Red Meat: Judith Collins' return to Cabinet as Police and Corrections Minister is intended to appease National's rural and provincial base. Her hard-line approach plays well with those National voters who feel that the Prime Minister, John Key, has pandered too much to the sentiments of metropolitan voters.
WAS JOHN KEY’S DECISION to stand down his Justice Minister,
Judith Collins, critical to his 2014 election victory? The National Party was
haemorrhaging votes as a result of the extraordinary revelations contained in
Nicky Hager’s book Dirty Politics. Collins
featured prominently in the book, making her, in the eyes of many, a symbol of
all that was wrong with the National-led Government.
The bleeding ended abruptly when, pending the outcome of an investigation
into yet another spate of allegations, the Prime Minister decided to stand
Collins down. (The investigation subsequently cleared Collins of any
wrongdoing.) Had she remained in Key’s ministry, National’s numbers may well
have fallen to the point where voters began writing the Government off. If
Key’s plurality on election night been 43 percent rather than 48 percent, then
his ability to continue as prime minister would have been seriously – perhaps
fatally – compromised.
But, if the standing down of Judith Collins played an
important part in securing Key his third term – why bring her back into his
Cabinet? In her new role as Minister of Police and Minister of Corrections,
Collins is once again displaying all the headstrong and abrasive qualities that
made her so unpopular during her first, controversial, stint in Key’s cabinet.
Many political scientists would dismiss this question as
naïve. They would argue that Key brought Collins in from the cold in order to
appease National’s “base”. Collins has become the poster girl for a great many
of the deeply conservative National Party voters living in rural and provincial
New Zealand. Many of them also belong to the Sensible Sentencing Trust, a
powerful lobby group committed to securing harsher penalties for criminal
offending and a more Spartan regime for prison inmates.
Presumably, National’s conservative base are as much in awe
of their leader’s ability to win elections as the rest of the country, but they
are less enthused about the price he has to pay for that success. By their
reckoning, Key has flung much too sweet a sop to the socially liberal Cerberus
who guards the gateway to the crucial metropolitan vote.
The persistence of Working For Families (which Key memorably
described as “communism by stealth”) and interest-free student loan, rankles
with these voters. Similarly, they cannot understand why their government
hasn’t “dealt to the unions” after the fashion of Bill Birch in 1991. Nor can
they comprehend why the Resource Management Act hasn’t been erased from the
statute books. The accusation that Key has adopted a “Labour Lite” strategy for
remaining in power strikes a very resonant chord with the party’s conservative
base.
They are also aware that had it not been for the
intervention of Collins and her fellow backbench exile, Maurice Williamson,
there is every chance that farmers would have found themselves taking health
and safety orders from their own employees, or, even worse, from their unions.
Indeed, it was almost certainly that back-bench intervention
which persuaded Key to bring Collins back under the protective umbrella of
collective cabinet responsibility. As President Lyndon Baines Johnson crudely
explained his decision to keep the intimidating FBI Chief, J Edgar Hoover, in his
job: “Better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent
pissing in.”
Of course, the unfortunate corollary of LBJ’s metaphor is
that, in the situation described, it’s always the long-suffering public who get
wet!
But what kind of politics are we encouraging when policies
unsupported by evidence, and rejected by the wider public, are accepted by the
conventionally wise as the price governments must pay to keep their party’s
base onside?
To hear the Minister for Corrections blithely bat away
concerns about overcrowding in our prisons, with glib references to “double
bunking”, is chilling. Are there really people out there so bereft of empathy
and compassion that they cannot imagine the acute psychological stress (and
physical danger) of confining two human-beings in a tiny cell for hours on end?
Even in the best relationships there are times when people must have time and
space to themselves. Denying individual prisoners all hope of coping privately
with the many besetting stresses of incarceration is not only cruel and
inhuman, it also reduces significantly the odds of the prisoner’s
rehabilitation.
National’s base doesn’t care. For rural and provincial
conservatives, the tougher the prison regime, and the longer the prison
sentence, the better they like it. There is deeply punitive streak running
through these voters that is apparent not only in relation to crime and
punishment, but also in their expectations of welfare and housing policy.
John Key, raised by a cosmopolitan Jewish mother in New
Zealand’s second-largest city, and with years of residence in Singapore, London
and New York, has little genuine affinity with National’s traditionalist base.
Judith Collins is his sour sop to the snarling Cerberus of social conservatism.
* sop to Cerberus,
give a - an allusion to the story in the Aeneid of the descent of Aeneas into the underworld; he was able to
pass safely by the monstrous watchdog Cerberus by drugging him with a specially
prepared cake.
This essay was
originally published in The Press of Tuesday,
23 February 2016.
