Luxon And Leadership.

What Kind Of Leader? It’s the only definition of leadership that makes any sense in the world most people live in – which is not the corporate world. A leader has followers. If a person lacks followers, then they are not – by the reckoning of most human-beings – a leader. The other real world distinction between corporate and political leaders is that the former have power given to them, while the latter take it for themselves.

LEADERSHIP. The corporate world is obsessed by it. In the absence of strong corporate leadership an adequate return on the shareholders’ investment cannot be guaranteed. Poor corporate management can lead to poor dividends, lower share prices, disinvestment and, ultimately, disaster. That’s why corporate leadership matters. In theory, anyway.

Many critics of contemporary capitalism argue that corporate managers exercise excessive influence over the businesses they run. That neither the corporate board, nor the shareholders, any longer exert any real influence over the management – until it’s much too late. Poor corporate leadership can, indeed, lead to failure, but the price paid by bad leaders is often in inverse proportion to the size of the disasters for which they are responsible. When they leave the scene of their managerial crimes, it is only very rarely that they depart empty-handed.

Poor corporate leadership is seldom punished.

Poor political leadership, by contrast, is almost always rewarded with the Order of the Boot.

The reason lies in the very different kind of power that corporate leaders wield. Corporations are permanent hierarchies in which vacancies are filled from the top down. Political leadership works from the bottom-up. If corporate leaders are measured against the power and wealth of the corporations they command, then political leaders are judged by the number and enthusiasm of their followers.

It’s the only definition of leadership that makes any sense in the world most people live in – which is not the corporate world. A leader has followers. If a person lacks followers, then they are not – by the reckoning of most human-beings – a leader. The other real world distinction between corporate and political leaders is that the former have power given to them, while the latter take it for themselves.

It is why all the books written about corporate leadership ring so hollow. The behaviour prescribed for leaders in these breathless volumes is the behaviour of a successful courtier – and the only power successful courtiers wield is the power given to them by their sovereign. A courtier retains power by retaining the confidence of the person at the very summit of the hierarchy. Political chiefs stay at the top only for as long as those below them are willing to trust and follow “their” leader. Without the trust and confidence of their followers, political leaders are powerless.

Christopher Luxon has plenty of experience in the intricacies of corporate leadership. He knows what must be done to retain the support of those above him. His successful career as a corporate executive amply confirms that he has mastered the politics of hierarchy. But, New Zealanders are still awaiting confirmation that Luxon has successfully transitioned from the politics of the boardroom to the politics of the caucus-room. Does he fully grasp, even now, that it is only the support of National’s MPs – along with the more than a million party followers who elected them – that keeps him in the top job?

Luxon became the parliamentary leader of the National Party in November 2021. Not, it must be said, after a strong and successful demonstration of his political leadership skills – particularly those relating to the attraction and retention of followers – but because the National Caucus had run out of options.

Bill English, the man who had led them to a Party Vote of 44 percent in the 2017 General Election, while an excellent Finance Minister, and a deep political thinker, had never quite managed to convince himself that he had what it took to lead the NZ National Party. A great pity, because it is one of the ineluctable rules of democratic politics that politicians who doubt themselves find it extremely difficult to convince others.

English’s replacement, Simon Bridges, appeared equally plagued by doubts. At times he seemed like a nervous adolescent, heading-out with his stylish girlfriend for the end-of-year school ball, wearing his father’s suit. Leadership of the National Party never quite seemed to fit Bridges: it was always too big for him.

Bridges nemesis, Todd Muller turned out to be living proof of “Dirty Harry’s” warning that “A man’s got to know his limitations.” Like Labour’s disastrous leader, David Cunliffe, Muller proved himself to be much more adept at winning the leadership of his party than wielding it. The difference being, Muller took only a few weeks to realise that he was completely out of his depth. A conclusion not reached by Cunliffe, even after winning just 25 percent of the Party Vote!

Muller’s replacement, Judith Collins, had long been hungry for the leadership of her party – and her country. It was just that her preferred means of getting there, beneath the daunting mask of “Crusher”, put off a great many more voters than it attracted. The New Zealand electorate has, over the years, displayed a worrying willingness to elect frightening male leaders. Scary female leaders, with the obvious exception of Helen Clark, have enjoyed considerably less success. National’s terrible showing in the 2020 General Election (25 percent) dissolved what little was left of Collins’ political judgement – along with the confidence of her caucus colleagues.

And that just left the man acknowledged by all to be the preferred option of National’s most successful leader since Keith Holyoake – John Key. Never mind that Christopher Luxon had been a Member of Parliament for barely a year, his successful career as a corporate leader – as CEO of Air NZ – was deemed to be more than sufficient preparation for the job of Leader of the Opposition.

But was it, really? Luxon had been seized upon by his fellow Nats with the same desperation as the drowning man seizes upon a lifebuoy. He was new, he was fresh, he had a bright smile and he wore a suit like the boss he had been. But, unlike his patron, Luxon never quite understood that voters are not employees. You can’t just instruct them to vote for you and your party; you have got to give them a reason for voting that way. In a democracy, politicians cannot simply demand people’s votes, they have to earn them.

Yes, yes, yes: National won 1,085,016 Party Votes in 2023, which is a great deal more than Judith Collin’s 738,275 in 2020, but, Luxon’s 38.6 percent of the Party Vote falls a long way short of Key’s winning percentage of 44.6 in 2008.

That’s because Key, unlike Luxon, had spent two years giving New Zealanders a reason to vote for him. Speech by speech, stunt by stunt, goofy-grin by goofy-grin, Key had done what all political leaders do – he had gone out and got himself some followers. Key may have been a highly successful player in the grand financial casino, but he knew the difference between corporate and political leadership. The electorate doesn’t vote for designations, it votes for ideas. 38.6 percent is what Christopher Luxon got for not being Chris Hipkins. It isn’t enough.

And it’s not at all clear, yet, what Luxon’s ideas are. He had very little that was inspiring to say before the election, and he has had virtually nothing even interesting to say after it. The man doesn’t yet seem to understand that he hasn’t been appointed to lead New Zealand, he’s been elected. There’s a difference.

A political leader would have used the three weeks between Polling Day and the counting of the Special Votes to talk to New Zealanders. There were horrors in Israel and Gaza. There were things to say about Te Tiriti and Democracy. About economics and security. About a world gripped by multiple crises, and about the Prime-Minister-Elect’s confidence that New Zealand would get through them all. Because this, the country he has been given the extraordinary privilege to lead, is a remarkable place, filled with remarkable people.

He could then have strode into those coalition talks, and David Seymour and Winston Peters would have risen from their seats and applauded – their nation’s leader.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 20 November 2023.

A Smooth Performance.

In A Word: The new Leader of the Opposition, Christopher Luxon, has very clearly chosen to reject the option of presenting a “flinty-faced” National Party to an electorate grown accustomed to the rhetoric of “kindness”. If the message of National’s new leader could be compressed into a single word, then that word would be: Moderation.

COVID HAS A LOT to answer for. Todd Muller, in particular, has good cause to feel aggrieved. How much more smoothly his induction to “the hardest job in politics” might have gone if he had been able to sit down, in familiar surroundings, and answer his inquisitors calmly and with due consideration.

What New Zealanders saw, instead, was Muller standing all alone in the echoing darkness of the Old Legislative Chamber. Starkly lit, and filmed from a low angle, he was forced to respond to questions directed at him from hundreds of kilometres away. Fixed to his position in front of the camera, he attempted to enliven the strained encounter by raising his voice and gesticulating energetically. The effect was unsettling: a big, shouty man, waving his arms about randomly it the dark. In short, a performance most unlikely to inspire either confidence in, or affection for, the National Party and its new leader.

The contrast with Christopher Luxon could hardly be sharper. Interviewed by Jack Tame for TVNZ’s Q+A current affairs show on Sunday, 5 December, the new National leader was seated comfortably in what one must assume was his own (very stylish) Auckland residence. The interview set-up was so much more conducive to useful communication than the desperately uncomfortable environment inflicted upon Muller. The lighting was flattering, the camera-angles professionally determined. With both men seated comfortably, eye-to-eye, Tame’s questions, and Luxon’s answers, resulted in the sort of unforced, self-revelatory dialogue that permits the voters to get a good measure of the Opposition’s new leader.

One can only speculate about the to-ing and fro-ing between TVNZ, the Q+A team, and Luxon’s people, that presumably preceded the interview. What seems clear, however, is that the advice being tendered to the new National leader is several orders of magnitude superior to that supplied to his hapless predecessors. This is important.

For most of her term as Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern has had at her disposal the formidable expertise of, initially, Mike Munro (Helen Clark’s superb media manager) and then the equally competent Andrew Campbell. Combined with her own not inconsiderable talents as a communicator, the highly professional media management of Ardern’s Government has contributed significantly to its political success.

There is a story (possibly apocryphal) which illustrates the vital importance of what would now be called the “situational awareness” of a good media manager. It harks back to a post-election period when Winston Peters was, not untypically, denying all interest in the “baubles of office”. When, however, it became clear that his support would be needed to keep Helen Clark’s Labour-led Government in power, Peters’ disinterest began to slacken.

Waylaid at one of the country’s larger airports by a scrum of journalists, Peters was repeatedly challenged to explain his sudden change of heart vis-à-vis said baubles. It was then that Mike Munro, who fortuitously happened to be present, noticed that Peters was standing in front of a Christmas display featuring a plethora of – you guessed it – baubles. Understanding immediately how damaging this “Winston with Baubles” image would be: Munro gently nudged the NZ First leader in front of a less compromising backdrop.

Silly? Petty? Well, yes, of course. But one has only to recall the images of Don Brash attempting (unsuccessfully) to climb in and out of a racing car, or “walking the plank” from a speed-boat to the jetty, to grasp just how much careful thinking and planning needs to go into how a political leader is presented. Even in 2021, one picture is still worth a thousand words.

It should, therefore, be a source of real satisfaction to National’s backers and strategists that Luxon has around him a team capable of setting up something as politically constructive as the Q+A dialogue with Tame. Quite apart from all the non-verbal communications: the sophisticated and stylish surroundings; the subject’s relaxed demeanour; Luxon was able to deliver his pitch without any of the weird distractions that prevented Muller from communicating effectively with his audience.

What, then, was the substance of Luxon’s pitch and how effectively did he present it? If the message of National’s new leader could be compressed into a single word, then that word would be: Moderation.

Luxon made it clear that he will be making full strategic use of Bill English’s “Social Investment” policy – “surging” resources to where they can do the most good for those deemed likely to make a prolonged call upon the state’s resources. While declining to offer a full endorsement of former National Prime Minister Jim Bolger’s call for a “reimagining of capitalism”, Luxon made it clear he was no hard-line adherent of the laissez-faire policies of Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson. (Not to mention Act’s David Seymour.) Nor was he prepared to put a cap on state indebtedness as a percentage of GDP. (As both Labour and the Greens did in 2017.) Lower taxes: while something he would “love” to do, is not something he’s committing National to – just yet.

All this will be music to the ears of the 400,000 National “deserters” of 2020. Luxon has, very clearly, chosen to reject the option of presenting a “flinty-faced” National Party to an electorate grown accustomed to the rhetoric of “kindness”. There are simply too many women voters the party needs to win back from Labour.

Conservative males will likely interpret Luxon’s pitch in slightly different terms. The priority for these voters is a National leader capable of restoring the New Zealand ship of state to an even keel. Radicalism of all kinds: be it of the Right or the Left; is unsettling. Moderation is exactly what they are seeking: a return to business as usual.

Perhaps the most important of Luxon’s answers to Tame’s questions were the ones he gave on Māori-Pakeha relations. After displaying an impressively succinct understanding of the Treaty of Waitangi’s three articles – an understanding conspicuously lacking in the Prime Minister when similarly questioned in 2018 – Luxon drew a very clear line in the sand on the issue of Māori co-governance.

Foreshadowed here, is what, for many New Zealanders, will be a welcome rejection by National of what is fast becoming the “official” version of the Crown’s Treaty obligations. Members of the political class have been given a thoroughly polite, but timely, warning that a change of government will bring with it a considerably less radical interpretation of the Treaty’s meaning. Those senior public servants anticipating an inexorable, bi-partisan advance towards the full realisation of Māori co-governance, in time for the Treaty’s bicentennial in 2040, should think again.

Naturally, not every one of Luxon’s replies were as polished, or filled with political heft, as his response to Tame’s questioning on the Treaty. Indeed, it would be astonishing if they were. National’s new leader has been in Parliament for barely a year, and there is still a lot of polishing to do. Labour’s problem, however, is that Luxon is not a rough-hewn work-in-progress, still bearing the marks of the chisel. On the contrary, the man already offers a remarkably smooth surface to the camera’s gaze.

Two more years of polishing. Two more years of coming to grips with the insatiable hunger of the 24-hour news cycle. Two more years of drawing the best from a caucus team already buoyed by the palpable change of mood across both party and country. Two more years of favourable poll numbers. Two more years of rising donations from the fabled “big end of town”. Two more years of refining National’s message and upgrading the means of delivering it – and Labour will be in a world of pain.

How eagerly the Prime Minister must be awaiting medical science’s final judgement on the Omicron Variant. The worse, the better.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 6 December 2021.

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.

Are Walker and Boag National’s (and the Media’s) Designated Villains?

No Other Suspects? The mainstream news media was willing to print and broadcast harsh Opposition criticism of the Government, even though they knew that the source of the leaked information was a National Party MP. Even though, by pushing the story up towards the top of every news bulletin they were stealing oxygen from the Prime Ministers keynote address to the Labour Party Congress. It’s a very strange kind of journalism that keeps more information hidden from the public than it reveals!

THIS LATEST SCANDAL will be the making of Todd Muller. The news media, up to its armpits in Hamish Walker’s and Michelle Boag’s leaking of confidential medical information, will do everything possible to deflect its impact. Radio NZ, Stuff and NZME, the outlets that received the leaked information all have a powerful interest in moving the story on.

Fortunately for them, this will not be difficult. The villains of the piece have conveniently identified themselves. Muller has ended Walker’s political career, and the Auckland Rescue Helicopter Trust is in the process of dealing with/to Boag. As a news story, the scandal has lost its “legs”.

Over the next few days we should expect to see the mainstream media pivot away from National’s bad behaviour and begin praising Muller for his decisive cauterisation of the Walker-Boag wound. The right-wing commentariat will already be bashing-out commentary pieces for the weekend papers celebrating the “fact” that, at last, National has put the era of “dirty politics” behind it.

Todd Muller will be hailed for seizing the moment and driving the National Party in a new direction. The Right will be encouraged to rally around its new, ethical, leader. Walker’s and Boag’s indiscretions will be presented as having given Muller his moment to shine.

As I noted in my last posting, a malign symbiosis exists between the mainstream news media and the parliamentary opposition. The passing-on of information – from MPs to journalists – constitutes a crucial stage in the production of major news stories. Journalists mask the highly tendentious nature of this exchange by invoking their core professional obligation to “protect one’s sources”.

No matter that this obligation originated from the need to protect the relatively powerless providers of information from the excessively powerful institutional players committed to its suppression. Under the current interpretation of source protection, even a National Party MP, determined to disprove the charges of racism levelled against him by breaching patient confidentially, is deemed to possess the same expectation of anonymity as a genuine whistle-blower. From an ethical perspective, however, such an expectation is outrageous. To facilitate an already powerful politician’s absurd quest for personal vindication, by concealing his betrayal of powerless Covid-19 sufferers beneath the cloak of anonymity, is morally and professionally indefensible.

Just consider the likely sequence of events in this latest case. A journalist is contacted by an Opposition MP claiming to be able to prove that his racially-charged allegations are backed by official information. Before viewing this information, however, the MP extracts from the journalist a promise that both his identity and the nature of the proof will be kept under wraps. Rather than demanding to know what he’s insisting she keep hidden from the public, the journalist gives the MP her promise – and he hands over the confidential medical records of citizens who have tested positive for Covid-19.

At this point the journalist finds herself horribly compromised. She has in her hands clear proof that not only is a National MP guilty of an appalling breach of the public’s trust, but also that someone within the Ministry of Health is passing highly sensitive information to a person or persons closely associated with the National Party. The clear public interest in her revealing these facts is obvious, but she can’t – not without “revealing her source”.

Inevitably, somebody further up the chain of command called “bullshit” on this insanely conflicted situation. The leak of information identifying Covid-19-positive patients was made public – but not the identity of the leaker. Entirely predictably, the release of this information immediately sparked yet another round of harsh National Party criticism. Once again, the Leader of the Opposition, Todd Muller, and his Health spokesperson, Michael Woodhouse, castigated the Government’s “shambolic” handling of the Covid-19 crisis.

Just think about this for a moment. The mainstream news media was willing to print and broadcast these criticisms of the Government, even though they knew that the source of the leaked information was a National Party MP. Even though, by pushing the story up towards the top of every news bulletin they were stealing oxygen from the Prime Ministers keynote address to the Labour Party Congress. It’s a very strange kind of journalism that keeps more information hidden from the public than it reveals!

It would be nice to think that Hamish Walker and Michelle Boag “came clean” because of a belated attack of common decency. More likely, however, their confessions were driven by fear of the official inquiry into the leak ordered by Minister of Health, Chris Hipkins. The powers given to Michael Heron QC, the man charged with undertaking the investigation, were certainly comprehensive enough to inspire such fear. He had the ability to subpoena witnesses and extract testimony under oath. Scary stuff.

Will Mr Heron, knowing the identity of the leakers, be content to deliver a pro forma report to Minister Hipkins? The mainstream media will be hoping so. They have nothing at all to gain from someone asking too many searching questions about the way this story was handled. The poor, misinformed public, however, has every reason to hope that Mr Heron goes hard and goes early to lock down all the elements of this scandal.

Was there, for example, some sort of quid pro quo arrangement by which the National Party was encouraged to offer up Walker and Boag in return for the mainstream media pivoting swiftly towards Muller’s “decisive handling” of the crisis? Certainly, that would take the spotlight off the implications of the Auckland Rescue Helicopter Trust’s insistence that Boag could not possibly have obtained the Covid-19-positive patient’s details from them. If National, as seems increasingly likely, has a “Deep Throat” located in the heart of the Ministry of Health, or, even worse, in the Prime Minister’s Office, it will not want such a useful informant dislodged.

I am not optimistic, however, that these sorts of questions will be asked or answered. With the General Election less than three months away, it is most unlikely that anything like the entirety of this scandal’s moving parts will be examined too closely – by anyone. The voters need to be able to believe that New Zealand’s major political parties conduct themselves ethically and responsibly at all times. Bad behaviour must always be presented as the product of “bad apples”. That National’s whole apple tree might be blighted and diseased is not a conclusion which this country’s political establishment will ever allow to pass unchallenged.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 9 July 2020.

Why Todd Muller – and National – Are Toast.

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.

Holding The Centre.

"You call that a conservative? Nah, this is a conservative!" New Zealanders are in the market for a quiet and reassuring small-c conservative political centrist. The critical question, however, is which politician is currently playing that role? Who has mastered the art of relaxed, informal and intimate political communication? Who will soon announce her intention to mobilise the expertise of New Zealand’s most practical and successful businessmen and women? Who, like so many “ordinary” people has a toddler with a future to protect? Is it Todd Muller - or Jacinda Ardern?

THE PROBLEM WITH CENTRISTS is that, practically by definition, they shy away from extremes. It’s the quality that most encourages voters to trust them. The quality that makes people feel safe. Unfortunately, it is also the quality most likely to bore people rigid. If a politician wishes to promote safe policies, then it is absolutely vital that he does so in an interesting and engaging way. If your brand of politics is boring, then you have to be anything but. So far, Todd Muller has come across as every bit as uninspiring as his politics. Not a good start.

In fact, compared to Jacinda Ardern’s first few days as leader of the Labour Opposition, Muller’s gaffe-prone performances have constituted an excruciating tutorial in how not to play the game of politics.

Who could forget the day Jacinda emerged from the Opposition caucus-room as Labour’s new leader to greet the assembled media. Hers was a performance so faultless, so accomplished, so crackling with energy and sheer, draw-dropping competence that seasoned professionals were reduced to stunned silence. Not, however, before offering brief, two-word responses to her performance like: “holy shit!”, “fucking hell!”, and “bloody unbelievable!” That some political commentators have uttered exactly the same words in response to Muller’s performances should not be considered a good thing. In Jacinda’s case the journalists were responding to how astonishingly good she was; in Todd’s they were registering precisely the opposite!

Muller’s problem is that he lacks Jacinda’s ability to make moderation come alive. Ardern understands that most people are drawn to traditional values and common sense ideas. Far from seeing this as a sign of their intellectual weakness, however, she treats it as proof of their ethical strength. It’s an insight which allows her to infuse the great rounded hump of the bell-curve with heroic purpose. By characterising people’s conventional reactions as the only serious, morally-defensible options available, Jacinda makes the ordinary extraordinary.

Just think of her inspired “They are Us” comment following the dreadful events in Christchurch. It resonated so powerfully because it expressed to perfection the instant identification with the unjustly attacked that is hard-wired into the human animal. Ardern understands the enormous power of common human emotions. Her ability to unleash them; to in effect mobilise the ordinary; is what makes her such a formidable politician. Ardern’s description of herself as a “pragmatic idealist”, and her commitment to being “relentlessly positive”, encapsulate perfectly her determination to not only make Labour’s middle-of-the-road brand of social-democratic politics interesting and exciting, but also to make it honourable.

If Muller is to have the slightest hope of becoming competitive in this election, then he has to get his head around all this – and quickly. Conservatism, in its proper sense of reflecting the organic social bonds linking the past (our parents) the present (ourselves) and the future (our children) will always enjoy a pronounced advantage over those political movements dedicated to altering the status quo. In politics, no less than in physics, inertia is a difficult state to overcome. And when, for whatever reason, it is overcome; when things are changing way faster than most people like; then offering to make them stop will, almost always, be the winning offer.

What does that mean in practical political terms? That Muller doesn’t appear to know should be scaring the bejesus out of his promoters. That he didn’t immediately reassure voters, calmly and with fatherly conviction, that he understood fully the need – without in any way endangering New Zealanders’ extraordinary victory over the Covid-19 virus – to do everything required to bring New Zealand’s perilous economic situation under control, is problematic – to say the least. Above all else, Muller’s approach to the electorate needs to be relaxed and informal – intimate even. As an avid reader of American political history, he should have no difficulty recalling the way Franklin Roosevelt communicated with the American people during the Great Depression. What could be more relaxed, informal and intimate than a “fireside chat”?

Muller doesn’t need to attack Jacinda or her government directly, he merely has to present the electorate with a credible plan for economic recovery. He doesn’t have to point to Phil Twyford’s, David Clark’s and Kelvin Davis’s failures, he simply has to draw people’s attention to how much still remains to be done. And all the time, in the finest small-c conservative tradition, he has to subtly remind voters of how well the country has fared under past National governments; of the expertise he and his colleagues can bring to bear immediately; of the historically reliable instincts of practical and successful businessmen and women and how vital these will be in securing a prosperous future for New Zealand’s children.

None of those objectives will be achieved by standing in an empty Legislative Chamber, booming out trite phrases to Q+A’s Jack Tame, and gesticulating wildly to thousands of startled New Zealanders sipping tea in their living-rooms.

It is debateable whether Muller and his advisers understand the danger they and the National Party are in. Yes, this is a moment for the quiet and reassuring counsel of a small-c conservative political centrist. The critical question, however, is which politician is currently playing that role? Who has mastered the art of relaxed, informal and intimate political communication? Who will soon announce her intention to mobilise the expertise of New Zealand’s most practical and successful businessmen and women? Who, like so many “ordinary” people has a toddler with a future to protect?

Is it Todd Muller – or Jacinda Ardern?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 28 May 2020.

National's Army Is On The Move.

Let's Roll! The easy victory over a Bridges-led National Party which the Left had every cause to anticipate just a few days ago is no longer in the offing. Our enemy’s position has changed. His numbers are swelling. A rapid thrust to the left, followed by an audacious outflanking manoeuvre can now be expected. Slap in a fresh clip, comrades. We have a fight on our hands.

THE TRICK IN POLITICS, as in war, is to know where your enemy is today – not where he was yesterday. An even more useful trick is knowing where he will be tomorrow. The Daily Blog’s editor, Martyn Bradbury, is certain that the Jacinda Ardern-led Government’s current political position is unassailable. In justification, he points to the most recent state-of-the-parties polling and (with even more emphasis) to Ipsos’s just-released polling on “the issues”. All of these surveys show Labour in a commanding political position vis-à-vis their National Party opponent. Were the General Election to be held this week, Labour would be returned by a landslide.

Unfortunately, the General Election is 120 days away.

The National Party’s new leader, Todd Muller, is similarly perceived by Martyn as representing no serious threat to Jacinda’s dominant political position. His inspired meme equating Muller’s “desperate” leadership coup with Gollum’s last-minute acquisition of “The Precious” above the all-consuming fires of Mount Doom, speaks to his conviction that regardless of who its leader might be, National’s defeat has become inevitable.

The question I would put to Martyn is simple: If defeat is inevitable, then why not let Simon Bridges carry the can? Why would the National Party caucus, along with the National Party Board, risk a player as highly regarded as Muller by committing him to a fight he cannot hope to win? Surely, if Muller represents the best interests of his party – ideologically as well as electorally – then the smart move would be to hold him in reserve for the process of rebuilding, which defeat on the scale anticipated by Martyn would necessarily entail?

Martyn may well respond that Muller’s job in 2020 is the same as Mike Moore’s in 1990: to “save the furniture” – i.e. to forestall the utter collapse of his party’s vote and keep it at least vaguely competitive for future political contests. This is not an implausible explanation, but I believe the true answer lies elsewhere. What the “save the furniture” explanation misses is the seriousness of the danger posed to National’s long-term future by Simon Bridges’ leadership.

Over the course of the 27 months Bridges led the National Opposition, the sense of unease among both party members and supporters regarding its direction of travel was palpable. Moderate conservatives across the country became convinced that the Simon Bridges-Paula Bennett-led National Party was veering further and further to the right. Concern that a far-right faction, drawing its inspiration from Donald Trump’s Republican Party, was growing in strength led first to murmurings, then to outright plotting. Reclaiming control of National became an urgent priority for those convinced that a sudden lurch towards Trumpism would make the party unelectable. Far from seeing Todd Muller as some sort of Gollum figure, National Party centrists began looking forward to his elevation as the return of the king.

The centrists win would have come a lot sooner had they not had to contend with the lingering and very sour aftertaste of 2017. Winston Peters decision – against all precedent – to spurn the party holding the largest number of parliamentary seats in favour of a “coalition of the losers” left a great many National Party members and voters feeling bitter and vengeful. They were looking for someone to inflict serious harm on Labour; someone to make Jacinda Ardern suffer; someone to drive a stake through Winston Peters’ heart. Simon Bridges was that someone and, who knows, had the Covid-19 Pandemic not come along, he might have delivered.

What the Covid-19 crisis made increasingly clear to National members and supporters, however, was that a win by Simon Bridges and his backers would deliver a lot more than the humiliation of Jacinda and her Labour Party. There was something else lurking at the back of Bridges’ policy positions – something unpleasant. The National Party he led wasn’t asking people to use their votes as tools, he was urging them to use their votes as weapons.

As the implications of this shift began to sink in, National’s numbers began to collapse. Simon Bridges was seen as hopelessly out of step with the overwhelming majority of New Zealanders’ support for Jacinda’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis. With each of his tone-deaf utterances more-and-more former National voters began to contemplate the unthinkable prospect of actually voting Labour.

Which is how the electoral battlefield looked immediately prior to Todd Muller’s coup. It would be most unwise, however, to assume that it will look the same in 120 days’ time.

A week or so ago I wrote emotionally about Labour “coming home”. Grant Robertson’s Budget Speech made it clear that his party had moved beyond the neoliberal economic and social settings which have guided it since 1984. No matter how great the imaginative effort required, it behoves the Left to put itself in the shoes of the ordinary, decent National Party voter now that Simon’s gone and Todd is in charge. For a great many of them it will also seem as if their party, the party of Keith Holyoake, Jim Bolger, John Key and Bill English, has “come home” to its core values.

The chances of tens-of-thousands of erstwhile National supporters also "coming home" over the next 120 days are very high. The easy victory over a Bridges-led National Party which Martyn and the rest of the Left had every cause to anticipate just a few days ago is no longer in the offing. Our enemy’s position has changed. His numbers are swelling. A rapid thrust to the left followed by an audacious outflanking manoeuvre can now be expected.

Slap in a fresh clip, comrades. We have a fight on our hands.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 26 May 2020.

Does National Still Need A Street-Fighting Man?

Eyes Left! On the face of it, the election of Todd Muller and Nikki Kaye is a no-brainer. New Zealanders are clearly in no mood for a “dirty little street-fighter” and, if the polls are any indication, resent strongly Bridges’ implication that they are. To be at all competitive with Labour, National needs a radical change of faces.

WHO WILL EMERGE from Friday’s emergency meeting of National caucus as the party’s No.1 and No. 2? Will it be the incumbents: Simon Bridges and Paula Bennett? Or will the election of Todd Muller and Nikki Kaye signal National’s return to a kinder, gentler conservatism? Does Judith “Crusher” Collins’ very public renunciation of her leadership ambitions indicate her intention to swing her support behind Bridges and Bennett? Or, is she backing Muller and Kaye in return for the crucial Finance portfolio? Are Collins’ supporters even numerous enough to swing this contest, or will Mark Mitchell’s handful of votes be required to nudge the eventual winners over the line? If so, what will Mitchell’s price be?

On the face of it, the election of Muller and Kaye is a no-brainer. New Zealanders are clearly in no mood for a “dirty little street-fighter” and, if the polls are any indication, resent strongly Bridges’ implication that they are. To be at all competitive with Labour, National needs a radical change of faces. Beating Jacinda’s “Kindness” will require of the Right a credible presentation of “Kindness+”. In the best of all possible contests that “plus” would be “Wisdom”. In its present mood, however, the best “plus” the Right is likely to offer the voters is “Competence”.

Like everything in electoral politics it will all come down to numbers. Who has them and who doesn’t. In the February 2018 caucus contest that gave New Zealand the Bridges/Bennett combination it seemed pretty clear that the liberal wing of the party backing Amy Adams didn’t have the numbers. The question to be answered now is whether or not the 27 months under Bridges/Bennett have convinced enough of National’s hard-liners that dirty street-fighting is not going to win them back the treasury benches. If the polls have sufficiently spooked them, then they may be persuaded to reluctantly shuffle left. Unspooked, they will keep their nerve and wait for Covid-19’s economic shit to hit the fan.

Empirically, the hardliners can point to the impressive solidity of National’s public support across all but a few of those 27 months (the big exception being the period following the Christchurch Mosque Shootings). They might also cite the salutary impact of Bridges’ dirty social media street-fighting on Labour’s popularity. Unbuttressed by crisis and calamity, they can fairly argue, Jacinda Ardern and her colleagues are sitting ducks. Thinking of political feather-brains like Phil Twyford, David Clark and Kelvin Davis it’s hard not to agree!

Those hardline Nats with a bent for military history might compare National’s position with that of the Germans at the Battle of the Somme. The Covid-19 health crisis, like the British artillery’s horrendous opening barrage, has indisputably shaken the defenders’ confidence – but has it been destroyed? When the whistles blew and the poor Tommies rose out of their trenches and began moving steadily across no man’s land towards what they had been assured was a pulverised enemy, the German machine-gunners mowed them down like corn. Substitute utter economic carnage for those German machine-gunners and the analogy becomes strikingly clear.

The problem with political hardliners of every stripe is that they lack the flexibility of mind to put themselves in the position of their opponents. Not being able to imagine – and hence anticipate – what their enemy might do to thwart their plans, they are rendered incapable of adapting fixed strategies and tactics. The National Right has convinced itself that the Coalition Government lacks the experience and talent required to steer New Zealand safely through the Covid-19 induced recession. Confronted with ever-increasing numbers of failed businesses and unemployed workers, they see Jacinda and her colleagues freezing in the headlights of the Right’s oncoming truck. As far as National’s hardliners are concerned, all they have to do to win is make sure those headlights are kept on full-beam.

What they have singularly failed to grasp is that, as Laila Harré observed on Q+A on Monday night, the Covid-19 emergency has elevated Jacinda well above the plane of a mere party leader or prime minister. It has transformed her into New Zealand’s leader: the woman credited with doing the right thing to defend her people by an astonishing 92 percent of Reid Research’s respondents. A political dynamic is operating here that goes way beyond mere partisanship. Jacinda has not only changed the way her people look at her, she has changed the way she looks at herself. You cannot bring down such leaders, you can only wait for them to fall.

Jacinda does not have to do anything more between now and 19 September than urge New Zealanders to endure the pain. Like Winston Churchill in 1940, she need offer them nothing more in the immediate term than “blood, toil, tears and sweat”. But, if they can hold out in these fortunate islands; if they are willing to give her and Labour the votes they need to finish the job of rebuilding and recovery; ah well, then, in Churchill’s wonderfully evocative words: “the life of the world can move forward into broad sunlit uplands”. This is the new reality that the National Opposition has to grasp: that Labour does not need to win the battle of the present, if it has already won the battle of the future.

Which is not to suggest that Jacinda and her government are incapable of slipping and falling. Unanticipated obstacles, new disasters, may yet send dark clouds scudding across those sunlit uplands. If they do, then who is better placed to comfort and inspire their dispirited compatriots: Simon Bridges and Paula Bennet, or Todd Muller and Nikki Kaye?

There have been times in New Zealand’s political history when its more conservative citizens have been in the market for “a dirty little street-fighter”. One thinks of Sid Holland, who tamed the militant unions in 1951. Or Rob Muldoon in 1975, promising conservatives New Zealand the way they (not the Left) wanted it. In 2005, it was Don Brash who asserted the rights of “Kiwi” over “Iwi”. These were the leaders chosen by National for times of “Us” versus “Them”.

These are not such times. The Covid-19 global pandemic of 2020 has brought the New Zealand people closer together. They are not looking for a National Opposition determined to drive them apart.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 21 May 2020.