A Party Of Honourable Men?

Reprehensible: There is much that could be said about Michael Woodhouse, but what would be the point?  Any man who willingly involves himself in a situation as reprehensible as the one depicted in the above photograph has already vouchsafed all that decent people need to know about his character. That there have been no reports of the National MP apologising to Clare Curran, or making any other attempt to atone for this vile incident, merely confirms the futility of pursuing Mr Woodhouse any further.

IT’S ONE OF those rules that every politician lucky enough to have a responsible political mentor learns very early. Never say or do anything that you wouldn’t be happy to see reported on the front page of the daily newspapers.

The former National Party Prime Minister, John Key, must have been blessed with such a mentor at a very early age. No matter how hard the Labour Party trawled through Key’s past (and they trawled very hard indeed!) they always came away empty-handed.

This absence of dirt was all the more remarkable given Key’s chosen profession. Currency traders are notorious for their reckless lifestyles. But, while the future prime minister’s friends and colleagues were winging their way across the Atlantic to sample the manifold delights of New York and Las Vegas, Key was on his way home to his wife and kids in the suburbs. It was almost as if he was proactively protecting himself from the sort of past his political enemies would one day be desperate to exploit.

Clearly, National’s Michael Woodhouse has never made the acquaintance of a responsible political mentor. Had he done so he would never have allowed himself to be photographed holding up a toilet seat with Dunedin South MP Clare Curran’s face attached to it.

One must assume that Mr Woodhouse is far from happy that the image in question, and all it says about him, is everywhere on-line and in the news media. Moreover, if National’s Health spokesperson really has no memory of the circumstances in which this disgusting photograph was taken – and Mr Woodhouse insists that he does not – then he is far beyond the help of any sort of mentor.

Perhaps he should learn how to pray?

There is much more that could be said about Mr Woodhouse, but what would be the point?  Any man who willingly involves himself in a situation as reprehensible as the one depicted in the photograph has already vouchsafed all that decent people need to know about his character. That there have been no reports of the National MP apologising to Ms Curran, or making any other attempt to atone for this vile incident, merely confirms the futility of pursuing Mr Woodhouse any further.

The only entity worth pursuing in this whole sordid story is the National Party itself.

The comic maestro, Groucho Marx, once quipped that he could never join any club that was prepared to have him as a member. What, then, does it say about National that eight years after allowing himself to photographed displaying that appalling toilet seat, Mr Woodhouse remains a member in good standing of both the National Party and its caucus?

More importantly, what does it say about National’s new leader, Todd Muller?

For the sake of argument, let’s give Mr Muller the benefit of the doubt and say that he knew nothing of the toilet seat with Ms Curran’s face on it: that he was as shocked and appalled by its crudity as every other decent New Zealander. But if, as we all hope, that was Mr Muller’s reaction, then are we not entitled to ask why he didn’t take the next obvious step of demanding Mr Woodhouse’s immediate resignation?

Because that is what any decent, honourable leader of a political party looking to become the next government of New Zealand would have done. Such a leader would have transformed this sordid stain on his party’s reputation into a learning opportunity. He would have made it clear to every member of his caucus and party that anyone deriving any sort of perverse excitement from such scatological misogyny had no place in either. He would have used the occasion to reaffirm his determination to elevate politics above the bloody cruelty of the bearpit. To make of the word “honourable” something more than a perfunctory honorific. And, finally, to demonstrate his bona fides, Mr Muller would have tendered his apology to Ms Curran on behalf of every National Party member.

At the time of writing, however, Mr Muller has made no obvious effort to do any of these things. Mr Woodhouse remains a member in good standing of the National Party club.

Which raises the obvious question: If this malodorous boot was on the left foot of New Zealand politics, what would Jacinda Ardern be expected to do?

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 10 July 2020.

Green Party Lesson No. 1: Anticipating The Direction Of Political Sniper Fire.

Not A Good Look: Golriz Ghahraman (then an intern for the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda) poses alongside Simon Bikindi - the Hutu singer-songwriter whose "killer songs" played a deadly role in the killing of 800,000 to one million Tutsi tribes-people during the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Ghahraman has come under intense criticism for not making clearer this, and other, associations with war criminals. That the Greens did not anticipate such attacks should be of real concern to the Ardern Government.

IN POLITICS, as in war, the aggressor’s first strike is almost always directed against the defender’s weakest point. That being the case, the National Opposition has clearly identified the Ardern Government’s lacklustre political management skills as its primary target. Their secondary target, equally clearly, is the Greens. This should be the cause of considerable angst on the Government’s part. The Labour-NZ First Coalition’s political management skills will improve with practice. Improving the Greens political skills is a much taller order!

The Greens face a number of serious problems at the moment, not the least of which is the extremely heavy workloads being borne by the most experienced members of their tiny caucus. James Shaw, Julie-Anne Genter and Eugenie Sage, as Ministers Outside of Cabinet, have their hands full just bringing themselves up-to-speed with their portfolios. Of the remaining five Green MPs: one is an Under-Secretary; one the Party Whip; another is campaigning to become the next Female Co-Leader; and the remaining two are complete newbies.

Unsurprisingly, it was one of the latter, Golriz Ghahraman, who this week found herself in the cross-hairs of David Farrar and Phil Quin, two of New Zealand’s most deadly political snipers.

Both men’s attention had been drawn to what can only be described as the unnecessary grandiloquence of Ghahraman’s CV. Describing her fairly modest role in the massive UN exercises known as the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia and the Special Tribunal for Cambodia (ICTs) in terms that made her sound like Geoffrey Robertson and Amal Alamuddin Clooney all rolled into one, really was asking for, if not trouble, then most certainly some pretty close enemy scrutiny.

That Ghahraman was not well-placed to withstand such scrutiny, raises two obvious and important questions. Why did she draw attention to her participation in these ICTs without fully disclosing her potentially controversial roles as a member of the defendants’ legal team? And, why didn’t the Green Party carry out the same sort of due diligence exercise on Ghahraman’s CV as Quin and Farrar? At the very least, these simple precautions would have allowed Ghahraman and her Green Party colleagues to anticipate precisely the sort of attacks that eventuated.

The obvious lesson which the National Party will have drawn from this incident is that the Green Party – or at least those responsible for its communications strategies – are in the grip of a conception of politics that places far too much emphasis on marketing and spin. Only the most inexperienced (and cynical) public relations flack could consider it “okay” to leave out of a politician’s most immediately accessible biography (the one on her own party’s website!) something as potentially explosive as the information that she had helped to defend people accused of genocide and other, equally horrifying, crimes against humanity.

The incident will also have alerted National to the fact that the Greens have learned absolutely nothing from the parliamentary bullying meted-out to their colleague, the former Green MP, Keith Locke.

It was the Labour Party’s Opposition Research which dug out of the pages of Socialist Action, the Trotskyite newspaper which Locke edited for many years, a nugget of pure political gold. The Socialist Action League had been an enthusiastic early supporter of the Khmer Rouge – the revolutionary party led by Pol Pot which, in 1975, toppled the right-wing military government of Cambodia. As the editor of Socialist Action, Locke had celebrated the Khmer Rouge takeover as a “victory for humanity”.

In vain did Locke attempt to explain to his parliamentary accusers that, at the time the offending articles were written, neither he nor the Socialist Action League were aware of the wholesale “politicide” unfolding in the killing fields of Pol Pot’s Cambodia. John Pilger’s shocking revelations that the Khmer Rouge had murdered millions of Cambodians, however, rendered Locke’s after-the-fact explanations utterly ineffective. He had written in support of Pol Pot – and for many MPs that was enough to place him beyond the pale of political respectability.

The point of this cautionary tale? That a political party – especially one which, like the Greens, attracts radicals and activists of all kinds – not only needs to keep its institutional memory alive, it needs to keep it kicking-in. The most important lesson to be drawn from Locke’s experience is that political parties need to conduct exhaustive research into the backgrounds of all its candidates, so that areas of weakness and vulnerability can be identified early and, if possible, neutralised by preventive revelation.

It is supremely ironic that Ghahraman, Locke’s successor in the role of Green Spokesperson for Global Affairs, was a member of the Special Tribunal for Cambodia’s prosecution team for bringing the mass murderers of the Khmer Rouge to justice. Ironic, too, that she, like Locke, has seen her credibility in the Global Affairs and Justice Spokesperson roles severely damaged by a failure to anticipate how the Greens’ enemies, however unfairly, might turn the actions of her past, no matter how well intentioned, against her.

After Ghahraman’s ambush, Jacinda Ardern will be acutely aware that improving her government’s political management skills is not simply a matter of keeping her own Labour Party safe from political snipers, but that the job also entails teaching the Greens how to anticipate – and then dodge – their common enemy’s bullets.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 30 November 2017.

The No. 8 Wire Prime Minister.

Principles? Seriously?  New Zealanders, as a people, are not much given to following theories of any kind. If we subscribe to any philosophy at all it is the philosophy of pragmatism. If a problem can be fixed by using the political equivalent of No. 8 Wire, then “no worries, mate”.

 

JUST HOURS BEFORE HE RESIGNED, the Prime Minister told RNZ’s Kim Hill that “you can’t right the wrongs of the past”. He was responding to questions about the acknowledged ill-treatment of children in state care during the 1950s, 60s and 70s, and whether his government was prepared to sanction an independent inquiry into multiple allegations of systemic child abuse.

 

It struck me as an extremely odd thing to say. Not least because righting the wrongs of the past is a cause into which this National Government has poured (and continues to pour) hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.

 

True, the wrongs being righted with government money are not those inflicted upon acutely vulnerable children in the care of state institutions – like the Epuni Boys Home. No. The Crown’s cash is being doled out to compensate Maori iwi and hapu for wrongs inflicted by its representatives as far back as the 1850s, 60s and 70s.

 

What’s more, for the wrongs inflicted upon nineteenth century Maori by the colonial authorities, the present government of New Zealand (usually in the person of the Minister for Treaty Settlements, Chris Finlayson QC) has issued multiple apologies. But, issuing a public apology to the hundreds of young people (a great many of them Maori) who were, according to the testimony of their victims, beaten, tortured and raped by public servants acting in loco parentis: that, apparently, is impossible.

 

That John Key failed to recognise the extraordinary inconsistency embedded in his response to Kim Hill’s questions speaks volumes about the way he and his government have played the game of politics.

 

Mr Key and his ministers do not come at the nation’s problems with solutions informed by a common philosophical understanding of the world. If they did, then the need to inquire into the alleged injustices suffered by state wards would be as pressing as the need to inquire into the alleged injustices suffered by Maori iwi and hapu. And if those injustices were proved, then the need for proper compensation, and a public expression of culpability and regret, would be just as apparent.

 

Lacking a common philosophy, National’s ministers are forced to respond to economic and social problems in an ad hoc, piecemeal fashion. They do not appear to recognise that much of the advice they receive is underpinned by philosophical and ideological assumptions with which their party has little affinity. Assumptions flatly contradicted by the arguments ministers use to convince and/or placate the public.

 

Public Choice Theory, for example, seeks to limit the power of state providers to “capture” the processes by which services are delivered to the public. Those who subscribe to the theory are, consequently, searching constantly for ways to disrupt and “downsize” bureaucratic systems. Government ministers, on the other hand, have often attempted to “sell” such measures as the only way of shifting scarce resources to the people on “the front lines” of service delivery.

 

It would be wrong, however, to suggest that philosophical inconsistency is a failing which constantly occupies the mind of the ordinary Kiwi voter. New Zealanders, as a people, are not much given to following theories of any kind. If we subscribe to any philosophy at all it is the philosophy of pragmatism. If a problem can be fixed by using the political equivalent of No. 8 Wire, then “no worries, mate”.

 

The problem with this “pragmatic” approach to politics is that, eventually, one’s society finds itself held together by nothing but No. 8 Wire temporary fixes. When every remedy is ad hoc, and every argument is cobbled together to meet the needs of the moment, then the inconsistencies of approach and internal policy contradictions reach a level that even the most “practical” of voters is no longer able to overlook.

 

If it is simply not possible to right the wrongs of the past, as the outgoing Prime Minister insists, then why is the long-suffering taxpayer called upon continually to address the wrongs inflicted upon Maori in the nineteenth century? If it is unreasonable to become too agitated about the way children in state care were treated in the 1960s, then why apologise for the colonial confiscations of the 1860s?

It is to be hoped that Bill English brings to the office of prime minister a more consistent and coherent political philosophy than his predecessor. No. 8 Wire cannot fix everything.

 

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, 9 December 2016.

The Better Angel: Why Birgitte Nyborg Beats Donald Trump.

American Cynicism vs Danish Idealism: That the ruthless and corrupt hero of House of Cards, Francis Underwood, so completely captivated American television viewers should, perhaps, have alerted us to the possibility of Donald Trump in the White House. The tremendous popularity of the Danish TV series Borgen and its heroine, Birgitte Nyborg, testifies to the worldwide hunger for a more principled kind of politics.

 

ALONG WITH LEGO, and those foiled-wrapped segments of creamily delicious cheese, Borgen, is one of Denmark’s most successful exports. When the idea of a series about the intricacies of Danish politics was pitched to the bosses at the publicly owned Danish Broadcasting Corporation more than a few eyebrows must have shot up. But, somehow, the show’s creator, Adam Price (one of Denmark’s leading television chefs!) convinced them to back the project – and Borgen went on to wow the world.

 

What made the series so compelling (apart from Price’s intelligent script and Sidse Babett Knudsen’s insightful rendering of Birgitte Nyborg, the drama’s central character ) was the way party politics was presented to the show’s well-off and well-educated audiences.

 

Unlike the blackly comical British series, The Thick Of It, which delighted in portraying the political process and its practitioners as irredeemably corrupt and ineffective, Borgen took as its starting point the historically undeniable ability of the democratic process to improve the lives of ordinary human-beings.

 

It’s an important difference. The Thick of It may be funny, but it is also profoundly disempowering. Nothing good can come from the politics represented in TTOI because none of its characters are in the least bit inspiring. The viewers may laugh at the hugely inventive invective which pours out of the mouth of its anti-hero, Malcolm Tucker, but very few of them would want to inhabit his world.

 

Borgen does not pretend that the political world is without self-aggrandisement and venality. Or that deception, compromise and betrayal are not inescapable aspects of the exercise of political power. But the series refuses to make these the be-all and end-all of the process. In the character of Birgitte Nyborg, Price offers his audience a politician who, through all the vicissitudes of high public office, remains unswervingly committed to the bright bundle of ideals that impelled her into politics.

 

Borgen is empowering precisely because it refuses to validate the cynicism and disillusionment which pervades so many ordinary citizens’ perception of contemporary politics. What makes the series work dramatically, however, is the way Price plays to his audiences’ deep-seated yearning for a politician who refuses to play it safe. A person with enough faith in the intelligence of the voting public to tell them the truth, and enough trust in the essential goodness of human-beings to address her policies to what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature”.

 

This is the style of politics that Birgitte Nyborg practices – and Borgen’s audiences love it.

 

Danish Broadcasting is to be commended for Borgen. Not only because it reveals Denmark, a country about the same size as New Zealand, to be deeply committed to the idea that its public broadcaster has a vital role in both explaining and upholding its democratic institutions, but also because it is willing to invest in the creative capacities of its own citizens – to the point of funding a project of Borgen’s scope and scale. Would that New Zealanders were as committed to preserving the public service aspects of their broadcasting system!

 

Because there is a price to be paid for dwelling only on the negative aspects of politics. If voters are encouraged to believe that their political system is “rigged”, and that their political leaders are “crooked”, then they will cease to have faith in the intricate networks of alliances; the complex arrangements of compromises; and the step-by-step fulfilment of promises that is the daily grind of democratic politics.

 

And when that happens: when the voters dismiss the give-and-take of parliamentary politics; the sort of politics that President Lyndon Johnson personified, and which produced the transformational Voting Rights Act of 1965; then they begin to long for a leader strong enough to dispense with the formalities of politics and cut to the chase.

 

Except that a leader who’s contemptuous of complexity and compromise must also be contemptuous of the voters themselves. Because the inescapable fact of human existence is that it is not simple, and that the competing needs of human society are only resolvable by people who are willing to compromise.

 

Compromising does not mean capitulating. This is Borgen’s core message. That compromising is about keeping your own ideals alive by recognising the ideals of others: the rights of others.

 

Rejecting the politics of Birgitte Nyborg, leaves only the anti-politics of Donald Trump.

 

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, 28 October 2016.

The Secret Agreement.

The Crusher Returns: Judith Collins, a shrewd Auckland lawyer, is well aware of the widely-held belief that politics has become an almost entirely disreputable profession. She knows that those who enter it are greeted with a knowing cynicism – as if both the voter and the politician have entered into a secret agreement that nothing good will ever come from the latter’s intentions and achievements.

 

JUDITH COLLINS is to be congratulated. There are very few western nations in which a parliamentarian hauling as much baggage as Ms Collins would be given a second chance. When did ours become the country that awards the average politician more lives than the average cat?

 

Is no one surprised that Ms Collin’s rehabilitation is so unsurprising. Is no one asking: why wasn’t her treatment of Justice Binnie; her decision to allow Serco into the New Zealand prison system; her fraught dealings with the Orivida company; and her friendship with the highly controversial blogger, Cameron Slater, enough – more than enough! – to rule out a return to the Cabinet Table?

 

The answer lies with, and in, us – the New Zealand electorate. Our steady disengagement from the political process (in which we were once amongst the world’s most enthusiastic participants) has been accompanied, and justified, by the widely-held belief that politics has become an almost entirely disreputable profession. Those who enter it are greeted with a knowing cynicism – as if both the voter and the politician have entered into a secret agreement that nothing good will ever come from the latter’s intentions and achievements.

 

In practical terms, this means that it is the honest and principled politicians who attract the most scathing condemnation. Such people have clearly failed to understand their job description, which demands only a show of decency – and not even that if the politician’s indecent objectives can be achieved swiftly, decisively – and with ostentatious brutality.

 

As Freddy Gray wrote recently in the British magazine, The Spectator: “What strange people we Brits are. We spend years moaning that our politicians are cynical opportunists who don’t stand for anything. Then along comes an opposition leader who has principles — and appears to stick by them even when it makes him unpopular — and he is dismissed as a joke.”

 

Not that the Brits have “strange” all to themselves. When David Cunliffe, having heard the statistics on domestic violence and met with some of its victims at the Women’s Refuge charity’s annual conference, told his audience that it made him “feel sorry for being a man” – a not unreasonable admission in the circumstances – he was universally pilloried. The New Zealand electorate doesn’t appreciate that sort of raw and unmediated political honesty.

 

Ms Collins, a shrewd Auckland lawyer, would never make such a fundamental error. She knows what New Zealanders expect of their politicians – and she gives it to them good and strong.

 

Critics accuse her of arrogance, but a heapin-helpin of self-importance has been de rigueur for National Party politicians ever since the days of “Piggy” Muldoon.

 

Others accuse Ms Collins of being unable to differentiate private from public responsibilities. But those who believe that all politicians are venal and self-serving remain completely unfazed by such charges.

 

The same applies to the Serco contract. Sure, the company has a less than stellar international reputation. Yes, it is determined to make incarceration profitable. But – so what? That’s what Capitalism does, and it’s unreasonable to ask capitalist politicians to do otherwise.

 

But, surely, it is the duty of the Prime Minister to uphold the highest standards of behaviour in public office? Regardless of the low esteem in which many citizens hold their political representatives, shouldn’t the Prime Minister do everything within his power to elevate the public expectations of his government?

 

John Key knows better than to attempt such a risky project. Improving the average citizen’s opinion of politics and politicians must, of necessity, involve reversing that secret agreement between the leaders and the led. Instead of endorsing the public’s withering contempt for the political process, Mr Key would be forced to contradict it. Instead of validating the unspoken assumption that the system is rotten and immutable, he would have to redefine politics as the best way of improving the lives of ordinary people.

 

In conveying these messages to the electorate, the Prime Minister would, of course, also be asking them to assume responsibility for holding him and his ministers to account. He would be inviting them to apply a consistent moral code to the conduct of all politicians, and imposing the duty of taking action to reprimand and/or punish all those who break that code. In short, he’d be demanding they behave like virtuous citizens.

 

“Crusher” Collins would roll him before you could say “Democracy”.

 

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, 11 December 2015.

Steering By The Real: Chris Trotter Responds To Paul Buchanan.

Uncharacteristically Idealistic: Normally a cool-headed realist (as befits an expert in international relations) Dr Paul Buchanan has taken issue with Chris Trotter's "cynical" Bowalley Road posting Dirty Politics - Is There Any Other Kind? by offering a passionately idealistic defence of democratic politics.

WHEN ACADEMICS take to blogging the rest of us best be careful. And when they offer comment on the subject of dirty politics we should all pay attention. I will always remember my history lecturer, Dr Michael Cullen’s, confident dismissal of the challenge of representing the working-class Dunedin electorate of St Kilda after the 1981 General Election. Having secured selection, he told his admiring followers in Labour Youth that Parliament would be a welcome respite from the most vicious and dirty political environment of them all – the university common room.

 

Dr Paul Buchanan has more reason than most to endorse Dr Cullen’s comments, which is why I was surprised to see him describe what I regarded as an admirably realistic assessment of democratic politics as evidence that I had either lost my ideological bearings or had “consciously decided to join the Dark Side”.

 

In Why Throw In The Towel? – A Brief Response To Trotter’s Cynicism I am thus dismissed by Dr Buchanan as either bewildered or a blackguard, and my offending essay Dirty Politics – Is There Any Other Kind? is deemed “a cynical defence of dirty politics as being the norm”.

 

Unfortunately, Dr Buchanan’s critique does not engage with my essay’s essentially historical-realist argument. He does, however, rehearse (in suitably dense academic prose) my inverted Clausewitzian characterisation of politics as “the continuation of war by other means”. Democratic politics, in particular, argues Dr Buchanan, must be “self-limiting” lest the “political game descends into a zero-sum self-interested maximisation of collective opportunities.”

 

The above sentence is not, however, how I would formulate the alternative to the self-limiting behaviour so crucial to democracy’s success. The historical record suggests that, in the real world, the “self-interested maximisation of collective opportunities” is the democratic norm, and that, historically, the descent from that norm is characterised by the decision of key political actors to abandon self-limitation in favour of popular or state violence. “Foul means or fouler” was how I put it: revolution or repression.

 

Bluntly speaking, Dr Buchanan’s uncharacteristically idealistic aspirations for democracy (in his discussions of international relations he has always struck me as a pretty staunch realist) cannot survive the taste-test of history. And it is this ahistorical idealism which largely explains his disinclination to engage with any of the many historical examples included in my essay – not even the all-American examples advanced by his compatriot Professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson.

 

Whether it be the dirty political deal that abandoned Southern Blacks to their fate in 1876; or Joseph P. Kennedy’s dirty deal with the Chicago mob to secure the crucial electoral votes of Illinois for his son in the desperately close presidential election of 1960; or the low-down and dirty theft of the 2000 presidential election by the Bush clique and their Supreme Court allies; the historical proofs for the universality of dirty politics are legion.

 

Nor can Dr Buchanan escape this reality by shovelling all the blame for dirty politics onto the “elites”. The shenanigans I have observed in union elections do not bear repeating, and even in the idealistic Green Party the ruthlessly ambitious have been known to reach for the contents of the self-composting toilet.

 

Democracy has always danced upon the back of the monstrous interests composing the capitalist state. It does so, with the lightest of feet, because it knows that while the monsters beneath prefer to govern by consent, they are perfectly willing to resort to force. To preserve at least the illusion of consent, the political writers of the 1920s, were quick to reassure the powerful that, properly managed by astute politicians, a responsible media and the new (dark) arts of advertising and public relations, the millions of newly enfranchised voters would pose no serious threat to the status quo. For the likes of Edward Bernays and Walter Lippman, democracy without deception and distraction was a non-starter.

 

These are not pleasant truths, but those who locate themselves on the Left would be most unwise to ignore or dismiss them. Navigating by the starry eyes of the idealistic all-too-often lands left-wingers on the rocks. I prefer to steer by the real.

 

But there is dirty politics that works, and dirty politics that doesn’t. The manufacturing of popular consent increases in effectiveness in inverse proportion to the voters’ proximity to the factories where it is made. What Nicky Hager has exposed in his book is the failure of the National Party leadership to recognise in Cameron Slater and his comrades a political cadre too protean, too volatile, and much too much in love with the smell of napalm in the morning to be allowed anywhere near the Prime Minister’s Office. What Nicky describes is Watergate writ small: a scandal precipitated by a general failure, at the highest levels, to understand that the essence of successful democratic politics is illusion; and the only thing you must never do is allow the mask to slip.

 

This essay was simultaneously posted on the Bowalley Road and The Daily Blog blogsites on Friday, 22 August 2014.

Winning Women's Equality - With Men's Weapons

The Price of Power: To secure selection as the candidate for a major political party requires the surrender of all those qualities generally associated with femininity. To survive as an MP, women must develop an impenetrable outer-skin which, as it thickens, leaves less and less space for the things it is supposed to protect.

 

I’M NOT PROUD of what I did. In fact, recalling those events, I recoil in dismay from the memory of my former self. Why did I do it? Because experience had taught me a very simple and brutal truth: in politics you either master the art of destroying your opponents – or you are destroyed by them.

 

The media storm whipped up by Labour’s plan for ensuring gender equality in its caucus – the so-called “Man Ban” – has concentrated all its force on the merit-based selection versus party-mandated quotas debate. There has been next to no attention paid to the more important question: why do fewer women than men make it through the candidate selection process?

 

The whole purpose of a quota system is to even up a contest which, from the very outset, is stacked against women. Or, perhaps, that should read: a game which, from the very outset, is stacked against those who demonstrate the characteristics our culture generally associates with women.

 

Can you stand up at a party branch meeting and respond to anyone foolish enough to oppose your plans with such cold ferocity and unflinching personal cruelty that not only do they shut up for the rest of the meeting, but they never attend another? Are you willing to spend hours on the phone lining up supporters for, and running down the opponents of, party movers-and-shakers whose backing you need to succeed? Can you cross off the names of former friends, allies – even lovers – from the “ticket” your faction is running at Annual Conference? Are you prepared to assure a pivotal party “fixer” that although you were once a fervent supporter of a cause he or she opposed, you have now seen the error of your ways?

 

These are the “skills” the aspiring parliamentary candidate needs to acquire in order to stand a reasonable chance of selection. Not to beat about the bush, they are the skills of a sociopath: the ability to lie convincingly; the ability to manipulate and exploit; the ability to impress and overawe; and, most vital of all, the ability to hurt and betray other human-beings not only without compunction – but without the slightest guilt or remorse.

 

Culturally-speaking, these sociopathic qualities are overwhelmingly associated with masculinity. And, no matter how loudly we may condemn the men who display such immoral behaviour, when we encounter them in the flesh it’s a very different story.

 

Almost against our will, we are seduced by these ruthless individuals. Some ancient species memory kicks-in to subdue our moral qualms – reminding us that these are the qualities that work. It reassures us that the family, tribe or nation that places itself under the protection of such men stands the best chance of survival. Extraordinary moral strength is required to avoid falling under their spell.

 

The most pernicious aspect of modern, democratic politics is that it cannot explicitly acknowledge any of these arcane truths. No political party is going place an ad’ saying: “Parliamentary Candidates Needed. Must be prepared to discard all conviction and compassion in the name of victory. Sociopaths Preferred.”

 

On the contrary, the qualities “officially” sought after by political parties (especially those of the Left) indicate the exact opposite. Fidelity, commitment, diligence and a high level of emotional intelligence (traditionally, the defining attributes of femininity) are the qualities demanded of a modern politician. Significantly, these were precisely the qualities which the pioneers of women’s suffrage promised their sex would bring to the corrupt and cut-throat world of male politics.

 

It was all a lie. The women who took such blandishments at face value and put their names forward for selection soon discovered that sweetness and light were no match for bitterness and the night. Those with no stomach for the vicious battles that clearly awaited women candidates and parliamentarians, withdrew from the arena. The ones who stayed had no option but to acquire both the weapons and the armour for competitive combat. Masculine weapons. Masculine armour.

 

It was seldom a comfortable fit. Certainly not for women, and not for an encouragingly large number of men. New Zealand’s most successful woman politician, Helen Clark, reported being physically sick after some meetings of the Labour caucus – so toxic were the tactics of her male colleagues. By the time she became Prime Minister, however, her armour was as hard as dragon’s hide and her swords and stilettoes honed exceptionally sharp.

 

The great danger, of course, is that those who develop such an impenetrable outer-skin leave less and less space for the things it was supposed to protect. Likewise, those who master the skills of the sociopath too often forget that they were ever anything else.

 

I was lucky to escape that fate.

 

What disquiets me is not how few women make it through candidate selection – it is the number who succeed.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 9 July 2013.

Executive Ethics

Mind The Gap: According to our Prime Minister: "There's quite a wide definition of ethics." To which we can only reply: "And it's getting wider!"

RON SUSKIND is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, best known for his reporting of the Global War on Terror (GWOT). It was while covering GWOT for The Wall Street Journal that Mr Suskind first encountered the ethics of self-created reality.

All wars do violence to human sensibilities, but the war which began on 11 September 2001 was destined to set new benchmarks. Dark practices such as torture, collective punishment, and extra-judicial killings: extreme sanctions which, from the moment of its birth, the United States had proudly and emphatically renounced; suddenly became accepted elements of American state-craft. In order to live with these acts (for which no ethical justifications are available) American military, diplomatic and bureaucratic personnel were forced to devise a whole new way of looking at and explaining the world.

Ron Suskind was the first to report it.

“In the summer of 2002,”, he recalls, “after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend – but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors  . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’.”

It is difficult to overstate the importance of this reported conversation. Not only because its content spoke to the very dark heart of the Bush presidency, but also because it constituted much of the “discernible reality” of contemporary politics – including our own.

In essence, what the Bush Administration official was saying to Mr Suskind was that the exercise of raw executive power, by virtue of its self-evident effects, removes any need for ethical justification. If the United States invades Iraq, then that is the reality the world must face. Questions about its ethics are simply irrelevant. As the 9/11 hijackers demonstrated: if the deed is big enough, it explains and vindicates itself.

Our ethical structures are simply too fragile to contain, or judge, such acts. Like the spider’s web which ensnares small creatures, but whose fragile threads are powerless to hinder larger prey, the “reality-based community” can only “judiciously” report and study – but never stop – what the “Empire” does. As President Richard Nixon notoriously observed to David Frost: “Well, when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.” Or, in the language of the Roman Emperors: Necessitas non habet legem: Necessity knows no law.

Fish, it is said, rot from the head down. If the most powerful men and women in the most powerful nation on earth were now free to embrace torture and murder with impunity, then how likely was it that those occupying the next steps of the social hierarchy would repudiate these new, self-justifying, realities of executive power? If the President of the United States could now condemn an American citizen to death without trial, what was there to prevent Wall Street looting the American treasury? Or fat Germans beggaring emaciated Greeks?

And, if the exercise of naked power now requires no justification, should we local representatives of the “reality-based community” really be surprised to learn that the rights of film technicians and actors can be cancelled at the urging of an accommodating prime minister? Or that, by building a convention centre, a casino owner can secure a revision of the gambling laws? Or that an “anonymously” funded politician can ride off, Scot-free, into the political badlands on the ass that is New Zealand’s local electoral law?

No. Not when, as our own self-created little emperor says: “There’s quite a wide definition of ethics.”

This essay was originally published by The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 4 May 2012.