Still Smiling: New Zealand’s leading political journalists appear to operate a roster when it comes to disparaging Winston Peters and his party. This week it was the turn of veteran NZ Herald journalist, John Armstrong, to put the boot in. That NZ First's prospects have seldom looked better was not permitted to influence Armstrong's tale of decline and doom.
A JOURNALIST FRIEND of mine once told me that most
politicians’ credibility was inversely proportional to their proximity. Which was
just her fancy way of saying “familiarity breeds contempt”. Which is about the
best reason I can come up with for the Parliamentary Press Gallery’s ongoing,
undisguised and frequently ill-judged contempt for Winston Peters and NZ First.
New Zealand’s leading political journalists appear to operate
a roster when it comes to disparaging Peters and his party. This week it was
the turn of veteran NZ Herald
journalist, John Armstrong, to put the boot in.
In addition to being “unfashionable – and deliberately so”, Peters
followers were also, in Armstrong’s expert opinion, “politically dazed and
confused”. With their vision of the future “based on nostalgia for the
relatively recent past”, Armstrong described NZ First’s supporters as being
“marooned in a time bubble”. And that time would be? The New Zealand of the
prosperous 1950s. With Peters’ small-c conservatives revelling in “the
suffocating social conformity of that era”.
Entertaining writing, to be sure, but it has little, if
anything, to do with Peters or the NZ First Party. Indeed, it’s the sort of
condescending tosh meted out (with only a name change or two) to any politician
or political party which dares to defy the neoliberal orthodoxy of our own era.
The purpose of the insults is to encourage the reader to identify with the
writer, and not the subjects, of the commentary. Who in their right mind would admit
to being “unfashionable”, “dazed and confused”, living in a “time bubble” or
revelling in “suffocating social conformity”?
In reality, of course, NZ Firsters are none of these things.
Far from being “dazed and confused”, they are considerably more focused on what
is happening in New Zealand – especially rural and provincial New Zealand –
than the great majority of the conventionally-wise metropolitans to whom
Armstrong is, presumably, appealing. What Armstrong condemns as “suffocating
social conformity” and the “myth of a better past”, they recall as a period of
strong communities and mass participation, when there were jobs and homes for
everyone, and an entire household could live comfortably on a single income.
That Armstrong goes to such lengths to ridicule the
historical memory of the NZ First voter is actually highly instructive. History
is Kryptonite to Neoliberalism. Like Pol Pot’s genocidal Maoism, it needs to
erase the memory of everything that existed before the revolution – “Year
Zero”. Only those who know nothing of the child and family-centred social
policies of the 1950s and 60s could possibly accept Armstrong’s “suffocating
social conformity” as an adequate characterisation of the New Zealand of 50
years ago. There was a time when journalists aspired to do more than promote historical
amnesia. But, like so much else, that was before 1984 – our own “Year Zero”.
Armstrong comforts his readers with the thought that NZ
First’s prime electoral demographic – the so-called “RSA Generation” born in
the 1920s – is a wasting asset. He argues that the party’s refusal to confront
the “myth of a better past” condemns it to a slow death: “as those who lived
through those times and who gain comforting reassurance from Winston Peters’
pronouncements pass away.”
Had Armstrong but looked around him at NZ First’s Rotorua
Conference, he would have realised the inadequacy of that analysis. In 1993,
when NZ First was born, the RSA Generation was much in evidence. Twenty-two
years later, however, a roll-call of delegates would reveal a preponderance of
Baby-Boomers. Armstrong appears to have forgotten that the New Zealanders born
between 1946 and 1966 all have direct experience of what New Zealand was like
before Rogernomics. Over the intervening 30 years, a great many of them have reached
the conclusion that there are much worse things in this world than mediocre
coffee and Rob Muldoon. RSA Generation voters, alone, did not take the
Northland seat off National.
Armstrong would have done better to analyse Peters’ Rotorua appeal
for more party members and a bigger war-chest. Standing atop his mountain of
Northland ballots, he has seen a nation struggling to keep its head above
water. Old, middle-aged and young New Zealanders are desperate to hear that
“Help is on its way”. A NZ First that offers up the achievements of the past as
proof that the future can be better, will not lack for voters.
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, 7 August 2015.
