Let's Do This - Again? If all Labour has to take to the electorate in September 2020 is an automobile-driven infrastructure programme borrowed wholesale from the last National Government, then Simon Bridges is going to make sure that being the prime minister of a one-term Labour government is the only thing Jacinda will ever have in common with Norman Kirk.
HOW DID 2019 END on such a jarring note of neoliberal
bi-partisanship? With the Coalition and the Opposition united in their backing
for a lavish spend-up on roads, roads, and more roads? It’s possible the two
parliamentary groupings may diverge on the question of how all this bitumen
should be paid for: directly by the state, or through Private-Public
Partnerships (PPPs); but that’s about it in terms of potential disagreement.
The year is ending on an apparently unanimous parliamentary assumption that
trucks and cars will continue to provide New Zealanders with their prime means
of transportation. With this slavish commitment to the automobile, the
country’s political class has demonstrated its near-total moral incapacity. New
Zealand’s claim to be taking Climate Change seriously stands exposed as utter bullshit.
Also exposed is Labour’s intellectual exhaustion. By
returning to National’s pro-automobile vomit so shamelessly, Jacinda Ardern and
her senior colleagues are essentially admitting that they lack the necessary
competence to translate their promises of “transformation” into reality. It’s a
fatal admission. By acknowledging that the big stuff is simply too much for
them they have opened a royal road (if you’ll excuse the expression) along
which Simon Bridges and his team can now motor to electoral victory.
Bridges’ script is pathetically easy to write: “National and
Labour are in full agreement about what needs to be done in New Zealand. But,
let’s be brutally honest, only one party possesses the competency required to do
it. From KiwiBuild to the Provincial Growth Fund, the Labour-led Government has
proved woefully inept. By the time the election rolls around, New Zealanders
will be looking back at three wasted years. About the only things our Prime
Minister and her Cabinet are good at is making promises, finding excuses and
providing hugs. By contrast, National possesses both the will and the talent to
get this country moving again – and that’s exactly what it’s going to do.”
Which is not to suggest that Bridges and his team won’t
employ Topham Guerin Ltd to mastermind a complementary social media campaign.
If the high road of “competency” fails to inspire, then the low road of crude
emotional arousal will be primed and ready for all the traffic it can bear.
Indeed, Ben Guerin and Sean Topham may advise Bridges to use both roads – at
the same time. They’ve already proved they can do it – just ask Boris!
Labour, the Greens and NZ First could beat this style of
campaigning easily – if they only had the will and the talent to get even a
little bit creative on the propaganda front. But, that, alas, is where the
party falls so woefully short. Unless he or she is being kept extremely well
hidden, there just isn’t anyone in Labour’s ranks who even remotely fits the
description of “a little bit creative”. How could there be? The culture of the
Labour Party in 2020 is hardly what you’d call welcoming to the swashbuckler
and the maverick. Its ideologically rigid and puritanical apparatchiks simply wouldn’t
know what to do with a political gunslinger like Ben Guerin.
Even if Jacinda intervened on behalf of the 2020 equivalent
of Bob Harvey – the young swashbuckler who somehow persuaded Norman Kirk to
take a punt on him in 1969 and who then proceeded to transform the public’s
perceptions of both Labour and Kirk by deploying state-of-the-art advertising
techniques – it’s doubtful he or she would last the distance. Ideological
Orthodoxy and Art have never been the best of friends.
Which only leaves Jacinda, herself, to take on the role of
the swashbuckler and maverick. Looking back, that’s exactly what she did in
2017. There just wasn’t the time – or the script – for anything other than
Jacinda’s inspired, seat-of-the-pants, political acrobatics. The party had to
let her carry more-or-less the whole campaign because it had nothing else to
offer. When it did step back in – remember the sudden about face on the Capital
Gains Tax, and the equally sudden reversal of the about-face? – it succeeded
only in slowing Jacinda’s momentum and carving 3-4 percentage points off Labour’s
final tally of Party Votes.
The best we can hope for is that Jacinda will be put in
touch with someone with the same insouciant brilliance as Ben Guerin. Someone
who simply doesn’t care if what he’s pushing out there is politically correct
or incorrect – only that it works. Only if it causes the person scrolling-down
his or her device to stop and read Labour’s latest post. That means engaging
them at the level of the heart – not the head. To win “The Battle of the
Thumbs”, as Guerin calls this struggle to hold the modern voter’s attention,
you don’t have time to make them think – so you have to make them feel.
In the last, crucial days of the UK general Election, Topham
Guerin Ltd’s brilliant parody of “Love Actually” was watched by more than 7
million British voters. It held them spellbound for the few minutes it took the
equally brilliant Boris Johnson to give them his simple, but winning, messages.
“The other guy could win.”, and “Get Brexit done”. Jacinda has the skills to do
something similar – just ask Stephen Colbert! The $64,000 question, however,
is: “Does she have anyone smart enough, and creative enough, to come up with an
idea that good?”
Because, if all Jacinda has to take to the electorate in
September 2020 is an automobile-driven infrastructure programme borrowed
wholesale from the last National Government, then Simon Bridges is going to
make sure that being the prime minister of a one-term Labour government is the
only thing she has in common with Norman Kirk.
When Jacinda stood in the Auckland Town Hall in 2017 and
proclaimed Climate Change “the nuclear-free moment of my generation” – how we
all cheered.
The thing is, we were expecting her commitment to amount to
something more than the well-meaning but toothless Zero Carbon Act. Something
like announcing a completely new, wider-gauge, electrified, national rail
network. An infrastructure programme that would allow New Zealand to replicate
the ultra-fast trains that move people around Europe, China and Japan.
Something to put the greenhouse-gas pumping road transport industry out to
pasture. Something more than a plan to build roads, roads and more roads.
Something to make young and old alike exclaim, at least one
more time: “Let’s do this!”
This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Friday, 20 December 2019.
