Australia's Dysfunctional Democracy.

"Don't think of it as a hand on your shoulder, Malcolm. Think of it as a knife in your back." The ultimate beneficiary of the Liberal Party meltdown, Scott Morrison, is a deeply conservative evangelical Christian from one of Sydney’s leafiest suburbs. He replaces Turnbull largely because his name isn’t Peter Dutton – and because his face doesn’t remind the voting public quite so much of Harry Potter’s Lord Voldemort! In policy terms, however, there is very little that distinguishes Morrison from his ultra-conservative colleagues.

NEW ZEALANDERS WATCHED, with mounting incredulity, the meltdown of Australia’s Liberal-National coalition government. What unfolded appeared to be driven almost entirely by a toxic mixture of personal antipathies and oversized egos. Nowhere in the whole unedifying political saga did the interests of the Australian people appear to get a look in.

Mind you, the Australian people had made it easy for Malcolm Turnbull’s enemies. When questioned by the pollsters they had failed to draw a sufficiently clear distinction between the Prime Minister and his increasingly dysfunctional Party Room. Had they praised Malcolm Turnbull, and damned the Liberal Party, then the cause of governmental integrity and stability might have been strong enough to repel Tony Abbott, Peter Dutton and their reckless co-conspirators.

As it was, the polls and a swag of dispiriting by-election results in Queensland and elsewhere across Australia provided Abbott and Dutton with the pretext they needed for a leadership spill. Never mind that the declining popularity of the Liberals was almost entirely attributable to the party’s conservative faction’s blank refusal to accept that most Australians wanted nothing to do with their reactionary ideas.

Not even the decisive result of the informal plebiscite on Gay Marriage was enough to convince them that they were out-of-touch with mainstream Australia. They clung to the demonstrably false notion that “Real Australians” were with them.

Though fantastical, this conservative conviction was constantly reinforced by reactionaries in the news media. The views of a decided minority of the Australian electorate were thus supplied with amplification out of all proportion to their true demographic weight. As Dr Goebbels discovered more than eighty years ago: a fantasy repeated often enough will, eventually, take on the colour of reality.

Poor Malcolm Turnbull was, therefore, dammed if he did attempt to reassert the liberalism implicit in his party’s name; and damned if he didn’t. The deeply conservative ideology of the Liberal PM, John Howard, has become practically ineradicable from Liberal Party ranks. Turnbull may have been able to oust Abbot from The Lodge, but he could never muster the numbers to oust the conservative faction’s racism, misogyny, homophobia and purblind climate change denialism.

The ultimate winner of the Liberal Party leadership, Scott Morrison, is a deeply conservative evangelical Christian from one of Sydney’s leafiest suburbs. He replaces Turnbull largely because his name isn’t Peter Dutton – and because his face doesn’t remind the voting public quite so much of Harry Potter’s Lord Voldemort! In policy terms, however, there is very little that distinguishes Morrison from his ultra-conservative colleagues.

But, it is with these largely cosmetic considerations that the Australian political system’s willingness to be guided by the wishes of the electorate ends. The notion that the major political parties might still aggregate and organise the interests of clear and readily comprehensible chunks of the population: businessmen and professionals; shopkeepers and farmers; workers and intellectuals; has long since ceased to correspond to any recognisable description of political reality on either side of the Tasman.

To be fair, most of the voting public has enthusiastically reciprocated the politicians’ lack of interest. Over the course of the past 30-40 years membership of political parties in both New Zealand and Australia has plummeted. Most voters now draw little distinction between a Member of Parliament and any other variety of highly-paid public servant. The crucial democratic role which the people’s representatives are supposed to play is no longer generally appreciated. As the unedifying spectacle of Malcolm Turnbull’s deposition unfolded before their eyes over the third week in August, the response of most Aussies was to angrily instruct MPs to: “Do your f***ing job!”

But, if the people are no longer sovereign – then who is? It’s a tricky question. In the days of Robert Menzies or Rob Muldoon it was pretty clear to everyone who ran the show. Nowadays, however, respect for the party leader tends to last only as long as the polls remain favourable. But, when public support falters, the most treacherous and ambitious politicians look in the mirror and ask the oldest question is politics: “Why not me?”

The historical precedent, therefore, is not that of a powerful monarchy like England or France, but of Poland or Scotland. Weak kingdoms brought down by the unceasing intrigues and inveterate treachery of aristocrats who cared more for themselves than they did for their country.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 31 August 2018.

Unreliable Sources.

Alarmist Images: As part of the Australian Government's effort to undermine Jacinda Ardern's outreach to Manus Island refugees, Australian Intelligence (oxymoron?) sources claim to have recorded a "spike" in people smugglers' attempts to land asylum seekers on Australian shores. These claims have been illustrated with images of boat-people headed for "Newsland". Few of those absorbing these images will realise they are 7 years old!

IS IT REAL NEWS, or fake news? In the end, it all comes down to sources. The people and the institutions we most trust, are the people and the institutions we most believe.

For those who lived through the Second World War, the words “London calling! London calling!”, which prefaced the BBC World Service’s news broadcasts, signalled accuracy, reliability and dignity in a world awash with bombastic propaganda.

President Donald Trump’s followers place their faith in the “fair and balanced” reporting of Fox News. His opponents rely on the Washington Post, whose intrepid reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, covered the Watergate break-in and contributed to the fall of President Richard Nixon.

Why were Woodward and Bernstein so sure of their ground? Because their most valuable anonymous source – “Deep Throat” – was none other than Mark Felt, the Associate-Director of the FBI! Good sources make for good stories. The rule is as old as journalism.

What, then, should we make of the latest stories, sourced to “Australian Intelligence”, of a “spike” in the number of “boat people” intercepted en route to Australia and, allegedly, New Zealand? Are such reports to be taken seriously? And should the National Party Opposition really be using them as a stick against Jacinda Ardern’s handling of the Manus Island refugee crisis? Just how good a look is it to rely upon leaks from a foreign government, in order to have a crack at your own?

The first thing to observe about these “intelligence” leaks is that they shouldn’t be happening. Just recall the repeated, blank-faced refusals of Helen Clark and John Key to share even the tiniest scraps of “operational” intelligence with the New Zealand news media. Even when the details of New Zealand’s involvement in special forces operations overseas were published in foreign newspapers, the politicians remained tight-lipped. As for the directors of our own intelligence agencies: the SIS and the GCSB; their mouths appear to have been sewn shut!

Which can only mean that “Australian Intelligence” is leaking information to the Australian and New Zealand news media under instruction and on purpose. Which immediately raises the question: What can that purpose be?

Before we attempt to answer that question, however, there are one or two other things to note about these Australian Intelligence-sourced stories. The most important of these is a disturbing lack of detail. Apart from the improbably precise figure of 164 intercepted asylum seekers, New Zealanders have been given precious little in the way of incontrovertible evidence.

The Royal Australian Navy and its Coast Guard are equipped with multiple video cameras to record any and every interception in Australian waters. If a small flotilla of “boat people” had indeed put to sea, inspired by Jacinda Ardern’s international displays of compassion, then it would be a straightforward matter to release the video recordings of its interception to the news media. What better way to make the Aussie Immigration Minister Peter Dutton’s case, than to record an asylum seeker naming New Zealand’s prime minister as the reason she and her children are risking their lives in a leaky boat?

What we have been shown, instead, is a seven-year-old photograph showing Sri Lankan refugees displaying a sign which reads: “We like to go to NEWSLAND.” Interesting, but hardly relevant to the situation in 2018!

This promiscuous mixing of dated imagery, emotive language, and uncorroborated assertion is almost always evidence of an unreliable source. Which raises, once again, the question of whether or not there is any method to the Australians’ madness? Why is the Turnbull Government persisting in its attacks on New Zealand’s new prime minister?

The most probable cause of this spike in Australian pique is the deteriorating situation on Manus Island. There, the already deplorable conditions into which hundreds of male asylum-seekers were pitched, following the forcible closure of the New Guinea government-owned (but Australian government-controlled) detention centre, have continued to deteriorate.

The Turnbull Government’s latest leaks would, therefore, appear to be pre-emptive in intent. If Manus erupts in riotous violence, attracting global scrutiny and condemnation, as well as a reiteration of New Zealand’s willingness to take at least 150 of the refugees trapped on the island, then the Liberal-National Government has primed its trans-Tasman soulmates in the National Party to step forward and entertain Kiwi voters with “Australian Intelligence’s” grim fairy tales.

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 26 January 2018.

Not Quite An Act Of War: Analysing Australia’s Push-Back Against Jacinda’s Manus Island Outreach.

Real Human Suffering: In the face of the extraordinary Australian push-back against the government of Jacinda Ardern, it is important to remember the people at the centre of this controversy - the appallingly-treated victims of Australia's "Pacific Solution" who remain trapped on Papua New Guinea's Manus Island.

YOU HAVE TO GO BACK A LONG WAY to find anything remotely resembling Australia’s current treatment of New Zealand. For a supposedly friendly government to deliberately inject inflammatory disinformation into the political bloodstream of its supposedly closest neighbour is an extraordinarily provocative act. Not quite an act of war, but the sort of intervention that can all-too-easily provoke a catastrophic loss of trust.

It’s the sort of thing that the Soviets and the Americans used to do to one another all the time during the Cold War. Except, of course, those two superpowers were ideological and geopolitical rivals of the first order. It takes a real effort to re-cast the relationship between New Zealand and Australia in similar terms. Nevertheless, it’s an effort we are now obliged to make.

So, what is it that Australia has done? Essentially, its national security apparatus (presumably at the instigation of their political leaders) has released, mostly through media surrogates, a number of related stories calculated to inflame the prejudices of a certain type of New Zealander.

Like Australia, New Zealand harbours a frighteningly large number of racists. Politically-speaking, such people are easily aroused and have few qualms about setting-off ugly, racially-charged, debates on talkback radio, in the letters columns of the daily newspapers and across social media. These individuals are trouble enough when all they have to fight with are their own stereotypes and prejudices. Arm them with the carefully assembled disinformation of “fake news” and they instantly become quite dangerous.

And yet, this is exactly what the Australian authorities have done. Planting stories in their own press (knowing they will be picked up almost immediately by our own) about at least four boatloads of illegal immigrants that have set out for New Zealand only to be intercepted and turned back by the ever-vigilant officers of the Royal Australian Navy and their Coast Guard comrades. The purpose of this story (unsourced and lacking in detail, making it, almost certainly, fake news) was to paint New Zealand’s prime minister as an ill-informed and ungrateful diplomatic naïf: an inexperienced young idealist who doesn’t know which way is up when it comes to dealing with real-world problems.

This, alone, was an extraordinary intervention. To gauge how extraordinary, just turn it around. Imagine the reaction in Australia if some unnamed person in New Zealand’s national security apparatus leaked a memo to one of this country’s daily newspapers in which the negative diplomatic and economic consequences of being tainted by association with Australia’s flouting of international law is set forth in clinical detail. If the memo also contained a collection of highly critical assessments of Turnbull’s cabinet colleagues, allegedly passed-on by a number of unnamed western diplomats, then so much the better!

Canberra would not be impressed!

If the Australians had left it at just one intervention, then perhaps New Zealanders could simply have shrugged it off as yet another case of bad behaviour from the land of the under-arm bowlers. But when have the Aussies ever left it at “just one”?

The next intervention came in the form of “Ian” – formerly a guard (or so he said) at both the Nauru and Manus Island detention centres. For reasons it has yet to adequately explain, RNZ’s Checkpoint programme provided “Ian” with nearly ten, largely uninterrupted, minutes of air-time during which he poured-forth a stream of accusations and characterisations which, to put it mildly, painted the protesters occupying the decommissioned Manus Island facility in the most lurid and disquieting colours. The detainees were criminals, drug-dealers – paedophiles even! Not at all the sort of people New Zealanders would want in their country.

“Ian”, it turns out, is a “witness” well-known to the many Australian NGOs that have taken up the cause of the detainees on Manus and Nauru. They have noted the curious similarities between “Ian’s” supposedly personal observations and experiences, and the inflammatory talking-points constantly reiterated by Australia’s hard-line Immigration Minister, Peter Dutton. A cynic might describe the grim “testimony” of “Ian” and Dutton as mutually reinforcing.

No matter. New Zealand’s racist, Islamophobic and militantly anti-immigrant community had been supplied with yet another truckload of Australian-manufactured ammunition.

Enough? Not hardly! Only this morning (17/11/17) New Zealanders were fed the shocking “news” that the protesting Manus Island detainees are harbouring within their ranks an unspecified number of men guilty of having debauched and prostituted local girls as young as 10 and 13!

Too much? Over the top? Redolent of the very worst instances of the murderous racial-incitement for which the Deep South of the United States was so rightly infamous? It sure is! Which is why we must hope that the Internet does not operate on Manus Island. Because, if the local inhabitants were to read on-line that the detainees were responsible for prostituting their daughters, what might they NOT do?

One almost feels that the Australian spooks behind this extraordinary disinformation campaign would actually be delighted if the locals burned down the Manus Island detention centre with the protesting detainees inside it.

“This is what comes of 37-year-old Kiwi prime ministers meddling in matters they know nothing about!” That would be the consistent theme of the right-wing Australian media. It would not take long for the same line to be picked up here: first on social media, and then by more mainstream media outlets. Right-wing outrage, mixed with a gleeful “we told you so!”, could not, however, be contained within the news media for very long. Inevitably, the more outré inhabitants of the Opposition’s back bench would take possession of the controversy, from there it would cascade down rapidly to Opposition politicians nearer the front.

Before her enemies could say: “It’s all your fault!”, Jacinda would find herself under withering political fire from both sides of the Tasman. Canberra would register her increasingly fragile government’s distress with grim satisfaction.

As the men and women responsible for organising “Operation Stardust” deleted its final folder, and fed the last incriminating document into the paper-shredder, one or two of them might even have voiced a judiciously muted “Mission Accomplished!”

This essay was posted simultaneously on Bowalley Road and The Daily Blog of Saturday, 18 November 2017.

Australia: Seeing What We Have To See.

"Here's looking at you, kid." But what does Jacinda Ardern see when she looks at the Australian PM, Malcolm Turnbull? A friend and ally? The dissimulating representative of an arrogant and aggressive regional bully? Or, the ruthless commandant of a terrifying collection of fetid tropical concentration camps?

WHAT DOES IT MEAN when otherwise intelligent people look at something – and don’t see it? How do people train themselves to misperceive – and therefore misrepresent – the reality before their eyes?

Paul Simon’s song, ‘The Boxer’, explains it like this:

I have squandered my resistance 

For a pocketful of mumbles,

Such are promises. All lies and jest.

Still, a man hears what he wants to hear

And disregards the rest.

Faced with the deepening humanitarian crisis on Manus Island, why is the New Zealand Government, like the boxer, only seeing what it wants to see, and disregarding the rest?

What should our new government be seeing?

First and foremost, it should see the Australian Government’s policy on illegal immigration by sea as an exercise in imposing immediate cruelty to achieve long-term kindness. Assailed by the victims of corrupt criminal enterprises: the desperate men, women and children being sent out in flimsy boats, foundering on the high seas and drowning; successive Australian Governments have embarked upon a programme of extreme deterrence.

Refugees and economic migrants attempting to circumvent Australia’s official immigration policies, by sailing there illegally, will be treated with the utmost harshness. Without the slightest regard for age or gender, they will be interned in fetid tropical concentration camps; brutally mistreated; and informed, coldly, that under no circumstances will the Australian Government ever permit them, or their offspring, to set foot on Australian soil.

And, it’s worked. The terrifying example presented to potential “boat people” by the inhabitants of the Manus Island and Nauru detention centres has had the desired effect. The criminal middle-men have found fewer and fewer individuals and families willing to pay them the huge sums of money they had previously been able to demand for a journey to Australian shores. People smuggling has become uneconomic. The leaky boats have stopped sailing and their passengers have stopped dying.

When criticised, the Australian Government simply points to the situation in the Mediterranean. The European Union’s “humanitarian” policy of rescuing and receiving boat people has resulted in a huge expansion of people-smuggling. Every week, thousands of refugees and illegal migrants set sail from North Africa for Spain and Italy. Of those thousands, many hundreds – men, women and children – drown at sea.

On 17 June 2017, the British e-newspaper, The Independent, reported that: “More than 2,000 migrants have died attempting treacherous boat crossings to Europe so far this year”. That number must now be approaching 4,000.

These are the numbers that the Australian Government points to as justification for the astonishing cruelty of its policies. The so-called “Pacific Solution” may not be pretty to look at, runs the official argument, but it saves lives. Mothers’ lives. Children’s lives. “If we gave in to the demands of our critics,” say the Australian authorities, “we wouldn’t just have detainees, we’d have blood, on our hands!”

In the authorities’ eyes, the actions of the Australian navy, in intercepting the people-smugglers’ vessels and towing them back to their departure points; and the harsh internment regimes subsidised by the Australian state; are not only the delivery mechanisms for effective policy, but they are also entirely morally defensible. By their reckoning, it is the “humanitarian” NGOs; the groups which insist on “saving” the boat people, that have thousands of drowned human-beings on their consciences – not the Australian Government. For every boatload of refugees and illegal migrants that are “saved”: ten, twenty, thirty more overloaded and leaking death-traps are encouraged to set sail.

Faced with an adamant Australian Government which is utterly convinced that it is doing the right thing vis-à-vis illegal immigration by sea, what should the New Zealand Government do?

If we engage the Aussies in a full-scale moral debate on this issue, can we even be sure of winning it? With the example of the EU’s policy before us; and with the Australians arguably blocking the people-smuggling routes to New Zealand as well as to their own country; might we not expose ourselves to the charge of allowing our kind hearts to get in the way of the higher moral good of breaking the people-smuggling trade?

Let’s assume, however, that we are capable of refuting the Australians’ moral arguments (their policies are, after all in breach of numerous international covenants to which New Zealand remains firmly committed) what, then, should be our course of action?

Some are arguing that we should negotiate directly with the government of Papua-New Guinea. But, that really would be evidence of our diplomatic blindness! The government of Papua-New Guinea is almost entirely in the thrall of the Australian Government – its former colonial master. Ostensibly a democracy, the country is, in fact, a corrupt kleptocracy whose senior ministers are pretty-much the bought-and-paid-for playthings of Canberra. Were we to ask Port Moresby if it was willing to allow New Zealand to take 150 detainees off their hands, its officials would simply pick up the phone and ask Canberra if that would be okay.  Canberra would say “No!” – and that would be that. The same applies to the supposedly independent state of Nauru – another Pacific regime morally and politically compromised by the Australians’ Pacific Solution.

All of which should tell us exactly what we are looking at when we fix our gaze on Australia.

Because it’s not just big Papua-New Guinea, and tiny Nauru, who find themselves in no position to do anything other than obey without question the dictates of Canberra. Australia may not have purchased our politicians, the way it has in other parts of the Pacific, but that’s only because they don’t need to. Our Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade is quite capable of assessing this country’s strategic economic, military and diplomatic interests without the need for Canberra to spell them out for us.

What Jacinda saw when she arrived at Kiribili House on Sunday was what she wanted to see. Our good friend and ally, the Australian prime minister. She comported herself accordingly: joshing and joking; and reporting (politely) on her Government’s response to Australia’s latest policy decisions.

Had she seen anything else: a nation able to break the New Zealand economy at will, for example, or, a regime prepared to be almost unbelievably ruthless and brutal in the pursuit of its national objectives. Had she registered a nation arming itself to the teeth in preparation for projecting “Five Eyes” power north, into the Indonesian archipelago, east, into the Pacific, and west, into the strategically vital Indian ocean, and which looks upon its “little mate”, New Zealand, as a lucrative source of economic tribute, a handy supplier of skilled labour, a cheap holiday destination, and, at need, an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” fortuitously positioned to defend Australia’s eastern flank; then what, realistically, could she have done?

Other than josh, and joke, and hope like hell that Australia never decides to treat Kiwis the way it treats the detainees on Manus Island and Nauru.

Oh, wait a minute …

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 7 November 2017.

Equally Disappointing: What Should We Take From The Australian Election?

Sitting Pretty: Even if Australia's incumbent Liberal Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, somehow manages to scrape together a ramshackle government, Bill Shorten has almost certainly done enough to keep his ALP colleagues’ daggers in their sheaths. Labor’s voters are especially delighted that Turnbull’s discomfiture is the result of Shorten turning the Liberals’ own weapons against them.

 

BILL SHORTEN’S FOREWARNINGS may yet ensure a rich electoral harvest for the Australian Labor Party. His prediction that Medicare, Australia’s public health system, would be at risk if Malcolm Turnbull and his Liberal-National Coalition were returned to office certainly focused the minds of Australia’s poor. Fear of losing Gough Whitlam’s greatest legacy to the Australian people, combined with Compulsory Voting (which ensures that poor Australians actually vote) may yet be enough to make Shorten Australia’s next prime minister.
 

Even if Turnbull somehow manages to scrape together a ramshackle government, Shorten has almost certainly done enough to keep his ALP colleagues’ daggers in their sheaths. Labor’s voters are especially delighted that Turnbull’s discomfiture is the result of Shorten turning the Liberals’ own weapons against them.
 

Election after election, the Liberals and their right-wing media allies have employed scare tactics against Labor. This time, however, it was Labor doing the scarifying. What’s more, those scare tactics contained a sizeable kernel of truth. The Liberals would relish the privatisation of Medicare. Why? Because it’s an article of ideological faith among Australia’s “economic rationalists” that the private sector is better at supplying services than the state. To claim, as Turnbull did – repeatedly and with growing exasperation – that his party harboured no such intentions raised disingenuousness to new heights.
 

Shorten’s tactics recall those employed by Helen Clark in the New Zealand general election of 2005. On that occasion the warning issued was about housing and the likely consequences for state house tenants of a Don Brash/National Party win. It was enough to see the large South Auckland polling booths tip the balance in Labour’s favour.
 

Twelve years on, and Labour’s 2005 warnings concerning housing and the fate of state house tenants are being vindicated almost daily. That it has taken so long is because National’s ideological antagonism towards state housing, which Don Brash displayed openly and honestly, has been camouflaged and concealed by John Key’s government.
 

It has been National’s intention, ever since winning power in 2008, to eliminate the state as New Zealand’s default housing provider. According to the economist, and author of “Generation Rent”, Shamubeel Eaqub, New Zealand’s stock of state houses – proportional to its population – is at levels not seen since 1949. At the core of National’s housing policy is the all-too-familiar neoliberal negation of the state’s capacity to respond to social need. In terms of practical policy, this is expressed by facilitating the entrenchment of the private sector as the only legitimate provider of housing – even for the poor.
 

The radicalism of this new policy regime is only slowly being recognised. Much easier to spot has been the sudden emergence into public view of the consequences of the state abdicating its role as housing provider of last resort. The grim spectacle of families living in their cars has stimulated public outrage and forced the National Government’s hand.
 

At the National Party’s 80th annual conference, held in Christchurch over the weekend, the Prime Minister announced the establishment of a billion-dollar Housing Infrastructure Fund (HIF) to kick start what is intended to be a local government-administered housing construction programme. This latter effort seems likely to become the responsibility of a new legal entity – the Urban Development Authority (UDA). The first cities to receive a UDA will be those currently experiencing the fastest population growth: Auckland, Hamilton, Tauranga, Christchurch and Queenstown. The HIF will not, however, be empowered to issue genuine grants to these cities, only loans, and the funds expended are to facilitate the plans of private property developers exclusively.
 

Dismissed by Labour Leader, Andrew Little, as “a rushed, piecemeal policy that hasn’t been thought through”, Key will, nevertheless, be hoping that voters receive these announcements as evidence that his Government is, at last, “doing something”. It is nowhere near enough, but unless Labour executes a radical overhaul of its own, very similar, housing policies, Key’s latest efforts will be compared not unfavourably with his opponents’.
 

The extraordinarily close finish in the Australian general election is, in part, a reflection of the extremely drab selection of colours in which both the Left and the Right were content to paint their country’s future. What most Australians experienced was an overlong campaign characterised by limitation, negation and fear. Without the enforced participation of Compulsory Voting, Turnbull’s Liberal-National Coalition would have been returned handily. The self-interest of the “Haves” would have seen to that.
 

To ensure the participation of the “Have Nots” in 2017, New Zealand Labour will have to offer much more than Shorten-style scare-tactics. To compensate for the lack of compulsory voting, Little needs to devise a campaign that is expansive, affirmative and chock-full of hope.
 

If a broad programme of state house construction does not lie at the heart of that campaign, then a hung parliament will be the most that Labour deserves.
 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 5 July 2016.

Governing For The Boardroom – From The Barroom.

Cheers, Tony! As an opposition leader, Abbott made the Barroom his own, championing its prejudices and magnifying its fears. Upon becoming prime minister, however, he attempted to ram the Boardroom’s agenda down the Barroom’s throat. As a strategy it proved fatal. The Barroom turned decisively against him, driving his government underwater in the polls. It’s hard to help the Boardroom when you’re drowning.

 

THE ROLLING of Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, offers some interesting lessons in the conduct of right-wing politics. The multi-millionaire businessman and lawyer, Malcolm Turnbull, who instigated the “spill”, is generally identified as the candidate of Australia’s boardrooms – someone to finally make good on his predecessor’s promise that “Australia is open for business!” Abbott, on the other hand, might best be described as the candidate of the Australian barroom. A politician with whom the “little Aussie Battler”, and his mates, were more than happy to have a beer with.

 

Turnbull caught many Kiwis off-guard by holding up their own prime minister, John Key, as the very model of a modern conservative leader. Was Turnbull’s fulsome accolade inspired by the fact that Key (also a multi-millionaire) seemed to be as comfortable in the barrooms of New Zealand as he was in its boardrooms – maybe even more so? Acutely aware that in the Party Room he had just left, Boardroom and Barroom were at daggers drawn, and that he faced a Herculean task in drawing the patrician and plebeian Liberals back together, Turnbull can be forgiven for envying Key’s ability to keep a foot in both camps.

 

The prime minister John Key defeated, Helen Clark, had tried to do the same, but with only limited success. No matter how many times she speeded to an All Black test-match, or waved at the Warriors’ Rugby League fans, very few (if any) New Zealanders were fooled. Everyone knew that Clark was more comfortable at the Opera than the footy. And the blokes who drank beer never really saw themselves sipping Chardonnay with “Helen”.

 

On the face of it, this shouldn’t have mattered. Clark was, after all, a Labour Party leader. The loyalty of the blokes in the barroom was, supposedly, a political given. And, for a little while, it held. Clark’s gender, which, normally, would have counted against her in many barrooms, was neutralised by the fact that the Nats had also chosen a woman to lead them – and a pretty scary one at that! It did not take long, however, for the Barroom’s welcome to wear out.

 

No matter how hard she tried to signal her endorsement of the plebs’ pleasures, the conviction grew that it was all a little disingenuous. To the blokes in the barroom, Clark came across as someone who inhabited a different world. Not the boardroom, exactly, although she was doing everything she could to be accepted there, but another sort of room. They might have struggled to recall its proper name, but they knew exactly what sort of room Clark would feel most comfortable sitting in – a university common-room.

 

Key observed the steady alienation of Clark’s barroom allies and drew the appropriate lesson. Whatever else he did as New Zealand’s prime minister, he must never allow the blokes in the barroom to form even the faintest outline of a notion that he thought he was better than they were, or that he considered their views to be bigoted and ill-informed. If the Barroom listened to Newstalk-ZB, or Radio Sport, or The Edge – then he would talk to them from there. The listeners to Radio New Zealand’s “Morning Report” would just have to suck it up. The ones who voted National would forgive his nonappearances. The others didn’t matter.

 

John Key: Just one of the guys.

 

The Boardroom might have sniffed at this sort of pandering to the hoi-polloi, but Key knew better than to worry too much about the prejudices of the “1 Percent”. They may control an obscene percentage of the nation’s wealth, but their share of the nation’s votes would always and only be – 1 percent. Not that as a One-Percenter, himself, Key was in any way unsympathetic to the Boardroom’s needs – far from it. What he’d learned from Clark, however, is that, in a democracy, it pays to make haste slowly – always allowing time for the doubters to be persuaded.

 

As an opposition leader, Abbott made the Barroom his own, championing its prejudices and magnifying its fears. Upon becoming prime minister, however, he attempted to ram the Boardroom’s agenda down the Barroom’s throat. As a strategy it proved fatal. The Barroom turned decisively against him, driving his government underwater in the polls. It’s hard to help the Boardroom when you’re drowning.

 

If Malcolm Turnbull’s wise, he’ll cultivate John Key’s taste for beer.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 25 September 2015.

Where Loyalty No Longer Counts.

He's Behind You! Malcolm Turnbull rolls Tony Abbott with ruthless efficiency. Ain’t it always the way? Politicians like Abbott and his Treasurer, Joe Hockey, are invaluable in the ruck, kicking and gauging where the ref can’t see their infringements. But they’re not the sort of guys you send up to receive the cup from the Governor-General. Team captains have a certain look – and poor Tony Abbott never had it. Just a little too excitable. Too much the true believer. Unable to compromise. Not really clubbable.

 

YOU CAN’T HELP ADMIRING the Aussies. There’s a raw energy about them that grabs, and holds, your attention. A brutal kind of honesty, too, which is equally compelling.

 

It was all there on display, on Monday night, as Malcolm Turnbull’s faction of the Liberal Party cut down Tony Abbott and his lieutenants with chilling efficiency. Watching Sky News Australia’s seven-hour, live-commentary marathon, I couldn’t help but be impressed.

The way Abbott’s loyal ministers were rotated through the Sky News studio, each one just a little more desperate than the last, seemingly unable to believe that they were in the middle of the very thing they had railed against when the hapless Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard were hacking away at each other on prime time – a leadership spill involving a sitting Prime Minister.

 

“Good God! As a country we’re better than this!” Was Abbott’s anguished observation as the realisation that Turnbull was about to remove him from power finally beat its way past his emotional defences and made contact with the rational centre of his brain.

 

Paul Murray, a big, burly, bearded bloke, who makes his living telling Sky’s right-wing viewers “what’s really going on” spent the night acting as Abbott’s emotional proxy.

 

Right-wing Commentator, Paul Murray. Abbott's emotional proxy.

 

Alternately flailing his arms about in a balletic combination of anger and despair, and roaring defiance at a studio full of journalists and commentators who were clearly relishing the slow demise of the “Mad Monk” (as Abbott’s less charitable fellow citizens were wont to call him) Murray more and more came to resemble a baited bear. It seemed inevitable that the smooth young fellow seated well within range of Murray’s agitated paws would offer one acerbic taunt too many and end up smearing claret all over the studio floor.

 

I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the poor joker. Especially when he blurted out the obviously painful question about whether it was any longer possible for conservative politicians like Tony Abbott to survive in the tolerant culture of twenty-first century Australia. You could read the anguish plainly on his bluff features as he internally answered his own question.

 

Because, of course, the answer is “No, Paul, it’s no longer possible.”

 

Not that his sort of Aussie is easy to convince. Not even when the Irish – yes, the Irish! – vote in favour of Marriage Equality. That’s right, Rome’s most dutiful daughter, snapping her fingers at the Clergy like she just didn’t care anymore about who did what, where, and to whom – just so long as love got a look in there somewhere.

 

Why couldn’t the Liberal Party Right see it? Why didn’t Abbott just declare a free vote on the Marriage Equality issue and save his rapidly diminishing supply of bullets for something that really mattered – like getting the deficit down and keeping all those tailored suits in the high towers of Sydney and Melbourne smiling their special, self-satisfied, squatocratic smiles.

 

Sacking the bloody useless Joe Hockey was the easiest way to do that, but Tony just wouldn’t. Loyal to a fault, poor fella. As Murray put it: “He was loyal in a game where loyalty no longer counts.” Honestly, I thought the guy was going to cry.

 

The other journos in the studio just shrugged. They knew it was all over for Abbott when reports from a weekend corporate shindig started filtering back to the Canberra press gallery. Turnbull had been present and, apparently, he had the more than 400 business leaders present eating out of his hand.

 

Secure in the knowledge that the mood of the boardroom was solidly behind a change at the top, the silver-haired millionaire locked and loaded his supporters for a leadership spill on Monday afternoon.

 

Ain’t it always the way? Politicians like Abbott and Hockey are invaluable in the ruck, kicking and gauging where the ref can’t see their infringements. But they’re not the sort of guys you send up to receive the cup from the Governor-General. Team captains have a certain look – and poor Tony Abbott never had it. Just a little too excitable. Too much the true believer. Unable to compromise. Not really clubbable.

 

Not that anybody’s ever going to say that about Malcolm Turnbull. Like that other Malcolm, the late Malcolm Fraser, he fits right in – a leader in the Menzies tradition.

 

Not a pair of Speedos in sight.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 18 September 2015.