Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern at the General Assembly of the United Nations where she spoke of the need for global political action on climate change (Image: 
EPA/PETER FOLEY)
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern at the General Assembly of the United Nations where she spoke of the need for global political action on climate change (Image: EPA/PETER FOLEY)

PoliticsOctober 20, 2018

The Jacinda Ardern coalition, one year on

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern at the General Assembly of the United Nations where she spoke of the need for global political action on climate change (Image: 
EPA/PETER FOLEY)
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern at the General Assembly of the United Nations where she spoke of the need for global political action on climate change (Image: EPA/PETER FOLEY)

What a difference a year makes, writes Massey University politics professor Richard Shaw.

This article was first published on The Conversation.

Shortly before last year’s general election in Aotearoa New Zealand, a Morrinsville farmer protesting the then opposition Labour Party’s planned water tax held up a placard describing its newly minted leader, Jacinda Ardern, as a “pretty communist”.

A year on, Ardern is New Zealand’s prime minister, the third woman and the youngest person to have held the role in 150 years. She is comfortably the most popular politician in the land, and one of the brightest stars in the international political firmament.

The Labour-New Zealand First-Green coalition government led by Ardern celebrates its first birthday this week.

It has been quite the year for Ardern. It is worth reiterating just how far she has travelled since she took the reins as Labour’s leader just weeks before the election, igniting a dull campaign and resuscitating Labour’s polling.

A contemporary politician

Following the election, the conservative National Party looked odds-on to retain office. But on 19 October, after almost two weeks of negotiations, the leader of the centre-right New Zealand First (NZF) party, Winston Peters, surprised virtually everyone (including Labour’s front bench) when he used the balance of power to form a government with Labour and the Greens.

In the year since, Ardern has firmly established herself as the government’s and her party’s most valuable political asset. In an ironic turn of events, Andrew Little, the man who voluntarily stood aside so Ardern could become Labour leader, is also performing well.

An astute and effective political communicator, Ardern regularly uses Facebook Live to apprise the nation of the contents of a day in the life of the PM.

The formal set pieces that have helped established Ardern as the dominant figure on New Zealand’s political landscape include her speaking on the lower marae at Waitangi, the spiritual birthplace of the nation, wearing a Māori korowai while meeting New Zealand’s head of state, and taking a seat in the United Nations General Assembly with her child, Neve Te Aroha, and partner, Clarke Gayford.

Jacinda Ardern brought her partner, Clarke Gayford, and baby to the UN General Assembly.
EPA/PETER FOLEY

The informal, popular-culture moments – particularly those mediated by social media – have been just as important and reflect how Ardern occupies political time and space in a way no previous New Zealand prime minister has. She and Gayford have used Twitter to announce Ardern’s pregnancy, triggering stiff nationwide competition for the role of official babysitter. Social media also charted the birth of their child in a public hospital, the PM’s taste for mac’n’cheese, and the creation of a special UN pass for Neve Te Aroha.

But swooning international audiences do not vote in Aotearoa New Zealand, and what plays well on the Colbert Show does not necessarily resonate in quite the same way back home.

Not all smooth sailing

It is important to note that National continues to outpoll Labour on the preferred party vote. At times the political management of the coalition has been shoddy. Ardern has already had to relieve two members of her cabinet – Clare Curran and Meka Whaitiri – of their ministerial duties, to the disappointment of those hoping to see more, not fewer, women at the top table.

Ardern has also been criticised for not taking a stronger stand on the plight of refugees and on questions concerning possible Chinese involvement in domestic politics. While the government has established many reviews, it is taking some time for the material achievements to start racking up.

But there are signs the administration is starting to hit its straps. Finance Minister Grant Robertson recently announced a larger than expected budget surplus, thus meeting his promised public debt/GDP ratio four years ahead of schedule.

Since Ardern’s return from the UN, Peters and his New Zealand First party colleagues have looked uncharacteristically focused, although the call at the party’s recent conference for a Respecting New Zealand Values Bill was quickly slapped down by Ardern.

Meanwhile, the opposition National party is spiralling into nasty internecine strife that has gone global, may cost the party its leader, and will almost certainly damage its polling.

Changing the culture of politics

Standing back from the detail, what can be said about the political landscape in Aotearoa New Zealand one year on from the formation of the first Labour-NZF-Greens coalition? For one thing, on this side of the ditch we are cautiously re-familiarising ourselves with the idea that the state can be a force for good. The results at this early stage are patchy, as you would expect, but this administration’s belief that government can be benign rather than benighted feels new and different.

Second, Ardern is normalising a whole bunch of things. Being a prime minister and a new mum, breastfeeding at work, and having a male partner who is a primary carer are all becoming, well, just normal.

Third, our cultural politics are changing. Not quickly enough, to be sure, but the symbolism of the fact that Ardern and Gayford’s child carries a Māori name and will be raised speaking both te reo Māori and English has been lost on precisely no-one in this country.

Finally, the nation’s political stocks in the international arena are appreciating. That is no bad thing for a small, exporting nation. There is a powerful progressive-egalitarian narrative in New Zealand reaching back through the nation’s anti-nuclear stance in the mid-1980s to the achievement (or granting) of women’s suffrage in 1893.

As is the case with all political narratives, this one obscures as much as it reveals. But in an age of international fear and loathing, many New Zealanders take quiet pride in the sight of the “pretty communist” defending a rules-based international order, in opposition to the stance taken by the president of the US, a nation that was once the self-appointed leader of the free world. One wonders whether the farmer from Morrinsville appreciated the irony of that moment.The Conversation

Richard Shaw is a Professor of Politics at Massey University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Keep going!
Jami-Lee Ross, pictured here  standing in front of a billboard of Jami-Lee Ross in happier days (Photo by Simon Watts/Getty Images)
Jami-Lee Ross, pictured here standing in front of a billboard of Jami-Lee Ross in happier days (Photo by Simon Watts/Getty Images)

PoliticsOctober 20, 2018

The uniquely damaging betrayals of Jami-Lee Ross

Jami-Lee Ross, pictured here  standing in front of a billboard of Jami-Lee Ross in happier days (Photo by Simon Watts/Getty Images)
Jami-Lee Ross, pictured here standing in front of a billboard of Jami-Lee Ross in happier days (Photo by Simon Watts/Getty Images)

The Jami-Lee Ross saga is a betrayal without precedent in New Zealand’s political history. Danyl Mclauchlan explains why.

So much of what happens in politics never makes it into the media. Every now and then a journalist – out for an early run or stumbling home from a late night – passes Parliament and observes the prime minister of the day and their senior advisors hurrying into the Beehive, hours before dawn, expressions of shock or anger on their faces. Something big is going down but the press secretaries don’t know what it is, or won’t tell. The PM is in a vile mood for a few days and then everything returns to normal. The crisis is over, whatever it was, and most of the time no one ever finds out about it, or any of the lesser day-to-day crimes and blunders and scandals that play out behind the scenes. It’s only when things really fall apart – as they did for National this week – that we get a rare glimpse of what’s really going on.

‘Politics should be about policy and values,’ is a sentiment we’ve heard from a few commentators in response to recent events; an understandable reaction to the torrent of malice and lies vomiting out of the many orifices of the National Party. And that’s all very well and good, but for professional politicians ‘values’ are mostly just a form of marketing: the current government talks about transparency and open democracy but is obsessed with secrecy and cosy with lobbyists; National is supposed to be the party of conservatism and family values and their married-with-kids MPs are having ‘brutal misogynistic sex’ with each other while the president of the party covers up allegations of harassment. We’re learning a lot about some of the people who run our country, or who aspire to, because we’re – briefly – seeing them as they really are, not as they want to be seen.

Let’s start with Jami-Lee Ross. A few days ago I asked a senior political journalist whether she thought Ross was in his right mind. She gave me an incredulous look. “Do I think the guy who just drove from Auckland to Wellington overnight to deliver the longest stand-up media statement I’ve seen, in which he implicated himself in a crime punishable by two years imprisonment is in his right mind? Is that what you’re asking me Danyl?”

Most politicians have a strong streak of arrogance. That’s not a bad thing: they need to have confidence in themselves to inspire confidence in others, and that confidence needs to be robust because the political system can be very bruising. Lots of us lose sleep over conflicts at work: imagine if your most vicious critic got to attack you via the national media for several nights a week whenever you did anything wrong. It takes a certain type of person to survive and thrive.

It’s not unusual for MPs to drift over the line from healthy self-confidence into the oncoming traffic of delusional narcissism. In many ways the parliamentary and party systems incentivise some of the harassment and toxic behaviour Jami-Lee Ross has been accused of. Almost everyone who works for an MP is on an events-based contract, meaning they can be sacked without notice or cause; serious incidents can be settled with confidentiality agreements negotiated via payments from the leaders’ funds; it’s in everyone’s best interest – the MP, the party, the unfortunate staffer with a future career to consider – for everything to be settled quietly. Whichever party you support has or had toxic MPs who were protected by the leadership.

But there’s a limit. Sometimes MPs who go off the rails step down quietly, shuffling off to repair their devastated marriages, broken families, ruined mental health. Sometimes they’re forced out, scratching and biting, clawing at their party while insisting they’re the only one who can save it. But Jami-Lee Ross just put all those previous flameouts to shame. No one has ever seen anything like it in New Zealand politics. What makes him so uniquely terrible?

Firstly, Ross is really high-functioning. When two of the Green Party’s backbench MPs quit the caucus during last years’ election campaign, they didn’t know how to send a press release or log on to social media, or when the tv deadlines were. Ross, by contrast is a media-trained front-bencher for a major party, and it shows. He dominated the news cycle for three solid days, outperforming his leader during his standups and making plausible accusations against Simon Bridges which – if true – would destroy his leadership, and now look as if they probably aren’t true but might destroy him anyway.

Second, politicians usually fall out with their rivals, not their confidants. No one really knows if Simon Bridges can survive this because no one’s ever seen a leader of a major party fight a deathmatch against their own former numbers man and senior whip. They’ve never seen it because the consequences of such a thing would be so terrible any leader would do anything they could to avoid it.

Ross has more tapes of Bridges and – allegedly – his colleagues; he’ll have text messages, emails, maybe screenshots of private social media exchanges. Who knows! Ross’s behaviour is so unpredictable there’s no way to know what he’ll do next or will happen with any of it, but an extended campaign of terror in which he releases bombshells during every National AGM or whenever Bridges makes a policy announcement seems simply unsurvivable. And this isn’t because Bridges is outstandingly flawed: no leader can survive having their conversations with their close advisors made public. That’s right, readers of The Spinoff. Not even her.

Finally, a huge component of Ross’s unique toxicity is his political lineage. He was a supporter of Judith Collins, a friend of Cameron Slater and Simon Lusk, who has been advising him through this trainwreck. They comprise the core of the nihilist faction of the National Party made famous in Dirty Politics and sundry other scandals. Lots of politicians from across the political spectrum resort to unethical tactics to achieve their goals, but what was so unusual about the Dirty Politics crowd is that they didn’t seem to have any goals, other than to be in politics so they could lie and leak and bully and smear and ruin people’s lives. For them that IS politics. And, in the grand tradition of the ‘you knew I was a scorpion’ parable, empowering a faction of ruthless, amoral assholes whose only goal was to destroy everyone around them has been a predictable disaster for National.

It’s a disaster that’s shone light in some interesting places though: like those scuffles in Scooby Doo where someone falls backwards through a tapestry revealing a hidden disguise and secret passageway.

Ross has raised questions about that perennial source of political scandals: fundraising. The major parties like to maintain this fiction that their leaders don’t solicit donations, that they direct potential donors to the party president. But the leaders are always the most successful fundraisers. That’s why Bridges knows who has given his party $100,000, why he wants to have dinner with them at his house, and knows what they want in exchange: another MP in his caucus.

New Zealand politicians get angry when anyone suggests their fundraising activities are a form of corruption. And you can hear in Ross’s tape that there hasn’t been an explicit transaction: ‘there’s no catch to it,’ Ross tells Bridges, but these guys want (another) MP in National’s caucus. That’s tricky, Bridges replies: depends on what’s happening with the list, what’s happening with the polls, where they’re at with candidates from other ethnicities. So we can’t quite say its a cash for access deal.

Political scientists have a term for this type of behaviour: they call it a gift economy. It’s the same form of unspoken reciprocity as when we exchange presents at Christmas or invite friends to weddings. No one ever says, “You can come to our reception if you buy us something expensive and invite us to your own wedding when we will give you something equally nice.” That would be a weird breach of etiquette. Everyone knows how it works but no one says anything – which is vital from a legal standpoint: for a donation to function as a bribe under the Crimes Act a prosecutor needs to prove it was made to reward or influence them; the unspoken  ‘gift economy’ nature of the transactions makes that impossible.

More importantly, it’s a form of corruption that’s very palatable for our political class. No one likes to think they’re taking bribes. And Bridges isn’t! He’s just accepting a large sum of money from a guy who wants something from him in return, and who may or may not donate future large sums.

We’ve learned about how effortlessly donors and parties who give large sums can evade the disclosure requirements. If you give less than $15,000 then your name does not have to be revealed in the expenses declaration, so payments made separately with different names listed as the donors allow huge sums to be gifted without disclosure. Just under half of the total sum of National’s declared campaign donations in 2017 came from the greater than $5000 but less than $15,000 bracket, which Zhang Yikun allegedly structured his donation into. Less than a quarter of the total sum of Labour’s disclosed donations come from the same bracket.

It’s rare for the major parties to break the laws around political donations because they get to write the law. It’s designed to work for them, to allow them to solicit money while concealing their funders. Based on the content of the recordings and text messages Ross has made public, if anyone has actually done anything wrong, it’s probably him. Bridges said during his media stand-up on Wednesday, “Jami-Lee Ross is an expert and experienced fundraiser.” Which sounds, ominously for Ross, like former crown prosecutor Simon Bridges preparing his own potentially devastating case.

And, finally, Ross has shone a light on the influence of China on New Zealand politics, especially in the projection of the rising super-power’s soft power in the region. During last year’s election campaign it was revealed that one of National’s current list MPs – Jian Yang – had extensive undisclosed links to Chinese intelligence. If that story had come out during the 20th century it would have been the largest political scandal of the decade, the instant end of that politician’s career, a disaster for National. Today it’s just a weird thing that happened and everyone mostly forgets about, and which Yang still politely refuses to discuss with the media. The Cold War is over. Nationalism is declining, at least among our business and political class who enjoy dual citizenship as both New Zealanders and members of the trans-national elite. Now we’re all happy consumers in one big global economy. The leaders of our right-wing political party have dinner with the Chinese Communist Party’s envoys in New Zealand and prefer that they bring the wine because theirs is better.

Some commentators are saying this has all been “good for Simon Bridges” because it makes him look prime ministerial. I don’t see that. He performed well on Wednesday but mostly Bridges has looked shell shocked, evasive, doomed. It’s possible his personal popularity will improve among National voters – very few of whom previously named him as preferred prime minister – as they rally around their man. But Bridges hadn’t defined himself with the public before the crisis hit: he was just another generic, faceless opposition leader, now his brand is contaminated with the most hateful betrayal New Zealand politics has seen. I think his possible ceiling of support is much, much lower, and he hasn’t even defeated his enemy yet.