Political Business

Elitist obsession with Brash/Massey

The liberal elite are bothered by Brash and fascinated by Massey University shutting him down, but they’re not at all bothered by what happened to the kids at Whanganui High. Brash just says things the liberal elite don’t want to like, and Massey is a test of whether the liberal elite can get away with shutting this down (it looks like they can). But Whanganui High was real racism in action – a…

Political tweet traffic during Republican primaries

Further evidence that social media is enabling a wave of public discourse which is unstoppable. Politicians often fret about low levels of public engagement in politics – and now they’re getting engagement – through social media – they’re worried about what is being said. Political tweet traffic during Republican primaries

Dog whistle politics: religious left

This letter-based religious appeal to voters from winning Bradford candidate George Galloway defies dog-whistle carefulness in the era of professional politics. He shows that when you are confident about your electorate, you can be confident about reflecting their opinions. Dog whistle politics: religious left

Politics should be civil but tough

The tolerance of Western culture for robust expression of diverse points of view in politics may be weakening. Ironically, the tolerance is weakest among politicians themselves.

Politicians complain of  bullying from colleagues and opposing politicians (examples here).  Yet they participate in the tough abuse as well (example here).

Politicians have always argued for more civil discourse within…

The real problem with Whanganui High School limiting a talk by boxer Joseph Parker to Maori and Pacific Island boys is that it is part of an institutional shut down of options for working class Kiwis.

Middle class white people, teachers in particular, are locking working class Kiwis into mediocrity, under the guise of cultural support and positive discrimination.

Parker talking to Maori and PI kids illustrates a very limited vision of the future these kids; as sportsmen - entertainment for others.

This poverty of options that is shined up by calling it cultural; Kia kaha, but stay where you are.

I love boxing. I’ve trained and fought in the ring. It teaches self-discipline and true resilience. But as a career it is limited. Sports in general is hardly a novel or aspirational career path for the working class. At best it pays off for a short while, as vassals of business-savvy promoters, before their body breaks down.

The poor and working class should know that any and every option is open to them, all dependent on their interests, skills and willingness to work hard.

It is not a way out of their socio-economic conditions to treat them separately, to put up familiar “role models”, and slap a cultural lacquer on education. Social mobility requires people to be exposed to the unfamiliar - to regard what they don’t know and recognise as something equally possible.

So they don’t need only Parker talking to them. They need a wide array of people of any colour and culture, from any and all lifestyles and any career.

Across the Western world, social mobility is falling. Children born to poor and working class parents are increasingly less likely to earn more than them. The institutions set up by the elite and managed by the compliant middle class is responsible.

Long term agreements - like political coalitions - are about relationships far more than they are about deals. There's no point in prenuptial agreements in life, business or politics unless they're between people who share values and purpose.

Right now, New Zealand's political parties are in coalition talks to build a Government. The reported focus of the discussions is to strike deals on policy and positions of responsibility.

But very little of the work of government is new policy. Most of the daily of politics deals with the massively diverse range of matters that emerge in the course of daily life of a nation. Some of these are momentary and unexpected. Others are very long-term inter generational matters.

Judgements made by Governments in these situations are based on deep-seated beliefs and value-systems, along with practical and shrewd political calculations about what will work.

It's arguable that this is where the real business of politics lies, and where there's the greatest opportunity for change and influence in the life of a nation.

Coalition deal-making has nothing to say about how to handle these matters. Even a system to resolve disputes and disagreements won't cover these issues unless coalition parties are prepared to compromise on values.

Political analyst Geoffrey Miller and I run a database of the employment, education and living circumstances of New Zealand MPs before they reached Parliament.

We do this to better judge the likely choices of Parliamentarians. What people say is not as reliable as what they do, and what we do is likely to be based on our life experiences. People signal a lot of information about their values, interests and purpose in what they choose to do, where they do it, and who they do it with.

So Geoffrey and I used the database to assess the likely chances of success of the coalition options currently being negotiated in New Zealand.

What we found was a lot of common ground in work and education experience between National and New Zealand First. The most common career or work experience for an MP from either party before joining Parliament was in business, property or finance.

A National-New Zealand First government would include more MPs with business, education and agriculture backgrounds than a Labour-New Zealand First-Greens combination.

National’s main source of MPs is the business sector (25% of all pre-jobs held by all party MPs) and government (19%).

New Zealand First has the largest proportion of its caucus with business experience (27%), followed by employment in education (18%) and Police/Military (18%).

Based on the share of employment experience, a Labour-New Zealand First-Green coalition would deliver a group of MPs with the broadest range and diversity of skills, knowledge and experience.

Labour has significant groups of MPs who come from education, legal and media backgrounds, and includes a strong contingent of Maori MPs, who have often held senior leadership and governance positions within Maoridom.

Labour has the largest number of MPs with experience in government jobs (17), forming a quarter of its caucus. But the second largest category of Labour experience is in business (14%).

The Greens are dominated by MPs with employment backgrounds in union and activism (43%). But in contrast, are the party with the largest proportion of MPs from the business sector (29%).

The scale of activism of Green MPs would appear incongruous with the backgrounds of New Zealand First MPs. But there is common ground across the Greens and Labour in people who have experienced the challenges of starting and running businesses.

New Zealand First’s own education and media backgrounds would complement Labour’s employment experience in these fields. Their strengths in business, farming and military would extend the coalition’s representation of these sectors.

The coalition choice for New Zealand First is a more natural relationship with National, or a better deal with Labour and the Greens.

Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull was an idiot to insist that, right in the middle of Donald Trump acting tough on refugees, the US honour Obama’s agreement take some of Australia’s imprisoned refugees.

Spinners suggest Turnbull was standing up to the bully. If he was, that’s like the class nerd insisting that the school bully honour the student charter. Admirable, but stupid, because not only do you still lose your lunch, you get a black eye.

It seems more likely that Turnbull is, like many in the political establishment, a bit rubbish at the job in the newly emerging conditions.

He, or his advisers, didn’t appreciate the scale of the request he was making of Trump. And over such a small domestic matter as 1250 refugees, which the Australian ruling elite hasn’t had the guts to fix itself.

Wouldn’t it have been far more insightful of Turnbull to recognise Trump’s position and say - “We are prepared to deal. How about we allow you to claim you forced us to back down on the agreement, and in return we fast track a refresh of the trade deal?”

The tether that once bound urban and rural New Zealand has come loose. Urbanisation has disconnected us. Some people, including politicians, even contemplate a country without rural industries.

I don’t.  I am convinced we need to rebind urban and rural New Zealand for the better of our economic and cultural future.

We need to build an urban-rural compact; a renewed modern appreciation of the critical importance of the rural sector to the New Zealand way of life. The nation’s decision-makers and influencers must be part of it.

I grew up in a purpose-built working class suburb in Hamilton. We were in that suburb thanks to a 3% Government home loan. My Dad was a welder at a farming equipment factory. Mum worked at Waikato Hospital, bringing babies into the world – including many to rural parents.

Our house backed onto a dairy farm. To get to my primary school I followed a creek alongside the farm. Farms and rugby fields were our playgrounds.

My Dad could never resist snide comments at the 6pm TV news reports of whinging farmers who decried poverty or weather woes.

The sector’s government subsidies were the source of that acrimony. But no one ever questioned the existence of agriculture, as they do now.

As my generation has grown up, agricultural industries have become highly efficient and productive.

The output of the agricultural sector has tripled since the 1980s. The agricultural sector produces two thirds of our exported goods. In 2009, that was worth $17b. Agriculture exports more than pay our entire core health bill.

The dairy industry went from producing 6 billion litres of milk in 1980 to 20b litres in 2014. Operating profit on dairy farms has jumped from $250 per hectare before 1985 to $1300 in the past 20 years (2012 dollars).

During this period something else dramatic happened – New Zealand urbanised.

My old suburb has grown in size, inhabited now by many new immigrants. There’s no farmland within walking distance. To get to school kids to cross under a four-lane motorway.

In 1956, 70% of New Zealanders lived in towns. Ten years later, when I was born, 80% of New Zealanders lived in towns.

By the time I was 10, in 1976, I was already part of a generational divide between town and country. 85% of New Zealanders were urban. Today, almost 90% of New Zealanders live in towns and cities.

We have also stopped working in the agricultural sector. In 1986, 11% of New Zealanders were employed in the sector. This year it’s 6%.

Urbanisation is inimical to rural work and life.

The most visible impact is the decline in resources available for rural use. Since the 1990s, urban growth in Auckland has destroyed 1% of the very best productive land. Future urban growth in Auckland is expect to destroy another 5%.

Urbanisation locks labour in the cities. Rural workers are getting older. Staff shortages are common.

Imagine what it’s like for city-born kids who have a latent interest in the rural sector. Their family lives don’t expose them to the rural environment. The public discourse suggests rural work and living is hard, dangerous and tedious. They are career-guided by city-dwelling teachers.

The less obvious effect is regulatory and attitudinal. Privately, and even publicly, urban intellectuals critique rural people and industries. They impose their perspectives on the rural sector via their actions as lawmakers, consumers and public commentators.

The noise of this city elite could give the impression that ordinary people don’t like agriculture, particularly because of its environmental impact.

In private, two-thirds tell researchers they have an overwhelmingly positive attitude to dairy farming.

That’s because 150 years as an agricultural society has still left us with an indelible cultural mark.

If you ask the public to describe the traits that mark out New Zealanders, they say things such as making do, number-eight wire practicality, modesty and innovation.

If you ask them to describe the traits that typify dairy farming, they list almost exactly the same things.

So the empathetic connection is present. It’s not too late to avoid our urbanisation hardening into a permanent handicap.

Agriculture is central to our economy. Its world-leading productivity and innovation is a massive economic advantage. Our urbanisation has no comparable alternatives.

Rural industries have done a lot of changing – becoming far more environmentally sustainable, and modifying everything from the way they use roads, treat crops and animals, and allow public access.  

The onus is now on the urban population. We need to fuel the rural sector with those young, socially immobile people in our city suburbs. We must moderate regulatory expectations.  We can encourage rural perspectives back into our cultural life.

Sue Moroney’s tweet deriding a snazzy bach owner for flying John Key’s preferred flag revealed not a real attitude, but a fake one.

In this era of professional politicians, the uniform of the job is an ill-fitting suit of ideologies, attitudes and platitudes. It is your entry to group think; the race to illogical conclusions and amplified emotions. If you wear the suit for long enough, it defines you.

As a sensible and reasonable person, and someone who owns a bach herself, it is unlikely that Sue Moroney believes people in holiday homes can’t express an opinion, or that they get to decide things for everyone else.

The rules of belonging to the professional class of politicians don’t have a lot of room for reasonableness. That doesn’t get you heard. It doesn’t help define you, especially among your political network. It doesn’t help your right-on political credentials.

The result is a spiral into intolerance which turns citizens into politicised symbols. You define yourself by objectifying voters.

The irony is that the whole thing objectifies politicians as well. They become caricatures of narrow types of political thinking.

John Key broke his own rule with the new flag debate: don’t get ahead of the public.

In the first few months of John Key’s new job as Prime Minister, I attended a few business breakfast lunches at which he spoke. He had a common theme back then; he had observed that government’s failed when they got ahead of the public with “big ideas”. It was an idea that spoke to the experience of the third term of the Clark Government, where environmentalism had created the ETS, and the end of florescent light bulbs. But it was also a deliberate reference to the previous Labour Government’s Rogernomics experiment, and the Muldoonist Think Big policies.

It was an indicator of the approach he would take to politics - cautious, incremental, safe.

Politicians can’t help themselves though. They all feel obliged to have “big ideas”. So Key’s National Government has given us an “open for business” tout for oil and gas exploration and Public Private Partnerships, a National Cycleway and a fibre digital network.

The gamble of a new flag was Key’s step too far ahead of the public. There was no rising public call for a flag before he mooted it. There was no strong public campaign in support of the idea or his preferred options.

The defeat of the alternative flag is the end of an aura; John Key’s aura of invincibility. For the first time he has been revealed as a mortal Prime Minister.

I have to be fair - the vote was closer than I expected. A 56% vote to keep the current flag is not very conclusive. Still, you can be sure if the new flag won, it’s supporters, and John Key in particular, would be crowing.  But they can’t.

John Key has failed to read the public correctly. He argued that the public wanted a change, and backed himself to be right. He said in his flag referendum announcement speech “I am proposing... a new flag."  

On that count, Key has tonight lost.

That was already clear in the first referendum, when less than half the nation voted. Ten percentage points of that were spoiled ballots - indicating only a third of New Zealand wanted a change. That number appears to have climbed in the second referendum.

John Key campaigned for the flag we voted on tonight, even if half-heartedly. Maybe he should have tried harder. Either way, a majority of New Zealanders didn’t agree with him.

On that count, Key has lost tonight.

The problem is not that Key proposed something the majority did not support.

The problem is that John Key’s power has stemmed from having his finger on the pulse of the nation, and the power to persuade the public.  

The vote tonight has illustrated that Key and National can be offside with the majority.

Just over a year ago I warned (paywalled) the business community to avoid using zero hour contracts because they would create a national backlash.

My argument was that zero hour contracts appeared unfair by ethical  standards of New Zealanders. Worse, these contracts were beginning to be experienced by children of the middle class. Their unfairness was the subject of BBQ conversations.

I warned that a middle-class backlash was about to happen, followed by politicians changing legislation.

To retain the flexibility they offered for unique situations, the business community needed to back off widespread use zero hour contracts. A couple of companies publicly stopped using them. Most did not, and leaders of the business community took no strong stance.

A little over a year on, the Opposition has managed to secure from National a change in legislation.

You’d think I would be happy with legislation stopping a practice I disliked. But I am not. Legislation, and legislators, are rarely subtle. No one is clever enough to understand and surgically excise behaviour from the billion-layered complexities and machinations of people.

People from all over the Establishment spectrum have poured scorn on Donald Trump. Most of the abuse is based on their idea that he is not the right sort of person to be a President - primarily that he is not very intelligent.

I’m no apologist for Donald Trump. I’m dispirited by a guy who talks about his penis in public debates and says he is smart because he “knows lots of words, big words.”

But look at what all the smart people running America have done in just in the last two decades eh? Trump is being damned by a privileged political system of smart people who are politically incompetent.

The situation reminds me a little of the criticisms leveled at Ronald Reagan. The man partly responsible for the end of the cold war was said by liberals to be as “dumb as a stump”.

Yet in 2008, Obama praised him, saying “Ronald Reagan was a transformative political figure.”

The things said against Reagan by smarty-pants liberals, eerily recall the things they say now about Trump.

Like Trump, Reagan gave them plenty of material to work with; he claimed the Russian language had no word for "freedom" (it’s "svoboda"); claimed intercontinental ballistic missiles could be recalled once launched, spoke often about the "End Times" of the Bible, and claimed he had been at the liberation of the Nazi death camps. 

I wanted to find quotes leveled at him before he became President, but lacking time for a pre-internet search, I grabbed the following from a great story in 2011 by the Washington Times.

“I think he’s out of his mind.”

“It’s Alzheimer’s. They ought to rename the disease after him.”

“That’s what I want to be when I get old and feeble-minded - president.”

“His idea of serious reading is the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated,”

“He likes to count the pieces in the two-piece bathing suits. That’s as high as he can go.”

February 22, 1987 - Chicago Sun Times

"Mrs. Reagan’s husband has shown the command decision instincts of a glazed donut.

He sat there like a stone for months, acting like someone whose IQ equals the mean temperature of St. Petersburg, Fla.

March 2, 1987 -The Boston Globe

“He has to demonstrate he has all his marbles,” said Wattenberg.

March 5, 1987 -The Boston Globe

How can this happen? How can Reagan be both dumb and transformative? Was he ever dumb? Was he ever transformative? I think the truth is that our perspectives are heavily and inaccurately influenced by our ego, by the egos of other people, and the times.

In a piece titled “The stupidity of Ronald Reagan”, Christopher Hitchens wonders how it was that his liberal friends were busy criticising this obviously “cruel and stupid lizard” just at the time Reagan was making “Glasnost” possible, and ‘saving’ the world from Cold War.

“Many of those friends had twice my IQ, or let's say six times that of the then-chief executive.

“I have been wondering ever since not just about the stupidity of American politics, but about the need of so many American intellectuals to prove themselves clever by showing that they are smarter than the latest idiot in power, or the latest Republican at any rate.”

At a glitzy function, some well known New Zealanders spoiled things by voicing that New Zealand should have a new flag. Their views were greeted with surprisingly healthy applause from the assembled crowd of luminaries.

It was no coincidence that John Key was present that night.

This is how politicians lose touch; they are surrounded by either like-minded people who are disconnected from the masses, or people sucking up.

This is also why the elite regularly gets things terribly wrong; they try so hard to appear to be motivated by greater concerns than mere mortals. They are all busy concerning themselves with ‘Brand New Zealand’ and other such twaddle.

Their judgement is confused by a desperation to be part of whatever new thinking is currently orthodox - the bien pensant.

The two thirds of the public who prefer the old flag, do so for wildly varied and sophisticated reasons. I think I can embrace them all by summarising that the proposed flag is a bit too rubbish to be worth the effort.

This is why our nation’s very small band of self-styled ‘thinkers’, and some celebrity not-so-thinkers, have talked each other into supporting a shitty flag, mistakenly believing it signals big thinking about our nationhood.

Some of the elite have recently claimed that the process has been worse because it was democratised. They want a design elite to have decided the outcome.

Donald Trump is striking chords with disgruntled middle America because of the emotional intent of what he says, not the literal meaning.

All the intellectual smartiepants mock Trump because he says he’ll build walls and stop Islamic people coming into America. They mock the sort of people who like him as being stupid to agree with these things. Yes, the illiteracy of the words, the phrasing and the concepts is unusual for a modern candidate.

But the emotional intent of those concepts is what attracts voters. Few voters seriously think a wall is viable. Few voters seriously think to ban religions. Few think Trump can magic-up “millions” of jobs.

They want these things, and know they can’t get them. But at the very least, they want a President who also them.

They believe they are more likely to get those issues that matter to them dealt with under that sort of President. It may not be a wall - but it will be an attitude and set of rules that amount to a metaphorical wall. 

Intellectuals and the establishment elite are appalled at the Trump appeal to base emotions. But how easily they themselves followed the base emotion of hope when they cheered on Obama’s empty and nonsensical “change” rhetoric during his first campaign. Where is that “change” and wonderful world that Obama promised?

The elite, intellectuals and the left have an ego-concept of themselves as smart, thinking people. They beleive their opinions are based on logic,reason and altruistic intentions.

They are infuriated by Trump’s almost undebateable style. He doesn’t say anything concrete. He makes it up as he goes along. He shifts seemlessly between multiple forms of irrational argument format and unlinked content. It would be like arguing with my Dad - pointless.

And they hate that people respond to this rhetoric. Isn’t this world of politics for smart people to argue cleverly over smart things?

The elite’s hand-wringing over a rash of physical engagements between public and politicians is a symptom of the very problem that causes people to lash out: a desire to order politics so real people don’t participate.

A typically awesome column by Bryce Edwards this week covered both sides of the debate.

I shouldn’t have been surprised to see the media and society elite rush to condemn the threat to their order. Despite all their rhetoric urging  public engagement with politics, they are discomforted when the masses get involved.

The general consensus is that we want civility in New Zealand. A fair advancement of that view was given by Geoffrey Miller in his blog.  I totally agree - and roughly speaking, I think the recent ‘violence’ was just within that scope.

Politics is about how people with incompatible ideas manage living together. The further politics attempts to control our lives, the more likely some will resent the control.

I’m comfortable with disorder. Ordered politics is what happens when there’s nothing much to argue about. Ordered politics is just another means by which the elite retain their privilege. 

I think a reasonable citizen is entitled to action proportionate to the emotions stirred and threat posed to what that citizen values.

The elite has not give due weight to the nature of these violent engagements. The normally sensible Tim Fookes asked ‘what if these people had thrown something else?’.

The fact that they did not throw other things, or use weapons, is exactly why people can be trusted with physical encounters.

The guy who threw brown muck on Gerry Brownlee had lost a teenage son in the Christchurch earthquake. He is an ordinary guy. He has suffered. He finds it hard to put that into words. Who can or has listened to him? What has this buckled down, process-orientated, celebrity and cerebral society done for him?

He has endured something I cannot conceive. It was not the fault of Brownlee but of the earthquake. It was not Brownlee, or even the Government, that generated the built environment that caused deaths, or failed to help recovery afterwards. It was the amorphous mass of organised ambivalence, where no one takes responsibility.

The guy did not pull out a weapon. He concocted a cocoa-based mix of foodstuffs, stepped up to Brownlee, there to go through the organised formalities of commemoration, and tipped it on him. When measured against his life experience, it was a demonstrative act against the only target that was willing to present itself.

Some writers correctly worry that these incidents may shrink New Zealand’s level of intimate and open politics. But what is the point of this sort of politics if it is always civil and passive?

What is the point of openness if we can’t get close to politicians, look them in the eyes and tell them, or even show them, what we think?

If you value openness then you must value disorder.

Labour leader Andrew Little is wasting the coolest job in politics.

In opposition you get to critique the undoubtedly crap work of the Government, and take time to dream up alternative policies.

There’s few other lines of work where can your idea can leap from your brain straight onto the public agenda.

An Opposition should be an ideas crucible, generating critique and concepts that touch on public need and keep the Government off-balance.

Your ideas have few limits, but must be internally consistent. Since they’re just ideas, you can make up the bits that hold it together.

This morning Andrew Little has been advocating the idea of a time limit on insurance decisions. Five years after the Christchurch Earthquake people are still waiting for conclusions to insurance claims.

In one of his most cringe-worthy interviews, Little poorly evaded answering the obvious question, posed multiple times by an admirably persistent Guyon Espiner. The question amounted to: under your idea, what would happen if insurance companies don’t settle by the deadline?

Andrew Little didn’t have an answer. He and his team had forgotten to dream up this part of the idea.

The shoddiness of this situation beggars belief: with the time and inspiration to develop ideas, Labour moots something as basic as a deadline, but can’t dream up how to make a deadline enforceable.

I’m not about to do the job for them, but off the top of my head I can think of three ways that would pass muster for the 24 hours this idea is live.

I feel sorry for Little. He is very poorly served by the Labour idea factory and his media people (who should really be the idea factory), and doesn’t appear to have the capacity to do this on his own.