Peace Researcher 34 – July 2007
In the days after his late 2006 accession to the
National Party leadership John Key apparently told a radio interviewer that he
did not recall his attitude to the Springbok tour. At the time, 1981, Key would have been around
21. He is very much of the Springbok Tour Generation. Is it likely that a bright
young New Zealander had no views about a controversy that merged several of our
national obsessions?
Key should not be blamed for his faulty memory,
even if it is selectively vague. His is a political memory, which mandates a
certain attention deficit disorder. An ambitious Nationalist knows that there
is no right response to such matters. Were he to have backed the tour, Key
might have come across as uncool, a provincial - or even a Muldoonist. But had
he been a protester, he might have been deemed out of touch with the National
heartland. He might have risked being carried in an ebb tide from the Don Brash
mainstream. Key realised that any answer would act as a diversion. He was going
to stay “on message”, just as that week he had stayed “on message” by shrugging
off Orewa-type topics like race relations.
Whatever message Key was to express, his
efforts will be economic. Key is a pragmatist. He sees himself as a realist. He
is
The conventional media response to these
responses, the “mainstream” take, is that Key is “positioning” himself as
centrist because that’s where the votes lie. That is of course true, but only
in the trivial sense that all the parties in Parliament, and especially the two
main ones, always do this. There are no grounds for supposing that Key’s
necessary gestures are a guide to what a Key government would do. There is
nothing in either his background or his foreground to suggest that Key is
anything but an economic “dry”, as dry as Brash or Roger Douglas. Like them, he
doesn’t define himself as a career politician, in it for the lifestyle. He’s in
politics to dry us, and, like the other true-believer neo-liberals, he doesn’t
need the distraction of other people’s agendas.
For a politician what Key was doing was
routine. His task was to “neutralise” potentially damaging issues. He had to
“inoculate” National from the diseased citizenry. In his penetrating analysis,
Nicky Hager suggests that National’s strategic need is to convince voters that
a future government would not be a “back to the 1980s” outfit. Brash would not
have been able to do this, and not just because he is a half-generation older
than Key. Brash was very much an 80s’ person, but then so is Key. What could be
more 80s than a hot-shot career as a
Another very 80s man is a former adviser to
Ronald Reagan, the
The Reaganite shape of National was seen on the
TV news, where Brash used to appear before a backdrop reading “Family,
Security, Work, Community, Freedom”. This had been adapted from an American
original: “Family, Neighbourhood, Work, Peace, Freedom”. It might seem ironic
that National’s formulation reverted to a, once specifically American,
McCarthyite repulsion to “Peace”. When in 1951 the first National government
wanted to break the trade union movement by locking out the watersiders, they
brought John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, literally into the
Cabinet Room to give them their orders. That was when Reds were under our beds
and “peace” was a commie plot. It’s still a concept that National needs to
neutralise”, to “inoculate” itself from.
Spin Doctors,
Pointyheads & Mike Moore People
National spin doctors like to pretend that the
power of transnational public relations (PR) and advertising firms, the heft of
US elites and the united and dedicated efforts of the big NZ corporates is as
nothing when it comes across the combined opposition of local dissidents. They
want us to despair that our elites tremble before the wrath of the fearless journalists
at Fairfax and News Corporation and the outspoken nationalists at CanWest’s
TV3. They bang on about the “pundits”, the chattering class, scribes and
pointyheads – “pointyheads” is another 50s reversion - and how they dam up the
“mainstream”.
Now where have we heard that word before? The
pundits and the chattering classes didn’t use it. Oh, yes, Don Brash did. He
defined himself as being “mainstream”. For those in a democracy who vote for
one of the other parties on offer it might well seem odd that someone seeking
to be Prime Minister would have done so by announcing that an opinion that was
not his was illegitimate, an eddy on the margins of history. Again, it’s all so
oppressive, so conformist, so 50s. Who first waded into the “mainstream”, inducing
us to follow? It wasn’t the pointyheaded NZ press? Oh, yes, it was The
Gipper.
Hager found that within National circles a
“political hygiene test” is conducted so that policies they are planning which
the public might not like are disguised. In the words of a strategist, “every
time we talk tough on issues we also run hard with a compassionate line”. Now
that talk of consultation is fashionable, the spin doctors prescribe verbal
placebos. The front men are to look sincere and assure voters that they “hear
your concerns”. They express “disappointment”. They’re “listening” and
“engaged”. In Hager’s precise summation, “the positive elements provide
political cover; the negative bits are what most listeners remember”.
National’s hope is to convert “socially-conservative
working-class people” to its cause. With support from this constituency
National could secure majorities. Apparently - on the evidence of the spinning
e-mails sent to the leader – “Mike Moore* people is the best shorthand” for
this target group. This identification surely is derived from the “Reagan
Democrats” who provided the Republicans with the majorities that they are only
now losing. * It is an indictment of Labour that National should identify
people who supported Labour’s former leader – and Prime Minister for the blink
of an eye, in 1990 – as a natural constituency to be won over.
National has close links to the Australian far
Right. In November 2003, Hager relates, a Wellington PR adviser, coached Brash
for his Orewa speech: “Dr Brash’s
tactics must be to win as much of the Winston Peters vote as he can without
doing a Bill English and losing National’s core vote in the process. This is
where some ‘dog whistling’ could come in handy”. Hager comments: “Dog whistle
politics is the term associated with Australian Prime Minister John Howard and
his appeal to so-called blue collar voters [the ‘Mike Moore’ crowd] on
anti-immigration and race issues. It refers to political actions and rhetoric
that, while superficially appearing reasonable, contain language, claims and
racial stereotypes designed to excite the prejudices of certain target audiences,
in the same way that dogs will react to a high-pitched whistle that humans
cannot hear”.
The Aussie PR outfit which advised Howard was
called in. It seems that they’d also been hired by the UK Conservatives to
whistle up the doggy issues there. These are, in order of importance:
immigration, abortion, taxes, hospital waiting lists and gypsies. One of the
more disturbing of Hager’s revelations is not in itself the existence of such
cynics. We assumed such types are active. It’s the apparently direct influence
they exerted over the doctored Doctor. It’s worth looking at a subsequent Brash
speech:
“There is resentment that too many immigrants,
and especially those who arrive as refugees, go straight onto a benefit, and
live for years at the expense of the hard-working NZ taxpayer... Nor, frankly,
do we want immigrants who come with no intention of becoming New Zealanders or
adopting NZ values. We do not want those who insist on their right to spit in
the street; or demand the right to practice female circumcision; or believe
that NZ would be a better place if gays and adulterers were stoned”.
In
It’s PC To Bash PC
Hager has an excellent passage on political
correctness (PC), which has surely done its dash. But, however tired the
polemics around PC, it’s a phrase central to the ministrations of National’s
spin doctors, who like nothing more than PC-bashing. As Hager points out,
“[t]he political objective was to delegitimise Leftwing social justice ideas
and reverse the polarity of blue collar politics from Left to Right”. The road
to a “Mike Moore” vote is signposted with ridicule of PC, which is identified
in the public mind with Leftist ideology. With a large part of the world to
provide them, it’s not hard to find examples of the silliness that the spin
doctors seek.
PC’s been around in different guises for some
time. Muldoonist (“Mike Moore”) NZ resolved doubt or painted over cracks by
opposing whatever seemed “trendy Lefty”. Then we were invited to scorn the
“chardonnay socialists”, as though we should be infuriated by the very idea
that within one person might be tendencies to both advocate social justice and
enjoy a glass of wine. Hager points to a further, crucial, reason why there has
been so much fuss about PC. He suggests that accusations of political
correctness act as a diversion from real issues and as a screen from examining
real privilege. It is not trendy Lefties who set the agenda; it’s the corporate
elite who own the media and advertising firms. It’s in their interests that
people worry themselves about PC trivia as that means they avoid scrutiny. As
long as enough of the public blame trendy Lefties for what ails them they won’t
notice that the trends are in fact set by the corporates and their mates.
For National’s spinners, PC serves yet another
purpose. It allows the party “to avoid confronting a deep and fundamental rift
within its own ranks”. Hager reminds us that National has always played host to
contending interests, united by a common need to retard progressive ideals. In
its recent form, says Hager, the broad division has been expressed by a Winston
Peters-Philip Burdon wing concerned about social stability, and the Ruth
Richardson market purists. The former are traditional conservatives; the latter
are Tories in a hurry, who ACT up.
This history is reason enough for John Key to
forget where he was when the Springboks toured. It’s an unresolved history, for
which anti-PC rhetoric serves to hide the division in a common derision of
egalitarian ideas. Hager’s analysis here is sharp. It’s not easy to speak for both strands of
Nationalist opinion. Consider Mike Moore, the (Labour) man himself.
National’s spin doctors are adept at “framing”,
which Hager explains as the art of “setting a notion not about the issues
people think about but giving them a WAY to think about the issues in question,
that is giving them a model or a structure or equation”. Hager shows that the
PR hacks define issues and create the language with which they come to be
discussed. Those trendy Lefties and their PC children have no such reach. They
merely spin versions of what results.
During Brash’s tenure the framing was to do
with talk of tax cuts, and then, having placed cuts on the national agenda,
with equating tax cuts with incentives. The implication has been that cuts were
self-evidently good. It’s worked. The other aspect was the relentless nasty
insinuations about irrelevant and improbable aspects of Helen Clark’s habits,
framed to marry personal abuse with a bit of dog whistling. Was the PM too busy
catering to “other people” and not “working families”? Following their work in
the
From Brash’s Orewa
Gambit
Notoriously, the Brash version was the Orewa
gambit, a pitch to the perceived middle by whistling the dogs to hunt local
aliens. One PR hack wanted an “inoculating” Brash appeal to Maori. Don would
host a meaningless hui on the steps of Parliament, an event that would be
replete with photo ops and self-satisfaction and a waste of time and money.
This gimmick was inspired by an invitation for a heart-to-heart from George
Bush to a group of Muslim clerics. Muslims in
In a study of the use and misuse of language it
is reassuring that Hager writes with a clarity that is rare in NZ political
journalism. His definition of neo-liberalism is spot on. It is, he writes, “the
process whereby power, resources and responsibility for the provision of services
are transferred from the public to the private sector; from the state to
markets”. Hager goes on discuss a British philosopher, John Gray, a significant
source in that in the heady 80s. Gray was regarded as one of the most coherent
advocates of neo-liberalism. He now disavows it:
“[F]ree markets are creatures of State power,
and persist only so long as the State is able to prevent human needs for
security and the control of economic risk from finding political expression...
The free market is most recklessly short termist in its demolition of the
virtues it once relied upon. These virtues - saving, civic pride,
respectability, ‘family values’ - are now profitless museum pieces”. In other
words, neo-liberalism erodes conservatism. Hager confirms this, adding a
further complication by pointing out that “the conservative emphasis on social
cohesion and stability has more in common with the Left’s emphasis on social
justice than with the free market destructiveness of all these values”.
Hager reveals that at least one of the 80s’
Rogernomes was frustrated by the namby-pamby spinning. Roderick Deane
remembered that National was supposed to be “halting and reversing ... the
pervasive regulation” of the economy. Deane was singing his old, familiar tune.
In this context the politics to do with the Resource Management Act (RMA),
where developers and the rest of society can collide, has been a favoured
target. The RMA can provide the opportunity for propaganda that combines the
economic-freedom and the anti-PC, anti-nanny-state modes of Nationalist spin.
Hager prefers facts. These show that by any
standards NZ is lightly regulated. Building consents take less time to get than
in most comparable jurisdictions. Deane would know this, but Deane also knows
that there are such things as inconvenient truths. “In this context”, Deane
elaborated, “I use a broad-based definition of regulation to effectively
encompass government ownership of commercial assets”. Deane, an architect of
Rogernomics, has always been a most overt neo-liberal. Unlike the PR types, he
is prepared to say that he sees politics as a facade behind which you do
whatever you can and say whatever is expedient to help your side win. Abuse
language. It’s all win-lose, zero-sum
stuff.
Interestingly, Deane wrote this in a letter in
March, 2005, to John Key, with a copy to Brash. From clues like this we can
make the likely inference that Key had been the preferred option of the
neo-liberal fundamentalists for some time before Brash’s resignation. Brash,
who might have found Deane the most sympathetic of his legion of courtiers,
sniffed that he was not in politics to be “Helen Lite”. Deane and Brash made
the same mistake. They did not have an appetite for “swallowing dead rats.
Swallowing dead rats is like taking your medicine was in the days when medicine
had to taste bad to be effective. It’s the act of pretending to go along with
some trendy Lefty, welfarist, civil-servant, solo-mother, Treaty, PC drivel so
that you get into power. There you can unleash your own neo-liberal agenda.
Dead rat swallowing is one of the “inoculations” against telling the truth. For
more on Roderick Deane, see Jeremy’s review of Michael and Judith Bassett’s
biography of him in Watchdog 113, December 2006, which can be read online at http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/13/11.htm. Ed.
Just as Helen Clark used to give the impression
of having modelled herself on Tony Blair, so has Key apparently been influenced
by the likes of David Cameron, the UK Tory leader, and Stephen Harper, the Tory
Canadian PM. They’re all trying to appear moderate and reassuring and, most
importantly, non-ideological. In office with a majority some of them might be,
but who knows which ones? Early in his Presidency - it seems distant now –
Bush’s speech writer had him prattling about something called “compassionate
conservatism”.
To Key’s Bryndwr State
House Gambit
Hager’s expose might have brought forward the
Key takeover by as much as a year. The spinners would have hoped that his
present honeymoon could have been delayed. That he is largely absent from
Hager’s book is not significant. Key was not the leader. No-one was inviting
him to a fundraising lunch and serving him dead rats. The Bryndwr gambit, Key’s
“Orewa”, has the potential to exploit all the tricks that Hager has exposed,
but Key’s unlikely to go canine. He’ll go for the log cabin to the White House
look, an American classic since Abe Lincoln’s days. That would be presidential.
Key seems to be looking past the Mike Moore People (whom he might well hope to
have snared) to urban liberals. Nats like to throw around concepts like
“devolution” and “self-management”, sometimes in order to appeal to notions of
individual responsibility, but always in order to erode the ethic of universal
public entitlement. We might expect Key to appeal to neo-liberals within
Maoridom, not least those within the Maori Party, by tossing in some “property
rights” and well-phrased suggestions about how to make the Treaty “relevant for
the 21st Century”..
It can be said that Key’s childhood was not one
of real deprivation. He grew up in a culture of relative equality in a
full-employment economy. His local school, Burnside High, where he gave his
speech, was, then and now, respected. There wasn’t much under-class about
living in a State house a couple of blocks from a Decile Nine high school. But
Key would say that all you can do is play the hand you’ve been dealt. As
Brash’s would have been, a Key government would be a contest between what he’ll
find easy to manage and what he’ll be able to get away with. National’s
prospects depend in large part on what policy details emerge before the next
election. The risk for National is that Key won’t be able to be vague enough
for long enough. After years of fine dining he might gag at dead rats.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing that NZ has
not evolved a strong tradition of political writing, but to say that Nicky
Hager is our best political journalist is not faint praise. This is a fine
book. Hager is of course a thorough and resourceful researcher. He’s also a
good writer with a clear narrative line and a subtle intelligence. “The Hollow
Men” is the best guide to early 21st Century NZ politics that we’re likely to
see.
|
|
|
|