Little Feet: Candidates vying to succeed Dr Russel Norman as the Green Party's Male Co-Leader. From Left: Gareth Hughes MP, Kevin Hague MP, James Shaw MP and Vernon Tava. When tasked by The Nation's Lisa Owen with supplying the answer to a simple economic question, three out of the four candidates failed dismally. His successor will have to work very hard to reclaim even a little of Dr Norman's hard won economic credibility.
IT WAS IMPRESSIVE – but it wasn’t real. The Greens’ apparent
mastery of economics turned out to be just one man’s – Dr Russel Norman’s –
achievement. Hopefully, Dr Norman’s successor will attain an equal level of
economic literacy.
Because most commentators agree that, throughout
John Key’s second term as Prime Minister, the Greens’ co-leader, Dr Norman,
easily outstripped his centre-left rivals as the best informed and most
articulate economic spokesperson on the Opposition benches.
With rare political discipline, Dr Norman acquired a good
working knowledge of economics and spoke its language as fluently as Finance
Minister, Bill English. Perhaps more so.
Quite rightly, Dr Norman had identified the Greens’
unfamiliarity with mainstream economics as a serious weakness. Why should the
voters take them seriously if they cannot talk convincingly about the exchange
rate’s impact on manufacturing; the effectiveness of the Reserve Bank’s
handling of monetary policy; or whether employers are responding adequately to
rising levels of worker productivity?
It was all very well to talk about a future based on “Green
Growth” and “Green Jobs”, but voters living in the here-and-now needed to feel
confident that the Green Party understood what was happening in New Zealand’s economy – to their jobs.
To become a great artist, it is said, the art student must first learn all
the rules and master all the techniques of painting. Only then will he
be ready to break all the rules and develop new techniques of his
own. Dr Norman clearly believed that the same applied to economics. Only after
familiarising themselves with the “dismal science” of classical economics would
the Greens be ready to preach the more joyful gospel of sustainability and
self-sufficiency.
Dr Russel Norman: Big shoes to fill.
Dr Norman’s efforts in this all-important sphere of politics
did not go unnoticed. Mr Key’s second term had hardly begun when the
Parliamentary Press Gallery began referring to Dr Norman as “the real Leader of
the Opposition”. This wasn’t solely due to the fact that the Labour caucus’s
internal feuding was wreaking havoc upon the Party’s political credibility. It
was also about the way Dr Norman, as the Greens’ economic spokesperson, was
going head-to-head with the Finance Minister in the House – and not losing.
Did all this praise go to Dr Norman’s head? Is that why he
raised the possibility that, in a future Labour-Green coalition government, the
Finance portfolio might well end up in his own hands? (The very idea was enough
to cause serious conniptions in Labour’s ranks!) Was Dr Norman’s much derided
suggestion that New Zealand embark on a limited degree of quantitative easing
all the evidence his critics needed to prove that a little knowledge is a dangerous
thing?
Actually, neither of these accusations stack up. Subsequent events
were to reinforce Labour’s serious lack of talent in matters economic. And the journalists,
so quick to pour scorn upon Mr Norman’s QE proposals, revealed much more about
their own, and their government briefers’, ignorance of economics than they did
about the Green co-leader’s.
In spite of the fact that Labour’s policies on
superannuation and capital gains had been in place for more than three years,
neither the party’s leader, nor its finance spokesperson, proved equal to the
task of selling them to the electorate. A Labour-Green coalition could have
done a lot worse than making Dr Norman its Minister of Finance.
Not that any of this matters now: not after last week’s
edition of The Nation on TV3. In the
course of introducing the four candidates competing for the co-leader’s job Dr Norman
is stepping away from (Gareth Hughes, Kevin Hague, James Shaw and Vernon Tava)
the show’s co-host, Lisa Owen, asked each man to answer a quick-fire question on
the economy. What’s the unemployment rate? The inflation rate? The Reserve
Bank’s official cash-rate? The economic growth rate?
Only one of the candidates, Mr Shaw, even came close to
supplying the correct answer. In less than five minutes, Dr Norman’s hard graft
over more than three years: his gift of (as Ms Owen put it) “economic cred’”;
was needlessly thrown away.
None of the questions were difficult. A few seconds on the
Statistics New Zealand website was all that they required. That none of the
candidates had devoted even this much time to acquiring the answers, makes Dr
Norman’s economic literacy an even more singular achievement.
Some very hard yards await his successor.
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, 20 March 2015.
