Elections 2017: How to avoid the post-election slump

Another body was found in the halls of parliament this week when the corpse of Peter Dunne’s political career was found slumped in the corner of his plush office.

There were no marks on his body but it was clear from the masque of terror on his face that he had seen the slavering horror of FukYoo Politix and his heart had simply stopped out of the sheer fear of actually having to do some genuine political campaigning in his previously safe, niche, electorate.

And like the other recent bodies found inside parliament (that of Metreia Turei and Andrew Little) it was clear that some unknown force was stalking and killing political careers left, right and centre.

In Turei’s case she was run over by her own fetid ambitions (suspiciously found in neutral gear and with the hand brake off when parked on a steep slope) while Little was bludgeoned to death by his own low poll ratings (his mashed body was found locked in the caucus room and no one could find the key).

Then there is the body that started all this, John Key, which at the time was thought to be from natural causes but now, like all good murder mysteries, seems to have met with foul play (possibly poison slipped into his morning expresso by a “trusted” friend and confidant).

Thus, this election campaign, like all good teenage horror movies, has now entered, as we discussed a few months back, that final phase (cue the creepy synth music) as the killer is now out in the open, striking at will and the panic this has engendered in the survivors has them sweating with fear and swiveling their heads as they try to figure out where the beast will strike from next.

But this post is not about the last few weeks of this increasingly chaotic political campaign but what will happen in the days after September 23^rd because it’s clear that there are only two real options for an electoral outcome and both of them boil down to whichever way Winston Peters happens to go when Labour and National front up and try and jam his hairy, outsized foot into the political glass slipper they are carrying.

And the mechanics of that podiatry nightmare are best covered by the recent work of Chris Trotter who shows that while we can track the creature that is Winston by his spoor and territorial leavings (think the usual Winston rhetoric) it could still come down on the day to some obscure factor like how tight his pants are or what color a reporters shirt is.

What is certain is that there are only two possible political outcomes: a National Coalition government or a Labour coalition government.

And while the composition of those governments remains malleable (think Labour and NZ First with or without the Greens or National and NZ First or even National and the Greens* if Winston decides to go with Jacinda to the ball) there are only two major structures that will be constructed post-election.

The ramshackle Mc-mansion that National will build will do its best to hide the rot (as I describe in my previous post National party embiggened by cromulent election victory) or the slightly newer looking house of Labour which may start with the best intentions to restore the property to its original condition but instead turns into a The-Block style superficial makeover before they flip it on for a quick profit.

This then, is the peril of post-election politics for Kiwis this year, the election ends on September 23^rd but the next three years of our political lives start the very next day when whoever or whatever we elect will take office.

And this message was never clearer with the end of the political career of Peter Dunne as Dunne entered politics 33 years ago in 1984 with the then Lange Labour government which immediately proceeded to enact the neo-liberal reforms which brought us to where we are today.

How ironic that the deeply cynical populist anger that Dunne helped create was also what chopped him down this week, the same populist sentiment that chewed up and spat out Andrew Little, Meteria Turei and James Shaw and even John Key was born of these last 33 years.

And if we can get all Pol-Sci for a moment the dynamic that is now at play works like this.

When the majority of the voting populace is content with the current government and its policies it will maintain that government and its policies.

When the majority of the voting populace is not happy with the current government and its policies it will seek to first change the policies; then the government; then the structure of government and finally the system of state (in that order).

And in the last 33 years we have seen the voting populace first object policies like the mother of all budgets, the dismantling of the welfare state and the privatization vital public services before getting ticked off with being ignored and then deciding to remove one government for another (as in 1996 and 2005) before arriving at where we are now with the mood of both NZ and much of the rest of the world reflecting a want to change the structure of governments themselves (by removing the neo-liberal and free market ideals which have created the housing hernia, dirty water and a swelling underclass living in dire poverty) and substituting other (possibly new possibly old) ideas and theories for how we wish to organize our society.

This is why all the recent calls for having a focus on policy this election are the proverbial rearranging of deck chairs on the sinking ship. 

The last 33 years has seen a raft of policy and politicians who ignored reality, and any who dared to call for it, while crafting policy cut from a particular vein of ideology which created people like John Key as our PM; created dirty dairy farming; pumped up the housing market until it became a national hernia; threw up an open door immigration system as a way to provide cheap labour; built up a culture of poverty and beneficiary bashing while ignoring any and all indicators that something was deeply wrong with the direction that society was heading.

Nor is New Zealand the only place where this dynamic has played itself out; the US, the UK, France, Spain, Italy, Greece and may other democracies around the world have been though the crazy that we are going through now in NZ.

But here is the kicker because this election is not really about who or what we vote for, or even if we vote at all but what will those who are elected do once they get given the task of fixing the mess the last 33 years has left us.

We know that if National get back in it will be more of the same and Steven Joyce might even dust of that “final solution” policy he has had locked away in the Beehive basement for the last nine years, the one where they stop pretending that we are not a third world banana republic and where he and the rest of National decide to live and act like the plantation managers they really aspire to be while remaking NZ into something like Thailand (with its booming tourist industry, military junta, grinding poverty, mass corruption and semi lawless society) rather than a genuine social democratic state (with the rule of law, fairness and natural justice and an economic and social system that prioritizes people over profits).

Of course with Jacindamania building to a fever pitch we could end up with the Labour party bus parked up our driveway for the next three years and the scent of change fading from our nostrils as Jacinda and Labour keep the ovens rolling but with a “kinder and gentler” face to the proceedings to help sooth those liberal sensitivities which were bruised under National but unwilling to acknowledge the cognitive dissonance that it was a Labour government that unleashed the beast 33 years ago and that it will be a Labour government which will attempt to stanch the sucking chest wound that is our failing state with a Band-Aid.

Let’s be clear here, if Bill and the B team are out and we get Jacinda and Co in they will still have to “win the peace”, as it is, by actually doing something to turn back the tide of neo-liberal garbage washing up on the beaches of NZ because if they don’t there is a very clear fate waiting for governments which fail to live up to the promise they embody (be it conscious or not).

In the US populism splattered Donald Trump all over the faces of the US public and now sees him deeply unpopular and divisive; while its brought Theresa May's popularity to its knees, Brexit horror, Tory Decline and a resurgent Jeremy Corbyn to the UK; Its seen the recent Macron government popularity sink less than six months after being elected; Justin Trudeau (who unseated the uber-neo-liberal Harper government in 2016) stumble as his feel good glow begins to fade and the PC brigade start to act just as bad as Harper and his goons were; while even Australia has descended into a carnival of revolving door PMs, bat guano insanity passing as rational debate and rabid racist sentiment becoming the core theme for how Oz behaves both domestically and internationally; not to mention a murderous town mayor running the entire Philippines (complete with one of his clones campaigning for National in Auckland) and all those other wavering democracies which are failing to address the core issues they face and having powerless politicians in office.**

This is the post-election slump and this is why policy is no longer relevant because the policies that are driving NZ today (see my recent post about the three P's of politics) are tied to a system of principles, which unless changed, will see us strangers in our own country and Godzone nothing more than a slogan on a shirt sold at some roadside stall in Roturua or Queenstown.

  

NZ has ascended the scale from seeking to change policy and party to now changing the actual principles and if Labour get in and fail to grasp this fact then expect to see Jacinda become just as unpopular as Trump, Macron or Trudeau as she does nothing but minimal or incremental policy tweaks to the overpriced and undervalued society that Labour needs to fix wholesale.

Also worth remembering is that if the populace fail to change the principles the next step will be to change the system and the other words for that are ones like revolt, revolution or civil war as I have alluded to in earlier posts.

It won’t be enough for us to just vote for the brighter day and then those voted for can sit and act like a few small policy ideas will save the day; they won’t. And if the pendulum swung far to the Right in 1984 then it may have to swing just as far Left before it can be brought back to the center because while I don’t endorse NZ becoming a communist utopia I do wish to see a civil society that is not an adjunct to the market and people, not profit, as the virtues of this nation.

Given how the current election campaign has gone the remaining four weeks are sure to be just as rowdy but both we, the voter, and the politicians coveting our vote would do well to heed what we see elsewhere when voting and enacting that vote because populism won’t go away until the things that are causing it go away.

This is why so many have recently fallen to the beast and why this campaign has become so chaotic as few, if any, in NZ politics really understand the animal they are seeking to ride into office. Unlike previous electoral cycles where they could play the popularity card while on the hustings and then forget it once safely in parliament this time the beast is riding them.

Any MP or political party who seeks to harness populism to get elected best be aware of the horror of the post-election slump if they piss away all the positive energy of the populist mood by trying to keep the status quo because populism is the diametrical opposite and will brook no backpedalling.

Naturally this applies to Labour and NZ First much more than National but in the end the beast is still hungry and, as we have seen, anybody can end up between its teeth.

Finally I am open to the idea that, as it is today, democracy may need a major tune up or even to get "pimped out" to make it work but that is what revolutions are for and I don't think we are up for that yet.

Are you? 

*- Six weeks ago even I would have scoffed at this suggestion but given how crazy things have gotten this campaign, how bad the Greens have botched their election chances and how desperate Shaw has acted to get into government I would not put it past him, or Bill English to consider the most unholy of alliances post September 23^rd.

**-Of course political popularity always goes down once the honeymoon is over but this is not just the reality of government sinking in but also the public realizing that they have been duped again.

KP Repost: Peter Dunne - New Zealand’s Most Successful Politician?

This is one of my favorite posts from my short stint at KP last year and after reading Brian Edwards recent post about the man* it was pleasant to find that we were of similar opinions regarding him.

And for Peter, the 2017 election is going to be crucial as Labour is fielding a determined candidate in Dunne's electorate and its clear that there is going to be no room for Peter in a Labour/Little government if they can at all avoid it.

And I think that why we have seen Peter in the media recently, desperately advocating for medicinal marijuana because what the hell else is he got left to peddle to the electorate? That's right, nothing!

So it would be an understatement to say that Dunne and United Future (his political front party) are heading for the high jump at speed this time and with the numbers getting tighter and tighter (current polls have National fractionally ahead of a Labour/Greens front) there is a very high chance that National will be eyeing up his electorate rather than allow another political parasite hold it on their behalf (they already have that with ACT in Epsom) and seek to head off Labour at the pass by cannibalizing it for themselves.

In fact I will be watching Dunne's electorate and Epsom very closely this election, if only for the sheer thrill of watching both of these guys sweat at the prospect of their cushy number being removed (at least Dunne can retire**; Seymour on the other hand will be walking the street the day after his WINZ benefit is canceled).

But Dunne is a survivor and he has been through this before but as Mr Durden says "on a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero". Dunne is no exception. 

 

Word around the campfire (several campfires in fact) is that Peter Dunne is a good minister.

I open with this little bit of information to be fair in the information I present (yeah right!) and to balance out my following assessment of him.

You see, unlike my other research into political parties and the individuals that compose them (a process which usually consists of me trolling the internet, checking my library, badgering my sources and “polling” those around me for a general opinion of the situation) I did not turn up the usual treasure trove of data, Wellington gossip, internet foot prints or scathing rants attached to the Peter or the United Future Party.

Oh to be sure there were some juicy slabs of salacious gossip abounding but none which could be verified beyond even the merest rumor and as such I decided to leave such things out and focus on what I actually could confirm by more than one source.

Which lead to a surprising amount of people, from many places in government, having nothing but praise for the man in his role as both current (DIA) and previous (IRD) ministerial positions (and various sub and acting ministerial roles).

It seems that Peter Dunne is the kind of minister that Chief Executives and Permanent Secretaries like (except for those truly aspiring to be Sir Humphrey Appleby) as he is intelligent enough to know the material, studious enough to know it in detail, pragmatic enough to take advice given and principled enough still make decisions in line with the party ideals and general values.

Dunne is not one of those ministers that require vast amounts of baby-sitting (Sam Lotu-Liga in the wake of the Serco debacle and his rapid removal from the corrections portfolio to something much much safer (and far less important); the Local Government portfolio); is a power hungry profiteer (Steven Joyce); dangerously ignorant (Murray McCully and Jerry Brownlee) or one of those empty political vessels which then become an avatar of greed, avarice and naked ambition (Judith Collins and most of the remaining vermin in cabinet).

All of which soon overwhelmed my own preconceived notions of him as a bow tie wearing political hack who simply went whatever which way the winds were blowing and who was now a dangerous relic helping to prop up an increasingly unpopular government.

It was my good friend Q who pointed out one night over drinks that while Dunne was all of those things that I believed he was (and Q should know having spent a good deal of time actually walking the halls of parliament playing nurse maid to its many skeezy denizens in both Labour and National governments) he also had many of the better points I have listed above and while still a political creature he could be considered “one of the better examples of the breed”.

On first hearing this I nearly choked on my drink as Q, while the perfect example of the legal/rational devil’s advocate type that can be found in Wellington if you look hard enough, was not known for laying out such glowing endorsements for MPs without an equal measure of dirty laundry culled from his time as first hand witness to their grubby behaviors.

But there was no skid marked Y-fronts to be found this time and I had to accept the fact if I was looking for examples of the usual slimy tendencies that politicians display I would be better suited to look elsewhere.

And so it went, time and again, over drinks, dinner and in the tea-break small talk between meetings which make up the bulk of the time any actual work in Wellington is achieved (for further details I direct the reader to Parkinson’s Law). Same story, again and again; competent minister, rational individual, good to work for and such and so forth.

Which meant that by the time I came to write this I felt compelled to open in the manner I just have which for me is a hard thing to do. I rate politicians just above pedophiles and just below lawyers.

But the subconscious nag which kept running in the back of my mind that accepting Minister Dunne as some sort of silver slipper bobbing among the turds in the parliamentary toilet bowl was wrong just would not go away.

So it was time to put some Jazz on the turntable, pop open a few beers, lie back on the couch in my usual meditative (or just plain lazy) position (fingers in the traditional Monty Burns “excellent!” manner) and think things through.

So after a few Montheiths and several sides of Donald Byrd I felt I had a handle on things and it went a little something like this.

Peter Dunne has been in politics, and parliament, for over 30 years. First as a member of the Labour Party (he entered in 1984) and later as an Independent MP and then as part of various assemblages of parties which eventually ended up under the banner of United Future.

And Dunne, like his significant doppelganger Winston Peters, has been in coalition with both Labour and National, supporting both governments and holding ministerial positions in both. Both have developed into one man band operations, despite the veneer of party structure each has assembled around them.

Both men have seen various bills through parliament and both have had their moments of controversy (although Winston could claim a lot more) and both have fallen afoul of the particular government of the day (Peters with both National and Labour and Dunne with National in 2013 over his leaking of documents to journo Andrea Vance).

But NZ First, as a party, appears a lot more coherent, if more sycophantic (I am always impressed when Winston storms or is thrown out of the house and his drones obediently follow) while United Future is a shell party assembled to give the illusion (for those who remember the de-registration saga in 2013) of coherent support outside of Dunne’s immediate staff so he can continue to receive government funding and allow Dunne to remain in parliament.

Where the symbiosis ends is that while Peters has championed the cause of the proverbial, and possibly theoretical, Kiwi, Dunne has not. Peters has retained a constituency outside of any particular electorate despite his win in Northland and his loss of his previous long held seat in Tauranga while Dunne has only ever held one seat (now by the slimmest of margins), Ohariu in Wellington.

From the Numbers side United Future has sunk in public polling from 6% in 2002 to 0.27% in 2014 while Dunnes margin in his home electorate has shrunk to a few percentage points ahead of Labour (36% to 34% in the 2014 election) and with National and the Greens holding healthy shares as well (National at 16% and the Greens at 7%).

NZ First on the other hand stole 54% of the votes in an electorate in had not really polled in before (Northland) and NZ first holds at around 7% to 10% on any given day in the party popularity stakes.

This means that as a political party United Future is a non-existent entity with no mandate of any kind and with a single MP who holds his electorate by the barest of margins due to a fractured makeup (the previously grumbles by Charles Chauvel of Labour in 2011 that Dunne had won the seat due to a deal with National to feed voters to United Future was probably sour grapes on Chauvels part but to me it would be less a case of National doing a deal with Dunne and more National simply encouraging its voters to “vote strategically” by supporting Dunne without any conspiracy needed to keep Dunne in power knowing that they could not win it themselves and to keep Labour out).

And the party website reflects all of this with sparse (if any) policy prescriptions, a list of members which appear to be entirely composed of all the individuals who care about the party (when you read their bios) and tag line “Economically responsible, socially conservative” all of which screams “dead man walking” in our current political climate. Granted it’s not as bad as ACTs website but that is a matter of degree not difference.

And Dunne is a dead man walking, he is a statistical anomaly who exists because he has carefully created a niche in the MMP ecosystem where he can remain and exploit his position in governments which require minor party support to make a majority.

He has played key roles in getting many pieces of legislation through the house and none worse than his deciding vote in making government asset sales a reality (which for me was the turning point where I went from seeing Dunne as a true inhabitant of the middle ground to a servant of the power).

His competence as a minister is commendable but not a saving grace in such a situation. And while I do believe that he is a genuinely principled individual (as his willingness to criticize the government of the day can sometimes show) his position in the system (and the actions he takes) comes at a far greater costs to the country than any service he has given to his electorate or imaginary party supporters.

Where Winston Peters is an out and out political showman demagogue grandstanding on issues to cynically get votes and keep punching his meal ticket Dunne has quietly enabled the slow motion train wreck (although he is not alone in this) that New Zealand politics has become by being one of the “silent majority” that has helped keep the neo-liberal reforms in place and the machine oiled and running.

It’s all there on the United Future Website where it tells the visitor that they are part of a “global movement” under which the flag of neo liberalism is proudly flown and in his own history when his move out of Labour in the 1980s came after Rodger Douglas and the other right wingers had already exited and Dunne was left alone in a party with blood on its hands and trying to rid itself of the remaining guilty candidates (of which Dunne was one).

But let’s compare further with his significant other. Winston’s great(est) moment in the political spot light was the Wine box inquiry which saw him expose the seedy underbelly of New Zealand for all to see through his uncanny ability to grab an issue and extract maximum fury from it while Dunne’s was his refusal to handover all his emails to a government inquiry which saw him vilified for a short while by National (and many in public) and then let back into the beehive clubhouse. Winston remains a potent threat to any government in that he will scramble their entire agenda if it warrants or he does not get what he wants.

Dunne can occasionally express mild upset or disapproval at various tweaks of government policy (as his rather entertaining twitter feed shows) but his protestations usually amount silent farts of apathy and reek of a schizophrenia of morals rather than any real outrage or protest.

And it is there that the difference shows, as a true centrist Peters remains a threat to either side and retains his King maker mystique while Dunne is an accomplice to whatever government will pay his price but without any real threat value. I admit that it’s a small difference but in MMP politics it’s a crucial one; that of unpredictability and exposure vrs predictability and acquiescence.

Some had said that Peter Dunne died in the 90s along with Jim Anderton and the Alliance (yes I know he was an MP till 2011 but he was another example of a MP leeching off his electorate) and was resurrected in 2002 by the “Worm” used to monitor the statements made by MPs during the televised debates (and lets not start on the Worm right now, a more blatant example of election engineering I cannot think of).

If that is the case and Dunne owes his current existence to a cheap TV gimmick then he has done well from this quirk of fate but in the final analysis he, like Peters, Anderton and ACT, is a child of MMP and the system allows for such creatures but unlike Winston, Dunne is on borrowed time as the only thing holding him in place is the fact that any push by Labour to unseat him might drive voters in his electorate in the arms of National as much as themselves. But a desperate Labour might just be tempted to risk it to get one more “easy” seat come a tight 2017 race.

But I leave the final words to my good friend Q who in his measured tones noted that despite all of the vitriol I could muster Peter Dunne may actually be the “most successful politician in NZ politics today” having served both as a MP continuously for over 30 years (Winston has 40 but it has gaps out of office and his limited time helming actual portfolios weakens his legacy) and for long stretches as a minister in many governments which is not a feat that many politicians can boast of.

Of course that was a pure measurement on the scale of politics devoid of morality of anything else (Q is a trained lawyer after all) but grudgingly I would have to agree with him.

*- here 
**-Which is the final point of this recent piece on Dunne.