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.

Those coalition talks: so far, so bad

The coalition talks are playing out just as might have been predicted. Or to put it another way: so far, so bad.

Right from the outset the omens didn’t look good when it was revealed that Winston Peters hadn’t responded to David Seymour’s attempts to make contact. Did anyone really believe that Peters refused to answer a text from the ACT leader because he thought it might be a scam?

Even in the unlikely event that the explanation was true, what did it say about Peters’ commitment to the coalition-forming process that he couldn’t be bothered checking? Or that his staff hadn’t ensured he had Seymour’s number stored in his phone the moment it became clear the three party leaders would need to talk to each other?

A more plausible explanation for this failure to communicate (to borrow a famous line from Cool Hand Luke) was that Peters was just being Peters: putting Seymour in his place and letting him know who was boss. In other words, indulging in gamesmanship – as you do when your name is Winston Raymond Peters. This was entirely in line with Peters’ character and history.

For his part, Seymour was paying the price for his many dismissive comments, dating back years, about Peters and NZ First. They included his description of Peters as “the least trustworthy person in New Zealand politics”.

If the ACT leader has a politically problematical flaw, it’s his propensity to say what he thinks without regard for the possible consequences. Under MMP, you never know who you’re going to end up having to pretend you’re friendly with – and no one holds a grudge like Peters.

The NZ First leader doesn’t have the same power in these talks as he did in 2017. As Pattrick Smellie pointed out on BusinessDesk shortly after the election, he’s no longer the kingmaker. Having to work with the centre-right fundamentally changed Peters’ negotiating position from his usual dance (as Smellie put it) between National and Labour, playing one side off against the other. But that didn’t stop him from playing hard to get or deny him the chance to throw a few spanners into the works.

And so we then had the pantomime of Peters staying in Auckland this week when everyone expected him in Wellington for further coalition talks. This time it was on the pretext that a mysterious VIP visitor from the Pacific leaders’ forum was passing through Auckland and wanted to see him – a person so important, apparently, that his visit necessitated a further delay in negotiations on the formation of a government.

If true, that again says something about Peters’ priorities. Alternatively, it was more gamesmanship.

The latter is far more likely. Certainly, Peters’ no-show has been portrayed in the media as a deliberate snub and, in Tova O’Brien’s words (yes, I’m quoting Tova O’Brien) a humiliating display of political brinkmanship aimed squarely at Christopher Luxon, who was forced to spend the day cooling his heels before flying back to Auckland.

On top of all this we are now told, by Matthew Hooton in today’s Herald, that the coalition talks were almost stillborn because of Luxon’s assumption that he would be calling all the shots. According to Hooton, the prime minister-elect went into the talks with little regard for what the other parties might want.

“Act, NZ First and National insiders say Luxon is a talker rather than a listener,” Hooton wrote. “He never asked how Act or NZ First thought negotiations should proceed, or what they wanted from them.”

This is not a clever approach when you’re dealing with someone as touchy as Peters or as seriously ambitious for his party as Seymour. Even allowing for Hooton’s obvious animosity toward Luxon, his column, even if only half accurate, gives no cause for optimism about the solidity of the putative new government’s foundations.

Observing this masquerade, it’s hard not to be reminded of the old joke about a camel being a horse designed by a committee. As in the coalition talks, the bits just don’t fit together.

We have three parties with different cultures, different ideologies and different priorities. And no matter how desperately Luxon and Seymour try to sound positive, it stretches credulity to think the parties can overcome their fundamental compatibility issues and form a “strong, stable government”.

Simply repeating that phrase ad nauseam, as Luxon does, doesn’t magically make it happen. Short of the return of Labour and the Greens, this ragtag and bobtail arrangement is arguably the worst possible election outcome.

We’re supposed to believe that the advent of MMP ushered in a glorious new era of compromise and consensus. MMP’s bright-eyed promoters – predominantly leftists frustrated by New Zealanders’ annoying habit of electing centre-right governments – told us so. In fact MMP, because it yokes together parties with conflicting objectives, is too often a formula for political paralysis and inertia that leaves all players vaguely dissatisfied.

The first-past-the-post system it replaced was, by common consent, flawed. But it had the singular advantage that the electors knew what they were voting for and that whatever government was elected was free to push ahead with its agenda unhindered by minor parties.

Contrast that with a situation where all bets are off once the election result is declared and no one knows which policies and promises are going to survive the secretive coalition talks. At worst, this renders the entire business of election campaigns meaningless.

Arguably even worse, in terms of respect for democratic values, is the spectacle of a minor party (NZ First won only 6 per cent of the party vote) again wielding wholly disproportionate power and even dictating the course of negotiations.

Should we then revert to the FPTP system? Not necessarily. The past three years stand as a cautionary tale of what can happen when a government is given absolute power. In my lifetime, no government – not even that of Robert Muldoon – has done more damage than that of Jacinda Ardern.

But we should remind ourselves that New Zealand was competently governed for much of its history by parties elected under the FPTP system – certainly no less competently, and arguably with a lot more stability, than since 1996.

FPTP had the virtues of clarity, certainty and finality. Who would say that about the current opaque post-election manoeuvrings? And given the history of one of the personalities involved, who could have much confidence that whatever hotchpotch government emerges will go the distance?

ACT should make abolition of the Human Rights Commission a bottom line

The Human Rights Commission says it’s “very disappointing” that the government isn’t going ahead with law changes that would curb New Zealanders’ right to free speech.

Let me repeat that, just in case you didn’t get the irony. An agency ostensibly set up to protect our rights is upset that the government isn’t introducing new laws that would restrict them. What better evidence could there be of the commission’s highly selective interpretation – you might say perversion – of its own name?

The commission says it’s frustrated that planned amendments to the Human Rights Act won’t go as far as it would like. As it stands, the law quite properly makes it unlawful to incite ill-will or hostility against people on the basis of their race, colour, or national or ethnic origins. The commission wanted these protections extended to “other groups who are vulnerable to harmful speech, such as women, disabled people, and the rainbow community”.

Women? Really?? They make up half the population. There are now more of them in Parliament than there are men. They occupy the three most powerful positions in the country. Does the HRC really expect us to believe they are so vulnerable to “harmful” speech that they warrant special statutory protection? Come to that, couldn’t the same argument be made in respect of men – especially those who feel picked on by being disparaged as male, stale and pale? If so, don’t the two cancel each other out?

And note the “such as” in the commission’s statement. This leaves room for other groups – transgender people, for argument’s sake, though for the life of me I can’t imagine why I would choose them as an example – to also be protected against statements that might offend them. Who knows where the list of protected groups could end? It could be extended ad infinitum as political whim dictates. But Justice Minister Kiri Allan, pulling back from Labour’s original sweeping but vaguely defined proposals (and no doubt taking note of mounting public opposition), now says protection will be extended only to religious groups.

This is a nod to the royal commission that investigated the Christchurch mosque massacres and recommended tougher hate speech laws, no doubt with a view to protecting Muslims – a worthy aim but an ineffectual one, given there’s no evidence that the absence of such laws was a factor in the atrocity.

The government’s retreat from its original intention is clearly a blow and a setback to the HRC, which is so obsessed with identity politics and the supposed menace of hate speech that it completely ignores its bigger responsibility to protect New Zealanders’ freedom of expression. The commission is silent on this most crucial of democratic rights, despite it being enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ratified by New Zealand in 1978) and our own Bill of Rights Act. 

You’d think the commission’s own name was a bit of a giveaway, but no; its interpretation of the phrase “human rights” is selective, self-serving and unfailingly woke. Rather than concern itself with upholding and promoting New Zealanders’ rights generally, it directs its energies toward protecting us from racism, islamophobia, homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia and white supremacy. These endanger all of us, according to chief human rights pooh-bah Paul Hunt, arguably the most useless bureaucrat on the government’s payroll (in fact worse than useless, since the effect of his job, if not its purpose, is to promote a sense of division and drive wedges into the community).

To put it another way, the commission thinks it’s okay in a democracy to sacrifice the free-speech rights of the majority in order to protect supposedly vulnerable minority groups. It justifies this by arguing that restrictions on speech are needed to counter “violent extremism”. This is worryingly similar to the spurious pretexts – such as public order and public safety – routinely cited by authoritarian regimes that want to control what people think and say. Iran and Xi Jinping’s China come to mind.

Reconciling free speech with the interests of minority groups calls for a balancing act, but the commission doesn’t even attempt it. It solves the problem by simply ignoring the free speech side of the equation altogether.

All this adds up to a compelling case for abolishing the commission, as urged last year by David Seymour. It has been captured by ideologues and morphed into an extravagant travesty, endlessly haranguing and seeking to shame the public that funds it. Even Meng Foon, who as mayor of Gisborne seemed sensible and grounded, comes across as a tiresome, shouty nag in his role as Race Relations Commissioner.

The commission is a $13 million-plus per annum deadweight on the economy – money that could be redirected to any number of more worthy projects. Teaching dogs to ride bikes, for example. 

Seymour called for the commission's abolition after it was revealed that Hunt, a refugee from the barmy socialist Corbynista wing of the British Labour Party, made a $200 donation to the Waikato chapter of the Mongrel Mob as koha for his attendance at a gang hui.

The ACT leader should now go further and insist that the axing of the HRC will be a bottom line in any coalition negotiations with National after next year’s elections. It would be better still if National decided for itself that the HRC has outlived whatever usefulness it ever had, but the party of Christopher Luxon would run in fright from anything so bold and radical.

National, after all, is the party that signed us up to the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and was in the process of appointing an Indigenous Rights Commissioner when the Labour-NZ First coalition took office in 2017. Far from resisting the advance of wokery, it has enabled the process.

In any case, half-baked, rinse-and-repeat policies bereft of imagination or political courage (army boot camps for teenage offenders come to mind) are more National’s style.

Well, at least we now know who the real defenders of free speech are

Parliament passed the so-called Safe Areas Bill, which I wrote about on Tuesday, by a majority of 108-12 at its second reading. That’s a slightly bigger margin than at the first reading last year.

Among those who swung behind Louisa Wall’s Bill after opposing it first time around were National MPs Christopher Luxon, David Bennett, Jacqui Dean, Joseph Mooney (no, I’d never heard of him either), Scott Simpson and Tim van de Molen. Labour’s Rino Tirikatene also changed his vote, while his fellow Labour caucus member Neru Leavasa courageously switched the other way.

National MPs Penny Simmonds, Louise Upston, Melissa Lee, Maureen Pugh, Harete Hipango, Simeon Brown, Simon O’Connor, Michael Woodhouse and Chris Penk opposed the Bill, as did Labour’s Anahila Kanongata’a Suisuiki, Jamie Strange and Leavasu.

Although it was a conscience vote, the Green Party caucus supported the Bill without exception. No surprises there. Chloe Swarbrick probably reflected the Greens’ confusion (a less charitable word would be hypocrisy) when she wrote an impassioned defence of the right to protest last year and apparently saw no contradiction in wishing to deny that right to people opposed to abortion.

More surprising than the Greens’ vote, and infinitely more disappointing, was the bloc support for the Bill from ACT. So much for the party’s posturing as champions of free speech. Perhaps the novice ACT MPs were influenced by their leader’s oafish attack on the anti-abortion movement during the first reading debate last year when, at the same time as declaring his commitment to free speech (yeah, right), he confessed to detesting the “odious ogres” who maintain protest vigils outside abortion clinics. Want to see a bigot masquerading as a liberal? There he is, right there.

There’s no disguising or softening the fact that yesterday's vote was a betrayal of free speech and a blow to the right to protest. New Zealanders who place a high value on those democratic principles will just have to note the names of those who voted for and against the Bill and remember them at the next general election.

Footnote: Someone asked me why I keep referring to the legislation as the “so-called” Safe Areas Bill. My explanation is simple: the space around abortion clinics is anything but safe for the unborn.

 

 

The worst of all possible worlds

The following column was first published on The BFD. It has since had a small amount of new material added.

We’re all familiar with the phrase “the worst of all possible worlds”. Well, I think we now know what that world looks like.

We have an all-powerful, increasingly authoritarian government that combines ideological zealotry with ineptitude, profligacy, laziness and contempt for democratic process – surely the most lethal confluence of malignant political forces in living memory.

We have an opposition that should be presenting itself as an alternative to Labour but instead has been busy disembowelling itself. Both Judith Collins and Simon Bridges placed their egos and ambitions ahead of the interests of the country. The primary blame lies with Collins for her clumsy and desperate last-resort survival ploy but Bridges cannot entirely escape culpability, having done little to hose down media speculation about a change of leadership – indeed, appearing at times to revel in it. The voters are likely to punish them, but tragically New Zealand will also pay for their hubris. As long as the National caucus remains fractured by leadership squabbles, Labour has a good chance of squeaking back into power in 2023 and completing its transformational, neo-Marxist agenda.

The smart money is on Christopher Luxon to take over the leadership of the National Party, but it will be a hospital pass. People who know Luxon speak highly of him, but running an international airline is no preparation for the brutal business of top-level politics – and especially not for dealing with destructive and mischievous elements in the media, who will set out to destabilise him from day one.

Speaking of the media, we have a new breed of political journalists whom no one can trust, who regard themselves as players rather than observers, and who treat politics as some sort of entertaining blood sport – one in which all participants risk being maimed with the exception of … the media, who are accountable to no one and are in the uniquely privileged position of ensuring they always come out as winners. I’m reminded of a British journalist’s memorable line about newspaper editorial writers: “They watch from the hills as the fighting rages, then come down and bayonet the wounded.”

That pretty much describes some of today’s Press Gallery journalists, such as Newshub’s political editor Tova O’Brien and her understudy Jenna Lynch, who have no skin in the game and can walk away unscathed from the carnage they helped to orchestrate. Newshub played a key role in National’s leadership crisis, constantly contriving opportunities to undermine the floundering opposition leader while leaving the prime minister – the person actually running the country – untouched within her media-enabled force field. Dirty politics? You have it right there – but don’t expect another book from Nicky Hager. 

We have a rising political star in the person of David Seymour, whom voters clearly see as the most effective alternative to Jacinda Ardern, but who has no experience in government – in fact remains largely an unknown quantity – and who leads a party of absolute greenhorns. Theoretically there’s scope for an electoral arrangement between Act and National, on the assumption that they share at least some political values and might achieve together what they cannot do individually. But my guess is the same petty egos that have torn National apart would sabotage any such proposal. Sharing power and relinquishing control just isn’t in their DNA.

So there it is. Good luck trying to find something optimistic to latch onto in that lot.

Who’s to blame, then, if anyone? Mike Hosking this week fingered John Key as being responsible for the mess we’re in, and I don’t think he was being entirely flippant. If only Key hadn’t stood down, Hosking implied, New Zealand would still be basking in the sunlit uplands.

But I suspect Key regarded the prime ministership as just another box to be ticked off on the career path he had mapped out for himself, and once he tired of the job he could hardly be expected to stick around just for the sake of the country. After all, a bloke like Key likes to quit while he’s ahead.

No, if you want to trace New Zealand’s parlous situation back to its origin, the trail leads inexorably to Winston Raymond Peters. Remember the 2017 election? With just 7 percent of the vote, Peters held the balance of power and exercised it by anointing Ardern as prime minister when, morally, National had earned the right to govern with 44 per cent of the vote to Labour’s 38 per cent.

Had the New Zealand First leader done the honourable thing in 2017, Bill English would have remained prime minister and might have turned out to be a good one. Not only had he done much of the heavy lifting behind the scenes in the Key government, but he had a social conscience that marked him as a politician in the mould of National Party liberals from the Holyoake era – National’s golden age, when it won four consecutive terms.

But Peters gifted Labour with a glittering prize that they didn’t expect and hadn’t earned, and the rest is history. Ardern’s initially assured handling of the Christchurch mosque massacres, the Whakaari-White Island eruption and the Covid-19 crisis won her a cult-like following both at home and abroad – so much so that voters rewarded her with a decisive majority that conferred virtually absolute power, something never envisaged by the architects of the voting system.

Since then, other events have served only to consolidate Ardern’s power. Covid-19 provided a handy distraction from Labour’s agenda, pre-occupying the public and the media while Labour got on with the job of pursuing a programme of radical change that was mostly kept from the voters during the pandemic-dominated 2020 election campaign.

The media have been complicit in this process, for months on end treating the pandemic as if it was the only story of any consequence and ignoring, or at the very least playing down, elements of the government’s agenda that might cause public disquiet. Covid-19 has forced almost everything else off the news pages and the evening bulletins, allowing Labour’s activists to get on with their project virtually unhindered.

Peters, ironically, found himself ousted from Parliament, the voters finally having had enough of his decades of chicanery, so perhaps there’s some justice after all. But with the NZ First leader again hovering balefully around the periphery of politics, no one should forget his ignoble role in all this.

 

A referendum? You mean, like, allowing people to have their say? We can't have that!

It’s fascinating to observe the force with which the government and its protectors in the media have jumped on the National Party’s suggestion that official use of the name “Aotearoa” should be the subject of a referendum.

If this is the most pressing issue Judith Collins can come up with, they scoff, then she’s gone off the road (Ben Thomas’s phrase on Stuff). In any case, they remind us, “Aotearoa” has been around for years. It’s on our passports and banknotes. And guess who was in power when it was put there, as Newshub reminded us last night: why, the National Party! Game, set and match, then. Hell, hasn’t even Judith Collins been heard using the name once or twice?

(As an aside, you almost have to admire the zeal with which Labour’s cheerleaders at Newshub trawl through their old files and video clips looking for anything that might embarrass National. I sometimes wonder whether they get a bit of discreet assistance from the Labour Party research unit. In another example last night, Jenna Lynch, Tova O’Brien’s understudy as chief tormentor of the opposition, portrayed Collins as a hypocrite for criticising a government grant to a Mongrel Mob drug rehab scheme. National had given money to the very same programme in 2017, Lynch sneered. But hang on: National gave $30,000, whereas Labour is giving the gang $2.75 million. Admittedly it’s an infinitesimal difference – like, a mere $2.72 million – but, you know, apples with apples and all that.)   

But back to that suggested Aotearoa referendum. Even David Seymour disses the idea, saying he would have thought New Zealand had more important things to grapple with. (After all, we’re merely talking about the name by which the rest of the world has known us since we first existed as a country. Nothing to see here, folks.) But of course that may just be Seymour seeking to score points over his main rival for the support of the swinging voters whom Jacinda Ardern and her government are doing their best to alienate. I mean, he’s a politician, after all.

What’s interesting here is the sheer weight of the attacks on the referendum idea. This tells us the government and its de facto PR operatives in the media are keen to snuff it out before it gets any traction.

The argument that “Aotearoa” has been around for years is utterly and wilfully disingenuous. Yes, it’s on our passports and banknotes, as an acknowledgment of this country’s bicultural roots. But it has always been secondary to our official name and for that reason, no one could reasonably have objected (and to my knowledge, no one ever has).

But what has happened in recent months is vastly different. With striking suddenness, Aotearoa – which we need to remind ourselves is a name of dubious authenticity – has become the term of choice for politicians, government departments and agencies, academics, teachers, virtue-signalling corporates and the mainstream media. Its use has become routine in government advertising and public statements. In other words, it has officially been adopted as a substitute for New Zealand. And all this has happened without so much as a skerrick of public endorsement.

The absence of a mandate is the issue here, and I suspect National, which otherwise appears bereft of ideas, is correct to latch onto it. Like low-energy light bulbs and cats in dairies, it has the potential to become a focal point for public unease about a barrage of radical government initiatives. That would explain why opponents of a referendum are so eager to kick the ball into the long grass.

They sneer at National’s claim that “Aotearoa” is being promoted by stealth and technically they’re right, since there’s nothing remotely surreptitious about it. “Aotearoa” has been brazenly imposed by a political elite in the hope that we will all adopt it as if by osmosis.  

My own view, for what it’s worth, is that we have nothing to fear from a debate about the country’s name. “New Zealand” has no intrinsic historical or cultural relevance and is almost comically inappropriate, considering our geographical contrast with the flat, low-lying Dutch province that inspired the name. But while it was acquired by historical accident, the name has come to stand for something in the world, as we’ve been reminded during the Olympic Games. It has acquired its own powerful resonance in all manner of spheres: sport, warfare, diplomacy, trade, tourism and the arts, to mention a few. That has to be weighed against the appeal of an alternative that is more distinctively our own.

Other countries (Sri Lanka, Iran, Thailand, Madagascar) have changed their names, but the ramifications are enormous. The only democratic way to determine the issue is by popular vote preceded by a thorough, transparent and informed public discussion of the pros and cons. But the left distrusts democracy, which may explain why the government would prefer that we compliantly adopted Aotearoa “organically” – to use a term favoured by the prime minister – rather than go through the inconvenient business of letting the people have their say.

The He Puapua affair makes Labour look shifty

The cat is well and truly out of the bag over the hitherto secret report He Puapua – no thanks to the media, which seemed to be in no hurry to dig into it when ACT began asking awkward questions in Parliament last month (see the comment posted yesterday by Trev1 under Joyous hugs and kisses as democracy takes another hit). Even now, some in the press gallery are playing things down with a “nothing to see here, folks” line.

If He Puapua (translation: “a break”) were to be adopted as policy by the government that commissioned it, the creation of Maori council wards and provision of council seats for unelected iwi representatives would be just the first step in a revolution that would entrench racial separatism over broad areas of our constitutional arrangements and methods of governance. Needless to say, this is potential political dynamite.

Jacinda Ardern says the report wasn’t released because the government was concerned it would be misconstrued as government policy. It’s been pointed out, in the government’s defence, that the report hasn’t been considered by Cabinet and remains just that: a report by a working party. But the very fact that it was kept under wraps makes Labour look shifty.

At best, Ardern looks as if she doesn’t have much faith in the public. It never looks good when a prime minister doesn’t trust voters with important information on the pretext that they probably wouldn’t understand it.

As Auckland political writer Graham Adams noted in an excellent analysis, critics are calling He Puapua an undeclared government manifesto. It took the intervention of the Chief Ombudsman, using the Official Information Act, to drag it into the sunlight.

The author of the report says the working party wanted it made public. Perhaps the government should have taken their advice, because now it has is a major damage control exercise on its hands. It has delivered a gift to the embattled Judith Collins and to David Seymour.

If Labour was genuinely worried that the opposition parties would make political capital out of He Puapua, the smart tactic would have been to pre-empt them by making it public. That would have taken much of the sting out of the backlash. More to the point, it would have been the proper course to take in the interests of transparency, which this government professes to be committed to. If Labour is genuinely interested in promoting debate on how best to eliminate Maori disadvantage, as Ardern has indicated in the House, then the report would be a starting point. As it is, Collins and Seymour are able to paint Labour as a party with something to hide.

It’s true, then, as my mother always said, that honesty is the best policy. But Labour has given the impression its default setting is one of dissembling and prevarication.

Nonetheless, the government has one potent propaganda point in its favour. It can argue that by commissioning He Puapua it was merely following through on the National government’s decision in 2010 to sign up to the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. That inexcusably furtive act, which I wrote about here, shows that National is just as capable as Labour of going behind our backs.

I eagerly await John Key’s explanation for his shameful role in this affair, but he’s probably in a board meeting somewhere. Or playing golf.  

Footnote: If I seem even more than usually behind the eight-ball on this issue, it may be because I wrote this yesterday morning (Wednesday). But when I went to post it, my Internet connection was down. It was finally restored this afternoon. 

The dead cat bounce

I feel it’s my duty to call out ACT leader David Seymour for his misuse of the expression “dead cat bounce”.

The phrase cropped up in Parliament yesterday when Winston Peters, under the protection of privilege, tried to divert attention from the scandalous taxpayer-funded Antarctic junket he arranged for two wealthy friends by naming Seymour’s former partner as the person responsible for leaking details of his (Peters') superannuation over-payment. (As an aside, are we witnessing the increasingly desperate flailing of a politician who senses he’s on the ropes? First the pathetic invitation to Seymour to join him in the boxing ring, and now this?)

Seymour responded by accusing Peters of using “the old dead-cat bounce – throw something on the table in the hope that it would overshadow the bad news coming his way”. A Stuff journalist helpfully tried to explain that “the dead cat strategy is a common political tactic. It refers to the practice of unveiling a ridiculous, scurrilous story to take attention away from a more legitimate issue. It’s likened to throwing a dead cat on the table”.

But that makes no sense and it's not what the expression means. I first heard the phrase during the share market crash of 1987 and it came, as so many colourful expressions do (think “lonely as a bastard on Father’s Day”, “as flash as a rat with a gold tooth”), from an Australian.

Share prices had briefly rallied after a prolonged and spectacular fall, raising hopes that the worst might be over. But an Aussie analyst laconically punctured the premature optimism, explaining: “Even a dead cat bounces”. So the phrase has nothing to do with attempts to create political distractions, as Seymour and the Stuff reporter seem to think. The appropriate zoological metaphor in that situation is “red herring”, which supposedly derives from an attempt to throw hounds off the trail of a fox by dragging a smelly smoked fish across their path.

Ghahraman's master-class in media manipulation

It’s safe to assume that lots of politicians are incorrigible attention-seekers – if not at the start of their careers, then certainly once they figure out how the system works and how the oxygen of publicity can be exploited to their advantage.

In this respect, Green MP Golriz Ghahraman is hardly unusual. But what marks her as different is the skill with which she plays the game. Although ostensibly still a political novice, she’s as media-savvy as any veteran.

She has also learned that she can exploit the sympathy of journalists who are drawn to her because she’s young and female (like many press gallery reporters) and also Green and an Iranian asylum-seeker. Looking good on camera helps too, although I shouldn’t mention that because it will be condemned as sexist.

We have seen all these attributes on full display during the past 24 hours with the disclosure that Ghahraman now has a personal security guard because of anonymous online threats against her safety.

Media coverage casts her as a victim of vile white male supremacy, a role she appears almost to relish – and why wouldn’t she, given that it neatly aligns with her portrayal of New Zealand as a country seething with poisonous white nationalism?  

I’m not suggesting the threats against her are not real and alarming, or that Ghahraman has somehow contrived to create the situation for political advantage. But I do suggest that she’s milking her victim status for all it’s worth, and that the media are obligingly dancing to her tune.  

All this might be bearable, at a pinch, but for one thing. Ghahraman laid the blame for the threats against her, subtly but unmistakeably, at the feet of ACT leader David Seymour, who said in a radio interview earlier this week that Ghahraman was “a real menace to freedom in this country”.

Seymour was expressing a legitimate opinion (one that I share) in the context of a debate about freedom of speech, but Ghahraman cleverly twisted his comment to imply that he was somehow inciting violence against her. She sanctimoniously suggested that post-Christchurch, “New Zealand has asked us to be different” – meaning, we can only assume, that people like Seymour should shut up.

Make no mistake, this was a master-class in the dark art of media manipulation. Winston Peters and Shane Jones must have watched with grudging admiration.

Ghahraman even managed to weave the parliamentary bullying report into her comments to reporters, saying attitudes need to change. All this serves her bigger agenda, which is to discourage free and open debate about when legitimate opinion becomes “hate speech”.

Sadly, but predictably, the media appeared to uncritically swallow Ghahraman’s line. She must have been thrilled to see reporters pursuing Seymour down a parliamentary corridor hurling accusatory questions at him.

To his great credit, he stood his ground. Would that other centre-right politicians showed similar spine when the pressure is on.

The bottom line here is that while every civilised person abhors any personal threat against Ghahraman by pathetic cowards hiding in the shadows of cyberspace, there is something deeply distasteful – you could almost say despicable – in her attempts to weaponise that threat politically.