Politics
Outrageous weirdness
by Jane Clifton
Heck, put a pinny on me and call me Miss Alice, too.
Sometimes you have to stop and ask: what kind of country are we running here? A prominent male lawyer appears before the High Court in a frilly pinny, demanding to be referred to as “Miss Alice”. And a lot of people complied. The state television broadcaster, legally committed to a charter that mandates high-quality information programming, is eviscerating its newsroom.
The state radio broadcaster spends hundreds of thousands renaming and branding itself as “sounds like us” authentic – and reinforces this with a promo in which the narrator says “everythink”.
Police chiefs and Corrections officials squabble in public over whose fault it was that a bailed killer was let out to kill and terrorise more innocent strangers, and even injure a prison guard on his way back into pokie. Rather than accept responsibility, they decide to … hold an inquiry.
What would a visitor from abroad think of us, based on this?
And sure enough, in politics, things are just as weird – though, at least temporarily, rather more endearing.
The Foreign Affairs Minister makes a speech chastising us citizens for being “rude and unstylish” enough to be openly critical of American and Australian foreign policy – then admits he’s on very heavy pain medication and needs to go home straight afterwards and lie down.
And the conservative party leader makes a speech in which fiscal and economic orthodoxy gets not a single mention. No word on tax cuts, the OECD, GDP, productivity or superannuation savings. Instead, he produces a social policy vision that appears to be based on TV1’s hits, Jamie Oliver’s School Lunches and Ian Wright’s Unfit Kids.
Heck, put a pinny on me and call me Miss Alice, too.
Still, some of the weirdness is quite bracing. Sure, the bureaucrats and SOE bosses need their heads smacked together as usual, but the politicians are in intriguing new form. How nice not to be hectored about how many times we lag behind Turkey in the OECD tables at the start of a year.
National leader John Key’s speech was innocent of hard policy, but that’s not what State of the Nation speeches are for. They’re scene-setters, definers of the year’s battlefields. It’s plain what Key is up to: attacking Labour on its own policy heartland, the new social order of which it always says it is so proud; daring it to defend the status quo of routine bashings and drug- and gang-fuelled terror in suburbia, truancy, malnutrition. National must supply its policy remedies, and pretty quickly. But it’s tactically ahead, in that on so many fronts, Labour’s policies have failed to improve the miserable lot of the poor.
Sure, you can argue that National exacer-bated the misery in the 90s. But then, Labour created the misery in the 80s. (Okay, it did so in an effort to fix the misery-aversion policies of National in the 70s, but hell, most of today’s misery sufferers weren’t even born in the Muldoon era. They won’t want to hear it.)
Winston’s angle is less obvious. One could be uncharitable enough to suggest that he leave it till after politics to get the other knee done. But it’s possible this was not entirely the product of post-surgical boredom, but of clever strategy. Nobody is out there in the political firmament defending the US position – on Iraq or anything else. Unless you count Paul Holmes. And yet, though they may be a minority, there are voters who support the US and even admire George Bush.
And where might these invisible grumpies lurk? From where do they call radio talkback when the Bush-bashing overwhelms them? Why, from the NZ First grass roots, of course. They Remember The War. They mistrust immigration. They mourn the death of ANZUS. There are quite a few of these voters in the National camp, but they’ve had no representation there. Heavens, Don Brash was so pro-Ahmed Zaoui’s residency case that he would have made him a JP if he could. And they must by now realise they will get no truck from the current populist leadership. Rodney Hide is too busy perfecting his physique. Winston is their man.
This is probably not purely an act of niche marketing, though. Never underestimate the mystic influence of the ley-line of testosterone that runs through our political landscape. Think of Winston sitting upon this landscape like a significant dolmen. Another ancient blokey rock is Jim Anderton, and it will be remembered that he went off on an anti-American spiel early in the new year. Winston-watchers knew this for a trigger point.
Sure enough, the answering tremble in the standing stone came this week. At his inaugural Orewa address, he also had a whack at the Reserve Bank’s monetary policy for old times’ sake. A highly attuned medium would have been able to detect a stout, dimpled little eminence floating approvingly behind the speaker, going “Heh!”
The other aspect not to be under-estimated is Winston’s undimmable appetite for quarrelling with the media. He still feels that travelling reporters embarrassed and disrespected him on his visit to Washington last year, and he never leaves a slight to grow stale.
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