The Making Of A National Party Leader

What It Takes: That Simon Bridges was willing, coolly and efficiently, to curtail New Zealanders’ protest rights, would not have gone unnoticed by his political patrons (among whom were John Key and Steven Joyce). They had set him a test – and he had passed it with flying colours. In order for Bridges to become a successful statesman, his political peers needed to be convinced he had it in him to put his most cherished ideals to the sword without flinching.

THERE IS AN AIR OF UNREALITY about the leadership struggles within political parties. It’s as if all the journalists and commentators have entered into an unspoken agreement not to draw too much attention to the fundamental opaqueness of the process. Instead, the public is treated to a wealth of irrelevant information about the various contenders. When and where they were born; who they married; what they like to do in their spare time: as if any of these details matter.

Unmentioned and unexamined are the pivotal, career-consolidating decisions that these candidates have made on their way to the top. What did they do to demonstrate the seriousness of their intent to become more than bit-players in the big political dramas of their day. Who are the former enemies with whom they were secretly reconciled? And who were the former friends and allies they betrayed in the process?

These are the only details that truly matter: the information that only those close to the political action can reveal; the stuff that the public almost never gets to hear about. Long-retired politicians may write about it in their memoirs, but by then the dirty deals laid bare are so far in the past that almost nobody – excepting family, friends and the odd political historian – gives a damn.

Oddly, most people who pay attention to politics know that this is the way that political leaders have always behaved. It’s the reason why television series like House of Cards and Borgen are so popular. They allow us to view the behind-the-scenes events that go unreported in the news media. Indeed, much of the dramatic action in these series turns on the huge discrepancy between what the leading characters say to the media and what they say to each other.

When Francis Underwood makes his direct asides to the viewers in House of Cards the effect is always electrifying. Instead of being mere spectators, they suddenly become the hero’s trusted co-conspirators. For just a few seconds they get to experience what it is like to be inside the action: to feel the adrenalin-rush that comes from wielding raw political power; to be liberated from the pettiness and insignificance of the “ordinary” citizen’s highly circumscribed existence.

The National Party’s new leader, for example, was being promoted as one of the people to watch more than 15 years ago – long before he wrenched the Tauranga electorate from Winston Peters’ grasp in 2008. The decisions made by Simon Bridges in those crucial years before he entered Parliament will, undoubtedly, have played a role in the way the votes were cast in the National Party caucus-room on Tuesday morning. Loyalties in politics tend to be a long time in the making: leaders get back only what they have given.

What has Bridges given? Far more than we will ever be permitted to know.

One of his more notable public gifts, however, was the legal expertise he deployed in the framing of the legislation prohibiting seaborne protests aimed at impeding oil exploration in New Zealand’s territorial waters.

That expertise was a long time in the making. Bridges learned the lawyer’s trade here in New Zealand, at Auckland’s Law School, and then among the dreaming spires of Oxford University. In the course of his training, Bridges studied not only how the legal system works, but also what the Rule of Law is intended to protect. As a keen student of history, he must have known, even as he proscribed them, how important the rights of the citizen have always been to the proper functioning of a democratic state.

That Bridges was willing, coolly and efficiently, to curtail New Zealanders’ protest rights, would not have gone unnoticed by his political patrons (among whom were John Key and Steven Joyce). They had set him a test – and he had passed it with flying colours. In order for Bridges to become a successful statesman, his political peers needed to be convinced he had it in him to put his most cherished ideals to the sword without flinching.

That, too, would have been a factor in Simon Bridges’ successful campaign to become the National Party’s twelfth leader.

It is one thing to have the accent of a “petrol head” from West Auckland: more important by far, however, is how well a leader of the National Party is able to speak the language of power. That New Zealanders know much more about the former than the latter is proof of just how little political reality they are expected to bear.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 1 March 2018.

The Better Angel: Why Birgitte Nyborg Beats Donald Trump.

American Cynicism vs Danish Idealism: That the ruthless and corrupt hero of House of Cards, Francis Underwood, so completely captivated American television viewers should, perhaps, have alerted us to the possibility of Donald Trump in the White House. The tremendous popularity of the Danish TV series Borgen and its heroine, Birgitte Nyborg, testifies to the worldwide hunger for a more principled kind of politics.

 

ALONG WITH LEGO, and those foiled-wrapped segments of creamily delicious cheese, Borgen, is one of Denmark’s most successful exports. When the idea of a series about the intricacies of Danish politics was pitched to the bosses at the publicly owned Danish Broadcasting Corporation more than a few eyebrows must have shot up. But, somehow, the show’s creator, Adam Price (one of Denmark’s leading television chefs!) convinced them to back the project – and Borgen went on to wow the world.

 

What made the series so compelling (apart from Price’s intelligent script and Sidse Babett Knudsen’s insightful rendering of Birgitte Nyborg, the drama’s central character ) was the way party politics was presented to the show’s well-off and well-educated audiences.

 

Unlike the blackly comical British series, The Thick Of It, which delighted in portraying the political process and its practitioners as irredeemably corrupt and ineffective, Borgen took as its starting point the historically undeniable ability of the democratic process to improve the lives of ordinary human-beings.

 

It’s an important difference. The Thick of It may be funny, but it is also profoundly disempowering. Nothing good can come from the politics represented in TTOI because none of its characters are in the least bit inspiring. The viewers may laugh at the hugely inventive invective which pours out of the mouth of its anti-hero, Malcolm Tucker, but very few of them would want to inhabit his world.

 

Borgen does not pretend that the political world is without self-aggrandisement and venality. Or that deception, compromise and betrayal are not inescapable aspects of the exercise of political power. But the series refuses to make these the be-all and end-all of the process. In the character of Birgitte Nyborg, Price offers his audience a politician who, through all the vicissitudes of high public office, remains unswervingly committed to the bright bundle of ideals that impelled her into politics.

 

Borgen is empowering precisely because it refuses to validate the cynicism and disillusionment which pervades so many ordinary citizens’ perception of contemporary politics. What makes the series work dramatically, however, is the way Price plays to his audiences’ deep-seated yearning for a politician who refuses to play it safe. A person with enough faith in the intelligence of the voting public to tell them the truth, and enough trust in the essential goodness of human-beings to address her policies to what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature”.

 

This is the style of politics that Birgitte Nyborg practices – and Borgen’s audiences love it.

 

Danish Broadcasting is to be commended for Borgen. Not only because it reveals Denmark, a country about the same size as New Zealand, to be deeply committed to the idea that its public broadcaster has a vital role in both explaining and upholding its democratic institutions, but also because it is willing to invest in the creative capacities of its own citizens – to the point of funding a project of Borgen’s scope and scale. Would that New Zealanders were as committed to preserving the public service aspects of their broadcasting system!

 

Because there is a price to be paid for dwelling only on the negative aspects of politics. If voters are encouraged to believe that their political system is “rigged”, and that their political leaders are “crooked”, then they will cease to have faith in the intricate networks of alliances; the complex arrangements of compromises; and the step-by-step fulfilment of promises that is the daily grind of democratic politics.

 

And when that happens: when the voters dismiss the give-and-take of parliamentary politics; the sort of politics that President Lyndon Johnson personified, and which produced the transformational Voting Rights Act of 1965; then they begin to long for a leader strong enough to dispense with the formalities of politics and cut to the chase.

 

Except that a leader who’s contemptuous of complexity and compromise must also be contemptuous of the voters themselves. Because the inescapable fact of human existence is that it is not simple, and that the competing needs of human society are only resolvable by people who are willing to compromise.

 

Compromising does not mean capitulating. This is Borgen’s core message. That compromising is about keeping your own ideals alive by recognising the ideals of others: the rights of others.

 

Rejecting the politics of Birgitte Nyborg, leaves only the anti-politics of Donald Trump.

 

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, 28 October 2016.

"Flexicurity" - The Future Of Work?

The Fictional Realm: Borgen's prime-ministerial heroine Birgitte Nyborg (Sidse Babett Knudsen) is consoled by her Machiavellian spin-doctor Kasper Juul (Pilou Asbaek) in the award-winning drama series from Danish public television. Until very recently one of the world's most progressive states (its current immigration reforms are insupportable!) Denmark is able to run active labour market policies such as "flexicurity" only because the Danish working-class still enjoys effective representation in the country's political system. Would it were so in New Zealand!

 

IF ONLY New Zealand’s politics could be like those of Borgen – the Danish television series. Centred around the actions of a fictional Danish prime minister, Borgen’s politics are realistically riveting. More than this, however, they are rational. Denmark is portrayed as a nation with a conscience: the host of better angels to which, in extremis, Borgen’s heroine (yes, the prime minister is a woman) can successfully appeal. In the fictional realm, at least, the Danes remain the sort of people New Zealanders once believed themselves to be: decent, practical and courageous.

 

In population terms, Denmark and New Zealand are not that far apart: 5.6 million to 4.6 million. They are also similar in possessing large and efficient primary production sectors. Like New Zealand, Denmark’s political history has been strongly influenced by social democracy, with both countries boasting large and historically competitive Labour parties.

 

It is, therefore, unsurprising that left-wing intellectuals and Labour politicians from New Zealand have, from time to time, turned to Denmark for inspiration. In the late-1950s the left-wing political economist and public servant, William B. Sutch, urged Walter Nash’s Second Labour Government (1957-60) to follow the example of the small, highly-productive nations of northern and western Europe by radically increasing the range and complexity of New Zealand’s exports.

 

Excluding the political anomaly of the Rogernomics years (1984-1990), Sutch’s blueprint, albeit much updated and amended, has remained at the core of Labour’s economic thinking ever since.

 

Equally consistent has been the party’s predilection for adapting Scandinavian solutions to New Zealand’s social problems. Until the mass unemployment created by Roger Douglas’s free-market policies rendered the whole subject moot, the David Lange-led Labour Government borrowed heavily from the so-called “active labour market” regimes of the Scandinavian countries – especially Sweden and Denmark. Under the rubric of Grant Robertson’s “Future of Work Commission”, Labour is about to look northward again.

 

The Holy Grail? Grant Robertson's Future Of Work Commission looks set to make "flexicurity" an important part of Labour's 2017 manifesto.

 

Robertson’s buzzword-de-jour is “flexicurity”. As the name of this highly successful Danish policy suggests, the dual objective is to facilitate the maximum degree of labour market flexibility while providing the maximum level of employment security. Employers are offered considerable freedom to hire and fire, but, in return, employees are generously supported through periods of unemployment, and assisted with re-training and re-entering the labour market, by the state.

 

According to the official website of the Danish Government: “Danes are positive about globalisation and do not fear losing their jobs. Rather they seek opportunities for new and better jobs. This is partly ascribed to the flexicurity model which promotes adaptability of employees and enterprises.”

 

Small wonder that Labour’s Future of Work website links directly to this quintessentially Danish solution. In a New Zealand labour market increasingly composed of “independent” contractors, people holding down multiple jobs, part-timers, interns, and the plethora of similarly “precarious” employment relationships, the Danes’ flexicurity policies must have appeared to Grant Robertson in much the same way as the Holy Grail appeared to King Arthur.

 

Unfortunately, Robertson and his advisors failed to read the small print. New Zealand and Denmark have many similarities, but in 2016 they also feature a number of vital differences. In relation to flexicurity, the most important of these is the respective level of union density.

 

As the official Danish website puts it: “The development of the labour market owes much to the Danish collective bargaining model, which has ensured extensive worker protection while taking changing production and market conditions into account. The organisation rate for workers in Denmark is approx. 75%.”

 

The organisation rate for New Zealand workers in 2014 was approx. 19%.

 

It is typical of the contemporary New Zealand Labour Party that it has simply ignored the profound contextual differences between the workers of New Zealand and Denmark. With three-quarters of the workforce organised, the Danish Confederation of Trade Unions is a force in the land. With fewer than one in five New Zealand workers organised, the NZ Council of Trade Unions is in no position to prevent flexicurity turning into a government-backed scheme for employers to hire and fire at will. Presumably, the lone trade unionist on Robertson’s “External Reference Group” pointed this out. Presumably, Robertson wasn’t listening.

 

Borgen’s politics are rational because the balance of social forces in Denmark obliges its politicians to behave reasonably. Labour’s policies of 30 years ago predetermined the future of work in New Zealand: flexibility without security.

 

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, 15 January 2016.