PoliticsSeptember 6, 2017

The critical questions raised by Steven Joyce’s missing billions fiasco

Senior Writer, NZ Herald

What was Steven Joyce really up to when he said Labour’s budget plan was missing almost $12 billion? Simon Wilson considers the possibilities.

On Monday morning the minister of finance said the opposition finance spokesperson was so incompetent, he had produced a fiscal statement that overlooked nearly $12 billion worth of spending they should have accounted for.

He said it on the day of a crucial televised leaders’ debate. At a time when the polls showed his party was declining and the opposition party was rising fast. If he had been right, it would have been a king hit: a single blow that destroyed his opponents.

But he was not right. The expert opinion has piled up against him and, to date, not a single independent analyst has supported his central claim. What’s really going on?

There are several possibilities.

The minister of finance, Steven Joyce, is right, and everybody else is wrong. It’s possible, at least in theory, although you might think by now they would have found someone trustworthy to say it for them.
He’s lying. On the fact of it, this scarcely seems credible. To mislead the public deliberately on such a big and fundamental matter, during an election campaign, would be grossly unethical. And surely to tell a lie like this is to run a very big risk of destroying both you and your party’s entire election campaign.
He himself is incompetent. He simply did not know how to read Labour’s version of the budget. But Joyce does not seem to be incompetent. Of all the things his political opponents have ever said about him, that’s not one of them.
Joyce isn’t incompetent but this is a complex issue and he simply made a mistake. Seems unlikely. It might be too complicated for most of us to understand, but not him. As he says himself, he was associate finance minister for eight years before he became finance minister last year. “I know these numbers,” he insisted several times to John Campbell on RNZ’s Checkpoint last night. He himself has ruled out a simple mistake.
Steven Joyce is also the National Party’s campaign manager. Did he do this on his own? That would make him a rogue element, unshackled by the discipline of party, campaign, loyalty to his boss and simple common sense. The National Party does not seem to be a party where that happens, certainly not at the top level. If Joyce did act on his own, that means his boss, prime minister Bill English, will now know he is dangerously untrustworthy.
If he didn’t make the claims on his own, who did he consult? It’s reasonable to assume the prime minister, Bill English, was party to the decision. (If you were English, a vastly experienced former finance minister, you’d be absolutely furious if this, of all things, was done behind your back, wouldn’t you?) And everyone else in the inner circle of the party’s campaign. It is hard to see how English is not complicit in this attack on the opposition.
Perhaps they hoped for a king hit. This would require that both English and Joyce misunderstood the Labour budget plan or decided to lie about it. Is that credible?
Perhaps they did not expect a king hit. Perhaps they knew that when this story broke, it would cause confusion, and claim and counterclaim, and for a day or two it would get very messy, and then a general scepticism would settle over everything and the public would be tired of it all. As Jacinda Ardern herself said during the leaders’ debate on Monday night, all the public would hear was the two of them squabbling. And when all that was over, there Steven Joyce would be, smiling and speaking in a reasonable tone and looking solid, all of which he is very good at. While Labour would have had a suspicion raised against their credibility that will never entirely go away. Because it’s too complicated to explain, because you can’t ever explain that you’re innocent, because explaining is losing. Because when it comes to a showdown on competence, we don’t decide on the facts, we go with our gut. Steven Joyce, Bill English and their campaign team know that.
The decision to attack Labour in this way was, inherently, a decision not to attack them on the facts. As several of those independent critical commentators have noted, there actually are questions to ask about Labour’s budget plan. It’s light on some details and it requires real confidence about the party’s ability to keep tight controls on new expenditure. Joyce shifted his argument late on Tuesday, playing up that aspect of the issue. But it wasn’t what he claimed when he “broke the news”. The analysts’ comments have not been offered in support of his position, but by way of saying that he has misunderstood the nature of the problem. But he’s been hard at work to blur that distinction.
Perhaps Joyce was never interested in the facts. He went with the smear. Facts don’t win elections, feelings do. To win an argument is merely to win an argument, but to stir the hearts of voters is to win the prize. Steve Joyce smeared their opponents in a way intended to put the dispute beyond the reach of facts. He was trading in fear. Fear of what? Of Labour’s big bogey: the party that is too incompetent to run the country. Because look, it can’t even write a budget.
National has brought us here before. A vote for Labour is a vote for Kim Dotcom. Iwi/Kiwi. Dancing Cossacks. It was disgraceful then. It’s disgraceful now.

Keep going!

Jacinda Ardern and Bill English during the Newshub leaders debate. Pic Michael Bradley/Newshub

PoliticsSeptember 6, 2017

The art of prime ministerial bullshit

Danyl Mclauchlan

Contributing writer

Jacinda Ardern and Bill English during the Newshub leaders debate. Pic Michael Bradley/Newshub

Does being prime minister compel a person to lie? Of course, says Danyl McLauchlan, and thus far in this campaign it’s the more convincing liar with all the momentum.

There’s a moment in Monday night’s NewsHub leaders debate I’ve been thinking about all day. It’s right at the beginning when the debate moderator and NewsHub’s political editor Paddy Gower asks Jacinda Ardern and Bill English “Is it possible to survive in politics without lying?”

Now, all three people up on that stage knows the answer to that question is “No”. One of the most proximate reasons Ardern is up there debating English is because her predecessor Andrew Little made the mistake of telling the truth to the media when asked if he’d thought about resigning in the wake of disastrous poll results. Back when this happened Gower explained to Duncan Garner that this admission meant that Little’s career was over. “He’s broken a rule in politics. You just don’t do that. He should be saying, ‘Yes we’re struggling in the polls, but I could still be prime minister – we could form a government, we could get these guys together.'”

There are countless situations like this in politics where “the rule” is that the politician needs to lie and if they don’t the consequences are catastrophic; countless circumstances where political leaders have to lie for strategic or moral or legal or diplomatic reasons. If, for example, an MP opposes a policy in their portfolio area but the caucus is in favour of it, they’ll need to put on a big grin and march out to a media scrum to argue in favour of a policy they hate, insisting they fully support it. If they don’t then “there’s a split in the caucus” and they’ll get torn to pieces.

Or, once they’re the leader, if one of their MPs is an incompetent who refuses to stand down because they’re unemployable outside of Parliament, the leader can’t admit to that because then they’ll have a rogue MP on their hands, so blundering fools become “hard working and competent members” when their leader is questioned about them. No one believes it, but they have to say it. It’s the rule. It’s a pretty good deal for the gallery: when a politician breaks the rules and tells the truth, they’re finished and the gallery gets a scalp; and if they follow the rules and lie but then get caught they’re also finished, and the gallery gets a scalp.

This campaign might well be won by the most convincing liar (Photo by Michael Bradley/Getty Images for TVNZ)

But not always, because the rules are somewhat mysterious. On Monday finance minister Steven Joyce claimed to have found an $11.7 billion hole in Labour’s fiscal costings, and as far as anyone credible can tell this was a total and blatant lie. But playing by the nebulous rules of political journalism, Gower wasn’t allowed to describe it as a lie in the debate even though, as Ardern pointed out, the entire point of the lie was to manipulate Gower into raising it in the debate casting doubts about Labour’s fiscal credibility in front of over a million viewers.

Instead it was left for the public to make our own judgments, though the public are completely unqualified to make judgments about the accounting rules for line items in the Crowns’ future operating allowance, and informing us about the veracity of complex technical disputes in very high stakes disputes like this would be a useful public service for informed experts – like political editors – to perform. So in certain circumstances blatant lying is a successful and consequence-free political tactic eagerly rewarded by media outlets.

When trying to answer Gower’s original question Bill English was clearly aware that he lied all the time – Gower went on to question him about his role in the Todd Barclay affair – but English seemed reluctant to lie about the fact that his role compelled him to lie. “None of us is perfect Paddy,” he admitted before pivoting wildly and gushing, “What’s also important is trust in a team and we’ve got a great team!”

Jacinda Ardern worked in the prime minister’s office under Helen Clark. She’s been an MP in Parliament for nine years and knows that a core requirement of her job is following the unwritten rules and lying convincingly to everyone’s face all the time. She also knows that one of the rules is that she has to pretend this isn’t the case so in answer to Gower’s question she put on a huge, sincere grin and announced, “I believe that it is possible to exist in politics without lying and by telling the truth,” and assuring Gower that she’d “never told a lie in politics”, before spending the rest of the evening effortlessly gliding away from awkward questions, confidently prefacing all of her subterfuge and evasions with “Let me be absolutely clear.”

The truth is we don’t want our prime ministers to tell us the truth. What we want is for them to convincingly perform the role of prime minister, and part of that role is to lie to us when the unwritten rules demand it and another is to reassure us that they’re always telling the truth and never lie.

Arden seems very qualified to play this role. Bill English was very good at performing the role of finance minister, dour and prudent, gruffly announcing that growth was “a bit grumpy” when we went into a double dip recession, and denouncing his opponents as spendthrifts who would crash the economy by borrowing on international markets at the same time as he was borrowing unprecedented amounts to keep the economy afloat. On Monday night he doubled down on his finance minister’s lie with gusto. He’s in his comfort zone lying about the economy and Crown fiscals.

But he hasn’t figured out how to play the role of prime minister even though this is actually his current job. His performance flickered in and out; for much of the debate it was merely Bill English up there on the stage, hesitant and clumsy, real and thus fake, outperformed and outclassed by Jacinda’s genuine prime ministerial bullshit.

Read more of The Spinoff’s awesome election 2017 coverage here