'Waitakere Man' Finds His Avatar

It's Alive! When the monster escapes its creator's control terrible things happen. 'Waitakere Man' first appeared on the pages of The Independent Business Weekly in September 2009 and gained wide currency as a shorthand term for Labour's conservative deserters to National. Now Waitakere Man has found his own political avatar - John Tamihere.

 

FOR DR FRANKENSTEIN the moment of maximum horror and surprise came when the monster he’d created disobeyed his orders. He’d assumed it was his to command. But, once abroad in the world, the monster went its own way.
 

Mulling over the Labour Party’s decision to re-admit John Tamihere to its ranks, I’m beginning to understand how Dr Frankenstein felt. “Waitakere Man” – the monster I created more than three years ago on the pages of The Independent Business Weekly – has not only gone its own way, it’s acquired a powerful, new, flesh-and-blood political avatar.
 

Before proceeding any further, I’d better introduce my monster. He was born out of a desire to understand the character of the thousands of former Labour voters who had switched to National in the elections of 2005 and 2008.
 

This is how I described the person I called “Waitakere Man” back in 2009:
 

He’s the sort of bloke who spends Saturday afternoon knocking-back a few beers on the deck he built himself, and Saturday evening watching footy with his mates on the massive flat-screen plasma-TV he’s still paying-off.

His missus works part-time to help out with the mortgage, and to keep their school-age offspring in cell-phones and computer games.
His trade certificate earns him much more than most university degrees. Indeed, he’s nothing but contempt for "smart-arse intellectual bastards spouting politically-correct bullshit". 

What he owns, he’s earned – and means to keep.

"The best thing we could do for this country, apart from ditching that bitch in Wellington and making John Key prime-minister," he informed his drinking-buddies in the lead-up to the 2008 election "would be to police the liberals – and liberate the police."

Waitakere Man values highly those parts of the welfare state that he and his family use – like the public education and health systems – but has no time at all for "welfare bludgers".

"Get those lazy buggers off the benefit", he’s constantly telling his wife, "and the government would be able to give us a really decent tax-cut."

On racial issues he’s conflicted. Some of his best friends really are Maori – and he usually agrees with the things John Tamihere says on Radio Live. 

It’s only when the discussion veers towards politics, and his Maori mates start teasing him about taking back the country, treaty settlement by treaty settlement, that his jaw tightens and he subsides into sullen silence. 

Though he didn’t say so openly at the time, he’d been thrilled by Don Brash’s Orewa Speech, and reckoned the Nats’ "Iwi-Kiwi" billboards were "bloody brilliant!"
 

Waitakere Man proved troublesome from the moment he emerged from my computer keyboard. Many people believed he was my avatar. They charged me with counselling the Labour Party to embrace this bigoted blowhard and tailor its policies to suit his prejudices. Not true. My intent was only ever to make Labour aware of Waitakere Man’s existence. To remind the party that he represented a lot of voters, perhaps as many as five percent of the electorate, and that if Labour had no thought of reclaiming this important political demographic, it could not avoid devising some means of replacing it.
 

But it soon became clear that Labour – or at least those elements advising Phil Goff – were openly entertaining thoughts of reclaiming Waitakere Man from National. They were anxious to shed the party’s image of being a place where no red-blooded, heterosexual working men would dare to venture; where political correctness had ousted common sense; and where the pet causes of educated middle-class New Zealanders (teachers) took precedence over the values of ordinary Kiwis (small businessmen).
 

The social liberals and trade unionists in Labour’s Caucus defeated Mr Goff’s attempt to re-connect with Waitakere Man. But, under his successor, David Shearer, the invitation has been re-sent. Mr Shearer’s sickness-beneficiary-on-the-roof story was one sop to the Waitakere Cerberus, his veiled threat to the teaching profession another.
 

And now, apparently at the behest of Mr Shearer, the New Zealand Council of the Labour Party has voted to re-admit Mr Tamihere to full membership status. Waitakere Man now possesses his very own ideological champion.
 

But what an ideology! Mr Tamihere is, after all, the man whose unreconstructed sexism and homophobia (“front-bums”, “queers”) cost him his seat at Helen Clark’s Cabinet Table. His subsequent career as Radio Live’s political shock-jock has only given these intellectually bankrupt and reactionary prejudices a wider audience. In welcoming him back, Labour’s New Zealand Councillors have spat in the faces of their most progressive members.
 

Because, like Dr Frankenstein’s monster, Waitakere Man’s newly-minted avatar answers to no one but himself. Labour has opened the door to an individual who regards most of its membership with undisguised contempt.
 

When, inevitably, he brings his knee up between progressive Labour’s legs, let no one who voted for Mr Tamihere’s re-admission feign either horror or surprise.
 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 4 December 2012.