Caught between hope and misery

Colin James has a couple of excellent pieces. Firstly, a speech outlining the challenges that lie ahead. There is a war coming. To balance this gloom, James' graduation address raises a glass to the excellent amateur.

Man Of Our Times

Let's face it, Lange was a clown. Sometimes this was good. His showmanship and timing made the post-cabinet press conferences the best show in town for journalists. Sometimes this was bad. His need to be everybody's friend meant conflicts were resolved poorly. The Buchanan visit was an early example. Above all, Lange's love of the limelight was very useful. The clown made the perfect diversion. Cabinet kept Lange busy with speaking engagements, high media visibility stuff. This left the executive collective to concentrate on running government.

It worked for a while. The nuclear-free issue provided Lange with a subject he could sink his wit into, and an audience ready to listen. For two years, everything was sweet. While Lange chugged away abusing American Jesus Freaks with non sequiturs, consultation papers flew in and out of the Beehive. Laws were passed, things got done.

Tragedy struck in 1985, when David Lange's brain died. Joe Walding, the British High Commissioner, has passed on. Lacking Joe's sage counsel, Lange had nowhere to turn. He had alienated the Left bloc MPs, couldn't keep up with the economic jargon of those on the Right.
Lange turned to Margaret Pope and, as everyone knows, it went downhill from there. The clown wanted to be taken seriously.

So what's all this got to do with the price of iPods? Two things last week sparked a thought. Mike Moore's guerrilla noun attack on Clark for one. Muldoon! Octopus! Fridge magnet! Although Helen Clark is not Muldoon, she may share his some of his fate. Surrounded by a fearful, strung out, burnt-out caucus. The Electoral Finance Act (Clause 13o) will come into effect if writ day is after 1st March 2008, thereby leaving a snap election a distinct strategy to minimise the Labour party's electoral rout. All one has to do is wait for a Marilyn Waring to turn up.

Helen Clark may have also done her job too well. Having successfully killed off most of the Right wing of the Labour party, she may very well be guaranteeing her party a very long time on the opposition benches until a new equilibrium comes along.

And secondly, Colin James' quiet insistence on Key's stance on a New Zealand Head of State:

Key is of the post-independence generation. His generation takes independence as an unremarkable given.

Key's generation, even if not Key himself, is more culturally Pacific than Clark's but also more confidently able to reconnect with the British/European side of its heritage after the necessary distancing during the independence decades. Its members are more educated than the independence generation and more footloose, especially to bigger outlier Australia outside the front door.

Those who choose to stay here still live in an outlier country, as have all generations going back 10 centuries, and globalisation of capital, money and people, if anything, accentuates that outlier quality. And symbols of colony linger. Clark's generation did belatedly repatriate the highest court four years ago but it has bequeathed to Key's generation an English Queen as head of state, a flag with Britain's flag on it, a name that ties us to a flat bit of northern Europe and a national anthem that prays for God to save us instead of standing tall on our own feet. We are still a wingless, flightless bird.

How will Key the returned expatriate, still playing catchup to some of the cultural changes, deal with all that? His external policy essentially mimics Clark's, with some fine-tuning. Some in his party are plotting legislation to disestablish the monarchy on Queen Elizabeth's death. There are attempts in his party at new thinking on the aspirations of iwi and hapu to bring the two indigenisations into synch.

The thought is this: If National are looking for a populist issue on par with Lange's anti-nuclear stance, Key could do far worse than outbid Labour in the National Identity stakes and seek a Kiwi Head of State. Sure, it's not as sexy as No Nukes, but try opposing the policy. The Greens would go for it. Whatever monarchists still lurk in the shrubbery can bugger off to NZ First, thereby throwing Winston Peters a bone and giving National another minor party to talk to after the election.

But why wait for QEII to die? Surely there'd be more to gain by formalising an amicable split between Her Royal Highness and this outlier nation? Can someone please get hold of Simon Walker and put some feelers out. Otherwise we'll be sharing the peace pipe with Charles and how would that look?

Unleash the hamsters of indecision

I had a good chuckle over Colin James' Stout Centre speech on Ruth Richardson. After giving Ruth so many back-handed compliments I thought even Sue Bradford might complain, he ended by giving her a pat on the back. One point struck a nerve though:

"She confounded one TINA ("there is no alternative"), the undoubted need to deregulate and rely more on the market, with another, that there is only one true set of policies, which is demonstrably untrue. She applied a lawyer's logic to abstract economic rules and then advocated them with the intensity of a courtroom lawyer who allows no doubt about his or her case. She knew best. Actually, the electorate knows best."

This is ever so slightly an unfair criticism. What Mr James is describing is the plain and unvarnished dark art of politics. This is how politics works, the exertion of various powers to get what you want. Applying a lawyer's logic when pushing through legislation largely intact is a good start.

It is for this reason that Chris Trotter pulled the plug on Sue Bradford's Bill. Get out now. You sold it all wrong, lost the initiative. Whatever's left of the Bill after passing through the digestive tract of the select committee is bad law. It's as if the Section 59 Bill snapped a mast and the only way to win now is to get the team to walk on water and carry the thing across the line. It is for this reason that the prolific number of policy u-turns and drifting Order Paper is such a bad look for Labour. There are Tribbles in the halls of power.

It was also interesting to see Sidney Holland glossed over as a small-c conservative slash small-l liberal. The Waterfront strike and everything Holland did around it, from jigging for an early election through to evoking emergency powers, isn't a thought that sits easily next to "equilibrium". In many ways, the Holyoake years were a New Zealand reflection of the Eisenhower years in the States. Steady growth, conformity, boring as fuck. Just what the General Electorate is looking for in John Key.