My shameful confession

(First published in The Dominion Post and on Stuff.co.nz. September 20.)

I have a shameful confession to make.

On a gorgeous spring afternoon in 2017, I drove to Fernridge School, just west of Masterton, and cast my vote in the general election.

Virtually until the moment I entered the polling booth, I remained an undecided voter.

My electorate vote was straightforward enough. It went to Labour’s Wairarapa candidate Kieran McAnulty – mainly because I thought Alastair Scott, the sitting National MP, had done bugger-all in his first term other than turn up for photo opportunities, and therefore didn’t deserve to be re-elected.

In the event, Scott was returned, albeit with a reduced margin, and has been noticeably more active than when his party was in government. Perhaps the fright did him good.

But that’s not the shameful bit. For the crucial party vote, I ended up holding my nose and placing a tick beside New Zealand First.

I apologise now for this act of political vandalism. It was a moment of madness in an otherwise unblemished life and I will suck up whatever opprobrium comes my way.  

Voting for Winston Peters went against all my instincts, but I was able to rationalise an otherwise irrational act on the basis that I was voting for purely tactical reasons.

The polls indicated the result could be close. I reasoned that whichever major party formed a government, it might be useful to encumber it with a coalition partner that could serve as a check on its power. Tragically, the only party likely to fulfil that purpose was New Zealand First.

If Labour got in, and especially if it had Green support, Peters and his MPs  might be in a position to curb any wild ideological excesses of the type centre-left parties are prone to after long periods in opposition.

If a National-led government was returned, I foresaw a different problem. I didn’t fancy the thought of a smugly triumphalist National Party. The born-to-rule syndrome is not a pretty sight. Being in coalition with New Zealand First, I reasoned, might take some of the wind out of National’s sails.

Well, we all know the outcome. As the old saying goes, we should be careful what we wish for.

Some readers may recall a great deal of huffing and puffing in this column over the way Peters subsequently gamed the system to secure maximum advantage for himself and New Zealand First, leveraging his party’s piffling 7 per cent share of the vote into a commanding position from which he was able to dictate the shape of the government.

I was too ashamed at the time to admit my partial responsibility for this state of affairs. Only a trusted few knew my guilty secret.

No doubt I’ll be accused of hypocrisy for giving my vote to Peters and then professing to be appalled by what transpired.

Well, fair enough. But I would argue that it was possible to vote for Peters and still be outraged by the way he took control of the coalition negotiations. I don’t think anyone could have foreseen the ease with which he was able to manipulate the other players - helped, of course, by Labour’s desperation to regain power after three terms in opposition.

And in mitigation I would point out that in voting for New Zealand First I was doing exactly what the MMP system was intended to do, which is to ensure as far as possible that no one party ends up wielding total power. The architects of MMP would be proud of me.

From a strictly pragmatic standpoint, I have to admit that things panned out pretty much as I envisaged. My tactical vote had the desired effect, which was to moderate the behaviour of whichever party formed the government.

New Zealand First has now jammed several sticks into the spokes of Labour and the Greens, to the teeth-grinding frustration of the Left. The government is looking shambolic and there must be doubts about its ability to run a full term.

No one should be surprised at this turn of events. Peters is a team player only if he’s in charge of the team. He might behave himself for a while, but in time his natural belligerence and contrarianism will assert itself.

The irony is that the Left now has to endure the agony of seeing their agenda frustrated because of an electoral system that the Left championed. But this was always on the cards, given the fundamental incompatibility between two socially “progressive” parties and one that draws inspiration from Muldoon-era conservatism.

It’s kind of perversely satisfying in an “I told you so” way, so why am I not celebrating? Probably because I don’t think this is how democracy is supposed to work.  

Labour's tackling its reno project with typical gusto - but will it last?

(First published in the Manawatu Standard, the Nelson Mail and Stuff.co.nz)

So far, so predictable. This government is doing pretty much exactly what people expect Labour-led governments to do.

Whoops. I almost said that it’s doing what people elect Labour governments to do, but of course the Labour Party won only 38 per cent of the vote last September. In fact this government’s legitimacy may be permanently tainted by the suspicion that it was formed essentially as a result of Winston Peters’ desire for utu against the National Party.

But let’s put that inconvenient misgiving aside. How’s the Labour-led coalition actually doing, nine months into the job?

 

The opinion polls suggest the public think it’s doing okay, but no more. Radio New Zealand’s most recent “poll of polls” put Labour on 42 per cent while National’s level of support, at 44 per cent, had barely shifted since the election.

The Greens dropped slightly from their election-night result of 6 per cent. But the big dip was recorded by New Zealand First – down from 7.2 percent at the election to 3.9 per cent. In other words, the man who now occupies the most powerful post in the land, albeit only temporarily, wouldn’t even scrape back into Parliament if an election were held tomorrow.

That makes a travesty of democracy, but let’s put that inconvenient fact aside too.

Those caveats aside, the Labour-led government is performing true to form. It inherited a house that was structurally sound but looking a little tired and neglected. So it’s knocking out a couple of walls, moving the furniture around, buying some new home appliances and giving everything a coat of fresh paint.

We expect National Party governments to be essentially laissez-faire – to leave things much as they are unless there’s an urgent and compelling need for change. You might say that’s the essence of conservatism.

At their worst, National governments grow lazy and complacent. Farmers might well be wondering, for example, whether Nathan Guy as Minister of Primary Industries was asleep at the wheel over Mycoplasma bovis and the less-than-rigorous policing of the National Animal Identification and Tracing scheme (Nait) which assisted the disease’s spread.

But we expect Labour governments to be radical and to break a few things. We customarily elect them when we think National has become too tired and smug for comfort.

It was a radical Labour government that rebuilt the economy in 1984 – something many National politicians knew had to be done and would love to have taken credit for, but didn’t have the nerve to attempt.

Labour governments shift the political centre-ground and remould the political landscape. Some of their initiatives don’t work and are discarded, but many remain firmly locked in place long after Labour has been dumped from office.  

Labour’s potentially fatal flaw, of course, is that it comes into power fizzing with impatience and ambition but quickly develops speed wobbles. Policy stresses, personal agendas and the pressure of relentless media scrutiny begin to take their toll. Bits start flying off, and soon the electorate finds itself longing for the dullness and stability of a National government.

It doesn’t always have to happen like this. Helen Clark’s government was cautious, gradualist and tightly disciplined, which probably explains why it stayed in power for nine years. It initiated as much reform as it thought it could get away with while keeping one eye on the opinion polls. When it suited Clark politically, as with the Foreshore and Seabed Act, she slammed the brakes on. .

But with this government, Labour seems to have reverted to type. It has plunged into a dizzying programme of reviews and task forces – 122 according to one count. Not even the presence of New Zealand First, which attracted voter support in the expectation that Peters and his MPs would act as a restraint on the Labour-Green agenda, is holding it back.

Labour has created expectations among its supporters that it may not be able to fulfil. At times it looks perilously close to being out of control and you wonder if the wheels are going to fall off.

The government’s greatest asset, of course, is Jacinda Ardern, and now her baby too. Ardern is Labour’s talisman. As Stuff political editor Tracy Watkins wrote last week, she’s the only thing standing between Labour and potential disaster.

Ardern is obviously politically astute as well as possessing bucketloads of personal appeal and almost preternatural unflappability, but she will also need something of Clark’s steely resolve to stay in control of her potentially fractious coalition.

Does she have it? It’s too early to say, but my long-range guess is that this will be a one-term Labour government.

The inherent strains and contradictions of the coalition arrangements will eventually take their toll. But if Labour is tossed out of office in 2020, or even before, it will have left its mark on the political landscape in a way that National governments rarely do.

None of our business? Of course it is

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, January 24.)

First things first. Prime minister Jacinda Ardern and her partner Clarke Gayford are entitled to our congratulations and goodwill following the announcement that they are expecting a baby.

There are few experiences more joyous or life-changing than becoming a parent, and anyone with a modicum of human empathy will want them to be blessed with a healthy baby who will grow up loved and happy. 

But amid the wave of euphoria that swept the news media following the announcement, one or two inconvenient questions appear to have been overlooked.

There is enormous pressure, even on Ardern’s political opponents, to unreservedly welcome the impending birth. Anyone not caught up in the general mood of feel-goodism risks being pilloried as a sexist, a reactionary and a killjoy.

Make no mistake: This is an ideological minefield, and the Left-leaning commentariat lost no time firing warning shots across the bows of anyone who might dare to question the circumstances of the pregnancy or its political implications.

After all, everyone knows what happened to AM Show co- host Mark Richardson when he asked Ardern, following her elevation to the Labour leadership last August, whether she had motherhood aspirations.

Richardson has a reputation as a jock and a bit of a loudmouth (that’s his role), but it was a fair and arguably obvious question to ask on behalf of viewers, many of whom might have been wondering about the same thing.

Indeed, Ardern acknowledged that Richardson was entitled to ask about it, since she had raised the issue herself and effectively invited questions. In any case, shouldn’t all cards have been on the table when someone was asking us to elect her as prime minister?

But the subject was deemed to be off-limits because we’re told that motherhood intentions are no one’s business but the woman’s, and certainly not the business of a prospective employer. This applies even when the prospective employer is the public of New Zealand and the woman in question is running for the most important office in the land.

The message from that episode was clear: anyone who asks personal questions, particularly relating to the prime minister’s gender, can expect to be crucified. But in politics, the personal and the political constantly overlap, since personal factors unavoidably influence political positions.

It follows that only the most sensitive and intrusive personal matters should be off-limits. Yet the boundaries around what are deemed to be legitimate subjects of public discussion are being drawn ever tighter.

So what awkward questions, if any, have the media shied away from asking about Ardern’s pregnancy? They relate mainly to disclosure and political practicalities. 

Ardern has said she learned of the pregnancy on October 13. At that stage Labour and National were still vying for the favour of kingmaker Winston Peters.

The discovery that she was pregnant must have presented Ardern with an acute moral dilemma. Should she have said something?

Couples are understandably reluctant to announce a pregnancy in the early stages because apart from anything else, there’s a chance something might go amiss. Besides, Ardern at that stage might not have been confident of forming a government.

Even so, there was a chance that she would become prime minister, in which case she would have to take time off – and this during her vital first few months in charge of an inexperienced government that would still be feeling its way.

There is a valid argument that Ardern should have disclosed then that she was pregnant. That would have enabled the pregnancy to be factored into coalition negotiations, and later into how the new government would be set up and who might deputise for her.

She had a choice between disclosure and staying silent, and she chose silence. Some people, while appreciating that she must have been in an awkward predicament, will think less of her for that. Some say she misled by omission.

She then agreed to the appointment of Peters as her deputy, knowing that a man whose party won only 7 percent of the vote would be acting prime minister while she takes six weeks off – and possibly longer, given the unpredictability of childbirth and the challenges of adjusting to the demands of a baby.

And if anything goes wrong, or if Ardern struggles with the combined demands of motherhood and the prime ministership (although we’re not supposed to consider that prospect), what then? These are issues of public interest. We are entitled to discuss them without being shushed.

I don’t have an opinion on whether Ardern can do a good job as PM while simultaneously attending to the needs of a new baby. Perhaps she can, although mothers I know say the demands of a baby, particularly a first one, can be all-consuming and overwhelming.

We shall see. But if things don’t work out, it could have consequences for the country. This puts Ardern’s pregnancy in a different category from other expectant mothers whose personal decisions are said to be none of our business. 

The real winner in 2017: Winston Peters, the Great Tuatara of New Zealand politics

(First published in The Dominion Post, January 12.)

Almost without exception, political commentators declared Jacinda Ardern their politician of 2017, and you could see why.

Thrust into the leadership of a floundering and demoralised Labour Party six weeks out from a general election, she re-energised the party and ran an assured, upbeat campaign that saw Labour bounce back from woeful poll ratings to win 37 per cent of the vote and 14 new seats.

History will record that she failed on election day. The gap between Labour and National remained too wide. Yet contrary to expectations, probably including her own, Ardern ended up as prime minister.

For the first time since New Zealand adopted the MMP system in 1993, the party that won the biggest share of the vote didn’t form the government. How we arrived at this outcome was down to one man: Winston Raymond Peters.

The Peters party, a.k.a. New Zealand First, won 7 per cent of the vote. It lost three of its electorate seats in Parliament, including Peters’ own. Despite this less than resounding endorsement by the people of New Zealand, Peters ended up determining the makeup of the new government.

Many insist, bizarrely, that this is an example of MMP working exactly as intended, but I would argue that it points to a gaping void in our constitutional arrangements – one that allows a politician whose party commanded an almost negligible share of the vote to decide who will govern us.

For his willingness to exploit this wonky system to his advantage, and for the sheer audacity of the way he went about it, Peters is a hands-down winner of my award for Politician of the Year in 2017.

The Great Tuatara of New Zealand politics brazenly played the system to ensure he became not only deputy prime minister but Minister of Foreign Affairs as well.

Foreign Affairs seemed an odd portfolio choice, given that his political preoccupations have always been domestic. But it’s tailor-made for him, involving maximum prestige in return for minimal effort. The ink was barely dry on the coalition agreement before he was jetting to Vietnam to hob-nob with world leaders at an Apec summit.

Peters played everyone for suckers in the post-election coalition game. He was allowed to orchestrate the entire coalition-forming process.

Just to make sure no one was in any doubt about who was in charge, he announced the formation of the new government live on television without even bothering to first inform the party leaders he had been negotiating with.

In a proper rules-based democracy, this whole process would surely have been controlled by the head of state – or in our case, her representative, the Governor-General. But Dame Patsy Reddy was just another impotent observer on the sidelines.

The coalition negotiations took place in an environment of almost paranoid secrecy. We now know there’s a document covering what was discussed and agreed but we’re not allowed to see it.

The political establishment insists this is the way it must be done. Voters are not to be trusted with information about how decisions are made on who will govern us.

But there are some things we do know. One is that National and Labour believed they were negotiating with Peters in good faith. Both thought they were in with a more or less equal chance of becoming the government.

We now know, of course, that on the day before the election, Peters had quietly commenced legal proceedings against four National cabinet ministers, including then prime minister Bill English. This made it extremely improbable that he would seal a deal with National, but it wasn’t divulged at the time.

Peters must have known all along who he would go with, but it suited him to allow both parties to think they were competing on a level playing field. 

It was especially to his advantage to play Labour along. Left-wing commentator Chris Trotter reckons the party fell into line with Peters’ agenda because it never expected to be in government.

It’s also now clear what some of Peters’ demands were. Apart from four cabinet seats – which is more than twice what New Zealand First would have been entitled to if appointments were proportionate with its poll result – he also insisted on a waka-jumping bill to ensure no MPs went rogue on him.

You could call this his utu bill. Peters has a long memory and is clearly still smarting over the eight MPs who deserted him in 1997.

The bill smacks of vindictiveness and runs counter to democratic principles because it shifts control over MPs from voters (where it rightly belongs) to party bosses, but Labour and even the supposedly principled Greens were happy to humour him.

How long can a government formed in such shonky circumstances last? Good question. But there can be no doubt who the real winner was in 2017.

Footnote: Sharp-eyed readers will have detected an error in this column where I referred to New Zealand First losing three  electorate seats. Of course only Peters held an electorate seat; the others were list seats. Ironically, my original version of the column was correct. But in the process of hastily correcting a relatively minor error in that particular sentence, I inadvertently created a greater one. There was a time when such a mistake would very likely have been picked up by a beady-eyed subeditor, but those days are gone.

A political high-wire act without safety harnesses

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, December 13.)

It’s always interesting to watch a new government bedding in, and never more so than when the Labour Party gets its hands on the levers of power after squirming with impatience on the opposition benches for several terms.

National regards itself as the natural party of government, which is perhaps understandable when it’s been in power for 47 of the past 68 years. National is also, generally speaking, the party of the status quo. It does what it needs to do to win elections and no more.

Labour, on the other hand, is a party of change. Whereas National in opposition bides its time, confident its chance will come again soon, Labour chafes with frustration at all the things that need fixing. By the time it finally gets a crack at the job, it’s jumping out of its skin.

History shows a clear pattern: long periods of stable but mostly unadventurous National government, punctuated by short, sometimes exhilarating bursts of ground-breaking reform under Labour.

People of a certain age will recall the speed with which Norman Kirk’s new government changed the political settings in 1972 – recognising communist China, withdrawing from the unpopular Vietnam War and adopting a forthright stance on apartheid and French nuclear testing.

Labour under David Lange in 1984 showed similar boldness, tackling the challenge of economic restructuring while simultaneously honouring Kirk’s legacy by taking an independent line in foreign affairs. But it was utterly chaotic and fatally divided ideologically.

Under Helen Clark, Labour took a more cautious and disciplined approach, probably realising that it needed to stay close to the political centre if it was to defy the hex that had seen previous Labour governments tossed out after one or two terms. And it worked: Clark became the most successful Labour leader since Peter Fraser in the 1940s.

Now we find ourselves once again watching a new Labour government – or at least a Labour-led one – grappling with the unfamiliar demands of power. And as in the 1980s, it’s a bit like watching a high-wire act performed without safety harnesses.

One crucial disadvantage for the new government is that it’s wearing L plates. Jacinda Ardern ran a remarkably assured election campaign but she is new to the demands of power and has a cabinet that is extremely light on ministerial experience.

Labour came to power with a highly ambitious – some would say reckless – 100-Day Plan that it seemed determined to fulfil even as neophyte ministers were still moving into their new offices, appointing key staff and getting to know the relevant officials.

I wonder whether it would have been wiser to take exactly the reverse approach: that is, do nothing for the first 100 days so while it caught its breath, took proper stock of things and got over the intoxication of finding itself back in power.

As it is, Labour pitched headlong into an unnecessary and avoidable spat with Australia over the Manus Island asylum seekers (who saw that coming?), and then fast-tracked a crowd-pleasing but suspiciously light-on-detail no-fees bonanza for first-year tertiary students that has been costed at $380 million for the first year alone.

Education Minister Chris Hipkins impatiently brushed aside Treasury concerns that the financial implications hadn’t been properly considered. Government officials didn’t get to determine political priorities, he haughtily pronounced.

Hmmm. Is this is a case of an over-eager reformist government putting its heart before its head in its haste to get things done? It wouldn’t be the first time.

On other policies, Labour is having to learn that there’s a world of difference between making promises on the campaign trail and having to deliver results in government. Supporters of Labour and the Greens will be disappointed by the spectacle of the government equivocating and even back-pedalling on a range of key issues, from the TPPA to Pike River, but they daren’t complain too vociferously because it would be letting the side down.

Similarly, fans of Winston Peters have been remarkably quiet about the convenient disappearance of New Zealand First’s pledge to abolish the Maori seats. But feelings of betrayal can only be suppressed for so long.

Speaking of Peters, there are bound to be bumps in the road ahead as policy tensions arise between the “progressive” Labour Party and its socially conservative coalition partner, New Zealand First.

We got a brief glimpse of this ideological divide when New Zealand First’s Shane Jones recently espoused a “work for the dole” policy that Ardern promptly tried to douse because it conflicted with Labour dogma.

To all those pressures, add a large and formidable National Party opposition, still seething because it believes it was shafted in post-election coalition negotiations that were controlled and manipulated by Peters.

We may never get to the bottom of what really happened in those talks, because Ardern doesn’t want to make the details public. This makes a mockery of Labour’s supposed commitment to openness and leaves her coalition government ineradicably tainted by the shonky circumstances in which it was formed. 

A coalition of convenience

(First published in The Dominion Post, November 3.

“We won, you lost – eat that!”

Remember? That was the reported taunt to National MPs by deputy prime minister Michael Cullen in Parliament not long after National was banished to the opposition benches in 1999.

Actually, Cullen didn’t use the words in that sequence. Hansard quoted him as saying “Eat that! You lost, we won”, which conveys a subtly different nuance.

Although it’s commonly assumed that he was gloating over National’s election defeat, he was celebrating the fact that Labour had just consigned National’s Employment Contracts Act to the scrapheap.

But the triumphalist sentiment was unmistakeable, and since the paraphrased version has entered New Zealand political mythology, we’ll go with that.

Cullen’s comment is worth recalling because there has been a chorus of “We won, you lost – eat that!” since the formation of the new centre-Left government.

None of the crowing, I hasten to add, has come from Jacinda Ardern or her partners in government. They are wisely concentrating on the work ahead rather than wasting energy on nyah-nyah point-scoring. Rather, it’s the Left-leaning political commentariat that has been relishing its WWYLET moment.

Another crucial difference from 2000 is that this time, the taunt isn’t directed at the National Party. It’s aimed at Right-leaning commentators – including me, probably – who questioned the process by which the new government was formed.

Anyone who expresses any such misgivings is derided as a sore loser or caricatured as a dinosaur, still pining for the days of the first-past-the-post electoral system. The assumption is that they must be disgruntled National supporters.

The Left is keen to stifle any discussion about the questionable circumstances of the Labour-led government’s birth.  Get over it, they say; move on.

Well, just for the record, I don’t advocate a return to FPP and I don’t support the National Party. I didn’t vote for it and would have been happy to see it beaten fair and square.

Neither do I believe that National was automatically entitled to form a new government just because it won more votes than any other party.

I would argue, however, that it had a powerful moral claim to be first cab off the rank in coalition negotiations. But in the constitutional vacuum that followed the election, it was left to Winston Peters, Mr Seven Per Cent, to orchestrate the coalition-forming process. And it suited him to play the two major parties off against each other in order to secure maximum advantage for himself and New Zealand First.

Ultimately, Labour got Peters’ blessing because it was more willing to accede to his demands. To put it more bluntly, Labour was more desperate than National to win power.

Peters then added insult to injury by taking his media label of kingmaker rather too literally, magisterially announcing the formation of the new government as if delivering the speech from the throne, and not even having the courtesy to inform Ardern or Bill English beforehand. I suppose it was his unsubtle way of reminding everyone who was in charge.

You have to hand it to him. It was a breathtakingly audacious hijacking of the post-election process, and we let him get away with it.

The Left-leaning commentariat insist this was a glowing example of MMP working exactly as it’s supposed to.

They would say that, of course, because it delivered the result they hoped for. But can anyone deny that democracy is debased when a party with 7 per cent of the vote effectively dictates the rules of play?

We’re now expected to accept the fiction that Labour, the Greens and New Zealand First are soulmates, joined at the hip. But in reality, all that united them was a hunger for power. It’s a coalition of convenience. Peters couldn’t even bring himself to mention the Greens in his kingmaker speech.

The inherent tensions between those parties – socially conservative and populist on one hand, “progressive” and highly idealistic on the other – could easily cause this coalition to implode. That’s not wishful thinking; it’s just being realistic.

However it’s not the outcome of the election that grates so much as the process by which we got there.

Those who insist that the vote for change was bigger than that for the status quo have an arguable case. Many New Zealanders were tired of National’s laissez-faire approach to pressing issues, and even some on the Right accused the party of appearing arrogant and complacent. It will do National’s MPs no harm to suck it up on the opposition benches.

We now have a new government that’s fresh, ambitious and full of energy. It’s doing what Labour governments have traditionally done – coming in with a hiss and a roar after a long period under National and hitting the “reset” button.

But it’s unfortunate that our likeable new prime minister’s moment of glory is tarnished by doubt about the legitimacy of the process by which her government was formed. There has to be a better way.

Early pointers to the challenges Ardern will face

A few random thoughts on the election outcome:

● In yesterday’s Dominion Post, Tracy Watkins wrote that Jacinda Ardern had won the election. In fact she didn’t; her party was well beaten. What Ardern won was the round of secret horse-trading that followed the election. All elaborate, self-serving rationalisations aside, this inconvenient but incontrovertible truth will continue to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Ardern’s government. When it came to the crunch, Labour was more desperate than National to secure power and thus more willing to defer to New Zealand First. That’s how we ended up with a government in which a party that won only 7.2% of the popular vote, and couldn’t even retain its only electorate seat, is perversely rewarded with four seats at the cabinet table and the second-most powerful job in politics.

● In the rapture over the left’s putative victory, there’s a lot of denial and wishful thinking going on. No one wants to confront the possibility that it could all go pear-shaped. Perhaps the most notable example is James Shaw’s less than convincing insistence that having the climate change ministerial portfolio outside cabinet doesn’t mean the issue has been downgraded in terms of importance.  He has to say that, of course. But a lot of voters on the left will be wondering how climate change – a priority issue for both the Greens and Labour – ended up being pushed off to one side. They will see this as a weakening of core commitments. It’s an early sign of the uncomfortable compromises that are required to make coalitions work, and which can gradually turn septic.

● Similarly, reported differences over the proposed Kermadec Sanctuary are being played down, but these point to the fundamental incompatibilities built into this three-way coalition – most notably between NZ First, which is big on economic development, and the Greens with their priority on sustainability, low growth and a pristine environment. Scuppering the Kermadecs deal at the behest of NZ First would inevitably be seen as a betrayal of the Greens, who initiated the sanctuary proposal. If it was agreed behind the Greens’ backs, as reported, so much the worse. And if NZ First was acting to protect the interests of friends and donors in the fishing industry, as implied by news reports, even worse again.

● And this is just the start. The potential for tension between the three coalition partners, but especially between NZ First and the Greens, is enormous. As Lisa Owen noted on The Nation, Winston Peters pointedly didn’t mention the Greens in his speech announcing the formation of the new government (an announcement that should properly have been made by the Governor-General, but that’s another matter).  A politician of Peters’ cleverness and experience doesn’t make such an omission by accident. It unmistakably implies an intention to treat the Greens as if they don’t exist. But of course he can’t ignore them – and at some point, Peters’ Muldoonist enthusiasm for government stimulation of industry and employment, especially in the regions, is bound to clash head-on with the Greens’ concern for the environment.  I wonder, for example, how the two parties might reconcile differences on issues such as offshore drilling and mining – a potential creator of jobs in some struggling regions (South Taranaki, for example), but an absolute no-no for the Greens.

● On social issues, the gaps are potentially even wider. A socially conservative party will have to co-exist with Labour and Green MPs who pride themselves on their “progressive” politics. How’s that going to play out when it comes to liberalisation of the drug laws, to give just one example? New Zealand First voters will expect their party to hold the line against a tide of liberalism on issues such as race-based preference and gender politics. Even with the Greens shut out of the cabinet room, it’s hard to envisage a meeting of minds.

● Not much was said during the election campaign about industrial relations, but with every Labour-led government there’s an expectation of a dividend for the unions. An increase in the minimum wage will be just the first and most obvious step. Expect a partial reversion, at the very least, to the old national awards system under the more friendly label of “fair pay” agreements. The unions have been chafing under nine years of National government and will want some of their old power back.

● Expect lots of talk about investment in innovation, education and upskilling. This is the stock-in-trade of modern Labour governments. It typically involves empowering the education sector (Labour governments are a godsend for teachers and academics) and spending enormous sums of taxpayers’ money for results that will be conveniently hard to measure.

● According to James Shaw, this will be a government of consensus. But in truth, there are only two obvious broad areas of consensus across the three parties. One is belief in the need for a more interventionist, hands-on government and in the power of regulation to create a better and fairer society. But the more pressing consensus binding them – at least for now – is their common desire to be in power. Having achieved that, all three are trying hard to ignore the obvious disparities that point to the possibility that this coalition will be fractious and short-lived. Perhaps the sheer relief and delight at being in government is blinding the left to the huge difficulty of maintaining unity.

● Jacinda Ardern hasn’t put a foot wrong so far. Her relaxed and assured performance, for such a relatively inexperienced leader, has been remarkable. Shaw, too, is a personable and seemingly capable politician who did well to haul the Greens out of the deep hole that Metiria Turei dug for them. But the real test is yet to come. A prime minister with no experience in government will have to manage a large number of similarly inexperienced ministers, while also managing potentially very awkward relationships between two smaller coalition partners with very different agendas. It’s going to be interesting.

● One final thought. It’s been a cruel outcome for Bill English, but he hasn’t shown a trace of bitterness. For her part, Ardern made a point of generously paying tribute to English in her opening remarks on the night she became prime minister-elect. Whatever else may be wrong with our politics, we should be proud that the two leaders behaved with such civility after the white-hot tension, drama and uncertainty of the election. Perhaps it’s because we’re a small, intimate country and we need to get along with each other. Your political opponent might have kids at the same school as yours, or end up sitting next to you on the plane, or bump into you at the meat counter in the supermarket. Whatever the explanation, perhaps other countries should send their politicians here to see how it can be done.

The demeaning of democracy

(First published in The Dominion Post on October 20.)

I’m writing this column on Thursday morning. Winston Peters, who is described as the kingmaker but behaves as if he’s actually sitting on the throne, has said he’ll make an announcement about the formation of a new government this afternoon.

We shall see. With Peters, who knows?

Everyone’s talking about the time lag, but that should be the least of our concerns. Other western democracies have taken months to form coalition governments and haven’t suffered any obvious harm.

No, what should cause us to rise up in disgust is that the post-election circus has made a travesty of democracy.

For that we can principally blame Peters – but not just Peters alone. Both Bill English and Jacinda Ardern, by kowtowing to Peters, have been complicit in the demeaning of the process by which we elect governments.

The media are not without blame either. By dancing around the New Zealand First leader and hanging on his every snarled utterance, they have encouraged the delusion that he’s entitled to decide our next government.

It’s only in the past few days that commentators have started to openly question the morality of a situation in which a party that won a mere 7.2 per cent of the vote, and lost its only electorate seat, should determine who will govern us.

There is a place in the political ecosystem for the Peters party. You can see why people voted for it. But a flawed system has given New Zealand First a degree of power and influence far beyond that to which it’s entitled.

In any half-rational and honourable democratic system, National and Labour – which between them won 81 percent of the vote and all but one of the 71 electorate seats – would have dictated the terms of coalition negotiations and perhaps humoured Peters with a few policy concessions.

Failing that, English could have made a principled decision not to play Peters’ game. If things came to the worst, he could have chosen to sit out the next three years and watch a Labour-New Zealand First-Greens coalition tear itself apart, as it almost certainly would.

Instead we’ve ended up with the worst possible option: a washed-up politician, unwanted by his own electorate, behaving as if the country had handed him a mandate to dictate the government agenda for the next three years, or however long any ramshackle coalition with Peters at its centre might last.

It’s been reported that he expects to be deputy prime minister, whichever party he goes with. What colossal gall from a politician who couldn’t even persuade his own electorate to return him to Parliament.

But that’s Peters. We know him well and shouldn’t be surprised.

What was less foreseeable was that both National and Labour were reportedly prepared to humour Peters’ preposterous ambition. Like everything else that has happened since election day, this makes a mockery of democracy.

First, there was Peters’ haughty refusal to talk to English and Ardern in the immediate aftermath of the election, on the spurious pretext that he had to wait for special votes to be counted.

Then came the bizarre aura of obsessive secrecy that surrounded the negotiations at Parliament, where officials even went to the point of ensuring that reporters couldn’t get a clear view of the National and Labour teams as they went to and from meetings.

The message to voters couldn’t have been clearer: Once they’ve cast their votes, the doors are slammed shut and the politicians are left to get on with it, unencumbered by any obligation to disclose whatever they might be up to.

Open government? Forget it.

Peters was the only party leader fronting the media, and he lived up to expectations by (a) barking at reporters for their impertinence in wanting to know what was going on, and (b) delivering pronouncements that were minor masterpieces of obfuscation and evasiveness.

Deadlines and time-frames shifted and changed like wisps of smoke. But that’s Peters; nothing he says should ever be taken at face value.

The crowning indignity came when it became apparent that the decision on who would govern us was to be made by an anonymous bunch of non-entities few people even realised existed – the board of New Zealand First.

We should all feel humiliated by this pantomime. A country that could once claim to be a model liberal democracy has been discredited by a flawed electoral system, compounded by Peters’ overweening self-regard and the readiness of the two major party leaders to defer to him.

There is a solution that would avoid these farcical proceedings in future. In our haste to drop the first-past-the-post system in 1993, no one thought to ensure there were rules in place to govern what happened under MMP after the votes were counted.

Peter Dunne has the right idea. He suggests it should be the job of the Governor-General to invite the party that has won the most votes to form a government. If it can’t get the numbers, then an approach should be made to the next-largest party.

The crucial thing is that the Governor-General should control the process. Instead, we’ve handed that power to a huffing and puffing egotist having his last shot at glory via a hole in our constitutional arrangements. Well done us.

A political bastard child

I love the way political commentators are delicately skirting around the inconvenient fact that our new government is one whose formation was driven by a party with only 7 percent popular support. This willingness to ignore the obvious is hardly surprising, The commentariat generally leans to the left and is delirious with pleasure at the anointment – I won’t say election – of a left-leaning government. They don’t want anyone raining on their parade and would prefer to overlook the fact that this is a government with little moral legitimacy. It is a political bastard child and it’s unlikely to grow up happy.

Jim Bolger pointed out on Morning Report this morning that this is the first time that the party that won the most votes isn’t in government. The standard counter-argument from the left, and it’s superficially persuasive, is that the vote for change on September 23 outweighed the vote for the status quo. The problem with this line is that New Zealand First voters wanted change for very different reasons than those who voted for Labour or the Greens. It now suits those parties to claim they are all singing from the same hymn sheet, but the coalition is one born out of pure pragmatism and convenience rather than ideological compatibility. The fundamental differences – especially in areas such as social liberalism, where NZF is the polar opposite of Labour and the Greens – is likely to make this an inherently unstable government.

I like Jacinda Ardern. She has shown in her short time as Labour leader that she has formidable intelligence and political smarts to go with her attractive personality. It’s a winning combination and I believe she could make a very capable prime minister. It’s just a shame that she should attain power in such dodgy circumstances.

Pardon me, but this is all arse-about-face

After 21 years and eight general elections, New Zealanders are finally starting to ask some hard questions about MMP.

The current political lacuna demonstrates all that’s worst about the electoral system we adopted in 1993 and put into effect in 1996. The problem is not that everything has come to a standstill while National, Labour and New Zealand First complete the negotiations which will determine who governs us. Other countries routinely experience long periods in political limbo without appearing to suffer great harm.

Neither should we be either surprised or even troubled by the fact that Winston Peters, having declared that everything would be sorted by tomorrow, has now reneged on that assurance. This is par for the course from Peters, who promotes himself as the only honest man in New Zealand politics but has never hesitated to shift his ground or even execute a U-turn when it was expedient to do so.

Peters is, however, central to the reasons why we should be having second thoughts about a political system that enables a man whose party got barely 7 per cent of the votes to determine who the next government will be. Under any circumstances this would be a travesty, but it’s made worse by Peters’ grotesque posturing.

Bizarrely, he behaves as if New Zealanders gave him a mandate on election day. We did no such thing, of course.  The power Peters is exercising at this moment (and so obviously relishing) has nothing to do with the popular will. It was placed in his hands through a quirk of a system that makes a mockery of democracy. A more humble party leader might acknowledge this by pulling his head in, but this is Peters we’re talking about.

In any half-rational political system, it would be the parties which between them won more than 81 percent of the vote, not Peters with his measly share, that determined the course of negotiations. A minor player such as New Zealand First, if it had genuine respect for democracy, would accept that its negotiating strength should be proportionate with its level of popular support. But again, this is Peters we’re talking about. And sadly he’s encouraged in his delusions by both the media, which can’t resist stroking his ego (for example, by calling him the kingmaker), and by the major parties, whose attempts to appease Peters come perilously close to grovelling.

Pardon the expression, but this is all arse-about-face. It’s demeaning to democracy. We’ve heard a lot over the years about the tail-wagging-the-dog scenario under MMP. Well, here it is writ large, and unfolding before our very eyes.

It’s a situation rich in irony. We voted for the introduction of MMP primarily to punish our politicians and bring them to heal. We were fed up with their broken promises. We wanted to make them more accountable.

Only now are New Zealanders realising that we achieved the exact reverse. Voters have no control whatsoever over whatever’s going on right now behind closed doors at Parliament. In effect, we have placed still more power in the hands of the political elites. This is the antithesis of what the promoters of MMP promised (and perhaps naively believed themselves).

It has also dawned on us that there’s a bit a constitutional vacuum around MMP, which means that the politicians are free to play by whatever rules suit them. For example, there’s no obligation on minor parties to negotiate first with whichever party won the biggest share of the vote.

And note the almost paranoiac emphasis on secrecy and confidentiality that surrounds the negotiations, even to the point of parliamentary security officials initially trying to prevent reporters seeing who was on the negotiating teams. So much for transparency. The last thing the politicians want is for the people who elected them to know what decisions are being made on their behalf. They couldn’t be more brazen about the fact that the public is locked out of the game. We’re not even impotent spectators. It’s particularly ironic that Peters, who has presented himself throughout his political career as a man of the people, a party leader who refuses to play by the rules of the self-serving political establishment, should be at the very centre of all this.

Nothing I say here should be interpreted as a call for a return to the first-past-the-post system. But it’s time to face up to the fact that we replaced one imperfect system with another that was equally flawed, and at the very least we should be having a national conversation about whether there may be a better way.

Post-election hiatus illustrates the perversity of MMP

(First published in The Spectator Australia, September 30).

The only thing that can be said with any certainty about the next New Zealand government is that it will look very different from the last one.

National party prime minister Bill English won an emphatic 13-seat majority over the opposition Labour party at the weekend in an election result that defied the pattern of history. But the vagaries of New Zealand’s mixed-member proportional electoral system mean it could be weeks before the shape of the new government is finalised, and no one can be sure what form it will take. Paradoxically, it may not include the National party.

Not for the first time, New Zealand finds itself at the mercy of the relatively small New Zealand First party (yes, it’s as nationalistic as the name implies) and its fractious leader, Winston Peters. That’s because despite winning 46 percent of the vote on election day, National doesn’t have the numbers to govern on its own. Three of the minnow parties that supported the government in its previous term crashed and burned, forcing English to look elsewhere for a deal that will give him a parliamentary majority.

That unavoidably leads him to Peters’ door, since the support of New Zealand First’s nine MPs would enable English to form a government. But the two parties of the centre-left, Labour and the Greens, are also courting Peters because his support would give them a one-seat majority – perhaps more, once 384,000 special votes are counted.

That puts Peters in the box seat, which is exactly where he likes to be. He will, in effect, determine the shape of the next government. No one knows what price he will demand in return for this, or what concessions the bigger parties will be prepared to make in order to humour him. Strangely, neither does anyone question the morality of a political system that allows a party leader to wield influence grossly disproportionate to his party’s share of the vote (7.5 percent).  But Peters can be expected to make the most of the situation. At 72, it may be his last shot at power.

It’s a situation that illustrates the perversity of the MMP system. Adopted in 1996 and modelled on the electoral system created in post-war Germany to ensure that no extremist party could again win total power as the Nazis did, MMP was promoted to Kiwi voters as a means of reasserting control over rogue politicians. In fact it turned out to be every bit as flawed as the first-past-the-post system it replaced.

Under MMP, voters are shut out of the game the moment the votes are in. Unless one party has an absolute majority, which hasn’t happened in any of the eight elections since MMP was introduced, the politicians then disappear behind closed doors to do whatever furtive horse-trading is necessary to cut a deal.

At that point, all bets are off. Every policy dangled in front of voters during the election campaign is effectively up for negotiation. What were solemnly declared on the campaign trail to be bottom lines become wondrously elastic or evaporate altogether. Voters have no influence over this process and can only await the outcome.

It doesn’t help that there are no clear constitutional conventions governing coalition arrangements. There’s a compelling moral argument that minor parties should first offer their support to whichever party has won the greatest number of votes. In this instance, that would clearly be National.

But politicians are free to interpret the rules in whichever way suits them. Labour and the Greens rationalise that because more people voted against National than voted for it, there’s a mandate for change – although it’s hard to imagine a potentially more fractured and dysfunctional coalition than one between Labour, the Greens and the socially conservative Peters party.

New Zealand has found itself in this predicament before, and it’s not a comfortable place to be. By instinct Peters is an attack politician, which helps explain why previous coalitions he has been part of – one with National, one with Labour – have ended acrimoniously.

He’s a true maverick: combative, polarising and capricious. He relies for support on a dwindling constituency of ageing voters who yearn for the reassuring certainties of the New Zealand they remember from the 1970s under authoritarian National prime minister Robert Muldoon, Peters’ role model. It was an era when New Zealand was comfortably monocultural and subject to suffocating state regulation.

So while English was nominally a clear winner on election night, he now has to curry favour with a politician whose support is smaller than National’s by a factor of six. He may even end up in opposition. It takes some of the shine off what was, in most respects, a signal victory.

English’s success was notable for two reasons. Conventional political wisdom decreed that the tide had gone out for National, since no New Zealand government had won a fourth term since 1969. A late resurgence by Labour, re-energised under its popular new leader Jacinda Ardern, reinforced a sense that New Zealand might be about to revert to the historical norm.

But English, the Catholic son of a South Island farming family, not only swam against the current of history. He also emerged from the shadow of former prime minister John Key, under whom he served as deputy and finance minister until Key’s surprise resignation last December.

In the Key government, English did the heavy lifting behind the scenes while the supposedly more charismatic Key took care of the public charm offensive. Although credited with guiding New Zealand safely through the global financial crisis, English wasn’t seen as either charismatic or populist. He partly reversed that perception during an election campaign in which he came across as genial and relaxed. But more important than that, he has erased the notion that National’s success in three elections was entirely due to Key’s personal popularity.

It would seem a cruelly ironic blow if, after accomplishing that, he ended up on the opposition benches putting questions to a 37-year-old Labour prime minister who has never held a cabinet post or even served in government. But under New Zealand’s topsy-turvy electoral system, and with a politician as contrary and unpredictable as Peters in the mix, it can’t be ruled out. 

History is on Labour's side in this election

(First published in The Dominion Post, September 22.)

Phew, what an election campaign. Voters’ heads must be spinning from the daily blizzard of policy announcements and extravagant promises, most of which involve spending large sums of our own money. Only the most nerdish political obsessives will have kept track of them all.

Another reason to be grateful when the campaign is over is that we’ll be spared those cringe-inducing nightly news reports in which the party leaders appear on camera flanked by the local candidates – or in Bill English’s case, cabinet ministers – slavishly nodding in agreement with whatever the boss says.

Presumably it doesn’t occur to them that they look mindlessly servile. This is one campaign ritual that the party image minders would be well advised to ditch.

The campaign has been intense, the more so because of the topsy-turvy polls, but it has remained generally good-natured. Jacinda Ardern’s relentlessly sunny disposition was put to the test as journalists started asking hard questions about Labour policies that hadn’t been satisfactorily explained, but we didn’t see her crack. It was an impressive feat of self-control for a leader who hasn’t previously experienced the white heat of the campaign trail.

Overall, she’s had a good campaign. But so has English, who has looked more relaxed than we’ve seen him before. Both leaders give the impression of having genuinely enjoyed themselves.

Taking his wife along wouldn’t have harmed English’s prospects. Mary English is personable, mixes easily, and being part-Samoan she’s an effective counter to the perception that National is the party of old, white New Zealand.

For her part, Ardern seems to have been accompanied everywhere on the campaign trail by Annette King – an unusual strategy, given that King’s stepping down, but a shrewd one. Of all Labour’s old hands, King is arguably the most universally liked and non-threatening. Her presence will have been reassuring to voters worried about the influence of radical ideologues in Labour’s ranks.

So, which way will the voters go?

History is on Labour’s side. Only one National government has won a fourth term – the one led by Keith Holyoake in 1969, which squeaked back into power by a very narrow majority. Labour leader Norman Kirk blamed his party’s defeat on the prolonged Wainui shipping dispute, which stoked public concerns about militant unionism and inevitably reflected unfavourably on Labour.

There are no such factors to help National this time. The party does, however, go into the election with a record of sound economic management. Few, if any, Western economies came through the global financial crisis in better shape.

Will that be enough to save National? It’s hard for a three-term government to look fresh and visionary, the more so when voters have seen the same ministerial faces defending the same policies for nine years. And it’s much tougher for a government to defend its record than it is for opposition parties to attack it.

As former National deputy leader Wyatt Creech has pointed out, when a party has been in power for nine years, niggles and annoyances build up. He calls it the death of a thousand cuts.

John Key no doubt saw this coming and with the same instinct and sense of timing that made him a masterful foreign exchange trader, got out while he was ahead.

The historical pattern is for National governments to serve three terms, gradually running out of puff as they go. The voters, observing the growing fatigue and complacency, then elect a Labour government fizzing with energy and reformist zeal.

Sometimes Labour crashes and burns, as in 1975 and 1990, but in the meantime the country’s political settings have undergone an irreversible reboot. Despite Wednesday night’s poll result, it’s hard to escape the feeling that this may be about to happen again.

English may come to regret not having been more adventurous in bringing new talent forward at the expense of his friends. His mate Nick Smith, for example, long ago ceased to sound convincing as Environment Minister and should have been dropped. Jonathan Coleman is similarly unpersuasive defending National’s health record. These are areas where National is vulnerable.

But all this may ultimately be neither here nor there. The election result may ultimately come down to something as basic and irrational as the natural human desire to try something new – and Ardern, with her relative youth and appealing personality, appears to be the right person to harness that mood.

Former National prime minister Jim Bolger pointed out this week that personality doesn’t pay the bills, or words to that effect. But Bolger, as a shrewd judge of politics, knows that personality can sway election results. We saw that with Key.

Bolger also stressed the importance of experience in government. Ardern has none – but neither did David Lange, and that didn’t stop the electorate from seeing him as a desirable alternative to Robert Muldoon.

Will the election come down to essentially a two-horse race, as English suggested this week? The polls certainly present a confusing picture on the state of the minor parties.

It’s possible that both New Zealand First and the Greens have duffed their chances. Winston Peters took a big punt with his refusal to take part in a TV debate with the other minor parties, and I hope it backfires. It was an act of supreme arrogance which suggested Peters thinks he’s above the drudgery of having to explain or defend his party’s policies.

For their part, the Greens don’t just have to recover from the Metiria Turei fiasco. Their core message of environmental health is one that resonates with many New Zealanders, even conservatives, but the Greens have muddied their brand by pushing “social justice” issues that are ideologically more contentious.

A final thought: if it’s a close result, as seems likely, how about a grand coalition between the two major parties?

National and Labour have at least as much in common with each other as they do with some of their idiosyncratic smaller potential coalition partners. They are both led by competent, likeable politicians who appear to respect each other.

It won’t happen of course. Old tribal enmities run too deep on both sides. But it’s a fascinating possibility to contemplate. 

Looks like we've got ourselves an election campaign

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, August 23.)

It’s hard to recall a more dramatic – you might even say enthralling – election campaign. And there’s still a month to go.

Last time around, there was the noise and smoke surrounding Kim Dotcom and Nicky Hager. But that was manufactured drama, and voters were unmoved. This election is different. The drama is real.

A former British prime minister, Harold Wilson, famously said that a week was a long time in politics. That may have been true in the 1960s, but time frames have been greatly compressed.

Media scrutiny of politics and monitoring by pollsters is now so merciless and unrelenting that the landscape can be transformed in hours.

Politicians have lost the ability to control events. Developments wash over them almost faster than they can react. Politics has turned manic.

Less than a month ago the election looked drearily predictable: a contest between two major parties led by worthy but unexciting middle-aged men.

National seemed to be cruising on auto-pilot toward a comfortable majority over Labour, so interest centred on what was happening on the political fringes.

Would Winston Peters end up in the driver’s seat again? Would the Greens finally get their feet under the Cabinet table? Would voters in Ohariu jettison the long-serving Peter Dunne? (He’s now taken that decision out of their hands.) Was the Maori Party in trouble? Would Gareth Morgan’s out-of-left-field initiative resonate with voters?

If there was going to be drama, it would come after the election when the political horse-trading started. Or so it seemed.

Then Andrew Little quit as Labour leader, his hand forced by dire opinion polls.

It was a huge risk. History suggests that changing leaders when an election is imminent is suicidal. It looks desperate.

But Jacinda Ardern’s bloodless accession to the Labour leadership had a galvanising effect that few people could have anticipated. Ardern’s relative lack of exposure to high-level politics could have been a handicap, but turned out to be an asset.

Critics could rightly point out that she didn’t have a lot to show for her years in politics and had never really been tested under pressure, but this also meant she came to the job untainted. And it seemed that the public was prepared to give her a go.

Her performance has been hard to fault. She’s relaxed and smiley, so people naturally warm to her. But she’s also composed and articulate when answering journalists’ questions, and she hits that sweet spot between confidence and arrogance.

She appeared to deal firmly with Labour MP Chris Hipkins over his ill-advised involvement in an Australian domestic political issue (is there a hint of Helen Clark steel under that sunny exterior?), and the outburst from Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, who pompously said she couldn’t trust a New Zealand Labour government, will have done Ardern no harm at all.

In fact quite the contrary, since New Zealanders have had enough of Australian bullying and condescension.

Ardern’s succession also had the important effect of re-energising the Labour Party and restoring morale. But perhaps most important of all, she’s new, and there’s a sense that voters are ready for a fresh face.

In one respect, she has history on her side. If there’s a recurring pattern in New Zealand politics, it’s that National governments serve three terms before voters decide that the party is looking tired and complacent and it’s time to give someone else a shot.

It happened to the National governments of 1949-1957, 1975-1984 and 1990-1999. The exception was the Holyoake administration of the 1960s, which won four terms. Going by that precedent, National’s time is up.

Is Ardern up to the job of prime minister? We don’t know.

That’s something Labour is inviting the country to take a punt on. But given the international mood for political change, and an apparent willingness to leap into the unknown (Donald Trump, Brexit, Emmanuel Macron), voters may be willing to risk it.

The point is, National suddenly looks wobbly. Labour has come up with little that’s new in terms of policy, yet it has risen in the polls to the point where it’s looking like a serious contender, and Ardern is level-pegging with Bill English in the preferred prime minister stakes.

National has started scattering election lollies, which always looks a bit panicky, and some of its friends have turned against it. When centre-right commentator Matthew Hooton attacks National for being lazy and complacent, you know it’s in trouble.

We have a genuine election campaign on our hands. It’s striking evidence of the potential for a mere change of face to change the political dynamic.

And now Dunne, a key government support partner, has gone, which will give National even more reason to feel uneasy. You have to wonder, what next?

In the meantime, of course, there’s been even greater drama in the Greens. They have been damaged not only by Metiria Turei’s spectacular fall from grace, but also by vicious internal recriminations that revealed an ugly side of the party that the public hadn’t seen before.

I almost feel sorry for them. It’s not long since North and South magazine devoted its cover to a glossy, Vanity Fair-style photo featuring some of the party’s most attractive young candidates. It looked like a fashion shoot. No party has ever assembled a more photogenic slate.

The magazine’s website promoted the issue with the line: “The Greens as you’ve never seen them before”. With Turei’s undignified exit and the subsequent blood-letting, that line acquired a whole new meaning.

Greens pay the price for one woman's hubris

(Published in The Dominion Post, August 11.)

This was going to be a Turei-free column. Honest. But how can anyone ignore what has been arguably the most tumultuous fortnight in politics since 1984?

My colleague Tom Scott had a cartoon in Wednesday’s paper in which a priest asked a boy: “What has Metiria Turei’s admission of benefit fraud and the Green Party’s subsequent meltdown taught us?”

The boy’s answer: “Never admit to making a mistake even 25 years later.”

That’s a legitimate interpretation of what happened, but my take on it is slightly different.

I think most people are prepared to forgive politicians for things they did when they were a lot younger and prone to bad judgments. But I don’t think it was Turei’s admission of benefit fraud that turned people against her.

What repelled many people was the air of sanctimony that accompanied her confession, as if she had done something noble and virtuous.

People noted that she made this declaration a few weeks out from the election. She said she did it to start a conversation about welfare, but it looked like a calculated play for votes: a dog-whistle. Turei may have been hoping to tap into that same tranche of disenchanted young non-voters that came out behind Jeremy Corbyn in Britain and Bernie Sanders in the United States.

The tactic seemed to work, initially at least. The Left was desperate for a hero – remember, this was before Jacinda Ardern stepped up – and Turei seemed to fit the part. For a few days she bathed in the warm glow of the Left’s adulation.

But then things started to fall apart. A backlash started to build, one that was spontaneous and broad-based rather than orchestrated by Turei’s political foes. You could see it building on social media, on talkback radio and in letters to the editor.

By the time Turei was summoned to an interview with WINZ investigators, she was looking decidedly less cocky. She had also changed her tune. From being airily non-committal at first about whether she would repay the taxpayers’ money she had illegally pocketed, it was now: “I’m very clear that I will certainly be repaying any over-payment.”

But things were to get messier yet. Turei didn’t seem to grasp that lifting the lid on something from her past would only encourage reporters to go digging around for other things that might be interesting.

Once that happened, she ceased to be in control of where things were going. That should be Media 101 for politicians.

Sure enough, other facts began to emerge: first a wrong address on the electoral roll and then the rather inconvenient fact that the father of her child was listed as living at the same property – a bad look when she had claimed the DPB. It even turned out her mother had been one of her flatmates while she was defrauding Work and Income by not revealing income from other people in the house.

The cumulative effect was that Turei was soon looking less like a heroic crusader and more like someone who had sneakily gamed the system for her own benefit.

The public was entitled to wonder what else might be in her past. But more crucially, it was entitled to form a judgment about her character.

Then came what seemed a climactic meltdown, when two respected senior Green MPs decided they could no longer, in conscience, share the same party ticket with her.

That exposed a nasty side of the Greens that the public hadn’t previously glimpsed. The recriminations were vicious until co-leader James Shaw pulled back from a vow to expel the two.

Shaw said he changed his mind after getting some sleep. I suspect the truth is that he realised how bad it looked for the Greens – who want everyone to think of them as a kind, gentle party that eschews bitchy politics – to be indulging in vengeful Stalinist bloodletting.

But by then it was too late. The damage was done.

And now Turei herself has gone, amid a nauseating display of self-pity and self-justification. “I wish I hadn’t had to do this,” she whimpered to a sympathetic John Campbell.

Well, she started it, and she should suck it up.

There’s irony on a Shakespearean scale in the fact that just when the Greens had high hopes of finally getting their feet under the cabinet table, the party has been brought crashing down by one woman’s hubris. But it’s great for the clean-nosed Ardern, who is now reaping a bountiful harvest of disenchanted Green voters. 

Catholicism and politics: a continuing story

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, July 26.)

Ever wondered why Britain has never had a Catholic prime minister?

Contrary to a popular misconception, there’s no constitutional barrier preventing it. So why hasn’t it happened?

The most likely explanation is that there remains a residual suspicion of Catholics that dates back to the bloody power struggles between Catholic and Protestant contenders for the throne several centuries ago. A gentleman named Guy Fawkes might have had something to do with it too.

Fears that Catholic politicians might secretly owe allegiance to Rome have never entirely been erased. Until 1829, Catholics weren’t even allowed to sit in the British parliament.

The closest Britain has come to getting a Catholic prime minister was Tony Blair, who regularly attended Mass with his Catholic wife when he was in No 10 Downing St, but waited until he had stood down before formalising his conversion.

Blair, who was nothing if not a shrewd calculator of political odds, knew that Catholicism would have been an impediment to his career. Besides, he wouldn’t have wanted to imperil the fragile Northern Ireland peace agreement by antagonising Protestants in the religiously divided province.

By comparison, we in New Zealand are relatively relaxed about Catholic politicians. We got our first Catholic premier, Frederick Weld, in 1864 and have had several Catholic prime ministers since then, including Labour hero Michael Joseph Savage, National’s Jim Bolger and of course Bill English.

This differentiates us not only from Britain but also America, which didn’t elect a Catholic president – John F Kennedy – until 1960. There hasn’t been another Catholic in the White House since then, despite Catholicism being the largest religious denomination in the US.

But while we in New Zealand might view lingering religious prejudices in other countries as rather quaint, there have been periods of religious tension in politics here too – especially in the early 20^th century, when the Catholic Church in this country was led by bishops of Irish descent whose republican sympathies were at odds with staunchly pro-British governments.

Archbishop Francis Redwood and Dunedin’s Irish-born Bishop Patrick Moran were both outspoken supporters of Irish home rule – a cause energetically taken up by the Catholic newspaper The Tablet, which Moran founded.

The Irish issue famously caused political ructions when a priest named James Liston, later to become the long-serving and politically influential bishop of Auckland, was tried in 1922 on the rare charge of sedition. Liston had offended the government of William Massey, a Northern Ireland-born Protestant, by making a St Patrick’s Day speech in which he praised the IRA rebels behind the ill-fated Easter Rising of 1916. Ironically, he was acquitted by an all-Protestant jury.

Even relatively recently, Catholicism has been suspected of wielding too much influence behind the scenes. Anti-Catholic resentment surfaced during 1970s debates over abortion and state aid to Catholic schools. Opposition to liberalisation of the abortion laws was often dismissed as being driven entirely by Catholics, which wasn’t the case.

I remember once interviewing the late John Kennedy, then the redoubtable editor of the aforementioned Tablet, who told me there was a feeling in New Zealand that the Catholics had to be watched.

That didn’t stop Kennedy stirring things up by writing a controversial editorial in 1972 supporting the election of a Labour government – this at a time when New Zealand newspapers rarely took political sides, at least not openly.

Kennedy’s editorial probably served to reinforce suspicions that there was a Catholic bloc vote and that Catholic voters did as they were told. It certainly did no harm to Norman Kirk and the Labour Party. They swept into power, ending 12 years under National.

Again ironically, Kennedy later became a supporter and confidant of the autocratic National prime minister Robert Muldoon, whose social conservatism aligned closely with his own.

And so we come to the present day, and the New Zealand Catholic bishops’ 2017 election statement, which was distributed to Mass attendees recently.  

Dear me. What a wishy-washy, touchy-feely, hand-wringing document it is.

Under section headings such as “Fair Tax Structure”, “Affordable Housing” and “Caring for our planet” it largely parrots the position of the centre-Left parties.  But it conspicuously stops short of any rigorous critical analysis, preferring to take refuge in facile generalisations and cosy platitudes.

It doesn’t come straight out and urge Catholics to vote for Labour or the Greens, but it might as well. In fact I would have more respect for the Catholic bishops if it did. At least they would then be nailing their colours to the mast openly and unequivocally, rather than disguising their soft-Left leanings behind coded signals.

That the statement was issued at all is telling. If I were a practising Catholic, I wouldn’t be impressed by the presumption that I relied on the bishops for guidance on how to vote – least of all when they appear to take the lazy option of suggesting Big Government can solve all our problems.

Will the bishops’ statement do anything to restore the flagging moral authority of the Church? I doubt it. But then I don’t think it will revive fears about Catholic leaders exerting too much influence either. Those days are long gone.