Not Ready: Todd Muller’s lack-lustre and self-contradictory performances offer conclusive proof that a political leader cannot be managed into competence. National’s new boss has Janet Wilson handling his media and Matthew Hooton writing his speeches. Both are highly professional political and public relations specialists, and Muller is lucky to have them. But, they can’t be Leader of the Opposition for him.
TODD MULLER is toast. All the signs are there. The weird
contradictions contained in his own public statements. The constant leaking of
damaging information from inside his own caucus. The obvious delight of former
colleagues as they lower their lifeboats and pull away from National’s sinking
ship. The party’s been here before. Unfortunately, it was in 2002.
Just think about Paula Bennett’s bravura exit performance.
Dancing up a storm with Tom Sainsbury – as if to say: “You always thought Tom
was exaggerating, didn’t you? Nah, the boy never even got close!” There was
something very P.J. O’Rourke about Bennett’s departure: something subversively
liberating. When right-wingers turn out to have a sense of humour strong enough
to make even hard-bitten lefties chortle, it says something very reassuring
about our common humanity. Though some of us are loathe to admit it, we are all
much more the same than we are different.
One of O’Rourke’s most memorable lines was: “First we got
all the money. Then we got all the votes. Now we’ve got all the power!”
Bennett’s celebration boogie, in anticipation of Muller’s failure to win
O’Rourke’s electoral trifecta, has about it the same bracing honesty. Speaking
of her hardcore National colleagues, she once told a startled journalist: “We
didn’t come to Wellington to fuck spiders!” And wasn’t that the truth?
Muller’s lack-lustre and self-contradictory performances
offer conclusive proof that a political leader cannot be managed into
competence. National’s new boss has Janet Wilson handling his media and Matthew
Hooton writing his speeches. Both are highly professional political and public
relations specialists, and Muller is lucky to have them. But, they can’t be
Leader of the Opposition for him.
It was exactly the same with David Cunliffe. Not even Matt
McCarten, a.k.a “Mattiavelli”, could transform the ambitious climber who
deposed David Shearer into a credible alternative prime minister. In the end,
the person has to want the job enough to do what it takes to get it. Also
needed is a clear idea of what to do with “all the power” once you’ve got it.
This is where Muller falls short. Quoting Mickey Savage is all very well, but
when a traditional Catholic talks about “applied Christianity” – what, exactly,
does he mean?
It’s something which, I suspect, Muller’s evangelical
Christian colleagues would also like to know. Their right-wing, fundamentalist
version of the Christian message would see National taking a very different
stance on a broad range of social issues from the one so clearly favoured by
Muller and his liberal allies. A couple of months back, David Cormack (another
PR maven) offered up his own take on National’s Christian conservatives:
“There is a large bloc in National of Christians with some
pretty extreme views. They’re not traditional Christian National Party folk,
but more fire and brimstone. Muller is a traditional National Party Christian,
he voted No on the abortion bill’s second and third reading, he voted No on all
three readings of the euthanasia bill. But he is considered not right wing
enough by the large Christian bloc.”
According to Cormack:
“All of the highly conservative Christian MPs want to fight
their very own culture wars here in NZ; think GOP level. Staunchly pro-Israel,
really strongly anti-abortion, anti-women and gay rights. They want to fight
the ‘Marxism’ that they believe has infested our schools, universities and even
Labour (!)”
Contrast these hardline views with the gentle conservatism
set out by Muller in his Te Puna hometown address in mid-June. Beautifully
crafted by Hooton, the speech enunciated a set of values radically at odds with
the proudly reactionary beliefs of Chris Penk and his comrades. Reading that
speech, Muller’s opponents in the National caucus must have wondered whether
their party was any longer big enough for the both of them.
On the one hand stands Muller (and Hooton) eager to keep the
two main political parties committed to delivering the same neoliberal lines
(albeit with some relatively minor differences in emphasis) that have bound the
precious “median voter” to the aspirations of the broad centre of New Zealand
politics for the best part of four decades.
On the other hand stand what might best be described as the
“Radical Conservatives”. Their principal objection to the existing neoliberal
order is its acceptance of what they see as the immoral and
socially-destructive consequences of the cultural revolution of the 1960s and
70s. With some justification, they see identity politics as intrinsically
hostile to the unequal distribution of power and wealth under patriarchal
capitalism. Take patriarchy out of the capitalist equation and, in the view of
the Radical Conservatives, it will fall.
These are not the sort of ideas to earn more than a curl of
Nikki Kaye’s upper lip. Rightly, she foresees the wholesale rejection of such
an avowedly sexist National Party by the overwhelming majority of middle-class
Pakeha women. Indeed, it was to forestall such a radical-conservative deviation
into Trumpland that the coup against Simon Bridges was mounted. That it
succeeded only because the erratic Judith Collins anticipated taking more
satisfaction from shafting Bridges and Bennett than from saving them, merely
reinforces the scale of the dysfunction currently besetting the National Party.
Such dysfunction is essentially ineradicable by anything
other than the annihilation of one of the two contending factions. This is,
after all, what happened in the Labour Party when the Rogernomes and their
careerist enablers made it more-or-less impossible for the left faction to
remain within the party without surrendering their most deeply held
convictions.
For National’s Radical Conservatives, the path to this
annihilation solution is clear: engineer a defeat on a par with the disaster of
2002. The principal victims of such a strategy would be the party’s liberal
faction. In Lenin’s famous phrase, it would lead to “fewer – but better”
National MPs. A solid foundation of radical-conservative patriarchal Christian
capitalism upon which National’s electoral recovery can be built.
You see now why Todd Muller is toast! Also clear, is why so
many National women are now determined to give their votes to Jacinda.
This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Thursday, 2 July 2020.
