Politics
Urine, cats and tennis balls
by Jane Clifton
Nothing, it seems, has much effect on Labour’s poll rating.
It may be time to reappraise the dimmer bulbs of the Labour caucus. Some Labour MPs who we thought were gormless-looking and had nothing to say for themselves may simply have had tennis balls lodged in their gobs all these years, courtesy of an iron-willed Chief Whip. We’re not allowed inside party caucus meetings, so whether David Benson-Pope ever outgrew his habits – alleged by former students to have included throwing things at recalcitrants, biffing them about the ears and gaffer-taping them to furniture – we can never be sure.
What we can be sure of is that even if all this is true about Benson-Pope, and more, and even if most right-thinking people frown on that sort of discipline, and even if there is more hideousity to be disclosed about the nasty little ways of our governing party’s elite … nothing seems to have much effect on Labour’s poll rating.
We can dislike and disapprove of these people. They can leave a trail of urine-soaked corridors, neglected, virus-spreading pets, wronged police chiefs and emotionally scarred school children behind them. But if we think, on balance, they would still be the best mob to run the country, they’ll still get our vote.
You would have to rate the voters of this country as remarkably tolerant. Personal vileness is one thing. But this government has also been guilty of operational incompetence on a massive scale. Ordinarily, something as shocking as the failure of the police emergency system, and of the secondary school exams system, would have meant a certain election victory for the Opposition, however cabbage-looking.
But we remain barely shaken in our view that Labour is competent, even faced with that compelling evidence to the contrary. We will even put up with the fact that George Hawkins and his police commissioner swore black and blue that the 111 system was just fine – till finally an independent report proved them to have been talking rubbish. And the fact that Benson-Pope was adamantine, to the point of becoming choleric with interviewers, that the NCEA system was working beautifully, and people had no right to snivel about the lurches in pass-fail demographics – till multiple inquiries and a couple of bureaucratic resignations rather proved the point that he, too, had been talking piffle.
Are we finally in the realms of what the academics call real politik? The cynical acceptance that incompetence, dishonesty and politics go together like bacon, lettuce and tomatoes? Expect governments to get things badly wrong, expect to be stonewalled and flat-out lied to by ministers when they go wrong, and expect to have to just put up with it because, on balance of probability, the other side would get other things just as wrong, if not wronger?
Clearly we’re not quite there yet, because we are still sweating the small stuff, to wit Benson-Pope and the heroic versatility of the humble tennis ball.
Admittedly, the past is another country, our much younger selves embarrassingly naff individuals we prefer to disown. And having grown up in the paddiwhacks-and-go-to-your-room era, we might now think our parents’ approach to discipline wrong – but do we think them to have been knowingly bad people?
However, it’s in the details that some past actions are irreducibly telling of character. Ruthless as we may be, rating competence above character as a vote-mobiliser, we do still care about it. A person capable of stuffing a tennis ball into a young teen’s mouth and taping his hands to a desk is simply beyond the pale. It’s in that same continuum of discipline that ends at Abu Ghraib. If it’s proved that he did this, his political career is over. It’s behaviour carried to a degree that would be hard to explain away.
As John Tamihere found out recently, abandoning the family pets is simply not something a nice person is generally held to do in this country. There can be no excuses. For Donna Awatere-Huata, claiming to have lost an heroic quantity of weight by massive lifestyle change, without admitting to a secret stomach-stapling that made the lifestyle change unavoidable, was infinitely more damaging than financial malfeasance with public money. It was knowingly dishonest. As Clark discovered, passing off someone else’s artwork as your own is generally held to be a low and embarrassing act of vanity.
This allegation is worse than dishonesty or vanity. It’s one of making a child in one’s charge suffer, physically and emotionally, by a deliberate act.
There are two let-outs in all this for a seriously errant politician, but you have to have fulfil both of them to get off.
One: that the awful lapse happened so far in the past that it’s another country. For example, say Tamihere had abandoned his pets years ago when he was a feckless student, rather than just last month when he was a sanctimoni-ous Maori leader preaching parental responsibility.
And two: you have to own up to the lapse, and be measurably sorry. As in, Tamihere making abject public statements about personal responsibility extending to animals, and volunteering to clean out litter trays at the SPCA for the next 10 years. Which he didn’t.
For Benson-Pope, only one of these let-outs is in play. It was a long time ago. Sure, during his teaching years, corporal punishment was still quite routine and acceptable.
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