(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, December 7.)
Cast your mind back to the 1990s. The Berlin Wall had collapsed, and with it the entire rotten edifice of Soviet communism. Democracy and free enterprise were taking root in countries previously kept under repressive state control.
Internationally there was a marked swing from left to right. Thatcherism in Britain and Reaganism in the United States had radically changing the political landscape.
Even in countries such as Britain, Australia and New Zealand, the traditional parties of the left were shedding their socialist heritage and reaching a new accommodation with economic liberalism.
Political scientist Francis Fukuyama was sufficiently emboldened to write in 1992: “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
It was hailed as the ultimate triumph of capitalism over socialism. The great battle of the ideologies that had raged for much of the 20th century was proclaimed to be over. But was it?
Many of us thought so at the time, but we reckoned without one very important factor – that old human impulse, greed.
Capitalism’s golden age – if that indeed is what it was – turned out to be disappointingly brief. The Western world went on a delirious spending binge using borrowed money, precipitating what is now known as the Global Financial Crisis.
Consumerism – the urge to acquire the newest and best of everything – was rampant. In New Zealand, we joyously threw off the shackles after decades of tight economic controls by going on a residential property spree that drove house values, especially in fashionable suburbs and coastal resorts, to preposterous levels.
The new princes of capitalism, the bankers and financial traders in centres such as London and New York, acquired wealth previously undreamed of. Taking full advantage of an environment that spurned regulation and control in the belief that markets could safely be left to govern themselves, they created complex financial instruments tied to real estate values; and as these continued their apparently limitless upward trajectory, the money men rewarded themselves with stratospheric bonuses.
In New Zealand, investors fell over themselves in their eagerness to entrust their money to dodgy finance companies, some of them run by the same sharks who had feasted on the gullible during the sharemarket and property boom of the 1980s.
As is often the case, those closest to the centre of the action were the least capable of foreseeing how it would play out. They seemed to think the party could go on forever, but of course it couldn’t, and didn’t.
A catastrophic economic collapse reverberated throughout the West. Once-solid banks fell over like dominoes and had to be bailed out by the taxpayer, even as the bankers – by now completely detached from reality – continued to reward themselves with huge bonuses.
America was traumatised by unemployment and mortgage foreclosures. Thousands of New Zealand investors, many of them elderly, lost the savings they had counted on to keep them in their retirement.
More recently, the European Union has been through convulsions as incompetently managed economies collapsed under a mountain of debt and had to be rescued by more responsible member states.
Where this will end is hard to predict, but the unravelling of the EU can’t be ruled out. The industrious Germans can’t be expected to prop up the feckless southern Europeans indefinitely. And in the meantime, democracy itself is being undermined as elected politicians are replaced by technocrats appointed from Brussels.
Capitalism hasn’t covered itself in glory in Russia, either. There, assets that once belonged to the state have been corralled by a small coterie of ultra-rich and often corrupt oligarchs – hardly a good advertisement for the free market economy. Small wonder that the communist party still appeals to many Russian voters.
It’s fair to say, then, that capitalism is in crisis. In fact you could say it’s on trial.
You can sense a distrust of capitalism lurking behind public unease about our own government’s proposed partial selloff of state assets. People haven’t forgotten that when this last happened, state-owned businesses were flogged off at fire sale prices, stripped of assets and, in several instances, had to be bought back in order to save them.
There’s also a perception that unbridled capitalism runs counter to the spirit of egalitarianism that New Zealanders pride themselves on. I think too much is made of the gap between the rich and the poor; we shouldn’t worry that some people are stonkingly rich as long as everyone has enough, in the words of Listener columnist Joanne Black, to live decently. Yet there’s little doubt that social cohesion is undermined if people perceive that they live in a stratified society where status is determined solely by wealth.
One consequence of capitalism’s recent failings was the emergence of the Occupy movement, but it’s impossible to take seriously the ragtag protest groups that have taken over public spaces such as the steps of London’s St Paul’s Cathedral, New York’s Zuccotti Park, Auckland’s Aotea Square and Dunedin’s Octagon. They are mostly young and their idealistic minds are unencumbered by knowledge or wisdom.
Their objections to capitalism are vague and often incoherent. They express a fervent conviction that there must be something better, but they don’t know what it is.
The truth is that if there is a better way than free-market capitalism, humanity has yet to discover it. Capitalism may have temporarily let itself down, but it remains the world’s best hope for prosperity and peace. The world’s most liberal, humane, peaceful and prosperous states are all capitalist democracies – something the naïve young idealists of the Occupy movement don’t seem to grasp.
Certainly, socialism is no solution. Capitalism may not work perfectly all the time (what human system does?), but socialism has never worked anywhere, under any circumstances.
What’s needed, then, is for capitalism to rediscover its moral compass. In the words of Ken Costa, a former chairman of international investment bankers Lazards, the markets have “slipped their moral moorings”.
Costa was asked last month by the Anglican Bishop of London to lead discussions on how a form of “ethical capitalism” might work. While he believes markets are still the best system for creating growth and jobs, Costa said the market economy had shifted from its moral foundations “with disastrous consequences”.
The challenge now is for capitalism to set about regaining public trust. It may be a long haul, but it must be done.
Friday, December 9, 2011
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
More on that emotionally manipulative doco
(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, November 6.)
TV3’s RECENT prime-time documentary on child poverty in New Zealand had exactly the intended effect. Viewers were aghast at the evidence of sub-standard housing and preventable illnesses such as scabies and school sores. Anguished writers of letters to the editor wondered how this state of affairs could have arisen in a country once considered the best in the world for raising children.
In one respect, the viewer reaction was encouraging. It was a reminder that we are still a decent, compassionate society.
The problem is, the programme represented a very one-sided view. Its message was that the welfare state has failed our poor – and so it has, but not in the way that documentary maker Bryan Bruce wanted us to think.
The welfare state is now part of the problem. Originally designed to tide people over hard times, it has created a culture of long-term dependency, helplessness and entitlement.
There is ample evidence that dependence on benefits, more than any other factor, causes the poverty trap that Bruce professes to despise. Yet the solution he proposes is more welfare spending.
The documentary ignored the risk that more spending on benefits and state housing would serve to make a welfare-based lifestyle look more attractive and end trapping up even more people.
Neither did Bruce concern himself with the inconvenient fact that more welfare spending increases the burden on the diminishing productive sector of an already weak economy.
Socialists never bother to ask where the money comes from; they are interested only in spending it. But consider this: New Zealand in 1972 had 26 working people for every beneficiary. Today that ratio is down to 7 to 1 (in fact 3 to 1, if you include superannuitants).
This was a disgracefully simplistic, emotionally manipulative programme, but fortunately not everyone was fooled. This newspaper published letters from people who had grown up in state houses and pointed out that the mould Bruce was so appalled by in some of the homes he visited could be avoided simply by proper ventilation – in other words, opening windows – and wiping away condensation. But of course it’s far more dramatic to present state house tenants as the helpless victims of Dickensian indifference and heartless, right-wing politicians.
I agree with Bruce on one thing: child poverty is deplorable. But the problem is far more complex than this slanted programme would have us believe. As I wrote on my blog, a film maker could just as easily produce a documentary proving the exact reverse of Bruce’s thesis – namely, that the welfare state and the culture of dependency it encourages are the cause of, rather than the solution to, the poverty and deprivation that Bruce finds so intolerable.
* * *
I KNOW NOTHING about cricket beyond what I read in the sports pages. I managed to navigate my way through childhood without ever playing the game and it remains a mystery to me.
However I was intrigued by a recent article in Britain’s Spectator magazine, prompted by the death of English cricketer-turned-journalist Peter Roebuck, which examined the abnormal suicide rate among former cricketers and asked: “How is that cricket drives so many players out of their minds?”
The best answer it could give was that top players devoted themselves wholly to the game and were left feeling lost and bereft when their careers ended. With no team at the centre of their lives, many didn’t know what to do with themselves and succumbed to drink and depression.
It certainly seems true that cricket, being a game that lasts days rather than hours, requires players to spend a disproportionate amount of their life with other young men in pavilions and hotel rooms. I wonder whether this results in some being emotionally stunted – trapped in an eternal adolescence of high-fives and howzats – and thus less able to cope with the rigours of ordinary life. Certainly some first-class cricketers give the impression of being unusually self-absorbed and perhaps even mentally fragile.
Spending a large part of your life in the company of other blokes, especially at a time when you’re biologically programmed to search for a long-term female partner, just seems downright unnatural.
Of course I didn’t grasp any of this when I decided never to play cricket, but I’m pleased that I made the right choice.
* * *
ANOTHER outbreak of Acute Sensitivity Disorder has made headlines, this time in Britain. Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson said on TV that striking public sector workers should be shot – taken out and executed, preferably in front of their families.
It was a typical Clarkson line, clearly intended as a provocative joke. But even the Poms have lost their sense of humour.
The BBC, intimidated by unionists’ howls of outrage, apologised. Worse still, so did Clarkson.
When political correctness stifles humour and free speech in the country that once gave us such outrageously irreverent and wickedly funny programmes as Monty Python’s Flying Circus, we should all be very afraid.
TV3’s RECENT prime-time documentary on child poverty in New Zealand had exactly the intended effect. Viewers were aghast at the evidence of sub-standard housing and preventable illnesses such as scabies and school sores. Anguished writers of letters to the editor wondered how this state of affairs could have arisen in a country once considered the best in the world for raising children.
In one respect, the viewer reaction was encouraging. It was a reminder that we are still a decent, compassionate society.
The problem is, the programme represented a very one-sided view. Its message was that the welfare state has failed our poor – and so it has, but not in the way that documentary maker Bryan Bruce wanted us to think.
The welfare state is now part of the problem. Originally designed to tide people over hard times, it has created a culture of long-term dependency, helplessness and entitlement.
There is ample evidence that dependence on benefits, more than any other factor, causes the poverty trap that Bruce professes to despise. Yet the solution he proposes is more welfare spending.
The documentary ignored the risk that more spending on benefits and state housing would serve to make a welfare-based lifestyle look more attractive and end trapping up even more people.
Neither did Bruce concern himself with the inconvenient fact that more welfare spending increases the burden on the diminishing productive sector of an already weak economy.
Socialists never bother to ask where the money comes from; they are interested only in spending it. But consider this: New Zealand in 1972 had 26 working people for every beneficiary. Today that ratio is down to 7 to 1 (in fact 3 to 1, if you include superannuitants).
This was a disgracefully simplistic, emotionally manipulative programme, but fortunately not everyone was fooled. This newspaper published letters from people who had grown up in state houses and pointed out that the mould Bruce was so appalled by in some of the homes he visited could be avoided simply by proper ventilation – in other words, opening windows – and wiping away condensation. But of course it’s far more dramatic to present state house tenants as the helpless victims of Dickensian indifference and heartless, right-wing politicians.
I agree with Bruce on one thing: child poverty is deplorable. But the problem is far more complex than this slanted programme would have us believe. As I wrote on my blog, a film maker could just as easily produce a documentary proving the exact reverse of Bruce’s thesis – namely, that the welfare state and the culture of dependency it encourages are the cause of, rather than the solution to, the poverty and deprivation that Bruce finds so intolerable.
* * *
I KNOW NOTHING about cricket beyond what I read in the sports pages. I managed to navigate my way through childhood without ever playing the game and it remains a mystery to me.
However I was intrigued by a recent article in Britain’s Spectator magazine, prompted by the death of English cricketer-turned-journalist Peter Roebuck, which examined the abnormal suicide rate among former cricketers and asked: “How is that cricket drives so many players out of their minds?”
The best answer it could give was that top players devoted themselves wholly to the game and were left feeling lost and bereft when their careers ended. With no team at the centre of their lives, many didn’t know what to do with themselves and succumbed to drink and depression.
It certainly seems true that cricket, being a game that lasts days rather than hours, requires players to spend a disproportionate amount of their life with other young men in pavilions and hotel rooms. I wonder whether this results in some being emotionally stunted – trapped in an eternal adolescence of high-fives and howzats – and thus less able to cope with the rigours of ordinary life. Certainly some first-class cricketers give the impression of being unusually self-absorbed and perhaps even mentally fragile.
Spending a large part of your life in the company of other blokes, especially at a time when you’re biologically programmed to search for a long-term female partner, just seems downright unnatural.
Of course I didn’t grasp any of this when I decided never to play cricket, but I’m pleased that I made the right choice.
* * *
ANOTHER outbreak of Acute Sensitivity Disorder has made headlines, this time in Britain. Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson said on TV that striking public sector workers should be shot – taken out and executed, preferably in front of their families.
It was a typical Clarkson line, clearly intended as a provocative joke. But even the Poms have lost their sense of humour.
The BBC, intimidated by unionists’ howls of outrage, apologised. Worse still, so did Clarkson.
When political correctness stifles humour and free speech in the country that once gave us such outrageously irreverent and wickedly funny programmes as Monty Python’s Flying Circus, we should all be very afraid.
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Were we too quick to dismiss John Banks?
The announcement that National will trial charter schools in low-income areas as part of its coalition agreement with ACT suggests that John Key’s government will be a lot more adventurous in its second term than in its first.
It’s an extremely significant policy gain for ACT and runs counter to the suspicion expressed by many commentators (me included) that John Banks is a political impostor; a National MP in disguise. Charter schools and parental choice in education have been core ACT policy from the start but until now, have never looked like gaining mainstream traction.
It rather looks as if National is using its tiny ally in Parliament to advance policies that it knows will resonate with National supporters – and no doubt with many of its MPs too – but which it hasn’t had the nerve to embrace itself. Radio New Zealand political editor Brent Edwards also pointed out this morning that it’s in National’s interests to help ACT rebuild so that it continues to have a dependable partner on its right. Allowing ACT a few important policy gains – and several ministerial positions – would be consistent with that strategy.
That John Key went on Morning Report this morning to defend the coalition deal with ACT – and took a pot shot at the “vested interests” of the teacher unions that oppose charter schools – is another indication that National has experienced a testosterone surge as a result of its election triumph. In the past Key has only rarely been interviewed on Radio New Zealand, leading to accusations that he wasn’t up to aggressive questioning.
We should all now brace ourselves for a furious co-ordinated offensive from the teacher unions, which have been remarkably successful in bullying governments in the past and will see the introduction of charter schools - even if only on a very limited scale - as a threat to their iron grip on the education system. To the teacher unions, parental choice is a seriously subversive concept. Inevitably, they will seek to forcefully remind the government just who the system exists for: the teachers.
The big question then will be whether the government stands up to the unions or shamefully capitulates, as National did over bulk funding in the 1990s. To its credit, the Key government stood its ground over national standards in the face of an almost hysterical outcry - the first setback for the teacher unions for as long as most people can remember. I hope it demonstrates the same resolve over charter schools.
It is, after all, just a trial, although we can rely on the NZEI, the PPTA and the school principals' organisations to portray it as tantamount to the sacking of our schools by Barbarian hordes.
It’s an extremely significant policy gain for ACT and runs counter to the suspicion expressed by many commentators (me included) that John Banks is a political impostor; a National MP in disguise. Charter schools and parental choice in education have been core ACT policy from the start but until now, have never looked like gaining mainstream traction.
It rather looks as if National is using its tiny ally in Parliament to advance policies that it knows will resonate with National supporters – and no doubt with many of its MPs too – but which it hasn’t had the nerve to embrace itself. Radio New Zealand political editor Brent Edwards also pointed out this morning that it’s in National’s interests to help ACT rebuild so that it continues to have a dependable partner on its right. Allowing ACT a few important policy gains – and several ministerial positions – would be consistent with that strategy.
That John Key went on Morning Report this morning to defend the coalition deal with ACT – and took a pot shot at the “vested interests” of the teacher unions that oppose charter schools – is another indication that National has experienced a testosterone surge as a result of its election triumph. In the past Key has only rarely been interviewed on Radio New Zealand, leading to accusations that he wasn’t up to aggressive questioning.
We should all now brace ourselves for a furious co-ordinated offensive from the teacher unions, which have been remarkably successful in bullying governments in the past and will see the introduction of charter schools - even if only on a very limited scale - as a threat to their iron grip on the education system. To the teacher unions, parental choice is a seriously subversive concept. Inevitably, they will seek to forcefully remind the government just who the system exists for: the teachers.
The big question then will be whether the government stands up to the unions or shamefully capitulates, as National did over bulk funding in the 1990s. To its credit, the Key government stood its ground over national standards in the face of an almost hysterical outcry - the first setback for the teacher unions for as long as most people can remember. I hope it demonstrates the same resolve over charter schools.
It is, after all, just a trial, although we can rely on the NZEI, the PPTA and the school principals' organisations to portray it as tantamount to the sacking of our schools by Barbarian hordes.
Monday, December 5, 2011
The horses will remain unfrightened
(Written for NZCPR Weekly - www.nzcpr.com)
Let’s get the congratulations out of the way first. National’s election triumph was as emphatic as they get, at least under MMP. Admittedly, it’s rare for a government to be tossed out of office after only one term: it last happened in 1975, and the circumstances then were unusual. Norman Kirk had died in office and the Labour Party leadership had been assumed by the mild-mannered Bill Rowling, who was ill-prepared to deal with the aggression and firepower of a political streetfighter named Muldoon.
But for National to strengthen its hold on power after one term, especially following a year as challenging as any in memory, was some feat. Colin James reports that it’s only the fifth time in 75 years that a first-term government has increased its vote. (Labour did it in 2002, but not as resoundingly.)
Perhaps desperate to inject some drama into a dull campaign, the media talked up Labour’s chances, arbitrarily declaring Phil Goff the winner in two bland TV debates; but it only served to demonstrate – again – that political journalists in Wellington are poorly equipped to read the public mind. Even the predicted narrowing of the gap in the last stages of the campaign never happened.
The vital statistics – 60 seats for National (up two) and 34 for Labour (down nine) – tell only part of the story. Even more striking was the fact that in Labour strongholds such as Christchurch East, Te Atatu and New Lynn, National won the party vote. That humiliation was compounded by Labour’s loss of well-regarded up-and-coming MPs such as Stuart Nash and Kelvin Davis, and by the thrashing handed out to glamour candidate Andrew Little in the previously ultra-marginal seat of New Plymouth, Little’s home town. The ambitious former union boss still gets into Parliament at No 15 on the Labour list, but his star has lost a lot of its lustre.
So, a romp for National. But this was an election where the sub-plots were more interesting than the main action on centre-stage.
Everyone commented on what a great campaign the Greens ran. Certainly they seemed to pick up a lot of former Labour supporters, and their electoral appeal can only have broadened since the departure of polarising figures such as Sue Bradford and Nandor Tanczos. In fact it looks as if the Greens are re-positioning themselves as a mainstream party of the centre-left (watch out Labour) rather than one on the beansprouts-and-sandals fringe. Russel Norman’s stylish suit and tie are a clue to that; the eccentric garb of the late Rod Donald is already a distant memory.
But just wait: the Greens have yet to be fully tested. They have never been exposed to Minor Party Curse, the fatal affliction that strikes small parties once they formally become part of coalition government arrangements. That’s when the stresses start to tell and party discipline starts to fall apart.
As long as a party remains outside government, as the Greens have done, it can safely occupy the moral high ground. Its high-minded principles are unlikely to be compromised. But the moment a party is drawn into a coalition, deals are done and principles get stretched. Ambitions are unleashed and tensions arise between idealists and pragmatists. It happened to the Alliance and it happened to ACT – both parties, like the Greens, with a strong ideological base. Being in government also means a minority party is subjected to much more intense media scrutiny. All things considered, the Greens might have a more assured future if they remain in opposition. A memorandum of understanding with National may be as far as they can safely go.
Then there’s Winston Peters, whose comeback was the big story of the night. (Obviously, someone forgot to drive a stake through his heart.) Peters too has an unhappy record in government. This may explain why he declared before the election that New Zealand First wouldn’t align with either National or Labour – although as with all Peters’ hand-on-heart declarations, that vow could be relied on only for as long as it was expedient for him to stick to it. So Peters is back doing what he does best, which is opposing.
Being in government never suited him; the burden of office, with its requirement to toe the line, curb his tongue, make decisions and accept some form of collective responsibility, was far too onerous. Heck, he was probably even expected to read briefing papers. No, at his age (66) it’s much more fun huffing and puffing from the cross-benches, feuding with the media, stoking the fears and prejudices of his ageing support base and holding court at the Green Parrot. Already there are hints that Peters will set out to hijack the first sitting of the new parliament, as only he can, by using it to divulge the transcript of the secret conversation between the two Johns, Key and Banks, at the Café Urban.
And finally we come to ACT, a Shakespearean tragedy that has unfolded in slow motion. Its disintegration began with the acrimonious leadership struggle that split the party after Richard Prebble’s departure in 2004 and now we are observing the painful last act (pun not intended).
Where did they go wrong? Well, it’s clear that the leadership contest between Rodney Hide, Ken Shirley, Stephen Franks and Muriel Newman created tensions that have never gone away. (Deborah Coddington, who left Parliament in 2005, still can’t comment on her old party without sounding as if she’s settling scores.) Under Hide’s leadership, ACT’s focus drifted away from the party’s founding principles, thus deepening the divisions. In embracing the Sensible Sentencing Trust’s law-and-order agenda (a worthy enough cause, but hardly consistent with ACT’s classical liberalism), Hide strayed perilously close to Winston Peters territory. His foray into television on Dancing with the Stars – a misguided attempt to court mainstream popularity – not only devalued the ACT brand but gave the media a fresh excuse to belittle the party by showing endless replays of Hide dropping his dancing partner. The David Garrett sideshow didn’t help either, and neither did perkbuster Hide’s credibility-damaging acceptance of an overseas holiday paid for by the taxpayer.
For all that, Hide was a capable, committed and hard-working politician who knew the ropes and made some significant gains in parliament. So it seemed churlish and high-handed that when Don Brash launched his hostile takeover bid for ACT, he made it clear that Hide had to go. That now looks like a bad mistake. ACT has lost one of its most effective performers and Brash’s own political career is probably beyond resuscitation. History will record that while the former Reserve Bank governor's principles were unimpeachable, his political judgment was too often woefully astray. ACT is now represented in Parliament – nominally, anyway – by a man with no history in the party and no record of commitment to its philosophy. John Banks has some admirable personal qualities, but he presents the absurd image of a man wearing an ill-fitting suit tailored for someone else.
But back to National. Will the Key government show more daring in its second term than it did in the first? It has the excuse that the global economic crisis calls for bold action, but it could just as easily argue – and probably will – that a period of international uncertainty is no time for making radical changes that might create anxiety. And of course it won’t have an eager-beaver ACT caucus prodding it to take bolder steps to arrest our relative economic decline. So while we can expect modest reforms in such areas as welfare, youth wages, accident compensation, partial privatisation of state assets and the Resource Management Act, no one’s bracing themselves for tough action to curb the state spending binge that began under the Helen Clark government and has continued largely unabated under National. Stability is likely to remain National’s soothing mantra. The horses mustn’t be frightened.
Let’s get the congratulations out of the way first. National’s election triumph was as emphatic as they get, at least under MMP. Admittedly, it’s rare for a government to be tossed out of office after only one term: it last happened in 1975, and the circumstances then were unusual. Norman Kirk had died in office and the Labour Party leadership had been assumed by the mild-mannered Bill Rowling, who was ill-prepared to deal with the aggression and firepower of a political streetfighter named Muldoon.
But for National to strengthen its hold on power after one term, especially following a year as challenging as any in memory, was some feat. Colin James reports that it’s only the fifth time in 75 years that a first-term government has increased its vote. (Labour did it in 2002, but not as resoundingly.)
Perhaps desperate to inject some drama into a dull campaign, the media talked up Labour’s chances, arbitrarily declaring Phil Goff the winner in two bland TV debates; but it only served to demonstrate – again – that political journalists in Wellington are poorly equipped to read the public mind. Even the predicted narrowing of the gap in the last stages of the campaign never happened.
The vital statistics – 60 seats for National (up two) and 34 for Labour (down nine) – tell only part of the story. Even more striking was the fact that in Labour strongholds such as Christchurch East, Te Atatu and New Lynn, National won the party vote. That humiliation was compounded by Labour’s loss of well-regarded up-and-coming MPs such as Stuart Nash and Kelvin Davis, and by the thrashing handed out to glamour candidate Andrew Little in the previously ultra-marginal seat of New Plymouth, Little’s home town. The ambitious former union boss still gets into Parliament at No 15 on the Labour list, but his star has lost a lot of its lustre.
So, a romp for National. But this was an election where the sub-plots were more interesting than the main action on centre-stage.
Everyone commented on what a great campaign the Greens ran. Certainly they seemed to pick up a lot of former Labour supporters, and their electoral appeal can only have broadened since the departure of polarising figures such as Sue Bradford and Nandor Tanczos. In fact it looks as if the Greens are re-positioning themselves as a mainstream party of the centre-left (watch out Labour) rather than one on the beansprouts-and-sandals fringe. Russel Norman’s stylish suit and tie are a clue to that; the eccentric garb of the late Rod Donald is already a distant memory.
But just wait: the Greens have yet to be fully tested. They have never been exposed to Minor Party Curse, the fatal affliction that strikes small parties once they formally become part of coalition government arrangements. That’s when the stresses start to tell and party discipline starts to fall apart.
As long as a party remains outside government, as the Greens have done, it can safely occupy the moral high ground. Its high-minded principles are unlikely to be compromised. But the moment a party is drawn into a coalition, deals are done and principles get stretched. Ambitions are unleashed and tensions arise between idealists and pragmatists. It happened to the Alliance and it happened to ACT – both parties, like the Greens, with a strong ideological base. Being in government also means a minority party is subjected to much more intense media scrutiny. All things considered, the Greens might have a more assured future if they remain in opposition. A memorandum of understanding with National may be as far as they can safely go.
Then there’s Winston Peters, whose comeback was the big story of the night. (Obviously, someone forgot to drive a stake through his heart.) Peters too has an unhappy record in government. This may explain why he declared before the election that New Zealand First wouldn’t align with either National or Labour – although as with all Peters’ hand-on-heart declarations, that vow could be relied on only for as long as it was expedient for him to stick to it. So Peters is back doing what he does best, which is opposing.
Being in government never suited him; the burden of office, with its requirement to toe the line, curb his tongue, make decisions and accept some form of collective responsibility, was far too onerous. Heck, he was probably even expected to read briefing papers. No, at his age (66) it’s much more fun huffing and puffing from the cross-benches, feuding with the media, stoking the fears and prejudices of his ageing support base and holding court at the Green Parrot. Already there are hints that Peters will set out to hijack the first sitting of the new parliament, as only he can, by using it to divulge the transcript of the secret conversation between the two Johns, Key and Banks, at the Café Urban.
And finally we come to ACT, a Shakespearean tragedy that has unfolded in slow motion. Its disintegration began with the acrimonious leadership struggle that split the party after Richard Prebble’s departure in 2004 and now we are observing the painful last act (pun not intended).
Where did they go wrong? Well, it’s clear that the leadership contest between Rodney Hide, Ken Shirley, Stephen Franks and Muriel Newman created tensions that have never gone away. (Deborah Coddington, who left Parliament in 2005, still can’t comment on her old party without sounding as if she’s settling scores.) Under Hide’s leadership, ACT’s focus drifted away from the party’s founding principles, thus deepening the divisions. In embracing the Sensible Sentencing Trust’s law-and-order agenda (a worthy enough cause, but hardly consistent with ACT’s classical liberalism), Hide strayed perilously close to Winston Peters territory. His foray into television on Dancing with the Stars – a misguided attempt to court mainstream popularity – not only devalued the ACT brand but gave the media a fresh excuse to belittle the party by showing endless replays of Hide dropping his dancing partner. The David Garrett sideshow didn’t help either, and neither did perkbuster Hide’s credibility-damaging acceptance of an overseas holiday paid for by the taxpayer.
For all that, Hide was a capable, committed and hard-working politician who knew the ropes and made some significant gains in parliament. So it seemed churlish and high-handed that when Don Brash launched his hostile takeover bid for ACT, he made it clear that Hide had to go. That now looks like a bad mistake. ACT has lost one of its most effective performers and Brash’s own political career is probably beyond resuscitation. History will record that while the former Reserve Bank governor's principles were unimpeachable, his political judgment was too often woefully astray. ACT is now represented in Parliament – nominally, anyway – by a man with no history in the party and no record of commitment to its philosophy. John Banks has some admirable personal qualities, but he presents the absurd image of a man wearing an ill-fitting suit tailored for someone else.
But back to National. Will the Key government show more daring in its second term than it did in the first? It has the excuse that the global economic crisis calls for bold action, but it could just as easily argue – and probably will – that a period of international uncertainty is no time for making radical changes that might create anxiety. And of course it won’t have an eager-beaver ACT caucus prodding it to take bolder steps to arrest our relative economic decline. So while we can expect modest reforms in such areas as welfare, youth wages, accident compensation, partial privatisation of state assets and the Resource Management Act, no one’s bracing themselves for tough action to curb the state spending binge that began under the Helen Clark government and has continued largely unabated under National. Stability is likely to remain National’s soothing mantra. The horses mustn’t be frightened.
Friday, November 25, 2011
Reflections on a carefully stage-managed campaign
(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, November 23.)
Older readers of this column will recall a time when election campaigns were momentous events – part politics, part entertainment spectacle and part sporting contest.
Those were the days when party leaders such as Norm Kirk and Rob Muldoon attracted packed halls on barnstorming tours and local candidates were energetically heckled at street corner meetings.
Membership of political parties was much greater then (according to one estimate I’ve seen, 10 times greater) and the electorate was less jaded and cynical. Besides, there weren’t so many distractions competing for people’s attention.
There’s been precious little of that sense of drama and excitement, still less enthusiastic public participation, in the campaign that is now in its last days.
Election campaigns these days are carefully stage-managed affairs conducted largely through the media, notably television. The only big public event I’m aware of in this campaign was the leaders’ debate sponsored by the Christchurch Press – the one made famous by National leader John Key’s repeated taunts to Labour leader Phil Goff to “show me the money”.
Otherwise it’s all about sound bites and photo opportunities, principally with the 6pm news in mind. Everything is obsessively controlled by party strategists and PR advisers to minimise the risk of something going wrong.
Political reporters get very little advance warning of where the party leaders will be and are left scrambling in their wake, hoping for an unguarded remark, an unexpected drama – such as Mr Key being confronted by an ACT member unhappy that his party was getting the rough end of the stick over campaign arrangements in marginal seats – or a scrap of new information.
This campaign has lacked defining ideological issues. It has largely been about debt and borrowing figures – National’s versus Labour’s – and about who offers the best prospect of stability and progress in an extremely uncertain world.
Those figures are probably pointless, because they are of such magnitude that voters’ eyes glaze over. In any case, what credence can we attach to forward fiscal projections when the international environment is so unpredictable? Even at the best of times, forecasts are dodgy.
As the campaign has progressed, Labour has latched on to National’s proposed partial state asset selloff as the crucial point of difference between the two main parties. Obviously Labour’s polling has indicated this is the issue on which National is most vulnerable.
There’s an acute irony here, since the public suspicion of asset sales that Mr Goff hopes to exploit can be traced directly back to the actions of a former Labour government in which he was a high-profile minister. That’s politics for you.
Given the relentless focus on the two men vying for the prime ministership, the campaign has also been about leadership.
Neither man has turned in an entirely convincing performance. Mr Key came perilously close to seeing his campaign derailed over the symbolic cup of tea with John Banks (another exquisite irony, since the stage-managed meeting at the Café Urban was supposed to shore up their parties’ positions, not undermine them).
My view is that Mr Key and Mr Banks were too clever, too cocky, for their own good. That the stunt rebounded on them was poetic justice.
Polls indicate that National was correct to gamble that public dislike of the media would outweigh any concern about Mr Key’s supposedly indiscreet comments or the more general issue of electoral jiggery-pokery in Epsom. Yet he may still rue the meeting, since it had the undesired effect of breathing life into Winston Peters’ campaign.
Arguably the worst possible outcome of this election is that the former MP for Tauranga, a man who has exhausted his credibility several times over, should end up holding the balance of power.
As for Mr Goff, he has given the impression of sleepwalking through much of the campaign. He speaks in a whiny tone of voice that lacks fire or conviction. A capable senior minister in the Clark government, he appears to have risen above his level of competence. If he loses, as seems inevitable, it’s impossible to envisage him surviving as party leader.
And what of the other parties? The Greens have run a good campaign and been rewarded in the polls with their highest ratings yet.
Doubtless they have benefited from events such as the Pike River disaster and the Rena grounding, which have raised public consciousness about environmental fragility. But the Greens have also gone to some lengths to present themselves as a party with credible economic policies, presumably with a view to making themselves acceptable as a coalition partner for National should they find themselves in that position.
While that would stick in the craw of diehard Green supporters, it can’t be ruled out, especially when the Greens have been treated with such casual disregard in the past by their preferred partners, Labour.
And the Maori Party? People tend to give it the benefit of the doubt because Pita Sharples seems a likeable bloke, and even Tariana Turia is a lot less strident than she used to be. But there can be little doubt, after the past few days, about who the Maori Party represents, and what its agenda is.
It is the party of corporate Maoridom and its main purpose is to achieve privileged treatment for the Treaty-enriched tribes that it acts for. This couldn’t have been made clearer than when Dr Sharples said the Maori Party opposed partial asset sales, but would go along with them if the government gave iwi preferential purchasing rights. What’s “each-way bet” in te reo?
This might play well to the Maori corporate elite, but it can only have damaged the party’s credibility among the electorate at large. Perhaps the best that can be said about Dr Sharples in the present circumstances is that at least he’s honest.
Older readers of this column will recall a time when election campaigns were momentous events – part politics, part entertainment spectacle and part sporting contest.
Those were the days when party leaders such as Norm Kirk and Rob Muldoon attracted packed halls on barnstorming tours and local candidates were energetically heckled at street corner meetings.
Membership of political parties was much greater then (according to one estimate I’ve seen, 10 times greater) and the electorate was less jaded and cynical. Besides, there weren’t so many distractions competing for people’s attention.
There’s been precious little of that sense of drama and excitement, still less enthusiastic public participation, in the campaign that is now in its last days.
Election campaigns these days are carefully stage-managed affairs conducted largely through the media, notably television. The only big public event I’m aware of in this campaign was the leaders’ debate sponsored by the Christchurch Press – the one made famous by National leader John Key’s repeated taunts to Labour leader Phil Goff to “show me the money”.
Otherwise it’s all about sound bites and photo opportunities, principally with the 6pm news in mind. Everything is obsessively controlled by party strategists and PR advisers to minimise the risk of something going wrong.
Political reporters get very little advance warning of where the party leaders will be and are left scrambling in their wake, hoping for an unguarded remark, an unexpected drama – such as Mr Key being confronted by an ACT member unhappy that his party was getting the rough end of the stick over campaign arrangements in marginal seats – or a scrap of new information.
This campaign has lacked defining ideological issues. It has largely been about debt and borrowing figures – National’s versus Labour’s – and about who offers the best prospect of stability and progress in an extremely uncertain world.
Those figures are probably pointless, because they are of such magnitude that voters’ eyes glaze over. In any case, what credence can we attach to forward fiscal projections when the international environment is so unpredictable? Even at the best of times, forecasts are dodgy.
As the campaign has progressed, Labour has latched on to National’s proposed partial state asset selloff as the crucial point of difference between the two main parties. Obviously Labour’s polling has indicated this is the issue on which National is most vulnerable.
There’s an acute irony here, since the public suspicion of asset sales that Mr Goff hopes to exploit can be traced directly back to the actions of a former Labour government in which he was a high-profile minister. That’s politics for you.
Given the relentless focus on the two men vying for the prime ministership, the campaign has also been about leadership.
Neither man has turned in an entirely convincing performance. Mr Key came perilously close to seeing his campaign derailed over the symbolic cup of tea with John Banks (another exquisite irony, since the stage-managed meeting at the Café Urban was supposed to shore up their parties’ positions, not undermine them).
My view is that Mr Key and Mr Banks were too clever, too cocky, for their own good. That the stunt rebounded on them was poetic justice.
Polls indicate that National was correct to gamble that public dislike of the media would outweigh any concern about Mr Key’s supposedly indiscreet comments or the more general issue of electoral jiggery-pokery in Epsom. Yet he may still rue the meeting, since it had the undesired effect of breathing life into Winston Peters’ campaign.
Arguably the worst possible outcome of this election is that the former MP for Tauranga, a man who has exhausted his credibility several times over, should end up holding the balance of power.
As for Mr Goff, he has given the impression of sleepwalking through much of the campaign. He speaks in a whiny tone of voice that lacks fire or conviction. A capable senior minister in the Clark government, he appears to have risen above his level of competence. If he loses, as seems inevitable, it’s impossible to envisage him surviving as party leader.
And what of the other parties? The Greens have run a good campaign and been rewarded in the polls with their highest ratings yet.
Doubtless they have benefited from events such as the Pike River disaster and the Rena grounding, which have raised public consciousness about environmental fragility. But the Greens have also gone to some lengths to present themselves as a party with credible economic policies, presumably with a view to making themselves acceptable as a coalition partner for National should they find themselves in that position.
While that would stick in the craw of diehard Green supporters, it can’t be ruled out, especially when the Greens have been treated with such casual disregard in the past by their preferred partners, Labour.
And the Maori Party? People tend to give it the benefit of the doubt because Pita Sharples seems a likeable bloke, and even Tariana Turia is a lot less strident than she used to be. But there can be little doubt, after the past few days, about who the Maori Party represents, and what its agenda is.
It is the party of corporate Maoridom and its main purpose is to achieve privileged treatment for the Treaty-enriched tribes that it acts for. This couldn’t have been made clearer than when Dr Sharples said the Maori Party opposed partial asset sales, but would go along with them if the government gave iwi preferential purchasing rights. What’s “each-way bet” in te reo?
This might play well to the Maori corporate elite, but it can only have damaged the party’s credibility among the electorate at large. Perhaps the best that can be said about Dr Sharples in the present circumstances is that at least he’s honest.
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
What's going on at TV3?
In a post on this blog site yesterday I mentioned my reluctance to accuse media organisations of political bias. I have seen those allegations hurled about far too often and far too loosely, invariably by politically aligned people frustrated that their side wasn’t the only one getting newspaper space or air time. But in the past couple of weeks I have begun to wonder seriously whether TV3 is running some sort of political agenda.
My suspicions were aroused by political coverage that in recent weeks has too often seemed slanted to discredit National. An example was Patrick Gower’s report last week about a supposedly hush-hush meeting between John Key and the head of the international oil exploration firm Anadarko. As only he can, Gower reported this in such a way as to suggest that there was something underhand going on. (“TV3 can reveal that Prime Minister John Key made time in his diary this week for a secretive meeting with the boss of an oil company that wants to undertake deep sea drilling off New Zealand’s coast.”) Never mind that prime ministers probably have meetings with international businessmen all the time without necessarily alerting the media. If there was something dodgy going on, it certainly wasn’t substantiated by the TV3 report. But never mind: Gower nonetheless raised dark connections with the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster in 2010 (Anadarko had a 25 percent share in the Deepwater Horizon rig) and generously gave Greens co-leader Metiria Turei an opportunity to link Key with “catastrophic oil spills”. In other words, the story was spun to put the worst possible complexion on what may have been an entirely innocent and legitimate meeting.
This technique appears to be something of a Gower specialty. On October 26 he reported: “3 News has learned that John Key has had a private meeting with a controversial right-wing British billionaire, Lord Michael Ashcroft.” Recognise the style? The loaded phrases “3 News has learned” and “TV3 can reveal” immediately create the impression that something sneaky is being covered up.
Gower went on to say that Ashcroft was “best known for pumping his time – and millions – into the British Conservative Party and right-wing politics.” Ah, so he’s a shadowy political manipulator, then. But hang on: Ashcroft is a former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party – hardly a secret society – and sits in the House of Lords as a life peer. Nothing overtly sinister there. He’s also a philanthropist who founded Crimestoppers, a crimefighting organisation now established in New Zealand, and he put up the reward money for the return of war medals stolen from the Waiouru army museum. All of these seem perfectly valid reasons why he and Key should get together while Ashcroft was in New Zealand for the Rugby World Cup. But Gower seemed more interested in the fact that the left-wing Guardian newspaper had reported a controversy over Ashcroft’s tax status – a shocking blot on his character that he shares with innumerable British rock stars.
Gower’s report concluded: “Mr Key is usually quite open when it comes to his meetings with the rich and famous. His critics will argue he kept this one on the quiet because of Lord Ashcroft’s controversial baggage.” So there we are, then: the two men were quite clearly up to no good. This style of reportage, where two and two are added together to make 22, relies on innuendo and loaded phraseology and is devoid of integrity.
Then there’s Duncan Garner. When Labour recently announced its welfare policy for beneficiary families, Garner found a South Auckland mother on the DPB with six children whose desperate plight was clearly meant to impress upon us the urgent need for more spending on benefits. They were living in a four-bedroomed state house and getting by on $560 a week which, under a Labour government, would increase by $60 – enough, Garner informed us, to fill their fridge and freezer.
The oldest of these six kids would have been about seven and the youngest were toddlers. I waited for Garner to ask a few pertinent questions such as who the fathers were, where they were, why they didn’t provide any support and why she continued to have children knowing the taxpayer would have to pick up the tab. But of course these questions weren’t asked; they never are. Instead we heard Garner ask a leading question about what she would like to see as a result of this election, to which her reply – hardly surprisingly – was “more money for beneficiaries”. We then cut to Phil Goff talking about Labour’s empathy with the downtrodden before ending with Garner’s line that “help is on the way, but Labour has to win the election first”. Take from that what you will. Only a brief reference was made to the estimated cost of Labour’s desperate bid to win more votes by promising to expand the welfare state.
There was more in a similar vein on 3 News last night. In a review of the day’s campaigning, Garner praised Goff’s performance in the leaders’ debate the previous night and said the Labour leader’s message on asset sales and the minimum wage went down well on the campaign trail in South Auckland (well, of course it would). National, on the other hand, was continuing its “scare tactics” over Winston Peters. Then, just in case we hadn’t got the message, Garner referred again to National’s “scaremongering”. He wrapped up his summary of the day by referring to National minister Steven Joyce’s latest cost estimate of Labour’s election promises ($25 billion), and quoted Greens leader Russel Norman as saying that Joyce should consider a career with the “bankrupted and discredited Lehman Brothers”. The way this was reported implied that Garner endorsed Norman’s cheap shot, or at the very least considered it the most newsworthy statement of the day. A balanced assessment on a national television network just three days out from the election? What do you think?
Speaking of that TV3 leaders’ debate, some critics have suggested that John Campbell’s questions highlighted issues where National was on the defensive. Whether they did – and if so, whether it was deliberate – I couldn’t say; but I do think TV3 has now got into itself into such a position that even when it does something in complete innocence, people will be looking for signs of bias.
I should state here that I am not a supporter of Key or the National Party (I’m certainly right of centre, but I’ve voted for Labour far more often than for National), and I repeat that I’m not in the habit of alleging institutional editorial bias based on one or two examples. Now and again a report may lean one way or the other, but generally things balance out in the long run. What worries me about 3 News is that a persistent pattern seems to have emerged. And what finally convinced me that the channel has abandoned all semblance of political neutrality was its screening last night of a pseudo-documentary entitled Inside Child Poverty, written and presented by Bryan Bruce.
I say pseudo- documentary because it was an undisguised, overwrought piece of hand-wringing political polemic that made no pretence of objectivity or balance. To screen it at any time would have courted controversy, but to show it in prime time just three days before a general election couldn’t be construed as anything but a deliberate attempt to tilt the political playing field in Labour’s favour.
That couldn’t have been clearer than when the host – who clearly aspires to be New Zealand’s answer to the sanctimonious John Pilger – genuflected, metaphorically speaking, before the Michael Joseph Savage monument and reminded us of Labour’s proud historical commitment to feed, clothe and house the poor. Another overtly political moment occurred when Bruce asked rhetorically: “Who builds state houses? Labour. Who sells them? National.”
I waited at the end for the announcement that this had been a party political broadcast. It never came.
Inside Child Poverty was disgracefully selective in the way it approached its subject and nauseatingly pious in the way it attempted to manipulate viewers’ emotions. Bruce sought to demonstrate that the poor in New Zealand had been systematically beaten down by heartless right-wing politicians (cue shots of Ruth Richardson and Roger Douglas) and called for a revival of what he called our “socialist” traditions to ensure there is food on every poor family’s table.
Lindsay Mitchell (www.lindsaymitchell.blogspot.com) has demolished some of Bruce’s flawed arguments more effectively than I could. Suffice it to say that he couldn’t even get basic historical facts right – recalling, for example, that he had grown up in "a socialist country". I grew up in New Zealand at the same time as Bruce and it was never socialist; a welfare state, yes, but not socialist. But why bother with such nitpicking distinctions? “Socialist” has such an uplifting, righteous ring.
He took us to Sweden to show his vision of a Utopian society where well-scrubbed, state-subsidised, middle-class Scandinavian fathers stay at home to look after their babies, and where doctors tut-tut when told of the incidence of scabies and school sores in New Zealand, but he ignored the huge cultural differences that make comparisons pointless (such as the fact that Sweden has no Pacific Island and Maori populations, the two groups that are grossly over-represented in New Zealand welfare statistics).
He didn’t bother to consider the capacity of the fragile New Zealand economy to fund the potentially limitless demands of the enlarged welfare state he seeks. He didn’t consider the probability that providing more generous welfare assistance will simply encourage more people to become dependent on it (the so-called moral hazard). He talked loftily about morality but didn’t consider the morality of having large families sired by multiple fathers and then expecting other people, working people with mortgages to pay and their own children to raise, to pick up the tab. All too inconvenient.
Instead he marshalled every half-baked assertion and catchy bumper-sticker slogan he could think of (example: “The we society became a me society”) to make his point, and he was careful to interview only people who agreed with him. (It was no surprise to see Gareth Morgan, who has positioned himself as New Zealand’s leading capitalist-with-a-conscience, pop up.) But here’s the thing: a film maker could just as easily produce a documentary proving the exact reverse of Bruce’s thesis – namely, that the welfare state and the culture of dependency, entitlement and helplessness it encourages are the cause of, rather than the solution to, the poverty and deprivation Bruce professes to despise. Trouble is, NZ On Air would never fund it.
This was the first Bryan Bruce documentary I had watched and I won’t be bothering with him again. I’m tired of being lectured by smug, self-righteous baby boomers (a generation of which I, unfortunately, am one, and which has largely created the unholy mess we’re now in).
But the bigger issue is why TV3 chose to show this particular programme, with its very explicit political message, in this particular week. I’m not entirely averse to the screening of ideologically one-eyed, intellectually dishonest and emotionally manipulative crap, but I think TV3 needs to explain the timing. Perhaps someone will complain to the Electoral Commission.
My suspicions were aroused by political coverage that in recent weeks has too often seemed slanted to discredit National. An example was Patrick Gower’s report last week about a supposedly hush-hush meeting between John Key and the head of the international oil exploration firm Anadarko. As only he can, Gower reported this in such a way as to suggest that there was something underhand going on. (“TV3 can reveal that Prime Minister John Key made time in his diary this week for a secretive meeting with the boss of an oil company that wants to undertake deep sea drilling off New Zealand’s coast.”) Never mind that prime ministers probably have meetings with international businessmen all the time without necessarily alerting the media. If there was something dodgy going on, it certainly wasn’t substantiated by the TV3 report. But never mind: Gower nonetheless raised dark connections with the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster in 2010 (Anadarko had a 25 percent share in the Deepwater Horizon rig) and generously gave Greens co-leader Metiria Turei an opportunity to link Key with “catastrophic oil spills”. In other words, the story was spun to put the worst possible complexion on what may have been an entirely innocent and legitimate meeting.
This technique appears to be something of a Gower specialty. On October 26 he reported: “3 News has learned that John Key has had a private meeting with a controversial right-wing British billionaire, Lord Michael Ashcroft.” Recognise the style? The loaded phrases “3 News has learned” and “TV3 can reveal” immediately create the impression that something sneaky is being covered up.
Gower went on to say that Ashcroft was “best known for pumping his time – and millions – into the British Conservative Party and right-wing politics.” Ah, so he’s a shadowy political manipulator, then. But hang on: Ashcroft is a former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party – hardly a secret society – and sits in the House of Lords as a life peer. Nothing overtly sinister there. He’s also a philanthropist who founded Crimestoppers, a crimefighting organisation now established in New Zealand, and he put up the reward money for the return of war medals stolen from the Waiouru army museum. All of these seem perfectly valid reasons why he and Key should get together while Ashcroft was in New Zealand for the Rugby World Cup. But Gower seemed more interested in the fact that the left-wing Guardian newspaper had reported a controversy over Ashcroft’s tax status – a shocking blot on his character that he shares with innumerable British rock stars.
Gower’s report concluded: “Mr Key is usually quite open when it comes to his meetings with the rich and famous. His critics will argue he kept this one on the quiet because of Lord Ashcroft’s controversial baggage.” So there we are, then: the two men were quite clearly up to no good. This style of reportage, where two and two are added together to make 22, relies on innuendo and loaded phraseology and is devoid of integrity.
Then there’s Duncan Garner. When Labour recently announced its welfare policy for beneficiary families, Garner found a South Auckland mother on the DPB with six children whose desperate plight was clearly meant to impress upon us the urgent need for more spending on benefits. They were living in a four-bedroomed state house and getting by on $560 a week which, under a Labour government, would increase by $60 – enough, Garner informed us, to fill their fridge and freezer.
The oldest of these six kids would have been about seven and the youngest were toddlers. I waited for Garner to ask a few pertinent questions such as who the fathers were, where they were, why they didn’t provide any support and why she continued to have children knowing the taxpayer would have to pick up the tab. But of course these questions weren’t asked; they never are. Instead we heard Garner ask a leading question about what she would like to see as a result of this election, to which her reply – hardly surprisingly – was “more money for beneficiaries”. We then cut to Phil Goff talking about Labour’s empathy with the downtrodden before ending with Garner’s line that “help is on the way, but Labour has to win the election first”. Take from that what you will. Only a brief reference was made to the estimated cost of Labour’s desperate bid to win more votes by promising to expand the welfare state.
There was more in a similar vein on 3 News last night. In a review of the day’s campaigning, Garner praised Goff’s performance in the leaders’ debate the previous night and said the Labour leader’s message on asset sales and the minimum wage went down well on the campaign trail in South Auckland (well, of course it would). National, on the other hand, was continuing its “scare tactics” over Winston Peters. Then, just in case we hadn’t got the message, Garner referred again to National’s “scaremongering”. He wrapped up his summary of the day by referring to National minister Steven Joyce’s latest cost estimate of Labour’s election promises ($25 billion), and quoted Greens leader Russel Norman as saying that Joyce should consider a career with the “bankrupted and discredited Lehman Brothers”. The way this was reported implied that Garner endorsed Norman’s cheap shot, or at the very least considered it the most newsworthy statement of the day. A balanced assessment on a national television network just three days out from the election? What do you think?
Speaking of that TV3 leaders’ debate, some critics have suggested that John Campbell’s questions highlighted issues where National was on the defensive. Whether they did – and if so, whether it was deliberate – I couldn’t say; but I do think TV3 has now got into itself into such a position that even when it does something in complete innocence, people will be looking for signs of bias.
I should state here that I am not a supporter of Key or the National Party (I’m certainly right of centre, but I’ve voted for Labour far more often than for National), and I repeat that I’m not in the habit of alleging institutional editorial bias based on one or two examples. Now and again a report may lean one way or the other, but generally things balance out in the long run. What worries me about 3 News is that a persistent pattern seems to have emerged. And what finally convinced me that the channel has abandoned all semblance of political neutrality was its screening last night of a pseudo-documentary entitled Inside Child Poverty, written and presented by Bryan Bruce.
I say pseudo- documentary because it was an undisguised, overwrought piece of hand-wringing political polemic that made no pretence of objectivity or balance. To screen it at any time would have courted controversy, but to show it in prime time just three days before a general election couldn’t be construed as anything but a deliberate attempt to tilt the political playing field in Labour’s favour.
That couldn’t have been clearer than when the host – who clearly aspires to be New Zealand’s answer to the sanctimonious John Pilger – genuflected, metaphorically speaking, before the Michael Joseph Savage monument and reminded us of Labour’s proud historical commitment to feed, clothe and house the poor. Another overtly political moment occurred when Bruce asked rhetorically: “Who builds state houses? Labour. Who sells them? National.”
I waited at the end for the announcement that this had been a party political broadcast. It never came.
Inside Child Poverty was disgracefully selective in the way it approached its subject and nauseatingly pious in the way it attempted to manipulate viewers’ emotions. Bruce sought to demonstrate that the poor in New Zealand had been systematically beaten down by heartless right-wing politicians (cue shots of Ruth Richardson and Roger Douglas) and called for a revival of what he called our “socialist” traditions to ensure there is food on every poor family’s table.
Lindsay Mitchell (www.lindsaymitchell.blogspot.com) has demolished some of Bruce’s flawed arguments more effectively than I could. Suffice it to say that he couldn’t even get basic historical facts right – recalling, for example, that he had grown up in "a socialist country". I grew up in New Zealand at the same time as Bruce and it was never socialist; a welfare state, yes, but not socialist. But why bother with such nitpicking distinctions? “Socialist” has such an uplifting, righteous ring.
He took us to Sweden to show his vision of a Utopian society where well-scrubbed, state-subsidised, middle-class Scandinavian fathers stay at home to look after their babies, and where doctors tut-tut when told of the incidence of scabies and school sores in New Zealand, but he ignored the huge cultural differences that make comparisons pointless (such as the fact that Sweden has no Pacific Island and Maori populations, the two groups that are grossly over-represented in New Zealand welfare statistics).
He didn’t bother to consider the capacity of the fragile New Zealand economy to fund the potentially limitless demands of the enlarged welfare state he seeks. He didn’t consider the probability that providing more generous welfare assistance will simply encourage more people to become dependent on it (the so-called moral hazard). He talked loftily about morality but didn’t consider the morality of having large families sired by multiple fathers and then expecting other people, working people with mortgages to pay and their own children to raise, to pick up the tab. All too inconvenient.
Instead he marshalled every half-baked assertion and catchy bumper-sticker slogan he could think of (example: “The we society became a me society”) to make his point, and he was careful to interview only people who agreed with him. (It was no surprise to see Gareth Morgan, who has positioned himself as New Zealand’s leading capitalist-with-a-conscience, pop up.) But here’s the thing: a film maker could just as easily produce a documentary proving the exact reverse of Bruce’s thesis – namely, that the welfare state and the culture of dependency, entitlement and helplessness it encourages are the cause of, rather than the solution to, the poverty and deprivation Bruce professes to despise. Trouble is, NZ On Air would never fund it.
This was the first Bryan Bruce documentary I had watched and I won’t be bothering with him again. I’m tired of being lectured by smug, self-righteous baby boomers (a generation of which I, unfortunately, am one, and which has largely created the unholy mess we’re now in).
But the bigger issue is why TV3 chose to show this particular programme, with its very explicit political message, in this particular week. I’m not entirely averse to the screening of ideologically one-eyed, intellectually dishonest and emotionally manipulative crap, but I think TV3 needs to explain the timing. Perhaps someone will complain to the Electoral Commission.
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Scalp hunting: the new style of political journalism
(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, November 22.)
THE ELECTION campaign has brought to the fore a new style of television journalism.
It is aggressive, confrontational, highly opinionated and designed to provoke a reaction. Its chief practitioners are Patrick Gower and Duncan Garner of 3 News.
Both are astute political journalists who clearly see their role as much more than simply reporting. When Garner announces “This issue isn’t going away”, under the guise of making an objective statement about the political controversy du jour (such as the Café Urban furore), he does so with the certainty of a man who will make damned sure it doesn’t go away.
But it’s Gower who has obviously been designated TV3’s resident attack dog, with a brief to get in politicians’ faces.
3 News recently showed Act leader Don Brash saying to Gower outside Wellington’s Amora Hotel: “You are a deceitful bastard, quite frankly, and I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”
To goad the almost painfully polite Brash into responding so vehemently must have taken some doing, but I bet Gower went home that night feeling pleased with his day’s work. It’s just a shame that 3 News didn’t explain the background to the exchange so that viewers could decide whether Brash’s accusation was justified.
Former Act MP David Garrett subsequently wrote on Kiwiblog: “Gower is the prick who tried to goad me into dropping my bag and dropping him at Wellington Airport a year ago.” Garrett, who was up to his eyeballs in political strife at the time, accused the journalist of blocking his path at the security gate until a security man pulled him out of the way.
I watched that news item and agree that Gower seemed intent on provoking the volatile MP into lashing out. But as Garrett said, that would have played into his hands.
Tripping politicians up, catching them out, is an honourable journalistic tradition. Gower had the usually cocky John Banks on the ropes last week over what was said over tea at the Café Urban, and even John Key looked rattled in the face of Garner’s questioning. Neither journalist lacks guts.
Yet there’s something disconcerting about Gower’s approach. You get the feeling that its purpose is to claim political scalps for the sheer sport of it.
He is a journalistic picker of scabs, a scavenger who swoops on the wounded. He scans the political landscape looking for any story that, with judicious editing and sneering voice-over, can be manipulated for maximum effect.
The Gower approach illustrates two trends in modern political journalism. One is to strive at all costs for what former British prime minister Tony Blair called “impact” – something to excite the public blood lust.
The other is to put the journalist at the centre of the story. The modern political reporter is no longer content to be a passive observer, but wants to be a player – a maker and breaker of careers.
* * *
HIGH COURT judge Forrie Miller acted sensibly and compassionately in discharging without conviction the mother of a toddler who drowned in the family swimming pool while she was distracted inside the house.
Mary-Anne Illston will serve a life sentence anyway, metaphorically speaking. She hardly needed a conviction to realise the terrible consequences of not supervising her daughter more closely.
But the case raises an important question about the need for consistency in the way police deal with such matters.
Illston was charged with manslaughter. Similarly, last April, Ashish Macwan was charged with careless driving causing death after his three-year-old son Aarush drowned in Lake Dunstan. The family van, with the boy inside, rolled into the lake after Macwan inadvertently left the handbrake off. In that case too, an enlightened judge discharged the bereaved parent without conviction.
Most people would say that in both instances, the parent’s grief was punishment enough. Yet police followed the book.
It will be interesting to see, then, whether they take the same uncompromising approach in the case of two-year-old Sukhraj Singh, who recently drowned in the Taruheru River at Gisborne. News reports said Sukhraj and his cousin, who also nearly drowned, wandered off from Sukhraj’s home and it was 10 or 15 minutes before anyone noticed they were missing.
The family blamed Gisborne District Council for not fencing the river. But the primary cause of this terrible accident, if news reports are accurate, was a failure of parental supervision.
Only the stony-hearted could not feel sorry for the Singh family. But as Justice Miller pointed out, there have been 85 pre-school and infant deaths in the past decade, most of them the result of adult complacency. Water Safety New Zealand accepts that prosecuting parents can compound their grief, but says it’s an effective way of drawing attention to the problem of child drownings.
What’s important, surely, is that the police are seen to be even-handed. The law should not be a lottery.
* * *
AT AN ELECTION meeting last week, Wairarapa MP John Hayes mentioned that of 25 young men who went on a forestry work course, 22 subsequently failed a drug test.
This is an aspect of the drug problem that the pro-dope lobby doesn’t mention. Present laws may not be very effective, but at least they serve as some sort of curb on usage. Legalise cannabis, and even more young men may be condemned to lives of uselessness.
THE ELECTION campaign has brought to the fore a new style of television journalism.
It is aggressive, confrontational, highly opinionated and designed to provoke a reaction. Its chief practitioners are Patrick Gower and Duncan Garner of 3 News.
Both are astute political journalists who clearly see their role as much more than simply reporting. When Garner announces “This issue isn’t going away”, under the guise of making an objective statement about the political controversy du jour (such as the Café Urban furore), he does so with the certainty of a man who will make damned sure it doesn’t go away.
But it’s Gower who has obviously been designated TV3’s resident attack dog, with a brief to get in politicians’ faces.
3 News recently showed Act leader Don Brash saying to Gower outside Wellington’s Amora Hotel: “You are a deceitful bastard, quite frankly, and I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”
To goad the almost painfully polite Brash into responding so vehemently must have taken some doing, but I bet Gower went home that night feeling pleased with his day’s work. It’s just a shame that 3 News didn’t explain the background to the exchange so that viewers could decide whether Brash’s accusation was justified.
Former Act MP David Garrett subsequently wrote on Kiwiblog: “Gower is the prick who tried to goad me into dropping my bag and dropping him at Wellington Airport a year ago.” Garrett, who was up to his eyeballs in political strife at the time, accused the journalist of blocking his path at the security gate until a security man pulled him out of the way.
I watched that news item and agree that Gower seemed intent on provoking the volatile MP into lashing out. But as Garrett said, that would have played into his hands.
Tripping politicians up, catching them out, is an honourable journalistic tradition. Gower had the usually cocky John Banks on the ropes last week over what was said over tea at the Café Urban, and even John Key looked rattled in the face of Garner’s questioning. Neither journalist lacks guts.
Yet there’s something disconcerting about Gower’s approach. You get the feeling that its purpose is to claim political scalps for the sheer sport of it.
He is a journalistic picker of scabs, a scavenger who swoops on the wounded. He scans the political landscape looking for any story that, with judicious editing and sneering voice-over, can be manipulated for maximum effect.
The Gower approach illustrates two trends in modern political journalism. One is to strive at all costs for what former British prime minister Tony Blair called “impact” – something to excite the public blood lust.
The other is to put the journalist at the centre of the story. The modern political reporter is no longer content to be a passive observer, but wants to be a player – a maker and breaker of careers.
* * *
HIGH COURT judge Forrie Miller acted sensibly and compassionately in discharging without conviction the mother of a toddler who drowned in the family swimming pool while she was distracted inside the house.
Mary-Anne Illston will serve a life sentence anyway, metaphorically speaking. She hardly needed a conviction to realise the terrible consequences of not supervising her daughter more closely.
But the case raises an important question about the need for consistency in the way police deal with such matters.
Illston was charged with manslaughter. Similarly, last April, Ashish Macwan was charged with careless driving causing death after his three-year-old son Aarush drowned in Lake Dunstan. The family van, with the boy inside, rolled into the lake after Macwan inadvertently left the handbrake off. In that case too, an enlightened judge discharged the bereaved parent without conviction.
Most people would say that in both instances, the parent’s grief was punishment enough. Yet police followed the book.
It will be interesting to see, then, whether they take the same uncompromising approach in the case of two-year-old Sukhraj Singh, who recently drowned in the Taruheru River at Gisborne. News reports said Sukhraj and his cousin, who also nearly drowned, wandered off from Sukhraj’s home and it was 10 or 15 minutes before anyone noticed they were missing.
The family blamed Gisborne District Council for not fencing the river. But the primary cause of this terrible accident, if news reports are accurate, was a failure of parental supervision.
Only the stony-hearted could not feel sorry for the Singh family. But as Justice Miller pointed out, there have been 85 pre-school and infant deaths in the past decade, most of them the result of adult complacency. Water Safety New Zealand accepts that prosecuting parents can compound their grief, but says it’s an effective way of drawing attention to the problem of child drownings.
What’s important, surely, is that the police are seen to be even-handed. The law should not be a lottery.
* * *
AT AN ELECTION meeting last week, Wairarapa MP John Hayes mentioned that of 25 young men who went on a forestry work course, 22 subsequently failed a drug test.
This is an aspect of the drug problem that the pro-dope lobby doesn’t mention. Present laws may not be very effective, but at least they serve as some sort of curb on usage. Legalise cannabis, and even more young men may be condemned to lives of uselessness.
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