Who’d have thought a cup of tea would get Labour so comprehensively out of the news?
The media were plastered to the cafe window like a stick-on Garfield.
I blame the tea. JB Priestley once warned that the friendly amber liquid was the East’s revenge on the colonial West – the secretly enfeebling “yellow peril” it had introduced to our diet. The trouble with tea is, unless you treat it as a solitary vice, it’s impossible not to gossip as you drink it.
There are tea-monitors who have high-mindedly averred that John Key and John Banks should have restrained their conversation, knowing the media was plastered to the cafe window, like those ghastly stick-on Garfields, just metres away from their tea ceremony.
But as Billy Connolly said, “Never trust a man who, left alone in a room with a tea cosy, doesn’t try it on.”
Of course the two Johns were going to have a wee gossip about Don Brash and Winston Peters when they thought no one was listening. Both are immediately and immensely troubling to National and Banks. Neither Key nor Banks look forward to working with the stubborn and electorally inept Don, and the sudden resurgence of Winston in the polls stirs up ancient ley lines of mischief for the whole political landscape. What else would they discuss?
And yes, as the high-minded have also pointed out, the whole tea party was a stunt and as such should not enjoy the privilege of privacy. But it was a stunt in which the media were equally complicit. For weeks, Key faced a clamour: when are you going to have a cuppa with Banks? We love such occasions because, transparently manipulative and hokey as they are, they provide a bit of theatre and humour in an otherwise all walky-and-talky campaign.
We positively demanded the cafe stunt because we enjoyed it so much the last couple of elections. Then, of course, we got to criticise the whole thing as a stunt and a rort, afterwards. It’s win-win for the media – the outcome not so clear this time for the tea boys.
The point of the exercise was to encourage Epsom voters to elect Banks and thus sneak Act in under a much-despised MMP wrinkle.
Trouble is, thanks to the actions of a freelance cameraman who bizarrely “accidentally” left his radio mike muffled in its bag on the cafe table, thus recording the pair’s conversation, hardly anyone is talking about the MMP rort any more. Hardly anyone is talking about party policy any more. The campaign has devolved into an orgy of high-horsery on all sides. The principle of privacy versus the public interest in hypocrisy in politicians versus the ethics of the media.
Key massively over-egged the drama by going to the police. Far from shutting the thing down, this heavy-handed approach has led to such craftily oblique questioning from those in the know about what’s on the tape that by now it’s old news. The pair apparently discussed Brash, fuelling speculation that his leadership will soon expire, and that National will try to jolly him from under its feet by giving him an overseas posting (which, by the way, would be such an obnoxious act in the eyes of voters that National had better not try it). And Key, in canvassing Winston’s horizons, is understood to have made a flip and disparaging remark about the senior nature of New Zealand First’s demographic.
There’s no doubt this could be damaging. Voters hate covert deal-making, and if National is planning to assist in or cheerlead the deposing of another party’s leader five minutes after that person is elected, that’s not going to look much like cricket. (Although given how Brash got the job in the first place, few will reach for their hankies.)
However, other parties will have to self-audit before they chuck the first rock in this direction. Labour, for instance, bundled several of its own faithful and fully entitled list candidates out of the way when a list seat vacancy came up last year, because it wanted Louisa Wall to have it. NZ First’s list-ranking process has been even more opaque. Other parties are guilty of the same sort of ducking and weaving as National – legal under MMP, but somewhat noisome to the lay person.
Disparaging the elderly will be harder to shrug off. While NZ First supporters tend toward the grey, any comment that smacks of ageism is a colossal faux pas. Having turned 50 this year, baby boomer Key should know better. It will be seen as a character issue – a glib readiness to belittle a group, especially one that sees itself as downtrodden and disempowered. Tea, and lack of sympathy. Not quite the caring everybody’s mate John of the popular imagination.
There is, however, a curious backhanded feature to this solecism: considering how grave an affront he believes has been delivered to his loyal supporters, Winston looks wildly and inappropriately euphoric.
It’s possible the longest-burning grievance to emerge from this fiasco is that between the Government and the Sunday newspapers. The reason Key responded so heavy-handedly is because there’s quite a history of Sunday journalists using controversial tactics to get stories, and not just on politicians. Sometimes these tactics have been unpleasant and overbearing rather than unethical.
But ill will has grown steadily in the Beehive – and in Key, to witness his terse walkout on tea-harping media. But on balance, it’s always ugly practice when governments go to war with the press. Neither can claim victory.
Another big Ugly in politics is a vandalised election billboard – although, in fairness, the Green-allied group who did a dead-of-night guerrilla raid on 700 of National’s hoardings made a beautiful job of it. Elegantly overstickering with pointy new slogans rather than adding rude bits or hacking candidates’ eyes out raised the “art” of vandalism to a new, slightly less grubby low.
But, to put a nosebag on one’s high horse for a minute, these people didn’t invent campaign vandalism.
Theirs was a daring act of mostly youthful exuberance to express passionate concern about the environment and social justice. No one can doubt their sincerity, and although they were heedless of the damage they could cause the Green Party, their organiser believes the party is far too conservative and inert, and needed a wake-up anyway.
But the scale of this action should give us all pause. This was not just a ragtag and bobtail group causing trouble, but an extremely populous exercise. And it is not, as critics of the allied Occupy movement complain, incoherent. Although the current ruling generations may now eschew the direct action they favoured when they were young, the younger cohort may not “grow out of it”.
For now, the association may hurt the Greens. Its carefully non-horse-frightening, disciplined approach, which has finally given the party a purchase on the mainstream electorate, may suffer if voters perceive a wild-eyed anarchist tail comes with the Green deal.
It’s worth pondering how much more constructively the tea and billboard scandals would have played had both perpetrators declared straight afterwards: “Yes, I did it, because I wanted to expose hypocrisy/to put mining and social justice on the agenda.” The cameraman’s claim that he didn’t take the cover off his mike because he didn’t have time rather discounts any moral authority the recording content may have furnished for his subsequent attempt to have it published. Why would a worker who lives by selling clear footage and sound even bother to obtain muffled audio?
And the sticker guerrillas, in waiting to be outed rather than fronting up, missed an opportunity also to front-foot the debate they wished to have. In both cases, the important issues have been clouded by polarising and avoidable ethical debate.
If any of those involved in these fiascos wish for a left-centred Government, they should also be congratulating themselves for wiping Labour, and Green policy, right off the agenda for more than a week. Yet again, they’ve ensured the agenda was dominated by Key. Well done.
As for National and Act, Henry Fielding, the author of Tom Jones, who knew a thing about monkey business, once said that love and scandal are the best sweetener for tea. As it’s turned out, the former is an artificial sweetener for this pair, and the latter has been spooned on far too lavishly.