Chris Trotter argues governing is now about fulfilling private interests’ objectives whilst trying to pass them off as your own

By Chris Trotter*

“Campaign in poetry, govern in prose.” It is one of the most memorable political maxims to emerge from American politics. A relic, perhaps, of the era in which the policies of the major parties did not diverge substantially from one another. In those circumstances, the winning of elections is largely reduced to questions of style and performance.

The maxim’s most famous proof came in the presidential election of 2008. Millions of American’s were uplifted by Democratic Party candidate Barak Obama’s soaring rhetoric. Pundits and professors compared his speeches to JFK’s, or even to those of Rome’s greatest orator, Cicero. His campaign poster, emblazoned with just one word: “Hope”, and his campaign slogan: “Yes we can!”, all contributed to the “poetry” of his victory over the Republicans’ John McCain. In office, however, Obama turned out to be a very prosaic president indeed. As McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin later quipped: “How’s that hopey, changey thing going for ya?”

A large measure of policy consensus, by refocusing attention upon the personalities of contending party leaders, offers the additional benefit of keeping the political temperature agreeably low. Representative democracy works best when the most heated arguments are restricted to the cover art, rather than the content, of the political books on sale. It is only when the personalities presenting the policies begin to matter less than the policies presented, that the prospects for a peaceful transfer of power start to diminish. When a party’s supporters become convinced that they cannot afford to lose an election, they will stop at nothing to win it.

The greatest virtue of the First-Past-the-Post (FPP) electoral system (and it does not possess that many!) is its propensity to, first, generate a broad measure of political consensus, and, second, to deliver the decisive electoral outcomes required to keep that consensus in place. It is only when the voters begin to sense a widening gap between the rules of the traditional democratic game, and the rules of whatever game its leading politicians have taken to playing, that demands for a new set of rules – or even a whole new game – start attracting significant support.

New Zealand’s adoption of the Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) electoral system was driven by the widely-shared voter perception that Labour, followed by National, had been taken over by ideological zealots who made a fetish out of their refusal to be swayed by the policy preferences of the either their own party members, or the voters.

Perhaps the most dramatic demonstration of this indifference to public opinion came from Richard Prebble, who, upon learning that close to 90% of the population opposed the privatisation of Telecom (then a state-owned telecommunications enterprise) declared that New Zealanders should be proud to have a government willing to defy such a powerful pressure-group!

In large measure, MMP prevailed over FPP in the referendum of 1993 because most voters were convinced that the coalition governments made more-or-less obligatory by proportional representation would prevent the politicians responsible for turning Labour and National into ideologically-reanimated zombie parties from imposing upon New Zealanders even more economic and social “reforms” they hadn’t asked for and didn’t want.

What most New Zealand voters failed to grasp, however, is that for this moderating influence on Labour and National to be effective, the new minor parties made possible by MMP would need to possess extraordinary negotiating skills, and, if these proved inadequate and/or unavailing, the political courage to force a new election. That was a very big ask. To date, no minor party has been willing to court the electorate’s wrath by becoming the tail that wagged the dog. Certainly, the conventionally wise have cautioned against such behaviour. Indeed, the pundits’ predictions have never varied: any minor party deemed responsible for forcing a new election will be “wiped out”.

But, the minor parties were damned if they did, and damned if they didn’t. Voters may well have punished any small party that forced them back to the polls, but that didn’t mean those same voters were ready to reward it for refusing to create political instability. Parties opting to enter coalition arrangements with either Labour or National, and agreeing to swallow all manner of dead rats in the process, frequently found themselves falling below the 5% MMP threshold at the next election.

Governing in prose came at considerable cost to the minor parties.

Preserving the policy consensus they were elected to unwind, however, was not a strategy the minor parties could afford to pursue indefinitely. The logic of MMP is implacable. Excessive co-operation with a major party is likely to result in the guilty minor party exiting Parliament – as NZ First, the Alliance, and the Māori Party could all attest, and Act, too, would surely have attested, had it not been for the strategic nous of the Epsom voters. In order to survive, a minor party must present to their preferred coalition partner a short list of “must haves” that cannot, under any circumstances, be traded away.

It must, however, do more than that. To get around the problem of what to do if the major party says “No.”, a minor party needs to persuade those with a powerful commercial and/or political interest in seeing specific policies enacted to clear a path for them in either National or Labour well in advance the next scheduled general election. Intensive lobbying, generous targeted donations, probably both, will be deployed to create what amount to “fifth columns” of policy allies inside the major parties. With these in place, the pressure to give the minor parties their “must haves” will likely prove irresistible.

Such arrangements are unlikely to generate serious objections from within the major parties. There will be times, after all, when it is to the considerable advantage of both National and Labour to be able to shrug philosophically and pardon themselves for cooperating in the introduction of controversial and divisive policies by explaining to an outraged public that this is simply the way MMP works.

Naturally, if it was just up to them, they wouldn’t dream of re-writing the Treaty, introducing hate speech laws, relaxing firearm controls, phasing out the internal combustion engine, introducing a Māori upper house, reducing the taxes on tobacco products, or privatising the Cook Strait ferries, but, sadly, the wishes of one’s coalition partners cannot be ignored.

Given the pernicious evolutionary path MMP now appears to be following, does it still make sense to talk about campaigning in poetry, and governing in prose? Sadly, it does not.

Lobbying and donating large sums of money to carefully cultivated politicians in both the major and the minor parties, for the purposes of securing specific policy objectives, is not the sort of behaviour that lends itself to poetry – unless it’s Bob Dylan’s pithy observation that “money doesn’t talk, it swears”.

Governing, too, is changing. No longer written in the dull but honest prose attendant upon raising the money needed to keep the nation solvent and in good heart, government, today, is all about fulfilling private interests’ pre-paid objectives – while attempting to pass them off as your own.

*Chris Trotter has been writing and commenting professionally about New Zealand politics for more than 30 years. He writes a weekly column for interest.co.nz. His work may also be found at http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com.