Deceived and demoralised

(First published in The Dominion Post, October 3.)

I WONDER, was this the most demoralising election result ever for the New Zealand left?

There was an excited buzz in the left-wing blogosphere and in social media in the weeks leading up to the election. There seemed to be a sense that victory was in their grasp, even when the polls suggested otherwise. But they were cruelly deceived.

Their optimism is easily explained. In the early stages of the campaign, they saw the fallout from Nicky Hager’s book Dirty Politics dominating the news bulletins night after night.

After that firestorm had abated, the media turned its attention to Kim Dotcom’s Moment of Truth, with its dazzling line-up of high-profile journalists and leakers from overseas, all eager to tell us how morally bankrupt our government was.

Those on the left observed the adulation heaped on Hager, who was lionised at speaking engagements. They thrilled at the big turnouts attracted by Dotcom and his incongruous handmaiden, Laila Harré. And they deduced from all this that an unstoppable momentum was building, the inevitable result of which would be the unceremonious dispatch of the Key government.

They were wrong. It was a massive indulgence in wishful thinking, and it must have made the left’s defeat even more crushing psychologically.

How could they have been so misled? That’s easy to explain too.

Consider the enthusiastic capacity crowd at Dotcom’s Moment of Truth event and the full halls he addressed on his barnstorming campaign through the country. The left interpreted this as evidence of an irresistible groundswell of discontent, when it was nothing of the sort.

Someone as novel and entertaining as Dotcom was bound to attract crowds, especially in provincial centres where not much happens. In any case, there are always enough true believers to fill halls and give the impression something big is afoot.

Alas, it was all an illusion. The great mass of New Zealanders, the Joe Average types who determine election results, were unmoved.  They watched the overheated news coverage on television, read the headlines and marvelled at the unpleasantness of it all. Then, on September 20, they went into the ballot booths and voted National.

Now the left is in disarray, as is obvious from the painful recriminations within the Labour Party. David Cunliffe inevitably became the scapegoat for Labour’s humiliation even though he ran a tolerably good campaign.

Ironically, the controversy over Dirty Politics and allegations of illegal state surveillance, all of which should have been helpful to Labour, deprived Cunliffe of the opportunity to articulate the party’s policies on issues closer to the concerns of ordinary people.  

The question now is whether Labour can recover from its self-evisceration in time to mount a credible challenge in 2017. When a veteran loyalist like Sir Bob Harvey is questioning whether the party should do away with its traditional red and even consider changing its name, there’s clearly a deep identity crisis to be resolved.

Labour still hasn’t determined whether it’s a party of the blue-collar working class (think South Auckland) or of the university-educated, inner city-dwelling liberal left (think Mt Victoria).

The Greens are licking their wounds too. They worked hard to make themselves more palatable to the wider electorate. They mounted an effective campaign and seemed supremely confident that this would be their moment, but the voters had other ideas. The Greens’ message didn’t seem to resonate beyond their core supporters.

They too must now withdraw to figure out how it all went so wrong. Small wonder that we’ve heard barely a peep from them since election night.

Internet-Mana is deservedly history. Never has a new party made so much noise for so little reward.

Will Harré and John Minto get the message and ride off into the sunset? Somehow I doubt it. Zealots don’t give up easily; they are sustained by an overwhelming sense of righteousness and rationalise defeat by convincing themselves that their fellow citizens are either suckers or knaves.

The net effect of the election result is that the New Zealand left must contemplate the unpalatable possibility that it is now irrelevant. The noisy activists and ideologues who used up much of the oxygen during the election campaign have been exposed as hopelessly out of touch with the reality of most New Zealanders’ lives.

They will of course continue shouting in their own echo chamber. That’s what they do. But after the drubbing of September 20, it will be a long time before they convince anyone that they have a message worth listening to.

This was not in the Left's script

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

What an extraordinary election campaign. And what an extraordinary result.

I am writing this column on the morning after. By the time it’s published, most of the dust will have settled. But even at the time of writing, I think some firm conclusions can be drawn

Obviously the result can be seen as an endorsement of the National-led government. But for me the really significant point was that voters overwhelmingly repudiated concerted efforts by outsiders to sway the outcome.

New Zealanders were emphatically saying this was their election and they weren’t going to have it hijacked by agenda-driven activists, some of them with no stake in the country.

By outsiders I don’t just mean literal outsiders such as Kim Dotcom, the journalist Glenn Greenwald and the security leaker Edward Snowden. I include anyone trying to exert influence from the sidelines.

That means Nicky Hager, whose book Dirty Politics was obviously timed to derail National’s election campaign. It’s not that Hager was wrong to expose the unsavoury goings-on detailed in his book. National deserved to be shamed and Hager was entitled to the scalp of cabinet minister Judith Collins.

But questions remain about his motive, his method and most of all his timing. It’s reasonable to ask whether he was just as guilty of trying to influence an election as the furtive National Party funders he exposed in his 2005 book The Hollow Men.

The media firestorm over Dirty Politics dominated the first weeks of the campaign. When that subsided, it was Dotcom’s turn. But the momentum of the campaign shifted noticeably after the German’s much-touted “Moment of Truth” event in the Auckland Town Hall.

Again, it was a carefully orchestrated attempt to sabotage National. All those high-profile speakers, parachuted in or beamed in by video link from their various boltholes; it all looked a bit too obvious.

It didn’t help that Dotcom failed to deliver on his promise to expose John Key as a liar, and even less that he then angrily turned on journalists when they challenged him. Suddenly the public saw the less benign side of the fun-loving German.

No one can say with absolute certainty why people vote the way they do, but as the campaign went into its final days I sensed a stiffening public resistance to all these finger-wagging interlopers telling us how rotten our government was.

If I’m right, it’s highly ironic that it was the Left, not the Right, that was damaged.  Labour’s support collapsed and the Greens fell far short of the ambitious goal they had set themselves.

This was the law of unintended consequences kicking in big-time. It was not the outcome that the Left had scripted for itself.

Interviewed on Sunday morning, Labour leader David Cunliffe said the firestorms over Dirty Politics and state surveillance had sucked up all the oxygen in the campaign, leaving little opportunity for voters to consider policy issues.

I’m sure he’s right. The issues that the Left had been pushing, such as child poverty and the inequality gap, hardly got a look in.

The biggest irony of all, of course, is that Dotcom’s own party was humiliatingly wiped out, taking with it three-term MP Hone Harawira.

Both men will have learned a lesson. Dotcom will have learned that New Zealanders resent big-spending outsiders throwing their weight and money around (he acknowledged, to his credit, that his influence had poisoned the Mana Party), and Harawira will have learned about the dangers of Faustian pacts.

He was seen as compromising his principles, and his people punished him for it.

I felt a bit sorry for Colin Craig, who was thwarted by the vagaries of a flawed electoral system. The cheerleaders for MMP frequently remind us of the failings of the old first-past-the-post system, but they can’t ignore the shortcomings of one that denies a seat to a party that commanded more than four percent of votes while giving two to parties with less than one per cent support.

You have to wonder, too, whether distrust of MMP explains the marked falloff in voter participation since it was introduced. Voters are cynical about MMP because they realise that the system puts more power, not less, in the hands of the politicians. That was not the promise when it was introduced.

I almost felt sorry for Cunliffe too. He was more convincing by the end of the campaign than he was at the beginning – but given the history of leaders who lose elections, it’s unlikely he’ll get another shot.

What Labour must do now, urgently, is rejuvenate. Too many of its list MPs in the last term looked as if they were merely keeping their seats warm.

The need for a vigorous opposition is never greater than when a government has convincingly won a third term and risks becoming arrogant and complacent. Democracy prevailed on Saturday, but the concern now is whether it will be up to the job of holding the government to account over the next three years.

Is this the most bizarre campaign ever?

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

This election is shaping up to be the strangest in my lifetime.

There’s a cacophony of minor parties scrambling for attention and a frenzied political bidding war in which there seems to be no limit on the extravagance of the promises made.

We’ve had an outbreak of thinly disguised xenophobia over the sale of a farm, a sideshow over the use of the phrase “Sugar Daddy”, and a blatant appeal to the emotions of voters who imagine New Zealand can raise the drawbridge and retreat into a cosy and safe economic fortress, 1970s-style.

And all this is taking place within the context of a seriously flawed electoral system originally devised  to prevent an extremist party such as the Nazis regaining power in Germany, as if that were somehow applicable to New Zealand.

The weirdness is so all-pervasive it’s hard to know where to start. But let’s begin with the largest (literally) and most bizarre factor of all.

The very name Kim Dotcom suggests a character from a Batman or Austin Powers movie. But while Dotcom likes to present himself as something of a fun-loving jester figure, he’s a noxious force in politics.

If there was any doubt about that, it was erased by the Internet-Mana Party video on YouTube in which Dotcom urged an apparently liquored-up audience of Christchurch students to chant “F--- John Key”.

Apologists for Dotcom have tried to excuse this as free expression and youthful exuberance. It was nothing of the sort.

Whatever you think about Key (and I’ve never been a fan) this was rabble-rousing at its basest and most puerile level. Dotcom looked like a grotesque cross between a gangsta rapper and the Fuhrer at Nuremberg. 

Policy? Issues? Never mind that tedious stuff. Let's bring it all down to mindless, hateful abuse.

The video did, however, serve one useful purpose: it left no one in any doubt that what primarily drives Dotcom is deep personal animosity against Key.

No matter what you think about the other figures in this election campaign, you have to allow that they are all motivated by genuine concern for New Zealand. But Dotcom doesn’t give that impression.

The question voters should ask themselves is whether a toxic personal grudge is a sound reason for entering politics (not forgetting, of course, that Dotcom may also be motivated by a desperate desire to avoid extradition to the United States, where he’s wanted for Internet piracy).

Relax, the apologists for Internet-Mana say; Dotcom won’t necessarily have any influence on party policy. If you believe that, you probably also believe in chem trails. He doesn’t strike me as the sort of person to put $3 million into a party if he’s not going to have any control over it.

Which brings us to Laila Harre, the nominal leader of the Dotcom-funded party. Of all the performers in the current political circus, she is the one whose reputation has been most damaged.

Harre once commanded respect as a leftist politician of conviction. In aligning herself with Dotcom she has redefined herself as a rank opportunist – a retread, desperate to revive her political career even if it means throwing her lot in with a flashy and extremely rich capitalist entrepreneur with an opaque agenda.

Try as she might, she will never overcome the perception that she has betrayed her proletarian principles in the pursuit of power.

So what of the other players in this most bizarre election campaign?

There’s the cerebral and unworldly Jamie Whyte, whose Herculean task is to rebuild the discredited Act. Whyte is a conviction politician, just as Harre once was on the other side, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that Act has no gas left in its tank.

There’s Colin Craig, who hopes to capture the substantial social conservative vote, but who seems determined to sabotage himself. I mean, who persuaded him to pose for that tragically misguided photo where he’s lying in the grass with a come-hither look?

Craig is another conviction politician, but like Whyte, he’s up against a media that is at worst hostile, at best unsympathetic. The last thing he needs is to provide ammunition to the mockers, but he can’t seem to help himself.

Then there’s Winston Peters. There’s always Winston Peters. But I wonder if this could be the old warhorse’s last charge. If New Zealand First doesn’t get past the five per cent threshold, I can’t see Peters sticking around for another three years – in which case that could be the end of the party too, unless Ron Mark can be persuaded to take over.

And of course, lastly there’s Key. His preternatural popularity is a complete mystery, but you can’t argue with the opinion polls.

The only thing standing between Key and a third election victory is the MMP system, the vagaries of which could still deliver a rogue result in the form of a dysfunctional coalition cobbled together from the disparate, angry forces of the left.

As a journalist, I find it riveting; as a citizen concerned for our future, I find myself getting more apprehensive as the big day approaches.

FOOTNOTE: This was written last weekend, before the Nicky Hager bombshell. What was previously our most bizarre campaign ever is now also shaping up to be the ugliest.

At least Bradford has principles, even if no one else does

(First published in The Dominion Post, May 30.)

WHATEVER else you might think of Sue Bradford, she sticks to her principles. You have to respect her for walking away in disgust from the Internet-Mana pantomime.

Who, other than the most gullible, is going to believe these two parties have genuine shared concerns? They are united only by rank opportunism.

Hone Harawira needs access to Kim Dotcom’s bank account, while Herr Dotcom seems driven by a personal grudge against John Key and a need for political friends who might help him avoid extradition. These are hardly a sound basis for a credible political party.

In his desperation to make the merger look honourable, Harawira argues that Internet access is a pressing issue for young Maori. This is a convenient but very recent conversion. When I last looked, digital access wasn’t even mentioned on the Mana website.

The $200,000 that Dotcom reportedly put into the Internet Party [note: since this column was written, we've learned the sum is $3 million] is a far more likely explanation for Harawira’s enthusiasm. But at least he had the decency to grin cheekily when he admitted coveting his new ally’s resources. Like Winston Peters, he often gives the game away by grinning when he knows no one is fooled. 

Unfortunately a mischievous grin can’t disguise the truth that this alliance is a cynical exploitation of a deeply flawed electoral system. Theoretically at least, there is a possibility that Internet-Mana will end up in a classic tail-wags-dog position of power that bears no relationship to its voter support.

What’s more, the two parties have undertaken to review their relationship six weeks after the election. So if they get into Parliament, all bets will be off. Take that, suckers. 

The best we can hope for is some entertainment as the inherent tensions boil to the surface and Internet-Mana blows up like Krakatoa. How long, for example, before Mana office-holder John Minto – a conviction politician in the Bradford mould – spits the dummy? He can only fool himself for so long that the merger is in the best interests of the proletariat.

Even on their own, far- Left parties such as Mana have a glorious history of disembowelling themselves. Who knows what bloody mayhem could result when the hard-core Left hitches itself to a wholly incompatible ally like the Dotcom party?

 

* * *

MY FELLOW columnist Joe Bennett has written in these pages about his irritation at the tone of phony familiarity adopted by marketers in their sales pitches. I think I know what he means.

A few weeks ago I received a card from Telecom announcing its proposed name change. It began with the words “Hey there”, which is the type of fatuous greeting you might expect from a cashier at Starbucks.

Genesis periodically sends me emails with the subject line “Let’s chat”, apparently unaware that a chat is a two-way dialogue that requires consent from both parties.  Other companies begin their promotional messages with the words “Hi guys”, at which point I stop reading.

A common marketing misjudgment, one guaranteed to raise older people’s hackles, is the presumption that customers are happy to be addressed by their first names.

Members of the generation that was brought up to address each other as “Mr” or “Mrs”, at least until invited to do otherwise, are affronted when employees in the bank or insurance company, who are usually young enough to be their grandchildren, assume the right to call them “Joe” or “Mary”.

Most are too polite to say anything, but quietly grit their teeth in resentment.

The problem, of course, is that corporate marketing departments are run by Generation X-ers who assume that older customers will be flattered to be addressed as if they are teenage airheads.

I’m waiting for a bright young marketing graduate to send me an email with the introductory words, “Hey, dude”. It can only be a matter of time.

* * *

BIG GOVERNMENT is now so all-pervasive that many people find it hard to imagine life without it.

That was evident from a recent minor party leaders’ debate on TV3’s The Nation, in which ACT leader Jamie Whyte was treated as some sort of freak - or possibly even a traitor - for daring to suggest that New Zealanders don’t need constant intervention from the state in every aspect of their lives. This is clearly a dangerous heresy.

Only days later, Dr Whyte got a similar going-over from Guyon Espiner on Morning Report. It seems we’ve all become so accustomed to the smothering influence of Big Government – even to the extent of deciding whether we should have children – that we can’t comprehend any alternative.

Dr Whyte, of course, believes the state should get out of our lives, save for a few essential functions. It’s an idea worth exploring, but you get the impression that for a lot of people, it’s just too scary.

 

The Masterton you don't read about

(First published in The Dominion Post, April 4.)

SIGH. It’s happened again. Masterton has been back in the news, and for all the wrong reasons.

The town where I live is also home to the four people found guilty last week of bashing Featherston supermarket worker Glen Jones to death, supposedly in revenge for an alleged rape.

It’s also where police raided three properties a few days ago in a crackdown on cannabis and methamphetamine. Among the seizures was a loaded sawnoff shotgun.

I could imagine people reading those newspaper stories and nodding as if to say, “There you go – Masterton again.”

Masterton people are accustomed to a bad press. I call it a decile 1 to 10 town. Sociologically speaking, there’s a bit of everything here, from the genteel rich to a few families with multigenerational problems of violence, drugs, alcohol and welfare dependency.

Inevitably it’s the bad stuff that gets reported. News, by definition, is anything out of the ordinary, and what’s out of the ordinary is often bad: crime, car crashes, death and general unpleasantness. Ordinary people leading good lives – bringing up happy kids, supporting community organisations, doing useful work, playing sport, paying the bills – are not newsworthy.

The Masterton of the negative headlines is not the Masterton I have come to know. It’s not a town of lowlifes and no-hopers, though of course it has its share. The Masterton I know is a town full of good people.

It’s the town where the family that won $37 million in Lotto in 2009 has donated more than $1.5 million to the Wairarapa ambulance service.

It’s the town where, according to the nurse who took my blood recently, the Blood Service gets more donors than anywhere else in the Wellington region.

It’s the sort of town where, when someone gets cancer, her friends quickly rally round and organise a roster to drive her to Palmerston North Hospital each day for treatment.

And here’s another thing. Masterton actually doesn’t feel like Detroit or Juarez. By that I mean you don’t feel you’re taking your life in your hands walking down the street.

In more than 10 years here, we have been the victims of only one crime. Someone – I suspect kids – took advantage of an insecure shed to reach inside and steal a fishing rod. I hope they have better luck with it than I had.

My wife and I have now lived here longer than in any other locality. Our habit of moving house every few years used to be a standing joke among our friends, but Masterton has cured us of our peripatetic urges. That speaks for itself.

* * *

IN A PREVIOUS life I once interviewed the great British actor Donald Pleasence. We talked about eyes.

His own eyes were his most striking feature. They were a pale, steely, penetrating blue that could give him a quite menacing aura.  But Pleasence – a friendly, obliging man off-screen – reckoned the eyes by themselves communicated nothing. He insisted it was the accompanying facial expressions that conveyed meaning.

I had trouble accepting this, and still do. I was inclined to believe, as Shakespeare said, that the eyes are the windows to the soul.

I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve been watching Kim Dotcom on television, and Dotcom strikes me as contradicting the Pleasence hypothesis. Even when the Internet Party founder’s face is smiling, his eyes seem to express distrust, suspicion and hostility.

They invite suspicion and distrust in return. I’ve decided I’m with Shakespeare on this one.

* * *

PERHAPS the least surprising news so far this year was that Hutt City Council officials are excited about the prospect of a new sports stadium at Petone.

Of course they are. Municipal functionaries are always keen to talk up any proposal that promises glamour and excitement, particularly in towns that conspicuously lack it.

Besides, it’s easy to get excited when it’s other people’s money that’s at risk.

Invariably, when such projects are proposed, council bureaucrats flourish glowing economic reports from obliging consultants.  But just watch the bureaucrats and the consultants go to ground when the stadium turns out to be a dog.

For a cautionary tale, Hutt ratepayers need only look to Dunedin, where projections for the Forsyth Barr Stadium turned out to be grossly over-optimistic.

That city is now lumbered with a facility that cost a lot more than expected and has failed to deliver the promised returns. It’s massively indebted and running at a loss. Isn’t that always the way?

The proposal for a 12,000-seat stadium at Petone strikes me as particularly misguided. It’s a permanent solution to a temporary problem – namely, the embarrassment of the Wellington Phoenix at having to perform in an almost empty Westpac Stadium. But who’s to say the Phoenix will even exist in five years?

Dotcom and Bradbury: a match made in heaven - or should that be hell?

Some of the greediest people I've known were lefties. In fact I suspect the reason they were lefties is that they were deeply, bitterly envious of people with wealth and wanted a share for themselves. In a few notable cases, once they discovered their inner capitalist, there was no holding them back. This was true of several people I can think of who were once staunch union activists but later discovered a talent for making money.

I thought of this when I read courtesy of Whale Oil that Martyn Bradbury, the man whose flat was once decorated with portraits of Mao, Marx and Che Guevara, was charging Kim Dotcom $8000 per month plus GST for political strategy, "on top of a $5000 payment to allow him to upgrade his computer, cellphone and tablet devices". In other words, just another greedy left-wing trougher.

Bradbury has been making heroic efforts in recent months to appear sane, presumably with a view to making himself politically acceptable. It now appears he wants to stand for the new Dotcom party in Auckland Central. If Dotcom has any sense at all he will cut Bradbury loose; in fact today's Dominion Post suggests he might have done so already. I hope it's wrong. Dotcom and Bradbury deserve each other.

2012: year of the buffoon?

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, January 2.)

In the week before Christmas I was invited to take part in a radio programme where we were to discuss, among other things, the good and bad of 2012.

Worryingly, I had to scratch my head to think of anything that had happened in 2012. I put this down to my many years as a daily newspaper journalist, a career which revolves around the event of the moment. Once a story has been written and published, it’s expunged from the memory bank to make room for the next one.

It follows that casting one’s mind back over an entire year was a tall order. But I duly went back through my files and slowly, little by little, it all came back to me.

Here, then, is my highly selective resume of 2012.

It was a year in which, bizarrely, a large and buffoonish-looking German named Kim Dotcom became a national celebrity and caused enormous political embarrassment.

Buffoonish-looking he may be, but Herr Dotcom is a very shrewd customer with a natural flair for public relations. He cleverly turned the controversy arising from an over-the-top police raid on his home near Auckland to his advantage, in the process becoming something of a folk hero.

Public support for Herr Dotcom (even his adopted name sounds like something created by a Hollywood scriptwriter) arose largely from the perception, not entirely unjustified, that America, determined to put him on the mat for alleged copyright infringement on a massive scale, had told the New Zealand government to jump and the response had been, “how high”?

Public unease at this perceived grovelling to the Americans would have been accentuated by controversy over the government’s sweetheart deal with the Sky City casino company and, going back further, to the furore over The Hobbit, which saw prime minister John Key swiftly moving to placate Warner Brothers to ensure production remained in New Zealand.

In each of these instances, the government’s opponents were able to portray the National Party as a pushover, ready to sell New Zealand’s soul.

There was a time, decades ago, when many New Zealanders accepted that we had no choice but to bow to powerful outside interests (usually British, in those days), but all that has changed. Since Britain abandoned us for the EU and we fell out with the Americans over Anzus, we have acquired a taste for asserting our autonomy.

The problem is that we are a small, vulnerable economy, often at the mercy of external forces. The government must seize what opportunities it can without appearing to compromise our sovereignty. Getting that balance right will present a continuing challenge for the government’s political management skills, which looked distinctly ragged in 2012.

It was a year in which Mr Key seemed to forget the words of the magic incantation that protected him against political damage during his first term, but whether he has learned anything is a moot point. His final act of the political year was to indulge in juvenile clowning on a radio station – not a good look when the education sector was in turmoil. 

Herr Dotcom’s other significant achievement was that he effectively destroyed the Act party, although not without a great deal of help from the pathetic John Banks and the man who unwisely installed him in Epsom, erstwhile Act leader Don Brash.

Mr Banks had been happy to accept Herr Dotcom’s generous help when he ran unsuccessfully for the Auckland mayoralty, but ungraciously disowned the German the moment he looked like becoming a political embarrassment. Herr Dotcom took his revenge by publicly exposing Mr Banks’ duplicity, and fair enough. Now Mr Banks’ reputation is in tatters and so is Act’s. (In fact the more I think about it, the more I'm forced to conclude that, given Mr Key's radio antics and Mr Banks' embarrassing attempts to wriggle out of his predicament, buffoonery may have been the defining quality of 2012.)

Many people will rejoice at the prospect of Act being obliterated at the 2014 general election, but I’m not one of them. It was a bold, radical and idealistic party – as idealistic as any party on the left – but like many idealistic parties, it suffered from a surfeit of talented but idiosyncratic and often undisciplined personalities.  Dr Brash’s ill-conceived takeover of the party sealed its fate.

But back to 2012. There was ACC and the Bronwyn Pullar fiasco, which claimed more victims than a cluster bomb. Yet I still refuse to buy Ms Pullar’s portrayal of herself (with a huge amount of help from TV3’s disgracefully partisan Sixty Minutes) as an heroic whistle blower. It’s my opinion she was driven from the start by pure, undiluted self-interest and adopted the mantle of crusader only after her attempt to exploit her highly-placed connections failed.

There was a sensational murder trial that resulted in an equally sensational acquittal. Ewen Macdonald, who was accused of murdering Scott Guy, shows every sign of becoming another cause celebre in the tradition of Arthur Allan Thomas, David Bain, David Tamihere and Scott Watson, with the obvious difference that those cases resulted in convictions whereas Macdonald will walk free. It’s as if New Zealand has developed a craving for murder cases that fail to produce, at least in the public mind, a satisfactory and definitive conclusion.

There was The Hobbit: all two hours and 50 minutes of it, and there are still (spare us!) two films to go. Sir Peter Jackson is the new Ed Hillary. Whatever one thinks of his films, he has done more than anyone since Hillary to put the country on the world map and make New Zealanders feel good about themselves. Even the late Sir Peter Blake was never this big.

There was an unholy mess in education – the result of an inexperienced but headstrong minister pushing too hard? – and mounting unease about child poverty and income disparity, with no shortage of suggested solutions (increased welfare payments, a higher minimum wage, meals in schools, more cheap rental housing) but a conspicuous failure to explain how a struggling economy could afford them.

There was noisy agitation for alcohol law reform and same-sex marriage. Parliament emphatically rebuffed campaigners on the first issue – not that that will silence the taxpayer-funded wowser lobby for long – but it remains to be seen how much traction the marriage reformers will get.

And then there’s potentially the most troubling and divisive issue of all: race, biculturalism and the Treaty. Of all the issues that bubbled away in 2012, this is the one most likely to change the face of New Zealand fundamentally and permanently. And it’s one on which the political consensus in Parliament seems entirely out of step with the mood of the electorate.

The wolf pack has moved on

The media are finally losing interest in the Dotcom saga. It’s no longer generating daily headlines and the journalistic wolf pack has moved on.

But here’s the thing: the public was never that interested anyway. To use the fashionable jargon, it was a classic Beltway issue (the Beltway being the highway that encircles Washington DC, and hence a metaphor for any issue that excites political obsessives but leaves ordinary citizens wondering what all the fuss is about).

What made the Dotcom affair particularly riveting for political junkies was that it implicated normally secretive security agencies – a rare treat. Better still, it exposed them to embarrassment and ridicule.

Combine the scent of a wounded prime minister’s blood with the spectacle of panic and discomfort among the "spook" community, to use another term much loved by reporters, and you have what might crudely be called a political journalist’s wet dream.

But even if the public had cared much in the first place, which I doubt, they would have very quickly lost interest as the tangle of allegations became ever more intricate.

This is not to say the media should have ignored the affair, especially when a government security agency had flagrantly disregarded the law. But its significance in the eyes of the public was probably greatly over-estimated.

Still, there are rich pickings there for anyone interesting in scripting a political farce. It might be something for my fellow Dominion Post columnist, the parodist Dave Armstrong, to pursue when he’s not tending his basil plants.

WHAT'S THAT ABOUT SUPPING WITH THE DEVIL?

In a very real sense, whatever happens from now on in the John Banks-Kim Dotcom imbroglio is immaterial. The public has made up its own mind. Banks has lost where it ultimately counts most: in the court of public opinion. And he has only himself to blame, because Banks has made himself look every inch a guilty man. What has swung people against him is his extraordinarily evasive response to questions – the infantile references to cabbage boats, the pitiful “I don’t remember” mewing – which have been broadcast for all to see, and which are likely to be repeated ad nauseam until, like a maimed animal, Banks is put down.

There are now at least three counts against him. The first is that he was dishonest about the source of donations from Dotcom and SkyCity. The second is that when confronted, he was incapable of giving a straight answer. To those charges can now be added a third: that he abandoned his benefactor and former chum, Dotcom, when the German turned to him for help after his arrest. It’s distasteful enough that a sycophantic Banks should grease up to a billionaire entrepreneur as he did, but it looks almost reprehensible that he didn’t want to know Dotcom once the German was in trouble (which is presumably why the Dotcom camp turned on him by leaking the information that now has Banks writhing). No matter what people think of Dotcom, there is bound to be some public sympathy for him in the light of David Garrett’s claim on Kiwiblog that Dotcom sought assistance from Banks when he was banged up in Mt Eden (which is apparently in Banks’ electorate) but was ignored.

Perhaps Banks has learned that you can’t have it both ways: you can’t schmooze rich patrons without accepting that some sort of payback may be expected down the track. Old sayings about free lunches and supping with the devil come to mind. On the other hand, you get the feeling that Banks may be one of those men who just doesn’t learn.

Footnote: In an earlier post on this subject I wrote that a conviction for a breach of the electoral law would place Banks' Epsom seat at risk and therefore endanger the government's tenuous majority. In fact, as Duncan Garner pointed out last night on TV3, the government can count on safely retaining Epsom, but it would be left without a potentially helpful ally on its right.

Cosying up to the big money

(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, January 31.)

IF THE National Party has an Achilles heel that makes it vulnerable to attack, it’s a fondness for cosying up to big money.

First there was the unseemly eagerness with which it prostrated itself before emissaries from Warner Bros in the 2010 row over Sir Peter Jackson’s production of The Hobbit. Then came the sweetheart deal with Sky City, whereby Auckland will gain a new convention centre in return for regulatory concessions that will allow the company to install extra gaming tables and 900 more poker machines.

Any competent government will look for ways to promote tourism and create new jobs; but there’s a counter-argument that if it results in more gambling addicts squandering the family grocery budget on pokies, it’s not worth it.

Meanwhile another Sky, Sky TV, has benefited from a hands-off regulatory regime (admittedly adopted by Labour as well as National) that has seen Sky’s audience multiply at the expense of publicly owned broadcasters. Benevolent market conditions enable the pay-TV company to outbid free-to-air rivals for sports broadcasting rights and all the best new drama programmes. As a result, we have witnessed the gradual death by strangulation of public service television.

National has also exposed itself to the accusation that it’s too matey with Australian-owned TV and radio operator MediaWorks, which was the beneficiary last year of a $43 million government loan guarantee. What made that deal look particularly dodgy was that Steven Joyce, then Minister of Communications, is a former managing director of MediaWorks’ radio subsidiary – although to be fair, it was reported that Mr Joyce initially advised against the arrangement.

Now we've learned that the grotesque German known as Kim Dotcom, who is fighting extradition to the United States on charges of internet piracy, purchased New Zealand residency in 2010 by investing $10 million in New Zealand government bonds. Immigration officials knew of his convictions in Germany for insider trading and embezzlement but weighed his criminal record against “potential benefits to New Zealand”.

We don’t know whether political influence was brought to bear in the decision to grant Dotcom residency, but perhaps direct involvement wasn’t necessary. Officials often take their cue from what they know to be the attitudes of their political masters.

Of course everyone expects National to be business-friendly, just as Labour ingratiates itself with trade unions. But it’s one thing for a government to promote a prosperous economic environment, and quite another to roll over for big business or any sleazy entrepreneur waving a cheque book.

* * *

HOW DISPIRITING that a country as dynamic and full of talent as the United States couldn’t produce a more impressive set of Republican challengers for the presidency.

Virtually all the contenders are encumbered with compromising baggage that journalists were bound to unearth. With early frontrunner Herman Cain, it was a history of sexual harassment. For Newt Gingrich, it’s his marital record and apparent predilection for adultery. For Mitt Romney, who tried hard to present himself as Mr Clean, it’s not so much his great wealth – Americans have no problem with that – as his evasiveness over how much he pays in tax.

Rick Santorum has been accused of living in one state while claiming school subsidies for his large family in another; Ron Paul has been embarrassed by bigoted views expressed in a newsletter published under his name. And on it goes.

But it’s not just that. Conspicuously absent from the Republican campaign is any hint of inspirational vision.

Where are the successors to the great American political speechwriters of the past such as Ted Sorensen, who crafted John F Kennedy’s famous inaugural speech with its appeal to Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”? Or Peggy Noonan, who masterfully recycled the poet John Magee’s line about aviators who “slipped the surly bonds of earth ... and touched the face of God” in a speech by Ronald Reagan honouring the astronauts who died in the Challenger space shuttle explosion.

Certainly there’s been no sign of soaring rhetoric so far from the Republican hopefuls. At this rate all Barack Obama has to do is turn up and the White House will be his for another four years.

* * *

VERY FEW men look better with their shirts off than on. (The same is true of women, but I’m not allowed to say that.) So why do Wellington Phoenix fans insist on baring their torsos when their team plays? All that pale, flabby flesh, all those man boobs and scrawny chests … it’s not a pretty sight.

I note with alarm that Gareth Morgan, one of the team’s new owners, demonstrated his solidarity with fans by getting his own top off at a game last year. It’s all very well wanting to prove that you’re one of the boys, but surely this is going too far.