Luxon And Leadership.

What Kind Of Leader? It’s the only definition of leadership that makes any sense in the world most people live in – which is not the corporate world. A leader has followers. If a person lacks followers, then they are not – by the reckoning of most human-beings – a leader. The other real world distinction between corporate and political leaders is that the former have power given to them, while the latter take it for themselves.

LEADERSHIP. The corporate world is obsessed by it. In the absence of strong corporate leadership an adequate return on the shareholders’ investment cannot be guaranteed. Poor corporate management can lead to poor dividends, lower share prices, disinvestment and, ultimately, disaster. That’s why corporate leadership matters. In theory, anyway.

Many critics of contemporary capitalism argue that corporate managers exercise excessive influence over the businesses they run. That neither the corporate board, nor the shareholders, any longer exert any real influence over the management – until it’s much too late. Poor corporate leadership can, indeed, lead to failure, but the price paid by bad leaders is often in inverse proportion to the size of the disasters for which they are responsible. When they leave the scene of their managerial crimes, it is only very rarely that they depart empty-handed.

Poor corporate leadership is seldom punished.

Poor political leadership, by contrast, is almost always rewarded with the Order of the Boot.

The reason lies in the very different kind of power that corporate leaders wield. Corporations are permanent hierarchies in which vacancies are filled from the top down. Political leadership works from the bottom-up. If corporate leaders are measured against the power and wealth of the corporations they command, then political leaders are judged by the number and enthusiasm of their followers.

It’s the only definition of leadership that makes any sense in the world most people live in – which is not the corporate world. A leader has followers. If a person lacks followers, then they are not – by the reckoning of most human-beings – a leader. The other real world distinction between corporate and political leaders is that the former have power given to them, while the latter take it for themselves.

It is why all the books written about corporate leadership ring so hollow. The behaviour prescribed for leaders in these breathless volumes is the behaviour of a successful courtier – and the only power successful courtiers wield is the power given to them by their sovereign. A courtier retains power by retaining the confidence of the person at the very summit of the hierarchy. Political chiefs stay at the top only for as long as those below them are willing to trust and follow “their” leader. Without the trust and confidence of their followers, political leaders are powerless.

Christopher Luxon has plenty of experience in the intricacies of corporate leadership. He knows what must be done to retain the support of those above him. His successful career as a corporate executive amply confirms that he has mastered the politics of hierarchy. But, New Zealanders are still awaiting confirmation that Luxon has successfully transitioned from the politics of the boardroom to the politics of the caucus-room. Does he fully grasp, even now, that it is only the support of National’s MPs – along with the more than a million party followers who elected them – that keeps him in the top job?

Luxon became the parliamentary leader of the National Party in November 2021. Not, it must be said, after a strong and successful demonstration of his political leadership skills – particularly those relating to the attraction and retention of followers – but because the National Caucus had run out of options.

Bill English, the man who had led them to a Party Vote of 44 percent in the 2017 General Election, while an excellent Finance Minister, and a deep political thinker, had never quite managed to convince himself that he had what it took to lead the NZ National Party. A great pity, because it is one of the ineluctable rules of democratic politics that politicians who doubt themselves find it extremely difficult to convince others.

English’s replacement, Simon Bridges, appeared equally plagued by doubts. At times he seemed like a nervous adolescent, heading-out with his stylish girlfriend for the end-of-year school ball, wearing his father’s suit. Leadership of the National Party never quite seemed to fit Bridges: it was always too big for him.

Bridges nemesis, Todd Muller turned out to be living proof of “Dirty Harry’s” warning that “A man’s got to know his limitations.” Like Labour’s disastrous leader, David Cunliffe, Muller proved himself to be much more adept at winning the leadership of his party than wielding it. The difference being, Muller took only a few weeks to realise that he was completely out of his depth. A conclusion not reached by Cunliffe, even after winning just 25 percent of the Party Vote!

Muller’s replacement, Judith Collins, had long been hungry for the leadership of her party – and her country. It was just that her preferred means of getting there, beneath the daunting mask of “Crusher”, put off a great many more voters than it attracted. The New Zealand electorate has, over the years, displayed a worrying willingness to elect frightening male leaders. Scary female leaders, with the obvious exception of Helen Clark, have enjoyed considerably less success. National’s terrible showing in the 2020 General Election (25 percent) dissolved what little was left of Collins’ political judgement – along with the confidence of her caucus colleagues.

And that just left the man acknowledged by all to be the preferred option of National’s most successful leader since Keith Holyoake – John Key. Never mind that Christopher Luxon had been a Member of Parliament for barely a year, his successful career as a corporate leader – as CEO of Air NZ – was deemed to be more than sufficient preparation for the job of Leader of the Opposition.

But was it, really? Luxon had been seized upon by his fellow Nats with the same desperation as the drowning man seizes upon a lifebuoy. He was new, he was fresh, he had a bright smile and he wore a suit like the boss he had been. But, unlike his patron, Luxon never quite understood that voters are not employees. You can’t just instruct them to vote for you and your party; you have got to give them a reason for voting that way. In a democracy, politicians cannot simply demand people’s votes, they have to earn them.

Yes, yes, yes: National won 1,085,016 Party Votes in 2023, which is a great deal more than Judith Collin’s 738,275 in 2020, but, Luxon’s 38.6 percent of the Party Vote falls a long way short of Key’s winning percentage of 44.6 in 2008.

That’s because Key, unlike Luxon, had spent two years giving New Zealanders a reason to vote for him. Speech by speech, stunt by stunt, goofy-grin by goofy-grin, Key had done what all political leaders do – he had gone out and got himself some followers. Key may have been a highly successful player in the grand financial casino, but he knew the difference between corporate and political leadership. The electorate doesn’t vote for designations, it votes for ideas. 38.6 percent is what Christopher Luxon got for not being Chris Hipkins. It isn’t enough.

And it’s not at all clear, yet, what Luxon’s ideas are. He had very little that was inspiring to say before the election, and he has had virtually nothing even interesting to say after it. The man doesn’t yet seem to understand that he hasn’t been appointed to lead New Zealand, he’s been elected. There’s a difference.

A political leader would have used the three weeks between Polling Day and the counting of the Special Votes to talk to New Zealanders. There were horrors in Israel and Gaza. There were things to say about Te Tiriti and Democracy. About economics and security. About a world gripped by multiple crises, and about the Prime-Minister-Elect’s confidence that New Zealand would get through them all. Because this, the country he has been given the extraordinary privilege to lead, is a remarkable place, filled with remarkable people.

He could then have strode into those coalition talks, and David Seymour and Winston Peters would have risen from their seats and applauded – their nation’s leader.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 20 November 2023.

Judith's Last Stand.

Going Out With All Guns Blazing: Why didn’t Judith Collins stick with the strategy that had kept her, National’s most improbable of leaders, in power for more than a year? One might just as well ask why Rob Muldoon (that other unforgiving right-wing populist National Party leader) got drunk and called the snap-election that would destroy him, way back in June 1984. Or, demand to know why Jim Anderton suddenly abandoned the leadership of the Alliance in November 1994.

WHAT JUST HAPPENED? Seriously. What on earth possessed Judith Collins to move against Simon Bridges so maladroitly, and with so little prospect of success? It’s baffling.

The tactic employed, resurrecting a five-year-old incident that had been resolved, um, five years ago, was just so incredibly dumb. Honestly, I thought Judith Collins was a whole lot smarter than that. To take such a huge risk, she must have believed Bridges had a lock on the caucus that was unbreakable and that he intended to move against her sooner, rather than later.

Presumably, that is why Collins refused to call caucus together yesterday evening (24/11/21) as Bridges, quite understandably, demanded. She must have calculated that the move she was intending to make against her principal contender would not be approved.

As a lawyer, Collins should have known that even Bridges’ caucus enemies would require a proper process to be followed, and the rules of natural justice observed. So, according to her own testimony, she took the matter to the National Party Board instead. With their (alleged) full support, Collins then issued a media release banishing Bridges to the back-benches. His crime? Telling a dirty joke in the earshot of Waitaki MP, Jacqui Dean.

Except, that makes no sense at all. By refusing to take the matter to caucus, and beheading Bridges without their consent, all Collins did was make sure that, when the National Caucus next convened, her own head would be on the block. One had only to listen to the pure, cold, fury in the voices of National MPs as they made their way to the caucus room this morning (25/11/21) to appreciate just how hopeless Collins’ position had become.

The peculiar thing is, it could all have been done so differently – and with a much greater chance of success. Had Collins caused the information, and the precise wording of Bridges’ dirty joke, to end up in the hands of the relentless Furies of the news media, his progress towards a caucus showdown would, at the very least, have been slowed. Indeed, with the right handling, Bridges could have been “exposed” as a nasty, sexist, sleaze-bag. To paraphrase the inimitable Lyndon Johnson: Collins wouldn’t be calling her rival a “nasty, sexist, sleaze-bag”, she would be forcing him to deny it.

Surely, that would have been the smart move? She could have knifed Bridges good and proper, while leaving no fingerprints on the blade.

Collins huge advantage – before she committed “political suicide by caucus” – was that National’s caucus was split into what, from the outside, looked like four factions.

There was her own faction, of course, not that big, but not that small either. Then there were Bridges’ people, who were said to constitute a bare majority. Impressive, but also inadequate. Bridges needed to come roaring home in any contest. Just squeaking in would only leave a roughly equal number of National MPs seething and fuming behind his back. Christopher Luxon’s people were also numerous, just not as numerous as Bridges’. Finally, there were the so-called “liberals”. A small faction, but potentially crucial to securing a decisive vote for Unity and Change.

The trick was to keep all the factions in favour of a leadership change off-balance and mistrustful of each other. Let their numbers people work away, drawing up lists of “Definites” “Possibles” and “Don’t Bother Askings”. Just make sure that while they’re doing that, you’re doing everything in your power to keep the tallies inadequate to the challenge of achieving Unity and Change.

It isn’t an heroic strategy, but you’d be surprised how often in history it has succeeded. The Romans called in divide et impera – divide and rule. What it had given Collins – and was continuing to give her – was time. Time in which all manner of unpredictable things can happen. What sort of things? The sort of things which the 1960s Tory leader, Harold Macmillan, famously reduced to: “Events, dear boy, events.”

Why didn’t Collins stick with the strategy that had kept her, National’s most improbable of leaders, in power for more than a year? One might just as well ask why Rob Muldoon (that other unforgiving right-wing populist National Party leader) got drunk and called the snap-election that would destroy him, way back in June 1984. Or, demand to know why Jim Anderton suddenly abandoned the leadership of the Alliance in November 1994.

“Events, dear boy, events.” Something you didn’t expect, and can’t fix, happens, and it all just gets too much. All the plotting and scheming. All the arm-twisting and political assassinating. Suddenly, the whole shitty business no longer seems worth the effort, and the all people around you start looking too hopelessly fucked-up to bother with.

And. You. Snap.

No other explanation seems to fit. Wednesday, 24 November 2021, will go down as the day Collins simply stopped fighting. Not because she was beaten, but because she could no longer remember the point of trying so hard to win.

In the midst of a global pandemic. Facing a Labour Party whose leadership is younger, nimbler, and more attuned to the zeitgeist. In charge of a party too ideologically and socially constipated to re-join the political fray as a competitive player. Judith Collins, eyebrow raised, quietly picked up her rifle, climbed out of the trench, and started walking across no-man’s land towards the enemy. Predictably she was shot to pieces before she’d taken 100 paces.

It wasn’t pretty. But it was, at least, over.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 26 November 2021.

Act’s Precarious Ascendancy.

On The Lookout: It is easy to imagine how closely Seymour has been watching the National Opposition for the slightest sign of a Clark figure emerging. A respected politician, who enjoys broad support across the party and, much more importantly, who impresses the ordinary centre-right voter as having what it takes to be an effective Prime Minister. From Seymour’s perspective, Judith Collins was the perfect Opposition Leader – for Act.

THE PROBLEM which the Act Party faces for the next two years, is the same problem that plagued the Alliance. Jim Anderton’s coalition of anti-establishment parties thrived while the official Opposition, Labour, languished. But, for every percentage point Labour recovered in the opinion polls, the Alliance was forced to contemplate the deflation of its political hopes and dreams. Now that National stands poised to elect a new leader, Act’s own leader, David Seymour, will be praying that he or she proves to be no better than the last.

The only glimmer of hope for Act, and Seymour, is that National’s fractured caucus currently contains no one even remotely like Helen Clark.

The Alliance’s fortunes were never more promising than when the Labour Party was led by Mike Moore. For all his undoubted strengths as a politician, Moore’s inescapable weakness was that he was part of the cabal of Labour politicians responsible for what came to be known as “Rogernomics”.

The famous photograph of Roger Douglas, Michael Bassett, David Lange and Moore guiltily enjoying a feed of fish-and-chips following their first (unsuccessful) attempt to roll Bill Rowling, was to haunt Moore for the rest of his life. For those many thousands of former Labour voters who experienced Rogernomics as an unforgiveable betrayal, Moore would always be one of the “Fish-and-Chip Brigade”. It made him Jim Anderton’s best recruiting sergeant.

Helen Clark was a different story altogether. Among those who knew her (and that was pretty much every Labour Party activist of the 1980s) Clark was never going to be condemned as a “Rogernome”. By the same token, she was determined not to be branded an “Andertonista”. The title she relished, and never ceased to cultivate, was “pragmatist”. In practical terms, that meant Clark was willing to be a good social-democrat, if possible; and a reluctant custodian of Roger Douglas’s legacy, if necessary. It was a fine, but vital, distinction. It made her what Anderton never managed to be – prime-ministerial.

It is easy to imagine how closely Seymour has been watching the National Opposition for the slightest sign of a Clark figure emerging. A respected politician, who enjoys broad support across the party and, much more importantly, who impresses the ordinary centre-right voter as having what it takes to be an effective Prime Minister. From Seymour’s perspective, Judith Collins was the perfect Opposition Leader – for Act. How fervently he must be praying that her successor turns out to be as big a liability. Because Seymour knows that if National’s caucus chooses wisely, then Act’s poll numbers will tumble and its electoral support crumble.

That is, of course, a very big “if”. Since 2018, all of National’s choices have gone awry. Even so, someone must be chosen to lead the party. Who?

His sterling efforts at re-branding himself, notwithstanding, former leader (and off-colour jokester) Simon Bridges still fails to impress. Frankly, the man’s a puzzle. Pre-Covid, Bridges was handsomely repaying his colleagues’ confidence with positive poll results. Why, then, did the public never take to him? Perhaps, as Bridges’ autobiography suggests, his perception of himself as an outsider was simply too strong to hide.

Helen Clark never doubted that she was Labour through-and-through. Bridges, however, seems convinced that he’ll never cut the mustard as a “genuine” Nat: never be welcomed as “One of Us” by the Tory toffs. Entrenched racism? Class prejudice? Whatever the explanation, Bridges appears to suffer badly from the “Imposter Syndrome”. The problem being that, in politics, if you don’t believe in yourself, then neither will anybody else.

What about Christopher Luxon? Does he cut the mustard? Until Judith Collins’ self-immolation, the answer to that question was: “Not quite yet.” Parliamentary politics, Luxon’s backers argued, cannot be comprehensively mastered in the space of a year. Better to wait for the politics of the situation to “mature”. Well, the Collins vintage has “matured” alright – and National’s caucus has the shattered wine bottles to prove it. Ready, or not, Mr Luxon has a “tide in the affairs of men” to catch.

Then again, it’s always possible that we are all looking at – but not seeing – the person fated to relegate Seymour to the Reserves Bench. After all, how many people saw the young MP for Mt Albert as a future Prime Minister? And, isn’t that Act’s worst nightmare? National’s very own “Jacinda”?

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 26 November 2021.

Frail And Confused: National Succumbs To Political Alzheimer’s.

"Dammit! Where Did I Leave My Party?" What we saw over the weekend of 6-8 August 2021 was a party which no longer knows how to play the game of electoral politics. Neither its leaders, nor its members, any longer have a clue what’s required of them. They no longer know who they are, what they believe in, or how to reacquire a competitive electoral edge. National has succumbed to the political equivalent of Alzheimer's Disease.

WHAT NEW ZEALAND WITNESSED over the weekend (6-8 August 2021) was the demise of the National Party. That parties are often divided and fractious after a significant election defeat is a fact of political life. Indeed, it would be worrying if passionate disputation was absent from a party’s post-election AGM. People would probably be more alarmed by a party that accepted it defeat by exuding a sort of Zen calm. Not that National was demonstrating anything like Zen acceptance from the Manukau Events Centre.

Proof of the party’s decline was not, however, to be found in either an excess of passion, or the lack of it, but in the sheer political ineptitude of the entire 700-strong gathering. What we saw over the weekend was a party which no longer knows how to play the game of electoral politics. Neither its leaders, nor its members, any longer have a clue what’s required of them. They no longer know who they are, what they believe in, or how to reacquire a competitive electoral edge. National has become frail and confused.

What else but a frail and confused party could possibly have acquiesced in the re-appointment of Peter Goodfellow as its president? This is a man who failed to perform on not just one, but many fronts. After leading the party to its second-worst defeat ever, and insisting on playing a decisive role in the selection of some truly appalling candidates, Goodfellow’s resignation wasn’t just expected – it was required. He needed to supply his party’s 2021 AGM with his own head on a platter – garnished with heartfelt apologies and seasoned with a passionate call for rejuvenation.

That Goodfellow didn’t understand that; that his fellow board members didn’t understand that; that the delegates who replaced the retiring board members didn’t understand that; is all the proof one could possibly need that National has succumbed to the political equivalent of Alzheimer’s disease.

Judith “Crusher” Collins ended-up piling failure upon failure. Either she wanted Goodfellow back, or she lacked the political chops to prevent his return. Whichever explanation is correct, National’s leader emerged from last weekend’s AGM looking stupid, weak, or (more accurately) like an uninspiring combination of the two. Her references to the certainty of sunrises notwithstanding, Collins did not give the appearance of a women who either wants, or expects, to lead her party into the 2023 election. That she may end up doing exactly that will merely confirm that there is no one in National’s parliamentary caucus who could do the job better – or wants to!

Can you imagine Rob Muldoon, Jim Bolger, Don Brash or John Key dutifully reciting this abject excuse for a political pitch to the disaffected and disappointed?

Over the next two years we will engage with experts and the public and you, our members, to develop solutions. We will listen and we will discuss. We will demonstrate we are the Party that can deliver on our promises, and has the ability to deliver solutions for the country’s big problems. Outlining a vision to the New Zealand public. And releasing policy in each of these and other areas as we go.

It is hard to know where to begin with this glutinous heap of political blancmange. Perhaps by re-emphasising that a political party seeks power to implement the policies advanced by its members, and the socio-economic forces those members represent. A viable political organisation contains within its ranks all the expertise it needs to knock the rough edges off the membership’s policy ideas. Moreover, why would any political party worthy of the name want to “engage” with the public? That is what it does every time an election is held! Only when the ballot boxes have been emptied, and the votes counted, does a political party discover whether or not its proffered “solutions” have been deemed equal to the public’s problems.

This is political Alzheimer’s with bells on. National has simply forgotten how to play “Democracy”. It also seems to have forgotten that the Opposition cannot deliver on its promises until it becomes the Government: that the delivery of solutions comes after the people have voted – not before. There is something both tragic and embarrassing in the spectacle of a once great party losing its wits.

National brought it on itself, of course, when the party decided that it could no longer be trusted to play the Democracy game successfully. After the debacle of the 2002 general election, when its Party Vote plummeted to a risible 21 percent, National allowed Steven Joyce to transform it into a sort of electoral holding company.

Instead of living, breathing, thinking citizens, National’s membership transformed themselves into a bunch of largely powerless political shareholders. Henceforth, they would not be turning up to an annual conference. [For readers under 35, annual conferences were where the members of political parties used to gather, in full view of the public, to argue about policy and elect themselves a President and a National Executive Committee.] No, what the Nats turned up to after 2002 was an AGM – where they dutifully rubber-stamped their “Board of Directors’” decisions and cheered-on the CEO. Safe enough when your CEO was a Don Brash or a John Key. Not so safe when your leader was a Simon Bridges, a Todd Muller or a “Crusher” Collins!

The medical experts say that the best defence against real Alzheimer’s is to keep one’s mind as active as possible. At 85-years-of-age, the National Party should be doing everything it can to stay sharp. Reading books, listening to invited speakers with exciting new ideas, writing and thrashing-out policy, debating the great issues of the day, vetting and choosing candidates, and making sure its office holders are up to snuff. Allowing all those jobs to be done by others (and done badly!) is not the way to stay sharp and remain a competitive player of the Democracy game. (At 105-years-of-age, Labour should probably be contemplating something similar!)

Though only a handful of the delegates attending last weekend’s AGM realised it, National was wandering dangerously close to the edge of a deep political hole. If it was to avoid a fatal fall, the party needed to wake itself up with a painful slap in the face. Having slapped itself, National should then have grabbed itself by the scruff of the neck and shaken itself until all the dead wood dropped off. Had it done that, then it just might have found the courage to reclaim its proper role as a living, breathing, thinking political party, in a living, breathing, thinking parliamentary democracy. But, that’s not what it did. Instead, frail and confused, it forgot what and where it was – and fell into the hole.

Which just leaves Act.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 10 August 2021.

Engineering A Miracle: Can Judith Collins Reprise Rob Muldoon?

Miracle Worker? But Judith Collins and National cannot regain power by simply hoping for the worst. Elections are won by politicians like Rob Muldoon, who persuade the voters that the incumbent government is the worst choice.

WAITING FOR THE MIRACLE, as Leonard Cohen observed, is an agonising test. Especially if its arrival is far from certain. Judith Collins is living through that test right now. Convinced that political disquiet is taking hold of more and more New Zealanders, she waits for evidence of its existence outside National’s rural heartlands. Collins’ “Demand the Debate” campaign has undoubtedly stirred the latter, but is her caucus capable of holding its nerve until those former National supporters who voted Labour in 2020 start showing similar signs of feeling “left out”?

The “Groundswell” protests of 16 July 2021 were generated primarily by the Government’s unrelenting imposition of regulatory responsibilities on an already stressed rural sector. Farmer anger and impatience was readily mobilised because rural dwellers still enjoy a significant degree of effective political representation and are well-used to participating in decision-making forums. Federated Farmers, in particular, reaches into every wool- and milking-shed in the country. The Fonterra co-operative is run by and for its highly engaged farmer members. Farmers are used to having their say – and being heeded.

Collins’ problem is that the rest of New Zealand has become decidedly rusty at defending its interests. Gone are the days when working-class Kiwis could rely upon their peak trade union body, the Federation of Labour, to flex its industrial and political muscle on their behalf. The current peak union body, the NZ Council of Trade Unions, is overwhelmingly a middle-class institution dominated by the Public Service Association, the teacher unions and the Nurses Organisation. Since its formation in 1987, the NZCTU has operated as a “top-down” organisation. Recent historical experience suggests that middle-class unions don’t ask their members – they tell them. (That Labour and Green activists are drawn disproportionately from this social layer and its representative structures is no accident – a point we shall return to presently.)

That the National Party lacks the ability to raise Cain in either the working-class or the professional middle-class with the same swift effectiveness that it rouses the ire of rural New Zealand is a truism of New Zealand politics. Only Rob Muldoon demonstrated any facility for breaching the electoral and cultural defences of the working-class, and even then, his infamous “Rob’s Mob” encompassed only a small fraction of New Zealand workers.

National’s grasp upon the professional middle-class first began to weaken in the 1970s, but it was the Springbok Tour of 1981 that generated the first really significant migration of professional support from National to Labour, where – with a worrying wobble-or-two under John Key – it largely remains. Poor performance by Labour may send some of this social-liberal support leftward to the Greens, but only rarely does it flow rightward to National.

Among the conventionally wise, National’s “Demand the Debate” campaign is dismissed as dangerously mistargeted. By their reckoning, Covid-19 and its economic fallout remains the central issue of New Zealand politics. A serious misstep on the part of Jacinda Ardern’s government in relation to the Coronavirus – most especially an outbreak of its highly infectious Delta variant in the community – is seen as the eventuality most likely to move the needle decisively in National’s direction.

While it is hard to argue that a Delta variant outbreak would not, indeed, rebound to National’s electoral advantage, that does not free the main Opposition party from its obligation to take the political fight to the Government on other issues of public concern. After all, the Delta variant may not break through the border. By the end of the year, most adult New Zealanders may have received both jabs of the Pfizer vaccine. As predicted, inflationary pressures may prove to be temporary. New Zealand’s economic growth may continue to surge ahead of forecasts. National cannot regain power by simply hoping for the worst.

While massive and widespread economic dislocation remains the principal reason for Governments being hustled out of office, the same result may befall political leaders for whom a sudden loss of public faith has been engineered. The fates of Richard Nixon, Gough Whitlam, Bill Rowling and Donald Trump bear testimony to how rapidly political fortunes can change when a decisive majority of the voting public gives up on you in disgust. Engineering such a reversal is never easy, but Collins could learn something by studying Muldoon’s demolition of Labour’s Bill Rowling in 1975.

At the heart of Muldoon’s campaign was fear. The First Oil Crisis of 1973 had raised well-justified fears of impending economic dislocation. Rowling’s decision to borrow his way through the crisis was attacked to great effect by the National Party’s “Economic Wizard”. With his in/famous “Dancing Cossacks” political ad’, which characterised the Labour Government’s newly-established Superannuation Fund as an anti-Capitalist Trojan Horse, Muldoon also exploited New Zealanders’ Cold War-stoked fear of socialism.

It was, however, a much more diffused fear that Muldoon exploited most effectively. The fear that the New Zealand in which most of the voting public had grown up was under insidious attack. The moral and political certainties of the post-war years, he asserted, were being undermined by liberals and radicals who held the “traditional values” of the majority in ill-disguised contempt.

Muldoon’s stroke of political genius was to implant the suspicion that these revolutionary ideas had found a home in the upper echelons of the Labour Party. Ideas which had received short shrift when “Big Norm” Kirk was alive, Muldoon insinuated, were now tolerated – even encouraged. The ill-conceived “Citizens for Rowling” campaign was portrayed by National’s leader as a bunch of academics and liberals pouring scorn on a humble champion of the “Ordinary Bloke”. It was out of this febrile political atmosphere that Muldoon distilled National’s winning election slogan of 1975: “New Zealand the way YOU want it.”

If Collins can pull off a reprise of Muldoon’s political miracle, then she, too, can win. For that to happen, however, the normal electoral order of things must be reversed. In 1975, for example, it was not uncommon to see eager young university students waving placards celebrating Labour’s promise of “A New Society” being shouted down by young working-class adults chanting “We Want Rob!” Those young workers had jobs they feared losing, and mortgages they feared being unable to pay. They interpreted Labour’s new society as a threat – not a promise.

Collins must blend together the twin challenges of responding to Climate Change and fighting racial injustice into a single, frightening, threat to the way of life of New Zealand’s comfortable majority. If she can persuade voters that getting rid of their prized SUV’s, sending people to jail for “Hate Speech”, and setting up a separate Maori justice system for the Mongrel Mob, are all illustrative of Labour’s and the Greens’ determination to change everything – irrespective of the wishes of the majority – then there is every chance the electorate will respond negatively.

Should Collins further lace her political concoction with the idea that the Labour/Green “social revolution” is being driven by a new priesthood of public servants, academics, journalists and “woke” members of the helping professions – all of whom have come to regard their less-enlightened (deplorable?) fellow citizens as “suitable cases for treatment” – then she will lead the National Party to an election result as dramatic as Muldoon’s miraculous reversal of fortune.

The only questions that remain to be answered are whether Collins possesses Muldoon’s ruthless and unwavering political aggression; and whether or not her caucus is as terrified of her as Muldoon’s caucus was of him. If the answer to both questions is ‘No’; and Covid-19 can be kept at bay; then in 2023 Jacinda Ardern and Labour will ensure that National remains left out of the debate. Still waiting for the miracle to come.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website of Monday, 26 July 2021.

Nothing Left – Or Right – To Say.

Or, Better Still, Start It! When did philosophical literacy cease to be a core competence of political leadership? Past New Zealand political leaders managed to explain themselves and their parties with reasonable fluency, why not the present crop?

THE NATIONAL PARTY’s “Demand the Debate” campaign speaks volumes about the Right’s ideological weakness. A more coherent and courageous conservative party would not have demanded a debate, it would, instead, have encouraged one by taking a clear, well-argued position on the issues under scrutiny. The obvious conclusion to be drawn from this failure is that, at present, National is unable to formulate a clear position. One suspects, moreover, that even if it was capable of doing so behind the Caucus Room door, it lacks the confidence to argue it in public.

Not everyone involved in politics needs to be a philosopher, but when the ideological temperature has risen to its current level, a party’s leader must be able to hold their own in any debate about the “whys” of politics. It is easy to accuse Judith Collins of not being equal to this most basic of political responsibilities. But, by any honest assessment, neither is the Prime Minister. Yes, Jacinda Ardern possesses formidable “communication skills”, but that is not quite the same thing as being able to present a coherent defence of one’s policies. Her inability to explain her government’s proposed “Hate Speech” legislation is only the most recent example of this rather significant failing.

When did philosophical literacy cease to be a core competence of political leadership? Past New Zealand political leaders managed to explain themselves and their parties with reasonable fluency, why not the present crop?

A clever post-modernist scholar would, at this point, wax eloquent about the collapse of the metanarratives that underpinned the politics of the twentieth century. Not just the Marxist metanarrative but, at least two decades before the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, the dramatic attenuation of the practical Christian compassion which, for at least two centuries, had blunted the teeth and claws of free-market capitalism. An even cleverer social historian might point to the subversive consequences of the 1960s “counter-culture”, which elevated personal choice above political conviction and turned “you do your thing and I’ll do mine” into the guiding wisdom of an entire generation.

Into this rather barren philosophical landscape rolled the Tiger Tanks of the Neoliberal Wehrmacht. With everybody else’s philosophy reduced to rubble, the Neolibs were able to establish an ideological monopoly of unprecedented durability. Nobody expressed the new reality better than Francis Fukuyama, the US State-Department savant who penned the in/famous 1989 essay entitled “The End of History”. According to Fukuyama, the great battles of ideas that had driven history forward for 2,000 years were over. Liberal-democratic, free-market capitalism had won. It’s ideas weren’t just the ideas of the ruling-class, they were the ideas of every intelligent, well-educated person. Henceforth the only philosophical catechism a political leader needed to master was: “Leave everything to the free play of market forces.” Anything more complicated than that was bound to set their country on the road to serfdom.

But history didn’t end. If anything, the free play of market forces only speeded it up. In their haste to implement the supposedly last great ideology, the Neolibs cast aside the critical post-war stabilisers of a prosperous working-class and a civic-minded middle-class. In the resulting “there is no such thing as society” moral wasteland that resulted, just about everybody became a survivalist of some sort. Investing emotionally in a political ideology, even thinking philosophically, was a mug’s game.

With nothing left to do, political parties became the equivalent of hood ornaments. The voters cared only about how political leaders looked; the social caché they conferred; how they made them feel. Nobody gave two hoots about what they thought!

John Key and Jacinda Ardern provide outstanding examples of this new kind of political leadership. Very early on in their careers, they grasped the key lesson of Neoliberal politics: that leaders didn’t need to be effective as much as they needed to be affective. Providing you engaged the electorate’s emotions in a powerful way – “I feel your pain” – what you actually achieved didn’t really matter. The working proposition was, after all, that “the government that governs least, is the government that governs best”. Politicians weren’t supposed to do much more than smile and wave – and take selfies with their adoring fans.

Meanwhile, behind all this front-of-house flim-flam, the problems of capitalism (which had never gone away) continued to accumulate. The rich got obscenely richer, while more and more previously comfortable citizens became decidedly uncomfortable. Infrastructure, the crucial skeleton of a modern industrial society, was simply left to rot and decay. Not just roads and bridges, but schools, hospitals and universities. If there was demand, there would be supply. Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” would build all the houses people needed. If there were no houses for the poor, then clearly that was because the poor preferred to sleep under bridges and in cars. Supply and demand, mate, supply and demand. Stands to reason!

In the end, of course, simply mouthing Neoliberal slogans wasn’t going to cut it. The neoliberal economists could insist all they liked that their discipline was about responding to people’s choices, but they were wrong. Economics, in the end, is about meeting people’s needs. Socialists have always known this, and so too, in their own quiet way, have conservatives. The socialists have positioned themselves across the tracks of history and demanded “Justice!” The conservatives (according to William F. Buckley) have stood athwart history and cried “Stop!” The important thing to remember is that Neoliberalism cannot afford to surrender an inch to either of them.

Judith Collins is demanding a debate because, from somewhere in the back of her mind, a tiny voice is reminding her that if injustice isn’t stopped by politicians constitutionally, then it will be stopped by the people unconstitutionally. Somehow, people must be persuaded to once again put their faith in the political process. Reality engenders ideas that need to be given a voice. If only she could remember how to evaluate and express those ideas. If only she could remember the words. Because then she would not need to demand the debate – she would have one.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 15 July 2021.

Following Labour's Lead.

Red And Proud: The only real question, after Thursday’s Budget, is: How long will it take National to realise how profoundly the political game has been – and is being – transformed by Covid and Climate Change? Socialism is no longer a dirty word.

YOU HAVE TO ADMIT, Judith Collins made a reasonable fist of responding to Grant Robertson’s 2021 Budget. It wasn’t enough, of course. It would have required a truly Churchillian performance to dispel the magic of Robertson’s speech. Labour has well-and-truly learned what National appears to have forgotten: that people feel long before they think. And Robertson had just made a goodly portion of the New Zealand electorate feel righteous. As performances go, his was a bloody hard act to follow.

Still, the leader of the Opposition has not forgotten how to use her sword. Her thrust against “Meccano lessons” at the Hillside Workshops was deadly. Unfortunately, she failed to follow it up with an equally devastating assault upon the whole import substitution policy to which Robertson’s proudly proletarian pitch paid homage. There was, after all, a reason why Labour, in the early 1980s, began casting around for something to replace the Sutchism that had dominated Labour’s policy-making since the late-1950s.

It is one of New Zealand political history’s greatest ironies that Rob Muldoon, the “Young Turk” who won his spurs attacking the massive import substitution programme unleashed by the Second Labour Government, should have ended his career amidst the wreckage of “Think Big” – as he called his own updating of the left-leaning economist, civil servant and historian, Bill Sutch’s, radical economic development policies.

Indeed, it is interesting to speculate on what might have happened if Muldoon had remained true to the instincts of his younger, private-enterprise self, by continuing to reject state-directed development in New Zealand. Had Muldoon embraced the same ideas as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the late-1970s and the early-1980s, it could easily have been Labour which ended up betting the farm on one last roll of Sutch’s dice.

As things turned out, it was Labour’s new leader, David Lange, who found himself proclaiming that New Zealand couldn’t go on being run “like a Polish shipyard”. Egged-on by his Treasury advisers, and the smarter elements of the Fourth Estate, he was persuaded to join his backers (Roger Douglas, Michael Basset, Mike Moore and Richard Prebble) in “thinking the unthinkable” about New Zealand’s economic future.

A strong case can be made that Labour’s willingness to “think the unthinkable” made it possible for National to give up thinking altogether. Initially confounded by Labour’s abrupt change of ideological direction – not to mention the near universal praise heaped upon its new “more market” policies by the mainstream news media – National floundered hopelessly. Its win in 1990, which the news media proclaimed a “landslide”, was, by MMP standards, a remarkably close contest. National may have received 47.82 percent of the popular vote, but the combined popular vote for Labour, New Labour and the Greens was 47.15 percent.

Thanks to the First-Past-the-Post electoral system, the new National prime minister, Jim Bolger, was spared the challenge of governing with a one-seat majority. He may have campaigned in the poetry of “The Decent Society”, but the prose he governed in was all written by the same neoliberal scribes who had authored Labour’s policies – albeit with considerably sharper pens. The National Party’s finance minister’s, Ruth Richardson’s, “Mother of All Budgets”, so loudly condemned by Grant Robertson in Thursday’s Budget Speech, was really only Roger Douglas – with bells on.

By the time Labour (with the Alliance in tow) was back in control of the Treasury Benches, its acceptance of the ground rules of Neoliberalism was, if not complete, then sufficiently substantial for the emergence of a style of governance that could be, as John Key went on to prove, as readily adopted by National as Labour. Conservative purists railed against Key’s “Labour-Lite” approach, but it proved more than equal to the challenge of a global financial crisis and a devastating earthquake. It was certainly enough to secure nine years of National Government, which might easily, in the absence of “Jacindamania”, have stretched into twelve.

Historically, this is par for the course with National. From the Opposition Benches, it railed against the Keynesianism of the First Labour Government, only to embrace it as the price of electoral victory.

Muldoon shot down radical Sutchism in 1961, only to see Holyoake and Marshall adopt a watered-down version of the same well into the 1970s. In 1979, beggared for options in the face of seemingly indefatigable “stagflation”, Muldoon became the last, and easily the most radical, of the Sutchists.

Bolger played the same game with Neoliberalism: railing against its brutalities from Opposition; then allowing Bill Birch to crush the trade unions, and Richardson to poleaxe what was left of the welfare state, from the safety of the Government benches.

In 2008, Key accepted a less-sharp-edged version of Neoliberalism from Helen Clark, and cruised effortlessly to three electoral victories in a row.

And now, thanks to Covid-19, Labour finds itself, once again, strategically placed to set a new course for economic and social policy in New Zealand. With the monetarist policies that have, for the past 40 years, constituted the core of Neoliberalism, discredited (by that inveterate foe of all theories – Reality) Prime Minister Ardern and Finance Minister Robertson find themselves at a turning-point very similar to the one their party encountered in the early-1980s.

Confronted with the immediate challenges of a global pandemic, and, behind them, the even more daunting challenges of climate change, governments all over the world are shrugging-off the dogma that there is no problem so great that it cannot be solved by giving the market its head. State action, on a massive scale, is once again being seen, by politicians with an eye to the future, as the indispensable agency of economic and social survival.

Ardern and Robertson have grasped this ideological shift a great deal faster than any of their rivals. Certainly, it has encouraged them to deploy the sort of rhetoric that would have made their predecessors cringe. Targeting Richardson’s Mother of All Budgets and raising benefits in a long-delayed one-fingered salute to this hated left-wing symbol of neoliberal cruelty, was only the beginning. As the Budget Debate wore on, Labour’s backbenchers could not forbear from getting in on the act. The new MP for Wairarapa, Kieran McAnulty, delivered the lines most likely to raise the National Party’s collective blood-pressure:

“Yes, I am a socialist and I’m proud of it. Yeah, there you go. Thank you very much. Bring it on. And I’m very proud to say to the good people of the Wairarapa that they elected a proud socialist as their MP.”

The only real questions, after Thursday’s Budget, is how long will it take National to realise how profoundly the political game has been – and is being – transformed by Covid and Climate Change? Will it be two, three, or four terms? And, how many leaders will the party have to elect, and discard, before it finally masters the new language of electoral victory?

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website of Monday, 24 May 2021.

The TV3 Poll: Journalism or Propaganda?

Predictable “News”: Expecting the mainstream media to acknowledge its own deficiencies as the supposed protector and facilitator of democratic discussion and debate has become unrealistic. It no longer sees its role in such terms. Its responsibility, now, is to impart the truth – as officially defined – to the population, while doing everything within its power to ensure that this official version of reality is not effectively challenged by anyone – up to and including the Leader of the Opposition.

TV3’s PRESENTATION of the poll results delivered to them by Reid Research Ltd tells us a lot. The most important message to draw from the way it handled this “news” is how rapidly propaganda is replacing journalism in the mainstream news media. The data supplied by the pollsters confirms that there has been no major shift in political opinion since the general election of 17 October 2020. Given the decisiveness of the 2020 result, and the want of any developments of sufficient magnitude to cause Labour voters to change their minds, this stand-steady result should have come as no surprise. “Voters still happy with Jacinda” is not, however, a headline likely to stop viewers in their tracks. “Support for Judith Collins plummets”, on the other hand, just might.

Had TV3 been polling regularly since the election, with five or six sets of results accurately tracking the public’s feelings about the Leader of the Opposition; and had the latest results confirmed or confounded a rising or falling trendline; then such a headline might have been justified. But, TV3 has not been polling regularly. Indeed, the last poll it conducted was back in October 2020. Yes, that’s right, in the middle of last year’s election campaign. Naturally, the Leader of the Opposition was then polling around 18 percent. More than six months after losing the election by an historic margin, she is polling around 6 percent as New Zealand’s preferred prime minister. Well, gosh! What a surprise! Clearly, Collins’ days are numbered.

But wait, there’s more. Tova O’Brien, TV3’s political editor, would have known that Collins’ numbers were bound to drop back over a period of six months. The temptation would have been strong, therefore, to attach her predictably “plummeting” numbers to her recent campaign to elicit a coherent government response to the He Puapua Report, and whether or not it is guiding government policy.

Any failure to reproduce the extraordinary 17 percentage point surge in National’s numbers generated by Collins’ predecessor’s, Don Brash’s, in/famous “Orewa Speech”, would allow O’Brien and her colleagues to paint Collins’ He Puapua campaign as a flop. Even better, it would allow them to present the poll data as proof that New Zealanders have grown up and grown out of racial politics.

Just to be sure, however, O’Brien inserted a couple of questions to drive that message home. Were the Government’s policies separatist? she had Reid Research ask. And: Were the Opposition’s criticisms divisive? Entirely unsurprisingly, between 40 percent and half of respondents thought the government wasn’t being separatist, and that the Opposition was being divisive. For good measure, the viewers were further informed that roughly a quarter of National voters thought their party was being divisive and about the same number of Labour voters saw their party as separatist. All of which added up to? Almost nothing at all that was helpful.

Of much more use to TV3’s viewers would have been a carefully worded series of questions aimed at discovering just how much people knew about the He Puapua Report, and seeking their reaction to some of its recommendations. Ah, yes, but that would have cost TV3 an arm and a leg. It would also, almost certainly, have shown that most Kiwis know next-to-nothing about He Puapua, or its recommendations; and that, when appraised of some of the report’s more radical proposals, their responses tend to be less than favourable.

Of course, the responsibility for the public’s general ignorance about He Puapua, and the general direction of travel favoured by its authors, rests squarely with the likes of Ms O’Brien. Realistically-speaking, however, expecting the mainstream media to acknowledge its own deficiencies as the supposed protector and facilitator of democratic discussion and debate would be foolish. The mainstream media no longer sees its role in such terms. Its responsibility, now, is to impart the truth – as officially defined – to the population, while doing everything within its power to ensure that this official version of reality is not effectively challenged by anyone – up to and including the Leader of the Opposition.

This is how it works now. If a potentially damaging report like He Puapua makes it into the public arena, do not under any circumstances attempt to inform the public accurately and dispassionately about its contents. Instead, brand any publicly voiced misgivings about the report’s recommendations as “racist”. Give maximum coverage to accusations and recriminations arising from politicians’ responses to the report, and highlight the alleged divisiveness of their attempts to question or challenge its findings. Then, commission a poll, the entirely predictable results of which can be used to discredit the report’s critics: most particularly the leader of the political party most heavily invested in challenging its officially sanctioned version of reality.

It’s a game played out every day in Moscow and Beijing. The only serious distinction between the players there, and the players here, being that ‘there’ they know that the name of the game is “Propaganda”; while ‘here’ they still think it’s called “Journalism”.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 18 May 2021.

Shaken and Stirred: The Left Reacts To Judith Collins’ Race-Based Politicking.

Extremely Moderate: That was the “problem” with Judith Collins’ address to the National Party’s Northern Regional Conference on 1 May 2021: its totally unexpected moderation. This was no bilious outpouring of racial hate – quite the reverse. With a degree of political subtlety and tactical agility that did both Collins and her speechwriter, Michael Forbes, credit, the speech left Labour with nothing but questions to answer. 

THE REACTION to Judith Collins’ speech to National’s Northern Regional Conference (1/5/21) was always going to be instructive. It would signal just how seriously National’s opponents took both Collins and her race-based politicking. A flat line on the political seismograph would indicate complete indifference: proof that the National Party leader’s strategy was out of time, and that she, as Leader, was running out of luck. Were the seismograph’s needle to flutter, however, National would know that it was on to something.

And flutter it did. Not wildly, admittedly, but enough to register something large and dangerous shifting deep underground. To give the Prime Minister credit, she was careful to let Collins’ speech pass without comment. While undoubtedly registering the seismic shock, her instincts told her to pretend that she hadn’t. Prime Ministers have surrogates to do that for them. Dutiful as ever, Kelvin Davis let loose the necessary slings and arrows – as did Jacinda’s Pavlovian poodles in the Press Gallery. Given the quality of Collins’ speech, they really had no choice.

Because that was the “problem” with Collins’ address: its totally unexpected moderation. This was no bilious outpouring of racial hate – quite the reverse. With a degree of political subtlety and tactical agility that did both Collins and her speechwriter, Michael Forbes, credit, the speech left Labour with nothing but questions to answer. Difficult questions about the contents of He Puapua, the report of the secretive, Cabinet-appointed working group established to develop a plan for bringing New Zealand’s state institutions into conformity with both te Tiriti o Waitangi and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

“The Prime Minister needs to explain why Labour has been busy implementing He Puapua’s recommendations one by one”, Collins stated in a follow-up media release, “without sharing this wider plan with New Zealanders.”

This is clever politics. We live in an age of mistrust. Fewer and fewer citizens have much faith in their country’s political institutions anymore. Fewer still have faith in the reliability of the nation’s news media – as a study released last week by AUT’s Centre for Journalism, Media and Democracy makes clear. Plant a seed of doubt in the voters’ minds about the Labour Government’s secretive “wider plan” for New Zealanders and watch it grow into a thornbush of paranoia.

Collins knows that Jacinda’s only hope of preventing that seed from sprouting is to dismiss He Puapua as just another of Labour’s many, many working party reports; and to reassure New Zealanders that any changes to New Zealand’s core constitutional structures will only ever be undertaken after they’ve been endorsed by a binding referendum. Except, even these undertakings offer Labour only the most fragile of defences. It was, after all, Helen Clark and Margaret Wilson who abolished appeals to the Privy Council and established the Supreme Court of New Zealand without holding a referendum. Moreover, it was precisely because referenda kept quashing attempts to set up Maori wards, that Jacinda’s government rushed through legislation denying local voters that option. On these matters, the public has every right to be sceptical.

Collins also knows, or, at the very least, suspects, that throwing He Puapua over the side of Labour’s waka might prove to be a great deal harder than it sounds. If Labour’s Maori Caucus’s “Plan A” was a full-scale assault on the homelessness, joblessness, ill-health, incarceration-rates and general despair of so many of their people, then it has failed. Both Jacinda and her right-hand man, Finance Minister Grant Robertson, made it clear, very early on, that the rapid “transformational” effort required to move the dial on Maori deprivation was a fiscal bridge too far for them to contemplate. That made the slower, but much deeper, transformations set out in He Puapua, the Maori caucus’ “Plan B”. If Jacinda, bowing to pressure from National and Act, tosses He Puapua overboard, then Te Paati Maori will invite the Maori electorate to, once again, draw their own conclusions about the wisdom of expecting a Pakeha party to prioritise Maori concerns.

The truth is that Labour, just like Saint Peter, does not wish to be caught denying the messianic He Puapua, just as David Seymour and Judith Collins commence crowing.

If anybody knows this, then it’s Jacinda’s former Chief-of-Staff, and the current Director of the lobbying firm Capital Government Relations, Neale Jones. Sitting alongside his fellow Wellington insider, Brigette Morten, on this morning’s (3/5/21) Nine-to-Noon “Political Panel”, it was Neale who finally indicated exactly where on the Richter Scale, Collins’ political earthquake registered. And it was high. High enough, in fact, to thoroughly rattle Mr Jones who, unlike the identically named hero of Bob Dylan’s Ballad of a Thin Man, knows exactly what’s going on here.

Which is why, presumably, from the moment host Kathryn Ryan asked him for his take on Collins’s speech, Neale started throwing bombs. The Leader of the Opposition, he insisted, was guilty of “racist fearmongering”; engaging in a “toxic form of politics”; and had concocted her very own “conspiracy theory”. This is not the sort of language your average capital city insider generally uses to describe a political event of no impact or importance. On this occasion, I think it’s fair to say that the man licenced to kill Labour’s foes (at least rhetorically) was both shaken and stirred.

Perhaps the most disturbing element of Neale’s critique was his characterisation of any attempt to critique the rangatiratanga agenda of He Puapua and its ilk as illegitimate and sinister. It was difficult to avoid the conclusion that if Neale had his way this kind of “toxic” politics would be impermissible: a form of “hate speech”. As a line of argument, it is chilling: conveying the impression that some kinds of politics – most particularly the politics of Maori-Pakeha relations – should be considered “out-of-bounds” and strictly controlled.

Listening to this morning’s “Political Panel”, I found it impossible not to imagine Brigette Morten sitting in the RNZ studio with a grin as wide as a Cheshire Cat’s. Seeing, as we, the listeners, were hearing, Neale’s discomfort, Morten must have recognised just what a winner Collins has picked.

The National Party leader’s May Day address, unlike Brash’s Orewa Speech, will not be a sky-rocket – hauling National’s poll numbers up into the electoral stratosphere. No, He Puapua and all it stands for will be a slow-burner, spreading underground like a peat fire until, finally, it surfaces in clouds of acrid, choking smoke.

In the immortal words of Rachel Hunter: “It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen.”

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 4 May 2021.

Can Judith Collins Make Don Brash’s ‘Nationhood Soufflé’ Rise Twice?

Can She Raise It A Second Time? The question is: Can National’s current leader, Judith Collins, rely upon Don Brash’s Nationhood Soufflé recipe to produce an equally dramatic rise in her party’s fortunes? Or, in the intervening years, has the ideology of “Treatyism” persuaded enough New Zealanders to renounce the ideas which, in 2004, transformed National overnight from a party of the walking wounded into a serious electoral contender?

SEVENTEEN YEARS HAVE PASSED since Don Brash gave his in/famous “Nationhood” speech to the Orewa Rotary Club. On the strength of the sentiments communicated in that address, the Brash-led National Party leapt from a risible 28 percent in the polls to 45 percent. In a single 17-point bound, National was free of the clutches of its crushing 2002 election defeat. Had National’s chief strategist, Steven Joyce, not played silly-buggers with the Exclusive Brethren Church, there was every chance that 18 months later Brash would have become prime minister.

The question is: Can National’s current leader, Judith Collins, rely upon Brash’s Nationhood Soufflé recipe to produce an equally dramatic rise in her party’s fortunes? Or, in the intervening years, has the ideology of “Treatyism” persuaded enough New Zealanders to renounce the ideas which, in 2004, transformed National overnight from a party of the walking wounded into a serious electoral contender? More to the point, does Collins share Brash’s unwavering moral commitment to the ”single standard of citizenship” principle at the heart of his “Nationhood” address.

This is not an idle question. If Collins is unable to convince those voters who are either doubtful of, or openly hostile to, the Labour Government’s radical Treatyist agenda, that her opposition is authentic, then she is most unlikely to emulate Brash’s success. Love him or hate him, only the most rabid of his opponents doubted Brash’s sincerity on the “race issue”. Those who voted for him were absolutely certain that, if elected, he would fulfil his promise to remove all references to the Treaty of Waitangi and its ex post facto “principles” from the statute books; and that the Maori seats would, indeed, be abolished. Collins, if she is to capture the support National so desperately needs, must convince both her party, and the public, that the “separatism” she decries must – and will – be stopped in its tracks.

The slightest equivocation on this matter will convince even those who agree with Collins’ basic proposition that she cannot be trusted to see it through. Anything other than a rock-solid guarantee to uphold the core principles of liberal, colour-blind, democracy will only convince her potential supporters that her brave words are hollow: that, when push comes to shove, she, like all the others, will retreat before the relentless criticism of practically the entire political class. Does Collins have what it takes to hold her ground on the “race issue”? Does her caucus? We shall see.

The feeling that National needs to exploit, if it is to return to office in 2023, is the feeling shared by a great many voters that, no matter which party they vote for, the core settings of New Zealand society will not be changed. That the people “in charge” have absolutely no regard for, or interest in, the opinions of what Richard Nixon called “the great silent majority”. Indeed, many Kiwis are now uncertain whether or not their opinions are any longer shared by a majority of their fellow citizens, or whether they – and people who think like them – now constitute a minority of the New Zealand population.

On the “race issue” and “Treatyism”, this sense of being shut out of the debate is very far from being a figment of their imaginations. The politician most responsible for inserting “the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi” into legislation is the former constitutional law professor-turned-Labour-politician, Sir Geoffrey Palmer. In a paper entitled “Māori, the Treaty and the Constitution” delivered to a Maori Law Review symposium on 12 June 2013, he observed:

“These [legal] developments, and indeed later developments, have meant that substantial grievances of the Māori minority have a good chance of being handled in a principled fashion. Insulation from the ravages of extreme opinion has been achieved. The settlements have become mainstream.”

“The ravages of extreme opinion”. It is difficult to conceive of a phrase that more vividly sums up the way the New Zealand elites view the thoughts and feelings of their less elevated citizens. It would be equally difficult to locate a clearer confirmation of the widely held conviction that nothing ordinary Pakeha New Zealanders might say in relation to the “race issue”, or the Treaty’s place (if any) in this country’s constitutional arrangements, is likely to have the slightest effect upon the conduct of the powers-that-be.

Palmer, himself, confirmed as much in the same address when he stated: “My mail about the Treaty was always adverse and voluminous, but I was not deterred by it.”

What produced that extraordinary 17-point jump in National’s poll-ratings following Brash’s “Nationhood” speech was the electrifying collective conviction that Brash had listened to the opponents of Treatyism, heard their grievances, and was determined to give effect to their wishes.

Nothing mobilises voters faster or more effectively than the belief that, for once, their vote might actually count. Whether it be Dominic Cumming’s invitation to “Take Back Control”, or Donald Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again”, the idea that a visit to the ballot-box just might make a difference, almost always makes one helluva difference.

Collins’ predicament would be made a great deal easier if she and her team could avail themselves of solid data on New Zealanders’ views about the Treaty of Waitangi and the “race issue” generally. Twenty years ago this was a relatively straightforward process. In the 1990s, for example, one could turn to the reports of the New Zealand Study of Values (NZSV) for a very precise take on the public’s attitude to a whole host of economic, social and political issues.

In a little book entitled New Zealand Politics At The Turn Of The Millennium by Paul Perry and Alan Webster, which was based on these reports, New Zealanders attitudes towards the Treaty of Waitangi were set out very clearly.

In 1998 only 5.4 percent of those questioned believed that the Treaty should be strengthened and given the force of law. A quarter believed that Treaty claims should be dealt with through the Waitangi Tribunal “as it is at present”. Nearly 30 percent believed there needed to be greater limits on Maori claims under the Treaty. And 33.8 percent believed the Treaty should be abolished. Only 16.3 percent of those questioned responded positively to the idea of giving Maori special land and fishing rights to make up for past injustices.

When Don Brash delivered his “Nationhood” speech to those Orewa Rotarians in January 2004, his ideas fell upon fertile ground. We cannot be so sure that Collins’ views on separatism will be equally well-received. The NZSV ceased in 1998. For reasons one can only speculate about, academic interest in acquiring and publishing data on inconvenient public attitudes appears to have declined in the new millennium.

A great many of the New Zealanders who participated in those NZSV surveys more than two decades ago are no longer alive. Judith Collins must, therefore, make a big political bet. Have the numbers relating to the status of the Treaty of Waitangi, and to the “race issue” generally, become more favourable to the Treatyists – or more unfavourable? How many New Zealanders have changed their minds? More importantly, how many of them are willing to bet that National’s leader won’t change hers?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 30 April 2021.

Judith Collins’ State Of The Nation Speech Fails To Comfort – Or Connect.

Nothing New: State-of-the-Nation speeches are opportunities for those charged with their delivery to demonstrate renewed political credibility. Those hoping that Collins’ SOTN address to the Auckland Rotary Club on Tuesday, 26 January would constitute a significant step towards restoring her credibility must be feeling disappointed.

JUDITH COLLINS, remember her? She’s the woman who led the National Party to its second-worst defeat in 85-years. In a normal political party, leadership of that quality would have left the politician responsible with only one option: resignation. But, National hasn’t been a normal party for quite some time. Not since the departure of its last credible leader, Bill English, in 2018.

State-of-the-Nation speeches are opportunities for those charged with their delivery to demonstrate renewed political credibility. Those hoping that Collins’ SOTN address to the Auckland Rotary Club on Tuesday, 26 January would constitute a significant step towards restoring her credibility must be feeling disappointed. Certainly, National’s normality hasn’t been reclaimed.

A political party trounced as badly as National in 2020 owes the electorate two gestures – at the very least. The first is an apology to the voters for so egregiously misreading their mood and intent. The second is a promise to move beyond its clearly inadequate diagnosis of the nation’s ills and towards a whole new suite of remedies.

Collins’ speech did neither of these things. For the most part it was content to rehash the promises made to the electorate last October. The balance consisted of all the usual bromides of lazy conservatism.

The worst of these was Collins’ reflexive rejection of the Government’s plan to lift the minimum wage:

“Labour’s intentions are laudable but they are focused on alleviating the symptoms of stretched working families struggling to make ends meet rather than on the root causes of prosperity – supporting businesses to be more productive, investing in new capital, taking on new staff and lifting wages.”

We have heard it all before. The only way to lift wages is not to lift wages.

What would really make New Zealanders sit up and pay attention is an admission from National that it is precisely its own and the business community’s ingrained opposition to lifting wages that keeps New Zealand’s productivity so low. Recognition by Collins that only by winnowing-out our weakest businesses – i.e. removing the crutch of low wages – will this country’s long-delayed investment in skills, innovation and new technology become unavoidable. A brave declaration that low-wage economies are low-productivity economies. Now, that would have shaken the nation out of its Covid fever-dreams!

Another of those lazy conservative bromides holds that households and economies are subject to exactly the same constraints. That living beyond one’s means is as disastrous for countries as it is for individuals. Save all we can, reduce our debts as quickly as possible, keep the government’s nose out of our businesses’ business: these are National’s new remedies – same as the old remedies.

For the homeless, the solution is equally traditional – and facile. Make a bonfire of as many regulations as possible. Collins has promised her party’s support for emergency legislation designed to strip away what’s left of New Zealand’s social and physical environmental protections. It would be open-slather for property investors and developers.

“We need to reform our planning and RMA processes with one goal: freeing up land and getting more houses built”, Collins told the Rotarians. “And if councils won’t do it, we will do it for them.” (Some forms of state intervention, it would seem, cannot be done without.)

So far, so “same-old, same-old” from the Collins-led National Party. That familiar conflating of the particular interests of farmers and businessmen with the general interest of the whole nation.

“[W]e had a strong sense of community”, confided Collins, recalling her childhood in the Waikato. “We were surrounded by farming families who got stuck in and helped each other out, particularly when times were tough. It wasn’t something to be remarked on or exclaimed over, it was just the way things were – as a Collins, as a farmer, as a Kiwi.”

As if working-class families, a layer of New Zealand society considerably more familiar with tough times than Collins’ comfortable cockies, wouldn’t know how to get stuck in and help their neighbours.

It has always been there: National’s profoundly objectionable assumption that the only real Kiwis are people like themselves. That the rest of the nation are either parasites or problems. Probably both.

Collins has yet to learn the lessons of Holyoake, Bolger, Key and English. That National only regains credibility electorally by opening its arms wider – not to crush voters, but to comfort them.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 29 January 2021.

The Royal Commission’s Recommendations On Hate Speech Will Unite The Right.

Free Speech Coalition? There is no way in Hell that the National Party is going to let the free speech issue become the exclusive political property of the Act Party. Judith Collins is going to make damned sure that she, too, has her hands on the banner of freedom. Defending free speech is poised to become the unifying mission of the entire New Zealand Right.

THE BIG QUESTION now facing the National Party is whether to defend free speech or give that job to Act. If it is foolish enough to take the latter option, then its chances of rebuilding its electoral strength anytime soon must be considered slim. The banner of freedom is a potent electoral prop, once relinquished it is extremely difficult to reclaim.

How gratified Act must have been to read the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Terrorist Attack on Christchurch Mosques on 15 March 2019’s recommendations relating to hate speech. David Seymour’s greatest worry must surely have been that the Royal Commissioners would resist the clamour for a clamp-down on New Zealanders’ freedom of expression.

A modest suggestion to extend the already existing legislation outlawing incitement of racial disharmony by including religious affiliation would, for example, have been considered unobjectionable by most New Zealanders. But, to what I am sure is Seymour’s immense relief, the Commissioners have gone much, much further than that.

To read the relevant part of the Report is to be presented with a plan for comprehensive social engineering that is as ambitious as it is frightening. The Commissioners are clearly determined to downgrade the right of citizens to express their opinions freely. Their justification for attacking this most sacred of democratic principles? Society’s supposed duty of care to those who might be offended by people giving vent to harsh or cruel opinions. Protecting people’s feelings from the insensitivity of their neighbours is seen as vital to building and maintaining “social cohesion” – the Commissioners’ over-riding desideratum.

If National Party MPs’ hackles are not rising at this point, then the condition of political liberalism in this country is a great deal worse than I dared imagine. Any subscriber to the principles of liberal democracy should stand aghast at the implications of the Commissioners’ arguments.

Society, it would seem, cannot be relied upon to do the right thing. Left to themselves, people will insist on behaving badly. To borrow a term from Hilary Clinton, far too many Kiwis hold opinions and harbour prejudices that are utterly “deplorable”. To make these bad Kiwis think twice before voicing opinions hurtful to their neighbours, the Commissioners are recommending that the Government raise the maximum penalty for inciting racial disharmony (“hate speech”) from three months to three years! That’s three years in prison for voicing or publishing the wrong opinions. In New Zealand.

At this point, you can see why David Seymour might be gleefully anticipating lifting up the banner of freedom and sallying forth to do battle with the Commissioners and their willing enablers in the Labour Government. (Oh yes, that’s right, the Prime Minister herself has promised that her government will give legislative effect to all the Royal Commissions’ recommendations.)

Equally easily imagined is Act’s nervousness that National might decide to abandon the bi-partisanship forged in the horrific circumstances of the 15 March 2019 attack. It was that bi-partisanship – especially on the need for gun control – that set Act on its path to 7 percent of the Party Vote and ten MPs. How keen they must be to see National lend its support to the Commissioners’ crusade to forge a richly diverse – but socially cohesive – New Zealand. Even if that involves police officers arresting comedians for failing to recognise the difference between edgy humour and hate speech!

By now, I would hope that it’s becoming crystal clear to the reader that there is no way in Hell that the National Party is going to let this issue become the exclusive political property of the Act Party. Judith Collins is going to make damned sure that she, too, has her hands on the banner of freedom. Defending free speech is poised to become the unifying mission of the entire New Zealand Right.

And it is in this respect that the Royal Commission has served New Zealanders – especially Muslim New Zealanders – very badly. What should have been a reaffirmation of unity and solidarity has instead been repurposed into an incitement to division and rancour. Pretty soon the only aspect of the Report that anyone recalls will be its attack upon New Zealanders’ freedom of speech – and, inescapably, upon the vitality of their democracy.

The Prime Minister’s inspired formulation, “They are Us” will be replaced by three much more dangerous words: “Us versus Them”.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 11 December 2020.

Looking For "The Drummer".

Drumming-Up Support For The Nationalist Right: They’ll know “The Drummer” when they see him. He’ll be raffish, but not dishevelled. He’ll be articulate, but not slick. He’ll tell the most outrageous lies, which they will want to believe. But, most important of all, he’ll tell the most outrageous truths, which nobody else has the courage to speak. He’ll say the things that everybody on the Right (and even some disillusioned comrades on the Left) are thinking – and they’ll love him for it.

 

IN THE FIRST, fraught years of the Weimar Republic, its enemies spoke longingly of “The Drummer” who would re-awaken Germany. By the early 1920s, a small group of ultra-nationalists were convinced “The Drummer” had been found – in Munich. The name of this decorated front-line soldier and self-proclaimed artist, with an extraordinary gift for rousing political oratory? Adolf Hitler.

With the demise of Winston Peters and his NZ First Party, the New Zealand Right is in the market for a replacement “Drummer”. To say that the political merchandise currently on offer is shoddy would be an understatement. The manifestoes of the New Conservatives, Advance New Zealand, The Public Party and Heartland New Zealand are too cramped, and their leaders too lacking in talent, to serve as any sort of replacement for Peters and NZ First. For the time being, therefore, right-wing anger and resentment will seek to find expression in the National Party and Act – vessels too old and weak for wine as new and strong as theirs.

That said, it is difficult to see a radical right-wing party built from scratch achieving very much very soon. For a start, who would lead it? It is equally difficult to see the next Winston Peters in the latest intake of MPs. If there is a truly dangerous man or woman among them, then these qualities have been kept exceptionally well hidden.

David Seymour has performed admirably, it is true, but for a good part of the last term he was essentially pushing on an open door. National was too divided, too conflicted, to offer a credible alternative to Jacinda Ardern’s kindly populism. This allowed Seymour to move Act into the unoccupied political space. Holding that space, however, should National ever recover its mojo, will be a much harder task. Historically, Act’s success tends to be inversely proportional to National’s and, hence, a reflection of the Right’s overall weakness.

Could National’s leader, Judith Collins, morph into the long-awaited Drummer in the way her predecessor, Rob Muldoon, did between August 1974 and November 1975? The answer is: No.

There just isn’t enough of Judith Collins: intellectually, culturally or performatively; to become New Zealand’s next Drummer. She possesses neither Muldoon’s ear, nor his stomach. Muldoon “heard” the anxieties and resentments of “ordinary” New Zealanders more clearly than anyone except Norman Kirk – the man who had the good grace to die just weeks after Muldoon became National’s leader. More significantly, “Piggy” Muldoon had ample stomach for the political brutality required to transform the electorate’s anxiety and fear into votes. It helped, of course, that he was an intellectually formidable politician who despised “intellectuals”. That always plays well with “ordinary blokes”.

If the Drummer is not to be found in Act or National, then the Right will have to go looking for him elsewhere. (That the Drummer might be female is, of course, possible, but given the nature of right-wing Kiwi culture, unlikely.)

The monied men of the Right will not find him among the ranks of the ideologically compliant. The Drummer cares nothing for the “rules” of neoliberalism. For him, economics is a means to an end – nothing more. Having carefully studied the fortunes of the populist parties of Hungary and Poland, he’s convinced that nationalism only succeeds electorally when mixed with good sized dollops of socialism. This, he tells his friends, was where Trump got it so wrong. You can’t promise to rescue the working class from the clutches of the liberal elites, and then pump billions of dollars into the already bulging pockets of the One Percent!

So, where should they look for their twenty-first century Drummer? Will he be found, like Hitler, regaling the patrons of a crowded beer-hall with all manner of outlandish conspiracy theories? Unlikely. The place to find New Zealand’s next Drummer, Winston’s replacement, is by frequenting the one place Peters never felt comfortable – Online.

They’ll know him when they see him. He’ll be raffish, but not dishevelled. He’ll be articulate, but not slick. He’ll tell the most outrageous lies, which they will want to believe. But, most important of all, he’ll tell the most outrageous truths, which nobody else has the courage to speak. He’ll say the things that everybody on the Right (and even some disillusioned comrades on the Left) are thinking – and they’ll love him for it.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 4 December 2020.