A Damn Near-Run Thing: The 2005 General Election was very far from being a triumph of New Zealanders’ tolerance and generosity. In reality, it was an election which saw the National Party come roaring back into political contention on the strength of one of the most racially-charged elections in New Zealand history. 2005 was the election best-remembered for National’s incendiary billboard campaign – most especially the billboard which pitted “Iwi” against “Kiwi”.
WHAT’S WRONG with our journalists? Why do so many reporters
and columnists memories appear to fail them? Only this morning, the veteran NZ
Herald columnist, Brian Rudman, contributed yet another lapse to the Fourth
Estate’s growing tally of memory malfunctions. He’s one of the Herald’s best,
of course, with years of intelligent and splendidly trenchant commentary behind
him, but today’s memory fade is every bit as egregious as the historical
deficiencies so apparent in the writing of much younger journalists.
The context for Rudman’s misrecollection was Shane Jones’s
recent playing of the race card. This was not, as the columnist quite correctly
pointed out, the first time NZ First has reached for its racially-loaded
rhetorical shotgun. Rudman quotes from a 2003 pamphlet entitled “Who’s Country
Is It?” – a document fairly dripping with anti-immigrant animosity. Fair call. It
was only when he attempted to draw a moral from his tale that Rudman went
astray.
Here’s what he said:
“To New Zealanders’ credit, this casual racism turned voters
away from NZ First. The following election, its party vote nearly halved to
just over the 5 per cent threshold needed to stay in Parliament, and Peters
lost his Tauranga electorate seat. It’s a lesson Jones should be
contemplating.”
To anyone who wasn’t here at the time – an immigrant
perhaps? – Rudman’s observation offers a reassuringly happy ending to a rather
unsavoury political story. If you knew absolutely nothing about New Zealand’s
2005 General Election, his account of NZ First’s electoral comeuppance would be
heartening. Your confidence in New Zealanders’ tolerance and generosity
reaffirmed, you could look forward to Jones’s insulting statements about Indian
immigrants being answered with punishing force at the ballot-box.
Except, of course, the 2005 General Election was very far
from being a triumph of New Zealanders’ tolerance and generosity. In reality,
it was an election which saw the National Party come roaring back into
political contention on the strength of one of the most racially-charged
elections in New Zealand history. 2005 was the election best-remembered for
National’s incendiary billboard campaign – most especially the billboard which
pitted “Iwi” against “Kiwi”. Had National, led by the former Reserve Bank
Governor, Dr Don Brash, won the election (and he came within 100,000 votes, out
of 2.3 million votes cast, of doing so) then the Treaty of Waitangi would have
been retired; all reference to “Treaty Principles” in New Zealand legislation
removed; all “affirmative action” programmes for Maori discontinued; and the
Maori Seats abolished.
Not quite so tolerant, then. Not entirely generous.
The Right’s race-driven comeback might have been even
stronger if the NZ First Leader, Winston Peters, hadn’t been so roughly treated
by the National Party in the late-1990s. Jenny Shipley’s plot against her
coalition partner, which involved luring half NZ First’s parliamentary caucus
away from their leader, fatally poisoned the relationship between the two
parties. Had Shipley not betrayed Peters, then the electorate’s rightward swing
in 2005 would, almost certainly, have been even more emphatic.
As an enthusiastic globalist, Brash was unwilling to lead
National too far down the anti-immigrant road. As a consequence, there was
plenty of space for NZ First to fill around the immigration issue. Had Shipley
not torpedoed her party’s chances of ever again forming a coalition with NZ
First, Brash could have quietly encouraged the Right’s more rabid supporters to
treat the election as a “twofer”. Those who despised Maori more than immigrants
could vote National. Those who despised immigrants more than Maori could vote
NZ First.
Such a strategy would likely have boosted NZ First’s vote at
Labour’s expense. As it was, however, Brash’s overall strategic goal of uniting
the whole of the Right under National’s banner not only actively discouraged
right-wing voters from splitting their support, but also, by turning National
into a much bigger and scarier political monster, persuaded Labour’s more
conservative supporters, who might otherwise have indulged their own, deeply
ingrained, anti-immigrant sentiments by voting for Winston and NZ First, to
stick with Helen Clark and her government for another three years.
The 2005 General Election was, therefore, a “damned
close-run thing”. Only 45,000 votes separated National’s vote-count from
Labour’s, which suggests that if Peters’ nearly 6 percent of the Party Vote had
been added to National’s column, then 2005 would have been an even closer-run
thing. When offered the choice of an openly anti-Maori National Party and a strongly
anti-immigrant NZ First, very close to half the NZ electorate voted for one or
the other. Nor should it be forgotten (although Rudman somehow failed to recall
the fact in his column) this was the same electorate that lifted National’s
support from 28 percent in the polls one month before his in/famous “Nationhood”
speech to the Orewa Rotary Club (27 January 2004) to 45 percent two weeks after
it.
A much better example of New Zealand voters turning away
from NZ First’s “casual racism” came three years after 2005, in the first
general election contested by the National Party’s new leader, John Key. Under
Key’s sunny tutelage, National got quite a lot bigger and a whole lot less
scarier. He achieved this not only by reaching out to Labour’s more
conservative voters, but also by making sure he wouldn’t have to deal with NZ
First’s.
Key simply refused to play the race card in the same brutal
way as Brash. It was clever politics, because, by ditching the Iwi/Kiwi
rhetoric he expanded his coalition options well beyond Act’s hard-line
neoliberalism. The resulting National-Act-Maori Party-United Future coalition
government placed a floor under National’s support that has remained
preternaturally solid for 12 years – and counting.
Though lacking Key’s sunny disposition, Simon Bridges could,
nevertheless, learn a thing or two from his predecessor’s bland opportunism. One
of the ways, Key convinced the electorate that he was the anti-Brash was by
coming to Labour’s and the Greens’ rescue over their highly contentious
anti-smacking legislation. To the bill’s opponents on the rabid Right, national’s
leader was saying: “You’ll get nothing from me.” (Who else were they going to
vote for!?) To the rest of New Zealand, Key’s bravura display of
bi-partisanship, guaranteeing the success of a long-overdue social reform,
signalled that his were a safe and compassionate pair of hands.
A similar display of bi-partisanship in relation to the
current Covid-19 medical emergency could offer similar reassurance to an
electorate which has yet to learn the knack of relaxing in the arms of the Leader
of the Opposition.
Which is, finally, the lesson from our history which Rudman,
along with an alarming number of his colleagues, has somehow managed to forget.
That New Zealanders, as a people, are more than capable of rising – or sinking
– to just about any political occasion.
Providing they have someone to show them how.
This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Thursday, 12 March 2020.
