A coalition of convenience

(First published in The Dominion Post, November 3.

“We won, you lost – eat that!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The conspiracy of silence that protected Harvey Weinstein

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, November 1).

Hardly a day passes without a fresh allegation against the serial Hollywood sex predator Harvey Weinstein.

As I write this, the latest claims have come from Annabella Sciorra, who starred in The Sopranos (she played a mentally unstable woman who had a turbulent affair with Tony Soprano) and Daryl Hannah, best remembered as the mermaid in the 1984 Disney movie Splash.

Sciorra told the New Yorker magazine this week that Weinstein violently raped her in the early 1990s, while Hannah alleged that he tried to force his way into her hotel room.

Weinstein was carrying on a Hollywood tradition that dates at least as far back as Jack Warner, one of the founders of Warner Brothers, who was notorious for auditioning ambitious starlets on the “casting couch” in his office.

Then, as now, the Hollywood establishment seems to have been complicit in the practice. Everyone must have known it was going on, but chose to ignore it because the men involved had the power to make or break careers.

That’s why I can’t help feeling cynical about the sudden stream of accusations against Weinstein.

It’s not that I doubt his accusers. The weight of evidence against him is overwhelming. But it seems obvious that Hollywood protected him for decades.

As far back as 1998, Gwyneth Paltrow alluded to Weinstein’s reputation in a television interview. There were even jocular references to it in the comedy series 30 Rock in 2012 and at the Oscars ceremony the following year.

So people knew what he was doing, but turned a blind eye. Presumably they didn't want, or didn't dare, to make an enemy of him. 

All that changed when, several weeks ago, the New Yorker and the New York Times reported dozens of claims against Weinstein, ranging from sexual harassment to outright rape.  That opened the floodgates, and since then there has been a constant stream of complainants emerging into the light with accusations dating back to the 1980s. 

Suddenly, everyone in Hollywood is trying to distance themselves from this man whose patronage was once craved. Weinstein has been fired by his own company and expelled from the pompously named Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. His wife has left him, his brother called him sick and depraved and his lawyer, a woman, announced she could no longer work for him.

Of course we're expected to believe none of them had a clue about what he got up to.

High-profile actors and politicians have lined up to condemn him – including, ironically, Hillary Clinton, who huffed and puffed about sexist and misogynistic behaviour but delicately avoided any mention of her own husband’s record as a sexual predator. (Remember Paula Jones, anyone?)

Mrs Clinton, incidentally, had been happy to accept Weinstein’s campaign donations when she ran for president. Did she really know nothing of his reputation, or was the money more important?

Then there’s the creepy Woody Allen, who described Weinstein as a sad, sick man. Well, he should know about sad, sick men. This is the same Woody Allen whose own sexual history is, shall we say, less than exemplary.

Weinstein helped salvage Allen’s career after he was accused of abusing his own daughter (which he denied). They worked together on several movie projects. But Allen, while conceding he had heard “rumours” about Weinstein, claimed to know nothing about the “horror stories” that have now come to light.

Cue the Tui billboards. Can we now expect Roman Polanski to also express his outrage?

The growing scandal has seriously tarnished the liberal credentials of a few Hollywood heroes.  Matt Damon, who made several movies with Weinstein, initially denied knowing anything of his sexual proclivities but has since changed his tune, calling him a monster.

Damon’s friend Ben Affleck said he was sickened and angry by what had been revealed, but was then accused by the actress Rose McGowan, one of Weinstein’s victims, of having known about Weinstein for years - because McGowan herself told him.

Other actors – George Clooney, for example – say they had no idea what sort of man he was. So where were all these people when Weinstein was at it? Looking the other way, that’s where.

Wikipedia lists 70 women who have made claims against Weinstein. Not even the most powerful man in the movie industry can rape, molest or harass 70 women without other people knowing.

If it was widely known that Weinstein was a rapist and a molester, why did no one blow the whistle to protect other women who were likely to be targeted? And why did so many women continue to work with him?

Some even appeared on his arm, smiling for the cameras at glamorous Hollywood events. They put their careers first. It’s an ugly insight into the decadence of Hollywood, where debasement is something women seem to accept as the price to be paid for fame and success.

None of this exculpates Weinstein, who apparently regarded women as sexual playthings – due reward for his position at the pinnacle of the film industry.

But the mass outbreak of virtuous disgust is almost as repugnant as the ghastly and contemptible Weinstein himself. The entire rotten Hollywood establishment stands condemned for the conspiracy of silence that protected Weinstein for so long. 

Early pointers to the challenges Ardern will face

A few random thoughts on the election outcome:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The demeaning of democracy

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

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

We shall see. With Peters, who knows?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Open government? Forget it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A political bastard child

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

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

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

Licensing trusts: a great social experiment that mostly failed

(This is a slightly longer version of a story first published in The Dominion Post, October 13.)

It probably comes as a surprise to many people to learn there are still places in New Zealand where it’s not possible to buy wine or beer in a supermarket. Invercargill is one such place. West Auckland is another.

These are not “dry” areas, where local voters have chosen to remain liquor-free. New Zealand lost the last of those (two in Auckland, one in Wellington) in 1999.  

They are, however, a lingering hangover – although that may not be the most appropriate word – from an era when anti-liquor fervour caused legislators to seek a balance between total prohibition and an open-slather alcohol regime where the much-vilified booze barons, the rich men who controlled the liquor trade, would hold sway.

The solution, as prohibitionist sentiment gradually abated and areas that had previously been dry chose to go “wet”, was for voters to be given a choice: they could either allow ownership of liquor outlets by private enterprise, or they could opt for community control.

Under the community control model, voters would elect licensing trusts to run hotels, taverns and bottle stores. Each trust would enjoy a monopoly on liquor sales within its area and profits would be ploughed back into the community.

In a country that remained deeply suspicious of the privately owned liquor trade, the trust option seemed an ideal “third way”. People would have access to alcohol, but its sale would be controlled by elected local representatives who would ensure it was managed responsibly for the community’s benefit.

The first licensing trust was established in Invercargill in 1944, after 38 years as a “dry” city. The Invercargill trust still enjoys a monopoly on liquor sales in that city (other than in clubs and licensed restaurants) because apparently that’s what the community wants. 

Three other trusts – Mataura (also in Southland) and Portage and Waitakere (both in West Auckland) – have retained similar monopoly rights, which explains why mystified visitors to those areas can’t find wine or beer in local supermarkets.

But in all other areas where licensing trusts have survived, voters – often frustrated by lack of choice or disheartened by the trusts’ poor performance – have taken advantage of “competition polls” to strip them of their monopolies. Hence in places like Masterton, trusts are still active in the local liquor trade but must now compete with privately owned bars and liquor outlets, including supermarkets.

A government working party headed by Sir George Laking in the late 1980s recommended that trust monopoly powers, which were out of step with the general trend toward deregulation, should be abolished altogether. But parliament, which was often cautious to the point of timidity on liquor issues, decided that the public should have a choice – hence the competition polls, which gave voters a chance to register their dissatisfaction with trusts that failed to measure up.

The patchy history of the trusts is told in the recently published book A Great Social Experiment, by Bernard Teahan. It’s a story of social and political idealism that often collided disastrously with commercial realities.

Teahan sets the story against a backdrop of wowserism, the deeply ingrained suspicion of alcohol and its purveyors which brought New Zealand to the brink of country-wide prohibition in 1919.

Licensing trusts grew out of dissatisfaction with widespread drunkenness, primitive drinking conditions and distrust of powerful brewing interests. Rex Mason, the reformist Minister of Justice in the Labour government of the 1930s and 40s, threw his weight behind the idea and so did prime minister Peter Fraser, who saw trusts as a way of eliminating profit as the sole motivator of liquor sales. Profit was explicitly not intended to be the trusts’ primary goal.

Masterton followed Invercargill’s lead in 1947 and other trusts were established in quick succession. Between 1947 and 1975, voters in 57 areas backed the creation of trusts, although only 30 became operational. Nineteen are still functioning today.

Teahan records that brewery companies, which effectively controlled the hotel industry, opposed the trust concept every step of the way. The National Party showed little enthusiasm either, although up-and-coming National politician Jack Marshall, a devout Presbyterian who would eventually lead the party, supported trusts and thought they might force brewers to lift their game.

Local councils were often instrumental in getting trusts established. A key figure behind Auckland’s ill-fated Mt Albert trust – which never became operational and was eventually swallowed by the neighbouring Portage trust – was Frank Ryan, long-serving mayor of Mt Albert (and the father of actress and environmental activist Lucy Lawless).

Ironically, as trusts struggled to get established because of inadequate capital and the crippling cost of loan finance, many ended up depending on supportive arrangements with the big two brewery companies – in effect, sleeping with the enemy.

The last functioning trust, Flaxmere (Hastings), was established in 1975. By then the flaws in the trust model were becoming obvious. Even with a monopoly, many were unable to stay afloat.

The enthusiasm and good intentions of the elected boards that controlled trusts were all too rarely matched by the necessary business skills or funding.  Many trusts tested the patience of their communities by taking years to open their first outlets.

One, the Stokes Valley Licensing Trust in Lower Hutt, failed spectacularly after only a year because the Licensing Control Commission required it to provide hotel accommodation where there was no demand for it.

Others over-reached themselves of their own volition, incurring massive debt to build grandiose premises on the basis of wildly over-optimistic business projections. One example was the Orewa trust, north of Auckland, which destroyed a healthy balance sheet by investing heavily in a substantial restaurant where there was no market to support it.

In their desperation to prove themselves, a few trusts resorted to dodgy practices (such as borrowing money without approval) which attracted the attention of the Auditor-General.  Management was often sloppy: Wellington’s Johnsonville trust somehow lost $200,000 worth of stock for which no one was held accountable.

Poor service and sub-standard facilities are other factors cited by Teahan as harmful to the image of the trust movement. Civilised drinking conditions were central to the trust philosophy, yet Teahan describes the Otara trust’s pub in South Auckland as a “dark and dingy barn”, designed to maximise consumption.

Otara also had problems with violence and lawlessness, as did some other trusts. The Porirua trust’s first tavern was known locally as the Flying Jug because of the frequency with which brawls erupted. This was not what the architects of the trust movement had envisaged.

Even Teahan, a true believer in the trust model (he spent most of his career in trust management), acknowledges that trustees and their managers were often not up to the job. Communities grew tired of hearing promises of good things to come, only to be let down when trust-owned outlets closed or another dismal set of financial results was announced - always with a fresh batch of excuses.

By the 1980s, the great social experiment was in peril. A few of the longer-established trusts, having had decades in which to build up a solid base, were strongly embedded in their communities and trading profitably. But changing social expectations and a more liberal and sophisticated drinking environment placed demands on the newer trusts that they were hopelessly ill-equipped to meet.

Teahan says the trust model fell out of favour because “the market philosophy became the all-powerful belief”. But in fact most of the “demised” trusts, to use his own euphemistic terminology for those that failed, were undone by their inability to live up to their idealistic vision.  

Addressing a licensing trusts conference in 1990, former prime minister David Lange described trusts as a bizarre experiment and said they were an endangered species.

He was almost right. Four trusts in the Wellington area subsequently collapsed after years of governance so shambolic and muddle-headed that it became almost painful to watch. Even Teahan is scathing in his criticism of trusts that imploded because of egos, personal whims and political agendas.

The 1990s was also the decade in which competition polls – usually initiated by supermarket chains chafing at their inability to sell wine and beer – began turning the tide against trust monopolies.

Where areas voted to renounce their “dry” status but chose to reject the trust option, as in Auckland’s Grey Lynn and Wellington’s Tawa, Teahan acknowledges that the poor performance of trusts in neighbouring areas was a factor.

Yet the better-managed trusts survive, and a few weaker ones have been saved by being brought under the control of successful operators.

At least one has moved far beyond its original remit. What was originally the Masterton trust (which Teahan managed) is now Trust House, which operates licensed premises on behalf of several trusts and also has substantial investments in social housing, aged care and even supermarkets.

The Invercargill trust, the mother ship, is still flying and seems to enjoy solid support from its community. According to Teahan, the southern city is one place where supermarkets haven’t bothered to push for a competition poll because they don’t think they could win.

Teahan points out that successful trusts return millions of dollars to their communities: nearly $27 million nationwide in 2014.

This is the argument that trusts always fall back on, even when their performance has been dire. It’s what they emphasise whenever their monopolies have been under attack from supermarkets and other private interests.

But much of the money invested in community assets comes from gaming profits which, under law, private hotel and bar owners with gaming facilities must also return to the community.

Teahan retains an almost evangelistic faith in the trust concept despite its many failures. The irony is that his book, which is obviously intended to promote the virtues of trusts, also serves as a crushing indictment of the concept because it can’t avoid acknowledging the many ways in which it was flawed.

A Great Social Experiment: The Story of Licensing Trusts in New Zealand, by Bernard Teahan (Fraser Books, $39.50). 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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