This Week Ten Years Ago: (Private Vices, Public Virtues")

Gliding On: Playwright Roger Hall's characters came to epitomise the solid, decent - but uninspiring - central government bureaucracy. The Right dubbed them the "woolly-pulley brigade" after the sensible woollen pullovers Wellington civil servants wore to protect them against the capital's notorious southerlies.

POOR CHRISTINE RANKIN, reprimanded for displaying a lack of "financial discipline". It must be embarrassing, standing up there on your little WINZ podium, suffering our slings and arrows for the outrageous fortune expended on charter flights to Taupo. But for those of you experiencing a sense of grim satisfaction at the outcome of State Services Commissioner Wintringham’s inquiry, I have some bad news. Neither Ms Rankin, nor her reputation, are going to suffer the slightest long-term damage. Not where it counts. Not in the private sector.

For the past twenty years we have been told that the public service must follow the example set by private enterprise. To speed up the process, civil servants were transformed into objects of derision; figures of fun to be pilloried and laughed at. Sir Robert Jones liked to talk about the "grey shoes wearers". Richard Prebble laughed at the public servant’s fondness for "woolly pulleys". Even Bill Ralston was once moved to describe the Wellington of the early 1980s as a "grey, East European city". But it was the mild-mannered Roger Hall, who – in a caring way – inflicted the deepest wounds, with his hilarious play Glide Time and the Gliding On television series. And it still goes on. Only the other day, the Prime Minister, Mrs Shipley, was moved to remind her Federated Farmers audience of the bad old days when Social Welfare bureaucrats came to work in "walk-shorts and jandals".

It is a measure of what the Italian socialist, Antonio Gramsci, called "capitalist hegemony" that we take all this nonsense about the superior efficiency of the private sector seriously. The private sector is, by its very nature, inefficient. After all, what else is "profit" but the result of deliberately distorted pricing? Virtually any commercial service you care to name could be provided more cheaply if it were not for the private owners’ personal "cut".

Having trouble getting your head around this? Well, that’s the power of genuinely "hegemonic" institutions – in the end their arguments begin to sound a lot like "common sense".

To help you understand what I mean, consider the Mafia. In a recent newspaper article it was reported that thanks to the sterling efforts of the FBI, most of the great Mafioso crime families have been broken. This has led to a dramatic fall in the prices of the goods and services formerly under Mafia control – garbage disposal, the garment trade, building construction, etc. To extract their "profits" the criminal entrepreneurs of the Mafia imposed a sort of "tax" on the businesses they controlled. To pay this "tax" (and continue to make a profit of their own) businesspeople were forced to build it into their overall cost structures. The near elimination of Mafia extortion on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States has made life a lot cheaper for everyone.

That is what profit really is – a private "tax" on consumers. And that is why the New Right hates publicly owned businesses with such passion. Not because they are inefficient and wasteful, but because they have no need to "make a profit". They just can’t bear the fact that properly run public enterprises will always be cheaper and more efficient than their private sector rivals.

What’s more, the key motivation of public enterprise – to provide the best possible service at the lowest possible cost – instils a set of values radically at odds with the selfishness and greed of private sector players. Genuine public "servants" may not wear smart suits, or prattle on about "teamwork", but neither do they expect – or get – six-figure salaries, five star accommodation, and chartered air travel.

It’s private – not public – taxes that pay for those things. (Unless, of course, you’re Christine Rankin!)

This essay was originally published in The Dominion of Friday, 6 August 1999.

National's Sinful Blunder

Christine Rankin: Utterly unfit for the job.

"THE naïve, the almost childish brutality, with which the chiefs of the National Party fell upon power may seem quite surprising, until one remembers how famished for power they were, and with what an innocency of experience they faced the world about them."

That was how the New Zealand historian, Dr J.C. Beaglehole, writing twelve years after the event, in 1961, described the transition from Labour to National in 1949.

Nine impotent years in opposition – the longest stretch since the 1940s – coupled with last year’s emphatic election win, has inspired in today’s National Party a similar desire to make a bonfire of their predecessors’ most detested policies.

This time, however, the Tories’ auto da fé of Labourism is taking a little longer to get going.

The Right has been in no position to indulge in the wholesale destruction of Labour’s policies for the very simple reason that National only secured its electoral success by guaranteeing in advance a large chunk of the Clark-Cullen legacy.

Certainly, there have been examples of Tory pettiness – Anne Tully’s cancellation of Labour’s healthy schools programme springs to mind, as does Tony Ryall’s unjustified dismissal of Otago DHB Chair, Richard Thompson.

In general terms, however, the first few months of John Key’s reign have seen the sage (if cynical) advice of the Party’s Australian advisors, Crosby/Textor, continue to hold sway. Mr Key won the trust of New Zealanders by presenting National as the non-threatening alternative to a tired and discredited government. Forfeit that trust, and his government’s lease on power will be short.

Mr Key, at least, required little in the way of prompting. His sensitivity to the electorate’s longing for national unity, and to their need for reassurance in the face of globalised economic calamity, has been impressive. Especially well received has been his successful outreach to the Maori Party, and the inclusive spirit of the Jobs Summit. The Government’s unprecedented popularity is due almost entirely to the political adroitness of these prime-ministerial touches.

But, National’s stratospheric poll-ratings may yet turn out to be Mr Key’s undoing. They have imbued his cabinet colleagues with a partisan triumphalism bordering on insolence, and encouraged the very dangerous belief that the Key-led Government is politically unassailable. Jonathan Coleman’s lofty indifference to the plight of public broadcasting is but one example this heedlessness. Murray McCully’s roughing-up of MFAT, and his wilful demoralisation of NZAid, another.

National’s right-wing coalition partner, Act, is similarly interpreting the Government’s 50 percent-plus poll-rating as an endorsement of its own far-right policy initiatives. As Minister of Local Government, the Act leader, Rodney Hide, appears determined to drive through his own version of the Auckland "super-city" – spurning genuine consultation with the people of the region, and heedless of the proposal’s growing unpopularity.

With each passing day, Crosby/Textor’s advice: to safeguard the people’s trust in Key’s leadership; and to maintain the Government’s non-threatening stance vis-à-vis the average punter for as long as possible; grows fainter and fainter.

To be fair to National, the sheer weight and volume of the decisions that must be made in a faltering economy, and the necessity of preserving the good opinion of the international credit-rating agencies, cannot help but over-ride the purely electoral considerations of even the most astute of the Government’s political advisers. It is the fate of every administration that, sooner or later, good governance and good politics will come to a parting of the ways.

What Mr Key needs to keep in mind is that most thinking voters understand this, and are generally reluctant to punish a government for doing the right thing – even when it is manifestly to the electorate’s short-term disadvantage. What the intelligent voter will not forgive, however, are political decisions that owe nothing to the irresistible force of economic necessity, nor the dictates of good governance, but which are simply and crassly partisan.

The appointment of Christine Rankin to the Families Commission falls squarely into this category. Ms Rankin, by aligning herself with some of New Zealand’s most reactionary individuals and organisations, and by adding her voice to those insisting that children be denied the same legal protection against physical assault as adults, has rendered herself utterly unfit for the job.

By offering this sop to the Far Right, Mr Key has diminished both himself and his government.

Worse than a sin – it’s a blunder.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 15 May 2009.