We like John, but he should leave his mates at home.
There is probably no more reliable maxim for politics – or for life in general – than Woody Allen’s gallows observation: “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” Religious or not, there can be few New Zealanders who don’t now wonder whether this country is facing some sort of Old Testament obstacle course. The global credit crisis might have been enough to be going on with, but fate saw fit to add the devastation of Canterbury and the Pike River mine tragedy. Now we have a horrific marine contamination with unknowably awful environmental and commercial consequences for our busiest port town.
All this on top of international credit downgrades and a suddenly much nastier deficit outlook, which will make all of the above that much more difficult to fix without further jeopardising our economic viability.
If you were John Key, wouldn’t you now think twice about asking aloud for a second term as prime minister? Key was uncharacteristically twitchy and furtive this week, for once succumbing to the pressure of awkward questions about whether this Government is up to all these challenges. This week’s is the third emergency to have caught both officialdom and political leadership floundering.
The only political consolation for him is that too few voters seem able to imagine a Labour-led administration doing any better.
However, we have seen some of the gloss come off Key’s what-me-worry persona, through two silly-ass incidents that suggest unattractive hubris.
In the first, when he made a cut-throat gesture at Labour and said it was “all on you” when a disturbed beneficiary tried to jump into Parliament’s debating chamber, he came off as tastelessly mocking.
His explanation, that he was highlighting the folly of Labour’s criticism of his profuse police guard, only went part-way towards excusing the off tone of the exchange.
The second gaffe, when he had to backtrack after saying Standard & Poor’s had said it would go easier on New Zealand’s credit rating if National was re-elected, was an example of his bad habit of – excuse the vulgarity, but there’s no other term for it – bullshitting. Key can be just a bit too loose and glib. Sure, we all put a gloss on things at times, and gild lilies. But the internal governing rod most of us have that rations our BS seems to malfunction with Key at times, especially if he’s over-stimulated. No wonder he was so heavily scripted for his Letterman appearance. You can easily imagine him getting carried away. “Yeah, I was brought up by gypsies. Well, it was a pack o’ wolves, ack-shully …”
In politics, you don’t just get points off for looseness. The media and Opposition treat it as straight-out mendacity. At a time when Bay of Plenty cormorants and penguins are turning all black for other than patriotic reasons, it might seem rather petty to devote energy to the fact that someone said something to Key about what Standard & Poor’s said to them, and that Key cut out the middle-man in relaying the comment to the media, upon which S&P said they never said the thing anyway – which of course it would, because it was embarrassing to have had it said that it had said that. But as Helen Clark found out through the small expedient of submitting someone else’s rather dreadful artwork for a charity auction because she was too busy to do a daub herself, often it’s the petty lapses that voters find the most telling.
Key’s store of trustworthiness is now ever so slightly depleted. With the alarming questions piling up about the timeliness and adequacy of responses to the Rena grounding, and about how adeptly the Treasury wallahs are grappling with our fiscal emergency, he cannot afford to be “pretty relaxed about that!” any more.
To paraphrase the drinking ads, John’s voter mates are probably going to invite him back as PM for a second go, but they’re less keen on seeing his mates, Smirking John, Glib John, Wise-Cracking John and Making Up Stuff As He Goes Along John. Solid and Empathetic in a Crisis John needs to shut the others in a cupboard for a while.
It’s not as though Parliament has been without a selection of dodgy characters. Notwithstanding all the external turbulence it had to deal with, the 49th Parliament managed to generate its own gratuitous horror shows, pretty much continuously. If you tote up the individual MPs who disgraced themselves, sometimes to the point of having to quit, you quickly get to 10%. One out of 10 of our MPs was a twerp, or worse. Their sins make unlovely prose. Richard Worth: a randy old goat who misled his leader.
Rodney Hide: denounced perks, then wallowed in them. Chris Carter: troughed unabashedly, betrayed his leader and cried gay persecution. Pansy Wong: failed to separate family and state business. Heather Roy: blatantly undermined her leader, pretended to reconcile with him, then burst into tears. David Garrett: once stole a dead baby’s identity for a lark. Phil Heatley: resigned over credit card abuse which he was later found not to have committed. Shane Jones: pervey videos. Mita Ririnui: bargain golf clubs. Bill English: perceived double-dipping in Dipton. Sir Roger Douglas: despite being the oracle of personal fiscal self-actualisation, went junketing. Hillary Calvert: modelled for a brothel ad and made sundry chooky remarks; Hone Harawira … where would you even start?
But then, Parliament is a parallel universe, in which a level of pretending that would defeat the most imaginative five-year-old is demanded of MPs, stopping only just short of imaginary friends.
For instance, under urgency, the clock is stopped, and Parliament pretends the date stays the same for however many days the session drags on – prompting some in the public gallery who notice the wrong date on the chamber’s wall calendar to observe that the silly buggers don’t even know what day it is.
Another pretence is that “an honourable member’s word is always accepted”. Thus in Parliament, as nowhere else, no one may ever say a politician has lied, because it is held that politicians never lie. Same goes for being hypocritical, for being influenced by outside forces and even for having a physical manifestation. In Parliament, you are not allowed to point out that an MP is absent. Even if, plainly, they are not there, and you have even looked under their desk.
One of the weirder conventions – that only the things that the Speaker chooses to notice may be seen by the public – was breached last week, when the New Zealand Herald published a shot of the man who tried to jump from the gallery. The conceit here is that the Speaker is the public’s eyes, and only what he chooses officially to notice may be broadcast. Officially, he never notices anything except the MP on his or her feet speaking. He does not notice anything happening in the public gallery, ever.
The ostensible purpose of this is to preserve the supremacy of parliamentary business over any naughty diversions members of the public, or even MPs themselves, might wish to attempt. A man once abseiled into the chamber, and a group of women stripped to their bras in the gallery, but officially, this did not happen. Nor are we allowed to show MPs dozing, picking their noses or having giggle sessions.
Speaker Lockwood Smith’s unprecedentedly harsh 10-day accreditation ban on the paper’s gallery staff has been softened, so they can still do their jobs. But the issue leaves a bad taste. We cannot fully inform voters about how our MPs behave in the House, or what threats there may be to their security – both undoubted matters of public interest.
Other Parliaments, including Uttar Pradesh and Taiwan, allow filming of out-and-out brawls among their MPs. This is a regular thing in South Korea’s Parliament, where they even had hand-to-hand combat over school dinners.
Smith’s flexibility and even-handedness have raised the tone of Parliament. But having landed himself in what is effectively a news censorship row, he might reflect on whether these “pretending” rules really protect the integrity of Parliament or, by their absurdity, make it look ridiculous.
For which little enough extra help is generally needed.