Echoes of Citizens for Rowling

Who remembers the Citizens for Rowling campaign? It was a concerted attempt by the Great and the Good to derail National Party leader Robert Muldoon’s election campaign in 1975.

The campaign’s backers didn’t like Muldoon’s combative, divisive brand of politics and argued that Labour’s gentlemanly Bill Rowling, who had assumed the prime ministership after Norman Kirk’s death in 1974, offered a far more desirable style of leadership.

Citizens for Rowling generated enormous publicity, circulating a nationwide petition and taking out ads in all the major papers, but the campaign was an ignominious failure. National won the election in a landslide, securing 55 seats to Labour’s 32.

For Muldoon, Citizens for Rowling was political gold. It played to his strength as a political counter-puncher and a man of the people, enabling him to portray Rowling’s backers as elitist and condescending.

So who were Citizens for Rowling? The driving force behind the campaign was the Canadian-born former TV current affairs interviewer David Exel, who enlisted the support of a bevy of high-profile names – among them, Everest conqueror Sir Ed Hillary, Anglican bishop Paul Reeves (later to become governor-general under a Labour government), academic and peace campaigner John Hinchcliff, civil libertarian and educationist Walter Scott, lawyer John Jeffries, businessman Sir Jack Harris and future Labour prime minister Geoffrey Palmer.

It’s that last name that particularly resonates 50 years later. Palmer, who was then an idealistic young law professor at Victoria University, is the only survivor of the leading Citizens for Rowling signatories. And sadly, he appears to have learned little or nothing during the intervening decades.

I’m forced to that conclusion because according to the NZ Herald today, Palmer is the leading signatory to an open letter opposing ACT’s Regulatory Standards Bill.

If you closed your eyes and concentrated hard, you shouldn’t have too much trouble guessing the names of at least some of the others. In fact they are almost comically predictable.

There’s Dame Anne Salmond, Professor Emeritus Jane Kelsey, Professor Emeritus Jonathan Boston (they do love their titles in academia), climate change bore Jim Salinger, old-school socialist Geoff Bertram, former CTU economist Bill Rosenberg and geeky law academic and activist Max Harris. The usual suspects, in other words - a select roll-call of the Left-leaning brahmin academic caste. 

The parallels with Citizens for Rowling are unmistakable and their efforts are likely to be just as ineffectual, because New Zealand society, for all that it has changed, still has a deep egalitarian streak that is stubbornly resistant to guidance from self-appointed elites.

To put it simply, many New Zealanders resent being told what to think. That was the lesson of 1975 and I don’t think much has changed.

There is more than just a faint whiff of patronising intellectual superiority in the posturing of Palmer and his fellow signatories. In their lofty eyries, they appear to labour under the naïve delusion that their open letter may help turn the tide against David Seymour’s Bill.

I don’t think it will – not because their objections don’t have any substance, necessarily, but because the people most likely to be influenced by the letter are those who belong to that steadily shrinking portion of the population that still habitually reads the Listener and listens to RNZ, both of which can be relied on to reinforce their world view. Such people are programmed to suspect the worst of Seymour anyway and will earnestly nod their heads in agreement with Palmer’s open letter.

Of course the signatories are simply exercising rights available to everyone in a liberal democracy. But they are doing so in the obvious belief that their names, and hence their opinions, carry a lot more weight than those of the average citizen. In other words they are pontificating from a position of entrenched privilege, though I’m sure they don’t see it that way. (It’s worth noting here that this type of elitist posturing invariably emanates from the Left – a curious fact, given that the Left has always presumed to speak for the disadvantaged.)

To return to Citizens for Rowling: I disliked Muldoon intensely, but the campaign against him got my back up nonetheless. Citizens for Rowling gave the clear impression they didn’t trust their fellow New Zealanders to figure things out for themselves; that we needed guidance from mountaineering heroes, lawyers and high-ranking clerics.

I voted for Labour in the subsequent election, but I greatly resented this elite group’s attempt to use their public status to influence the outcome, and the election result suggested that lots of other New Zealanders probably did too. I predict this latest ill-conceived initiative will misfire for much the same reason.