Intransigent Minorities.

No Compromise! The price of not keeping faith with the voters can be high. The Coalition Government would be wise to learn from the Left’s more recent mistakes. The most obvious of which is its truly bizarre belief that intransigent minorities will not be electorally punished for spitting in the face of the majority.

WHEN THE UNITED KINGDOM next goes to the polls, the Scottish National Party (SNP) will struggle to retain office. Currently, the Labour Party has a better-than-even chance of reclaiming its crown as Scotland’s electoral darling. After 17 years as the dominant force in Scottish politics, the SNP is running neck-and-neck with Labour. The reason: it allowed itself to get seriously out of step with Scotland’s voters.

The Scots are a well-educated and progressive people, but they drew the line at backing a premier, and a party, that saw nothing wrong with incarcerating a convicted rapist in Cornton Vale women’s prison on the grounds that she had subsequently self-identified as a woman.

Though the Premier, Nicola Sturgeon, responding to public outrage, removed the rapist, Isla Bryson, from Cornton Vale, the damage was done. According to The Guardian, Sturgeon’s predecessor (and political mentor) Alex Salmond accused her of “throwing away” the hope of Scottish independence (the SNP’s raison d’être) for the sake of controversial gender recognition reforms.

Things went from bad to worse for the SNP when, following Sturgeon’s resignation, she and her husband became the focus of a police investigation, and the SNP membership opted to reject the socially conservative candidate for Premier, Kate Forbes, in favour of the woke Humza Yousaf.

One instance of challenging the voters’ values might be forgiven – but two? It may, or may not, be relevant that the SNP’s fall from grace occurred while it was in coalition with the Scottish Greens.

Why allow a party currently polling at around 2-3 percent push you into backing reforms that most voters do not support? Why risk incurring the wrath of the electorate by allowing the perception to grow that the tail is wagging the dog? These questions are not restricted to the Scottish situation. There are people here in New Zealand asking very similar questions in relation to Act’s Treaty Principles Bill.

Not the least of these inquirers is Dame Anne Salmond who, in an uncharacteristically tetchy post for the Newsroom website, observes: “The process surrounding the Treaty Principles bill is a farce. With 8.6 percent of the vote at the last election, Act has no democratic mandate to advance a referendum on Te Tiriti.”

A perplexing observation which, on its face, suggests that even to “advance” the idea of a referendum (to resolve an otherwise irresolvable public issue) a political party must first secure 50 percent +1 of the Party Vote.

As National Party gadfly, Liam Hehir, observed on X (formerly Twitter) :

“Does Dame Anne Salmond have self-awareness enough to realise she is arguing against MMP and in favour of FPP? Is there an acknowledgement that you can’t construct a system where the Greens and TPM are allowed to ‘distort’ things but NZF and ACT are not?”

We shall come back to Hehir’s question presently. But, before we do, the pithy response of lawyer, and all round go-to guy on electoral matters, Graeme Edgeler, to Dame Anne’s commentary is worth citing:

“It seems like Anne Salmond is proposing a 15% threshold for MMP?”

Why 15 percent? Because, ever since the introduction of MMP 28 years ago, no minor party has ever secured more than 13.35 percent of the Party Vote (NZ First in 1996.) Hence Hehir’s quip about Dame Anne calling for the reintroduction of the First-Past-The-Post electoral system.

But, a return to the old system would not resolve the problem that lies at the heart of Dame Anne’s rather intemperate post. This, stripped of all its distracting rhetoric, boils down to one, key, question: how does one prevent the wrong sort of people, by which, presumably, Dame Anne means “right-wing” sort of people, from gaining access to the most important platform in the land – the House of Representatives?

The answer, as Hehir points out in his tweet, is that you can’t – not without abandoning democracy altogether. If left-wing voters, and Dames, are willing to accept the right of a party receiving 11.6 percent of the Party Vote, let alone one attracting just 3.08 percent, to materially shape the policy agenda of a Labour-led coalition government, then they must also accept the reality of Act and NZ First shaping the policy agenda of Christopher Luxon’s National Party-led coalition.

The problem is: “abandoning democracy” is exactly what a growing proportion of what passes for the Left in 2024 wants to do. Only by getting rid of democracy’s open-ended promises can the “correct” ideas be assured of winning through. Hence, the woke majority of the SNP’s membership’s refusal to acknowledge that the gender recognition reforms that they and the Scottish Greens were advancing would only end up sending a majority of Scottish voters in the direction of less radical electoral alternatives.

We see the same ideological intransigence at work within the American Left. The radical wing of the Democratic Party simply refuses to accept that a clear majority of Americans have grown alarmed and dismayed at the number of migrants making their way into the United States. No matter how damaging their opposition to closing the US-Mexican border might be to the Democratic Party’s electoral fortunes: no matter how many voters the Left’s uncompromising zealotry is driving into the wide-open arms of Donald Trump; their ideologically-driven position is correct – and must prevail.

That same unshakable conviction that they are right, and must prevail, is especially evident in the New Zealand Left’s insistence that the Treaty principles identified by Te Iwi Māori, the Waitangi Tribunal, the Judiciary, the Public Service and Academia are the only ones that count. That a majority of the population might feel uncomfortable with the current, “official”, interpretation of Te Tiriti simply does not signify. Under no circumstances can the ill-informed views of poorly-educated (deplorable?) New Zealanders be permitted to decide the issue.

Hence, the demands from left-wing (and even some right-wing) political commentators for Luxon and the National Party to put their feet down and insist that the Treaty Principles Bill not proceed. Presumably, they are of the view that Act’s David Seymour, and NZ First’s Winston Peters, lack the grit to challenge Luxon. Such people are guilty of, to paraphrase J.R.R. Tolkien, weighing all things to a nicety in the scales of their own malice. They forget that the Right, no less than the “Left”, can, at need, be impressively intransigent.

The opponents of the Treaty Principles Bill are also guilty of forgetting just how adroit a parliamentarian Seymour has already proved himself to be. His End of Life Choice legislation – the ultimate success of which few predicted at the time of the bill’s introduction – is now the law of the land.

Nor should it be assumed that it is only Act’s 8.6 percent of the electorate that are committed to seeing his bill proceed all the way to a referendum. In Saturday’s (27/1/24) edition of the NZ Herald a group calling itself “Democracy Action” inserted a full-page advertisement headed “We Stand With You”, which urged Luxon, Peters and Seymour to be steadfast in the defence of both their electoral mandate and the democratic process. Formed by Aucklanders Lee and Susan Short, Democracy Action has long had the official interpretation of Te Tiriti o Waitangi in its sights. The wealthy couple insist they are not alone.

Nicola Sturgeon and the SDP discovered, to their cost, just how high the price of not keeping faith with one’s voters can be. The Coalition Government would be wise to learn from the Left’s mistakes. The most obvious of which is its truly bizarre belief that intransigent minorities will not be electorally punished for spitting in the face of the majority.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 29 January 2024.

Commentary Is Free – But Facts Are Sacred.

Toeing The Party Line: On the subject of Venezuela, at least, right-wing commentators seem content to pack as much “fake news” around their ideological prejudices as possible, confident that their position on the crisis, by conforming to the official position of the USA and its allies, is most unlikely to blow back upon them in any kind of “career-limiting” way.

POLITICAL COMMENTATORS tell us a great deal about themselves when they turn their gaze away from home, and towards events unfolding overseas. Domestic politics inevitably presents a rather muddied picture. There is so much happening: so many players – all with competing agendas – that achieving clarity is extremely difficult. With events overseas, however, there is much less in the way of clutter. The issues seem so clear, and the players so compelling, that the temptation to apply only the brightest primary colours to one’s analytical canvas is very hard to resist. Muted palettes are best reserved for the politics of one’s own homeland.

The commentary currently being offered up to New Zealand readers on the crisis playing-out in Venezuela strongly confirms these observations. And nowhere is the tendency to apply the brightest colours with the broadest brushstrokes more in evidence than in the commentaries of Liam Hehir.

Hehir is a conservative writer: vehemently and unrelentingly hostile to all things socialist. Hardly surprising, then, that Venezuela and its United Socialist Party government extract from him the most unequivocal political judgements.

As far as Hehir is concerned, the President of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, is a “dictator”, and the election which returned him to power was corruptly “rigged”. What a contrast with the self-proclaimed “Interim President” of Venezuela, Juan Guaido. Described by Hehir as “social-democratic”, this telegenic young man is said to have acted heroically and in complete accordance with his country’s constitution. Hehir is equally certain that the United States has played no dishonourable part in these events. Its only sin: placing itself at the side of the heroic Señor Guaido and the oppressed Venezuelan masses.

Unfortunately for Hehir, none of the above is true.

President Maduro was re-elected in an election certified by international observers as both free and fair. This is hardly surprising, since Venezuela has one of the most tamper-proof electoral systems in the world. That Maduro’s right-wing opponents, young Mr Guaido among them, opted to boycott the last presidential election in no way invalidates the process. Rather, it confirms the opposition parties’ profound political demoralisation, after seeing their candidates soundly defeated in every presidential election since 1999.

Nor is it even remotely true to say that Guaido acted in accordance with the Venezuelan constitution. Article 233, the constitutional provision cited by Hehir and the American government (from which Hehir appears to source all his information) was written to cover the situation in which the President Elect either resigns, is incapacitated, or dies prior to being sworn into office, and there is no formally acknowledged Vice-President available to take his/her place. These are the only circumstances in which the National Assembly is empowered to appoint an Interim President.

Given that Venezuela’s president was officially declared elected and formally sworn into office – along with his vice-president – on 10 January 2019, there is absolutely no legal justification for Guaido’s actions. This is confirmed by Alfred de Zayas, an American lawyer, writer, historian, expert in the field of human rights and international law and retired high-ranking United Nations official, who tweeted on 6 February: “Article 233 of the Venezuelan constitution is inapplicable and cannot be twisted into legitimizing Guaido’s self-proclamation as interim President. A coup is a coup.”

Nor is it even remotely true that Guaido is some sort of benign social-democrat poised to resurrect his country’s mixed, if currently broken, economy. The real Juan Guaido is a far-right activist who has engaged in violent protests against the Venezuelan Government for the past five years. The party he belongs to, Popular Will, scorns the democratic process – preferring direct and highly aggressive action in the streets. Notwithstanding (or, perhaps, because of) its insurrectionary praxis, Popular Will enjoys the fulsome support of the US national security apparatus. (That Popular Will was permitted  to affiliate itself to the “Socialist International”, of whose youth wing our very own Jacinda Ardern was once the president, speaks volumes about the authenticity of the SI’s allegiance to social-democracy – let alone socialism!)

All of this information (and much, much more) is readily available on the Internet. That Hehir has consistently declined to adequately test his bald right-wing assertions about Venezuela; that he relies, instead, on the propaganda pouring out of the United States government and its news media “assets”; tells us a great deal about his approach to political journalism.

On the subject of Venezuela, at least, he seems content to pack as much “fake news” around his ideological prejudices as possible, confident that his position on the crisis, by conforming to the official position of the USA and its allies, is most unlikely to blow back upon him in any kind of “career-limiting” way.

It is, of course, much more difficult to get away with this sort of “journalism” domestically. New Zealand is just too small for Hehir’s lurid misrepresentations of Venezuelan politics to be replicated in his commentaries on Kiwi current affairs.

A truly sobering question remains, however: If political conditions in this country ever deteriorated to the point where journalists were not only permitted, but encouraged, to pack fake news around their own and their publishers’ prejudices, would Liam Hehir’s commitment to telling the truth about what is happening in New Zealand be as strong as his commitment to telling the truth about what is happening in Venezuela?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 12 February 2019.