Unstoppable And Explosive.

An Awesome Power: The metaphor of the erupting volcano is often pressed into service by journalists and historians. Understandably, since political upheavals, like volcanic eruptions, tend to take all but the most attentive observers by surprise. The existing political order, like a dormant volcano, seems stable right up until the moment it blows apart. 

IT’S VOLCANOLOGISTS who detect the first signs of the pending eruption. Barely discernible tremors, swarms of them, imperceptible to those not equipped with a seismograph, but indicative of something stirring beneath the seemingly solid earth. Magma, rising from the depths, disturbs an equilibrium that may have endured for centuries, causing the ground to shake. Inside the volcano things are heating up. Expanding gases create fissures in the volcano’s flanks, asphyxiating birds and other creatures caught in their invisible plumes. The quakes grow more violent. The air reverberates eerily – as if the mountain itself is groaning. In the final few hours before eruption, the volcano begins to deform, swelling ominously as the magma and the superheated gases expanding ahead of it approach the surface. Finally, with a roar like that of a stricken god, the volcano belches millions of tons of molten rock and ash into the upper atmosphere. For miles, across the landscape, Hell rises and walks around.

The metaphor of the erupting volcano is often pressed into service by journalists and historians. Understandably, since political upheavals, like volcanic eruptions, tend to take all but the most attentive observers by surprise. The existing political order, like a dormant volcano, seems stable right up until the moment it blows apart. Destroyed by forces which have been gathering strength for weeks and months right under the authorities’ noses – not so much unnoticed – as disregarded.

In this volcanic metaphor, the role of the seismograph is played by the polling agencies. It is the pollster who picks up the first tremors of political mobilisation. Barely noticed at first, generating results well inside the margin-of-error, but real nonetheless. Unmistakable evidence that beneath the familiar political topology magma is rising, gases are heating, hitherto solid rock is melting.

It was Act which provided the first indication that the fragile equilibrium established in the aftermath of the Covid Earthquake was coming apart.

As National began its belated rise towards electoral respectability (i.e. a Party Vote in the low-to-mid 40s) it soon became clear that getting there, and staying there, was more than it could accomplish. Meanwhile, the angry Right was refusing to cool down. New Zealand society was being changed radically, and without the permission of those who saw changing things as their prerogative. Moreover, National didn’t seem to be that bothered – as if they regarded the changes as tolerable.

Act’s take-off in the polls was the first sign of the roiling masses of magma churning away deep below the surface. More than willing to take the hard lines that National was eschewing, Act gave voice to the fears of those whose long-established privileges were being challenged by proudly insubordinate social movements pushing transformational ideas about ethnicity and gender.

Below the Me Too and Black Lives Matter agitation, however, and below the bewildering claims of the transgender activists, there was an upward thrusting force that at once empowered and overwhelmed the causes which Act and its fellow travellers dismissed as “Woke”. This was the magma of Māori nationalism, the expanding force of a people whose numbers and aspirations simply refused to stop growing.

The Māori Question was being put to Pakeha New Zealanders with an urgency born of too many wrong and/or misleading historical answers. It was heating the rhetorical gases of the Left, but it was not the Left. To the defenders of Pakeha privilege, however, the denizens of old New Zealand, two things were terrifyingly clear. That all this “Māori stuff” was huge – and that it was rising inexorably towards the surface of New Zealand politics.

Act placed itself athwart the Māori nationalists’ path. It promised to turn back the relentless advance of “Aotearoa” against “New Zealand”. The Treaty of Waitangi would be re-written, all traces of co-governance, would be swept away. A new, written constitution would entrench Pakeha privilege forever. But, these were horizontal solutions: as if the Māori cause was an army advancing towards a defensible border; a force that could be stopped and turned around.

Wrong metaphor.

The upward thrust of the Māori cause is magma – unstoppable and potentially explosive. It may flow down the slopes of New Zealand as lava, reshaping the state in dramatic and irreversible fashion. Or, blocked by the congealed rock of racist resistance in its throat, its pressure will grow and grow until New Zealand disappears in an explosion of fire and ash, leaving behind only Aotearoa.

Therefore, take note of the latest Roy Morgan poll. In that dramatic upward tick of Te Pāti Māori – to a system-busting 7 percent – perceive the first, tell-tale tremors of a political eruption in the making. It is the young people, the rangatahi, who are rising. Not simply in response to Act’s futile policies of obstruction and suppression, but because there is in them a passion for growth and expansion that must, by whatever means necessary, find its way to the sky.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 7 July 2023.

Not Quite Enough "Passionate Intensity".

The Fire And The Fury: And so, they came out and voted for him – four million more of them (and counting) than turned out for Trump in 2016. Not quite enough, it would seem, to keep their Rough Beast in the White House. But close. Far too close.

PRESIDENT BIDEN. It has a reassuring ring. A democratic ring, too, given that more Americans have voted for Joe Biden than for any other presidential candidate in US history. That is hardly surprising, since the last time such a large percentage of eligible Americans turned out to vote the year was 1900 – twenty years before US women secured the franchise! And yet, in spite of all these hopeful portents, the world is not ready to cheer – not yet.

Because it is close. Very close. So much closer than, in theory, it should be. In theory, a big turnout equals a big Democratic Party victory. For decades, the political scientists have argued that if it is poor and marginalised Americans who are boosting the numbers voting, then, overwhelmingly, they will be voting for the party which, ever since the Great Depression of the 1930s, has presented itself as the friend of the ordinary American working man and woman.

That theory now lies in tatters. The huge surge in voting numbers has, in large measure, been a bi-partisan surge. Yes, the Democrats have turned out their vote, but so have the Republicans. The latter’s strategists learned the art of the “ground game” from, of all people, Barack Obama, whose campaign team pioneered new and highly effective methods of identifying and mobilising the Democratic vote. Even those pundits sympathetic to the Democratic Party have conceded the superiority of the Republicans’ ground game in key battleground states.

But it wasn’t just the party’s ground game that turned out the Republican vote, it was Trump himself. With the energy of a man half his age, the President criss-crossed the United States on Air Force One, sometimes speaking to as many as four rallies in a single day.

The veteran Republican strategist, Karl Rove, famously advised those wishing to understand American politics to watch the television news with the sound turned down. Anyone following his advice over the course of the final few days of the campaign would have seen Trump, pumped-up and punching the air in front of rapturous crowds. Biden, careful and Covid-wary, spoke to car-parks full of masked and socially-distanced voters. With the sound down you wouldn’t even have been able to hear the beeping of their horns.

Observing these very different events from afar, it is difficult not to be reminded of the following lines from W. B. Yeats’ famous poem, The Second Coming:

The Blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

It is also very difficult not to be reminded of the political magic of the UK Leave Campaign’s Dominic Cummings – the man who made Brexit happen. With help from the notorious Cambridge Analytica, Cummings was able to communicate directly with people who, for years, had given up on politics as a mug’s game. The sort of people who chuckled when someone joked: “Don’t vote – politicians always win.” The fatal mistake of the Remain Campaign was to assume that these non-voters would stay non-voters. Their chief pollster, one of the best in the UK, built that assumption into his data analysis. That’s why he got it so wrong. That’s why the Remainers never saw Dominic coming.

It is highly probable that the US pollsters made a very similar sort of error. Certainly, Michael Moore, the left-wing US film-maker, who famously called the election for Trump as early as June of 2016, has been warning anyone willing to listen that the pollsters were dramatically under-counting Trump’s supporters.

Moore knew this because he’d made it his business to go to the places where Trump supporters lived: to the trailer parks and the endless miles of soulless suburban tract-housing. He knew because he had sought out, as Paul Simon puts it in his song The Boxer: “the poorer quarters where the ragged people go, looking for the places only they would know.” He knew it because he’d heard it from their poor, white, barely-making-it, working-class mouths: “Trump is making us great again.”

And so, they came out and voted for him – four million more of them (and counting) than turned out for Trump in 2016. Not quite enough, it would seem, to keep their Rough Beast in the White House. But close. Far too close.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 6 November 2020.

Driving Us Up The Poll.

Rubbish In, Rubbish Out: Put all this together, and it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that anyone who responds positively to a pollster’s request to “answer a few questions” is just ever-so-slightly weird. Desperately lonely? Some sort of psephological train-spotter? Political party member primed to skew the poll for or against her opponents? All of the above?

THE INCONVENIENT TRUTH about opinion polls is that the people who participate in them are not really typical Kiwis. Agreeing to participate in anything remotely public-spirited is something fewer and fewer New Zealanders are willing to do. Charities struggle to attract volunteers. Sports teams can’t get enough players. Political parties have long since ceased to be mass organisations. Just finding enough people to satisfy the statistical requirements for an accurate public opinion survey gets harder and harder with every passing year.

It wasn’t always this way. Back in the era when nearly every New Zealand household had an old-fashioned land-line telephone; and the easiest way to locate somebody was to simply ‘look them up’ in the phonebook; polling was a breeze.

It was a time when community action and political debate was engaged in by an extremely broad cross-section of the population. Indeed, New Zealanders were gently chided by Austin Mitchell, the best-selling author of The Half-Gallon, Quarter-Acre, Pavlova Paradise, for being inveterate committee formers. “Pressure groups” were studied forensically by political scientists. Overseas visitors marvelled at a nation of joiners.

The late Professor Keith Jackson, in his book New Zealand: Politics of Change, confirms the strongly participatory character of our democracy by citing the research of R.S. Milne:

“Membership of the New Zealand Labour Party which had peaked in the year 1939-40 at 235,605 remained high after the war at 201,765. By 1960, however, this figure was down to 180,000 distributed through more than 600 branches.”

National’s engagement with New Zealanders was no less impressive: “Much the same pattern appears to have developed within the National Party. Speaking in 1956 the President of the National Party claimed that membership varied from 143,000 in a non-election year to 250,000 in an election year.”

In a nation this politicised, the opinion polling companies of the 1960s and 70s easily assembled the requisite number of participants.

The contrast between those times and our own could hardly be sharper. Who uses the land-line-generated phone book anymore? Asked to do so, most younger Kiwis would probably look at you blankly. The ubiquitous cell-phone presents the pollsters with endless difficulties. There’s no “phone book” for a start, and caller ID allows us all to screen our incoming calls. Many people simply don’t answer unidentified callers – justifiably fearing tele-marketers and scammers.

These latter miscreants have become the bane of land-line subscribers’ lives. For many citizens – especially the elderly – it is considered foolhardy to converse with anyone whose voice isn’t instantly recognisable. Someone can say they’re calling from Colmar Brunton or Reid Research – but how do you know? Better to politely decline and hang-up the receiver.

Put all this together, and it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that anyone who responds positively to a pollster’s request to “answer a few questions” is just ever-so-slightly weird. Desperately lonely? Some sort of psephological train-spotter? Political party member primed to skew the poll for or against her opponents? All of the above?

These distorting possibilities are only increased when the fact that landlines tend to be attached to owner-occupied dwellings is factored into the polling equation. Just ask any Gen-Xer or Millennial what sort of person is likely to pick up the phone in their own home and they will hiss “Baby Boomer!” Quite correctly. Which way, do you suppose, a voter sitting on a million dollars-plus of tax-free capital gain is more likely to vote – Left or Right? No wonder, really, that about 45 percent of the Party Vote appears to be welded-on to the National Party!

So, what do the pollsters do? Basically, they innovate. They try to assemble a representative number of cell-phone-using voters to offset the encrusted biases of land-liners. Or, like the new kid on the New Zealand polling block – YouGov – they step away from phones altogether in favour of a “panel” of potential online participants many thousands strong.

Trouble is, these innovations require the pollsters to run the raw data through all manner of algorithms to make sure their samples remain representative. They then have to make some, frankly, subjective assumptions about voter behaviour. That’s when things can turn very seriously pear-shaped.

The highly-experienced pollster advising the campaigners for “Remain” in 2016 assumed those who didn’t vote in the 2015 UK General Election would also sit out the Brexit referendum.

That worked out well.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times of Friday, 6 December 2019.

Opinion Polling In 2019: More Art Than Science?

Conflicting Messages: With so few publicly available opinion polls being conducted in this country, we really do need to know how one reputable polling agency can put National on 46 percent, while the other puts it on 37 percent. Nine percentage points is a hell of a gap – well beyond the usual statistical tolerances. The public is entitled to know what happened – and which one of them got it right!

IT WAS ANDREW COOPER wot won it! Or so might the Brexiteers have crowed, paraphrasing the Sun’s famous headline of 1992, when its concerted assault on Neil Kinnock turned what looked like a dead cert for Labour into a surprise win for the Tories’ John Major.

Who is Andrew Cooper?  He was the chief pollster for the “Remain” campaign. The man whose assumptions, about how many Britons would turn out to vote in the European Union Membership Referendum of 23 June 2016, lulled Prime Minister David Cameron into a false sense of security. Allowing the “Leave” campaign’s chief wizard, Dominic Cummings, to steal a victory his enemies had, quite literally, not seen coming.

That’s the thing about polls. It’s not simply a matter of assembling the data: whether by calling landlines, mobile phones, or, acquiring people’s opinions online; it is also about how you go about interpreting the data. What are the assumptions you make about how the hundreds, or thousands, of people you have interviewed will behave when the time comes to cast their votes – or not.

That was Andrew Cooper’s big mistake. According to Tim Shipman, author of “All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sunk Britain’s Political Class”, Cooper assumed that the same percentage of Britons would sit out the 2016 Brexit Referendum as had sat out the General Election of the year before. Take these ‘can’t be arsed’ voters out of the equation, and – Bingo! – “Remain” emerges as the referendum winner every time.

He was, as well all know now, quite wrong in that assumption. The turnout for the Referendum was well up on the 2015 General Election. Cumming had successfully mobilised the forgotten, the marginalised, and the very-bloody-angry. The Britons who had given up voting, because, after Tony Blair, the largely indistinguishable politicians of the Tory and Labour parties always won. This time, however, said Cumming, their votes would count. This time, they could deliver an almighty “Fuck You!” to the entire British Establishment, and there would be nothing – absolutely nothing – they could do about it. “Take Back Control”, bellowed Cumming’s inspired slogan. And, they did.

It is something like this. Something in the interpretation of the raw data. Something about the assumptions they’re making, that explains how Reid Research and Colmar Brunton were able to come up with such wildly different descriptions of New Zealand’s current political landscape. And that ‘something’ is very important. With so few publicly available opinion polls being conducted in this country, we really do need to know how one reputable polling agency can put National on 46 percent, while the other puts it on 37 percent. Nine percentage points is a hell of a gap – well beyond the usual statistical tolerances. The public is entitled to know what happened – and which one of them got it right!

But, is that even possible anymore? Getting it right? After Brexit, Trump, the British snap-election of June 2017, and the Australian Federal Election of May 2019, can “The Polls” be trusted to tell us anything at all reliable about the voting intentions of the public?

Is it possible that opinion polling, like black-and-white television, was something peculiar to a particular historical era? To a time when everybody had a landline telephone; read the same newspapers; watched the same shows, at the same time, on television; and were limited to a choice between two very large and broad-based political parties?

Back then, when people still had a huge amount of faith in the political system, polling struck many people as a welcome, and highly scientific, addition to the process of determining their electoral preferences. When a pollster called, the person picking up the phone felt under a heavy obligation to co-operate fully. To refuse, was tantamount of declaring oneself a bad citizen. Answering the pollster’s questions honestly and comprehensively was the randomly chosen interviewee’s civic duty.

How things have changed. Fewer and fewer voters have landlines. As a consequence, the phonebook is no longer sufficient to the task of preparing a statistically valid survey. And, unfortunately, there is no handy, publicly available, register for cell-phone subscribers. Even if there was, the dutiful citizenry required to make the survey truly representative has largely disappeared.

Because, while the pollsters were learning every little quirk about the voting (and buying) public, the public was also learning a thing or two about polling. What it was for; how it was being used; and by whom. With painful slowness, more and more voters realised they were being used. That what they were participating in wasn’t a matter of civic duty. It was a marketing exercise, impure and simple. They were helping the politicians to manipulate the electorate – i.e. themselves. Clever “communications specialists” were persuading them to buy back their own opinions.

This is the reason why polling agencies have so much difficulty in persuading the people they contact to participate in their surveys. For every one person who agrees to be interviewed, there are dozens who refuse. So many, that in statistical terms, the participating subjects have become unusual in themselves, and their opinions have to be weighted accordingly. Then, there are the respondents who deliberately mislead their interviewers. The “rat-fuckees” who become “rat-fuckers”.

Confronted with these formidable obstacles, opinion polling is becoming less and less a science, and more and more of an art. The trick now lies in assessing how much of the sample to write-off as tricksters; how many as atypical political junkies; how many as persons who enjoy being asked for their opinions, but who will never make it off the sofa on election day. These questions cannot be answered scientifically, they can only be guessed at. Those guesses will be guided by experience; by ex post facto analyses; and, crucially, by intuition.

One pollster will say: “Oh sure, people love Jacinda – but will they turn that love into a bona fide ballot paper stuffed into a ballot-box? Young people may revel in Jacinda’s stardust, but its old people who vote. We need to be conservative in our assumptions about the relative weighting of these two groups.”

Another pollster might say: “Normally, I’d apply a pretty heavy discount to the under-25 preferences. But, you know what? I’m betting that, in 2020, the under-25 vote is going to spike. I’m looking at all those secondary-school kids on the street demanding action on climate change. I’m thinking about the influence they’re going to have on their big brothers and sisters. Heck! The effect they will have on their parents! That’s why I’m assuming a significantly higher turnout.”

The first pollster might predict a solid vote for National. The second, a game-changing surge towards Labour and the Greens. They both can’t be right – but I’m hoping that more than 50 percent of voters would like to see the second prediction proved correct.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 11 June 2019.

The Political Economy Of Mainstream Political Journalism.

New Faces - Same Old Spin: Sensationalism and scandal-mongering have become the bread-and-butter of political journalism. Politics is being reduced to an endless struggle between the good-guys (us) and the bad-guys (them). Complexity and nuance just get in the way of relating this Manichean struggle between darkness and light. All the punters need to remember is that all politicians are driven by the will to power; and all governments are out to get them.

FEW WOULD ARGUE that journalism is not in crisis. Beset by the manifold challenges of a global on-line culture, journalists struggle to keep pace with the demands of readers, listeners and viewers whose tastes they once led but now must follow. The mainstream news media’s dwindling share of the advertising dollar drives it inexorably towards the sensational, scandalous, salacious and bizarre: the “clickbait” upon which its profitability increasingly depends.

For political journalism the consequences of these trends have been particularly dire.

Prior to the arrival of the Internet, the coverage of politics by the mainstream media, like its coverage of the arts, was seen as a necessary and important contribution to the well-being of the community. A well-informed electorate was widely accepted as an essential prerequisite to the proper functioning of the democratic process. Covering politics soberly and comprehensively was just one of the many important services provided by the mainstream news media in return for the rivers of advertising gold flowing into its coffers.

As the revenue required for this sort of disinterested political coverage diminished, the mainstream news media was confronted with a very different set of imperatives. Political personalities and events, which had formerly provided the raw material for professional political journalists’ speculation and analysis, underwent a dramatic transformation. From being the passive subjects of political journalism, politicians and their actions were fast becoming the active drivers of it.

Readers, listeners and viewers were interested in politics, but only on their own terms. Political journalists whose copy failed to both reflect and amplify the prejudices of their mass audiences required the most steadfast of editors to keep their words in print; their voices and images on the airwaves.

How did the mainstream media’s consumers perceive politics? Poorly. As the “more-market” polices of the 1980s and 90s became bedded-in; and as political practice – regardless of which party was in power – took on a dismal and dispiriting sameness; the voting public’s respect for politicians (never all that high) sank even further. Increasingly, politics came to be seen as something which politicians did to – rather than for – the people.

Political journalism which did not reflect the public’s deep-seated cynicism and suspicion of politics and politicians became increasingly difficult to sustain. By far the best way to keep people reading, listening and watching political journalism was for journalists to affect the same cynical and suspicious air towards the entire political process.

Regardless of party, politicians were portrayed as being in it for what they could get: and what they most wanted was power. Those who attributed noble motives to politicians were mugs. It was all a game. It was permissible to admire a politician for how well he or she played the game – but not for any other reason. And the only acceptable measure of how well they were playing the game was the opinion poll.

The medieval saying Vox populi, vox Dei (the voice of the people is the voice of God) was re-worked by political journalists to read: The results of the polls represent the opinion of the people, and the opinion of the people is the only thing that counts.

It was a formulation that removed from political discourse every other criterion by which the voters could judge the political performance of their elected representatives. In effect, the political journalism of cynicism and suspicion had trapped them in an inescapable feedback loop. If a political party was losing support, then that was only because it was failing to give the people what they wanted. What did the people want? Whatever the political party ahead in the polls was offering them.

The other rule-of-thumb by which political journalists were now encouraged to operate was the rule that told them to regard every person in a position to wield power over others as automatically suspect. Since most people are not in a position to tell anyone what to do (quite the reverse!) this mistrust of authority allowed political journalists to cast themselves as the ordinary person’s champion; their courageous defender; their righter of wrongs. Which meant, of course, that they had constantly to be on the lookout for wrongs to right.

Sensationalism and scandal-mongering became the bread-and-butter of political journalism. Politics was reduced to an endless struggle between the good-guys (us) and the bad-guys (them). Complexity and nuance just got in the way of relating this Manichean struggle between darkness and light. All the punters were required to remember was that all politicians are driven by the will to power; and that all governments are out to get them.

Does it help to sell newspapers? Does it boost radio and television audiences? Of course it does. Human-beings have always been easy prey for those who insist that individuals and groups who thrust themselves forward to the front of the crowd are not to be trusted. And, of course, they’re right to be suspicious: not everyone who claims to have our interests at heart is telling the truth. And yet, the political journalism of cynicism and suspicion cannot, in the long-run, be constitutive of a healthy democracy.

Sometimes those in power are genuinely bad, and those seeking to turn them out of office are motivated by an honest desire to put things right. But, if political journalists are no longer willing to recognise any politician and/or political party as a force for good, what then? If their profession has become nothing more than an endless search for scandal and the abuse of power; if even the possibility that a politician might be idealistic and well-intentioned is rejected with a cynical smirk; then the always difficult process of implementing progressive political change will become next-to-impossible.

The tragedy of our on-line culture, is that to remain profitable the mainstream news media has little choice but to alarm, outrage and inflame its audiences. “If it bleeds it leads” turns tragedy into journalism’s most negotiable currency. For a news media on life-support, there is simply not enough clickbait in the stories generated by a properly functioning democracy. For the foreseeable future, therefore, the only news fit for political journalists to use – will be bad.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 22 March 2018.

This Is Still A Fight: Some Thoughts On The Newshub-Reid Research Poll.

Enough of "Let's do this", Jacinda. It's time to say "Let's do them!" Labour thought it could bluff its way through this election with warm fuzzies and vague promises. They assumed that these would be enough because the electorate has grown weary of the National Government. Well, the Newshub-Reid Research Poll has reminded them in no uncertain terms that this is still a fight.

FIRST OF ALL, it’s just one poll. And, one poll does not a Labour election loss portend. RNZ’s Poll of Polls which averages out the results of the three or four most recent polls, presents a considerably calmer picture. In a nutshell, National and Labour are level-pegging; NZ First and the Greens are drifting dangerously close to the 5 percent MMP threshold; the Maori Party looks set to take two seats; Act just one; and the rest (including The Opportunity Party) simply aren’t in the race.

Even so. The latest Newshub-Reid Research Poll has delivered a pretty solid kidney-punch to the Centre-Left’s morale. What had begun to feel like a smooth escalator ride to certain victory has been brought to a sudden, stomach-lurching halt. The Nat’s are sitting pretty on 47 percent – enough, with the Greens out of the running, to let them govern on their own.

The cynical genius of the Crosby-Textor pairing has armed the National Party with a pretty serviceable baseball bat and they are swinging it hard. Frustratingly, that Nat bat has been carved out of Labour’s errors. In a fine example of Crosby-Textor’s standard operating procedure. National’s fightback strategy zeroes-in on Labour’s point of maximum vulnerability: their MPs’ abiding fear of stating clearly what it is that they intend to do – and how they intend to pay for it.

Instead of responding to National’s “Let’s Tax This” jibe with a resounding “Hell, Yeah!”, Jacinda has been persuaded to double-down on the Little-led Labour Party’s “keep it vague until the election’s safely won” strategy. The Tax Working Group was supposed to save Labour’s blushes by placating voters with the promise of wise and disinterested expertise. Clearly, the party strategists failed to read the Brexit Memo. Had they done so, they would have been alerted to the fact that the electorate’s faith in “expert opinion” has grown rather thin of late. The stock response of 2017 voters to the prospect of having their future decided by a committee of experts is: “Whose experts will they be?” and “Which side will they be working for?”

Forced to rule out more and more of the promised Working Group’s most predictable recommendations, Jacinda has been made to look as if she already knows what her committee’s findings are going to be – but is reluctant to tell us. This merely reinforces the doubts National has been at such pains to sow. Tactically, her position is grim. As Paddy Gower observes:

“Part of Labour’s problem is that it keeps ruling certain tax variations out during heavy interviews. That keeps the story going. And the problem now is there is no way out for Labour – it cannot backtrack on this. It has to take its vague tax policy all the way to the election – and National will hack at it every step of the way. Labour must find a way out of the tax vortex. Suggestions on back of an envelope to J. Ardern of Mt Albert please.”

Unfortunately, there just isn’t enough time for snail mail. So, Jacinda, please accept the following as my best shot at describing “a way out of the tax vortex”.

Strategically, Labour’s best bet is to go on the offensive over tax. Not by responding to endless challenges to rule this or that tax out of contention, but by reminding voters why they pay taxes in the first place. Give it to the voters straight. That if they want better health care, better education, more affordable housing, improved mental health services and clean rivers and streams, then they cannot avoid the question of how all these things are to be paid for. Tell them that Labour’s Tax Working Group will be asked to come up with the fairest ways to gather revenue, but also tell them that they should not be in any doubt that gathering-in more revenue is, simply, what her government has to do if it is to fulfil its promises to repair the damage wrought by nine years of National rule.

Jacinda should remind the electorate that the determination of tax policy: how much should be gathered, and from whom; goes to the very heart of the democratic tradition. It’s why Kings were required to summon Parliaments. It provided the rallying cry for the American Revolution: “No taxation without representation!” Taxes are the price we pay for civilisation – and democracy.

And then she should turn her attention to the farmers. Because, with their bare-faced lies and angry demonstrations, they have shown the rest of New Zealand exactly why a Working Group to improve the fairness of our taxation system is needed. The farming sector’s dirty dairying has been subsidised by urban taxpayers for long enough. A reasonable contribution from farmers to the cost of cleaning up the waterways they have so recklessly befouled is only fair. Jacinda should invite all those who believe farmers should pay a water tax to join her and James Shaw outside the headquarters of Federated Farmers in Wellington. The spiteful decision of Waikato cow-cockies to protest in Jacinda’s home-town of Morrinsville should be answered in kind.

Labour thought it could bluff its way through this election with warm fuzzies and vague promises. They assumed that these would be enough because the electorate has grown weary of the National Government. Well, the Newshub-Reid Research Poll has reminded them in no uncertain terms that this is still a fight.

The National Party doesn’t do surrender. It understands what the Centre-Left appears to have forgotten: that every general election involves a deliberate intensification of what Labour’s founders referred to unashamedly as “the class struggle”. Or, in the words of Leonard Cohen: “the homicidal bitchin’ that goes down in every kitchen to determine who will serve and who will eat.”

“Sunny Ways” have taken Jacinda a long way, but now it is time for her to unleash a blast of true arctic fury. “Fear and lying” is a good start, but, to put it bluntly, at this point in the campaign Labour’s voters are in need of a much more visceral morale boost. The opportunity is there to deliver a blunt message to all those who believe that taxes are what other people pay.

National’s friends in the countryside have raised their hands against “Let’s do this”. It’s time to show them what it means.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 13 September 2017.

Before The Flood: Political Ruminations On Labour’s Fate While Waiting For Tonight’s TV3-Reid Research Poll.

Taken At The Flood? The rumour-mongers are already whispering that, if tonight’s (31/7/17) poll actually is as shocking as everyone is says it is, then Andrew Little will resign tomorrow. If they’re right, Jacinda Ardern will be faced with the daunting prospect of either leading Labour on to fortune – or seeing her party swept away on the flood tide of history.

 

TONIGHT’S REID RESEARCH POLL promises to be a shocker. Such a shocker that, like Santa Claus in the Christmas song, the journalists at TV3 are making a list of the awful numbers – and checking them twice. If the results of last night’s One News Colmar Brunton (ONCB) poll are confirmed, then Andrew Little’s future can only be described as bleak.

 

Viewers didn’t need to hear Corin Dann’s interview with Little on last night’s edition of One News to understand what was going on – the Labour Leader’s face said it all. People don’t vote for people who look like Little did last night. He must know that – and so must his colleagues.

 

It gets worse. If tonight’s Reid Research poll results really are shocking, then that will make it three from three. Because the ONCB poll wasn’t the first, but the second, instalment of bad news for the Labour Party. Its own pollster, UMR Research, is telling Labour that its support has fallen to 23 percent. So, another sub-25 percent poll result will practically rule out the possibility that Labour are looking at rogue results.

 

What should Little do? Well he could try toughing it out. Talking up the party’s fighting spirit. Telling his supporters that it ain’t over till it’s over. Except that’s what he should have said to Dann last night. Instead he told him that he has canvassed stepping down with his senior advisors and they had told him to hang on in there.

 

Which tells us two things: 1. That Little knows in his heart that he has no chance of leading Labour to the Treasury benches. 2. That his “comrades” are only too happy to let him take the rap.

 

It also tells us how far from their party’s core values Labour’s parliamentary caucus has deviated. Instead of accepting Little’s principled offer to stand aside, and dispassionately nominating the most effective successor available, the Labour caucus has decided that their career prospects will be better served by allowing their leader to crash and burn.

 

Little’s deputy, Jacinda Ardern, needs to think very carefully before committing herself irrevocably to this course. The precedent of Mike Moore stepping-up to rescue Labour’s fortune’s in 1990 is there to guide her. The man must have known he was being invited to drink from a poisoned chalice, but Moore belonged to a generation of Labour leaders for whom “the cause” and “the party” still possessed the power to inspire heroic acts of self-sacrifice.

 

He also knew his Shakespeare:

 

“There is a tide in the affairs of men. Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.”

 

There is still time for her to step up, but she had better hurry – lest she fall foul of another Shakespeare quote:

 

“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em.”

 

The rumour-mongers are already whispering that, if tonight’s poll actually is as shocking as everyone is says it is, then Andrew Little will resign tomorrow.

 

If they’re right, Jacinda, then you will be faced with the daunting prospect of either leading Labour on to fortune – or watching your party swept away on the flood tide of history.

UPDATE: 6:15pm - The TV3-Reid Research poll confirms Labour's parlous position below 25 percent in a third consecutive survey. Reid Research has the four main parties at: National 45 percent; Labour 24 percent; NZ First 13 percent; Greens 13 percent. Andrew Little - and Jacinda Ardern - look set for a long and sleepless night.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 31 July 2017.

A Gut Feeling.

Hooked On A Feeling: From having a National prime minister who worked tirelessly at being “Everyman”, New Zealand finds itself saddled with a prime minister who appears to have it in for every man, woman and child unfortunate enough to have been born outside the top 10 percent of income-earners. Have New Zealanders told the pollsters this? Not yet. But that’s probably because they have yet to admit to themselves that their love affair with National is over.

 

AM I GUILTY of wishful thinking, or are the times really a-changing? If I still took any notice of opinion polls, the answers, respectively, would be “Yes” and “No”. There is, as yet, no empirical evidence of a major shift in electoral allegiances. Unfortunately, in these times, that sort of data only seems to become available after the electoral picture has been radically defaced.
 

More and more people, according to the psephological post-mortems of both Brexit and Trump, are either refusing point-blank to speak to pollsters, or flat-out lying to them. The burden of representing the popular mood is, increasingly, falling to the well-meaning and the well-heeled; the believers in conventional wisdom; or, more worryingly, to the purveyors of unconventional ignorance.
 

Which only leaves me my gut – and my gut is answering, respectively, “No” and “Yes”. This is not wishful thinking. A big political shift is underway.
 

And because this is New Zealand, the shift is being registered in the electorate’s responses to – and the reactions of – its political leaders. Like iron filings scattered on a white sheet of paper and then positioned over a magnet, New Zealand’s politicians are arranging themselves along unseen but irresistible lines of force.
 

Those who have been following Andrew Little around the country have noticed the change. Where once the Labour leader would turn up to meet and greet embarrassingly small audiences, Little’s entourage are now reporting audiences in the hundreds.
 

Winston Peters knows all about this particular barometer of the public’s appetite for change. His scorn for polls is based upon their inability to capture the peculiar temper of a political crowd. The way it lets the man or woman standing behind the microphone at the front of the hall know whether or not their messages are getting through. The shiver of recognition with which it greets the telling example; the shocking statistic.
 

Maybe Crosby-Textor’s polling techniques and focus-group analyses can replicate this. Maybe not. What they cannot replicate is the almost erotic intimacy between speaker and audience, audience and speaker. When that connection is made, the impact on both parties is formidable. The audience’s faith in the politician soars: as does the politician’s faith in himself.
 

Then there’s the evidence of the ballot-box itself. The Mt Albert By-Election, for example, could have produced a very different result. After all, the electors were presented with two, strong, centre-left candidates, and no candidate at all from the governing party. At least one journalist, who had followed the campaign closely, suggested that the Greens’ Julie Anne Genter was good for 30 percent of the votes cast. In what was essentially a two-horse race, it was a perfectly reasonable expectation.
 

But it was not the result. Labour’s Jacinda Ardern walked away with nearly 80 percent of the votes cast, leaving Genter with a measly 11 percent. Reasonableness had nothing to do with it.
 

For Little, himself, it’s as if the impenetrable fog blanketing Labour’s leadership since 2008 has suddenly lifted, revealing a clear pathway to victory. From being ham-fisted and flailing, Little’s gestures have become purposeful and precise. For the first time in nearly nine years, Labour appears to have a leader who sees where he’s going, and knows what he’s doing.
 

Just as suddenly, the same fog of misfortune which had formerly enveloped Labour has wrapped itself around Bill English and the National Party. The self-assured political touch of John Key has been replaced by ill-considered improvisation and counter-productive communication. English cannot seem to avoid either insulting or upsetting the electorate. If he’s not dismissing young New Zealanders as drug-addled layabouts, he’s informing them that they’ll have to wait an additional two years before becoming eligible for NZ Superannuation.
 

From having a National prime minister who worked tirelessly at being “Everyman”, New Zealand finds itself saddled with a prime minister who appears to have it in for every man, woman and child unfortunate enough to have been born outside the top 10 percent of income-earners.
 

Have New Zealanders told the pollsters this? Not yet. But that’s probably because they have yet to admit to themselves that their love affair with National is over. How many of us, after all, are all that keen to admit to a relationship gone bad? In our heart, though, and in our gut, we know that something has shifted irrevocably: that the love has gone.
 

Inevitably, the day comes when we are no longer afraid to say: “It’s over.” Call it wishful thinking if you like, but my gut is telling me that, for the New Zealand electorate, that day will be Saturday, 23 September 2017.
 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 8 March 2017.

A Better Poll.

Bogus? So devastating was the latest One News/Colmar Brunton poll result for Labour that the Opposition leader, Andrew Little, declared it "bogus". In desperation, Labour released its own - vastly more encouraging - internal poll data from UMR Research. Unfortunately, in political terms, this is a bit like presenting an affidavit testifying to your beauty and intelligence, signed by your Mum.

 

ANDREW LITTLE has described the latest One News-Colmar Brunton poll as “bogus”. He insists that “other polls” show the Labour Party doing much better than Colmar Brunton’s figure of 26 percent.

 

It’s a comment that recalls the famous World War I cartoon in which two British soldiers are depicted taking cover in a shell-crater in the middle of No Man’s Land. “If you know of a better hole,” says the first soldier to the second, “then go to it.” Little’s statement merits a similar dose of mordant humour: “If you know of a better poll, Andrew, then show it.” (And, no, that is not an invitation to show us your own!)

 

Regardless of its severity, it was tactically foolish of Little to deny the accuracy of Colmar Brunton’s latest survey. The Labour Leader should have anticipated that National’s chief pollster, David Farrar, would have all the relevant facts and figures at his fingertips. With impish glee, Farrar swiftly posted these on his Kiwiblog website:

 

“At the last election in September 2014 this same poll [Colmar Brunton] had Labour at 25.2%. They got 25.1%. They were very accurate for Labour. In fact it was National they got a bit wrong with a poll of 45.1% vs an actual election result of 47.0%”

 

When presented with terrible news, it is perfectly natural for human-beings to take refuge in denial. The reactions of ordinary human-beings are not, however, available to those who aspire to political leadership. Upon hearing the poll result, it was Little’s duty to thrust aside his disappointment and deliver a response that would help, rather than hinder, his party’s cause.

 

The most obvious rejoinder to a poll showing the Government’s opponents severally commanding 50 percent of the Party Vote would be to emphasise the enormous political cost of disunity. Little should have pointed to the National Party’s consistent success in rallying centre-right voters behind a single banner – its own. He should then have invited centre-left voters to imagine the outcome if, instead of dividing their support between Labour (26 percent) the Greens (13 percent) and NZ First (11 percent), they had followed the example of their right-wing counterparts and swung their support decisively behind the largest opposition party.

 

How differently the story would be presented if, instead of languishing in the mid-20s, Labour was seen to be level-pegging with National. Would David Farrar be responding to that sort of result with impish glee? Probably not.

 

Enter the massive strategic problem created by Labour’s decision to negotiate a “Memorandum of Understanding” (MoU) with the Greens. In signing that MoU, Little and his colleagues were effectively admitting that their party’s former, dominant position on the centre-left was irrecoverable. They were also denying Labour the “Unity is Strength!” rallying cry that National used to such good effect in 2005, and which has served them so well in every election since.

 

It is worth recalling here how tempting it must have been for National to similarly surrender its electoral primacy. It had, after all, sustained a much worse defeat in 2002 than Labour’s 2014 debacle. At just 21 percent, National’s Party Vote could easily have persuaded Bill English and his colleagues to embrace the politics of permanent coalition. This was what the logic of MMP dictated: National and Labour simply had to accept that the days of parties registering support in the high-40s had gone forever.

 

Tell that to John Key! The latest Colmar Brunton poll gives National 48 percent of the Party Vote – exactly the same figure Key’s party was registering on Election Night 2014. For a party approaching the end of its third term in government, that is little short of miraculous!

 

Apart from the strategic blunder of the MoU, what else explains Labour’s failure to recover its electoral primacy? The answer is brutally simple. Unlike Don Brash in 2004-05, neither Andrew Little, nor his predecessors, have been willing to embrace the sort of policies demanded by their party’s electoral base.

 

Since 1984, no Labour leader (with the honourable exception of Jim Anderton) has unreservedly and steadfastly repudiated the ideological underpinnings of Rogernomics. A speech from Andrew Little in which he acknowledges the devastation wrought by Rogernomics, and spelling out how he proposes to right the wrongs it inflicted on working-class Kiwis, would almost certainly produce a similar galvanising effect as Brash’s 2004 speech to the Orewa Rotary Club.

 

And a much better poll.

 

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, 16 September 2016.

Keep Calm And Carry On: Why The Left Should Ignore The Next Round Of Poll Results.

Good Advice: The Left should think of the next round of polls as the Right’s all-or-nothing artillery barrage – something to panic them into a headlong retreat. But, as the shells loaded with appalling results burst over the heads, they should simply tighten their helmet-straps and hold tight. The Internet-Mana Party has not yet begun to fight.

BRACE YOURSELVES, COMRADES, for some horrendous poll results. The next round of surveys from Colmar Brunton, Reid Research, DigiPoll, Ipsos and Roy Morgan will almost certainly register a major slump in the Centre Left’s support and a concomitant rise in National’s numbers – quite possibly to 55 percent-plus. Labour and the Greens will both take nasty hits and the Internet-Mana Party (IMP) will be very lucky to make it above 1 percent. Apart from John Key, the only other person likely to be smiling is Winston Peters.

 

The polls will be bad because the framing of Kim Dotcom’s latest intervention in New Zealand politics has been so near-universally and overwhelmingly negative. From the Right (and Sue Bradford) has come the steady drumbeat that Hone Harawira and the Mana Party have done a “dirty deal” with Kim Dotcom and, in the process, “sold out their principles” for cash.

 

Amplifying this message, TV3’s political editor, Patrick Gower, has characterised the IMP strategy as “a rort” (a term which normally denotes morally questionable if not downright illegal manipulation) even though what the Mana and Internet parties are proposing is well within the rules and has been a feature of every election campaign since MMP came into force in 1996. Gower’s destructive message has, however, been repeated, ad nauseum, by an endless succession of editorial writers, talkback hosts, columnists and bloggers.

 

The presence of former Alliance Party politicians and staffers in the IMP – most notably the Internet Party’s choice for leader, Laila Harré – has only reinforced the public’s perception that Dotcom has unleashed upon New Zealand a fiercely left-wing coalition that may yet play a decisive role in determining whether or not John Key continues to be New Zealand’s prime minister.

 

Labour and the Greens, simply by sharing the left of the ideological spectrum with the IMP, will be judged guilty by association with the controversial German entrepreneur. Accordingly, a broad swathe of moderate and centrist voters, when contacted by the pollsters, will register their knee-jerk objections to Dotcom, Harawira, Harré and the IMP by rededicating themselves unhesitatingly to John Key and the National Party. Or, if that is too big a leap, by making positive noises about Winston Peters and NZ First.

 

The ill-considered outbursts from a number of right-wing Labour MPs over Queen’s Birthday weekend reflected conservative Labour’s instinctive reaction to this sudden and controversial eruption of a new, well-resourced political force to its left. Precisely because they are conservatives, their gut reaction told them that the voting public’s first response to the circumstances of the IMP’s birth would be to punish the entire Left indiscriminately. Their broadcast statements, tweets, and Facebook postings were crude (and ultimately self-defeating) attempts to persuade centrist voters that they should spare Labour from their righteous wrath.

 

It’s a pity these Labour MPs were so unwilling to hold their nerve and work their way through the emerging situation calmly and logically. Had they done so, their fears would have subsided as swiftly as they had flared.

 

The Right has been taking free shots against the IMP and its putative allies on the Left because they know this is the last chance they will get to land unanswered blows before Dotcom’s millions begin to take effect. (And rest assured, they will take effect.)

 

The Right’s principal movers and shakers know – even if their media minions do not – just how much difference a huge campaign war-chest can make to an election’s outcome. They caught a glimpse of what IMP is capable of in the razzmatazz of Harré’s introduction. They have also heard the rumours about whole floors of brilliant IT-geeks all beavering away; unheard of political applications; unprecedented polling capability. It’s why they’re hoping against hope that the beating currently being administered to the IMP during this period of “Phoney War” will be sufficiently savage to obviate any chance of its recovery. And a big part of that hope is that the more conservative elements of the Left will help them out by getting in a few kicks of their own.

 

Hopefully, the more courageous elements within the Labour and Green camps will prevent this from happening. The best thing they can do as the Right strikes out blindly at the IMP is to strongly and confidently articulate their own party’s core messages to the electorate.

 

They should think of the next round of polls as the Right’s all-or-nothing artillery barrage – something to panic them into a headlong retreat. But, as the shells loaded with appalling results burst over the heads, they should simply tighten their helmet-straps and hold tight.

 

Behind them the IMP is marshalling its troops, stockpiling ammunition and gasoline, and unloading its tanks from their transporters. The Left has only to keep calm, carry on, and remember that blitzkrieg is a German word.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 4 June 2014.

Outflanked On The Left - By The Voters!

Public Service Notice: Across the Western World there is evidence that the political parties ostensibly standing for progressive change are being comprehensively outflanked by their own supporters - on the Left. Is it possible that the people are becoming more radical than the politicians "representing" them?

 

WITH LABOUR’S POLL NUMBERS FALTERING, there will undoubtedly be much agitated discussion in the Office of the Leader of the Opposition.

 

“What’s wrong with everybody?!” David Cunliffe’s advisers will wail. “Why didn’t anyone like KiwiAssure? What was not to like about a state-owned insurance company? What on earth do people want!?”

 

Well, if the news from abroad is anything to go by, they want a good deal more than the cautious gestures they’ve seen so far. Indeed, if the research published recently in both the United Kingdom and the United States is correct, a substantial chunk of the electorate is willing to embrace economic and social policies that are genuinely and unashamedly radical.

 

A YouGov survey for the Centre for Labour and Social Studies (Class) think tank, carried out at the end of last month, showed that UK voters “strongly supported support state-imposed price controls on the utilities, re-nationalisation of the railways and Royal Mail, an end to private cash in the public sector and even state power to regulate rents”.

 

Putting it bluntly: a solid majority of the UK electorate is well to the left of Ed Miliband’s Labour Party.

 

Nick Assinder, the political editor of the IBTimes, summed up the poll results rather incredulously with the observation: “[I]f the findings continue to be borne out as the general election campaign moves into top gear, and if Labour takes them to heart, it could spark the sort of ideological debate which Britain has not seen since the late 1970s and 1980s – for good or ill.”

 

Something similar would appear to happening on the other side of the Atlantic. New polling from Hart Research Associates, undertaken on behalf of Americans For Tax Fairness, indicates a strong, pundit-confounding, public appetite for imposing higher taxes on the rich.

 

On the liberal website, Campaign For America’s Future, blogger Richard Eskow writes: “As that covert recording of Mitt Romney showed last year, some of the ‘1 percent’ think other Americans aren’t pulling their own weight in this economy. As this new polling confirms, the feeling’s mutual. By a seventeen point margin (56 percent to 39 percent), the American people want the next budget agreement to include new tax revenues from corporations and the wealthy.”

 

One of the reasons David Cunliffe won the leadership of the Labour Party was the widely held view among the party’s rank-and-file that he – alone of all his rivals – “got” this. On the day he announced his candidacy, his “You betcha!” response to a question about raising taxes on the rich had thrilled not just his Labour Party followers, but a large portion of the wider electorate.

 

At Labour’s annual conference, held in Christchurch at the beginning of this month, considerable behind-the-scenes diplomacy went into blunting the sharper edges of policy proposals from branch members and union affiliates who had taken Mr Cunliffe’s radicalism at face value. For the most part, the radicals were happy to oblige – not wanting their man to be embarrassed in front of a sceptical news media.

 

But, if the trends from abroad are any guide, smoothing off the radical edges of Labour’s policy platform was exactly the wrong thing to do. If Mr Cunliffe would improve his political fortunes, he should think about sharpening – not blunting – his party’s attack on the status-quo.

 

The Labour Caucus, too, needs to summon up the courage to abandon what may turn out to have been its entirely unnecessary caution. It is one thing to protect the party leader from stepping beyond the limits of the electorate’s tolerance; quite another to stand between the voters and the radical policies they’re hungering for. Neoliberalism has been weighed in the balance and found wanting – Labour MPs should not attempt to second-guess the zeitgeist.

 

Bill Clinton’s campaign-team’s note-to-self: “It’s the economy, stupid!” has become the stuff of US political folklore – and a potent reminder to stay focused on voter priorities.

 

Perhaps Mr Cunliffe’s note-to-self should be: “Radical policies for a radicalised electorate!”

 

This essay was originally published by The Dominion Post, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 22 November 2013.

Clifton's Notes

John Key's Bodyguard? Jane Clifton's latest Listener column uses this week's One News/Colmar-Brunton poll to paint a picture of an electorate grown weary of big ideas and convinced that, in a world of economic woe, life under the National-led Government is about as good as it gets. Especially since none of the other parties could do any better. As spin goes - it's pretty good.

JANE CLIFTON’S ANALYSIS of the latest One News/Colmar-Brunton poll (The Listener, April 14-20, 2012, pp. 12-13) makes fascinating reading. Like me, The Listener’s political columnist is astonished that the National Government appears to have sustained no damage:

It’s as if the whole of this year, with its unending stream of mini-scandals and unpopular announcements, never happened.

But, rather than question the credibility of the poll, Ms Clifton questions us – the people.

The poll’s lack of responsiveness to such carry-on is a total mystery – unless you consider that people might be beginning to have a different relationship with both politicians and the media. As in, perhaps they are just filtering out the argy-bargy, and the strongest, bossiest prognostications, because they no longer trust any sort of absolutism.

Who would have thought that Jane (Wot, me an intellectual? Geddaway wif ya!) Clifton would end up putting such a smooth, post-modernist spin on her analysis? This is nothing less than Jean Francois Lyotard’s “incredulity towards meta-narratives” translated into Wadestown dinner-party-speak.

Thrown in for good measure is an impressive little riff on the political impact of globalisation:

[V]oters may now be viewing domestic political noise in the light of wider global realities, and this could be making them more sanguine about the brush fires.

Only a few years ago we were gazing longingly at Ireland’s economic prowess, and now we see the Celtic Tiger declawed and practically auctioning its stripes to stay afloat. That has to have an impact on how we view stringencies here.

Ms Clifton’s voter is nothing if not sophisticated. Grown incredulous of “absolutist” meta-narratives, she is reassessing her expectations of politics and politicians in the light of dramatically re-ordered global realities. This paragon of civic responsibility understands that:

Not just now, but for the foreseeable future, our normal economic reckoning has had to change, and perhaps it’s political noises about that stuff that we’re listening for, while screening out the rhetoric and theatre.

John Key is blessed indeed to have such a journalistic bodyguard. Because, if we carefully dig into Ms Clifton’s analysis, what we find is a core proposition of confidence and satisfaction. Apparently, Mr Key’s National Party-led administration is about as good as it gets these days:

Do we really think Labour, the Greens and New Zealand First would be able to govern without making similar or equivalent cuts and trade-offs?

Austerity, lowered expectations, a default cynicism towards anything smacking of “rhetoric and theatre”: this, according to Ms Clifton, is the new black of political discourse. Get used to it.

Democracy itself: the whole notion of an engaged citizenry holding their rulers to account, dissolves before our eyes in Ms Clifton’s clever prose:

It’s possible a lot of people now see politicians’ squabbles rather in the way they view Kim Kardashian’s bottom – as something to contemplate to pass the time in a supermarket checkout queue, but not as any useful pointer to character or competence.

Guy Debord, who gave us “The Society of the Spectacle” would no doubt feel vindicated by Ms Clifton’s description of the vacuity of contemporary political life. Way back in 1967 he observed: “The spectacle presents itself as a vast inaccessible reality that can never be questioned. Its sole message is: ‘What appears is good; what is good appears.’ The passive acceptance it demands is already effectively imposed by its monopoly of appearances, its manner of appearing without allowing any reply.”

And isn’t that the entire purpose behind Ms Clifton’s treatment of the One News/Colmar-Brunton poll? Our unquestioning acceptance of its findings is secured by making us collaborators in our own compliance. In the world Ms Clifton has constructed, Kiwis are no longer interested in big explanations or big solutions; because it’s a jungle out there, economically, and we’re doing better than most; and, anyway, nobody could run things any better; because all political parties are really the same; and that’s why more than half of us are sticking with the devil we know.

But let’s just examine that One News/Colmar-Brunton poll for a moment. As presented on people’s screens it is already a highly misleading document. For a start, where is the information about how many people were contacted by the pollster, and of those how many consented to being questioned? It’s not there. Nor is the number of respondents who said they didn’t know, or were uncertain, about who to vote for. Or, those who declared they wouldn’t vote at all. What we see on our screens are the rounded-up levels of support for each party after the “Undecideds” and “Won’t Votes” are dropped out.

We are told by Colmar-Brunton that their raw data is massaged to ensure it accurately reflects the gender, ethnic and residential contours of the population – presumably based on Census data that is now at least 6 years out-of-date. What we are not told is that Colmar-Brunton makes no allowance for the distribution of household income in New Zealand.

Turnout for the 2011 General Election, at 74.21 percent of registered voters, and 69.6 percent of eligible voters, was one of the lowest on record. Did Colmar-Brunton ever draw our attention to the possibility that between 25-30 percent of New Zealand voters might abstain from voting altogether? Did they draw any conclusions as to the likely impact of such a high abstention rate on the final result? No, they didn’t. And, apparently, TVNZ didn’t ask.

Only in the last line of her column does Ms Clifton draw attention to the fact that the polls are not always accurate predictors of electoral outcomes:

Or, as Jim Bolger said in 1993 when he unexpectedly almost lost the election. ‘Bugger the pollsters’.

And even here, she gives herself away. Because for those of us on the Left of New Zealand politics; those who’d been involved with the Alliance; those who’d watched the growth of New Zealand First; there was nothing unexpected about the closeness of the 1993 result. Indeed we were absolutely gobsmacked that any prime minister, after presiding over swingeing budget-cuts and spiralling unemployment figures, could possibly have given credence to opinion polls telling him he was going to win at a canter.

Far from existing in the best of all possible post-modernist worlds, New Zealand in 2012 is seething with anger and frustration. And by no means all of it is directed at John Key’s government. Many voters are just as fed up with the Labour Party and its seeming incapacity to either understand their aspirations, or articulate their rage. If any group has a 51 percent share at the moment it is surely the group that's crying: “A plague on all your houses!”

Ms Clifton will have none of that, however. And really, how could she? When was she last locked-out of her workplace? When did the bank last foreclose on her home? When was the last time she went hungry so her children could eat?

When the pollsters and the networks start asking those questions, Jane, write us another column. And, when you can answer them yourself, perhaps you’ll understand why so many of us remain sceptical of their “snap-shots”.

Not everybody lives in Wadestown.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.