This is not democracy; this borders on autocracy. Only the names of the powerbrokers change. When the leaders of the two largest parties in the country have to go cap in hand to the joker in the pack in order to govern, something is very amiss with the system. This might not be the case if the joker in the pack were motivated by altruism on behalf of the citizenry. But that really is stretching credibility.

It’s fun though. No denying Winston really is a hoot. So that’s all right then. Isn’t it?

I never saw myself defending Winston Peters, but I’ve sat in a WINZ office with woman who could have been my mother.

She was lovely. As was the superannuitant who sorted Brian’s some years earlier.

Both of them filled in the forms for us and, although we’re both reasonably literate, we were both very grateful, because forms can confuse.

So I have no difficulty believing that Winston had trust in the officer who processed his application, and that he simply signed this form as we did. Particularly since his partner was with him at the time and there should have been no confusion about his status.

So, like us, he may have assumed that all the details had been checked and accepted by WINZ, since their representative had filled them in.

Just saying.

Stuff

I find myself in the improbable position of coming to the defence of broadcaster Mike Hosking.

Winston Peters has called Hosking “a National Party stooge whose jowls are up the Prime Minister’s cheeks”. I take this as some bizarre rephrasing of the common term “cheek by jowl” intended, I presume, to mean that the broadcaster and the PM are close buddies. Winnie will no doubt correct me if I’m wrong.

Meanwhile the Leader of the Opposition, Andrew Little, has accused Hosking of “making no attempt at objectivity”.  One might have expected a more robust critique. I’m told the words “right wing little prick” have been simply flying down the corridors of the Opposition Wing to describe Mr Hosking.

I think this critique rather misses the point. While I’d be surprised to discover that Hosking is a closet member of the Parnell, Remuera or Epsom branches of the Labour Party  – total membership five! – I’d also risk my bottom dollar that he isn’t a member of any political party. This is, or should be the default position for any broadcaster working in the field of news or current affairs.

What Hosking betrays on Seven Sharp, on commercial radio and in his writing is not political bias but social conservatism. The two may overlap from time to time, but are inherently different. It’s entirely possible and even commonplace to be left wing and socially conservative.

Another way of putting it might be to say that Hosking is somewhat “old fashioned” or “old world” in his approach to many issues. This is reflected in his relationship to Toni Street whom, his manner suggests, he respects as a woman (meaning because she is a woman), but less, it seems to me, as a broadcaster of equal ability and status. He “talks down” to her in a somewhat paternal manner.

So I entirely disagree that Hosking is “a National Party stooge” or that he makes “no attempt at objectivity”. I’m sure he does his very best. But two things make objectivity a challenge for him. The first I’ve referred to before – Hosking is perhaps the most personally opinionated broadcaster I’ve come across in half a century in the business. The second is the social conservatism I’ve described above. Hosking’s values are “old school”.

Sometimes being “old school”  can be really good. Sometimes it can be really, really bad.

You pays your money and …

Since 1964, when I arrived in this country, I’ve mostly, though not always, voted for the Labour Party. My core political belief is that in a caring society the haves have a moral obligation to support the have-nots. I see progressive taxation as the only reliable mechanism for bringing this about. “Trickle Down” won’t cut it. Little or nothing “trickles down” and the concept smacks of charity. Nor can charity itself ensure social and economic justice for those at the bottom of the heap. Charity is capricious and unreliable. So the rich have to be compelled to do their part. That includes me.

If you want to give a name to it, I suppose you’d call this Socialism. I see myself as a Socialist. Not surprising, you might think, since I was an only child raised by a solo parent in a council flat in Belfast. Though John Key had  a not dissimilar background.

Bit different now. Judy and I have a nice house, a nice car, a bach up North and a few dollars in the bank. And of course we both get the pension. But I’m still a Socialist. That’s more about principles than party politics. And not complaining about paying tax.  

I was one of the first people to hear Labour’s policies for the 2011 election.  Judy and I were down in Wellington for a media-training session with Phil Goff and the party’s senior finance spokesmen. The policies included a capital gains tax to be implemented by 2013, a new marginal tax rate of 39% on incomes above $150,000,  a tax-free threshold of $5,000 and a plan to raise the age of entitlement for superannuation to 67 by 2033.  I remember leaving the session highly elated. These were sensible and courageous policies, in particular the capital gains tax, then widely considered to be political suicide. These were some of the policies I believed in.

I’m not entirely sure whether Labour still wholeheartedly supports these policies. Idealism has a tendency to give way to pragmatism in politics. Leaders, particularly in opposition, have a tendency to become followers of what is sellable rather than what is right. Labour Party leaders are no exception.

But, all things considered, I’m still a Labour voter with a greenish tinge. What I’m not is one-eyed. I don’t believe that everything about the Labour Party is good and everything about the National Party is bad. I’m simply not “tribal”.

Tribalism in politics is the death of reason. It involves seeing no good in the parties you oppose and no bad in the party you support. It involves blind admiration for the leader of your party and dismissive rejection of the leaders of opposing parties. It involves ascribing the worst motives to those on the other side of the fence and the best motives to those on your side. Tribal thinking can be bigoted, irrational and capable of real malice. To get a taste of this read some of the almost invariably anonymous comments about  my posts on this site or Twitter or the National Business Review which republishes what I write.

Tribal politics draws no distinction between the person and the party they support. It’s as if being Labour, National, Green, a follower of Winston or Colin Craig  was part of your DNA – permanent, irreversible and , perhaps worst, capable of explaining everything about you. “Typical Labour!” is the commonest term of disapproval I read about myself when I’ve written a post or left a comment on Twitter or Facebook. The words stick to me like the label on a supermarket apple.

But there’s nothing “typically Labour” about me. And the truth of the matter is that I could never join the Labour Party or any other party, because that would compel me to think  tribally rather than thinking for myself and saying what I thought.

Which is why I say that tribal politics inevitably involves the death of reason. If you really think that a political party, your political party, is the only viable option or can do no wrong, you’ve given up thinking.

On the other hand, it’s a very, very comfortable position to be in.

This is an OUTRAGE!

If we are to believe the papers, the radio and television news, New Zealanders live in a perpetual state of outrage. The nation’s blood pressure is never less than 180 over 110, so outraged are we by the egregious sinning of our fellow man and woman, at home and abroad. Our outrage can be singular or plural. An individual may be outraged by a neighbour’s cat walking across his lawn and want to damn the breed. In response an entire community of cat-lovers, numbering millions,  may declare themselves outraged at such a perfidious suggestion. Occasionally the entire nation is said to be outraged, most commonly by something said or done by an Australian. An under-arm ball comes to mind.

The connection between the seriousness of an action and the public outrage it occasions is tenuous at best. Where outrage is concerned, actions need no longer speak louder than words. Indeed, as sources of outrage, words seem to have surpassed actions altogether.  

The most recent example of words leading to general public outrage (as defined by the Fourth Estate) was a passage from an article in Investigate magazine, penned by New Zealand First MP Richard Prosser. Mr Prosser wrote:

“I will not stand by while [my daughters’] rights and freedoms of other New Zealanders and Westerners are denigrated by a sorry pack of misogynist troglodytes from Wogistan.

“If you are a young male, aged between say about 19 and about 35, and you’re a Muslim, or you look like a Muslim, or you come from a Muslim country, then you are not welcome to travel on any of the West’s airlines …”

Now my assessment of Mr Prosser is that he is blithering idiot because only a blithering idiot would paint a target on his forehead, while carrying a sign with the words “please shoot me” in neon letters, and distributing loaded firearms to passers-by. God knows, one would have thought being a member of Winston Peters’ raggle-taggle caucus was ignominy enough without revealing oneself as a suicidal maniac.

Mr Prosser deserves our pity, not our outrage, but our outrage he has got and it runs to tens of thousands of column inches and millions of spoken words.

I am reminded of the old saying, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” They were never entirely true of course, but these days they could not be further from the truth. While we tolerate man’s inhumanity to man in so many areas, national and international, we mount our high horses more commonly over what is said than what is done.

In the process the currency of  the word itself has been debased. We should express “outrage” in the face of real outrages, not merely when we think something said or done is bad or offensive or stupid  or insensitive or neglectful or unkind.  We have words for all of that – annoyed, angry, pissed off, ropable, furious, horrified or that old journalistic standard “shocked”.

When I recently wrote what amounted to a favourable obituary of Paul Holmes, I was faced with the ire of many readers (still) outraged at a handful of  ill-considered words spoken in the course of a 40- year career of live broadcasting, and at my praise of a dying man, seemingly rendered beyond redemption for having given verbal offence.

I’m more inclined to be outraged by what is done than what is said, though one can of course lead to the other. Off the top of my head I’d rate poverty, unemployment, discrimination, child-abuse, torture, cruelty in all its forms, the absence or denial of justice or free speech, the subjugation of the weak by the strong as outrages, and the tolerance of such evils as outrageous. You can make your own list.

Anyway if you think I’m making a mountain out of a molehill, count the number of times in a week that the words outrage, outraged, outrageous appear in your local rag, favourite mag or on radio and TV. You’ll be shocked by what you find.

I am at this very moment preparing my invoice to send to Raewyn Rasch, the Executive Producer of Seven Sharp. You may recall that Raewyn wrote to me, unhappy with my early comments about her programme. Very early, come  to think of it – a week before the programme even went to air. The omens, I’d said, weren’t looking good.

Well, they still weren’t looking good a week into the show and I wrote another fairly lengthy post saying what I thought was wrong and, by implication, needed fixing.

And then came last night, Tuesday.  And Tuesday was different. Tuesday’s programme had a real edge to it, the very thing I’d said was missing from the earlier shows. The banter was sharper, more Paul Henry and less Play School. And the tag-team interviewing had been largely abandoned. There was Greg Boyed manfully attempting to do the impossible – get a straight answer from Winston Peters; and Ali Mau doing an interview with Investigate magazine publisher Ian Wishart, who had brought us NZ First MP Richard Prosser’s thoughtful views on ‘Wogistan’. The interview was a model of its type. And finally, a really interesting item on just how long you can survive in the open sea without a life-jacket.

All in all, a nice example of what you might call ‘palatable current affairs’. Which is ironic really when you consider that last night was also the first night that Campbell Live beat its opposition on One with 352,600 viewers against Seven Sharp’s 296,700.

My unsolicited advice to Raewyn Rash would be not to be discouraged by last night’s figures which are a reflection of viewers’ response to the previous eight days and not to last night’s show. Stick with it.

Though can I please make one suggestion to Greg Boyed. It isn’t necessary in a probing interview to look and sound so angry that you’d like to climb across the desk  and throttle your interviewee. Winston can be annoying, but not that annoying. And he has the sweetest smile.

Waitakere News

The absence of anyone from Labour on The Nation was explained by Garner at the very start of the show. The programme had invited Labour’s Spokesperson for Economic Development and Associate Finance Spokesperson, David Cunliffe, to discuss more or less the same things that Norman and Peters were discussing on Q & A – the future direction of the economy. Cunliffe was happy to appear but, conscious of the current sensitivities in the parliamentary party over Labour’s leadership, sought an assurance that that topic would not be canvassed in the interview. He received that assurance in writing from Executive Producer Richard Harman and Garner himself. 

Despite those assurances, Cunliffe’s appearance was later vetoed by what Garner called Labour’s ‘top team’ which he defined as ‘David Shearer and the media team’. The reason given was apparently that the ‘top team’ didn’t want anything to distract from Finance Spokesman David Parker so close to the Budget.

But the real reason was the party’s reaction to a ‘positioning’  speech given by Cunliffe to the New Lynn Women’s Branch of the Labour Party on 29 April. Judy and I both considered the speech brilliant, as did many other commentators from both sides of the political divide. As it happens, and if I read it properly, it was the political divide that the speech was actually all about.

The conventional political wisdom these days seems to be that, if it is to win the next election, Labour has to ‘move to the centre’. But if you’re on the left, the only direction in which you can move closer to the centre is to the right. Logic tells you that that can only result in loss of differentiation between you and your political opponents and an at least partial loss of your identity – in this case, what Labour stands for.

There is an inherent dishonesty in this approach which involves pretending to be something you aren’t in order to gain the power to reveal who you really are. But that of course is commonplace in politics.  

Anyway, ‘the top team’ didn’t like Cunliffe’s brilliant speech and he was apparently bawled out by Shearer and others and told the  speech was’ naive and stupid.’ That tends to be the price you pay for idealism. And, according to the extremely  well informed Duncan Garner, the  price may be high for Cunliffe who has been ‘put in his place, somewhere down the bottom of the pecking order’.

This is so utterly stupid that it beggars belief. Cunliffe is not only intellectually brilliant, he is by far Labour’s most accomplished debater in the House and on television and radio.  No-one in the Labour Party can hold a candle to him as a media spokesperson. Stammering and stuttering seem to be the main criteria for that at present.

I’ve written two major posts on Labour in recent months. The first was before the leadership vote and headed Shearer or Cunliffe? Why I’ve changed my mind. The second began, ‘I find myself wondering whether I want to be bothered with the Labour Party any more.’ It was more or less about the sort of things David Cunliffe was talking about in his speech to the Labour ladies of New Lynn.

I’m still wondering.

Finally, given the paranoia that clearly surrounds Cunliffe in the Labour Caucus, I should perhaps add that nothing in this post came from him.

Here’s the tape that’s caused all the fuss. Fairfax has confirmed that it’s the real thing.

After listening to it, you might well decide that it is truly a storm in a teacup. But – it got Winston Peters and his motley crew into Parliament, so the PM may now be wishing he’d released it on the spot!

It’s difficult to decipher, but here’s a link to a transcript on The Jackal’s blog.