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.

Digitally Together - Politically Alone

You Had To Be There: National's Rob Muldoon campaigning in the 1970s. Digital political communication will feature hugely in this year's general election. But can the solitary experience of on-line politics ever match the powerful feelings of solidarity generated by the mass events of an active and participatory democracy?

 

THIS YEAR’S ELECTION will be won and lost in private. People seated in front of PCs, or, more likely, caressing their smart phones, will be the ones who decide between National and Labour. On both sides of the great political divide some very smart people are already working on ways to bring their followers together – alone.

 

What a contrast with the campaigning methods of the past. Right up until that most pivotal of election years, 1984, the opening of an election campaign was an unequivocally public event. Political parties typically hired the largest covered venues available – town halls, theatres, opera houses – from the stages of which their leaders addressed audiences of one-to-two thousand energised supporters.

 

And some determined opponents’, too. Because this was the era in which the noble art of heckling still boasted many proud exponents.

 

When Rob Muldoon kicked-off National’s official campaign in Hamilton’s Founders Theatre in 1975,  a clutch of seasoned Labour hecklers were lying in wait. As the pugnacious Opposition Leader was working his way towards his oratorical climax, one of those hecklers cried out in a voice that echoed around the auditorium: “Who stabbed Jack in the back!?” [Jack Marshall had been deposed as National’s leader by Muldoon barely twelve months earlier.] It took the great counter-puncher more than a few beats to recover his composure.

 

All good fun! With the entire spectacle broadcast live on the state-owned radio and television networks. Political leaders truly earned the right to rule us in those far-off days before auto-cues, headset microphones and carefully screened audiences waving pre-printed party placards in front of the cameras.

 

None more so that the revered Labour leader, Michael Joseph Savage, who barnstormed the country in 1938. Diagnosed with colon cancer, Savage disregarded the advice of his doctors to conserve his strength, and hit the campaign trail. Faced with near-universal press hostility, he knew he would have to sell his party’s ground-breaking Social Security legislation face-to-face. Town halls could not contain the crowds that gathered to hear him. Labour stalwarts in Dunedin recalled wonderingly the rain-swept afternoon that Savage spoke to an audience of 20,000 at Carisbrook. It wasn’t even his largest.

 

The mandatory broadcasting of campaign openings was a legacy of Savage’s prime-ministership. Like the social-media of the twenty-first century, these live broadcasts allowed political leaders to execute an end-run around the conservative gatekeepers of the privately-owned media.

 

The live broadcasting of Parliament was instituted for exactly the same reason. Working-class families gathered around their radio sets were able to hear Savage describe Labour’s Social Security legislation as “applied Christianity” – as he said it. They were also able to hear National’s leader, Adam Hamilton, dismissing it with a sneer as “applied lunacy”.

 

Paradoxically, the generation raised on Snapchat, Facebook and Twitter, will find more to respond to in this celebrated Labour legend than their Baby Boomer parents. Millennials need no instruction in the galvanising effect of instantaneity: the extraordinary privilege of being able to monitor events as they happen. A single tweet can reach 20,000 people in a millisecond – and none of its recipients are required to stand for hours in the freezing Dunedin rain to receive it.

 

Hence the sustained effort of all the major parties to craft their messages to the specifications of our digital age. Tweets, text messages, Facebook postings, YouTube videos, and personally addressed e-mails will increasingly complement the old technology of snail-mail-shots, robo-calls, pamphlets, posters, TV/radio/print ads and, of course, all those bloody billboards.

 

Parliament itself has bowed before these new digital imperatives. The mandatory broadcasting of the political parties’ opening and closing election statements has been discontinued. State subsidisation of party-political communications will continue, but now it’s to be applied across all platforms.

 

New Zealanders should, therefore, prepare themselves for an onslaught of algorithmic politics. Messages pitched with unnerving precision at our entire demographic profile: gender and ethnicity; marital status and family composition; level of educational attainment; occupation and work history; income-bracket – all the stuff Facebook and Google know already – will arrive, unbidden, in vast numbers.

 

Will they work? You bet your life! You’ll be blown away by their sky-high production values and will thrill to the uncanny resonance of their messages. What’s more, you will feel caught-up in something much bigger than yourself: a movement for change; a people’s crusade! Your determination to cast your vote on 23 September (or before!) will grow ever stronger.

 

But will it be the same as standing in a rain-swept stadium listening to a frail and desperately ill old man asking you to vote for applied Christianity? Will the sound-track in your ear-pods produce the same reaction as 2,000 people chanting Mul-doon! Mul-doon! Mul-doon!? Will your computer screen meet your eye with a flash of solidarity, or join with you in wild applause?

 

Can citizens truly be together – alone?

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 16 May 2017.

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.

Employing Representatives: How Limiting MPs Pay Rises Increases The Democratic Deficit.

Representatives NOT Employees: The steady reduction in the status of our Members of Parliament: from democratically elected representatives to "our employees in Wellington" reflects New Zealanders increasing disengagement from the political process. Seriously, how much power do employees have in this country?

 

“WHAT HAPPENS NOW?” The newly elected Member for Manuwera, Phil Amos, still not quite believing that his days as a secondary-school teacher were over, had rung the Leader of the Opposition, Arnold Nordmeyer, for guidance.

 

“Well,” said Nordy, “we’ll probably have a Caucus meeting sometime in February. [The conversation was taking place in November.] And since the Nats don’t like to call the House together too early – far too many farmers in their Caucus, with far too much to do – things won’t get really busy around here until about the middle of the year.”

 

“What am I supposed to do until then?”, Phil responded plaintively.

 

The Labour Leader chuckled. “My advice, Phil, is to talk to as many people as possible, and just use the time to get to know your electorate.”

 

Phil Amos: MP for Manurewa 1963-1975

 

That’s the way it was for a brand new MP, in a brand new seat, back in 1963.

 

Fifty years ago New Zealanders held very different expectations of their Members of Parliament. Very few people in 1963 would have considered it either appropriate, or accurate, to refer to Members of Parliament as “our employees in Wellington”. Most voters understood that they had elected a representative: someone whose duty it was to reflect, protect and defend the interests of their electorate.

 

The idea that one’s MP is nothing more than a glorified civil servant: a person expected to turn up for work every day, do their “job”, and collect their (excessive) pay, is a much more recent notion.

 

In 1963, Parliament was still a deeply respected institution: a place through which awestruck school-children were led by school-teachers and guides who informed them, solemnly, that this was where the country’s laws were made.

 

Democracy, itself, was still a highly-valued and hard-won achievement in 1963. Hardly surprising when, just twenty years earlier, a significant number of MPs, Phil Amos among them, had been fighting in North Africa, Italy and throughout the Pacific for its survival.

 

Perhaps that explains why communities informed, in 1963, that their Member of Parliament was coming for a visit felt both pleased and honoured.

 

How was that respect so comprehensively forfeited?

 

Partly, it was the work of the Baby-Boom Generation. Shaped by decades of post-war affluence and the dramatic technological innovations that had fuelled it, the Baby-Boomers  aggressively challenged the conservative moral and political assumptions of their parent’s and grandparents’ generations. Artists, movie directors, television producers and songwriters grew increasingly impatient with yesterday’s values: the times they were a changing.

 

And those changing times were stoking the fears of bankers and businessmen, who were rapidly coming round to the view that democracy was getting out of hand. Politicians were responding to the demands of workers, women, blacks and gays in ways that threatened capitalism’s long-term profitability.

 

Their solution, which in New Zealand went by the name of Rogernomics, was to take as many of the important economic decisions as possible out of politicians’ hands and give them to bankers and businessmen. But, to make this solution work, it would be necessary to turn a whole generation of politicians into liars and cheats. Telling the voters that they were being stripped of the power that had made the post-war era such a levelling experience for the rich and the powerful was, obviously, out of the question. They would have to be tricked into giving it up.

 

The people who copped the blame were, of course, the politicians. Many of these were guilty-as-charged – but some were not. It was important, therefore, to foster the notion that politics was an entirely disreputable profession, to which only entirely disreputable people were attracted. Populist media personalities insisted that, because no politician could be trusted, it was necessary for them and their readers/listeners/viewers to keep politicians on the shortest possible leash.

 

Members of Parliament were, accordingly, re-branded as the voters’ “employees”. Every aspect of their lives was subjected to the closest media scrutiny, and any failings ruthlessly exposed. Inevitably, as the public was increasingly persuaded that all politics are “dirty politics”, politicians felt obliged to surrender what remained of their ancient rights and privileges as political representatives, and to embrace, instead, the democratically empty role of political employee.

 

Many will cheer the Prime Minister’s decision to align their “employees’” pay rises with their own. Fewer will ask whose interests Mr Key is representing.

 

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, 6 March 2015.

The Ecology Of Poverty

The Ecology Of Poverty: The range of common experiences between the comfortably off New Zealander and the struggling beneficiary has narrowed dramatically. The days of "getting out the vote" may be over.

 

THERE’S A STORY I like to tell about “getting out the vote”. I’m sharing it with you today because unless Labour is able to substantially increase the number of New Zealanders participating in the electoral process its chances of becoming the next government are negligible. The story is also important because I’m not that confident it could be repeated. And if it isn’t repeatable, then the whole character of electoral politics in New Zealand has already changed – irrevocably.

 

But first – the story. I have changed the name of the woman at the centre of this true tale because it happened a long time ago and she has since gone on to carve out a highly successful career in a major New Zealand company.

 

But, back in the day, Mary was living in one of those provincial centres where the city fathers (and mothers) like to keep all the unemployed, solo mums, invalids and sickness beneficiaries in one shabby suburb so that the authorities can keep an eye on them. Just about everybody rented: either from the state or from the folks who lived in the nicer parts of town. The houses had mostly seen better days, even if the people inside them hadn’t much hope of doing the same.

 

Mary and her little boy subsisted on the DPB and whatever extra help her (proudly left-wing) family could provide. Survival, under the tender legacy of Christine Rankin’s WINZ, was a full-time job for most beneficiaries. Very few of them had any time for politics or politicians. And, if we’re being honest, most politicians didn’t have that much time for them.

 

Though Mary lived in a Labour-held electorate, her MP really wasn’t much cop – at least not as far as the people who lived on Mary’s street were concerned. She had made her way up through the mostly middle-class Women’s Network of the Labour Party which meant that her working knowledge of the working-class was, to put it kindly, somewhat limited.

 

But, as I said, Mary came from an intensely political working-class family. Both her parents and two of her siblings were left-wing party activists and Mary had acquired the ability to formulate a better-than-average political analysis practically by osmosis. Unlike most of her neighbours, she saw a General Election looming. And just like the city’s shrewder party bosses, she was pretty sure her local MP was in trouble.

 

Sure enough, the polling booths had only been open a few hours on Election Day when Labour’s scrutineers noticed a frightening trend. If the hundreds of “natural” Labour supporters in Mary’s suburb continued to stay at home (as they were doing in droves) the incumbent MP was going to lose. Somehow word was got to Mary: “Can you get your neighbours out? If Labour doesn’t maintain its vote at your local booth, the Nats will win.”

 

Now Mary may not have cared much for the Labour Party but she cared for the National Party a whole lot less. So, as the day wore on, Mary wore her knuckles raw on the doors of her friends and neighbours.

 

She knew them and they knew her. More importantly, they trusted her. So when she told them: “You gotta get down to the school and vote. Yep, right now. Coz if all of us living round here don’t vote Labour, the Nats will win.”

 

And it worked. Mary’s neighbours squeezed their babies into their strollers, and their voting papers into the ballot box – and Labour held the seat.

 

I told this story to my brother last Christmas, and he shook his head. He’s been a social worker for 40 years and he told me, sadly, that “the ecology of poverty” (as he memorably described the social relations of deprivation) has undergone a dramatic change since he first ventured into those hard-scrabble suburbs back in the late-1970s. He’s not so sure that the species of citizen to which Mary belonged – already on the edge of extinction 20 years ago – exists anymore.

 

Had he been dropped into Mary’s social ecosystem 20 years ago, he said, finding a path to survival, though difficult, would still have been possible. The poor still had enough in common with “Middle New Zealand” for a reasonable measure of mutual comprehension. Today, he said, it would be much harder. The range of common experiences between the comfortably off New Zealander and the struggling beneficiary has narrowed dramatically.

 

“I don’t think I could do it.”

 

And, believe me, if he couldn’t do it, and if the sort of well-read, politically-aware, working-class families that made Mary possible no longer exist, then the mission of “getting out the Labour vote” has become a fool’s errand.

 

Twenty years ago the ecology of poverty still possessed a sufficiently political dimension to preserve Labour’s honour. Twenty years later – it’s gone.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 18 March 2014.

Reclaiming Labour

Perfect Harmony: How many Labour Party MPs (especially those in David Shearer's camp) look wistfully at the Chinese Communist Party's five-yearly congress, where all the delegates are hand-picked and the results of every ballot pre-determined?

 

AND STILL WE WAIT. The Eighteenth Congress of the Communist Party of China has been and gone and yet, at the time of writing, the world still doesn’t know the identities of the dozen or so men and women who will govern China for the next five years.
 

The manner of choosing the ruling “Standing Committee” of the CPC’s “Political Bureau” is nothing if not carefully managed. The Congress’s roughly two thousand delegates are more-or-less hand-picked by a special party commission. Its task made easier by the fact that these potentially unruly comrades are only summoned once every five years. That’s a long time between drinks to the Party’s unconquerable unity, but it does ensure that the outcome of just about every vote is known long before it is taken.
 

How many, I wonder, in Labour’s lacklustre caucus have gazed wistfully at the CPC’s meticulously stage-managed “democracy” and wondered how it might be imposed on their own increasingly restless rank-and-file?
 

Especially this weekend, when said rank-and-file show every sign of reclaiming their party from a caucus whose use-by date – collectively-speaking – expired a couple of elections ago.
 

Most New Zealanders will not be much bothered. Such media coverage as the event attracts will focus almost exclusively on the real or imagined threats to David Shearer’s leadership. If we are lucky it may also feature a few excerpts from the “make or break” speech he is scheduled to deliver on Sunday afternoon. The likely consensus of the assembled scribes? That “Shearer is safe” – at least until February 2013.
 

It was not always so. Forty years ago our single public broadcaster would park an outside broadcast van outside the Wellington Town Hall and deliver roughly twenty minutes of live interviews, commentaries, and recorded highlights of proceedings, each day the conference was in session. The usually three-day conferences of Labour and National would, therefore, receive an hour of television coverage.
 

That’s because, forty years ago, party conferences mattered. New Zealand boasted the highest level of political participation in the Western World. One in four of the population was enrolled in one of three major parties: Labour, National and Social Credit. National, under Rob Muldoon boasted a membership of close to a quarter-of-a-million. Labour in 1984 had a branch membership of 85,000.
 

Party conferences were, therefore, events of genuine democratic significance. The policy remits of rank-and-file members alerted the electorate to how a very large number of their friends and neighbours were thinking – and were seriously debated. Mass party memberships also made it extremely difficult for National and Labour MPs to stray very far from their party’s principles.
 

That is why the successful implementation of “Rogernomics” ultimately required Labour’s destruction as a mass political organisation. Had upwards of 60,000 members not voted with their feet between 1985 and 1990; and had the remaining dissidents not decamped with Jim Anderton to form the NewLabour Party; such a treacherous mix of economic and social policies could never have endured.
 

And it is here that we come to the nub of Labour’s present difficulties. If it expands and democratises itself, the party’s incomplete (and, therefore, insincere) repudiation of neoliberalism will not be permitted to stand.
 

Helen Clark understood this very well, which is why she imposed a level of discipline on Labour that would have made the CPC blanche. Ms Clark’s caucus removed the formation of policy from party hands. For the fifteen long years of her domination, most of the senior positions in the party were filled by “elections” that were effectively uncontested. In 2008, her reign over, she was permitted, in classic CPC style, to nominate and install her own successor.

Apres Moi, Le Deluge: Helen Clark preserved Labour as a political force, but only by imposing an iron discipline upon its members and eliminating as many opportunities for dissent as possible. 

 

This is the legacy that Labour’s rank-and-file members are gathering at Auckland’s Ellerslie Convention Centre this weekend to either decisively repudiate or, fatally, extend. If they seize the right to choose (and dismiss) their own party leader; to determine and enforce their own policy platform; and, by reaching out to their fellow citizens with genuine people-first-money-second policies, to rebuild a mass political organisation; then Labour will survive and prosper.
 

If they bow to the demands (no matter how silkily presented) of Labour’s parliamentary caucus, then the party’s long and increasingly dysfunctional descent into electoral disconnection and political irrelevance will continue.
 

The world has to wait for the CPC. New Zealand will not wait for Labour.
 

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 November 2012.