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Today is a FREE taste of an Insight Politics article by Lushington D. Brady that was first published October 20th 2020.
Election 2020: The View from Oz
Elections Past From Across the Ditch Have Some Salutary Lessons.
If it’s any consolation to BFD readers who, I think it’s fair to say, are probably disappointed (to say the least) with Saturday’s election result: I feel your pain. I’ve been there, as they say. Even if it was back when I barracked for the other team. Allow me to reflect on my own election disappointments past.
Of course, the applicability of any election to another is always limited. Events, dear boy, events, as Harold MacMillan said. Events are necessarily always different in different times and places. Nonetheless, there can often be enough similarities to allow some applicability to stand.
The elections I am thinking of are the 2001 and 2010 Australian elections. Two very different elections, with opposite results, but each in their own way saying something about New Zealand in 2020.
The first lesson is: don’t give in to despair and resentment. It’s somewhat natural, of course, to despair of one’s fellow citizens when they make what is so clearly the wrong decision. Wrong… according to you. As far as they’re concerned, they made exactly the right decision – and who are you to gainsay them? You must assume that your fellow citizens are, on the whole, at least as smart as you are. They just have a different opinion.
This is democracy in action. Even so clunky and arcane a version of the democratic process as New Zealand’s MMP system. If you can come up with a better system than democracy, give it the ol’ college try. To date, all the other systems have been worse, as Churchill noticed.
Raging at the “idiots” who voted for the other side is childish and futile. I first learned this lesson from then-Labor leader Kim Beazley, after he lost the 2001 Australian election, back when I was still a rusted-on Labor supporter. Beazley gently chided his supporters who were raging at the “stupid and gullible” public who’d voted wicked John Howard back in.
Beazley had every right to feel cheated, of course. John Howard “stole” the ‘98 election every bit as much as Jacinda Ardern has stolen 2020. For most of ‘01, Howard had been on a hiding to nothing. Having just scraped back in ‘98, Howard queered his pitch even further by introducing the GST. The 2001 election was Labor’s to lose.
Then two extraordinary and unforeseen events intervened. The Tampa affair and 9/11. When Howard refused the MV Tampa, loaded with illegal immigrants rescued from their sinking boat, permission to enter Australian waters it was the beginning of the border protection policies that have been a Coalition strength ever since. 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror also rallied Howard’s support. Polls which had already swung heavily back to Howard after the Tampa incident backed the government even more strongly. Beazley’s Labor suffered a swing against it double what it had gained in 1998.
As Howard did with the Tampa and 9/11, Ardern has done with COVID. Howard first stoked fear and then rallied voters ‘round the flag. This is exactly the same playbook that delivered Ardern’s thumping 2020 win.
But, hang on, I hear you wail: Howard won another term after 2001. In fact, he became Australia’s second-longest serving prime minister! How is that any consolation?
Because Howard was not just a canny politician, he was a superb administrator. So, while Ardern may have won in the same manner as Howard in ‘01, as an administrator she is more akin to Julia Gillard in 2010.
Sure, Gillard only managed to scrape a minority government out of a hung election, but, having done so, she ended up with a grip on parliament that few prime ministers have ever enjoyed. By signing on to an informal coalition with the Greens, Gillard controlled both houses of parliament. This gave her the numbers to do pretty much as she wanted – and she did. Gillard’s most frequent boast as prime minister was that her government had passed over 500 pieces of legislation. In fact, Gillard’s government holds the record for passing legislation.
But, as many commentators have noted, simply passing legislation doesn’t make a good government. It’s what gets passed that matters. Gillard swung parliament further left than it had been in Australia for decades. And Australian voters noticed. Labor was swept from office in 2013.
The 2010 and 2013 elections also hold important lessons for a bruised National party. Gillard was backed to the hilt by an oestrogen-soaked media. St Julia could do no wrong. Any criticism of her was greeted with cacophonic wails of “misogyny!” But opposition leader Tony Abbott simply ignored Gillard’s feminist Praetorian guard. Instead of stepping down after the 2010 loss, Abbott stayed on as leader and relentlessly savaged Gillard’s policies – and triumphed. Abbott understood that voters didn’t want a teal-blue Labor-lite opposition: they wanted a clear alternative. The success of ACT in NZ indicates the same.
Ardern may well have won a Pyrrhic victory. The years ahead are a minefield of challenges that Ardern, on her record so far, is clearly not up to. Having won the COVID election, Ardern has to navigate the wreckage of the post-COVID landscape. Not least of the challenges is that New Zealand’s economy has been trashed. Unless Ardern is smart enough to re-open New Zealand’s borders very soon and let the furore of the inevitable rise in COVID cases fade away by the next election, her options for revitalising the NZ economy are limited, to say the least.
Quite simply, Ardern is going to run out of money very, very fast. The biggest danger for New Zealand is that she will go chasing it in the same place her idiot twin Daniel Andrews did: in the welcoming arms of China’s BRI.
But, as many nations have already found to their chagrin, Beijing’s money comes at a very, very big cost.
So, the overall lesson for the right of politics is: don’t despair, much less spend the next three years grousing that you wuz robbed. Ardern’s been given plenty of rope to hang herself with: a canny opposition just needs to twist the noose.
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