TLIAF: You Can Quote Me On That

(unless you wanted to pull a twist in your TL and it was someone like Tizard?)

Ooh, now that you mention it the early 90s are the best time to go "Stop! Helen Time!" while the meme iron is hot - but that would be telling.

In terms of speculation, I would encourage you to go to the first post and check the gimmick of TTL, and examine where - and whether - Helen fits into that. Shocking Twists are rather part of the territory, no?
 
I'm still not quite sure what the gimmick is but it seems to me that you've made the marginal figures of our political history more prominent and made the prominent figures minor. In that case I'm expecting a one year Clark Ministry and a 9 year Palmer ministry.
 
I'm still not quite sure what the gimmick is but it seems to me that you've made the marginal figures of our political history more prominent and made the prominent figures minor. In that case I'm expecting a one year Clark Ministry and a 9 year Palmer ministry.

Well, now I'm considering rewriting the next three PMs (Bob Tizard and Cath Tizard as a Billary Clinton-esque dynasty could've been fun). Mmm...nah. You'll get the PM you're given and like 'em! (slogan for the Fourth Labour Govt right there)
 
12. Margaret Wilson
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“The economy is not an end in itself.”


Margaret Wilson (1992-2001)


Let’s set aside for now the propaganda coup Labour received from being the party of our first female Prime Minister. I’ll address that – feminists, still your defamatory petitions for just a moment [1] – but first I want to examine Margaret Wilson on the same basis as Jim McLay, in the 1992 election.

Wilson’s success lay in her ability to tap into a desire within sectors of the electorate for a politician who wasn’t an insider while drawing upon the resources of a nationwide party organisation. However, Wilson had been a lawyer, a trade unionist, a professor at Waikato University, and a senior adviser to Bill Rowling (a career path Rob Muldoon referred to as the “stairway to Communism”): in short, she had experience by the bucketload. Although only elected in 1990, that she did this by turning the safe National seat of Eden into a marginal Labour one showed her political nous, while by 1992 she was still enough of a newcomer to appeal to those who agreed with Winston’s tirades against isolated insiders.

Then, of course, there was Paul Henry’s tasteless joke about Labour being willing to give an arm and a leg to get into power, Douglas having supplied the arm and Wilson the leg. I’m obliged by the legal department to point out that the story of her response, that she “only needed one leg to kick his arse” (whether she meant McLay or Henry is open to interpretation), is only anecdotal, but it gives a much more satisfying image to act as if it’s gospel; my hypothesis then and now is that the comment only helped boost her appeal to an electorate who would gladly have lined up to boot either fellow.

But enough talk about why she got people to vote for her in the first place: let’s look at how she became the first Labour Prime Minister in fifty years to get three terms, and what she did with them.

Today’s quote goes some way towards answering both questions. First, it was short, sweet, and to the point, much like how Wilson presented herself. Her populism wasn’t the acid-tongued razor-edge of Peters, but rather a self-affirming humanism that brought to New Zealanders uncertain of their own or their country’s place in the world after a decade of non-stop change a reassurance that genuine human emotion – common decency and common sense – was coming back to The Way Things Were Done Here. At the same time, she was far, far more in touch with the ordinary New Zealander than any Prime Minister since Nordmeyer.

Wilson was also admired, even on the right, for practising what she preached. As part of Labour’s campaign she had promised a referendum on electoral reform, based upon the findings of the Royal Commission Rowling established to steal back Social Credit votes after the terrifying nadir of 1980. In 1993 she delivered, over the opposition of several Cabinet colleagues, and received broad support from within Parliament (National being quite keen upon the idea of forcing Labour into a minority government, underestimating the Democrats’ ability to translate polling figures into votes) and without (the electorate being quite keen upon the idea of punishing their representatives for Birchism).

Indeed, it cannot be denied that MMP has been a shot in the arm to political debate in this country. If people have an issue with their party of choice, they can now choose to shift their vote to a minor party and have far more confidence in the likelihood of being represented. While this came too late for the 26 percent who voted Social Credit in 1980, the fact that an even larger percentage of the vote went to small parties in 1995 and five more parties entered Parliament than in 1992 says a lot for its appeal.

This all came with negatives, however, and the teething troubles of that system in New Zealand must be placed at Auntie Maggie’s feet. The coalition with the Greens (who had burst from the casket of the Natural Law Party (successor to the Ecology Party)) and the reliance upon the perpetually-name-changing Unity Party for confidence and supply led to instability in government for the rest of the 1990s, with New Zealand’s kneejerk reaction to the Asian financial shock of 1997 easily traced to the loony lefties who insisted that the short-term pain of economic reforms to make our economy more competitive in the long-term wasn’t worth it.

That brings me to another area where Wilson deserves criticism: while regulating the hell out of certain sectors must have seemed like a good idea at the time (one almost suspects, but is advised by the legal team not to claim, that her Coalition partners were passing around some of the electric puha from back on the commune), the late-nineties recession can be laid at her feet, rather than her Finance guru Michael Cullen, as it was her narrow focus on social experimentation which led her to ignore his sound advice. The economy may not have been an end in and of itself for Wilson – there were many other issues which it is commendable that she focused upon – but to dismiss its importance in favour of social experimentation was and would still be a rookie mistake.

For despite the efforts of the far-left, it must be said that her efforts to legislate equality for women and ethnic minorities were putting the cart a fair bit before the horse. She quite neatly stole the credit for the resolution of several historical Māori grievances in the Waitangi Tribunal established under Talboys, and while the legalisation of same-sex marriages in 1999 gave us another international “first” outside Scandinavia, the wedge it drove between Labour and Unity and the split of Unity contributed to the ineffectuality of the Fifth Labour Government throughout its third term. Given Mister Capill’s later incarceration this was not, in hindsight, completely negative, even though being forced to rely upon the support of Dunne’s faction to get a majority of one was absolute hemlock in the run-up to the 2001 election.

This, along with several growing political pressures, contributed to the slow implosion of the Fifth Labour Government. The rise of political Maoridom, which saw the Mana and Maori parties challenge Labour’s sixty-year-old stranglehold on the Maori seats, was cemented by their merger into Kotahitanga in 1999 and the defection of several high-profile Labour Maori MPs, and compounded by the Democrats’ seizure of four Maori seats in 1995. Although two were reclaimed in the ’99 by-elections, the prompt defection of Maori voters to Kotahitanga immediately undermined confidence in Labour’s ability to get things done.

To touch upon that feminist point, though, Wilson was, for all the flaws of her Government, the best woman to be our first female PM; despite the bitter, biting, and backhanded commentary she received in 1992, she proved to be exactly the firm yet gentle touch the tiller of the ship of state needed, a young-but-not-too-young captain to steer New Zealand into the twenty-first century as a country with a new sense of purpose – even if, as the first year of the new millennium proved, that purpose was to throw her out.

And throw her out we did: despite Labour’s respectable 38%, it wasn’t enough to ward off National who, despite only gaining 2% less of the vote than Labour, were able to cobble together a coalition with their ideological bedfellows in Freedom and the desperate Democrats to nose over the line in an eleventh-hour stunner. The new PM would prove to be a similar eleventh-hour stunner, even if it was for all the wrong reasons.

[1] I'd like to take a moment to separate myself from the author ITTL; he's a fiftyish fellow writing a political op-ed column, so tends to show his age like this.
 
13. Donald Brash
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“Now we are all one people.”

Donald Brash (2001-2007)



Donald Brash has been portrayed as some sort of inevitable reaction to the far-reaching social liberalism of Margaret Wilson’s Compassionate Society, the Moses who led the Baby Boomers into the Promised Land of higher house prices and lower taxes.

Like most caricatures it’s an exaggeration, but there’s some truth in there all the same. An economics professor and former head of the National Bank, Brash made his way to the top of the National Party amidst the confused fighting following Jim Bolger’s forced resignation. Coming with the National Business Council’s blessings, Brash appealed to National’s economic liberals while remaining pleasingly vague enough on social policy to be whatever the social liberals wanted to see.

And as the bus crash of Unity’s breakup reduced the Wilson Government to weak-tea centrism, Brash was well-placed to take the tired Labour Party to task over all it hadn’t done in the past nine years: where were the tax cuts for working New Zealanders, Brash asked, where were the rewards for hard work while lazy beneficiaries got hand-outs to study rubbish subjects at polytechnics?

Mired in scandal, Labour couldn’t give convincing answers, and while they maintained a razor-thin lead over National in the seven-party Parliament arising from the 2001 election, it was no longer theirs to dominate.

The story of Don Brash’s first term is therefore that of six weeks of agonising negotiations where nobody knew what was going on, even more than the pro-Americanism which got us calling the capital Brashington, D.C. from the number of American officials visiting. Labour had the most seats, but couldn’t get 61 MPs with the Greens and any reasonable third partner (a Labour-Green-Democrat trifecta made exactly 60, with either Kotahitanga or the two lonely, scandalised Unity MPs needed to cross the line), while Winston Peters theoretically remained damnatio memoriae for National.

In the end, Winston proved there was one more surprise left in him when he lent Democratic support to a National-Freedom coalition, the lean 61-seat Government requiring now-Sir Bill Birch, the political cryptkeeper-turned-Speaker, to cast tie-breaking votes on controversial budget measures, Opposition MPs decrying the violation of the old norm of neutrality. This was MMP’s coming-of-age, where the system forced parties to work together and compromise, rather than simply acting as a vehicle for Labour dominance.

After his slow start Brash made up for lost time, speeding through massive tax cuts which took us overnight from one of the highest rates in the developed world to well below the average, fuelling a consumer spending splurge which had economists nodding approvingly as exports to Asia took off under a spate of Brash-penned free-trade deals, Kiwis cheering from houses newly-renovated after consent processes in the Environmental Management Act 1994 were gutted.

Between surging economic growth and a civil war between Clarkite and Andertonian factions, 2004 became Labour’s worst defeat since Douglas, crashing below 35% for the first time in seventy years. Brash crushed Clark by an eight per cent margin, National apparently destined for three-terms in power for the first time in decades.

But 2004’s biggest legacy would be a far smaller success story, as Kotahitanga’s successful seizure of five Maori seats, despite their paltry 2 per cent nationwide showing, increased Parliament’s overhang. While it didn’t break National’s hold on power, it did mean Brash couldn’t get a simple National-Freedom coalition and threatened a repeat of 2001, with (now Sir) Winston’s insistence that Brash’s privatisation programme be called off seeing him dumped for Unity’s two MPs. Yet another lengthy hiatus in forming a government didn’t look good for Brash, and he blamed Kotahitanga. PR dictated that he had to act to reassert his leadership, and the Waitangi Day speech offered a good venue.

It’s the speech he delivered at Waitangi, the only time he visited there in his term, which contained today’s quote, so bitterly ironic in hindsight. It was intended by Brash to echo Hobson’s declaration after signing the Treaty of Waitangi but, by declaring that the Maori seats should be abolished after Treaty claims were settled, ended up splitting the country worse than ever. As the Electoral (Referendum on Maori Representation) Amendment Act 2005 was forced through under urgency, the Hikoi From Hell saw thirty to fifty thousand march on Parliament to voice their opinions.

But by November, Brash had his way; there would be a referendum in March 2006 alongside the Census. Despite the best efforts of Opposition and tens of thousands of protestors to convince New Zealanders, we got our answer by April: once the Tribunal wrapped up its work, New Zealand would be without Maori representation for the first time since 1867.

Whatever we tell ourselves, it wasn’t altruism which beat National in 2007, but self-interest. While New Zealand was more prosperous than ever before, more than half of Kiwi shares were foreign-owned (as Winston, having found a dead horse to beat, pounded on about from his one remaining seat), economic growth was hugely dependent upon foreign demand for demand for agricultural products and the housing market, and many domestic finance companies were dodgy at best, Ponzi schemes at worst. As John Campbell famously told us through the state broadcaster Brash so despised, there was a deep sense of unease throughout the nation.

This unease, and political tribalism stirred up by the referendum, ensured a surprisingly narrow defeat. Donald Brash had already shifted into victory mode at 9:30 when the South Auckland returns came in; it was a shock to all when they put Labour over the line in a reversal of 2001. Brash therefore became noteworthy as the head of only the second National Government (since Marshall’s golden hat trick) ever to end without a change in Prime Minister. And unlike the Fourth National Government, there would be no Winstonian comeback kid from the Fifth.

By January 2008 accusations of dodgy dealings between National and major financial backers were getting louder and better-substantiated, particularly when leaked emails showed Brash had been doing the naughty with business concerns (including memorably supervillain-like proposals from an Australian mining firm to relocate Niue’s population to New Zealand if they struck uranium). As his marriage crumbled very publicly following an alleged affair with one of those businesspeople, a backbench revolt broke out in caucus.

By November Brash would be forced to surrender the leadership, with the desertion of ex-Finance Minister and heir presumptive, J.P. Key, to a finance company board leaving the National Party of 2008 in a similar position to that of 1998 - a mess.

Of course, none of the National members clearing out their Cabinet offices could have imagined how soon they'd be back.
 
14. Michael Cullen
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“The fool who spends on the upturn will find himself broke on the downturn.”

Michael Cullen (2007-2010)



First, a not-quite-retraction: I have already in the week since publication received criticism in letters to the editor for my keelhauling of Margaret Wilson; the free-trade deals I credited to Don Brash were, her defenders say, begun under the Fifth Labour Government, and I failed to mention the moral dimension of her foreign policy. These are valid complaints, but ones which I think illustrate the perils of writing on politicians prominent in the last two decades, as the cults of personality formed around them by accident or (in Winston’s case) design make it nigh-impossible to make an informed argument on them.

Funnily enough, I don’t anticipate any such complaints on today’s piece. Our thirty-seventh Prime Minister is not, to be sure, a much-loved man. Cullen suffers in comparison with those preceding and succeeding him. The latest in a succession of three leaders elected to try and replicate the magic of the Fifth Labour Government at the polls, he was forced to be constantly wary of coup attempts inside his party from (wounded, not dead) Andersonites and desperately try to maintain a rickety coalition on the outside.

This is all a pity, I think. Yes, Cullen was the harbinger of doom as the bottom fell out of the economy, but he was a tremendously well-spoken harbinger. His wit was, in all probability, the deciding factor in Labour’s comeback in the last three weeks of the polls, with more than one old-timer in a pub somewhere in the country heard to compare Cullen favourably to “that wet noodle Brash”.

That wit gave us, for instance, today’s quote. Originally a shot aimed at Brash’s apparent opposition to the concept of a government, Cullen’s cutting remark ended up acting as a sort of epitaph for the Sixth Labour Government, highlighting both his deep misfortune in inheriting the perfect storm of ill electoral winds from Brash and the unpopularity he earned for his told-you-so efforts to salvage a working economy from that absolute mess.

Besides summarising the country and Government’s situations, today’s quote also demonstrates why Cullen was Labour’s only single-term PM since Douglas. Because while quite correct in pointing out how a decade of loose living had left the nation unable to heave itself out of its hole, his approach to getting New Zealand back in black earned him enemies and lost him friends. Nobody particularly cares to hear that their misfortune is their own fault, no matter how true that is, and Cullen learned this the hard way.

Cullen realised his position was precarious from the start, of course; having pulled victory out of a hat at the eleventh hour, Labour had to maintain good relations with the Greens and Kotahitanga to respond to an economy entering freefall; the kind of exercise in cat-herding which would give a veteran of the dying days of the Wilson Government nightmares. On one side, the Greens had become used to being the default third party during Opposition, and despite falling behind the resurgent Freedom Party continued to demand a deference from the Labour Party quite out of proportion to its size. At the same time, Kotahitanga had strengthened its hold on the Maori seats as political Maoridom lost confidence in Labour’s ability to defend separate Maori representation, annihilating a traditional support base while using their crucial seats to exert pressure on Cullen to undo the Electoral Amendment Act 2005 and enshrine the Maori seats forever.

Faced with Hobson’s choice, Cullen was forced to allow the tails to wag the dog. The Greens were given Environment, Climate Change, and Conservation as well as the Deputy Minister of Finance, while Kotahitanga got Deputy PM, Maori Affairs, and the Electoral (Maori Representation) Amendment Act 2007, guaranteeing the Maori seats until and unless they are voted against in a future referendum – restricted to the Maori roll.

While the left tried to spin this as a matter of redressing legitimate historical grievances it went down like a cup of cold sick with middle New Zealand, which saw the will of the majority, as expressed in a referendum, ignored by an out-of-touch Labour Party in favour of placing power in the hands of a minority of New Zealanders. Within six months of the election Cullen’s approval rating had plummeted as Labour nosedived in the polls.

At the same time, the Green Party – still derided, not entirely unfairly in my opinion, as a bunch of long-haired layabouts more interested in legalising drugs and communing naked with nature than actual governing – was being given its own veto over what the government did. In doing so, they butted heads with Kotahitanga who, having won the big battle which had won them seven seats, now needed to find other windmills to tilt at in order to justify their existence.

And this was the inescapable dilemma of the Sixth Labour Government which would ultimately doom it: while Labour did what was necessary to gain the support to respond to the Recession as it saw fit, it came at the cost of being seen as a party which was not in control of its own destiny. Labour, and by extension Cullen, was perceived as weak, a fatal blow to any government. And as Labour’s promise to undo the “Brash Slash” fell by the wayside, it also lost support amongst its traditional base, as the working class and the growing legions of the poor became disenchanted with the ability of their traditional representatives to actually fight for the things that mattered to them.

Heading into 2010, Cullen’s grasp on the more fractious members of his Cabinet slipping further by the day, the election was becoming an increasingly uncertain prospect. Brash’s successor was able to go toe-to-toe with Cullen on most issues, countering his message of regrettably necessary austerity with her own platform of common sense and personal responsibility instead of what National claimed was a dangerous culture of encouraging dependence upon government handouts, a passionate argument which struck a chord with New Zealanders resentful of the Maori representation saga and tiring rapidly of Cullen’s austerity economics.

Leftist pundits talked a big game about the support Labour enjoyed from Maori and youth voters, but ultimately – as I pointed out back then – they had a) enjoyed their support since year dot, and b) those groups weren’t exactly falling over themselves to get to the polling booths.

So the electorate handed the reins back to National and Labour members – looking fearfully to 2013 – spent election night making halfhearted noises about keeping Cullen in place as the only competent whipping boy in the room.

But after three decades in Parliament, Cullen had decided enough was enough. As a junior Minister, he’d seen Mike Moore deliver nine budget surpluses. As Prime Minister, he’d overseen a litany of failures. It is the ultimate desire of any politician to leave a good legacy after they go, and Cullen, as a savvy if tactless political operator, was determined to salvage something from the wreckage. Within twelve hours he had resigned the leadership, and by early 2011 he would be gone.

By then, of course, Labour had far bigger problems.
 
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15. Judith Collins
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“Once we start saying society is the problem, that means no-one has any personal responsibility.”

Judith Collins (2010-2015)



It will come as no surprise to know that I will, this week, be treading a very fine line in detailing the rise and fall of the Sixth National Government. That said, how could I resist using one of Collins’ interminable quotes about personal responsibility? If the irony of Brash talking about ‘one people’ is bitterly funny, Collins talking about personal responsibility is a laugh riot.

It’s a rather cringeworthy pun to say her leadership got off to a shaky start with the Christchurch earthquakes and, to be honest, I think the two essential themes of the Collins Ministry, those of scandal and survival, were better shown by the Passport Scandal shortly before the first quake.

Shortly after the election, it emerged that the Freedom Party’s leader – hitherto notable mostly for his mournful moustache and porcupine haircut – had stolen the identity of a dead child to get a fake passport. It was a bad look for anyone, but it was a career-ender for a law-and-order politician like the Deputy PM and an apparent PR disaster for the Government itself.

But it was in precisely this kind of scandal that Collins proved her worth as a leader and epitomised those two major themes: a major scandal or crisis would arise and threaten the stability of the government, the Prime Minister would very publicly strike off the individual responsible, distancing herself from them all the while, and the Opposition would see its efforts to gain political capital by attacking the Prime Minister frustrated by her own pre-emptive moves to preserve the image of the leader running a tight ship and keeping her crew on the straight and narrow. The Freedom caucus had a bloodless coup, National strengthened its grip on the direction of the Government, and Collins came out smelling like roses, just in time for September 4.

This pattern played out in a dozen other scandals, with the most masterful display of Collins’ ability to turn weakness into strength – and strength into a cudgel – coming when the Minister of Justice was accused of making unwanted sexual advances. As usual Collins fired the guilty party and acted tough, but it was her follow up, where she shamelessly cribbed notes from Labour’s script on women’s rights in her public statements on the matter of sexual harassment, which was the real stroke of genius. In one fell swoop, the Prime Minister reassured her supporters, secured the approval of voters ever-paranoid of dodgy politicians, and won stunned plaudits from her mortal enemies on the left for being an unlikely progressive icon.

This skill in handling disasters, and the public relations offensive after the 2011 earthquake portraying Collins as the great overseer of the project to rebuild Christchurch and the economy, meant that for a good two or three years Collins was the first Prime Minister since Talboys to hold the support of New Zealanders on the centre-left and centre-right alike, with her image as the woman cleaning the skeletons out of the government’s closet obfuscating the fact that it was her party that was responsible for most of them.

But it would be incredibly naïve to call Judith a Talboysian moderate. Collins’ image as the arbiter of justice included a hard line on law and order, which saw punitive action taken against boy racers, recidivist criminals, drug addicts, dole bludgers, benefit fraudsters, gangs, bikies, deadbeat parents, fighting in schools, underage drinking, and smoking in prisons. All of this only helped her image, with the emphasis on the individual’s responsibility for their own actions helping New Zealanders feel safer as well as – more importantly – superior to the grimier elements of society.

But even with Collins’ crushing re-election victory, strengthening National’s grip on power as the Greens failed to return to Parliament thanks to three thousand or so votes, the good times would come to an end. While Collins responded extremely well to scandal, the big names just kept on coming: a Cabinet colleague of the sex pest Justice Minister caught with his fingers in the till, a weatherman-turned-backbencher aligned with Collins found quite literally gambling away his dying mother’s money, assault charges filed against the MP for Northland (and withdrawn after a hush money settlement), an MP at the other end of the country bugged his own electorate and Parliament offices – the list went on.

And then the Vivakai scandal hit.

This isn’t the place to rehash the entire debacle, not with half of it still in the courts. What can be said with confidence after two years is that Collins’ biggest misstep was her unusually tame response; if she had simply sacked Morrie Williamson instead of putting him “on notice,” the media would have lost interest in short order. But questions went unanswered, and before long it was rumoured that he knew something the PM didn’t want made public.

Just how Williamson came to know of Collins’ interactions with the head of the import-export firm, including during a state visit to China, is quite the mystery, but a crack finally appeared in the façade of the Iron Maiden during a post-Cabinet press briefing where she took an angry swing at the media. While this wasn’t surprising in itself, it set journalists to wondering, and before long diligent investigations turned up quiet meetings, big donations, and bizarre irregularities in the accounts of her husband’s businesses.

The old scandal playbook was pulled out, but it quickly became apparent that this one was not going to go away in a hurry. By early 2015 it was a question of when, not if, and it’s still remarkable that she clung on until most of her Cabinet presented her an ultimatum and, rather than subject the party to a repeat of the Peters saga, she resigned the leadership in a rush and in disgrace.


Overall, Collins’ tenure serves as an important reminder of the fact that modern politics is at least as much about image as actual achievements or beliefs. Once Collins had established the image of a no-nonsense boss overseeing a responsible, well-run government, it didn’t matter if there were scandals because Judith would sort it out. And without wanting to rearrange facts after the event, I maintain that this was key to the Sixth National Government’s success, even more than Labour’s impotence. Once National had secured a reputation as an effective government who demonstrated their honesty by cracking down on crime, the scandals and by-elections didn’t matter to the man on the street, because that didn’t fit with the National he knew.

This shows the power of a government to control the narrative around its actions and the danger inherent to that, and it’s why Judith was right, in a sense: it’s fashionable to blame society for electing a bad government, but there’s a place for personal responsibility as we address the rot in our politics. It falls to the voter to choose a government which will run the country with transparency and as much honesty as can reasonably be expected.

On Collins, it’s hard to give a conclusive ending, as her story continues to be written. I will simply note that Mrs Collins returned to Parliament in the last election with an increased majority in her electorate, and her name has been floated as a contender for the next leadership stoush. Whatever comes next, it should be worth the watch.
 
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I get the theme of this one much better. It's the "might have been PMs" (with the exception of Nash)
 
This is absolutely fantastic. I’m afraid my political knowledge of NZ is basically 1980s and modern era, but it’s been tons of fun digging up info to make sense of everything.
 
I get the theme of this one much better. It's the "might have been PMs" (with the exception of Nash)
More or less: broadly speaking it's the "might-have-done-betters"; the also-rans and those who were screwed over by history despite being talked up as the Next Big Thing at the time - Nash, Peters, and Rowling, for instance.

This is absolutely fantastic. I’m afraid my political knowledge of NZ is basically 1980s and modern era, but it’s been tons of fun digging up info to make sense of everything.

Thanks! It's been a fun excuse to dig into NZ political history for me, too; it's hard to find anything in-depth for non-PMs and I've wanted to write a properly innovative NZ Shuffling the Deck for a while. Even if it has taken a year.

Two updates left, so this may be finished before the two-year mark.
 
On the basis of that logic - that must mean Prime Minister Cunliffe or Shearer must be next?
 
16. Gerry Brownlee
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“I’m sick of these people carping and moaning. And could any of you people that are complaining have done a better job?”

Gerry Brownlee (2015-2016)



With three of his four most recent predecessors within the National Party to serve as Prime Minister being deeply mired in a great deal of muck, either through their own peccadilloes or simply by association, it’s a breath of fresh air to write about the almost boringly clean Gerry Brownlee.

Which is probably the first time anybody’s ever called Brownlee a breath of fresh air; for all that his professional integrity was unquestionable (save perhaps for that time he put his foot up an environmentalist’s backside in the nineties, a move which probably won him more supporters than it lost), as a person he lacked the same reassuring dullness. Indeed, his fourteen months in the Beehive were so incredibly gaffe-prone that it is hard to credit that many faux pas to one man.

He referred the nation of Finland as “poorly educated, barely able to feed its own people, with a terrible homicide rate and no respect for women.” He responded to the question of what to do with quake-damaged heritage properties still in limbo – many within his own electorate – by saying he’d like to “pull down half those ruins tomorrow”. He called Hone Harawira a “black bastard” in a heated debate after the Kotahitanga member called him a fat one, a move which saw the Speaker forced to discipline his own party superior. He was so wondrously unlucky, as it happened that he couldn’t even get sworn in as Prime Minister under the right name, which has to be some kind of record.

Yet even this long since the election, nearly a quarter of the way into his successor’s first term, it’s difficult to say anything more incisive or interesting about Brownlee besides the obvious: that he was a caretaker Prime Minister who, all things considered, would rather not have been there. For the National Party, he kept the hot seat warm for a little over a year while they cleaned house and debated where they wanted to take the party after the inevitable election defeat.

For New Zealand as a whole, this was also true; all the really important functions of government were covered by ministers, the economy was ticking over satisfactorily since the Cabinet chaos which had unsettled the markets died down, and everyone was more concerned with the rugby in any case. Labour was clawing its way back in the polls under their own new leader, who acquitted himself extremely well in the debating chamber, and the Freedom Party was becoming a less pliable coalition partner as they sought to manoeuvre into the best possible position for 2016. It would have taken an extremely skilled political operator to rebuild the country’s confidence in the Beehive and weld the warring camps of the National Party back together. Gerry Brownlee was not that man.

To be fair, it was a hard ask that was made of Brownlee. He was not an exceptional politician and had never made any pretentions to being one; his reward for a quarter-century of solid service and toeing the party line had been to be set up as the whipping boy while those around him manoeuvred for position, an unenviable position to say the least.

There were a whole range of inconvenient questions being asked around mid-2015, and with Collins continuing to enjoy the support of a large percentage of New Zealanders and a larger percentage of Brownlee’s caucus, there was nothing he could say to please everyone. Often, it seemed like there was nothing he could say to please anyone.

In this spirit, his quote gets to the clogged heart of who he was as a Prime Minister. Blunt, forthcoming, rude, and up against the wall. Unlike any of the other men and women I’ve written about over the past few months, Gerry Brownlee stands out for how little he wanted the job. He didn’t want his job, he didn’t like his job, and he either missed out on or neglected to exercise the positives of his job.

And could anyone have done a better job, in his position? Brownlee was promoted into the hot seat entirely because those of his Cabinet colleagues more suited to or desiring of the job were able to see how the maths looked for the next election after the Vivakai debacle broke the camel’s back, and decided amongst themselves on an inoffensive fall guy. He was the cleaner who mops the blood up after the police have caught the criminal, the groundsman who picks the empties off the pitch after the game, the first mate who helps his crew into the lifeboats because the captain’s shot himself. And by God did he resent it.

Call it what you will, Brownlee never hesitated to speak his mind or voice his frustrations. That all belied a retiring, almost shy personality behind closed doors, which we caught glimpses of in last year’s election campaign – Brownlee gave no personal interviews (another first, of sorts, at least since the 1968 campaign), rarely talked about himself to the press and refused to get his family involved in the campaign. While he gave the impression of a bullish operator who liked being in charge, he never seemed comfortable or entirely willing to be in the hot seat during those fourteen months.

Maybe that’s why he made frank statements like today’s: he simply had too little invested in being Prime Minister to care about popularity, and just wanted to get the job done so he could go home.

As it turned out, that wasn’t nearly good enough, not when facing a candidate as dynamic and open and approachable as Labour’s latest cab off the rank. The Prime Minister was tired, health rumours refused to go away and weren’t helped by Brownlee’s silence, and the debates were one-sided fights as even National didn’t seem to be able to run a campaign entirely on the economy. A clean slate was called for, and Gerry was the first stain to be wiped off.

In a final insult, one which is still ringing throughout Christchurch after a legal challenge to the Ilam result failed, Brownlee didn’t even get to resign on his own terms, losing his seat – National since 1947 – to independent MP and complete unknown Raf Manji. And with that, if the Book of Judith is still being written, the Book of Brownlee is already gathering dust on the shelf.

Poor Gerry.
 
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