John Key's Legacy - A Protected Status Quo.

Shhhh! Don't Frighten The Horses! And that, in essence, is the story of John Key’s prime-ministership. For National Party voters the status quo of 2008 has been protected and extended. The lives of most New Zealanders have not been subjected to sudden and dramatic changes.

 

INCREMENTAL CHANGE is, generally-speaking, the most effective expression of democratic government. Most human-beings are uncomfortable with sudden and dramatic change. They can live with it, and through it, if they have to. (Just ask the citizens of Christchurch and Kaikoura!)  But most people, given a choice between the status quo and massive upheaval, will opt for the status quo.

 

Understanding the New Zealand electorate’s sensitivity to change is what made John Key such a successful prime minister. Like all clever politicians, he approached the whole fraught business of change with the wary circumspection of someone handling nitro-glycerine.

 

There are, of course, exceptions to this general rule about change. If, for example, the status quo has become unbearable, then the prospect of dramatic change acquires a much less frightening aspect. In these circumstances, the smart politician not only embraces the necessity for “Big Change”, but he also does everything he can to cast the dog-in-the-manger defenders of the status quo as “enemies of the people”.

 

On 4 March 1933, the day Franklin Delano Roosevelt was sworn-in as the thirty-second President of the United States, nearly one in every three adult American males was out of work and most of America’s banks had closed their doors. For many millions of Americans the status quo had, indisputably, become unbearable, and they were hungry for change.

 

Nevertheless, Roosevelt was mindful of the need to reassure his fellow citizens that he understood their anxieties concerning both the magnitude of the economic crisis gripping their country and the radical scope of the measures required to fix it. “So, first of all,” he told the American people, “let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”.

 

By the time John Key became prime minister on 19 November 2008 there were many who believed that Big Change would be the defining characteristic of his ministry. His election victory had coincided with the full onset of the Global Financial Crisis and the world was teetering on the brink of an economic calamity every bit as transformative as the Great Depression.

 

New Zealand’s free-market enthusiasts were as eager for Key to take advantage of this real crisis as they had been for David Lange to take advantage of the 1984 speculator-driven financial crisis triggered by Labour finance spokesperson, Roger Douglas’s, leaked promise to devalue the New Zealand dollar by 20 percent. Their hope was that the incoming Key government would seize the opportunity provided by the Global Financial Crisis to announce a raft of savage spending cuts and launch yet another round of radical deregulation.

 

But John Key was made of considerably sterner stuff than the politically inexperienced and economically illiterate David Lange. The new National Party prime minister understood that for most New Zealanders – especially those who had been kind enough to vote for him – the status quo was a very long way from becoming unbearable. Quite the reverse, in fact. A lengthy period of economic buoyancy had turned the status quo into something to be protected and, if possible, extended for as long as possible.

 

And that, in essence, is the story of John Key’s prime-ministership. For National Party voters the status quo of 2008 has been protected and extended. The lives of most New Zealanders have not been subjected to sudden and dramatic changes.

 

For those Kiwis living on the margins, however: the unemployed, solo mums, unskilled workers, homeless people; the changes have been wrenching and unceasing. Unfortunately, a majority of New Zealand’s more secure and contented citizens have been willing to accept the suffering of this marginalised underclass as the price to be paid for maintaining their own, very comfortable (and increasingly valuable) status quo. Had the poor mobilised politically against the unbearable conditions of their daily lives, the status quo might have changed. But they didn’t – and it hasn’t.

 

All the evidence points to Andrew Little and (most) of the Labour Party having, finally, absorbed the key political lesson of the past nine years. That a clear majority of voting New Zealanders remain unconvinced that New Zealand faces anything remotely resembling the conditions that confronted Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, or Michael Joseph Savage in 1935. The status quo, for most Kiwis, remains far from unbearable. Big Change is not required.

 

Certainly, the multiplying number of government failures: the lack of affordable housing; declining water quality; land sales to foreigners; overcrowding in primary school classrooms; the sorry state of New Zealand’s mental health services; is fast reaching the point where, after nine years, the voters are ready for “an orderly rotation of political elites”. What the electorate (as presently configured) is not ready for, however, is revolution.

 

The contemplation of six impossibly big changes before breakfast can safely be left to the TOP of Gareth Morgan’s head.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 21 March 2017.

“By Their Fruits Shall Ye Know Them”: There’s nothing ‘moderate’ about John Key’s government.

Wolves In Wolves' Clothing: What Key and Joyce, both inveterate poll-watchers, clearly grasped after National’s last-minute failure in 2005 was that when push came to shove, the New Zealand electorate just wasn’t ready to take yet another wild ride into political and economic upheaval. National had to learn how to "make haste slowly".

 

NEW ZEALAND’S LOVE AFFAIR with John Key, like most enduring relationships, is based on trust. Ever since he wrested the leadership of the National Party from the scary Don Brash, it has been Key’s unwavering mission to present both himself and the party he leads as ordinary, decent and (most important of all) non-threatening. Looking back over the past six years, only a fool would say he hasn’t been extraordinarily successful.

 

Had Brash won the 2005 election New Zealand would have been plunged into a period of acute political instability.

 

Faced with a government determined to relegate the Treaty of Waitangi to the status of an historical relic, and abolish the Maori seats altogether, the Maori Party, the Greens and (with much less enthusiasm) the Labour Party would have found themselves mobilising not only a furious Maoridom, but also a very significant swathe of Pakeha society as well. The resulting clash of a very significant minority of the population with “the racist Right” would have made the 1981 Springbok Tour protests look like a tepid historical dress rehearsal. After three years of increasingly violent and ultimately fatal confrontations, it’s likely that Brash, the National Party and their rabid Act allies would have been consigned to electoral oblivion. The Right’s electoral rehabilitation would have taken at least a decade.

 

In a very real sense, then, National (and New Zealand) dodged a bullet in 2005. And the two National Party politicians who appreciated just how big a bullet it was that had whistled over their heads were John Key and Steven Joyce. It’s not that these two politicians underwent some sort of Road to Damascus conversion from far-Right fanatics to kitten-eyed moderates – far from it. What they grasped was that any further attempts to impose the entire right-wing agenda in one fell swoop were bound to produce exactly the same electoral failure.

 

Brash had taken his inspiration from Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson. All three of these politicians were “policy aggressors” determined to overturn “the conventional wisdom” in the name of a radically reconfigured New Zealand economy and society. But what Key and Joyce, both inveterate poll-watchers, clearly grasped was that National’s last-minute failure in 2005 was only partly due to Brash’s personal stumbles. When push came to shove, the New Zealand electorate just wasn’t ready to take yet another wild ride into political and economic upheaval. If National was to capitalise successfully upon the electorate’s growing disenchantment with “Nanny Helen’s “ “political correctness” and a Labour Party fast becoming unrecognisable to “Middle New Zealand”, then the negative legacies of Richardson, Shipley and Brash had to be expunged.

 

And nobody does expunge like John Key. In spite of the fact that in his earliest incarnation as a National Party back-bencher, the MP for Hellensville boasted a decidedly reactionary political profile, John Key, as Leader of the Opposition, proved to be extraordinarily adept at presenting himself as “Mr Moderate”, “Mr Bloke-Next-Door”, “Mr Guy-I’d-Like-To-Have-Beer-With” or (if you were a woman) “Mr Guy-I’d-Like-To-Shag”. If Brash’s mentors had been Douglas and Richardson, the policy aggressors; Key’s were Sir Keith Holyoake, Jim Bolger and Clark herself: incrementalists all.

 

But just because, as a politician, you’ve decided to make haste slowly, doesn’t mean that you don’t get to where you’re going in the end. A dispassionate review of the Key Government’s legislative achievements since 2008 could only conclude by observing that notwithstanding all the taunts of National having turned into “Labour-Lite”, this is a very right-wing government indeed. It’s unrelenting hostility to all forms of environmental protection; its opening of our land and sea to mineral exploration and extraction; its blank refusal to take any meaningful action against Climate Change and its determination to protect the dairy industry from any and all forms of practical regulation: these are only the beginning of what is now a very long list National’s reactionary victories.

 

And just consider what has characterised the opening shots of National’s third term. Dismissed as mere technical adjustments, the Government’s changes to the Employment Relations Act place New Zealand at the far right-wing reaches of the OECD. (As the CTU president, Helen Kelly, quite rightly points out.) Then there is Bill English’s and Paula Bennett’s extraordinary decisions in relation to state housing. At a time when people are living in caravan-parks and cars, the idea of selling up to a third of the nation’s state houses represents a sudden and utterly unmandated return to the darkest days of Jenny Shipley. And as if these measures weren’t reactionary enough, it now seems certain that Key will commit New Zealand military forces to the confused and almost certainly ineffective US-led war against the Islamic State.

 

“Moderate”? “Labour-Lite”? Not really. John Key’s government is every bit as bad as its predecessors. It is, however, a great deal better than most of them at pretending it isn’t. And to those who find it impossible to see “that nice Mr Key” as being anything other than the soul of reason and common sense, I can only offer the words of St Matthew’s Gospel:

 

 “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits.”

 

This essay was posted simultaneously on The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road on Tuesday, 4 November 2014.