We want our money back

It’s a shame the Consumer Guarantees Act doesn’t apply to politics. If it did, the country would be entitled to demand its money back. The governor-general could be petitioned to annul the election result and do it all again.

I say this because it’s becoming increasingly obvious that the new government was formed under false pretences. We were sold faulty goods, not fit for purpose.

This is not the fault of the Labour Party, although it was over-eager to do a deal with Winston Peters. Labour was conned, as were National and indeed the entire country. No one knew Peters was planning to sue key National Party figures, including Bill English, which meant the theatrical negotiations leading to the formation of the new government were a sham.

We can also blame a flawed system that allowed Peters, whose party wasn’t wanted by 93 percent of voters, to take control of the government formation process. Our constitutional arrangements generally serve us pretty well, but they let us down badly by not setting sensible rules for post-election negotiations.

Of course there’s little prospect of a fresh election, in the immediate future anyway (hold all bets in the longer term), but it’s a tantalising thought. I wouldn’t mind if it resulted in a Labour-Greens coalition, just as long as the process was fair, open and transparent.

The crucial thing is that Winston Peters should never again be allowed within a mile of Parliament. No government can have any credibility as long as Peters is part of it, and this one is ineradicably tainted by association with him. Labour and the country will have to endure three years of shame and humiliation unless someone pulls the pin.

Were the coalition talks skewed by Peters' secret utu plan?

Let me see whether I’ve got this right.

We learned yesterday that on the day before the September 23 general election, Winston Peters kick-started legal action against National cabinet ministers and officials over the leaking of his superannuation overpayment. He took this action without disclosing it to either the National or Labour parties.

Then, post-election, Peters entered into – indeed orchestrated – what were held out to be “good faith” negotiations with both parties on possible coalition arrangements.

Both parties believed they were in with a chance – in fact an equal chance – and Peters seemed happy to encourage this belief. It suited him to do so because that way, both Labour and National would be keen to do business with him.

But realistically, what chance was there of Peters going into coalition with National when he was simultaneously – apparently unbeknown to anyone but his lawyers – taking legal action against senior National ministers and officials? What sort of hopelessly dysfunctional government would it have been if the deputy prime minister (let’s assume his appointment to that role would have been one of the conditions of any NZ First deal with National, as it was with Labour) was suing the prime minister?

No, it’s inconceivable.

The obvious conclusion, then, is that Peters kept quiet so he could play the parties along, spinning out the negotiations and extracting maximum concessions, when he must have known all along that he would go with Labour. To put it another way, the negotiations appear to have been an elaborate charade.

If this was the case, National weren’t the only ones being played for suckers. Labour were deceived too. Ask yourself: what concessions did the Labour team make that they wouldn’t have considered had they known Peters intended to go with them regardless?

I’m not alone in thinking this. Veteran political editor Barry Soper writes: “Like all good gamblers, Peters kept a stony face, letting them [National] believe they were still in the game whereas in reality they'd been dealt out when the court papers were filed against them."

They were playing blind, says Soper, and so was Labour. “If they’d known of the court papers they might not have been so generous”.

Now Jacinda Ardern is left with little option but to play it all down by insisting it was just a “personal” matter between Peters and the people he’s going after. She says Peters gave her a “heads up”, although not until last week. All sorted, then; nothing to see here.

Of course Ardern has to maintain the line that this doesn’t affect the unity or stability of the coalition. But seriously, how can Labour trust Peters after this? They appear to have been shafted before they even had their feet under the cabinet table. At the very least, they were misled by omission.

On Morning Report today, political law expert Graeme Edgeler put a benign interpretation on Peters’ behaviour by suggesting he may have decided to proceed with legal action only after deciding to support Labour.

In other words Peters may have negotiated with National in genuine good faith, intending to shelve his legal action if they reached agreement. But if that were the case, why did his lawyers file papers in the Auckland High Court the day before the election? He would surely have stayed his hand while he waited to see how the post-election talks panned out.

I suppose some people might admire Peters’ mastery of the political dark arts (Soper seems to), but to me it just looks dishonest and deceitful. On the face of things, he has treated Labour and National with contempt, he has treated the electorate with contempt and he has treated democracy with contempt. 

And what a cute coincidence that he should have left the country to attend the Apec conference in Vietnam before the bomb went off, so that he was spared having to answer awkward questions. (I won’t comment on the irony of a foreign affairs minister who’s deeply sceptical about free trade representing New Zealand at a meeting of an organisation formed to promote it, but hey - who's going to pass up an opportunity to hob-nob with the big boys?)

Let’s allow that the leaking of Peters’ superannuation details was a political dirty trick, albeit a transparently clumsy one, aimed at embarrassing him ahead of the election. But the secrecy of his plan to exact utu, and the possibility that the coalition talks were skewed by it, can only add to misgivings about the integrity of the process by which the new government was formed. Am I the only one who thinks this is a whole lot more important than the entertaining gamesmanship in Parliament yesterday?

The first 100 days: a better way

There has been a lot of talk about what the new government proposes to achieve in its first 100 days. It has set itself an extremely ambitious workload and a very limited time frame in which to accomplish it.

Political parties forced to chafe and fidget in opposition over a long period accumulate a big wish-list. They’re naturally impatient to correct everything the previous lot got wrong. When they finally get their hands on the levers of power it’s like a dam bursting.

There's a danger, then, that some of the Labour-led coalition’s priority objectives will be rushed through with insufficient preparatory groundwork or detailed consideration of the practicalities and possible consequences.

The risks are compounded because the vast majority of ministers have no previous experience in government and will be distracted by prosaic demands such as appointing staff and acclimatising in their new offices. Oh, and there’s the Christmas break coming up.

There’s also the tantalising possibility that neophyte ministers, giddy with excitement at their new-found power, will spin out at the first bend. Defence Minister Ron Mark certainly left some rubber on the tarmac this week when he appeared to rashly promise government funding for the RSA. To mix a metaphor, it looked like a case of political premature ejaculation.

Contrary to what Labour and its coalition partners are contemplating, I wonder whether it would be a good idea for power-starved incoming governments to resolve not to do anything for the first 100 days while they wait for the rush of blood to the head to subside.

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.