Can Winston Ride Jacinda’s Wave To An Enduring Political Legacy?

Riding The Wave: A dark and glowering Winston Peters hurling rhetorical thunderbolts at all and sundry will find himself very poorly placed to participate positively in creative change. But, a wise and benevolent Winston Peters, determined to render every possible assistance to New Zealand’s youngest prime minister in more than a century, will leave behind a political legacy of no small significance.

 

IMAGINE HOW GALLING Jacinda Ardern’s Auckland Town Hall love-fest must have been for Winston Peters. Just one tumultuous month ago, that sort of spectacle had been his for the making. NZ First was on a roll: effortlessly rising on the swell of an electoral wave that had the pundits making serious predictions about Peters becoming New Zealand’s next prime minister. Not anymore.

 

It is only fair to note at this point that the NZ First surge was no figment of the pundits’ imagination. A month ago, Peters’ understanding of the political mood seemed altogether more profound than any of his rivals. His appeal to what he perceived to be a simmering anger, roiling just below the surface of New Zealand politics, was borne out by his party’s steady rise in the polls.

 

Political historians looked at those numbers and, recalling Peters’ ability to nearly double his party’s level of support over the course of the formal election campaign period, began speculating that the final NZ First vote might actually equal (or even outstrip!) that of the ailing, Andrew Little-led Labour Party. In those circumstances, the precariously placed, Party List-only candidate, Little, could, conceivably, have lost his seat in the House of Representatives, putting the post of prime minister well-and-truly in play.

 

The rise and rise of NZ First proved equally unsettling for the Greens. Their Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Labour Party should have been a source of political reassurance, but the fact that it expired on Election Day made it a constant source of worry. With NZ First nipping at their heels in the polls, and their own history of losing support over the course of the formal campaign period, what guarantee did they have that Labour would not pull another “2005” on them by striking a deal with Peters?

 

Recklessly, the Green Party co-leader, Metiria Turei, lashed out at Peters; castigating him and his party for their “racist” policies. Then, even more recklessly, Turei seized the opportunity of her party’s AGM to declare the Greens’ determination to legislate a “preferential option for the poor”. The signal to Labour was unmistakable: MoU, or no MoU, the Greens had lost faith in their putative coalition partner. Labour was sinking and the Greens were standing by to pick up all of those Labour voters sensible enough to abandon ship. A five-point surge in the polls suggested that this just might prove to be a winning strategy.

 

Labour’s answer was Jacinda Ardern – and it was devastating! As her first, astonishingly accomplished, media conference drew to a close, it was clear to every political observer in New Zealand that the game had changed.

 

How seriously it had changed for the Greens was made clear by their catastrophic slide in the One News/Colmar Brunton poll of 17 August. Amidst all the smoke and flames of Turei’s and the Greens auto-da-fé, however, it was easy to miss the less dramatic, but equally important, decline in the fortunes of Peters and NZ First.

 

The outcome of the 2017 General Election may now turn on whether or not Peters is able to discern the full strategic significance of Jacinda’s Love-Fest.

 

On his multiple tours of the provinces, Peters had registered a great deal of anger and resentment: feelings which, like Donald Trump, he believed he could distil into a winning brew of electoral moonshine. But, anger and resentment aren’t the only emotions out there in the electorate. As the heart-breaking responses to Turei’s turn towards the poor made clear, so are desperation and despair.

 

‘The Wave’ is not, however, generated by anger and resentment; nor is it impelled by desperation and despair. These raw emotions are just the foam at the Wave’s crest. Driving the Wave is a massive tide of dissatisfaction with the way New Zealand society is evolving. The voters want change, yes, but not for the purposes of punishing their fellow citizens and/or destroying the things they hold dear. The change they are seeking is creative and constructive; change to usher-in a fairer, more inclusive and more joyous nation.

 

A dark and glowering Winston Peters hurling rhetorical thunderbolts at all and sundry will find himself very poorly placed to participate positively in such creative change. But, a wise and benevolent Winston Peters, determined to render every possible assistance to New Zealand’s youngest prime minister in more than a century (think Winston Churchill and the young Queen Elizabeth) will leave behind a political legacy of no small significance.

 

All the great historical changes contain a blending of radical and conservative impulses: a determination to construct a better future on the solid foundations of a cherished past. If Peters draws the correct strategic lesson from Jacindamania, he will make himself the champion for all that made New Zealand great – and can make it great again.

 

This essay was originally published by The Press of Tuesday, 22 August 2017.

Voter Motivators 2017: Poverty.

Making Poverty History: Dorothea Lange's iconic portrait of a Depression Era mother and her children speaks of a time when poverty was a problem to be solved - not a condition to be sneered at.

 

WHEN ENOUGH PEOPLE ARE POOR, poverty changes. Instead of being seen as the outward manifestation of vice, poverty is transformed into the enabler of virtue. In communities where everyone is poor, the merits of compassion, solidarity and generosity are everywhere on display. Poor people support one another, take care of one another, defend one another.

 

In societies where wealth and resources are controlled by a tiny minority, it is the rich who find themselves stigmatised. Their greed, love of luxury and relentless selfishness are everywhere condemned. In the eyes of the poor, wealth and vice are indistinguishable.

 

Eighty-five years ago, at the height of the Great Depression, poverty stalked four out of every five New Zealand streets. More than one in four men of working age were unemployed, and those who still had jobs were forced to accept regular – often savage – reductions in their wages and salaries.

 

As the economic crisis deepened, the spectre of poverty crept out of the urban slums and into the leafy suburbs of the middle-class. Respectable men on respectable salaries found themselves “let go”. Poverty ceased to be something that affected the “lower orders”. Now ordinary “decent” people were staring it in the face.

 

In 2017, with a general election looming, the issue of poverty still ranks as one of New Zealand’s big voter motivators. People sleeping in their cars; children succumbing to Third World diseases; workers lining-up at food banks for assistance; whole families going hungry to pay the power bill and keep the landlord happy: those lucky enough to live in the three out of four streets where poverty does not intrude have been made to feel profoundly uneasy by its evident proximity.

 

In a society where only a quarter of children are being raised in poverty, however, the remedies for privation and despair are hotly contested. With security and comfort now the norm in New Zealand, the question a great many voters ask themselves is: “What is going on in these families which prevents them from living a happy and productive life like the rest of us?”

 

In 1935, the answer to that question could be reduced to two words: “The Slump”. The effects of the Great Depression weighed upon the whole of New Zealand like a leaden overcoat. It made all the old explanations of poverty redundant. Whoever was to blame for the collapse of the capitalist economy – it wasn’t the poor.

 

And, for those who were hurting, the remedy was clear: vote for the party pledged to make poverty history. Let the state take the place of your family, friends and neighbours and become the collective deliverer of compassion, solidarity and generosity. All those things denied the poor: good jobs on good pay; free education and health care; a warm, dry house at an affordable rent; a measure of equality in the workplace; state assistance in old age, infirmity and economic adversity; these were the changes that Labour promised – and delivered.

 

Not only was poverty (in the sense of the harsh economic and social conditions experienced by a clear majority of the population in the early years of capitalism) reduced dramatically by the creation of the Welfare State, but in the decades that followed its moral character underwent an enormous revision.

 

No longer was poverty seen as the consequence of the viciously rich and their failed economic system. No longer was it celebrated as the creator of virtuous behaviour. Now it was regarded as the consequence of individual and familial inadequacy. Now it was the poor who exemplified vice. Laziness, drunkenness, violence, cruelty and crime: these became the new markers of Poverty.

 

The National Party’s twenty-first century response to this re-defined poverty is unequivocal: deal with the individual and familial inadequacies of the poor and the vicious circles of deprivation can be broken. They call it “Social Investment”.

 

Labour’s position is much more difficult. Gone are the days when an economically victimised majority saw themselves as the deserving beneficiaries of a long overdue and radical redistribution of society’s resources. In 2017, the no-longer-poor majority identify much more readily as taxpayers, and are much less certain that Labour’s (and the Greens’) compassion, solidarity and generosity are entitlements to which the “undeserving poor” have any claim.

 

Poverty will be motivating voters in 2017 – but in ways far removed from those of 1935.

 

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, 16 June 2017.