Politics
You can’t be too pure
by Jane Clifton
One-eyed tribalism can get you voted off the parliamentary island.
It’s a contrary thing about Parliament, that more seems to get done when it’s not sitting, and all the little members have scurried home to their families, or overseas on junkets, than when they’re all together concentrating on their work. MPs just took a one-week recess, and look how much long-drawn-out nonsense got settled: David Benson-Pope was finally convinced to resign, handily bringing the Prime Minister closer to Labour’s overdue Cabinet reshuffle. The Therapeutic Products and Medicines Bill was resuscitated. A Royal Commission was called on the state of Auckland’s local authorities. The police were finally reassured that they would not be bisected into separate police and traffic units. And – though MPs were not, obviously, responsible for this – the New Zealand dollar finally went down.
It’s awfully tempting to call for more and longer parliamentary recesses, but then the select committee junkets bill – which, of course, we all pay for – would skyrocket, so this could be a false economy.
Among other lessons, the David Benson-Pope fiasco underlined the perils of excessive tribalism inside a political party.
For all that Labour derides the Exclusive Brethren, some of its members replicate that sect’s behaviour, and none more so than Benson-Pope. They despise non-Labour folk, shun them, resent having to have any commerce with them, and regard them as damned or somehow less than human. The idea of political intermarriage – that someone could even associate with a non-Labour person without foul taint, let alone form a romantic relationship – is anathema.
The only practical difference is that these extremists do it in the name of the Labour Party, rather than the Almighty. (Though in some cases, it amounts to the same thing, as of course He is held to be a Labour voter.)
Labour does not have the monopoly on this quasi-racist attitude. All parties have their one-eyed sectarians. (Try whispering the word “union” at a National Party conference or “welfare” at an Act gathering and see how ugly a crowd can get.) But in high office, one-eyed tribalism is extremely risky, and in an MMP system, it’s toxic.
Most Labour seniors are blessedly free from this tendency. Even the toughest Tory-bashing operators like Helen Clark, Michael Cullen and Trevor Mallard secretly respect their foes, strive to understand them and seldom make the mistake of underestimating them.
Benson-Pope’s constant weakness in office stems from his absolutism – if you’re not with us, you’re against us. It has consistently blinded him to the perils before him, which is why he fell into so many holes and never once put down his spade. This tendency showed up long before the tennis-ball scandal, with his black-is-white defence of the NCEA, when he abused anyone who dared to question the blatantly obvious teething problems with the new system. He never seemed to realise that not everybody who challenges a government action is a Tory scumbag, and that sometimes even Tory scumbags have a point.
Passive-aggressiveness is among the least attractive qualities in any person. Who would have expected to find it in our current political pin-up boy, John Key?
His admission that he only refused to sign up to Winston Peters’s compromise deal on the Therapeutic Medicines Bill because – sniff, huff, smite of brow – no one asked him, is really rather childish.
Admittedly it was very bad political manners of Winston and the bill’s sponsor Annette King not to seek a meeting with Key to outline the compromise proposal. When you need someone to pull your arse out of a sling, it’s common sense to ask them nicely. It was either careless or petty of them not to so much as send National a bit of paper on the proposal.
But even so, Key reads the paper. At least, he pays people to read it for him. He knew about the proposal. All he had to do was pick up the phone and say, “Oi!”
But oh no. Just like your mum when you forgot her birthday, weeks later he pipes up, with that more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger bleat of reminder. Now, National will support the Peters amendment, so that New Zealand complementary medicines can be dealt with separately, minimising the risk of incidental hardship to our manufacturers.
Can we really believe that National held out on doing this deal just to teach Winston and Annette a lesson? Since when did political etiquette come before public health and international relations on National’s list of priorities?
The suspicion lingers that Key was not, after all, as reassured as he maintained he was about the feelings of the Australian Government on the issue. Did the Australians get after him in a big way?
And, we now have to wonder, did he discover he lacked command of his caucus after all?
Or was it a polling/focus group rethink? Did National suddenly find it was, to use Benson-Pope’s infelicitous phrase, a fellow traveller of the extreme Greens and health food nuts – not an ideal pozzie for a party seeking to dominate the middle ground?
More disturbingly, you have to wonder if this compromise deal really is satisfactory. If it answered all the legitimate concerns of supplement manufacturers and their customers, then the Greens would support it, too. And they don’t.
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