN headquarters in New York. Like the prospect of a hanging in the morning, elections tend to concentrate the mind wonderfully. That the responsibility for determining policy and strategy would be reclaimed by Labour’s parliamentary wing was inevitable.

And, like artists, MPs know that you never show children – or journalists – unfinished things.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 24 May 2011.