Editorial
The road ahead
by Tim Watkin
With this issue arriving in your mailbox or being on sale on election day, I can’t say anything about the election, the parties or their policies. It’s your time now – to vote, and learn at last what the majority wants from the next three years. After weeks – and weeks – the campaigning and debating and scrutinising is at last over. Even if you’re reading this on Saturday, before the result is known, the campaign is safely behind us. And won’t we all breathe a sigh of relief? Our fuming and fretting over the past two months – and the exhaustion many of us feel – is yet another good reason for New Zealand to move to a four-term electoral cycle. But that’s another editorial.
For now, it’s a case of “the election is dead, long live the election”. The campaigning is over, but politics will remain at the forefront of discussion and the scrutiny will continue. There will be some analysis of where strategies and leaders went wrong, but mostly we will turn our thoughts to the next three years.
Throughout the campaign, the popularity of the two main parties swayed like ambling elephants. That offered little comfort for the voter who likes to vote strategically (or, indeed, to follow the crowd), but it gave us all a degree of freedom to vote purely on the basis of what we believe. In an era when polls shape politics almost as much as they describe them, that’s remarkably healthy.
The same purity applied to the choice on offer. For all the dirt thrown in recent weeks, the choice at the end of the campaign was crisp and clean – intervention or laissez-faire, redistribution of wealth or tax cuts. The choice was the starkest in 20 years.
Because of that, whoever takes control of the Treasury benches this week will bear a heavier-than-usual weight of responsibility. They will have almost certainly negotiated a coalition that carries just a squeak over 50 percent support and they will be governing a divided electorate. Like All Black supporters after World Cups, around 40 percent of New Zealanders will be, well, grumpy this week. They will be looking at a government whose policies and values they find abhorrent. This is what the commentators have been calling a “volatile” electorate, and that volatility won’t disappear just because the votes have been cast.
After George Bush’s re-election last year, many of the same concerns were raised. Much comment urged him to heal the wounds inflicted in the campaign and heed the disunity of the country. At first, he acknowledged “a new opportun-ity to reach out to the whole nation”, but then he carried on with his less-than-centrist agenda as if he had won in a landslide. A government tempted to follow a similar path here need only look at his plummeting support levels now, and learn.
The comparison, of course, is imperfect: we’re arguably more used to political division than Americans are, and we’re not burdened by the national fragility the US has felt since September 11. We can handle robust disagreement without feeling that our country’s going down the drain.
Still, the government shouldn’t get carried away with its win. Whoever ends up in power would be wise to respond to a restrained mandate with commensurate restraint. They should recognise that, to take the country with them, their MPs and agenda will have to reach beyond their core base. That will mean some listening, some clear vision and some sensible explanation. Some healing time will be required.
What issues will define this next electoral term? There are always unknowns just over the horizon, but it seems to me that the true test of this government will be how it deals with two main issues: the slowing economy and race relations.
New Zealand’s evolution into a high-value, high-wage, sustainable economy is vital. The world economy – especially, as this week’s cover story shows, the price of petrol – will continue to buffet us, and whoever governs will have to wrestle with a complex mix of economic priorities.
The relationship between Maori and Pakeha will also be crucial. The political debate from all sides has destabilised our race relations and has shown that, as a nation, we’re still confused about our history and, as a result, about our future.
The good news is that left or right, Maori or Pakeha, there’s more that unites us as New Zealanders than divides us. A wise government, rather than pushing an ideology, will build on that consensus.
