The two main parties seem to be lacking a major strategy: how to grow the economy.
Elizabeth Warren, photo/Getty Images
We have a national problem, which I saw aptly depicted on a birthday card recently. A bulldog is crashed out on the floor, basted with streamers and multicoloured icing and crumbs, with the most ecstatic smile on its great chops; the message: “This is what cake brain looks like.” We’ve all got a serious case of cake brain. Depending, of course, on the outcome this weekend, we will all be having a big party going on in our heads well into next week, and potentially next month.
All but the flintiest of us have been high-fiving, face-painting, wearing silly costumes and waltzing the cat around the living room more or less continuously for six weeks. No one would begrudge us given the ghastliness governing the rest of our lives. But it’s very hard to apply cake brain to serious political issues and get a sensible result.
Acknowledging that, with the election campaign officially under way in a week’s time, someone should at least pretend to be interested in it, the major parties have rattled dags with a bit of new manifesto fodder.
That the best they could come up with was a passive-aggressive piggy-bank push, and a plan to hobbit-proof our workforce suggests they really shouldn’t have bothered.
If National thinks a desultory discussion about the future of National Super – in which nobody is allowed to talk about the actual future of National Super because the Prime Minister has promised not to touch it – is the way to ease us out of rugby dotage, it’s delusional. And if Labour thinks the way to cut through the seemingly snake-charmed daze with which many voters regard John Key is to put on its grumpiest face and extoll compulsory collective agreements, it has also been at the marzipan for rather too long.
Nagging us about savings, and guilting us out about the low paid is hardly constructive, inspirational politics. Both parties may be out of ideas about the vital question of how to get the economy growing. But they could at least come up with some more edifying turns of rhetoric. Heaven forfend there should be any original thinking, but do these parties’ strategists never, ahem, have a browse around the internet?
She may or may not have the rocket power to take on President Obama, or offer any better programmes to fix things, but United States Democratic hopeful Elizabeth Warren is managing to single-handedly reframe the debate around the global credit crisis towards a left-wing perspective, which Labour here might (if only it could stow its political baggage) learn a lot from.
She isn’t simply advocating soaking the rich to uplift the poor, but running a line that ropes all income levels into the problems and solutions together. In her most famous YouTube hit, she commends a notional business person who has built a factory and provided precious jobs, but reminds him that he didn’t do it alone; every taxpayer paid to educate him and his workforce, provide the infrastructure through which he moves and sells his goods, and the emergency services that protect his factory’s safety.
In another speech, she avoids the finger-wagging “greedy borrowers!” shtick in deconstructing how the American middle class has come to be an endangered species. She argues government spending on wars, ill-targeted tax relief and inefficient health schemes has forced what were once easily borne collective costs for things like health and education to be foisted onto middle-class folk as individuals. The overall price of ascending to or staying in the middle class has become prohibitive.
Her subtext is, it’s no wonder people over-borrowed, as given all the new pressures on each family, people have only behaved in a way that seemed in their best interests at the time. Her concentration on middle-class plight neatly encompasses the low paid, because her key assumption is that most Americans are prepared to strive to get into the middle class. Warren is talking “we” and “us” – not “you” and “them”.
Contrast that with Labour, which still speaks of middle-class earners as though they were wealthy and wilfully withholding food from the mouths of the poor. In its latest industrial policy, the overall tone still assumes most employers are filthy stinking rich, and have a default setting of grinding the faces of the poor, rather than the more common reality: small businesses who have to work their socks off for ever-slenderer margins of viability.
That’s not to say Labour’s tax and industrial policies are wrong, or wouldn’t work. But if it continues to do such a poor sales job, it’ll be a long time before it gets voter sign-up. Politicians have to recruit voters to an inclusive, positive wider vision if they’re asking them – or as more often telling them – they must make sacrifices.
National in turn could learn a lot from Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard about how to frame tough talk about welfare and work. Despite coming from the furthest left of Labor politics, she typically tells Australia’s low paid and jobless that welfare comes in an indivisible partnership with industry and effort. “All Australians must pull their weight,” she says – a clear message that some are not. It must be admitted that thanks mostly to her wildly unpopular climate-change efforts, she’s close to being dog tucker. But her way of framing the welfare-work dynamic makes our ministers’ seem like evasive waffle.
Calling hers “the party of work, not welfare”, she prefaced the last Budget saying, “The old way we saw a victim, we saw an excuse. Some today see a problem, they offer blame. I see a person – a person who can work. I offer only opportunity. I ask only responsibility in turn.” Gillard puts equal emphasis on the unfairness of the jobless being excluded from opportunity, and the unfairness of taxpayers supporting someone who could work but doesn’t. Somehow, our leaders either pussyfoot around the facts when they’re trying to toughen up in the hip-pocket zone, or they revert to old class-war templates.
Although there’s always a certain political mileage in blaming and demonising, popular leadership is only sustainable for the longer term when it strongly evokes inclusiveness. Perhaps the most vivid example was the first tranche of Rogernomics in the 80s. Voters signed up to a second term of tough love, because they believed it was something “we” were all doing together. By the end of that term, it had become something being “done to us”, from which only a few rich buggers seemed to be benefiting. Despite voters’ loss of faith, none of those reforms has ever been overturned or seriously questioned in the mainstream of politics. Yet still, what voters think of as Rogernomics is about as popular with them as Scientology.
Still, on present indications, both parties will auto-pilot themselves through this campaign, pressing all the old buttons and not thinking too deeply about why they’re not getting the trusty old response, or whether, when they are, that response is quite what it seems. Long term this is possibly more dangerous for National, which should resist at all costs taking its enduring poll lead as a sign of profound approval. Many voters are either distracted – rugby, spring, money worries – or feel so disempowered by global gloom they’re simply taking the line of least resistance this election.
A specially wearying example of auto-pilot was Act’s Epsom candidate John Banks crowing that National was in electoral trouble for its handling of the Rena oil spill. Cue the old Monty Python sketch: “Nudge-nudge, wink-wink, say no more, Squire. Pwhah! Eh? Phwah!” Banks expects National voters to again throw their keys in an ashtray and commit temporary adultery with Act to give National a few more votes in Parliament. Despite the cake-brain epidemic, Epsom seems to be keeping its knickers on. Both polls and anecdotage suggest those voters are resisting that strategy, because even though many might like National to have more seats at its command, they don’t believe Act deserves support.
And we are talking here about the ultimate cake-brain party, whose erstwhile deputy leader continued a campaign speech without missing a beat while a lamington was squashed onto his head by a protester. John Boscawen may now have retired, but he serves us useful visualisation therapy post-RWC: when the cake is mashed, the party really is over.